[MUD-Dev] Re: The great crusade....

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 08 Aug 1998 17:57:28 -0700 
Mike Sellers<mike at bignetwork.com> wrote:

> At 09:03 PM 8/7/98 -0700, brandon wrote:

>> When I first discovered the online world, I paid a decent amount
>> of cash to play a full IC mud in which OOC was not accepted.  ...
>> The thing is, this mud wasn't spectactular in the way of combat,
>> or interface, but it was strong in Roleplaying and that kept
>> people coming back...  I believe though that the roleplaying
>> aspect died a little bit when they expanded their user base
>> beyond what they currently had...

> Another example of Koster's Law: the quality of RPing is inversely
> proportional to the size of the user base.

This law seems almost self-obvious.  Quality RP would seem
predicated on careful and detailed expectations of how other RP'ers
will react as well as of the current phsyical and social context in
the game world.  'Tis a cooperative world, maintained by the active
and careful colusion of all.    

That said, the larger the group of players, the more likely the
disjoints in the shared understanding of the common illusion, and
the lower the probable exactitude (if only in character) of any
expectation one player may have of the effect generated on any other 
random player.  

> This goes along with Hanke's Law: in every aggregation of people
> online, there is an irreducible proportion of ... jerks (he used a
> different word :-) ).

Or, to be a mite more generous:

  Given any collection of N people, gathered for their stated common
agreement to principle X, the standard deviation of the definition
of X in any individual in that group is minimally proportional to
the size of the group.

Translation: The more people you get, the more versions of "what
we're really doing" you're going to get.  You may *think* you're all
really out to do XXX, but Bubba over there is really out for f(XXX),
and Boffo for some other (more or less slight) variation of XXX,
etc.

--
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...