Well, folks, I think it may be safe to say that this little blog is a done deal.  I just haven’t had the urge to talk about gaming online in a good long while.  One of these here days, I might get around to just taking the whole thing down for the pleasure of finality, but at least for a while I’ll leave it as is.

I’ve enjoyed it, but my head is not really in the game.  It’s full of other things these days.

Have fun everybody.

Nor even taking a break from nerdly endeavors like game design.  I’m just quietly trying to put together a game that operates as much as possible within the confines of the game’s fiction, that incorporates ‘mechanical’ elements into the fiction, ideally in a kind of non-disruptive way.

If it keeps shaping up nicely, I’ll start to talk more about it.

I’ve been fiddling around with Uns in some of my spare time and trying to figure our how to relate the spatial and temporal elements of the game.  It is not too complicated, really, but when I was thinking through the discrete spatial locations and movement between them, I kept having this faint sense of familiarity.  It was like I was mimicking something I couldn’t quite remember.

Then I remembered.  All the way back to ancient times, when I was growing up, playing these text-based computer games on the TRS-80, things like Zork.  Simultaneously, I’m first discovering D&D and modules, with their constrained movement between spaces.  Then flash forward to early college when I knew a guy running a low-fantasy themed talker, when I discovered MUD’s.

I didn’t much enjoy MUD/MUSH stuff.  I just never spent enough time online to hook into the social dynamics that seemed to be the secret to their success.  I always felt a little too much like a spectator.  Still, the interface had its appeal.  What do they all have in common, though?  They are readerly mediums that rewarded attention to words.

When Wizards of the Coast decided to trim down description blocks, I was a little disappointed.  It made sense; they saw people at gaming tables tuning out during longer descriptions.  I still had the curmudgeonly “oh, that it weren’t so” reaction, though.

In a group, especially in a convention setting (where the WotC observations were made), there is a lot vying for your attention.  Other players at the table are people with whom you want to engage, not just sit quietly together.  Does that hold with just two people?  Attention shifts quite a bit when we read to and with just one other person.

That’s one of the appeals of making Uns aimed for two person play, though, to recapture the readerly space and intensify it, give to the players the tools to complicate and ’sink into’ that written-spoken word.  It’s an effort to create a ‘living’ book, with a real emphasis on the book-ish quality of the experience.

As I think about what it might look like to play Uns, I keep wondering about this issue of character ownership.  Superficially, the game is all about the character ownership.  There is one player, one main character, and everything basically happens for the sake of them.

But that really doesn’t capture what the game is about.  The rigid constraints of the module system (here are the places you can go, period) makes any sense of ownership more limited.  The character serves as a screen to be drawn through the setting, an organizing element that structures play, helps narrow down what can or ought to happen where.

This really isn’t so different from what happens in an old fashioned D&D module, except that the modules I would like to author aren’t about the dungeon crawl or the violence.  How much did I own ‘Rojo the Monk’?  As a character, he was just a list of interactions I could have with a fairly stable setting.

Sure, there was probably some window-dressing that gave him the appearance of independence, but if I wasn’t going to have him wander through the strange abandoned house up on the hill, I wasn’t really playing the game.  Because Rojo was designed for the module, designed to pummel monsters and pirates, to avoid damage from that pit trap, and so on.

I identified with him because his position (and history of positions) in the module determined what information about the setting was available to me, in a way that mimics a real dimension of my experience: limited access and control.

It also reproduces, in miniature, the anxieties of that situation.  The very same anxieties that I suspect result in really desperate expressions of character ownership, where the character must be a hero, their actions must have a profound impact, must draw together the disparate elements of the module into a coherent, understandable thread.

I am thinking about this, because I wonder how to write a module to alleviate that anxiety, but on a much smaller scale, where things come together for a character without thereby making it about the character in toto.  That, too, seems tied to being able to realize a comic form for the story.

That is one of the delights of a good comedy (again, dramatic sense here, not comedy as in humor-driven), it is light, things come together, but there are not the pretensions of epic or tragedy.  The world of comedy stretches almost to infinity, but it does not break or dissolve or get remade.  The comic form may have a certain gravitas, a reflectiveness, in fact works best with reflection, illuminating what is more clearly, gently.

It is the return to the beginning without the confusion and fear of beginning.

(That’s my current thought, at least)

ETA: These sorts of game bring actor and author stance into close proximity sort of as a matter of course.  What you have access to as a player and a character are remarkably similar, though not quite identical.  I wonder how many badness happened as a result of exporting this peculiarity outside of its original context, into games without such strict setting determinations…hmm.

As I toy with what I want to do as a mock-up for Uns, I realize that there are plenty of games that focus on delivering the drama, where drama equates to tragedy and disaster.  When I start to think about design, my instincts go in exactly the opposite direction.  I want the hope of happily ever after.

It’s kind of obvious, really, but I want a game that does romance, in the Greek Romance sense Bakhtin talks about in The Dialogical Imagination.  I want a game where, yes, there are all these occurrences between the story’s beginning and it’s happy ending, but I want the ending to be happy.

I know, it is sort of a simple thing, but I want to affirm it, because it’s easy to lose sight of that, and easier to still to realize that there has to be something in the game that facilitates that.  This is where the computer game comparison comes in since plenty of computer games are structured to produce this sense of satisfaction and happily ever after.

Anyway, enough rambling.

As I start to fiddle with cards, seeing what it looks and feels like to have a hand of cards as a tool for playing Uns, I very quickly find myself wanting the face cards to be more than just another card of some suit or another.  While I think getting too fiddly with card meanings can be distracting, face cards, well, have faces.

At the same time, I don’t like the idea of the explorer having too much narrative freedom, since that feels like it shifts them away from the exploring headspace into a thinky, fiddly headspace.

I thought about just taking the face cards out, having them occupy a separate deck or something, but that feels and looks wrong to me.  As I start to pull face cards out, separate them into a pile, the play space feels too cluttered for my tastes.

I could just have them pulled from the explorer’s deck, letting them remain the property of the guide, but that feels too controlling.  I don’t want the explorer to have no authority for introducing characters, I just don’t want them to have the same authority as the guide.

I’m thinking, instead, to let them be a dual purpose card for the explorer.  The explorer can either treat them as any other card of the suit or use them as an occasion to ask “Is that so and so I see/hear/smell/etc. over at such and such?”  The guide may then take the hook and run with it or spend a card to “no that isn’t so and so, but…”

Tune it to the face cards, too.  Jack can be any young male or female, Queen must be a woman, King must be a male.  Perhaps have module specific connections to the suits and make those requried elements of the character suggested?  In other words, if ‘Diamonds’ relate to the market in a given module, any diamond face card must be tied to the market?

Maybe.  That has the advantage of encouraging descriptions to feed back into the setting…

It needs a shorter name, to be sure.  I’ll just call it Uns until I figure out something.  It is easier to type, neither long nor with too many capital letters.  There is a braindump’s worth of drafting in the sketching a game page, above.  Emphasis on draft and dump.

I just want to start thinking about how to approach this in a fairly concrete fashion, so I’m setting some parameters for myself.  I hope that I might end up with something with more reach, but I don’t want to aim for that since that only fosters my own tendency of sidetracking myself with shiny mechanics.

• 2-Person Play, roughly traditional GM-player
• Playing card based (the suits are evocative and seem better-suited for guiding description)
• Module-like play, which means finite and discrete locations through which the player can move, each detailed before play begins
• Mechanics should encourage both players to engage with descriptions and elaborate upon them, activate them

This begins to resemble a plan.

Ask me a simple question…I dare you.  The soul of my wit is surely not brevity!  So, in response to a question Mo asked me, I have this elaborate answer.  Here’s her question:

Do you think you gloss A/B and go to C because you have an internal black box that takes it for granted?

The basic answer is yes, I do have something of an internal black box that takes this for granted.   The long answer is yes, and let me start taking the screws off that black box.

First off, I suspect I probably should broaden (d) to include all kinds of over-management of social interactions at the table through economy.  That is important for making sense of what makes the black box function.

This requires a little history about how I engaged with role playing and how that engagement shaped how I understood the design process.

I first started to think about designing a game about the same time I started to really figure out how to run a game well.  For me, that entailed focusing play away from module (or module-like) content and developing a more free-form, plot-driven manner of interacting with players.  I got much better at noticing small and large cues about what piqued their interest and shifting play toward those interests.

So, if some small detail jumped out to players and they started making a big deal about it, I would make that detail more important.  Running a game involved managing the ‘face-time’ a given player or player’s interests got, too, so that everyone felt engaged.  While occasionally I might have drifted into sneaky Illusionism, a lot of times I managed to just let player interest guide the course of play.

Now, when I started thinking about design, I started to think about what I had done to manage play and how I could create rules that would facilitate that process.  That led me to consider the ‘important’ part of design to be little more than packaging table management.

Now, what gets lost in the shuffle is the very real pleasure players took in the details of the setting, the pleasure of exploration.  This did not get lost when I was running the game, but it got lost in how I conceptualized the game.

That led to an ass-backwards design process virtually guaranteed to patchwork monsters of setting and mechanics.  Instead of trying to figure out how to facilitate exploration, I kept trying to settle on how to manage player interaction at the table.

As I got more focused on that, the concept drifts to the background and the mechanics as a thing unto themselves take center stage.  Random ideas about mechanical elements (which may or may not be interesting) get sutured to a concept.

Free association about mechanical elements then replaces contemplation about how to facilitate exploration.  There end up being almost no connection between the mechanics and the setting. Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, the heart does not beat.  The game just sort of lays there, dead.

I’m not saying that the economic issues are unimportant, it is just that I am coming to terms with how poorly I have been at identifying their proper place in the design process.  The first goal needs to be figuring out how to get the players to interact with the setting, the details.  There has to be flow before I can think about managing flow.

Okay, I have officially gotten a bee into my bonnett about giving this blog a little tlc.  Just to make a point of drawing attention to some of those changes:

I’ve changed the theme to one that accommodates additional pages more attractively.  That has entailed some layout changes, as well as a change in header image.  I kind of miss the old header, but I like the new one, so I’m going to let it be for a while, see how I like it.

I have some non-blog content which should see some growth in the coming months.  There is an about page now (‘blog of shadows’) as well as some dedicated space to start thinking about design and trying to sketch out some mechanical elements in that direction (‘sketching a dream‘).

Maybe something will come of all this.

Talking, even half-heartedly, about sketching out a game again shook loose something in the back of my head.  I started to think about how I design, why I design, and then I started thinking about how I think about play.  What is more, I have been producing a game of PTA for my gaming group, a more active role than I have taken in gaming for a good long while (it’s been refreshing, with a few bumps).

Somewhere over a slice of pizza, it hit me that almost all of my design efforts to date have been presumptively focused toward a Simulationist CA.

What I most want the rules to do is provide the mechanics for the elaboration of a setting, the exploration of a setting.  This (yep, look at me, actually quoting an old Forge classic like Simulationism: the right to dream):

For play really to be Simulationist, it can’t lose the daydream quality: the pleasure in imagination as such, without agenda.

holds very true for what appeals to me about designing a game and how I imagine it might be played, whereas I have not been able to fully come to terms with this, which makes it easy for me to get lost:

For game design to promote this goal, it must be openly valued and its virtues articulated…

Well, I’ll be.  That is just about it.  The games I want to design amount to structured, cooperative, daydreams.  What I want is a game that contains (a) material to prime the pump along with (b) rules that provide some structure as to who can contribute to that base material and when they can.

I tend to drift from (b) toward trying to (c) establish an economy of access to contributing details which, in turn, drifts into (d) looking for mechanics that determine when the game ends.

(c) superficially looks like (b) and may or may not be inimical to my primary goals.  (d), however, is something of a siren, that draws the ship of design onto the rocks.  Artificially determining the end of a dream is inimical to the very process of dreaming it.  It redirects attention away from the dream to rationing, to the mundane.

When does a dream end?  When people drift away from it.  When people get hungry or bored or have to go home to check on the kids.  You don’t need to structure it to end, dreams end well enough on their own.

I want to design a game of the floating worlds, of the ethereal, of the passing moments.

Huh.  How about that, indeed?