[MUD-Dev] Re: WIRED: Kilers have more fun

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 3 Jul 1998 22:33:25 +0100 (BST) 
Marian Griffith<gryphon at iaehv.nl> wrote:

> If I understand you correctly then I have to disagree still.  Combat
> can not be a justification to allow combat in a game. There may be
> other and valid reasons to include combat, but conflict solving can
> not be one for the same reason it is not allowed outside games
> either.

Actually it can in a much more simple manner: conflict not as a
distinct feature, but as a simple mechanical extension of the basic
structures of the game 

  The game supports gravity and weight effects.  What happens when you
drop a boulder on Bubba?  The game supports basic lever-class
mechanisms.  What happens when you put Bubba's head in a press and
turn the screw?  The game supports eating?  What happens when you feed 
Bubba poison?

Combat is both allowed and used IRL for conflict resolution, its just
socially frowned upon and discouraged in our narrow western and
idealised view of society.  Cop shoots robber -- good violance.
Robber shoots store owner -- bad violence.  Bubba goes to bar, gets
drunk, gets in bar fight, gets bloody nose, wakes up in the ditch
outside the next day with a sore head -- per some people (and I know a
whole bunch of people like this) this is a recipe for a damned good
time and is ___exactly__ how they like to spend their weekends (they
even plan these things in advance), but per others is beyond gauche.

A few streets from where I used to live an old man did something a
mother of a couple kids didn't like (I don't know what).  She yelled
at him.  He continued.  Her inventive response was to put dog shit up
under the door handles of his car.  His response was to stay barely
legal with the noise levels from his stereo and to work on his car in
the street such that a long streak of oil ran down the gutter and was
tracked into her house.  Her response was to siphon the fuel out of
her car and let down its tires after having parked it across his
driveway while his van was in it.  He called a tow truck.  She
intercepted and got a can of petrol at his expense, her tires
re-inflated, with the car pushed back into her driveway.  Somehow his
van was filled with broken glass at about this time.  When he came to
complain she opened the door to let him in, and then slammed it on his
face, breaking his nose, smashing out three teeth and scratching a
cornea (as it was her property and she claimed that she had refused
him entrance and that the wind blew the door shut (it was the windy
season), the case was not pursued).  Mysteriously all four tires of
his van went flat the next night.  I never did catch the end of the
battle.

Certifiably violent.

A kid I knew remotely was found unconcious in a ditch, severely beaten
and bruised, apparently having been worked over with great
thoroughness with a rubber hose.  No broken bones, but no areas that
weren't well bruised and sore, and a fairly high possiblity of brain
damage and minor concussion from blows to the head.  One gonad was
crushed (the phrase "split like a ripe tomatoe" was used), apparently
by a well aimed kick to the groin.  He spent a week in hospital before
he was physically able to walk more than a few steps.  No charges were
ever pressed.  The story about town was that he'd gotten a girl
pregnant and the father hadn't been pleased.

Definitely violent.

These things don't happen every day.  That doesn't stop them from
happening however.  That given, philosophically my approach to
remedying such "problems" is not to either avoid them or attempt to
prevent them, but to exacerbate them.  Make the problem so big, and so
glaringly huge, and so invasive and ever present, that the social
structures in the game world react accordingly to accomodate.

Think of it like innoculations.  You handle rampant violence in your
game by making it worse, not better.

> The strange thing then is that so few people, on this list only
> Dr.Cat that I know of, attempt to create a safer game environment,
> at the expense of some freedom of the players. Or am I being overly
> pessimistic now?

There are quite a few more actually.  They're just not a very vocal
crowd.

That said one could attempt to define two sorts of safeties:

  1) The safety of a homogenous group.

  2) The safety of the teeter-totter of constant mutual assured
destruction (or other valuable loss).

Both are highly artificial states, but only one seems to prompt
concerted efforts to "do something about it".

>> Not at all! As Dr Cat rightly points out, solutions such as
>> ostracism are very powerful. Of course, given the fluidity of
>> identity, ostracism is hard to implement. :(

> I dearly would like to discuss this topic as well, preferably under
> an- other subject and concentrating on possible solutions rather
> than on the problem which has over the time been beaten to death (if
> you forgive me the very poor pun).  What mechanisms in reality
> control the rampaging warbands? I don't think fear of punishment is
> an effective deterrent as (would be) criminals do not rationaly
> compare risks and rewards. Instead the simply believe they will not
> get caught. So what social, ethical, economical and other mech-
> anisms keep the vast majority of people from taking what they please
> and eliminate all who oppose them. And can similar mechanism be
> brought over to the mud environment with its unique characteristics?

Control of identity is a biggie, and perhaps the ultimate key.
Raph(?)/Sellers(?) earlier made the comparison to The Well, where
everybodies real name was always known and associated with every
action (and of course the "real names" were certified as being
correct).

Without getting into the implementation concerns, what would happen to 
your average maurading PK'er in a game where all indentities were
reducable to one of:

  a) A real name/identity.  (eg "Bubba is played by Marian Giffith,"
or "Bubba is played by Marian Griffith, home phone XXXX, home address
YYY, etc.")

  b) A guaranteed correct account number or other key string which is
guaranteed to identify a particular human uniquely without identifying
the individual further.  (eg "Bubba is played by account XXX, where
XXX represents a specific human we won't name.")

  c) A virtualised and extended form of the last where a central
database entry "joins" and relates all identities assumed by any one
human without revealing anything about the human directly.  (eg
"Bubba, Boffo and Bernie are all played by the same person")

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...