Shared Experiences and Swapping Game Stories
It has now officially been a decade since I last went to GDC, which is now wrapping up in San Francisco. I do miss it. I used to tell my coworker, Kirk, that I thought it was always more inspirational than educational, but I always had a good time.

The part I enjoyed most about GDC was rarely the lectures (though they were often informative and fun). The best part for me was just getting together with other game developers, talking shop and talking about the games we love. The roundtables were a good structured way of accomplishing that, but the parties, the showroom floor, and (when they had them) the hospitality night activities were by far the best.

Rip on the mainstream game developers all you want (I do!), but in general, they love games and they have a lot to say about 'em.

Having the Utah Indie Night has definitely helped. While much less intense, it's nice to be able to get together four times a year to do exactly the same thing - chatting over pizza or Mexican food, talking shop, talking games, sharing experiences, and doing a little bit of dreaming together.

Last night I got to get together over dinner at the Asian Buffet with Mike Rimer and Butch Istook. Mike's a developer in the "Deadly Rooms of Death" game series, and the principle guy behind DROD RPG: Tendry's Tale. Butch lives in Oregon and was in town for the week, and Mike made arrangements for us all to have dinner and shoot the breeze. I've chatted with Mike a few times at the Utah Indie night, but it was my first time meeting Butch.

We talked for nearly two-and-a-half hours. I think we could have gone for another two-and-a-half hours, but I had to get back to work (yes, late nights the last couple of weeks). The subjects varied, including our own projects and business topics, but most of the time we were talking about games. Games we had in common, and games we didn't. Final Fantasy, Baldur's Gate, Kingdom of Loathing, Angband, Wizardry (particularly the original - Mike plowed through it at age seven!), Ultima III, Ultima VII, Unreal, Aveyond, Master of Magic, Oblivion, The Bard's Tale, and several others were all topics of discussion. Not the games themselves, so much, as aspects of them.

Curiously, the shared experiences of these games formed a vocabulary of sorts for us to talk about things, but it was also a major topic of conversation itself. It left me inspired and pondering (as these kinds of conversations always do), and feeling like sharing some thoughts on... shared experiences.

Back in the day, when I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons and it was actually - well, not exactly "cool," but everyone was trying it - there were a handful of modules (pre-written adventures) out, and most people had played them, but under different Dungeon Masters. As a result, you had an interesting situation where people had this shared experience - the canned adventure - but the details were so different that there was plenty to talk about. The core was the same, but the hows and the whys were completely different.

You get much of that same experience now if you are talking about a popular MMORPG (What? There's more than one?). And for certain single-player games, you still get that. We swapped stories of comparison.

But too often, single-player video games have such a tightly scripted narrative now that those "moments" and points of discussion get lost. Our illustrative example was Final Fantasy VII. "Oh, and then Aeris died." That whole thing plays out the same for every player. Aside from maybe reactions to it, there's really nothing to discuss. There were no decisions to be made, no variations to explore. She got Aeris-kabobbed while praying (meditating) every time at exactly the same place, and there was nothing you could do about it.

By comparison, our lunchtime games at SingleTrac of ATF Gold and Rainbow Six were followed by almost as much time spent talking about our just-completed games as it took to play them. We were all in the same game, but the experiences were a little different for each of us. That was the part that brought us together socially.

That's kinda where I would like to see indie RPGs go. Well, RPGs in general, but hey - we indies may as well take charge, right? But I'd like to see more of that balance between having something that forces a common experience (so randomly generated content doesn't work so well), yet is flexible enough that everyone's version of that encounter is different and memorable. That would need to go beyond simply a different choice of tactics to defeat a boss. Or which of the three possible endings you saw.

Some games have it. We've talked about it here. Richard Garriott even went on record at one point with the Ultima series by saying that he tries to make sure there is one solution guaranteed to work for any challenge or puzzle in his game, but he didn't rule out other approaches for creative players. These kinds of games are pretty goal-driven. This can lead to a scary, "ends justify the means" type of behavior... but isn't that what role-playing is all about? You choose your path through the game, and you accomplish the goals your own way. If you do it by being an evil jerk and extorting the money fom all the villagers rather than doing favors for them, so be it. Ideally, those actions will also have consequences.

That's a big part of the "exploration" that makes RPGs so fun. As is the opportunity it provides for players to swap stories about these common experiences.

Labels: Indie Evangelism

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