It appears I have a lot to learn. Our issues putting this game together, and it's a set of ideas years in the forming, have been around 'will it be fun to play', 'what will the experience of putting stories together be', 'how can we encourage good storytelling in a play experience' and so on. The original birth of the system was as something to support world-building in a writing group I used to run - which contained as many women as men. The issue of gender has literally never come up. We have had women and men alike test the game - both genders have enjoyed it, and that is as far as we have gone in considering this.
With regards to similarities between our system and MU* systems - well absolutely these things fall into the same category of story writing games. I think what we are offering is quite different - it’s got similarities to IF but it’s not a GO NORTH GET LAMP kind of thing, our stories are split into chapters and encounters rather than rooms and objects.
Our living world consists of (hopefully) hundreds of different realities and stories co-existing in flux with each other. A story becomes an instance in an world populated by a great variety of writers. Someone compared this to SKOTOS over on WORA - I think you’ll find it to be a very different experience to that. Part of that is building something designed to appeal to a wider audience - something a little easier to use. We think we’ve built something that will crucially be a different story-telling experience to MUSH - but I guess only time and more testing will tell for sure.
With that said:
Caltha: No doubt all the individual ideas we are offering have been put into place somewhere before - we're hoping we put them together in a novel way that's a lot of fun to play with. Thanks for the links. In terms of scholarly books on the topic - I’d love to hear any recommendations. I’ve been lucky enough to see Sherry Turkle talk on issues surrounding technology but I’ve not read Life on the screen, I will seek it out.
I’m genuinely sorry that our approach to communicating our project disheartens or frustrates. It’s not been our intention to suggest that this is the only way to be creative on the internet. I couldn’t be further from looking down on this kind of activity - the idea that this project connotes that attitude - well clearly we are failing somewhere. How can we do better?
Persephoneflame: Again, the idea that the way we are communicating is sneering at fan communities can only mean we are entirely failing somewhere. Is there a way we can improve? I’d love to put together an update communicating about these issues.
Our misuse of the term slash - it’s been corrected. The question came from someone on Kickstarter and it was, I believe, mostly concerned with young people interacting with adult content - but I can absolutely see the ways in which it was insensitive.
With regard to the history and context: I can see why there is frustration about this. In putting together our Kickstarter copy we felt we had a limited amount of time and space to get people’s attention and we chose the route we did to try to communicate as clearly as possible to as many people as possible.
With regard to female fans: Putting them down couldn’t be further from my\our intentions. Aside from the slash issue where in our language can we rectify this issue?
With regard to the money: We’re a very small enthusiast team working on rent+ramen type money. We’re not using any pre-existing MUD/MUSH code - we’re raising the money to bring a functioning game to the audience who support us, and iterate from there.
I hope I’ve addressed the issues raised - I’m more than happy to keep up the conversation.
Hello
Skywaterblue - thanks for posting this up.
It appears I have a lot to learn. Our issues putting this game together, and it's a set of ideas years in the forming, have been around 'will it be fun to play', 'what will the experience of putting stories together be', 'how can we encourage good storytelling in a play experience' and so on. The original birth of the system was as something to support world-building in a writing group I used to run - which contained as many women as men. The issue of gender has literally never come up. We have had women and men alike test the game - both genders have enjoyed it, and that is as far as we have gone in considering this.
With regards to similarities between our system and MU* systems - well absolutely these things fall into the same category of story writing games. I think what we are offering is quite different - it’s got similarities to IF but it’s not a GO NORTH GET LAMP kind of thing, our stories are split into chapters and encounters rather than rooms and objects.
Our living world consists of (hopefully) hundreds of different realities and stories co-existing in flux with each other. A story becomes an instance in an world populated by a great variety of writers. Someone compared this to SKOTOS over on WORA - I think you’ll find it to be a very different experience to that. Part of that is building something designed to appeal to a wider audience - something a little easier to use. We think we’ve built something that will crucially be a different story-telling experience to MUSH - but I guess only time and more testing will tell for sure.
With that said:
Caltha:
No doubt all the individual ideas we are offering have been put into place somewhere before - we're hoping we put them together in a novel way that's a lot of fun to play with. Thanks for the links. In terms of scholarly books on the topic - I’d love to hear any recommendations. I’ve been lucky enough to see Sherry Turkle talk on issues surrounding technology but I’ve not read Life on the screen, I will seek it out.
I’m genuinely sorry that our approach to communicating our project disheartens or frustrates. It’s not been our intention to suggest that this is the only way to be creative on the internet. I couldn’t be further from looking down on this kind of activity - the idea that this project connotes that attitude - well clearly we are failing somewhere. How can we do better?
Persephoneflame:
Again, the idea that the way we are communicating is sneering at fan communities can only mean we are entirely failing somewhere. Is there a way we can improve? I’d love to put together an update communicating about these issues.
Our misuse of the term slash - it’s been corrected. The question came from someone on Kickstarter and it was, I believe, mostly concerned with young people interacting with adult content - but I can absolutely see the ways in which it was insensitive.
With regard to the history and context: I can see why there is frustration about this. In putting together our Kickstarter copy we felt we had a limited amount of time and space to get people’s attention and we chose the route we did to try to communicate as clearly as possible to as many people as possible.
With regard to female fans: Putting them down couldn’t be further from my\our intentions. Aside from the slash issue where in our language can we rectify this issue?
With regard to the money: We’re a very small enthusiast team working on rent+ramen type money. We’re not using any pre-existing MUD/MUSH code - we’re raising the money to bring a functioning game to the audience who support us, and iterate from there.
I hope I’ve addressed the issues raised - I’m more than happy to keep up the conversation.