It is also interesting when it comes to issues of gender. And it is definitely gender, not sex, that is in question. Let me elaborate by describing the character creation process:

You choose a name for the character from a list of names provided. Most of them are simply absurd enough to be gender neutral – like objects from a time past, with purpose long forgotten. I’m also told Baker plays around a bit with this in his writing, playing around with gender assumptions. I chose the name last in creating a character, but opted for “Man”, adding “the” to it after consulting the other players.

A bit later in the character creation you choose what your character looks like. This is also where gender is defined, so it is simply cast as a question of appearance. This is highlighted by the choices available:

Most characters can choose from three of the most common ones: man, woman and transgressive. Some have additional options of concealed and ambiguous, and one the character types can also choose androgynous. This is a surprisingly wide variety to choose from. I chose “woman”, wanting to see how a strong female character would fare in a world gone bad. I have a weakness for irony, so this is also why I chose the name.

Apocalypse World has rules dealing with sex – not the act itself, but for the game mechanical consequences. Usually this is a simple (but well thought out) benefit to one or both of the characters, usable later in the game. The game is also neutral with issues of sexuality: there is no heteronormative bias to be found. Sex is a free-for-all.

But the game is hardly free of gender-related issues. One of the character classes players can choose is battlebabe. While you can choose a male battlebabe, it is clearly created as female stereotype (after all, it is battleBABE). As an example of their abilities: battlebabes get more armor the less clothes they wear. It is not the only character type that uses sexuality as a tool, but it is the one that is most clearly gender-stereotyped.

It is not very subtly done, but then again, Baker isn’t known for his subtlety. I’m sure he didn’t set out to create a more gender-balanced game than rpg’s usually are, but the results are generally not that bad.

Luolia ja Diskursseja

Dungeons & Discourse esiintyy nettisarjakuva Dresden Kodakissa. Siinä filosofian ja tieteen teorialla varustetut sankarit seikkailevat korkealentoisissa ympäristöissä, joissa lohikäärmeet korvataan p-zombeilla, solipsisteilla ja neoluddiiteilla. Tarina kuvaa roolipeliä, mutta ei perustu mihinkään todelliseen peliin. Ropecon 2010 tarjosi tilaisuuden kääntää tilanne toisin päin ja pelata roolipeliä luolien ja diskurssien maailmassa. Peliin käytettiin Donjonin systeemiä, jotta kaikki pelaajien villit ajatukset pääsisivät oikeuksiinsa: Donjonissa pelaajat saavat varsin paljon kerrontavaltaa.

Pelaajat valitsivat valmiista hahmoista pelattavakseen Albert Plancktonin, kvanttimanserin ja teoreettisen fysiikan mestarin; René von Helsingin, p-zombin tappajan ja kartesiolaisen dualismin harjoittajan; Siegfried Youngin, egomanserin ja psykoanalyytikon; ja Karl Trotskyn, proletaarin sankarin ja marxilaisen retoriikan taitajan.

Seikkailun lähtökohta oli perinteinen: Scientian valtakunta oli vaarassa, sillä kammottava velho Der Rida piti hallussaan Virheiden Lähdettä. Lähteen avulla hänen pahat postmodernistinsa saattoivat kaiken tieteellisen tutkimuksen vaaraan. Seikkailijoille myytiin varusteita ja sitten heidät jo potkittiin pois kaupungista Der Ridaa voittamaan.

Ensimmäinen askel Der Ridaa vastaan otettiin pian vastaan tulleessa post-apokalyptisessa kaupungissa. Sen ainoa ehjä rakennus oli postmodernistien täyttämä Starbucks. Siegfried käytti ovelasti heihin psykoanalyyttisia taitojaan ja postmodernistit alkoivat kaivata takaisin symboliseen kohtuun, eli Der Ridan luolaan.

Seikkailijat seurasivat postmodernisteja, kunnes nämä katosivat freudilaiseen sienimetsään. Postmodernistit katosivat näkyvistä, mutta tattien ja kumpujen seasta löytyi tupakkaa polttavia keijuja ja heitä ahdistelevia kreationisteja. Kreationistit protestoivat keijujen edessä ja polttivat paheellisen näköisiä sieniä. He kantoivat kylttejä, joissa luki iskulauseita, kuten ”God Hates Fairies!”, ”God Hates Fags!” ja ”1 Moos. 9:20-21”.

Uskonnollinen kirjallisuus osoittautui vaaralliseksi, sillä kreationistit yrittivät takoa seikkailijoihin järkeä raskailla raamatuillaan. Heidät kuitenkin lannistettiin: Albert kiskoi etävaikuttamisella kyltin keijuja uhanneen kreationistin käsistä. Samalla Siegfried osoitti yhdelle kreationisteista, miten Raamattu edustaa hänelle miehisen falloksen valtaa, saaden kreationistin luopumaan inhoten raamatustaan. Kun Karl vielä järjesti keijuille luxemburgilaisen seksuaalivallankumouksen, vapauttaen heidät kreationistien uhasta, jäivät kreationistit metsän siimeksiin marssineiden keijujen jalkoihin.

Seikkailijat jatkoivat matkaa ja sienimetsä muuttui merkitykseltään epämääräisiksi aroiksi. Aroilla kuului etäistä koirien haukuntaa ja kellojen kilinää, mutta toistaiseksi Pavlovin koirat pysyivät loitolla. Aroilta löytyi symbolisesti murtunut torni, jonka kautta kulki reitti Virheiden Lähteelle.

Torni ei kuitenkaan ollut tyhjä, vaan siellä vaani p-zombeja. P-zombit kaatoivat kirjahyllyjä tornin sisäänkäyntien eteen, jotta seikkailijat eivät pääsisi pakoon. Psykoanalyyttinen teoria kuitenkin pelasti seikkailijat: zombit alkoivat aivojen sijaan himoita jäätelöä ja rynnivät itse kaatamiensa kirjahyllyjen läpi etsimään sitä.

Seikkailijat avasivat tornin lattiassa olevan luukun ja paljastivat kellarissa odottavan kauheuden: itse epäkuollut Pavlov kalisutti suurta kelloa, kutsuen koiriaan. René kuitenkin toimi nopeasti ja käytti kartesiolaista dualismiaan, yhdistäen Pavlovin sielun takaisin hänen ruumiiseensa. Karl käytti tilaisuutta hyväkseen ja osoitti marxilaisella retoriikallaan Pavloville, miten hänen omaisuutensa tulee paremmin käytetyksi, jos se on yhteistä. Pavlov jakoi omaisuutensa seikkailijoille.

Yksi Pavlovilta löytyneistä esineistä oli Unien tulkinta. Se osoittautui myöhemmin hyödylliseksi, kun Siegfried käytti sitä selvittääkseen pidemmälle jatkuneen luolan eri käytävien päätepisteitä. Hän tulkitsi luolan suunnittelijan alitajuntaa ja sai selville, miten Der Ridan löytää.

Der Rida istui keskellä luolaa työpöytänsä ääressä ja kirjoitti postikortteja. Seikkailijat nähdessään hän muuntautui lohikäärmeeksi, kommentoiden samalla kuivasti lohikäärmeiden roolia länsimaisen fiktion antagonisteina. Varjoista astui esiin postmodernisteja. Der Ridan takana Virheiden lähde valui lattialle ristiriitaisia matemaattisia symboleja.

Taistelu Der Ridaa ja postmodernisteja vastaan oli tiukka. Postmodernistit vahvistivat joukkoaan tekemällä kirjallisuusviittauksia toisiinsa. René ampui Der Ridaa hänen symboliseen akilleenkantapäähänsä. Samaan aikaan postmodernistit vahingoittivat häntä purevalla sarkasmillaan. Albert kuitenkin latisti sarkasmin kaksiulotteiseksi. Siegfried hyökkäsi Der Ridan kimppuun feminismillä, mutta Der Rida esti hyökkäyksen fallogosentrismillään.

Albert heitti Der Ridaa singulariteettikranaatilla, mutta se lensi ohi ja laskeutui Der Ridan työpöydälle. Singulariteettiräjähdys yhdisti kaikki Der Ridan teokset, synnyttäen Platonin différance postikorteista grammatologiaan. Sillä aikaa Siegfried poimi repustaan painepesurin ja suuntasi sen Virheiden lähteeseen lannistaen sen fallisella vesisuihkulla. Der Ridan voima tuntui heikentyvän. Albert suuntasi Virheiden lähteeseen invarianssikentän.

Karl lähestyi heikentynyttä Der Ridaa ja osoitti kansan tahdon lyömällä Der Ridaa lapiolla otsaan. Der Rida ja postmodernistit talttuivat ja varjoista laahusti p-zombeja syömään heidän aivonsa. Virheiden lähde ehtyi lopullisesti ja seikkailijat palasivat Könisbergiin keräämään mainetta, kunniaa ja nimekkäitä julkaisuja.

With a strong game master influence and a narrative focus it is a traditional game in many senses. Even the rules used in Heimot tend towards the old-school. They are also contradictory and unsatisfying in many cases, so we made some adjustments and hand-waving as we played.

I was the game master, so I spent significantly more than the once-a-week session thinking about the game. With two years of narrative baggage it started feeling like work towards the end. It wasn’t easy trying to make everything fit together so that the ending would be satisfactory. The ending (or the game in general) wasn’t perfect, but I’m mostly satisfied with it. The themes in the game came from both my interests and player input. I’m too biased to evaluate in what ratio this happened, but I tried to take into account my players’ wishes.

I think the main themes in the game were religion, transhumanism (cloning, nanotechnology) and the threat of the unknown. Religion was part of the game through one of the characters, who was deeply religious. There was also stuff about prophecies, a messiah and one of the alien races in the game played the role of guardian angels (and Deus ex Machina, in a couple of cases).

Nanoviruses were a recurring threat in the game. There was also a clone army, and one the characters was an original prototype of those clones. He was also resurrected with advanced technology. Another character was created from millenia old DNA by the guardian aliens and later become a messiah-type character, binding the two themes of technology and religion together.

Apart from the nanoviruses, the threat of the Swarm was a constant source of conflict. The Swarm is a Starship Troopers type of a insect-race that had almost wiped away humanity in the games mythical history. In our campaign they returned, and from small personal combat against the PC’s to the wiping away of most of humanity, they were the main antagonist. They were also mostly unknown: nobody knew what they wanted, where they were and what were they going to do. Their motives were never made clear – they were more like a force of nature or a monster of a horror story, simply killing.

One of the ways I tried to create continuity in the game was reintroducing the same NPC’s again in different roles and situations. They developed  as the PC’s grew. Some that ended being the friends of the PC’s were very important people at the end of the game. They were also far from perfect, having weaknesses and personal, selfish objectives. There were some NPC’s that were simply against the PC’s but these were rare. Some were both enemies and allies at times. Most just wanted to achieve their own goals and were willing to work with the PC’s when it was convenient.

At times this attempt at narrative continuity strained the limits of credibility: there are only so many times you can meet the same person while traveling the endless space. But I decided that this was an acceptable prize to pay, since this is how stories are built: with fortunate and unfortunate coincidences.

There was no story when we started playing. I simply took what the players did and asked me to include in the game and combined it with what I wanted to see in the game. Slowly the pieces came together in a mostly consistent way and we had a story that was built piece by piece, usually a game-session or two beforehand.

There were three seasons of the game, with small pauses in between, usually both in- and offgame. As the game progressed, the PC’s became more important, their allies (and enemies) rose in the ranks of their respective organizations and the conflicts became more far-reaching. In the beginning the PC’s tried to figure out how to make enough business to pay for the gas for their space ship; in the end they decided how humanity faced an impending genocide.

This also affected the way conflicts were framed. In the beginning they were personal and close: bargaining for profits, shooting at space robbers and such, but in the end of the campaign they become political and far-reaching. This also meant that most conflict in the end of the campaign was social, handled through dialogue. Some times we rolled dice for this, often we did not, depending which seemed better.

A transcript of the game will soon be available, after some editing from me and my players. Unfortunately it is available only in Finnish, because that’s how I wrote things down and there is too much of it for me to translate.

In fact, there are four types of randomness in role-playing games:

1. Stochastic
2. Performative
3. Social
4. Semiotic

Dice and cards go in the first category of stochastic randomness, meaning randomness created by non-deterministic processes. The exact definition is unimportant, in this context it refers mostly to dice and related objects. Most games employ these mechanics, because they create uncertainty and thrill. Dice are usually outside the domain of the game master, and so even if the game includes one, s/he can enjoy the uncertainty created by these mechanics. Stochastic randomness can be analysed using probability.

Performative randomness is the one most familiar from sports. In rpg’s it is mostly used in live-action role-playing. Performative randomness is best portrayed by the question: Can you succeed in it this time? Even world-class athletes don’t always succeed perfectly, and this gap between optimal performance and actual performance creates the uncertainty discussed here, performative randomness. Performative randomness is created by the uncertainty of human actors in performing constantly at their peak. An example that used performative randomness in table-top role-playing is Stalker, a Finnish science-fiction role-playing game. It has a system where the game master estimates the probability of success based on the capabilities of the character and the description/strategy of the player. The latter part could be seen as performative, with better player performance rewarded by the system. Some forms of reward mechanics in table-top rpg’s can also be seen as being part of this category: people don’t constantly play at their peak ability (or effort), so rewarding what is considered good play (whatever this is to the players involved) measures performance.

Role-playing games are a social activity and this social interactions creates social randomness. Even games with no stochastic randomness can be quite unpredictable in practice when there are several human players involved. Examples include Nobilis, which is one of the most unpredictable games I have played, yet having no dice or other forms of stochastic randomness. The characters played are very potent forces in the world, so the choices made by the players affect others in great measures. (Don’t like that mountain? Throw it away. The concept of racism offends you? Obliterate it.) In any game with more than one player, there is social randomness created by the players’ interaction. This is one of the greatest sources of fun in rpg’s.

Semiotic randomness is theoretically very interesting, yet most games do away with it, and players try to eliminate it from their games. It is created by the uncertainty of interpretation. A statement about the game can be usually interpreted in several different ways. Players use the context the figure out what was meant by some statement, but this is not always perfect. Different interpretations persist until they come into clash, and they are negotiated so that the game can continue. For example, someone may state that the way to another place in the game  is long. What that means is ambivalent, but possibly obvious from the context. If it simply means that the way is too long to travel then it is irrelevant how long it actually is. But if at some point it suddenly becomes necessary to travel that journey it must be decided just how long the way is.

Because semiotic randomness is so rare, it is interesting when it is actually employed as a game mechanic. The jeepform game No Sign of Alex uses “different perspectives, truth, misunderstandings, (mis)interpretations, mis- and disrememberings” to create interesting play. There are not set truths to figure out. Instead, the game focuses on how things are remembered, and since the past is created in-game, how things are interpreted. No Sign of Alex is a rare example; using semiotic randomness in games is hard. But it can still be a tool to create interesting play.

It is written in Finnish and the book looks really good. The setting is a bronze-age fantasy land, with a strong emphasis on magic. There are also political undertones about who gets to use it. The world is also animistic, with everything consisting of spirits that the mages then try to influence.

The game is very rules light, while being very traditional in style, with a game master and the rest playing characters each. The game is probably particularly suitable for new players, but if it sounded interesting I suggest you pick it up and give it a try.

Unfortunately not very close to me.

Pervasive Games

Pervasive games are not an entirely new phenomenon, but the research done on them is quite new. We’ll define what pervasive games are in a minute. First, lets look at an example and see if it enlightens what type of games are in question.

I Love Bees is our first example. It was produced by 42 Entertainment, which has produced similar products for other games, movie The Dark Knight and the Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero. The website ilovebees.com seemed to be about – not surprisingly – bees and beekeeping. But the person the page belonged to had a problem: a rogue AI seemed to have taken over her web page. She complained about the problems she was having on the blog that was reachable through the page. Some people looked deeper and helped her solve the problem with the AI. This was done mostly by following clues on the website, through the web in general and by answering certain payphones at certain times. All of this was figured out more or less collectively by the thousands of people participating. The plot was tied in with the plot of Halo 2. Those that followed the plot to the end received a chance to play Halo 2 in advance. And they got some stuff. It was an ARG (Alternative Reality Game); it was viral marketing; it was also pervasive gaming.

Magic Circle

We’ll define pervasive games by looking at what they are not. In order to do this, we need to introduce the concept of magic circle. Magic circle is where the game takes place. It is a theoretical construct, but often there are also concrete boundaries to games. Think of a hockey ring, a football arena, but also of the playground. The boundaries are not absolute, and they are not set – but they are there. You can test this out in practice: try going on the ice during an ice-hockey match.

The magic circle as a concept does not refer to just games. Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian, writes that the ritual circle, the playground and the playing field are basically the same thing. They are all surrounded by boundaries that set them apart from the ordinary life, from the normal. Within these boundaries, the rules of reality are different.
How are they different in games? Bernard Suits, a philosopher of games, calls it the lusory attitude. It’s basically like this: players accept the limitations of rules because of the pleasure a game can offer. They think that “it’s just a game so I can act like this and enjoy it”. It also means that players adopt worse rather than better means for reaching an end.

Suits uses golf as an example:
If I want to get a small ball into a hole in the ground, it is not very efficient to do it with a crooked metal stick from hundreds of meters away. And as if this is not enough, I make sure that there are lots of obstacles on my way when I start hitting the small ball. But it’s expected of you, if you want to play golf. No one would take you seriously, if you went on the golf field, took the ball into your hand and placed it in the hole. That’s not what you do in golf. That’s the lusory attitude. To say to yourself ”I’m playing a game, so what is normally idiotic becomes expected, and what is normally expected is idiotic”. We accept rules, because of the possibility of enjoying a game that those rules create.

Now that we know what the magic circle is, we know what pervasive games are not. Pervasive games are games that expand the magic circle. They don’t happen inside easily marked boundaries, but rather they spill over these boundaries and become part of the normal, of the ordinary. This makes them interesting, engaging and also potentially risky. They are games, but they can’t be neatly and safely summarised by saying that ”its just a game”.
Next, we’re going to look at three different ways of how pervasive games expand the magic circle: spatially, temporally and socially.

Spatial Expansion

Spatial expansion is the simplest. It means that there are no distinct  boundaries between the area of play and the world in general. The game can happen anywhere, or at several places at the same time.

Pac-Manhattan is an example of this. As the name suggests, it is – or was – played in Manhattan. There are boundaries in the game, but the area of play is huge. There is one Pac-man running around the streets, with the Ghosts following. Each has a controller, sitting behind a computer screen, updating each runner of the position of the others. First, it was supposed to use GPS, but since that didn’t work very well in the city, they ended up using cell phones and verbally communicating about the positions. The game is delimited to a certain area, but that area is within the real world, with the streets of Manhattan as the playground.

Temporal Expansion

Temporal expansion means that there are no strict time limits for the game, or that the game may happen over a long period of time with periods of play and non-play overlapping each other.

The game Assassin – also known as Killer – has a start and an ending, but the time between these may be weeks. Within this time, the players are expected to live their lives as usual, but also to assassinate other players. Players may be assassinated on their way to work, during lunch or in a bar. The tools of the trade are water pistols, Tabasco sauce in your beer or props like a box with the word ”bomb” written on the bottom. An important part of why this game is exciting is that you never know when something is going to happen.

Social Expansion

Social expansion means that it is not entirely certain who is, and who is not playing. The players may not know each other. There may also be bystanders that affect how the game is played, even if they don’t know it. Outsiders may meet people playing the game without realizing it.

This is true in the case of Assassin – and it may lead to problems. Universities have banned Assassin from their campuses after incidents where water pistols have been mistaken for real guns and fake bombs with real explosives.
But next, we will look at Prosopopoeia Bardo 2: Momentum, for several reasons.

1. it blurs the boundaries of game and real more intensely than other games.
2. it was funded by the European Union, as part of the Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming.
3. while expanding the magic circle socially, it also expands the circle spatially and temporally.

Momentum was a larp – live-action role-playing game – that went on for 36 days in and around Stockholm. During that time 30 players played in it. To make it possible, almost a hundred people worked to create it during that time. It was the second game of the Prosopopeia series, the first prototype being Där vi föll. Momentum had an ending, but during the time it was played it was continuous, with some periods of more and some of less activity. The game also had a political message: ”we live in the world we perceive, and changing that perception changes the world”.

The beginning of the game is telling, so I’ll explain it shortly:
The game started when the game masters invited the players to a seminar. At the last-minute the players were told that the seminar was cancelled, were sent to a basement in central Stockholm and told that IPerG had cancelled the project. The game masters then told them that the system they were going to use in the game to contact the dead actually worked, and that the game was actually based on transmissions from the other side. The players were asked if they wanted to – instead of playing a game – participate in this project of bringing the dead spirits back through themselves. All of the players agreed.

In a sense, the players played themselves, but themselves possessed by dead revolutionaries. These people were chosen from real historical rebels, so players could find more about them by simply googling. This was also a way of keeping the game from disturbing their ordinary lives: the spirits tried to stay hidden, so they could act ”normal” whenever necessary. But still, once they had begun, the players were part of the game-world – not just as characters, but as themselves. There was a safeword for emergencies, but it was rarely used.

Incidentally, Momentum also answers the age-old hysteria of ”can role-players get stuck in character?” The answer seems to be: no. Momentum used every trick in the book to get players inside the game world, and still the players had no trouble leaving it when the game ended.

The game happened in the real world, which in this case means Stockholm. It used indexicality as a design principle: everything represents itself. This had some consequences:

1. The game used techno-occult devices. The technological limitations of these devices had to be explained within the game world, and if there was a problem with them, they had to be repaired within the game.
2. There could be no violence within the game, as it would also be violence in the real world – with real consequences.

In a sense, everyone the players met was playing in the game. The game ended with a public demonstration, with police officers watching over dead revolutionaries without knowing it.

Ludic Society

But it is not only pervasive larps such as Momentum that blur the lines between play and reality. Pervasive games of more everyday type are becoming common because of mobile phones. Games like The Journey require that the user moves in real space in order to travel in the fictional space. In Botfighters the other players are enemies that can be combated through your mobile phone. Geocaching has been popular since GPS has been opened for personal and commercial use. These are all part of games that happen in public spaces, in the ordinary life and not just inside the magic circle.

Mobile games are not the only signs of playfulness escaping the limits of the magic circle usually surrounding gaming consoles and PCs tightly. Zombiewalks continue to draw crowds (even here in Finland). The streets are used as stages for gaming-inspired street-art, like with Mario Question Marks, an example that also shows how society can also react negatively to such attempts, with the innocent yellow boxes seen as a potential bomb threat.

Games are changing the society around us, but they have also been intentionally harnessed for this purpose. Evoke claims to be a “crash course in changing the world”. And even corporations have seen the implicit potential in this as is shown by Conspiracy for Good, a game by Nokia.

In a sense, we’re already living in a ludic society – a society of games. It remains to be seen what that will mean in the future.

More info:

Most of the information in this text is from Pervasive Games (2009) by Montola, Stenros and Waern. For more information, see their blog.