Kestrel

@L.-B.-Heuschkel

I don’t think that liking PvP in a creative writing game is necessarily about being competitive. At least for me it never has been. It’s about wanting tension and conflict to drive the narrative.

E.g., I play a witch, you play a witch-hunter. The goal here isn’t to “win”, it’s to use our characters’ different ideologies about magic/religion/sin to tell a story. I might enjoy being captured/interrogated/blackmailed or put on trial IC just as much as I’d enjoy getting away with it and winding up your religious character, so the goal is obviously not competitive so long as we both have a clear understanding that we are not our characters, and this is all just pretendy-fun-times.

@bear_necessities said:

I was a volunteer on IRE! Ask me anything lol I never had an issue as a volunteer, except for other players. I also knew Matt Mihaly and some of his team. They were nice people (at least to me) and I never heard any complaints from the paid staff. But I’m sure it happened, and I’m sure that some paid staff and volunteers had bad experiences, if only because it was really the wild west era of MUDing and in general some people are terrible to other people online.

I do think the model was predatory, but I believe that about any micro-transaction sort of situation. I spent a considerable amount of money on IRE games and never got anywhere, mostly because I didn’t understand how to make triggers.

I was also IRE staff. The team I was in had more backstabbing and politics than Game of Thrones. I wasn’t too heavily involved, because I was 18 and real life was still new and exciting and full of promise that didn’t depend on the whims of pretend-Gods online. But for instance I watched multiple “volunteers” being cajoled into essentially working a full-time job at that company, unpaid, expected to be on-call all day, all for the promise of a dangled carrot of maybe, just maybe, if you keep up all this hard work, we might consider you for a paid position. And the older I’ve gotten, and the more I’ve looked back, the more I’ve realised how incredibly fucked up and completely disgusting that was.

I mean they pick these volunteers from a crop of the most dedicated/addicted players who have generally spent a lot of money on this game, invested their identity into it, are desperate for approval, and then keep milking that need through the false promise that there’s a chance that if they keep buying in like that, and in fact even harder since they’re not even players/customers anymore, but staff with duties, then they might eventually end up recouping their investment, turning their addiction/hobby into their dream job. Take into account the wealth disparity that some of these hopeful volunteers weren’t American, but earning below the American equivalent of minimum wage in their countries, and they really believed an IRE Producer’s salary could be their golden ticket.

Then there’s the whole ego aspect of being in this parasocial position where other players refer to you as a God, and I know because I was one. It wasn’t just IC, I had a full-on fanclub who would get excited anytime I dropped even a single syllable their way. That kind of power-dynamic weirded me out and made me intensely uncomfortable, but what concerned me even more was to see other Gods so readily leaning into it, in-game and off-game too.

Whole thing was unhealthy for everyone involved IMO, and since I have friends still involved with IRE, I know it’s not completely a thing of the past.

@bear_necessities

Yeah IRE’s “free-to-play” model was always incredibly predatory. I actually think how they treat both their “volunteers” and even paid staff might be worse. But that’s a rant for another thread and another day.

I think the “I need to be winning” mindset isn’t discouraged by PvE at all, tbh.

There are toxic reasons why some players prefer PvP, but I also think there are toxic reasons why some players prefer PvE. Like, is it because they want to collaborate with other players? Or is it because their persistently obnoxious behaviour tends to invite challenge, and they’d prefer an environment where they won’t be, and the person doing that is the bad guy?

The type of toxic player I see on a PvP game is someone who needs to prove they can take out other players.

The type of toxic player I see on PvE games is a self-insert power fantasy who acts like if you don’t agree with everything their character says/does, and stroke their ego, you’re being rude.

The chill type of player I see on a PvP game is someone who separates themselves from their character, intentionally wrote in flaws and exploitable secrets, and looks forward to other players using those pressure points to drive the story forward.

The chill type of player I see on a PvE game is someone who enjoys being part of an ensemble cast working together to solve the main story’s problem.

But I just don’t really buy into the idea that PvP/PvE inherently inspires a higher calibre of players.

I’m not really a MUSHer, or at least I wouldn’t describe myself that way, but I do consider myself a part of “this hobby”. I would more broadly consider myself a text-gamer or a MU*er. I’m making that distinction since the OP focuses mostly on MUSH history. I’ve played MUSH and happily would again, but it’s not the main kind of text-game I play.

So with that perspective in mind, I don’t think this hobby will ever really be consigned to the annals of history, because I think that text-games scratch a very specific itch that no amount of graphics can ever fully replace. They used to be more popular before graphical games took over, but the people who still play them now are those who actually always liked the genre just for what it was, not simply because it was all we had available.

What may happen (and has already been happening for a very long time) is that it evolves, and I think that’s fine, and good, and not a tragedy. It’s why I don’t really call myself a MUSHer. There are many other kinds of games that fulfil the same function that MUSHes do.

In terms of preserving history, I think that what would interest me most would be any kind of effort to try and trace the history of that exact evolution. From the first game that called itself a MUD, to the first game that called itself a MUSH; to authors and academics who’ve tried to write about the hobby in various ways, to varying degrees of success; all the major forums and websites and chat servers where fans of the hobby have congregated, even major schisms like the the MSB/BMD split; various controversies over the years like MUDs with exploitative business models, plagiarism and copyright allegations, child-safety concerns, GenAI, attitudes towards played-bys, art commissions, accessibility awareness; PvE vs PvP perspectives, and other game design philosophies; MU* taxonomy, clients, engines, and ways the genre has shifted over time from exclusively text-based to incorporating graphics.

I think this would be beneficial because despite how fractured the hobby is, it’s a lot larger, historied, and interconnected than many people realise. MUSH players could benefit from learning more about alternative mediums like RP-focused MUDs, and vice versa. There’s so much multi-directional influence that many people, including myself, aren’t aware of. (I literally don’t know what a MOO or MUCK is.) Maybe an effort to catalogue that kind of history could encourage more cross-pollination, and invigorate the hobby.

The day-to-day stories that were lost, I personally care less about. Books are infinite, stories are infinite, but maybe this thread has inspired me to think more about ways the history of the medium itself could be preserved.

As for the last question, I’ll be honest: I’ve definitely spent more time in specific corners of this hobby than was beneficial or healthy for me, but I don’t regret my participation altogether, and will continue to participate.

Most of my peeves these days are AI related, here’s another one:

I hate that I’ve stopped using em-dashes even when they’re objectively the best punctuation choice in a sentence, and that I’ve mindfully changed my intuitive writing style, in order to avoid being interpreted as AI.

@Ominous

This is more to do with media genres in a broader sense than game design, but I think that if you’re working on a storytelling game, it applies.

—>Also, here is a big fat disclaimer that this describes trends, not individual tastes<—

So the two (commonly measured) personality traits that I personally would care most about in a large/open playerbase are empathy and openness to experience. It doesn’t matter as much in a TTRPG small group of friends, but if you wanted to open a MUD that anyone can join under an anonymous username, you ideally want to cultivate a playerbase that’s prosocial, considerate, and more likely to yes-and than no-but or poo-poo other people’s fun.

There are actually a whole bunch of studies that have looked at the way consuming literature can either develop a reader’s empathy, or may be motivated by high empathy to begin with. For example, this 2013 article demonstrated that when readers feel emotionally transported into the narrative, it had a positive effect on their empathy over time. So in theory if I wanted to design a game that encourages players to experience greater empathy for other players, I might want to consider tools that provide an insight into other characters’ inner workings. For example, I could incentivise in-character journal entries, incorporate IC mind-reading/telepathy/psychic tools that let one character gain insight into another character’s emotional state or thoughts, etc. This study showed something similar, though I’ll note it later had some replication issues that, IMO, could be explained by the way the previous article focused not just on “reading fiction”, but how we read/experience fiction.

More recently in 2025, a study looked at the film genres preferred by college students and found some correlations between genre preference and OCEAN personality traits. The most useful finding for me in this is that mystery correlates with openness to experience, because “mystery” doesn’t have to be a standalone genre, it’s something you can incorporate into any game. And anecdotally I’ve noticed that whenever a game has some big central puzzle theme, a lot of people really hate it and don’t care about it, but they tend not to be players I like playing with anyway. So … good?

There are also a lot of small-scale tools you could incorporate to encourage mystery, and you could even combine them with tools I suggested in the previous paragraph. For instance, if you encouraged characters to write up personal secrets, you could then also add another tool that allows other characters to uncover them in fragments. You could have some kind of psychic power that allows multiple characters to pool together their energy, and then each one has a chance to uncover a different portion of their target’s inner thoughts/feelings/goals etc. Rather than having journal entries be public automatically, you could design a system that both rewards writing them, and rewards uncovering someone else’s journal entries by going through their house or something.

Lastly, and this may be controversial because I know the hobby loves this genre, but I think I would personally avoid horror as a central theme, based on this metastudy. And again, going back to the big fat disclaimer, this isn’t a criticism of individual tastes; I love lots of horror films! Obsession was great. But horror fans trend younger and lower in empathy. So what I would expect to see is that while the majority of players on any horror game are normal and chill, the extreme types of problem-players would probably be a little more extreme.

For people who have either created games, or are at any stage of the creative process to attempt it, I’m wondering:

Are there aspects of your game design that exist almost as an intentional net to filter certain player temperaments?

Some examples might be an arbitrary chargen requirement meant to excite/repel certain players out the gate. Or purposely overdeveloping social skill options, because you find Might Is Right style players offputting.

For my part, I recently found myself deep-diving some studies on how preferences for certain genres and literary themes correlate with certain personality traits. It has me second-guessing the genre I want to focus on, and looking into ways to incorporate themes that might better appeal to players I’d like having.

I remember also talking to a game dev who was very hurt by how badly some bad actors had spoken about a game they’d made. On the other hand, I said it was actually a very good sign that such shitty players find the game unplayable, and a sign of good game design — since it didn’t have the kinds of tools they needed to fully enable shittiness, but was rife with prosocial and storytelling tools they found pointless.

EDIT: Apparently misread.

@Gashlycrumb said:

It’s horrible. I’m not sure what a therapist could do about it, though.

[…]

There’s probably some super-expert therapist out there who teaches other therapists how to deal with this, but it does sound like a hell of a challenge and a special skill.

Disclaimer that I’m not a therapist/doctor of any kind, but my understanding is that mentalisation therapy (MBT) can be effective on abusive types if they’re at the point where they actually want to change. That can sometimes happen after they’ve burned every last bridge and start to gain an inkling that they might be the problem, but don’t bank on it.

What I’m probably more qualified to say is what helped me personally, which is letting go. Like I would just stop spending so much energy wondering what’s wrong with them, and how they can be helped, and why they did what they did, and how they can be made to understand your perspective, etc. In a way they’re still controlling you when you have this mindset because your inner world still revolves around them, and you wanna snatch that right back and instead start thinking about who you are, and what you want, and all the cool things you can do without all that dead weight dragging you down, regardless of whatever irrelevant motives they had for all the nonsense they caused.

I have a family member who’s genuinely very insane, whom I still have to see on occasion. And I’ve come to just think of them as a cat. A cat has no intention to hurt you. A cat isn’t thinking about you at all. A cat doesn’t knock the glass off the counter or bite your feet and scratch up your legs in the night because of some misunderstanding, miscommunication, or wrongdoing on your part, they’re just doing what cats do. And no amount of tearfully explaining to that cat how important it is to you that they don’t knock the glass off the counter is gonna make them understand or care or not do it, because they’re a cat and have a cat brain. And it doesn’t make the cat evil, it just makes them a cat, they literally cannot comprehend evil. There’s no reason to ever take anything a cat does personally; they’re a cat. So then whenever I see this person and they act insane or make inappropriate comments about my body or whatever else I can just think: cat, and compartmentalise all their lunacy separate from any standards or thoughts or feelings I would ordinarily apply to interactions with an actual human being. Oh and you know, don’t try to rub their belly when you know it’s a trap.

That’s what helps me, anyway.