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Book Review: Blackbirds, by Chuck Wendig

May 18th, 2012
by Doyce.
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I’m a sucker for amnesia stories.

You know the kind I’m talking about: Our hero wakes up in a hotel room with no memory of who he is or how he got there. There’s a pounding on the door, the landlord’s hollering that this week’s rent is due, the nameless protag opens the door, and the cops burst in, pinning him to the bed and reciting Miranda for the murder of so and so and OH MY GOD WHAT’S GOING ON?!? Dark City‘s a good recent example, but it’s something I’ve loved since Corwin woke up in a hospital bed in Nine Princes in Amber.

There are any number of acceptable and equally fun variations on this basic idea, a lot of them circling around the idea that the protagonist is investigating some blank spot in their recent history, trying to learn what happened and how they were involved — bonus points if it starts look like they themselves are the killer/criminal/victim they’re trying to find. I ran into a fun twist on this not too long ago in Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, a sci-fi detective story where the main character’s memory is fine, but his new body (not-so-gently used, one previous owner) has a number of dark secrets; it’s was a really good way for me to scratch that itch.

Chuck Wendig‘s come up with another one.

Let me introduce you to Miriam Black. She’s got a hell of a party trick: give her a little skin-to-skin contact (fingertips, lips, elbows on the subway, whatever), and she gets an instant, full-color, down-to-the-second replay (preplay? foreplay?) of your death. Pretty cool. Pretty dark. Pretty bad ass. That’s Miriam Black.

At least that’s what she wants to world to think.

Truth is, if you watch Miriam for a little while… if you listen to her talk (she loves to talk) and notice how she goes out of her way to alienate anyone and everyone with whom she comes in contact (emitting a stream of viscous, vicious, venomous dialog that fills a defensive moat only the brave or stupid would try to cross), you realize that that Miriam hurts. She blames herself for every death she’s ‘witnessed’; dies a little bit every every time a soul she’s touched shuffles off this mortal coil (no matter how much of a human stain they happen to be). She’s damaged goods, brother, and she’s getting worse, not better.

Miriam Black knows when you're going to die... and she will do anything to convince herself she doesn't care.

“Sounds interesting,” you might say, “but where in all that is your little amnesia fetish getting sated?”

Well see that’s the interesting bit.

Miriam, road-weary and cynical, has a chance encounter with someone… nice. Someone she likes almost immediately. Someone she might even become friends with; a granite block of a human being who’s maybe tough enough to withstand the wear and tear of the shit storm that is Miriam’s life.

Inevitably, she reaches out for a bit of human contact, and sees her new friend’s death.

Murder. Violent and nasty. In a month.

And, somehow, Miriam is involved. Somehow, she’s there when it happens, and does nothing.

That’s when Blackbirds got me.

I don’t know how to tell you what this book is — a paranormal sci-fi conspiracy horror murder-mystery roadtrip? Maybe. It isn’t even an amnesia story, not really, because you can’t really have missing memory of something that hasn’t happened yet.

Except… Miriam can.

How can I sum this up? How can I give you the one-line morsel that will send you off to find the rest of the meal?

If Phillip K. Dick had lived Charles Bukowski’s life, he might have written Blackbirds.

Might have, I say, because I doubt he (or certainly Bukowski) could have given half as much depth to Miriam as Wendig shares, and it’s Miriam that makes Blackbirds work. The gritty asphalt fantasy that makes up the plot? Don’t get me wrong: that’s great stuff, but it’s poor, damaged, desperate Miriam that brings the whole thing back to where we live.

You may not like her (she’ll be happier if you don’t), but you’ll care.

Just see if you don’t.

Mass Effect, Creative License, and the Rights of the Player in a Story/Game #me3

Mar 27th, 2012
by Doyce.
4 comments

This post is (thankfully) going to be shorter than yesterday’s. I wasn’t going to write another one on this topic at all, but there was a really good comment on yesterday’s post that led to a really long reply on my part — so long that I figured it would be better served as a post of its own.

The reason it’s interesting to me is because it has to do with the weird line between the traditional cultural definitions of “story” and “game” that a product like Mass Effect walks.

So, yesterday, Kaelri wrote (in part):

Frankly, I do believe that art is inviolate – that is to say, I don’t believe an artist has some sort of moral obligation to address the grievances of audience members who don’t happen to like what they came up with. If I’m a fan of a thing, it’s because I found the product and liked it; and if I choose to support it, as an advocate or a consumer or both, they still don’t owe me nothin’. Maybe they “should” pay attention to me for the sake of their business model, but that’s different from saying they “should” listen to me as though my fandom makes me a shareholder in the creative process.

First off, I get exactly where you’re coming from. I would even agree with you — when it comes to traditional media, a writer or really any creative person of any kind is not obliged to make fan-demanded changes to their work, unless they’re trying to make a more saleable product, or they just want to because their work would be better that way.

They can refuse, as I said in my original post — it might mean they never get published or that they never reach a wider audience, but that’s entirely their choice… when it comes to traditional media.

But, as I said yesterday, Mass Effect is something other than traditional media, which is why I’m going to disagree with you when it comes to this particular artistic work, and others like it:

I believe that we — the participants in the Mass Effect games — are co-creators.

Now, that’s a big statement, so let me dig into it a bit. This certainly isn’t true of every game out there — no one is complaining that they didn’t get enough creative input into the ending of Braid, because that isn’t what Braid is about — it’s not that kind of game.

Mass Effect, however, is that kind of game. It’s a conscious and (as I said in my made-up LotR example) difficult thing to do, but it is undeniably a can of worms Bioware chose to open, and once it’s open, they’re pretty much stuck with the consequences. The players have control of a lot of stuff that happens in the game series, if only with a binary yes/no level of input, and having extended them that authorship power you have, to a greater or lesser degree, given them access to the canvas and the right to call foul if they disagree with what you’re painting.

Again, this is not the case in every game out there (and it is not true of any traditional media of which I’m aware), but it is the case with Mass Effect. I can (with studious and somewhat questionable effort) entirely remove even someone like Garrus from all but a few scenes in the entire game series (the equivalent of having Samwise in one scene in Fellowship, no scenes at all in Two Towers, and writing him in as a bit-part escort for the last couple chapters of Return of the King). I decide whether many if not all of the character’s live and die and, with ME3, my influence is extended to the point where I can effectively wipe out two whole species.

It’s fair to say that Bioware is steering the A-plot, but when it comes to dictating the very tapestry against which that plot plays out, I am being dealt a lot of cards, and the hand that I play is a strong one. Certainly, my control over the personal stories in all three games is ironclad, and would be argued by many to be the most important and interesting bits.

So am I, at some level, a co-creator?

In indie tabletop RPG design, there’s an idea that some call “The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.” It refers to the classic, old-school RPG notion that “The GM is the author of the story and the players direct the actions of the protagonists.”

The term was coined to illustrate the fact that story is made of the actions and choices of the protagonists, so claiming to control one but not the other is senseless. If you have influence on the story at all, you exert influence on the protagonists, and if you truly control the actions of the protagonists, you have real and concrete influence on the story.

Or you should.

And, to be fair, Bioware did a fantastic job throughout ME1 and ME2 with giving players that kind of control and influence. (They’re not as good about it in ME3, but they’ve (sadly) compensated by becoming very skilled at disguising a lack of choice with something that feels like you’re making a decision.)

I would say that one of the biggest problems with the end of ME3 — or at least the part that causes the loudest initial outcry — is that it very baldly revokes that player-authorship at the point in the story where the players want it most.

To say that the players — while certainly not equal partners in the process, but creative contributors nonetheless — should have no say in the conclusion of the story they helped create is unfair, and to defend it by hiding behind “artistic expression”, as Bioware has done, is an insult to the players’ input throughout the series and a rather crude misrepresentation of what Mass Effect has been to both the creators and the players for the last five years.

Mass Effect, Tolkien, and Your Bullshit Artistic Process

Mar 26th, 2012
by Doyce.
128 comments

It may seem a bit odd that I’m posting this here rather than on my gaming-related blog, since it is about the Mass Effect game series and other related geekery. I debated where I should post it, but ultimately this is about writing as much or more than it’s about gaming, so here it is. Everything that follows is my opinion and, further, is infested with spoilers for both the Mass Effect series and, I suppose, The Lord of the Rings. Reader beware.

In late February, I said (on twitter) that I thought the Mass Effect universe was probably the most important science fiction of a generation.

Since then, the executive producer for Mass Effect 3 has been working tirelessly to get me to retract that statement.

If you follow gaming news at all, you’ll already know that there have been great clouds of dust kicked over this particular story — the gist of it is that Mass Effect was brought to a conclusion with the release of Mass Effect 3 (note: not brought to its conclusion, just brought to a conclusion — more on that later), and while 99% of the game was the same top-notch, engaging, tear-inducing stuff that we’ve come to expect, the last five minutes or so is a steaming, Hersey’s Kiss-sized dollop of dog shit that you are forced to ingest at the conclusion of the meal, like a mint, before they let you out the door.

It’s fair to say that it’s soured many players’ impression of the experience as a whole.

Now, I realize that many of the folks reading this may not have played through the Mass Effect series. First of all, that’s really too bad, because it is very, very good both in terms of play (which steadily improves from game to game) and story (barring one steaming exception) and (I think) completely worth the time.

But secondly, I’d like to keep you non-ME people involved in the conversation, so I’m going to draw a comparison that I think most anyone likely to visit here will understand, so that we can all proceed with reasonable understanding of the issues.

Let’s pretend for a moment that The Lord of the Rings was released not as a series of books, but a series of games. More importantly, the company behind the series decided to do something really hard but rewarding with the game — they were going to let you make decisions during play that substantively altered the elements of the story. That means that some of people playing through this Lord of the Rings story would end up with a personal game experience that was pretty much exactly like the one you and I all remember from reading the books, but that story is just sort of the default. Whole forums were filled up by fans of the series comparing notes on their versions of the game, with guides on how to get into a romantic relationship with Arwen (the obvious one), Eowyn (more difficult, as you have to go without any kind of romance option through the whole first game, but considered by many to be far more rewarding), or even Legolas (finally released as DLC for the third game).

And that’s certainly not all of possible permutations. Some players actually managed to save Boromir (though he leaves the party regardless, but gets you a whole extra army in the third game if he’s alive, and makes Denethor much less of a pain in the ass to deal with). Some folks don’t split up the party, and spend most of the game recruiting supporters through the South and North, from Aughaire down to Dol Imren. For some, Gimli dies at Helms Deep; for others only Merry escapes into Fangorn (which makes recruiting the Ents all but impossible). Hell, there are even a few weirdos who chose NOT to recruit Samwise back at the beginning of the story, and actually play through the whole first game without him (though the writers reintroduce him as a non-optional party member once you get ready to leave Lothlorien).

And what about the players who rolled the main character as a female? That changes a LOT of stuff, as you might well imagine. (Though, thankfully, all the dialogue options with Legolas are the same.)

Are you with me so far?

Okay, so you’re playing through this game — you’ve played through parts 1 and 2 several times, in fact, sometimes as a goody-two-shoes, and sometimes as a total bad-ass. You’ve got a version of the game where you’re with Arwen, one with Eowyn, one with Legolas, and one where you focus on Frodo and his subtle hand-holding bromance with Sam. You’re ready for Part Three, is what I’m saying, and out it comes.

And it’s awesome. You finally bring lasting alliance between Rohan and Gondor, you form a fragile-yet-believable peace between elves and dwarves, and even manage to recruit a significant strike-force of old Moria orcs who don’t so much like you as much as they just hate the johnny-come-lately Uruk-hai.

The final chapters open. You face down Saruman (who pretended to fund all your efforts through the second book, but then turned on you at the end of the Two Towers), which was really satisfying. You crawl up to the top of Mount Doom, collapse against a rock, and have a really touching heart to heart with Sam. It’s over. You know you have all your scores high enough to destroy the One Ring with no crisis of conscious and no lame “Gollum bit off my finger and then falls in the lava” ending, like the one you saw on the fanfic forums last year.

And then out comes this glowing figure from behind a rock, and it’s… Tom Bombadil.

And Tom explains your options.

Oh, and you're totally going to die too. And all the roads and horses throughout all of middle earth vanish. And by the way did you know that Sauron and the Nazgul all actually just work for Bombadil? True story.

Now, let’s just ignore the fact that the company behind this game has been quoted many times as saying that the game will end with no less than sixteen different endings, to honor all the various ways the story could go, and focus on these three options.

None of them have anything to do with destroying the ring, do they?

Has ‘destroying the ring’ (alternately, destroying Sauron) been pretty much THE THING you’ve been working toward the whole game? Yeah, it has. In fact, it mentions “Rings” right there in the title of the series, doesn’t it? Rather seems to make The Ring a bit of a banner item, doesn’t it?

But no, none of these options are about the Ring; they’re about one of the b-plots in the series, and one which you pretty much already laid to rest a few chapters ago.

So… okay, maybe this isn’t the END ending, you think, and you pick one of the options…

And that’s it. A bunch of cut-scenes play, Mount Doom explodes with fiery red light, you die, and the credits roll. The end.

Ohhh-kay. Maybe that was the bad ending. Let’s reload a save and pick option 2…

Same. Exact. Cut scenes. Except Mount Doom’s explosion is green. What?

Alright… umm… let’s check #3…

Nope. Mount Doom’s explosion is Blue. That’s it.

And, absolutely inexplicably, every single one of these cut scenes shows Gandalf, Aragorn, and SAMWISE escaping the explosion on one of the eagles and crash-landing somewhere in Lorien where they all pat themselves on the back and watch the sun set together.

What? But… Sam was with you. Aragorn and Gandalf… did they start running away halfway through the last fight at the Black Gate? Your boys abandoned you?

So, given this example, it’s possible — even for someone who didn’t play Mass Effect — to understand the fan’s reaction. The ending has no real connection to the rest of the story; barring the last scene and one conversation with an unnamed Nazgul in Book 3, it would lift right out with no one even noticing. It completely takes away your choices at the end of a game about making world-altering choices. It effectively destroys the Middle Earth that you were fighting for 100 hours of gameplay to preserve — no magic? Maybe a completely wiped out dwarven race? No one can travel anywhere without painstakingly rebuilding roads for a couple hundred years and replacing horses with something else? Also, no matter what, no matter how much ass you kick, you’re dead? Yeah. No thanks, man.

And that’s not even paying attention to stuff like how (and why) Sam and Gandalf and Strider ran away at the end. I mean… even if you’re going to do a shitty twist ending, don’t be so goddamn lazy about it. Don’t sit there and claim that criticism of the ending is an attack on your artistic product, because frankly that ending is full of holes and needs a rewrite and probably two more chapters to flesh out. (More on that in a bit.)

So… that’s where the Mass Effect franchise was after ME3 came out. A lot of confusion. A lot of rage. Some protests of a very interesting sort, where the gamers against the terrible ending decided to draw attention to the issue by raising something like seventy-thousand bucks for geek-related charities.

Now, let’s go a bit deeper.

Let’s continue with this Lord of the Rings video game analogy. Let’s say that after a bit of digging, people realized that Tolkien actually left the company to work on other projects before the game was complete. He wrote up a detailed outline, though; something that clearly spelled out exactly how the main arc of the story was supposed to play out, in broad strokes, basically laying out what we would expect the ending to be, pretty much.

But Tolkien left. So they get another guy in. Someone else who’s written stuff about some kind of powerful ring…

They get Steven R. Donaldson.

(Those of you who know me and my history with the Thomas Covenant books can guess that this analogy is not going to be a positive one, because seriously: fuck Thomas Covenant.)

So they get this Donaldson guy in to helm the end of the series, and it turns out he’s the guy who comes up with the Tom Bombadil, fuck-the-continuity-of-the-series ending.

Why? Maybe he’s pissed about being the second choice. Maybe he’s not getting paid enough to give a fuck. Maybe he just really wants to do this kind of story, but can’t be arsed to write a series of his own for which it makes sense. Maybe the original ending outlined by Tolkien got leaked on a forum the year before the last game came out, so people decided it had to be changed, even if the alternative makes no sense. I don’t know.

What I do know is the there was a different ending written out for the Mass Effect series, the short version of which is that the Big Reveal in ME3 is that the Mass Effect itself — the magical black-box technology that allows interstellar travel and powers a ton of other things from weapons to expensive toothbrushes — is causing a constant increase in dark energy in the galaxy, and that’s causing all kinds of bad things (like the accelerated death of stars).

The Mass Effect — you know, the thing from which the name of the series is derived — is the secret behind the Big Reveal. Who would have thought?

So, in the end of the game-as-envisioned, you’re given a choice of saving the galaxy by sacrificing the human race (making humanity into a biomechanical, synthetic-life, communal-intelligence “Reaper” that can stop the Dark Energy decay), or telling the Reapers to screw themselves and trying to fix the problem on your own (with a handful of centuries left before the Dark Energy thing snowballs and grows out of control on its own).

Which, in a word, would have been better. Certainly FAR better than some kind of stupid Tom Bombadil/Star Child explanation where we are told that the (synthetic AI) Reapers destroy advanced organic civilizations every 50 thousand years to prevent organic civilizations from… being destroyed by synthetic AIs.

Now we don’t just have some gamer complaints about the terrible ending, we have a demonstrably better ending that was actually supposed to be the one implemented. Complicates things, doesn’t it?

But Why All the Hate?

The simple fact of the matter is that Mass Effect is a story, and it’s a very good story — in my opinion, it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever experienced. People can hem and haw about what constitutes a story — about whether a game can really be a story if people can play it — as though a story is only a story if it’s spoken or written or projected up on a movie screen. That’s like saying a person is only a person if they walk or ride a horse or drive a car… because we all know the vehicle in which the subject is conveyed changes that subject’s inherent nature.

Some people say it’s not a real story because the player’s choices can alter it. I think they’re full of crap, and I say the proof of its power as a story is right there in the story-pudding — it affects me as a story does — and that’s all the criteria met. Walks like duck, quacks like duck, therefore duck.

But the problem (if you’re BioWare) is that human beings understand stories; we know how they’re supposed to work, thanks to thousands of years of cultural training. Mass Effect (until that conclusion) is a nigh-perfect example of how a story is done correctly, thanks in part to the medium, which allows (if you’ll permit me the slaughter of a few sacred cows) a level of of immersion and connection beyond what a book or movie or any other storytelling medium up to this point in our cultural history can match, because of the fact that you can actively take part in that story from the inside. Heresy? Fine, brand me a heretic; that’s how I see it.

And since it’s such a good story, people know how the thing is supposed to proceed, and they know how it should end.

You start out in ME1 trying to stop a bad guy, Saren. He’s the guy who gets us moving (because he’s a bad guy, and that’s what they do — bad guys act, and heroes react to that and move the story along). As we try to stop him, we find out there’s something bigger going on than just a rogue cop on a rampage. The picture keeps getting bigger, the stakes keep getting higher, and we keep getting our motivation and our level of commitment tested. Are we willing to sacrifice our personal life? Yes? Okay, will we sacrifice one of our friends? Yes? Okay, how about the leaders of the current galactic government? Yes? Okay…

It goes on like that. You fucking invest, is what I’m saying, and that’s just in the first game.

In the second game, the fight continues, as we have merely blunted the point of the spear, not stopped the attack. Our choices in ME1 had consequences, and we start to see them play out, for better or worse. Meanwhile, we’re trying to stop Evil Plan #2, in a suicide mission that could literally cost us nearly every single friend we’ve made. In the end, we get the joy of victory mixed with the sadness of the loss of those who didn’t make it, and it’s all good, because it’s a strong, healthy, enjoyable emotional release.

And now it’s ME3, and the stakes are even higher. We’re not recruiting more individual allies — we’re recruiting whole peoples — whole civilizations. Planets are falling. Worlds are being erased.

In the words of Harbinger, this hurts you.

Why? Because you know these people who are dying. You’ve spent over a hundred hours traveling this setting, meeting people, helping them, learning about each of their little stories; building relationships with, literally, hundreds of individuals. Every one of these planets going up in flames has a face (even if it’s a face behind a breathmask), and no one falls in this final story that wasn’t important in some way to you or someone you know.

(By contrast, the enemy is faceless and (since the reapers harvest your former allies and force them into monstrous templates) largely indistinguishable from one another — as it should be in this kind of story. You do not care about a Husk, though you might mourn the person killed to create the thing.)

In short, you aren’t just playing this game to get the high score. You’re fighting for this galaxy of individuals you’ve grown very, very attached to; to protect it and, as much as you can, preserve it. You’ve spent several hours every day on this, for months. It matters.

"Hard to imagine galaxy. Too many People. Faceless. Statistics. Easy to depersonalize. Good when doing unpleasant work. For this fight, want personal connection. Can't anthropomorphize galaxy. But can think of favorite nephew. Fighting for him."

(Best of all, you get to shoot bad guys in the face while you’re doing it, which takes this heavy topic and makes it engaging at that level as well. It’s like soaking up all the gravitas of Schindler’s List while enjoying the BFG-toting action of Castle Wolfenstein at the same time.)

The end comes. We talk to all our friends. Everyone’s wearing their brave face, talking about what they’re going to do afterwards, which beach they’re going to retire on. You start to think that maybe the end is in sight and maybe, just maybe, you might even be able to see some of that ending.

The last big conflict starts. You fight some unkillable things and kill them. You face off against an old nemesis and finally end him.

And then…

And then you’re given three choices, none of which result in anything any different from the others, and none of which have consequences that have any connection to the goals we’ve been working on for the last hundred hours or so.

Those people you were just talking to? They’re gone. Or stranded on an alien world. Or dead. All those planets you helped? They’re gone too — cut off, or starving, or maybe just destroyed in manufactured super-novas. Nothing you did or accomplished in the last three games actually matters — it’s all been wiped out by one of three (red, green, or blue) RESET buttons you pushed, because pushing one of those buttons was the only ‘choice’ given to you at the end.

As a species, trained for thousands of years in the way stories work, we know this is a bad ending. Not “tragic”. Just bad. Poor.

This isn’t about a bunch of priviledged gamers complaining about a sad ending, because there are well-done sad endings that make contextual sense.

This is about a mechanical ending to the game that doesn’t end the story — that provides no emotional release — one so disassociated from the previous 99% of the story that the fans of the series collectively hope it will later be revealed to be a dream (or, in the context of the setting, a final Reaper Indoctrination attempt).

Dear writers: If you create something, and your readers hope that what you just gave them was, in reality, an “it was a dream all along” ending, because that would be better than what you wrote, you seriously. fucked. up.

Is the ending, as an ending (taken out of context with the game we’ve been playing), a bad one? No. It’s an interesting theme that was explored extensively in a B-plot within the series and which could certainly be the central thread of a series of its own.

But it’s not the ending of this story. Our goals — the one we’ve been fighting for — are never addressed. There is no closure, either happy or sad — we want our emotional release as it relates to the game we actually played. Maybe that means tragedy at our own stupid hands — maybe victory wrested from the biomechanical jaws of defeat (and at the cost of a greater looming danger ahead).

The ending we got? It didn’t make me angry or sad or happy. It left me unfulfilled, because it ended the game talking about something I didn’t actually care about, and left me waiting for that emotional release that ME1 or ME2 pulled off so well.

The idea that the player’s should just deal with the ending, because it’s Bioware’s ending and not theirs is one of the interesting points in this debate, simply because it rides this weird line where we don’t really have a cultural context for what the Mass Effect series is: Is it a game? Is it a story? If if it’s a game, then who cares about the story, and if it’s a story, then treat it like a book and stop pretending you get to influence it, stupid consumer.

The answer is more complicated: Is it a game or story? Yes. Moreover, it’s a game that’s welcomed player input into the narrative from the first moment, and as such, should be committed to honoring that input throughout. It’s a story, but it belongs to everyone telling it.

But It’s Art!
There’s a recurring tune being played by Bioware in response to this outcry, and it goes something like this: “We might respond to these complaints, and we might flesh out the ending we presented, but we’re not going to change anything, because this is art — this is the product of artists — and as such it is inviolate and immutable in the face of outside forces.”

Which is, speaking as a working artist, complete and utter horseshit.

If you make a movie, and you put in front of focus groups, and they categorically hate the ending, you change it. If you’re writing a book and your first readers tell you the ending is terrible, you fix it. (Ditto your second readers, your second-draft readers, your agent, your editor, your copy editor.)

Or maybe you don’t — maybe you say “this is art, and it is inviolate and immutable in the face of outside forces”, which is certainly your choice — but don’t expect anyone to help you bring that piece of crap to print.

Anyone can tell a story. You can sit in your special writing nook and turn out page after page of perfectly unaltered, immutable art and be quite happy — you’re welcome to, in fact.

But when you decide you want to make a living off it? Even if you want to just make a little spending money?

Then the rules change. Then it’s work. Then it’s a job. More importantly, then it’s part of a business model, and those golden days of your art being inviolate and immutable blah blah blah are well and truly behind you. Name me a story that saw print, or a movie that saw the Big Screen, and I’ll show you art that changed because of input from someone other than the the original creator — from someone looking at it from the point of view of the consumer.

Bioware is a company. Making their stories into games is their business model. Hiding behind some kind of “but it’s art, so we’re not changing it” defense is insulting, disingenuous, and flat-out stupid. Worse, it perpetuates the idea that the creator’s output is in some stupid way sancrosant and, as art, cannot be “wrong” or “bad”. If you as a creator imagine that to be the case — if you think that kind of argument is going to defend your right to never do a rewrite or a revision or line edits or to ever alter, in any way, your precious Artistic Process — discard that notion.

Or become accustomed to a long life as an “undiscovered talent”.

Scott Pilgrim without any Fighting

Aug 19th, 2010
by Doyce.
No comments yet

(Yeah, I know I’m writing about Scott Pilgrim a lot right now — for whatever reason, it’s providing me a lot of thinking fuel, so I’m using it.

Also, it’s helping me deal with some of the requests a publisher sent me for revisions on Hidden Things, which makes the whole Scott Pilgrim oeuvre very precious to me right now.)

“So…” I said to Kate, “here’s an interesting thought; imagine Scott Pilgrim if there were no fighting, and it was just about him trying to make a relationship work with Ramona.”

Kate thought about it for about two seconds and said. “Yeah that would basically be every other Michael Cera movie, ever.”

“That’s not what I mean,” I replied. “Also: that’s totally true, and you’re funny. But that’s not what I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean look at the movie without the fighting in it at all, but with everything else — with Scott ‘beating’ not Ramona’s literal exes, but just her memories and baggage from those relationships, and how he does that in every case.”

She looked nonplussed. “Give me an example.”

I nodded. “The first time Ramona sees Scott play with the band in front of people; how he looked up on stage and his whole Scott-ness — that boosted him up past the first of her exes — he beat that one. She’s looking at him rock out up on stage and feels like ‘Okay, he’s already better than the first guy I ever kinda dated.’”

“That works,” she said. “You should blog this.”

And since I always do what she tells me*, I did.

We went through the whole list of evil exes and parsed the results of each confrontation as though they weren’t actually fights.

I will tell you about these things now, but there are kind-of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet (you should), you may want to stop reading now.

(more…)

Scott Pilgrim, the books and the movie, a mostly spoiler-free mulling-over

Aug 18th, 2010
by Doyce.
3 comments

((This post is basically just me being unable to get all my thoughts to fit into Twitter-sized posts. Deal.))

We’ve really enjoyed the Scott Pilgrim comics around Casa Testerman, and I was excited (and determined) to see the six-book series to its conclusion prior to seeing the movie. Dave was nice enough to cart the new stuff back home from SDCC (thanks, Dave!) and help me along that OCD/CDO road — I think I squeezed in book 6 between my daughter’s birthday party and The Weddingening on Saturday.

And… I gotta say, it kinda left me cold.

It wasn’t that it didn’t wrap things up. Things were wrapped. No doubt about that.

It’s just…

Okay, you know what it was like? Let me tell you.

Story time…

A couple years ago (actually, five years ago), I wrapped up this really long, bog-standard DnD game. I was a little sick of running that set of rules, to be honest (4+ years with 3.0 and 3.5) and somehow I managed to talk the group into playing Heroquest after that (the RPG, not the old, completely unrelated boardgame). I had a fun set up for the game, which was designed to be a little bit sandboxy and yet sort of a short run — maybe a dozen sessions — a palate cleanser, you might say.

Anyway, the game was pretty darn good. Enjoyable. Really let the players kind of dig in and do some fun stuff.

But we ran into time constraints. Kaylee was on the way (or had just been born — details are fuzzy), and the scheduling for the game had always been a struggle.

So… somewhere near the end, but not AT the end (Session 8: a big bad, but not THE Big Bad, lay in a steaming pile of dead at the heroes feet), we were sitting around the table and trying to schedule when to play next, and it just wasn’t happening.

“Well,” I said, “I guess we could just… not finish it.”
“Yeah…” said the players, “I guess.”
“Want to hear what else was going on?” I asked.
“Sure…” they replied.

So for about 30 minutes, I sat there and told them other stuff that had been going on. As I said, it was a sandbox-style game, so it’s anyone’s guess as to what they might or might not have ended up dealing with if we’d kept playing, but I mentioned it all. Who was behind this. What that was about. What the deal was with that one weird magical thing. Who was sleeping with her. And him. And them. And why. What I figured would probably happen with that one girl. And that other dude.

Et cetera.

It would probably taken about two more proper game sessions to actually get some real closure on the game, and some of the stuff I told them about would never have come up, but rather than make the effort to play two more sessions in their own time, I just mashed it all together into one big infodump that kind of sorta looked like a story, but was really just me making sure I told everyone everything that had been in my head, before some kind of imaginary deadline came and went.

That’s pretty much what I think of Scott Pilgrim #6: an enjoyable but kind of chaotic and hollow info dump, where the creator should have instead taken the time to give proper attention to everything — probably in at least two more books instead of one — without worrying about getting it out before some external deadline (the release of the movie).

I liked it, but I didn’t lesbian it.

Then I went to see the movie. Here’s what I think about the movie.

I think the movie crew took the books and did what the best book-to-movie adaptions do: boiled the whole thing down to the highest level of clarity. It also moved a few things around, taking stuff from the book that had been incidental and making it more important; more useful. It was a kind of surgical operation, making Frankenstein’s monster into a leaner, meaner, prettier creature.

Yeah, it was boiling for clarity and surgery. Surgical cooking. Shut up.

It didn’t do what some of the Harry Potter movies do and try to get as much as possible jammed in. It didn’t go the opposite direction and bring in too little.

Honestly, it helped me understand the books better than I had, and any movie that does that is really pulling off something good.

And the movie itself? So. Much. Fun.

I loved the way they used the imagery from the books. I loved the casting. (I kind of adored what they did with Knives Chau, who was a second-string character in the books and totally a first-string star in the movie.)

I loved the kind of anachronistic, Dark City-esque, timeless style of Toronto (mostly as expressed in the video games and computer tech). AOL mail. Apple IIes. Tetris. Zelda… and on the other end of things, Dance Dance Ninja Revolution and not-Starbucks.

It just… it worked. The books worked too — they’re very fun — but the movie?

The movie I highly recommend.

Stories within Games

Mar 24th, 2010
by Doyce.
7 comments

“That,” Kate said, her face lit with a kind of bemused, awestruck, lopsided grin, “was the best damn movie I’ve seen in a long time.”

The context?

This was last week. She had just finished playing Mass Effect 1.

For pretty much as long as there have been computer games, people have debated their value, or worth, or effectiveness at storytelling. Zork. Myst.

Ugh. Why make up a list? Think of pretty much every ‘big’ game in the history of at-home video games, and someone probably brought up it’s effectiveness as a story medium. Once upon a time, the line between the one and the other were stark. Limitations within the medium were evident — sometimes even celebrated — and in a lot of ways, that was seen as a good thing.

That line has gotten pretty damned thin in the last couple years, and someone drew it in charcoal. That stuff smears, man… it’s indistinct.

Me and my bias

I do a lot of gaming of all kinds, but by and large my computer-based gaming for the last four years or so has been allocated to MMOs. MMOs are fine and good things – very enjoyable, if that’s the sort of thing you enjoy – but they’re really not what I’m talking about, here. In an MMO, there may be a main but largely irrelevant-to-daily-play story line (CoH), it might be a big sandbox (Eve Online), it might be a means to play around inside an Intellectual Property you like (Star Trek), or maybe a mix.  I play a lot of LotRO, and while I love the game, I don’t really think of myself as being a star in the story — at best, I’m playing through a good stage production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (complete with cyclical death), knowing that almost everyone will only ever remember Hamlet, if they’re aware of the story at all.

But in the last year or so, I’ve gotten back into some ‘solo’ games. Mirror’s Edge. Portal. Left4Dead.

And of course Mass Effect and (just recently) Dragon Age: Origins. Mirror’s Edge is quite something, and a good kind of mystery/action story, but it’s really these last two games that have got my brain bubbling about successful storytelling in games.

I mean, when asked, I told someone a few weeks ago that the Mass Effect series was one of the most enjoyable books I’d read in a long time. Kate’s quote is above. Clearly, these games aren’t either movies or books, and we know that, but we say it that way because that is the best language we had to convey the experience.

Consider that for a second: it was easier and it felt more accurate for us to say “that was a great movie” or “this is a great book” than it was to say “this is a great game” or even “a great game with a good story.”

So what’s going on?

I have no idea, really. I’m still thinking on this.

Games make Joe happy.

Games make us happy.

Chuck poked at this a couple times last week — a discussion I didn’t jump into because I was still playing through the games that I suspected might have been contributors to the brain-stew, so I’m getting to it late, but in it, he draws distinctions between books and movies as being passive entertainment, and games being more interactive and thus (I’m sort of interpreting/paraphrasing here, so apologies in advance if I misrepresent) more likely to dilute the story to the point of not being a story anymore.

In that post, regarding that passivity, Chuck said:

“Your only real options as the recipient of the [written/movie] story are: a) Keep listening (reading, watching), b) Quit, c) Change the pace of consumption.”

And my first thought was “Dude, I think I can find a post *you have written* that disagrees with that.”

I was too lazy to look for it then, but… well, I got unlazy.

A while back, I posted some thoughts about writing descriptions. Specifically, about acknowledging and utilizing the fact that the reader brings a lot of their own stuff into a story, and how to use  “less is more” with descriptions, so that the reader fills in their own stuff.

And someone commented:

My favorite thing about description is how a targeted absence of description can make something stronger. The reader will do work on behalf of the story — you never want them to do too much, but you want them to fill in enough blanks that they have ownership over it, mentally, and are as much a part of the fabric of the tale as you are.

Now, I’m not picking on Chuck — dude’s the hardest working band in rock-and-rock, as far as I’m concerned — I’m pointing out these contradictions to illustrate that even though we’ve had since Zork to puzzle this fucking question out, we still don’t have a handle on it.

All I can reliably assert it my own reaction.

“I don’t know if it’s story or not, but I don’t care too much. I’m willing to call it whatever is most useful to help get more of it.” - Rob Donoghue

Yes. A hundred times yes.

In the last… I dunno, month? I’ve played through Mass Effect 2 four times, and when the “end game” series of events starts, I never fail to find myself standing in the middle of my office, hopping up and down with excitement and cheering. It has been a long time since a movie got me feeling that good. Moreover, I have at least one other character I intend to play through the game (alongside, if not “with” Kate’s play through), and even then I know that, if I wanted, there are at MINIMUM five additional play-throughs I could do to get different end results (at least insofar as concern the characters in the story and how they “end up” at the end of the game.)

You get that last bit, though? It’s not so much the different ways the story could end — I’m a bit too much of a perfectionist to invest too heavily in one of the story outcomes where I completely fail, but I enjoy watching that conclusion on YouTube — but about what happens to the characters.

Last night I finished up my first play of Dragon Age. It’s a different kind of story — one that doesn’t leave my jumping up and down and cheering at the end, but still impacts me profoundly. In fact, I have no doubt it affected my mood for several days this week, leading up to the end, as I started to see and suspect where things were going; there are endings which are ‘better’ or ‘worse’, but none I’d wholeheartedly embrace as “flawless victory” — no matter what, best case scenario, you’re going to lose friends in the worst possible way: by driving them away from you.

I don’t think of myself as a particularly mercurial or unstable person, but I like my media experiences to engender some kind of emotional response, so while the decisions I have to make therein make me pull at my hair, I still kinda love it.

And, of course, as soon as I was done, I flipped open a new character and got the ball rolling to play it all again, but this time different.

Maybe that’s it.

When I was a kid, I remember reading Tolkien for the first time. I plowed through that epic fucking landmass of a story and, when I was done, slumped about for days because… well… the story was over, and I didn’t want it to be.

So I went back and read the books again. (And again, and again, and again. Fifteen times, before I was 20, I think. I believe it’s the desire for ‘more of that’ that led to so many very successful (if not actually, you know, good) Tolkien-esque fantasy series over the years.)

I haven’t done that with a book in a long time. I have done that somewhat more recently with movies, but it’s still not frequent.

But… man. ME2? Yeah. Dragon Age? Yep.

I mean…

What if you could read Tolkien again and have it be a little different every time?

  • … this read through, Boromir and Gimli both died, and Legolas talked Aragorn into leading Lothlorien troops against Dol Guldor, then taking the whole army down to Gondor? Rohan never even comes up.
  • … the next time, Aragorn picks the reality of Eowyn over the dream of Arwen. Legolas dies at Helm’s Deep.
  • … the next time, Aragorn picks Legolas, and Sam finally gets Mr. Frodo to see what all the hand kissing was about.
  • … Frodo dies on the way. Sam carries on, fights with Gollum and they both fall into the lava.
  • Sauron wins.

I think about what someone writing that kind of story has to be prepared to write — not just a story, but (in a way) ‘every’ story, and I’m impressed as hell.

So, if I judge a game strictly by my own personal emotional response — whether or not I have been given a story in my head to mull over and think about and ponder — then I thing yeah, the games these days are stories. Sooth. We have a whole new medium in which to enjoy a good yarn.

If I judge it by whether or not there is real story-creation going on on the part of the person/people creating the thing, then yes. Many times, yes. There’s something new going on here. Something different.

As a writer, that’s pretty damned exciting.

Elephant Fight: the Macmillan-Amazon scorched earth offensive

Jan 31st, 2010
by Doyce.
5 comments

(Author’s Note: Chuck has a calmer assessment of this situation. I get worked up about this stuff. If that offends, I highly recommend his post.)

All right. Wow. There’s a lot to talk about here.

First, Backstory

Once upon a time, the five major publishers in the country decided they wanted to sell their ebooks for about 15 bucks, give or take. Their reasoning and justifications given for this price point were (and continue to be) insultingly disingenuous; the real reason (in my opinion) I will sum up in this trite opening paragraph as “this new technology scares the holy fuck out of us, and we’d like to erect a price barrier around it to ensure that only wealthy early-adopters make use of it until about 2022, when we hope we will finally understand it.” (I will address their reasons in a more detailed manner below. Promise.)

Amazon took a look at this and decided to sell those books for ten bucks, instead. Given that they still have to pay publishers the same amount as they always did, and still owe the publisher the same percentage of fifteen dollars that they always have, it’s fair (if mildly mathematically inaccurate) to say that, by doing so, they were voluntarily losing 5 bucks on each ebook sale.

(“Losing” is a poor way to say it; they were setting themselves up to make considerably less per sale, but they hardly started hemorrhaging money.)

Why would they do this? Well, they haven’t said why, officially, but there are three main schools of thought on the subject:

  1. If they price the ebooks for less, it will drive consumers to Amazon’s Kindle device. Once a consumer has bought said device, they are pretty much locked into buy ebooks from Amazon into perpetuity, so this reduced price results in a huge net win for Amazon.
  2. Amazon is pricing ebooks at 9.99 to set expectation for ebooks priced a well below the publishers’ 15 dollar target, to eventually use that consumer-groundswell to force publishers to lower their prices permanently.
  3. Amazon is FIGHTING THE MAN, using their corporate power to defend consumers from the greed and tyranny of Big Publishing.

I have listed these theories in descending order of likelihood/connection to reality. (Also, #2 is basically a fake-out: it doesn’t exist without either #1 or #3 as a motivator.)

Full disclosure: I have believed each of these three theories at some point in the past, though I’m currently standing by Theory #1, because (generally speaking) any theory about a corporation that ascribes the least amount of moral compunction and the highest amount of profit-mindedness is probably going to be the most accurate.

What’s the new News everyone’s on about?

Within the last 48 hours or so, all the books (paper or electronic) published by Macmillan or any imprint of Macmillan (Tor, St. Martins, etc) became unavailable for direct purchase via Amazon.com. (I say ‘for direct purchase’, because you can still buy em, but only from third-party businesses that sell through Amazon.) The NY Times talks about it here.

Basically what happened is that Macmillan struck a deal with Apple, in which Macmillan gets to set ebook prices at whatever price they want in the iBooks store, and in exchange, Apple gets a bigger chunk of the profit. Once that deal was set, they went to Amazon and proposed the same deal. This was Strong Arm Negotiation Move #1 (or #2, if you count the 9.99 pricing that Amazon adopted as String Arm Move #1, but that only works if Theory #2 is correct, and I don’t think it is — for Amazon, it’s not (primarily) about ebook pricing — it’s about selling Kindles.)

Then, Macmillan told Amazon that if they didn’t accept that proposal, Macmillan wouldn’t give them access to their ebooks until about six months after other distributors (read: B&N, iBooks) had it.

Amazon said no to this deal, and after what I can only imagine was an acrimonious end to the meeting, pulled all Macmillan stuff from their site. This was Strong Arm Negotiation Move #2.

So…

I managed to stay out of the “debate” surrounding this for the better part of Saturday, until my wife (who is a bright and shining star in the industry, and thus gets industry communications brought right to our doorstep by scantily-clad delivery ‘boys’) brought it up after she got a panicked “special weekend edition” message from Publishers Marketplace, penned by John Sargent of Macmillan. At the time, it was an industry-only thing, but PW sensed the potential newsiness of the topic and made the letter freely available to the unwashed masses here.  An excerpt:

I regret that we have reached this impasse. Amazon has been a valuable customer for a long time, and it is my great hope that they will continue to be in the very near future. They have been a great innovator in our industry, and I suspect they will continue to be for decades to come.

I want to parenthetically point something out here. Mr. Sargent is making a huge mistake in these two sentences:

  • Amazon is not part of the publishing industry.
  • They used to be, yes. Those were the days, eh?
  • We have it stuck in our head that they’re an online bookstore. They haven’t been just an online bookstore for years. Amazon can not only deal with the loss of sales from Macmillan imprints for a good long time, they could get boycotted by every major publisher in the industry and for most consumers they’d still be the primary source for almost every other retail thing you can reasonably expect to buy online. Such a massive change in the publishing industry would alter Amazon, but not end it. Not remotely.
  • In other words, for Amazon, Macmillan is a ‘nice to have’. (Yes, in terms of Kindle sales, it’s more than that, but only in terms of Kindle sales. Kindle is a route of expansion, not a means of survival.)

I’m not trying to make some point with that — I just want to call out that the scale of this move on either side is not the same.

The debate on this event, such as it is, boils down to these two points:

  • Amazon can do what it wants — it’s just trying to get a fair price for ebooks to the consumers, cuz holy crap: fifteen bucks for an e-book? And I don’t even own it? Eff that.
  • zOMG publishing books costs money — Amazon and you greedy consumers are going to bankrupt publishing and then there won’t be any more books at all. Ever.

Dear Proponents of Either Side: You’re both wrong.

The crippling costs of creating ebooks (writers: Macmillan isn’t on your side)

I’m going to go after “The cost to publish e-books Oh My God, Woe” side first, because it’s the next thing in the list of quotes I grabbed from various sites.

Over on The Harper Studio, we have this gem from 2009 explaining to all the unwashed why e-books cost just as much to make as hardbacks. Excerpt:

We still pay for the author advance, the editing, the copyediting, the proofreading, the cover and interior design, the illustrations, the sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity, and the staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible in these stages.

What an incredibly disingenuous pile of crap. I’m actually insulted that people think I’m so dim as to swallow this.

Yes, Harper, you have all those costs, but you only pay those costs once. You don’t get to claim those costs as justification for the price of ebooks when you’ve already paid those costs during normal dead-tree print-and-production — those costs are already your justification for high-priced hardbacks; by the author’s own statement, actually paper-printing a book costs about 2 bucks per unit, and it’s these production costs that drive hardback price points up. Don’t tell me you need to roll these expenses into ebook costs as well to make ends meet, because before ebooks existed, you were making money hand-over-fist without that revenue stream.

I’ve said it before, and I will keep saying it: once the process has been completed for printing a hardback, 90% of the production work necessary to create an ebook version of the same book is ALREADY DONE. The cost has already been paid.  If you try to sell me the same thing a second time, I’ll tell you to fuck off.

(Note: if someone wants to publish a new book as nothing but an ebook, then yes, they totally get to claim all the costs of copyediting and so forth, and I have no beef whatsoever with paying 15 or 20 or 25 bucks for said book — I do it ALL THE TIME with independently published, ebook-only, roleplaying games and think nothing of it.  But when ebooks are merely one part of a book’s list of available formats? No.)

And here’s some costs that paper books incur that ebooks don’t:

  • Cost of printing. Only 2 bucks a book, but that’s still almost 10% of the retail cost of a hardback, and 25% of the cost of a paperback.
  • Cost of distribution. Books in trucks (and planes) being shipped around the country.
  • Cost of warehousing. Incurred by both the publisher and the brick and mortar retailers.
  • Cost of returns. (Significant, and anticipated in book pricing and contracts.)
  • Cost of additional print runs. There are no additional print runs of ebooks. You never run out. Ever.

So let’s look at a normal, big-publisher ebook; one which is being produced along with hardback and paperback editions:

  • Author advance: already paid as part of buying the right to publish the book in the first place. Would have been paid regardless of the existence of an ebook version. Not an ‘ebook cost’.
  • Editing, copyediting, and proofreading. Again, this is not an ‘ebook cost’ – it’s just a part of publishing at all. Ebooks don’t ‘own’ this cost.
  • Cover design. Ditto.
  • Interior design. A ha! Yes: here is a thing where some separate consideration must be made for the ebook. This is work that would not otherwise take place, but it is a tiny subset of the work already done to lay out the paper edition, and in many cases amounts to nothing.
  • The sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity. Not an ebook-specific cost. Hell, in most cases, publishers don’t know what to do about marketing ebooks — they’d rather people didn’t know about ebooks, and just stuck to the good old days, so marketing the bloody things is a little counterintuitive for them.
  • The staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible. Yeah, you need someone who knows how to post the ebook to Amazon and Smashwords correctly. If any of the big publishers out there need someone to teach them this, I do freelance education and my rates are quite reasonable, especially when the subject is so simple.
  • And as I’ve already said, there is no cost of printing, truck-and-plane distribution, warehousing, returns, or additional print runs.

(Also: writers? If this “agency model” becomes the norm? Renegotiate your contracts, because you’re getting screwed.)

its not art

Anyway: I think it’s fair to say that fifteen bucks for an ebook, when the paperback edition incurs more production/distribution cost and is priced for half as much, appears to be, as they say, “fucking robbery”. Readers aren’t stupid. It doesn’t take much to look at the justification for current ebook prices and think “that’s just not fair.”

Especially when you don’t even end up owning the ebook the way you own a paper book.

Which brings me to Amazon.

Amazon isn’t on Your Side Either

The very idea of Amazon being portrayed as some kind of consumer-rights advocate when it comes to ebooks is insulting. Amazon’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) for the Kindle is a slap in the face to the traditions that surround the act of buying, reading, and most-of-all owning books.  Amazon’s ebooks are locked to the Kindle (or to Kindle-simulating software, also available from Amazon), and even if the book has no ‘official’ DRM, it’s still in a Kindle-only file format that no one is legally allowed to create a translator microbe for.

Thus, the grave-pissing level of insult that the Amazon ebook setup inflicts on readers. Now, you need a license agreement to read your new book. Now, you can’t share a good book with a friend. Or your wife. Or your kid. Copyright recognizes the reader’s rights to own, loan, gift, resell and read your books any way you want. But now, they aren’t ‘your’ books; you don’t own a book — you lease it.

Amazon wants that. They can fuck off, too.

In Summary: Caution

Listen: you want to charge 15 bucks for an ebook? Fine.

If the market sustains it, fine. I don’t think the market will. I think you can sell an ebook for half the price of the paperback and still be essentially printing your own money. (And I am not alone in this opinion.)

I think it’s telling that readers are coming down on Amazon’s ‘side’ on this whole thing, even though Amazon clearly gives fuck-all for the reader’s rights. In as much as I can be said to have a side in this, I’m also on that side.

But I’m not standing too close to Amazon when I take that side. I would suggest the same level of care for anyone standing with either of these combatants.

Because those big bastards will trample you if you’re not careful, and they don’t care if they do.

“When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.” — Kikuyu Proverb

Everything One thing I Know about Writing I Learned from MMOs

Jan 4th, 2010
by Doyce.
3 comments

Once upon a time, I was a pretty hard core MMO raider.

Now, I’ve been playing MMOs since long before they were called that (or had graphics) and I’ve enjoyed almost all the time I’ve spent on such pastimes, but I’m not talking about the play of MMOs in general — just about a very specific activity: raiding.

For the uninitiated, ‘raiding’ is a term for an activity in a multiuser game like World of Warcraft. In this activity, you and a largish group of other like-minded people assemble at a set time online and in somewhat organized fashion attempt to defeat some boss in the game who is designed to be too tough for a single person or even several people to beat. These fights are usually quite challenging, with multiple phases and ‘tricks’ that you need to figure out and learn how to deal with before you can finally put all the pieces together, do all the dance steps in the right order, avoid the specter of Plain Ol’ Bad Luck, and beat the guy.

All MMOs with which I am familiar have this mechanic, though some (CoH) have it to a much smaller degree, which others (LotRO, WoW, many others) use the idea of ‘added complexity’ to bring interest to boss fights that would otherwise be “the big guy gets the guy’s attention, and we all beat on him with relative impunity.”

Because of those little tricks and features, it’s a situation where you go into each new fight pretty much assuming that you won’t win the first time. You’re not really even trying to win — you’re gathering information. What kinds of attacks is he using? Fire? Okay. Do his special attacks have any visual or audio clues that provide warning? Do we have to stay moving or fight in a particular location, or both, depending on what’s going on? How hard is he hitting? How hard are WE hitting? Is he resisting our attacks too much? Can we fix that?

And, ultimately: “How can we avoid the thing that just killed us, the next time?”

Victory does not come easily, and it rarely comes quickly — when I played World of Warcraft, I participated in a raid a couple nights a week, for two to three hours each night, and it would often take us several weeks of attempts to learn how to reliably down a new boss. During those weeks, there were no rewards — nothing but the ongoing drain of repair bills, consumables consumed, and the ever present specter of Time Spent Without Victory.

In terms of gaming, I don’t think there is anything else like this try-fail-try-fail-try-again experience in other games. Certainly not tabletop rpgs.

Sounds pretty depressing, but I’ll tell you a secret: The Win Made it Worth It. There was nothing at all like finally putting it all together and making it work.

And I still enjoy it. I certainly don’t raid like I used to (or play WoW, come to that), but probably my second favorite thing to do in Lord of the Rings Online is to get in a group with Kate and a few other good players, chat about our day, and figure out how to beat a new fight.

Sometimes, we don’t figure it out.

There’s this new fight we tried this weekend that looked like it would be pretty easy to beat. I mean, tricky, yes, but even during the first attempt we pretty much had it figured out: when he says THIS, you run away; when he says THAT, we all bunch up; don’t stand on the open grates with the fire underneath; stay behind him.

And then, suddenly, we were dead.

“What happened? Oh. Fire. Fire bad. Stay out of the fire. Okay. Good tip. Let’s try again.”

Almost beat him… and boom. Fire. Weird.

And again, and again, and again, and again.

Finally, we called it for the night, said we’d ponder it, and come back to it later — maybe ask around on the forums to see What The Hell?

So we ask around, and everyone says we’re idiots. No one knows what we’re talking about. No one’s having that problem.

Well, dammit, what do we do now?

Easy.

We go back and try it again.

Like I said, there is no real corollary (that occurs to me) between this experience and any other kind of gaming.

That’s not to say it doesn’t remind me of something; it reminds of several things, one of which is writing.[1]

In November, I blasted through writing Adrift. I didn’t finish it, because it’s considerably longer than 50k — probably twice that — but I knew that would happen, and I was prepared to continue on in December.

Which, to be clear, I have done. But man has it been painful.

How painful?

I’ve been working on the same scene — not editing it, mind you, just writing it — pretty much for the whole of December. Nothing is working right. Everything is coming along hard; every sentence is like pulling out my own front teeth with a pair of pliers.

Just when I think I’ve got it, boom. Fire. Dead. The looming specter of Time Spent Without Victory. Right now, I’m not even trying to win; I’m just trying to gather as much information as I can, so I can improve my performance in the next attempt.

Then, I stare at my screen, and I think “well what do I do now?”

And sometimes, there’s no poetic answer. There’s no author’s quote that shines a light ahead. There’s no technique or skill or talent to get you out of it.

There’s just the answer I learned from Boss Fights in MMOs.

“Go back in. Try again.”

Maybe, eventually, succeed.

Maybe, eventually, succeed.

1 – The other thing it reminds me of is submitting your work and trying to get published, but that’s a whole different post.

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