Revisionist History: Mechanics Clarity Check

[Trevis Martin]

Hi folks,

I've just put the alpha writeup of my game Revisionist History on my website.  Check it out here

This is a game in which all the players take on the roles of scholars who discover a story through their research, and who try to shape it to their own ends.

I intend for the game to be eventually sold as a PDF from my website.

At present the writeup doesn't have any examples of play. (I am working on amending that)  Without those I want to know if the mechanics seem clear or not on first reading.

Thanks for your attention.

best

Trevis

[Jeremy L.]

Hi Trevis,

This is my first post on the Forge, but I thought this was a really clever game and I had to respond.

Let me start by saying I'm excited about what you've offered, and I may try to organize some of my friends for a run of it. Your rules lend themselves well to the kinds of stories we enjoy, and the kind of play format we'd have to use since we can't get together for regular gaming.

I have a few questions that you might clarify in the next draft:

1: In a challenge, how does bidding work? Does it happen in one declaration and one response, or does it proceed in a series of "raises" until one or the other party "folds"? (Considering the nature of the game and what it's supposed to be recreating, I think the latter would work best.)

2: During a challenge, can other players support the challenger or the defender, with their own credibility tokens? Like, pool their own contribution with that of one or the other party? I would think this would make play more involving for everyone (and again, it would suit the nature of the game).

3: Is there a limit to the number of articles a player can submit during one period? If it's more than one, does a player receive a point for each submission, or only one point for participating in that period at all? Or can the player get up to a certain limited number of points?

Oh! ps. 4: Is there a compelling game reason for having researchers present their agendas to one another? Is this supposed to be something like a win-game condition (although it will necessarily be abstract -- how can anyone determine whether a researcher who wanted to get to the truth at all costs actually has gotten to the truth!)? Or is it for flavor and group dynamic reasons? If the latter, I can see plenty of reasons for thinking about your researcher's agenda, but I can also envision situations in which you don't want to announce that agenda. (For example, my researcher is secretly a member of a cult heck-bent on obscuring the horrible truth of what went on at the creepy old Kensington family mine during the 1890s.)

Thanks for posting these rules and thanks in advance for considering my questions.

[Nathan P.]

Well, it pushes my buttons. I would love love love to see an example of play, if at all possible. I'll try to read through it with more attention (only having time to skim at the moment) sometime this weekend, but it looks pretty sweet right off the bat.

Sorry for the somewhat empty post, just displaying some enthusiasm...

[Trevis Martin]

Thanks for the response, guys.

Nathan, I appreciate the enthusiasm very much! And I'm working on putting together an example of play, possibly several.

reprobate,

I'm flattered that the game prompted you to respond, and welcome to the Forge.  If your friends need a place to try it, I'm willing to host the game at the site.  I'll clarify your questions in the next draft as well but let me answer them here.

1. The second option is what I had in mind, with the caveat that a challenge has to be resolved within a single play period (default is one calander day.)

2. I didn't remember to include this but other players may support challenger or defender with their coins but only from thier research fund.  Their source ratings are static and can only be used when they are challenging or defending.

3. A player can submit as many articles within a play period as they wish but they only recieve one point per play period in which they submitted something, not per article.  If you have players that post frequently you should consider adjusting the play period from its default of one calander day to something shorter.

oops, time is short, I'll be back to answer the last question.  But the short answer is that the scholar's agenda is a focuser for the player and does not have to be public.

best,

Trevis

[Jeremy L.]

Trevis,

Thank you for the offer of play space on your Wiki. I may take you up on it; I'll let you know in a couple of weeks. I've already recruited a troupe of four or five friends who are interested in trying the game out.

I do have another question:

You said in your rules that "If two articles appear that contradict each other then a challenge automatically ensues between their authors with the more recent article being the challenger." Now, let's say information disclosed in article A is used in articles B and C (by the same player or by other players). And along comes article D, which challenges a critical assumption in A. Is the challenge resolved only between A and D, or between A+B+C and D? I mean, I can see pro's and con's either way: On the one hand, you do want core or canon material to be protected; on the other hand, canon material can be protected by the votes, and it is important to permit as much flexibility to the game as players want to take advantage of. So I guess I'd prefer it be resolved between articles A and D alone; but maybe you have some other, weightier consideration to offer.

[Trevis Martin]

Reprobate (may I ask your name?),

Aha, this is why I need critical eyes.  Thanks for finding that one.  My intent was for challenges to be resolved between A + D alone.  I should remember to mention in the next draft that each article should 'reference' other articles with information that they are building on.  I figure if someone attacks an article that others have built on that those players would pitch in to defend the core article.

A fuller answer on the last question from above, I think that it doesn't do any harm for everyone to know the agendas of the scholars.  Especially in the first discussion phase discussing this kind of thing openly can lead to setting up good dynamics within the group.  I can also see some people wanting to use it as only a personal motivator, letting their agenda come out through their roleplaying.  Agenda isn't necessarily a static thing either but it will help give you a direction in play.

best,

Trevis

[Jeremy L.]

Trevis,

Thanks for the answer. If I come up with any other questions, I'll let you know.

My name is Jeremy.

[Jeremy L.]

Trevis,

You may be interested to know how my set-up for play testing is going.

I've already got a total of ten people interested in participating. Many of us are students, and some working stiffs; but since we're playing by electronic correspondence, there's no reason we can't take our time with it. I'm suggesting turns of 3 month duration. I know it's very long, but it gives us time to work on our posts. If you think this format would be inappropriate for your Wiki, we can set up a LiveJournal community -- in fact, that may work better. Your advice here would be appreciated.

With input from the other players, I've put together this story seed/teaser:

In 1615, a group of settlers, led by the charismatic preacher Alec Brewer, established themselves on the dark, lonesome coast of eastern Maine (then called the Territory of Sagadahock), far from any other populated areas. They called their new home Beulah, in honor of the virgin land. If they kept any contact with other settlements, it must have been very infrequent; from the time of its founding, there is no further record of any dealings with any other Europeans.

In 1618, a ship wrecked on the rocks not far from Beulah, and the survivors found the village -- or its remains. The sailors found that all the settlers had disappeared. There were no signs of a struggle; tools, chores, and even table settings looked as if they had simply been walked away from in mid-use.

An inquiry was conducted by the Crown. It was ascertained that the colonists could not have disappeared more than six months prior to the settlement's discovery. It was believed that the colonists took up with a local Maliseet or Passamaquoddy band, perhaps because of some trouble during the winter; but when the Crown investigators went to these bands, they could find none of the colonists. Many of the bands, however, implicated a secretive hostile tribe they called the Quadgie. The Quadgie were supposedly witches, and were known to raid the other Indian tribes; it was surmised that they had raided Beulah as well.

In 1619, an armed expidition was made to find any Quadgie encampments in the area. Only one was found, and after some sort of confrontation (the details of which are not known), the entire band was massacred. The leader of the expedition, Captain Jonathan De Blois, filed a report (now lost), but swore his company to secrecy, and would never speak of the incident again except to say that the disappearance of Beulah had been solved and justice done to his satisfaction. The case was henceforth considered closed.

In November 2004, the Washington County archives in Bangor were renovated. The archives building had been built at the turn of the 20th century, to replace an older building. During the recent renovation, it was found that a large cabinet in the basement had been blocking a forgotten door. Behind this door was a small room, with several old boxes and chests filled with unregistered or mis-registered files. One of these chests contained all of the evidence that the 1618-19 Crown inquest commission had discovered (though it seems they had not gone through it very thoroughly, perhaps because it was determined that the case had been relatively straightforward).

The county turned these archives over to a group of researchers called the Institute for Early Maine Studies; they will be publishing their discoveries and debates in their Quarterly Journal.

[/quote]

[Trevis Martin]

Hi Jeremy,

Wow.

That sounds cool.  The wiki would be fine if you wish to use it. I'll be happy to set it up for you. I don't see any problem.  PM or email me if you want me to set it up.

As for turn length.  Are you saying that your people will only be able to earn and invest a token every three months?  I suggest that you don't really need that long a frame.  You aren't requred to post an article every play period, nor take any action at all really.  The play period rule exists as a speed limit to how fast players can earn new tokens and invest uncommitted  tokens.  I think a play period of a week would be enough if you want a longer one, but I'm not sure its even necessary.  Your call of course as long as everyone playing with you agrees.

best,

Trevis

[Jeremy L.]

Hey Trevis,

My overriding consideration, when I came up with that "3 months" figure, was giving us enough time to think about where the game stands, coming up with a way to insert ourselves into the story again, and working up a solid post within the free time we have. I know I won't be able to do this in a matter of a few weeks, but I will be able to do it within a matter of a few months. Also it fit with the idea of a "quarterly" journal.

The figure hasn't been decided, yet; this was just a suggestion for my group. When the semester ends, I hope to get more input from them. I'm hoping to start play in the new year.

Jeremy

[Lathan]

It seems clear enough to me; unfortunately, I doubt I'll have time to play it in the near future with real-world finals coming up, but maybe sometime.

Gordon

[clehrich]

Aha, this is why I need critical eyes.  Thanks for finding that one.  My intent was for challenges to be resolved between A + D alone.  I should remember to mention in the next draft that each article should 'reference' other articles with information that they are building on.  I figure if someone attacks an article that others have built on that those players would pitch in to defend the core article.

Do the various scholars know each others' credibility scores on a given topic?

Let's say we're arguing about the secret origins of the English Second Civil War of 1836.  Dave's scholar's credibility on the nobility is 4, and your credibility on the French proto-anarchists is 3.  Dave posts a document that clearly indicates that the supposed death to illness of the child-heir Victoria was actually an assassination plotted by the Duke of Devonshire.  You post a document showing that the document Dave's posted was actually a plant, a fraudulent document composed by French anarchists in order to swing the Parliament toward open warfare.

Now if we all know the credibilities in advance, we know you're going to have to stump up some chips; if not, we guess.  I assume, but am not sure, that we all know.

Second, using the same example, what's to prevent me from doing a close analysis of the document in question, posting no new documents except maybe a corroborating palace circular, and focusing primarily on the commentary and analysis, arguing that everyone here is misreading the texts: in fact, Victoria committed suicide, having been abused by her own father, and all these documents were actually attempts to cover it all up.  What credibility might apply here?  Couldn't it really be any at all?  To put it differently, how do we assess the credibility of pure analytical criticism rather than raw documentation?

Out of interest, does it make any difference if I post an actual document, that is one that really is historical?  I realize the rules don't take this into account, and that it's an oddity, but how would you handle it?

I'm just a little confused as to how this will play out in practice.

In case you hadn't guessed, I do this sort of nonsense for a living, so it REALLY pushes my buttons.  Some time soon I have to run a game of this....

[Trevis Martin]

Hi Gordon,

Part of my motivation for writing this game, besides that I like that layered narrative effect in novels, is to write a game specifically for the online medium that allows for varying speeds of play by its participants.
Like other PBP or PBEM games the time investment need not be gigantic.

So maybe after finals.  Anyone who wants to participate in a playtest can register at my site and let me know.  I'm hoping to get a playtest together within a month or so.


Hi Chris

I'm glad you're looking it over.  (If you didn't I was gonna PM you about it anyway.)  I'm not a professional academic though I could be.  Even if I was I've got an MFA in painting and printmaking so it's not quite the scholarly process that you experience  so your eyes will be helpful.

The players do know the credibility scores of all the scholars in the game. The scholar's character sheet should be maintained publicly. The scholars themselves of course, don't know any such thing.

In your example you have scholars with credibility in groups (such as Frech proto-anarchists.)  I envisioned the game as each scholar having a credibilty score for particular people (which is what I meant by subjects I originally called them historical personae.)  So for your example, Dave's credibility for his document would depend on his score for the Duke of Devonshire and the child-heir Victoria.

On your second question, in terms of hard game mechanincs, whether you color it as raw documentation or analysis it comes down to your credibility in the area being studied (your scores for the subjects involved) and the amount you're willing to commit from your reseach fund.  The other thing that prevents you from doing only analysis is that you only earn a new token and gain the privelage of investing a token if you publish articles yourself within a play period.  If you don't then there is no income and your own credibility in the various subjects in the game does not increase.  Its therefore more efficient to post a counter article, even if it is referencing the same texts, rather than simply post criticism to an existing one.

Did I address what you were asking?

I'd like any comments and thoughts you have by PM or email as well.

best,

Trevis

[clehrich]

I'm glad you're looking it over.  (If you didn't I was gonna PM you about it anyway.)  I'm not a professional academic though I could be.  Even if I was I've got an MFA in painting and printmaking so it's not quite the scholarly process that you experience  so your eyes will be helpful.

Not to worry, some of my best friends are MFA's.

On your second question, in terms of hard game mechanincs, whether you color it as raw documentation or analysis it comes down to your credibility in the area being studied (your scores for the subjects involved) and the amount you're willing to commit from your reseach fund.  The other thing that prevents you from doing only analysis is that you only earn a new token and gain the privelage of investing a token if you publish articles yourself within a play period.  If you don't then there is no income and your own credibility in the various subjects in the game does not increase.  Its therefore more efficient to post a counter article, even if it is referencing the same texts, rather than simply post criticism to an existing one.

I'm still just a tad confused, though.  Do those articles have to present new primary documents as well?

I mean, let's say Dave published a long letter from the Duke of Devonshire, about, I don't know, George III.  His credibility on the Duke and mine on George are the same.  If I write an article claiming that he has misread the letter, and it actually shows something other than what he says it does, does that count as an article published so I can blow tokens on it and get some?  Or do I have to publish also a corroborating diary entry by George's secretary (or his doctor, of course, since he was mad as a March Hare most of the time)?

I'm really just wondering because it seems to me that a lot of the best historical scholarship happens by going back over the documents pulled out by archival researchers.  See, what happens is the archivists pull out all this stuff and publish it, with critical commentary and evaluation.  Sometimes that evaluation is terrific, but often it isn't, since often the people who have access to the right documents aren't so much the smartest as they are the ones are affiliated with the right library or collection.  

So for example, I love Italian and German scholars who dig up all sorts of weird documents about the 16th-17th C. occultist freaks who interest me most.  They edit, compile references, and publish the things, and then I go and tell everyone what the documents actually mean.  This is a division of labor.  The thing is, these Europeans (especially the Italians) are paid by libraries and collections to crank this sort of thing out; Americans are usually not well rewarded for doing this sort of work, and in fact there are disincentives.  That's stupid, but it's true.  In America, I get huge credit for doing the analysis (in theory, anyway).  In Europe, people might say, "Yeah, but you didn't publish any new documents."

Concretely, Vittoria Perrone Compagni and Paola Zambelli (note Italian names, right?) between them published almost the complete works of Cornelius Agrippa in critical editions, with commentary.  Until I wrote The Language of Demons and Angels (2003), nobody really understood what the hell his magic was actually about.  I have never seen an Agrippa manuscript in my life, and don't see any particular reason I should do so -- it's all available in critical editions done by people better at that sort of work than I am.  Without them, I couldn't have written my book.  Without me, nobody would know what he was on about.  [In the occult philosophy -- there's lots of good stuff on his other work.]  You see?

If it were my game, and I might add this as a variant some time if I put this together just to see what happens, I would make a formal distinction between primary and secondary articles.  [In real life, I think this is usually an invidious distinction, but it's useful heuristically for things like this sort of history.]  I would say that in order to do the token thing, you must either (1) publish a primary document (or more than one) with critical commentary, or (2) publish a secondary analysis of previously published documents.  I would require the analysis in case #2 to be considerably more detailed and probably longer than the critical commentary in #1.  This gets subjective, but the point is that the standards of analysis go way up if you don't have new primary documents.

Then I would probably make some sort of analogous distinction within the lists of scholarly credibilities.  So for example, here on my lfar eft is Lynn Thorndike, author of the 8-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science, who's got credibility from hell for knowing every single obscure document in that history from especially the 14th through 16th centuries.  Here on my near right is Paolo Rossi, author of Clavis Universalis and a whole bunch of others, who's got credibility from hell for being able to analyze such material amazingly well.  Somewhere in between them, a little to the left, we have Carlo Ginzburg, author of The Night Battles, who digs up weird crap in the archives and then analyzes it amazingly.  And WAY off on the right we have a pure theorist/analyst* who's not interested in digging up new documents but rather in looking at the same damn documents and saying, "Um, no, you've totally misunderstood what all that really means."

Anyway, you see where my question is coming from?  It's really just fine either way, but I'm just a little confused on how you envision this thing.

Which, I should remind you, I like very much.


* We haven't really had one in my field yet.  Foucault wanted to be but wasn't really any good; Levi-Strauss and Derrida, whatever else they were, weren't historians; de Certeau is a possibility though I think he did some archival stuff.  I suppose Stuart Clark [Thinking With Demons] is sort of like this....  This is what I do, basically, though there are certainly others nobody here's going to have heard of, like Stephen Clucas, Hakan Hakansson, and Gyorgy Szonyi.

[Trevis Martin]

Chris

First thanks for the comments. These had me thinking for a bit.  And I'm glad you like my game.

Okay,  I see how unclear it is.  This is what I'm thinking at this moment.  Originally my thinking included being able to disprove the article with commentary on the article itself (in the same thread, page, whatever) offering contrary evidence.  You could also post a contradictory article to refute an existing one.  I see now this method doesn't make much sense.  Or, rather, It is more complicated than it needs to be.  I think in the new writeup of the game I will propose that you must write an article to refute all or part of an existing article.  Your refutation can either present new originial documents that disprove the evidence of the original article or it can be an analysis of an existing article and its evidence.  Either way you get both your earning and investment privelages.  

Mechanically though, it comes down to the same thing.  Credibility scores for the people involved and research tokens bid.

I'm not so sure on how to require an analysis type article be more detailed than the original.  I've always thought of the articles themselves as rather short affairs, maybe a page or so.  There is no GM to act as a threshold on this and that's how I want to keep it.  I don't think people who are interested in the game would be all that short about it all anyhow.

Thanks for your help,

Trevis

PS.  I looked up your book on Amazon.  Wow, it looks like something I would like to read.  I have an edition of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy because I'm fascinated with sign and symbol systems (its a part of my artwork.)  Alas I don't have the 80 bucks for it, but perhaps someday.