[AE.Writing, AE.Gamedev] Writing as play, play as writing.
If you've been wondering why I'm so preoccupied with play as a concept right now, it's a confluence of two things: my ongoing attempt to recapture some youthful creative energy in my fiction writing, and my documented tendency to fall back into my gamemaking hobby when it feels like things in "real life" (mine personally or the world generally) are spiraling hopelessly out of control.
And the world... she is a-spiraling right now, to be sure.
But it's very timely, that I feel pulled into gamemaking at a moment when I'm also picking apart my writing skills and trying to put them together in new contexts and configurations, in a way that I think is ultimately beneficial to both of these related skill sets. It's helping me to figure things out that I might otherwise have continued to miss.
Like... my fiction projects tend to be most successful in terms of my ability to, you know, write them, and write them on or ideally ahead of a schedule, and feel enough hype and pride about them that I can promote them very early on, and during those time periods I might build up tens of thousands of words of story and even more notes on the characters and worlds, but that kind of focus is not sustainable and I don't know how to keep the project or story going when the fruits of the initial manic focus wears out.
I've known this about myself and I had thought about it a lot since I started ADHD meds, as that seemed like a potential catalyst for finding a more sustainable model for creativity... but I haven't found a way forward there.
But thinking about tabletop roleplaying games and computer games and what draws me into them... well, I mentioned this earlier, that nothing sparks my imagination in a game quite like an extensive catalogue of options I can page through. There are roleplaying games I've never played and don't necessarily want to, but whose manuals I keep handy to crack open for an easy and rewarding flight of fancy.
And it occurred to me after I wrote about that yesterday that maybe the thing that characterizes the early, fun, successful parts of my writing projects isn't some kind of vaguely defined lightning-strike of inspiration that I can't capture in a bottle, and maybe it isn't manic hyperfocus so much as a thing that results from manic hyperfocus, and that is: a well-stocked catalogue of toys for the toychest of my mind.
The serialized or semi-serialized writing projects I maintained the longest over my career as a crowdfunded web author both started with me coming up with an extensive list of characters and concepts -- many of whom were variations on characters or ideas I'd found in the pages of a roleplaying game -- and then basically spinning out a series of scenarios involving these characters.
Now, I don't at this juncture know if the point I can feel myself groping towards in my meandering meditations on the relationship between play and creativity are true, if it's in fact the case that the lightning I've been trying to bottle is to treat my writing more like I've dragged a toy box into a sandbox and go to town with them... if starting every writing project by writing a story bible in the form of "here's some cool stuff to play with on the page" will make a positive difference in my literary life... but it seems like it's worth exploring, so I have been exploring it.
And at the same time, thinking about the nature of play in terms of something that isn't a game meant to be played with or by other people is helping me rethink some of my ideas about tabletop roleplaying games... or maybe more accurately, get over the hangups I still have from ideas I have consciously rejected.
I think I did a newsletter recently on dividing my gamemaking efforts into different hats, mainly Designer and Developer. It turns out there's another hat hanging around the hatroom, though, which we might call the Catastrophizer.
The Catastrophizer is the one who thinks I need to put guard rails and fences and gates into the system of any game I design, in order to stop players from playing it in a way that not only is not intended, but which could ruin the game for others.
As an example: imagine I describe a character weapon ability option in a game as Far Too Many Knives with a definition that amounts to "You carry so many knives that your supply over the course of an adventure is effectively unlimited. If you think you've run out of knives, you can immediately find another one, and even in situations in which you would reasonably not have any knives, you can produce or acquire one whenever you need it."
In the kind of game I'm interested in making and playing, that's really all the definition that is needed.
The Catastrophizer, though, is there to tell me that we know from experience that a lot of players will read that, scoff and say "So if I have to cross a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon, I could just dump infinite knives into it and then lay a rug across it? You can't say I couldn't do that because this ability says I always have another knife." and to insist that the only way to head this off is to either make the wording of the trait more complicated to explicitly limit the number of knives or head off such uses, or to write instructions for how to interpret such abilities in a way that makes it clear that this is off-limits.
In theory... I shouldn't care about that hypothetical objection rattling around in my brain, because the theory I'm consciously operating under is that there's neither any need nor any point in trying to design a game to be airtight against people who refuse to engage with its premises in the first place.
A person who can't wrap their head around "this character always has more knives" as an ability probably is choosing not to wrap their head around it, because they'd rather be playing a different game. And there are in fact several games out there that are different games from the one I'm trying to make, so I can refrain from accommodating this person with a clear conscience.
But embracing this theory intellectually hasn't ever silenced the Catastrophizer.
What has worked is defusing the catastrophe; changing my perspective from seeing "What if I want to use my effectively infinite knives in these cartoonisly unrealistic ways?" as being not my problem to solve to deciding it's not, in fact, a problem at all.
If a player somewhere actually wants to play a wielder of Far Too Many Knives as a walking cartoon... maybe that will be fun for them and the people they're playing with.
And if they don't actually want to play that character because they can't get past the potential for it spiraling into such loonatoonacy... well, then they won't.
Either way, it's not a problem.
And the way I get there is by thinking of the option as a toy I'm putting into a package of toys, which people will play with in whatever way strikes them as fun, in the service of whatever kind of story they might want to make up.
It might not be anything like a story I would have made up given the same parts, but that is the point of putting such toys out there in the world, isn't it? To see what other people can make of them.