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Old 07-20-2002, 09:30 PM   #4
Burr
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Join Date: Apr 2002
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On the other hand, imagine mud utopia, where you get everything for free, but as only good players have found the mud, they limit themselves rather than being limited by the admins.

I don't know about pk muds, but I see this type of thing in freeform RPing all the time.  (I'm not certain I'm getting the terminology right.  Freeform RPing is RPing that is basically a bunch of collaborative writing where each writer has control over his own characters, isn't it?)  Such RPers could give themselves unlimited powers, as they are absolutely free; but they often don't, because they are concerned with making an interesting story, and having fun, etc.  In fact, in one free-form sub-community I used to read, I saw God-like powers in several of the players, but even then the powers themselves were used in ways to make the RP more fun, not simply to "win."  They were often given up at some point.

Maybe the problem isn't that power is given away too freely, but that it is overvalued in the first place.  

If the purpose of the mud is only to win, then how a person wins doesn't matter.  If the purpose of the mud is to have fun as a group, then you need to realize that winning is not a group activity, so a culture centered on winning, on the value of power, defeats the purpose of the mud.
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