In case you’ve decided to never read Story Games ever again, here’s the video demo (Quicktime) I made for how basic fights work in Super Snow Queen.

This little 16-bit style evolution of some of the “chakra”/theme maps stuff I was doing earlier is pretty solid, I think, and I’m mostly trying to figure out how to present the various locations in the palace, which link the fights together with puzzles and characters you can talk to and other stuff.

I’m at a frustrating crossroads with the Snow Queen game where I have to figure out which of my various conflicting intentions to follow and which need to be left behind by the side of the road.

The main issue I’m wrestling with is the degree of abstraction vs. representation in the graphics / mapping of the game. There’s this thing in roleplaying games where the less physical representation you have, the more the players’ imaginations are free to take flight with the narrative contents. Imagine a continuum of representation that starts with the 4E battlemap, is abstracted into the Agon strip, is abstracted further to Danger Patrol’s arbitrarily moved slips of paper, then is further abstracted into scripted moves like Mouse Guard, and is finally totally abstracted into freeform description.

As you move towards increased abstraction in physical or mechanical structures, more of the burden of creating appropriate and powerful content and structures — including, that hallowed technique, “reincorporation” — falls on the players rather than the game designer or scenario designer. When there are few physical representations of the fiction, including details and numbers jotted down on a sheet, the play experience leans totally on the imagined content because there are no other records or indicators.

So, as a game designer, when there’s physical component or narrative structure that’s going to be difficult or nigh-impossible for me to create physically or mechanically, my instinct is to create a very abstract representation — allowing the players to flesh out and fill in the blanks as needed — or have it exist purely in the players imaginations. But this creates a problem when I feel like I have a relatively clear vision of what play is supposed to feel like. It’s difficult to both leave things up to the players and also create methods by which the things that the players come up with match my overall design vision.

And that’s where I think I’m at with the Snow Queen. The whole purpose of the game is for the players to imagine wandering through an immense ice palace, a beautiful and harrowing combination of Zelda and Ico, full of puzzles and monsters and characters to meet and missions to accomplish and interactive scenery. But it’s difficult to create really complex puzzles or dungeon layouts without mapping out every corner of the ice palace and that’s way too difficult and time consuming, I think. So I need to find a level of abstraction that allows me to frame various sections of the castle while still leaving room for the players to describe and flesh out the castle, both so 1) the play experience will be personal and emotionally powerful for the players, and 2) so I don’t have to spend the next year pushing pixels to create a giant map of the entire palace.

The other problem I’m having is tone. The 16-bit graphics I’ve been working with are really fun, but I’m worried they’re going to trap players’ minds in certain ways, worrying about how certain things would be depicted in a 16-bit video game rather than following the fiction and imagining whatever they want. In the same way that Shadow of the Colossus followed the classic Zelda narrative pattern but subverted it, I want the Snow Queen game to draw on the narrative structures of classic video games but not be trapped by them, and I’m not quite sure yet how to present the game in a way that will make that happen. I don’t want to have to commission a bunch of expensive art, but I’m not sure I have the capacity to illustrate it myself if I don’t use a 16-bit style. But I’m not sure people will have the capacity to look at Mega Man art and imagine Pluto, to draw a parallel to a different genre.

Anyway, those are the issues I’m currently wrestling with. Once I have those figured out, designing the game should be easy. But, in my mind, the physical components and presentation are key to making the game work, so I have to start there.

In an effort to develop some Google hits that aren’t all about my embarrassing hobbies, I’ve started a new China-oriented blog to discuss my schooling, scholarship, experiences abroad, and whatever I’m currently reading. It’s called 3 Principles, after Sun Yatsen’s “three principles of the people.” If you have any interest in China, my professional life, or my thinking about international politics, culture, and identity, you should check it out. No knowledge of anything is required or assumed.

Generally speaking, my online life is going to be split in three directions, with this blog covering creative stuff (music, games, illustration), 3 Principles covering professional / scholarly stuff, and Facebook handling personal stuff like cooking and whatever social stuff I’m doing.

With the guardhouse and walls added, plus a new way of doing shadows that I’m not entirely satisfied with. Getting closer at least.

The bridge is basically done, the rest is just a rough outline of where stuff will go.

I’m designing something that’ll blow your mind.

Here are some statistics on religion in China.

- about 8% of the Chinese population “claims belief in religion” (1997 survey)
- about 3-4% is Christian (CIA factbook)
- about 1-2% is Muslim (CIA factbook)
- about 20% is Buddhist (BBC/Chinese Gov)

What’s the jargon at work here, which makes these numbers really weird? If you guess it’s “religion,” you’re right! The modern Chinese word for religion was imported from Japanese at the turn of the century (and it was a relatively recent word in Japanese, as far as I know). Hardly anyone believes in religion in China (except for the Christians), but almost everyone goes to temples and participates in festivals on occasion (even the atheists).

For another example, see “peasant.” Is China still feudal? Why are its farmers called “peasants”?

Think about that the next time you pull out “story games” or “Narrativism” or “bird-in-ear.” What are you doing? You’re training your brain to think a certain way. Make sure that’s what you want to do.

/soapbox
/note to myself
/hypocrisy

Over on Structured Freedom, Emily asked:

What gives a game with no mechanical resolution that kick? What makes a scene crackle with energy and tension, or sit there like a limp noodle?

In the Mothers, there is one “perfect mother” in the new mothers’ support group. The other mothers have to be willing to go for the throat to get the game to really click.

And I said:

Are these things that can be explained as being part of the core guidelines for playing the game (i.e. “pick one player to be the Perfect Mother…”) or are you seeing them more as emergent properties that are harder to ensure, aside from setting up spaces in which they will likely occur (i.e. “inevitably, one or more players will aspire to be the Perfect Mother…”)?

I’ve been thinking about both of these a great deal when working on the new draft of Geiger Counter, even though it isn’t structured freeform. My approach to Geiger has definitely been strongly informed by my thinking about structuring play in general, in the sense that there are a lot of “soft guidelines” and suggestions in the rules that aren’t hard-coded into resolution. And there are many other things that are emergent that I’m not even sure whether / how to talk about. I don’t think Geiger is different than many other games in this regard actually, which is why — more recently — I’ve found it harder to talk about structured freeform as a separate thing from other styles of play, which I see more and more as heavily intertwined. You know that article on the Forge where Erick Wujcik says “You’re playing diceless all the times when you don’t roll dice.” I think structured freeform is like that too — it’s what you’re doing when you’re not engaging with formal resolution mechanics.

Like, to flip your question around, what is it about games WITH mechanical resolution that give them that kick? You know how Dogs in the Vineyard really starts getting teeth when one or more Dogs take a strong stand on an issue that the other Dogs disagree with (“That guy deserves to die. I shoot him.” / “What? Are you insane?!! I totally stop you!”)? The game doesn’t tell you that moral conflicts within the party are awesome, but they are.

I honestly think there’s a whole bunch of interesting structures that are put into place by a variety of games, from Dogs to D&D, but often times we — following players and designers before us — ignore these broader structures and focus on resolution. Like, take Initiations in Dogs. Totally a valuable and interesting structure: “Say what you want to accomplish during training and then play out that scene.” Even without any resolution mechanics, that would be awesome.

In reality, designing structured freeform games is honestly not that different from other kinds of game design work because designing structures that create exciting or valuable play experiences is a skill you should be constantly working to improve if you want to design good games. In fact, I think design work that focuses on resolution more than interesting structures is almost always less interesting. The games that you really like, your favorite games, most likely rock the house because they have a core of interesting structures that would hold your interest even without formal resolution mechanics.

Or, to be completely frank… my thinking about structured freeform has finally moved from the “I’m/we’re doing something really different” phase to the “we’re all ultimately doing the same thing” phase. That’s a pretty standard progression in theoretical exploration, I think (or sometimes people go the opposite direction, from assuming sameness to assuming utter cacophony). Hopefully that means I can eventually move to being aware of nuances in these kinds of techniques and not focus so much on broad similarities and differences.