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September 14, 2005
Google blog search
So, Google has this new Blog Search feature. What's interesting is what happens if you search for "roleplaying game". Almost none of the links there go to sites talking about what I first think of when I think of that term; they are almost entirely collaborative storytelling exercises. I feel kind of like Edwin Hubble must have when he realized that there are more galaxies than just our own -- the world is a lot bigger than I thought. This is neat.
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The 20' By 20' Room: Google blog search So, Google has this new Blog Search feature. What's interesting is what happens if you search for "roleplaying game". And if you search for Zelazny,... [Read More]
Tracked on Sep 16, 2005 6:46:46 PM
» Google peers at blogs from in the Shadow of Greatness
The 20' By 20' Room: Google blog search So, Google has this new Blog Search feature. What's interesting is what happens if you search for "roleplaying game". And if you search for Zelazny,... [Read More]
Tracked on Sep 16, 2005 7:32:28 PM
» Google peers at blogs from in the Shadow of Greatness
The 20' By 20' Room: Google blog search So, Google has this new Blog Search feature. What's interesting is what happens if you search for "roleplaying game". And if you search for Zelazny,... [Read More]
Tracked on Sep 17, 2005 9:39:42 AM
Comments
I see an awful lot of stuff from a blog called "Starlight Prayers", apparently a Sailor Moon blog-RPG? Or collaborative storytelling? But aside from that, I think everything (almost) is what we think of as RPG's.
It'd be nice if there was a way to filter out certain blogs from the search (for just that reason).
Posted by: Elliot Wilen at Sep 15, 2005 2:05:46 PM
Hi Neel,
I spent a lot of time this Summer talking with Sarah Kahn about "narrative rp" and how different it ends up being from table top rpg. And that is a huge world--from Harry Potter fans to Lady only knows what. It is very related to the "fanfic" world. And, not surprisingly, demographically it is the inverse of the traditional rpg crowd: mostly female, old & young.
Here's a randomly chosen"how to" page for online rp.
Yup. There's a lot out there.
best,
Emily
Posted by: Emily Care at Sep 15, 2005 3:02:04 PM
Hi Emily, it's been ages since I've talked with SK, but I remember her as possibly the sharpest and most thoughtful observer and critic about rpgs that I've ever met. So when I learn the two of you talk gaming, my reaction is: don't leave me suspense! What did you guys observe/learn/conclude?
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Sep 15, 2005 4:19:54 PM
I've played in a game or two like that - they require a lot of creativity. I've heard some people from traditional roleplaying talking smack on them for various reasons, one having to do with the lack of a game, which is true, and another that it's all wish fulfillment/mary suism, which it doesn't have to be.
It's more rules via mutual consensis than anything else - there's usually one or two people in charge, but when a group is groving along together, things really take off.
Posted by: John Fiala at Sep 15, 2005 7:02:38 PM
What John said is similar to the impression I got: at it's best narrative rp is die hard consensus with some really sophisticated techniques of collaborative story telling & role play.
I got to spend a week with Sarah, her husband Charles & also Ben Lehman, and I came away with some new fundamental questions about what gaming can be. I was pretty blown away by it all, actually. Sarah is still one of the most brilliant people I know. I'm still mulling a lot of it over, but what Sarah said has inspired me to think a lot more about the specifics of free form play: what techniques people use, how different groups differ, how consensus is arrived at & how the creative process is structured.
A key issue Sarah brought up is that so much attention has been paid to game design and mechanics specifically, that discussion of how play occurs has been left out. And as a corollary, since free form play doesn't fit into the mechanics box as easily (though I think we'd all agree that free form has rules like anything else, much of the etiquette and format of a nar rp clearly spelled out, though much more is implicit & has to be observed). I see her question as looking at the "ephemera" level: actual application of rules, and moment to moment decisions and actions such as stance, framing and meta actions like plotting.
Posted by: Emily Care at Sep 16, 2005 10:03:11 AM
Googling "RPG" gives you two blog hits on Final Fantasy VII, and the rest of the top ten is Harry Potter freeform.
Much of what we blog about (and I'm no exception) in these circles still cleaves very closely to a gaming frame than it does a purely roleplay-based frame. That said, even the Harry Potter crowd have inherent rule structures that they use - conventions for interaction. It'd be interesting, I think, to analyze their play and see if there's some new paradigm there.
Posted by: Kuma at Sep 17, 2005 2:58:18 AM
My two youngest sisters are constantly involved (well, besides schoolwork) in online "roleplaying." While I've (of course) had them play traditional RPGs, they now do a lot of the narrative-specific stuff (I think mostly Teen Titans right now) on play-by-post forums, instant messengers, and some chat opportunities, as well as "in the back of the car on long drives." It's that latter piece which I think is important. They don't really see a difference between what they've done with me and what they're doing with random internet folk... why should I?
Posted by: MT Fierce at Sep 18, 2005 3:39:08 PM
One of my favorite things about collaborative freeform games is when you can construct a world that doesn't depend on a fandom or a previously created world. Yes, for every original RP, there are fifteen Harry Potter games, but freeform roleplaying is quite popular.
One such game I'm in is based on the collaborative efforts of four moderators, who created four different realms alongside Earth to play in, therefore opening up the scale to accomodate a larger playerbase and scope of plot.
It's an idea of consensual roleplaying, whereas sometimes in games with a rules system you can get nonconsensual roleplaying (i.e., unexpected character death) because the rules had no parameters to keep said thing from happening.
To me, narrative roleplaying is just that - the act of telling the story of a character with the help of other characters in a consensual creative way.
Phew! So yes! It is very neat. :)
Posted by: Selenya at Sep 19, 2005 10:48:45 AM
Okay, now I'm totally blushing, I'll have you know.
Hi, Neel! Long time no write. Yeah, I've been really interested in freeform on-line fandom-based RPG lately, partly because I'd like to try to run an on-line game set in my group's RPG world, and so wanted to get a feel for how such games work -- but also partly because my obsession for the past couple of years has been fandom and fandom dynamics, so, hey! Both of my fascinations now combined into one easy package!
This form of gaming is a whole lot younger than table-top, and it really shows in many ways. In some ways, I see RPers (a term I'll use, for lack of a better one, to distinguish them from "gamers") as being where TT gamers were in, say, the '80s. They're only now beginning to develop stock terms for specific types of players, they're only now beginnning to develop a body of memetic gaming in-jokes (the equivalents of the infamous "Gazebo Story"), and they haven't yet built up much of a theoretical vocabulary relevant to their play. They're not talking a whole lot of theory, and when they do try to look critically at their gaming dynamics, the discussions are often somewhat crippled by the fact that they're forced to resort to terminology and concepts developed either by fanfic writers or by table-top gamers - neither of which are really well-suited to their style of play. (Old .advocacy members might be interested, however, to know that ye olde DAS/DIP distinction has made the leap: that particular set of terms is useful to on-line fandom RPers, and I've seen more and more of them using it in their discussions.)
One of the big distinctions I see between the two forms lies in the usual origins of its participants. Table-top grew out of a competitive gaming paradigm, so a lot of the rules that table-toppers find useful seem to be designed to force them to think more narratively. Most on-line RPers, on the other hand, come to play from a background of writing fanfic: they don't need rules to guide them in shaping a satisfying narrative; they're already down with all that. Instead, their rules tend to focus very strongly on enforcing the differences between RP and writing fiction. Many of the rules, for example, are designed to enforce "player turf:" to explain just to what extent, and in what ways, it is or is not acceptable to write another person's character. Not a sort of rule it would likely occur to table-top gamers to create, as coming from a competetive paradigm it seems intuitively obvious that you don't get to "move" for another player, but of course, if you're coming to play from fiction-writing than that's not intuitively obvious at all!
Kuma and MT are both right, I think. It's all RP, and many younger people - accustomed to this new style of gaming - don't see much difference between the two. At the same time, though, I think that there are paradigmatic differences, and so, as is always the case with culture clash, you can sometimes also see a bit of mutual hostility and suspicion between the two groups. I've seen a lot of contempt (usually liberally mixed with a good deal of only very thinly-veiled misogyny) from TT gamers towards fandom on-line RPG, while the on-line crowd can in turn occasionally get a bit dismissive of table-top ("What those people do isn't really role-playing" is a not uncommonly-heard sneer, the on-line RPers' equivalent of the "that's not really gaming at all!" sneer which comes from the old-timers.)
Anyway, I'm with Neel here - it is neat, and I've been thinking about trying to work up some more coherent analytic thoughts on the subject. It's not something that I've found it possible to discuss very well on places too mired in the Forge paradigm, though: those folks have their own focus and their own agenda, and it's all cool -- but just not very conducive towards that particular discussion.
Posted by: sk at Sep 21, 2005 9:12:29 PM
Hi Sarah,
I started to ask some questions, but them I realized that I don't know have even basic knowledge of how people do this. So some really elementary questions, first:
1. How big are the individual groups that RP? Two, four, ten, twenty, more?
2. What media do players favor? Livejournal, obviously, but do others use web-boards, email, wiki or IRC/IM?
3. Some of the striking differences between online RP and tabletop is that the product of play is not ephemeral, (can be) publically readable, and (can be) hyperlinkable. Do different groups ever try to link up their campaigns (stories, archives -- I don't know the right word) with each other, in cross-over-ish events?
4. Even more basic -- how public are typical RP games? Is it normal to make them world-readable, or normal to restrict them to just the participants (and maybe their friends as observers)?
5. Are there audience players -- are there people who read the play and speculate/cheer/etc, but don't directly write? That is, is there any role like beta readers in fanfic?
6. The idea that you don't need rules (or even potent cultural norms) to get satisfying narrative is very surprising to me. I did a little consent-based MU* a few years back, and gave up when I realized that the consent requirement meant that it was WAY too easy to block any surprising or threatening offers (which are where real conflict comes from). Likewise, over in the fanfic world I see lots of fanfic writers consciously and passionately trying to establish norms against shapeless conflict-free narrative sludge, and in favor of story. Is your claim really true, and if so, what's their secret?
7. What's the breakdown between fanfic (playing in a pre-existing fictional universe) and playing in an original setting? Do people write the "main characters", or do they make up their own?
In tabletop, I think it's very rare for the players in a Star Wars game to play the main characters from Star Wars. I did this for my Revenge of the Jedi game, and people have commented on how strange it was to be the main characters -- but in fanfic, I've noticed that there's sometimes a bias against making up original characters.
8. Do you have any pointers to the rule sets, guidelines, whatever they call them?
9. Does each group make their own? Are there rule sets that are widely acknowledged to be better than others?
Okay. I should stop now. :)
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Sep 22, 2005 6:52:17 PM
Hi, Neel.
Errr...Oops?
I started to address your questions, then got totally overwhelmed with the prospect and then, er, sort of procrastinated and procrastinated and procrastinated -- and then forgot about it for eight months or so. I'm sorry about that.
Anyway, I have no idea if you're even still interested in this stuff, but I've made a shot at addressing your questions here.
1. How big are the individual groups that RP? Two, four, ten, twenty, more?
It varies a great deal. On one end of the spectrum, you've got the phenomenon of the ginormous pan-fandom games, like "Sages of Chaos" and "Milliways Bar." These games tend to be sprawling, chaotic, not at all selective (ie, anyone and his brother can play, so a lot of the roleplay is frankly pretty craptastic), and deeply deeply silly. They're sort of the fandom equivalent of Beer 'n' Pretzels. Milliways reached around 1500 characters before it closed its doors to new members; Sages, which has remained open, now has over 5,000. (Note, though, that it can be difficult to determine exactly how many players those numbers represent, as participants often take on more than one character, and on-line RPers often strive to preserve their anonymity.)
Huge games like those are really more the exception than the rule, though. I'd say that the majority of the journal-based RPGs have somewhere between five and thirty players.
2. What media do players favor? Livejournal, obviously, but do others use web-boards, email, wiki or IRC/IM?
All of the above. "Play-by-post" games (games which use either blog/journal or forum software as their primary media) are the ones that I've been most focused on, but PBEM is still around and kicking. "Chat RP" is the usual term for RP which uses IRC/IM. And then, of course, there are also the MU*s, which are often perceived as the far end of a spectrum, with PBEM and PBP on the other end, and chat RP falling somewhere in between.
I've not seen wiki used much for RP itself, alas. I have seen groups use it to build up and archive setting material. It doesn't seem to have caught on much as an a medium for actual game play with this crowd yet, though.
A large number of these games are mixed media. Many of the journal-based play-by-post games, for example, also use IM, usually as a discretionary option, but sometimes as a mandatory aspect of play. The specific media required to participate in a game and the precise ways in which players are expected/required to use said media are one of the things specified in each game's rules.
3. Some of the striking differences between online RP and tabletop is that the product of play is not ephemeral, (can be) publically readable, and (can be) hyperlinkable. Do different groups ever try to link up their campaigns (stories, archives -- I don't know the right word) with each other, in cross-over-ish events?
Weirdly, I haven't seen anyone do that - although of course that doesn't mean that it's not happening somewhere. (Remember, there are a lot of these games.) Mainly, I see hyperlinking used for doing tricksy things with parallel narrative structures within a single game.
For example, some games have a "main storyline" taking place on one set of journals, while a separate set are running an AU version of the first story - either a "this is how the story would have gone if Event X had gone differently" What If sort of thing, or an "okay, now, here's the same story, but this version is being told as a comedy rather than as a tragedy" genre-shift.
Similar techniques are also quite often used for duel-chronology games: the second set of journals is used to tell a story set in the past, which in some way parallels or reflects upon the 'current-day' story. Hyperlinks are sometimes used to help the reader jump back and forth between time-lines.
Mainly, though, I think that the most notable effect of the non-ephemeral nature of the games has been the introduction of uninvolved spectators to the dynamics of play. More on that below.
4. Even more basic -- how public are typical RP games? Is it normal to make them world-readable, or normal to restrict them to just the participants (and maybe their friends as observers)?
Again, it depends. Some games are public; some are private. And some are a combination: in many games, only the "in-world" stuff is left visible to non-players, with all of the OOC discussion and meta taking place behind closed doors.
This, of course, can be deeply frustrating to people like me, who want to know how the games actually, y'know, work, but it can be very enjoyable for less analytical observers, who are free to sit back and enjoy the game narrative as fiction, without being distracted by the antics of the men (or, rather, nearly always, women) behind the curtains. :)
It seems to me that the group's decisions regarding what material to make private and what to leave public are often strongly informed by the extent to which they want to "play to an audience." Some groups prefer the traditional table-top dynamic of having the only real 'audience' be the participants. Others seem to enjoy playing to a (real or imagined) body of external spectators.
Which, of course, leads us to...
5. Are there audience players -- are there people who read the play and speculate/cheer/etc, but don't directly write? That is, is there any role like beta readers in fanfic?
Popular games do attract audiences, but the spectators play the role of readers, not of betas. Beta readers are editors. It would be considered extremely rude for someone reading along with an RPG to attempt to "edit" the roleplay, just as it would be considered extraordinarily rude for an outside observer of a LARP (at a convention, say) to criticize a player's acting ability.
It's understood that RPG is improvisational and primarily for the enjoyment of the players, so it's not really held to the same standards as, say, a fanfic. Negative critique of a role-play in progress would be considered "heckling," and if it happened more than once or twice, I think that all but the most thick-skinned RPers would probably choose to lockdown their game and go private.
Of course, there's a double-standard here. It's perfectly okay for audience members to praise a player's writing skill! Rampant speculation, cheering, booing the Bad Guys, and all that sort of thing is usually very much appreciated by RPers.
Fans of very popular RPGs have been known to form fan communities, where they can discuss the in-game events and speculate about future developments to their heart's content without distracting the players. Some games attract really devoted fans: although the immensely popular Harry Potter slash RPG "Nocturne Alley" ended nearly two years ago, its fans still occasionally post to their community "NrAged" to reminisce about the game, and they occasionally organize chat sessions where they meet to discuss the now-completed narrative. They have t-shirts, too.
(You might find this post on NrAged, in which after the game had ended, its Mod answered questions from the fans about how the game was organized and run, particularly interesting.)
6. The idea that you don't need rules (or even potent cultural norms) to get satisfying narrative is very surprising to me.
Oh, dear. Did I give the impression that potent cultural norms were not involved? If I did imply that, then I was in error. I tend to think of the fanfic community as a distinct subculture, one with very potent cultural norms - and one that is specifically, as you pointed out, concerned with establishing cultural norms in regard to narrative.
Likewise, over in the fanfic world I see lots of fanfic writers consciously and passionately trying to establish norms against shapeless conflict-free narrative sludge, and in favor of story.
Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Absolutely. That's precisely the arena in which I'd say the fandom community is most strongly driven to attempt to enforce cultural constraints.
Is your claim really true, and if so, what's their secret?
Hmmm. What was my claim, again? If I seemed to be claiming that fandom narrative roleplay always produces good narrative, then no. That is far from true. There are certainly many crappy writers, and many crappy narrative roleplayers, and many many crappy RPGs out there. Sturgeon's Law, and all that.
I think, though, that the claim I was trying to make was that fandom freeformers are less, well, oblivious to narrative concerns. For example, when a fandom game goes awry or is generally crappy, the population as a whole is overall better equipped to identify its flaws in terms of what went wrong with the narrative. Whereas I think that table-top gamers, historically, have had to be strongly encouraged even to give the question of narrative structure any consideration whatsoever.
In other words, I think that most TT gamers are more likely to see flaws in terms of game-y considerations like power balance and tactical problems, while ignoring the possibility that maybe the game sucked because of narrative considerations. Fandom gamers, in my experience, have just the opposite problem: they do perceive narrative flaws in games, but it often doesn't occur to them to analyze what went wrong in terms of "game-play" issues - even though, IMO, those sorts of issues are quite often what causes their games to falter or fail.
There's also a difference in skill set. Fandom gamers are mainly coming to the game from writing, so they know what it means to - say - "stage a scene," or "foreshadow an event" or "build on an internal conflict," or "touch upon a leit-motif," or whatever. Fiction writing concepts. They may often need to improve upon those skills, but they generally don't need to be taught what those terms even mean, or special training in being aware of them. They're already aware of them, because they're accustomed to thinking in fiction writing concepts, even if they may not be so great at the actual praxis. If that makes sense.
7. What's the breakdown between fanfic (playing in a pre-existing fictional universe) and playing in an original setting? Do people write the "main characters", or do they make up their own?
I know I keep giving this answer, but it really does just depend on the game. I've been mainly following Harry Potter fandom games lately, and even they vary a great deal on this score.
As you noted, there is bias against original characters in some circles, largely due to suspicion that such characters will be munchkinized self-inserts, or "Mary Sues."
At the same time, though, I've noticed that many fanfic games wind up with a strong focus on those "canon" characters about which so little is known that they're really original characters in all but name - you know, the "Third Stormtrooper From the Left" sorts of guys - while the main characters of the original canon are played more like NPCs: as supporting cast, rather than as protagonists. When the original canon protagonists are the focus of the game, more often than not, there's some strong and obvious AU deviation from the original source material.
Games that take place in the canonical world, but in a different time period than the original source material are also very popular; obviously, those games tend by necessity to be largely populated by original characters.
8. Do you have any pointers to the rule sets, guidelines, whatever they call them?
Each group makes their own. For the most part, however, they all look the same - and are weirdly Not Rules. It's strange: the most vital rules of play (consensus, 'stop-at-the-skin,' God-Moding, etc.) tend to get ellided (presumably due to the assumption that everyone knows them already), while the stated "rules" usually deal with points of etiquette and the sort of issues that I believe Forge theorists refer to as 'Ephemera' (is that right?): procedural stuff like "all posts must be written in the third person past tense," and "all scenes once begun must be completed in two days time so that the timeline doesn't get bogged down" and "remember to post your role-play in the proper place" and "NO NETSPEAK!"
It's rather strange, that, and honestly, I think that some of these games could really benefit from better rules codification - which is one of the reasons that I've found myself becoming interested in RPG theory again. Right now, they often devolve to a kind of vague cultural agreement, which makes it incredibly difficult for new players to figure out what's expected of them - and which can also, of course, sometimes lead to unfortunate misunderstandings and bad feelings and all of that usual problematic jazz.
I've just started a private PBEM with a group who use a slightly-more-structured-than-the-freeform-norm rules set that I think seems really promising. I have hopes that it might address some of the pacing problems that all too often seem to plague freeform games. (Pacing is, in my [admittedly probably idiosyncratic if not necessarily all that humble] opinion, the One Big Huge Glaring Achilles Heel of freeform gaming.)
Annoyingly, however, the group doesn't seem actually to have it written down anywhere, so I've been trying to piece it together from one of those conversations in which seven different people keep adding "Oh, yeah, and if..." and "Oh, and did we mention...?" statements at you. Very irritating.
I'm taking notes, though. Because honestly, right now, to me, it sounds like a damned good rules set, although of course I'll have to see it in practice to know for sure how well it actually works.
::pause::
Heh. Neel, did you ever think you'd hear me say that I felt a need for stronger rules codification? Or, for that matter, for more rules? Or, hell, for any rules at all?
Yeah, well. I guess I've finally met my freeform Waterloo.
Are there rule sets that are widely acknowledged to be better than others?
You actually expect a bunch of role-players to agree on whose rules are better?
Awww. That's so sweet, Neel.
Heh. No, alas, it's exactly like table-top in that regard, with the schismatics and the snobberies and the "plebe vs. elite" dynamics, and the endless fighting between those who favor one sort of play and those who favor another. The only real difference is that instead of the arguments being over things like "diced vs diceless" or "Sim vs Dram" or "Trad vs Narr" or, uh, whatever the current hot issues are (Yeah, I've been away for a while. :->), they're instead over pressing issues like "formal 2-para vs. freeform para vs. emote."
Same dynamics, though. ::sigh::
Okay. I should stop now. :)
Me too. :)
Posted by: sk at May 20, 2006 3:19:25 AM
Great post, Sarah.
I think, though, that the claim I was trying to make was that fandom freeformers are less, well, oblivious to narrative concerns. For example, when a fandom game goes awry or is generally crappy, the population as a whole is overall better equipped to identify its flaws in terms of what went wrong with the narrative. Whereas I think that table-top gamers, historically, have had to be strongly encouraged even to give the question of narrative structure any consideration whatsoever.
I guess it should be not surprising, though perhaps a bit sad. Table top designers have just begun to start looking at design and play in narrative terms. I wonder how much of that is due to the different skill sets of the players, the differences in approach based on "game" focus vs. "writing" focus, or the sheer fact of the medium: it's much harder to edit & refine what you do in person, or even just look back over what you've done and see it in terms of narrative structure if it's not recorded.
I'd love to hear about the rules your group is using, too, Sarah.
Posted by: Emily B at May 20, 2006 9:27:37 AM
Thanks, Em.
I'll try to write them up in a coherent fashion somewhere, just as soon as I'm sure that I understand them.
Posted by: sk at May 21, 2006 12:49:11 AM
Whew! This is a lot of information, and a lot to digest. Certainly kudos to you for putting it all out here.
Posted by: Jeffwik at May 22, 2006 10:06:18 AM
Thanks! I was out of town over the weekend, so I got this as a very pleasant surprise when I got back. :) More once I have a chance to digest and reflect.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at May 22, 2006 11:46:23 AM
It's fascinating to me where the differences are between fandom-based freeform communities and non-fandom based ones. I have a lot of experience playing in the latter, but basically none in the former (with the exception of some experimental MUSHing). I wrote a bit about my experience here.
The view I've encountered about original characters, for example, is diametrically opposed to the fandom one. Established characters are deeply frowned upon (too many Drizzts running around), and originality is key. "Mary Sue" characters are still somewhat frowned upon; the players just express this in different terms (keeping IC and OOC separate).
That said, I completely agree about pacing. It's one of my main issues, and not only because chat play is only 20% as fast as talk play (and post play much, much slower). Many freeform players could benefit from learning about scene framing, for example. To this day, I frequently see people starting a scene with their characters at opposite ends of a given area, doing their thing, and it takes them ten sends each before they ever meet. And once they do, finding a focus and a good ending to the scene proves equally challenging. Part of that is the attitude that scenes are there to let the characters "come out" during play, i.e., they're not to be forced by OOC considerations.
The second issue that I see is what I call the "Comfort Zone". People are so used to having complete control over their characters, they are reluctant to let bad things happen. But stories without bad things happening, or without the other characters having an influence on yours, tend to be dull.
Anyway, that was a great write-up. Thanks for sharing :)
- Christian
Posted by: xenopulse at May 22, 2006 11:56:51 AM
Hi, Christian. Thanks! I was wondering if you'd have some input on this, actually, as while lurking about various places, I'd noticed that you had a lot of experience with on-line freeform. (Wow, does that make me sound like a creepy stalker or what?)
I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who finds pacing to be the great bugbear of on-line freeform.
I think that the problem you mentioned - scenes being staged in such a way that it just takes them forever to Get! To! The! Point! - speaks to a very real and (IMO) very interesting culture difference between the freeform crowd and the indie crowd - and one that also seems to me to tie in heavily to recent discussions both of gender expectations and of 'push and pull.' I see online fandom freeform as exceptionally pull-oriented. As a general rule, these gamers tend to be leery of incorporating strong push dynamics into their play. Strong pushes are viewed as somewhat aggressive and confrontational - not necessarily rude or bad or wrong, mind you, but there's definitely a limit on how much of the kind of "in your face" stuff that many indie gamers seem to thrive on is considered acceptable. When I do see strong push-play happening in the fandom online freeforms, it almost always seems to be among people who have played with each other for a long time, or who started out as friends.
I suspect that those endless meandering scene lead-ups are partly a result of each player fearing that in media res would be too "pushy." On the one hand, I get that: of course it is sensitive and kind and reasonable and all that good stuff to want to make sure that you're allowing the other player all the time she needs to get herself eased into play. On the other hand, the end result is far too often a kind of absurd "You first, my dear Alphonse!" "No, no, I insist, after you, my dear Gaston!" dynamic.
It is annoying, to be sure, especially given how many unavoidable factors already exist to slow down on-line play.
The group I've just started playing with takes turns for scene-staging, with the person who "calls" the scene playing the third person POV character, while the players of the other characters in the scene are there more to provide support. The player who 'calls' also gets to stage the scene. I've just asked them how they feel about dramatically in media res scene-staging. (I know that it must happen sometimes, because I've read a transcript of one of their previous games in which it obviously does - but I'm curious to know whether it's considered necessary or polite to get any kind of special above-and-beyond-the-usual-call-of-duty permission from the other player(s) involved before deciding to start a scene that way.)
Posted by: sk at May 23, 2006 10:55:34 PM
hey.. thank you
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