[MUD-Dev] Re: Marian's Tailor vs. Psychopaths

[Koster]

Related to this topic, I recently got a letter from a UO player who has
been reading some of my writings on muds (including excerpts from
mud-dev) who badly misinterpreted something I said. Below is his email
and my response to him...

start quote---

> Raph:
> 
> Continuing in my reading, I turn now to the above subject.
> 
> I must agree with you that most people have no sense of the 
> reality that
> there is someone on the other end of the connection.  They 
> play with pure
> impunity knowing that nothing in RL can happen to them, and 
> therefore they
> are as mean as they can be.
> 
> I took agree that this only shows the truest form in RL of 
> that player.
> For example, when someone in UO attacks without reason or 
> cause, attacks a
> newbie, or just cuz they can, it shows their total lack of respect for
> anyone else not just in the virtual world, but in real life.  
> Although in
> real life they may mask thier dis-respect with a smile and a 
> laugh, and
> since there would be real penalties to pay, then they only 
> think of what
> they would like to do in thier mind.

On the meanness issue: I take exception to your statement that it just
reveals that these people are requally mean in real life. Usually they
aren't. The level of meanness we see in virtual spaces approaches the
sociopathic in real life. But sociopathy is often casually defined as a
total lack of empathy for other human beings. The vast majority of
people are not actually sociopathic.

This is what led me to coin the term "virtually sociopathic"--meaning
people who cannot seem to reach that level of empathy with others who
are sharing a virtual space. It does NOT reflect on their dealings in
real life, where they may indeed be thoroughly empathic and caring.
Rather, it means that because their inhibitions are lowered by anonymity
and perhaps by the lack of physical cues, and because the other people
in the environment are more easily objectified, and because they are
able to present themselves as a person divorced from their true identity
and therefore are better able to engage in actions which their normal
persona could not bring themselves to do--they act sociopathic *within
the virtual context*. Without being so really.

(Long parenthetical note: it's long been known that people are less
inhibited over the phone than in person, and people are now aware that
they are less inhibited in email than on the phone, and I believe they
are less inhibited in muds than on email. It's interesting to me that at
each stage you lose crucial identifiers of personality for the person
with whom you interact: by stages we remove physical cues such as
expression, smell, etc; then we lose the voice and its emotional
content; then we lose even the unique address and identity and sense of
individuality in the person with whom we are interacting. This is not
dissimilar to how much easier it is to kill people in uniforms, have a
one-night stand with someone you hardly know, act witty and daring at a
costume party, or get unbelievably rude with someone on a call-in radio
show...)

This leads to an interesting conclusion for mud design--penalties won't
solve your playerkiller problem. Helping them gain empathy will.

---end quote

Anyone got a handy-dandy set of tactics for this? :)

Classic ones are general community building ones, but these don't
necessarily target your troublemaking population. I have an essay on
community building tools at http://mud.sig.net/raph/gaming/essay6.html
but none of them seem REALLY aimed at empathy-building.

-Raph