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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39135779

遗留 SCP 行为准则确实是一项令人印象深刻的壮举。 尽管它存在一定的挑战和缺点,但它代表了开发人员的创造力和奉献精神,创造了引人入胜的叙事并为玩家提供愉快的体验。 此外,玩家拥有的地点的加入为游戏世界增添了定制和独特性的元素。 尽管最初对其实施持怀疑态度,但进一步探索揭示了错综复杂的复杂性和微妙的游戏元素。 最终,遗产 SCP 的潜力似乎很有希望,为玩家提供了深入探究其神秘宇宙的黑暗角落的机会,并有可能解开以前无法发现的秘密。 尽管在风格和语气一致性方面肯定可以做出改进,但开发团队在创造引人入胜的叙事环境方面值得赞扬。

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Improbable Island, one of the largest and longest-running online text adventures (improbableisland.com)
221 points by alentred 1 day ago | hide | past | favorite | 81 comments










I'm sure the game is good, but (not to say it's bad, just haven't had the time yet) the only part I've browsed for a significant period of time so far is the code of conduct, which I think is absolutely amazing and helped form a lot of my thinking around online communities: https://www.improbableisland.com/coc.php

Edit: HN user drewzero1 also linked a long Mastodon thread written by the admin, https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109354147264054179, which is equally critical reading. I cannot recommend both highly enough.



A few years ago the admin Dan ("Caveman Joe") wrote a massive thread [1] about what he's learned about online communities, moderation, and dealing with users in general (both good-faith and bad-faith varieties). I thought it was worth a read for anyone thinking about creating or moderating any online community. It felt kind of like a peek behind the scenes of that code of conduct.

There were some hard-earned pearls of wisdom there, and I'll have to read through it again when I have some time.

1: https://mstdn.social/@ifixcoinops/109354147264054179



Yes!! What an amazing thread. That and the CoC above should honestly be read together. I've added a link with credit.


I'd rather my CoC not try to replace a mental health advocate or psychologist.

'Appendix A' is particularly egregious.

I understand the dark patterns of psychology that an administrator should be on the look-out for; it's another thing to task the player-base with the witch hunt through explanation.

P.S. I think it's noble that you read the CoC before product usage, and I wish more people -- including myself at time -- would do that.



The CoC explicitly tells you to go see a mental health advocate or psychologist instead of taking it out on the game.

That aside, the general population absolutely must be educated on these behaviors. The admins can't be everywhere at once, and the amount of surveillance to replace players' eyes and ears would have to be enormous and the very definition of a nanny state.



Id go further and say the CoC has 0 impact. The first rule by itself is absurdly long. No one is reading that. Its not shaping anything. It’s for the writer.


Well, the writer is the community manager, so at the minimum they are reading the CoC. That in itself shapes their moderation, which shapes the community.

However, in my experience core community members will read things like this CoC, at least partially. They also be fairly involved with discussions about it, which go a long way to shape a community.



I disagree. I've never heard of this game before, but I just read the whole CoC and it made me want to give it a try.

I respect that the developer went to great lengths to outline their expectations in such clear detail. It sounds like a cool community to me.



> No one is reading that. Its not shaping anything.

That may well be the case.

But in any online community, eventually some people are going to get banned. And many people - even those who aren't getting banned - prefer it if the banning is conducted according so some sort of written document, even if they've never read that document in detail themselves.

Other online communities with far more lightweight rules are also available, for people who prefer that :)



(Un)Just In Time Code of Conducting to be even more hilariously capricious: your "ban user" button has a "reason" field that then appends that "reason" to your Code of Conduct.


In the 1000-active-user forum I managed, the small subset of ppl who feel ownership of the community (maybe 20 in my case) ABSOLUTELY read the CoC. it's a small minority, but those who read it are often prominent and engaged ppl, and they lean on it to make decisions and advocate for actions under their spheres of influence. Not everyone needs to read something in order for it to be impactful


How do you know it doesn't have an impact?


Wow, I'm the opposite. I probably sunk triple-digit hours into this game, and never bothered to interact with another soul on it. The code of conduct is great now that I'm reading it.


As you have played it, does it have player owned places/shrines which can be built via some drag drop interface? I couldn't find any more info on it except what's there on the About page.


A dissertation as CoC. Great. Impossible to read and then keep in your head. In their desperate attempt to be as inclusive as possible, they actually created a framework under which everyone will eventually become guilty of something.


The best post in that thread is the (currently) last one: https://mstdn.social/@[email protected]/10937670143...


You are not kidding! I just sent a quick note to CMJ in recognition of what I must call a sustained, exemplary act of community management.

Reading that was gratifying.

That team should feel really good about their work.



> we make our decisions based on the spirit of the rules rather than the letter

That's precisely the kind of thing that turns people off codes of conduct.

"Here are published rules, in incredible detail. They sort of resemble the real, unpublished rules that are actually used for decisions."

> Brits, please don't use the word "fag" in reference to cigarettes (or at all).

LOL. 100 y-o grannies, don't call your cat character Silky P__y

> When we started this game in 2008, our code of conduct was

Oh, that's what's what one of the ... longest running means?

That's like yesterday!

I once played EOTL for a while in the middle 1990's. Looks like that exists in some shape.

http://www.eotl.org

Still using plain telnet, and recommending TinyFugue as one of the ways of connecting it, wow. (That's what I used.)



I'm quite convinced that the person who wrote that code of conduct is entirely happy with turning people who take issue with that rule off the game - see the linked Mastodon thread and it's linked thread giving the advice about any community management to "remove the people who don't like being there", and it would seem that in this case would include turning off people who are unable or unwilling to figure out the community norms without a detailed set of explicit rules that leave them plenty of room to push past the community norms by exploiting ambiguities or loopholes.

Would you be happier about it if they didn't try to explain how they operated? Because most places mods finds way of "working around" the rules for behaviours they don't like but that may not technically violate rules. There's slack and ambiguity in any wording.



> That's precisely the kind of thing that turns people off codes of conduct.

I don't know if you've ever moderated a large community, but if you do it by the letter of any law, people will endlessly probe for loopholes and argue over edge cases. I'd imagine the wording you quoted is there to head off such issues, not because the moderator loves vagueness for it's own sake.



Seconded. I was a moderator for a subreddit with 120k readers. If you want to see what the outer limits of your rules are, enforce them as written and the community will be more than happy to show you.

It's much better to be flexible and operate case by case within some common framework. The people who look would accuse you of subjective favoritism also do it when you enforce to the letter of the rule, so you're going to get flack for it either way.



That's another of the unwritten rules of moderation, I think: You WILL get flak. There is no scenario where you get no flak. Therefore, you must not treat not getting flak as an end goal, or you might as well just turn the moderation power over to your biggest assholes and cut out the stressful process of being the middleman for their asshole decisions.

The question for a moderator is, who is giving you the flak? If it's the sort of people you don't want in your community, whoever that may be for your community, then you seem to be on the right track.

A private message to the mods from an asshole pulling every psych trick out of the book to hurt you in that private message is not a sign of failure; it is a sign of success. It can take a bit of emotional adjustment to feel that as a success and not a failure, but it's doable. The more vicious they are in that post the more they are proving you didn't want the there anyhow.



> The people who look would accuse you of subjective favoritism also do it when you enforce to the letter of the rule, so you're going to get flack for it either way.

No matter how precise the rule, it's possible for someone to make the baseless accusation that you're deliberately singling them out to apply the rule to them, while letting the behavior of others slide.



>That's precisely the kind of thing that turns people off codes of conduct.

https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/



I don't see that post as a convincing argument for codes of conduct. Indeed it's a pretty good argument for avoiding codes of conduct, e.g. the below:

> That’s why I mostly now make quasirules like “don’t be a dick” or “keep your vitriol to your own blog“. The general expectation is still clear, and it’s obvious that I reserve the right to judge individual cases — which, in the case of a small community, is going to happen anyway. Let’s face it: small communities are monarchies, not democracies.

> I do have another reason for this, which is based on another observation I’ve made of small communities. I’ve joined a few where I didn’t bother reading the rules, made some conversation, never bothered anyone, and then later discovered that I’d pretty clearly violated a rule. But no one ever pointed it out, and perhaps no one even noticed, because I wasn’t being a dick.

> So I concluded that, for a smaller community, the people who need the rules are likely to be people who you don’t want around in the first place. And “don’t be a dick” covers that just as well.



> The person didn’t break any of the rules — how dare you ban them?

Very simple: articulate new rules which cover the behavior, and publish them.

Alert the user that their former behavior is now against the rules.

Have a meta-rule that anyone who triggers the above workflow more than twice will be banned.

There is also this alternative: say that there are hidden rules that are completely unrelated to the written rules, even in "spirit". You can be removed from the community for any reason, without any explanation, by the powers that be, due to any behavior they find displeasing.



Very simple: articulate new rules which cover the behavior, and publish them.

You essentially argue for common law: an enormous corpus of precedents that is impossible to navigate without dedicated lawyers, is a pain to arbiter and still does not preclude injustice.



To continue the comparison, some of common law's shortcomings can be overcome with an entity like the UK's law commission, eg, rewriting statute (or the code of conduct) to incorporate changes based on new precedent. Which does appear to somewhat be what has happened.


Twice? Seems like that'll get argued about endlessly, at the very least.


Even if so the arguments can get settled, any agreed upon changes made, and the discussion archived. Next time someone runs into it, you have that to point to.


Why would you possibly want a contract of social norms enforced by the letter instead of the spirit? That sounds awful.


Why would you possibly want a contract of anything enforced by the spirit instead of the letter? The whole point of a contract is to be explicit, to spell things out. If you're going to enforce social norms according to their spirit (and you should!), writing out a pseudolegal code is a waste of everyone's time (and, in my experience, actively harmful to the social health of your community).


I don’t know if you’re actually looking for an answer, but after having managed a small 1,000 person community I think the “spirt of the law” makes a lot of sense. You’ll get a few community members that are great, but then they want to be helpful and will start trying to micromanage other community members. They’ll see a rule like “Please keep discussions on topic for the channel”. And then if somebody asks a question about C++ in the programming channel (instead of the C++ channel) the “helpful” member will tell the person that they’re posting their question in the wrong channel.

As the manager/moderator of a community, I appreciate that this person is just trying to help. However, having somebody disregard your question and then tell you you’re doing stuff wrong can be a major turnoff to newcomers. In this specific case, it’s against the spirit of the rules because it’s a one off scenario. Now, this rule is helpful for the members that like to post memes everywhere, or talk about school or politics or religion in random channels. For these repeat offenders, I can point to the rule and politely ask them to move the discussions to a more appropriate channel. As with all laws in even real life, the rules are great for the black and white areas, but the majority of situations are gray. And it’s in those gray situations where we can operate within the spirit of the rules rather than the letter of the law.

Edit: also, to respond to your last statement. The code of conduct is there so that moderators have something to reference to repeat offenders. It’s much easier to tell somebody they’re banned because they repeatedly broke a specific rule rather than ban somebody because of personal distaste. I don’t see how having a code of conduct could ever be harmful to a community? How would that harm a community in any way?



> The code of conduct is there so that moderators have something to reference to repeat offenders. It’s much easier to tell somebody they’re banned because they repeatedly broke a specific rule rather than ban somebody because of personal distaste. I don’t see how having a code of conduct could ever be harmful to a community? How would that harm a community in any way?

It harms the community precisely because it's easier. A moderator will ban someone they don't like, blame it on something ambiguous they twist into a code of conduct violation, other people will point out that there's a double standard because they didn't ban someone else who broke the same rule much more clearly, pretty soon allegations of discrimination are flying.... And you also get the opposite problem where a moderator won't ban someone who's doing a lot of harm to the community because "well, they technically haven't broken the rules yet...".

Actually applying human judgement and taking responsibility for it is psychologically harder, but it's vital for moderation that's actually going to work and be respected, IME. I think we're pretty much on the same page about what moderators should actually do with what you said about "grey situations" and "spirit of the rules". But if you pretend you're following a clear written code when you're actually expecting to have a lot of ambiguity and exercise personal judgement, you're creating a mismatch of expectations that causes problems (like your example of community members micromanaging each other). Better, IME to make it clear that while you may have some agreed guidelines, moderation isn't going to be according to a legal code.



> Better, IME to make it clear that while you may have some agreed guidelines, moderation isn't going to be according to a legal code.

Yes. Some would say, it’s almost like using the spirit of the rules ;)

In all seriousness, your theoretical example of why code of conduct can be harmful to a community has nothing to do with the code of conduct. It sounds like it’s just an unhealthy community with unhealthy moderators. Remove the code of conduct and the same scenario would play out. The only difference would be members crying out about how one member was banned for such a reason and another member who did the same thing wasn’t banned.

And lastly, in my community at least, it doesn’t come down to personal judgment. Unless a user is spamming or spewing racial slurs, the moderators meet and discuss whether or not the behavior of the user is ban-worthy, temp ban-worthy, or inconsequential (in the former case, the moderator who notices such abrasive action can take immediate action). This way we can at least remove some level of bias by ensuring that there’s consensus.

Who knows, my community might just be small enough and inactive enough that I haven’t run into the flaws of the code of conduct. This is all off topic anyways though, so I’ll leave it at that.



> Some would say, it’s almost like using the spirit of the rules ;)

Well, yes, but if your "rules" are intended to be applied more as sort of guidelines, then better to call them that and have everyone be on the same page.

> In all seriousness, your theoretical example of why code of conduct can be harmful to a community has nothing to do with the code of conduct. It sounds like it’s just an unhealthy community with unhealthy moderators. Remove the code of conduct and the same scenario would play out.

It's not a theoretical example, it's a real experience from a community I was part of, and the breakdown happened immediately after the code was introduced. Bad moderators will be bad with or without a code and good moderators will be good with or without a code, but in reality most moderators are somewhere in the middle, and these details can make a difference on the margin. Just like even though locks don't stop professional thieves, locking your door makes a big difference as most theft is opportunistic.

> Unless a user is spamming or spewing racial slurs, the moderators meet and discuss whether or not the behavior of the user is ban-worthy, temp ban-worthy, or inconsequential (in the former case, the moderator who notices such abrasive action can take immediate action). This way we can at least remove some level of bias by ensuring that there’s consensus.

That kind of process sounds like a good thing. IME thinking through and tuning the procedures of how you moderate is a lot more productive than spending time codifying the "what" that you think you're moderating.



I don't want my interactions online to be like a contract negotiation... or have to be litigated like one.


Because the spirit is always in conflict with itself. Humans cannot be reasoned with.

This is not even anywhere near settled either, thats why various legal experts apply multiple different interpretations of the law, which is the ultimate form of this argument.

And no, just because you say it is so, does not make it so.



To see if I could create a thoroughly well-debugged, robust set of rules that accurately distinguishes unwanted behavior, yet minimizes the amount of subjectivity.


So you're ridiculing somebody who's done the work, on the basis that you might like to attempt to solve the problem from a position of idealism?


Minimizing subjectivity, is subjective. English is lossy and interpretation is subjective. There is always going to be a spirit vs word issue, in any contract.


> Brits, please don't use the word "fag" in reference to cigarettes (or at all).

This highlights (in a small way) one of the issues with codes of conduct in an international context. A lot of things are culturally, linguistically or generationally specific.

So a code of conduct, unless it is very loose, has to pick a dominant culture that sets the rules.



LOL whoever wrote that CoC has a worse case of snowflakism than the local college reading club and a Trump rally combined, yet has the audacity to tell others to go see a therapist? That's bold.


[flagged]



Amused is the word you're looking for.


The code of conduct immediately made me realize that this place will be cliquey and run by rules lawyers who take delight in making a billion subcategories for the sake of empowering themselves to ban. I've never seen an instance where this was not the case.

Anything that needs to write paragraph after paragraph for what could be summarized in 4 to 8 rules, especially with weird, no doubt completely irrelevant to the game itself "DRUMPF GAMERGATE VACCINE" clauses on top of that, is not something anybody who values their time should involve themselves in.



Or it's a community that's successfully kept itself alive for a very long time and "simple" rules get interpreted wildly differently so over time you're naturally going to build up at lot of explicit rules around edge cases.


> Support of Gamergate, racial supremacist groups, the redpill/incel movement, or any other hate group - including, and especially, hate groups that have gained political power such as the Donald Trump administration - is a direct challenge to the lives and well-being of other players and will result in a permanent ban.

I don't know man, I don't care about your TDS, this is just eyeroll-worthy. Pure political soapboxing.



Setting boundaries or requirements for a community they manage is different from lecturing unwantedly on politics.


If a community intends to exclude certain political affiliations or classes of people, I’d want to know about it up front.


That's a shame. I thought this much was progressive:

> Do not roleplay racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise bigoted characters in public-facing or semi-public areas (emphasis mine)

Too good to be true?

> hate groups that have gained political power such as the Donald Trump administration

That's not a hate group, that's the other half of the entire country that doesn't toe your party's line.

And it'll probably happen again because this sort of sophistry has made life an insufferable pain in the ass.

Like or hate Bush/Clinton/Obama, nobody was kicking you out of a community because of your political affiliation. I miss the inclusiveness of the 90s.



> That's not a hate group, that's the other half of the entire country

We have historical evidence from many countries that those need not be mutually exclusive categories.



So why add the unnecessary category?


The CoC doesn't ban supporters of specific political agenda or party line but it is a banned topic. Anyone who's been on the internet in the past few years knows how passionate these supporters can get. That's a magnet for heated political discussion that very quickly gets uncomfortable for everyone else. It's impossible to be inclusive to certain minority groups while allowing promotion of politics directly against them.


> Like or hate Bush/Clinton/Obama, nobody was kicking you out of a community because of your political affiliation. I miss the inclusiveness of the 90s.

The 1990s weren't more inclusive, quite the opposite. But the groups you are talking about just all at least tried to work with the community. They actively sought out common ground and were willing to compromise. Today's populists, e.g. Trump, say the aforementioned community is not the real community, they are all crooks, or pests, and in fact only the populists and their followers are the real community and everybody else is the enemy and needs to be locked up, denied citizenship, or be exterminated. There can't be compromise. It is a big part of their sales pitch.

Witness how so called moderate Republicans are treated -- you know, the ones who seek to work within the community and are willing to compromise -- they call them RINO "Republican In Name Only", i.e. they are not _real_ Republicans. There are more examples you are probably aware of. I, for one, can see how this makes it really hard for all involved to find some common ground to work together, don't you?



they really listed "Gamergate" before "racial supremacist groups" lmao


I mean, it's not particularly surprising that it's a lot easier to manage a community if you just find every political split point, pick a side and then remove the people on the other side.

I think we used to call that sort of thing "gatekeeping"?



Gatekeeping is about group identity. You’re not a real A unless you x, y, z.

Choosing who you let in to your spaces based on criteria you choose is just the normal thing to do.



I don't think that's how the term has been actually used so far.


It's how I see it used.

There's even a large subreddit dedicated to pointing out and mocking gatekeeping and they pretty much all fit that definition.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gatekeeping/



Of all the things you could label as gatekeeping, I don't feel that excluding hate groups is one of them. We should never be tolerant of the intolerant, otherwise intolerance wins.


The game's wiki is amazing! It cleverly manages to avoid excessive spoilers while staying (mostly) useful by mandating that 20% of all content must be lies!


thats.... actually incredible? I think more game wikis should strive to something like that. Whole genres of games have been irrevocably changed by omniscience.


This is cool. I really enjoyed choose-your-own-adventure books when I was a kid a long time ago, part of the fun being that as you were flipping to the page you were supposed to go to, you'd come across wild sections of text you hadn't quite visited, and it became a game to see if you could navigate all possible paths of the book. The really clever ones would have tantalizing pages that were unreachable paths just to frustrate you, or would trap you in infinite loops.


A while back, I had multiple people respond to my support request, with impeccable results, no back and fourth responding to automated messages. Which easily puts the game well above the bar set by many others.


I've never seen this before but I instantly love it! It has real Kingdom of Loathing vibes for me.


KoL really scratched an itch for me for many years. It's too much of a time sink for me these days (I've replaced it with other time sinks...), but the studios newer single player games are quite fun with the same charm!


My main complaint - choice buttons extend faaar too far to the right

I'm clicking the website to be sure it's in focus, but keep choosing an action



Was this maybe meant to be a link to the "What even is this website, please help me" in the bottom right? (Which it doesn't seem to be possible to hyperlink to).. as it is this just throws you into.. that mess.


Throwing you directly into the mess is completely intentional


Tried it, didn't like the feel of it.

Text adventures are wildly different from one to another and personal taste. This one didn't grab me.



Is this a MUD? Can it be accessed through telnet or a MUD client?


No, it's a text adventure, an RPG, online, in a browser.


Some basic searching says this is based on an even older game called Legend of the Green Dragon. Looks kinda cool honestly. Anyone know if the writing is okay?


You can try the game without logging in.

The writing reads like tolerable fanfiction, so it's not stellar, but cringe moments and needless cussing are still present to some degree.

As someone who used to write room descriptions on MUDs, I can say I I remarkably difficult to strike a balance between immersive writing and functional prose that English speaking persons of different comprehension levels can engage with. We also had to be mindful of screen readers for sight-impared players, the idea being keep your descriptions informative and short without being boring.

I'm not a big fan of Impossible Islands writing, but they have my respect for it because it is quite the task to please an audience like that.



It talks about building your own shrine as a player owned place using some drag drop interface but I can not find any more info on that. Not in the wiki or image search on Google.


From what I can tell 'shrine' is being used metaphorically to describe a player 'Place', and the drag-drop part might be a Place Program? There's not a lot of documentation without jumping in.

I haven't played but I've read way too much about it since following Dan on Masto/Fediverse. Someday if I ever have time and bandwidth again I've really got to get on there.



Does anybody know what the total word count is?


No.


Anyone hook this up with a GAN yet to keep it peaceful yet make it visual?

Plus translations.



I really just deeply do not care about the code of conduct but the game seems cool. I mean, the writing is very bad, but the thing's got spirit


amazing.






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