Category Archives: game play

Talking about Fantaji with Calvin Johns

Today I got to talk with my friend and game designer (and academic nerd) Calvin Johns about his brand new Kickstarter campaign for the Fantaji Universal Role-Playing System. I loved Calvin’s work on Early Dark and I’m excited to play around with the flexibility of this new system. Take a look at our recent conversation:

While you’re at it, you might want to watch the Fantaji system in action on the Kickstarter video:

The campaign had a great first day and it sounds like there are some awesome stretch goals down the road. I’m looking forward to playing Fantaji and to talking to Calvin again about the academic-y stuff that shapes his thinking as a game designer (and vice versa)!

Storium, Collaborative Storytelling, Civic Identity

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog (and at the end of this podcast), my current research focuses on tabletop roleplaying games. (I type this with bloodshot eyes and a larger-than-usual cup-o-joe after a late night session of Deadlands). I am most interested in RPGs as tools for teaching powerful civic lessons for youth. The collaborative storytelling that is often shielded behind complex game mechanics and nerdish tropes of dragons, Cthulhu, and steam punk  (oh my!) are powerful spaces to consider for learning and engagement. Which is why, with just over two days left, I want to tell you about why I am excited about Storium. As described on the Kickstarter page, “Storium is a new kind of online game where you and your friends tell any story you can imagine, together.”


 

Anyone that backs the Kickstarter gains immediate beta access to play in/with Storium. And while the system is geared toward fantasy, genre-fiction, and roleplaying enthusiasts (there are some amazing worlds being written by a who’s who of notable authors and game designers), I am most thrilled by the pedagogical opportunities of Storium. And I’m not alone: the final, $200k stretch goal is “Storium for Schools

The connections with history and English are immediate. Think about learning about what is most foul in Denmark by retelling the stories of the titular Hamlet. Or for youth to explore affects of imperialism from globalized, student-constructed narratives. Having played around with the narrative engine that is running Storium, that stuff seems pretty easy to do. A bit of groundwork from educators can make a ton of content-specific modules at-the-ready for teachers.

However, I’m most interested in two things with regards to Storium:

1. Having youth world build and construct their own narratives. Storium encourages a systems thinking approach. Students will have to label their environment, set the stakes, identify assets, subplots, and challenges. Strip this stuff away from a high fantasy or cyberpunk setting and you’ve got an amazing opportunity for youth to label their reallived environment. The narrative possibilities here become lessons in civic identity and can foment action.

2. Building off of this, I want to explore how youth can explore their actual environment through virtual engagement and storytelling. I played around with this last night by creating a new story setting:

I woke up to find two players interested in this story with powerful character identities tied to politics and gender identity.

In creating a Storium world, you create character strengths, weaknesses, and other attributes (these are used as cards that are intuitively played throughout the game to help instigate narrative action). For my world, the attributes are grounded in the kinds of theories I believe are important for civic learning.

Likewise, “weaknesses” are framed around the real world challenges I’ve seen my own students face in the past.

I don’t know where this narrative will go (I’m still waiting for players, so come join me!). I am, however, enthused about this intersection of storytelling and civic engagement.

You can learn a whole lot more about Storium from the Kickstarter page. Likewise, the designers have been making the rounds on the ‘nets. Take a listen to this episode of Master Plan or this episode of Indie Talks to hear more nuanced discussion of the platform.

As I write this, the Kickstarter is currently hovering just about $167k. That’s an amazing number and signals that more than 4500 fans enthusiastic for telling stories and constructing worlds together.

Snorkeling in virtual worlds

 

My current research on tabletop roleplaying games can be understood as part of a larger movement by researchers. In particular I have been considering the ways individuals interact, learn, and communicate in virtual worlds. Because the virtual world interactions I’ve been observing in tabletop roleplaying games seem to differ from those in online environments, I wanted to sketch out my general understanding of immersion within these spaces.

 

Defining Virtual Worlds

In their book Ethnography and Virtual Worlds, Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, & Taylor identify four characteristics that help define “virtual worlds” (page 9):

  1. They are “object-rich” environments with “a sense of worldness.”
  2. They are “shared social environments.” Participants can interact with others within these worlds in real time.
  3. These worlds persist over time. Though a participant may disconnect from a virtual world, the world may change or grow over time. [I’d note here that while time proceeds within virtual worlds it does not necessarily do so at the same rate as that of the ticking clocks of the “real” world. During a major showdown in Eve Online, for example, the game moved at one-tenth the speed of normal time to help ensure players’ actions were processed correctly. Likewise, in future posts I will discuss the ways time unfolds in tabletop roleplaying games.]
  4. Virtual worlds provide participants with the opportunity to “embody themselves.” Using avatars, participants can move about and explore the world.

Examples of virtual worlds within this definition include the World of Warcraft and Second Life (both of which have been explored in foundational virtual worlds ethnographies by two of the authors mentioned above). The authors specify that online social networks like Facebook and digital discussion forums are not examples of virtual worlds. They claim that, for instance, these spaces do not include the “worldness” or “embodiment” that is integral to virtual worlds. This is an argument I’m not entirely convinced I agree with. As I watch my wife’s fingers help her meander her way across the updates and statuses of “friends” on her phone’s Facebook app, I see an immersion and embodied, representative sense of self that is patently different and representative of her own identity. My own ethnographic travelings within and around tabletop roleplaying games and virtual worlds has sometimes focused on blogs, discussion groups, podcasts, and uses of online social networks. I will be discussing how these may or may not extend our understanding of social networks as virtual worlds later on.

 

On Immersion in Virtual Worlds

Let’s start with the literal to talk about the virtual.

Immersion can be defined literally (according to my dictionary) as placing something fully within a body of liquid or as delving deeply into an intellectual subject.

As if subsuming one’s body within a pool, we immerse in virtual worlds fully. At least that’s what is suggested by the metaphor of immersion in virtual worlds. The standard narratives are of people who get lost in the virtual worlds of The Sims or WoW. There are the stories of some poor schlubs who die from being overly immersed in the virtual.

However, in tabletop games that’s not really the case.

 

On Snorkeling 

During my honeymoon in Belize recently, I was talked into (possibly coerced into) going snorkeling on the lip of the Belize Barrier Reef. This would not have been a problem if I knew how to swim but alas that is not the case. I am something akin to a lead pipe in water and the process of jumping into a large body of water (even with two life preservers) was one of the most terrifying experiences I’ve had. And yet, after finally calming down and beginning to explore the wondrous world beneath me, I was thrown by the beauty of the ocean. I would take small visual sips of the world, placing my head down and allowing the oceanic world to enter my vision before assessing my general position to the boat by coming back up into the real world. Gradually these sips became longer and longer as I allowed myself to trust the plastic snorkel’s function and remain in the underwater world of the reef and coral and fish. However, I would, eventually, have to return to the world above water from time to time.

And this is a lot like what virtual worlds are like in tabletop roleplaying games. The idea of being trapped for hours in the time-sucking world of a game like World of Warcraft doesn’t function the same in tabletop roleplaying games. Interactions with other players dips participants in and out of the virtual world. Part of the process of playing a roleplaying game is the table talk with other participants: catching up, joking, talking about movies or other games; camaraderie is developed through the more-than-just-roleplaying aspects of time at the table.

Further, game mechanics require us to step away from immersion. We take sips in dialogue and engagement within the virtual worlds we explore but return to the physical world to check rules in books, roll dice, and refill beverages. We can imagine our interactions in the fantastical worlds of Numenera or Golarion as the equivalent of snorkeling. As we look down into the hand drawn maps and scattered dice below and in front of us at the gaming table, we cannot fear getting too lost here: we come up for air regularly and return to the physical world.

Learning Alchemy: Digitally Mediated Collaboration and Game Design

[The tl;dr stuff:] This is a long post. After the jump I detail how Chad Sansing and I have been collaborating on developing a card game  called Learning Alchemy. Amongst the screenshots of Google Docs and card examples, I try to explore how collaboration is mediated in 2013. The short story: Chad and I have only met in-person 3 times and after both participating in a webinar in July we decided to begin an epic collaboration. Moving from wanting to create … something and play around the with rapidly-shifting landscape of gaming due to crowdsourcing, the narrative below is one of free-flowing thought being honed into something tangible. As I explain below, we are currently playtesting our game, soliciting card-remixes, and looking to “bring to market”* a product for people to enjoy.

* Note: I use this phrase very loosely.

Continue reading

Talking with Nicholas Mizer: Kickstarter, Roleplaying Games, and Dissertations

Nicholas Mizer is a doctoral student in the Anthropology Department at Texas A&M. His research has looked at storytelling, play and modernity in roleplaying games – topics I’ve also been looking at from a literacies and education perspective. I talked with Nicholas about his current research and about his Kickstarter to fund parts of his dissertation research. Called “The Greatest Unreality: Story, Play, and Imagination in D&D,” this Kickstarter allows gamers and a general audience a bit more of a behind-the-scenes look at how the dissertation-sausage is made: backers get a copy of his final dissertation, gaming materials, and regular updates from Nicholas. Please consider backing here.

Below, we discuss Nicholas’s Kickstarter, his research topic, and RPG gaming trends. Links to things we discuss follow.

Related & Discussed Links:

Talking Roleplaying Games with Chad Sansing (Part One)

Chad’s awesome map – credit: davesmapper.com

Over the summer I was thrilled to join an Educator Innovator webinar discussing some of my classroom work with Suzie Boss. In doing so, it was awesome to get to virtually hangout with NWP superstar Chad Sansing (I would highly recommend subscribing to Chad’s blog).We’ve since been discussing gameplay and exploring elements of game design in ways that will merit future posts. At one point Chad mentioned that he ran a D&D campaign for his middle school students. As I am currently looking at the learning principles and literacies enacted in tabletop roleplaying games, I asked Chad to describe his gaming experience with his students. This is the first of several posts that find Chad discussing his innovation as a gamer and educator.

What games did you play? What edition?

Last year, during the 4th 9 Weeks, several kids at school asked for a D&D club during advisory time. Serving as nerd-in-residence, I agreed to host the club and run the campaign. One student began a self-directed learning project to become the DM – or dungeon master – a kind of show runner for the game’s campaign (or season, if you will). However, she ultimately decided to remain a PC, or player character, and spent language arts class reading the Mortal Engines series, so I couldn’t complain. I became the house DM, in much the same way that other teachers serve as permanent pitchers or quarter backs during games at recess.

We played a mutt version of the game. I signed up for the official online D&D resource and used it to help kids create characters. I also used Dave’s Mapper to create some of the larger maps used in our campaign. Other maps, I drew by hand on graph paper, the same way I began in 2nd grade while playing Gamma Riders at LatchKey in the morning. In fact, during our campaign, I found some of my maps from late elementary school or middle school in a box in my parents’ basement. Ah, life.

Since we were using the up-to-date online resource, our characters were created through menus and algorithms referencing the game’s 4th edition rules set. The last time I played, I used 2nd edition rules. At no time have I ever cared about movement or encumbrance. Essentially, we used a twenty-sided die (d20) rolled against our opponents’ defenses or the number we needed to roll to achieve a specific task. The time that praying-mantis ore-smuggler hijacked negotiations with the Dwarven navy and somehow rolled two natural 20s in a row to avert a disastrous strike on an Elven grain ship remains the stuff of legend. Natural 20s happen when a player rolls a 20 on a d20 without any modifiers buffing or debuffing her chances. Essentially, if you roll a d20, you can do anything. Conversely, if you roll a natural 1, no bonus can save you. The DM can do anything she wants to your character or party of adventurers.

Generally, we put story first, community second, d20 rolls third, logic fourth, common sense (a distant) fifth, and all the other rules last. (Having just played Pathfinder for the first time, it occurs to me we essentially played Pathfinder.)

I made it clear that any players wishing to split off of the main party could do so, but that I would finish the main story first before returning to their characters a few months of real time later. That kept everyone together nicely. Also, I discouraged evil characters and evil role-playing. An explicit and repeatedly stated purpose of the group was to be a community and to enjoy our time together as co-creators of an awesome story.

How did the students learn the rules? What things didn’t they get? Did anyone buy their own copies? Dice?

Many kids in the club had played some form of D&D before, usually with a parent or family friend as DM. Everyone seemed to quickly get the idea of using a d20 to roll against target numbers. It was difficult for some students to read all of thew abilities and items listed on their character sheets, so some students spent a lot of time repeating actions that they knew had been successful in the past. Other students and I tried to help by scanning their character sheets and suggesting things to try. The kids wanted their peers to do cool things and generally included everyone who wanted to play each day, though some players kind of wandered in and out of the game until they were sure of actions they could perform. Then they stuck with the game and began to bring in their own bits of humor and story-telling as their anxiety about the rules and playing “correctly” diminished. We had tons of running jokes by the time our campaign finished, and each player had a part in at least one of them.

Before the adventure began, most students wrote back stories – without much help from me – that brought them together on the map I showed them of the campaign world. I asked them to come up with explanations for how they could all wind up in one, particular nation at the same time. All kinds of writing and creativity ensued as we got characters built over the first three or four days of club.

Can you describe the campaign – what was it about, how long did you plan for it to go on, how many players?

I planned the game for 10-15 players and thought it would last for about a nine weeks, or for the entirety of a marking period. We played three or four morning per week (during advisory) for about eight weeks, forty-five minutes at a time. If you count the time we spent developing our characters, rolling new ones as needed, and dividing loot, we probably spent just over 20 hours playing the game, which gives us a total playing time roughly equal to that of the main quest in a typical AAA adventure video game.

How did the campaign change? How did players react?

As the kids came up with ideas I didn’t anticipate – as they decided to travel to places or to take on enemies I thought they would ignore – I had to revise some of my planning and adventure flow-charts so that the kids could attempt to meet their own goals and find entry points back into the rest of the main quest I had designed.

I changed the big bad about halfway through the campaign: I added a co-villain and revised the motivations of the first one. I also improvised the ending to help the players defeat their major antagonists before the end of the school year. I began the game thinking of political and economic struggle, but I ended the campaign thinking of belief and sacrifice thanks to the kids’ decisions.

What did you learn?

Kids want to cooperate and learn with, through, and from people and stories that involve them in personal inquiry, trusting relationships, and opportunities for exploring identity at school. A well designed lesson, unit, curriculum, class, or year is one in which kids feel like adventurers, in which they feel like heroes, and in which they can apprehend the heroism of their peers, some of whom fight awful battles just to be present and to risk being seen and heard.

What did they learn?

I wish I had asked in a semi-formal way. I can only speculate. Natural 1s are bad, but failure is sometimes funny and always safe in our classroom. Natural 20s are good, but sometimes being great at something right off the bat changes what comes next or what’s expected of us. Everyone has something to say, but some of us take more time to find our voices than others. Everyone wants to belong, and we can include them when we decide to be patient, inviting, and kind. Everyone has a sense of humor. Stories are best created together. Community sometimes requires sacrifice, even when sacrifice is just a willingness to be silly in front of others.

I’ll ask around some more.

Did you always DM?

I always ran the game, though the kids really owned and shaped it. I tried to set up interesting constraints and to perform the NPCs well, which required me to run a functioning map of the world, its people, and their interests in the back of my mind. I tried to stress co-creation of the story throughout the campaign. Playing D&D with my kids was like teaching them in a participatory learning environment – without them it would have fallen flat; with too much control on my part, the game would have sucked.

What kinds of players did people play? Any assumed gender stereotypes?

The kids largely played themselves, though a few of my older students attempted more serious role-play, taking into account how their characters would have approached battle, diplomacy, and the other characters. I didn’t hear a lot of gender stereotyping, but the player with the pixie character nearly never hit a target with her miniature cross-bow, which led to frequent, but good-natured, jokes at the expense of her dice rolls. And no one wanted the bug-man to speak, but he often had the highest diplomacy rolls leading to situations where he would say ludicrous things (to the elves: “the dwarves? They LOVE you guys!”) that the NPCs had to believe.

Most players began as friends, but by the end, I think everyone who chose to play felt welcome in the group and spoke and played.

Sadly, we had a few near-total-party-kills and some ill-advised walking across a narrow bridge over an endless pit, so there were many new characters along the way, as well was a lot of fodder for running jokes. As the game went on, kids also opened up and brought humor to their characters. The dwarven beast master who woke up after 700 years of sleep, for example, demanded that the group help him recover his familiar, Cookie the Cat (or bunny?), from the lowest level of the under-city before he would help the group fight the big bad. He figured if Cookie had died, he could have a spirt familiar.

As it turns out, he found Cookie, made her into a spirit familiar, and then sacrificed her soul to open and close a mystical barrier trapping a rainbow dragon the group needed to free. So, yeah. He ultimately went mad and lived out the rest of his life as a bear in the woods.

Middle schoolers are great story-tellers when given the chance over time to find themselves and the multitudes in them.

How did you find time for this and planning and everything else (I’m thinking about just how much time preparing for running a gaming session can take)?

I spent some time on developing a small world map and back story for its nations. Maybe two or three hours. Hand-drawn maps took about 30-45 minutes each. Encounters often took two or three sessions to resolve, so I tried to sketch out loose flow-charts and NPC details for about five encounters at a time. I’d order each set of upcoming encounters in a flow chart and allow for branching paths between the initiating and terminating events in the sequence. I probably spent 20-30 minutes planning per day during the campaign. It felt like planning participatory learning experiences, which I love, and involved a lot of performance and improv, which might be the parts of my teaching that I enjoy (but downplay) the most. Planning for the game also seemed very manageable because of the schedule I had last year, which left me time for writing and supporting other classrooms after I finished my teaching for the day before lunch. I have a much more traditional and full schedule this year, but I would still leap at the chance to plan nearly any kind of participatory learning club, regardless.

Thanks, Chad! In the next post, Chad will address some of the specifics of his campaign, its storyline, and the ways students interacted. Stay tuned!

Same Table, Different Game: Role-Playing and Differentiation

[This is likely one in a slew of forthcoming posts related to role playing games, learning, literacies, and performance. These are exploratory in nature and a space for me to write through some of the topics I’ve been thinking about in this area. Feedback and pushback are welcomed.]

I’m reading a recently released book about the history of Dungeons and Dragons called Of Dice and Men by David Ewalt. I appreciate the accessibility of the text as a way to describe what could happen within a role-playing game. I think Ewalt’s book offers a good introduction but will also likely be read primarily by people already intimately familiar with the polyhedral dice and tomes of rules charts he carefully contextualizes; as accessible as the book is, it’s not going to turn the world of gaming on its head. Which is tricky… because most people probably see D&D more like this.

A month or so ago, when I came home from an evening playing Pathfinder, Ally asked me, “So, what do you do when you play?” I’ve been struggling with an answer to this: I think there is an assumption that all role-playing looks like the live action sort a la Role Models. And actually, I think the endearing, epic ending of Freaks and Geeks is a good primer of what typical role-playing looks like. (Leave it to James Franco to help clearly explain nerd culture to the masses.)

As I’m reading Ewalt’s book, I’m reminded that even with five or six or seven people all sitting around and playing the same campaign, they may all be playing a different game. For instance, Ewalt notes that “at the most fundamental level, a PC is defined by a bunch of numbers written down on piece of paper–the DNA of an imaginary person” [emphasis mine]. And that’s not really how I see it. In my current Pathfinder game, I’m less interested in the stats that I search for on my page than I am with who my character is in regards to his traits, disposition, outlook on the world. For instance, I might be playing a paranoid thief that gets a little flighty when confrontation arises (which is often). Instead of chasing down villains, it could be entirely in-character for my character to run away: the numbers that frame an abstract set of skills are less important to me than the characterization of how this character behaves.

That doesn’t mean Ewalt’s wrong, it means people around a gaming table are playing different and parallel games. For instance, at the same Pathfinder game, there are players who have made uber-fighters and badass spellcasters. Don’t mess with them: they’re really good at using the game mechanics to ensure that battles end in their favor. This is the game they are playing. Like Ewalt they are defining their characters by “a bunch of numbers.”

I want to emphasize that neither approach is “the right way” to play. Some gamers I’ve played with have spoken disdainfully of the “roll”-players in comparison to the “role”-players: they see gaming as the co-construction of a fulfilling narrative. Others see gaming as building the best and most epic character ever. The name, the behavior, and the backstory aren’t so important. Many people find a balance.

Having to figure out what players want and their own narrative goals, the Game Master (GM) must figure out how to help meet the various needs and interests of those around a table. It’s a tricky proposition to differentiate the needs of players and the parallels between a GM and a teacher are significant (and will be discussed in an upcoming post).

When we ran the Black Cloud game in my classroom several years ago, I noticed that students enjoyed the game for different reasons: several students focused on the story of a cloud gaining consciousness and communicating with it. Some students wanted to “win” by finding the most pufftron sensors in their community. Some students were most interested in the environmental concerns and addressing real world health issues based on data. Regardless of what attracted students to the curricular unit/alternate reality game the same things took place. How students took up the data and story and competitive elements (and standards-aligned English-y “stuff”) reflected the parallel and differentiated spaces for literacy exploration.

As I continue delving into RPG-related research, I’m struck by how complex systems of rules deliver content that is interpreted and enacted upon based on the interests of individuals. When we play Monopoly we (usually) play it in the same way every time. When we play Pathfinder or Fate Core or Savage Worlds, each of us have different interests and goals and they all intersect over the course of several hours of dialogue, dice rolling, and identity formation.

Discussing Live Action Role Playing, Schools, and Why You Should Join Seekers Unlimited

I was thrilled to get to talk with Roz and Aaron of Seekers Unlimited this afternoon about their current Kickstarter.

Our conversation (embedded below) discusses the power of LARPing in educational contexts, the need for roleplaying in schools, and the differences between “sandboxes” and “rails.” LARPing really isn’t just for nerds swinging foam swords on the weekend!
 

 

And do please consider Seekers Unlimited’s Kickstarter (currently with just days left for funding)!

 

 

Images and Sounds and Provoking Different Reactions

But if a film can provoke the audience’s participation–if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work How each moment gets completed depends on each individual person. So the film, although it’s materially the same series of images and sounds, should, ideally, provoke slightly different reactions from each person who sees it.

Even though it’s a mass medium, it’s those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. The fantastic thing about the process is that they actually see their own version on the screen. They would swear they saw it, but in fact it wasn’t there. Enough was there so that they completed it in their own way, but as it’s happening they don’t stop to think: That’s just me completing it. They really see something that appears as authentic to them as anything else that’s actually physically in the film

How does this happen? It can only be because the film is ambiguous in the right places and draws something out of you that comes from your own experience. And then you see it on screen and think: Only I know that, so the film must be made for me.

– Walter Murch, The Conversations

As part of summer reading catch-up, I’ve been meandering through the conversations between Michael Ondaatje and Walter Murch about film editing. As much of my time lately has been preparation for ethnographic research on tabletop role playing games, I am struck by Murch’s sense of empowerment for viewers. The agency of the audience within his films is one that is personalized. It negotiates the relationship between storyteller and story-receiver in such a way that both feel emboldened in nuanced interpretations.

A blog post will follow about the quasi-brilliant marginalia in this used copy of the book I have and the erratic bouncing ball of ’80s sing-a-longs that makes cameos by its previous owner.