[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: Emergent Behaviors spawnedfrom...]

[Sean Howard]

"Damien Neil" <damien.neil at gmail.com> wrote:

> Nobody says, "Damn, I let Mario fall into that pit."  You say,
> "Damn, *I* fell into that pit."

Exactly my point. People don't say "my car got hit", they say "I got
hit".  And when playing Warcraft 3, they say "I kicked ass". You
don't "use a hammer to hit a nail". You simply "hammer the nail"
yourself. When watching sports "we won" when they were playing the
game. You just watched.

Our egos are capable of enveloping the tools we use, removing the
third person context and making it first person. This is why we can
play games from the third person or even from a god like state, and
why the rest of the world tends to melt away when we play (or even
watch). We aren't playing as Mario, we are playing as ourselves.

> People playing games where they have direct control over a single
> character most certainly *do* identify with that character.

I've played games where I absolutely didn't identify with the
characters at all. I have zero problems picking up a controller and
playing Tomb Raider, despite the fact that I am not a sexpot women
or could ever possibly understand what it would be like.

> If there had been no moderation at all, people wouldn't have felt
> the need to suck up to the bully, because he'd have had no power.

Power doesn't come from moderation alone. I'm pretty sure that the
bully would find other ways. It's a self esteem thing.

> If there had been persistent moderation, another moderator would
> have removed him from power and possibly banned him.

Exactly my point. The people are still the same. There's still a
bully.  It's just the proper moderation reduced his impact on the
chat room. If you were to argue that persistent moderation would've
prevented the bully from ever emerging in the first place, you might
have an argument. But people are jerks no matter what, and
moderation always happens after the fact - trust me on that one.

> The only one where people habitually kicked each other without the
> intent of permanently banning was IRC.  This is not a coincidence!
> The transient and relatively harmless nature of the command--and
> it's complete worthlessness for actually banning
> troublemakers--results in it being used in a completely different
> fashion than a permanent ban command.

In YOUR chatroom. But what about in some other guy's chatroom. All
you need to do is look at all the different public forums out there
on the net. All of them are capable of moderation but not all of
them choose to moderate them in the same way (or at all). Compare
the forums at Gaia Online with the forums at Something Awful with
the forums at one of the political blogs. Perhaps the same forum
software, or at least same forum capabilities, VERY different
communities. The communities are defined by their size and
philosophy of their rulers, not anything innate to the forum
software.

- Sean Howard
http://gamebastard.blogspot.com
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev