I think it’s pretty highly dependent upon how you’re defining ‘game’. So, looking at Mike’s HQ game, is a ‘game’ a single session, a phase, the entirety of play (phases 1, 2, and now 3), all the play done by that group of players?

Because it seems obvious that you want a given session to end. It seems obvious that each phase will come to an end if you’re actually progressing your story (no story is infinite). I would suggest that given enough play you’d want the cycle of phases to end, eventually you’ve told all the stories you want to tell with a given set of characters in a given world (though this is a theoretical thing, I’m not sure how many hundreds of hours it takes to exhaust something like this). I imagine that people are complex enough that you can play indefinitely with the same group.

Since you want some of these things to end (for they must eventually end if play is functional), it seems worthwhile to see if you can make them end satisfactorily and predictably. The open-ended nature of traditional gaming (we play every week until the apocalypse) makes it difficult to get people involved. I mean, I can’t really maintain that sort of schedule, and I’m a college student.

It seems much better to me to be able to do something like Primetime Adventures where I can say ‘We’ll play this every other week for about three hours, and we’ll be done in three months.’ That’s a commitment you can agree to in good conscience (or not, as the case may be). You can evaluate it.

Even better, I’d like to see something like the idea Tony was tossing around in the ‘Social Footprint’ threads where I can say ‘we’ll play this for an hour or two’ and when we’re done we’re all satisfied. We don’t have that ‘that was fun, but half of the game was spent building stuff up for the next session, if I don’t get that next session I’ll feel like my time was wasted’ feeling. I hate that feeling, and it is one of the things that makes it hard for me to get involved in longer-term games.

Thomas

http://www.newciv.org/pos/infinitegames.html

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of “infinite games” but a fellow by the name of James Carse wrote a book a while back about this topic that’s worth reading with an eye towards roleplaying games.

I think one of the most fascinating things about roleplaying games is that they can become very infinite in character; the purpose of play is not to “win” and thereby end the game, but to keep playing.

It’s for this reason that I’m not as interested in timing mechanisms that bring a game to an end. There’s nothing special about that.

Having read the mechanic in question, I think that it’s definitely a timing mechanism of a sort, if not quite the type I’m focused on at the moment. It’s clear that it’s a pacing mechanism. It allows for players to specify that event X will be super-important and will happen after event Y. And that event Z is cool, but not too cool, and will happen early on. It ‘times’ things in the sense that it tells you what order they will happen in, which is sort of like the Plot Arc mechanic in Primetime Adventures, but more specific than that.

But it’s not a timing mechanism in the sense that it controls how much time play takes. Because clearly you could play for hours and hours without expending any of the pivotal scenes. In fact you could finish a session with the same number in play (having never changed them at all).

Contrast that with something like Uno where on your turn you must play a card if you can. Otherwise you’re not playing Uno, you’re playing some crazy game with the Uno deck. Thus, eventually, you’ll run out of cards. And further you should be able to develop a nice bell curve regarding how much time it takes people to do so.

Thomas

http://vaxalon.livejournal.com/

Thomas