formalizing the art of invention

A lot of my refereeing is intuitional. I ad lib. I come up with one idea or image and then follow it around. When this happens in a game it works for me, but one of the things I need to do to make a game work for someone else is formalize these processes. Reveal them to others so they can reproduce them.

The problem is, of course, that I just do it. I don’t have a system.

But this is nonsense — I do it the same way every time. There must be a system. I just haven’t looked at it closely enough. So I’m going to go through a premise and lay out my thought patterns as a hierarchical choice tree. Someone else can use this as a jumping off point for their own exploration of the same premise. For a lot of game design this is the heart of it (for me): watching myself ad lib and then formalizing that.

Premise: you have a space that has not been explored (a slipstream that connects an unknown or forgotten system). You might not be familiar with Diaspora: a slipstream is a wormhole that connects two systems. There aren’t a lot of them — clusters in Diaspora are only a handful of connected systems.

So in this cluster we have a link from Cando to…what? It starts out unknown! At some point the players are going to want to go there though, so…what’s there? Quick! There’s a session in twenty minutes?

Here’s what I would go through. At the top level, I explore the big questions.

• Why did no one know about the route before?
• Who’s there?
• What’s there?

And then I cascade. For each I ask more questions. And then again. Until I get to some answers. And I might ask more questions.

• Why did no one know about the route before?
  • It’s new
  • It has been deliberately hidden
  • It recurs
  • It was destroyed but has re-emerged

Once I have a nice set of possibilities, like say:

• Why did no one know about the route before
  • It’s new
    • Why did it suddenly show up?
      • Local astronomical change
      • Change in the astronomy of the new side
      • New technology reveals it
      • Technology on the other side has suddenly allowed them to visit us
  • It has been deliberately hidden
    • Who hid it?
    • Why?
    • How was it revealed?
  • It recurs
    • When was it last here
    • How do we know that?
    • What causes it to oscillate?
      • Astronomy? Maybe a distant binary?
      • Technology? Did someone or something do this deliberately?
  • It was destroyed but has re-emerged
    • Who destroyed it?
    • How?
    • Why is it back?
    • Is it stable now?

I pick a path. That’s the plan. Here’s the whole tree:

• Why did no one know about the route before
  • It’s new
    • Why did it suddenly show up?
      • Local astronomical change
      • Change in the astronomy of the new side
      • New technology reveals it
      • Technology on the other side has suddenly allowed them to visit us
  • It has been deliberately hidden
    • Who hid it?
    • Why?
    • How was it revealed?
  • It recurs
    • When was it last here
    • How do we know that?
    • What causes it to oscillate?
      • Astronomy? Maybe a distant binary?
      • Technology? Did someone or something do this deliberately?
  • It was destroyed but has re-emerged
    • Who destroyed it?
    • How?
    • Why is it back?
    • Is it stable now?
• Who’s there?
  • Are there humans there?
    • Yes: may connect a whole other cluster, different colonist cultures
    • No: did there used to be?
      • Yes: dead failed colony
        • What killed it
        • How long ago
        • Is it still here?
  • No: new territory
    • Intelligence?
      • Yes: aliens, alien cultures
      • No: used to be but no longer
        • Dead civilization
        • Reclaimed by nature or ruined?
      • No: example of pristine location, no penetration by intelligence. What’s awesome? What’s horrible? It has to be DIFFERENT. No one has EVER been here.
• What’s there
  • Nothing. What the hell? How is there a slipknot to nothing?
  • A normal system
  • A normal system with something anomalous
    • Black hole
    • Neutron star
    • Giant artifact
    • Evidence of ancient civilization
  • A very not normal system
    • Impossible orbital arrangements
    • Planet sized artificial structures
      • Bigger?
    • An artificial star
      • How do we know it’s artificial?

This can be used at two levels. At one level, it’s a thought process you can adopt in its most general form: ask a few big questions, answer them, and let the answers raise more questions. That’s one kind of mind’s tool.

If you are not comfortable with something so unbounded, at least in the context of this game, you can literally use this tree. I only used a fraction of it and even if you pick the same things I did, you probably won’t present them the same way I did. And your players won’t be arriving with the same baggage mine did. It will be different.

And of course this could be further formalized into a randomized oracle.

With the process laid bare, you can choose the level at which you want to ad lib and still benefit from someone having blazed a path for you. Happy trails.