Blaming Cerebus - a look at The Order of the Stick

A bit of a departure this week as I sidestep towards an example of serial online storytelling from the world of role-playing game culture. I'll specifically be looking at Rich Burlew's online comic Order of the Stick, now in its tenth year and having just completed the antepenultimate book in its ongoing storyline. The Order of the Stick takes its title from its stick-figure artwork, artwork the characters therein sometimes seem aware in occasional cracks in the fourth wall. So yes, this post is about a stick-figure comic strip about gamers. It's also about more - OoTS has been successful for a long time, and gained a very devoted following (Burlew raised money via Kickstarter to reprint his back-catalog to reach new readers. Out of a goal of just under $60,000 he raised well over a million in what was, at the time, a Kickstarter record).

OOTS began  way back in 2003 as a somewhat one-note satire of role playing games in general and Dungeons and Dragons in particular. This came at a time when I still counted myself among role playing gamers, and the humor somewhat worked for me. Sadly (or not so sadly - I've found much else to enrich my life), I've not thrown dice with a g

Order of the Stick style fan-art
MyNameMattersNot (DeviantArt).
This is that the comic looks like

aming group in years now - likely almost as long as OoTS has been running. Why do I keep coming back for all these years, following the story of an adventure-gaming group which - at least sometimes - seems to know that they're in an adventure game? How has Burlew been so successful for so long with stick-figure artwork? Two factors: first is evolution, and the second is a successful twist of expectations.

Satire can be fun, but very quickly outstays its welcome. OoTS isn't alone in using broad satire to hook an audience into something which eventually grows more serious. Terry Pratchett's early Discworld books, to take another example, were as broad a satire on fantasy literature tropes as OoTS is about role-playing games. Comic book artist David Sims started his series Cerebus as a not too smart or clever satire of various works of fantasy literature, before moving to a not too smart but increasingly serious (and increasingly problematic) philosophical tale. I see it as the opposite of George RR Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice, which started over a decade ago as a grim and gritty take on secondary world epic fantasy and today continues as -- a grim and gritty take on secondary world epic fantasy. Keeping a consistent tone in works such as this runs the risk of creating a thing preserved in amber, unchanging as the world moves on around it. Burlew has successfully avoided that fate.

The very opening of the comic over a decade ago began in media res with a situation very familiar to gamers - a typical "dungeon crawl" in which a group of heroes were exploring an underground maze of rooms and tunnels, fighting various monsters lurking there for no apparent reason. We got jokes about the rules, about how the world subtly changed when the people playing the game switched to an updated version of the rulebook (RPG rules change from time to time; Dungeons and Dragons has gone through various incarnations, now up to the "fourth edition". The four doesn't count various in-between changes [the upgrade on OoTS was from 3rd edition to 3.5 {oh no! Nested brackets! I hope they all close correctly}] , and many groups have their own unique "house rules". Many gamers have very strong opinions on which edition is "best" [with the split usually between traditionalists who want to go one edition backward and futurists who see the latest as shiny and fun]). It's the kind of story that's fun if you're in the middle of that world, but likely wouldn't appeal much to those outside of it. It's also the kind of story which is fun for a fairly short time.

As time went on, a larger story took shape around the initial "joke" strips. There's still a great deal of humor, but the humor has become more of a vehicle for a genuine character-driven stick-figure novel. A recent story arc, for example, dealt with the party's elvish wizard Varsuvius. Ze (I'll use a non-gendered pronoun for zim; we don't know if Varsuvius is male or female) started off as a stereotype: the "blaster" wizard obsessed with gaining more and more power to smite enemies using magic energies. Somewhat early on in the story, Ze killed a young dragon in a scene which appeared inconsequential at the time. Later, we meet the dragon's parent and, to avoid having zir family slain in revenge, Varsuvius is tempted to sell zis soul to devils for more power. The resulting storyline (which I'll not further spoil) calls into question the core assumptions gaming makes about the nature of evil and the role of violence and develops V's character while remaining true to the core personality left over from the "joke a day" times. It was a surprisingly effective bit of storytelling, and a reminder that in today's increasingly accessible media environment one can find notable or interesting works in surprising places.

The moral of the story? Given passion and dedication, something which at first seems silly can become something something special and interesting as it grows with you and the audience. Do you have a wild idea? If so, stick with it, and look me up again in a decade. We'll see where we're at.

Playtime - The World is Not as it Appears!

I attacked a post office this morning.

Before you call the FBI and I end up on a government watch list, I should explain. You see, it was really the Post Office, but I was actually attacking a portal rather than the building itself or, more specifically, the resonators controlling that portal. For those not in the know, this is part of Ingress, Google's augmented reality game (ARG). It's still technically in closed beta, but they've been trickling out invites to join at a pretty steady pace since late last year. And, while there are flaws, it's an intriguing concept for gaming, storytelling, and even marketing. I've faded into and out of and back into it again,  seduced by the ease of picking it up and the temptation to climb the ladder and simultaneously pushed away by the level of grinding and frustration. (Grinding is an expression mostly dealing with computer role-playing type games. It denotes the act of repeatedly fighting the same challenges to gain the experience and equipment needed to progress in the game. Ingress can feel very grind-y at times. More on that later).

The game starts with the premise that the secretive Niantic corporation has been performing experiments with a new form of matter/energy called "XM" or "exotic matter". There's a science-fictional back-story regarding XM, "portals" through which this energy flows, mysterious extra-dimensional entities called "Shapers" which can influence people's thoughts through the XM and a vast global conspiracy keeping everything quiet. As an ARG, the story and "game board" are not given as expositional flavor text but are woven through various websites and in-game discoveries. New features and rule-changes are introduced as short videos, website links, and audio recordings discovered at various in-game locations - the aforementioned portals. When you sign up, you're given a choice of joining the Resistance - dedicated to protecting humanity from the Shapers - and the Enlightened, who believe that the Shapers can offer us great gifts if we have the courage to embrace them.

The field of play  - links I placed from the NYPL
to Grand Central Station, NY

And what are these "portals"? They're locations and landmarks in the real world, which you need to approach by physically walking to them with a GPS-enabled Android phone (this is Google's project. Apple and Blackberry users need not apply!). Once you get within range (about 40 meters), you do a few things:
-"hack" the portal - shaping its XM into in-game items.
-Deploy a "resonator" on the portal. You receive resonators by hacking, and a cluster of 8 resonators fully powers a portal for your team.
- Link the portal to others. Link lines that make up triangles create control fields which impact your team's overall score.

What makes it challenging is that the other faction is competing for the same portals, to create the same fields. If you find a portal already claimed, you have to attack it with single-use bombs called "bursters". There's an experience bonus for creating links and fields, and half as much for destroying them. Earning experience allows you to use more powerful items and create longer links.

That's the game in a nutshell. What makes it work? There's a cooperative aspect which is quite appealing; there are various in-game limitations that encourage or even mandate group play. There also is a "level cap" at 8. This is a source of frustration for high-level players who can be lacking in goals, but it prevents the discrepancy between newer players starting out and those who've been around a while from getting too large. It seems possible to "catch up" no matter how late you joined and how sporadically you play.

It's also sometimes possible to see some really amazing feats. At one point a group of players in California accomplished this:

It must have involved not only several players, but someone would have had to physically travel to the portal at each corner of the triangle. And yes, that's nearly the whole state of California.

So what are the problems with the game?

First, while there is what appears to be an interesting story, the more one looks the thinner it appears; whatever narrative arcs there are move very slowly and the whole thing reminds me a bit about the old joke about writing a series rather than a novel; instead of a beginning a middle and an end there's a beginning and a middle and a middle and a middle and a middle. The story, in other words, can't end without ending the game. So, everything I talked about - building control fields, the global MU score, the battle between Resistance and Enlightened - those are all just window dressing. Some days the Resistance leads, some the enlightened leads, but in the end it's like a baseball game with infinite innings; being ahead today only means what you decide it means.

It also means that an epic feat like the giant California control field can be undone by one person attacking one spot, with no long-term impact on the game.

This brings the next interesting thing to me, and what's interesting as a writer and even a designer of technology; absent a real "winning condition" people tailor their gameplay to their own local goals. So, rather than build fields players will make "farms" of high level portals to collect items, and deliberately avoid connecting them into fields to make them less appealing targets for the opponents to attack. In-game chatter becomes more war-gamey than in-character; people follow the overall story to some extent or other, but mostly talk strategy and tactics.

There's also a fair bit of wrestling with ones GPS and, again, a fair bit of repetition. Still, there's just enough promised change - and in-game events - to keep things lively.

Where the war-gaming dominant community and game have really come together is for in-game special events; there'd be a post on social media somewhere about, say, a Niantic Corporation operative being spotted at a Duane Reade drugstore (all Duane Reades have portals in them; this is one of the most overt examples of using the game as a marketting tool), and the next week a challenge was announced - the team that controlled the most Duane Reade's at a certain time would win some advantage in-game. What followed was an extraordinarily coordinated plan of attack. I didn't get to participate (I'm a very casual player, with the job, kids, and family eating up the time that some people seem to have to wander around attacking portals), but the recap was pretty amazing; an under-manned Enlightented team managed to hold dozens of portals and handily win the event with the assistance of a player sitting at home monitoring the battle on a PC and directing traffic. It was a moment in which game play, social elements, and the creativity of the playing public combined to create something that otherwise couldn't exist. So what is the bigger lesson here? Technology, including the growing ubiquity of GPS enabled phones, can continue to give us be ways to pay, work, and tell stories that wouldn't have been available to us otherwise. That people will use what you give them in their own way, for their own ends.

 And, most importantly, the world isn't what it seems. The shapers are out there, waiting for us. Should we welcome them, or fight them?

Z is for Stats

It's the very, very end of the A to Z challenge. I'll finish with what looks like a bit of a cheat, but does have an actual idea behind it.

"Z for Stats" was not, in fact, my cheat; gamers of a certain age might remember it as the last keyboard command from the Ultima IV Computer Role Playing Game. Today with high-resolution graphics, better input devices, and even better sound there are very few constraints on what a game-writer can do. Years ago we didn't have any of this, so game designers had to operate under constraints of technology including graphics, sound, and input interfaces. The remarkable thing is that many of them were still able to create an immersive  gaming environment and a compelling experience within the constraints of the technology. In fact, I'd argue that working within those constraints created a deeper and richer experience than many modern games with fewer such limitations. Being restricted to keyboard commands, for example, means having to choose which 26 things you want a character to be able to do, and then trying to shoehorn them into the alphabet in a reasonable enough way that the player won't go scurrying for the quick reference guide every ten minutes. Some - O)pen, T)alk were obvious, while others J)immy lock or Y)ell "Giddyup" or "Whoa" (to make your horse go faster or slower) were certainly among the game's quirks.

What does all of this have to do with a writing or technology blog? The same concept comes up in writing. This A to Z challenge was all about fitting thoughts into the artificial constraint of the alphabet. Formal poetry, from sonnets to Haiku, is about fitting ideas and images into a specific meter and rhyme. These often require a specific kind of thought and care with each choice, leading to a very different work than one would have free-form. I very much enjoyed taking this trip through the alphabet with you, and likely shared a handful of things that I'd not have absent prompting from the alphabet. Was it, therefore, a success? I'll say yes.

Now that we finished the April challenge I'll step down from the daily schedule, but will be back later this week with either technology or writing. I hope some of you who found me through A to Z will stick around to see where we go next.