[MUD-Dev] Happy healthy players (was Blacksnow revisited)

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Kylotan wrote:
> From: Brandon J. Van Every <vanevery at 3DProgrammer.com>

>> We shouldn't pretend the bias is mere cultural relativism.

> Why not? If they're not relying on you to
> support/clothe/house/feed them, then what they do with their time
> should be none of your business.

If you want to understand a bias, you can't pretend its logic is a
mere feature of peoples' collective imaginations.  "Should be" and
what society cares about is another matter.

> (Addiction issues aside.)

Why is this an aside?  You've just defeated your own point.  Why
aren't people allowed to be addicted to things?  Well, because
there's a concrete social dialogue about behavior in there.

> Without consumers there would be no producers anyway, respected or
> not.

One's higher up the food chain than the other.  It's important to
understand this physical reality when assessing bias.

> And merely contributing to society in the way that society
> dictates is not exactly a foolproof way of showing who is
> "emotionally and psychologically stable"!

People have their illusions.  Sometimes societies accept things like
Vallium.  They're not currently accepting MUD addiction.  *I* don't
accept it, as a game designer.  My whole life movement is towards
balance.  It's basically what you end up with when you're trying to
get anything done.  Well, ok, to really get things done you might
have to be unbalanced in terms of overproductivity.  But that's not
a consumer's problem.

> The original post seemed to imply that rewarding people for
> playing the game was somehow a bad idea, when in fact this has
> nearly always been a fundamental part of games.

Yeah, I don't agree in rewriting A's A, B's B.  That's scapegoating.
But you still have to deal with the undisputable physiological fact
that there are big negatives in hardcore gamer behavior.  I'd like
us to encourage people to get a life.  I don't want anybody's money
badly enough to just make them my crack whore.  Nor, really, do I
want the responsibility of being labelled the crack whore provider,
I don't think it's fair.  In all things I move towards balance and
I'd like to see more balance in how people use their life energies.
I'd like to see online social activities that redirect people
towards real world activities.  That was always my dream for the
cyber cafes.  It was never a reality of them, it still isn't.  But I
can dream.


Cheers,                         www.3DProgrammer.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

20% of the world is real.
80% is gobbledygook we make up inside our own heads.

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