Text and Hubris

At the beginning of the year, I began developing a project that revolves around the idea of identity. In this case, I am referring not to the identity of the author or the viewer, inescapable in some regards, but to the identity of the characters. In most static works the identity of a character and its evolution is set. The response of the reader or viewer has no effect on the outcome or growth of the character.

In the new media space, this is no longer true. In this space, the viewer becomes a component of the story. Their experience of the story changes based on how they interact with the character and the space. This means that multiple passes through the same story play out differently because each situation has its own set of variables that are never precisely the same. The difficulty, though, is in creating a story that allows for such interaction without devolving into little more than a sandbox-style game focused solely on one character and sacrificing the value, and depth, of all other characters.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to turn this into a proposal, so I think I will pause here. Hopefully the above gives you a quick sense of what I am talking about. I may actually submit a complete proposal later on but for now let’s just say that I am working on creating different forms of interactive fiction.

My primary canvas for this project is a MUSH environment. It is a bit old-school, to be sure, but it allows rapid textual prototyping without the more time consuming graphic component. Due to class and school considerations I had put off work on this project but I am picking it up again because it is an aspect of story that has always intrigued me. I love creating interactive spaces and stories for people to explore. That truly is my passion and it is a space that I feel still has a lot to offer.

That said, the MUSH is no longer my only concept and I think I may be able to merge aspects of Operation Paranoia into a series of interactive stories. Some will be in real space while others will take place in various online venues. In these cases, I am more interested in using live players, actors if you will, to develop a scene. This will extend well into the summer and I look forward to exploring where this concept takes me.

Questions, suggestions, or friendly inquiries are all welcomed!

It’s Spring Break this week which means that I have a little more time than I usually do. It’s a rather nice departure from the constant pressure that makes up most of my weeks. I had enough time, in fact, that I was able to add to a couple of the short stories I am working on. I wrote for few hours and, after I was finished, I realized that I hated everything I wrote. Now, it is quite possible that everything I wrote last night was absolute trash. I am certainly capable of writing garbage. In fact, depending on the day and my own bipolar sense of self-worth, I might argue that most of what I write garbage. None of that really matters, though. What matters is that I was able to get the few thousand words actually down on the page. I will go back over the writing during the editing process and cut, chop, and rewrite a good 30% or more of what I wrote yesterday because that is how it works.

We’re taught with art that inspiration is key. Every media portrayal of the artist follows the same arc of inspiration, mad dash of work, and finished piece. The artist then becomes this savant who magically weaves great works out of the energy of vision. While this is a wonderful romantic thought, it is also absolute bullshit. We look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a sense of awe and reverence only viewing the final work and forgetting about Michelangelo on his back painting for four years straight. Great texts, great paintings, great works in any genre and medium take work. They may also take determination, skill, and even talent but work remains the most important ingredient.

The truth is that there are days when inspiration is miles away. The are days when every word takes effort and every page comes with pain. I used to think that this was some sort of block. I realize now that this is the difference between being a hobby writer and someone who does this full-time. I love to write, I need to write but I also want to write for a living. That means I write even when I am not feeling the most on my game. Sure, I may rewrite it all later but the ideas still flow in their own sluggish ways. The work loosens those sluggish lines and opens them for something more later on.

At least, that is what I keep telling myself.

Courtney and I spent last evening at a celebratory dinner party in honor of a close friend who was accepted into grad school. It was an enjoyable evening of good wine, great food, and even greater conversation. In that sense, it was precisely what any good dinner party should be.

On the way home, I began to think about how one goes about building a successful creative team. After all, everyone who attended this party was certainly creative and either successful or well on their way to being successful in one form or another. I am incredibly lucky to have such a strong group of creative friends. We had in fact tried several times to actively pull together as a team with varying degrees of success. It frustrated me that none of it was working.

Of course, I see the same problem in my professional life and in my academic life. Corporate teams rarely work effectively. The only truly effective technical team I worked with was run by Othgood and management shut that team down because, to put it simply, it threatened the existing power structure too much for their comfort. Most corporate teams are filled with individuals working to survive. They dodge layoffs and watch coworkers drop like flies without batting an eye. There is no sense of loyalty, connectivity, or shared value. The same is true in the academic world. I am watching my project stall because I can’t effectively manage people who only have a cursory interest in its success. I may actually go outside of class to complete it which may be the only way to get it done. Students, like workers, are only interested in the grade. The product is secondary. A paper needs an A. It doesn’t matter the voice or the content as long as it guarantees them a good grade. In that sense grades are currency, unfortunately, art driven by currency alone tends to be devoid of any real life.

What’s the fix. then? As usual, it is deceptively easy to understand and incredibly hard to implement. It is all about vision. You need people passionate about the work and the idea. I have creative and talented friends, but they all have their own focus and passion. We don’t have a shared vision and I don’t really think we ever will. Without a shared vision, you end up with people working in a hundred different directions. I admit its frustrating. I would love nothing better than to take them and merge them into a solid and effective creative team that could focus on each others visions, but you can’t force a team. You can only develop it with willing members. People who are willing to do the work and to follow through all the way. People who help keep you accountable because they value the project as much as you do.

Of course, this is an unlikely thing to find beyond a single project. I suppose that is why there are so many individual artists, it is hard to find a shared vision. It would sure be nice, though.

My last post was on removing the game from roleplay. Today, I am going to talk about the problems with that and possible scenarios to overcome them.

We all know the reason why a game structure exists. It exists because there needs to be a way to resolve conflict and disagreements that arise in all stories (most of you know this as the “I shot you” “No, you didn’t” issue). Game structure acts as a method of adjudicating these conflicts in order to keep the story going.

This was all fine and good until people started to realize that by focusing on the game structure they could, essentially, make their character capable of never being hit. In this sense, the rules actually act to make the “I hit you!” “No, you didn’t!” problem worse. Now each player is concentrated on making sure their character is optimally built to hit and not be hit and modern games (I’m looking at you 4th Ed) emphasize this to no end.

That is why the term “game balance” exists. The enemies are slotted to match up with characters of a certain level who have spent their points in a game appropriate manner. The idea of story is all but dead, there is only the stat and the counter-stat.

Of course, people realized this and a whole myriad of systems rose up trying to find a way around the issue. Honestly, I have not found one that has succeeded. There have been a lot of attempts. Diceless systems such as the Amber system were less than successful primarily because they removed the chance element but kept the conflict-challenge element. This is the worst of all possible worlds in my mind. The dice pools and story concepts of White Wolf systems were solid and the removal of levels was a great thing. Unfortunately, the same issues rose in combining certain skills, powers, and traits. People sought out the best combination and forgot about story. Beyond this, White Wolf micromanaged their world concept to such an extent that players and Storytellers had little choice but to exist solely inside the World of Darkness. There were very few people out there who were creating new worlds with the White Wolf system. WoTC has pretty much failed from day one. The OGL was genius, but they’ve already blown any credit they deserve there. They made a card game and they should have stuck to that. When I go looking for a solid story, I don’t look to HASBRO. Sorcerer was an excellent game, but the system was so tied to a single concept that it made for good play but offered little in the way of creative flexibility when it came to the worlds. I’ve looked at the aspect system that FATE has which really sounds like a modification of the FUDGE rules to fit other systems. The flexibility of FUDGE and True20 are the main reason I tend to use them as systems now, but even they fall short. I’m not going to cover every game system I have played simply because this paragraph is already overly long. Suffice it to say that no system has yet found a way to hold to the narrative angle without the GM enforcing strictly.

So what do you do? If you remove the game structure entirely, you end up with a bunch of people trying to tell a story that falls apart. Players lose that care about their characters and the story suffers. If you include a game structure, you end up with players doing whatever they can to make their characters “succeed” even if that involves the manipulation of meta-content. There is no easy way out, but I’ll offer a few ideas.

The first option is called the “get good players and a GM option.” This was my standard argument for many years. If you have great players and a great GM this is a pointless article. If you like the narrative/collaborative style, you’re all playing it already. The system isn’t an issue in this regard because most you already ignore anything that conflicts with the story at large. This is a great option for experienced and established players, but how do you add new players? Narrative roleplay is a niche within a niche and both niches are growing smaller. GM’s need to reach out to bring in new players if only to help keep this concept of storytelling alive. The first option just doesn’t work here.

The next option is to try to make a system work. Shoehorn in rules and stretch rule concepts to such a degree that the narrative can work. Of course, this will only work in your specific story and conflicts will still arise. A GM can manage this dissonance to some degree but after awhile the system becomes a greater and greater hindrance to the story. Ultimately, if the game survives, you will descend into a freeform style which is right back where we started.

The last option is too look seriously at creating a structure that works to manage the story. This is not simply a character creation issue. This must be a whole new look at the idea of storytelling in general. I mean this both from a tabletop perspective and from a networked perspective. Honestly, I am talking about the re-emergence of storytelling in general.

This will be part of my project for next year. I will be looking at storytelling concepts both from the traditional gaming community and from a more general perspective. How do we tell stories? Why? How do we add to stories and what new opportunities in storytelling are out there? I really believe that we have just started to scratch the surface of this topic. Hopefully, what I discover will be of value to myself and everyone else who reads this.

As I peruse the sites and read more and more on RPG design, I begin to see the fundamental flaw. I am not a gamer, I am a storyteller. When it comes to system mechanics, I am not interested in making combat fun or easily devised combat scenarios and traps. I am not interested in any of those things. I am interested in what makes a story compelling. I want to know what drives characters to succeed.

In Doryn, in the far northern wastes, a young boy felt a great rumbling and watched as the earth before him seemed to split apart. He might have screamed but no sound was heard save the scraping of ice and the thundering of stone. His life could have ended there. In this moment he could have fallen into the depths of the earth and disappeared from the life and the world forever. His existence would have been nothing but a speck of momentary text on a site that no one reads.

When the earth stopped shaking and everything fell silent once again, the boy was still there, though. His name is Devid Kindas and as he is no longer afraid. He has stared into the face of the abyss and he is ready. He in not more than nine years of age, but he is ready.

Now I ask….ready for what? Who is Devid? I can tell you. I will tell you eventually. I will explain how his life melds into the lives of others and how it may come to shape the Northern Lands. This is story. I can’t tell you stats, he is bright, articulate, distant, and exceptionally aware. He is still a child, though. He loves to play tag or to be dragged on the ice by his father or their dogs.

Last year, the older boys in his village captured a live arctic fen (think a large reindeer-esque type of creature) and Devid is still proud that he was the only one brave enough to ride the sled they tied to it. It actually pulled him for several hundred feet before turning on him and trying to trample him. Here, again, he barely survived and he’ll always carry a curved scar on his left should where the fen’s hooves caught him.

This is part of Devid’s story. In a few more minutes, I could give you his father, his mother (in a panic right now), and a younger sibling.

This is story. We write stories. We share stories. We do not create games that can be won or object that are worth value. There is no gear, no item worth it, we create characters and worlds and that is more than enough.