Knights & Knaves Alehouse

http://vimeo.com/15142335

This video is interesting on several levels, but the final of the three examples (the "Alice" one) provided by Ideo suggests several interesting analogues to RPGs (to me, anyway). The example may in fact be more applicable to a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style of RPG-lite experience, perhaps, but the potential interactivity is striking, in particular if it could be driven not just by pre-programmed events/queues/hidden stuff to unlock under condition X, but also be triggered in real-time by a DM, or in response to someone else playing an NPC, etc.

Thoughts?

Gro I thought I would first post my reaction to the idea of this as an analogue and then turn to whether or not the concept shared by rpgs and Alice is the same. '

'Alice'. As soon as the video's narrator mentioned 'immersive' I started to feel my wheels turning backwards...Lots of bells and whistles here, and the sell, itself, is aesthetically immersive audibly and visually, but...

'How might we experience written narratives in new and engaging ways...an interactive reading experience that invites the reader to engage in the story-telling process, with the written narrative at the center of the experience, stories unfold and develop through the readers active participation, blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Unexpectedly, the reader stumbles upon plot twists and turns embedded in stories that are unlocked by performing certain actions; such as, being in specific geographic locations, communicating with the characters in stories, or contributing to the stories themselves. By doing this the reader co-develops the stories and gains actions to secret events, character back-stories, and new chapters. Contextual details about people, objects, and places are also revealed. In time a non-linear narrative emerges, allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the story from multiple angles. Alice an interactive and playful reading experience, that invites exploration well-beyond just turning the page'.

...here are some of the responses I resonated with:
a. 'Alice is a trainwreck ... when you're in a story, you want the story to go on ... you don't want to exit the story, exit your frame of mind, become a co-creator, and write/re-write/add more story. There may be times when you want to do that, but experience and cognitive science show that the disruption caused is not conducive to deep, immersive, experiential reading'.
b. 'rather have a conversation with a co-worker about a book they loved and recommend instead of having yet another push notification or 'social experience' tell me that something is being recommended to me'.
c. 'I have no desire to be lead by others. Is this for cattle? Perhaps these people should get out more'
d. 'I think it was Richard Nash who said that the lack of distractions and immersion required by reading a book is a feature not a bug. We already have videogames',
e. 'Yes, it's interesting how all three concepts are trying to make books more like the internet. Internet = endless distractions / Books = focus and contemplation. Add the presence of two or more real human beings to books and you can also unlock the dimension called "discussion" '.
f. 'the focus on the content and the solidarity of books (as others have already mentioned) is what gives, and has given books their power for the past 500 years'.
g. this scares the hell out of me. I'm an avid reader, and what I need are less distractions, and more comfy chairs. resist the feed!

I will admit I am the first one to buy an annotated version of book I love, or one that I wish I initially had had more time for. Nonetheless, I think books, annotated or not, and Alice, do not share the same being or conceptual reality. By this I mean that the book has more of a tactile semblance of something living (once a living plant) with its inked words than what we see on an interface. Here is where I think there an analogue to RPGs, they are like books, not like Alice. Alice appears more like a fun-house set to go- off and entertain you. With books and rpgs its is your own limitless imagination which is triggered by human interaction in the case of an rpg, or by the printed word on the page in the case of a book. That journey takes us far-beyond the codified associations 'Alice' provides, be her connections informative or not. In both cases, immersion triggers something innate in us, without us needing 'Alice'. I'm beginning to feel like I'm talking about the maid on the Jetsons...

To my mind, Alice is another machine, trying imitate life, something which really only living and engaged beings can do. Unlike 'Alice', rpgs invite us to be our own 'new and engaging way' with ourselves, and/or with one another, and we do this, because we can, with or without an 'Alice'. Like books, they remind us of what we can do on our own and together.

So conceptually Alice to me appears more like a railroaded WOTC version of what we do, this is not an analogue for the 'old school'.

All that said it is nice and shiney, and pretty fascinating, Thanks for posting this link and getting the wheels turning.

Alice could be a useful platform for what I was talking about in another thread (what would be in an ideal AD&D starter kit) a week or two ago -- that the only way to get new people into the game other than word of mouth is to let them experience it first-hand without first having to study the rules and assemble a group of fellow players. Basically an elaborate "choose your own adventure" that introduces the themes, aesthetics, and setting of the game (after making that post I actually briefly outlined the form such a thing could take -- part 1) a journey through a woods avoiding monsters that introduces the basics of the wilderness, assorted monster types, and the ideas of combat and magic; part 2) a macguffin hunt in town that introduces the various classes and races, alignments, and more details of the setting (religions, thieves' guild, taverns); and part 3) the first dungeon expedition - by this point the player knows enough to create a character and join a dungeon expedition wherein are introduced the notions of dungeons, exploration, treasure, tricks & traps, secret doors, various dungeon monsters, and so on). Something like Alice could help make this experience more interactive and customizable, less like reading an old-fashioned choose your own adventure book and more like the open-ended experience of the actual game.

But beyond that, once the player has learned about the game and decided to stick with it, I see the other two as much more useful and applicable -- the first one could obviously link to various discussions and commentary on the rules (something like what Gene was talking about a couple of weeks ago, or our AD&D-wiki project from a few years back that never really got off the ground) and the second could both help organization within the group as, for instance, the GM creates "reading lists" for the players showing what rules (including supplements, magazine articles, house rule documents, etc.) are being used, suggested "inspirational" reading, and so on, and in the larger community as you can see and interface with other groups running the same adventures, etc.

I can see the game use for all three with more important on the first two.

For the first can be used as a seminal flow of what came first would be awesome "at a click". Certainly of use to those who want flavor over BS.

The second. a categorized database of useful according to a certain flavor with percentage of "take" would be great.

The third, having "spring loaded" adventure maps with extra minutiae? That would be cool but who's going to do it?

It isn't much different than a wiki although the presentation is much nicer.

The visual grid and usefulness percentage/citation would actually "less damn" certain things that contributed (briefly) to the feel of the era but bulkwise and designerwise are best avoided normally as to not get stuck in the geeky morasses.

geneweigel wrote:The visual grid and usefulness percentage/citation would actually "less damn" certain things that contributed (briefly) to the feel of the era but bulkwise and designerwise are best avoided normally as to not get stuck in the geeky morasses.

"I don't use any rules with less than a 50% approval rating"

I'm reminded of the way BoardGameGeek (and RPGGeek) allow users to rate games and you can filter ratings so only those made by your "friends" count -- so the fact that a particular game is overall rated a 9.6 doesn't mean much to me if my friends' combined rating is a 3.4 (and vice versa). That would be a useful feature if everybody actually used it, but since it would require everybody to devote time and effort to rating everything they knew (both good and bad) and most people aren't willing to do that, we're left with a great big could-have-been.

Yeah, that is interesting as another possibility.

Think of this. What if you loved a shit bag adventure because of the laughs you had poking fun of it? If you had a checked out list of the content that you could easily demark with a checkbox (whenever you got around to it) then it wouldn't even show up as relevant.

That might actually revolutionize things and make the original D&D sell itself.

Nuts. This is what books are supposed to look like.
As a book reader and collector, I'm going to spend the next 50-60 years of my life hating these kinds of gadgets.

Thats awesome. Unfortunately, I can imagine people that I know looking at that same list of collector's edition books and getting me the DC Comics Encyclopedia...

<<<SHUDDER>>>

A really bad gift that I got in that vein was the Art of Cthulhu or something like that. Its like one of those gifts where youre like holding back the overwhelming need to slam their head into the book and closing it on them but instead you swallow your "taste" and say "its interesting!".

geneweigel wrote:A really bad gift that I got in that vein was the Art of Cthulhu or something like that. Its like one of those gifts where youre like holding back the overwhelming need to slam their head into the book and closing it on them but instead you swallow your "taste" and say "its interesting!".

This? I actually have this book (or had -- now that I think about I can't actually recall actually seeing it any time in the last ~15 years...) and think/thought it's pretty cool, both the artwork and the mildly humorous "in-character" commentary. Or are you talking about something else?

No, the Peterson's Guide thing is actually not that bad however the BARLOWE'S GUIDE TO EXTRATERRESTRIALS that it ripped off was a little crisper in art style.

I was referring to this other "Cornosium Dilu-thulhu mythos" cover retrospective art book. It makes the field guide look as if its by Lovecraft himself!

Here it is:

http://www.amazon.com/Art-H-P-Lovecraft ... 1589943074

Terrible!

From a gaming perspective, Alice could have some potential. From a book reading perspective, it would totally suck ass. Nelson would be terrific as DM's aid, and good for any type of research.