unforum

[tygr20]

In the end, doesn't this all boil down to:

This is SpaceBass' house.
Registered or unregistered, you are a guest in his house.
Don't piss on the toilet seat.
If you insist on pissing on the toilet seat, do it somewhere else.

His house, his rules.

[Shadow E. Coyote]

 Will this ever end?

[Shadow E. Coyote]

 I think I have a compromise that will make evryone happy!

[Storm E. Crow]

Still reading the endless threads I've been told to read...

[Storm E. Crow]

New Rooms Make Good Neighbours!

[Euchre]

How's this for simplicity in response to the original post:

Note that we are talking about Chaotic Fiction. The discussions here are supposed to be between real people, with a real intent. Ergo, posting as a fictional element in these forums violates their purpose.

[xnbomb]

Here, I made you your very own sandbox:

http://ununfiction.freeforums.org/

If it doesn't suit you, you could always make your own ... they are free these days.

[SpaceBass]

Re: I think I have a compromise that will make evryone happy

[imbri]

Re: I think I have a compromise that will make evryone happy!

[Rogi Ocnorb]

As space mentioned, this typically crops up when someone new to the genre wants to bull forward on something they only half understand and think that like most places, they can do whatever they like because "Hey, It's the internet and nobody knows who I am, anyway." Poop!, Poop!, Poop!

When it goes south like every other selfish, lazy, ill-conceived pursuit they undertake, they can just bail.
While most of these people do just that and leave us to clean up all their crap, some hang around and write long "intellectual" diatribes on why they aren't responsible for hurting any feelings and that things should be done differently.
"Hey! you can't call me lazy! Look at all the writing I'm doing!"

*wrings mop

If we had an area on these fora setup as you've suggested, the only difference is that we'd now be having this conversation about your failure to use said place.

ETA: And regurgitating the

[Nighthawk]

Wow, somebody's got all the forum admins on edge more than I do! Woohoo!

[natas]

[mapmaker]

I usually only grab on to a tiny bit of a discussion when I chime in, and this is no different. Some of the ARGs I've played have had in-game forums as well as being played out here on the Unfiction forums. Eldritch Errors and Who Is Ben Stove? are what's coming to mind. They've got their pros and cons, and luckily I've never had to be an administrator in them.

One of the nice things about not having in-game forums is you don't have to deal with people going "OMG GUYZ THIS IS NOT REAL UR NOT REAL STOP PRETENDING UR REAL" or trying to hijack the game. It's a little different situation than in LARPing or D&D. Admittedly, I've never LARPed, but I have had some D&D times in the past.

A lot of people want to DM/PM/XM Radio because they have a story to tell. In D&D the DM always has ultimate control, being able to lay down the law because they control encounters and the story - and that power is both implicit and explicit. AFAIK, no player is going to go "hey, I'm DM now, we just ran into a Level 1 kobold with asthma that's carrying 100000 gold pieces" and expect anyone to go along with him.

But in an ARG, that situation is different. Due to the nature of the curtain, there has to be some trust that no one's going to try and piss on the PM's storytelling. Let me say of course that in some cases the PM will be fine with that, and if someone clears things with the PM beforehand, that's fine. And of course, doing crazy or unexpected things within the context of the story is OK - betraying the Sleeping Princess, betraying the rest of your party to side with the Evil Vizier, what have you. But if you try to usurp the PM, it just sort of gets into this annoying clash of authors, leading to upset players and hurt feelings.

Anyway, back to the situation at hand. It's already been said, but I figure I might as well chime in. I like Unfiction the way it is. No in-game posting, that's the way it is, that's fine with me. There are slippery slope arguments that could be made, but I guess the key to me is "why bother?" It's not that I'm not for "advancing" the genre. It's just that there are other ways to do it. Unfiction has always been a good "safe" area. If that's the way people like it, why change it?

If you wanted to create a game where there are no safe areas - one that's fully immersed, so to speak - that's going to be a challenge no matter how you slice it, because if you're doing a good job, chances are the game will be traced to its puppetmasters (I know of very, very few popular and convincing games that have managed to keep its PMs an iron-clad secret) and once that happens anyone who wants to have a "safe" space can just go create it on their own. I guess ultimately anyone who wants to be fully immersed will be, and anyone who doesn't won't be. What Unfiction does is sort of irrelevant to that end.

In Eldritch I've seen people who have kind of crept towards the Way-Too-Immersed-For-Me line, even though Unfiction was always there. Part of that has to do with the existence of the in-game forums. So I dunno, if you have a game that benefits from an in-game forum, then you make an in-game forum. Not hard to do, it seems. I dunno if anyone mentioned it, but there was a "room" (another "competing" ARG forum) like that you're mentioning called Immersion Unlimited. It died due to lack of activity before I arrived on the scene.

[FacianeA]

Alright. I finally finished reading all of this. Now, I would like to talk about a few things.

It's starting to feel to me like it's pretty much given that changing the TOS isn't even a real thing. There's no real point to it anyway. This isn't a public forum and as such, there's no responsibility to accommodate such a thing anyway.

Next, I wanna assert that this does not by any means imply that I am even hinting at a condemnation of a more immersive style of play. However, this doesn't seem to be what this about either. What it has instead become, at least how I'm seeing it, is a debate over like, where morals come into the field of alternate reality game design.

Puppet Master, as a term, I have always viewed as valid. Of course, I have always seen it as a reference to pulling the strings of the puppets that are characters in the games, rather than like, controlling the destinies of players like a megalomaniacal super-genius. Along these lines, I would like to talk about what responsibilities this role, at least to me, do and do not bring.

Firstly, I think there is a measure of trust that players put in PM's that has to with the promise that they will be taken care of as a result of committing to the fiction of the game world presented. I feel like it's the primary goal of a PM to deliver on this world, and to do their best to present their vision while simultaneously trying their hardest not to let their audience down. After all, if the audience doesn't enjoy it, what's the point?

Anyway, the way PM's do this is by creating two things: rules and stories. This, I believe is a result of Alternate Reality Games being a sort of narrative gameplay combo that's essentially unique in the world of entertainment. This uniqueness comes from the next thing PM's are responsible for providing, which is the ability for player input to directly affect the game's narrative outcome, rather than just rewarding them with a win or a loss.

This "power of the player" is usually a main source of entertainment for players, and one thing PM's are DEFINITELY NOT meant to do is betray that trust. Lying in order to create the illusion of this power is lazy and unethical, and contrary to progress in this genre.

Possible abuse of this dynamic is not limited to the PM's, however. When a player tries to, in their quest to impact the narrative, begins to wrest control away from the PM's and start controlling the "puppets" themselves, it becomes a gamejack. This is undoubtably an interesting phenomenon, but attempting to rationalize it as a "next step" in gameplay/design dynamics, I feel, is incorrect and unfair to both players, who are now essentially just being tricked and losing out on an experience they signed up for in favor of something different, and the PM's themselves, who have in most cases worked incredibly hard, only to see it all deliberately taken from them, rather than naturally evolve in line with their vision.

Another thing that gamejacking does is take away all the rules, as explained very clearly by Faeryqueen21 a ways back in this very discussion with her Tag analogy. How can anything be categorized as a game when the rules have no weight? It's not even possible to consider games as something to be designed if you can just opt to not follow the rules. It literally, if gamejacking is accepted as part of the game, takes control away from everyone, makes everyone on Earth unwitting possible players, and renders the very existence of the game moot.

So that's what I'm gonna say. Don't steal, don't lie, and go rules.

No disrespect to anyone by the way. I didn't intend for any of this to be backhanded, and certainly don't pretend that this is how things definitively are, rather just how I see it. I love everything about everyone who's ever been on this forum, and just want to do everything I can to make sure that the concepts discussed, presented, and furthered in this space over the years continue to grow and evolve.

[Star Spider]

COOKIE!