Poke, Poke

Playing without buttons

Do you know who Link is? Yeah, the little dude in green in all the Zelda games. Who is he? Where’d he come from? Is he an elf? I’m not talking to the people who played every version of the game and bought all the lore books. I’m just talking about you or me, playing Link. Who is he?

Us. He’s us. He’s our little guy in the world.

I have been thinking recently about two essays. One is by video game developer Andy Schatz. It’s about the Apple Mouse. You can read it here. The other is by Knave designer Ben Milton. It’s about playing D&D with kids. You can read it on his blog here. I think these are both connected to something special about Link and something special about the kind of RPGs we call adventure games.

Let me start with the Schatz essay. Andy dives into the differences between a one-button mouse (Apple) and a two-button mouse (PC). Here’s what he says:

There’s a big philosophical difference between one mouse button versus two. In the case of the PC, your mouse cursor is like a magic wand, a tool, an implement with many uses. It is not a physical projection of your body, but rather a mental projection of your thoughts. The mouse cursor points, but you still must decide what the mouse cursor MEANS when you click it. The branching decision path from your brain to your finger to the cursor is two degrees deep.

On the Mac, the mouse cursor is a projection of your finger. It’s physical. Your finger is just a pass through straight to the mouse cursor. And that also requires that anytime you have an object on the screen, that object can only have one meaning, one purpose. All you can do with that object is poke it. Poke poke.

Looking at modern game controllers just makes me feel old. So many buttons! Schatz is just talking about one versus two, but the principle is the same. You’re either playing with a multi-use implement or you’re poking things with your finger. Schatz wanted to design his game Monaco so that poking was all you had to do. He wanted to make a game that was more physical than mental. You don’t have to remember which button to push. Just go around poking things and see what happens.

Milton’s essay, on the other hand, is mostly about how kids interact with game rules. He critiques RPGs built specifically for kids as concerned with how adults imagine kids play or how adults think they should play. Ben’s experience as a teacher has given him a different perspective. Here’s how he puts it:

Most kids’ RPGs are highly mission based. Set up a quest, have the kids go do it. Turns out that kids love random tables and surprising twists that they have to deal with on the fly. Most Kids RPGs focus on carefully designed PCs who don’t ever die. Turns out that kids love the high-risk, high-reward structure of lethal dungeon crawls, and love generating oddball characters with dice rather than planning them out. Turns out that kids don’t enjoy games where violence is sanitized or glossed over, and enjoy dealing with real danger.

Read the whole thing to get a better picture of what he’s talking about, but what I want to focus on is the way kids play and what they’re after: danger, excitement, and surprise. They want, in a word, adventure.

This gets me back to Link. I don’t know anything about him. I don’t need to. He’s my way into the game and that’s all he needs to be. At a certain level, this is all I need from a character in an RPG: no history, no backstory, flaws, or special abilities. Just a way into the world. Something I can use to move around and interact. Poke, poke.

I think this makes me essentially a kid when I play. I don’t want to flesh out a character, I want to explore a world. I recently listened to a podcast wherein two game designers rhapsodized about a game session where they did nothing but speak in character the entire time. The 9 year-old Adventure Kid inside me rolled his eyes: ‘You just talked? For hours? You could have been looking for treasure!’

Now, far be it from me to cast aspersions on the way other people play. I’ve played story games and crunchy tactical games and I like them all. Gaming is gaming is gaming. But the thing that made me fall so hard for the Knave system was that you started as just a guy with six things in his pockets. You could have a sword, too, if you wanted: ‘It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!’ (I have an earlier post about Inventory where I go into this in more detail.) There are other games like this: Into the Odd, Tunnel Goons, etc. These are the ones that really get a hold of Adventure Kid and make my fingers itch to grab dice and paper.

In a sense, when I run games, I’m running them for Adventure Kid, too. I’ve tried to do the ‘grand narrative’ kind of GMing before, especially when I thought that’s what good GMs did. But I’m much happier running a game that’s essentially me coming back to camp after doing some early morning exploration: ‘Guys, guys! Wake up! You have to see what I found! You’re not going to believe it!’

So wake up and come with me. Grab some dice and paper and let’s go exploring.

Poke, poke.