Tinytalk Episode 024: Bits and Bobs

Hi, and welcome to Tinytalk. It's midsummer, and there were a few things I wanted to talk about and call to your attention.

First, a great opportunity that's just started. Ian Schreiber, a video game designer and co-author of the book "Challenges for Game Designers: Non-Digital Exercises for Video Game Designers" has just started running a free publically-accessible online course in Game Design. What I really like about this is that the course is focused on non-digital game design -- really the heart of how you develop a playable game -- but discusses their application to video games as well and this kind of material is really important for MUSH game design. Too many MUSHes adopt a system, a theme, some mechanics, without solid thinking about the game experience and the principles on which a game is made playable, challenging, and enjoyable. The course will run through early September, and Schreiber posts twice a week; only the first two postings have gone out, so this is a great time to get in on this. The web site is http://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com
If you follow it, I hope you'll update us on how you apply the concepts to your MUSH -- in fact, if you want to start a side discussion of the course material specifically for MUSH designers, feel free to do it on community.pennmush.org.

Second, I was recently invited to contribute a short essay to the SerenityMUSH podcast, Echoes from the Black, for an episode that they ran on The Signal, a major Firefly fan podcast. I like what I had to say, so I'm going to re-run the piece here in a second, but first I wanted to recognize Echoes from the Black and what it's doing. In an early tinytalk episode, I talked a bit about podcasting and how it could be a neat vehicle for a MUSH to communicate with its players and potential players. Right now, Echoes is the only gaming MUSH podcast I know of, and they've really taken advantage of it to provide a variety of content for their players and a lot of introductory material for new players. And by having one of their episodes go out to non-MUSHers who are interested in their theme, they've greatly extended their reach and the chances that new players will be introduced not just to their MUSH but to MUSHing in general. And that's great. Many years ago, DuneMUSH took a similar approach in advocating for the creation of the USENET newsgroup alt.fan.dune. As a result, DuneMUSH players got another place to talk about their favorite scifi world, and many fans of the Dune books were introduced to MUSH roleplaying. I think many MUSHes with derivative themes can benefit from this kind of collaboration with their media fanbase.

So, here it is, my little essay on why MUSH is a good platform for roleplaying:

Let's start with chess. If chess is your passion, you can find a way to play chess virtually anywhere, and the core rules will always be the same. You can play postal chess, mailing or emailing moves between players. You can play chess on an internet chess server. You can play chess in World of Warcraft or in Second Life -- in fact, you can play with your avatar as a chess piece. And in many cities, you can walk down to the park and find a real live game. I'll go out on a limb here, though, and say that if what you really want is the best game of unadorned chess and you want it right now -- whenever that is -- you'll gravitate toward an internet chess server, because (a) that's where the other serious chess players are, (b) the server is focused on playing chess - not talking about chess, designing chess sets, waiting around to form an adventuring party, etc, and (c) it's available round-the-clock.

The same is true for roleplaying, and especially for immersive roleplaying, in which the player speaks and acts for their character in first person. The devoted roleplayer can play around a tabletop, in a "live action" event, by email, on a chat server, on a textual virtual world server like a MUSH or on a massively multiplayer online RPG platform like Warcraft. Each of these has a different flavor. The combination of advantages of a MUSH are (a) a sense of virtual geography that's stronger than tabletop or chat servers, (b) a focus on storytelling and roleplaying rather than avatar design or leveling up, and (c) that's where you'll find many serious roleplayers round-the-clock.

In an interesting way, it's all about the power of constraints. Many MUSHes don't have a programmed combat system or an automatic experience level system - fighting's not a one-click activity and character development isn't a set of numbers. It's an environment that facilitates situated social interaction and can be relatively impoverished -- in a good way -- in its support for activities like exploration and achievement. On a text-based server, you are constrained to text, and that forces you to find ways to be evocative with the written word. Fortunately, we know that writing can be evocative, and MUSHes leverage this by making it possible to say or pose or look like virtually anything. In his landmark book "Understanding Comics", Scott McCloud points out that comic artists often draw their lead characters in a more iconic and less photographic style than backgrounds or inanimate objects, because the greater abstraction allows the reader to project themselves into the character -- just as the world of Dune, imagined by the reader of the novel, can be larger and more immersive than the particular slant on Dune taken by any of the film or television depictions.

There are other intriguing aspects to MUSH roleplaying - for example, the ease with which a log of a scene can be kept, archived, or published, leading to a rich collection of player-created content in the world. At its core, however, roleplaying is about roleplayers, and the best storytelling arises when great roleplayers connect with each other in environments tailored to their vision and supportive of their fun. What more could we wish for each other?

So there it is. Hey, want to help Tinytalk out? I'm putting together material for an upcoming show on the use of gag, boot, toad, sitelock, and other technical and social means of handling difficult players. I bet you've got something to add to that conversation -- how about dropping me an email?