Iron Filings and Experiments in Gaming-upon-Writing
This will be a bunch of thoughts about gaming, storytelling, writing, character creation, and emotional relevance/resonance. So, y’know, take with a grain of salt.
Talking to one of my players from my now-defunct Strasbourg campaign, re-reading the interactions she quoted to me and enjoying the warm-and-fuzzy-feeling of having created characters who won my players -my readers’- hearts, I had a thought:
I wonder, (went this thought) whether it’s simply that they loved most the characters that loved them.
This question probably needs some unpacking.
Gaming is still a hobby lingering on the fringes. Some styles of gaming -miniatures, HeroClix, anything on a computer, battle-mats and Dungeons and Dragons- have become very accessible to the non-gaming public. I think of them as threshold games, although that term is misleading: many people never outgrow the kind of play that got them into the hobby, even if they do pick up other styles of game.
Myself, I like roleplaying. I like thematic, epic, long-running, complexly-characterized, brilliantly-executed, plot-driven role-playing games -exactly the same kind of fiction I enjoy, as it happens. As you might imagine, I have an easier time finding books written to this standard than I do games. Such campaigns take time to develop -at least as much research as a novel, in my experience- and may run for years. Those that are running tend to be pretty insular, too: it’s hard to break into these games. And Gaming society, like any society, borrows heavily on street-cred. I was a largely-awful player at sixteen, playing in my hometown; years later I still can’t get involved in any games there, and I doubt I’m fondly remembered. Here in my new hometown, I’m an unknown, and very few Storytellers are honestly willing to try incorporating strangers into their games. You never know when you’re getting a player with bad habits, whether social or gaming (or both.)
My solution has been to run my own games -to select a setting from one of the published lines, to learn and utilize the rules that are intrinsic to that setting, and to create my own adventures. As the creator of the story I have a lot of administrative say-so: who plays, who doesn’t, what characters are allowed, what the themes of the game will be, who has access to what and when. Motivations, settings -that’s all in my hands.
It is almost exactly like being a fiction writer. In fact, it is the best exercise I could ever recommend to a fledgling author, for a variety of reasons.
Certainly, the time constraints of running a roleplaying campaign are more taxing than those of writing a novel. You can set a novel down at any time, although you might not be paid if you do; in a campaign, you meet weekly, or bi-weekly, or twice weekly, and God Help You if you don’t have something ready, even if it’s only a pot of indescribables bubbling on the back burner of your brain. Storytellers who routinely show up to games without anything of substance for their players to do find that their players lose interest and join other games -or are rowdy, or disruptive, or unhappy with the direction of the campaign. Storytelling is a bit like amateur stand-up comedy: if you’re bad at it, you’ll see the audience yawning, or playing Tic-Tac-Toe, or taking five-minute bathroom breaks -variously and pointedly indicating their disinterest in what you have to present. Unlike amateur stand-up comedy, though, your job isn’t just to entertain your players for three hours that night: it’s to make that entertainment congruent in tone, theme, characters, characterization, and plot, with what went before and what will come after. You can’t use all your best jokes and trust you won’t be back until a year and surely by then everyone will have forgotten them.
Game narration is, in fact, an object lesson in pacing. Pacing -not just for the storyline you’re promoting, but for the individual plotlines of each of your players and a couple of your side characters and antagonists too. You learn to think in Storyboard-Form: last session Jack did this, Jill did that, and the Big Bad countered them by a third thing over here. This session Jack will naturally try something new, Jill’s player is sick and won’t be here, and Big Bad will be moving in on Jack. Helpful Side Character here would almost certainly intervene on Jack’s behalf -but that means he’s left himself open to attack for next session, when he’ll be obliterated. So on.
This practice is immensely valuable when you sit down to write a novel because you find that you can as-easily seat yourself at the table with the allies as with the opposition: you know what their little maps look like, and what forces their would-be-croupiers are pushing around with little sticks today. You can also -just as easily- follow your antagonists home and meet their adoring cats, answer their mail, and discern from their book collection what has brought them to the point of opposing your protagonist. You have been watching your players do just this for the duration of your game; you yourself have been forced to follow the development of their motivations and interests, and to respond to those developments, at every step along the way.
But there is also a certain extent to which I think a Storyteller is compelled to be complicit in her player’s storylines that I think maps neatly onto the way that an author is complicit in her protagonist’s narrative. (A more exact parallel might be between being the player with the character, and the author with a protagonist, but that parallel only holds for stories with a single protagonist -and I would argue that only a very few novels have a single so-central character.)
But -on the off chance what I just wrote made as little sense to you on first read-through as it did to me- what I’m really saying is: who makes a protagonist? And now, I think, we arrive in territory more comfortable to those readers of this blog who are also writers, but not gamers.
A protagonist is not special-by-definition. I realize that this goes counter to whole schools of Fantasy and Science Fiction and now YA fiction, too, in which the hero or heroine was Distinguished by Destiny(TM). (The aforesaid was not intended as a pun on Rowling, but since it seems to have turned out that way, maybe I get points for wit.) The hero or heroine may protest, occasionally, that they are a “perfectly ordinary _____,” but we as readers can perceive from the reactions of the characters around them -from the Convenient Conspiracy of Circumstances, as it were- that this person is special. If only because that sword-wielding Orc didn’t run them through on page two when any sensible sort of Lower-Order Servant of Evil would have done. Mr. Jordan, I am looking at you.
It is my general opinion that no author can entirely avoid making exceptions for their protagonist. But I think that the better sorts of writing arise from the writer -and the Storyteller- anticipating these moments and either addressing them openly, or finding ways to go back and make the exception fit within a pattern of pre-established behavior. (Considerably harder to do in Storytelling than in novel-writing.) This is why the trope of the monologing villain once worked and no longer does, or not so consistently: it tacitly assumes that the villain is the sort of person who has an interest in explaining themselves, in being understood. A megalomaniac might fit into this category; so too might a reluctant antagonist. But a particularly competent, unimaginative, or pragmatic antagonist would have absolutely no reason to explain their behavior and to thereby create the critical window for the hero’s escape. As the megalomaniac antagonist has fallen out of vogue, monologues have not -which leads to some of the more horrendous mistakes in characterization I have seen.
A classic example comes from the first campaign I played in very seriously, the campaign that has become the genesis of the V:tM story that I am perennially finishing. (”Perennially finishing” sounds a good deal better than “writing” or “drafting,” and I think it will be my new euphemism for same.)
During the course of the campaign, my storyteller was moved by my interest in a character to develop that character more, eventually concluding that he was one of those interested in overthrowing the city’s current leadership and installing himself in its place. This character had been elusive, mysterious, abstruse for the duration of my in-character interactions with him -hence my interest, I’m sure.
In the second-to-last session of the game, this character approached my character and informed her of his intention to take over the city. He also asked for her support.
At the time, I was quite chuffed; it was a very satisfying scene, and explained a great deal to me. It’s only later, now that I’m responsible for redrafting the story -now that I’ve taken this character on myself, gotten a feeling for his internal bits and pieces, and am responsible for representing him realistically in my own fiction- that I notice how screamingly out of character his confession was. The very last thing you should want to do, if you are planning a political coup, is tell someone about the coup who is not capable of doing any more to assist you than shaking pom-poms and swearing her support. Who is, in fact, in a position to telegraph your intentions to your enemies, whether unwittingly or intentionally.
Some of this is surely due to the fact that my interpretation of the character varies from the original Storyteller’s intentions. (I’m fine with that, for the record.) But some of it is also what I am calling the “iron filing phenomenon.”
The Iron Filing Phenomenon may be stated as follows:
In any work of fiction, the presence of the protagonist within five feet of any other characters shall produce in them an effect similar to iron filings confronted with a magnet: to wit, they shall be drawn to, and into alignment with, the protagonist. In cases where no realignment is possible, their intelligence will decrease by a factor of ten, and they shall unwittingly find themselves in compliance with the protagonist’s desires. See also: Lemming Effect, and side-bar entry “Whatsamatter with Kansas?”*
This is particularly egregious in sidekicks and other secondary characters who by rights ought to possess interests and opinions in conflict with that of the protagonist, but who seem to find themselves doing that protagonist’s bidding with greater frequency than their own, and rarely show any awareness of the fact that they are not achieving their own goals by this expedient. (Or, for variation: sidekicks whose personal aspirations are simply erased in proximity to the protagonist.) But it’s also a more general problem: what is it about the protagonist that motivates a crowd of dissidents to side with them? That stirs sympathy or momentary hesitation in the foes they encounter? Because these sorts of transformations are very often the meat-and-bread of a book, without being adequately explored.
I say adequately explored because we follow a protagonist’s story because he -or she- is creating some kind of change in the world that interests us. We have this in common with everyone else following that protagonist’s career -including the antagonists. But I think too often, too little thought is given to the motivations of the small, the incidental, the important-only-in-aggregate characters.
This is clearly a fetish with me -inappropriate use of the word fetish, but maybe those of you who are as absorbed in English as I am will accept “fixation” instead, or as well. I cannot imagine a more rewarding story than one that focused with real sincerity on the process of establishing loyalty between characters. Going back to my supposed V:tM novel: part three of the story is consumed with the protagonist’s struggles to win over her nominal subordinates, all more senior than she is, and in many cases more powerful. Recently I found myself practice-writing a turning-point scene for this story. I know that by this scene, she has to have privately won the support of certain elements of the group; I know that writing it now is really futile, until I see how she’s gotten her hooks into each beforehand. But in a way I was writing for the satisfaction of the moment in which each individual in her command discovered that the political sympathies of the secondary characters had shifted -that they had a common goal without having consciously tried to create such a thing, and that their goal was essentially embodied in the story’s “protagonist.” Nobody is necessarily ready to admit or acknowledge that goal yet -least of all the protagonist, who would describe herself as a pragmatist, not an idealist. But there is a shared wish for a cease-fire, for an end to all the wrongs they must anticipate from one another -and this moment is central, necessary to pave the way toward that possibility.
It’s this moment that I think is so often under-depicted in fiction -and this brings me around, now, the point that I made at the outset of this piece, a point that has as much to do with creating relationships between characters as it does with creating emotional resonance between characters and readers or players: connection should not be one-directional. Connection should be reciprocal and responsive; the connection must be, for authors to succeed in attracting readers, for players to find something rewarding in a game. The only game I’ve ever played in that I unilaterally disliked, I disliked because I had no sense of personal contribution to the story. Why did I dislike that game, but not the hundreds and thousands of books I’ve read in my life, the outcomes of which were as far beyond my control as stars and comets? Is it as simple as different expectations of different genres? Or is there more to it -do you think it’s true, that we have to identify with protagonists?
Or is it -and I think this is my thesis- that we merely have to be able to love them? And is this then why so few books really need to spend long hours meticulously building the strands of interpersonal relationships -because we can condense those hours, those instincts, into common interests and goals?
You’re all writers of credit, and a few of you are gamers, too. What do you think?
*An obscure political dig on my home state and its tendency to vote for politicians whose national and economic agendas are in exact disagreement with what would be economically most beneficial for the region. You are forgiven if you did not get the joke.
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