Okay, let's talk footprints. 'What do you mean, Assy?" You ask. "You mean like the ones you make in the sand on the beach?" You're on the right track, kiddo, but there's more to it. So have a seat and listen up, ya dingus!

Footprints are traces of someone's activity in a given area or evidence of a one's previous occupancy of a space. To put it another way, they're little tell-tale signs, or clues, that someone has been in the area. Think of Goldilocks' entering of the Bears' house. She eats up their porridge, sits in their chairs, and sleeps in their beds. When the bears come back from whatever the hell bears do while their oatmeal is cooling, they find evidence, through the eaten porridge, the warm seats, and the messed beds that they have a griefer on their hands. Their discoveries lead them to the little snot, just dreaming her lazy, porridge stealing ass away, right in Baby Bear's bed!

So why am I mentioning this? Footprints are our inevitable impact on the world. Though the individual may be absent, the evidence of her activities remain, effecting a virtual record of her presence. In the real world, we all leave a little something of ourselves behind, be it a diary, a cigarette butt, a half eaten bowl of porridge, a dead body. Of course this is common sense to us, because we make footprints all the time without even trying or thinking about it (until we have to clean up a murder scene). But in virtual environments, like Dead End, in which players have little to no means of altering the environment, footprinting, in light of its absence, stands out as a meaningful device in creating atmospheric depth.

One immediate problem to making footprints is the fact that virtual spaces run on bits of memory, and there are only so many bits to dole out. Economy is vital in this regard. It would do little good to have players littering up a sim with virtual garbage and exhausting the memory supply, no matter how real it would make a sim look and feel. But when used wisely and selectively, and for specific purpose, footprints can be enormously effective in fleshing out the world and any of its running story lines.

Now, some Cynical-Sally would say all this jibber-jabber I wrote here is just a long winded request to admins to let me leave a little virtual 'litter' on the sim for the purpose of filling out my story. But it's more than just that! It's about...discussion...discourse about the aesthetics of online rp, and engaging the community in a dialog concerning means to improve it. So for now, let's just call this thread a discussion on the potential role-play mechanics of 'footprinting.' How can it be achieved in a virtual world? What are its limitations? Has it been done before on other sims with any degree of success? What is its potential for story expansion?