I heavily contributed to both map games, to the point where at times the sole content contributers were basically me and a couple of other friends, and as such, I was able to see behind a lot of the thought processes and interactions each of the players had with each other. This and my own personal experiences will have inevitably coloured this "review", but I will do my best to give my thoughts on this series and how it turned out as I can.
On the plus side, the worlds of PISOT are spectacular examples of how a Mega Crossover can develop into a world of its own over time. The basic premise is that nations from reality, fiction, and even the players' own imaginations find themselves in a world previously devoid of sentient life, and are forced to cooperate or compete with each other to survive. But far from degenerating into spontaneous exercises in Rule of Cool (though it of course factors in), both games eventually developed unwritten rules, with geopolitics and economics playing as major role as good and evil and character motivation in how the games unfolded. For example, in the first game, geographic locations means Mega-Kat City and the British Empire are forced to cooperate in order to survive the harsh conditions of the new world, while a Red Alert-esque war between Russia and an advanced Habsburg empire in the second ultimately stemmed from simple economic scarcity.
And of course, there's the bad. Like many collaborative projects, we of course ran into inevitable problems such as conflicting interests between a player's own nation and those of other players (exuberated by the fact that updates were for the ENTIRE world as opposed to just one's own factions such as in Imperium Offtopicum), areas not "made" by the current turn author falling into neglect, and of course, the inevitable Canon Defilement stemming from players being unfamiliar with a given work. Yet none of this became too overbearing, and in the end, we created something that was something completely off the rails, yet strangely consistent with its own internal logic of sorts at the same time and is almost certainly unique in the world of play-by-post games.
Roleplay A Retrospective
I heavily contributed to both map games, to the point where at times the sole content contributers were basically me and a couple of other friends, and as such, I was able to see behind a lot of the thought processes and interactions each of the players had with each other. This and my own personal experiences will have inevitably coloured this "review", but I will do my best to give my thoughts on this series and how it turned out as I can.
On the plus side, the worlds of PISOT are spectacular examples of how a Mega Crossover can develop into a world of its own over time. The basic premise is that nations from reality, fiction, and even the players' own imaginations find themselves in a world previously devoid of sentient life, and are forced to cooperate or compete with each other to survive. But far from degenerating into spontaneous exercises in Rule of Cool (though it of course factors in), both games eventually developed unwritten rules, with geopolitics and economics playing as major role as good and evil and character motivation in how the games unfolded. For example, in the first game, geographic locations means Mega-Kat City and the British Empire are forced to cooperate in order to survive the harsh conditions of the new world, while a Red Alert-esque war between Russia and an advanced Habsburg empire in the second ultimately stemmed from simple economic scarcity.
And of course, there's the bad. Like many collaborative projects, we of course ran into inevitable problems such as conflicting interests between a player's own nation and those of other players (exuberated by the fact that updates were for the ENTIRE world as opposed to just one's own factions such as in Imperium Offtopicum), areas not "made" by the current turn author falling into neglect, and of course, the inevitable Canon Defilement stemming from players being unfamiliar with a given work. Yet none of this became too overbearing, and in the end, we created something that was something completely off the rails, yet strangely consistent with its own internal logic of sorts at the same time and is almost certainly unique in the world of play-by-post games.