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Well, we have returned from the Realms of Despair 20th Anniversary Barbecue hosted at Thoric and Jane-wh0-does-not-mud’s house and for those of you who could not attend due to the short notice (as travel plans go) I hope you will enjoy living vicariously through this post.  I will break away from my tradition of not overwhelming people with pictures for this post and hope I’ve chosen enough to give you a good feel for the day.  A word of warning and a lead in apology: I am bad with names at the best of times … I am HORRID with game names.  There are a few of you whose names have slipped back out of my head and I apologize wholeheartedly.  If someone reminds me I’ll make an appropriate edit here.

Where to begin?  We had a nice drive up to Cambridge from Hamilton, it’s a drive I’ve done several times before back when my car had air conditioning and my apartment didn’t … we passed the pub I used to have a rib and chicken wing special at before returning home to sweat.

As we arrived we knew we were in the right place when we saw the “Thoric” licence plate.  We were lucky that our little dude slept the drive up, which meant he was quite ready to play with anyone or anything in range.  It took him very little time to meet and begin playing with all the little Thorics and Janes wandering about and to discover their cache of blocks for tower building!

Moving into the back yard I was struck with just how beautiful the property is.  It is very quiet and peaceful out here, or at least it will be until we get this party rocking!

The forecast called for some rain but we were fortunate that it seemed to skirt around us.  I noticed as we drove home that it appears to have hit just the other side of town, so thanks prevalent weather system for dodging us!

We were getting set up when other guests began arriving, Kali, Despeyre, Cygnus, Destre, Oxnyx, Adamus and Eisengrim. In the meantime, the kids took over as is right and proper! 🙂

If not for this yard equipment, I think my day would have gone very differently, but as it stands it served as the most wonderful babysitter and provider of exhausted children at the end of the day.  Behind this equipment is a small path that led around the lake, notable later in the RL quest.  A short time later a stopping car informed us that Hoerkin, Stoneheft and Loril had arrived and with the arrival of Serina, Azrielle and friends we had our cast of characters set.  The only things left to do were to eat, chat and have fun … and then be put through quest hell, well hell only because it meant leaving chairs and keyboards behind and having to actually … run?  Or jogging … errr shuffling at an above normal pace?  Well, something like that.

Thoric, Jane and others did a great job of manning the grill,if anyone went home hungry it’s their own fault!!  Lots of pickings like fruit and salads were brought, as pot lucks go I’d say we had a winner.  There was a discussion which ended with a few simple assertions … firstly that salads are the sort of things that food eats and secondly that we have a buyer available should we ever get down to our last pig … who would buy it so that it could be cloned, providing riches as the bacon market becomes dominated by a user of the Realms of Despair.

The day was not without party crashers, some of whom felt quite entitled to simply drive right on up and tell people to pay attention to them!  The nerve of some people eh? 🙂

So once everyone was sufficiently fed and adequately lethargic it was time to quest!  Some of you would have known right off the bat how to find a Nenmellon among the reeds in the shallows of the lake, some of us appropriately asked “what the hell’s a nenmellon” … yet others used true Realms questing experience and waited for the groups to start moving and followed them!

Once you had your frog, you had to take it to the gazebo on the other side of the lake.  Yes, that one below those trees.  To get a better perspective, the zoomed in shot is the same shot as the first picture of the lake above.  We used the trail behind the playground and we were off!  Stoneheft and Adamus had a great lead that disappeared when their frog escaped from the bucket they had it in allowing me and Jeremy to move into first place for a short while …. until a Kali like blur sped past me to capture a lead he wouldn’t relinquish.

Once we retrieved our crystal, ran it back around the lake we hunted down a warrior who gave us a cryptic riddle … a question whose answer could change the fates of everyone ….. “You hear it speak, for it has a hard tongue. But it cannot breathe, for it has not a lung?”  Though Serina and her partner had passed us by being in better shape than I am they chose the wrong trail to find the Shaman and ended up having to adventure over very rough terrain while I stalked Kali’s team on the easy path.  We answered the riddle and managed a few sprints to close the distance and arrived to plant our sacred plant in the second terrace of the garden while observing a square dance style jig that will forever remind me that while he can drop a hand grenade in the room, obliterate my corpse and purge me from the Realms for all time, I have survived seeing Kali dance a jig… which we promptly copied since Jane-who-does-not-play disliked our Chicken Dance.

This Supreme Wife-ity told us that we had to present Thoric with the “Jewel of Thoric’s Eye” … but we were too clever … this wasn’t lost boots time, but we spun her about and presented her to him and completed the quest, 2nd, but happy to be able to indulge in the warmth of success and chilled by cooler fresh Coke 🙂

From our lofty perch atop a lawn chair we watched the other teams complete the quest and it looked like everyone had a lot of fun… and once the questing had completed … the desserts!  We cut into the Cake of Despair and attacked another piece of devilishness … prepared by the wife of another ranger and typer of blogs … This picture only took a particular new player helper a handful of tries on a phone before giving up and taking a picture with *gasp* a camera!!

All in all it was a great day, for everyone who was there I hope you enjoyed yourself as much as we did.  For anyone who missed it I hope you will get the chance to attend another get together in the future.

In this era where the Realms population is less than it was at it’s peak I think it’s important to remember that this game started with a few dozen people who enjoyed the Endless Medieval Adventure … 20 years later it is still alive because of the efforts of hundreds who have come and gone.  Thoric saw things lacking in the mud world he participated in and threw himself into coding something better.  Many creative people have brought inspirations from literature and other games into our world, be it Vampires:The Masquerade, Dragonlance, The Books of Swords or many countless other be they obvious or subtle.  I encourage you to find a way to improve the Realms in some way.  Make friends, learn something, expand your horizons and most importantly … have fun.

Happy 20th anniversary Realms, best wishes for the future!

Kinux has been wonderful at supporting this series of blog post and he contributed the following for your enjoyment.  Note that this wasn’t written specifically for the 20th anniversary but it ties in well enough that I think you will enjoy it.  It comes from a note board where Gorog posted it for a different reason some time ago.  So even this note has history attached to it :->

Reading it now I appreciate more deeply some of the things people have been through with the administration of this game.  One of the best reasons to remember history is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

I hope you enjoy: HAUS!

 

Nostalgia. This may be a bit self-indulgent, but some folks might find it interesting… My first imm was on ROM in May 1992. Alander, ROM’s imp, did a pfile wipe (yes, I said pfile wipe! gah!) that August for the port to RoM2.0. Dozens of ROM imms jumped ship, and a chunk of us went to a mud called Farside, now known as Avatar. I got Hausdorff to level 35 over Christmas and Spring breaks, and was determined to avatar him by June.

On May 15th, Farside was down for what would be 3 days. I started digging through the Diku usenet group for something to do, saw a post from some dude in Toronto ( 🙂 ), that mentioned a Merc-derivative with a Vampire class… Sounded interesting.

When I logged on, there were 2 other players Pandora, a level 16 mage, and Simple, a level 10 warrior. There was, much to my amusement, a single imm listed on the WizList: Thoric. I avatared in 3 days, in a flat out race with someone whose name I can’t remember. The Vampire was way, way over-powered, but there were no level35+ mobs, so levelling past 35 sucked. The
only thing to do was sit around recall and whack away at “The Executioner,” predecessor of Hakiem/Harakiem. The race to avatar was very close, I only beat the other guy by a couple of levels in the end.

I was an avatar for, like, a day. Then, Thoric advanced me to 51. For a week or two or three, I enjoyed being the only imm. Then, unbeknownst to me, a ‘Someone’ busted me for sancting healing Pandora. That was the beginning of the always vigorous/interesting relationship between myself and Caine/Dominus.

I built, offline, a little area called ‘Calvin’s House’ based on the now-defunct comic strip ‘Calvin Hobbes.’ A bit later, ‘Seth’s
Fortress’ was added to the game, and good old Calvin.are was a memory: “Please pick a more medieval theme.” 🙂

By August/September 1993 we were averaging 20-30 players at peak time. By December 1993 (help me out oldies, if I’m leaving anything significant) names like Grishnakh, Tricops, Strahd, Sin (=Damian) were becoming known. I spent the next year primarily as a coder and fruiting around on immtalk (avtalk) while I coded. I think I got Lesser around December 1994: if I recall correctly it was for implementing version 0.9 of “deadly clans.”

Around May 1995 we went on a huge immortal-a-thon which netted us imms like Narn Blodkai. It was that summer that we finally put to rest the “DIKU Credits” issue that had hindered our acceptance in the mud community. About August/September 1995, Selic was promoted to 57 (?) as an overseer of Mortal Affairs. By November (during some really bloody wars in the higher immortal community), Dominus started picking other immortals to advance to 58 to act as a new revision of Fauvre’s “Council of Elders.”

That group consisted of Selic, Myself, Damian, Circe, Grishnakh. Soon after Selic resigned and Narn was added.

By May 1996, the CoE was in trouble. Due to political differences of opinion and extremely chronic frustration due to having the same arguments with the same people over a period of years, our influence and morale was at a low ebb. There was considerable unrest in the immortal community.

Personally, I was trying to get a multimedia business off the ground and had very little morale to be spent at RoD. I resigned my position and set my level to 50. ***Whew***

Within 24 hours, I’d recieved a dozen e-mails from mostly higher-level immortals to come back and help to straighten things up. Gorog arranged a meeting at 5500 between the CoE (Narn, Damian, Blodkai, and myself), Thoric, and about a dozen immortals who strongly supported the concept of the CoE. The upshot is that we were reinstated with full executive control of the Mud — we’d gotten a mandate to run the way we collectively felt was right. Another war followed, we had to clean house and get a foundation for a healthy immortal community. It was kind of like being Stalin in 1917… we had to be bad guys to do what was right. We agreed to promote Gorog to 57 as a ‘Junior Member’ of the CoE for his abilities as an administrator as much as adding new blood to a group still suffering from chronic, deep frustration.

By July, we’d gotten most of the kinks out of the system and made the immortal community a very close approximation of what we, as a group, wanted it to be. It made us all happy to see the mud growing from an average of 75 players to 100 players to 200+ players over the following months.

There are still problems: some old wars that are more asleep than dead. The inability of high imms to socialize and interact with
immortals and mortals due to the fact that we’re still voting on 20-40 issues in a given week. Specific things, like warning everybody about code changes, and never ending debates about “appropriate behaviour.”

We’re chipping away at these problems in, probably, unobservable ways. All of our decisions are rendered on a board other immortals can’t read, or, in particularly sensitive issues via e-ml/phones/etc. The reason is so we can feel free to argue viewpoints that would be unpopular or hurt the feelings of others, but the price we pay is in being “mysterious” and “unapproachable.”

Anyway, this has gone on longer than I’d planned. The points I wished to make are that gee, it is fun for us old fogies to wax on about the old days.

Kill Well, Kill Often!

Haus
The Old One

The Midway of Despair has been open for a little while over the last few days.  I’ve had a blast trying out all the games and seeing what little bits of history pop out of the woodwork.  It’s expected to be open a few more times over the next while, so be sure to visit it and have some fun with it.  A lot of the minigame prizes are just trashes but they’re amusing, I will treasure my suspendies and a bra for a long time to come.

Many waited for this area to open to obtain a few particularly interesting items.  A few of us wanted supple longbows, renown for their range.  I wanted a couple silk scarves … 40 mana each at level 1 they’re a nice option for mana users who have the con to avoid traveler cloaks at level 2.  The magician’s hat is always neat, not supremely better than a purple pouch but more flavourful.  I did grab figurines of Tharius from getting bullseyes on the Spear and Axe throws.  Finally, I was very excited to chase after some storage bins!

The quest for the storage bins is pretty simple, a bit of running around the area to gather the parts, a bit of luck and an item from the King’s Castle and bada bing, you’re done.  Home owners drool over these items  because they’re light weight and hold more than 1k of goodies.  I was looking for a batch for the Guild of Origin, larger containers to sort things in our storage room is welcome.  So it came as absolutely no surprise that players flooded to start farming the items required.  To my knowledge people were being pretty fair with one another, I didn’t hear any complaints of people pushing each other too badly to retrieve tiny body parts.  Yet after a short while the mob was removed to “The Dog House” where it was last seen.

These bins have been sold for 500m-1b gold coins, indicating a massive level of demand so perhaps someone in the immortal community felt that people were farming them to make a profit.  The bins have a midas value of 10m coins … but frankly if anyone was farming them for midasing I’d be stunned.  So we can all speculate why Someone decided to limit the influx of this metal nosac container.  Frankly I don’t get it, there’s a huge demand for a NON RUN ITEM that is at least approximated by a cheap (150,000 coin) accessory available 24-7 for homeowners.  Our storage room uses carts which are also cheap even if they’re smaller.  When someone told me 500m was a fair offer I laughed … I said “Midway is open and you think anyone’s going to pay that?”  The fact is more influx means market crashes and good riddance.  The area opens rarely so it’ll always be a bit of a premium item but … oh well, I’ve ranted about the economy being ridiculously artificial and the worthlessness of gold more than once.

My point here isn’t to criticize the decision, whether I agree with it or not.  The point I’d like to make is that all the complaining in the world on avatar and elsewhere will only discourage people from doing things like opening Midway again in the future.  Why put up with all the complaints … why not simply not open the area?  I suggest people have fun with the area and enjoy the games that are in there.  They are pretty neat.  Get yourself a dicing cup, down a few flagons of ale and take a ride on the Wheel.

Happy 20th!

 

I was somewhat taken aback to learn to day that Justin Carmical aka JewWario had committed suicide in January.  As I read his wife’s announcement to the community, including his fans from Youtube many thoughts ran through my head.  Many of them absolutely typical I’m sure.  Please indulge me for a few minutes.

You see, I wasn’t a fan of Carmical’s work.  I profess to have never watched an episode of You Can Play This because I’m not a big fan of Japanese games/animation styles however I did encounter him through the work of James Rolfe (aka The Angry Video Game Nerd) and of Doug Walker (aka That Guy With the Glasses).  You see just as we on Realms form communities, many of the early Youtube channel creators along the same theme have been aware of one another and sometimes collaborated.  I heard of Carmical’s death on a post about the AVGN Movie premiere next month.

What struck me is that there is a post describing a situation that I cannot imagine ever wanting to relate.  A human being I love locking themselves in a bathroom and fatally shooting themselves while I talked to them through the door.  Let that sink in for a minute.  Then imagine having to go online and tell the world.  That was Jenny Valentine’s experience and she handled it with a grace I can only wish for.

In the upcoming month I will be sharing with you some reminisces of a variety of people from the Realms to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our game.  I’m going to share a very quick one now.  As a run council leader in the Guild of Druids about 12 years ago or so I found myself counseling people from time to time.  One of these people was a regular who we thought was a pretty heavy drinker.  One night he told me that when he logged out he was going to kill himself.  I don’t know why he chose me, it doesn’t matter.  I took him seriously, not only because of the way he told me but because of the history.  I get a bit nervous calling police.  Calling police halfway across the continent to explain that someone I knew from a chat game on the internet was suicidal was a very strange call indeed.  Today police might be more prepared for that kind of call, 12 years ago it was a strange one, big time.  Through a mix of keeping him talking and asking careful questions I drew enough information out of him to get the police to his house.

I don’t know what ever happened to him.  I want to tell you he lived happily ever after but honestly I don’t know, I sure hope he got the help he needed.

If you or someone you know are feeling hopeless, like there’s no way to make your life better let me share this: it can be a hard road but there is help out there.  I spent a lot of time hiding away from my own problems and it almost destroyed the joy in my life.  I was very  lucky that I finally reached out for help, more than 5 years later I can tell you life is pretty good.

Find someone to trust, find a hand to hold.  The road is long, but you need not walk it alone.

Player retention is something which seems to be on a lot of people’s minds.  I suggest it may be more important than attraction but at the very least they go hand in hand towards creating a healthy player base.  I don’t claim these ideas, this is something I’m adapting from a business article that I read earlier it deals with more universal satisfaction topics rather than delving into game play issues. I think this might be interesting to any organization leaders, immortals or even people looking for a way to better express things that are bothering them.

10. Treat everyone equally

Some players contribute more to the game.  They bring people with them and help contribute to other people’s enjoyment.  Equality isn’t sufficient, fairness is.

9. Tolerate mediocrity (in yourself).

The idea that “A-players” have less desire to play with “C-players” is true, perhaps more in gaming than in the work world.  “A-players” are under no obligation to explain the “big” runs or “hard” mazes.  People do figure these things out by investing time learning simpler mazes in low risk areas and eventually graduate to bigger and better.  These players are under no obligation to teach new players though many do for lots of good reasons.

8. Have dumb rules.

The original article talks about having rules that get in the way of doing their job.  I believe in simple, unambiguous, enforceable rules.  Establish solid principles and derive rules from there.  I don’t just mean laws, I mean things like using “in area ip check” versus “global ip check”.  To me this is a dumb rule … let me leave my characters in Darkhaven who aren’t at all involved in the fight’s outcome online waiting the 4 hours for their tinker tag to rot off online.  This is just an example.  There are lots of little things like this that are irritants for the sake of anti-exploitation or anti-staking.  Let’s put our heads together and come up with better ways of doing business.

7. Don’t recognize outstanding performance and contributions.

The original article says it best “[b]ehavior you want repeated should be rewarded immediately”.

6. Don’t have any fun at work.

In the game context I’m going to say that you can suck all the fun out of your own game if all you do is monotonous things.  When your strategy to bigger and better gear is to gold until someone auctions it, are you having fun?

5. Don’t keep people informed.

I think this one is really prevalent on Realms.  The latest news item is from March 28.  The latest pknews is from April 05.  Today is June 22.  Nuff said.

4. Micromanage.

There’s two sides to this.  The first is telling people what you want done and how to do it.  Some runs have become an exercise in micromanagement … this tendency is not adding challenge to runs, but tedium (again in the name of anti-staking?)  The other side of this is not asking players how to make things better.  I think this happens on a small scale but there are issues lurking about that I recall from the late 90’s.

3. Don’t develop a [player] retention strategy.

To borrow from the original article again here, make a list of players you would not want to lose from your organization or from the game in general.  Think about whether those players are happy.  Ask yourself if you are doing anything to make sure they stay engaged.

2. Don’t conduct retention interviews.

Ok, this isn’t a workplace so retention interviews probably wouldn’t be formal but sit and talk with people before they’re walking out the door because in the game you never know when they’re typing quit for the last time.

1. Make getting started as tedious as possible.

This has been harped on for 20 years.  The wall of text that is help start and the way players learn the game by reading instead of doing … it goes well for the new preauth but then we dump players into the game and say good luck.  I have some ideas about this and to be clear people like Loril work at this tirelessly but I have first hand experience at trying to recruit MMO gamers and their first reaction is “Yeah, too much reading to even get going doing anything”.  These are people who came from BBS gaming too.

 

I thought these 10 points were relevant.  They don’t address everything but I think that they address enough that they were worth adapting for you here.  Cheers!

 

Well!

Last weekend we saw a house put on the market after a conversation that included talking about how housing makes people feel more invested in the game.  People get their own corner and set up their own sect, even if it’s just their alts, they’ve got something that they designed, named and get to take pride in.

Some of us get that feeling in the organizations we’re in but the fact is that organizations have rules about treating their save rooms as your own personal storage and from time to time people drift from organization to organization.  So having your own part of Realms has a special appeal, it’s yours.  No matter where you go or what you do.  Want to leave 50 laundry baskets on the floor?  Go for it!  Yay!

We also talked about the previous record holding 14b coins spent on the last house and how that was a ridiculous sum.  Some people assert that housing is a gold sink.  It’s something that sucks a whack of gold out of the economy and evens things out a bit.  Maybe that’s true.  It certainly does suck gold out.  Somewhere along the line however, it also became a reason to amass gold.  Some people who are golding say they’re doing it to save for a house.  So while it will continue to suck the gold out of the system, it also has become a reason for people to amass every increasing totals.  One nameless “up there” immortal told me the only time they ever golded was after buying their house to pay off their loans from friends.

I think part of the problem is that supply is far lower than demand and that apartments are more or less seen as useless.  You can start a sect, but if you ever upgrade to a house you’ll have to disband your sect and re-create it in order to move it.  I think this has to do with how secthome recall has been coded but I’m talking out of pure speculation here.  IF apartment sects could upgrade to a house somehow, without spending another 500,000,000 gold coins I’d already own one.

In help tsnews it was mentioned that there was some discussion about how to modify apartments, so it’s not as though it’s not on the radar, I’m repeating here a lot of what I said during that meeting.  It would be AWESOME to be able to upgrade and expand apartments and houses without every little thing dinging your house owning non-ordered non-clanned character having to scrape up the glory.  Seriously, if you wanted to tunnel a room to 1 in your house it’d be 80 glory… 80… a room ed is 40 glory for 24 lines…  (note I’m not sure if you have to pay an extra 20 if you want a COLOR ed).  Do I think this stuff should be freebies or gold driven?  No.  You need to earn stuff to feel some pride of ownership (imo) and if it’s gold driven it’s just going to be another reason for people to run level 30 barbarian bots in Coral Depths.  These things could make great quest reward scrolls though, even accepting that someone’s gonna hit traffic and try to sell theirs (if we say 300m per 10 glory using a rename scroll as a guide, do you think anyone’s going to trade 1.2b for a tunnel change scroll?  For a +1000 weight scroll, maybe!).  What’s the other bonus?  If you’re earning these things, you’ve been out and participating in quests and that’s gotta be a good thing right?

I made no secret that I was in on this house.  At any price?  No.  The hammer price on it was 16,500,000,000 gold coins (unless there was a last minute bid I didn’t see) and I chose to step out of the bidding around 15,000,000,000 coins.  I want a house and once I have one my desire for gold will fall off, if I can buy potions and do repairs I have enough, I’ve always been that way.  Gold is not a high score to me.  It’s just a resource that comes and goes.  I see people on traffic all day long looking for stuff and honestly, I’d rather run, it’s the getting not the having for me, but that’s a different rant.  The handful of us who are looking forward to starting a sect together will keep adventuring together and wait for the next little bit of Realms to go up for sale.

 

As real life sort of settles back down with the end of term and an (almost) end to marking papers I’ve had the chance to get out and do some things that require more concentration than chit chat.

I’ve been leveling a barb, more because I didn’t level my first 2 so I wanted to go through the paces.  So far pretty cool, finding a low level spring item stinks (hint hint) unless I’ve totally missed it.  Can’t use any brandishables so the stuff in Town Hall won’t work and dowse is useless against aggressive mobiles, such as those in the upper part of the barbarian training area.  Nonetheless using create spring potions (magic! uggh! grunt! Me drink make water on ground but not pee!) I managed to work my way to the top of the mountain and complete the quest.  There does seem to be a tiny ‘hint malfunction’ in that I didn’t get the parts of the quest that says go to the top and kill so and so until I had already killed him and looted his goodies.  Of course the motivation for that was from the poisoned barbarian on the second level.  Anyway, the progs still work, even if they seem a little out of order and the quest reward was a nice L15 5dr 2 Handed Sword that I used a fair amount, swapping Neptune’s Tridents in where needed for stats.

Dragonslayer has been fairly active, running a lot of different things.  I haven’t been out with them much because so much of their stuff is spontaneous and seems to start a bit on the late side for me, but I’m sure if I tried to get something going earlier we could get out more 🙂

Guild of Origin has been moving nicely, Erandor was elected to 2nd and has been easing his way into a role of leading regular runs.  We did a week of Gyges that was well attended, a surprise visit to Raelin for a few kills and last night we went to Danbala which didn’t work out so well, but the team felt like they learned a bit about run organization and so it was still fun.  Being in the trans maze with Zistrosk was just like old times … circa 2001 with Guild of Druids.

Happy Easter, Happy Passover to those that will be celebrating this weekend and to those who are watching Hockey, keep your stick on the ice.

Over the last 4 years or thereabout I’ve really put an effort into improving the way I interact with people around me.  My experience was that I really had to step back and look at how I interacted with people and find a better way of doing it.  In a lot of ways it has been a very enriching process that has helped me to invest in people and develop friendships that may have otherwise remained arms-length acquaintances.  Lately I’ve been coming to realize that my outgoingness may be offputting to some people and it’s something I’ve been putting some thought into and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts with you.

I used to be a very shy kid.  There were periods of my life where I found criticism from any authority figure I respected absolutely devastating.  Of course to a very large degree I grew out of these things but every now and again there are moments 🙂  To this day I still get anxious when I have to perform some task in front of others like solving a math problem on a black board.  You’d think this would be a big problem standing in front of a class and solving problems but I’ve found a few techniques that help me manage it and get through my day: prepare examples ahead of time, try to identify some of the common ways to go off track in case someone asks and deflect any mistakes I make in real time away with humour.

Learning techniques to help me get by in social situations is something I’ve consciously worked at.  Let me lead by saying that this doesn’t mean I have a formula for dealing with people, nor does it mean that I’m in some way disingenuous in my dealing with people it means that I’ve recognized that there are areas where I struggle and I’ve tried to find ways to get along better so that I’m dealing what is really going on around me rather than what I _think_ is going on around me.  It’s not always successful, I don’t expect that I have to get along with everyone, but if I’m doing the best I can then at least I’ve upheld my part of the social contract 🙂  So the general openness I project, trying to learn about people’s lives like where they live or events that are important to them, and other one-on-one personal interactions is something that tends to work well at opening people up and to at least create an friendly environment.  I’ll amend here that these aren’t the sort of details that are deeply personal, it’s the internet after all, to me knowing if someone’s married or has a kid is a generally public thing whereas knowing their cell phone number or childhood love interest’s name is much more personal.  For most people I do a fairly good job of respecting boundaries.

There have been people that I’ve had a very hard time interacting with, where my outgoingness seems to be exactly the wrong way to approach these people.  I don’t like to label people, if someone self identifies as something then ok, but I don’t know people and their lives well enough to say this person is this or that.  Some of the people I have a hard time with probably self identify as introverts, my wife included.  Face to face I can use non-verbal cues to gain some ideas about how people feel and so forth, despite being fairly extroverted myself I do actually care about the well being of those around me … I tend to apply that to everyone actually, but the depth of it varies from person to person based on my relationship with them.  I will admit that I used to think introverted people were just shy and if they worked at it they could ‘get along’ with the rest of us better.  After all, I have struggled with shyness and worked my way through a lot of it.  This is a ridiculous idea but it helps to show what a poor idea of introversion I once had.  I’ve read things posted by self-proclaimed introverts to help understand better, websites like this one help me adjust my thinking and try to see where and why I keep sticking my foot in my mouth.  Of course everyone’s different and there’s no recipe, but perhaps I can avoid some common pitfalls.  I’ve learned that perhaps the hardest part I have in it is letting others take the lead rather than taking the lead myself.  This isn’t talking about a chain of command or authority, this is strictly talking about personal interactions.  For me, and I _imagine_ others, it’s easier to avoid social situations that are uncomfortable even if dealing with it could lead to it resolving.  Of course both parties have to feel it’s worthwhile to resolve and that the resulting relationship would be worth the effort.  To me avoiding those conversations means things never get better or perhaps they get worse as miscommunication and misperception get cemented into resentments and become gospel.  Or maybe I over think things… maybe.

So what has motivated this post?  I feel that I’ve alienated at least one person on Realms that I have been genuinely interested in developing a friendship with because of the way I’ve tried to interact with them.  Why would I want a friendship with this person?  It is not to curry influence or favour … one comment they’ve made in the past (and not directed towards anyone in particular, but in a general way) is that “everyone has an agenda”.  There’s an innocent way to take that, meaning people have their own goals but it also has a sinister one where people ONLY do things to advance their goals.  I identify with the first but don’t identify with the second.  They are creative in more than one manner that I admire: they are good creative writers which is something I attempt to improve on and they are also musically talented which is something I can only admire from afar being utterly useless with instruments.  I know them to be the type of person that is hard working and a loyal friend.  These are qualities I admire so it opens the door, it’s not an automatic suggestion that a friendship will ensue.

Since we are in an organization together we have interacted on channels to some degree and I’ve felt we were getting along well.  Just to reiterate this is only talking about an on game friendship, absolutely nothing more than that.  Frankly if I needed off game friends that I never see I could just stick to family 🙂  The relationship has gone down hill lately with a couple of faux paus… I will admit to creating a bit of drama with individuals, mostly unintentionally and mostly motivated by frustration and perhaps tempered by over work and tiredness, but without excusing my own part in it, it takes two to tango.  Further, I’ve dealt with these things one on one with the people involved and attempted to make amends and rebuild any fences that needed mending.  No channel rants, no big emo demonstrations.

One of the issues was something that to me was completely silly, but was absolutely not to the other person.  In my circle of people I play with, we generally know each other’s alts, and if we don’t then asking who this alt is or that alt is is an entirely normal social thing.  I stuck my foot in my mouth by guessing someone at an Olympic event was the alt of the person I’ve referred to here and I was very wrong.  Nonetheless the message was essentially “good luck” but the response was outright hostile.  Since I initiated it, I made an attempt to apologize (tells turned off, ok can’t apologize) and then I completely left it alone because even to my thick head that the person wasn’t interested in any further conversation with me 🙂  Well until they dropped a tell out of the blue with a mild insult but I just let that slide … no good can come out of a pissing match, and again it all comes out of my mistake.  Turns out the original person who I had intended to contact would have felt insulted even if it had been them, well, oh.  See, I don’t think of “the character” of one alt or another very much, but rather tend to interact with the person at the keyboard regardless of the character I’m dealing with at the moment, but there’s a different way of thinking out there and clearly I had overstepped the bounds of acceptable behaviour and/or over assumed the degree of friendship.  Ok, apologies as always, live and learn.

So why post here now re-addressing all this?  The person I’m talking about seems to be consciously avoiding any interaction with me on public channels, simple social niceties like hello and good bye.  That’s fine, it would be easy to say that the person is an ass and being rude and move along, but I don’t believe that’s true.  I think perhaps they think that even saying hello might lead back to another dramatic situation.  Fair enough, it might.  To directly address them with a mail message or tells would probably be very unwelcome but I feel that this is an awkward situation that can be made better with a little communication.  Maybe not.  Maybe the answer is leave it alone.  I can live with that too.  Perhaps with patience and in time it’ll improve on it’s own, or not.

I shared this because I think that interacting with one another in text is a very difficult medium.  We cannot pick up on any social cues beyond a few lines of glowing dots arranged on a monitor.  I find that it allows situations that could perhaps be easily dealt with IRL to become larger than they are.  Perhaps some other players have struggled with these issues, perhaps there are different mindsets or interpretations I haven’t considered … we are a global game with a plethora of cultures interacting with one another across many socio-economic groups and ages.  I look at it as a great place to try to grow as a person, the one thing that if the the game went offline tomorrow forever I would be able to keep.  I guess that’s my agenda, personal growth.