So I’m going to start with an axiom that may or may not work for all of you: people roleplay in order to experience things that they would not normally be able to experience. At its most oversimplified, I’m saying, “RPGs let you be Frodo.” To be all nuanced and erudite about it, I’m saying, “RPGs let you experience what it would be like to enter a liminal state where you interact with the apotheoses of significant influences in your life, whether they be oppression, intolerance, compassion, stress, camaraderie, or many others.” But I’m going to stick with Frodo cause that’s easier.

Now, the root of all that is the experience — the context, here imaginary, of people and places and events. That’s what we’re after. So we read The Lord of the Rings and we think to ourselves, “I wonder what it would be like to visit Rivendell while on an epic quest to save the world.” It’s the “what it would be like” that we’re looking for.

Direct Experience

Now, the obvious way to go about getting the “what it would be like” is to take a single point of view (we call it a character), start at an arbitrary time and place (the ’start of the adventure’), and imagine sequentially what that character might experience and how they’d react to it. What the character does helps determine what things we experience (Frodo goes out the door, we experience what’s out in the hallway). In addition to these in-character cues, however, we also respond to conscious and subconscious out-of-character cues (like, “I wonder what’s outside the Shire?”) and engineer means to manipulate the experience to get us what we want (chased out of the Shire by ringwraiths!).

So, guided by both in-character and out-of-character cues, we experience all the stuff we can’t in our regular lives. I’m going to call this direct experience since we experience the hot desert town by visiting the hot desert town and getting sand in our imaginary shoes. I also identify this with immersion, but — and here’s my big disclaimer — I am not an immersionist and have had some sincere problems grokking immersion, so I may be way off. Point being, this approach takes the short, direct, and obvious route to connect us to ‘what it would be like.’

In my experience with this kind of play, your Frodo tends to be a little more prosaic than the one in the book. The reason is obvious: the book portrays the characters talking as spent dinner dishes are swept away. In the pursuit of experiences what that’s all like, we want to have the dinner as well as the conversation. We want that context, and we want to directly experience it. This applies to the rest of the game, too: instead of griping about an argument with a merchant, I want to have the argument with the merchant. Instead of explaining that there were guards at the door but they’ve been taken care of, I want to actually sneak up on and take out those guards. The whole point here is to experience everything directly, usually in chronological order.

Other Media

Now, that’s not how things are presented in movies, or books, or newspaper articles, or in fact any other media besides the most honest and completist journal ever written. In other media, we as audience experience the people, places, and events portrayed indirectly instead of directly, and in necessary order rather than chronological order. To continue on with Frodo, we don’t know about the White Tree of Gondor until the characters in the book are standing face-to-face with the tree dying in its planter on top of Minas Anor. Before that, it wasn’t necessary for our experience as audience to know that there was this thing called the white tree. We don’t know about “Strider’s” heritage until he’s musing over his broken sword, because up until then all we needed to know about him was that he saved the hobbits’ heinies. Or going back into The Hobbit, we don’t know that the ring is actually really really bad through that entire book, and continue in our ignorance until the beginning of Fellowship when it’s necessary that we know that it’s bad.

There’s a number of reasons for this. The first that should be mentioned is that when Tolkein was writing Hobbit, the ring was just a bit of nifty treasure and the author himself didn’t know what he was eventually going to do with it. Whatever the “reality” of the fiction, the ring was just a useful device to both the author and the audience. Secondly, and perhaps relatedly, is the simple fact that the world in the fiction doesn’t actually exist, and is being created in your head as you read. So if you only ever read The Hobbit and preclude the possibility of ever reading the rest, the ring is, always has been, and always will be a nifty bauble that Bilbo uses to get out of trouble.

Now, audience members are actually profoundly smart. They are more than capable of continually incorporating new information into their understanding of the status of the fiction, continually revising and retroactively uprooting and reworking the world in their heads. This applies to kids reading Harry Potter just as much as it applies to fans of Dr. Who. We’re all very capable of revising the worlds we create in our heads as we go. It’s the fundamental act of reading and film-watching because it’s the fundamental act of living our lives. We’re all capable of saying, “What? You weren’t at that party? Man, I wonder who that was!” We do the exact same thing when watching or reading a fictional story. “What? The ring’s actually a big evil artifact? Man, I wonder why Gollum had it!”

Implied Experience

To drag this back into the world of RPGs, it’s more than possible to approach our experience-getting goal with the same strategy. Instead of creating all the details of a character before we begin experiencing the game, we can start with only those things we need established to begin the experience. This is actually very, very little — a description of what the characters look like (so the players know what they’re looking at) and a description of their immediate surroundings (for similar reasons) is about all you need. Then you can jump right into play, introducing new elements of setting, character, and situation as you go. You can reveal to each other that the ship is heading towards Planet Doom, that the life support is failing, and that one of the passengers is a spy. You didn’t need to start with any of these; everything can be “revealed” (read: created) in play.

As new elements are introduced into the running experience, they will continually redefine that experience by implying new information about the experience. I’m going to call this implied experience to contrast with the direct experience above. Now, this is very much not the obvious point-A-to-point-B approach to getting our goal of “what it’s like.” This is, in fact, probably about as circuitous as possible. I am seeing this strategy with increasing frequency in story games and the Forge end of the indie pool. I also see it a lot in short-form games produced in design contests and challenges. Two obvious reasons: (a) in games that seek to prioritize story, it’s an obvious decision to coopt the strategies used by stories in all other media, and (b) short-form games often leave the onus of creating the setting and situation with the players, and create-the-world rules start leaking from pre-play prep into mid-play procedures.

Now, I will say, again with disclaimers, that this approach looks really poor for immersion. Starting with only what is necessary for the experience means that character motivations and histories are often created midplay rather than preplay. This means that characters often start as blank slates, and it’s hard to get into character when there is not yet any character to get into. And if the game is primarily about creating from wholecloth, people who are interested in detailed piecework are going to be disappointed. It’s good for some stuff, and bad for others.

As direct experience play tends to make your game a little more prosaic, implied experience is like giving your game crack cocaine. Characters are incorporated in the setting and situation quickly, powerfully, and often inextricably. Actions and stunts become grand to the point of excessive. Stunning reversals and byzantine plots are commonplace. Which isn’t better, I want to state very emphatically and very up front. It’s very, very easy for this kind of set up to create a torrent of too much, too fast that tears through stuff that may be better approached with a more measured, sedate, and nuanced approach. To dodge away from LotR for a moment, this approach does not create Star Trek and Stargate; it makes Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who.

Actual Play: Sailing for Atlantis

In the recent Reversed Engineering Design Challenge, I wrote a little snippet of a game called Sailing for Atlantis, and this game is the germ of most of this article. Note that most of what I’m about to talk about are totally emergent effects, not intended when I wrote the game; I’m not trying to toot my horn, I’m saying, “Oh my god, look what happens when you do this!”

The basis of Atlantis is that you create both the situation and your characters in play. You define your character on the fly, and other players redefine your character as you go, as well. In fact, you start play with only one thing defined on your character sheet: what you say your destination is. You don’t even put your name on the character sheet. You are nothing until it shows up in play.

In our playtest, I started off without making any plans whatsoever for my character. He was wearing a military uniform. He gave his name as Astor. How was I to know, at 2pm that day, that by 11pm it would turn out that he was, in fact, a member of a centuries-old conspiracy to subvert the entire underworld in order to restore the monarchy of Atlantis and usher in a new Golden Age? That he was using his son — Jesse’s character — as a pawn in order to ensure that he’d have influence over both the world of the dead and the living? That he was going to marry a goddess and become the King of the Underworld himself? And that’s just jumping from the start to the finish. That’s skipping over the part where he went insane, or the part where he was the Fisher-King and his well-being translated to the well-being of the universe, and vice-versa.

Throughout the game I had very clear means by which I could influence the experience of the game for both myself and for the other two players. I also had some interesting “constraints” if you can call them that. I didn’t have a name. About halfway through the game, I stopped referring to myself by any name, except occasionally “King of the Underworld” and the other two players took to calling me “scaryfuck” or something similar. But because I had no name, I never felt compelled to maintain any sort of continuity with any “core character concept” and felt very free to completely transform my character as I went. Things that I had believed were true of my character and history early in the game I turned into lies and deception later. In fact, the only character-seed you start with is where you say you’re going, and this is almost guaranteed to turn out to be untrue. This in turn made everyone at the table distrust each other’s characters from the outset, and give players a bye for lying through our teeth. I mean, if even I don’t know if I’m lying, can you really blame me?

Which means we had free reign to utilize implied experience as much as we liked. We channeled, incarnated, and married a goddess, not because we knew all about the goddess from the start, but we introduced each step through the game mechanics. We didn’t even know there were goddesses to summon at the start! As we introduced things that happened, we also introduced the very possibility of those things happening. And if that happened, something similar or related might happen. Step by step, conflict by conflict, element by element, we constructed the entire context of a world and built up an experience unlike any other game I’ve played.

It was heady stuff, and I want to harness that power. It’s not a panacea, and it’s not appropriate for all applications. It’s like rocketfuel: good for rockets to the moon, bad for the car to the market. But for the over-the-top, dialed-to-11, make-up-the-crazy, this is good stuff.

Tomato, Tomato

All of which may sound totally uninteresting to you. We are starting to see some strains in the gaming community along these lines. As is so often the case, we gamers have been using one term to mean many things, and we’re surprised when it turns out that we’ve been talking about different things the whole time. When I said “roleplaying” and meant implying things about a fictional experience and some other guy said “roleplaying” and meant directly experiencing the fiction, we were talking past each other. I hope as the technique develops, we’ll start to see the distinctions better, and come to better understand and appreciate what our fellow gamers are doing.

Recently, Merten at story-games started a thread asking for clarification because he simply didn’t understand why Tony Lower-Basch wants to distill a complete storyline down to one hour of high-impact play. “What’s your hurry?” he asked, “Why can’t you savor the experience?” In responding to him, I realized that, to a large extent, I didn’t understand why he didn’t want these powerful tools to rock the story over the cliff screaming the whole way down. In the course of discussion, I think I understood a little better that he wanted to be there and experience events directly, and I hope he came to the point where he could see how some people weren’t so interested in being there as implying things about being there.

It’s also possible that these two methods — direct and implied experience — might find their way back together again. Perhaps we can peel them apart, write a few games about them, throw them around until we intimately know how both work, and then thread them back together into a better-constructed whole. Won’t that be an interesting game to play!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 3:38 pm and is filed under My Games, RPG Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.