10 by 10 room

From the Daedalus Project: Slideshow of Emergent Social Beahvior (i.e. ad hoc fun stuff) in MMORPGs. Did you know there was a Gay Day in City of Heroes? Now you do.

Clay Shikry writes frequently about social software. Stewe Boyd comments on his latest:

In a nutshell, his thesis is that we have a moral responsibility - those of us whose purpose is the development of social technologies - to explore the social contract between the users and owners of online interaction. More importantly, he calls us to a higher goal: to discover the most productive patterns for group self-moderation so that social tools can not only ‘work’ in a technological sense, but so that we can craft techniques that shape culture into positive channels.

Hot new Mafia variant (in progress): The Thing!!! Feel the horror.

From Fair Game: I will not abandon you does not equal nobody gets hurt. Meguey’s talking about games, but also really talking about social commitments in challenging situations.

“RPG = storytelling” was the Big Fat White Wolf Fallacy of the ‘90’s. RPG’s have more in common with a going to a party, jamming with a garage band, or attending church than telling a story. If you really need a metaphor to describe RPG’s, you may as well pick one that has some degree of utility. It’s past time to let the “storytelling” metaphor die and move on.
Blue Seraph on RPGnet

Neel K, “Meeting Facilitation and Gaming”:

I started thinking that I should take the idea of meeting facilitation more seriously, and turned to Google to try and find out what people did about this. It was pretty neat; I never knew you could get professional certification in meeting facilitation. This makes sense, though, because I know I’ve lost some serious SAN sitting through pointless meetings…. Anyway, I did find some interesting sites, and one of the pages I found most interesting was the page on writing an agenda script for the meeting. The idea of writing down what I want to happen, and how long it should take, and who should get involved is something I never thought of.

Crossing meeting methodology with gaming? Then again, I realize I ended last week’s succession by getting each player’s “next action” for when we resumed play. So how about applying GTD to social gaming? What a country!

Folk were talking about possibly adding “roleplaying bonuses” to Dogs in the Vineyard”, but the consensus was that the Social Contract among players was where a problem was really at. DannyK’s interpretation:

The price of a stripped down, narratively driven system like the DitV system is that the system doesn’t provide as much protection against asshats. That’s common to a lot of Forge-baked games. You could narrate your character god-modding and killling everybody n Chicago in hand-to-hand combat in a PTA game, and there’s nothing but the contempt of your fellow players to stop you.

Does that make them bad games? Of course not. It just means you have to be careful who you play them with. “Will allow you to play with asshats” is not a very good design goal for an RPG.

But really, Brand reminds us:

Of course, this is the same with D&D.

GM: “The orc comes swinging his sword at you, what do you do?”

Player: “I tell him I like toast”—player pushes forward a natural 20 and grins.

GM: “The fuck?”

Player: “I like toast with a natural 20. That’s critical toast liking.”

GM: “Right… the orc ignores your toast liking and kills your ass. Go roll up a new character.”

Of course there’s still a need to put more structure onto the rules / pre-existing social contract, rather than straining the ad hoc social contract further. But dude: toast.

Speaking of AvantGame: Zombie Village!, a SADL* game, is now under playtest.

*SADL: “Sleep, Accuse, Debate and Lynch”, a la Mafia.