Alpha Centauri Collaborative Fiction - You’re Invited!

[Trenacker]

I’ve begun publishing some SMAC fiction on another forum where they host reader-assisted writing games. After each update, readers vote on a set of story prompts I provide. That means you get to choose how to deal with new problems, what research branches to pursue, and how to use your military units.

I believe some members of this forum are already participating, but I’d love to reach a broader audience that shares my passion for this great game of old.

The readers decided to take the role of Commissioner Pravin Lal. We are in the first year of settlement and dealing with challenges that range from missing Foils to uncooperative Spartan prisoners.

The story takes most, but not all, of it’s starting points from the computer game and accompanying fiction. Bringing the different factions to life inevitably means making personal judgments about how their ideologies work in practice. You’ll also see some new factions in there.

Ideas, discussion, and feedback are welcome on our Discord channel.

[bvanevery]

I was going to ask you about permanent and public archives of things that had occurred in the game.  Especially vote tallies.  Then I realized, my "theme" on this site has the unfortunate side effect of not showing hyperlinks.  I will change my theme now, especially given that seasons are changing.  I now seem to be the only person using the Star Trek "Enterprise" theme, which is fine because my mod has Phasers and Chronoton Guns in it.  It's still a little hard, but not impossible, to see a weblink.  I did find the website you linked.

This is a complex medium for a "lay audience" to try to follow.  It looks like it would be of much more significance and substance, to the participants, than anyone coming along just trying to read it.

I do wonder, strategically, how many "decisionmakers" can be supported with all the communication and argumentation about "what to do", and the voting, before some people are no longer invested in trying to "follow along" or "having influence".  I would expect that one's willingness to speak, would greatly affect one's agency in the game.  And that at some point, there are too many cooks.  I have no idea what that threshold would be, especially for people with previous experience and ideological commitment to this medium of gaming.  For those that don't have such ideology and commitment though, I really wonder how many participants you can sustain.

A long time ago, I did experiments in Freeform PBEM RPG.  I wanted to see how many people I could sustain on an imagined Multi-User Dungeon server, as though all technical implementation was perfect and immediate.  The only bottleneck, would be my personal ability to think of and write new content.  And for the players to react, of course.  I wrote full time, 40 hours a week, for about 6 weeks.

I have a vague memory of sustaining 40 players at peak.  Although I might be misremembering, and it might have been 25.  At some point, I had to take a hatchet to all the different plotlines, and consolidate them down to roughly 4.  The game imploded less than 2 weeks after that.  It was untenable and I had to call it quits.

Subsequent games had no more than 7 players including myself, and no more than 3 units of independent action.  The latter became known as "The Rule of Three".  These restraints seemed necessary for inter-player communication to work, for concepts of the world state to be propagated, for people to have an idea what was going on, and for them to stay motivated.  I also worked with "veterans" of my games for the most part, not just random people on the internet like in my 1st attempt.

Unfortunately due to a hard drive crash, I lost all the writings.  I have what's in my head, how it went.  It made me take backup protocols much more seriously.  It was the big "content" loss of my life.