What do you think of when you think of adults? What do they do? How do they carry themselves?

How about in an intact, and indigenous culture? Does that picture change at all?

It does for me. In our culture we have the ‘provider’ side of adulthood down, but we seem to have long lost our traditions of agreements and community collaboration.

In Gypsy Law, Romani Legal Traditions and Culture, editor Walter Weyrauch has assembled a group of essays that address the heart of this subject, using a cultural group that has role-modeled a sustainable and vital adult tradition of collaboration and agreements for centuries now. Alternately demonized and romanticized, at the heart of Romani culture sits something extraordinary, invisible to modern eyes because it in fact impacts the mundane flow of day-to-day life the most; an unarticulated, yet ever-present system of religious (and therefore to indigenous minds, legal) strictures that modulate behavior and prepare the ground for community disputes and dischord, called the Romaniya.

For this essay I’d like to focus in on one piece of this vast and ever-evolving (yet also unchanging and the most ancient of traditions - deal with the paradox, you can do it!) web of laws held and passed on by the community elders. I’d like to single out the legal proceeding and communal adjudication known as the kris. A kris forms whenever two adult parties have irreconcilable differences and need some more powerful tools to find a resolution (and often, some kind of reparation).

In the United States of America, any typical courtroom in any legal context operates using a very important guideline: in a community of highly diverse religious traditions and values, from cultures all over the world, you must narrow the scope of the proceeding, and the kind and source of information, or total chaos will result.

Whether or not you agree with this notion, it defines our legal system, the system that, barring radical and fundamental cultural change, we do have to deal with as part of the bargain of living in the modern world.

The Roma (Gypsies) flip this idea of narrowed-scope. At a kris court proceeding, no complaint, story, comment, or rant from an adult belonging to the community lies outside the scope of the proceeding. Every kris acts as a chance for adults to voice the current crop of imbalances and issues at play in the community; this can seem like a stream of non sequitors, irrelevant to the stated reason the community convened the kris in the first place. And the spokesman for the different parties, what you might call ‘citizen attorneys’, act more as mediators.

So, in a state-controlled diverse context of highly varied values and traditions, we narrow scope to help find a resolution. In an egalitarian and communal context of very similar values and traditions, we widen the scope of information kind and source.

Note that each has a narrow scope, but of a different kind. Non-Roma (whom gypsies call gadje) do not attend a kris; the community excludes them. The Romaniya does not, in fact, apply to non-Rom, so they simply do not belong and have no say. So Roma narrow the scope of a kris by only including adult community members, and find their own kind of efficiency.

If you know anything about Open Spaces Gatherings, you may have just had quite the revelatory moment.

The Roma, amongst themselves, use the kris for every intra-Roma dispute that they can; issues of theft, adultery, and rare incidents like murder, they try to convince the state legal system to allow them to resolve. When the ‘crime’ or dispute has occurred between Roma and gadje outsiders, then they use the state’s legal system. They have interfaced in this way, between egalitarian Roma community and majority hierarchical state culture, for several centuries at least, and only have more success with this balance as they go along.

As a cultural critic I cannot help but note one other contrast between these two cultures, and of the balancing act it illuminates.

The United States legal system, along with narrowing the scope of information allowed, also employs an adversarial paradigm. The system applauds and supports the discontent of two parties, and assures them that, in the end, the state will announce one party ‘Right’ and the other ‘Wrong’, and divvy punishments and rewards accordingly.

The Romani legal system uses a paradigm of remedy; the kris endeavors to answer the question, “what must we do to make this situation right again?”, as opposed to “who do we blame, who do we punish?”. To stay clear, the kris does allot fines and other penalties at times, but it prioritizes the return to community balance over such solutions, and uses penalties and fault-finding in accord with mediation and peacemaking.

Boiling it all down, in one hand we have an adversarial system of narrowly-focused information exchange between parties of different values, and in the other a peacemaking system of widening-scope communal information exchange between parties of very similar values.

Ironically, I don’t see the state’s legal system as more efficient and less time-consuming; I emphatically see evidence of a situation quite the opposite, where the days or week of a kris court end in a resolution satisfying to the community, where state trials can last months and years ending in a resolution that truly satisfies few or even no one (anybody who gets paid from it probably feels pretty good).

For regular readers of the College of Mythic Cartography, I hope to tie a whole assortment of parallel threads together in this. In a culture of people who don’t actually listen to each other, but rather just wait for their turn to talk, we have very little experience when it comes to making systems of agreement, collaboration, and conversation that works. This whole field of knowledge really has just begun to open up with real possibilities.

I believe, that just as we can work with community energy by changing the games we play, just as we can choose our culture depending on the kind of experiences we want, we too can choose how to resolve disputes and remedy dischord by learning from the Romaniya and applying some of its principles.

I struggle with throwing too much into my explanations of things. I enjoy wandering the places where all kinds of craziness overlaps, and so you may find this subject involves far more than just ‘improv warm ups’ - hence why I call it “working with energy” rather than just ‘warm up games’.

I believe you can’t move human energy where you want it by forcing it, explaining to it, or blocking it.”Moving” energy really means opening space for the energy to go. In some kind of odd way, human energy fills the container you put it in, like water. So, by changing the shape  and structure of the container, you can really shape the energy of relationships within your group.

Think about this! The implications! I have a five year old friend who just discovered exclamation points, so in his spirit I won’t hold back. To wit: you change relationships within a group, not by changing the people within the group, but by changing the shape of their container!! This means you no longer look for virtuous (or flawed) behavior, but you simply play games that change the shape of the container the group dwells in, according to your needs.

I find this ridiculously cool. If you’ve listened to my “Yes, and…!” podcast (and read the corresponding article), or my interview with Lisa Wells, you know how no matter how simple the intuition/improv game, it has an incredible amount to teach and a broad applicability.

So you can use these games and this understanding, as principles, to subtlely shape any container you find yourself in with another human being, when you find the space disintegrating into something that doesn’t support healthy interactions. Nonviolent Communication sessions, decision making processes, project retrospectives, all these ‘containers’ comprise themselves of many sub-games and understandings, that you can further support using improv/intuition games (whether fully, or just in principle).

Now, many, many people use improv/intuition games with insufficient understanding of how they work. I don’t claim any expertise myself, but I’ve had some very good mentors and seen how skilled folks work the games. An improv game doesn’t work like a magic bullet - you don’t just play “yes, and…!” a couple times and consider your problems solved. Don’t use them as one-size-fits-all icebreakers, and pick them out as random candy to distribute. These games require attention and intention.

Each improv game has a diagnostic function, and an energy moving function. Every time you play a game, you look for how the group handles it. If they seem unready or overwhelmed, then you know to back up into simpler and more fundamental games. I had this experience just the other day over skype, in my mythweavers storyband. I’d never done improv games “over the phone” before, and yet I knew we needed some way to further cohere as a group. So I gave it a shot, and discovered I had run the games exactly backwards (which tells me a LOT about our group, what we needed, and what we hadn’t gotten yet). I first ran a game called “color, advance”, where I had one person (A) tell a story, while another person (B) yelled ‘color!’ for more details periodically, and yet another person (C) yelled ‘advance’ for plot progression. They struggled with that, so I knew to back up (diagnostics! don’t blame the group, change the shape of the container!). So I backed up to “Word at a Time”, where in order each person added a single word to an ongoing story, as quickly as possible. They struggled with that too. So, I backed up yet again, played “Firing Line”, where two folks took turns calling out words to a third person, who immediately responded with the first word that came to mind. I noticed them handling that pretty well, so once they had a definite rhythm we next went back to “Word at a Time”, did great, then finally back to “Color, Advance”, doing great (you can find a handy card deck that contains all or most of these improv games Creative Advantage, or look in Viola Spolin’s book).

Huh, you know? Simple.

Except for of course the unbelievable limits that skype places on what I would normally do with a group (way more body movement and interaction, way more emphasis on eye contact), I feel like we can at least work up a decent enough container to consistently get better-than-average moments out of our skype storyjamming. In a way, playing over skype feels like blindfolding the group, which I might do for an improv game anyway; so maybe in the end it has a lot of potential!

The model I normally follow to warm up for storyjamming specifically, looks like this:

Follow the energy - all groups need something silly to start with, more tired or distracted groups need more silly games than usual. Silly doesn’t mean ‘easy’,  just silly (think ‘musical chairs’). Once energy has really begun to fly around the room, after a couple different silly games, use that energy to fuel more focused games. When their focus burns out, go back to silly and fun. Then back to focus, amping up the level of focus challenge each time we return. Look for mutual group eye contact as a sign the group has begun to feel ready for bigger challenges. End with a fiendishly difficult group mind diagnostic game, like ‘Counting’.

Even more concisely put:

A) Follow the Energy

B) Build energy with silly fun, use that energy to focus until burn out, then back to silly fun until ready for next level of focus challenge.

C) End with a group diagnostic game that demonstrates group unity.

Now about that ‘level of focus challenge’ - this part has a very open-ended nature. You can’t run out of ever-deeper levels of focus challenge. Think about the play you want your story games to create, and tune the warm-ups to get you there. If you want to go all the way to method acting and beyond, well, why the hell not. I think it’ll surprise you what you can achieve, and how quickly. However, don’t rush things either; really, only time limits you. The group will get as far as it can get in each session. The quicker you want to create group cohesion, the more time you must spend watching and opening space for the group energy to move into. Ironically, the more in a hurry you feel, the more time you must spend playing; you could warm up for a couple hours if you really wanted to get to magical places fast.

Which brings up the last point. Do you need to play these games, to create the storyjamming that satisfies you? Certainly some folks have very satisfying and consistent play without ever hearing of these improv games. I’ve had great story jams without them, but not consistently, and I think I know why; I play with new groups all the time, and only recently formed my core group. Folks with great consistently play tend to have tight, intimate core groups with long histories. I think these tools solve the problem of building brand-new groups to a high level of cohesion quickly, creating a space for satisfying play to happen fast and consistently. I also think these warm-up games find one’s blindspots, and iron them out, making each player personally improve over time.

So, as they say, Go Play!

I’ve noticed when jamming story with new folks, that we often have a lot of hesitancy, self-censorship, and creative blocks to work through - and conversely, lots of trust to build between us. Often because of how I explain storyjamming to others (resuscitating oral tradition, telling meaningful story worth caring about, weaving dreams back into story to create truly magical experiences), I think they come with even more nervousness than they might otherwise, thinking they really need to do it “right” and create something “good”. Well, oops on me. Someday I’ll come up with a better way to inspire folks about it without also removing their sense of play and experimentation.

In any case, even without any nervousness, hesitancy, or self-censorship, I think a certain bag of tools can create play and story above and beyond the norm, on a consistent basis. As introduced to me by my friend Lisa Wells, I call this bag of tools “theater improv games”, or better yet “intuition games”. These games do many things; but first and foremost they blunt our ability to self-censor and overthink our behavior, which only leads to good stuff. In our culture we so overcondition and overvalue our own ability to think, rather than actually ever using it all the way to the hilt at any one time, it reminds me of the problem some of my favorite physical fitness methodologies endeavor to address.

Lots of high-repetition, low intensity strength training, results in chronic fatigue, lowered immune response, and injury. Whereas savvily applied sessions of extremely high intensity, low repetition, and varied exercises create a very happy and fit body. I see this as present in our thinking too; I see us working over the endless minutiae of our day, grocery lists, to do lists, over and over in our head, rather than amping up our curiousity and problem solving skills so high that they burnt out and we get thrown into the only thing that can catch us - our right brains. Body, emotion, pattern and picture; awareness, acceptance, and action. They don’t often direct us modern folks anymore, but in certain situations we can create a space to let them out.

Different artists have different methods, and what I will say in a moment does not apply to everyone. But I believe in it strongly. In my world, you don’t plan Story; you discover Story. You don’t decide Story; you dream Story. In a way, Story chooses you. And the more you can get out of your own way, the stronger the signal coming through from the Story place. And to discover worthwhile Story, you need to warm-up those story muscles first.

Also, once a person masters the basics of storyjamming, I think we still need intuition games to maintain our skills. Like how a good martial-artist constantly drills the basics, or a good animal tracker always keeps a beginner mind, and keeps returning to tracking as if they’ve never done it before.

I have a strong footing in the “show, don’t tell” tradition, in all its permutations. As an educator, artist, family member and friend, I practice showing rather than telling. Everybody has advice on how you should live; few people show you what happens when you follow it (for better or worse, in my case). I believe people learn more wholly and concretely from someone showing them, rather than telling them.

For example, if I write a story game text which encourages players to play in the spirit of “yes, and…!”, I have very low expectations of my players to follow this advice (if they even fully understand it). But if I warm up a story jam by playing the game “yes, and…!”, where one by one we tell a possibly nonsensical story by contributing bits and pieces, one after another, starting with the words “yes, and…!”, then if the group performs well, I know they can and will bring this spirit into our story jam, even if I don’t tell them to. Think about that. I have changed the culture of our play, by playing a game that changes them.

So, to me, a way to design a game that has the “yes, and…!” spirit in it, involves making the “yes, and…!” warm up part of the game.

I’ve always experienced that systems (whether an institution, a game, a factory, or a society) produce what they do because of their design, not in spite of it. If you want them to produce something else, you don’t train the factory workers more, or publish more articles on virtuous behavior, you change the design of the system.

This has run long, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of this issue, much less addressed something else I really value: an organic model of influencing the flow of energy with these diverse and specialized intuition games to create a culture of relationship within a group.

We’ll get there.

Most of you know where I stand on nouns - I don’t like ‘em much. I have a much friendlier relationship with verbs. Verbs describe and animate; Nouns pigeonhole and create an illusion of certainty.

For example, I don’t often hear people argue about whether a person “wrote” something or “scribbled” it. But I often hear people argue about whether that person “is” [sic] a writer or not. You can extend this list infinitely to include arguments of all kinds about “is this an A or a B?”.

I think it improves one’s clarity of thought exponentially to toss this out as a valid subject for a conversation. Throw it in the compost. You’ll feel better, I wager.

So, can we categorize things usefully? I believe so. We just have to change the shape of the object that we call “category”, including all its various synonyms and idioms: sets, boxes, labels, and so on.

Right now, linguistically and in the common-sense logic of our culture, we believe that categories have solid borders. The next step of enlightenment (or as I prefer to call it, ‘clarity’) occurs when we notice the permeability of these borders (i.e. a person in the “riot cop” category quits her job and enters the “poet” category) in startling ways.

I believe the next step occurs when we stop seeing any borders at all, but rather clouds of points, each point indicating a specific subjective observation. For example, rather than the convention image of atoms as solid spheres, or like little solar systems with electrons moving in fixed orbits, quantum physics maps them this way:

[Thanks to image creator Blake Stacey, who describes this image as ‘How quantum mechanics sees a hydrogen atom: one electron “inhabiting” the space around one proton.’]

Now, let’s think of words as flags for marking a point of observation. So, for example, let’s say I assign the word “dog” to a certain animal I’ve observed. I’ve planted a flag, from inner cognitive space into physical space. Primary to this act: I have a relationship to that flag. I have feelings about that flag, because of the initial observation I made. Think of the red proton in the image as that flag, a symbol planted in the physical world. Now, everything around that, the electron cloud of probable location points, indicates all the further observations that I make  about the world that have some level of similarity to where I stuck my flag to begin with; the closer in, the more similarity, the farther out the lesser. Note that the electron and the proton do not share space; neither does my word “dog” inhabit any physical space. But the observation points cluster around the central point.

These observational clouds can (and do) overlap with clouds belonging to other flags. [Please keep in mind I’ve used the hydrogen atom image as a fun comparison; not all of this model of seeing ‘categories’ necessarily applies to the behavior of atoms!].

Now, instead of defining things according to whether they sit on this side of the border or that, we can define them according to their relationship to an abstract center we have created. Keep in mind that our flag doesn’t actually exist in the physical world; it models actual things we can observe, but doesn’t replace them.

Each person experiences flags differently; by their very nature, they must have a different relationship to this or that flag (you love dogs; I don’t - you grew up with dogs; I didn’t) that fundamentally orients how we think about all beings and observations that cluster ever more closely around that flag.

Nothing in this universe comes in neat little boxes; or at least, to believe so will only bring you a lot of grief. A flexible and relationship-to-a-center oriented way of organizing your perceptual world will increase your clarity of mind and cut out a lot of pointless arguments. Give it a shot!

Much like with Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication method, and with e-prime/primitive (of which I see this as an inextricable part), you may best spend your time translating others’ speech into this model, rather than explaining to them why “ur doin it rong”. I find that thinking and speaking in this way consciously will iron out fuzzy conversations without having to explain anything to anyone about electron clouds and center-focused categories.

I thought I’d sum up my position that I’ve tried to articulate recently, about what I look for in an Indie Story Game (also known as Role-Playing Games) design.

But first, some clarification. Why should anyone care what I personally look for? And why do I look for it?

If you’ve read my blog over the past year, you’ll know I came to the indie role-playing game scene via my interest in teaching storytelling skills (and what the hell: improving my own too). Jason Godesky, designer of the (in beta playtest) Fifth World game pointed out to me the possibilities of ritual re-enactment, and resuscitating our ability to maintain healthy oral/spoken traditions.

This priority created a kind of play so consistently in one corner of the field of activity that one could call “role-playing”, that I gave it a name to reinforce its single-minded identity: storyjamming.

Now, a kind of play with such single-minded focus needs game design that supports that focus. The fact that I consistently play with storyjammers with no or little role-playing game experience (aka newbies) narrows that focus even more.

I see this as a place of super-high growth: people, who have never heard of role-playing or story gaming (or storyjamming, for that matter), discovering this activity, picking up games and jamming story together. I run into a lot of people who find this an exciting idea.

So, I want games for these purposes; easy on newbies, and supporting the specific kind of activity I call storyjamming. My friend Jake Richmond tossed out the possible term “art games” to point to a certain subset of indie games which I think excellently support storyjamming.

I propose that “art games” with the needed design will incorporate:

1. To really sum up, just “Judge your Design by what you’ve left out”. That incorporates pretty much everything else. But if you need more details, this incorporates the following aims -

A. “Just enough rules” in the “Keep It Simple, Stupid”  spirit. Sleek, elegant, spare.

B. “Bite-sized pieces” of rules, delivered one at a time according to an intentional pedagogy, so that players can play an enjoyable game at every stage of learning (small-chunk modularity spins off of this too, I think). Even if you’ve designed a ridiculously complex game, never let them know!

C. “Show, Don’t Tell” using evocative, succinct oracles, setting generators, and actual stories and sequential art that embody the setting. Remember, ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’.

The learning curve for a new role-playing game presents a constant drag on the quality of play. When does the fun start? It starts once you learn the rules. Why can’t we enjoy learning the rules? And the more complex the rules, the longer it takes to start having fun. Some of my favorite indie games I still don’t know how to play (Ben Lehman’s ‘Polaris’ comes to mind). Some I think I know how to play, but friends of mine tell me I don’t play them correctly yet (as my friend Joel tells me about Vincent Baker’s ‘In A Wicked Age’).

Something seriously needs attention here. Why do we assume that to learn a new role-playing game, we must drudge through the learning curve of a new system? I in fact hear players of some role-playing games say “I don’t want to play those indie games - I don’t want to have to learn a new rules system” (though they don’t bat an eye at learning to play new video games or card games).

This to me indicates that too little focus in indie role-playing game design has gone in to the pedagogy of play; meaning, how can we make sure players enjoy every step of learning the rules? How can we give them such bite-sized pieces that they never notice the medicine going down? Once they’ve mastered one rule, we go on to the next, and the next, and the next…

In fact, Evan Gardner’s language fluency game ‘Where Are Your Keys?’ works exactly like this; I think any highly player-friendly game works like this.

For some games, learning the complex rules counts as the price of admission. This makes sense in the right contexts.

But for story games, where we want to remove barriers to play, where we want them accessible by more kind of players in greater amounts, where we want to tell stories and storyjam with all kinds of folks who haven’t experienced it before - as indie game designers aiming for this new crowd, we need to start learning the pedagogy of play.

Oftentimes the gaming convention ‘demo rules’ version of story games makes them much more accessible and easy to play (above and beyond the fact that personal interaction makes them much more easily learnt). Problematically, I’ve bought games that I’ve played at a convention, gone home excited, and then couldn’t figure the rules out. So I see a need for an intentional step-by-step design to get a person from holding the game in their hands, to playing a fully complex version of the game.

[Keep in mind, as I rant on this topic, that this mainly concerns what I and the growing group I play with personally need from an Indie Role-playing Game, and why we haven’t gotten it. I hope everyone continues to make the games they love to make; I also hope some people start making the kind of games that serve folks like us really well. Disclaimer done!]

I think most role-playing games, as a culture, have some very old and hard-to-shake traditions.  One has to do with designing according to what you put in (think traditional RPGs, with pages of charts, facts, magic items, abilities, setting, etc.), even though what you leave out makes an equally large impact. Designers have known this for a long time, and use it as a primary principle. What you leave out gives room for what you put in to breathe, to draw the mind and eye of your reader to what matters. I have noticed a very few indie game designers exploring this territory, not just graphically, but textually. That excites me; I want more!

Another traditional problem: role-playing game texts ‘tell’, instead of ’showing’. Switching the balance around, by ‘showing’ more often than ‘telling‘, would make RPG texts far more easy to absorb and enjoy (god forbid) for many people, including myself.

Imagine, you have two options to absorb the proposed setting for an RPG. You can thoroughly explore it in the form of a novel (or graphic novel), or you can ‘learn’ it in the form of a history textbook.

Which do role-playing game designers most often choose?

Funny enough, many new RPGs, based on novels or comics (a ’show’ medium if ever I saw one), immediately start ‘telling’, as if nothing could make more sense than to go from an enjoyable story that makes you want to inhabit its characters, to a history text about those characters that you must slog through and retain. Now, I think this has started to change (I just looked at the Mouse Guard Role-Playing Game, and it  does seem really promising!), but the pattern exists: “Oh,  you want  a role-playing game? That means stripping out the story and replacing it with lists of factoids and history”.

Now, many traditional RPG readers do absorb setting this way, and enjoyably so. I know some of these folks. We just need to expand the design values to include more of the rest of us. I sometimes hear that indie game designers want to pull in ‘non-role-players’ into the world of role-playing. Well, here lies one method: make  your books absorbable by a wider community of people.

I’ve learned the hard way that most newbie folks that I want to storyjam with me really cannot handle that many impediments to play itself; they don’t want to stop to have setting ‘told’ to them, they don’t want to look through lists and charts, they just want to play ASAP. If playing ever starts feeling like working, I immediately start losing them.

So, I propose that instead of creeping farther in the direction of including these kinds of people, we plant a flag in the place where design must end up to serve these folks. Rather than slowly shaving away traditional elements, or making RPG texts less text-like, we just jump over to that new spot and start designing the (at first) shockingly different games that those folks need.

I think Nordic role-playing game poems, though not exactly what I mean here in terms of visual presentation, do tend to ’shock’ traditional and indie game players and designers in the way that I want. They often question whether or not we can even call them Role-playing Games. But I see this as a good sign; if you’ve designed something that makes  you wonder that, then boy do I have an ever growing group of players that want to play your game.

Last fall I wanted to raise funds to interview someone I feel really excited about. We didn’t reach our goal then, but with the new year, I figure it justifies a fresh attempt!

“Where are Your Keys?”

Evan Gardner, who rewilds in Molalla, OR, has made a breakthrough. But does anyone even feel ready for it? Over a period of years, he pieced together all the most effective language-learning techniques into one, seamless whole; a game called “Where are Your Keys”.

Everyone knows about the epidemic of endangered indigenous languages, all over the world, and yet linguists and teachers continue to use old, academic and schooling methods, that for those many of us who studied foreign languages in school and college, we know they don’t work. We never achieved fluency, and we struggled to learn them. For those that did gain some mastery of their chosen language, they did it by actually traveling to its home and immersing themselves in the culture.

But how do we do that for languages on the edge of extinction, with one 90 year-old fluent speaker left? How do we create the experience of immersion, as best we can?

Evan has the answer. So far, he has struggled with getting the message out there. Since “Where are Your Keys?”, by its very nature, creates not students, but Teachers, he knows in only a matter of time the game will spread like wildfire, as Teachers make more Teachers. But will it happen in time to save the endangered native languages where you live?

Go to the fundable page to donate.

Why do I love Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr  Norrell? Why have I oft listened to the audiobook edition as I fell asleep at night?

“Just then a high mournful sound broke in upon Stephen’s dream — a slow sad song in an unknown language and Stephen understood without ever actually waking that the gentleman with the thistle-down hair was singing.

It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if the song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in rapture at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

Stephen began to dream again. This time he dreamt that the hills walked and the sky wept. Trees came and spoke to him and told him their secrets and also whether or not he might regard them as friends or enemies. Important destinies were hidden inside pebbles and crumpled leaves. He dreamt that everything in the world — stones and rivers, leaves and fire, had a purpose it was determined to carry out with the utmost rigor, but he also understood that it was sometimes possible to persuade things to a different purpose.”

…Fairies do not make a strong distinction between the animate and inanimate. They believe that stones, doors, trees, fire, clouds, and so forth all have souls and all are either masculine or feminine.”

I spent some time the other night ranting with some fellow players of story games about a subject that I feel very strongly about when it comes to Indie Role-Playing Games and RPGs in the mainstream too.

I think, for far too long, buyers, creators, and players of RPGs determine the buying value of a particular game dependent on how much text it has, and the complexity of its rules.

I think this has continued even into the indie renaissance, even with games that have dead simple rules, still padding them with distracting and eventually confusing explanations, side chatter, setting descriptions.

I think a possible next step for indie games awaits the adventurous indie designer in making games that look as dead simple, elegant, and beautiful as a well-made children’s picture book or graphic novel. Think Frank Miller’s 300, James Gurney’s Dinotopia, Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet’s Gnomes, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

My friend Jana, a graphic designer, tells me design blossoms from what you leave out, not what you put in. Bruce Lee says the same thing about martial arts, by the way.

So why do I see even my favorite indie games with gobs and gobs of background and text that nobody but the evangelist for the game will read?

Instead of pages and pages of setting, provided a streamlined setting oracle.

Instead of descriptions of character possibilities and worldbuilding, provide awe-inspiring portraits and landscape panoramas.

Instead of trying to teach someone how to play with the book, know that people only really learn role-playing games face-to-face, and let the book support that kind of learning.

I of course see some designers experimenting with this already; Nordic RPG poems in a sense may already have the tiger by the tail for some of this ethic - Jonathan Walton’s Murderland contest produced a whole bunch of awesome possibilities for exploring this territory - Matthijs Holter’s Archipelago works this angle really well Judd Karlman’s Dictionary of MU rocks this idea - Vincent’s IAWA design seems within the realm of this kind of thinking too. For just rules simplicity, check out Creative Advantage’s Juicers deck.

To sum: rather than ensuring value by the thickness of the book, or the amount of text, ensure value by making it beautiful and elegant. If people will slap down $15-$25 on a short children’s picture book or graphic novel, potential players will do that for your indie game, believe me, if you design it beautifully enough.