@Jennkryst said in Age Verification & Games:

Extremely controversial opinion: Minors on games aren’t inherently bad.

I don’t think it’s that controversial in theory, but in practice it’s a bit more complicated. In that specific case they obviously knew that the player was a minor with their parent’s permission, but I have no freaking clue how I, as a game-runner, would figure that out.

In terms of the broader tech sphere, I think non-sucking parental controls would be a better solution to the issue than this crap, but there are problems: a) it’s really hard to make something robust and standardized, b) there’s no profit motive for them to do so, especially when c) there’s a perverse incentive for the age-gate systems in data harvesting.

@Pavel said in Age Verification & Games:

So if a MU wanted to connect with, say, Yoti ID and could get a token from them that “the person you’re asking about has demonstrated to us that they are over 18” that would be a different question, and I’d encourage such a thing.

1. That’s assuming you trust Yoti. Do you really want to give THEM your government ID? ETA: Are you comfortable with them being able to build a database of all the sites that ask: “Hey, is Faraday over 18?” And then sell said database to marketers, the government, or heaven-knows-who?

2. Services like that cost money, putting them out of reach for your average free-to-play online RP game/group.

@Kestrel Yeah, one of my kids told me about seeing “RPs” on Scratch of all places several years ago. Their friends play via discord - only with people they know, but it’s a short hop from there into other forms of text-based gaming with strangers.

As a parent, this stuff concerns me greatly. People can bark about “just use parental controls”, but I wonder how many of them have actually tried to keep a kid safe on the internet these days.

Even so, I take issue with the current laws because they are a massive invasion of privacy and a security risk. There have already been instances of leaked documents and other identifying info. It will only get worse. The anonymity of the internet certainly has its problems, but tying your RL governmental identity to every platform you visit is a free speech and information nightmare.

@Muscle-Car said in Age Verification & Games:

especially in this hobby the chances of encountering underage players is slim

Underage players have been playing in this hobby since the 90s. With the resurgence of TTRPGs among teenagers, I wouldn’t be surprised if some number of them stumble into text-based games.

But regardless of whether they’re there or not, MUs most likely do (or will) fall under some of the recent age verification laws imposed by places like Texas and Australia. EU regulation is probably coming soon. A “I’m over 18 I swear” tickbox is not sufficient under these regulations.

Even big companies are struggling to figure out how to conform to these rules. On a MU? Good luck.

@ham I didn’t start the business owner analogy, I was responding to a previous comment. Any kind of RL analogy is going to be flawed because once you meet the people in person you can be like: “Oh no, not Harvey again. I’m out.”

You’re never going to get that same 1-1 correspondence in an online system. What we’ve been talking about is whether staff OWES people that same level of transparency.

I think being transparent is a good way to build trust. I think being cautious around staffers you don’t know is reasonable. I just don’t think “they have no handle therefore they have something to hide” is appropriate or fair. YMMV.

@dvoraen said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

“ok but who owns the business?” “You don’t need to know.”

I view it more as: “Who owns this business?” “No clue. <shrug>”

Which is honestly how I feel about most businesses. Most places do not plaster their owner’s identity on their front door, and most patrons just don’t care.

There’s nothing wrong with caring. By all means, give your business to a place that you’re not comfortable with. I just reject the notion that not advertising your OOC identity is some kind of shady practice.

@Pavel said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

NPCs are a different thing, they’re storytelling tools, but if your personal player character is in a position of authority and you are in a position of OOC authority, I do look upon that with askance.

I can understand being wary of that. Heaven knows there have been enough staff shenanigans through the years to warrant such skepticism. But I’ve also been on games where staff PCs were in authority positions and it worked out just fine. I’ve done it myself, though I usually avoid it.

It all depends on the staffer, so I agree it’s nice when you know staff’s reputation. I just prefer if the default “trust-o-meter” is at neutral for someone without an OOC rep rather than “OMG they must have something to hide”.

I still see all of it as kinda separate from Ares player handles. Everyone knew me as Faraday on MUs (from staff char names) looooong before player handles existed. Even on games where staff had wacky themed names, I’d still announce myself in my +finger. And we’ve had alt tracking systems for forever (I already mentioned the auxiliary alt tracker mechanism baked into Ares).

@Roadspike said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

ut it’s also disingenuous, because you are a staffer, and you’re seeing things through staffer eyes the whole time, and can bring in the weight of staff whenever you want (either through yourself or one of your fellow staffers).

Yeah, it’s always felt icky to me to be “undercover staff”.

I think it’s better for a game when everyone knows who everyone’s alts are, staff included. It just avoids a bunch of particular kinds of drama, and it boosts trust.

And to clarify, when I say that folks don’t owe anyone their OOC identity, I meant across games. Forcing people to share alt info within the same game is different IMHO.

@catzilla I agree with the principle, but you don’t need a player handle to link alts on a game. You can do it with tags.

@bear_necessities said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

As far as staff having a handle, I prefer to play on games where I know the admin. I do think staff alts should be tagged.

I’m 100% on board with this as well.

@bear_necessities said in Staff Bits Linking Handles:

If you don’t have a handle, you have something to hide, and my brows immediately raise.

As the creator of the handle system, this kind of bothers me. The system was never intended to pressure people into identifying themselves across games. There has been enough stalking, creeping, and other shenanigans in the MU community (and the internet at large) that I don’t think anyone owes anyone else their OOC identity. Ever. Staff included.

That’s why even Ares games have a built-in alternative method for alt tracking that doesn’t require a player handle.

It’s meant to be a fun tool for those who choose to use it. I’m not a fan of it being held against those who don’t.

(Also in practical terms a creeper can just make a new handle, so I’m not sure what it gains you really.)

@Jennkryst I don’t believe that’s accurate. The writers didn’t have a plan for Head Six. She was a Mystery Box because they thought it was cool. Even in a recent interview, RDM was still insisting that the final season writers’ room didn’t want to come out and call them “angels” because they didn’t want to put a name on it and kill the mystery.

There was a copy of the original BSG series bible floating around the internet years ago. Some relevant snippets:

Our show is built on the idea that a science fiction series can employ ground-breaking special effects, dynamic cinematography, realistic situations, believable characters and explore contemporary social and political issues without sacrificing dramatic tension or excitement.

(Our new) approach is to introduce realism into what has heretofore been an aggressively unrealistic genre.

We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other cliches of the genre.

My favorite aspects of the series were the things mentioned above. The fact that they extinguish the fire in the pod by venting it to space. The running count of people left alive in the fleet. The time they spend worrying about supplies. The commentary on social issues and moral dilemmas. Even most of Head Six’s original shenanigans could be attributed just to Baltar being insane (like when he points to the place they should strike on that one moon and then Six attributes it to “God guiding his hand”; they deliberately left it vague enough that maybe he just got lucky.)

So yes, quite clearly they ENDED UP where you describe, but I think there’s a ton of evidence that this was something they backed themselves into, and not a clear plan from the start.

@Jennkryst for me, there’s a big difference between “religious themes” and literal on-camera angels. I also think some of the giant plot holes you pointed out were theme-breaking. But of course reasonable people can disagree on such things, and none of that stopped me from enjoying the show. i just would have enjoyed it even more (probably in the same storytelling tier as B5) if they’d had a better plan from the start.

@Aria Yes, B5 was the best.

IMHO BSG fell into the same “Mystery Box Storytelling” pit that Lost did at around the same timeframe. Set up a mystery, and hope you can come up with a satisfying resolution by the time it matters. The trouble is that’s NEVER been how satisfying mysteries work. Seat-of-your-pants storytelling has its place, but not in a mystery. @Jennkryst is exactly right about how that wrecked the plot. They painted themselves into such a corner that the only way out was divine intervention.

BUT I still love the show. Low-tech sci-fi military stuff is my jam. The characters are great. The writing in any individual episode is usually stellar, especially in the early seasons.

For all the various Battlestar MU* peeps, you might enjoy this react series in which Katee Sackhoff (aka Starbuck), her husband, and the occasional former cast guest star all react to the BSG episodes in order. They’re up to Season 2 now and it’s so entertaining.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiHvVvKZ9lt4-IZiosUjdxqB7IEQJJ6RU

It’s been awhile since I watched all the eps from the beginning, and it’s reminding me both of how great the show was, and how maddening the lack of a coherent “plan” was lol.

@Ominous said in When is the last time you played?:

To find out how the story resolves? Just because everyone knows all the details of a setting doesn’t mean they know how it plays out.

Even if you DO know how things play out, it can still be fun. I’ve been on plenty of games based on established settings (Star Wars, Battlestar, Babylon 5, etc.) where the lore wasn’t in any way opaque but we still had lots of fun playing in that sandbox.

@Jumpscare said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

With everyone’s responses, and to my surprise, I guess that makes Silent Heaven a MUSH, haha. Strange that I didn’t think of it as one.

I mean, Silent Heaven call themselves:

RPI-lite: MUSH-style RP + coded support for supplementary skills.

So it seems that they’re trying to straddle the line a bit. Nothing wrong with that.

There’s a very clear distinction between minimal-RP, code-heavy MUDs and code-light, RP-heavy MUSHes, but there are also varying shades of gray in-between. And the MUX distinction, which is usually just MUSH but with a different codebase. I have no idea where MUCK falls. Is it just MUD with a different codebase?

@Jumpscare said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

For me, I see them as how much of the game is dictated by code.

I agree that the code plays a part, but I don’t think it’s that simple. There have been plenty of games branded as “MUSH”, running on MUSH platforms (aka TinyMUX / PennMUSH), that had significant amounts of coded mechanics. I never once heard any of them called RPIs.

In fact, I’ve been playing MUSHes since the 1990s and only heard the term RPI for the first time a couple years ago. It seemed like a term that had originated in the MUD community.

Now it’s possible someone from the MUD side might have looked at a game like TGG and said: “Oh, that’s a RPI.” But TGG called itself a MUSH, and I never heard anyone call it a RPI. Nor would it fit the “No OOC commo”, “figure out everything IC” rules that @Kestrel described earlier. (which, as an aside, seem REALLY weird to me. Unless you’re literally playing yourself, your character is always going to have knowledge you don’t have. Any RPG that doesn’t have a mechanism for bridging the gap between IC and OOC knowledge is bizarre IMHO.)

@MisterBoring said in Hello, Survey, and Looking for Recs:

I’ve been in this hobby 20+ years now and I still don’t know what makes RPI unique

We don’t really have good categories for any of it. There’s a technology side based on which server you use, but the rest is really just vibes.

@Yam said in When is the last time you played?:

Has anyone seen a system that effectively incentivizes players to run things for other players?

I don’t think this works, like, at a human nature level. People are generally not motivated to volunteer for things because you offer them peanuts. They might be motivated by altruism (it’s good for others) or self-interest (if everyone pitches in, I also get to play and have fun), or genuine enjoyment. But I don’t think most folks are going to be meaningfully motivated to do something hard by a tiny carrot.

(I’m not saying you can’t reward someone to make them feel appreciated, just that it’s not an effective motivational tool on its own.)