Obviously, receipts are handy but they’re not a requirement. And I’d (speaking only for myself, though with a polite nod in the direction of that Admin tag) rather not make posting every shred of evidence possible the expectation here.

@Jumpscare said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

That means that since the birth of BMD, no other game has negatively affected MU* players as broadly or as painfully as Star Wars: Age of Alliances.

A board of women, queers, and allies reacting strongly against sexual misconduct and anti-reporting prejudice… Isn’t that how we started in the first place?

For posterity, I present thus:

Tracy is a man and he is a very hansome and manly man.He likes women a lot and women like him too but men think he is compitishion.He has very long brown shiny hair everywhere and a little blue eyes that are mostly green but very hansome anywya.You can tell a lot of things from his eyes.He has a very big bulge in his jeans where the dick would be and it is not a sock because it makes all women almost orgasm with desire.Behind him is a very firm muscled ass that makes you want to slap it and play with it in lots of ways but only if your a women.If you are a man you will die if you touch it because Tracy is strong and very not Gay.If you are a women he winks and smiles at you and thinks you have a nice personality.If you are a man again he frowns at you and it makes you not hit on him or on any women when hes here.He likes lots of women very much and likes very few men but not as boyfriends.And he has a shitr which is nice and blue.I mean shirt sorry.

@hobos said in Bannings:

From what I’ve seen, you are a people with boundless empathy, but you choose who to direct that towards.

Not to really engage in the debate, here, but that’s literally the same as everyone else.

Me. I’m a good thing about mushing.

And this isn’t a throw away joke, or an ego thing, or whatever. But I’ve finally been able to arrive at the conclusion that yes, my RP is good. My events are good. My being present on a game is good. And I’m finally free to feel that I am good enough.

So there. Me. I’m a good thing about mushing.

So obviously it’s a very dark time, horrid things incoming and so forth…

But did anyone actually have The Onion buying Infowars on their 2024 bingo cards?

@Warma-Sheen said in Los Angeles 2043: A Blade Runner MUSH - Discussion:

Just because you can open a game on your own doesn’t mean you should.

You should. It might last, it might not, but at least stuff’s being made even for a moment.

@GF We’re for taco Tuesdays, no-pants Fridays, and the violent and utter overthrow of the capitalistic, white-supremacist patriarchy. And tea.

@CuriousGamer said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

@Tez There seems to be a few bad actor threads now, would it make sense to put them into their own ‘Bad Actor’ kind of topic at this point? I know there’s been a couple discussions of others in the not too distant past as well.

No. We don’t need a whole section of the forum devoted to talking shit about specific people.

@untitled said in Underage Players:

because I’d be unhappy if I found out my kids were

That right there is the ultimate point. Policing children is the job of the parent, not any game they would seek to join.

Establish rules that state, outright, that the game is for adults, will contain adult themes, etc. If it is revealed from a trustworthy source that there is an underage person, remove them. That is all you can do.

These days, children on these kinds of games are very much the exception. There’s a high barrier to entry and far more free-to-play games around than there were in the early years when a lot of us first started. So don’t stress over it too much.

@Gashlycrumb The worst part of some of the more… famous problem players, especially those with whom I have been the most acquainted, is just how vital they make themselves to be. They provide story like nobody’s business, take over all those little jobs that nobody wants to do but need to get done. It’s like waking up one day to find out the janitor is actually Stalin.

@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 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.

@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.

@Aria That WoD bias is something I’m keenly aware of, but honestly when it comes time to report on the info this survey has gathered I think that’s going to be an important point to remember going forward when we, this forum, talk about problems we’re coming at it from a primarily X, Y, or Z-shaped lens so that’s going to skew our responses.

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.

@Aria To be honest the most surprising thing is that people are replying at all. But I’ve only had the fifteen replies, for which I’m obviously grateful and enthusiastic, but it’s not a very large sample.

I’m not exactly surprised by the result itself, I wouldn’t have the hypotheses otherwise. But so strong a showing does make me concerned I’ve got some bias in the data. Which I do, to be fair, selection bias being the most obvious.

@Aria I mean I’ve only done a tiny analysis on this preliminary data but if I said Kruskal–Wallis H test (H(6) = 16.24, p = .006) would that be exciting enough?

@Aria I was going back and forth on norm internalisation, honestly. While it’s obviously a big part of game culture, and culture in general really, I think that would show up more in data biasing than as a measurable thing at least at this stage.

If I want to do more than satisfy my curiosity and make some very, very broad strokes generalisations (including saying p-value to sound smart), I’d want to do a more qualitative follow up with thematic and/or IPA analysis of answers to longer form questions. Probably in the flavour of an interview of some kind.

Great now I’m thinking about better study design and sampling… If I have to break out SPSS for this, I’m blaming you.

ETA: I’d want a bigger and hopefully more varied sample, regardless. Thus far, 86.7% of respondents answered, “15+ years” for question 1. >_>

@InkGolem Unfortunately, if I were to include every permutation of every genre, I’d still be writing the questions, so I picked the most common genres I’ve seen spoken about.

@Gashlycrumb I’ve got a couple of working sub-hypotheses, but thematic spillover is definitely one I’m tentatively hopeful for. Not that I’m “hopeful” about any being right, but you know what I mean.

For the interested, here are my general hypothetical reasons behind my overall thesis:

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

Systemic Enabling, where the structure of the game makes certain behaviours easier or more rewarding;

Norm Internalisation, where patterns of behaviour become normalised within a specific community culture;

Demographic Affinity, where different genres attract different types of players with differing tendencies; and

Legacy Culture, where older habits and traditions—both good and bad—are carried over from game to game.

ETA: Obviously this isn’t a super serious research study, results won’t be conclusive or even generalisable (that is to say applicable to a population larger than, but including, the participants). And these hypotheses aren’t the only possible answers, but if I wanted to check every single thought I’ve had on the topic I’d be doing a doctoral study and I don’t hate myself that much.