Games by the Page

Page Source

Not what jumps to mind when one says “texts” though certainly full of text, web forums (and their layouts and attributes) present interesting platforms where we can encounter reading. 

The traditional, largely unchanged format of the web forum (take the simple machines engine for instance) is composed of a series of topic sections, in which users can post messages of texts, pictures, links etc... Further posts comment or build on the initial post, and comments string along until there are frequently numerous pages of posts. The “page” mechanic is particularly interesting, because the digital medium does not necessitate it. Indeed, services like Facebook and many other more recent information aggregation displays feature functionally infinite scrolling, the list forever being repopulated.

And so the classic web forum format has a particularly static quality, and harks back the corporeal limitations of the printed page. Yet the ‘page’ of the forum means something very different then a printed page, it is more of an archive of activity organized in a naked succession, rather then anything like an indexible list of page numbers or chapter heads. There is a degree to which older posts get lost from consciousness or fade in context the farther back they are. Indeed, this is because the forum is a kind of strangely extruded record of conversation between forum members, instant but non-instant messaging as it were.

Countless web forums exist for plumbing various tech-support problems, or composing lists or long strung out debates, and in this they serve as a knowledge base that can be read and easily participated in. However, I am particularly interested in the context of forum games.

Forum games and Forum Rpgs employ all the above mentioned mechanics and quarks of the interface, but attempt to produce out of them the resolution of games. The sample taken for the screenshot here is from a Web RPG where one member is serving as the game-master and posting the results of actions, other members playing various factions in the game post how they react to circumstances and outcomes from the actions in previous turns. The result is a text that can be read, not merely as history of a conversation, but a quasi-coherent play-through of a game universe.

Many more fast and loose forum games have to particularly contend with the modal curiosities of the Forum as a medium. The most obvious handicap is that posts made at the end of a page (right before the forum algorithms automatically start a new page of posts) tend to get ignored or read less, while posts at the top of the page or the first post of a given topic, tend to garner eye-balls longer and hold more impact. Members will also quote older pages, link to other pages on the forum etc… Sometimes games will have multiple topic threads simultaneously running, and these threads are expected to be read and cross-referenced by the all players and any serious onlookers.

----

I realize in the process of writing this, how quaint and primitive the mechanics of web-forums are (especially small forums) Yet they seem to continue to thrive, and as a medium I find them superior to the more constantly churning eye-ball ingratiating mechanics of the newer social-media. Perhaps the not-so-hidden truth here is that rarely does a web forum arise under the auspicious or drive of naked profit generation. Forums are perhaps comparatively more innocently social documents and texts.

-Ben