A Little Close to Home

I started a thread on Story Games asking folks what they'd look for in a game about exploration. I got a lot of good suggestions from that thread, but, at the risk of seeming like I just have an interest in patting the backs of people who follow my blog here and comment after yesterday's post thanking Michael Wenman, I really got a great suggestion there from Bill White. He wrote:

I think there was something powerful in The Fifth World's transformation of a modern landscape into a post-urban one. It's like that old Talking Heads song: "Here was a parking lot; now it's all covered with daisies." Make that a part of play: lay out a roadmap of the place you'd like to see transformed and have one output of play be alterations to the modern landscape. Another output of play then becomes integrating these newly defined zones into the post-urban politico-spiritual economy.

I could've jumped out of my chair when I read that. Yes! That totally captured what I wanted from the game. It captured what had excited me so much when I first saw Michael Green's Afterculture, that consideration of a future where the world has become magical—as Michael Green would put it, "cool"—again. A re-enchanted world, a world once again recognizably more-than-human.

So, now I wonder, what if you had to set every scene in a place you knew? Then, you had to tell us what that place looked like 400 years in the future? It seems like it could fit well with a mechanic built for awareness, where you have to spend points to add details to the scene.

I feel pretty excited about this. What do you think?

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?

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"):

• 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.

A Game of Movement

What do we mean when we call something "alive"? The very word biology means, in Greek, "the study of life," yet despite significant efforts, biologists have never managed to come up with a solid, scientific definition for life. The attempts invariably focus on the criteria for life, and the best shot so far points to homeostasis, organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli and reproduction. Perhaps the pursuit has so far failed because it fundamentally looks in the wrong direction--in seeing the universe as a collection of objects, each defined by its unique characteristics--if "life" indicates not an object but a process, might we have some better luck at figuring out what we mean by it? We could not say "that is alive," but we could say, "that lives."

In Ojibwa, the word "bema.diziwa.d" comes closest to our phrase, "living things," and translates literally as "those who continue in the state of being alive," though we might more accurately gloss it as "those who have power." (Black, 1977) That really just moves the question, though, to what we mean by "power."

Since we talk about roleplaying games here, I should begin with mana. Before it signified a wizard's pool of magical potency in games, it existed as a term in Oceania, and few terms in the world have ever suffered as much abuse. Anthropologists forced it into a linear model of cultural evolution, casting it as an impersonal magical force that pervaded the world, and that magicians could manipulate. They saw this as the most primitive type of religion, eventually giving way to polytheism that concentrated that magical potency in a pantheon of gods, then monotheism which concentrated that power in a single god, and finally, at the apex of cultural evolution, the enlightened, scientific atheist, who understood the truth that the world operated according to impersonal forces. But that theory had more to do with the imagination of Western anthropologists than what Oceanian peoples meant by the term. To them, mana meant potency, or "power." They would describe a skilled craftsman, a capable chief, or a talented hunter as mana-ful. Mana meant something more along the lines of skill, potential, power, or capacity, than anything as mystical or supernatural as the ethnographers dreamed. Certainly, I, too, have greatly abbreviated the full discussion here, and the native concept has many nuances and complications, but I think, in general, I can stand by the statement that mana, in its original sense, has much more to do with the kind of power you'd find in your muscles than the kind of power your level blood elf taps in World of Warcraft.

Closer to home, the concept of "orenda" has a similar history, having at one point seen use almost as often as mana and for much the same purpose. J.N.B. Hewitt's influential 1902 article in American Anthropologist, "Orenda and a Definition of Religion" (Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1902), pp. 33-46) offered the word and its reference to a mystical, impersonal force pervading the world. But Hewitt offers a mistranslation at best; the better term, uki, exists in tension withutkon (sometimes also spelled utgon in English). Hewitt's elevation of "orenda" over utkon fundamentally breaks the traditional Haudenosaunee perspective, which put the two in equal tension. Uki benefitted life, while utkon described the impacts of the Trickster. Too often, when Westerners have noticed both concepts, they have simplified them into a Manichaean good/evil dichotomy. My own understanding seems to put them more in relation as things that promote ecological succession, and things that cut it back. A world of only uki would become a stagnant forest of nothing but towering old trees, while a world of only utkon would look, well, distressingly similar to the world civilization has left us. But a healthy world emerges from the interplay of both forces. Seneca forestry, for instance, often used fire to clear out fields, in a clear wielding of utkon, yet that created forests with varied successional stages, which maximized edge and thus maximized biodiversity.

But I see one process running through Oceanic mana and Haudenosaunee uki and utkon: change. We asked before, what do we mean by "power"? I think this short analysis points us towards a clear answer: the power to change, or the power to move. Oceanic mana seems to take a unitary view of change, while the Haudenosaunee concept of uki and utkon specifies change in one of two directions. No doubt other traditions would see change along other axes; might the Lakota medicine wheel chart change going out to one of the four cardinal directions, for instance? But we fundamentally, always mean change, regardless of the direction of that change. "Those who remain in the state of being alive" means "those who keep changing." To live means to change, constantly, to engage a changing world, to open yourself for the world to change you, and for you to change the world.

Before, I asked about The Fifth World as a game of awareness, but now I see that awareness just means one kind of movement (Noë, 2005; Ingold, 2005). Dan Moonhawk Alford described native modes of perception by pointing to "watching the dancing rather than the dancers — the dancers fade back- into the background as you just describe the rhythms and the motions of what is." Or, according to Alford's account of a conference with American Indians and quantum physicists:

After listening to the physicists and American Indians talk for a few days, it struck me that the way physicists use the term potential, or quantum potential, is nearly identical to the way Native Americans use the term spirit. They all agreed there was something similar going on.

Potential, spirit, life means change and movement. When we stop changing, we stop living. It has such an elegant beauty to it, and it really refocuses my efforts. The Fifth World should focus to become a game of movement.

• Black, M.B. (1977). Ojibwa power belief system. In Fogelson, R.D. & Adams, R.N. (Eds.) The anthropology of power: ethnographic studies from Asia, Oceania and the New World. New York: Academic Press, pp. 141-151


• Ingold, T. (2005). Stop, look and listen! Vision, hearing and human movement. In Ingold, T. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge, pp. 241-287


• Noë, A. Action in perception. Cambridge: MIT Press.