@sao said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

@Gashlycrumb I disagree. Players playing in small groups can’t bottleneck story if staff is attentive to how story is seeded. This is not a player problem. If your IC leadership structure has the ability to prevent OOC story access, your game is not functioning correctly.

This exactly. People playing amongst themselves CAN bottleneck story if you let it, but it’s not that hard to design the story in such a way that it doesn’t. If Anne, Bob and Cathy only like to RP amongst themselves, don’t give them the McGuffin that Dave is going to need to propel the story forward. That doesn’t mean that the ABC club can’t make their own stories, or can’t contribute to other stories in their own way.

@somasatori said in RPing with Nobody:

I forgot that this was a thing on Ares MUSHes

It’s not really Ares-specific. I first encountered this with people posting solo vignettes on LiveJournal way way way before Ares. More recently it was a thing on various games with MediaWiki/Wikidot wikis. I think it just gets a little more formalized/visible on Ares games because of the scene type tagging.

@Juniper said in RPing with Nobody:

That’s weird. Like at that point, at least write a vignette and post it on the forum so someone can read it. Or write a book offline?

The showboating part is weird to me, but I’ve written a fair bit of solo stuff with no intent to share. Sometimes it helps me flesh out a character. Or it can be fun to put down the details of how an off-camera scene went down. I just like to write, really. It’s like someone above talked about doodling.

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

If you’re going to expect players to somehow guess at your intent in creating a game, I think that’s inherently misguided.

I would never have them guess. In any future game I run, my intent will be documented in the game’s documentation, and pointed out on the front page of the game or in the initial room upon connection.

OK but this thread as a whole is not about players who are willfully ignoring clearly stated rules of a particular game. We’re talking about general, tacit expectations for behavior in the broader MU community.

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

someone joining a game to play Uno in the basement with their BFF has either missed the cue that the game owner is trying to build a more social storytelling experience, or noticed the intent of the game owners and willfully chose to ignore it.

If you’re going to expect players to somehow guess at your intent in creating a game, I think that’s inherently misguided.

There’s nothing wrong with setting expectations for your personal game based on your personal preferences. People can judge whether that’s the right game for them.

Like if you set up a board game night where you say “We’re going to play Settlers of Cataan together” and then someone wants to go play Uno in the basement - sure, that’s more of an issue. (Though there may still be a good reason, such as due to disability or neurodivergence - communication and understanding are key.)

But players aren’t psychic. And there are PLENTY of games out there that have no issue whatsoever with players who are just merrily playing by themselves and not causing any trouble.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

Whether it’s social anxiety, bad health, busy life – at least on Keys, we have a couple of folks who never or almost never actually RP. When they do, it’s one on one, with only a few chosen folks.
… I think Roadspike put it well above; if the player isn’t hoarding plot or otherwise obstructing things for others, they’re still a gain for the game.

This 100%. The person who is only minimally participating is still participating! They are still bringing value, and they have the chance to participate more in the future if they choose to.

@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

Let’s say a person invites friends and acquaintances over for a board game night. Snacks and games are provided, just show up and have a good time. Most people come in, find a table, and join a game or start a new one with a few others. People are migrating between different games, pairing off in some cases for smaller games, getting up to get snacks and chatting in the kitchen, and generally socializing together.

One couple shows up, takes an Uno deck and a bag of popcorn, and adjourns to the basement. They stay down there most of the night, and occasionally other attendees overhear them talking or laughing but they’re not making a scene or anything. Is that a crime? No, of course not. Is it rude to the host and the other guests? At least a little, yes.

I don’t think that’s rude in the slightest. You even said that people were “pairing off in some cases for smaller games”. How is that any different from what the people in the basement were doing??? Unless the basement was off-limits for the party, or the people in the basement got snarky or rude when someone came down to see how they were doing, what on earth is the problem? They came, they played board games, no one was harmed. If I had a board game night and that happened, I’d be happy they came and had fun. Why do we need to wrongfun them for being less social?

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

You must have stopped reading when I mentioned “often times become hostile when asked to join RP / plot”. I have politely approached a duo like this and asked them if they’d like to come join a plot, as they were nominally part of the same faction as myself, and received a rather angry response. I’ve seen staffers on other games politely send a duo like this an invitation to a plot event and get told very plainly to get bent for trying to force them to play the game the staff intended to run. I’ve also witnessed these people throw tantrums when they were suddenly touched by plot they refused to be a part of.

Then that goes back to the part where I said: “Unless they are engaging in other problematic behavior” (paraphrased). If someone’s being rude to staff or throwing a tantrum or whatever, then talk to them about their inappropriate behavior and/or show them the door. Otherwise, they’re not actually doing any harm sitting their in their private room playing with each other. It’s not like the game is charged for the bandwidth of their bits (at least on any normal modern server).

@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

Best for the community of players that make up “the game”, which is all a Mush really is. The good of the community, of which all players participating in the game are a part, absolutely is the responsibility of each individual player.

We’ll just have to disagree then. When I join a game, I’m not signing up for any sort of responsibility to the greater good of that game, nor do I expect that of any players that join a game I’m running. It’s just a game. Players should be free to engage with it in whatever way meets their needs / playstyle (within the bounds of the rules of course).

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

If they never respond to the goings-on of the game, and never leave a single grid square, are they really active? What structure are they using?

You’re making a leap from “prefers to play with their friends” to “never responds to the goings-on of the game.” That may be true for a few people, but it is simply not true in all cases (or even most, in my experience). There are plenty of folks who engage with the game in their own way, and plenty of people who contribute the logs of said RP to the public repositories. It’s really not that hard.

But even in the most extreme strawman, assuming there are two players who only ever RP with each other, never share anything, and literally never leave a private grid room, I say again - so what? They’re having fun. They’re not hurting anything. Why do we need to shame/wrongfun them? Nobody gets any more RP if you run them off the game.

@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

You can, but the question is whether players should, I assume from the perspective of what’s best practices.

A Mush, if it’s healthy, feels like a world. You can “go” there. There are people there. Some of them, yes, are not your favorite people, but that is what a real place is like. You can certainly choose to ignore certain people, as I described in the analogy. It doesn’t break the game. It’s also not productive to building a healthy community that feels like there are possibilities and unknowns rather than another window for chatting with pals.

When talking “best practices”, you have to ask: best for whom? Every player comes to the game with different desires and different needs, and I really don’t think it’s fair to expect them to put those aside for some vague “good of the game”. That’s not their responsibility. As long as they’re not doing active harm to the game (toxic cliques hogging resources is one example of that) and are playing within the established bounds of the story, who cares what they do or who they do it with?

@MisterBoring said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

That said, if a person intends to RP with a single other person to the exclusion of both the rest of the players and staff run plots, I seriously have to question, especially in the age of Discord and Free VTTs, why people are choosing to pad a MU’s numbers with their secluded RP that might as well be inactivity as far as the census and statistics for the MU in question is concerned.

That’s easy - MUs have structure. Even if you don’t directly engage in scenes with people outside your circle, you can still respond to the goings-on of the game. You can make your own stories within their world. You can even cause ripples that generate RP for other people. And sure, maybe occasionally you step outside your circle for a big event or to take a chance on someone. You can’t do those things on a private discord.

I cannot fathom how people having fun with each other telling stories and generating scenes would be considered “inactivity” by any sensible MU metric. Would you seriously rather them just not be there than be there having fun in the world you built?

@Trashcan said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

At the same time, a Mush is too big to be treated like a tabletop game and has more in common with a sports team or even a sports league. Past a certain size, you simply do not know enough people that are your favorite people to make up a team with, and necessarily there will be some you do not enjoy

The sports analogy doesn’t really fit for me. If I sign up for a softball league, we need 9 players on the field at any given moment to actually play the game. You have to work together, and I think that signing up for such a thing is more of a group commitment. But that’s just not true for a MUSH. I absolutely can RP with just a single other person, and that’s not stopping anyone else from playing with others.

Sure, at some point the gamerunner might decide that there’s “not enough RP” to make it worth keeping the lights on, but even that isn’t a given. I’ve seen sandbox games with just a handful of players. Either way, gamerunners shouldn’t expect me to spend my free time not having fun just to make their game work. I may choose to, but I’m never obliged to.

I play with people I enjoy playing with. Expecting players to do otherwise feels like trying to control who you socialize with at a club/party. It’s just not what people are there for.

If a clique is being exclusionary to an unhealthy degree (in terms of rudeness, hogging resources, etc.), that’s a different story, but I don’t think that players should be penalized just for playing with their friends.

As staff, there are things you can do (public events, involving players through your PCs, offering incentives through cookies, etc.) to spread the RP out a bit, but I think those efforts should be encouraging, never punitive.

All that said, I do think it’s helpful to play outside your normal circles sometimes just for the overall health of the game. That benefits you as well, presuming you like playing there and want the game to continue.

@Gashlycrumb said in Not MU-related daft question:

Since those files on a disk with personal information already exist, I just have to paste into them, I think the security concern is either already taken care of or already deemed unimportant?

The email server probably won’t be able to run on your PC, so the information will likely wind up on a second external server and need to be FTPed down or something. Regardless, whatever computer it’s running on will now has a new attack vector (the email server). These are potentially solvable problems, it’s just a question of whether the tech team will go for it.

@Gashlycrumb said in Not MU-related daft question:

If there is no active student’s address on the list, throw the email away.

That addresses spam, but it doesn’t do anything for security. There’s still a server running with a port open and all that jazz. There are also a bunch of files on disk with personal information in them that need to be protected. And you need a way to either get those files OFF the system securely, or manage other peoples’ access to them. Not saying it’s insurmountable or anything, but it’s a consideration.

@Gashlycrumb said in Not MU-related daft question:

Guys. Mailbox rules alone won’t accompish it, because it’s not for me. I have to paste copies of my emails into a record that a bunch of other people use to see if I emailed.

Right, but that’s why I said:

Then I think there are various ways to get the messages with a certain label out - Google Takeout maybe, or a mail client like Thunderbird that has an export feature.

It changes it from an every-email copy&paste thing to a once-a-week-or-whatever export feature.

I think what you’re describing is a standalone mail server (probably running postfix or something like it) with some custom scripts that would route incoming emails to text files based on a set of filing rules.

Honestly, though, that sounds like an awful lot of work for the tech team. Apart from the setup and scripting, they’d have to guard the email server against spam and other security risks. But hey, it can’t hurt to ask. Maybe I’m overestimating the complexity.

You could probably accomplish your same goal with a lot less effort by setting up mailbox rules (as Aria said) to label messages. Then I think there are various ways to get the messages with a certain label out - Google Takeout maybe, or a mail client like Thunderbird that has an export feature.

@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:

This is an example of what I am hopeful AI will eventually do, which is help push scientific discovery forward.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr94xxye2lo

That is neat, though it’s worth noting that this doesn’t appear to be “Generative AI” in the usual sense of ChatGPT, etc., but a custom-trained model. With much of this, it’s not the technology itself that is the problem, it’s the way in which it’s being trained and used that people take issue with.

@dvoraen Heh I enjoyed that video, thanks.

That reminds me of this post: My new hobby: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane. It’s reactions to a series of Pull Requests (the programmer equivalent of “Hey, I did a thing, someone check it out please and make sure I didn’t mess up”) from Copilot AI. The top comment says it all:

I just looked at that first PR and I don’t know how you could trust any of it at some point. No real understanding of what it’s doing, it’s just guessing. So many errors, over and over again.

Can AI tools make coding easier? Sure. Just in my lifetime I’ve seen code go from assembly language (low-level instructions to the computer registers) to visual coding tools (like Scratch) that let my kid build a game like Frogger. But even with that astonishing advancement, we still need developers to figure out what to build in the first place, and then make sure what gets built does what the customer needs. AI is highly unlikely to replace that in the forseeable future.

In other news: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

I know it’s unlikely to succeed, but one can dream.

@ProperPenguin said in AI PBs:

When I told a few dev friends this, they got surprised and then tested on other instances (not just ChatGPT) and found yeah, it spits out a whole mess or sometimes it suddenly veers into turning your request into Python or similar.

Knowing how these things work, it is not at all surprising that they are bad at generating a custom regex. If you want a well-known one, maybe, but GenAI doesn’t truly think or reason. It generates statistically likely responses. Not correct ones.

But vetting regex-es is as hard as writing them, so you’re still not getting out ahead.

@Trashcan said in AI PBs:

It doesn’t always do that either.

Yeah, there’s also this: Trust in AI Coding Tools is Falling.

The thing about GenAI is that it can make you seem more competent at a skill without actually having the competence. Maybe enough to fool a layperson, but not enough to actually BE competent. So someone without skill in programming can do some vibe coding, someone without skill in writing can write an article faster, etc.

But even setting aside the ethical/legal/environmental/etc. impacts, it just doesn’t work great. Programs are buggy and you don’t know how to fix them (or worse, don’t even realize they have gaping security flaws or subtle edge case conditions). Writing sounds same-y and cringe because it’s using statistics to generate the words instead of having a human voice.

There are certainly limited things when an ethical GenAI tool can be useful and increase productivity. It might give me the answer to a programming question faster than StackOverflow. But people on SO don’t generally hallucinate library functions that don’t exist. And if they did, the upvote/comment system would probably point that out.

A tool that makes up information and generates wrong answers might be useful in some situations, but it is not going to make you better or faster in general.

Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of AI

Brian Merchant’s new book, “Blood in the Machine,” argues that Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers in the face of automation.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

But art is hardly the only medium that AI is taking over and I don’t know why it gets romanticized as a protected class that needs saving, exempt from the same pressures that affect every other job in a capitalist system. I’d love to game, or dance, or write all day instead of working a job, but there isn’t any money in it for 99.9% of people who can do it.

You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills. I’m not just talking about the starving artist trope making their own music in their garage. I’m talking about the graphic designers, the technical writers, the voiceover narrators, the people who write ad copy, the animators who make the Marvel movies, the musicians, the novelists, etc. There are a tremendous number of jobs impacted by GenAI.

And hey, if the AI companies had gotten their tech through legit means, that’d still suck, but it would be different. The printing press put the monks out of business, but it did not steal their work to do so. These companies are, in my opinion, crooks. You can say copyright law is a joke but I couldn’t disagree more. I think it is a cornerstone of society. Not just for financial reasons, but for moral ones. Because it’s one thing to not make money off your art. It’s quite another to make art and then have some company steal it so THEY can make money.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people.

Of course the problem is people, but imagine what the world would be like if we’d taken that stance with other technological advancements. We can’t un-invent LLMs any more than we can un-invent the steam engine, but that doesn’t mean we have to let tech companies run rampant either.

The industrial revolution caused a whole lot of chaos before we had reform and regulations to make it better. And for all the faults of the modern world, things are better in countless ways than they were in the 1870s.

Copyright law came about after the invention of the printing press, to recognize that just because you had a copy of a book, that didn’t give you the right to re-print it and sell your own copies. Those laws have evolved over time, but the core idea has remained the same: it’s not right to make money off of someone else’s creative work, and it’s not good for the world if artists have no incentive to share their art.