ars ludi

Remember that game five months ago, when you met that guy who got you that forged visa? Y’know, during that adventure when your ship was smuggling medical supplies past the blockade? Shifty little guy? Wore a monocle?

He wasn’t an important character, and he wasn’t the interesting part of the game, so maybe you remember and maybe you don’t. You’re more likely to remember if you were playing the character that talked to him, and you’re much more likely to remember if you were the player who said “hey, instead of blasting our way through, let’s find someone who can sell us a forged visa!”

Games only live in your memory, and memory has a nice way of tidying things up and conserving space. You remember the good (and the really, really bad). You remember the exciting parts but the boring parts fade away (except for the really, really boring parts, which may also become legendary). You remember the clever things someone said, the dramatic moments, and probably the broad arc of what happened.

Maybe everyone remembers the overall gist of the game, and then on top of that each individual also remembers the parts that were really interesting to them. I remember escaping the yeti in that Tibetan temple, because my adventurer guy was super-cool in that sequence, but a year later nobody else remembers that part because it just wasn’t that interesting (”Yeti? Uh, I think I remember something about yeti…”).

All of that is fine and natural — which is good because it’s also inevitable.

Sure we try to fight it. We write lavish game summaries to try to capture the moment in amber (And make other players jealous. And to impress teh internets.) but that becomes a thing all its own, a particular person’s perspective on the events. Even the most factual “actual play” isn’t actual play, it’s one point of view of what happened at the table, selectively edited. A creative interpretation. A biased report. It’s already one step removed from the game.

But when you’re playing and you don’t remember that guy with the visa from five months ago, well heck, it’s not the end of the world. Because so long as someone at the table does remember what happened they can remind everyone else (and let’s face it, if _no one_ remembered it wouldn’t come up in the first place — if everyone forgets it deserves to be forgotten). It can be the GM, another player, whatever. After a short refresher for the collective memory, everyone is ready to go. The necessary ingredients from the past have been encapsulated and reinjected into the present. The players can decide what to do and the game moves on.

Games are enriched by their history, but if they forget the past that’s okay, because they’re concretely in the here and now. What is your character like now? What is the situation now? What do you do now?

Not unlike the real world.

Why am I dwelling on something that is a) pretty obvious and b) pretty much inevitable anyway? Because microscope is making me.

In microscope, everything that has ever happened in the game is accessible, now. You can jump to any point in the history and start playing.

It’s all on top. It’s all fair game. There is no comfortable “oh well that happened a while back and it isn’t pertinent right now, so I don’t have to think about it.” The past is never closed.

While this is super cool (and super fun), it radically changes how you have to store game info. Instead of a nice serial stack, where the old stuff is way at the bottom somewhere and you only have to think about what just happened, a microscope game is a big flat random access platter. It’s a DVD, not a cassette tape. You can jump to anywhere.

Once you do decide where in the history you’re looking, you focus there and it does become “now” for all intents and purposes of play and excitement. When you are playing out the scene where the civilian cargo ship suicide-rams the alien dreadnought during the last attack on Earth, you are playing in the moment, live or die. But then a minute later, when the scene is done, you step back ten thousand feet, look down on all creation, and decide where to look next. Zooming in and out and then in again. Like, um, a microscope.

Building a structure for that kind of game — even thinking about it at the table — is a whole different ball game. The normal rules don’t apply, so I’m trying to figure out new ones.

(for the curious, I’m generally talking about microscope development over in the Lame Mage blog, but when it has interesting implications or broader game theory I’m putting it over here)

Years and years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I did a psychological study that looked at the relationship between gamers and the characters they played.

I had two phases of questionnaires, one asking a lot of standard personality index questions and the second asking what kind of character the person played, how their character would handle different in-game situations and so on.

My theory was that if you compared self-acceptance (how much a person liked who they were) versus character similarity (how similar the character they choose to play was to their personality in real life) you would find an arc.

On one end, the people who didn’t like themselves very much (low self-acceptance) would choose to play characters that weren’t like them (low character similarity), because they would want to escape or (more productively) practice a different personality to arm themselves for switching in real life. I want to be a bolder person, so I practice being bold in the game.

In the middle we have people who were moderately happy about themselves (medium self-acceptance), who I predicted would play characters that were a lot like themselves (high character similarity). For them roleplaying was really just more practice being themselves. They weren’t comfortable enough to expand their horizons with radically different roles, nor were they unhappy enough to want escape from their personality.

On the other end, people who were very happy with themselves (high self-acceptance) would play characters that were different (low character similarity). Why? Because they could experiment with different roles without the risks and sanctions of being (for example) an evil dictator in the real world. They were comfortable enough with their current personality to try new things and learn from those experiments.

Fear my ancient bitmapped graphic!

After all the data was compiled and the numbers crunched, I found… well, not a lot. I didn’t have a ton of subjects (less than 50), so while there were hints of the curve I expected the results were not, as they say, statistically significant.*

The real question is: years later, do I still think this theory makes sense?

Probably. I haven’t thought about character vs player this way in a while, but it still seems to shed light on what I see in games now. Agree? Disagree? That’s what the comments section is for.

Funny story: shortly after I finished, I sent a copy of my research to the editor of Dragon Magazine. I never got a reply, but shortly thereafter came an editorial (Dragon #164, “What you are in the dark”) that was pretty much a “nothing to see here” summary, without every mentioning the existence of my research. Go figure.

* Complete tangent: I want to see a game that uses statistical significance as a mechanic:

“I hit the ogre!”
“Yeah, but not by enough to be statistically significant. We can’t say confidently that your swing was the result of your warrior’s skill and not just chance. This fight isn’t a big enough sample size.”
“So is the ogre dead?”
“Maybe, or it might just be an artifact of the data.”

I’ve been playing a lot more indie games lately, which is great, but I’m finding they have one big problem: boredom.

Not boredom during the game — the games are fun. But lots of indie games follow a model where the GM (if there even is a GM) doesn’t prepare anything ahead of time. Everything is created at the table, during the game, usually with all participants acting as more equal contributors in the creation of the game world.

Neato, and terribly convenient too, since it means you can just sit down and play whenever you can get folks together.* If you have three people and two hours you can blast off and explore the mysteries of space without ever having the GM say “well, I really don’t have anything prepared…”

But there’s the rub. Ask any serious GM: preparing game material is half the fun. Sometimes more than half the fun. It’s a creative process all in itself, even if the game never gets played. Lots of GMs would sit around and make worlds all day, even if they didn’t have a group lined up. Because let’s face it, if you don’t like prepping games then traditional GMing is not going to be your cup of tea — if it’s not fun, it’s a huge burden.

I admit it: I miss prepping games and building worlds. Sure it’s frustrating when your golden idea is smashed to bits by contact with the players, but that goes with the territory. But I’m also consistently surprised by how awesome the ideas are that are born at the table, in the moment, as a reaction to the hodge-podge of ideas everyone else is throwing in. It’s one thing to be able to shape a nice clean idea in a vacuum, but it’s a far greater mental challenge to come up with ideas on the fly that genuinely click with everything else other players are tossing in. I would never have come up with the some of the ideas that emerged organically in the chaotic consensus of play.

If you look closely at that last paragraph you’ll discover something interesting: what I’m describing sounds an awful lot like, y’know, gaming. That thing where you all sit down at the table and react to each other and see what happens. No matter how much the GM has prepared, when the player running Carlos the Dwarf says something rude to the Duke’s daughter, what happens next is just improv. Everyone at the table is reacting and coming up with something on the fly. That’s gaming.

The no-prep game just shifts the bar, taking what was once the GM’s prep and making it part of everyone’s play. Making it just like the rest of the game.

There’s a serious danger in becoming all grown up and brainy, getting overly-analytical about games and what you want from games, thinking too hard about what’s right and wrong in gaming. Chasing perfection.

It’s the kind of over-analysis that leads to GMs strangling the life out of the game by preparing too much, by thinking they have to control the game for it to succeed and (gasp) thinking they’re storytellers and their players are the audience. It leads to GMs that fear the unexpected, which is like a fish fearing water. The unexpected is the game, dummy! It’s why you’re playing with other people and not writing a book.

It also makes players who doubt their own instincts, who hesitate and analyze when they should just jump in with both feet and (you guessed it) play.

Do you remember what is was like when you gamed when you were a kid? Did you think about that stuff? Do you remembering GMing those games where you were totally making stuff up on the fly and it went great? Do you remember doing totally crazy stuff as a player like you were a young revolutionary Dave Arneson?

All of which is to say: try trusting your instincts again. Don’t get so hung up on doing it right. Let go and see what happens. If you goof.. big deal. It’s a game, remember?

It is entirely possible that there are so many indie game designers because they have nothing else to do: they would be preparing adventures like traditional GMs, but since they can’t, that between-game time and energy has to go somewhere. That’s pretty much what I’m doing so I can hardly criticize.

But don’t let the risk of being sucked into game design scare you away from trying no-prep games. There are lots, but I’ll throw out In A Wicked Age, Shock, Geiger Counter, and InSpectres — I’m specifically picking games where the premise is made at the table, not games that include a premise, module-style.

Will playing no-prep games help you get back to trusting your instincts? Will it make you a better more interactive gamer, a more fluid GM? It’s a trick question. What you should be asking is will it be fun.

* kind of like Promised Land, but in a way that actually works…

Games don’t always work. A game might be too ambitious to really be feasible, or it might just be too much for the people involved. In the middle is the range of games that work, the successful game, the fun zone.

There are two ways you can widen the fun:

1) you can push the boundaries of gaming, going into dangerous territory and making new and exciting game techniques possible

2) you can lower the barrier to gaming, making it easier for people to play and have fun

These are really measures of what the players at the table at the time can handle (GM included). The successful gaming zone is different for every group, perhaps different for every single person at the table. If you invent a bold new roleplaying technique some people will find it fun and exciting, others will cringe in its cruel embrace. And if you lower barriers to make it easier to play, some people will leap for joy but others won’t even need that help (at least not most of the time — some days even the best gamers need a booster seat).

…

Despite the experimental stuff you may have read about in these very pages (dirty tricks like NormalVision or postcognition), I find a lot of my activity revolves around the second case, lowering the barriers. I write and publish adventures to (hopefully) make it as easy as humanly possible for a GM to mount the hot seat and run a game that lands squarely in the fun zone.

When I run games, I do all those clever things I talk about here to embrace players and draw out their best game. Of course I’m not made of pixie dust. There are days I’m a cranky, fed up, and ready to grind the players into chum if they won’t stop being so goddamned stupid. But that’s not what I’m shooting for. It’s not what I’ll call the _ideal_ case.

My ideal case is not to impress them with my GM craft, but to get them to play so well that afterwards they walk around thinking how awesome they were. That’s victory, me bucko.

…

This division is a pretty fundamental one, philosophically speaking. Forging ahead or lowering the bar, experimenting or inviting, etc. Whichever your inclination (if you have an inclination), recognize that both are good for gaming as a whole. Both.

The natural question is: are they mutually exclusive? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that yes, in a particular moment in time, something that promotes one is unlikely to simultaneously promote the other. Different facets of the game may do either, but a technique that does both, that pushes gaming into new territory _and_ makes it easier to play… well that’s the holy grail isn’t it?

For many, many years I ran games as a way of expressing the worlds I had built.

I ran different campaigns, with different groups of people, all in different places or different times, but the vast majority were all on the same world and in my mind all connected. Not connected in plot, just connected because they were part of the same setting.

Even if I wasn’t running games, the world existed in my mind. I was constantly refining and revising it, though it would be more accurate to say I was exploring it, because as any serious world-builder will tell you it often feels more like you are discovering rather than creating. Just a trick of the brain? Probably.

But now I’ve noticed that I do the opposite. Now I run games, and if I need worlds to provide a context for those games I whip them up.

Game => world, not world => game.

As an experienced world-builder I can build a setting that feels detailed and fleshed out in a very short time so to a certain degree I can make the difference invisible to the players, but the root motivation is still entirely different.

For extra credit extend the concept: it’s not just the GM making the world and running the game, it’s also players and their characters. Is your character a tool to play the game, or is the game your vehicle to play the character you envision?

Naturally you’re asking: which one is the right way? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: what drives each? They may look the same on the surface, so much so that some people in the same gaming group may be doing one and some the other and never realize it, but I think they are intrinsically different activities. Understanding that difference can tell us a lot about why we game.

Which one are you doing?

A man in a trenchcoat stands before a grave. He hears tires squealing and runs to catch a glimpse of the car before it disappears down the cemetery lane. As the rain falls softly, the camera pans back and shows a single rose newly laid on the grave…

Here’s a GM Tip you’ve heard before: Look at books or movies to get ideas for your games. Sounds good right? Well yes and no. You can steal some ideas, but movies or books are not good guides for how to create games.

In movies there are actors and then there is the audience. The audience can be completely in the dark about what is going on, but they have faith that as the story unfolds it will all make sense. Why is the man in the graveyard? Why is he interested in who’s in the car? Does he know them? Is he afraid of them? Did he leave the rose or did someone else? We (the audience) don’t know yet, but that’s okay because he (the actor) does know, and we can sit back and munch popcorn until the answer is revealed.

In a game the players are both the actors and the audience. In order to play they need to make decisions, and to make decisions they need information.

GM: So you’re going into this warehouse…
Player: Why am I going into a warehouse?
GM: You’re investigating a case. You’re following a lead.
Player: What case?
GM: It’s not important, it’s just setting the scene.
Player: Do I expect trouble? Is this the same day as that fight at the bar? What part of town is this?
GM: …

Is this information the character should know? Yes. It’s only the player who’s in the dark.*

Movies hide a lot of information. They gloss over the details that connect the scenes or that bring characters from A to B. How did the detectives figure out where to find the suspect? Does it matter? The movie skips that part and cuts right to them kicking in his door. We (the audience) assume that some kind of clever investigation went on off-screen.

But players (as actors) demand that information. They need to know how they went from A to B. Even if it’s as trivial as “a snitch tells you where the guy lives,” the players need to know so they understand the basis for what they are doing. If you don’t tell them they’ll back up and ask you.

Forgetting to include this kind of “connective tissue” to make transitions work is a common design flaw. How do the heroes find the warehouse? How do they know the heist is part of the crime spree, not an isolated incident? Why will the heroes go back to Doc Mercury’s lab the next day?

These details are trivial but critical. When they’re there you barely notice it, but when they’re missing it can stop the game in its tracks.

Then there’s the obvious problem: a movie or book is scripted. Actors always do exactly what the writer or director wants. Games aren’t. The players can do whatever they want.

Player choice is what makes it a game, not a story. Building a scenario that can deal with player free will is one of the most critical parts of design. It’s not about what will happen, it’s about what might happen or if you’re lucky what probably will happen.

In movies the actors don’t stop and raise unexpected questions. They don’t get confused, misunderstand elements of the plot, or just take the bit in their teeth and make a hard left for the sheer fun of it.

Even if your players did want to follow your “script” they can’t because they don’t know what it is. They can try, but sometimes their guesses of what they “should be” doing are more unpredictable than when they try to rebel.

* As the GM it is forbidden to interfere with the flow of information between the character and the player. You can never say “yes, your character knew that all along, but I didn’t tell you.”** You can mess with the character’s mind all you want, you can introduce amnesia or flashbacks or whatever, but if it’s happening in the character’s conscious mind, whether it’s real or delusional, the player is privy to it.

** Well okay, you can, and it can be a lot of fun. But that’s experimental stuff and it doesn’t always work. You should never do it without knowing you’re taking a risk.