Does Anyone Even Care?
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Because I thought @Ashkuri’s post was a good topic of discussion and one I was actually thinking about today:
@Ashkuri said in MU Peeves Thread:
Even with all that effort, people naturally lose interest in the game/story over time. Very few people are stay to the end people, which is the nature of the medium. I think persevering through the fatigue of “does anyone even care?” is another kind of staff work, perhaps one that doesn’t get talked about a lot.
What’s stopping you from being a stay to the end person? Or, alternatively, what makes/made you a stay to the end person?
I don’t think I’ve ever “finished” a MUSH in my lifetime, not even the MUSHes I helped create. I certainly finished storylines - Gray Harbor comes to mind, I feel like we told a story that was relatively complete but people wanted to keep going so we let them. But I’ve never finished a MUSH. Mostly because when I’m done with my character, I stop being interested in the game itself - my storyline is over, I’ve got my own head canon, and I am OK with that.
What’re your thoughts?
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Ash and I were just talking about this! He’s RIDE OR DIE and I’m… not sure. I try to stick as long as I can, but what generally happens is the staff burns out. I have finished all of the private games I’ve personally run, but been staff on games that wrapped due to general disinterest or weariness.
Someone mentioned their Discord RP involving people all posing in with their novella intros and then moving on to the next story which totally aligns with how we see a 3 month introduction bubble on new games in the MUSH world. I think people chase that high for a bit and can coast on it even if the core concept doesn’t really resonate with them. But eventually the new car smell wears off and your friends dip and you have to contend with a question: Would you have joined this game if your pals didn’t? Does anything here really pique you enough for you to keep putting in effort?
If I’m a player I don’t really make a personal vow of commitment. I’m just feeling it out, see if anything interests me. If I start building relationships, sure, I’d like to see where they end up, but as I was telling Ash, I’m so bad with goodbyes, and I struggle deeply with sorrow, and if I’m activated, the idea of all this fun shit ENDING is very troubling to me, so I don’t even think about it. Let the waves of eventual disinterest wash over me. I guess that’s sad in its own way.
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People like what is new and struggle to keep fresh what has become familiar. There’s always a new game to check out. People’s rp partners/ships leave and make them less invested on their own, RL happens and then people struggle to re-engage, there’s all sorts of reasons. Also some games don’t have an end to stay to, they just wither out.
As both staff and player I am a Stay-er but I’ve come to understand it’s an aberration, lol. MUSH is a transient medium.
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There plenty of reasons to leave a game.
To @bear_necessities’s take, finishing a personal storyline is also more important to me than a game’s overall storyline. (Even though in an ideal world, those are connected.)
The last few games I left, it was because… a) they got way too big, too fast for me to keep up with game happenings at the level I prefer, b) even though I liked the game, players entered my sphere who I was already trying to avoid and I protect my peace, c) “season 2” storyline just didn’t do it for me the way the original storyline did.
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Do you feel like this puts extra work / fatigue on a gamerunner? From a GM perspective, as I sit here and ponder the likelihood of my running another game, I have thought a lot about the 3 month bubble but not from the side of potential players and more from the side of myself. I’m the type of person that regularly has 3-4 worlds building in her head at any one given time … for me personally, the idea of running a single world for months and months (or even years) is so uninspiring to me that I actually give up before I even put pen to paper.
It’s why I’ve thought a lot more about anthology games, because at least then I can switch it up every few months (cowboys today, regency tomorrow!) but then I get stuck on the question of downtime and wander away from that idea too lol
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@bear_necessities All of our attention spans have changed. There’s a lot of appeal for anthology games, though I’d lean more toward the 12 month mark to accomplish meaningful story, personally.
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@helvetica Do you mean 12 months in a single “chapter” or “season” of the anthology, or 12 months in total for the game itself? I’d wonder if a 12 month “chapter/season” would kind of defeat the purpose of the anthology, but that could be because my personal fatigue over a setting sets in around the 4-5 month mark.
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@bear_necessities 12 months for the whole damn game. I could see doing it in 7-8, but I think like… what if someone didn’t app the correct character right away and has to make a switch? What if they don’t find the game until it’s been going a month? What if rl happens and you have to drop off for 2 weeks? That offers some padding.
My tabletop group does a new campaign every year with the GM rotating out after their storyline is done, back in once the others have cycled through. It’s done a lot for our longevity.
ETA: I guess it could be 12 for the “season,” too.
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@helvetica We might be thinking of anthology games differently? I was thinking more like HorrorMu or Network, where you had an identity during the “season” and a real persona during the downtime, and those seasons changed up every 3-4 months. So a 12 month game entirely would probably not be very satisfying in that sort of dynamic.
I really like the idea of games being self-contained. I.E. we are here for 12 months to tell this story, and in 12 months it will be over. I wish more games did that instead of open-ended “small / big town supernatural” esque sort of thing.
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So there’s some interesting work done by social scientists on romantic relationships that, while they probably don’t track directly, I think they have strong parallels with Mushing and people’s relationship to a game/the people who play there, specifically John Gottman at the Relationship Research Institute.
The two things I think track best to MUs are these:
- A ratio of positive:negative interactions during conflict
- A ratio of successful:unsuccessful “bids for connection”
You can’t expect a game to provide a connection every single time you want one, but there is some ratio where you feel like generally speaking you’re easily able to get plugged into things when you want to, and below that, it starts to feel like it’s quite hard, even if ‘most’ times you actually are successful.
Gottmann’s numbers for couples are 5:1 and 20:1 respectively to predict a successful relationship. I think the standards are probably higher for a romantic relationship vs a game, but I put the numbers to illustrate that the gap needs to be pretty large to stave off a perceived feeling of ‘this is actually quite difficult’ from creeping in.
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Hi, my name is RightMeow and I hyper focus.
I have done both. I have stayed until a game is done, the doors are closed and people are dismissed. I have also wandered away. I wish there was some magical reason that I left places or didn’t even start them when I looked into them. I think a lot has to do with time. When I first started, I was working from home. I had time. I didn’t have as many obligations as I do now. Now, I went back to school. I am in management with odd hours to fill gaps. I am investing in people around me far more and investing in a game sometimes just feels tiring.
Previous games I have left reasons (not games they didn’t do anything wrong).
I didn’t feel connected to the story line. I felt like it was done in a way that I couldn’t break into it, but only certain people could. They were quested out and only X number could quest out on it. No bad vibes to the people, for sanity one has to lock down the number - but then they progressed and I felt not so progressed and then lost on how to get into it without seeming like a pest.
The game closed while I was on my annual holiday hiatus (I work retail management - I’m barely eating and sleeping let alone hobby-ing).
I adored the people I was playing with, but the game runners had a very very very specific vision in their heads about how the game should be run and how characters should act. It felt more like a novel than an interactive performance. It was also locked to 1:1 time and you had to achieve certain things in age, experience, etc that a young rostered char would take RL years to even break into. It was disheartening, but while there was story - I could overlook it. Then all the people I was writing stories with left.
However, that said. I do try to stay around until I can’t (I even check in at Arx from time to time). This also shadows who I am as a fundamental person though. I have a hard time giving up on people and always thinking they changed, etc. So that is more who I am then the game I’ve hyperfocused and locked in on.
Leaving just tends to be that I respect they can run the game how they see fit and I respect myself to know when it won’t work out for me. — although, I adore and miss writing stories with you. Even when someone gives dark visions of my poor teddy bear being ripped apart like a monster. (haha)
I think another struggle for me is the platform. I feel with Ares, it’s hard for me to ‘walk the grid’ and come across organic random RP. It’s scheduled and it’s strange for me (I’m old) to ask to join as I still sort of view them as private scenes and I tend to respect people want to play with their people.
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If a game hits for me I tend to stick with it for the long haul, at least if Something doesn’t happen (I also bounce off places that aren’t for me pretty quickly). I get more invested in characters over time as they and their IC connections develop. It’s part of why the 3 Month Bubble is so frustrating for me as both as a player and a staffer. It’s reality, I’ll just never enjoy it.
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@RightMeow said in Does Anyone Even Care?:
Leaving just tends to be that I respect they can run the game how they see fit and I respect myself to know when it won’t work out for me.
An understated fundamental skill. Anyone that knows how to do this is the real MVP.
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I am a stay-er, and I thought a lot about why that is, and I think most of it is just particular to me and how I operate. I have never played on a game I was not invited to, and once I am established on a game, I don’t even think about looking for a new one.
When I had more free time, I’d try out another game if I was invited, but these days I know that I only really have time for one game at a time. For better or worse, history says that means whatever game I’m playing on at that time until that game shuts down or I quit over sexual harassment (sad lol).
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@bear_necessities said in Does Anyone Even Care?:
What’s stopping you from being a stay to the end person? Or, alternatively, what makes/made you a stay to the end person?
I have a hard time verbalizing what I look for in a MU, but most of the time it boils down to atmosphere. Even over plot. I’m making this character to be in this world, in this genre, with this atmosphere/vibe to it.
Stay-to-the-end: The genre/atmosphere is one I like, I can find a variety of RP, and we all buy in to the theme. If we’re in some gothic-themed MUSH, I will bar-RP all day if the bar is a whistling shack on the moors and everyone who walks in has a dark secret, air of melancholy, a peculiar fervency, etc etc. It might be shallow, but bonus points for great writers behind the characters.
Quick exits/3-monthing it:
- I’ll misread a game’s vibe. I go in expecting a whistling shack on the moors and everyone’s in black leather and there’s a rave in the ruins.
- The vibe is too inconsistent. There is a shack on the moor in a Gothic-themed MU, but it’s been painted bright blue with sparkling mica dust for the weekend dance party, and someone let a flying squirrel loose inside a week ago. (no slander to flying squirrels, it’s about the incongruity)
- The game is too much mechanics/too competitive. I actually prefer sheets, dice, and stats, but if there’s some sort of weekly roll to put players on some List of Awesome, that could be discouraging for me. (This is obviously a personal preference, as is most of this).
- The RP style doesn’t suit me. I’m not going to well with MUD-style RP or somewhere short-form (1-2 sentence poses) are the norm.
Left before closing (in order of how common):
- Last few years, long medical leaves. Coming back and feeling lost and disconnected from the plot, with no idea how to rejoin and limited energy to catch up.
- A lack of RP. Either the game’s population trickles to 4 people idling, or it’s a personal problem of mine, with my preference for live/distracted but an inconvenient availability.
- Game closes/goes on hiatus and never returns.
- The plot reveals or transitions the atmosphere to something less interesting to me. This can take a few weeks to a few months. I try to stick it out (since I usually love my characters and probably have plot threads) but more often than not, I end up ghosting the game. Example: Game is about mysterious lights in the sky. Plot happens over months, players are now on a spaceship chasing down intergalactic pirates. It’s probably a result of the players’ successes and that’s gorgeous… but that’s the point I’ll start leaving, because I joined for the atmosphere of mystery and discovery, not action-packed space adventure.
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For me, it’s all about…matching energy.
I’m typically an enthusiastic player. I’ll be out there, approaching people, trying to set up scenes, I’ve got ideas for small scenes or PrPs, and my character has goals and things they want to accomplish.
But that takes energy, which I get back from feeling other people’s enthusiasm coming back to me. In poses, in reaching out with ideas or wanting scenes, in responses from staff, in plotty scenes that seem to accomplish something.
If the energy is off balance, especially if I’m bleeding out more than I’m getting back, then I’m going to end up drifting away. Usually, I realize I’m done with a game when I haven’t logged on in 3-5 days and I realize…I don’t regret it.
But it’s all about the energy exchange, not really about the completeness of the story or the structure of the game itself. When I log on, do I feel like my excitement is matched by other players/staff? If yes? I’m locked in for whatever is going on. If no? I’ll drift away.
