When a World-Builder Dies

Location: Marooned in a Campaign that Ended

Last week, Gary, a dear friend of 40+ years, passed away. He was a gamer of the old-school sort, and he'd been running RPG campaigns since the late 70s.  I'd never really joined him for MMO play, so my encounters were weekly "Nerd Nights" with dice, character sheets, rule books, and a great deal of unhip humor. Gary was a consummate world-builder, as all good game masters should be.

As Gary's health declined in recent years, his "runs" became a bit more formulaic, based upon TV shows, films, or even the online game Mass Effect, and they all got a lot darker. To be honest, much of the fun was gone at times, and non-player characters often rushed in for a deus-ex-machina finish.

Without Gary's presence, what becomes of the characters we players have nurtured over the years? And what of his voluminous notes and maps for various settings, from a vampire-haunted New Orleans to a bleak fantasy setting where, a millennium before, a Sauron-style figure won the final war between good and evil?

As the population of paper-and-dice gamers ages, the questions of "what to do with their invented worlds?" will arise more frequently. There's an academic point to be made here, but I'm in no mood to theorize. In Gary's case, we others in the gaming group have decided to honor his memory by keeping his worlds alive, at least for a time.

We will work to finish current story lines for a few campaigns and, in the bleak fantasy world noted, to finish the setting off by seeing how the characters fare, all rebels against "The Graven One" who has oppressed an entire continent for 1,000  years. Then there is a sprawling project called "Spaceship," in which Gary and I developed a science-fiction campaign of epic scope, spanning two galaxies with 5,000 years of backstory and focusing on the fates of the twin galaxies' alternate Earths. My half of that epic will continue, though without Gary, it will be a somewhat lonely venture.

In spite of the challenges, I'm looking forward to it. And somewhere beyond the veils of reality and illusion that separate this world from whatever else exists, I suspect that Gary is mightily pleased with us.

Creating Claustrophobia in a Build

Location: Attic, Virtual House of Usher

I'm close to finishing the SL build, at least to the point where I'll open the doors for visitors. Later, we will schedule a few events with our Usher actors.  I wanted, first, to address some concerns that my last group of students had in the OpenSim build.

See the chest to the left of my avatar? It's way too big, and I cannot resize it.

Normally, I'd build something or do without, but here, I  decided to "leave it big" (also letting me pull out an old inventory item we liked before).

Students noted that the House in Jokaydia Grid was not cluttered and crowded enough, and in both OpenSim and SL builds run bigger, with taller ceilings, than most real-life spaces.  That's the fault of 8' tall avatars and the clumsy way the camera follows  us when we move.

To create claustrophobia in wide-open spaces, I have tried a few methods to "trick the eye." These reverse the process I wrote about for creating the illusion of vast distance. Notably:
adding low-prim partitions and obstacles in rooms

• splitting some Jokaydia-Grid rooms into two rooms in SL
•  living with the jumbo-sized SL items, or making some things a little larger than to-scale. That way, space gets crowded!
• tinting distant items slightly darker to add complexity to the space. This also keeps the build from being too bright, a complaint by a few of my students last term.
• adding prims, such as rafters in the attic, that lower the ceiling without making the camera bounce around when an avatar walks.

In doing these things--and I am sure I will find more techniques!--I continue to be amazed at the low-cost affordances of building in SL or OpenSim. While some educators are tempted by Minecraft or Unity 3D, I would ask them to consider the outcome desired.

For now, at least, for low-volume simulations SL and OpenSim suit my needs perfectly. I've been back to the Trident Main Store again and again for items I cannot or do not wish to build. Unlike some of the mesh items from Turbosquid that John Lester showed me for building, the costs have been trivial, a few thousand Linden Dollars total.

Students and Academic Roleplay: Some Responses

 
Location: Virtual House of Usher, Second Life

The work in Jokaydia Grid last semester gave my students the chance to sound off about roleplay. I was pleasantly surprised how many of them slipped into character. In a post last month, I looked at ideas students had for improving future expeditions to the House of Usher: new settings, characters, effects, and props. In this post, I share some reflections about what students felt they did well to make the improvisational roleplay work, or not.

My student Elon, who is drafting an academic article about the nature of story in the game Mass Effect, replied a great deal with useful information. Like a good academic, he's drafting ideas for the later project.

• Logan: students were required to think critically and put effort into the simulation if they expected to gain a better understanding of the story, and quite possibly change the story altogether within the simulation.
•  Elon: In order to be a proper role-playing character, the user has to continuously maintain the world’s setting and authenticity. To do this, I had to first find out about the House of Usher by reading the story, and then I had to carefully maintain who I was within the simulation.
• Emily:  A character must be created and maintained, usually conforming to some specific guidelines but otherwise left up to the player. For example, my character was given a motive of holding a grudge against the Ushers due to the fact that they had denied her a loan. 
• Elon:  I decided to tell Roderick I admired his paintings and wanted to wander around a bit. I still couldn’t find the family papers. I was panicking by the time Roderick called for us to see our quarters, but luckily Mark drew Roderick away to explore the island with him. This gave me the opportunity to find the papers, detailing his family history and more information about the nature of the land.
• Emily:  If my character had not chased Roderick out into the swamp, then [a major clue] would not have been found. Since my partners were convinced at the time that Roderick was evil, it is likely that the ending of the story would have played out altogether differently if I had not possessed that proof of his innocence.
• Elon:  The interactive experience isn’t purely just with the game engine, but also with other users . . . . The result is an experience where everyone has their share of invested time, choices, and manipulations of the plot.

An Illusion of Distance For Immersive Learning

Location: Nevermore Island, Jokaydia Grid

Immersion in a roleplaying setting means that, while exploring a doomed family's mansion and grounds in the year 1847, one should not glimpse Tesla Coils and trees the side of skyscrapers. When I did, I realized that raising some mountains would be in order.

My neighbors in Jokaydia Grid have some well conceived builds. I just don't want my students to see them, as they take on the role of Poe's narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher."  Unlike what I did in Second Life, here I'm not interested in having them experience a world: I want them to experience a closed simulation. So I began to raise the borders of the sim; gradually the Mountains of Nevermore got very steep.

When my geomancy was finished, the result amazed me. The borders of the sim now seem very far away. This too will become part of our roleplay.

Parts of the island are now very hard to navigate, and the difficulty increases as an avatar walks toward the mountains that ring all of the island except near rocks where the shipwreck of Grampus rests. That hulk contains some important clues about the dark history of the Usher family.

I've been playing with the idea of having several ghosts near the ship and on the land, instead of simply in the house; most of these spirits will help the students by giving them hints and clues. I may have one or two who are malicious. I've also hidden clues in the swamps and woods near the mountains.

When we run the simulation, I will turn flying off on the island. In the end, I hope we have a place where avatars who leave the House will get lost in a space that seems larger than it really is.

When I ran the Poe build in Second Life, in theory anyone could come by the site. My fears were that some exotic-dancer avatar, in pasties and g-string, would burst in using IM-doofus text chat during a crucial moment of the roleplay. I suppose we'd have pretended she was the ghost of some mad Victorian harlot.

Second Life users are mesmerized by the coming of more advanced mesh items to that grid. I am curious on several levels, but in particular I wonder if the added complexity won't slow to a crawl any systems save for high-end desktop computers. That would be a terrible outcome for educators who remain there. In leaving SL for my work, I've given up many things--namely, the loss of great inventory available at very low prices. But going back, at Linden Lab's rates for tier, is simply not an option.

And, gradually, as the Jokaydia Grid sim comes to life, with content mentioned in my prior post, I think we'll have ourselves a wickedly immersive time in our new home, even without the bells and whistles SL can provide to those with very fast computers.

Breaking the String: Why Improv Acting Bridges Game and Story

Location: Grabbing the Polyhedra Dice for Nerd-Night

I've had a good time skimming the 2007 anthology Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. I often start reading seriously in the middle of such works, then skipping backward or forward, but when I saw that Greg Costikyan penned the first essay, I waded in and learned a great deal about why I enjoy the House of Usher project so much.

In Fall, I'll run 20 students in a 200-level literature class through our simulation. The essays in the Second Person collection are giving shape, and theoretical grounding, to some of this 3D work.

Games are Not Stories, Are They?

Costikyan, like me, came along in the era of Avalon Hill's classic board games, bound by rules and not exactly the fodder for stories, and TSR's original Dungeons and Dragons, rife for storytelling if a good Game Master (GM) was posing problems for players. Unlike me, however, Costikyan got to design and publish some excellent games, including one of my all-time favorites, Bug-Eyed Monsters.

So when he wrote of the essential differences between narratives that cannot change quickly (MMOs and MMORPGs) and those that can (tabletop and free-form RPGs), then differentiated them from how stories work, I spotted something I'd not yet been able to put into words:

It's hard to see how the lessons from narrativist RPGs and free-forms can be brought into digital media since they depend so heavily upon a gamemaster and player creativity--and 'player creativity' doesn't generally work well in tandem with 'limited pregenerated digital assets.'

"Yabba Dabbo Doo!" I heard myself saying, Thursday being my gaming night, after all. It's a time when such dorky exclamations fill the air whenever a d20 lands on "critical hit."

OpenSim grids, where I'm building the Usher simulation, and Second Life are essentially big sandboxes where amateurs and professionals make pregenerated digital assets. The game may change (or just end) for amateurs with the arrival of mesh in SL, but that is another tale and rather beyond my interest, as I'm done teaching in that particular virtual world.

Unlike a game, in improvisational RP using an acting team (Roderick and Madeline Usher for our build) plays the part of GMs in tabletop RPGs.  A crucial element of story remains, one Costikyan identifies as "a single, linear, driving narrative arc." The actors in the role of the Ushers determine this before the simulation, when they pick, among several predetermined options, what has caused the trouble for the family. Then, during the simulation, they decide when several key plot points occur, such as when Madeline will enter a coma or when Roderick's fragile sanity will begin to further slip.

Meanwhile, the students playing the role of Poe's narrator have a quest, not unlike those sometimes given in D&D: save the Ushers from themselves and a family curse.

Traditional games online cannot permit such latitude with narrative. Virtual worlds can.

How Virtual Worlds Break The String

Costikyan makes a clever point, something obvious but never so well stated to me before, when he notes that "a game is a system of constraints." Thus even the somewhat open-ended "adventure games" can come to resemble "beads on a string," where at each stage of the adventure, or "bead," players have some control over choices until they reach a critical point. Then the players move on to the next part of the game.

I found, in earlier iterations of the Usher project, that we broke this string. The students, wandering in the confines of the House of Usher, really can move from any one setting or group of clues to another. The world they explore, being continuous and persistent, allows them discovery at any point. They need not find a particular clue in order to find another. The only exception are a few locked doors that require a password.  

How the students fulfill their quest, as well as discovering clues and subplots they encounter along the way, depend upon several factors that they very much control. This is very much like what players do in good tabletop RPGs, when their decisions shape the course of gameplay.

Deciding how much choice students can have at Usher is maddening work, I'll admit.  Already I see the development of the simulation as giving me and the students so many choices that they may become overwhelmed in the two hours planned for live simulation with actors.

So now I find myself as constraining certain choices by making more clues point in only a few directions.

That said, in even the loosest form of roleplay a player cannot declare "I'll grow a set of wings and fly away from danger," unless the player's character possesses that ability or finds a magical item that enables flying. I've turned off flying in Nevermore region and students must cope with what they have in their avatars' inventories (we use premade avatars) or can find during the simulation. But choosing which sorts of improvisation to limit is harder than that.

Players will draw upon knowledge their characters could not have, and in tabletop RPGs, the GM can call foul. In the Second Life version of the Usher simulation, my avatar would roleplay the family doctor and provide clues and advice in back-channel IM for the students. Sometimes they'd ask something along the lines of "would my character know anything about medicine?" or "does anesthesia exist in 1847?" and I would chime in with an answer, saving the Ushers from breaking the flow of roleplay by having to step out of character.

We may be able to repeat this in the Fall, though I think we'll be short of actors! If not, I will simultaneously be Roderick and the teacher. GMs can do that well, stepping out of character as a nonplayer character and answering a question about rules or backstory.

Getting Ready to Play and Make a Story

This type of improvisation simply does not--really, cannot--exist in MMORPGs where the game-engine might generate a new monster or peril automatically, depending upon the actions of players.  The game company cannot alter the world or even the arc of an adventure on the fly. When an out-of-character question arises about the game-world or system, the players usually rely on a Web site  or they ask other players in-game. Even so, players cannot really go very far "off script." As Costikyan points out:

Only with the final game style, the tabletop, do we escape the demands of linearity--and we do so, ultimately, only by relying on the creativity of a live gamemaster.

Physics and graphics in a user-generated virtual world will always lag far behind most games.  But story is the strong point of well designed simulations in virtual worlds. Thus a well designed simulation with actor/GMs in a virtual world comes closest, in digital form, to capturing the tabletop RPG experience in all its narrative richness.  It's the potential "killer app" of virtual worlds for educators. I've heard machinima called that; it is wonderful for promoting work done in-worlds to those without accounts, or to a group of fans. It is not, however, an interactive form of art.

One week, as we waited for the crew to arrive for Nerd Night, I watched our host finish a "bead on the string" in Mass Effect. He was playing in single-player mode, and the graphics and action were cinematic. The game has deep backstory, and the space to explore is vast. That said, my friend could not do anything he wished. He also could not ask a GM for advice, in or out of character.

In Usher, however, short of leaving the island or making new items, the students have a great deal of agency in the scenario. Even making things, or perhaps assembling them would be possible if, say, the students wished to build a raft to escape a crazed Roderick.

I do not know if the big commercial virtual worlds can make money by encouraging an online analogue to free-form RPGs with live GMs. Yet they may wish to consider it, as no other 3D technology usuable by amateurs has this potential.

Battlestar Galactica in Second Life: Fair Use Permitted

Location: Viper Cockpit (I wish)

hat tip to Hiro Pendragon, for announcing this on the SLED list

image credit: Syr Villota's Flickr Photostream

Some firms understand that an enthusiastic group of customers can extend their brand, if those customers are permitted to play with intellectual property.

That's the case today with NBC/Universal, who had previously sought cease-and-desist orders against Battlestar Galactica roleplayers in Second Life. Now, according to the story in ArchVirtual, fans can again share BSP materials for non-commercial use.  I wish the company had done so earlier. A few Galactica-themed sims have now closed.

There's a long-standing precedent for letting fans just be fans and play: Paramount long permitted Star Trek fans to create derivative works. With the board game Star Fleet Battles, an old chestnut that is still around (I gamed it 30 years ago!) Paramount even granted permission for a commercial product based upon elements in the original Star Trek series.

One could easily argue that these fans kept the ST franchise alive long after the cancellation of the original series. Now that BSG's run on TV has ended, for a time in any case, perhaps that franchise too will continue to thrive through the work of fans.

I do hope that Frank Herbert's estate and others who have slapped around fan communities might actually talk to those fans, before crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of law.