Scott Pilgrim without any Fighting

(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.

Continue reading “Scott Pilgrim without any Fighting”

August 18, 2010

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

((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.

March 24, 2010

Stories within Games

“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.

January 31, 2010January 31, 2010

Elephant Fight: the Macmillan-Amazon scorched earth offensive

(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:

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.
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.
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.)

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

January 4, 2010January 4, 2010

Everything One thing I Know about Writing I Learned from MMOs

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.”

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

December 19, 2009December 19, 2009

Avatar: my thoughts, my opinions, my recommendation

… and my background: with the exception of Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, I’ve seen all of James Cameron’s movies at least three times. Yeah, even Titanic (though the third time was against my will). Understand that simple fact about me first: I’m pretty much the guy’s target audience.

Kate and I went to see Avatar last night. As I told some folks afterwards, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable, fun movie, and I didn’t remotely mind the nearly three hour length, even wearing the Real-3D glasses. (In fact, there was no point in there where I so much as shifted in my seat and thought “Okay, you could have edited this bit out, Jim.” I enjoyed it all, even the Diaspora-esque ship the protag comes to Pandora in.

Those of you who know me know that I do not consider “in 3-D” a selling point for a movie: I’ve never once walked out of a show thinking “man, if only that had been 3-D, they might have had something.” However, thanks to an observation from Chuck, we chose to go to to the 3-D version, and I’m very very glad we did. Like Coraline, this movie uses 3-D intelligently.

Even those of you who don’t know me might suspect I enjoy a good story. Much has been said about the simple, damned familiar story of Avatar — I’ll admit that I’ve repeated the Dances with Smurfs joke more than once — but the movie reminded me that old, simple stories are a lot like old, simple words: they resonate.

Is it a great movie? I don’t know. It’s certainly good. There are no major plot holes I could see. The technology is brilliant and used well, and the setting itself is gorgeous. Kate and I talked about the different parts we liked for a solid half hour after we left.

And here’s what I realized this morning when I woke up — the thing that made me write this post: I want to go see it again. In the theatre. In the 3-D. I will, in fact, be a little sad if I don’t manage it. Take that for what it’s worth.

I was going to make a nice little list of all the various kinds of people who might like this movie, and suggest they see it, but here’s the bottom line: If you like movies, even a little, I think you should see it.

Like it or hate it, I think you should see it.

In the theatre.

Probably even in 3-D.

Man, those are some words I never thought I’d say again, after Coraline. Way to go, Cameron.

Damn.

December 18, 2009December 18, 2009

Extracting the Signal from the Noise

Over on Twitter today, I linked to three of the seven parts of an analysis of the Phantom Menace that was posted over on YouTube, and which I initially found on /Film: 70-Minute Video Review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

The reason I didn’t link to all seven videos? I didn’t want that to be the main thing I linked to today.

Some folks retweeted it and seemed to enjoy it… others were put off by the video’s… odd tone.

Which I totally understand.

How should I explain this tone?

Ahh…

Okay, you know the serial killer guy in Silence of the Lambs?

Not Hannibal Lector, but the other guy? The “It puts the lotion on its skin / or else it gets the hose again.” guy?

Yeah. Him. Imagine if that guy, in between skinning girls to make a woman-suit, sharply and insightfully analyzed all the (multiple) failings in Phantom Menace… and periodically went off his meds.

That’s the video. It even sounds just like him.

It’s not to everyone’s taste.

The problem is, the insight is really good. It’s really useful, from the point of view of story construction and character building and even the use and purpose of cool-ass fight scenes.

But can I legitimately recommend a video like this to someone when I know the humor might be distasteful?

Yeah, I probably can. I’m sorry if the humor is not funny to you, or it goes over the line, but dammit, the analysis is too sharp to ignore. I always knew I didn’t like Phantom Menace, but I’d never put a lot of brainsweat into why. Thanks to this guy – his fucked-up sense of humor notwithstanding – I understand why, and I take away tools I can use to make my own stories better.

I guess I just have to remind myself it’s a joke. It’s part of the ‘brand’, maybe, and that’s his choice, but it’s also his problem – I’m just focusing on the useful signal. Sometimes I have to ignore the joke.

I mean, we all know Chuck’s not actually gaining carnal knowledge of vegetable or animal produce, right? We know Warren Ellis isn’t boiling hookers and shooting their cerebral juices into his femoral artery, yes?

Maybe this guy jumps over the line here and there. Fine. Yes. Not every joke is funny. Fuck knows I scratch my head at some people’s idea of humor sometimes, and at the twitter retweets that link back to my site with a parenthetical “Warning: NSFW”.

Really? Where the fuck do you work? I’ve known pastors that swear more than me.

Anyway.

If you really can’t stomach the meat because of the seasoning, I’ll try to summarize the guy’s points, below.

But I still think you should check out the video.

Keep people around who will push back on your work and force you to make it better… or just make sense.
People need to care about your protagnist – someone you can identify with – especially if you’re writing genre stuff. Get really basic. People should be able to:
“Describe the character without saying what they look like, what kind of costume they wore, or what their profession/job is.”
ACTION: in part two of the video, the guy’s analysis of what the first scene of the original movie conveys is brilliant.
You might be able to skip part three, because it’s JUST about the movie’s plot holes. So’s part four and five.
“Welcome to Coruscant, Home of the Mid-air Collision.” Heh.
Part Six: five minutes in. What Fight Scenes Do.
“When you’re worked up with emotion […] you expose your humanity a little.”

Temptation, revelation, anger, redemption.

“Lightsaber duels have less to do with the fight, and more to do with the characters.”

“We need a deeper meaning to things.”
Part Seven: the Ending Multiplication Effect — the simpler endings have more force and interest because we can focus on the important elements and the story.

So… yeah. The summary doesn’t really do the points justice. Not really.

I completely agree if you found the noise ratio too high to get anything out of the signal. Okay. I respect that. This is, I suppose, simply my explanation of why I chose to to the recommend the thing anyway.

(Also: I’m a huge Star Wars fanboy. There’s that too.)

October 8, 2009October 9, 2009

Pulling a dick move, and other things that make stories (and games) better.

Somewhere*, sometime**, D was talking about writing things and said something like:

The only scene in a story with no conflict in it should be the epilogue at the end of the story.

I know that isn’t it exactly, but that’s the gist of it; when you’re telling a story, scenes should have conflicts in them, or they shouldn’t… you know… be scenes.

De also pointed out*** that you can cheat this a little bit in a scene without any obvious conflict by then revealing “Yeah, while it looked like Mom and Daughter were have a nice happy cup of tea for six pages, Mom had ACTUALLY CALLED THE INSANE ASYLUM TO TURN IN HER DAUGHTER!” DUN Dun dunnnn.

A good trick (one which I’ve used), but it doesn’t change the basic idea, which is (put into my own words):

Never stop fucking with the main character.

Yeah, yeah, “show, don’t tell” works, because if you are legitimately trying to “show” as you write a scene you’ll instinctively put in some kind of thing worth showing. A conflict. There you go. You’ve done it.

(Tangential thought I just had: This may be be a legitimate means of separating “porn” from “erotica”. Erotic has sex scenes with conflict. Porn just has scenes with people fucking. Maybe? Hmm.)

Now, none of this is particular epic storytelling trickery; people get this. People mention this kind of thing all the time.

What people are only slowly starting to get is how it applies to roleplaying games.

Let me tell you about this guy I know. Plays in my Wednesday game. Like most of the people who come in and out of the Wednesday game, he’s also runs games. As a person-who-runs-games, he has a bit of a reputation. A Nom-de-GM, even: people call him Weeda the Evil.

He’s earned this title and the attendant rep via a pretty simple means and method – he rakes his player’s characters over the coals. I’m pretty sure he used to give out certificates to anyone who died in a game he was running. There may have even been t-shirts.

He is, without a doubt, one of the most popular GMs in the Denver area. Probably, if you’re a gamer (or a reader, or an author) I don’t need to explain why.

…*crickets*…

BUT JUST IN CASE I DO, it goes something like this: no one ever gets the feeling from this guy that he’s screwing with you just to screw with you — he’s screwing with you because you’re the Big Cheese, the Main Character, the Hero. He believes you can take it, and he’ll Test to Destruction to prove his point.

He has a similar rule to the one I blocked up above. It is (not surprisingly) more concise.

Heroes Suffer.

Sometimes, your heroes will not appreciate your exciting plot twists.

Yeah.

The thing with RPGs is that, for a really really long time, the only tool that GMs had at their disposal was their own sense of drama and their desire to make sure the Hero Suffers. Take another guy without that sense and you have a lot of dead, boring fights. Take a different guy who only gets that you’re screwing with the characters, and not where that motivation comes from, and you just have some dick GM that everyone hates playing with.

(Take a writer who misinterprets this sort of guideline, or misreads what it is about one of their successful stories that makes people happy, and you get someone who thinks “the key to a successful story is doing horrible shit to my main character”, which somewhat misses the difference between ‘introducing conflict’ and ‘torture’. I’m looking at you, Vorkosigan series!)

Sometimes you just have to punch your favorite character right in the junk. That's fine. But it's way more interesting when you give a character a choice between junk-punching and something else, and they CHOOSE junk-punching.

Luckily, there’s a lot of great games out there that are figuring this out and helping GMs find that sweet spot between “I want to be fair and impartial” and “I need to put you through the wringer or you’re going to be bored.” It started in the good old days with GURPS and Champions and their Dependent NPC (8), but that sort of thing never really worked they way it should. Sorcerer figured it out and introduced “bangs” that pretty much made all of the GMs prep a process of building a list of tough questions the players had to answer. That was good. Primetime Adventures actually breaks if you don’t throw tough conflicts at the main characters and get the Fan Mail flowing.

And it’s gotten better. Fate/Spirit of the Century has the whole Fate Point/Aspect compels that give you a great Devil’s Deal kind of thing to use, but for my money, the best stuff out there right now that does this is Mouse Guard and Danger Patrol. I won’t get into they “whys” of this right now, because this is not the gaming blog, but MG pretty much builds an entire game around “Heroes Suffer”, and Danger Patrol is built around the idea that the only way you can help your fellow players out is by making the situation they’re in more and more Dangerous (potentially creating new dangers everyone has to deal with).

GM: “Okay, Tim is going to jump from one flying car to the other. That’s super dangerous, and worth some extra dice, but what other dangers are out there he doesn’t know about?”
Kate: “There’s a school bus coming the other way, and he’s going to force it to swerve into oncoming traffic.”
GM: “Okay… bonus dice.”
Chris: “And it’s full of kids.”
GM: “Another bonus die.”
Tim: “Umm…”
Kate: “And puppies! It’s ‘bring your puppy to school day!”
GM: “Bonus dice!”
Tim: *Groans*

NOTE: This conversation actually happened in a Danger Patrol game, just not mine – it was Brennan! (Thank you Brennan for helping me find that lost bit of info.

The result of a escalating series of Dangers in Danger Patrol. — The result of a escalating series of Dangers in Danger patrol.

For the longest time, I had to remember to bring what I knew about conflicts from writing, and try to apply that to games I ran.

Now? I borrow tricks from the games I play and use them when I’m writing.

* – On her blog.
** – I couldn’t find the post.
*** – I couldn’t find this post, either.