Pay With Purposeful Acts of Social Good; Pay Charity

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I have some pretty big issues with capitalism, as an ethos. As someone who sells games for money, it plays into that exchange. And I’ve spent some serious time thinking about that, and thinking about how to move forward. What follows is my interrelated set of solutions.

You can now pay for Perfect Unrevised (and future games I release) in two different currencies: dollars, or purposeful acts of social good. If you pay in dollars, some of those dollars are going to be donated to charities that support the kind of social causes championed or explored by the game. Details follow.

A Portion of Proceeds

$5 from every sale of Perfect Unrevised (PDF or Print+PDF) will be donated to PEN Canada. It’s an organization that provides advocacy and support to authors whose freedom of expression is under attack – including authors who are facing exile or imprisonment for their journalism and prose.

In the future, when I release Monsterhearts, I plan to donate a portion of the proceeds to It Gets Better, or a similar organization that provides outreach and support to queer youth.

Purposeful Acts of Social Good

I’m going to try offering people a new way to obtain my games without buying them or stealing them. It is this: do purposeful acts of social good, tell me about those purposeful acts of social good, and then you get the game. I’m going to start this experiment with two PDFs, as I face zero risk in doing so. In addition to Perfect Unrevised, the other PDF on the table is The Grotesque, a new Apocalypse World playbook.

AW: The Grotesque
A new Apocalypse World playbook that I wrote. It was workshopped with Johnstone, who’s really good at workshopping Apocalypse World design stuff. You are a mutant, a physical mirror for the maelstorm and the apocalypse. You are unpredictable and alien, but you also have something good to offer the community that accepts you. Oh, and you can have nested drones or retractable claws or you can produce food spores.

“Purposeful acts of social good” is a pretty abstract currency to be working in, obviously. So I’ll just paint a picture of roughly what I envision, and then whatever you do will be correct. Perfect Unrevised is worth about 3 of these acts of good, and The Grotesque is worth 1.

  • Baking bran muffins for everyone on your block/in your apartment building.
  • Offering to walk your over-burdened neighbor’s dog once a week.
  • Volunteer to do an hour of work at a community co-op radio station.
  • Donating ten dollars to a worthy charity.
  • Organizing a story games club for a local middle school.
  • Spending an hour walking around downtown telling strangers about how they’re beautiful.
  • Give a ride to a hitch-hiker, and go out of your way to deliver them to their destination.
  • Spend half an hour cleaning up garbage in a local park.
  • Do something subversive that provokes thoughtful discussion about the world we live in.

Once you’ve completed your purposeful acts of social good, email me at mcdaldno. That’s a gmail address. And I’ll hook you up with your PDF.

It should be stuff you weren’t planning to do already, if there’s a distinction. Go out of your way and do good, and that’s how you can pay for Perfect or The Grotesque. If this works, I’ll open the stage up for all my games, print and digital, maybe.

Why Not Free?

So, why not just give away my games for free? The answer comes down to what I want to get out of making games, and putting them into people’s hands. I want to foster an exchange and dialogue with people interested in my games. I want to feel validated for my efforts. I want people to understand these are major efforts with great worth. And, finally, I want these games to contribute to social good. I feel like, at the moment, these goals are best met by adopting a different type of exchange, rather than just giving them away. I’d love to hear other ideas, though, and to engage that conversation with you more. Comment!

Setbacks

So, the print version of Perfect Unrevised has been 99% complete for the last month. Or, at least, at any given moment, I’ve been under the impression that it was 99% done. But then as I round the final hump, I encounter a frustrating setback, and it puts yet another hump between me and finally ordering this print run.

Here’s where I’m at now: I’ve received the proof, and with a friend gone and checked it page-by-page, line-by-line. I noticed some typos, as well as some sentences that would be clearer with revision. The border graphics for Chapter 5 looked really muddy, and I decided they should be replaced with something similar.

I made all those changes, and then the file I was working in corrupted. I had made a back-up shortly before ordering the proof, thankfully… but I still lost several hours of tedious work. I’m on the road right now, still, and so made a new plan: when I arrived at my next destination, where my friend owned a computer with ID CS4, I’d re-do my work there. But, his computer was a Windows machine, and the fonts that I’m using are Mac formatted… so it’s not possible here. So, when I move on to my next city (Olympia, once more), THEN I’ll be able to re-do those edits and send in updated files and order my print run.

So, I guess this is just a status update, to say: in a week, I’m going to be able to make all the edits that I made half a week ago. And then I’ll be able to order the print run. And then I’ll be able to ship them out. And then I’ll be able to hold a book in my hands, smiling, and say, “I made this.”

Soon!

Perfecting It

Perfect, Unrevised is for sale. This is one of the most exciting announcements of my life. Folks can pick up the PDF for $10, and preorder the book for $22 + s&h.

This moment has been a long time coming. I’d like to share with you how I got here, and link you to some reviews and AP along the way.

In late 2005, I started reading The Forge. I participated in one or two little design contests, before stumbling upon my big RPG idea in early 2006. Imagine a game where your character sheet only told you about the things you can’t do? Imagine if play was about finding out how to work around that?

That idea in and of itself didn’t prove to be very exciting, but it did lead to Perfect. Impatient and seventeen, I rushed to design and release the game as soon as was humanly possible. I was at Gencon with the game in hand that very same year – about 6 months after my initial idea.

That’s, uh, a stupid way to design a game. In May of this year, I blogged about some of the lessons I learned in that experience.

I published the game, and was initially really excited about it. I heard some really lovely compliments from Paul Czege, who was my game design idol. Ron Edwards played it,  and then played it some more. He encountered some glaring hiccups, but generally liked it. Malcolm Craig played it too. He encountered some glaring hiccups, but generally liked it.

Over time, the glaring hiccups came to occupy more and more of my mental real estate, and reports of people having “generally liked it” were less exciting. Some time in 2007, I pulled the game off the market. I was determined to refine it and re-release it once it had been, well, perfected.

I assume this process will take about three months. It takes over three years. The game receives about 100 playtests over this period, some led by me and some blind. I posted about one session here.

I almost abandoned the game several times, because the work of editing and refining turned out to be hard. Gasp! What a surprise!

It’s then that fans and supporters came out of the woodwork, to help push me to keep going. Gary Breinholt is one of those people. He playtested every iteration of the game I put out, for years, and always came back with critique and encouragement. I shared some of that process here, in 2008.

Finally, in the early Summer of 2010, I had something that felt complete, that told the kinds of stories I wanted it to, that was easy and compelling. Playtests started to soar. Feeling immensely confident – cocky even, I put the game up as a Kickstarter project, asking for $7,000 in funds to publish the game. I managed to raise an exciting $2,660… and am ultimately glad that I failed to raise more. The game design was done, but the physical product was still far from complete.

I worked with editor Josh Roby, who was fantastic. And then I spent months slaving away in inDesign. I learned a lot about graphic design in the process, predominantly that it is a much slower craft than you would think it is.

Come to think of it, I’ve learned something about all crafts: they take much longer than you’d think. Artistry isn’t something you can just vomit onto a page. It takes years of training, honing, doing, refining, re-examining, doubting, and trusting.

It’s been exciting to actually go through that process, and give every step its due attention. At the height of my wit, I named this second edition Perfect, Unrevised – a nod at the dystopian, history-erasing setting it exists within. But truth be told, this is the project that’s taught me the value of revising – the value of hard work.

I talk about some of the important mechanical changes here. The folks at the tremendously good Ninja Vs Pirates podcast explore the mechanics and the structure of the game, with me, here.

And now, finally, it’s ready. You can buy it if you want to. Wilper did, and he reviewed it the very next day. The review is really good and comprehensive, albeit short.

Things That Have Changed

Brian Peters asked me:

“Can you tell me some about what’s sweeter and tastier about this new edition [of Perfect]? Game-wise, I mean.”

Brian, I’d absolutely love to tell you about some of the changes I’ve made from the first edition book and the upcoming one. Right now, I’ll focus on two: I’ve changed how Aspects work, and I’ve added Holds.

In the first version, a large part of character creation was creating Aspects. You’d give them a name, and then spend time fiddling with balancing out levels and numbers and strategizing, all before knowing how the game played out or what your choices really meant. The system for building your Aspects was broken – there were a few winning combinations that you’d be silly not to take. Some of the decisions you were making at this pre-game stage (specifically, choosing Fallouts) would have mechanical significance that as a new player would be extremely hard to predict – Fallouts are dangerous across multiple rounds or even sessions of play, not so much in an immediate, concrete moment. Before play, Aspects were complicated and hard to get a grip on.

During play, Aspects were tedious. Since your only way to get ahead in the game was to constantly rely on your small number of Aspects, you are struggling to work “Scent of My Mother’s Perfume” and “Vicious Like a Caged Animal” into every single scene. So the system was leading you down a stale and contrived path.

That whole system has been cleaned up, in a major way. You have a Resources score. In a given scene, you decide what your Resources are in that scene, and invoke those numbers that way. During character creation, your choices are dead easy: you can have Resources 6, or you can have Resources 5 and take 2 points worth of Contacts (a slightly more volatile option). The named-traits-called-Aspects thing still exists, in a different role. You create 3 Aspects, which are phrases that demonstrate things you rely on: Sharp Wit, Flawless Liar, My Father Taught Me a Code, Unremarkable Face, etc. You can invoke 1 per cycle, for a re-roll (a BIG deal in Perfect). So, now almost all of the mechanical strategizing has been taking out of character creation, and getting started with the game takes about fifteen minutes less. Play is much more about manipulating immediate resources, and much less about rely on fallback strengths.

The other new thing is Holds. I saved it for last because it’s best. In the old version of Perfect, the inspectors were always after you, once you’d committed a crime. There were lots of chases and interrogations and invasive home searches, even when it didn’t fit a character’s narrative, because that’s how the game was structured.

There was no, “Jacob, you don’t know me. My name is Inspector Raleigh. I’ve been watching you for quite some time. I’m glad you managed to make it.”

There was no Inspector looming in the shadows, collecting evidence and building a repertoire of perfect emotional weapons, biding his time. And mechanically, there wasn’t any way for the antagonist to build up resources without just intentionally losing a bunch of times, which really weakened the authority of the inspectors! Now, when you’re the antagonist, you have two choices: do you attempt to capture the criminal, or do you establish a Hold?

Holds are things that will come back to haunt the protagonist character later. They come in two flavours: Minor Holds (evidence, witness testimonies, etc – things that help the antagonist win a test), and Major Holds (secret fears, emotional weaponry, hopes and dreams, the names of loved ones – things that both help the antagonist win a test, and double the stakes). Holds change the pacing of the game. They lend it “quiet, too quiet” moments, and then they bring the hammer down and smash everything to pieces.

Source material where Holds are ruthlessly accumulated and then dropped all at once: A Clockwork Orange. Source material where the antagonist is focused on constantly weedling down a character: Quills. Holds in A Clockwork Orange might be stuff like: He loved the music of Beethoven; “Singing in the Rain”.

So, those are two changes I’m really excited about with the new system. Mechanical resources that don’t require a lot of forehead-scratching during character creation, and that lend themselves to dynamic and fluid stories; and, a way for the antagonist to bide their time, to get their dirty little strings deeper into your head before they start tugging.

Hopefully that stuff excites you too!

Simple, Single-Purpose Elegance

I hate Facebook.

There’s lots of reasons to hate it, but I hate it for the reason that it is obtuse and sprawling. The worst part is that I used to love it. And back then, when we were starry-eyed for one another, I swear that it was a different creature altogether. I swear that it changed, more than I did.

This is going to get around to talking about story games in a minute, but give me time to bitch about Facebook first, okay? See, Facebook is now a mess of Walls, status updates, pages, groups, events, apps, social network games, ads, albums, chat windows and boxes. I have a hard time looking at a Facebook page and establishing a clear vision of what it’s supposed to do.

Facebook used to have a vision, right? College students and alumni could sign up with a college email, and then they’d be able to find their friends, write on walls, and view people’s pictures. It was a time magnet for people wanting to creep the hundreds of photos that their ex Courtney has up. Excellent. A simple and elegant social site. Now, it has traded in that vision for extra tools. It’s become a big, sprawling box of tools, something unwieldy.

Perhaps I’m weird, but I want everything in the world to have a clear and immediate purpose, to have a clear and immediate big picture. I don’t care if it’s important or not, I just want it to know what it is.

And now, I want to take a moment and share with you some of my favourite stuff on the internet, and unpack why it’s my favourite.

Twitter
Twitter is the perfect example of what I wish Facebook was comfortable being: a site with a clear role. A simple, single-purpose elegance. Twitter is a place where you can talk to yourself about what you’re doing, name-drop the people you’re hanging out with, and watch other people do the same. It’s like a perpetual, narcissistic chatroom. You can reply and retweet, follow people and whatever. Or not. You can just spit out little 140-character tidbits about what you are doing on your day off.

Now, Twitter is constantly adding new features, just like Facebook. So, how are they different? First of all, Twitter’s features are unobtuse and unobtrusive. Some (hashtags, @replies, new search options) are an increase in functionality without an increase in visible stuff. Others (lists, retweet button) are quiet & available, obvious in their purpose. In all cases, Twitter’s features increase functionality without detracting from core elegance, and reinforce what Twitter is supposed to be about: dropping little updates, and watching your friends do the same.

750Words
I’m absolutely in love with this site right now. It’s a beautiful middle-ground between Livejournal and Nanowrimo and Twitter. Here’s how it works: you log onto a private journal. Along the top of the page, there’s a very-sleek simple calendar showing you which days this month you’ve written and which you’ve missed. On the bottom of the page, there’s a word counter. Write until you have 750 words or more.

It’s inspired by an exercise called morning pages, wherein a writer starts their day by writing three pages. Usually journals and untidy thoughts. So, a really simple purpose. What does 750 Words bring to the table? Well, first of all, the main journaling page is simple and tidy. There are no distractions in your virtual workspace. The calendar along the top (just a series of thirty checkboxes, with completed days filled in) is a powerful, powerful motivator – seeing a skipped box isn’t fun, and there’s a drive to fill today’s. The real-time word count along the bottom is another powerful motivator. So, the main workspace is motivating and uncluttered, a perfect environment in which to write. It’s also accessible from anywhere, a bonus over real-world journals that you need to lug around with you if you want them handy.

But here’s the cool bit! Once you’ve hit your goal, click the little word count link. It takes you to an analysis page, which breaks down your words-per-minute, total time, number of distractions and total words written. It graphs that in comparison to your record best. And then it analyzes your post and tells you about your mood, your writing topics, and your common words. It’s not always right, but it’s a fun feature. FINALLY! You can earn badges for writing a certain number of days in a row (badges at 1, 3, 5, 10, 30, 100).

So, there are all these features. But, here’s the cool thing: they don’t cloud the site’s functionality. They support the core vision (daily writing and self analysis). The badges motivate, the analysis tools invite you to take a look at what you’re writing. Everything about the site supports its core vision, and every feature is unobtrusive and purposeful.

Canabalt
Perhaps the best video game I’ve ever played. Canabalt follows a man in a tuxedo, only a couple pixels tall, as he makes a “daring escape” from a crumbling city. He runs along rooftops automatically, and you click your one button to make him jump. Jump from rooftop to rooftop!

The game is super, super slick. Great music, great graphics, great pacing. And it’s simple: your only control is jump. He’ll run progressively faster and faster, and the only way to slow him down is to crash into some obstacles (there are crates and garbage cans scattered across these roofs). Some buildings are covered in cracks, and start collapsing the moment you land on them. Sometimes, you need to jump through a “window” and run through a building. Finally, there are two types of bombs: little ones, that land on top of a building and that you shouldn’t hit; big ones, that obliterate a building upon contact, that you need to jump on top of to make it through the level. There’s a “tweet your score” button, and you can tweet how many meters you ran before falling. That’s it. On the ipod version, you have two different soundtrack options.

So,
This all relates to story games and game design. You can already see how, right?

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[Design Diary] Perfect v1: The Need for Patience and Flexibility

Ah! So, before I begin this post proper: I’ve moved to Nelson, a small artsy city built up the side of a heavily-wooded mountain. It overlooks a pristine lake, is populated by lots of amazing coffee shops & restaurants & galleries (a selfish amount for its size, really), and is wonderful. I feel so at peace, re-collected, grounded.

And, thus, it’s time to start blogging again. With a fresh perspective & vitality. And to kick that off, I’m going to start a little series called Design Diary. Expect one every Friday. I’m going to move through all of my design & publishing efforts, and explore some lessons learned and successes achieved. I’m going to try to focus on the social elements of play & design, but might drift the conversation elsewhere if it feels right.

Although I designed some other stuff (and released some PDFs of it) prior to it, I still think of Perfect as my first game. I started working on Perfect shortly after I started participating at The Forge, in early 2006. The Forge was really lively back then – an active design community and lots of people sharing thoughtful reports of actual play. The theory forums had recently shut down, forcing people out of their heads and back to the drawing boards.  There were lots of designers, and I could feel the energy in the “room”. There was an excitement about the fact that anyone could be a designer, that it didn’t have to cost a million dollars, that indie design was growing and thriving.

Excitement is infectious. It’s also really hard to build structures around. The result (I feel) is that 2006 was a year of really exciting but incomplete products. Shock: Social Science Fiction is an amazing game and a novel take on how worldbuilding and roleplaying can interact, but the original text is extremely opaque and spotted with errors. After a couple years and two revisions, its definitely doing itself more justice. But it came out of a year of premature releases and a culture of enthusiasm > follow-through.

I’m not meaning to harsh on Joshua AC Newman. He’s a bombin’ cool designer, and Shock: is a bombin’ cool game. Other games saw premature releases that year too, Perfect being a prime example. Perfect was released without adequate playtesting, without adequate revision and design tweaking, while early fans were cautioning me to develop it further and continue considering it. It lacked polish. It was far from perfect, ironically enough.

There were several lessons that I learned from that experience, that I subsequently forgot about. I’m trying really hard to ingrain them into my design process, to re-learn them and to take them seriously.

Heed the Advice of Those Lending a Hand. This doesn’t mean that you should let your friends design your games. You shouldn’t. But designs florish when they exist within a social process. If you are lucky enough to have interested and thoughtful people that want to support you, as I did when first designing Perfect, you need to hear and engage with what they say. To do less is a disservice to yourself, to them, to your game, and to the community that is rallying around your work. It’s quite simple: when good-natured and thoughtful people support your vision and offer wisdom, take it seriously. This is one of the most meaningful and hard to come by things in the world.

The reason that I take the time to spell that one out is that design is an art form, and there is a notion of artist as monolithic and brilliant and untouchable. When you step into that artist role, especially when you pour lots of your creativity and hard work into it, it’s easy to forget that you aren’t monolithic and brilliant and untouchable. In fact, you’re hard-worked and blind to your own weaknesses and you’re only one person. It can become easy to reject the good support of those who’ve put less sweat into something. The first lesson is: don’t. Don’t reject support, and encouragement, and love. It’s find to consider it and decide it isn’t for you. It’s fine to take it with a grain of salt, or a cup of salt. It’s fine to debate and hesitate. But treat all support and perspective like it’s super important, because it is.

Slow Down. I was very concerned with getting Perfect ready for Gencon. This was a grave mistake. The game and the product suffered as a result, and I burnt out some of my support network by pushing unrealistic deadlines upon them. That damage to my support network was made even worse by the fact that the person editing and doing layout for me (David Artman) was doing it absolutely free.

My design process used to be: Create, Release. That’s a terrible design process. A more sustainable and thoughtful design process might be: Consider, Create, Reconsider, Share, Revise, Invite Critique, Edit, Release. I used to see editing (especially entrusting my work to external editors and critiquers) as unnecessary in my design process. Even worse, I saw it as an affront to my process.
Everything suffered as a result of rushing, of not taking time to let things simmer, of not engaging in a dialogue of improvement. Creating, especially the initial burst of creativity it takes to produce a first draft, is actually a tiny fraction of the process of designing and publishing a game.

It’s Not Done Until You’re Proud Of It. The world has a ton of artists, of art, of games, of bands, of professionals. The amount of stuff we produce and participate in is astounding. And, as a result, the world has no need of things which are good enough. And I reproach myself for going to press with something that I told myself was “good enough.” If it isn’t something that you’re unwaveringly proud of, there’s zero need for it.

The first version of Perfect is the last thing I have ever published before I was totally proud of it.
In conclusion… Heed the Advice of Those Lending a Hand, Slow Down, and It’s Not Done Until You’re Proud Of It.
Those are the lessons learned in publishing the first edition of Perfect. As I get closer and closer to being finished Perfect, Unrevised (my cleverly named second edition), I’m having to remind myself of these lessons constantly.

Soft Play.

I’m back!

Summer has been going well. Ribbon Drive is nearing publication. My garden is doing fairly well. And I got back from Go Play alright. Go Play helped me realize something about my play preferences – a shift I’ve made in the past two years.

We sometimes talk about this mode of play that is goal-focused, situation-driven, poweful, assertive, emotionally aggressive, testing and meaningful. It’s a subset of Story Now play, and I’ve heard it described as “playing passionately,” “story by the throat,” and the less flattering “face stabby play.” And I used to be all about this. Yeah! Let’s play close to home, and let’s be really INTENSE about it! So there’s this spectrum that runs from easy/safe/light play to demanding/vulnerable/intense play. Basically, “light-hearted play” vs “intense play”.

There’s a second axis that I find doesn’t get much attention. It’s that of quiet/subtle/downbeat play to loud/obvious/gonzo play. Basically, “soft play” versus “thunderous play”.

Most of the time, when “intense play” gets discussed, it’s assumed we’re also talking about “thunderous play.” A lot of newer games support emotional violence, pushing really hard on character/player goals, centralizing conflicts (the phrase “push to conflict” being a common one) and rewarding powerful and tense moments. Stabbing your mother to protect your forbidden love = awesome.

The shift in my play preferences is that I no longer like this combination. I’m cool with combining “light-hearted play” and “thunderous play”. In this combination, there’s a focus on getting the most fun out of a moment of play, of having actions sound cool, and of building upon any and all suggestions (ie, not filtering). This kind of play works well with Dungeons and Dragons or Danger Patrol or Inspectres. Firing your rocket gun while jumping out of a flaming zepplin = awesome.

I’m fine with “light-hearted play” and “soft play”. This kind of play focuses on appreciating little character quirks, working together, figuring out what you want, and having fun.  Breaking the Ice does this really well; the endgame mechanics are: look at the relationship you’ve created. Decide whether or not you want it to last. A thoughtful end to a feelgood game about trying to make something nice work out. Playing out the simple dialogue of two quirky people in a supermarket = awesome. Maybe. Perhaps this cross-section is a straw man – I don’t really know this type of play well at all.

I’m most interested in mixing intense play and soft play.  This is the kind of play where things hit home, but they do so slowly. There’s room for subtlety. There”s also room for abrupt, sudden violence. The difference between this abrupt violence and that of “thunderous play” is that when play is soft, we watch the violence shake itself out. We see repercussions, we follow the downbeats after the action. Play utlizes pregnant pauses, focuses on difficult decisions and transitional moments, and makes us think about what our characters really want.

I’m working on two games right now. Ribbon Drive and Perfect. Ribbon Drive is  a game about everyday people on road trips, learning to let go (and sometimes giving up on their dreams). Perfect is a game about committing crimes in a Victorian Dystopia, and facing the punishment and brainwashing that follows if you get caught. I started working on them both in earnest months ago. Ribbon Drive is ready to print, whereas Perfect has a lot of writing left. Part of the reason is that Ribbon Drive is a simpler game. A bigger part is that Perfect is intense/thunderous, whereas Ribbon Drive is intense/soft; my interests have shifted and its hard to bring them back.

I don’t see a lot of support for intense/soft games. The techniques are less explored – utilizing pauses and silence; mechanically codifying ambiguity or indecision (how would this work?), or even signalling it for that matter; delaying important decisions without escalating them; using character avoidance without it being a form of player blocking; asking hard questions; reincorporation over time; downbeats; de-escalation; backing down (this is explored in some games, like Dogs in the Vineyard, but still fairly virgin territory for most); and compromise.

I’ve seen some games that do this – Breaking the Ice can do intense/soft as well as light-hearted/soft. Roleplaying poems and stuff written by Jackson Tegu are often really meaningful and powerful but also really quiet and introspective. But there’s something of a void still existing. I’m excited to be nearing completion on Ribbon Drive – I think I’ve done a really good job of exploring some techniques for play that’s both intense and quiet. But I’m still searching for other games that do this well.

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