Swords and Smiles

Melee combat is very complex, but you wouldn't guess that from most RPGs. The melee combat has been abstracted into a simpler form where we use high-level commands to control the combat, and the low-level bits aren't even simulated. Of course, once you've abstracted something like that, it's easy to include fantastical elements like magic, and re-weight things so that various approaches are balanced in game when they aren't in real life. The abstraction simplifies a lot, so we add in a lot of stuff to prop up the play - plot, highly varied monsters, an equipment-buy cycle...

Social play is very complex... but is it more complex than melee combat? Is it more complex than torque and positioning and sharpness and how the body reacts to injury? I lean towards "no", but I'm interested to hear your thoughts. I understand that social play isn't a zero-sum game like melee combat, but...

Here are the questions I'd like to figure out how to answer:

1) Can social play be abstracted out into something very similar to the play in some existing genre? Not "can we replace swords with smiles?", but "can we use a turn-based dynamic like an RPG?"

2) With the advent of "deeper" interfaces (such as the Wii), melee combat (and other situational) simulations are likely to get less abstracted. Will this new wave of "realistic" models provide us with a better foundation for abstracting social play?

3) Does anyone care?

Games you Never Thought of

Here's a few games you Never Thought of.

First: I finally managed to get a group to play Primetime Adventures, which has to be THE hardest game to sell people on. I finally got a group together - five players, two audience members, and me. Fourteen scenes later, we had finished a comedic romp through a steampunk space opera.

It works very well, even if you have no plot planned. Our "pilot episode" plot was made up on the fly, and it still ended up being an enjoyable game. I wonder whether I can get anyone to play a second time, though. It's so hard to sell.

Second: For the past few years, I've been creating games with lower and lower levels of immersion - testing the edges of what the minimum possible immersion is. It's been a very interesting romp, striding the edges where games fail. I don't think it's too egotistical to say that Boogaloo has proven most of my theories in application: a minimum-immersion game that people like to play.

It falters, but that's expected given the fact that the game has not a hint of immersion. I can, should, and almost certainly will write a paper about it.

However, what I'd like to do now is work on games with higher and higher levels of immersion. There are dozens of possibilities, but most of them have some severe drawbacks. So far, all my ideas have had the big drawback that they take at least half a day. I think that's inevitable: you can only immerse so fast.

Here, however, are two interesting ideas me and my roomie came up with. These games would avoid most of the drawbacks, but there are still some.

A game based on road trips. You get four to ten cars (and their drivers) and 2.5 times that number of players. You then set off on a day-long road trip. Each leg of the trip is an hour or so, with all the cars meeting in various locations. The idea of the game is that it's some kind of Cthulu-esque experience where the passengers are slowly being driven mad (ar-har-har): each car ride is functionally an hour of role-play based entirely around conversation and occasional in-game paper passing.

The players would need to figure out where they wanted to go in whose cars to solve whatever their goal was.

I could make this game a lot of fun, but the downside: about $100 in gasoline per car. Yeowch.

The other game is similar, but you simply ship everyone to a nearby big town (Boston, in my case) and instead of road trips, they take trips on the local subways and/or busses. You get some of the local businesses to go along with the game - a used book store, a little restaurant, a pub somewhere, someone to play a crazed homeless person - and you have everyone check back with "central" every hour or two. Some kind of "event" that happens that they don't want to miss.

It's the same basic kind of experience. The immersion should be comparable to the road trip, but would likely be more erratic. On the plus side, day passes for busses and/or subways typically run $5-$10, dramatically cheaper than the $30 players would need to pitch in for the road trip game.

Why these game ideas evade many of the problems with immersive games is an interesting topic, but kind of a long one, and I've taken enough of everyone's time today. Feel free to muse about it in the comments: I'd be interested to see everyone's take on immersion.

Lucid

Okay, I keep reading "Lucid" as "Ludic". So, I'm taking tonight off. Soon: something shorter, and maybe a re-luciding of that five page thing I did a bit ago.

Tomorrow: Peanut butter sandwiches, far as the eye can see! My eye, at any rate, being severely nearsighted.

Actually, I'm about out of bread. So: peanut butter bagels, as far as the eye can see!

Darius Sucks!

I got to play the Wii a little bit, and I'll I can say for certain is that avatars that look like Darius really suck at boxing.

Idiot's Guide to GMing

Here's five pages of the Idiot's Guide to GMing, a book I'm not really writing. These five pages are a how-to on immersion. I hope you'll find them useful or, if not, tell me why not.

Talk to Strangers

(Google Documents has some irritating issues with non-HTML formats. Anyhow, looks best at about half window width. :P )

Wandering Too Far

The restrictions of language preclude relative unknowns from propagating advanced theory, therefore they must achieve a reputation for incisive comments about common theory first.

There, academic enough for ya?

Big Book o' Social Play

Here's a 25 page essay, if you're man enough to read it! Or woman enough! Or whatever. I suggest tackling it two pages at a time, with copious amounts of webcomics, caffiene, and wild beach parties between sessions. Invite me.

Anyhow, it explains my most recent theory in grotesque detail. There really is a lot of juicy, applicable stuff in there. At least, I think so.

Just keep in mind this is not exactly a polished document. Especially at the end, it kind of dwindles to random tips and notes. But it is full of juice! You will definitely learn some interesting game design tips, although I might be talking out of my buttocks. You'll never know unless you read it.

Big Book o' Social Play