I’m reading some great bad fiction. In fact I was up until almost 4am reading fiction that I am almost embarrassed to admit I was reading. But I’ve often said that bad fiction makes great games and great fiction makes bad games and so maybe I can call it research. Maybe I can even write it off next tax day. Maybe I just adore some bad fiction even though I am not necessarily enriched by it. Being a game designer (of sorts), however, and feeling as I do about the relationship between fiction and game, maybe I am part of a small sector that’s even enriched by it. Lucky me!

Anyway, the book I finished is part of a long line of books (one of which was made into an awful movie — not just “bad” but also not enjoyable) with a character that epitomises another pet idea of mine, the competence myth.

The competence myth is the story about the guy (it’s almost always a guy still) who gets it right. A lot. And who, on the way from troubling inconsistency to successful resolution (usually through violence), faces the betrayal and incompetence of his supposed peers as his chief obstacle en route to success. He has no peers. He is the best.

This story form is pretty familiar. Dirty Harry is a great example. There are all kinds of things wrong with Harry Calahan. He’s a bastard. He doesn’t play by the rules. He makes the department look bad. Sometimes he even makes choices that are, strictly speaking, illegal, and that’s not so good when you’re a cop. He probably drinks too much. But he has his code, which the fiction of the samurai (though in North America they were called gunfighters) would find consistent: do your duty. Do it well. See it through. Even when the chief of police doesn’t like your methods and the D.A. won’t touch your case because you didn’t have a warrant and you’re suspended and have to leave your gun and badge at the desk, you go home to the old .45 under the bed and get down to business. And at the end of the day, you solve the problem so well that no one looks too closely at how you got from A to B. Your critics are silenced, one way or another. The incompetent fall by the wayside. You probably don’t get the girl.

Today the computer geek is a new kind of gunfighter in this same sense. This is the same myth we see for ourselves, facing down the unnecessary bureaucracy and control, battling “reviewers” who don’t know C++ a fraction as well as we do, doing things “right” rather than “correct”. It’s the same sort of story we see ourselves starring in, it’s just less violent. And so we identify — the hero of the competence myth is not just someone we want to be, he’s someone we think we are. Oh sure, we admit we’re not that good, but the story parallels with our lives are just too close. Maybe we are kind of the same.

The hook for this particular character, in the book I just finished, is that he’s one step more. He is not just the best but he’s older (father figure alarms) and he’s quiet and he doesn’t like pretty much anyone. Except those he sees as competent or at least aware of their failings, which is a kind of competence. Now, see how this sneaks up on you? He’s not just a guy you hope you are or might be. He’s a guy you want to like you.

Seriously. When you read about him shrugging off some loser with stupid questions about his field of expertise or sneering at someone using the latest and greatest gizmo to compensate for a lack of skill, you don’t just think “yeah what a loser” but you also run through the scenario in your mind with you as the loser. Except you’re not a loser. You know what gear to choose that would impress Mr. Swagger. You know just the right thing to say to make him nod grimly and respectfully. You know how to act so that he’ll like you.

You’re in love with this guy. He’s a fictional character and you are dreaming up ways to please him. Maybe that’s partly because he’s your father (maybe not the father you have, but certainly an idealised father — fair, wise, capable, duty-bound, honourable — basically my father, certainly, but maybe the one you wished you had if you weren’t so lucky) and partly because he’s both a goal for you and a self-image. He’s who you want to be, he’s who you think you are, and he’s a man you want to like you. To respect you even. To confirm your membership in that club.

This book (the whole series, really) has a lot of flaws in it, but the one thing it does, for me at least is hook you right through the cheek with adoration for the character.

Oh and every single action scene would be a great moment at the gaming table, and I know just how the dice fell in whatever system I’m fiddling with at the time.

–BMurray

So I’m reading some science-fiction because it seems like, as an author of Diaspora, I ought to have a better handle on the genre than I do. Maybe not, though. Anyway, I was out of reading material and surfed for some classic Asimov for my Kindle and realised I hadn’t read his Foundation trilogy in a very long time indeed. Click click.

There is a structure to the early part of the first book (and maybe to the whole thing — I can’t recall and I’m not finished yet) that startled me. The pattern is one that would righteously suck in a game, which reinforces my instinct that games and fiction are completely separate beasts. The narrative proceeds roughly like so:

1. The previous conflict resolution is presented (usually as dialogue) as a past event.¹
2. An amusing character is introduced.
3. A conflict is hinted at.
4. The conflict is revealed.

We don’t seem to ever participate directly in the conflict resolution! We only get to see it as described from a future time. There is no truth about the resolution, because we aren’t in the moment — there is only interpretation of it. This is awesome! This is a really interesting structure and one that reinforces the meta-story — this book is about pre-interpretation of history and therefore in some ways about interpretation. Having major conflicts described after the fact through interpretation is brilliant — the reader is always in the position of historian, in a sense, reviewing the past with the characters in an analytical fashion rather than participating in gunfights.

I don’t think you want to do this in a game. I think you can, but I don’t think you want to. Where there’s an itch for it you already do it, but not exclusively — that is, we participate in gunfights and we can (and often do) review them in post-game chatter, inter-game write-ups and reports, and pre-game summaries. What is highlighted for me, though, having discovered that Foundation is great fun even though it lacks the game altogether, is that these three aspects of extra-game gaming (pre- inter- and post-) are really important parts of the fun I have.

So this sort of explains why in Diaspora we formalized the pre-game summary (we have a whole Refresh “phase” in which players resolve all pre-game data like getting more fate points, resolving consequences stuff, making maintenance rolls, changing character information, and summarizing the previous session). But it also points to two more areas that might bear formalizing, or at least discussing in a new game. What happens outside the first person play is all potentially important and fun.

So thanks, Isaac.

–BMurray

Fred Hicks asked if I’d talk a little about the role of the micro-fiction in Diaspora and so I will.

First let’s be totally above-the-table here. I’m going to talk as though what we got is what we intended and as though what it does is what we wanted it to do. This is a habit of speech with me. The reality is that we were working through the creation of the text from a starting point of no idea to an end point of refining stuff that happened in the middle. There wasn’t a template for what we built until very late in the game. But I will analyze what I think the micro-fiction does because I think it was our target, it just wasn’t our clearly stated and totally deliberate target. In future it will be more deliberate because I think it works.

Zoom out and step back. I have heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I’ve read a lot of great books, though, that don’t need illustrations and so I’m tempted to believe that a well chosen thousand words is better than any picture in some contexts. I am motivated to deliver, at work and at play, as much as possible in text before resorting to illustrations because I think that illustrations should, well, illustrate the point. That is, they are ancillary to it. Augmentation. A nudge because sometimes the words are complex when delivering a complex idea. A picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s not clear to me that pictures replace a thousand words.

Zooming in now. When we started building Diaspora artwork was not in the plan. Illustration is, however, essential for delivering context to a game and it’s also essential for delivering enthusiasm. So I think early on we felt instinctively the need to inject context with little blurbs of fiction. These are our proto-illustrations of what happens to characters inside a Diaspora game. It partly works because people are used to receiving science-fiction in text anyway — my favourite authors never needed any, to my recollection, and yet I have great pictures in my head of ringworlds and monoliths and starfaring museums. So I can send you pictures without drawing any, which is a boon with four writers and no artists on the project.

So the micro-fiction in Diaspora followed an illustrative pattern: small images that don’t eat a ton of space and attention, but draw out what’s cool about the immediate text. Where possible they came from actual play because, frankly, if contextual imagery wasn’t coming from play then there wasn’t enough playtesting. Later we would make some up from whole cloth, but by that time we had a pretty good idea that what we imagined about play would be true — we had a couple of years of experience by then.

Eventually we realised what we were doing and established some rules for the micro-fiction: there would be some for every chapter and most sections. It would be short — less than a page except in two special cases. It would come from actual play if possible but would always come plausibly from actual play. It would deliver some emotional impact — it would be cool as well as instructional. It would introduce jargon in context so that players knew how to talk cool in the game, or at least would know how to imagine talking cool. And it would introduce a little wonder. A little awe. Because those things are part of what the game needs to deliver in this genre, and so it’s nice to get a little sent your way while reading it too.

We also knew what we didn’t want. We didn’t want to deliver a whole setting, so some of the fiction is inconsistent because you (we for sure) might play several separate campaigns and things might be inconsistent and that’s just fine. It’s awesome, even. So embedded in that fiction is some permission.

We didn’t want a lot of fiction and we didn’t want whole stories. Stories are not illustration. They are more demonstration. We wanted to augment the text and not interrupt it. But we did want the voice of each author, and so we solicited material from everyone for the fiction and we got enough that we could cull some out and only take the best or at least best-suited. Being short, it was something each author had time and skills to produce effectively because it drew mostly on their experience of the game itself.

There are two long pieces in Diaspora, though, and they frame the whole text. The first is the story of Lawrence, a person who lives somewhere wondrous and lethal and certainly not a place where humans evolved. It actually started as a short story for a different purpose but I suck at writing short stories, so instead it lies with no story but as a study of character and place intended to deliver the wonder I talked about before and the alien and, maybe most importantly, the commonplace: Lawrence lives somewhere incredible and does incredible things but he’s still just this guy, with his little place in a huge universe. He could be you. He is the extreme of the “blue collar space” concept — the guy who’s just a farmer but who farms alien life at night because during the day the sun will kill you. An ordinary man in an extraordinary place, which I think is clearly what we want players to be too. Maybe not always characters, but always players.

The second long piece is a real story, the one about Dave and the slipknot discovery. Again, it’s an ordinary guy in an extraordinary place, though this one (written by Toph and not me) shows an ordinary place becoming extraordinary. Without making Dave a superman. Or anyone else. Not even the high tech aliens that change everything are supermen. Everywhere you look in Diaspora, it’s just folks. Sure, they often wield extraordinary things at extraordinary scales, but you could still share a beer with them and they still go to the bathroom and worry about their kids.

So that’s the story of the micro-fiction in our game. We wanted to illustrate without drawing and as our source material was text, we felt text could do the job on several axes: show the system, show the “setting”, and deliver a little wonder in a small package. I think if anyone wanted to know in future what Diaspora was “about”, they could do worse than to borrow someone’s copy and read, at random, the stuff in italics.

–BMurray

P.S. Thanks Fred — in writing this I was forced to go back to my copy and read some of the fiction there. It does deliver, as you say, and that’s something I didn’t really get a chance to appreciate while it was going through the chores of being written.

I cry in movies. Ask Jack — I invest so heavily in fiction, whether written or film, that I’ll cry whenever my buttons are pushed. Some commercials make me tear up.

The thing is, I cry at bad fiction. Not only and not mostly, maybe, but I certainly cry when I read or watch some parts of some fiction that is really not especially well crafted. It’s just very easy for me to invest in human interactions adequately represented. This is especially funny for others when we are watching, say, Planet of the Apes. I can’t believe they blew it up either!

So if I’m emotionally invested, how is that fiction “bad” in any interesting sense? Well, I really dislike the idea that anything that entertains you is somehow “good” or maybe “good enough”. I love entertainment and sometimes something light and shallow is what I want. Sometimes I want a quart of scotch, too. Or a gallon of ice cream. But I have to decide whether that’s really how I want to spend my time and energy.

And sometimes it is, and that’s because I invest. If I didn’t invest, bad fiction would be worse than bad, it would be dreary. And to be honest, a lot of fiction is dreary to me — it doesn’t sell me its characters and consequently, no matter how pretty, I am not transported. I don’t care. So that’s maybe the extreme case — bad, bad fiction.

Good fiction is a different beast. I don’t read it as fast and I might not even find myself invested. But at a level above emotional identification, I feel personally improved. I have learned something and often I have been inspired to make something. While reading Solzhenitsyn I got a blog post a day — my brain was on all the time. It felt great.

The past week or so I’ve been reading some less good fiction. A new Jack McDevitt novel (I cried at the end — what a sucker!) that was fun and now a Stephen Hunter novel that is even more compelling (and I already cried once while reading on the bus — very embarrassing) are being ingested. But the output — the amount of read content that gets converted into interesting thought and (maybe) interesting writing — is low. I write about television. I am not thinking as hard generally and that’s a little depressing.

On the other hand, that bad fiction is generating game ideas, and that’s cool. I have always suspected there was a relationship, and I am not dissuaded since this experiment started. Moorcock and Moebius are driving my thoughts about Soft Horizon (the setting and the play) but in a very real way Solzhenitsyn drove more complex thought about system and personal interaction. It’s as though they operate at difference levels of thought — different stances, even. In one case I am definitely identifying and immersing in story — my stance is as observer of events. In the other that happens to some extent, but more I am immersing in thought about thought — my stance is as reader of text.

In that respect “good” and “bad” are crappy labels. I don’t actually use them to imply quality. I use them because we all know what we mean when we use them. We pretend we don’t and we map them onto ideas like “boor” or “effete” but we do get it. We know that hard, complex reading is good for the brain, that it drives and inspires more complex thought and thoughts about thought. Similarly we know that engaging entertainment doesn’t always (maybe usually) doesn’t do that but it does something else, something more animal and more immediately appealing. When I say “bad fiction” you know that’s the kind of thing I mean. But removing the judgement value and seeing “good” and “bad” as abstract labels, these are pretty clear categories. Of course there is material that achieves both and of course different people may find different levels of immersion (got you!) or flow or inspiration or investment. But generally these labels are at least comprehensible.

And so when I say that bad fiction makes good games, we see why. Fiction that engages emotionally and visually, that grabs at big archetypes that are easy to understand and story shapes that we know in our spines are the kinds of things that work in games because we need to think fast at the table. Any story element that’s going to work has to be invented and deployed almost as fast as it takes to speak. And not only does it need to be deployed, it needs to be instantly received as well. And that means it needs to be visceral — spinal even. It needs as much shared subtext as possible so that the slightest effort produces rich communication. And bad fiction does that. “A dark and stormy night” is a great way to set a scene for a game. “I am your father” resonates like crazy instantly.

So maybe it’s true that bad fiction — fiction that is no more than it looks at first glance — works because we get it instantly. And we can create it almost as fast. When I say, “Your mentor turns to you as Vader approaches him. He smiles. He waves you on, and Vader prepares to strike him down,” you know what your role is. You know what you feel. And so you are free to feel it, because you are not being asked to investigate it. Bad fiction makes good games. It has to flow easy there.

Of course there are exceptions. But look at the market leaders: in these games you know what your role is, instantly. You improvise trivially, effortlessly. Something in there works. I contend it is the crappiness of its fiction.

–BMurray