When Google Wave was first announced I (like probably every other tech-minded gamer) immediately started seeing its possibility as a play-by-chat medium. Unfortunately, that thought took a back seat to other more pressing concerns, even after I got my own invite to the preview.
That all changed when Robin D. Laws posted on his blog some thoughts about the whole shebang. Ignoring his whining about technology moving too quickly for him (keeping up is still optional; people still play RPGs face to face), he links to a couple of good articles.
First of all, there’s the Ars Technica article which concludes it’s a bit of a chaotic mess. The reason for this is that everything’s still fairly primitive right now. Rules-heavy RPGs require tools like random number generators (dice) to keep arbitration fair and honest, and even rules-light games require multiple waves for different channels of information:
- Out of character
- In character
- Character sheets & bios
This all really requires a fair amount of discipline. I ran a PBEM Call of Cthulhu game a long while back and the book keeping really held us back.
The second article is a better case study. Recognising that a text-heavy game such as Trail of Cthulhu is probably one of the better places to start WaveGaming, he demonstrates a method that emulates screenwriting to emphasise character names, actions, and outcomes. I like the idea (even if I still dislike ToC), and the use of editing posts and embedded dice rolling to make the wave readible.
Given that I am doing a lot of gaming at the moment, and not everybody’s on Wave yet, I don’t think I’ll explore the idea right away myself. What are your play-by-post experiences like? Would you be willing to try Wave?
2 replies on “Google Wave and Gaming”
It’s probably more condusive to what fandom refers to as role-playing games which is pretty much simply communal storytelling where each players control specific characters. the rules often look like this.
It involves lots of fanfiction style text and most have no interest in dice. I tend not to join these as I’m not willing to commit to the vast amount of writing required.
The Wave seems almost perfect for that style of play.
That’s exactly the kind of thing that it would be good for right now. In the future, I can see it becoming more useful as people get access to the programming interfaces so we can have dice rollers, mapping, character sheets, and combat trackers all built in.