The good news is that I'm writing other things, although some of them are technically games that I'm playing and not works of fiction. I wonder if there is any benefit to the writer in participating in this sort of thing, or if it takes up time that would otherwise be spent writing more seriously? I know that it's taking up time I could otherwise spend blogging.
Having suckered myself into getting involved in two games of online Diplomacy, I won't spend much time trying to justify it. But getting involved in a play-by-post Burning Wheel campaign actually raises the question of whether--or to what extent--my contribution to the game is practice in or a distraction from the writing craft. Most of the other players are of a literary persuasion, and I know two of them are spinning a different campaign off into a novel, so it's not necessarily a waste. And where Burning Wheel looks like it should shine is in creating characters with depth and wringing story out of them. I have to wonder.
A few years ago I DM'd a D&D campaign that was apparently well-liked by my players. I DM'd in college more or less continuously, but just found it harder and harder to create sessions. I wrapped up one long campaign to everyone's satisfaction, but everything since then has sort of sputtered and gone out.
To the extent that running a game is performance, I fear it. To the extent that it is writing, it is trying to write a story when you have no direct control over the main characters. (A million good GMs would tell me that I'm doing it wrong if that's how I'm looking at it, and they would probably be right.) And I think that the attentive GM will be the most aware, of anyone at the table, of everywhere the game drags or stalls, and every sword swing that stretches over 15 minutes because arewesurethisishowthatthingactuallyworksohshootIforgotaboutthis.
But for all that frustration it's worth mentioning that my most recent stalled D&D campaign has recently fermented into the concept of a novel. As I strip out the epic fantasy generica and trademarked materials something genuinely intriguing--to me anyway--is taking shape. Although I run into a new problem there, in that several of my characters were created by good friends of mine, who became invested in their avatars over the course of the game. In the vagaries of interpersonal emotional law it is hard to see how much right I have to take these characters and change them to suit my needs, as I do with my own. And can I play the capricious god with characters who wear my friends' faces? It was easy enough to do in the game, when the friends could fight back with dice and their own ideas, but is someone being denied a fair deal when I'm at both ends of the table?
Playing from the passenger seat has given me some perspective, not only on gaming as such but on writing. Getting to play characters instead of running things is a relatively new experience for me, then, and I often find myself preferring it. But I can see that I conceptualize characters differently than most of my friends, whether they're for games or stories.
When does a fictional character acquire a soul? By this I think I mean at what point does the character acquire an integrity that can be violated--when does changing the character become writing them wrong? I see my friends hit this point pretty early on, perhaps less than halfway through character creation in the case of an RPG. Whereas I come to a potential story wanting certain things to happen to certain sorts of people, and I pick and shape the characters to make that happen. I suppose when writing, a character is mutable until the final draft, but you only have one go at a game. That would perhaps argue for ensouling an RPG avatar relatively early, but I find that I don't know my character until I have a firm grasp of the world that they're inhabiting.
The World includes the Rules. Rules are worldview. The game developer codifies the answers to questions that we struggle with in real life: What defines a (human) being? What is important? What brings success, and what brings failure? In Dungeons and Dragons it pays to take risks, and be larger than life. In Call of Cthulhu it doesn't pay to get out of bed in the morning.
This is getting fairly long. I should save some thoughts for the future.
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