player politics (was RE: [MUD-Dev] An introduction...)

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

"Sellers, Michael" wrote:
> paper has yet to be written.  There have been some good, if limited,
> analyses of player politics on LambdaMOO and from a few MUDs that have tried
> this, but (IMO) the implementation and/or prior state of the game has always
> gotten in the way.

There's the Anna duval Smith bookchapter on conflict management (the
link can be found in the kanga.nu library), which also provide
references to conflict management litterature. I have yet to look up
those though... (the conlifct management angle does, I think, suggest
that the political game will fail, and that you will need a mediator)

Then again, I think it is just as much an issue of which people you
collect from where, for what reason, what kinds of expectations users
have, what kind of establishment you have... mud-dev essentially covers
the same field rec.games.mud.admin, but there seems to be a significant
difference. Even in how the same people act on the two arenas. (I havent
been reading Usenet much in the past five years or so, but...) Of
course, there are just a handful of people that make the r.g.m.*
newsgroups almost unbearable. Unfortunately they choose to stay... ;*)

Maybe it just isn't sensible to make large 4all moneymaking machines...
If one care about the human personal growth perspective?

> I think this is one of a few areas with some pretty
> juicy PhD theses waiting to happen.

There'll be lots of _pages_ and entertainment, but I wonder if the
environment/premises are stable enough for results to actually be
useful...

> My own research has led me right back to the basics: for example, the
> creation of the Magna Carta, the Plymouth Compact, and Penn's Frame of
> Government.

Why? What? Explain?


Ola.




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