term paper: DONE. Also: LJ roleplaying geekitude.

[zwol]

Finished it at about 5am last night, actually. The hard copy will be late, but the professor has indicated that that's okay.

Spent an awful lot of time over the past few days procrastinating by reading milliways_bar, as discussed in a previous post.

Being who I am, I've been thinking about LJ roleplaying from a user-interface point of view. The basic problem I had reading backstories is that there's no way to find all the conversation threads involving a particular character. Take for instance the recent story arc which culminates with Ron Weasley in the cells for killing someone (in self-defense, to be fair). That arc is spread over at least five different LJ entities: Milliways itself; the Security-office community; the Ron, Hermione, and Gaston PC journals; and probably others. I still have not found all the pieces. Similarly, gone_byebye has been training lots of people in the use of proton packs, and I just today read that this is to do with a demonic invasion of "Andrew's World" -- but I have no idea which character Andrew is, nor how Ray found out about it. I suspect this is not nearly such a problem for the players, since they know which threads their PCs are in and they get the nice email notifications when someone says something. For an outside observer, though, it's quite frustrating.

There are other problems with the interface -- the LJ comment system is really not set up to deal with conversation threads of one or two sentences per post but hundreds of posts total. Text squashed into the right margin of the window = hate. Having to click through to the next bit of the thread over and over because LJ gave up on squashing the text into the right margin of the window and just printed "(no subject) - [character] [date]" a zillion times = also hate. Again, I suspect, not a problem if you're actually playing.

Now, it's one thing to identify a problem, and another to fix it. The comment overflow problem has some relatively obvious fixes, but that's not the important one. (Although LJ bidirectional syndication to netnews would be nifty.) "Find me every dialogue thread involving this PC" is a database query comprehensible to a computer, but thinking about it a bit more, it's not necessarily the right question. What one really wants is "every dialogue thread germane to this plot arc", which is a question a computer cannot answer. Any solution involving humans doing stuff after the fact (e.g. tagging threads "war on Andrew's World") is likely to be incomplete, especially since the players aren't (if I'm right) the ones who need it. People do provide partial selections of plot-arc-germane threads in the form of memories, but those are thoroughly incomplete, and the tags tend to be less than helpful.

My muse is jumping up and down going "Another reason to do your sekrit project! You could fix all this!" but to this I say, "It's already huge, the sekrit project! Doesn't need more mission creep! And where were you all weekend — no, all quarter — while I was trying to exposit, anyway?!"

---

I did think of two characters whom I might like to play, that no one else has got: Tron (post-movie, presumably; easy, fun, but not much character development potential) and Arya Stark (snatched from her timeline just before she gets on the boat at the end of A Storm of Swords, and desynchronized from canon at that point; I'd have to finish rereading the series, but way more character development there). Dunno which is the better choice for a newbie player. Still suspect I shouldn't be considering this at all.

Quite curious to know what it's like for people actually playing. camwyn, I'm looking at you here.

P.S. Yes, I know the proper terminology is "mun" and "pup", not "player" and "PC". Old skool tabletop RPG guy here.

Comments

[camwyn]

Hoooh. Where do I start...

It's like the old forum-posting boards that still dominate a lot of the RPG world. Slap something up and hope people take an interest. And it's like a big freeform fanfic writing project with a couple of rules to keep things going, only you can't always choose who you're writing with, and sometimes you let personal annoyances decide things you shouldn't (i.e., you'll notice fewer posts during the daytime hours from my characters, because people whose RP styles grate on me are among the ones most active during the daylight hours and I would rather not be available for them to tag).


And if you write well, and if you're lucky- it has to be both- you get attention from all kinds of people, and you have tremendous fun; and other days you just sort of don't wanna play.

It's really a matter of teaching yourself to get inside a character's head and wear them like a skin. You have to be able to do that to play them for any length of time, because there will always be SOMETHING that you just aren't prepared for. It's a great exercise in learning to think like different characters, I think.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Much of this is as I had expected. I think I've got a handle on the getting inside a character's head thing, from face-to-face roleplaying, though certainly not as good at it as some people I know. (Part of my interest is from wanting more practice at that.)

It's like the old forum-posting boards that still dominate a lot of the RPG world.

Err... I'm not familiar with these, can you give an example?

...sometimes you let personal annoyances decide things you shouldn't (i.e., you'll notice fewer posts during the daytime hours from my characters, ...)

Tell you the truth, I hadn't — the overall traffic volume is so high that I haven't been able to keep track of who's on when. Which goes into another user-interface thing that didn't make it into the initial blather: no way to filter at the top level by poster, and no indication of when a thread you've been reading has been updated (unless you can memorize all of the "X comments" numbers, and even then it doesn't tell you which subthread to check). The phenomenon doesn't surprise me, I've seen similar things plenty of times in face-to-face and IRC-based roleplaying (and in both contexts, avoiding people is much harder...)

Could I ask you to comment on the user interface stuff, by the way? How much of a problem are those things for people who are actually playing? Especially the bit where you can't find all the pieces of a plot arc. That would drive me completely Bursar if it happend to an arc I was actually involved with.

And if you write well, and if you're lucky- it has to be both- you get attention from all kinds of people, and you have tremendous fun...

Hmm... well, one hopes one writes well, but I suppose it's a question that can only be answered by trying it. Can you tell if there's a correlation with the characters that people choose? I mean, are there character types that seem reliably to be bad, or good, choices? (Ignoring effect of popularity of the canon story if possible. All the really popular characters are already taken, after all.)

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I can't believe I didn't think of Arya. I'd want to claim her myself, if I thought I was at all cut out for this.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Gah, if you did that I would have to take Jon Snow. And he's all awkward. He's got responsibilities back home and stuff.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

No, I'll leave her to you. I lose interest in games like this too quickly; it's more fun to watch other people play them.

Then again, from what you've said and from what I've seen, this isn't an easy game to keep up with from outside. Hmph.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

If I did play, I'd be carefully adding everything to the pup's memories, so you could follow that way. Still kinda leaning toward 'I don't have time for this' though.