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Too Much Backstory?

[Ehsan]

I think it ultimately comes down to you to find the perfect balance. For me personally there's no such thing as too much back-story because it just creates greater immersion.

The point you have to watch for though is translating the back-story into a presentable form for the players. Regardless of how much you have already written, when it comes time to turn it into content you might find that it requires even more work. For example consider if you wrote the educational history of a character. If you're going for website breadth you might represent that with a website for every educational institution they went to and the accompanying content, graphics, and code for each. If you're going for an in-depth blog you might have to write entries dating 10 years back.

If you do manage to create all that content, then you have to focus issue of guiding the players to the main trail. Updating specific content and reacting to player interaction with the game universe will help players determine which areas to focus on, and understand that other areas are just filler as they have not made any actionable difference to the game.

As you run the game, being a PM becomes an interactive and iterative process. You'll have 90% of the work already done, but you'll write another 90% after you launch (yeah I'm 80% outside of a full circle, that's how hard it is ). It ultimately comes down to how you shape the players' expectations and guide them through the main trail.

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[rowan]

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[krystyn]

I think backstory can also be formed to fit the sort of experience you're hoping the audience will get - in other words, less can be more.

In situations where WHO your characters are, and HOW they relate to each other is a big mystery, keeping the backstory minimal (while still providing enough content to keep people engaged) can be really effective. Players will likely spend a good amount of time trying to fill in the gaps, which can have a similar effect to the one Rowan mentioned above, in that they can feel closer to the characters, because they've invested so much time and thought over what might have happened, and what is happening in the present moment of the game.

It's tricky, though: you don't want to be stingy, or deliberately obtuse, just for the sake of being mysterious. You also don't really want to leave too many gaps where YOU don't know the informational filler - having internal consistency is just as important in an ARG as it is in a novel or screenplay. Immersive fiction can be very exciting and unpredictable, but cultivating trust in the story and the details can be an incredible boon to your game's playerbase.

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Ah! This comment really got me thinking.

[Phaedra]

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[Phaedra]

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[Phaedra]

[krystyn]

[MageSteff]

Even if the players never see 99% of your backstory it is important to think about it and talk about it to your assisting PMs.
Please note I can only really talk about Orbital Colony that I helped PM, but to me the back story and fleshing out the background scenery helped when I was in live chat sessions so I didn't have to think about the answers, I knew the answers because of the surrounding information I had. It also meant that other PMs could fill in on blog entries and such when needed, because they had the same information I had. For example, we had a bit where Professor Bronco had stuffed his favorite cat when it died and had it sitting on a desk somewhere. I don't think we ever actually used that bit of information but it helped us to set the mood when other characters were describing him, because they had seen the cat! Useless trivia, but it helped set the feeling of just what kind of a adversary we had. Background can show up in the oddest places as well, an offhand comment in an e-mail exchange between charaters, used as part of a larger puzzle, and to just expand the horizon in the game universe.

I like knowing that the characters have more to them than what I can see, it makes them feel more three dimentional and not so much a cardboad cut out.