Ghost/Echo

Last night we finished my first-ever tabletop gaming campaign. True to form, though, the tabletop was virtual, my GM in a different timezone. While we couldn’t share a pizza, we did share a good game, the indie Ghost/Echo (from One Seven Design, and part of the Story Games community), and I got a fine example of where story really comes from in games.

We used Skype video chat: it turns out that, at least for Shadowminister, gestures are as important a part of atmosphere creation as bad Russian accents   Skype has a dice-roller which we ended up using after the really versatile online dice-roller we started with broke. Ether Pad was where we tracked the choices and outcomes being rolled for, and that rounded out our toolkit.

In my classes we’ve struggled with the definition of “game.” Whatever a century of academics have said, nothing prepared me for considering the two cryptic pages of Ghost/Echo to be, embody, describe, enable or otherwise have anything to do with something I’d recognize as a “game.”

The website describes Ghost/Echo as

a quick-play aetherpunk adventure module for 2-6 players. It includes the raw materials you need to construct your own setting and characters as well as a complete rules system.

Here’s a link to the PDF that is the whole of the raw materials for Ghost/Echo. It didn’t mean a damn thing to me before we started playing it. What you get is two illustrations, a page of names for people and places, and a page of rules for when to roll dice. And that’s it.

Out of that, Shadowminister, a dice roller and I created a four-night, six hour adventure of high-stakes bluffing, battling and badassery that, thanks to a fortunate final roll of the dice, left me, Coil, a fallen starship builder turned high-value scavenger, into Earth’s dimension-crossing warlord.

Now, this should put to rest a long-standing debate on story in games. It won’t, of course, but it should. Where was the story of how Coil, stuck in the Ghost World with a broken transport and a dazed pilot, played the Russian Mob off a Ghost World warlord to get his crew back together, beat everyone to the Score and stop an alien invasion cold?

Not in the games-designer-as-auteur product, the rule set and mechanics. As the creator says,

//GHOST/ECHO is presented as an ‘oracle game’. It provides only a starting point and a resolution mechanic. You and your friends fill in the rest of the details as you play.

So there clearly was a story in our four-session gameplay. And clearly, it came from the intersection of my imagination with Shadowminister’s and the dice roller.

There! Academic teapot-tempest unstirred!

The game’s a great example of my favorite games definition, from Sid Meyer: “a game is a series of interesting choices.”  Episode 3 ended with me awakening back in the main Ghost World town, covered in ectoplasm and blood, surrounded by bodies apparently killed by my trademark lightning gun, and guards closing in on me.

How did I get there? I’d tried to use my ghost powers to pull a Ghost Spider out of my teammate, Vixen. So we rolled: the goal was to get the thing out of Vixen, the danger that the battle would crash our transport on The Six Arms, a deadly space of grinding planetary spheres with unpredictable, shifting gravity.  In order to up my odds through getting an extra die to roll, I asked for an extra danger. Shadowminister added, the Spider would shift to me.

It was a night of bad rolls. I got one plus and two minuses, as I recall. I took the plus on getting the Spider out of Vixen (reuniting my team was one of my/Coil’s primary, self-selected goals), and took the hit on getting possessed.

In Episode 4 it worked out fine: while I came to being chased by the warlord Chain’s guards, a lucky roll saw me successfully co-opt them to help repel a Ghost attack and set me firmly on the road to my own warlord-hood.

The “interesting choices” made possible by game mechanics provided a series of insights into character, here that “projective character” fusion of me and the scavenger Coil.  Anyone who knows me fairly well could’ve predicted that what would emerge would include deep team loyalty; bluff, blarney and bullshit as tools of first resort; and standup heavy-weapons close-quarters battle as the last.

Now, while it didn’t surprise me that my first “interesting choice” was, in response to

“You turn the corner and face a pack of Ghost Dogs, who growl menacingly at you,”

my response was “I growl back,”  (I won the roll, they slunk away with ectoplasmic tails between their legs), it did generate a good startled laugh from Shadowminister, and set a tone for the game.

So, the psychological/sociological value of those “interesting choices ” is pretty self-evident. My research question, though, is, what are the political implications? What can gaming teach us about how to construct better communities?

No, I don’t think I’m really finishing my dissertation in Spring 2011 either!