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Comments
I wonder how many of these requirements for writing exercise were devised and approved by college students or college graduates? Applying to a school takes an essay or three, and depending on your subject, the finals for any given class will almost always include essay questions. Your mindset tells you a test requires an essay. That is just the way the world works!
Wow, what kind of Essays are you guys writing... usually when I read through Sylvan essays for their tier two requirements they are just a paragraph or two if that. Just some small blurb about some topic they choose to write about. It really isn't that bad plenty of people do it for the Sylvanic Fellowship.
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing. When the Wardens did require essays, I set the goal at about one short paragraph, 100 words or less. If I heard of some Page or Squire's "essay" getting kicked back for being too short, I'd try to step in and fix that.
If there were/are 500+ word essays being assigned out there, complete with thesis, conclusion, and bibliography, then yeah, that's dumb, but I don't think all written requirements are unreasonable.
I agree that in-person lectures and interactive requirements are better ways of doing things, but for some things I think its perfectly acceptable to say "Write out a little something to show me that you understand XYZ, so I can glance over it and we can move on to more fun things."
I don't disagree with this. The problem is just that "interactivity" and "time-intensity" are gradual terms, as well as the definition of what constitutes an "essay" in the first place. Judging from your post, it also seems as if you don't reject essays post HR 5 either, which wasn't originally stated. So how would you practically expect a ban on "essays" to be formulated?
You can't ban something as vague as "non-interactive and time-intensive requirements". And even if you could, how can you ban it but still grant them for higher house ranks? Just make an exception for HR5? That would be awfully arbitrary. Make a further exception for houses that have more than one path and only contain an "essay" in one path? Arbitrary again.
You couldn't possibly grasp all eventualities and cases where something may or may not be "acceptable" in a rule like that without making a requirement rulebook rivaling the old pk laws.
That's why a rule won't be helpful for something like this at all. What can help are friendly suggestions and reminders to keep interactivity and reasonable time investment in mind when creating new requirements. I'm willing to bet most of the new house leaders would be willing to listen to such suggestions.
P.S. Keep in mind that @Sarapis, before suggesting a blanket ban on "essays", also agreed to the quote: "Whether it is an essay, a new scroll, a story, a sermon .... 200 words is still 200 words. I know it is a text game, but for the people who are in it for the action, those essay type requirements are killers.". This suggested to me that we're not merely talking about a ban on literal "essays" but indeed about a ban on any kind of writing requirement - even interactive ones!
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Just finished reading all these long, thought out posts about how essays are bad and have no place with Achaea.
@Mathonwy is just greedy and wants to keep the glorious essay writing all to himself.
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To be fair, on his first post on the subject, @Sarapis basically said essay were acceptable so long as they were not the only means a person could progress up in a House. In other words, so long as alternatives existed for people unwilling to write in that manner. Whether the subsequent posts amend the initial view or not is for him to clarify, I suppose.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
I think part of the problem may be the conception of "essay". I see an outline, introduction, thesis, body, and conclusion. I see research, thought and evaluation.
Some people see it simply as an attempt to put thoughts into words.
Maybe instead of calling for an essay, could the leaders ask for a short written work with your thoughts on <subject>?
There is always the alternative of bribery!
That's generally already the case, to my knowledge. I don't think many houses literally ask for "essays". "Essay" is just being used as a stand-in hyperbole in this discussion for any kind of written document.
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Yeah. I love rituals, but I really don't think it's a fitting requirement for new players, but something that should be done by well-established members of an organisation.
Besides, I actually consider it a positive thing that new players don't know yet what is "real" in the game, and what is only "pretend play". This ambiguity adds to the magic of the game and lets it appear even deeper than it really is. Once you learn that an emote is "just" an emote and a ritual is just a sum of emotes, the world has already lost some of its mystery. That's bound to happen, of course, but there's no need to rush the revelation.
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I for the life of my cannot figure out why people try to cram so much stuff within just a few house ranks for advancement. Aren't there 20 house ranks? It's like getting to the next rank is gas at $10 a gallon and there are only 50 gallons left.
HR1 to HR6 should be the most basic tasks ever... What are the ideals of our guild. Have 30 of each mineral/herb. Have one of each Elixir/tonic. Reach the 50th circle... Etc
HR7 to HR 15 Move into reinforcing guild ideals. Our guild ideals are bacon, whiskey and hand puppets. So create tasks that begin to emphasize those ideals.. Completing tasks in each category with various choices
HR16 to HR19 specialization... I am going to be a Grand Baconmancer so all my tasks are focused on bacon.
Can I join that house? Freshly grilled Vaetra, triple Baconator has a nice ring to it.
Not so easy to do when the new Houses have their leaders at Hr5/6, but that's my opinion on it... since it makes making news posts and such a little chaotic.
Well, from what I understand, such tasks will now be handled by the city, no?* Well, except for the level 50 one, maybe? So no need for such basic things in a House task.
*Not really familiar with the City Novicehood thing.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
If you think 'essay' is an arbitrary and overbroad term, then you shouldn't've been arguing with me about exactly that concept for the last, like, five pages! #realtalk: obviously we have at least a working understanding of what it is we've been discussing, or else you've just been arguing with me to argue and wasting everyone's time, you naughty boy.
I've also been pretty adamant from the beginning that they're great opt-in mechanics for post-HR5. I was the first person in the thread to use the phrase 'opt-in mechanics,' actually, and likened them to the branches of a tree. Not my most elegant metaphor, but hey, it works in a pinch.
The HR5 cutoff is no more arbitrary than 'oh you can be robbed at level 30' or 'oh you're out of Minia at level 20.' In fact, it's actually probably less so; HR5 is full membership, meaning you can hold Houseleader then and begin to have an effect upon the House and etc. It's also the first real achievement a lot of new players will accomplish. To put it into the parlance of single-player RPGs, it's roughly when the training wheels come off and you get to free-roam the map.
Similarly, in re: banning 'non-interactive and time-intensive requirements,' you can absolutely ban them, should ban them, and they're not arbitrary concepts at all. Is this writing requirement causing you, as a player, to take time out from playing the game to prepare blocks of text that you then submit to another person in order to advance in the game, and which only you and the person who's assigned/forced/draws the short straw end up reading? If so, you've just written an Achaean essay, characterized by its immutable nature of being non-responsive in the face of RP (it's like the long descs in a room, except it doesn't do anything to set the scene). All you've done is engaged two people (badly) in a task that could've involved many, many more, and which will likely result in the person reading the essay to issue a flat pass/fail instead of provoking discussion. And even if it does provoke discussion, that discussion is only going to be between two people by virtue of what an essay is, unlike lectures or sermons or Q&A sessions, which fundamentally involve people from the beginning as their operative mechanism. You can't have any of the previous three without an audience; you CAN write stupid essays without one, and in fact the writing of them precludes having an audience/being an audience during the writing because of how the Achaea writing composer dealie works.
I'm pretty sure, too, that the context of '200 words is 200 words' means 'a requirement to write 200 words on a concept.' That's the only interpretation that really makes any sense; obviously you can't blanket-ban writing requirements because this is a text game that requires you to write for literally everything you do including combat. What is frowned upon are x-number-of-pages or x-number-of-paragraphs or x-number-of-words as an integral part of the requirement, because the focus is on filling a quota of words, not on the quality of the words or the degree to which those words involve other people/make their gaming experience any better.
tl;dr Stop trying to make slippery slopes happen, @Iocun! They're not gonna happen.
Yeah, as far as I can tell, the curative thing isn't a thing in the Virtuosi, as I was told it was handled by something else.
TBH I think this is precisely the type of task you should try hard to avoid (unless you are running a library).
But it's quite hard to create the opposite: fun, interactive, gameplay-ish requirements. It's doable, but it requires a good bit of creativity to adapt existing mechanics and design tasks around them, and perspective on why you're assigning the tasks in the first place. I'm not sure whether Houses moving away from profession-related identities - where you could assign a task like 'sneak into Cyrene and slip these incriminating documents into that guy's inventory' or 'make your homunculus walk across the city and retrieve a package, I'll wait' - and towards more general, abstract ideals will make this harder or not.
Another issue, sort of, is that if your tasks require heavy interaction with other House members to evaluate, this becomes taxing on your support structure (secretaries, aides, senior members) as those people may not enjoy spending a lot of time going through the routine for the same tasks over and over. You can offload some of the tedium of a task by shifting it on the evaluator, eg. instead of "write about the elements" it becomes "have a chat with a secretary about the elements", but then you require that secretary to be charming and interesting and in a cheery mood, otherwise there's nothing fun about it.
So, my comment sort of got skimmed over because essays (and I feel pretty passionately about them myself), but yeah, are cities taking over basic novice stuff or what? I thought that was the plan?
My point was they should be really easy simple tasks... Read "The Beauty of Bacon" by Vayne and on the last page there are 10 questions be able to answer any of those question for advancement.
I'm interested to see how the ambassador will handle it but have you checked the city tasks yet? It's a step in the right direction but isn't completely comprehensive.
Let me start with this: 200 words is not an essay. To frame what I mean, consider that Iocun's postscript above is nearly 100 words alone.
Many of the House essay requirements I've seen in Achaea have required far more than this, usually 300 words at minimum. So while I support Sarapis' inclination to ban the essay as a requirement, I want to be clear about what an essay actually is in Achaea.
Why were essays popular House requirements in the past? Well, an essay is a easy way of evaluating critical thought on House related concepts and history, usage of House jargon, etc. But it is also wholly uninspired as tasks go.
I teach college-level reading courses, so pardon me while I get on my high horse about this. Reading - whether it involves reading a novel, a textbook or what goes on in Achaea - is meaningless unless we set a purpose for it. House requirements should be designed to help Achaean players respond and interact with what they've read/learned in their time within an organization. There are many, many ways to do this that go beyond the traditional essay:
Activity Evaluation
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Read a journal Design a new cover for the journal
that depict its contents (can use any
any materials, painted illustrations, etc.
Studying House values Create a "casting call" roster as if you
were a director putting on a play about
these values. Who would you cast in each
"valued" role and why? Discuss your decisions
with <whoever>.
Studying House history Create a puzzle, game, or event so that
everyone in the Hous can participate.
Explain why you chose to create this and
how it added to your understanding of this
<journal, scroll, etc.>.
You can do everything from having them read a history tome and then creating "fortune cookies" for each notable name to edible reviews of tomes ("Some books are to be tasted, other swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested," -- Sir Frances Bacon). I could take any tome in Achaea right now and make a book review using edible food items that help me retell its content, explain its themes and insights. And you know what? It would be fun. People would enjoy the discussion, and their characters would enjoy the sustenance provided.
In short, not only will banning the essay help to ensure a deeper level of enjoyment and understanding of Achaea - but it will also help new players to see that there is no one right way to interact and respond to the information presented in Achaea.
Album of Bluef during her time in Achaea
@Mathonwy: I'm not talking about slippery slopes at all. I'm talking about the "ban on essays" idea and nothing else. I am, at least in my recent posts, merely speaking about the practicality of trying to formulate such a ban in a reasonable sense. We may have sometimes talked about the same things, sometimes not, but I don't think we're going to get much further beyond this point until someone states exactly how such a ban would be formulated. So, what exact ban would you propose? What would you write in that announce post if you were Sarapis?
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I assume he'd put the smack down to leadership, if it came to that. Not necessarily an announce. It sounds like Tecton gave quite the foot stomp this time around (so we'll have to see how that shakes out).
Problem about doing it that way is that subsequent leaders won't know about it.
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