Monthly Archives: September 2017

Iron Fist Week Part 5: Knowing Yourself

Iron Fist, the 2017 Netflix series, is bad.

Let us, for now, set aside its issues as an adaptation of a source material.

Let us set aside its issues with racial contexts.

Let us set aside the choices it makes heedless of women and culture.

Let us set aside its poor editing and the practical work of cinematography.

Iron Fist is bad because more than anything else, it’s a series that doesn’t know what it is about.

I’ve touched on this in these articles. The fear of the costume and the style of the superhero. The way they hired someone who wasn’t good for the role in any way. The excuses, the endless excuses for why the show isn’t very good, the defensive posture that blames their failings on, amongst other things, a presidential election. The way the took a story about a martial artist returning home to right a dreadful wrong through violence against an old disabled man, and made it about conspiracy and zombies and another hero’s villains. Every single one of these decisions is a bad one and none of them are bad enough to stand on their own as a sign of what made the series break, none of them are this series’ fatal flaw.

But every single one of them could only show up if you, when presented with the series as it exists, had no idea what it was meant to be. The show doesn’t know why it missed or what it missed, because the show didn’t know what it was trying to even be in the first place. Say what you want about Luke Cage’s position on Blackness, it at least knew damn well it was a series about a Black superhero dealing with Black Street problems. The identity of Luke Cage permeates its very being.

Let us then speak of what I feel represents the central coda, the most important and vital flaw of the Iron Fist series and the way it handles its central premise, the characteristic that the series is literally named for.

What is the Iron Fist?

It is the power that Danny has, which the story… sort of doesn’t really explain. It’s just, he has the power of the Iron Fist, and he mostly uses it to punch through walls. It’s not used creatively or cleverly. It is power, a direct application of force, and Danny can’t use it constantly. There is no explanation as to why. At one point he heals Coleen, and then that’s it. The Fist is returned to being vaguely explained. Defenders elaborates on it, but it still is building on the foundations of Iron Fist, inheriting its flaws.

Some comics fans may be seething, shouting at their screens about how the comics handle it and yes, the comics handle it better and you are right, but that is not important. This is not a point of comparison, this is looking at the series and its own message.

When and how does the character use the power? What limits it? What provokes it? What, in this superheroic story, is the thing that sets the character apart from the greater population, and how do they access this power? What, more than anything else, is the Iron Fist about?

I’ve watched this series now, I’ve double checked, and the single common trait with Danny using the Iron Fist is Danny getting mad.

Danny gets angry, and the power comes to him. When the power is not available, it is because he has not gotten mad enough. There is no philosophy, no coda, not even the most rudimentary of koan. The story doesn’t frame the Iron Fist’s power as a result of study, or training, or an emotional centering, or being able to spend his time fighting or charging up or needing to summon the megazords or anything. It connects very directly. Anger In, Power Out.

That is the story this show thinks is interesting. That’s the central idea of this series. Danny needs to find things that make him angry enough to act, angry enough to draw on that power. That’s your story. It permeates. Danny is mad that he is being denied his billionaire status – not because he wants it, but because he’s being denied it. Danny has outbursts of anger, he hates his opponents, he steps to violence in his very first scene for no really good reason. Opposition to Danny deserves violence, because Danny uses violence, and violence is directly and only connected to anger.

This is this world’s Danny Rand. He is angry, not because of things he experienced, or internalised guilt. Not because of self-loathing or cruelty. I’d look at the subtext to work it out, but we don’t have to, because the story just flat-out tells you.

Danny doesn’t feel he has a place in the world, he feels like he doesn’t belong, like he needs something more in his life, a life that already features being an immortal god-fighting dragon-punching superhero billionaire. Danny was picked on a little bit as a kid, but he had loving parents who gave him everything, and even his father’s last words were that he loved him. Danny’s anger puts the loss of his family’s company on the same level as the loss of his parents at the same level as handcuffing him and so on, and it does not feel making his parents’ death an act he could be angry about is worthwhile.

There’s an attempt to represent his violence as like Coleen’s violence, as if the two share some emotional challenge, but it’s never explained because they don’t explain why Coleen is that way, because women don’t need backstories.

Danny’s anger is petulance at a void.

That’s not what the Iron Fist story really is about. That’s a stock character – it’s almost a cliche. Heck, it’s a Disney Princess at the most bland.

This, all of this, is what you get when your story doesn’t really know what it’s about. The people in the story talk about the trappings of kung fu – in a really orientalist way, of course – and about the idea of a business conspiracy or Rand enterprises or all these things, and there’s talk about centering Danny’s chi and connecting him to other stuff, but none of it connects, none of it really makes any sense because there’s no central throughline of the character, the idea of how you attain power, or how Danny relates to power and violence beyond get opposed, get angry, get power.

A final example, from the last episode.

In two scenes, back to back, Meachum forwards that he can do whatever he wants, because he has money. Cut. A different scene. Jill informs Danny that he can’t do whatever he wants, because he has money, meaning his actions will be observed. It literally uses the same funds to represent that Danny is unable to do things, and that Meachum can do anything.

This is a series that doesn’t know what it’s about, and doesn’t know what matters to it. What follows then is things cast down, to land near one another, in the shape of a narrative, ultimately hollow, ultimately meaningless.

There’s a sad irony here in that one of the most basic, well known pieces of actual historical philosophy quotes, a quote you can find on coffee mugs for executives, would help avoid this problem.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
Sun Tzu’s, The Art of War

Surely even the kind of dinks who wrote this Danny Rand would know that one.

Iron Fist Week Part 4: Doing Poorly Poorly

Iron Fist is bad at doing all the things it wants to do.

We’ve talked in the process about things that will make your storytelling better. We’ve talked about looking at issues in structural ways, and we’ve talked about invigorating characters with character rather than as instruments for the story. We haven’t really dealt with specific, individualised incidents of hecking up execution. And this is a series that hecks up the execution a lot.

The Opening

Hey, remember this dark dynamic? This black arcing?

Why is this here?

Do you see this in the series at all? Does it tie into the colour dynamics of the rest of the series? Can you think of any time that the series does anything that looks like this? Danny has a clear colour dynamic of bright yellow, but dark black never really shows up to contrast with it like in this opening.

This is a visual motif that the show literally never uses except in its opening. In Daredevil, the colour scheme of the opening is a signifier; you see the red in Daredevil’s outfit, in Elektra’s outfit, in background colours and lighting and shots and it’s also a motif of the bloodstains and damage you see on Matt. Luke Cage uses yellow to indicate street signs, and imbalances (like yellow tinted windows, gold of crowns, the warm light of the club looking down on the patrons).

By contrast, Danny gets a yellow fist and that’s it. The Defenders builds on his colour scheme, of course, putting him in green light that helps to contrast him to Matt, while also suggesting a commonality in his space between Luke and Jessica, but in this opening, in this first impression, what is there of Danny that exists. What works?

Nothing.

Also, because this character is both animated and obscured, they can show that character doing a bunch of extremely cool things, as if he had, perhaps, mastered some martial arts, martial arts that let them do something like attain the powers of the Immortal Iron Fist. I hope you’re not attached to this sort of acrobatic motion with lines of energy like this, though, because you’re never going to see it.

The Chi Focus

If you go back and rewatch the first episodes like I did, because I dunno, I make bad life choices, you might remember there was this recurrent visual theme they tried to use for Danny to focus his chi. Lots of vertical lines, blurring and shifting over the film. Remember that? Danny’s inability to focus his chi is an early story beat that fades away, and with it, the effect. It’s not used later to represent when he’s out of focus with his chi despite the fact that his chi is out of whack is used as a story beat.

Remember? It was a whole thing? It was after Danny healed Coleen with Bakuto’s help and – oh, okay, Remember how Danny healed Coleen in the middle of the series? Remember that now he has the ability to do Amazing Healing Moves and he just… doesn’t do it again?

I bring this up because these are examples of rudimentary execution error. If you introduce a power in the second act of a story it should matter, in some way, by the end of the story. If you’re going to introduce a visual aesthetic to a problem, use that visual aesthetic again when you use that problem a second or third time.

In this, the healing is a doorway the story stepped through and forgot when they move on.

As a game, you can probably ask ‘remember when this happened’ about a lot of things in this series and watch people fail tell if you’re making it up or not, because there’s a lot of forgettable stuff here. There’s a reason we talk about repetition and patterns and structure in storytelling: These things make it easier – or possible – for the things you do to remain in people’s minds. It’s like telling a joke. You can’t just state a punchline – without a setup, it’s just a weird interjection pineapple.

Iron Fist’s central plot is mostly made up of about six or seven really short story beats, and the rest, because it is not anchored, it does not reside in the memory, is just… lost. It’s not just bad storytelling – it means much of this story is boring.

The Cu-Cu-Cu-Cu-Cu-Cuts And Edits

The fights in Iron Fist with one exception suck.

The excuse for this style of combat choppiness, with these super-short edits, is that it’s done to obscure the fact that half of the people in this scene can’t fight. Not in the style of the Iron Fist comics, not in the style of this series. Hell, not even in the style of Daredevil, the nearest approximate.

Now, this gets held up as an example of bad editing and I’d say it’s almost the opposite. The editor here clearly did a lot of work to try and turn pillowfist douchebeard into the person who was throwing punches. The editor can only work with what they’re given, and here, they’re given 56 individual components that they had to stitch together to fill 35 seconds. I give the benefit of the doubt, where I think this editor was using as much as they could of each shot, because editing is very hard.

With that, it means this bad scene’s fault falls on the person making decisions, and that means yeah, the director had to direct the fight coordinators and choreographers and camera people and the set managers. Some of these shots require cameras to be in places the characters physically are, meaning this was shot multiple times over.

There is nothing wrong with having Danny have a fight in this space, or even a fight with a bunch of cuts in it. But this way of doing it is bad, and has bad effects. It also gets to be easily held up as an example of a problem. It’s frantic and sloppy.

This is an example of an execution error, and not just stuff like the Line of Action that even a clueless donk like me knows about. I’m not a camera guy! I’m not a cinema guy! If I can look at this and say ‘whoah this is shit’ imagine what it’s like for editors and cinematographers and critics of that form! Imagine how it looks to them!

Oh and by the way, Finn, know what’s a great way to obscure when you change a shot from stunt double to lead actor?

A mask.

Like the Iron Fist wears.

Like he’s meant to wear.

LIKE A SUPERHERO SHOW WOULD USE.

Part 5: Knowing Yourself

MTG: GR Madness

Magic: The Gathering is a game which at its root has a sort of culture built straight into the game’s mechanics, with five distinct flavours of play execution forming the centerpiece of the game’s style and mechanics. Players introduced to the game will almost always have something to say about how they relate to the colours based on first impressions, and the flavour of the colour pie represents a truly excellent, trope-level structure for not just game design but wholesale story design. People may not even consciously think of it, but the colour wheel lets them choose how they want to play the game, it gives them strategic insight into how others play the game, and it lets them talk about characters and mechanics with the same fluid ease.

The colour pie is great.

A thing that still surprises me, then, given my deep affinity for them, is how rarely I wind up playing green and red together.

Continue Reading →

Iron Fist Week Part 3: Fantasy That Mocks Reality

Let’s talk about choices.

There are some writers out there, and yes, I might mean you (and if I do mean you, I am judging you), who regard the story that they are writing as a wild creature that wanders and runs as it goes, and you, the author, are helpless to do anything but document it as the tiger whose tail they hold goes where it will. Which is to say, these people will blame the story for the choices they make about what to put in it. Which is to say, these people are cowards who don’t want to own up to the things they want to put in their story, the things they choose to do.

Choices like, for example, punching a woman in the face for no good reason, and treating an entire school of Asian martial philosophy like it’s a cereal box top. These are problems you can fix, if you acknowledge they are things you are choosing to do, and if you think about what you’re doing; they’re much harder to deal with if you pretend they sort of just magically slithered into the story themselves.

Does K’un-L’un Exist?

In Iron Fist Danny and Coleen talk about the philosophies of their martial studies. It’s a conversation that we see in small, clipped ways. He uses her sword in a way that’s kind of insulting, and the pair spar back and forth about the ideology of their worldviews. She cites this, he cites that. He demonstrates his superiority over her with physical force, imposition of his hand and body, while they discuss, her ideas being presented as tested against the ideas of his way, his way that seems to be winning all the encounters. Her ancient philosophy she learned from her family vs his ancient philosophy he learned from K’un-L’un.

Here’s the problem: K’un-L’un doesn’t exist.

The philosophies of Japanese martial arts are real things with real histories. Danny is talking made up D&D sourcebook bullshit, which is patched together with that special kind of ‘I just heard of this’ problem, things like travelling to a dojo to meet with a sensei to gain their respect as if that’s a practice everyone should know about despite it being a trend from one very specific period of Japanese history. Things like his disdain of shoes, his (unconsciously?) racist language when talking to the students, these are all covered under the heading of being ‘like K’un-L’un.’ Danny acts this way, and it is forgiveable in how it makes the character look in a world that is like our own, because Danny is from K’un-L’un.

But the problem is, again, that K’un-L’un doesn’t exist.

This is a worldbuilding point, this is about making the things you create in a universe feel like they matter, and showing them in contrast to things we know matter. It’s why heroes punch bricks to show how strong they are.

This story wants to juxtapose one culture it doesn’t really seem to understand or respect with a culture it invented. They chose to compare K’un-L’un’s ideals with Coleen’s and then present K’un-L’un as superior. It could have been a non-confrontational relationship; they could have spoken of old teachers together, of connecting to mysterious masters that don’t exist because of Coleen’s association with the Hand. Instead, they made this choice.

And again, K’un-Lun doesn’t exist.

That Time Danny Punched A Pliable Woman In The Face

This example’s been discussed elsewhere but let’s talk about Season 1, Episode 6; Immortal Emerges From Cave. It’s a tournament episode (that’s not a tournament, because Danny just has to fight everyone). That’s where we meet the Bride Of Nine Spiders.

Remember our Daredevil conversation? Here’s the short list of signals that a character isn’t a character but is instead an object.

  • Instrumentality: Does this character exist to explain something about the story?
  • Agency: Does the character have the capacity to make choices for themself?
  • Ownership: Is this character owned by someone else? Do they exist without that character?
  • Fungibility: Is the character interchangeable with other such characters?
  • Violability: Can you visit violence on this character without moral question?
  • Subjectivity: Does the character have a subjective perspective? Their own views, their own desires or values?

The character is not fungible – she’s got a standout design that contrasts with the rest of the Hand. Also, she’s a woman while they’re mostly represented by men. You can maybe read something into her introductory shot suggesting she’s a poison researcher… but you’d have to do a lot of work to claim that’s subjectivity or violability. Beyond that? She gets the whole list. Note that there’s nothing wrong with having a character be an object in your story, objects are useful tools to move things along. There sure is a problem with, for example, having a lot of characters who are just objects, especially if all those characters share a racial grouping.

The Sexually Dangerous Exoticised Woman is a trope so old it’s literally gathering dust, and she’s an Exotically Sexy Acupuncture Spider Lady, which is …Not A Good Look. I’m not against spiders, or sexiness, or associating spiders with sexiness; No, the concern is that The Bride of Nine Spiders isn’t presented as anything but that. There is no question of why she does things, or how she does things. She simply is.

For instrumentality, she does a bunch of stuff that makes no sense when considered as her actions to achieve her ends, and once she fills her role in the story she’s gone. Hypothetically her purpose is to defeat the Iron Fist. What we see is a sequence where she enables and explains things about Danny to the audience, things that the story has not shown to the audience. Somehow, we’re told, the Bride of Nine Spiders knows what Danny really wants, what he really is.

How is she supposed to know?

Why does she try seducing him after poisoning him? Why does she put herself in unnecessary danger? If she can close with him and pin him, why not just poison him more? If she had her own identity, her own personality, you could use that as your reason, but the scene doesn’t do anything to do that. The Bride of Nine Spiders is a tool Iron Fist uses to fill time in the story, to state some things about Danny, and then she needs to be dealt with so the story can proceed.

That’s why we get a full shot of Danny backhanding a pretty Asian lady who’s pressing up against him. It literally takes a beat to show us, oh hey look at Danny punching this woman who was flirting with him in the face.

Now remember: This is not a scene from the comics. This isn’t something in the actress’ contract. This is something they chose to show.

Why.

Who failed to think about this scene twice?

Part 4: Doing Poorly Poorly

Game Pile: Prey

Prey is an immersive sim game, an Arkane game of that mould that echoes System Shock and Dishonored. They’re first-person not-shooters, games that we’ve had a hard time giving a genre name to in these past few whens. Back when they were new they were another type of RPG, in the vein of Ultima Underworld, but as engines improved and the games moved with them, they’ve existed in the shadowy space alongside your more combat-oriented first-person shooters. This legacy, which Campster has covered over on his channel, has its latest incarnation here in Prey.Continue Reading →

Iron Fist Week Part 2: The Whiteness Of Danny Rand

Why’s Danny white?

We talked about how the truth of the comics is nonsense – they threw out everything in the comics that matters to the origin and structure of Danny. They didn’t even tell a superhero  story with him. They made a Daredevil knockoff, complete with giving Danny one of Daredevil’s villains to oppose.

Why then, is he white? The answer lies at the bottom of this post, but before we go there, a fold, and a conversation about what Danny should have been, in my opinion.

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Iron Fist Week Part 1: True To The Comics

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
  Leo Tolstoy

While I’ve had things to say about Daredevil and Luke Cage, those works were largely mixed, fairly robust and reasonably whole things, things that worked. They were series that were not great, but were good enough and were mostly remarkable in the ways they could be better. They were, as it were, happy families: they were similar. Even outlining their failures was mostly best left to small, short summaries.

Iron Fist, however, is an unhappy family, and it is unhappy indeed.

Rather than try and hammer together every complaint there is about Iron Fist into one mega-essay, which, let’s not kid ourselves, it’d be a rant, lose focus, and it’d need to be a dozen things all at once. Instead, then:

WELCOME TO IRON FIST WEEK!

Oh and I’m gunna spoil the heck out of stuff.

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Luke Cage

First of all, I am legitimately not, in any way, an expert on the greater contextual and cultural significance of Luke Cage, the series, as it pertains to blackness in America. I am no expert, nor am I even in a position to be an expert. If you’d like to read a take about blackness in Luke Cage and its first four episodes, check out these pieces on Women Write About Comics: They are better informed and better aware than anything I have to say. They do touch on something that I see in the other Marvel series, but we’ll get onto that when we get there.

I’m not only not black, I’m not only not black but in a culture that has dominated and oppressed black people. I’m not only not black and part of a culture that dominated and oppressed black people, I’m not even in the right culture that’s dominated and oppressed the black people that Luke Cage is all about. I am, simply put, nobody on that topic. Go read those posts, they taught me stuff, and crystallised some realisations. I do not think Luke Cage is a work that should be looked to as an example of How To Write Blackness.

As best I can see, Luke Cage is a work of media that wants its blackness to be palatable to whiteness and is willing to simplify things to do that. I don’t hold it against anyone in the show on that front, I just see that as a byproduct of being made by businesses that ultimately don’t want to piss off white people too much. Yet, that’s not a perspective I’d have come to on my own.

Nonetheless, no work is a single expression; while the greater throughline and message of Luke Cage can ring hollow, while it is a show that has as said, forgotten the face of its father there are still things, I’d say smaller things, in this series that I think are good ideas, good things for storytellers to reach out and learn from. Telling stories is hard, telling great stories is incredibly hard – you take whatever tools you can get from whatever source you can get ’em.

However, that stuff is more… fiddly. So let’s put it after a jump.


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Bad Balance: Paralysing Potential

Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 was absolute nonsense balance-wise, but it was remarkable because it was imbalanced in a whole variety of different ways that are good object lessons for designers to take on board when making your own RPG content.  So, rather than one huge master-post explaining it, here’s one example:

Paralysing Potential

Did you play a spellcaster back in 3.5? Did you play a Cleric? A Druid? A Wizard? God help you, did you play an Archivist?

The 3.5 spell list is an absolute swamp of bullshit, a completely festering mire of options that include procedurally generated X damage over Y area with Z range math-up messes that really form the basis for what you can probably handle, balance wise,  to spells which are unimpressive with one basic form, and totally busted if you think about them innovatively, spells designed to be worse versions of the former, multiple spells designed to fill the same space by designers working on different books, grandfathered together, spells designed to duplicate other spells just with a different flavour to try and keep the spell schools reasonably balanced, then some complete out-of-context nonsense that didn’t have any combat-or-existing mechanical application but suddenly changed the context of how combat even happened. Feel tired at the end of that sentence? Good, because it’s worse than that.

Spellcasters 3.5 were broken and it was easy to get a modest amount of broken just by paying attention to a few exploitable spells, but if you wanted to go deep, if you were the kind of player who was willing to marinate deep in the dank shit of supplemental sourcebooks or even just read through the ramifications of everything in the player’s handbook, if you were the person who bothered to use Scribe Scroll and stockpile every level 1 spell you didn’t wind up using in any given day until you had literally a library of the dang things, then you knew how broad, how busted, and how blinding your potential was.

There’s no surprise that players – despite the weakness – really appreciated Sorcerers. All sorcerers needed to know was a small handful of useful spells, rather than try to learn all of the spells present in the entire danging game.

The way I coped with it, myself, was to opt away from the full-bore spellcasters. My few times playing Cleric or Druid were times that DMs quickly started nerfing things on the fly. If you instead limited yourself to doing a smaller handful of things really well, you might be less powerful, but you’ll at least be able to make a choice on your turn without ever being stymied by the thousands of things you could do. Levelling up and building your character was still a long, agonising process, but at least that concentrated the wait.

These older editions would sometimes present you with complicated puzzles in the form of a combat arena and expect you to answer that question with a spell template; a line, a point, a single target, a circular template or maybe a chain. But then, the Wizard didn’t have to do that, they could answer it by teleporting away, by charming something, by becoming invisible, by summoning thirty tons of stone directly above the enemy, by becoming something else, by making someone else into something else, and all of these options were presented to you.

Now it’s your turn.

Pick something.

Go go go.

Ixalan In Review

Ixalan has now been fully spoiled! New cards! New deck potential! Things!

As always, I’m only going to really focus on the things I want to talk about and that means most cards get ignored because so what. The majority of cards are for people who aren’t me, like all the limited cards.

I’ll be looking at cards in terms of if I want to play with it or get a set or copy of them, and that means cards that I can see using in a multiple different decks or in one deck a few different ways, or, crucially, cards I expect will be pretty cheap.

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Robin Hood’s Canon

Robin Hood was one of those few story sources that could slip through the cracks of our tight ideological filter and land in my personal space as a kid. Disney’s Robin Hood was acceptable, for example, or old golden-book tellings of the stories of the man. There were anthologies and retellings and, of course, dozens of Christian versions of the same basic idea of a good person doing good in the woods dealing with an oppressing, wicked government, often with a queer-coded mincing villain.

Now imagine that you’re doing this from the perspective of a kid who mostly knows Biblical scholarship and doesn’t actually know that movies and TV shows are made by people, that they are stories. I actually thought for the longest time literally every single song was a literal, real experience of the person who had written it, that there was always an origin story for everything that was created.

Yes, that is weird.

The thing that I never quite put my finger on was what the story of Robin Hood actually was. I mean, we all know there are story beats about where the story ends up, and enough of things showed up in two or three of these overlapping stories that I knew there had to be something to it, but these things actually worked to reinforce in my mind that Robin Hood really existed. After all, there were all these stories about him splitting an arrow during a competition – they couldn’t all have made that up, right? It’d be impossible for them to all make it up and get the details so similar.

I guess what I’m saying is Biblical scholarship is a really silly version of media scholarship.

The funniest part of all this is that even now, thinking back on it… I still feel like the version of Robin Hood where he’s an actual fox is probably the truest one of the lot?

Game Pile: Diablo III

I have had Diablo III for some years now – years! – and literally never played it after the initial release. A friend bought it for me, a beloved friend, a dear friend, and it was a birthday gift, a special edition with fancy extra bits and all sorts of wonderful, wonderful intentions behind it, and I just didn’t play it. I didn’t play it because it didn’t feel like Diablo 2 to me, it didn’t have my Druid, it didn’t work. Also there’s few things as irritating as playing alongside people who Care A Great Deal about doing things in a particular way that you don’t really mind or care about.

Well, this week – well, not this week, a few weeks ago because I write in advance but the magic of scheduling – I randomly got a hair to try it out. I don’t honestly know why – perhaps someone mentioned it to me or I overheard something about the necromancer class or whatever. Whatever. I went down to the devil’s larder and I busted out some magnificently stinky Blizzard cheese.

Let’s see how it tastes.Continue Reading →

Rules Glue!

This started out as at first, a treatment of the evolution of the rules of Psionics in dungeons and dragons from its inception through to its incarnation in 4th edition, with an eye towards showing how you can respond to mechanical restructures, but it quickly became clear to me that that was both too huge an undertaking and also one I wasn’t all that qualified for. See, I can tell you about 3.5 and 3.0 D&D psionics, and I can tell you about 4ed Psionics, because I was there, I played with them, and I enjoyed and loved them at the time.

I can talk about how 2ed psionics were broken (sort of) because the mechanics of 2ed were broken (sort of). Thing is, that will be always the dissection of an outsider, someone who misses rules as written or worse, misses rules as experienced. Nobody is under any illusion that tabletop games aren’t done with some sort of rules fiddling around.

Thing is, as broken as some things are in a roleplaying game, you don’t actually test large groups of characters against one another. You test small parties against those same small parties, and against the challenges presented to them. It’s easy for me, a player, to recognise shortcomings between two spells, but fixing the weak spells might not be as high a priority as making sure the overall structure of a game is okay. D&D is a rare example in that we have a lot – a lot – of it to work from and that huge volume means we can hold up a lot of examples to be tested against one another.

What happens to make this stuff work though is, at the table, a person communicates the rules to another person. Then, people trust one another to make their rules work out reasonably okay. And that’s why it’s important to make your rules human interpretable. If you have rules that a human can feel comfortable explaining to another human, even if they explain them a bit wrong, things can still work because a human is involved.

Still gunna do a bit on 4e Psionics, mind you.

Steam Cleaning!

I’m trying to go through my unplayed games. It seems a bit of a waste of the time and effort of the people who made the games, then of the time and effort of the people who gave them to me. However, what does it mean to mark a game as done?

There are a few games I picked up or wishlisted because they were cheap. Some, I played a little bit, then decided maybe I’d try them another time, and it wasn’t until months later I deleted them to save space on my hard drive.

It’s not a problem. Not really.

Now I have a simple thing; if I’m done playing a game and feel no desire to come back to play it, it’s done. It’s completed. This may mean some games aren’t great returns on investment, but that’s okay, too. Some games I may play only long enough to learn I don’t want them

But at the same time, it is introducing me to a host of reasons to discard games. For example, I have Bioshock and Bioshock Remastered. I don’t have any interest in revisiting it, so that’s a matter of shuffling the game out of the main library. Some games I played for twenty-five minutes, and didn’t feel compelled to come back. That’s okay. Part of what a game wants to do is get you to play it – and if it doesn’t do that job, then it doesn’t do that job.

We need to be okay with not playing games. We need to be okay with having made small mistakes – I bought this thing I wound up not wanting. I’m not saying it’s not a mistake to occasionally buy things you don’t really want, because of sales or opportunity. But I am saying that it’s worth our while, generally, to be okay with once a mistake is made, that mistake being made.

There’s this line from the original Robinson Crusoe: To be in trouble troubled, is to have your trouble doubled. I think about it a lot: The idea that we can make our problems worse by chasing ourselves around in mental circles. That part of solving our problems is to stop punishing ourselves for having made them in the first place.

Daredevil — Season 2: This Got Silly

Season 1 of Daredevil was a fairly tight, coherent narrative that had a great big mystery to establish, and a story point it wanted to build to. There was the twin arcs together of Wilson Fisk ascending to his status as the Kingpin, and Matt Murdock becoming the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. Good work, rounded well, mesh ’em together and you have a solid structure to fill in with incidents and plans and ideas and stuff.

Season 2 did not have any such singular narrative and instead spent all its energy on world-building and narrative construction that was going to matter later. It wanted you to know about Elektra, about Frank Castle, and about yes, finalising the book-keeping of the ascent of Wilson Fisk. There was also some attempt to make the Hand more prominent, to put Madame Gao in position, and to tie up and resolve the question of Nobu, as a character.

What you get as a result is a TV series that has a lot to get done, but almost nothing to say. Instead, the show tries to give you a whirlwind tour of important things while giving you almost nothing to make them hold together?

As with last time, no plot synopsis; no episode by episode rundown. What I’m going to talk about are things the series tried to do, to give you both a potentially interesting insight into the series, maybe a hit of media analysis, or just a way to continue experiencing something you already like. I guess you could also frame this as is there stuff in this that’s enjoyable, if I bother to think about it?

So, content warning about the violence and child death in the series and also spoilers after this cut.

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The Fundamental Superpower

More than anything else, invulnerability is the centerpiece of the superhero genre.

There are characters who can fight other people, characters who can beat opponents, characters who can shoot opponents, characters who can talk others down, plan things around them, characters who can present lethal force and characters who can present nonlethal force, but when there is a character – a heroic character – who walks through what the enemies do, unharmed, when they do not need to fear the people who can do all the others, that is the genesis of the story space that goes towards superheroes.

And what’s more, that invulnerability creates a new moral impetus. Suddenly, when a character is safe, when a character is beyond harm, there becomes a question of what to do with that personal safety? How many stories are about characters who are functionally immune to harm who idle around and boredly don’t do things?

This is one of those things Luke Cage does that I really love. There’s one scene, just the first scene where we’re shown his invulnerability, in action, in practice, and watching the physics-defying nonsense of two people trying to punch and hurt Luke and the action slows and stops and suddenly you just revel in the moment of our protagonist being utterly unhurt.

MTG: Examining A Possible UB Keyword

Hey, WOTC employees! As much as I want you to read my stuff, in the hopes you wind up hiring me to write for your sites like the Mothership and whatnot I have to ask you to not read this one because I’m talking about amateur designs and new mechanics. After the fold, we’re going to discuss The Empty Space For A Blue-Black Combat Keyword.

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Bad Balance: Accidentally Overpowered

Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 was absolute nonsense balance-wise, but it was remarkable because it was imbalanced in a whole variety of different ways that are good object lessons.  So, rather than one huge master-post explaining it, here’s one example:

The Accidentally Overpowered

If you played D&D3.5 and you were into it, you knew you could spend hours working on a character, combing through dozens of races and classes and prestige classes, and even if you weren’t going to scrape through everything to milk every single possible advantage, it was still not uncommon to see builds like Wizard 5/Really Strong Wizard Prestige Class 10/Archmage 5.

That, however, is something you work for, something that comes at the result of a lot of system mastery, and, speaking as someone who had a lot of that mastery and really loved it, it was nice. It was good. I liked that. I don’t even feel that that was, itself a problem (though we’ll get to that).

The problem that cropped up in 3.5, and you could see it happen in people’s stories of their games and problems adjudicating how characters work, in that some characters could, completely accidentally, be utterly honking busted, and those characters could be wildly out of whack with their friends and party members without ever trying to be. If your party featured a composition of a fairly boring Fighter, Cleric, Rogue and Sorcerer, one of those four characters is absolutely in a league of their own compared to the others, and as players play, it’s going to come out and get noticed.

Or what about an arrangement like Ranger, Druid, Barbarian and Wizard? The barbarian is better than Ranger, the wizard is better than both and the Druid has a single class feature that’s better than the Ranger.

The issue isn’t that a player could work to be broken, the issue is that players could accidentally be so good that other people would completely replace another character in the party, and if anyone noticed, it was just straight up feels-bad territory. It was really obvious – and it got worse as people levelled up and you had more room, more opportunities to make mistakes! What makes it even worse still is if players went and did stuff that was redundant! Fighter, Ranger and Barbarian were all the most easily grasped, handleable classes, and if a party has two of them, one of them was going to notice the gap!

Well, if they looked.

So you had to hope they didn’t look.

That’s not a good solution to the problem.

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Game Pile: Stories Untold

Now this wasn’t something I expected; a really good limited-interface horror game.

Stories Untold is a game that positions itself as firmly being about the 1980s, but about the technology of that era. It also relies on a creeping, uncomfortable sense of horror, a sense of unease that builds. You have to know that it’s going some place bad, but the knowing ahead of time doesn’t alleviate the tension, and the game does its best to put you under pressure by tugging your focus in multiple directions.

That said, this is a horror game, and it does deal with interface problems, feelings of isolation, confusion and memory checking across difficult, uncomfortable designs. I cannot remember anything I’d call a jump scare, but the game is definitely creepy, and there’s a point where lightning flashes and startles you.

If you want to experience the game in as pure a state as possible, and simply know whether or not I think it’s good or recommend it, then this is where you want to check out. The game is available at Humble, Good Old Games, and Steam, it is very good, and it is cheap enough that if you give it a shot and don’t like it, you’re not losing much.

Still here? Let’s talk about interface.Continue Reading →

The Laziness of A Ghost

Over on Patreon, friend of the blog and Viking Accountant Doc Destructo wrote a recent article on Asshole DNA, a series that seeks to study the way a game can leave you with a certain insight into the person who made it who’s a dickhead. He, naturally, started with Watch_Dogs.

Now I’ve spoken in the past about the Ghost of the Author, which is really just an extension of Barthes’ original idea, the Death of the Author. The notion is that there is no singular, pure entity that is the author, and therefore, the person who may think of themselves as the creator is gone and it falls to us to try and interpret who and what they do. In videogames, I argue, it’s not even possible to call that creature the author – they are the ghost of an author, a creature that came about because so much of the creative process of videogame development is

Now I want to highlight something in Doc’s piece:

This phrase he uses, this is lazy gamedev. And then he goes on to qualify how it’s not you know, laziness, but this is defintiely laziness. In this case I kind of want to chime in and note that there is a laziness here, just not the laziness of lack of energy or work. Rather, it is the laziness that reflects a lack of thoroughness.

The thing with laziness in videogames is that it’s sort of impossible to be actually lazy when you’re in this industry. Everyone is working long hours for lots of work and even the person whose work is vanishing down a hole isn’t actually being lazy – they’re just having their effort wasted by other, mistakenly made management practices.

If the ghost of an author is the collected information, behaviour and effort of the entire crew making it, this person can view the allocation of resources as effort. That is to say, while there is no actual laziness from any individual in the organisation, it can be said that having the opportunity to spend resources on a particular field of the game’s development and choosing not to, especially if those resources are being spent in a way that leaves large, unpleasant gaps in the work’s sense of reality.

Nobody on this dev team was lazy. But the author, this ghost of an author, chose to not allocate energy and effort to making sure this world’s gangs and its image of race and racism in Chicago were meaningfully well-thought out. They were done as simply as possible, using shorthand, using a general, broad method that didn’t involve spending more resources on second drafts or rewrites or double-checking narratives or implications or sensitivity testing.

No developer, writer, individual worker, creating this vast project was lazy. But the author of this work was lazy.

What Is: Skulk!?

Do you find at times, when the burdens of a normal day-to-day job have got you down, when you’re after a change of pace, that what you really need in your life is to go to a Dragon’s den, and plunder the dragon’s gold coins? And don’t you know, like, isn’t it just such a thing that when you do it, there’s other thieves who are here to get your haul out of your dragon that you did all the hard work of not actually earning?

Sucks, right?

Well, now you can share that experience with those friends of yours too frightened to actually go spelunking in a dragon’s domain! Skulk is a board game of moving fast and dying rich as, you know, as the box cover indicates!

Each turn, you’ll play a card that indicates three things – how much you’re doing, how quickly you do it, and when the dragon stirs from its slumber and starts acting! You can act carefully, a little at a time, and try to make sure you and the dragon are always away from one another – or you can dive for a big handful of gold and what are the odds the dragon comes after you?

Oh wait, it’s pretty good because when it’s not your turn, the dragon is controlled by the other players!

With art and visuals by Talen Lee and Alex Zandra, Skulk handles 2-6 players of age 8+, for roughly 30 minutes of play time, it’s fast to set up, easy to learn, and incredibly portable, shipping in an itty bitty box that’s the size of two playing cards side to side (and like, deeper than that) so you can just huck it into your bag and go go go, a good shelf-filler, a great small gift for, I dunno, Thanksgiving or Halloween, and as far as I know is one of the few games where a granny can gleefully trip over a whippersnapper so that they’re eaten by a dragon that leaves behind gigantic swampy gas clouds when it moves!

You can buy Skulk at TheGameCrafter for $28.99, which is less than you’d pay for an actual dragon, and it’s much easier to home!

Daredevil — Season 1: Arcs In Red

With the Defenders arriving, I wanted to take some time to walk back through the Marvel series that made it up and see what I really felt about these things. I really like having access to some binge media I can have running alongside other tedious tasks like data entry or design management.

The arc of these series to me start with Jessica Jones, then Daredevil, Luke Cage and Iron Fist. I watched one episode of Jessica Jones and immediately checked out. Maybe I’ll go back to it if Defenders gives me a stronger anchor to the character. What that means is that the first Netflix hero I really watched, and thought about was the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, Matt Murdock himself.

You’re not going to see plot synopsese here, or rundowns episode by episode. That’s for other people to do and do better than me. What we’re doing here is a conversation about what the series tried to do, what the story was about, and things about how the story lingered in my memory after it got made.

I’m personally of the opinion that when you talk about ‘themes’ and ‘concepts’ in a work you might be seeing something the work does that wasn’t necessarily put there by the people making it. That’s fine: That’s its own conversation for later, but the basic gist is that whether or not it was put there, if I can find it and justify it, it is still there enough. We all bring our interpretations to the work, and what we find satisfying or interesting matters to us.

There will be content warning about the violence and child abuse in the series, a brief attempt by a person without autism discussing something of autism, and also spoilers after this cut, so here, we, go!Continue Reading →

Thing I like: QWERPline!

I listen to a bunch of podcasts and watch a lot of video media, and for some reason I’ve just wound up being a big fan of stuff from Canada. One thing I really like from Canada is this, Qwerpline, a surreal deep-cover comedy podcast about the local radio broadcast from Scenic Nsburg!

It’s hard to explain what Qwerpline is without just showing you, so here’s a playlist of all of it! I can say that as far as it goes, the first episode sets the tone for the whole series, and with only a little bit of adjustment, things are largely going to follow that. If you find the first episode makes you laugh? Check out the rest, it follows that arc. It’s got an itunes page if that’s what you’d like, too.

In other news, good grief, I’m kinda mad about how hard it is to find an official page to link to for Qwerpline? It’s really hard! I get it – the Loading Ready Run crew are kind of up to their eyeballs in things to make, which means it’s just easier to use Twitch or Youtube to sort your production? But it’d be nice to be able to point someone to Qwerpline’s page and just, y’know, say, ‘check that out!’

MTG: Ixalan Exploration

Ixalan’s mechanic roundup has been done! New tools, new toys, new things to look forward to! The window of time for useful commentary on upcoming mechanics is extremely short since it’s not just one thing to say ‘hey, this is how the mechanic could be used,’ and ‘I hope this is something we see,’ when the fact is it could be revealed tomorrow that none of what I mention will ever show up.

Nonetheless, let’s talk about Explore, specifially about Explore as it relates to deck building, and that means we’re going to look at some Explore cards and that means I’m putting up a fold so you can avoid looking at these cards if you’re trying to remain unspoiled. Go! Flee!
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Notes: Daniel Solis on Tuckboxes

Designing Tuckboxes! [Card at Work - Game Box Design Part 2]

Disclosure is that Daniel Solis is a designer who also publishes on DriveThruCards and his work has heavily informed some of my own work.

  • The damage tucks get over time is a real thing and I don’t have a good solution for it
  • Top-and-bottom tucks are actually harder to get into and can have the bottom fall out; I really don’t like those for larger, heavier games
  • DTC Tuckboxes are easier to put cards away into and get out of too:
  • UGH that backwards design is so much smarter than what I do, ugh, dangit

Samurai Pizza Cats’ Missed Joke

Hold up, time to complain about something deeply inconsequential.

Back in 1990, back when rebadging/retheming already-made anime with extremely minimal alterations to on-screen animation, Saban – yes them – picked up a Tatsunoko series and revamped it quickly and with minimal actual relation to the original material, resulting in a product that, uh… I guess the nice way to phrase it is it’d be a very different work.

Samurai Pizza Cats Opening

Now I’m not going to talk about the remix culture of it, the thematic transformation, the characterisation of the adults doing the remake, the meta-awareness of its jokes, the winky way it handles the audience, the trans narrative inherent in an odd character decision, the plot arc about the extra rangers, or even the fact that the opening spells Samurai wrong, and nobody seemed to notice,  but rather, this is about something I only just noticed recently.

This is Speedy Cerviche. Without getting too deep into it, he’s sort of the central character of the Samurai Pizza Cats. This is a series where characters commonly have punny names – Polly Ester, Jerry Atric, Seymour Cheese, for example. The thing is, for the longest time, I was convinced Speedy’s name, while pronounced ‘seh-vi-chey’ was spelled Service. I thought that was the joke. You know, his name put emphasis on the wrong syllables.

Well, turns out that no, his name is a reference to ceviche, which is a totally fine thing to reference but it’s somehow both more wide a reference and also not the really clever joke I always thought it was about ‘Speedy Service’ from a pizza delivery boy.

Bullet Journal Module: Game Dev

I’m trying out a Bullet Journal, and by trying out, I’m using it pretty much constantly for two months, which is a good sign that I like it, and with Bullet Journals, one of the things you do is make tools that are useful for you.

Well, one of the tools I need is a way to track the progress of a game in development, which is a task that sometimes needs some specific notes about people to contact, problems to overcome, things to emphasise, and a way to remind myself in a basic way what a game’s about.

With that in mind, I made this module:

Super simple rundown, the top is a synopsis/summary of the game’s concept. The left hand column is a series of bulleted tasks that the game needs before it’s ready to go, and then that gives me space in the right to either point to things holding up specific events in the timeline.

If you don’t know what a Bullet Journal is, or don’t use it, and this looks like gibbering nonsense? Well, yeah don’t worry about it. Still, this is one of those tools I use.

Leverage – Eliot

Eliot is introduced to the viewer in one of my favourite kind of moments; an off-screen demonstration. He walks up to some very dangerous people, challenges them directly, then the camera cuts away to show the signs of violence, but not the violence itself. Then it cuts back, and he is unruffled and successful.

This is a good joke and a great bit of a vibe at first, but it also is something you see directors do to save money and effort. You know, using editing tricks to hide that an actor can’t pull off something intense and active. Yeah, looking at you Iron Fist. Anyway. Just to hammer that point, though, later in the episode, you get to see Eliot pull off just that kind of action scene, almost a sort of nyeh-nyeh, yes, I can do this.

This is – as I keep saying about Leverage, a fast way to get us acquainted with the character, gives us an idea of how he solves problems, and it sets a rule that the series uses for the rest of its lifespan: Eliot doesn’t lose fights. He doesn’t necessarily win all of them (there are a few ambiguous ones), but Eliot, any time he starts to fight someone, is not going to lose.

Does that sound boring?

It’s amazingly, not.

Remember how I say that Leverage is built around short, fast exchanges that let them explain a character quickly and therefore, cram a lot of narrative, with multiple twists and points of tension in a short space? Part of what lets them do those exchanges quickly is sharp contrast: a threat for one character might be meaningless for another, so the tension around one character being in a dangerous space or facing an impassable wall is something you’re going to see another character waltz through.

All four of the other cast members have to treat a bigger opponent who is willing to be threatening seriously. Even Parker, who learns to fight some from Eliot, can’t control a scenario that turns violent. On the other hand, if Eliot commits to fighting people, he will win.

The show handles this really deftly, though: Eliot is often presented with problems he can’t punch his way out without wrecking the plan, or without endangering another member of the team. He still leaps to do it – it takes Nate a few times to tell him that while they can use him to extract, it’s not necessary and he has an alternate solution that will preserve the plan.

Eliot is a great contrast point in the series in that he’s the pessimism to Nate’s optimism. Sophie likes people, while Eliot doesn’t trust them. Hardison embraces new things and loves complexity while Eliot prefers simplicity and provability. Parker doesn’t understand why Eliot is sad about the things he struggles with, and he doesn’t know how to explain them to them.

What this means is that Eliot is a great foil for almost anyone, though he does admittedly have the least overlap with Sophie.

Still, in almost any scene you see him, he’s a perpetually grouchy, always slightly prickly, extremely competent force for violence. His wide range of experiences with military forces and security forces mean that he always has a way to provide information about random Generally Dangerous But Not Actually Interesting things you’ll see in periods of militarisation and violence. Also it means that if Eliot mentions a thing, you know it’s from a military source, and also that there’s no reason to ask more, because it’s not usually actually interesting.

The presence of Eliot in a story means you will get to see a pretty cool fight. He will often dress up in a cool outfit or be sexy and smouldering. And usually, he’ll be frustrated with someone in a super funny way.

 

This contrast carries through to the characters too: Eliot is the person in the group who demonstrates, in a way that none of the other characters do, that his actions have affected him. Oh, sure, he’s basically Batman – literally, the showrunners have said they think of him as like Batman – but unlike the other members of the group, whose criminal enterprise is shown regularly to be somewhat external to themselves, or a response to being already different, his experience changed him.

The others are independent and individualistic; Eliot is the one created by the government. The others function by minimising their direct impact on people; Eliot is the most blunt instrument in the group. The others favour mechanisms that they’re best at; Eliot is shown to give up a very useful, very powerful tool because he’d rather not use it.

You can look at Leverage‘s cast in terms of what about them sets them apart from the others, and I think this is the big thing about Eliot: He is the one changed by his experiences, and working with the rest of the crew is not how he becomes who he wants to be, but is how he claws back to something he once was.

There’s a power fantasy to Eliot, and I don’t know if it’s the same as what the rest of you feel. The thing with Eliot is that Eliot is someone deeply scarred by violence, someone who was impacted by it, and who enacted it, and that scarring gave him both powers and capacities to protect others. That’s a very enticing fantasy, a want I know I can understand. It would be nice if hurting was a superpower that let me spare others from hurting.


There’s one final note, and not one I want to ignore but also don’t put much stock in: According to Christian Kane, he, the actor, is of Cherokee descent, but he cannot prove that beyond family information, and does not seem to be actively involved in his Native community.

On the other hand, if you like, you could interpret the character of Eliot as someone with Native ancestry who has some experience with diaspora.

A List of Tools I Use

I’ve been asked by students about the tools I use to make my games, and I figure it’s a reasonable thing to put together a short list. I’m doing this to make sure that you’re not left convinced that the problem you’re facing is a tool limitation, the idea that you need some sort of special tool to achieve things.

Here’s a quick list of the programs I use to make the games I make.

  • Cards, Boards and Token Images: GIMP
  • PDF Creation for Cards: Scribus
  • Documentation, Rulebook Creation: Microsoft Word – I use an older version which can save PDFs; you can almost certainly get the same effect from something like Libre. You can even use Google Drive for most of this (though not all of it).
  • PDF Reader/Convertor: Foxit Reader
  • Stitching PDFs together: Online service PDFMerge

Also, don’t let anyone give you shiz about what you choose to use. The main problem with the tools you use is whether or not they can be shared with other developers. Tools are tools, and if you’re comfortable or skilled with a particular tool, then you can refine that. You may eventually run into the barriers of what your tool can let you do, but that’s for you to hit, not for other people to shame you into.

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