One of the major faults of most, if not all, LARP organizers I have ever met is the lack of technique in the writing. I am guilty of this as well. I think it can be remedied with limited effort, if the proper resources are produced and distributed. The reasons for this is that we are not professionals, for the most part, and we have very few professionals to show us the way in the industry.
Technique comes in a variety of flavours. Character creation, meta-arc design, background designs, scene writing, prop creation, prop use...
Before I continue, let me make one point clear: technique feels formulaic, and many of you will hate it at first. Don't avoid it for that reason. Once you've mastered it enough, you can grow out of technique when necessary. I know the example is overused, but Picasso mastered realism and basic techniques long before his masterworks in Cubism were realized.
In this post, I will address technique in scene preparation.
Inner and outer turning points
The authoring of any scene must begin with its outer or inner turning points. The outer turning point is the major change that the scene throws on the character. It must either propel the characters further in their goal, or move them back a step, and it must be significant for the scene to be meaningful.
Examples: If the play is a street war against a megacorporation in a dystopia, finding out that the director's wife has been cheating on him in secret, or that the Head of Security has embezzled money from his boss and created a separate security force working only for him, would be outer turning points moving the characters forward. Receiving a phonecall from a character's wife in tears because the megacorporation has announced that they will cut the funding to redirect the money on "defense against terrorism" sets them back.
The inner turning point is the effect that the outer turning point will have in the characters' heads (and the mind of their actor/players). This is mostly out of your control, but usually pretty easy to foresee. Thus, it is your job to try and predict how the scene will affect your players, and to predict their possible reactions as a result.
Examples: If the director's wife mentioned above has been cheating on him, she can be blackmailed. This is a unique opportunity to get access to high-level information, and can be the ray of hope the characters have been praying for since the beginning of the chronicle. When the character gets a call from his wife, he realizes that it is a push from MegaCorps for him to stop his activities, and a reminder that they can get to his wife, too, and not just to him. A panicked wife will make for a panicked character, and that is inner conflict you want to create.
Introduction and Conclusion
Once you have defined the scene's outer and inner turning points, it is time to set up the introduction of the scene, and the most probable conclusions on paper.
The introduction of a scene is very important. In many scenes, it is ideal to be a little melodramatic about scene introductions, to show the participants that something is happening. The introduction for some scenes is very obvious, like for the call from the panicked wife above. Some others are much more difficult to pin down.
Making the players stumble on the scene works in a number of occasions, as it can throw them completely off-guard. Say your characters are raiding a hotel for some reason and one of them is performing camera surveillance downstairs or in a truck. Gunshots begin, and most people in this dystopia have the well-established reflex to lock their doors and stay inside their room. One woman, however, runs out with only a bedsheet around her body and runs away from a room just one floor above the shooting, running for the stairs.
The surveillance man looks at the woman for a moment, and suddenly realize that this is MegaCorps' director's wife running mostly naked through the hotel. She is definitely not supposed to be there. She escapes using a helicopter. One way or another, the characters will go find out who rented the room, and find her illegitimate lover's name. He is middle management of MegaCorps' Human Nutrience Division.
See how dramatic that was, compared to the age-old call from a contact who gives a player this information in exchange for a "future service"? The introduction sends the actors/players a shockwave, and the scene just got very juicy.
Another note about the introduction is that the characters must have a good reason to be there and get into the scene. They must have a goal, and not follow through simply because the actors portraying them realize that the play's organizer obviously wants them there.
Once you've written your introduction, and planned the most probable outcomes of the scene, you are ready to write the whole thing.
In conclusion
Remember, when you write, that everything in the scene has only 2 purposes: your inner and outer turning points. Everything in the scene must push those two turning points forward, from the introduction to the conclusions. This includes dialogues, props, non-player character actions, music...
Great scenes that deviate from this technique exist, obviously, but most often, the deviations from the technique that will enhance a scene will be visible on a case-by-case basis, when you will have mastered the technique enough. Using a technique does not tie you to it, and your brain's higher functions are developpped enough to enhance a scene beyond this when you have to.
Friday, 17 June 2011
Monday, 6 June 2011
Literature and Gaming
I'm finally finished setting into my new apartment. Back with the posts!
I have taken an interest in writing prose (short stories and maybe a novel) in the past few months, and for the first time in my life, my interest is not waning. One thing I figured was that, since I was competent in creating very involved and interesting game worlds, I ought to be ready to write literature with limited adaptation, right?
I've rarely been that wrong in my life.
For players to really be involved in either Interactive Theatre or Roleplaying Games, the setting is the basis for everything you will design, since the oh-so-interesting characters that your actors/players care about will be created by your players themselves, for the most part. If you create a sufficiently entertaining playground, you can give your actors/players thrills for months and years.
In literature, your audience won't create a character tailor-suited to their own interest. The author's job, then, is to create a single character that a large audience will feel for, and make his viewpoint the viewpoint that will be the most enjoyable for the widest of audiences. Your reader is mostly trapped within your choices.
I had read 18 pages of "The Fire in Fiction" before I threw out 80% of the material I had written beforehand to begin anew. I know now how long and hard the road will be to dedicated authorship.
Still, I decided to write, and am happy I did. My girlfriend gives me full support, which I know to be crucial in my situation.
I have taken an interest in writing prose (short stories and maybe a novel) in the past few months, and for the first time in my life, my interest is not waning. One thing I figured was that, since I was competent in creating very involved and interesting game worlds, I ought to be ready to write literature with limited adaptation, right?
I've rarely been that wrong in my life.
For players to really be involved in either Interactive Theatre or Roleplaying Games, the setting is the basis for everything you will design, since the oh-so-interesting characters that your actors/players care about will be created by your players themselves, for the most part. If you create a sufficiently entertaining playground, you can give your actors/players thrills for months and years.
In literature, your audience won't create a character tailor-suited to their own interest. The author's job, then, is to create a single character that a large audience will feel for, and make his viewpoint the viewpoint that will be the most enjoyable for the widest of audiences. Your reader is mostly trapped within your choices.
I had read 18 pages of "The Fire in Fiction" before I threw out 80% of the material I had written beforehand to begin anew. I know now how long and hard the road will be to dedicated authorship.
Still, I decided to write, and am happy I did. My girlfriend gives me full support, which I know to be crucial in my situation.
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Selling your event
There are multiple ways to sell an event. Most of all, I recommend using any and all networking resources at your disposal to hype your event. This networking is very dependent on your personal contacts and social skills, so it is very hard for me to write about.
The presentation of your event, however, can be helped.
The first thing you need to work on is knowing your audience. Think about the people you want playing your event and about what type of roles they enjoy. If all they want is to play is a game of modern-day heroes killing zombies with diamond-tipped chainsaws, don’t try and force a psychological drama play on them. It is not going to work. If you cannot find enough players that would fit your event, think about redefining the event in question.
The most common sorts of publicity for this kind of event are posters and websites. Websites will usually also contain information for your established players, but that is cause for another discussion.
The first thing that will grab your player’s eye is the graphic design. If you can get a talented artist to cook up something nice, use it. Make sure the theme of the event is well represented by the design. If you cannot find a talented artist to do it for you, go with a simpler design rather than use a bad one that draws too much attention to itself.
The next thing the audience will notice is the title and the introduction text. In a poster, 3 short lines is the maximum you should put to detail the setting. In a website, you can use the standard 6-line introduction used in most current-day novels. The best guide I ever found to write those introduction lines is available on Will Greenway’s website, The Ring Realms. I could never tell this as well as he does, so I suggest you just follow the link to his own description and examples. Will Greenway is awesome. http://www.ringrealms.com/rrmainindex.php?PAGE=inspiration&SUBPAGE=dfictech_07
At the bottom of the poster or website, you need to put the date, time and location of the event, and your contact information. Make sure that it is easy to read, but mostly out of the way. It’s not there to sell your event: just to inform potential participants who were sold by the rest of your publicity.
The presentation of your event, however, can be helped.
The first thing you need to work on is knowing your audience. Think about the people you want playing your event and about what type of roles they enjoy. If all they want is to play is a game of modern-day heroes killing zombies with diamond-tipped chainsaws, don’t try and force a psychological drama play on them. It is not going to work. If you cannot find enough players that would fit your event, think about redefining the event in question.
The most common sorts of publicity for this kind of event are posters and websites. Websites will usually also contain information for your established players, but that is cause for another discussion.
The first thing that will grab your player’s eye is the graphic design. If you can get a talented artist to cook up something nice, use it. Make sure the theme of the event is well represented by the design. If you cannot find a talented artist to do it for you, go with a simpler design rather than use a bad one that draws too much attention to itself.
The next thing the audience will notice is the title and the introduction text. In a poster, 3 short lines is the maximum you should put to detail the setting. In a website, you can use the standard 6-line introduction used in most current-day novels. The best guide I ever found to write those introduction lines is available on Will Greenway’s website, The Ring Realms. I could never tell this as well as he does, so I suggest you just follow the link to his own description and examples. Will Greenway is awesome. http://www.ringrealms.com/rrmainindex.php?PAGE=inspiration&SUBPAGE=dfictech_07
At the bottom of the poster or website, you need to put the date, time and location of the event, and your contact information. Make sure that it is easy to read, but mostly out of the way. It’s not there to sell your event: just to inform potential participants who were sold by the rest of your publicity.
Sunday, 15 May 2011
Julie: an antagonist you feel for
As I have said before, the best antagonists have to be human for players to care about them. When the players investigate their backstory, they should find torment that would make them think that they, too, could have wound up like the bad guy in similar circumstances.
Take, for example, Lug’s Clockwork, a Kafkaesque organization I created for a LARP where the players embody the rare humans fighting to be freed of the influence of an Orwellian society. If the main leaders of Lug’s Clockwork are just faceless men in black, the players are going to grow bored fast with them.
That is why I created Julie.
Julie was a bright kid. Her mother took good care of her until she started to go to school. Her mother taught her everything she knew, from home. Protected her from the local bully a few times. Then school started.
Julie wasn’t good with other kids. They bullied her pretty much from day one, and life soon got miserable for her. Her only respite was always with her mother. She came to learn that anything she did well was thanks to her mother, and everything she did wrong was because she tried anything by herself.
By the time she became a teenager, she was grounded most evenings for reasons that had become more and more pointless. Then her mother saw a boy try to flirt with her and, to protect her daughter, sequestered Julie in her basement. The imprisonment lasted a whole summer and ended in November when the school authorities alerted the police about Julie’s disappearance.
Julie was at first traumatized by these faceless policemen who came to take her mother away and send her to a foster home away from all she knew. With time and therapy, she ended up understanding how her mother wronged her, and how much society had failed in protecting her. She knew how much society needed to be more informed, and more in control, about the actions of its people.
Julie was indicted into Lug’s Clockwork because she believed that humans cannot hurt humans if society watches everything all the time, everywhere. “Freedom” is nothing but an excuse to let the bastards and criminals ruin the world for their own ends. The chaos that the players cause in their fight for freedom is nothing but a self-interested fight for anarchy and the world’s end.
This character is right to act as she does when she attacks those things that the players’ characters cherish the most. Some players will even agree with her. At that point, you get real conflict in your event. Dramatic conflicts like this one create the best stories.
Take, for example, Lug’s Clockwork, a Kafkaesque organization I created for a LARP where the players embody the rare humans fighting to be freed of the influence of an Orwellian society. If the main leaders of Lug’s Clockwork are just faceless men in black, the players are going to grow bored fast with them.
That is why I created Julie.
Julie was a bright kid. Her mother took good care of her until she started to go to school. Her mother taught her everything she knew, from home. Protected her from the local bully a few times. Then school started.
Julie wasn’t good with other kids. They bullied her pretty much from day one, and life soon got miserable for her. Her only respite was always with her mother. She came to learn that anything she did well was thanks to her mother, and everything she did wrong was because she tried anything by herself.
By the time she became a teenager, she was grounded most evenings for reasons that had become more and more pointless. Then her mother saw a boy try to flirt with her and, to protect her daughter, sequestered Julie in her basement. The imprisonment lasted a whole summer and ended in November when the school authorities alerted the police about Julie’s disappearance.
Julie was at first traumatized by these faceless policemen who came to take her mother away and send her to a foster home away from all she knew. With time and therapy, she ended up understanding how her mother wronged her, and how much society had failed in protecting her. She knew how much society needed to be more informed, and more in control, about the actions of its people.
Julie was indicted into Lug’s Clockwork because she believed that humans cannot hurt humans if society watches everything all the time, everywhere. “Freedom” is nothing but an excuse to let the bastards and criminals ruin the world for their own ends. The chaos that the players cause in their fight for freedom is nothing but a self-interested fight for anarchy and the world’s end.
This character is right to act as she does when she attacks those things that the players’ characters cherish the most. Some players will even agree with her. At that point, you get real conflict in your event. Dramatic conflicts like this one create the best stories.
Saturday, 7 May 2011
A root in the real world part 2
I said in the past that I would like interactive theatre to exist as an activity by itself, independently of the gaming aspect of LARPs. Because the LARP community is a community of gamers, by definition, this seems like a very daunting task.
The idea of creating such a community from scratch is, indeed, daunting. Creating bridges with existing communities of simulationists is another story altogether.
Did you know of the Boys’ Work Movement of the YMCA and the numerous parliament simulations that have spanned from this for more than half a century?
Did you know about the numerous experiences of classical theatre troupes to make their plays more interactive?
Did you know that the term role-playing predates role-playing games by a decade?
I claim that creating a solid community of interactive theatre events that would span various themes and objectives is possible. A solid entrepreneur with significant networking resources could make a solid business out of this in any large city of a western world. Interactive theater can be used to teach the inner workings of parliament, economics, entrepreneurship and a host of other professions. It can be used by a company to bolster confidence in its products and services. It can be used, and often already is, to teach history.
The idea of creating such a community from scratch is, indeed, daunting. Creating bridges with existing communities of simulationists is another story altogether.
Did you know of the Boys’ Work Movement of the YMCA and the numerous parliament simulations that have spanned from this for more than half a century?
Did you know about the numerous experiences of classical theatre troupes to make their plays more interactive?
Did you know that the term role-playing predates role-playing games by a decade?
I claim that creating a solid community of interactive theatre events that would span various themes and objectives is possible. A solid entrepreneur with significant networking resources could make a solid business out of this in any large city of a western world. Interactive theater can be used to teach the inner workings of parliament, economics, entrepreneurship and a host of other professions. It can be used by a company to bolster confidence in its products and services. It can be used, and often already is, to teach history.
Tuesday, 3 May 2011
A root in the real world
Recently, the news have grabbed my whole attention. We just underwent an election in Canada that completely changed Canadian politics, by basically throwing out 2 political parties that have been entrenched in Canada’s parliament for decades and centuries, respectively. On an international level, Osama Bin Laden has been killed.
Look at the people who have gone to the streets in New-York to celebrate the American victory in Pakistan. Look at the NDP partisans celebrating the ascension of the party as official opposition, and how they are overjoyed even though they don’t even form the government. Look for similar events in your own local history. Find those events that people have cared about. Especially, find out what made them care!
Once you understand why people love this and that man, why they are overjoyed by this and that event, you will know what to put into your interactive plays to make them care. Look at what made Osama Bin Laden so hated, above and beyond anyone else in the world, by the American people. When you make an antagonist, look at such people whom people truly hate, and incorporate what makes them hate those people into those antagonists.
How much an event impacts the world is irrelevant. How much people care about it is everything.
The news are a wonderful tool for an author of interactive plays. Look at the way the sensationalist media tug the emotions of people to grab their interest, how they take pains showing how this-and-that major fraud has left a poor widow without the money to keep feeding her young children anymore. If you want your players to care, use the same tricks the media use. Those tricks work.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
How to make your participants care about your event
If you are a writer for a LARP or Interactive Theatre, you have probably tried dozens of different scenarios to try and reach your players, and get them interested in your plots. Some have failed, while others have succeeded. You might not have realized why yet.
Here is a wake-up call.
People care about people. They will also care about characters. Plots, concepts, organizations, objects and just about everything else only exist to serve the characters. Do not waste your time creating evil organizations; spend your time creating characters who run evil organizations. If you want to showcase a concept, do it as a relation to a character, and not in a vacuum.
A Stargate matters because it affects the life of O’Neil and Carter, not the other way around. Beating back evil organizations matter because those organizations are run by, and affect very real characters in your setting. Gear matters because it enhances characters. Abilities work in the same way.
The reason behind this is very simple:
As a race, humans have survived only because we care about people more than we do about things and concepts. If trees had mattered to us more than people, all humans who experienced winters would have died off. If animals had mattered more to us than humans, our ancestors would have starved to death millennia ago.
We are genetically programmed to care about people. Everything that matters does so solely in that it affects people.
If you want your participants to care, base your events around characters, whether those portrayed by the participants themselves, those portrayed by your actors or, hopefully, both.
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