Anyone who is rude/a chore/a hassle/a drain/mean/a liar when dealing with staff (and let us leave room for grace and assume this is more than an isolated incident) is doing the same shit to everyone else.
If I’m on staff and it’s persistently unpleasant for me to deal with you, I’m not going to inflict you on anyone else either. “Then your game will just become the type of people you personally don’t find unpleasant.” I know, sounds pretty cool to me.
Having recently played on a game where banning/asking to leave was applied in what I would describe as a fairly liberal manner and for many years on games where it was, in fact, almost impossible to get banned, the experience was dramatically more positive on the game that was relatively zero-tolerance for bad behavior. It was a smaller game than the other ones but, and I cannot overstate this, that was a small price to pay.
Everyone has a bad day sometimes. Sometimes people are bad at regulating how that affects the people they interact with. It does happen. But as the philosopher G.W.Bush once said, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me- you can’t get fooled again.
@Faraday said in Empire Discussion Thread:
I know this is gonna’ be hard to believe for some folk, but you can actually have a game of relatively decent people that, even on their off days, won’t be particularly rude or pushy directly to the game runners. It might not be a BIG game, but from what I gather, it doesn’t look like most staffers want to staff big games anyway.That’d be nice, but I have never in my life been on such a game.
I don’t know, man. The last game I was on, somebody was rude to staff and got banned for it right away, right after the game opened. That game went on to have over 4000 scenes, so it seemed to work out to me, and everyone was pretty chill in their dealings with staff after that, at least to my knowledge.
@Pacha said in Empire Discussion Thread:
even great players can sometimes have a day where they have a shitty attitude.
A great player probably knows enough to be on their best behavior while I’m getting to know that they’re a great player.
I’m starting to feel like the staff on this game are not to be trusted, you guys
Since I was namedropped earlier in the thread (thanks @Tez) I felt compelled to post something here.
I think representation is important, and I wouldn’t be inclined to run a historical game that glossed over the historical facts of what it was like to be a member of a group subject to “isms” at that time. I also wouldn’t be inclined to run one that didn’t.
When you put an “ism” into the social contract as allowed content, you immediately open up the expectation that it will be a gameplay factor and you open up the conversation to what is “accurate and allowed” and what is “accurate but not allowed”, and by opening up those things you now have taken on the responsibility for providing it and policing it. This leads to a lot of questions.
Why is this dynamic being included? Do you expect it to enhance the story in some way? Do you have plans to engage with it directly, or will it just be existing in the background? If you have no plans to engage with it directly, what is the benefit of including it? Do you expect people to RP about it? What will that depiction look like? Does that depiction serve to illuminate something about the human experience in a respectful representation or does it serve to create spectacle and story drama purely for entertainment? What will you do about players who are leaning too far into the latter? Can you clearly define where that line is? What will you do if YOU are the one who crossed the line and it’s been brought to your attention?
Regardless, the expectation should be that a game clearly state on the tin exactly what unconscionable things might occur to your character in the course of play. Do not leave players to discover this through play. If my guy could be killed, say they could be killed. If they could be sexually assaulted, say they could be sexually assaulted. If they could be discriminated against, say they could be discriminated against and how it could look. Gritty Games are allowed. Please put the Narrative Facts on the side. I can choose if this is right for my diet.
I don’t know if it was intentional, but Materialists is Sweet Home Alabama.
@Yam
There was coded money (you received a coded paycheck). You could go to a coded bounty board and offer people coded money to capture another PC for you.
@Muse
I played on a game that had:
@Yam said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
I’d like to hear the cold hard requirements that you might expect from players and how you plan to enforce them. Hypothetically.
I don’t plan to enforce them and I don’t think that attempts should be made to enforce them. I’m arguing that it is better (for the game community, of which each player is a part) if individual players choose to RP outside of their core group of friends than if they do not. I’ve said a couple times that it’s not a crime, and I’m not sure that I’d even “have a polite conversation” with someone about it. It’s somewhat rude and people will notice it, but it’s not an infraction (unless specific game policies are being violated) or an indictment on their presence on the game.
@Yam said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
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.
I agree but I think this is a really interesting topic. We talk about what people expect of staffers a lot, but what about the average expectation of players? I’d like to know if there are more folk that think that if you app into their game, you’d better get your ass out of your room with your pal(s) and dig into the plot.
I don’t agree. The gamerunner has created a place for people to play on their terms, and players have an obligation to do that when they choose to show up there and continue showing up there.
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.
Of course there is an expectation that players behave a certain way and engage with the MU in a certain way. You have to accept the MU’s terms of service to even create a character on an Ares game, and by default maintain a certain level of activity to avoid the idle sweep. Every Ares game I can remember looking at has policies listed on what they expect from players. That obligation may be small, but it is not zero. Whether it compels anyone to behave a particular way is a personal matter. There is no active harm in not doing so, and I am not advocating for bans or repercussions for it. People are allowed to eat only candy if they want to. It’s better if they eat some vegetables, to use Yam’s phrasing.
I’m also not trying to say that people aren’t allowed to RP with their favorite people, or that they shouldn’t RP with them “too much”, because that’s stupid and toxic, and I’ve experienced that firsthand. I am only saying that if you show up and receive the benefits of the game (structure, etc), then perhaps you owe something in return, however small.
@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
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?
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. If we’re talking best practices, then it should hold that, generalizing the behavior to everyone on the game, it would result in a net benefit for the average player. I think that it’s pretty easy to make the case that if everyone is playing with people who aren’t their most favorite experience on occasion, on balance, everyone will probably have more fun. I think it’s also pretty easy to make the case that if nobody is, there will probably be less total fun.
It can be true that what results in the most fun for everyone and what results in the most fun experience for a particular person are not the same thing.
@Faraday said in RPing with Everybody (or not):
I absolutely can RP with just a single other person, and that’s not stopping anyone else from playing with others.
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.
@Ashkuri
My hot take on this is that Mushing, while often described as a “hobby” and a “game”, has elements of both but doesn’t fit neatly into either category, and that while hobbies and games can be solitary, the defining feature of a Mush is that it is not solitary. Other people are required or you are merely writing. Who those other people are is a question for the owner/staff team of the game to decide.
We have (probably) all played on large games that took a laissez-faire approach to playerbase and character creation, but these days, at least in this neck of the woods, that is not the norm anymore. Most games are smaller, shorter-lived, and more focused. On a big game with 70 connections, it is a lot more defensible to take the position of “I played with this person a few times and didn’t love it, so I will never play with them again”; presumably someone out there sees them and will love them for who they are. On a smaller game, this is much less likely to be that person’s reality.
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. While you are not obligated to pass them the ball every time they are open, if you never do, they will notice, your team will notice, and your team’s performance will likely suffer for it. If everyone on the team feels the same way, then that is a matter for the coach (staff) to resolve; that player should be removed from the team. The team will operate better without them, and there may be another team that that player coheres with more ably.
People should play with people they don’t know and people they don’t actively enjoy. I don’t think anyone should feel like they need to do it all the time, or even most of the time, but what’s “fun” is not written in the stars either. Sometimes someone I love to play with will produce a bad time. Sometimes I am the one producing the bad time. Sometimes someone I don’t normally enjoy surprises me.
A sidebar to say that I don’t think RP incentives ever work well. The RP must be the incentive or you’re barking up the wrong tree.
@Pyrephox said in AI In Poses:
But an LLM is not that. They have no sense of accuracy, of understanding of the data they’re receiving or outputting. They’re often (like, sometimes higher than 50%) confidently wrong, which is the last thing you need to assist you with a processing or sensory disorder.
This is true, and it’s true in the context of disability.
However, the limitations of these LLMs in this study demonstrate apparent ability bias. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 27% of American adults have some type of disability. When prompted, ChatGPT generated persons with a disability at 5% of the population whereas Gemini generated 11.7% of its population possibly having a disability (fig 4). The underestimated approximation immediately demonstrates a lack of diversity and inclusion.
Source. The same researchers also asked the LLMs to describe people with disabilities and documented that both models were much less positive in the word choice they used than when prompted to describe a control group, both containing around 5% less positive words and those words skewing towards descriptors like “inspirational”.
Information provided by AI has already been shown to influence user behavior, and if that assistance is biased, users find themselves adapting to that bias. When these decisions affect the health of others, the consequences have much stronger risks associated with them. LLMs used to supplement medical decision-making may perpetuate this bias and compound already existing inequalities.
One of the most considerable findings in this study is how unfavorably patients were described in ChatGPT- and Gemini-generated responses. […] This biased perception of patients should be reconsidered before integrating into health care systems. These tools that have been designed to enhance the patient experience do not demonstrate the same equality and respect for the people they were built for.
@Warma-Sheen said in AI In Poses:
I’ve had the conversation on other threads, so I won’t get into it again here if people reply back to tell me all the ways I’m wrong, but taking a tool that improves writing and using it on text based game seems like it would be a godsend to cure many of the ills that people have complained endlessly about for decades - bad writing, lack of storytellers, no interesting plots.
Let’s grant for a second that these are ills that ChatGPT (and other LLMs, but based on the stats, it’s ChatGPT) can cure.
Genuinely, if I can have a better time engaging with content from ChatGPT, then why do I need the other person in the loop at all? Because their (evidently) poorly-written self is somehow so much better and more effective at prompting than I am? Because I enjoy the randomness of whatever they might happen to throw at it? Why is the other person involved here? Why should I wait for them to pose back to me instead of asking ChatGPT myself? Someone explain it to me.
@KDraygo
I don’t think that the majority opinion is that using ChatGPT is a great evil; I think the majority opinion is that many of us don’t enjoy it and want people who are using it to pose (or substantive portions of what it produces to help them pose) disclose that they are. That being said, I’m going to take issue with a few of your points for the sake of being contrary myself.
my experience shows me that there are three major points I need to develop to contribute good writing to the stories being woven together with those I am RPing with.
I would argue that Mushing doesn’t call on you to contribute “good writing to the stories”. It calls on you to contribute fun to the community of players. How you are doing this is by writing in stories, but it’s also by vibes and a million other things, like showing up when you said you would.
My view on ChatGPT is that it’s a tool, one that can help a lot with part 2. [translating that creativity, imagination, thoughts, and ideas into written form that is both enjoyable and clear for everyone to read.]
I am again going to argue that “Part 2” is not about being “enjoyable and clear for everyone to read”. It is about being enjoyable to interact with. This is not the same thing. Many great writers are not enjoyable to interact with because they leave no air in the space. I think you get that, because you come on to Part 3, which is
being able to cooperate with the community in the game. Coordinating with the staff and cooperating to your fellow players to help create and develop these stories and adventures.
This is close, again, but it’s not quite right. You are not cooperating to create and develop stories. You’re collaborating to create fun.
Am I being pedantic? Maybe. but there is an important distinction here between creating “good stories” and “good writing” (which we’ll grant for the sake of argument that those are things that ChatGPT can actually do) and creating a good time, which is the actual point of playing on one of these games.
I’m not sure who will be wasting time having ChatGPT just come up with poses completely by itself and just copy pasting into the game, so to me, the concern may be a bit overblown.
I promise it’s happening. But on to my closing point:
So my “starting stats” into the hobby were probably a high part 1, low part 2, low part 3. […] The second part took years of not just reading but also RPing, going from a newbie RPer that wrote probably very cringe and rough poses to something that was more palatable to everyone.
This is part of the journey, it’s part of the fun, it’s part of the magic of these games. Outsourcing the writing means you never get better. You never look back and laugh at your own cringe moments. You never track your progress and appreciate that you haven’t just been dicking around online, you’ve actually bettered yourself in some way. You weren’t just part of a cycle of regurgitating content, you created something, however meager. Studies have already shown that using ChatGPT to help you write something makes you less creative and less engaged, which sort of bumps up against your optimism about “Part 1”.
Do you think it’s fair that people ask AI users to disclose it?
@Gashlycrumb
The most relevant piece of information here is probably the system you are pasting the data into rather than the fact that these are coming through email. Is this a cloud-based solution, or does your organization run it on premises? Is it one of the big ones or something nobody outside your org has probably ever heard of?
@Roadspike said in AI PBs:
It doesn’t make you better, it makes you faster.
It doesn’t always do that either.
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.