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

[Jon A. Lambert]

> Erik Jarvi wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 11:53:34PM -0400, Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> > 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?  
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Is your policy different for summer, winter, spring vacations/holidays, insert
> any day(s) off?  How do you know exactly with thousands of different school
> districts? You'll be close with 80%-90%.
> Not to mention home schooling, who knows maybe the parent/teacher is using
> a MUD/MMRPG to teach social interaction, one of the classic major negatives of
> home schooling.

My own policy is strictly 18 or older.  And is likely to be enforced via 
an adult verification system.  That's my target audience.  

Now my query above is for those whose targetted game audience contains a 
significant population of 12-17 year olds.   And yet continue to use adult 
analogies and other libertine arguments based on bartender dilemas, driving, 
smoking, and drugs to justify not taking any responsibility. 
 
> As a "step" parent to a 12 year old and a real parent to a 11 month old, 
> it's _my_ responsibility to make sure Timmy does his homework and get off his (my)
> computer.
 
I heartily concur as I have 14 and 10 year olds.  Now suppose your particular
Timmy has a friend named Sammy who arives at your home immediately following 
school and proceeds to stay there for six hours.  Obviously you are going 
to tell Sammy to take a hike.  The way you go about doing that can vary 
quite a bit.  

So Sammy does take a hike and hangs out on the street corner smoking 
dope, terrorizing neighborhood dogs, and throwing bricks through windows.
You don't have to worry about Sammy, he's not _your_ problem.  Or better
yet, Sammy disappears completely off social landscape of your neighborhood 
because he's logged into UO or EQ eight hours a day after school.  
Still not your problem.  Maybe not until Sammy is 17 and robbing houses 
in your neighborhood to pay for his UO fix.  ;-P

Then again you may even like Sammy and know his parents.  You might
even call them up and say, "Hey I'm kind of worried about your Sammy.
Timmy tells me he's not doing to well in school and he does seem to
spend a lot of time over here.  blah... blah... I know someone that 
might be able to tutor Sammy... blah .. blah"  
Sure they might be more likely to scream and hang up on you, than wake
up, listen and thank you.  

So tell me...In your neighborhood, do you have any interest at all in 
seeing that most of the friends that Timmy might bring home are not 
Internet Sammys?  Does the notion that UO, EQ, AC, and others have a 
vested interest in broadening their internet audience, making their games 
much more attractive and more appealing, and that that might begin in 
a way to further erode your neighorhood's quality of adult and child 
social interaction give you pause for just a little worry?  
Hi I'm Chicken Little.  The sky is falling. :-)

For those who hold the my mud is my house/my party analogies, consider
hosting an event in your house with a dozen 10-14 year old boys in 
attendance every week.  Something I actually do for a hour or two
every week (it's known as cub scouts).  Now consider having them over
for 6-8 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Methinks most parents are going 
to take a very dim view towards that health of that activity, whether
it be scouting or mudding.  Would it be cause for puzzlement and 
bafflement should angry mobs of them showed up outside Verant or 
Simultronics (for "instances") wielding torches and pitchforks or
holding hands and singing "Cumbaya" while holding posters of Timmy?
Hi I'm Chicken Little.  The sky is falling. :-)
 
Certainly many of us on this list are excited and enamoured with all
the possibilities of online communities.  Perhaps one might consider
the ramifications of the progression of the media from radio, a one-way
audio medium, to television a one-way audio and graphical medium, to
online graphical games, a graphically interactive medium.  No you are 
not just replacing TV like radio.  TV is substantally more engaging 
(addicting) to the general populace than radio ever was.  It's not a
leap of logic to venture that the interactive online worlds, (and many
other Internet tools) promise yet another exponentially higher level of 
engagement (and perhaps addiction).  

We all realize it's going to happen anyway.  But imagine for instant
walking outside your home and _not_ seeing or hearing children playing
in the street, for they're all jacked-in like cyber machines.  Ooo... 
do you hear the sounds of violins playing in this emotional sci-fi 
horror epic?  Charleton Heston enters stage left screaming down the 
street at the top of his lungs, "Muds are made from people!", while 
Burgess Meredith sits atop of pyramid of musty books in an otherwise 
silent dead world trying to read a book through broken glasses..."  
Mine is not the argument of logic you see, it's an emotive one. 
Hi I'm Chicken Little.  The sky is falling. ;-P

So when Brian says let's try to shelve the emotion, and argue logically
I have to grin a little...let's not...what sort of community is formed
by logic and reason?   What does it really mean to move from small 
communities of fairly like minded individuals to large diverse communities 
that are much more than games?  I'll tell you what I think it requires.  
You need your free-speech anarchists screaming you can't control me or 
shut me up, you need rational logical unemotional Mr. Spock types, as 
well as Dr. Spock types, you need empathetic females who feel more with 
their hearts than reason with their heads, you need someone yelling 
out that prior statement was sexist, as well as someone making it, 
you need McCarthyite players engaging in witch hunts looking for a 
cheaters or closet communists, you need people screaming "save the 
children", "save the whale", or "don't eat the fido dogs", oh and you 
do need your Mrs. Grundy's (cf. Heinlein) poking their noses into other 
people's business, and tattling to administrators and spreading gossip 
and inuendo, you really do need Colonel Grossman and Ralph Nader 
jumping all over your interface and available activities along the way, 
you do need player preachers hanging out on mud street corners beating
passerbies over their head with Bibles and Korans, as well as lusty 
lads and lasses looking for sin in private rooms. ;) 
You need homosexuals, vegetarians, bleeding heart libs, and you need 
homophobes, meat-eaters, maybe even cannibals and conservative 
reactionaries.  Maybe then you'll have a REAL communities.  Worlds full
of meaty substance with real live grade-A Yin and Yang.  
Not artificial playgrounds...or the world _I_ want it to be...in which 
noone can truly live and breath, like those worlds envisioned by 
Marx, or More's Utopia, or Plato's Republic.  Instead something real 
and something very very human ...something that reflects a mature 
candid _acceptance_ of human nature like Machiavelli, or a glorification 
and revelry in the joy in the duality of human nature like St. Augustine.  

Methinks the question of social responsibility will not be your decision 
or one settled aforetime on the design table, or encoded into implementation.  
It's more likely that social responsibility is going to be _thrust_ upon 
you by your massive player base and external entities and forces you have 
no hope of containing or controlling.  Are you _really_ the creators of 
communities?  Hmm...

Maybe we ought to just consider running muds or online games.  <grin>
Or focusing on something small, cozy and confortable.

I know that Chris doesn't really want the list to devolve into detailed 
discussions in developmental child psychology.  Most of us are poorly 
equipped to bring a great deal of thought to the issue, like myself for 
instance, and many of us rightly view the area with some justifiable 
suspicions, reservations and skeptism.  However, there is an awful lot 
of published information and research on the issue for to provide you 
with endless hours of amusement, snoozing, or eye-popping fascination 
off-list.   But frankly, it's pretty safe to say we haven't the slightest 
clue of how it is, or what the effects are of
...growing up as a "child of the internet".  

We certainly will find this out soon enough. :-)

p.s.  My post isn't really directed at you Eric or Brian, but like many
posts just a convenient launching pad for a rambling whining soap-box
opinion-type thingy.  

--
--* 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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