On a forum on another web site, not too long ago, Jack Spencer, Jr. (whose series The Wanna Be will be remembered by those who were frequenting Gaming Outpost in 2001), wrote, “if a gamer had made Jaws it would not have been a shark but a shark with a laser on its head.” By this he meant that people who create game adventures have an almost universal tendency to go over the top, to push the envelope into the absurd. Someone on that thread corrected, or perhaps expanded, him: it would have been a shark with a laser on its head that had been built by a secret evil organization intent on taking over the world, whose identity is discovered by searching the shark’s body after it has been killed. The term Lasersharking thus entered the game design vocabulary.
I used the term two weeks ago when talking about Gamer Movies, when I commented that Pirates of the Caribbean: The Legend of the Black Pearl was a bit lasersharky. It’s not just pirates; it’s immortal undead pirates. Yet that in itself became the failure of the lasershark concept. After all, Pirates lures you into expecting a swashbuckler, but instead gives you a nautical ghost story. One man’s laser shark is another man’s genre trope.
Yet I retain the idea. I note that when it was proposed, it rang a chord with a significant number of gamers, all of whom felt that they had seen this, and perhaps themselves had done it, in games they had played. There seems to be this temptation to make it just a little more than anything believable within our expectations. Thus I think for design purposes–whether designing monsters or adventures or entire games–it is worth asking ourselves the question, am I making a laser shark?
It is not an easy question to answer, perhaps. The question really is, have I gone just a bit too far? In the words of John Wick (somewhere in his Game Designer’s Journal series here at Gaming Outpost), there comes a point at which you snap the disbelief suspenders of your audience. There’s nothing wrong with a shark with a laser on its head, even if it’s built by a secret worldwide criminal organization intent on seizing power, if that’s within the expectations of the game. It’s only wrong if it violates those expectations. It’s good to push the envelope, to do things that are unexpected, even extreme. You just have to keep in mind that there is a point that goes too far, and if you go that far the shared imaginary space collapses in disbelief.
It’s also perfectly legitimate to bait and switch–a criminal activity in advertising and retailing, but a clever approach to fiction and gaming. It’s what Pirates does so well. We are prepared for a swashbuckler, expecting Captain Blood perhaps, a nautical Three Musketeers. Then we get a ghost story. We are surprised; but if we can roll with the punches, we’re still with the story. We weren’t entirely wrong; there is still a lot of buckling of swashes in the film. It’s just that there’s another element here which is outside of that. If we’re willing to release our grip on what this story, or game, was supposed to be, and go with what it has become, we discover that there’s a great story here, made all the more interesting because it was unexpected. I’m not in a swashbuckler; I’m in a ghost story. This isn’t man against nature; it’s a spy thriller, in which a shark with a laser on its head was made by a criminal organization bent on world conquest, and sent to terrorize the beaches. It’s not what I expected, but that’s good.
Somewhere there has to be that point of balance, the place at which far enough is not too far, the spot where suspension of disbelief is stretched but not snapped, the place where the crazy idea is just within credibility. Cross that line, and you lose your audience, or your players. Stay too far from it, and you’re predictable, and thus boring. You need to do something interesting, innovative, exciting, different, but not so far out there that no one is willing to make the journey with you.
The secret may lie there. It is not whether you go too far; it is whether you can take your audience with you as you go. How do you do this?
Foreshadow the true nature of the story. As Pirates opens, there is an encounter between the ship carrying many of those who will play important rolls in the story and another ship, a seeming derelict, with black, tattered sails and an abandoned deck, adrift and sinister in the sea. We are given to shudder at the sight, but there is no reason to think it other than the derelict it appears to be. The scene is more about rescuing the boy who will grow up to be the hero, and about the girl who takes from him what Hitchcock would have called the McGuffin, that thing in the movie everyone wants, in this case the last piece of cursed gold. The ship passes out of our attention; we move on to setting place and time and character for the real story. Yet having seen that ship, we are not so surprised when it returns with a pirate crew; and having wondered how tattered sails can carry it in the wind or crews can vanish from the decks, we are less surprised to discover that they are cursed with an evil immortality. If the shark has a laser on its head, if there’s some nefarious purpose behind its release against our shores, find ways to hint to the players that this is not an ordinary shark and that it may be part of something bigger before they themselves face it. This may seem to be a swashbuckler, or a man against nature struggle, but if you have a few bits that don’t fit with that understanding, if you’ve got the players wondering why it doesn’t feel quite right, then when you pull the switch and tell them it’s really a ghost story or a spy thriller, rather than say, Oh, no, that’s just too ridiculous, who could possibly believe that? they find themselves saying, Ah hah! Now it all makes sense!
Also, let the mystery build. The first hints of incongruity should be little things. We saw the ship adrift; later we heard seamen’s tales of a cursed or haunted vessel. By the time the other shoe dropped, we were looking for the explanation, trying to construct the puzzle from the pieces. Some of us probably were there already; those who were not knew that the picture needed something it didn’t have. When the big secret was revealed, we didn’t know exactly what it would be, but we were ready for it. With our laser shark, perhaps the wreckage of the boats it has destroyed have unusual scorch marks; witnesses report seeing the gleam of a strange light in the water; seemingly unrelated incidents are pointing to increased criminal activities in areas where the unseen creature has attacked. The evidence builds. We can’t deduce the explanation from it, but the moment the explanation is before us, everything makes sense.
In short, you’re only over the top if you’re there alone. If everyone is right behind you, it works.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
