I feel I should make clear the "challenge" the DM faces in attempting the design formulation that I've been proposing: 1) that the game should be hard enough to play that players can lose heart or contentment as the game progresses; 2) that 'fun' is not a design feature; 3) that the game setting be fixed and reasonably predictable; and that 4) the player's actions should result in a change to the setting, which then adjusts and directly addresses what the players have been doing.
Is this hard? Yes. Extremely. Is this beyond the ken of most DMs? Without question. And let me address that for just a moment.
We cannot expect others or even ourselves to step into an interpretation of a game that is distinctly different from what we have expected it to be for a long time and then do well. What I've been arguing flies flat out in the face of "role-playing games" as they've been sold and promoted since their inception. The potential difficulty of the game has never been embraced by the makers of the game nor the company that ultimately acquired the property from those makers. In every case, in every media release, in every publicized demonstration of the game, the principal goal has been to make the game accessible to a wider buying public, a public that can't be counted on to attempt to play a difficult game that can't be easily explained or mastered. There's no benefit in attempting to promote this, not by the company continuously re-inventing the game, not by clubs who count their importance by the number of their attendees, not by game stores who care first and foremost about sales and certainly not by virtually every game-master discussing the game on the web, having been steeped in the marketing culture of Cons, modules, splat books, fictionalized role-playing novels, podcasts, blogs and a nostalgic background in junior high school and high school introduction.
D&D, and the other role-playing games that followed, can't be properly compared to other games such as baseball, hockey, golf, Monopoly, RISK, chess or bridge, etcetera, because those games can be easily explained. The "hard" part inherent in those games depends upon the actual skill of of the participants: but take six-year-olds and teach them hockey and they can enjoy the "difficulty" of the game against each other, even if a group of seven-year-olds would wipe the ice with them.
But D&D isn't like that. The actual process of the game is more difficult than the play. Once it has been decided to kill the chimera, further game play is dependent on whether or not one survives. The player can add information as the fight goes on, but most of the actual process is spent in determining chance of hitting, weapon used, effectiveness of weapon, personal skills, losses, niggling details surrounding every part of the experience and, finally, waiting to see which lives or dies, the player or the chimera.
Video games manage this process by greatly simplifying all the details so that the player need only press a button; the speed at which the battle is resolved is maximized and so twenty seconds or so of pushing a button at a hard target will sort out the result. D&D isn't like that. Much of D&D, no matter how simplified we make the game, is accounting.
This means that, for most people playing, the quality of the game is based solely on how much accounting the players and the DM are prepared to do. Less rules, less accounting. More DM fiat, less accounting. More story-driven, character-driven parley and general in-character chatter, less accounting. And if we get rid of details like experience gained, hit points, levels, 'to hit' rolls and other features of combat, all of which I've seen proposed for throwing into the trash, less accounting still.
Those who describe "a better game" as one in which accounting takes place on a grander, deeper scale (meaning that rules and details are added), are considered pariahs and abuse-mongers among the much larger populace of participants who have determined that "better" describes a game in which the character sheet is drastically reduced in scope and detail. These are people who don't want to play golf, or hockey, or anything else that requires sweating. These are people who, when they buy a game, immediately seek out the "cheats" pages on the internet because even the automated process of having a computer calculate out pleasure and rewards for time spent can't wait, but must have their rewards right now.
Because of all this, we can't merely describe the sort of D&D I'm proposing with those four points that started this post as "challenging." Let's be correct. D&D as I try to play it is unpleasant, unmanageable, unfair to the DM and the player, unreasonable in its rules' systems and, for the most part, incomprehensible in terms of how it produces "fun."
Which it doesn't. My game produces strain. My game produces panic. My game promotes feelings of inadequacy and frustration and, occasionally when a party can't get its shit together, exhaustive periods of boredom. When new players come into my game, they're familiar with my online persona and they presume, not always rightly, that I'm waiting in the tall grass with a knife, waiting to gut them. And even though I will occasionally step out and say, "Relax, I'm not just going to kill you for no reason," they don't believe me. Largely, because they have no idea what would count as a "reason" and, just in case, it's best to think everything does.
They have no idea because I'm perfectly ready to blindside a party with something they didn't expect, I'm good at that, and people have personally witnessed me doing it.
So why? I ask you. Why would anyone want to play in a game like mine? It's just a lot of accounting and rules-making and reading and memory-work, just to stay on top of what your player can and cannot do, much less trying to figure out what the NPCs might want to do, or how the world itself fits together.
Screw all that! Please, just give us a lot of description and a king who wants a thorough back and forth with us about our backstory.
Monday, July 10, 2017
Sunday, July 9, 2017
Iceland Coast
I'm sorry to say it, all, since some of you are paying the price, but it is nice to have a little time to myself again. Before digging myself into deadlines and such, I was working on Iceland. This was just a couple of hours work. It needs cities, adjustments to elevations and what small hydrofeatures that will exist, but on the whole I'm pleased with the size of the thing. I felt initially that it would not cover so many hexes.
I have been basically relaxing all week, aside from working in a bakery on 95-degree days, as the city is going through a heat wave. The house is so hot it is hard to sleep at night. Still, yes, I am sorry about letting this break spin out overlong, and I do plan to get back to writing. I hope I can hammer out a few words this evening, if it would just bloody well cool off.
In the meantime, there's a little Iceland: oh, how I wish I were there.
There is one feature on the map that shouldn't be there, as it wasn't "land" until 1963, the year before I was born. But what the hell. I've said, it isn't the real world; it's my world.
Saturday, July 8, 2017
The Wheel Turns
Having laid the groundwork with the previous few posts, starting here, I'm in a position to discuss a relationship between blocking and RPG adventure writing, that struck me as I was reading this comment from Tim.
We're told to think in terms of the 'story' of the adventure ~ but as I've explained, this is a lazy use of the word from game makers who did not have the vocabulary or the design-experience necessary to find the right word in their lexicon. A proposed adventure is a delivery system for communicating a set of ideas to the players which will produce a vaguely understood but ultimately unknown behaviour, the same way that a phone app will be designed for one purpose and then find itself being used very differently once in the hands of the public.
The correct term for this design process is "modelling," which the reader will note is the term used by experts when discussing the principles of design, such as here, here, here and here. If we take the last, which is about security systems and threat models, the professor ~ after some introduction ~ talks about how the security system is based on achieving a goal when there is an adversary present: and this is more or less the principle behind what we should be thinking when we are designing a dungeon.
The type of dungeon being entered should be based not on the environment or the amount of treasure or how dangerous it is, though these things matter and are ultimately part of the system, but specifically how rigorous is the dungeon in terms of dealing with the players as invaders of that system. Is the dungeon open or closed? Prepared or not prepared? Do the denizens of the dungeon expect a threat or has the likelihood of a threat become minimal to the point where the denizens have become quite lax. Specifically, how much confrontation should the players expect once they've entered the model?
Most of the original dungeons that were created by the early adventure designers were built like a series of museum exhibits, each with something different and interesting to show but no real continuity from location to location. There have been varying attempts to move away from this model but it continues to turn up again and again in dungeons made by DMs who just don't know any better and who can find plenty of examples to support the notion that this is good design. In fact, the dungeon should be organized in a manner that suggests that the denizens within are as free to move from room to room as the players are. If the rooms are separated by fixed, nearly impassable walls, then the dungeon rooms so divided can exhibit a severe break in continuity; but if the players can just walk through a door or move down a passageway into the next room, then it should be assumed that the monsters can also: and if they can, why are the rooms arranged in the way that they are?
This is where we might imagine that we need 'blocking' to determine the arrangement of the rooms or the denizens within; but blocking is an inflexible structure for the movement of theatrical characters moving according to the rhythm and time-sense of the lines of the play as it is presented, or the inflexible plot points of a piece of literature that is meant to be experienced but which does not allow interaction. The monsters within the rooms the party is investigating will move according to the players' behaviour, or their lack of behaviour.
Consider: as a DM, you stipulate that the snake in the fountain will be moving slowly through the water at the moment the players enter the room. We can think of that as blocking, if we want; however, what the party does can change the habits of the snake, even if the party does not know the snake exists. Suppose than none of the players approaches the fountain? Suppose that one player decides to remain as a guard in the room, while the rest of the players move on to the next room? What then? Does the snake leave the fountain or not? We know the snake finds food by passing through the cracks in the wall. At what point does the snake leave the fountain to do so, enabling the player to safely watch the snake cross the floor while remaining unthreatened?
The tendency is to always assume that the snake is a threat: that if the party will not go to the snake, the snake will go to the party. But we may easily play an entire golf course and never hit a water hazard; does that mean that the water hazard should come to us? Or that something is wrong with the golf course? Nonsense. As a designer, we have to see the design features of the model we're creating as flexible enough that the players can avoid hazards. And we have to see those hazards as living, breathing things, that won't remain in a static position within the system, just as the players are not in a static position.
Too often, we have tried to account for dungeons as a series of demanded expectations: the thought process has been, when the players do this, this happens. We should be thinking in terms of "if," and we should be thinking even better in terms of not having a certain response on the part of the monsters being fixed and inflexible.
If the monsters are vigilant, if they are certain that their lair is being invaded and they do feel reason to be threatened, they should fight like a cornered animal, perhaps to the last creature. But if the party has reached the dungeon through a trackless waste, only to finally find these creatures within, how vigilant should we expect them to be? Would they not, perhaps, be interested in news from the outside world? Might they not first seek to parley, then fail to understand for a time why the party is so violent and obsessively murderous? Could this not send a ripple down through a dungeon, where different groups have created negotiated boundaries between various lairs, which are now communicating as the word is sent down through the sixteen layers that the orcs on level 1 and the bugbears on level 3 have been nearly wiped out, except for a few left over who are now speaking with the ogres on level 6 or the hill giants on level 7?
Dungeons are virtually always seen as collections of targets; as museum exhibits; where the monsters stand frozen in time until activated by the players' entrance. But the player's decisions, speed of movement, order of investigation, access of magical power within the space and so on should influence what position the monster is in when the players arrive, how much intel the monster has had the opportunity to gather, what other forces already know about the players and what disturbances have occurred. These things make running a dungeon vastly more complex ~ but ultimately more interesting for the user.
Remember that line from Salen and Zimmerman: play is free movement within a more rigid structure. More rigid. Not totally rigid. Your personal control in driving your car is more or less predictable; but that predictability changes if it rains or snows and changes the surface of the road, and changes again if you wait three hours before getting on the highway to visit the nearby beach or campground where you hope to sleep tonight. Waiting can produce a better effect and it can produce a worse effect. You might wait and avoid the rain. You might wait and find the campground is full. You might wait and discover that you're so hungry before you reach your destination that you must now make an unscheduled stop. Your decisions have consequences to the way the complex, multi-varied world operates, both internally to the structure of your biology and externally to the structure of what nature and everything else is doing while you make a decision to act.
Whenever possible, a DM should try to stretch far enough to account for those decisions, giving enough free movement to the player to let them play, while enabling the structure to shift and adjust in response to that play. The car works in a rigid way; but the wheel still turns. The world the players participate in has to turn as well.
We're told to think in terms of the 'story' of the adventure ~ but as I've explained, this is a lazy use of the word from game makers who did not have the vocabulary or the design-experience necessary to find the right word in their lexicon. A proposed adventure is a delivery system for communicating a set of ideas to the players which will produce a vaguely understood but ultimately unknown behaviour, the same way that a phone app will be designed for one purpose and then find itself being used very differently once in the hands of the public.
The correct term for this design process is "modelling," which the reader will note is the term used by experts when discussing the principles of design, such as here, here, here and here. If we take the last, which is about security systems and threat models, the professor ~ after some introduction ~ talks about how the security system is based on achieving a goal when there is an adversary present: and this is more or less the principle behind what we should be thinking when we are designing a dungeon.
The type of dungeon being entered should be based not on the environment or the amount of treasure or how dangerous it is, though these things matter and are ultimately part of the system, but specifically how rigorous is the dungeon in terms of dealing with the players as invaders of that system. Is the dungeon open or closed? Prepared or not prepared? Do the denizens of the dungeon expect a threat or has the likelihood of a threat become minimal to the point where the denizens have become quite lax. Specifically, how much confrontation should the players expect once they've entered the model?
Most of the original dungeons that were created by the early adventure designers were built like a series of museum exhibits, each with something different and interesting to show but no real continuity from location to location. There have been varying attempts to move away from this model but it continues to turn up again and again in dungeons made by DMs who just don't know any better and who can find plenty of examples to support the notion that this is good design. In fact, the dungeon should be organized in a manner that suggests that the denizens within are as free to move from room to room as the players are. If the rooms are separated by fixed, nearly impassable walls, then the dungeon rooms so divided can exhibit a severe break in continuity; but if the players can just walk through a door or move down a passageway into the next room, then it should be assumed that the monsters can also: and if they can, why are the rooms arranged in the way that they are?
This is where we might imagine that we need 'blocking' to determine the arrangement of the rooms or the denizens within; but blocking is an inflexible structure for the movement of theatrical characters moving according to the rhythm and time-sense of the lines of the play as it is presented, or the inflexible plot points of a piece of literature that is meant to be experienced but which does not allow interaction. The monsters within the rooms the party is investigating will move according to the players' behaviour, or their lack of behaviour.
Consider: as a DM, you stipulate that the snake in the fountain will be moving slowly through the water at the moment the players enter the room. We can think of that as blocking, if we want; however, what the party does can change the habits of the snake, even if the party does not know the snake exists. Suppose than none of the players approaches the fountain? Suppose that one player decides to remain as a guard in the room, while the rest of the players move on to the next room? What then? Does the snake leave the fountain or not? We know the snake finds food by passing through the cracks in the wall. At what point does the snake leave the fountain to do so, enabling the player to safely watch the snake cross the floor while remaining unthreatened?
The tendency is to always assume that the snake is a threat: that if the party will not go to the snake, the snake will go to the party. But we may easily play an entire golf course and never hit a water hazard; does that mean that the water hazard should come to us? Or that something is wrong with the golf course? Nonsense. As a designer, we have to see the design features of the model we're creating as flexible enough that the players can avoid hazards. And we have to see those hazards as living, breathing things, that won't remain in a static position within the system, just as the players are not in a static position.
Too often, we have tried to account for dungeons as a series of demanded expectations: the thought process has been, when the players do this, this happens. We should be thinking in terms of "if," and we should be thinking even better in terms of not having a certain response on the part of the monsters being fixed and inflexible.
If the monsters are vigilant, if they are certain that their lair is being invaded and they do feel reason to be threatened, they should fight like a cornered animal, perhaps to the last creature. But if the party has reached the dungeon through a trackless waste, only to finally find these creatures within, how vigilant should we expect them to be? Would they not, perhaps, be interested in news from the outside world? Might they not first seek to parley, then fail to understand for a time why the party is so violent and obsessively murderous? Could this not send a ripple down through a dungeon, where different groups have created negotiated boundaries between various lairs, which are now communicating as the word is sent down through the sixteen layers that the orcs on level 1 and the bugbears on level 3 have been nearly wiped out, except for a few left over who are now speaking with the ogres on level 6 or the hill giants on level 7?
Dungeons are virtually always seen as collections of targets; as museum exhibits; where the monsters stand frozen in time until activated by the players' entrance. But the player's decisions, speed of movement, order of investigation, access of magical power within the space and so on should influence what position the monster is in when the players arrive, how much intel the monster has had the opportunity to gather, what other forces already know about the players and what disturbances have occurred. These things make running a dungeon vastly more complex ~ but ultimately more interesting for the user.
Remember that line from Salen and Zimmerman: play is free movement within a more rigid structure. More rigid. Not totally rigid. Your personal control in driving your car is more or less predictable; but that predictability changes if it rains or snows and changes the surface of the road, and changes again if you wait three hours before getting on the highway to visit the nearby beach or campground where you hope to sleep tonight. Waiting can produce a better effect and it can produce a worse effect. You might wait and avoid the rain. You might wait and find the campground is full. You might wait and discover that you're so hungry before you reach your destination that you must now make an unscheduled stop. Your decisions have consequences to the way the complex, multi-varied world operates, both internally to the structure of your biology and externally to the structure of what nature and everything else is doing while you make a decision to act.
Whenever possible, a DM should try to stretch far enough to account for those decisions, giving enough free movement to the player to let them play, while enabling the structure to shift and adjust in response to that play. The car works in a rigid way; but the wheel still turns. The world the players participate in has to turn as well.
Friday, July 7, 2017
Narratology's Limitations
Taking up where the last post left off, the tendency nowadays is to think of the room, the snake and the poison as a narrative, which it is not. Narratives are defined as accounts, which describe an order of events that take place in the past. What is interesting is that multiple narratives, even hundreds or thousands of possible narratives, can result from the same set up of the room, the snake and the poison. This is why we have to resist establishing a narrative before it can take place: our goal is to establish the mechanism that enables a narrative to happen ~ even if we don't know how that narrative will play out until it exists in our past.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure, and the ways that we are affected (behaviour) by our perception of those events. A player character dies as a result of the snake and this produces a reaction to the story of the character having died. Does this dying character encourage us to be more cautious when approaching rooms? Are we more cautious where snakes are concerned? Then, in the wider picture, does the sequence of events that become the narrative cause us to reconsider our will to play? Or our trust of the DM? Or the DM's certainty that this is a good way to run a campaign? These are all examples of how narrative might affect our perception.
This is why we tell stories: to evoke a response. To teach a lesson or examine a situation or develop awareness about human behaviour or encourage a better human behaviour. It is logical and rational to examine games of all types to determine what sort of effect is had on us by the way we have interacted in the past as a result of playing those games.
It does not make sense to suppose, then, that "narrative" can also describe something that hasn't happened yet. In the context of what narrative is and how narrative results, describing multiple possible future happenstances as "narrative" simply doesn't make sense within the definition of the word. That's why we use other words to describe a possible future; and why we use other words to describe a set-up, or a design, that will ultimately elicit a variety of possible futures. Those futures haven't been written yet; they haven't happened; therefore, they are not narratives. Those who think they are have gotten confused about what principles they are arguing.
That's not unusual. Very often, an individual with a flash of insight will turn a word or a phrase to a new meaning, representing something as what it is not but which it seems to reflect, in order to increase our understanding of that thing. All too often, however, this is not done very well; and for a time, a fad arises in which that phrase becomes a pursuit of thousands, even tens of thousands of scholars who are temporarily infatuated with this idea as conceptualized.
I will offer a favorite example of this: a Canadian example. Marshall McLuhan, born right in my own province, wrote a series of books about the media that, for a time, took the world by storm. His most famous quote, "the medium is the message," created a revolution in our understanding of media and its influence on the viewer.
Or rather, it seemed to do so. While there remain millions of people, academics and non-academics alike, who will rush to assert that this is true, and that McLuhan's key concepts are also true, there is one thing lacking in the whole structure.
Who has built upon this idea? Having understood that the medium is the message, what do we do with this knowledge? Where is the next scholarly goal post? For while McLuhan was certainly a breath of fresh air, he is an isolated breath where it comes to present-day discussions about media and it's influence. The phrase, "the medium is the message" is the equivalent of saying, "this is a table" or "this is a chair." Accepted. Now what?
This present faddism of narrative as the central key to role-play suffers from the same problem. Suppose we accept that, all right, role-playing is story-telling. How does that enable me to design a dungeon? Or encourage a particular behaviour in my player? Or describe how I should expect a player to respond once I have invented my story? How do I measure the effects of "story," when the story hasn't happened yet?
No one arguing for story-based role-play is addressing these questions; these are unanswerable questions in terms of "story." How can I, as a writer, ascertain with certainty what the specific reader's reaction will be to this post? I can guess that some readers will think this or that some readers will think that, but do I know what you, Joan or Jim or Jason, will think? No. Yet I need this sort of targeting tool when you, Joan or Jim or Jason, sit down at my table to play a game with me.
So let's focus on design, hm? Let's concentrate on those principles, because precepts like structure and function and observable behaviour, that has occurred in the past, can be evaluated and corrected, time and time again. Let's not waste our effort redefining a term that was never meant to describe the future.
Afterward:
Wonder Woman had some good features; but as a directed work, it had enormous transition flaws and considerable defects with regards to motivation, character development, goals, direction and ultimately structure. Those things can be overlooked in favour of a fun film, but the flaws exist nonetheless. I would say I expected better, but DC. Again.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure, and the ways that we are affected (behaviour) by our perception of those events. A player character dies as a result of the snake and this produces a reaction to the story of the character having died. Does this dying character encourage us to be more cautious when approaching rooms? Are we more cautious where snakes are concerned? Then, in the wider picture, does the sequence of events that become the narrative cause us to reconsider our will to play? Or our trust of the DM? Or the DM's certainty that this is a good way to run a campaign? These are all examples of how narrative might affect our perception.
This is why we tell stories: to evoke a response. To teach a lesson or examine a situation or develop awareness about human behaviour or encourage a better human behaviour. It is logical and rational to examine games of all types to determine what sort of effect is had on us by the way we have interacted in the past as a result of playing those games.
It does not make sense to suppose, then, that "narrative" can also describe something that hasn't happened yet. In the context of what narrative is and how narrative results, describing multiple possible future happenstances as "narrative" simply doesn't make sense within the definition of the word. That's why we use other words to describe a possible future; and why we use other words to describe a set-up, or a design, that will ultimately elicit a variety of possible futures. Those futures haven't been written yet; they haven't happened; therefore, they are not narratives. Those who think they are have gotten confused about what principles they are arguing.
That's not unusual. Very often, an individual with a flash of insight will turn a word or a phrase to a new meaning, representing something as what it is not but which it seems to reflect, in order to increase our understanding of that thing. All too often, however, this is not done very well; and for a time, a fad arises in which that phrase becomes a pursuit of thousands, even tens of thousands of scholars who are temporarily infatuated with this idea as conceptualized.
I will offer a favorite example of this: a Canadian example. Marshall McLuhan, born right in my own province, wrote a series of books about the media that, for a time, took the world by storm. His most famous quote, "the medium is the message," created a revolution in our understanding of media and its influence on the viewer.
Or rather, it seemed to do so. While there remain millions of people, academics and non-academics alike, who will rush to assert that this is true, and that McLuhan's key concepts are also true, there is one thing lacking in the whole structure.
Who has built upon this idea? Having understood that the medium is the message, what do we do with this knowledge? Where is the next scholarly goal post? For while McLuhan was certainly a breath of fresh air, he is an isolated breath where it comes to present-day discussions about media and it's influence. The phrase, "the medium is the message" is the equivalent of saying, "this is a table" or "this is a chair." Accepted. Now what?
This present faddism of narrative as the central key to role-play suffers from the same problem. Suppose we accept that, all right, role-playing is story-telling. How does that enable me to design a dungeon? Or encourage a particular behaviour in my player? Or describe how I should expect a player to respond once I have invented my story? How do I measure the effects of "story," when the story hasn't happened yet?
No one arguing for story-based role-play is addressing these questions; these are unanswerable questions in terms of "story." How can I, as a writer, ascertain with certainty what the specific reader's reaction will be to this post? I can guess that some readers will think this or that some readers will think that, but do I know what you, Joan or Jim or Jason, will think? No. Yet I need this sort of targeting tool when you, Joan or Jim or Jason, sit down at my table to play a game with me.
So let's focus on design, hm? Let's concentrate on those principles, because precepts like structure and function and observable behaviour, that has occurred in the past, can be evaluated and corrected, time and time again. Let's not waste our effort redefining a term that was never meant to describe the future.
Afterward:
Wonder Woman had some good features; but as a directed work, it had enormous transition flaws and considerable defects with regards to motivation, character development, goals, direction and ultimately structure. Those things can be overlooked in favour of a fun film, but the flaws exist nonetheless. I would say I expected better, but DC. Again.
Thursday, July 6, 2017
SFB
What I'll do now is give an example of structure, function and behavior, which I did not do enough of in How to Run (so I was told). Sometime I'll have to write an update of the whole worldbuilding section and do nothing but give examples for each point I was making.
I'm pushing the clock here, as I'm not going to write tonight like I should, but I'm going out to see the film Wonder Woman, which I hear is good to women. I'm certainly hoping that it is.
Let's invent a basic dungeon room and then examine that room in terms of structure, function and behavior, to better understand how designing works. People get quite muddled about this and, while not their fault, it is helpful to be clear about things.
As a reminder, "structure," from the Latin structura, is the manner in which things are fit together, built, constructed, arranged or ordered, in the sense of how they are assembled and joined in order to create the bare bones of the project. Thus, the structure of the room is as follows: the room's dimensions, the fabric from which the room is made, the contents of the room, the fabric from which the contents are made, the arrangement and dimensions of the contents and the physical relationship of the contents, from the point of view of the maker that is in a position to know every detail about the actual room. If we wish, we can also discuss the manufacture of the room and its contents, since that is relative to the structural process.
This is the structure of the room. Take note that we do not describe the manner in which any of the things in the room are meant to interact with the players. These things are not part of the room's structure.
"Function," on the other hand, is the manner in which the structure does work, or the purpose of the structure, or the manner in which the structure is intended to interact with its environment. Specifically, how does the room perform? Why have we included it in the dungeon? We're not making the room to satisfy the purpose of the entity that made it, but the purpose of responding to the players' free movement in the rigid structure. Think of it in terms of why we make a car or why we make shirts for everyday wear. The "why" is not part of the structure; the structure is an answer to the need, but these are not the same thing.
Nonetheless, I need to emphasize at this point that while this is the purpose of the room, and the basic expectation of the DM as the designer, this does not describe the player's actual interpretation of the room nor what they will do.
"Behaviour" describes the range of actions and free movement of the user of the room, once the room has been presented for examination. Behaviour consists of the user's actions, evaluation, investigation and manner when confronted with a structure and its function.
There. That should be pretty clear. Structure. Function. Behaviour. Your world relies upon you understanding these three elements, making them fit better together and having a clearer idea of how the best possible function, supported by the best possible structure, produces the best possible user behaviour.
This isn't a new problem. Every design company in every field of endeavor, from battleships to fidget spinners, works tirelessly on making the computation between these three elements come out exactly right.
I'm pushing the clock here, as I'm not going to write tonight like I should, but I'm going out to see the film Wonder Woman, which I hear is good to women. I'm certainly hoping that it is.
Let's invent a basic dungeon room and then examine that room in terms of structure, function and behavior, to better understand how designing works. People get quite muddled about this and, while not their fault, it is helpful to be clear about things.
As a reminder, "structure," from the Latin structura, is the manner in which things are fit together, built, constructed, arranged or ordered, in the sense of how they are assembled and joined in order to create the bare bones of the project. Thus, the structure of the room is as follows: the room's dimensions, the fabric from which the room is made, the contents of the room, the fabric from which the contents are made, the arrangement and dimensions of the contents and the physical relationship of the contents, from the point of view of the maker that is in a position to know every detail about the actual room. If we wish, we can also discuss the manufacture of the room and its contents, since that is relative to the structural process.
So, we have a room that has been manufactured by two basic means; first, that an entity has constructed the room by excavating the stone and then finishing the room according to the premise for its construction: in this case, a room that is 20 feet by 20 feet, with a typical dungeon door in the centre of two opposite, facing walls, with a 9 foot diameter fountain in the middle of the room, upon a parquet floor. The lip of the fountain is 2 feet above the floor and the centerpiece of the fountain is 6 feet above the floor. The centerpiece is a basalt stone woman, dark violet in color, adorned with wings and a peasants dress, holding a small infant that is clearly not a human but is of an unknown humanoid race. The fountain is powered by water pressure, through a drilled pipe that delivers natural water from a higher water source outside the dungeon, so that it runs continuously even at the present. There are no other constructed objects present in the room that have come about as a part of the this entity's original design.
The second means of construction has been time, several hundred years, over which time erosion, pressure and perhaps seismic activity has caused the fountain to break, causing water from the fountain to stream continuously over the parquet floor, enabling plants beneath the floor to emerge through the floor's crack and steadily destroy the cohesiveness of the floor's tiles. Since there is no sun, the plant life is little better than lichen, but endless generations of lichen have died and deposited compost upon the floor, so that now it is more plant and "dirt" than it is stone flooring. In places the walls are cracked, showing dark gaps as thick as two fingers. As the fountain is still spurting water, through several cracks breaching the lip of the fountain, the floor is spongy and damp. The fountain water is green and polluted with algae. The odor is musty and foul with rotting vegetative matter.
Finally, a green water snake has somehow found its way into the room, where it resides most of its time living in the water, moving out of it to search for food in the way of insects that it can reach through gaps in the wall. Inside the water snake is a poison sac.
This is the structure of the room. Take note that we do not describe the manner in which any of the things in the room are meant to interact with the players. These things are not part of the room's structure.
"Function," on the other hand, is the manner in which the structure does work, or the purpose of the structure, or the manner in which the structure is intended to interact with its environment. Specifically, how does the room perform? Why have we included it in the dungeon? We're not making the room to satisfy the purpose of the entity that made it, but the purpose of responding to the players' free movement in the rigid structure. Think of it in terms of why we make a car or why we make shirts for everyday wear. The "why" is not part of the structure; the structure is an answer to the need, but these are not the same thing.
The function of the poison in the snake's sac is to find its way into the body of a player; so the snake is likewise intended to be put in proximity to the player in order to effect the transfer of its poison from sac to player body. To accomplish this function, the snake is difficult to see among the polluted water of the well, which itself exists as the single enticing element of the room the players will feel compelled to investigate. Once the players begin to move through the room, a sign of the water's movement should be suggested, or any other clue, that will induce a player to move close enough to the fountain to attack the player character.
In turn, the sponginess of the floor is there to discourage rapid movement by the players, so the amount of give in the floor should be emphasized to create doubt, suggest a trap, suggest that the mold growing on the floor among the lichen might be legitimately dangerous and that the floor itself might perhaps be alive or otherwise threatening. A slower movement across the floor will cause a greater likelihood of players becoming interested enough in the fountain to investigate its contents.
Nonetheless, I need to emphasize at this point that while this is the purpose of the room, and the basic expectation of the DM as the designer, this does not describe the player's actual interpretation of the room nor what they will do.
"Behaviour" describes the range of actions and free movement of the user of the room, once the room has been presented for examination. Behaviour consists of the user's actions, evaluation, investigation and manner when confronted with a structure and its function.
Depending upon their proclivities, a group of players may exhibit none of the expected responses to the floor, the fountain or the snake; they may frankly choose to examine nothing and to act in such a manner that the snake, and ultimately the function of the poison, is never engaged.
Behaviour can be reasonably accounted for and to some extent predicted by designers who are thoroughly engaged in the sphere of their design, but ultimately any function of any design can fail to meet those expectations as users have minds of their own. The great struggle for design is to create functions that will produce instinctive, reliable, useful and effective behaviours in design users. When the users fail to respond as expected, that is an error in design ~ and possibly in the implementation of that design, where it comes to the presenter.
A successful design, one that produces the behaviour desired, relies considerably upon the presentation of that design, in the form of marketing, awareness, description, ease of use, user trust and a whole lot of other factors which can sink a perfectly viable design through mishandling of the user's experience. Therefore, once structure and function have been determined, it is up to the designer to evaluate the behaviour of the user in order to return to the drawing board and come up with a better design and a better function in order to relate better to the user's expectation and probable interest.
There. That should be pretty clear. Structure. Function. Behaviour. Your world relies upon you understanding these three elements, making them fit better together and having a clearer idea of how the best possible function, supported by the best possible structure, produces the best possible user behaviour.
This isn't a new problem. Every design company in every field of endeavor, from battleships to fidget spinners, works tirelessly on making the computation between these three elements come out exactly right.
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
Bogost Deconstructed
Ian Bogost speaking to user experience designers at the UX Design Conference, 2013, in San Francisco:
I can hardly express my gratification at finding that my own arguments and positions are supported by a professor at Georgia Tech, who admittedly is considerably less volatile than me. But, of course, when he speaks, he's respected as knowing something about what he's saying.
Bogost then deconstructs the song near the beginning of Mary Poppins, "A Spoonful of Sugar," for about four minutes and I won't reproduce it here. Basically, the question he asks, in design terms, how the principle of the song, that a job can be made a game, can actually work:
Because Bogost doesn't, since he's talking largely to a room that will have bumped into this philosophy, largely expounded by business concerns who think that any human activity can be pumped into a business environment in order to provide motivation for people who are being deliberately underpaid, I'll say a word or two more about gamification.
The most obvious failing of the gamification argument is that "games are fun." In fact, some games are fun; the same games are never fun for everyone; in fact, all games are ultimately despised by someone. More than this, games that are fun for a lot of people are extraordinarily rare, spectacularly difficult to create and usually rely upon a principle that says nothing of human importance is riding on the outcome.
Gamification completely ignores all of these facts. Gamification designers stubbornly argue that all games are fun, for everyone; that no one who is a good person can possibly dislike a game they are forced to play; that great games can be invented by anyone for any situation; and that my job, my income, my dignity or my enthusiasm won't or can't possibly matter once the game is presented. What we get are twenty miserable people at a gamification event, grinding their faces into evidence of appearing to have fun, while gamification divisors, supervisors and enablers congratulate themselves for a moment of fantastic success!
Bleh.
I'll pause a moment for that word, "Unexamined." Straight up, on this blog, I've been struggling to examine precisely how this "fun" is manufactured: and running head-on into a community that argues that fun is obtained by either: a) protecting the notion of fun from any examination, because examination, words, argument, investigation and so on are all horrible boring and therefore can only serve to ruin fun; or b) believing in the fun to such a degree as to argue that fun exists when people will it to exist, that thoughts create fun reality, that this is the only way to make fun, etcetera, etcetera. In other words, make your campaigns fun and they'll be fun.
And there it is, right in your face. He's speaking about video games, but since there's much less money to be made in RPGs, it's doubly true. Participants of role-playing are not taken seriously because they insist on measuring themselves in the most meaningless way possible. Moreover, there's no way to improve the game if there's no way to measure how it works.
My etymology dictionary says that prior to 1727, fun is
Picking up with Bogost again, following his dissection of fun as a term, followed by a longer dissection of fools and fooling, leading him to this point:
I'm sorry, I'm only going to repeat Bogost's point, now, sermonizing it for those in the audience who can't understand how this applies to the stuff we read as children when we began role-playing or how the game itself began in the hands of people who set out to market an incredibly complex idea in the space of three or four little books. We were told that we had to fill in the gaps, that we had to do the 'work,' that we shouldn't expect the creators to manage all the problems and situations that we were going to face, because it was our responsibility.
And when we failed in that responsibility, as was inevitable, as every would-be DM fails, even those who don't believe they have, running toxic nightmares as they strut their abilities, we feel ungrateful if we disparage the game or we feel that DMs who ask for more from the source are lazy and misunderstanding of their responsibilities. When Gygax, poorly as it turned out, tried to account for more possibilities with more rules, today he is mocked and derided for trying; and when the modern creators of D&D 5e make claims about how they've simplified the rules and streamlined the game, they subtly and knowingly disregard the millions upon millions of pages describing precedents for DM decision-making and gaming ideas and protocol and previously existing rules systems, that a desperate DM can turn to when 5e falls flat on its face. But the creators of 5e aren't responsible for acknowledging that resource, the DM is responsible for turning to it, though the creators of 5e can certainly trade on it.
The readers' sense of D&D being really, really hard comes about because we were obscurely led to believe that role-playing could be easily managed by ten and twelve year olds without much effort ~ and when we faced that effort, and failed, we knew it had to be ourselves that failed. And this has, in turn, left us with a legacy of people claiming they haven't failed, the game just needs to be simpler, easier, less complicated, less beneficial or adaptable to the player, while yet retaining its fun no matter how many legs we hack from the corpse.
The reader can look at any number of the endless arguments going on about role-playing, that were there ten years ago and twenty years ago, and see that argument being made again and again, where the writer says, "You're not getting what you're supposed to be doing to make this game better," then refuses to give us any real information. We're told to believe, or just accept, or trust that it's going to happen if we embrace it, without ever actually being told what "it" is.
I am backing off from the fight because I'm abused for arguing that there's "one true way" to play D&D; but as near as I can tell, I am one of a very small cadre of individuals who are willing to talk about any way to play D&D ~ because we are deconstructing the game and trying to empower the participant with tools, knowledge, comprehension and resources that they can use in real time. We're not just saying, "The game is fun for those willing to open themselves up to the game being fun." We're saying, "Work; build; prepare yourself; stop taking short cuts; admit errors; ask your players for feedback and ready yourself to change your precepts." And for that we're told we're being inflexible.
And I covered that point with my last post.
Oh, jaw dropping. What I would have done to be able to put it that simply ten years ago. This is the basis for all my arguments about setting and player agency; and for why all fudging and all DM fiat is bullshit. Good and proper play happens not when the car's steering randomly changes to make the process of driving a car more interesting, but when the car is utterly reliable and the driver learns exactly how much it takes to adjust the wheel at 90 mph (144 kmh) to fly past the startled faces of the old people driving their crumbling 1978 Gremlin. Do you like it when your car does something weird? Why should we imagine that a DM's random and irrational judgements would make a better gaming field to play on? Are the best surfing beaches full of rocks because it increases the randomness?
As players, we want to control things; more importantly, we want to believe in that illusory attitude that they can be controlled, even if that is nigh impossible. For that, we have to be able to interpret the landscape; we don't make a golf course better by random blasting. We make it better by cutting the grass every morning to exact, measured specifications, so that when someone plays this hole a year from now it is the same hole they are playing today. That's the bloody point.
Now ask yourself, with this in mind: why doesn't alignment work?
This is not the whole of the speech, which I strongly recommend the reader now go and watch (the link is right at the top of the post. What I've copied has done two things for me. First, it has absolutely vidicated every argument I've ever made on this blog about what needs to be done in making a game. I will remind some of my readers that my opening chapter in How to Run about worldbuilding began with structure, function and behavior; that is what Bogost is talking about here. I grant that was a difficult chapter; we're not steeped in what those terms mean, even as we pretend we know what we're doing when we design games. 'Fun' isn't a structure, it isn't a function, it isn't even a behavior, not as those words are defined. It isn't anything. We need to stop talking about it in terms of fundamental purpose and design.
The second thing it has done, hopefully, is to shine a clearer light on the matter of what are you doing when you run your campaign; and with regard to your behavior ~ your actions and the manner in which you interact with the game setting ~ in campaigns where you are a player. We just haven't got a solid, clear, rational notion of what this role-playing concept is: because we refuse to believe, as a community, that it follows the same laws and principles of other games, other human activities, other structures and other principles of design.
If you want your game to get better, you have to stop thinking like that. Because the sciences of design, user experience, interactive mechanics and so on have LOTS to teach you, solid stuff, real stuff, that will work and won't depend on you reaching inside yourself for the answers. The answers already exist; they've just been applied to other things that work just like role-playing works.
"This is the worst of the lot, this word [fun] and it's what I want to talk to you about today, because fun, after all, is the feature that is supposedly endemic to games and its the one that designers like yourselves sometimes want to extract from games and apply to websites and apps and whatever else. You know, make it fun. In the world of game design, 'fun' is taken as a given. It rules as an assessment of artistic quality. A game has to be fun, we say. And in fact that sentiment, that statement, is one that could easily be made by an adolescent boy on an internet forum or by a Nintendo CEO in a keynote before twenty thousand game developers at our annual conference that takes place right across town. And if fun just indicates that a product is sort of any good, then I guess it's a reasonable sentiment but it's also a kind of mercilessly vacant one."
I can hardly express my gratification at finding that my own arguments and positions are supported by a professor at Georgia Tech, who admittedly is considerably less volatile than me. But, of course, when he speaks, he's respected as knowing something about what he's saying.
"The unexamined weirdness of these terms seems to go under discussed. And it was actually best summarized, the weirdness of concepts like 'fun' and 'game,' was most effectively summarized by one of the most well-known twentieth century philosophers of play: Mary Poppins."
Bogost then deconstructs the song near the beginning of Mary Poppins, "A Spoonful of Sugar," for about four minutes and I won't reproduce it here. Basically, the question he asks, in design terms, how the principle of the song, that a job can be made a game, can actually work:
"At first blush it seems like just terrific advice ~ but just try to follow it . . . if an element of fun is hidden in every job, then how do you find it? Where do you look? By what process beyond this sort of supernatural 'snap' does the job become a game? A spoonful of sugar offers a kind of entertaining pointer to something that we already know, which is that things are more enjoyable when they're not less enjoyable. A job seems like more fun if it's more fun, so make your jobs fun so that they'll be fun.
"And incidentally, and I'm not going to talk much about this, but this is also the kind of logic of a trend known as gamification: games are fun so let's add games to things that are miserable . . . and it's kind of shame on us for falling for this; it's the same as Mary Poppins' snake oil, that we're just to dupe people who don't know any better into doing our bidding."
Because Bogost doesn't, since he's talking largely to a room that will have bumped into this philosophy, largely expounded by business concerns who think that any human activity can be pumped into a business environment in order to provide motivation for people who are being deliberately underpaid, I'll say a word or two more about gamification.
The most obvious failing of the gamification argument is that "games are fun." In fact, some games are fun; the same games are never fun for everyone; in fact, all games are ultimately despised by someone. More than this, games that are fun for a lot of people are extraordinarily rare, spectacularly difficult to create and usually rely upon a principle that says nothing of human importance is riding on the outcome.
Gamification completely ignores all of these facts. Gamification designers stubbornly argue that all games are fun, for everyone; that no one who is a good person can possibly dislike a game they are forced to play; that great games can be invented by anyone for any situation; and that my job, my income, my dignity or my enthusiasm won't or can't possibly matter once the game is presented. What we get are twenty miserable people at a gamification event, grinding their faces into evidence of appearing to have fun, while gamification divisors, supervisors and enablers congratulate themselves for a moment of fantastic success!
Bleh.
"But I think part of this problem, the fundamentals of this problem, come from the word 'fun' itself. It's a word that we use indiscriminately, without knowing what we're actually saying . . . when someone asks, 'Did you have fun?' it's mostly a courtesy: "Yeah, yeah, we had a good time.
"In common parlance it kind of suggests like, 'How are you?' 'I'm fine' ~ that you know everything went okay. There's nothing we need to report on further; but weirdly, as an aesthetic assessment, it sort of works similarly. So when you say, 'Oh this is a really fun game,' it's sort of like saying this is a good book. It was a good movie. It's a generic, slightly positive but basically empty sentiment that does little more than kind of endorse the speaker's unexamined, imprecise feelings."
I'll pause a moment for that word, "Unexamined." Straight up, on this blog, I've been struggling to examine precisely how this "fun" is manufactured: and running head-on into a community that argues that fun is obtained by either: a) protecting the notion of fun from any examination, because examination, words, argument, investigation and so on are all horrible boring and therefore can only serve to ruin fun; or b) believing in the fun to such a degree as to argue that fun exists when people will it to exist, that thoughts create fun reality, that this is the only way to make fun, etcetera, etcetera. In other words, make your campaigns fun and they'll be fun.
"[this empty sentiment] may do even less than that for games, because other media don't tend to enforce a sort of single, meaningless, almost immeasurable metric for aesthetic value. I mean, what critic or creator or consumer, even, would take an art seriously if its aesthetic ambition was something as vague as being "good." This kind of clown town, right?
And there it is, right in your face. He's speaking about video games, but since there's much less money to be made in RPGs, it's doubly true. Participants of role-playing are not taken seriously because they insist on measuring themselves in the most meaningless way possible. Moreover, there's no way to improve the game if there's no way to measure how it works.
"If we want to be more generous, we might say that fun is a surrogate for some more complex, yet unspoken sensation of gratification and satisfaction, rather than as a description for that satisfaction ~ and that standard could be replaced by any number of varied emotions. It's sort of like a pigeon. Fun is a way of translating actions into emotions, but we never fully complete the translation. And I think that's also why designers like you folks are maybe slightly mistaken to be interested in games on account of their ability to deliver fun, or engagement or whatever the hell it is that you think that we deliver. Or at least your interest in games maybe slightly misplaced. The thing that you might think is a kind of black magic of engagement or enjoyment, turns out maybe just to be the kind of ordinary practice that only seems exotic when it's unfamiliar. There's a kind of Orientalism in any interest in games among the design community and asking how you can harness fun in your design practice, it might be a bit like asking how you can harness umami in your design practices? It's just a mixed metaphor. It doesn't quite make sense.
"But the weird thing is that fun turns out to be unfamiliar like this not just in the design context, but kind of in every context. No one has any idea what they're really saying when they talk about something as being 'fun.' In fact, even the origin of this word is sort of murky; we can't trace it back philologically and gain much ground. It seems to be uniquely English, which is interesting ~ and there's a middle-English word 'fonnen' which is related to the fool: you know, to be a fool, to make a fool of, and that's our meaning that we sometimes use, "Don't poke fun at me" ~ but it's far less common than the usual sense of amusement or enjoyment that we've adopted today."
My etymology dictionary says that prior to 1727, fun is
"a cheat, trick" (c. 1700), from verb fun (1680s) "to cheat, hoax," which is of uncertain origin, probably a variant of Middle English fonnen "befool" (c. 1400; see fond). Scantly recorded in 18c. and stigmatized by Johnson as "a low cant word." Older senses are preserved in phrase to make fun of (1737) and funny money "counterfeit bills" (1938, though this use of the word may be more for the sake of the rhyme).
Picking up with Bogost again, following his dissection of fun as a term, followed by a longer dissection of fools and fooling, leading him to this point:
"The fool finds something new in a situation and then shares it with us. So think about it. A friend returns from an evening out; 'How was your night?' you ask. 'Fun, we had a good time,' she reports. What does she really mean? Even with the same friends at the same bar, with the same hot wings and the same complaints about the same co-workers, the evening resulted in some new discovery . . . so we had a fun time is a kind of compressed shorthand. It's a way of telling a story without telling it.
"This is where Mary Poppins leads us astray. The spoonful of sugar covers over something, it tries to hide it, it tries to turn it into a lie. It assumes that the situation itself is always insufficient. It is never capable of holding up to scrutiny; that we've already figured out everything there is to determine about it and that thing is negative. It's wanting. And that singsong job works in a movie but actually if you face a challenge like this in real life, a big messy room or a long boring flight or whatever it is, then the song and dance number just becomes an affectation. It's just an adornment.
"Then we feel guilty about that ~ and we feel guilty because we were weaned on children's stories like Mary Poppins that taught us that meaning comes from outside a situation, from what we make of it, that has to sort of arise from ourselves, that we have to manufacture it. Otherwise we're ungrateful or lazy or something."
I'm sorry, I'm only going to repeat Bogost's point, now, sermonizing it for those in the audience who can't understand how this applies to the stuff we read as children when we began role-playing or how the game itself began in the hands of people who set out to market an incredibly complex idea in the space of three or four little books. We were told that we had to fill in the gaps, that we had to do the 'work,' that we shouldn't expect the creators to manage all the problems and situations that we were going to face, because it was our responsibility.
And when we failed in that responsibility, as was inevitable, as every would-be DM fails, even those who don't believe they have, running toxic nightmares as they strut their abilities, we feel ungrateful if we disparage the game or we feel that DMs who ask for more from the source are lazy and misunderstanding of their responsibilities. When Gygax, poorly as it turned out, tried to account for more possibilities with more rules, today he is mocked and derided for trying; and when the modern creators of D&D 5e make claims about how they've simplified the rules and streamlined the game, they subtly and knowingly disregard the millions upon millions of pages describing precedents for DM decision-making and gaming ideas and protocol and previously existing rules systems, that a desperate DM can turn to when 5e falls flat on its face. But the creators of 5e aren't responsible for acknowledging that resource, the DM is responsible for turning to it, though the creators of 5e can certainly trade on it.
The readers' sense of D&D being really, really hard comes about because we were obscurely led to believe that role-playing could be easily managed by ten and twelve year olds without much effort ~ and when we faced that effort, and failed, we knew it had to be ourselves that failed. And this has, in turn, left us with a legacy of people claiming they haven't failed, the game just needs to be simpler, easier, less complicated, less beneficial or adaptable to the player, while yet retaining its fun no matter how many legs we hack from the corpse.
"And this [guilt] is not just a problem for children, actually. In their book, All Things Shining, the philosophers Bert Dreyfuss and Sean Kelly talk about this exact same issue, in the context of the depression and madness of our secular age. They argue that meaning today has to come from within, because we've forgotten about God, right? So we can't just choose the arbitrariness of theology, and that this demand to make something holy from scratch, by sheer force of will, is slowly eating away at us. It's driving us insane. David Foster Wallace becomes the sort of martyr for this cause in the end of Dreyfuss and Kelly's book.
"So along with Mary Poppins, we assume that finding the fun is a task that comes from us rather than from the thing itself ~ and we just have to encourage or support that activity, that we have to bring something to the table that makes intolerable things tolerable, or we have to somehow cover over those things so as to make the intolerable things tolerable."
The reader can look at any number of the endless arguments going on about role-playing, that were there ten years ago and twenty years ago, and see that argument being made again and again, where the writer says, "You're not getting what you're supposed to be doing to make this game better," then refuses to give us any real information. We're told to believe, or just accept, or trust that it's going to happen if we embrace it, without ever actually being told what "it" is.
I am backing off from the fight because I'm abused for arguing that there's "one true way" to play D&D; but as near as I can tell, I am one of a very small cadre of individuals who are willing to talk about any way to play D&D ~ because we are deconstructing the game and trying to empower the participant with tools, knowledge, comprehension and resources that they can use in real time. We're not just saying, "The game is fun for those willing to open themselves up to the game being fun." We're saying, "Work; build; prepare yourself; stop taking short cuts; admit errors; ask your players for feedback and ready yourself to change your precepts." And for that we're told we're being inflexible.
"But what if it's wrong; what if it's just the opposite? What if we arrived at fun not through expanding the circumstances that we're in, in order to make them less wretched, but actually by embracing the wretchedness of the circumstances themselves ~ and this will feel very counter-intuitive to you. What if, in a literal way, fun comes from impoverishment? From wretchedness?
"The Philosopher Bernard Suits argues that, 'Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.' A game is something that's good enough on its own. Something for which on its own-ness is precisely the point. As Suits calls this willingness to accept the arbitrariness of a game, the illusory attitude; we have to adopt this illusory attitude and accept the thing for what it is. So golf would be worse than a good walk ruined were it a Broadway song-and-dance number about dropping balls in holes, maybe ~ but when we really play golf, if we reject it as insufficient, then we're missing the point. We're missing the point of golf. The point is that golf is meant to be annoying and unsatisfactory and that's why we like it."
And I covered that point with my last post.
"And there's something deeply abhorrent about games, something kind of revolting ~ but then out of that revulsion comes sublimity. Occasionally. And it's not just true for games. When you operate a mechanism, like a steering wheel, we sometimes talk about the 'play' that's built into that system, and has a space through which the steering wheel can be turned before the shaft couples with and turns the pinion at its end, or you can find this elsewhere, too. The play of light, the play of the waves, a play on words ~ and the game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have adopted this sense of play in their formal definition of the concept, which is one that I like a lot; free movement within a more rigid structure."
Oh, jaw dropping. What I would have done to be able to put it that simply ten years ago. This is the basis for all my arguments about setting and player agency; and for why all fudging and all DM fiat is bullshit. Good and proper play happens not when the car's steering randomly changes to make the process of driving a car more interesting, but when the car is utterly reliable and the driver learns exactly how much it takes to adjust the wheel at 90 mph (144 kmh) to fly past the startled faces of the old people driving their crumbling 1978 Gremlin. Do you like it when your car does something weird? Why should we imagine that a DM's random and irrational judgements would make a better gaming field to play on? Are the best surfing beaches full of rocks because it increases the randomness?
As players, we want to control things; more importantly, we want to believe in that illusory attitude that they can be controlled, even if that is nigh impossible. For that, we have to be able to interpret the landscape; we don't make a golf course better by random blasting. We make it better by cutting the grass every morning to exact, measured specifications, so that when someone plays this hole a year from now it is the same hole they are playing today. That's the bloody point.
Now ask yourself, with this in mind: why doesn't alignment work?
"So when designing a game, the question is not how to make it taste sweet, but what sort of structure it ought to be. What sort of structure it can be? What sort of structure it wants to be. And then when we are playing a game, the question we ask is not how to overcome that structure, not how to reject it and make it something its not, but what it feels like to subject ourselves to it. To take it seriously. To really play golf for what it is.
"Play turns out not to be an act of diversion, but the work of working a system, of working with it, of interacting with the bits of logic that make it up. And 'fun' is not the effect, it's not the enjoyment that's released by that interaction, but its a kind of nickname for the feeling of operating it, particularly of operating it in a way we haven't done before or haven't seen before. That lets us discover something in it that was always there, but that we didn't notice or that we overlooked, or that we found before and now we're finding again.
"And the colloquial senses of game or play or fun would hold that those activities normally involve going outside the boundaries of normal behavior, of doing whatever we want, right? That's usually what we think of when we play. Don't play with your food. This is why designers I think are so interested in taking advantage of fun, and why they are mistaken in thinking that fun relates to pleasure or to reward, when it's really just the opposite."
This is not the whole of the speech, which I strongly recommend the reader now go and watch (the link is right at the top of the post. What I've copied has done two things for me. First, it has absolutely vidicated every argument I've ever made on this blog about what needs to be done in making a game. I will remind some of my readers that my opening chapter in How to Run about worldbuilding began with structure, function and behavior; that is what Bogost is talking about here. I grant that was a difficult chapter; we're not steeped in what those terms mean, even as we pretend we know what we're doing when we design games. 'Fun' isn't a structure, it isn't a function, it isn't even a behavior, not as those words are defined. It isn't anything. We need to stop talking about it in terms of fundamental purpose and design.
The second thing it has done, hopefully, is to shine a clearer light on the matter of what are you doing when you run your campaign; and with regard to your behavior ~ your actions and the manner in which you interact with the game setting ~ in campaigns where you are a player. We just haven't got a solid, clear, rational notion of what this role-playing concept is: because we refuse to believe, as a community, that it follows the same laws and principles of other games, other human activities, other structures and other principles of design.
If you want your game to get better, you have to stop thinking like that. Because the sciences of design, user experience, interactive mechanics and so on have LOTS to teach you, solid stuff, real stuff, that will work and won't depend on you reaching inside yourself for the answers. The answers already exist; they've just been applied to other things that work just like role-playing works.
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
Worth Playing
Ian Bogost is a game designer of the sort to which I can relate. If the reader has some time, I would suggest listening to some of his speeches regarding the elements of game design and the creation of fun, what fun is, how fun is obtained through taking game design seriously and so on. Just the sort of thing that I've been preaching on this blog for years.
I admit, I ran into Bogost yesterday. I find it encouraging that when I agree with someone's take on what makes play or what makes a game, it ends up coming from someone in academia, who has to defend their position in order to have a position, rather than from a business relationship with a company that sponsors the same event at which they speak.
In this video, Bogost reminded me of an old aphorism about golf that calls it "a good walk spoiled." Bogost doesn't go into it, he knows his audience is familiar with the concept and he's using it as shorthand to build towards another idea. But I'd like to talk about the saying a little, since I think it can be applied to the role-playing campaign concept.
The "spoiled" aspect is that a game of golf, 99% of the time, leads to disappointment. As one arrives at the golf course in the morning, the sun being out, the sweet smell of freshly cut grass in the air, upon the idyllic setting that is a modern, tailored golf course, a golfer has an certain expectation ~ this might be a great game, where par is more closely approached than perhaps ever before, that swing after swing will only make the day better and better.
What inevitably happens, almost always from the first tee, is that this expectation is dashed. The first drive is a disappointment, the sand pit isn't missed and the first putt misses the hole by an inch. And things only get worse from there. Those who play golf understand this ~ and they understand what keeps them playing even as things go bad. There's still the next 17 holes. There's still a chance to turn this around. There's still hope.
At the end of the day, when all that hope is gone, the clubs are being loaded into the car and all there is left to do is to dissect every attempted swing, take note of every momentary success, contemplate woefully the overall failure of the effort and remind ourselves that golf is, after all, an impossible game.
No one wins at golf. It is a game where one person's score is compared to another person, but where the course is always the winner and the players are ultimately always the loser. If the reader has not played golf very much, this point will be lost; but golfers know exactly what I mean.
Golf is life. This is part of why it is so popular with spectacularly successful people who have the money to play anything they want. Golf is humbling. Golf is unbeatable. For those who are able to beat, either personally or financially, any obstacle they encounter, golf is obsessive. Because when we find most things to be too easy for us, when we lack challenge, when we want something that will push us beyond our capacity to succeed, we seek the impossible.
If the DM of a campaign plays according to the original precepts of D&D, players will die. If the players are of the sort that find the business of living to be obvious and dull, if they're not challenged by the process of going to work or being part of a group, they will want this. They will see the risk of dying as a good thing. Not because it doesn't matter if they die, for they will feel the pain and the sadness of losing their characters as keenly as anyone; but because if that chance of dying isn't there, the game just isn't hard enough.
If it isn't hard enough, it's not worth playing.
I admit, I ran into Bogost yesterday. I find it encouraging that when I agree with someone's take on what makes play or what makes a game, it ends up coming from someone in academia, who has to defend their position in order to have a position, rather than from a business relationship with a company that sponsors the same event at which they speak.
In this video, Bogost reminded me of an old aphorism about golf that calls it "a good walk spoiled." Bogost doesn't go into it, he knows his audience is familiar with the concept and he's using it as shorthand to build towards another idea. But I'd like to talk about the saying a little, since I think it can be applied to the role-playing campaign concept.
The "spoiled" aspect is that a game of golf, 99% of the time, leads to disappointment. As one arrives at the golf course in the morning, the sun being out, the sweet smell of freshly cut grass in the air, upon the idyllic setting that is a modern, tailored golf course, a golfer has an certain expectation ~ this might be a great game, where par is more closely approached than perhaps ever before, that swing after swing will only make the day better and better.
What inevitably happens, almost always from the first tee, is that this expectation is dashed. The first drive is a disappointment, the sand pit isn't missed and the first putt misses the hole by an inch. And things only get worse from there. Those who play golf understand this ~ and they understand what keeps them playing even as things go bad. There's still the next 17 holes. There's still a chance to turn this around. There's still hope.
At the end of the day, when all that hope is gone, the clubs are being loaded into the car and all there is left to do is to dissect every attempted swing, take note of every momentary success, contemplate woefully the overall failure of the effort and remind ourselves that golf is, after all, an impossible game.
No one wins at golf. It is a game where one person's score is compared to another person, but where the course is always the winner and the players are ultimately always the loser. If the reader has not played golf very much, this point will be lost; but golfers know exactly what I mean.
Golf is life. This is part of why it is so popular with spectacularly successful people who have the money to play anything they want. Golf is humbling. Golf is unbeatable. For those who are able to beat, either personally or financially, any obstacle they encounter, golf is obsessive. Because when we find most things to be too easy for us, when we lack challenge, when we want something that will push us beyond our capacity to succeed, we seek the impossible.
If the DM of a campaign plays according to the original precepts of D&D, players will die. If the players are of the sort that find the business of living to be obvious and dull, if they're not challenged by the process of going to work or being part of a group, they will want this. They will see the risk of dying as a good thing. Not because it doesn't matter if they die, for they will feel the pain and the sadness of losing their characters as keenly as anyone; but because if that chance of dying isn't there, the game just isn't hard enough.
If it isn't hard enough, it's not worth playing.
Monday, July 3, 2017
July Manifesto
After much thought and introspection, I am resolved to take the following steps with regards to this blog, my work and my accessibility to others. These are my goals for the next year.
1. I am going to stop talking about my personal life.
I'm not ashamed of anything about my life and I have always freely spoken about my circumstances or my difficulties, about my past and my aspirations . . . but I feel at this time that this is not accomplishing my goals and therefore I'm going to stop.
2. I am going to stop openly disagreeing with people.
My willingness to defend my position and my beliefs is, without question, a touchstone for the vehemence and general distaste for my ideas and this blog. Apparently, it is all right to be hated. Many tremendously successful bloggers are sincerely hated by literally millions of people. But while it is okay to be a screaming, smug, shit-bag of human garbage, preaching the justified murder of black people and Arabs and the deserved rape of women, all the while receiving thousands upon thousands of dollars every month on Patreon from tens of thousands of other sexists and rapists, as long as you can claim that it's "humor," it is NOT okay to take an earnest stand against second-rate story-telling, alignment, fudging and DM privilege. For that, you can expect to receive honest Patreon donations from a small cadre of loyal people of like belief, and no one else.
So I quit. I don't care what sort of D&D you run or what time-honored rules you adhere to, as long as it isn't discussed here.
3. I am going to keep blogging about the sort of D&D I play and how I think it should be played.
I'm going to make a sincere effort to going back to daily posts, even if it is only two hundred words and addresses the minutest of points about the game. I'm going to push myself to writing gritty pieces about mundane parts of the game, such as what do to about working animals and how to effect the temperament and immersion of player interest, but I'm going to honestly try to keep away from any content about how it used to be done or why people shouldn't do something any more.
That is going to be very hard for me. I expect to slip. I expect a few times I'm going to put up a post and find myself taking it down within a few minutes, having realized I shouldn't have written it. Habits are hard to break. Nonetheless, this is the goal.
4. I'm going to stop drawing the comic . . . for now.
I'm personally pleased at the nature and quality of the comics, and expect that someday I should have enough of them written in order to produce an 80-page book that I shall sell at Cons. I got into the comic-making business for one reason: to create some interest in the blog and in me. To break the notion that I have one dimension and that I can poke fun at the game ~ and even at my own ideas, as I did more often that not ~ like a person. However, the comics are getting no traction. There are four people who share the comic every time on Facebook and about eight more who do it with scattered willingness. There are four or five who do it on Twitter. I have not had a single comic reshared by anybody, ever. Not one time.
That's a failure of the comic, that's a failure of social media, that's evidence that I'm wasting my time. It is an enormous amount of effort and creating thought to make these and I can use that 8 hours a week back in my pocket.
5. I'm suspending the online campaign.
I don't want to. I love the online campaign. But this, too, is feeling like a straightjacket in the face of my writing, both on this blog and on the important book-writing process. This is a cold slap in the face to my players; there's been no warning and I'm not letting them know ahead of time.
That's on me. I will address that in private conversations, if my players want to discuss it. The truth is that the campaign is also not doing what I need it to do: it is not creating interest or a return on my investment of time and creative energy. I'll explain.
Regularly, creators who request support on Patreon and elsewhere will emphasize the following statement: "If you wish to see to it that I am able to produce more comics, books, blog posts, a wider wiki, an inspiring online campaign, etcetera, you will give money to . . ."
Here, right now, the reader is seeing the reverse of that. I'm getting nowhere near enough money to enable myself to work on my art, because I am pushed more and more to donate my time to the physical grunt work of a very physical job, that is physically taxing me and disallowing me from the process of creating online work. Those are the facts. If I want to go on writing my BOOK, then I am looking at budget cuts, plain and simple. The online campaign is a luxury if it doesn't encourage those who will offer the minimum of donations, $1.
Those startlingly loyal, fantastically supportive like-minded individuals are helping me with an average of $10.20 per month; that's an remarkably high average for Patreon. When people like me, they like me a lot. But what I need is a lot more people to like me just a little bit ~ which isn't happening.
So I'm cutting the cord. I will pick up the campaign again when I'm working less.
6. I'm going to finish the Fifth Man.
Not in a year. In less than that. Then I'm going to work on the next project I'm planning and the project after that. Because here's the fact of it: the books sell. The books make me money.
7. I'm not putting out any more tutorials.
These were wonderful. Everyone who took a tutorial was pleased with them. But there are only so many people on that very small list who will trust me enough to pay. And I have been through that list now, so thank you to those who stepped up. Right now, I have to turn everyone else away.
8. I am putting the blog back on moderation.
Thank you.
1. I am going to stop talking about my personal life.
I'm not ashamed of anything about my life and I have always freely spoken about my circumstances or my difficulties, about my past and my aspirations . . . but I feel at this time that this is not accomplishing my goals and therefore I'm going to stop.
2. I am going to stop openly disagreeing with people.
My willingness to defend my position and my beliefs is, without question, a touchstone for the vehemence and general distaste for my ideas and this blog. Apparently, it is all right to be hated. Many tremendously successful bloggers are sincerely hated by literally millions of people. But while it is okay to be a screaming, smug, shit-bag of human garbage, preaching the justified murder of black people and Arabs and the deserved rape of women, all the while receiving thousands upon thousands of dollars every month on Patreon from tens of thousands of other sexists and rapists, as long as you can claim that it's "humor," it is NOT okay to take an earnest stand against second-rate story-telling, alignment, fudging and DM privilege. For that, you can expect to receive honest Patreon donations from a small cadre of loyal people of like belief, and no one else.
So I quit. I don't care what sort of D&D you run or what time-honored rules you adhere to, as long as it isn't discussed here.
3. I am going to keep blogging about the sort of D&D I play and how I think it should be played.
I'm going to make a sincere effort to going back to daily posts, even if it is only two hundred words and addresses the minutest of points about the game. I'm going to push myself to writing gritty pieces about mundane parts of the game, such as what do to about working animals and how to effect the temperament and immersion of player interest, but I'm going to honestly try to keep away from any content about how it used to be done or why people shouldn't do something any more.
That is going to be very hard for me. I expect to slip. I expect a few times I'm going to put up a post and find myself taking it down within a few minutes, having realized I shouldn't have written it. Habits are hard to break. Nonetheless, this is the goal.
4. I'm going to stop drawing the comic . . . for now.
I'm personally pleased at the nature and quality of the comics, and expect that someday I should have enough of them written in order to produce an 80-page book that I shall sell at Cons. I got into the comic-making business for one reason: to create some interest in the blog and in me. To break the notion that I have one dimension and that I can poke fun at the game ~ and even at my own ideas, as I did more often that not ~ like a person. However, the comics are getting no traction. There are four people who share the comic every time on Facebook and about eight more who do it with scattered willingness. There are four or five who do it on Twitter. I have not had a single comic reshared by anybody, ever. Not one time.
That's a failure of the comic, that's a failure of social media, that's evidence that I'm wasting my time. It is an enormous amount of effort and creating thought to make these and I can use that 8 hours a week back in my pocket.
5. I'm suspending the online campaign.
I don't want to. I love the online campaign. But this, too, is feeling like a straightjacket in the face of my writing, both on this blog and on the important book-writing process. This is a cold slap in the face to my players; there's been no warning and I'm not letting them know ahead of time.
That's on me. I will address that in private conversations, if my players want to discuss it. The truth is that the campaign is also not doing what I need it to do: it is not creating interest or a return on my investment of time and creative energy. I'll explain.
Regularly, creators who request support on Patreon and elsewhere will emphasize the following statement: "If you wish to see to it that I am able to produce more comics, books, blog posts, a wider wiki, an inspiring online campaign, etcetera, you will give money to . . ."
Here, right now, the reader is seeing the reverse of that. I'm getting nowhere near enough money to enable myself to work on my art, because I am pushed more and more to donate my time to the physical grunt work of a very physical job, that is physically taxing me and disallowing me from the process of creating online work. Those are the facts. If I want to go on writing my BOOK, then I am looking at budget cuts, plain and simple. The online campaign is a luxury if it doesn't encourage those who will offer the minimum of donations, $1.
Those startlingly loyal, fantastically supportive like-minded individuals are helping me with an average of $10.20 per month; that's an remarkably high average for Patreon. When people like me, they like me a lot. But what I need is a lot more people to like me just a little bit ~ which isn't happening.
So I'm cutting the cord. I will pick up the campaign again when I'm working less.
6. I'm going to finish the Fifth Man.
Not in a year. In less than that. Then I'm going to work on the next project I'm planning and the project after that. Because here's the fact of it: the books sell. The books make me money.
7. I'm not putting out any more tutorials.
These were wonderful. Everyone who took a tutorial was pleased with them. But there are only so many people on that very small list who will trust me enough to pay. And I have been through that list now, so thank you to those who stepped up. Right now, I have to turn everyone else away.
8. I am putting the blog back on moderation.
Thank you.
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Turning Point
Over the past seven weeks, I have rewritten, adjusted, edited and reviewed 25,000 words of my book, The Fifth Man. I am just now getting to the point where the second draft I was writing began to go off the rails.
There were a lot of small reasons that slowly coalesced to create larger and larger problems. The central problem was blocking, which in turn created problems of pacing and character that were being subverted in order to compensate for that blocking problem.
For those who don't know, I'll talk about blocking. From what I've seen from most sites on the net, "blocking" is usually described as a rough outline of what happens in each scene of a book or play, from beginning to end. This is partially correct but it is astoundingly oversimplified ~ if you go looking on general websites to find advice that will help you block your book or other work, you're going to find yourself struggling pretty quickly.
I learned about blocking from performing in theatre, where the term describes the arrangement of actors during a scene from moment to moment of that scene; blocking is best when this is coordinated with the spoken lines, and when the acting reaches a level where it is impossible for the audience to notice that any blocking has taken place.
We watch bad blocking all the time, particularly in television shows. Watch from scene to scene how the actors move when they speak a particular line: all of a sudden the actor stands up, walks forward four paces, turns around and then speaks their line. It is both an example of bad blocking (minimal, natural moves are best, rather than stark dramatic actions) and bad acting, where the excessive move is made more blatant by the actor thinking, "Okay, the other actor has finished their line, now this is where I rise up and walk over there before speaking my line."
In a good performance, every second of movement needs to be timed and then fixed with rehearsal and more rehearsal. The concept is more or less the same with a novel, though the rehearsal is replaced by examining the description carefully in order to produce the correct impression on the reader. The actions of the characters must make sense: why do they go here at this time and why does it matter to them? How did they know to ask this question that adds to the novel's exposition without it sounding staged and inappropriate? If three different groups of people all arrive at the same point in space and time for a confrontation, how did they all get there, and why are they there at the same time?
A writer can spend a lot of time angsting over these details. It is like putting an enormous puzzle together with thousands of words, none of which can jump out and look painfully obvious to the reader, since that's the best way to destroy the sublime, suspended disbelief that makes a story work.
In the Fifth Man, there are certain moments that have to come together to make the main character think a certain way about himself and about his place in the world. Those moments have to come together fluidly and interestingly; the characters who help these moments come together must be believable and, for the most part, likable. This includes the villains! Everyone in the story is following their own path but, since I am writing in first person, only one path is for certain known, that of the main character. This means that other narratives have to cross the main character's narrative in a specific, patiently crafted way if the reader is to know anything about what's going on, while keeping both the main character and the reader in the dark enough so as to not know what's going on. If someone lies to the main character, and the main character doesn't know it, then the reader can't know it either; but at some point the main character has to discover the lie, whereupon the reader discovers the lie, which creates the identification the reader shares with the main character: both the reader and the character are in it together.
This is tremendously difficult and I have been wrestling with certain scenes since I began this novel. Just when I think they are working, I realize I have forgotten some detail which then threatens the fabric of the story (often called plot holes), which must then be fixed and explained away in a manner that doesn't ruin the verisimilitude of the rest of the novel. And since I like to tell complicated stories, about complicated people doing complicated things, I have felt pushed to the edge by this novel.
Steadily, however, I get on top of it.
At this point, I find I need to put down the semi-daily editing and rewriting, since I've come to this point in the novel where the clarity started to break down. There has been a massive redrafting of Chapter 17 and I can see that, with the changes I've needed to make, that Chapter 18 forward is going to need considerable examination to get the various blocking to come out correctly. I am deeply steeped in the characters so I am not worried about them; there is one pacing issue that starts with Chapter 18 that I am frankly going to eat because the book needs to work that way. Consider the way Dickens did it with Great Expectations, at the point where Pip returns to the village to attend the funeral of Mrs. Joe. The book's steady progress is subverted somewhat at that point, with the pacing changed and a different point of view for Pip offered; yet the passage of about four or five thousand words is an important one for many reasons I won't go into.
I have a similar passage like this in my book and I'm fine with it, though some readers may feel the book slowing; nonetheless, I can't make later scenes work without it, nor can I firmly establish the relationship in concrete between the two most important characters. The reader will just have to wait for the next action scene.
Anyway, this brings me to the point of this post. I don't wish to stop posting my progress; however, I'm going to adjust that progress to show the second draft, which I'm going to essentially write again from where I am. It will effectively be a third draft, which will then be followed by a fourth draft, but since I have been working on the third draft to date I want to keep it straight what draft is being managed for the whole book.
Therefore, think of it as me throwing out the old second draft and writing a new second draft, since large portions of it will technically be a first draft, as there are scenes to be added that only occurred to me (as a way of solving my blocking problem) as little as a month ago.
I will be recording how much second draft is being written from day to day and keeping a note on how much of the third draft was finished before I stopped and began the second draft again. I know that for some this will make it sound like the book will never be finished (and no one succumbs to that feeling more than me!), but in fact the book will be finished when it IS ~ and that is a little insight into the mind of an artist with a sense of proportion. We don't write these things to get them done, we write them to get them right.
I thank you for your patience. I know I have been fairly tetchy lately, but we live in a tetchy world. I appreciate that you have the tenacity to come back and read me again and again; gawd knows, sometimes I can't make it easy.
There were a lot of small reasons that slowly coalesced to create larger and larger problems. The central problem was blocking, which in turn created problems of pacing and character that were being subverted in order to compensate for that blocking problem.
For those who don't know, I'll talk about blocking. From what I've seen from most sites on the net, "blocking" is usually described as a rough outline of what happens in each scene of a book or play, from beginning to end. This is partially correct but it is astoundingly oversimplified ~ if you go looking on general websites to find advice that will help you block your book or other work, you're going to find yourself struggling pretty quickly.
I learned about blocking from performing in theatre, where the term describes the arrangement of actors during a scene from moment to moment of that scene; blocking is best when this is coordinated with the spoken lines, and when the acting reaches a level where it is impossible for the audience to notice that any blocking has taken place.
We watch bad blocking all the time, particularly in television shows. Watch from scene to scene how the actors move when they speak a particular line: all of a sudden the actor stands up, walks forward four paces, turns around and then speaks their line. It is both an example of bad blocking (minimal, natural moves are best, rather than stark dramatic actions) and bad acting, where the excessive move is made more blatant by the actor thinking, "Okay, the other actor has finished their line, now this is where I rise up and walk over there before speaking my line."
In a good performance, every second of movement needs to be timed and then fixed with rehearsal and more rehearsal. The concept is more or less the same with a novel, though the rehearsal is replaced by examining the description carefully in order to produce the correct impression on the reader. The actions of the characters must make sense: why do they go here at this time and why does it matter to them? How did they know to ask this question that adds to the novel's exposition without it sounding staged and inappropriate? If three different groups of people all arrive at the same point in space and time for a confrontation, how did they all get there, and why are they there at the same time?
A writer can spend a lot of time angsting over these details. It is like putting an enormous puzzle together with thousands of words, none of which can jump out and look painfully obvious to the reader, since that's the best way to destroy the sublime, suspended disbelief that makes a story work.
In the Fifth Man, there are certain moments that have to come together to make the main character think a certain way about himself and about his place in the world. Those moments have to come together fluidly and interestingly; the characters who help these moments come together must be believable and, for the most part, likable. This includes the villains! Everyone in the story is following their own path but, since I am writing in first person, only one path is for certain known, that of the main character. This means that other narratives have to cross the main character's narrative in a specific, patiently crafted way if the reader is to know anything about what's going on, while keeping both the main character and the reader in the dark enough so as to not know what's going on. If someone lies to the main character, and the main character doesn't know it, then the reader can't know it either; but at some point the main character has to discover the lie, whereupon the reader discovers the lie, which creates the identification the reader shares with the main character: both the reader and the character are in it together.
This is tremendously difficult and I have been wrestling with certain scenes since I began this novel. Just when I think they are working, I realize I have forgotten some detail which then threatens the fabric of the story (often called plot holes), which must then be fixed and explained away in a manner that doesn't ruin the verisimilitude of the rest of the novel. And since I like to tell complicated stories, about complicated people doing complicated things, I have felt pushed to the edge by this novel.
Steadily, however, I get on top of it.
At this point, I find I need to put down the semi-daily editing and rewriting, since I've come to this point in the novel where the clarity started to break down. There has been a massive redrafting of Chapter 17 and I can see that, with the changes I've needed to make, that Chapter 18 forward is going to need considerable examination to get the various blocking to come out correctly. I am deeply steeped in the characters so I am not worried about them; there is one pacing issue that starts with Chapter 18 that I am frankly going to eat because the book needs to work that way. Consider the way Dickens did it with Great Expectations, at the point where Pip returns to the village to attend the funeral of Mrs. Joe. The book's steady progress is subverted somewhat at that point, with the pacing changed and a different point of view for Pip offered; yet the passage of about four or five thousand words is an important one for many reasons I won't go into.
I have a similar passage like this in my book and I'm fine with it, though some readers may feel the book slowing; nonetheless, I can't make later scenes work without it, nor can I firmly establish the relationship in concrete between the two most important characters. The reader will just have to wait for the next action scene.
Anyway, this brings me to the point of this post. I don't wish to stop posting my progress; however, I'm going to adjust that progress to show the second draft, which I'm going to essentially write again from where I am. It will effectively be a third draft, which will then be followed by a fourth draft, but since I have been working on the third draft to date I want to keep it straight what draft is being managed for the whole book.
Therefore, think of it as me throwing out the old second draft and writing a new second draft, since large portions of it will technically be a first draft, as there are scenes to be added that only occurred to me (as a way of solving my blocking problem) as little as a month ago.
I will be recording how much second draft is being written from day to day and keeping a note on how much of the third draft was finished before I stopped and began the second draft again. I know that for some this will make it sound like the book will never be finished (and no one succumbs to that feeling more than me!), but in fact the book will be finished when it IS ~ and that is a little insight into the mind of an artist with a sense of proportion. We don't write these things to get them done, we write them to get them right.
I thank you for your patience. I know I have been fairly tetchy lately, but we live in a tetchy world. I appreciate that you have the tenacity to come back and read me again and again; gawd knows, sometimes I can't make it easy.
Friday, June 30, 2017
I Am the Wall
[edited to remove random words unnecessary to sentence construction]:
Yep, that's me, the DM. Putting up with a lot of crap. And, I think, more crap than most, because I am adding a lot of rules as I design, leading to a lot of walls and a lot of having to say, "No, you can't do that."
In reality, however, this is an initial problem that steadily evaporates as the game progresses. The new players I launched back in Nov-Dec of 2016 bounced a lot against those rules and at times it was aggravating. But with just six months of online campaigning, the game details are moving a lot smoother. In real life, when questions can be answered immediately and both my tone and my intent can be read more easily through observation, the amount of correcting swiftly falls away and the players rapidly move between the walls without any difficulty.
This is a careful point that needs to be made. The presence of walls limit a game space but they do not eliminate it. A lot can happen inside the game space of a hockey rink or a soccer field; the restrictive degree to which pieces can move in chess or the limit in the variety of pieces in go does not challenge the fascination and delight we find in those games. We can say that good games need boundaries; but we can also say that well made boundaries produce a fabulous extravagance in controlled possibilities.
I made a point last week when writing about haphazard settings that, in conditions of risk, when options are lost, the players are pressed to dig deeper into themselves in order to produce solutions. The reader may need to view this another way: that, when pushed against the wall of the rules, the player fights harder to live. Or, to put it another way still, the player is more alive when fighting against the odds; life is sweeter.
Remove the walls, reduce the threat, free the player to experience absolute freedom, and we produce a paralyzing surfeit of choice, followed by a sense of ennui in that nothing really matters.
The super-fantasy of removed walls, where players willy-nilly create character backgrounds based on a complete lack of mechanics, on pure whim, is inevitably countered by the extremely narrow wall-set that we usually describe as a railroaded campaign. It is helpful to this argument that DeCoster and Rubin use Mario as their example ~ a game which, in role-playing terms, certainly has one eventual outcome, even in later incarnations where many different paths led to the same goal. Obviously, a railroad works for a video game; initially, in VG design, there was no choice but to create a railroaded experience: it is still a virtual necessity for most video games, with notable and successful exceptions.
Role-playing, however, only leans upon the rat-maze concept (pulling the metaphor back to walls rather than trains) because for most DMs it is very hard to imagine a game world where the maze has no beginning and no end and a virtually unlimited number of paths that are all, nonetheless, contained inside walls. And because those paths can be added and enhanced as necessary, as fast as the players move between the walls they happen to find, there's never any danger of the setting reaching its end.
Even if the players were to move through every single hex of my world, that would not be the end of the adventures they could find in those hexes. The non-maze is in my head, not on the paper. So long as I'm ready to play, the game goes on.
Yet the walls themselves are not made of cardboard and cannot be easily broken through, because I am there to say, "No." The combat rules are fixed, the player's hit points are fixed, the effect of the dice are fixed, the access to knowledge and power is fixed, etcetera. The walls may move back, the benefits and upgrades to the players may increase, but the manner in which they increase is also fixed. If the players choose not to pick one of the upteenth number of paths in front of them, and instead try to bash through a wall, they'll find themselves made impotent and ~ eventually ~ tossed from the game.
Just because D&D is complicated doesn't mean that it's not Settlers of Catan. It may offer millions of arrangements that can be sorted out and advanced at a moment's notice, but the "winning" strategy is still the one that accumulates the most points (of whatever form) and ensures continued survival as the game goes on. Settlers ends because the board is finite; D&D does not end because the board is, for general purposes, infinite. But the principles that guide play for each, the building of strategies that produce effects that are then resolved (by dice in the way of D&D), producing a payoff and opportunities for further strategy, work alike.
Unless, of course, one chooses to ignore that a given RPG works according to rules, for reasons, in order to produce an "experience" that can't be measured meaningfully, which in turn must then be interpreted as a "feeling" receiving for having participated.
Honestly . . . are we playing a game or are we just playing?
"Imagine that there's a big open space, and the open space is everything in the universe. So if you have absolute freedom, you can just go anywhere and do anything. the rules of the game are these walls that keep you in. As long as you stay inside the walls, you're not cheating, and if you go outside the walls, you are cheating. So you play a video game like Mario, for example, and you don't know where the walls are. You've never played Mario before. But you start exploring this space. You press A and you jump, and you go, 'Ha! - I know that if I press A, I jump.' So you've seen the wall. And he jumps this high. You start seeing where the walls are.
"Like when you play Metroid and you explore the map, you see what the map looks like. You're exploring this rules space by trial and error. You're moving around in space finding all the walls, and eventually when you move around enough and try enough different things, 'Oh, a Fire Flower does this, I jump on guy and I kill him, but if I fall in a hole I die.' You learn the rules and eventually the whole shape of the walls of the game expose themselves to you and now you know how to play."
(...)
"In a video game, those walls are in the form of software. Software doesn't have to do any work. Your computer, it's just electricity, it doesn't have any feelings, it doesn't have to work hard. It just is walls. It shows you what the rules are. But if you want to play a board game, and learn it by bumping into all the walls, some human being has to be like, 'No. No you can't do that, you can only do this ... imagine sitting down to play Settlers, you know nothing about the game, and someone has to sit here and watch you and tell you when you've done something right and wrong the whole time, that's a huge pain in the butt for them. If someone's willing to do that for you so that you can learn Settlers in the most fun, easy way without reading the rules or anything, they deserve a lot of accolades because they're putting up with a lot of crap."
Brandon DeCoster and Scott Rubin
Yep, that's me, the DM. Putting up with a lot of crap. And, I think, more crap than most, because I am adding a lot of rules as I design, leading to a lot of walls and a lot of having to say, "No, you can't do that."
In reality, however, this is an initial problem that steadily evaporates as the game progresses. The new players I launched back in Nov-Dec of 2016 bounced a lot against those rules and at times it was aggravating. But with just six months of online campaigning, the game details are moving a lot smoother. In real life, when questions can be answered immediately and both my tone and my intent can be read more easily through observation, the amount of correcting swiftly falls away and the players rapidly move between the walls without any difficulty.
This is a careful point that needs to be made. The presence of walls limit a game space but they do not eliminate it. A lot can happen inside the game space of a hockey rink or a soccer field; the restrictive degree to which pieces can move in chess or the limit in the variety of pieces in go does not challenge the fascination and delight we find in those games. We can say that good games need boundaries; but we can also say that well made boundaries produce a fabulous extravagance in controlled possibilities.
I made a point last week when writing about haphazard settings that, in conditions of risk, when options are lost, the players are pressed to dig deeper into themselves in order to produce solutions. The reader may need to view this another way: that, when pushed against the wall of the rules, the player fights harder to live. Or, to put it another way still, the player is more alive when fighting against the odds; life is sweeter.
Remove the walls, reduce the threat, free the player to experience absolute freedom, and we produce a paralyzing surfeit of choice, followed by a sense of ennui in that nothing really matters.
The super-fantasy of removed walls, where players willy-nilly create character backgrounds based on a complete lack of mechanics, on pure whim, is inevitably countered by the extremely narrow wall-set that we usually describe as a railroaded campaign. It is helpful to this argument that DeCoster and Rubin use Mario as their example ~ a game which, in role-playing terms, certainly has one eventual outcome, even in later incarnations where many different paths led to the same goal. Obviously, a railroad works for a video game; initially, in VG design, there was no choice but to create a railroaded experience: it is still a virtual necessity for most video games, with notable and successful exceptions.
Role-playing, however, only leans upon the rat-maze concept (pulling the metaphor back to walls rather than trains) because for most DMs it is very hard to imagine a game world where the maze has no beginning and no end and a virtually unlimited number of paths that are all, nonetheless, contained inside walls. And because those paths can be added and enhanced as necessary, as fast as the players move between the walls they happen to find, there's never any danger of the setting reaching its end.
Even if the players were to move through every single hex of my world, that would not be the end of the adventures they could find in those hexes. The non-maze is in my head, not on the paper. So long as I'm ready to play, the game goes on.
Yet the walls themselves are not made of cardboard and cannot be easily broken through, because I am there to say, "No." The combat rules are fixed, the player's hit points are fixed, the effect of the dice are fixed, the access to knowledge and power is fixed, etcetera. The walls may move back, the benefits and upgrades to the players may increase, but the manner in which they increase is also fixed. If the players choose not to pick one of the upteenth number of paths in front of them, and instead try to bash through a wall, they'll find themselves made impotent and ~ eventually ~ tossed from the game.
Just because D&D is complicated doesn't mean that it's not Settlers of Catan. It may offer millions of arrangements that can be sorted out and advanced at a moment's notice, but the "winning" strategy is still the one that accumulates the most points (of whatever form) and ensures continued survival as the game goes on. Settlers ends because the board is finite; D&D does not end because the board is, for general purposes, infinite. But the principles that guide play for each, the building of strategies that produce effects that are then resolved (by dice in the way of D&D), producing a payoff and opportunities for further strategy, work alike.
Unless, of course, one chooses to ignore that a given RPG works according to rules, for reasons, in order to produce an "experience" that can't be measured meaningfully, which in turn must then be interpreted as a "feeling" receiving for having participated.
Honestly . . . are we playing a game or are we just playing?
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Good Comments
What makes a good comment?
Yesterday, G.B. Veras expanded my diatribe against role-playing groups looking like beer advertising by describing a movement in Brazil to change the story of those commercials: suggesting, perhaps, that there is another way for something old and tired to appear, it just takes being original and creative. Enlightment is always good.
On the same day, Lothar rated one of my posts to describe its importance to him. Not, I think, because he agreed, but because something he already believed had been stated more clearly than he'd heard it said before. That's how it is with a lot of my posts.
And again on the 27th, Wandrille Duchemin described a post of mine giving him an epiphany. Again, not because he didn't already agree with the concept, but because my description was clear and easy to understand. I write and write about the same things because I hope that I can make that connection with the reader; when I get a comment like Wandrille's, I know I'm on the right track. [I'll just add that Wandrille and I have gone head-to-head many times].
On Monday, Vlad Malkav wrote to say my post about self-esteem was "refreshing." The day before, Samuel Kernan called it "worthwhile." Someone else might call this tacit agreement, but I think it is indicative of my willingness to write about something ELSE, other than another post about monsters, another spell list for yet another monster race, another review of a product that was made more than ten years ago and yet one more retrospective on Blackmoor. I appreciate hearing that my persistant attempts to wake people up have succeeded in waking someone up.
On Saturday, Michael Giffin made a point about aluminum-steel that was well worth consideration; since I'm running a very real-world campaign, where technically actual aluminum sits unused, packed into bauxite, I'm not sure how this fits, but it might give some stress equivalents for mithril steel if that should ever come up in a campaign. I'm definitely glad Michael took the time to comment.
A week ago, Discord, who used to disagree with me very strongly but whom I think I have begun to win over these past six years, expressed his satisfaction with my articulation of story vs. sandbox (which was not what I called it in my post), adding a personal experience of his that fit into the post's general tone and meaning. Such comments are very important, not because they "agree" with me, but because they express the same sense of frustration and difficulty in making the point clear to others.
On that same post, the day before, Fuzzy Skinner confessed frankly to the difficulty of running the non-story campaign, specifically in terms of players unwilling to embrace it out of fear for their characters. When a reader steps forward to articulate this sort of problem, it serves as a guidepost to ideas and posts I want to address and discuss in the future. It identifies, clearly and for all my readers, that there is a problem and what the problem is.
I get a steady drift of such comments, week after week. I always wish there were more; I always wish the comments were longer and more intricate. I wish we could go back and forth several dozen times, getting down to the nitty-gritty of the issue. I know why we don't.
Yes, I'm a frightening son-of-a-bitch. I'm intolerant and basically vicious when I see something that's insistently evidence of old, dead, discarded ideas ~ most of which I had, once upon a time, but which I've since discarded in the 37 years that I've been obsessed with this game. Those 37 years, that's a bloody mountain of time and data and thought-processing, spent building tables and wrecking them, spent building world systems and then ripping them out of my game because they didn't work.
Just look at the way I went at one of my own systems, that I put forth on the blog: that disastrous experience with Conflict Cards. I advanced the idea, I fought for the idea, I insulted people who resisted the idea and I blasted ahead with it, spending at least a hundred hours thinking through the damn cards and more time testing them. But they didn't work, did they? They were shit, to be honest. I playtested them with my real life group and they showed promise, then I played them with the boys online and they went all munchkin with the cards, proving just how much rot the notion was.
Did I resist trashing them? No. Did I keep throwing out new efforts for the next six years? No. They were a failure. Once I was sure that they were, a process that took about a week, I knifed that idea in the gut and left it for dead on the side of the game trail. Because that's what I do. I don't quibble about sixteen possible definitions for something that's clearly a dead issue. I see it is shit, I call it shit, I dump it and it's done.
And that is hard for people. Hard. Largely because I'm willing to be just as ruthless with the reader's ideas that I have just described myself being with mine. But I really don't care what anyone feels about an idea. I only care if an idea works. If it doesn't, it goes out with the trash and no funeral.
So when people comment on this blog, knowing how cold and insensitive I will be to the warm fuzzy feelings people have about their opinions, they're cautious. They say little. They protect themselves.
Perfectly understandable. I did the same when I was in university, when I sat in courses with professors who knew a thousand times as much as I did about Greeks and Romans. If I wanted to take a position about something Thucydides said with Dr. Heckle, I goddamn knew that I had to be right enough to win his respect, even when it happened that I was wrong. Because Heckle wasn't friendly, he wasn't patient, he wasn't sympathetic to feelings and he wasn't giving an inch on things he knew were bloody well wrong. And so it was with Baldwin and Walbank, with Yardley and Dewar, with Vanderspoel and Humphrey and all the rest. Because they believed in their training and their material, in their time spent researching, thinking, arguing and putting themselves on the line against the world when publishing their ideas. Where it came to handling a 20-year-old punk kid with 18-months of reading under his or her belt, the responsibility they felt was to snap the kid's dumb-fuck neck with the facts, not to give a pat on the forehead and not to make sure our precious little feelings weren't hurt. That's why it was one of the best classics departments on the continent when I went and that's why every prof I've just named was trained in either England or Germany. Because that's how courses were taught there in the 1950s and 60s.
I'm not teaching classics now, but I am teaching D&D and role-playing. And I think it is serious stuff.
In the movie Koyaanisqatsi, there is a long and patient zoom of a flight officer standing in front of a jet intake. The shot lasts 29 seconds, which is a long time in film. Throughout the whole zoom, the man's face does not change from this:
I was watching the film the other day and thinking, when I came to this point, about the expereince behind these eyes, behind the eyes of almost every military man I've ever met. This fellow here; I promise that he does not care what anyone thinks they know about aircraft or their use in warfare except where it agrees with 99% of what he knows.
The most common disparagement on the internet is that I am not interested in people who don't agree with me. And I think I have slowly come to accept that this is true. It hasn't been an easy acceptance. I've chafed against it and denied it, but truth be told, I'm like this fellow in the picture. I've done my work. I've learned my trade. And I'm not prepared to put aside all that I've learned because someone with feelings feels that I'm not kind enough or patient enough or tolerant enough of ridiculous quibbling arguments about the meanings of words or the motivations of those who won't accept obvious truths like rules matter, that player agency matters, that cheating is cheating or that repeatedly arguing about the same points over and over is time wasted. So no, I'm not interested in being disagreed with.
I am interested in being educated. I am interested in knowing that others are having the same experiences that I'm having, that others are fighting the same war that I'm fighting. Like any officer or rating, I'm comfortable discussing things with my own people, who see that the world works in a certain way not because our thoughts make reality, but because we're willing to bend our thoughts TO reality. And those that won't, or can't, or insist it just isn't so, can get the fuck out of my sandbox.
See that man's eyes? That's what my eyes will look like when I delete your comment.
Yesterday, G.B. Veras expanded my diatribe against role-playing groups looking like beer advertising by describing a movement in Brazil to change the story of those commercials: suggesting, perhaps, that there is another way for something old and tired to appear, it just takes being original and creative. Enlightment is always good.
On the same day, Lothar rated one of my posts to describe its importance to him. Not, I think, because he agreed, but because something he already believed had been stated more clearly than he'd heard it said before. That's how it is with a lot of my posts.
And again on the 27th, Wandrille Duchemin described a post of mine giving him an epiphany. Again, not because he didn't already agree with the concept, but because my description was clear and easy to understand. I write and write about the same things because I hope that I can make that connection with the reader; when I get a comment like Wandrille's, I know I'm on the right track. [I'll just add that Wandrille and I have gone head-to-head many times].
On Monday, Vlad Malkav wrote to say my post about self-esteem was "refreshing." The day before, Samuel Kernan called it "worthwhile." Someone else might call this tacit agreement, but I think it is indicative of my willingness to write about something ELSE, other than another post about monsters, another spell list for yet another monster race, another review of a product that was made more than ten years ago and yet one more retrospective on Blackmoor. I appreciate hearing that my persistant attempts to wake people up have succeeded in waking someone up.
On Saturday, Michael Giffin made a point about aluminum-steel that was well worth consideration; since I'm running a very real-world campaign, where technically actual aluminum sits unused, packed into bauxite, I'm not sure how this fits, but it might give some stress equivalents for mithril steel if that should ever come up in a campaign. I'm definitely glad Michael took the time to comment.
A week ago, Discord, who used to disagree with me very strongly but whom I think I have begun to win over these past six years, expressed his satisfaction with my articulation of story vs. sandbox (which was not what I called it in my post), adding a personal experience of his that fit into the post's general tone and meaning. Such comments are very important, not because they "agree" with me, but because they express the same sense of frustration and difficulty in making the point clear to others.
On that same post, the day before, Fuzzy Skinner confessed frankly to the difficulty of running the non-story campaign, specifically in terms of players unwilling to embrace it out of fear for their characters. When a reader steps forward to articulate this sort of problem, it serves as a guidepost to ideas and posts I want to address and discuss in the future. It identifies, clearly and for all my readers, that there is a problem and what the problem is.
I get a steady drift of such comments, week after week. I always wish there were more; I always wish the comments were longer and more intricate. I wish we could go back and forth several dozen times, getting down to the nitty-gritty of the issue. I know why we don't.
Yes, I'm a frightening son-of-a-bitch. I'm intolerant and basically vicious when I see something that's insistently evidence of old, dead, discarded ideas ~ most of which I had, once upon a time, but which I've since discarded in the 37 years that I've been obsessed with this game. Those 37 years, that's a bloody mountain of time and data and thought-processing, spent building tables and wrecking them, spent building world systems and then ripping them out of my game because they didn't work.
Just look at the way I went at one of my own systems, that I put forth on the blog: that disastrous experience with Conflict Cards. I advanced the idea, I fought for the idea, I insulted people who resisted the idea and I blasted ahead with it, spending at least a hundred hours thinking through the damn cards and more time testing them. But they didn't work, did they? They were shit, to be honest. I playtested them with my real life group and they showed promise, then I played them with the boys online and they went all munchkin with the cards, proving just how much rot the notion was.
Did I resist trashing them? No. Did I keep throwing out new efforts for the next six years? No. They were a failure. Once I was sure that they were, a process that took about a week, I knifed that idea in the gut and left it for dead on the side of the game trail. Because that's what I do. I don't quibble about sixteen possible definitions for something that's clearly a dead issue. I see it is shit, I call it shit, I dump it and it's done.
And that is hard for people. Hard. Largely because I'm willing to be just as ruthless with the reader's ideas that I have just described myself being with mine. But I really don't care what anyone feels about an idea. I only care if an idea works. If it doesn't, it goes out with the trash and no funeral.
So when people comment on this blog, knowing how cold and insensitive I will be to the warm fuzzy feelings people have about their opinions, they're cautious. They say little. They protect themselves.
Perfectly understandable. I did the same when I was in university, when I sat in courses with professors who knew a thousand times as much as I did about Greeks and Romans. If I wanted to take a position about something Thucydides said with Dr. Heckle, I goddamn knew that I had to be right enough to win his respect, even when it happened that I was wrong. Because Heckle wasn't friendly, he wasn't patient, he wasn't sympathetic to feelings and he wasn't giving an inch on things he knew were bloody well wrong. And so it was with Baldwin and Walbank, with Yardley and Dewar, with Vanderspoel and Humphrey and all the rest. Because they believed in their training and their material, in their time spent researching, thinking, arguing and putting themselves on the line against the world when publishing their ideas. Where it came to handling a 20-year-old punk kid with 18-months of reading under his or her belt, the responsibility they felt was to snap the kid's dumb-fuck neck with the facts, not to give a pat on the forehead and not to make sure our precious little feelings weren't hurt. That's why it was one of the best classics departments on the continent when I went and that's why every prof I've just named was trained in either England or Germany. Because that's how courses were taught there in the 1950s and 60s.
I'm not teaching classics now, but I am teaching D&D and role-playing. And I think it is serious stuff.
In the movie Koyaanisqatsi, there is a long and patient zoom of a flight officer standing in front of a jet intake. The shot lasts 29 seconds, which is a long time in film. Throughout the whole zoom, the man's face does not change from this:
I was watching the film the other day and thinking, when I came to this point, about the expereince behind these eyes, behind the eyes of almost every military man I've ever met. This fellow here; I promise that he does not care what anyone thinks they know about aircraft or their use in warfare except where it agrees with 99% of what he knows.
The most common disparagement on the internet is that I am not interested in people who don't agree with me. And I think I have slowly come to accept that this is true. It hasn't been an easy acceptance. I've chafed against it and denied it, but truth be told, I'm like this fellow in the picture. I've done my work. I've learned my trade. And I'm not prepared to put aside all that I've learned because someone with feelings feels that I'm not kind enough or patient enough or tolerant enough of ridiculous quibbling arguments about the meanings of words or the motivations of those who won't accept obvious truths like rules matter, that player agency matters, that cheating is cheating or that repeatedly arguing about the same points over and over is time wasted. So no, I'm not interested in being disagreed with.
I am interested in being educated. I am interested in knowing that others are having the same experiences that I'm having, that others are fighting the same war that I'm fighting. Like any officer or rating, I'm comfortable discussing things with my own people, who see that the world works in a certain way not because our thoughts make reality, but because we're willing to bend our thoughts TO reality. And those that won't, or can't, or insist it just isn't so, can get the fuck out of my sandbox.
See that man's eyes? That's what my eyes will look like when I delete your comment.
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Insufferable
O Gentle Reader . . . do you like beer commercials? Specifically, those commercials that take place in bars, where everyone is "drinking," laughing, shooting pool, dancing, pushing their bodies against each other, looking, oh, I don't know, cool?
See? You want to be these people! You want to wear their costumes, you want to draw on your friend's face while he's passed out, you want to shoot a pinata in a snowy forest and threaten it with your weapon. You want to pose in feathered costumes and pretend your super-sized styrofoam sword is an air guitar! You want to play their shitty game.
Do those work for you? Do they make you want to drink beer? They must work, because beer companies have been making these commercials for a long time. Here's one from 2017:
I watched just 12 seconds of this video before deciding that it would work for this post . . . and in that short time, I absolutely came to the conclusion that these people ~ except for the fact that they are actors and that some of them probably don't drink beer (though they wouldn't admit that on set) ~ are assholes. These are the kinds of assholes who are sitting at the next table, living in the glorified belief that every person in the bar wants to know everything about their jobs, their exes, their shouted opinions about what's wrong with Mounds candy bars and, you name it, whatever other dumb-fuck thing that matters to them.
Yet the commercials are clearly shot to be aspirational. "You want to BE these people," the commercial says. "You want to be cool like them, you want to dance like them, you want to scream like them, you want to drink their shitty brand of beer."
You want to be an asshole.
Strangely, I get the same vibe from role-players when they hit a certain, uh, level of fame. Here's a video that Critical Role put out in March:
See? You want to be these people! You want to wear their costumes, you want to draw on your friend's face while he's passed out, you want to shoot a pinata in a snowy forest and threaten it with your weapon. You want to pose in feathered costumes and pretend your super-sized styrofoam sword is an air guitar! You want to play their shitty game.
This is a beer commercial. For role-play. And like these people, it is clear that you want to be an asshole. You want to portray smug indifference as you poor fake coins over yourself before dancing in the yard of a borrowed property that has not given you permission to film indoors.
I really, really, really hate that I am in any way connected to this.
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