sub-creation in games

[Greybeard]

Something I have always done in gaming, whether in PBM, PBEM, Mass online games, or solo gaming is to develop the background of my characters and the in-game places they lived, worked and explored. Tolkien is probably the most important author who has subcreated an entire world and its languages. How much one can do is to some extent dependent on the quality and depth of the game itself. This website is as good as anywhere to start.

I try to subcreate in all games I join, like in pbm games like Keys of Bled, and The Known World, both now long inactive, or folded. I have also subcreated backgrounds in modules, especially D&D The Keep on the Borderlands (the link is to Blog on the Borderlands, no connection to me).

This was one of the attractions of Ultima Online. I've copied some links to extant threads that I wrote as subcreations of characters in Ultima Online. This is one: Tyg's Tale. This is another: The Fiskdotter Matriarchy. I also did some subcreation writing in Midgard UK as others have done so in that as yet un-launched game by its new owner Medieval inspirations.

[Greybeard]

The sub-creating in this game was fun. Role-playing my abbott was helped by historical fiction of the sort that Ellis Peters wrote, as in her series on Brother Cadfael, or (using her name Edith Pargeter) the 4-volume Brothers of Gwynnedd (pointedly subtitled as the one and only true Prince of Wales) and the Heaven Tree Trilogy. Her ability to bring history alive was remarkable.

Combined with some fairly general church history, the Abbott used the travellers who stayed the night in the guest quarters and the mendicant friars to learn of the latest church building techniques and to hire a French glazier. I enjoy just doing creating writing to describe an abbey or any other situation. Using "sub-created" characters this can bring alive a personl dimension of any pbm game. The result was something like the Great East Window in Exeter Cathedral, on which I modelled the window.

[Greybeard]

I became a Life Friend of Exeter Cathedral some time in the late 1990s. Devon is where my parents met in 1939.

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More on the concept of sub-creating by Tolkien can be found in Paul Kocher "Master of Middle-Earth" (Penguin, 1972, p. 147 and onwards).

"The other half of the connection between Niggle's story and the essay, mentioned in the Introductory Note to Tree and Leaf is that they both touch ´in different ways, on what is called in the essay "sub-creation"`. What different ways, and what is this thing called sub-creation?"

Kocher goes on to put it like this: "...the process by which human imagination invents secondary worlds strange to the everyday primary world in which we live and move, but nevertheless possessed of an internal consistency of their own."

[ixnay]

Just out of curiosity, do you consider the fan-fiction I am writing in the Cluster Wars sub-forum to be an example of sub-creation? (Or the running narrative Grim, myself, and others did in the Far Horizons game?)

Also, this concept reminds me of a text-based game that was available on AOL a long time ago. I don't remember the name, and it was probably some sort of ICQ-based chat game at one point in the distant past before being adopted by AOL. Basically you started out as a captain of a small trading ship, and could navigate and trade in the inner solar system. You could earn pittances here and there, do a little gambling, and otherwise work to pay off your loan on the ship. With luck and diligence, you could upgrade to bigger ships, run to the outer planets and other star systems, and rise in rank.

At the very highest ranks, you were given a new planet to customize as a destination for other players. You could set up "areas", with interaction trees, stores, "adventures", etc -- all editable by you. I think you even earned points or income based on how much other players liked your content.

Would that count as sub-creation?

[Greybeard]

Thanks for that, Ixnay, very interesting.

I don't really know either game, but it sounds from your description very much like it to me. Basically, all players are free to develop a zone of sub-creation just as they wish. I suspect Second life is another such. But it can be done in any game, easier in the more complex games, easier still in complex games where you sub-create together with others, co-operatively, like UO.

I came from solo gaming originally, simply because where I lived there were no players I knew in provincial UK in the 1960s). Gaming then comprised of RPG based on D&D or tabletop miniature figurines at first in plastic, there were no mags no ads that I could find, in fact it was all looked on askance by many. I wrote a couple of articles for the very earliest issues of Lone Warrior, then colonised existing PBM games by sub-creating. I've always done it and got a lot of enjoyment out of it.

I don't game any more, as my reactions are too slow after a stroke and using the internet to pay fees is not easy. I've also become more and more pacifist in my gaming, basically packed it in. But have lots of fine memories.

[Greybeard]

Spellbinder Games Keys of Bled was a complex and very deep game that ended some time in the late 1990s. It was ideal for sub-creating. Here I want to describe one of my positions in one of the oldest and most addictive PBM games I have been in.

My oldest clan in the game was Balgownies Bairns last turn being No.104, and with the objective role of Insurgent (Landholm). The youngest clan was called Israel headed up by Rebecca with a Matriarch objective role, on turn 62 (Firstholm). This had evolved out of Abraham's Children after the clan had settled in a Holmland (homeland).

My second oldest clan was called The Gnos reaching Turn 81 (Farholm), and for one of the 1960s generation it was a classic choice to sub-create in the spirit of the Age of Aquarius. Its original leader was called Sib, short for sibling, but at some point I replaced him with Olga. Naturally, my position was given "the objective role" of Priest, which I guess was fine. It also originally had a dance troop called Darvish's Dervishes in the tradition of dervish dancing (Wikipedia see Dervish and Whirling Dervishes in the same item). This also fitted with my idea of a multi-religious approach. I abandoned the idea when it proved to be redundant as just one of many ways of increasing morale, which in-game was its only effect. Easier to increase supply in winter.

The point here is to highlight the importance of adapting sub-creation to the spirit of the game s well as its rules.

I made the Gnos sea-based, on a farmland coast, sector 90/99, with a main fleet of 5 warships: Flagship Maharishi, the other four Krishnamurti, Rudolph Steiner, Esterhazy I and Esterhazy II and a base for the ships. Each warship had 25 FM and 25 sailors. The FM were equipped with leather armour, stabbing sword, and longbow. There were also 3 smaller and faster Escort Ships: Cosmic Consciousness, Transcendence and Nirvana, each with 20 FM (20 Leather Armour, 20 Stabbing Sword, 20 Sling).

The main body of the clan was a defensive force of 720 Infantry organised in 6 x 120 units, plus 120 cavalry, 30 commandos and 100 trainee mercenaries under Don John (as in Don John of Austria - see Wikipedia). there were also 100 potters. The civilian population was some 4,600 plus equipment for farming and hunting, tracker dogs and guard dogs and a bullion reserve of nearly 5,000 gold. 105 spies (people) were also part of home base security.

One subgroup was headed by Attila comprised of 25 mountain commandos and a further 25 trainee mountain commandos. They also had 4 carrier eagles for communication with Base. They were in 83/97 High Mountains but as I don't have mapping any longer I don't know where these were in relation to the coastal farmlands of home.

Items included various potions like 10 truthall, 10 truth seer, 10 fertility, 5 keysearcher, and 1 mutant key.

I never got to use many of these potions, and can't remember if I used even the obvious ones like fertility and truth seer. I suspect the 5 keysearcher potions and 1 mutant key potion were needed to learn what the keys of Bled were. I never got that far in all the many turns I sent in. The keys remained a secret I was unable to solve. Did anyone succeed? I never heard of anyone doing so. But then I was a very cautious and defensive player, trying to husband resources in a hostile world containing many NPCs of different kinds to interact with.

But the mystery and difficulty of the game were legion. Chris Dempsey was an outstanding GM, and the game turn results were so detailed that I have not even attempted to copy the results into this already very long post. Basically they consisted of a one-page detailed info on all resources of the clan, which needed revising by the GM after each turn, and a unique turn result report for each turn which was typed single-spaced on foolscap folio (see Wikipedia for a brief description).

I met Chris Dempsey a couple of times and expressed my enthusiasm for this very addictive and absorbing game. His response was simply a smile of amusement.

But it is clear that the work involved in running such a detailed game was too much. Bledian Diary was the simplified alternative, a game I never got into. But that is another story. Keys of Bled remains for me the PBM game that epitomised the spirit of gaming at the time. It wasn't always about "winning" but about exploration, collaboration with other players and enjoyment. But it did need a dedicated and inventive GM like Chris Dempsey to make it work.

In a later post in this thread I will look closer at Ultima Online. For the major factor for me was my discovery of mass on-line role-playing, and the beginning of an entirely new era in "peaceful" gaming, a climax to my career as a gamer that eclipsed all else that had gone before. I did much writing in this, more sub-creation than any game I had been in before.