Credibility & Self-Validation

24 10 2009

I said that I’d be writing a post about mercy & cruelty (and how those can fuel stories in roleplaying games), and I promise that I still will. Right now I’m at Steamcon, and my mind is where it is.

I’ve been thinking about credibility, approval and validation a lot this weekend. Here are some scattered thoughts:

  • When branching out and trying new things, people sometimes feel very vulnerable, and thus cope with some defensive measures. This is true of gaming for the first time (especially with friends who are more experienced) and for trying new kinds of games (especially crossing the trad/new-wave design threshold, in either direction).
  • One defense tactic: compare the current game to some golden pinnacle of gaming to which no other games will measure.  A common example of this is "Well, it couldn’t replace my campaign D&D game, but it’s a fun little game." A common refrain that I find myself accidentally falling into is "Well, for a game without stakes and shared setting authority, this isn’t bad."
  • Another defense tactic: discrediting your own performance, lest someone else. "…I don’t know, I’m not very good at this." It’s phenomenal how many creative people sit down, begin to play a character amazingly well, and then put themselves down for fear that someone else will.

How do you stop this?
I’m unsure.

A good start is play obviously. In a Perfect game I played last night, I made sure to play the most obvious character I could – a grade-A overachieving student whose crimes were… kissing girls! He was struck between two loves, he was kissing both in secret, he was committing obvious crimes and I was constantly doing the obvious thing. I was trying to be unclever, to give permission to others to be unclever.

This is pure speculation and inference, but I think it was helpful. People saw me doing the most obvious thing, and they felt okay to do the most obvious thing. This took the strain off of "being clever" and allowed people to just play.

Another thing is creating space. Finding ways to politely get the clever/loud/quick/experienced players to keep quiet for long enough for the uninspired/quiet/slow/new players to find some traction. Without this "quiet space", that traction might never be established and the confidence divide might only widen.

Again, I don’t have many answers. A good sentence is "Okay [loud player], but I want to hear [quiet player]’s response," followed immediately by turning your body and attention and gaze to the quiet player. Letting that player know "you can pick up that suggestion and use it as your own" and "you can ignore that suggestion and be your own player" at the same time seems vital.

Aside from that, a larger observation is this: when gamers show up to play a game, they’re also showing up to prove an identity (or several). The concern of "will I have fun with this?" gets translated into a lot of different identity issues:
Is this my kind of game?
If not, is my kind of game better? (If not, why am I playing inferior games?)
Am I good at this?
If not, why am I playing? (and why are they tolerating me?)
If I screw up, will they tell me?

We are excited about spreading the Go Play message.
Sometimes it seems like it needs to be coupled with a Just Play addendum.


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Categories : Game Design, Unpacking

The Little Things In Life

20 10 2009

Writing this post took several hours, and forced me to re-evaluate my stance several times. Here goes the current thinking…

Good story games, and good stories, present meaningful and challenging choices. Sometimes, these choices really grab me by the heart, and really make me think & feel. And I wondered what made those choices different, that made those choices stand out and hit me so viscerally. Why do some choices hit me quite viscerally, and not others?

Let’s look at a decision with great stakes, great potential for catharsis, that doesn’t grip me at all. Spiderman is facing off against a powerful enemy, and a situation emerges: save your dream girl, or save a train-car full of innocent people. Which do you choose? The first thing my mind does when presented with “X or Y” is to think in terms of utility (which is objectively more important? how about subjectively?) and likelihood (how easy is saving the train? how about the girl? what about both?). I don’t consider the poetry of the situation, the great weight of power, nor do I consider how I view the world. In other words, the epic ultimatum becomes a strategic and utilitarian thing (to me). At a fundamental level, I fail to think about this experience in terms that matter to me. Strategically, it might be a fun exercise. Otherwise, unimportant. Part of the reason is that reasoned consideration will reveal the “right” action, and pursuing that action will be the right thing to do. And that is uninteresting, because you can take a morally gray situation and separate it into something black/white. Another thing that’s going on there is that the interesting consequences aren’t really at the hands of the decision-maker, but at the hands of the person forcing the decision (perhaps that’s untrue, please consider that line and argue it back at me).

A much more interesting kind of decision, to me, is “what are you willing to do to get what you want?” And the primary reason that’s an interesting question to me is that all of the consequences (positive and negative)  stem from the decisions of the decision-maker. Suddenly, there is no shining hero in a shiny suit defending the world with a noble and angelic duty, facing hard choices because of the bad people. There are people, and their actions are tinged with consequences, and no matter how noble your intentions, there’s no such thing as pure good. Or, to quote something I see every day on the way to school: this.

Suddenly, the situation becomes relevant to me: I’m a regular person who makes decisions with consequences. Further, I may be put in a situation where I decide “what are you willing to do to protect the lives of a group of people”, whereas I’ll likely never be put in a situation where I decide “do I save my girlfriend or do I save a group of people.” Worth/risk assessment is a much more transferable skill than binary-choice assessment, which makes it more likely to be relevant to us. Which makes it matter more. Please tear that apart if you disagree.

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Categories : Game Design, Unpacking

Reporting Back: Game Design In 48 Minutes

5 10 2009

This Saturday, I ran a game design panel with Brad Murray, one of the authors of Diaspora. We were surprised and delighted to fill every chair in the room. Granted, there were 15 chairs in the room. I’d like to share my outline and discuss how the conversation unfolded, because I think it worked really well. The text in italics is the stuff on the outline we handed out, and the plain-face text is my post-panel thoughts.

1.) Designs Should Have A Guiding Vision (2 minutes)

The plan: In general, discuss the idea of designing a game to deliver a certain set of goals. What does your game do, in terms of… stories, characters, setting, situation, mechanics, play experience?

After opening with some introductions, we dived into the idea that a game should have a guiding vision, that it should seek to deliver something specific. Although this might be a Forge-centric idea, we didn’t discuss it in a Forge-centric way – Vampire: the Requiem has a guiding vision, and that is a major boon to the game. Introducing this idea not as revolutionary, but as something intrinsic to all design work, was helpful in unifying our audience.

2.) Take An Audience Game Pitch, Answer “The Big 3″ (7 minutes)

Audience Pitch: What is your game about? Now, what is it really about?
What is your game about? What do the characters do? What do the players do?

We asked the audience members to share a game idea that someone was working on, that we could workshop throughout the discussion. One guy put forward an idea that he said “wasn’t really a roleplaying game, but more of a baseball simulation exercise”. We took that and ran with it. The guy’s game was a two-player game: pitcher vs batting line-up.

We asked him what his game was about (baseball simulation), then dove into what interested him about baseball simulation to get at what the game was really about (the tension and the psychological mind games at work between the batter and pitcher). We presented the “big three” (what is your game about? what do the characters do? what do the players do?), and learned that both character & player are locked in the mind game component. We probed to find out what else the players do, and learned that they managed resources (batting line-ups, fan support, mechanical resources).

3.) Mechanics Should Support What The Game Is About (10 minutes)


Discuss the notion that mechanics support what the game is about, and structure an intended experience. Talk about things that the designer could do to facilitate their goals. Be sure to question the necessity of given mechanics: Do you need a GM? How about stats? Do you need dice? If so, why? Audience Pitch: What system/mechanics will support this design?

Here, we had about a 15-minute round-table, exploring mechanics that would supporting the evolving game. The discussion came around to the use of decks of playing cards, with suits representing different tactics and the number representing effectiveness. We introduced the idea that the players would take the deck of cards and from it build a deck of ~30 cards (so that if I want to throw lots of curveballs, I take all the clubs and widdle down on the other suits) – this would be part of the resource management aspect.

We had a boon in this game in that we were STARTING OUT with a GMless design, built for only two players. We were miles ahead of the curve to begin with. However, that let us focus on even more interesting questions: do you need a random element in your game to simulate how random the situation in the fiction is? In the end, we ditched the necessity for dice in determining whether batting was successful, though we integrated a secret card-bidding element.

At the tail end of this conversation, I tossed out a question: would there be a “you can’t focus because your wife is having an affair” card? The audience cheered that idea on, and the idea that hearts would correspond to out-of-game dramas was introduced.

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Categories : Reporting Back

City Spirits

29 09 2009

A friend of mine, Jackson Tegu, has spoken several times about the notion of city spirits – that every city (or more generally, every place) carries with it some essence, quintessential quality, or spirit. That a place can be generous, or selfish. That people in a given place will often feel as if they are taken care of, or supported, or neglected, or quieted, as if by the place itself.

This could be looked at differently, in terms of localized culture, or in terms of social networks. There are countless models & perspectives for breaking down how places are unique. But it’s interesting and perhaps useful to think of places as having an essential spirit, an essential meaning.

I’ve been working on this game design lately, called The Night It Died. It’s about how communities end – what their members go through, how cliques break apart, what gets built as the flame flickers out, and what remains afterwards. And I’ve been struggling to build something that felt right. The essential dilemma is that it wasn’t supposed to be a game about what people do, but what they go through. Mechanics based around succeeding at goals would feel completely irrelevant to what mattered. I was so stuck, and losing steam on the project. Then, when I happened to think about the idea of “city spirits” again, the answer to my Night It Died dilemma hit me suddenly.

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Categories : Game Design, Stories We Tell Ourselves

Buried Without Ceremony, Next Attempt

23 09 2009

I’ve had trouble authoring this blog, in general, since its inception. I think that a big part of what’s been going on is that I have stated a certain mandate and proceeded to provide content that fails to match up with it. And so, I’d like to take a carving knife to both mandate and content, and try to establish something different for my next attempt.

Guiding Principles

These are some tenets I hold to, mixed up with some goals that I want to dedicate my life to advancing.

We are strongly moved by and informed by stories.
Stories unify communities.
Stories reveal who we are.

The beautiful thing is that we don’t owe stories anything, meaning we are free to create them, explore them, deconstruct them and learn from them as we see fit. We are free to draw from them only what we want and need, and to leave them afterwards. There is a certain joy to this freedom, which I summarize as a freedom to “bury without ceremony”.

Joyful and intentional communities are vital in living rich, balanced lives.
The ability to share our experiences and stories, and to be heard, brings us joy and peace.

I’ve used the word joy several times – it’s an important one for achieving any goals I have. A community will prosper if it operates on willing, enthusiastic, rewarding participation. Communication, likewise. I’d like to see storytelling, community building, community participation and meaningful communication all stemming from that willing, enthusiastic, rewarding place. In other words, I don’t want to see any of them conflicting with self-interest. Rather, they should be the best way to fulfill self-interest.

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Categories : Uncategorized

Elegance & the Death of Clever

21 09 2009

I’m currently working on a game called The Night It Died, which is about the breakdown of a community, and the exploration of what its participants do in its dying moments. It’s the game I’m writing to play SLC! Punk, and in a way I’ve been working on this game since 2006 (albeit under different names: Guttersnipe, later Boulevard).

One of the struggles I’ve been having is figuring out how to set up the general structure of the game in order to deliver the experience I’m envisioning. I’ve thought up several systems, and then trashed them wholecloth. Why? Because they were clever. And when something is clever, it isn’t elegant.

Clever mechanics do something in a cool way, and they noticeably change play. That sentence sounds nice, perhaps it even sounds like a compliment. Let’s unpack how it isn’t. The first key word here is “noticeably”. Clever mechanics are flashy, attention-grabbing and immediate. They demand that you pay attention to them, and especially that you pay attention to how clever they are. The second key word, compounding the issue, is “cool”. Clever mechanics hook you in; they are exciting.

Clever mechanics put themselves on your radar. They announce themselves, demonstrate themselves, and require your enthusiasm. If something is flashy and prominent, there are two options: it’s either the focal point, or it’s a distraction.

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Categories : Practical Theory

This Particular Darkness.

16 09 2009

“I got a hundred years of down home running through my blood.”
-Alabama

Let’s pretend, for a second, that every type/genre of music can be reduced to a question about life, the universe and intentionality. For the moment, we’ll just treat this as a game, an exercise. I think rap music could be paraphrased as “How do we emerge from hardship?” You see a lot of songs about enduring and surviving (Talib Kweli’s Gotta Get By, Eminem’s Lose Yourself), a lot of songs about conflict, and then an explosion of songs about having made it. Maybe it’s more complicated than a single question, but certainly the culture of rap music could be well described in a few short questions: “how do we deal with hardship?”, “how do we overcome hardship?”, “what will we do with our power, once we gain it?” These questions are ultra-prevalent in rap, but to try to ground the body of pop music, or indie rock, in them would be a difficult exercise.

Ask me four years ago what I listened to, and I would have answered: punk. I might have then added “ska and indie rock”, but my answer was that I was a firm proponent of punk. Let’s give the unifying-question treatment to punk. “Are you willing to fight back?” “Who is to blame?” “How should we die?” Correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve recently rejected the importance of those questions. I don’t see fighting a system as the best way to affect a system, and I don’t see confrontation as the best means for deep-rooted change. Thus, “Are you willing to fight back?” is like asking “Are you willing to break the hammer on the screw?” for me. I don’t see blame as a necessary or useful component of problem solving or conflict resolution, so “Who is to blame?” is problematic and unhelpful to me. And finally, I’ve moved away from the hometown I despised, and in doing so abandoned a lot of the fatalism that I carried with me, leaving the “How should we die?” question one that could only be answered prematurely and rashly.

Punk’s burning questions are no longer burning. They sit as nice signposts to remind me of my adolescence, but my mind has turned to new ones: “Where do we find beauty?” “How shall we live?” “Where do we go from here?” “What can we learn from the past as we explore new ground?”

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Categories : Stories We Tell Ourselves

How To Resolve Intense, Interpersonal Situations in Ribbon Drive

11 09 2009

Graham Walmsley recently hosted a game of Ribbon Drive and his group encountered an interesting situation – two characters were locked in intense struggle, and the players didn’t know how to resolve this tense situation. To really zoom in on the issue, although either of them could have just decided what happened, they wanted the game to support them by providing some kind of structure (whether concrete resolution, flags, choices or else). A game should indeed do this for its players. Ribbon Drive gives you those tools, but they aren’t very obvious. This how to post will explain what those tools are and how to use them, in the context of resolving intense, interpersonal situations between characters.

Specifically, Steve posted the following situation:
I played Rashid. My character’s futures were “I hope I find someone” and “I’m never going back”. Rashid was on the run from the gang from whom he’d stolen drugs. Basically he was an asshole, causing Jenni to clip a jackknifed lorry.

In the scene with the crash, Rashid pinned Jenni’s foot on the gas pedal. It was a good moment of tension but it didn’t have any clear method of resolution.

I think part of the problem might have been that there wasn’t any clear way of resolving issues between the travellers. They didn’t seem like obstacles. I mean, could I have made Jenni not leave the band by using my drugs trait to keep her happy? That didn’t seem right either.

The first thing to keep in mind is that Ribbon Drive differs from many games that you’ve played, in that it is not a game that cares very much about what happens. That sounds like a big statement, and indeed it is. What do I mean by it? Well, this: the system doesn’t offer “conflict resolution” tools, because even in the midst of the conflict, it has different priorities. Two of those priorities are music and Futures, and I’m going to unpack how to turn to them in such a situation:

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Categories : How to play Ribbon Drive

Housekeeping Redux

30 08 2009

Every once in a while, I feel like it’s a good idea to check in with readers on a few things. As I’ve started posting regularly again, now seems like a good time.

1.) Since last housekeeping post, I’ve changed the layout and removed nested comments. As far as site accessibility/functionality, how do you feel that this is working?

2.) If you read this blog regularly, post a comment letting me know that. Especially if you don’t regularly post.

3.) I’m currently the President of the Vancouver Gaming Guild, and thus am at the intersection of nonprofit organizing and story games. Are you interested in exploring thoughts like: how to support volunteers, how to foster community, how to support gaming in your area?

3b.) I’m going to be leading an Appreciative Inquiry process for the VGG soon, redefining the mission statement and building a new set of core focuses. Would a documentation of this process (say, 1,000-2,000 words) be interesting? It’d give me an avenue to discussing facilitation and story-based communication, while grounded in a shared interest: supporting gamers in our communities.

4.) How am I doing so far with this blog? What works? What needs improvement?

5.) Out of the following topics, what sounds most interesting to you: identity issues, further exploration of sockets and play priorities, discussions about community, exploring the stories we tell ourselves about fear & death, conversations about cooking, about free food, actual play reports from story games, conversations about ethics.

6.) Are you most interested in experience-grounded posts, technique-grounded posts or theory-grounded posts?

7.) Is there value in putting a Donate button on this site?


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Plugging in Scenes and System

25 08 2009

I swore that I would never do this. That I would never make a story games theory post.

But this feels different, and somehow allowable. I’m going to explore some theory, tie it directly into play techniques, and offer some diagnoses of play. This post aims to explore the idea of sockets, why we should pay attention to them during scene framing, and how game systems should support us in engaging sockets and framing scenes.

I’ve created a new category to place this post in: Practical Theory. If the conversation goes well, there might be additional Practical Theory posts in the future. If the conversation crashes and burns, I’ll destroy the category. Alright, enough preamble.

Term: Sockets

We engage stories, and especially story games, in different ways. Some of us latch onto the characters involved in the fiction, and their decisions and viewpoints are paramount. For others, the story and the plot are most important. For others, the descriptions of setting and surrounding are most important. Some of us care most about the other people at the table, and the social element of play. These different modalities of engagement are known as sockets: they’re how we “plug into” the game and our enjoyment of it. To quote directly from Mo (linked in the last sentence), sockets are where people “give and take their focus and energy to and from“.

Term: Aggressive Scene Framing

To quote, scene framing is “the technique of skimming through time in the game to a particular time and place of interest. ” Scene framing is when you cut from the previous scene and move into a new scene, establishing details of setting and situation that unfold and develop through play. Aggressive scene framing is when your use of scene framing is intentional, purposeful and focused – framing to moments of high engagement and involvement (in other worlds, moments that demand immediate and meaningful participation). Note that I intentionally avoided saying “frame to the moment of conflict”, and I’ll talk about why in a minute.

Drive Toward Meaningful Engagement (Sockets & Scene Framing)

It’s a common misconception that the way you do aggressive scene framing well is to frame to the moment of pregnant conflict, that you open with an opposed situation that must be diffused. I’m going to take a step back from this idea and offer a suggestion: scene framing should work to engage our sockets in a meaningful way, skipping that which doesn’t satisfy our engagement and energy. In other words, if we all have Conflict/Plot/Choice sockets, then and only then is it appropriate to frame to moments of intense conflict. If we all have Setting/Aesthetic sockets, then we should be framing with interesting and evocative images, and use scene framing to move us to those images.

Example A: The Spelunkers. Imagine a group of D&D players whose primary sockets are Tactical, System and Choice. Good scene framing will meaningfully engage these sockets above others. The GM uses aggressive scene framing by saying, “Alright, your trip back out of the Cavern of Doom is uneventful. When you return to the hamlet you last stayed at, you see several buildings in flames. Two pairs of guards patrol the perimeter of the hamlet, sticking to lit paths. I’ve got a map of the village here. Note that it’ll take a skill roll of 20 to put out a torch from afar, and a skill roll of 15 to sneak up on the guards.” This immediately engages their tactical socket (by asking them to choose the best and most effecient entry point), and their Choice socket (by framing the moment of planning). It would be bad scene framing to fast forward past this point, because it is here that tactics and choice have the highest level of engagement.

Example B: The Crazy Folk. Imagine a group of Don’t Rest Your Head players whose primary sockets are Aesthetic (“not necessarily caring if a narrative is created or if character development makes sense, as long as play creates something beautiful / interesting”) and Character. The GM uses aggressive scene framing by saying, “So, you’ve got the soldiers cornered. Great! With some prodding, they’ll agree to lead you to the Wax King. You are led through rank, disgusting sewer line. Along the walls of the sewer, you start to notice… wax. Hot wax seems to be bubbling out of every possible crack in the wall. One of the soldiers turns to you and asks if you’ve ever met an immortal before.” Note that there is no conflict inherent in this scene, no decision that needs to be made. There is a description/scene that the GM thinks is evocative and interesting, and there is a conversation for the characters to join into. The players are given a chance to narrate their characters’ thoughts and interactions. The GM skipped over negotiations/conflict to get to meaningful engagement – in this case, aesthetic and character.

Term: System

One compelling summary of system: System (including but not limited to ‘the rules’) is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play (Lumpley Principle). I’m not going to extrapolate on this idea much: system is the wedding of hard rules (like when you roll dice) and soft procedures (like who has the authority to introduce setting descriptions).

At its best, system makes your participation more meaningful. These next two sections will explore that.

The Right Game Will Support Your Engagement (Sockets & Game System)

One of the reasons that RIFTS is not a good game for me is because the system doesn’t support shifting character priorities, and it doesn’t mechanically reward beautiful or interesting description. I’d be “plugging in” to stuff that is irrelevant to the mechanics/system of the game. When looking to a game, see where and how your sockets are supported and integrated in. If you have a choice socket, ask “does the game make choices meaningful”?

Why does it matter if your sockets are supported by the system? Because sockets are where you put your energy in and expect to get your energy out of. If the system doesn’t support your sockets (and your sockets don’t support the system), then you’re dividing your energy and forced to choose between two reward sets (mechanical/system, and personal).

Example C: The Spelunkers. Having decided to ambush the patrolling guards and slip into the shadows afterwards, this group of D&D players looks to the system. Does their game support and reward making tactically advantageous decisions that are based on system knowledge? If so, their sockets are integrated and supported well by their chosen system. If not, they should probably switch games. In this case, I’d say “yes”.

Example D: The Minions. A group sits down to play My Life With Master. If the players have a strong aesthetic or setting socket, they will be richly supported by the system, which provides lots of meaningful interactions across those sockets. If they have a strong choice or tactical socket, they will be unsupported by the system. Their GM and group might work to provide meaningful engagement of their socket (ie, by engineering the fiction and situation to a place where choice is relevant), but these efforts will be unsupported by system.

The Right Game Will Engage Your Best Material (Scene Framing & System)

This steps away from sockets, and offers something similar to “The Right Game Will Support Your Engagement”.

When you play, you make decisions, create new situations and details and advance the story. This content/material will take creative energy to create, and some of it will be quite amazing. Seeing that material engaged, reincorporated or integrated into an ongoing story/game/plot arc/situation equates to seeing a return on investment.

You can manage that engagement, reincorporation and integration on your own, but it takes a lot of effort. A system is right for you to the degree that it re-integrates your best material easily and meaningfully.

The Disconnects

When there’s a disconnect between sockets & scene framing, you either skip the meaningful engagement or need to wade through unmeaningful content in order to reach it. In the first case, you’ll see decreased trust and people challenging where a scene starts (“no, my character wouldn’t have done that!”). Frustration will likely build over time, as people are being denied key chances to invest and see return on their creative energy. In the second case, you’ll see boredom and mixed participation levels. People may start engaging scenes in inauthentic ways (rushing to conflict, making uncharacteristic decisions, disrespecting genre) in an attempt to move more quickly to what excites them.

When there’s a disconnect between sockets & system, players will either pursue their sockets and drift play away from engagement with the mechanics, or they will engage the mechanics with disinterest, seeing little return for their energy. In the first case, you’ll have expectation clash and a deprioritization of system (which might have been the unifying factor of play interests). In the second case, you’ll see unenthusiastic participation.

When there’s a disconnect between scene framing & system, you’ll see great material that fails to become integral to your game, or at the very least, a lack of reincorporation of great material.
This is already 300 words over my self-imposed post limit, so now I’m signing off.


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