Point of Vampire

[wolffyluna]

I have recently got very into Vampires SMP. It is a linked series of Minecraft Let's Plays of several players all playing a modded version of minecraft. (The 'SMP' in the name stands for 'survival multiplayer' which translates to 'on a multiplayer server where you can die and have to gather resources.) The modifications: vampires exist and have access to powers that the 'human' players do not have, including the ability to turn humans, and there is a capture the flag like mechanic about claiming beacons for the vampire or human teams.

But what makes this most interesting are that all of the players are roleplaying, and that the game very quickly becomes a social deception and deduction game-- one made even More So, because at the beginning, most of the characters do not believe vampires are real.

Now, roleplay combining with social deduction is fun enough, but there is another reason that Vampires SMP has got it's claws into me so much: the way point of view works. Because each player creates and edits their own videos, and these videos are all in first person. If the player did not see it, the camera and the viewers don't know about it. (Only adding to this is the fact that players will often edit conversations they have, so two videos of the same conversation can be slightly different.) This leads to people doing soliloquies to their audience. To people having conversations where from one point of view you know they are a vampire, and from the other you have no idea that they are lying. It leads to, in one case, someone giving a dramatic speech thinking it worked because the other characters only went "so, they were lying, right?" after they left.

But even better, is the way that, at least for me, you end up seeing things through that character's eyes and ~agreeing with them? Which makes it interesting to then watch those same scenes from other people's perspectives. Is this person reckless and jumping the gun, or full of reasonable paranoia and intense emotion. Is this person in a revolving door of loyalty, or do they keep getting driven away from people.

It's fun!