@Hobbie I love that one.

Friend quoted me this recently:

"It’s like ChatGPT has read everything on the internet, and kind of vaguely remembers some of it and is willing to make up the rest.”

There are so many documented instances of LLMs making up nonsense. Citing books that don’t exist. Making up fake lawsuit citations. Misrepresenting articles written by journalists. Making up fake biographical details. The code it spits out is often garbage (or, worse, wrong in subtle ways). And that’s not even touching on all the random stupidity where it tells people to use glue in their pizza or incorporate poison into their recipes.

The whole GenAI industry is most likely just a big bubble built on a con.

@Pavel said in The 3-Month Players:

WWIII with Aliens and Zombies is plot, sure, but so is Gilmore Girls, and the latter would generally be considered social RP.

There are gray areas, sure, but in most dramas (like GG) some storylines are given more prominence and feel more like Plot than others. It doesn’t have to be action-packed, just impactful.

As an example - in the pilot episode from ER, some of the major plotlines are a building collapse, a new medical student’s first day, and a doctor deciding whether to leave the ER for a quieter specialty. Those I would call Plot. In-between are various scenes that don’t affect the overall story but promote character development, like one doctor turning up drunk and sleeping it off in an exam room. Those feel more like Social RP.

TV shows and novels don’t tend to have much (if any) BarRP, because they don’t have time to waste on random meetings between strangers or small talk that serves no other narrative purpose. But MUs generally aren’t as heavily plotted as those other mediums. People don’t meet because the plot demands it, they meet because they happen to be on at the same time and decide to have a scene.

ETA: I’m not claiming that these definitions are an infallible or universal classification scheme or anything. They’re just useful for me in terms of evaluating what kinds of RP I enjoy, and what’s going on in a game.

@Tapewyrm said in The 3-Month Players:

The question I would have is: why are you turning the lights out?

Games end for all kinds of reason. Burnout, goals being met, RL disruptions, running out of story ideas, and yes - to your point - losing enough critical mass of RP to the point where people stop showing up.

@Tapewyrm said in The 3-Month Players:

I think maybe what’s been missed is the point that social RP by itself, with no plot, seems to never actually sustain a population, at least from my observation.

We may just be using different definitions. In an earlier post (which I’m too lazy to dig up) I gave my personal ones:

• Plot RP (direct plot action)
• Social RP (not directly connected to a plot, but furthering relationships, characterization, and setup)
• BarRP (fluff RP, usually just to fill the time because nobody has a better idea)

The church scene in Saving Private Ryan falls squarely in the Social RP category for me. You could take it out and the plot would be the same, but it’s important for character development.

If you’re saying that BarRP alone cannot sustain a MU - I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve just never seen that happen. There’s always some kind of Social RP going on. And in fact, BarRP often leads to Social RP, since it’s the way characters first meet each other. It opens doors to further RP.

Can Social RP alone sustain a MU? I’ve seen games where that was most/all of what was going on. They were smaller, but the players were happy. Is that successful? YMMV.

@InkGolem I appreciate you having an open mind about it.

ETA: Also this is an example where it MIGHT theoretically be possible to find an ethical LLM to do what you need, with a private model so the data never becomes fodder for the LLM in the sky. The mainstream models like ChatGPT are just not that tool.

@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

I never share a scene in progress, and I only share ones that are publicly viewable on the internet.

Publicly viewable doesn’t mean “use for whatever you want” though. By feeding scenes into the GenAI databanks, you’re allowing the written work of your fellow RPers to be leveraged to generate other AI slop and put other writers out of business. It’s feeding the machine. That’s the harm of which I speak.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI Megathread:

What school teaches stuff that isn’t based on other peoples’ works? Haven’t artists looked at other people’s works and been influenced?

GenAI isn’t influenced by other peoples’ works. It doesn’t learn in the same way humans do. It’s a statistical model referencing the works it has ingested. It would not exist without those works it has copied. Not referenced, not learned from, not experienced as humans do, copied.

It’s like we teach every schoolkid writing an essay - it’s totally fine to read from various sources, synthesize the info, cite your sources, and add your own thoughts. If all you do is copy from other people and shuffle the words around, that’s plagiarism. GenAI doesn’t have its own thoughts to contribute, and can’t cite its sources properly.

For example, GenAI can never write about a new technology, new celebrity, news event, etc. until some other human has written about it first. Then all it can do is make a virtual collage from their words.

People complain that AI “steals” jobs. But it doesn’t. People do that.

That’s a technicality. The use of GenAI takes jobs away from human creatives, who are already having a hard time making a living.

Cars are not great for the environment, but they are not intrinsically evil. We can regulate their pollution and make better cars that harm the environment less. Car drivers can take steps to mitigate their carbon footprint. We can invest in better public transportation. Cars can be used for the public good, like emergency vehicles.

In contrast, GenAI is an arrow aimed right at the heart of every creative industry, and that is a huge thing to me.

@KarmaBum said in AI Megathread:

*Other than the time DeepSeek said, “I am what happens when you try to carve God out of the wood of your own hunger,” and I was like “well we’re all fucked now.” Those were some feels. But not the ones I’m going for when I MUSH.

Even those feels are largely just stolen from other human works by the plagiarism bot. Here’s an interesting breakdown: https://medium.com/@zabrinova/deepseeks-poem-shouldn-t-give-you-nightmares-maybe-just-bad-dreams-a55080a04f80

@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

I don’t think there is any harm.

Generative AI is harmful to artists. It’s harmful to the environment. It’s harmful to students. It’s harmful to teachers. It’s harmful to critical thinking.

I understand that most people don’t realize this, so I try not to hold a grudge against the people who use it “for fun”, but it’s really hard when it’s destroying so many good things.

ETA: I’m speaking specifically about the mainstream GenAI implementations. The underlying technology itself could (theoretically) be used for good. It just currently isn’t.

@Pavel said in The 3-Month Players:

I’ll use another metaphor. If all you do is Event RP, Plot RP, or whatever you’re calling Not-Social-RP, then you’re playing the first 15 minutes of Saving Private Ryan over and over and over again. The only character information you get being the how not the why.

I like that analogy. I’s the “social RP” scenes in Saving Private Ryan that elevate the movie beyond just a shoot-em-up. Like the quiet scene in the church where the captain and sergeant are remembering the guys they’ve lost. That’s character development.

@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:

Yet, few shows were as successful or as well known as GoT. The stories where your favorite characters might be lost at any moment are the ones people become most invested in. Investment is what we are looking for.

MASH, Friends, Dallas, and the 21st season of Grey’s Anatomy would like a word. Investment does not require death. It just doesn’t. There have been plenty of MU*s that have proven that. If PC permadeath is your thing - no shade! It’s a perfectly valid playstyle. It just isn’t the only way to be successful.

@Tapewyrm said in The 3-Month Players:

It’s more in this case that unless someone runs something, there swiftly becomes no RP at all, because the more random RP fizzles out. Every time.

I have never not observed this to happen, although I’ll concede I have remained in a certain gaming niche for 25 years and only rarely explored outside of it, so of course ymmv.

I won’t dispute your experience, but it is different than mine. On games that I’ve run, it is usually the “primarily social” RPers who are the last ones still lingering when I turn the lights off. In fact, several times they’ve spun off to other games to keep their personal stories going or KEPT PLAYING on a sandbox even after the game ended.

Don’t get me wrong - I think a majority of MU players DO expect to be entertained, and will get bored if the entertainment dries up or does not meet their expectations. I’m just challenging the assertion that this is some kind of universal requirement.

@Ominous said in The 3-Month Players:

You’ve got to have some substance under it all.

I mean, yes it’s common (and also my personal preference), but you don’t -have- to. For example, I used to play on several Western games. There were those of us who wanted plot/adventure, but there were a LOT of players who were happily off on their own doing costume drama/soap opera stuff. People MU for all kinds of reasons.

Mostly these different playstyles can peacefully co-exist on the same game. I think it only becomes a challenge when you lose critical mass to sustain a type of RP (like to @Tapewyrm’s point, when you don’t have enough plot/adventure peeps to run or participate in the plots). I’m not sure a middle ground exists though, because they’re just looking for different things. You can’t force someone to engage with a style of play that doesn’t interest them.

@RedRocket said in The 3-Month Players:

You had to struggle to become enough of a bad-ass not to have to live in fear all the time. I can not emphasize enough how important that feeling of progression is to the health of a game.

Many players enjoyed DarkMetal.

Many other players wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole because that style of gameplay holds no appeal to them.

TGG was a game with permadeath, trivially easy chargen, XP-based progression, stakes, drama, rotating “seasons” to keep things fresh, and the some of the most impressive immersive code systems I’ve ever seen. It still had a lot of player turnover. (and about 10 very passionate core players)

People want their actions and choices to matter. … It’s the same reason people add stakes and drama to TV shows. If nothing changes, there is no point.

This I agree with, but routinely killing your PCs off is not the only way to accomplish this. There are plenty of successful TV shows that avoid the Game of Thrones style of knocking off main characters left and right.

There is no one-size-fits-all game.

@RedRocket said in AI Megathread:

You might find something interesting.

And if you’re lucky, it might even be true! That’s the problem with LLMs, though - you’ll never really know for sure.

@Pavel said in The 3-Month Players:

While that’s how you and I might mean it, I have quite legitimately seen the term used in discussion to tar all social “non plot moving” RP with the negative brush. As if the best bits of DS9 were the explosions and not the conversations between Garak and Bashir.

Sure, no definition is ever going to be universal. Also I’m certainly not going to WrongFun anyone who doesn’t like social RP. I just think it’s useful to highlight that distinction. Social scenes can absolutely move a plot forward if that plot is “will the Duke of Nowhere undermine his rivals” or “will Mary reconcile with her estranged brother”. If all you want to do is RP flying a fighter jet and shooting Cylons (no shade, btw) then anything in-between can feel like fluff.

@Ominous said in The 3-Month Players:

@MisterBoring I have no idea. I don’t consider duels to be BarP.

I don’t think anyone does? Folks are reacting to @KarmaBum who literally said: “Just that 4/5 of these sound like the L&L equivalent of Bar RP”. The 1/5 that didn’t was the duels.

That aside, I think it’s important to consider a distinction between social RP, RP that happens to take place in a bar, and BarRP. They are not really the same.

Social RP can include deep, meaningful relationships (not just romantic) between characters; backstabbing plots; high drama; fallout from other plot/action scenes, etc.

RP in bars can be exciting. A bar fight, confrontation, breakup, backstabbing plots, etc.

“BarRP” is usually used for time-filling “fluff” RP that’s just filling space because the players have nothing better to do. It’s the MU equivalent of small-talk. There’s nothing wrong with it, but if that’s all you ever do it can feel unfulfilling.

L&L games aren’t really my thing, but on the surface it seems like most of the balls/plots/drama would fall more on the social end than the BarRP end. YMMV of course.

@Pavel said in The 3-Month Players:

You’re not going to appeal to 100% of people, but 95% of people will want to try the new hotness. After a bit, the ones who don’t like it will leave. It’s not really a mystery.

Yeah this. I don’t think it’s a magical 3-month window so much as bunch of people saying: “Oh hey maybe this will be fun!” Then after anywhere from 1 to 12 weeks being all: “Eh, not so much.”

Like you said, it’s the same with TV. A hot new show will get a bunch of viewers for its premiere, but then they’ll start trailing off. Depending on how good the show is, or how niche its appeal is (even if it’s objectively good), you might see that tapering off be more or less dramatic, but you’re never going to get rid of it entirely.

@Third-Eye said in The 3-Month Players:

But the Bubble is its own thing and it’s exhausting and it keeps happening and I want it not to happen again on the next project I undertake.

What’s the alternative though? Let’s postulate that a game is likely only a good fit for 30% of the people who check it out. If 60 people check it out in the first month, you’re left with 20 players who will hopefully stick around. You can build a game around that. If only 20 people check it out and you’re left with 7 players? That’s a tougher proposition. Sure it can work (see: TGG and other smaller niche games) but I think it’s an uphill battle.

@Trashcan said in The 3-Month Players:

I also don’t agree that all players want to stick on a game but the game fails them, and I don’t agree that you can make the game so shiny that these people will stick when they would have otherwise gone off to the new shiny thing. Some people are 3Ms and that’s just the way they are. You can make the greatest, most inclusive, most content-having, most relationship-building game anyone has ever seen, and they will still wander off to check the next up and coming game.

Just because the game isn’t meeting their needs, that doesn’t mean that the game failed them. There’s no conceivable way that a game can appeal to every single MUSHer out there, because many of us want different things out of a game.

There are many reasons folks move on from a game. I’ve just seen zero evidence that there’s some kind of ticking 3-month clock (where they’ll move on just because of “novelty” if the game is otherwise a good fit for them) built into the majority of MUSHers. YMMV.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in The 3-Month Players:

Smaller but invested. It sounds harsh, but it’s not those March violets you need to invest in as a game runner. They come with great enthusiasm – and they bail with just as much enthusiasm when the next game opens. It’s the other players you need to invest in – the ones who will stick around for a longer time. Those who came looking for a community to move into and stay in.

I think this is where we see things differently. Of course I can’t speak for everyone, but in my experience–the majority of players want to stick around. MUSHers come to tell stories and build IC relationships. That’s the long game. It’s not like a MMO or single-player game where everyone’s always drawn to “the new shiny”. The biggest reason they move on to a new game is that the one they’re on isn’t meeting that need.

@Ashkuri said in The 3-Month Players:

Has The Bubble always been there, but games came out more slowly back in the day so we didn’t notice it as much?

I’ve seen this phenomenon since I started MUSHing in the 90s.

The main issue IMHO is that many (most?) games open without a clear plan of what players are going to do. You can get people in the door with any interesting concept, but what’s actually going to happen in the game to keep players there?

So players hop on, hoping that something’s going to catch their interest. When you don’t hook them, they’re gone. If this happens with a lot of players at once, the initial turnover is extremely disruptive.

@Third-Eye said in The 3-Month Players:

One thing I’ve thought a lot about this year, and do not have an answer to, is if there’s something unique to Ares that drives this phenomena more than other MUSH-like formats, or if the transparency just makes this all more visible.

The phenomenon has always existed, but I think you can reasonably argue that Ares magnifies it.

Ares lowers the bar to opening a game. If we postulate that 50% of games will fail after 3 months, then more games that open = more games that fail (numerically speaking).

Ares also makes it easier to discover games. This arguably could lead to bigger initial bubbles, magnifying the effects of the collapse.

Making it easier to open a game also potentially reduces staff investment in the game’s success. “Try it and see if it sticks” is a more workable mentality when you haven’t invested a mammoth about of blood, sweat, and tears just getting the game to opening day.

Lastly (and I don’t think this is Ares-specific), it feels like a lot more games are opening now in limited alpha/beta status than there once were. I think it’s harder to build critical mass for a game when you’re starting on a shaky foundation.