[MUD-Dev] Re: Family, was characters per account

[Raph Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu [mailto:mud-dev-admin at kanga.nu]On Behalf Of
> Paul Schwanz - Enterprise Services
> Sent: Thursday, April 13, 2000 11:54 AM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: RE: [MUD-Dev] Re: Family, was characters per account
>
>
>
> Daniel said:
> > > I've been especially disappointed in the graphical MMORPGs.
> Family?  They
> > > don't even have NPC children.  Because, I'm supposing,
> someone somewhere
> > > decided that it wasn't the least bit important.  Waste of
> disk space for
> > > the art, waste of system resources to have them in-game.
> It's not as if
> > > anyone wants to pretend those are real towns with real people in
> > > them anyway.
> >
>
> Raph replied:
> > Actually, in UO's case it was because a) we were concerned about the
vast
> > potential for nastiness (children-killing, pedophilia, etc), and b) we
> > didn't actually finish the artwork. The former is worth discussing on
the
> > list, I think: the viability of children, and children-specific
> > environments, particularly in comemrcial ventures.
>
> Isn't this mixing apples and oranges?  I think Daniel was talking about
children
> as _characters_ in the game and not children as _players_ of the game.

Doesn't matter.

> Why is children-killing worse than player-killing, if both are really
being
> played by an adult (or even if they are not)?

Because people in our culture see it that way. *shrug* Out of my hands, they
just do.

> Should child-killing in a game offend us in a way that
> killing other innocents does not?

A basic MMORPG design lesson for me was that sociological questions starting
with "should" should be considered a waste of time. Take human nature as a
given, don't try to code around it. ;) The fact is that it DOES offend most
people most of the time. You just deal with the fact, not try to change it.

> I don't know the answers to these questions, but I thought this might be
> interesting to explore.  I think the important thing is to have
> appropriate
> in-game consequences for those characters who practice evil of
> any sort, but I
> can see how giving any kind of opportunity for gamers to
> role-play a pedophile
> is very disturbing.  Of course, there really isn't much to
> prevent them from
> role-playing a pedophile in current MMORPGs, they just have no
> way of acting it
> out in public.

The lack of children artwork helps reduce the occurences of it, basically.
There's a reason no major children-oriented chat spaces have hit it big yet:
the cost of policing is sky-high.

> Administratively speaking, I would think that
> this type of
> behavior could be handled just like you currently handle lewd or
> offensive
> behavior on the part of gamers (such as attempting to act out a
> rape, etc.).

EG, manually. Except that you have to be much more careful because the
victims are kids, which means it costs more: in an adult environment you
settle for post facto punishment, in a kids' environment the children's
parents will demand a priori prevention.

-Raph




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