The Evolution of a Game

[jducoeur]

The process of LARP writing is a fascinating mix of fear and exhilaration. Yesterday, I have a mass of semi-related characters, and I'm nervous about the whole mess. Today, after six hours of brainstorming and design, I have a game. Still need a few more plots, but every character has two so far and most are up to four.

Finishing casting helped a lot (the letters will be going out shortly). That finally commits me to which characters are going to be in the game, and that presented me with a neatly-organized matrix of characters vs. plots. (Thanks again to those who helped me figure out how to get the nested queries working.) And that, in turn, made it nice and clear which characters needed more beef, so I could focus on drawing the right lines in the web to fill those holes.

Which brings us up to the next step: writing the damned thing. There's a lot to write -- 27 characters in about six weeks. But that's reasonably straightforward, once the plot web is done...

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Some day I'd like to sit down with you and hear about your process for generating a LARP, and what a plot web means to you, and so forth...I've had some of these conversations with learnedax, and still have the crazy larp-writing-support-software ideas kicking around in the back of my head...

[jducoeur]

Well, keep in mind that that's a large part of what motivates the ProWiki/Querki project. Writing a LARP is more or less the process of describing a small world, and that's what has driven me to the OODB-wiki model: OODBs are pretty much always the best way to do worldbuilding.

Curiously, this seems to be one of those little facts that crops up again and again, with little common understanding of the phenomenon. On the one hand, it's the best way to build sim games: Looking Glass' games were built on top of a very sophisticated in-memory OODB, which gave us wonderfully detailed and flexible worlds, far more complex than most. On the other, I recently came across Eastgate Systems, who apparently have evolved a system for more-traditional story design and management that bears many striking resemblances to ProWiki.

But yes -- I'd be happy to schmooze on the subject. It's become something of a passion of mine in the past couple of years. (I really should have suggested it as an Arisia panel, but it didn't occur to me...)