March 2011

Oh, one of the things I forgot to mention about the Harry Dresden game the other day was that most nouns in the game have “aspects” that can be appealed to in the interest of the story… and these appealed to aspects can help you by allowing you to re-roll a bad roll or add two to a mediocre-to-good one.

The system uses “fudge dice”, that is, dice with two pluses, two blanks, and two minuses (or, of course, you can use regular dice) and the basic idea is that you need to roll four of these and add up the pluses and subtract the minuses and figure out how successful you were to do any given something… like, you need a 1 to do something boring and normal, roll a 3 to do something cool, roll a 5 to do something amazing, and roll a 7 to do something *EPIC*. (You have a handful of skills that are likely to provide bonuses… so you probably have a 2 in driving, a 4 in investigation, a 1 in intimidate… that sort of thing)

It’s the aspects that allow you to appeal to various situations and spend some of your refresh to give re-rolls or bonuses.

For example, an aspect of a mall could be “crowded” and so it’d be easy to lose a tail there. An aspect of a warehouse could be “dark” so it’d be easy to hide from hoodlums who are making a deal. Additionally, you can appeal (once, but better than nothing) to an aspect that you created… so, like, if you knocked out the lights on the warehouse, you could get a plus two or re-roll for some action you are taking that takes the new darkness in the warehouse into account without having to spend one of your precious, precious refresh to do it.

What we’re going to get into on Thursday is how *YOU* have aspects. (And, by extension, so does everybody else.)

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One of my friends told me about how he went to a signing of Jim Butcher’s during the run of the Dresden Files show (note lack of recommendation) running on Sy Fy (it may have been Sci Fi at the time) and mentioned the show when he got to his turn in line. My bud told me that Butcher’s response was phrased exceptionally carefully. Something like “I’m pleased that they like my books enough to try to make a show from them.” 

Well, if you watched the show, you see all of the semiotics of Butcher’s statement.

So you may think that we’ll never see a show capture all of the little things that make Butcher’s books really fun. Well… we probably won’t. However! One of my friends pointed me to a show that he said was Dresden without the wizarding. Burn Notice.

I know! When I first heard that, I whipped my head around and said “what are you talking about, Willis?” and he explained to me all of the little things.

Dresden explains the intricacies of building a protection spell. Michael Westen explains the intricacies of building a perimeter. Dresden would explain how a fireball works, Westen explains where to put the explosives. There’s the supporting cast that doesn’t have 1:1 overlap with the books, but the high notes are hit… you’ve got the handler who keeps telling Michael that he’s going to get himself killed, you’ve got the friend (BRUCE FREAKIN’ CAMPBELL) who gets Michael in trouble under the excuse of bringing him work, you’ve got the love interest who is probably bad news… well, Michael has Mom who doesn’t really have an analogue in the Dresden books. She’s an awesome character though.

More importantly, they capture the most addictive thing about the Dresden books: the whole “little arc, big arc” thing. Every show is self-contained for the most part… except for maybe 4 or 5 minutes. Those 4 or 5 minutes are dedicated to the arc of the season. So you sit down for your 45 minute television show and you see the procedural work its way through: Person needs help, person convinces Michael to help, Michael has conversation with Gabrielle Anwar and BRUCE FREAKIN’ CAMPBELL, we get a brief tutorial on the best way to build a bug out of a kiddie cell phone and two good ones, we see Jeffrey Donovan affect a pretty good accent from somewhere exotic, we talk to Mom, we learn just the tiniest piece of the story pertaining to the storyline of why Michael got burned in the first place, the person gets helped, we run the credits… and you want to watch the next episode to find out where those 4 or 5 minutes take us next.

It’s a solid action/spy show but if you watch it as the Dresden show you’re never going to end up seeing? It magically turns into an awesome one.

So that’s my recommendation for you this week.

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My Saturday group recently finished playing a game based on Jim Butcher’s Dresden series (to be recommended in a future post!).

The most memorable part of the game, for me, was the first night. To explain why, well, let’s imagine the first night of any given tabletop RPG…

If it’s D&D, you get together and roll up your characters and hand them in to the DM, that is, if you hadn’t rolled it up the night before. The DM may ask “how do you guys all know each other?” or it’s as likely that s/he will tell you that all of you stand in front of the dungeon door and look down a long torchlit hallway and let everybody figure out their relationships as the game progresses.

White Wolf games (Vampire, Mage, Werewolf) probably have the first night having you hand your characters in to the Storyteller and having a short (individual, private) interview discussing backstory, motivation, secrets, and whatnot and then he, with everyone else, hammers out everyone’s relationship to this point. The Gangrel and the Ventrue aren’t likely to run in the same circles, after all. What would inspire them to interact? Oh, the Ventrue knows the Toreador who knows the Brujah who knows the Gangrel? That sort of thing.

Well, when you sit down to play Dresden, the first thing you do is not create characters, the first thing you do is create your *CITY* collaboratively. I mentioned “The Dumpster!” previously, well, this circumvents that problem by allowing everybody to create their own “The Dumpster!”s together. We explored stuff around our city (Colorado Springs) and made a fairly interesting narrative from just little things that struck us as odd. Colorado Springs has a large number of military bases… there’s Fort Carson, Peterson Air Force Base, Schriever Air Force Base, Cheyenne Mountain, and the US Air Force Academy… why does it have so many? Colorado Springs has a large number of evangelical organizations… why does it have so many? In the 80′s and 90′s, Manitou Springs was a hotbed of “Satanism”. Why? Garden of the Gods is an explosion of red stone in the middle of a lush high plains region… why? There is a new marijuana store opening up every other day. Why? So on and so forth.

After doing that, we came up with a grid for “in the know” and “not in the know” and crossed those against “wants to maintain the status quo” and “wants to change things” (the military was in the know and wanted to maintain the status quo, for example). Only after had we fleshed out our city did we sit down and say “well… who are *YOU*?”

And “well… who are *YOU*?” is going to be Thursday. (I have to talk about Burn Notice first.)

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So… what are you reading/watching?

I’m doing some minor research/seed planting into a Batman post so I’m re-reading both Batman: RIP and Batman: Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?

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So… what are you playing? I’m playing Dragon Age II again. I realize that I really wanted to see some of the other possible endings… I’m also playing Zen Pinball and Torchlight to help me not feel like an addict.

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Oh, my goodness. I wanted to write an essay here but, instead, I am beat down from a crazy week.

So *MY* plans for the weekend include: laundry, getting a burned-out taillight fixed, going to Costco/PetsMart/Safeway, and, maybe, seeing Sucker Punch. If not Sucker Punch, maybe seeing Red.

What’s on your docket?

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Duke Nukem Forever has been delayed.

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I was recently asked about the Brian Moriarty lecture on Roger Ebert’s famous declaration on video games’s's status as art. (It’s a neat little essay, check it out.)

It seems obvious to me that video games *ARE* art and the argument that they aren’t strikes me as similar to arguments that Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings aren’t art or that Picasso’s Dora Maar, Sitting isn’t art. Or that Karen Finley smearing herself with chocolate and talking about her childhood isn’t art. But me saying “the burden of proof is on you, dude!” isn’t really that useful given my readership of seven (of which he is *NOT* one) and also given the fact that he’s more or less retracted his statements and has more or less promised to never, never ever talk about this stuff ever again.

So I’ll lay out the case and, hopefully, make it as obvious for you as it is for me.

When we talk about “art”, there are any of a dozen things that come to mind. Painting is probably the first thing, but there is also sculpture, and poetry, and storytelling, and acting, and dance, and we can probably go so far as to include stuff like foodcrafting. I’m sure that all of us are cool with something as different as dance and a cubist still life painting of a bowl of grapes both falling under the umbrella of “art”, right?

Well, here in town, there’s a Fine Arts Center that has a section off to the side of “interactive art”. You know, for the kids you dragged to the Fine Art Center. It includes a bunch of sculptures that are *INTENDED* to be stroked, poked, prodded, felt, twiddled, and otherwise touched. Feel the negative space of a cube with a sphere slice carved out of the side. Turn a weathervane. Put your fingers in the eye of a carved stone Kokopelli.

We have no problem grasping that a good story told well can be art. Look at, oh, Citizen Kane. Or Huck Finn. Or an audio book of _The Island of the Day Before_ read by Tim Curry. Art? Of course!

Well, a video game is a mashup of such ingredients. A story well-told (if we’re lucky) that we interact with and, here’s the kicker, even cause to progress through our interactions. The game Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is a story told in retrospect by the main character/narrator to a woman he’s attempting to woo (and is full of delightful little moments where we see the character die and then hear the narrator say “that’s not what happened…” before we restart at the save point to try again). The Bioware games are stories of grand fantasy where worlds (or galaxies!) are saved. Instead of the person sitting and absorbing the art passively, like in a movie or (audio)book, the person actually has to move the story along him or herself… in the case of many RPGs, even the endings can be modified by the choices the player makes. This is art that is modified by the audience and tailor made for each viewer according to the whim of each viewer. (I want to play a good guy vs. I want to play a bad guy.)

Now, it’s true, that many (if not most (if not 90 percent of)) video games are crap. To compare the Godfather Part II to Ninjabread Man (I ain’t gonna link it) is, indeed, a comparison that makes Ninjabread Man look very bad indeed. It’s also possible to compare such things as Knights of the Old Republic to Clint Howard’s Ice Cream Man.

It’s cool to prefer scupture to poetry, or books to dance, or music to movies. Hey, we’ve all got our own inclinations. That’s cool.

But to say that this, or that, or video games cannot be art? That’s obviously wrong. Not even “are not” but “cannot be” art? That’s so wrong that even the person most famous for saying it has retracted it.

What’s interesting is the aesthetics that allow us to say “this is crap” or “this is good” or even “this is so good that the preponderance of people who engage with it will walk away embiggened”. But that’s another essay…

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