[MUD-Dev] Enforcing roleplay on small muds

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "Arnau Rosselló Castelló" <arocas at alumni.uv.es>

> I'm in the design phase of a (projected to be) small mud,
> ambiented in a world similar to the PNP game "Paranoia" for
> R. Talsorian games, and i've decided that roleplaying will be
> enforced on this mud(Paranoia without roleplay just isn't fun).

The computer wants you to roleplay. Failure to roleplay is treason.

Where can I get updates on progress? I strongly doubt you'll be able
to capture it, since I've seen so many failed attempts, but I'd
*love* to see someone make a serious stab at it. And besides, you
just might get it right.

> What problems do you see on it? Too hardcore for players? How many
> admins will i need? Admin abuse? Previous experiencies? Give me
> your feedback, please

It will never work.

A group of California teenagers at San Rafael High School in the
early 1970s couldn't say "let's go smoke some marijuana after
school", so they just said "4:20". Now the term is everywhere, and
we all know it whether we'd like to or not.

My BBS users in the eighties called pirate software "Long John
Floppy" to avoid prosecution. (For some reason, almost everyone I
knew in the eighties thought he was a dangerous hacker on the FBI's
hit list and his phone was tapped and sometimes the feds would
follow him around -- because this one time, he bought this cool game
and made a copy for his cousin.)

When I was in junior high school, teachers would monitor the
lunchroom for inappropriate conversation, so we created our own
sexual vocabulary -- which included such words as "buda" for "big"
and "sequentia" for "penis". Then we could talk about our buda
sequentias, and people would react in very amusing ways to avoid
admitting they had no idea what we were saying.

Similarly, we created the term "keb", an insult that meant
absolutely nothing -- so we could call people names without getting
in trouble. We got that idea from Battlestar Galactica's (over)use
of the word "frak" as a meaningless expletive.

My wife was recently on a web forum that censored the word
"thumper", so when she complained about a "bible thumper" she got
"bible *******". To avoid censorship, members of that forum now say
"bible humper" instead. (I think that's a much more amusing image,
anyway.)

Long story short? If I want to say "mud" and you don't let me, I'll
figure out how to say it. I'm motivated. My motivation is the most
basic and primal of all motivations: "I WANT". Your motivation is
something else entirely, more along the lines of "it is better for
all concerned". That doesn't motivate squat, and when you try to
explain to someone why they can't say "my shoes are covered with
mud", they are not going to be sympathetic. They have "I want", you
offer "it is better for all concerned", and the end result is that
you won't let them have what they want even though it's perfectly
reasonable. (Whatever is motivated by "I want" is perfectly
reasonable, no matter how tortured the reasoning is.)

You can't censor this sort of thing. When you install software to
prevent behavior, people change the behavior. The more you try to
stop people from talking about certain subjects, the more they will
try to talk about them, and your userbase is collectively both
smarter and more determined than your admin team. They have more
time. And a lot of people have nothing better to do with their lives
than to start a censorship crusade.

The only way I know to start up a roleplay-founded MUD is to start
with a small core of people who roleplay there. Add additional
people slowly until you have a core playerbase of a few dozen, and
then let those players invite people. Once you have enough to
populate the MUD with a reasonable number of existing players most
of the time, peer pressure tends to enforce roleplay.

Unfortunately, this method doesn't scale. When you're going to have
maybe two thousand players total, it's workable. When you're going
to have two thousand currently playing on each server at any given
time of day, it never works. You can't police that many people, so
just don't worry about it.

Bluntly speaking, there are only so many roleplayers in the world
anyway. If you intend to make a commercially viable game, roleplay
can't really be a *forced* part of it.

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