So, why have I spent my time blogging these ideas, rather than writing rules and playtesting? Well, I have to wait a bit. Willem has gone on a little trip, so the Myth Weavers will have to wait until he gets back before we playtest Ben Robbins' game, Microscope. I want to play The Fifth World's history! When we finish, I'll have the story of how a globalized history fragmented into bioregional histories that we can only speak of in the plural. I'll have lots of good ideas, great scenes, and a breakdown of major periods will pass through.
See, I got Nørwegian Style last week. As I'd hoped, the book has proven full of great ideas to inspire the kind of play I want from The Fifth World. It did leave me with the disappointment of learning that "roleplaying poems" don't actually come in poetic form. They just provide short, intense play. But, I've taken some inspiration from an experimental and somewhat incomplete game called Virtue as well, to consider some other possible meanings of the phrase, "roleplaying poem."
Nørwegian Style had other ideas for me, though. The first game in the anthology, Matthijs Holter's Fuck Youth!, includes reading the rules as part of play. In fact, reading this game moved me all by itself.
That night, I had one of those wonderful, sleepless nights, the kind where you can't sleep because the ideas just keep coming, each one more exciting than the last.
Naturally, not everyone in The Fifth World thinks of the collapse of civilization the same way. I thought of an isolated order of monkish scholars maintaining a library, partly inspired by the monks of the Dark Ages, partly homage to A Canticle for Liebowitz. The book you hold in your hands never breaks character. It presents itself as something like, "The Fifth World, With the Commentary of the Scholars of the Distant Halls." "The Fifth World" here refers to well-known, old poem. I can imagine an introduction that begins says things like this: "It seems that every land has its own version of this poem. We hear of performances lasting hours, or even days, though the text itself cannot possibly last this long. Many scholars, after studying the text and witnessing oral performances, believe the poem provides a framework for storytelling, rather than a text entirely unto itself."
I can layout the book like a Talmud: the poem itself on the inside, with commentary, explaining the rules in simpler language but written like the interpretations of these monks, in the outer margins. Like Holter's game, you read the poem as part of the performance—and here I get to why I've hit a snag in writing the game. It needs a good pedagogy of play and good warm-ups that help tell the creation story. This becomes even more important if you have to set scenes at places you know. Our Microscope game will give me historical periods that every land goes through; that gives a structure to the creation stories, and a structure to developing the places where you set the scenes.
I think reading the poem will help set the tone, create a good flow for the game, and establish a good pedagogy of play all at once. It also makes the book interesting in and of itself. That one I'd keep short, as the most generic version of the poem, kept by the monks. It would end with an invitation, asking his brothers to record the versions of the poem in other lands and send them back to the library for study and preservation. That neatly sets the stage for a series of land-specific books, like, "The Fifth World, as Recited in the Restless Land." It would include the different variations (like bead colors) relevant to that land, but also include notes and illustrations for the brotherhood about life in that land.
Showing posts with label Bioregionalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bioregionalism. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Calling the World: Warm-Up Games, Character Creation & Creation Myths
I read a book some months ago (I wish I could find it now, or at least remember its title) that told two stories of how the world came into being: the creation story in Genesis, and the creation story of the Haudenosaunee. It contrasted the two, and pointed to a crucial divergence between them. In the Jewish story, a perfect, divine being ordered the universe, and on the seventh day he rested. In the Haudenosaunee story, people create the world over time. The creation story in Genesis fits in very well with what Tim Ingold called "the building perspective." First came the model, then a divine being implemented the model, and finished it. It "is"—in fact, just trying to summarize this myth this much in E-Prime proves a revealing exercise. The Haudenosaunee story, on the other hand, complements nicely what Ingold called "the dwelling perspective." No model precedes; instead, the world arises from our interactions and relationships. At no point can we look at it and call it finished. That underlines the important point for the moment: to our literate culture, creation happened; to oral people, creation continues.
David Abram and Tim Ingold both discuss the place of songlines in the traditions of Australian aboriginal peoples. As they travel across the landscape, aborigines repeat the songs of the paths they walk. Each journey composes a unique story, recounting the ancient journeys and adventures of ancestors. Yet, traveling in the same places and repeating their tales, the aborigine blurs the lines between himself and his ancestor. In the most real sense imaginable, walking a trail creates the trail; in tracing that pattern, the aborigine shares in part of what made his ancestor, and in a very real sense, becomes that ancestor. The Dreamtime of creation does not happen in the distant past, but concurrently with lived experience; creation did not happen, but people engage in the ongoing process of creation every day. Calvin Luther Martin underlines this with the Yupik and the Dene: they, too, see the ongoing project of creation as the chief occupation of living persons. The Dene specifically put their charge in terms of entropy and beauty; entropy brings everything into decay, so persons must always continue the work of creation, to create beauty.
I find this in nearly every native tradition I take the time to examine, and I suspect that it has less to do with some primitive universality than a perspective uniquely bound to the written word—people not bound by letters to a page that once printed seems to never change (at least along the timeline a human could appreciate) see a world constantly made and remade, and see themselves at the very least as co-creators alongside gods and ancestors, if not the current heroes of an eternally unfolding myth.
I promised I'd move past theory and get to game mechanics, but this lays down an important principle. Fred Hicks has said (and I freely insert myself into his "we's"):
I see a lot of parallels between what Fred Hicks suggests here, and the pattern that so many native peoples have already laid out in their creation stories. Particularly since, to so many of these cultures, nothing defines them more than their relationship to their home.
In this phase of the game, according to the journey I've written about lately, we face the challenge of separation, or the "call to adventure," moving out of the ordinary world and into the liminal space where storyjamming happens. I've experimented with Willem Larsen on warm-ups in storyjamming. We all hesitate and censor ourselves in our daily lives, and while we might need to do that in our ordinary social interactions, nothing can kill a storyjam faster. To effectively jam requires jammers to let their creativity and feelings flow, so that we stop "making up" a story, and instead find the story that already exists between us, and chase it. Via Willem via Lisa Wells, I've learned about the improvisational theater games and techniques of Viola Spolin. In Play Unsafe, Graham Walmsley credits many of his ideas to improvisation teacher and director, Keith Johnstone. Johnstone and Spolin have a great deal in common, and indie RPG players have worked with improv games, theater games, and roleplaying games for a long time. Bringing together some of these approaches from Johnstone, Spolin, Walmsley, and Larsen don't constitute some striking new innovation of mine. But by the same token, while players have recommended these as ways to improve a game, I've never seen a game that wove these things into the game itself before.
I want The Fifth World to create storyjams, and like Fred Hicks, I want character creation to play like a game, and like Willem Larsen, I want warm-up games that teach the game and how to play it and put players in the right mindset to approach the rest of the game, and I want all of that to tell a creation story that doesn't end, but sets a pattern for the rest of the game to explore. (I feel like I just played a fairly exhilarating warm-up game of "Yes, and" just writing that sentence!)
So—how to make a game out of that?
Let's start with the warm-up games we've used, their form, and what they do.
Some of these seem easier to apply to a game than others—for instance, Yes, and!, See Me, and Color/Advance all seem easier to include in character creation, whereas a game like Firing Line would almost always stand out as something difficult to tie into the game.
So, true to the bioregional ethos, we want to start with the landscape itself. Perhaps here we can start with a few rounds of Yes, and! describing the landscape and adding features: rivers, streams, terrain, climate, and so on. We wouldn't want to get too specific—places play a different role in the game, that we'll need to define later—but this establishes the general lay of the land. While reading this over, I went back to sectors and zones in permaculture. Perhaps the bulk of this little game should focus on the sectors that most impact the region.
Next, we begin aging the characters, beginning with the oldest character, and stepping through seven-year increments until all the characters reach the present. Each iteration has an initiation. For the initiation, the player gets to set a scene at a place; she gets to add a specific place to the map. To add a place, she must draw it on the map and tell the story of its creation. The game will have to include an oracle and some guidelines with prompts for people who don't have anything specific in mind. I think descriptors, like "cleared by fire," or "poisoned with ancient pharmaceuticals," could apply like templates, adding new features. The combination of the place and any of these "templates" applied would set a starting point for the place's creation story, which the player could expand upon. That creation story would establish an explicitly defined theme for that place. The player will always have a choice of making the place featured in an initiation the character's home. These creation stories may provide an excellent place to apply Color/Advance. This could help short-circuit the problem we saw in playtests, where the initiation scenes went straight to the conflict, often making players wonder why they cared about the stakes. It really got to the heart of the immersion problems I found at Dreamation.
At this point, you'll have characters and a map. Perhaps, like Polaris, the game could use a small ritual to introduce these characters, once they have fully aged? See Me suits that need perfectly. A character's ritual introduction should provide all the preface necessary for a round of See Me.
If this works properly—and it will need some good playtesting to make sure—this could turn character and setting creation into a unified whole, a game unto itself, and a recitation of a myth of ongoing creation that sets the stage perfectly for some feral storyjamming.
David Abram and Tim Ingold both discuss the place of songlines in the traditions of Australian aboriginal peoples. As they travel across the landscape, aborigines repeat the songs of the paths they walk. Each journey composes a unique story, recounting the ancient journeys and adventures of ancestors. Yet, traveling in the same places and repeating their tales, the aborigine blurs the lines between himself and his ancestor. In the most real sense imaginable, walking a trail creates the trail; in tracing that pattern, the aborigine shares in part of what made his ancestor, and in a very real sense, becomes that ancestor. The Dreamtime of creation does not happen in the distant past, but concurrently with lived experience; creation did not happen, but people engage in the ongoing process of creation every day. Calvin Luther Martin underlines this with the Yupik and the Dene: they, too, see the ongoing project of creation as the chief occupation of living persons. The Dene specifically put their charge in terms of entropy and beauty; entropy brings everything into decay, so persons must always continue the work of creation, to create beauty.
I find this in nearly every native tradition I take the time to examine, and I suspect that it has less to do with some primitive universality than a perspective uniquely bound to the written word—people not bound by letters to a page that once printed seems to never change (at least along the timeline a human could appreciate) see a world constantly made and remade, and see themselves at the very least as co-creators alongside gods and ancestors, if not the current heroes of an eternally unfolding myth.
I promised I'd move past theory and get to game mechanics, but this lays down an important principle. Fred Hicks has said (and I freely insert myself into his "we's"):
- We believe that character creation is not a nuisance you need to "get past" in order to get to play.
- We embrace the idea that creating characters is a game in and of itself.
- We suggest that character creation is the first (and most important) step in communicating to the GM what the GM must do in order to make the game rock.
- We do not believe in character stats that do not directly hook into driving actual play in interesting and vibrant ways.
- We never provide a means for creating characters that does not embed them in the story of the game, and does not embed the story of them in the game.
I see a lot of parallels between what Fred Hicks suggests here, and the pattern that so many native peoples have already laid out in their creation stories. Particularly since, to so many of these cultures, nothing defines them more than their relationship to their home.
In this phase of the game, according to the journey I've written about lately, we face the challenge of separation, or the "call to adventure," moving out of the ordinary world and into the liminal space where storyjamming happens. I've experimented with Willem Larsen on warm-ups in storyjamming. We all hesitate and censor ourselves in our daily lives, and while we might need to do that in our ordinary social interactions, nothing can kill a storyjam faster. To effectively jam requires jammers to let their creativity and feelings flow, so that we stop "making up" a story, and instead find the story that already exists between us, and chase it. Via Willem via Lisa Wells, I've learned about the improvisational theater games and techniques of Viola Spolin. In Play Unsafe, Graham Walmsley credits many of his ideas to improvisation teacher and director, Keith Johnstone. Johnstone and Spolin have a great deal in common, and indie RPG players have worked with improv games, theater games, and roleplaying games for a long time. Bringing together some of these approaches from Johnstone, Spolin, Walmsley, and Larsen don't constitute some striking new innovation of mine. But by the same token, while players have recommended these as ways to improve a game, I've never seen a game that wove these things into the game itself before.
I want The Fifth World to create storyjams, and like Fred Hicks, I want character creation to play like a game, and like Willem Larsen, I want warm-up games that teach the game and how to play it and put players in the right mindset to approach the rest of the game, and I want all of that to tell a creation story that doesn't end, but sets a pattern for the rest of the game to explore. (I feel like I just played a fairly exhilarating warm-up game of "Yes, and" just writing that sentence!)
So—how to make a game out of that?
Let's start with the warm-up games we've used, their form, and what they do.
- Firing Line. This game has one person on the firing line, and the rest of the group. The group takes turns throwing out random words; the player on the line has to respond with the first word she thinks of. This game breaks down your self-censorship.
- One Word at a Time. The players tell a story, each player contributing one word at a time. This one helps get the group working together, and further breaks down self-censorship.
- Yes, and! Each player throws out a declaration. Declarations must all begin with "Yes, and...", forcing players to build on each other's ideas without negation. This breaks down self-censorship even further, and trains players to build on each other's ideas without negation.
- See Me. After an initial description—perhaps as little as a name—players take turns adding descriptions, until someone says, "I don't see it." This game trains shared imagining.
- Color/Advance. Each player takes a turn telling a story. The player on your left tells you when you can advance the plot by saying, "Advance." The player on your right tells you when to fill in more color and description by saying, "Color." This helps each player develop better descriptions, and better pacing.
- Counting. The group must count to 20, but no one can say two consecutive numbers, and you can't form any detectable pattern. This trains players to listen to each other—what they say, but also their body language and other non-verbal communication.
Some of these seem easier to apply to a game than others—for instance, Yes, and!, See Me, and Color/Advance all seem easier to include in character creation, whereas a game like Firing Line would almost always stand out as something difficult to tie into the game.
So, true to the bioregional ethos, we want to start with the landscape itself. Perhaps here we can start with a few rounds of Yes, and! describing the landscape and adding features: rivers, streams, terrain, climate, and so on. We wouldn't want to get too specific—places play a different role in the game, that we'll need to define later—but this establishes the general lay of the land. While reading this over, I went back to sectors and zones in permaculture. Perhaps the bulk of this little game should focus on the sectors that most impact the region.
Next, we begin aging the characters, beginning with the oldest character, and stepping through seven-year increments until all the characters reach the present. Each iteration has an initiation. For the initiation, the player gets to set a scene at a place; she gets to add a specific place to the map. To add a place, she must draw it on the map and tell the story of its creation. The game will have to include an oracle and some guidelines with prompts for people who don't have anything specific in mind. I think descriptors, like "cleared by fire," or "poisoned with ancient pharmaceuticals," could apply like templates, adding new features. The combination of the place and any of these "templates" applied would set a starting point for the place's creation story, which the player could expand upon. That creation story would establish an explicitly defined theme for that place. The player will always have a choice of making the place featured in an initiation the character's home. These creation stories may provide an excellent place to apply Color/Advance. This could help short-circuit the problem we saw in playtests, where the initiation scenes went straight to the conflict, often making players wonder why they cared about the stakes. It really got to the heart of the immersion problems I found at Dreamation.
At this point, you'll have characters and a map. Perhaps, like Polaris, the game could use a small ritual to introduce these characters, once they have fully aged? See Me suits that need perfectly. A character's ritual introduction should provide all the preface necessary for a round of See Me.
If this works properly—and it will need some good playtesting to make sure—this could turn character and setting creation into a unified whole, a game unto itself, and a recitation of a myth of ongoing creation that sets the stage perfectly for some feral storyjamming.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Coming Home
I left off yesterday with the question: where do you find the storyjamming equivalent of re-incorporation and the hero's return? This forms a crucial part of the journey; the separation meets us in the ordinary daily life we inhabit, and then breaks us away from it to enter the liminal space where we participate in the raw power of ambiguity and plenipotential—where "anything is possible." But then, all too often, our stories stop. Instead of an ending that brings us back into the ordinary world, enriched by our experience, we cut the story off right there. Freytag's classic pyramid of dramatic structure seems lopsided against time: we spend nearly all of our time with rising tension, then hit our climax, and fall precipitously towards the end. If a story has a denouement at all, it happens quickly, like an epilogue. Many writers say that falling action has an inherently boring quality. But a meaningful story—a story worth telling—leads you along a journey. What does it say if it picks you up for a ride, shows you incredible things, and then abandons you in an unfamiliar neighborhood at the end of the night?
I think we have trouble with the re-incorporation phase of stories in our tradition because we come from a people who have spent the past 10,000 years homeless and rootless. In his book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning outlines the history of agriculture and its ancient unsustainability. As Derrick Jensen put it, "Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels." The center of Western civilization keeps moving west as the consequences of our actions chase us around the world, and we move west to find some place that we haven't yet turned into lifeless desert. We have told our children for generations now, at an increasing pace, that fortune and opportunity lie not at home, but over the western horizon. It has turned us into rootless wanderers, so our myths and legends honor rootlessness and wandering. Our classic heroes come, like Beowulf, from somewhere else, and when they have solved our problems, like the the classic hero of Western films and books, he rides off into the sunset—into the west.
We romanticize our pathology. Because of our experience of rootlessness, the theme of coming home holds little allure for us. We don't know what it means. I think that goes a long way to explaining why we have allowed this crucial part of our art to atrophy so severely. In a very real way, we've gotten to the very root of rewilding here—how to perform this grand group therapy to heal this wound and reconcile our abused Land and our dysfunctional Family. To become native means to come home. If we knew a good story about how to come home, we could follow it—and come home.
The Fifth World tries to tell a story about coming home from start to finish. Its strong bioregional focus keeps tying the way we live and the stories we tell back into the landscape. I have no excuse to neglect re-incorporation. Warm-up games seem comparatively easy—they move us towards the liminal storyjamming space we want to go. But a good re-incorporation moves us in the opposite direction, back towards our daily lives. In Soul Hunters, Willerslev describes storytelling itself as the re-incorporation of returned Yukaghir hunters. The return to human language re-humanizes them, and putting their experiences into human terms allows them to synthesize what has happened, and bring it back with them into the human community. From this perspective, the entire game seems like an act of re-incorporation; but even if it does work that way, we still have a complete journey sub-set into that re-incorporation, which still requires some re-incorporation of its own.
Willem has suggested a few techniques that provide some excellent starting ground for our explorations. Like warm-up games, you can think of re-incorporation in terms of the "cool-down" needed after exercising your other muscles. Willem also suggested using the ORID debrief method:
As Willem points out, this weaves the story back into our real lives, and brings it home. I think most gaming groups already do something like this, sticking around to discuss their game experience for some time after it has finished. But I also think that most gaming groups could get a lot more from that discussion with a framework like this. Just like we've had to find clever ways to weave warm-up games into the game itself, so that we don't feel like we haven't started the real game yet, or that we can cut this part, it will also take some clever design work to weave this part, too, into the game experience, so that players don't just throw it aside as good advice at best.
This pattern sets some clear design challenges, but I've done a lot of theorizing now. Tomorrow, I'll get down to some game ideas, and what kind of clever, elegant techniques we might come up with to make this work.
I think we have trouble with the re-incorporation phase of stories in our tradition because we come from a people who have spent the past 10,000 years homeless and rootless. In his book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning outlines the history of agriculture and its ancient unsustainability. As Derrick Jensen put it, "Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels." The center of Western civilization keeps moving west as the consequences of our actions chase us around the world, and we move west to find some place that we haven't yet turned into lifeless desert. We have told our children for generations now, at an increasing pace, that fortune and opportunity lie not at home, but over the western horizon. It has turned us into rootless wanderers, so our myths and legends honor rootlessness and wandering. Our classic heroes come, like Beowulf, from somewhere else, and when they have solved our problems, like the the classic hero of Western films and books, he rides off into the sunset—into the west.
We romanticize our pathology. Because of our experience of rootlessness, the theme of coming home holds little allure for us. We don't know what it means. I think that goes a long way to explaining why we have allowed this crucial part of our art to atrophy so severely. In a very real way, we've gotten to the very root of rewilding here—how to perform this grand group therapy to heal this wound and reconcile our abused Land and our dysfunctional Family. To become native means to come home. If we knew a good story about how to come home, we could follow it—and come home.
The Fifth World tries to tell a story about coming home from start to finish. Its strong bioregional focus keeps tying the way we live and the stories we tell back into the landscape. I have no excuse to neglect re-incorporation. Warm-up games seem comparatively easy—they move us towards the liminal storyjamming space we want to go. But a good re-incorporation moves us in the opposite direction, back towards our daily lives. In Soul Hunters, Willerslev describes storytelling itself as the re-incorporation of returned Yukaghir hunters. The return to human language re-humanizes them, and putting their experiences into human terms allows them to synthesize what has happened, and bring it back with them into the human community. From this perspective, the entire game seems like an act of re-incorporation; but even if it does work that way, we still have a complete journey sub-set into that re-incorporation, which still requires some re-incorporation of its own.
Willem has suggested a few techniques that provide some excellent starting ground for our explorations. Like warm-up games, you can think of re-incorporation in terms of the "cool-down" needed after exercising your other muscles. Willem also suggested using the ORID debrief method:
- Observe. What happened for you? What happened for the group? What critical moments did you experience? What did you learn from success and failure?
- Reflect. How did what happened compare with your expectations? With stories you had heard? With your interests? What personal "a ha" moments did you experience? Work group "a ha" moments?
- Interpret. What in this applies to your daily life? What defined this experience for you? For the group? What got in the way?
- Decide. Do you want to do some things differently in your daily life as a result of this?
As Willem points out, this weaves the story back into our real lives, and brings it home. I think most gaming groups already do something like this, sticking around to discuss their game experience for some time after it has finished. But I also think that most gaming groups could get a lot more from that discussion with a framework like this. Just like we've had to find clever ways to weave warm-up games into the game itself, so that we don't feel like we haven't started the real game yet, or that we can cut this part, it will also take some clever design work to weave this part, too, into the game experience, so that players don't just throw it aside as good advice at best.
This pattern sets some clear design challenges, but I've done a lot of theorizing now. Tomorrow, I'll get down to some game ideas, and what kind of clever, elegant techniques we might come up with to make this work.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
One Map
At GASPcon and Dreamation, I used a pre-generated region for the playtests, in order to get into regular play as quickly as possible. I do subscribe to the philosophy of Fred Hicks that character creation should play like a game unto itself, but for the purposes of conventions, sometimes compromises become necessary. Since I had a pre-generated region, I produced a map with all the information printed directly on it, invested some time into making it look nice, and had it printed at FedEx Office (the copier chain formerly known as Kinko's). At both cons, the map seemed like a big hit. It happened at Dreamation, too; plenty of people remarked on how unique and evocative they found the map.
In native cultures, that "native" part plays a big role. E. Richard Sorenson describes the sense of space in "preconquest consciousness", saying, "Geographic sensibility was simply affect relationships thrust out onto surroundings. Such geography was haphazard and rarely uniform. It fluctuated over time, from place-toplace and from individual-to-individual." (Sorenson, 1998)
That "real discovery of America" lies at the heart of the Fifth World. David Abram (1997) also writes powerfully about the centrality of place in the native sense of self, going so far as to claim that "[t]he local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind."
Naturally, with sentiments like that, a map of the setting has to play a major part in the Fifth World. But the v0.6.0 game that I ran at Dreamation has other maps, as well. The character sheet really presents a relationship map in disguise (I use the term "relationship map" here in its most generic sense, not in the same sense as, say, Ron Edward's Sorcerer). You have a character built up from relationships, so your character sheet really just shows you one nexus in a relationship map. Putting all the character sheets together, you could draw a single map for the story.
I also took an initial step towards another dimension of the setting map in v0.6.0, an admittedly weak step, but an attempt to define each place as an affect, as Sorenson describes it. Abram (1997), Ingold (2005) and Sheridan & Longboat (2006) all discuss the differing assumptions about where imagination comes from. While we assume that imagination comes solely from the human brain, native cultures experience imagination as an ecological function, something that belongs to a place, and they get to participate in it while at that place. In other words, they do not make up stories; they discover them in the landscape.
I wanted this to become an important part of the Fifth World; by defining places with themes, a story moves across a landscape of not just geographical changes, but changes in tone and emotion. I don't think v0.6.0 accomplished that very well, but the movement across the map could still become a movement through the story. In fact, that kind of mirroring of internal and external seems to strike precisely the magical realist tone the game needs.
Biologically, you don't go too far wrong to call an animal a bit of soil ecology that wraps itself up in a skin so it can go for a walk. And when you die, you go right back to living as soil ecology. So, the setting map has places connected by paths; the relationship map has characters connected by relationships; and then you can have a theme map, with themes connected by transitions. In the modern viewpoint, these all need to have their own maps; people don't map to places, and neither map to themes. In the native viewpoint, people exist as places, which express their theme.
So, why not have everything on one map?
You don't need a character sheet—everything you would have on your character sheet already exists on the map. When your relationship with your sister sours, the path connecting your place to hers becomes difficult—which again, strikes precisely the magical/animist realist tone the game needs. Themes arise from the place, and apply to a character like issues in Primetime Adventures. The issue map could also help generate the story. In a collaborative game, you may not want to throw trouble in the way of other players, but blocked paths and conflicting issues on the map can do that for you.
In v0.7.0, I think I can work out the whole game on one map. I don't know if any other game could do this, but because of the native perspective that the Fifth World aims to recreate, I might have a chance at it after all. Ambitious? Definitely. But I don't think this particular game will settle for anything less.
Do you have any ideas, advice, encouragement or feedback? I'd love to hear from you—please comment!
In native cultures, that "native" part plays a big role. E. Richard Sorenson describes the sense of space in "preconquest consciousness", saying, "Geographic sensibility was simply affect relationships thrust out onto surroundings. Such geography was haphazard and rarely uniform. It fluctuated over time, from place-toplace and from individual-to-individual." (Sorenson, 1998)
In indigenous societies such as the Native Americans and also the Australian Aborigines, great importance attaches to the relatedness of a person to a particular named place. Such a person might introduce themselves by saying: "I am from this place, and my father's family comes from these mountains, and my mother's from this river." It is only after describing in some detail their relationship to that place, that land, that they can proceed with the business at hand. In Euro-American society, we are much more likely to introduce ourselves and friends by saying "what they do," their profession, accomplishments, and the like. We don't know where we are "from" very often; even if we own a house somewhere, we might not really be "inhabiting" that place with consciousness, or feel at home and rooted there. The Indo-European tribes have always been nomads, wanderers, emigrants and invaders. They invaded Europe, conquering and dominating the aboriginal civilization known as Old Europe, thousands of years before they set sail for the so-called "New World." It has been aptly said, that as the Euro-American descendants of the European invaders and colonizers begin to understand the true story of what happened, perhaps the time for the real discovery of America has now come. (Metzner, 1999).
That "real discovery of America" lies at the heart of the Fifth World. David Abram (1997) also writes powerfully about the centrality of place in the native sense of self, going so far as to claim that "[t]he local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind."
Naturally, with sentiments like that, a map of the setting has to play a major part in the Fifth World. But the v0.6.0 game that I ran at Dreamation has other maps, as well. The character sheet really presents a relationship map in disguise (I use the term "relationship map" here in its most generic sense, not in the same sense as, say, Ron Edward's Sorcerer). You have a character built up from relationships, so your character sheet really just shows you one nexus in a relationship map. Putting all the character sheets together, you could draw a single map for the story.
I also took an initial step towards another dimension of the setting map in v0.6.0, an admittedly weak step, but an attempt to define each place as an affect, as Sorenson describes it. Abram (1997), Ingold (2005) and Sheridan & Longboat (2006) all discuss the differing assumptions about where imagination comes from. While we assume that imagination comes solely from the human brain, native cultures experience imagination as an ecological function, something that belongs to a place, and they get to participate in it while at that place. In other words, they do not make up stories; they discover them in the landscape.
I wanted this to become an important part of the Fifth World; by defining places with themes, a story moves across a landscape of not just geographical changes, but changes in tone and emotion. I don't think v0.6.0 accomplished that very well, but the movement across the map could still become a movement through the story. In fact, that kind of mirroring of internal and external seems to strike precisely the magical realist tone the game needs.
Biologically, you don't go too far wrong to call an animal a bit of soil ecology that wraps itself up in a skin so it can go for a walk. And when you die, you go right back to living as soil ecology. So, the setting map has places connected by paths; the relationship map has characters connected by relationships; and then you can have a theme map, with themes connected by transitions. In the modern viewpoint, these all need to have their own maps; people don't map to places, and neither map to themes. In the native viewpoint, people exist as places, which express their theme.
So, why not have everything on one map?
You don't need a character sheet—everything you would have on your character sheet already exists on the map. When your relationship with your sister sours, the path connecting your place to hers becomes difficult—which again, strikes precisely the magical/animist realist tone the game needs. Themes arise from the place, and apply to a character like issues in Primetime Adventures. The issue map could also help generate the story. In a collaborative game, you may not want to throw trouble in the way of other players, but blocked paths and conflicting issues on the map can do that for you.
In v0.7.0, I think I can work out the whole game on one map. I don't know if any other game could do this, but because of the native perspective that the Fifth World aims to recreate, I might have a chance at it after all. Ambitious? Definitely. But I don't think this particular game will settle for anything less.
Do you have any ideas, advice, encouragement or feedback? I'd love to hear from you—please comment!
- Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage.
- Ingold, T. (2005). The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge.
- Metzner, R. (1995). The place and the story: where ecopsychology and bioregionalism meet, The Trumpeter, 12:3
- Sheridan, J. & Longboat, R.D., The Haudenosanee imagination and the ecology of the sacred, Space and Culture, 9:4, pp. 365-381
- Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness, In Helmut Wautischer, Tribal epistemologies: essays in the philosophy of anthropology. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
The Land of the Three Rivers
Just finished retooling the boon trees for the places in the Land of the Three Rivers. I know that doesn't make much sense with the rules currently available, but it's all part of the v0.5.1 I'm trying to get finished this week. Tomorrow, I'll do the demons (things that grow out of the Underworld, i.e., the soil), and on Thursday, I'll do the angels (things that move about in the Overworld, i.e., the atmosphere, including humans). Instead of the four main pillars of their way of life, I've made the Archangels and Archdemons the "Animal Masters," now that I think I understand them a little better. The four big spirits crucial to daily life are now the Four Winds. Not to worry, though, the Four Winds and the Eight Totems still make up the Twelve Apostles.
I'm rather liking this iteration. I have some early design guidelines for crafting boon trees, and it makes designing spirits a whole lot easier. That's really been the hardest part of this--detailing even a useful fraction of the spirits involved in the land. With this, my job gets a lot easier.
Of course, come February, I'll have a whole new task to worry about: getting enough of the Restless Land together to present at Dreamation!
If you haven't found it yet, I've been keeping much more regular updates on Twitter.
I'm rather liking this iteration. I have some early design guidelines for crafting boon trees, and it makes designing spirits a whole lot easier. That's really been the hardest part of this--detailing even a useful fraction of the spirits involved in the land. With this, my job gets a lot easier.
Of course, come February, I'll have a whole new task to worry about: getting enough of the Restless Land together to present at Dreamation!
If you haven't found it yet, I've been keeping much more regular updates on Twitter.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Consulting the Oracles
I haven't played In a Wicked Age, though I'd very much like to, and all the more since reading Willem's actual play report on it, and seeing everything he accomplished with an animist oracle and a myth-map (to say nothing of some excellent ideas on how I can help my shy, timid wife bring out her inner storyteller). I've heard a good deal about the Oracle concept that Vincent Baker included in the game, and while listening to episode 3 of "The Game that May Be" (great podcast, by the way, no matter how much my inner E-Prime editor cringes every time I hear the title), I remembered what we did with the Statue of Liberty and the Anayok. We all know that every post-apocalyptic setting must feature the Statue of Liberty as a touchstone to establish how the setting relates to our current time, even when you set it in Las Vegas—or did only I catch that opening shot in the Resident Evil: Extinction TV ad? Well, we took our cue from one of Michael Green's images from Afterculture collection, showing a girl in a small boat, sailing away from a mostly-submerged Statue of Liberty. Imagine what the sunken city of New York would look like in four hundred years, with heaps of strange, red boxes jutting out of the ocean at all angles (the remains of rusted skyscrapers, many toppled over), and then this blue woman, up to her chest with the sea, rises up before you. We put a single hermit living in the observation deck shouting out prophecies, and decided that the Anayok called her the Water Oracle. Well, as I listened to Mick describing the Oracles of Liam, I realized, these ideas go together quite nicely.
Now I wonder what we could do with bioregional oracles. Every region could have its own oracle, that could use playing cards or tarot cards to dispense the stories that resonate through that bioregion. Perhaps we could even make adventures out of just going to consult the oracle in the first place. But I think this gives us another thing to include in our region books—which makes me think, more and more, that we'll end up with a fairly small core rulebook, and a series of nice, crunchy regional books.
Now I wonder what we could do with bioregional oracles. Every region could have its own oracle, that could use playing cards or tarot cards to dispense the stories that resonate through that bioregion. Perhaps we could even make adventures out of just going to consult the oracle in the first place. But I think this gives us another thing to include in our region books—which makes me think, more and more, that we'll end up with a fairly small core rulebook, and a series of nice, crunchy regional books.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Setting, Place & Character
For a while now, I've heard about the idea (often in Story Games) of players collaboratively creating the setting in which their story takes place. I love this idea. But The Fifth World began from a discussion of open source gaming, and how you really need an open source setting, not just open source rules. For a while, I thought, perhaps, as awesome as it sounds to have collaborative setting creation, it just didn't fit with this game.
Then I read Tim Ingold's "To Journey Along a Way of Life: Maps, Wayfinding and Navigation," which he includes as the thirteenth chapter of The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (this one appearing under the "Dwelling" heading).
There, in his typical fashion, Ingold challenges the idea that we navigate by "mental maps," drawing an analogy of maps to navigation as writing to communication. Like writing, maps follow from the "building perspective," an attempt to detach ourselves from an engagement with the world, to give us an impossible "god's eye view" where we can somehow, paradoxically, know the world without participating in it. Now, Ingold does distinguish between "mapping" and "mapmaking," along the same lines as one would distinguish between "speaking" and "writing." When we give directions, we map; we use that word, "map," as a verb here. We do something. We map something out for someone. When we make a map, we deal with a noun instead: we shift our focus from the process of mapping, to the relic of mapping, the map itself. Similarly, writing shifts our focus from communicating, to the relic of communicating, the form of the letter left behind.
But getting more to the point, the map shows us a region as a continuous plane, but this does not reflect our phenomenological experience. Consider when you yourself give directions: do you orient the lost person to a map, or do you tell them, "go down that way until you cross the bridge, then make a left and go up the hill"? In other words, do you give them a map, or tell them a story? Ingold contrasts wayfinding to using maps; we do not navigate by mental maps, but rather, following stories. We experience journeys as narratives, a continually changing landscape and an experience in our muscles and bodies.
We see this related directly in how traditional societies relate to place, as Ingold highlights. Australian Aboriginal songlines provide only the most well-known example. With maps, we plot a course from one location to another through space, all idealized concepts, detached from any necessary experience with the world (readers of David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous may recall his discussion of Euclidean space). Ingold offers a definition of a region as a matrix of places connected by paths. Places exist as crossroads of paths, as distinct nodes of story and human participation. Camp sites and watering holes mark some of the most important places in Australian Aboriginal regions. Paths connect these places, formed from many, many journeys between them. Ingold uses the example of one Aboriginal group that makes drawings of these regions, making circles for each place and drawing lines between them.
This gave me the perspective I needed to put together these two, seemingly conflicted, design goals.
Places make for a particular kind of character, with relationships all their own. Characters have relationships with particular places. Among Australia's Aboriginal people, many believe that a child's life comes from the place where he first kicks. The mother and father having sex gives the child flesh, but he doesn't come to life until that place gives him or her life. From Tom Brown and his students, we get the concept of the "sit spot," and its powerful potential for connecting us to place, which seems like a very similar practice.
Paths look an awful lot like relationships between Place characters, and give you stories of the journey between them. Such things could give you the fun parts of a "random encounter," without the absurdity of its, well, randomness. You might encounter difficulties getting from one place to another, but such difficulties would arise from the story of that journey; as you might put it in terms of the Aboriginal Dreaming, becoming the Ancestor, and reliving his journey, and thus remaking the world. It ties in quite beautifully to what we so often see as a paradox of tradition and innovation.
Take a set of places and the paths connecting them, and you have a region; a watershed, for instance. We can include rules for making your own regions and provide example regions. When you create your character, you can create a Place character he or she relates to. With some framing mechanics we'll get to later on, defining the setting for a scene at a particular Place will give some characters bonuses, and others perhaps penalties, depending on their relationships to that Place. You can publish the regions you make to the wiki, where others might decide to use them, just like the Town Archive for Dogs in the Vineyard, or the Oracles collection for In a Wicked Age, and we'll have rules for how to add new places to existing regions.
So you still can participate in a truly massively-multiplayer world, and still come together and collaborate to create a vision of your own region in the Fifth World, and find the stories of the Places that matter to you, and the Paths that connect them.
Then I read Tim Ingold's "To Journey Along a Way of Life: Maps, Wayfinding and Navigation," which he includes as the thirteenth chapter of The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (this one appearing under the "Dwelling" heading).
There, in his typical fashion, Ingold challenges the idea that we navigate by "mental maps," drawing an analogy of maps to navigation as writing to communication. Like writing, maps follow from the "building perspective," an attempt to detach ourselves from an engagement with the world, to give us an impossible "god's eye view" where we can somehow, paradoxically, know the world without participating in it. Now, Ingold does distinguish between "mapping" and "mapmaking," along the same lines as one would distinguish between "speaking" and "writing." When we give directions, we map; we use that word, "map," as a verb here. We do something. We map something out for someone. When we make a map, we deal with a noun instead: we shift our focus from the process of mapping, to the relic of mapping, the map itself. Similarly, writing shifts our focus from communicating, to the relic of communicating, the form of the letter left behind.
But getting more to the point, the map shows us a region as a continuous plane, but this does not reflect our phenomenological experience. Consider when you yourself give directions: do you orient the lost person to a map, or do you tell them, "go down that way until you cross the bridge, then make a left and go up the hill"? In other words, do you give them a map, or tell them a story? Ingold contrasts wayfinding to using maps; we do not navigate by mental maps, but rather, following stories. We experience journeys as narratives, a continually changing landscape and an experience in our muscles and bodies.
We see this related directly in how traditional societies relate to place, as Ingold highlights. Australian Aboriginal songlines provide only the most well-known example. With maps, we plot a course from one location to another through space, all idealized concepts, detached from any necessary experience with the world (readers of David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous may recall his discussion of Euclidean space). Ingold offers a definition of a region as a matrix of places connected by paths. Places exist as crossroads of paths, as distinct nodes of story and human participation. Camp sites and watering holes mark some of the most important places in Australian Aboriginal regions. Paths connect these places, formed from many, many journeys between them. Ingold uses the example of one Aboriginal group that makes drawings of these regions, making circles for each place and drawing lines between them.
This gave me the perspective I needed to put together these two, seemingly conflicted, design goals.
Places make for a particular kind of character, with relationships all their own. Characters have relationships with particular places. Among Australia's Aboriginal people, many believe that a child's life comes from the place where he first kicks. The mother and father having sex gives the child flesh, but he doesn't come to life until that place gives him or her life. From Tom Brown and his students, we get the concept of the "sit spot," and its powerful potential for connecting us to place, which seems like a very similar practice.
Paths look an awful lot like relationships between Place characters, and give you stories of the journey between them. Such things could give you the fun parts of a "random encounter," without the absurdity of its, well, randomness. You might encounter difficulties getting from one place to another, but such difficulties would arise from the story of that journey; as you might put it in terms of the Aboriginal Dreaming, becoming the Ancestor, and reliving his journey, and thus remaking the world. It ties in quite beautifully to what we so often see as a paradox of tradition and innovation.
Take a set of places and the paths connecting them, and you have a region; a watershed, for instance. We can include rules for making your own regions and provide example regions. When you create your character, you can create a Place character he or she relates to. With some framing mechanics we'll get to later on, defining the setting for a scene at a particular Place will give some characters bonuses, and others perhaps penalties, depending on their relationships to that Place. You can publish the regions you make to the wiki, where others might decide to use them, just like the Town Archive for Dogs in the Vineyard, or the Oracles collection for In a Wicked Age, and we'll have rules for how to add new places to existing regions.
So you still can participate in a truly massively-multiplayer world, and still come together and collaborate to create a vision of your own region in the Fifth World, and find the stories of the Places that matter to you, and the Paths that connect them.
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