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MU Peeves Thread
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What in the world.
@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
Yeah, and I think the point of this specific conversation is that a lot of people want it to be culturally inappropriate in this hobby. There are already games that make it explicitly not allowed to use generative AI in writing, and so sometimes they have to use tools to help confirm suspicions.
Those tools are basically useless. They have a success rate of about 60%, which is to say 40% of the time they give either a false positive or a false negative. They’re only marginally better than using a magic 8-ball. You’re wasting GPU cycles by relying on them.
Lol nobody’s pulling these out for every piece of text that comes in. They’re pulling them out when something is already obvious enough that it twigs people’s senses of “this feels off.” And then the results are inevitably like 99% because if it pings someone’s gut, it’s because it’s a pretty terrible example.
They’re not wasting nearly as many resources as the generative AI itself.
Also, the “MU*” segment of RPG players, what’s left of it, is notoriously backward in culture. Your culture needs fixing. I watched MUDs, which had legitimately sophisticated game design, get gradually replaced by MUSHes, which are basically just glorified Telnet chat rooms. It was done because they wanted to get rid of the Game part of Roleplaying Game, especially when it came to the Game part of Game Design. Through the 1990s, the conceit was that there was an automated GM that managed the world and did all the rules accounting involved in that. You could treat the rules almost like a strategy game, especially when it came to combat. More advanced MUDs had committees designed to better balance this element of the game and to add new features, to make the game richer. There was a potential to gradually build up a system so sophisticated that it basically was an automated GM, in all respects. But that was discarded in favor of World of Darkness MUSHes where most of the game is in the character application process and in making sure you never offend the right clique in the OOC foyer, and not in the scenes your character is in.
What in the world are you talking about? The MUSH style of game has never replaced MUDs, and they’ve basically coexisted alongside each other for decades. MUDs are still plentiful now, probably moreso than MUSH style games. They serve different audiences and fulfill different niches. This is not a matter of “one is right and one is wrong.”
(And the idea that MUDs never have weird OOC issues with cliques is…a strange take.)
LLMs have a similar potential to function as an automated GM, although there are some issues with the prose they generate, most notably a lack of something called “perplexity.” The current thinking is that the programmer feeds it all of the facts of the gamestate, all of the game rules, and what the players intend to attempt to do in that scenario, and the LLM uses its advanced reading comprehension to determine which rules to invoke, which gets returned to the programmer. They then evaluate the outcome of those invoked rules and feed the outcome tot he LLM, asking it to write some prose to describe what happens. That workflow has already been implemented in some limited contexts, it just needs work and refinement.
And you’re doing what people did with MUDs again, here. Instead of seeing something with all of this potential and going, “How could we improve this? How could we identify its flaws and mitigate or remove them?” you think, “How can we make sure this never gets utilized at all?” It’s not conservative thought, it’s literally regressive thought.
??? I literally don’t care if some code-heavy MUDs want to make use of LLMs to generate automated responses in their code. I don’t want generative AI writing on the games that are specifically focused on collaborative writing.
Is “the drugery of production” here…writing? Writing words in our writing hobby?
RPGs entail a lot more than just “writing.” Remember the “game” part of “roleplaying game”? That thing MUSHers gradually excised from MUDs because it might entail a little bit of logic, a little bit of math? That’s pretty key here. “Writing” is one aspect of many in RPGs. There’s also game balance, mechanical flavor, simulation accuracy, ensuring choices players make are consequential, game depth (players have more than one avenue that could lean to a “win”) over game complexity (having a bunch of rules to memorize), and the list goes on and on. Calling RPGs a “writing hobby” really tells me quite a bit about what you think the whole point of this is.
Yeah, could it possibly mean that different parts of the MU* hobby spheres have different focuses? That different types of players have different interests?
I wasn’t saying anything about RPGs in general. I’m sorry if I didn’t specify that I was talking about a subset of games within the MU* sphere that this board tends to discuss most often.
It also probably explains the contempt I recall for a certain class of players I met in the 1990s and 2000s, who didn’t have the best English skills, but boy oh boy, did they display a lot of creativity and cunning in the warfare/combat modes of MUDs back then, and why they were gradually pushed out in the 2000s and were basically gone by 2010. It also explains why what’s left of the MU* sphere has a dearth of good programmers. As I demonstrated above, this isn’t just a “writing hobbby.” It’s also a design hobby and an engineering hobby. It’s a hobby for people who know how things work, and want to make things.
I’m pretty sure people are still making things!
You got rid of the grognards and the math geeks and now all you have are people who think RPGs are about purple prose and pronouns.
Oh Jesus Christ.
ChatGPT doesn’t need you veering off in a conversation just to shill for it.
By “ChatGPT” do you mean “LLMs”? They aren’t all interchangeable. But like I said. It’s not going away no matter how mad you get about it.
Buddy, it was just one person making a joke, it doesn’t need paragraphs of explanation.
My guy, to the crowd who thinks that it’s actually a better use of time and resources trying to detect LLMs so you can squelch them than it is to fiddle with them and make them serve your purposes better, it absolutely does need paragraphs of explanation.
It’s literally been like 0.5% of the time spent on the game I help staff on. This is not actually a big investment.
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@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:
@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Narrator this has nothing to do with this thread, please shut up
This is the MU Peeves thread. “You replaced smart people with purple prose and pronouns” is a pretty scathing peeve. But no wonder you want me to shut up. That peeve applies to you, personally.
lmao i can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want you listen to you.
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Right now the biggest benefit of LLMs I see for this community would be in editing arguments made for their inclusion less wordy, more concise and compendious.
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@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:
Lol nobody’s pulling these out for every piece of text that comes in. They’re pulling them out when something is already obvious enough that it twigs people’s senses of “this feels off.” And then the results are inevitably like 99% because if it pings someone’s gut, it’s because it’s a pretty terrible example.
They’re not wasting nearly as many resources as the generative AI itself.
Cope.
What in the world are you talking about? The MUSH style of game has never replaced MUDs, and they’ve basically coexisted alongside each other for decades. MUDs are still plentiful now, probably moreso than MUSH style games. They serve different audiences and fulfill different niches. This is not a matter of “one is right and one is wrong.”
(And the idea that MUDs never have weird OOC issues with cliques is…a strange take.)
The kind of people into the sort of thing I’m talking about by and large graduated from MUDs into things like EVE Online, which often don’t rely on roleplaying at all.
??? I literally don’t care if some code-heavy MUDs want to make use of LLMs to generate automated responses in their code. I don’t want generative AI writing on the games that are specifically focused on collaborative writing.
You could also use them as automated builders in the MUSH sense. You could have a blank room that’s earmarked for generation, and then when a player first enters it, the room, and all of the adjacent rooms, and all of the mobs and items and so on in those rooms, get fed into an LLM, and it generates a new room for you, with new mobs and new items and exits, and between 0 and 10 new rooms that are also earmarked for generation, iteratively.
That would be really cool. It could be done with API use of an LLM, but I’d prefer a locally-run one fine-tuned on the right materials than a commercial one like Claude2 or GPT-4.
You got rid of the grognards and the math geeks and now all you have are people who think RPGs are about purple prose and pronouns.
Oh Jesus Christ.
Not an argument.
ChatGPT doesn’t need you veering off in a conversation just to shill for it.
By “ChatGPT” do you mean “LLMs”? They aren’t all interchangeable. But like I said. It’s not going away no matter how mad you get about it.
Not an argument.
My guy, to the crowd who thinks that it’s actually a better use of time and resources trying to detect LLMs so you can squelch them than it is to fiddle with them and make them serve your purposes better, it absolutely does need paragraphs of explanation.
It’s literally been like 0.5% of the time spent on the game I help staff on. This is not actually a big investment.
Please post the games you staff on so I can avoid them at all costs.
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@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:
What in the world are you talking about? The MUSH style of game has never replaced MUDs, and they’ve basically coexisted alongside each other for decades. MUDs are still plentiful now, probably moreso than MUSH style games. They serve different audiences and fulfill different niches. This is not a matter of “one is right and one is wrong.”
(And the idea that MUDs never have weird OOC issues with cliques is…a strange take.)
The kind of people into the sort of thing I’m talking about graduated from MUDs into things like EVE Online, which often don’t rely on roleplaying at all.
Wow sounds like they had some different interests in their hobby life! Wild that different people are interested in different things.
??? I literally don’t care if some code-heavy MUDs want to make use of LLMs to generate automated responses in their code. I don’t want generative AI writing on the games that are specifically focused on collaborative writing.
You could also use them as automated builders in the MUSH sense. You could have a blank room that’s earmarked for generation, and then when a player first enters it, the room, and all of the adjacent rooms, and all of the mobs and items and so on in those rooms, get fed into an LLM, and it generates a new room for you, with new mobs and new items and exits, and between 0 and 10 new rooms that are also earmarked for generation, iteratively.
Yeah, having mobs and items and generated rooms are – not actually the point of some games. Because, again, different games have different focuses and audiences.
My guy, to the crowd who thinks that it’s actually a better use of time and resources trying to detect LLMs so you can squelch them than it is to fiddle with them and make them serve your purposes better, it absolutely does need paragraphs of explanation.
It’s literally been like 0.5% of the time spent on the game I help staff on. This is not actually a big investment.
Please post the games you staff on so I can avoid them at all costs.
Has your deep technical expertise left you overlooking the publicly-posted playlist linked in the signature of literally all my forum posts?
Or were you too scared to look in the face of terrifying pronouns preceding it? I know, I know – basic parts of speech are pretty scary to think about.
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@Narrator Dismissing the “MU*” segment of RPG players as backward overlooks their preference for narrative-driven experiences. The shift from MUDs to MUSHes reflects a desire for deeper storytelling and social interaction, not a regression. While AI like LLMs may offer potential as automated GMs, they lack the nuanced understanding and emotional depth of human game masters, risking a loss of the human touch essential to RPGs.
Introducing AI into RPGs could alienate players who value traditional, hands-on approaches. RPGs are social experiences that thrive on human creativity and spontaneity, which AI cannot replicate. Instead of relying on AI, the community should focus on nurturing talent, encouraging creativity, and embracing diverse play styles. Preserving the core values of collaboration and personal engagement is crucial to maintaining what makes RPGs special.
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@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:
@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Narrator this has nothing to do with this thread, please shut up
This is the MU Peeves thread. “You replaced smart people with purple prose and pronouns” is a pretty scathing peeve. But no wonder you want me to shut up. That peeve applies to you, personally.
lmao i can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want you listen to you.
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@Narrator
lol my dude did you just compare yourself to Jesus on a message board? Is that where we are now? -
@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Narrator
lol my dude did you just compare yourself to Jesus on a message board? Is that where we are now?dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there
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@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:
dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there
I have seriously been wondering if this was a 4chan guy but he seemed different than the standard 4chan guy? IDK, maybe they contain multitudes.
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@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:
@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:
dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there
I have seriously been wondering if this was a 4chan guy but he seemed different than the standard 4chan guy? IDK, maybe they contain multitudes.
nah i found the “zine” they’re publishing, including the zine’s social media presence on the fediverse (and one of the two main contributors to the zine’s accounts/handles).
there’s a reason they weren’t loud and proud with the fact that they publish IDDQD Magazine and instead did a soft sell (probably trying to find likeminded people here to DM them to grift for money).
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@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:
@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:
dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there
I have seriously been wondering if this was a 4chan guy but he seemed different than the standard 4chan guy? IDK, maybe they contain multitudes.
nah i found the “zine” they’re publishing, including the zine’s social media presence on the fediverse (and one of the two main contributors to the zine’s accounts/handles).
there’s a reason they weren’t loud and proud with the fact that they publish IDDQD Magazine and instead did a soft sell (probably trying to find likeminded people here to DM them to grift for money).
ah yes, our old friend NEETzsche, we meet again
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I know I did this to myself and really it’s a board peeve and not a MU* peeve. But damn. I want my last X amount of minutes back in my life from reading all that.
carry on.
I did this to myself. Self board peeve.
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all I’m writing now is purple prose.
and oh my – it’s florid.
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@Testament said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:
I am begging game-runners to stop using ChatGPT.
I AM BEGGING PLAYERS TO STOP USING CHATGPT.
I’LL STOP USING IT WHEN GAMES STOP ASKING FOR DESCS
Disclaimer: If it wasn’t obvious; this is a joke, I use it to get ideas for a desc and then actually write one. As much as I absolutely loath to write it.
Although this is a joke: I do think that the advent of AI has done one small favour to the MU* genre, which is expose a lot of the drudgery that people don’t want to do. If people are so unmotivated to write or read prosaic descs that one could literally replace them with AI-generated slop, and in the minds of some people that would be better, then those are aspects of the game that might be superfluous.
I think this is a bigger problem on MUDs than MUSHes, but there are games where instead of walking in and posing, "Kestrel arrives on the scene, wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. She looks around curiously and then waves to Testament", I would have a white T-shirt and jeans as codified objects on my person, that can be examined. And because some people think more prose is always better, there can be a cultural expectation that your character isn’t properly presentable unless each of those objects has a paragraph describing them. Even though no one cares, and no one is going to read a paragraph describing a white T-shirt. It’s a white fkn T-shirt, what more is there to say?
That’s the stuff I see people delegating to AI a lot now, and that’s my peeve. We should just rethink outdated cultural norms, instead.
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Did that guy really turn up to a MU* board to tell us all that MU* games are dumb and we’re dumb for playing them?
Lol. Lmao. Don’t come back.
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I will never understand people acting like descs don’t matter, or that no one reads them. If you don’t read the desc of your scene partner, that is fkin rude. It’s a verbal medium. If you don’t want to read a paragraph to get your mental image right, that is a you issue. Not a game design issue.
Are they difficult to write sometimes? Sure. Drudgery?? What?? You absolutely cannot replace them with LLM slop without it being painfully, repulsively obvious, and I have literally never in all my years in this hobby seen someone disparaging a desc for not having a paragraph to describe clothes. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t ever happen, but it’s not some widespread standard.
fr fr
(she/her) -
@hellfrog I think to me, the best amount of description/background/whatever is however much it takes to get the point across and not a word more. Sometimes you have people writing to a minimum word count because that’s the culture or they’re self-conscious and that’s when it can become a slog to read. All this could be avoided if they’d written “it’s a white t-shirt” instead of turning to chatgpt to fluff it up.
I play games where the RP is time sensitive. If someone flounces up to me with a description taller than my vertical monitor full of chatgpt-isms, I ain’t reading that shit. Got halfway through the scene once before we both realised she was buck naked.
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@Juniper That’s fair, I also roll my eyes and backflip out of characters when I see the chatGPT signifiers in the desc. Any time a physical quality “embodies the nature of” or “speaks to” a vague and unrelated personality trait? Bam.
I like a little fluff in descs. I like it in poses, too, even though I know it isn’t good writing, strictly speaking. I also prefer not to have clothes in a desc and just pose them where appropriate in scenes. To me, these are preferences. Something doesn’t have to be for me, but that doesn’t mean I think it should be designed out of the hobby. Except the LLM stuff. That should be.
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@hellfrog I actually don’t read character descriptions. Not to be insulting but more that it doesn’t actually do anything to help me when I try to get a mental image of someone, I need an actual image. And for whatever reason, it only seems to apply to people’s faces. It might be some kind of internal blindness on my part, I know @imstillhere and I have spoken about this that has an actual word associated with it.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
