The SciWorld 2006 Online Convention was held on March 29th-31st 2006, it covered chats about a wide range of subjects relating to online roleplaying.While I did not have the opportunity to attend in person due to being in a different time zone, I have received reports from friends as well as read the logs collected during the convention.
The discussions
Most of the discussions and open games were originally about live action games, such as roleplaying in online chat rooms and virtual-reality worlds. However, the discussion topics could easily be used in PBEM games too. With one of the sponsors, the USS Wyvern game, being a PBEM game many of the visitors came from a PBEM background. This helped turn the discussions towards that side of roleplaying.
The chat discussions hold by various sponsors ranged from discussions about NPCs to how to start and run your own game and to relationships in and outside of games.
The website for SciWorld 2006 can be found at http://www.sciworldonline.com/
Day 1
Wednesday featured, along with an open chat room for general discussions and two open games, a discussion about NPCs. A lot of different opinions and ways of using NPCs came up. For example, how NPCs can be considered the property of a player. The attending guests shared stories and memories such as their all-time favorite NPCs.
Day 2
During the second day, a gaming group showed their game in the virtual-reality world Second Life. Alongside these games, trivia sessions were held in another chat room. The day’s topic of discussions concerned starting a new game and the history of simming.
One major point in the discussions was how games need to work together nowadays to attract new players. With chat rooms becoming more and more uncommon and popular recruitment websites such as pbem.com being offline, there needs to be new places to find players.
The discussion also covered the change in how gaming groups are organized. Years ago, there were massive organizations with several gaming groups under one flag, united for administration and recruitment purposes. Nowadays, they are no as common.
Day 3
The third, and last, day of SciWord 2006 featured several interesting discussions as well as the usual open chats, open games and trivia sessions. The first discussion was concerning useful resources on the Internet that can be used by games or players. It covered the use of message boards, blogs and easy ways of building and maintaining a website for your game.
The second discussion for the evening is probably the one that was geared the most towards PBEM games. It covered several topics ranging from the basics of roleplaying by email to the role of being the Game Master for such a game.
The evening ended with two discussions that turned into one long discussion about relationships and genders in roleplaying games. Stories were shared about how games have brought together several couples, but the effects of couples in games were also discussed. One interesting topic was about players playing characters of a different gender than themselves.
Conclusion
The convention was very successful; many people from different gaming backgrounds joined in to share their experience with online games. I look forward to next year’s convention!