Another thing that interests me is how players work around the limitations of a medium. For example, many MUSHers simply state emotions and intentions that would arise nonverbally. “She looks at her like she’ll stand by her no matter what.” Nobody “looks” that way, really, and there might be a third person subjective that does as good a job, but this is a challenge to write, so simply using expression as a tag for bringing forth subtext is a valuable tactic.

Is modern design focused on patching bad play? In many cases, yes; the mechanics at serve as a signal for expected behaviour, and as we shift to a less intimate gaming culture some of this has to happen to get things up and running at all.

Western society is undergoing a shift in how we socialize, due to the decline of close friendships compared to 20 years ago. I think this does drive many people to go to online discussion first.

I’d like to put to be in this comment the idea that mindblindness is a character defect. There’s a difference between the information we have access to and the moral choices we make.

Anyway, its interesting to think about this vis a vis my own experience of online play. It was often the case that in many stable online environments you’d develop a subtle and ongoing structure of play, but that such environments were often disrupted by new additions or random interactions. Thus folks would look for hard system structures in places where they weren’t often helpful in ongoing play.

Or to put it less hypothetically, we’d have a “clique” on a MUSH or talker — a stable group of people who played together often — among whom things like reputation, ongoing mutual appreciation of subtle interactions, and many of your binary issues of the offline sort were common. But because we were playing on a public MUSH or talker there would always be someone who wasn’t part of the group who we’d end up playing with, and they didn’t get any of that. (And there is no special reason they should, its subtle and thus hard to get at first blush. Some didn’t get it, and some never tried. Some were actively hostile to it.)

When they didn’t get it we, and they, (“them and us” talk about not subtle) would often fall back to the less subtle online forms. “I have Rank 5, and you have Rank 4 so I have precedence” type stuff.

For some folks this formed a bridge from which they were able to move increasingly over time into the more subtle forms that we actually valued in play. But much of the time it didn’t. The interaction stopped there, and lead to mounting frustration on both sides as none of us were able to clearly articulate to each other what the problem was. Then the accusations of elitism, system mongering, and all the rest would start.

Over time there was a cumulative effect of all this even on members of the clique. We’d become more and more focused on the exoteric systems of the game — grubbing XP to buy up stats as it were — despite the fact it wasn’t where our joy was. But we felt we had to do it because it was the only way to make sure that we’d have enough clout to maintain our position when the folks who weren’t part of the subtle and backgrounded play would come into the picture.

As a result there were plenty of times when we’d fuck our own play because we’d started shifting focus to things we didn’t actually want. We were playing on the defensive, trying to avoid bad play rather than actively seeking good play.

And that’s something that’s been haunting me recently: the difference between designing/running/playing to avoid bad play and designing/running/playing to create good play. I’ve an unfortunate feeling that a lot of modern game design is, subconsciously, focused more on the former than the latter.