Improbable Island, one of the largest and longest-running online text adventures
improbableisland.com
improbableisland.com
Edit: HN user drewzero1 also linked a long Mastodon thread written by the admin, https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109354147264054179, which is equally critical reading. I cannot recommend both highly enough.
There were some hard-earned pearls of wisdom there, and I'll have to read through it again when I have some time.
'Appendix A' is particularly egregious.
I understand the dark patterns of psychology that an administrator should be on the look-out for; it's another thing to task the player-base with the witch hunt through explanation.
P.S. I think it's noble that you read the CoC before product usage, and I wish more people -- including myself at time -- would do that.
However, in my experience core community members will read things like this CoC, at least partially. They also be fairly involved with discussions about it, which go a long way to shape a community.
I respect that the developer went to great lengths to outline their expectations in such clear detail. It sounds like a cool community to me.
That may well be the case.
But in any online community, eventually some people are going to get banned. And many people - even those who aren't getting banned - prefer it if the banning is conducted according so some sort of written document, even if they've never read that document in detail themselves.
Other online communities with far more lightweight rules are also available, for people who prefer that :)
I prefer the new CoC. Lists of rules are never something that someone will regularly reference. You'll read through it once, get an understanding of the ground rules and community expectations, and then fit into the community and get up to speed by experience. Sometimes, people make mistakes, and someone can say "hey, maybe don't do that, Code of Conduct has a bit about that", and that someone can go "ah crud, thanks".
That aside, the general population absolutely must be educated on these behaviors. The admins can't be everywhere at once, and the amount of surveillance to replace players' eyes and ears would have to be enormous and the very definition of a nanny state.
I don't know man, I don't care about your TDS, this is just eyeroll-worthy. Pure political soapboxing.
I think we used to call that sort of thing "gatekeeping"?
Choosing who you let in to your spaces based on criteria you choose is just the normal thing to do.
There's even a large subreddit dedicated to pointing out and mocking gatekeeping and they pretty much all fit that definition.
> Do not roleplay racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted characters in public-facing or semi-public areas (emphasis mine)
Too good to be true?
> hate groups that have gained political power such as the Donald Trump administration
That's not a hate group, that's the other half of the entire country that doesn't toe your party's line.
And it'll probably happen again because this sort of sophistry has made life an insufferable pain in the ass.
Like or hate Bush/Clinton/Obama, nobody was kicking you out of a community because of your political affiliation. I miss the inclusiveness of the 90s.
We have historical evidence from many countries that those need not be mutually exclusive categories.
The 1990s weren't more inclusive, quite the opposite. But the groups you are talking about just all at least tried to work with the community. They actively sought out common ground and were willing to compromise. Today's populists, e.g. Trump, say the aforementioned community is not the real community, they are all crooks, or pests, and in fact only the populists and their followers are the real community and everybody else is the enemy and needs to be locked up, denied citizenship, or be exterminated. There can't be compromise. It is a big part of their sales pitch.
Witness how so called moderate Republicans are treated -- you know, the ones who seek to work within the community and are willing to compromise -- they call them RINO "Republican In Name Only", i.e. they are not _real_ Republicans. There are more examples you are probably aware of. I, for one, can see how this makes it really hard for all involved to find some common ground to work together, don't you?
Still, saying that "support of Gamergate ... is a direct challenge to the lives ... of other players" sounds a little bit hyperbolic to me.
But maybe that's just my privilege of having heard so many diverse opinions that their existence no longer feels like a direct challenge to my life.
No tolerance for intolerance. Your last sentence implies you've never been at risk or a target yourself.
I think the record for a group-written player-made place was something on the order of tens of thousands of words.
Reading that was gratifying.
That team should feel really good about their work.
Anything that needs to write paragraph after paragraph for what could be summarized in 4 to 8 rules, especially with weird, no doubt completely irrelevant to the game itself "DRUMPF GAMERGATE VACCINE" clauses on top of that, is not something anybody who values their time should involve themselves in.
The game used to have one rule: "Don't be a dick."
The game used to pride itself on having banned fewer players than the number of players who met and got married in real life.
Eventually the community realized that wasn't a good thing. If you've banned almost nobody, it doesn't mean that everyone in your community is being nice and wonderful and not harming anyone else, it means that you've only been told about the most egregious and obvious cases.
It means a dozen different cliques can decide for themselves on how people "ought to" interact and play.
A big CoC doesn't mean everyone's a judgmental lawyer. Traffic codes in the US have thousand and thousands of words for different edge cases. But it doesn't mean everyone goes around with a camera and a lawyer in their backseat, people generally understand "hey don't speed and don't run red lights and don't drive drunk".
I'm clicking the website to be sure it's in focus, but keep choosing an action
Text adventures are wildly different from one to another and personal taste. This one didn't grab me.
I tried a little but didn't find any part where I would go "north", "south" etc
Or there are rooms, but without directions?
I haven't played but I've read way too much about it since following Dan on Masto/Fediverse. Someday if I ever have time and bandwidth again I've really got to get on there.
Player-owned places are fairly straightforward to learn once you're in there, but the drag-and-drop is a reference to the programming aspects of a place. They're mostly conditional things, like being able to display different descriptions for different times of day... but they go all the way up to being able to set up logic chains sufficient to set variables based on past events, displaying different things depending on what room a player came into a given room from... there's a lot of depth to it that I've never mucked with.
The writing reads like tolerable fanfiction, so it's not stellar, but cringe moments and needless cussing are still present to some degree.
As someone who used to write room descriptions on MUDs, I can say I I remarkably difficult to strike a balance between immersive writing and functional prose that English speaking persons of different comprehension levels can engage with. We also had to be mindful of screen readers for sight-impared players, the idea being keep your descriptions informative and short without being boring.
I'm not a big fan of Impossible Islands writing, but they have my respect for it because it is quite the task to please an audience like that.
I'm also somewhat biased because one of the most well-fleshed out stories hits a nerve for me in how it confronts the horror of the loss of one's identity, enough that I can't comfortably read it. I say that in an absolutely positive way, much like a horror movie might be so unnerving that I can't bear to watch the whole thing.
It's generally light-hearted, with some dark humor, odd humor and silly humor, and I highly recommend giving it a go. Meet the community! Discover the setting,! Fight your own tongue, an ambulatory pair of pants, your past self, and a Panthzer (50% jungle panther, 50% Panzer tank, don't ask questions)!
Some of which have programming.
Some of THOSE have created miniature games inside of those places, complete with events, character statistics, and a character creator. I've been on this site for ten years and never come close to that level of creative madness, and I will always deeply respect those loveable maniacs.
Plus translations.