This is the start of something. This something began with “Storytelling Games as a Creative Medium,” an essay that first appeared in Second Person: Roleplaying and Story in Games and Playable Media
Click on any of the images at right to enlarge them. We’ll explore them further in future posts.What is it that we’re doing at the game table when we play? How are we doing it? How can we do it better? How can we teach new Game Masters (GMs) how to make great game experiences, and why is that important?
Here at the site, I’m going to be riffing on these questions, exploring GM tricks and techniques, and looking for ways to critically describe what we’re doing in play. I want to discuss these themes, ask questions, and get your feedback. Through that, I hope we can all hone our craft and make these games more attractive to new players.
Also, I’m hoping you can tell me how I’m doing it wrong while I tell the ludologists how they’re doing it wrong.1
The Gist of It
It’s the difference between having a created story and creating a story. Gameplay can be a storytelling medium just as the act of telling a story can be made into a game.
In his paper, “Where Stories End and Games Begin”, ludologist2 and game designer Greg Costikyan wrote:
A story is linear. The events of a story occur in the same order, and in the same way, each time you read (or watch or listen to) it. A story is a controlled experience; the author consciously crafts it, choosing precisely these events, in this order, to create a story with maximum impact. […]
A game is non-linear. Games must provide at least the illusion of free will to the player; players must feel that they have freedom of action within the structure of the game. The structure constrains what they can do, to be sure, but they must feel they have options; if not, they are not actively engaged. Rather, they are mere passive recipients of the experience, and they’re not playing any more. (Costikyan 2000)
I think Costikyan’s definition of story is incongruent with his definition of a game. A finished story isn’t analogous to a game ready to be played. An author is a participant in the “controlled experience” of crafting her story, just as a player is a participant in the experience of playing a game, but even an author is a passive recipient of the experience once the novel is finished and she’s not writing any more. A game of chess that’s been played is now a linear experience, in hindsight; the moves cannot be unmade and, when recounted, the game will be (and have been) the same every time.
A story may be linear and fixed in its form (though even that’s debatable), but the process of creating it was not. The goal of a storytelling game isn’t to have a story, but to create one. To tell a story. A game of chess isn’t the set, but the action of playing. A game of storytelling isn’t a script, but the action of playing.
The rules of a story game aren’t some kind of coded stage-play script. The goal isn’t to successfully decrypt the rules and produce, through play, the very story the playwright devised. The goal of a storytelling game isn’t to enact one playwright’s pre-crafted, controlled experience. The players aren’t quite players as on a stage — they are all playwrights and actors, at once. The game designer isn’t the author of the story, but the designer of an authorial experience. If well designed, the authorial experience can yield several different stories within a conceptual or thematic territory laid out by the designer.
A story game isn’t out to create one specific story. Instead of a binary state — victory or defeat — a story game results in something analog. It might result in an experience not controlled, but regulated, by game rules that define and describe the imaginary reality of the fictional tale (e.g., the rules let us know whether or not the brave knight’s wound is fatal), but that tale is still not fixed. What happens isn’t predetermined, but it is determined — through play. The players may vie for control of the experience, as in Once Upon a Time, or they may collaborate to some degree in an effort to produce a story of thematic and atmospheric resonance, as troupes of White Wolf‘s Storytelling System games sometimes do. The point is, the story’s not there at the outset, but created through play.
Nothing else is quite like playing or GMing an RPG with storytelling aspirations. Thus, these games can be hard to discuss. The common language is scant, cobbled together from narrative and ludological jargon.
Most of what we have to work with, to talk through, are metaphors, touchstones, and personal experience. I’m trying to add visual touchstones into the mix, in part with the graphics you see in this post. (We’ll explore those in greater depth as we go on.) With these graphics, I hope we can get on the same page so we can have more conversations on common footing.
But this is the start of something — something like what Chris Anderson described in his book, The Long Tail
My hope is that the same process—stress-testing many of my ideas in public—has led to a better, or at least sounder, book. [The Long Tail, 2006, p. 12]
I’m hoping to beta-test some ideas by smashing them together like atoms, right here, and see what we get. Hopefully, it’ll be something worth writing a book about later.
In the meantime, let’s play.
1. I don’t really think ludologists are doing it wrong as much as I think that those who create a dichotomy between ludology and narratology are turning the contrast up to high.
2 I use the term here not as a philosophical label but as a descriptor of his work: he’s a game designer and expert.
You are right on in doubting whether a traditional story (novel, film, etc.) is, in fact, a once-and-forever, unchanging linear thing. A story’s consumer absolutely does not experience it that way, at least not the first time through, and I think that’s a vastly overlooked point in discussions of story games.
We don’t even have to go as far as The Hobbit, which actually underwent revision between editions to synch up with Lord of the Rings, to find examples of stories whose experiences are not fixed over time. This, the Age of the DVD, and the restlessness of Oliver Stone, Ridley Scott, and George Lucas shows us stories changing as they’re able.
Who’s to say when it’s finished? What device can we hook up to a movie to see if the circuit is right and there’s now a narrative flowing through it? When it does go from being footage to being a story?
First, I agree that a story is not always an unchanging narrative from the POV of the reader. While many of the major high points of the story will remain the same, the reader’s interpretation of them (and the reader’s attention to various details) will change with each reading because the reader has changed (in perspective, maturity, what is important to them at this time in their life, etc). So, to the reader, the story will have changed each time that they read it.
On the RPG front, I have always been of the opinion that each product is intended to create an experience through play rather than a story.
Human beings are natural storytellers, narratives are our natural means by which we capture the experiences we’ve had and pass those experiences to others. So, everything gets turned into a story, whether it is what happened to me on the way to the grocery-store yesterday or the perils that befell my character the last time I played Amber Diceless.
Saying that an RPG is about creating “Story” always sounds ridiculous to me. It’s like saying that an RPG is about making me human.
An RPG creates an experience. If it is well crafted, the experience it creates will be exciting, incorporating enthralling character drama, tense action, and moments of tragedy and humor. It will make a great story when I tell my friends about it later but it isn’t telling a story while I’m playing it because the experience isn’t over until we start packing up at the end of the session.
I would argue that it’s human nature to not want a story to be fixed, actually. From childhood, the entire “Daddy, tell me a story,” ritual involves a story that remains the same in its essentials, told repeatedly, but with varying details and recollections. Names can change, exact actions can change, secondary scenes can be added or deleted and so forth, but the core of the story is expected to remain whole. We do this to our most loved stories quite often, boiling them down to their essentials and recasting them in all their glory — take for example the works of Alexandre Dumas, pere (forgive my unaccented French). The stories of the Three Musketeers and D’Artagnan have been told dozens of times over in their varied ways, but we still know it when we see it, even when it involves wire-fu or Raquel Welch’s boobies.
As for the game experience as it relates to story, I always end up thinking about it as a collection of linked short stories more than anything else. There’s a central situation or conceit and a cast of characters, usually provided by the GM, and an ongoing overarching situation that the characters are trying to cope with in some way, whether it functions as backdrop or challenge or danger-room-equivalent. Against that are the players whose characters move through this larger-scale story, and each person writes their own stories revolving around their specific character and interaction as they go.
Of course, it’s worth noting that this is specifically true of games that focus on story, character development, etc. There are also games that are very rules oriented and the goal is to get through the next encounter, not focus on what sort of group narrative we can create. Those strike me as far more linear — you have choices available to you, but one’s very like another (at least until your character dies, but even then you hit the reset button and pick up at the next “save point,” as it were. There’s a vague sense of a linear story, a set of encounters strung along it as embroidery and means of transit, and an end point wherein things are neatly wrapped up. I’m not sure that this sense of “story,” group or individual, linear or non-linear, applies as clearly to that style of game.
I think of most story games as adventure simulations. The player has the experience of having an adventure, but without the pain, expense, risk, and lateness to breakfast of actual adventures. The game rules should provide a level of simulation that is realistic enough to be enjoyable but not so realistic as to be distracting or boring. The story is, as you say, the product of the experience: ideally someone who participated in such a virtual adventure would be able to tell a story about it just as interesting as would be told about a real-life adventure. (Alternatively, a story-game could be like Once Upon A Time: a game about telling a story rather than vicariously participating in an adventure. I like this game too, but it’s not the experience I’m looking for, or trying to create.)
Jason Dettman,
I’d say that roleplaying can be about the experience or about the story. For me it is certainly more about the story, but that may be because I have GM’d a lot more than played. I know a player or two who are more interested in the experience. Most people enjoy both.
Tommi,
I run games more than I play also, and I think what you’re talking about hinges on how you think about story while you’re running the game.
If you are thinking about story in the sense “what story am I going to tell this week” or “how will I advance the story this week” then I think you’re undermining the value of the gaming session for you and your players.
On the other hand, if you’re thinking “In this situation, what would be more dramatic, or interesting, or cool” then I think that’s awesome.
In the end, it’s really all about how you work with your players to create an entertaining experience for everyone. Sure, if you’e using the first type of story thinking, you can create an entertaining experience for your players but they aren’t participating any more than they would be in a video game. They show up for your pre-arranged “cut scenes” and get to participate in combat but they can’t change the flow or direction of the ‘story.’
In the second mode, the GM is giving into the collaborative nature of of the game and allowing the players to fully engage. The game world (setting, fiction, what ever you want to call it) is suject to the actions and desires of all the participants and that gives a much more entertaining experience.
Right on, Jason. This is something I got at in more depth in my piece for Second Person, and I’ll be covering in more detail in the future. The GM can’t have a particular ending in mind and still afford the players the freedom they probably expect during play. The GM is better off constructing a scenario with an obvious objective and forward momentum, rather than pre-defining a story, per se.
Getting this across to people was part of the aim with Storytelling Adventure System. For example, we know that “The Resurrectionists” is the tale of some vampires searching for a buried, controversial religious nut, and thus the tale obviously ends with them finding him or not. We can know in advance roughly what a story is about, but not quite how it goes.
The skill that goes into being a great GM is being able to take the random, clashing feeds coming in from dice and player inputs and weave them into a narrative in real-time. Not easy, but can be a lot of fun.
I don’t know if I’d agree that it’s human nature, Michelle, but I’ll certainly agree that it’s the older tradition. The Greeks were constantly reframing, reshaping, and retelling their same old stories. This was a praiseworthy skill in itself. For whatever reason, today it’s sometimes considered lesser storytelling to retell a familiar story without major changes. See The 13th Warrior, Beowulf & Grendel, and Beowulf.