Ganakagok

I've taken lessons from Ganakagok already, but only on Saturday did I get to play it. Bill came to GASPcon 10 to run it, and I made a point of getting into his game. I walked away with a book and a card deck; I hope to run it this weekend, and at the next regular GASP Games Day.

Something kind of magical happens in a game of Ganakagok, it seems. Bill's designed the cards so well that you could really believe in their divinatory power. So often, you get just the right card, that you might swear that someone rigged the deck. I think this involves more than just a common Barnum effect, where people naturally interpret a vague, general statement as something eerily specific, though that no doubt plays a part. Rather, Bill's designed the deck so well that the kinds of situations that the Nitu face come up in it regularly. More than just sufficiently ambiguous meanings, these cards have just the right punch and context to really make them matter.

Much of the game revolves around the interpretation of those cards. When we roll dice, we roll to see who will get to interpret the cards, and what consequences will follow from that struggle. That gives the game a definite momentum. Each interpretation builds on the last; the game gains a forward motion as we rush towards its climax.

Bill's called this the "Mythopoietic Edition," and I think he has picked just the right word for it. He's designed a game that really does seem to create myths, consistently and reliably. He calls it "a quasi-Inuit Silmarillion" (referring to the poetic elven mythology that J.R.R. Tolkien invented).

Issues of cultural appropriation do arise out of this, and while I, too, cringed at phrases like, "primitive and icy," overall, I admire how Bill has handled the situation—particularly upon reading his most recent blog entry, where he advised people who have enjoyed the game to donate to the Nunavut Arts and Crafts Association.

While the cards you draw will create a different world with each game, you can never get very far from the stars disappearing from the night sky, and the inevitability of the morning. Though the world you've known differs from one game to the next, that world always comes to an end. Your character stands out as a protagonist because you recognize this earlier than most others. You have your hope for what the change could mean, and your fear for what it might mean. You have the balance of Good and Bad Medicine in the world, amongst the People, and for yourself. Ultimately, this game really digs into how we cope with inevitable disaster. The real world lets you take your pick:—global warming, peak oil, mass extinction, et cetera ad nauseam. In this game, the coming change—the Morning—has definite positive aspects, as well as negative. You almost certainly won't succeed in having more Good Medicine than Bad for the world, the people, and all of your characters. Even one will give you a challenge. So this change will include some amount of tragedy. Yet it doesn't need to mean unmitigated tragedy. As much as this game deals with fear and resistance to change, it also deals with embracing change, and finding hope in it. For that, I think Ganakagok has some pretty powerful, good medicine for us all. It leads you through a myth all about how the world will change, and how we deal with the need to face that reality—pretty much exactly what we all need right about now.

A Narrative Game Economy of Making You Look Awesome

In discussing lessons I'd learned from Ganakagok, the question of the game economy came up. I really like the balance of good and bad medicine in Ganakagok, and thought of something very inspired by Primetime Adventures. The game starts with an amount of fate determined by the number of players. The Genius loci spends fate to introduce obstacles. Spent fate becomes a pool from which players can award one another will, and spent will goes back into fate.

This has a lot to recommend it, including the dynamic of will vs. fate and good medicine vs. bad, and a tested narrative economy (tested by Primetime Adventures). It allows the Genius loci player to complicate the story without breaking the cooperative feel; since you'll need will to complete the game, the only way to free up will involves facing adversity. So you choose to introduce adversity in order to free up will—you make things harder not in an adversarial way, but because facing adversity now offers the only route forward. You choose the harder path on purpose. I find that alone a good enough reason to do it. But it also addresses another issue that one of my close advisors raised: namely, that will in the game seems to reflect a very modern, anthropocentric view of it. This dynamic makes will (and fate) something you find in the region, something you breathe in and breathe out. I could even add something so that when fate runs out, really bad things start to happen, so you need to keep a balance between will and fate—again, like that balance of good medicine and bad medicine I liked so much in Ganakagok.

But, Willem raised an important concern about this. Does Primetime Adventures' fan mail mechanism create a "punishment by rewards"?

In his 1993 book, Punishment by Rewards, [Alfie] Kohn argued that rewards are ways to manipulate student behavior. He cautioned teachers that rewards can be most damaging when the task being rewarded is already intrinsically motivating to the student. A student who is praised every time he or she completes math facts may lose interest in the task, especially if math comes easily for him or her. (Powell & Caseau, 2004, p. 180)

Or, to quote Marshall Burns in a recent post to Cultures of Play, "They're supposed to be reward mechanics, but I don't see the reward. I don't want points for doing dynamic, interesting character stuff. That's fun by itself! What could I possibly gain from points?" A very interesting point; one I didn't really get fully at first, but chewing it over longer, I began to really understand.

That made me start thinking about Keys in The Shadow of Yesterday. If you haven't spent a lot of time with indie games, these provide a means for a character to declare, at creation, what kinds of things he or she wants to advance in. In Dungeons & Dragons, every character has the same Key: they kill monsters to advance. In The Shadow of Yesterday you could advance from killing monsters, or from protecting someone or something, or from acting in a certain manner, etc. Characters get XP when they act in accordance with their Keys. It contains rules for changing keys, so that the game can provide a pacing mechanic for character development through the story—not just characters becoming more powerful, but characters changing through the story.

Which brings me to this morning, listening to the latest episode of The Voice of the Revolution. In the Pravda section, Paul Tevis—I apologize again—I got his name wrong when I met him briefly at Dreamation, too—Ennie-award-winning Paul Fucking Tevis—discussed playing Judd Karlman's hack of The Shadow of Yesterday, 1st Quest. Instead of Keys, 1st Quest uses "Banners." They act like Keys, except that in addition to your character advancing when you act on your Banner, other characters also advance when they act on your Banner. So, your Banner to protect a little girl allows you to advance whenever you protect the little girl, but it also allows my character to advance whenever I threaten that little girl, giving you the opportunity to protect her.

"I'm gonna make you awesome" has a long history in improvisational theater, and Story Game hippies have talked about it for a long time. Most recently, a great thread on Cultures of Play got started discussing this.

Say someone is playing the incredible hulk. The hulk yells, screams, roars, and flexes his muscles. This helps sell that he is very strong and not to be messed with. But it is thin and fragile. Say the hulk punches a car. That's pretty strong. But if the car doesn't react, doesn't break, doesn't move, then the hulk looks weak. I'd say in contrast all his previous muscle flexing now makes him look like an idiot in context to not being able to break the car. On the other hand, if the car exploded into a million pieces, that sells to me waaaaay more than anything the person playing the hulk could have done. The reaction cements the perception being communicated.

I'd much rather the 5 other players in a game try to make me look cool rather than me trying to do so alone. Hell, if the other 5 were making me look cool, I wouldn't have to. They would do a better job and I can focus on making them look cool.

In wrestling, the villain is in charge of making the hero look sympathetic. And the hero is in charge of making the villain look like a threat. This codependent relationship works amazingly. And way better than if the villain was primarily interested in making themselves look like a threat independently.

1st Quest's Banners offer a brilliant mechanic to provide precisely that kind of play, and it suggests a brilliant solution to my own problem of the narrative economy in the Fifth World. An "RP reward" falls into the trap of "punishment by rewards," because good roleplay has intrinsic rewards. But what about selling your character concept—making you look awesome? What if, instead of getting will from the pool of spent fate for "good RP" in general, I can reward you with will whenever you hit my issue? You can never award yourself will; you can only give it to other players, and you give it to them when they sell your pre-established issue, your "Banner."

I really like this idea. I think, taken all together, this solves a lot of problems, and could really come together to make something great. What do you think?

• Powell, R.G. & Caseau, D., 2004. Classroom Communication and Diversity. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lessons from Ganakagok

I haven't played Ganakagok, but I've taken some lessons from it already.

First, seat players in order of character age. That means that the game starts with the young people going out boldly, making mistakes, and generally wreaking havoc, which means that the elders have to step in and fix things. Pure genius, and I plan to just steal that part outright.

Second, the balance of good medicine and bad medicine that drives the game. This one I can't steal outright, but it drives home how the gameplay of the Fifth World has so far failed to really hit the notes it needs to. Gameplay should focus on the tension of living in a world of relationships; different relationships pull you in different, even mutually exclusive, directions. You need to spend a lot of time building up those relationships, because you burn through them when you find yourself in need, and you need to balance out the time, energy, and attention you give to each one.

How to achieve that with simple, elegant rules, well, there you have my present predicament.

I have tossed around the idea of Fate to balance Will; when you spend Will, it goes towards Fate, which goes towards complications. I know that isn't a good answer in itself, but it might give me a start. I don't know. I'd love to hear your ideas!

Dreamation Report

Dreamation has been great. I got to meet some awesome people, especially Bill White, the designer of Ganakagok. First, I saw the gameplay in my two playtests veer towards grisly cannibalism. Giuli & I even discussed how often the game seems to trend towards things we really have no interest in promoting. In play, the Fifth World always seems to wind up as a typically savage, violent, post-apocalyptic world. Seeing Ganakagok in action, even just a little bit, gave me a glimpse of the alternative. Giuli's report on how her game of Brennan Taylor's How We Came to Live Here sounded like it really produced something powerful, meaningful and mythic from everyone's contributions, too. It all makes me realize just how far the Fifth World has to go. I'll continue the v0.6.0 playtests, but I've already come up with some ideas for v0.7.0, including some Fate mechanics to oppose Will, and possibly eliminating the character sheet entirely, to put everything on the map.