Deus Ex Machinatio

Of Writing and Rabbits

Some random musing from me on IM this evening, and with thanks to Naomi Alderman, who first made the magic trick analogy and let me run with it:

Well, and you know, you're right, that writing is something of a magic trick

You're pulling a rabbit out of a hat each time you sit down

And sometimes you know how the trick is done and you already knew you'd put the rabbit there

And sometimes you pull out a squirrel instead and it surprises you as much as anyone

But there's always SOMETHING in the hat, if you go through the motions of pulling something out of it

GDAM: Single Play Sessions

I've submitted the topic for this month's, well, Game Design Aspect of the Month. Allow me to quote myself from the GDAM blog:

Games are designed with the understanding that each player needs to meet some requirements to get the best play experience. Hardware specifications and age or maturity level, for example, are even listed on the box. But game design also makes implicit assumptions about a less obvious requirement – the time commitment we ask from our players each time they sit down to play.

This is an interesting topic, I think, from both a traditional game design point of view and from a pervasive/transmedia point of view. Like the sand of time, the social contract between a player and a designer is always shifting. 

GDAM is now actively soliciting contributions talking about this topic, and I'd really love to hear what all of you smart people have to say. If you have an opinion or theory on the matter, why don't you write it down and submit it?

Some Things I've Learned About ARG Design

In no particular order. Design goals, best practices, aesthetic principles. Some things I find myself striving toward, talking about, doing. It's categorically untrue that I always do all of these things, of course. But maybe you can see what I'm reaching toward.

Feel free to add, elaborate, or dispute in comments.

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Content is a reward. Make sure the content you provide is worth the effort you're rewarding. Even an autoresponder should be worth the time it takes to read it. 

Never, never let effort go unrewarded, even if the effort isn't what you expected or wanted. 

That said, don't excessively reward players heading in the wrong direction -- the volume with which you respond is an indication as to whether they're barking up the wrong tree. 

Each discrete piece of your game should be independently entertaining in its own right, even if the player never sees another piece of it. 

If you want to make a game for a mass audience, there should be something for every level of involvement, if possible, and for as many kinds of players as you can manage: explorers, achievers, socializers, killers; more than just spectators, speculators and solvers. Read up on Dr. Bartle. 

Try to make an experience that would make sense even to a single player who is too shy or otherwise unmotivated to find or join a community. 

Be aware of trolls. Consider interactive elements of your design from the perspective of somebody who has the most fun when defecating into somebody else's swimming pool. 

Reference new content streams from within a known-in-game source as soon after discovery as possible. Once firmly established, this habit both supports the players' effort by acknowledging it and helps to prevent gamejacking. 

Again, for a large-scale game, whenever possible, keep all communication in the open. Do as little as possible through private IM and email. This scales much better and will save you time and headaches. 

Consider structure. Completely open-ended games can lose players who miss a road sign and get lost. Structure can mean a guide through the experience (often a cute brunette girl). It can mean a central website acting as a story clearinghouse. Just make sure players know where to look, and when, rather than guessing.

Make sure it's obvious to your players what their current goal is. Uncertainty isn't that much fun. 

Use your structure to provide clear calls to action from time to time. It's helpful to get everybody on the same page now and again. 

Provide rolling recaps. This serves two purposes: It allows existing players to attend to an urgency (vacation, term paper, conference) without risk of losing the thread of the story. It also allows new players a simple way to jump in, even late in the game. 

Value your players' time and attention as much as they do. Don't release a lot of content solely for the sake of having a lot of content; don't create a lot of puzzles solely for the sake of having a lot of puzzles. It's surprisingly easy to overwhelm players with more information than they can process at once. 

Manage expectations carefully. Don't commit yourself to a volume of content you can't realistically do, like live IM around the clock, or fifteen updates every single day. 

The players will generally care less about plausibility than you do. Still, you need to put in the footwork on the motivations and actions of your cast. Make sure you understand how all of the parts of your game fit together, or the gears will grind instead of spinning. 

Never let realism get in the way of fun.

Heroes Week: Merlin Mann

Once upon a time, Merlin Mann was a slinger of productivity porn. His website 43 Folders was a mecca for idle eyes looking for the latest and greatest in aspirational geekware. He sang the praises of the Hipster PDA, the DIY pocket planner, the Moleskine, Quicksilver, GTD, kGTD, the now-defunct Stikkit, and much, much more. It was a fantastic, shiny way to imagine yourself as a doer with a rock-solid tasklist and a squeaky-clean inbox. (Even if you weren't.)

And don't get me wrong: It was awesome and I read it. But that's not enough to make him one of my creative heroes.

Then, sometime last year, Merlin had something of an epiphany and stopped writing about all of that stuff for a while. When he emerged from his months-long radio silence, he wrote a lovely essay on how he'd been blind but now he could see. The problem is this: Reading about all of that shiny stuff -- software, business books and office supplies, basically -- is not productive. It's the opposite of productive -- in fact, a killer way to keep yourself from doing productive things. So now he's become a prophet, speaking the holy words we all need to hear:

Doing stuff is way better than reading about doing stuff.

I don't know about you, but that's a message I need kicked into my head. And not once, but over and over and over again. So I read the Mann, and I am reminded: Andrea, you are only doing actual work when you're actually creating something. And while some thinking, planning and research may be necessary for you to create, don't for a second confuse those things with actual working, because they're just not the same thing. At the end of the day, no matter how many cool apps and calendar hacks and email foldering strategies you've got, you still have to do the work to get it done.

That bears repeating: The only way to get work done is by working.

So now Merlin's posting again, a bit sporadically, perhaps. And each time he does, there's a new subtext to it: This is how Twyla Tharp or Ze Frank get on with just trying to make their best stuff. This is the point. Aspiration without action is completely worthless.

I don't want to be Merlin when I grow up, so he's not in quite the same category as my other People I Admire. I'm not sure the internet could handle more than one of him anyway. But his work is actively trying to help people like me become what it is they want to be when they grow up, and hot damn if that isn't intensely admirable.

Heroes Week: Roger Zelazny

I missed yesterday's entry in my self-declared People I Admire Week (more deftly called Heroes Week by my pal Tom Bridge). Sorry about that, folks; much of my life was temporarily disrupted over an amusing vignette involving my husband, a side-impact airbag, and a little old lady in a Chrysler Sebring*.

There's also a Facebook group for like minds now; please play along!

But enough meta-level stuff, let's get to the point, shall we? My next personal creative hero is Roger Zelazny. This one requires a bit of exposition first, so please bear with me.

When I was growing up, everybody was always telling me how I should grow up to be a writer. Teachers, relatives, friends. Me? I never really thought about it one way or the other, to be honest. And sure, I knew how to string words together to make my point in an essay, and I spent more than one summer writing incredibly embarrassing adolescent ElfQuest fanfic with and for a close friend, but I never had that moment when lightning strikes and you think: "THAT. That is what I want to be doing." It was my path of least resistance, and like any good electron, I went along for the ride. There was no element of volition for me.

I did have a different sort of moment, though, one sultry Florida summer when I was dawdling in the bath and reading a book, as was my habit. My mom had an occasional subscription to the Science Fiction Book Club, and this time around I was reading a book of short stories I'd read a few years before -- probably closer to when it came out. At the time I'd been too young to get the most out of it, but old enough to know bits of it were passing me by.

So there I was, maybe 13 or 14 years old, bored, wet, re-reading a book of shorts by Roger Zelazny. Unicorn Variations, to be precise. There's a story in it called Recital. The first time I found it... kind of dull, really. Excessively sentimental, and rough-hewn, not like the stuff I was used to reading at all. Recital starts in present tense, describing an older woman singing at a microphone. Then came my lightning bolt, starting in the second paragraph:

Let's call her Mary. I don't know that much about her yet, and the name has just occurred to me. I'm Roger Z., and I'm doing all of this on the spot, rather than in the standard smooth and clean fashion. This is because I want to watch it happen and find things out along the way.

So Mary is a character and this is a story, and I know that she is over the hill and fairly sick. I try to look through her eyes now and discover that I cannot. It occurs to me that she is probably blind and that the great hall in which she is singing is empty.

Why? And what is the matter with her eyes?

Were you struck by the bolt, too? Do you understand what happened to me?

Probably no. There are as many paths to enlightenment as there are people, yes? But there, explicitly there in the story, I saw something I'd never noticed before, something crucial to anyone who wants to make stuff up for a living. I saw a creative process in action. My bolt wasn't so much "I want to do THAT." No, it was more like "Oh, THAT'S how you do it!"

I did a lot of writing in school. I even did a lot of creative writing, equal measures tepid stories and vapid poetry. But it had honestly never occurred to me that you could make it up as you go along, so to speak. I thought the way to write a story was:

1. Think up an idea
2. Write it down
3. Hand it in for your grade

This three-step process is sometimes still there in the back of my brain, and frankly, it's a terrible model. (Or for me it is, anyway.) I find some of my most magnificent ideas, some of my most subtle touches, they come when I work and let the ideas come from the mystic place where they spawn and swim down through my fingers without interference from that no-good meddlesome brain. And beyond that: "Think up an idea" is so huge, so intimidating, that if you wait on that step before starting to write, why, you might never write anything at all!

And here Zelazny published a rough-hewn bit of work -- he even says it's not "the standard smooth and clean fashion" -- and puts it out there where readers like me could see the raw process and have a revelation. So I admire Roger Zelazny, not just for being an amazing wordsmith and reputedly a magnificent human being, but for taking creative risks and pushing the envelope even after achieving recognition as a celebrated author.

Thanks, Roger, wherever you are now. I wish I could have met you.

Speaking of Creative Heroes...

I'm developing something of a wicked girl-crush on Amanda Palmer. It started with the ukelele Creep performance, which is mind-blowingly effective.

Now look, I've been spending a lot of time in a cave making games lo these past several months, and even before that, let's face it, I'm just not hip to the cool kids and their music the way I used to be. Scratch that: I've never really been hip to the cool kids and their music. So I didn't know much of anything about Amanda Palmer before now.

But that ukelele and that low, lovely voice and, most of all, the incredible creative vision that led her to put the whole performance together tickled me in the "you're seeing something special" sense, so I've been looking around a little more.

What I've found is someone to admire. Someone who pursues her craft with abandon and without fear, stays true to her creative vision, and keeps strong her principles. Seriously, check out the Chogyam Trungpa quote on her MySpace page and try to tell me that isn't the most awesomest thing ever with a straight face. You won't be able to.

Damn, I want to be Amanda Palmer when I grow up, too. I'd better get cracking on that, huh?

Voices Readers, Please Weigh In

It's been over a month -- nearly two! -- since I launched Voices, and I wanted to take a moment to step back and look at what I'm doing and where I'm going. I'd also like to ask a few questions of those of you who are reading and taking part -- and those of you who aren't.

When I first planned Voices, I'd hoped to be able to update every day. (Hah!) Then I delayed updating, both because I'm chronically overscheduled, but also because I wanted to give more people a longer window to participate. I've generally fallen into an update schedule of once or twice a week.

So... how is that working for people? Is it enough to maintain momentum? Is more better? How would anyone feel if I went to a regular schedule of, oh, call it once a week on Wednesdays? Would such a small trickle of story be insufficient to maintain your interest? Or is my paltry volume already keeping you from keeping up?

If you haven't been keeping up so far, or have been reading but not talking, is anything in particular keeping you away? I adore and admire the participants I have already, but some of the fun things I have in my bag if tricks won't really work without a somewhat higher threshold for participation.

And while we're all here, are there any questions you have about the project and what I'm trying to do? If you want to tell me the whole thing blows and I'm full of myself, hey, now's your chance!

Let Me Hear Your Voices

Some of you may remember me tweeting about the need for a private wiki for a Sekrit Project several weeks ago. (And I got a wonderful avalanche of volunteers, too. Thanks again!) 

Now I'd like to introduce that project: Voices. 

As it stands now, Voices is the seed of an exploration of narrative in the wiki format, and I hope to include elements of collaboration and branching storytelling as it goes forward. But to do that... I need your help. 

The structure of Voices is two-tiered. There are content pages, which only I can edit, and discussion pages, which can be edited by anyone with a user account. (I apologize for the need for a user account, but a stunning volume of pharmacological spam in the planning phases for Voices made that necessary.) The story will grow slowly over time, in response to the participation of, well, YOU. So we'll be making this thing together, you and me. Teamwork.

I've also included a page for donations to CARE, a reputable non-profit organization, and I'm hoping to raise a respectable amount of money for them. 

Obviously this won't be a successful project if I can't get anybody to come play with me. It should be fun, and it's all in a good cause, so go and raise your Voices right now. Tell a friend, email your buddies, Digg it, spread the word however you know how. Let's see where this thing can go!

Circular Logic

I've been inspired by projects like the Six to Start We Tell Stories project and of course Loose-Fish. So I've been musing about pushing the boundaries of the art in search of that elusive net-native literature.

Along the way, I happened across a short story idea and put it into iCal, and from thence into a Google Calendar. And here, my friends, I present that little twiddle to you:

This is obviously not so different from the epistolary narrative format we've all seen before, in a slightly novel application. Do let me know how you like it!

Updated 9:10pm: For some reason the calendar is clipping the last event. Working on it right now.

Updated 9:35pm: Can't get it to display my 11th event so I gave up and rewrote around the bug. Ahhh, technology, don't you love it! If you're having trouble getting the calendar to render any dates, click through to the public calendar and then change the display mode to 'Week', this is the only way I've found to get, ex., Safari to render accurately. Also, if you're unfamiliar with the Google Calendar format, be sure to... well... click on the events.

A social experiment

I've grown bored with cool, hot, awesome, fabulous, and all of their ilk. I have therefore decided to begin a quest to popularize a new word with the same general meaning. That word is:

Dynamic.

Join me, brothers and sisters, in this quiet effort to consciously change language or at least have fun trying. If we succeed, our glory wlll be openly dynamic, and if we don't, well, at least we'll all know we're dynamic for trying to change the world, in our own small way.