Has gaming got a secret storytelling sauce?

You know those get-to-know meetings where everybody is invited to say a little bit about who they are. Like when the heroes exchange boasts in the Trojan War, only without the spear-throwing as a chaser. When I mention that I’m a game designer as well as a writer, a publisher or a network exec will nod and say, ‘Yes, that’s what we like about your writing. The gaming feel.’

I expect Michelangelo heard the same sort of thing. ‘What we love about your painting, Mike, is the sculptural look.’ And a compliment is a compliment. You don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, even when it’s a camel. But it irks because it’s too facile to be true or even useful. When you’re a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work. Whatever quality those network execs think they’re seeing, it’s as likely that I got it from reading Elric of Melniboné as from playing The Witcher.

Why it matters: publishers and old TV networks alike are looking at their shrinking audience and, perceiving that young people especially are eagerly consuming games, they feel sure that an injection from those glands could surely perk up their own medium.

Is that true? When I was getting started as a writer, back in the mid-'80s, all the publishers wanted Fighting Fantasy style gamebooks. Those went a long way beyond mixing a game sensibility (whatever that is) into the narrative. They were stories with gameplay. And on one level it was a massive success, but only in the same way that the US surge in Iraq was a massive success. Reluctant readers, especially boys, took to the books in their millions. But fast forward 35 years and I don’t think you’ll find many of them became regular readers. If it didn’t have a tunnel with an orc at the end they could kill, they just weren’t interested.

Should we worry? After all, most people are not regular readers. It can be a misperception to see all those kids’ faces wide-eyed and screen-lit and to think, gosh, if we could just bottle that gaming juice we’d soon have them just as addicted to books.

@Porter_Anderson well I would say the answer I offered was that they want the same 10 positive emotions. Not game like interaction.

— Jane McGonigal (@avantgame) May 29, 2015

Back in the late sixties, what got me and another 400,000 kids out of bed without needing to be called twice was the latest issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. You think my parents and teachers approved? ‘Why can’t you read proper books?’ they asked. The answer, of course, is that it’s not either/or. Maybe most of those other Spidey fans didn’t become regular readers in later life. Others did. Some became writers and game designers and now rarely put in a day’s work that doesn’t owe something to Stan Lee’s storytelling. We didn’t look at the page and see a 3 by 3 panel grid, or four-colour pictures with word balloons. We saw how original characters, sparkling humour, a gazillion personal problems, and a spectacular fight scene or two added up to a don’t-miss monthly saga.

When a medium like games or comic books whips up such a rapture of enthusiasm, naturally we look for lessons we should be learning. Yet tread carefully on these deceptive sands. It’s not necessarily about grafting gameplay into novels. Nor is anything gained by mere apery, such as renaming chapters ‘levels’. You could sell truckloads of books, after all, if you made them in the shape of a football somebody could kick around a park. Game elements, when only sutured onto other media like an experiment by Dr Moreau, have their limits.

The really valuable takeaways here require us to dig deeper. When Quentin Tarantino brought a little grindhouse vibe to CSI with his episode ‘Grave Danger’, the show’s producers acknowledged that he’d jolted them back to the realization, half forgotten after five seasons, that their stories needed to grab and excite the audience, not just fill an hour’s gap in their lives. A decade and half ago, Russell T Davies regenerated Doctor Who with a transfusion of soap opera sensibility which relegated the SF plot shenanigans almost to MacGuffins in order to foreground the characters’ personal journey. Opinions remain divided, but there’s no denying that it gave a direction to a show that seemed to have nowhere left to go.

Putting the ‘pop’ back into art is a trick that goes back a long way before one pixel dashed across a screen to devour another. Patricia Highsmith understood the same affect of compulsion: writing emotionally on the edge of your seat so as to put the reader on theirs. Dickens grabs you by the lapels; even his narrative prose has the vim and urgency of the spoken word. Coleridge too: ‘There was a ship...’ I defy you to stop there and start texting. Or how about three witches, a blasted heath, and a bloody man – you’re not going to be popping off to the loo for the next couple of hours, are you? And the Bard couldn’t have picked up those tricks from the games industry. Gadzooks, they’d only just invented cricket.

How do we make people want to read? Bring them up in a household full of books, or (next best) with free access to books. But also recognize that the human race reinvents itself. That’s its trademark turn. So we could ask, why aren’t the youth of today painting mammoths on the walls of caves? Why aren’t they going to the opera? Where are the Oscars for epic poetry?

Humans love stories, and we always will, but media evolve, speciate and go extinct. And so it goes.

A journal of the play years

Here's the thing about write-ups. The point of a roleplaying game isn't to create a story. "But, but..." you may say, especially if you've bought into all that genre-flavoured, trope-carbonated Hollywood screenwriting fizz. And I do like stories. I read a lot of them. I even write a few. But the second life conjured up by a good RPG session goes way beyond any of that break-to-act-two nonsense.

I'll give you a really good example. Watch The Knick. The first eighteen episodes are tour-de-force writing, as superficially formless as daily life and yet driven by conflict, emotion and need. In the last two episodes the writers were forced by Cinemax's cancellation of the show to tie everything up with a bow -- not even a suture -- and that meant scraping the barrel of trope-driven, by-the-numbers storytelling. Suddenly characters were having arguments that the actors obviously couldn't bring themselves to believe. Previously complex characters stood revealed as dastardly villains. An interesting and rather touching romance turned out to hinge on an improbable master plan. Two of the hospital staff abruptly decided to turn into psychotic murderers and then got together. Where before we'd had great original drama, now we had the most disappointingly cliched melodrama.

That's the kind of cookie-cutter plotting that comes from treating the narrative as an artifice to grab the attention of bored audiences rather than, as they had done previously, allowing it to find its own shape from the many nuanced processes going on inside. The determination of incident driving the illustration of character.

So I'm wary of going into a game with the intention of doing write-ups because it can make the roleplaying self-conscious. Players start worrying about whether their character will come across well, get enough of a starring role, be perceived as having an interesting (ugh) arc. That said, when the write-up is done in character and comes with all the unreliability and partiality that implies, it can be fun. And as I get older it gets harder to remember what happened in the session two weeks ago, so write-ups are useful mnemonics.

Preparing for one of our Christmas specials, it occurred to me that, although my group don't often bother with write-ups, nevertheless we'd accumulated enough of them in twenty years to fill a book. So I put them all together and printed up a dozen copies to hand out to the players, with this introduction:

Getting around the table for an evening’s gaming is a highlight of the week, and lots of fun even when (as often) we’re simply larking about.

But when the magic starts to work, and we steep ourselves in the world, and the characters speak through us – then our imaginations join together and take flight. And that’s when we might say to non-gamers: we have seen things you people wouldn’t believe…

Stories matter to human beings. They entertain, but they do more than that. They are how we see the world. And in our games we’ve had the privilege of getting inside the story. The joy of creating it together with good friends. The wonder of experiencing things beyond the everyday.

This book collects some of the fugitive scraps of those marvellous moments together. Long may it continue.

ADDENDUM: The point here, of course, is "the joy of creating [a story] together with good friends". That's why roleplaying is such a unique experience -- like life, what matters is not the story that emerges, but the fact that you make it happen and you experience it with people you care about. But for those who are interested in my group's write-ups, you can find a lot of them just by excavating the deeper strata of this blog. For instance:

• Tekumel
• 1890s
• Paragon
• Redemption (Legend) parts 1, 2 and 3
• Jewelspider (Legend)

I could go on, but it's safe to say that's probably more than enough.

Dave's and Jamie's Christmas party

Every year at this time, Jamie and I get together for a marathon gaming session at his computer, which is nicknamed "the Beast" either because it's the real McCoy or because it's heavy enough to use in a smash-&-grab raid on a cash machine. This is our opportunity to catch up on some computer games we've missed, so we download a bunch and work our way through until we find one worth sticking with. It has to be said that usually the best games are the indies: Inside, Papers Please, This War of Mine, Pathologic -- though we have been known to binge on hours and hours of The Witcher too.

This year our serendipitous find was What Remains of Edith Finch. We thought we were getting a horror game, but it's much more intriguing than that. There are elements of horror, but also black comedy, tragedy, innocence, loss, grief, identity, madness, pastiche, and the awareness of the precious fragility of life. It's superbly written and voice-acted and you can play the whole thing in a few hours. We really enjoyed it.

Also on the theme of madness was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. We gave that an hour and then lost interest. Unaccountably it was about a 1st century BC Celt wandering around an 8th century AD Norse underworld -- called in the game not Niflhel, Hel or even Niflheim, but "Helheim", suggesting that historical research went no further than leafing through a heavy metal magazine. Still, you might like it if your paradigm of a game is a twenty-hour, one-note cutscene interspersed with occasional fights and arcade-style match-the-symbol tasks. Almost the opposite of Edith Finch in every respect, that.

And we finished off with Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a monumental CRPG set in the Holy Roman Empire during the reign of Wenceslas IV (most definitely not the one in the carol). It's so thoroughly researched that you could use the source material text to run a tabletop campaign, and in fact the absence of magic/fantasy reminded me of a purist Legend campaign. The writing and acting are excellent, and if I had a spare one hundred hours I'd throw myself into it with gusto.

Other recommendations if you're looking for last-minute Christmas presents are Gregor's Vuga's gem of a roleplaying game Sagas of the Icelanders, David Nicholls' miniseries Patrick Melrose (the best thing on TV this year), and Posy Simmonds' long-awaited new graphic novel Cassandra Darke (surely soon to be "a major motion picture" with Gemma Arterton).

And if it didn't have a price tag in the stratosphere I'd have treated myself to the White Album, my old vinyl copy being scratched to acoustic fuzz by too much use over the years. If you've never listened to it, don't dip in track by track like some pill-popping Megacity juve perp with ADHD. Put on each side in turn and just sit back. People say it's not a concept album, but ninety minutes later you'll think differently. Good night, good night, everybody.

Duty calls

GURPS 4e is the rule set of choice in my gaming group. I don’t like everything about it (fights take up way too much time without actually feeling terribly exciting) but there’s lots of interesting debate to be had when you shine a light into the obscure nooks and crannies of the system.

Just one example. Characters can take a Duty. This is a disadvantage of variable points value; by taking it you get points to spend on attributes or skills. The more likely a Duty is to apply during a game, the more it’s worth. You get extra points if it’s extremely hazardous (ie you are at constant risk of death) and also if it’s involuntary. An involuntary Duty is one where the character has no choice in the matter. Their actions are coerced by threats to loved ones, mind control, or a curse.

One of the players in our Victorian campaign took a character who was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He argued that the Duty should count as involuntary and extremely hazardous:

"Since the penalty for abrogation of this duty is court-martial, punishable possibly by death (and the utter shame and ruin of his entire family and tarnishing of the reputation by association of his circle of friends) I think his duty is pretty much involuntary. 'Enforced by threats to you or your loved ones...' – GURPS 4e page134."

My counter to that was that the whole point about involuntary Duty is it's enforced – the cartel have a gun to your wife's head, the terrorists have strapped a bomb to you, that kind of deal. If you ask a British RN officer in the 1890s why he is carrying out his duties, he's not going to say, "I don't want to, but the British government are holding my life and family honour to ransom." So it's voluntary. The GURPS Compendium explains it pretty well:

Duty (Involuntary; an extra -5 points) Some duties are enforced by threats, threats to loved ones, or by exotic methods of mind control. Such a forced duty can result in difficult decisions or surprising insights for the affected character. An involuntary Duty would not include military service by draft (although service by impressment, as practiced by the British navy of the 18th century, would qualify), nor any other "normal" service. Only cases where life or sanity are directly at stake qualify.

The player disagreed. (When do they not, when character points are at stake?)

"It is involuntary! What you're talking about is Sense of Duty, which makes him feel he wants to do it. But he has no choice, and if he should be given an order with which he disagrees, or is too afraid to carry out, the true nature of the duty is clear. It's not just imprisonment or a broken relationship with his patron he has to deal with afterwards. Plenty of the fellows who sign up for the armed forces will attest to the level of choice they have. If it were WW1 and he were in the army, I don't think you'd try and sustain your case. The overwhelming horror of enforced duty tearing against the survival instinct is pretty well documented."

Sense of Duty is indeed another, quite different character trait in the GURPS rules. It’s mental, not social, and bears on whether you feel you ought to carry out the duty. This is where it gets interesting. Because all duties must have some degree of either voluntary or involuntary internal compulsion. That’s what the extra -5 points for an involuntary Duty is all about. But does the GURPS rulebook insist that all voluntary Duties are accompanied by a Sense of Duty? No. It is perfectly possible to take a voluntary Duty without having a Sense of Duty.

And quite right too. I know people who were in the British armed forces, ordinary squaddies who joined straight from school. If they had failed to do their duty they could in theory have been court-martialled and imprisoned, but I don’t think that was any kind of motivating factor. They did their duty voluntarily and effectively without any overwhelming sense of duty (a typically British mentality!). They were conscientious, but when they got a better offer they quit the services and did that instead.

The acid test for an involuntary Duty would be "can you resign?" In almost all modern armed forces you can. Being press-ganged on a pirate ship or British navy vessel of the mid-18th century are notable exceptions. A Royal Navy lieutenant of the 1890s is not, if you’ll pardon the pun, in the same boat.

It begs another question: why are involuntary Duties worth -5 pts more anyhow? A person who is coerced into doing his duty is less effective than somebody who does it voluntarily. Also, involuntary Duty could be lifted by removing the coercion. "We have your wife and kids safe, sir. You can put down that gun." So you'd think involuntary Duty would be less of a disadvantage, points-wise.

The player had also claimed his Duty as a naval officer to be “extremely hazardous”, which the GURPS 4e rules define thus:

Extremely Hazardous: You are always at risk of death or serious injury when your Duty comes up. There are significant penalties if you refuse to take these risks: dismissal in disgrace, imprisonment, perhaps even death. The GM has the final say as to whether a given Duty is “extremely hazardous” in his campaign.

You can see why that would be worth extra points, at least. And certainly if the lieutenant failed to do his duty he would face the possibility of disgrace, imprisonment or death. (In point of fact, the standard penalty for failure to do one’s duty in the Royal Navy is up to two years’ imprisonment, but that only if the court finds you deliberately at fault.)

But that’s mere plot detail. What interests me about this is the whole question of volition when carrying out a duty. Reading Sassoon on his moral objections to the Great War, or Max Hastings on his various relatives' reactions to fighting at the front shows there's a stew of motivations and conflicts going on there. Did the Twin Towers attackers act voluntarily? If you asked them, they'd probably have said yes, this way lies paradise. But the truth was, how could they back out? To do so would mean not just facing retribution from their al-Qaeda commanders - that's nothing, it probably never crossed their minds - but the much scarier prospect of sweeping away a whole bunch of simplistic beliefs on which their entire identities were built. So I'd say they probably had both involuntary (sic) Duty and Sense of Duty. Humans are wonderfully screwed up pieces of work, aren’t they?

There are a lot of interesting and complex aspects to dutiful behaviour, and we can hardly expect a set of game rules to get to grips with them. But it’s fascinating to come across these questions, discovering all kinds of philosophical and moral matters lurking amid the numbers and mechanics, and the fact that I am continually able to do so is one of the things I love most about role-playing.

Twenty-twenty talking

I gave a rapid-fire presentation at the Groucho Club last week. It was one of those PechaKucha things, or Sancho Panzas as my mum would call them. You put up twenty slides and try to say something sensible about them in twenty seconds. Each, that is. A whole twenty seconds per slide.

Well, I don't know if anyone there could follow what I was talking about. I enjoyed the other presentations, though, notably by Phil Stuart of Preloaded (who ran through a bunch of really intriguing and original games that showed the medium is starting to flex its creative muscles) and Dean Johnson of Brandwidth (who showed what his company are doing with Mark Staufer's evolution of the novel, The Numinous Place).

The evening was organized by Four Colman Getty as part of their new Off The Page series of events. The idea is to look at how publishing and technology intersect, and the specific focus of this first one was gaming. You see, it all makes perfect sense.

My thesis was how I'd like to see interactive storytelling evolve. Yep, in 400 seconds or less. For those who weren't there - or even who were, and couldn't follow the machine-gun exposition, I've written up the gist of the argument for the Huffington Post and you can read it right here. Though really I need a few hours to do it justice.

Comments welcome, here or on the HuffPo site. Photos for Off The Page here and copyright Roger Blagg.