Design Journal: Crescendo is Negative Design

I had a "Eureka!" moment the other day, and wanted to share it with y'all. I'm going to use two terms: Positive Game Design and Negative Game Design. The blog post will be about I went from trying Positive Game Design to where I'm at now, Negative Game Design, and why I'm satisfied with where I wound up for Crescendo.

Before the definitions, however, understand that my general goal in design is to be mechanically invisible during play. This doesn't mean there aren't rules. Crescendo's actually a fairly heavy game, filled with a lot of crunchy bits that would take awhile for people to learn. I want my designs to fuse mechanics and fiction in a way that makes you forget they're mechanics in the first place. It goes from "what does this thing do" to "what's the consequences in the fiction?" and then looking to the rules automatically, without breaking the flow of being in a fictional world with your friends. I think this is generally what people are trying to accomplish in the rules-lite genre, but I don't think that works. We'll get to why in another post, but it's necessary to know I feel that way.

Positive Design is very simple: whatever you want the players to do, reward them for doing it! You want people to get money? Link gold, the highest form of currency, to XP. Now players will chase the gold, because that will help them level up. You want players to do something, you give them a carrot. There's no stick inherently in the set up. Maybe there's something like HP that makes you want to be careful, because when your HP is gone your character is dead and you can't get gold. Moves from the PBTA games are another example of positive design. "Do X, you trigger a Move", with a pretty generous canon on whether you succeed or not. People sort of like rolling dice in an RPG (put a pin in this for later), so if they do the triggers they get to roll dice! Yay! Do a thing, get a thing. Positive Design is good because it's simple! You know what to do! Go get gold! Or go trigger Moves! You know what you need to do, and in general you're not told how to do it. This opens up a lot of freedom of choice and lets people do all sorts of ridiculously awesome stuff, because there's the carrot! GO GET THE CARROT!!!! I love Positive Design done well. The OSR this stuff down to an art, the highest form of science. My favorite game, Burning Wheel, is positive design par excellence. Really good PBTA has Moves that are just open enough to allow for creativity, while getting the carrot, see Hearts of Wulin.

But.

Positive Design can have some serious problems. At a basic level, Positive Design is Pavlov on a "global" scale. If you reward an action players will drool on command. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. We're rationalizing animals. We respond to positive impetus. Whether or not that's "right" is irrelvant: we do it. Trying to ask if it's bad or good is like asking if air is bad or good. It's a fact. Using that fact about humanity in a game isn't wrong. But it has to be used very carefully, otherwise the rationalizing part of the animal goes out the window, and suddenly you think you're only a rat hitting the button. That's tragic! Part of what makes playing, fun, so awesome for kids is that they attach a great deal of meaning to it. Childhood games are very serious affairs. They mean something to those who undertake them. If you do too much Positive Design you'll actually wear out the pleasure center in your brain and then you won't be able to even remember what fun really is. 

Negative Design, at first glance, appears to be the opposite of Positive Design. If you do a thing the game doesn't like you're punished for it. If you don't dribble the ball in basketball you can't play. If you touch the ball with your hands in soccer you're penalized. Hits in Dark Souls are devastating. If you get hit in the OSR it's almost always lethal, or at least a huge inconvenience. You know not what to do. 

Negative Design, however, holds a secret: the things they don’t penalize are inherently pleasurable. You pull off a jump in Ninja Gaiden or Mario and you immediately feel good, because you did a thing you found fulfilling. It’s not that you’re rewarded by the system like with Positive Design. The action itself is enough. And, because you never do the same thing the same way, the variety of gameplay is automatic. How you can do something the system doesn’t punish is theoretically infinite! Expression and creativity are inherent parts of a Negative Design. The list of things you can do is wider than what you can’t.

But. 

You can overdo it. If the system is too punishing, then you shut play down entirely. If the negative reinforcement is too light, nobody will discover the style of play that you intended. If the game doesn’t properly communicate the general picture of play through theming and art, players will get lost. It’s really difficult to get a Negative Design correct. The designer of a Negative Design arguably must have a clearer vision of the game than a Positive Design, because figuring out the game is impossible without there being a very strong vision.

The astute may protest: “But no game is entirely a Positive or Negative Design!” And that’s correct! Dark Souls rewards you for stabbing someone in the ass. Points are given for getting balls into or through nets in soccer and basketball. HP is definitely a Negative Design. Like most things in life, it’s not one or the other, but a continuum between two poles. Most games, while being definitely closer to one pole or another, definitely aren’t entirely in one camp. 

Now for that “Eureka!” moment in designing Crescendo. I don’t love dice rolling in RPGs in general. Don’t get me wrong, picking up the magic math rocks is addictive! It’s fun to roll! But the act of breaking up a narrative to pick up the dice has always been jarring to me. I like the table in a steady flow state, one where everyone is locked in, and picking up the math rocks hurts the immersion I look for in Crescendo. 

And the system I had come up with fixed a lot of my issues! Players initiate “checks”, Defying either the LW (GM) or another Player, or the LW (GM) starts calling for dice rolling in batches, changing the flow state to include dice for large stretches of time. Rolling itself was really simple: pick a Skill, roll against an announced DC. There. That’s it. It works. 

But I didn’t love it. For one thing, Crescendo has Stats and Item dice, and it felt like Player investment was irrelevant there. Stats or Items would only come out if a Skill was unavailable. I didn’t like the loose ends. But the ultimately damning thing was that Players would drift out of the narrative. They just picked up a die and rolled. It wasn’t a long break, but Crescendo’s meant to be one long continuous flow of play. 

And then I read the pitch for Journeyman, on Kickstarter. The core mechanic is to roll 3d6 and pick either the top two, middle two, or lowest two, depending upon your fictional advantage, “normal”, or disadvantage. I had seen this idea before, but this time something lit up in the back of my head. 

Crescendo’s rolling changed to grabbing a Skill, Stat, and Item die, based off the narrative the Player had supplied. But I had an idea: you rolled all three dice and automatically took the two lowest dice… unless you could provide clear fictional advantage. At which point you took the highest two. If you failed there are Conditions, which really sting to get, as they take awhile to get rid of. 

Trying the system led to spectacular results! The flow state barely stopped in that session, and we were rolling a lot that night. What happened was simple: once players were told “You need to justify getting those top two dice” the fiction was gamed, hard. Players began narrating to justify higher rolls. So long as I was a bit forgiving at times the Players didn’t break narrative flow. Having more granularity of mechanics actually increased RPing, as Players would take the hint from the system that to not narrate would mean lots of negative feedback. But, as it turns out, narrating and RPing is a naturally pleasing activity! So instead of a chore, players were having a ton of fun! The negative systemic feedback was simple and brutal. The benefits were obvious and creative. Before even the middle of the session there were grand speeches and awful revenge promised. 

The realization hit: I had made Crescendo a very Negative Design. Contrary to the Positive Design of the OSR and Burning Wheel, Crescendo assumes that players will find heavy narration and RP fun activities in and of themselves. No one needs to be given rewards for doing what they already want to do! Instead, the game has a bunch of strategically placed punishments. If you don’t lean into your Traits your actions fail, outright. If you betray your Beliefs you pick up Conditions, even if you succeed. There’s massive changes that happen in the narrative if you change Beliefs, discouraging willy nilly changes. 

An “empty” space is created by the boundary lines. Go outside them and the feedback is immediate and long-lasting. But inside the boundary? There’s an infinite sky. And you got wings. 

The Lancelot Problem

 

“In summary, modernity replaces process with result and the relational with the transactional."

- Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

I have developed a metric, a canon of sorts, to judge another’s aesthetic (and thus ethical) roots. This metric takes the form of a riddle, a nasty question I call The Lancelot Problem. So far only one person I know has answered the question correctly, which is more than I expected. One other has answered with brutal honestly, and his failure is almost as good as success. Almost. It’s really close. I commend him here for being braver than the rest of us.  How many will even get that far is beyond me. Maybe a handful? Possibly ten? Who knows?

Cast your mind to the mythical land of Logres, King Arthur’s halcyon days of peace, wherein his knights could right the wrongs at home, while Arthur labored tirelessly abroad. Eventually it all comes crashing down, like all good things. Mordred, the offspring of Arthur’s lack of true control, brings the chickens to roost. Lancelot is long gone, exiled after sleeping with Guenevere and accidentally killing Gawain's brother. But times are desperate. The mightiest knight is needed. Mordred is here and must be repulsed. A mortally wounded Gawain sends his letter, begging Lancelot’s help and giving his forgiveness! 

And Lancelot comes! He drums up an army out of nowhere and runs to his old friends' aid! He flies like the wind! Can he come home? Can he blot out his sin?

Too late. 

Just. 

Arthur is dead. Everyone is dead. Excalibur is gone. Logres is falling around Lancelot. What does Lancelot, in the face of a problem literally only he had the martial strength to master, do?

He retires. To a monastery. And stays there as the dream his king and friends shed blood for dissolves in blood and screams. A new dark age descends, and Logres falls. 

And Lancelot does nothing.

Why? Why would Lancelot do this?

I won’t give you the answer. But I will tell you some of the wrong ones. 

It is not merely a question of an anachronism. In medieval stories retiring to a monastery is akin to the Questing Beast in terms of feelings that we cannot quite comprehend. I acknowledge that there’s a historical blindspot for us here. But it doesn’t invalidate the real answer. 

It is not because Lancelot decided that the world was futile, and that he could do nothing about it. Lancelot was many things, but a coward wasn’t one of them. Neither was he a defeatist. Nor a pessimist. 

It was not to be closer God. Lancelot had his crises of faith already. He’d had his trials. He had been shown who he was. Arthurian lore is filled with people deciding upon their courses of action despite being told the outcome, because they are who they are and damn the torpedoes! Lancelot didn’t have doubts. He did what he did.

It wasn’t because of his failure. Again, Lancelot was not a stranger to failure. He wasn’t afraid of it. He didn’t cave in because he thought he couldn’t do it. 

Why did Lancelot hang up his weapons and watch as the world went to pot around him?

The answer is so simple. But almost no one I have asked the question of has been able to answer it, on the first go. And why can’t we fathom this very simple reality?

Could it be that, since we expect life to imitate an idealization - which we immortalize in movies - we deny ourselves the ability to conceive of art that shows life? We expect the pre-moderns to make art not inherently connected to their experiences. We think they just made up stuff they thought sounded cool, like we do. But they didn't. They didn't have time for flighting fancies. They had to make things they truly believed in, something we know very little about.

Have we been rendered so brainless as to think that myths are merely an exaggeration of reality, as opposed to a direct psychological and spiritual mirror? Once again, pre-moderns didn't have the mindset for mere flights of fancy. If they did something, they truly believed in it. They didn't write about people as they wished they were, but how they actually behaved. Gilgamesh fails to resurrect his friend because he's an arrogant asshole. Achilles sulks. Arthur fathers multiple children, some with his own half-sisters. Gawain flinches as the axe comes down. Lancelot retires to a monastery.

In our race to idealize everything, as post-Enlightenment victims in need of something to strive for, do we accidentally cut out the most vital, the most important, the truest, parts of ourselves? Do we forget that the rationality is secondary to human behavior, a post-fact rationalizing of an action? We have certainly failed to notice that even the least peasant in the Medieval era was mightier than any of us. They could rise up and destroy their lords if they wanted, and they did. Don't pretend for two seconds that you have their courage, nor try to pretend you know where it comes from. It certainly doesn't come from betwixt your ears.

The man who failed this test so admirably he practically won, affirmed all the above and so much more, with one very simple, poignant, heartfelt and heartbreaking statement:

“I don’t want to feel.”

How I Approach Media

Over the last few months, as I've not written on here, I've actually been having some rather productive and intense conversations with folks on Discord. I have found that the way I view media, and really the way I see everything, has been questioned. Apparently, my taste in movies can be a bit strange for people. Which is fair, I'm not exactly with the crowds. I've learned a lot about how other people actually approach media (even if they deny it) and why my approach is different. By learning how others interact with media, I learned how I do it. Given that I've never really succeeded in understanding my process before this point, I'm grateful to be able to understand something so important to me. However, the conclusions this leads me aren't really what I expected.

Mean It!

The very bedrock of my approach is grounded in the Church Fathers' repeated and urgent cautionings against frivolity. Which, you know, sounds like they're saying "Don't have fun". Which is simply not human. It is my ironclad experience that translators are traitors and are only to be trusted after a thorough investigation, under the assumption that the translator is actively harming the thing they translate. 

I am only occasionally wrong on this assumption. It's a unicorn level event.

When I investigated what the likely traitors meant, all linguistic experts and priests I could find on the subject broadly defined frivolity as the attitude: "This doesn't mean anything". Sobriety was a virtue, because life always does mean something. And not keeping your head inevitably leads to harm. So, whatever you do, you do it with intention. Make sure you mean it.

Someone is going to say that sounds exhausting. I will acknowledge it takes more work to mean what you do and say. I will also not claim that I'm terribly good at this. I'm terrible at it actually! But it is something I try for. Something I value. Something I prize. No matter how I fail at it, I hope to someday achieve it.

Until then, I practice on art.

My Assumptions

My first assumption is that if a movie was filmed some competency must be assumed and thus sought and appreciated. Making a movie is expensive, time consuming, and requires a large crew. You do not make a thing like that unless most of the people on it believes in it. And yes, people can be delusional, but by definition people don't work on complex projects unless they're getting something out of it. So, I look for it! What drove them?

The second thing I assume is that everyone follows the same general pattern. Plot structure is generally easy to figure out. This means that there's acts, there's a general structure, the movie is designed to tell you what it's about. So, I take very careful note of the first act. What are they setting up? What kind of story are they hinting at? Runtime is vital to my approach. How long a movie tells me generally what to expect as far as when shifts are going to happen. I've found that the shifts to different acts are pretty close to universal. This approach works well enough to where I can confidently say "Okay, we're in act two, they're going to start doing X with the information they've set up" and be reasonably accurate.

From there, the question I have is: "Did they deliver on what they said they would do in the first act?" This is a "Yes" or "No" answer. And a lot of my enjoyment of the media is based off of this question. A lot. If they manage to deliver, I'm generally going to enjoy it. I want them to pull it off. At this point I can be pretty generous. If you pulled it off, you pulled it off! Congratulations! That's more work than I can readily imagine. So, at the very least I usually appreciate some aspect of a work and really do let that sit with me. 

However, if not? Well, that gets more complicated. Not necessarily difficult, or more complex. Was the execution bungled? That's more forgivable in my eyes. I do not assume people are geniuses. I assume it will be flawed. There are too many moving parts in most stuff to not have flaws and hiccups. So, that part's not going to bother me all that much. But sometimes? It's coz someone had a bad or even an evil idea on what to do with their set up. Both of those piss me off. I am generally far less forgiving of bad and malicious ideas than I am of bungled execution. Usually.

The Questions

Then, I ask myself a very important question: "Can I chew on this and find something of value in it?" If the answer is "Yes", I usually find myself blogging about the end process of that part on here. I'm still working on what this part of the process looks like. I won't pretend that I'm very good at it. But I do give it my honest shot to see if I can.

I ask myself another question: "Do I even particularly like what I've seen?" That is when my own taste comes into play. I like stories about deeply detailed and conflicted individuals rubbing against the world till they're both shredded by the experience. The epic and the personal push and poke each other until there's just broken pieces. You give me that and I'll automatically like whatever it is you're doing. If you do that in a generally fantastical way, I'm really going to enjoy that. If you throw blood into that you definitely got me. But my tastes are a distant second to me. I've found that merely liking things simply isn't that satisfying. Taking things on their own terms, asking what the object itself is, grappling with it, is far more interesting than just "Do I like it?". I find I benefit more from letting things be uncomfortable and imperfect and maybe even bad, so long as I can benefit somehow.

Then: "Can I watch it again? Do I want to?" Some stuff I have to squirm through... and then I make myself do it again. Because I think it's important that I do so.

At some point I start asking myself how this impacts what I believe. Is there anything that got cleared up? If so, what? Frequently I've found that horror clears up some aspect of the supernatural for me, usually by showing some detail that helps click certain things into place. Sometimes the answer is no, and that's perfectly fine.

Conclusion

So, I think that's how I do it. 

I'm not really pretending it's a fully functioning metric. But I know it's coherent, because it is a bit jarring, as all truly coherent things are. Coherency is surprising because it doesn't rest upon popular assumptions and "culture", but upon something arrived at organically. I kinda wondered what would happen if I wrote out what happens in me. Would I find some strange emotional "skipping of the work"? A spot where I jumped a line of code? But that's not what I found. What I've found allows coherency... by making it reference back to the only thing in this world I will never understand.

Me.

Skew

I am not pretending that Skew is a great film, or even a good film. I certainly don't like the characters. The idea behind the film is trite, at first blush. It's yet another found footage film about a story that normally wouldn't have found its way onto a camera. The characters are the usual unlikeable jerks we find in the spotted history of found footage films. The camera work's intentionally spotty with the crucial information "accidentally" finding its way into the frame. The artificiality of the genre is such that I found myself falling into the old rut. I was in "the trance".

And then ice-cold water was dumped on my head.

And then the movie ended.

What just happened??? This didn't go the way I thought it was going to go.

So, I started over. And found this, right at the front, waiting for me.

"All physical bodies are made entirely of an infinite number of ghostlike skins, one on top of another. Photography has the power to peel away the topmost of these layers. Exposure to the camera actually diminishes the self."

 And then, halfway through the film, the following monologue:

" If my parents are going to rob me of my memories then I'm going to make up my own, and I can shoot what I want, and then I can pick and choose, and I can take it home, AND I CAN PLAY WITH THE FOOTAGE. The trick that I've learned is that you just gotta keep shooting. Just let it roll. CAUSE YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN YOU'RE GONNA GET THAT RIGHT SHOT..." (emphasis MINE)

 So, a few things were just established.

1. This tape isn't "raw". It has been manipulated.
2. There is an editor, who doesn't intend anyone else to see this film.
3. The footage is out of sequence, deliberately.
4. Something is deeply wrong with Simon.

On point the first, the footage has been manipulated. We're shown that Simon never stopped filming, with Richard going through the tapes and making fun of Simon for constantly filming. Given that the movie is 80 minutes long and that dozens of tapes were recorded. This gets all the more disconcerting one realizes that the footage from the police station was probably stolen. This means it's likely that someone added the "dead" people, the ghosts, in post. Did the dead people actually show up? You can't see them on rewind, according to the editor, and large portions of the movie have been rewound over. The movie is consistent with its own "rules", so the question now becomes how the "ghosts" wound back up on the footage. Or it could just be that the editor is making something to assuage their own guilt. Normally I wouldn't go in for such a thing, but the text of the movie openly says the filmer will go back and change the footage later.

The editor doesn't intend doesn't anyone to see this film. Richard and Eva are clearly being shown in the worst possible light they can be, with the fun/vulnerable scenes showing nasty/petty sides to both of them, while trying to show Simon in the best possible light. Simon is always the nice guy, always the goofy one, always the victim. It almost starts to resemble the natural process of memory... except this has VFX and music edited in. It's artificially made to look natural, like the genre!

The footage is most definitely out of sequence. There are interspersed cuts of the world's largest chairs, bowls, knives, and don't forget the forks! Certain scenes don't make linear sense. They'll jump back and forth between different lights, soundscapes, at the drop of a dime. The footage is pieced together to make something linear, make something that resembles a normal existence... by chopping apart a few key scenes and peppering them throughout the movie.

Now, at this point it should be obvious that, if Simon is the editor, there's something psychologically off about him. But when I say wrong, I don't mean like that, I mean there's something existentially wrong with him. His parents wouldn't take pictures of him. The movie ends with the only picture of Simon known. He has manufactured his version of terrible events and put his name and face to it. Whatever actually happened, whatever it was, Simon wanted the first picture of him to be associated with this series of horrifying events.

What kind of person would want to do that?

And that's why I can't stop thinking about this movie.

The movie asked me a question, which I find compelling.

The Grip on the Carousel

 

Run sand, hourglass

When it's my time, will I be worth?

Spin 'round, carousel

When your horse isn't screwed in

I couldn't do merry-go-rounds as a kid. Under any speed. I'd get green so fast that I never got any joy from the experience. I could practically fly up to the top of playgrounds and the deep ends of pools from the tender age of two, so I was by no means a tender child. If anything, I blazed circles of flame around other kids. They were standing still. From the high dive to the bottom of the pool, I remember the world as motion. As wind. As rush. The world was meant to be experienced as motion, as something to be joined in with.

But you put me on a merry go round? Oh man, get me off. Now.

Same with cars. If I'm not driving, I start feeling a bit green, sometimes very quickly.

The world felt still when I moved. So, as a child, I moved all the time. It also helped me process all the nonsense going on: rapes, beatings, fallings-out, and the list could just go on and on. Whatever it was, I kept moving. Whatever happened, I just kept jumping and vaulting and running and sparring and whatever it took.

Until one day.

When I just couldn't do it anymore. 

I couldn't move fast enough. No matter how fast I moved, no matter what I did, the spinning kept going, both inside and outside of me. At the age of thirteen I felt something break. And then I realized: I had to find a way to weather it.

So, I first had to figure out what exactly what I was running into. It didn't take long to realize that this nauseating experience was simply time. And time was apparently thought of as linear: one event went to another went to another to another. Each moment was unique. Something to treasure. Time was progression.

Out of all the lies I have been told, this is one of the most destructive. It has taken me well over twenty years to learn just how wrong it is. The experience of time isn't linear, it is cyclical. You are cyclical. You do not change. Your understanding of you may change, but you do not change.

Well, sorta, we'll get back to that in a minute. Just put a pin in "We don't change".

Every time, over the last twenty-three years, that I have thought "Ah, that's over and done with", I have been wrong. For, you see, the world (and therefore time) revolves, bringing us back to the same experiences of ourselves and of the world. History repeats. It takes longer to come back to the same world events under a different glamor, but they're the same events, whether you want to admit or not. Now, the usual brainwashing rot is to tell people to ignore this feeling of revolution, this sickening realization that yes, indeed, you have been here before, yes indeed, you didn't get away from it. "It's a new day! Don't worry! You're different this time." You're taught to look at the ephemeral qualities, not the archetypical substance of what it is you're encountering.

The gullible and/or brave manage. The gullible just find any of the ephemeral and inconsequential details they can to trick themselves. The brave throw themselves onto the merry-go-round, blocking out everything else until they finally collapse in on themselves, and if they're very lucky they'll get wise to the grift. If they're not, they'll become cowards/honest people. Sorry, brave and gullible, the cowards are right this time around.

The honest and/or cowardly start abusing substances, to dull the internal nausea, all the while everyone is telling them that they're progressing, not spinning! This level of dissonance between what you're told and what you experience usually creates bitter addicts who, if you get them into a corner and put a gun to their head, will tell you what's really going on. And don't worry, they'll usually get very poetic and specific about what they're going through. But you have to listen, without judgment. They all say the same thing. It's 100%. Sorry, brave and gullible, the cowards are right this time around.

"But wait, people change!" the brave and gullible will say. "I've seen it! With mine own eyes! And that's progress! That's linear! There's a clear change that makes that person different from what they were before!" Is that really true? Are we really counting the incidentals, the surface level stuff that doesn't mean anything at all? The inner experience of change has nothing to do with linearity at all. We've got enough universal wisdom to know that. The interior experience of change isn't that of linearity. At all.

No, things get quiet. Real quiet. And then something happens to you. One minute you're one way, and the next you really are something different. It's like this odd wink in time and presto! Well, if you're Christian you know it's not a "something", it's a SomeOne. God changes you. He acts based upon what you have sincerely tried (and failed!) to do. He sees the failures and your insistence on not backing down. And then He changes you, as much as you can stand. He'd do the whole thing at once, but there aren't many who can do a whole hog change like that. So, He watches you go 'round the carousel, with the unscrewed horse, and waits until you have built up enough hope, and then He changes you as much as you can stand. But you have to actively work at hope.

So, the thing that's being called "linear" is a combination of three different factors, one of which is outside of time. If you wanna oversimplify that to linear, that's your decision.

But that's reductive, unhelpfully so.

It doesn't describe the experience that people are actually going to go through.

People are going to come away with the worst possible idea of what the human experience, nevermind of God saving them, actually looks like.

But sure! Linear!