City of IF

[Fats_Masterson]

This is something kind of off topic, but I've always thought that fable are a great idea but there are very few different ways to spend them. I think wee should contemplate making more uses for fables. If it is possible.

Something like being able to buy your own Arena Team, or more high profile auctions, and perhaps some low fable auctions for people not as comfortable as Cren or Zephyr.

I myself am thinking about buying a couple of copies of Crens books and putting them up for auction.

I also think it might be an idea to create, maybe not a new forum but a place where we can show off, and collect Multi-Character Stories like Wrath and Superhuman.

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[Key]

Zephyr wrote: RPG’s come in many shapes and forms and I think the SG is one of them, but there’s still a lot of possible new ways for that to manifest. I don’t think its negative for us to explore those new ways. What I found initially disappointing about the SG was that it really relied too much on the author’s imagination alone, that the author could force you down a path despite the vote. This makes sense that sometimes it has to be this way, but not having a ‘random’ element to whether a character succeeds or fails was a shortcoming to the SG format. It also denied players the ego gratification of seeing their own character develop. Still, SG is just a particular shade between RPG and novel, and has its own place. What we need to find is what makes an SG so popular that it becomes more than a fancy but a phenomenon. THEN, IF will take off. It will take time for this to happen, but the cat’s out of the bag now, and I’m sure, with patience, it WILL happen.

Good thoughts. Let me say a little more about why I was making a distinction between RP-like storygames vs. traditional SG in the context of IF.

I believed when I founded IF and I still believe that there is a huge and compelling desire out there for interactive storytelling. I think RPing (and by that I mean traditional tabletop RPs) meet this need to some extent, which is why they have the popularity that they do, but they fail in some key ways. I talk more about that in the City of IF story, but I'll abbreviate that discussion here just by saying that interactive storytelling via RP games doesn't scale.

By that I mean that running a roleplaying campaign with four or five players works, eight to ten players is stretching it, and anything more tends to fall apart. Non-interactive stories like books or a movies could easily be experienced by a hundred, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand people, but RP is limited to a small number per story (in the essay I describe why this limit is bad for RP as an art form, and what are some other attempts, such as MMORPGs, to get around it).

Storygaming was my attempt to get around this limit. It's true that in traditional SG, you lose the personal investment in (and control of) a character; what you gain in return is the ability for many more people to play a particular storygame, and for a particular interactive experience to (in theory) scale to a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand participants. And scaling in that way I believed would have a lot of the benefits that come with a mass audience.

If you tweak storygaming back in the direction of RP, and have a character for each player (like with Superhuman and Wrath), you run into the same tradeoff: the story is more interactive and compelling in certain ways, but you run into a limit of how many people you can scale to. Since we've never had a hundred people playing any storygame, traditional or no, this is really more of a theoretical disadvantage than a real one. But it's what I was thinking of when I raised this issue, and why I brought it up in the context of figuring out where we want to take the City.

Quote: Obviously, there’s some of us who feel this is the bee’s knees, and if there’s a few of us, there’s thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of potential Ifians out there.

That may well be true. But my initial goal for IF was not to have a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand IFians, but to have a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand IFians playing the same storygame.

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Yes, I agree with all of that, and didn't mean to knock Superhuman or other RP storygames.

Some good food for thought.

:-)