David Ball Interview
Added : 13th August 2007
Interview with JMC Blue Dwarf creator and GM David “Onion” Ball. This article was created for a spotlight article on pbemplayers.com and simmingleague.com.
Background information:
I live in Derby, England and work as a Web Designer/Developer. I have been the GM of the JMC Blue Dwarf PbEM since 2000. I like reading, writing, movies, theatre and snowboarding.
Q) How long have you been playing?
I've been playing PbEM games since 1999, so at the time of writing that’s 8 years!
Q) How did you start?
I first heard about the concept of simming when I was in my first year of college. A friend of mine said one lunchtime that you could create a “game” using yahoo groups. At first I thought this concept was madness, I’m a very visual person, when I play computer games I like to explore vast and interesting levels and progress through an engaging plot through ever-changing scenery. I was totally sold on games with good graphics, so I didn’t really think that anyone would want to play a game with no graphics whatsoever and just words.
Then a few months later I was making a website to promote a Star Trek story that my brother was writing. I looked at some other sites that were doing the same thing and came across several sites promoting Star Trek PbEM sims, and became very curious. My curiosity lead me to sign up for a Star Trek sim called The USS Endeavour-A (http://www.theendeavour.com) which was a logical choice, I’d always loved the Star Trek series and films, so was familiar with the universe and technology.
My first posts were pretty terrible. I did the usual sci-fi entrance of entering the ship by shuttle, and posted several short posts about my character getting to know his new home. Then something wonderful happened, I was emailed by another member wanting to joint-post with me. It sounds so bizarre now, but the concept was so unusual to me. I’d written short stories before, and couldn’t get my head around how a story could be interactive. The character that I had invented from nothing was suddenly having conversations with another fictional character, his character building all the time in my head with the things that I would make him say and do.
I was welcomed by some very friendly people on The Endeavour and loved the tight community aspect that I’d never experienced with anything online (forums and community sites weren’t as widespread as they are today). I found myself conversing over email and working with people from all across the world, I loved how a community so far apart could work so closely together.
By the time I had received my first SOTM (simmer of the month) award I was hooked. The reward for me was that people were reading my stories, I’m not an egotistical person at all, I don’t go out of my way to make myself stand out or be noticed, but I do live my work to be recognised. If it’s rubbish I like to be told, and if it’s good I like to know that my efforts aren’t wasted.
I soon realised that within the Star Trek setting there was millions of potential storylines. The setting is just a starting point for your own stories. I tried to push my imaginations to the limits and enjoyed everything I wrote.
The feel of my first sim was quite mature, and in many ways quite serious. Still a relative youngster, I felt like I should rebel against this, and so the stories that I wrote sometimes challenged the universe we were writing within and almost made the Star Trek genre a parody of itself. I’m sure some people must have hated my writing style because it was quite jokey, for example I’d create subplots where my character an another go to a bingo planet, where everyone is old and play bingo all day, or we crash on a planet and discover a mad scientist who created a spaceship out of a Volkswagen beetle, or my character’s dirty sweater gained the ability to live and tried to take over the ship. The impact of my style was noticeable because it was so different to the other posts. I hope it was refreshing for all members.
For me it wasn’t enough, I loved the Star Trek setting, but the types of things I wanted to write were becoming far too comical for a serious genre so a friend and I created our own sim based on the British sci-fi comedy series Red Dwarf. The setting is less limited as very little was actually defined in the series, allowing the entire universe to be created, but with enough existing for all members to have a shared understanding of the world they are in.
We named the group JMC Blue Dwarf, as wanted it to be pretty obvious to fans of the original show that the two were related, but different enough to avoid lawsuits! The setting for the sim is Red Dwarf’s sister ship, a large mining vessel sent out to search for the missing Red Dwarf. The decision to set the sim aboard a separate ship aside from the original characters was definitely important to the success of the Blue Dwarf group. Recruiting new members to play existing characters from the show sounds to me like a recipe for disaster, who is to say that that person will play the character correctly? I was definitely set out to allow people to sign up to write about characters of their own choosing.
The Red Dwarf TV series sets place after the ship has become adrift and lost for 3 million years. I decided to set my sim in this vast gap, just after the ship was lost. This allows us to not have to care about messing up any timeline issues, all apart from one. We can never accomplish our primary mission – to find the missing Red Dwarf! I find this quite poetic however, that the mission is doomed to failure, and every member knows that this is true. This does however give us a lot of scope for adding as many storylines as we possibly can.
The friend who created the Blue Dwarf group actually had no experience in role-playing or writing, and ended up only ever writing one post. I took over and started recruiting fans of the series to create our own adventures. The early days were hard work, getting people to spend time on something that isn’t yet successful, and had yet to have a community spirit built up around it.
Seven years later, I’m not sure if I can call the Blue Dwarf sim my own anymore, I’ve just been there the longest! We’ve had well over a hundred members, some lasting only a short time, some lasting several years.
Q) What types of games (IRC, PBEM, [....]) do you play?
I used a Yahoo group to create the Blue Dwarf PbEM game, as it has been reliable in the past. Many times over the years I have considered using something more tailored to roleplaying, but I have always remained with Yahoo groups because with their resources they can provide a constant level of service which will always be better than an “amateur” option.
Yahoo provide the facility to read all of the posts on the JMC Blue Dwarf webpages, as well as send email out. It is up to the members whether they decide to read the posts via email, or check the website. I actually prefer to check the website frequently, with an RSS feed on my google desktop sidebar alerting me by showing me the titles of new posts. So for me the term PbEM barely fits anymore! But what would I replace the terminology with? Play-by-webpage?
I have considered what it would be like to have an IRC or even tabletop version of Blue Dwarf, but this has only been a fleeting thought, as I like the time to prepare my posts thoroughly, I am inspired by things around me that will give me the creativity to come up with an idea to write about. Without this time between posts there wouldn’t be the chance to email other members with storyline ideas, hoping to inspire them to take their story down a particular path, or create a subplot parallel to the main storyline that becomes important later on. Also the ability to spend time on posts means you can really focus on grammar. Obvious things are spelling mistakes, which I will tolerate, but using l33t speak is something I can’t tolerate in posts. When you create a post you should choose your words carefully to give the reader a good description of what you’re trying to show, so I’d always favour a medium where you’re allowing yourself time to choose your words and sentence structure very carefully.
Q) What do you like the most about simming?
I love the endless possibilities. With one starting point you can take a story down many different paths. I love it when you start a storyline, then someone else comes up with an idea that is different to your original idea, and uses it to expand the story, and it ends up progressing in a way you never expected.
Q) What do you like the least about simming?
Recruiting new members can sometimes be a lot of hard work. Some people take to it straight away and know exactly what to do, but others can be slow burners and require a lot of pushing to get into the swing of things, some people hold back nervously and don’t post for fear of treading on footsteps, and some bolster in, changing everyone’s characters and messing up stories. I have a lot of patience for all members and do what I can to steer them in the right direction, because I know that it will pay off eventually and they’ll be pleased with themselves. But the process requires a lot of communication and negotiation that sometimes I’d prefer to avoid!
Q) What would you change to make simming better?
Despite the amount of time I’ve spent on the Blue Dwarf, I’m still a pretty lazy individual! If anything could be done to make things easier for me then the better! I’d love it if a screen reader could read the posts out to me, but they say it in such a boring monotone computer voice with no enthusiasm about the story. Also if computers could pull the words directly out of my head onto the screen when I’m writing that would also save time!
Q) Who are your main characters?
The character that I play is called Ambassador Seymour Niples. This was my first character I created for Blue Dwarf. When I created him I guess I wasn’t taking it too seriously, as the joke name implies. But over time I really enjoyed the character and incorporated his joke names as something that plagued him his entire life, leading most people to not take him seriously.
The character started out as First Officer, so he was a strict by-the-book officer, eager for his own command. At the time the Captain was a character named Will D Cannon, played by the friend who set up Blue Dwarf in the first place. His character was a seat-of-the-pants kind of Captain who made questionable command decisions, and mine was the one always questioning his sanity and fixing things when all went wrong. I kept the Captain’s character on for a while after my friend left, as I found it useful to have an NPC Captain I could use for important *Action* posts, to tell crewmembers what to do, and use my regular character for fun dialogue-driven posts.
Eventually after a dramatic story arc involving the death of the NPC Captain Cannon I switched my Seymour character to the role of Captain. “Captain Niples”. I kept it this way for a year or two, his character gradually changing in my eyes and imagination the more I used him. Now that he had accomplished his goals as a character I found it quite hard to think of him as the same character, he naturally evolved into someone who was complacent in his job and quite egotistical and self-righteous. I began to find it very difficult to use this new character as I used the Captain in *Action* posts to push the storyline along, and having a lot of negative character traits I felt was getting in the way of my ability to use him to tell other characters what to do.
I removed Seymour from the role of Captain and gave him a purpose that better suited the pompous and posh character he had become. After a plot where I actually made him the King of Great Britain for a while I delved into how the Royal family could be perceived in the future, and built up a familiarity between Seymour and the teenage Queen. Since then, Seymour has had the title of “Royal Ambassador”. Admittedly, it is a title that means absolutely nothing, but this fact is so important to Seymour’s character, someone who is so hollow that he must put important-sounding titles before his name.
This is how Seymour’s character has remained to this day. I have dwelled on his selfishness, his arrogance, his vanity and his ego in comic detail. I find it is much easier to write about a character that I love to hate than a character that is truly likeable.
Q) What do you consider to be the Blue Dwarf's best mission/adventure?
There have been so many storylines on Blue Dwarf that I have enjoyed thoroughly, and many stand out to me at the moment. I’ll briefly run through a few.
A mysterious virus spreads throughout the ship, causing everyone’s hallucinations to become real. This leads to all sorts of bizarreness caused by everyone’s imaginations to run riot. Anything from pink trees, pixies and Pokemon ended up running around the ship at some point.
Travelling to a planet with an extremely radioactive moon causes all crewmembers to gain superpowers which we use to fight against robotic spiders and flying machines. A missile loaded with these metallic spiders gets launched towards Earth, where the robots breed and spread across Europe.
The Blue Dwarf travelled through a wormhole which lead into the atmosphere of a water-planet, leaving us bobbing around for a few weeks, held afloat by several thousand helium balloons and the unpopular decision to jettison all alcohol onboard (booo!).
We had to save the inhabitants of a French speaking planet from a virus that turned them all into large chickens.
A holiday resort is overrun by large man-eating insects, including some Godzilla-sized beetles that stomped through the streets.
Q) Who do you think is the Blue Dwarf's weirdest character?
The Blue Dwarf has had lots of weird characters. A pink tree, an 6 foot tall hamster, someone who thinks he’s William Shakespeare, a rock-hard alien marine, a four armed man with his genitals on his head, a man called Dean who kept crashing things and was obsessed with toasties, a murderer who turned his victims into beanbags, a midget clone who is a sexual deviant and has perverted fantasies involving goats... I could go on but I’d better stop there!