Should You Play Your Own Game?

[howyadoin]

Should game runners have active pcs of their own on their own games?

[Kestrel]

Yes because:

1. This isn’t a paid job, you deserve to have fun on the labour of love you built.
2. It’s very easy for game admins to grow out of touch with what the actual day-to-day experience of the game is like. This especially matters on crunchy games. You need to have the experience of someone stomping you into the dirt in the least fun way possible, in order to appreciate just how unfun it is for everyone else (and realise it needs fixing).

It’s good to have some boundaries and separation between staff and players, but this isn’t one IMO.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

Yes, because we made the game we wanted to play. If it had already existed, we’d be playing over there. But it didn’t, and now it does, so why should we be punished for making it happen?

Also Kestrel’s reasons above.

[Muscle Car]

As long as staff characters are marked as such, absolutely they deserve to play!

[Third Eye]

Sure.

I can’t imagine having the motivation to staff if I didn’t like playing what I was running, but also I think not playing your own game as a PC doesn’t really accomplish anything and is performance/optics rather than an indication of anything. I’ve seen staffers who technically don’t play do far more abusive things on NPCs than they could’ve done on PCs.

[Meg]

So, what do you guys think about staff not playing the game? Would that raise any red flags? I know the immediate thought is from people saying ‘oh, staff shouldn’t play’! But if staff legitimately did not want to play any characters, would you find that a warning sign or anything?

[dvoraen]

@Meg Not necessarily. I mean, it entirely depends on the staffer. I feel like my best example of this would be the people who have done MU* coding over the years but didn’t engage other than with the codebase.

I know there’ve been both good and bad apples there, so…