"They are elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty."
— Oscar Wilde
"I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before."
— Margaret Atwood
Item Customisation
Hi! This will probably be the last controversial thread I make on these forums for a good long time, but as a warning, it's going to be controversial. People are going to be upset and have strong opinions. Let's try to be respectful of differing viewpoints.
I want to talk about one of the longest running systems that exists in every IRE game to date; one which I believe is outdated, and would like to see revised or maybe even done away with in the newest MUD: the craft approval system.
For those unfamiliar with the system, it's covered in here and works like this:
- IRE games allow you to create custom items for your character to use.
- To do this, you must purchase a craft permit to practice a particular tradeskill such as tailoring, and then a specific pattern for the item type. For example, 'coat'. You can have a fluffy coat, a fur coat, a leather coat, a raincoat, an red riding coat, but a coat is still a coat and if you want to make a coat, you start with the basic coat template.
- At this point, it's your job to customise the template in question by filling in the details, thus turning it from a plain old coat to a fancy red military coat or anything else your heart desires.
- You then submit your design for approval by staff (or sometimes elevated players) who read through it, check that everything's OK and then either give you the go-ahead or return it for specified corrections.
Here are some shortcomings that exist with this system:
- Staff (or player craft approvers) are often busy people who have more important things to do than check your craft. There's often an approval queue which, depending on how lucky you are, may have yours seen through within a few hours, or sometimes make you wait up to a week.
- No one, and I mean no one who's been given authority to check these crafts has to meet any kind of entry-level criteria to demonstrate that they're qualified to perform the job of what's essentially a copy-editor / English teacher. You don't need an English degree or any kind of other qualification to get this 'job'.
- As a result of #2, crafts are approved on the subjective basis of what each individual approver considers to be correct English, spelling and grammar. These standards are often incorrect, outdated or arbitrary. For example, a rule may exist to be checked that all collective nouns (e.g., 'a school of fish') must be treated as a singular object (e.g., 'a school of fish swims past you'.) But this rule, while a good rule of thumb, isn't universally correct; there are many cases where a grouping of items should not be treated as singular, for example: 'a column of buttons decorates the front of this coat' vs. 'A plethora of buttons lie scattered on the ground'. These differences are subtle. Language is complicated, and moreover, language is ever-evolving. Even English professors have debates about proper grammar standards, and sometimes standards previously thought of as 'improper' are even deliberately put forward to challenge preconceived norms. For example, the use of 'her' as a gender-neutral pronoun, which even the Starmourn website has been making use of.
My intent here is not to disparage the language skills of staff/approvers, but rather to encourage a more modest acceptance of the fact that we are all toddlers when it comes to understanding the English language, and that properly policing language isn't just hard — in many cases, it's impossible and flat out wrong. Would you look at the title of this thread and tell me that I spelled 'customization' incorrectly? You would be wrong to, but you would also not be wrong to spell it with a 'z'. Both spellings are equally correct. Would you look at the last two sentences and tell me that I mistyped my "quotation marks"? You would again be wrong to, and doing so from a perspective of cultural bias. Different style manuals exist not only for different countries, but even for different regions and industries within the same country. Will Starmourn be following the Chicago Manual of Style, or the Associated Press? Does it matter?
I hear alarm bells ringing. 'OK, but what's the alternative?! You can't just let everyone do whatever! We have to draw the line somewhere! IRE is a business, it has a duty to provide professional quality assurances for all items that exist in the game!'
Well first of all, as detailed above, IRE does not have the tools to provide literary quality assurance. Second of all, I would question whether it should. Who actually benefits from ensuring that all crafts follow an arbitrary set of regional (or even custom, IRE-specific) grammar rules? Are we concerned that someone may read a collective noun treated as plural and instantly have a seizure? Suffer a sudden fugue as they struggle to interpret the true meaning of the words? Are there any Americans out there who're genuinely confused as to what the word 'customisation' means? Don't get me wrong — grammar can sometimes be the crucial difference between helping your uncle jack off a horse vs. helping your uncle Jack of a horse, but what I often see outside of academic circles isn't the use of language standards as a means of providing clarity, but as a means of signalling one's socioeconomic class and asserting faux-intellectual dominance.
If IRE tells me that I'm spelling 'customisation' or 'armour' wrong, are they helping their paying customer ensure her writing is legible to herself and others? No. Honestly, they're just being irritating. I certainly don't benefit from being told that I must conform to American spelling, and I don't think anyone else does either. I don't think my preference for 's's over 'z's or my overabundance of errant 'u's is genuinely upsetting to anyone who isn't used to seeing them. IRE's business is the business of leisure and recreation; is this served by policing its players' use of the Oxford comma?
Thirdly, the idea that without the policing of language all hell would break loose is a totally false narrative. IRE doesn't police players' descriptions, nor their room/shop/housing descriptions, and for the most part these turn out to be pretty OK.
Yes, every now and then you're going to run into a snowflake human who decides to give themselves a big fluffy cat tail — but what happens next? Does theme-breaking disaster strike because staff let this slip through the cracks? No. The players around the catboi will all proceed to laugh at him. Players will take it upon themselves to police that player on their own; peer pressure is a powerful thing. The catboi may end up on a thread about bad/hilarious descriptions, where it'll be picked to pieces. In MKO, I actually did run into a newbie Moredhel elf who had an errant tail in my guild once — so what I did is let the GM know. Together, myself and the rest of the guild then convened around the newbie to ask her why she had a tail, sympathetically listening to her tail (:awesome:) of woe about being part of some scientific experiment. We let her know that we can't let her run around with a tail unfortunately, as it would bring shame to the guild, and then we RPed out a magic ritual in which we burned it off and cauterised the stump. I believe it was fun for everyone involved, including her.
That newbie actually ended up achieving leadership positions later on in the game, and the whole debacle was forgotten over time.
There's no need to be concerned that people will write awful or unthematic descriptions for their items, because nobody wants to be ridiculed. Someone will point out their spelling errors and if you grant them this ability, they'll edit it on their own once they spot them. If the item is just silly, players will laugh at them and their leaders will admonish them. Let their writing stand on its own merit; if it's bad, they're only hurting themselves.
But furthermore, and here's why Starmourn should be the first game to do away with craft approvals: Starmourn is a sci-fi game. More than any other IRE game that's ever come before, Starmourn is a game of possibilities.
It's actually not, or shouldn't be that terrible here, if a snowflake human has a cat tail. Like yeah it's dumb but in theory they could've just paid for plastic surgery or some technological enhancement. The universe is so large and is it really so terrible to imagine that some people will do some weird things? Treat them like I treat weirdos in London, where I live. Raise an eyebrow, but then smile because you just remembered you really live in a diverse, multicultural, crazy and colourful place. The beauty of London is that no one cares if you dye your hair pink or have cat-eye contacts in because it's a truly massive place. Kooks here barely get a second glance; they're weird, sure, but not totally unexpected. That should be what the Starmourn sector is like. Pink catboi with a dildo-shaped ray-gun? Weird, but OK. You've probably seen weirder.
And as for differences in spelling and grammar style? It'd honestly be weirder if across twelve player races and however many solar systems exist in the Starmourn sector, everyone follows the same style rules and spelling conventions. The Fatar and Selassian are both matriarchal; maybe from their perspective, using 'he' as a gender neutral pronoun is flat out incorrect. Maybe they always default to 'she'. Maybe my British spelling is typical of the Shen. Don't police these differences. Celebrate them.
Punitive:
- Instead of wasting staff and player time with a craft approval system, handle the more egregious errors through a penalty system. For example if I make myself a dildo-shaped ray-gun, and Starmourn has a policy against that (although to be honest I hope they don't, not because I really want a dildo-shaped ray gun, but because I like freedom of expression), the offended party who spots my shocking design can submit an issue letting staff know that Kestrel has a dildo gun in her inventory that needs to be policed.
- Staff then tracks down the source of the dildo gun, for example to whatever craft spawned it, and then either deletes or suspends the craft for correction, depending on how severe the problem is.
- Players like me who try to repeatedly flaunt certain rules (no dildo guns, no making a sword described as a twig that can't be targeted by the more obvious 'twig' noun, etc.), or repeatedly end up with suspended designs, may over time sour their reputation with the Craft Guild. This could result in losing your crafting license or having it suspended for X number of days.
- Instead of having the craft approval system be the default, have it be a penalty. So for example if I broke a serious craft rule, like disguising a sword as a twig, all my crafts now require approval until staff are satisfied that I've learned my lesson. For the first offense, you must have one craft approved before you can craft at liberty again. For the second offense, it's three. For the third offense, it's ten. And so on.
- Nobody who's enjoyed the liberty of being able to craft freely and spontaneously would want to go back to needing staff approval for their crafts. This would encourage players to follow rules, or else face consequences.
- Regularly run crafting contests. Just like other games have Bardic/Artisinal contests that reward you with an honours line, have the Craft Guild show up in your honours with a level of prestige. E.g., 'She is a respected member of the Trade Association', 'She is an initiate of the Trade Association', 'She is an exemplary member of the Trade Association', 'She sits on the High Council of the Trade Association', etc.
- Let guild/city leaders offer recognition to their orgs' top crafters and designers. Once a day, for example, let CLs review a list of new crafts that their org's citizens have created and reward ones they like best. So if I make a really cool Song Dominion uniform coat, the CL could tap that particular design with their stamp of approval.
- Provide mechanical rewards for high level of craft prestige and officially stamped designs. For example, give me, the designer, a small XP reward every time someone crafts my formally endorsed military coat. Give the person wearing my formally endorsed military coat a boost to their outfit score and diplomacy checks (if we end up having such systems). Give me a small discount on the cost of materials for being a well-recognised member of the Trade Guild, and have it scale to my rank. Respected get a 2.5% discount, exemplary get a 5% discount, celebrated get a 10% discount, etc., with a cap of 25%.
- Making bad/rule-breaking items like a twig-sword can cause you to lose some prestige in the Trade Guild.
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Comments
For real though, I do like the idea of designs being removed and approval being the default but maybe after being pushed through as an approved crafter. You may have said something similar, I don't know. I've only skimmed. But at least make sure that crafters are upholding a certain level of standard before letting them loose.
I don't know. Most of my Achaean designs encountered no problem. I do remember people getting designs rejected over particulars that seemed unnecessary though.
— Oscar Wilde
"I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before."
— Margaret Atwood
— Oscar Wilde
"I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before."
— Margaret Atwood