The Fifth World Movies: Avatar

I actually feel very ambivalent about Avatar, so I hesitate to call this an "endorsement." But it sparked some good discussions with the people I went to see it with, which certainly counts for something. Moreover, the points that bother me about Avatar have some significant connections to The Fifth World.

Visually, the movie awes. It even has its moments as a story. I especially liked the part where Neytiri calls Jake a baby. The montage of the outsider learning Na'vi traditions hit the high notes for me, including the language, and even tracking. The intelligent root system—ethernet cords in animals' hair notwithstanding—presents an only slightly more magical version of the mycorrhizal networks that really do knit Earth's continents into enormous organisms (even though the movie's presentation seems to suggest that Earth has nothing like this).

I also liked that the genocide has no real stand-out villains. Even the colonel acts as he does because he has gotten hurt before. He wants to protect his people, and his inability to do so makes him increasingly paranoid. He becomes more and more violent not because of any moral failing, but because of the impact of living in the system he does. The businessman in charge of the whole operation cares about the bottom line; the scientists care, but their arrogance and their need to cast everything in their own terms constantly gets in their way. The genocide doesn't happen because of a villain; he happens because of the systemic problems and relationships between these different people, pushing them forward towards an end that none of them, on their own, particularly wants. Just like real life.

That said, I can hardly deny the deeply disturbing, racist undertones in the movie—once again, the condescending conceit that native people need a big, strong white male to come save them, right down to the "Indian Princess" story. Will Heaven summed this up much better in The Telegraph. Annalee Newitz puts it quite well on io9:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color—their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It's not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it's not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It's a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

I went to see the film with these things in mind. I probably wouldn't have gone on my own because of this, but my brother wanted to see it, and I hadn't passed such absolute judgment based simply on the report of others that I would refuse to see it myself.

First, might it sometimes take a European to fend off other Europeans? After all, consider the depths of sociopathic depravity we see from the humans in Avatar (which only dimly mirrors the sociopathic depravity of Europeans who invaded the Americas, Africa and Australia). They do more than simply "displace" people, they rip them from a rootedness in a particular place that affects them in ways not unlike a collective frontal lobotomy. That takes a kind of bloody-mindedness, a ruthlessness and cruelty—or at the very least, a kind of devastating ignorance—that no healthy person can really understand. To know what they'll do, you might need someone as damaged as they to think in such, frankly, psychotic terms.

Second, it seems to me that Jake Sully's rise to Na'vi savior came from precisely what Neytiri said of him at the start: he acts like a baby. He stumbles about, knowing nothing. He heard the story of Toruk Makto, but he lacks a real feel for it. Most of us have heard the story of Moses, but we wouldn't try parting a sea. Someone else, having heard the story only once, might not know better; and if it worked, well then! Seen in this light, Jake Sully becomes the hero—both when entering Na'vi society, and when becoming the "great white savior"—precisely because of his ignorance, and his willingness to admit his ignorance. He does something amazing not because he is amazing, but because he doesn't know better, so he tries.

I don't think these perspectives absolve Avatar of its faults. I don't see much ground for taking these as authorial intent. They provide what seems to me like the most generous reading possible, and even then, I have to wonder to what degree these serve simply as the rationalizations of another white guy?

I think I liked Avatar most not for the film itself, but for the discussions it sparked—discussions of race, identity, cultural appropriation, imperialism, privilege and white guilt. The Fifth World raises these questions, too. I hope to handle them somewhat more honestly, though.

Cool Ideas

In my last post, Willem suggested something really cool. In Dogs in the Vineyard, you create towns ripe with moral quandaries for the Dogs to judge (and thus, suck them into one moral dilemma after another). You do this by using a step-by-step template that plays along with the Christian view of sin: all sin begins with Pride, Pride leads to Injustice, etc. For each step, you introduce the problem. So, what Pride lies at the root of this problem? What Injustice did it lead to? And so on.

You have an animist equivalent: all problems begin with unmet obligations. Unmet obligations lead to people feeling taken advantage of. People feeling taken advantage of leads to withdrawing their help. Withdrawing help leads to mutual resentment, and mutual resentment might lead to violence. So, for example, some hunters take 21 deer, when they agreed to only take 20. The deer feel taken advantage of, so they withdraw their help. The people go hungry, so they begin to resent the deer. How long will this go before the humans and the deer start escalating their resentment to violence?

The poem offers a really good framework for this, too. What obligation has someone failed to meet? An obligation between persons? Between families? Between villages? Between peoples (as in the preceding example, between the human people and the deer people)? Then, just like Dogs, we escalate: how does the other group feel taken advantage of? What help do they withdraw? We can do this around the table, so we all have a hand in escalating the situation.

Now, I think players only have so much patience for "set up" time, so I think this option might mean eliminating the cycles by which we'd previously created characters from places. But we could introduce characters quickly, who we flesh out in play, and they get to unravel this whole mess. Just like Dogs, you've escalated past the point where simple measures would solve the problem. You've got mutual resentment and all kinds of unrecognized obligations. How do you fix that situation?

I also looked at John Harper's Lady Blackbird again recently. My brother ran Spirit of the Season last week, and it has me really excited about FATE. It reminded me of how simple and fun the game played. Lady Blackbird seems even faster and simpler. It made me wonder about simply designing The Fifth World as a simplified FATE game. I've heard good things about Chronica Feudalis lately, too, and it does much the same thing. That idea especially appealed; perhaps, instead of my misunderstanding of the term "roleplaying poem," I could follow John Harper's lead, and simply design a single-page, front and back, beautifully laid-out game.

And yet, I ultimately came back around to the ideas I'd started with, with coins for power and players pursuing their ambitions. I share these as unequivocally cool ideas—but I think this will work better. I told myself years ago that I'd know I finally had a good system when I stopped bouncing around all the time, and when the ideas I came up with started to focus on details instead of the most basic elements of gameplay. Dare I hope that I've finally reached that point?

Putting Debt in the Fruitful Void

A lot of Story Games got started with disaffected World of Darkness players. They loved what the "Storyteller" games promised: games about story and character, and all those things. But they didn't really get that. The Storyteller System just provided another game about combat. That disappointment led to some of the first indie games, which began with ideas like "system matters," that stressed designing a game to fulfill a goal.

In that context, the idea that Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker started working towards back in 2005 seemed revolutionary: the Fruitful Void. Ron Edwards said, "Without such 'fruitful voids,' perhaps envisioned as what you get when you show a person seven of the eight corners of a cube, a rules-set is no fun. It's just a full cube; you can look at it, pick it up, mess with it, and nothing happens except it stays a cube." Vincent Baker said, "There's a trick to designing games, which I'm trying to tell. Ron says it's to leave the eighth corner of the cube unmade. I say it's to make a whirlwind."

In short, what you leave out matters just as much as what you put in. Most often, people use Dogs in the Vineyard as the example, I think in part because it does provide an excellent example, and probably in part just because Vincent used it in his post. You'll note that Dogs doesn't have any kind of "Judgment" or "Faith" mechanic. Yet, everything in the game—town creation, stakes, raising and seeing, escalation, fallout—it all points towards that. The game centers on judgment and faith. It doesn't need to address them directly—in fact, it makes the game more strongly focused by not addressing them directly, because everything else in the game already pushes you in that direction.

Yesterday, I worried about what role debt should play in the game, now that it no longer makes sense as a mechanic. Willem Larsen commented, stressing the importance of debt, and saying, "I would rather play archipelago-style and just presence the debt relationship in my story through setting."

I started to wonder how I could point players in that direction without preaching or mechanics—because, without something pointing them in that direction, what would make it come up more often than anything else?

And then I remembered the Fruitful Void.

The Fruitful Void of the Fifth World, the undefined center, should deal with Debt and Obligation.

I talked to Giuli about this earlier, and realized that I had to make the challenges harder, so that you need help. I thought of a new twist: you don't get to reduce obstacles by how many heads you get, but by how many heads you get over the obstacle. So, if you want to try to earn an Achievement with six coins on it, and you get seven heads, you can take one coin off the top. That would make it very hard to get started on an Achievement, but each success makes the next success easier. You might get the final, winning blow by yourself, but you'll know that in the beginning, you needed help.

I thought about a mechanic about people you owe, like if you help someone, they owe you, so you can force them to help you at some point later on. But I hate rules that force you to do something. In fact, I wonder now if this works better by leaving it undefined: if you get a reputation for not helping others in return, maybe they won't help you, which will make it awfully hard to earn the Achievements you want. Just like cooperation in the real world.

I don't know if this whirlwind has really built up enough force, though. Do you have any ideas of how other ideas could push play towards debt and obligation? I'd love to hear them!

Rethinking Debt

Since introducing the concept of Debt, it has gotten a very mixed reception. I think the narrative economy works, but I don't know if it really works to think of it as Debt.

At first, I enjoyed challenging the conventional notions of debt, and moving players more towards a feral conception of debt—as something ambivalent, rather than negative, as something that creates relationships and obligations and thus ties the world together, rather than simply a burden. But I haven't gotten that reaction; more often, I've simply gotten confusion.

With Debt and Trouble, the economy had a nice balance: causing trouble got you into more debt, and you could reduce your debt by solving troubles. It worked nicely. Trying to Achieve something, though, makes that pool look less like debt, and more like strength, ability—I keep coming back to the oft-abused "mana" as the best term, in its original Maori sense, as "impact-ful," or efficacious.

I've often thought about representing strength in games, and I think I've put my best ideas into the Fifth World already, even before I started thinking of the economy in this fashion. On the one hand, you have your pool of strength; on the other, you have your "bandwidth," or how much you can pull from that at once. So, you have weight lifters who can tap all their strength at once; you also have endurance athletes who can tap their strength continuously. You also have other kinds of strength, like willpower. You might have an impressive ability to resist a single temptation (high "bandwidth"), but if you've used up your reserves by resisting many different things all day long, you might succumb to something you'd otherwise resist easily. This allows both for the possibility of getting overwhelmed, and getting worn down.

In the Fifth World, you have your pool of coins, and you can use as many coins as you have words in your Name. I like that, because it gives you a lot of complexity with very simple rules.

But it doesn't really have much to do with debt at this point. I see three alternatives here. First, I could abandon the whole idea of Achievements, and go back to debts and obligations, and try to find better ways of fleshing those out. I fear what that might mean for the feel of the game, though. As I said, I didn't change people's conceptions nearly so much as I sowed confusion. Would a game all about debts and obligations make the Fifth World feel like a terrible place to live?

Second, I could scale up. Instead of dying when you pass an arbitrary threshold (which I never felt entirely good about), you die when your Debt surpasses your "Mana" (I don't feel entirely comfortable with that term because of its specificity to a single tradition and how much games, anthropologists and pop culture has abused it, but I'll use it provisionally for the moment for convenience's sake). You reduce your Debt by fulfilling your obligations, and gain Debt when you get the help you need to earn your Achievements. Those Achievements give you more "Mana," and take time away from your obligations. Those details may need more work, but you get the idea: your character has two pools, and you have to worry about the balance between them.

I worry that this makes the game too complex. In his design notes, included as an appendix in Ganakagok, Bill White talks about earlier versions of the game that had complex mechanics for determining what the people needed, meant to urge players to do things like go hunting, or acquire other provisions. That complexity didn't help the game. The current game relies on a tarot deck that originally came out of that problem, but the game now doesn't really deal with that kind of resource management. Instead, it creates the space for mythopoiec roleplaying. I worry that doubling the complexity of the game like this could have the same impact on the Fifth World, as the early resource management mini-game had on Ganakagok.

Third, I could let go of the whole concept of Debt. Yes, it plays a crucial role in tribal life, but does the Fifth World really want to get into the details of day-to-day tribal life, or does it want to present bioregional epics? Does it want to provide a taste of bioregional animism, does it want to excite you with visions of the future? To quote Michael Green in Afterculture, "It's about opening up a whole new category of solutions, about finding another way of being: evolved, simpler, deeper, even more elegant. Even more cool. Even very cool."

Maybe I can afford to let go of the notion of Debt in the game itself. An obsession with realism all too often leads to clunky, difficult games. The Fifth World doesn't necessarily aim to realistically simulate day-to-day life in the feral future, it aims to excite us today with visions of the kind of future we could have. So, the game should focus on that kind of story. Dropping debt doesn't imply that it doesn't matter to the people of the Fifth World, it just means that it doesn't relate to the bioregional epics that this game tells.

I often worry that I worry too much, that I analyze until I paralyze myself, that I spend so much time thinking about these problems that I never get around to sitting down and solving them. Then I worry that I haven't thought it through enough. In this case, does Debt represent something so important that I can't abandon it? Or has it become more a distraction than a goal, and so, something that I really need to leave behind? I don't know; I've gotten too close to it to really tell. What do you think?

Trouble or Obstacles?

I started thinking tonight about the wider implications of my "Causing Trouble" idea. I think it works well as a mechanic, but what does it say about the Fifth World? It seems to present the world as a place filled with trouble, trouble that our heroes must go out and answer. That can work, but it certainly doesn't jive with the pseudo-utopian feel I want to convey. It seems to lead me straight into the trap I've feared most: designing a game that inadvertently undermines the point of the setting.

It seems to me that the twist that separates a utopian setting from a gritty one might ultimately come down to something as simple as whether your characters reactively face problems that someone else created, or whether your characters proactively pursue ambitions that they themselves have set.

The rest needn't change that much. Achievements count more, based on how many Obstacles you put in your way. For each coin, you narrate one more obstacle you face, and you can reduce those obstacles just like you might have faced Trouble before: invoke your Name, cast your coins, and reduce by one for each one that comes up heads.

This would also make for characters with lists of achievements of varying strengths, which reminds me somewhat of Gifts in Ganakagok. Those Achievements should replace Memories, in that case, and their value tells you how many coins you can re-cast when you invoke it.

I started thinking about the ways you might use this, and the versatility made me feel good about the idea. For example:

• Achievement: Slay the ogre! Six obstacles:
  1. In one bitter winter, my desperate uncle ate his child, my cousin.
  2. He became an ogre, a cannibal addicted to human flesh.
  3. Human flesh gives him supernatural strength.
  4. When they discovered his crime, the family tried to kill him.
  5. He got away.
  6. He has lived on his own ever since.
• Achievement: Marry the beautiful maiden. Five obstacles:
  1. Her father hates me.
  2. Her mother doesn't mind me, but she won't stand up to her husband for me.
  3. She loves me, but I can't bear to make her choose between me and her father.
  4. Her father discovered our secret love, and forbade me from seeing her anymore.
  5. Now, her father has started trying to arrange a marriage for her to someone else!
• Achievement: Restore the irradiated lake. Five obstacles:
  1. In ancient days, our ancestors created light from glowing rods.
  2. You cannot see the magic fire in those rods, but it burns forever, and it boils the skin away with a magical disease.
  3. Our ancestors knew how to start those fires, but not how to put them out.
  4. In desperation, they sank those rods in the lake.
  5. Their magic fire continues to burn, though, and it has turned the lake and everything around it into poison.

I think these three quick examples show some of the strengths of this idea. Firstly, it can cover everything from a good old-fashioned monster-slaying quest, to a romance story, to trying to restore an irradiated lake. Secondly, the obstacles can provide so much more context and depth to these challenges.

I can also see different ways of apportioning the value of such achievements. Perhaps you want to get a new Name from it, or perhaps some special effect. Set aside one point for the Name, and one point for the effect. If you had a five-point Achievement, you could turn it into a three-point Achievement, with a Name and an effect.

You could also have an overall "Prestige" score, totaling all of your Achievements and Names. Age should count somehow, as well. I don't know what I might want to do with this yet—perhaps nothing at all. The idea of competing for Prestige occurred to me—you could even give extra Prestige for helping others gain their Achievements, which would make the optimal strategy one of cooperation—but even then, I think that might undermine the tone of the game.

The idea of "Prestige" did remind me of Flow in FreeMarket. I despise transhumanism passionately, but despite that, I can't help but notice that the more basic premise of a utopian setting pushes me into a space somehow both similar and opposite to that game. In FreeMarket, "Flow" essentially means prestige—what the more technologically-intoxicated call things like "social capital." You use Flow to create things, which in turn gives you more Flow. The similarity makes me think I've hit upon something. Despite our almost totally opposite settings, we both face the basic question of how to tell stories in a more-or-less utopian future, and that might ultimately come down to something as simple as whether your characters reactively face problems that someone else created, or whether your characters proactively pursue ambitions that they themselves have set.

In Media Res

A thread started on Story Games about starting games in media res, or, "in the middle of things." This has particular interest for me, because I've tried to design the Fifth World to tell bioregional epics. The Wikipedia entry on "epic poetry" provides a list of criteria you'll find, more or less, in any discussion of what an epic means. I have my praepositio and invocation at the beginning. Like John Milton in Paradise Lost who turned the Greek Muse into the Christian Holy Spirit, I use the invocation to ground the epic by identifying the muse as the Spirit of the Place. The use of epithets requires a little more thought, but at present, I think having to invoke your name to start using the mechanics helps bring that element in. I'll admit, I still don't have a good idea on how to bring in more enumeratio. But for the moment, I have the problem of starting in media res more in mind.

From the playtests so far, I feel confident that the basic approach to story structure does work. Fluency play means introducing each rules element, one at a time. As an extension of that, you can control the pacing of the story by introducing rules elements in a deliberate order. I definitely need to tweak that order, but I feel confident now in the basic premise. Specifically, we consistently found that the coin-flipping mechanics came up too late in play. Many of the ritual phrases and so forth refer to that implicitly by costing coins, but without the coins in use early on, you have little idea of what kind of price you pay.

What if the very first scene had you confronting Trouble and flipping coins? You could begin in media res. Later, when we introduce the Memory mechanics, you can use those to establish how we got to this point. This would introduce the coin-flipping mechanics at the very beginning, and add the other ritual phrases later on.

I think this would definitely change the tone of the stories, too. It would make the stories fundamentally about confronting Trouble. I think I like that emphasis, since it also gives more room for players to cooperate. The current framework sometimes allows for the game to end in some clever consensus, which works especially well when characters end up with what they wanted, but not in the way they expected to get it. This approach, though, does seem to give gameplay an essentially player-versus-player quality. I think beginning in media res, with Trouble mechanics, would make gameplay essentially cooperative, about our heroes working together to solve the Trouble facing their people. I think that dynamic could work very well. I'll need to whip up a version of the poem that does that, and see how it plays.

Wrap It Up

In improv theater, knowing when and how to end a scene often poses a problem. Often, a show has an emcee who solves this problem by simply deciding when a scene ends. In traditional RPGs, GM's control all aspects of pacing: they frame every scene and determine when every scene ends. Collaborative storytelling means liberating players from GM's and GM's from their obligations—and that means exploring other ways of figuring out when a scene ends.

This came up in playtesting. We had some scenes that had a hard time finding their focus, and as a result, would ramble on for far too long. We need some way to signal when to wrap it up.

In literature, every scene has a specific purpose, and the scene ends when it has fulfilled that purpose. In a story game, though, we may not know a scene's purpose until we've finished playing it, so how can we know when it has fulfilled that purpose? More importantly, how can we know in that moment, that a scene has finished, with all the other things we have to keep in mind in play?

I've decided to take a page from a Norwegian game called "Until We Sink," which itself seems to follow the model of most plays. In "Until We Sink," a scene ends when two characters have left. This means that one character can't arbitrarily end the scene prematurely, but by the same token, one character can't keep the scene going, either. When the first person leaves, it probably signals to the others that this scene should end soon, sending that "wrap it up" message to everyone playing. As with so many other parts of the game, I'll have a ritual phrase to indicate this, which should help to give it some additional weight.