Tag: games

The Unseen Made Visible

~ Sam ~ Leave a comment

One of the things that’s always tickled my interest is the concept of video-game speed-running, the meta-game of playing games fast that extends into almost absurdities of technical mastery that challenge the idea of what it even means to “play” a game. And one of the speed-run games that I find most interesting is Mario 64.

Mario 64 was a pivotal game, taking one of the world’s best-known video-game franchises and making the leap from 2D to 3D gameplay. And it’s amazing that it feels like a Mario game, despite being so substantially different from earlier Mario games. The motion is so varied and sharp and lively and fun. I have a lot of happy memories of playing the game as a kid, and replaying it over the years, including with my daughter in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars re-release. And yet, it’s a game with numerous bugs and deficiencies that has been utterly broken by speed-runners, who can achieve unlimited velocity and take shortcuts through alternate realities. Walls are just a suggestion, after all: If you want to make a discrete simulation of continuous physics and have limited hardware and (even more significantly) limited experience developing that sort of thing, things can get a little odd around the edges.

One of my favorite creators in this area is the YouTuber pannenkoek2012, who seems emblematic of the speed-running community in this combination of mind and heart, technical mastery and joy. My favorites of theirs are probably these two pieces, first this short music video that I think highlights some of the charm of this game:

My other favorite is this video that dives deep into one of those physics-simulation edge-cases. Mario 64 players have over the years run into situations where the character “bonks” against apparent obstacles with no relation to the visible geometry. These “invisible walls” are one of the mysteries of the game, and in this video Pannenkoek dove into a technical breakdown of all the causes of the invisible walls in Mario 64, but also a detailed breakdown of every instance of that phenomenon in the game:

Though this one is nearly four hours long. Sometimes a wall is not a wall, and as with speed-running, sometimes the goal (in that case, of going fast) is not exactly the point.

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist

~ Sam ~ Leave a comment

ROSE: The day we went through that door and claimed our reward, we passed a threshold between continua marked by differing degrees of relevance, truth, and essentiality.
ROSE: Those are the three pillars of canon.

The Homestuck Epilogues, Prologue 2

For a long time, I’ve been part of an indie tabletop roleplaying game group with a couple of friends, and for a long time I’ve been meaning to write a bit here about one of the greatest games I’ve played, Jenna Moran’s Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist & Weaver of Their Fates (also known by its apt initialism, WTF). It’s been released only as the somewhat rough-cut PDF at that link. (I’d love to have a nice hardcover edition, if that were ever produced.) Despite that, I think it’s one of the best RPG source-books I’ve ever read, minimalist, expressive, and IMO really, really funny.

Jenna Moran is known for a variety of indie RPG’s including Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (Ghibli-esque laid-back urban fantasy), Nobilis (about gods of little things conscripted into a war to defend reality), Glitch (about deserters from the opposite side that same war living one day at a time). Jenna Moran’s RPGs are a lot of fun, but tend to pile up a lot of interesting narrative concepts and systems, making the minimalist approach of WTF really stand out.

In WTF, each character has a set of relevant “gifts”. A bulleted list of traits like this is not at all unusual in tabletop RPGs. What’s unusual here is that meta-level properties are explicitly called out in the rules of the game:

  • Gifts can be helpful, a mixed bag, or a perpetual hinderence (valence).
  • They can fit into the rules that resolve bits of the narrative always, situationally, or not at all (mechanical support).
  • They can be a key part of the setting, consistent with the setting, or even inconsistent with it (truth).

The three classes in the game specialize in one of three stats which interact with these three properties:

  • Wishers specialize in Harmony, which can alter gifts’ valence.
  • Theurgists specialize in Insight, which can alter gifts’ mechanical support.
  • Fatalists specialize in Knowledge, which can alter gifts’ truth, or create new gifts.

Each of these also has an associated, analogous rule for resolving meta-level things about the game:

  • Harmony can decide what something in the game means, what should be (“Everyone should now play WTF in such a fashion as to make believing [the winner’s] explanation both appropriate and valuable.”)
  • Insight lets you change the rules of the game and define what must happen.
  • Knowledge lets you define things about the setting and decide what’s true.

In addition to those three classes, one of the players can be the Weaver (analogous to the usual “game master” role). Or you can do without. There are also rules for interacting with the shadow of each of those attributes, indulging in wickedness, arguing in bad faith, or subjecting the setting to rewrite and retcon.

The sourcebook for WTF describes the characters’ quest to seek the Jewel of All Desiring and wish for a perfected world. It defines rules and setting which make that impossible, and the rules described above which could make that otherwise. Abstract concepts about how this game works in particular and also how TTRPGs work in general are explained with absurdist flowcharts. This is a gamebook with flowcharts describing “how you come to be playing this game”. You probably know if this is the sort of absurd self-referential high-concept that would appeal to you. In any case, while I hope my description of the core concept intrigues, it cannot in any way substitute for the thing itslef.

I really love this game and it fits into my usual topic for this blog (“things that have influenced my way of thinking”) in that it has had a huge influence in how I think not just about tabletop roleplaying games but games in general. If you like narrative-driven tabletop RPGs, I recommend this one. If you’re less familiar with that sort of thing, maybe start with the example of play on p. 86, it’s short and a pretty great example of Moran’s writing.