DW: gossip & player folksonomies

[mirrorshard]

Recent thread on the DW witchesguild board suggested that witches could be given a 'gossip' ability allowing them to learn, or propagate, information about other players.

So basically it's like photo tagging on Flickr, or meatspace meta-tagging, or whatever the current folksonomy craze is, but for people - an interactive reputation system, but only interactable-with by one guild.

Some discussion (or rambling, rather) follows.



I like the idea, and it's very Witchy, but it also seems subject to two opposing forces which could kill it off.

First, lack of participation could mean that only a few people start doing it, and therefore that the comments which did get made were all of one type, and show the same social biases.

Second, it's easily spammable by the malicious or just plain bored - or simply in favour of your friends.

There are, of course, a few other aspects.

Are there anywhere near enough people able to join in for it to have even a hope of becoming self-sustaining?

Secondly, the primary mode of social interaction is at a distance, not face to face. One idea suggested was being able to add a witch-only extra-look line. This won't work - looking at someone is rare enough for it to be worth a comment, or indeed a stab in the face if you're both PK.

Comments

[glassstrider.livejournal.com]

Psst, that wasn't on the game board ;)

[unsomnambulist.livejournal.com]

The gossip command could certainly be used to filch out naughty players that do harm to witches. However, for example of how I largely seeing it used, during the past month three different witches have gotten married. There's been two henne's nights for them etc

Not too long ago I spoke with fabricati_diem that if you really think about it very few people actually read the boards. (I've been discovering more and more of this whilst making an attempt to interview people for the Desert Dispatch.) For me, "gossip" would be a sort of more in character replacement (that would obviously be monitored by the liaison department) where this sort of information could be spread. If the gossip would go unused, well, it's most defenitely not the first useless thing for the witches guild to acquire. ;)

The idea was submitted, however took on much of glassstrider's tweaks to it. And for the extra look line, which was not submitted because the idea was over all changed because I liked the other ideas about it better ;), it would have been seen through using "gaze" [1] our scrying replacement.

[1] Another command barely anyone uses.