Monthly Archives: February 2010

Solipsistic MUSHing

Just a quick though in a particular flavor of geekiness.

In MUSHing, a lot of players are uncomfortable assuming GM authority, even for a single scene, because they are uncomfortable about the boundaries. This is rough to wrestle with, but I wonder if it might be addressed by creating a lesser, but perhap smore intuitive, level of authority: that of the protagonist.

The idea is simple: in a given room, one player is the protagonist. If this was a book, it would be about their character. If other players aren’t cool with that, they go elsewhere[1] but otherwise, he can resolve issues and answer questions based on how it suits his story. It requires no broader knowledge of the game, nor authority beyond ht escope of regular play, it simply makes it clear where the focus of things is, and allows for that to flow.

Certainly some protagonists may be selfish, others generous, and that’s fine because it works either way. Because you’re not opting into a another player’s authority, you’re opting into their story, and that’s a very different sort of dynamic. And ideally also helps address the instinctive 14 year old in a lot of MUSHers.

Anyway, not a lot of bandwidth today, So I figured I’d share one of the weirder ones.

1 – This can even be handled with virtual spaces, as a nice compromise between all stages and fixed geography. If I want to be in a location, but I want to do it for my story, not for the guy who’s already there, then I can ‘shard’ the location, creating a new version which is “Bob’s Dark Alley”, and it’ll show up appropriately on exits and such (so people in the adjacent room might see Dark Alley, Steve’s Dark Alley and Bob’s Dark Alley and be able to at least glimpse who is in what. There’s also a lot of implicit information in this kind of sharding: you can automatically find out where scenes are happening in a location, and you can also pass through or around them if it does not interest you.

Artifacts of Play

I had an interesting exchange with Ethan Skemp the other day[1] about the selfishness or generosity of the art of RPGs. One one hand, RPGs are very selfish: they create something ephemeral for a small group of people, usually with a lot of effort and creativity going into that creation. That much work for so few people seems inherently selfish. On the other hand, that ephemeral nature means putting in a lot of effort with neither reward nor recognition. When you are finished, there is no novel or painting to show, only an experience, and the act of putting so much effort into something without something concrete to walk away with an add to your CV is an exceedingly generous one[2].

I feel like these things are both true, and I don’t see a lot of mileage in resolving the contradiction. Life is full of contradictions, and if you can coax one out into the light, it’s wiser to leave it there so you know where it is.

But this did remind me of something that’s been bugging me for a while. I have played in a great many games in my life. Most have been fun, and a handful have been really powerful, really amazing experiences. The problem is that unlike other powerful experiences in my life, from which I tend to have photos or other mementos, there are very few artifacts of these experiences.

There are exceptions. For Fred’s magnificent “Born to be Kings” game (seriously: READ THE QUOTES), we commissioned an artist to do character portraits for the group and gave them out at Christmas. My wife and I also shelled out for our own characters to make a complete set. We still have them, framed and hung with pride of place in our home. I walk past them and the memories come back.

But for most other games, the best I can hope for is that I might find a folder full of old character sheet some day. That seems a lackluster fate for something that may actually be quite important to me, and i find myself wrestling with a question: how can the pursuit of this hobby create artifacts that celebrate it?

There are some obvious ones – art, for example, can work. However, it’s a bit tricky to do remotely, and we’re not all lucky enough to have Storn Cook at our table. More traditional trappings, like dice and books, are a bit less compelling because of their fungibility[3]. Those may be the dice I used for a particular great game, but I could have used them for any game, so there’s no natural association with the game I want to remember.

If I want to shell out a little bit of money I can easily make mementos. Cafe Press or the many corporate branding sites make that relatively easy. And that’s an option, certainly, but it’s external to the game.

The web is a weird hybrid space for such things. One one hand I still love the flash movie for Second Stringers, but on the other hand it’s not quite a physical thing.

What this all comes down to for me is the question of whether it is possible for the creation of artifacts to be part of play. Maybe as part of the rules, maybe as part of the social structure around it, I dunno.

In retrospect, I think I’m inspired by this in large part by my experience with the Amber DRPG, where player contributions were rewarded with points, and many of the contributions explicitly created artifact of play, whether they were short stories, character journals or (most prized) decks of trumps.[4] Maybe the success of the idea can be laid at the feet of player reward, but that got diluted by also rewarding efforts that leave no legacy (like bringing food) so that’s muddied. But at the same time, that invitation to create is, I think, one of the reasons that the ADRPG fandom is such a robust one.

I’d love to see ways to make this work in other games, especially longer campaigns (though a memento of a good one shots would be both cool and a great thing for conventions) but almost every solution I can think of is a bit too ad hoc. Maybe that’s how it has to be, but maybe not.

So let me ask, oh ye who have been patient enough to get this far, have you had any games create artifacts or mementos? How and what kind?

1 – Oh yeah, watch him namedrop like a MOFO

2 – While there’s something to be said in comparing it to performance art – the performance is a fleeting thing – most performance has a degree of repeatability. Sure, two showings of Hamlet will never be identical, but you an still do it again, or at least try to. You can’t really do that with a game session. There’s probably some overlap with improv performance in that regard, but that also usually has a bit more of an audience, so it’s less muddy.

3 – This is one of the roughest parts about using cards for play. They’re so interchangeable that it’s hard to build strong associations with them the way you can with a character sheet. if I ever figure out a good card-based ruleset, one step is going to involve marking cards with a sharpie so they can’t even be used for anyone else.

4 – Cards with images of characters and places. In the setting they are artifacts used for transportation and communication.

Books

My writing time this weekend was eclipsed by other things (both writing wise and sick-kid wise) so I’m going to fall back on a few bullet points about this whole Amazon/Macmillan nonsense.

  • Neither of these companies is doing it for the customers. Customers are bags of money, and they both want to get more of that money. I’ve seen supporters of each side talk about how the other company isn’t really interested in customers. And they’re right. They just are operating under some sort of delusion that their team is different.
  • Ebooks are not free. Even setting aside the costs of paying the writer, editor and other folks involved in the actual creation of content, storing, distributing and maintaining the electronic files introduces costs.
  • However, it is not unreasonable to expect that ebooks are cheaper to produce (printing), distribute (shipping), and warehouse (storage). [1] While the costs for doing these things are non-zero, they are also costs that diminish as they scale up.
  • Most of the reason this is any kind of argument is that neither side is particularly transparent about their figures, and the figures that they put forward are usually so obviously cooked as to be useless.[2] This is, by the way, a good indicator that both sides are on shaky ground. If one side was clearly in the right, they could break down the costs and make their case.
  • Macmillan expects too high a price for ebooks. Seriously. They’re nuts, and the iPad will not save them.
  • Amazon’s desire to control the ebook market has made them handled this very stupidly indeed.[3]

  • In a vacuum, authors have every reason to back Macmillan because they need their books to be sold. Amazon taking down the books was a punch right in the affiliate link. Authors talk a lot, and do so reasonably well. That meant there were a lot more voices making the case for why Amazon were a bunch of poopy heads than the reverse. Amazon was already losing the perception war when they decided to so profoundly misuse the term monopoly as to start a meme. Authors are marketers, whether they accept that or not, and this was a marketing conflict.[4]
  • The fact that one side was better marketed than the other, even accidentally, has no actual correlation to rightness.
  • EDIT TO ADD: None of this forgive amazon apparently having its head firmly up its ass. They could have been entirely on the side of angels, but handling it the way they did was flipping the bird to everyone who might have been sympathetic, including authors. Authors know that publishers are bastards, and they’re great spokesmen (see above) so punching them in the head with no explanation is not a great way to start out making your case.
  • This was not a war, or even a real skirmish. This was a shot across the bow at best. In 10 years this will seem so charmingly dated as to be funny. Publishing and bookseller is going to change dramatically and disruptively over the coming years. And for people who have made it, the successful authors, it’s going to either be a time of great opportunity or of vast and painful suckage. But I think a lot of authors have already seen this coming – this is already an era where authors need to be their own champion to survive, and that’s going to become more true than less.
  • I am sympathetic to the idea that as a writer you just want to write, not deal with also being a marketer and so on. That fact is, i think, going to have some big impact on the role of agents in the future. But the unpleasant reality is that if its your job, then you are subject to the whims of the industry. That can suck. I know. I feel you. But I work in a goddamned cloth covered cubicle, so my sympathy has limits.[5]
  • Seriously. The book trade is a byzantine mess. The numbers on who buys books and how many they buy can break your heart. Book lovers are killing bookstores. The distinction between loving reading and loving books is leading to knife fights. Disruptive change is going to hurt, maybe a lot, but there’s a case to be made that it’s just what we need.

1 – All of which to say nothing of avoiding taxation on backstock and punative returns, two of the poison pills of the book trade today.

2 – If, for example, as MacMillan claims, printing represents only 1% of the cost of a book, I admit I wonder what magical trees they are using to get their paper. Oh, I’m sure it’s true if looked at just the right way, but that’s spin where transparency is desirable.

3 – On this point I concede that it’s possible that Jeff Bezos is an ebook true believer – a lot of Amazon’s decisions can be seen as promoting the medium, albeit on Amazon’s terms. Ebooks and ebook readers are more than 15 years old at this point, but it took the Kindle to make it a viable market. Of course, the counterargument is that this was a cynical ploy: Amazon created the market so they could control it. Might be true. Truth is probably more mixed.

4 – This is more true of the internet than the real world, but we’re talking about ebooks here, and most of that audience is on the internet.

5 – I know several authors and all of them work their asses off, and they are exactly the kinds of folks who I think will weather the transition well. If I sound snarky at authors, lets just say that some sound a lot more entitled than others.