Filtering player temperament through game design
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People will 100% try to impose their will on others even on places where they can’t be killed for doing so. I doubt there’s any meaningful difference.
I’ve played on PVP games and I’ve played on PVE games and I’ve absolutely seen a meaningful difference in the levels of cooperation and antagonization between players depending on the type of game. YMMV obviously.
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For me, I never really gave much thought to community curation or community building. I always sort of went with “this seems fun” and it either drew people who wanted to play or it didn’t.
Darkwater was my first and at a time most popular game I ran. I started it with a secret backstory I don’t think the players ever discovered. However, in the long term running of the game I made a lot of mistakes and a lot of toxicity began to seep into the community.
I would have probably called it the most successful game I ran, at one point. But now I don’t. Again, while it was popular— there were times when the players had no faith in me. And, frankly, times where I resented the players.
A lot because I wasn’t really thinking of it as community effort. I wanted to run a game telling stories, but I didn’t sit down and think about what kind of community I wanted. I allowed anyone in, and shouldn’t have.
I think if I ever dust off another project, I’ll need to sit down and consider the theme a bit more. What kind of community do I want to engage in? How can the systems I put in place draw those types of people? How can I ensure that theme drift doesn’t lead to community drift.
Tl;dr: Never in the past, but absolutely in the future.
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@L.-B.-Heuschkel Is there a way to filter these people out purely through game design or community design, or is it a case of finding them and plucking them out like stray hairs with the tweezers of fuckoffitude?
I strongly suspect it’s a combination of game attitude (i.e. the atmosphere you create as staff) and generous appliance of tweezers. I mean, you can’t stop people from wanting to be best/biggest/most known – and it isn’t always toxic, either. Want to have written the most words or have the largest scene count? Good, that creates activity for others on the game. Want to have fucked the most women? Not quite so great, that might just mean you’re a sex pest.
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@Kestrel said:
But I just don’t really buy into the idea that PvP/PvE inherently inspires a higher calibre of players.Higher? No. There’s nothing wrong with being competitive. Preferring PvP does not make you a lesser class of player.
Toxicity happens in any flavour of player. Some environments attract toxic people more than others, but that doesn’t mean they’re somehow less viable. It probably means they need more active moderation.
Any pronouns. Come to Chincoteague. We have ponies. http://keys.aresmush.com
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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.
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@Kestrel Competitiveness is not the only reason people might prefer a PvP game, no. But then, as long as people are not being toxic jerkasses, does it matter, from a game design point of view? It’s not the people who play nice with others that we need to worry about as admins.
Personally, I’m pretty competitive. I prefer a PvE environment, but I am unable to stop myself from looking at word counts and whatnot. And because I have a strong competitive streak, I stay the hell away from environments where I might not be able to keep it under control – for example, despite being an equestrian in real life, I have never started in a competition. Wouldn’t be fair to the horse or anyone else, having to listen to me bitch about not winning.
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I don’t think that liking PvP in a creative writing game is necessarily about being competitive.
It doesn’t have to be, but for a great many people it is.
Couple that with the extreme amounts of OOC bleed in this community and you get a very explosive brew.
Does that mean those people are bad players, or that PVE players are in some way superior? No.
But it does mean that, for me, allowing PVP in an open game with Internet Strangers is just not worth the headaches.
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To add to the PVP conversation: I’ve met more than a few players in online RP situations (forums, MUs, and similar) who prefer PVP because they aren’t getting the kind of villain / conflict they are looking for from the PVE elements (be it stuff they run themselves or stuff run by other players / staff). In one particular case they felt weirdly selfish in trying to participate in the PVE conflict of the week.
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@Kestrel I agree that liking PvP in a creative writing game isn’t necessarily about being competitive. But what you’re describing isn’t, to me, PvP. I mean, it is, but not the way it usually (in my experience) plays out. What you’re describing isn’t two players competing, it’s two players cooperating so that their characters can get RP that they enjoy. It’s also a) the minority of PvP/CvC RP that I see, and b) the kind of PvP/CvC that I really enjoy.
I would honestly expect to see that sort of story being told in that OOCly-cooperative manner on a PvE game (I make sure to put some tension into the various factions in any game I’m running exactly because I like this kind of RP, even if there’s a greater threat causing them to work together).
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What you’re describing isn’t two players competing, it’s two players cooperating so that their characters can get RP that they enjoy. It’s also a) the minority of PvP/CvC RP that I see, and b) the kind of PvP/CvC that I really enjoy.
It’s not uncommon to meet people who say they love PvP. I don’t think I’ve seen them making characters who are in opposition to their PvP loving friends’ characters so they can play that out, but I would presume that it happens on games that are more PvP-friendly than ones I’ve been playing.
I enjoyed a period when I played a few official antagonist characters, with the understanding that the whole point is to challenge the good-guy PCs and be fun for them to hate, not mess them up as hard as you can. And the understanding that you’re gonna tend to lose.
If you wanna have a bad time, approach something thinking everyone understands that that you intend to fail to foil the other PC’s plan but want to give them a fun hard time, when the other player thinks it’s competitive PvP.
“This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”
– A. Bertram Chandler -
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It’s not uncommon to meet people who say they love PvP. I don’t think I’ve seen them making characters who are in opposition to their PvP loving friends’ characters so they can play that out, but I would presume that it happens on games that are more PvP-friendly than ones I’ve been playing.
Yeah. Most of the games I’ve seen that have been CvC friendly and succeed at it have built up a lot of OOC tools and methods to make that work. I have yet to see the OOC techniques and tools for that really catch on in the MU hobby, but I have seen it work in other online RP formats and in live play (the strongest examples of this were LARPs where workshops and care were given to make sure the players understand that their characters are in conflict where as the players are not).
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