[MUD-Dev] Criminalize Community Volunteers?

[Dave Rickey]

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian 'Psychochild' Green <brian at psychochild.org>
To: mud-dev at kanga.nu <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Date: Thursday, September 07, 2000 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Criminalize Community Volunteers?
>
>Now for the real rant portion of this post.  I find it disgusting that
>so many people seem willing to defend this practice by saying "The money
>isn't there" or that "Online RPGs just wouldn't be made" if companies
>couldn't exploit free employees.  What kind of defense is that?  That's
>like saying, "McDonalds can't stay in business if we have to pay our
>employees actual wages.  Can we just give them a few burgers at the end
>of the shift?"  How far would that fly?  It's worse in our case, because
>commercial MUDs are primarily a service, not a product; and we have come
>to expect "volunteers" to help us provide that service.

    Hey, hey, back off here.  That was a very specific response to the
contention of "if the volunteers went away, they'd just have to hire
people."  If they go away, the companies *can't* just hire people, not on
anywhere near the same scale.  My belief is that if it comes to that people
would just have to reconcile themselves to catch-as-catch can for customer
service, and lower their expectations, or else they'll have to be prepared
to double their subscription fees.
>
>How many of us professional developers would "volunteer" our time to
>make a graphical MUD for a large publisher that intended to make money
>from it?  What if there were no chance for you to realize any profit
>from it, even though the publisher is making a sizable amount of money?
>How about if you could be removed from the game for any reason at all,
>even that the publisher just felt you had worked too long on it?
>(Admittedly, given the wages paid in the industry, some of us do/did
>give away part of our lives, but it at least paid the rent and bought
>the Top Ramen.)

    That's about all it does.  I could triple my salary tomorrow on any of
several standing job offers to go back to web server programming, with a
little hunting I could make twice *that*.  And the rank and file doesn't get
royalties, if I see profit from success of DAoC it will be because my
employer chooses to give me a bonus.  And development houses *don't*
discharge people for incredibly petty reasons?  Read Fat-Babies much?  I'm
doing all this in hopes of stepping up to the next rung, where I can make
serious money and I will get royalties, but I'm too cynical to think that's
a given.
>
>Unfortunately, the distinction between volunteer and unpaid employee is
>often fuzzy at best.  The law has a nasty tendency to run roughshod over
>subtleties like this, especially when money is involved.  It's sad that
>the selfish exploitation by some of the larger companies could cause no
>end to problems for the rest of us.
>
    Sorry, but I think that's your bitterness talking.  Most of the people
doing this do it because they *like* it.  If they have enhanced powers it's
because they *asked* for those powers so they could do it better, if they
have restrictions on how they can treat the customer and use their powers
it's because the company can't endorse their efforts and grant them powers
and *not* excercise control over what they do "on duty".  Hell, I've seen
too many cases where a really *bad* apple had to be weeded out, just for
example a supervising Guide in EQ that was thrown out for sexual harassment.

    In a MUD, you can hand someone wiz powers and if they don't actually do
anything constructive with them, you don't *care*.  In an MMOG, you can't
afford to lose track of what people are actually doing with those powers.

    I want to give these people *more* power.  I want to give them the keys
to the engines of creation, make it *their* world.  You're telling me I
can't do that without paying them?

    That being said, I would have to agree in principle that there is a
tendency in some quarters to think of the volunteer programs as an
unreliable employee pool.  I can't get into specifics without getting myself
sued, though.

    I think the way out of this is to integrate the "players helping
players" system back into the game.  But that's going to be *very* tricky.

--Dave Rickey




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