[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method

[S. Patrick Gallaty]

-----Original Message-----
From: Leach, Brad BA <Leach.Brad.BA at bhp.com.au>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Tuesday, July 28, 1998 4:27 PM
Subject: [MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method


|On Tuesday, July 14, 1998 12:21 PM
|J C Lawrence <claw at under.engr.sgi.com> wrote:
|
|> On Mon, 13 Jul 1998 11:50:39 -0700 (PDT) 
|> Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:
|> 
|> > 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. :)
|> 
|Has anyone actually tried running a mud as an invitation-only service?

not a whole mud no, but I have run small portions of larger muds as
such.

For example,  I wrote an early 'guild' for lpmuds back in 1989, which
had an invite-only social structure.  To get into the guild one had to
be invited to join by one of the guildmembers.  To advance one 
needed the cooperation of advanced guildmembers.

The result was that the members of this guild were *very* well 
behaved because the members were hand-picked by other 
members.  The 'troublemakers' were categorically denied 
entrance into the guild repeatedly.

The second experiment I performed around this basis was
7 years later.  I took the largest and crummiest guild on my 
mud and changed the fundamental social fabric - I did this by
making 'joining' the guild happen only by invitation, by 
making it so that when players left the guild they lost all gained
and unspent experience, by making parts of the guild 
completely private to non-guildmembers, by refusing entrance
into the guild by non-guild players who had killed guildplayers,
and by limiting the max level of players who could join as new.

This guild went from a gang of strangers to a tight-knit and 
supportive social mechanism within a month.  I
was impressed that the players became selective about 
membership, started banding together to protect their own
and became a positive force on the mud.


|How successful has this been? 

It was in my isolated cases perfectly acceptable.  The goal in my
situation was to 'Give teeth to community.'  In other words 
make peer acceptance and approval highly important.

[ 8< ]

|I would love to have a culture built up in my mud from this method, but
|there are other "experiments" I would like to "run". One of the other
|methods I would like to try is to have (initally) a "rule-less" mud.

The success of 'rule-less' environments in my opinion depends
on the capacity for the isolated character to be curtailed by the
ill-will they create.
That can be and will be interpreted in many ways by different 
people on this list and really is meant to be an open statement.

In some cases that ill-will is manifested by a 'you killed someone'
flag, in other systems by having a series of mechanisms that
afford for other players to help or hinder one another (such 
as diverse and narrow skill sets, cooperation requirements
in mud functions and quests etc.)

|There would be no rules set by the admin - it would all be left for the
|players to inadvertantly set and enforce. I am not sure this would be
|successful. It has worked for the human race, 

The mitigating factor here is that we as humans exist on a work
ethic.  We are greater in community than we are individually.
Enhance the feeling of community yes, but also enhance the 
need and effect of community and you are working towards
the sort of self-regulating environment that we are discussing here.

This list isn't a good example of a mud.  We are all highly motivated
people with a large degree of common experience and rarified 
knowledge.  We have some common purpose and nothing to gain from 
disruptive behaviour aside from ejection from the list.

|but then again, we were
|faced with the options of evolving into a society with culture, or at
|the other end of the scale - extinsion. As there are no consequences of
|any actions from a mud, I cant see any result apart from extinsion -

You've hit upon a very interesting concept that I strongly suggest you
investigate.  You want to create a society on a mud?  Make something
that the mud has to work together to protect and create.
For instance, a mud that started out without technology like steel...
where players had to work to research it, mine it, to protect their 
hovels from the monsters who would actively attack the base 
town etc.

Make extinction a real possibility... extinction meaning loss 
of technology, loss of some cooperatively gained bonuses...
loss of the infrastructure that makes things like metal armor and
domesticated animals possible... that makes magic and written
language possible.

Survival is a very good way to make people stick together.

You might have just answered my questions about where I should
go with my next mud :)


|except if a very strong culture is formed by a tight knot of players.
|Even then, the chances of the mud forming into a culture that *I* like,
|is limited. I dont think I am prepared to put the time in to a mud to
|find that I dont want to be there/play it after a certain period of
|time. Maybe it can be a project for a University experiment (or a
|concurrent server to my "real" mud) in the future.
|
|That's all for now,
|-Brad
|
|<sig snipped>
|
|-- 
|MUD-Dev: Advancing an unrealised future.
|
|