Okay, here's a concept I'm getting some leverage out of.

An activity has what I'd call a "social footprint." I would define that (loosely) as being the minimum amount of time and effort that is required in order for the activity to be complete unto itself that fully justifies everything that went into it.

A game of Jungle Speed has a very small social footprint: You deal the cards, you play the game, I win, you praise me. Okay, yeah, the whole praising thing could go on for a while, but I hope the main point is clear.

Now, if you were in a best of 16 elimination-style Jungle Speed tournament ... that has a larger footprint. Even though each game, individually, is just Jungle Speed, if you got to the final round, against the final opponent, and then everyone just decided "Eh ... we're done here. Let's break out Puerto Rico," you would (I suspect) feel that the activity was not complete. You would have put in emotional energy (in the form of anticipation and excitement) that wasn't justified by the end result. A Jungle Speed tournament's social foot-print stretches all the way to the awarding of victory.

Let's consider the D&D of my youth, shall we? I would argue that it had an infinite social footprint. The expectation was of campaign everlasting. If you played the game for twenty years, and then it finally stopped, some players would feel that they'd been let down ... that the true payoff of all of the campaign was going to happen next year, or in 2067, or something.

There's the measure. Applications, elsewhere.

I like your thoughts, Tony. The concept of game "scope" has been on my mind a lot lately- part of that is understanding how long a period the game was designed to be played. Is it a single-evening game? 4 sessions? a year-long epic? Being part of a 17 year-and-counting D&D game (played maybe twice a year at this point) I agree completely with your assessment of the infinite footprint- it could go on until we all die...

Thanks for this explanation, Tony. Good terminology, it implies not only that you're spending time and resources, but SOCIAL time and resources.

The smallest possible piece is hugely small. It's as fast as a thought. We do it all the time. We refer to a model of a person inside our own head, and simulate their reactions.

You've seen those people with WWJD wristbands? They're roleplaying all the time.

Posted By: TonyLBYou've seen those people with WWJD wristbands? They're roleplaying all the time.

So, so disturbingly true.

Daniel: Borderline. Who are they pretending to be? A different version of themselves? When does it cease being roleplay and become just living?

Posted By: TonyLBYou've seen those people with WWJD wristbands? They're roleplaying all the time.

Mfth! (Sound of me not laughing uproariously and causing all my co-workers to look at me funny.)

Fast role playing doesn't have to be internal either. The kid who grabs a towel and spends ten seconds pretending to fly like Superman is role playing too.

I'm liking this analysis. It is very true that the traditional role playing game campaign is set up to have no natural ending. I've often said that most games don't end, they just fizzle. Those that end in a satisfying way tend to do so inspite of themselves. One of the things I admire about TSoY is the built in mechanic for saying "My character's story is over." It encourages you to push for that sastisfying ending. I'm definitely very interested in ideas which promote full story arc games complete with endings, and not just for "fast food" games.

- Eric Sedlacek

Tony,

If your definition of "social footprint" requires completion, then of course open-ended games will have an "infinite" footprint. I think that the true social economy issue is whether the fun you get out justifies the time you put in, compared to other social activities.

So, the open-ended D&D game is like a junk bond - it promises a very high return once the campaign matures, but there's a high chance your game will go under...
but if you can make a "quick kill on the market" (with a low-investment game that delivers a lot of fun) then you're going to go for that instead.

Only, this assumes that the fun you get from a traditional game is comparable to the fun you get from the quick game. Some people really want the traditional, long campaign sort of fun, and you won't be designing for these people.

Posted By: Doug RuffSome people really want the traditional, long campaign sort of fun, and you won't be designing for these people.

Several linked short-run games could form an indefinite-run game.

Serial gaming; we're already seeing parts of this.

It may also be useful to provide distinct segments of game-time, like episodes in PTA or towns in DitV. If you can say, "Let's run an episode real quick," then that's a readymade endpoint that people can anticipate and plan around.

Fred: Agreed.

Posted By: Doug RuffSmall social footprint gaming is the first sort of gaming: it's accelerated gaming, and as well as being great in its own right, it's more valuable to people who don't have much time to invest in the first place. For people who do want to make a sizable time investment in their campaign, both times of gaming are goodand these people are not the core market for small social footprint games(in italics because it's the point I wanted to make first time around, not because you won't get it otherwise.)

See, that assumes that people are divided up into those two types. I don't think that they are, exactly. I like games of many different types; I only want to have them *presented* according to what they are so that I can buy in properly. Which to me means that the idea can be approached by presenting the small and large footprint stuff in more than one way, to the same audience.

Here, let me give you an example, something I'm actually preparing to *do.*

The Cog Wars, my (and others) current project, is a basically open-ended game - large footprint. It runs mainly off of single - mission games; those are *theoretically* small-footprint games, but they aren't presented as such.

However, I'm also working on the idea of "escalations"; mini-games that play independently, but use most of the same core mechanics as Cog Wars. Ones with win-or-lose conditions, self-contained, many of them not even RPGs by most definitions. These mini-games will all be potential plug-ins to the main game.

So, if you download the "Cog Escape" minigame, it's a stand-alone game with a small footprint, and a promotion for the main game. Unless you already own the main game - In which case, you could choose to look at it as an optional expansion that can be used to model a specific kind of situation.

There's plenty of ways to link small / large footprint games. And I think it's more about presentation than audience.

Well, as DnD modules are usually played, there is the expectation that you will play the same character from one to the next.

So no.

Maybe more like DnD tournament modules, where there's a list of pregens available at the beginning, that may or may not have any connection to pregens from the module that came before? If you ever played the A1-2-3-4 series you'd know what I'm talking about.

An interesting article that's related to this same phenomenon: It's Not Just a Game, It's a Lifestyle by Andy Collins.

Sweet baby Jesus.

That article is horrific.

It's like he is so far gone that he doesn't even realize that what he's saying is a very bad thing. RPGs are a game that are only interesting to the tiny fraction of people so intensely committed that they'll restructure their entire life in order to game? GAH! That's a bad thing, Andy! A very bad thing.

My God ... what other product could survive at all under that kind of pressure? Would beer be an industry if only hard-core alcoholics were able to drink it? The automobile industry took off precisely when production standards created a car that people could use without having to take up "automobilist" as a lifestyle. This whole "one of us" nonsense is absolutely toxic in every way shape and form ... I'm all for recognizing it, because without recognizing it I don't think anyone will be able to beat it, but there is no cause to be celebrating.

Man, I'm still shuddering. That article was scary.

Posted By: Doug RuffHowever, there's another approach to the problem, which is "let's improve the 3 hours and 40 minutes so that it is as fun as the 20 good minutes". The play is still as slow (in story pacing terms) as before, but it's quality slow gaming.

(Minor diversion: I think this is part of the reason that "story" gaming and "immersive" gaming don't mix. Diversion ends.)

Doug, I agree a lot. For some reason I get this constant message (which might or might not be right) that there's is some kind of definition of "fun" and that it largely has to do with short-term return of investment; you take out a game, you play it for short time, and you enjoy it.

It sounds a lot like the argument that the only good place to eat is McDonalds, because you get served fast, you know what you'll get, and you're out fast. If you like McHamburgers or you can learn to like them, it's an excellent choice. Does this mean that eating in fancy restaurant where you'll have to wait for the the main dish for, I dunno, an half an hour while sipping wine and eating the first course, is somehow an invalid option? Or, furthermore, that you invite your friends to the dinner, plan the menu, go shopping, prepare the food for hours, eat and socialize is somehow an invalid option? In the later two choices, it's the experience that matters, in the first one, it's the fact that you get your stomach filled and you can head out to do some other cool stuff like, maybe, go and taste what Burger King has to offer.

Is there some reason why you can't do all this, in different times, or pick your poison and stick with that? Is there a difference between the amount of social capital you have invested or does it matter that people don't invest the same amount of social capital - as long as they feel that they get out roughly the same amount (and probably more) than they invested?

If some part in the experience, wheter it's a long or a short one, sucks - that's a bad thing. But I don't understand what the scope and lenght of the experience has to do with it, as long as people know to what and how much they are investing.

Posted By: TonyLBStraight up, larger social foot-print means more of a barrier to entry. A higher barrier to entry means less people will enter. Less people willing/able to play a game with me means less gaming, and thatsucks.

Understood and understandable from a designer -point-of-view, if he wants to target the audience who have not roleplayed or have not roleplayed because of not being able to allocate time/not feeling like they enough payback/some other similar reason. I can't claim to share the viewpoint (then again, I'm not a game designer), but I'll take them to other thread.

Setting aside (for at least this post) the "market" question ... On a purely personal level, I get more mileage out of games that fit into a small footprint. They get played more.

I made huge efforts to get together with people for a season of Primetime Adventures. We knocked ourselves out to do it. And it was worth it. It was some damn rockin' roleplay.

I make very little effort to get together Jungle Speed. It just happens. People are sitting around and I say "Hey, how about a game of Jungle Speed." And it, too, is always worth it.

Now if I said "I've played more games of Jungle Speed than I have of PTA" you'd say "Well of course! Jungle Speed takes ten minutes! You can play more games of Jungle Speed in an hour than you could possibly play of PTA in a month!"

But I'm saying a few things beyond that. I have played more total hours of Jungle Speed than I have of PTA. I have played Jungle Speed with more different people in the past few months than I have roleplayed with (in all systems combined) in the past few years.

Given the disparity in effort, that strikes me as a pretty startling situation.

I don't think I have a preference between those two, and I'm struggling to see the relevance.

My point is that I'm not playing Jungle Speed for a short period of time. I'm playing it for a very, very long period of time which happens to be broken up into manageable chunks.

Tony said: People are sitting around and I say "Hey, how about a game of Jungle Speed."

If I may ask, what leads to you say "Jungle Speed" and not "PrimeTime Adventures"?


Cheers,
Roger

Posted By: RogerIf I may ask, what leads to you say "Jungle Speed" and not "PrimeTime Adventures"?

Repeated experience that asking people to play Jungle Speed results in playing Jungle Speed, and asking people to play PTA results in people saying "Four hours, huh? I don't know ...."

Posted By: Doug RuffI would find this "footprint" idea a lot more useful if it describes the minimum amount of time or effort required to guaranteepayoff...

I thought that was the idea?

Posted By: Doug RuffIf your payoff is to riff creatively with your friends or compete with them for kudos, then small footprint.

Not necessarily, no. No matter what your "payoff" is, if you join up with a Burning Wheel game that's planned to run eight sessions it's simply not cool for you to say "Okay, I got my fun in the first fifteen minutes. Let's do something else now!" Yes?

Tony: Group dynamics may change what qualifies as payoff. In less well-adjusted groups, people have been known to do exactly that - or to switch off at the table once they've had their fun.

But I'm far less interested in the semantic issues (and it's entirely my fault for bringing them up) than in how effective shortening the wait for something fun to happen in a longer game is, compared to just making the game short.

Ridiculous Illustration: Doug, come play this game with me. It'll be SEVEN YEARS of solid happy-making fun! Every single moment from start to finish will be exhilerating!

Or:

Doug, come play this game! It's called Bang! and it takes a half hour and it's totally fun.

Counterpoint to Joshua's illustration: If we start to play the seven-year game, and we stop after half-an-hour, and we had more fun than we would have done playing Bang!, does it matter that we didn't complete the game?

Yes, people may feel let down, and that may reducethe amount of "fun" that was had. But - if there was any way of measuring such a thing - the "net" fun was still higher from the abandoned game, then maybe starting that game wasn't such a bad thing after all.

You know, people do this all the time - I'm sure that the vast majority of the posters here have played a game of D&D or Heroquest or PTA or something else and have stopped playing before the campaign is "over". That doesn't invalidate the time they put in or the fun they got out.

So, I see the difference, but I reject the analysis that larger-footprint games don't have a payoff until the end of the "footprint" or that measuring the footprint is somehow more important than measuring the fun. It's still a useful concept though.

Tony, have you EVER known a seven-year campaign to spring up among people who weren't already friends?

I haven't.

Socially, I think RPG's are more like sports than games.

Fred,

I think that analogy may be true.

But it still doesn't negate Tony's point(s).

Because I played highschool football, and commited a fucking year of my life through pain and rain and training camp to my team. I've also played touch football with 4 guys I met at the park and knew I'd probably never see again in my life, for a total about about 45 minutes.

The big thing about RPGs is that they're the kind of sport that has traditionally assumed that you have to do the first kind of game, and can't do the second. Doing the second, however, is very possible with most sports. M(aybe not racecar driving, but that isn't a sport anyway.) One of the reasons why sports are so popular is that it is equally possible to play basketball for 20 minutes and have a blast or play for 30 years in a Y league and also have a blast.

From where I'm sitting, social footprint is mostly about up-front commitment. Here are a couple of recent examples from non-RPG activities that I've run across.

A buddy asks me if I wanna go catch a movie with him. We'd go see it today (Friday) and it runs for just over 2 hours. I think about all the other things I could be doing with two hours on a Friday, and I think about how badly I want to see this particular movie, and I decide that I just don't feel that it's worth it tonight. Some other night, maybe, but not tonight.

I've been working my way through an anime series titled Monster. I really like it. A lot. I think many other people I know would also like it. A lot. However, I'm hesitant to pressure anyone into watching it because it's so dang long. As in, over 25 hours long. That's a big commitment. Sure I think most people could enjoy it in broken up chunks. I figure you could watch five or ten episodes and enjoy them all, and then decide if you want to watch more some other time. But, that's not what people are commiting to when they say they want to watch the series.

The social footprint thing is, to me, about evaluating the activity before you actually start it. What time/effort is being asked of me to participate, and is it going to be worth it? Even for a one-shot RPG session, we're talking three or four hours. That's a lot of time. We could play four sessions of Settlers in that time, or watch two entire movies, or see six episodes of Firefly. Or we could be watching three episodes of Firefly, playing a game of Settlers, and playing an hour of Guitar Hero. Notice how I can't mix and match any of that with my session of roleplaying.

Thomas

Thomas, in your distinction, is there any difference between the social footprint of a four-hour one-shot and an ongoing campaign that meets in four-hour sessions?

Posted By: TonyLBSmall social footprint isn't about making games better for the folks who are happy to commit to eight hour sessions every week until they die. It's about making games possible at all for the folks who won't commit to more than "Well, we're here right now, and we've got an hour to kill before I have to get to the metro."

Okay, on one hand I can't really disagree with this perspective except on one level...

Thus far gaming has had fringe status in the States. It's gotten a few leaps of popularity (ie. White Wolf brought in a different kind of gamer and made an aspect of gaming 'cool' for a short time, 3rd Ed D&D used fantasic marketing to draw in millions of new or returning gamers & some other media have made the nerd/geek/dork sub-culture take a little more positive social spin) but otherwise it's completely outside the public's frame of mind as a normal activity.

If they were to be better incorporated into the social norm then the "social footprint" wouldn't be as big of a deal. The activity would be something parents would regularly drive their children to week in and week out, buy uniforms, and coach on the side. I suspect that in communities where gaming is introduced into schools as a positive, team-building, slightly competetive activity we would see gaming be more widely accepted.

Now don't get me wrong, this is an over simplified analysis. I mean we'd also have to break the media mold of the asthetics of the athletics body and somehow convince families that a successful gamer could get scholarships into collages or even national exposure and million dollar endorements by Pepsi and Ray Ban. But I think schools, extracurricular organizations and church groups are a good start.

Tony: I'm rejecting what I perceived to be an analysis made in the post that started this thread:

"Let's consider the D&D of my youth, shall we? I would argue that it had an infinite social footprint. The expectation was of campaign everlasting. If you played the game for twenty years, and then it finally stopped, some players would feel that they'd been let down ... that the true payoff of all of the campaign was going to happen next year, or in 2067, or something."

But also the implicit assumption (which may be a strawman: if so, I'm sorry) that a game designed for long campaigns also automatically has a large social footprint, or that it is automatically better to play a complete small-footprint game than an abortive large-footprint game.

Example: I used to play regular "fantasy heartbreaker" RPG sessions with a group that I met by chance (at a Police identity parade, but that's another story.) We used to game regularly once or twice a week for hours at a time. The adventures were basically one or two session "modules" but soem of the characters had been going for years before I joined, and we played for several years afterwards. We even re-wrote and retconned the rules several times and did a near-complete campaign "reset" after one of our players died - we kept the setting, but ditched most of the player characters because we needed a bit of emotional distance from the older game events.

Then the game slowly fell apart due to competing time commitments (we could never all show up at the same time, other issues.) Looking at it from a footprint
perspective; that sucked big-time, the campaign ended early, and there was all this cool stuff we never got to do and stories were left untold.

Payoff-wise: it was some the best fun I've had roleplaying (even though there were many sucky, long sessions) and am satisfies that I got my investment back.

So far, this doesn't actually contradict anything you're saying, so please don't jump over it... what's more interesting is what happened next.

We still get together for gaming - mainly those evil collectable card games, precisely becasue of the very social footprint thing Tony is talking about! - but we have also started at least three or four different campaigns (more fantasy heartbreaker, Spycraft, CoC) that we knew full and well that we would never complete a major "campaign length" story-arc for; sometimes we had more than one of these running simultaneously. However, we were still having fun playing (and socialising, and mucking about) and would still make long-term game decisions knowing that those decisions wouldn't come to fruition in play (for example, we're planning our feat choices for the Spycraft campaign several levels ahead, but we're very unlikely to be reaching that level in play. Or we are trying to build up a frontier community in our fantasy heartbreaker, knowing we will never see it turn into the major town that we want it to become.) Some of these games are definitely ended; some may get picked up again.

From the outside, our sessions would have looked like "large-footprint" gaming, but I think they're not. We all would like to play more, but we are happy that our other commitments mean that we almost certainly won't. We all know the game is not complete, but any dissatisfaction from this is outweighed by the pleasure we got from the play.

Or maybe it is better for to say that the "game footprint" was large, but the "social footprint" was smaller?

And I am still very much up for some small-footprint gaming on top of all of this. No, I really want to play small foot-print roleplaying games. But with this group, I would want to trade it for the card gaming, not for the meandering and abortive campaign sessions.

Regards,

Doug

My respect for you just doubled, Tony.

And it was already a big huge pillar of respect.