Future Enhancements

This page lists enhancements to the game or the Space that should be addressed after it runs.

How to Run

We should have a page on how to run this game, including the casting process, what to print, and so on.

Emotional Weight

Comment from Lisa Lassner:
Duncan did the whole group a big favor I feel by doing his eulogy/stump speech so early. For those of us who had mostly angst as a plot, getting up the emotional energy to be depressed cold was hard, but his stump speech allowed us to get angry at him, which was easy to convert into sadness.
I don't know if the best way to make sure this happens in future runs is to make sure that his character does a similar thing early on, or to maybe do a political ad on gun access early, but either way, it really helped me and I think the others who were trying to become unhappy.
Dan suggests:
Early trigger on that one's not so hard - envelope that says "open when you see a reporter with a camera show up" and play on the character's need to get some free air time; an NPC PR minion that points out the same; a NPC camera person asking for a statement...

CUVC vs. VCU

C Nikolaus and Seamus went to City University of Violet City; the upper-crust types all went to the sub-Ivy League Violet City university. We should play with this, and see about introducing some old rivalry between the schools.

Email

We introduced Roger's email account for the first run, so that the detectives and/or Ainsley can get into it and mine it for info. But this is actually a nice mechanic, and one we could use more generally. How about we give email access to everybody? With modern smartphones, it might even be useful, and with Querki it's pretty easy.
To make this work better, it would be helpful to have a proper DateTime type for the timestamps on the emails.

Grief Counselor

In the first run, Dan got pulled in as an NPC grief counselor from a local hospital. This proved to be a pretty good character, and should be considered a future archetype.

Romance Casting

The Characters should have a bi-directional Link Property for Relationships. (Once we have bi-directional links.) The Character to Player possible castings page should use this, plus the questions about romance and homosexuality, plus player preferred gender, to filter possible casting of those roles. This is actually a very strong filter, and it is quite possible that some runs might require removing a romance plot or two if there aren't sufficient options!

Use Real Media

Suggestion from Heather:
I don't entirely know what this looks like yet, but I'd like to get some more multimedia experience involved. Build at least a TV screen/monitor set piece even if it's only out of cardboard, for a more distinct visual and space than miming it. Have a tablet or two available through the GMs for whatever random thing needs it, like when we played that song for the political ad.
This is partly player randomness and partly not pushing it more as a mechanism, I think, but it felt like the level of media involvement, including virality, was not true to modern life, partly due to the chaos of the tight room size. It was totally unrealistic to me for instance that the blogger's "post" was only seen by the people who happened to look his way at that moment; I wished instantly afterward that I'd recorded it on my tablet to enable simulating its spread. I'm still slightly regretting not running with my thought of having a hashtag.
I don't want the tech to distract from the play, I just noticed the absence of its realistic use. Some of this is just a greater change in paradigms for playing modern day games overall - for instance, in my Saturday night HS reunion game, we as players had a very sudden realization that no one, including the GM, seemed to have taken the time to think through in advance whether or how the characters would have been connecting electronically leading up to the game.
Most characters in the game with a smartphone would have been using them, but as players it's ingrained (for good reason) that using phones during games is rude. I don't know where the compromise between that is exactly but if we decide we want players to be able to go there, we probably have to explicitly state in advance that bringing/using tech is allowed.
Notes from Chad:
There are some small things we could do easily. A camera/projector setup isn't hard, but teaching people to look into the camera when delivering is, so the cardboard TV Frame (with a 'spotlight') is a nice idea because it would let the mediacritter see their audience. A tripod and camera can swivel between the podium and the mock screen to give more of a media sense. Prop microphones on the podium.
For real tech, I'd suggest having a projector/large screen to display a realtime feed. We designate a specific hashtag, and use something like Hashatit or Tagboard to automatically pull posts from twitter/fb/vine/etc. and display them. This would not only add some verisimilitude, but give another channel for people to post thoughts, feelings, plots, and give them something to do if they are feeling a moment of downtime. Or we create a similar experience in Querki, which would let us prepopulate fake accounts and connections for these people. We already ask players to log in to querki to access game materials, this would be an extension of that. Then we invite players to use their realworld devices, bringing them into the magic circle of the game.
Maybe as players give speeches or 'video news segments' we record them and throw them into a youtube playlist, set up a small tablet in the corner somewhere autoplaying all the videos in the playlist, with the sound low. So it helps reinforce and spread what the players have done without distracting from the game too much.

Misfires

Jamie Rickie seemed a bit isolated, but didn't complain.
The Board election plot resolved much too easily, with Millie getting elected to the Board and H Derren winding up as CEO. Probably need to beef up both Millie's and Carla's ambition, and maybe tweak the stock allocations.

Security

The security model of this Space is a complete fuckup. Before we create the LARP App, we need to make this work better.
This Space is a really good example of a complex security problem. On the one hand, we have the authors/GMs, who should have full Edit rights; that part is fine. But for the players, it's a mess. We want the players to:
  • Have the ability to read the front page of the Space, but not most of its content. (Ideally, I'd like to be able to specify an alternate front page for this category of Member.)
  • Have the ability to comment on any page that they can see.
  • Have the ability to give User Values (for the Questionnaire).
  • Not be able to read any Things unless explicitly permitted: if they look at All Things, it should be mostly empty.
  • BUT (and this is where it gets hard), they need to be able to see such information as we explicitly allow them. As a player, I should be able to go to a Character Sheet page, and have it show me my character.
The trick here is that Who Can Read is currently too crude: it slices all the information right out of the SpaceState. We need a way to be able to explicitly bless specific pages as having a higher security. The idea is that I should be able to specify a Property called Bless on the Character Sheet page, which automatically records who is doing the blessing and takes a Permission; it elevates that permission on that page to the level of the Blesser. (This probably implies building an alternate SpaceState rendition for the purpose, which is a bit pricey but seems necessary.) The notion here is that I can bless a page up to my own security level, and no further.
This is mainly relevant for Read, but I can see it being useful for Edit as well; hence, it should take an explicit Permission. Indeed, it should potentially be a map, from Permission to Blesser, so that several different Permissions can be blessed, potentially with different rights.

Public Information

When asked "but what does DeCameron do?" - what would be available casually online to the average Joe (corporate website, Wikipedia entry) as well to someone who might have dug a little deeper, but is still accessing information publicly available to someone knowing where to look.

Consent, Safety, Start and Stop

This is a potentially emotionally fraught game, and is supposed to be. That implies that we should be more conscious about entering and exiting the game. While it doesn't necessarily require hardcore workshopping, it should probably have some pre-game time for folks to touch base with the other characters who they are close to, encourage them to establish boundaries (both physical and emotional), and set some common safety mechanisms. (Choose some appropriate safety mechanics -- give thought to what is likely to be needed here.)
Folks need to be actively encouraged to use the safety mechanics whenever needed. Talk a little about why this is necessary -- that it is everyone's responsibility to support this.
Similarly, we should probably have some formal de-rolling. This needs some thought and research, but if this game is to have the intended level of emotional force, then there is a responsibility to deal with this properly.

Seek out review

This game is mostly just my viewpoint at this point. It would be very useful to get other viewpoints and commentary about what is problematic and what could be improved.
Specific questions to ask:
  • What safety mechanisms would you recommend? In particular, what should we have in terms of consent mechanics?
  • Are there safety problems in this game that are fundamental enough that they need to be changed?
  • Where is this game potentially offensive? What content warnings should be on the label? Is there beyond-the-pale material that needs to be changed?
  • What could be improved? In particular, is there low-hanging fruit that would improve the game?