benlehman

From a conv w/ Jonathan last night:
Censors and artists are natural enemies. But censors and big media companies are naturally allies. What does that make artists and big media companies?

I realized that there's a strong trend in my latest RPG designs, which is present as sub-text in the previous games, but has become really strong in the designs that I'm presently working on.

I think that the Forge tradition of narrativist design is very strongly focused on what a character decides to do and, by extension, what a player decides to do. There's a great statement of Dogs' premise somewhere, which says something like "the sinner's fate is in your hands. What will you do?" which I think captures the whole thing pretty damned well. It's a pretty great mode of design, and has produced (and will produce) some great games.

There's something which I've been doing lately (and I think is present, but not formally, in Polaris, Breaking the Ice, the Mountain Witch, etc. It's formally present in Spione) which I think is a pretty neat and underexplored area for design. The premise in these games is not based on "what will you do?" That's locked down. It's based on "how will you do it? And why?"

Like, for instance, in HGMO, the two leads are going to have a sexual relationship. The existence of their relationship, and the existence of sex in that relationship, are not on the table. What is on the table is what sort of relationship will they have and how? And that question is wide open, with an infinite number of possible answers, ranging from kidnapping and stockholm syndrome to intense, shameful passion to repressed simmering to open, loving commitment.

There's a similar thing (not with sex) in Clover. Clover is a happy child. Why? How? What does that mean?

I'm really grooving on this design principle right now. It requires a whole new set of techniques and there's a lot of fulfilling stuff there.

1) my lungs did not spontaneously fill with bees.