Teleconferencing may equalize some of those things, true. I’m still waiting for my immersive VR world, though.

And people play Diplomacy by email, by message board, etc. Indeed, the first Diplomacy game I ever saw actually played was done in my college dorm, with people submitting their “moves” to a GM by writing them down and putting them in an envelope. It was very interesting, since there were mysteries about who was playing whom. (In some ways, that added to the fun, since it sparked a subgame of “let’s try to figure out who’s playing what”.)

The main limit I’ve seen on social interaction via computer is the speed — when everyone’s having to type out their comments, it’s hard to get the bang-bang-bang interplay that you can get in real life. That, though, is mostly a keyboarding limit; I’ve played in an online D&D game where we were all talking via a conference call (one of the players worked for the phone company) while at the same time using a program designed for playing games online (so we had a virtual map & minis), and we were able to get that sort of interplay (plus voice acting!) by doing that. It still wasn’t quite the quality of a face-to-face game, but as teleconferencing grows, we’ll be able to get closer and closer to that.

Exactly, Frank. Capes is a highly tactical game, but I don’t think we’ll see that online anytime soon, because a good portion of Capes play involves interacting (provoking) your fellow players, and that’s very difficult over an internet connection (at least difficult to do productively). It’s the people that the game’s about. It’s what distinguishes Diplomacy from Axis & Allies — A&A online is exactly the same; Diplomacy online loses most of its appeal.

Hmm, if this part was really true, the board game would be in danger of obsolescence also. A computer can (and does) facilitate board game play quite nicely. Except for one thing the computer CAN’T DO. The computer doesn’t create real life, face to face social interraction. Oh, another thing the computer can’t do. It can’t give you 3-d miniatures that you can hold in your hand (notice how much D20 has become a miniatures game…).

Now perhaps the next generation will be sucked into computer games that they never meet face to face. And I shudder to think what that would say for society. But you know what, I trust that people will continue to seek out face to face interraction, and some of that face to face interraction will be to play games.

Frank

Great essay! I completely agree with what you’re saying. I used to try and make the same point in the past. The game I have was initially designed specifically to target the not-gamer crowd. I’m so glad that you’ve had so many better ideas than I. (I can steal them now, eh?)

As to the question of complexity, it does present an interesting problem. If we ditch the bigass book, what are we selling? Pamplets don’t go for $15-20

Actually we came up with a whole tiered set up based on some working models (and presaging another). I had this idea to give away pamphlet versions of Scattershot; one for core mechanics, one for Gming, one for spell casting, one for cybernetics and et cetera. We’d give these out at any event we showed up for.

On the publishing side, we wanted to license content differently than RPGs have in the past; instead of coming out with a game based on…say, Goosebumps books, we’d come out with a Goosebumps (-like) book with micro-mechanics in the back. We also planned on genre-narrow ’splat books’ for gaming stores (shows how dated I am). GURPS eventually went this way including ‘lite’ rules in each book.

Ultimately all ‘versions’ of our game would drive sales back to a series of twelve more comprehensive books (which apparently TSR went for with the D20 thing). We wanted to place product on shelves right next to our licensees using the same format (when possible – yes, that’d mean an RPG on a DVD too). By streamlining and simplifying the mechanics and the processes to get them out of the world of computer science majors, we felt we’d have a stable enough package that we could patch onto licensed material or fad genres, that we could produce as fast as the fads passed.

I detailed this stuff (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=979.msg9179#msg9179) on the Forge quite often (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=420.msg3869#msg3869), but it wasn’t the right place for it.

I may yet resurrect the project, but the current online and POD publishing world will require a whole new approach.

Thanks for the essay, I find it invaluable.

Fang Langford

Doing what I can to re-establish a stable teaser balance!

Thomas