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livI think it's Wittgenstein or some philosopher of that ilk who has a famous discussion of the fact that it's really hard to define what a game is; any definition you can come up with, it's easy to think of an exception which most people agree is a game. Recently I've been playing a couple of things which are kind of edge-casey, and I wanted to talk about some of them.
One is Microscope, whichjack discovered while looking for roleplaying systems more fun and less time-consuming than D&D. We managed to get session in with ceb at the weekend, and I really enjoyed it a lot. I mean, that's partly because it involved spending time with ceb, who is always awesome; she pointed out we hadn't seen eachother since Worldcon, which is a pity except that we've all been busy doing fun things.
For me, Microscope distils exactly the things I like out of table-top roleplaying, while leaving out most of the annoying aspects of D&D and its descendants. What I like: having a framework in which people can collaboratively create stories. Microscope does really well at this, it has enough structure to make sure everybody gets some input and you don't just reach false consensus based on letting the loudest person take over. And equally enough structure /constraints that you can usually think of something to extend the story, you're just trying to do the impossible task of "write something". It manages to be almost entirely open-ended beyond that minimum, though, which is a good thing if like me you enjoy the story-creation aspects of RP, but possibly less good if you like the discovery aspects of gradually following someone else's story. There is no GM as such; it makes sense to have at least one player doing some minimal organization and probably suggesting the initial story seed, but beyond that it's fully collaborative, not GM versus players. This also means that it requires vastly less preparation and buying pre-set scenarios than traditional roleplaying. You can just show up and put some pizza in the oven and dive straight in to play.
What I don't like: having to wrangle lots of complicated tables of statistics and rolling lots of dice to see whether you're successful in fighting monsters or possibly other things you might attempt. Trying to reduce your character to a further series of statistics, to the point where adding more fine-grained detail to the list of traits they have doesn't really help with characterization. Microscope has exactly none of that, so if what you like is strategic wargaming and levelling up and so on, it's not the game for you.
The concept where you start with the broad outline and gradually "zoom" in on the details means that the timing is really flexible. You're not in too much danger of running out of time with the story still halfway through, or having to rush through the final section or whatever. We played this in a single session of about 3 hours, and had a story that felt, not finished but at least satisfying. I think it would probably work as a complex enterprise over several sessions if you wanted it to, though that would probably require at least some amount of write-up between sessions to keep track of what you'd already composed.
There's a small amount of what might be conventionally defined as role-playing, in the sense of players pretending to be characters and improvising dialogue. That's about right for me, because I enjoy that aspect of table-top but in lots of ways many scenes work better if you play the broad outcomes rather than the exact words stated by the different characters. And you don't necessarily stick with the same character throughout the scenario, though I suppose in theory you could if you were really invested.
If Microscope is almost all creativity and no formal rules or measurements of success (the only victory condition is that you make a good story), you might say that the opposite end of the spectrum is Ingress, which is basically all gamification and essentially no strategy or play. It's the first pervasive game to really take off, the idea is that you use a smartphone with GPS to make the real world playable. When I first heard of it, I both loved and hated the idea. Loved, because it's so very cyberpunk, having a portable computer which creates a shared imaginary structure overlaid onto the real world. And hated, because the game is a very, very thin bribe to get people to transmit their fine location to Google at all times. What tipped me over into playing was thatkhalinche and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
timeplease were enthusiastic about it when I was hanging out with them in London the other week, and then ghoti also enthused about it, and hey, if my friends are playing that makes the game a lot more appealing than just the gameplay for its own sake. And to be fair, Google pretty much tracks my movements anyway, since I have an unrooted Android phone which reports my location pretty well when I connect to WiFi, even without GPS.
Basically, in Ingress you go to real world places, and get points for doing so. I like the mechanic where players can suggest new locations, called 'portals', and the game devs vet them and eventually add them. Portals are places of interest; it can be quite minor interest, like a bench with a plaque in memory of someone, they just have to be identifiable locations rather totally generic places. The idea of the game is that there are two factions, green (Enlightenment) and blue (Resistance) and the team that visits a location most often gets to control that location. You can pick up and deploy virtual objects to attack enemy portals and defend portals controlled by your team, that's about it so far.
So far I've been wandering around with it running for a couple of days, and I'm finding it reasonably fun, though I definitely am being suckered in by the standard reward mechanic that every semi-evil app has these days. It's easy to pick up, with a fairly standard modern app system where the tutorial itself is gamified. And I've visited a couple of places I wouldn't have gone to if I weren't looking for Ingress portals, including the village war memorial, appropriately for the season, which is tucked away at the top of a side street rather than in the centre as is more typical. It really eats battery, though, more even than just having GPS turned on in general. Just walking the ten minutes from my flat to the medical school (albeit by a slightly circuitous route so I could get some portals on the way) ate 2/3 of my battery, which isn't really manageable.
(Username
Apart from trying out new quasi games, I've had a fairly quiet few days. Some good conversations withjack, some gardening (for we are boring middle-aged home owners now), and a really fun visit with ghoti and cjwatson Saturday evening. The very good thing about being boring home-owners is that we have awesome neighbours.
One is Microscope, which
jack discovered while looking for roleplaying systems more fun and less time-consuming than D&D. We managed to get session in with ceb at the weekend, and I really enjoyed it a lot. I mean, that's partly because it involved spending time with ceb, who is always awesome; she pointed out we hadn't seen eachother since Worldcon, which is a pity except that we've all been busy doing fun things. For me, Microscope distils exactly the things I like out of table-top roleplaying, while leaving out most of the annoying aspects of D&D and its descendants. What I like: having a framework in which people can collaboratively create stories. Microscope does really well at this, it has enough structure to make sure everybody gets some input and you don't just reach false consensus based on letting the loudest person take over. And equally enough structure /constraints that you can usually think of something to extend the story, you're just trying to do the impossible task of "write something". It manages to be almost entirely open-ended beyond that minimum, though, which is a good thing if like me you enjoy the story-creation aspects of RP, but possibly less good if you like the discovery aspects of gradually following someone else's story. There is no GM as such; it makes sense to have at least one player doing some minimal organization and probably suggesting the initial story seed, but beyond that it's fully collaborative, not GM versus players. This also means that it requires vastly less preparation and buying pre-set scenarios than traditional roleplaying. You can just show up and put some pizza in the oven and dive straight in to play.
What I don't like: having to wrangle lots of complicated tables of statistics and rolling lots of dice to see whether you're successful in fighting monsters or possibly other things you might attempt. Trying to reduce your character to a further series of statistics, to the point where adding more fine-grained detail to the list of traits they have doesn't really help with characterization. Microscope has exactly none of that, so if what you like is strategic wargaming and levelling up and so on, it's not the game for you.
The concept where you start with the broad outline and gradually "zoom" in on the details means that the timing is really flexible. You're not in too much danger of running out of time with the story still halfway through, or having to rush through the final section or whatever. We played this in a single session of about 3 hours, and had a story that felt, not finished but at least satisfying. I think it would probably work as a complex enterprise over several sessions if you wanted it to, though that would probably require at least some amount of write-up between sessions to keep track of what you'd already composed.
There's a small amount of what might be conventionally defined as role-playing, in the sense of players pretending to be characters and improvising dialogue. That's about right for me, because I enjoy that aspect of table-top but in lots of ways many scenes work better if you play the broad outcomes rather than the exact words stated by the different characters. And you don't necessarily stick with the same character throughout the scenario, though I suppose in theory you could if you were really invested.
If Microscope is almost all creativity and no formal rules or measurements of success (the only victory condition is that you make a good story), you might say that the opposite end of the spectrum is Ingress, which is basically all gamification and essentially no strategy or play. It's the first pervasive game to really take off, the idea is that you use a smartphone with GPS to make the real world playable. When I first heard of it, I both loved and hated the idea. Loved, because it's so very cyberpunk, having a portable computer which creates a shared imaginary structure overlaid onto the real world. And hated, because the game is a very, very thin bribe to get people to transmit their fine location to Google at all times. What tipped me over into playing was that
khalinche and timeplease were enthusiastic about it when I was hanging out with them in London the other week, and then ghoti also enthused about it, and hey, if my friends are playing that makes the game a lot more appealing than just the gameplay for its own sake. And to be fair, Google pretty much tracks my movements anyway, since I have an unrooted Android phone which reports my location pretty well when I connect to WiFi, even without GPS.Basically, in Ingress you go to real world places, and get points for doing so. I like the mechanic where players can suggest new locations, called 'portals', and the game devs vet them and eventually add them. Portals are places of interest; it can be quite minor interest, like a bench with a plaque in memory of someone, they just have to be identifiable locations rather totally generic places. The idea of the game is that there are two factions, green (Enlightenment) and blue (Resistance) and the team that visits a location most often gets to control that location. You can pick up and deploy virtual objects to attack enemy portals and defend portals controlled by your team, that's about it so far.
So far I've been wandering around with it running for a couple of days, and I'm finding it reasonably fun, though I definitely am being suckered in by the standard reward mechanic that every semi-evil app has these days. It's easy to pick up, with a fairly standard modern app system where the tutorial itself is gamified. And I've visited a couple of places I wouldn't have gone to if I weren't looking for Ingress portals, including the village war memorial, appropriately for the season, which is tucked away at the top of a side street rather than in the centre as is more typical. It really eats battery, though, more even than just having GPS turned on in general. Just walking the ten minutes from my flat to the medical school (albeit by a slightly circuitous route so I could get some portals on the way) ate 2/3 of my battery, which isn't really manageable.
(Username
ewerb, team Resistance, if you're playing or thinking of playing)Apart from trying out new quasi games, I've had a fairly quiet few days. Some good conversations with
jack, some gardening (for we are boring middle-aged home owners now), and a really fun visit with ghoti and cjwatson Saturday evening. The very good thing about being boring home-owners is that we have awesome neighbours.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-11 06:31 pm (UTC)It sounds quite a lot like the online phone game 'Spooks' played by the characters in Charlie Stross's 'Halting State' (which turns out to be an actual front for MI-5).
Microphone sounds fascinating too. I'm very much split on role-playing, I possibly like the role-playing elements much more than the game-mechanics, but having come in from the wargaming side (and probably also from having the CompSci background) I'm deeply fascinated by the rule mechanics, the more complex the better.
I haven't been an active gamer in years, but noodling about in the depths of background or rules is something I often bring out when feeling stressed. With all the not-sleeping I'm doing recently, I'm spending a lot of time hacking spacecraft design spreadsheets for Traveller. If nothing else my Excel's getting a refresher ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-11 06:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 12:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 01:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 05:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 12:11 pm (UTC)I think that you and I need to start talking to each other.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 01:07 pm (UTC)I kind of favour simplicity for actual face to face gaming, complexity for solitaire nerdery and building backgrounds for the f2f stuff, but I really haven't been an active f2f gamer in a long time. In some ways this is why I like military alternate history, because doing it well actually includes this sort of development.
The has-both-positives-and-negatives side is that the deeply complex rules/simulations appeal to my obsessive side, which sometimes I need to feed, and sometimes I need to control.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 05:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 12:34 pm (UTC)Stross is the kind of futurologist I've known to complain that his cool what-if future technologies become completely mundane parts of reality faster than he can publish novels about them. And he's a fast writer! Another SF example you might enjoy if you haven't seen it already is Walter Jon William's This is not a game and sequels.
Yeah, I think traditional D&D-influenced tabletop is a lot of different things to different players. I don't hate the statsy wargaming part, but this weekend's Microscope session showed me I'm having as much fun without it and leaving it out makes the games a lot shorter. I can see the appeal of getting deep into rule mechanics and spreadsheets and so on, just I've never quite picked up that hobby!
(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 01:16 pm (UTC)Yeah, I saw his post saying he'd abandoned plans for a third book in the Halting State/Rule 36 series because he wasn't even sure which country Edinburgh was going to be in :) I hope he'll consider going back to it now that's answered.
Now that sounds interesting, very much like Neal Stephenson's Reamde, which likewise isn't SF, but written with many of the sensibilities of SF.