metapunk

I seem to be fumbling toward some kind of important personal discovery in my game design. For a long while now, I have struggled to define exactly what it was that the game was supposed to be about—not in terms of setting or colour, but in terms of the experience of playing.

It’s because I am an inspiration junky. I read another game text or review, some piece of theory, a fragment of a forum discussion, and I start getting all these ideas about how I can improve my own work. But it never seems to end—my game never gets done. It’s the worst case of Feature Creep this side of Duke Nukem Forever.

For most of that time, I have focused on mechanical stuff; the core dice-rolling scheme, the combat sequence, the skill system, etc. I’ve succeeded a half a dozen times or more to create perfectly serviceable simulations of reality, only to throw them out and start over from scratch. Each time, something just wasn’t right—the aesthetics were off.

This has only gotten worse since I started reading the Forge, and learning about the Big Model and GNS theory. Before this, despite my burning ambition to create story-focused, literary kinds of games, I really had no idea what that meant. Instead what I was doing, over and over, was refining a tactical game, to facilitate the sorts of storm-the-castle and back-alley-gunfight scenarios my friends and I were used to from our days playing Rifts and Palladium Fantasy. I mean, that’s all any of us have ever really played—and honestly most of the other games I had (World of Darkness, Millenium’s End, Heavy Gear) would have just given us more of the same tactical play with more coherent rules. I have some different kinds of games now (Shock:, Dogs in the Vineyard, Everway, Over the Edge, etc.) that I’m dying to try out, but I don’t see my friends often enough anymore to really get into something new. Our very limited gaming time is always focused on playtesting my own designs. Yet I want to try something new, even if that means doing it without the aid of someone else’s rules. I’m sailing off into uncharted (or at least unfamiliar) territory.

The thing is, there’s no real challenge in tactical play. By “tactical play” I mean games where the players work together cooperatively in order to slaughter armies of generic bad guys as efficiently as possible, using “realism” focused rules, with dramatic concerns as window dressing between action scenes. I guess I shouldn’t say that there’s no challenge to that—there is; but the challenge, and the stakes, are entirely artificial. Sure, my character might die or fail the mission, but I don’t come away from the table feeling like I’ve learned anything, or done much that I can’t do in a game of Call of Duty—only much, much slower. It’s not that I don’t like the tactical stuff—it’s just that I don’t want the game to be about that and entirely focused on it. Just like a good book or a movie, I want to be moved by the experience; not just impressed with my frag count.

Let me tell you what I mean. I just rewatched Back to the Future III; which may seem like an odd choice for an example. But consider the showdown (the mini-climax) just before the main climax of the movie: Marty McFly has to face Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen in the street. He can’t back down, because Mad Dog’s men are holding Doc Brown at gunpoint. Marty has already demonstrated that he’s quite skilled with a gun (thanks to years of arcade game experience), but is he really ready to kill a man?—even someone so low-down and mean as Mad Dog, and even in self-defense? In fact, if he did kill Mad Dog, he would endanger his own existence, because it is only through conflict with Mad Dog’s descendant Biff that Marty’s parents get together. So what’s he going to do?

Marty of course solves the problem by wearing the iron stove cover under his poncho—imitating Clint Eastwood in a scene from A Fistfull of Dollars (shown briefly in Back to the Future II). It’s a terribly convenient solution—and really the only one that would ensure Marty’s continued existence, but I still felt tension watching the scene, because at least in theory Marty is still having to face a difficult choice. He has to decide what kind of man he is, and how to reconcile bravery and honour with self-preservation and mercy. Even though it’s a comedy and it was obvious how it was going to end (plus I’d seen it before), for that brief minute I was still thinking: “What’s he gonna do?” and I couldn’t look away.

Is that what thematic / narrativist play is all about? Because whatever it is, I really want more of it in my gaming.

So, I’m at a turning point. I can continue to write the big, generic, tactical simulation—which as it turns out is also a phenomenal amount of work with everything that needs to be defined—and which really isn’t what I want to create. Or, I can write something small and focused, with strong themes and simple and flexible rules. It’ll still be work, but it will be much more rewarding work.

I’m going to try the latter—although it means trying to write for a style of play that I’ve never done before. It’ll be a bootstrapping operation. Or, to quote Wernher von Braun: “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Looks like I’m just doing research.