20109119.0430

I am once again amid an online roleplaying game--two, actually, playing in one and helping to administer another, both of which concern the exploits of magical samurai. I am once again immersed in creating stories collaboratively, working with others to present and negotiate challenges, developing characters and pushing forward plotlines--and, given the online media, leaving behind me and my fellow players records of what is being done and how. It marks a difference from what Daniel Mackay describes as an ephemeral performance, which also opens the possibility that the games I'm in could be studied by later researchers.
I've worked on such things before, whether in reviewing products (as here and here) or acting in a pseudo-scholarly fashion (such as here, here and in preceding work, or here and in its predecessors). And I've received at least a little favorable feedback on the work I've done so far; some of the players I'm with now have seen at least some of the work that I've done, and they've approved of it, for which I am grateful. Consequently, I have some idea that more such work might be done well, and I've opined about it in previous posts, noting my desire to return to doing such things, since I have not the burdens of formal academe under which to labor anymore. (This is not to say that I would do the work well, of course; did I do such things as well as I might like, I'd likely still be in academe. But that's another matter entirely.)
What approach might inform such work is not clear to me, however. Considerations of medium and content development obtain. While the narrative in the games I play starts at a fixed point of in-milieu time and moves forward from that point, it does not do so consistently. In the game I am helping to administer, days begin linearly, but they do not end in linear fashion. Additionally, motion through the days themselves is not linear; bits of gameplay do not start in the in-milieu morning and move smoothly forward, but begin at various points in the in-game day and fill in from those beginnings. And there are many people starting and adding to narrative threads throughout. As such, while each narrative thread is linear in itself, the emergence and development of those threads is not so neat, and following the lines of narrative from structural and related perspectives is therefore more complicated than might otherwise be the case.
Addressing each narrative thread as a separate work would not work, however. The threads are too interconnected to permit of such easy untangling. They might be regarded as being analogous to chapters in a book, each treated as such, but that would also run into problems as threads run into and emerge from one another. Nor can one character's progress be taken as a focal point, given the relatively egalitarian nature of most such games. But even the notion of coming up with a rubric or apparatus to make sense of the game as a whole would be quite an accomplishment...I hope to see such a thing someday.