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Aesthetics of Play: Masquerade

The masquerade aesthetic is an aesthetic of character design, like the cathartic aesthetic. The masquerade playstyle approaches roleplaying as an opportunity for the player to try on new personalities, to be someone that they aren’t. Masquerade play draws its fun from novelty.

Masquerade characters are therefore little like their players, except sometimes in superficial ways. The core of the character — the element around which the character forms — is selected for its very alienness. I, for example, often design impulsive masquerade characters; they make an interesting contrast to the reflective types that are closer to my everyday self.

There can be an escapist dimension to masquerade play; sometimes people design characters as a refuge from parts of themselves of which they’re not so fond.

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Aesthetics of Play: Catharsis

Many players bring an aesthetic that I think of as cathartic play to their relationships with their characters . The cathartic playstyle approaches roleplaying as a venue for players to take risks or indulge impulses in ways that might have unpleasant consequences in real life. The satisfaction of cathartic play is the chance to blow off steam.

Consequently, cathartic characters are often similar to their players, but with certain traits amplified and certain inhibitions muted. In a more extreme form of the aesthetic, these characters may be wholly designed around the traits to be amplified. I’ve known people who used short-tempered characters to work through their anger issues; I like to play impulsive people from time to time as a break from my usual overthinkery.

More commonly, however, a cathartic character is simply a version of the player who kicks more ass and isn’t afraid to be a jerk. This milder form of the aesthetic is extremely popular — at its root, traditional “hack and slash” gaming boils down to “It’s us, but we’re killin’ orcs and takin’ no guff from nobody.”

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The Examined Life: Gumption

I’m taking a moment to mull over some of the concepts I use to think about life and the universe. And because I’m the kind of guy I am, I figure I might as well do it in public, though I realize this is the intellectual equivalent of showing off a half-chewed mouthful of food.

Gumption is a term I picked up from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, though I don’t use it exactly the way Pirsig does.

Gumption is a mysterious psychoemotional quantity which is the prerequisite to accomplishment. It’s the fuel of facing challenges. Doing anything difficult demands gumption; succeeding at something difficult restores it. (I find that this is one reason that projects in limbo drive me up the wall; the gumption spent to do the work is gone, but the payoff of completion is not forthcoming.)

It regenerates over time. A good night’s sleep helps; getting away from the daily grind is better. Pirsig suggests that gumption returns “when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s stale opinions about it”, which sounds about right to me.

Conversely, there are many ways for gumption to bleed away; Pirsig calls them “gumption traps”. Setbacks and frustration are gumption killers. Unexamined assumptions and value rigidity can also be stealthy gumption sinks, making you feel mired without knowing why.

In everyday life, the feeling of being unable to face the task at hand is a symptom of inadequate gumption. Tedium and boredom are warning signs of low gumption. Depression (at least the cognitive variety) is a collapse of the mechanisms by which gumption regenerates.

Gumption is, I think, the conviction that good things can, should, and will happen. Discouragement, disillusionment, and disenchantment are its enemies.

Originally published on LiveJournal
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Ah, internship

So today closes my third week interning at the EFF. (I’m not working tomorrow because I’m going to be taking part in a study at NASA.) Happily, I appear to be wildly exceeding everyone’s expectations and blowing people away with my overdelivery. The downside is that this is largely because my work consists mostly of checking OCRed documents for accuracy and uploading them to a database. For variety, I look at websites and copy addresses into an Excel spreadsheet. It’s mildly novel, but not exactly stretching me to my limits. I suspect I may be the best-qualified buttmonkey they’ve ever had. My supervisors all seem mildly perplexed as to what to do with me.

Alas, these are the wages of my dilettantistic twenties. I’ve done a lot of neat things, and I have a whole lot of interesting (if random) skills, but I’m not really equipped for anything requiring much depth of expertise. I am, to borrow a gaming metaphor, that guy who multiclassed too much and picked feats because they looked neat, and is now feeling a little less than useful in the dungeon.

So, I’m putting in my time now. Besides, training myself to withstand excruciating tedium can only be useful in the next few years.

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Dinosaur Mind

At the Game Developers Conference this year, I went to the Casual Games Summit, which wound up discussing a variety of markets underserved by the hardcore-centric status quo. One of the speakers noted, “People think that games for children have to be so simple. Have you ever looked at Pokemon? I can’t figure all those critters out.”

There’s an interesting issue there about the nature of complexity.  Pokemon is intimidating to the uninitiated — there are several hundred of those little critters, with weird names and subtle distinctions between them.  But it’s not really that *complex*; mechanically, it’s pretty simple (a little baroque, maybe, but not complex). Its complexity lies in the *diversity* of the game assets, and the fact that children can master this complexity is basically the same phenomenon as when six-year-olds memorize every dinosaur of the Jurassic through Cretaceous periods; kids are good at absorbing massive swathes of systematized trivia.

“Dinosaur mind” is a talent that fades for most people over time; I know I find my brain less willing to hold on to information I’m not going to need later, or that I can look up if I need to, as the years go by. Interestingly, I think gamers as a class tend to hang on to their dinosaur minds longer; I can cost out a GURPS 3e character without a book, and I know people who can debate the differences between the spell lists in the first and second editions of AD&D from memory. Probably it’s a matter of practice.

Dinosaur mind has implications for designing games for non-standard audiences. When designing for non-gamer adults, you can assume that your audience can tolerate at least moderate complexity, but not that they’re willing to memorize all sorts of fiddly bits. When designing for children, the opposite is true; it’s probably wise to place the complexity of a children’s game in the data, not the algorithm, to use a computing analogy.

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Reflections on Complexity in Game Design

I’d like to share some personal terms of art I use when talking about game design, because I will probably want to use them in the future, and it would be handy to be able to simply hyperlink to what I mean.

There are three dyads I want to talk about today. The first comprises brittle and robust; these terms discuss the scope of things that a game system can do. A robust system can handle a wide variety of issues and situations without breaking down. The HERO System, for example, is an RPG which places a high value on robustness; the implicit design goal is to be able to handle any concept within the game’s mechanics. Original D&D, conversely, is a brittle system; it’s pretty good for going into dungeons and killing things, but anything outside that scope requires the players to expand the rules somehow. (Arguably, this was a good thing for RPGs as a whole, by demanding large-scale rules innovation and ferment from the get-go, but that’s a different topic.)

The second pair of concepts is simple and complex, which cover, in essence, how much stuff you have to remember or reference in order to play the game. A system in which you have to roll a die and exceed a certain number to succeed is simple; one where you have to roll a die, apply a raft of modifiers, cross-reference with the difficulty of the task on a table, then roll another die, apply a different set of modifiers, and check another table, depending on the results on the first table, is complex. (Some of you may know what I’m talking about here.)

Finally, we have elegant and baroque, which refer to the relationship between the other two quantities. An elegant system has high robustness relative to its complexity; it is no more complex than it needs to be. A baroque system, on the other hand, is more complicated than it needs to be for its expressive power. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; some systems are deliberately baroque in order to convey a certain flavor. Original Deadlands, for example, is extremely baroque, using all the major polyhedral dice, playing cards, and poker chips in its resolution system; some of this baroqueness, however, pays dividends in setting a tone for the game.

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Aesthetics of Play: An Occasional Series

Theorizing about roleplaying poses me a difficult challenge. I’m generally dubious about totalizing theories of playstyle like the GNS scheme or the older Adventurer/Problem-Solver/Roleplayer triad — I think they all tend to highlight real and interesting issues, but they tend toward the Procrustean, trying to cram all game styles into a fairly limited space with questionable success.

On the other hand, I gravitate to stylized categories like a moth to a stroboscopic bonfire. It’s a character flaw. 

The way I’ve decided to wrestle with this particular issue is to keep my theorizing on a lower level, focusing on value clusters that prize particular types of gameplay experience. Borrowing, folding, and spindling a term from the MDA framework, I’m going to call these clusters aesthetics of play. These aesthetics are not intended to be exclusive; multiple aesthetics can be, and usually are, operative for any player at any time. I’m going to try to avoid constructing opposing pairs of aesthetics, as I’ve had limited success with that in the past, but I may present two different approaches to a single issue at one time.

I’m also going to take this opportunity to note some stylistic ground rules. In all Aesthetics of Play essays (and, probably, other future theoretical works), I’m going to be using bold for emphasis. Italics are going to be reserved for introducing terms of art. I’m certain that my choices of terms of art are going to seem questionable to someone at some point; I recommend Jargon and Definitions before writing me snide emails about my choice of terms. You can write the email regardless, but I’m going to ignore anything along the lines of “That’s not what X means!”

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Book Review: Out of the Silent Planet

Recently, I read Out of the Silent Planet, which is the last book of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy that I hadn’t read (though it’s actually the first book). It’s a good book, and I recommend it (primarily for its worldbuilding), but this is going to be one of my reviews wherein I talk relatively little about the book itself.

A lot of people I have known feel somehow betrayed by C.S. Lewis, mostly because of the role of Christian allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia. You’re reading along in a perfectly nice fantasy adventure series, and then one day — maybe years after reading the books — you find out, holy crap! Aslan was Jesus! (I’m sorry if that was a spoiler for anyone. Rosebud was a sled, too.)

I’m not sure if it works the same way in other countries, but I think Christian children’s fiction has really shot itself in the foot in the United States. So many extremely earnest people work so hard to make sure that kids get their regular dose of Jesus that Christian allegory has become the green vegetable of kids’ narrative. Finding out there was spinach in the chocolate cake is … well, disappointing. As if the Establishment put one over on you, the bastards. Hiding Jesus in a fairy tale; it just ain’t right.

I begin to think that this is unfair to Lewis. Reading the Space Trilogy, I realize that Lewis doesn’t write allegory at all. Rather, he writes fantastic stories in settings which include our own world, a world which for him is framed by the existence of the divine. Aslan and Maleldil don’t symbolize Christ; they *are* Christ. And yet, on some level, it doesn’t matter. The books aren’t parables; the stories are meaningful on their own terms. Perelandra isn’t Eden; neither is Narnia. They’re just places which went through similar histories after arising from similar origins.

It’s interesting, in passing, to contrast many modern comic books which rely heavily on Christian mythology, but in which God is a vague and distant presence and Jesus barely figures at all. It’s sort of the Apocalypse Now of the War in Heaven: angels and demons beating the crap out of each other with minimal supervision. It always seemed like sort of a dodge to me to tap the geekish glory of angelological hierarchy while avoiding the cosmology of which that hierarchy is a part. I would totally buy a comic about superheroes in the intertestamental period. (Yeah, I’d probably be the only one, but still, an apostle superteam would so totally kick ass.)

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Modes of political discussion

Elsewhere in LJ-land, I’ve been in a discussion of the plight of conservatives in generally liberal environments such as the one I live in (and, presumably, the plight of liberals in generally conservative environments). I think it may be worthwhile examining the truth that all political discussions are not alike.

Leaving aside political debates where something is actually at stake, there are, I think, two basic modes of political discussion, which I’m tempted to give classy Greek names to, but I can’t find any that work for me.

On the one hand, there are discussions among people who share most of their fundamental values. I’m going to call this the club mode. These discussions tend to focus on elaborating the theory behind a shared policy position, or excoriating some opponent. (On the left, we had a lot of these the first week of November.) This mode doesn’t tend to question people’s beliefs that much, and it’s not supposed to. It’s ritual; it’s comforting and invigorating. This is the mode of so-called “activist” blogs like dKos or Powerline.

On the other, there are discussions among people with diverse and often opposing ideologies. I’ll call this the forum mode. These can be antagonistic or not, depending on the temperaments of the people involved. Discussion tends to be more formal, as you can’t assume very much when constructing your argument, and have to retreat back to more basic principles. Forum-style discussion tends to be more demanding, which is draining for a lot of people.

I think, for most people, a balance is healthy. Too much forum-style discussion, and you start to feel besieged; too much club-style, and your political thinking gets flabby and cultish. (Some people seem to have different political metabolisms; Christopher Hitchens, for example, seems to thrive on all forum-style all the time.)

Thus the singleton’s dilemma. A conservative in the Bay Area has ample opportunity for forum-mode debate; not so much for club-mode. Also, it will get awkward if he happens to be in the room when a bunch of liberals launch into a club-mode discussion. Nobody likes it when their club-style bull session gets hijacked into forum mode, but nobody wants to sit through someone else’s club session.

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Book Review: The Art of the Start

One of the nice bits about the GDC was that I wound up riding BART for 45 minutes every day, which gave me some time to catch up on reading. Not that the mighty backlog of stripped books, using-up-the employee-discount purchases, and holiday loot is anywhere near expunged, but I did manage to get through the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (which I’m not going to talk about except to say that I enjoyed Runaway America more; got to give a shout out to Yale AmStud) and The Art of the Start (which I am).

The Art of the Start is the latest book from Guy Kawasaki, who made his name back in the 80s as a product evangelist for the Macintosh. These days, he writes books and runs a venture capital firm. The book bills itself as “the time-tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone starting anything”. I liked The Macintosh Way a lot; Kawasaki has a knack for drawing expansive lessons from amusing anecdotes, and so I thought I’d give this one a shot.

Alas, the book oversells itself. The entire thing would be useful for someone assembling a startup firm; maybe half of it would be useful to someone starting any sort of organization; the first chapter or so is worth reading in the context of any major project. As I am not establishing an organization, this made it interesting but not terribly useful.

That said, it’s good at doing what it does. His discussion of mantras versus mission statements alone makes it worth reading, and the chapter on pitches is excellent stuff as well. The later chapters are solid but more mundane; it’s possible I’m less enthused simply because they deal with biz dev stuff that’s almost entirely unuseful to me. And then the final chapter is the seemingly obligatory “Oh yeah. Don’t be evil.” section that every business book seems to have these days.

Originally published on LiveJournal