Against Play By Post
As of writing this article, it has been exactly 3 months since Sam Sorensons Over/Under ended, and since then a small subculture of real time play by post games has spawned. Most of them have been takes on the very same 'phracts structure that o/u was based on, alongside other more free-form political sims, war-games, and even at least one game based in the very same setting as o/u!
Over/Under was a complicated beast, there have been many people trying to pick apart exactly what made it so magical, and I'm sure there will be many more. For now, though, I'm mostly interested in working out its legacy and what can be learnt from that. One of the things that made o/u so immersive was the real-time nature of it, the game didn't stop when you logged off, the thousand-odd players would keep playing and the world would keep breathing, choking, and moving onward. There was a few times I went to sleep just to wake up to war being declared, or someone having been murdered and then being thrust into helping clean up the chaos that ensued.
This was both its biggest strength and one of the most dangerous aspects of it. The structure generated a huge amount of fomo, which led to so many stories of people spending an unhealthy amount of time in game, to the point that some people had to quit because it was effecting their personal lives too much, I myself was putting an absurd 15-20 hours in a day, which I only (poorly) maintained due to being in just the right spot of having nothing going on at the time. Sustaining this for an entire month burned out so many people, even Sam, as noted in his latest cataphracts blog.
Most of the games I've seen descended from o/u haven't learned from this, but instead have played into it in an attempt to recapture that lightning in a bottle. This design choice has led to some harsh consequences for both the health of the players and the sustainability of these games. It causes inconsistent troughs and peaks in the amount of time, energy and investment needed to be able to participate in the game, going from days of minimal to no interaction, to suddenly demanding your complete and total attention and investment at exactly that moment, or else you end up at a huge disadvantage, or could even end up with your pc dead. Not only is this extremely stressful and inaccessible to people with some disabilities, but it gives a vast structural advantage to people who have less busy schedules where they can just switch focus on the spot. It also severely disadvantages players in time-zones outside of where the main bulk of players are, often requiring players outside of those time-zones to be up at late hours just to be able to participate in the "live" parts of the game.
So many of these problems could be solved with design intentionally built to run asynchronously or just as regular scheduled sessions. Using mechanical structures to slow player interaction, even possibly prevent players from interacting 1-on-1 in real-time entirely.
I decided to give designing a game like this a shot, initially conceptualising a game of cataphracts that's a step back on the logistical scale, being the regent of a kingdom sending orders for armies to march on solely via letter while remaining at the kingdoms capital, which would allow for a slower, more asynchronous style of gameplay, but I realised that this would 1: be better off as a fkr game, and 2: be way too intensive for me to ref. So I cut the idea back even further; what if it was solely about letter-writing, that way. The next step from there was to try and build the mechanics to prevent over-investment and huge spikes of commitment required, so I decided to make the players drift in space, light-days apart, sending messages in real time, only able to send one message at a time. The next design goal I had was to make it flexible so that it can work around people who have busy schedules, so I set decided that players can save up to seven messages to send at a time, that way if you're busy, you can just save them up over a week and bulk send them once you have the free time. The last thing I wanted was to reduce the workload on me as a ref, so I decided the players have to pick the angle for the message, meaning the majority of messages just shoot into the void.
I decided to call the game Alone in Space, and started running a 40-player, year long game last week, there's been a few snags so far, and I'm sure there will be plenty more to learn from along the way. The full text of the game can be found here!