Official News page 6

WHY LITTERING IS ANTI-SOCIAL

by Hazed

Several times over the Christmas period people walking into Santa's grotto were greeted by a strange sight: a floor-full of coal:

You can see Santa, a lucky dip tub, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal, a coal and a coal.

In order to create this effect, somebody had to go to a great deal of trouble, so it surely didn't happen by accident. What that person did was called littering, and doing it deliberately is against the rules.

Now before you start grumbling about stupid rules, bear with me, because there are reasons why littering is against the rules. The first is a technical one. Put enough objects on the ground in one place and keep on piling more on top, and eventually, you're bound to hit some kind of limit that the game won't be able to cope with. No, I have no idea what that limit is and I don't want to find out by having the game crash on us!

The other reason is a social one. The specific rule that gets broken is the one against disruption. A great long list of identical objects in a room looks... well... wrong. It "breaks the dream" and jerks players out of the fantasy world that is Fed DataSpace. It is also disruptive because of the way it makes players' screens scroll - enough litter in a room can chase the actual room description off the top of a screen.

I have heard it argued that I should not make littering against the rules - if the game allows you to do it then the rules should too, and if I don't want people to do it I should make sure the game won't let them. Well, frankly, my dears, that's bull... there are plenty of rules that describe things you can do that are fine when you do them once, but anti-social when done to excess, such as kissing other players, or walking in and out of a room.

Besides, if I made littering something that it was impossible to do, it would have serious consequences.

I have in fact taken quite a lot of steps to make it very hard to drop litter. Most objects have some kind of event on them so that if you drop them, they vanish - or in the case of expensive objects like charms, they don't leave your inventory at all. The only way objects can end up on the ground is if your inventory is full when they are created. An obvious way to stop littering from ever being possible would be to get Bella to change the code so that if your inventory is full when an object is created, it just vanishes again, rather than being put on the floor. That would be fine for objects like Santa's coal and candy canes, or the role-playing objects in Sol; you would simply have to make a choice about whether to discard something you are carrying in order to get the new object, or go without.

But if the object is something required for a puzzle, to lose it as soon as you gain it simply because you are carrying a load of junk around with you could have serious consequences. There may not be a way to get the object again.

Therefore, I don't intend to make the game code enforce the no-littering rule. It remains a social problem and will be dealt with in the same way as other anti-social behavior or game disruption.

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