[MUD-Dev] Our player's keepers? (long)

[Jon A. Lambert]

> Brian Green wrote:
> 
[snip]  
> This is issue is an emotionally charged issue, and we risk one side of
> the argument alienating the other side of the argument;
[snip] 
> I will strive to stick to more logical arguments.
[snip] 
> The now notorous Colonel Grossman is making quite a living on the talk show 
> circuits trumpeting the harmful effects of video game violence.  

Ahem...what happened...isn't that a emotively charged statement?  ;-)
 
For those not familiar...
Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman is a West Point Psych Professor, Professor of 
Military Science and Chair of the Department of Military Science at Arkansas
State U and the author of the Pulitzer nominated "On Killing: The 
Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" and many other 
books.  He served as an Army ranger and paratrooper.  

> The "link" between playing a game and the disasterous effect on a
> person's life is even more evident in our case; no one could argue that
> the player's obsession with UO is not what caused his problems,
> particularly when dealing with the general population.  Negative press
> will come, my friends, and it will be a force that we may not be able to
> handle.  It won't matter who is morally or legally wrong or right in the
> matter, the masses will decide our fate if we allow it to come to that.

A significant population of the players of UO, EQ, AC, and Diablo are
between the ages of 12 and 17.  Yes or No?  Most all of the arguments I've 
seen in both threads _assume_ your playerbase is adults and on that score 
I wouldn't disagree with the most libertine of all of you as to your
responsibility.

Now there's some NEW light on this issue.  Do a search in the Mud-Dev 
archives for "children & responsibility" or "children & policy" or 
"kids & policy"?  Let me know if you find anything of relevance. 

> Why should we care?  Why should individuals even consider how the
> industry as a whole fares?  To put it simply, because we are a
> community.  Communities flourish when people contribute and wither when
> people take without giving back to it.  Any person not interested in
> becoming part of such a community should seriously reconsider online
> gaming as a career.  Our job is stated most simply when we say that we
> "create communities."

If you have players who are playing 70+ hours a week, is your policy 
the same or different for a 25 year old adult, or for a 13 year old child/
adolescent?  

One could argue that your not Timmy's mom or dad, you're not responsible
for the fact that they aren't providing a proper level of parental 
supervision, it's none of your damn business, maybe they do know and don't
care, besides you really don't know for certain how old Timmy is anyway,
and they'd just find another mud if you took any action.  You can wash 
your hands of the whole matter...

One wonders at what point we did lose this mutual respect, civility and 
understanding we once shared with other members of our societies concerning 
our common interests in the raising, teaching and protection of children.  
Isn't it true that our own children will grow up side by side and cross 
paths quite often with these other children, the very ones we wash our
hands of?  Maybe for this reason alone we should take just a little more 
interest in _other_ people's children, maybe if we did our own children 
will have to deal with less disfunctional humans rather than more. 

> In the tradition of offering possible solutions in an effort to start
> discussion, allow me to give a basic example.  I think the obvious way
> to break such obsessive behavior is to destroy the link between time
> invested in a game and the resulting advancement within the game's
> mechanics.  This is nothing short of heresy according to many
> developers.  Tradition is strong in our medium, but there are some
> legacies we can stop clinging to so stubbornly.  

I believe if you've got known minors logged in and they're putting in 40+, 
70+ hours a week, you've got a ethical obligations to terminate the account, 
or throttle it way back.  YMMV.

--
--* Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD        Email:jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com *--
--* Mud Server Developer's Page <http://tychomud.home.netcom.com> *--
--* If I had known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself.*--
 





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