IP: Dungeons and Dangers

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 13:56:49 -0700
To: (humor-select)
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker () brandenburg com>
Subject: Dungeons and Dangers


Well, it's probably a mistake to break the long dry spell of this
distribution list to send something that neither attempts nor succeeds at
humor, but I thought it inciteful enough, well enough written, and relevant
enough to all things Internet to be worth passing on.


(For those not familiar with the term, MUD refers to a game, called
Multi-User Dungeon, which has become something of a paradigm for group
interaction mediated by a computer network.)


d/




Forwarded by Paul Hoffman:


Although this is aimed at MUD folk, it certainly seems to apply to some
IETF WGs. Maybe Jackie is interested. I found it on the RRE mailing list.


--Paul


People who run MUD's keep telling me variants of the same story, whose upshot
is that some user starts behaving in extremely divisive ways and starts
turning the whole place inside out.  One typical pattern is for this user to
do something outrageous, provoke a strict response, scream about injustice,
and polarize the community between lovers of order who hate the user and
lovers of fairness who hate the administration.  Another typical pattern is
people who wait until the last minute of a group decision-making process to
raise fundamental objections, carrying on about dictatorship unless everyone
starts the whole process over again from scratch.  Such people give genuine
crusaders for justice a bad name, of course, and they also cause immense and
mysterious upset.  Everybody who operates a MUD should read R.D. Hinshelwood's
book "What Happens in Groups: Psychoanalysis, the Individual and the
Community", London: Free Association Books, 1987.  It is a detailed account
of exactly this sort of behavior.  It's set in mental hospitals, of course,
as opposed to MUD's, but the principles are the same.  Bill Moyer, whose
writing on social movements I recommended in TNO 3(1), also points out that
these pathologically divisive people, who often show up in left-wing political
groups, are indistinguishable in their behavior from government provocateurs.
(Right-wing political groups, on the other hand, specialize in pathologically
aggressive people who project their aggression into the people they are
attacking, pretending that they are the ones who are being attacked.)  My own
view is that a democratic society requires everyone to recognize these sorts
of behavior, name them for what they are, and refuse to allow the principles
of fairness and democratic procedure be hijacked by divisive people.  This
is very hard.  But at the end of the day, we have to recognize that we cannot
save democracy just by making more and better rules.  It has to be something
that starts with our active concern for the community and our own boundaries.