Cloudy, dreary Friday
Reading: I'm making my way through John Adams but during my packing for the weekend, I didn't bring that big lug of a book but chose the more slender Money Shot by Christa Faust instead.
Wearing: I've got this splendid white cotton button down shirt that makes me want to go to a Carribean island so I can wear this shirt while drinking on the beach. Also, clean jeans.
Planning: Going to Aaron's wedding!
Writing: This week was a bust. I'd like to blame the allergies and the xyrtec but that wouldn't be too damned honest.
And you?
</b>
Game Chef Results
The Game Chef results are in, and my game Dulse ended up in second place in the “best game” category. Which makes me really happy! I’m proud of the game and can’t wait to playtest it. Being recognized feels like icing on the cake after a very productive, very positive Game Chef experience this year.
Late Night Bag
The journey this weekend is a joyous one to boot. My buddy, Aaron, is getting hitched to a lovely lady and its a relationship where I had the honor of seeing it born. I get to spend a night in a nice bed and breakfast with Janaki and we'll get all dressed up and foxy.
But an hour ago, I was all pre-trip jitters. It was time for heavy-bag therapy.
My iPod has a playlist with four minute upbeat songs that I use to time out four minute rounds on the bag. Tonight I was working on the 1-2 combo, concentrating on keeping range and really thinking about snapping the jab back.
In between rounds I did a fairly easy three exercise circuit. Six rounds later, any travel stress had evaporated and there was nothing left but sweat, the clean laundry I had dropped in the dryer before starting my bag routine and good pre-trip excitement.
The Middle Ground
I know I gave up forums, but there’s a relative new one called Cultures of Play that Ryan Macklin started. Like the Forge, Story Games, and Knife Fight, it seems really exciting in the beginning, and hopefully it will continue to be so for a while. I think I will try to restrain myself from posting too much, because that’s one of the proven ways to ruin a forum. This is cross-posted from there, though.
Ryan’s been talking about this “Middle Ground” term that he and Leonard Balsera have been discussing. This is me unpacking what that term means to me, because I’m probably coming from somewhere else.
“Middle Ground” is a loaded term for me because of the work of cultural historian Richard White, who uses it in a very specific way in his award-winning 1991 book, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. This book was really significant in changing the way I thought about interpersonal and intercultural communication, though Richard White himself warns that many aspects of the Middle Ground he described are unique to the period he was talking about and may not be accurate when applied universally to other situations.
White’s book is about Native American and European interactions during a specific period of French colonialism in the Great Lakes region. His central argument is that — because neither side had the power to dictate the rules of how the relationship between them could be conducted — they created their own system of interaction through a process of trial and error, a pidgin in-between culture founded on misunderstanding the intentions of the other. For example, the French would do one thing, hoping for a certain kind of reaction from the native peoples, and the native peoples would do something else, maybe in response, maybe totally unrelated, and, over time, this formed a set of rituals, rituals that weren’t things native people or French people would ever normally do, but rituals that only had meaning when certain French and Native American people performed them together. Otherwise, they were meaningless. These rituals were both an artifact of intercultural communication and a method of communicating between the cultures. So, basically, before they could communicate, both sides had to collectively create a system for communicating, basically through misinterpreting what the other side was doing.
(Sounds a lot like roleplaying theory, huh?)
Nicolas Standaert, a Belgian scholar of Chinese Christianity (yeah, I read a lot of weird stuff), also wrote a short booklet on this subject, called Methodology in View of Contact Between Cultures: The China Case in the 17th Century. In it, Standaert talks about the various ways scholars have thought about intercultural communication and how it happens. His first three models are:
1. Focusing on how Western cultures transmit traditions to non-Western cultures.
2. Focusing on how non-Western cultures misinterpret and adapt Western traditions.
3. Focusing on how, in the process of transmitting culture, Western cultures also transmit their false understandings of non-Western cultures (Said’s Orientalism being the classic example of this kind of model).
Standaert’s fourth model is something like Richard White’s “middle ground.” He says that this last model focuses on how different cultures come together to create something new as a result of their interactions, something neither of them could have created on their own.
Speaking more generally, not about White or Standaert’s specific thoughts, I think this way of thinking about intercultural communication has many direct ties to what happens in roleplaying, the communication between players that creates something new, often through a process of misunderstanding. It’s also interesting that White’s model specifically posits that this only happens when one side cannot dictate the rules for interaction or overwhelm the other. It only happens when there is a negotiation that occurs because of relative parity. There’s more than a few lessons there, I think, speaking to some of what’s underlying the “player empowerment” that’s often mentioned in relation to small press games.
Playing With A Five Year Old
Last week my brother brought his five year old, my nephew, over to say hello before game night. He stuck around for a few minutes and we sort of explained what it is we do. He rolled some dice. We promised to run a game for him this week, which we did. I came over early and I so wish we’d recorded it. I started by asking him what he was into. Star Wars and Harry Potter. I know Star Wars so we went with that. Who is his favorite character? Luke! Who is Luke’s best friend? R2D2! My brother played R2D2. Who is Luke’s enemy? This stumped him, because, as a student of the films, he knew that Darth Vader wasn’t really Luke’s enemy. Finally it came out - The Evil Empire! After some linguistic confusion, I finally understood that he was talking about The Emperor, who he called the Evil Empire, so I set up Luke Skywalker vs. The Evil Empire. I gave him choices, we rolled dice, there was a rock monster and a mosquito man village, I experimented with stance a bit to see where he was at (he preferred to speak as Luke, but broke out to talk to me for clarification on stuff he wasn’t sure about). We explained that while he didn’t understand my brother’s plaintive beeps and boops, Luke did, and he should tell us what R2D2 was trying to tell him. He exhibited true gamer bloodlust:
ME: OK, you’ve made it to the secret door to the Evil Empire’s inner chamber. What do you want to do?
HIM: Does my light saber have a way to be silent?
ME: Yes!
HIM: OK, I use my silent saber to cut through the door and surprise him!
ME: Awesome! It works! You caught him by surprise! What do you do?
HIM: I take out my blaster and shoot him in the back!
So it was fun, and the little guy was positively vibrating with excitement, which was very satisfying.
Indie Games and Distributed Play, with some comments on Game Chef
The results for Game Chef will be announced tomorrow - assuming that the judges don’t have to push it back again. I’m quite happy with how Acts of Creation turned out - as a strategy game, it really clicks for me. The roleplaying aspect is a bit more understated, but that seems to be a design hurdle that I need to jump over. DEAD has the same issue: The game flows very well now that I’ve refined the shit out of it. The real question now is how to re-integrate the roleplaying aspects into the game.
Why?
Well, first of all I have a sort of Holy Grail that I’m shooting for, here. I really believe that the gap between the play of board and card games, particularly many of the eurogames, is not all that big, and that the integration of roleplaying into these games is not much more difficult than the integration of the mechanical variety of boardgames to RPGs.
Ancillary to that is the fact that I’m relatively bored with indie systems these days. While there are exciting things being done all the time thematically, and in terms of genre-bending, the mechanical richness of the indie set is lacking. A lot of the mechanics lately seem to boil down to fancy footwork to cover the fact that you’re really rolling another die. While this helps in terms of creating a narrative, these systems lack any real strategic or tactical depth.
I’m trying to mine boardgames and their components for new and mechanically interesting while still bringing the story home. I’ve gotten a lot more done with the first part, and I’m working hard on the second part.
One of the things I’ve talked about on here is the idea of Distributed Play - the idea that toys (or in our present discussion, game components) carry with them inherent mechanical options that aren’t suggested by others. For instance, if you play a game with a small set of cards marked 1-6, you could theoretically replace a six-sided die with the cards. However, the physical aspect of the cards allows for options that dice don’t have: they can be sorted, stacked, turned (’tapped’), flipped and marked - all things that dice don’t do as easily or as well. These properties give a stack of six cards a different set of gameplay possibilities than a a similar number of dice.
The importance of this can’t be overstated - points and aspects and attributes are fine and well. But when their net effect is to simply add +1 to a number, the mechanical flora of games starts to pale.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
