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15453: Re: [MUD-Dev] UO rants

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From: Dan Merillat <harik@chaos.ao.net>
Newsgroups: nu.kanga.list.mud-dev
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 13:55:17 -0400
Organization: Kanga.Nu
"Dave Rickey" writes:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dan Merillat <harik@chaos.ao.net>
> To: mud-dev@kanga.nu <mud-dev@kanga.nu>
> Date: Friday, August 25, 2000 10:39 PM
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] UO rants
> >Attempting to call a large group of people with no RL interaction a
> "community"
> >of any kind simply because they are all interacting in the same system
> online
> >is a mistake.  A community may for, or multiple communities, but the whole
> thing
> >is a collection of people interacting with people that have nearly no
> impact on
> >their RL lives.   Fairly obvious why grief playing is so common, no?
> >
>     I'll refer you to "A Story About A Tree",
> http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/essay1.html .  I defy you to explain
> how that *wasn't* a community, even though few if any of the participants
> had any RL interaction.  It's just one of many such examples I've personally
> witnessed.

No, that dosn't contradict what I said.  I said "a community may form".
She was a member of that community, and as such her loss was felt by that
community.  And possibly, on a small enough world, the community may
envelop a large portion of the playerbase.

I've been on games where I knew everyone, and on games where it was rare to
see the same face twice.  On a small enough scale, yes, you can have a
sense of community.  Add enough people in the mix and no, you probably won't.
Or perhaps you can, if given enough time and a slow growth.   Perhaps it's just
that VCs are inherently fragile due to their transient nature.

--Dan



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