“All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour
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It’ll be fun to see the results, but there’s no way to control for confounding variables unless you get a cumbersome amount of data or build experimental MUs.
I bet If I made a My Little Pony '80’s edition MUSH and ran it like WoD with separate Pony, Unicorn, Sea Pony and Pegasus spheres (and winged unicorns a super-special restricted sphere, oooh) and a lot of seckritz and attempts at equine intrigue and very little transparency, it would, like a WoD MU, produce some high-level vicious fuckery if it lasted any length of time.
"This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"
– A. Bertram Chandler -
@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.
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@Gashlycrumb said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
I bet If I made a My Little Pony '80’s edition MUSH and ran it like WoD with separate Pony, Unicorn, Sea Pony and Pegasus spheres (and winged unicorns a super-special restricted sphere, oooh) and a lot of seckritz and attempts at equine intrigue and very little transparency, it would, like a WoD MU, produce some high-level vicious fuckery if it lasted any length of time.
Exactly. And we’ve already seen that same exact sort of behavior on sci-fi games. The behavior is tied to game design elements (factions, PVP) that are not dependent upon genre.
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I know the resume-post usually means nothing but… I’m a data analyst who’s spent the last several years on a project examining incoming customer surveys alongside operational KPIs. When this topic opened, I cringed but thought it’d be fine FOR FUN.
It might be interesting. But that’s not the same as insightful.
So please read any interpretation of the results with about as much gravity as you would a personality quiz: FUN but not REAL.
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@Faraday I think it’s possible to do factions and PvP without it going too pear-shaped if you prevent factionalising OOC. Certainly factions-lite and happily supporting mutually-agreed-upon ‘let’s try to kill one another and see what the dice do’ scenarios worked for me.
I think it has a lot to do with creating the vibe that we’re all sitting at the same table.
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@Gashlycrumb said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
I think it has a lot to do with creating the vibe that we’re all sitting at the same table.
Right, I’m not saying it can never work, just that if done poorly it can contribute to some of the negative behaviors that Pavel’s asking about in the survey. I’m asserting that those behaviors are tied to the game design and personnel, not intrinsic to the genre.
So even IF the survey shows that, say, Sci-Fi games have more of (some bad behavior), that doesn’t really tell you anything at all. It could be that those games just share a particular design element (rosters, PVP, you name it). Heck, for all we know, all the respondents played on the same one bad Sci-Fi game back in 2001. That’s the problem with drawing conclusions from terribly small sample sizes.
@Pavel said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
Anyone seeking deep scientific meaning from a google form survey based on a throw away joke on a niche forum is missing the point.
I mean, you had an ethics statement and everything in the intro. It seemed that you were taking it pretty seriously, so I didn’t get “funsy joke opinion poll” vibes from the whole thing. If that’s all you want from it, then by all means, have fun.
People (broadly) just tend to be very bad about attributing deep scientific meaning to statistically insignificant studies though, so that was my concern.
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I just want to know what the first question to the survey I can no longer take was, to see if I should feel attacked too.
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@dvoraen the part where you had to acknowledge how many years you have been in this hobby
let it be a challenge to you
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@sao And it didn’t go high enough for many of us.
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@Gashlycrumb said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
(and winged unicorns a super-special restricted sphere, oooh)
Hello, those are alicorns.
Sorry, my kid was really, really hard into MLP for a while. I promise I’m not a brony, not that there’s anything wrong with that in itself.
As a data-nerd myself (although amateur, not professional), I’m very curious about the data from the poll/study/whatever-you-wanna-call-it. And the qualitative information as well (whatever can be properly anonymized and shared, at least).
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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After reading through this I see why you titled it as if you were submitting it to a conference @Pavel.
I have a ton of thoughts which I will work on writing out, but this is a very good discussion that needs to be evaluated further. Honestly, an social psych analysis of MUSH trends wouldn’t be a terrible idea for a legit academic paper.
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Kids called them unipegs in 1983. This is clearly very wrong.
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@sao said in “All the World’s a MUSH”: Genre as Destiny in Collaborative Roleplay Behaviour:
@dvoraen the part where you had to acknowledge how many years you have been in this hobby
“Yes.”
Next question.
