[MUD-Dev] Moral / legal responsibility of games

[Ben Hoyt]

Raph Koster wrote:
  
> It's called "the Werther Effect." Googling the term will give you
> a fair amount of hits.
 
> I first read about it in INFLUENCE: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSUASION
> by Robert B. Cialdini, which is readily available at any bookstore
> (it's sadly considered to be a bit of a classic business book even
> though it's about how to AVOID being persuaded).
 
> As it happens, INFLUENCE is on my bookshelf here at work, so
> here's some citations from the bibliography:
 

Raph,

Thanks for this.  I'll try to look into it after the mania of
GDC/DICE dies down.  Speaking of which, I enjoyed your panel at
DICE.  You mentioned a couple of things that got me thinking:

  1) I thought you were overly dismissive of Voice over IP in MMPs.
  I agree that it is imperfect when it comes to interacting with
  "strangers" because of the voice-masking problems you pointed out.
  But I don't see it as mutually exclusive with text messaging, and
  I know from experience that it can dramatically enhance the game
  play experience when shared between friends.  That being the case,
  I see no reason not to support it as an opt-in feature.

  2) You mentioned what sounded to me like a very cool concept of
  filtering chat messages for emotes and translating them into
  graphical character actions (i.e.: LOL=character laughing).  Yet,
  you said that you had decided to make this an opt-in feature in
  SWG because some people didn't like the specific character
  reactions to certain text strings.  Seems to me that a really fun
  feature would be to allow players to map specific text strings to
  character reactions themselves, so as to allow them to customize
  any/all/or none of those actions.  Simply create some kind of
  interface where I can "play" a reaction and then either accept a
  default or map a new string to that reaction (much like mapping
  hotkeys).  

Anyway, just a thought.



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