Friday, June 27, 2025

 All the ganz mespuchah came to town for the office summer party, and we had narrative workshops. These were in no way silly fun games, they were Very Serious. Okay, they were silly and fun, but they were also serious.

One game we like to play I dubbed Ludonarrative Resonance. I don't claim it's original -- my friend Shelly made a similar game for movie pitches, and probably lots of people have something like it. It's a card game for breaking folks out of their familiar tropes.

What you do is you take index cards, or blank playing cards like these and separate them into four piles:  Setting, Main Character, Goal, Mechanic.

You write a mess of cards with the word Settings on their backs, for example:

• 
  Paris, in the 20's, sort of
• A city with a dark secret
• Zombie apocalypse
• The dreams of a dying scientist
• A decayed city in a faithless empire 
• A forgotten town in the Deep South
• Sparta!!!
• Renaissance Florence
• A volcano island

Then you write a bunch of cards with Main Character on the back:

• An apologetic Englishman
• Member of an arcane order of assassins
• A mysterious circus girl of unknown age
• A sly fox with poor impulse control
• The Monkey King
• A beginning witch
• A not entirely harmless lamb

Next, Goals, for example:

• Become a Real Boy
• Bring back the Old Ones
• Bring your beloved back
• Get the MacGuffin
• Survive
• Heal the monsters
• Go to there

Some of these are a bit specific; ideally the cards should be ideas you can interpret in different ways, but also evocative. By now you've probably recognized the games, movies and fairy tales I stole these from (some of which I wrote).

Finally, Mechanics:

• Social stealth: pass as one of them
• Deck builder
• Walking simulator
• Parcour
• Battle Royale
• Romance simulator
• Enter dreams and alter them
• Soulslike
• Punch them in the face
• Time loop

Now, the dealer deals three of each kind of card, and someone else picks one from each three. There shouldn't be two cards from the same source material.

Then everyone collaborates to pitch a game using the selected setting, main character, goal and mechanic.

Initially, this will seem ridiculous. But with a little thought, the ridiculous becomes plausible -- and original.

In our workshop, for example, we had:

A lamb

A volcano

Go to there

Puzzles

We ended up with the idea that The Lamb is solving puzzles to climb the volcano to get to Mary. The puzzles come from spectral lambs. Over the course of the puzzles we discover that Mary has been abusive towards the Lamb, and we're worried that we are in an allegory of someone returning to their abuser. But it turns out the Lamb is there to kill evil Mary and set the spectral lambs free.

We had:

An apologetic Englishman

A zombie apocalypse

Bring back his beloved

Social stealth

That turned into a game pitch where the apologetic Englishman has to rescue his beloved, who has become a zombie. That means he will have to infiltrate three groups:  the zombies (to get to her), the lab guys (to get the cure) and the kill teams (to prevent them from killing her before she can be turned back). Being an apologetic Englishman is a nice impediment to passing as any of these groups, and failing to pass will result in him being eaten, killed, or used as an experimental subject.

Both of those are perfectly cromulent games, right? I would at a minimum watch the trailer for these games, and probably wishlist them on Steam. 

Aside from exercising your ludonarrative muscles, which is always good, you quickly learn how many possibilities there are. When we were thinking about our next game after We Happy Few, we only seriously discussed two possibilities. We should have been discussing twenty! I mean, if you're planning to spend a couple of years making an indie game, or five or more making a AAA game, would it kill you to spend a month or two pitching crazy ideas? You don't want to be making a cookie-cutter fantasy game because that's what's at the front of your brain.

Make randomness your friend!

10:50 AM

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