Over the last twenty odd years, GURPS had become my go-to rpg with an odd and end other here and there. Over time, a few things had begun to consistently bother me though. Hazardous action, and combat in particular are of course long time staples of rpgs, but I didn't like that the most immediate action for dealing with most conflicts was lethal force, even in circumstances where violence was far from believable. The mechanics however reward direct and decisive results without necessarily mechanically generating consequences. I love that GURPS evolved beyond venerable games in providing advantages and disadvantages to put solid grounding for personality and motivation beyond mere action effectiveness. I hated that disadvantages were often gamed as point mines to squeeze extra points to get an extra point of Dexterity (to be more action effective). I hated that action and combat, while staples of fictional conflict, may be a few moments or even a few minutes of game time, but take many times longer (sometimes an hour or more) to resolve in real time. The breathless pace of cinema or even a good book are lost in even best practice die rolling, record keeping, and turn waiting. I was trying to find complicated probability matrices to make an ideal one roll resolution for any action so that I could focus on narrative. I wanted narrative consequences to dangerous and lethal action. I wanted the flaws of the character to be what drove the motivation for heroism rather than mechanistic power-gaming. I wanted story that felt as satisfying, at its best, as watching a movie or reading a book can be. I wanted story.
So I started digging, and looking to see if I could find anyone else who had tried playing with those same kind of ideas.
What I discovered, was the indi game design community. I discovered that I was not alone in being interested in the question of whether games could be more than just a diversion... more than a throw away entertainment... whether games could be art.
Several months before, I had read an article in a video game magazine that discussed that very question in regards to that medium. It talked about Shadow of the Colossus, and Journey as two examples of video games that met that criteria. Journey in fact, is designed quite intentionally to reflect the Hero's Journey model by Joseph Campbell, and to give a complete emotional experience that comes from making that journey as a player. While electronic games have in the last couple of decades begun to take more and more design cues from film, I had not at the time I read the article seen that level of intent taken for tabletop games. But electronic games lacked the social interactivity that was also an interest to me of games.
Jenova Chen, creator of Journey, wrote about games as a grad student. His bio notes his frustration about "games losing their appeal as he and his friends age. While studying in film school about the history of media, Jenova realized that to mature a medium, a wide range of content is required to satisfy audience's various emotional needs. Jenova wants to be part of a movement to expand the range of emotions video games can communicate" as a more fully expressive medium. He cites the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a Hungarian psychologist that studies happiness, motivation, and creativity. He studies and writes about, among other things, Flow,the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment.
I did not discover the work of Csikszentmihalyi till later, but while I was in Afghanistan, my daily news review was followed by reading The Brilliant Blog about learning, neuroscience, and creativity. I felt that I was getting mentally slow and dull. I also spent that year exploring ways to challenge that, including my first experiments with nootropics and brain games. All of these things formed a kind of stew that was on the back burner of my brain.
And then, one night after work, sitting in my dust scented tent, I found the unassuming back door.
There not only were other people thinking about story in table top games... not only asking about whether games could provide something more satisfying than a throw away distraction... not only interested in both games and art, and games as art... but they had been discussing it for years. I came a decade late to the party. But they were out there. They were trying to start parties with more people elsewhere. They had a vocabulary for what they were discussing.
There were rpgs that did not even have mechanics for combat or action scenes. And they were good.
I went to college to study theater, and came out with a minor in English lit and communications as well. I cut my reading teeth on fairy tales and mythology. That there were games where themes, throughlines, dramatic reversals, and mythic journeys were not just the inspiration but were the way the mechanics were designed to reveal was just what I had been looking for without having the benefit of others to figure it out. There were other writers who were thinking of games in mythic terms as well, like Witney Beltran, who in her doctoral studies in mythology/psychology and play, suggests that "one way to keep the mythic knowledge and stories of cultures [alive] is through narrative play via analogue and/or digital mediums." She is one of many that I have discovered in the last two and a half years taking this idea and running with it.
I'm interested in game design now, because role playing games, as a creative medium, share many elements with books and film, yet are unique in this: rpgs are the only medium in which players are both audience and author at the same time to one degree or another. What they lack in hard lined vision, they trade for social investment. Players get out what they put in, and at the finest, they get a story experience that is more than the sum of the parts. Obviously, that is not a given every time, and perhaps not even most of the time, but it can be sometimes. I am looking to make something that can evoke or reveal something through this artistic vehicle about ourselves... about others... about the world... about the myths that make us human. But I want to have fun doing it too.
I'm not really sure just what the tight focus, or purpose of this blog is yet. I know that I have ideas about a number of things. Some of those things converge in odd ways, but they matter to me in the convergence. I know that I want to sharpen the easy creativity that I recall having as a child. I know that I want to sharpen the edge back onto writing that has become clumsy. I know that I want to have the sense of playfulness that lightened my heart when I was very young. I know that I also want to explore things that blow my mind now as an adult but would have been incomprehensible as a child. I know I want to challenge other ideas without feeling that the person holding them feels threatened. There seems to be some kind of convergence, though I cannot say its name yet.
I don't know what will come of this attempt at blogging. I don't know if anyone else will ever even read it but me.
But I hope that what I am looking for are the tracks of that pale stag dancing through the woods off the map...
No comments:
Post a Comment