hurricane Helene didn't get me

[bvanevery]

I have one life to live.  The work is more important than the money.  I always thought that if I stuck to what I wanted to do, the money would follow somehow.  As I've gotten older, I've realized that doesn't have to be true.  But it certainly won't make me give up what I intend to do.

The more partners you take on, the more "voting rights" you give other people to torpedo your efforts.  For instance, writing better AI for 4X games.  You take on even one partner who doesn't totally share that view, you'll be in some squabbling match about limited resources and what must be done to survive as a project / studio.  You take on two, and you'll be outvoted.  The vision dies.

I know why AI in most 4X games is substandard.  I know the structural development / production reasons it happens.  It's all about who's in charge, who has the real power in a game project.  AI people generally do not.  They chase after what game designers, artists, and producers want.  Which is MOAR, to make more money on gewgaws.  99% of the game industry runs on this model.  That may be a bit generous, to say that there's even 1% dissent.

[Buster's Uncle]

[ninja'd - I agree, though, and it doesn't change the following]

-And of course, I can speak to the community-building/PR parts and how forums work with considerable proven authority - that's the part that sucked me in, as I don't get to Talk Shop about my main life/hobby nearly enough to suit me.  That's what I'm trying to do here, and it's complex, the components of that.  I hope you're listening to everything - the personal stuff, only you can control, and we needn't necessarily belabor it.

Mangement style and Leadership, I talk a lot about, not just in public, but to whatever ephemeral staff I've empowered over the years -mostly ephemeral because the natural member attrition factors, only one outright failure to teach- as the way that works for me and how I like things done in my place.  I look for people who aren't entirely comfortable telling anyone what to do -I really do- which is also me.  The failure was personality wrong for the job, my mistake.  It's complicated...

[Buster's Uncle]

Lorne Michaels has said he made what he liked, creating Saturday Night Live and his audience, luckily, found him.  I've seen other successful showbiz producers say the same since; you're not wrong.

-Just, it's complicated...

[bvanevery]

Hmm you have made me realize, if I were to someday succeed with the democratic forum software and community ambition, I would inevitably be having to train a moderator cadre.  But I think I'll cross that bridge when / if I ever get there.  It's not exactly the same thing as a business partnership.  If you are a site owner, there's an inherent power imbalance between yourself and people who moderate the community.  You can lose moderators and you'll still have the site.  The loss of moderators might be a bad impact, causing you to hemorrhage users.  Or it might solve problems and stop a bleeding!  It just depends on why they had to go.

I actually wrote Constitutions for the International Game Developers Association's nascent Game Design SIG and Indie SIG, back in the day.  They contained a mechanism for due process and redress.  I got the memberships to pass these Constitutions by a 2/3rds supermajority, with a quorum.  The ratification was very much in the style of old Usenet newsgroup hierarchy changes, another thing I did big work on a long time ago.  I've been a Newsgroup Proponent for a major hierarchy reshuffle, if that means anything to you.

Unfortunately, a fair chunk of the "citizenry" was participating in a sort of bored duress.  They didn't really believe in what I'd crafted.  I'm not sure why they went through the motions anyways, as the point of a supermajority, is to destroy proposals that people don't actually want.  Governance is only ultimately as good as the people though.

Some "command and control" business types quickly asserted themselves and jettisoned myself and others out of the IGDA.  I wasn't a paying member at that point, which wasn't against protocols.  There were widespread issues in their forums, and the organization's direction.  Withholding payment was an effort to gain leverage, to extract a reasonable attempt at straightening things out.  That didn't happen; broadly speaking, I think the "command and control" crowd took over.

I got a rude shock that the game industry is not composed of people with grassroots community values experience.  They aren't political activists, or trying to make a good neighborhood.  Experiences in organizations like the Fremont Arts Council in Seattle, were not applicable here.  Frankly in hindsight, the show was run by capitalist pigs with extremely abusive labor practices.

It was a huge career disappointment and I washed my hands of it.  It made me a sadder and wiser man.

I didn't know back then that I was trying to be a union organizer, and just didn't know it.  Nobody talked about unions in the game industry back then.  They did talk about Quality of Life issues, and those "command and control" types would always push back on it.

[Buster's Uncle]

I have some experiences with that impulse to democracy in forum management.  Someone I trusted, and someone I came to very much not trust, made a pushy push, which I found profoundly insulting.  I appointed one of them to the Co-chairmanship of the rules committee, to the sound of crickets.  Yeah; if you're not interested in doing any of the work, especially the work you don't want to do, you shut the hell up about taking over my job in any way; seriously.

Which is to say, I got cause to think hard about it a long time ago, and forums just don't work as democracies.  Period.  I observe a lot of the forms -we live and die on member happiness- but SOMEbody has to make those decisions about what people want, and make them work, and Benevolent Despotism is the only way - I've always been open about that.  Read my current user title again.

The one I trusted has since said that he was wrong - it can't work w/o member interest, which wasn't there.

-Unions are a different matter, of course, by their basic philosophical nature; being otherwise would be like drawing up a constitution for an anarchists club and appointing a sergeant at arms to enforce the rules...

[bvanevery]

I've been influenced a bit by Syndicalist thinking.  Some of them recognize the historical mistakes of avoiding engaging the Spanish government, back when the anarchists actually had some power on the ground.  I don't recall all the details and I hope I'm not butchering time periods, but I think the Fascists ultimately clobbered them all.

Broadly speaking, that would be a story about praxis.

A long time ago, I had a gamedesign-l on the Yahoo! groups.  It was a reaction specifically to the toxicity of the Usenet groups I'd helped build.  All posts were moderated, and moderators were not allowed to approve their own posts.  We had a co-moderator system of 4 moderators, myself included as the listowner.  We only had a slight scuffle once about my power imbalance, the one time I banned someone.  But he did tell me to #### off twice in no uncertain terms, and I did turn the cheek the 1st time, asking if this is what he really meant and wanted.  He did, so he had to go.  No moderator anywhere has to put up with that.  I said so and laid down the law about it.  I think it stuck because really, who can argue against it?

I run r/GamedesignLounge on the same basis.  Premoderated like old Usenet groups, not postmoderated like most forums.  When someone is allowed to utter their nasty words, damage has already been done.  I've had very little traffic in my sub, so my current system hasn't been stress tested.  I can't even remember if I actually banned anyone.  If I did, I know it was only 1 person, and they were the same kind of deliberately unpleasant foul in your face type.  No misunderstanding about what or why they were doing it, it was about them.

[Buster's Uncle]

Swear policy is a good example - comes up every once in a while, people not taking no for an answer, and I'm not very flexible.

I'm trying to run a place, this is actual AC2 policy, that I will not be ashamed if my Momma looks in.  She doesn't, but that's not the point - it's a reasonable standard for adult public speech; watch your dirty mouth as just being civil to the prudes, who are people, too.  There are business reasons, also, but it's really about not being ashamed of y'all.  I allow some words that aren't in the filter, but don't wear them out, thanks.

That one would never work in a democracy.  Our generation cusses - the classy decent ones, only in private.

[bvanevery]

I think you mean, wouldn't work in an online democracy.  I think in a face-to-face city hall meeting, you can be ejected for profanity or obscene speech.  I'm not sure about this in practice, as I've not attended a lot of official government public meetings.  But they do have bailiffs with actual weapons, authorized by law to haul you out of there.

On the other hand, there are some traditions of attendees being armed, with open carry.  Perhaps you don't get to remove people, in such circumstances.  Perhaps you think twice about laying hands on anyone, or drawing weapons.  Perhaps people are generally less unruly.

But I do know of some specific historical incidents, where it went badly.  Think it was some session of Congress in the pre Civil War era, where some Southern gentleman beat some other man savagely, maybe using a cane, over some slight or matter of honor.  And I think such a matter of honor, may not have been seen as unusual or aberrant in the period.  I forget the details.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Diet makes news with everyone fistfighting each other, every decade or so. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Yes; online democracy.  -And I agree with all you say.

The gun nuts like to say that an armed society is a polite society - and that's true until it isn't and people get shot.  They got nothin', then.  <- Except it ain't really funny, is it?

[bvanevery]

It turns out the origin of that phrase is from a work of fiction.  I didn't know that until recently.  I read an essay breaking down the narrative into an imagined set of ideals, rather than anything anyone's actually been observing in real life.  It's like listening to someone quote scripture.  They want things to work that way, and they invest a lot of energy pretending that it's causal.

[Buster's Uncle]

Heinlein?  I think maybe Bob said it first, now that you mention.  Almost certainly repeated it.

[bvanevery]

Yeah that sounds about right.

Widespread cultural amplification like that makes me want to put my anthropology hat on.  It's a bit weird what things seem to carry indefinitely.  But maybe they are definitely.  Like we're not nearly as fixated on beards as men of the US Civil War era were.

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, Heinlein wasn't a great for his views on family - but he did touch greatness...

[Buster's Uncle]

https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=22286.msg138078#msg138078

You may be interested to know that this is the last post on the forum before I found it working on the morning of the tenth last month -post made in April, the day after I'm sure the hacker script was gone, and then there was an extended server crash on iFast's part- you were probably last post before the big crash - which I'm fine, BTW if that doesn't keep getting brought up; we're working on fixing that right now...

[bvanevery]

I do remember "shoving something in there" as things were burning up, posting with the expectation that things were about to be doomed.  You're saying I literally had the last post before the Great Forum Outage??