Game Ideas Un limited: Reset

  I discovered video games at about the same time as I discovered role playing games.  I had played and even owned some of the precursors, particularly the pong games that you could attach to your television; I had seen others in arcades, but I never had money to waste on arcade games beyond a rare splurge of a quarter on pinball.  These games were interesting, but they didn't really grab me.  It was the home game console with changeable games (more than just tennis/hockey/handball/practice mode) that made video games exciting.  I can remember playing Atari games with our gaming group, and getting an Intellivision to expand the options.  I couldn't say which came first, Atari or Dungeons & Dragons.  I can say that I lost most of my interest in video games.  This is in large part due to their relentless advance--by the time I had gotten good with a game, it was no longer available, and the expense of keeping up with what was current outstripped my budget.  I'm still saving up for some of those wonderful Intellivoice games, but no one has them; I have despaired of replacing the worn out controllers to make the console operational again.  Role playing games have a much longer shelf life, and as a result I've stayed with them and even kept on top of at least some of the new releases.

  Video games had another aspect which in some ways was a feature and in others a deterrent.  When you turned them off, they forgot all that you had done to that point.  I know that the new ones have memory cards (and even some of the old ones had that feature, if you went the route of the computer system games), but the popular ones of that time were designed such that when you turned it off and on again, you were back at the beginning of the game.  Everything that had been done, for better or worse, was undone.  There was even a button on the console, marked Reset, that did this power interruption to restart the game without requiring a complete reboot of the system, so you could clear what had been done and start over.

  I don't know whether this influenced our role playing any, or whether it was incidental, but it seemed that for some aspects of those early games there was a similar reset button.  People would run the same adventures for different groups of players, or sometimes for different characters with the same players.  Whether these were modules purchased from publishers or home designed dungeons, they were reusable because when you started over it was as if no one had ever been through them before.

  I don't think we ever really thought about that.  The past could be erased in an instant in our games, and replayed in a new way.

  We don't erase the past in this series; each quarter we look back over the dozen installments that have appeared in those three months, to bring these ideas back to mind, keep them fresh, and provide a bit of historic context.  Here are the articles you might have missed this time.

131. Songs took advantage of the fact that I was a composer before I was a writer or a game designer, and drew from that famous question about whether lyrics or music come first a consideration of how system and setting interact at the development level.
132. Auspicious provided an idea for a mechanic to make good and bad luck a real part of play.
133. Power gave consideration to the interpersonal struggles that sometimes arise between people in all kinds of situations, and warned against the trouble they can cause in a gaming group.
134. Selfish was the third installment in our alignment series, nominating economist Adam Smith to be the patron saint of evil.  One reader called it brilliant; I trust others enjoyed it.
135. Challenge talked about adjusting the level of difficulty in a game to suit the abilities and preferences of the players, with thanks to Kelly Tessena for her comments on playing solitaire.
136. Haunting attempted to explore one of several worlds I'm hoping to use in convention demos, to find ways to keep it frightening.
137. We considered when and how to use Pictures both to make things clearer and to make them less clear, and when it would be better not to use them.
138. Recalling an old saying from my radio days about being "Paid in Prestige", this article looked at the in-game reward of making characters famous and respected.
139. Freedom took us back to alignment questions with a study of chaos and what it means.  This, too, was extolled as one of the best explanations of the concept available, so I trust others can find use for it.
140. Credibility was heavily theory-oriented, with a look at some of the cutting edge work in understanding role playing games and what really identifies them.
141. Professional gave some thought to character skill improvements and how they can be presented within a game.
142. Disabilities talked about how individuals cope with their own weaknesses, and gave ideas for enhancing game experiences by considering the ways characters compensate for their own shortcomings.

  The last time we looked back, we considered why we remember the past in Memorium.  There it was suggested that games can be enhanced by recalling the dead, the history, the past that makes the world what it is.

  Of course, we can erase the past; we can replay it.  We can hit the reset button any time we like, and go back to who we were (as characters, at least) when it all began.  Sometimes we do this with our characters; more often we do it with our adventure settings.

  Yet I'd like to suggest that it might not always be the best choice.

  When I was introduced to Multiverser, there was a world associated with it in which all players up to that time had started.  For those unaware of the nature of my connection to the game, E. R. Jones had started working on it about half a decade before he met me, running it for other gamers and getting feedback from them.  Richard Lutz was probably the most influential, as he also ran games and created world ideas, including the famed Zygote Experience, but the only one of these early players I ever met was Sean Daniels, who joined a game with me one night.  I was brought in after these people were scattered to the four winds, and was asked to take the general concepts that made this game so wondrous and turn them into a system that could be published.  It was another half decade of work to put this out, but we were pleased with the results.

  The results included a book of worlds, of which NagaWorld was the centerpiece, a world E. R. Jones had imagined that was so incredibly alien that no one could possibly fail to realize they weren't in Kansas anymore.  It was here that each of our players had started, including me, and even including E. R. Jones.

  Yet it was not exactly the same world for each of us.

  E. R. Jones entered NagaWorld as a non-player character; he was running the game, but his character arrived in that world first.  Lutz and Daniels and two other players followed him in short order.  They dug a hole in the ground, partly for shelter, and struck water.  Soon they had an underground shelter, and before they left, they left a note behind for anyone who would follow them.

  When I entered the game, I found their hole in the ground, their shelter, their water supply, tracks showing their departure, and the note they left behind.  There also was another character present at that time, a character brought in by a player who had been transferred out of the area, but whose persona remained in the game world, living in a truck the presence of which he could not explain.  I met him, and a non-player character who was keeping him company, and started to explore that world.  There were some hazards, and in response to these I started to build defenses.  The defenses turned into a city.  That's right:  I'm the Architect.  I built Umak Tek, as a player testing the Multiverser game system.

  The interesting thing is that as this world went to paper, those details remained part of it.  We never really gave it a thought.  This was the world that had been created, in the form it had at that moment.  I suppose that most world designers would have hit the reset button, taken it all back to the beginning, cleared away the city, the shelter, the water, the tracks, all trace that anyone had ever been there, and let the new players around the world each become the first humans to set foot in this world.  We didn't.  We expanded with a few other potential starting points, but we left our player contributions to it intact.

  One of our reviewers said that this was the among the most interesting aspects of that world:  that players could encounter the changes made by previous players.  It seems we blundered into a good thing.

  I often run the same worlds for new players; I've got a few that are favorites, because I know them well and they usually run smoothly.  In many of these, I do hit the reset button--if you wind up on a spaceship named The Mary Piper, they will never have heard of Shawn Kelley or Dorian Mantell or any of the many other players who have been there and done that.  On the other hand, there are other worlds in which the touch of previous players is wonderful.  My own copy of NagaWorld includes a number of changes that have been made by people like John Walker and Dorian Mantell, Jim Denaxas and Bill Friant, who played in that world and left something behind for other players to find.  I run too many people now for all of them to be included; I'm just not organized enough for that.  Yet some of the adventures my players are having today will be the history of that world for some future players who come upon it, and that will be more interesting because of it, because of the way these creative minds collaborated with mine in expanding the world as they explored it, and the fact that I did not hit the reset button.

  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.