[Three Guys Walk Into a Movie...] first playtest

[David Berg]

Last night was my first time playing my genre-warping movie proto-game.  Actually, I didn't play; I had plenty to occupy myself with, instructing my 3 friends how to play (there was no rules document).

It took us one hour to get through the 3 scenes.  The results were confused and uneven, and yet we spent most of the time laughing and having a great time.  Everyone said they'd like to play again if I put together the requisite play aids (mainly just cards and instructions), and they seemed to already have some ideas about what they'd do differently next time for even better results.

Players: John, Ali, Shelley

Genre: Chick Flick

After Ali proposed "Chick Flick", everyone continued to toss out genre ideas, until I finally had to say, "Well, let's pick one."  So we went with teh first one.  I then handed each player a list of elements to provide:

1) Scene Location
2) Threat
3) Thing to be Threatened
4) Action Verb
5) Tool
6) Individual or Group
7) 6 Character Changes - Good & Bad Relationship Changes, Good & Bad Life-Station Changes, Good & Bad Lessons Learned

I instructed them to fill these out in genre-appropriate ways, and that relying on chick flick cliches was just fine.

John had a ton of fun filling out the sheet.  As he finished, he said that he'd play the game just for that part.  However, he put "genre appropriate" second to "would be funny in the location I picked".  While I loved reading his list, we all agreed after the game that play would have gone better if everyone had stuck more with genre tropes.

Contributions:
1) diner, underwear store, cardio striptease class
2) break-up, ex-boyfriend, ex-girlfriend of love interest
3) relationship w/ love interest, best girlfriend, female protagonist
4) twirl, throw water in face, fall
5) stiletto, automobile, sling shot
6) gay best friend, high school friends, security guard
7a) enemies->friends, dating->broken up, friends->lovers, friends->enemies, make friends, make enemies
7b) ugly duckling->swan, popular meanie->outcast, become prom queen, become outcast, winning 1000th purchase award, credit card rejected
7c) chicks before dicks, nice guys finish last, must date someone popular to fit in, it's okay to just be yourself, a good kick to the balls is the best solution, don't let X know you're getting married

Now it was time to take this (supposedly) epitome of chick flick essence and throw in three protagonists to explore it with.  This is the basic fun of the game.  I could tell everyone was in the mood for absurdist comedy, and the picks were no surprise:

John: Yoda
Shelley: EVE (from WALL-E)
Ali: Inigo Montoya

Play was hard to track, as the Threats, things Threatened, and Relationship Changes produced the most convoluted love triangles ever.  However, the basic mash-ups of chracters and situation (mainly location + "chick flick") kept everyone giggling and coming up with excellent contributions.

Scene 1:
This was kind of chaotic, with everyone feeling through using the elements they drew.  Players leapt at the first application they came up with, and the action was kind of perfunctory.  EVE was shopping for underwear and bemoaning how she couldn't win her crush, Tonny, from a competitor.  Yoda arrived, splashed water in the competitor's face, knifed an interfering security guard with a stiletto, and promptly fell for Tonny himself, leaving EVE friendless and alone.  It was fun, though, just hearing John and Shelley try to communicate about love in Frank Oz- and Robot-speak.

Scene 2:
Inigo Montoya was leading a striptease class.  His best female friend, in the class, was about to be dumped because of some competitor (I think).  EVE floated in and offered to take out the competitor with a slingshot.  This was interrupted, though, as Inigo's gay best friend, Hortensio, stepped right into the line of fire to profess his love for Inigo.  As Inigo attempted to reject him tactfully, EVE twirled too much and let the sling bullet go, knocking Hortensio over.  Feeling ugly, EVE then tore the striptease poles from the room and wove them around herself to become beautiful.  Inigo stopped denying his true self just to fit in, and embraced Hortensio as his lover.  This scene had a really funny climax, as people worked in the Change elements with quite a lot of flair.

Scene 3:
Yoda was in a diner bemoaning how his ex-girlfriend Ventris was scaring away his new love interest Tonny, when Inigo Montoya arrived and offered a plan of letting an automobile fall on her.  Ali (playing Inigo) then realized that wasn't very true to genre, and revised her usage of "fall" and "automobile", to suggest that they break Ventris's car and get her to fall in love with a hunky automechanic so she'd stop meddling in Yoda's affairs.  Thanks, Ali!  Then Yoda's high school friends arrived and mucked up the plan by offering to fix the car themselves.  Yoda got fed up and succumbed to the dark side, blasting them with lightning and becoming an outcast.  Inigo had an epiphany that he'd abandoned the girls in his class for Hortensio and resolved to focus on his students first (weirdest implementation of "chicks before dicks" ever).

Before play, I had to kind of convince my sleepy friends to squeeze this in, and we kind up sped through it.  The fact that they didn't get sick of it before it was over, and that they were actually suggesting I provide more constraints, demands, and creative challenges, makes me pretty happy.  (We agreed Yoda should act like Yoda, not just talk like Yoda.)  We'd all like to see the scenes progress more smoothly, with fewer out-of-nowhere contributions.  Hopefully, I'll get another chance to try.

[Simon C]

This sounds really cool! Very different from your other projects too.  What kind of fiction do you want the game to eventually produce? The kind of absurdist mashup you've got here, or something more approaching a standard example of the genre being played?  It seems like what you're heading towards is the kind of "spoof comedy" movies that come out every so often.  I find them kind of unbearable to watch, but I can see how they'd be fun to play.

[David Berg]

Good question.  I'm wondering if it might be better to pick one, thus giving the game a more solid identity, or just leave it flexible.  Personally, I can see doing absurdism / spoof movies (good call on that) for a while, then showing up one day and saying, "Enough of that for now; let's try something more serious, with a subtler twist."  Jack Bauer (24), Dexter Morgan (Dexter) and Martin Riggs (Lethal Weapon) in a Western.  MacGyver, Mal Reynolds (Firefly), and Sylar (Heroes) in a detective mystery.

The fact that specific characters will naturally drag their own associations and context into a new fiction does kind of lend itself to absurdism, though.  It might be hard to play Mal and Sylar without dropping space travel or superhero references into one's detective mystery.  Maybe the key for non-absurdism is to pick characters whose original fictions will mesh with the chosen genre in a "high concept pitch" kind of way, rather than a peanut butter and tomato sauce kind of way.