Brain Dump

Unlike last week, where I could blame my host for the lack of posting, this week I have no such excuse. The reason I didn’t have this posted yesterday is because… well… I forgot that it was Monday. Which is bizarre, but true. Apologies. Hopefully I’ll manage to finish up the month on-schedule.

There is, I believe, an often unvoiced discomfort that many people who are not deeply into immersion have with the idea of immersion. (Special thanks to Shreyas Sampat for being the first person to articulate this to me clearly.) This discomfort is caused by a fundamentally different understanding of how the activity of roleplaying is supposed to be undertaken. First I’m going to lay out the objection, and then I will attempt to explain why it isn’t as bad as it might first appear.

The objection is pretty simple, and can be simplified as ‘immersion is a selfish goal, and as such is likely to cause dysfunction’. I use the term ’selfish’ because, I believe, that while it doesn’t get said, a lot of us (and I include myself) see immersion as a fundamentally selfish activity. At least while it is being undertaken. Let’s look at why.

Since immersion is a purely internal activity* it is not concerned with the other players.  When you are immersing you are not thinking about whether your fellow players are having fun, you are not checking to make sure that you are not crossing any thematic lines which will ruin play for them.  Further, to some degree, any breaks in immersion to discuss these sorts of things ‘ruin’ the fun of the immersionist.

This perception of how immersion works is not without foundation.  In fact, I believe that it is generally accurate, though it is only one way of understanding what’s going on.  Still, when looked at from this angle I think that it is pretty clear why people who approach roleplaying as an activity in which one of your primary goals is to make sure everyone else is having fun have a negative reaction to immersion.

All that said, I do believe that this view of immersion overlooks two very important factors.

First, selfish activities can be meaningfully undertaken in social settings.  One example of this is eating.  At least when you’re eating something you like to eat.  Eating is a fundamentally selfish activity.  You eating can not provide me with any direct pleasure (though I might feel pleasure because you are enjoying yourself).  Yet we still eat together.  We can all enjoy a selfish activity together, and that’s a completely functional mode of interaction.  I think that immersion can work in similar ways (though it does not always do so).

Second, the dysfunctional understanding of immersion is built upon the premise that immersion is the entirety of play.  In one sense, for serious immersionists, this is the case.  If you’re not immersing, you’re not really playing.  However, there is a certain amount of preparatory work that happens outside of play proper that is still part of the game.  I’m going to illustrate this point with sports.

I really like playing ultimate frisbee.  It’s an incredibly fun game, and I’m going to draw some examples from it, but I think most of the points will stand if applied to other sports.

The thing to understand is that ultimate frisbee is a fundamentally selfish activity, at least for some people.  Enjoyment is derived from playing as hard as you can, from pushing yourself, and from exercising your skills.  You don’t worry about whether other people are having fun, you just go out there and you do what you’re going to do, and you have your own fun.

Despite the self-absorption, ultimate frisbee does a remarkable job of making sure everyone is having fun.  This is accomplished in two ways: 1) The activity itself is structured so that people achieve their fun by providing an environment in which everyone else has the best chance of achieving fun as well.  2) There is negotiation of the structure of play that is done outside of play proper.

That first thing is important.  The fun to be had by playing hard is easiest to achieve when everyone else is playing hard too.  The challenge goes up and there’s a sort of synergistic increase in energy among all the players as everyone does well.  The fun is, in a sense, infectious and builds upon itself in a sort of feedback loop.

I had an interesting discussion with a player who really enjoys immersion the other day, and she suggested to me that one of the things the supports her immersion best is when other players are immersed.  Or at least when they seem to be.  She explained that there’s a certain ‘life’ to the characters played by immersed players and that that ‘life’ really helped her stay immersed herself.

The second thing is also important.  A game of ultimate frisbee functions most smoothly when you agree before play begins where the field boundaries are and where the goals are.  Once play begins it is assumed that, except in special circumstances, those things are fixed.  By having an explicity, but closed, period of negotiation players are able to ensure that the structure of play will support their goals, but also ensure that they do not have to constantly renegotiate those boundaries play, which would be distracting.

All that said, I do believe that immersion can be dysfunctional.  While I think it is clear that immersion is not necessarily dysfunctional, there are some conditions that must be met to keep it that way.  Just as with ultimate frisbee, functional immersion requires that play be structured in a way that players support each other in attaining their goals and that all negotiation be handled outside of play proper.  And neither of these conditions is guaranteed.

So, immersion people, do you agree with the need for these two things?  If so, how do you make sure they happen in your own games?  Are there other things that are necessary for functional immersive play that I missed?

*: I say immersion is a purely internal activity, but this is misleading.  Part of immersion is responding to outside stimulous.  It’s not just an internal activity, but an activity of interaction.

Ugh. Missing my Monday update threw me off, and then I had a crazy school project to work on. Apologies to everyone for not having this up Thursday.

One of the important implications of the way I understand immersion to work is that immersion as a process can not be engaged in simultaneously with thinking about it. That is, thinking about immersion, abstracting it, and considering it are forms of conscious mediation.

This is possibly one of the reasons that people who seek immersion as a primary goal in roleplaying tend to be disinterested in new mechanics and new games, and often tend to ignore new mechanics in new games they do play. New mechanics require abstraction and consideration because they are unfamiliar. Players must think about implications carefully or risk ineffectiveness.

But that very consideration is disrupting to immerstion. No matter how clever the mechanics are, or what cool things they facilitate, when they are unfamiliar they make it more difficult to immerse. And when immersion is a primary (or even the pirmary) goal of play, new mechanics, no matter how clever, tend to make play less fun.

I believe that this sheds some light onto part of the ’system does/doesn’t matter’ debate. It is not that the system does not matter to the immersion-seeking player, rather it is that, to date, all systems have been similarly unsuited to promoting immersion. System most clearly does matter, otherwise it would be unneccessary to ignore it when seeking immersion.

Does this mean that mechanics themselves are opposed to immersion? I think not. The problem is not mechanics in general, but rather the specific types of mechanics that have been focused on in design to-date. What we need to do, then, is to seek out the sorts of interactions that support immersion, and then attempt to design mechanics that promote those interactions.

One thing I believe is also worth mentioning is that familiarity with a mechanic can allow a player to engage with it without disrupting immersion. As you become familiar with a mechanic you are able to evaluate it unconsciously. Players can roll dice, add a small number, and report that to the GM without really considering those actions. This may account for the fact that many people stick with familiar systems, that very familiarity allows them to engage in the mechanics without disrupring their immersive goals.

Of course it would make sense that the simpler the mechanics, the more quickly a player can familiarize themselves to the point that engaging the mechanics is not disrupting to immersion.

To reiterate, if we want to develop mechanics that support immersion (with the caveat that immersion works in some way similar to how I have proposed it does), then we need to:

1. Identify the sorts of player-to-player and environmental actions that support immersion.
2. Develop games that utilize simple mechanics that support these interactions.

So, what are we waiting for?

This should have gone up yesterday, but my webhost was unfortunately down. That’s why you’re getting it today. Hopefully you’ll be able to forgive me.

In the ancient dawn of civilization, also known as the tail end of 2002, Emily Care had a post over on the Forge in which she tried to explain Why immersion is a tar baby. It’s a good post, and something to keep in mind as a serious influence behind this one here. Because, you see, I’m going to try to explain why I think immersion is a tar-baby.

I stated at the beginning of this month, when I kicked off the whole ‘immersion month’ thing, that I believe that almost everything that everyone calls immersion is, ultimately, the same thing at some level. The problem is finding that level, and then identifying that unifying similarity. This task is made terribly difficult by the fact that the term is used by so many different people to describe things that are so seemingly different. Figuring out what the actual similarities are is no simple task.

And the difficulty is only ratcheted up by the way that the topic is discussed. It is this mode of discussion that, as far as I can tell, lies at the heart of the tar-baby problem. The problem is that most people, when they discuss their own immersive experiences, tend to resort to a sort of mystical explanation.

To some degree this is fairly natural since it tends to be difficult to explain how the mind works from the inside. And this is further complicated by the fact that immersion seems to be, by its nature, opposed to abstraction. That is, immersion is what it is, in large part, because you aren’t thinking about it.

In a recent discussion online (on Adam Dray’s ‘Foundry’, if anyone is curious) on the topic of immersion, Mo pointed out that one of the problems when discussing immersion is that people who tend to immerse also tend to talk about it as a sort of mystical process. Phrases like, ‘it just happens’ and ‘I don’t think about it’ and sometimes ‘I become my character’ get tossed around, and then misinterpreted.

This is a very solid observation, I think. Part of the problem with discussions of immersion is that they try to capture a purely-internal idea, one that most people don’t try to study in other people they’re with, and explain that idea to someone who likely doesn’t have the context to know what you’re talking about.

All of this stuff seems to ‘lay the blame’ for the problem at the feet of the people who are doing immersion and trying to explain it, but it’s not all their fault. In fact, I think a significant amount of the blame lies at the feet of theorists, and I think I know why.

The Forge’s ‘Big Model’ is typical of most design-focused theoretical frameworks for roleplaying in that one of the major elements of analysis of actual play is reward cycles. Especially procedural reward cycles. This is intensely problematic when discussing immersion because immersion is an internal process and it is self-rewarding.

Since it is internal, immersion can only be self-evaluated, at least for most people. I can not turn to you and judge your level of immersion. While I may be able to infer, based on past experience playing with you, that you are immersing to some degree or another, I can’t tell just how much or how well.

Since it is self-rewarding, that is: immersion is an activity that you work toward because you enjoy it, not to get some dependent reward from it, most players don’t care to evaluate themselves for rewards since they are already being rewarded. Perhaps a bit more clearly: since immersion is an end goal of play, and as far as I know, no one has come up with a metagame resource that can be expended to help you immerse better, immersion does not fit into traditional understandings of reward mechanisms.

In some sense, from the viewpoint of those who are not immersionists, talking about ‘immersion’ is like talking about ‘fun’. There’s no way to productively understand it using the models that they are used to.

Immersion’s internal nature fits poorly with a reward-cycle understanding of roleplaying games, so how should we understand immersion? That’s a good question. I’m hoping some of you will have some good suggestions…

Thomas

I had a piece on mechanics and immersion and how they interact lined up, but I feel that my post last week was actively confusing. So I’m pushing the mechanics piece back to next week, and trying to clarify what I mean by ‘unfiltered’ and why it is significant.

To refresh memories, my definition from last week was:

A participant is immersed in an activity when his or her participation is not consciously mediated or filtered.

To clarify, because later conversation suggests this was unclear, this does not mean that players are not conscious of their participation and it does not mean that players are unable to analyze what they are doing. In order to clear things up, I am going to expand on what I mean by ‘mediated or filtered’, and then I will explain what I mean when I say that immersed players do not consciously do that.

If someone were to ask me what car I would want if I could have any car I wanted at no cost, I would require some time to consider. To provide a serious answer I would need to consider it for quite a while. There are a lot of factors involved in answering that question, and they are not factors I often consider. This answer is consciously mediated. I have to analyze, consider, and abstract in order to provide a satisfactory answer. This is conscious mediation.
If someone were to ask me ‘does this dress make me look fat’, I would not need to think about the answer, or at least not in most cases. So this is not a case of a consciously mediated response. However, I would consider who it was that I was talking to. Is it appropriate for me to respond to this person with ‘no, but your huge butt does’? Should I say ‘a bit, but it really sets off your eyes so it’s all good’? I do not have to think to find an answer, but I do have to think about whether to give it or not. This is conscious filtering

If someone were to come up to me and ask me whether or not I like icecream, I would have a response ready (’yes!’ if you are curious). I would not have to pause and consider it, I would not need to recall my past encounters with icecream and evaluate whether or not they were pleasurable. This is not a consciously mediated answer. I also do not feel that anyone should not hear my answer. I mean, I do not care if you know how much I like icecream; if you are curious, I am glad to answer that curiousity. This is not a consciously filtered answer.

It is important to note that one of the primary things that allows us to give answers that are not consciously mediated is familiarity. We do not consciously mediate walking or drinking or any number of other highly familiar physical activities. The same is true of mental activities. As we become more and more familiar with certain mental patterns we need less and less conscious guidance to do them.

The point of all this is that immersed players are interacting with the game without consciously mediating or consciously filtering. This is probably some sort of sliding scale rather than a real dichotemy, but we can probably talk about it as a dichotemy profitably as long as we do not forget that it is not really one.

The reason all this matters is that conscious mediation tends to reduce emotional reaction. When you think in abstracts, when you get the distance of consideration about a topic, you are less emotionally influenced by it. When you consciously filter your reactions, there is a tendency to shy away from dangerous topics. This is not always the case, some people actively seek dangerous and emotionally engaging topics, but I am currently thinking that filtering can not increase emotional engagement (but I might be wrong about that).

The point of all this is that immersion, by taking away conscious barriers between query for response and actual response, increases emotional engagement with play.

If I’d been on top of my game, I would have opened up Immersion Month with this post rather than a definition.  Still, better late than never…

‘Immersion’ is, in the immortal words of Emily Care Boss, a tar-baby.  Discussions of the topic inevitably become extremely sticky, and the more effort you put into getting a good grip on it, the less productive your efforts become.  This is largely due to the fact that so many people mean so many different things by the term.

The first step to any solid and productive discussion, one which ends up producing interesting results rather than self-congratulatory back-patting, is to figure out who means what.  So, that’s what this post is for.

I want to hear from everyone.  If you are big into immersion, if you dabble, if you think it’s the worst thing to ever happen to roleplaying, I want to hear it.  So, what does the term mean for you?  And do you do it or know people who do?  And what do you think of that?

Even if someone says pretty much what you think, please chime in.  On this issue, the internet-standard ’silent agreement’ is probably going to do more harm than good.

Also, for now at least, let’s not do any discussion.  Let’s just get some data, with no peanut gallery comments.  I say this, in part, so that everyone knows up-front that they won’t have to defend their statements.  Just say what you think and feel.  It’s a pretty low-risk proposition.

Thomas

It is with significant trepidation that I lay out what I think may be a comprehensive, if terribly general, definition of ‘immersion’. In all honesty I am willing to be convinced that I am wrong, so if you have comments please don’t hesitate to speak up. That said, as Emily Care Boss so rightly said, the topic is something of a tar baby. Let’s try to keep the discussion as civil as possible.

Let’s start things off with a definition, which I hope makes sense on its own, but which I plan to explain with the balance of the article:

A participant is immersed in an activity when his or her participation is not consciously mediated or filtered.

Utilizing this definition means that one can immerse in all sorts of experiences. I admit that this definition is, perhaps, dangerously broad as it permits one to immerse not only in things like books and films, but also to immerse in things like chess and basketball. Still, I do believe that this definition is accurate, and despite its generality, useful.

First, I think it may be necessary to demonstrate that the immersion that many people enjoy in roleplaying is fundamentally the same immersion that people experience with more passive forms of media such as film.

I believe that most of us are familiar with being so drawn into some passive media (like a book or television show) that we sort of lose track of time and our surroundings. We sit back and simply absorb whatever it is. I believe that one of the things that this sort of unfiltered engagement entails is that we, well, do not filter it. At least not actively.

I believe that this is relatively common in films viewed at the theater. There is social pressure to be silent, and this often results in a disengagement of the critical faculties. This is by no means a long-term disengagement. It has been my experience that post-viewing discussions are extremely common. You know the ones, where you stand (or sit) around and critically examine what you have just seen.

While this sort of experience seems to be rather common in passive media, roleplaying adds a twist. It is an active form of entertainment. It is not enough to simply sit back and absorb the media, one must be able to provide input. Immersion in these circumstances is a bit more difficult because it requires that the participant be able to provide input without engaging conscious mental filters.

This is not to say that participants must provide input that is unfiltered, but rather that the filters are not conscious. The question of, ‘How would the character react?’ or ‘What is the best direction to take the story?’ are never voiced, even within the participant’s head.

But the filtiers exist, and the questions are answered. It is simply done at the level of the subconscious, at some sort of intuitive level. I believe that in many ways immersive techniques act as muscle memory does for physical activities. You do not have to think ‘left foot, right foot’ in order to walk, you just do.

And this is where the divergence occurs. Since, for the most part, people do not consciously or actively train in immersive techniques, they are generally limited to those that they are already disposed toward based on previous experience.

It is worth noting that this would also explain a number of things that people bring up when they discuss immersion: The ability to immerse in different aspects of play is there. Some people have an intuitive grasp of character, and thus are easily able to immerse in it; some people have an intuitive grasp of plot or story, and thus immerse there. It also explains why people immerse better using mechanics that are familiar (whether due to the fact that they are used to the system, or the system is similar to one they are used to). People have had time to internalize the mechanics that they have been using, and thus do not have to think about the decisions involved.

One of the most interesting implications of all this is that one can learn to immerse better. One can learn to immerse in unfamiliar systems, or in aspects of play that they have not immersed in before. We should be able to develop methods of teaching immersion, and doing so systematically. And that makes me pretty excited.

Next week: are mechanics anti-immersive?

I figured I might as well kick off a month of discussions on immersion by pulling out the big guns. In this case, the big guns means interviewing someone really smart, which explains Mo’s presence.

‘Mo’ Turkington blogs over at Sin Aesthetics and is an all around smart cookie. She’s probably best known for kicking off the discussions of push and pull which were so much the rage earlier this year. Of course she’s said that those discussions were really preliminary to some other stuff that she was thinking about, and I’m pretty eager to see where all that ends up going.

Mo is also the designer of the super-hot Crime and Punishment. A single-session roleplaying game (designed for the Iron Game Chef 2006 competition) about police procedurals.

Nominally we’re here to talk about immersion, and Mo’s thoughts on it, but in all honesty I’ll be just as happy if we end up talking about something else. This is a chance to pick through Mo’s fertile gray matter and see what we can see.

I’ll end up doing the same thing here that I did in my interview with Sarah Kahn: this thread’s for me and Mo. If you’ve got questions I’m not asking please email me. I don’t think I’m the only one worthy to ask the questions, it just keeps things less cluttered. Then, when we’re done here, I’ll start up a new thread where everyone can talk about it.

I think that’s enough preamble for now. Let’s get to the questions. Well, first: Mo, thanks a bunch for being willing to do this. It’s totally awesome that you’re willing to give up your time and brainsweat. I’ll try not to let it go to waste… So, questions! We’ll start with the easy stuff.

1. Tell me a bit about yourself, in general. Who are you, what do you do, that sort of thing.

In a flurry of hubris and ambition, I have decided to devote the entire month of July to discussions of immersion.

I do this more because the topic fascinates me than because I think I’ve got something profound to say about it.  I mean, I do think I have some minor insights, but I don’t by any stretch consider myself an expert.  What I really want to do is start a dialog.  I want people to point out where my ideas are wrong and where I’m operating from faulty preconceptions.  In fact, it’s likely that I’ll be starting each and every post with a big, fat disclaimer.

I almost backed out and didn’t do this thing because ‘immersion’ is probably the single most ambiguous word in the roleplaying world.  It seems to mean two or three dozen different things to different groups, and as a result has incredibly high flame-war potential.  I’m coming into this discussion with that foremost in mind.

The reason I do this at all is that I suspect that the many things that immersion discussions refer to are all actually different faces of one big thing.  If I can, I’m going to try to get at that big thing.  If we can understand what lies at the root of the desire for immersion, maybe we can understand how to make our design and play more conducive to it.  I think it would be awesome to find new ways of satisfying the desire for immersion by some completely new and unexpected means.

But I’m not going to be able to do it alone.  I’ve only got a couple of the many views on immersion myself, and I’m going to need help getting to the others.  If you have the time and interest I’d really love to have feedback and input from you.

So, it is with some misgivings that I continue forward with this mad plan.  Hopefully we can manage to derive something cool and useful from it in the end.

Thomas

I generally try not to break my Monday/Thursday post schedule all that often, but I want to talk about this, and my schedule for July is full-up.

Thursday I had a really long and highly abstract theoretical discussion of different mediums for roleplaying.  Real briefly, I want to point out where the application lies here, and possibly explain why it’s not explicit in the original post.

The problem with trying to design games for mediums other than face-to-face is that we are so deeply immersed in thoughts about face-to-face communication that it is difficult to see how other mediums differ.  Face-to-face mechanics tend to be significantly denser because they are utilized in a rich medium.  You can afford complex mechanics because they still don’t take that much time (or at least they take less time than they would elsewhere).

Another thing is that we simply do not consider how to utilize aspects of communication that we don’t tend to deal with.  Consider that Code of Unaris utilizes precisely one mechanic (the one that makes the game so good) that leverages the medium it is designed for: Hacking works as well as it does because online chat has such a high level of permanency.  It doesn’t work nearly as well as a formalized mechanic in face-to-face play.

The question that arises from this is: what do mechanics look like that leverage permanency and delineation?  I don’t have an answer to this question.  In fact, until about a month ago I didn’t even realize that this was the question to be asking.  But it is.

If we are going to design for other mediums, rather than consider how to make it as much like tabletop play as possible we must consider a number of aspects of play that are so constant in tabletop play that we simply didn’t notice them before.

What are these games going to look like?  I don’t know, but I know I’m excited to find out.

Thomas

This post is long. It weighs in at nearly 3,000 words, and it barely scratches the surface of the topic. It is almost entirely theory, very little direct application has been included. That said, I do believe that it can act as a very good primer for people who are entirely familiar with only one or two mediums of play. It can explain why medium matters, and also show that no medium is better than any other for all applications.

As always, questions are encouraged. If you think I got something wrong feel free to tell me that. If you would like some expansion on a topic, or have a question that I didn’t address at all I want to hear from you. I do hope this ends up being helpful.

Introduction

This week the question comes at the front. I am going to be discussing the use of different media for roleplaying and how different mediums bring different advantages to be utilized and disadvantages to be worked around. Your homework is to think about these mediums, and ways to take advantage of them. It is an important thing to consider, because apart from Code of Unaris, I am not familiar with any published roleplaying game designed for any medium other than face-to-face play.

There are four major aspects for consideration when discussing mediums: richness, delineation, synchronicity, permanancy. Each of these is something of a continuum. Each gets its own section, in reverse order:

Permanency

Permanency is a measure of how accurate and permanent the record of play is. On the low end sits play that happens face to face with no recording whatsoever. No character sheets, no notes, nothing but human memory. On the high end sits video tapes. In between you have various degrees of audio recording and note-taking.

Traditional table-top play is pretty low on permanency. There are some character sheets, there may be someone taking notes, but for the most part play is simply remembered. Or not, as the case may be. While the technology certainly exists to do audio recordings, or even video recordings, of play, very few groups choose to do so. Further, the groups that do rarely refer back to those recordings during play.

Any form of computer-mediated play (such as IM, IRC, or forum/journal based play) has a significantly higher level of permanency. Computer systems are very good at recording, sorting, and storing information. This means that most play that takes place through comptuers generates logs, and those logs are of all play, and those logs are searchable. The last point is an important one. Searching through three or four hours of a (video or audio) recording of a game session to find what you are looking for can be a pain, using the computer to search for a memoral string of text is simple. This helps explain why even those who record their face to face play rarely refer to their records, it is just too much trouble.

Permanency matters for a number of reasons, and I think an exhaustive list is beyond the scope of this article. Still, a partial list is likely useful. Permanency can help arbitrate disputes over past events; memory is selective, and people often remember things differently, being able to point to a static record can help keep everyone on the same page. Permanency also permits you to remember, and utilize in play, previous fictional material with an extremely high degree of accuracy; quoting directly from previous play can be a powerful tool. Permanency also allows for new players (or even spectators) to gain a perspective and context of play that is incredibly rich, if they are willing to spend the necessary time.

Speaking of spectators and new players, one of the huge things permanency does is allow them to gain a firsthand impression of play, rather than a secondhand impression passed on by the players. That unfiltered view of what the game is all about can be a very powerful thing to bring to the table.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity is a measure of how much real time is expected to elapse between one contribution to play and the next. While this is actually a sliding scale, it can be productively considered to be a binary issue. Things can be thought of as either synchronous in which case players are actively waiting on your contribution, or asynchronous in which players may do other things while waiting for your contribution.

Most (all?) tabletop games are synchronous. In Polaris if the player of the Mistaken utilizes a key phrase like ‘But only if…’ then play stops until the Heart responds. Further, for most groups it would be considered extremely ill-mannered to wander off and play video games while the Heart frames just the right response.

Synchronous play tends to trade quality (which is enhanced by having more time to consider and edit a response) for speed, while asynchronous play tends to do the reverse. Though ‘quality’ here is likely a misnomer since it is not a case of faster contributions being worse, but rather that they are less considered. In fact, quicker responses are often less self-censored, less guarded, and thus have the potential to be more intimate, more ‘real’.

While treating synchronicity as a binary can be useful, it is important to remember that it really is a continuum. Delays between responses in face-to-face play tend to be on the order of seconds, delays in a lot of chat-based play (such as IRC) tend to be on the order of tens of seconds, delays in jounal-based online play tend to be on the order of minutes (with a number of relatively common exceptions), and delays in certain types of email-based play tend to be on the order of hours or even days.

There is an interesting correlation between time spent providing input and delay between inputs. If the game in question typically has player spend five seconds at a time formulating their input, then the delays between input tend to be significantly shorter than if the game tends toward half an hour of time spent on each input. Time spent on input is often, though not always, related to volume of input. If you are expected to toss in a sentence or two then it usually takes you less time than if you are expected to provide two paragraphs.

Synchronicity matters for a number of reasons, these include but are not limited to: Asynchronous games tend to remove the pressure to provide input, any input, rather than make the players wait on you. This allows players to shape their input with greater care in order to provide a more precise impact on play. Asyncrhonous play, because of the way that players tend to drop in and out of a mental playspace while they wait for responses, tends to be more broken and less continuous. Where in synchronous play you sit down and play until you are done, asynchronous play involves flipping in and out of play repeatedly.

Delineation

Delineation is the measure of how easy it is to divide various aspects of play from one another. This is most clear in the division between narrative input and social negotiation. In most face-to-face play these two aspects bleed together. What you as a player say and do has some extremely fuzzy borders with what your character says and does. When you say ‘I want to kill the king’, are you saying that you as a player think it would be cool for the game if your character wanted to kill the king, or are you saying that your character already does want to kill the king?

It should be noted that this is not something inherent to face-to-face play, but is something traditional to it. Ben Lehman’s Polaris tends to generate a pretty clear separation between negotiation and narrative contribution with its key phrases, and Shreyas Sampat’s Mrindangam (in the forthcoming PUSH) takes this even further by making everything narrative input unless it is expressly and clearly marked as something else. Since the markings in Mrindangam are physical gestures, rather than anything verbal, the delineation is marked in a separate channel which alleviates confusion.

Things are always less confusing when the various things communicated are communicated through different channels. Instead of having to parse signifiers out of a single channel, you are able to simply look to a channel that is dedicated to conveying specific information. It is relatively rare for tabletop games to be designed with this in mind (in fact, Mrindangam is the only one that springs to mind for me), but it is not all that uncommon for specific play groups to utilize multiple channels in the form of accents and verbal affectations. It is not something that all groups do, but some groups mark narrative contributions with affected accents or voice shifts.

In online play channels are extremely common. In fact, in my experience, they are the norm rather than the exception. Play in mediums like IRC often use different channels for narrative contribution and negotiation. Journal and forum play is very often supplemented with IM or email for negotiation, with all posts being pure narrative. (Sometimes there is simply a separate thread in the journal or forum for negotiation, but it is still strictly delineated.)

Even in online play which uses a single channel (as most MU* and some IRC play) there are clear and unambiguous ways to mark any given input as narrative or negotiating. While this may not be as clear a delineation as using different channels altogether, it is much clearer than most face-to-face play. It is similar to a game in which you migh have Polaris-like key phrases that you use to indicated when you are contributing narratively and when you are not.

Delineation matters for a number of reasons. It increases the clarity of your communication, reducing the number of misunderstandings about which contributions are narrative and which are not (note: this is not always a good thing, such miscommunications can result in amazing ideas coming forth that would not have happened if everyone had been on precisely the same page). It can, but does not always, help with immersion. It allows you to partition your thinking in such a way that whenever you are in one clearly delineated space you are in character, and when you are in a different space you are out of character. Having a clear arenas for each can be a useful tool.

Richness

Richness here is drawn from media richness theory (brief overview). Simply put, richness is a measure of the number of channels of information a given medium of communication has, combined with the amount of information that each channel can convey for any given unit of time. Face-to-face communication is extremely rich as it includes actual words said, tone, facial expression, body language, and all sorts of other stuff. Pure text (which most online play is) tends to be relatively poor, as it is mostly a single channel.

Where you might say something in a sarcastic manner with a wry smile on your face in a face-to-face interaction, in pure text you must actually mark which words are verbalized and also provide markers to signify that it is said in a sarcastic tone with a wry smile. It should be clear that this results in any given interaction requiring more time to convey in text, since you must provide each bit of information in a single channel sequentially rather than being able to convey the different parts simultaneously across multiple channels.

Voice-chat play (such as that conducted using Skype or Ventrilo) is in the middle. It allows you to convey across more channels than simply text. Verbal content, tonality, cadence, and accent can be conveyed simultaneously. However, it does not convey facial expression or body language. Video conferencing, which as far as I know is rarely used for roleplaying, is richer than voice-chat, but still poorer than face-to-face as it fails to convey subtle facial expressions and most body language.

Rich mediums have a number of advantages of poor mediums. Most people relate more strongly to some channels of communications than to others. Some people resonate strongly with accents or with body language, for instance. The richer the medium, the more channels it includes, and thus the more people you can resonate with effectively. If text is your only channel, and you do not find text very compelling, then play will not be nearly as good for you as if you were interacting in a channel you do find compelling.

Of course reducing the number of channels does not mean that no one will find what you have to say compelling, it simply reduces your audience pool. If everyone you play with finds text compelling, then you can get away with text as your only channel. If everyone you play with finds vocal stuff compelling, you can get away with voice-chat.

Rich mediums are also faster. Over any given unit of time you can convey significantly more information in a rich medium than in a poor medium. A rubric that I have found useful is that, given mostly synchronous play, that you will take approximately five times as long to convey the same information in pure text than face-to-face, and about twice as long to convey that information in pure voice than face to face.

One of the big reasons for this delay is that the vast majority of human turn-taking dynamics are handled non-verbally. Turn-taking is how you know it is your turn to contribute. In face-to-face interaction you can see somone draw breath in preparation, or you note in their stance and the way that they are looking that they are preparing to contribute and that you should allow them to. There is also a tendency to simply look expectantly at someone when you expect them to contribute. Without these cues you run significant risks of squelching other people in your communication. (This is why groups that use a lot of voice-only communication, like the military, evolve elaborate rules for signifying who’s turn it is to talk.)

This is further complicated by the fact that most people do not handle turn-taking on a conscious level. This means that we often fail to recognize the need to indicate when we are speaking, or that we are expecting a response from someone else, because we do not realize that we send such signals in regular interactions.

Note that turn-taking grows exponentially more complicated as you add participants. The result of this is that most text-only play takes place between only two participants, where turn-taking becomes simple: when one person finishes talking it becomes the other person’s turn. This is generally measured in single-contributions. One player will post some text, then the other player; and back and forth it goes.

All that said, rich mediums do have at least one major disadvantage to poor mediums: the more channels you have to deal with, the more difficult it becomes to precisely control the information you are conveying. For instance, you may be trying to convey something extremely sad or depressing in the narrative, but you are personally excited by how cool the narrative is. This can result in you conveying one message on some channels, and another message on other channels which can be confusing, and may actively undermine your purpose.

As you reduce the number of channels of communication it becomes easier and easier to control each one. In voice-chat, you only need to master your verbal and tonal channels to keep from sending mixed signals, and in most online play you only need to master a single channel: text.

This is made all the more powerful by our tendency to, when we reduce channels, reduce to the ones that convey the most information (or at least are the most flexible), and also to reduce to the channels we have the most conscious control over. Most people are better at manipulating their tone than they are their body language, and most people are better at manipulating text than their voice. This means that as we get to poorer and poorer mediums of communication we also tend to have more and more control over the information we are conveying.

Richness matters for a number of reasons. Not only does it impact how much information we can convey at any given time, but it also impacts how much control we have over the information we convey. It takes more and more varied skills to control more and more varied channels with a high degree of accuracy.

To make a long story short (too late!)

Each of the four elements is intimately connected with the others. Richness has an impact on delineation (the number of channels and the clear marking of channels for specific uses), richness and permanency are related (some channels are easier to store than others), syncrhonicity and delineation are tied together (it is easier to interact asynchronously when you have clear markings for when you are playing and when you are not).

The important thing to rembember in all this is that different mediums have advantages. They are not absolute advantages, but rather they are advantages for a very specific set of applications. We, as designers, theorists, and players need to be considering what it is we want to accomplish, and then picking the medium that best supports those goals. By using a medium that is sub-optimal for the goals we are pursuing, we handicap ourselves unneccessarily.

I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a while now, but I keep putting it off in favor of shorter fare.  This is going to be a bit rambly since it’s actually two topics in one post.  The first topic isn’t strictly necessary for the second, but I do think it’s relevant and interesting.

The first thing I want to talk about is interfaces.  Board, card, and roleplaying games of the table-top variety have rules and mechanics.  These are really just the procedures of play: they’re the things you do to interact with the game.  Video games actually have the exact same thing: procedures you use to interact with the game.  But there’s an important difference, and it’s pretty obvious.

Video games have their interfaces hard-coded, table-top games do not.  If I’m playing a video game in which I must press the ‘A’ button to jump, well, there’s not much I can do about that because the interface is enforced by coded software.  I can’t get inside and change that software.  Further, even if I could change the interface, there would likely be cascade effects which would require further changes.

If, for instance, I made the ‘A’ button into a kick attack instead of jump, what would I do when I needed to jump later?  I’d have to change things back, or figure out some other way to handle it.

The same thing is not at all true for table-top games because the procedures are social, and as social creatures we are extremely adept at social hacking.  This, combined with the fact that you are not stuck with a fixed interface device in social interaction (such as a controller, which only allows for so many different actions), means that you can actually add new interface options pretty much at will.

Further, since we’re so good at social hacking, we can add and change interface options with ease.  This allows us to make changes without fully anticipating the cascade effects because we can always make further changes later on to deal with them as they come up.

Credit where credit is due, most of my thinking on interface has been heavily influenced by Danc of Lost Garden.  What I’m calling ‘interface options’ he calls ‘verbs’.

So there’s a fundamental difference between traditional video games and table-top games, and it lies in the ease of hacking.  Every so often we get together and play a game of Castle Risk.  I won’t explain it for those who haven’t played before other than to say that the game is like Risk except that most of your armies come not from controlling territories, but from controlling banners.  Each player starts with one banner which is kept in one of his territories.  If you take that territory from the player then you get their banner (and thus a big boost in armies per turn) and move the banner to your own banner-territory (thus making it a more tempting target for others).

Now, I don’t actually like the moving of the banners thing.  I prefer to play by a house-rule in which the banners stay where they are.  This means that each time you conquer someone you have to cover yet another critical territory, and it’s likely that your new resource base is inconveniently located to your original one.  I like this dynamic.  And it’s easy to hack in a sit-down game of Castle Risk, we just agree to do it.

I think you can see what I’m getting at here, so I’ll stop belaboring the point.   One of the important things to note is that the un-hackability of video games isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  The same inflexibility that makes it difficult for players to hack things to fit their idiosyncratic desires also makes it easy to force players into certain behaviors.  This can be a good thing, as I shall demonstrate in the discussion on tactile feedback!

One of the things I had serious plans on getting to in my abortive series of articles on props (which one day I hope to rewrite) is the fact that physical objects and motions are intimately tied to memories and can be used to call up those associated memories.

This is running long, so I’m just going to provide a quick example from my own gaming.  I encourage you to provide similar stuff, and even analyze.

I got Guitar Hero for my birthday last month.  Since the guitar controller it comes with is incredibly intuitive, I felt no need to read the manual or play through the tutorial.  I mean, it’s basically as intuitive as a DDR pad, it just makes sense.

While playing I accidentally pushed a button and discovered that the ’select’ button activates your Star Power, which is a point-boosting thing accompanied by some pretty nifty visuals.  Timing your Star Power use to the heaviest parts of the songs is how you score big points, so it adds a bit of strategy to the game.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was feeling bored and figured I might as well play the tutorial (until you play through it, the system starts the menu selected on it, not a huge deal, but inconvenient enough for me to devote ten minutes to going through it).  And in that tutorial, I learned something important: there’s another way to activate Star Power, and it makes a huge difference.

Located deep inside the plasticy circuits of the guitar, there lies a level sensor.  It detects the angle the guitar is being held at.  While you can simply push ’select’ to activate Star Power, the game is designed for it to be activated when the guitar is vertical (perpendicular to the floor).

It doesn’t sound like much, but since you want to activate it fast in order to avoid throwing off your rythm, the best way to activate Star Power is to swing the guitar up and lean back and then whip it back down.  When I do this, I always get a little rush of adrenaline, I feel like a rockstar.  Every.  Single.  TIme.

There’s this mental and physical association that really adds to the game.  It just wasn’t as fun or as cool when I was just pushing a button, but throwing your weight back and rockin’ out! is something else altogether.  Since the game forces you to interface with it in a specific way, it is able to call up associations with that interface.

This is one (of many) reason(s) that Shreyas needs to get off his butt and finish Torchbearer.

I do not often talk about Forge theory as directly as I plan to today. Hopefully you can bear with me, I think this one’s important.

Ron Edwards, in his Provisional Glossary of Forge theory jargon defines the term “color” (which we will discuss today” as:

Imagined details about any or all of System, Character, Setting, or Situation, added in such a way that does not change aspects of action or resolution in the imagined scene.

In this definition System, Character, and Setting mean roughly what you would expect. System is (roughly) the procedures of play; character is, well, character; and setting is the English 101 definition of the time and place the action happens at. That leaves us with Situation, which is defined as:

Dynamic interaction between specific characters and small-scale setting elements; Situations are divided into scenes.

This is stuff like “The six fingered man killed my father”. Situation is a fairly macro concern, really.

This is all preamble to my primary point which is: there is some element of play at the mirco level that provides the real meat of play. I have been calling it “color”, but it does not mesh completely with the Forge definition.

The element I am talking about is the one that provides context to the narrative. Does a character undertake an action eagerly, reluctantly, sadly, in anger? This is an important question. In fact, it is key to the way we interpret the narratives we tell when roleplaying.

But remember that the Forge definition includes the clause that color “does not change aspects of action or resolution in the imagined scene”. In Dogs in the Vineyard, whether you gun a man down in anger or in cold calculation matters. In Nine Worlds whether you struggle to win, or win without serious effort matters.

What I call “color”, those contextualizing little bits of the narrative, is important for a number of reasons, but primary among them is that players need context. If there is not a shared context provided the players will simply provide their own, not-so-shared context. My post suggesting that Play is Chaos? This is precisely what I was talking about there.

If you fail to point out that your Batman-esque character is a reluctant hero, then in my head I will make him some kind of hero. It is possible that I will pick the same motivations that you do, but it is by no means certain. Maybe I will assign more sinister motivations to him.  This is not necessarily bad, though it can result in me misapprehending the sorts of challenges that you want to engage with,  This, in turn, likely means you will not have quite as much fun as you might if I were on top of things.

One example of different interpretations that really sticks with me is something that Ralph Mazza posted way back at the end of 2003.  While I happen to consider Tolkein’s Fellowship of the Ring to be chock full of good stuff, Ralph has other thoughts.  And, really, I think this is a matter of pickup up on different bits of color.  Ralph is noticing and remembering certain things while I am noticing and remembering other ones.

And those first bits of contextualization matter.  Once you have it in your head that a character is fundamentally evil (or good, or amoral, or whatever) then every action they take from there on out is going to be interpreted in that light.  And color provides that contextualization.

I fully acknowledge that “color” may be the wrong term for what I am talking about here, but whatever the term is, it is a fundamental aspect of what we do, not only when we roleplay, but when we interpret any bit of narrative.  In fact, without this color stuff, there is not a story.

Consider the fact that most television news channels are not telling stories.  There is not anything to grab onto to contextualize what is going on.  Instead, what they are providing you with is data.  And data is not the same thing as a story.

Color matters because it is what makes stories meaningful, and not just bits of data.

Next week: The long-awaited (by someone I’m sure) discussion of roleplaying via various mediums.

I touched on this extremely briefly on Thursday, sort of by accident.  Mendel then pointed it out in passing.  Here’s where I expand a bit on one of the things that theory is good for.

The purpose of playtesting is to provide you (the designer) with some sort of understanding of the emergent properties of the rules.  We call these properties “emergent”, generally because they’re fairly unpredictable to us.  It’s not that these properties are unpredictable by nature, but rather that we don’t have solid models to predict them.

A solid theoretical model of roleplaying helps us to predict how the game will work in action.  At the moment, rather than predicting, we are generally reduced to trial and error to figure out what’s going to happen.

But contrast that with modern engineering, or even marketting.  To some degree there’s still trial-and-error, there’s still a lot of “get out there in the real world and see what happens”, but there’s also a lot of accurate modelling and prediction.  You want to build a bridge?  Well we can build an extremely accurate computer model before putting down the first bit of concrete.  You want to market a product to a specific demographic?  We’ve got techniques that are effective for that.

Contrast this with roleplaying: for the most part we have only the vaguest idea of what a specific mechanic will do in play, and there are lots and lots of unpredictable emergent things.  This is why playtesting is so important: we don’t really have solid models for predicting complex interaction of various mechanics.  We don’t even have very many solid models for the impact of specific mechanics on play.

Now, to be fair we do have some very broad things, and we’re getting more stuff all the time.  There’s a pretty good understanding of some of the dangers of using certain techniques (such as “Task Resolution” mechanics), and we’re starting to see that there are powerful techniques out there like explicit scene framing, but…  To be honest, we don’t have a lot of good models that help us understand when we should use explicit scene framing and when we should use some other technique.  We don’t, generally understand the advantages and disadvantages of many techniques, or the alternative techniques we could be using.

For me, one of the big things theory does, is teach us about that.  We can use the models developed by theory-heads to better design games up front, to reduce the length of the playtest cycle.  Since roleplaying is a fundamentally human endeavor, and humans aren’t really fully predictable, playtesting will always be necessary, but I imagine a day in the future when we have a good enough grasp of theory that first draft designs do, for the most part, what the designer intended.

Sure they’ll be imperfect, and sure new techniques will be developed that don’t fit into the existing models, but people will be able to look at a design and see the sorts of behaviors it is supposed to promote in much more detail than we currently can.  I can look at Dogs in the Vineyard and pretty clearly see that it’s set up to test for escalation, I can look at Capes and see that there’s a strong economy between “winning” and “losing”.  But the deeper details?  I can’t see them from the text alone, I’ve got to see those rules in action.  Maybe one day, I’ll see much more without the action.

That’s one of the things theory is for.

Anyone (and everyone) involved in game design can tell you that if you want your game to be the best it can be, you must playtest it. A lot. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule. Most games that wind up being good without playtesting are good because they are A) a statistical fluke, or B) extremely simple.

It turns out that (B) is pretty interesting. This is because, at least at the current stage of game design theory, the vast majority of design is based on trial and error. We only have “laws” of interaction for the simplest of mechanics. This means that we can only reliably design extremely simple games based purely on our understanding of how games work.

But the ability to design without testing, without going through a process of trial and error, erodes incredibly rapidly as complexity increases. Most of the games I am personally interested in are rather compex. Video games and board/card games are already pretty complex, and they have extremely clear boundaries. Roleplaying games not only tend to be mechanically complex, but also tend to have extremely fuzzy boundaries, which adds a level of complexity which is generally unpredictable.

All that is preamble to my main point. In order to make your game fun to play, you need to playtest it. Further, and this will come as a surprise to no one, you need to playtest it as you intend it to be played. This means that if you have a bunch of different systems that are supposed to interact, make sure you playtest their interaction rather than playtesting them separately. And if your game is designed to be played across fifty sessions, you better be playtesting it across fifty sessions, and ideally, you do it more than once.

Now, none of this is news. At least I do not expect it to be. The “playtest, playtest, playtest” mantra has been kicking around game design for a while, and is especially prevelant around the Forge. Which brings me to the point of all this: there are not many (any?) games to come out of the Forge designed for serious long-term play (of 50+ sessions). In fact, the vast majority are extremely short-form: 10 sessions is usually at the upper end.

So, with all this talk of playtesting, you can see where I am going with this: there are no long-form Forge games, at least in part (and probably a major part), because it takes so much time to playtest them. People have many, many great game design ideas, and for each one they want to seriously pursue they have to do a lot of playtesting.

In the time it takes you to playtest your 50 session game once you could playtest your five session game ten times. In that series of playtesting you will end up significantly improving your five session game. While you would definitely improve your 50 session game, it would not be to the same degree. Your 50 sessions of playtesting your 50 session game would teach you a lot about the simpler, more closed mechanics, just as much as if it were a shorter form game. The problem is that there are some mechanics, and some mechanical interactions, that you will only see go off once time during that entire 50 session playtest.

In other words, there are not any long-form games from the Forge because of the incredible time-investment required to develop them properly. In the time it takes to develop and playtest a single long-form game, you could develop three or four short-form games easily. I estimate development cycles near three or four years of constant work for a good long-form game.

That is why there do not seem to be any. It takes a lot of work and dedication to make them happen. And on top of that you could develop three or four or five short form games in the same amount of time it would take you to develop that long form game. And those three or four or five games? Every one of them will be awesome, fun games. Well worth your time to design and play.

There are probably some economic reasons behind this as well. You can sell each of your three or four or five games to your target market, or even various target markets, at a higher profit margin than your single long-form game.

All that said, it should be pointed out that there is a long-form game that, while not originated at the Forge, has drawn a number of elements from Forge-style thinking: Luke Crane’s amazing Burning Wheel. Look around the web and check out any time Luke talks about playtesting. He is totally willing to tell people about the incredible amount of time, effort, and thought he put into that game. Years and years of development. And looking at the game? You can see where it paid off. The game, especially in its most recent Revised form, is shined to near-perfection. And Luke’s upcoming project Burning Empires has me incredibly excited.

The first in a possible irregular series. In today’s babbling piece I’m going to discuss a radically different publishing model for a game. Today’s game is, interestingly, not mine. I’m going to be talking about a game originated and written by someone else, and how I would consider publishing it were it mine.

Joshua BishopRoby has this game that he’s working on called Agora. Go read the little blurb, it’s a dang cool game concept. I’ll be here when you get back. I suppose that it’s only fair that I’m using Josh’s game as an example here since it was a blog post of his that this little article is in response to.
Okay, this next part could give you some context, but it’s not necessary: Josh has this playtest document. I’m going to say some things about the game to prove my points, but I’m not going to justify them with text. You can do that yourself.

Okay. I’ve gotten in a single playtest session of this with Josh via the Foundry MUSH. That means I’ve only ever played this in a synchronous text-only communication medium. I stored my character on my wiki (which is something I do with my characters in any online game, so nothing new there).

Here’s where we start talking about Agora specifically. The way the game is written, most conflicts involve to players: whoever’s turn it is to play their faction, and someone to play opposition. Now, the conflicts, once you get the system down, are pretty quick, so no one ends up idling. Further, the rules for Faction Lieutenants allow you to slot other players in pretty organically so that they can participate and contribute to the scenes fictionally and mechanically.

So you’ve got a system that has at its core two players. If you have those two players you’ve got enough to play. But at the same time it scales up rather smoothly if you have more.

Further, the resolution system has some important similarities to the See, Raise, See, Raise rules in Dogs in the Vineyard. Specifically, one player puts forth a Challenge to which the other player must Stand. Then the next player Challenges and must be met with a Stand, and so on. This works extremely well in the text-based environment because it nails down turntaking. When you play more traditional games online, it’s not always clear who’s turn it is to “talk”, and you will sometimes talk over one another, or worse, one player will type a big carefully worded bit to put into the game, only to have it obviated by someone else’s big carefully worded bit that gets put in five seconds earlier.

This problem isn’t a real problem in Agora because when it’s your turn to Challenge, then it’s also your turn to talk. And I know that my turn is coming up next, so I don’t have to worry about getting stomped all over and having no chance to contribute.

Further, the way the Obstacles and Factions change and are recorded are incredibly cool, and don’t require everyone to be there to pick up at least some of the significance of the changes. Every time an Obstacle is used it gets bigger, every time a Faction wins a conflict it gets bigger. Look over the playtest doc for yourself, but basically you could play with a group of ten people, and people could be missing for any given game and lots of fun could still be had. Then when whoever missed a session showed up and looked through the Obstacle list, they would get at least some sense of how things have changed.

So, to the point. I would write (or, more accurately, hire someone with the appropriate skills to write) a net application for the play of Agora. The game would be centered around a database of Obstacles and Factions, and have some sort of chat client (maybe a modified IRC or Java-based chat program). The chat-client would be preferrably web-based. It would have integrated tools for searching the database for Obstacles, and for handling all the mechanical stuff for the game, including the ability to click on dice to re-roll them, and the ability to roll in entire abilities by clicking on them, and the ability to create new Obstacles if there isn’t an appropriate one in the database.

The big draw for people is the Demo Game. Run a single game of Agora that resets every month or two. Anyone can make a Faction for this game (which means, yes, hundreds and hundreds of Factions and Obstacles in a single game). The time between resets should be calculated to let most people get just enough play to be invested and thirsty for more play before the reset happens.

People can log in at any time and play, as long as they can find someone to play their opposition. Hopefully people try to meet up with the same people over and over, where they have a shared history, and where they can build a community of specific investment.

But all of this so far is free, where does the money get made? Custom games. You let people pay you a flat fee of, I don’t know… let’s say $5, to start a new game. The game runs perhaps indefinitely, perhaps for a month or three (with the option to extend the game for another payment). If you’re the one who paid for the game, then you can authorize other players to join. Each new game gets a unique database for storing Factions and Obstacles, so only people in the specific game in question get to use the items created for that game.

Again, creating player accounts is free, you charge by the game. You bring them in by giving them a little demo of play, and then get them to pay you to get the full experience. People may play multiple games at once, nothing wrong with that. I’m not sure if it would be a good idea to have a system set up so that each player can only get one account or not.

I would also consider, though I don’t know if this would be good/necessary, tweaking Agora so that it had an end condition. At some point the game ends based on mechanical accumulation, or maybe there’s a game-winning goal all the Factions strive for. If such a mechanic was introduced then a flat fee per game (rather than some sort of monthly/quarterly/whatever upkeep fee) would probably work great.
So, that’s it. That’s how I would publish Agora. I’d be curious to hear comments on this model. What do you lose from the game (or roleplaying in general) when it’s played like this. I’d be especially curious to hear what Josh thinks of my butchering of his game.

I’ve had a lot of fun grilling Sarah Kahn over in the interview. Now it’s your turn!

So, if you’ve got questions for Sarah, or comments or anything really. If you’ve been involved in the online freeform scene and you’re experiences are the same or different from hers, this is your chance to speak up.

I’m hoping that this will be a pretty open discussion, free-ranging and all that. So, if there is something you wanted to ask Sarah to expand on, or a comment you wanted to make, here’s your chance!

In the interests of disclosure (and because it’s just plain interesting), this post was primarily spawned by a thread over on Story Games. Specifically, Tony Lower-Basch’s How much should we get to see?, with special interest to be called to this post by Brand Robins. I’d be thinking about some of this already, but this helped clear up some of my thoughts.

Everything I am about to talk about is specifically in the context of face-to-face play. Some of it holds true in other mediums, but the big important thing here is the fuzziness of record keeping. We have only our memories of play, rather than a hard-copy record, upon which we base our interpretations of what is going on in the narrative of the game at hand.

As much as we talk about the “Shared Imagined Space”, any given instances of play will be interpretted differently by each player. This does not mean there is nothing shared, in fact there is a lot shared. However, there is a lot of stuff that is not shared as well, and a lot of it is important.

An example from my own recent play: We have a local game of Capes that we started rather recently. We play when we get the chance to. The game draws (extremely) loosely on Arthurian themes, so the main character is Art. The first introduced villain was The Black Knight. That is mostly an aside, the point is that Will (who came up with Art) and I view Art quite differently.

First, a disclaimer: Will and I have not seriously discussed how we view Art, so I am going to be doing a lot of conjecture here. He may come in and correct me. That said, I think the point I am trying to illustrate will still be valid.

As far as I can tell, Will sees Art as mostly heroic. A sort of Batman-esque character. Betrayed by friends and loved ones, with little support and a tortured past, he still does what he has to to keep the city safe. His methods may be somewhat extreme, but for the most part they are necessary.

I see Art as being much darker; more of a Punisher character than a Batman. Art is brutal. He takes violence farther than he has to because he is a terribly violent individual. He uses tactics of pain and fear not because they are effective, but because he likes to cause pain and fear.

I can point you at the in-play events that lead me to my beliefs about Art, and I bet Will can do the same. I would not be at all surprised if many of them were the same events, simply interpreted in different ways. I would also not be surprised if I were giving a lot of weight to some events while Will was mostly ignoring them, or if Will were giving weight to events that I had completely forgotten.

Now, we do share an understanding of the things Art has done (beaten up some muggers, defeated The Black Knight, etc.), but we differ in how we interpret those events, and in how we ascribe motivation to the various characters. Part of this is, no doubt, attributable to the fact that the game is young yet, and the number of events we have to draw on is small.

But these first impressions are important, and they will shape the way we view the characters for the rest of the time we use them.

I could easily come up with an entire array of similar situations in various other games involving various other players. Further, I bet you could do the same. It is not like this is some isolated phenomenon; in fact it is a fundamental element of play, and there is nothing wrong with that.

The important thing to recognize in all this is that while many things in play are shared there are a lot of things that will be different. This can lead to some interesting problems. An action taken can appear inconsistent for a character to one player, while completely logical for that character to another player.

I believe this may be one of the primary reasons that most games tend to put a character under the authority of a single player. That way when disputes over which version of the character is the “real” version, and which are misunderstandings, are simple to resolve. However, allowing one player to be “in charge” of which interpretation of a character to use in you game you lose some elements of collaboration. Each character becomes more unified, but also less of an amalgamation.

Which can weaken one of the coolest thing this varied perspective brings to play. There is just something fun about discussing your different views of a character. The recontextualization that happens when you suddenly realize the viewpoint that another player has been playing with can be awesome. Suddenly certain decisions they made make an all new kind of sense and take on an all new thematic consequence.

So, play is chaotic, we each have different views about what is going on in play. And that is, ultimately, a good thing. I, for one, would have it no other way.

I claimed way back when I started this blog that it wasn’t all about roleplaying theory, but look at all these posts about roleplaying theory!  Time to make good on my claims.

Don’t get me wrong, today’s post does apply to certain types of roleplaying, but it applies to more than that too.  Today’s post is on games that include solo sub-games.  The most common example is the CCG.

I love CCGs, and other games that include this dynamic.  I can spend hours by myself pondering card choices, and combos, and balancing various factors for deck construction.  This same dynamic draws me into miniatures gaming of all stripes.

But the optimization game is a bit odd.  It’s designed to be played alone, with multiple players taking on a sort of workshop atmosphere.  Further, it’s a sort of anticipatory game.  It’s not much fun at all on its own.  Designing stuff that you have no intention to play is rarely fun.  However, designing stuff that you intend to play can be fun even if you never play it.  At least up to a point.

You see this sort of thing in roleplaying in complex character generation.  I can spend hours tweaking a Burning Wheel character, for instance.

The optimization game is an odd beast though.  It’s not really collaborative or competative.  In fact, the optimization game isn’t all that social.  Since we gather to play for at least partially social reasons, people rarely spend much time playing the optimization game in groups.

What this means, at least in part, for design is that you can design games that have an ongoing fun-factor when the game breaks up.  People can continue to play the game (or a part of the game) on their own time between sessions.  Since the optimization game is about setting up to play, so this also builds anticipation.

If you want to encourage a sense of rising anticipation in your players, and provide something related to the game “to tide them over” between sessions, developing some sort of optimization game is a great way to do that.  However, it’s important to note that the optimization game isn’t always a good thing to add to your game.

Some people are better (or worse) at the optimization game.  If you put one in your game then you are giving advantages to people who are better at the optimization game and to people who are willing and able to spend more time on it.  The guy who spends twenty hours meticulously designing his deck is going to have an advantage over the guy who just throws together some things that seem cool in ten minutes.

The other big risk that you run is building anticipation and then failing to fulfill it.  If I spend two or three hours designing a deck, and then it turns out that no one will play with me I will feel disappointed.  The real risk here is that repeated disappointment will rob me of anticipation, which defeats one of the primary purposes of the optimization game.

So, should you have an optimization game in your design?  Well, I like them a lot, but it’s not all hugs and kisses…

Mendel Schmiedekamp, on his excellent blog The RPG Theory Review uses the term “dynamic” in his summary of my piece on freeform from last week.

This is a great term for what I’m talking about. The dictionary definition I dug up is “Characterized by continuous change, activity, or progress”. This is an excellent articulation of what I’m thinking , or at least part of it.

Thanks, Mendel.

This is a bit late, but more than that relatively incoherent. If you do manage to dig up some of the (I think) clever ideas underlying this piece, please let me know. Especially if you can articulate it better than I can.

“Freeform” is a pretty loaded term. Consider the fact that my interview with Sarah Kahn is about “freeform”, but clearly we use the same term to talk about a bunch of other things too. Today, I’m talking about one of those other uses. Specifically, when I use “freeform” in this entry, I’m talking about play that does not refer to a game text to provide authoritative structures.

Remember that all authority in roleplaying ultimately belongs to the players, so what we are actually talking about here is a ceding of authority to a rules text. The text simply has no authority on its own. Now there is nothing wrong with ceding authority to a rules text, and doing so actually has a number of benefits. But like most things in life there are trade-offs, and it is important to realize what we are giving up when we give authority to the rules.

Let us examine the upside first. One of the really great things that granting authority to the rules-text does for play is that, in a sense, it gives authority to a person who is not a member of your play group. Specifically, the the writer of the game. This, in turn, means that you get ideas put into play that you would not have come up with on your own.

Ceding authority to a game text also gives you a static authority. This means that everyone knows that they final authority is impartial. For instance, when we play Capes around here, if we are not sure about how a certain thing should be handled, we check the book. The book shows no favoritism, and it provides a certain amount of stability to the game.

Further, ceding authority to the game text makes the game somewhat universal. If I am familiar with a rules text, and I want to play with any other group that is using the same rules text as an authority, then I know pretty much what to expect. While some of the particulars may differ, I can expect the core experience to be the same in both groups because our ultimate authority is the same.

The biggest advantage that I have noticed is the first one I mentioned: giving authority to the rules-text introduces a sort of new life to your group’s play. It allows for some emergent play that just would not happen if your group was left to itself. It is important to note here that your group does not necessarily need that emergent factor. In fact, your group is full of good ideas already. Getting that emergent factor from outside your group is something of a bonus, and one that comes at a price.

One of the big things that freeform play does for you is that, since you are not ceding authority to an inflexible game text, you are able to evaluate where authority should be distributed in real time. There are a number of risks in doing this: sometimes you make worse decisions in real time than if you just stuck to the game text. That is, real-time evaluation of where to distribute authority is a skill, and sometimes it is better to be safe than sorry. (Of course, this introduces a curious paradox, as it is difficult to improve the skill if you do not pratice it.)

There are a lot of points that I would love to talk about regarding freeform in the sense I am using today, but this is already pretty long, so I will limit myself to a single major point:

When you cede authority to the rules, one of the things you do is set aside your immediate evaluation of what the group wants most. In a freeform game, when a question comes up about the rules, the evaluation criteria is “what does the group think would be best?” When you have ceded authority to the text, the evaluation criteria is “what does the text say”?

Of course you still evaluate “what does the group think would be best?” when you cede authority to the rules, but the tendency is to do it between sessions. “Should we keep playing with these rules?” is not something that tends to get asked mid-session unless something is going terribly wrong. When you play freeform, you evaluate the question of how to best achieve your goals on a moment-by-moment basis rather than a session-by-session basis.

The thing is, freeform is hard. The group must have a set of play goals that is compatible, and they must have at least an intuitive understanding of what those goals are and how best to achieve them. And there is an entire array of skills involved in evaluating what structures of play will best meet the group’s goals.