Hopefully, most of you are familiar with the relatively recent writing form known as "microfiction." I don't mean the stuff that's just really brief short stories, but the stuff that's 10-15 sentences long at the most. Those of you who own anything by R. Sean Borgstrom are probably aware that she loves to include it in all of her game materials. It's the form for people who excell at crafting small chucks of powerful prose, but aren't as interested in (or capable of writing) longer works. Now, many good writers (like Rebecca) do write both, so that's just a generalization based on the amout of bad or passable microfiction you can find on the web.

Part of the fun of microfiction is that you don't ever read just one piece at a time. They're like bite sized crackers. You grab a handful and chow down. Sometimes a group is connected by a theme or idea or image. Sometimes not. Think of them like "prose haikus" and you've got a fair idea.

Anyway, I started this thread because I'm interested in the possibility of microfiction-style roleplaying. This has a direct relationship to my current project, Storypunk, which I'm trying to prep for publication this summer, but I'm also interested in broader and more general comments.

Here's some things to think about:

1. What would constitute a "micro-scenario" worth of roleplaying? Obviously, it'd have to be a bit longer than the 10-15 sentences, but maybe a few scenes of PC interaction? More? Less?

2. How to decide when one "block" of roleplaying is finished and it's time to move onto another? Time it? 15-20 min? Wait for a climax of sorts? What if it doesn't seem to be coming for a while?

3. How to turn it into a meaningful and fun experience? Maybe you could do something Co9C-esque and have players throwing around motifs to be incorperated into the scenes? Maybe you could make like Storypunk and have the bits resonate on a common Theme? But would you necessarily have to build a unity between the pieces in order to create a rewarding experience? What about a system for creating completely unrelated bits of narrative?

4. What kind of system would be optimal for running these kind of brief, improvizational one-shot tidbits of roleplaying? Something like Universalis Lite or subjective-style Fudge, where you can brainstorm elements and assign traits to them? Or maybe a bit heavier system, but one that allows you to put pre-generated components together to make microbits (like Once Upon a Time or Everway's use of Vision cards)?

5. Any other thoughts? Would you play a game like this?

EDIT: Some bad typos that obscured the meaning in some places.

Do you have a link to any microfiction sites so we can have a better idea of what you're talking about?

The obvious time frame to me, is one thingy. I've tried the words situation, Situation, conflict and scene in there, and it's not working. What I mean is that I can definitly feel that there is a certain size, small enough to be comparable to the micro-fiction, in an RPG. I'll say scene for the moment, but expect me to come back with a better description. In terms of wall time, I feel about 15-20 minutes is where I'd be comfortable with this sort of thing.

I think the the answear to the second part is that the average RPG does not come with the sort of set up that would support this. For it to work, I can see it needing specific initiation, which would define the end point. For this to work well, a sudden, and apparantly unsatisfactory end , would be set up to have meaning. For example, a scenario where either the situation is resolved, or a bomb blows up. Another (better?) example is 15 minutes till the plane leaves. Do you leave with your girlfriend, whose going away cos you just had an argument, or let her go. The implication being that you either stay together, or never see each other again. Both of these cases, the set up give an endpoint, that's can't drag out.

For your mention of Universalis, I get the feeling your thinking of a GMless environment? I think that these would probably require a GM. The GM's job is pacing, and these are all about pacing.

Jumping out of order, it's clear to me that a low search and handlng time are required. If it's short, you don't want the feeling of rolling dice all the way through it. In fact, I'd be tending towards the extreme low end, and probably not invole fortune either. This style would be well suited to serve Narrativist aims. I think that you could get some very interesting Gamist sessions out of it too.

My first thought was Soap. My second was Baron Munchausen.

My third was to take a system (in this case, The Pool). Have each player write a sentance or two about a character. For example, "A lonely housewife, widowed 5 years ago". Some traits are assigned to the character. Then, separatly, they write down some goal or intent, focused towards the character to thier left. Some traits are assigned, associated with the goal. Choose a location (Stations and shopping malls are good choices), and then go. After the first scene, pass the goals to the player on the right. The traits associated with the goal go with it.

With 4 players then, that's 3 - 4, unique, linked, but separate scenarios played out.

The first two issues of the microfiction zine Double Room show a fairly varied and interesting group of pieces:

http://webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_one/issue1.html
http://webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_two/issue2.html

For a more roleplaying-oriented source, check out the fictional "quotes" in the margins of the intro chapter of Nobilis:

http://www.silveragesentinels.com/pdfs/Nobilis_Introduction_sample.pdf

Microfiction works are also called Short-Shorts, Prose Poems, Flash Fic, and a host of other names, just to clarify.

Hmmm...

This brought improv to mind for me... where people in the audience throw out some information, maybe a relationship between the characters and a place - and the performers create a short scene based around it. There are usually improv 'games' - which are sets of rules that provide some shape to the scene. Who's Line is it Anyway? is an example of this sort of thing. When to cut scenes off is usually a matter of judgement, but it becomes fairly clear to most when they have gone on too long...


Stuart

This seems a bit like the Soap sentence format we are using for the Yahoo indie-netgaming e-mail game.
We've apparently mutated it beyond the normal for the game in length of descriptions.
You get cool focused scene snippets.

Hey Jonathan,

Thanks for the links. Turns out I used to write microfiction back in high school without really knowing it. I will give you my thoughts on the subject and how it relates to making a microfiction RPG told from the perspective of someone who thought he had invented a new form of poetry, although never followed through on it.

When I was doing it, I came up with an idea of what it was, excatly, that I was writing. What I was writing was scenes or parts of scenes that were taken out of non-existent larger works. The term prose poems fits because the piece should convey an emotion they way a poem would. Taken as poetry, they can be satisfying. Taken as narrative, they can be potentially frustrating because there can seem to be more and we want it but it is the artist's intention to halt the story where he did so the audience can participate in the creative process by imagining what happened next, what came before, and so on.

So as an RPG were narrative is created in the shared imaginative space, I don't see how a microfiction game could work. Microfiction is already a shared imaginitive activity IMO with everyone who reads the piece sharing the text in their imaginitive space and then working from there to fill in the blanks, if there are any.

Micro fiction begins where it does and ends where it does because that is where the artist decides it should. With a group, how would this get decided. If part of a piece is meant to leave you wanting more, how can this be handled in a collaborative effort?

I think that microfiction might work as a starting point for an RPG scene as inspiration. The poetic aspect does serve well as inspiration. I'm not so sure about microfiction as play. I wouldn't equate it with playing a single scene, for example. Sure a single scene can be brief, but is it microfiction? These are questions to be asked.

Nanofictionary is a Looney Lab card game, focusing on the creation of extremely short stories. I suspect it's not quite what you're aiming for, but the deck could be a good way of creating characters and a scene without a GM. It is competitive rather than collaborative, though I suspect it could be tweaked to allow for cooperative play.

Here's a link to it: http://www.wunderland.com/LooneyLabs/Nanofictionary/Rules.html

I finally played a couple of rounds last night for the first time. It's fun, and brings Once Upon a Time to mind... with different goals and play.

Scott

[Oh, it's up for an Origins this year too.]

{Edited to eliminate a redundancy)

here's the vague glimmerings of an idea that might be useful.

some of the definitions of microfiction I have seen emphasize that the piece must have a character (or characters,) a conflict, and a resolution; in other words, it's a really tiny narrative piece, but it is still just as much a narrative piece as a novel, play, or film. I specifically recall these rules being in place when I competed in the local alternative paper's "Fiction 59" contest, where you had to write about a character resolving a conflict in 59 words or less.

for a "microrpg" game, one temptation is to translate those three restrictions directly, but some of the comments in this thread seem to suggest we all see problems making that translation...

but we may have something better. an rpg (distinct from literary forms) is Exploration. Ron has mentioned (including here) that Exploration involves imagining:

Ron Edwards wrote:
(a) characters (b) in a setting (c) dealing with a situation (d) via a system of rules (e) all colorfully

I think that you've just described a Universalis Complication, John.

Mike

I guess I'm not quite catching the drift of this thread. I've seen micro-fiction I think - like Jane Yolen's 100 word fantasy stories, right? They're cool and all, but what's the draw to do something like that in an RPG?

Basically you're talking about single-scene role-playing, which you sure could do easily with Universalis, but what's the advantage?

Paganini wrote: Basically you're talking about single-scene role-playing, which you sure could do easily with Universalis, but what's the advantage?

Jonathan Walton wrote:
Same thing goes here. Why play a roleplaying session composed of unrelated single-scene narratives? Because it's different. Who says that roleplaying has to involve a long extended narrative? What's the advantage in that? Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages in both types of play. So why preference one over the other?

So "because it'd be fun," "why not?," and "let's try something different" aren't good enough reasons for you?

If this type of thing doesn't interest you, that's cool, but it sounds like you're implying that this style of play wouldn't be fulfilling. I see it as being just as fulfilling as traditional narrative styles. Why? That's hard to answer. Why wouldn't it be? It's just a different form of roleplaying. Why am I attracted to it? Because it sounds interesting and fun. Do I need another reason?

Jonathan Walton wrote: So "because it'd be fun," "why not?," and "let's try something different" aren't good enough reasons for you?

Paganini wrote: So far, this thread is dealing with the design of such game, making the assumption that once the game exists someone will want to play it.

At a certain point, Nathan, you have to just accept that somebody wants to play, and that whatever their reasons, that as long as the game is well designed that they'll be satisfied. There are infinite numbers of reasons why anyone might want to play this or any other game. To try to cater to them all would be crazy. In point of fact you cater to the desire to play a particular game by simply creating the game.

Look at Jonathan's reasons above. How would you change the design to cater to any of them? You don't, you just create the game.

Mike

-- in the longer narratives of traditional roleplaying, Players are generally limited to dealing a single set of characters per session (or per campaign, for longer games). in a micro-rpg, you could have a new set every 15-60 minutes, perfect for short attention spans and keeping things interesting.

-- focus is definitely put on the present, on the action that's currently taking place. no planning for the future when the end is coming in 15 minutes. no messing around with continuity or things that happened previously in the campaign. no background knowledge required for new Players. all the important stuff is what's ahppening right now.]/quote]

Yeah, cool, that was exactly what I had in mind. Seems like these two are probably the most important items. Unversalis can already do the others, even though microfiction play would definitely have those properties as well.

Actually, the idea of Micro Universalis is kind of cool. A simple gimmick, that the game ends when the scene is closed would be all you'd need. Probably want to have a smaller number of coins than normal, maybe 5 to 10. It's sort of like the Story Now! idea taken to an existential extreme.

A couple of possible difficulties:

It'd be hard to identify with a character over such a short time-span. Drama comes from a character caring so deeply about something that he won't back away from the issue . . . it will be decided. But the drama is only dramatic if we, the players (or observers) actually care about it as well. If it's something trivial, we couldn't care less about it. This kind of identification takes time to build up.

A potential fix would be to focus on color rather than character drama (which I think is what a lot of actual microfiction writers tend to do.)

A more difficult problem is that of multiple characters. Multiple characters tend to have overlapping networks of relationships and conflicts. If you want resolution, multiple characters will cause problems with the tiny scale. I'm not sure how this could be fixed. I suppose one way that might work would be to define the conflict of the scene, and only allow the creation of characters directly related to that conflict.

Paganini wrote:
It'd be hard to identify with a character over such a short time-span. Drama comes from a character caring so deeply about something that he won't back away from the issue . . . it will be decided. But the drama is only dramatic if we, the players (or observers) actually care about it as well. If it's something trivial, we couldn't care less about it. This kind of identification takes time to build up.

szilard wrote:
I don't think that character identification is at all necessary for developing characters with deeply-held beliefs.

szilard wrote: Where does that drama come from, then?

EXAMPLE wrote: "I love you," she said, a teary smile growing on her face."

"No you don't," I replied. "Love died a long time ago. I bludgeoned it to death with the hammer of my hatred and the strength of my rage. There's no such thing as Love anymore. I killed it."

"Fair enough," she returned, "Love may be dead, but the memory of Love remains. And try as you might you cannot destroy a memory."

"What good is a memory?" I asked.

And then she showed me.

Jonathan Walton wrote:

szilard wrote: Where does that drama come from, then?

Situation, I'd argue. Characters in microfiction tend to either be A) iconic archetypes, or B) an avatar of the reader. Part of the power is seeing yourself in the situation of the microfic character.

Jonathan Walton wrote:
Same thing goes here. Why play a roleplaying session composed of unrelated single-scene narratives?

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: "I'm leaving, you worm!" she shouted and she slammed the front door. He sat down, unable to follow her. He stared at the door, unable to sob. For nine long years did that, staring at the door hoping she would return. With each passing moment he soured inside. Then one day, the door opened. It was her, he thought and he fired both barrels of his shotgun. Then to his horror he realised he had grown nearsighted and the ladylady had paid the price.

I don't know, Jack. What you wrote looks like a single scene to me. I mean, in Universalis terms is might be more than one (intitial encounter, souring period, final conflict), but there's nothing about it that necessarily makes it multiple scenes. Think about a play. All the action could take place without changing the set or dimming the lights, partially because it's so abstract.

Let me switch to a rpg-style script, since we're not really talking about actual microfic.

Jonathan Walton wrote: GM: Jack was known throughout the lands: Jack Giant-Killer, Jack o' the Lantern, Halloween Jack, One-Eyed Jack. But Jack felt incomplete. There was something missing from his life and he didn't know what it was.

P1 (Jack): I believe I'll travel to the four corners of the world to seek what I am lacking.

GM: So Jack roamed far and wide, until he came across a girl by the name of Jill. With Jill, Jack felt complete.

P1 (Jack): Ah! Now I finally have what I was missing.

GM: However, Jill soon began to feel that she was lacking something essential in her life.

P2 (Jill): I believe I'll travel to the four corners of the world to seek what I am lacking.

GM: So she did.

Etc...

Ah, the light comes on. The question put to you is 'how do you intend to roleplay that?' Keep going. you're doing fine.

I don't see the time thing being much of a problem. Even in Universalis there's no specification of exactly how long a scene must last. Let's say you've got a scene. You pay a coin to create a component: a Rock. Then you pay another coin for an event: "The rock sits and does nothing for a thousand years." Then you pay another coin to fade to black. Woohoo. You just had a thousand year long scene.

OK, I think my point about microfiction not necessarily being one scene is getting lost somewhere, and I know my own little example was no damned help, but what do you want for 90 seconds? Tolstoy?

Way I see it, microfiction is like a single page of a comic book. What is on it? Whatever you want. Sort of like Life In Hell by Matt Groening. No sequiter is possible.

But then thinking about it, I think the idea needs more work, really. It's like roleplaying poetry. How can you do that and what makes roleplaying it appealing compared to simply composing it even spontaneously while sitting around the living room?

Hi Jonathan,

I'm concerned about one thing - and it's a big thing, really, the very thing that sometimes tempts me to hurl texts across the room.

Examples taken from the text of my (1st edition) copy of Nobilis; the author of both is R. Sean Borgstrom.

This one is not a story:

The angel shed his guise. It was just as well ... easier to be certain that way. Seven or eight feet of wing spread on either side of him. A golden sword was in his hands.

In a single clean motion, the six of us aimed our submachine guns. The moment of firing was an epiphany: six thunders roaring at once. Six ripples of pain upon the angel's flesh. Those wings began to move as he staggered back. That was okay. They'd never support him, never lift the one sixty pounds of him into the air.

Except they did.

"Once upon a time," he said, "there was a very foolish King, who woke up every morning before the rooster's crow."

"Yuck."

"He would tiptoe up to the top of his highest tower, and when the dawn had turned the sky the right color, he would cry out, 'I command you, sun, to rise!'"

"That does sound pretty foolish."

He nodded. "Yup. But no one wanted to tell the King that. At least, not until he fell in love with a more sensible woman and brought her to the palace to live."

"And she wondered why the bed was empty every morning?"

He nodded again. "And when she found out, she told him just how foolish it was, and that he was probably going to get a cold. No man likes looking foolish in front of his wife, of course, so he immediately vowed to sleep in the next morning."

"And?" I asked.

"And the sun didn't rise."

Ron Edwards wrote: This one is not a story:

Hi Jonathan,

You're missing my point a bit, I think. What I'm saying has nothing to do with length of the text. You're absolutely right about that.

I'm talking about conflict and resolution, as well as about Premise in the Egri sense (extended outward to all narrative rather than restricted to playwriting).

Without that, text is prose, but it's not a story.

I should also point out that "story" is not a medium, it's a matter of content. A poem may or may not be a story, a song may or may not be a story, a picture may or may not be a story, a length of text may or may not be a story, and so on.

To repeat, it also doesn't matter if we're talking about a little eeny picture or one which covers a wall, and it doesn't matter if we're talking about 100 words or a 1000 page novel.

... And, before anyone gets pissed off by my tone so far, I say this: none of this post is meant to convince anyone of anything. I'm clarifying my contrast between the two passages, and that's all.

So ... do I gather correctly that you are not concerned with the story-or-not issue (as I've defined it, regardless of whether you agree) in reference to micro-fiction?

If that's the case, then the only distinctive feature about micro-fiction is its length, correct? Or more clearly, that it evokes (in that short length) some kind of "feeling"?

Translating that to role-playing would seem pretty easy, given that story-content's not the priority. It'd be neat to see a framework or rubric to prompt or organize it, though.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Without that, text is prose, but it's not a story...

If that's the case, then the only distinctive feature about micro-fiction is its length, correct? Or more clearly, that it evokes (in that short length) some kind of "feeling"?

Translating that to role-playing would seem pretty easy, given that story-content's not the priority. It'd be neat to see a framework or rubric to prompt or organize it, though.

Jonathan Walton wrote: The players collectively recount memories from a fictional childhood that they shared together. They take turns beginning each recollection with something like:

"Hey... Remember that time we went fishing down in the old pond and Jamie cut his foot open on that rusty tin can?"

Once the situation is set up, the players can all help tell the story, but mainly determine the parts of them story that involve themselves. If a player wants to describe what happened to another player, the other player can always reject the description and replace it with his/her own.

JAMIE: "Yeah! My foot was spurting blood all over the place. Jeff had to take off his shirt and tie it around the wound!"

JEFF: "Yeah, but it was Jim's shirt, not mine."

JIM: "The hell it was! You tried to use my shirt but I wouldn't let you. We had to use Jessie's handkerchief because none of us were willing to get our clothes bloody."

JESSIE: "I had the hardest time telling my mom how my hankie got soaked in Jamie's blood."

Each memory is an isolated incident and they don't have to be recounted in any sort of chornological order.

Hey,

You didn't misunderstand anything, although I thought you had when I started typing. I swear to God that I was swept away from the screen on a domestic mission and submitted the message before it was baked enough. Driving back from said mission, I said, "Dammit, I was wrong, he got it fine," and you know what? Just now the source of said domestic mission interrupted me again!

Whew. Anyway. Thanks for clarifying the issue. It may seem off-topic, but really, unless I knew where you stood on the conflict/no-conflict thing, the whole thread was gibberish to me.

Best,
Ron

Hey Ron,

I should just pass this thread by, but I cannot let such a sweeping generalization go unchallenged. I am okay with agreeing to disagree, but I do want to point out that you are using story to mean something other than the usual literary meaning. I hope we both agree your first example is a narrative. The author presented one or more events to the reader. However, to most people, a narrative is a story. Your second example is a more sophisticated example of a story -- one which might fall under the category of good, according to Egri -- but it is simply at a different point on the continuum. Both present events and leave differing amounts of imagined detail to the reader.

I cannot recommend C. S. Lewis' "An Expiriment in Criticism" enough. In this text, he examines different categories of literature from the perspective of the reader. One reader will create most of the story for himself, and so reads what amount to fairly generic sketches of a story and fills in the details for himself, while another wants only to read exacly those details the author has included within the text, and so he sets aside his own preconceptions and notions while reading. Both persons are enjoying a story, but the one man's good story is the other's trash.

Having said that, I think we should go back to discussing how a micro-session might be done. My feeling is that an interesting approach would be to put characters into an intense conflict, roll dice to determine the direction of the resolution, and roleplay out that resolution. Where a normal session would be a long build-up to the climax and a very short resolution, we would be starting virtually at the climax and going from there, throwing dice right at the climax and at no other time.

For example, a group of desperately poor men have tracked down the thief who has been stealing bread. The thief turns out to be a child. Do the men: a) kill the thief as a warning to others, b) cut off the child's right hand, in accordance with the law, c) capture the child, thus being responsible for feeding the child in jail, d) let the child go, e) something else. The micro-session would revolve around reaching this conclusion and dealing with the immediate consequences.

Later,
Grant