[MUD-Dev] curses and grief players

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

Greg Miller <gmiller at classic-games.com> wrote:
 
> That's debatable. Note, for example, capitalism which almost never
> functions based on exactly even power, yet succeeds nicely.

A "whois" lookup on "classic-gaming.com" lists you as the owner, and
lists your address in the US.  So, please excuse me if I find the
opinion of a computer literate male living in the US that "capitalism
[...] succeeds nicely" a bit hard to agree with on faith.

Take a walk downtown your nearby large city of choice and ask some of
the homeless, some of the dispossessed how well capitalism works for
them.  I'll bet you won't get many (sober) responses that it "succeeds
nicely".  Regardless of what rhetoric the "Rah capitalism!" crowd spews,
not every dispossessed person necessarily deserves their hard luck.

How does this relate to games?  Systems always create these dispossessed
people.  In fact, we depend on this fact to strip the "grief players" of
their power!  And, remember, unlike the offline world, those people who
are unfairly dispossessed don't have to stick around your game.  Worse,
they often have few repercussions from staying around and causing
troubles.  You don't want to upset people that weren't causing trouble
in the first place.

So, our job as game developers is to make sure that we exclude the
correct people from our games, IE, the infamous "grief player".  We need
to be aware of the fact that our systems are going to create the
dispossessed, and make sure we know how to handle these people.  Our
systems need to empower the people that improve our games and get rid of
the people that ruin our games.

--
"And I now wait / to shake the hand of fate...."  -"Defender", Manowar
     Brian Green, brian at psychochild.org  aka  Psychochild
       |\      _,,,---,,_      *=* Morpheus, my kitten, says "Hi!" *=*
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_  
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'  "Ritalin Cures Next Picasso" 
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)               -The_Onion_, August 4th, 1999



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