The Perfect Game

So crash course in RPG theory: the basic trichotomy that gets tossed around is the Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist, which in its extreme cases works like this:

Gamist thought tends to treat RPGs as though they were games like Go or Chess - that is, there's a focus on making the game mechanically balanced, and the point of the game is for the players to win - to beat the DM. Games like old-school D&D and I think to some extent Paranoia tend toward a gamist perspective - and I have to say: that's fine, and that can certainly be fun, but it's not intuitive to me - which is interesting, as I am extremely competetive with regard to board games. RPGs just don't hit those same switches with me, I suppose. Scorpio has a heavily gamist bent, and that has led to some friction in the past. (Jack, near as I can tell, doesn't really have any particular bent, but tends in practice to fit somewhere between narrativist and gamist, probably weighted toward narrativist.)

Narrativist thought views the players as providing the protagonists for a story, the rest of which is written by the GM. Extremely narrativist games, like Polaris or Universalis, dispense with the GM entirely, instead relying on things like ritualistic interplayer negotiation (for Polaris) or an interplayer economy (for Universalis) to determine things about the game world and resolve conflicts. I'm much more in sympathy with the narrativist perspective, obviously, but even though I have no problem viewing my own life, human life in general, and indeed the life of humanity as a whole as a fiction - and in fact probably couldn't view it any other way if I tried - I am not entirely satisfied with narrativist gaming.

Simulationist thought tries to model the game world as accurately and realistically as possible. It tends toward the complex rules systems - Shadowrun, for instance, which can fill several books with mostly rules and tables of vehicle stats, or D&D 3.5, the Dungeon Master's guide for which is very possibly the most stultifyingly boring RPG book I have ever read - and the point is that a realistically modeled world is more immersive - which is a relatively difficult quality to achieve when what you're looking at is the people you're in college with, a bunch of funny-shaped dice, and a Word document with a lot of numbers on it. And here's a weird thing: perhaps because worldbuilding is one of my favorite aspects of fiction, I am at heart a zealous simulationist. I know that byzantinely complex rulesets are no fun to play with. I understand that there is relatively little difference between rolling to throw a grenade, rolling to determine scatter, rolling the target's dodge, and rolling the target's damage soak, and and the GM simply interpreting the results of one die roll, except that the first one is a bitch to do and will make combat unreasonably long. But, dammit, it feels different. And of course there's no way so far as I can tell to have quick, clean combat resolution and accurately modeled conflicts. The rules hack for Shadowrun I and my players are working on is supposed to contain various levels of granularity, to allow you to make that trade-off on a case-by-case basis, but that's a makeshift solution to an apparently insoluble problem.

But that's only a problem because we have a limited amount of processing power, yeah? Given the ability to easily remember a very large number of rules and the ability to perform complex calculations very quickly, simulationist games really come into their own. More than that - we can get more complex than that - truly three-dimensional space combat, computer hacking that involves actually finding holes in the programs and systems the game has constructed, magic duels with ebbing and flowing mana, attacks and counterattacks on your opponent's qi, fights won by wits and swordsmanship rather than by dice rolls (which, just between you and me, has always seemed like an unsatisfactory conflict resolution mechanic - though comparing static numbers is worse). And since we're operating theoretically - the things we could do with unlimited processing power! And so on until, like the map of Borges' cartographers, our simulation is precisely as complex and as intuitive as the universe itself. That, to my mind, is the perfect game.

Turns out, we can't do that. So near as I can figure, the difference between an actual simulationist and an actual gamist or narrativist is that the simulationist probably sighs and looks up at the stars, half-imagining what cannot be, before going and playing a gamist or narrativist game.

Addendum: that perspective on games certainly opens one up to accusations of escapism. That's valid insofar as games are actually used as an escape from the burden of actually doing something with one's life. And this runs into the problem of me being a very bad existentialist. See, I think that a person's life is inherently meaningless - that the meaning of one's life is self-determined. I then want to turn around and tell some people that the meaning they seem to be deriving from their life doesn't count - people who work their way up the company ladder and then retire to a country home and a yacht, people who work in a factory nine-to-five and drink beer with their friends on the weekends in front of the TV - in fact, my (totally unreasonable) instinct is to exclude politicians, lawyers, doctors, and teachers from the category of people who have meaningful lives, leaving only scientists, artists, and people like Joshua Abraham Norton I, Emperor of these United States and Lord Protector of Mexico, whose lives are in themselves such interesting narratives that it counts as production. Of course, this is only my own personal existential choice - these are the lives that I personally would find meaningful.

So, back to the point, which is: I don't think playing games is sufficient for a meaningful life - it certainly is not for me, and I want to say (but can't) that it isn't for anyone. However, I do think that it can be part of one - whether I end up doing the art thing or the life-as-narrative thing (scientist being, unfortunately, not really one of my options), that games can add to it. I learn a lot about storytelling, among other things, from playing these games, and that is valuable. It's just not valuable enough, on its own. (I should reread Nabokov's The Defense, which if I remember correctly is on more or less the same subject, but with chess instead of Shadowrun.)

Further addendum: it's pretty clear that many of my positions are philosophically incoherent. I'm okay with that - in fact, it's somewhat deliberate. The line of reasoning is this: I am never going to be right about everything. If I attempt to construct a coherent philosophical weltanshauung, any error in the initial premises is like to be amplified until I find myself believing unacceptable things once I get down to particulars. Besides, I have a certain amount of faith in human instinct - not in any mystical way, but simply that our ethics, our art, and our drive to know are all products of pretty nonrational impulses, which means we already have pretty okay heuristics for a lot of things. Not, obviously, unimprovable, and I'm certainly not rejecting reason - I can be logically convinced that some of my heuristics are bad and should be changed - but by and large, I think it's pretty reasonable to go with one's initial reactions on a lot of things.

A new thing

So I was reading this blog and watching the associated video series, both of which are a good deal of fun, and I thought to myself, hey, the people I play RPGs with are just as interesting and we have a good deal of fun and maybe I should write up some of that. In the past I've hesitated to do that because really, who wants to hear about people playing RPGs? But the answer appears on further reflection to be "precisely the people I'd want to talk to about people playing RPGs", so that works out well.

So the games I'm currently involved in:

I'm running Shadowrun 4e (urban fantasy + cyberpunk dystopia), set in Hong Kong, with a group of relatively small-fry PCs trying to make some sort of living in the midst of crime syndicates fighting it out. We all love the setting, we all hate the system, and we're trying to kick it to pieces and make a new one, which is apparently just the done thing with Shadowrun.

Apocalypse World is, as you might imagine, set in a post-apocalyptic world. (See Freakangels for a pretty good approximation. Also see Freakangels because it's good.) There's hard choices and constant vying for power in the ruins of a once-great civilization. So sometimes you agonize over what to do with the loyal lieutenant who's also murdering relatively innocent people with his mind, and sometimes you shoot him in the face with a ballista. Good fun.

There's a game of In A Wicked Age, which is more or less an episodic Arabian Nights-style game which over the course of a campaign sort of develops its own mythology based on your previous sessions, which is fun. Also fun: the fact that every session ends in a massive clusterfuck. In A Wicked Age has been on hiatus for four weeks, so in the interim, we've been playing one-shots of Universalis, Don't Rest Your Head, Dread, and Dread again.

And sometimes there's also Paranoia, which is roughly 1984 meets the Marx Brothers. Which is just as fun as that sounds.

Just as important as the games we play are the people we play them with (I think I will not use their real names, just as a formality):

Jack is the guy who runs Apocalypse World and In A Wicked Age. He's really good at winning arguments, game design theory, and GMing awkward moral choices. He's less good at playing characters, but realizes this, so he uses random personality generators and tends to play people who really like punching things - as he does in my Shadowrun game. And that works well.

Scorpio is the other guy who knows a lot about game design - mostly from hanging out with professional game designers on the internet and having played D&D more or less since he could walk. As a rule, he and Jack are pretty good about poking at my incoherent vague feelings about games and trying to render them intelligible so they can disagree vehemently. He's very concerned with game mechanics, and his medic character in Apocalypse World is currently making my character's group of machine cultists look sane by comparison.

Kali, in games as in life, is very often the one holding everything together. In Shadowrun, she plays a fairly normal decent ex-smuggler who has a couple of fantastically nuanced relationships in his backstory and is trying to hold together a team consisting of of himself, Jack's amoral face-puncher, Sam's currently soulless killing machine, and Bertrand's deeply inept mage. She's also been working on a Lovecraft game system that in its first incarnation was a horrifying frankenstein of four or five different systems. Her character in Apocalypse World is, again, the sane one - a dredlocked techie who serves as a go-between for Scorpio's psycho and power-hungry medic, and my crazy cult.

Sam is a deeply creepy child, but that's okay. Her character in Shadowrun already had an excellent backstory consisting entirely of pain and death and the most terrifyingly Machiavellian crimelord - and then he got his soul eaten by an eldritch being in-game and is now incapable of feeling emotion, and must kill hundreds of people before he dies of apathy.

Bertrand is a genius logician, and also manages to be extremely well-versed in Kafka, philosophy, and foreign film - from whence he derives truly excellent characters, such as the genial sociopathic gambler who shows his affection for Bertrand's Shadowrun character by trying to have him assassinated every year as a birthday present.

Moishe is a skinny ur-nebbish who runs a damn good game of Paranoia, and also of Dread. Only seen him as a player in In A Wicked Age, so I dunno much about his play style.

Ann is kickass, but I've only seen her play in IAWA and also my one-shot Don't Rest Your Head session, which was less successful than it could have been, so again, dunno much about her play style. She seems to be good at it, though.

Jill I played Dogs in the Vineyard with, back when Jack was running that. Now she plays In A Wicked Age. She's not bad, but she's not a person you'd expect to powergame - and IAWA is really not a system that you can powergame in - but that certainly doesn't stop her from trying.

And that's the group, more or less. So I'll go this direction with the blog for now, trying not to forget to also write about music and stuff. In other news - I like Duran Duran way too much.

In which I continue to have excellent taste in music.

Actually you know what: you want to read a review of Plastic Beach, go read the Midnight Insomniac's. I'll just say that, where Demon Days is an acoustic nighttime junkyard, Plastic Beach is a glitzy casino resort. Also that the music video for Stylo is awesome, and Superfast Jellyfish is a much, much better song than you think it is.

What I really should talk about is Steven Wilson's Insurgentes, which I've been putting off because, frankly, this is a daunting album to review. But here goes anyway:

Steven Wilson is of course the creative genius behind Porcupine Tree, a more-or-less contemporary prog rock band, whose musical trajectory is an interesting one: initially drugged-out psychedelia, it evolved into a more alt-metal sound, with I think mixed success. Check out On the Sunday of Life... for the early sound, Deadwing and In Absentia for the later sound. There's a lot in the middle there too, but I haven't really listened to it. But anyway, the point is that Insurgentes is a very different sound from any of that. It's a very introverted sound, a sort of musical omphaloskepsis, fading between beautiful melodic reveries and heavy dissonant pounding. It's an intensely beautiful industrial dreamscape. The first track, Harmony Korine - look, there's no way I can do it any kind of justice. Just go listen to it, now. Okay? Now listen to it again. I try to be frugal with superlatives, but that is the most beautiful song I have ever heard, Allegri's "Miserere", Gravenhurst's "Black Holes in the Sand", and everything Simon & Garfunkel wrote notwithstanding. (I've talked about Gravenhurst, yeah? Can't do it here, I already used up my superlatives for this post.) Abandoner is next, with a hollow drum loop overlaid with high wavering melodic lines, leading into immense monolithic guitar chords toward the end. Salvaging rides hard, with air support via guitar and synthesizer, which melts into a constantly modulating orchestral melody, before crashing back into what sounds something like hitting a piano with the sostenuto pedal down - intensely dissonant, and very enjoyable. Veneno Para Las Hadas starts with a monotone bassline under the same three distant chords, and Wilson's quiet vocals and a subtle, excellent use of piano - and though it builds a little from there, it's content to do basically that for the song. And that's excellent. No Twilight Within the Courts of the Sun is an eight-and-a-half-minute virtuosic display - a very complex piece reminiscent of King Crimson, with excellent performances on drums, guitar, and piano. And here I have to resist the impulse to go through every single track on the album, because all of them are worth discussion. So I will just say that Insurgentes is a complex, layered work which far surpasses in depth, consistency, and beauty, Steven Wilson's earlier work. And while the album, on first listen, may well seem monochromatic - quiet melodic piano alternating with heavy dissonant chords - repeated listens will reveal a meticulously crafted, intellectual, gorgeous piece of work.

What hath science wrought.

Opening shot: sand gusts through the streets of a long-deserted Mediterranean town. The camera pans past abandoned stucco buildings, overgrown with weeds.

Text: They Thought It Was Over

Camera continues to pan, as music begins to fade in. It is tinny, as though played through an old radio. A gust of sand completely obscures the camera’s view, and clears to reveal a shot centered on a small stucco building, door hanging off the hinges, part of the roof fallen in. The camera zooms.

Text: But Some Memories Never Fade

Music becomes recognizable: “As Time Goes By”, a oldies-style instrumental rendition. Camera zooms through doorway; a crackling radio stands on a table across the room, illuminated by light shining through the doorway.

Text: And Some Wounds

Zoom in on radio, music crescendoes accordingly. A silhouette of a man wearing a fedora falls across the radio.

Text: Never Heal

Silhouette raises gun, fires. Radio sparks. Cut to black as music ceases.

Fade in: timpani sounds once, extreme close up of a man’s mouth, chewing a toothpick.

Mouth: Play it, Sam.

Brief shot of Samuel L. Jackson cocking a shotgun, fade to black.

Another timpani; Bruce Willis and Robert Downey, Jr. walk slowly toward camera, putting sunglasses on.

Bruce Willis: Louis – [an enormous explosion in the background] – I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The timpani begin to accelerate, heightening the excitement. Robert Downey, Jr. stands atop a ruined building, shouting to a courtyard full of dehumanized faceless soldiers.

Robert Downey, Jr.: [sneering] Round up the usual suspects!

Brief shots, now, one timpani per: Samuel L. Jackson, dual-wielding shotguns, in the smoking ruins of a building, turns to face the camera as it zooms; Robert Downey, Jr., face contorted with hatred, standing in the rain, turns to face the camera as it zooms; Angelina Jolie, wearing a kevlar corset and holding a katana, steps toward the camera and poses as it zooms; Bruce Willis, wearing a fedora and an overcoat, turns only his head toward the camera as it zooms down the length of the bar; Christopher Lee, above a machine torso and behind a mostly metal face, stands and glowers down at the camera. Silence.

Bruce Willis steps onscreen, looking down at the camera, pistol in hand. Points pistol at camera.

Bruce Willis: [sardonically] Here’s looking at you, kid. [Fires. Cut to black.]

Text: Return

Text: To

Text: Casablanca

Bruce Willis crouches behind the bar, reloading his pistol. Fragments of glass fall to the floor around him.

Bruce Willis: Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world – [slams clip into pistol] – she walks into mine.

He turns to fire over the bar. Cut to view across bar. He fires into the camera.

Text: In Theaters June 6