Walking the Edge of Reality

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Walking the Edge of Reality

A look behind the curtain to my world...

META - Timed Schizophrenia
Friday, March 13, 2009 3:55 AM

This post covers two topics...

1) Player Communication:

Another really difficult aspect of running a game is communication with the players, especially if you're playing multiple characters.

What makes it hard? You know all the players personally. Everyone knows you personally. OK, now pretend that neither one of you knows anything about the other and pretend to be two completely different people talking in a fantasy world. It's not as simple as it sounds, believe me.

As a PM, you have to become one of many characters, and by "become" I mean just that. You have to remember everything, every little bit of communication that you have with the players, because they will remember everything. They have a lot more resources than you do, and their collective brain power is far superiors to yours. They have forums and websites, Wikis and chat rooms, pages upon pages of reference, and that's not counting their collective memories as human beings.

For LGL this was exceedingly difficult, especially considering the lead character was a computer that was theoretically incapable of forgetting anything. When I did forget something, or make an error, players looked at that as if it were a clue 'cause, after all, the computer isn't supposed to make errors like that. There came a point where I had to write in a memory lapse (the "Green Eggs and Ham" error) as a flaw in the programming.

In BoL/Sid I admit I went "character happy", and had way more characters than any sane individual can handle. I had spreadsheets and text files detailing everything: every outbound message, every mail response, every player message, everything. That was amongst everything that was lost on the dead USB, so you can see now how difficult it would be to proceed without it.

The easiest solution for something like this is, when you have multiple PMs, divvy up who pretends to be who. Each person that was part of the team was responsible for all aspects of communication for one (or more) persona. Beyond the script, timeline, planning document, etc... they *were* that character almost exclusively. In cases like that, it's also much easier for the "actor" to be themselves since they only have their role for it to rub off on. But me, who is currently playing the role of at least two characters (those that are actually responding to players, anyway), it's only gonna get worse.

Thankfully, veteran players have learned to accept this nuance of the game. It's the new players that sometimes don't see it, fail to realize that, at the end of the day, the PM is human after all. It may not be as apparent in large scale games, games that have a fleet of people behind it, but in "grass roots" game you just have to come and accept it. I misspell something and the new players jump on it; not everything is a clue, sometimes it's just humanity rearing its ugly head.

For now, my information spreadsheet just keeps growing. Schizophrenia beats being alone.

2) Passing of Time:

Players, at least as their collective consciousness is concerned, never sleep. At any minute in the day there's always someone "playing" your game. I can do updates at 3am and, in the matter of minutes, someone acknowledges it on the forums.

The problem is that the PM isn't on a 24 hour clock; we're human, too. So you have to pace things, and hope that the players sync up with the pacing.

At the start of LGL I was *really* excited to be doing the game, so I literally WAS up 24 hours a day making updates, answering communications, etc... And the players got use to that. So on or about the third day, when there came a point where I needed actual sleep, I didn't quite know what to do. I actually had to fabricate network downtime, security crackdowns, firewall issues, etc... anything I can think of so that players know there will be a little bit of inactivity.

Nowadays my schedule is pretty hectic - I leave the house at 5am and get home at 11pm on average - and although I sometimes get the opportunity to make updates from work there's no guarantee. So I had to use my technological resources to find a solution.

Right now I have a framework of software that I use for any website that does a variety of things for me without me being around:

1) Blog posts can be post-dated to appear at any time, automatically. I can write blog posts months in advance if I felt like it.

2) I can post-date Twitter posts, so that they come up at planned times. I can even handle multiple accounts, scripting an entire conversation between two or more Twitter accounts, all time synchronized.

3) This afternoon I completed a scheduled mail delivery system, so I can queue up mails (even with attachments) and send them to mailing lists at any time of the day.

The one obvious caveat to all of the above is that, like I said earlier, the player collective doesn't sleep. So, between now and the time you schedule something for, everything could change due to player reaction. Especially if you're running a game that depends on player input.

For example, the entire Cloverfield campaign could have been scripted using the above methods on the first day; everything that happened there was completely devoid of any player input. Nothing the players could have done would have changed the chain of events. It was, in essence, a "fire and forget" campaign.

My campaigns are hardly like that; I rely heavily on user interaction, so much so that the players and their antics have more of an impact on the story than any plans I may have done myself. So, when I do schedule something for the future, it's usually no more than a few hours, because a single player's actions can change the course of a game in minutes.

I've considered providing the above scheduling services to would-be PMs. I have to figure out how to package it in a friendly format.

-=O=-

On an unrelated note, I have gotten a reasonable response regarding my idea for a "24 hour ARG-a-thon". It's gonna take some serious planning, but you can be sure we're going to try that some day. Get your sleep now while you still can!

Posted by David "Nighthawk" Flor on Friday, March 13, 2009 3:55 AM

2 comments [ View Comments ]

Posted by Chomecide & FunkiWangChung on Friday, March 13, 2009 5:16 AM

Your time issues get exascerbated when Aussies start playing your games. We live in your future...*evil laugh*...but we don't hold it against ya...we HAVE to be patient...BUT...i was home "sick" from work when LGL was in its "finale"

Posted by fishjp on Saturday, March 14, 2009 9:57 AM

I can seriously relate to the Schizophrenia. During my EILE I had 15 different characters that interacted directly with the players. At one point 5 of them were in a live chat with about 10 players. That was interesting to say the least. (In fact the number one question post game was "how many people helped out in the chat?" they were surprised that is was alone)

I do envy your technological prowess and look forward to the day when the post dating services you described above are offered to the public. I think there is a market for it. In order to add "realism" to the blogs in EILE I had to start writing posts about 4 months before the game launched. Your timed release system will be nice.

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