daisyninjagirl | Entries tagged with gametime

So, just over a week ago, my sister and I ran a fairy tale larp that was trying to mess around with the form. And our players. But in a good way!

I had two main things driving the design. One of them was a reaction to the intense emotionally charged psychodrama games that often get called Nordic larp. There are a lot of really powerful techniques being used, but a lot of the time they seem to revolve around making people feel miserable - I wanted to see if I could engineer a situation that would have the opposite effect. The other one was a video game called The Path. This came out a few years ago, and it just really stuck with me. The basic scenario is that you're a version of Red Riding Hood walking through the woods to your grandmother's house, and the gameplay is that you choose to walk, or stop for a little and encounter some object that's sitting in the woods, or if you're feeling lost and lonely you can wait for a guide character to come and give you a hug and take you back to the path. Or you can encounter the Wolf, which is devastating, and the only way to find out what will happen is go through with the encounter. And eventually you end up at your grandmother's house and there's some stuff that happens that depends on what you did in the woods. It's atmospheric as hell, and totally awesome. So I ended up with a game where the premise was that a group of lost 'children' (some of the characters were adolescents or adults) had each, once upon a time, fled from their own personal Wolf and become lost in the woods. Their goal, which they weren't explicitly told, was to find some sort of resolution with their wolf.

Game Design Stuff
First off, I'm going to thank my co-writer Catherine a huge amount - the original idea was from me, but if she hadn't been letting me bounce ideas off her, and helping me work out the mechanics - and writing some key characters that got me through writer's block, the game just wouldn't have happened. Plus, she really came through with the creepy doll. ;-)

For a lot of things in the game, there was often more than one reason why it was like that. The first one was the movement rules - the lost children had to keep moving, had to stay in the company of someone with a black headband (actually the GMs, the backstage helper 'wood sprites' and the wolves), and there was an OOC call "push-me-pull-you" to trigger them moving if they'd stopped. Partly this was to stop the game clogging up, which is something I've seen in other forest games - there's a huge play area, but 'something interesting' is happening at a particular site, so everybody stops and clusters around it, and ignores all the other interesting things going on. Another one, was that it was a way to make people tired. I wanted them to feel physically challenged but not in real danger, so that when they got to stop walking, that was a relief, and hopefully that would affect their emotional state. And the third reason - the be with someone with a headband rule - was to control the game and make sure that we could keep the lost children circulating around the different wolves, and so that no one was stuck by themselves for too long.

The area of the game was a set of interlinked tracks at a scout camp that I knew pretty well from previous larp events. We had a small fenced off area in the middle of the forest with benches and a single entrance (the scout camp's chapel) that we used as a base camp during the game, the mid game break area, and the final destination for the end game. There were also some buildings close to the game area with toilets and hot water facilities - we advised the players that while IC they were stuck with the group, OOC they could take a break at any time and wait at the chapel to catch up with the rest of the players. I don't think anyone used this, but it was important to me, because I figured that anything that we could do to increase people's physical feeling of real life safety would help them relax and enjoy the game content. We also scheduled a ten minute break for everyone about an hour into the game. This was originally for strictly practical reasons - to get some water and hot drinks, and food, into people in what could have been any kind of weather (Auckland in spring can be really hot and sunny, or cold and miserable, and no way to know in advance), but as we were working through the game design, it made sense to turn this into the emotional turning point of the game.

We cast people by questionnaire - a lot of this was the standard stuff, like do you have any health problems, do you want to be a lost child or a wolf, is there anyone you do or don't want to be paired with. We also got people to fill in tag clouds, a grid of key words related to fairy tales which we asked people to decorate with word art, colours, bold, stuff like that to give me an idea of what they were interested in. We also put in a brief description of the Lines and Veils rule and asked people what squicked them out so we could cast them away from any problems.

We used the technique which I've seen in some other games of giving people the skeleton of the character, and then asking them a series of leading questions about themselves. Partly this was to help them buy into the characters, but we also staged this so that the lost children answered their questions first, then gave that information to the wolves so that they had a lot of information about their paired lost child, along with the lost child's tag cloud. We also set up an IC roleplaying forum a couple of weeks before the game with the intent of having each pair roleplay out their first encounter in which the child ran away from the wolf, so that we could set up some shared experiences pregame, and hopefully jump start the warm up period that I've often seen in larps where it takes a bit of time for people to feel comfortable with each other.

On the day things - the very first part of the briefing was that everyone had to shake hands and introduce themselves to everyone else, regardless of whether they'd met before or not. I nicked this idea off someone on Story Games (can't remember who, sorry) and it's awesome. It's a straight out jump start to get people from silently staring at you to giggling and slightly embarrassed in a "we're all in this together" way. I've also read a couple of articles out on the interwebs on the role that touch has on bonding - you get a small spike of a hormone called oxytocin, which is related to feelings of well being and attachment. Apart from this, we defined the touching rules as people's faces, arms and hands only, to keep things in a relatively neutral frame. The fighting rules were none - you weren't allowed to fight at all. You could talk it out or run away. This idea was robbed from a video game I can't remember the name of, where they'd found that if they gave players the ability to fight the monsters, people would try to do that even if it was difficult and a doomed effort, then complain that the fighting mechanics were clunky; whereas actually the game designers wanted to emulate the narrative of a horror movie where it's mostly about fear and hiding and survival. So they removed the ability and found they got better emotional responses.

We turned the mid game tea party into a 'tilt' event - we asked the wolves at this point to offer some food or drink to their lost child, and to change the tone of their roleplaying, from scary and messing with them as they'd been at the beginning, to more vulnerable. (I think the line my partner quoted from me on Twitter was: "Try to manipulate her into realising that you have no power over her." So, um, yeah. Like that.) After the tea party, we also encouraged them to split up the group more - reminding people that they could go off with any wolf or wood sprite, if they wanted. We also asked the wolves to try to push the storyline to a resolution - perhaps the lost child overcame their fear of the wolf and was willing to walk alone with them, or could finally stand up to them, or had found a way to let them go. Once they'd reached a point where the wolf felt the story was resolved, they were asked to bring their lost child back to the base camp chapel, where everyone who was there had been asked to give them a big cheer (because everyone, at least once in their life, should get a cheer. It's a rule.) The final debrief was the reverse of the opening, asking people to split up into pairs, shake hands, and tell each other something they liked about each other.

***

Right, I'm totally planning on writing up an Actual Play account, but it's late and I'm tired, so it'll be in a day or two. But I have pictures for you...

[originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/86143.html]

So in some recent behind the scenes chatter, a comment was made that Gametime is currently "the lethargic zombie of NZ roleplaying discussion." Alas for Mash, there will be no zombies in this post. But then, that's kind of the point of it.

I've been on a larp writing jag for the last couple of years, working in the genre of domestic realism. I kind of drifted into it via a game about a wake, Sitting Shiva, which I talked about in an earlier post. The thing is, what I liked about that game wasn't the magic, it was the realism, and in fact I found that removing one of the 'magical' game mechanics in the second run made the game stronger.

I also think that if you ask people what are the basic ingredients that go into a larp, or any kind of roleplaying game, you'll often get a bunch of opinions back about how what you really need is conflict. You might also get some comments about how it's essentially an escapist form. These NZRag conversations are examples, but I don't think it's that unusual a view. But I want to challenge that view a bit - in the second conversation I linked to, I made a comment that what you really need is a reason for every character to be there, and something for every character to do. (1) But if you do remove conflict as a game element, what are you going to put in its place? What are people going to do? And does roleplaying have to be escapist, anyway? Isn't one of the cool things that people can get out of a game a heightened emotional experience? Don't we have heightened experiences in real life, all the time?

So anyway, that's where I ended up - games that aren't exoticised at all, that could pretty much happen to anyone and that my player pool would have a good set of referents for (2), but would also meet the criteria of 'heightened'. I was also looking for non-standard ways (for theatre-style larps) to deal with what people were going to do during the games; and I wanted game mechanics to be as invisible as possible. Three of these games ended up as very quiet, semi-larps that involved a group of people who knew each other well sitting around a table, talking: Sitting Shiva, The Book Club (pretty self explanatory from the title), and A Stiff One (an evening in a bar after everyone has had a horrible week.) The other two were much more chaotic: But Nobody Loses An Eye!, about a child's birthday party; and its notional sequel Super Sparkle Action Princess GX!, about filming an episode of a kiddie tv show - the one that the children were a fan of in BNLAE. (Credit where it's due - BNLAE, SSAPGX and A Stiff One had my sister Catherine as co-writer, and the idea for A Stiff One came from Vaughan Staples. Thanks guys! (3)) Looking back on the set, there have been some common features that turned up, that I'd like to talk about.

Structure
I gave up a lot of traditional control over the pacing of the games: no formal goals, no NPCs appearing with information, few timed or staged events (BNLAE was an exception to an extent), no contingency envelopes etc. These games were all set up so that players got their character sheets, walked into the playing area and started roleplaying until they stopped and walked out. In the three quiet games, I got to influence things a little by being another 'character' in the room and getting to contribute using the same mechanisms as the other players - by asking questions, or stating my point of view, but I tried to keep that to a minimum, mostly just nudging things if the game got quiet and sitting back when the players were talking. In A Stiff One, I also gave people the ability to call a couple of mutual friends (ie me via two cellphones), but in those phone conversations I tried to act as a mirror to the discussion that was going on in the game, picking up details from what they'd talked about and adapting what was happening with the friends to what was happening with the player characters. In the chaotic games, I had more of an NPC role by acting as an authority figure (the birthday boy's Mum in one, and the Producer's EA in the other) but again tried to keep in the background unless specifically called on.

Inside that formlessness, though, the basic structure of the games was activity focused. Everyone always knew exactly what they were there to do: talk about a specific topic, or do birthday party stuff, or run around filming, and their characterisation emerged around that skeleton. This was a deliberate design choice - I didn't want anyone in the games sitting in a corner wondering what they ought to be doing and feeling lost. Whatever else was going on, they always had the core activity to fall back on. I think they worked well enough to demonstrate that you can run an effective game without having to use some of the theatre-style design standards of puzzles, mysteries, political deals and object quests. I still had some romance plotlines in some games, because I like romance, but they weren't necessarily of the "there's someone you like, go out and win their heart" either.

The three quiet games seemed to have a natural runtime of around 1.5-2 hours, which is consistent with another 'talky' game I've played in, A Serpent of Ash by J. Tuomas Harviainen. At every run of BNLAE, it's tapped out at 2 hours (that's when people exhaust themselves). The first run of SSAPGX had a hard time limit of 2 1/2 hours excluding briefing/debriefing because of the event it was run at, but I think I wouldn't want to extend it's runtime to more than 3 hours (part of its shtick was that the players were racing against the clock).

The Shared Fictive Space
I also want to invent a new term here, Shared Fictive Space, because I feel like it, and because it riffs of some of the material that other Gametime writers have put up about Shared Imagined Spaces and GM Imagined Spaces. All of these games had an added layer of intertextuality, an awareness of an explicitly fictional element that they could manipulate directly in character, instead of having to negotiate in an OOC or game mechanics sense. In Sitting Shiva, this was our relationship with the Ghost (the conceit of the game was that the player characters are slightly alternate universe versions of themselves, in which they all have a relationship with another player who has just 'died'), which was built up as a cooperative conversation and storytelling throughout the game. In The Book Club, the shared fictive element was The Book, which in the game space was highly important to each player character, but in real life never existed. For that game, everyone was given a written essay describing their opinion about The Book with some details to back it up, and the goal of the game was to build up a group consensus about it. (4) In A Stiff One, the players were given information about something that had happened to them independently, but also shared information about some mutual friends and were encouraged to expand on that relationsip. In BNLAE, they were given a brief burble about a television programme they all liked, with enough space in the description that they could invent details - except for the one character who was an outsider to the group. And in SSAPGX, the shared fictive space was the point of the game - the group was assembled to produce an episode, but they all had different creative goals that they could push for in the course of the game.

Secrets, Lies and Maguffins
There weren't many. A few times there were some objects in the game that had plot relevance, but they weren't 'secret' and they weren't really hidden either - the closest we got was that in one case, there was a hidden object that one character was keen on that they'd 'lost' but they were pretty sure that another character had something to do with it. At a later point in the game the object turned up in a package for Pass the Parcel, allowing the players to guess the prize and try to manipulate who got the final present. The other objects in these games were designed to be revealed by their owners (either they wanted to show them to someone, or they were just highly visible), and things that would trigger an emotional reaction in the other players. There weren't many secrets, either. In some cases, people had information on their character sheets that wasn't well known but not plot-criticial, and this didn't really come out in the game; otherwise people had information about something that they cared about that they could choose to introduce into the game. Overall, I'm pleased with how these object plotlines worked - for me, anyway, questing for an object or secret in a game can often feel very mechanical and meta-game driven - but from my observer's view, it felt quite natural how the players used the hidden information or not, and interacted with the objects or not, as they cared about it.

The Emotional Game
We did put a lot of effort into character's emotional relationships with each other and the game material. In Sitting Shiva, this included a brief workshop at the beginning of the game where we all talked about how we knew each other, and inventing plausible connections where there weren't any real ones. And, well, that game had a lot to do with creating a safe space for emotionally sensitive topics. A Stiff One was written with the idea of emotionally processing a difficult situation - sometimes you need to talk something out before you've worked out how you feel about it, and the character sheets highlighted emotional dilemmas for the characters. The other games with prewritten characters were generally designed by thinking about the relationship map between characters and building them up from that. We put in romantic plotlines to several of the games, although we found that a typical "you fancy someone, go get them" plot didn't always activate in the games, and didn't seem to engage players as much as the alternative, which were the existing relationships. We wrote in several where the basic theme was "You have this person, but can you keep them? Do you want to? What about your mates' relationship?" These were great. The players involved were massively invested, the outcome was never possible to predict, and it made a good link to the other players because it's very easy to have an opinion. We also had some prewritten characters who had their own private unhappinesses, which were sometimes shared, and sometimes not. For these latter ones, I'm interested in hearing from the players of those characters - did they add to the game experience, or did they feel more like a nasty trick from an unkind GM?

All up, I'm glad I put the work into these games, I think I got a chance to try out some ideas that I'll keep with me for further work, and there've been some crazy awesome moments that were great to feel part of. I did find that writing this post has been surprisingly hard, involving a lot of poking at it for over a week trying to get my scattered thoughts into a semblance of order, and rereading it before I post it still feels very disjointed. I'm glad I did that, too, because it's a way of telling myself that these games are a set, that fit together, and that they're done now. And they are a set, for all it was a very organic process I went through to write them, and they do fit together, and I think that it's time for me to move on and do something else now.

(OK, when I started writing this post, Gametime was pretty quiet. It feels much less so now.)

(1) In hindsight I think it's a bit pat as a statement, but I think it's still true, with an additional rider that you need to give every character a reason to not just walk out early in the game.
(2) Yeah, just put in some corollaries about my accessible player pool being products of middle class Western society. So am I - there's been a really strong element of writing what I know, here.
(3) Seriously, Cat is the Best. Co-writer. Ever. She was astonishingly good about being bailed up for a weekend to brainstorm, and kept on throwing a big sparkly ideas ball back at me, and just came up with these amazing left field ideas that really made the games she helped with.
(4) At the time I wrote the game, I was spending a lot of time in Honours level English Lit seminars, and there were more than a few days where it felt like the conversation was less about getting on the same page as the author and more about asserting a point of view and finding enough evidence to make it stick. It really felt like a performance art - it wasn't just the book + author's intentions, it was book + author + the people in that particular room on that particular day as a transitory moment in time. I find the postmodern school of literary criticism to be extremely abstract and pretentious, but that my Big Critique of postmodernism is itself a postmodern work is not lost on me.

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/83313.html]

Lately, I've played in several campaigns, and the occasional one-off, that took a very loose approach to narrative structure. Some of this has manifested in multiple characters per player, or the casual assignment of NPCs to players to run for a session, but it also shows up in making the campaign timeline do loops and bows and strange wiggly bits designed to do players' heads in.

So we get flashbacks that establish more of a character's background, or provide more clues or evidence of the Bad Guys (TM) antisocial activities. Or we get cutscenes that show what someone else, like perhaps the Bad Guy, is doing, sometimes as a prologue to the story proper or spliced into the main narrative. One of the things that helps this approach work is a certain flexibility and ambiguity to story elements on the part of both GM and players - it's hard to run a heavily planned game when the outcome of a flashback session could wipe out the initial conditions of several months of roleplaying (the cry of "Damn you for having script immunity!" is a particularly pleasing one to hear, mind), and there are limits to a Tunnel of Fun's ability to force the story back onto its tracks. I've also heard of a roleplaying variant of Memento which took the exact opposite approach, with no ability to deviate from the preordained storyline. Sadly I didn't get a chance to play in that game, so don't know how it turned out. About the biggest risk I've seen so far is one also shared by a multiple character campaign, which is that sometime's it's hard to remember who knows what, when.

Whatever the case, playing fun and games with the timeline can bring a lot of richness into a campaign, as it provides alternate viewpoints to what's going on and allows players to build layers of meaning into their characters that weren't necessarily apparent at the beginning of the story. It's also not a new approach - several friends of my ex-defacto-stepdad's have several times regaled me with the story of a campaign he ran about 20 years ago in which the players split up and he ran the two groups on different nights of the week. One group heard an awesome story about a couple of people who fell off a colosseum and lived, and worked out from the description that it was probably their mates. It was two weeks later that the other group had a run of bizarre dice rolls that culminated in falling off the colosseum and living. Nobody knows if this was planned or luck, and my ex-defacto-stepdad just ain't telling.

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/75478.html]

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed the fabulous Karen Healey. Part 1 is below:

Karen Healey is a New Zealand writer, gamer, and academic, currently based at the University of Melbourne. She's studying the fan culture surrounding superhero comics, is involved with the feminist collective Girl-Wonder and the women-oriented gaming magazine Cerise, and has a young adult novel, Guardian of the Dead, due out in April 2010.

You've described yourself as a casual gamer. Can you unpack that a bit for us? What, to you, defines a casual game or casual gamer? What bits of gaming give you fun?

Okay! I'm a casual gamer in that I don't commit the same time to gaming that I do to my less casual pursuits. I'm not a casual reader, for example. I play an RPG weekly, more or less, and Bejeweled on my iPhone, and I have a love/hate affair with WoW.

So for you it's more about time spent than approach to?

Yep. I love gaming when I'm actually doing it, but I don't devote a lot of time to it.

So, moving on to roleplaying (because that's Gametime's real obsession :-)), what's the thing that most attracts you to it?

The roleplaying part - the improvised storytelling. I have a background in drama and theatresports, so I really love those moments where the DM and players suddenly crack out the most amazing reactions to situations.

What kind of a reaction, or event, would get you really involved in your game?

Well, you have to understand that this game is purest crack. We have been playing with the same group for about five years now, and though we do different settings (Buffy RPG, Angel RPG, X-men RPG, and the current is the Harry Potter universe, but in an American school for magic) a lot of the same things turn up. Like, for instance, Nicolas Cage appears in every game as an inept wizard. So every time that happens, I'm instantly delighted.

But my favourite game-involving thing is usually when something's happening with my character that the DM and I know about; but the other players are oblivious.

BAM! He can fly!

Or, it is time for a TRAGIC DEATH.

Does this mean you spend time talking to the DM behind the scenes about how you want your character or the game to go?

Definitely. It's a really collaborative process. I know it doesn't work for everyone, but it's great for our group.

This is going to make me sound like a bit of a dweeb - over the last few years I've seen people describe things as ‘crack,’ like fanfic they're written, or a roleplaying game they're in, or a TV programme that they like. I've kind of got a handle on the term, but I don't think exactly. What would you mean by it?

Oh, it's crack. It's bad for you, but YOU CANNOT STOP, because it makes you feel good. Or maybe it's just hilarious weird and crazy.

Have you ever had issues getting on the same page as your DM and other players? What kind of things would you do to get around miscommunication issues?

I can't remember any. Basically our philosophy is that things should be as awesome as possible, always.

Getting back to your definition of a casual game – you’ve been roleplaying with the same group of people once a week for five years, but you don’t think you spend a lot of time on it?

No, I don't think 2-3 hours a week is that much. Of course, that's comparative. And we skip out a lot - I've missed the last three sessions because of other commitments. I know I'm going to turn up and someone will have dyed my character's hair green.

So it's OK for people to take over protagonist control of other people's characters?

In our group, sure, although not for really drastic changes. Once, the last time the player was in control of the PC in question, she was eating chicken, so we dragged her around for the next four sessions with a rotting drumstick in her hand. That was fun.

In your regular online RPGs, what kind of system(s) does your group use. Like, a formally published one, or homebrew, or freeform...?

I think it's based on the Buffy RPG system, but we play pretty fast and loose with it. We tried to play the X-men game with their RPG system, but it's a total mess, so we kinda gave up on it.

About the only thing I know about the Buffy RPG is that there's an explicit inequality in spotlight time - the Slayer who gets lots of time upfront, and various mates who might spend a lot of time as supporting cast. Is that something that comes through in your games?

Oh, no. It's not actually spotlight time. What happens is the Slayer gets more upfront character strengths, but the White Hats have more points to spend during each session. So a Slayer will be very strong, and very fast. But she doesn't, for example, get to say "You know what, I'm going to use my good luck and reroll that." Or whatever.

But yeah, we screwed around with it anyway. I think that's a good idea in general - fit the system to your group, not your group to the system.

Right. I notice that your list of games is very media-influenced. Is that a deliberate choice by your group?

Those are the things that we like. I've done fantasy gaming and traditional D&D with other groups, but you know, less potential for inept Nicolas Cage. (One of our members was pretty miffed that we did Harry Potter this time, because she had vowed never to read the books, but she didn't have to to make it work, so that's cool.)

Do you have a preference for online or real life roleplaying? Does it vary for different games?

Hah, well, my current group live in four time zones, so real life would be a little tricky.

But compared to the games that you have played in real life, do you think there's a functional difference in how the game goes?

Yeah, people spend less time talking over each other and the jokes are better. There's less energy, but it feels faster - I don't know if that's a function of the format or because we tend to streamline the gaming process.

Do you get problems with game mechanics? I mean, things like people having different ideas about what they should be able to do, or who is winning a particular conflict?

I can't remember any. People tend to have a pretty good grasp on what their characters can and can't do, and if the DM rules against something we trust it's for a good reason. She's evil, but in a fun way.

This is a question from Morgue: Female participation in tabletop RPGs is significantly less than male participation, whereas in the world of online "RP" female participation far outstrips male participation. Why do you think these superficially similar pastimes are so gendered? Is this problematic in any way?

I think that part of it is that online participation is significantly physically safer, and for women, especially young women, that is a genuine concern. A fifteen year old boy goes to his mate's house and plays an RPG all Sunday with people he's never met before, and that's usually going to be okay. A girl in the same situation might feel considerably more trepidation about it, especially if she believes, rightly or wrongly, that she'll be the only girl there.

So that's one factor.

Another is that media fandom is a huge draw into online RP gaming. And there are thousands of fandom communities that are female-run and female-driven, so that's a starting point for a lot of women.

Do you see much of a tie-in with fan fiction writing?

Oh, god yes. Have you seen the LJ RPG communities? There's a ton. That's not a method of gaming I'm attracted to, but they're really huge. So, there are these big gaming communities where people take a role and play through comments and in their own journals - producing a collaborative story, again.

Right. One of the things I've noticed about the fan fiction I’ve read is how much of a relationship there is between the writers and the readers - the review comments are a really big deal to each writer, they'll often pick up ideas from each other, or give specific prompts or writing challenges - now that I think about it, it heads very much into collaborative storytelling as well.

Absolutely. Go collective media.

You've spent a lot of time studying the world of comics, and particularly the fandom of superhero comics. Is there the same kind of collaboration between writers and readers going on there?

Very much so. I could talk about it a bit, but I'd start pulling out words like 'archontic literature' and 'hierarchy‑in‑flux' and we'd be here a while. Basically, though, most people professionally involved in the comics industry are working on titles they were fans of first, they're actually third or fourth generation pro-fans. Not just of comics in general, but of, say, Spiderman. (When I say comics industry here, I mean the Big Two - indies and the smaller pros have a very different vibe, but even there they generally owe some debt to the tights brigade.)

Most Twilight fans know they're never going to work on Twilight, but it's different for comics, and it's really interesting to see what effects that collaboration and movement has on the industry and the fan relationships.

Can you give a brief definition of ‘archontic literature’ and ‘hierarchy‑in‑flux’?

Well, the first one takes several pages in my dissertation, so, let's see. Archontic lit is where you have an original text, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer the TV series, and that is the original text of the Buffy archive. Then people start taking things from that text - like the concept of Slayers, or Chosen Ones, or Buffy and Angel being in love - and create new entries to the archive. So, for example, all the tie-in novels. Or the comics. Or fanfic. Or fanvids. They are all entries into the Buffy archive.

Buffy is actually a weird example, because the actual originary text is the movie. But most people approach the series as the originary text. Anyway, my dissertation argues that superhero comics are, and have been for at least three decades, a corporate archontic literature.

So you could argue that things like the literature surrounding mythologies are archontic? They're added to over time by many authors?

Absolutely. But those aren't corporatised. I mean, Disney owns bits of the archive, but doesn't seek to control the whole thing. And hierarchy-in-flux is a hierarchy where who has the power tends to shift a bit.

Can you give an example?

Sure. Okay, Buffy again. The network has the power in that situation, nominally. They own the copyright, they fund the show. The creators - writers, directors, actors - have some power in what happens with the show. And the watchers are at the bottom of the hierarchical pile - they have nominally no power at all, they have to take what they're given. BUT if there are no watchers, there's no show.

(Actually, the advertisers should be in this hierarchy too, so pretend I said that.) So the network and the creators have to keep in mind what the watchers are watching, or what they don't want to see. That's not hierarchy‑in‑flux, yet. But if Buffy carried on for, say, twenty years, and the watchers became creators, and some became network people, and those boundaries started to give, that would be.

So, third or fourth generation pro-fans rolling into the writing teams for superhero comics.

Yep.

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/65998.html]

Do you think that some of the big publicity events that have happened in comics - like putting a character in a life or death situation and getting readers to vote on whether they survive - are legitimate? Do the readers opinions really have sway to where the storyline is going?

Yes and no. If you're referring to the Jason Todd/Robin death, that was apparently legit, but the writers had very clearly set it up for the readers to hate him. They wanted him dead. But of course, the company needs another black‑haired blue‑eyed Robin in there who matches the pictures on the lunchboxes.

Do you think that in a more general sense the opinions of the fans can have weight in the storyline? I know that Girl-Wonder was set up with a specific goal regarding content - has that goal been successful?

If you're talking about Stephanie getting a [memorial] case, Girl-Wonder actually wasn't set up with that singular goal.[1]

Hang on while I check the internet: "in response to a rising level of frustration at the treatment of female characters, creators and fans inside and outside the comics industry." Do you think that the comic companies are paying attention?

Oh, okay. Yes. They know what's going on, and a lot of people within the companies agree.

But these are big companies, and they are very slow, and they have a lot of entrenched, institutionalised sexism to get through before they get to change. And the companies as a whole, as opposed to the individuals therein, would really like to believe that sexism in comics is already over and that people criticising them are just exercising fan entitlement, because that would mean they hadn't done anything bad.

People want to be good. You tell them they've screwed up, and they'll spend so much time denying it that they might not actually get to addressing the screwups. But they're certainly aware that there are female readers, and feminist readers, and that some of them aren't very happy and think they could do better.

What do you think is the best approach for an individual wanting to change things in media - not just comics, but any media?

It really depends on the individual (and it depends on what they want to change.) But in general, I think honesty, persistence, and clarity are useful. Oh, and don't be afraid of emotion. If you're angry, own the anger. If you're sad and disappointed, say so.

Do you think it's possible to reach a point of diminishing returns? When protesting more might have a negative effect on the people you want to change?

You know, sometimes it's just not about those people. Sometimes someone will just be really pissed at injustice and they will say so so that it can be said. And the thing is, if you've got someone who is very angry and protesting very loudly, the people in charge might not want to listen to them. But they are then more likely to then listen to the people who are less obvious in their anger. Because hey, gosh, that seems reasonable.

So really, loud people are doing everyone in favour of progress a big favour.

We've been talking about comics, which have traditionally been catering to a male audience, and fanfiction and online roleplaying which seem to me to be attracting a predominately female audience, neither of them exclusively but with some definite trends. Both have a strong interest in collaborative storytelling, shared worlds, and have a lot of fan input. Do you think that ever the twain shall meet?

I think they're meeting now, thanks to the internet. What we're seeing now is the conflict engendered by those meetings. So we live in interesting times! Media and cultural studies students are having a ball.

Going back to your thesis - what kind of support are you getting in your research from mainstream academia?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by that.

When you're chatting to professors about what you're working on, do they look at you funny, or say 'how cool!' Is it an issue getting funding?

Oh, English/Cultural Studies are pretty diverse. People are working on a whole range of things. So I haven't encountered any snobbery. And I'm on a full scholarship at the University of Melbourne, so that part of funding isn't an issue. Office space is a whole other deal, but that's the university in general, not academic hierarchy!

I mostly get weird looks from civilians. My mother's response is "And what will you do with that?" although she's stopped doing that since I sold the book, so, yay me.

Tell me about Guardian of the Dead.

It's a young adult contemporary fantasy novel, set in Christchurch and Napier, and entrenched in Māori mythology.

It follows a teenager who's spending the last year of high school at a Christchurch boarding school and who has exactly one friend and is really not certain about anything except that the dude in her Classics class is totally cute and won't talk to anyone. Then he enchants her in the music centre, it turns out her best friend's in danger from a predatory patupaiarehe, there's a taniwha in the Avon and oh shit! Some bad stuff is gonna go down - time to pull out her rusty Tae Kwon Do skills and newly-awakened magical abilities.[2]

Working with Māori mythology, to what extent did you make allowances for non-New Zealanders who will be less familar with the context?

Oh, that was a mission. I'm Pakeha and the main character is Pakeha, and my two biggest fears were that I would cause Māori kids pain by misusing their heritage, or give Australian and American readers the idea that my twist on the mythology is an authentic and authoritative one and that is all they need to know.

So there are a couple of things I did. Where I could, I inserted translations of the story - retold, but based on the legends that had actually been collected. And at the end of the story, I wrote an afterword pointing out that this isn't a 'real' Māori legend, and here are my sources, and here are other YA books that have drawn upon this mythology.

My editors wanted explanation of some things that seemed obvious to me, so I went back in edits and unpacked that a little more. I think the biggest wake-up call was when my agent said "And of course we'll have some understanding of the culture here, because of our Native Americans - I imagine there are areas where Māori live, like reservations?"

And I went: OH SHIT NO. ACTUALLY, MĀORI URBAN MIGRATION QUITE A THING.

What I tried to do, and I don't know if I've succeeded (and I'll eat it if I haven't because I believe in owning your mistakes!) is showing that New Zealand tries, not always successfully, to be genuinely bicultural. So the school, which I made up, is called Mansfield College and the girls live in Sheppard Hall. But the boys live in Pomare Hall. One of the characters is a kapa haka guy, and that's a normal thing, it's not some exoticised activity, it's a normal school club. So that kind of thing.[3]

And honestly, overseas readers might not get all of it. But I have faith in them. I worked out that when my American YA books mentioned biscuits with gravy, they were not talking about Tim Tams.

No, something like scones, I think.

They are kind of gross. At least the ones they have at KFC are.

So, I'm going to change the topic by a lot, and put in one of Morgue's questions again. With your Girl‑Wonder hat on: when a group of male gamers sit down to play an RPG, what would you like them to keep in mind? And because we've been talking about cultural differences, what would you like anyone to keep in mind?

Please don't use these minatures.

Basically, I think that when you're playing an RPG, you're doing a lot of world-building and story-telling (in amongst the explosions and/or dragon-slaying, of course). So if you want your world to be awesome, and your stories to be really good, then relying on stereotypes of any kind - sexist, racist, homophobic - is only going to harm your game.

You don't have to play female characters, or characters of an ethnicity not yours, although this can be really interesting. But you know, the NPC bar wench doesn't have to be a giggling blonde moron. The evil queen doesn't necessarily want to seduce you, or is only acting out because she was raped. Do the Dark Hordes of the East really have to be Dark Hordes from the East?

That kind of thing.

If you're playing a modern game, there's just really no excuse, because you're right in it, and it's not all white dudes. It'll make your game better and bonus: you will be a good person!

One last question: how is the zeppelin piracy working out for you?

I'm giving it up for the exciting world of cost accountancy.

[1] Stephanie Brown was the fourth Robin in the Batman series. The character was brutally murdered and the mourning period after her death was notably brief and lacking in tangible signs of grief such as a memorial case holding her old costume in the Batcave, in strong contrast to a previously deceased Robin. Girl-Wonder.org ran a letter-writing campaign demanding greater acknowledgement. The character has since returned to the storyline via a ‘fake death’ and a memorial case for her has appeared in a couple of panels.

[2] Annotations for non-New Zealanders: The patupaiarehe have an approximate equivalence as the Māori version of the Fey. They're often described as being pale-skinned, human-like and supernatural, and live in out of the way places. Taniwha are a kind of monster, vaguely reptilian, often associated with lakes and rivers and caves, the darker and more treacherous the better. The Avon is the large river flowing through Christchurch.

[3] More annotations: Katherine Mansfield, significant New Zealand writer prominent in the Modernist school; Kate Shepherd, suffragist, ran the campaign bringing the vote to women in 1893; Sir Maui Pomare, first Māori doctor, and an influential public health campaigner and politician; kapa haka, a traditional Māori performance art, involving haka, poi dance and singing.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to me, Karen. :-)

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/66119.html]

I've never really hid the fact that I was a geek. A science fiction geek, a roleplaying geek, a re-enactment geek, and most of all a girl geek. It never struck me as a problem - my opportunities for education, employment and romance have always been reasonable, and I tend to use my 'geekiness' as a filter for working out if a new person is worth knowing. (Sometimes, it's even worked out as an attractant for finding the cool people that I specifically would like to know.) More than this, it's never occurred to me that pretending mundaneness might be an advantageous thing to do. Now, however, I'm wondering if perhaps this is not the norm for other geeks. Maybe I got lucky.

I had a conversation with a friend a few days ago and the conversation got onto gamer guys and gamer girls and how relationships worked between them, especially considering the male-female gender disparity in most gaming communities. Her theory was that for gamer girls the pickings inside the hobby were good, so they could flaunt their involvement without practical limitations on their love life. Conversely, she thought, there weren't enough gamer girls to go around, so that there were always a fair chunk of gamer guys who had to look for relationships outside the hobby. These men, she figured, or some of them, would try to mask geekiness so as not to turn off non-geeks. Some, she thought, were specifically looking for non-geeks to have a relationship with. This is where I ask for comments from the floor. Is this consistent with your experience? How do people feel about advertising their hobby preferences to the world at large, and do they think it changes with gender?

Maria Velazquez on Cerise talks about dating a subset of gamer guys who expected her and other gaming women to 'pay rent' for being female, either by grading her on 'prettiness' or on her interest (or not) in maths and gaming products: "I wasn’t their ideal and they thought it was okay to let me know that. They were playing a game where they got to change the rules whenever they felt like it… so that rent? For being female? It gets higher every time." Another question for the floor: has anyone here been the subject of that kind of toxic chauvinism, and what did they do about it?

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/48805.html]

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/48805.html]

Consider. You have decided to run a theatre style larp with a plenitude of romantic themes. You have recruited players and filtered them through a questionnaire so that you know who is interested in playing out a love story. You have written your characters, dressed the venue, made your final announcements and said “Go.” Nothing to do now but watch.

This article discusses the actual play of the romance story lines in Sanctuary, a larp I co-ran with Naomi Guyer and Sean Broadley. We had a range of romantic storylines planned. Some were quite sad, others were designed to be as chaotic as a Shakespearean comedy, and in fact some of our inspirations were drawn from there. (1)
( Romancing the Larp... )

Unrequited, Unconfessed Love. We had three characters who were written with some form of secret crush on another character, varying in strength from “You’re very loyal” to “You’re a bit psychotic about this.” Sadly, in all three planned instances, the objects of desire were entirely oblivious. In one case there was a marriage proposal and a suicide after the character was turned down – very much to the surprise of the person who was proposed to. Another character asked his object of desire for romantic advice as a prelude to dropping hints and was blithely advised to “find himself a woman.” I guess that roleplayed love is as subtle and hard to notice as the real thing. Advice to larp-writes: drop a hint to the object of desire that there might be a little bit more going on than is obvious.

Love at First Sight. OK, not love love, but roleplayed love, in which the player is handed a note when they first meet the other person telling them that they suddenly feel a strange desire. These had pluses and minuses. One player was reportedly quite appalled when he read his note and complained afterwards that he would have met the character previously and shouldn’t have been so thunderstruck. Another character took his ‘epiphany’ as a challenge and spent the rest of the game working hard to achieve marriage with the woman he’d ‘fallen in love’ with. In other cases, I don’t think that some of the planned pairings ever met up, or if they did, the new goal was subsumed underneath other material. From a larp-write point of view, these kinds of GM-mandated easter eggs seem to me to be a bit random – you might get a cool storyline, or it might never emerge out of the chaotic stew of the larp. I also think that the most successful character to roleplay being struck suddenly by Cupid’s arrow was one who had already been primed with a character sheet suggesting that marriage might be a good idea, hence putting the player in a receptive mood.

Same Gender Romance. These worked out rather well, if I do say so myself. The most spectacular of these storylines was full of confusions and ifs and maybes, in which the central figures were stumbling into each other, leaping to conclusions, quizzing people for (often misleading) information, recruiting friends for help and making meaningful looks at each other across the room. Often, the meaningful looks were also bouncing off an old flame of one of the principals for added melodrama. Most of this was subtle enough that I as a GM wandering about the room hadn’t realised it was going on until near the end of the larp when the two lovers got married, and most of it I heard about afterwards. The thing that made this storyline so successful was the degree to which the players leapt into their parts. One person commented afterwards that while he spent a little time managing his political goals, he was trying to get that done as quickly as possible so that he could spend more time worrying about his love life. In case it matters to anyone, the participants were a mix of straight and gay. I didn’t hear of any problems with people roleplaying outside their regular orientation. It was a question we had specifically asked people before casting them, and it made us a lot more comfortable with assigning characters.

Touch Me/Touch Me Not. There was very little physical contact in this larp – I think the limit for people was holding hands. One guy that got ‘married’ said that he would have kissed his partner if someone else had set a precedent, but that was as close as anyone got. I’ve heard of a mechanic invented in Scandinavia called Ars Amandi that deals with a low contact way of simulating sex by touching people’s arms and hands, but it wasn’t relevant to our game which, after all, was focused on the falling-for-someone stage rather than the doing-something-about-it stage.

Crossing the Boundaries. How far is too far? That’s always the question. People’s out-of-character relationships had a strong effect on how they roleplayed their in-character stuff. We had a player group of 62 people and some of them knew each other already and some didn’t. From the comments people made afterwards, I think that a previous acquaintance meant much more trust between the players and they were more comfortable pushing the envelopes of their parts. On the other hand, one pair was already dating each other in real life, and I don’t think I’ll knowingly cast that way again, because they said afterwards that there was a fair amount of confusion between what was real and what was in-character – quite important when you’re in the middle of a lover's tiff. I’ve previously played in a six player larp called Couples by Tony Shirley which had a very extensive preliminary phase to help people get into character and comfortable with each other, so I know that there are ways to shortcut the kind of trust you get by knowing someone well. I cannot stress how valuable that trust can be in a roleplaying environment.

You Can’t Write Me Love. Overall, I was very pleased with how the romance storylines went in Sanctuary. One thing I did notice was that you can’t compel people into roleplaying a romantic relationship, no matter what you write on their character sheets. You can plant plot hooks, you can dangle bait, you can drop hints, but if the people involved aren’t interested, nothing is going to happen.

When they do happen, when people leap into the uncertainty, melodrama and glory of a love affair, you get something magic.

(1) There is an Afterlarp report on Sanctuary here for people who would like more background.

[This was originally posted on the Gametime LJ community: http://gametime.livejournal.com/44830.html]