Excuse the late reply.
Aquinas wrote:But now, if I can presume for myself a right to reply, I would like to say I hope you will do so. You are an intelligent, thoughtful guy and you know the game well. I hope you can tell I listen to your ideas, if only because, during my time as Moderator, some of them have been adopted in at least some form (eg. role-play with inactive accounts, experimenting with second active accounts for RP Team members). You have probably had more impact in terms of changing the rules than some past Moderators. So it is hardly as though you are not without hope of a fair hearing.
Yeah, that's part of what I was referring to as your attentiveness and responsiveness. My position is that your great strength as a moderator is your high engagement and activity, and your clear enthusiasm for the game. What I (and, if I read it correctly, some others) are raising here is the double-edged sword of not only your personal management style but also the more fundamental question of what moderation's level of activity should be in this game, and into what areas of gameplay moderation activity should appropriately insert itself.
Aquinas wrote:If I can press my right to reply further, I also have to say I'm genuinely puzzled by how your criticism of extra rules and Cultural Protocols seems to be at odds with your own actions. You have used the Cultural Protocol mechanism to require players in your nation to follow a batch of extra rules (the whole of section 6) and require Moderators to enforce them. You have just lobbied us (successfully) to continue to enforce your Cultural Protocol for you for at least the next 4 months. Similarly, you seem to be making extensive use of the RP law system (see, for example,
here and
here), which - just like Cultural Protocols - is something Moderators can end up being required to enforce upon players. If a player came to me and said he didn't like rules and wanted to play in a nation where the rules were least burdensome, then your nation would be far from the first I'd recommend.
I addressed this in the Renaming Rules thread you linked to above. I'll address this more generally below. Let me know if there are more specific things on this point you'd like me to address.
Aquinas wrote:In return for enforcing a nation's Cultural Protocol, the only thing I ask is that just three times a year the players should ask me to carry on doing so, using the affirmation procedure. After all, why should it be enforced if nobody is serious about wanting it? But even here, when it comes to affirmations, a certain minority of players use this as an opportunity to express resentment at me (as opposed, for example, to thanking me for agreeing to police the Cultural Protocol for the next 4 months or more).
So yeah, you could say I have to put up with a fair bit of flak. But I don't mind and (at least most of the time) I don't complain.
If I sound at all like I am complaining now, then to be candid, it is because it is difficult not to feel ill-used when players strongly criticise me for carrying out tasks they themselves are assigning to me. It leaves me wondering whether a Moderator with less forbearance than me would shred your Cultural Protocol and your RP laws on the spot and tell you to defend your nation for yourself. But I've also considered the possibility we have somehow gotten our wires crossed, so if that is the case, I hope you can explain.
This begins to get to the meat of the issue to my mind. In general, my sense is that what's happening is there's a disconnect between how you vs. (some of us) players view the appropriate role of moderation in this game, and also a disconnect between your understanding of common particracy usage cases (I think I'm using the software industry term correctly) vs. how (some of us) players are actually playing the game. Here are some specific examples of what I mean.
Role of Moderation DisconnectEX 1: This
Cultural Protocols: What? Why? How? thread
Mpog starts a thread on a fundamental part of particracy gameplay. As I implied above to mpog, this topic a good opportunity to raise and discuss in depth some major structural issues with the game, some of which players have raised reservations about, and about which (some) players have criticized your role personally. The discussion very quickly became frank and open, and it read to me that with mpog's, Governor12's, and my posts on September 4th, the discussion was about to turn to significant depth, not only concerning cultural protocols, but also on your personal moderation style specifically.
Just as the conversation was getting serious, and just when it looked like we were beginning to find out various players' specific and detailed reservations about the cultural protocol system and about your personal moderation style, you decide to join the conversation. Now this is where the disconnect between how you conceive of your role as moderator vs how (some) players conceive of your role comes into play. There are two important points here: first, you are a moderator, not a player. Even for those several weeks when you and Reddy were both playing and moderating, the distinction between your roles was very clear. As mpog alluded to above, particracy moderation hasn't been confined to housekeeping for several years, likely as far back as Wouter's moderation days. Once moderation took on responsibility for overseeing RP, Mods' roles vis-a-vis players became much more regulatory than maintenance. While this change did not start with you, my sense is that it has significantly advanced during your current run as moderator. When we were going through the Hawu CPing process for instance, part of my occasional frustration was that it felt like we Hawu players were working for you (and the rules) instead of the rules (and you) working to support us in our enjoyment of the game (I'll come back to this point below). To return to the current example, due to the kind of moderation environment that currently exists in the game, when you Aquinas enter a thread, I as a player do not view you as an equal. I also do not view you in the neutral way that your 'moderator' title implies. I view you as something closer to a boss, meaning that I view you as someone who will tell me not only what is possible and workable, but also what is permissible and not permissible, and further what I as a player am required to do by you as the moderator/boss or else my eligibility to play the game will be in jeopardy. When I say 'permissible' and 'required to do,' I'm not referring to public decency standards enforcement and similar, which I view as appropriately within moderation's scope to ensure a healthy and welcoming gameplay environment. I'm referring instead to things like the Hawu CPing process, during which I felt like I was being required to jump through hoops the logic of which I could not divine, the origin of which I could not locate, and the utility and propriety of which I doubted (and still do). Back to the example of this thread: in that kind of environment where (some) players feel as if they are being assigned to various tasks at what essentially seems to be your whim (and I do not believe you're doing any of this maliciously as I said above, or even at whim: I think your too-long rules list is in fact part of your effort to ensure that moderation doesn't seem arbitrary -- but that's for later discussion), if you then enter a player discussion that looks to have the makings of a frank clearing-the-air talk, you get the result of this once-promising thread: the person who prompted the discussion, mpog, is reluctant to even broach the subject of moderation's role in the current CP system likely because he feels like his too-frank opinions on the subject led to feeling nearly hounded out of the game (I'm guessing); you have put me on the spot on such a enormous topic that I actually had to delay my response for several days and specifically set aside time to ensure I could marginally do your important but weighty questions justice and even now am taking hours away from work to respond to you personally and timely; Governer12, another player who looked about to share his frank assessment of your moderation style, has gone MIA on the subject for two days. Now, if you had exercised more appropriate self-awareness of how your role and moderation style are perceived by (some) players, it might have occurred to you that probably the best way to get sincere answers to your questions up-thread would have been to allow the conversation to run on without your input while you observed attentively from the sidelines. Now, instead of what looked to be a great opportunity for some fairly like-minded players to gather our thoughts and establishe our critiques and positions before approaching you formally for a response, the discussion has been short-circuited. This is the same sort of thing (I think) Governor12 is referring to as your 'very active-syle moderation.' You are characteristically inserting yourself in an area unnecessarily or too soon and disrupting the player usage case (and the value and utility players were garnering from the usage case) in the process.
EX 2: Usage Cases: How Players are Playing the Game vs How You Understand the Game Should be PlayedI've raised the
Asian Orgs deletionsas an sign of a larger issue elsewhere. To explain my position: what I observed in Zongxian's thread is that s/he said s/he and other players had been using several party organizations to detail story elements regarding various Asian characters, countries, companies, and/or groups. I got the strong impression that Zongxian and other players had been doing this for some time, meaning that some of the deleted Asian orgs could've been several (real time) years old or more. Zongxian said that as a result of your deletions, some of the stories and story details were permanently lost. To orient our discussion, let's keep a couple things in mind: particracy's game mechanics are rudimentary and repetitive; therefore, long-term players have taken to focusing on grand, protracted story-telling, to the degree that we've created entire universes which we use to interact with one another; our story-telling is unique and compelling largely because we do not develop the details of these stories alone -- other players can and do insert their own views, fantasies, and agendas into our stories, and they do so over spans of not minutes and hours, but over the course of months and years; due to its richness and depth, this storytelling game has supplanted the game mechanics as the primary usage case of particracy.net.
Now, into that reality of how players are voluntarily exerting such significant effort as a vehicle of enjoyment during their leisure time, you come in and inform Zongxian that despite how s/he and his/her friends have been playing this area of the game, it in fact should never have been played that way. And even though Zongxian is moved to near outrage at how his/her gameplay has been so summarily disrupted, you (patronizingly in this context, even if perhaps you didn't mean it that way) inform Zongxian that your rules changes are 'modest and far from unreasonable,' even though possibly years of storytelling (the whole point of the game) is completely lost and you have no means (or seemingly interest) to recover it.
Zongxian anticipated that kind of response by asking the burning question: did you ask what players thought of this change before charging ahead with it? And to reiterate for clarity: the reason that's the most important question is that this game, the game rules, and your moderation efforts exist because of the players. This game has no responsibility and essentially no meaning to anyone or anything beyond the few dozen people who frequent it. Of that small group, if even a small number of people are playing the game in a way you didn't envision, anticipate, or don't agree with, it is in fact essential to solicit and consider their views on nearly any change because it is those people who will have their leisure time disrupted by the changes.
Finally, the above point brings us back round to the current CP regime. I've always had strong reservations about the CP system. As SelucianCrusader implied in the 'Let's Allow Multis!' thread, the CP system was glommed onto a spare game system at least partly for the purposes of giving die-hard players a mechanism for regulating and controlling infrequent and new player gameplay. In general, I think that's an asshole thing to do. But beyond that, I've never felt the CP system is a particularly effective way to accomplish its professed goal: story continuity. When I characterize your current rules and the CP system itself as poorly conceived or with similar pejoratives, part of what I'm referring to is the way so much of these mechanics are supposedly contrived for the purposes of ensuring minimum story continuity. When it comes to the rules, my position is that less intrusive, less pedantic, and more comprehensive and enriching story continuity can be supported (and encouraged and enforced by moderation) with a much simpler, sparer, and shorter rules regime. Similarly, my position is that the CP system has an odd rigidity to its structure that doesn't seem to me particularly effective at sparking dynamic storytelling, but instead constrains dynamic storytelling to a degree. My position is that this CP structure problem has been compounded by your recent rules and process changes (one month to even 'affirm' a CP; 'affirming' CPs to begin with, which I was assuming was to make way for more culturally-open nations to avoid annoying new players, but with your post above, I'm now wondering if we're just doing all this so you won't have as many CPed countries to oversee: all of these questions and much of this sour mood in the air on this subject could have been abated or avoided by simply asking players what they thought at length and giving them an appropriately leisurely amount of time to respond; that is what we should be doing triannual consultations about: whether the rules should be kept, not so much whether this or that ethnicity/language/religion should be kept). Now, these points I'm raising implicate the fundamental and structural practice of the game. Even raising these matters for mere discussion (given the years of background, development, and controversy surrounding them) is a daunting undertaking. When you asked me in the 'Renaming Rules' thread why I would participate in a system given such reservations, part of my answer to you was that changing the system would simply require more time than I can make available. I'm embarrassed and shy to say that work is reaching a level again that will push me in coming days to decide whether and how I can continue simply playing the game in the near term. So the idea of taking on the task of changing the gameplay culture or alternatively choosing to operate outside the gameplay culture with which so much of the game's value is wrapped up . . . either choice is just really a non-starter. That was part of the reason I was happy to see that mpog started this discussion, because I hoped that at least by clearing the air and establishing various players' position on some fundamental points, the space might be opened to at least considering a re-look at the current gameplay culture and structure.
I'm sure there are points I've skipped over or addressed insufficiently. It is not intentional, I just don't have time to write more right now. My direct tone, plain language, and occasional pejoratives are also not a sign of any personal issue I have with you. I am not pissed. I am only posting these things in this way at this time because you asked and insisted. You are inappropriately lawyerly in the way you run the game, but you are also unfailingly courteous, and your consistent and obvious efforts to be available, attentive, conscientious, thoughtful, sympathetic, and serious in your interactions with players is greatly appreciated and they are all the things that make you a great asset to the game and a great asset as a moderator. So please accept at face value my assurance that no harm is intended on my part. And no apology or pardon is sought from you. I understand that you are justifiably venting just like the rest of us. What is clear about your style and rules changes, Aquinas, is that you have a strong vision for this game. What I am saying here (and I think some others may be saying too) is that your vision is sometimes feeling imposed rather than enabling to players. I believe it is unhealthy for the game. I also believe the character you demonstrate daily on this website is very healthy for the game. My wish is that we find a way to square your enormous assets with these significant challenges.
I'll keep reading the thread but it may be several days before I can reply.