Charmed and Harry-Potter online free-form roleplayers

[John Kim]

Yes, they are their own deal.  And what they are really doing is writing interactive fanfic.  What I've seen happen with the 2 games I followed, is that the moderators want to do their thing, and they don't pay any attention to anyone who joins that isn't playing a canon caracter.  And they heavily discourage non-canon characters.  

It seems like very incestuous, cliquey play.  I welcome comments/proof to the contrary.

So, if you're interested in what I've written so far, you can go to it at http://www.livejournal.com/users/librisia/2004/10/05/

Well, these seem like very real tendencies which are common in an open, anyone-can-join role-playing event.  I saw some of the same cliquishness in large Vampire LARPs, for example.  People are wary of new people butting in, perhaps because they have had problems either from style clashes or genuine jerkiness.  So those who want a little more of a "closed" event form their own clique.  

Really, it's an extremely tricky challenge to smoothly integrate the random people who may sign up for an online game (or show up to an open participation event).  I haven't seen it handled well -- but then, remember to compare these to an average tabletop game (i.e. D&D game) that you might stumble on.

[James Holloway]

Another way to look at this is that it's a consequence of freeform RP'ing.  If it's important to everone in the game that the game have a certain Sim feeling to it, and there's no practical way to control player's action once in the game (i.e. no system), then an easy and practical way to handle it is to disempower the players.  

In other words, you can play in a Harry Potter game, but you're only allowed to play Unnamed Griffyndor Student #23.

Well, the consequence is clearly this, but I don't think it's necessarily to limit the actions of the PCs -- after all, presumably even Unnamed Griffyndor Student #23's days are filled with wonder and whimsy, and even Johnny No-Name Werewolf leads a life of danger and excitement*

To me, at least, it's designed to make sure that concepts are in line with canon, because "appreciation of the material" is a big motivator. That's obviously more true of Harry Potter than of WtA. One of the core tenets of Harry Potter is that Harry Potter is specially, uniquely cool. But still in Werewolf you've got lots of things that are very rare or unique but that everyone still wants to play -- a white Wendigo, the last of the Croatan, a male Black Fury, a homid Red Talon -- and if you had all of these in your game, it would be really strange. All exceptions and no rule.

*Whether this is true in practice or not is one of those things -- probably not for the most part in my experience, but I admit my experience may not be representative.

[Alephnul]

I had very similar experiences with MUSHs in the early Nineties. Sign up on a big WoD mush where no one knows who you are, get restricted to playing a non-super, wander around in a world where all of the Super plot lines are invisible, and the only other non-supers are all newbies, and no one is setting up non-super plot lines, get bored and frustrated and quit. However, two of my housemates who were serious Mushers explain that if I'd stayed in longer and shown myself to be a decent player, then either my character would have gotten pulled into the cool stuff, or I would have been approached about taking a super character and brought into the actual plots.

I think the LJ style online RPs work similarly. You may start off as third Auror from the left, but if you can do interesting things with your character, then either you will become more important, or you will be offered one of the major roles if they open up.

One big advantage of the LJ style RPs is that you can at least read all of the plotlines, so you aren't left completely ignorant of where the interest lies. Also, since they are done in fic format, it is possible to do interesting stuff with your character even if no one else is paying much attention to you.

Smaller, less popular ones (such as http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=civilitas">Civilitas, a very good but fairly obscure HP game) may have more openings for central characters, although they will use other methods to make sure that you will be good at it, since they aren't able to survive badly played main characters anymore than the popular ones are.

My gaming group has actually been contemplating starting up an online LJ style game based around our game world, as there are things that seem like they could be done better in the online fic format than in face to face play (plus it would be a way to include some players who are separated from us by a continent and a player who has become disaffected towards face to face play). There are definitely some interesting things that the LJ game format has to offer (besides other players who are interested in playing in the HP universe).

Charles

[Librisia]

However, two of my housemates who were serious Mushers explain that if I'd stayed in longer and shown myself to be a decent player, then either my character would have gotten pulled into the cool stuff, or I would have been approached about taking a super character and brought into the actual plots.

Yes, I'm sure this is the case.  However, in a tt rpg, you don't have to go through a period of initiation.  If you show up, people try to figure out how to include your character in the action right away.  I think it's a matter of perspective on what the community is for/how it's supposed to work.

Frankly, I'm too old and don't have the time to hang around and wait for the other kids to decide I'm cool enough to be allowed to play.  I think online games should stop having open enrollment calls if they don't want to include new people in the action right away.  

I know that's unrealistic, and it won't happen.  That's just my opinion.

[Librisia]

sirogit, Ralph, Librisia:  You guys are aware of communities like Must Be Pop, right?  In a way, they are to the HP / Charmed FFRPs what the HP / Charmed FFRPs are to tabletops.

I'll have to check that out.  Thanks, Brendan.

[sirogit]

Could you explain that first part again?  "A very strong sens of very loose and vague definition" is not clear to me.  I just want to be clear, because, with your permission, I'd like to perhaps quote you in the rest of the article (when I get

I'm pretty emabrressed I screwed up that sentence so badly.

What I meant was, "The character's descriptions, excluding magic power stuff, is remarkably vague and imprecise. "A mysterious, handsome male." "a shy but sometimes outgoing female." Made very odd when it's paired up with the magical power definitions, as the result reads as "a mysterious, handsome male with the ability to create and manipulatie Ice, Water and Wind, and to teleport up to 20 feet."

[Alephnul]

Sirogit:

Which sites are you looking at?

Compare those to the character descriptions at Civilitas:
(e.g. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=eminence_grise">Fluer Delacour's Dad)
Or at the completed http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=Nocturne_Alley">Nocturne Alley(e.g. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=potterstinks">Draco Malfoy)

Of course, both of those are closed games (although I'm pretty sure Civilitas takes applications, since it does list the currently open character slots), so they don't have the cattle call issues that Librisia is objecting to.

Librisia,

I totally understand your position (I quit doing MUSHs after a month or two  for pretty much the same reasons, and I was still pretty young then), but it seems to me that the cattle call games at least offer a place for players to prove themselves. If all of the games were closed membership, then there would be absolutely no way for someone who wasn't already sufficiently involved in the fandom to be friends with a mod to get involved in a game.

[Librisia]

If all of the games were closed membership, then there would be absolutely no way for someone who wasn't already sufficiently involved in the fandom to be friends with a mod to get involved in a game.

True dat.

[SK]

::delurks shyly::

I've travelled in both fandom and gaming circles.  Both subcultures tend to be quite insular, and -- as has been mentioned -- both subcultures remain largely unaware of the others' existence.  To most people who came to gaming through fandom (whether the games they play now are based in canon worlds or in completely original ones), the term "RPG" refers to a written RPG, usually played on livejournal, but sometimes also through e-mail or forum software.  Most of them have never heard the term "table-top," and they won't know what you're talking about if you use that term to try to distinguish your preferred form of gaming from their own.  (Most of them don't know the term "PBEM," either, even though many of them avidly engage in it.)

As to the relative quality, whatever...my experience with both forms of gaming has been that both of them, like just about everything else in the world, follow Sturgeon's Law.  To generalize about fandom RPG based on some random crap livejournal game makes about as much sense as to generalize about table-top RPG on the basis of some adolescent boy's "My Very First D&D Dungeon Crawl" game.

One of the main differences between the two subcultures, of course, is demographic.  Fandom is overwhelmingly female.  Gaming, while it is not quite so extreme now as it was back in the pre-WW days, is still a primarily male hobby.

Personally, I don't see very much difference between playing a game set in the world of JK Rowling and playing an Ars Magica game, or a game set in the world of Greyhawk or Harn (or, for that matter, the world of Dragonlance, which straddles the border between "fanfic world" and "gaming world.")  In all such cases, there is a "canon" and a corresponding orthodoxy, which each individual gaming group can choose either to adhere to or to ignore (or to modify, but only in specific permitted ways.  Or to...well! You get the idea.)

There are some big differences, I think, which arise out of the differences in medium: written vs. oral.  On a very basic and grossly over-simplified level, one might say that online RPG is to fiction writing as table-top RPG is to acting.  Rather than acting stuff out, you're writing stuff out.  I believe that many of the aesthetic differences between these two forms arise out of this basic fact: online RPG tends to deal more heavily with the characters' internal states than face-to-face gaming does (just as novels tend to deal far more heavily with internal states than movies do), and authority over the characters is more "shared" -- ie, there is far less interest in preserving a pretense of absolute player authority over his character, partly I think because there is a great deal more player authority over those parts of the game which are allocated to the "GM" in traditionalist table-top gaming.  

(Many fandom gamers have never heard the term "GM" either, by the way.)

[Vaxalon]

Something tells me that if we can ever get the twain to meet, something wonderful will happen.

[SK]

I'd love to see that happen. As I hope was obvious, I've a great fondness for both groups, and I think there's a lot they could potentially be learning from each other.  Table-top gaming has been around longer, and it's already developed strategies to deal with a lot of the pitfalls that some fandom RPGers of my acquaintance have only now started encountering for the first time.  And I think that table-top gamers, for their part, could probably derive much of value from fandom RPG's different approaches to player authority and to the internal/external divide.

The "subculture" aspect is a difficulty, though.  Both groups have so much of their own slang and special terminology and, well, and cultural identity built up that I think that there's some degree of mutual incomprehension that tends to get in the way when you try to reconcile the groups.  

Not to mention, of course, the disdain factor.  

(To people not immersed in fandom, the idea that anyone might find the slightest bit of value in a game about Harry Potter characters having gay relationships at Hogwart's, to take a commonly cited example, does tend to produce an immediate "Ew, how embarrassing and childish!" reaction, even from people who themselves enjoy games about Four-Color Superheroes Dressed In Tights Fighting Master Criminals.  There are gender issues that come into play here, to be sure!)

But Librisia's anecdote really did make me wince when I read it, because while I'm pretty sure that what really happened there was just that the moderators of that particular game were a bunch of jerks, it's also possible that there was some culture clash over what sort of characters (or even what sort of character write-ups) were expected from potential players.  I really liked James Holloway's explanation above of what the relevance of the term "Mary Sue" might be to an RPG, why such characters could be perceived as problematic, and so forth.  Sadly, it's not a way of explaining things that I suspect you'd get from many fandom RPGers -- for the simple reason that they're accustomed to dealing with people who are already immersed in the culture, know the terminology, and so forth.  

(Please note that I'm not actually trying to say here that there was anything problematic about Librisia's character idea at all.  Far to the contrary, I think it pretty clear that the mods were being jerks -- "That's a Mary Sue!" is a downright rude way to express an objection to someone's character concept, no matter what the context.  But even if there had been a legitimate problem, it seems to me that a similar situation might still have arisen, simply out of a lack of shared vocabulary and terminology and cultural construction of gaming concepts.)

[Librisia]

::delurks shyly::

I've travelled in both fandom and gaming circles.  Both subcultures tend to be quite insular, and -- as has been mentioned -- both subcultures remain largely unaware of the others' existence....  One of the main differences between the two subcultures, of course, is demographic.  Fandom is overwhelmingly female.  Gaming, while it is not quite so extreme now as it was back in the pre-WW days, is still a primarily male hobby.

I think it's a misnomer to say that gaming and fandom are separate.  Gaming is a subculture of fandom in general.  I disagree that fandom is overwhelmingly female.  Fandom is overwhelmingly male and sexist (a thread for another day), in my experience.  HP and Charmed fandom may be overwhelmingly female and I would not disagree with that.  

Maybe you're defining fandom differently than I am.  I think of fandom as a HUGE category that includes all popular genres like Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, LotR (which has had a huge resurgence since PJ's movies), Pern, whatever you can think of.  Most people probably belong to more than one fandom.

As to the relative quality, whatever...my experience with both forms of gaming has been that both of them, like just about everything else in the world, follow Sturgeon's Law.  To generalize about fandom RPG based on some random crap livejournal game makes about as much sense as to generalize about table-top RPG on the basis of some adolescent boy's "My Very First D&D Dungeon Crawl" game.

These are not just my experiences with those two HP games, but also the experiences of some friends of mine in other types of online games (X-Men and Star Trek are examples).  I actually played in a few pbems years ago that I enjoyed immensely.  

I think I should probably clarify that the definition of SIM and RPG has changed over the last 10 years, because people who don't know anything about tabletop games are doing these things and calling them roleplaying.  

I'm willing to wager that most people playing successful, enjoyable online rpgs - whether they be SIMs or PBEMS - are having the enjoyable success because someone involved in the creation of the game has experience with tabletop games.

I am, of course, willing to be proven wrong.

Personally, I don't see very much difference between playing a game set in the world of JK Rowling and playing an Ars Magica game, or a game set in the world of Greyhawk or Harn ...

I don't either, which is why I was so shocked and dismayed by my experience.

Rather than acting stuff out, you're writing stuff out.  I believe that many of the aesthetic differences between these two forms arise out of this basic fact: online RPG tends to deal more heavily with the characters' internal states than face-to-face gaming does (just as novels tend to deal far more heavily with internal states than movies do), and authority over the characters is more "shared" -- ie, there is far less interest in preserving a pretense of absolute player authority over his character, partly I think because there is a great deal more player authority over those parts of the game which are allocated to the "GM" in traditionalist table-top gaming.  

I think this is a really brilliant observation.  Would you be willing to elaborate more of the idea?  For instance, what parts of GM authority are given over to the player in online sims?

[Librisia]

"That's a Mary Sue!" is a downright rude way to express an objection to someone's character concept, no matter what the context.

No one was actually that rude.  I was the one who brought the Mary Sue concept up to the mods in the first instance.  I the second instance, I simply never heard back from the mods.  I assume my character idea had been rejected.

But even if there had been a legitimate problem, it seems to me that a similar situation might still have arisen, simply out of a lack of shared vocabulary and terminology and cultural construction of gaming concepts).

That exactly my point in the article.  There are differing expectations in each group.  I don't know that the two are compatible, because people don't tend to even think about their assumptions when encountering a different culture, much less about trying to suspend those assumptions.

I think the other problem regarding getting the two sets of players together is the fact that RPG means something vastly different to each set (as I intend to explain in the rest of the article).  For tt gamers, RPG, especially if it is accompanied by an open call for applications, means, "everyone's invited unless they give us something that obviously isn't going to work!"  That also means that you are going to get some play time right away.  The analogy I'm making in the rest of the article is this:  

Imagine you invite some of your friends over for a game of Monopoloy (or any other board game you care to think of), and one of your friends says, "hey, can I bring someone with me?"  The group agrees.  Then, this unknown person, upon arrival, is not given a place at the game table to play, but has to watch everyone else play the game until he or she proves, after many such sessions, that they are the kind of person that others want to play monopoly with.  Also that they play monopoly by the same house rules that the core group plays by.  Lame.  The first time, I bet, would be the last time.  Because for tabletop RPers, the concept is the same.  An RPG is a game, and you don't deny people game time just because they haven't been part of the group for a while.

For the literary RPG groups (the ones you're describing as fandom), I think that the narrow definition of what "works" and is acceptable seems antisocial and antithetical to the social spirit of gaming that table top players normally assume.  And because there are no objective sets of rules that everyone has agreed on in literary gaming, each lit. game has its own set of rules, totally unstated, that are unlearnable unless you're willing to hang out for a very long time to learn.

Understandably, some of the high entrance requirements of literary online games have been created because the dysfunctional factor of people on the internet is SO high.  You want to try to weed out potential wackos BEFORE they get a foothold in your game.

I think the literary rpgs are also more interested in writing interactive fiction than they are in the experience being a game, per se.  I see over and over again, in game descriptions, in descriptions about "Mary Sues" and in the list I belong to on yahoogroups called FreeForm GMs, that people have this horrible aversion to ANGST.  Of course, I'm sure this gets boring to read over and over again.  I'm also sure that this was also a large factor in the rejection of the character I created.  And that has everything to do with your idea of literary rpgs being about internal states and tabletop rpgs being about external states.  But because the requirements for membership are so individualized to each group, there is no way to know how to write up a character proposal to get across the fact that I'm NOT going solely write angsty revenge scenarios plagiarized from "Taxi Driver."  And the fact that I reserve the right to write angsty posts seems to be taboo everywhere.  So, where's the fun, d00D?

[Brendan]

Librisia and SK, you might be interested in a paper I skimmed recently (found via Matt Webb's Interconnected):  "The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms."  It's as long and heavy as you'd expect from a paper on game theory, but it seems to describe exactly the "watching Monopoly" phenomenon and offer an explanation for it.  From the abstract:

"A large degree of cooperation can still emerge, through a convention in which newcomers 'pay their dues' by accepting poor treatment from players who have established positive reputations."

[Andrew Morris]

"A large degree of cooperation can still emerge, through a convention in which newcomers 'pay their dues' by accepting poor treatment from players who have established positive reputations."

Brendan, are you suggesting this is a good thing, or just a noted convention?