Over/Under was a month-long wargame within which a mass of more than 1,000 players roleplayed residents of the cyberpunk space station "Prospero's Dream" outlined in A Pound of Flesh. They did so in a single Discord server set up to represent the different factions at play on the station. For many (maybe even most) of the players, this game took over our lives during Mothership month.
I'm not going to try to explain the whole game, because neither I nor any other player played the whole game, very much including the GM. If you didn't play it, you can find a number of illustrative and interesting accounts. I intend to catalog the resources available to players (principally denizens) in the game. Hopefully by outlining these resources I can move toward a better understanding of how this game actually worked.
In-Game Resources
Denizens of the Dream who did not start as Bosses began the game with just the in-game currency, credits. This was the principal mechanical resource in the game. There were two other resources that could be obtained through Zhenya, the Discord bot built for the game: tokens ("mined" by playing a version of the game set) and shares (representing partial ownership of the Stratemayer Syndicate, the corpo faction on the Dream). Credits were by far the most commonly traded in-game resource and made it possible for players to make a bid for the top 10 each day, obtained by lavish spending. Tokens and shares gave access to two channels in Discord and, in the early game, granted the ability to vote in the factions with which they were associated (Canyonheavy Collective and Stratemayer, respectively). I should note here that access to channels was a significant in-game resource.
Each player started with an address, a location on the station map where they lived. Players could pay credits to move to another location. As far as I could tell, the only mechanical use the address had was in ordering an assassination (an action not available to non-bosses). Players who shared their address potentially put themselves at risk, but this could also enable trust through mutually assured destruction. One faction reportedly required the address to be shared prior to admitting a denizen.
Lifestyle, ranging from squalid to luxuriant, cost daily credits to maintain and could be changed once per day. Moving up to more lavish lifestyles granted access to new channels on the server (each one effectively a bar).
Members could gain faction membership, granting access to that faction's channels, a daily salary, and the right to participate in faction decision-making (mostly by calling votes of no confidence (VONCs) on faction bosses). Denizens could even rise through the ranks to obtain boss status if their faction's bosses were killed or removed from office. Joining a faction was often difficult, because apart from factions wishing to vet their recruits, the message sent by Zhenya would quickly time out, meaning the boss extending the invitation and the recruit would need to be playing at the same time.
Much of this game was about sharing info. Screenshots of conversations, rumors gathered in those bars you've gained access to, knowing what's going on in your faction's channels and sharing it outside of the faction. Much of the info game was played out in private threads, and a key in-game resource was access to private threads. Anyone on the server could create private threads, and the server regularly maxed out its allotment of threads. Some of these became crucial sites for trading and gaining info, making alliances, sharing conspiracy theories, or just getting fun roleplaying opportunities. See, for example, the Awesome Metal Butthole.
Out-of-Game Resources
A number of factors not emerging from the rules of the game, the medium of Discord, or the fiction of the game world had a bearing on the way the game played. I'll call these out-of-game resources, but they were central to how the whole thing worked.
As a 24/7 synchronous game, perhaps the most important resource was time. I was a small-time PC in this game, posting a bit more than 1,500 times during the month. Many players spent far more time on the game, and often this led to in-game benefits (and out-of-game sleeplessness and/or problems at work).
Players with real-world skills could leverage those in-game. Artists, programmers, designers, and writers sold their output and shaped the information space of the game. The game proliferated an astounding volume of memes, original art, and in-fiction journalism.
Out-of-character relationships helped players establish trusted groups in-character. In a game where deception was everywhere, having a real-life friend or two in the server could anchor a player. I'm aware of several examples of this working out to mutual advantage in Over/Under. Along similar lines, "celebrity" was really valuable in the game. Well, celebrity among people who play indie RPGs anyway.
Gaming experience unsurprisingly played an important part here. People who had both roleplaying experience and wargaming chops could navigate the complicated mix here. In particular, GM experience enabled people to take leading roles in the sea of freeform roleplaying on the server. Generating fun experiences became a kind of currency. In my faction, the Teamsters Union, a denizen rose to the position of president in large part due to their experience playing Cataphracts but also because they built a lot of connections through roleplaying within the union's channels.
Playing this game was a crash course for many of us in Discord literacy. People frequently commented on how they were getting better at writing in markdown, setting up private threads (I didn't know this was a thing until playing Over/Under), and using other tools available on the platform.
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