Where should people who are interested in getting involved in the online prose-based play scene go?

Oh, alas! If only anyone knew!

Seriously, this is one of the questions that plagues on-line gamers: how in God’s name do you find the decent games?

Sturgeon’s Law is very much in effect when it comes to on-line games. In fact, I’d say that on-line RPG probably even exceeds Sturgeon: more than 90% of them are crap. Imagine if it were possible to find an on-line link to every table-top game being played in the country. Now imagine trying to find one that you’d personally consider worthwhile. Now imagine trying to find one that you’d not only consider “quality,” but that would also match your particular genre and stylistic tastes enough so that you’d actually want to play in it. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

This question comes up rather often on rant communities like bad_rpers_suck, and the responses can sometimes be a bit telling. On this thread, for example, some people chimed in to express some degree of sympathy with the original poster’s lament

“I guess most of the ‘good’ games keep their heads down and let word-of-mouth do the work for them. Shame there’s not a ‘vetted’ list somewhere, but then, who’d be in charge of vetting?”

while others simply gave (rather unhelpful) explanations of how they find good games:

“I always just seem to follow the good role players and they lead me to the games. But I suppose that only works if one knows some good role players”

“Most of the ones Ive found I’ve found through friends who are a part of the group already.”

But it’s rather interesting to note that very, very few people actually volunteered the names of their own games, and that of the people who did agree to do so, most offered to contact the OP through private e-mail or AIM. This a community with over four thousand members. And yet, only a handful of them were willing to volunteer links to games in the public space of the thread, and those who did so were often playing games with rather specialized and possibly limited appeal (jrock celebrity, experimental murder mystery, smut).

And this brings us back right back to the gate-keeping issue.

There’s a terrible conflict in the minds of on-line gamers between the desire to be inclusive and welcoming to newcomers, and the desire to play only with people one already trusts. One of the results of this conflict has been the development of a kind of hierarchy of games: “cattle-call” games, which keep a large public profile and accept applications from new players; and “private” games, which are by invitation only and usually try very hard to fly under the radar, sometimes even to the extent of barring public access to their game (friends-locked livejournals, restricted access BBS, etc.) or by formally requesting that their players not talk about the game in public at all (often jokingly referred to as “The Fight Club Rule”).

What this means is that if you are new to the community, often the only way to get an invitation to play in one of the better, more private games is to do your time in one the ‘cattle-call’ games until you make friends, or until someone notices you and invites you to a more selective one.

Sadly, this does lead to a rather ugly “elite vs plebe” dynamic within the gaming culture. Cliquishness is a serious problem in on-line gaming, and one that people often complain about.

It’s easy enough to find cattle-call games. They advertise for players on “pimp communities” like unique roleplay on Greatestjournal, or RPG List on livejournal. There are also more specific advertisement communities for PBEM and forum-based games out there. It’s usually the case, though, that games which advertise themselves in pimp communities are pretty dire.

A somewhat sneaky way to find low-profile fandom-based journal-based RPGs is to go to Greatestjournal (a livejournal clone popular among RPers) and then to do an “interest search” on the name of a character from the particular canon world one is interested in. Such searches quite often turn up RP journals, and you can then follow the links to the main role-playing community and see if the game is any good.

Are there good introductory communities, or especially educational well-known games it would help to be familiar with?

Milliways Bar is a large and sprawling multi-fandom journal-based game which has spawned a rash of imitators. It’s a good place to check out if you want to get an idea of what thread-based RP can look like, although be warned: Milliways has over time developed a somewhat idiosyncratic “house style.” Its players favor third person present tense, which is less usual than third person past, and the convention is to write the “thread openers” in a quirky, strongly authorial and self-conscious “semi-OOC” narrative style, which only shifts to a more typical IC stance once IC interaction has actually begun. Because it is so large, it also has a more authoritarian structure than smaller games usually do.

Nonetheless, I think this is a good game to observe for a number of reasons. For one thing, its primary OOC journal is (rather unusually) not completely friends-locked, so you can get a much better feel for how the game actually works than you can with most on-line games. For another, it’s possible to see how certain rules and conventions – and the jargon which they engender – have developed over the course of the game in response to some common gaming dilemmas: pacing (“slowtiming,” “Millitime”), player-player disputes, and conflicts between IC behavior and meta-game concerns. (The thread in which a new rule on “canon puncturing” was imposed by the mods is an interesting example of an attempt to negotiate one particular IC vs. meta conflict.)

Milliway’s is one of those “trend-setter” games that many people seem to be currently trying to emulate – with varying degrees of success. It’s a good example of a Really Big journal-based game that has been quite successful – although there’s recently been concern that the game has been faltering, and the mods are taking action to try to halt its decline.

Nocturne Alley, a Harry Potter slash soap opera, ended several years ago. It was largely responsible for popularizing the quasi-epistletory “first person journal style,” as well as a genre which might be best described as “gay-friendly soap opera at Hogwarts.” (Some people really do not thank the game for that last part!) It was quite the phenom in its day; when the game ended in 2004, there were outpourings of mourning from its many spectators and fans. It has often been emulated, only sometimes with any degree of success.

There’s an interesting series of threads on its fan community, NrAged, in which after the game had finished, its players and one of its mods answered fans’ questions about the game. (Q&A with a mod can be found here, Q&As with some of the players took place over the months of August and September of 2004.)

Nocturne Alley is a good example of a number of the things we’ve talked about in regard to fandom games in particular: recontextualization of major canon characters, cultural preference for player pseudonymity, and use of the game to explore meta-fictional concepts. (In Nocturne Alley’s case, I’d also say that part of what the game was exploring was the very nature of CMC itself.) It also seems to me that in many ways the game may have been unusually deeply rooted in the particular aesthetics of media fandom, which could also be educational, but which might also make it seem a bit mystifying in places.

Both of these are examples of successful large games. Successful small games often have far more locked material, and are therefore harder to use as educational examples.

Also, where should we go if we’re curious about online fandom in general?

Metabib is a terrific resource. It’s a bibliography of material on the subject divided into categories, the most useful of which are probably the first (academic books and articles, some of them available for reading online), and the last (a linklist of livejournal discussions written by Just Plain Fans, and therefore varying widely in quality, topic and formality of approach). Highly recommended.

Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992), dated and tinged with apologia though it may be, is still probably the best available introduction to the culture of media fandom. It’s also to some extent required reading for everything that follows, as nearly everything that has been written about fandom culture refers back to Jenkins in one way or another, even if only to disagree with him. (It may be of some interest that Jenkins has also been known to write about the relationship between games and narrative.)

Matt Hills’ Fan Cultures (2002) is simply superb, and it makes an excellent follow-up to Jenkins. Hills takes issue with Jenkins, whose explanation of fandom culture he seems to see as rather one-sided and defensive. Great book.

Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (1992) is also seminal, if somewhat specific in focus.

Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity, edited by Harris and Alexander (1998), is a strong compilation of essays on the subject.

Material specific to online media fandom is relatively thin on the ground so far, mainly because it’s such a new phenomenon. (You gotta give people a little bit of time to study the stuff before they start publishing, right?)

That said, I’m now right in the middle of reading Rhiannon Bury’s Cyberspaces Of Their Own: Female Fandoms Online (2005). So far, it seems good.

I am very excited about the forthcoming Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, which is coming out this fall. Although the book hasn’t even been released yet, it’s already getting quite a lot of good buzz, and the abstract, which you can read on-line here, looks really promising.

“Refractory” is an on-line journal which often has good articles related to fandom. Pugh’s The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context could be of interest, as could Shave’s Slash Fandom on the Internet Or Is the Carnival Over?

“Intensities” was also a good on-line journal for this material, but sadly, they seem to have disappeared from the web. I hope they return someday: they published a fantastic Jenkins/Hills interview that I don’t think is available anywhere else.

Less formally, if you wanted to see what sort of issues online fans discuss among themselves, you could always lurk the livejournal communities fanthropology and metafandom. Fanthropology is a community dedicated to discussing and analyzing fandom culture, news, and events. Metafandom is what’s often called a “newsletter:” it links to whatever livejournal discussions on fandom issues are brought to the attention of its maintainers and considered “interesting.” (Whether or not they really are interesting is rather a matter of personal taste, but it is a good way of keeping up with What People In Online Fandom Are Buzzing About from day to day.)

17. Where should people who are interested in getting involved in the online prose-based play scene go? Are there good introductory communities, or especially educational well-known games it would help to be familiar with? Also, where should we go if we’re curious about online fandom in general?

Yes, it’s true. Original characters are held in great suspicion by a large number of fandom gamers. This is one of the major divisions in stylistic preference among fandom gamers, actually: do you prefer games which focus on OCs (or on those “canon characters” who are little more than names in the original source text, and who are therefore, for all intents and purposes, the same as OCs), or do you want to play with the ‘major canons?’

Disclosure here: I personally far prefer games which focus on OCs or on very minor canons to those which focus on the major canons. This makes me feel a bit hesitant about attempting to explain the prevalence of the other preference. I’m always a bit leery of trying to “explain” preferences which I don’t feel I fully comprehend, because it’s been my experience that when people try to do that, they often get it wrong – and sometimes wrong in ways that those who actually do hold the preference in question find actively offensive. Nonetheless, I’ll do my best.

One of the reasons for the bias against original characters in fandom-based role-play is simply a reflection of the bias against original characters in fan-fiction. The bias against original characters in fanfic usually derives from the suspicion that such characters are bound to be Mary Sues.

“Fear of Mary Sue” is itself such a huge, divisive, and contentious issue within online media fandom that I’m not even going to begin to get into it here. There seems to be a growing concern, though, that both anti-Sueism and bias against original characters have gone too far and become counter-productive – that it’s become a dysfunctional cultural bias and needs to be changed. (For a very recent example of an expression of this concern, see dragonscholar’s report from this year’s Anime North convention).

So…yeah. Huge issue, this, and not one that I feel prepared to tackle in too much depth here. Suffice it to say that many people view original characters in fanfic as inherently suspicious and problematic, and that since fandom-based RPG both evolved from fanfic and takes place within the same subculture, you see many of the same issues “bleeding over” into approaches to RPG.

Another reason that I think the bias against OCs exists derives from the combination of anonymity/open admissions and freeform play. Since most of these games are d-b (they don’t use quantified or discrete values to define character), there are no formalized mechanics which can help to regulate a character’s powers, abilities, flaws, or limitations. There’s no “character sheet.”

This aspect of freeform play is not all that problematic when you’re playing with people you already know and trust. In an “open admissions” game, however, I think there’s often greater concern that without some formalized bound on character, the game will be vulnerable to inundation by twinks/munchkins/powergamers. Insisting that people play only canon characters serves to mitigate this concern. The idea here is that the canon itself serves as something akin to a “character sheet” – it helps to define at start what a character is and is not, and on what he can and cannot do.

Another reason games might wish to restrict the PCs to the canon characters is the same reason that convention games, for example, often only offer pre-generated characters to their players: it’s a way to build specific themes and conflicts into the game from the very start, and thus to maintain tighter control over what the game ends up being “about.”

Sometimes I also think it’s a matter of challenge, a way of privileging gamism. Online role-players often find it enjoyably challenging to try to play a character within the limitations and boundaries set by a pre-existing body of work. Working within constraints is a test of skill, and it can also sometimes serve to introduce an element of player-player competition into the game – or even across games set in the same canon setting. For people whose enjoyment of RPG includes viewing it as, in part, a type of competition, playing a major canon character offers them a way to do that.

Finally, I think that in many cases, a preference for games which focus on the canon characters is just a reflection of the group’s fictive preference. We’ve talked a lot about immersion as one of the primary goals of online role-play, but we’ve not spent much time talking about one of the other primary goals: story-telling. I think that a lot of people view role-playing games as “storytelling plus role-assumption.” But “storytelling” can encompass a lot of different types of fiction, right?

If the sort of stories that you’re interested in are ones that deal with high adventure, then you’ll probably gravitate toward playing RPGs that tell stories of high adventure. If the sort of fiction that you’re most interested in is meta-fiction, on the other hand, then you’ll likely be drawn to games which tell meta-fictional stories – in other words, fanfic. And you might be particularly interested in fanfic that directly challenges and confronts the original source material by taking on the canon characters themselves .

This, of course, gets into the entire question of what people see in fanfic in the first place, which – again – is far too huge a topic for me to want to get into here. Fanfic comes in a number of different genres, and they all serve slightly different functions. A good deal of what a lot of fanfic is all about, though, is confronting the original source material, and one of the ways that it most frequently does this is through the reinterpretion and recontextualization of the canon characters themselves. So if you what you want to do is to role-play fanfiction, then it makes a certain amount of sense that you’d want a game in which the PCs are the major canons.

So those are some reasons for the prevalence of the preference for games which focus on the major canons. I’m sure there others which I’m just plain missing.

As for the popularity of playing in canon settings, though, which I think is what you’re asking here?

Why the strong preference to play in someone else’s back yard, especially when coupled with a strong preference against getting your own back yard? Is it an accessibility issue?

Yeah, I think it is often an accessibility issue. Published settings which were originally created for use in table-top play (World of Darkness, Greyhawk, etc.) are also quite popular among online RPers – and they serve pretty much the same function as they serve for table-top gamers, I’d say. They give the players some common ground to start out from, which in turn can help to combat certain types of assumption clash.

I think that accessibility is a huge factor in the popularity of canon settings for online games. If I wanted to run a game set in, say, my table-top group’s long-running fantasy world, any prospective players would first have to familiarize themselves with that world, which would be a hell of a lot of work. The worlds of popular fictive texts, on the other hand, have – by very definition of ‘popular’ – already been learned and assimilated by large groups of people. This makes it much easier just to find people to play with. The existence of a shared text also makes it a lot easier for people who find each other on-line to get down to playing relatively quickly. And, it provides an official textual authority – “the canon” – which makes it easier for groups of people to work together collaboratively and to play in an authority-diffuse style.

Playing in canon settings which have a large and active extant online fandom can also help to reduce squabbles over interpretation of the game’s genre and setting, paradoxically enough, because fandom itself is so completely obsessed with squabbles over conflicting interpretations of canon. Fandom RP’s existence within a wider subculture which itself can sometimes seem positively defined by heated partisan divisions between those who favor specific interpretive approaches to the source text gives fandom rpers a convenient vocabulary and context with which to evaluate whether a given gaming group’s favored interpretative approach will coincide or clash with their own.

It doesn’t always work, of course, which is one of the reasons that I think online gamers need to develop a much better theoretical vocabulary. But at least it’s something.

What’s going on in the online prose-based “freeform” world in terms of design?

It seems to me that people are only now really starting to put a lot of conscious thought into their design, and it’s still…well, I see it as still very much in its infancy. It gets back to what I was saying before about prose-based online freeform PBP being sort of where table-top was back in the ’70s.

My feeling about a lot of the people playing these games is that they really want to make them better – to make the successes more reproducable, and the failures less common – but that they’re somewhat hampered in discussing with each other how to go about doing that by a lack of a shared theoretical vocabulary on which they can build. I keep hearing murmers and grumblings that indicate to my mind that there’s growing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs: I know someone who has been talking about wanting to write a book about forum-based PBP; I hear people on rant communities like bad_rpers_suck complaining that there isn’t really any place they can go to talk about the theory of their play style, that the existing places they have at their disposal are either irrelevant or unsuitable for those sorts of discussions. I think there’s a bit of a sea change in the works within the community: people are beginning to want to look at what they are doing more analytically, and to be able to more consciously and deliberately design for the effects that they want.

I find this really exciting. It’s one of the primary reasons that I’ve recently become interested in following RPG theory discussion again.

What (if any) kinds of interesting things are people doing in terms of manipulating the rules to better facilitate certain types of play?

Well, as has come up before, there seems to me to be a recent upsurge in the number of people who are trying to play around with the rules governing turn-taking in order to achieve a variety of effects. I’m also seeing a lot of rules experimentation in regard to pacing, character ownership, narrative voice (not an issue of nearly as much concern to table-top play, but a very hot one in prose-based online), plotting, and conflict introduction.

And then of course, there are those already-established divisions in play style which so often cause arguments. Is “emote style” intrinsically more immersive than third person narration? Many people feel it is, and others strongly disagree, and then they get into fights about it. What about first person journal style? What are that style’s advantages and disadvantages? Does the strictly defined 2-paragraph format favored by some RPers provide an elegant framework which facilitates better and more satisfying play, or is it an artificial imposition which stifles expression and ruins role-play? Do games in which the mods take a stronger authorial role than the rest of the players in planning plot arcs create more satisfying stories, or less satisfying ones? Are fandom games that focus on the canon characters doing something fundamentally different than games which focus on OCs in the canon setting?

There’s no consensus on these issues, any more than there’s consensus on the equivalent table-top issues, and since people tend to have very strong preferences in regard to these stylistic divides, there are often arguments about them. “Style X results in better stories!” “Does not!” “Style Y is anti-immersive!” “Is not!”

You know how it goes.

Or is it still mostly a matter of tradition and intuition?

A bit of both, really. People do select from among the available systems and techniques in order to facilitate the type of gaming they want, but there’s also a lot that just comes down to tradition.

Sometimes, also, there are design decisions that are being made deliberately, but that aren’t terribly analytical. I see an awful lot of emulative game design out there, for example. “Game X was awesome, so let’s use the same system that X did, and then our game will be awesome too!”

The problem with that, of course, is that those who try to emulate a successful game usually fail to correctly identify many of the factors that made that game work so well. They are then disappointed when their own game, in spite of using roughly the same system, runs into problems that the game they’re emulating never seemed to encounter.

The emulative instinct also leads to a certain degree of conservatism, which in turn can lead to stagnation. I guess this would count as “tradition.” People often copy each other’s rules sets word for word, because they figure that those are just the rules that everyone’s using, so of course they must be the best ones. I also think that there’s a certain amount of design conservatism which derives from player resistance to change. On-line games need to be able to attract players, and players are often resistant to trying new things: they don’t want to have to learn how to negotiate a new system once they’ve mastered the one they’re most used to – they just wanna play already! Games which take unusual or experimental approaches can therefore sometimes find it difficult to attract players.

That said, though, there is a lot of experimentation going on out there, and a good deal of variation in the systems people use. And while I think that there are many people who choose their systems based on vague and perhaps not very well-considered emulative desires (ie, “I want my game to feel like Nocturne Alley, so I should run it Nocturne Alley style”), there are also lots of people who are more deliberate and thoughtful about how they pick and choose from among the many systems and techniques available to them, in order to encourage a stronger focus on the things that they most want out of their games.

15. What’s going on in the online prose-based “freeform” world in terms of design? You’ve mentioned rules a couple of times throughout. What (if any) kinds of interesting things are people doing in terms of manipulating the rules to better facilitate certain types of play? Or is it still mostly a matter of tradition and intuition?

You talk a lot about immersion in online play.

Well, immersion is an important part of RP to me, so it’s probably only natural that I tend to focus on it when I talk about RPGs. I also think that it is important to enormous numbers of role-players, which I believe is the reason that Forge theorists sometimes feel compelled to speak so strongly against it – they’re reacting against a widespread cultural norm. Yet even they often agree that it’s one of the main things they value in games: my old friend and ex-housemate Vincent, for example, considers immersion to be a terribly important part of role-playing; he just has very strong opinions over what can and cannot facilitate it, and considers many of the more prevalent beliefs on that subject to be groundless superstition.

I don’t find it surprising that role-players tend to be interested in immersion. Immersion is related to role-assumption, and role-assumption is the primary distinction between RPG and those things that RPG originally evolved from: tactical wargames in the case of table-top, collaborative fanfiction in the case of fandom RP. If people didn’t find there to be something terribly appealing about role-assumption, then RPG never would have evolved in the first place.

Is immersion one of the primary goals for online play?

That’s always going to depend on the individual player, I think. I mean, it’s a bit like asking “is immersion one of the primary goals for face-to-face play?” The only possible answer is: “Well, I guess that all depends on who you’re talking to, and what sort of games they favor.”

It certainly seems to me, though, that it is one of the primary goals for the majority of role-players. It’s something people talk about a lot. When they cite their reasons for enjoying role-play, it often tops the list. And when they complain about gaming styles that they don’t like, their complaints do seem often to be focused on immersion issues.

So, yes, I’d say that immersion is definitely one of the primary goals for most on-line gamers.

That seems somewhat counter-intuitive since it appears that prose-based play would be somewhat anti-immersive, but clearly you don’t seem to think so.

On-line RPers often express great surprise when they find out that table-top RPers also care about immersion! To them, that style of play seems inherently anti-immersive (I listed a couple of the more common reasons people cite for feeling that way in my answer to #11). They therefore just naturally assume that the people who favor it must value different things than they do. This is one of those things that just always totally cracks me up about listening to people talk about role-playing.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about RP, it’s that different people have very different things that they find “anti-immersive,” and that they nearly always assume that their own Immersion Killers must therefore be Immersion Killers for everyone else as well. You hear it all the time. “Those people can’t really value immersion the way I do, because they [use dice/use
mechanics/play multiple characters at once/play GMless/ plot/retcon/break play to discuss metagame issues so often/narrate in the third person/gloss over in-game events/don't play in real time/play face to face/fill-in-the-blank].”

It usually goes right along with the “if I wanted to do that, then I’d just [fill in activity]” statements. You know the ones, surely? If I wanted to do that, then I’d be writing collaborative fiction! If I wanted to do that, then I’d be playing a board game! If I wanted to do that, then I’d be acting in a play! Elliot Wisen once cleverly referred to these statements as “I might as well…” statements. “I might as well be playing a video game!” Very often, those sorts of statements are at heart complaints about Immersion Killers.

All that said, I think that one can often generalize about the types of things that most often prove problematic on the immersion front. People vary so much, though, in which of those things will actually impede them and which they can ignore without difficulty. Different people are thrown by different things. I also think that this is often a matter of familiarity and of learned behavior: people often learn to ignore the more anti-immersive aspects of whatever system they’re most accustomed to using, and then they feel totally mystified when those same things prove so terribly problematic for others.

However, I find it interesting because I never really thought of online play as being immersion focused.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that they prefer online play to face-to-face specifically because they find it more immersive. Others feel differently. It just depends, really.

For me, it’s a bit of a trade-off. I personally find the “sensory deprivation” aspect of online play to be incredibly conducive to immersion. At the same time, though, I also find the stop-motion effects of asynchronous play rather damaging to it. So from my perspective, there are both positives and negatives on the immersion front. The oral vs. written thing isn’t a big deal to me one way or the other – many people, however, seem to find one or the other of them to be far more conducive to immersive play.

Anyway, just as with table-top, some styles of on-line play are far more narrowly designed to facilitate immersion than others are. Just as “table-top” encompasses a huge number of different game systems and styles, all of which vary a great deal in precisely what balance of game values they’re seeking to facilitate, so it is with written on-line games. It’s really hard to generalize about things like “are they immersive?,” because just as in table-top, while immersion is often a primary goal of role-play, it’s very rarely (if ever) the only goal.

Just as table-top gamers do, online gamers choose for their games those systems and techniques which they find best facilitate the particular mix of values that their members prefer – and just as in table-top, this involves weighing their priorities and then making trade-offs until just the right balance is achieved.

This is unsurprising to me, really. A game doesn’t become “massive” in the first place unless lots of people have heard about it and decided that they want to join. And successful small games don’t have any particular incentive to draw public attention to themselves.

In some ways, though, the games that have the largest public profiles are – embarassingly enough – also the very least successful ones: The Small Games That Want To Be Big But Aren’t. Part of the reason that they’ve got such a large profile is that they advertise for players. Constantly. Repeatedly. With increasing desperation. For months or even years on end. They can’t retain players because their games are no good, and their games are no good because they’re designed for a much larger group than they’ve actually got playing, and they can’t ever get that large play-group that their game concepts require because they can’t retain players, and they can’t retain players because their games are no good….

Wash, rinse, repeat.

This brings us back to the problem I was talking about yesterday: the failure of many online RPs to design properly for small groups. Far too many online games seem to be predicated on the sorts of premises that can really only work if you have a lot of players. When they then fail to attract that many players (as they nearly always do), their games simply don’t work. I don’t know what the failure rate of journal-based online RPGs actually is, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it was well over 50%, and I’m convinced that the reason for that is this particular flaw in their game design.

I’m not quite sure why this is so common – whether it’s a matter of people being over-ambitious, or whether it’s in fact a direct result of the aforementioned higher public visibility of the Really Big Games. It seems likely to me that it’s the latter: because the Really Big Games are the ones that get the most public attention, people try to emulate their premises when they set out to create a games of their own. What they fail to realize, though, I think, is that many of the more successful (and therefore more often badly emulated) larger-sized games didn’t start out that way – they actually started out with plots and conflicts relevant to a small player group, and only expanded the scope of their games later, gradually, as it became necessary to accomodate a growing player base.

In case you can’t tell, by the way, I really find this frustrating. It’s just painful to me to watch people making the exact same mistake over and over again, when it seems so obvious to me that it’s a perfect recipe for game failure.

Also, do specific media tend to change for different types of games? That is, are larger games generally played in an audience-friendly medium like forums while smaller games tend to be played in more private mediums like email?

Yep. PBEM isn’t well-suited to large groups. Maybe there’s someone running an enormous PBEM out there somewhere, but I’ve never heard about it: all of the e-mail games I’ve personally heard about always seem to be quite small. BBS software, on the other hand, seems particularly suited to really big games. It allows for the allocation of different fora to different in-world “locations,” which can really help to keep things managable in a heavily-populated game, and it also has the advantage that it bumps recently-updated threads up to the top, which makes things so much easier to follow in a really big game. Journal-based play falls somewhere in between: it’s a good medium for small games, but it’s used for some big ones as well. Larger journal-based games often consist of a huge number of actual journals: the built-in aggregation feature of the LJ code helps to keep them all associated with each other so that people can follow the play. Larger journal-based games also seem to me to be particularly prone to delve into multi-media, supplementing journal play with chat rooms or IRC channels.

Of course, though, to some extent, this gets back into the public profile issue. For all I know there are a gazillion tiny little BBS-based RPGs out there, and I’ve just never heard of them because they’re not particularly well-known and they do not advertise. It does seem to me, though, that BBS is generally considered the best of the three formats for giant games.

13. You mention the size of online play. I’m not all that familiar with it myself (hence the interview), but the examples I know most well are sprawling, massive games, not tight games of a half dozen players. So, how common are big games, how common are small games, and what’s the most common size for a game? Also, do specific media tend to change for different types of games? That is, are larger games generally played in an audience-friendly medium like forums while smaller games tend to be played in more private mediums like email?

Whether or not – and to what extent – turns are really “guaranteed” in an online RPG depends on what system is in use. Generally speaking, though, in the most usual style of thread-based rp, if you are playing through a scene, then yes, those players who are directly involved in the scene (which is very rarely if ever the same thing as every player in the game) take turns.

The most common exception is large group scenes, which as I mentioned before, tend to be rather problematic in this style of play. The understood default rule for scenes involving two characters is strict turn-taking. Once scenes start to involve more than two people, however, then groups start to vary a lot more widely in how they prefer to handle play. Some groups adhere to strict turn-taking even in large group scenes; others leave it more up to the players’ discretion to figure out how to ensure that everyone is getting sufficient opportunity to describe what their character is doing without doing too much damage to the continuity. For very large group scenes, sometimes special rules are applied: arranging a chat session, for example, or temporarily empowering one player (usually either a mod or the player who originally staged the scene) to control the flow by “tagging” people to indicate that it is now their turn to post.

Another exception would be the introduction of a newly-arrived character to a scene already in progress. Someone just joining an “open thread” can cut in at any time, although the player is expected to use her discretion in picking a plausible and dramatically reasonable moment to have her character enter the action.

So no, one is not always guaranteed to get a fair turn, even in thread-based play. It’s certainly possible, especially in large group scenes in games which have not adopted formal rules for turns, for players to wind up feeling that their fair turn was inappropriately usurped or skipped over by the other players. This is in fact precisely the problem which the institution of more formal turn-taking rules – which seems to me to be becoming more and more popular in journal-based play-by-post, although I have no hard data on that – is intended to solve.

The idea of turn-taking, however, seems to me to be fairly central to this style of play, in a way which it is really not in table-top. “But I didn’t know when it was my turn to speak!” is a complaint I’ve often heard from online gamers after their first exposure to table-top play.

12. You talk about “guaranteed” turns in online play. How does that work? You can only post after each other person in the game has posted, or what?

Some of the responses she got were really illuminating. And some of them were…well, still illuminating, in their own way, but also really cringe-inducing (I got the distinct impression that the last table-top game some of her respondants had played was That One Awful D&D Dungeon Crawl Back In Junior High School – after which they had never felt the slightest desire to play another one).

Since I can’t seem to hunt down that post, though, let’s see if I can give this a try on my own. I think that I have a much better sense of what throws online gamers trying out table-top than I do of what throws table-top gamers trying out online rp, primarily because I’ve heard a lot more people talking about it. I don’t know very many table-top gamers who have tried online RP, while I’ve read many discussions between online rpers about what threw them when they first tried table-top. So if my response here seems extremely skewed – there’s a lot more “this is what’s hard about table-top” than there is of “this is what’s hard about online rp”-that’s the reason.

—–

Things that might throw table-top gamers moving to asynchronous Online RP:

Asynchronous RP can be slow. Really, really, really slow. I think that’s probably the hardest thing for table-top gamers to get used to with online RP. Not everyone lives in the same time zone, or is regularly on-line at the same times that you are. Sometimes you may need to wait a while to get a response that you need in order to proceed with play. It can be hard not to get impatient sometimes, especially when you’re accustomed to synchronous play.

People accustomed to table-top may find the stop-motion effect of asynchronous play damaging to their sense of immersion. RPG always requires the ability to shift back and forth between the IC mindset and the meta-game stances, but different play styles place different requirements on precisely how and in what patterns the players need to do this. The particular pattern of IC/metagame stance-shifting that asynchronous online RPG requires can take a while to get used to if you’re not accustomed to it. In order to find this a satisfyingly immersive style of play, it’s necessary to have a really strong “internal character,” so that it doesn’t take too long to get into character after a period of being out. For some table-top gamers, this may take a period of adjustment; those who cannot adjust to the new pattern may find that the play-style will never feel very immersive to them.

Online freeform requires a great deal of creativity and initiative, as well as a certain degree of social confidence. If you don’t initiate, you won’t have fun. There’s no GM whose job it is to make sure that you or your character is getting involved in the game, and nobody is going to actively involve you in a plot unless you first make it clear that you want to be involved in a plot. Similarly, if you want the other players to be pushing your characters buttons, engaging his conflicts, or otherwise smacking around his thematic issues, then you’ll want to make it clear that that’s what you want them to be doing. In other words, if you want stuff to happen, then you have to be willing to approach other players and talk with them about making it happen. This can be very intimidating at first, especially if you don’t know any of the other players, or you are shy. It’s really necessary, though. In table-top games, you can often get away with adopting a fairly passive play style at first, as a way of getting your bearings until you feel comfortable enough with the group to really step up. That tactic doesn’t work too well in this sort of online play: if you try to play passively, you’re almost guaranteed to be bored out of your skull.

Some people are just not very comfortable with writing, or with CMC in general. Writing is to online RPG as speaking is to table-top. Table-top gamers who don’t find written language a comfortable, intuitive, fluid or natural way of communicating may have a lot of trouble with online RPG.

—

Things that might throw asynchronous online RPG players when moving to table-top:

Table-top gaming is really, really inconsistent in its handling of how players are expected to convey what their characters are doing to the rest of the group, and this can be incredibly confusing to those not accustomed to the conventions. You *act* out dialogue. You *narrate* motions and actions. Unless they’re very small-scale motions, that is, like hand gestures and facial expressions, in which case you’re supposed to act them out, rather than narrating them. Oh, and sometimes you narrate dialogue as well, rather than acting it out. But only sometimes.

Oh, yeah, and you usually don’t talk about what your character is thinking at all. Except as OOC “table-talk.” Except that sometimes you do, but only if it’s to explain an IC motivation and you keep it really short: ie, “I think there might be something useful in the files, so I’m going to try to break the lock on the filing cabinet.” Usually, though, you don’t explain motivations either.

It’s a bit hard to grasp those rules, if you’re not used to them. How on earth are you supposed to know when you’re supposed to be acting, and when you’re supposed to be narrating, and when you’re supposed to be keeping stuff to yourself?

One of the most common things that people accustomed to online play complain about when they try table-top is the sensory distraction. Online rpers often find the contradictory sensory stimuli of table-top exceptionally damaging to immersion. Table-top gaming requires players to be able to filter out huge amounts of sensory data, data which in on-line gaming, the computer does the job of filtering out for you. You have to be able to ignore the sound of the other players’ voices, you have to be able to ignore what the other players look like, you have to be able to ignore the fact that although people are saying things like “I open the door,” in fact they are visibly doing no such thing. This is further complicated by the fact that you can’t just filter the data out completely, because you do need to be paying some attention to the other players’ facial expressions and body language: these are used to represent the characters’ facial expressions and body language. So you have to both note what they look like and ignore what they look like – you are supposed to allow the narrative description to override some of what you are seeing…but not all of it. Many online gamers find this exceptionally damaging to their sense of immersion. Hearing your character’s dialogue come out in your own voice is particularly often cited by online RPers as an Immersion Killer. Online RPers who cannot adjust to table-top play’s requirement of strong and complicated sensory filtration may never be able to find the play style at all satisfying: complaints about the lack of immersion and SOD in table-top (“Nothing in the game seems real,” “It makes it hard to really *be* your character,” “It’s more like telling a story than it is like role-playing,” etc.) are very common among online rpers.

Table-top gaming requires a great deal of verbal and social assertion, especially if you’re playing with an aggressive, talkative group of people. You don’t get a “turn,” and other people may speak right over you, especially if they’re really caught up in excitement over something going on in the game. You can be interrupted, and if you can’t manage to assert yourself conversationally, your contributions will never even be heard. To some extent, you’re reliant on the other players – and especially the GM – to grant you your fair turn to speak. This can be really intimidating and frustrating for people accustomed to being granted a turn as a fundamental part of the game system.

You don’t have the same authority as a player in a table-top game that you do in most online RP. In many styles of table-top play, you’re not allowed to narrate the setting or to create plot: only one player, the GM, is supposed to be doing that. If you try to do it, you may be viewed as stepping outside of bounds, usurping the role of the GM, or just as being a rude and pushy player. It’s often really hard for people accustomed to online RP to get to used to their limited narrative power in traditional table-top, and it’s also hard to internalize the rules regarding when it’s okay to narrate the setting and when it is not. In some ways, table-top requires a more passive and reactive approach to play, which is something that online RPers often find very difficult to get used to.

The sort of mechanics that many table-top games use often throws online RPers badly. Dice, cards, “points,” bartering systems, and the like seem very strange to online rpers: it’s sometimes hard for them to understand the relationship that these “subgames” are supposed to have to what’s going on in the fictive world. Many online rpers say that table-top reminds them of a board game or a parlour game, or complain about the way that the role-play is constantly interrupted to deal with what seem to them like irrelevancies. This is one of the most common complaints about table-top I’ve heard from online RPers. Table-top mechanics are really a huge, huge hurdle for a lot of people.

The degree of description considered acceptable in the narration of most table-top play could also trip up an on-line gamer. It might take some time for a third-person para player to get used to the idea that not only is “I open the door” perfectly sufficient, but that giving too much more description than that is often not even considered socially acceptable. The fact that it’s okay to switch back and forth randomly between first and third person narration could also prove a bit confusing to a prose-based rper, especially since that is considered a flogging offense in many styles of prose-based play.

Finally, some people are just not very comfortable with talking. Some people are also not very comfortable with “gaze.” Speaking is to table-top as writing is to online RPG. Online rpers who aren’t very comfortable speaking in front of others, or who feel self-conscious when other people are looking at them, may have a lot of trouble with table-top.

11. With some of the differences between tabletop and online play being intrinsic (rather than just traditional), what sort of assumptions about “how roleplaying works” will trip people up when moving from one to the other?

Moral: don’t use giant MU*s or convention LARPs – or, for that matter, a famously successful PBP game that had over a hundred played characters – as the model for how to build conflicts into the starting premise of your game if you’ve only got seven or eight people who want to play. That’s obviously not going to work, and yet it’s precisely the mistake that I see people making, over and over and over again.

On to your question…

How in the world do you do character interaction in an asynchronous environment?

The same way you do it in a synchronous environment, really. Just way more slowly.

Heh. Okay, I’m guessing that’s not a helpful answer. The three main media used for asynchronous play in this particular gaming style are e-mail, forum software (Yahoogroups, PhPBB, Infovision, EZBoard, etc.), and blog/journal software (mainly livejournal clones). They all work pretty much the same way. I write what my character’s doing, then you write how your character responds, then I write how my character responds to that, and so on, until we’re done with the scene. If there are more than two characters involved in a scene, then it gets much trickier: some people use a turn-order system, others just try to wing it. One of the games I’m playing in right now uses a “tagging” system for handling large group interactions.

Asynchronous play is slow, which is the reason that so many RPers who use asynchronous media as their primary gaming format still choose to supplement it with instant messaging. You can go a whole lot faster in chat than you can with e-mail or play-by-post. Chatrooms are also useful for negotiating those tricky scenes with more than two or three characters in them.

There’s also an entire body of play-by-post games which use the journal system as a direct representation of what’s happening in the fictional world of the game. In other words, part of the premise of the game is that the characters are themselves using a journalling system, or some local game-world equivalent thereof. In the Harry Potter fandom, this style of game is sometimes referred to as “Nocturne Alley Style,” after the game which popularized the system; other fandoms have other names for it. Usually people just call it “first person journal style.” Games run under this system are composed of the characters’ first-person journal entries and the written conversations which they then have with each other in the comments. Often, they also include other written artifacts: letters, newspaper articles, advertisements, etc. In this style of RPG, the actual physical events of the in-game reality are never shown “on-stage.” They’re established through reference (ie, if a character writes about something happening in his journal, then it’s understood to have happened), through off-screen OOC discussion, and through off-screen IC role-play conducted via whatever medium the players choose (IRC, IM, e-mail, over the phone, in person…whatever people want to do, really).

First person journal-style games are often highly satisfying for non-playing spectators, as they introduce a strong puzzle-solving element to the audience’s enjoyment.

Many journal-based play-by-post games combine these two styles. Third person or emote role-play takes place on the main community journal, while first person and journal-style role-play takes place in the individual character journals.

10. You mention that online freeform doesn’t tend to have a lot of character interaction, but that a lot of people seem to want it. I’ve got to ask: how in the world do you do character interaction in an asynchronous environment?