Looking back at Alice with more experienced eyes

I helped run The Prince Comes of Age at WPI last night, a favorite of mine written by morethings5, lightgamer, and Bernie. I enjoyed helping out, and it's made me wistful for running larps again. On our way home, Bernie brought up Alice, if I'd want to rerun it. I hate to say it, but honestly these days I kind of wince to think of that game. Because as good a track record as it has, the truth is that it's not all that well-made a game.

It's well-known that a fun game isn't the same as a good game, and I often talk about the phenomenon of games that work as well as they do because the players bring whatever baggage to it that allows their imaginations to run with it. That is different than the game providing sufficient material with the quality of its writing and design. Now that I look at Alice with the knowledge of a more experienced larp writer, I fear I must place the game in the former category.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good in it. It plays quite well, most people who've played it have enjoyed it; I'd say at least twenty people out of every twenty-five-person cast. I wrote it during a dark time in my life, and a fairly compelling central story came out of my exorcising certain demons. It's one of only a few goth games in the local larp canon that isn't World of Darkness, and it's cleaner and more elegant than that.

But it was the first game I ever wrote, and I hadn't played all that many games when I started it. Those few games, not all of which were great, have too much of an influence on its design. It has a number of plots that are just plain weak larp writing-- kill plots, fetch quests, too many characters motivated by money. There are a few characters that are just too thin. Whenever I think of it, I wince. I've written eight games and played many times that since then, and I've grown enormously since then. All the flaws in Alice just glare at me. They're not irreparable, and since the game has good bones, I probably could fix it. But it would likely be a lot of work, and I have an odd tendency to build up curiously painful aversions in myself. I find myself with one to the thought of digging through my amateurish mistakes in that game.