10 great ideas to steal from The Boy and the Heron

This post will include spoilers from Studio Ghibli's latest movie, The Boy and the Heron. I just saw it, and the hypnotizing underworld dreamscape that takes over the last two thirds of the movie is a wonderful source of inspiration for RPG's. Here are some interesting ideas you could use to inspire your campaign at home.

1. The dungeon is a timeless place.
   
   The dungeon stands outside space and time. Once you enter it, no matter when you went inside, you can meet anyone else who has ever entered. You may meet people who explored the dungeon a hundred years ago. Even people who are now long dead. You remember a story where your late mother went missing for a year when she was a child - it turns out, she fell into the dungeon. You can find her here again, as a young woman. 
   
   Once you return to the real world, you lose all your memories and return to your life. (It's probably a good idea to make the PC's special in some way that makes them exempt from this rule). The dungeon has stood for timeless aeons, so you can find different people from all throughout history within. 
   

Idea: A Foddian Megadungeon

You may have heard of "Foddian Games" like Getting Over It or Jump King (named after Bennet Foddy, the creator of Getting Over It). What makes these games unique is that they push you into situations where you have to risk losing all your progress and starting again from scratch. They are deliberately frustrating, but also very satisfying to master.

In Jump King, you leap upwards, propelled by rumours of a smokin' hot babe at the top. Each time you jump, you risk losing your progress and tumbling all the way back to the start of the game. As you leap higher, you meet ruined and broken men, their legs shattered. Seek not the babe, they tell you. She must be only an illusion. A hopeless fantasy. No man can make those jumps and live. 

One of the things that makes this interesting is the way it plays with risk and reward. You have safe areas that act like checkpoints. This area with the fireplace is one example. The floor is solid, so you won't lose your progress if you fall. Reaching this area is really satisfying, and this space feels safe and warm.

Then you get higher up and the game tempts you with this treasure.

If you want the coin this crow is carrying, you have to leap out of your safe zone, into the rain. You run the risk of falling way down, past your safe area, into the drain, losing a whole heap of progress. Can you take the risk? This creates a huge feeling of tension and danger.

So I wonder - could we make a fun Foddian dungeon?

The Tower Of Babel

The wretched fools tried to make a tower to reach God. Some even say they succeeded. Either way, they were struck down and scattered, turned into all manner of hideous beasts, their language split into many tongues so that they could never dare their hubris again. Now desperate men and heathens return to the ruins of that tower, seeking treasure - and perhaps even the fabled Door to Heaven. 

It's a vertical dungeon with a complete and total focus on traversing the environment. Your goal is to get as high as you can. The dungeon is all about climping the walls, swinging on the chandeliers, dangling from grappling hooks, balancing on the rafters, tiptoeing around rotten floors, finding ladders and ropes and secret passages that lead higher. Ultimate verticality. 

What's wrong with your dog?

1. It emits bursts of radioactivity at random.
2. It swears allegiance to no master but Belphegor, Lord of Hogs.
3. It sometimes no-clips into the walls and floor, jittering, whining, and looking at you in panic. You cannot help it.
4. It compulsively eats parts of itself which regrow overnight.
5. It knows everything there is about late 18th century moon-man architecture and constantly attempts to apply this knowledge in inapplicable situations.
6. It watches you at all times. Even as it eats, or fetches sticks, or attacks an enemy, its head is always contorted at an awkward angle to gaze only at you. It does not sleep.
7. Instead of barking, it just whispers the word "Bark". 
8. For reasons of its own, it is conditioning you to ring a bell every time you feed it.
9. In motion, it looks normal. When at rest, it loses it's internal consistency, slowly oozing and melting into a puddle until it moves again and re-solidifies. 
10. Whenever it's surprised it explodes into a dozen round miniature dogs that roll around barking helplessly, only reforming once it's calmed down. 
11. It stalks you online and creates dozens of sock-puppet accounts that bombard you with false perspectives, slowly warping your world-view to coincide with it's pro-dog agenda.
12. While you're at work it goes into the basement and excretes a noxious saliva that solidifies on contact with the air. It is slowly creating a coccoon. When it is complete, it will wait until you fall asleep and drag you inside.
13. It endlessly vomits up lost relics from the future and the past, then eats them again.
14. It has long conversations with your mother on the phone. She doesn't want to talk to you anymore. "Can you put the dog on?" They laugh about you behind your back. 
15. Flickering dog after-images follow it wherever it goes, like its form has been burned into your retinas.
16. When you look directly at it, you can't see it. You have to unfocus your vision or look at it out of the corners of your eyes.
17. It has lost a fortune of your money gambling on the stock exchange and swears it just needs a small loan to get back on top.
18. Its tail is long, thin, and pulsating. It connects the dog's body to something you can't see in the earth. When it opens its mouth, the barking comes from somewhere deep underground.
19. Every year another family members dies, and every year the dog digs up the graves and buries it somewhere underneath your house. The bone hoard grows. 
20. Whenever you try to warn someone about it, you can't get the words out. Instead, you find yourself talking endlessly about how much you love your dog. Your eyes look terrified, but your mouth says He Is A Good Boy. You notice the same frightened look in the eyes of your friends and family. Look At Him. What A Good Boy, they say. He Deserves A Treat, they say, as it slowly absorbs their hand.
    

Why play as kids?

Children are trapped in a set of rules they can't understand or control.

"Why do we have to move? All my friends are here." Well, because dad needs to switch jobs, because the company's downsizing, because profits are down, because the economy's fucked up, because the intricate invisible system that controls us all is shuddering and breaking.

Adults don't have much more knowledge or control, but we're tied into systems that we trust to understand things for us. We don't actually understand any of the crucial gadgets and systems that our lives depend on, but we can rely on the news, ads, other people to tell us that they're working fine. We can trust that everyone isn't lying to us.

Kids do not have this luxury.

Kids aren't smart enough to understand the Global Financial Crisis, but they are smart enough to know that you're lying to them about it. Inevitably, you'll lie to them. The truth is too complicated and terrible to explain, so you give them simple, clean lies until you think they've grown up. We teach them that 0 is the lowest number possible, then we reveal a hidden series of doppleganger numbers lurking underneath the system they thought was everything. A million small betrayals like this teach children that they are not being told the real rules.

So: Children don't understand the rules, can't control them, and they know everybody's lying to them about what the rules actually are. This creates a very specific and interesting mindset. Making a world that's a literal expression of an interesting mindset is a recipe for greatness. For instance, spy fiction has always presented a literal manifestation of a paranoid person's fantasies, a world where everyone really is out to get you.

In a million fairy tales, people are thrust into a world that works according to an intricate set of strange, often malevolent rules that are never clearly explained. This is the world kids live in every day, fishbowled around a child's perspective in the same way that spy fiction is fishbowled around paranoia. In the fairy tale, kids come to understand the rules, navigate them, and exploit them to their own ends. This is the heroic fantasy all children aspire to: attaining control and understanding over their lives.

Pan's labyrinth deliberately exploits the link to reality: The fairy-tale rules Ofelia has to follow directly symbolize the rigid laws of fascist Spain. In the real world her evil stepfather lectures on austerity measures. In the fairy tale world she is told not to take the food under any circumstances, for fear of the monster at the head of the table.

Here's a classic example, Vasilisa the Beautiful. Vasilisa finds something that works in a strange way: Skulls that glow with inner light. Like the badass she is, she rips off a skull and uses it to light her way through the forest. She has come into contact with a creepy rule, understood it, and used it to achieve her goals.

Of course, she still doesn't know what makes the skull glow. A kid may not be able to understand why their parents are fighting, but they can learn the patterns it runs by; what signs lead up to it, how to avoid it, and what usually happens afterward. In the mind of a kid, there's little difference between these rules and fairy-tale commandments like "Don't look behind you".

In comparison, Scooby-doo is the purest wish-fulfillment. Not only do you come to fully understand the hidden and terrible forces behind the world, you kick them into the light to be humiliated and destroyed. It's like punching the GFC in the face. Even here, though, there's some melancholy. There are no vampires, werewolves or ghosts. There's never any real magic or forces of evil. In the end, it's always just a bunch of assholes trying to make a quick buck.

Some Negadungeons

In my last post, I summarized the content theory. Simply put, many game reduce everything you can experience to "Content", which is meant to be consumed and reward you for consuming it. Designing a game-world to make the protagonist happy leads to games with a naive and solipsistic world-view that is often at odds with their serious stories. Here are some games that reject or oppose that.

Yume Nikki

You take control of a girl in her room. She can sleep, play video games, work at her desk, or go out to her balcony. She refuses to leave.

However, if you go to sleep, you enter a version of your room where you can open the door and walk out. If you do, you find yourself in an enormous mega-labyrinth of interlinked dream-worlds. The core sense of horror and surrealism in these dream-worlds comes from the feeling that they are not made for you.

The game is about wandering, lost, through enormous broken levels. Some force you to walk through giant black voids without landmarks. Others confuse you with cyclical layouts that loop endlessly. You might find the exit by walking between two stones, or interacting with a flower an odd number of times. There is the feeling that you've fallen through the map, into broken geometry you were never meant to cross.

There are many pieces of content that were clearly designed never to be found: Genuinely secret secrets. One monster has a 1 in 47 chance of being summoned whenever you flip a certain light switch. One door opens if you pass it three times, then turn back.

More thoughts here.

Earthbound

Earthbound was one of the first games to capitalize on the casual surrealism of JRPG's. It discovered a rich vein of weirdness that has since been mined by everything from Space Funeral to Anodyne. The quests are bizarre. Like in a dream, your reasons for doing anything dissolve when you try to explain them.

At first this dream-like atmosphere feels warm and charming. Slowly, though, over the course of hours and hours, you begin to get a sense of deep malice. It's not something you can put your finger on - most examples I can give will sound like trivial frustrations. But as you go on, the logic of the dream world slowly transforms into a nightmare that you feel trapped in.

At one point, you are suddenly transported to Moonside, a  inverted version of the town you're traveling through. The buildings glow neon, the inhabitants slur broken speech at you, and pieces of abstract art constantly attack you, even indoors. Being trapped there is nauseating; even worse is the way you have to follow the broken logic of the place to escape it. Internalizing it's crooked rules feels somehow corrupting.

The game suddenly and randomly transports you to a terrifying inverse world like this twice in a short space of time. The effect is a feeling that this darkness underlies everything, everywhere. Later, as you navigate the dream logic of another quest, you start to feel like you never really escaped Moonside. 

An exhausting dissection of Earthbound here.

The Path

There are flowers in the forest. A counter on your screen tells you how many you've collected, out of 144. If you collect all 144 flowers, absolutely nothing happens.

That is vicious. I can't defend it.

Spec Ops: The Line

The "Good Ending" of Spec Ops: The Line is to turn off the game. The longer you continue, the more you descend into increasingly horrific and unnecessary war crimes. The content you consume is repulsive: the combat itself is deliberately designed as an endless slog that slowly numbs you to all sensation. The game wonders aloud whether playing it is a morally questionable act: "To kill for entertainment is harmless," reassures one of the loading screen tips.

It largely exists for people who play Call of Duty without questioning its values. The game was marketed as a straight Military Shooter: The box offers no indication that it will slowly and surely become a nightmare. I can imagine that it reached a lot of COD-playing twelve year olds, who must have been traumatized to find their escapist killing suddenly become messy.

A 50,000 word long discussion of Spec Ops here.

Horror games in general

If a horror game is at all successful, you won't want to consume content. The genre expectations completely invert the philosophy of modern game design. As soon as you realize that a game is a horror, you expect that consuming content will not be traditionally enjoyable. You judge that the game has succeeded if you don't want to fight the monster or enter the new level. This means horror games are celebrated for things that would be seen as terrible game design anywhere else. Thank god they exist.

Silent Hill 4: The Room in particular

You wake up in your apartment. The door is locked: There's a hole in the wall that leads to a nightmare. You slowly explore this nightmare world, returning to your room as a safe place to rest and heal. At one point, someone offers you an item. You can take it, or refuse it. Obviously, you're going to take it - that's the way games work. Items are there to be picked up. 

If you do, a nightmare creature invades your room. Your safe place is violated. Nothing is sacred, nowhere is safe.

More on Silent Hill 4 in The Gamer's Quarter, issue 1, page 26. The magazine is now sadly defunct, and I can only find a download on that website. 

Dark Souls

I use this game as a modern stand-in for every classic RPG from fallout to the OSR way of running D&D. If you go to certain places, you will find monsters too terrible for you to fight. These places are not made for you: you are not welcome here. This feeling is temporary, of course: The games pretend that a place hasn't been designed for your benefit so that it feels all the more satisfying to come back when you're at the right level, and slot into your correct place.

The same feeling is captured in Metroidvania games. Classically, you'll have to jump around lava pits before unlocking lava-proof shoes. When you get that item, you've suddenly turned the world into something that's designed to be convenient for you. It's like turning a jungle into a department store with the flip of a switch.

More here.

Thief

The world is made for your enemies: You have to skulk around the edges of it, distort it to your own purposes, and penetrate it. 

More here.

So.

I worry that I haven't expressed this anti-content idea well, even after these two articles. It is, essentially, the idea that a game shouldn't make you happy: that the things in a game should not feel like they've been made for you; that the sickening feeling that you've done the wrong thing is just as valuable as a pat on the head. It's an advocation for games that are bewildering, broken, twisted and immoral. It stands alongside the philosophy of fun games, not against them. These ideas might be obvious, but they're important to the way I think about games. 

The insidious theory at the heart of games

The majority of modern game design is motivated by the Content Theory. That is:

"The goal of a game is to deliver entertaining content to players as smoothly as possible."

This basic assumption underlies everything about a certain philosophy, and it has some insidious implications if left unexamined.

I define content as everything that the player can experience. There's two types. You interact with  Gameplay content in order to achieve one of multiple outcomes. Based on that outcome, you unlock Reward content. This includes mechanics (A new spell, a shotgun), narrative (a cutscene), and art and sound (the enemy explodes in slow-motion with a satisfying "SPLURCH"). Content is entertaining if the player wants to keep experiencing it.

A game designer's job is to make sure the player experiences as much entertaining content as possible, and as little unsatisfying content as possible. To ensure this, content should be delivered smoothly, to make sure that the player is motivated to keep consuming it. Game designers strive to eliminate downtime, backtracking, and filler content. Losing is generally not entertaining content, so save systems minimize death and repetition. The game should be carefully designed to make sure no-one gets frustrated, lost, or confused, carefully guiding the player through either direct orders, physical walls, or subtle environmental cues. The ideal is that every playe experiences every piece of entertaining content. Addictiveness is the holy grail.

The direct effect of this theory: Everything is made for you. 

Obviously, the goal of almost every work in every medium is to make the audience glad they experienced it. The difference that comes with games is that the audience is also the protagonist. In a movie, comic, book or play, everything is made for a third party watching in from

 the outside. In a game, everything is made for the main character.

Everything you (the main character) can possibly do is content. That means everything you can do will be fun and rewarding, and you should do as much of it as you can. There are no secrets you're better off not knowing. No relationship will ever be bad for you.  There's no enemy that you shouldn't attack, no place you shouldn't go to, no goal that isn't worth achieving. You should kill every enemy, fuck anyone who's available, talk to anyone who'll talk back, make every promise they'll let you make and pick up everything they own when their back is turned. All these things are content, and the purpose of content is to be consumed and reward you for consuming it.

Geraldine Gamer travels to Death Mountain. The villagers at the base warn her that it's a terrible place that she should stay far away from. She knows they're full of shit: because it exists, it was put there for her entertainment. Now, a movie audience might well be entertained by seeing Geraldine become hopelessly lost and only barely escape with her life. In a game, because Death Mountain is made specifically for Geraldine herself, she knows it will be tailored to provide an entertaining experience for her personally.

They tell her it's a long and arduous journey up to the peak. She knows that the journey was tailor-made to offer a smooth, enjoyable experience to someone with her exact abilities. If she doesn't have a jump button, there will never be a need to jump. If getting up the mountain was long and arduous, the game would have failed to smoothly deliver content.

The villagers wail that all who enter come back broken and twisted. Geraldine knows that everything in the world exists to reward her personally. If she can enter Death Mountain, then it must be gameplay content, which means that she'll be rewarded for completing it. Including something that didn't exist to entertain and reward the player would be bad game design.

Thus, game designers must constantly bar your way with their left hand while waving "Come hither" with the right. The left hand tells you that the way is dangerous, that this enemy is too terrible to fight, that you're a crazy maverick who's breaking all the rules. The right hand reassures you that you're actually doing the right thing. That enemy was made to be killed by you. This is the way you're meant to go.  Keep going, you'll be fine - nothing can actually hurt you.*

Part 2: The alternatives.

*A piece of directors commentary on Half Life 2 muses on how hard it was to convince players to drive through a bunch of "KEEP OUT" signs on the side of a cliff.

Wanderlust

Just a scan of something I was working on a while ago. Maybe it'll inspire you.

Professor Quercus' Qorner

Some advice from one of my players, the wise Professor Quercus.

"Your problem is that you love us too much. You claim to be a PC killing maniac, but it's all talk."

"There's too many of you. I am weak. You all gang up on me."

"Of course we're going to fight you, we're spoiled children. You have to take a firm hand with children."

He's right. Conversely, I have some advice for players: Take off the black hats.

"Black Hat thinking" is criticism. Poking holes in an idea. Like, when I say "You open the door and a monster bursts out of the room!", someone who's got their black hat on asks "How did the monster get in there? What has it been eating? Why would it want to attack us?"

I don't know about you, but this happens to me all the time. I'm in creation mode, trying to make interesting stuff as quickly as possible in front of an audience, and my players are in problem solving mode, trying to find a way around my obstacles. I'm naturally going to leave a lot of gaps, and my players are naturally going to pick up on them.

If you can talk your way out of the plot hole, this might work out. Say: "Uh, the monster has a slave-race of tiny fungus-men that do nothing but bring it food all day." So now instead of a plot hole your players have an interesting thing to interact with, and your world is a little bit better.

No matter how you handle it, though, this always sucks away momentum in the same way that blocking does in improv theatre. When you critique like this you're taking energy away, not adding it. When the GM has to stop and think up an explanation, all the momentum he built up from that monster introduction disappears. Building up that momentum again is hard.

A GM is constantly giving energy to players by making stuff for them to break. For D&D to work, the players need to constantly give energy back. They do this by putting on funny voices, coming up with exciting plans, making jokes, and stabbing people in interesting ways. The best type of player gives out massive amounts of energy, to the DM and everyone else.

If you sit in the corner and don't add anything, then you're not giving the GM any energy - but you're not taking any, either, so it's sort of ok. If you wear the black hat, you're not adding anything, AND you're forcing the GM to spend more energy in making up more things. If you're wearing nothing but the black hat, then you're constantly sucking energy from the GM and giving out absolutely no energy of your own. This is the absolute worst kind of player.

There's a lot of writing out there on how to be a better GM, but not a lot on how to be a better player. If you're the kind of person who reads this blog you're probably already the raddest player possible, but I thought it was worth trying to articulate what kind of responsibility a player has.

Murder Simulators

I am designed to kill. My body is the product of thousands and thousands of years of humans killing things to survive.

The fact that I've never killed anything is a freakish abnormality. It's only possible because I was born in this recent time period in this small sector of humanity that can hire other people to kill things. Rebelling against my natural purpose like this is actually a massive problem. When I get stressed my body gets flooded with chemicals that are great for killing, but terrible for passing exams.


Games are about solving hypothetical problems, and the most common hypothetical situation is "What if you had to kill things to survive?" There's a lot of grumbling about this. People suggest opposing, peaceful hypothetical situations, like "What if you had to navigate emotional turmoil to survive?" or "What if you had to create stuff to survive?" There's a general feeling that we'll slowly outgrow our murder simulators, and move to pacifist games.


The problem is, I already live in a world where I have to navigate emotions and create things to survive. The point of a hypothetical situation is to explore something you can't in real life. I'm a weak, creative guy living in a civilized world that prizes pacifism and creation. That means the best possible hypothetical situation is to be a thug in a brutish dark age that prizes violence and destruction.


It helps that most of human history was a lot like that. Learn from history or be doomed to repeat it, right? Imagining myself killing a dragon, or doing it on a screen, doesn't bring me much closer to the billions of humans that had to kill things. But I can't imagine any hypothetical situation more compelling, more useful, and harder to experience in real life than killing for survival.