Universalis, Entropy and the Fall of the Uniwiki

[Trevis Martin]

Raven,

Honestly, I can kind of see why you aren't getting anyone excited about it: this is definitionally dysfunctional play! "It still isn't doing what we want, darnit! I'm not happy with the results! Let's do it again!" This IS all those broken gaming groups who prompted Ron to write about them in his essays.

Wow, that stung.  Part of why it stung is that I think you're probably right.  Damn, you think I'd know better.

Keeping the faith and sticking it out through thin times in this kind of thing is hard. Like Ralph said, I'm used to better than that.  When people just drop out like flies I wonder what might be wrong and whether it can be fixed or not. And I feel down because its like a bunch of people just walked out of the room in a FTF game.  When I first got caught up in this idea it was because I wanted to see a great big game of Uni.  I realize that I really don't want a game without limits though.

I want completeness, and resolution of some kind.  This was what happened in Razing too.  We had a damn good game going, though the posting slowed down.  We played for two years which I'm told is pretty good for a PBEM.  I was disappointed when it stopped because the reason I came to the game, to play out my characters situation, to address the premise in my characters situation, was not achieved.  Sure I we all did it some, but it still felt abortive.  I did have fun in that game.  There were great people involved and I had a good time.  Actually one of the better games I've ever played in anywhere.   I was just sorry it ended when it still had so much potential to realize.

That's how I felt about all the Uniwiki games.  I was sorry they petered out when they still seemed to have potential.  Now with the way we acted about it I'm sure we just drove a bunch of people off.  (Sound of shoe leather forcefully meeting head... repeatedly.)

Trevis

[nilsderondeau]

Raven,

Honestly, I can kind of see why you aren't getting anyone excited about it: this is definitionally dysfunctional play! "It still isn't doing what we want, darnit! I'm not happy with the results! Let's do it again!" This IS all those broken gaming groups who prompted Ron to write about them in his essays.

Wow, that stung.  Part of why it stung is that I think you're probably right.  Damn, you think I'd know better.

Well, don't beat yourself up too much.  Just think how high the conceptual barriers are to what you are proposing: 1. Uni is different from GMed RPGs; 2. You're playing asynchronously; 3. You're trying to create satisfying narrative; 4.(for me) You're playing by wiki.

To be honest, I don't think the play was all that dysfunctional, with the possible exception of Mike Holmes not taking a stand against anthropomorphism in one of the earlier games (I kid because I love).  In the last game, you all clearly made progress towards a more functional group CA.  I think also part of what makes the effort painful is that you can't simply reboot a game quickly once you've started as you could in FTF play.  The fact that you're writing words which don't go away becomes intimidating--again, this is a writer's perspective.  My first novel, for example, isn't really all that bad.  I could go back and make it marginally better.  But that would require fixing sentences that already have some permanency about them.

I want completeness, and resolution of some kind. 

Ah, now you're talking form.  From reading examples of play, I think this is a lot easier FTF, for a number of reasons.  Some of the ideas already talked about (number of scenes, some kind of agreed-upon plot structure) might help.  I'm certain that Mike's idea of every player having to buy in with some world-building tenent is necessary.  I can say that, when I write my own fictions, the notion for a resolution sometimes comes at weird moments.  When I first started writing I very often "overshot" my resolution, which demanded that I cut four or five pages here or there.  Increasingly I have a feel for what is the proper moment to resolve in terms of pacing, language, plot (though there is almost no plot in my fiction).  I'm an idiot with number but I can describe this feeling as the one I had when doing algebra problems in high school.  You get an instinct for an end.  One other bit of writer's arcana.  I would have never finished my first novel if I hadn't decided how long it would be.  I was set on 70k words.  I figured out how many words I could write by hand on a particular brand of notebook.  I went and bought the correct number of notebooks to accomodate 70k words.  This must sound insane.  I did not want to begin telling a story without knowing "where" I was.  It was a great measure, as I could actually hold the notebooks, look at the blank pages, etc.

[Christopher Weeks]

What if we were Uni-ing a TV series or serialized novel or something in even shorter chunks that had to stand on their own, but were (optionally) part of a larger thread?  What if we were committed to making just four scenes stick together?  And then we could do another episode of four.  And another.  As long as we wanted to.  And we really would have something in the end.

Here's another problem.  I'm not sure that participating twice per week is enough.  In our first TUA (I think of it as Montezuma's air-ship) it seemed like we were often banging stuff out more quickly than that and most of the time we were in a Complication.  I think some of our finest play came from that game (that in the end, died like all the rest).

Nils, what's the problem with wiki that you don't have with the web in general? 

[nilsderondeau]

Nils, what's the problem with wiki that you don't have with the web in general? 

I realize I didn't bother  to answer this earlier.  Sorry. 

I have an aesthetic problems with the wiki which reveals my background and prejudices about RPGs; namely, that they're stories.  The wiki, to my eyes, visually gets in the way of what it is we are producing (a page with a story written on it).  Threaded posts are obnoxious in this regard as well, but less so.  Let me tell you how I read your game and then you can decide whether I'm off my rocker or whatever. 

On Trevis's site I would always click "Changes" but I would only really look at new Scene information--okay, I wasn't a player so this is natural.  But once I had clicked three times to see the whole scene, I was confronted with comments (sometimes complex and interesting) interspersed with scene text written in three colors.  This may well be a just written version of what FTF play sounds like, but it is a hell of a lot of information to take in.  Well, I sense I'm becoming cranky and showing my age....

My other probelms reveal my inexperience with Uni play.  Already, I have to pay attention to the rules which, as written are simple, but remain conceptually at large.  This the effort I want to make.  Worrying about properly formatting my posts such that Trevis's cool features function properly is an effort I feel obliged to make, if only not to annoy the other players.  But such small worries, however silly they might appear to others, rapidly accrue.

I'm not saying I wouldn't ever give it a shot--I'm saying this kept me back from jumping in midstream. 

Cheers,
N.

[ScottM]

Thus far, it seems like you guys develop all this stuff, and then you quit. Well...OK. Why, though? That seems like a waste of time: "Well, that didn't work out, so let's do it again and start over from scratch!"

Honestly, I can kind of see why you aren't getting anyone excited about it: this is definitionally dysfunctional play! "It still isn't doing what we want, darnit! I'm not happy with the results! Let's do it again!" This IS all those broken gaming groups who prompted Ron to write about them in his essays.

It'd only be a waste of time to start over if we wanted to keep a small, two player game going. Because that's usually how small it gets before we reach for the towel.  A two player game of Uni doesn't have the same thrill of surprise, of attempting to work many views together.  People don't often join in the middle (though Jamie did this time, which I found promising while he remained) and most don't feel invested in "backstory" that's generated before they show up.

I think the main reason we don't say "we finished", is because there's been such a winnowing to get to the end.  We don't make it because we made it past elimination rounds (or any other thing that would imply skill on our part)-- we're the ones left after everyone else has decided it isn't worthwhile.  That's my hangup though-- I hope it isn't typical.

I do agree with Trevis when he says "I want completeness, and resolution of some kind."  Perhaps Universalis, played asynchronously and without lots of coordination (though tenets, forum posts, whatever) just doesn't build to an end. 

I also agree with Christopher when he says that our "Panama" game had the best scenes.  I suspect the short stories idea would run into the same problem as TUA3; which was based on "just one month" at a time.  I suppose strong rules against bringing components between stories (by making components non-transferable) might be more successful.   [That failure (and others) did make TUA3 more of a plane-hopping story, rather than the semi-disconnected story that we'd aimed for.]

Hope my muddle helps.
-- Scott

[Mike Holmes]

OK, first thing, yes the play is dysfunctional, but that's not really surprising as this is pretty much playtesting. I mean nobody else has ever done this. And we don't simply try precisely the same thing ever time. Each iteration we've tried various things to improve the situation. Not that they've worked. But the point is, as long as we're trying to make it work better than last time, we're not being lunkheads playing the same old dysfunctional RPG over and over.

We're being lunkhead designers, sure. But that's part of being a designer. At some point it's more efficatious to simply test what you have than to keep on trying to tweak the design.

So we don't have a lack of players because we're playing a broken game, we have a lack of players for the same reason that every playtest does - everyone knows it's broken up front, and that we're just looking for the solutions at this point. Actually the fact that we've got lots of good players trying out a system that is not widely played in an environment that's not understood by a lot of people to do something very experimental is, if anything, quite encouraging.

Which is to say that I think that the basic idea has a central appeal that grabs people's imaginations. If we can actually make it work well, and can prove it, then I think we'll have loads of players for the first non-playtest game.

I just have no idea how close we are, or even if the design is fatally flawed. Something I'm completely willing to accept as possible.


Raven, I played some Dulemasters, mostly the free turns they let you play at GenCon. And I agree it's a good model. This is what I've been harping on over and over.

To reiterate, the problem I see with UniWiki is that if you play it for story, as the story progresses, instead of making people want to jump in, or back into the game if they've taken time off, it has precisely the opposite effect. Story created makes a barrier to further play (to say nothing of it looking bad in Wiki format as Neal points out). In fact, I think that even if you have a group posting regularly, that the "Chasm" effect that Trevis mentions occurs. I've lost interest right in the middle of scenes that I was posting to myself. After only a couple of days and a couple of posts.

In Duelmasters et al, such games do not have a story at all. They are complete gamism stuff with a goodly level of sim. You get back into it because you want to compete, and to get back to your interest in your team. Here's the key - the other player's contributions and play satisfaction aren't important to you in playing - you're only interested in it for your own reasons. The other player's contributions are simply an evolving map on which you play.

That's what would work with UniWiki. Maybe. Completely selfish play. Which is why I keep bringing up the worldbuilding idea (oh, and also it solves Neal's problem with it because it no longer masquerades as a story at all). Because I've seen myself go nuts with it before. Whereas I've not once gone nuts with UniWiki. I can even remember the very first game starting (Gosnold Isles), wanting it to be all simmy, but having players immediately assume that it was simply normal Universalis play, just Asynch.

Basically I've yet to see if my original vision for the game works. Even in the "Hollow Earth" game, where I tried to make it clear what I wanted, somehow people didn't get it. In part I think that's because Universalis as written doesn't support the style in question well (which I've tried to fix since then, too, also without success).

All of which is to say that I'm officially giving up on UniWiki, the version where you try to tell stories using the system as written. I'm personally convinced that it's dead. That's not to say that it can't possibly work for somebody else - if you have the urge to play, please go ahead and try another round. Maybe you'll find something that works with constraints, etc. But I no longer have any interest in that, personally, for whatever that's worth.

As I've intimated, however, I am trying to forge something more along the lines of the vision I had originally. I'm tempted to try WorldWiki as presented, but I think it might be too notional and interim to a better rules set. So I'm working out something more coherent. Again, for whatever that's worth.


Oh, and one more thing (he said, sounding like Columbo). There may be an even simpler problem with all of this. Freeform interactive fiction is something that people do. And it, too, falls apart, as I understand it with great regularity. So it could be that adding point tracking to play, no matter how easy it is to do, is going to be seen in Asynch play as useless extra work. That at the speed of Asynch play, that the Universalis framework is merely too much for the benefits it provides. Said benefits being hard to see over such long stretches of actual time. I've often wanted to hand a copy of Universalis to a group of freeformers and get their reaction to it...

Mike

[nilsderondeau]

Oh, and one more thing (he said, sounding like Columbo). There may be an even simpler problem with all of this. Freeform interactive fiction is something that people do. And it, too, falls apart, as I understand it with great regularity. So it could be that adding point tracking to play, no matter how easy it is to do, is going to be seen in Asynch play as useless extra work. That at the speed of Asynch play, that the Universalis framework is merely too much for the benefits it provides.

Interesting.  Especially as a tactile element of tabletop Uni play is sliding tokens around.  So, what tactics (or tenents) could be adopted to facilitate Asynch play?  Or do we really imagine that all asynch play is dysfuctional?  Seems, Mike, that you have reservations about the structure of Uni itself.

[CPXB]

Said benefits being hard to see over such long stretches of actual time. I've often wanted to hand a copy of Universalis to a group of freeformers and get their reaction to it...

I've done this.  For a number of years I was involved in freeform online RP chat.  I showed Universalis to several people, and talked about it with several more.  I also tried with a couple of versions of The Pool with modifications to make it functionally GMless (not hard).

The upshot is that they don't see the point of rules in freeform RP.  One person, who had long experience with traditional RPGs, liked many of the concepts of Universalis but couldn't get any of her online gaming friends to get involved with it and while she tried it out with her FTF group they didn't warm to it very much.  The Pool variants had somewhat greater success -- this person was able to get some people to occasionally follow the rules in play that involved her, specifically, for a brief period of time before there was a rebellion against "roll-playing".

My general and brief analysis is that freeform gamers believe that all rules that govern character interactions (as opposed to rules that govern chat behavior which are quite common) are impediments to play.  I suspect that this is because they've been pestered by a large number of people bringing crunchy, traditional games to the environment and trying to foist them off in a large number of dysfunctional ways, but I think that the bias is there and persistent.

[Mike Holmes]

Thanks for the background, Chris.

Neal, I think you're reading too much into what I was saying. FTF, Universalis works fine for people like myself who enjoy structure. The sliding coins around as part of the process is not at all onerous, and seems to facilitate the action. Really the same old social stuff we talked about above that's lacking in asynch.

Anyhow, I don't think it's in the scope of this thread to try to salvage all asynch play for everyone everywhere. In any case, if there is some salvation for it, I do believe it's in structure. Has anyone had any experience with De Profundis?

Mike

[Callan S.]

Raven,

Honestly, I can kind of see why you aren't getting anyone excited about it: this is definitionally dysfunctional play! "It still isn't doing what we want, darnit! I'm not happy with the results! Let's do it again!" This IS all those broken gaming groups who prompted Ron to write about them in his essays.

Wow, that stung.  Part of why it stung is that I think you're probably right.  Damn, you think I'd know better.

Keeping the faith and sticking it out through thin times in this kind of thing is hard. Like Ralph said, I'm used to better than that.  When people just drop out like flies I wonder what might be wrong and whether it can be fixed or not. And I feel down because its like a bunch of people just walked out of the room in a FTF game.  When I first got caught up in this idea it was because I wanted to see a great big game of Uni.  I realize that I really don't want a game without limits though.

I want completeness, and resolution of some kind.  This was what happened in Razing too.  We had a damn good game going, though the posting slowed down.  We played for two years which I'm told is pretty good for a PBEM.  I was disappointed when it stopped because the reason I came to the game, to play out my characters situation, to address the premise in my characters situation, was not achieved.  Sure I we all did it some, but it still felt abortive.  I did have fun in that game.  There were great people involved and I had a good time.  Actually one of the better games I've ever played in anywhere.   I was just sorry it ended when it still had so much potential to realize.

That's how I felt about all the Uniwiki games.  I was sorry they petered out when they still seemed to have potential.  Now with the way we acted about it I'm sure we just drove a bunch of people off.  (Sound of shoe leather forcefully meeting head... repeatedly.)

Trevis

Hello,

I'd quit beating yourself up. I've screwed around on the Forge for what, about two years, looking for techniques that would get that game I'd really love.

The fact is, the heart of a great game depends on player investment. Particularly the founding players investment. But what your doing is going "Oh, I'll invest once I finally get a good game going" or worse "I'll invest once someone else invests...I wont go first though!". It does not work in that order! Investment must come first!

And beating yourself up about it will just make you withdraw that investment even more until 'you get it right', which wont happen because your withdrawing. It's like bashing your legs because you didn't run fast enough...oh yeah, that'll help you to run fast next time!

If I sound harsh it's because I'm saying this to myself as well. Don't concentrate on techniques that will make a great game for others, concentrate on techniques that will nuture your investment out of you and into play. It's a hypothesis, but I'll contend that the reason games like Capes or Sorcerer benefit from rules for managing how things go, is because it gives players control and thus they feel safe. That nurtures investment out of them and that's where the most exciting part of the game comes from.

Find something you can invest in even before you've thought of starting a game. Find rules that make you feel safe to bring that investment into play. Keep in mind that if you are a battered player, you not going to be able to muster the investment for a multi year epic campaign. Hell, you might only be able to do 30 minutes. But if your invested, that thirty minutes might kick ass more than two years of uninvested play.

Now fuck, I have to go and practice what I preach. Ah, fuck!

[Trevis Martin]

I appreciate the advice Callan.  I admit I was being a bit overy theatrical about the self scolding. It was a little pop for me is all.  Trust me, I get it.  Thanks to everyone for the discussion.  Mike's point about playtesting is well taken.  I'm not yet sure about giving up on it.  Anyone else interesting in getting one of these off the ground email or PM me.

best

Trevis

[Mike Holmes]

But what your doing is going "Oh, I'll invest once I finally get a good game going" or worse "I'll invest once someone else invests...I wont go first though!". It does not work in that order! Investment must come first!

Nope, nobody here is doing that. Don't know where you're getting that from. Everyone goes in making the game what they want it to be for themselves. Yeah, on one occasion, I distinctly missed an moment to challenge somebody on something I didn't like. But, for myself, mostly the problem has been that the game starts, and the other players head off into a type of play in which I'm personally very much not interested in. Despite my efforts to get them not to do that.

But at no time has anyone thought to themselves, "hey, I'll just jump in once it's good." Nobody involved has done that. Everybody gets inovolved to some extent right off the bat. The problem, very specifically, is that the game doesn't keep your attention. No matter how well invested you are from the start. In fact, in this last game, Trevis even put in rules saying that you had to be invested to play at all. Because of the worry that things would trail off as they have in the past.

All this "beating up" stuff is bunk, and really missing the point of the discussion.

Mike

[Trevis Martin]

All this "beating up" stuff is bunk, and really missing the point of the discussion

I agree, and to make it clear, I made the mistake of over expressing my response to Raven's dysfunctional play comment.  One of those things that happens when my natural sense of humor doesn't translate well.  Please excuse my hyperbole. When I said I apprecaite Callan's advice, what I mean to say is I appreciate the intent of that advice, though as Mike notes, I disagree with his assessment that the advice derived from.  All that said, let's drop the whole beating up self thing.  My bad, I apologize.

Nope, I think I jumped in early and pursued what I thought was enjoyable play. I'm disappointed that it didn't work out the way I wanted, with an active game with many participants enjoying themselves.  Mike nails the symptom right on the head.

Mike I wanted to ask you about

But, for myself, mostly the problem has been that the game starts, and the other players head off into a type of play in which I'm personally very much not interested in. Despite my efforts to get them not to do that.

And you know, I'm not sure how one would do that.  I mean I understand that you were going for a sort of sim Uni game, but I'm not sure that I know how to accomplish that in the structure of Uni.  I mean the system seems to push you toward conflicts, just to stay afloat, and my natural tendency is to make conflicts mean something.

I also really take Mike's point about this being experimental play, which is to say we know it is broken, and we are trying to see if there are reproducable conditions under which it works well.  To me asynch play is possibly the least understood format of rpg play.  We've seen raven bring up a couple of examples of very gamist play that doesn't require any continuity that seems to be very successful.  But I cannot think of one asynch game so far, that I have experienced,  where the game has, in fact, concluded or completed itself before ending.  Maybe its like TV series, it goes good then just starts to suck so much that the network pulls it.  Perhaps the idea of Asynch play is fundamentally flawed because it is in essence solo play, and I expect uni to be social or perhaps our notions of success have to change for the medium.

Trevis

P.S.
For those who have contacted me with interest in a more constrained Uni game, please head over to my forum so we can talk about it. (click the link in the sig)

[Mike Holmes]

Trevis, I admitted that the system is, in many ways, to blame. Basically I was asking for drift from the normal rules, and didn't get it. The vision was that people would probably spend alternating scenes doing world building while playing rather normally in the other scenes. Essentially the idea was to have people worldbuilding a somewhat sim world, and then other people playing through, and that these would largely be the same people. That is, I have a scene in your bit of world, then you have a scene in mine, then we both have a scene in somebody else's area, etc. The hope was that people would get the feeling that they were moving characters through more objectively extant world instead of creating world as they felt they needed it.

Think the kind of MUD where people can add stuff on making their own dungeons and other areas. You don't make it as you need it, it's made before you encounter it (in the case of MUD to make it a challenge). Imagine my chagrin in the first game when one of the tenets was that the game was to be in the real world, followed up quickly by the notion that anything you could find on the internet about the game locale was considered fact. Very interesting idea. Very much instantly crushed my idea, by setting up a notion that the setting was already largely established.

Later I actually did, in a couple of cases, lobby for changes to the rules that would have made my vision a bit more viable in play. But, realizing that these small changes weren't working, that people kept right on playing Universalis as written more or less, it's precisely that the system doesn't seem to produce what I was looking for that got me to come up with WorldWiki, and working on the new systems that I am working on now. With WorldWiki, in fact, one of my ideas is that people would theoretically be able to play UniWiki in the world produced. Essentially I've split the two funtions into their own games that are not connected. That said, I don't think that UniWiki would work any better in a WorldWiki setting (in fact, perhaps worse). But I think that WorldWiki, or something like it, may be viable by itself.

In fact, the newer systems I'm looking at are really getting back to the original notion of build some/play some. Which might be viable by asynch play, or might not be. I probably should test WorldWiki to see if that alone can sustain play in asynch any better. But, that said, I think that the new system may well work tabletop, so it might not be a loss if it turns out that it doesn't work asynch.

Mike

[Callan S.]

Hi Mike,

I dunno. I see a two year PBP campaign...two whole years, not being seen as an achievement. If you were dealing with what your invested in during that time, surely it's an achievement? I see several univeralis play tests where people came and stuff did happen, not being seen as an achievement. Again, either you were dealing with what your invested in and it had merit, or you weren't terribly invested in anything that was in play.

Excuse the one line quote:

We hoped that by attaining a critical mass of posters the game would be perpetually moving.

Moving toward what in particular? You can't really have a failure unless you have a goal you were going for, something your invested in. What was that here? I don't see a definite aim, just a search.

But at no time has anyone thought to themselves, "hey, I'll just jump in once it's good." Nobody involved has done that. Everybody gets inovolved to some extent right off the bat. The problem, very specifically, is that the game doesn't keep your attention.

I think that order of things may be the problem. The game itself shouldn't be keeping your attention, the thing your invested in should. The game is the means by which you and others play with that investment. Even if zero play happens to it, if it's an investment you should still be interested in, regardless.