Captain McGrandpa

It started when GameTap announced an upcomming GameTap Original: Captain McGrandpa -- Memory of the Forgotten. Touted as a multiplayer adventure game, and allowing an unlimited number of players to shape the world, it looked too good to be true. Slated for release on April 1, it was an obvious April Fool's gag. Go check the game listing, especially the instructions section, if you have any doubts. But it was what GameTap did, that makes it worth checking out.

I missed the actual game, and I'm kind of sorry I did. It looks like it was fun to play.

Organized and run by GameTap staff member TheRedEye, Captain McGrandpa really was a multiplayer adventure game. Hearkening back to the text adventures of old, TheRedEye narrated a real-time story. Over the period of 8 hours the forum members posted commands and he would use those commands to write the next part of the game/story.

You can read through the game log here (at least for now).
And you can read the Postmortem here.

I encourage you to take a little time, if you have it, to read through how the game went. It was rather interesting. He started the game with only a rough outline of starting areas and characters. The rest of the game, including the ending, was improvised as users provided commands. This did make advancing the game a little difficult, but fortunately he was able to see his way through.

Now, I'm not suggesting that improvisation was bad. In fact, just the opposite, I think it was the key to the game's success. But early on, I did feel the pressures of the game not having a definitive end. Fortunately, about halfway through, I saw a clear path toward the game's solution, which was inspired by items and situations created on-the-fly by our users. I promised that the users would shape the world around them in real-time, and that was accurate.

What I find most interesting is the community's initial reactions, and how they were able to get somewhat organized over time. Being put forward as an April Fool's joke I think had some initial detrimental effects, as people probably dismissed it as a gag and didn't realize that there was actually a heartfelt attempt to create a story going on. This raised a little bit of disdain from some people hoping to replace their dying Uru. However, some people ran with the gag and began to explore the story offered to them.

This led to more people realizing that they really were exploring something, and affecting how the story was turning out. Once that happened, you can see that more people start jumping in with commands and a little bit of confusion and argument crops up about what should be happening. However, with a little nudging from TheRedEye, the community started to work together. Some people started tracking inventory, some were keeping track of conversations, and overall, the game started going in a single direction.

Occasionally griefers got the better of the game and, in true forum fashion, would post ridiculous or counter productive commands. Well, perhaps they weren't really griefers. I can remember playing text adventures and trying ridiculous things to see what the parser would say. The advantage to having a human narrator is that even these out of the box commands resulted in interesting things happening. Even the few times that the game ended because of them.

Over all, I am sorry that I missed the chance to participate in this game and story experiment. I whole heartedly hope that they try something like this again. In fact, I'd love to do something like this myself. It has sparked a couple of neat ideas at least. If you know anyone who knows how to write Facebook apps, I'd like to speak with them.

Gaming Wikipedia

Wikipedia works pretty well when you are popular, established, and provable. It works, with a fair degree of success, for things like games, TV, books, medical terms, and even politics, debates, and history. Of course it fails as a system of information cataloging on a much broader scale. Which makes it useless as a source of information. By design it cannot even be trusted as a reliable source. In fact, it has more elements of social game than serious reference about it.

Take for instance Wikipedia's user structure. A large user base accesses information via the free and open portals. This information is easily searched and accessed by the public with no restriction. The information is provided by a content generating subset of the total user community. This subset is primarily responsible for addition of content, modification and editing of content, and the discussion and possible nomination for deletion of content. Of that subset, a smaller set of administrators determine final importance of content and can subsequently delete content not deemed significant.

So, while a lot of people (including myself) rely on Wikipedia for information, trivia, insight, and source points for further research, it by design will only ever cater towards the desires of the minority of content creators and managers. While major topics of interest can be easily covered, it lacks the agility and finesse to tackle topics of wide controversy or emerging content. Even if something is verifiable as information, written in a neutral form, and conforms to the other content rules, it can still be removed if a vocal minority of active players deem it insignificant.

This has cropped up most significantly (for me, at least) in the area of Webcomics. For more than two decades intrepid artists have been creating comic content and publishing via various forms of distributed network communication, even prior to the popularized internet. There are hundreds, nay thousands, of comics in constant inception, production, hiatus, or archival states. Many consistent comics have readerships in the thousands themselves. Each of these comics have histories, characters, story lines, and other verifiable data associated with them. Data that could be collected and entered into Wikipedia.

Except that since the vocal minority of players and administrators consider many of these comics unknown or insignificant they are removed from the content base. In fact, the social bias of the minority is adversely affecting the ability for webcomics to enter the wiki-world and become standard and significant. This feedback loop leads the wiki system to a state of game-ability. If one player was intent enough, they could significantly alter or delete an entry based on spurious information by playing to the bias or ignorance of the minority.

The proof is here: http://www.halfpixel.com/2007/02/15/delete-wikipedia/

As it turns out, it’s not hard to get something deleted from Wikipedia, especially if it’s on some ice-blasted, barren frontier land on the internet like webcomics, where no one really knows what’s important and what isn’t, and no one really cares to make sure. That’s pretty goddamn weak.

The feedback of the system leads it to a game of social ladder-climbing and self-important watchdogging. New players interested in adding content have to butt heads with established players who can gainsay information based on rank and community influence. Griefing even rears its ugly head, with users who are dedicated to causing damage, inciting argument, and establishing personal prestige. Articles about arguably insignificant TV, Sci-Fi, fantasy, game, and movie trivia are widely available and strongly supported by the vocal few while fresh content trying to gain a foothold in the larger consciousness is shoved aside as weak and ill-defined.

How could the game be changed to encourage unbiased, factual, and complete information from all areas of interest? How could the game be changed to respect and support expert knowledge (another large wiki-complaint)? How could the game be changed to draw a larger percentage of the participating players into creating and managing interesting content without needing to be obsessive about editing? How can we make Wikipedia a better social knowledge game?