Dueling

That "truly contentious ones are settled on the map", as you say, Angrim, is often because once you have begun to flesh out the various opinions on a subject you begin to get to the underlying principles or attitudes toward the subject.  In land claims those principles are best expressed as "It's just a game" or "It's about how players ought to treat each other as human beings."  If the former is true then of course land claims opposition is just another excuse for war and pretty meaningless since nobody should care if avatars go to battle and get mad and express themselves for good or ill.  If it's the latter though, then the whole matrix of play becomes a social interaction and how we treat others is a moral question.  "It's just a game" lets us off the hook and allows us to treat all others as pixels on the page.  "I'm sitting here playing a real person a game" means I have, if I'm a moral person, to consider how my actions effect and affect the person, and therefore, sometimes modify especially the "meta-game" aspects of my behavior so as to be a good sport. 

So the real problem is that just as we got to the question of "If the avatars of this game represent real people, how should those real people be treated" the moderator decided that we had strayed from the question and closed the thread.  It's kind of a shame that he either couldn't see the relevance or didn't like the intensity of the debate (or perhaps some other reason of which I am not privy) and closed the discussion, because I've always found that often when we begin to examine the assumptions upon which we are arguing we find more common ground and resolve conflict....without armies at that.

AJ


Edited by ajqtrz - 17 Jul 2015 at 20:18

most players find what is considered dueling in this game boring....maybe if the devs would add functions or features to enhance it but as of now military is more fun playing it as a team...you should play the ranking game a j...it is more your playing style and we need more nerds...I mean players competing in it

Or we don't capture any piece on chess.

abstractdream wrote: "If the avatars of this game represent real people, how should those real people be treated?" is a red herring. In Illyriad, if you play it, you must separate the avatar from the person. Not doing so removes the game from the game. I doubt there are very many folks who would, in real life use the sort of cutthroat tactics needed to thrive in Monopoly against their friends or family. Even if playing Monopoly with absolute strangers, in our daily, common interactions, it is likely we would not treat those strangers as we would treat their game pieces. Separating real people from their game pieces is an absolute necessity to play Monopoly in a competitive way. If we followed ajqtrz's suggestion while playing Monopoly, we would go around the board ad infinitum.

Why must you "separate the avatar from the person?"  Does the avatar have feelings, reactions, spend money, spend time and energy?  In the end it's a person playing and the avatar is nothing more than a bunch of pixels used to enact the persons decisions.  The game is a real thing...within real life.  It is a social activity.   It is this 'separating" of what you do in the game from real life that makes it easy for you to do something in the game you would not do in real life.  You wouldn't make up new rules and use intimidation by threats of coercion to get others to agree to them.  There is no mechanism in the game for intimidation by threats of coercion, as that is generally a verbal thing you bring to the meta game...as often published in your alliance profile.   But that you can do one thing does not mean you should be allowed to do it.

I don't play the car in Monopoly.  The wheelbarrow doesn't make decisions.  I play the person across the board from me and if they decide to make up a new rule to benefit themselves Monopoly has no real way to deal with that.  The only ways they can make a new rule is to either get me to agree to the new rule that benefits them to my detriment, or to intimidate by threats of coercion.  The intimidation by threats of coercion is part of the meta game one supposes, but what would be the limits of such a meta game?  I mean if I use intimidation to get you to go along with the new rule, how far should I be allowed to take that intimidation? 

In a game like Illy such behaviors are much easier because you have an easy way to enact the coercion.  But should that be allowed?  Since I'm not playing the avatars but the people behind the avatars SHOULD I be allowed to use the in game methods to bully the other players into accepting my new rule? 

On a different note, some people seem to think my illustrations are miss-leading or "lies."  I think it's a dangerous fantasy to remove the real person from your view of the game.  Such tactics have, in other venues, resulted in behaviors that have led to real deaths. 

And finally, it appears to me that if you can pretend that you are just playing monopoly pieces and that the people who are using those pieces to represent their place on the board aren't real, you are living in more of a fantasy world that even Illy can hope to present.  Once you figure out that you have social relationships and responsibilities toward the other players in the sandbox, you take a giant step in the direction of being a responsible and mature player.  Until then you probably can't tell the difference between competitive play and bullying.  More the pity.  My question is, by the way, based upon the understanding that real people play Illy, and avatars are just markers in the game representing real players.  So I ask it again: "If real people are playing Illyriad, how SHOULD they be treated?"

AJ

ajqtrz wrote:   So I ask it again: "If real people are playing Illyriad, how SHOULD they be treated?"

If the players of Illy are real people how OUGHT they be treated?