I don’t want to tell or be told stories. I want to play games.

 Let’s start this blog post right, by linking you to a much more competent blog by a much more capable creator. Read that article and then come on back and read this one, if you’ve got any time or energy left.

And maybe go buy and play Adios.

I don’t have a rebuttal to anything the man said or did, but I do have a notion that his masterfully executed article percolated in my brain, and I wished to share it.

I genuinely do not have any interest in telling or playing stories. None. Zip. Zilch. I find the act of fiction writing unsatisfying and I find things like visual novels uninspiring. Mind, I’ve played a few, but in the ultimate judgment I find my interest in them is where I can actively direct them, change them, how I can monkey with them…. How, in other words, I can play them like a game.

And hence, this thesis-cum-title: I don’t want to tell or be told stories. I want to play games.

Let me immediately back off a little; I do actually love stories. What I’m talking about is, when I go to engage with a game, if I get a story instead, I’m upset. I don’t want my game to be a story; I want it to be a game.

As an intriguing corollary to this, if a story is in fact, a game (or even game-ish!) I adore it. I found this out whenever I started picking at the mind-puzzles laid out in the fiction of Jorge Borges, by the way, and even earlier in life when I came across a collection of choose-your-own adventure books in the local used book store. The fantastic conundrum of MAZE also stuck with me, although I’m pretty sure the author of that enigmatic toy was playing dirty.

Notion One: I like stories with almost no conflict, but whose toyetic nature allows me to treat them like a game

What sprung first to my mind here was The Library of Babel by Borges. We’d be hard-pressed to find anything resembling conflict in this story; you might consider the past-tense descriptions of people’s struggles “dramatic”, but you shouldn’t; that’s a historical account, there’s nothing unknown about it, nothing hanging in the balance. The entire tale is told in past-tense, and the desires of its conveyor aren’t really even present in the story, let alone central. It is about as close as a dry, historical account of a totally fictional place could possibly be.

And I adore it.

I love the concept that every book that could conceivably ever be written must inevitably exist somewhere within the library, as well as the opposite of that book. By extension, anything which could be conceived and conveyed in English characters must exist, in nearly infinite forms, somewhere in its nigh-limitless (but still tantalizingly finite!) passages. I like that you can, right now, read a page from this mind-twistingly titanic library. Go ahead. Perhaps it will tell the legend of you, perfectly justifying and glorifying every facet of you.

If you followed my instructions and read that fantastic article I linked at the start of this journey, you’ll immediately notice the friction between its mentally succulent points and the statements I just made. The Library of Babel is, in effect, not a story in so much as its a brief but dense and enormously interesting lore dump. It barely has characters, has zero plot and about as much drama as a math textbook.

But the universe it describes is going to live in me forever. I can go back to its strange, nearly-empty-of-all-life hexes whenever I turn my thoughts back to the notion it conveys. And I have already dwelled in there for a long, satisfying time.

Why do I love this not-story, this dry recounting of a world and a notion that doesn’t and cannot exist? I think its because the concept is toyetic; it is something I can play with in my mind, a chewtoy for my imagination. I find its haunting possibilities seeping into my creative works, my games, even my everyday thought processes.

I don’t feel it lacks anything; character drama would get in the way of the toy. Distract from the eerie purity of the idea.

For a less pure version of this notion, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (also by Borges) does actually start with something of a plot, but its ultimately consumed by the ideas (as is the world of the tale, but I’m getting ahead of us). Its a mystery, at first; why does Tlön appear in one encyclopedia, but not another? Is it real, or a fiction of some kind? And our author’s self-insert certainly does experience friction and setbacks in trying to satisfying his intellectual curiosity in this matter.

But the more interesting notion, the superior toy, emerges and devours that scant narrative. And that idea is this; is there a meaningful distinction between Tlön being “real” or “fiction”?

It sends us into a spiral of embattled Dualism that ultimately makes a mockery of any concept of story and relapses back, like Library, into simply recounting this idea expanding and morphing its setting, distorting its lore around itself like a battleship displacing water to cut across the sea.

The hrönir, by the way, are one of the most toyetic ideas I’ve ever encountered. They’ve found their way, in one form or another, into almost every game I’ve ever ran.

Notion two: If in playing a game, I realize that it is not a game but a story, I feel cheated

The Stanley Parable jumps out as an example here; it goes so far as to make its single game-esque senquence, the “save the baby from X” sequence, an agonizing chore to mock your desire to play a game. A better example is Adios, of course, which is a story told via the medium of a game; it doesn’t mock you so much as entirely forgo the notion that you’re playing a game.

I hate that. I hate it like an unskippable cut scene before a boss fight. I hate it like an invisible wall that forces me to do some stupid task before I get to play more of the game I paid for. I hate it more than screen after screen of boring, pointless text that I have to mash X to get through and god help you if you accidently hit it once to much and select “Yeah repeat all that boring bullshit again please, waste my precious fucking time you stupid hooting asshole”

FUCK YOU

The problem with this notion is that I struggle to tell you, in essence, what is distinct between a game and a story, in the same way I can’t tell you what’s ontologically distinct between a sandwich and two slices of bread and a slice of ham thrown onto the floor. One is recognizably and intuitively a food, and the other is a mess.

Its something of a spectrum, I suppose; I don’t mind a bit of story in my game. But I can dispense with story entirely and still enjoy a game (checkers, anyone?), and the more story that you put in my game, the more frustrated I become with the experience. 

This is about my limit

Whenever the story consumes the game, it can fuck right off; its just wearing my beloved game as a skinsuit at that point. Just be a book or a movie or whatever. Stop lying to me.

I think something of a litmus test is this; can I fuck with the ending? Can I depart from the intended experience while remaining within the bounds of the game (ie; no hacking the code or whatever)? The more you can honestly answer yes, the more I’ll enjoy it.

The point: I need to follow this instinct when I run and write games

What’s all this building to? That I shouldn’t forget this instinct whenever I’m writing or running games.

One of the powerfully distinguishing factors between a game and a story is that one is allowed to become bored with a game. Stories should rightfully be criticized if they bore us, but a game isn’t like that; a game can still be satisfying whenever its boring. 

I can’t count the number of times whenever the player choice in one of my home games has resulted in them going somewhere that there is no further content to be mined; the dungeon is empty, there are no more clues at the Whately Mansion, etc. 

The temptation to roll the encounter dice or have something happen there can be overwhelming in these instances. The players have found an actual dead end; or, if I’ve properly Jaquaysed the map, they’re found a closed loop without any fresh content.

If I were an author, and writing this as a story, I would (and should!) absolutely follow my instinct and put something here. It would be my actual job to do so; if this bit of tedium didn’t somehow serve to further the plot, increase the drama, or enhance the mood, and EVEN THEN, it should almost certainly be ruthlessly cut.

But, whenever I play a game, I sometimes perform this exact kind of behavior. And it does actually waste my time. And I would be furious if the game decided to condescend to me by making my choice to make this mistake impossible. Like if there was a pop-up where some dickhead NPC said “Why don’t you continue to the castle” or such, I would despise that. And I would be insulted to the point of quitting the entire experience if it simply teleported me to the fucking castle instead of letting me dick around in peace.

Yet that’s exactly what I’m doing when I force content into these lulls. I’m breaking my own rules to deliver some preconceived outcome to players. Even when that outcome is just “something exciting happens!”

Same with scenes that “must” happen in a module, either because it’s critical to forward momentum or because “it would be the coolest thing that could happen”

The coolest thing would be your players having real agency over their own destiny.

Giving myself advice here: Skip the “cool” boss fight, kill your darlings, let them make mistakes and get bored. If you truly must have someone kick down the door with a gun, lean on an encounter chart so you don’t know when the door gets kicked down or who’s kicking it down.

Because you’ll have more game than story then. And as we’ve discussed, that’s what both you and the players want.