opening Pandora's Box

Well, here we go. This is the first of a series of posts meant to document the creation and unfolding events of my final project. I'll either wind up using them as reference for a later paper or this might turn into the reflective piece itself. I am also hoping it will serve as a forum for feedback from players on the gaming site. I am interested in their reflections as well as my own and invite any that wind up reading this to respond to what I write here. Just note that this blog has the potential to be read by my professor at some point so please, keep comments clean and relevant.

Starting thoughts: umm... blarg is a good one. I am amazed how much work even the most basic tasks are in building a site. For example, getting administrator access for my account so I can moderate chats and forums took three days due to a undefined bug. You know one of those glitches that spawns within computer systems like tiny dots of cancer that mysteriously clear up after enough swear words have been chanted in triple unison.

Then there is White Wolf, the publisher of Promethian: The Created. Their fair use guidelines
(details at http://www.white-wolf.com/fansites/) are rather restrictive. No images from the White Wolf New World of Darkness(NWOD) site (which Promethian falls under) can be used, which is a minor annoyance. It would be nice to be able to use the Promethain logo. But what really complicates matters is that none of the details of character creation may be represented, in whole or in part, on a private website. Which means any players I have must already understand NWOD character creation or they have to procure copies of the core books to assist them. All I can include regarding character creation are rules modifications specific to the chat. So that changes not only the planned audience and the content of the site, but also where I suspect most of the work will wind up happening.

The audience will be people who already know this system and/or are willing to spend the cash to buy the books to learn it. I won't be able to do much intro to NWOD or Promethian on the site. Instead it will contain an introduction to game play at this site, code of conduct specific to these chats and forums, and serve as a portal to the chat/forums/registration. And since all players will be expected to know the rules as decreed by White Wolf, I expect to spend a lot more time moderating interpretations of those rules within the gaming forums.

So there is the work part of all this. As for my thoughts on the rhetorical theory... this is a question I have been playing with for a number of years. Where do audience and author converge and does the Web allow for interactions between reader and writer that were previously impossible or rarely occurred? What is collaborative writing in a Web setting? Is it functional? Does it respond to the rules of rhetoric? Is it useful or does it just create a lot of crappy text relevant to individual user's lives? Where is that line drawn? I hope to find some answers through this experiment and if nothing else at least I'll have a lot more to think about.