[MUD-Dev] dealing with foul language

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

"Kristen L. Koster" wrote:
> "Every newbie is a psychopath."* Socialization (which really is a fancy word
> for a subtler form of peer pressure) is required.

(There can be a significant amount of peer pressure in the research
community without any significant amount of socializing.  I suspect you
could achieve the same thing with a skill/knowledge oriented MUD
society, assuming 10 years+ lifespan.)

> 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 my experience the rec.* and alt.* groups are notoriously bad, but the
comp.* groups are a lot better. A fairly high volume newsgroups like
comp.graphics.algorithms does rather well IMO.  One of the problems with
rec and alt groups is that those that really know a lot avoid them,
those that know a litte use them, but assume that everybody else are
clueless idiots.

What happens in c.g.a is that overly clueless posts are ignored or
answered with some enlightening information. In order to participate in
a flame war you will have to possess knowledge above a certain level. I
also think that it helps a lot that some very knowledgeable people
provides valuable information at an early stage. Of course the real crux
is that those that participate are interested in ideas and knowledge,
not only in boosting their ego. Create a constructive MUD rather than a
socialized kill-fest and I think you have a fair chance of creating a
high quality environment with sustainable growth potential. (Assuming
that the technical platform is sound)

The problem with EA is that they try to (re)invent TV.  TV is generally
low quality, even when heavily moderated. >;-}

> 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.

My theory is that gender will be less pronounced, and that the role-play
environment would suffer. "I'm not a fucking woman, it's just those
clueless Origin faggots..".  People will no longer have a reason to
expect a female-presenting character to be a woman?

Ola.




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