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There are Facebook people, there are Twitter people, there are even some
Google+ people. I’m a Twitter person. I use the others, mostly G+, but
Twitter is where I go by default for social chattering and output. It’s
home.
How can I possibly defend this choice? What about all the senseless
noise, the limited interface, the awkward fumbling monetization
attempts, the constant obsessions with retweets and status, Justin
Bieber and Trending fucking Topics?
Here’s the thing: Twitter has one feature. Facebook has at least,
like, nine or ten, just at a glance on the front page. I know this isn’t
really true; Twitter has larded a bunch of features on to its famous
basic 140-character core. But looking at the page, you can pretend
that one core feature is the only one there is. You can’t do that with
Facebook, or any of the others.
I used to say that the brilliance, and the fatal flaw, of wikis was that
you could do anything with them. The fatal-flaw part is that, while you
can indeed do anything with a wiki, you’ll be doing it your damn self:
the software isn’t there to have your back. All it has for you is the
capacity to edit the page easily. The rest is up to you. If a wiki does
try to assist you in any specific way, it usually fucks it up, because
that approach is at odds with a wiki’s raw, elemental core.
Twitter’s the same way: you can, with some effort, maybe some
third-party tools, and some settling for less, build any social-software
interactions you want, just out of tweets. The whole thing is comical
and faulty, but it also has a kind of elegance that speaks to my soul.
There’s a lesson here for RPGs too, if you squint.
A funny thing happened in 1974, and I’m not talking about me being conceived. (That was very, very serious.) What happened is a new category of entertainment product was created: interactive entertainment. A couple of guys from Wisconsin broke games – literally broke what they are – and changed history.
Nearly all games, up until Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published Dungeons and Dragons, are closed loops. You follow rules, and those rules produce new conditions and states of the game that feed back into the rules. They look like this:
Now, somebody might make stuff up about conditions or states of the game, that’s fine. It might look like this:
It looks like that because there’s no room for what anyone makes up to actually come back in and change the game’s conditions or states – and certainly not its rules. Just try it: first, say that your Monopoly pawn is a retired vaudeville performer trying his luck in the real estate market because your pawn is the top hat. You might get a laugh. Then try landing on Boardwalk and saying you should get a discount because the seaside patrons remember and love this ex-vaudevillian. Unless the other players are about three years old, that bullshit ain’t gonna fly. The loop is closed:
What Gygax and Arneson did that made their game the hit it was, and the classic it remains, was to open the loop. They deliberately put a place in their rules for wandering out of the loop and making stuff up, and the stuff you made up could come back into the loop of the rules, and determine in part how the rules created new states and conditions. You might say it looked like this (I apologize for the increasing crudity of the diagrams):
Or at least, that was how Gygax and Arneson intended things to look. They were wargamers, or at least they produced D&D for an intended audience of wargamers. Their basic intention was to make a medieval-fantasy skirmish-combat simulator, but to juice up both the combat strategy (by having a human adjudicate tactics that the rules hadn’t accounted for), and the overarching game (by connecting combat encounters with an ongoing story). It wasn’t supposed to be anything more than that. (To his dying day, Gary Gygax referred to speaking in your character’s voice as “community-theater crap.”) But – and this was already happening according to some observers when D&D was published – many people took that opening in the loop as an invitation to do something quite different, like a pull handle on a door that swings both ways but has a sign that says “PUSH.” They wandered out of that opening in the loop, and didn’t find that they had much desire to come back in. (They were, according to designer Robin Laws in his book *Hamlet’s Hit Points*, perhaps nudged along by something as simple as the narrative implications of changes to a player-character that persist from game to game.) Their games started to look like this:
And then this:
They could be heard saying things like, “we had a great game last night – we hardly even used the rules,” which might otherwise merit a DOES NOT COMPUTE from many people.
All this is basically a long-winded way of saying “a role-playing game is a game where the fiction is a part of the rules,” as player, designer and theorist Neel Krishnaswami http://games.spaceanddeath.com/yudhishthirasdice/133">put it. I would actually say that a story game is a game where the point of play is to make fiction which can in turn affect the rules by which you play to make fiction, and a roleplaying game is a story game that hews to the traditions of gameplay that started in American skirmish wargaming and were crystallized by Arneson and Gygax. (I prefer to make that distinction because established players of RPGs associate those traditions so strongly with the popular term for what they do; given that the media generally does too, I’m happy to leave them their term, and assign the more general meaning to the term with less baggage.)
A lot of people hate it when you try to give a necessary-and-sufficient definition to things that they’ve only ever really defined as “this thing we do.” Heck, the word “game” doesn’t really have an iron-clad definition itself. And these definitions are bound technically to exclude something that, in practice, probably shouldn’t be excluded. It doesn’t matter. An imperfect definition really is better than none at all. I don’t think it’s coincidence that ten or so years after Scott McCloud defined “comics” – another culturally marginalized “this thing we do” – as not having anything inherent to do with the subject matter it had normally focused on up until then, we have so many dramatically better comics that we essentially have a new medium on our hands. I want the same for story games, and I’m tired of waiting.
So there are these guys calling themselves the Verne & Wells Society
who are setting up a “country club for geeks” in the Seattle area, as an
alternative to mere hacker spaces or gamer pubs. They seem a little
obsessed with their own story; they’ve been posting a lot on G+ about
the evolution of their brand and their frankly very simple concept (I
already told you the whole thing) instead of showing much of what
they’re actually going to build, be, or do. It may be that I have them
wrong, and they were never planning to actually build a physical club,
although the occasional event seems like a lot to ask $300 a quarter
for. But the whole deal is at least potentially interesting.
While I was reading about these guys, my girlfriend was over in the
living room watching classic Trek on Netflix, specifically “Amok Time,”
the first episode that was ever performed by Portland’s Atomic Arts
“Trek in the Park” troupe. So I’m listening to Spock, Kirk and Bones
while I read the Verne & Wells brand philosophy of “science, technology,
escapism and play”… and then I think not just of Trek in the Park, but
of the old Star Trek Experience in Vegas and how it dumped you into
perfect Enterprise hallways that seemed to just keep going… and I think,
is a swanky LEGO night the best we can do for escapism? Is the throwback
to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and the fakey steampunk aesthetic that
will inevitably follow, the best way to honor science or encourage play?
The problem with the “geek country club” concept is “country.” If you
want wealthy geeks to pay $1200 every year for someplace nice to eat
and drink, build them the fucking Enterprise.
Think about it: you check in at the front desk, step into the “airlock”
to get into uniform, then step into that corridor (or a near enough
facsimile that avoids infringing copyrights) and head for Ten Forward,
or perhaps you report to a mission on the bridge, or a shuttlecraft –
one of several spaces devised for a relatively simple digital game along
the lines of Artemis. After all, a country club needs something to do.
We ought to be able to beat golf pretty easily.
You wouldn’t need the $70 million in starting capital that it took to
build the Vegas attraction. It wouldn’t need to be substantially nicer
than what LARPers have been known to build themselves, especially
since members will feel more pride of ownership than a tourist would.
You could start small – the above is fairly unambitious – and grow
slowly. San Francisco would be the perfect location, not least for its
fictional connections to Starfleet.
If I were a bigger Trekkie, I’d be on this already. As it is, I’m
waiting on the upper-class marketers of the world to expand their
vision.
Another do-stuff-for-a-month project, this time in short fiction-y
bursts. K and I made up some characters last year for a webcomic we may
yet do, set on a space station; I decided to spend some time with them.
They’re shitty first drafts, but they’re a bit fun. I put them over on
Tumblr, just to test the platform out. You might enjoy them.
I’ve continued to think about web forums, the problems with them, and
how to get them to support better, more human conversations. Lately I’ve
been pleased to find that some folks in one of my enthusiast-communities
are thinking about it too. (Historically, the clientele at the story gaming forums I frequent have taken the attitude that, despite Clay
Shirky’s oft-linked and oft-repeated insistence that “software” and “social” can’t be taken separately, forum software can’t do anything at
all, not even the littlest bit, to lessen social problems on forums.
Seems like an odd stance for a bunch of people who generally reject
gaming’s cherished notion that all you need is a great GM, and the
game system you use doesn’t even get a vote as to how your game goes.)
Specifically, a group of some gamer friends of mine wanted to try an
experimental structure they called Storycaravan. In Storycaravan, blog
posts made by members of the group would be echoed onto a central,
forum-like site which would give each post its own, separate comment
thread. Commenters would have to formally register with the site, and
when someone made a new comment, the post on which the comment was made
would pop to the top of the page, like on most forums.
It dawned on me that WordPress could make just about all of those things
happen already. The only piece I would have to supply was the sort: the
means to bring a post to the top of the page when it got a comment.
(WordPress already has a Recent Comments widget, but it turned out not
to be very reusable for this purpose, for a lot of wacky reasons.) So
here it is: Blogcaravan, my first WP plugin.
There’s a huge amount it doesn’t do, and it may be doing even less in
the near future – I may be able to do a better job of filtering the
functionality to leave pages alone when appropriate. But I love the
notion that by keeping functionality narrow, I can support a lot of
unexpected new combinations. (For Storycaravan we’re blending it with
the FeedWordPress aggregation plugin.) I hope it will be of use to
people who want to do forum/blog hybrids without starting from forum
software.
My girlfriend drew it, and I wrote it. (That means it’s a product of
the Soft Sciences!) It’s called Dangerous Aromas and it’s
about intrepid coffee buyers who will stop at nothing to win the Bean of
Excellence competition. It’s rad. Check it out.
Think Again, My Friend! I’m the host and producer of this new comedy
podcast in quiz-show drag. Learn while you laugh while you listen while
you learn.
The Soft Sciences, the name of my comics collaboration with Kalina Wilson. We’ve made a silly adventure comic that’ll be online soon.
I am really oddly satisfied that I was able to get those two domain
names.
My girlfriend and I recently made good on a pledge to draw journal
comics, for some definition of “journal,” every day for the whole month
of May. You can find them on Flickr, along with those of several
artist friends of ours, like the inestimable La Nina.
So there’s this thing! Yeah. Like the Ignite events, only more
expensive and less irritating. I’ll be trying to teach everyone in ten
minutes how to play story games. (Well, not those exact ones I talk
about in that old post; more like a hyper-streamlined, more general,
low-impact version. But one that totally works, and currently powers my
own play.) If you’re in the area, you should totally come. If you’re
not, I imagine there will be videos eventually, and I’ll pass you a link
unless they’re somehow incriminating.
First it was Betamax. Our household didn’t choose it, but if it had
been up to me, we would have. I was ten years old. My dad had just
announced we’d be getting a VHS deck, and I remember looking up at him –
not many memories of that, we were already close to the same height –
and arguing that all sorts of people said that Beta had better picture
quality and was more durable. I felt confused and powerless when he
wouldn’t listen. Within months the available Beta rentals at Five Star
started to thin; within a year they were gone. I felt kind of at peace
with that, probably because I had no trouble renting anything.
Then it was the Mac. In 1986 you either had a PC and could play all the
games, or had an Amiga and could play mysteriously awesome games no
one’d heard of, or you had some other shit and were a loser who hung out
at friends’ houses a lot. Don’t get me wrong, we had great stuff at home
– we had HyperCard – but we didn’t have status. The arguments didn’t
happen to us so much, because there “wasn’t” an Internet yet, but on one
notable occasion a friend and I had finagled an invite to the home of a
girl I had a crush on, so we could set up her stereo; some other kid who
was there started talking smack about Macs for no real reason, and
somehow I got sucked into fighting over it feebly with him while my
undistracted friend accomplished all the useful, girl-impressing tasks.
Yes, I learned to program, sort of, with HyperCard; yes, Defender of the Crown had a certain majesty in black and white when it (finally)
showed up. Yes, the Mac II made things a lot better. Still, none of us
Mac users of a certain age ever forgot – our superiority was not a real
thing. We cooked it up ourselves; when we went out in the world, it had
no currency.
Then it was the Sega Master System. I hope I don’t even need to say
more. (Space Harrier, though: yeah. And Great Volleyball, out of which
my brother and I wrung a truly odd amount of fun.)
Now it’s the T-Mobile G1. All I see is iPhone app announcements and
developer opportunities, in the music blogs, the game blogs, the web-dev
blogs. The Android platform gets some dap too – it’s evident that this
time I have at least picked Sega, not 3DO – but that doesn’t help me
when I have to fight with the G1’s camera again, or stumble through the
Market looking for something, anything that doesn’t suck ass
(illiterate app comments scrawled on the listings like they’re bad
YouTube videos), or watch performance slow and slow as I get further
from my last hard phone reset. Yes, it’s not that much longer until the
apps will get better, but let’s be honest: they’ll never catch up. I
abandoned all my noble open-source principles as soon as they failed to
reward me. I want an iPhone so bad.
Last month I was at the mall finishing holiday shopping and saw that my
shiny new phone was out of power again – I must have left GPS on by
accident, damn my eyes – so I stopped into a T-Mobile store to borrow a
cup of the ol’ juice. They kindly offered me a power adapter by the G1
display, and I soon found myself in conversation with a prospective
buyer, talking the phone up. The social pressure of being in a
T-Mobile retail store that was doing me a favor is only a partial
explanation. I suddenly recovered all my moral dudgeon against the
locked-down, anti-user iPhone and its monopolistic store full of
99-cent farting applications. I told this guy about the $400 unlocked
dev version of the phone when the sales guy’s back was turned. I talked
about the coming paid apps. I talked up all the promise that I wanted so
much to believe in again.
In summary: OMG I HAVE SUCH TERRIBLE PROBLEMS (soon we will all be
checking Twitter from the fucking bread line)
