unforum

[rose]

how about: If you use the relative anonymity here for fraud - in the sense of pretending to be a player when you are actually a PM - you and your game will lose the trust of the players. And, if your players don't trust you, your game isn't going to work.

edit - Now that I think about this some more, perhaps that comes across as too threatening? There must be a better way to explain this - perhaps in terms of collective intelligence? That is: each individual matters to the work of the group and trust among individuals is essential for the group to function?

I suppose it goes to an issue of transparency. If I play a game, like Monster Hunters Club, Who is Benjamin Stove or Art of the Heist, on an in-game forum, then I am not surprised to see characters posting there. In the story, the characters run the in-game website and forum, so they could be expected to post there.

[sixsidedsquare]

I've got another sort of in game perspective to look at this from. If you take everything to be part of the game world, including unfiction, then really unfiction is just another forum site on the internet. But as it is a normal forum, it still has its own mods and 'rules' these mods enforce. So even if it is completely 'in character' for a character to post on unfiction, it is completely 'in character' for the mods to lock the thread and tell them to go away. It's just the way this site is run, there's no changing that.

Along the same sort of ideas, characters from the game reading unfiction and using this information to their advantage can only really be stopped by the players making their own secret locked forum or some such thing. But forcing the players to do this dramatically decreases the player base by making it harder for people to 'jump in' or even just lurk (as so many of us do). Of course you may be wanting to go for this sort of thing with a game, Neurocam has done this sort if thing very well, but I've always seen Neurocam as more of the LARP of the ARG world. It takes a certain kind of person to play these sorts of games, a much narrower band in the spectrum of people that are interested by Alternate Reality Games.

Summing up in a more out of game way, just because something is pretending to be real doesn't mean the players have to pretend all the time as well. Without somewhere for people to be free to talk about the game as a game, what you have is more akin to a LARP. If you do try to mix the characters in with out of game discussion, the characters would need to take offence at this and you'd just end up with a mess and less room for players to enjoy the greater aspects of the game. Ignoring unfiction gives the players somewhere they can freely discuss things and collaborate better, and just makes things easier for all parties involved.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

CSI: unfiction

[FLmutant]

Rogi, I really like that metaphor you're playing with. I'm not sure I'd have used the law enforcement metaphor (as it implies a certain authority or resistence to anyone putting on a badge), but I've used forensic as way to describe the storytelling for a while (which is in the same neighborhood.)

Maybe there is an "uncontaminated laboratory for the forensics team" metaphor there somewhere that's similar? A non-metaphoric answer is always better than a metaphoric one, but a non-metaphic one followed by a tight one-sentence metaphor might produce a concept like TINAG that encapsulates some complexity and nuance.

[Phaedra]

[Giskard]