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MUDs, while wonderful, occasionally devolved into closed ecosystems where RP enforcement and opinions ended up creating a toxic community with the playerbase ev

• WorldMaker 7y ago
  I don't know, I feel like that only mirrors/emphasizes/complements my point: yes, political solutions are hard (we still refer to the USA as a political "experiment" 200+ years on, for some good reasons), but they are possible (versus trying to handle things entirely technically that are by their own nature political; as other arguments in this thread and elsewhere point out, dealing with bad actors that are people will almost always be at least somewhat political). Political solutions can clearly fail, and that becomes another reason to allow players to run their own servers as it is an "out" in the case of a political solution failing (a different sort of resiliency to the technical sort). MUDs also have tales of successes. Times when political alliances defeated griefers and the community was stronger for it. Partly because of the relative ease of spinning up MUDs there are so many stories and experiments out there to choose from / learn from. MUDs were an early laboratory for what became MMOs in so many ways, and it will always be easier to reproduce studies done in that sort of a laboratory setting, including the failures. In science often the failures are the greatest learning experiences leading to the most interesting hypotheses.