Choice

As an aside to the now THREE daily regular readers- I promised posting my story of the Sa-Ta-Tor. That will unfortunately be postponed indefinitely until I figure out what to do with it. Either the roleplay is dead and I need to reconcile my ideal vision of the story with what I have...or I wait until (if ever) it starts up again. Luckily, such projects need no deadlines. They get done when it is time to finish them. Eventually, I'll make a decision but not now. So it will wait in storage as a series of blog drafts, waiting to be published.

I probably did a blog post about this earlier. If I did, who cares? Here it goes again.

Compare these two videos:





In the first talk, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates why choice is a good thing: the more choices you have, the better chance you have at getting something you genuinely want. In the second video, Barry Schwartz demonstrates that infinite choice creates an information crisis: while you get exactly what you want, the cost it took to make the decision actually exceeds the benefit so you're overall WORSE off than you were before.

So why this topic?

Choice creates two sets of problems that interact with one another: why you roleplay and how you achieve that goal.

To create a Gorean community, much attention needs to be placed on the environment. SL, as a program, gives the creator a lot of choice in terms of creating the most authentic environment: build a Mediterranean city, Victorian style, inland city empire, coastal island, whatever. If someone can conceive of it, it can be built. The same goes with clothes, characters and everything else needed to build a Gorean community: SL provides infinite choice so it's absolutely possible to build the "perfect" Gorean community that a person wants.

The problem is that richly detailed environment makes it prohibitively expensive to play that environment. If you want to create an authentic Torvsland sim, you need to have people that fundamentally understand the nuances of a Torvie culture. People have to promote stories and characters that fit within that niche, instead of the generic Gorean man. And this isn't just one person. EVERY person that plays in that environment has to meet some threshold of immersion or else...the detail, nuance and sophistication is lost. Just walk into a scene where someone says, "Hi lulz. I iz Gorean. U r slave?" The mood is instantly broken. So, to keep that level of immersion, the sim has to create a whole rule set and create a system that approves people into the sim ("You must be THIS Gorean to roleplay here"). The more rules a sim has, the more time is needed to learn and understand those rules. More moderators are needed to keep the sim faithful to those rule sets. The more authentic the picture, the more people and time are needed. To actually extract the benefit of getting what you want, you have to pour in a lot of effort that you didn't think was needed. As Barry Schwartz points out, to get to the level of choice that makes you happy, you're worse off in a situation where there was no choice.

And that's a fundamental unsolvable problem for any online roleplay community: roleplay is supposed to be a diversion, not a job. But to get that deeply immersive and rich element, it's prohibitively expensive. Lots of lots of time and effort must be spent. Is it worth spending all that time and effort on what's supposed to be a game? Some people answer this question by making it personal: they use the game to find themselves a suitable real life mate. By raising the stakes, the effort is worth it (people will do a lot for love vs. just fun). Some people compromise their standards so that the benefit exceeds the effort. Most people, though, answer this question by simply just walking away.