Game structure oracle

Text parser adventure games, usually called interactive fiction, are video games which present you with the state of the virtual world, and expect you to type in commands which change this state, usually actions of a character which you play. Zork (playable online here) was a famous series of completely text-based parser adventure games, where the state was also presented as text. The early Quest games from Sierra (King's Quest, Space Quest, Quest for Glory, etc), while providing information in both textual and graphic form, still required you to type commands in.

Eventually most of these series culminated in games with more graphical interfaces, resulting in the genre of point and click adventure games, but there is a small community of designers who still create fully textual parser games, often using the Inform language, which is ultimately based on the language used to design the old Zork games and other Infocom interactive fictions. One of the skills you had to develop as a seasoned text parser gamer was expressing what you wanted in a way the parser would understand: which nouns must be acted upon by which verbs, based on possibilities gleaned from the textual descriptions, or from knowledge of the system itself, such as its inventory and combat features.

As a thought experiment, suppose that instead of developing these skills yourself, you had a professional parser gamer working for you: someone who knew exactly how to navigate the game and understand its description, who might even be able to peek at the video game's code or assets directly, although they'd only do so to make sure they were answering your questions correctly, rather than to give you information you shouldn't have. This person would take your descriptions of what you wanted your character to do in the virtual world, and translate them into commands that the mundane parser would be able to use; they'd then describe the new state of the world to you, using the result provided by the parser game. This person is starting to sound a little bit like a gamemaster, in the role of judge or referee, except that they wouldn't be enforcing rules, so much as translating back and forth between you, the player, and the parser game, which does the actual enforcement.

This professional parser interpreter would be acting as an oracle for the text parser adventure game. An oracle in this sense is the term used in theoretical computer science for a kind of black box which can be asked questions to which it provides answers, in ways that the questioning algorithm's designer does not have to understand. In this case, the parser sends the description of the current state to the professional parser gamer, who will eventually come back with instructions the parser can understand and act upon.

When we look at role-playing game structures like the hexcrawl, or the node-based scenario, their systems, taken at face value, could be implemented in software. You could write an Inform program to provide the backing to a hexcrawl, once you've populated it; you could change it whenever you added or removed anything. And then your job as a GM while running the game could move towards being an oracle for the program, and something role-playing-like would occur between you and the player, even if you don't go beyond that to riffing or improvising at the edges. This is an extreme version of constructive alienation, an almost complete distillation of all creative thought into the process of designing and implementing the external structure and its procedures, and then supporting the player in engaging with it as a mere interpreter.

If you limit yourself to being a game structure oracle GM, there are several ways in which you can improve. First of all, the better programmed or designed your game structures are, the more variety the players will encounter as they engage with them, and the less you will be pressured to improvise. This will make you a better systems designer - or adapter, if you decide to use an existing adventure module in this way. In fact, it may well make it easier for you to create an adventure for someone else to use - you could honestly provide them with an interesting experience to run for their players, without forcing them to improvise to cover gaps you might've otherwise left.

Another thing you can get better at is translating player intent into rules usage. If you want to better support the implied character sheet game of the RPG your system runs on, this can be very beneficial. Alternatively, you might come into conflict with player knowledge of the CSG if you're trying to hide the details from the players to improve immersion. There's a balance that's worth striking.

Since the system is limited, and we're excluding the possibility of improvisation or ad-hoc rulings, another thing you might have to get used to doing is either diplomatically saying no, rationalizing why an unsupported action won't work, or preemptively guiding the players to consider choices that are supported by the system. The latter can be done by making sure to emphasize the systematically relevant features of the environment when you're describing its state. In extreme cases, you'd be making sure that even if the system itself effectively requires pixel hunting, the players aren't required to perform it.

As I said when I was discussing the CSG, this limit of GMing isn't in line with my natural inclinations. I am far likelier to improvise, to make rulings in the moment, to run with what the players give me directly. The purpose of this exercise is to challenge myself to improve in the aspects of GMing that do not come naturally to me; hopefully, this will lead me to be more well-rounded.

Role-playing and roll-playing - incentives, peaceful coexistence, and pedagogy

Seems like many people have been reading Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift. And that's great - the more people realize how many arguments and design considerations relating to role-playing games are just as old school as "old school", the faster we can all discuss these matters more productively now, fifty years later.

One recent blog post took a main question from discussions in fanzines, APAs, and magazines of the '70s, on the distinction between role-playing and roll-playing: that is, whether to play your character to best emulate how it would act in any given situation, or whether to play it to win - the battle, the war, the contest, treasure, whatever is achievable. The rest of that post tries to apply game theory to the question of whether to role-play or to roll-play. And I do like the idea of looking at role-playing games from the perspective of probability and decision-making, which make up game theory: one of my first posts was about the Monty Hall problem, and I've written a series of posts about the character sheet game framework, which is my attempt to condense the most mechanical and strategy-based portions of a role-playing game into a form amenable to analysis by tools from strategy game design and theory. However, I must take exception to the very framing of this problem, because as it stands, I think it's a false dichotomy.

Let me explain with an example from your favorite edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It's a class-based system, which originally supported three classes: the fighting man, the magic user, and the cleric. This did not capture every type of character anyone would want to play, so people homebrewed their own classes or variants - that's where the thief class came from.

Now you, having access to either the homebrew version of the thief, or a more official form of thief or rogue from later supplements or editions, decide to create or manage to generate such a character. The character, per the rules, is very good at sneaking around, picking locks, disarming traps, climbing sheer walls, and other such dubious activities. It is not very good at fighting directly, or at taking a lot of physical punishment. So if you decide to play this character as someone sneaky and devious, who likes to pick locks, disarm traps, and stab enemies in the back from hiding, it works. The rules encourage you, the dungeon master has an easy time setting up challenges for you, and you contribute appropriately to a team of adventurers who are also playing to their niches.

On the other hand, if you decide, with this class, that you want to play a brave warrior who charges into battle, sword drawn, you will have a harder time succeeding at the mechanical challenges. You will not hit as much as a fighter would, you will not cause as much damage, you might not even be able to use the best weapons for the job, and so you may easily find yourself killed and forced to create a new character, or you may hope to be saved by the other players` characters, or by DM fiat. Why is that? It's because you chose the wrong mechanical archetype to go with your character concept.

You may counter that you're trying to challenge yourself, that real role-playing is playing against mechanical advantage, that focusing on mechanical advantage is roll-playing, and that a good DM or GM should be able to accommodate that. Well, to that I would say that you have made a role-playing decision by choosing both this class, and this behavior that is at odds with it. So the holistic concept is what we should interrogate. Why is it important for you that your character mechanically be a sneaky thief, but have the behavior of someone who insists on charging into the fray? Is this character trying to fight its natural or trained affinity to sneaking around? That's an internal struggle it has with itself. And there are role-playing game systems where that kind of struggle can be rewarded mechanically.

Let's say that instead of using D&D, you decided to play a fantasy FATE game. You want to create this holistic concept of a sneaky conniver, who is nevertheless driven to be a strong hero, a Gray Mouser who dreams of being a Fafhrd. You could choose what is called an aspect to capture this: "a scoundrel too combative for their own good". Aspects in FATE are used in two ways: the player can invoke them to gain some kind of advantage, spending a Fate point; and another player or the gamemaster can "compel" them from the character, forcing a disadvantageous decision that is in line with them. In the latter case, either the player resists this by spending a Fate point, or they can accept it, and gain a Fate point for use later. This is why the rulebook recommends choosing aspects that are two-sided - that combine the positive with the negative - and "a scoundrel too combative for their own good" is a perfect example of that. Let's try it out!

You and your party want to steal a big diamond from the Duke's mansion. You're a scoundrel, which allows you to spend a Fate point to give you a bonus for rolling to come up with a sneaky plan to get in there, and the roll comes out very well. The plan is set in motion, and it's proceeding like clockwork - a big distraction draws most of the guards to the front gate, and you're sneaking 'round the back. There are only two guards there, and the plan calls for you to throw a rock to their left, then use a well-positioned tree to drop in behind the wall to their right. But before you can do that, the GM compels you: "now that you see the guards up close, they don't look so tough. You feel like you could just take them there and then." If you accept the compel, you gain a Fate point. If you don't, then you need to spend a Fate point, which will allow you to proceed with your plan. By penalizing you for sticking to the optimal fictional choice, while rewarding you for accepting a less promising one, the mechanics incentivize you to play into this dual aspect of your character: a competent scoundrel who nevertheless can't stop themselves from getting into fights. To get to the position where you have the Fate point needed to avoid this hiccup, you would have had to surrender to this or another compel earlier, or not to have expended the ones you start a scene with; meanwhile, this extra Fate point you get from leaning into the negative side of this aspect of your character now can be used to improve the situation later, either by making it easier for you to do something, by sacrificing this point so that you can avoid being compelled by your weakness at a more critical juncture, or otherwise to improve the prospects of the whole plan, and the overall success of the party's mission.

If you had instead been playing a thief in D&D, mechanically this would have been a problem. You would have probably failed in the combat against the two stronger, more able guards, and if nothing else, at least one of them would have been able to raise the alarm, and none of that would have intrinsically involved any advantage to you or your party, equivalent to a Fate point.

Now we come to what I think is a better question than role- vs. roll-playing, which is an issue of taste, and possibly of human psychology: does the fact that there's an extrinsic, mechanical incentive help you or hinder you from role-playing your character? Do you get what you get out of role-playing by roll-playing to this mechanic, or not? Does it instead make role-playing less compelling for you, because it overrides an intrinsic motivation you previously had for role-playing?

And how does this affect the rest of the participants in the game? If you get the same joy out of role-playing along with the mechanical incentives, this means that you can peacefully co-exist with players who are more interested in making the best of the mechanics of the system. And the GM also has an easier time, because they don't have to negotiate some kind of fudging, or fiat, or other ad-hoc methods to make sure that everything keeps merrily moving along. Instead of having to work both on preparing and running the system, as well as on intervening extra-mechanically, to avoid letting your role-playing against the mechanics interfere with the enjoyment of the roll-players, everyone can play the same game, even though they might not be playing it for the same reasons.

Finally, in addition to the question of whether this will satisfy people who are looking for role-playing, we can ask what type of system encourages people who start out thinking as roll-players to move towards role-playing, and whether that's a worthwhile goal. When introducing role-playing games to new players, this pedagogical consideration can be crucial. I have personally found that the game that most encouraged me to play in character is by some accounts (including its current marketing copy) not really a role-playing game at all, but a story-telling game: Fiasco. Despite the fact that the mechanics barely have anything to do with playing roles in themselves, as they do not correspond to adjudicating actions that would make sense to the character itself in the world, the very framing encourages you to lean into the character you play as it interacts with the characters played by others.

It is important to remember that systems are designed by people to serve functions. They are not necessarily modeling a situation that people will encounter, which is where a game-theoretic analysis would be most appropriate, to tease out how to look at a given situation as a rational actor. They can instead model genre conventions, or they can be built to encourage and reward certain behaviors, reducing and even eliminating the tension between playing to win and playing to a role.

Character persistence between scenes

Many years ago, I belonged to an amateur theater ensemble. Our regular activities involved acting exercises, like rehearsing dialogue, improvising, and reacting to each other. In addition, about once a year or two, the group worked on a complete amateur production, in a real theater, with a paying audience. I took part in two of these.

In the first production, I played a bit part, a character who didn't really go through much change. During the course of the performance, I did have to know my entrance and exit cues, which meant keeping track of where in the script the play was, and I did have to remember the lines relevant to each scene I was in, but otherwise, my character stayed pretty much the same, so delivering my lines was just a matter of keeping a single persona going, and reacting to other characters as they changed - or like mine, remained static.

The second production, on the other hand, involved some development: my character gained confidence from scene to scene, became more and more comfortable with himself, until his final appearance, where he comes back to face his parents, expressing rage at something they did during scenes from which he was absent. This meant that I had to develop a narrative for him that continued offstage. The audience wouldn't see those parts, and possibly wouldn't care about their details, but if I wanted to deliver my lines and react to the other characters properly, I had to maintain this changing element from one scene to another, even through scenes in which I did not participate. So I wrote down narratives to patch my character between scenes, which continued this development, and recited them to myself from memory as I waited for my cues, trying to time my internal monologue so that finishing it would coincide with my next entrance. I think I did a reasonable job. It was definitely more intense than my role in the first production.

In a table-top role-playing game, maintaining character persistence is not as difficult. If you're a player, while you do have a persistent character between sessions, or before and after a break, or before and after a segment where your character is not involved, a lot of change usually hasn't occurred - with the exception of end of adventure book-keeping, like leveling up, or skill improvement, or downtime activities. In the latter case, it's a matter of updating your character sheet at your leisure, to consult it as you start role-playing or otherwise participating in the game once more. At worst, you might need to ask questions, if you suddenly forget where your character ended last session, or is expected to be right now.

It's a bit trickier if you're the gamemaster, as you do need to keep on top of things, including the progress of non-player characters, factions in the world, other world events, and, of course, the PCs. In my campaign, I did find that writing down narratives of what happens between sessions, or in parallel to sessions, was helpful for me to keep myself current for session start. But, as with being a player, since game time isn't usually real time, you can pause, you can ask questions, you can be reminded of things you've forgotten, and rewrite recent "history" when things turn up wrong.

Tic-tac-toe RPG - CSG-driven design

My first attempt at applying the character sheet game leaned towards the analytical and explanatory, with a few suggestions for design. This time around, I'm going to apply it directly to designing a role-playing game. I'll start with one of the simplest games of all: Tic-tac-toe. For brevity, in line with the roles of the game, I will refer to the first player in the board game as X, and the second as O.

Tic-tac-toe is a very simple game. In fact, it's solved: if you're X, there are strategies to always win, or at least come to a draw, with any opponent; if you're O, there are strategies to come to a draw, regardless of what the opponent does. There are clearly better and worse moves to make at each point, and it's clearly better to be X.

What does it mean that the CSG of an RPG is based on Tic-tac-toe? The character sheet should be a Tic-tac-toe board. The player will act as one side of the game, while the encounters generated by the gamemaster will act as the opponent's moves. But that's not specific enough. We still need to make a few more decisions.

First, we need to decide whether the player is X or O. Being X suggests a game where players have the advantage, while being O instead suggests a very challenging road ahead just to break even.

Then, are we going to be differentiating characters when they're created? That is, are we starting the corresponding RPG with any mechanical differentiation between characters, or are they all going to be equivalent, outside of playacting the characters? The easiest way to differentiate the characters would be to move for X at character creation, either randomly - say, by numbering the squares in the the board and then rolling a ten-sided die to decide the move, rerolling on 10s - or by letting the player choose the first square. Using what we know about the original game, there are obvious better and worse choices, and random generation is going to create a significant variety in mechanical power. Which choice is better of course depends on whether the players are X or O. If the players are O, then it would make more sense for some kind of random generation to pick the first X, or for the GM to do so, just to be consistent with the idea that encounters correspond to X.

The next step is encounters. Who chooses the moves, and what happens as a result? How does the mechanical loop of an encounter look? If the player is to remain X or O throughout the game, then each encounter has to involve two moves. To avoid combinatorial explosion, let's say we decided to randomly generate characters with a first move of X, which is the player's move. An encounter has to involve a move, because there's nothing else going on in the character sheet, and we've defined encounters in the CSG as involving some kind of interaction with what's written there. And since the player is X and the encounters are O, and we already start with an X, we need to get back to it - so an encounter has to involve an O move followed by an X move. The O move can either be random or determined. Randomness is tricky - unlike in games where rolling high or low is better, here it's a matter of randomly choosing out of the remaining squares. It's clear what good or bad choices are, if there's still a distinction, but that's going to depend heavily on the current state of the board. Also, since there's nothing else going on in the sheet, there isn't anything else to help determine any probabilities of the next move. This leaves us with the option of an encounter simply determining a difficulty probability for making a good O move, rolling, and then making that choice. The player's following X move would probably have to be explicitly chosen - there is no other information in the sheet from which to make any non-arbitrary decisions, and therefore the player has to decide whether to try to win or break even, if that's possible, or whether to lose, if that's possible.

This brings us to the a wider look at gameplay, and the endgame. Tic-tac-toe is very short. At most there are going to be five X moves and four O moves, and since we've decided that the first X move is at character creation, and each encounter is an O move followed by an X move, at most there are going to be four mechanical encounters in the game before it ends; usually, fewer. So either the corresponding RPG will be short, or it'll involve a lot of playacting or other, non-mechanical experiences, interspersed with very rare encounters going through the CSG. Once the character sheet Tic-tac-toe ends, there can be no more CSG encounters. So the character's progression would be in mechanical stasis. One way to interpret that is to say that winning Tic-tac-toe is ascending to godhood, a draw is retirement, while losing is character death. Another is to talk about becoming famous, returning to ordinary life, or living on in infamy. Any of the three would require creating a new character in order to further engage with the mechanics of the game.

So that's a glance at the design space created by Tic-tac-toe as an RPG's CSG. We can see that it's extremely constraining, and doesn't allow for interesting choices, even at game start, much less later. It also limits the length of play, because of how short the CSG is. Honestly, it's hard for me to imagine a group starting an RPG with this CSG without hacking it to break some of Tic-tac-toe's rules. For example, allowing a healing mechanic to undo moves would significantly change the possible interpretations of the CSG in an RPG context, and prolong potential play indefinitely - at the expense of reducing how much the current state of the CSG reflects the history of the character.

Nevertheless, I hope that this sketch shows how to use a board game as a starting point for an RPG through the CSG framework, and what that entails. I can't wait to see more interesting games come out of it!

Persistence of the ephemeral history of RPGs

Many years ago I read a collection surveying the thoughts and ideas of the pre-socratic philosophers, whose focus was on what we would now call natural philosophy, or science. They had some remarkably modern sounding ideas, including some presaging modern cosmology. And yet a large portion of the book was dedicated to explaining, for each thinker, just how little remained of their work. Some of them were only known through limited summaries of their work centuries hence. Throughout, aside from the astonishment at how relevant they present to the modern reader, there was this persistent sense of loss.

I got the same feeling when I read through some parts of Jon Peterson's Playing at the World (which I've discussed a little bit in comparison to Secrets of Blackmoor here), and especially through his latest book, The Elusive Shift, which expands on these parts - the parts that are based on fanzines, amateur press associations, variant rules and whole role-playing systems with very limited print runs, and other extremely rare ephemera. These sources came out in the era just before and after the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, and involved the communities of wargamers, science fiction and fantasy fans, Diplomacy afficionados, and ultimately, role-playing gamers and designers. Many of his sources are not widely available. In fact, a significant part of his work in both of these books was tracking them down in public archives and private collections, and sometimes even bidding on specific items in auctions to get at their contents. We are all the poorer for not having access to these discussions and arguments in full, and role-playing theory and design in the next few decades seem like they could have benefitted so much from building on them instead of reinventing the wheel.

A more recent archival catastrophe that has happened to role-playing discourse was the loss of many Google+ groups, not just as active creative spaces, but as archives of arguments, conversations, and designs. Indeed, we are fortunate that those ephemera of role-playing past that Peterson discusses were physical artifacts, booklets and sheets of paper, rather than files on the cloud. Otherwise, they, too, might have been irrevocably lost. This precarity of historical records is still a problem: Facebook groups can be shut down unilaterally by their administrators, or because some of their content violates the company's Community Standards, whether due to legitimate poor moderation of hateful content or just report bombing, taking important posts and discussions down with them. Twitter threads are hard to follow, and may also disappear or become sparse because some of the people involved either had their accounts suspended or deleted them themselves. Discord's management is entirely opaque, and the content there is not particularly well organized for archival purposes - and there is no way consistent with their current Terms of Service to back up servers.

One of the reasons I decided to start writing this blog, instead of merely engaging in the other platforms I've mentioned, is to move away from this one-point-of-failure ecosystem. It's true that Blogger is still a platform controlled by Google, but the actual framework of a blog is transferrable, and there are several competing platforms. I also back up my posts, just in case.

I think the hobby and the theoretical discourse about it would benefit from moving towards spaces that are not managed by platforms whose main focus is engagement hacking, and which are not as centralized. There is, of course, the question of moderation and dealing with bad actors, but being beholden to an all-or-nothing toolset outside of any particular user or group's control will leave us in a situation where some pieces of data are lost, others can only be found as quoted somewhere else, still others can only be known by the arguments of their detractors - just like with the pre-socratics.

Character death in games

Yesterday, it finally happened. Having indulged in some constructive alienation to set up a framework for a dungeon combat challenge for the player characters, and furthermore, committing to a certain attitude by the enemies, I ran the game as it rolled, and one of the PCs died. Even in Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, it's possible to die in battle, and it happened. And it was a good death, for several reasons: it was a heroic and somewhat foolhardy press forward to engage the enemy without really waiting for backup, which fit well with the character; this somehow worked in previous iterations, but his luck ran out. The player also will have to take a break from gaming for a few months, so the out-of-game timing was good, as well. But still, it's sad for me when a character dies, and especially when that is connected to the player leaving the game, even if it's amicable.

I am reminded of a round of Betrayal at the House on the Hill I played at Who's Yer Con 2019. The game starts out with all the players cooperatively exploring a haunted house, which is generated using random tiles. Things go wrong, until one of the players moves beyond a point threshold, and becomes the betrayer. The game is paused while this player consults an entry in a book expressing the haunting, while the other players consult a corresponding explanation in the other book of how to defeat it. Play resumes, and it is now adversarial, until either the haunted player is defeated, or the other players are all killed or coopted, or whatever other end condition is achieved. In this particular instance of the game, I was the haunted one. And I slowly had to take out the other players. This was the last game of the night, so as I was taking people's characters out, they left to their hotel rooms, or to drive off. And it was really unpleasant for me to succeed at each juncture, and then to win the game. I felt like I was kicking people out of the game, rather than just challenging them inside its rules.

In a single-player video game, the situation is often very different. If you run into a challenge, and your character dies, you can just reload and try again. Even without saves or continues, even if you have to restart the game every time, you're ultimately able to confront the same challenge - or type of challenge, if it's procedurally generated - over and over again, until you tire of it, or until you overcome it. Death is a signal to you that you have failed, and an invitation to try again. In games made for the arcades, it is also a way to push you to spend more money. But I think games have moved more and more towards focusing on the specific challenge at hand. Instead of having to start games over, there are saves, or checkpoints; some games automatically restart you at the beginning of the latest challenge, allowing you to retry it over and over. Some games will adjust the difficulty of the challenge down, so that you are not stuck in one area due to missing out on a particular skill or capability. And of course, there are many games where death isn't really a possibility; it's just a matter of which of a variety of endings you get to when the game ends. I personally find a lot of the older games a bit frustrating these days, although certain retro and retro-style indie games have captured my interest.

So my experience with death in games leans towards the negative. I don't like getting characters killed, as a role-player, as a gamemaster, or as a board game player, and I find video game deaths frustrating when they require me to redo a lot of progress. But when thinking about gamemastering, game design, and theory, I'm trying to avoid just focusing on what I like. So let's discuss some parameters for lethality in role-playing games.

Many old school games were very lethal, or could be made to be. Original D&D did not provide characters with many hit points, or quick ways of replenishing them, monsters were deadly, as were traps and poisons, some of which would kill immediately. It was also very easy to build a new character - I recently played an OD&D game, and even with checking up on whatever houserules were in place, it took me about half an hour the first time, and would probably not take me more than ten minutes if I wanted to do so again with the same table. Another important aspect of early versions of D&D is that it expected adventures which did not really dig into character backgrounds and motivations. You crawled a dungeon with other players to look for treasure. The constant threat of death motivated you to be careful as you crawled, although combat did often happen, as did falling into pits. If your character survived, it might develop a larger narrative, especially if it ended up taking its funds to settle outside, but it could easily perish, and you would write up a short memorial and start again from scratch.

As I noted above, meanwhile, D&D 5E makes it very hard to die, or rather, makes it very easy for a PC to survive brushes with death. Your character gets to revive some of your hit points with an hour's rest, or all of your hit points on a night's rest. Once taken to zero hit points, a character needs to roll 10 or lower three times with a d20 (or two if one of the rolls was a 1) before rolling three 11s or above to die permanently. Moreover, a critical success (a 20) has the character at 1 hit point and ready to get back into the fray - or flee, likely the more prudent option, albeit made difficult by the system's punishing combat movement system. Correspondingly, character creation is a much more arduous task than in the original edition. It is usually recommended that the party and the DM take up the equivalent of a whole session to build characters together, to make sure that they mesh well and that their backgrounds can be tied into the plot properly. The adventures are expected to be long-term affairs, with meaningful participation of the characters at each step, so a character's death can really mess with the process. But other things can happen when you play: allies and enemies can win or fail, you can alienate former allies, befriend former enemies. Your character's choices can have a lot to do with how that changes.

I think this leads to a bigger discussion of what stakes you are playing for. The stakes can be the life of your character. But if the character is easy to generate and is expected to be easily killed, what are you losing when it dies? The string of successes you've had with it against a hostile world? Definitely not time out of the game. Meanwhile, if a character is difficult to create and adapt to the world at hand, you're not only losing all that starting investment, you are also probably losing a significant amount of participation with the game as you are taken out of it to restart this process. And if the game involved a lot of social relations with other parties to the game, both player and non-player characters, then all of that is lost, too. Meanwhile, you can lose some of these connections due to poor judgment or failures without killing the character. So your experience of the game with the other participants continues, even though you have suffered setbacks, setbacks that can be significant for you, if you have become invested in the world and the people in it. It can be a meaningful experience even if it is not lethal for your character individually.

That being said, if there is combat in the game, there is no greater proof of how important it is to do it well than the death of a party member, with all that entails. If there is a dungeon, death by trap is the best way to show that it is vital to tread carefully. If there is a despotic society you must navigate in, there is no better proof that you have to watch your actions very carefully than a summary execution.

And on that positive note, rest in peace, 2020.

Deep Space 9 vignettes

I've decided to collect a few thoughts I've had about Star Trek: Deep Space 9. There are some spoilers for particular episodes and the general thrust of the show.

Not just a Babylon 5 knock-off

When I was a teenager in Israel in the 1990s, there was a sense of rivalry between fans of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5. Sure, I knew many of people who were fans of both, but since they were both in the same niche of a space station-centric longform science fiction drama, and since there were a lot of specific parallels, and even a story about how one stole the premise from the other, there was definitely tension.

For broadcast availability reasons, it was B5 which I ended up watching through, while I only watched DS9 sporadically. I was left with a sense that the former was superior to the latter. I was taken in by the attempt to make a mature piece of work: a TV novel, and avoiding kids and cute robots. But recently I have achieved a more nuanced perspective.

After an almost complete rewatch of B5 last year, I did a complete watch-through of DS9 earlier this year. And I feel I should have given the latter a fair shake earlier. No, it isn't a TV novel. There is a TV novel hiding there, maybe about 5 seasons of it, but it is also attempting to be a particle of the week Star Trek series, and manages to pull that off, as well. The characters are very well-written, engaging, and grow with the plot and the passage of time.

One thing that stands out is how the kids affect the story. The parental relationships add a depth and sense of stakes to the world that, with all of the dramatic development in B5, just wasn't there. Seeing the world through the eyes of Jake and Nog as they grow up, seeing the emotional toll that long parting has had on the O'Briens and the Siskos when those occurred, the fear for Jake and Molly's welfare when they were out of sight, were irreplaceable. Similar situations in B5 involved adults being concerned for their adult relatives, relationships which we were only introduced to remotely, so the impact was lessened. No children grew up on B5, either, instead just coming in for a plot point and leaving.

So I don't think JMS got more maturity out of the bargain. Cute robots were absent in both, though, and neither felt neglected as a result.

Vic Fontaine as an artificial gamemaster

As part of the transition from a paramilitary ship to an essentially civilian space station, the public holodeck became a set of private holosuites, run by everyone's favorite Ferengi bar-owner, Quark.

I didn't cover the holodeck or the holosuite in my talk about virtual reality in fiction and reality, because at that point it had been a while since I've watched The Next Generation or DS9, and frankly, it's a very weird entity, that benefits from thinking more in terms of role-playing games, and specifically, live action role-play. In the holo experience, a program creates artificial beings and an environment, which react to the real visitors naturally, and/or according to the program's dictates. The visitors are expected to dress for the occasion, and also play their parts - so this sits somewhere between augmented reality and larping. There is some interlock that prevents real people from being injured, which is occasionally deactivated to add more tension, but otherwise, the experience feels real. There is a finite room which can be seen when the program is shut down, but the visitors are able to feel like they are moving freely in an open-ended environment, when necesary.

In story terms, the holo experience seems to be a place for unrealistic crossovers to happen with in-fiction logic: TNG's Data can match wits with Moriarty, the crew can play Robin Hood's Merry Men, and, in DS9, a somewhat sanitized experience of 1960s Vegas is recreated, hosted by a lounge singer modeled after Frank Sinatra - Vic Fontaine. In time, the various crew members become his friends - he is very helpful and insightful, especially when it comes to their love lives.

One of these crew members is Quark's nephew, Nog. We have watched him succeed in achieving his dream of joining Starfleet, taking part in battle, and losing his leg. A few episodes later, in "It's Only a Paper Moon", he is back to the station, with leave to acclimate to a prosthetic and become rehabilitated. He visits the Fontaine program to cheer up, and then decides he wants to recover there.

This pushes the boundaries of the program as we have seen it so far: instead of watching a show and getting some advice from Vic, Nog is taken backstage. And an entirely novel part of the premise is revealed: the management of the casino and lounge, and particularly, its finances, which according to Vic, confound him. After an altercation with Jake, Vic tells Nog that he has to improve his attitude or he will not be allowed back to the lounge - until this episode - the only attraction of this program. Nog is finally convinced to have a look at the finances, and, in typical Ferengi fashion (the less said about a race of big-nosed aliens with a natural talent for money, the better), has an easy time sorting them out, and starts investing time in improving the profitability of the place, and even expanding it.

The fascinating thing about all this is how much this holo experience moves towards being an ideal role-playing game. Nog is able to be swept up by a part of the imaginary or simulated world that was only created to engage him, that wasn't planned in advance. This is something a good gamemaster would do; indeed, the framework, which does not require Nog to roll any dice or understand new behind-the-scene rules, much less reprogram anything, makes this closer to an ideal Blackmoor phenomenon, engaged with through pure larping. In our world, it would be very difficult to reproduce the freedom of this experience as a larp, because it would beg the question of how the new systems are designed and made to seem and sound and feel real, and where the new players required, or their clothes, would come from, and how they would be trained.

Odo as a literal referee

Earlier in the season, in "Take Me Out to the Holo-Suite", Captain Sisko manages to convince members of his crew to join him in playing Baseball against a team of Vulcans lead by an old nemesis of his. Since an actual Baseball court would be difficult to recreate on the station, it is reproduced in one of Quark's holosuites.

As we've discussed, holosuite programs are more than capable of creating people with complicated personalities, and a programmed umpire (Baseball referee) would have a perfect view and understanding of the situation in the field, but Sisko insists on having a person do it, specifically Odo. He wants a real person. He doesn't explain exactly why - it seems he mostly rejects a holosuite umpire on principle as what Solok, his nemesis, would do - but later something happens that is apparently not exactly according to the rules as, possibly, a holosuite umpire would do it: one of the Vulcans runs into the dugout without having touched base. Since he can't single out the Vulcan who had run in, he goes to them, one by one, touching them with the ball. It turns out that the one who had run in is the last in the seating order, and as soon as Nog gets to the player right before him, he runs and attempts to make home plate, but Jake is able to catch Nog's ball and tag him, anyway.

Had this been run by a holosuite umpire, maybe something like the MLB rules would have been used, and the runner would have been called out as soon as he entered the dugout. But instead, it was Odo who indicated that something was wrong, in his typical gruff manner, adding to the suspense and thrill of this small victory.

Sisko cheers and comments that it is this unpredictability of Baseball which he loves about the game. And having a living referee, one who can make mistakes, or idiosyncratic judgments, is part of what allows for this exciting unpredictability. Even in this, a competitive game with overall much stricter rules than any role-playing game.

Why was O'Brien self-conscious about his models?

As the series progresses, Bashir and O'Brien bond over holosuite experiences reproducing various desperate historical combat situations. The last one they repeatedly attempt is the Battle of the Alamo. In addition to playing at this scenario on the holosuite, O'Brien starts investing in recreating the Alamo Mission and the order of battle in miniature. And it is fascinating that he is repeatedly teased about it, with others constantly calling them toys, which he rebukes by stating that "it's not a toy - it's a model!" It's interesting because by the time DS9 was produced, actual model armies and miniature warfare were pretty well established as a grown-up hobby, particularly historicals.

This does remind me of a story suggesting why the author Robert Louis Stevenson gave up on miniature wargaming, which he enjoyed playing with his step son in Switzerland: apparently a friend mocked him so badly for playing a children's game that he never did much more with it, much less publish the rules he used, a loss to the history of wargaming.