unforum

[Cherry Cotton]

[META] (soapbox) Politeness

[Scumbag]

I just want to say I aint badmouthing any group, or saying one is better than another. I'm sure its going to sound like it, so I figured that I'd make a discalimer. Basically, if you think I'm badmouthing a group, I prolly am, but I don't mean it.

I'm pressed for time - aka "Scumbag's girlfriend is threatening to deploy a high-impact nerf cannon attack at the back of his head if he doesn't get off the computer within 3 minutes" - so I'll be brief.

This ARG/ad/whatever is a new breed for everyone. For ARGers, its a new reality to explore. For a Halo 2 fan, its a way to learn more about Halo 2. For a BungieDude, its a way to examine H2 connections to previous games.

We're all doing this game for different reasons. There's bound to be a little... viotileness.

Lord knows I wanted to pop half you people for putting Marathon / Halo stuff on the wiki that, as a BungieDude I considered common knowledge

[Anton P. Nym]

Unfortunately there's an ongoing problem, since early this summer, with problem children infesting Bungie fan sites. (Despite the "M" for Mature rating. One wonders what kind of parents they have.)

Immaturity isn't the biggest issue though. That can be dealt with, just using a little firmness and the odd thread-lock. The issue is the sociopathy of a few miscreants who don't seem to understand that it's PEOPLE who write this stuff.

The logic behind their behaviour seems to be thus:

*Because it's text on a screen, it's not real.
*Things that are not real don't have feelings.
*Therefor, I can do whatever I want.

(If I've got this right, then it's a major hole in the "Grand Theft Auto turned my child into a monster" theory.) They don't think about the originators of the content, who ARE real and are participating. They're used to the canned results of console games or television shows, where their bad acts do indeed have no real-world consequences. So they behave like monsters on the forums.

Alas, they've convinced some of the gullible and impressionable youths that they're "k3wl" and copy-catting escallates the issue.

I've started pointing out to the impressionables that there are real people with real feelings on the other side of the connection. Hopefully this will reach the more intelligent and empathetic of the crowd, and improve things somewhat.

However, progress there will be slow and there will be incorrigibles and recidivists to deal with. I hope that we can all endure this with patience.

-- Steve hopes that he can redirect gullibility. Canute thought he'd taught us a lesson...

[Scumbag]

[Tarrsk]

Calm down, Scumbag. I'm sure Steve didn't mean anything of the sort (especially as he himself was a respected member of the HBO forums way before ILB showed up... does the name "Enkidu" ring any bells?). His observation was that there has been a growth in the level of childishness in the Halo fan community, not that all Halo fans are children, and frankly, he's right. The Bungie fan community has changed a lot since the pre-Halo days, and the increase of immaturity and influx of trolls on forums like HBO's are the unfortunate (but inevitable) result of Halo's commercial success.

Back on topic, I have to agree to Cherry Cotton's original post, with one caveat- one thing that a lot of people seem to be forgetting is that the trout itself is supposed to be a friendly rebuke, not a flame. Newbies to the ARG assume that trouting is an inside-joke way of saying "you're stupid," and get upset when it happens, when it's actually supposed to mean "thanks for your contribution, but we've covered that before." Of course, it's not helping that a lot of these people are turning around and yelling "trout!" with the genuine intent of being belittling and insulting (and then we get Cherry Cotton's problem).

[Cherry Cotton]

Thanks for your comments, Greenhorn, but I feel that if what people intend to say with "trout" is "thanks for your contribution, but we've covered that before," then they ought to say, "thanks for your contribution, but we've covered that before." It's not the annotation that counts, it's the connotation; and if the connotation is rude than it doesn't really matter that you say it with the best of intentions.

I guess what I mean is this: "trout" is a technical term that the ARG community has invented, so it's a great thing to use as a tag to mark a message that is a duplicate of a previous message ("[TROUT]"). However, where the line is drawn is before where people use "trout!" as a statement in itself, where it sounds like a taunt, or even worse, when they use a smiley depicting somebody rolling their eyes and hitting you with a fish, which is a term of respect only in Monty Python land.

A few words on Halo: Halo is a wonderful game, and it's what brought me to this website in the first place, and alerted me to the general ARG community. No game I have ever played balanced the elements of gameplay and story with such depth and skill. But this is not Halo. It's pretty amusing how all the game websites, such as IGN, are trying to suck this dry for coverage (IGN said "perhaps Halo 2 will feature a bee-like race!), but all the noise and hype surrounding this puzzle needs to be seperated from the honest speculation that takes place here. Halo is relevant to this puzzle, yes, but we need to be thinking in terms of this puzzle before we think of Halo. That's why it irritates me when we constantly hear "is it a demo disc? is it a T-shirt giveaway? will Cortana materialize in my bedroom?" because it's all great wishful thinking, but we're trying to be productive.

Right now, we're dead stuck in this "axons go hot" puzzle, and all we can do is brainstorm. If you've ever been in a brainstorming session, you know that the only way to do it is for everybody to be able to spout whatever ideas are coming to them, no matter how silly and outlandish they are. That's part of what's fun about this excercise, it's an "experiment in groupthink." This puzzle is definitely Halo related, and that's what's so useful about the kind people who are cross-referencing the ilovebees universe with the Halo universe, and this kind of Halo-related speculation falls squarely within the bounds of speculation that we need to have on this forum.

The seperation that needs to be made, however, is between ilovebees and Halo. Again, we are not Halo. We are trying to figure out, on a superficial level, what is wrong with Aunt M's site. And, this address appearing in the Halo 2 trailer, for better or worse, has brought in Bungie fans across the Earth to help us in our quest to uncover the secret of Aunt M's website. And, for good reason, Halo is a popular game; and because of that, we're likely to get a lot of people, from the brilliant to the politeness impaired.

So, in order to solve this puzzle we need to weed out all the Halo smack-talk. And that means, no more "Halo 2 will feature Dana as the Master Chief-ess," no more "Halo 2 demo discs will eat Cleveland," no more "we're going to get a T-shirt giveaway in backwoods Wisconsin." As I said, we're brainstorming, but we're not brainstorming about Halo, we're brainstorming about the puzzle. In my opinion, Halo related speculation definitely has to stay, as this puzzle is set firmly in the Halo universe; but the speculation needs to stay about the puzzle, as forums for Halo 2 speculation are popular and plentiful.

This is the most popular ARG ever, probably, and the problem with that is that ARGs require a large group of people to think as one. Too many players and we have too many cooks. That's why our moderators work so hard to keep these threads organized; if we can't, people might gloss over valuable bits of info because they've been deluged by off-topic posts (by, I must add, usually ordinary players trying to solve puzzles and not trolls). In order to do this right, we need a lot of signal and not a lot of noise. In other words, tag your messages correctly, keep them short and to the point (yes, I know I'm breaking that rule, but that's why I tag this thread "soapbox"), and good God, don't speculate on Halo 2 when we're trying to talk in terms of puzzles.

Anyway, since I'm mainly bitching and not solving anything, I would like to make a proposal: we might want to add a fifth, "community" section to the Haunted Apiary forums (specifically for the ilovebees community), where people can talk about whatever they want. Here, we'll be able to speculate on Halo, goof off, and get to know each other. With that out of our collective systems, we'll be able to work on puzzles much more effectively, and maybe our (highly useful and necessary) moderation system won't seem so mean-spirited. Thoughts?

(Oh, and my last thing, promise: if you think I'm trying a little too hard to grease the wheels with all my meta-talk: trying to solve all these puzzles is a gargantuan undertaking, as though we are thinking in open-source, and it requires a feat of organization. I'm happy to try and grease the wheels because it will make solving the puzzles much smoother and more fun. After all, that's the point, right?)

[Aelith]

Thank you Cherry Cotton. You have expressed several things I have been feeling lately. I hope everyone listens.

[Astald]

I agree. I think this thread, or something that can combine all the valid viewpoints here for politeness, should be stickied.

[Atma]

[Anton P. Nym]

[sherpa]

My two pence:

Just because non-ARG players are involved doesn't automatically preclude a community... but the mix of attitudes here, and elsewhere, (and it's not all down to 'problem children', I'm pretty sure) is making community spirit an elusive phantom indeed. The main problem I've noticed is people with their fingers in their ears going "lalala can't hear what you're saying because I know my way is the right way", or even getting all upset when one politely replies to their wild spec with a suggestion that it might be such.

Still, the social and game-playing experiment of bringing together puzzle freaks and Halo freaks (..we're all freaks together *grin*..) to combine knowledge and skills together is certainly an interesting one.

I agree on the motion proposed elsewhere to remove the trout emoticon, too; it's not polite to follow up to a post with simply "trout" or, worse, "trout and lock", IMO. Especially after a polite rebuttal has already been given, adding your trout to the mix is just... harsh. In the realtime medium of IRC, slapping people around a bit with a trout is okay because you can explain it, but once you've trouted here it's there to stay, more or less.

I'm vegetarian; I don't do mindless trouting (actually, I've never used the smiley, but that might be because I browse with images off anyway). Let's have more people do the same! Go "Vegetarian" Today!

[Dorkmaster]

I first of all want to applaud Cherry Cotton for her long, but complete thoughts on this subject.

Secondly, I really want to clarify things on the Haloites and ARGers fronts... Because I think that's how a lot of people are seeing this, and for good reason! Up until now, there has been a feeling of "this Halo person said this" and the "Old skool ARGers say this". And like anything else in life, there's new generations, and growing pains. And that's what's happening here.

The deal is this: We need to respect the rules. I'll explain that in a bit, but here's where I think a lot of people are not getting along in terms of Halo-backstory (as far as that goes) and old skoolers: A lot of people who have played these games before believe that books and other games and things like that, (in terms of their characters and such) are most likely out of game. (I repeat MOST LIKELY, not DEFINITIVELY...) This is the reasoning for such behavior: If you were watching, oh, Friends on TV, and all the time, they were referencing back and forth between their character names and their real life names, it would be wierd and incongruent, right? Well, taking "backstory" from Halo might be like that. In terms of using previous characters, or plot regurgitation or something like that, it just seems like it would be bad form, and unimaginative. This is not to exclude the entire Halo world, obviously! Things like terms we "non-backstoried" would understand, like 'glassing' or 'ONI' or such, are definitely in-game because it gives us context in this Halo world. And that's awesome! No one would/should argue with anyone in that respect... Like it's totally cool to say "well to glass a planet you need X kind of energy" and stuff. Cuz in this world, that's true!

So, my point is this: Let's be honest with ourselves Haloites and ARGers alike... If it really makes sense in game, let's not bash it. But also, if it's really a stretch and we have no precedent for anything like it in the game, but it's "cool" to think about, maybe it should stay cool in your head, instead of going on the forums... Can we agree on that? Ok, moving on...

As much as some would hate it, and as much as some would like it, we've got an entirely new generation of ARGers here, even if the Beast is still less than 10 years old... We've got a generational gap here, and we've got to reconcile that.

I'm not saying that we should compromise the integrity of ARGs here, but that we should understand three things:

(1) Newbies don't get the rules right away. It takes time.

(2) The 10 commandments of ARGs, as well as other reasonings from our Cloudmaker friends, as well as the fine moderators and Admins for this site make sense and arose out of necessity and efficiency of previous games.

(3) Therefore, in light of #2 and #1, RESPECT THE RULES AND YOUR FELLOW PLAYER!

So here's the deal: Know that anyone with less than say, 25 posts may not understand how "Trout" works. Maybe you should do what Cotton says and explain:

"You have a good idea here, but it's been discussed here (and add a tinyURL link, so they can see how things work!). And that's why I "trout" you. It's not negative, it's a positive! Welcome to the game!"
And you're done.

Also, become familiar with the past games and such, so you can not only say "This is what's going on." but also the almost MORE important, "This is WHY that's going on." So instead of saying "I'm calling for a lock to this thread", you may say "I'm calling a for a lock to this thread so we don't get confused. I wish to refer you to "so and so" reference so you can see why I think this is going to end up distracting us instead of helping us get this solve" or whatever... you know what I mean...

We just have to respect each other. If you see SpaceBass, ANY of the Moderators, or ANY of the Cloudmakers, treat them with respect. Are they royalty, no, but they either run this site, which they DON'T have to do, or they know how these things work better than you do, and you should respect that...

And since you may be one day considered a "Beekeeper", maybe you'll want a little respect when the next game (Syzygy, anyone?) comes along, since you'll have some experience then... So maybe it's best to start that respect circle now.

Ok, since I've used the term "respect circle" I think I've used up all of my sensitivity points for the day. But, I think you all get my picture. Young or old, Hardcore Haloite, or Adamant ARGer, we've got to work together for this to work. What a cool thing, to be a part of such a social experiment! Thousands of people working together for a common goal? How cool is that?!? Make it a memorable and pleasurable experience for everyone, yourself included. Thanks for listening to me, and if you really have something you want to talk about with me specifically, please feel free to PM me, as I would be more than happy to discuss this or explain further. Have a good one all, and see you on the 24th (and every day in between)!


This message has been paid for and approved by Citizens Regarding All Players. Thank you and tip your waiters/waitresses.

[ScarpeGrosse]

1) There is already a forum entitled Various and Sundry for all discussions not related to ARG, the games, etc. Adding another forum to the Ilovebees thingie specifically for discussion of the Halo2 game isn't really in my list of things to do. It may show up later once SpaceBass wields his stick of sanity around. Personally, I think if you kept it all to one thread within "General/Updates" in the Haunted Apiary forum, labelled "META", things would be fine. (but that's my opinion. Again, things may change as UF continues to grow.)

2) Trouting: As I've said elsewhere... "trout" is not a bad thing. It should not be taken as a "bad thing". It should not be used to "smack dumb ideas around". If you'd note the glossary definition of trout, you'll find that really, its a term of respect in the ARG community. Granted, I do find the willingness of people to whip out the trout emoticon of death and the dancing lock to be rather excessive.

What I haven't seen mentioned here, is that if and when you discover a thread with trout, rather than just saying and Search, that maybe possibly YOU take the time to point the confused/lost individual to the appropriate thread with a small description of what was already discussed.

Forming a good community starts with the players and their reactions to each other.

EDIT - Okay, we just had a little mini-moderator/admin meeting and have made a decision re:TROUT. Hold onto your panties.

ANYONE who posts a without fully backing it up with a link to another thread where it was previously discussed, the post wherein it was discussed and/or the author of said post as reference and kindness to the trouted poster, will find their to be deleted and replaced with an evil moderator note.
FURTHERMORE, anyone who decides, without fully backing it up with a link to another thread where it was previously discussed, the post wherein it was discussed and/or the author of said post, to use the emoticon, will also find it to be deleted and replaced with an evil moderator note.

We hope that this will be found to be satisfactory to all involved. Questions/concerns/issues should be addressed to the admins or moderators of this forum, preferably via Private Message.
Thank you for playing nicely!
-SG

[Parasyt]

Thanks Dorkmaster (er...is it okay if I call you Dork? or Master? Gah, all the shortened names sound weird >.> ), you've pretty much summed it up. Prior to when I watched the Halo 2 preview, I didn't even know that ARGs existed, let alone that all these people played them. I was just one of the "OMGorz, it's HaLo 2!" fanboys...Well, maybe not that bad, but I was not very well initiated into Bungie (after all this, I really want to play Marathon )

But anyways, I ended up on this site after Louis Wu's entire "Don't spam the forums with ILB crap." news articles...I wondered what he was talking about, and wandered over here. I was entranced...I got the carp confused out of me, then I found this place. So far, I've only contributed once, (and that was pretty much a trout...the entire Axons go hot thing), but I'm trying to be more productive. I plan on participating on Project Syzygy, but I want to be more experienced. Guess that means I better get working on ILB.

Well, I better get finished with this rant...But thank you Dorkmaster for expressing my feelings.

[Varin]