Uh. Yeah. #### us and everything. And, while you're at it, go give to Child's Play and put your money where your mouth is.

I'm not even a little sorry if organizing a charity drive or talking about organizing a joint marketing endeavour offends you or insults you. The fact that it apparently does it just beyond bizarre to me.

--matt

Aw shucks no!  I'm not at all sold on the marketing opportunity yet.  There's got to be some angles I'm missing. I'm still in the cost-benefit analyis stage.  You must understand this is a pretty new paradigm shift for me.  I'm used to just giving.  It had never once occurred to me that my mud could reap a whirlwind of benefit from it.  And frankly, I have this problem of not being able think outside a somewhat limited and narrow moral box, being imprisoned by such embarassing quaint and irrational humility regarding such weighty matters as charity and exploitation.   Rest assured I will check with both my lawyer and preacher.

BTW, how many hits and referrals are the little sick kids getting you?  

Do you think maybe we can get limited edition ZMud disks into their small hands with perhaps a special edition mud list databases of only the donors muds?

And like the owner of Achaea said, I'm not at all one bit sorry if anyone's offended.   That's your problem.  I've got a business to constantly promote so if your offended it means you need to buck up, shut up and get outta my way.  Got it.  Good.

Well, considering the idea of business giving percentages of their earnings to charities (whether it's cancer patients or United Way or Habitat for Humanity, doesn't matter) has been a pretty common tradition in the world, I'm not exactly sure where your venom's coming from, friend.

Am I glad kids get cancer so that we get visits to our games? No. Am I glad that we can help the kids AND get some visibility? Sure. I'd be disingenuous to claim otherwise. But there's nothing immoral about it.

That's right. If you're offended by us giving to charity and announcing it, that's your problem, not mine, as it doesn't actually impact my life to any measureable degree. I find your attitude churlish, self-centered, and incredibly short-sighted. I'd like to sit you down with some of the kids who will benefit and have you tell them that you'd rather we hadn't done this, since apparently you feel it's more important for you not to see the announcement than it is for the kids to get some light into their pretty crappy lives.

See? You don't have to care about my opinion about you either.

I'm sure glad Bill Gates and his wife Melinda don't listen to this kind of nonsense when people criticize them for publicizing their donations. Largest charitable foundation in existence. Yay Bill. Personally I want to know what companies or extremely rich individuals are acting like good citizens. I want them to serve as rolemodels for others, or, if you will, create peer pressure for others to give.

--matt

Look I've already explained how short-sighted and misguided I was.  I didn't realize how much I could benefit from this marketing opportunity.  You are preaching to the holy choir now.

Wow.  I didn't realize we could go in and actually touch them.  I thought they were sick.  This is great news and brings up another excellent marketing opportunity.  Maybe you thought of it, maybe not.  I am glad you are finally talking about the kids, because there's another great way to exploit them.  Hear me out.  Can we get get pictures of them with my mud's T-shirts on them?  Invite in the AP, UPI, Reuters.  That would be a HUGE two-fer.  Free newspaper advertising!!!  Just like what I thought this thread was about until you brought up this charity thing, which at first admittedly didn't make any sense to me.  But I see the light now!  

Oh no I was telling a little white lie, just like you are.  You see like you I do care about public opinion, otherwise it would serve no purpose at all in posting, and being a "good public mud citizen" would be a waste of time.  You simply cannot BE a role model without letting people know about it.  I mean how will anyone know just how great we are if we didn't shove it in their pathetic faces and do a lot of self promotion, prancing, preening, and crowing about it.  It's our burden as elite moral leaders of the communtity to do this without shame and unabashedly.... in order to goad, pressure, and shame the lesser more immoral members of the mud community into being better citizens just like us.  :-)

You can see the Bill Gates story touched my soul. No sense requoting it as I don't want to get choked up.


Oh and hey.. *nudge nudge*  Psst... More hits, more money, more players, more fun.  

I'm thinking Africa may have a lot of opportunity for charitable business explotiation.   Can we ship in some starving children with distended bellies and get pics of them playing our muds for food.

All,

I tried to organise something along this intent a couple of years ago. Not so much buying adspace, but instead getting a group of the larger muds together to allow more traffic to flow between the sites rather than them being disjointed. It didn't happen because I was doing many other things on my mud at the time, I didn't have time for it.

It's perfectly possible, free - and just takes someone with a bit of time, design and organising skills. 20 muds all with a little link on their homepage to some other microsite promoting both those muds in particular (as payback) and mudding in general - a microsite targeted at specific audiences (ie one page for the bookies, one for the ad&d guys, yadda yadda).

I'd also advise anyone seeking a target audience not just to try and specify them too much. Go for all you can, in every way you can, using every hook you have. Also have a read of this - the stuff is as true today as when I wrote it several years ago:

I told myself I was going to bite my tongue, but man... Tyche, what's your deal? I've always enjoyed reading your posts on the various MU*-related forums I visit, but I think you're a little off-kilter here.

Your little lampooning tirade about needing to give in complete selflessness and altruism demonstrates a distinct ignorance of human psychology - whether it's feeling good individually (i.e. your apparent motivation of choice) or giving your cause or company more exposure as a group (i.e. what's happening here), absolutely no-one "donates" something without some sort of compensation.

Frankly, as far as I'm concerned, you don't really have the right to give these folks a hard time for donating money and resources to this charity because you don't approve of their motivations, whatever they may be. That is, not unless you happen to be a child with cancer and are in a position to benefit from what they've generously decided to part with, and what, by definition, others (including yourself?) have not. Such an excessive degree of misplaced self-righteousness is not at all becoming.

In other words - can it already. Sheesh.

I'm not even sure where the notion of "exploitation" came from. Which kids are being exploited, and how, exactly is this happening?

The charity is getting some great public relations by Logos just bringing up its name in this thread. Prior to his previous thread about it, I'd never even heard of Child's Play. I'm pretty confident that many readers here hadn't ever heard of it til then either.

You realize of course that most non-profs have to PAY for this kind of PR? Do you think the United Way gets all of its advertising for free? Do you realize that even the American Cancer Society has an entire division devoted specifically to public relations, and has to PAY its employees to do their jobs?

Where do you think the money comes from, for such an endeavor? It comes from people who are willing to exchange cash for their name on an ad. The nickles and quarters donated add up, sure. But it's the "heavy hitters" such as baseball leagues that have charity games, and famous entertainers who provide charity performances, who bring in the big bucks to these organizations.

All of these endeavors result in attraction drawn to the donating party. And all of this is intentional. I see absolutely nothing wrong with it. It's a win-win situation for everyone. The charity gets the cash it needs, PLUS it gets its name plastered all over the program for the function, AND the party offering the donation gets its name mentioned in the newspapers.

Who exactly is being exploited? Who is "losing" from this situation? Who - is suffering SO much that ANYONE should find a problem with it?

I guess I didn't see it at all like what you described, Molly. Not some exclusive site - what would be the point in that? I saw it outlined something like this:

At the top of the page in readable, but not blaring font:

(Name of Newly formed organization of contributors) Presents:

(Some kind of catchy title in blaring font to draw attention to potential mudders)

(Text extolling the virtues of muds, and of the mudding community)

(A graphic or two, maybe a paste of a generic room in some nonexistent mud to show potential mudders what a mud looks like)

At the bottom of the page:

Sponsored in part by the generous contributions from:

(Name of Mud, hyperlink to the mud's website
Name of Mud, hyperlink to the mud's website
Name of Mud, hyperlink to the mud's website)

through the benevolent auspices of (name of newly formed organization)

End

Kinda standard operations for almost any group advertising venture in the USA, in any case.

Well, you may have seen it that way, Jazuela, but I don't think that is quite what the_logos had in mind. In fact I distinctly remember statements of his like:

"Yeah, this is going to take some time to work out in terms of what the arrangements would be. I totally understand that MUDs being run as hobbys are not likely to have owners willing to contribute a lot (or any) money. The trick here is that I really do want to show the outside gaming world that text MUDs generally can offer a lot of great things, but I don't want to do it enough to essentially pay a lot to promote other people's MUDs. "

This suggests something quite different to me than what you seem to picture. I don't see how the rest of the Mud Community, beyond the few Muds that contributed monetary to that site, would benefit from it at all. And I doubt that any of the ones that did contribute a bit with constructive input on the thread would have been mentioned on that site either. That's what I meant by 'exclusive' site.

But of course the entire question is moot now, since the project is dropped anyhow.

Just a quick question, Achaea.

What part of that statement was so insulting to you?

Saying to someone to not take anything you say personally?

Or to not get insulted by what you say?

You can stuff the pop psychology, I'm not interested in it as it says nothing about morality.  I could show it's human nature to kill...end of story.  No, morality is governed by both action and intention, not just one or the other at your pleasure.  If what Brody claim was true, "it is not immoral" then no one would be offended or uncomfortable with the ideas and questions I asked.  Ah but things are apparently different.  99% of the donors to charities do not receive any compensation whatsoever and give in return for nothing.  I decided to loose my tongue when I read about using sick kids as a "guerilla" marketing opportunity on page 4 if your interested in the forensics of rants.  Considering the nonstop self promotion, preening, chest puffing and tone deaf corporate ear and history of the source well... let's just say it doesn't take a genious to make a judgement.  Most people I know believe that giving to charity for altruistic reasons is noble and virtuous, but for reasons of self-promotion and profit, or pride and selfishness, to be ignoble and not virtuous.  That is my moral position and I state it with certainty, and "by the same right" as those who state otherwise yet ask, by what right do I?  

P.S. To marketing, my particular view on these issues is not an aberrant blip in your data.  Have Smithers check your premises Mr. Burns.

P.P.S. To anyone who may be confused, yes, my prior posts were lampooning, dark sarcasm, whatever term you prefer.

Why don't you go ask the kids who benefit from it before condemning this as an immoral act. Hmmm?

A word of caution, Tyche:
Irony is usually a dangerous weapon, because there will always be some people around who do not detect the irony, and consequently will take everything you say literally. Also there are some subjects that are just too sensitive to make fun of. Cancer-sick Children is one of those. Starving people in Africa is another. I’m afraid that your posts will offend a lot of folks, and probably not the ones you were targeting in the first place either.

This is not meant as a flame, however. I do get the point that you are trying to convey, and I also agree with most of it. People crowing about their charity on Discussion boards, while at the same time counting new hits on their webpages, do turn me off a bit too. I do not particularly cherish people goading others to go and do the same either.

Sure it’s a good thing that some of the money for the publicity goes to some deserving purpose. Still, as Tyche already pointed out, most of us give to some kind of charity. But most of us like to choose what kind of charity we give to on our own. And most of us do not brandish our ‘unselfishness’ publicly on Discussion boards. Doing so actually reminds me a bit of that old story about Jesus Christ and the Pharisees.

True.

Reminds me of the ancient parable of the Diku license.  You can accept donations, but if there's any in-game benefits you are in violation of the license.   What's the Diku group's definition of charity?  Is that not the spirit of the license?  I don't know but I strongly suspect the POV is the similar to mine.  My opinion of the "business of charity" is that it ain't.

I do a lot of charity work with runaway teenage girls.  I help them out by giving them money and they sleep with me.  It's very noble and virtuous work.  If you have a problems with me promoting this charitable work go ask them before condemning it.  'kay?

BTW, The above isn't true.  I expect you to consider my intent.  It's not noble.

Your ignoring my point. My point wasn't "ignore the intent" it was "yes, they're doing this for advertising. But really, it isn't that bad." Maybe in your world perving on teenagers and getting publicity are comparable acts, but in mine they're worlds apart.

An example of someone emotionally invested in a charity not giving a rats toss is in the television show, The Apprentice. In it two groups have to do tasks, one task was to sell a product. One team said "why don't we give to a charity. People are much more willing to buy our product that way.." I believe the person who suggested it was someone who had lost his brother to lukemia. He definitely suggested donating to a lukemia fund. My family's reaction to that was "hey, that's a good idea" and then when they DID donate a good amount as opposed to $100 we were like "hey, aren't these guys great?"

We knew they were doing it to win the task, we accepted that from the get go. And we saw nothing wrong with that. No-one in the show saw anything wrong with it (that they said anyway). If someone who had lost their brother to lukemia didn't mind donating the money to a lukemia charity, I don't think it's a terrible at all.

Businesses donating to charities I believe do so for the benefits most of the time. I don't see anything morally wrong with it, and I'm amazed that some people do.

Then again, I can't help but wonder. What would the reaction had been to this had the_logos not been connected. Call me cynical, but I doubt it would have been like this.

Once upon a time, Jazuela worked for a big dairy company on the east coast of the USA. She was marketing secretary for the company, and used to get requests for donations from everyone and their brother. Most of them she turned down, because most of them wanted to tie in to product promotions her boss didn't want to promote over the rest of the product line.

One day, the American Heart Association sent a note asking if the dairy would be interested in a flat donation. Jaz's boss said "Sure, let's send them $200." Jaz said to the boss, "Hey - what about this instead?" and the boss loved the idea and let her run the whole program herself.

The result: For each gallon of 1% milk that home delivery customers purchased during a 1-month period at a 15-cent discount off the usual retail price, the company would donate ten cents. So that was a total of a 25-cent discount, between the 15 cents to the customer and the 10 cents to the AHA.

The dairy sold more gallons of 1% milk that month than in any other month since 1% milk was first brought on the product line, and we donated almost $1000 to the AHA, instead of the $200 the boss originally suggested.

Jazuela felt VERY good about it. The boss was deliriously happy. The AHA sent the office a very heartwarming thank-you note, and everyone lived happily ever after.

What it boils down to Tyche, is this: You may eat my shorts.

The end.

That just goes to show about the "best of your understanding." If you bothered to visit the Child's Play site, it spells out that we're giving 5 percent of our proceeds until Christmas - not a flat fee up front. So, it's rather necessary for us to let people know about the charitable donations so that we maximize sales in order to maximize contributions to Child's Play during this period. So, the more the_logos publicizes this, the more the kids get, hopefully.

For total clarity, visit and click on Partners.

Hope that clears things up.

No not ignoring it, but missing it.  You asked a question about how the recipients felt, and I missed the part about what you are quoting above.  Despite it being a hypothetical there's nothing "pervy" about it.  If I gave them money and took pictures of them in Armageddon T-shirts...well now that would be perverted.  People would talk and I wouldn't want something like that getting around.  But seriously, the fraud isn't in the transaction, as it's obviously mutually beneficial.  The fraud is in me selling you on the idea that charity is about the ROI, in this case sex.  Sex, money, power, no difference to me.

Sorry I'm not all that familiar with TV game shows.  I do know that nobody ever loses on The People's Court, and I suspect it's the same with The Apprentice.  

Yeah I did mention that.  He isn't the only person I've flamed.  Maybe they don't really get that the free mud community is flush with altruists of many different stripes.  That's always been the problem when hobbyists and professionals mix.


PS or Note to Admin:  I changed the time in the quote.  Apparently a colon followed by a zero in the time field is interpreted as an emoticon.

I think you mean statutory rape.  No there needn't be any of that.  If you're having trouble with the legal angle, I'll tell you I do my charity work in Amsterdam.  I intended for the word "prostitution" to come to mind; followed by mental prostitution of something, prostitution of the press, the protestituion of abilities, and finally the prostitution of charity.  You are right.  I'm no Jonathan Swift. ;-)

Now amusingly, constitutional rape would be when I take your money under threat of imprisonment in order to give it to the less fortunate and then ask you to call it charity.  :-P  An interesting tangent but not really situationally related to any point I'd make save one.  And that is I do know business people who operate under the same general principle of "Not yours to give" in respect and responsibilty to shareholders and partners.  Instead opting to open their own wallets in return for nothing.   I have no criticisms of them.  That's where Achaea's Gates analogy fails, because much of what Gates and his wife do falls into that realm.  The condoms they give out to Africans don't have microsoft stamped on them.  (And yeah on many levels there's some great fodder for jokes if that they did).  But yes, it's definately possible for the officers of corporation to do charity work in a way that does not call into question their motives (at least in respect to prostituting their business as opposed to the specific charity work).  OTOH, Microsoft giving computers to schools ain't charity work.  If I recall they've been roasted in forums for that "charity" work.

Here's a similar and worthy alternative --

This charity doesn't have a secondary goal like ChildsPlay.  It's not about polishing the image of gamers and promoting the gaming industry.  Not about the Marines either.   So it's probably offtopic, but I'll run that risk.

the_logos, Nov. 24 2004,15:56
I cannot speak for Dulan of course.  But then again, neither can you.  Nor for me.

Because a fact is, that you don’t have a clue about what other aliases I, or he for that matter, might be using on the net, or what we might, or might not, have achieved under those other aliases.  You see, not everyone shares your habit of crowing, flexing and strutting all over the boards about everything we do that might bring some more players to our games.

Another thing is that the most interesting input on this thread came from other people than you.  People that you didn’t even have the common decency to acknowledge in that little thank-you-and-goodbye note of yours.

But since you brought the subject up, why don’t you enlighten us all about what great and unselfish deeds you have done for the text mud community yourself?  (I mean, apart from causing the rules of the voting list to be changed twice because of your ‘innovative’ methods of scrounging some extra votes for your game?  Or those equally ‘innovative’ advertisements in the past, where a number of non-existing people voted Achaea ‘the number one Mud on the net’?  Or of course that old thread where you tried to persuade all mud owners to start breaking the Diky licence?  Or that even older post on MudDev, where you were crowing happily about your new concept for get ting rich on your Mud?  Since that one was even longer ago, I cannot recall the exact wording.  But the gist of it was, that most players are so stupid and power-hungry that they’d pay almost any amount of money, if they thought that it could bring them any advantages in a game.  While this actually may hold some element of truth, I cannot help wondering if your players are aware that you hold them in this high esteem).

But, there might of course be other unselfish achievements that you have done for the mud community, which just slipped your mind, so that you forgot to mention them on the boards?  Come on, don’t be coy, enlighten us!  I am sure that your huge fan club is waiting breathlessly for some new words of wisdom from their idol.

And while he is working on that list, which will no doubt be impressive, here is another quote of his, for the rest of you, including the list Admin  to ponder.

Could any of you explain to me how the text mud community in general (or any mud except those that paid to participate) would have benefited from this exclusive venture, if it wasn’t even meant to drive any traffic to the two largest existing mudlisting sites?  

And while it might be true that several of the mud listed have poor-looking websites, it is also true that quite a number have very good ones, and also very good games. But a majority of those might also be non commercial muds, and that is of course something that a commercial mud owner is not very interested in promoting, since it offers a kind of competition that he isn’t keen on. Perhaps that is why he was so eager to persuade all free mud owners to start violating the Diku licence?

You drive traffic to say "Otherspace, Achaea and Aardwolf" which all have links to TMS and you'll get a trickle-effect to TMS.

Interesting. I guess you must have access to parts of my email inbox that I don't, given that you're apparently aware of offers of financial help from Lanthum and Sanvean that I'm not.

I doubt you actually wanted to do anything but flame us anyway though. Par for the course.
--matt

Heh, funny that you'd bring that up. We donated a few thousand dollars to Toys for Tots last year in exactly the same kind of deal we did with Child's Play this year: we pledged a portion of sales for a period of time to them.

The exact same sort of bitter, frustrated schmucks flamed us then too. As now, it's their problem, not mine.

--matt

My god, I feel like I'm in high school. Are you telling me that TWO of you were offended, apparently on behalf of others that you appear to be claiming to speak for, that I didn't mention someone's name who made a post? For crying out loud, are you SERIOUS?! Are people's egos that fragile that not getting a mention for a post is going to offend them??

I don't even know what to say. Sometimes this board is beyond frustrating.

As for the rest, I'm not going to fall for your bait. All posting a list of what I think we do would accomplish is that certain of the more outrageous flamers on this site would start flaming us for doing it. ####, I remember at least one person flaming us for putting up, at our expense, on our network, a temporary replacement for Aardwolf (Achaea's main competitor on TMS) after it got knocked out by the hurricanes. If we can be flamed for that, and flamed for organizing a charity drive, there's just no point in talking about anything else.

--matt

Yeah I remember.   Do you remember how much Kyndig gave?  Tyche?  KaVir? Muir?  Scandum?  Spazmatic?  

It's the cheese that keeps on giving.

Different schmucks.  Same beef...

Hey I link to TMS too.  Right smack on the front page.  It bypasses all the vote counting hit counting traffic counting commercial horse manure and goes into the naughty mud forum organs of this site.  

I wasn't going to post again, but I noticed I was only one post away from attaining my long held dreams of a second gold star.   Whee!

I actually offered to donate not money, but some time/work on the writing side, since I'm a writer for a living, and a good editor. I'll make the same offer to anyone trying to spread the words on MUDs through articles, essays, etc. If you want feedback, suggestions, proofing on something like that, I'll be glad to help.

It would be nice to steer this thread back onto the original topic, since I'm curious what other people have done, and what tack they took in approaching it. Is it possible to hear some more about that? Are there magazines or other places that you think particularly approachable for something like this?

I wrote serial fiction for RPG Times a while back, but they also run columns on different types of RPGs and they're often looking for content.

Sanvean Nov. 30 2004,13:45
Glad you brought that question up again. As I already mentioned, I'm planning to write some slightly humoristic light articles about the quaint world of Text Muds,  with some useful links to Mud sites right at the end.  My plan is to try  palming them onto some paper Magazines, which sometimes accept freelance stuff, if it is reasonably interesting and well written.

But I am at a loss about what categories of magazines to best approach. And once I make that choice; is there a way to do web searches to bring up lists of these categories? And would there perhaps be any WebSites that might accept articles like that too?

Any input on this, anyone?

I doubt they'll post actual articles. But you could send letters to the editor to Computer Gaming World or PC Gamer (both have websites you can Google), and you might get some response. Some OtherSpace players did that last year and got published.

Computer Gaming World did do a half-page article about Achaea and gleam a few months ago, so they are, minimally, willing to write about text in certain circumstances. You're probably right though insofar as they almost definitely would not accept freelance articles.

Well, yeah, they'll do something about text if it's titillating and a little scandalous. They're unlikely to do something simply to remind people that these games exist, however, unless we appear to glorify drugs or something, it seems. Nothing against Achaea's coverage - publicity like that is awesome for a game. However, if the only way to get publicity from the mainstream game magazines is to push the envelope of cultural mores ... I dunno if that's the way we want to go to promote the genre as a whole.

Still, considering the PC games that get a lot of mainstream press - Grand Theft Auto, Leisure Suit Larry and even all the hubub about the JFK Reloaded game - and maybe I'm just thinking too moderately!

Yeah, I meant San Andreas. GTA 3 raised the bar for acceptable violence in mainstream video games and now it's kind of routine, so people don't cover the violence in San Andreas with anywhere near the same fervor they did for GTA 3 or Vice City.



Oh, for sure. We can't just repeat the same thing in different forms over and over. I'd also add 'new-sounding' to taboo/edgy. So, for instance, a game like A Tale in the Desert gets a lot more coverage than you might think it would judging by its relatively small playerbase, due to its relatively unique style of gameplay. I think a lot of the text MUD world is handicaped there by downloadable codebases though. When you're starting with what's designed to be a monster bashing game (which most of the codebases are designed to be), you're probably (there are exceptions of course) going to end up with a monster bashing game. (And please for the love of god, can we not start a flamewar about downloadable codebases?) A single unique or new system is probably not enough to garner a lot of attention, beyond flash-in-the-pan type attention. ATITD gets ongoing attention because it's entire game is fairly innovative.

--matt

I'd like to add that even getting a writeup in Computer Gaming Magazine has minimal effects.

Last year they did an "MMORPG Roundup" where they talked about all the current MMORPGs and those coming.

Threshold got its own little section and they talked about the fiercely devoted players, the RP focus, etc.

The affect of this writeup was hardly even noticeable in terms of new players.

I think I remember Logos mentioning somewhere that even the Gleam write ups did not have much effect in terms of actual users.

I think it would take a TON of mainstream write ups to help a text mud, or text muds in general. You need saturation.

Marketing experts know that it isn't until like the 5th or 10th or 100th time that you see some product mentioned that you actually become intrigued by it.

Right. The Gleam writeups didn't. The coverage they gave us on TechTV, on the other hand, did. TechTV has an absolutely massive following compared to the games magazines though.

--matt

Another couple of Sci-fi/fantasy literature sites:

sfcrowsnest.com
sffworld.com

Lusternia is advertising on both places right now, though not with very impressive results.

You can use my story if you want - I'm just not sure whether a non-mudder can even understand it...