Orthodoxy is a word with many meanings, depending upon connotation. You can use it to mean "right doctrine", "true beauty", My personal favorite, however, is “right glory”… but I mean it in a corrective sense, like in orthopedics: a glory and beauty that corrects and strengthens, a glorious compassion in a form immediately discernible, even as it cannot be fully understood. A beauty that heals, brings someone back into harmony with creation. Orthodoxy, as I mean it, is a medicinal reality. It is imperative to understand that I do not mean some faux-pious bullshit nonsense. I mean something with trackable, real-world, results. So when I say I am "Orthodox Christian"I do not mean I identify principally as the member of a has-been former imperial Christian Church that was universally dumped upon by any of the "Enlightenment" thinkers whose naivety directly led to WWII.
I mean, I do identify with that has-been former imperial Christian Church that was universally dumped upon by any of the "Enlightenment" thinkers. Very much!
But I think the Orthodox Church serves, channels, that corrective light. It may know the most about that light, sure, but it's a servant, not the healing light itself.
It is of the utmost importance to understand that this healing and creative light (which the smart figure out is alive and sentient and thus call God) does actually have rules, and "He" manifests under specific conditions, regardless of media.
What does this have to do with game design?
I'm getting there.
Chill out.
The problem is that, ultimately, you can't address whether or not a design is O/orthodox or not without talking about the elephant in the room: us moderns are stupid. We have fallen into this idiotic notion that the world can be defined principally in abstractions. This is such a laughably obviously bad idea that we now have at least two entire industries (porn and therapy, in that order) dedicated to cleaning the idea up so it doesn't break the entire population. None of the abstract frameworks we abuse like Walter White's crystal were meant to be used like how we are using them now. They're descriptive, in the same way that you use a medical textbook to diagnose an illness. They're shortcuts so you don't have to reinvent the wheel everytime. You're meant to look at the world around you and apply your knowledge to the symptoms of the world so that way you can get about to address the situation more quickly.
So when I say there are orthodox principles to game design, I mean that game design can be used in a way to reveal existentially healing beauty to those who play the game, not whether or not someone namechecks Jesus or the characters choose to not have sex before marriage because their purity is meant to be saved and all that happy modern garbage. One is identifying a phenomena happening in the real world and the other is just a Soviet-style checkbox. I am saying there are ways to heal the soul, just as much as healing the body, if not more ways to do it.
And, when I say "games can heal and they can do it on purpose" no one is really able to argue that. You can say you don't think the term "orthodox" shouldn't be applied in that way. And that's something I can respectfully disagree with.
I'll give you an example. I came to videogames late, later than TTRPGs even (19 versus 15). Twilight Princess was one of my first games. There's a lot about Twilight Princess I don't like now, but the ending of that game is not one of them. And then this happened:
For those of you who don't know, the ending of Twilight Princess is a sword fight between the protagonist Link and the antagonist Ganondorf. It's a tense affair, and then all of a sudden you lock blades and you have to tap that A button as fast as possible. Now, I've done that "tap button fast" crap in other games before and since and normally it's boring. But the thing is that Zelda does it right. You've spent all this time solving puzzles and most of the gameplay is about trying to find the most elegant solution to problems possible...
And then all of a sudden Ganandorf is just trying to bowl you over.
And all the people in the story, this sad and broken world, your own survival, requires you to button mash "A" as fast as humanly possible, all so all your work at outmaneuvering Ganondorf isn't destroyed.
The time for subtetly and craft is past.
Knock that jerk over and nail him to the ground with the sword.
And he then dies standing up. What. The. Hell.
I know I'm not the only one who was rather deeply moved by that climax. There's something about it that opens up a fire in the gut, where the only thing that now counts is whether or not you can mash that ridiculous button hard enough to get your shot in. You've not come this far to get overpowered by a dude at least a head taller than you thank you very much. This a moment where you are told to stand your ground or fail. The game has spent so much time telling you to be clever that the one time it tells you to just have raw gumption hits like a ton of bricks.It's a moment where the world of the game and your own interior world fuse, just for a second, just long enough to where you are Link, all the evils and travails in the world are Gandondorf, and you're going to win.
And then you do.
It's not like you lose sight of the fact that what happened on the screen is factual. It's something so much more mysterious. A part of you came out to the game and said "Yeah, I can do that too. I can fight. I'll fight till I drop." And, even though the victory on the screen isn't factual, a part of you said "No, I think I can go on now" that did not think so before. Something happened inside your soul that is far greater than the thing that prompted it.
Another example, really the example for me, was my second Burning Wheel campaign, The Revenge of the Countess of Fire. We finished the last session, and everyone just... stared... into space. There was utter silence. It was so thick you could cut it with a knife.There was a beauty to what had just happened. Marian, the villain, had just been proven to be a patsy for a greater evil, and she was wanting to end it all. She didn't see another way out. And the players, driven to pity, talked this child-drowning monster out of killing herself and trying to do something with the gift the players have given her: a chance to make a difference, the right way. Marian could make a difference, because the past wasn't king. And that was the victory they'd just had: convincing a monster to try to genuinely love, just one more time. After eight sessions of holding their noses around Marian, they had finally seen her as a person, saw what made her tick, and helped her want to try again. It was a moment that somehow went beyond the game. Not a soul was unaffected.
Some of you are nodding along, I know. You know what I mean now. You can see why it's so hard to define, because by definition you cannot define that movement in your own soul, can you? You sorta describe it, say what it's sorta doing, but that's about it.
That moment?
That is a moment of "corrective" beauty, of orthodoxy. You run into the beautiful infinity. And, as Victor Hugo says so freaking eloquently:
“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God.”
That beautiful infinity, that moment, is with a person.. We historically have called Him God, and “God is responsible for all good”, says St. Cyril of Alexandria. All good. Including what happens in something as seemingly trivial as playing a game. But nothing is too small for God “not even a teardrop, or a part of a drop”, as St. Symeon the New Theologian says. All things are His, all experiences of good things are a relating to God. And, just like any relationship, there are principles, a mode of thinking, that let you do this on purpose. Which means there are principles of design that can bring you into contact with the Almighty Himself. Because, as it turns out, there's thousands of years of techniques to get you into the proper mindset.
And this means that there are principles that can be used to shift your mindset while playing a game.
Now, for anyone who has not been paying attention over this last post, I'm not advocating someone sets up a checklist of stupid things like "Do we talk about God in this game? Do the characters act in a 'wholesome' manner? Do the good guys always win?" and all sorts of silly things that so many conservative Christians would want on such a list. Or, y'know, SJWs, who are just as prudish and dogmatic as the conservatives.
Yeah, no.
What exactly am I advocating for? Wait, you wanted me to have this mapped out? Figured out? Ha! Look, you want an honest look at this, or someone trying to sell you something? Me trying to sell you something is down below. You'll figure out very quickly I don't sell anything too well on this blog. I'm practically allergic to being a company man. Hell, I have a game I've published and I still keep forgetting to put a link up on this blog so the dozen or so people (if I'm lucky) might buy it. Maybe. Probably not. So I got news and it's either going to be refreshing or it's going to be terrifying: no I don't have this mapped out. I'll be taking this series irregularly, off-the-cuff, and a bunch of other words that I'm sure everyone will find as I go. I will make mistakes. And I will be wrong.
So you're either in for the ride or you're not.
As for me, I'll be messing around here. We'll see where it goes!
Thank you for reading!
OKAY, SO THIS IS THE SHILL TIME. If you go away after this point that's fine! Really!
If you like what I've written and want to see it in action, go over to my Itch, and pick up my game Apex, which is a single-page game that packs a lot of punch to it. It's way better than any one-page RPG has any right to be and it's really easy to play.
If you like what I'm saying and want to see what I'm up, design-wise, I update my two games on my Discord on an-almost weekly basis. If you want to see the drafts, go on over to Discord and take a look!
Oh, what am I working on, in general? Glad you asked! I'm working on two games: Dragons and Planets and Crescendo.
Dragons and Planets is a one-shot space fantasy game for two to six people, in the tone and tradition of Star Wars, Pacific Rim, and the Matrix. Gameplay is fast, frenetic, and extremely collaborative, while being surprisingly relaxing. Oh, and it's diceless and uses your favorite book. From character and world creation to the end it takes about two hours.
Crescendo is a long-form fantasy game of character development for two to four people. Innovative journaling with easy-but-deep storytelling mechanics, Crescendo is an intensely rewarding time for those who really want to sink their teeth into their characters and the setting.
You can find the most recent drafts for both games on the Discord.
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