Omega124
Challenging Fate
DISCLAIMER: So, after discussion with tolni my own personal theroy of why an IOT succeeds or fails, I have elected to formulate my thoughts on the subject matter into a full thesis not unlike Thorvald's attempts to explain IOT in Cult of The Offensive or The Death of IOT I've liked his works in the past and I do largely agree with especially Death. So firstly read them for a lot of context in my school of thought of what IOT ought to be. And then remember that, although this is my attempt to explain how a good IOT runs, this isn't an exact science and that results can vary for numerous factors out of the mod and/or player's control.
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What is the most important aspect of an IOT? There is a lot of differing, often outright competing views within our community over what an IOT should focus on, story or stats. On one hand, you have the mechanics-oriented people, who believe that games live and die on the ability to create a clear and concise ruleset that still manages to remain unique and engaging. People who champion this viewpoint, most notably Sonereal's since-redacted Heterodoxy and Robert Can't's efforts in creating a unified ruleset for all players, will argue that the best way to attract players is simply to make the best actual game possible, and people will naturally flock over to play. And I don't think they're necessarily wrong, either. Sonereal makes wonderful stat games that even people like me eagerly join and even have fun in. However, when all is said and done, do we look at the SonRISKs or the Cold Wars and say "This is the best IOT ever! Nothing could ever possibly top this!"? Do people (other than AA of course) fondly sigh over the exploits of Black Hole? StatIOTs are wonderful in their own right, but they're one and done; to be discarded and forgotten about once the game finishes.
The other school, which I must profess I am a part of, are the storyists. We maintain the belief that it is not the game itself that people join IOTs and the community with it, but it is our ability to weave narratives and tell a collaborative story which engages with the players that is the key for long term success of the IOT. Usually, purist storyists, such as Thorvald and I, have argued in the past how story and stats are in direct competition with each other; as soon as you stat your game up and make it more complex, that IOT loses its collaborative nature and ceases to hold long term interest. The dichotomy between story and stats was the central thesis in Death, and the continued legacy of storyist games such as IOT IV or XIV help bring vindication to the idea that IOT is best when the game is left as out as possible without descending into anarchy.
In the past, I would have argued that the dichotomy exists, and that if people finally let go of the idea that complex mechanics is automatically better, we'd have far more vibrant IOTs. However, there is an important IOT that launched last year that I personally believed shifted the paradigm. For Lucina's sake, it was the one of the only two IOTs I can think of in our five year history that actually ended. I am, of course, referring to Ninjacow'ss***post IOT, IdIOT.
At first, IdIOT was a return to the state of nature that people like Thorvald and I have argued for. There was some mechanics in place to please the mechanicists, but it was largely barebone and players were free to just sit around and roleplay. And roleplay we did! Even with some of the shoddiest update cycles known to man, we all stuck together and continued to build upon a world based on "fun"posting. However, as the game went on, there was a shift in how the game was structured. As player actions led to new concepts into game, and with the mod's own dissatisfaction with the initial ruleset, the game got more and more complex, until it was estensially a stat IOT in its own right. Yet, incidents of drama aside, player interest in roleplaying and woldbuilding did not wane. In fact, I'd wager the game would still be running with continued player interest if drama didn't overtake the game.
There is also the issue of NES, our sister community. NES doesn't just pride themselves on being "more" than "just map painting simulators" mechanically; they have a roleplaying tradition which equals if not surpasses our own. That seems to directly oppose the traditional storyist thesis, which views complex mechanics as being destructive to complex storytelling. While one could rationalize NES as having a different playerbase and culture than IOT, and thus can get away with having both, the fact remains that with IdIOT and with NES, it is possible to have both.
So, the question remains: what is the most important part of an IOT? What do all the successful games, from XIV to IdIOT to even Gone is the Old Guard*, have in common?
The answer is NOT having a story or being story-centric
The answer is having a living world.
A living world is more than just the background lore that makes up the context of the game. A living world is more than just a world that has internal consistency that remains unique and interesting. A living world is a world that players and mods work together to create a game that has its own inertia and reacts to its own stimuli.
Let's look at IOT XIV, my favorite IOT, for what I mean by that last statement. How would one sum up the plot of the game, like if we were writing a summary to someone who has never seen IOT before? The awnser is, it would be pretty hard to, because there was a lot of seemingly unrelated plot threads that nethertheless intertwined with each other into what would be the XIV world. Sure, the game started with Texarkana invading the Pirate Coalition right off of its doorstep, and the game "ended' after the Indonesian War was resolved**, but how we get from from point A to point B was the real magic of XIV.
Let's look at the invasion of the Pirates more in specific. From a purely IC perspective, what was the implications of Texarkana attacking them? The most immediate conclusion is that Texarkana became the dominant power of North America, and that it became one of the major power brokers on the diplomatic stage. Texarkana was one of the leading nations in in the peacekeeping operations in Vietnam, and would use its good international standing and initial show of force to create a union with the American Empire.
However, the invasion of the Coalition led to far greater implications than just the rise of Texarkana, one in which directly influenced the game until it ended. One of the pirates escaped the destruction of the pirate nation, and offered her services to France. France would use her to create the Rosemary Incident; a false-flag operation which secured France the ability to produce nuclear weapons while making Japan look like national pariahs on the international stage. The Rosemary Incident was one of THE leading causes for the UN Intervention against Japan, the one Texarkana took advantage of to eventually form the PAU...
Meanwhile, the Rosemary Incident effected France as well. The French government felt betrayed by the pirate they hired for never disclosing her intention on attacking their own sailors, and thus had the STD take her out. The STD agent would have a mental breakdown finding out her own government inadvertingly killed her sister in the Rosemary Incident, and thus eventually shot up a French university. This terrorist attack effected Germany, radicalizing the feminist movement in that nation, which would (unsuccessfully) attempt to assassinate the Kaiserin. This only heightened the tension between the two nations, which would have likely gone to war if I kept up with my stories instead of doing them post facto after the timeskip.
What did the Rosemary Incident mean for the rest of the world? Devilfish. The failed attempt to invade Taiwan by Rome and the Platonic Republicled to the death of Roman Emperor, which severely weakened the Roman State and caused outlying regions to splinter. More importantly, the Platonic Republic completely fell apart as it fell into civil war with the People's Militia (itself the creation of previous game events in the Thessaloniki Crisis). The weakening of both Greek states led to direct Russian intervention into first Platonic and later Roman lands, which the latter would kick off a war with Germany...
I could go on all day on causes and effects. The point is, XIV is filled with a lot of causes and effects, many of which are not immediately obvious. XIV reacted to the players, and the world changed with its own reactions back to the players. What people did in the game mattered, and more than the superficial stat-outlook. Robert showed some of the finest modding IOT has ever seen, crafting events in updates in reaction to what players did the previous turn, making sure to keep everything fresh. He built upon and added to the lore that players wrote on their own, and thus players felt like their roleplay actually mattered, encouraging it way more than any hard stat bonuses ever will.***
Without getting into extensive detail, IdIOT worked on this same principle. Events early on the game would continue to haunt nations in-game years after they were made, making the international politics dynamic and internally consistent. It told a story, and it was a story that the entire IOT, mod and players, experienced themselves.
So, what exactly am I proposing? I am proposing that, stat or story, all mods take the time to sit down and create a world. This doesn't necessarily mean sitting down and creating an extensive backstory with pre-defined nations (although there's nothing wrong with doing so!). What it DOES mean, is reading your player's sign ups and RP posts. It means, writing actual fluff updates that are more than just recaps or summaries of events that happened, but introduce new concepts of their own which build upon what they wrote.
An example: say a player wrote an RP post describing neoliberal economic reforms where they deregulate and privatize a once-mixed economy, in order to encourage foreign investment. In the update, you mention the neoliberal reforms, and talk about how foreign investors are interested, perhaps even list specific nations interested companies are from to involve those players, but hit the player with a whammy. The reforms have caused numerous wage cuts, and now his workers are on strike. You now have the world reacting to the actions of the player! The player responds with trying to suppress the strikers by shooting at them with police, so the next update, you have the workers organize into a communist revolt. Then it succeeds, and inspires revolutionary movements in nearby nations, etc, etc.
A little heavy handed of an example, but that's what I mean by introducing your own concepts. You want to have your updates REACT to whatever the players do, so the players in turn have to react to the changing circumstances of the world at large. If players aren't giving them sufficent RP to react, then you need to nudge them along with maybe an event you concout out of your mind, but that should be only if they don't do anything interesting themselves. And try to make it so that you have multiple people interact with the same stimuli; it makes everyone more engaged when they have to interact with each other to resolve crises.
Don't be afraid to write, don't be afraid to experiment. Not everything goes well on your first try. But players have an insanely cool knack of being able to fill in the potholes on the rough road themselves if you give them the chance. And as long as players feel engaged, they will take it.
In conclusion, modding in a way that not only just worldbuilds, but also makes it so that player roleplay matters in the development of world building, is in my opinion the most effective way to make a game memorable and enjoyable. Soon, maybe instead of reminiscing over IdIOT or XIV, we'd be sighing over our whimsical adventures in your IOT!
*GITOG is, from my own understanding, just as influental to NES as IOT IV was to IOT
**Not withstanding the botched final update which would have continued the war
***However, bringing up XIV as a case study means I must also say the biggest shortcoming of it and what eventually brought it to its death; the mod attempting to force his vision of events despite player's intent. From him trying to force the Caen Meteorite over my own storyline of my nation getting couped, to trolling the final peace deal in Indonesia, it just caused resentment of players who felt like they were sidelined and railroaded.
---
What is the most important aspect of an IOT? There is a lot of differing, often outright competing views within our community over what an IOT should focus on, story or stats. On one hand, you have the mechanics-oriented people, who believe that games live and die on the ability to create a clear and concise ruleset that still manages to remain unique and engaging. People who champion this viewpoint, most notably Sonereal's since-redacted Heterodoxy and Robert Can't's efforts in creating a unified ruleset for all players, will argue that the best way to attract players is simply to make the best actual game possible, and people will naturally flock over to play. And I don't think they're necessarily wrong, either. Sonereal makes wonderful stat games that even people like me eagerly join and even have fun in. However, when all is said and done, do we look at the SonRISKs or the Cold Wars and say "This is the best IOT ever! Nothing could ever possibly top this!"? Do people (other than AA of course) fondly sigh over the exploits of Black Hole? StatIOTs are wonderful in their own right, but they're one and done; to be discarded and forgotten about once the game finishes.
The other school, which I must profess I am a part of, are the storyists. We maintain the belief that it is not the game itself that people join IOTs and the community with it, but it is our ability to weave narratives and tell a collaborative story which engages with the players that is the key for long term success of the IOT. Usually, purist storyists, such as Thorvald and I, have argued in the past how story and stats are in direct competition with each other; as soon as you stat your game up and make it more complex, that IOT loses its collaborative nature and ceases to hold long term interest. The dichotomy between story and stats was the central thesis in Death, and the continued legacy of storyist games such as IOT IV or XIV help bring vindication to the idea that IOT is best when the game is left as out as possible without descending into anarchy.
In the past, I would have argued that the dichotomy exists, and that if people finally let go of the idea that complex mechanics is automatically better, we'd have far more vibrant IOTs. However, there is an important IOT that launched last year that I personally believed shifted the paradigm. For Lucina's sake, it was the one of the only two IOTs I can think of in our five year history that actually ended. I am, of course, referring to Ninjacow's
At first, IdIOT was a return to the state of nature that people like Thorvald and I have argued for. There was some mechanics in place to please the mechanicists, but it was largely barebone and players were free to just sit around and roleplay. And roleplay we did! Even with some of the shoddiest update cycles known to man, we all stuck together and continued to build upon a world based on "fun"posting. However, as the game went on, there was a shift in how the game was structured. As player actions led to new concepts into game, and with the mod's own dissatisfaction with the initial ruleset, the game got more and more complex, until it was estensially a stat IOT in its own right. Yet, incidents of drama aside, player interest in roleplaying and woldbuilding did not wane. In fact, I'd wager the game would still be running with continued player interest if drama didn't overtake the game.
There is also the issue of NES, our sister community. NES doesn't just pride themselves on being "more" than "just map painting simulators" mechanically; they have a roleplaying tradition which equals if not surpasses our own. That seems to directly oppose the traditional storyist thesis, which views complex mechanics as being destructive to complex storytelling. While one could rationalize NES as having a different playerbase and culture than IOT, and thus can get away with having both, the fact remains that with IdIOT and with NES, it is possible to have both.
So, the question remains: what is the most important part of an IOT? What do all the successful games, from XIV to IdIOT to even Gone is the Old Guard*, have in common?
The answer is NOT having a story or being story-centric
The answer is having a living world.
A living world is more than just the background lore that makes up the context of the game. A living world is more than just a world that has internal consistency that remains unique and interesting. A living world is a world that players and mods work together to create a game that has its own inertia and reacts to its own stimuli.
Let's look at IOT XIV, my favorite IOT, for what I mean by that last statement. How would one sum up the plot of the game, like if we were writing a summary to someone who has never seen IOT before? The awnser is, it would be pretty hard to, because there was a lot of seemingly unrelated plot threads that nethertheless intertwined with each other into what would be the XIV world. Sure, the game started with Texarkana invading the Pirate Coalition right off of its doorstep, and the game "ended' after the Indonesian War was resolved**, but how we get from from point A to point B was the real magic of XIV.
Let's look at the invasion of the Pirates more in specific. From a purely IC perspective, what was the implications of Texarkana attacking them? The most immediate conclusion is that Texarkana became the dominant power of North America, and that it became one of the major power brokers on the diplomatic stage. Texarkana was one of the leading nations in in the peacekeeping operations in Vietnam, and would use its good international standing and initial show of force to create a union with the American Empire.
However, the invasion of the Coalition led to far greater implications than just the rise of Texarkana, one in which directly influenced the game until it ended. One of the pirates escaped the destruction of the pirate nation, and offered her services to France. France would use her to create the Rosemary Incident; a false-flag operation which secured France the ability to produce nuclear weapons while making Japan look like national pariahs on the international stage. The Rosemary Incident was one of THE leading causes for the UN Intervention against Japan, the one Texarkana took advantage of to eventually form the PAU...
Meanwhile, the Rosemary Incident effected France as well. The French government felt betrayed by the pirate they hired for never disclosing her intention on attacking their own sailors, and thus had the STD take her out. The STD agent would have a mental breakdown finding out her own government inadvertingly killed her sister in the Rosemary Incident, and thus eventually shot up a French university. This terrorist attack effected Germany, radicalizing the feminist movement in that nation, which would (unsuccessfully) attempt to assassinate the Kaiserin. This only heightened the tension between the two nations, which would have likely gone to war if I kept up with my stories instead of doing them post facto after the timeskip.
What did the Rosemary Incident mean for the rest of the world? Devilfish. The failed attempt to invade Taiwan by Rome and the Platonic Republicled to the death of Roman Emperor, which severely weakened the Roman State and caused outlying regions to splinter. More importantly, the Platonic Republic completely fell apart as it fell into civil war with the People's Militia (itself the creation of previous game events in the Thessaloniki Crisis). The weakening of both Greek states led to direct Russian intervention into first Platonic and later Roman lands, which the latter would kick off a war with Germany...
I could go on all day on causes and effects. The point is, XIV is filled with a lot of causes and effects, many of which are not immediately obvious. XIV reacted to the players, and the world changed with its own reactions back to the players. What people did in the game mattered, and more than the superficial stat-outlook. Robert showed some of the finest modding IOT has ever seen, crafting events in updates in reaction to what players did the previous turn, making sure to keep everything fresh. He built upon and added to the lore that players wrote on their own, and thus players felt like their roleplay actually mattered, encouraging it way more than any hard stat bonuses ever will.***
Without getting into extensive detail, IdIOT worked on this same principle. Events early on the game would continue to haunt nations in-game years after they were made, making the international politics dynamic and internally consistent. It told a story, and it was a story that the entire IOT, mod and players, experienced themselves.
So, what exactly am I proposing? I am proposing that, stat or story, all mods take the time to sit down and create a world. This doesn't necessarily mean sitting down and creating an extensive backstory with pre-defined nations (although there's nothing wrong with doing so!). What it DOES mean, is reading your player's sign ups and RP posts. It means, writing actual fluff updates that are more than just recaps or summaries of events that happened, but introduce new concepts of their own which build upon what they wrote.
An example: say a player wrote an RP post describing neoliberal economic reforms where they deregulate and privatize a once-mixed economy, in order to encourage foreign investment. In the update, you mention the neoliberal reforms, and talk about how foreign investors are interested, perhaps even list specific nations interested companies are from to involve those players, but hit the player with a whammy. The reforms have caused numerous wage cuts, and now his workers are on strike. You now have the world reacting to the actions of the player! The player responds with trying to suppress the strikers by shooting at them with police, so the next update, you have the workers organize into a communist revolt. Then it succeeds, and inspires revolutionary movements in nearby nations, etc, etc.
A little heavy handed of an example, but that's what I mean by introducing your own concepts. You want to have your updates REACT to whatever the players do, so the players in turn have to react to the changing circumstances of the world at large. If players aren't giving them sufficent RP to react, then you need to nudge them along with maybe an event you concout out of your mind, but that should be only if they don't do anything interesting themselves. And try to make it so that you have multiple people interact with the same stimuli; it makes everyone more engaged when they have to interact with each other to resolve crises.
Don't be afraid to write, don't be afraid to experiment. Not everything goes well on your first try. But players have an insanely cool knack of being able to fill in the potholes on the rough road themselves if you give them the chance. And as long as players feel engaged, they will take it.
In conclusion, modding in a way that not only just worldbuilds, but also makes it so that player roleplay matters in the development of world building, is in my opinion the most effective way to make a game memorable and enjoyable. Soon, maybe instead of reminiscing over IdIOT or XIV, we'd be sighing over our whimsical adventures in your IOT!
*GITOG is, from my own understanding, just as influental to NES as IOT IV was to IOT
**Not withstanding the botched final update which would have continued the war
***However, bringing up XIV as a case study means I must also say the biggest shortcoming of it and what eventually brought it to its death; the mod attempting to force his vision of events despite player's intent. From him trying to force the Caen Meteorite over my own storyline of my nation getting couped, to trolling the final peace deal in Indonesia, it just caused resentment of players who felt like they were sidelined and railroaded.