Annie asked for a picture of her Castle Marrach character, Illiana, based on Connie Nielsen in the movie Gladiator:

Illiana’s one of the most illustrious PCs in Castle Marrach history — the first, in fact, to be promoted to the nobility, so I suppose this should be properly titled, “Lady Illiana.” She had a few other notable firsts, including the first marriage and being the first real victim of the Owls. I always admired how Annie used that experience to shape her character; instead of letting it lie as some traumatic incident in the past (good for a few tearful performances, but otherwise forgotten) it informed all her choices and led her to make some dark and difficult choices about how Illiana would live her life in the castle. None of my characters had a lot of direct interaction with Illiana, though, until not long before I left the game when we contrived an excuse for she and Helene to work together on a bit of mischief. That plot and the fabulous RP it encompassed is still one of my fondest Castle Marrach memories, and if there was any promise at recapturing that experience I’d go back in a second.

Well, maybe.

As for the picture: The features are okay, but I’ve failed to catch the sharp planes of the actress’ face, so she ends up looking very broad-faced (when in fact the dimensions are very close to the original photo) and not archly elegant and refined. This is a problem with this line-art style of drawing that I need to figure out how to compensate for; shading would have made a big difference. I have some ideas, and I might go back and work on this some more later to try them out.

And let’s not talk about the ear, okay?

For some reason, the content filter here at work has decided to block the image file, so if it doesn’t show up please let me know!

There’s not much worse for an introvert like myself than to be invited to a wedding where you don’t know anyone but the bride and her two children. But because one of those two children is best friends with my daughter Lucy, I decided to put in an appearance anyway, if only for the girls’ sake. Look how beautiful they are, after all. How could I not? Of course I barely spoke to anyone the entire time, but they had a blast so I can’t be sorry I went. At least I used some of the time wisely by scribbling dialog on some index cards I’d stashed in my purse.

I’ve been carving rubber like crazy lately, and one of my latest designs turned out to be this lovely curved feather. It reminded me of the insignia of a certain RPG guild, so I had to try it out on some shrink plastic and see what I came up with. As you can see, not all the iterations went so well, but the last shows promise. It’s just a smidge under two inches, which I think makes it just the right size. I would like to get it looking a little less plastic, somehow, and of course I’ll need to find a pin back for it. Anyone else out there who wants one? I’ll be happy to pop for postage!

Of course, the girls got to play with some of the shrink plastic. These are Lucy’s Pokemon charms. Anna made a dog, but she already broke it in two.

Five years ago today, Edouard Ramos died.

Those of you who knew Edouard will have to bear with me while I explain it to the few readers of this blog who don’t know who I’m talking about.

Edouard was a character I played in the online RPG Castle Marrach. Marrach is a text game, not like World of Warcraft with flashy visuals and an empahsis on slaying things, collecting treasure and leveling your character; it’s a very story-centric world with many intriguing characters and intertwining plots. Edouard was an NPC (non-player character, for those uninitiated in gaming parlance); as one of the original design team, I played a lot of NPCs in the early years of the game, but Edouard quickly wormed his way into my heart as a particular favorite, despite the fact that he was one of the least appealing to me at the outset — or, more likely, it was because he didn’t appeal to me that I came to love playing him so much.

You see, as any actor will tell you, to play a part really well, you have have an in-depth understanding of what the character is all about. This goes double for someone writing about a character, and roleplaying is, at its best, a happy combination of acting and writing. Oh, it’s true I could have played Edouard to his designated surface qualities (passionate, fiery tempered, amorous, fickle) and served his purpoes well-enough in the game, but that’s just not the kind of player that I am. To enjoy playing Edouard, I had to find a way to relate to him, and that meant I had to really dig into his psyche to figure out what made him tick.

Now I have to confess that this post is not really a paean to a lost, beloved character (it is that, but only a little). What I really wanted to do was say how much my writing was affected (and hopefully improved) by the experience of playing him. It was in learning to love Edouard that I first truly came to understand the complexity of any individual character, all the layers and textures and details that go into making the whole. If you google “character development” you’ll probably turn up a lot of questionnaires that ask you to supply details about your character like eye color, day job, favorite tv show, what they usually eat for breakfast, etc. You might also find some good advice about building character strengths and flaws, along with motivation and goals. Useful knowledge and tools, all, but I could never stand filling out those questionnaires; it wasn’t just the seeming irrelevance of some of the questions (like what kind of car he drives, when most of my characters had never heard of cars), but the static nature of the information they recorded.

Character is fluid, and it is this very fluidity that makes storytelling enjoyable. If we could count on people acting the same way all the time, there would be no point in telling a story about it. My excavation of Edouard led me to see that he was someone in the process of change — we all are, aren’t we? — and my job as a storyteller was to give him a story that allowed that change to take place. Because that’s the whole purpose of storytelling, to show how people change, to provide a model for ourselves in the changes we must face in our own lives. I may have read this somewhere prior to my time in Castle Marrach, but I didn’t truly understand it until I’d experieced it telling Edouard’s story, and was able to practice ways to show that fluidity and process of change through dramatic means.

I killed Edouard off largely because I was planning to leave the game in the near future, and I knew I never would so long as he was around. But also, with the end of his story arc, he’d changed in all the ways I thought he could; at the time, I didn’t know what direction he could go in afterwards, so it wasn’t TOO difficult to let him go. But the guy still fills a remarkable portion of my brain-pan sometimes. I’ve got at least two Works-in-Progress with characters directly inspired by him (not copies of him, of course, but definitely influenced by). My friend Sol, who played Edouard’s wife, and I still play the game of “what might have been” — to excess, sometimes.

I’m not sure I really expressed here everything I had in my head when I started (but really, if I use the word really one more time I’m really going to kill myself), but I’m at work and it’s nearly time to leave, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to do it later in the day so I have to post now. I really wanted to post an update to Promise, the site where I have archived some of the collected logs from Ed’s story, but every time I sit down to convert the files to HTML, I just end up reading and reading. Maybe, later tonight, I’ll find some time to squeeze it in. In the meantime, you’ll just have to make due with this digital portrait I did last year, when I was feeling particularly artistic. Draw yourself a flagon of ale, and enjoy!

I’ve got a few interesting links to post today.

First, from A List Apart, a journal for people who make websites, are a couple articles on building narrative into websites. Not necessarily websites that are intended as narratives, but just about anything: online stores, company sites, news sites, etc. In Beyond Usability: The Narrative Web Mark Bernstein writes:

We want to see narrative everywhere. Stories are fun, exciting, comforting. This isn’t just a matter of bedtime stories and art. The saga of the Great Browser War, the Open Source tales, the stories of Bill (Gates) and Steve (Jobs), populate our work life and our weblogs. So, too, do tales of Rise and Fall – of individuals, companies, and websites.

The point is not that we should add stories to our sites to ensnare narrative-starved readers. The point is that the reader’s journey through our site is a narrative experience. Our job is to make the narrative satisfying.

He then goes on to describe some high-level methods of doing so.

Then in A Case for Storyteling Curt Cloniger discusses the need for web makers to develop a narrative voice in site design, bridging the gap between style and content.

During the work day, mere data is exchanged. This work-day data exchange might be analogous to a multi-user, Lotus Notes(tm) collaboration. But at night, around the fire, stories are told. It’s the stories that the cowboys will remember after the drive, not the daily exchange of data. Data is denotative. Stories are visceral and emotional. Stories effect our entire beings, not just our minds.

And which stories will be remembered the longest? Which stories will be loved the most? Which stories will “succeed?” For the stories to succeed they first have to be interesting (read: good content). For the stories to succeed, they also have to be told in the native tongue of the listeners (read: no JavaScript errors). And finally, for the stories to succeed, they have to be told well, in a compelling, mature, engaging narrative voice.

He goes on to compare the web with television advertising in the 1950’s, and how commericials have evolved into 60-second narratives that make us laugh, cry, and watch the Super Bowl even though we hate football. And he compares a web development conference to a novel-writing seminar where the bulk of the time is spent on teaching you how to write neatly. But of all the worthwhile points Cloniger makes in this article, the one I find the most relevant personally is this: “The more power a user has to control the narrative himself, the more a user will “own” that narrative.”

Of course, one of my driving interests is interactive narrative, and that’s an important rule to remember. The idea that users - or players, when we start talking about games - want control over the narrative is understood if not overtly stated in the article Foundations of Interactive Storytelling, which discusses methods of allowing true interactive experiences in a gaming experience. The author briefly traces the evolution of interactive storytellling starting with tabletop RPGs and then segues into methods designers can use to add interactivity to a story via plot, characterization, or theme. There are some good basic principals here, with a reasonable balance in the presentation between the artistic and the technical merits of each method.

Finally, here’s a new twist on the granddaddy of all interactive storytelling: Choose Your Own Adventures. Ryan Macklin is putting together a book he calls Choose Your Own Fate, which is really just a collection of endings that maybe could have appeared in the original series.

If you’ve ever read Choose Your Own Adventure books, there were generally a number of ways that you would die or fail. This project is a collection of unconnected short stories in a style that emulates those horrible fates. The idea is that each story is completely contained in two facing pages, so that a reader can flip to a random page in the book, and in that way choose their fate.

Best of all, the proceeds will go to the Red Cross Katrina relief fund, so not only would it be fun, if you choose to submit, but it will be for a good cause.

Recently, I follwed a link from the Endicott Studio bulletin board to the site of the Belgian game design company Tale of Tales, currently developing two seperate products that make my myth-loving gamer-girl heart palpitate in anticipation.

The first, 8, is a single-player game based on the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. I won’t relate their evolution of the story — you can go read it yourself — but I’ll say that while they incorporate multiple historic versions of the tale, they have put their own dark spin on the material that will appeal to anyone who enjoys authors like Angela Carter, Tanith Lee, Ellen Kushner, etc., etc., etc.. This is no Disney tale, to be sure!

As a game, 8 is built on the principal of playing, not gaming. The player is invited to go where they like and do what they want to do without being driven by tasks to complete or goals to achieve. While the narrative does have an ending, reaching it is not the focus of the game — enjoying yourself along the way is the whole point. I keep saying game because there is no term, really, for a narrative that utilizes the technology of a video game, including puzzles and obstacles to overcome, but does not have an objective “you win” target for the player. The term “interactive fiction” applies in the most general sense, but is so often used to refer to hypertext prose that its use for other forms of computer-aided narrative is limited. Products like 8 look and feel like games, and for the time being will continue to be called such.

Other intriguing features of the game include an avatar with a mind of her own, who doesn’t always do as instructed by the player, and a complete lack of language. With no words, the entire narrative must unfold on a visual level, a challenge that appears to be well-met, judging by the sample screenshots on the site.

The second project under development by Tale of Tales is The Endless Forest, and MMORPG where players take on the role of stags living in an enchanted wood. Like 8, this game uses no language during play: there is no chat interface for either in-character or out-of-character communication. For a social game — and the site does emphasize the development of community and interpersonal relationships over achievement goals — this is a unique experiment, and I have to admit that having been plagued with meta-game issues deriving from OOC conflict in other multiplayer arenas, I’m keen to see how well it works. Stags will be able to fight with each other to impress the females, with whom they can mate in order to produce offspring, and they can learn magical skills that can change the appearance of their avatars or to make changes in the environment. The oddest thing about it is that it will run as a screensaver on your computer: I assume the developers intend the low-key game play to be an intermittant activity, not something one sits and focuses on for prolongued periods.

Both games are still have a ways to go before release, and I can’t say that either will live up to their own hype. However, I think they have intriguing premises — both mythically, and as far as narrative gameplay goes — so I will be keeping my eye on them to be sure.

Maybe it’s because it’s spring at last, or maybe it’s because it looks like I’ve finally got some builders who won’t flake out on me, but I find myself recommitted to the pursuit of completing my Skotos stage, High Noon. To be honest, the thing feels like an albatross around my neck, and in an effort to speed up production I’ve decided to pare down the scope of the story considerably. The idea of multiple tiers of characters went long ago — I don’t anticipate desire to play this game will be large enough that we’ll have 30 people wanting to play all at once. Now I’m going to pare down the set from about 20 rooms to 4 or 5 max, and refocus the remaining cast so that they’re a much grittier set, easier to arrange tension and conflict between.

My problem now is devising a story that, first, encourages the characters to stay in the limited space without wanting to kill one another right off the bat and, second, culminates in some pre-ordained climatic moment which indicates the completion of the scenario.

I’ve been scouring the net looking for insight to this problem and happened upon the Amor Fati Library, a Swedish LARPing resource, and one article in particular (I haven’t read any others yet), on Building Dramatics. Online RP is a lot like live-action RP, especially in a stage environment where you’re working with a limited time frame and a specific scenario. While this article didn’t answer my particular issue, I did find some interesting theories and wonder how they might be applied to online gaming.

First, there is mention of the “dramatic web” that connects all the characters within a given scenario. This is divided into three levels, the first being the whole game, the second the various groups characters belong to, and the third being the individual characters. In practice, this is what I have already done, though I hadn’t labeled what I was doing. Some “official” validation of technique is appreciated. The author of the article suggests that the writer needs to start on the third level, with character backgrounds and motivations, to avoid the pitfalls of creating “main characters” around whom the plot revolves, leaving other players feeling sidelined by events. This makes a great deal of sense, but I don’t think I could go so far as to leave off level one entirely (as the author did in one LARP): given the right audience I can see how that might work, but given that the audience for HN is largely unknown, I’d be uncomfortable not providing an overall “game goal” by which players can judge their success, or lack of it. While my own interest leans toward drama and storytelling, my perception of the Skotos community is that it’s still largely game oriented, meaning achieving a goal is still the focus of playing, as opposed to strict storytelling. Maybe I’m cynical.

Next the author introduces the theory of Dogma 99, which in essence states that everyone should know everything, allowing people to focus on interaction and drama as opposed to ferreting out secrets. I admit it sounds intriguing, but I’d have to read more about how it works and how it has been implemented and to what result in order to decide if it’s something might work in online games. Certainly, it would allow for the maximum amount of cooperation in cooperative storytelling, but it would demand a high level of trust among the players participating.

Finally, the author introduces the concept of “Fateplay”, which involves creating a specific goal for each character. This is not a new idea, of course, as most LARP scenarios contain a list of goals for each character. What’s different in this articles presentation is that fates are not necessarily plot bound, but provide an excuse for the player to extend their roleplaying in ways they might not otherwise have tried. This reminds me of a techinique I’ve been mulling over for what i think will be the project that I tackle upon the completion of High Noon, another stage with an adventure scenario. Instead of providing pre-made characters, each player would get to go through a typical chargen process, choosing their character’s gender and looks and basic skills. Then, they would be offered a choice of general goal: “revenge”, “love”, “greed” and so forth. Upon chosing from the general set, a specific but randomly generated goal would be given to the character. While the same overall goal of the game would be constant each time the stage was run, the dynamics of the drama would be different each time. However, I don’t think this will work in HN without completely revisioning the stage, which I’m not prepared to do right now. I wonder, though, how fates that guide the player to a dramatic event, without telling them how to get there, would work? Could you tell a player, “your fate is to die while sacrificing yourself on behalf of someone else”? Now that’s got some interesting possibilities!

P.S. I’m going to try allowing comments again. Hopefully the spam robots won’t find me again for a while.

Progress on High Noon is speeding along at the rate of a snail stuck in molasses. Which is to say, very slowly. Much of this is due to the lack of a proper team — I’m frankly surprised at the lack of response from the Skotos community when I put up my “want ad” for builders and coders. I really don’t want to do all the building and object creation myself, and I’m not capable of doing the coding, not to mention that this kind of project is hard to accomplish in a creative vacuum, without other minds to share ideas back and forth. It’s beginning to look like a couple of people are coming on board, though, and I’ve sent off an initial list of coding needs to the stable of other developers and coders at Skotos, so maybe some concrete work will start getting done.

I haven’t been totally non-productive. My efforts have been directed at the story end of things. Though the basic plot has been set from the beginning, I’ve had to make a lot of decisions about characters. I’ve had two goals in mind from the beginning (as far as characters are concerned). First, to provide a flexible number of potential cast members that can accomodate a dozen players as well as thirty. Second, to give players substantial freedom with regards to how they play their characters, for the dual purpose of allowing more variation in the story during each run of the game (the sheriff might be the hero one time, the villain the next), and to let players feel more comfortable making their characters their own, instead of being constrained by a detailed character portrait.

Orignally, it was my intention to provide practically no character information at all, just names, physical descriptions, and the individual’s position in the town. Everything else would be up to the player. It didn’t take me long to realize that would lead to a game filled with chaotic boredom, as players wandered around wondering what to do until the climax happened. My reading of Lajos Egri helped me see the light, as did feedback from a few players and looking at some LARP (live-action roleplaying) resources. “Conflict springs from character”, and a well-made set of characters will create their own plots. Given time, a good group of roleplayers will develop characters that generate conflict on their own — I’ve seen it happen more than once over in Castle Marrach — but the limited time frame of High Noon necessitates that players be given more than a shell to work with.

I think I’ve come up with a solution that provides for easy dramatic development along with considerable player freedom of interpretation. Each character will have a background, along with a sketch of his or her relationships with the other characters. This information will presented in a factual way, without any attempt to insinuate personality or motivation. These will be left for the player to decide — you could play your school teacher as a stuck-up prude, a sweet young girl just looking for love, or a conniving tramp out to marry a cattle barron, whichever suits your fancy. The built-in chain of relationships will be devised in such a way that each character has multiple opportunities for conflict and development, and potentially any character (or all of them!) can become the main character of the scenario depending on how agressive the player is in pursuing the opportunities. No one should feel that they’re relegated to supporting cast or the chorus just because of the character they chose. In addition, each character will be given a basic in-character goal, which will help the player focus their initial efforts. Hopefully it will be made clear, however, that the goal is not something that has to be achieved in order for the player to “win” the scenario. This is not a goal-based game, but a story-based game, and success doesn’t always equal having your character achieve what he set out to achieve.

Naturally, settling on this course of character development has made the first of my initial goals — making a flexible number of characters — even more complicated. It was easy enough to come up with a generous number of name-and-description-only characters based on the various personalities one might find in the Old West to populate my town. Whoever the players chose, those would be the characters for that run on the scenario. But the decision to create chains of relationships between the various characters in order to facilitate dramatic conflict means I have a lot more work to do. It’s not enough to simply choose a random set of people and plunk them down in the middle of town. It has to be a cohesive set bound by alliances and rivalries that will hopefully not end up looking too manufactured.

To provide for the ability to allow groups of varying sizes to play the scenario, I’m planning to divide the cast into three tiers. Only when the first tier of characters has been occupied will the second tier become available, and so forth. The additional tiers will each carry along their own sub-plot, as well, to accomodate the increased number of players and the need to keep them occupied. Of course, this makes my relationship chains even more complicated. In a small game, I don’t want players feeling they are missing crucial connections because the second and third tier characters aren’t present. However, I don’t want second and third tier characters feeling like they are being left out of the primary story and are simply playing out their own little tale at the same time and place as the primary group. Admittedly, I have not yet wrapped my brain around how to accomplish this yet. I’m focusing on the primary set at the moment, and it may very well be that the idea of a flexible cast may have to be discarded down the line. If it comes to it, I’d rather provide fewer players with a cohesive plot then simply create empty opportunties for greater numbers. It’s not a good storytelling experience if it’s not a meaningful storytelling experience.

Egri’s book has been invaluable to me, giving me guidance not only for this project but some ideas on how to improve my prose fiction as well, and I very much want to write up a summary/review for this site. I haven’t actually finished it yet — while the theory is great, his presentation drags sometimes — but given I’m not engrossed in any novel-reading at the moment, maybe I’ll turn my attention to re-reading with annotations, so that I can put something practical together for others. We’ll see!

“Tomorrow” turns into “next week” with alarming speed, sometimes.

In my last entry, I addressed the fact that a western-themed computer game doesn’t seem all that pertinent to a website meant to discuss the topics of myth and story, at least on the surface. But, in truth, both these issues are at the heart of what I am striving to do with my project High Noon in Dry Creek. I then went on to elaborate on the narrative issues that must be addressed when building a game like this (which is not so much a game at all as an interactive story), which are complicated by the factors of new media and multiple authorship. This time, I want to address the mythic character of High Noon.

I admit that it took me a little longer to put these pieces of the puzzle together, and it took a little intellectual prompting to figure it out. My initial thoughts and ramblings on the subject acknowledged the mythic nature of the story I would tell, though only in as much as it would rely upon archetypal characters and imagery (outlaws, six-guns, hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold) instead of attempting a more historical depiction. Most of us, when we talk about the “mythic West”, are using “myth” in the most general sense of the word, something that isn’t really true. We know that the West depicted in literature and film is an idealization of the world that was, not the acutality.

But there is another side to myth that is far more signficant than whether or not the stories are true or not. Myths are important because they define and illuminate the cultural ideologies of the people who tell them. The patina of falsehood that clings to the word myth means that we most often use the term when refering to ancient stories of dead cultures, but in truth it’s just as applicable to the living traditions of today — the stories of the Old and New Testament, for example — any tale that informs a culture’s beliefs, judgments and actions. (As an aside, I’d define “mythopoeia” as a singular act of myth creation for the purpose of fiction, a la Tolkien’s Silmarillion, independent of connection to real world mythology, whereas “mythology” is a cultural construction carried out over the course of years, decades or centuries. Mythopoetic works may be fictional, but they should still reflect the cultural consciousness of the author.)

The fact that stories of the West constitute a still-vital mythology of America didn’t really hit home with me until I happened upon an article in Images, “The Silent Western as Mythmaker”, by Peter Flynn (I was doing a search on “dime novels”, hoping to find some primary sources as background material for the game). Flynn traces the evolution of the silent cowboy film in the early part of the 20th century, and the simultaneous evolution of the mythology of the West that grew to become the cornerstone of modern American ideology:

Manifest destiny; rugged individualism; a pre-modern Eden of moral simplicity; a future built on the harmonious union of man and nature — all four cornerstones of the American psyche, each with their locus on that single moment of expansion and creation. No other period in American history has so frequently been called upon to define and solidify national identity.

A fledgling nation, it’s people a conglomeration of cultures and beliefs from across the globe, was in search of a way to define itself on the cusp of the new age of industry and mass media. Stories from the Old Country would not suffice to bolster the the raw energy of the new country ready to emerge as a world power, nor would the native culture that had been marginalized by the newcomers be suitable. A mythology born on American soul was needed, one that exemplified the American spirit and distinguished it from the hoary old nations of Europe and the rest of the world. The age of colonization and revolution was too tied to the old world, and the Civil War was too divisive. The period of westward expansion, though, was a uniquely American experience, with a cast of characters that could not exist outside its boundaries: the Cowboy, the Pioneer, the Noble Savage — the list goes on and on, each one calling to mind a distinct set of images that belong to our grand picture of the American Frontier, and nowhere else. Everything about the West was new, and America parlayed that imagery into a cultural identity that was new and distinct from everything that had come before. (A diverting study would be to examine the cultural mythologies of other emergent nations in the past hundred years, but that’s far from the topic at hand. So is any speculation about why the popularity of the Western myth declined during the late 1960s and 70s.)

Flynn’s article made it clear to me that I couldn’t tell a story (in whatever format) about the mythic West without telling a story about America itself. While I had chosen my setting simply because I thought it would be easily accessible to those who chose to play (having to read pages and pages worth of background material for 3 hours of play would be a real turn-off), I realized I did not have to sacrifice meaning for convenience.

The theme of my story is encapsulated in the premise for the scenario: The residents of a western frontier town must defend themselves against a hostile band of outlaws, due to ride in at High Noon. It is the classic Western conflict: law vs. lawlessness. (There are other classic Western conflicts — man vs. the wilderness, man vs. society, etc.) The critical decision each player will have to make on behalf of their character is whether or not they will stand up to the outlaws. When I considered the story in these terms, I could not help but relate it to the current situation in American politics (that my first impulse was to name the outlaw band “the Dubya gang” will reveal my political leanings — my husband suggested I just call them bushwhackers). I don’t expect that this connection will be immediately apparent to most players — themeatic messages should be subsidiary to telling a good story, and my insistence that the players themselves be the primary storytellers will prohibit me from making it as explicit as I might if I were the sole author.

But I feel better for knowing that the potential for truly mythic resonances lurk under the surface of what could otherwise become a cliche-ridden melodrama.

Frustration is computers that shut down inexplicably I don’t know if little fingers are to blame or some other force is at play while I was away from my computer for a while, but I do know that I lost a long post I was in the midst of composing. Maybe it was just the universe telling me it sucked. At any rate, I hope I can recapture what I was writing about then.

On first glance, discussing the design process for a western-themed game seems far off-topic for a site proclaiming itself to be all about myth and story. It certainly wasn’t what I had in mind when I put these pages together a few months ago. I figured my discourse would focus on mythic worlds and imaginary pantheons, the journeys of heroes and heroines across exotic landscapes, and the different tools used to tell such tales. Instead I’m trying to figure out the best way to program a shoot-out and wondering how many cows I should have wandering around my virtual town of Dry Creek. But technical trappings aside, the creation of High Noon is very much involved with both myth and story, and my primary job as author and designer will be to convey that.

First of all, it’s necessary to emphasize (to myself as well as to others) that High Noon is not being designed as a game, which for my purposes here I’ll define as something you can win. Granted, in many roleplaying games, winning is a nebulous term, but almost invariably there is some way of measuring your success, whether it is overt like increasing your skills or level or wealth or rank, or implicit such as achieving the object of the scenario or simply surviving. The only goal of High Noon is to tell a story, and the only measure of success is the enjoyment of the participants–something that is nearly impossible to quantify.

So it’s not a game, but something I presently call interactive narrative (to differentiate from Interactive Fiction, which is typically one-person). My goal is that the players themselves will tell the story, not be led through a series of events conceived by a StoryTeller. Yes, pre-determined events will occur, but there will be no puzzles to be solved or tasks that have to be completed or obstacles that must be overcome. Events alone don’t make a story, it takes characters to react to those events and the characters will be entirely in the hands of the players. It will up to them to provide reactions and interactions that transform an unembellished series of events into an actual story.

Of course, I recognize the fact that most people don’t really know how to do that. They may know a good story when they hear one, and might even to be able to tell you why it was good, but that doesn’t translate into knowing how to create a good story on their own. Not even every succesful writer knows how to do it–they may instinctively hit upon a formula that works but don’t know how to verbalize how they did it. If High Noon is going to be successful, I need to find a way to instruct players how to do it on their own; I’m not talking about advanced storytelling mechanics, but a simple formula that promises, “if you do it this way, you’ll get a satisfying result.”

I’m well aware that there is no single, true and correct formula for storytelling, but I’m hoping that I can devise something that works for this medium. To that end, because my own ability to verbalize how to make a good story is sorely lacking, I’m beginning research into theories of story and structure, studies that fit right into the topical foundations of this site. I’m starting with Lajos Egri’s Art of Dramatic Writing, because I think the emphasis on premise and character will suit a medium where every character is author as well as audience. Hopefully, I’ll find the answers I need and be able to translate them into something useful for the players.

Tomorrow, I’m going to talk about the mythic character of the Old West, and how I hope to bring that into High Noon

Problem:
A story is centered around a conflict that must be resolved (or, as I read once, about an imbalance that must corrected — I need to rediscover where that reference). In fiction, that conflict is often pretty obscure, but in a gaming scenario the conflict must be fairly explicit in order for the players to know what it is they are supposed to achieve. This is particularly so in a short-term scenario like High Noon in Dry Creek, when players have a very limited time frame in order to spot the conflict, decided (as a group) how to resolve it, and then carry out their plans.

My preliminary conception of High Noon centered on the idea that the climax of the story would be a shoot-out, the archtypal dramatic moment of Western lit and film. As I began to develop story ideas that would lead to that event, I found myself in a conflict of my own. My personal design requirements for this project dictate that once the stage is operational, it should require minimal oversight by staff. At the very most, it should only need one StoryTeller online when the stage is run, and then only to be available in case of trouble. Ergo, there will be no NPCs on hand to stir up trouble, point players in the right direction, or (most significantly in this instance) serve as the focus for player antagonism (i.e., play the badguys).

What’s more, I would like provide pre-generated PCs that only provide the barest essentials, leaving the majority of character development to the players. The pros and cons of this are still to be evaluated and decided upon, but my primary reasons are that 1) heavily defined characters can be restrictive and intimidating, as the player is always concerned about whether they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing or not, and 2) I don’t want to lead the players around by the nose. I want them to have the freedom to create the story they want to tell, not be driven through a series of scripted actions and reactions to a pre-determined ending. Thus the choice of the Western theme to begin with, as most players will easily be able to fill in the blanks with their own experience and interests.

But how do I provide that freedom to players and still guarantee that final dramtic showdown on Main Street? Unless players are provided explicit stage directions describing allies and rivals, there is no reason to assume that they will develop antagonisms on their own, let alone ones that would lead them to want to shoot each other, unless the premise of the game were altered to emphasize player versus player conflict as opposed to cooperative storytelling.* One idea was to have a number of convergent storylines, all of which would culminate at noon, ensuring that some dramtic climax would take place at that time, even if it didn’t turn out to be a shoot-out. The main drawback to that approach is the increased amount of story development that would have to take place and conveyed, drawing away form the dramatic freedom that I hope to give the players.

Resolution:
I admit I’m really a novice at this sort of thing. My RPG experience is far below what most of my fellow game designers have under their belts, and I’ve never participated in a LARP, the closest equivalent in the non-digital world to the type of storytelling High Noon is attempting to provide. On the one hand, the lack of experience is probably a good thing, because I have fewer preconceptions about how things have been done in those media, so I won’t try to transfer inappropriate conventions into the digital realm. On the other hand, there’s a lot that can be learned from those media that can be applied to mine.

So, I spent some time looking at LARP and game design resources — not a lot of time, just enough to help redirect my thoughts along more productive lines — and entually was able to see a way out of my dilemma while still keeping my design goals intact.

They key, I realized, was in providing an outside adversary, one that had to be faced by the PCs as a group: in this case, a roving band of outlaws due to arrive in town at noon. The challenge for the characters is to come up with a way to defend their town from the mauraders, and conflict will arise because not everyone will have the same ideas about the best way to do that. I’m not talking about a strategic plan, but the interpersonal conflict that will (hopefully) arise when individual characters are confronted with the choice of whether to fight or to run and hide. The permutions of story possibilities are theoretically limitless, especially if players are given the maximum amount of freedom in defining their character’s personalities and goals.

There are a couple of issues with the idea yet to be resolved. The question of how much character definition to provide needs to be addressed, still. And then there are the technical challenges: engineering a system that automatically processes a multiple players versus CNPC combat and can produce an unique outcome depending upon the significant factors involved. Ideally, that system will be relatively low-key, emphasizing the fact that it’s not the outcome of the fight that matters, but how people roleplay the outcome.

Do I have high hopes? Indubitoubly. But I don’t think you ever get anywhere if you don’t set your sights high, and don’t stop reaching.

P.S. From now on, entries regarding High Noon in Dry Creek will have [HN] preceeding the title, for archival use as much as anything. While the game will likely predominate the entries in this journal for a while, it’s not meant to be the only subject!

*Actually, I do think that a free-for-all shoot-em-up type game, where whoever survives is the winner could be interesting, but it isn’t the goal for High Noon; it’s be interesting to consider as a strategic game sequel to this one, and even use the same set.