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?
To ensure your script didn’t need to parse ALL incoming messages, you would want to prefix the messages with the bot id – like @rpgbot Put mirror in box, put box by door, open the door. It would be a lot easier if you do the entire thing using direct messages too, from a arch perspective.
Direct messages would certainly deal with the spam, and a hunt the wumpus-type game would do well with that. I like the idea that your friends could watch you play and perhaps play themselves.
I realized I left off the player replying directly to the bot after I posted. That should have been in there.
I was thinking, though, about making a straight-up, combat oriented game for Twitter — that would definitely be a direct message thing. So thanks for the great idea 🙂
Nice idea, how about using hashtags to make it clear it’s a game?
if you start the tweet #tiparpg then can you say whatever you want? What about limiting it to one task or discovery daily. That way the majority (or best) responses of those following the game make the action for the following days play? Also makes it easy for players to follow the game without following everyone if you see what I mean by visiting http://hashtags.org/
Oh and let me know when you start 😉
Oh man, that just gave me an evil idea.
What if it was a game like a raid, you would have this beast on some sort of # channel, and every player would have some basic gear and commands like, #raid cast magic missile, #raid attack with short sword or whatever, and every fifteen minutes or so, the game would tally all actions, the monster would respond, perhaps killing some people off (who would need healing etc), and then when the monster was dead, everyone would get a trinket, some gold or a piece of gear.
Something quick and dirty like that could be done fairly quickly without being TOO spameriffic. It’s not Zork, but it might be fun.
Maybe you can make a kill 10 foozle game with a number of daily quests that are resolved by direct messages. The bot would tweet status messages like “Tipa has completed the ‘Goblin Infestation’ quest!” or “Caffo was slain by a Giant Goblin”, so people following the bot would be able to get a feel of the ‘mmo’ side, even if everybody plays the game alone.
A daily encounter which you set and everyone attacks is kinda cool.
Once a day, short event. Nice.
@Shuttler — yeah. I can just imagine someone trying to get a friend to tweet their move because they just need one more ice blast to kill the dragon 🙂 Could implement action points so you could do as many actions as you had action points so you could play and react through the day if you wanted. Each move you made would be responded to immediately so you could keep playing until you ran out of action points. Or just use them all at once. Hmm.
@Malekith — that is an incredibly cool idea. Kinda reminds me of that FF:Crystal Chronicles game for the Wii, where you would basically train up NPCs and have them go on adventures, and then you would receive their descriptions of what happened afterward.
Characters have three attributes: Mood, Action, and Reactions. Mood is Dauntless, Brave, Resolute, Apathetic, Nervous, Twittery (see what I did there?) and Scared. You start with Scared and earn better ones by not fleeing. If your health drops below a certain amount depending on your mood, you run and survive, but you get no loot and you don’t earn toward the next braver mood. You don’t have to slot the mood, in which case you stay until you die or the fight ends.
Action is your normal action in the fight — attack with a weapon, cast a spell, shoot from ranged. You can change this at any time or slot nothing there.
Reaction is an action your character takes automatically based on some condition — healing (a certain target or all nearby targets), attacking a weak spot, ducking out of action, etc.
Mood must be earned by not running when your bravest mood says you should. Actions and reactions come with experience. Weapons, spells and heals are dropped. No classes (just slot the actions and reactions you want to use), but there are levels. Gaining levels allows access to tougher fights. Early encounters are soloable, later ones will require friends. A death penalty of some sort must exist to give the character a reason to run if things turn bad.
You can change mood/action/reactions as much or as little as you like.