In The Way of the Human Being, Calvin Luther Martin writes about the experience of "the skin of the earth," and uses moving, poetic description to tie together traditional stories, the first-hand experiences of American Indians, folk tales and myths, to reveal a common understanding that so much of what we call our "humanity" has to do simply with the experience of the world in our own bodies. That, far from a simple exercise in anthropomorphism, every animal experiences the world in a way that we might call "human." Yes, differences stand out. But so do the similarities.
For Rane Willerslev, those differences matter as much as the similarities. In his ethnography of the Siberian Yukaghirs, he also writes about the Yukaghir experience with other animals, and strange encounters where hunters go, as Martin might put it, past "the skin of the earth," to a world where elk experience themselves as humans. Willerslev makes his case with phenomenology and philosophy, but comes to much the same conclusion: the relativity of the human experience as less a unique feature of our species, and more the experience of any animal in its own body.
I plan to write a long article on anthropomorphism and animism later this year for a new web magazine called Toby's People, so I don't plan to write it all out here, but suffice to say that, with certain key caveats observed, stories of anthropomorphic animals may mean more than a simple flight of fancy: they mean what an anthropologist might recognize as the difference between an etic perspective and an emic perspective, between the view of an outsider looking in, and someone on the inside describing what he takes part in, lives in, and participates in. Biology excels at the etic perspective; so-called anthropomorphic animal stories try to deal with the emic perspective.
"Somewhere within its borders we unveil the very deepest powers of this aboriginal land, of possessing it in one's blood and brain, as Scott Momaday knew we must. Somewhere we must cross over—to where it possesses us." (Martin, 1999:46)
I enjoy a good RPG. But even more than that, I see in them the potential to regenerate oral tradition, to find stories rather than "make them up," the really important stories that create kinship and tell us something about the land we live in, stories that, once we learn them, give us a new appreciation and a deeper sense of belonging for the land we live in, that help make us more native to our home. Let's face it, a good RPG takes time, not just to play, but to learn, plan and prepare. If I can get that from it, I consider that time quite well spent. And if I don't, I don't know what I've spent that time for.
Which gets me to this: I love Mouse Guard! I haven't gotten to play any Burning Wheel games yet, but this game has a lot of powerful stuff going on: the mouse-world, the prominence of the seasons and the weather, and grand, medieval epics that unfold not in some imaginary fantasy world, but right here, in this land, just out of sight. Most importantly of all, it re-enchants the land we live in, lets us see the magic and adventure of where we live, here and now.
I've started getting together a Mouse Guard game, but it won't happen in the same Mouse Territories as the comics. No, we'll have "The Tales of the Black Forest." Besides the medieval references to Germany's "Black Forest," long ago, people called Cook Forest—one of the few remaining old-growth forests in the eastern United States, and a place that means a lot to me, personally—"the Black Forest."
As it happens, it seems I have a few things to learn from Burning Wheel, too. It turns out that it already beat me to the punch of "cool-down games," including using them to hand out rewards. I can see a really good, three-step process, like the storyjammer's journey, already nascent in the rules.
I haven't even finished reading the book yet, so I may have more to say about all this, but for now, I'll just end by saying that I haven't felt this excited about a game in quite some time. Thank you, Luke Crane!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Fifth World in Forge Parlance, One More Time
I've done this exercise a couple times already. The "Big Three" and the extended "Power 19" provide a tool for helping focus a game design. After all the rambling thoughts I've written up lately, from maps to narrative economies to "The Storyjammer's Journey," I've put a lot of ideas into play here. I tried taking a crack at some rules, and found myself overwhelmed by all of it. So I think I need to take a step back, try the Power 19 once again, and see if I can pull all of this in a little tighter.
See Emily K. Dresner-Thornber's two-part article, "The Crunchy Bits" (Part 1, Part 2)
The Fifth World tries to give its players an experience, however brief, of animist life—life in a more-than-human world, defined by relationships with other persons, whether human or otherwise. That means both the wonder of reawakening to a living, vibrant world, and the kinds of challenges faced by someone living in a world defined by relationships.
Each character belongs to a particular place in a very special way. Characters owe responsibilities to those places, and must work to keep a healthy balance of connections, relationships and resources flowing. The characters live in a dynamic world, one that requires their constant participation to continually renew itself. A hunter helps the land renew itself by taking the right number of animals and no more; a storyteller helps the land renew itself by telling the right stories in the right season; a gardener helps the land renew itself by planting the right plants together at the right time; a shaman helps the land renew itself by performing the proper rites in the correct fashion, and so on.
When things don't go so well, when a hunter takes one too many animals, or a shaman fails to perform an important rite, misfortune may fall upon the people. The players take the role of those characters who step forward to correct those situations, and put the human community back into proper relationship, whatever that may require.
The players hunt story. The story already exists in the landscape; tracing over that, tracking it across the landscape, the players find the story, and in so doing, discover the bond their characters have with one another, and with the land.
That sounds very flighty and high-minded, but the region—the system of places and paths connecting them—establish a setting map, a relationship map and a theme map simultaneously. The story really does already lie in the landscape. The themes recapitulate aspects of the creation story, and the story unfolds with the changing of the places and paths
The Fifth World focuses on the lives of feral human communities living in a post-civilized world. They face challenges left over from civilization, the challenge of negotiating a space for the human community in a more-than-human world, the challenge of keeping the world in a dynamic balance between mutually exclusive pressures and interests, and the regular, inter-personal challenges that arise inside any human community.
But the game also presents a hopeful vision of the future. These communities face challenges, but they also have the skill, strength and wisdom to face those challenges. They live dynamic, vibrant, rich lives, rather than the impoverished desperation more common in the post-apocalyptic genre.
The people of The Fifth World live in such an animist world. They experience the world as an ongoing process, knit together by competing and changing relationships, and thus, something that requires their constant participation. By the same token, as a feral future rather than a prehistoric past, the people of The Fifth World also have the example of what life in a world of objects entails. The distance from that life has allowed them to encode that in myths and legends that try to understand what happened.
Character creation also means region creation. That alone sets a strong initial tone that these characters belong to a particular place. The game defines characters and places in terms of their relationships. The actual nodes themselves matter much less than the connections that bind them. Character creation also takes an iterative approach of initiations, once every seven years, reinforcing the idea of creation not as a moment in time, but as an ongoing process of shifting webs of relationship.
Recognize adversity as opportunity. To win, players need Will, which they can only unlock from the land by spending Fate. So, the game rewards players for choosing to face adversity. Adversity frees up the resources the players will need in order to win.
Recognize opposition as a gift. In order to get freed Will, players must act in accordance with another player's theme. That means giving that player the chance to express her theme. So, a character might have a theme of protecting a child. Another player could act in accordance with that by threatening the child—so, giving the player the opportunity to express her theme, by protecting the child from harm. The player with the theme gets to decide if the other player deserves the reward or not, so the game asks players to recognize opposition as a gift, and adversity as an opportunity.
Play generously. Since players can only give freed Will to other players, and can never take Will themselves, the game creates a dilemma that appears again in the core mechanic, based on the Prisoner's Dilemma. In both cases, you have to make the risk to trust the other player, and hope they'll do the same for you. Mathematically, the Prisoner's Dilemma has an optimal solution: "Tit-for-tat," which begins with cooperation, punishes each defection once, and quickly forgives and goes back to cooperation as soon as possible. In both cases, selfishness seems like a good choice in the short term, but as the game goes on, it punishes selfish play, because all the other players know not to trust you, and ultimately, without the trust of the other players, you'll quickly become ineffective. So in the end, the short-term temptations of selfishness only underline the importance of trust and cooperation in the long term.
Players take turns setting scenes. The Genius loci plays all the other characters in the scene, including the landscape, weather, and even chance. Who plays the Genius loci depends on where you set the scene, and who has the strongest relationship with that place. So, narrative authority moves around the table, with creativity in the scene and relationships on the map mixing things up.
Players should play The Fifth World set in their own place, populated by their own possible descendants. Character creation recapitulates the creation myths, from the geological and historical forces that created the land you live in, and stretching out into the future of your place and your descendants. It might focus on how your descendants deal with the consequences of your actions, or simply how they live with the same land you live in now.
Themes give each player the opportunity to weave things she cares about deeply into the story. The "warm up" phase draws players into the story, while the "cool down" phase encourages players to think about the story and its impact afterward.
The resolution mechanic comes from the Prisoner's Dilemma. Everyone involved sets stakes, and chooses to either Open or Close. If everyone Opens, everyone gets their stakes. If everyone Closes, no one gets their stakes. If some people Open and some people Close, the people who Close take advantage of the vulnerability of the people who Open, so they get their stakes, and the people who Open lose their stakes. So, Opening leaves the possibility that everyone will win, but makes you vulnerable; Close guards against someone taking advantage of you, but also limits your chance of succeeding.
The Prisoner's Dilemma puts the player into the same basic dilemma of a traditional animist, as Tim Ingold described in his essay, "From Trust to Domination." Living in a world defined by relationships and trust means living with the tension of possible betrayal. By the same token, as Axelrod describes in The Evolution of Cooperation, the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma explains how and why people trust each other and cooperate.
Since relationships can stand Open, Closed or Uncertain, and that status sets how the Genius loci acts with that person, players can also decide to make short-term detrimental decisions in order to improve relationships. Making yourself vulnerable in a hostile relationship makes the other less hostile, though you must endure the first attack (Open against a Closed relationship, and you'll lose your stakes, but the relationship will shift to Uncertain). By the same token, betraying a trusted friend can shatter that relationship (Close against an Open relationship and you'll get your stakes, but the relationship will shift to Uncertain). So, players can also choose to suffer short-term setbacks in order to open up relationships.
Characters do not advance in The Fifth World, but they do change. In fact, how the characters change—and how the land changes with them—really lies at the heart of the game.
"Advancement" doesn't really exist in the real world. Change does, but "advancement" implies a single, linear scale along which one constantly improves. The world just doesn't fit into such a narrow concept; to become better at one thing, you must necessarily become less good at something else, and the changes we undergo might make us strong in one sense, but at the same time, weak in another. "Advancement" asks entirely the wrong question; we should ask, how does this person change over time?
After playing The Fifth World, I hope players can appreciate the animist perspective as a viable and worthwhile one. I hope that at least some players will take inspiration from the future The Fifth World depicts, serving for deep ecology and bioregional animists just as Star Trek did for humanists.
Most of us have a preconceived notion of primitive cultures as lacking in cultural refinement, knowledge, medicine, technology, and so forth. Trying to play The Fifth World with this misconception will likely not work out very well. The Fifth World derives a good deal of its content from real-world anthropology and ethnography, so it won't work with the Hobbesian misconceptions most of us harbor about primitive peoples. Dispelling those myths without falling into preaching requires a delicate balance, one that requires a lot of attention. Showing, rather than telling, seems key to this. I'll need to present the cultures of The Fifth World in a non-traditional way; I've taken some inspiration from Willem Larsen's ideas, as well as James Gurney's Dinotopia and Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes.
The "cool" factor. The jungle tribes of Texas that hunt giant beetles to turn their exoskeletons into armor or shields; the biker gangs that turned their hogs in for horses and now hunt elephants across the fields of South Dakota; the tribes exploring the heart of the verdant evergreen forests nestled amidst the razor-sharp peaks of an ice-free Antarctica. That element fires the imagination. It banishes the idea of life beyond civilization as "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," and excites people with the adventure of creating a new, tribal future.
To their own human nature, beyond their domestication. Other games take the stereotypes of primitive life for granted, which means that we keep looking outside ourselves for something to come along and "fix" us. The Fifth World has the audacity to suggest that we don't need fixing at all, that human nature already ennobles us, strengthens us, and unites us with a living world that we don't need to conquer, rule, or even steward. We belong to it—we just need to trust it again to repair that betrayed relationship.
I have some different ideas for publishing The Fifth World. The project began with the concept of a truly open source game—both rules and setting—so the publishing and business plan will have to work in accord with that goal.
We might reach some traditional gamers and some independent/story gamers, but we'd rather pull in non-gamers. I hope to sell the game to intentional and planned communities as an outlet for collaborative, communal art that could help build social cohesion. We hope to attract people with an interest in anthropology or ecology.
Concept & Summary
See Emily K. Dresner-Thornber's two-part article, "The Crunchy Bits" (Part 1, Part 2)
Concept
Four hundred years after the fall of civilization, humans thrive in feral tribes, by basing their lives in webs of relationship rather than technical mastery. You play the people who keep those relationships strong.
Summary
Four hundred years after the fall of civilization, humans became feral out of necessity. The old ways no longer worked. They rediscovered magic, tribal life, and became native, deeply rooted in the place they lived. They live in a more-than-human world, defined by their relationships with other persons—whether human or otherwise. They enjoy a more peaceful, healthy, carefree life, but that world of relationships requires constant participation. It requires them to continue the work of creating the world every day. You play those people.
The Big Three
1. What is your game about?
The Fifth World tries to give its players an experience, however brief, of animist life—life in a more-than-human world, defined by relationships with other persons, whether human or otherwise. That means both the wonder of reawakening to a living, vibrant world, and the kinds of challenges faced by someone living in a world defined by relationships.
2. What do the characters do?
Each character belongs to a particular place in a very special way. Characters owe responsibilities to those places, and must work to keep a healthy balance of connections, relationships and resources flowing. The characters live in a dynamic world, one that requires their constant participation to continually renew itself. A hunter helps the land renew itself by taking the right number of animals and no more; a storyteller helps the land renew itself by telling the right stories in the right season; a gardener helps the land renew itself by planting the right plants together at the right time; a shaman helps the land renew itself by performing the proper rites in the correct fashion, and so on.
When things don't go so well, when a hunter takes one too many animals, or a shaman fails to perform an important rite, misfortune may fall upon the people. The players take the role of those characters who step forward to correct those situations, and put the human community back into proper relationship, whatever that may require.
3. What do the players do?
The players hunt story. The story already exists in the landscape; tracing over that, tracking it across the landscape, the players find the story, and in so doing, discover the bond their characters have with one another, and with the land.
That sounds very flighty and high-minded, but the region—the system of places and paths connecting them—establish a setting map, a relationship map and a theme map simultaneously. The story really does already lie in the landscape. The themes recapitulate aspects of the creation story, and the story unfolds with the changing of the places and paths
The Power 19
4. How does your setting reinforce what your game is about?
The Fifth World focuses on the lives of feral human communities living in a post-civilized world. They face challenges left over from civilization, the challenge of negotiating a space for the human community in a more-than-human world, the challenge of keeping the world in a dynamic balance between mutually exclusive pressures and interests, and the regular, inter-personal challenges that arise inside any human community.
But the game also presents a hopeful vision of the future. These communities face challenges, but they also have the skill, strength and wisdom to face those challenges. They live dynamic, vibrant, rich lives, rather than the impoverished desperation more common in the post-apocalyptic genre.
The people of The Fifth World live in such an animist world. They experience the world as an ongoing process, knit together by competing and changing relationships, and thus, something that requires their constant participation. By the same token, as a feral future rather than a prehistoric past, the people of The Fifth World also have the example of what life in a world of objects entails. The distance from that life has allowed them to encode that in myths and legends that try to understand what happened.
5. How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?
Character creation also means region creation. That alone sets a strong initial tone that these characters belong to a particular place. The game defines characters and places in terms of their relationships. The actual nodes themselves matter much less than the connections that bind them. Character creation also takes an iterative approach of initiations, once every seven years, reinforcing the idea of creation not as a moment in time, but as an ongoing process of shifting webs of relationship.
6. What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
- Recognize adversity as an opportunity.
- Recognize opposition as a gift.
- Play generously.
7. How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
Recognize adversity as opportunity. To win, players need Will, which they can only unlock from the land by spending Fate. So, the game rewards players for choosing to face adversity. Adversity frees up the resources the players will need in order to win.
Recognize opposition as a gift. In order to get freed Will, players must act in accordance with another player's theme. That means giving that player the chance to express her theme. So, a character might have a theme of protecting a child. Another player could act in accordance with that by threatening the child—so, giving the player the opportunity to express her theme, by protecting the child from harm. The player with the theme gets to decide if the other player deserves the reward or not, so the game asks players to recognize opposition as a gift, and adversity as an opportunity.
Play generously. Since players can only give freed Will to other players, and can never take Will themselves, the game creates a dilemma that appears again in the core mechanic, based on the Prisoner's Dilemma. In both cases, you have to make the risk to trust the other player, and hope they'll do the same for you. Mathematically, the Prisoner's Dilemma has an optimal solution: "Tit-for-tat," which begins with cooperation, punishes each defection once, and quickly forgives and goes back to cooperation as soon as possible. In both cases, selfishness seems like a good choice in the short term, but as the game goes on, it punishes selfish play, because all the other players know not to trust you, and ultimately, without the trust of the other players, you'll quickly become ineffective. So in the end, the short-term temptations of selfishness only underline the importance of trust and cooperation in the long term.
8. How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?
Players take turns setting scenes. The Genius loci plays all the other characters in the scene, including the landscape, weather, and even chance. Who plays the Genius loci depends on where you set the scene, and who has the strongest relationship with that place. So, narrative authority moves around the table, with creativity in the scene and relationships on the map mixing things up.
9. What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation?
Players should play The Fifth World set in their own place, populated by their own possible descendants. Character creation recapitulates the creation myths, from the geological and historical forces that created the land you live in, and stretching out into the future of your place and your descendants. It might focus on how your descendants deal with the consequences of your actions, or simply how they live with the same land you live in now.
Themes give each player the opportunity to weave things she cares about deeply into the story. The "warm up" phase draws players into the story, while the "cool down" phase encourages players to think about the story and its impact afterward.
10. What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
The resolution mechanic comes from the Prisoner's Dilemma. Everyone involved sets stakes, and chooses to either Open or Close. If everyone Opens, everyone gets their stakes. If everyone Closes, no one gets their stakes. If some people Open and some people Close, the people who Close take advantage of the vulnerability of the people who Open, so they get their stakes, and the people who Open lose their stakes. So, Opening leaves the possibility that everyone will win, but makes you vulnerable; Close guards against someone taking advantage of you, but also limits your chance of succeeding.
11. How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
The Prisoner's Dilemma puts the player into the same basic dilemma of a traditional animist, as Tim Ingold described in his essay, "From Trust to Domination." Living in a world defined by relationships and trust means living with the tension of possible betrayal. By the same token, as Axelrod describes in The Evolution of Cooperation, the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma explains how and why people trust each other and cooperate.
Since relationships can stand Open, Closed or Uncertain, and that status sets how the Genius loci acts with that person, players can also decide to make short-term detrimental decisions in order to improve relationships. Making yourself vulnerable in a hostile relationship makes the other less hostile, though you must endure the first attack (Open against a Closed relationship, and you'll lose your stakes, but the relationship will shift to Uncertain). By the same token, betraying a trusted friend can shatter that relationship (Close against an Open relationship and you'll get your stakes, but the relationship will shift to Uncertain). So, players can also choose to suffer short-term setbacks in order to open up relationships.
12. Do characters in your game advance? If so, how?
Characters do not advance in The Fifth World, but they do change. In fact, how the characters change—and how the land changes with them—really lies at the heart of the game.
13. How does the character advancement (or lack thereof) reinforce what your game is about?
"Advancement" doesn't really exist in the real world. Change does, but "advancement" implies a single, linear scale along which one constantly improves. The world just doesn't fit into such a narrow concept; to become better at one thing, you must necessarily become less good at something else, and the changes we undergo might make us strong in one sense, but at the same time, weak in another. "Advancement" asks entirely the wrong question; we should ask, how does this person change over time?
14. What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
After playing The Fifth World, I hope players can appreciate the animist perspective as a viable and worthwhile one. I hope that at least some players will take inspiration from the future The Fifth World depicts, serving for deep ecology and bioregional animists just as Star Trek did for humanists.
15. What areas of your game receive extra attention and color? Why?
Most of us have a preconceived notion of primitive cultures as lacking in cultural refinement, knowledge, medicine, technology, and so forth. Trying to play The Fifth World with this misconception will likely not work out very well. The Fifth World derives a good deal of its content from real-world anthropology and ethnography, so it won't work with the Hobbesian misconceptions most of us harbor about primitive peoples. Dispelling those myths without falling into preaching requires a delicate balance, one that requires a lot of attention. Showing, rather than telling, seems key to this. I'll need to present the cultures of The Fifth World in a non-traditional way; I've taken some inspiration from Willem Larsen's ideas, as well as James Gurney's Dinotopia and Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet's Gnomes.
16. Which part of your game are you most excited about or interested in? Why?
The "cool" factor. The jungle tribes of Texas that hunt giant beetles to turn their exoskeletons into armor or shields; the biker gangs that turned their hogs in for horses and now hunt elephants across the fields of South Dakota; the tribes exploring the heart of the verdant evergreen forests nestled amidst the razor-sharp peaks of an ice-free Antarctica. That element fires the imagination. It banishes the idea of life beyond civilization as "solitary, nasty, brutish and short," and excites people with the adventure of creating a new, tribal future.
17. Where does your game take the players that other games can't, don't, or won't?
To their own human nature, beyond their domestication. Other games take the stereotypes of primitive life for granted, which means that we keep looking outside ourselves for something to come along and "fix" us. The Fifth World has the audacity to suggest that we don't need fixing at all, that human nature already ennobles us, strengthens us, and unites us with a living world that we don't need to conquer, rule, or even steward. We belong to it—we just need to trust it again to repair that betrayed relationship.
18. What are your publishing goals for your game?
I have some different ideas for publishing The Fifth World. The project began with the concept of a truly open source game—both rules and setting—so the publishing and business plan will have to work in accord with that goal.
19. Who is your target audience?
We might reach some traditional gamers and some independent/story gamers, but we'd rather pull in non-gamers. I hope to sell the game to intentional and planned communities as an outlet for collaborative, communal art that could help build social cohesion. We hope to attract people with an interest in anthropology or ecology.
Friday, April 17, 2009
The Storyjammer's Journey (Index)
I've written lately about the experience of storyjamming and how it compares to the "rites of passage" outlined by van Gennep, and the "hero's journey" described by Campbell, inspired by Rane Willerslev's Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Since this involved a number of posts, this provides an index for that mini-series.
- The Storyjammer's Journey: Introduction
- Ritual Phrases: Ritual phrases and their use in games
- Separation
- Liminality
- Immersion & Flow in Storyjam's Liminal Space - "Immersion" as what Csikszentmihalyi called "Flow"
- Hunting Story - Story as something to pursue, rather than make up
- Story in the Landscape - Ideas for practical application
- Re-incorporation
- Coming Home - The importance of the final phase, and some thoughts on why we so often neglect it
- Finding Your Way Back - Ideas for practical application
Ritual Phrases
We encounter ritual phrases all the time, both sacred and secular. Any Catholic recognizes a meaning beyond what the words, "Peace be with you," communicates to the uninitiated. We all rely on ritual phrases when faced with the enormity of death, and the insignificance of anything we can say in such situations. Jews have a codified phrase: "May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." The rest of us goyim often fall back to a more secular ritual phrase, like "I'm sorry for your loss," or with somewhat more religious inflection, "She's in a better place." We don't really mean what we say by these things, at least not fully; we really mean, "I want to offer you some kind of comfort, but I know I can't do much for you." Faced with another's grief, we rely on ritual phrases because they excel at the very thing we need at that moment: they give us something to say when we don't know what to say. That, in itself, says something; it confesses our inability to address the situation before us in the usual manner, instead relying on a vocal gesture towards something less easily defined. We point towards common experience, the context of our shared usage of that phrase, and all the meaning that it has accrued from all the times we've used it before.
As a student of permaculture, and as the kind of bioregionalist who looks for stories and language written in the landscape, I naturally tend to think of ritual phrases like oral swales. A swale stops the flow of water, giving the water time to build up in the soil. Ritual phrases interrupt the flow of regular conversation, building up deeper, underground aquifers of meaning that the swale points us to.
That kind of function not only helps us relate in times of great stress, it also provides an excellent means of moving from one "mode" to another. It won't take long for a church-goer to recognize the ritual phrase that marks the beginning of the service, or the much-awaited ritual phrase marking its end (I joked in my Catholic days that the congregation's concluding ritual phrase, answering, "Thanks be to G-d," had simply gotten some minimal clean up from the Church because they felt that everyone crying, "Thank G-d!" had gotten embarrassing).
Ben Lehman's Polaris uses ritual phrases to great effect. The game plays out largely as a negotiation conducted in a ritual language, giving the whole game a particularly ritualistic tone. Other games have played with this idea to one extent or another, including "Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan." Simon C. said of it:
Ritual phrases can establish tone, define the structure of a game, and delineate the social space of the game clearly and explicitly. It can mark the transitions from one phase to the next of the storyjammer's journey. They can serve as prompts when we don't know what else to say—in this case, not because we face the profundity of mortality, but simply because we have to tell a story and feel intimidated, or we just don't have any ideas at the moment.
As a student of permaculture, and as the kind of bioregionalist who looks for stories and language written in the landscape, I naturally tend to think of ritual phrases like oral swales. A swale stops the flow of water, giving the water time to build up in the soil. Ritual phrases interrupt the flow of regular conversation, building up deeper, underground aquifers of meaning that the swale points us to.
That kind of function not only helps us relate in times of great stress, it also provides an excellent means of moving from one "mode" to another. It won't take long for a church-goer to recognize the ritual phrase that marks the beginning of the service, or the much-awaited ritual phrase marking its end (I joked in my Catholic days that the congregation's concluding ritual phrase, answering, "Thanks be to G-d," had simply gotten some minimal clean up from the Church because they felt that everyone crying, "Thank G-d!" had gotten embarrassing).
Ben Lehman's Polaris uses ritual phrases to great effect. The game plays out largely as a negotiation conducted in a ritual language, giving the whole game a particularly ritualistic tone. Other games have played with this idea to one extent or another, including "Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan." Simon C. said of it:
While I'm on the subject, Ritual Phrases! These are so cool! I think they really went a long way towards establishing tone for the game, and formalising the "gameplay" aspect. Each post felt like a concrete "move" in the game, like sliding forward a chess piece or playing a card. The joy of the game was in making a move, and then anticipating the other player's response.
Ritual phrases can establish tone, define the structure of a game, and delineate the social space of the game clearly and explicitly. It can mark the transitions from one phase to the next of the storyjammer's journey. They can serve as prompts when we don't know what else to say—in this case, not because we face the profundity of mortality, but simply because we have to tell a story and feel intimidated, or we just don't have any ideas at the moment.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Finding Your Way Back
If I'd had a bit more foresight, or done a bit more planning, I'd have saved "Coming Home" until now, to keep the pattern of "Theory, Application, Next phase." But I didn't, so for the re-incorporation phase, I'll have to refer you back to that article for the theory behind it, since I have little new to add to it just eight days later in terms of theory. Today, in keeping with the pattern so far and wrapping up this discussion of "The Storyjammer's Journey," I want to discuss some of the ways in which we might tackle the problem of using those ideas to design an endgame for the Fifth World.
Most groups will stick around to discuss their game after they've finished. In lieu of any real support, players re-incorporate as a matter of social convention. The challenge lies in formalizing that, and making this formalized game relevant to players who might not appreciate the importance of the activity. Like warm-ups, saavy players may recognize immediately what they help achieve, but other players may not appreciate how much they shape a storyjam until they've experienced them firsthand. Besides, it seems like simple good design to weave these elements ever more closely together. You'll recall that we integrated warm-up games into character and setting creation, tasks that the game needs to begin with anyway. By completing those tasks with warm-up games, we can weave them into regular play. So, what tasks do we need to accomplish at the end of a game session anyway, that we could turn into re-incorporation?
Perhaps, first and most obviously, the game could support an "epilogue" round. Like the "previews" from the end of a game of Primetime Adventures—a game which, as Giuli observed, does have some mechanics for a reflective endgame (though admittedly weak), a final round of short scenes without the usual restrictions could allow characters to wrap up any final threads and bring their storylines to a satisfying close.
At the end of the story, the main task we face involves what other games might refer to as "awarding experience." How do we quantify and apply the ways that the game session has changed the setting and the characters? Often, this involves no more than a tally of points, but the very nature of the task seems to invite us to expand it to achieve the task of re-incorporation: bringing us back to ordinary reality, reflecting upon and thus integrating our experience in the story.
Others have noted before that character creation generally takes the action of what happens in a game and condenses it into a much faster process, so looking back at character creation may offer some hints. Initiations can create connections, add new features, and introduce new places. Did a character act strongly in accordance with the theme of another place? Perhaps that justifies shifting a character's home. Or, it might justify establishing a new connection between that place and the character's home.
In an earlier version of the game, I used a "questions" mechanic to establish themes. It broke immersion entirely, yanking players violently out of the game, so I scrapped it. But here, where we want to pull out of the story's liminal space to observe and interpret, it may fit well. Perhaps a series of questions could guide some discussion about the game, by which the group would award appropriate options to change the setting and the characters.
Perhaps we should go back to the land once again—each place could have not only a stanza of poetry to prompt a creation story, and a list of themes to choose from, but a list of questions, as well. Each player can ask one question associated with her home at the end of the game, pertaining to that story; the table answers the question, and that answer decides what kind of change happens.
I have my weakest mechanical ideas on this front, but I see it as largely unexplored territory, so that doesn't intimidate me too much. I'll open it up for discussion: what kinds of mechanics do you see for re-incorporation?
Most groups will stick around to discuss their game after they've finished. In lieu of any real support, players re-incorporate as a matter of social convention. The challenge lies in formalizing that, and making this formalized game relevant to players who might not appreciate the importance of the activity. Like warm-ups, saavy players may recognize immediately what they help achieve, but other players may not appreciate how much they shape a storyjam until they've experienced them firsthand. Besides, it seems like simple good design to weave these elements ever more closely together. You'll recall that we integrated warm-up games into character and setting creation, tasks that the game needs to begin with anyway. By completing those tasks with warm-up games, we can weave them into regular play. So, what tasks do we need to accomplish at the end of a game session anyway, that we could turn into re-incorporation?
Perhaps, first and most obviously, the game could support an "epilogue" round. Like the "previews" from the end of a game of Primetime Adventures—a game which, as Giuli observed, does have some mechanics for a reflective endgame (though admittedly weak), a final round of short scenes without the usual restrictions could allow characters to wrap up any final threads and bring their storylines to a satisfying close.
At the end of the story, the main task we face involves what other games might refer to as "awarding experience." How do we quantify and apply the ways that the game session has changed the setting and the characters? Often, this involves no more than a tally of points, but the very nature of the task seems to invite us to expand it to achieve the task of re-incorporation: bringing us back to ordinary reality, reflecting upon and thus integrating our experience in the story.
Others have noted before that character creation generally takes the action of what happens in a game and condenses it into a much faster process, so looking back at character creation may offer some hints. Initiations can create connections, add new features, and introduce new places. Did a character act strongly in accordance with the theme of another place? Perhaps that justifies shifting a character's home. Or, it might justify establishing a new connection between that place and the character's home.
In an earlier version of the game, I used a "questions" mechanic to establish themes. It broke immersion entirely, yanking players violently out of the game, so I scrapped it. But here, where we want to pull out of the story's liminal space to observe and interpret, it may fit well. Perhaps a series of questions could guide some discussion about the game, by which the group would award appropriate options to change the setting and the characters.
Perhaps we should go back to the land once again—each place could have not only a stanza of poetry to prompt a creation story, and a list of themes to choose from, but a list of questions, as well. Each player can ask one question associated with her home at the end of the game, pertaining to that story; the table answers the question, and that answer decides what kind of change happens.
I have my weakest mechanical ideas on this front, but I see it as largely unexplored territory, so that doesn't intimidate me too much. I'll open it up for discussion: what kinds of mechanics do you see for re-incorporation?
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
The Story in the Landscape
I know that I promised yesterday to talk today about some game mechanics that would design for flow (often called "immersion" when experienced in an RPG), but I pulled a dirty trick on you. See, I already did. You might not have noticed it; don't blame yourself; I admit, I did it in a pretty sneaky way. I'll have to spend most of my space today just detailing what I mean.
Whether in the warm-up phase of a one-shot game, or in the first session of a longer-term game, we started off telling the creation story for the places where our story unfolds. David Abram uses the example of the songlines of Australia (1997). Aborigines sing the songlines as they travel, effectively reading them, written in the landscape. The criss-crossing lines weave into each other, creating a woven epic written into the landscape of the continent itself. Individual aborigines bear not only the right, but the responsibility to keep those songs, to walk those paths. Walking/singing those paths where the ancestors walked/sang before them, aborigines blur the line not between a primordial creation and the present, but between ordinary reality and a concurrent Dreaming. They become the ancestors, and they experience creation not as an event long past, but as a process they themselves engage in. Thus, they bear the responsibility to renew their little part of creation constantly (Harvey, 2006).
This viewpoint has no interest in the novelties of "the Age of Exuberance." (Catton, 1982). Instead, it prefers focus, attention, rhythm; it wants to plumb the depths of the world we live in, peel back the layers, and find the magic hidden in the everyday. For our purposes, it means that the story of creation we told at the outset has established the elements—the game centers on the joy of finding the stories, patterns and relationships that our creation story implied, and tracing some of the infinite possible twists on the basic framework—the landscape—we already established.
The strong identification of personality in the landscape, as well as emotion, intellect and imagination in the landscape as well, means that the game can unfold on one map. The map of the setting also provides the character sheet; each character comes from a particular place, and each place resonates with a particular theme. The paths that connect places also mark the relationships between characters, and the relationships between themes. A journey across the landscape means a social journey and an emotional journey as well. The layering of what we would normally divide into "internal" and "external' worlds also helps to create a sense of "magical realism," or "animist realism," a literary tradition that has arisen from the interface of colonial and native literatures.
I laid out the basic mechanics that could bring all of this together in my post from almost a month ago, "A Narrative Game Economy of Making You Look Awesome." To refresh your memory, I took inspiration from the "Banners" that Judd Karlman's 1st Quest, a hack of The Shadow of Yesterday. This can work well as a mechanic to explicitly establish the theme of a place, and thus, the theme for characters from that place. But, I want to take it a step farther. Karlman's Banners allow a character to gain reward when they act in accordance with their theme, or when other characters challenge their theme (thus giving the character the opportunity to act in accordance with it). The Shadow of Yesterday still has a GM, which solves the problem of adjudicating what constitutes acceptably acting in accordance with the theme. I want to take this idea farther: I want themes that only reward you when you give someone else the chance to act in accordance with them. This also helps solve the problem of GM adjudication: the player whose theme you challenge gets to decide if you've really given her that opportunity or not.
We've established these themes as we told the creation stories—place types have a set poem to prompt a creation story, and possible themes to choose from, derived from that poem. A template adds another stanza, and more options for themes to choose from. But by the time the regular game begins, each place has an established theme. Players can challenge those themes when dealing with characters from that place, or in scenes set at that place, or while traveling to or from that place.
And what of those paths, that double as relationships? They have a weight and a status—either Open, Closed, or Uncertain. As a relationship, Closed connections indicate hostility, while Open connections indicate friendship. You can have a relationship with an enemy every bit as intense as your relationship with your lover, which indicates that kind and depth deserve entirely separate scales. Uncertain relationships can go either way; you don't know if you can always trust them, but you might still need them. As a physical path, Closed connections indicate danger, while Open connections indicate safety. Uncertain connections could become dangerous, if a player wants to make them dangerous.
This opens up a consideration in play, because these statuses can change. You can build trust by making yourself vulnerable, or break it by taking advantage of it. In true magical realist fashion, and just as in traditional folk tales and fairy tales, when you break your sister's trust, the path connecting her home and yours becomes flooded out, blocked by landslides, or prowled by hungry predators. You can't open all your connections—some mutually oppose each other, so opening one necessarily means closing another—but you'll need to choose which ones to open and which ones to close. You may decide that based on your own concerns, or you may need to consider how things can flow through the whole region.
But what do you reward players with for hitting on the right themes? What do you measure the weight of a connection with? I first considered calling this your "wildness," or possibly "wilderness," but that term comes with far too much romantic baggage. I long ago came to the conclusion that the most common English words do the best to describe such important concepts—like "family" instead of the much-debated "tribe." In this case, looking at the etymology of the word "wild" proves a valuable exercise in itself. It comes from the same root as the word "will," and in fact, before the vowel shift, sounded just like "willed," as in, "willed land," or "willed animals." "Wild" describes a person with a will of its own—whether a human person, an animal person, or a place person. But like imagination, intellect and emotion, like I wrote about yesterday, will does not come from inside of us; we partake in it, like the air.
In some of the earlier versions of the game, a friend objected to the will mechanic. To him, he said, it suggested an anthropocentric power that belied the relational context of the rest of the game. Instead, I now imagine Will as something that inheres in the landscape, set at the beginning of each game by a budget based on the number of players. At first, each place has some amount of Fate, a resource that the Genius loci can use to introduce complications. Spent Fate becomes available for that player to award when other players challenge her theme. Once awarded, it becomes Will.
Games with no GM notoriously run into the problem of opposition. Either they must oppose each other, breaking down the camaraderie and cooperation that defines one of the RPG's greatest virtues, or it runs into the Czege Principle: "When the same person is the author of both a character's adversity and its resolution, play isn't fun." (Of course, a game with a GM doesn't really solve the problem if we want camaraderie and cooperation, either, since it just unites everyone else at the table against a common enemy, creating some of the questionable dynamics that others have already remarked upon.) We've seen two dynamics for creating conflict in this arrangement that don't rely on either of these problematic solutions:
At Dreamation, Ganakagok reminded me of ideas I'd neglected in designing the Fifth World, centering the game on the challenge of balancing conflicting forces to maintain the world and your relationships, and negotiating mutually exclusive demands from various relationships. The dichotomy of Fate and Will establishes another source of tension: places need a balance of Fate and Will, or bad things happen. Players must balance Fate and Will, which may require them to volunteer to endure adversity. Once again, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
This kind of environment gives us the opportunity to define very clear goals for a game.
I think this set up allows for other types of games, with equally clear goals and feedback, but I have developed this one most of all. If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear about them in the comments below. In addition to the feedback provided in that particular kind of game, players have feedback from the amount of Will they have gotten, the balance of Fate and Will in the game, and the configuration of Open, Closed and Uncertain connections on the map. With this, we have some potent ingredients to design for flow, so we can start making a game that creates the conditions for immersion to happen.
Whether in the warm-up phase of a one-shot game, or in the first session of a longer-term game, we started off telling the creation story for the places where our story unfolds. David Abram uses the example of the songlines of Australia (1997). Aborigines sing the songlines as they travel, effectively reading them, written in the landscape. The criss-crossing lines weave into each other, creating a woven epic written into the landscape of the continent itself. Individual aborigines bear not only the right, but the responsibility to keep those songs, to walk those paths. Walking/singing those paths where the ancestors walked/sang before them, aborigines blur the line not between a primordial creation and the present, but between ordinary reality and a concurrent Dreaming. They become the ancestors, and they experience creation not as an event long past, but as a process they themselves engage in. Thus, they bear the responsibility to renew their little part of creation constantly (Harvey, 2006).
This viewpoint has no interest in the novelties of "the Age of Exuberance." (Catton, 1982). Instead, it prefers focus, attention, rhythm; it wants to plumb the depths of the world we live in, peel back the layers, and find the magic hidden in the everyday. For our purposes, it means that the story of creation we told at the outset has established the elements—the game centers on the joy of finding the stories, patterns and relationships that our creation story implied, and tracing some of the infinite possible twists on the basic framework—the landscape—we already established.
The strong identification of personality in the landscape, as well as emotion, intellect and imagination in the landscape as well, means that the game can unfold on one map. The map of the setting also provides the character sheet; each character comes from a particular place, and each place resonates with a particular theme. The paths that connect places also mark the relationships between characters, and the relationships between themes. A journey across the landscape means a social journey and an emotional journey as well. The layering of what we would normally divide into "internal" and "external' worlds also helps to create a sense of "magical realism," or "animist realism," a literary tradition that has arisen from the interface of colonial and native literatures.
I laid out the basic mechanics that could bring all of this together in my post from almost a month ago, "A Narrative Game Economy of Making You Look Awesome." To refresh your memory, I took inspiration from the "Banners" that Judd Karlman's 1st Quest, a hack of The Shadow of Yesterday. This can work well as a mechanic to explicitly establish the theme of a place, and thus, the theme for characters from that place. But, I want to take it a step farther. Karlman's Banners allow a character to gain reward when they act in accordance with their theme, or when other characters challenge their theme (thus giving the character the opportunity to act in accordance with it). The Shadow of Yesterday still has a GM, which solves the problem of adjudicating what constitutes acceptably acting in accordance with the theme. I want to take this idea farther: I want themes that only reward you when you give someone else the chance to act in accordance with them. This also helps solve the problem of GM adjudication: the player whose theme you challenge gets to decide if you've really given her that opportunity or not.
We've established these themes as we told the creation stories—place types have a set poem to prompt a creation story, and possible themes to choose from, derived from that poem. A template adds another stanza, and more options for themes to choose from. But by the time the regular game begins, each place has an established theme. Players can challenge those themes when dealing with characters from that place, or in scenes set at that place, or while traveling to or from that place.
And what of those paths, that double as relationships? They have a weight and a status—either Open, Closed, or Uncertain. As a relationship, Closed connections indicate hostility, while Open connections indicate friendship. You can have a relationship with an enemy every bit as intense as your relationship with your lover, which indicates that kind and depth deserve entirely separate scales. Uncertain relationships can go either way; you don't know if you can always trust them, but you might still need them. As a physical path, Closed connections indicate danger, while Open connections indicate safety. Uncertain connections could become dangerous, if a player wants to make them dangerous.
This opens up a consideration in play, because these statuses can change. You can build trust by making yourself vulnerable, or break it by taking advantage of it. In true magical realist fashion, and just as in traditional folk tales and fairy tales, when you break your sister's trust, the path connecting her home and yours becomes flooded out, blocked by landslides, or prowled by hungry predators. You can't open all your connections—some mutually oppose each other, so opening one necessarily means closing another—but you'll need to choose which ones to open and which ones to close. You may decide that based on your own concerns, or you may need to consider how things can flow through the whole region.
But what do you reward players with for hitting on the right themes? What do you measure the weight of a connection with? I first considered calling this your "wildness," or possibly "wilderness," but that term comes with far too much romantic baggage. I long ago came to the conclusion that the most common English words do the best to describe such important concepts—like "family" instead of the much-debated "tribe." In this case, looking at the etymology of the word "wild" proves a valuable exercise in itself. It comes from the same root as the word "will," and in fact, before the vowel shift, sounded just like "willed," as in, "willed land," or "willed animals." "Wild" describes a person with a will of its own—whether a human person, an animal person, or a place person. But like imagination, intellect and emotion, like I wrote about yesterday, will does not come from inside of us; we partake in it, like the air.
In some of the earlier versions of the game, a friend objected to the will mechanic. To him, he said, it suggested an anthropocentric power that belied the relational context of the rest of the game. Instead, I now imagine Will as something that inheres in the landscape, set at the beginning of each game by a budget based on the number of players. At first, each place has some amount of Fate, a resource that the Genius loci can use to introduce complications. Spent Fate becomes available for that player to award when other players challenge her theme. Once awarded, it becomes Will.
Games with no GM notoriously run into the problem of opposition. Either they must oppose each other, breaking down the camaraderie and cooperation that defines one of the RPG's greatest virtues, or it runs into the Czege Principle: "When the same person is the author of both a character's adversity and its resolution, play isn't fun." (Of course, a game with a GM doesn't really solve the problem if we want camaraderie and cooperation, either, since it just unites everyone else at the table against a common enemy, creating some of the questionable dynamics that others have already remarked upon.) We've seen two dynamics for creating conflict in this arrangement that don't rely on either of these problematic solutions:
- Closed connections place conflict right into the landscape itself. To change those connections, characters must willingly "lose" encounters and make themselves vulnerable. In other words, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
- If the players need Will to complete their goals, the only way to open up Will requires players to first use Fate to introduce adversity. In other words, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
At Dreamation, Ganakagok reminded me of ideas I'd neglected in designing the Fifth World, centering the game on the challenge of balancing conflicting forces to maintain the world and your relationships, and negotiating mutually exclusive demands from various relationships. The dichotomy of Fate and Will establishes another source of tension: places need a balance of Fate and Will, or bad things happen. Players must balance Fate and Will, which may require them to volunteer to endure adversity. Once again, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
This kind of environment gives us the opportunity to define very clear goals for a game.
- The Story of a Journey. The story begins in a specific place, and it must go to a specific place. You could expand this to an itinerary, or even a cycle, requiring successive scenes to move from one destination to the next, or to journey from home to a pre-determined place, and back home again. You have very clearly set goals: set a scene in each destination, in sequence. You have clear feedback on your progress, in knowing which places you have set scenes in so far, and which you have not yet visited.
I think this set up allows for other types of games, with equally clear goals and feedback, but I have developed this one most of all. If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear about them in the comments below. In addition to the feedback provided in that particular kind of game, players have feedback from the amount of Will they have gotten, the balance of Fate and Will in the game, and the configuration of Open, Closed and Uncertain connections on the map. With this, we have some potent ingredients to design for flow, so we can start making a game that creates the conditions for immersion to happen.
- Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage.
- Catton, W. (1982). Overshoot: the ecological basis of revolutionary change, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
- Harvey, G. (2006). Animism: respecting the living world, New York: Columbia University Press.
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