[MUD-Dev] Birthday Cake (or Why Large Scale Sometimes Sucks)(long)

[Par Winzell]

I'm not sure how much original substance I have to contribute to this
debate, but since Mihaley's opinion -- which to me is common sense --
actually seems to be outnumbered, I felt I had to at least put in some
manner of 'vote'.

Matthew Mihaly writes:
 > On Thu, 8 Jun 2000, Ola Fosheim [iso-8859-1] Grøstad wrote:
 > > But does the fact that Timmy is an idiot make the admin less
 > > responsible? I would have thought the opposite!! Some people think
 > > almost everybody but themselves are complete idiots... (Used to be me ;)
 > > What could this type of reasoning lead to? If one design systems that
 > > attracts idiots (or kids or other feeble minds) then one should be
 > > responsible for the detrimental effects of the system on said
 > > population. Some systems are clearly designed for idiots and marketed as
 > > such! >;-}  Your argument only holds if you take sufficient measures to
 > > exclude feeble minds.
 > 
 > The admin may be responsible, but he's responsible in the same way as the
 > universe is responsible for creating the hailstorm that destroyed Farmer
 > Bob's crops. I don't hold reality responsible for that, just as I wouldn't
 > hold the admin responsible for Timmy's problem. It's a meaningless kind of
 > responsibility, to me.

Responsibility is entirely irrelevant here. There are times when bowing out
of a market is the morally correct thing to do -- when you realize you push
dope to kids, for example -- and there are other times when it's precisely
the same thing as sticking your head in the sand and pretending reality is
something other than what it is.

The markets of the west are finely honed machines, designed for the one
purpose of satisfying without fail or delay any urge anybody (with money)
might have, at any time. The Fool brothers make the very serious suggestion
in "Rule Breakers, Rule Makers", that if you're considering investing in a
company that is not in _some way_ dedicated to making life more convenient
for Americans, you may want to reconsider the investment.

One major business one may consider complementary to that of convenience is
entertainment, and that's the one we're in. When we've shaved the 'useless'
hours out of our lives that our grandparents had to spend doing things like
cooking, cleaning, writing letters by hand, travelling for days to get to
another part of the country -- then we're left essentially with our high-
tech jobs, sleep, and a vast gap of leisure that need filling with pleasing
activities of some kind. We've burned up our reservoir of genuine hardship.

Now, in most ways this is a wonderful state of things. I do not suggest that
13th century England was somehow a cool place to be just because it tended
to kill you from starvation or warfare before your thirtieth birthday. What
I do wonder is what god-given task or bourgeois vision it is we're retarding
by building these fantastic, gorgeous, breathtaking virtual worlds? Hell,
people, this is what we're here for. This is art at the highest level.

Some guy neglects his job to run around in EverQuest? Great! Go for it, guy!
He neglects his family? Well, he's got his priorities a bit mixed up, but no
more than those who neglect their families to work 70-hour weeks.

Some guy suicides because his character got nuked? Well, that is a terrible
thing. So, we sit down and try to figure out went wrong, the way people do
on CNN every night. Did this game play too big a role in his impressionable
young mind? Yes, almost certainly, just as a tragic love affair plays too
big a role, or fights and quarrels, high emotion -- friction of any kind;
anything other than lethargy. Things affect people. Suicides are tragedies;
building something that inspires people to give a damn, that's no tragedy.

Pär



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