[MUD-Dev] Korea and online world responsibility

[Clay]

Raph Koster wrote:

> To be frank, it somewhat depresses me that given the supposedly
> egalitarian environment that virtual spaces can provide, that the
> mechanics that we provide serve to reinforce some of the crudest
> expressions of humanity.  Design a feudal world, get oppressive
> behavior? Design a caste-based world, get prostitution. Not
> surprising, I guess. But to me it does hearken back to the fact
> that *players do what we reward them to do.* To abdicate
> responsibility for that seems foolish--no, actually, it seems
> amoral.

I'm struggling with what seems to be the root claim here.  Are you
really contending that a virtual world with a different
sociopolitical structure could avoid provoking similar real-world
behaviors in its players?  Are you also asserting that there are
political forms which reduce these baser human behaviors (like
prostitution)?

I understand the gut reaction: "My God.  People are doing this over
something I made."  You want to think there must be some way to
remake or unmake it so that sort of thing will no longer happen.
But isn't that the same sort of implicit self-importance you
criticize in top-down storytelling in the genre?  Isn't there some
tension, in short, between the notion you seem to champion - that
the players create their own experience despite the best-intentioned
(and often misguided) efforts of the designer to shape it for them -
and the opinion you express here?  You talk about abdicating
responsibility, but don't you first have to assume it?  And are you
not then assuming too much?

People act this way when they care about something, when they *want*
something.  They do stupid, crude, thoughtless and self-destructive
things for it.  And although I take some offense to certain remarks
of Mike Parker's (I was raised in Korea), I think he's on the right
track.  There is an underlying social issue at work here which is
prior to all these concerns.

And I don't mean to say that there is nothing to reconsider about
the game design, and maybe that's all that you mean, too.  I think
Paul Schwanz is on to something in trying to balance enjoyment with
a less hours-on-end-compulsive play structure.

~Clay Fenlason


_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev