[MUD-Dev] Finding What a Gamer Lacks in Their Day

[John Buehler]

Raph Koster writes:
> From: John Buehler

>> Here's hoping that laws will require ethical behavior from all
>> those who entertain.

> My first reaction is "hear, hear." But at the same time I countion
> that this is something damnably difficult to get right, and
> terribly subjective. And it's better not done than done badly, I
> think.

Sure it's tough.  It's the same problem as coming up with rules of
ethical behavior for everyday use.  Entertainment is no different.
People have been pondering rules of ethical behavior for thousands
of years and there is a good body of knowledge on it.  The
U.S. Constitution is a pretty darned good stab at distilling those
into a practical set of rules.  Unfortunately, figuring out how to
apply those rules to entertainment is something that many consider
to be a fairly subjective thing because notions like 'the pursuit of
happiness' are pretty vague.

Note that if you don't officially try to establish what the ethical
rules are, they will be unofficially established by mob rule.  Or
the advertising executives will establish them - which is a trend in
the United States.  It's better to be consciously making the attempt
to estalish a set of ethical rules of behavior and to constantly
have to refine them than to leave it to random process.  Frequently,
that random process is a pendulum swing where opposing extremes are
simply revisited over and over again.  An artifact of human
psychology, it would seem.

>> I'll undoubtedly get more activity on that statement than
>> anything else that I'll ever say here.

> It's not very dissimilar to what I said in proposing the avatar
> rights stuff.

Although the term 'avatar rights' is catchy, it's not at all
reflective of what you're actually describing.  You're describing
the rights of players in an entertainment venue that relies on the
use of avatars.  In truth, the rights of players don't ever change
because they remain the rights of people in a community.  Our rights
don't need to be restated, only understood in light of the
anonymous, multiplayer environment.  Your document did have its
catchy treatment of the problem area, however, and that got people
to look at it.  And that's a good thing.

The follow-on to that is that the blurring of the boundary between
the people who play the games and the characters in the games is a
problem.  We don't retain the pattern of people playing a game.
Instead, our only identity in the game context is that of our
characters.  I consider this to be a mistake.  The starting point
for all games should be to first acknowledge the people playing the
game and to secondarily acknowledge the game itself.  Inverting that
relationship erodes the rights of the people and starts to invent
rights for the characters.

This is reinforced in things like the use of 'you' when the game
tells the player of something that has happened to the character
being played.  Or the omenclature of 'in-character' versus
'out-of-character'.  References to the character should be in third
person.  Conversations between players should be between players,
and conversations between characters should be between characters.
For anyone not picking up on it, I consider immersion to be bad when
the duration of the immersion is under the control of the player.
Limited immersion is one thing.  Hours and hours of it is not
reasonable.

So write a document that does one thing and one thing only:
reinforce the standing of the individuals playing the game and stop
focusing on the characters in the game.  It will very quickly
indicate that the viable community of a game is that of the players,
not of the characters.

JB

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