Monday, 1 March 2010
Play via Twitter
I hate twitter and deleted my account. But I have some friends who still haven't realised that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes. One of them wants to know if anybody plays D&D or other RPGs via the medium, so I thought I'd throw the question out into the blogosphere and see. So, does anybody play via twitter or know anybody who does?
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I have never seen anyone play via Twitter. Would certainly force people to be succinct in writing out actions if you only had 140 characters.
ReplyDeleteI'm suspicious of using any system that has the word Twit in the title.
ReplyDeleteYeah, ouch. Could you imagine trying to play my Doom & Tea Parties game in 140 character increments? I'd go mad and start eating my desk. ;p
ReplyDeleteBut no, I've not heard of such a thing, though I think Chatty floated the notion once.
Wave, however, is showing some promise as a gaming platform.
I got myself a Google Wave account, mainly because all these gamers were raving about it, but haven't figured out what to do with it.
ReplyDeleteAs for Twatter, I... don't understand it. It's ADD blogging, as far as I can tell. I was at a blog the other day, and the owner had an in-character Twatter feed there, but I don't know if it was part of a game. I'd imagine you could use it for gaming, but I haven't seen it done.
Twitter, ugh. A bunch of people yelling about what they had for breakfast to no one in particular. I'll never get it. At least with blogging there's a nice interplay among writers and readers.
ReplyDelete"ADD blogging"
ReplyDeleteYes, that's exactly right.
That must be why so many of my players do it.
ANYWAY...
Why would someone play-by-twitter rather than play-by chat?
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ReplyDeleteNo, you know Zak, you're right. That was uncalled for; if people enjoy using Twitter, then that's just fine, and I have no right to disparage them simply because I don't get it. I apologise to you and your players.
ReplyDelete> nice interplay among writers and readers.
ReplyDeleteIt's much more immediate with twitter with retweets and @replies and directs and also with being able to search for terms/names. It's not blogger and readers, everyone is on equal field.
Most breaking news occurs via twitter now. The news organization I work for regularly gets twit pics of breaking news by people on the scene before our or anyone else's photographer can get there. (e.g. plane into IRS building) Weather and traffic are also sort of big.
To me people who deride Twitter are largely indistinguishable from people who deride old-school play style. In that both groups hold preconceptions not based in reality and generally aren't interested in learning truth.
But yeah RPG via twitter sounds stupidly limiting compared to alternatives available.
Norman: I understand that twitter has a lot of usefulness - I just view "usefulness" as a qualified bad thing in this instance. I'm aware that breaking news occurs via twitter now, but the fact that it does so makes me recoil with horror, cover myself in sackcloth and ashes, and beat myself with a hairshirt. Or just get a bit down. Usually the latter.
ReplyDeleteI also have to point out that I did use twitter for 6 months. So I'm not speaking from ignorance.
ReplyDeleteDear All,
ReplyDeleteI was the person who asked noisms if he was aware of anyone using Twitter to play any kind of RPG. It seemed an interesting idea to me (a total RPG novice, although I will be starting a game with noisms soon), as I had read somewhere (Boing Boing perhaps?) that people were using Google Wave as a means to play D&D.
noisms tried to get me to play a game over Facebook messages before, but that was really play-by-email by another name. I guess I was wondering if there were any RPGs that Twitter might be quite suited for. In my head, having a set of private accounts (one shared timeline, evolving document, albeit composed of short messages) to have a game unfold in seemed like an interesting notion to me, but not knowing of many games (apart from those that I read about on here or from general internet meanderings) I thought it might be interesting to throw that out to those in the know.
What could be "good" about using Twitter as a means for playing an RPG?
Nathan
I like Twitter. I don’t really see any advantages to using it to play an RPG. Wrong tool for the job, IMHO.
ReplyDeletezero zero one: Hmmm... Good would probably be the shortness of the responses which might force the players to be more focused on action and keeping things quick and tight.
ReplyDeleteBut only if you consider those virtues. I usually don't.
- Brian
Actually, I'm one to rag on twitter simply because I've never seen the usefulness of it. But I *could* see some bizarre mashup of a LARPG that incorporated twitter...
ReplyDelete(goes and ponders)