This stuff on Story Games about postmodernism in gaming and what Matt said about how it’s difficult to relate to non-gamers because RPGs make you look at media in a different way got me thinking.

Two things: I’ve never played a game with the hopes of telling an awesome story, and I think Trigun is a triumph of storytelling.

These two seem initially unrelated, so I’ll go with the second first and then tie it all together. I know a lot of anime enthusiasts (which I do not consider myself to be; I have only enjoyed two anime series, and have been forced to watch dozens more) sort of roll their eyes at Trigun, because too many fourteen-year-old catgirls think Vash is dreamy or something. I don’t know about any of that. Here’s what I do know: the narrative arc of Trigun, minus one episode, is the tightest fucking thing I have ever seen. Everything is so tightly integrated and escalates on such a perfect, steady climb. There’s the traditional triple-arc structure to a serial (Each episode furthers and concludes the episode’s story arc, furthers a multi-episode story arc, and furthers the overall story arc), but there’s more to it than that. Every character’s personal/psychological story arc steadily plugs along in every episode, with few spotlights (not counting Vash’s spotlights, since he’s the main character). We’re given views of every character from every other character’s point of view. Every mini-boss is an exaggerated facet of the personality of the big boss. The right character to die dies, and the ending is satisfying but not conclusive. That is some high-end, thoughtful, intelligent storycrafting, and when I watch it, the author in me gets blown the fuck away.

I rarely consume media with the gamer in me at the forefront. My interests as a designer are firmly in the realm of genre simulation, so I’ll watch a movie or a TV show as my normal self, then later get all excited and want more of what I just saw, so I’ll try to write something that feels the same. Not the same narrative structure, not the stuff I talked about above. I don’t want to tell a story, as that’s always striked me as a less visceral thing than the non-LARP RPG equivalent of “playing star wars” like Tovey does, where he’s a dude with a lightsaber and you’re a dude with a lightsaber and you run around making cool noises and thinking “Holy crap! I’m in Star Wars! This is awesome!”

That’s what gets me hot about Mist-Robed Gate, It’s Complicated, Annalise. “Holy crap! I’m in a kung fu movie! A WB teen drama! A monster movie!” It’s also how I approached our game of Apocalypse World back in the day. “I’m in Mad Max or Waterworld or something! Whee!” I don’t think it’s really immersion though, because I wasn’t trying to BE THE PERSON and I never become one with my character or whatever. It’s just that I use the feeling of the media I consume to inform how I interact in a game. If I don’t like the color, or it’s not a type of media I’ve consumed, it’s hard to get me excited about playing a game.

So even though the thing that gets me all hot and bothered about Trigun is its narrative arc and the construction of its story, it has never occurred to me (until this post) to play a game trying to emulate that. Yesterday, if you came up to me and said “Hey, let’s play this game, it’s like Trigun,” I would have thought “Okay, post-apocalypse.. Are we all plant-aliens or are we just lonely people in an abandoned town or what? Can I have an arm cannon?” And probably would then go through the whole game going “Whee! I’m in Trigun!” without giving a second thought to the part of the inspiration that I loved the most.

This makes me kind of really want to try and play a game where I’m sitting down and consciously putting forth a narrativist agenda. I’ve never done that before, and I don’t even know if I’d have fun or be able to pull it off. But I totes want to try.

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