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Wave interacts with Google Maps in a way that could be great for play.

Wave interacts with Google Maps in a way that could be great for play.

If you’re not careful, Google Wave becomes just another play-by-chat option. Everyone’s typing at once, filing their character’s actions in order, creating a mess of information from which meaning must be extracted and the narrative of play recombined, like a puzzle. Everyone’s submitting pieces with one hand and everyone’s putting them together into something cogent with the other. It’s why play-by-chat typically strikes me as somehow both tedious and hectic, demanding a lot of attention for not a lot of reward.

My hope is that Google Wave will play a little bit differently. To do so, though, it has to be used as something other than a chat program with an editable backlog. Instead of focusing on its ability to let us communicate via chat, and instead of focusing on its real-time behaviors, let us focus on its shared editing options and degree of persistence.

Let’s use it breathe life into a few documents, instead of rushing to smother us with entries in an ongoing chat.

Is it just me or is Wave a Firefly reference? The “shiny, cap’n” error messages I’ve received make think it is.

So I propose a bit of new grammar or protocol for gaming through Wave: instead of tracking individual contributions post by post and turn by turn, let’s collaborate to create a shared, singular record of some part of play, whether it’s as long as a scene of dramatic play or short as a round of combat. That record expands as each player adds his bit to the action, and in the end it reads as a simple, workmanlike account of the action, somewhere between a prose report and a script.

This is the approach I’m going to take when I (hopefully) use Wave to playtest an upcoming game. But first, I’m going to use it to play a bit of a Gumshoe-system game with some friends, because I think Gumshoe is a pretty great fit for this type of play: it’s highly textual, highly narrative, with a minimum of randomness and fiddly bits.

This is just a rough example of how a “grammar of play” might be formatted for writing and reading in a Wave RPG. First, we see the Narrator’s setup for the scene (very simple in this case):

Scene One: The Body

DOUGLAS and EDGAR walk into the alley, through dripping rain, to survey the body. Tonight, this grisly scene is their workspace, their place of business. They are murder police, and a citizen is dead.

DOUGLAS …

EDGAR …

As play progresses, text is added to the active scene up above. Added. New text doesn’t replace what came before except by Narrator fiat. The formatting of the text helps convey information to the readers (who are presumably also the players):

  • ALL CAPS are PC names, used as in a screenplay to draw attention to player turns. Ellipses are used to indicate where a player’s next turn should go in the narrative, like traditional gaming initiative.
  • Regular text is basic description, whether by the Narrator or the player.
  • Bold-face text reveals when an ability is being invoked/used in play.
  • Italics are edits added in by the Narrator to reveal the response to such actions or to insert new information.
  • Dialogue is handled like a stage play, but with quotation marks for clarity.

Below the gameplay record, between the first scene and the second scene, players might chatter about what to do next, but their actual actions are written into the scene above, written into the actual account of the story as it happens, expanding the account and contributing to the official record. Chatter is behind-the-scenes talk and planning. The scene “plays out” in entries with headers like “Scene One: The Body” and “Scene Two: The Witness.”

(Maybe chatter even happens in another, simultaneous wave, which the Narrator might ignore as player planning, just as the players aren’t privy to the Narrator’s planning on her side of the computer screen.)

Now let’s look at the same record with some players’ actions in there. First Edgar happened to go, stating that he wanted to use his Evidence Collection skill in the scene (and writing it straight into the prose):

Scene One: The Body

DOUGLAS and EDGAR walk into the alley, through dripping rain, to survey the body. Tonight, this grisly scene is their workspace, their place of business. They are murder police, and a citizen is dead.

DOUGLAS…

EDGAR immediately sets to work with Evidence Collection, gathering up fibers from the body and any other available evidence.

Technically, Edgar maybe should have waited for Douglas, but in this case he’s just putting dibs on the skill he plans to use, and the Narrator can choose to either wait for Douglas or keep things moving. Remember, the top-to-bottom reading of the piece already determines order of action, as in regular prose, so we have an intuitive order-of-operations here—things happen in the order they appear in the account. The Narrator could always swap Edgar’s text for Douglas’s to reframe the order of operations, if she wanted to.

The Narrator then comes in and writes some follow-up description to Edgar’s actions, deleting part of Edgar’s post (“and any other available evidence“) and replacing it with more detail learned through the use of the skill. She writes it in italics to denote new information given out by the Narrator. The Narrator is still the final arbiter of the scene, so that text shouldn’t get altered by the players:

Scene One: The Body

DOUGLAS and EDGAR walk into the alley, through dripping rain, to survey the body. Tonight, this grisly scene is their workspace, their place of business. They are murder police, and a citizen is dead.

DOUGLAS…

EDGAR immediately sets to work with Evidence Collection, gathering up fibers from the body and lifting a spent casing from the pavement with his pen. At least four or five shots fired, but only one casing found. Maybe somebody thought they cleaned up after themselves and just missed a casing?

DOUGLAS …

EDGAR …

Here, then, we see the same account a few minutes of play later, wherein Douglas has taken his turn (and chosen to use his Ballistics skill to scour the crime scene) and the Narrator has revealed what that skill uncovers (in italics). Edgar then chimes in with some dialogue that doesn’t really require a new action—it just dramatizes the action and characterizes Edgar a bit.

Scene One: The Body

DOUGLAS and EDGAR walk into the alley, through dripping rain, to survey the body. Tonight, this grisly scene is their workspace, their place of business. They are murder police, and a citizen is dead.

DOUGLAS looks at the scene with an eye toward ballistics. He prowls the edges of the alley, looking for broken bricks, eyeballing the victim from afar at first, getting up the nerve to get closer while he finishes his coffee. He discovers three small-caliber slugs in shallow holes in the brick wall behind the victim, each one a little too far outside to be bullets that tore through her — these are shots that missed. Somebody fired a lot of rounds here.

EDGAR immediately sets to work with Evidence Collection, gathering up fibers from the body and lifting a spent casing from the pavement with his pen. At least four or five shots fired, but only one casing found. Maybe somebody thought they cleaned up after themselves and just missed a casing?

EDGAR: “Our guy isn’t as tidy as maybe he thought.”

DOUGLAS …

EDGAR …

Douglas and Edgar would continue their investigation by writing out other skills they intend to use, and describing them in use. The Narrator would respond by revealing what those skills uncover. When all the clues have been discovered, the Narrator ends the scene and begins a new one, which unfolds and builds toward completion the same as this one.

When action breaks out and it’s time to roll the dice, Google Wave has an app for that. Players just roll the dice in the text, hiding it away in brackets, and let the Narrator describe the outcome. For example:

Douglas whips out his sidearm and fires off two shots straight away — BAM! BAM! — then braces the gun with his free hand and scans the room for more trouble. [2 points of Shooting for 1d6+2 (3)] Both shots rattle off into the dark, beating back silence for a few seconds. His ears ring. He can hear the target sprinting into the night, but he sees only night-darkened brick and falling rain.

(The highlighting on the dice is done automatically in the program.) In this case, Douglas spends two points from his Shooting ability but misses the shot’s Difficulty of 4. Instead of spending hours on a few rounds of combat, though, we resolve it with a few simple lines of prose and a built-in die-roller.

Perhaps best of all, this kind of play doesn’t require rapt attention during a discrete play session. Instead, you can play gradually over the course of a week as players log in and out from their homes and offices, on lunch or a smoke break, all across the planet. This makes Google Wave potentially revolutionary in a way that a really great chat program doesn’t — it is persistent, it is editable, it is easy to use, and it facilitates a division of information, meaning it can help thwart confusion.

I don’t know if it’s truly revolutionary yet, but I intend to test this style of play and find out if it’s fun. If it is — if Google Wave is fun, easy, and online all at the same time — then it could seriously alter the way I play games by changing when and with whom I get to play. That ain’t nothing.