While I’m very much in a similar boat and 99.9% of my time is spent on Linux of some description, I do want to offer a warning to those who are tempted to make the switch:
Many games with an online multiplayer component rely on kernel-based anti-cheating software, which often doesn’t work on Linux (it could, but many devs don’t bother enabling it… it’s a big discussion point on Linux reddit). So if you’re big into your online multiplayer games, double check whether it’ll work before you go to the effort of moving everything over.
ETA: If you want to check compatibility between your steam library and Linux’s Proton, you can link your steam (or simply enter your steam id) here: https://www.protondb.com/profile and it’ll spurt out your Steam library and ratings of compatibility (including those impacted by the aforementioned anticheat problems).
There’s a lot of hearsay and more than a few stories that are difficult to substantiate from that particular group around that particular time. Practically, any bad thing that could be attributed to them eventually was.
Whether Spider was or wasn’t a member, they certainly took the blueprint and ran with it in later years.
@Noraaa I don’t have the ST ADHD but I definitely have the character concept ADHD, wherein a character concept kicks down my door at three am and screams in my half-awoken face “HELLO YOU ARE NOW OBSESSED WITH BRIAN FUCKING BLESSED FOR NO REASON HERE MAKE A CHARACTER AND MAKE IT FIT WOD.”
I’m largely in agreement with Pyrephox, surprising nobody, but I also have to acknowledge that I just don’t have the time nor the capacity for the level of moderation a historically authentic game would probably require. And if I don’t have the time, I can hardly make demands of others to have such time or spend such effort.
So I’ll most likely content myself with playing pseudo-historical dress-up on a MU instead of anything even remotely verisimilitudinous.
Star Trek. Though after putting some serious thought into running a Star Trek game, I think I can see why there aren’t more of them.
Time was that you couldn’t spit without hitting a Trek MU of some kind. There was a resurgence, of a kind, when the first of the Chris Pine Trek films came about but then nothin’. I think ATS might still be bumpin’ along, but I haven’t even looked at it in years.
@Aria I never did play the DigiChats, at least not for any length of time that made them stick in my memory, but I’ve heard that they were a layer of hell all unto their own.
To answer the other half of the question, though, the “If in hindsight folks want 1-2 sphere game” bit, it’s just as simple: That’s the ideal, but we don’t live in the ideal world. If someone wants to play a Gregorian Chanter, they’re going to go ask an already extant game to add Greagorian Chant instead of just sitting around hoping for someone to make a Gregorian Chant game, because it’s far more likely that the former wish will be granted over the latter, even if the latter is the better scenario for all involved.
I probably dipped my toes in various MUDs and such before this, but the first game I spent any decent amount of time on was TOS TrekMUSE back in coughcoughcough. Many an RP session interrupted because my mother picked up the phone and dropped our connection… ah the good old days.
Egelman et al. (2020) and Ferreira et al. (2021) both report that negative interpersonal interactions—ranging from subtle pushback to overt incivility—can provoke frustration, stress, and defensive reactions. Both highlight the role of code review processes, organisational policies, and power imbalances in shaping negative experiences. Ferreira et al. (2021) provides detailed evidence of uncivil behaviours, including name-calling, impatience, and personal attacks, with 66.66% of non-technical emails in their sample exhibiting such features.
Behroozi et al. (2019) finds that technical interviews are perceived as arbitrary, high-pressure, and disconnected from real-world work, with systemic biases favouring younger candidates and those with more leisure time. They also report that candidates experience dismissive attitudes, lack of empathy, and adversarial interviewer behaviour, leading to feelings of humiliation and offence.
So it seems, at least in corpo-professional contexts, that process design, power dynamics, and communication styles are the primary drivers of cynical interpersonal behaviours, rather than individual predisposition. But this is just based on a very brief skim of the literature, more research must be done, etc, etc, etc.
ETA: tl;dr people=shit and if you treat coders like shit they’ll not be happy, I guess.
References:
Egelman, C. D., Murphy-Hill, E., Kammer, E., Hodges, M. M., Green, C., Jaspan, C., & Lin, J. (2020). Predicting developers’ negative feelings about code review. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, 174–185. https://doi.org/10.1145/3377811.3380414
Ferreira, I., Cheng, J., & Adams, B. (2021). The “Shut the f**k up” Phenomenon: Characterizing Incivility in Open Source Code Review Discussions. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW2), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479497
Behroozi, M., Parnin, C., & Barik, T. (2019). Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1109/vlhcc.2019.8818836
Having Jumpscare dress me down is making a lot of this clear as to why things didn’t work!
I wouldn’t take it as a dressing down. She’s just a very tired teacher reaching for her third bottle of whiskey with one hand, pinching the bridge of her nose with the other, and staring at an assignment from that one child…