All Eyes on Me

This is excerpted from my upcoming article in Game Wrap Magazine, volume 2-- "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" about the tension between narrative design and player autonomy. I pulled this part out because it's applies strucutre in all storytelling forms, not just larps.

One of the tools storytellers use to shape narrative is structure. Structure in this case refers to the design of the order, manner, and pacing of events making up the story and the relationships of those events to each other. Narrative is at its fundamental level about change— starting with a thesis, confronting it with its antithesis, and seeing the new synthesis that results. Structure is an important tool for storytellers to choose and arrange events in order to create, control, and facilitate that change.

In much of literature, structure falls into a traditional form. The circumstances are established in a setup, after which a triggering change, the inciting event, propels the protagonist into challenging new situations. As the protagonist struggles to achieve their goals in the face of unexpected obstacles, the tension of the situation is increased by the rising action and its addition of complications. Ultimately, the action builds to the highest point of confrontation, the climax, where the hero faces their greatest challenge, and the changes they have undergone are tested to see if they are sufficient to overcome. This point is usually the most intense action of the story. After this, the tension ratchets down as the consequences of the climax are unpacked, at least to some degree, in the falling action. Finally, we are left with the resolution, which tells us the new status quo, to contrast with the way things were in the beginning.

This pattern of structure is so prevalent in storytelling because of how well it presents conflict and response to conflict in order to prompt development, growth, and change. It offers a steady buildup of the level of challenge in a manner that increases tension and our investment in the stakes of the conflict — the more struggle a goal entails, the more important achieving it becomes — while eventually providing satisfaction by offering a resolution.

Beyond this simple ordering of events, it offers the storyteller the tools to figure out how and at what speed the events should occur in relation to each other to achieve the best effect. By using this framework as a guide, the storyteller can determine at what point of the emotional journey they would like their audience to have reached at any given moment. The teller can then decide how to shape each event in relation to the other events to achieve the desired effect. If the tension needs to go up, intense actions can occur all in quick succession. If the intensity is increasing too fast, the plot-driving moments can occur on a smaller scale, or be spaced farther apart. So the curation of the occurrence of events in the story allows for the best release of information, timing of events, and measured building of tension.

But the key part of that is that curation. To utilize structure to best effect, it requires design— intentional choices made in what events occur when, with specific desired effects in mind. For events to have the greatest impact on the course of the story and, the development of the characters, they can’t just happen in any order or in any relation to each other; story events don't build properly upon one another or deliver their full effect when they occur in a completely uncontrolled way. For example, iIf you are unraveling a mystery, part of the appeal is acquiring each clue and encountering each complication in turn, with the opportunity to piece everything together and examine the picture step by step as it develops. If all the clues and secrets come together too immediately, the solution feels anticlimactic. If you are on a quest, the challenge of testing your mettle against obstacle and rising to the occasion to achieve your end is a huge part of the fun. If the ultimate prize is simply handed to you, the experience is short-circuited. Even if a character grows too much too easily, without any personal effort or cost, it feels cheap and unrealistic. Indeed, since goals become more important the harder you have to work for them, and easy achievements feel smaller than difficult ones, any resolution that comes too easily or too soon is going to feel less satisfying.

We are SO CLOSE to being able to release the first issue of Game Wrap Magazine, the publication I'm on the editorial board of that is devoted to analytical/semi-scholarly articles on the art and craft of larp. I'm incredibly pleased with this publication; the issue is going to have some really excellent, though-provoking articles in it, one of which is by me! I wrote about how larp designers and writers can support the narrative role of villain PCs in a game, and I think I did a very good job taking all the angles into consideration.

We're also accepting submissions for Issue #2, so if you have an idea for examining some accept of making and playing larps, I encourage you to send us an abstract! You don't need to have the whole article planned out, just know what subject you want to tackle and what perspective you're going to take on it. I sent in my bid for Issue #2 yesterday. I should have copied my abstract to repost here, but basically this time around I want to talk about the tension between narrative arc design and player autonomy. Constructing a sound narrative arc takes management, but in larp that can lead to railroading of players, who usually expect to have some input on how the storyline is shaped, so how do we go about balancing the progress and direction of the story while still allowing all the players to feel like they have some control over the direction of their journeys. I'm a pretty hardcore narrativist, so I really enjoy mulling over issues of building narrative in the larp form given the other needs, features, and challenges of the medium.

I'll keep you posted as to when Issue #1 is out. And in the meantime, you should totally bid us an article for Issue #2!

With a chunk of the article submissions in for Game Wrap Magazine, that means we've got to get down to editing them. I've gone through three of them that I was assigned to edit through with a handful more to go. I wanted to have some finished before we had our editorial meeting this evening.

Mostly I've been pleased. Of the three articles I've edited so far, I thought each one was thoughtful, had useful perspective, and clearly attacked their topic. There's going to be some quality material in this magazine. I have concerns about other things, though. There's at least one article that I started reading but not edited yet that I can't make head or tail of. It's so vaguely and pretentiously written about some obscure form of theater theory that I just can't follow it. I am even passingly familiar with theater theory! What do we do with an article like that? How do we fix it, when we don't even know what questions to ask for clarification? I'm hoping to discuss that at tonight's meeting, what everyone thinks is the best way to handle it.

Also, I'm a little distressed at how many people haven't handed in their articles yet, or even dropped out entirely. We want this to be a substantial journal, and our number of pieces is going to be disappointly low unless some of these late writers get their stuff in. I'm hoping to see a few more in the slate from the people who asked for extensions, so that our volume doesn't end up excessively slim.

I am back from my visit to Bernie in Baltimore, and it was very lovely. I am reminded every day how lucky I am to have him in my life, but it was great being physically in the same place for a while. He's so good and adoring to me, and when I read that article that's been going around on how much emotional work women tend to get stuck with in their relationships, I realized in ours most of it is readily taken on by him. Not too many men like that, and certainly NOT the way of my previous relationship experience. Bernie's the best.

On other notes, I stuck to my diet, though I didn't exercise nearly enough. I also got very little else done, besides keeping up with Hipster Feminist (which turned four years old on Sunday!) It turned out to be a very nice vacation, though, which I guess I needed. But it's tough to get my brain back into getting-things-done mode now that I'm home again. August is almost here, and I'm trying to figure out what I need to focus on for the new month.

Probably the most externally important is finishing my syallbus for the class I'm teaching at Lesley. I know mostly WHAT to talk about and stuff, but I need to find good texts. I don't want to make my class buy a ton of books, as I remember how I hated breaking the bank on that when I was in school, so I need stuff I can post as PDFs on the class website to save them money. And they need to have examples of protagonists who are possible to discuss in terms of what they mean for the culture and individuals that have embraced them.

I need to finish my article for Game Wrap Magazine, "yearly publication focusing on the art and craft of live action roleplaying games." I'm on the editorial board as well as contributing, because I've always wanted a forum like this to exist where people can really examine larping seriously! My article is on the narrative function of villains in theater-style games, and how they must be designed and managed in order to properly push the conflict.

I want to do 31 Plays in 31 Days again, though probably under different terms than the ones expressly stated. Not sure exactly how I want to tailor it to my purposes, but I have been very happy with what it's done for my writing to participate for the last three years. I just need to decide what my personal parameters will be. As you can probably tell, I find structure very helpful.

Possibly related to that, I want to finish draft 1 of Base Instruments by the end of the summer, which I'm considering to be September 1st. Maybe I can use 31 Plays in 31 Days to faciliate that. But I want a complete draft, so I can schedule a time for friends to come over, read it to me, and give me their feedback to shape the edit.

That's a fair bit! I shall use this week to figure out how I'm going to do it.