Announcement: Indie-Netgaming Wiki

[efindel]

A Wiki has been set up for the Indie-Netgaming group.  You can find it at:

http://www.lostthoughts.org/phpwiki/index.php/IndieNetgaming

What's Indie-Netgaming?  It's a Yahoo group which was created by Nathan "Paganini" Banks to help people organize online play of Indie games.  You can find out more by following the link above.

What's a Wiki?  It's a web site designed to have multiple people edit it.  In the case of the Indie-Netgaming Wiki, anyone can edit any page of it.  All you have to do is click the "Edit" button at the bottom of the page.

But I don't know HTML!  No problem.  Wikis don't use HTML -- they use a simpler markup.  You can read about it on the Wiki's "HowTo" page, at:

http://www.lostthoughts.org/phpwiki/index.php/HowTo

Alternatively, you can just click the "Edit" button on any existing page, and there you'll see exactly what was put in to make that page.  As you'll see from looking at a few pages, it's pretty simple.

What's the point?  By allowing anyone to edit any page, we make a community web site.  If you see a misspelling, you can fix it.  If you know that a particular game is on hiatus, you can add that fact to the page for it.  If you want to tell people about an ongoing game, you can add it to the list of current games.  If you're in a game, and you want to tell people about stuff that happened last session, you can add a link to the page for that game, and make a new page with your summary of it.

Can I use this to run a game?  Sure!  We've already got one game running on it -- a playtest game of Ed Heil's new Topos system.  If you want to make a game, go ahead.

A final note -- I'm hosting this on my home system, which is on a DSL line.  We haven't had any problems so far, and since it's mostly text, it should be pretty low-bandwidth, but if everyone starts hitting it at once, it's possible that there may be speed issues.  Just fair warning.

--Travis

[Mike Holmes]

To quickly ensure that this is on topic, does anyone want to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Play by Wiki (PbW). We've had several games going now, and perhaps people have some insights.

For example, I've got it set up for Universalis where there are potentially mane scenes going at once. We've had as many as three being developed simultaneously. That seems pretty cool, but I also sense that at some point somebody will make a mistake and contradict another scene. Seems just inevitable. The problem is monitoring time flow.

Any thoughts?

Mike

[efindel]

To quickly ensure that this is on topic, does anyone want to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Play by Wiki (PbW). We've had several games going now, and perhaps people have some insights.

Thanks for the thought, Mike, but it's not necessary... I checked with Ron on where to post this before putting it up, and he said to put it here in Actual Play.

I do have some random thoughts banging about my head on the topic you raised, though...

For email games, one problem can be history.  Unless you're using something like yahoo groups or a Mailman mailing list which keeps a web-accessible archive of posts, people who want to be able to refer back to older posts have to keep copies of them.  (And even with web-accessible archives, searching for a particular post can be a pain in the butt.)

This can become a problem due to the usual slowness of email games, and the fact that people sometimes (often?) tend to just skim posts that don't involve their character.  It can be easy to miss something happening, and hard to check back later to see exactly what *did* happen.

On a wiki or a message board, those problems are lessened, since there's an automatic "history".  Further, most wikis and message boards that I've seen have a full-text search function, some of them allowing logical operators in searches, which can make it much easier to find something that you remember happened.

One can have different scenes happening at the same time in an email game, but it can get confusing.  Some players don't seem to handle it well, and others can't handle multiple scenes being played at the same time which are at different in-game times happening.  I'd imagine that having these take place in separate pages on a Wiki or in separate "folders" or "forums" on a board might help.

For the time flow problem, on a Wiki, it might be useful to establish a timeline as one page of the Wiki.  How useful that can be probably depends on the feature set of the Wiki... if you can link to a specific point in a page, that could be helpful, so that a scene could have TimeLine links in it which take you to a point on the timeline.

--Travis

For example, I've got it set up for Universalis where there are potentially mane scenes going at once. We've had as many as three being developed simultaneously. That seems pretty cool, but I also sense that at some point somebody will make a mistake and contradict another scene. Seems just inevitable. The problem is monitoring time flow.

Any thoughts?

Mike[/quote]