To Heck with ethics! (was Re: The concept of "wizardly ethics")

• Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 16:42:33 PST
• From:
  tom@mvision.com (Tom Ritchford)
• Reply-To:
  tom@mvision.com
• In-Reply-To: <199602232351.PAA26200@Xenon.Stanford.EDU> (message from Judy Anderson on Fri, 23 Feb 1996 15:51:11 PST)

I have to agree with yduJ... we run a rather alternative MOO called Id
(actually we change the nominal name every week or so...) and part of
the social contract is that wizards have NO obligations of any type
and that players have NO expectations of anything!

We're running this from a private server, and I do this for fun.  And
what I find fun may not be fun for everyone else.  This is, after all,
basically a game.  You can walk away from the terminal regardless of
what happens to you!

What's interesting is that the wizards have all behaved so far in a very
ethical manner.  However, we were under no obligation to have done so
and may not in the future if the mood takes us.  This has been made clear
to the players, but we have still had to cut off new characters due
to overcrowding (1600+ in the player database...) so they can't mind much.

As a wizard, you are giving out a valuable product for nothing.  You
are providing a programming environment and a user community to test those
programs, for example.  In some sense, it's cruel, but the user must
take what e can get.

If some wizards wish to have a publically announced policy, well and good.
But I certainly won't let it bind my actions...

    /t

Tom Ritchford     tom@mvision.com, tom@weirdos.com

Verge's "Little Idiot" -- Music for the mentally peculiar.
1-800-WEIRDOS           http://www.fly.net/~tom/verge.html

• The concept of "wizardly ethics"
• From: Judy Anderson <yduj@cs.stanford.edu>

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