This reminded me of a practice on the rpol net forums around 'God Games'; where each player would take on the role of a god with certain 'domains' that restricted what they could do. Functionally, it was very similar to what you describe for microscope: Gods could create planets, celestial objects, entire races, objects of power, even laws of the universe or exotic matter. The game was phased into different tiers of play with points spent to dictate the relative 'power' of different creations, which also affected how hard they were to mess with after creation. Each tier decreased the scope of the god's power: going from easily making planets, to making races, then individuals, with the ultimate goal of playing out the stories of their prophets and adjutants, and the wars and tales they experienced within that created setting.
I played in a few and even ran one myself (the GM's role was to define how things interacted with each other in a neutral arbiter type way so one side couldn't just say that their god-beast always won), and I had fun during those experiences. But looking back on it, it was a very different kind of play to any RPG. Good in some ways: the creative juices, like you say, were flowing in abundance and if you entered with gusto and willingness to create the game was very fertile ground. I still remember some of my own creations and how they ended up defining the cosmology. The bad was in a few ways: games often petered out without constant renewed interest, constant addition of new material made consistency hard (the phases were intended to try and reset the gamestate to something managable, since you could have anywhere from 3-30 people playing in a forum game), the looseness of rules meant any PvP felt very arbitrary or just boiled down to who had more points or more-suited domains, and the need for a GM to be running dozens of stories simultaneously when you reached the prophet stage was heavy and led to burnout (the end-game for it was always a third-person RPG from the perspective of your 'hero unit' oddly enough).
I see many of the same downsides and upsides in the story-games of today. Creative writing exercises framed by rules have a fairly long history (I played these around 2005). The appeal to me has always been that creativity is easier to stimulate within restrictions rather than complete open freedom. Restricting player creations to 'domains' forced them to think creatively to accomplish their goals, and produced inspiration through word association (if you were 'light' domain you probably recalled every light-based power, hero, spell, etc you remembered as fodder for your creations. That was your spell-sheet). The co-adaption of RPG rulesets seems logical however they aim to create different experiences. Microscope seems to be a better version of those forum games by removing the GM bottleneck, so its interesting to see the genre keep evolving.
This reminded me of a practice on the rpol net forums around 'God Games'; where each player would take on the role of a god with certain 'domains' that restricted what they could do. Functionally, it was very similar to what you describe for microscope: Gods could create planets, celestial objects, entire races, objects of power, even laws of the universe or exotic matter. The game was phased into different tiers of play with points spent to dictate the relative 'power' of different creations, which also affected how hard they were to mess with after creation. Each tier decreased the scope of the god's power: going from easily making planets, to making races, then individuals, with the ultimate goal of playing out the stories of their prophets and adjutants, and the wars and tales they experienced within that created setting.
I played in a few and even ran one myself (the GM's role was to define how things interacted with each other in a neutral arbiter type way so one side couldn't just say that their god-beast always won), and I had fun during those experiences. But looking back on it, it was a very different kind of play to any RPG. Good in some ways: the creative juices, like you say, were flowing in abundance and if you entered with gusto and willingness to create the game was very fertile ground. I still remember some of my own creations and how they ended up defining the cosmology. The bad was in a few ways: games often petered out without constant renewed interest, constant addition of new material made consistency hard (the phases were intended to try and reset the gamestate to something managable, since you could have anywhere from 3-30 people playing in a forum game), the looseness of rules meant any PvP felt very arbitrary or just boiled down to who had more points or more-suited domains, and the need for a GM to be running dozens of stories simultaneously when you reached the prophet stage was heavy and led to burnout (the end-game for it was always a third-person RPG from the perspective of your 'hero unit' oddly enough).
I see many of the same downsides and upsides in the story-games of today. Creative writing exercises framed by rules have a fairly long history (I played these around 2005). The appeal to me has always been that creativity is easier to stimulate within restrictions rather than complete open freedom. Restricting player creations to 'domains' forced them to think creatively to accomplish their goals, and produced inspiration through word association (if you were 'light' domain you probably recalled every light-based power, hero, spell, etc you remembered as fodder for your creations. That was your spell-sheet). The co-adaption of RPG rulesets seems logical however they aim to create different experiences. Microscope seems to be a better version of those forum games by removing the GM bottleneck, so its interesting to see the genre keep evolving.