“All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour

[MisterBoring]

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

Thematic Spillover, where the tone and emotional content of the game world shape how players interact OOC;

I think this (which is called bleed in a lot of academic essays on roleplaying) will exist regardless of anything else on the list.

Also, Systemic Enabling, Norm Internalization, and Legacy Culture could be merged into one single hypothesis about the active pattern of misbehavior found in a lot of roleplaying communities (these three things along with poor handling of Thematic Spillover are why a lot of LARP organizations such at the MES, NERO, and others end up turning into cesspools of irredeemable behavior.

There are a lot of interesting articles on bleed / thematic spillover and other OOC dynamics coming from the European RP communities (especially those involved in Nordic LARP), and most of them are published for free every year as part of some of the major RP conventions that happen.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Faraday said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

FWIW I think there’s a lot of good ideas here. My only quibble is with the focus on “genre”.

Little House on the Prairie and Deadwood are both in the “Historical” genre and further in the “Western” sub-genre, but they are wildly different in tone and themes.

This. I can think of a couple of WoD games that were remarkable for their lack of any of these issues. They were both historicals, and one was really “WoD PC creatures vs. The Mummy (1999)” – a wildly different WoD tone.

@MisterBoring said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

Also, Systemic Enabling, Norm Internalization, and Legacy Culture could be merged into one single hypothesis about the active pattern of misbehavior found in a lot of roleplaying communities

This. The systemic enabling is part of the legacy culture and norms. So when I propose running a WoD game without sphere-separation, people spaz about it. Propose mandatory alt-transparency, same.

[MisterBoring]

@Gashlycrumb said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

So when I propose running a WoD game without sphere-separation, people spaz about it. Propose mandatory alt-transparency, same.

It really feels like proposing any tools that would help staff do more to protect a game from toxic players gets shot down very quickly, even by players who aren’t toxic in their own right.

[Gashlycrumb]

@MisterBoring I found that just doing it was fine with the ‘Game of Thrones’ MU, no objections from players (but a fair amount of “that will never work” from the peanut gallery) but just mention it concerning a planned or merely talked-about WoD MU and there’s a lot of squawking about the privacy and theme and how-horrible-I-would-never-play-it.

I think the legacy culture issue is strong in WoD. And that a lot of the toxic shit is coming from inside the staffroom.

[Faraday]

@MisterBoring said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

It really feels like proposing any tools that would help staff do more to protect a game from toxic players gets shot down very quickly, even by players who aren’t toxic in their own right.

They can only shoot down what staff lets them. The game-runner is the one in charge. Lots of players are quick to claim something will never work, and often that’s just not the case. In any event, I’d rather have a safe and friendly game than a toxic one, even if that means some players won’t play.

[MisterBoring]

@Faraday said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

In any event, I’d rather have a safe and friendly game than a toxic one, even if that means some players won’t play.

This 100000%.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

Little House on the Prairie and Deadwood are both in the “Historical” genre and further in the “Western” sub-genre, but they are wildly different in tone and themes. RDM Battlestar and the original Battlestar are literally set in the same universe/storyline, yet also have very different tones. WoD can be vampires or hunters. Fantasy can be Game of Thrones or Willow.

All true, unfortunately lines have to be drawn vaguely somewhere.

@Faraday said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

The way you structure your game absolutely influences player behaviors. But even if you argue that genre influences game structure by popular convention, the structure is still a choice (not directly tied to genre). Feels more like correlation than causation.

Sure, but we won’t know that with any degree of surety if we don’t check. So we should check.

@MisterBoring said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

could be merged into one single hypothesis

It’s all a single hypothesis broken down into sub-hypotheses for ease of conversation.

[Faraday]

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

Sure, but we won’t know that with any degree of surety if we don’t check. So we should check.

You’re only going to get surety from a carefully-crafted study that isolates variables and has a meaningful sample size. With the limited number of MUs and an obvious muddying between genre and other factors (like different game design/policy within a genre, or bleed, which crosses genres and even game types) you’re not going to have any confidence that genre is a causative factor.

If you have fun looking at the results, cool - more power to you. I just think we should be realistic about what a survey like this is (and isn’t) going to tell us.

[Pavel]

@Faraday said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

I just think we should be realistic about what a survey like this is (and isn’t) going to tell us.

Indeed, which is why I’ve said as much.

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

But so long as everyone treats any results as a “hey isn’t this anecdotally interesting” rather than “we have proof that L&L games literally cause spontaneous combustion” that’s all I really want. It’s just neat to think about these things in a pseudo-empirical way.

ETA: That said, when I say “we should check” I don’t mean “this survey is that check” I meant that checking should be done. Even if we only find some minor correlation based on limited anecdote, that’s more information than we had before, and it’s interesting.

Anyone seeking deep scientific meaning from a google form survey based on a throw away joke on a niche forum is missing the point.

[Gashlycrumb]

It’ll be fun to see the results, but there’s no way to control for confounding variables unless you get a cumbersome amount of data or build experimental MUs.

I bet If I made a My Little Pony '80’s edition MUSH and ran it like WoD with separate Pony, Unicorn, Sea Pony and Pegasus spheres (and winged unicorns a super-special restricted sphere, oooh) and a lot of seckritz and attempts at equine intrigue and very little transparency, it would, like a WoD MU, produce some high-level vicious fuckery if it lasted any length of time.

[Pavel]

@Gashlycrumb It could help determine what kind of things future game-runners would want to look out for or prioritise in their behavioural policies, but it’s not going to change the world. It’s like an exit poll, not an election result.

That said some of the results I’m getting so far are a touch on the surprising side. I suspect the most interesting results would be when/if I do a thematic analysis of the long form text answers rather than the numbers – I personally prefer qualitative to quantitative anyway.

[Faraday]

@Gashlycrumb said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

I bet If I made a My Little Pony '80’s edition MUSH and ran it like WoD with separate Pony, Unicorn, Sea Pony and Pegasus spheres (and winged unicorns a super-special restricted sphere, oooh) and a lot of seckritz and attempts at equine intrigue and very little transparency, it would, like a WoD MU, produce some high-level vicious fuckery if it lasted any length of time.

Exactly. And we’ve already seen that same exact sort of behavior on sci-fi games. The behavior is tied to game design elements (factions, PVP) that are not dependent upon genre.

[KarmaBum]

I know the resume-post usually means nothing but… I’m a data analyst who’s spent the last several years on a project examining incoming customer surveys alongside operational KPIs. When this topic opened, I cringed but thought it’d be fine FOR FUN.

It might be interesting. But that’s not the same as insightful.

So please read any interpretation of the results with about as much gravity as you would a personality quiz: FUN but not REAL.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Faraday I think it’s possible to do factions and PvP without it going too pear-shaped if you prevent factionalising OOC. Certainly factions-lite and happily supporting mutually-agreed-upon ‘let’s try to kill one another and see what the dice do’ scenarios worked for me.

I think it has a lot to do with creating the vibe that we’re all sitting at the same table.

[Faraday]

@Gashlycrumb said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

I think it has a lot to do with creating the vibe that we’re all sitting at the same table.

Right, I’m not saying it can never work, just that if done poorly it can contribute to some of the negative behaviors that Pavel’s asking about in the survey. I’m asserting that those behaviors are tied to the game design and personnel, not intrinsic to the genre.

So even IF the survey shows that, say, Sci-Fi games have more of (some bad behavior), that doesn’t really tell you anything at all. It could be that those games just share a particular design element (rosters, PVP, you name it). Heck, for all we know, all the respondents played on the same one bad Sci-Fi game back in 2001. That’s the problem with drawing conclusions from terribly small sample sizes.

@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

Anyone seeking deep scientific meaning from a google form survey based on a throw away joke on a niche forum is missing the point.

I mean, you had an ethics statement and everything in the intro. It seemed that you were taking it pretty seriously, so I didn’t get “funsy joke opinion poll” vibes from the whole thing. If that’s all you want from it, then by all means, have fun.

People (broadly) just tend to be very bad about attributing deep scientific meaning to statistically insignificant studies though, so that was my concern.

[dvoraen]

I just want to know what the first question to the survey I can no longer take was, to see if I should feel attacked too.

[sao]

@dvoraen the part where you had to acknowledge how many years you have been in this hobby

[Evilgrayson]

@sao And it didn’t go high enough for many of us.

[Roadspike]

@Gashlycrumb said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:

(and winged unicorns a super-special restricted sphere, oooh)

Hello, those are alicorns.

Sorry, my kid was really, really hard into MLP for a while. I promise I’m not a brony, not that there’s anything wrong with that in itself.

As a data-nerd myself (although amateur, not professional), I’m very curious about the data from the poll/study/whatever-you-wanna-call-it. And the qualitative information as well (whatever can be properly anonymized and shared, at least).

[somasatori]

After reading through this I see why you titled it as if you were submitting it to a conference @Pavel.

I have a ton of thoughts which I will work on writing out, but this is a very good discussion that needs to be evaluated further. Honestly, an social psych analysis of MUSH trends wouldn’t be a terrible idea for a legit academic paper.