Two timing

'Do you remember a guy that's been in such an early song?' asked Bowie. Until reminded by a shout-out from Alexis Kennedy, I'd completely forgotten that in Dragon Warriors book 6 I included some advice on handling passage of time in a roleplaying session:

Very long journeys often mean that a game-time period of many months will be skimmed over in a matter of a few minutes of real-time. However, it is not in the best interests of the game to be too quick about this. A sense of the ludicrous may creep into a game where the GM says something such as, ‘You ride south through Algandy, spend a few days in Ferromaine where you charter a ship, then you sail across the Coradian Sea and down the Gulf of Marazid until you reach the mouth of the Mungoda River after about a month. You find a guide and bearers and make your way inland through thick jungle, finally arriving at the ruined temple Sengool told you about three months after you set out.’

Such an introduction is implausible and does little justice to the adventure that is to follow it. I recommend that you never spend less than half an hour gaming each campaign month. Something of interest must happen in that time. Devise a meeting with officials in Ferromaine – are the player-characters stung for duty tax, or wrongfully arrested by the city guard? Embroil them in a subplot which may take up the whole gaming session (though try not to lose the impetus of the main adventure in doing so). As a last resort, at least throw in a pre-planned but ostensibly random encounter.

One useful trick that allows you to move through game-time at an accelerated rate is by means of a film-like montage. Wait for the players to begin a discussion amongst themselves – a plan of action, an argument over spoils, or whatever – then run them fairly freely through their journey, interjecting briefly sketched events or remarks from NPCs, such as the ship's captain, at intervals to show that time is passing. As in a film, a few minutes’ action can thus be made to seem to cover days or weeks. 

It's that montage technique that Alexis and Lottie were talking about, and it's very generous of them to give me the credit for it. I just swiped it from cinema, after all. But which filmmaker came up with it in the first place? It's almost but not quite what Welles uses in the breakfast montage in Citizen Kane. One flash of light but no smoking pistol -- where did he get it from? And who was the first to use it fully? By which I mean carrying on a continuous dialogue through a succession of scenes in which time is passing.

As with most fictive tricks, we can go right back to Shakespeare. He has two clocks, so to speak, running throughout Othello. (No montage there, obviously.) Montage as a cinematic technique predates dialogue, so at some point while cutting an early talkie it must have occurred to the director and/or editor that it would be neat to hold together the montage sequence with one voiceover or dialogue sequence. It's really just an extension of overtonal montage (a sequence of cuts linked by theme) which was well-established in the silent era. When talkies came along, some bright spark must have made the intuitive leap to using the dialogue as the overtonal glue. But who? Lev Kuleshov? Alfred Hitchcock? Don Siegel? In the absence of any further info, I'm going to have to bashfully submit to Mr Kennedy's attribution and call it the Morris Effect.

If you want to experience it in a game, the obvious pick is The Lady Afterwards, now available on Steam. If the story and game design are as gorgeous as the visuals (and Fallen London suggests they will be) then it's a must-have.

Stories that resonate

The film director Brian De Palma once gave a vivid description of how resonance works in storytelling. He likened different elements of the story to charged rods. When they get to just the right separation – CRACK! – you get a spark that illuminates the narrative. Too far apart and the discharge doesn’t happen. Too near and you get a closed circuit that never charges up in the first place.

One of the best uses of resonance in games is in Grim Fandango. The 1930s style of the setting allows a pseudo-Art Deco motif in the office block where the hero works, which is the headquarters of the Department of Death. Real-world Art Deco was influenced by Egyptian art, making it an excellent metaphor for the afterlife which is the setting of the game. In Grim Fandango, that Art Deco style comes with a spin, though, in that the decorative images used are not Egyptian but Aztec – which pulls us back to the origins of the Day of the Dead festival in pre-Columbian myth.

The 1930s trope also works well with Grim Fandango’s noirish private-eye slant and the slightly shabby elegance familiar to anyone who has ever visited a Mexican town like Morelia or Oaxaca. The game begins in the city of El Marrow, which looks like a sleepy burg that time has passed by. Indeed, this impression is accentuated by styling the world of the living, which the hero briefly visits, on Richard Hamilton's brashly colourful Pop Art paintings of the 1950s. (Life is to afterlife as the urban USA is to rural Mexico? That's resonance.)

Resonance can be used with varying degrees of subtlety. The least overt involves repeated images that defy instant critical analysis and so work on a very deep level. Examples of this kind of resonance – which we may call motifs – are hats in Miller's Crossing, water and the lack of it in Chinatown, and the use of discordant sounds and background noise in Touch of Evil.

More obvious are symbols that visually express the subtext. Hitchcock's thrillers often embody a sense of inevitability or danger by using shadows that seem to form a web or the bars of a cage. Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is set on the border between the USA and Mexico, and the story concerns a moral border: the grey area between the two lead characters, played by Welles and Charlton Heston. Those are more overt forms of resonance because they operate at the mind's liminal threshold.

Least subtle of all is resonance that simply swipes its whole scenario from another story or from the real world. I haven’t seen the new Picard series and know nothing about it apart from the screenshot that suggests Jean-Luc is now hanging out with Elrond. But a review mentioned that it deals with the refugees displaced by the destruction of the planet Romulus (what is it with Star Trek writers and blowing up planets?) and the notion that a less progressive administration at Starfleet is shirking their responsibility to help them.

Now, I have no quarrel with Star Trek being political. It always was; that was the whole point of it. The question here is whether it’s the kind of Roddenberrian allegorical scenario that fires us up with interesting ideas about timeless philosophical or political issues, or whether you’ll watch it and say, “Oh, so it’s a story about Trump.” The former is one of Mr De Palma’s lightning flashes: it’s alive! The latter fizzles out, its energy draining away in worthy obviousness.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever find out. There’s way too much TV these days to keep track of, and after seven seasons of TNG and Grabthar knows how many movies I don’t really feel the need for yet more Picard. But if you liked the show and can convince me it’s not from Western Union – well, okay then. Make it so.