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.