Blog Index Forum Games! There's a particular subset of online gaming that I find really interesting. Instead of taking place in your typical video game, these instead take place on forums. And no, I don't mean the simple goofy stuff such as "ban the user above you". I'm talking more about the intricate stuff that takes effort to play, and usually takes place of a longer period of time. I think it's really cool how people manage to take a simple messaging system and use it to play these complex games. Granted, a lot of it has to do with the fact that these games rely on social interaction above all else, but I do think that it is cool nonetheless. Anyways, I want to take some time to talk about a few of them. Mafia Ok, this first one is pretty well known, thanks to the fact that it is a popular in-person game. In case you aren't familiar, here's the jist of it: players are divided into two teams, the mafia and the villagers (also known as townies). The mafia knows who the other members of the mafia are, but the townies are left in the dark. The goal is to eliminate the other team. The game is divided into two phases. During the day phase, players talk with each other to try to figure out who the mafia are. At the end of the day the town votes to kill a player that they think is a mafia member. During the night phase, no one may communicate with each other. The mafia also decide on which town member they will kill. These two phases repeat until the end of the game. To spice things up, sometimes special roles are adding into the mix. For example, a cop and investigate the identiy of a player, while the doctor can protect someone from dying. How does this translate into the internet forum? For starters, the game lasts much longer. Instead of a phase taking several minutes, each phase lasts a day or two. This is to accomodate everyone's differing schedules and timezones. Secondly, people communicate differently. Instead of talking face to face, interaction is entirely text based. This means no body language. This means that everyone gets a turn to speak if they choose to do so. It can greatly change how the game is played. Third, games can be much larger than an in-person one. No need to gather everyone in one room. Getting eveyone to quiet down and listen to the moderater isn't a problem either, since all it takes is making a post. This makes it easier to have a lot of people in the game. Everyone was so sure this guy was going to die that they made a gravestone for him in advance. There are two more noticable effects: being on the internet and all, players can talk privately via PMs. This could allow the mafia to discuss strategy, or a cop could rally the players that are known to be trustworthy to coordinate a vote against a mafia member. Neither of these would be possible in a normal in-person game. Secondly, being online allows for more complicated roles that would be too logistically complicated to moderate for an in-person game. For example, the bus driver can pick two players to swap, resulting in an action that would've been performed on player A affecting player B instead, and vice versa. Personally, I haven't had the privilege of taking part in an online game of Mafia. I did attempt to organize one, but I had to cancel it since only three people signed up. They are fun to read through, though, as it feels like your witnessing an improvised murder mystery. A fun one to read can be found here, or its sequel. A cool website/wiki detailing many facets of the game can be found here. The Killing Game Another forum game with a murder mystery vibe, and one that I did actually get to play, is known as The Killing Game. It's heavily based on the Dangaropa series of games. From what I understand, it started out when Fun With Despair created it on the Minus World forums. Unlike Mafia, this one is a free for all. Tha game takes place on a map with multiple rooms, such as hallways, a kitchen, a bedroom for each player, and the like. On the first phase, known as the killing phase, everyone roams around the map, doing whatever they want, such as going to the kitchen to get snacks, engaging in tomfoolery, and maybe attempting to comit murder. Then, on the investigation phase, it is revealed who got murdered. Then, the surviving players discuss what happened that night in an attempt to weed out the culprit. Finally, everyone casts their vote on who they think is guilty. That player then gets executed, no matter if they were guilty or not. It then repeats until whenever the game ends. This is one of those games it's more fun if everyone embraces the role playing aspect rather than playing from a purely competetive standpoint. After all, it doesn't really matter if you catch the murderer or not, as long as the blame doesn't get pinned on you. Plus, the playing field isn't exatcly even. To make thing more, er, chaotic, each player is given a secret role with their own powers. In the game I played, one guy was given the power to phase through walls and posses unconscious people, another had deadly farts, while a third guy was stuck with an unquenchable appetite for Doritos and Mountain Dew. As for me, I was given the ability to forfiet my actions for the night in exchange for stalking another player. I didn't do that, although I wish I did, because I ended up wasting the entire game stumbling around a hallway with a towel on my head, only to get framed for the murder. If you're interested, you can find a summary of a game on the MFGG wiki. This is probably the best known documentation on the game, outside of browsing through forum posts of the games themselves. NS Sports This last one comes from the NationStates forums. NationStates is a political simulator. You make decisions as the leader of your country, and see how it affects your nation. If you want to go further, you could get into international politics. While there are some gameplay stuff, the bulk of international politics is roleplaying. As you can imagine, many take this roleplaying as far as they can. This extends to the realm of international sports, and specifically soccer (yes, I'm American). This is how it works: after players sign up for a league (or tournament, or whatever), the host running it uses a specalized program knwon as a scorinator to randomly generate the results of the games. Then, after sharing the results with the players, everyone uses the scores as prompts for more roleplaying. At first glance, there might not appear to be much "game" in there. But there are ways to influence the RNG in your favor. The first way is reffered to as skill. Basically, the more games you play, the higher your skill rating, and the more likely you are to win future games. The other is known as the roleyplay bonus. Here, the quality and quantity of your roleplaying has a direct effect on your chances of winning. The exact criteria of judgement is never disclosed, though, to prevent players from attempting to game the system. As for what counts as roleplaying, well, anything is fair game. It can range from statistics to player baackstories to behind the scenes drama. As long as it's relevant to the games in some way, it counts. A particularly creative group of players can make it very entertaining to spectate. You can find a detailed forum topic on the matter here. And that's it! Let me know if you know of any similar internet games. (I really should add a better way to contact me).