[arg_discuss] Deception and what it means to be Real

[Andrea Phillips]

It seems to me that this is a type of problem we'll always grapple
with, and it comes in a lot of different forms: Is it a fiction, is it
a hoax, is it both?

And there are so many places where we can run foul of that line, on
purpose or not so much. Some people will think the whole game is
really real, which makes it a hoax; some people will only stumble on a
piece of the game and think it's real. (In Routes, we were very
cautious about the pharma company websites we were making, in case a
real person with, say, Parkinson's, might think that the drug company
and its 'clinical trials' were real.) What's a hoax and what's a
fiction can depend an awful lot on context, and not everybody has the
same context.

Martin hits into the undesirable "hoax" end of that spectrum because
there was no visible fiction in process; there simply was no context,
whether you were looking for it or not. As others have said, you just
didn't know you were entering a play space when you were talking to
him, and that's not cool.

There's actually a flip side to this, too -- for Routes, there was a
player on Unfiction who posted an entirely fictitious interaction with
our characters. Private email we never sent at all! It didn't really
harm the direction of the story, but it made me realize how vulnerable
both we and the players are to that kind of intentional deception.
Obviously we couldn't post to the Unforums to contradict it, and I'm
not sure if there's a mechanism to deal with this sort of thing in
place in the moderation setup... especially when, for many games, you
can never really be sure who the PMs really are.

We're going to keep throwing ourselves at that line, again and again.
It's just a risk of the trade, the way football players get
concussions and runners get busted knees.

-- 
Andrea Phillips
http://www.deusexmachinatio.com
Words * Culture * Interaction