unforum

[danteIL]

thebruce is much more reasonable than I am, so ditto to what he said...


However, thinking about it some more, I think that Jane is glossing over the fact that it is extremely well-known that different styles of game play exist, even within a single community. Some players like puzzles; some players like character interaction; some players like constructing a narrative. We know this well and thrive on it, in fact. What enables these different approaches to play together nicely in the same sandbox is the shared understanding that all of these styles have something unique to contribute to any given game. I don't believe that any reasonable person here would ever state that everyone must play the same way. To suggest otherwise seems like a false and rather unfair characterization of the reactions in this thread. Better would be something like: IF YOU'RE GOING TO PLAY DIFFERENT, THAT'S FINE, BUT IF YOU DO THIS IN A WAY THAT INVOLVES OTHERS, LET THEM KNOW.

Also, she seems to be essentializing some set of characteristics in various cultural communities as representing something qualitatively different from anything we've seen before, when I would suggest that the differences that emerge in the Lost Ring are mainly quantitative and structural. Because of linguistic differences, but also because there is a large enough critical mass of players within each community, there is the opportunity for particular modes of gameplay to come to dominate simply because of the contributions of particular players and the fact that interactions within that community can exist relatively independently from parallel communities. My suggested analogy would be "speciation" in the evolutionary sense. All players may start from the same basis, but given the vagaries of language and physical proximity, different groups may evolve their version of the game along different lines. Eventually, these may become different enough that one could reasonably ask whether they are, in the end, the "same game." Along the way, it is a design decision of the PMs whether it is important that all of the players be "on the same page" or not. In the current case, this obviously hasn't been a priority.

The description of the actions of the couberteam sound to me like they were intended to be more in the mode of LARPing -- which is great and I would never tell them not to do that, but I would question whether LARPing and old-school (reactionary, traditional) ARGing can exist within the same game. Or whether they should exist together. I realize that part of the purpose of that blog post was to celebrate the beauty of chaos inherent in chaotic fiction, but confusion is a close cousin of chaos and can cause consternation (can't resist the alliteration).

[Rogi Ocnorb]

[VictorSueiro]

[VictorSueiro]

[ariock]

[jorgeguberte]

This thread will go around and around and around and we will keep fighting each other to see who's right and who's wrong, for...nothing.
I'd rather play than fight.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

[runeix ftlr]

[Khaos]

[xnbomb]

[ariock]

[Khaos]

[ariock]

[Tenchizard]

I wasn't going to post in this thread anymore, but I just want to clarify one thing:
right after taking the blurry pics, I showed them to Monica (I mean in real life, the camera I used is digital so you can preview your pics), and we saw they were very blurry. I suggested her we could send them out "to some friends" (that what I say when talking to an IG character when I mean posting to uF and such), who maybe could help or know something about them, and she agreed (the more help, the better). So when we got home I sent it to the IG group. Someone suggested we could use the fictional character we had created for giving this info out. I even suggested to give another pic which could give more clues of where had it all happened, and Monica told us she liked this idea, as long as the clue was really direct (it was a pic named Dama del Cerro de los Santos, a quick google sends you to Madrid National Archeological Museum), so she gave us her "green light". A few days later, before we could even send this last pic, she told us to speak in uF about all this.

And, again... we were not pretending to be PM. We had decided together with Monica to be a group to support the six. We had decided too, thinking it was a goog idea, to hide it from uF. And I mean, to hide the members and our ultimate purpose of deceiving TheO. For he support mission, we hoped anyone would understand that couberteam is a word's play with coubertine and cover team, and being coubertine the one to support the reborning of the olympic games, we thought the name was ok. And the mails were sent directly by a "Pierre de Coubertine" so association with couberteam was direct. But this mission didn't really "work". The idea was to try to cheer up Ariadne and the six (we sent them mails) and to get more people to cheer them up. We tried to be a bit mysterious. And of course, we had to do this (the mails and such) by ourselves, because as the rest of the tasks in this game, they are not to be done by a PM. What would be the point of Monica giving us ideas if it was not for us to make them real?

[Khaos]

Ok, my turn