I was inspired by a tweet from Red Headed Tim this morning to think about what a Twitter roleplaying game might look like.
Twitter, for those new to it, is, famously, “short messages continually answering the question, ‘What are you doing?’”. If that sounds only marginally interesting, I agree. What Twitter REALLY is, is a party with little clumps of conversation going on everywhere. You can listen in on friends talking, join in, or just walk around getting little nuggets from people here and there, occasionally adding some thoughts of your own.
Or maybe you just want to tell people what you are doing.
When you follow someone, you get everything they tweet to anyone in your twitter list. When someone follows you, they get all YOUR tweets. If the half of your friend’s conversation that you can read interests you, you can easily follow the link back to their friend and perhaps follow them. They get an alert that you are no following them; they might read your tweets and decide to follow you.
If someone you follow tweets too much or about things that don’t interest you, you might decide to stop following them.
So these are the challenges for a Twitter based RPG.
Every message from the game host must be 140 characters or less – that’s a Twitter limitation.
Player responses will look like half of a phone conversation to the player’s followers. The half they hear should be interesting enough to the player’s followers that the followers don’t drop the player (and perhaps they would like to join in).
And they shouldn’t spam the player or their followers.
My first idea was to do a simple game from personal computing’s stone age, “Hunt the Wumpus”. It would be really simple to program, but it completely violates points 2 and 3 – the player moves are strings of numbers, and there’s lots of spam for followers. You can check out someone else’s implementation of the game by following @huntthewumpus.
Games like Zork and Colossal Cave Adventures used a text interface and Zork, in particular, pioneered very forgiving player input that could deal with syntactically complex commands. However, the most usual player action in both these games was movement. If you just saw the player side of things, it would look like N N N N E NE W U TAKE LAMP LIGHT LAMP E E E U E PRESS BUTTON.
That’s gonna get you unfollowed pretty quick.
Twitter RPGs have to have the player tell a story to their followers even as the RPG is telling a story to the player.
I’ve come up with a simple design that might address this kind of thing.
Abolish repetitive RPG/MUD commands, like movement.
Limit player input to whatever they can fit in 140 characters, no more often than some long interval, half an hour or more.
Player input should help describe the game and imply the parts the followers cannot read.
So here’s kinda the thing I have in mind. Player input on the left, game output on the right.
Hello!
Hello, @player! You’ve come just in time! I have to get to my lab, but my mutant kitten Spices won’t let me through the door!
All I have, @player, is some chewing gum, a pencil, a cardboard box, a mirror and a balloon. Can you help?
Put mirror in box, put box by door, open the door.
You place the mirror in the box. The box now has a mirror in the bottom of it.
You place the box by the door.
You open the door.
The mutant cat runs snarling through the door, into the box.
The cat sees its reflection in the box and goes running far, far away, mewling in fear.
Phew! Thanks, @player! It’s like you knew exactly what to do… somehow…. Please meet me in my lab, I have a proposition for you.
Well, it’s okay to spam the player. They asked for it.
The player’s followers would only see the player tweet “Hello” and “Put mirror in box, put box by door, open the door.”. They will probably wonder what the heck is going on, but they won’t be spammed, and perhaps they would look in on the game and suggest possible things you could try (or play themselves).
Just some first thoughts on a rather traditional text RPG done Twitter-style. Any thoughts?