[Silent Sound] Revisiting My White Whale

[jburneko]

So I thinker with game design from time to time.  I admit I'm not crazy serious about it but there is one project I keep revisiting.  It is very much my white whale.  The game is called Silent Sound and it can be found here:

http://bloodthornpress.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/silent_sound.pdf

I've talked about it here before.  But to recap: It's a game inspired by the video game Silent Hill 2 and particularly the thematic dynamics of that game which involves a main character confronting horrors that turn out to manifestations of his own guilt.  I wrote and play tested one version of the game then scrapped it in favor of a totally ground up design you'll find in the link above.  I haven't play tested that version of the game yet.

So here are the design goals of the game:

1) The game is about dealing with guilt.  Each character has did something in the past they are harboring unresolved guilt for.

2) The opportunity to "make amends" in any substantial way to those wronged by their actions has long past.  This is important because I want this game to be about the internal spiritual journey concerning moving past something that is no longer actionable.  It's about being alone.

3) The primary antagonist is the entire setting.  This is (theoretically) how the game is not just character navel gazing.  The character's guilt is externalized by an active hostile setting out to get the character.  I often say this is Dogs in the Vineyard in reverse.   The town is here to judge YOU.

4) Success is not guaranteed.  I want the full range outcomes to be live at all times from totally soul crushing despair to cathartic hard earned self-absolution.

5) I want the game to actually be fun in a kind of a Dark Existential Fantasy/Horror story kind of way.  If the game is crushingly depressing or overly painful then it's not working.

To rephrase the above in terms of the two questions Vincent has been posting on his blog lately:

What are we here to do with this game?

Discover whether the characters can come to terms with their past or not.

What are we doing right this minute?

Exploring a surreal landscape, interpreting symbolic clues, and fighting demonic monsters.

In may ways, I almost think the game should play a little bit like Call of Cthulhu on a mobius strip.  The characters are following clues and confronting horrors that ultimately lead back to themselves.  In an ideal world this would be surprising to the players each and every time they play the game.  Not so much that the clue-chain leads back to themselves but what they discover about the character along the way that they didn't know back at character creation.

Anyway, here's the point of discussion: I think my current design gets pretty close to this but at the price of being overly formulaic.  What I'm looking for is feedback on that structure.  Is it boringly robotic?  How can it be opened up?  I'm even willing to go back to the drawing board again taking this draft as sort of a "what play MIGHT look like" scripted example.

Thanks.

Jesse

[jburneko]

How did this end up in AP?  I thought I posted it in Game Development?  If it could be moved that would be appreciated.

Jesse

[hix]

Hi Jesse,

Silent Hill 2 is one of my favourite games, and I'm totally into your aim of creating a game that hits that combination of dread and self-discovery. I'm reading through the draft, but it be great if you could help me out by highlighting some things I should look at.

• In what ways do the players discover truths about the character that "they didn't know back at character creation"?
  
  
• When the game's finished and working perfectly, how do you want these insights and discovered truths to surprise the players? 
  
  
• What are some of the ways that the players' choices affect the outcome of the story?

[jburneko]

Man, those are really good questions!  Thanks for asking.  That's exactly what I need.  Here are my answers.  The first and second are related so I'll answer them kind of together.

The Flashback sequences run by The Voice of Reason player is the primary method of character development.  That's how "new information" about the character and his "backstory" become developed.  The Shadow player is watching these scenes for material to turn into painful, objects, messages and demons.  The primary goal of those things is to provoke reflection on the part of the player about the choices he's making for his character.  That's where the surprise comes in.  For example, The Shadow player might notice that in the majority of Flashbacks the character takes the advice of a male character over the advice of a female character.  So The Shadow player might introduce a message that says something like, "Why do you ignore the women in your life?"  The player may not have even been AWARE that he was having his character do this.  So now he has new material to take into the next flashback: Why DOES his character do this?

Your third question is actually the hardest.  Because truthfully, maybe they don't?  Or more specifically the fate of any given character is in the hands of the other players.  Looking at the design I may have unintentionally created a voting mechanic.  That is as a player goes through the game he is justifying and defending his character which will affect the other players choices.  Does The Shadow lean on him harder than someone else?  Does The Voice of Reason give him more white dice?  Or do other players trade good dice with him more often?

It's possible that in many ways the player can only argue his character's case and the other players act as a jury.  That is either really bad or exactly perfect.  I need to give more thought to that.

Jesse

[Chris_Chinn]

Hi Jesse,

Three things come to me.

The first, is about color.   The Silent Hill games work really well because they're evocative and take normal places (a school, walking down the street, being in your apartment) and turn them into threatening and dangerous locations (even if nothing at the moment is threatening you).

The procedure for describing places is collaborative, which means it gets two steps - one, negotiating what this place looks like (as a normal place) and two, what's off or wrong about it in a general sense (even before the bad dice start coming out).  So, while it's light in terms of procedure, it seems that it might be a little more work than necessary for what it does?

Maybe just having one player always describe locations, or have a list of pre-set locations set up, and let players add descriptive modifiers to them?

The second thing, as you mentioned, is the idea of it as a moral voting structure.  It doesn't seem particularly strong or pronounced.  (Though, I could see it giving the sort of WTF kind of endings you get in Silent Hill... "Wait, I won, but I won the right to live in a limbo in my head sleeping with the projection of the woman I was obsessing over who didn't even know me?  It's like winning is losing!")

The third is that the penalties of losing Encounters aren't exactly clear to me as to what they mean in game.  Having a Scar or a recurring Message doesn't seem enough to make me want to seriously push to avoid having them.  Bad things happening is pretty much -why- you play a horror game so it's not exactly something you can threaten with, totally.

I could see something really fun where different players randomly get to toss out messages/questions to the other characters as part of play.   And maybe winning control in the end, of putting together facts or truths about who a character is and what they did and why.

Chris

[jburneko]

Hey Chris,

About the penalties: Scars and stuff give The Shadow the ability to mess with your Flashbacks.  It gives that player power to alter the "facts in the case" so to speak.  The more the Shadow wins the more the Shadow can make it actually, really true that you were responsible for horrible things.  The crime erodes from, "Hey this one time I made a bad call" to "No, it was a long string of deliberate decisions and willful denial that you could have bailed on at any point but didn't."

Your idea about players making up facts as they go along is an alternative structure I've considered.  I've thought about having the players NOT define their crime up front.  Instead the game starts with this question: Why are you here? (basically the Lure in the current design) and at key points answering ever deepening questions until the final one which is: Why are you REALLY here? which actually reveals and defines the crime.

Along those lines I've considered having the game play almost more like a clue chain mystery with the twist being that (a) players get to make up clues and (b) they get to assign them to other players.  So a character might find a bit of torn newspaper with part of police log reporting a domestic dispute.  That player can then hand that to another player and say this has something to do with your character.  The point would be to piece together the truth for that character from the pile of created clues and symbols.

But then I'm not sure how to tie that process into the threatening environment.

Jesse

[Chris_Chinn]

Hi Jesse,

The question that these kinds of stories have is, "Are you a horrible person, a messed up person in a hellish situation, or a person who can find their way out of the darkness?"

To me, it feels like a player doesn't have a lot of control after the dice get rolled - and if accumulating scars, etc. means changing the facts of the backstory directly through that, then it gets harder to justify one's humanity/goodness.

"Oh, you accidentally killed your wife in a car accident, it's ok, it was an accident."
"Oh, you were trying to commit suicide and you had her in the car?"
"Oh, you drugged her, and wanted to drive both of you off the cliff in a double suicide so she wouldn't leave you?  WTF MAN."

Whether it's the Shadow player or other players, I feel like there needs to be some more control over the dice or choices (besides the voting between areas) and maybe something that limits how quickly the crime is revealed as well.

And the big design question is which parts do you want the system to ruthlessly drive, vs. which parts do you want the people playing to make judgments upon?

One of the options in Dirty Secrets is that the investigator is an unreliable narrator and may be the criminal themself- I'd check out playing with that option a few times and see how it manages making slow reveals as well as it's points of danger- it might give you some ideas of how to structure it in fun ways.

Chris

[hix]

Thanks, Jesse. I've had a bit more of a read through Silent Sound, and wanted to check my understanding and ask you a couple more questions. To start with, I had a think about your answers to Vincent's questions, and I added in a mid-level answer:


What are we doing right this minute?
Exploring a surreal landscape, interpreting symbolic clues, and fighting demonic monsters.

What are we doing over the course of, say, an hour of play?
All the Condemned characters travel through the rooms of a Location and learn more about their past through confronting images and demons.

What are we here to do with this game?
Discover whether the characters can come to terms with their past or not.

How does that sound?


THE BASIC PROCEDURES OF PLAY

Here's how I understand the game works:

Locations are the big areas to explore, that contain some sort of thematic connection to the Condemned's past live or their relationship to the Lure (like a high school or a hospital or a lakeside hotel). Rooms are sub-areas inside that Location.

The Condemned enters a room.

The Voice of Reason describes a memory the Condemned character has. The memory presents a small situation that calls for the character's reaction.

The Condemned is then confronted by a nightmare (a symbol, a message or a demon). All the Condemned players confront the nightmare simultaneously. The confrontation involves one to three exchanges.

The Condemned leaves the room. If they didn't confront a nightmare, they can discard a black die or The Voice of Reason may give the player a white die from his pool. If they did confront a nightmare, the Condemned may either move past the substantive content of the nightmare or the nightmare gets a hold of the character and recurs through the rest of the game.

Condemned characters may meet between rooms, discuss their situation and trade dice.

Play proceeds from room to room within a location until The Shadow player uses his last black die (or until he can not use any more black dice because the players are out of white dice)

At the end of the first and second location each Condemned player calculates if the lure they are following is closer or more obtainable (or not).


OK. MORE QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS

I like the Locations --> 'rooms' structure that you're using in the game. How do you think a character is going to change after going through a whole Location? And how does a character change after going through one room?

You also said the interaction between the VOR and the Condemned in the flashback creates material for the Shadow to draw on and pervert, darken or twist. That sounds cool. I think you could give more emphasis to how important these flashbacks are. You describe it as "the primary method of character development", but in the rules they seem almost incidental.

My biggest concern is about the dice game that we play out when confronting a Nightmare:

• For a start, everybody's doing basically the same thing at the same time (and it's the same process every time), so procedurally it feels a bit monotonous.
  
  
• I don't know if this is an issue for you, but the exchange mechanic doesn't feel like it's going to create the same sense of jeopardy for the Condemned character that an equivalent confrontation with a Nightmare in Silent Hill does. It doesn't seem unpredictable or threatening. Part of that may be how it's left up to the Condemned player to decide if they overcome the Nightmare or not. Maybe there's a role for other players to decide if the Nightmare is overcome.
  
  
• I worry that the dice game doesn't make the fiction very vivid. The way you explain it in the rules, a player puts a white or black die forward and then narrates either overcoming the Nightmare or not. When I imagine myself playing this game, I think that having to make that decision would take me out of the mood and the moment. Silent Hill is so much about atmosphere and unrelenting, unbelievably-protracted tension (as well as sudden instances of thrashing terror), and I'm not sure the dice game contributes to that ... if that's one of your aims.
  
  And one final question: what's the Reward for playing Silent Sound? What's the real-world, social and creative fun that you want people to get out of playing the game?

[jburneko]

I wanted to pop in and post to say, I haven't abandoned this thread.  I'm still digesting the current round of questions and life got a little bit busy.  I'll post with another round of thoughts soon.

Jesse

[jburneko]

Yay, I finally have the time to respond to this properly.

The lack of control that Chris points out and the potential for monotony that Steve points out I think go hand in hand and perhaps my biggest problem with the design at the moment.  The problem is that the game is meant to be so dream-like and symbolic I don't know WHERE to introduce more interesting choices.  One of my big sacred cows for this game right now is that I don't what "Do you forgive yourself?" to be a question the player ever answers directly, himself.  I want the *process of play* to answer that question.  Maybe I need to let that go?  Maybe that's impossible?

Maybe the game shouldn't try to answer in a binary fashion?  Maybe the game should focus more on the events that play out and leave the answer open to interpretation by the... "audience" so to speak?  I don't know.

To answer more of Steve's questions directly.

After going through each room we should know more about the character's back story.  Each room provokes a flashback and presents a symbolic piece of mental baggage from that flashback.  After a whole Location we have done a sorting pass through that baggage.  We will know what is lingering and what has been left behind.

I'm not sure the nightmares are actually meant to be particularly threatening, in the "Oh my god I might not survive this!" kind of way.  They are meant to be more evocative and highly emotionally suggestive.  If the nightmares did absolutely nothing at all but stand there, they should still evoke thought and consideration about the character.  That's why the player chooses.  Is this something I can push past or is this something that overwhelms me?

Christopher Kubasik once called this game extremely ambitious because he doesn't think I'm creating a game that's about dramatic narrative at all.  He said it's more like a game about lyric poetry.  I'm inclined to agree because I've often likened it to Dante's Inferno.  Indeed this particular version of the design of prompted when I once described the game as, "a dungeon crawl through the PCs own mind."

So what's this all about?  What's the reward?  That's a good question.  I want this to be about the development and discovery of a character through play.  You start with this sketch and by the end, you have this full character for better or for worse.  There is no character creation and then I enact him as I envisioned him.  The game is constantly forcing you to question and evaluate that character concept until the very end.  Is that rewarding enough?  I don't know.

Jesse

[hix]

I haven't got time to reply in more detail right now, but I just wanted to say that your aim for this game (which is some ways is like Angel Heart the RPG) sounds really good. The idea of playing a character who you hope will turn out to be a good person, but who you fear may wind up being revealed as deserving punishment ... I love it.

Anything you can do to reinforce that sense of the players struggling and twisting to evade that sort of revelation that they deserve to be damned, I'd be right behind.

[Callan S.]

I'd think instead of 'follow clues', the entire environment is a reflection of either the characters condemnation or its absolution. In as much if 'follow the clues' is there, it's there simply as an aspect of condemnation or absolution. Any moving on to different places/rooms, the actual moving is also a reflection of condemnation or absolution.

I think these environments would be crafted by the player, and most importantly, whether something has to do with condemnation or absolution is utterly unknown to the player in the moment of play. The player crafts without any idea of 'oh, this means absolution' or anything. They just craft. If the player describes a weeping statue, cold stone hand outstretched, is this part of the character going to absolve themselves? Or is it part of condemnation? Who knows? Even every step has something to do with either - there is no step that is just a mundane, banal step. All of them are with great significance - and a significance that is utterly unknown at the time.

That's my reaction to the 'I don't know where to put interesting choices'. The interest comes from knowing all things described have an almost excruciating significance, but having absolutely no idea why. And frankly, no matter how vivid the images at the end of the game get, I'd say mechanically you don't determine any absolution or condemnation. Merely have those intense images and that's it. To paraphrase what I said with diary of a skull soldier: what are the intense images for? They are there to make you wonder what they are. Which should annoy Ron, but let me say I don't mean wonder in a 'sit there with a glass of wine thinking how great oneself is' wonder.

Not sure how much that meshes with what you've written so far. But in terms of inserting interesting choices - I'd say this simply begs for the entire environment and every single movement in it to be a hotbed of significance towards some end. You don't need to insert choices. Even breathing, in such a place, reeks of significant choice. Even if you just can't stop.