There is a new Issue of City of Heroes MMO coming up, and with it, the Mission Architect that allows players to create new content to the game. It is currently in open beta testing, and this is a shameless self-promotion about the arc I wrote as a test for the system:
I assume I will be hooked on this game for years to come, which is nice. 
On tonight’s “you sort of had to be there to get it”:
Alvan: Listen, all I’m saying is that clichés aren’t all bad
Spikey: Hear hear, people who are looking at things through a black and white filter, skin deep will go “Argh, another cliché! This ain’t original! It’s POOP!” And then I’ll be all horrified by their simplistic views and will have to fight with them about it.
Alvan: Clichés are Clichés because they’re things that have been proven to work.
Spikey: So say we all.
Alvan: Of course, it boils down to how you use them. The situation and presentation.
Spikey: So say we all.
Alvan: And there is nothing wrong with a guy wearing a dress.
Spikey: Providing one can stop the sniffage of glue on the correct date.
Alvan: So say we all.
So, remember back in the day when everything was simple. Evil was Evil and Good was Good. Or at least it was easier to tell who was backstabbing you because they weren’t a part of whatever side you were on. And this gave you more than enough excuse to stab them in the eye first. Because, you know. They were the enemy.
The older I get, the more I seem to appreciate the simple things like that. When you can simplify a large group of something in a game to just a large group of something and be happy about it. While games full of individuals are fun, it’s nice to be able to identify groups as well. And in a large scale games, even better so.
When people ask what my favorite video game of all times was, I answer Star Control 2 without hesitation (unless I’m feeling exceptionally nostalgic about some other game that very moment). A big great part of the affection has to do with the amazing job the designers did with the various races in it. The basic setup of the game is that there are these big evil Ur-Quan things that have pretty much subjugated the whole galaxy under their rule (read: They’re The Evil). Including the human race, who are now living under a slave shield, stranded on Earth. The only beacon of hope is the player’s Captain and his super-ship, who goes around the star-systems, meeting old alien allies who have turned hostile or gone into hiding, trying to convert them back to the good fight. And maybe make some new allies in the process.
The races (read: factions) in the game are wonderfully unique when compared to each others. They are made quite simplistic, so that they don’t have a huge number of defining characteristics. A big part is of course the speech-patterns and the way they look, but they also have quite a personality. Each race is like an extension of a very solid, vivid, coherent personality. There is the sycophant, the coward, the honor-obsessed, the angsty, etc. race. The race as a collective share the traits, but there might be individuals who are individuals, while still being part of the race. Each of the races have a couple of these character traits that they embody, and each have a very strongly defined society. They have their superiors and they have their political systems. They have their passions and they have their quirks. But, all in all, they can be discussed with caricatures. “Those hippie birds”, “The honor-obsessed kamikaze/samurai rodents”, “The communication impaired great old one fish” and so on.
And they have a wonderfully complex relationship with each other. No man is an island, so to speak. Even if in this case the men are alien beings that aren’t even remotely human. To quote something from the game:
“This may come as a shock, but the Shofixti are reborn. We have a Shofixti Captain here with us. Now do you believe?”
If this is being a true thing, there will be many changes.
But we are a species long wise in the ways of deceit.
Ye must be proving these words ye say, Captain.
Send the Shofixti to us as a way of proof.
Those were the words of the Yehat, a funny-looking bird-like race who lived and died by their code of honor. When they failed to protect their marsupial allies, the Shofixti, the whole race fell into despair, and only through the leadership of their queen, they managed to stay even semi-coherrent, and joined the Evil Side to forget the tragedy.
I’ll switch to tabletop roleplaying for a moment – You might have heard of a game called Vampire: the Masquerade, where they came up with a great mechanic that has been later dubbed the clubhouse system amongst friends. Every character belongs to a club. Membership is mandatory. A character can belong to a single club. And can’t change their colors. The vampires’ clubs in Vampire: The Masquerade were their clans. You get bitten by a vampire who belongs to a clan and you belong to that clan as well. There was an artist clan, there was a businessman clan, there was a rebel clan, there was a clan of ugly vampires. And that worked damn well. It was easy to connect with, easy to vary, twist, mirror and all that. You could make a vampire character that was a part of the businessman clan, who was a brute. You could make him as much of a brute as you wanted. But he was still initiated into the vampires through the a part of a proud and long tradition of businessmen. He was chosen by the businessmen to become a vampire, and thus he is defined by the clan even if he wanted to be defined by it or not. If he had been a part of the artist clan, the fact that the artists had chosen to turn the brute into a vampire would have mattered as much, or even more, than the fact that he’s a brute.
And it was easy to build political structures for the vampires. Every relationship was in the end defined by the clans – even if some vampire boss managed to rule his city so that all the different vampires from different clans were one big shiny happy family, if one of the clans’ big names arrived to the city, the clan members were more than likely to flock under his wing. And usually even this wasn’t needed for the players to talk about things like “Wonder what the Tremere (the magician clan of the vampires) are up to, we haven’t heard anything of them lately” or “If we want to go to the woods, we may need some help from the Gangrel (the half-animal vampire clan)”. Even if the whole local Gangrel population was a group of former zookeepers and biology professors, the instinct would be to run to them when planning a woodland trip, because “The Gangrel, they know the woods.”
Besides the clans, there was the division between “us and them”, the Camarilla and the Sabbat. In the early works, Sabbat was pretty much an undefined terror that was only very loosely described in the source books. Camarilla was the group where the clans belonged to and that had all the player characters in it. Later, Sabbat got some clans as well, making it equal to Camarilla and as playable. But before that, while there might have been political squabbles and backstabbing between the Camarilla clans, when it came to Sabbat, there was a nice solid threat that everyone hated equally.
White Wolf released several games in their game line after Vampire: The Masquerade, that tried to follow the same mold, but only Mage: The Ascension came close to managing a good, pure mandatory clubhouse system. With games like Werewolf: The Apocalypse, where the clubhouse you belonged to was determined by birth (thus there being no “why is this character part of our club” thing) or Wraith: The Oblivion, where the clubhouses were kind of odd and hard to point out, it didn’t just work. In Mage, the character gravitated towards one of the clubs because of the similarities in their worldviews, which made the club something that could be more easily thought through.
Now, exit the old White Wolf games and enter the next generation. The clubhouse system evolved there. Each strain of bogeymen (vampires, werewolves, whatnot) have not one, but two clubs they belong to. The club they are born into (this might be the vampire’s clan, or the fairie’s type) and the club they join (the vampire’s ideology, much like Camarilla or Sabbat in the old days, or the court of faeries the critter belongs to, or something like that). This creates a far more complex network of relationships between various factions, as each character is usually loyal to at least two external bodies. And as they say on the internet, “OMFG TEH DRAMA” when these two come to clashes.
But it’s taken something away from it all. Without the clear-cut clubhouses, the factions have become blurred, and it’s no-longer a question of wondering what the Tremere are up to, it’s a question of the individuals in that particular city. It takes away from the grandeur of it all to know that you’re most likely just involved in local politics than to be, through the clans, actually affecting something greater. To return to the earlier example of Star Control 2 – the fact that you were dealing with a real faction allowed something like the following to happen:
“All right, I’ll send over the Shofixti.”
We are scanning the separation of a vessel from yer fleet, Captain and indeed, its configuration matches that of a Shofixti Scout vessel.
This had better not be a trick, Captain!
We are knowing the power of a Glory Device, and if you detonate the weapon near us the price for you shall be dear, very dear.
The Scout has docked, and we await the pilot’s appearance at the airlock.
The atmosphere cycle is complete… the door slides open… and
AWK!! BRAAK!! YEEP!! IT IS TRUE!!! THE SHOFIXTI ARE ALIVE!!!
Look at that furred muzzle, those shining black eyes, the sweet claws!
Our children have returned from oblivion!!
But now we are faced with the cruellest truth!…
…We who have sacrificed our honor! We who have lain with our enemy!
WE ARE NOT WORTHY! WE ARE NOTHING!…We are less than nothing.
But wait! We are not Spathi. We are Yehat… OF THE STARSHIP CLANS!
We will NOT live this lie any longer!
Listen as I speak these words! If our Queen makes the dishonorable command
then it is THE QUEEN WHO HAS NO HONOR!
And a dishonorable Queen is NO QUEEN AT ALL!
We, the Zeep-Zeep, are the only Clan who remember the TRUE MEANING of honor we shall TEAR THE QUEEN FROM HER THRONE!
The two-thousand year reign of the Veep-Neep Queens IS OVER!
THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN!
Sorry. A bit carried away there. But if you’ve played the game, you know how much pathos that bit of text contains. I mean tha because it’s clear that the Yehat are a honorable race, and that they mourn over the loss of the Shofixti, it’s possible, that when the race (as an entity) is presented with a Shofixti captain, they will actually rebel against their queen. Not just go “oh well, me and Bob agree with this and think the system’s a bit bad now”, but have a revolution.
In old Vampire The Masquerade this sort of wholesome clan-movement happened a lot. One of the Camarilla’s clans actually got fed up with Camarilla and left. The Gangrel got fed up at some point with the system and decided they could leave it behind. Of couse a few individuals here and there stayed behind, but the Clan, the Club, as a faction, decided to call it quits. And when I spoke of how the clan defined a lot about the character, it came quite obvious at that point. If you were playing a Gangrel, you would be defined as “a Gangrel who stayed as a part of Camarilla” if you were one of those who didn’t want to leave.
While any game benefits from strong characters and individualism, I love to think that there is a huge benefit in being able to lump these individuals into generic boxes. Be it as simple as race “He’s a bugbear”, or profession “he’s an adventurer”, or something a bit more complex “He’s one of the people from the Northern Mountains”, it still makes cataloging the person when big wheels turn on the world. If you know the people from Northern Mountains have declared war, you have to make judgements about the people frrom NM whom you know.
Colossus, The Forbin Project (1970) is from my perspective something from the annals of history. One of those things that happened years before my birth that I would never hear of if it weren’t for freak accidents like manatic bringing it up (thanks for that!). So, today, I managed to dig a copy up and watched it. I had preconceptions about the film, that it might be a more polarized view of the Cold War politics, but in fact it turned out to be quite the opposite. This will contain spoilers, so be warned. Also, there is no fancy gaming angle to this – it’s just because the movie touches two things I’m interested – communication and the Cold War.
The movie poster, from wikipedia
The movie is based on a book, which in the end turned out to be a trilogy – something that explains the references near the end, where the computer mentions about something being built, that will take five years to complete (the second book of the trilogy takes place five years after the first one) and probably the reason for the very bleak situation it ends with, even if those weren’t exactly uncommon at the time when the movie was filmed. And while the book was published in ‘66, which sets some backdrop to the events, I’d like to see the movie more as the product of those later years (69-70).
So it’s interesting how the Soviets are pictured in the movie. Considering that they “just” had invaded Czechoslovakia with their allies, the fact that the biggest atrocities the Soviets commit are exactly the same ones the Americans do (shooting of their own when presented with choice between that or destruction of a whole city), is actually quite endearing. And that both sides use the same, unified tactics to combat the computers brings them to light as not as polarized superpowers, but as simply members of the same human race. The Soviets in the film even don’t do things the way they usually are portrayed in movies like this – behind the backs of the Americans and in effect working against the heroes as their plans backfire. In fact, it’s the Soviets who get to pay the human price before the Americans do, and the viewer gets to feel sympathy towards them with no strings attached.
And there is a lot of that anti-war and unity-between-all sympathy in the movie. For example the president of the USA is pictured as something of a Kennedyesque character who wants to explain things to the public as frankly as possible and who is horrified when he has to explain to them that there’s been a nuclear incident, even if the administration at the time was in the hands of Nixon. And Nixon at the time was the conservative right wing man who approved secret bombings in Vietnam instead of being the president who negotiated the peace there. Also, the crew of scientists the main character is a part of is like the bridge of a Star Trek ship, filled with men, women, white, black, asian alike, with what seems to be equal status. Another nod at the world of man being at least somewhat unified.
But then there’s the language theme that keeps popping up that parallels and mirrors the other questions of unity. Even as all men stand united when they face the technological threat, humans are ineffective because they don’t share a language. This comes up at many points – there is the need of interpreters between the Soviets and the Americans. People keep explaining that their language skills are lacking and others saying that their skills are much better than they were saying. There are conversations that happen in one language that needs to be repeated in the other because there had been someone in the group who didn’t speak the first language. There seem to be moments of misunderstanding when the interpreter is asked to explain things. And so on. Also, the computers don’t speak the same language from the start, but the first thing they do is develop a language they both can use equally well. They are effective. And when humans don’t understand the computers, the computers immediately respond with the language the humans understand – force. Eventually, when they have had time to communicate with their shared language they become one, the ultimate computer. Unity.
The president calls out for a “human millennium” when the movie starts, an age where they may get rid of famine and suffering. And the way to that will be peace through the impersonal guardian computer. The exact same words are later echoed by Unity, who has been working for that very goal, through the subjucation of the human race. Leaving us with the question if the needs of the whole human race are more important than the needs of each member of it.
And in the end, even if we kept asking for the end of war, of a world united as one, a world without suffering, when we’re asked to actually sacrifice our illusion of freedom and love Unity as our master, our defiant answer is “Never”.
Kings is an alternate reality drama about modern royalty and court intrigue. “based on the Biblical story of King David but set in a world resembling the present-day United States.” as described by Wikipedia. Very powerful acting, dramatic characters and strong, classic themes. Possibly the best thing on television in a long while.
And The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is a nice lighthearted detective series with an African flair from BBC and HBO. A dream production company combination if one could ever think of one. The characters are very likable and the mood of the show is quite unlike the typical European/U.S. detective series.
I apologize to all three of my readers (myself and Spikey included) that I haven’t written anything in a week, but I’ve been busy with all the things that happen after you’ve been in bed rest for over a month and finally feel well enough to go out. Things like “go meet your boss for the first time this year”, “enroll to classes” and “play some RPGs with friends”. So when I’ve had time to pause between these things, I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity, fun, rules and the related concepts. And one of the big dilemmas for me when it comes to role-playing games – where do I stand in the eternal struggle between the game and the play.
Don’t know about you lot, but when I’m presented with a situation where there are strict rules in place, but a lot of freedom to what can be done with those rules, my first gut reaction is to start searching for ways to use the rules to create something that wasn’t planned for them. And I know I’m not the first one – most of the planets in Spore are filled with various monsters that resemble human genitalia and people use Little Big Planet to create mechanical calculators and other oddities.
When it comes to RPGs, this is one of the key reasons I like systems that have very detailed and strict rule set. They allow the player to get really creative with the limited material that is available. While the systems that allow a player to formulate things about their character more freely encourage the players to do exactly what they want to do, systems that rely on preset variables tend to inspire me a lot more with a “ooh, I could totally try this one out!” or “I wonder how I could make a character like this using this system?”
The other great thing about detailed rule sets is the fact that they also serve as a great wall of defense when someone else (usually the person who is running the game) tries to pull something off that limits my control over the options available to my character. I must admit, I become a bit of a rules lawyer the moment a game master tries to start railroading the game to only please his need to narrate his story to the players without having the players have any say in what’s happening. I’m one of those assholes who find it so much more fun when they are actually allowed to participate and change the outcome of events if they get stuck in an interactive environment. So, when there is a description of how the enemy bogeyman, who the characters have been after, runs to the portal to safety, I will be the one asking to get a dice roll to prevent that from happening because the rules say I should able to do that.
Now, I do have my dirty hippie side buried somewhere underneath that this. So I should probably say something to support the touchy-feely side of RPGs, where we have less rules and more just plain fun. When you’re playing a free-form game, where the rules are more set by the social contract (of not being an ass) than some rulebook, things can work out really great. The biggest plus side to this sort of games is the fact that there is nothing that even remotely points to “winning” – everyone is just having fun and enjoying the moment. And that’s something that roleplaying games should be about. We’ve all played like this as kids, and usually things went really well (until you got too tired and cranky and had to go take a nap), so why not do it as adults as well. Adding rules also adds to the need to compete.
Now, when I’m talking about rules, I don’t mean that the game should be a strategy/tactical simulation of medieval warfare (been there, done that, we shall never speak of it again), but more a situation where, when conflict arises, the judgment of what happens next is not left fully on the shoulders of the game master. He should and could be able to rely on a strong set of rules that start with the basic rule of “say yes or roll the dice”. But I must say I’d like to expand on that.
The game master is often a self-proclaimed king of the game. He’s above the rules – what he says holds true. And he’s an artist extraordinaire, he can paint any picture, climb any mountain. .. and so on. He (read: me, usually) is a pompous artist who doesn’t have to live by the same set of regulations the other players do He lies and cheats and creates his own vision if the one presented by the game isn’t pleasing. He tells the players a little less than they deserve so he can take their characters down another adventure on his terms. He decides if there are 3 trolls behind the corner or 30. That calls for some limitations. That’s where I think most role-playing games need more rules.
As a positive example of what I mean by rules for the game master, I present this: In the game 3:16, the game master is mechanically limited by the game’s system. There is a certain number to the number of enemies he can use on a single planet depending on the number of players in the current game. And during the planet, the creatures the player-characters run into are actually defined by a series of rolls. And the players have an option of actually saying “no, we’re not doing this” in many different ways, from evacuating their characters from the planet, to blowing a tactical nuclear weapon on the planet, destroying the rest of the opposition. And the way the world reacts to the success or the failure of the players’ gaming is determined by simple formulas. This means that the amount of bullshit the GM can pull is controllable. He can’t create enemies that are somehow unbalanced, because the mechanical effects are limited and determined by the rules. And he can’t pull stunts like punish a PC because he feels like the character could use a snap on the wrist. If he wants to do it, he has to do it by the rules. And if he decides to make something so hard that the player characters will not be walking out of it alive, the players can opt-out of the mission and the game master has to accept that he can’t use the same tricks again. A delicate balance of things.
Another one that needs a nod is Bliss Stage, where the game master plays one character, just like the rest of the players. He (and his character) just has some responsibilities that the other players don’t. And it’s perfectly possible for the game master’s character to die, and be succeeded by one of the other players’ charactes, turning that player into a new game master.
Now, to extrapolate from these thoughts to think of a system that I would find most pleasing. On the player side, there would be a lot of crunch. Many moving parts – interlocking bits that create a character that has a lot of different effects he can use. Some combination will be of course be more specialized, some more generic, some quite unexpected, but still working. There would be a mechanical watchdog in place to ensure that all the characters would have the minimum amount of abilities to survive in the game, but have a lot of room to maneuver beyond that. If there is some sort of a balancing system, it will be such that it balances only the things that are somehow relevantly connected – if I want to play a former artist in a game where the player-characters are all assassins, me taking art skills shouldn’t hinder the assassinating of people. But I might have to make decisions if the assassin I play prefers knifes or rifles to do his work. Also, the mechanical system would be transparent enough so that I, as a player, can call, without the game master’s decisions, if the action of my character was successful or not.
And on the game master side, I am provided with a similar set of interlocked rules I am allowed to use to create the adventures. I don’t have to of course tell the players which pieces I’ve used while the game is in progress, but I would have to be able to produce the story in the form of the rules to the players after the players had gone through it, so they could look at it and nod at “yes, that’s what happened, and it was done by the books, very good”. There would also be rules that allowed the GM to pull some crazy stunts – sort of cheating even. But using them would mean that he would have to give the players something in return. It would be a beautiful harmonious system. These rules would of course leave the game master a lot of freedom to fill in the blanks, so the meat around the pre-set bones would be still done by him. And that’s where we come a full circle.
Don’t know about you lot, but when I’m presented with a situation where there are strict rules in place, but a lot of freedom to what can be done with those rules, my first gut reaction is to start searching for ways to use the rules to create something that wasn’t planned for them. That would mean that when I am, as a game master, given only three encounters to introduce the plot elements, and only two of them could feature creatures of any kind, I would have to focus on taking everything out of those available resources. I would have to actually be a bit shrewd to pull of the things I would normally take for granted. It would make me pay attention more to what I’m doing as a game master. And the way I would probably be doing the stories would be quite refreshing to when the sky was the limit.
We excel when we can’t have everything we’ve wanted.
I have a son who’s nearing 3 years of age and doesn’t talk yet. No – don’t worry, this won’t be a daddyblog, I’m just putting down a basepoint here. He’s facing the challenge of picking up 2 languages at once, and to make matters more interesting, the two languages sound really similar, yet are completely different beasts. Does he communicate, then? Oh hell yes. He understands bloody everything told, and in a way, he talks back with clearly understandable feedback towards us. I had no idea kids could reach such levels of empathy and living-along and whatever terms you might want to coin here. Body language is on such textbook-case level it’s almost bordering on eerie. There’s clearly a communicative level of emotions and empathic level of emotions, and they mesh together perfectly. So, while his brain is figuring out the very basics concepts of spoken communication, he’s developed an interim way of communication, and it just now opened my eyes to something quite curious. It might be yet another textbook example for some people, but I’m not educated on that field. My cherry just got popped on this field, an hour or so ago.
The basic eye-opening moment required an additional “ooh..” moment stemming from thinking up an example from polar opposite. I know people who are highly educated and use their brain on levels of analytical depth that’s alien to me, and on daily basis, they use vocabulary no “ordinary” person has to ever face. They are also somewhat detached on personal level of communication. Everything is questioned and referred and quoted for wise words of masters of relevant field. Everything said is important, not mundane. To me, something feels missing when I listen to them.
Maybe lack of words does not mean lack of communicative abilities, it just drives the communication through emotional and empathic pathways. Body language. Slightest twitch of some hidden muscle somewhere which is registered by an ever-observant lizard brain hidden under our clever superbrain capable of analyzing things down to quantum levels.
Using and knowing too many words leads to reduced level of empathy and that curious “automatic” communication. Go even further with words that are inherently “too sophisticated” and “out of my league” and you end up emotionally distant from the ones who are listening to you. You become an alien most people can’t connect with anymore.
Now, games.
First, games that draw you in and make you ooh and aah on the vague feeling of intimacy of the world itself. ICO and Shadow of Colossus come to mind as first examples. They connect with you, which means they’re able to communicate with you even though they are not something you’d talk and converse with. Yet, they manage to deliver the very feeling of soul of the gameworld in a way you accept with open arms, with your defenses down. They pull your walls down, fullstop. Does this remind you of other such games? Which ones are they? Do they have lots of dialogue, or do they have a distinct lack of it? ICO has minimal dialogue, and even then it’s fictional language..
Second, games that feel deeply interesting and urges you to dig deeper. Clear notion of a traditional story, lots of little details, carefully constructed world and everything connects with everything else. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow Of Chernobyl comes to mind. Half-Life. Witcher. Bioshock. Fallout 1 through 3. Tinkering with things, objective-based gameplay with new dialogue, diary notes and events presented along the way. They tell you things through words coming out of NPC mouth, or by text. Possibly lots of it. Depth of the world is achieved by presenting you with a barrage of information your brain begins to click through, creating coherent forms and shapes that define the world. World is couraged to observed as realistic, open for literal interpretation. Very, very much like reading a book, except you have to fight and solve your way through the pages of it. No “automatic” flow as such.
So, there’s two different ways of communicating to the player what world he or she is in, and how he or she should take it in. They’re very probably better kept separate, and not mixed up. Further from the middlegrounds, better the impact. Mixing them up might tickle up an irrecoverable “that’s not right, dunno why but it’s just not right.” -reaction one can’t justify even if asked. It’s the automatic bits of our brain that dictate how we feel about things, and games should always feel just right with no apparent reason. Apparent reasons come through analytical thinking, feeling of just right comes from clicking with the game, and that’s empathy.
“It was a grizzly scene, possibly a murder-suicide pact – I don’t know what the fuck happened”
A very descriptive quote. It creates vague notions of how it might have happened, what did happen and leaves us curious, and shocked. Evoking empathy and mystery. Very standard event in entertainment industry, yet handled in so many different ways. Most of the time, it emotionally impacts us when we are passive in front of television and let it all wash over us, allowing ourselves to be smothered with scripted-to-detail flow of it.
How on earth do you communicate the emotional magnitudes of such event to a player who sits comfortable on a sofa with a piece of knobby plastic in his hands? Throw blood on screen? Meh. Five-eyed tentacle monsters the size of skyscrapers? Bah. Basic videogame tropes, and they have lost much of their impact. Only games that manage to pull a good left hook on the player are those with something new and plenty of borrowed. Dunno about blue, we really don’t have to go to color grading here.
Do you do it by player character narrative? A voice of the character you’re playing? But it doesn’t sound like you! Are you audience or player character or something in between? It’s a detachment from gameplay in itself. Basic narrative voice? Basic, works, but has to be played beforehand really really well so it won’t become one of those annoying gameplay breaks. You know them, I know you do. Most of the time we get to see a fancy CG clip with near-Hollywood production values. How does that work, then?
“Ah damn you, stupid cutscene,” *clickclickclick* “AND WHY CAN’T I SKIP THE DAMNED arfg meh” *foreheadslap* and off you go, distracting yourself by clicking around a random pornsite in teh intarwebs, ruining your life forever, cocaine, etc.
Developers poured sweat, blood, money, tears, long hours, lost marriages, haggard faces and years worth of therapy sessions to those cutscene / narrative break moments and what do you do? You throw a tantrum, you selfish prick. Have you no heart or sensibility to those starving and homeless? No, wait — it’s not your fault! My apologies. I should have added narrative design to the list of good sacrificial traits us developers have, but then I wouldn’t be writing yet another blogpost that stinks of a bitter lemon a very fat and unpleasant tourist has sat on for hours.
Exhibit B:
Developer conclave, the masters with tallest chairlegs, sits silent under a pendulum axe that swings nigh-on their worried brows.
Lords of their realm are not pleased with their latest offering, the majestic tour de force through worlds imagined by their masterminds, and they have summoned a wrath on their homes. A Mandatum carved in black obelisk has been tossed amids the conclave, and lest they follow it, they will be banished from their realm.
Their gods are gods of coins, and coins they need to create worlds, and worlds they need to create to summon more coins for their gods. Vicious circles surround them, and the Mandatum has words that glow red:
“Sequel must be made, and Sequel must replenish the faith of all who follows us; Sequel will set us up as lords of imagination, and this world will follow us to those we create. Sequel must have thriceworth explosions, ten sacks more guns, and in hearts, it must taste bitter and sorrowful, yet caring and full of springtime hope”
Conclave has banished the scary-speaking and shallow designers, for they were aliens to them. They have new ones, young and snappy and filled to brim with new ideas, yet new ideas worry conclave, who already shit worry-shaped bricks out beneath their lizardly tails.
“How do you, young and snappy and filled to brim with ideas designer minds, would approach this quest? How, shall we reform our words, will you fulfill this bloody Mandatum we have received from the angry skies?”
The new designers, their hats full of their head, with their heads too big for their hats, reply:
“We shall rethink teh whole thought of moving pictures, teh very soundness of it. We will bring you a new prince of emotions, of new pedigree of teh empathy itself!”
The conclave, as if made of one mind and of one body, buries its many heads in its colourless hands, and shits some new bricks.
Designers scurry amidst the trained monkeys, peering over their hairy and scrawny shoulders, asking this and that. They are like mosquitos, sucking a drop of ideas from there, another from elsewhere, and so it goes. They look at the world monkeys are creating, on deeper level than mere head-lines and key-words and idea-boards. They see the ethereal and surreal and unreal character take his babysteps, reaching out to his buddies amidst the ravages of war, in the torn land. They are empathic creatures, and they are moved.
“Something is here. Something wicked has cometh. Be still, my heart! What is it made of?”
“It is sad. No, it is hopeful, but has not found resolution yet. It is a story in itself. How do we tell teh story with no words like teh words we are written in?”
They confer. They look back at old moving pictures, and see how moving and marvellous they are. Yet, they were not of the same world, in the end – they were of another. Detached.
How to attach them? Something new is needed. Did they not have the world already, a beautiful world that interacts with you, a world that touches you back and reacts when you shoot at it? Their eyes opened up, and they sang a song.
Hi-ho, world is not of heartless personae-less AI-animatronics;
Hi-ho, world creates the stories it weaves it leaves for us;
The AI-animatronics teh monkeys have bred are teh answer, thus;
[chorus] Me so horny, ahunka-hunka-hunka!
Wait, did I just wander towards context-sensitive AI and world and .. oh, drat. No, forget all that for now. I won’t go there, partly because I still like to entertain the idea of presenting you dear readers with gameplay blogread breaks that possibly annoy you to no end, and if you’re a game developer, you probably deserve it anyways.
So. Cutscenes?
On my part 1 of this probably neverending quest against wrongful cross-use of different storytelling media, I was rather annoyed at how media for passive audience gets treated in media for audience that dictates action and is hardly ever passive. Did I say cutscenes are inherently bad by nature if they are in games? Hell no. They can carry the story forwards, and if they are long and interesting enough, they do turn the player around into passive audience mode. It’s just the introduction and preparation and other cunning juggling of mindgames that gets forgotten, or gets acknowledged with “.. but it’s C priority, look at the schedule and just forget it already.”
Let’s juggle with some ideas. Let’s follow that white C priority rabbit down the hole nobody ever goes.
Traditionally, as mentioned before, cutscenes get slapped in where the transition from place / gameplay event / level to another occurs. It’s introductionary clip, a thematic booster or a plot forwarding device. Nothing wrong with that! It’s external stimulus within the game, as it comes automatically and with no player interaction required. One inherent problem might lay in the natural fact that it’s made to match the game world. It looks the same, it has the same colors and same art direction, even if it has higher production values and better looks than the game itself.
Scenario 1: Marshall Blueberry Got The Twitches
Player trots down an alleyway after clearing it free of giant cockroach combatant drones. It narrows down ahead, but we can see it opens up to a T junction alley between city blocks ahead. Right as the player is about to step to that crossing alley,
something loud and yellow and black and blue screams past his eyes, blurry and totally out of this world. Viewpoint suddenly shoots away, world on screen turns into caricature comic book representation of Your Mind On Cockroach Drugs, with more angles and corners than there can logically be, with colors dancing and the cockroach recon convoy passing our players location, who now is seen curled up in fetal position. We are watching him from high up, as if in astral experience. Loud cacophony fills our ears, wild vivid colors only drugged up demo coders can come up with fill our eyes, and with a quietness that comes so fast it sounds like a bang,
everything returns normal. Black frame or two on screen, regular colors of the world fill our view, everything is 90 degrees tilted. Your character is still on the ground, and you SO did not expect that moment. Oh, right, there was some gas tossed your way during the last skirmish..
Yet, cutscene it was. Thematic, maybe – or if the convoy had some wild caricatures of doomsday machines being transported, it could have been a plot forwarder as well. With good luck, it left the player eager to move along and figure out (allowed to figure out, really) what those drugged up, psychedelic hallucinations actually meant. And most importantly, it threw the player off the safe stand, reinvigorating him. It gave him something fresh to chew. It’s a game, you can go ahead and run with scissors at hand!
It doesn’t have to be the same static looking world you live in, you bitter monkeys.
Scenario 2: TVTropes edition!
Player trots down a grey alleyway after clearing it free .. you know. The same basic premise, right? Just as our hero is about to put his foot into the alleyway, we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE–
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder)
Hello folks, have you been feeling downwards lately? Have you not considered – or have you considered, but never dared to try the radio-activital water enhancer? With pellets of pure uranium carefully hand-casted into cement base, you only dip our Radium-O into your water tank and it will be filled with reinvigorating, life-energy boosting ATOMS OF THE FUTURE for you to drink! Available now from Lol-Mart!
(cue War Bonds Are Good For You -jingle and video reminder. “Returning to live action now!”)
–we snag the viewpoint with a reflex snap towards right, where a BLOODY HUGE MASSIVE CRAB TANK AIEE is shooting past your eyes and oh shit that’s big, those are hardened orbital bunker buster nukes on that platform, and oh wow I’ll just wait this one out, I know I’m gonna run into these baddies again–
And so on. Player is very, very used to all kinds of media. He watches television and movies. Television more than movies. He probably has watched television more than he has played games. He bloody well grew up with it. It was his nanny when he was a toddler. We took a step out of the box only to find old familiar things in new context, but somehow, as it was all so very familiar, it didn’t annoy .. And it was part of that world! Atomic age, with gigantic cockroaches with nukes that go to orbit. Cutscene itself did not serve gameplay function, other than slip a bookmark into the players memory about what he’s done and seen before. He’ll remember that moment, and that’s depth in itself, in a world filled with cliches seen bazillion times.
So maybe it wasn’t exactly out of the box. Maybe it was more like beating and kicking the box into different shape, but it doesn’t matter. Only as long as you can see the box, tiptoe around it, have some whacks at it and generally see ways to make things that go into the box and out again, you should be fine.
- If it’s a radically different cutscene, make it radically fast change because it’s not in balance with regular gameworld.
- If it looks like the ordinary gameworld, present it in much slower fashion as it’s heavily balanced. As mentioned, unbalanced you can whack into the weirdwoods as hard as you can, and it’ll be better for it.
Scenario 3: Daily grind
Our hero is about to embark on the crossing alley, and world pauses for split second. You hear DVD whirring to life. Screen comes back alive, but from a different viewpoint. There’s a big-ass tank-like monster with chipped armour, viewed from almost ground level to emphasize the big guns and bolts and stuff covering it. Lots of shiny bits, flares, DOF tricks with camera that shakes and rattles. A tank tread rolls menacingly towards the camera, which cuts to another angle right when the heavy metal descends on it. We’re shown the full size of convoy now, from aerial perspective. Sound is muffled, a cloud drifts under the camera to further emphasize scale. It’s all very movie-looking.
Cut back to player viewpoint, with player control. If he walks now, he’ll die under the machines. So he waits, watching. Pre-scripted convoy doesn’t care about him, its only function is to hint at future developments of this world war against bloody big insects with guns.
Sound familiar? I won’t even go there anymore, lest this blog gets banned from teh intarwebs for all the cursing.
Traditionally we suffer from too much safety, stay too sheltered and make familiar decisions. Things end up too “financially sound” and “marketable” and “it’s what others do so it’s what players want”. There’s no need to make the whole game artistically different and clever and celshaded whatnot with “unique art direction” with “extravagantly brave colours”. Just include the salt that goes on top of the same goo others are cooking. Little pinch is enough to remind people of the proper flavors.
There’s so much more to be said, regarding generally descriptive moments inserted in the middle of gameplay et cetera, but this is already bordering on too long post. I do smell the part 3 coming in nearish future, possibly with the notion of fading the cutscenes transparent to the player, or something. Until then, do leave comments if you have anything to add or argue.
I guess there is some unwritten law that every person who went to see Watchmen blogs about it. (will probably spoil some bits about the movie, so be warned)
It was a nice movie. People have complained about the fight scenes and the sex scenes being too long, but I didn’t think so, even if the whole movie was a bit on the long side. I think they both brought out the physicality and reality of the needs these people had, even if they donned on masks and set out to fight justice. Especially how brutal the violence got when it got rolling. It brought the question of the characters’ sanity much better to the surface (The lovers switching approving glances while breaking thugs’ arms and legs) and kept the viewer nicely reminded that this is not a Superman or X-Men movie where violence is more fun and games for all.
The casting was top-notch down to Nixon.
The huge blue smurf … manifestation… that was such a huge deal was pretty natural in the end and didn’t at least bother the flow of the film. As said, the sexuality in the movie was quite apparent a lot, but we are talking about people who dress up in rubber suits, so it’s to be expected.
And the ending. The controversial ending with no squid. It worked for me. The squid would have made the movie a bit less serious – this way it still filled the needs of the story, while fully focusing on the characters. While in the comic (with the pirate story-within-a-story and whatnot else), the presence of yet another major character (the squid) is easy to do, it was better to focus on what was there. The five Watchmen.
So, Game Mastering is like making love to a beautiful woman – Lots of work, but if you do it well and you do a lot of it, it gives you something to talk about when you’re golfing with your divorce lawyer.
Cosmo, GQ and other magazines are full of seduction tips. To be honest, half of the tips are basic human interaction stuff just put into words so that people realize what they are already doing / what they are already doing wrong. The other half of the tips are something that can be used by a good GM to accomplish something in the games they’re running. So, in spirit of these – a top ten list of seduction tips that have their uses for GMs.
In social animals, the alpha is the individual in the community to whom the others follow and defer.
This neat little tip has two ways it relates to RPG sessions and Game Mastering. First, while it doesn’t necessarily mean that when one of the lower-ranking members of the group gets out of line, you’ll dry hump them against the table until they recognize your superiority, it does mean that you are expected to have some charge of the situation. While there are games where the Game Master isn’t the ultimate authority in the game world, it is a fact that if you’re the one inviting people over to play and organizing the gaming situation, you’re in a way responsible of keeping things rolling. This is an authority position and you should embrace it as such. Someone needs to think of the game first, and that’s sort of your role. If the others think about it as well, that’s good too.
The second thing about being an alpha in a game is that you need to be able to stand confidently behind your words. If you say that something is happening in the game world, then that is happening in the game world. If you constantly have to go about correcting yourself, you appear insecure, and the rest of the pack will a) eat you alive b) leave you behind to the wolves. Depending if you’re carnivores or vegetarians. The most common type of failure in taking charge of your actions is demonstrated best by the following:
Players: “We enter the room”
You: “There are three menacing yeti in the room”
Player 1: “Yeti, sweet. My character has this special ability to make any yeti my friend. I’ll use that.”
You: “You can’t do that, they seem to be uhmn… mind controlled yeti!”
Player 2: “Great, I’ll use my character’s de-mind-control -power to make them not mind controlled. And then P1 can make them his friend!”
You: “Uhmn… They’re robots. They attack! Roll for Initiative!”
If you say they’re yeti, be man enough to keep them yeti even if it that doesn’t lead to the result you were originally hoping for. Don’t let that weakness seep through. The players are most likely expecting you to be the reliable leader that is best for their pack. Act the role. (Note: Being an alpha doesn’t mean being macho or even manly. You don’t need to boast – let the actions speak for you.)
If you sit in your mom’s basement and just watch TV and eat cheeseburgers, you might get great ideas for your games and your friends might really like the way you run them. But seriously, for a game master, there are two great reasons for staying fit and having a life.
First is that frankly you’re a lot better off when you’re in good shape and have some form of social life beyond your gaming group. Being fit makes you more cheerful and less lethargic. And an energetic game master is a good thing to have. The second, a bit less obvious bit is that having a life and being in shape means you’ll be out and about. Meeting interesting new personalities and getting mugged by yet another generation of street thugs. Experiencing the life outside the four walls of your home. By having a larger social peer group you will not be obsessing about games as much, and you’ll be guaranteed to get some real inspiration out of that. You’ll hear stories that are odd and wonderful. Low key and world shattering to the people telling them. A new person you meet might give you an idea for a new character. Or she might turn out to be the love of your life, for that matter. But the first thing is to get off your ass and go get a life.
Also, there is no shame in dressing in something else than black jeans and the Metallica T-Shirt you bought 15 years ago. Getting a shave and a haircut wouldn’t hurt either. Just saying. Real job maybe?
Sometimes there are players and games that just aren’t meant to work together. Maybe the player has very different ideas about roleplaying than you, or maybe she just doesn’t like you, the fellow players or the game. Maybe she’s going through a rough patch and the game isn’t what she needs just now. Maybe she’s a pretentious bitch who thinks you’re a lowly brute for your interest in 12th century underwear. You just need to set your personal motivations aside and let her slide. The game will be harmed more by the obtrusive player than it will be by her leaving the group.
If you notice a player who is constantly away from your games, or cancels at the last possible moment, or just doesn’t seem like she’s really that interested, be frank about it and offer her a way out of the group. If you can’t say “Okay, this doesn’t work and I don’t want you to come to this game anymore,” tell her a lie – something along the lines that there is a friend who would like to join the game and could take over her character. It gives her a way out that leaves everyone feeling a bit better. Sure, saying to someone that it might be better to “do it” with someone else is painful, but will help a lot in the long run.
The age old wisdom from the TV series Lost is that a good way to keep the audience hooked to a show is to generate more questions than you give answers to. Also, the same show has taught us that if you overdo this, it just gets ridiculous. When you have a good group together and you’re selling your game to them, keep them wanting more – keep them waiting to find out what happens next. And after teasing them for a while, give them a reward for their patience. Reveal to them some of the things you’ve been teasing them with.
You can use this question-answer cycle as a motive for the game to move forward – if you leave something hanging in the air, you can then have the characters go explore it. By doing that they’ll find out things about it, but also new questions. Don’t answer all the questions you have posed with new questions. That just gets frustrating for everyone.
This has actually more to do with selling NPCs than selling you. When you introduce a person to the game and want it to be interesting, give it a story to tell the players. By a story I don’t mean a full-fledged narrative, but something that is interesting and tells the players something about the NPC. Could be something like when the new recruit to the team comes in a bit late, she says “Hi guys, check my new gloves – I had to actually tear them from this chav chick’s hands over at the store. They were the last pair and I weren’t going to let some skank have them before me. So, what’s going on?” This is something that will help the players relate to the NPC a bit better instantly. Even if the game is about fighting supernatural terrors from beyond, a character that nearly got into a fight at the H&M will be remembered better and with more personal attachment than some cute chick with neat gloves.
In fact, keep a few different stories around for each character and tell them as the game progresses – to re-introduce the NPCs to the players every now and then. Maybe every few gaming sessions.
Interaction is the core of RPGs. This means that you have to pay attention to what the other side is saying. And by paying attention, I mean really paying attention. What are the things that keep coming up again and again when they talk? Which parts of your GMing they react to? When are they being non-responsive? When you’re playing with other people, these are the ways they can and will give you clues of what they want from the game. Sometimes a direct approach helps (asking “What do you want from the game?”) but might also lead them to just bullshit their way out of the situation – telling you what you want to hear. What you want from the game. Thus, being interested in what they say when in actual game situations comes in handy.
Also, this leads to another seduction tip that I have to mention here – Eye contact. Eye contact. Eye contact. Don’t just observe, show that you’re observing. If you’re hunching into your rulebook while the player is trying to explain her ideas, you’re discouraging her. She will think that you’re dismissing her ideas outright and will not go all the way with them. Even if you were actually listening while reading, you’ll miss on content as the other party thinks you’re not interested.
Now, a mirroring technique in seduction means something where you are copying a person’s movements and gestures and eventually noticing how she starts to mimic you, and you’ll be able to get her bend over backwards for you. In RPGs the techniques are more about you being willing to let the players influence how the game works to get them drawn in and using that to your advantage. If you paid attention a moment ago when I was talking about paying attention or even bothered to read the player’s character sheet, you already know quite many things about what a player wants to do in the game. And more often than not these wants and needs the player has are in opposition to your own ideas about what the game should be about.
How is it done? Simple. Pay attention when the players are explaining their characters to you and start the game with the players having their characters involved in exactly what they’re wanting. Give them positive things to associate with the game by doing what they like to do and then slowly introduce your own ideas.
The benefit of this is that the players get more excited about games where the things they like are happening. So if you give them a game where the focus is on these things, they’ll be eager for more, even when you start bringing in plot elements that aren’t the ones they were originally interested in.
Sometimes things go right, sometimes things go wrong. What is important is to know what worked and what didn’t.
After each game, try to think what was good and what was bad. And then think how to replicate the good in future games. And how to avoid the bad. Much more demanding than it sounds. Players are usually horrible at giving feedback, especially negative. You’ll have to listen to what they say went well and then fill in the holes as “ok, they didn’t say this thing was good. Was it mediocre or bad?” And every time you start a new gaming session, try to fix one of the things that have been going wrong and hold on to one of the things that went well (if you manage more, that’s even better, of course). Eventually you’ll get the hang of what went right and what went wrong.
A good player can spot bullshit a mile away. When you try to feed her stuff that is not really you, you’ll get made. Of course, as a Game Master, you will have to create NPCs and tell stories. But try to be something you’re not cut for and you’ll end up with the players rolling their eyes. If you can’t create great action scenes, settle on creating good ones, but make the social interaction great. If you have problems running games with huge complicated conspiracies, run games that don’t have them. And if you decide to make a scene that seems really cool, make sure both you and the players have emotional investment to it so that you’re not just running it to impress everyone while your heart is not in it.
Also, know your shit. The more things you need to pull out out your ass, the more your authority ends up under inspection. If you are playing with a new system, try to know most of it beforehand. And if you don’t know something, say “I’m not 100% sure about this, but is it okay with all of us if we use a variant of this rule here,” at least you’re being honest. And honesty can be a great thing when you’re getting called on doing things differently than the rulebook said.
And when everything went to hell, and half of the players aren’t talking to you anymore after you tried some experimental Norwegian artsy things they didn’t like, the best way to get back on the horse is to get back on the horse. Play something light everyone likes, don’t try too much. Roll AD&D characters and play a scenario you found on the internet while laughing together at how bad it is. The best way to get over a bad game is to ignore all the fancy things, all the roleplaying game theory you know, and just to hang out with your friends. And roll some dice.
You are currently browsing the The CoW: Half a Dozen Years blog archives for March, 2009.
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
