Category Archives: Gaming

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The Man With No Game!

02 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Gaming, Movies, Narrative VIolence

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Who could forget the man with no name? It’s easily the most memorable character in Clint Eastwood’s acting career. After generations of protagonists so apple-pie obvious in white hats and chaps, always doing the right thing, and always winning in the end, there was something especially compelling about this antihero. You never quite knew what he was going to do. He might save the town, or he might kill everyone. You didn’t really know until right about the same time you learned the outcome of the conflict itself. This vision of moral ambiguity was a wonderful contribution to film.

As a character in a role-playing game, he totally sucks!

To be a little more specific, he makes a terrible player character in an ongoing campaign. The Man With No Name has some potential as an Non Player Character, if the guy running the game uses him well, but in the hands of a player this sort of character can be a terrible buzzkill. That doesn’t stop players from creating characters with similar personae. Time and again players bring such characters to the game table only to they aren’t nearly as interesting as their cinematic counterparts. The difference illustrates a little about storytelling, I think. But of course the issue is larger than the man with no-name. It extends to any number of morally ambiguous characters, characters who inspire fear and hope in roughly equal amounts.

What makes such characters work is the extra tension they provide to the narrative. Instead of just wondering if the hero will beat the bad guys, a morally ambiguous protagonist leaves you wondering if he will even take up the right side of the fight. He might just as easily prove to be the biggest nightmare of the narrative. Done well, such personalities will leave you on the edge of your seat well into the third act, but of course resolution will come in the end. Sooner or later these characters do the right thing, even if reluctantly so, and perhaps with a trace of wrong mixed in with it for bad measure, but they will step up to the challenge and save the day.

The audience needn’t do anything but soak up the story.

And therein lies the difference. Role playing games (or at least the pen&paper variation thereof) is an inherently cooperative enterprise. The players must come to a series of agreements in order to make it work. At minimum this means coming to an understanding of the game rules, but it also requires some agreement on the essential features of the setting as well. Ultimately, the players will need to come to a shared understanding of the plot-line for a campaign as well. Failing that, an rpg can easily descend into an endless session of bickering over one detail after another. Were things going right, these very details would be the icing on the cake, the features of the story that make it so much more vivid. But when the players aren’t on the same page, such details instead provide fodder for a series of arguments about imaginary things, and being imaginary, those things don’t admit easily of resolution by rational argument. This is of course what makes the old Summoner Geeks parody so brilliant. Most of us who game have been there at one time or another. ….A story that isn’t quite happening, it’s every detail becoming an excruciating source of pointless conflict.

The morally ambivalent character is just one more variation on this problem. It poses the dilemma of a character who may or may not accept the central plot-lines of the story. More to the point, it poses the challenge of a player who may or may not accept the central challenge of the story. Unlike a movie viewer, the other players must then actively contend with the possibility that his ambiguous loyalties will undermine their own efforts to resolve the central story line. They have to worry if the dark and mysterious character will piss off the one great side character whose help they really need; if he will start a random fight in a bar where they hoped to meet an important contact; or if he might simply wander off when the big battle is about to go down. The possibilities are as countless as they are frustrating. It’s a bit like watching a side-plot to a movie take-over the entire narrative. …except that you’re not simply watching that happen. You are actively trying to resolve the main narrative and the player running the ambiguous character has just derailed the whole project!

Of course a player running a morally ambivalent character needn’t do this. He can do as the writer of a movie or a book might and choose to let his character do the right thing, so to speak, perhaps grumbling a bit in the process or adopting an ironic reason for doing so. That can be fun. It can actually work.

For about a game or two.

What makes such characters really frustrating is the prospect of dealing with their ambivalence three, four, even ten games into an ongoing campaign. It can actually be kind of fun to figure out a mysterious character in the early stages of a campaign when the story-line is just beginning to emerge. If you are still worried about his likely course of action well into the campaign, and long after the central challenge of the plot has taken shape, the whole act is going to get damned old. Ironically, such characters eventually lose their bad-ass quality and start to seem more like pampered children or special snowflakes.

It isn’t just that such characters are frustrating (though they are). The problem is that the sense of mystery -the dramatic tension that makes them tick – fails over time and they simply become tedious, just one more detail that cannot be settled. Part of what makes ambivalent characters interesting to begin with is a sense of anticipation. What will he do? It’s an interesting question, but this question must eventually be answered to provide a satisfactory theme in a story. If a player leaves his or her character sitting on the fence umpteen plot twists into a campaign, that in itself starts to become the answer to this very question. He’ll stay on that damned fence and make you beg him to help out every time something needs doing.

This can be a bit like watching unrequited love in a sit-com. It’s kinda fun for an episode or three, but it’s a bit old by the second season. By season three it’s a distraction from the cool parts of the series, and by season four it’s the reason you’ve decided to watch something else.

Ultimately, the mystery that makes such characters tick resides in a moment within a plot line, but that moment must eventually pass. A character who doesn’t know what side he’s on well into an ongoing plot becomes a source of irritation. When a player tries to make moral ambiguity a lasting feature of his character, he or she may well end up as a the buzz-kill that ended the campaign.

And the man with no name thus acquires one.

It just isn’t a good one.

Taking The Piss Out of Magic: What it Isn’t and What it Really Isn’t: Special Gaming Edition

17 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in Gaming, General, Movies

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flashlightDo you Recall that glorious moment in The Return of the King when Gandalf rides out to save Feramir and the last defenders of Osgiliath! Do you remember when he raised his staff and great light issued forth, driving the ring-wraiths away (along with all the cool kids who happen to be reading these here lines)? Yes, well, I do too. And now that it’s just us nerds here in the blog, let us talk of wondrous things!

What I’m particularly interested in on this dark morning here on the tail end of polar midnight, (aside from hope of a Gandalf-like ray of sun-light soon to come) is the way that some folks (ahem gamers!) often speak of wondrous things in particularly unwondrous ways.

‘Unwondrous’, Yeah, it’s a word now dammit!

One of the amusing meta-games that gamers have been playing ever since those heady-days of the early 80s is the game of “how do you stat that?” You know, the one where you decide that the Arnold version of Conan is a 10th level Ranger with an eighteen double-ought strength, and then your friend says; “hell no, he’s a 12th level fighter and he must have supernatural strength, 20 at least, …probably Chaotic Good alignment.” Then someone says; “You must be nuts! He’s easily true neutral.” …yeah, we geeks do that. Well anyway, the game of “how do you stat that” really comes into its own with magical effects, because stating magic helps to define the fantasy worlds in which the games take place.

In Tolkien’s work, mythic narratives began to flourish in fantasy fiction. Hell, for a time they almost seemed cool, cool enough for the mighty Zep at any rate, and this was a significant part of the cultural background informing the early days of pen&paper RPGs. But here is one moment where the game of stating the worlds around you  (real or imagined) always seemed to fall short for me, at least in mainstream games. They fall short really the minute the game of stat this is played.

You see, to stat that magic moment in which Gandalf drives off the wraiths in AD&D one would need to assign his light effect to a designated spell with a designated range, area of effect, and duration, all defined in precise mathematical terms. The effects of light on undead would be clearly defined in this spell, and the sort of power it takes to generate the spell would also be clearly explained. In Dungeons and Dragons and many of the games emulating it, this wondrous moment in the story becomes a function of well-defined principle of mechanics. One might even suggest that it becomes part of the natural laws of the universe in which the games take place.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed countless hours of manipulating precisely those very mechanics over the game table. Good times! I wouldn’t part with them for brand new vorpral sword. But one thing is definitely lost in this approach to gaming, the wondrous part of it all. The rules of mainstream fantasy games normalize the features of mythic narratives to such a degree that they become a kind of demi-science. One can often see gamers haggling over the details of some magic effect or trying to plot the precise mathematical formula needed to ensure that all the orcs on the game table fry-up in a fireball without singing the elven maiden. in most cases there is nothing mysterious about it; the game rules tell us exactly how this sort of thing works. It’s how many of these games are played.

What is lost in this approach to gaming is the very fluid nature of the narratives which inspire and inform the genre. The Lord of the Rings doesn’t really present us with a theory of Gandalf’s light, not a complete one at any rate. We might imagine that Gandalf is able to generate that effect because of some arcane set of rules we know nothing about, but what we have in a mythic narrative is simply the fact that he did that, odd as the whole thing may be. Wondering just how such seemingly impossible feats actually happen is an important part of the story. Wondering about it at the game table? Not so much. Not usually anyhow.

In the scientization of mythic narratives, the spell-books of classic fantasy gaming effectively set that wonder aside. Of course there are alternative approaches to the subject, such as those used in story-teller games, but my purpose here isn’t to argue for upping the nerditude of the game table. It’s to comment on something I consider an interesting twist in the culture of fantasy gaming, namely its tendency to frame wondrous things in terms of a well defined rational principles.

If fantasy games presents us with a kind of alternative physics, I don’t think this is entirely unique to modern perspectives on the subject. One sees it in references to The Force of Star Wars, and still more so in the theme-killing notion of Midi-chlorians (microorganisms responsible for the force. …blech)! You can see it in old Theosophical notions of an astral plane through which emotional and psychic powers turn out to follow a kind of physics in their own right, and of course you can see it in sundry New Age efforts to turn Quantum Mechanics into a science of wishful thinking. Folks use these notions and others like them to embed the uncanny moments of a narrative in a theory which makes sense of it. In some cases, that is the total point of the theory; in others it is one of many uses.

Time and again, folks seem to want to find a theory in stories made wonderful precisely because they defy our theories, or more importantly, because they defy our normal strategies for making sense of the world. What makes the moment Gandalf creates his light effect compelling is precisely our inability to fully make sense of it. It is likewise with more traditional epic narratives such as the role of missletoe in the killing of Baldur in Norse mythology, the origin of sea mammals in the in Sedna’s severed fingers, or the forceful eviction of the Gambler in Navajo legends (he was fired up into the skies from a great bow). What all of these and so many more narratives share is not conformity to an arcane set of natural laws so much as a momentary in-your-face violation of expectations which people are most familiar.

What I am suggesting here is that the notion of magic isn’t really a part of these narratives, or at least that it is not the key to understanding the momentary occurrence of irrational events. Such stories may relate information about a natural order (such as a world in which the availabile game-animals are in some sense part of an active relationship to Sedna), but that order does not itself explain the moment in which something odd springs forth from her severed fingers. One doesn’t really need a theory to appreciate the story, nor need one assume that the story could be explained by a valid theory. One needs only to understand that the outcome of the narrative will be meaningful. In the interim, the shear absurdity of certain moments in that story is a thing to be savored, not to be explained away.

The notion of magic along with its specific variations come into such stories in efforts to square them with more familiar realities. Where the uncanny can be a feature of such stories, it becomes a bug when one imposes an expectation of literal truth upon it. So, people sometimes concoct a theory to explain the matter. Those theories then provide an ad hoc defense of the uncanny, but they provide us with no real insight into the stories.

Magic, resides in the secondary and even tertiary rationalization of mythic narratives, but there is no reason to believe it resides in the narratives themselves. We needn’t imagine Tolkien plotting an area of effect for Gandalf’s wraith-baffling light ray, nor do we need to ascribe a theory of mythic-evolution to Inuit story-tellers relating the story of Sedna. Hell, we don’t even need to imagine that the Book of Genesis constitutes an attempt to explain the cosmos, though a world touched by the hand of Thomas Aquinas can hardly seem to imagine otherwise.

There is something in the effort to find a theory behind wondrous narratives that does violence to those narratives themselves. Such theories always end up falling short of their source material. It is the same whether we are talking about the hackneyed apologetics of fundamentalist Christians looking to read a consistent theory into all the traditions crammed into the Bible; an anthropologist trying to find such a theory in the oral traditions of some exotic people, or yes; something as simple as a game designer trying to fit a wondrous theme into a rule system. The explanation never quite lives up to the promise of its inspiration.

Sometimes that failure matters more than others, but for me at any rate, the disappointment is a fairly common reaction. What concerns me most nowadays is the ease with which people seem to accept that mythic narratives ought to have a theory behind them, a set of principles that will explain them, even if only in terms of an error. That just isn’t the case. Sometimes this expectation gives us bad story-telling, sometimes it steers a whole generation of fantasy-gamers right past the fantastic part of fantasy, and sometimes it leads people to genuinely misunderstand great texts and brilliant oral traditions. Either way the variety of magics are never quite as brilliant as the stories which inspire them.

Magic itself just isn’t all that compelling, but a man playing chess with a fish or a cat that sings itself into a dragon? No explanations required.

…or wanted!

Gaming the Market and Kitbashing The Old Landlord’s Game

12 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by in Gaming, Politics

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402px-BoardGamePatentMagiePoetic injustice!

The forerunner to monopoly was intended to demonstrate the evils of …well, monopoly. It was particularly intended to show the long-term consequences of private land ownership in America, and one of the games more interesting features included an option to pay rent into a community pot instead of private landowners. Needless to say, that is not the game we play today.

If Elizabeth Magie intended the Landlord’s Game to illustrate the evils of a real estate market, the end result of her efforts has been a century of people celebrating that very thing. When all the dice of rolled and all the mice have been moved, the end result of this game is one player joyously happy with his acquisition of everything in sight. Far from mourning their own financial tragedy, the losers are often eager to start again, each hoping be the bad-ass rich-guy the next time around.

Christopher Ketcham detailed the evolution of Magie’s creation into the modern game of Monopoly last year. As Ketcham makes very clear, the modern version of Monopoly celebrates precisely what The Landlord’s game decries, but that is not merely something as simple as the ‘free market’ or ‘capitalism’; it is rather the defeat of the market by the development of propertied interests:

A few weeks before the tournament, I’d had a conversation with Richard Marinaccio, the 2009 U.S. national Monopoly champion. “Monopoly players around the kitchen table”—which is to say, most people—“think the game is all about accumulation,” he said. “You know, making a lot of money. But the real object is to bankrupt your opponents as quickly as possible. To have just enough so that everybody else has nothing.” In this view, Monopoly is not about unleashing creativity and innovation among many competing parties, nor is it about opening markets and expanding trade or creating wealth through hard work and enlightened self-interest, the virtues Adam Smith thought of as the invisible hands that would produce a dynamic and prosperous society. It’s about shutting down the marketplace. All the players have to do is sit on their land and wait for the suckers to roll the dice.

Smith described such monopolist rent-seekers, who in his day were typified by the landed gentry of England, as the great parasites in the capitalist order. They avoided productive labor, innovated nothing, created nothing—the land was already there—and made a great deal of money while bleeding those who had to pay rent. The initial phase of competition in Monopoly, the free-trade phase that happens to be the most exciting part of the game to watch, is really about ending free trade and nixing competition in order to replace it with rent-seeking.

What strikes me most about the passage above is just how much more subtle it is than common notions of equity guiding popular (and particularly conservative) media. Today’s defenders of the free market are tone deaf to any real difference between the creative bargaining characterizing the early phase of a Monopoly game from the rent-vacuuming process that comes to define its actual victory. I cannot help but wonder if this isn’t to some degree because much of Libertarian thought is actually a defense Aristocracy, a calculated holding action against anyone who might have noticed the game in America (and the world) has long entered the phase at which a final outcome is clear so to speak. The creative possibilities which may have defined the early growth of market economies have long since given way to a process wherein we all simply watch the wealthy take their profits.

…from us.

When I hear people defending the free market, I see little sense for such distinctions. Too often, such folks advance a vision of equity summed up in the phrase “equal at the starting gate.’ It is a mantra used most often to hold off affirmative action, progression taxation, and any number of attempts to help those on the losing end of the market, and it is a mantra that reassures us of the basic fairness of equal treatment under the law. It is a mantra that calls to mind that early moments in a monopoly game; the ones in which ever player can still imagine the possibilities, still see themselves as a potential winner.

The phrase “equal at the starting gate” could only apply to the outset of something, but in economics, there simply is no starting gate. The production of inequality is always an ongoing process into which each of us is dropped and out of which each of us will be taken without any real resolution of the game, so to speak.

This is one respect in which the game of Monopoly absolutely fails to illustrate the nature of capitalism; it doesn’t show people living with the consequences of inequality. It doesn’t emulate a life lived in the red so much as the struggle to achieve a life lived in the black (preferably including Park Place). Perhaps that is one reason for the success of monopoly; whatever its original intent, it has proven to be time-honored promotional piece for the social orders embodied in modern capitalism. For a little while, anyone with a few good die rolls and a smart purchase can be captain of commerce, and to most people that sounds pretty cool.

In real life, we don’t get to start over. We just keep right on playing long after some folks have bought up the world around us, and the frustration of paying fees with every step you take and falling further behind with every turn becomes for many a forgone conclusion. That sense that comes toward the end of a losing game, the moment you realize that your money will be going to another player until it’s over thus becomes an absolute reality from the cradle to the grave, …just add the urgency of food, medical bills, and any hope of accomplishing anything before death itself tells you it’s time to leave the table.

But of course the game goes on.

And the child of yesterday’s winner does not start with the same bank as those who lost to him. Indeed generations upon generations simply keep building up their leverage over the total market and those who start with nothing can count on little comfort from rules that supposedly treat them just the same as the guy with all the cash. In the real world, we do not begin with equal cash and equal opportunities. In the real world player A begins with millions and player B begins with a few thousand Player C starts in debt, and Player D has a few hundred.

There now start rolling the dice!

USA-LandlordsGame-1904-Thomas-Forsight-largeBut the prospect of using Monopoly to comment on economic realities remains interesting, if only as a thought experiment. To model the actual market, we have to add a few other quirks to our Monopoly Game.

Let us take out Millionaire (Player A), name him Joe (Donald would be just too obvious!). Our several thousand-air, we shall call Anne (Player B). The poor chap who started in debt (player C) we shall call Ralph, and the almost-lucky gal with a few hundred we will call Marcy (Player D).

The first thing we have to do is connect the differences in wealth to differences in the health and education of the participants. For this purpose, we’ll will show Ralph and Marcy only about half the rules. The rest they will half to figure out the hard way. It is tempting to model inadequate health care by making Ralph sit on a thumb-tack and forcing Marcy to slam a couple of Long Island Ice Teas just before the start of the game, but that would be just cruel. So let’s just go with the incomplete rule thing. Now when our less privileged players make mistakes on account of their lack of knowledge, Joe will no doubt make fun of them, or at least laugh when his smart-assed buddy Rush makes fun of them from a spot across the room. Anne may not be so mean, but both she and Joe will no doubt count their mistakes against them when Marcy and Ralph end up doing poorly. To complete the analogy here, let us just imagine that Joe’s friend Billy will sit through the whole game provide a full-time commentary on just how bad Marcy and Ralph are at the game. Billy is of course quite the wit.

…is friends usually just call him ‘Fox’.

But it’s worse than that, because of course all of this assumes that the rules are set in stone. Not a chance! No the rules of play are constantly evolving. We have to model that somehow, and we want to be totally fair about it, so each of the players gets to vote on a single rule change every so often (say after each player has taken a turn). Of course a democratic rule process would make each of their votes count equally, but we have to find some way to model the impact of the media and campaign finances, personal connections, etc. So, we’ll just say that you can get an extra vote for every $250.00 you put back in the bank. Marcy and Ralph will soon have a host of rules working against them, and they will no doubt complain about the unfairness of each such rule, at which point Billy will call them ‘special interests’, and another commentator named Antonin will be happy to explain that the rule-making process must be allowed to continue unfettered by anyone pretentious enough to think she might know fair from figs.

I suppose we should add another spectator named John who will be happy to tell Anne that she shouldn’t help Marcy out; that would be enabling bad play.

If we want to get really serious about this, then we have to find a way to replicate the laws of supply and demand, making the property values shift up and down depending on the interests of the players, but our game of 4 makes that a little hard to do. Plus, we have to questions of elasticity, and, well… nevermind. This is over-extending the metaphor.

But of course I am loading the comparison up in favor of a morality tale in which Ralph and Marcy get screwed by the system. To be fair, they should enjoy a range of public utilities police, fire departments, education (however inadequate). All of these provisions may be skewed to favor Joe and Anne yes, but they do exist, and we may add to them a certain range of welfare provisions designed explicitly for the purpose of keeping Marcy and Ralph in the game. But maybe that is the real point of this meditation, because such measures are precisely the features of our real economy most commonly attacked in the name of the game rule vision of fairness. Why should Joe have to pay for Ralph’s laziness? And why shouldn’t Anne and Joe get a better education (a more complete set of rules) if they can pay for it? And so on…

Any attempt to help the unfortunate would seem to run up against a vision of fairness as a procedural matter, as a set of rules which must treat everyone equally, and I can’t help but think an awful lot of people are using games such as monopoly as a source-model for their thinking of such issues. A significant portion of the general public seems to begrudge the provisions for public welfare, the few things that might give Ralph and Anne a chance. Let’s be honest I do not mean a chance to become wealthy, to win at the game so to speak. If there ever was a time when the free market afforded the poor (or even the middle class) a meaningful chance to move up in status, that time is well past. Barring the lotteries of celebrity fame what we are talking about is a chance to live one’s own lives with a measure of dignity, perhaps to own one’s own home and to control one’s own life.

…or simply to receive adequate healthcare.

We can talk about the pros and cons of any number of policies, but those debates are always skewed by the voice of those who would have us believe in the essential fairness of the game, so to speak. Such voices are quick to point out the unfair edge that any attempt to help Marcy and Ralph will give them, but they are damned slow to acknowledge the unfair edge that the game itself gives to Joe and Anne.

And of course the worst thing about all of this is the notion that it is all just a game, that our economy is here to help us sort the winners from the losers.

…as if the sorting were not itself an act of violence.

Geeks Only: Intruders from the Cool Table Just Move Along!

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Gaming

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200px-Deities_&_Demigods_(front_cover,_first_edition)Just a quick note to say that I am running a summer youth camp right now, which is why the blog has been silent lately. What I’ve posted has been stuff written in advance (like this one for example). The kids will soon dismiss me, though, and I’ll commence bloggenating proper once I taste freedom.

***

Okay, most of you probably aren’t going to get the point of this story, and some of you may flee in terror shouting ‘nerd alert! nerd alert!’ That’s okay, because, well, …guilty as charged.

The game was D&D, and it may have been the mid-90s, but we were playing first edition. I was the Game Master, and two separate gaming groups (one from Las Vegas and one from Flagstaff) had come together for a single game session. Each of the players had several characters on the table and we were engaged in a massive battle with an army led by evil forces. At some point in the evening, the players had achieved a clear victory over that army, so I thought it was time to wrap up the long game session and give the players their just rewards for a battle well-fought.

I told the players that an evil God (Li Kung, I believe) had descended upon the battlefield and congratulated the party on their victory, asking them to consider sparing what remained of the evil army and allowing it to quit the field. In exchange for this, Li Kung would grant a number of favors. At this point I meta-gamed the issue and simply told each player that they could ask for 1 favor for 1 of their characters. The players readily agreed.

It didn’t take long for the players to begin making their requests. Most of the specifics were perfectly forgettable, but one of them stands out. This player prefaced his request with the words; ‘it can’t hurt,” which I actually thought was probably a safe assumption under the circumstances. He then asked for a Holy Avenger for his Paladin.

I thought about explaining to the player that his great and Holy Warrior ought not to ask an evil deity to provide him with a weapon that was supposed to be a symbol of his faithful service to his own (good) god.  Then inspiration struck me. I told the players that Li Kung nodded his head and then disappeared. The players chatted a moment in character, wondering where he went and whether or not this meant the deal was off. Then the evil one reappeared with a great sword, which he offered to the Paladin, the bloody stump of a human hand still gripping its handle.

“Oh goody!” the player was positively beaming.

He wasn’t entirely sure why the sword functioned as a simple +2 weapon.