A central question I’ve been thinking through while reading all this is “is this stuff actually relevant to me?” A lot of it is solving a different problem than the one I’m solving. How much of it transfers to building a rationalist community or ecosystem?
Raph’s work seems most directly relevant to “how to build the great transhumanist future.” His Theory of Fun is, non-coincidentally, related to LW’s Fun Theory sequence. He spent UO and SWG trying to play is own much harder game than any of the players instinctively wanted: how to create a virtual world where player’s lives had meaning.
I find Raph’s story of UO very heartbreaking. I can describe the plot in a few sentences, but I’m not sure I can do justice to the heartache. The design process for UO was a higher level game, and each “round” in the game Raph would try a new strategy.
Victory or loss for Raph’s meta-game was measured (in a goodharty way) by whether players were subscribing to Ultima and/or complaining on the forums.
In a (hopefully less goodharty way), victory or loss was measured by reading the precise stories players were telling or complaining about and seeing if the world was actually achieving the ability to self-police, in a way that was actually meaningful. (A more easy-to-parse-metric for self policing was “amount of playerkilling going on”, where Raph wanted it to be non-zero, but nowhere near as high as it was.)
He tried numerous strategies to give players better tools for self-policing. I think there is some experiential thing that’s important to get from reading, chapter by chapter in Postmortems, each new strategy Raph would try in this crusade, and the ways that it failed or only partially succeeded.
Raph played this meta-game multiple times (i.e. UO never really succeeded the way he wanted. He might have gotten differently closer in SWG, trying a different strategy and perhaps making different mistakes, although I haven’t played either game so I’m not sure)
(I guess most of the history here is encapsulated in this blogpost – A Brief History of Murder (in Ultima). I think it’s a bit less impactful if not read in the context of the entire history of Ultima and it’s predecessors but is still a decent 80⁄20)
A central question I’ve been thinking through while reading all this is “is this stuff actually relevant to me?” A lot of it is solving a different problem than the one I’m solving. How much of it transfers to building a rationalist community or ecosystem?
Raph’s work seems most directly relevant to “how to build the great transhumanist future.” His Theory of Fun is, non-coincidentally, related to LW’s Fun Theory sequence. He spent UO and SWG trying to play is own much harder game than any of the players instinctively wanted: how to create a virtual world where player’s lives had meaning.
I find Raph’s story of UO very heartbreaking. I can describe the plot in a few sentences, but I’m not sure I can do justice to the heartache. The design process for UO was a higher level game, and each “round” in the game Raph would try a new strategy.
Victory or loss for Raph’s meta-game was measured (in a goodharty way) by whether players were subscribing to Ultima and/or complaining on the forums.
In a (hopefully less goodharty way), victory or loss was measured by reading the precise stories players were telling or complaining about and seeing if the world was actually achieving the ability to self-police, in a way that was actually meaningful. (A more easy-to-parse-metric for self policing was “amount of playerkilling going on”, where Raph wanted it to be non-zero, but nowhere near as high as it was.)
He tried numerous strategies to give players better tools for self-policing. I think there is some experiential thing that’s important to get from reading, chapter by chapter in Postmortems, each new strategy Raph would try in this crusade, and the ways that it failed or only partially succeeded.
Raph played this meta-game multiple times (i.e. UO never really succeeded the way he wanted. He might have gotten differently closer in SWG, trying a different strategy and perhaps making different mistakes, although I haven’t played either game so I’m not sure)
(I guess most of the history here is encapsulated in this blogpost – A Brief History of Murder (in Ultima). I think it’s a bit less impactful if not read in the context of the entire history of Ultima and it’s predecessors but is still a decent 80⁄20)