Top Sekrit Option No. 4

I appreciate the post Falk made about the three options that he sees for me going forward with OtherSpace.

In short, they are:

1) Shake things up again.
2) Hand the game over to someone else.
3) Close the game.

I’ve given it a lot of thought during the last week and I’ve reached the conclusion that none of these options addresses the fundamental problem: I miss *enjoying* what I like to do.

The most vocal players on OtherSpace make it clear that they don’t want their corners of the universe messed with anymore. Even just opening the door for them to make their own changes leads to people throwing words back in my mouth about keeping things simpler. If anything, they seem to just want systems fixed and/or finished so that they can plod merrily along with the game they want to play. I don’t suppose I have any room to blame them.

However, that doesn’t solve my problem.

Picking an heir apparent isn’t the answer. We’ve tried it before. It doesn’t work.

Closing the game would do nothing but make people angry. We’re not at that point yet, and I certainly don’t live under the false pretense that if I “can’t have it,” no one can.

So, I’m going with Top Sekrit Option No. 4. It’s a pretty simple option – painless to people who have invested themselves in OtherSpace, creatively interesting and potentially lots of fun for me.

I’ve started development of a modest side project that won’t get any major advertising. It’ll be a small MUSH with web character applications and invitation-only play, minimum age of 18. No badges. No medals. No Twitter feed or Facebook fan page. Just an easy-to-grok theme, story-driven, which won’t be designed to compete with OtherSpace.

I’ll probably have a little more to say about it as work continues on the project, but I’m optimistic that it will help rekindle some of my passion for this storytelling format.

The circle of ennui

Something Chiro wrote in the “Too many doors” post has stuck with me during the last week or so:

“You’re obviously not here for the same reasons we are.”

It’s accurate. When I think about why I started OtherSpace, the reasons are as follows:

* I enjoyed the fast-paced back and forth interaction of collaborative storytelling in a MUSH environment.
* I knew and liked many of the players/staffers and wanted to entertain them and to be entertained by them in return.
* I relished the challenge of building an audience for an original theme RPG.
* I wanted to do this for a living.

Well, look at where we are now:

* The interactions usually aren’t fast-paced anymore.
* Many of the folks that I liked entertaining are gone. Many of the new faces are awesome, but some, let’s face it, we just rub each other the wrong way and that doesn’t make you want to participate in my events anymore than I want to interact with you.
* We reached our popularity peak a long time ago.
* I do this for a living.

This leaves me less motivated, which may lead to more player frustration and boredom – a vicious circle that keeps feeding on itself.

I’m not sure where things go from here.

Too many doors to open

I think there’s just no room in even the above average attention span for a roleplaying MUSH to thrive anymore.

Next week, we celebrate the 12th anniversary of OtherSpace – an evolving collaborative space opera epic that’s been the shared creation of hundreds of participants from all over the world. We still manage to draw 50-60 people on our busiest nights, but the new blood is rare and the veterans just can’t do enough to gain and retain new prospects.

It’s no one’s fault. The world’s just so different these days. Back in the peak of our popularity, the worst distractions that threatened MUSH activity were:

* School/work
* TV shows
* Other text-based games

Now, we’re faced with those distractions, plus:

* Graphical MMORPGs
* Console games
* Smart phone apps
* Hulu
* Streaming Netflix
* Hundreds of cable channels
* Facebook – with Farmville, Castle Age, and Mafia Wars (among other attention funnels)
* Twitter

It’s not that hard to find a few minutes here or there to tend crops or help our friends fight boss monsters in a Facebook game. But who really has the time, energy, attention, and creative drive required to tell a collaborative evolving story?

It takes a special person to invest themselves in the effort of building a living novel, but such people, I think, are just becoming too rare a commodity anymore.

Sad but true: I envision a bigger draw for players to a web-based OtherSpace: Dominion game than we’ll ever see on the story-driven MUSH. It’s unfortunate, but it’s what people have time for. It’s as deep as most people are willing to go.

The age of the MUSH may really be over.

So, let’s assume it’s true. What’s next? Can the form evolve?

We’ve tried to experiment with other options – play-by-post in the forums and the Facebook fan page – but that’s never quite taken off. We’ve seen players start blogs to enhance the storytelling experience beyond the game. Again, they start, but they never really take off. Google Wave? Maybe, but that’s still less than elegant and not wildly popular.

I’ve heard some initial murmurings of a MUSH client for the iPad, but I remain skeptical that it would improve the likelihood of people committing themselves to the effort that’s necessary to create a quality storytelling environment on OtherSpace. It’s far more likely that iPad users would be drawn to apps like Plants vs. Zombies – quick fix, easy to drop, low intensity entertainment.

I’m not yet at the place where I want to call it quits with OtherSpace. However, I do think we might be reaching a point where we have to accept and embrace that the game’s never going to grow significantly and that the generation of players that we’ve got now may be the last of a dying breed.

Monday MUD Day – 3/22/2010

Today’s selections include:

* Diamond MUD
* DC Universe: Legacies of Justice
* Darkover
* The God Wars: War of Legend

Monday MUD Day – 3/1/2010

Today’s selections include:

* Transformers Universe
* Dark Lair
* Cleft of Dimensions
* Ashirion: The Broken Sphere

Thinking About: I can’t hear your typing’s intent

There’s a nasty trap that people who interact in real-time text-based environments can fall into. Even on a MUSH, where people can spend multiple paragraphs setting the scene for what their character is doing and saying, we don’t always do the best job conveying meaning when we type. It’s particularly nettlesome when people are having an out-of-character, player-to-player conversation without any of the aural or visual cues that are normally available with real face-to-face communication.

You may be the most well-intentioned person in the world, but sometimes what you type might be read a totally different way by someone else. Or, you might read something someone else types, make a joke about how it offends you, and then offend them with your behavior. Or, you might be someone like me: You’ve got a reputation for being snarky and cranky, so any time you type ANYTHING on an out-of-character channel, some people will immediately infer a certain tone from it.

And, no, I’m sorry, but and and don’t help. In fact, they will just make it worse, adding new layers of potential offense for people to puzzle over. Is that a snotty wink? Is the poking tongue dismissing me as irrelevant? Is that regular smiley like the kind you see on the face of the fellow with the knife hidden behind his back and ready to strike?

So, the next time you’re thinking about typing something in a text outlet – MSN, Facebook, Twitter, the MUSH – you might do yourself a favor and think about the words you’re using and the intent behind them, and be sure to make that intent abundantly clear.

I’m not saying you should always be nice and polite, though. Fact is, if you muddy the waters too much when you’re TRYING to be a sarcastic son of a bitch, you might miss the mark entirely. Subtle nuances of tone rarely work in real-time text interactions.

Monday MUD Day 2/22/2010

Today’s selections include:

* Rifts: Chronicles of Kingsdale
* Forgotten Dreams: Prelude to Light
* Haelrahv
* Clessidra

Between the Lines: The Lost Missionaries, Part II

Part II of The Lost Missionaries picked up just minutes after the showdown between Jaswinder and Thayndor, with the group setting aside their differences for the time being and delving into the jungle in search of the missing Opodians and the lost rescue party.

In my original vision of this adventure, I had anticipated a more extended period of jungle exploration. However, knowing how some folks felt about each other behind the scenes, I decided it probably wouldn’t be a great idea to prolong the situation any more than necessary. Besides: Encountering trash mobs in the middle of the jungle would just dilute the story that I wanted to craft. Instead, it didn’t take more than a round of poses for the group to come upon a cave entrance flanked by two of the newly discovered “Aukampires.” Razorback also detected noise coming from the direction of the shuttle landing site.

This was soon followed by the first reveal of the evening: The two Aukampires killed the other night? They were back, cranky, and rather persistent about wanting their crystals returned.

Between the Lines: “The Lost Missionaries, Part I”

This event started with a news story earlier in the week about a group of Opodian missionaries who went missing in the jungles of Kamsho while off on a journey to convert a village of Tupai to their faith in the goddess Opodi.

I didn’t specifically plan a time for the event. I had another potential event in mind that would have been a follow-up to the assassination attempt on Marisa, but on Friday evening I was pinged by a player about hunting for the missing Opodians.

So, with just a couple of hours notice, I announced that players who wanted to participate should get to the Kamsho landing pad in Ope’mot. I wasn’t sure how many players we’d get. This was the first Friday night event that I had run in about two years. It turns out: I got plenty. More than enough, really. The initial group consisted of Dean, Razorback, Narai, Jaswinder, Kestrel, Sheppard, Umishi, and Thayndor Zahir. Internet issues knocked Dean out early, but the rest plugged along.

Thayndor was the last to arrive. There was some joking almost immediately on the OOC side of things about everyone conspiring to kill him before the event was over. His creepy ghost uncle, Zolor Zahir, even showed up and made comments about the prospects of his hideous demise. I thought it was just a big joke. Heh. Joke’s on me. We’ll get to that later.

I introduced the gang to their shuttle pilot, Olabn Opo’te. He was an affable Opodian, struggling to learn Terran Standard and mangling it badly, but with much enthusiasm. He made one comment that really had people scratching their heads. If they go back and read carefully, I’m hoping it becomes clear that Olabn said he’d seen them on holovid and wasn’t sure he approved of their Kamir artifact hunting. It seemed so obvious to me at the time. *ducks*

Everything was a weird shade of Predator as the shuttle flew this ragtag group over jungle to a drop zone to start the hunt for the missionaries. After the landing, everyone clambered out and immediately started toward a path leading into the jungle toward the Tupai village. The excitement began behind them, however, aboard the shuttle – now closed – with shadowy figures attacking Olabn. They could hear his desperate screams. They ran back to the shuttle in time for the cargo bay hatch to slide open and reveal my big plot secret of the week: OHSHIT! AUKAMI VAMPIRES! Two of them, dripping in the blood of the late shuttle pilot.

Someone on OtherSpace…

…said this reminded them of me. I laughed.