Next Gen RPGs
Between the CCP/White Wolf announcement and the obvious rise of e-publishing as a vital component in the industry it’s time to ask: What should electronically delivered tabletop RPGs look like?
The Current Formula
Electronic implementation is currently a user-organized exploit of current cheap technologies. You could express it this way:
Hardware + PDF + Native Applications + Web Tools + Community = Tabletop Simulation
Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this model:
It isn’t integrated. Even DDI is a jungle of web apps and PDFs that require individual kludging to wrestle into an easy process. My DM Steve has a DDI subscription and campaign notes in Word. As far as I can tell his processes uses DDI for prep and community insights but it doesn’t have much of a table presence. If it did, he’d be switching back and forth.
Steve doesn’t use electronic dice. I do, using an iPod Touch app. I also use the Touch to share relevant media from the Star Wars setting. I showed them a picture of The Force Unleashed’s PROXY when it joined the party, for example. It’s still clumsy, and I spend about 75% of my time using paper.
It aims low. Theoretically, GMs should be able to show rich media applications with a touch. Rules documents should be extensively hyperlinked, including links to FAQs, tutorials and community feedback. All of this is possible with current technology. Furthermore, PDFs are too wedded to the illusion of paper. Why can’t I have continuous scrolling for one big page, with page markers unobtrusively popping up to let me know my progress? Why can’t I get rid of unwanted art, or change its size and location? Why can’t I make a character as a read character creation rules? Why aren’t there a dozen characters available at a click?
It’s a slave to the tabletop concept. A new medium should inspire a new kind of game. Fandom RPGs already show us the way by building play into the community portal. that I suspect many companies are boldly striding toward dead ends by trying to simulate the tabletop on whatever technology looks cool and trendy.
For example, I’ve read a lot of dubious stuff about using augmented reality to create a virtual game table. Are five guys really going to squint through iPhones to look at a phantom battle map? Plus, even though I loved the demo too, the recent hype around using Surface as a game table disguises its impracticality. Even though we have desktop multitouch now we don’t have cheap, rugged Surface style tables, and won’t get them for a while yet (Surface machines cost about $14,000 now – drop it by half every 18 months and we’re talking about four or five years for viable consumer versions). Smarter, more practical ways to take RPGs in truly innovative directions are out there.
The New Formula
Instead of talking about how we’ll use sexy-trendy tech to replicate the offline gaming environment, let’s put together a new formula informed by the real potential of technologies that are going to be widely adopted:
Couch Computing + Cloud Portal = Integrated Gaming Environment
Now, to break down each component:
Couch Computing: The big trend in consumer computing right now lies in multitouch interfaces wedded to OLED and e-ink screens that are either built into tablet computers, or into laptops that easily configure into tablets. The rumored Apple tablet isn’t the only game in town, either. Nvidia’s Tegra chip is due to launch in at least one tablet. For those willing to navigate the chaotic Shenzhen OEM market, cheap resistive tablets are already available. These “couch computers” won’t draw users away from play with a clumsy interface, provided they host the right tools.
Cloud Portal: If we’re going to drop the physical book, why stick with the illusion of a book? I can visualize an interface that lets me look at the rules in “book mode,” but will also give me one touch access to a dice roller, character generator, wiki and community, all laid out in one window, not several. We can achieve this by using the browser as our primary way to interact with content. This is something folks partially kludge right now with tabbed browsing and online SRDs, but we’ll be able to take it a step further once browsers make the jump to HTML5, which will display rich content without needing plugins and support offline access to web resources.
Integrated Gaming Environment: When I fetch information from the cloud, summon, mash and dismiss elements at will, and jump straight to community content without tabs and self-bookmarking, it means the game becomes a place instead of an artifact. This place includes community forums, blogs, character databases and campaign wikis. My players know where to go to either continue the game of the table or run new games in a shared setting. This environment should be designed to capture the bulk of the player base not only because it’s where my game comes from, but because the features are attractive in of themselves. Players become interest groups within a bigger community and can opt for any level of interaction they want. Beyond these traditional-style groups, the community should also be able to self-organize massive multiplayer games.
The next time I talk about this I’m going to throw up a few diagrams to butter explain what I’m talking about. For now, take a look at Wired‘s tablet concept:
. . . and Time’s (with Sports Illustrated):
[...] been almost a year since I first asked this question of my gaming group, and Malcolm Sheppard’s new post just reminded me that I should be asking all of [...]
I can definitely see better gaming ebooks, with embeded character sheets and dice rollers, but I wonder about their utility. Essentially everyone has a mobile phone, and in a couple of years almost every gamer will have a smartphone, but it’s far from clear that they will all have computer tablets. I wonder how many of them will still be reading gaming books on laptops or dedicated ebook readers. Web tablets are a tiny market currently, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that they will ever be more than that.
Looking at this from another perspective, tabletop gaming is an in-person social activity, and while giving the GM the capability to display images, IC documents, and suchlike to players is very nice indeed, I’m not certain that a vision of the GM and all players crouched over their web tablets is working to the strengths of in-person gaming, since that separates people rather than bringing them together.
OTOH, pico projectors are starting to get big, and they go on phones (or can be plugged into one), so the likelihood of them being actually popular is much higher. So, you have a GM displaying maps, images, documents, and suchlike on a screen or wall for everyone to see together, rather than having separate web tablets separate the players and the GM from each other.
The big difference now is that multitouch is native to Windows 7 and high quality touchscreens aren’t expensive any more. The tablet form factor doesn’t create any more of a barrier to interacting than a piece of paper, and in many ways is less intrusive than hard copy. Keep in mind, also, that I picked this one because universal adoption isn’t necessary – I don’t put a high priority on ad hoc networking between devices, for example.
Previously, the main barriers have been bad or expensive touchscreens, unnatural gestures and the need to use spotty functions of the OS or specialized software. The technology and anticipated price point are right, and record-breaking Kindle and Nook orders mean that style of interacting with content is being broadly accepted.
Pico projectors are interesting and I’ve been following them ever since phones with them were unveiled earlier this year (one of my clients requires me to keep abreast of wireless tech stuff).
This is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. PDF is a terrible medium for this sort of thing and I’m glad so many people are thinking about how to move past it.
I can certainly imagine why you might not be planning on getting into it, but I’d love to see you talk about how you take the step into making money on this.
Well, the big problem is that this won’t be cheap. The current hack exists in part because it’s influenced by the solutions developed by software pirates. Getting past that requires a serious up front investment to develop the interface. I don’t have that skill or money. Monetizing this is a whole post in of itself that I hope to tackle at some point.
An interesting way of seeing technology and social events come together Malcolm, but a lot of this is just a change in technology to present media, not much different than the old S3 module that actually provided flipbook style pictures of what you could see when you were in certain areas, as opposed to now a GM popping the projector on to show the same slide on the wall, as opposed to on paper.
I could see the augmented reality tools being used in a larp, more than a tabletop game, but I have been looking at how to use the Smartboards we have in schools as a gaming tool, but i haven’t got the cash to bring one home, yet, but i keep hoping.
also – does Steve actually do prep?
He does more prep than me:-) Anyway, once I throw a diagram up of the kid of UI I’m thinking of it should make some things clearer.
[...] The Post I Wish I Had Written… Damn, this guy’s good. [...]
@Bark: check http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/
It’s a DIY SmartBoard for the price of a Wii remote and a laser pointer.
@admin: love the post have been thinking about a few of these points in the last few months but you articulated them much better than I could have. Thanks for the post.
Also, holy shit! Really? White text on red. White text on black. And white text on white! Come on. For someone so up on tech get with the 21st century on web design. Hell, meet us in 1995. Most people knew better than white on black by then. It burns! It burns!
It’s an issue with the theme settings. Well, that and me being a tad too lazy and busy to fix it. I’ll get around to it at some point – promise!
I have a hard time envisioning myself ever wanting to play tabletop games with rich media texts or electronic aids.
Part of it is a tactile/kinesthetic preference on my part, but I also have a hard time believing technological gadgets will ever have interfaces elegant enough to contribute unobtrusively to the flow of play. There’s always going to be problems with clicking or finger-swiping through slides too quickly or fumbling around looking for the correct file.
@Tyler – don’t you think there can be a way to merge the two? I don’t allow laptops at my game table, but that’s because they’re a distraction. If there was a way of having both the tactile/paper input as well as the electronic, then this might be a different thing.
In a way, I think the “inputs” (paper, real dice, emails about things, visual images) and the game “space” (the campaign world) shouldn’t matter. The question is managing those inputs into the space and providing the outputs in a way that everyone enjoys.
Can I haz holodecks now?
A few quibbles:
These solutions require gaming companies who are a)web-savvy, b)tech-savvy, c)able to drop the capital on R&D to make this happen, d)able to re-design their internal processes to move content from creator to editor to layout to website effectively, and e)still produce good games. Not likely to happen. Even the 300-lb. gorilla of WotC found that integrating web 2.0 and gaming was a very big bite to chew all at once. DDI is nowhere close to where the marketers were telling us it was going to be.
This also pre-supposes that a significant fraction of the game’s market wants their games delivered this way. I still see huge pushback in forums against the PDF format. And even among people who like the convenience of buying PDF, they often will print out the book to carry with them. I think it’s going to be two years minimum before we can see real, monetizable numbers of gamers interested in computer-augmented tabletop gaming. (Though, I think there is already a core of gamers interested enough in tools to get the tabletop feel with players online that virtual tabletop software is a viable market.)
One of the big advantages of PDFs is precisely that they don’t change the underlying paradigm. Books are still the basic units (even if we are seeing some cheap PDFs that are little more than expanded magazine articles). They are still monetized the same way. They are still written, edited, and laid out the same way.
I think that it would take a brand new company to overthrow that paradigm. You would need to design your internal processes from the ground up to emphasize flexible content delivery with quick turn-around. The standard editor-writer relationship isn’t going to be enough.
You will also need to add personnel to the equation specifically to maximize the potential of your web presence. And I’m not just talking a guy who is pretty snazzy at WordPress themes and knows how to install and moderate a forum. Some of the interactions you are talking about are very easy to do half-assed, but very hard to do well. And highly skilled personnel like that aren’t likely to want to work for the peanuts you get at a game company.
Especially because of my next point. You are going to need serious full-time staff to pull this off. Most game companies today have maybe one or two full time staffers, and the rest also maintain day jobs (or also write a considerable amount for other companies). For the kind of responsive, interactive content delivery system you are describing, you need the authors to be part of the online community. It won’t be enough to drop off your 10K words and move on to the next contract. You will need to continue to support your work, more like an application than a book. That makes using freelancers awkward, and probably more expensive. It’s going to be much better for the paradigm to use a stable of dedicated writers (and other content producers) that also engage the user community as part of their job. That’s not going to be cheap (by current game company standards).
This kind of stuff always sounds so easy and obvious when you lay it out in broad strokes. But the devil is in the details. And, as I mentioned before, it would be very easy to do half-assed (as WotC demonstrated with their initial fumblings with DDI). It would be very difficult, and very expensive, to do well.
It would be a huge challenge and admittedly may be a bit *too* forward looking. This is something I plan on talking about in the future.
[...] Over at Mob United, Malcolm Sheppard talks “next-gen” RPG experiences, and while perfectly awesome a notion, I can’t help but look down at my little iPhone buddy [...]
Filthy lies! I don’t have DDI. I do all my stuff in my head or using a calculator. Though I’m sure it would be easier to make monsters with the monster maker, I pay too many “monthly” subscriptions as it is.
[...] has major implications for electronic tools in tabletop RPGs, a topic I’ve blogged about here and here. As I cover the tech beat for one of my freelancing clients none of this was too [...]