Mwahahaha!
You want social games? Deal with people. They will always be the weakest link.
And for the record? I applaud Ryan’s moves here. ”Kirk to the GDC’s Kobiyashi Maru” indeed.
Tangentially, the commenter in Eric’s discussion thread who noted that “rules are for both the admins and the players” is crucial to good governance.
“‘rules are for both the admins and the players’ is crucial to good governance.”
This is why I have a post sitting around titled “I wish Hitler had been born in America.” We can’t filter out all the Hitlers, neo-Hitlers, quasi-Hitlers, or even Stalins, but we can carefully watch and regulate government to ensure that they can’t do too much damage. Ideally a representative government would promote loyalty to the nation but disloyalty to the government.
Once you release the rules into the wild, you are at the mercy of what your players do with them.
The problem could have been entirely cleared up if the displayed rule of collecting coins from others had been preceded by “each attendee will be given one coin at the door.” They made rules for what to do with the coins, but they forgot to make rules for how to get one to begin with.
Hmmm I don’t know – I always liked people with unorthodox approaches to a problem or creative (and bold) problem solving. I’m with the second article about that there’s a huge difference between griefing and cheating. the first actively harms others, usually for the sake of harming them. the second is either someone having fun with a ‘forbidden challenge’ or simply a strong drive to win.
it’s obviously a problem if it breaks an EULA of sorts, but in the coin game I really cannot see any harm – in fact I applaud him for his guts and witty move. the article made me chuckle more than once.
Haha! Someone just linked me this yesterday!
This is so great.
I think what Ryan did was great too.
Heh. Makes me a bit sad. The good kind of MUD admin was the kind that could see this kind of use of the world system, laugh, say okay you did that… but you also reported it after one exploit. Go forth and giggle, for now we shall fix it.
…unfortunately, that kind of sanity seems pretty scarce, whether in ze fleshy form or ze digital one.
I don’t have a lot of tabletop RPG experience, but I’ve played both as a player and as a GM. Seems to me that “roll with it” is one of the cardinal rules of RPG gaming… and that’s pretty social. Seems like it would apply here.
“and they broke an implicit rule that your target audience should already know”
Ah, the rules people should just know…telepathically, somehow!
Another guy who can’t discern between someone just lying and where the designer has screwed up in his design and a player is simply playing the cards he was given.
It’s one of the hardest tricks for a human to turn – to, when one feels the victim, realise one is actually the victimiser.