[MUD-Dev] The Ideal Player

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Rickey" <daver at mythicentertainment.com>

> Most of them simply act within whatever apparent boundaries the
> context allows, and if the context does not include both
> hard-coded limitations on the abilities of jerks to annoy, and
> prompt enforcement vs. the behaviour that cannot be coded away,
> then they will act like jerks simply because there doesn't seem to
> be anything to stop them.

I would add this.

The human psychology works primarily in terms of what is remarkable.
Remarkable traits are grouped together. When someone on a given game
is acting like a jerk, he has certain remarkable traits.

All of these remarkable traits are combined into a mental category:
low-level male dwarf fighter jerk. Once enough people fall into the
same groups of categories, we start to build composites. If we run
into a high-level female dwarf thief jerk, we simply collate the
traits and come out with "dwarf jerk".

I've said it before, I'll say it again: twice is always. Having
encountered *two* dwarf jerks, ALL DWARVES ARE JERKS. Replace dwarf
with whatever you like. Newbies, fighters, staff members, whatever.

It takes very few remarkable people to convince someone that
"everyone" is remarkable in that way. This is how peer pressure
works. When your teenager says "everyone is doing it", it means
"Cindy Chapman did it once and Erica told me that Melissa Sterling
does it too". In a room full of three hundred people, two guys can
come up and act like jerks -- and the whole room is condemned as
jerks. Along with their wives, and a few of their friends.  Simple
guilt by association.

The important thing to remember is that people who are polite and
considerate of others are THE NORM. That's why we don't see them:
they aren't remarkable. So when people say "everyone is a jerk",
just do the mental math and think "Cindy Chapman is a jerk and Erica
told me that Melissa Sterling is a jerk too".



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