[MUD-Dev] dealing with foul language

[Kristen L. Koster]

on 4/7/2000 12:10 PM, Wes Connell wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Kristen L. Koster wrote:
> 
>> "Maintaining a mature environment" is not a very scaleable solution as your
>> playerbase grows. This effect is noticeable even when you go from 10 to 100
>> to 200 simultaneous users on a hobbyist text mud. "Mature environment"
>> largely depends on the effectiveness of peer pressure. Peer pressure largely
>> depends on small group size.
> 
> Yes but most muds of those size typically have more than one starting
> point. These muds do not lump all the players into one big group. The
> players are distributed over the whole map. If you have proper in-game
> mechanisms for managing multiple small communities I beleive you could
> maintain a mature environment.
> Example: In UO Skara Brae has a population made up of mainly veteran
> players. On a very rare occasion do I see a character running through the
> streets shouting bad words. In Britain this happens quite often.
> 
> The small community of Skara Brae tended to have a mature feeling to
> it.

As long as you feel tied to that community. Which usually requires a
moderately mature player to start with. :) In other words, the folks who
hang out in Skara Brae are fairly mature in part because they have chosen to
form a microcommunity there, in a place which is not frankly that hospitable
to the general run of players, and which requires a fairly advanced and
experienced player (ergo, a more socialized one) in order to survive or
derive sufficient enjoymnent from the situation.

The same thing on a larger scale happens on the Siege Perilous shard, which
can be termed "Advanced UO" (more realistic and therefore more difficult
economy, one character per account, increased difficulty of magical travel).
This is a small subset of your potential audience, however.

> If UO possessed in-game mechanisms for nuturing this then it might
> help. With the new lands patch Ocllo will be turned into a 'newbie town'
> which is definitely a cool idea. This herds newbies into one area and
> keeps them under the influence of Companions. The Companions *should* have
> a mature influence on the newbies. It could even have a trickle down
> effect.

"Every newbie is a psychopath."* Socialization (which really is a fancy word
for a subtler form of peer pressure) is required. And yes, Companions are
both an overt forcing of socialization and also a friendly welcome to assist
in getting past UO's notoriously difficult learning curve.

> IMHO a mature environment could be maintained on a large scale given
> proper in-game mechanisms.

A major factor barely touched on here is player mobility. The greater the
mobility, the harder it is to maiontain said mature environment, because
it's harder to provide the peer pressure necessary for socialization. This
was discussed previously on the list, albeit in the context of
playerkilling, rather than foul language. Different points on the spectrum,
to my mind, but the same issue.

Of course a mature environment can be maintained on a large scale, if the
game encourages microcomminities sufficiently. Any of the microcommunities
within UO offered an environment perceived by their citizens as appropriate
except when invaded. They had formed their own norms. The problem was when
these norms were violated by some other group that happebned to be passing
through is sufficient numbers to form a consistent disruption. Ease of
travel makes this possible. In a game with a single official broadcast
channel (gossip or chat for example) you may never get sufficient norming.
It's an easily observable phenomenon on Usenet, where the rule of thumb is
that the larger the group, the less polite it is.**

In most of the microcommunities in UO, excessive or gratuitous foul language
was generally unacceptable. However, in many it was perfectly OK.

Observation one:
Geographically bound communities (eg towns) were more polite than
geographically unbound ones (guilds).

Observation two:
often because the community norms were formed by a group that was almost
exclusively male. This is purely anecdotal, but a society with
female-presenting characters in it tends to be a more polite society
regardless of whether they are female in RL. I speculated to my design team
the other week that perhaps we should allow only two characters per player,
but they had to be one male and one female--my theory is that we'd get a
much friendlier world overall.

-Raph

* to quote a law I haven't put into the Laws yet. I just never seem to get
around to it, even though Damion tells me it's his favorite Law.
Technically, I guess it's hyperbole, but it sounds good that way.
Sociopathic would be a better term, and even that's hyperbole :)

** go read Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for a nice
anthropological look at all these issues. There's a whopper of a scary
question that book raises for the viability of large-scale online
communities that I should dig into in another post sometime.





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