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Lisaera · 01-11-2006, 10:57 AM

I was actually about ready to agree that labelling IRE as "pay-for-perks" would be accurate and agreeable, but actually as I read Matt's post I realised the intrinsic problem with all these things, which this thread itself is testament to. All these snappy, soundbite-like and truly quite vague expressions such as "pay-for-perks", "free to play", "hobbyist", "RPI", "hack 'n' slash", etc. actually mean very little, and can be debated endlessly, as we see in this thread.

This thread even began to argue the definition of a fairly common word in "free", not even going into the dangerous territory of trying to debate these terms that we've come up with ourselves in the MUD community. I think trying to correctly describe all these games with these very narrow and hamfisted categories is very foolish of us. The reason I think this is because I know how much work I have put into the game I am an administrator and coder of, Lusternia, and I know it chafes me whenever someone incorrectly categorises my game and shaves off some of its complexity and variety to make it fit into their grouping. I know many of you debating here are administrators yourselves, or have been at one time, and so I know you must all feel the same about your own games. Even players can feel this, their chosen game can be a thing they are loyal to and will defend if its honour is questioned or it is being underrated, they can often feel just as attached to the game they play as those of us who create the game for them to play.

For this reason I can only think of two solutions that I believe might work:

1) All the games are simply allowed to describe what their MUD is about as specifically and fully as they like, only using the connotation-burdened phrases such as "amateur", "pay for play", etc. if they wish to.

2) Get rid of all the categories. This has been suggested by others in this thread, and though it would make things a tad more difficult for players just scanning through games looking for what they want, it would certainly cut down on any confusion about what a game is, as they'd have to try it/go to their website and read about it to find out what it was about.

You might notice Lusternia has no assertions of any kind about being free or able to pay or anything like that in our information, and our out score isn't that bad.

01-11-2006, 10:57 AM	#61
Lisaera Member Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 34	I was actually about ready to agree that labelling IRE as "pay-for-perks" would be accurate and agreeable, but actually as I read Matt's post I realised the intrinsic problem with all these things, which this thread itself is testament to. All these snappy, soundbite-like and truly quite vague expressions such as "pay-for-perks", "free to play", "hobbyist", "RPI", "hack 'n' slash", etc. actually mean very little, and can be debated endlessly, as we see in this thread. This thread even began to argue the definition of a fairly common word in "free", not even going into the dangerous territory of trying to debate these terms that we've come up with ourselves in the MUD community. I think trying to correctly describe all these games with these very narrow and hamfisted categories is very foolish of us. The reason I think this is because I know how much work I have put into the game I am an administrator and coder of, Lusternia, and I know it chafes me whenever someone incorrectly categorises my game and shaves off some of its complexity and variety to make it fit into their grouping. I know many of you debating here are administrators yourselves, or have been at one time, and so I know you must all feel the same about your own games. Even players can feel this, their chosen game can be a thing they are loyal to and will defend if its honour is questioned or it is being underrated, they can often feel just as attached to the game they play as those of us who create the game for them to play. For this reason I can only think of two solutions that I believe might work: 1) All the games are simply allowed to describe what their MUD is about as specifically and fully as they like, only using the connotation-burdened phrases such as "amateur", "pay for play", etc. if they wish to. 2) Get rid of all the categories. This has been suggested by others in this thread, and though it would make things a tad more difficult for players just scanning through games looking for what they want, it would certainly cut down on any confusion about what a game is, as they'd have to try it/go to their website and read about it to find out what it was about. You might notice Lusternia has no assertions of any kind about being free or able to pay or anything like that in our information, and our out score isn't that bad.