[MUD-Dev] UO rants

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Merillat <harik at chaos.ao.net>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Tuesday, August 29, 2000 2:44 PM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] UO rants


>
>"Dave Rickey" writes:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Dan Merillat <harik at chaos.ao.net>
>> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
>> Date: Friday, August 25, 2000 10:39 PM
>> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] UO rants
>> >Attempting to call a large group of people with no RL interaction a
>> "community"
>> >of any kind simply because they are all interacting in the same system
>> online
>> >is a mistake.  A community may for, or multiple communities, but the
whole
>> thing
>> >is a collection of people interacting with people that have nearly no
>> impact on
>> >their RL lives.   Fairly obvious why grief playing is so common, no?
>> >
>>     I'll refer you to "A Story About A Tree",
>> http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/essay1.html .  I defy you to explain
>> how that *wasn't* a community, even though few if any of the participants
>> had any RL interaction.  It's just one of many such examples I've
personally
>> witnessed.
>
>No, that dosn't contradict what I said.  I said "a community may form".
>She was a member of that community, and as such her loss was felt by that
>community.  And possibly, on a small enough world, the community may
>envelop a large portion of the playerbase.
>
>I've been on games where I knew everyone, and on games where it was rare to
>see the same face twice.  On a small enough scale, yes, you can have a
>sense of community.  Add enough people in the mix and no, you probably
won't.
>Or perhaps you can, if given enough time and a slow growth.   Perhaps it's
just
>that VCs are inherently fragile due to their transient nature.
>
    My apologies, after I sent that out I realized I had misread your
original message.  You won't have one contiguous community past a certain
size, no.  You will have multiple subcultures.  That *doesn't* mean you
can't have an over-arching social fabric that those exist in, just that it
won't form on its own.  I don't think it's from any "fragility" in the
structure, or resistance to being part of larger structures (these people
have been part of national-scale social structures their whole lives, after
all).  I think it is a failure on our part to simulataneously provide social
challenges large enough to require larger structures, while providing the
tools needed to support those structures.

    It's not that I disagree with you, one of the reasons I see little
purpose in making 5,000-50,000 peak-population worlds right now is because
we don't know how to encourage social structures of that size yet, we can't
even create social frameworks for 1500-2000-peak games very well.  But I see
the lack of such structures as a challenge, not a law of nature.

   It's not "Time and slow growth", all the time in the world wouldn't break
the human race out of a tribal social structure to city-states until
agriculture made it both possible and neccessary.  The current situation of
player organization peaking out at around 150 players is a *stable* one
unless we figure out how to move beyond it.  Doing that will require
presenting the players with an opportunity that appeals to and benefits the
individual, but can't be effectively used unless they organize into
something larger.

--Dave Rickey




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