Playing the Game: Virtual Worlds

After an initial burst of activity I've somewhat neglected this blog. There was a lot to be said about Canon in the Firefly/Serenity 'Verse, at least from our perspective as gamers in Secondlife. There's been a bit of disagreement and fractioning of the community over Canon too. Pat of that, of course, comes from folk having the own perspectives on what should and shouldn't be in canon and what should and shouldn't be allowed in game.

I tried to address a lot of those issues in previous posts. It's hard to have strict canon with only 14 episodes, one feature length movie, and a few comic books that tie things together. There's just not enough information to go on. Doesn't stop people from arguing about it though. Just watch the Trekkers going at it some time.

In a restricted pencil and paper gaming environment, you have the luxury of setting canon for you and your group and not having to worry about accommodating a broader crowd. As I tried to get across, an open environment like Secondlife provides doesn't afford that luxury. Unless you plan to be snobbish about it, of course. In that case, go ahead and be as restrictive as you like.

But this post isn't about that. It's about dealing with the vagaries of translating our games into the realm of virtual worlds. Specifically, Secondlife.

In the last post I talked about cooperative story telling. The concepts there apply whether you're playing a game in Secondlife, on a forum, in IRC, or pretty much anywhere else that there's an ongoing give and take between players. Work together. Build on each other's stories, and everyone has a grand time.

But what about assembling the environment you're playing in?

I remember some years ago, lounging around a friend's room at a gaming con, one of the better game masters, a fellow computer geek, talking about how he'd really like to have adaptive voice changing software for everyone. That way you could speak as the character or NPC or whatever, and people would hear that voice. The scared little kid. The angry cop. The megalomaniac bad guy. This has to be 15 or 18 years ago when the technology was close, but not quite there. The conversation went on to what would be really cool, and described something like a cross between Secondlife, Neverwinter Nights, and Halflife.

We're actually fairly close to that 'really cool' state with Secondlife. But it has its limitations. Some of them are pretty glaring limitations and often lead to issues that actually affect the RP as it's happening.

One of the biggest limitations in SL is the footprint problem. A standard region (sim) is 256 meters on a side. Virtual, scale, meters. That's really not a lot. While it's usually enough for the kinds of combat most RPG's simulate - melee, close quarters gunfights, urban brawls, jungle ambushes, etc., - it's not an awfully big space. Yes, you could drop, say, Candlestick Park into a single sim, but you couldn't include the parking lot. On a 'city' scale, a sim is roughly a city block or so square.

I'd say it's enough for in-game combat because most RPG firefights take place over fairly short ranges. But not military ranges. Once you're out of an Urban or Jungle setting, engagement ranges go up dramatically. And we won't eve talk about snipers. The current world record for a confirmed sniper shot would cross 11 full sims.

The small footprint precludes exploring large areas unless you either layer vertically, since the sim is four kilometers high (effectively - you can go higher, but can't really build above 4Km), which has it's own issues, or you get multiple sims and spread out. The problem with that, of course, is the sheer cost of it. Sims run in cost from less than $100 a month for an "Open space" to around $300 for a full performance version. That's a lot of money to dedicate to gaming.

While there are alternatives to Secondlife using OpenSim, the open source version of the Secondlife server, there's not a lot of people there and you'd have to recreate many of the objects, textures, scripts, etc., that we have in the main Secondlife grid. The upside would be the fact that sims are dirt cheap, like $50 a month for full performance, or less if you have the capability of running your own.

Yes, I've considered it.

Cost aside, there's the issues of physics, limited prim counts, limited terraforming, lag issues, player limits, and all the other issues we've come to know and "love" in Secondlife.

Now, it may sound like I'm just bitching about the limitations of Secondlife, and I'm not. Well, not exclusively. I'm ultimately pointing out some of the known issues that keep it from being the ultimate RP platform. On the plus side, there's the radical customizability of your avatar, a very versatile (though limited in some key areas that would be useful to us) scripting system, and the ability to build some pretty elaborate sets to suit your needs.

How does this relate to us as players in a virtual environment?

The most important thing to remember is that what you see may not really be what you get. Examples?

• The entrance to the mines are really a couple kilometers away, rather than 120 meters from the bar.
• The tunnels leading from the mines actually go out into the wilderness, and go deep, rather than running under the church as they appear to.
• There really are four hundred people living in town and not just the dozen or so player characters you see.
  
• Some doors are locked, whether they're coded that way or not.
• Just because someone's combat meter says "Noble" or "Mutant" or "Mercenary" doesn't necessarily mean your character knows that - or it's even accurate.
  
• The Colonial Viper isn't really a Colonial Viper. It just looks like one - because it's what we have.
• The person's name you see floating over their head may not be who they're actually playing at the moment. Remember, not everyone is going to create a different avatar for each character they play.
• The space station is really in orbit and not at 2500 meters as it appears.
• The completely out of place Darth Vader avatar isn't really there (unless someone's wearing a Vader costume in-character. Which would just be weird.)

You get the idea. We have to adapt what we see to what should actually be there. When it's something obvious it's usually easy to treat it as the Designer/GM/Admin intended, rather than what you're seeing on screen. When it's more subtle it can be harder. But that's where the GM's and the experienced players come in.

Secondlife gave us a versatile but limited platform. It's up to us as players, and GM's, work within those limitations and create an environment we can all share in. Even when it means ignoring what we see on screen and accepting what we're told is real.

Playing the Game: Cooperative Storytelling

It's been a while since I've done an entry here, and I admit it's overdue. Of course, I haven't done an entry in Children of Earth in a while either. But that's neither here nor there. This is about gaming and now I'm going to shift away from Firefly Canon for a post or two and talk about Role Playing in a collective environment like Secondlife.

Role Playing in Secondlife ain't your grandpa's RPG.

Every RPG rule book has a little blurb in the beginning that talks about what Role Playing is and what you can expect from that particular game. It usually runs at least a couple paragraphs, up to a couple pages, and is the same real concept no matter who's writing it or what setting they're in. It boils down to you're one character in a cooperatively told story, and the Game Master is directing the action for everyone.

Simple, really.

Most pencil and paper RPG's also come with a ton of back story, resource materiel, game mechanics, and everything else you need to play a coordinated, cooperative, story with your friends. In our Secondlife setting, we don't have all that.

While the overall campaign setting is based on the 'Verse and its Canon, which I've been writing about, our individual settings are unique and were developed by a number of very creative people. Like a lot of conventional games, we've taken what was originally published and run with it in various directions.

What we're usually lacking, is game mechanics. While some areas might use a dedicated "combat meter" for first person combat, many areas, and players, don't. Game mechanics, such as they are, are usually very abstract and revolve around agreements not to metagame, god mod, be a dick, etc. It puts an emphasis on the Cooperative part of Cooperative Storytelling. It's a style of gaming sometimes referred to as Freeforming.

Another aspect that puts an emphasis on Cooperative is that the role of the Game Master is often very different in a Freeform environment. Where the GM in a conventional RPG is effectively required, in our's they serve more as moderator when a disagreement arises between players than as the driving force of most stories.

Yes, there are some stories that are Game Master run, but overall most of the story arcs we encounter were spawned by other players.

Getting good Player Generated story arcs can be somewhat tricky, since there's no one Game Master to maintain a balance between keeping everyone involved, maintaining the flow, and making it exciting for everyone. Again, it comes back to the whole cooperation thing. Working with people behind the scenes and telling whoever's "in charge" of the environment - be they a server admin or GM - can go a long way to making the story work for all involved.

But those points are important. Most players have a natural desire to tell their character's stories, where a Game Master is usually telling a broader story. Properly done, gaming is more like a well developed TV show, where there may be a star, but the rest of the cast is important too. The difference, of course, is that an actual Game Master has a responsibility to keep everyone interested and involved where a Player generating Story doesn't. What the 'Player as GM' should be doing, is giving people the opportunity to get involved and have the flexibility to let the story flow as more people add their characters to the mix.

It's not always easy.

Tips? First and foremost, be flexible. Sure, you may have things that're important to the arc you're working on and you may not want to let another character mess that up, whether it's rescuing you from the baddie, taking a bullet, or killing the baddie in his sleep. Sometimes, your carefully laid plan gets a crowbar tossed in it. When it does, think like a Game Master, not a Player. It's not just your story.

Another option is to bring the other player(s) in on your arc. If they know that you need to be shot, or kidnapped, or lost in space, or something, they.re much more willing to work with you than if you keep them in the dark and treat them as Extras.

Also, there's things that can be taken off-camera. Sure, you were rescued by the Other Heroes and that messed up the kidnapping that was part of the larger arc, but you can work around that. While it may not be as exciting in real-time, from a story perspective it's just as workable to have the baddies somehow execute their plan while everyone else is asleep. You snuck out and went for a walk and didn't tell anyone and bang, you're caught. Story goes on, and the other characters don't feel like props.