The Joy of Hacking

In days past, I didn’t really “get” the appeal of hacking existing games. (A tentative definition of hacking, for anyone who doesn’t already know the term: taking an existing game system and modifying it until it’s a new game.) I thought that it was lazy design that produced incoherent results.

While I still believe that hacking has some big wide pitfalls to avoid, I have seen the light. Hacking is a liberating and accessible design process. It allows people to create based upon their strengths instead of their needs. It lets designers dialogue with one another, and stand on one another’s shoulders. It creates diy communities instead of diy lighthouses. I’m going to unpack each of those statements, and then relate it back to Monsterhearts, my hack of Apocalypse World that tells teen monster drama stories. The post is going to end with a preview of Monsterhearts, if you want to skip the big unpacking.

Hacking Has Some Big Wide Pitfalls to Avoid

Games are designed to accomplish certain things – to create a specific type of story, to have a specific impact on players, to support specific tactics or approaches. And the tricky thing is that not all of those goals are going to be listed on the outside of the tin. When you hack a game, you risk removing the critical element that makes the game fun and magical. The best practice here is that if you’re going to hack, you must do so in a critical and self-examined way. When designing systems from scratch, you need to spend lots of energy making the system do what you want it to do. When designing systems by hacking, you need to spend lots of energy learning why a system does things the way it does them.

I think that it’s only in the past 10 years that people have really wrapped their head around how to make good hacks. It isn’t about creating new weapon lists and character classes, it is about learning how and why a game works, and then getting up to your elbows in that structure so you change it and make it into something new. Simply replicating a system for a new setting or media property is going to lead to either a drab game or an incoherent game.

Now, with the words of warning out of the way, here’s what I’ve learned about the joys of hacking!

Hacking is a Liberating and Accessible Design Process

Glancing up at my menu bar, you can see that I’ve designed a number of games. When you start a game from scratch, you need to make a thousand interrelated decisions. Those decisions are contingent upon one another, meaning that it can be hard to isolate what works and what doesn’t work throughout the design process. If part of the game falls flat in playtesting, you need to ask yourself so many questions: are my design goals valid and appropriate? Do the mechanics I’ve designed here actually uphold my design goals? Is this specific mechanic too complicated or too simple? Do I need to fix the problem at the specific and immediate level, or by overhauling the whole system? Should this game actually be diceless? Because that’s how designing a new game system works, you need to ask yourself all these questions simultaneously.

When you hack a game, you don’t need to ask yourself all of those questions. You’re starting with a complete set of answers, and you’re only changing the ones that matter to you and to your game concept. You’re liberated from having to weigh important decisions that you don’t particularly care about.

Monsterhearts is a hack of Apocalypse World. Anything I didn’t really care about answering for myself, Vincent Baker had already provided me an answer for. I really cared about how relationships were represented and changed via the mechanics, so I spent a lot of time developing those answers for myself. I didn’t really care about how success/failure worked – just that I wanted characters to sometimes get their way and sometimes land themselves in a sticky mess – so I leaned upon Apocalypse World’s existing answers, here. “Roll 2d6 + a stat, with 6- being a failure, 7-9 being a mixed result or hard bargain, and 10+ being a clean success” is simple and fun, and crafting my own mechanics from scratch here would have been arduous and uninteresting to me. Hacking Apocalypse World liberated me from having to craft my own answers when I didn’t have strong feelings one way or another. Though, pleasantly enough, as I continued to work on the design, I found myself continually getting invested in more of the questions. But that process was never forced at gunpoint, the same way it is when you design from scratch.

It Allows People To Create Based on Their Strengths, Not Their Needs

This point is pretty similar to the first one. A game needs a lot of things in order to work and to achieve all of your design goals. As a designer, you have a set of design strengths. Your strengths and your needs aren’t always going to overlap, even if you’re designing a project that’s “just right for you.” There’s a couple different ways to respond to that a-synchronicity. First, you can just work really hard and design through your weaknesses. Sometimes you overcome them and design something brilliant, sometimes your design is generally brilliant but held back in ways. Second, you can outsource the parts of the design process that you don’t excel at. Many of us already do this with editing, layout, and art. You can partner your creative wellspring mind with a big-picture analytical mind, or vice versa, in order to lift one another up. And finally, you can hack an existing game, one that is already successful and strong in the design areas that your strengths aren’t situated.

It Lets Designers Dialogue with One Another, and Stand On One Another’s Shoulders

A hack is more than just a method for producing a game. It’s also a method for interacting with a game you really like (or, in some cases, a game you really want to like but identify problems with). It’s a dialogue between designers. Whether it’s your goal or not, you’re creating a community of exploration, each of you proving new applications to a core set of ideas. They show you a cool idea, you respond with your own cool idea that builds on it. Yes, And.

What I like about Apocalypse World is the sense of desperation and the messy and transitory relationship webs. I like that the only constant is a lack of constancy. When I look at those things, my mind leaps to a different place than post-apocalyptica, though. It leaps to the volatile emotional journey that is adolescence. Monsterhearts is a big “Yes, and” statement to Apocalypse World. It’s a way for me to do more than just buy Vincent’s art, but to instead engage it and reply to it.

It Creates DIY Communities Instead of DIY Lighthouses

Let me tell you about a really motivating force that I had behind me while I was publishing Monsterhearts: I was not alone. This design path that I was walking, it wasn’t lonely. I was walking a path that Vincent had carved, and there were other pilgrims sharing the road with me. I might be doing things that didn’t apply to those other pilgrims – like designing the Strings mechanic or Darkest Selves – but I still felt the symbolic support of a community.

Hacking creates diy communities, whereas independent from-scratch design often creates diy lighthouses.

So, Monsterhearts

It started as a joke (most of my games do). I was playing around with the idea of using Apocalypse World to run Twilight, and then I sort of realized that I’d struck gold. Melodramatic teenage monster drama makes for fantastic storytelling, because it has a strong genre formula to lean upon as well as rewarding us for playing volatile characters involved in intense-and-immediate situations.

This is the first hack that I’ve seen through to publication, and it was a really rewarding design experience. Being able to stand upon the shoulders of a giant helped me reach the mountaintop in one piece. Having a hyper-focused design community around me gave me support and critical eyes whenever I needed it.

The game’s currently available for preorder on IndieGoGo. To give people a taste of the game, and to thank those who have backed the game so far, I’m releasing a little excerpt from the game: the long play example that will be located in the back of the book. As the final text is still with the editor, this is a draft version that might be changed or revised before printing.

Click Here For a Monsterhearts Preview