jducoeur

I was just commenting in another journal, and wound up describing my general approach to game design. I'm actually not sure I've ever described it here, and other writers might find it interesting food for thought, so lifting that comment almost verbatim:

My standard technique is what I think of as "character archetypes". That is, I usually try to overdesign the game, but instead of trying to come up with completely-fleshed-out characters early on, I focus on coming up with conceptual snippets: bits of character, which are often easier to invent and to tie into conceptual plots. I then "mix down" the game to characters by looking for which archetypes might combine well. A given character typically uses 2-6 archetypes.

Periodically, I re-examine the characters as things are growing. When a character is looking thin, I'll look for additional archetypes I can mix in, that I haven't already overused. These archetypes typically come in bunches of several related ones (related by plot or faction or some such), so pulling in one usually leaves me with a bunch more that need to get dealt with, so I assign those to other underserved characters. This usually provides me with great opportunities to place connections that otherwise don't exist in the game, thickening the web nicely.

I actually *write* the game quite late in the process, usually, after I've gotten the mixing to a point where I'm fairly happy with it -- that is, I try to design thoroughly before I start to write. This lets me blast through the writing very fast, with relatively few modifications later. (Although it does make the writing phase very intense.)

The other nice thing about the archetype approach is that they are often reusable -- when I design a Romeo and Juliet plot, for example, that gives me half a dozen character archetypes that I can slot into almost *any* game. This means that, if I come up with a good idea but never manage to fit it into this game, I might be able to do so in another one sometime later. So it's less frustrating to overdesign and wind up with leftovers...

Random Quote du Jour:

"God isn't dead, He's just got a lousy PR department."
-- John Berryhill

I seem to have accidentally wound up with the high concept for my game for Intercon next year. (As so often, it's all Christian's fault: he is always a font of game ideas.)

To that end, I am looking for any and all ideas for Drip -- the water-cooler horror game. It's going to be a vicious satire of All Things Office. The ideas are already flowing pretty quickly, but I welcome more: if you have character ideas, situations or just war stories about Office Life, send them along and I might work them in. Feel free to brainstorm wildly: weird and unlikely isn't necessarily a bar here. (Those who remember Panel will know how willing I am to get downright strange in my scenarios.)

(No, tpau, I'm not bidding it yet. Among other things, I haven't figured out the game's scope yet. It might be a one-hour 10-person Z game, a two-hour 20-person Sunday-or-Friday game, or a full four-hour 25-to-30-person slot. Once I understand how big the game is, I can think about bidding it...)

Lessee -- a random assortment of recollections:

The panels I was on all went decently well. Far as I can tell, the con somewhat constrained the number of panels to make sure they were better-attended, which is a *lovely* idea in my book. As expected, "LJ and the Nature of Community" was a rollicking good time -- I wound up moderating it (because shadesong unexpectedly had to pull out), and managed to just barely keep a measure of control. Also as expected, we barely scratched the surface of a topic that could probably support an entire conference unto itself. Somewhat more to my surprise, the Steampunk in Comics panel was jammed silly; I really didn't think we had enough topic for that panel, but it got run fairly loosely by Mario and attendees seemed to enjoy themselves.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that came out of my panels was from the Morality Play one. One of the audience members brought up the notion of the Five Foundations of Morality, which apparently made its way around LJ a while back but while I hadn't checked out. It's a fascinating way of breaking down what people mean by "moral", and is particularly interesting to me as a writer trying to introduce conflict into his games and create varied characters. I'm going to need to explore this idea further.

The hotel restaurant proved generally solid, if a smidgeon pricey: the paella was dreadful, but the flank steak excellent. And the bar's nacho platter is preposterously expensive ($15), but turned out to be quite good and enough for dinner for the two of us. (Useful to remember for the next time we wind up watching the Pats in the playoffs in the hotel bar.) I am glad we went out to the Green Street Grill for our Friday date, though.

The view from our 12th-floor hotel room was beautiful; the room was marred only by the thermostat's inability to understand that yes, it's warm enough in here and we don't need any more heat. This seems to have been a common problem: a group of us wound up guarding the door to Touchy Subjects in SF, discouraging anyone else from going in, lest mass heatstroke result.

Never made it up to the Art Show, I'm afraid, and did only a brief pass through Dealer's Row. (I am gradually talking myself into buying the $200 book of 10th century Baghdadi cooking at Poison Pen Press.) Exhaustion claimed me before getting to the dance, so I feel like something of a wimp; on the plus side, I managed to not make myself sick this year. Didn't make it to the Lodge meeting, which was a bit too close to the Masquerade. We did get to spend a while playing Giant Squid vs. Homosexuality, which was a fine party game. And I spent an hour or two just standing in the middle of the hotel lobby as friends swirled around me, engaging in free-flowing conversations -- always the best part of a con for me.

In general, a good time. I still think this hotel is a bit ill-suited for the convention, but it works significantly better when the elevators are functioning. And the atrium is really fascinating on Saturday night, when the whole con is crawling around on the balconies, wandering from party to party...

It surely says something about me that three of the games I most want to play at Intercon H are all opposite each other -- on Sunday morning. In the end, I think Purging Purgatory wins in The Battle of the Silly Games, but both Sam and Max and 10 Bad Modules are damned tempting. Fun, silly and experimental is always a way to get my attention.

(Friday evening is also a damned hard choice, but I think Desperadoes wins by a nose over Brother Ezekiel...)

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...

I wrote this as a response to a comment on the larpa-gen list. But it occurs to me that it makes a good entry unto itself (especially since so many people have been driven off that list by the endless rounds of NERO arguments). The original comment was to the effect that we won't see much change in MMORPGs in the next five years, and probably not dramatic change in the writer's lifetime; this was my response.

I don't know -- five years is a pretty long time in this business. I'm quite sure that your estimates of not seeing the next level in your lifetime are way off.

There are a lot of directions of evolution coming; the only question is which ones happen when. On the one hand, there will be more "story-based" MMORPG systems, where the system is designing more customized and sophisticated quests. No one's had the nerve to build a large-scale one yet, but enough people have talked about it for long enough that I'm pretty sure it's going to happen sooner or later. (We tried to pitch one to EA back at Looking Glass, but they didn't get it.) That's going to be pretty crude at first (same as the current systems were), but I'm reasonably confident it'll evolve quickly.

On the other hand, there are going to be the highly-distributed systems, which are *eventually* going to eat the lunch of the current centralized models. The only reason the commercial systems have thrived as well as they have is that the attempts to do open versions have been so half-assed. But one of these days it's going to be done correctly -- there are projects out there doing *very* interesting stuff, and the real question is which one will gain traction first. Once a properly-designed open system is up and running, it should gradually eat the proprietary ones, the same way that the Web destroyed systems like AOL and Prodigy. (Which, it should be noted, thought that idea was ridiculous -- my father was Director of Advanced Tech for Prodigy, and it took me a fair while to convince him the company was doomed.)

Moreover, even if distributed technologies don't take off soon, I'm reasonably sure that distributed *story-building* will. One of the systems I'm paying attention to is Second Life, specifically because their attitude is conducive to this. If they were to give their users good tools to customize scenarios, the way they give them tools to customize the world, it would become a *very* interesting environment for games that were more RP focused, less hack-and-slash, and significantly smaller-scale. In the YouTube era, there is every reason to expect that small-scale game creation has a rich future, if people are provided with the proper tools.

So there's going to be evolution, and it's going to be fairly fast. The only thing slowing it down, really, is the inherent conservatism of the companies that can afford to build large-scale systems. Still, we're going to see more small, successful experiments, and you can bet that the big companies will jump on those bandwagons *fast* every time they happen. Or they won't, and they'll die and be replaced. That's how evolution works. Punctuated equilibrium in the online world...

Player A wants to work with Player B. Player C wants to work with Player B. Players A and C are explicit that they should be kept away from each other. Verrrry special...

The hell with chess. When they come up with a computer that can cast a 27-person LARP, *then* I'll be impressed...

... this is probably the best-footnoted game ever written. As part of prepping for it, I've been going through the series to date and taking extensive notes, with everything back-linked so I can check it later. At some point, just out of sheer curiosity, I want to figure out how many links I have from the game wiki to the story. It's certainly hundreds; wouldn't surprise me if I crack a thousand when all is said and done...

Argh! The Foglios aren't going to make it easy to figure out who to put into this game, are they? *Sigh*.

Yes, yes -- it's just a Heterodyne Story, and we can (and probably must) to some degree fiddle with continuity. But I'd really prefer to keep as close to canon as reasonably possible. We'll see how we have to play this: yesterday's page doesn't bode well...