[MUD-Dev] Cheating in the world

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

Cheating does of course not exist in MUDs (=MMOs). Or rather it
does, but then in terms of attacking the client side software and
breaking the EULA. So, let's modify that to: cheating doesn't happen
within the world, as that is clearly not possible. If you think
somebody else is cheating it just means that their local norms are
different from yours. Cheating is all about breaking norms, but
breaking norms should be ok in a virtual world. That is, if you want
it to be a world and not merely a game. Games are all about global
norms (rules) and climbing some power-ladder while staying within
the limits of the rule set (either by lowering the powers of others
or increasing one's own power). Worlds are all about not having to
know the rules on which the game world physics relies. In a game you
are meant to stay within the confines of the intentions of the
rules, if you are not, the referee or GM will make sure to interpret
the rules for you and enforce it. In a world you shouldn't have to
learn the rules, but do what you feel like and learn the
consequences by success and failure. Whether you should be happy
with the consequences of these success and failers is really up to
you and not up to global norms. A game is different in the sense
that it assumes that you want a dominating position. If other
players optimize for loosing rather than winning the game
breaks. Not so with worlds. If it is a world, you simply live in a
world full of loosers...

What you do have in MUDs are bugs and flawed designs. Whenever a
player has to appeal to admin power the world has failed. The
stronger presence admin power has in the world, the less it is a
world, simply because admins are out-of-worldish and the ultimate
failure you risk by challenging their rules is also out-of-worldish
(i.e. a ban). One could also argue that admin presence makes a shift
from world to game, as the sole purpose of having admin moderation
is to enforce global rules that are not embedded within the
world. Such rules will obviously be highly gameable as their
enforcement is less strict, more subjective and easier to influence
than hardcoded rules.

So, in MUDs you don't have cheating, but you do have exploits. This
is where the water gets really muddy. Its muddieness is best shown
by the fact that the admins not only forbid you to use exploits they
also forbid you to communicate the exploits to others. You are
basically assumed to know or accept that some consequences are
intended while others are not. This is where the world dies and the
game wins. It institutionalizes the idea that you should know the
rules before you interact with the world and that you are not
allowed to take the world for what it is.

So what about roleplaying, norms about separating IC and OOC etc?
Clearly this is a global norm generally enforced by the players
themselves. The need for the norm arise because players always have
an out-of-worldish component to them, and in the case of roleplaying
other players constitute the virtual world which you are exploring
so the isolation of the out-of-worldish component becomes
important. I'd however still argue that the above argument also
holds for the IC/OOC case: if you start to act OOC roleplayers will
either ignore you, reply in IC or switch to OOC. You learn by
success or failure. In the odd case that you have admins enforcing
IC/OOC separation the very definition of OOC becomes gameable and
the roleplaying MUD takes a swing from world towards game provided
that players have the means to make OOC a powerbase.

The gameability of admin presence have been discussed extensively on
mud-dev before. I hope this won't evolve into a discussion on
admins, to me it is obvious that MUDs should be admin free. The
point I'd like to see contested is the idea that cheating isn't
possible in a world and that any attempt to get rid of cheating will
by defintion be detrimental to the unique characteristics of virtual
worlds.

The games of MUDs shouldn't be enforced, they should be embedded and
deduced from the use context by the players. If they are enforced
and defined out of the world then you no longer have a world and
therefore it isn't a MUD. If you forbid cheating you get a multi
user game, but you don't get a multi user world.

--
Ola - http://folk.uio.no/olag/
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