I know there exists some frowny-face action over the toolbox approach, and I get that. In many ways, I miss the “old” World of Darkness for all its Byzantine canon and its signature characters. What I felt about the oWOD, though, was that it was about someone else’s game. It was about the guy who played Jan Pieterzoon or about the girl who ran her pack through the events surrounding the death of the Stargazer Tribe.

The “new” World of Darkness, though — well, that feels like it’s for my game. Not the game of someone distant, but the game of this motherfucker sitting right here.

The nWOD didn’t want me to read. It wanted me to play.

Mirrors is for me the culmination of that attitude. I wanted the writers to take the rules and molest them, mutilate them into shape and more importantly, show everyone else how to shape the game to their whims and wishes. You want to see the intro to my outline, the one I sent to the writers, well, here’s a portion:

The Idea Is This

The World of Darkness and the Storytelling System as they exist are written to strike a balance.

The setting of the World of Darkness (we’re talking from the Rulebook here, not with the addition of the various cores) is purposefully a bit direct and flavorless – it’s got that creepy occulted-conspiracy vibe, but never commits to it entirely because the World of Darkness is meant to be a template over which all the core games can be laid.

Similarly, the Storytelling System isn’t meant to skew one way or another; it’s a system that tries to marry the simplicity of story-based games with a reasonable-yet-unobtrusive conflict resolution system. It favors story more than system, probably, but not by much.

Both the setting and the system have, throughout all the current gamelines, taken on something of a “toolbox” approach. Lots of tools for different purposes. Some games and books do this more directly, others try to keep the tinkering behind the scenes or at a minimum – this is easy to see in the major gamelines. You look at, say, Promethean: The Created, and you’ll see a game whose themes and notions are very concrete and very intact. The toolbox factor is present, but not extreme or overt. Hunter: The Vigil is something of the opposite: its themes and notions are, frankly, all over the place, but that’s as designed. It doesn’t approach the hunter experience from one direction, it tries to approach it from all directions. The themes are a bit muddier, perhaps, but the variation on “play experience” is far greater.

One of the more recent overt examples of this is what you’ll find in Armory Reloaded, with the final chapter: “Combat Hacks.” [Matt] McFarland and [Travis] Stout took combat and rejiggered it, providing a beautiful basket brimming with all manner of crazy ideas. (I will send the “Combat Hacks” section along for reference.)

That’s what this book is, except not bound only to combat systems.

We’re going to take the World of Darkness setting and the Storytelling System and offer a variety of “hacks” that players and Storytellers can use to customize any and all aspects of the game we can think of.

Multiple play-styles and play experiences will be addressed and provided for.

The Approach

Here’s part of the approach we’re taking:

We’re not judging the system or the setting as it stands. Maybe the system and setting work for you as written. Maybe they don’t. I don’t care. This book isn’t here to say, “Gosh, it works perfectly,” but it’s also not here to say, “Whoa, this shit needs fixing.”

It’s not about repair. It’s not about building a better mousetrap.

It’s about variants. Options. More tools in the toolbox.

You probably play videogames, right? Multiplayer-type? Even if you don’t, you’re likely familiar with, say, Halo? Well, when you start a Halo multiplayer game, you can customize certain elements of this session. Bigger shields. Lower health. Only certain guns on the board. Everybody’s invisible. Whatever. (More obscure but no less relevant is the game called Worms, which features tiny cartoon worms blowing the unmerciful fuck out of each other with lunatic cartoon weapons like bazookas and flying sheep and holy hand grenades. Worms also allows customization, often far deeper than most games – how many seconds is a round, the level of gravity, the type and theme of the board you’re playing on, how many banana bombs a worm gets, and so on and so forth.)

That’s what we’re looking at, here. We want this book to serve as a kind of Advanced Options Bible for anybody about to begin a World of Darkness game. We want them to pick up this book before really settling into the game to say, “Do I want to borrow anything from this book for the current game? Should I use this Virtue/Vice hack? Maybe I’ll take a different look at Morality this go-round.”

We want to encourage them to fiddle with the levers and knobs.

Oh, one more thing about approach: include lots of transparency. Any time you can clue them into the nitty-gritty of how a mechanic really works, do so. Feel free to remind them, “Hey, three dice generally equals one success,” or “Here’s what happens if you tweak the difficulty or add 9-Again or 8-Again.”

Questions, Questions

Whatever you’re writing in this book, whenever you’re writing it, you should have a few questions firmly stapled to your brainmeats.

First: “How can I dial this up?”

Meaning – how to make it more complex? More present and overt? How can I make this system or setting element a more prominent feature than it already is?

Second: “How can I dial this down?”

Meaning – how to either simplify it or reduce the game’s focus on this one thing? Note that those can be two very different approaches. You can punch up an element’s meaning while making the system more simplistic, certainly.

Third: “Can I fit one more option in here?”

Meaning – when you think you’re done, don’t assume you’re done. Try to approach the element from a new direction. Rethink it one more time. What happens if you remove it? What happens if you replace it with something entirely different? Even if that just means throwing in a quick 200 word sidebar to give some off-the-cuff variant, do it.

Tricky Shit

Writing this book might be some tricky shit, and here’s why:

It’d be great if we had 300,000 words to totally just blow the doors off this thing.

We don’t.

Hell, we could probably write a nine-volume series.

We won’t.

So, that means the writing needs to be punchy. It needs to be brief. Systems and options need to be very sharply written – lean protein, no fat. Right?

Except…

Fat is delicious.

Seriously. Fat and seasoning is what makes most protein delicious.

So, we need to add the fat back in.

Which means we need a really delicate balance.

That balance is writing a punchy system without using lots of junk words, but also writing it in such a way that it is interesting to read. A book of system and setting permutations runs the risk of being a useful but dull menu, and we cannot have that.

So, I encourage you to write conversationally. Enjoy yourself, because if you’re not enjoying yourself, the reader won’t enjoy himself. Obviously, we’re still writing a World of Darkness book, and horror blah-blah-blah darkness, but in the end, have a little fun. Speak to the reader directly. Speak to the reader in a frank discussion.

Don’t bog your systems down with heavy game-ist theory, but do approach each option as a kind of argument – discuss briefly why the reader might want to use this, and why they might not want to use it. What’s the point? What can be the result?

Again, the Combat Hacks chapter from Armory Reloaded is a good starting point – it provides lots of options, but it presents them in an interesting, readable way.

Lucky me, I got a bushel and a basket of kick-ass writers to do the job. Together, those crazy dicemonkeys and playgibbons descended out of the light of the sun and leaped down from the trees and ninja-fucked the shit out of this book. They did a slamming job, and they get a tip of the hat (and a tickle of the nipples) from me. Hopefully they have their books and are happy with the end result.

In fact, I should thank all the writers who did work for me on the books I’ve developed, and since I’m getting all maudlin here (seriously, my panties are moist with tears), I should also say thanks to all the great developers who have let me pollute their books with my foul-spunked word count. I’ve written, mmm, well, let’s just go with “a lot.” (At the last rough count it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 million words written across a number of game lines.)

Which is, as they say, batshit. Hell, it’s moonbatshit, you ask me.

I don’t know if my ride with White Wolf or the World of Darkness is really for-real done, but I know that I don’t have any work lined up at present. Mirrors isn’t strictly speaking the last writing or developing I did — I did quite a bit of mutant wordsmithy on Danse Macabre and also pinch-hit the second stage of development on that book, so keep your grapes peeled, cats and kittens.

Anyway, I figure this is a good time for a Q&A. You got questions about Mirrors, I’ll try to answer them. Well, I’ll definitely answer them — I just don’t know if they’ll be the answers you want.

To head off one question I suspect I’ll get: yes, the mighty Stephen Herron did write a Sci-Fi “Shard” for the book. And yes, I went ahead and cut it out of the book. I had two reasons for doing so.

The first and biggest reason is that the book ran way over word count. Bursting at the seams like a microwaved baby hot dog. For example, the space allotted to the Shards section was 60,000 words, and with the Sci-Fi section in, that section’s final draft tallied to a big ol’ 70k. And that was just that one goddamn section. All the areas of the book ran over count. Normally, hey, writers should write to spec — but what, I’m going to complain because everyone delivered a little extra awesome-sauce? (For future record, though: writers, write to spec, or I’ll punch you in your respective gender-specific genital regions. You don’t write to spec and you make Santa cry, you make angels kick babies, and you make me cut word count from other people’s sections. Don’t make me get nut-punchy. Or labia-slappy.)

The second reason was that the Sci-Fi section was a great sampling of lots of awesome ideas, but it ended up a little too scattershot — science fiction being as broad a subject as it is, well, it’s hard to say, “Here’s the entire genre of sci-fi crammed into a World of Darkness can in 15,000 words.” Pretty tough job. And Stephen did it with aplomb — I blame myself for not seeing that problem ahead of time and planning for it in the outline. Stephen’s section was solid, and in a perfect world I could’ve thrown him another 10,000 words (or even 100,000 words) and said, “Hey, keep going with this, because I want to see more, more, more.”

(So, to reiterate — he did his job. I didn’t do mine so well.)

Unfortunately, yeah. Way over word count. Which means I either needed to pick through the little-bitty sections and start clipping (which then creates the worry of, “Can this system stand reliably on three legs instead of four?), or I needed to find a big honking section that could undergo the brutal swipe of the developer’s machete. Hence how the sci-fi section, while good, ended up on the cutting room floor.

So, apologies to Stephen and all of you for that. The realities of cramming lotsa lotsa words into a not-so-hugetastic book are harsh and unyielding. Like the DMV. Or herpes.

You’re going to ask me now, “Will it be released as a PDF?”

And my answer is, I have no idea. I’m not an employee of White Wolf. That decision lies squarely in the hands of Eddy Webb — and, for the record, he’s aware of this, he knows all about it, so please don’t get all up in his shit about the issue. No matter how politely you press, it will only serve as a redundancy. He knows. He’s on it. He’ll make the right decision, and if it doesn’t end up in a PDF somewhere, maybe I’ll be allowed to post it here (or Stephen can post it to his site).

That out of the way, onto the Q&A.

You got questions, ask.

I’ll answer!

I’ve had this notion I’ve been noodling for a while. And by “noodling,” I mean, like, “catfish noodling.” Like, you stick your arm down a swampy dark hole and hope you return with a truly Herculean underwater beast. But if you do it wrong, you’re dragged down in the depths. Or a water moccasin bites your weenie. And then sunfish lay eggs in the orifices of your bloating corpse.

Okay, maybe it’s not like catfish noodling. Maybe it’s more like Ramen noodling? Mmm. Ramen noodling. Cheap. Saltbomb. Warm. Delicious. Also: no water moccasins.

Where was I?

Right, right.

A notion.

The notion is surely not original. The notion is probably something smarter minds have conjured long before now, and I’m probably just playing catch up. But, either way, it’s helping me think about game design a little differently; we’re rocking up an Android app for our (hopefully eventual and unstoppable) film release, and in thinking about the game, I started thinking first about the players.

And I thought, “Well, you can’t please everybody.”

And then I thought, “Except, I don’t even know who everybody is. Who will play this game?”

And then I thought, “Mmm. Ramen noodles. And catfish.”

And finally, I thought, “Y’know, if you could identify certain subsets of game players, you might be able to target them more efficiently — so while you may not be able to please everybody, you may be able to directly please a greater number of players.”

The notion is then to set aside the notion of “game genre,” and instead worry about the, erm, “genre” of player — or, really, the archetype of game player — you’re hoping to attract, appease and engage.

Let’s talk about these archetypes. You’ve got:

The Action Hero

(aka, the Adventurer, Indiana McLane)

The Action Hero wants, well, action. This is less overt than the title suggests, and while it certainly could involve, say, First-Person Shooting or any combat-heavy game experience, really it suggests straightforward action of any variety: platforming, survival horror, athletics, whatever. The Action Hero gets his kicks by putting himself in the middle of the madness: it’s all about movement, motion, activity, the dynamic doing of clicking buttons or rolling dice in a real-time “shit is happening right now” kind of situation. Halo. Call of Duty. Madden. Tekken. In pen-and-paper RPGs, any game that cuts to the quick of the action: 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, or maybe Exalted.

The Ally

(aka, the Team Player, the Social Gamer)

The Ally does not want to play alone. The Ally gets her kicks first and foremost from connecting with other players — she’s still a player, mind, and is still interested in the game. But her game experience — or, rather, her enjoyment of the game experience — is shared with others. Any PNP roleplaying game likely appeases The Ally, though even in each game there are ways to play more cooperatively and less competitively (Hunter: The Vigil obviously offers stakes for playing together rather than separate). Any MMORPG also suits this player, but so do “local” games like Rock Band.

The Anarchist

(aka, the Agitator, the Kid In The Sandbox)

Some players just want to play. Anarchist sounds negative, but it’s not — this player just wants to break the rules. It’s playtime, after all, and in an imagination run rampant, it’s a crazy romper room of fun. So, a game like Grand Theft Auto yea verily appeases the Anarchist. Drive around! Blow shit up! Ramp the car! Club a hooker! Once more, any PNP RPG likely can appease this type, though some are modeled more distinctly to allow this kind of play-style. D&D4e probably allows it less than, say, Spirit of the Century.

The Answer Man

(aka the Puzzler, the Riddler)

The Puzzler wants to put all the pieces together — the game experience is one big Sudoku match, and the play experience has An Answer. Even if it doesn’t, the Answer Man (note that in this post gender articles are arbitrary, so chill, TMeeps) seeks to put order over chaos and find the puzzle, the conundrum, the query. Probably the poster boy game experience for this would be something like Bejeweled, but even if you look back at a game like Doom, it had a lot of elements to appease the Answer Man — keycards, mazes, arrangement of elements. So too, Braid. In terms of PNP RPG — what? Probably D&D (any edition) again? Dungeon-crawling serves this well.

The Artist

(aka the Artificer, the Creator)

Ahh, the Artist. Probably a saner, less schizo version of the Anarchist. The Artist wants to own the experience in the same way, but she wants more than just play and chaos. She wants a result. She wants to hang something on the fridge afterward (er, metaphorically). She wants freedom. And customization. A good PNP game-table experience might be, say, Changeling: The Lost, which gives you lots of axes of customization both before game and during it (Kith?Seeming choice, Oathcrafting, Dream-Shaping, etc.). Any PNP game that forces you to “roll up a character” serves the Artist less, I suppose. In terms of video games, MMOs offer ways to appease the Artist: think of how City of Heroes lets you design your costume.

The Arbiter

(aka the Strategist, the All-Powerful)

Hello, God-Gamer. The God-Gamer wants control. The God-Gamer wants every game to have that board game element to it — move pieces like an absolute being, like an arbiter of all She sees. The game experience is something she sees in an almost top-down view, even when it’s not really in a top-down view. Any RTS game serves the Arbiter well: Dawn of War, for instance. Again, D&D4e is a good example of the top-down: moving your pieces, viewing the battlefield as much as “commander” than as “combatant in the thick of it.”

The Audience

(aka Storymonkey, the Narrative Investment Dude)

The Audience enjoys the experience. The Audience is along for the ride and wants to achieve a conclusion of story. That’s not to say the Storymonkey is passive; no, he can be active and want to define his own place in the narrative, but it’s that sweet sweet narrative juice that keeps her going. In Grand Theft Auto, he doesn’t waste a lot of time ramping motorbikes into old people — no, he goes to the next mission to see what’s going to happen next in the saga. Once more, PNP RPGs often give a lot of juice to the Audience, but again, some more than others — any game that actively seeks to put story elements into play is rewarding to the Audience. Old-school Vampire: The Masquerade was a game that appeased even those players that didn’t play all the time because of the metaplot. Other games, like 3:16, encourage you to create new story elements on the fly as the game continues, which offers different reward to the same type of player.

What Does This Mean, Exactly?

Well, it just means that when you’re conceiving a game and its scope and spread, it helps to think about who you’re designing this for. It’s probably not useful to try to appease all seven of these archetypes (which conveniently begin with A! Just like “archetype!” It means I must be right!), but it does mean, I think, that a game that serves three of these is better than a game that serves one. And that’s not that hard to do: again, a game like Braid is a game that serves three of these very well: the Action Hero (jumping!), the Answer Man (jumping puzzles, and weird time-based mechanics!) and the Audience (what the fuck is going on!).

It’s just one more axis by which you can examine your game design — yes, you want to look at your game, but another way to look at it is through the eyes of its (eventual) players.

In other words, you’re asking: “For whom am I designing this game? Who are my players?”

I dunno. Whaddya think? Make sense? Make no sense? Am I missing anything?

What are some example games that appease more than one type of player archetype?

[Edited to combat perceived gender biases.]

First, I must ask: “Wagyu Fruitcake.” Band or Album?

Hey! Look. Guess what hit the dance floor yesterday?

Compacts & Conspiracies for Hunter: The Vigil. It’s a PDF product from White Wolf Game Studios (CCP). I wrote it. For the game that I helped to design and that I developed. Basic gist is, it cracks open the breastbone on each of the compacts and conspiracies from the H:tV core and it roots around in the lung-meats and heart-holes for fresh meat, juice, and tissue. Sure, you can buy each compact and conspiracy separately, purchasing only the one you want, but hey, you’re no dummy. I can smell the intelligence on you, like a whiff of Hai Karate. You’ll buy the whole thing because you’re thrifty and wise.

(Oh, and to you silly knuckleheads who proudly won’t buy this product because it doesn’t cover the other conspiracies and compacts from the supplements: really? You’d really want to triple the price of this thing? You’d really want redundant information, since each conspiracy in the supplements got over five times the amount of word count that the core conspiracies got? You’d want to reduce the value of this product by customizing it for people who only bought one or none of the supplements? Maybe the book should also cover all the vampire covenants, and changeling courts? Me, I was hoping it would contain instructions on how to install a garbage disposal. And it would teach me how to hang-glide. Why do people feel so vocal about not spending money? “I won’t buy this because this is a dog and I wanted a duck!” Well, then don’t buy it. Do you really need to tell everybody about it? Newsflash: in my day to day, I don’t buy a lot of things. This morning alone I did not buy SCUBA gear, a Nissan Leaf, a pound of civet-shit coffee, or a book about antique sex robots. Do I rant about the things I’m not buying? No. Because then I’d be here all day. So stop it. Stop that nonsense. “This is a major problem that I see with how these books are written.” A major problem? No. A major problem would be if it was written in Klingon. A major problem would be if it accidentally contained only rules variants for Settlers of Catan. A major problem would be if the book turned into a monster and tried to eat your hands off.)

(Man, that turned into a whole other rant, though.)

(Sorry.)

(Moving on.)

So, I figure this is a good time to talk a moment about my game design and game writing ethos.

Used to be, I was a dumbass about writing game material.

And I apologize for that, because a bunch of you probably purchased some of my dumbass game-writing hoo-hah. Why was I a dumbass? Because I really liked to talk to — or at — the reader. This isn’t necessarily uncommon in game products, and is particularly common in, say, some White Wolf books, because it feels easy to wax poetic and go on at length about how it feels to be a Carthian vampire who just lost his dog, or a Bone Shadow werewolf who is watching a bum fight outside a hockey game or whatever, blah blah blah. It’s easy to just talk. The oh-woe-is-me monstrous condition is a good throughline, but it doesn’t demand a lot of examination.

Some older White Wolf books, I crack the cover, I start reading, and my eyes glaze over. Eyelids flutter like moths trapped in a child’s hand. Drool from lip as chin slackens. Muh. Guh.

And then, I wonder: what asshole wrote this?

*checks files*

Oh, right. Me. I’m the asshole.

Over time, and I dunno when this was, really, I started to feel like both brevity of idea and density of material could be a valuable combination. The first corebook where this really strikes me is in Changeling: The Lost, a book where any time I flip to a page I am abused and molested by a cabal of new ideas. Or, what about a book like Damnation City? Same thing. Flip, flip, flip, holy crap I can’t feel my legs the words are holding me down and stabbing me in the brain with the idea knife. A great example outside White Wolf is Spirit of the Century. Another book that infects my head like a termite colony, chewing holes in things I had been thinking about, and replacing those old ideas with hot squirming game ideas.

Hence, I now think of this as Wagyu Fruitcake.

Wagyu beef is a densely-marbled beef. Fruitcake (which unfortunately comes paired with negative connotations) is a rich cake product — heavy as a brick (and, made wrong, as tasty as one).

In either, each square inch of food is a super-compression of the essence of that food. You eat one bite of (good) fruitcake, you’re suddenly like, “I think I’m full. That was a whole meal.” You cut into some rich Wagyu beef and you can see the layers of fat and muscle and fat and muscle, all wound together like the swirls of milk in hot coffee, and the juices run free and –

Oooh. I think I just shellacked my manties.

What I’m saying is, when I write game material, I now strive for this. I want each page to have all those layers — layers of fat (meaning, the strong writing, the compelling explanations, words that are juicy and flavorful without being overwhelming) and layers of muscle (the game systems, the ideas, the — well, the meat). Meat and fat, meat and fat.

Or, in terms of fruitcake: cake and fruit and cake and fruit.

I want each page to have something new for the player, something new for the Storyteller, something rules-based, something idea-based, something story-based. No wasting time. No wasting pages. Each page, an idea knife stuck in your brain-block.

That’s what we all tried to do with Hunter: The Vigil, and that’s what  I did with Compacts & Conspiracies. So, know this: you buy that product, you’re going to get a densely-marbled game supplement. You will be getting the Wagyu Fruitcake approach to game design and game writing. Is it any good? Hell, I dunno. That’s for you to decide. I’m just telling you what I did; you can tell me if what I did worked.

You will find this same approach in World of Darkness: Mirrors.

You will also find it in Danse Macabre.

Meat, fat, blood, meat, fat, blood.

Cake, fruit, blood, cake, fruit, blood.

Sing it with me.

So. You terribleminds peeps (teeps? tmeeps? terriblemeeps?) were here for the formative discussions that built to the workshop I gave this past weekend. (Part One, Part Two, and then Part Three.) You can also see Guy’s kick-ass recap of this and the whole event right over here (“Collaboration Is The Killer App“).

If you’re curious what exactly it was that I got up there and said (slash preached), well, hold on to your knickers, because they are about to get firehosed off your body.

Yes, I just said “firehosed.”

Got a problem with that?

Take it up with management.

Once Upon A Time

With plumbob USB in hand (and then in USB slot), I cranked up my clumsily-put-together Powerpoint presentation, and I got right into it.

I started off by saying, essentially, “Shit, this should be easy, right? Storytelling is storytelling.” Nothing fancy about it. It is what it is.

Once upon a time, Jack and Jill went up the hill.

They met Dick and Jane who were pushing some ugly-ass dog in a wagon.

Then they were burninated by Trogdor the Burninator.

The end.

Except… uh-oh. Something doesn’t feel right.

Where’s The Game, Mary Jane?

No game there.

Right? At no point does Jack have to kick Dick’s ass with some sweet Kung-Fu moves. Nobody has to platform jump to rescue that fugly-ass wagon dog. At no point is there a Boss Battle against Trogdor.

No game in that story.

And “game” is a pretty important consideration, right? After all, a game without a story functions just fine as a game, thanks for asking. But a game without a game is… mmm, not a game at all. Games are not passive. Games are interactive, collaborative, dynamic. (During the Q&A, I hastily defined a “game” as something that requires contest and option. As in, I can choose how to play, and I am playing against an opponent whether real or abstract. In Monopoly, I can choose which properties to buy [option], and I am trying to beat your ass at the fake money real estate game [contest].)

Throwing “game” into the equation muddies the waters a little.

So, I said, let’s take it back a notch.

Let’s define some terms.

The Apple And The Arrow

I said, we better go ahead and figure out what “story” means in the first damn place. And, if we’re going to raise the specter of “story,” it’s best to further resurrect its old buddy — its compatriot in undead arms — that thing we call “plot.”

Then I popped up an image that had me feeling clever for about 30 seconds until the inevitable reality of soul-crushing self-disappointment sets in:

It’s a little something I call the “Apple & The Arrow.”

The story is everything. Character. Character arcs. Dialogue. Theme. Mood. Setting (or “storyworld”). Conflict. And stuff.

Hence, the story is the apple.

The plot is just the sequence of events. This happened, then that happened, then this other thing happened. People will sometimes say, “That movie had no plot.” They don’t mean that. A guy walks into a room and then throws a mug at a cat, that’s a plot. It’s maybe not a really engaging plot. It is perhaps not very sophisticated, nor does it really make sense in any context. And that’s usually what they mean: “The plot didn’t make sense,” or even more simply, “I did not like that plot.”

The plot is the arrow. It is the thing that punctures the story. With its piercing arrowness, it punctures all the layers, but does not encompass them. Proof that the story lives outside the margins of the plot.

Plot is a thing, too, that has a set pace. Here to here, there to there. Step by step. The sequence of events is paced out to deliver doses of story, like that magical morphine button next to the hospital bed. Turn the page of the book, hit the button. Story delivery. Sweet morphine. Yes.

Problem, though.

Games don’t allow for measured pacing, not exactly.

Certainly conflict escalates and moves forward, but really, the player controls the pacing through both choice and ability. The story in Grand Theft Auto is something I can get to whenever I jolly well fucking feel like it. I can dick around for hours, shooting hookers and old people with rockets and slashing cop cars with katanas. The story happens whenever I choose to trigger a story event. This is close to, but not the same thing as, turning the page or hitting pause/play on the DVD, in my mind — in those, I’m simply halting the story. In something like GTA, I’m engaging in the game and manufacturing new story events. In fact, I don’t even need to get to the “main story” if I don’t want to. (Look at Fallout 3, where I literally jumped half the “main story” on accident by wandering the Wasteland and finding Liam “Daddy-Cakes” Neeson trapped in some virtual 1950s simulation; I excised fatty hunks of plot without even meaning to.)

This then deserves a redefinition of “plot” in terms of game.

The plot in a game, then, is the protagonist’s path through the story.

The Leap Of Faith

Here’s where it gets a little fucked up.

Here’s where you need to hang with me.

Here’s where you might disagree with me and throw bricks at my head.

The player is the protagonist.

I’ll let that sink in.

Let me say it again: the player is the protagonist.

Not literally, of course. I am not Niko Bellic, Master Chief, Fat Princess, the Little Monopoly Shoe or Elf Ranger Ivybark Thimblenuts. I’m me. But when I’m playing, there exists a fairly thin membrane between me and the protagonist. The protagonist is an avatar. Perhaps not an avatar I created, but that individual — digital or otherwise — is my representation in the storyworld. In an ARG (alternate reality game), this membrane grows ever-thinner because even though I’m participating in an alternate reality experience, I’m likely doing so as me. I’m the guy solving clues and dialing phone numbers and pulling up websites and tracking down geolocational elements.

(Want to know how blurry the line between “real world” and “game world” can get? Japanese dude marries a video game character.)

In traditional storytelling, the protagonist makes her own decisions. Except, that’s not really true. The protagonist’s decisions are the author’s.

In a game, the protagonist’s decisions are the player’s.

In traditional storytelling, the authorial voice matters. Ego is a key piece. The author must assume in some small or large way that his story is important. The story is the author’s chosen story, the author’s voice.

In a game, that’s not true, then, is it? The ego must go. The story is then the player’s story to own.

Assuming that this is true — or, at least, is an ideal scenario — then the game creator’s job is not to tell his own story, but to empower the player to tell her own story.

But how do we do this?

You empower the player by providing the pieces.

The LEGO Brick Is King

And so we go back to the good old LEGO brick as a point of reference.

LEGO bricks are toys. You use them to build little worlds, and from these toys stories are born.

Each brick is a piece. In terms of narrative, we’re talking “story components,” and story components are things like, oh, I dunno…

Character. Character arcs. Dialogue. Theme. Mood. Setting (or “storyworld”). Conflict. And stuff.

Sound familiar?

Right. All those things that comprise the larger notion of story are things that break apart to their constituent pieces. Game creators needn’t build the models for the player; they can simply provide the pieces for the player to build the models himself.

“Model” meaning “story,” of course.

And this might be where someone asks, “But what about authorial voice?” Or, in terms of a pre-existing product, what about the voice of the “brand,” the voice of the corporate author?

The authorial or branded voice lurks in the pieces the game creator chooses to include in the game. Think of it how you can go out and buy themed packages of LEGO blocks (which is largely how they’re sold). Batman. Star Wars. Bionicle. Requiem for a Dream. Y’know, the favorites. By choosing what pieces go into the game, you have jammed the stake of authorial voice and intent into fresh earth.

So, ultimately, all this is a ruse.

When we ask, “How do you use games to tell stories?” the answer is, “You don’t.”

You empower the player through player agency to tell their stories.

New stories. Different stories. Unique experiences.

Egg Samples

You want examples? I got examples out the hoo-hah.

Pen-and-paper games are potentially the best example. They provide you with all the rules and tools you need as a player (or a group of players) to concoct your own storyworld. Toys come close, but toys don’t necessarily have “game” built in as a condition.

Of course, technology hasn’t yet caught up with the raw storytelling power of a pen-and-paper game yet. MMORPG’s have some element of that, as to MUDs and MUSHes, but even still, it’s not quite the same as the ability to more or less do anything you want.

Video games have come far. Good examples of what I’m talking about include Bioshock 1 & 2, Mass Effect 2, and Sims 3. The latter is obviously the most “open” example — the story component LEGO bricks there are cast far and wide. Not a lot of restrictions, really. Through the Sims series you can play vampires, alien babies, have all kinds of relationships, build all kinds of homes, engage in your own mad cycles of faux-drama. Bioshock and Mass Effect are good examples of where authorial voice still matters, but where the ability to “build” your own story in the story world still counts in a big way. When people talk about ME2, they say things like, “I played the hard-ass ice-queen Shepherd,” or, “I was a total paramour, but ended up losing half my crew at the end.” In Bioshock, you might talk about your plasmid or tonic loadout, or whether or not you chose to kill certain characters, or whether you harvested or saved the Little Sisters.

(And there, by the way, is also the answer to a question I haven’t even asked yet. “What about character arcs?” If we assume the player is the protagonist, and the character arc of a protagonist is often about change [A -> B -> C], how do you enforce change on the player-protagonist? Answer: you don’t. You let them define their own arc. Good? Bad? Powerful? Stealthy? Berserk warrior who learns to love? Kind ninja wizard with a hardening heart? Let the player certify the protagonist’s arc.)

ARGs, you might look to something like The Dark Knight and the Why So Serious campaign. Yes, you still have those traditional pockets of passive story delivery, but you also have community-building, you also have the players contributing their own art and their own story components to the mix, you have them actually helping to steer the ARG in an almost “pop culture grassroots” movement. That’s the case because those story components were laid into the mix like bricks in the foundation. That isn’t an accident.

Now What?

That’s where I ended the presentation portion and moved onto questions.

I’ll get into those at another point — actually, if you want me to talk about them, I can bop them in comments later in the day. If not, then don’t sweat it. Ask your own. Contribute ideas. This isn’t firm ground; it’s still soft for tilling. I am coming down more and more on the idea that player agency — ownership of the story, democritization of those story components — is pretty critical when it comes to merging game and story. A lot of games get this wrong; they keep a firm wall between game and story, and the player is forced to effectively hop the fence from one to the other. You want them seamless, though, you have to start ceding control to the dude with the — oh, wait, what’s that thing called?

Oh. Yeah.

The controller.

Boom.

(EDIT: I’d like to thank everybody who attended my mumble-mouthed crashsplosion of a workshop.)

]]> http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/04/05/once-upon-a-playtime-final-countdown/feed/ 24 http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/29/karate-kicking-your-way-into-the-game-industry/ http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/29/karate-kicking-your-way-into-the-game-industry/#comments Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:23:43 +0000 terribleminds http://terribleminds.com/ramble/?p=3722

So, I go to a con, I generally give a panel about “writing for the game industry,” which at the con usually means, “how to break into the pen-and-paper game industry.”

It’s often a widely-attended panel, by which I mean, you get seven people staring at you.

Clearly quite popular.

I don’t know that I have a great deal of explosive information to offer, but it seems like maybe I should come here and speak on the topic for any who care about such things. I generally get similar questions, and generally provide similar answers, so let this post serve as a small catalog of that talkery.

“How Did You ‘Break’ Into The Game Industry?”

I fought Justin Achilli. We were both dressed as bears.

I loaded a machine gun with d10s, and kung-fu’ed the White Wolf doors down, and shot dice into their brains, and inside their skulls the dice rattled and rolled until each one came up a shining, mighty 10. I’m making a note here, huge success.

I made Ken Cliffe drink my hypnotizing urine.

I never worked in the game industry. It has been a carefully constructed Internet lie.

Or, invent your own story!

Ahem, no. My path to Roleplaying Stardom (shut up) started eleven years ago. The ever-excellent Bruce Baugh, through the always-drunk Ken Cliffe, put out a “writer’s all-call” for Hunter: The Reckoning that basically said, “Write 1000 words on what Hunter means to you.” I thought about writing some kind of sexy Valentine’s Day card to some dude named “Hunter” and sending that in, seeing if I could get points for humor, but I figured hinging my first professional writing gig on what amounts to a “middle finger” would be a horrible idea.

Instead, I wrote a thousand probably-pretentious words about internal and external loci of control. So, playing an Imbued Hunter was representative of shifting your locus of control from external (the world controls me) to internal (I control the world).

It passed the gauntlet of Bruce, then Ken, and next thing I knew I was working on two books for the game line, and then Demon work started coming in, and then Tribebook: Stargazers and suddenly I blinked and it’s 85 books later. And 11 years. Holy shit, 11 years.

“How Can I Get In On One Of These So-Called All-Calls?”

You don’t. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen White Wolf do another all-call. That’s not to say a game company might not advertise for freelance positions. They probably do. But I don’t know that you’ll find the exact permutations duplicated again.

Point being, I don’t know that One True Path Into The Game Industry exists. Everybody seems to find their own way in. It’s a small enough industry that this isn’t totally bizarre. Every tunnel carved into the industry is demoed after you pass through it; it collapses in on itself so that no others may crawl that path.

“So What The Fuck Do I Do?”

If you’re smart, you run the hell away. Go get a cubicle job somewhere. It’ll pay better. It’ll look proper on a resume. It’ll earn you more respect in the world. Seriously. Try telling someone you “write RPGs.” Or, “write games.” Unless that person actually plays pen-and-paper role-playing games, you’ll receive one of several likely responses:

“I love roleplaying games. I play World of Warcraft. Do you write that?”

“I love video games! Tetris rules. Do you write Tetris?”

“Are you a programmer?”

“Like, what does that even mean?”

“You write Dungeons & Dragons?”

And on, and on.

Of course, you’re potentially one of those persistent weirdos who really loves games, and so as moth-to-flame, you are drawn ineluctably toward the shiny-burny. Presuming you therefore will not deviate from this immolation, then you might want to consider a few things…

Don’t Suck As A Writer

“Game writing” isn’t “game writing,” it’s just “writing.”

I’m not saying it doesn’t require its own special considerations; it does. But if you’re a shitty writer, you’re a shitty game writer. If you’re a good writer, you might make a good game writer. Writing is writing, by which I mean, writing is communicating using the written word. Whether you’re writing a pamphlet, a menu, a game book, a novel or a suicide note, good writing remains good, and bad writing remains stinkworthy.

Thus, learn to write.

Do not attempt to emulate the writing in pen-and-paper games. The quality across the entire industry is dubious. Not universally bad, no. Some game writing is jaw-dropping in quality. I’ve had the fortune of working amidst such quality (need I say named like Hindmarch, Laws, Ingham? The industry has many holy trinities). I’ve also had the misfortune of reading some truly bad writing in game books, writing that is eye-watering with the foul stench of inability and uncertainty.

It might not be the worst idea to refer to another post on this’n bloggery: “Crap Habits Of A Highly Ineffective Professional Writer.” Try that on for size.

Present Your Ability In Public

And let me add: “for free.”

Yes, I did my 1000-words for the all-call. It probably didn’t hurt that, prior to that point, I’d done a handful of free resources at Ex Libris Nocturnis. I worked on those as if they were not free, but paid resources. Meaning, I strove for quality and did not dismiss them as piffle, because I was really hoping they’d serve as examples of work rather than bullshit free nonsense on the garbage-choked Internet.

You are a fan, but don’t act like one. Act like a resource. A knowledgeable, friendly resource.

Further, Don’t Present Only Game Writing

When putting work online or submitting material to companies, I’d suggest presenting broadly. Fiction? Essays? Interesting and well-written blog posts? Yes, yes, and yes. All in addition to good game material. When I was developing, I was far more interested in those who could write broadly. See, game writing necessitates wearing many hats: fiction writer, essayist, advice columnist, system monkey, level designer, and so forth. The more aptly you can handle work in multiple arenas, the better you become as a writer and the more sought after you become in the industry. If you’re the best damn fiction writer only, you might get work. But fiction writing in the game industry isn’t often a big chunk of text, so that might be the only work you get. Meaning, minimal word count across fewer books.

Further, be advised:

Game design is not the same as game writing.

A designer can design all he wants, but if that design cannot be communicated properly, then that design is meaningless. The game writer must communicate good design. In a perfect world, the game writer is also capable of good design.

The 2/3rds Rule

I think this was once in regards to “writing for the comic book industry,” but I suspect it works here, too: if you’re two of the following three things, you’ll probably succeed in the industry: fast, friendly, or good.

Fast means, get your shit in on time, or even early.

Friendly means, service with a motherfucking smile.

Good is good. Don’t suck. Be excellent.

Being “fast” got me lots of work. You can write the most awesomest shiznit anybody has ever seen, but if you pile all that awesomeness into the Slow Boat To China, then it really doesn’t matter, does it? Being fast allowed me to step in where, frankly, sadly, other writers couldn’t hack it. “Someone wasn’t able to do this, can you get 30,000 words to me this weekend? Can you write a short story in five minutes? A game system in 17 seconds?”

Turning it in fast, and turning in good work, helped. I don’t think I’m a great writer, but I think I’m a good one. Solid, dependable. Not sure if I’m friendly or not? I try to be.

So, you can go for two out of three. Me, I say aim for all three.

“Will It Make Me Rich?”

Rich and famous. Your game writing will get you laid. On your yacht. Off the coast of your own personal island. Just last week, I had to break up with Lindsay Lohan.

No, game writing will not make you rich.

If you do a lot of it and for long enough, you might be able to sustain yourself, though. Which I think is the case for most freelance writing. You can sustain. Never rich, but never starve.

Be sure to get paid, though. If someone plans on making money off of it, then you should be making money. Doesn’t need to be a lot, but if their idea of “pay” is some weird fraction of a penny (per word), then I personally would suggest making a jerk-off motion in their general direction. That’s just me, though. You want to work for some dude’s testicular lint, that’s your choice.

Questions, Comments, Prayer Requests, Death Threats?

That’s pretty much that.

Other game professionals: do you have advice? Further thoughts? Conflicting info? Share and share alike.

Everybody else: got additional questions? Pop ‘em into the comments. I’ll attempt to address.

Oh, okay, none of that shit happened.

SimCon was good, but from the perspective of “making a great blog post,” it’s probably pretty dang boring.

The people who brought me here were great. (Did I mention that the person who officially extended the invite knows me not actually from my gaming, but is one of my Flickr contacts? More proof that you sometimes just need to throw a pebble, yo.) So, thanks to Darcy and Justin for this, and thanks to Melanie, the con chair, for getting it all done.

My “writing for the game industry” talk was good — sparsely attended (what, 7, 8 people?), but the people there were diligent enough to ask questions and pin me to the corkboard for the full two hours of the talk, so that was very cool. The talk went way outside of writing for the game industry, but hey, so what?

Both games were solid.

Fear-Maker’s Promise was a nice wow-moment because, while only 4 of the 6 players showed up (it was 9:30 AM, after all), three of those players “loved my work” and had actually played this module before. Heck, two of them had played it multiple times, and seemed to really love it. Those three players were great, very into it. The fourth was cool, fine, but perhaps because he was separate from the other three, he kind of continued to take his own independent path through the game, and by the end, got actively aggro with the other characters (throwing rocks at them when they fell down into ravines, stuff like that). That’s always interesting to me, because — it almost seems impolite to dick around with a character played by a person you simply don’t know. You’re basically screwing with a total stranger.

Still, that game was nice.

The evening game — well, all the awesome advice from the other day (…64 fucking comments?! — thanks, peeps!) helped me settle on Bad Night At Blackmoon Farm as the game of the night. Especially the Brontosaurus advice, which is just giving me the tingly-wingles every time I think about it, as it’s a really solid piece of game design advice in general. So, if you head on over to Eddy Webb’s shiny-ass new website, you’ll be able to read this post on games in which he actually uses the structure of both Blood Drive and Bad Night as examples. The image map provided with Bad Night (again, seen at his site, so make with the clickity-clickity) could actually be drawn as a Brontosaurus, it’s that spot on.

So, I sit down at 7:30 to run that game, and… a big holy-shit fucking lot of people show up. See, the con’s database shit the bed, and they lost the ability to cap the pre-reg’s for the game.

And 18 people preregistered for the Hunter game. Which is awesome, especially at a con of 300 people (which is like, what, six percent of the con-goers wanted to play in my Hunter game?).

Now, 18 people didn’t show — but I nine sure did, and I really wanted to run a game for five, but I decided I could run a game for six instead, which still left three people out in the cold…

Or does it?

dun dun dun!

*crash of thunder*

*dramatic music*

So, what we did was, three people came back two hours into the four hour session and swapped some characters and just jumped into the adventure as it continued — no restarts or anything.

And they actually finished the story in four hours!

Holy shit!

The group was great. Nine total people over four hours, each in groups no larger than two, and they worked very well together. From the beginning, I asked them if they wanted to just have their characters thrown into it as individuals, or if they wanted to know one another. They wanted to know one another, and they played it throughout. Very satisfying. Great stuff, great group, glad the story went well.

Hey, someone used their breasts as a weapon.

One guy beat up a severed head.

The criminal was the most virtuous.

The detective almost died via a gut shot.

Someone accidentally burned a girl alive in a grain silo.

Lots of gunplay. Lots of crazy shit. Tense cult action on a distant farm.

Oh, one thing, too — with the pre-gens, I take the tack that I do up the character sheets pretty thoroughly, but I always leave something behind for the players to fill in. In this case, it was just Skill Specialties, but even that little bit helps them paint their own visions for the characters a little more completely. I have in the past also let them choose their own Virtues and Vices.

So, that’s that. Huzzah. Ta-da. Now it’s time to drive the fuck home (ugh, five hour drive, five hour drive).

Later, nerds.

It’s like a loose tooth, this topic. I can’t stop tonguing it.

I’m getting ready to head off to SimCon (driving five hours to Rochester — whee!), which means this post won’t be super-crazy-holy-shit-long. But seriously, I can’t stop thinking about it. It makes sense; I have to give a talk on this very subject in just over a week, but even without that motivation, it still nags at me.

I have new conclusions and questions to add to the mix. Take them. Breathe them in. Let the airy, academic fog encircle your lungs. Then exhale it. Spit it into my eye if you must.

Oh, and if you need them, the first two parts are here (Part One!) and here (Part Two!). New comments have been added since last you looked, I bet.

Last note: for the most part, I’m going to continue to focus on video games. Tabletop RPGs are really their own animal at present, and do what they do very well (conceptually, not necessarily in each iteration).

The Word “Effective” Can Eat A Dick

Ah. Ah-ha! Ha. I got it. The word “effective” can be shot in the neck. It can bleed out. Spurt, spurt.

The word I seek is “sophisticated.”

Video games, at present, have not told particularly sophisticated stories. They’ve got the standard mythic-pop culture fare down pretty well. They’ve got the “single narrator” thing down (though, Heavy Rain I guess does “multiple perspective,” but perhaps not to the degree of Rashomon). Video games tell one simple story pretty effectively… and it’s usually some variation of “fight enemies to save the princess.”

(Here’s a challenge: prove to me that all stories are some variation of this. Go!)

I’m not saying that video games fail to offer sophistication in design or experience. They plainly do. And some video games strive for internal sophistication: elements of the story that perhaps do more than just scratch the surface (Dragon Age and Mass Effect in terms of character; Bioshock and System Shock in terms of philosophical complexity; Braid in terms of… whatever the fuck is going on there). But as a whole, these are essentially just “princess rescue” stories once more. Sure, in the Bioware games the “princess” is really the “universe” or the “world.” Bioshock 2 and Braid are both almost literal interpretations of “princess rescue,” though both do enough to subvert that in a pretty cool way (I won’t spoil).

The LaBute Factor

This is interesting.

First, I did not know that Neil LaBute worked on Heavy Rain.

Second, I did not know that LaBute sees his play, Wrecks, as somewhat interactive:

“LaBute counts on our desire to alter outcomes in his play Wrecks, a one-hander starring Ed Harris, currently running in LA. Harris walks on stage each night with a basic plot in his head and a clutch of possible routes to the story’s resolution. Which of them he opts for depends on the mood of that particular audience on that night.”

(Though there the interactivity relies more on the actor than LaBute as the original storyteller.)

(And we probably shouldn’t even talk about the Wicker Man remake.)

I look forward to the day video games utilize stories based almost exclusively in human drama. Are there any now? I remember a game, way back when, that I had when I was a kid. It was largely text-based, and you played a person’s life from start to finish — choices you made as a child, as a teen, as an adult, and into death. And it was pretty different every time. That was… what, 20 years ago? (Mind you, I shouldn’t have had that game at that age, since the game featured moderately explicit “sexual decisions.”) That game was only-only-only about human drama. The choices were sophisticated. Ah, but yet again, the game wasn’t about the story the designers were hoping to tell; rather, the game was about me creating a story out of the “story parts” the designers placed in my bucket. It’s like a very advanced version of LEGO-building, except the little colorful blocks are story components.

And That’s What I Keep Coming Back To

The best thing you can do as a “traditional storyteller” is to let your ego have the run of the place. That sounds horrible, I know, but look at it this way: you have a story to tell, and it’s a story only you can tell. That assumes a degree of ego. Not comfortable with it? Too damn bad.

The best thing you can do as an “interactive storyteller” is to put that ego aside. That’s not to say your vision isn’t important, but it’s less your vision of the story and more your vision of what story components to include — you get to choose what LEGO blocks the player gets to build his own version of this story. Sometimes, you might only leave “easy” components in play — “Do I choose to rescue the Little Sisters? Do I use my security bots to fight the Splicers, or do I go all-in with my Plasmids?” Sometimes, you might make the entire game about those components — “Design your face! Give your character wants and needs! Build them a house and loose them on the neighborhood!”

In traditional media, the reader empowers you, the storyteller, to tell your story.

In games, you empower the player to tell a new story.

And in Soviet Russia, the game plays you!

… uhh, sorry.

What I mean is… well, look at Doyce’s post from the other day. Doyce says something interesting (well, he says a lot of interesting things, but I want to focus on this one thing):

‘In the last… I dunno, month? I’ve played through Mass Effect 2 four times, and when the “end game” series of events starts, I never fail to find myself standing in the middle of my office, hopping up and down with excitement and cheering. It has been a long time since a movie got me feeling that good. Moreover, I have at least one other character I intend to play through the game (alongside, if not “with” Kate’s play through), and even then I know that, if I wanted, there are at MINIMUM five additional play-throughs I could do to get different end results (at least insofar as concern the characters in the story and how they “end up” at the end of the game.)

You get that last bit, though? It’s not so much the different ways the story could end — I’m a bit too much of a perfectionist to invest too heavily in one of the story outcomes where I completely fail, but I enjoy watching that conclusion on YouTube — but about what happens to the characters.’

First: holy shit, Doyce, you played that game four times? Man, it took me 36 hours on the first playthrough. Even on a second play through at 20 hours, I’d still be investing a minimum of 100+ hours. Dang, dude. You’re equally my hero, and equally a guy who might want to go to a meeting. (Insert smiley face here, I’m just poking fun. Obviously, this is exactly what the game designer hopes — you’ll keep coming back for more, and that means maximum value from the purchase of one video game.)

Second: Doyce is getting a great rise from experience here, but more specifically, he’s very interested in the story he is composing with this game. In a very oblique way, Mass Effect 2 isn’t a game; it’s a language. And Doyce is using that language to tell a story. He’s choosing which words to put where, and how the end will go. Sure, the language is limited, and is more plug-and-play than anything as complex as how the human language or parsed image can tell a story, but as a notion it is pretty sophisticated. And pretty awesome.

And there’s my conclusion.

The traditional storyteller tells his own story.

The interactive storyteller provides the tools and the language for the player to become a storyteller.

Yes, some of the tools are the same — dialogue, character arcs, even themes or moods — but those tools are repurposed to a different task. That’s not a bad thing. It is, in fact, a fucking incredible thing indeed.

]]> http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/26/once-upon-a-playtime-iii-return-to-the-gamestory-lagoon/feed/ 22 http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/25/the-ancient-and-esteemed-brotherhood-of-gamemasters-is-now-in-session/ http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/25/the-ancient-and-esteemed-brotherhood-of-gamemasters-is-now-in-session/#comments Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:16:26 +0000 terribleminds http://terribleminds.com/ramble/?p=3680

Bang a gavel.

On Saturday, I am running two game sessions at SimCon– one session of Changeling: The Lost (Fear-Maker’s Promise), and one session of Hunter: The Vigil (Blood Drive). And, if I have time for pick-up games, I might throw in a little taste of Maschine Zeit.

Now, I’ve been running games since… well. Let’s just go with “around a decade and a half.” Not like I’m a stranger to tooling around the game table and playing a cold and heartless god — er, I mean, being a kind and beneficent storymonger. I like to think I don’t suck. I don’t, however, have huge bundles of experience when it comes to “running games for total strangers.” I think I ran my first con games at DexCon many moons ago, which is where I met one of the smartest and nicest dudes alive, Rob Donoghue. (I was and perhaps remain a huge idiot. I ran Changeling for him and some other total strangers, and it was a great game, probably the best con game I could’ve envisioned. But I had no idea who I was sitting with, and then he invited me to lunch, and suddenly I found myself with him, Fred Hicks, and a few others, and I suddenly realized I was hanging out with a gaming brain trust. What an asshole I am, I had no idea of the caliber and quality of people surrounding me.)

I’ve since run games elsewhere, and they’re always a mixed bag. The Hunter games I ran at GenCon were interesting if only for the variety of gamers who sat at the table — the first group was perhaps the best, willing as they were to band together and pretend to know one another. The other two sessions consisted largely of people acting at opposite interests, and doing their best to dick one another over. That remains doubly odd for the last group, which consisted of a table of dudes who were all friends before they sat down. Like, they came together. And this is how they game? By constantly trying to fuck each other up? Eeessh.

(Oh, for the record, those GenCon games happened to be when I first conceived and ran the Blood Drive adventure. It’s a shame, I guess that adventure never really caught on? I never heard of anybody actually purchasing it, I don’t think. I really wanted to subvert the normal Hunter plot — instead of “Kill The Monster!” it suddenly becomes “Protect The Monster!” Couple that with an adventure that’s basically one giant chase movie and it, to me, works in some good tension. Then again, see earlier notes re: I am both idiot and asshole, so who the hell knows?)

What’s the point of this post, you ask?

Hot damn, somebody’s impatient. Stop jumping around like you have to pee. I’m getting there.

And get your hands out of your pants. It’s rude to paw at yourself in polite company.

The point is, I’m running con games on Saturday and it’s been about a year or more since I’ve run any games at all. (Insert sad face here.)

Thus, I come to you. And beseech your advice.

I know a shit ton of you have run games as gamemasters, dungeon masters, storytellers. Further, many have run con games, to boot. Which means it’s time to cough up some advice. Give me — and the other readers — some tips on running games. Con games, but “regular” games, too. Whatchoo got? You are the terrible minds, after all, so purge your poison here for all to see.

]]> http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/25/the-ancient-and-esteemed-brotherhood-of-gamemasters-is-now-in-session/feed/ 65 http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/19/once-upon-a-playtime-ii-revenge-of-the-gamestory/ http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2010/03/19/once-upon-a-playtime-ii-revenge-of-the-gamestory/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:31:53 +0000 terribleminds http://terribleminds.com/ramble/?p=3591

I might actually be more confused than in yesterday’s post. This is probably natural. Some metaphor probably waits at work here — “Well, first you’ve got to go through the darkness to get to the light,” or, “You must first be eaten half to death by angry fire ants before you become the Mighty Ant Lord.”

Let’s see if I can’t crystallize some of my questions (and shaky-footed conclusions).

No Good Examples?

As yet, I didn’t find too many examples of “games with great stories.” And, to be clear, I’m talking about video games or ARGs. I’ll talk more about pen-and-paper roleplaying shortly. I would argue that the Grand Theft Auto series exemplifies probably the most cinematic, filmic storytelling — cutscenes move to missions move to cutscenes. A quilt thus creating a fairly epic crime story. Is it on par with some of the best storytelling out there? Tell me: what’s your favorite story in a video game? Share it, yo.

Pen-And-Paper Roleplaying Sets An Interesting Precedent

“Stories” in pen-and-paper roleplaying games — meaning, the stories created by the designers and not by players — are generally relegated to backstory or to the active conflicts in the world, born from that worldbuilding stuff that Rob Donoghue was talking about yesterday. This isn’t a bad thing, because it shunts the focus of the game onto the players and their stories. This is awesome.

There exists a gap, though, between those low-tech games and the high-tech video games and ARGs. The lo-tech games trump the new stuff, and will until both technology and game design cross paths in a way that really opens up the raw potential of storybuilding freedom.

The closer a “new-tech” game can get to this “old-tech” approach, the more interesting games can become. This is probably worthy of a whole other post (and it’s early, and I’m just getting my coffee on), but this to me is the real power of games — not in telling stories, but in making the telling of stories interesting and fun for the players. Games have gotten close either on purpose or accidentally — the old Ultima games or Fallout 3 (the list doesn’t end here) let you customize your character enough and gives you enough in-world freedom so that you’re effectively “writing your own story.” (One might argue that the Sims series is best at this: gives you a world, gives you the power to create and control robust avatars, and lets you record the visual stories as a result.)

“Storyshowing…”

…Is a horrible term, but it gets to the center of what I’m talking about. Nearly all modes of storytelling offer a fairly passive engagement, even when the audience is engaged. I sit in the theater sets. I have a book in my lap. I bathe in the warm glow of the television. I flip through a comic book on the train.

In all cases, I’m being told a story.

But the players of games are like wormy infants struggling against the car seat — we don’t want to be told a story. We don’t want passivity. We want to bust out of these buckles and drive the car and kick Mommy in the face and ride Daddy like a tauntaun into some dude’s backyard.

Storyshowing gives us a little more action over passivity: the game designers have effectively lit the path and placed landmarks along the way, and we are shown the story when we choose to look. And if we don’t choose to look, then we don’t really get the breadth and depth of the story, and that’s okay. (Same way that in a pen-and-paper roleplaying game the characters ignore Vital Clues and run off and do some Other Shit.)

Good examples of this: anything by Valve, really. Half-Life and Portal, anybody? The story there is largely your own, with the “backstory” relegated to conversations you overhear, graffiti on the wall, events you see unfold. Nobody infodumps. Nobody sits you down and tells you the truth. You can play through the game a few times and get new story tidbits as you go.

This makes me wonder if the “storyworld” (encompassing the setting, the backstory, the characters) is thus more important than the “story.”

The storyworld is what I remember most about a lot of games. The stories — unless we’re talking about the stories or meta-stories I created as a player — less so.

Fail State

Games are either stories punctuated by gameplay or gameplay punctuated by story. Roleplaying games (pnp) have this integrated, generally. The actions I take and fail become part of the story. Video games don’t have this so well integrated — the actions I take and fail often break the story, or end it outright (“I lose”). This outcome condition and the condition of failure in particular are what help to separate game events from story events and what (to me) helps keep the distance between game and story overall. Or, put differently, in video games, failure is rarely interesting. (The Sims again comes to mind as a game that makes failure interesting. I fail in my friendship bid and now I’ve got an enemy. What other video games make failure a part of the story?)

Is It About The Craft?

I’ll call out MC Zanini’s comment, because I found it clear and insightful and speaking to what keeps circling the drain in my brain:

“But I’m sitll rolling over the idea of “effective story” in my mind, trying to grasp the concept. As I (partially) see it, an effective story is not quite about emotional content, it’s about craftsmanship (or craftspersonship), I mean, how effectively the author was able to bring a number of techniques and resources to bear on a story. Taxi Driver or Ulysses aren’t only great stories, they are well-crafted stories. I’m talking here about versimilitude, suspension of disbelief, point of view, 3-D characters and the works.

However, notwithstanding claims that characters sometimes have lives of their own, I still think well-crafted stories in a traditional storytelling scene like literature and movies are possible because authors have (or should have) absolute control of the creative process. So, I’m essentially saying stories are effective in so far they are painstakingly (*struggling to find the right word in English*) cut from the marble block, carved and polished by a steady hand that knows where all that effort will lead to.

When Daniel Dafoe came up the with the novel, he might have been looking for an easy way to entertain bored married women from the bourgeosie. Centuries later, the novel was to be acclaimed as an art form (Effective stories? Not implying Moll Flanders was less effective than, say, Madame Bovary, but we have to admit techinques have improved and diversified a lot). Movies also evolved from “low” entertainment to art. So why can’t games?

But, the way I see it, games are not traditional storytelling. They are interactive storytelling (or simply storyshowing, or maybe storyexperiencng). Most RPGs I know — effective or not so effective stories are just a byproduct of playability. Most video games I know — well, it’s hard to keep disbelief suspended. However, I think we’re still getting acquainted with a potential art form in the making, and we need to pick out, find out or make up techniques and resources interactive-storytelling-oriented. Reinventing the craft, and ourselves as crafters, we might get to the point stories in gaming won’t be solely byproducts.”

This brings that word “effective” back into play, and I still find the word cumbersome yet somehow meaningful. It’s not the stories in games I find particularly effective — by which I mean, the overall story doesn’t usually affect me. Characters, yes. Situations, yes. Dialogue, sure. But the overall thing, maybe not so much. And what that ultimately means is maybe the “overall story,” by which I mean the one the designers want to tell, isn’t that important. And that’s okay. It might even be freeing.

That doesn’t mean the elements of the craft aren’t important (again, characters, situations, dialogue, arcs, emotional beats), but it means that the overall thing you’re making doesn’t need to be quite as directed, quite as “top-down,” quite as perfectly placed and elegant. Games allow for so much randomness that a certain chaos is bred into the system. The story must allow for that chaos.

New Tools, Or Just New Blueprints?

I do think the craft of storytelling in games is one that is different from the craft of storytelling in passive, traditional forms. (And yes, while “writing a comic” is different from “writing a novel,” I’d argue they’re closer together than we think.)

I think that games offer so many special considerations that you’d be a fool not to incorporate those special considerations into your overall process. Chief amongst those special considerations is the player. The player is active. The player is random. The protagonist — even if he’s named Nico Bellic or Batman or Big Daddy — is always the player.

That doesn’t mean we need new tools. The hammer and saw still work. Dialogue still needs to be dialogue. Good characters are still good characters.

But they may fold into the story in different ways. Thus, while new tools are not necessary, new blueprints may be. Just as the film has its “three act structure,” or how TV has its “X-act structure” (X based on the commercial breaks), it’s worth looking at the structure of writing stories for games, too. Will is right that gameplay forms a kind of negative space in the storytelling (and, I’d argue, vice versa) — and that means you need to figure that out, because it affects pacing, it affects emotional beats, it shifts the shape of the arcs and acts. Oh, and by the way –

I know other people have already crossed this ground and have come up with awesome stuff. I’m not saying anything new or interesting, really, I’m just trying to puzzle it out for myself. But if you have links or other info to pass along, hey, please do.

So, What The Foo?

I dunno yet. Again, I’m still noodling. I got a talk to do. And I have some games to write. So this is a formative process, all these elements whirling around my head like angry hornets. High-five to all of your crazy people for dropping mad logic yesterday. Keep dropping it, if you so choose. You’re all far smarter than I am about this stuff, so thanks for contributing your fat bag of genius.

I’m on deck at DIY Days NYC to give a talk about storytelling in games (a talk that is, at present, called “Once Upon A Playtime”). Basically, with this talk I’m shunting aside the old question of Are games art? because that question is (to me) meaningless to the designer, to the creator. Instead, I’m focusing on the question, Can games be used to tell an effective story?

I don’t know the answer to that, yet.

When I first started cracking the nut that is this question, my kneejerk response was a blustery, stammering, “Well! Wuh. Pffh. Of course they can! That’s not even a question.”

Except…

Then I really took a good long look.

At its core, storytelling is (duh, bear with me) the act of me telling you a story.

Ah, but gaming isn’t quite that. Gaming is about you experiencing a story, and further, it’s about you making your own story from that experience. I don’t mean to suggest that this is a bad thing. It’s not. It’s a great thing. It’s its own thing. But is it classic and effective storytelling?

The campfire storyteller, the writer, the filmmaker, the comic book artist, they’re all telling a measured story. It unfolds word after word, page after page, frame after frame. It exists at the pace of the storyteller. It’s a roller coaster ride. You’re buckled the fuck in. Your only real options as the recipient of the story are:

a) Keep listening (reading, watching)

b) Quit that shit (put the book down, turn off the movie, walk away from the campfire)

c) Change the pace of my consumption (read more slowly, watch the film in increments, choose to read the graphic novel over the comic series as its released)

As a game, though, my options are larger, wider, and altogether stranger. Yes, in the Call of Duty games, I traverse the battlefield, unlocking cinematic events that continue the story that the creators are telling. (Be aware, I’m not arguing that games do not tell stories; I’m asking again whether these stories are effective.) But I can stop. I can dick around. I can run around the battlefield area, shooting holes in cars, or letting wave after wave of enemy spawn for giggles. In Halo, I might even partake in emergent gameplay — me and a co-op buddy might sit and screw around with a level (re: a “chapter”) for hours, building ramps for our Warthogs, grenade-jumping to get secret skulls, shooting rockets into each other’s faces. Whatever.

Given that an “avatar” in the game world is generally the story’s protagonist (Master Chief, f’rex), that’s kind of wonky, isn’t it? Imagine being told a story and then the storyteller stops in the middle and suddenly rambles on about how Master Chief tried to give his Spartan best friend a plasma fire enema, or how the two of them ran around on the battlefield playing a digital game of high-definition avatar grab-ass for a half-hour. The story’s arc suddenly plateaus, or rather, hits something that looks a static frequency. Meaning, at that point it’s just noise.

This isn’t a bad thing for the game.

But it might be a bad thing for the story.

Is the story just context for the game experience? Is it just The Thing That Frames The Fun?

Is the story that meaningful in a game? In a pen-and-paper roleplaying game it is, but even there, the creators of said game are not actually telling a story. Not even with a module. They’re giving the gamers the tools to create and engage in their own storytelling endeavors. In an ARG (alternate reality game), the “story” that’s concealed is one that might be meaningful to the canon of that property, but once more, I can experience the story in an ultimately arbitrary and random way. I can come in late, I can come in early, I can juggle the pieces and put the story together as I see fit.

In some ways, this is great, right? Games then embody show over tell. Half-Life and Portal show us the story. We can care, or we can just shoot things. We can search out the writing on the wall (in both games, literally), or we can give the story the finger and run around with the Gravity Gun, shooting boxes into the faces of Combine agents.

It’s too twee, really, but in games, are we talking about storyshowing rather than storytelling? Is storytelling an art that simply cannot operate properly in a game context? Does interactivity offer too many random elements? Does interactivity render the old storytelling mechanics inert?

I’m honestly having a hard time thinking of a video game that truly told an effective story. Are there any? I’m not trying to make anybody mad; it bears repeating that I’m not saying I have not enjoyed the stories and worlds put forth by games. I have. I love games. But has the story of any video game matched up with the best films, the best novels, in terms of storytelling potency, in the terms of true craft? Will video games have a 70s-era surge into craft? Can we ever see the video game equivalent to Taxi Driver or Apocalypse Now? Or Moon? Or District 9? Will video games ever give us something as powerful as Ulysses or The Things They Carried or even Lord of the Rings? Yes, I love Bioshock. I love Mass Effect. But even when I can explain a game’s story in a way that isn’t totally ludicrous, I don’t know that I’m really getting the same emotional urgency and narrative impact as the great stories of our time.

By putting the supposed target of the story (you, me) into the story, have we irreparably damaged the act of storytelling in that particular situation?

I cannot help but envision the day that we begin to tell new stories, static stories born out of our digital interactive experiences. Just as today I might tell you a story about how I went to the convenience store and got robbed (relax, that didn’t happen), I might in the future tell you a story of the time me and a couple of buddies invaded the Overlord’s base and how it was a total suicide mission in the end. Hell, I might tell you that story now. I might tell you how Hindmarch and I sniped some pinko fools, or how last night I protected a Little Sister from an army of Splicers but how everything went pear-shaped when the game dropped one of those ape-bodied brute splicers in my lap at the same time some dude started chucking firebombs at my face. I’m getting stories from the game, but the game is not telling me a story.

Help me out here. Noodle this shit. Give me a boost so I can get my head around this. It feels like a rabbit hole; I tumble, I tumble. Can you think of video games that have effectively told stories to you? Stories on par with the best and brightest? Did the interactivity — the sheer possibility of option — change your notion of “story,” or is it simply outside that notion entirely?