How to hear a lie

19 12 2009

I am a community support worker. This means that I get paid to hang out with people who have developmental disabilities, and support them in achieving their goals and being safe. It’s an interesting job, in many ways. Notably, it brings me face-to-face with a lot of behavior that throws me for a loop at first, that I have to spend time thinking about in order to really “get it.” Having a job that forces me to think about the motivations behind human behavior = a good thing in my life. I’ve spent some time working with individuals who lie a lot, and it’s given me a new understanding of why we lie, and how to hear a lie in a nonviolent and productive way.

So, behavior is a form of communication, right? When we behave in a certain way, we are communicating our needs and our understanding of how to accomplish them. Lying serves a purpose, and the more someone lies, the stronger the message is that they see lying as essential to meeting their needs. If these statements are in any way controversial to you, the rest of this post will seem pretty loopy.

When we lie, we paint an idealized picture of who we are. Idealized, at least in some way. As an example, if your teenage son spends all evening reading comics and then you ask him if he remembered to take out the trash, which he didn’t,  he might say “Yeah, of course.” This lie is communicating a need (finding approval in his parents; validating his role in the household; being capable and responsible) and an understanding of how that need will be met (taking out the garbage; meeting responsibilities).

That’s a weak-sauce example. Here’s a better one: Your teenage son comes home, with spraypaint flecks on his fingertips and a furtive look on his face. You ask him what he’s been up to and he says, “Oh, not much. Me & Rodney shot some hoops after school, then I did some studying before coming back home.” First of all, your teenage son is communicating a need to lie and cover his tracks, which in turn communicates a need for a safer environment before he shares (or perhaps a clearer indication of the environment’s safety). Secondly, he’s communicating the need to be perceived as a good son, a social person, a dedicated student and an athlete. Thirdly, he’s communicating his idealized picture of a good son. A good son has meaningful friendships, is active, keeps his grades up, doesn’t go spraypainting, and doesn’t disappoint his parents.

Lies give others important information about how we want to be perceived, even though we aren’t there yet. And put that way, it starts to look like every lie contains an unmet challenge, a goal waiting to be approached. That’s because they do. Lies are goals, albeit expressed defensively. Something useful, nestled in an expression of unmet needs. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Stories We Tell Ourselves, Unpacking

I don’t remember what I like

8 12 2009

Yesterday, I spent some time considering whether I would enjoy being a member of the police force. The day before, I spent time listening to Star Fucking Hipsters, belting out “in every single town, every officer is down. All dead police! All dead police!” Discord much?

I don’t remember what I like, anymore. Or, perhaps, the reasons that I have had for liking the things I have liked… have all eroded. School ended on Thursday, and I’ve had 4 days of blissful self-reflection since then. Except, they haven’t been blissful. They’ve been confusing and I’ve been struggling to find something to do with my time.

I’ve stopped writing poetry, I’ve been finding less and less enjoyment in game design, and I’ve been finding less and less enjoyment in my hobbies and pastimes. I feel like my interests have fallen asleep, and I’m not sure how to wake them up.

Every day, my career goals seem to change. And often, they’re targeting professions that I find myself unwilling to interact with in my daily life. I’ve not seen a counsellor of any type for years, and yet I want to be one. I hate university, and yet I’m considering becoming a professor. I have a deep-routed distrust of police officers, and yet I’m wondering if it’d be a job that I’d like.

The nice thing about a void is that you can make some intentional decisions about where to go next, what you want to pursue. The ugly thing is that you don’t have the momentum to start moving in those directions. And I’m unsure how to build that momentum.

How does one go about learning what they like? How does one reconstruct a conception of self? Can it be done mechanically, forced out of the woodwork and intentionally and consciously developed? If so, how? If the process must be organic and self-energized, and cannot be forced, then what can I be doing to give it space?

I feel like there’s a story here, but I’m not sure what it is. I’m confused about what I like, and I’m wondering how to go about constructing an answer. Advice would be greatly appreciated.


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Categories : Stories We Tell Ourselves, Unpacking

Inventing Our World

23 11 2009

I’ve felt a paralysis on expressing myself lately, and thus I haven’t been posting to Buried Without Ceremony much, and what posts I have made are scattershot. I think I’m pulling out of that trend now, due to the liberating boost that Nanowrimo brought me. I am not going to finish my 50k word novel this month, but I am going to finish my final draft of Perfect, as well as taking on several other big projects. So – yay! It’s put me back in gear.

I’ve been wanting to talk about rewilding for a long time, but haven’t felt like I have any particular right to. After all – I don’t compost with humanure, I don’t fox-walk through the woods at daybreak, I don’t make my own plum wine from foraged fruits,  and I don’t work to revitalize indigineous languages.

But the aspects of rewilding that I am interested in, I am profoundly interested in. Specifically: withdrawing from capitalism, seeing the world through stories, becoming close to my home, being a steward of the world.

And I was thinking recently, about how our society views the world, and the concept of place. For our society, place is merely an access point, an inanimate thing where human action can happen. We view places as owned, controlled and purely physical. Journeys are the necessary movement required to get from one point on a map to another, and the more efficient it is, the better.

Or, to summarize this neatly: this is how we understand Vancouver.

But geography is more than physical positioning, and place is more than a controllable and discreet location. The world is a net of experiences, stories, ideas, attempts, people, actions and histories. We embody and interact with place more than we traverse it. And, to quote Willem Larsen, “We have embodied maps for far longer than we have drawn them on paper.”

Yet the rationality of our society stresses that we should discount our connections to place, to view a place in terms of utility, to view a journey in terms of efficiency, to view people are being elevated above the world and the stories that they exist within. Why? Probably because it gets the job done.

I’m interested in inventing our world differently. Telling stories is one thing (and a very good thing!), but I want to ground our stories in places. And I want this to be just as concrete and real and low-context as a map can be, so that anyone can access it just as easily as they would a map.

I don’t advocate walking away from the kind of maps we’ve started to communicate with (and the connotations they carry), because they are good – they are accessible, make new kinds of travel possible, make congregating easier (especially for disparate or spread out groups). But I want to look beyond their cold rationality, their paradoxical way of de-emphasizing the significance of a place as they chart it, and their lack of story.

Languages can serve a lot of purposes, and one of the most important is telling stories. Our current language of place and geography doesn’t tell stories. (Read that charitably, looking to believe me, okay?)

Rather than ditching the language, I want us to start using it to tell stories. To anchor that network of meaning that the world holds to the places around us, as we express them today.

Concretely, what could this look like? One very specific idea I had was this: create a Platial map for the city you live in, recording the stories, legends, experiences and histories of the districts and street corners that you live near. There’s a “Local History” place tag, and perhaps that’s all it’d take to start populating our world with these stories.

Of course, that’s a tiny application of a greater concept, which I’m really interested in: how do we use our current language of place (epitomized by Google Maps) to tell stories?


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Categories : Uncategorized

Low Standards & Joy

9 11 2009

I’m participating in Nanowrimo right now. For those not already in the know, National Novel Writing Month is a contest spanning November, where participants try to write a 50,000 word story in 30 days. That amounts to about 1,700 words a day. It’s doable, but requires you to really grind away at producing, and to make some changes to how you normally create.

Most notably, you have to embrace low standards. You have to be willing to forgo editing, commit to whatever you start writing, and just create. In order to churn out 50,000 words in a month, you need to write with low standards. A lot of advice for Nanowrimo flies in the face of what’s commonly accepted as “good writing”: don’t plan; don’t edit; if you run a storyline dry, just switch storylines but keep the word count; put your characters through hell in order to wrack up a suitable word count.

At first, it’s quite stressful. You’re being asked to keep writing, even when you’re unsatisfied with your work. Eventually, though, you realize “holy shit, I’m at 15,000 words now”. And you feel proud, regardless of the utter bile contained in those words. A joy arises, from the permission you’ve given yourself.

Nanowrimo challenges you to validate yourself and your work without qualification. If you banked 4,000 words in a single day, then you’re doing an amazing job, full stop. Every word is the perfect word, so long as you leave it and keep moving on.

This contest isn’t exactly unique in promoting sheer, unconditional creation: One Song Every Day, Thing-A-Day, Album-A-Day, Crap Art, Three Day Novel, 24-Hour RPG.

What’s brilliant about these projects? They promote us to produce, to create, to ignore that inner critic and to validate our own efforts without qualification. And its that last part that’s really vital, because we so rarely allow ourselves to acknowledge something as perfect and finished and good. Which is bizarre, because we get such joy out of those rare moments when we do acknowledge something as perfect and finished and good.

Lowering standards (especially removing standards entirely) allows us to accept ourselves without qualification.
Doing that brings us joy. It also trains us to overcome our creative paralysis.

That creative paralysis that comes with high standards… we can learn to avoid it, by creating without those high standards. And if we so choose to return to those standards again, we’ll be better equipped to deal with them, because we’ll know more about our capabilities and our limits. Playing in a safe space equips us with new skills that we can take with us, even outside of the safe space.

Story games work like that, in a way. We can explore courses of action that we are paralyzed from committing in the real world, whether from fear or uncertainty or strict norms. And we can play them out in this shared imagined space, and learn about capabilities, limits, consequences and the impacts of those actions. And that enables us to better understand those actions, and even to carry them out, in the real world.

Sometimes, though, we find ourselves returning to those standards that have become so intrinsic to us. In a story game, this is about blocking and rejecting on the basis of quality or realism or some sense of need. What need is there, and on what level is it truly operating? Can a story or character take a “gift” from left field and incorporate it, play with it, and in doing so give us that joy of creating without qualifiation? I think it can. So, what other benefit are those standards giving, when we bring them into our creative endeavors? And what other harm are they creating, at the same time?


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Categories : Uncategorized

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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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

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