MUSHy Musings

One of the most insidious curses of MUSHes is the clique. Cliques get established (innocently or malevolently both) and then begin to choke out a game until the game is essentially a private game for a core group of friends (that often lies to newcomers).

If a game wants to survive (or to at least live up to its inevitable press of being “newbie friendly”) cliques have to be busted up.

But how?

To answer this we have to understand why and how cliques form in the first place.

Why cliques form

Cliques form, broadly speaking, for two major reasons:

1. A bunch of friends who are used to each other's RP and whose tastes mesh just find themselves playing with each other more and more often.
2. A bunch of friends decide they want to be the centre of all MUSH attention and actively work toward that end.

The first of these is relatively innocent: the clique has formed organically, likely slowly, and isn't formed out of malice. The second is quite malevolent, however, and is made with specific intent to interfere (or eliminate) the enjoyment of other players.

Both, however, are cancerous to games and, if left untreated, can kill the host game, especially if any of the staff of the game start being part of the clique.

Innocent cliques

The formation of innocent cliques is just a byproduct of people tending to play with those they have a proven track record of being comfortable with. Nobody in an innocent clique intends to lock others out of RP. What happens instead is that a new player asks for RP, but the clique members have their RP dance cards filled with scenes they have already arranged with other clique members.

This leaves players who are not in cliques without viable sources of continuing RP. They might occasionally hook up with each other for a scene here or there, but this tends to not be satisfying because two players not really integrated into the game interacting doesn't lead to memorable, long-term RP.

Worse, when non-clique players do get RP from a clique member, the clique member will often give off vibes of doing it as a favour, not out of a genuine desire to integrate a fellow player into the game. This comes across as condescending and can actually make matters worse: new players get frustrated as they play in a scene they thought both parties enjoyed, but the clique member never follows-up with any more scenes.

Still, it's hard to point to anything specifically wrong with innocent cliques. There's several right things they're not doing, but nothing actively wrong.

Malevolent cliques

Which is where malevolent cliques come in. Malevolent cliques are groups of players who almost exclusively play with each other, just like innocent ones. What distinguishes them is that rather than being the source of benign neglect of other players, they actively seek to suppress the enjoyment of (perhaps even try to run off!) other players.

Malevolent cliques know what they're doing and tend to be very good at doing it. Their most alarming trait is how they tend to ingratiate themselves with staff, before starting, even, to infiltrate it. Once one or more of them is in staff, they ramp up their own in-game rewards (in the form of RP, plots, special events, special items, etc.) while suppressing all others.

In the terminal stages of such a clique's infestation you'll find situations like clique-staff running super-complicated, epic plots for their clique-player friends while, if forced at gunpoint, running the most mundane and pedestrian scenes for non-clique members.

For a concrete example of this, in a game I played in once, a game of political intrigue in an isolated castle, a clique had taken hold of almost all the staff positions. For their friends they ran long, convoluted story lines that just happened to have the members of the clique get honours and influence and rank. But when noise started coming from the mundane masses about how only they ever seemed to get anything, one of the staffers begrudgingly took out a staff-run NPC (the castle's chef) and ran a scene where ... ... a rat ran off with the chef's ladle. Where the 'reward' for the person finding the ladle and returning it was they'd get to eat a stew made by the chef. That was it. That was the plot that was supposed to satisfy the 'common' players while the clique's own plots were vast and sweeping dramas.

The toxicity of a malevolent clique's influence on a game cannot be overstated. Games have died from this. Games will continue to die from this. The aforementioned game in my example still has its web page up, but its forums connect to nothing, its events calendar is empty, and in trying to log in just now all the means of actually connecting to it are broken. A game you can't connect to is not a living game...

Dealing with cliques

Dealing with cliques presents several problems to staff.

1. Members of the cliques may be viewed as friends by staffers.
2. Innocent cliques aren't even doing anything explicitly wrong. They're just driving off new players by benign neglect.
3. It's often hard to believe that people would expend the kind of energy it takes to form and operate a malevolent clique; staff often can't (or won't) believe the evidence of their own eyes because the very notion is insane.

Yet cliques are very much a threat to games. They can choke off new games before they get a chance to grow and they can give an established game a poor reputation that leads to avoidance and inevitable decline. Cliques must very much be handled.

Innocent cliques

Handling an innocent clique comes in two flavours: staff handling and player handling. Each has its role in ensuring that cliques don't form or, once formed, break up.

Staff

There is a single, useful maxim in motivational psychology that can cover most of the situations staff have in getting desired behaviour from players:

You get the behaviour you reward.

Note the wording. It's not “you don't get the behaviour you punish” it's “you get the behaviour you reward”. And this can have subtle implications.

If you see a cluster of people RPing as staff and decide to reward that cluster by throwing plot their way, you're encouraging that cluster to come together again. And again. If you want to change that, change the reward. Instead throw plot at people visibly RPing with people outside of their usual circle.

It's easy enough to see who is habitually in their own little circle. You can probably automate this by checking who every hour and seeing which people are together in IC rooms across a week. You'll likely get a surprise. (Or maybe not if you've got the finger on the pulse of your players and have heard the chatter.)

Once you know the usual groupings, start looking for things that break these well-worn patterns and throw desirable things at those who do this. This is probably the single most effective thing staff can do.

Player

But the game isn't just staff and the solution to cliques shouldn't be only on staff shoulders. Players, too, bear some responsibility for mixing it up. The single best way players can break an innocent clique is to not be in one. But how do you know if you are in one?

You don't.

So actively avoid being in one. Get in the habit of finding new players and engaging them. Pick one day of the week where you will seek out someone you've never RPed with before and RP with them. One day out of seven isn't onerous, but if all players do this, there will be a huge surplus of open RP for new players in particular to fall into.

But doing this isn't enough. When you've done it, if the RP was to your satisfaction (nobody is asking you to play with people you don't enjoy!), follow up. Add this person to your list of people that you seek out the RP of. Invite them into plots. Have follow-up scenes based on your introductory one. In a word: INTEGRATE.

If even a handful of players starts doing this, the MUSH will come across as much friendlier, and if staff then also starts rewarding this, more players will do this and happier players will abound.

Malevolent cliques

Which brings us around to the topic of malevolent cliques. These are particularly hard to handle. Players can't handle them. Members know they're in it and don't want to stop: the clique is doing for them what they want. Other players are generally unable to do anything meaningful with them because the cliques are usually very experienced at dealing with dissent and at using procedural judo to throw people who oppose them off the game (doubly so if one or more of the clique members are staff).

This means staff needs to handle it.

Identification

The very first thing staff needs to do to handle the problem of a malevolent clique is to identify it. These kinds of cliques are good at sucking up to staff, good at ingratiating themselves to it, and indeed are good at infiltrating it. (The same procedural judo they use to get rid of dissenting players is often applied to hostile staff.)

So how do you identify it? This is where keeping your finger on the pulse of the MUSH is valuable. Talk to players, casually. If you have ombuds consult with them. Your players will know when there's a clique and when the clique is of the malevolent sort. After all the whole point of being a malevolent clique is to lord it over the “ordinary” players. If you keep your finger on the game's pulse, you'll know when a clique has formed/infiltrated.

Of course you also have to believe your players, which is hard to do. On the one hand you've got a coordinated clique of active players who are buttering you up. On the other you have a loosely-connected, disjoint set of players who are probably bitter, by now, at how they've been treated and come across as malcontents. It's very easy to let the former blow smoke up your arse and to ignore the latter.

A good rule of thumb is a rule of three: if only one player is complaining about a clique (or cliques), probably a malcontent. If two players are doing so, it may be worth paying a bit of attention. If three or more, however, are doing so, especially if they're not really visibly linked in any way, then you've likely got a clique and you need to deal with it.

Handling

But how do you deal with it?

The one thing you don't do is follow rigid procedures for mitigating player conflict or the like. Malevolent cliques are experts at such procedural solutions. They can use (and have used!) them to great effect in purging troublesome fellow players (and even staff) from games they try to take over. They will even use off-game resources to coordinate activities across the clique to that no single one of them ever falls afoul of the procedures while they continue to run rampant.

Neither can you rely on “you get the behaviour you reward” because they are already getting the reward they want: control over the game.

The only real solution for a clique like this is to excise it. Kick them off of the game and be ready for blow back from the players who don't recognize the problem and think you're just being authoritarian. Document everything you can get, and when banning the members, use that documentation to justify it, but be prepared for losing a few more players in the process.

Then build up the game anew, being more wary of cliques in the future.