About 2 years ago I started working on a new game. I had created a handful of very simple games up to that point, and wanted to try my hand at something a bit more developed and a bit more complicated. The concept that I developed came to be known as Anomalous State, and I still can't get it out of my head.
This is not a finished game, and at this point I don't know if it ever will be, but the concept lives rent free in my head. Part of the reason that I don't think I can finish it, is that I don't think it will ever live up to my hopes and expectations - and I don't think any game can live up to the subject matter and aesthetic. This game was heavily inspired by Annihilation, the Southern Reach series, Roadside Picnic, and Stalker (the film). Aesthetically, these worlds bring me so much joy and dread and are the pieces of art that I gravitate towards again and again. They are unsettling and weird, and upsetting, and tragic, and there is so little in them which is redeemable - there are so few places where people win or succeed. They are about failure and change, and suffering, and letting go. How then, should I go about bringing those concepts into the very regimented world of wargaming?
These concepts lend themselves much more easily to role playing games, and I think there are probably already a few good candidates out there for playing something like this - Indeed, my friends and I played a very upsetting campaign of World of Darkness in highschool that would have dovetailed nicely with these settings. The problem is that I don't play enough ttrpgs, and it's a space where I'm less confident about my design skills. I think what happens when you try to take these concepts and aesthetics and pull them into a more concrete wargame system, is that you get something like Stalker (the game/books) and Zona Alfa. These are settings that I still like a lot, but they graft soviet mercenary simulations on top of the supernatural strangeness of the source material. The guns, conflict, and militarism change the feel. They make it a "wargame", and the anomalies and strangeness come afterwards. But the sacrifice almost feels necessary to capture even a portion of the original feeling.
It is probably unsurprising that H.P. Lovecraft is one of the other great artistic inspirations in my life. I've been reading his works since I was quite young, and his stories impressed on me the importance of not knowing. I judge most fiction against this concept, and when I find that a piece of art is giving away the mystery and the magic, I lose interest. The unknown is unsettling - once something is familiar, it is mundane. So, when we take a setting like Southern Reach or Stalker (film) where the story introduces way more questions than answers, and we graft combat rules and anomaly tables onto it, we get a setting that becomes familiar and understandable. The way I tried to combat this was to make a ridiculous number of tables that can act on each other creating increasingly complex systems of events - and of course the problem with this was that it both dramatically increased the amount of work required to create and playtest the game, and it also increased the crunch of the game system. When the aesthetic you are trying to evoke is mystical, spiritual, and emotional, searching through a series of tables and cross referencing pages does not create the right atmosphere.
So the answer that I have arrived at, is that wargaming is just not the right medium for me to explore this aesthetic - which makes me a bit sad. Skirmish games are a medium that I feel very comfortable working within, and they can be very collaborative and community driven. My heart tells me that I should just write and imagine stories inspired by these pieces of media, but I also like to pair my narrative with play. The arc that these stories largely present is one of individuals undertaking a journey into a liminal space where they are slowly transformed into something unrecognizable to themselves. If they happen to return from this journey, their understanding of the world is shattered and they can never truly re-integrate into a normal life. How do you gamify these concepts?
I haven't entirely given up hope on the possibility of creating a game in an anomalous world, but I'm also not holding my breath. I do really like the title I chose for my game, and think it is relevant to this discussion. Many of these stories talk about anomalies - unexplainable events that happen outside of human comprehension - things that distort physics, chemistry, and biology - things that shouldn't be possible. The phrase "anomalous state", however, comes from education and information theory. In grad school I was randomly assigned to learn about this concept and then teach it to my class. I'll spare you the powerpoint presentation. The anomalous state is the place you are in before you learn something complicated. It is the feeling you get that you know nothing, and that going forward towards your goal will be impossible. Understanding feels like an insurmountable obstacle. But the anomalous state can be overcome through time and effort. We start to look at what we do know, and where we want to go, and we learn a bit more, and we explore around the edges, and we shore up the things that might be important. And before we know it, we can see the goal. And when we look behind us, back to where we started, there lies a clear path. I don't know if I'll ever make this game, but maybe one day it will all be very clear to me.
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