[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 23 Feb 2001 13:15:47 -0800 
Ananda Dawnsinger <ananda at winterreach.com> wrote:

>> From: "John Buehler" <johnbue at msn.com>
>> 
>> why do grief players do what they do and can they be actively
>> dissuaded?  Sneakily dissuaded?  Stopped outright?

> Why do grief players do what they do?  A few reasons:

The greatest (in terms of most common and most fundamental) interest
of human is arguably to create some sort of effect on another human.
They want to do something that has impact, significance, import, or
otherwise noticable effect on someone else.  The common (blinkered)
phrasing of this is, "looking for attention".

Gaming the game is a great way to cause a significant and very
obvious effect on a great many people with little effort.  So is
shouting fire in a crowded theatre, the contents of rotton.com, or
unconstrained PK.  The requirements of the practitioner are usually
uncomplex, often undemanding (or if demanding, subject to automation
and other forms of direct-reward "improvement") and have a high
reward rate (in terms of perceived effect) for any gains in gried
ability.

Its a pretty nasty feedback loop if you think about it.

>     1.  ...
>     2.  ...
>     3.  ...
>     4.  ...
>     5.  ...
>     6.  ...

7.  Gaming you (or the game) is more rewarding both in magnitude and
in terms of return for effort invested than playing the game.  

One can hypothesise a great many possible reasons for these above,
many presumtious of some prior personal state, but really only one
thing is known:

  They are playing a different game than you would like them to.

This does not necessarily mean that they are directly playing a
grief game.  Their goals and intents could have nothing to do with
you, with gaming you, or whatever.  Their intent, quite simply, may
be different.

  At this point I usually wander off and write about how I used to
  play the arcade game "Tron".  Suffice to say that I never played
  the game as the makers intended: My goal was to throw my frisbees
  not at the enemy, but at his frisbees, and to see how far I could
  stretch that before my error rate accidentally forced me on to the
  next level (games usually lasted a little over an hour this way).

Bubba the rampant PKer and slaughterer of thousands may actually
only be interested in PK as has a bet with his neighbor for a beer
that he can camp a given location and pick off at least 20 other
players before getting knocked off himself (I did that just half an
hour ago on a Town2 CTF map just to see if I could).

He's not playing your game and he may be playing some other utterly
unrelated game that you have zero design or control inputs for.

--
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--
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