[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wire d Magazine...)

[Adam Wiggins]

On Mon, 13 Jul 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:
> Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:
> > As someone asked, "How does this list manage to stay violence free?"
> 
> It doesn't, we just have a particularly courtly form of combat.  Its
> equally violent in principle, just less bloody.

Well, there's a few different issues here.  One is the term "violence" -
we normally don't imagine that we are hacking each other up with swords,
that I've seen.
Another is "harassment" or "jerk-like behavior", which seemed to be more
what Marian is worried about.  *That* is what could easily skyrocket here,
but has been kept low by careful population control.
The "combat" which goes on is more the combat of our ideas - one person
places their idea into the arena, the others throw questions and
counter-ideas at it and lets them do combat, as it were.  Then when the
dust clears, everyone nods their heads and draws conclusions (and
hopefully enlightenment), although not everyone's conclusions are the
same.
This also harkens back to our discussion of "if you PK my character, are
you *really* PKing my character, or are you PKing *me*"?  As I recall we
had a fairly long (and quite enlightening) discussion about this after I
responded to an essay which stated baldly, "My character *is* me."
To extend the metaphor, then, our characters (or more generally, "tokens")
which we "play" here on the list are our ideas.  When I put forth an idea
of mine on the list, and someone else throws counterideas at it, it can be
thought of as similar to someone attacking my character on a mud.  I take
neither personally.  Others feel very differently, as we found out.

> > The answer is that it is invitation-only, and at its core a
> > dictatorship.  This keeps quality up, but number of players low
> > (have we ever had more than about 20 active posters at any given
> > time?).  I think most here would agree with me that this is a
> > desirable effect; you could do a mud the very same way as long as
> > you didn't mind spending a lot of energy on it and after four years
> > only having 20 active players. :)
> 
> MUD-Dev hasn't been invitation only since April '98 when we moved from 
> Null.Net to Kanga.Nu.

Sorry, let me rephrase: posting priviledges are not automatic.  Lurkers
are, for purposes of this comparisson, not present.

>   I don't keep track of how many members post with any regularity.  A
> quick scan of the author index for 1998Q2 shows 75 discrete posting
> addresses that are actually posting to the list.  There are many
> duplicates (two listings for Raph Koster for instance with variant
> spellings, and two for me from different addresses), but I'd
> guesstimate that that accounts for less than a third of the total
> count, leaving us with 50 posters (or 37 if you take accept 50% dupes)
> as posting in that period.  That's not a bad number, and considerably
> higher than your 20 (which I'll admit I subjectively thought was high
> when I read it).

Note I said *at any one time*.  There are plenty of folks who are active
for a while, then get busy and drift away.  For instance, Orion has been
subscribed just as long as I.  Do an archive search on both our names,
however, and I imagine you'll find hundreds of posts from me and only a
dozen or so from him.  I don't consider him to be an active member except
for those occasions where he goes on a brief flurry of posting activity
(usually when people start talking about combat systems...).

The comparisson to a mud is the size of the playerbase vs. number of
players that have logged on this week.  Arctic has a playerbase of 10 to
20 thousand most of the time, yet probably fewer than 1500 actually log in
each week.  I consider that number (1500) to be the telling one.  An
equivilent value for the list would be number of disinct email addresses
that posted last week.  I imagine the number is around 20, which is why I
cited it, above.

> More critically you may notice how little dictating I do, and how much
> the membership takes over that job for me on occasion.  A simple
> search on the archives for "Writing as list owner" will give you the
> matches for my high horse riding (less than 100 in almost three years
> and the majority of those are not dictums but comments).  
> 
> This is not to say that I'm not a (benign?) dictator, or that you
> shouldn't perform suitable sacrifices in my O! so worthy honour.

Yes, exactly.  Your administration of the list is very similar to that of
the muds that I thought were best admined.  Clearly define the boundries
of acceptable behavior, then let players run free.  If they cross those
boundries, they are delt with quickly and decisively.  If they never cross
the boundries, it's like there's no admin at all.

> The period when the list /was/ invitation only (remember, that hasn't
> been true for several months now) was significant however.  It allowed
> the list culture to evolve, consolidate, and to become deeply accepted
> by the membership.  This is important to the extent that it provides a
> commonly agreed upon and accepted premise for new members conform to
> and join.  In the MUD world this would be equivalent to having a
> beta-test period to form a central knot of players for the new
> players, once the game is opened to the public, to coalesce about.

Agreed.  And as mentioned before, because of the permenancy of the actions
performed here (== posts), this is achievable with *far* fewer players.
For this to work similarly on a mud, you need enough oldbie players such
that there are a signifigant number of them around at any given time of
day at most major locations.  If there is a knot of old-timers that are
around to give guidance, but they are in a different location or play at a
different time than a given newbie, it's like they don't exist.

Adam