In this video...

DestinyCall · 2020-04-17 15:45:02

Griefing is a system-level issue, like cheating or bot-use. It is not an in-world challenge, but rather a meta-problem created by players who are intentionally subverting the game field and playing by a different set of rules. Expecting the playerbase to "deal with" the griefer problem on their own, instead of addressing this problem at the administrator level is not appropriate.

It would be equivalent to expecting regular users in a forum to deal with trolls and spammers by themselves without involving forum moderators. We have the tools to talk to each other, argue, and debate. But if someone starts intentionally abusing the forums in a way that ruins everyone else's ability to communicate or targets vulnerable users, we lack the tools to respond appropriately. That user is the source of problem and they can continue to disrupt normal conversation for as long as they want, if the mods do nothing to stop them. You can argue with a troll, but you can't win an arguement with a real troll, because he isn't really arguing with you, he is baiting. You can't use words to fight a spammer, because a spammer isn't debating, he is flooding.
Words are their weapons and words alone will not stop them.

In the same way, griefers are not playing the same game as everyone else. Property fencing, village guards, prisons, and other ideas for "in-game policing" are largely ineffective.
Killing is essentially useless. It moves them around, but does not stop them from having "fun" in other villages. Cursing is more useful, since it acts as a soft ban. But the curse system has limitations and flaws. It reduces the problem, but is a poor substitute for real moderation.

Ultimately, moderation is a necessary part of any online community or game. And it needs to come from someone in a position of authority. Expecting players to "self-moderate" by using tools that are equally distributed to all players is a pipe dream. It is a flawed system that was designed to fail.

Spoonwood · 2020-04-17 16:13:54

DestinyCall wrote:

Griefing is a system-level issue, like cheating or bot-use. It is not an in-world challenge, but rather a meta-problem created by players who are intentionally subverting the game field and playing by a different set of rules. Expecting the playerbase to "deal with" the griefer problem on their own, instead of addressing this problem at the administrator level is not appropriate.

I don't disagree. I will point out though that Jason said this before:

jasonrohrer wrote:

Regarding "the spirit of the game," the only spirit present is what is embodied by the mechanics themselves. Playing "against the spirit" of Chess or Go is impossible, despite what some people have said in the past when people employed "perverse" strategies.

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues/529

Like Jason could be consistent, if he just dismissed such murdering as griefing. Like he could say that playing against the spirit of the game was impossible and get rid of all the advertisements as this a game about parenting and civilization building, and the game just ends up as about being about whatever players do in game (the game also wouldn't be about Jason's or anyone else's "vision" in such a case). But, he doesn't do that, and I find it hard to conceive of anyone accepting all the consequences of what it means for this game or other games like Chess to have no spirit which it's impossible to play against. As if someone just moving pieces around not trying to win or draw plays chess.

jasonrohrer wrote:

In the same way, griefers are not playing the same game as everyone else.

For clarification, if I understand correctly, griefers have different goals than everyone else. In this way, the goals of a game in part define it. And if game X has different goals than game Y, then game X and game Y are NOT the same game.

Crumpaloo · 2020-04-17 16:28:54

Game design dictates player behavior, if the players are or arent doing something you did not expect, thats the fault of the game, not that of the players themselves. For example, the present killing system, it dictate player behavior by encouraging through game design that people get in parties of 3 and go on uninterrupted killing sprees, the video proves just as much.

The tools you have given us to fix this problem in your eyes dont work with the current status of the game, as such if we are to fix this as players we need to be given better ones so that we can.

Last edited by Crumpaloo (2020-04-17 16:30:33)

Dodge · 2020-04-17 17:02:27

Crumpaloo wrote:

Game design dictates player behavior, if the players are or arent doing something you did not expect, thats the fault of the game, not that of the players themselves.

This.

You keep telling players to make fences but there's a reason they dont make them and you dont seem to understand that.

It doesn't make sense to make fences in the current game and griefers are not part of the game and not a reason to make fences.

When a player gets born in a family he's not thinking "i should make a fence to avoid my family getting randomly murdered for no absolute reason"

Why would players kill each other?

...

Exactly there is no reason for them to do that, by consequent there is no reason to protect them using fences.

Same goes for protecting the engine with a fence, it's your own family members why would you not trust them to not destroy the only water/iron source, they have no reason to do that, so players have no reason to protect it.

You can get mad as much as you want at players for not using fences but they only play the game you are making and if they dont make fences it's because the game is the way it is.

The only way to change player behaviour is by changing the game.

tobiasisahawk · 2020-04-17 17:14:38

Easy fix, once you kill someone it no longer takes a posse to kill you and you can't be healed if killed. Boom, problem solved. Why go through all the effort to meet up in a town if you'll only get to kill a couple players? Besides murderers are the least of our problems. Bobo took out a single town using a gang of three people? Meanwhile there were significantly worse griefs happening yesterday that I don't want to mention where Bobo reads lest he actually learns how to grief effectively.

DestinyCall · 2020-04-17 17:20:34

Jason has said many things about OHOL over the years. He isn't always right, even if he believes what he is saying at the time.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Regarding "the spirit of the game," the only spirit present is what is embodied by the mechanics themselves. Playing "against the spirit" of Chess or Go is impossible, despite what some people have said in the past when people employed "perverse" strategies.

In regards to griefing, it is tricky to draw real world parallels to griefing behavior in on-line games, because the veil of anonymity provided by on-line interactions is a key component. This lack of accountability allows "bad faith" players to act against social norms without significant repercussions. They know they are doing "wrong" and upsetting the status quo, but they also know that they can get away with their virtual crimes without real consequences. It provides the thrill of risk-taking and rule-breaking without the self-endangerment and long-term problems that would haunt you if you broke the social contract in the physical world. Like riding a roller coaster, it is a "safe" thrill and the people you hurt are far enough away that their pain doesn't touch you.

With that in mind, can you grief a game of Chess? What would that even look like? If you place your pieces in the wrong spot, your opponent will immediately notice and call you out for breaking the rules. If you are sneaky, you might try moving the pieces around when he is not looking. There is danger of discovery, but if you are fast and clever, you can do it. But that isn't actually griefing. That's just cheating. You are moving pieces around so you can win. You are bending the rules, maybe even breaking them, but you are still playing the same game. So how do you grief a game of Chess?

A griefer isn't the player who cheats in order to win. The griefer is the player who flips the table over, so he can't lose. You could put the table back and return the chess pieces to their previous locations, so the game can continue ... but you can't keep play a game of Chess with someone who will toss the board off the table whenever he wants to shake things up. Have you ever tried playing a game of Chess with a three year old? It is an exercise in futility. You can't reason with them and you can't convince them to stick to the legal moves. They are a force unto themselves.

A game of Chess requires two players willing to play by the same set of rules. There are various assumptions that we make without even realizing it. We assume that both players understand and follow the rules of the game. We assume that neither player will cheat or intentionally sabotage each other or themselves. We assume that both players WANT to win and will make every effort to succeed. If one player goes into the game with the singular goal of pissing off his opponent at any costs, he isn't playing Chess. He is using Chess as a medium for playing a different game entirely. Whether he wins or loses or flips the table, it doesn't matter, because winning a game of Chess was never his objective.

...

Jason might not believe that OHOL has a "spirit" or specific goal, but his design choices say otherwise. He wants us to care about our village and our family. He wants us to try to survive and ensure that our lineages survive for a long time. He wants us to progress up the tech tree ... to upgrade our wells ... to mine for iron ... to dig for oil. These are all things that the game assumes that we as players want to do in order to achieve the unwritten goals of the game. Every game has goals, even an open sandbox game like Minecraft has implicit goals of exploration, crafting, and construction. A game like Don't Starve has the goal of not starving, but it also has the goal of exploring the world, overcoming bosses, gaining rare items, progressing through the tech tree and more. A game like Oxygen Not Included has the basic goal of survival, but it also has the goal of achieving sustainability, improving efficiency, colony management, and much more.

The goal of OHOL is definitely not personal survival. One life lasts just one hour. It doesn't really matter that much in the grand scheme of things. But the life of the village matters quite a bit. It is a player's true legacy. Something that can be passed down from generation to generation. You can nurture a small village and watch it grow into a bustling city. That desire to watch your village thrive is at the heart of this game and a big part of what brings me back to it, again and again. You don't get that same feeling by playing on a low-pop server and building a huge solo camp by yourself. The magic of OHOL comes alive when you are working in coordination with strangers to form a true community.

But if that is the spirit of OHOL, then it is absolutely possible for players to work AGAINST the spirit of the game. And we call those people "assholes" ... or griefers. Whatever.

Karrots · 2020-04-17 17:31:02

jasonrohrer wrote:

The griefer team has something like 3 knives, and some arrows.
Where did they get 3 knives at such a young age?
This town is not following rule #2 from California's Weapon Safety Handbook: keep weapons under lock and key to prevent unauthorized access.

Those players did nothing wrong by not hiding the weapons.

Let's look at it this way: weapons are tools. We use the bow to hunt and the knife for cutting bread, mangoes, pork and sheep. Knife is also functionally a spare flint. It would be foolish to waste iron that we desperately need (thanks for that, J man) on locks.

I'd also like to remind you we don't know who to trust. Our leaders at the moment are just the successful mothers, as we automatically follow our parents. This tends to work out because the mothers who are experienced enough to become leaders and the children experienced enough to survive can coordinate.

It's natural selection, and while imperfect, leaves the town with a working system with some luck.

One of the many imperfections is that the system isn't based on trust. You don't really know who to pass things on to. Here are a couple of ways hiding things can go wrong:

You hide the bow and knives?
a. You die without telling anyone, and they are lost. The village suffers without the tools.
b. They are found by someone else, and you don't know where they are or how to get them back. They don't resurface and the village suffers without the tools.
c. They are found by someone else, and are used for murder. Whoops.
d. You tell someone trustworthy and they betray you and either hide or murder with them. Whoops.

And even if you find someone trustworthy and tell them where the weapons are, it is inevitable that somewhere on the line of pass me downs one of the above happens. Or worse. And all the while the village needs the tools and can't find them because they're hidden, slowing down production.

So the superior option most villages go with is knife in bp. The people that need knives will have them in a pocket or bag, and use them when they need them. Same problem as before. They will eventually end up in the wrong hands over generations and there's nothing you can do about it. No matter what method you choose, the overarching problem remains.

You can't manage things over long-term.

So, just don't hide things. Easy. Leave the knife in the kitchen, and some people keep personal knives. When there's trouble, the griefers can easily acquire weapons but so can you. And as long as one person has a weapon we can fight back with "I join you."

Coconut Fruit · 2020-04-17 17:41:58

Would be cool to have something like overwatch in cs go. People who reached gobal elite rank can watch replays of people who have been reported by other players. Then after watching the replay they decide whether the player actually cheated or not and should be banned or not. We could deal with griefers the same way instead of cursing them if we had similar system.

In real world we would just put people that don't follow the rules to prisons. Yeah, we don't have written rules here in OHOL what can be done and what can't, but if majority decided to put a player to jail for a certain amount of time, that means that player deserved it... Democracy

Spoonwood · 2020-04-17 17:51:11

DestinyCall wrote:

With that in mind, can you grief a game of Chess? What would that even look like? If you place your pieces in the wrong spot, your opponent will immediately notice and call you out for breaking the rules. If you are sneaky, you might try moving the pieces around when he is not looking. There is danger of discovery, but if you are fast and clever, you can do it. But that isn't actually griefing. That's just cheating. You are moving pieces around so you can win.

The rules of chess don't enforce players playing with the objective to win or draw.

Thus, some examples of griefing chess would be to resign early on, even so far as your first move, even though you know that you could win or draw (of course... if someone resigns because of something else in real life, that might not be griefing, but setting out to play that way and then doing so would be griefing). Or someone *deliberately* moving pieces around just to see how the other player reacts, or trying to upset them. I would guess that experienced chess players have seen some other players do this before, and suspicion of some people doing such may be one reason why grandmasters will sometimes just not play with people, because they don't want to become suspicious of people playing not to win or draw.

Also, if I recall correctly, Magnus Carlsen recently appeared to deliberately play to draw every match of the world chess championship (before it went to a more blitz mode run-off). I wouldn't say that playing to draw in chess is griefing. But, moving pieces around not trying to win or draw, once one understands it's rules, I would consider griefing.

DestinyCall wrote:

If one player goes into the game with the singular goal of pissing off his opponent at any costs, he isn't playing Chess. He is using Chess as a medium for playing a different game entirely.

Yes, I agree.

DestinyCall wrote:

A game like Oxygen Not Included has the basic goal of survival, but it also has the goal of achieving sustainability, improving efficiency, colony management, and much more.

Since Oxygen Not Included gotten released, it's had hard-coded goals, which you can find by checking the printing pod. Before that, alright, it had implicit goals, but now it has explicit goals.

Melea · 2020-04-17 17:58:45

tobiasisahawk wrote:

Easy fix, once you kill someone it no longer takes a posse to kill you and you can't be healed if killed. Boom, problem solved.

Good idea. If the posse system is meant to be mob 'justice' (by needing a certain number of people to allow a killing), then it ends up implying that the other villagers passively interfere with or otherwise don't permit non-mob-approved killings.

Being able to solo kill someone who killed another player (recently?) would just imply that the villagers aren't willing to interfere with a revenge/justice killing of a killer. Which works pretty well from a roleplaying view.

And from a non-roleplaying view, it's still a good way to get rid of griefer murder groups before they can chew through an entire town population. A few will die, but then one or two 'town guards' could handle getting rid of the killers.

Locking up all the knives isn't a viable strategy as others have mentioned - knives are absolutely necessary tools for town survival. Since knives are tools that get used often, and since most murder-griefers are in your own family, eventually they'll get access.

DrChef · 2020-04-17 19:34:18

jasonrohrer wrote:

But every time I patch another one of these "holes" for you.... holes that you have the tools and power to patch yourselves.... I feel....

We still need more organizational mechanics and technology to be empowered to do these things. While it is possible for dedicated leaders to organize and have everything properly locked up, time and speech are limited by basic survival, and maintaining a coherent system even in a thriving city is difficult without trust, permanence of law/social rules, way to communicate long term and without speaking directly. We need mechanics that support fast communication of what to do and who to trust, especially during the breakdown in communication when murders and justice happen. Hierarchy and orders are great because they provide additional power to communicate for a mid level city, while posses can organize violence at any level. There needs to be more communication abstractions that represent how much one would know about the happenings in town without speaking, like our ability to know when related babies are born, or a murder has happened off screen.

For communication by leadership and the community:

-creating royal decrees to break nearby gates and fences quickly. This could be restricted to just the birth location (Government enforces the concept of private property)

-Visual identification of anyone labeled as 'sentenced to death', a 'criminal' ('we've all been warned of this enemy of the state skulking about')
-criminals are more easily targeted by posses of the civ they are sentenced to death in

-exiled or criminal players have a slight mechanical disadvantage in leader's territory (speed, hunger, etc 'they are generally not welcome in the community').

-low level leaders can allocate player generated titles or from a list. Or we get a title from marking it from a job board, or based on the tools slots we've used. Metalworker Baroness Hope Diamond starts to get clunky though

Giving leaders more power is ripe for abuse obviously, and most players already will not trust leaders even if our mothers followed them. This is also partly because the hierarchy powers are not powerful enough to make them truly useful. By late game, it should be just so much more efficient to have leaders that it only makes sense to use the system, if only for job hunting and raid alerts, but we are not there yet.

To increase trust:

+1 for blessings as a possible incentive/assurance, and we should know how many blessings our villagers have given to our current leader.

-Anything to be able to see the confidence of your peers in your leader, or the number of allies that have cursed or unfollowed a leader.

-The powers of leaders are not automatically given, and must be voted upon by a number of players when adding or removing powers to a certain level.

-Being ousted as a leader should put you in a dangerous/debuffed position to prevent retribution for ousted leaders and to incentivise being a good leader

-I personally would like to be able to craft a constitution as mid/advanced tech, or some kind of law menu. It could have basic options for types of government, and the privileges leaders get to have. This way the government is generally in the player's hands, and they have proper tools to make a society. Or if we want leaders to potentially be able to act in times of crisis, they can still do all special commands, but all followers are alerted when a monarch uses a command when it is not legal for them.

This could be implemented in many different ways, including just with commands and laws/government type shown in the ui. A craftable object makes government somewhat more permanent, and gives future players a scaffold when the city dies out, creating a possibility for a city culture to develop and last. This is important for trust, because players will usually see a city more than once, and some consistency in governance adds legitimacy to the meta that settles. Still voting should be its own menu just to make community decisions faster and not dependent on who or what object is near you.

Other communication tech solutions that have been proposed before:

-Books, helpful for recording laws if there is no abstract mechanic for law. It would also make teaching more enjoyable, shifting the focus from typing recipes to directing learners where to go in that specific town and tips and etiquette about consumption/citizenship. Once veteran players make a few decent textbooks, schools for newbies can last without immense effort. This is incredibly important because new players' ignorance about certain mechanics like posse, make raids more dangerous, and you need people to know it beforehand to be effective at all.

-Advanced sign-making that is faster, and can hold more text like a way stone.

-For early game camps, a low tech sign that degrades could help show what builders are planning, encouraging help from others if its useful or fun, and quickly establishes a panic room.

-Mark a direction or symbols on a tree with a knife to direct yourself and others, degrades half hour

-Job boards, maybe only leaders can write on, that way leaders can drop a quick order that jobs are up on the board and not spam their citizens, leading to more 'organizer' leadership than tyrant.

Hoax · 2020-04-18 07:13:56

I very very rarely ever see someone play the role of Security, even though it's one of the most important roles in any functioning society of any size. Every life where I've seen a couple guards the town is safe. This shit is getting way too complicated

tobiasisahawk · 2020-04-18 07:31:30

Guards don't work. You need a posse too kill.

One Hour One Life Forums

#26 2020-04-17 15:45:02

Re: In this video...

#27 2020-04-17 16:13:54

Re: In this video...

#28 2020-04-17 16:28:54

Re: In this video...

#29 2020-04-17 17:02:27

Re: In this video...

#30 2020-04-17 17:14:38

Re: In this video...

#31 2020-04-17 17:20:34

Re: In this video...

#32 2020-04-17 17:31:02

Re: In this video...

#33 2020-04-17 17:41:58

Re: In this video...

#34 2020-04-17 17:51:11

Re: In this video...

#35 2020-04-17 17:58:45

Re: In this video...

#36 2020-04-17 19:34:18

Re: In this video...

#37 2020-04-18 07:13:56

Re: In this video...

#38 2020-04-18 07:31:30

Re: In this video...

Board footer