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Re: Recommended reading

funny how MUDs and mental hospitals are so similar. 

i propose we change .wizard to .quack in future versions.

At 02:28 PM 10/2/96 PDT, Zachary DeAquila wrote:
>
>A friend forwarded me this:
>
>------- Forwarded Message
>
>Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 10:41:49 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Phil Agre <pagre@weber.ucsd.edu>
>To: Red Rock Eater List <rre@weber.ucsd.edu>
>
>[...]
>
>People who run MUD's keep telling me variants of the same story, whose
>upshot is that some user starts behaving in extremely divisive ways and
>starts turning the whole place inside out. One typical pattern is for this
>user to do something outrageous, provoke a strict response, scream about
>injustice, and polarize the community between lovers of order who hate
>the user and lovers of fairness who hate the administration. Another
>typical pattern is people who wait until the last minute of a group
>decision-making process to raise fundamental objections, carrying on about
>dictatorship unless everyone starts the whole process over again from
>scratch. Such people give genuine crusaders for justice a bad name, of
>course, and they also cause immense and mysterious upset. Everybody who
>operates a MUD should read R.D. Hinshelwood's book "What Happens in
>Groups:  Psychoanalysis, the Individual and the Community", London: Free
>Association Books, 1987. It is a detailed account of exactly this sort of
>behavior.  It's set in mental hospitals, of course, as opposed to MUD's,
>but the principles are the same.
>
>
>------- End of Forwarded Message
>
>
>
---
michael reece             deprogrammer                 huskylabs, inc.
sick@lab.com     http://www.butterfly.net/sick/    http://www.lab.com/
in case of emergency, break glass. or page 1-800-skypage, pin 4197381.
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