My Gaming Evolution

Since I started using Twitter again, it’s been a rare day that I don’t come across a link or three that lead to interesting reading.  Like most people, I retweet the ones that I like.  I usually use TweetDeck or (more recently) HootSuite to send them to both Facebook and Twitter, since I have almost 400 people on my Facebook friends list and only about 30 followers on Twitter.  In my post last night, I shared a number of them here.

One “meme” that I’ve seen on gaming blogs lately is the sharing of your “RPG DNA.”  This means sharing what I think of as your gamer biography.  Sharing the influences that you’ve had, the games that you’ve played, since the very beginning of your life as a gamer, that have shaped your development into who you are as a gamer today.  Back in February, Rob Donoghue of Evil Hat Productions shared his.  Several others responded to the meme (links at the bottom of Rob’s post), including the “Chatty DM” Philippe-Antoine Menard.  His second contribution to the meme was published yesterday, while I was mentally chewing on a piece that I’d read the previous day.

After reading all of these RPG DNA profiles, I was struck by how sheltered my life as a gamer was when I was younger.  As I’ve previously shared, I began playing in 6th grade, at age 11.  Some kids I knew at school bought the AD&D hardcover books to start playing the game, but they quickly lost patience with reading all of those pages of text and consulting the dictionary for unknown words, so they just passed them along to me so that I could read them and then teach them how to play.  Thus was my entry into gaming.

From then (1982) until I got married and started working full-time as a high school teacher in 1992-93, my gaming consisted mainly of a steady diet of Basic/Expert/etc. Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.  As I posted last week, I hacked out my own game, Terrorist Wars, which we played off and on for a few years, along with Top Secret, Boot Hill, Star Frontiers and Gamma World (notice what all those games have in common? hmmmm).  I also played some Stormbringer, and in the mid-80′s Twilight: 2000.  I even tried my hand at some Rolemaster, but it never stuck.

In the mid-90′s, disappointed by 2nd Edition AD&D and an overworked new teacher and newlywed, I took a break from gaming.  After a few years, I began quietly introducing some of my students to gaming and fostering the interest of those who were already gamers.  I used to leave my classroom open late one day each week for the gamers to play while I worked in my office.  This was dangerous, since I taught in an extremely conservative rural southern school whose administrators still saw role-playing games as inappropriate material.  It wasn’t until 1998-99 that I began playing again.

After a move back to the town where my parents lived in 1999, I was unfortunate enough to live in the path of Hurricane Floyd.  The storm caused extensive damage to my area and left me without power for a week (my generator was enough to run a single lamp and the refrigerator).  The school where I was teaching also closed for the week.  So, I spent my days at a FLGS.  I struck up a sort of friendship with the owner and a few of his employees and when 3rd Edition D&D was released, I was tapped to be the store DM.  I always had dozens of people who wanted to get into my games and I did this until a change in ownership and atmosphere at the FLGS.  Throughout the 1st decade of the 21st century, I played exclusively 3.x D&D and D20 Modern until I went through a life “reorganization” in 2007 and stopped gaming for a few years.  When I started gaming again, I quickly discovered that I had grown out of D&D/D20 or something.  I drifted over to White Wolf’s Storyteller system and found Hunter: The Vigil.  Due to some life challenges lately (including starting to write again), I haven’t gamed in a few months and turned my Hunter game over to one of my players to run.

Since I turned my game over, I’ve gone back to “gaming school” to write my own game and I’ve discovered something else.  The vague, general unease I had been feeling during my return to gaming over the past two years is likely due to another evolution in my gaming preferences.  I wasn’t really able to put a handle on my thoughts until Tuesday night, when I read the piece by Jesse Burneko over at Play Passionately (Thanks go to Jef Godesky for tweeting the link) about the “social risks of story creation.”  That article blew me away.  I’ve been turning it over and over in my mind ever since I first read it.  I knew I needed to not only link to it, but also to write a response to it.

Jesse articulates beautifully what I’ve been thinking, but haven’t been able to quite grasp in a full, coherent manner.  He connected, for me, all the dots I’ve been seeing, but didn’t know how to interpret.  Jesse writes that “a good story must reveal something about the characters as real human beings no matter how fantastical their circumstances.”  He goes on to mention his craving for “emotional intimacy, revelation and resolution that speaks to recognizable human issues.”  This goes beyond the role-playing vs. roll-playing discussion.  This speaks directly to the quality and resonance of the role-playing story creation experience.

Then, he hits the nail on the head and taps it home:

“Since role-playing happens face-to-face getting that kind of emotional resonance requires a degree of honesty, self-reflection and social vulnerability in ways that I think many gamers find uncomfortable.  Indeed I think that a great number of ‘story oriented’ gamers have spent a great deal of time and energy developing techniques that remove that need for vulnerability.  By removing that risk these techniques not only diminish the emotional rewards of story creation but also unintentionally introduce new social tensions and stresses that further complicate the role-playing experience.”

Think about that for a minute.  He is basically saying that some gamers develop a defense mechanism to decrease the social/emotional risks of gaming, which decreases the chances of them receiving the desired outcome of their gaming experience.

Later in the piece, he elaborates:

“Somewhat ironically I believe that such behavior is an attempt to reduce tension.  I have come to the conclusion that many gamers value drama but actually shy away from tension.  By drama I mean emotive character play such as lying, betrayal, threats, grand speeches, mysterious behavior and so forth.  By tension I mean actual trepidation over potential outcomes when characters come into active conflict.  In many ways, it is emotionally safer for a player to manipulate his character into a calculated dramatic failure rather than honestly pushing the character’s agenda with no certainty to how things will resolve.”

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To me, this ties into the basic social insecurities of gamers.  We are not the most socially/emotionally adept creatures ever to grace the face of the earth.  Most of us have passion in spades, which leaves us emotionally vulnerable.  We have also adapted to being slightly outside the circle of conventional social norms.  This means that we’ve developed defense mechanisms to protect us and reduce our vulnerability.  I’ve been at tables where a lack of emotional trust has made navigating the game the role-playing equivalent of whistling through a minefield.  This lack of trust and emotional connection between everyone at the table, and believe me all it takes is one person who has fallen into these patterns to cause the behavior to spread like wildfire around the table, leads into a downward spiral of dramatic one-upsmanship:

“Emotional engagement has ceased to arise from honest connection with the characters and their crises and moved into the social arena where ‘dramatic effect’ is to be owned and delivered to each other with calculated effect.  The behavior often leads to social competition under the guise of co-operation as players begin to ‘one up’ each other for status and recognition over their dramatic contributions.”

I have seen countless hurt feelings and misunderstandings arise from this behavior.  I’m also definitely not innocent in the lack of trust department.  We all share the geek DNA and we all fall into the common geek social traps from time to time, especially if we fail to understand the problem and commit to its solution.  I definitely wasn’t aware of what was happening at the time, but I’ve seen one of the best games I’ve ever run dissolve under the weight of this emotional baggage, where the mechanics “ceased to resolve imagined tension between characters within the fiction and instead… moved to resolving real creative tension among the players.”  The “wrestling match between the players over narrative direction” that Jesse mentions takes over the game.  At that point, neither the players nor the gamemaster is in control.  Instead, the social/emotional tensions are in control of the game and nobody enjoys the end result.

The revelatory part of this piece however, lies in Jesse’s suggested paradigm shift (for me at least, and most players I’ve ever played with) from defining characters based on their abilities and capabilities to defining characters based on their crisis.  He’s right.  Looking at characters based on their abilities and capabilities leads to a “niche-driven spotlight rotation method” that can and often does “lead to immense disappointment and frustration.”  Not only are players disappointed with their share of the “spotlight” time, which is never enough in this system, but they are also disappointed when their character fails at something in which they have invested a great deal of game resources in ensuring that they will succeed.  These failures are directly at odds with how the players have defined their characters, resulting in the necessity for the player to redefine that character.  I’ve also seen the lack of sufficient spotlight time, especially if the character’s capabilities were ill-designed for the story as it evolved, cause a player to have to redefine character.

To this end, Jesse has laid out the deceptively simple solution to a problem that has dogged me for years:

“The key to avoiding this disappointment is to shift focus away from thinking about what the character is supposed to accomplish and start thinking about the character in terms of what crisis he is confronting.  When a player invests in the character’s crisis the paths to satisfaction become less confined.  If my character is defined by his struggle with his religion then any set of events and resolutions which speak to that struggle will be satisfactory.  Maybe he drives his family away with his zealousness.  Maybe he abandons it all together.  Maybe he learns to keep it quiet so he can co-exist with his best friend.  What happens almost doesn’t matter because what the player and the group care about is the character’s struggle with his religion.

That isn’t to say that a character’s approach to that struggle isn’t important.  If part of the character is that he’s willing to shoot someone to back up his religious beliefs then that matters.  In fact, it’s vital.   But saying, ‘This is a guy who’s willing to back up his beliefs with a gun’ is very different from saying, ‘This is a guy who never misses a shot.’  The former raises questions and introduces elements of narrative risk.  Who is he going to shoot?  What happens if he succeeds?  What happens if he fails?  The later introduces a comfort zone in which the character can safely take action without risk to his image or ego.”

BINGO! YAHTZEE!  DING DING DING!!!  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WE HAVE A WINNER!

It seems so simple, yet so revelatory at the same time.  It’s a paradigm shift for most of us, I believe.  Those can be incredibly difficult when we are trying to give up decades of habits, ingrained defense mechanisms and conditioned responses.  He is asking us to think about the game differently.

Ironically, in that game I mentioned earlier that dissolved into social conflict, one of the things I had the players do during character creation was to “build-in” a crisis for the character.  One character was dealing with the aftermath of losing the wife and child he loved so dearly due to alcoholism fueled spousal abuse, the stress of which caused him to make mistakes at his construction job that resulted in the deaths of some of the men under his supervision.  Another character was an actor whose lover died in his arms on the set due to a prop malfunction.  I just failed to utilize these crises fully over the next 18 months of play.  At some point, they took a back seat to the “story” that we were creating.  It didn’t help that we were using D20 Modern, which lends itself to ability defined characters, in my opinion.

So, once we make the shift to crisis-defined characters, the natural question seems to be, “How do I decide what crisis to use?”  Jesse cautions us not to just pick a standard literary conflict, like the stereotypical “religious figure who has issues with his faith.”  He urges us, and I believe this is a key concept especially in a game like the horror game I am working on, to pull “from something that personally frightens you or that you struggle with.”  He gives some excellent examples in the piece itself, which I consider a must read for all tabletop gamers.  This allows the players to “buy in” to the game on a personal, emotional level, which seems to naturally circumvent the emotional guarding that was discussed earlier, ironically by increasing the emotional exposure and vulnerability.

The one caveat here is that this has a chance to fail and that chance can be greatly affected by your group.  If you fear failure and the social risk involved, this will not work.  Not every player can play every type of game, even if they want to be at the table for other reasons.  Everyone has to commit to sinking or swimming together and if the game doesn’t work, moving on to something else.  Jesse’s final paragraph seals it all together for me, so I will leave you to check out this excellent article for yourself.  Hmmm… three links.  Have I recommended it strongly enough yet?

I kind of combined two topics here (and wrote an extremely long post in the process), but I
feel that the evolution of my RPG DNA was a key component of the epiphanies induced by Jesse’s piece.  I definitely feel that I am about to explore some “passionate gaming” at this point in my gaming life.  It is definitely a logical step and coincides with what I am trying to do with the game I’m developing.

So, where are you in your gaming life?  What is your RPG DNA?  Do you “play passionately?”