Games and Art and Myth

I really like Jared Sorensen's three questions for game design.

1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?

I keep mulling over aspects for my political build in Fate through the lenses of those three questions. I have changed my mind a number of times, but at this point I am thinking about the aspects that I want to really define the kind of stories that this build is intended to make.  So, I want a sense of history to this... the feeling that the faces and events are part of a much larger tapestry.  I want something that explores the themes of history, and legacy, and sacrifice.

I have not read Greg Stafford's game Pendragon, but I read about him playing with a group that included his son, and every time the characters came in to meet with King Arthur after a quest, they saw him aging and still the throne to his right was empty, and he and the Queen without a child as the land crumbled around them, slouching toward the fatal battle of Camlann.  Over months of play, Stafford's son mostly ignored it until one day, it clicked, and they saw the tragedy of Arthur for the first time.  They went from simply having a good time, to feeling a deeper sympathy for the man that was Arthur.

In Stafford's words: "Roleplaying is a way for humans to interact with our deep, hidden mythological selves.  They are a way to feed our souls."

Notorious designer, John Wick wrote about running his players through the ringer in one supers campaign that he describes in his book Play Dirty,  For 19 months, his villain defeated a dozen different characters.  Only one of them died in the game, but John milked every last drop out of the character builds to make the players quit thinking mechanically and really pause to think about what their characters stood for.  One was a Wolverine style combat monster who wrecked super villains left and right... until John had him go berserk in a crowded public street and the civilians were the collateral damage.  Another masked vigilante had a very prim and proper grandmother who did not approve of the tramp running around beating people up... and died of a heart attack when a villain paralyzed her and unmasked her in front of grandma in a restaurant.  A third very noble hero retired after falling in love with the girl who turned out to secretly be a super villain who he pulverized before unmasking her.  One player spent six weeks (that is game sessions) in prison on a life sentence because he knew too much about the mastermind.  The player never gave up, and when the characters finally sprung him after the murder of the one hero that John killed in game, John asked him what he was going to do, and he described putting the cowl on and the players, who all had each others backs now, went after the BigBad that had given the characters and players so much grief... and they caught him, arrested him, and turned him over to the law with all the evidence.  The players who 19 months before happily played a game about casual mayhem made a sober team decision to choose moral restraint.

Robin D. Laws has often asserted that role playing is the only art in which the author and audience are one and the same.

I find these stories interesting because while they only exist in imagination, I am seeing a closer and closer relationship between games and art, and I have for a long time thought that art inspires us to follow where our head navigates.  I like the idea that the whimsy of games and art can weave together to reveal something to us about ourselves or the world or other people.  It may not all the time, or even most of the time... but what medium of art ever does?  

So I have no idea if I achieve that in what I am designing.  But that is what I want to shoot for, but I like the idea that thoughts in play can make for better thoughts in work.