[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Matt Mihaly]

On Sun, 8 Dec 2002, Paul Schwanz wrote:
> Matt Mihaly wrote:
 
>> Well then, why not say exactly the same thing about the habitual
>> player who does something naughty. He CHOSE to contribute to the
>> problem and thus he shares blame. "What? Just shares it? Surely
>> if he made a choice to do naughty thing X, he doesn't share the
>> blame. It's all his." "No no!", argue those who prefer to let
>> people abrogate personal responsibility. "It isn't entirely his
>> fault, because other things, such as the game design, contributed
>> to his making of that decision."

> I'm *against* letting people abrogate personal responsibility.
> I'm against letting players abrogate personal responsibility for
> the choices they make when playing the game, *and* I'm against
> letting developers abrogate personal responsibility for the
> choices they make when designing the game.  It makes no sense to
> me whatsoever to claim that the player and the designer cannot
> both be held responsible for their own choices, especially when
> you are talking about contribution and not merely cause.

It's because for me the moral line is drawn at the use or threat of
force. The designer makes a product that can have no effect on
someone else unless that other person chooses to let it (by playing
it). In my worldview, that makes the player entirely morally
responsible for the effects he or she experiences while playing the
game. I feel the same about cigarettes, drugs of any sort, etc.
 
> Suppose a pinto driver brakes suddenly at a green light, gets
> rear-ended by a drunk driver, and the passenger in the pinto is
> killed because the gas tank explodes.  Must I let Ford or the druk
> driver abrogate personal responsibility in order to say the pinto
> driver shouldn't have braked at a green light or that doing so
> contributed to the accident?  Understand, I'm not saying that the
> pinto driver should be held accountable for the passenger's death,
> only that he should not have stopped at a green light.
> Furthermore, I see no logical fallacy in pointing to this accident
> as an example of why people should not drink and drive while also
> using the same accident to iterate that Ford shouldn't build cars
> that explode when rear-ended.  I have no cognitive dissonance when
> I claim that all did naughty things X, Y, and Z and each should be
> held accountable for the naughty things they did.

Yes, I agree, people shouldn't drink and drive, or build cars that
explode when rear-ended. I disagree that game developers shouldn't
make games that encourage habitual play, just as I would disagree
that food makers shouldn't make tasty food that encourages us to eat
more, or that ski slope operators should somehow make skiing less
fun, so that people will not do it habitually.

The difference between driving and a game is that the roads, etc,
are owned by the public. We all have a right to be on them, and to
some extent, to be safe on them. I have a -right- to drive, from my
point of view, because my money is paying for the infrastructure. I
don't have a right to play games.

> I'm not saying that developers should be held accountable for the
> actions or choices of addicted players, only that they should be
> held accountable for their own choices in deciding to create an
> addictive game, because I believe such choices can *contribute* to
> the harmful results that addictive behavior can bring.

Yes, they can contribute. That doesn't equal moral blame to me.

--matt



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