Games, Design, Culture, Politics...

The Process is a series I just invented wherein I post links and observations about the creative process. It’s a subject which fascinates me, in my case because I am a creative professional and I find such insight invaluable in my daily work.

I count, for instance, among the most important and influential things I’ve read; Christopher Tolkien’s chronicle of his father’s writing process on The Lord of the Rings, the letters between Frank Herbert and titanic SF editor John W. Campbell that influenced the development of Dune, Nicholas Meyer’s commentary on directing his first two movies, Time After Time and Star Trek II, and Ridley Scott’s narrative covering the development of Alien and Blade Runner. We may get to all of these in time. (more…)

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Gentile or Jew
O ye who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

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The Game Story Series, Part V

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: Central Conflicts | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

Greatest in both senses; large, epic, and excellent. I’m talking here about the best story I’ve ever encountered in any game of any type I’ve ever played. RPGs, Computer Games, whatever. The game is Legend of the Five Rings, a collectible card game, and the story is the Clan War that ran from 1995 to GenCon 1997, and this is the last in the Game Story series.
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The Game Story Series, Part IV

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: Central Conflicts | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

“This is no fantasy – no careless product of wild imagination.”

Richard Donner deliberately opens Superman, for my money the best Superhero movie made thusfar…at least until the moment where Lex Luthor shows up and brings the whole thing down a few notches, with these words, spoken by Marlon Brando. Casting Brando, the most naturalistic actor of his century, in the role of Superman’s Dad and God-surrogate to Superman’s Jesus Analog, and giving him these words to open the movie, grounds the film in reality. A reality the movie desperately needs because it is the height of fantasy. It doesn’t merely concern a man who can fly and shoot laser beams from his eyes, it starts on another planet.
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I was talking with a traditional RPG-designer friend of mine who was extolling the virtues of the RPG as a storytelling device. In many ways, in talking to me, he was preaching to the choir. He told the story of a friend of his who’d never played an RPG before and what happened when an NPC betrayed her character, literally stabbing her in the back. The player said “I felt like I had been stabbed!”

Certainly, for her, this was a revelatory experience. She didn’t expect to have that kind of experience while playing a game, and this is all well and good.

My friend said “That is the kind of thing RPGs can go that movies cannot do!”

This was where we parted company. (more…)

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The Game Story Series, Part Three: Up A Tree

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: Central Conflicts | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

When we first meet John McClane in Die Hard, which I will probably always reference as Plato’s Ideal Action Movie Story, he is a cop. But, critically, an off-duty cop. He is a cop, because that helps us believe he can do the inhuman stuff he does in the movie (verisimilitude, stay tuned) but he is off duty for a more important reason. The same reason Deckard is a retired Blade Runner.

If he were on duty, if he were on patrol like the twinkie-eating cop who responds to his call later, he would be obligated to act. And that creates a barrier between us and him. We are not like police officers, we are not bound to act.

Steven Spielberg said that he made Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind a telephone repairman because he felt earlier drafts, which had the main character as a cop or a firefighter, would not resonate with people. We do not think of cops and fireman as normal people, Spielberg said. Because, and I think Spielberg knows this, they are obligated to help. They see a problem and try to stop it. They are active, not reactive.
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The Five Pillars of Game Story, Part Two: The Central Conflict

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: The Central Conflict | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

When I saw the press release for Monte Cook’s massive D&D city/setting Ptolus, I knew I wanted to run it. Ptolus is a city. A huge city. And the book detailing it is massive and filled with a level of detail never before presented in any fantasy sourcebook. Furthermore, the presentation is the best I’ve seen. The art is beautiful, there’s full color work on every page, great use of color in the layout and the information is presented in the most efficient and accessible fashion possible. No effort has been spared to make this massive tome easy to use.

I pitched it to the L.A. group and we immediately started brainstorming ideas for what the Party would be. Who do the players play, and how do they know each other? As is often the case, we talked about running a Thief campaign with All Thieves. That was ultimately discarded, as the idea always is, because it’s too limiting. But we hit upon the idea of running a Mercenary company. This has a special resonance with us because we are, all of us, working on the Mercenaries property at Pandemic Studios. The players are all programmers, designers, animators, artists. Mostly designers.
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The Five Pillars of Game Story, Part One. I mean, Pillar One. Whatever.

Part One: The Plan | Part Two: The Central Conflict | Part Three: Up A Tree | Part Four: Verisimilitude | Part Five: Meaningful Choice

There’s a moment, you’ll see it in the trailers, where Agent Phillip Joyce, the head of the Allied Coalition operating in Venezuela (and the fact that the ‘Allied Coalition’ is secretly led by a CIA agent should only be taken as commentary on American Foreign Policy if…you know…you’re paying attention) turns to the Mercenary, the main character of Mercenaries 2, and says;

“Alright, dammit! It’s yours. But you’ve got to get him. Solano’s going to win! I can’t act. You’ve got to get him!”

He says this because I wanted to reinforce to the player that Solano, the bad guy, WOULD win. His plan works. Thanks to a deal with the North Koreans, obliquely referred to in a brief cutscene, he has at least one nuke. He…convinces the Americans and the Chinese that he’ll use it, and both nations decide that a land war in Venezuela over oil is one thing, but a full-blown nuclear conflict is a different issue. Solano successfully uses The Nuclear Option, and America and China decide to pull out.
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