With the Venice Chronicles Beta out, I thought I’d talk a bit about how it got put together. I’m oing to start with a chat about the online medium.
Those of who’ve been following my thoughts on RPGs know that I think that online roleplaying represent an important “parallel” hobby. People are taking roleplaying and running with it in directions that didn’t really exist before because of the advantages of the online medium. Let’s go over these:
Avatar Embodiment: Though it’s romantic to think about the importance of raw imagination, the ability to completely disconnect your character’s appearance and style from yourself is a huge advantage to those who want it. In chat games this began with the “textual avatar:” a block of descriptive text. With the advent of easy image uploading and web design we’ve moved to self-made graphical avatars. Combined, these two methods create a powerful vision of the character. Not only that, it’s easy to refer back to, where verbal description can twist and change over time in people’s imaginations.
Distant Intimacy: This sounds contradictory, but isn’t. With the strong player/character disconnect, right down to physical location and OOC socializing, there’s a much braver approach to certain themes: sexuality, characters’ personal lives and so on. In the White Wolf chats, this struck me petty strongly, especially when settings designed to support “safer” play sometimes acted against the interests of players exploring these themes. This became apparent after being involved in a scene where a character gave birth. There was a *lot* of handwaving past the setting to make this possible.
Now you do get some cheesy and objectionable things coming out of this, as well as fringe elements like cybersex. But these aren’t flaws, but examples of what the process can support. You can have dumb things in any game, but you can’t have *these* dumb things happen as easily outside of online play, and these dumb things are aspects of things that can be used to construct powerful scenes.
Fluid/Negotiated Spaces: Online play usually falls into a bunch of forums/channels which are easily conceived of as “rooms” — but they don’t have set *spaces*. A room can be a vague physical location, a theme or a class of spaces. Players enter these rough templates and make them their own. The room is the basis for communication, so it always has *some* thing to direct play, even if it’s just the pubs of early Usenet-based play.
Parallel Interaction: Related to this are tools that provide multiple contexts within the same space. It’s easy to label OOC conversations and even take them to a parallel space, allowing people to interact on multiple levels explicitly instead of interrupting. Parallel conversations are extremely useful, especially when it comes to clear communications about scene objectives.
You can also use this to easily provide information on multiple “meta” levels by, for example, posting interior thoughts. This is a matter of choice. Back when I played on other chats I had a “play hygiene” rule where I *never* made interior thoughts exterior, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t benefit from people who didn’t follow that rule.
Next: How we harness these benefits in the Venice Chronicles and how we wanted to go to the next step and allow uses to define their own level of commitment to roleplaying.