Theme and the Construction of Shared Imaginative Space

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I’ve been listening to a metric ton of boardgaming podcasts lately.  In many of them, there’s a lot of talk about the theme of games, and whether or not it’s important to have strong theme, or mechanics that reflect the theme.  (If you want to take a listen, here’s a Q&A with Reiner Knizia where he talks about theme and his process quite a bit.)

A lot of talk about theme centers around the idea of a game ‘feeling’ right: Does a merchant game give you a taste of the experience of being a merchant trying to make it in 15th century Florence?  Does Lifeboat give you the feeling of trying to talk your way out of a grim death at the bottom of the ocean?

RPGs, particularly story-games, are all about theme.  They tend to be smaller in scope and focus their mechanical energy towards the theme that the designer has in mind.  For example, Jason Morningstar’s excellent Grey Ranks.  It’s a game about playing a teenage resistance fighter during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.  More to the point, it’s about the emotional lives of those soldiers during the intensity of combat.  The character sheet and the grid that the game is played on are tightly bound to the theme – there’s no hit location charts for combat, no list of skills – nothing that you’d traditionally associate with a game about war and combat.

What’s most interesting about these two ideas, however, is how theme is approached differently between board game design and RPG design.  Theme in boardgames is primarily a physical function: do the pieces, the board art reflect the desired theme?  Process, while certainly part of the equation, has a much smaller role – many board game processes are identical to each other, or are structured around existing mechanical paradigms – the ‘chase game’, for example.  So theme, if we talk about it from an AGE Model perspective, is a function of the manipulation of resources in the gamespace.

This is inverted when we talk about roleplaying games.  Physicality is removed from many modern RPGs – dice and a character sheet can only do so much.  So theme emerges through play – do the patterns of the characters’ interactions conform to the themes as expressed in the rules?  So while the wellspring of theme is the same between RPGs and board games, the gamespace, theme’s ‘proper place’ in RPGs is in the emspace – in the shared narrative, and how the players interact.

Stepping back a bit – are these as different as they might at first seem?  It seems to me that board games simply don’t have explicit constructors for emspace – there’s nothing in the rules of Pandemic or Race to the Galaxy that promotes the idea of putting yourself inside the narrative flow of the game.  So does this mean that emspace doesn’t exist in boardgames?  No – I’ve played a lot of Pandemic lately, and Amy and I do enter a shared space inside the game.  We talk about our pawns in the first person (‘I’ll go to Bogota and cure there.’) – so the emspace appears to be present, though to a much lesser degree than in RPGs because of the lack of explicit construction of the shared imaginative space.

So is the emspace inevitable?  Is it inherent in play?  Reflexively, I’d say no – but there is an intriguing possiblity: perhaps there are two imaginative spaces: an emspace (or explicitly constructed shared imaginative world), and a second kind of shared world, formed from the collapse of the gamespace and the playspace.  I’d call this the gameplayspace, but that’s a very Germanic construct.  How about Ludospace (or Ludispace? – declension was never my strong suit)?  This, then, is the space constructed by theme in boardgames – the enhancement of the ‘magic circle’ of a game to include thematic elements.

How is this a different animal from the Emspace?

At first blush, the Emspace, while tied to the rules of the game (no matter how loosely), includes a much larger extraludic narrative component that exists independent of the rules of the game.  This is best explained (by me, at least), in computer terms: the Ludospace is a function of the Playspace and the Gamespace, and is wholly encompassed by the two.  For the Emspace, however, the game is a service - exposing some of the imaginative space to manipulation by the players, but not in its entirety – the rest of the space is manipulated directly by the players.  Again – a large portion of this is mediated in the Playspace, but is understood not to be encompassed by that. 

Taken another way, the Emspace in RPGs is assumed to be autonomous; in board games, it is wholly dependent on the structure of the game.  This essential difference is what gives RPGs their open-ended nature: the rules are the starting point of the narrative, instead of a description of it.

Systems, Formal and Informal

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

In this post, Jonathan Walton asks “System Matters + Lumpley Principle = ?’.  At ‘Story by the Throat’, a blog name that I personally covet, Joel considers the differences between RPGs and what his friend Willem is doing with his own blogject, the College of Mythic Cartography.  Both posts consider the same subject: what is the boundary between structured play in RPGs and the unstructured ‘other stuff’ – either the happenings at the table in the Lumpley Principle, or in an activity such as story-jamming.

The answer to my mind is quite simple: with any activity of this kind, there are formal and informal systems.  The formal system in RPGs is the rule systems.  They define what is part of ‘the game’ – the exchanges of currency that can be made, and the channels that the players can operate in. 

Of course, the players also operate in one or more informal systems – social networks, interpersonal dynamics, gaming culture and the like – which have their own sets of rules and operations.  A classic examples of the informal systems at the table are the Girlfriend Effect, where the main squeeze of the GM gets special consideration for his or her character.  A more positive example is when I let my 5 year-old daughter know that there’s a better move that she can take in checkers.

With this in mind, story-jamming simply moves the formal systems surrounding story creation that are in place in most RPGs and places them inside the bounds of the informal social systems of the group doing the jamming.  The players do what feels right, and there’s no resistance from more formal systems of interaction – the game isn’t telling them what to do.  To varying degrees, the ‘classic’ RPG player wants that resistance.  They want the game to push back, to confine their actions.  Working within the bounds of that resistance makes the game interesting – the idea that you I can say ‘BANG’ and you can’t say ‘NUH UH’ – or rather, that you can say ‘NUH UH’, but you have to have the rules backing you up as well.

Various attempts over the years have been made to introduce formal structure to the informal areas of gaming, and vice-versa.  I would call any explicit Social Contract an attempt to introduce formality to the informal system around the game table.  Primetime Adventures codifies things like ‘everyone agreeing what the show is going to be about’ – that sort of explicit agreement is a formal structure inside the fuzziness of informal table gatherings.

While I have no problem with the abstraction of game rules to fit in with a given social situation (Willem’s friends want to story-jam, not to do something kinda like story-jamming), I don’t agree with the imposition of formal structures into the social realm of games.  At best, I think that games designs should function well regardless of the social structure of the participants – imagine the rules of chess falling apart because the two players didn’t like each other.  A game should contain enough formal structure to insulate play from egregious social dysfunction – at least to the point where play is still possible.  If everyone walks away from the table, that’s another situation entirely.

A lot of the ideas that I’ve been playing around with: DEAD, AFTER and Cold War being the three that stand out, revolve around the idea that complete harmony at the table is all fine and dandy, but it’s not what makes a game interesting.  What’s interesting is having your best friends around the table and gleefully backstabbing them for the sake of a good story – which is the only shared endgame that everyone at the table shares.

* * *

As a postscript, the AGE Model takes all of this formal/informal stuff in stride.  The Gamespace is the home of the formal systems set up by the rules.  The Playspace is where the messy social stuff happens.  Interaction between the two spaces is the same idea covered by the Lumpley Principle, and taken together, and the two spaces taken as a whole, with all of their interconnections, is the answer to the equation ‘System Matters + Lumpley Principle’.  Call it the Fuzzyformal System, or something even more clever.

T +368, plus a new Cairn twist.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

So I’m an idiot and I thought that GenCon was this last weekend – a weekend that I actually spent playing a lot of strategy games (GMT’s Paths of Glory and Fantasy Flight’s Cold War, mainly), but not writing a whole lot.  I was sitting down to do the first serious work in about a week, lamenting my lost seven days, only to find out that GenCon is this coming weekend (the 15th of August), meaning that I got a reprieve of seven days, with three days left.

Official countdown total: 368 days left.

* * *

During this trip, I interviewed my opponent (shout-out to Mike Bellar!) and we talked about his perfect game.  The answer was a manageable tabletop 4x (explore, expand, exploit & exterminate), with two different boards: a strategic and a tactical.  We talked a bit about the obstacles to 4x on the tabletop, and here’s my AGE-Modelish take on the problem:

4x games suffer from two conflicting forces: Authenticity and Simplicity.  Play should carry enough verisimiltude that you feel that you’re making valid decisions in the gamespace you’re playing – a space-empire game should feel different from a business/stock market game.  The addition of authentic rulespaces, though, creates complexity and exceptions that clutter up the game play – to the extent that now two different people that I’ve interviewed that have worked on their own 4x-ish games have resorted to Excel spreadsheets to manage play.  (In the interest of full disclosure, past versions of both Merchant and Manor have required the aid of a computer to make them work – so I’m no saint in this matter.)

Streamlining the mechanics of the game, however, dissolves the authenticity – pushing chits around on a board that provides only marginal thematic feedback isn’t satisfying.  The chits could be crates of exotic spices, tons of dilithium or shares in Gizmonics Institute.  If the play doesn’t create the right “feel” then the experience is lost.

Balancing the two is, if not nigh impossible, at least grindingly difficult.  On thinking it over for the past few days, the conclusion that I’ve come to is this: choose the key aspects of the experience that separate it from other 4x experiences, and keep those aspects to a minimum.  For my merchant game, maybe it’s spoilage orf the cargo.  For the space game, a unique mode of travel.  Then tie those core mechanics together to create secondary layers of derived mechanics.

Derivation of mechanics means less to remember, and an easier flow to the game.  Secondarily, layers of information that would take up a spreadsheet can be represented in a few key stats, so long as the derivations are relatively straight-forward.  The derivations themselves can aid verisimilitude, so long as they conform to the player’s expectations.

An example: In a space exploration game, the population of a colony could be derived from the Habitability score of the planet added to the Tech level of the colony, that technology representing the ability of the colonizing power to alter the habitability.  The habitability could be a raw score on a card; the Tech level a stat that the player is already keeping track of.

Of course, where this runs into problems is with highly dynamic/volatile aspects – for example, the price of a company’s stock during the course of a business 4x.  Part of the solution, I think, comes from the use of multiple-derivatives.  The stock price could be dependent on trade volume (a stack of chips of two colors), the scale of the company (its ‘market cap’), and the actions of the current round of play.  This is where Cairn comes into play: with three mediums of information storage (chips, cards and a tracking sheet), these factors can all be presented simultaneously by chip color and number, location on the card, etc.

This is where 4x and complex wargames get it wrong – and where they’re starting to get it right.  Information is stored in the rules instead of right in front of the players – a multitude of exceptions instead of play structures that encourage following the same thought patterns.  In playing Paths of Glory, I was stunned by how the rule structures for Entrenchment and core mechanics simulated the plodding course of the war, and the rigidity of the fronts.  Despite endless attempts, both of us didn’t manage to budge the Western Front of the Great War more than a space in either direction.  Towards the end of our play time (we got through 1914 and a bit of 1915 in 4 hours, our time window), I decided to get bold, and I paid for it by winding up in a position where Germany was going to fall by 1916 at the latest.  WWI wasn’t about audacity, no matter what the posters said.  It was about grinding attrition and economic ruin for the win.

The other thing that GMT gets right in the game is the use of cards with multiple uses (this is similar to their Command & Colors system): you can use a card to order up replacements, advance the action, or as an event (say, phosphene gas attacks).  Deciding what to use each card for, and by placing mulitple forms of information on each card, they become much more versatile, and the game is deeper as a result.

This is distributed play at work – a wargame with cards plays out differently than a wargame with just the chits and dice.  Cairn is built on that philosophy.

The AGE Model expands a bit: The Three Fulcra

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I’ve had the AGE Model on the brain quite a bit over the last few weeks, particularly as I engaged in Game Chef this year. As I’ve been working it around in my skull, quite a few Big Model-genic discussions have come up on Story Games: here and here, specifically.

I’ve come across another possible addition to the strength of the AGE Model: The Three Fulcra (Fulcrums, for the plebs).

Each of the AGE Model’s three axes (Art > Em, the Consensus Axis; Em > Game, the Clarity Axis; and Game > Art, the Constraint Axis) has across from it the third principle: For example, the Art > Em (Consensus) axis has across from it the Game Principle. What I’ve begun to wonder is this: Does the third principle act as a sort of fulcrum for the forces present on the axis? Does the Game principle act as a mediary between the Em and Art principles?

The seductive part of this idea is that the first example that I’ve given, with the Art > Em Consensus axis on one side, and the Game principle on the other), it seems trivial to come up with examples of the rules of a game mediating between players’ personal choice and the experience of the game. That’s what rules often do in RPGs.

The other two axes aren’t as clear-cut.

The Clarity axis (Em > Game) represents the complexity embodied in the experience of the game, with Art as the mediating principle. So how does player expression mediate between the structure of the game and the experience that the game provides? The first example that comes to mind is the ‘hacking impulse’, the creation of game content on a local level (a game group, or a mod for a computer game) that alters the structure to provide an experience that the player(s) prefer.

This works either way, with the players hacking together rules to support some aspect of a given milieu – for example, making rules for a Star Trek game to support the command structure aboard the Enterprise. Similarly, players may create non-mechanical supports to bolster their experience of the game – for example, explicitly agreeing to keep in-character.

The last axis (Game > Art, the Constraint Axis), mediated by Emulation.  This is the hardest of the three Fulcra to put my finger on.  The axis itself is a measure of the extent to which players are free to make choices, or to express themselves through the play of the game.  Towards the Game end, players are limited in the amount of choices they have.  This has the positive effect, from a designand play perspective, of creating predictability and repeatability – players can devise strategies and expect them to work from one play of the game to the next; similarly, they can alter their strategies with some assurance that they know the outcome.

Games further toward the Art apex are eschewing predictability for player freedom – opening the players’ range of choices to the extent that they can create new game situations that the rules of the game may not account for explicitly. A couple of examples of Art over Game would be tabletop RPG play where conflicts are resolved through dialog between characters, with no mechanical backing; and ‘sandbox’ games like SimCity where the basic rules of behavior are mapped out, but players are free to develop cities in any shape or form that they see fit.

So how does Emulation, the creation of a certain type of experience, mediate this?  The answer lies in the social aspect of emulation – the idea that emulation is a purely social property of games.  Does a mechanical outcome ‘feel right’ to the group, or to the player?  Does resolving a long-standing conflict completely outside the framework of the rules ‘seem fair’?  Is it in the ‘spirit of the game’?   These are nebulous quantities, but they’re almost always present to some extent in games.  Playing within the spirit of a game can be just as important as playing by the rules – and while it may be ineffable to a degree, the sense of playing fairly or coming to a satisfying conclusion for all of the players is important: games are social constructs, and if that social cohesion, the ‘magic circle’ is broken, then the game falls apart.  Finding, and staying within, that social norm (whatever that is defined as by the group), mediates between the use of rules and players’ desire to express themselves.

D&D 4th Edition is a MM(P)RPG.

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

John Kim put up a link to a 4th Edition set of character sheets that were provided by WotC at the D&D Experience in Arlington, Virginia.  This is my first look at the new system (I’m not tracking it closely because I want to come to it relatively fresh when it’s released in June), and it stuck me very suddenly – just as D&D birthed the MMORPG, the MMORPG has now wrought changes in D&D.

Very interesting.

Most of the sheets are the same as usual, until you get to the feats, class features and spells.  Now, instead of spell lists, you have ‘Powers’, which are further sub-divided by type: At-Will, Encounter and Daily.  At-Will is like it says – as a standard action, use said power.  Encounter powers are used once per encounter, and Daily are used once (or more) until you rest.

Looking closer, the mechanical breakdown of spells, feats and skills have reached an all-time minimum.  Most powers have been stripped down to their mechanical roots, and those roots are laid bare.   For comparison, check out the text blocks on those sheets again this list of Warlock spells and abilities from a WoW site, or even this list of Elementalist skills from Guild Wars.   The similarity is striking.

So why am I writing about it here?  Well, first of all I find this sort of feeback loop very interesting.  If you want to lure WoW players into D&D, make D&D more like WoW.  Basic marketing logic.  Secondly, this provides a very interesting test basin for Elsewhere.  Whereas modelling D&D was always a chore for previous editions, this one should prove a snap.  I’m going to start working on some basic diagramming this weekend.  I’ve modeled WoW and Guild Wars using Elsewhere as a framework for a while, and D&D 4th seems like a good way for me to transition into ‘traditional’ RPGs.

AGE Model Note

Friday, December 21st, 2007

I recently had a link by Thanuir to his blog Cogito Ergo Ludo regarding the AGE Model.  With DEAD coming along, I’ve decided to put a little time aside for refining the model in the new year.  Watch for a new revision/expansion in these pages.

The Current Hiatus & Bringing the RTS to RPGs.

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

I’ve had personal health issues and the relocation of my workspace to deal with over the last couple of weeks, along with two birthdays to make memorable.  I’ve also been playing games instead of just thinking about them.  Chief among these games is Company of Heroes, a WWII RTS by the same folks (Relic) who made Homeworld, another personal favorite.

The action in CoH is brilliant – you capture strategic points on the map in order to secure one of three different resources (Manpower, Fuel and Munitions), which then accumulate and can be spent to call up reinforcements.  It does away with the need for micromanaging farming of resources and keep the focus on combat and taking ground, which is what the game is all about to begin with.

It’s put me in mind of a similar system for RPGs – by accomplishing various goals in scenes, the player scores resources of various sorts, which can then be accumulate to buy, say, authorial control or in-game benefits.

It’s embryonic, but it’s the beginning of something, I thin.

Toys v. Games 2: Distributed Play

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

In the comments to the last post, intrepid reader Fang Langford made some interesting points about games versus toys. I wanted to make sure they got the airing they deserved.

While you create a pretty good argument that role-playing games are probably not toys, you unfortunately conflate the game with the play. Something like saying that a basketball court is the game of basketball.

The ball is a toy. It does nothing alone. Even moreso sitting on the court. Your mention of Sim City as being ’structured’ and therefore a ‘game’ and not a ‘toy’ illustrates the conflation. The mistake many people make about what Costikyan wrote is that the ‘toy’ is the city itself, not the software. Saying the software makes you play it as a game is the same as saying the hoop makes you play the court as a game. It can, that’s very true, but that doesn’t mean that the ball or the hoop is a game.

For the record, here’s what Costikyan has to say in his essay:

According to Will Wright, his Sim City is not a game at all, but a toy. Wright offers a ball as an illuminating comparison: It offers many interesting behaviors, which you may explore. You can bounce it, twirl it, throw it, dribble it. And, if you wish, you may use it in a game: soccer, or basketball, or whatever. But the game is not intrinsic in the toy; it is a set of player-defined objectives overlaid on the toy.

Just so Sim City. Like many computer games, it creates a world which the player may manipulate, but unlike a real game, it provides no objective. Oh, you may choose one: to see if you can build a city without slums, perhaps. But Sim City itself has no victory conditions, no goals; it is a software toy.

A toy is interactive. But a game has goals.

http://www.costik.com/nowords.html

The basic problem that I have with this is the insistence on goals. Early drafts of the AGE Model also referenced goals and goal-structures as being part and parcel of games. Now, I’m not so sure.

But what I’d really like to talk about here is the idea of distributed play, which is an idea carved out the intersection of distributed intelligence and applied to gaming.

A ball, in and of itself, is a toy. It has no inherent goals associated with it. It has properties, and those suggest possible uses within the realm of play. A court, likewise, has certain properties that suggest its uses in play. Together, the ball and the court begin to suggest larger play-structures. Bounce the ball on the court. Run and bounce the ball simultaneously. We’re still in the realm of play with toys.

But the moment we introduce structure, in the form of rules, we have a game. That structure can come up from the properties of the objects involved (keep the ball inside the court), always remembering that the players themselves are part of the equation (don’t take more than three steps without bouncing the ball, i.e. travelling); they can also be imposed from above, with the relationships between the objects involved changing due to the structure, as opposed to the other way around.

The idea here is that toys are protogames – requiring only context with other toys to produce games emergently.

This idea gets very confused when we start to talk about things like RPGs and video games, since the line between program, programmer and model gets very fuzzy. Particularly so when you look at something like SimCity, where the rules of the game (the algorithms of the program which generate the model of the city) are inextricable from the thing generated (the model itself). Can bundles of rules, themselves, be considered a toy-object under my thinking above? Maybe. If so, then RPG books are toys under this idea, with a very rich and complex set of contextual hooks for interacting with other objects (mainly the players).

The same is true in role-playing games. The play of the game is the toy, not the text. People miss this a lot when they maintain that, “You’re not playing it right!” Following the rules explicitly is playing in a structured fashion and as you correctly point out, it is ‘game-ish.’ But that does not mean that the actual play is not ‘toy-ish.’ The fact that people bend or change the rules, in role-playing games or on the basketball court, illustrates what is toy and what is game. The ‘game’ gets altered, but the ‘toy’ stays in play.

Here’s where we differ: I believe that the text of the game is a toy, and the play of the game, the emspace (SIS), is also a toy. The interaction of the two, and the rules that the players create for themselves in the relationship between the two, as generated in the playspace under the AGE Model, and this relationship is where the game itself starts to take shape.

Ultimately what I’m saying is that the act of ‘play’ in a role-playing game is the ‘toy’ and using rules, texts or manuals, is what makes it a game. However this suggests some unusual possibilities. How about writing a role-playing game where the play is the most important thing? Not the rules, not a creative agenda, nor a plot or theme, just the old fashioned act of playing.And yet in the rush to be publishers, many mistake the product sold for the game itself. A role-playing game product can produce a good play experience only if the play can be good without it. (You can’t play good basketball when the ball is flat.)

A basketball that teaches sportsmanship is a more apt analogy. I’m not sure if such a thing is possible – but it is intriguing.