In that spirit of festive messiness, I’ve decided to participate in a blog carnival started by Gnomestew.com, called New Year, New Game, which encourages gamers to try out new roleplaying games and then write about them. This last year I tried my hand as a Gamemaster for a slightly messy version of Dogs in the Vineyard by Vincent Baker. It was not only my first time playing the game, but my first time hacking it as well, even if just a little bit.

The eponymous “Dogs” of this game are supposed to be cowboy paladins of a sort, whose job is to travel from town to town (in a land very much like 19th century Utah), and confront the sinners they find there, righting wrongs and protecting the good people of their Faith. The problem is of course that sins don’t always break down so easily into “good” and “evil” categories, and sometimes in trying to confront evil, you might become evil. And what are good and evil anyway?

My two friends and I liked the moral aspect of this setup, but we wanted something a bit more familiar to our own background, and felt that a Star Wars setting would actually be a better match for us. After all, don’t Jedi basically run around from planet to planet, writing wrongs and protecting the good people of the Republic? Don’t they also face the problem that, in fighting the Dark Side of the Force, you might end up embracing it? And what are the Light and Dark sides anyway?

We tried it — we used the Dogs mechanics with a Jedi setting, and for a while it seemed like it was going pretty well, until I encountered some difficulties as the Gamemaster. Part of the difficulties for me involved the back-and-forth, attack-and-defend nature of the game. The rules say that you can attack with words, actions, fists or weapons, but whatever you do has to be something your opponent “can’t ignore.” Drawing that line on what my characters could ignore and what they couldn’t felt difficult for me at first. In hindsight, I let the players’ characters get away with word-based attacks when actually I was within my rights as the Gamemaster to just say “nope — they just ignore what you say and keep on fighting with you.” Being a firmer opponent would have made for a better game because otherwise I could never win any conflicts; they players always seemed to have stronger dice than mine. I wasn’t unhappy that they won, of course — I just wished that they had been forced to embrace the Dark Side in order to win sometimes, which would have made for the interesting part of the story — where do you draw the line? At what point do you accept failure in order to avoid becoming the evil you struggle against?

This led to the other problem: that the Jedi of Star Wars, and the religious cowboy-paladins of standard Dogs in the Vineyard actually turned out to be quite different in one very fundamental way. The Dogs are supposed to judge — their word is law when it comes to sinners, and if they don’t root out the sinners and make them stop sinning, then they’re not doing their job. Jedi, on the other hand, can afford to be much more aloof. Their mandate does not extend to private matters the way that the Dogs authority does, and their moral code allows for a lot more tolerance than that of the Dogs. If a woman in one of the Dogs’ towns is trying to rise above her station, the Dogs have to deal with that somehow (or rebelliously decide to be more open-minded than their training dictates), whereas men and women in the Star Wars galaxy are already supposed to have equal rights, and if not, then the Jedi would stand up to protect that. In short, the Jedi really are supposed to be good guys, while the Dogs only seem to be good guys at the outset, and then play reveals their moral position to be much more murky and confusing than it seemed at first.

There may be a way to play Star Wars characters with the Dogs rules and still get the right mix of moral questions that the rules are built to reinforce, but it would probably require more hacking of the system than I know how to do right now. In the future, before I change anything about a game system, I’ll be sure to play it exactly the way the rules say at least a few times so that I’ll know what should be changed to fit my preferences later on.

Related Reading:

• A Friendly Foe
• The Game World
• The Value of Games

Of course games like football, chess, and rock-paper-scissors have made use of opposition to provide this excitement and interest for countless years: It’s me and my team against you and yours — which of us will win? The interplay of strategies, skills, and intuition makes such games fascinating to play over and over again, or even to watch without playing.

Roleplaying games are a very special case. The gamemaster (or “GM”) is often the individual tasked with creating a series of monsters, dangers, or other problems that the rest of the group (usually called “the players”) must overcome. The inherent imbalance in the situation — one person versus all the rest — means that the GM needs a lot of power. Most roleplaying games tend to give the GM virtual omnipotence within the game and story environment, but they protect the players from this unlimited power by changing the GM’s role from “opponent” to “opponent and ally.”

The GM has to create just enough opposition that the players will feel properly opposed and challenged, but not so much that they feel overwhelmed and discouraged. The goal here is to actually help the players engage with the story and the game by being their worthy opponent, the darkness that they must dispel. If the players successfully overcome the challenges you set out for them, then you rightly feel happy about their accomplishment, and if they fail, you can of course give them some sort of second chance or way out, albeit with consequences attached. The right balance of success and failure leads to story and character development that feels very real, because even though the story will eventually reach some kind of conclusion, along the way we see what the characters had to sacrifice to get there. This is the real win condition for the group as a whole, players and gamemaster together, and the apparent competition between them is just a tool to help them get there.

Related Reading:

• New Year, New Game: Dogs in the Vineyard
• The Game World
• The Value of Games

Drawing based on Dave Gray's original at www.gogamestorm.com

All good games have power, to inspire, to captivate, and change your behavior. The best way that I’ve found to understand why is to imagine each game as its own world; the process of playing that game involves finding or creating this world, understanding or defining it to some extent, entering it, exploring it, and then leaving it and taking something out of it with you, back into real life.

It’s an exciting process I learned from Dave Gray’s Gamestorming blog, which is mostly concerned with games as tools you can use in the workplace, as focus points for meetings or other activities. The way I think it makes the most sense, however, is in the context of tabletop roleplaying games, which are not only the best example of the power games can have, in my opinion, yet also one of the least understood types of games known today.

A roleplaying games (or “RPG”) seems at first to be an ancestor of the modern computer roleplaying game (“CRPG”), only without the speed and beauty that computer graphics and processing engines can provide. In fact, however,it is a dynamic framework of social interaction that reorders the way we talk, think, and imagine for a time. It is an activity you engage in with real people instead of machines, and if the game is a good one, it can help you see any aspect of human life, from adventure to morality, in a new light.

One of my favorite roleplaying games is called Apocalypse World, by Vincent Baker. In it, the first thing you do is get together with a small group of friends and decide what sort of apocalypse seems most interesting to you; this is the first stage in the process I mentioned above: imagining the world. Next, you create characters who survived the apocalypse, and are trying to pick up the pieces; and this is stage two, creating the world. Then, in the third stage, your group enters the world and starts to describe your characters in action, deciding who they know, how they go about life, and so on, as you would during the outset of a book or movie. Then, for many more sessions to come, you enjoy the 4th stage, exploring the world; here we trace our way through unfolding conflicts and problems that your characters must deal with, and along the way your characters grow and change just like real people do. No one can predict what happens next — we simply say what our characters want to do, and see where they bump into challenges, dangers, or each other. Dice help us to resolve conflicts easily and fairly, and the rules help ramp up the tension and develop the situation more deeply. Finally, in the fifth stage, you leave the world, finishing this game and moving on to something else, with a unique experience living on in your memory.

This process is not specific to Apocalypse World — all games express these elements in different ways, from just wanting to play at first, through explaining the rules to someone and setting up the game, to making starting choices, following through and exploring the possibilities, and finally coming to the end somewhat changed from before. In a roleplaying game, however, the field of play is not a playing field or a board — it is in your mind, and the changes happen there as well. After you play Apocalypse World, for example, you may have a better appreciation of your friends and their creativity, a deeper sense of what’s most important in life once all the shiny things have been stripped away, or something else — your experience is bound to be quite different from anyone else’s because you bring your imagination into it.

But in the end, all games are worlds in your imagination, because the rules you agree to are not laws of physics, and whatever boundaries the game sets up could easily be crossed, yet you do not do so. You do not break the rules because you agreed to follow them when you entered play. To cheat is to break that agreement and leave the game before its proper end, without attaining any real purpose. That is the invisible line we cannot cross: the boundary of honesty and a trustworthiness that is so central to being human. And that invisible world at the core of being human is what roleplaying games are all about.

Related Reading:

• New Year, New Game: Dogs in the Vineyard
• A Friendly Foe
• The Value of Games
• 2012, the Titanic, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
• An End and a Beginning

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★

Take for example the line of that song from Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken atheists in the world, saying, “science replaces private prejudice with publicly verifiable evidence.” This sentence has immense value for religious people everywhere, for so many reasons, not least of which is to highlight some of the ways that religions have tended to go off track and lose their focus over the centuries, as well as consider one of the ways that their true essence could be restored.

My study of world religions and their history has made clear to me how they all share a common foundation and purpose, and yet historically many of them have tended to veer away from it when individuals and institutions take control and seek to utilize the outward forms, beliefs, and structures of religion as tools to maintain their power. As this happens, the official interpretation of scriptures tends to become rigid, with endless debates between sects over their precise meaning, while the poetic elasticity behind them becomes increasingly hidden, even taboo. Questions like, “are those people going to heaven or hell?” tend to take the place of more important questions like, “how could I gain a deeper understanding of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ as symbols, metaphors or conceptions that could inform my current situation, improve my life and benefit everyone around me?”

When any body of knowledge becomes reduced to certain statements of belief or inflexible sets of law, it changes from a cooperative quest to understand, a yearning to grow, into a mechanical juggernaut in political power struggles, its depth of meaning hidden behind the gears and levers of social manipulation. That’s one key reason why scientific thought is so important for sincere followers of any religion — it exemplifies that spark of faith inherent in science that should be there in religion too: the faith that there is something more out there for us to discover, which can be understood, and which can benefit us in our lives now and forever into the future. To lose that faith is to lose humility, to presume that “I know, and others do not know” and to shut the door of communication in “good faith” against anyone who bears the slightest difference of opinion.

A true spirit of faith asks that we look around us with open eyes, to rejoice in the fact that someone out there may have just the right difference of opinion that can correct our assumptions and give us a deeper understanding of the world as a whole, from the surface at the physical level, through social currents flowing throughout the past and present, to the deepest spiritual realities of the mystery that is being human.

That’s why faith and science always walk hand in hand in my mind. I listen to atheists like Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, and I find much truth that I can learn from. I listen to members of various religions and find the same. If I have a mind free of private prejudice, open to any good evidence, whether physical, scriptural or even just practical experience based on solid principles, then I am as free as the wind, unconstrained in my vision, able to take in all truth, whenever and wherever I find it, yet also bounded to reality by the fact that I am not undertaking such a quest alone, subject to my own wild imagination and dreams, but together with others, who, whatever our differences, cherish the faith that the truth is our there, not only to find, but to share.

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By the way, speaking of apocalypses, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was given a ticket to board the Titanic at a time when anyone would have thought you’d have to be insane to turn such an opportunity down. Later, having taken a much less expensive ship instead, he discussed the Titanic disaster during a talk he gave in Washington D.C:

Although such an event is indeed regrettable, we must realize that everything which happens is due to some wisdom and that nothing happens without a reason. Therein is a mystery; but whatever the reason and mystery, it was a very sad occurrence, one which brought tears to many eyes and distress to many souls.

It’s important to note that although the reasons he gives are spiritual in nature, and illustrate a perspective on the mysteries of life after death, he in no way means to reduce the sadness of such tragedies, nor the need for scientific preparation in avoiding them. Whatever you may believe about spiritual questions, there is no doubt that many of the earthquakes, hurricanes and famines in recent years have taught us much, not least of which is that trustworthiness saves lives, and the lack thereof destroys them. As the AP reported concerning the 2009 earthquake in China:

Engineers said the school’s walls and support columns gave way almost instantly.

“These buildings just weren’t made for that powerful of a quake. Some don’t even meet the basic specifications,” said Dai Jun, a structural engineer and concrete specialist in Chengdu who was surveying damage in the area.

If you build something, whether a ship or a school, then the lives of everyone in it rest in your hands. And as every day goes by, we are building a future for humanity — is it a sturdy one?

Related Reading:

• The Game World
• An End and a Beginning

In fact, of course, the Mayans never predicted anything about the apocalypse this year; rather, their calendar begins a new “long count” in December 2012. A long measurement of time is set to end this year, not the world itself. Just as no one expects the world to end on New Year’s Eve simply because it’s the last day of the year, so the Mayans themselves wouldn’t expect anything significant in 2012 except perhaps a really big party, if they were still around counting things their way.

Nonetheless, the apocalypse bears thinking about, because it represents the worst fears of many people at a time when there really are many dangers facing the world: terrorism, economic collapse, climate change and many others all threaten to do terrible damage to the human race as a whole, and sometimes it seems as though the individuals and institutions in charge of protecting us are completely oblivious to the problems they are charged to solve.

This is an end, and a beginning. No matter what happens now, the future will be drastically different from the past. We may call it an apocalypse of a sort, not in the sense that the “world” of the earth is ending, but in that the “world” of life as we know it will never be the same. It will be painful to go through these changes, but just as a new year brings an end to one calendar and the beginning of a new one, these changes represent an opportunity as well as a danger.

For further reading on this topic, check out an article called “The Next 50 Years: Why I’m optimistic because everything will be terrible.” Reading it makes you feel oddly horrified and hopeful at the same time.

Related Reading:

• The Game World
• 2012, the Titanic, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Admittedly, not all that change was for the better. God only knows how many hours I spent in front of a game console or computer instead of going out and getting exercise or whatever. Now I’m paying for it — I’ve got to develop a habit of exercise or my health won’t be very good for very much longer.

But in spite of these negatives, games gave me a sense of how to apply the power of thought to new problems and solve them. As I grew up, I learned which games were actually worth playing, and which weren’t. I learned to ask myself, “What am I learning from this?” and expect a decent answer. A game doesn’t have to be “educational” in the sense that it teaches me math or history or something, but it should have something in it that stimulates my imagination, my skills, my awareness, or improves my life in some way, even if I don’t know exactly how to express how that might be. In fact, every game, from tennis to tic-tac-toe, has the potential to be a learning conduit, by which people can approach new problems and pick up whatever they need to solve them. Understanding the principles of game design can even give you an idea of how the rules that shape a good game could influence the laws (written or unwritten) that govern societies around the world.

This is quite a claim, although if you have played (or better yet, designed) some really good games of any kind, you might have experienced this sort of potential already. It’s too much to prove in just one little blog post, but I plan to provide all sorts of examples and reasons for this in future posts. For now it’s probably enough to just think: has a game ever changed you in some way? If you think about it, the change might be bigger than you ever realized.

Related Reading:

• A Friendly Foe
• The Game World

Times have certainly changed since then. I met my wife in 2008, and married her in 2009. My wife helped a great deal in easing my mother’s passing later that year, and she held me as I held my mother’s hand for the last time. We decided to have a baby pretty quickly, and I’m now the father of a young 1 and a half-year old boy. We live here in Nanjing, China, and my English-teaching career is going better than ever.

It’s time to start blogging again! I have become keenly aware of how short life can be, as well as how precious. I live an interesting life that’s worth writing about, and after everything that’s happened, I realize you never know how long you’re going to have before your chance to write and share with others is over.

So I start this blog once again, while at the same time thinking of the day that it will end. I’m not so morbid as to think that will necessarily be the day I die — perhaps some other technology will replace the Internet as we know it today, or another pressing concern will consume all my blogging time. But sooner or later, the day will come that this blog will cease, and like my life, I hope it will have served its purpose and fulfilled its potential by that time.

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