Justin Achilli - Justin Achilli -- Blog

Entries in exploration (6)

Thursday

08Oct2009

Manifest Destiny

October 8, 2009

What did this used to be? What's here now?Part of the appeal of the exploration playstyle is a sort of manifest destiny, a chance to "go west" (or wherever) and make some mark on the world. In the simplest sense, that's a chance to stake a claim in the world. You can see it in the old-school origins of hobby gaming in the form of establishing a stronghold and attracting a following once your character achieved a certain level. In a modern game world like Vampire, that's a chance to build, say, a princedom or domain from the ground up. I remember the old, boxed-set live action rules for The Masquerade, which assumed that most players would be interested in more of a small-scale murder mystery style game. Look at the live-action organization that's most active today, though -- it's a network of thousands of players who participate in a collective shared world divided into domains characterized by the schemes (and sometimes antics) of its characters.

Online, EVE is a great example of this, too, of course. With its systems for sovereignty, corporations and alliances, player-owned stations, and security and aggression, it's a game about staking a claim in space and defending it and expanding it.

It doesn't have to be stuff to conquer or dominate, either. It can be making a mark by learning a little more about the world. For example, I remain a fan of Ultima Online's world presentation. It's not the most complex, but it doesn't want to be or claim to be. Here's a fort in the wilderness. It's full of orcs. Sometimes, a shaman shows up. That's all the information necessary to paint a compelling portrait of that part of the world -- for me to feel like I've learned it, mastered it, and know it, and the excitement of how that's paced is the thrill of the experience. From the information I learn in that exploration, I can discern that this part of the world has a problem with orc presence, and that those orcs have a form of potent spiritual leadership in their shamans. Why are the orcs here? Do they have a tribal theocracy? How far will they range from that fort in the interests of protecting their territory? These are all questions I ask when I explore the UO world. I have a hard time playing it now because of its dated look, but its emulation of a vital world is still, well, vital.

You have discovered a new region! Please christen your discovery. "BONERTOWN."Compare that with a more traditionally narrative-driven game like Oblivion, which comes across more as a novel than an exploration. Oblivion inundates the player with such a vast quantity of information that not only does he not ask additional questions about the world, he doesn't even want to know the answers to the questions the content creators have decided he's probably asking. The exploration of their wide-open world is at odds with the great body of their lore. You can explore all you want, but all you're going to find is what they want you to discover. I like Oblivion, but I don't love it -- it's obviously not a game that caters to how I want to play. That said, I'm interested to see how Dragon Age plays, but I know it's not going to be a manifest destiny sort of game.

On the other hand, you couldn't just turn the players loose and let them shape the world entirely, as much as it hurts my idealistic design to view to acknowledge it. You'd find yourself exploring the Plains of Fart, Beavisland, or Bukkakeville if you let people name things as they discover them. Naming discoveries is one of the features of a tabletop adventure campaign I'll soon be running (or via Google Wave if the invite a friend sent me is ever processed), but my players are finite and handpicked. In a public MMO, anyone who pays a subscription fee has a right to be there, and their play is just as valid. A dyed-in-the-wool roleplayer and a mob-grinding tactician both have the same share of the world, so both "The Valinaur Steppes" and "The Poop Fields" are equally reasonable outcomes of a world in which the explorer names his finds. Even though one is less desirable for the integrity of the experience and actively intrudes upon one group's enjoyability, they're both "fair." And that's why, with no barrier to entry, you can't have them.

Late Addendum: Here's an article on the difference between exposition styles that may sound somewhat familiar to regular readers here. It's brief, but it covers both quantity of background information and the method of communication.

Justin Achilli |

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Saturday

19Sep2009

Exploration, System, and Genre

September 19, 2009

Talking to Rich got me thinking a little more about the exploration game I wanted to run. He and Monte Cook had a conversation a while back, which I won't pretend to paraphrase (because I don't want to misrepresent either party in a conversation I didn't actually hear), but the gist was that the beauty of older versions of D&D was that, as a collection of systems that didn't fit together seamlessly, they encouraged the GM to fill in the gaps. The GM made adjudications on the fly that fit the campaign as it was being told.

The interstices caught my attention. What the rules didn't cover was as important as what they did cover. The patchy systems were still open-ended enough that the fact that this was a game was secondary to the opportunity it provided to, in Rich's words, "stretch the imagination."

Later editions of D&D became much more mechanical than the early ones. That's not a bad thing, necessarily -- they focus more on the game aspect of the RPG appellation. The earlier ones, while hardly taking the tack of games that expressly labeled themselves "storytelling" exercises, emulated the experience of the experience more than the mechanics. Sure, you could min-max, and a significant magic item might break the game by virtue of its introduction, but neither the character nor the systems were sacrosanct. Players didn't have the same sort of personal investment in their characters as they do in today's storytelling games, but neither did they approach characters in the way that, say, 4e encourages, with emphasis on which benchmarks, mathematically and in the context of party role, the player wanted to accomplish.

(Note that you couldn't release that perforated game today. It'd be incomplete. You'd take a beating on the forums.)

An anecdotal but real gaming group might include an artist-type, a pair of athletes, a military history enthusiast who would go on to become a career soldier, and an actor. Only after the game became more of mechanical exercise did the math-nerd stereotype come to be associated with it.

No indictment, this. There's nothing wrong with liking the mechanics of the gaming hobby, or viewing a ruleset as a puzzle to solve. That's just not my approach.

I'm likewise less interested these days in focusing on story first and foremost than my tenure with Vampire. I don't want to tell a scripted story, I want to get together with my players and let the story tell itself. I'm more interested in the player interactions right now than I am with being the focal point of their entertainment. Not that I never want to play story-heavy again, I just have this admittedly nostalgic itch I want to scratch.

Vampire is one of those super-polished games that avoids gaps in its ruleset. While the previous World of Darkness admittedly handwaved a lot, it did give enough infrastructure that a Storyteller could make an educated and fair ruling on the spot -- combine some Attribute and some Ability and let that do the work. The new World of Darkness under the Storytelling system does the same, though it's well defined enough to leave fewer holes that the Storyteller has to plug.

This looks like an interesting modern place to explore.I was originally going to suggest that the difference between them is because the play style is different, but I'm not entirely convinced that's the case. The old-school methodology behind early D&D is exploration, whether it be of dungeon-map square grid or hex-map wilderness. Vampire explores a cityscape in most cases, and city geography and architecture can signify literal, geographical exploration, or it can take the form of negotiating a political landscape or a mystery for which the metaphor holds. It's not the same style of exploration, but it's definitely a journey into the unknown.

To diverge briefly a little more (trust me), check out James M.'s interview with D&D stalwart Ed Greenwood. Check out what Ed says specifically when he's talking about his campaign and creating new material. People accuse D&D of the old "roll-playing versus role-playing" chestnut (which I'd gladly pay a dollar never to hear again), but read Ed's commentary. He talks about ham acting, sessions in which no one draws a weapon, and writing setting material first for which the rules become secondary. Let me tell you straight up, that's a familiar approach. One of my writer's guidelines for Vampire was to be cool and let the rules serve the setting. It's cool to see that happening across the supposed ideological divide.

What's the upshot? What's the significance of comparing Vampire with D&D instead of contrasting them? I'm thinking I can use a lot of what I learned working on Vampire to make a foray into fantasy gaming, but without using the story-heavy structure that characterized Vampire under my guidance, sine that's not the chroni-- er, campaign I'm wanting to undertake. That's because perhaps they're not that different in the first place.

Justin Achilli |

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Monday

15Jun2009

Radical Estrangement

June 15, 2009

You can't go back. You can't ever have that first time (or those first times again).

This weekend I watched Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet and thought to myself that this must have been visionary at the time, but given the current state of the genre, if it were released today, it would pass without anyone's notice. The animation is charming. The story is harrowing. The fantastical world is so weird that no one would touch it today -- it wouldn't fit into the prepacked trilogy-with-maps model of the printed fiction world, the clear morality of modern movies, or the "what do I do?" ethic of games.

(Speaking of games, the graphic style reminded me a little bit of Quirks, which was one of the tone-setting hobby games of my youth. I found a copy at Origins a few years back, and I played it with my mother when I visited for Christmas.)

Laloux's Fantastic Planet would be an amazing place to explore, mostly for the reason that it was shaped in a context that didn't rely on everything that went before it. Its world is a weird place, with enough of the familiar to stick a concept in the watcher's mind, but with enough freshness of outlook to make it interesting or believable. One particular idea resonated with me: The fugitive humans of Fantastic Planet hid out in an abandoned park. An abandoned park? It worked great. When was the last time you got excited about the phrase "abandoned park"? Who even knows what an "abandoned park" is? The illustration here (Untitled #817 by Douglas Walker) isn't from the film, but is similarly evocative. Familiar but strange, identifiable but alien.

The sense of wonder imparted by a first visit to a fantastical new world, in whatever medium, gives me an emotional buy-in that I don't get in, say, Oblivion or the Belgariad, where the worlds are essentially derivatives of genre foundations. And, weirdly, too much wonder puts the experience beyond one to which I can relate. Morrowind, for example: The city built in a giant crab shell was dazzling, but the fact that long-distance travel occurred on the back of giant bugs whose "pilots" climbed inside their guts and manipulated organs... huh?

The New Weird movement terms this "radical estrangement," and that phrase carries the Other beauty of the experience. The fairy-tale feel of the original Legend of Zelda had a lot of this. You knew you were in a kingdom, because the lore told you, but you never saw any of the people around whom the kingdom existed. You needed to save it, but it was far-off, seemingly surrounded by mists, withdrawn from your experience. It felt isolated, characterized by a bit of bittersweet loneliness. That's surely more than the creators wanted to put in place, but the broad-strokes treatment of the world let me know the blanks were there, and that felt innocent and grand. I get the same feeling from Nausicaa's Valley of the Wind (and a lot of Miyazake's work, actually). Ico and Shadow of the Colossus have this same sort of mystery world behind the scenes. Hopefully The Last Guardian carries on this tradition.

Contrast that with, say, American McGee's Alice, which takes a deliberately innocent subject matter and then goes for a shock treatment of darkness. It's almost crass -- playing to the cheap seats -- and there's a reason that you don't hear many people who have the same sort of acclaim for it that they do for Miyazake films or the Ico series. Alice took an obvious shortcut, as did China Mieville's King Rat. They trade in the innocence of those children's tales without the wonder that the tales originally invoked. You can't have wonder with cynicism. Innocence carries the amazement. Cynicism traffics in world-weariness, not grandeur.

(Another aside: I have high hopes for Brom's treatment of Peter Pan in his upcoming The Child Thief.)

I've been banging my head against the rock of creating this experience a few times in a tabletop environment, and I've reached the ultimate conclusion that I can pull at the sense of dawning wonder for a brief period, but it by definition couldn't sustain a traditional "campaign" or an MMO that requests hundreds of hours. Weird tales work best in the short form. Skilled hands can carry the feeling through a bit of a longer presentation, as in China Mieville's much better Perdido Street Station, or in the collected Dying Earth tales of Jack Vance, but I couldn't get a game group together on an infinite, open-ended schedule and hope to maintain that wonder. Eventually, the details would fill in and the wonder wouold become backdrop.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite H.P. Lovecraft stories, "The Outsider," which turned the innocence and isolation of wonder toward a horror end. I've got a collection of Clark Ashton Smith stories in the mail, too, so I'm looking at spending more time being lonely and dazzled by it.

Justin Achilli |

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Friday

12Jun2009

Racing Through the World

June 12, 2009

I'm not a competitive player in MMOs. I'm more interested in the shared-world aspect than I am in the struggle for supremacy between player characters. I don't begrudge anyone that if it's their preference, of course -- I just don't want to participate in it too frequently. I'd rather explore the nooks and crannies of the world than fight stuff.

That's not how most MMOs work, though. Most MMOs have an implicit competition against other PCs, in addition to any explicit competitions they have. The implicit competition is a nebulous competition, too, which is a disenfranchising aspect. There's not really a plainly stated finish line. Sure, things like level caps, endgame content, and elite equipment exist, but attaining those is an illusory achievement, or at least a subjective one.

Which means, then, that obtaining that piece of equipment or playing through that story arc can really be taken on its own terms only. Someone else is going to kill the dragon, too. Someone else is going to earn that potent weapon.

My play style -- more of a participation style than a play style, actually -- is undone by that paradox, too. Someone else has seen the nifty area I'm exploring. Tons of other players have been there before me. A level designer has built the thing in the first place. I'm not discovering, I'm treading where someone else has already been. And because I'm guided through the experience by the game's content, those paths are pretty well-worn.

Now, these aren't inherently flaws of the game in question. They're that negative space between what the game is designed to do, and what I actually want. Levels exist, therefore I want them. More accurately, I know I'm supposed to want them, even though most times I don't actually give a shit, so I pursue them even though I don't care about them. The result is that I feel like I have to race through the world, gobbling the content as quickly as it's presented to me. I don't have the time to read mission text, let alone luxuriate in it. There's more to find, more for me to get. I don't have time to explore like I want to because I know that's not really what the game's about. I know it's about leveling and acquisition, so that's what I do, even though I don't want to.

Few of the shared worlds that currently exist allow player activities to shape those worlds. Even the ones that do don't allow complete control over the state of the world. In most cases, you're interacting with a partial diorama, a pretty box that's going to reset for the next passerby, so he can have the same experience you do.

That's where the game experiences converge, and that's where the stories offered by the environment are told. When I explore a place I think is fascinating, that's cool to me. When a hardcore PVPer smashes another player, that's cool to him. When a crafter finally obtains the skill and raw materials to make a rare item, that's cool to her.

It's different around a tabletop. The gamemaster crafts an environment that only the other players around the table get to experience. The players' characters can undertake any action and change the world as they will, because no one else is going to come by and require that an NPC respawn to offer them the quest, too.

That's not to say the tabletop is better, however. At the tabletop, you're not meeting a potential infinitude of other characters drawn from beyond the boundaries of geography. The gamemaster has the responsibility of filling in those blanks. And building the world. And coming up with at least a sketch of a plot, in order to keep events moving forward. That's a lot of work. It's not always rewarding for the gamemaster.

Meeting other people in the world is enjoyable as well, but I find it less so if those meetings are overtly and exclusively competitive. For other people -- lots of other designers with whom I work, for example -- the competition is the experience.

The answer, then, is that there's no sweet spot, no secret ingredient that puts all the answers in place for every play style. You can set a place for everyone, but not everyone's going to enjoy the dinner, as it were. Not every game needs to cater to everyone. It's okay to leave a portion of the audience unserved if your design goals mean that those people aren't really your audience. To paraphrase Sid Meier, one solid game is better than two experiences (of whatever quality) under one roof that conflict with each other. That's why the Civilization games never bother to incorporate military-sim tactics and why Street Fighter (er, not a Sid Meier game, I know) doesn't have puzzle-solving.

To bring that back under the auspices of, um, what I was talking about in the first place, look at World of Warcraft. It's a game that pretty much wants you to fight monsters in PVE. You can explore, sure, but look at how the game rewards you: with a few paltry experience points whenever you find something new. You get twice as many experience points for killing a monster in the location as you do for discovering the location itself. Exploring the world isn't the thrust of tha game, fighting things in it is. That's not a condemnation, that's a game rewarding you for behaving how it wants you to. If you don't want to fight monsters, WoW isn't the game for you.

If a game's not for you, no amount of wanting to like that game is going to throw the switch for you. You're supposed to be having fun. You don't want to have to try to like something.

Final Fantasy XXI, in my case. It just misses me. Final Fantasy is one of my favorite video game franchises, but FFXI leaves me cold. It takes too long to do anything, I don't like the character race designs, and I don't like that so much of the gameplay practically requires grouping. That's not to say I don't like any of it -- quite the contrary. I like a lot of the character and critter design, I like the feel of the world and its environments, and I like the music. If there were some way I could play it by myself, like a traditional Final Fantasy title, that might change a significant amount. But that's not what they've done, so I have to acknowledge that it's not a game I want to play...

...as much as I want to want to play. I want a game that appeals to me, I don't want to change my definition of what appeals to me. And that's fine.

Justin Achilli |

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Thursday

26Feb2009

Manifest Destiny

February 26, 2009

Without a doubt, a lot of the fun I get from gaming is in the world creation. I've said as much here, and many, many other GMs find the same joy in it, whether the malicious glee of a cleverly designed trap, or the dramatic turning point of a story or scheme that's going to provoke an emotional response from players.

Something like Ben Robbins' Western Marches, then, is almost perfect for me. First off, just imagine the sheer volume of worldbuilding going on there. Second, it'd challenge me -- the overwhelming majority of the time, I design my antagonists to be other people, because I like the interpersonal dynamics that happen. But Ben's design pushes those dynamics aside to focus on exploration, conquest, and mood of a different sort.

I'm one of those "tangled skein" storytellers. Something like the Western Marches, in leaving complex plots and backstories in the GM's toolbox, would have me flexing creative muscles I don't normally use. That's why I'm inclined to give it a spin.

On the downside, most of the people I game with are around my age. We have responsibilities. Game time is at a premium. So there may be a whole lot of worldbuilding preparations that never see the light of day. That's okay to some degree, as that's part of the fun of doing it -- for its own sake, and for the challenge. It's not like I don't have dozens of unused ideas already committed to paper already. Part of the experience, though, is putting the thing into use.

And I've already got a thousand other projects going on. Do I need a new one? No. No, I don't. But damn, if it doesn't sound like a hell of a lot of fun.

Justin Achilli |