Jun

27

What are story games? And why?

Telling Stories Together

Let this post act as a primer, for anyone who’s interested in story games. Too few people know what story games are. There is a huge wealth of amazing, creative, social people in the world. People I’d love to play games and tell stories with.

This post is an attempt to paint a picture for those people. If you’re one of them, welcome. Here’s this thing I do:

Stories are vital. They’re the reasons our hearts beat. They’re how we make sense of emotions, and fortunes, and the days of our lives. When we don’t take time to honor and cherish stories, we fall back upon only the necessary ones. The ones that help us cope, that reinforce our pre-made choices. We fall back upon the belabored and uncontested stories.

When we step outside of ourselves, and seek stories out on purpose, we hit a great diversity. There are things we hate, and love, and things that change us. We change some things in return. Exploring a story can fill us with awe. It can also be tiring.

Games are vital. They are playful, and engaging. They give us a chance to succeed, but also the freedom not to fret over our success. If you don’t win at a game, your life is still OK afterwards. When something takes the form of a game, it becomes instantly lighter and more playful.

So, marrying these two things, that’s a pretty obvious first step, right?

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May

28

[Design Diary] Cheap: Design The Game, Not Its Reviews

Design Diary

This is the second post in a series I’m calling Design Diary, where I revisit past game design efforts and unpack some of the lessons that I’ve learned from them. The game in question this time around is cheap, which requires participants to dive headlong into a nightmarish world where they are trapped in someone else’s story, exploited by some unseen narrator. Only by noticing and exploiting the patterns and symbols of the narrator’s story can they ever earn a chance to take down their dark master.

It was a game about exploitation, victimization, manipulation, strangeness, absurdity, and revenge. And it had potential. It was messy and intense, but it had potential. But I crashed that potential into the ground, by trying to design cheap‘s reviews rather than cheap itself. Allow me to unpack that.

Design The Game, Not Its Reviews

I decided, pretty early on, that cheap was going to be a cutting edge game, an intense game, an avant garde game.  I dreamed of its potential, and how it might be received. While I didn’t realize it at the time so much, I made bad design decisions in an attempt to manufacture those dreamed-of reviews. I didn’t make the design decisions that best expressed the game, or my goals for the game, or that achieved any certain effect on play. I made the design decisions that I thought would get excited, shocked, anxious reactions.

I dreamed of various bizarre distribution schemes for the game. One being that only those who had beaten the game and killed their narrator were allowed to learn the rules of the game. And, if they wanted to be “certified” to re-teach the game to others, they could pay a licensing fee to do so. Like, really bizarre ideas. 100% gimmick. Oh, context: you’re never told the rules of the game. You figure them out through playing.

To design a game from intended reaction upward… is to be self-indulgent, conceited, to disservice your game. Design the game, not its reviews.

That’s it, the one lesson learned from this one. The game has the potential to be awesome. All I have to do is stop trying to make it awesome, and start trying to actually make it.

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Sep

11

How To Resolve Intense, Interpersonal Situations in Ribbon Drive

Promotion / Telling Stories Together

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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Aug

20

How To Be Quiet Together

Promotion / Telling Stories Together

So, in the middle of July, I published Ribbon Drive. It’s a game wherein you create stories about road movies.  If you didn’t already know that, click on the “Ribbon Drive” page of this site.

This is the first of a few very specific “how to” posts I’m going to make to support the game. The game is complete as written – these aren’t errata or updates, they’re just further exploration that I invite you to share with me. They’re the fireside conversations with the designer.

Ribbon Drive opens with a difficult task: as a group, listen to a song in silence, while thinking about it. To the uninitiated, that might sound really easy. It’s actually not. I’ve talked about the first reason why in earlier posts: being silent together is a difficult and sometimes uncomfortable thing to do. Many of us aren’t as accustomed to it as we say we are. The second reason why this task is hard is because we’re asked to pull something concrete (an image, a story, a premise for a road trip) out of something abstract. This kind of open-ended interpretation is common in therapy, and poetry, and some literature… but in general we demand concrete and immediately knowable media (simple movies, linear narratives, three-act structure, background information, etc). To ask a group of players to start in the abstract and move to the concrete is actually a big step away from the norm. Finally, it’s difficult because we don’t know if we’re doing it right. The idea is to share and discuss after the song, but to do all of your interpretting and immersing during. There’s a legitimate fear that you’ll misunderstand the song, or that you’ll fail to share what others understood from it.

If I know this is a difficult task, why does the game open with it? First of all,  because it seems like an easy task, and it doesn’t require any immediate sharing or creative production. The buy-in is easy, though the task itself is as big as you can handle it being. Second of all, it sets up some pretty clear expectations of what the game looks for: listening to music, being thoughtful, adapting to the flow. Finally, because it’s interesting to see what we do with already beloved art, and I want to put that at the forefront of the game.

So, how do you make the most of this tricky task? First, keep in mind:

1.) We’re intentionally de-contextualizing something. We’re not going to have Chris Clavin on the road trip with us, so the context that he wrote the song in doesn’t need to matter to us. We can let it matter, but only if we want to. In other words, we have no obligation to interpret what the song was trying to tell us. We can go our own direction with it.

2.) Difference in interpretation is good. If three of us envision a trip through murky Ohio backroads, but one of us sees showgirls livin’ the high life… Suddenly we have a range to choose from. We can play either of those points, or an intermediary. We can combine those things, too: what about a bunch of showgirls, booked for “the tour of their lives”, only to find that it runs through murky backroad Ohio? Or, what about a bunch of rural Ohio girls, deciding to move to Vegas and become showgirls?

3.) Difference in depth is good. Some players are going to read deeper into a song than others – they’ll unpack the imagery, get what it’s really about, tap into the creative gusto behind it. Some won’t. This difference in depth of opinion is good! The deeper interpretations might provide a strong thematic or contextual element, while the simpler interpretations will give us tangible facts about the trip. If someone says, “It’s clearly a song about child abuse and working through your issues”, you shouldn’t be disheartened that all you got was “I think it’s set in Canada,” or “they mention green in the song, so maybe our van is green!” Different depths of interpretation give us different things that  compliment each other.

4.) Every answer is right. As a culmination of the other three: every answer is correct. Simple answers, deep answers… incomplete answers and comprehensive ones. If you hear a song and envision lemon orchards, voice that. If you hear a song and all you come up with is the word “musky”, voice that. In the absolute worst case (ie, your idea gets shot down), it’ll still provide definition through contrast.

So, what are some techniques for sharing this focused silence?

1.) Find a comfortable space. There’s nothing to stop you from laying on the floor, closing your eyes, nodding along, standing up and leaning against the wall… If you aren’t at your utmost comfort in your chair, step out of it. It’ll put you in a deeper state of relaxation and leave you better prepared to take in the song.

2.) Explore images. If a particular line grabs you, try to envision that line in your head. Invent both a narrative and a visual track for the song as it plays out. Don’t force imagery if it’s not coming (be quick to move on), but definitely invite the opportunity.

3.) Use the printed lyrics as a grounding point, but nothing more. If you’re following the rule that says “bring printed lyrics for the first two songs,” then you’ve got a page in front of you which can be helpful in decoding the meaning of the song. Don’t focus on it to the detriment of focusing on the actual song. When first playing this game, I kept my eyes glued to the lyrics, and as a result missed the main activity: open visioning and engaged listening. Use the lyrics to clarify a line, find out where you are in the general structure of the song, or follow along for a few seconds in order to feel “grounded”. Don’t rely on them beyond that. They’ll always be there when the song ends, if need be.

4.) Use everything at your disposal. While this exercise is focused on the song playing, there’s no reason that you can’t look around you for additional inspiration. Watch people’s faces and note their reactions to the song. Look at how the sunlight streams through the blinds, and think about how this image interacts with the song. Note how the song fills the space you’re in – do they clash? do the compliment one another? does it feel like a natural pairing? Feel free to look around you and think about what’s going on in the space you’re in, especially if you’re thinking about how these things interact with the song.

5.) Ground the song in something you know. What does this song remind you of? If this song were to soundtrack a moment of your life, or a larger experience, what would it be? Ground the song in memory and situation, because this will give both the song and your game of Ribbon Drive more traction.

Ribbon Drive opens with a simple yet difficult task. It asks you to open up your mind, work with the abstract, work with already existing art that at least someone at the table loves, and create something meaningful as a result. And, it asks you to start this process in silence. Hopefully this post gives you a bit of an idea what to do with that silence, if you were stuck.

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May

01

Imaginary Funerals

Telling Stories Together

This post is an attempt to sketch why story games are significant to me.

Before I do that, a quick breakdown of the term: story games are tools we use to have fun, tell stories and roleplay. They use rules (many centered around chance) and structures to guide players to the same creative page, and to shake things up and provide the unexpected. Someone once described them as “instructions for using your imagination” (Nathanael Phillip Cole, though he was being ironic) and someone else once described them as “stories you play” (Matt Snyder). I like both of those descriptions.

Alright, for those of us who are invested in the definition of the term, let’s not get caught up on it right now.

There are a lot of different explanations about what story games do, and about why we care about them. Some people say they create stories, and that stories are really important to us, and that this is the utmost truth of the matter. Well, in truth, story games produce some pretty sub-par stories. We leave critical situations up to chance (we literally hardcode this into most games), we divide authority across the moving parts rather than across lines of movement (which helps keep things concrete, but does not help create meaningful stories). While we are definitely creating stories, this is not the most important thing. Games which generate almost no plot, but have plenty of minutae and dialogue, are often really rewarding. Some people say they inhabit roles, and that roleplaying is really important to us, and that this is the utmost truth of the matter. But, we distance ourselves from these roles almost intentionally. We ask people to stay seated while playing, much of the time. We use numbers and papers and resources to give ourselves a comfortable, protected distance. While we are definitely roleplaying, we have clearly put that second to something.

Here is something that I find a lot more accurate and resonant than either of those suggestions. Roleplaying games create experiences. Experiences that we haven’t had the opportunity to live through. They allow us to recontextualize our paradigms, challenge us to see things in a new light, explore the casaulity of something, regardless of how realistic that something might be.

This was put really well by a man named Malcolm Sheppard. I quote:
Memories are unkind. Even the sweetest ones are tinged by the fact that the experience has fled. A memory is a funeral for experience. Roleplaying games are designed to create those funerals. It’s the way they work.

Awesome. I’ve been using the moniker/label Buried Without Ceremony for various projects for a while. When I read that quote by Malcolm, I was suddenly filled with this sense of “yes!”. This is the very same sentiment I wanted to communicate.

Roleplaying games/story games create experiences. We live them for a moment, they die as we return to our actual selves, and we promptly bury them without ceremony. These are phantoms that have existed for us alone, and the joy of it all is two-fold. We owe them nothing. We can take from them what we want to.

Do we feel the need to draw something poignant out of our sessions of play? No. Could we? Yes. No matter what we choose to do with those experiences, we cannot be accused of being selfish. We created them in order to bury them. Everything else is what we want to make of it.

It’s a pretty heady feeling.

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