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.