Politics in MUD

There has recently been a discussion on the BB, initiated by Laura, about real-world discussions in The Land. In it, she mentions a heated discussion started by a comment about politics in the tearoom.

Apart from the point that in a game like MUD it's often hard to tell whether someone is joking or not (perhaps a topic for an article, Laura?) she makes that point that The Land is no place for discussions of politics, it should be a place to escape from things like politics and wars.

My personal opinion is that politics (and a lot of other real-world subjects) are best left out of conversations in The Land. Laura is absolutely right that it's nice to be able to escape from such real-world issues such as these.

But, one of my earliest memories of MUD was playing while the Eurovision song contest was on, sharing opinions of the singers and songs with other players in The Land. It was a great atmosphere and I don't think anything was wrong with it as a topic of conversation. (Although these days, some might argue that the Eurovision song contest IS deeply political!)

So, where should the line be drawn between real-world topics that may be discussed, and those topics that would degenerate into heated political arguments?

While I said that I don't believe politics should be a topic for The Land, I also don't believe that there should be rules against topics of conversation - it would be unfair for a set of players (in this case arch-wizzes) to dictate what may and may not be discussed according to their own standards.

Therefore discussion of politics won't be banned, and I am certain that politics will come up again in conversation and probably upset someone once more. But as an individual, any player is free to ask someone to "take it elsewhere" or simply use the IGNORE command. In the end, the rules of acceptable behaviour for our community are defined by the community itself.

I would love to end this article here, but having looked through the logs of this incident and others, I have seen some "political opinions" bordering on racial prejudice and hate. While I'm not going to ban topics of conversation, this sort of behaviour often amounts to real-world abuse, and as such won't be tolerated.

Politics can be an emotional topic, so as a favour to me, I'd like to ask everyone to drop real-world politics as a topic of conversation and take it elsewhere. After all, there surely must be enough MUD politics to keep you going?

Foddy