[MUD-Dev] Trouble Makers or Regular Citizens

[Par Winzell]

Matthew Mihaly writes:
 > On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Jon Lambert wrote:
 > > Are you saying you don't allow players to express views on a public channel 
 > > that would be derisive of those marriages, yet do allow players to express 
 > > affirmative views of those marriages on a public channel?  And are you saying 
 > > you allow both views in private, in-game or otherwise in-role communications?  
 > > How exactly do you deal with the issue?
 > 
 > Oh, they could be derisive of the marriages. I just won't stand for things
 > like (pardon the following): F*CKING FAGGOTS! If players can dress up some
 > restrained criticism of gay players into a relatively role-related issue
 > (perhaps that player's God does not like homosexuality) then I don't mind.
 > I tend to get quite down on the teenage idiots who aren't mature enough to
 > dress it up though.
 > 

This does keenly illustrate the basic problem, though, which is that
there are a large number of issues that _ought_ to be entirely IC, such
as racism, sexism, homophobia, and to require it to be dressed up is
essentially to require a disclaimer. If I'm an IC peasant who doesn't
hold with men fooling around, I'm hardly going to make some reference
to a vague decree by some priest interpreting for some homophobic God.
I'm going to be pretty straight about it; that's as IC as it gets, yet
it is intolerable because it's much too close to OOC problems.

The conclusion of this must be that there is no obvious, consistent
theory that explains when something should be insulting and when it
should not; therefore, I hereby place myself firmly in the "I know it
when I see it" camp championed (as far as I can tell) by Mihaley.

That's for a smaller community, though, that's precisely how I ran
my Mud for a long time. The question is what you do when you have to
write up guidelines for your customer support people when somebody
calls up, irate, demanding that some content they find offensive is
immediately removed... or... wether perhaps communities should simply
be kept separate, at a manageable size.

I guess scaling of peer pressure is one of the key issues in this
debate.

Par



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