Matts Gaming Maniphilosophesto

It's unfair for me to say this is the only way I like to play or run games; I'm perfectly happy running a conventional game where I make up a universe and you all frolic in it. That said, there's also other people in our group who enjoy that probably more than I do, and would be better choices for that sort of game.

I have a lot of personal and professional interest wrapped up in the idea of collective authorship. I see interactive media as being a fundamentally different beast from old-school narrative media, but I haven't seen the promise of it played out. I came into the game industry with a lot of talk about how it was an untapped medium full of all sorts of promise, but to date, I haven't really seen many people crystallize that promise. The best games I can think of are of a straightforward narrative fashion (Grim Fandango comes to mind), and are touching examples of a great story heightened by interactivity. But they're still fundamentally linear. Even games with "morality tracks", like Knights of the Old Republic, are still just broader-scoped versions of a linear progression - any action you take has to be explicity expected by the designer, and the various outcomes, while interesting, depend entirely upon the designer's point of view and not the player's.

With collective authorship, the balance changes, so that the player's perspective and "narrative agenda" and the designers' carry a more similar weight, and the story that emerges is wrought between them. Obviously, this assumes that the product of these two visions combines in more than a linear average, and that the result is really compelling and memorable; maybe not a "great story" if we were to sell it, but that the action of creating this story is made fun by our participation in and ownership of it.

The most memorable experiences I've had when gaming seem to come from when the players jump the rails; when the players' idea of what should happen and the GM's collide and something comes out of it. My primary example here is in the Iliadic game, when Dieter blew all his honor to gain the power to smite the evil troll king, in what was basically an improvised move. When you rehash it narratively, it sounds sort of anticlimactic, but at the time, it was the coolest thing ever. It got me thinking that the GM's plan for an event usually isn't the most interesting for the players, and that a lot of the time, the group will take a left at Albuquerque, and you'll be left out in the cold.

Hence, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about requiring the players to author a significant part of the drama, in more than a reactive fashion.

I'll try to keep my rants on the topic limited to here though, as I'm sure everyone is getting sick of my bullshit.