“All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour
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Hey folks,
Recent discussion has prompted me to take an old idea I’ve had off the backburner for a little exploratory poke: I’m wanting to semi-formally (and slowly) analyse negative behavioural trends in MUing with the ultimate goal of developing resources for staff and players, both present and future, to mitigate these behaviours on games and within themselves.
To that end I’ve written up a little google form survey thing-o that I’d appreciate participation in.
https://forms.gle/1nQne5S4ApUAgfnY8
Semi-Obligatory Research Ethics Statement
This survey is part of a casual research project examining how genre influences out-of-character (OOC) behaviour in text-based roleplaying communities such as MUSHes, MUXes, MUDs, and similar environments.
Participation is entirely voluntary. You may skip any question you do not wish to answer and may exit the survey at any time without penalty. No personally identifying information will be collected unless you explicitly choose to provide an email address for follow-up or to receive a summary of results.
Your responses will be kept anonymous and confidential, and any data used in future posts, reports, papers, or publications will be presented in aggregate or with identifying details removed. This survey is not affiliated with any specific game or organisation.
By continuing with the survey, you indicate that you are at least 18 years of age (or the age of majority in your region) and that you understand the nature and purpose of the research.
If you have questions about this study or how your data will be used, you may contact the researcher at: [email protected]
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@Pavel Your first question is a direct attack on so many of us.
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@Tez Oh I know, checked yesterday and I was like “oh maybe I should’ve added more larger numbers…”
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@Pavel I applaud your research efforts. As someone who mostly clings to a single genre, my brain balked at wanting to answer “but it depends on the game and the people on it…” to every single question
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@Faraday Alas “it depends” is most often the most firmly valid answer, but I’m trying to go for broad strokes. Unless someone wants to provide a livable stipend for me to do this properly.
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I’m interested to see the results.
I expect that further investigation might find that genre is serving as a proxy for OOC structuring. While WoD itself isn’t exactly wholesome fare, I thiink the problem with WoD MUs is in the usual way it’s set up, separating players by factions and sub-factions OOCly as well as IC, secrecy/“OOC Masq”, layers of low-key obfuscation and barriers to developing OOC friendships outside your RP-group. It’s probably an artifact of the model-world-building exercise that the original MasqueradeMUSH was doing.
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@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.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
A game category that is missing is “people with weird powers in the real world”, my personal favorite genre that doesn’t really fit into any of those.
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@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.
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@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
@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.
If you’re not familiar with Geek Social Fallacies, you may want to take a look at that, too. It took the White Wolf game servers by storm back in the early '00s and they’re generally something that I think are applicable to a broad swath not only of genres, but hobbies and subcultures. I’ve been in this hobby since '99 and I’ve seen the behavior in the thread where you first mention this idea happen in World of Darkness games, two different permutations of Five Rings Online (which was Legend of the Five Rings), I saw it on Arx, I saw it on two different Ares games with very different themes…
And honestly, I’ve seen some of the worst offenders that I’ve known in the 20+ years I’ve been hanging around doing this on different games, with different systems, and different genres. My guess is norm internalization, but with norms that are older than my time in the hobby and, in fact, are probably older than I am. (They said while quietly eyeing the SCA.)
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@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. >_>
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@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
(including saying p-value to sound smart)
Don’t start talking about null hypothesis testing in front of everyone unless the p-value is large enough to share with the whole class.
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@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?
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@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
@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?
I mean, you were supposed to laugh at me comparing p-values to the kid who brings in cookies but doesn’t want to share with the whole class, but yeah, dude, a p-value of .006 is pretty surprising, at least to me. How many responses have you had?
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@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.
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@Pavel I haven’t answered it yet, but one thing I was considering when looking at it was definitely, “Well, yes, while I can think of examples like this on more games that I’ve played on than not, a lot of those examples happen to come from WoD games because I’ve played in that genre more than any other.”
So that would definitely skew my own answers. Meanwhile, though I’ve since played a few L&L and even a Pern game, I avoided them for a really long time because in the WoD communities that I came from in the late 90s and early 00s, they tended to have really bad reputations among the playerbase, specifically around spotlight hogging and IC/OOC emotional bleed. Kind of ironic, really.
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@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.
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@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
“we have proof that L&L games literally cause spontaneous combustion”
It’s because of all the bared ankles, right? It’s gotta be!
…well that and the incest.
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@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
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.FWIW I think there’s a lot of good ideas here. My only quibble is with the focus on “genre”.
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.
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.
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@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
Thematic Spillover, where the tone and emotional content of the game world shape how players interact OOC;
I think this (which is called bleed in a lot of academic essays on roleplaying) will exist regardless of anything else on the list.
Also, Systemic Enabling, Norm Internalization, and Legacy Culture could be merged into one single hypothesis about the active pattern of misbehavior found in a lot of roleplaying communities (these three things along with poor handling of Thematic Spillover are why a lot of LARP organizations such at the MES, NERO, and others end up turning into cesspools of irredeemable behavior.
There are a lot of interesting articles on bleed / thematic spillover and other OOC dynamics coming from the European RP communities (especially those involved in Nordic LARP), and most of them are published for free every year as part of some of the major RP conventions that happen.
