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2025-11-20 15:02:26

Today, on the Transgender Day of Remembrance, I’m remembering more friends and family than ever before. I don’t mean that in a vague “all trans people are my family way”; I mean, I’ve attended more memorials in the last twelve months than ever before, for friends and family who couldn’t cope in in the UK any more.

Also today, on the Transgender Day of Remembrance, our Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) leaked their intention to ban people from single-sex spaces based on how they look.

Under the new guidance, places such as hospital wards, gyms and leisure centres will be able to question transgender women over whether they should be using single-sex services based on how they look, their behaviour or concerns raised by others.

I’m quoting directly there, but the quote is bullshit. Since the point of the “questioning” would be to find out if someone is transgender, the truth of the guidance is:

[…] will be able to question women over whether they should be using single-sex services based on how they look […]

But this interrogation that they’re planning to legalise can’t include a documentation check, because there’s no documentation that could possibly prove what they’re looking for. They’re legalising harassment based entirely on vibes.

The final code instead says it would “unlikely be proportionate or practical to ask for further evidence of a person’s sex” even if doubts were raised.

It said “there is no type of official record or document in the UK which provides reliable evidence of sex” because people can change their sex on passports and driving licences without a GRC.

And here’s the kicker. If your interrogator doesn’t believe you, they can kick you out anyway.

But it says that if there is “genuine concern about the accuracy of the response” it may be proportionate to exclude a transgender person anyway.

…though, again: this quote is bullshit. Just because the cops believe you’re trans, doesn’t make you trans. The truth is:

But it says that if there is “genuine concern about the accuracy of the response” it may be proportionate to exclude a person anyway.

And after all that, if you’re one of the Good Ones and decide to use a single-sex space of your sex-assigned-at-birth anyway, they can still kick you out.

It also states that transgender people could be barred from single-sex services even when their biological sex matches, such if a trans man […] attempted to use a women’s changing room. It says that they can be barred because they are likely to be seen by others as the opposite sex.

So, a short list of places that trans people won’t be able to use bathrooms:

• Shops
• Gyms
• Government
• Police stations
• Hotels
• Restaurants
• Theatres
• Cinemas
• Hospitals

Fuck you if you go to a restaurant and need to pee. They don’t want us in their restaurants.

Fuck you if you need medical attention and need to pee. They don’t want us in their hospitals.

You have to be honest with yourself--look at the legalised harassment and ban from using toilets in hospitals--and admit they want us gone.

Next year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance is going to be horrific.

2025-11-20 11:33:00

This weekend, I fly out for my final travel of the year to Mexico City for the first time. It will also mark the 21st country I’ve visited.

I’m someone who loves traveling but avoids making plans. For example, I once booked my flight and accommodation to Chiang Mai, Thailand the night before my departure. My first moment in Rome after taking the train from the airport consisted of me wandering into the city and happily getting lost for two hours. While friends have told me that this way of traveling would stress them out, it’s led me to unexpected places and friendships.

While I usually pack the night before my flight, the pre-trip excitement usually hits me most when I'm on the way to the airport.

A lot of people hate that part of travel and even get anxious about it. Not me. It’s where everyone is going somewhere. It’s the official start of leaving where I am. It’s a huge reason I love the airport-centered films Up in the Air (2009) and The Terminal (2004).

During my last few trips, I started the tradition of arriving early enough to hit the airport bar for a few drinks before my flight. Yes, the drinks are overpriced, but I see it as a celebration of what’s to come and the real beginning of my holiday. One of my favorite memories came from that ritual: last year, while waiting to board a flight to Taiwan, I was having a beer at the LAX bar when I sparked up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me. He was on his way to India for the first time for business, and that immediately led to my favorite kind of talk: travel talk. We traded stories about past trips, business travel, and our upcoming destinations. After a few round of beers and a high-five goodbye, I unintentionally boarded my flight to Taiwan pretty tipsy, which conveniently helped me fall asleep almost instantly.

I have a tradition for the return experience too: one final meal in the visiting country’s airport. And while it is never the best meal of the trip, it always makes for a nice, bittersweet goodbye.

While I’m super excited to explore Mexico City for ten days starting this weekend—including daily travel blogging/journaling for the first time (!)—I’m also looking forward to returning to the airport bar this Saturday afternoon for that drink or two to kick off another new round of cultural experiences.

2025-11-20 09:36:00

Aura, on Bluesky, posted:

given no one in this thread can even agree what an "immersive sim" is except "it's made by someone who worked on deus ex or system shock", I feel like it's time you all got together and made a Berlin Interpretation to get pissed off about for the next 20 years

Okay, sure.

So here’s one approach to genre, heavily influenced by the way Borde and Chaumeton originally sought to define film noir¹.

We start with a corpus of works that are near universally agreed to fit within a genre; we then identify their commonalities. We define a genre ultimately not through some ‘if this then that’ predicate but as a fuzzy cluster of works that are featurally related. We insert some (subjective) critical judgement in trying to grasp the thematic core that unifies these works and from which these individual characteristics stem.

In the end, we view the genre as having a ‘core’ made up of that definitive canon, but also a ‘mantle’ of more diverse works, and a ‘crust’ of genre blends, sub genres, and variants. It is true that games may or may not have the immersive sim nature; but it is also true that some games have it more than others.

I'm also not going to litigate whether the term "immersive sim" is a good one, semantically. It's just a historical term attached to a particular canon of games, from which I'm trying to divine commonalities and lines of design thinking. My definition doesn't make any references to concepts of "immersion" or "simulation", because I don't actually think they're useful to understanding immersive sims!

1: The Core

Everything stems from our choice of what that canon is. The goal is not to be exhaustive; the goal is to include a good sized set of works that embody the genre. My list is:

• Thief
• Thief 2
• System Shock
• System Shock 2
• Deus Ex
• Dishonored
• Prey

That’s a pretty short list, with some deliberate omission.² It’s also notable that all these games are the work of very few studios that are all related in some way.

What, then, generally unites these games? Here’s a list of morphological and ludic commonalities:

• First-person camera perspective.
• Linear, level-based structure with authored (not procedural) scenarios.
• Individual levels have an open structure that allows for varying routes and approaches; levels as spaces for the player to pursue goals, not gauntlets of challenges arranged sequentially.
• Combat and stealth are both present if not coequal options.
• Embodiment and physicality – ie being able to see the player chatacter model and affordances like mantling, crouching, going prone, leaning.
• ‘Systemic interaction”. Things that obey rules and act on their own independently of the player, allowing for emergent behavior, chains of cause and effect.
• Use of the environment or scenario to the player's advantage; assess-then-exploit play.
• Wide gamut of player affordances that interact with those systems in different ways or empower the player to manipulate scenarios in creative ways.
• Resource management as a limiting factor in those affordances, usually with resources scattered throughout the environment.
• Complex NPC or enemy behaviors, often around player stealth.
• Thematically, these games generally posit the player character as a lone operator going into hostile environments with a mission that they accomplish on their own in the field.

Before talking about this list holistically, I also want to mention one specific point which is more of a design attitude, or a contract with the player than a specific individual feature. This is the idea of verossimilitude³ and completeness: elements of the environment incorporate rich behavior pervasively. The design aims for a world model without "gaps" of expected interaction. If there's both puddles of water and a gun that shoots lightning, the player can safely expect that shooting the lightning gun into water will electrocute everyone in it. If you can light things on fire and throw objects around, you should be able to propagate fire between objects.

Things behave in ways that are consistent (all like things have like behavior), comprehensive (all things have all expectable relevant behaviors), and verossimilitudinous (all behaviors are legible representations of real-world referents).

Because actually implementing this principle is really, really hard, immersive sims often have individual exceptions or misses in achieving it. But their design points in that direction, if that makes sense. And I think this direction is that thematic center that unifies the genre; this idea of "lots of player affordances that point at rules-based systems, embodied in a design that aims at verossimilitude and completeness."

Which isn't to say that this sentence is a complete "definition" of immersive sims; I think all of the elements listed above are to some degree important to that core identity. The lone-operator theme and the sense of embodied presence, for example, are universal to the canon listed above and you could easily put them on the same level of importance as the idea of verossimilitude and completeness.

Classifying things by their features is always fraught, of course, because there's always going to be something you miss, or something that's borderline. One example is character progression systems; people tend to point to the abilities in Dishonored as an RPG-like feature, but they're actually fairly common. But they tend to take very different shapes; progression in Deus Ex, through things like the augmentation canisters, doesn't look much like progression in Dishonored. And Thief doesn't really have much of a progression system at all. So that feels much more like a borderline property of the genre – although of course, if you defined the canon differently, you'd get a different perspective on that. This definition isn't necessarily definitive, but it is at least somewhat systematic.

The mantle and crust

The 'mantle' of the genre, then, includes everything that's clearly within the genre but deviates in one or two ways, or simply isn't so obviously and universally regarded as an immersive sim as to make it into the core. Deathloop is an Arkane immersive sim that twists the formula a bit with its time loop conceit, making it almost a run-based game. Weird West ditches the first-person perspective and thus is lower on the "embodiment" characteristic of most of the genre, but it is very selfconsciously an immersive sim in most ways that count.

Hitman (2016) fits almost every feature listed above: it has a linear structure of individually open-ended levels (though replaying them is encouraged) driven by missions. It's about a lone operator going into a hostile environment. It has rich NPC behavior and various interlocking systems – including, yes, puddle electrocution. Perhaps the main thing that might make immersive sim purists tilt their heads is the game's reliance on scripted scenarios, but I'd argue that every script in Hitman is a scenario, that is, a set of initial conditions and rules for how they move towards various outcomes rather than simple "a thing that happens." The idea of verossimilitude and completeness seems to be present.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its sequel do count, I think. Most arguments to place them outside the genre are about those games' relative "complexity" or "depth". You could say that a wading pool is still a pool; or you could say those games gesture towards immersive sim ideas more than they actually enact them.

And then, even further out, you have the broad "crust" of genre blends, twists on these ideas, and games that are informed by immersive sims in their design but are radically different in structure or conception. Shadows of Doubt, for example, is an immersive sim in all but its superstructure – it's a procedural open world that the player navigates in totally self-directed ways, unlike the level-based structure of traditional immersive sims.

The first-person RPG genre is just as descended from Ultima Underworld as immersive sims are, and so the shared DNA manifests in phenotypic similarities that you can easily read as immersive sim influence, or even as those games being immersive sims – if you want to look at the genre expansively. Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and so on all feature stealth and combat, certain tropes of immersive sim interaction (like password locks and environmental clues to their solutions). But they don't necessarily aim towards that idea of completeness and verossimilitude; if you cast Lightning Bolt into one of Skyrim's rivers, you don't expect to electrocute all the fish. Similarly, games like Kings Field (and Lunacid) have that Underworld DNA but are not necessarily built around richly prevalent systems or environmental features.

Of course, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a game in which you can electrocute fish. It seems hard to argue that the game isn't an immersive sim but for the fact that it's an open world and that it doesn't selfconsciously share design lineage with "0451 games".

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic has a lot of immersive sim ideas built into it, but it mostly plays like a straight action game in which kicking enemies into walls of spikes is a central mechanic. Similarly, Bioshock is more linear in its approach, and that series gets less immersive-sim-like as it goes. It's reasonably easy to argue that the original Bioshock is an immersive sim, albeit an action-oriented. It is, after all, a puddle-electrocuting game. But Bioshock Infinite is almost impossible to view as anything but a straight shooter with some funky special abilities the player can use.

Speaking of electrocuting puddles: is "Divinity 2: Original Sin", the ultimate puddle-management simulator, an immersive sim? Food for thought.

Always lurking in the background of immersive sims is the broader idea of an action-stealth genre, into which we can place basically every core immersive sim but also Far Cry, Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2, Splinter Cell, and so on. The line does blur, here; does the Far Cry series acquire the immersive sim nature in Far Cry 2 and then immediately drop it?

My overarching point here is not to argue for the futility of definition, or to try and place any games (besides the canon at the start of this article) exactly in or out of the immersive sim genre. It is, rather, to point out that there are so few truly unambiguous immersive sims that the immersive sim genre does not really fulfill the typical role of genres in games culture. That is, it is not a marketing label you can use to readily find more similar games like the one that you liked; if we imagine the corpus of available video games as one gigantic store, the shelf labeled "Immersive Sims" barely exists. If you go on Steam and look at the "immersive sim" tag, you'll see basically no games that have anything of the immersive sim nature – rather, you'll see job simulators like Power Wash Simulator and Truck Simulator.

Many fans of the immersive sim genre have exhaustively played every game they think is an immersive sim, which is certainly not a feature of a normal genre!

Therefore, for immersive sims to be a truly useful concept, we have to think of them more as a broad cultural force in video games than as a specific canon of games – hence why it matters to list this broad "mantle" and "crust" of immersive sims, this wider space of games that have the immersive sim nature at some level even if not everyone is willing to fully place those games in that box.

Immersive sim ideas get used over and over again and permeate a surprisingly broad swath of games, even if a game everyone can agree Is An Immersive Sim only rarely seems to come out. Arguably⁴, the entire idea of entity component systems in game programming has the immersive sim nature.

I do want to go back to that core idea of verossimilitude and completeness. Games where things behave; things behave as you expect; things behave everywhere; things behave with each other. Centering that lens without entirely disregarding questions of structure (open levels, linear campaign) and embodiment, I'd propose a secondary canon of games that I do think are immersive sims:

• Hitman (2016) and its sequels;
• Deathloop;
• Shadows of Doubt;
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom;
• Far Cry 2 (and no other Far Cry);
• Weird West;
• Ultima Underworld;

This list is very debatable – purposefully radical, even. It is not meant to be a definition so much as one interpretation of the definition above. May this essay, then, be not an end to arguments but just a tanker full of gasoline crashing directly into the discourse. Forever and ever, amen.

2025-11-20 04:07:00

I was never that into social media, I forgot constantly to create accounts to all things.

But what was there was distracting me. It made me worse at everything else and stopped me from getting things done.

So, some years ago, I deleted all the accounts I had. It was good, but it wasn't enough.

My problem was, and is, consumption. Unchecked, unfiltered consumption of things.

Because there are so many things! If left unchecked, I feel like I could go on forever if I didn't had things to do. That's not what I want in my life!

As I understand it, there is this thing called the default mode network. It activates when you don't do things. Left to daydream and to wander, the mind builds it's sense of self. (Editing to add: this is not completely true. This is the self-construction hypothesis that asserts this, but it's not entirely understood. This is what I was referencing but I did it wrong sorry.)

But my thought is that one establishes one-self in the world when doing things. Origami, drawing, cooking, walking some routes, hanging out - all of these build and establish one self not only to you but to the world around. (Editing to add: I have no proof of this. It's my lived experience. My theory relating to the previous part about the DMN is that the more things you do the more material you give your brain to build your identity. No proof for any of this though.)

Passive unchecked consuming not only makes me distracted and less prone to focus. It makes me less me. Less of the things I like doing and more a statistic.

If only I could tell how to escape this and to be. But I don't know. I know deleting social media is a very good step, and likely the most significant one. But it's not enough. It's important to reduce in general consumption around, and to start doing things. At least for me I think.

2025-11-19 07:06:00

I’ve made YouTube videos for ten years, but I can’t do it anymore. I can no longer tolerate the abhorrent things YouTube and Google have gotten up to in the last year.

They’ve never been great. When I started in 2016 through 2024, they made a lot of terrible decisions. But these were more obnoxious and annoying than anything. But starting in late 2024 and especially in 2025 they’ve upped their game, or lowered it, becoming a truly disgusting organization, a fetid stink of a company on top of a putrid pile of awful tech bros and social media cancers.

There’s a lot to cover, so we’ll go over this in a list, starting when I first noticed them.

Blocking Ad Blockers and Forcing More Ads Than Ever

In 2023, YouTube declared war on ad blockers. This may sound like a strange thing for a creator to complain about, ads are where I make my money. But YouTube chose not to take prisoners, and they didn’t care about innocents caught in the crossfire. Not only did they disable videos for anyone using any ad blocking program, they also disabled videos for a lot of people who didn’t use any. Suddenly a lot of my viewers couldn’t watch my videos. In a move made to make more money, I certainly lost it, as more people left YouTube or found other ways of blocking ads, emboldened by the site’s terrible behavior.

This is something they continue into late 2025. You may have read stories earlier this year about a loophole that lets Firefox users get around this ad block blocking. Well, YouTube found a way to shut this loophole, which again affected a lot of innocents.

This move to restrict users who use ad blockers coincides with a big push into place more and longer ads into videos. Earlier this year, I got a message from YouTube telling me that they had enabled “Automatic Ad Place” on all of my videos, without my consent.

Let me back up: creators have two ways of putting ads in videos – they can place them manually or automatically. If you choose the automatic option, YouTube will place about two or three ads every minute. Placing them manually meant I could put one or two in the whole video, depending on how long it was. But starting in March 2025, they automatically placed ads on all my videos, newly uploaded ones AND old ones. You are able to turn these ads off, but only individually by editing the videos one by one. I spent hours going through my backlog of videos disabling ads I didn’t place.

But this only affects when the video stops to show ads. I have no say over how long the ads actually are, and very little say over what they show. I turned off political ads, gambling ads, alcohol ads, anything showing crappy mobile games. Whether they honored this, I have no idea.

Forcing AI on Creators

Around the same time, YouTube started going all-in on AI. Creators saw this through the “Inspiration” tab in the Creator Studio, where we upload and edit videos. This section looks at your videos and gives you suggestions for what videos to make next based on what would be most popular. The recommendations were terrible, always giving me the same clickbait garbage like “10 Hottest Women in Games!” and “These Are The WORST Indie Games EVER!” I feel dirty just for typing those titles here.

But it doesn’t stop there. Not only did they give you titles, this “feature” would also generate an entire script, voice over, and a thumbnail. LGR has an overview of this on his second channel if you’re interested.

Sure, I could just not use it, and I don’t. But this points to three other problems. The first is that YouTube is absolutely taking all of my videos and using them to train their AI without my consent. The second is that other creators have no problem using this. The site is now flooded with these zero effort abominations that take traffic away from those who actually put effort into making a decent video. Others see this crap and they stop watching YouTube entirely.

And third, well, it turns out this genAI isn’t entirely optional. We’ll come back to this.

New AI Age Check for Viewers

Throughout 2025, websites, apps, and services across the internet have had age verification schemes forced on them in the name of protecting children. Ironic, considering the current President of the United States is the biggest child molester in human history and the most popular video game in the world is little more than an all-you-can-molest buffet for pedophiles. Most sites require users to upload a photo of their ID. YouTube requires this for creators, something I deeply regret ever doing.

But for users, that’s a harder sell. YouTube’s solution? AI, what else? YouTube will look at what videos you watch, and somehow determine your age based on that. Sounds stupid? That’s because it is. What kinds of videos people watch has little correlation with their age, and sure enough, people are already being blocked from certain videos based on this AI algorithm.

At the same time, YouTube randomly turned on Restricted Mode for thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of users. This meant that countless videos were hidden for them, videos with bad words like ‘poopyhead’ and harmful content like trans people existing. Phew, dodged a bullet there. YouTube didn’t tell anyone that Restricted Mode was turned on, and they were missing videos without even knowing it, including to channels they were subscribed to.

Unbanning Election Conspiracy Theorists and Anti-vaxxers

YouTube suspended Donald Trump’s account in January 2021 after his retroactively successful insurrection. This set off a wave of far right-wing accounts getting banned for spreading election lies, which in turn forced YouTube to moderate other conspiracy theory channels, namely those pushing vaccine misinformation. Trump later sued, then got re-elected in 2024. And would you like at that! YouTube agreed to settle! And, purely coincidentally, trust me bro, at the same time they announced they were unbanning election deniers. And anti-vaxxers.

How many creators are allowed to come back we don’t know. But we do know that this applies to every single account previously banned. Every. Single. One. It took years to convince YouTube to do something about these horrible hate- and misinformation-spreading accounts. And with the snap of a finger, they’re all welcome back with open arms.

This was the final straw for me, the moment I read about this I decided I was done. But any doubts I may have developed were put to rest with plenty more horrible things.

$22 million Bribe to the Epstein Ballroom

Also as part of that settlement, YouTube agreed to pay Trump $24.5 million. $22 million of that is going towards Trump’s unapproved and unsupervised creation of the Epstein Ballroom, which likely saw lead and asbestos clouds choke DC because the construction crew didn’t bother containing it.

The other $2.5 million will be donated to the American Conservative Union and conservative writer Naomi Wolf.

That is a bribe. This is as blatant as it can possibly get. Trump sues YouTube, Trump becomes President, YouTube gives him and his friends millions of dollars and welcomes those same people back on their platform to make it go away. We’re seeing the same thing with CBS, NBC, Target, Amazon, and many other corporations bowing down to Trump threats, giving millions of dollars to him and his friends for approvals of mergers, FCC licenses, and whatever else they want.

It doesn’t get any more blatant than this. I mean, it literally can’t.

Secretly Using AI to Change Videos Without Telling Creators

In August 2025, two creators discovered YouTube was using AI to alter their videos without their consent, and without telling them. This might be even more horrific and terrifying than the bribe. You can read about it here or watch the video of the creators in question talking about it here.

The short version is that YouTube used AI to “enhance” the videos of Rick Beato and Rhett Shull. YouTube used an AI smoothing filter that made the videos look like they were AI generated, and didn’t tell Beato, Shull, or their viewers that they were doing it. They only admitted to it after the two made videos proving it happened, later claiming it was only a “limited test.”

Their excuses are irrelevant. They’ve opened Pandora’s box; they’ve told the world that they can and will edit videos after they’ve been uploaded, and will not tell creators or viewers. You can’t trust anything you see anymore, even from creators who adamantly do not use AI. Sure, it’s “just” an AI smoother today, but tomorrow they could put an ad straight in the video, or remove something they don’t like. Speaking of...

Good Old Fashioned Censorship

YouTube channel CyberCPU Tech posted a couple of videos showing how to get around Windows requiring a Microsoft account, and how to get around Windows 11’s hardware requirements. Neither of these things is against Microsoft’s terms of service and they’re completely legal. Yet YouTube removed both videos anyway. The creator of these videos wasn’t told why there were taken down at first, he had to contact YouTube, and only after days of waiting did he get a (clearly AI-generated) response saying that the videos were a violation “of Harmful or Dangerous Content which prohibits content that encourages or promotes behavior that encourages dangerous or illegal activities that risk serious physical harm or death” which barely makes any grammatical sense, much less common sense.

Worse still, journalists Nikita Mazurov and Jonah Valdez reported that YouTube removed over 700 videos documenting Israeli war crimes and human rights violations in Palestine.

YouTube has a long history censoring videos, but this feels more surgical, more insidious than past instances. Usually they demonetize a video. This means that not only does that video not generate ad revenue, but the site’s algorithm also doesn’t promote it or even place it in the subscription feeds of those subscribed to that channel. It’s rare, or at least it was rare, that they’d outright remove a video. It took years of campaigning to get YouTube to take down conspiracy videos and anti-vaxxer misinformation. Yet these videos were removed within days or weeks of being uploaded.

New Header Attempting Comic Relief WOOOOOOOO!!!!!

I cannot in good conscious continue to use a platform that is going out of its way to be a Saturday morning cartoon villain.

In a just world, at best, none of this would have ever happened. At worst, creators would unite and sue YouTube, winning easily. But this isn’t a just world, is it? So YouTube gets to do whatever they want, and most creators will accept it because there is no viable alternative.

Not me. From now on, all my new videos will be posted exclusively to Peertube. There are no ads, so I don’t make any money from these videos. I make videos because I like doing it, not because I want to be rich and famous. I’ve uploaded some of my old YouTube videos to my Peertube and removed those from the YouTube account. In the future, I’ll be transferring more of my videos over and when that’s done, the YouTube channel itself will be deleted.

My old channel, Triple Iris, already has many of its videos on Peertube. I’ll be transferring videos over the next couple of months, and that YouTube channel will also be deleted when the process is complete.

I left Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Wordpress and I was fine. Something tells me leaving YouTube won’t be any different.

2025-11-19 05:56:00

My social media feed has been consumed by indie TTRPG insiders processing the emotional impact of Sam Sorenson's Over/Under on their lives.

To those unfamiliar, Sam attempted to create a real-time play-by-post wargame set on Mothership’s best module, but he accidentally created an enormous text-only LARP instead. Ramanan’s summary of the game is the most digestible, as an informed and well-spoken ‘outsider’ to the madness himself. Research freaks should instead dive into Jack Shirai’s intricate daily summary of events.

To me and a handful of others (shoutout to Mondo Terminal, Paige Laux, and "Da Weed Whackerz") this deeply moving roleplay experience was quite familiar. Despite the gaming community’s outpouring of joyful surprise, this was not the first time such a social metagame - which I’m calling “Live Text Roleplay (LTRP)”¹ - has grown from another game’s soil.

I wrote this article to ensure it won’t be the last. I will teach you how to grow your own.

My Bona Fides

LTRP was my primary hobby for the entirety of my late 20s. I’ve watched identical RP cultures emerge out of half a dozen West Marches discord servers running all sorts of TTRPG systems (5e, Lancer, Fabula, Masks). I’ve written 110,448 posts across four such servers - an average of 38 posts per day, every day, since 2017.²

At the end of O/U, folks joked that this game would lead to several marriages. I can say from experience that's correct. I know of four separate households composed of folks who met playing these games, and half a dozen romantic relationships. I have helped these people move cross-country. I send them christmas presents. I have helped paint their walls. LTRP's ability to foster deep human connections is completely unmatched.

What is Live Text Roleplay?

Left: A casual O/U scene in the Smoking Room of The Ember bar.

Right: A four year old scene in which my friends made the mistake of giving Hyx a gun.

Live Text Roleplay is an online synchronous real-time text-first roleplaying event with enough participants to simulate the complexity of a real social environment. Traditionally held on Discord, with text channels corresponding to physical locations in the fictional world (ex., #The_Bar, #The_Hospital, #The_Docks).

The sheer volume of participants allows each character to have their own inner life - lives they keep living when you aren't looking. It feels real because it is real, socially speaking. You aren't simulating a relationship with the people you meet in these games, even when the people themselves are simulated. You are literally building relationships, using the same small talk and vulnerability that fosters connections in your real life. The bleed must be experienced to be believed.

My prior LTRP servers fluctuated between 25 and 80 active participants. O/U hovered around 500. While its incredible size added to its appeal, you don’t need a server that big to evoke a similar mystique. All that matters is that your server has enough active RPers to ensure you can’t keep up with every story. Not knowing some crucial information and not knowing a lot of crucial information is subjectively similar. Most GMs go to great lengths to evoke the feeling that their world is larger and more alive than what their players can see. In LTRP, that is literally true.

While LTRP is technically an offshoot of Play-by-Post, that comparison obscures more than it illuminates. The actions you take in LTRP are constrained by social rules and the fiction, unmediated by formal rules and mechanics. There is no rule preventing your character from existing in multiple places simultaneously or from suddenly acquiring super strength and laser vision. O/U has proven to me that such rules are unnecessary - adults understand the appeal of committing to the bit.



Can you play LTRP without an underlying game system?

Yes - it's just playing pretend. However, I would strongly advise always layering it atop some sort of game system, so the latter can act as a narrative catalyst. 

 Most of your players are not improv trained. It takes a while to get a sense for how you can help make RP scenes entertaining by setting up conflicts, bits, and intrigue. Most players just walk into a situation with few expectations and look forward to the unpredictable ways their character bounces off of those around them. After spending enough time with the same characters, the outcomes become rote.³ Characters just "do their bits" at one another to predictable results.

In LTRP, some outside force needs to exist that repeatedly and massively shakes up the status quo. In O/U that was the wargame - assassinations, espionage, ARG-triggered mass hysteria. In the prior games I played, these shakeups were triggered by traditional TTRPG sessions - character death & advancement, traveling to new exotic locales, an angry dragon suddenly attacking #The_Town_Gates. Part of what gave the Choke Incursion such terrifying verisimilitude was the way it felt completely outside of anyone's control. It was a thing that was happening to us. Dice can simulate the existence of a wider world full of unpredictable events, but they are merely a substitute. The goal, which LTRP uniquely places within reach, is to actually create a system unstable and complicated enough to cause dramatic consequences no single person intended.

"The Dreamcatcher", one of O/U's diegetic newspapers.

What games pair well with Live Text Roleplay?

As a vet of the genre, Over/Under taught me that LTRP pairs better with PvP games than Co-Op games.

O/U had considerably less OoC drama compared to all of my prior LTRP experiences. Some of that credit goes to the mods, some to “interested in Mothership” being such an amazing filter for cool people, but some of it also comes down to players having no expectation that the other players in the game were obligated to help them in any way. League of Legends gained its reputation as the most toxic game on earth because of its high time commitment and reliance on a team of competent teammates to succeed. Both of those are equally true of a high-lethality trad TTRPG session.

The vast peace conspiracy I engaged in during O/U felt so much more real when I knew that naive idealism alone was holding it all together. The care we expressed for one another was real because it was personally costly. ‘Against Incentive’ validated yet again.

PvP has its own costs too. It’s much harder to ‘respawn’ players as new characters when their OoC knowledge comes back with them. However, I found O/U’s solutions to this problem satisfactory - make death permanent and the game duration short.⁴ The bugbears of growing LTRP atop a trad game were much harder to manage - inequality in player capabilities, dissatisfaction with character “builds” tempting players to abandon existing relationships to start fresh, and OoC pressures to make opposed PCs ‘get along’ so the planned sessions could happen all plagued us for years.

Beyond “PvP” and “Cataphract-likes”, I’m not sure what sorts of games are the best soil for a LTRP to grow. I invite you all to organize into the largest group you can and start experimenting!

—————Advice for GMs—————

Decide how much time you’re willing to spend

Sam was spending three to twelve hours a day GMing O/U. That’s obviously insane and unsustainable. I suspect Sam’s grind had a lot to do with the ‘catalyst game’ being almost as real-time as the RP, and his personal involvement being necessary for the resolution of so many types of player actions.

So I beg you - make sure neither of those are true of your game! You want to give your players as few reasons as possible to add to the inevitable pile of PMs.

You need 25 players at minimum

Any less than that, and you run into problems. The most dedicated players will be able to read every chat, and the game loses its magic. Spaces will become more predictable as the same characters monopolize scenes.⁵ Instead of walking in on living spaces where characters are already talking, players will be forced to “fish” for scenes by posting opening lines and waiting minutes or hours for another player to take the bait.

You also want as many of your players to be ‘creative types’ as possible, though that’s rarely under your control. Even the most amateur art creates the building blocks of culture - there are MS Paint drawings from the server I played on in 2017 that I reference to this day. Songs, talk radio, newspapers, DJ sets... I doubt I need to sell you on the value of cultural ephemera.

A snippet from "d101.6: The Real Dream" a player-created radio show in Over/Under.

Only use threads in 40+ player games

At lower player counts, letting players hide threads can give the erroneous impression that the RP culture is dead. This starts a vicious cycle of reduced RP engagement. O/U had an infinite number of players, so their ability to hide themselves didn’t matter.

A lot of folks also treat RP as a stage performance and object to how threads hide them from their audience.⁶ Private threads are a necessary evil in espionage games, but note that allowing players to create locked doors will inevitably make your game so… so much hornier.⁷

Once you have the player count to afford threads, they’re useful as a way to crowdsource compelling RP environments. The popular locations literally rise to the top. Speaking of…

Create fewer channels than you think you should

You want to pressure characters to interact with each other by forcing them into limited space. If there’s too little space - too many participants in the same channels - scenes can become hard to follow, though. Luckily, it’s easier to add channels than remove them (the latter feels strange in practice). When you do add channels, make it a rare event. Try not to add more than one or two at a time.

Lastly, remember that you cannot force a channel to be popular. Cultural inertia is a powerful force.

Add an out of character “#RP-Discussion” thread.

Players want an outlet for live commentary on ongoing scenes. It’s fun to be the peanut gallery. It’s also crucial for consent check-ins before, during, and after scenes.

Additionally, it’s useful for RPers to have a space outside of a scene where they can ask for OoC clarification on their partner’s posts. “What does your character look like?”, “Are you pointing the gun at me or Janice?”, etc.

Write up a Player’s Guide

Include information on your game’s setting, constraints on PC backstories and in-game actions⁸, what themes are on or off the table, the local RP norms, and the server’s rules. If you’re playing a trad game, include all the usual stuff (character creation, house rules) as well.

By ‘RP norms’, I’m referring to the communication customs that inevitably develop meaning, like text formatting and emoji jargon. For example, the formatting of my posts represent the following:

Present these as guidelines, not rules. Players do interesting things with freedom. As for the emoji jargon, in my servers:

📂 = “I am around and want to RP.” When this emoji vanishes from the post, the poster is no longer looking for a scene partner.

👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 = “I want lots of people to stop by this scene.” We referred to these as “group scenes” in contrast to the much more common 1 on 1 scenes. At higher player counts and lower channel counts, group scenes are presumed by default.

🎬 = “I would like to finish the scene with this post.”

An example "Open"; a post implicitly asking another player to RP with you.

—————Advice for Players—————

Set healthy boundaries

LTRP servers are a digital living room that is always - always - filled with a handful of your close friends. Something you deeply care about could be happening at any time. It's the platonic ideal of a social engagement feed. Communicate your hard cutoff times to your RP partners as early as possible, and stick to them! Knowing when your partner needs to end the scene lets you assist in the scene’s pacing, and gives the writing a more natural flow.

If there are particular topics you're worried might come up, communicate with your scene partners early and often. Check in after emotionally intense scenes.

Read improv advice

Yes that’s right I buried the lead it’s all improv you’re that kinda freak now it’s too late you already cried when Mr. Moneybags danced at the ball search your feelings you know it to be true.

Alternatively watch Dropout.tv

Move elsewhere when a channel is full

“Full” does not mean “when there’s a lot of people there”. The fullness of a channel is determined by the amount of attention it demands of all participants. A channel’s attentional demand is determined by the number of “cameras” an audience needs to keep in mind, and how much each participant’s messages change the status quo.

It’s not a problem for 12+ people to participate in the same scene, assuming they’re keeping up with the pace of conversation and reacting to the same events. When reading a channel becomes too confusing (multiple simultaneous reply chains, fast typers changing the fiction faster than you can react) start a scene in a different place, or open a thread in the same channel.

Crowd scenes are a great example of this principle in action. Short, quippy posts that don’t change the status quo. Everyone present is reacting to the same events.

Think physically

It’s easy to fall into the habit of “Just Talking” - posting words alone, back and forth. Think about where your character is and what they’re doing. Spend a line or two narrating that in every post. Add kinetic energy to the imagined space.

How does your character sit? What are their nervous tics? Are they multi-tasking? What are their hands doing? Where are they looking? What is their expression?

These sorts of details are first on the chopping block in busy channels, but they’re crucial to adding life to 1-on-1 conversations.

Read books

I suspect I’m preaching to the choir here, but still. It’s not a coincidence that the most beloved RP threads of O/U were mostly penned by Lin Codega, award-winning journalist and fantasy author.

Coordinate relationships during character creation

If every character begins as a drifter, it takes time for relationships to build enough to result in drama. Skip the slow bits by making your PC invested in other PCs from minute one.

Are you their bodyguard? Secretary? Relative? Enemy? Boss? Have feelings about other people. The NPCs in your backstory will never come up in play. Relationships with other players are visible and dynamic.

Amanda Lee Frank's Over/Under character portraits

Embrace change

The story of a LTRP is about what’s happening now, on screen. One of the most memorable characters I’ve ever seen in an LTRP was “Average Joe”, a 13s-down-the-line Human Fighter with healthy parental relationships. Over the course of a year, we watched this comically unimportant boy be molded into an edgy isekai protagonist by the cruel whims of fate. It ruled. It was sick as hell.

As preached by OSR advice of yore, climbing up from mediocrity produces more compelling arcs than starting cool and remaining cool. Make sure the game you’re playing is the most interesting moment of your character’s life.

A 'Height Chart', a cherished LTRP tradition.

Go Forth and Be Merry

It’s been so wonderful to watch hundreds of people experience the magic of Live Text Roleplay for the first time. I have seen so many bluesky takes calling Over/Under magic in a bottle, impossible to replicate, as they come down from the high.

All of those people are wrong. We can keep playing these games whenever we want. Some of us never stopped. If you want to, you can keep going. The wonder, terror, and joy are still out there, within reach.

Just try not to slack off too much at work, okay?

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