Structured Freeform in the Indie Game Design Community: Inching Toward LARP

<title>Blurring the Boundaries</title>

subtitle>Structured Freeform in the Indie RPG Design Community</subtitle>

<author>Bill White</author>

<abstract>The small-press tabletop RPG design community is making connections to other gaming traditions and communities as its members seeks new ways of achieving their design goals.</abstract>

It is August, 2009 and I am sitting at a small table in the Indianapolis Convention Center during Gencon, a large annual gaming trade showthat has its origins entangled with the emergence of Dungeons & Dragons. With me is game designer Paul Tevis. In the booth run by the small-press game distributor Indie Press Revolution, Paul explains how to play his newly published game, A Penny for My Thoughts.

“The set-up for the game is that you are suffering from acute global amnesia,” he tells me. “Complete loss of memory.” He tears a sheet of paper into little slips as he talks. “You are undergoing this experimental therapy with this breakthrough new drug called Mnemnosyne, which—as weird as it sounds—allows people to connect with the unconscious minds of their fellow patients.” The little slips are for players to write “memory triggers” for the amnesiac characters in the game. A memory trigger is a phrase that suggests a Proustian stimulus. Paul writes “chopping red bell peppers”on one of the slips he’s torn as an example of a memory trigger.

“Several years ago, I was chopping red bell peppers and I nicked my thumb,” he says. It was fine, but he had to go the next morning to the doctor to have it cauterized to stop the bleeding. “And now every time I chop red bell peppers, I get this phantom pain in my thumb.”

To begin the game, players write down five memory triggers each and put them in a hat. Then one player, the traveler, pulls one of the slips out of the hat, treating it is a fragment of memory brought to the threshold of consciousness by the Mnemnosyne drug. The other players are the traveler’s guides. Each guide may then ask a question about the memory trigger. “The answer is always ‘yes, and . . .’” Paul says. “What they see is essentially right but it’s lacking some detail,” which the traveler then provides. Paul gives me examples: “‘Were you in your kitchen?’ ‘Yes, and I was making dinner for my wife.’ ‘Were the red bell peppers fresh?’ ‘Yes, I had just picked them in my garden.’ ‘Were you making one of your favorite dishes? ’ ‘Yes, and my wife loved it as well.’”

Then, thus aided by the prompts of the guide, the traveler begins to relate the memory that has been newly recalled. “I remember a time when I was in my kitchen chopping fresh red bell peppers that I’d just picked in the garden that morning, starting to make dinner, and my wife came into the kitchen.” As the traveler “recalls” the details of the story, he may introduce new details about what he or she saw or felt as well as what others did or said. The only thing the traveler cannot introduce is his own actions. “You GM your character,” Paul explains, “and other people play your character. It’s a weird inversion.”

To signal that he wants to find out what actions the traveler took in the shrouded past, the player holds up a penny, at which point each guide may offer a suggestion for the traveler’s action. One guide might ask, “Did you kiss her?” Another might say, “Did you ask her to bring you something?” The traveler then gives the penny to the guide whose alternative he likes best. Ultimately, guides who acquire enough pennies can find out the answer to their own traveler’s question, “How did I lose my memory?”—if they want to. “Some people choose not to find out,” Paul says. “They’d prefer not to know.”

The style of game that Paul is experimenting with is called “structured freeform,” and A Penny for My Thoughts is one of the first games emerging from the small-press RPG indie game design scene that makes use of this design aesthetic.This style focuses on establishing social procedures that constrain how players interact, or what they may introduce into the in-game fiction, rather than on creating game-mechanical procedures to resolve in-game conflicts. Jeepform, Paul reminded me, was another structured freeform style of RPG play that was a cousin to his own improv-inspired game design.

<heading 1>The Jeep Arrives</heading 1>

That same summer that Paul and I had our conversation at the Indie Press Revolution booth, the tabletop RPG blogosphere had been aflutter with the news: “jeepform” was a nominee for the Diana Jones Award, given at Gencon each year since 2000 to recognize “excellence” in gaming. According to the nominating committee, jeepform is “an innovative and increasingly influential style of roleplaying” developed by some sort of “Nordic collective.” A hybrid of multiple styles infused with “clear-eyed maturity,” said the committee, “jeepform games are often deeply moving, occasionally hilarious, and always compelling.”

But to many observers in the tabletop gaming world, the nomination was puzzling: jeepform? What is that? What does it even mean? Others were downright curmudgeonly: “It's a kind of Scandinavian mini-game LARPing,” explained one skeptic dismissively on a forum called theRPGSite.com. “It's meant to be very politically or socially charged, and to cause one to think about a particular subject in a new or unusual way.” Thus damning jeepform by its pretensions to seriousness, the skeptic drove the bolt home: “Most famously, one jeepform game was called ‘Gang Rape’ and is meant to teach you that gang rape is transgressive and bad, and the rest of it is at about that level of intellectual sophistication.”

Even amid these carping sneers, however—and even with jeepform’s runner-up finish to the card game Dominion in the 2009 Diana Jones Award—there is increasing recognition of the possibilities inherent in a gaming form that, asveteran game designer and observer of gaming Greg Costikyan says, “blurs the boundaries between theatrical improv and tabletop roleplaying; indeed, you could see it being performed before a theater audience, and perhaps one day games of this type shall be.”

And so a small but diligent group of American designers from the small-press, “indie”tabletop RPG community isbeginning to apply—or as in Paul’s case independently develop—theprinciples and techniques of jeepform gaming totheir own “structured freeform” games, in effect creating a North American version of this European-pioneered hybrid gaming style that combines elements of table-top RPG, improv, and LARP. This account attempts to describe this cross-cultural engagement, offering it as an example of the creative possibilities that emerge from the interaction of different ways of thinking about games.

In short, then, it is the story of two gaming traditions, each with its own history and approach to games, coming together and coming to influence each other as individuals meet, interact, and collaborate with one another. It is told from the perspective of a participant observer—an indie RPG designer with an interest in structured freeform. My involvement, however, ison the margins. The real story begins at the center.

If the North American school of structured freeformgame design can be said to have a dean, it is Emily Care Boss, an energetic and thoughtful RPG designer whose companyBlack and Green Games is best known for a trilogy of romance-themed indie games called Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under My Skin.

“Indie games” are creator-owned, small-press tabletop RPGs that are often experimental in form, playing with the design conventions pioneered by “mainstream” games like Dungeons & Dragons, Steve Jackson’s GURPS, and White Wolf’s World of Darkness. The on-line locus for this sort of innovation in the middle years of this past decade was a place called the Forge ( moderated with a firm hand by a biology professor-cum-game guru named Ron Edwards, whose game design paradigm can be summed up in the motto, “System Matters.” In other words, the procedures used to playany given RPG reward different player approaches to playing it in different ways—so some approaches to a particular game will tend to be enjoyable and others frustrating, and this will vary by game. This may sound uncontroversial, but from the earliest days of tabletop role-playing a philosophy has been around that says that system doesn’t matter, that what matters is the quality of the Game Master (GM) or the players’ ability to immerse themselves in the fictional world of the game (“role-playing not roll-playing,” is the chief tenet of this camp).

As a participant in the deliberations and discussions about games on the Forge, Emily helped formulate what is sometimes called “the Lumpley Principle,” which defines a game’s “system” as the procedures used to determine who is allowed to introduce what into the game’s fiction, its diegetic “shared imagined space.” She is interested in creating collaborative, player-centered games. As she explains in a 2006 essay appearing in the sole extant issue of a gaming journal called Push:

<blockquote>In “collaborative” games, rights and responsibilities formerly held solely by the GM have been extended to all the players. . . . Collaborative roleplaying games take advantage of the multiple viewpoints people bring to the game. Instead of primarily using one person’s ideas—those of the GM—they find ways to intentionally weave together the many creative strands that are present. The historical GM/Player split is but one possibility along a continuum of collaboration, and new games that make more of an effort to make gaming more of a team effort capitalize on the inherent potential of gaming: the creativity of the entire play group.</blockquote>

Emily’s engagement with jeepform gaming began in 2007, when she was the guest of honor at a Finnish gaming convention called Ropecon, where she met two Swedish members of the jeep collective, Tobias Wrigstad and Thorbiörn Fritzon. “I had an amazing experience with jeep,” she said. “It hit on a million things I’d been looking for.”

The hallmarks of the jeepform style that appealed to Emily included its focus on social realism rather than the fantastic, its emphasis on psychological inquiry as part of the design, and its use of the player “as part of the field of play instead of it just being about the fiction.” In other words, jeepform is more about creating an experience for the players than about constructing a shared narrative. Its games emphasize “techniques” that structure the interactions among the players and the action in-game in particular ways; for example, in the game Gang Rape, the attackers are only allowed to describe the physical actions and reactions of the characters in the game, while the victim is only allowed to describe the thoughts and feelings of those characters. The effect, according to one young man I met right after he had played the victim, is viscerally powerful.

Meanwhile, the jeepers were also excited by their meeting with Emily.

“We had met a lot of other American writers of roleplaying games,” Danish jeepformer Frederik Berg Østergaard told me, but the impact was not the same. “They had their own thing, and we had our completely different thing.”

Before the formation of the jeepform collective, Frederik had begun to play and write“scenarios” for the Danish convention scene in the middle of the 1990s. “That was a special tradition of play,” he recalled. “We called it ‘semi-live,’ which was in a room with a table, without costumes, but you could stand up, you could yell and move around.” He played one memorably mind-blowing gothic game in a room whose walls were covered in black velvet, and then went home and prepared and ran the same scenario for his friends. “We called that ‘systemless role-play’,” Frederik explained. “We didn’t use rules systems, we didn’t use dice; what happened was based on what the GM felt was good for the story.” Danish convention scenarios were heavily oriented toward the GM guiding the action, with the scenario instructions telling the GM what the game was about, what should happen, and how it should end.

“We pushed the medium,” said Frederik, experimenting with things like GMless games, player-controlled narration, avoiding conflict, and other challenges to the typical conventions of role-playing. Then, at a gaming convention in 2003 in Malmö, Sweden, Frederik met Tobias Wrigstad. “It was like meeting a long-lost friend,” he said. “We met, and we exchanged contact information, and it was just a matter of time before we began to collaborate.” Thus was born the jeepform movement, under the sobriquet and rallying cryVi Åker Jeep (“we go by jeep,” i.e., not by fiat; according to some accounts, the name was selected to make it easy to find via Internet search engine), which began to refine and extend the techniques they had been experimenting with in the Danish and Swedish freeform traditions. Ironically, Tobias once told Frederik that if they hadn’t met, he would have stopped playing. The freeform movement in Sweden was slowly dying, but the Danish scene was still—and continues to be—vibrant and energetic, with a strong presence at Denmark’s annual Fastaval gaming convention.

The flagship jeepform game, hammered into shape between 2004 and 2006 by Tobias and Thorbiörn as well as jeeper Olle Jonsson, is called The Upgrade. It is a reality show parody that serves as a showcase for various jeepform techniques. According to Jason Morningstar, an American game designer (whose historical game Grey Ranks, about Polish teens fighting Nazis in World War II, did win the Diana Jones award in 2008) who had met Olle on a visit to Denmark, “Olle told me, ‘You should really look at The Upgrade, which is our teaching text. It’s sort of remedial jeep. It teaches you all the techniques you need to know to play real games.’” By “real,” Jason told me, Olle meant serious. “The Upgrade is light-hearted and lots of fun—deliberately,” Jason went on. “It’s captivating, it pulls you in, it’s familiar, it’s extensible, you can play it in front of an audience, and when you’ve finished it you’ve mastered a bunch of techniques that you can use to play abusive alcoholic fathers, which is really where their interests lay at that time.”

Some of these techniques employed in jeepform games include “bird-in-ear,” in which one player will literally whisper first-person perception into a player’s ear to guide their character’s actions; “pillow talk is better than sex,” where players describe what their characters are seeing, somewhat after the fashion of an old-fashioned radio play; “fast forward” to aggressively move in-game action to a crucial point; “insides and outsides,” where players shuttle between acting out characters’ surface actions (the outsides) and their private thoughts (the insides). Other devices involve differentiating the playing space by function, so that one area is used for confessional-style character monologues or for acting out what happened in the past or the imagined consequences of the main action in the future.

“Meeting Emily put a human face on the Forge,” Frederik said. “It was an interesting scene to discover, but at the same time it seemed like a step backward because of all the rules.” The focus on game-mechanical procedure—System Matters!—characteristic of Forge-inspired games was something that jeepform gamers in particular found hard to wrap their heads around. “What are you doing here? How are you playing this?” They invited Emily to write an essay explaining Forge theory—Ron Edward’s “Big Model” of RPG play—for the annual Scandinavian LARP conference that that rotates among Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway, changing its name as it does to match the language of the hosting country: in Finland, where it was held in 2008, the conference is called Solmukohta—in English, “Nodal Point.” That essay, called “Key Concepts In Forge Theory,” appeared in the Solmukohta proceedings book Playground Worlds, and was called “the highlight of the book” by Finnish jeeper and fellow contributor J. Tuomas Harviainen for condensing the diffuse and unsystematized Forge conversations into a single coherent and accessible summary.

<heading 1>See Emily Play</heading 1>

Emily returned to the United States in the summer of 2007 energized by what she had experienced at Ropecon. “I came back a converted woman,” she told me. That year at Gencon, she began searching for allies, people who would help her spread the word about jeepform. She knew of some members of the indie RPG community who were interested in improv, including Jason Morningstar, who had already made contact with some of the Danish freeform gamers, as well as Paul Tevis, who was at that time beginning to show people the “ashcan” (printed playtest draft) of A Penny for My Thoughts. “I didn’t run any jeep games at Gencon, but I told people, ‘Come to Dreamation,’” a smaller gaming convention held in New Jersey each year that attracts indie gamers from across the Northeast and sometimes even further afield.