[MUD-Dev] Re: Affordances and social method

[Leach]

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?
How successful has this been? I am extremely impressed with the quality
of this list, and at this stage I would like to run my mud as such a
service. There seem to be a few issues with this, however. Do people log
on for the "average 4 hour per day" as they do on other muds? Do they
get bored and leave due to the lack of people on? Is the player base
centralised a common logon time? [That question is important to me as I
live in Australia :-) ]. How is motivation retained for the
implementors?

[MUD-Dev stats snip'ed]

> 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.  
> 
Imagine the fun you would have with such a player base for a mud. :-)
>From a personal point of view, the culture of a mud is one of the key
factors for me. I have played an old EoD based Diku mud for years. The
code is, well, primitive (Sorry Greg :-), but it has such a
distinguished culture (to me). I continue to go back and play there over
and over.

> 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.
> 
I can see my mud never getting out of the beta stage...

[Closing comment snip'ed]

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.
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, 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 -
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>