Genre emulation, or “how can birds be real if our eyes aren’t real”

I’ve had a really longstanding game project on the back-burner for many years now, long enough to have gone through several iterations of “now that I know more about game design, I need to scrap all of this and start over from the base concept”. It’s called Draw Your Last, and it’s specifically built to emulate card game anime. (By which I mean, “I watched Yugioh Duel Monsters and the first half of 5Ds and really liked them.”) In the last few weeks I have once again pulled it out from the pile and started chipping away at a new draft, and, with the benefit of once again getting to examine the first principles I’m building the game from, I wanted to talk about them, and how they can inform how you form your own concepts of games to build.

In short, the premise of Draw Your Last is an opinion shared by I and my sister: that card game animes rule and the drama and heroic willpower and battles of conviction are amazing, but actual card games are miserable to play and work nothing like that. At least that last point is true: if you’ve ever sat down to play a game of Magic with someone, and held within your heart a burning conviction to win, well, that doesn’t really mean you do win, now does it? That’s down to what strategies your deck is built with, and what luck you get in draws and effects and blunders on both sides. Which is, y’know. How you’d expect a multiplayer competitive game to work. Dare I say, how you’d want it to work.

But not if you’re trying to build a story about it.

See, in a card game anime, there’s a whole lot of waffle about the heart of the cards, and how your deck is a manifestation of the friendships you’ve made and the ways you’ve grown, and you can demonstrate how you’ve learned to use your power for good and not hurt the people you care about if you just draw the one symbolically-relevant card that happens to finish up your combo and assure a win, and what a surprise, you do. When I say I want to make a card game anime rpg, that’s what I mean! That, to me, is what makes card game anime cool, and what I’d want to build a game to emulate.

That’s not everyone’s take.

(It’s certainly not something my card-game-enjoying friends appreciate, when I tell them I think their fun hobby is boring and sucks and needs more speeches about the power of friendship.)

That’s the big trick of genre emulation. It’s about identifying your take on what makes a given dynamic tick, and building for that. I’ve seen a handful of other card game anime rpgs here and there, and while none of them are ones I particularly like for my take, they’re clear about what their own take is! Sometimes they’re building specifically for tournament arcs, sometimes they’re trying for a more casual “just two friends playing cards (while still having speeches about friendship)”. sometimes they’re actually directly in opposition to my thing and trying to build the direct feel of playing a card game. All of those are neat, and, if you were to set out to make a card game anime game (gotta love turning nouns into adjectives to get nonsensical strings like that), they’d be fair approaches. If they were what you wanted. But they’re not what I want, which is why I’m setting out once again to make this one.

This is, I find, the biggest stumbling block people have when discussing and recommending games to each other. (Especially people with little games literacy.) They’ll be able to go “got it, this is [insert genre]” – y’know, like, “got it, this is fantasy”, “got it, this is horror”, “got it, this is a paranormal romance”, they’ll be able to read narrative signifiers and look at the cool art and figure out what the genre is, but not the structure of what’s going on. Not the most important question. How is this genre being emulated, what bits of it are, and how.

Genre is an arbitrary categorization for reader convenience. It’s not actually a real thing.

Which means you’ve got the surprise homework of understanding what you actually want to emulate, in order to emulate it.

There’s an old CGI show that I really really love, called ReBoot. It’s mostly a kids show, with a fun episodic premise for the first big chunk of it, and it’s a concept that, every so often, I feel the urge to try to put to dice and paper. (When all you have is a hammer, every interest looks like a nail, okay? This is just how I enjoy things.) The concept of ReBoot is that it’s set entirely inside of a computer, called Mainframe, with the main characters being somewhat-unclearly-defined parts of that computer as people called Sprites. Other than being, say, blue and with metallic hair (there to flex the bleeding-edge ability to kind of render reflections, ish), they’re more or less just people – one of the main characters runs a diner, and has episodic shenanigans and not-intense-enough-to-mess-with-the-kids-show-dynamic romantic tension with the charming trickster hero here to protect the place from the evil computer viruses. (The viruses are amazing. Banger characters. Really all of the characters in this show are amazing.)

…Right, sorry, I was going somewhere with this. This isn’t just an excuse to gush about the show.

One of the big overarching dangers in ReBoot is the threat of games. (This isn’t going anywhere meta, I promise.) Essentially, whenever the user wants to play a video game, a big apocalypse cube descends from on high, and consumes a whole chunk of the city. Unless the citizens from that chunk manage to fight the user off, they win, and then that whole chunk of the city is destroyed and everyone who was caught in that game is dead. Which is a hell of a premise! And it’s a big part of what said charming hero is here to do – dash into games as they come down, play them well enough to make the user lose, save the day. Throw in tension with said diner-owner and her precocious younger brother, and whatever shenanigans the viruses have decided to get up to this week, and some now-outdated pop culture references, and you’ve got a solid episodic format for a show.

Gamifying that formula can go in a lot of different ways, really, depending on how you wanna do it – rotate the players through various “power sources” of what kinds of shenanigans occur, one getting to be a game, one getting to be one of the viruses, one getting to be the dissatisfaction in one of the main characters prompting them to do something dumb with catastrophic consequences, use that as a scenario-builder, then go through a codified series of steps to guide the roleplay of fixing that scenario, for instance. Focus specifically on dealing with games as the primary mechanical space, with something like abstracted node-map combat/control rules for fighting against the user and keeping them at bay, with the sections outside of games being more framing sequences. Specifically running a virus as an automated boss fight where one player has to do a territory-control phase to manage their infection of the city, one player has a social dueling game to charm them and keep them distracted, one player has a stealth game for sneaking through their base and stealing the terminal window they have open or some such, etcetera. There’s a lot of things in this format you could point at and go “that, there, that’s what I want to make”, and build for that!

But, see, I’ve buried the lede a bit. ‘Cause ReBoot takes a turn at the end of season two. The rather-routine x-files reference turns into a bit more than it bargained for when a full-on nightmare alien from murder space (the web, as opposed to the cool space of other bigger city-computers called the net) shows up, and then opens a portal in the sky to said murder space and now there’s a whole army of nightmare aliens attacking the city. Which, as you can imagine, puts the status quo on pause! Everything becomes a battle for control of the whole city, with the viruses working with the heroes to fight off the nightmare aliens, and none of those game ideas built for the old format would work. You could totally make a new thing for this! A system-structured war game about battling for territory, maybe actually using more literal computer architecture than the show used, with different kinds of powers for retrofitted command programs and for computer viruses, fighting together against invading code-monsters, could absolutely be a neat game, and I’d love to see that, but it wouldn’t really be what the rest of the show was until now, now was it? And a game that encompasses both wouldn’t really be good at either.

That’s not the end of the story, either. This is where the show gets wild.

At the end of the invasion, right before they seal the portal murder space, the evil virus who’d been allying with the heroes betrays them (shocker) and full-on launches the cool hero main character into said murder space. Which then closes. Leaving a season finale where the protagonist is fucking gone. And next season is not his cool adventures in murder space, no no! It’s still in the computer world, exploring how rapidly things go to shit without him. ‘Cause he was the only one fighting off the viruses well! So suddenly it’s another war of control, and we follow the kid sidekick character as he tries really hard to fill the shoes of the old protagonist, and fails.

He fails hard. Like, he full-on loses in a game, which, if you recall, kills you. Which is a traumatizing moment for the now-dwindling cast of characters for sure. But we do follow him thereafter. Thanks to some prior shenanigans involving an actual AI (which is distinct from a Sprite), he manages to survive losing the game by changing himself into also the form of an AI and “riding” the game out. The game then goes to a different computer (this is how video games work in real life, trust me, I know what I’m talking about), and he gets out there. And now it’s a quest of hopping games and exploring new computers to find his way home. Which, remember, his home thinks he’s dead.

Also he becomes turbo-ripped and becomes an edgy badass who calls himself a “renegade, lost in the net” and he has an actual gun and the gun has a name, the gun’s name is gun.

I fucking love this show.

This is a hell of a shark-jump. And it makes for a whole new status quo for the show! A badass one! It’s now a matter of hopping between whole new computer worlds, some of which are fucked up in various ways and heavily overtaken by a virus or some such, and using the games to transport between them. That, too, is its own cool setup you could build a game around. A concrete rhythm of “here’s a new computer world, go explore it and solve its problems and find out what’s going on with it” to then riding a game out of there, and once you leave a world, you proper leave it all behind? That’s absolutely a gameplay rhythm you can mechanize, and a balance of how much you wanna focus on the games vs the computers is a valid question no matter what your answer is. But, all that stuff we talked about earlier for a ReBoot game? None of it meshes, because so much of it is about your interaction with the computer-world and how it changes over time, not leaving it all behind with each step! Could you make two similar-functioning games with different focuses for that? Yeah, but the same game wouldn’t fit.

Eventually, we meet back up with the old protagonist stranded in murder-space, and there’s some scary space adventures, and once they get back to their home computer, there’s a big ol’ war for control with the virus who conquered the whole place essentially unopposed, and it’s also really cool and you should watch it. I’ve already spoiled a bunch of what happens, but trust me, it’s cool as hell, the first three seasons of this show are a fantastic watch. And, again, this can kinda be lined up with an earlier game concept for this – it’s the same war for territory-control against the viruses premise, just much higher-stakes and with a harsher tone. (And, naturally, the stakes and the tone are things that affect how you build a game.)

But, the point is, given all that… how would you build a ReBoot game?

You wouldn’t! ‘Cause that’s a lot of totally different things that that show does, and it has explicit moments where the formula and status quo changes. You could easily have two or three completely different games that line up with one particular status quo of this show, and then get a whole new batch whenever it pivots. And any one of those could do great for the specific status quo they’re trying to emulate and what parts of that they want to focus on, but put them in the other dynamics and they sure don’t align well.

That’s the thing with trying to emulate a genre, or a show, or what have you. There’s always gonna be moments like that that fundamentally change the game, one way or another. Usually not as extreme as ReBoot‘s, but, that’s why I picked it as an example! Sometimes they’re not really great, or they’re just not done at all – Leverage‘s season with Damien Moreau as an overall arc villain, a big change from their usual format, kinda just… forgets about him, such that in the finale when they do actually take him out he has no idea who they are, but if they had proper committed to the whole season being about targeting and taking out one big guy, well, that’d be a lot different from the episodic stuff! You could do it with an episodic game, with just handwaving the impact each individual caper does on the big bad as just a lead-in into the next one, but actually playing up the “taking down an empire” premise and dealing with inter-episode backlash would be its own neat thing! It’s a different status quo, and thus, the potential for a different game.

What composes a “genre” is a difficult question, in part because it’s actually a nonsense one – genre is a categorization for readers, not for writers. They can be useful aesthetic shorthand, and communicate a sense of tone, for sure, but as designers, it’s important we expand and analyze all the shorthand we use. The same comes from wanting to make a game “like [insert X other piece of media]”. You have to analyze the core structure of how that media flows, and then decide which parts you think are important and you want to emulate. A ReBoot game specifically about the cool computer-hopping with a gun is a separate beast from a ReBoot game about the desperate territory war with a rampaging computer virus. A card game anime game about tournament arcs where everyone is coming in with their own dream and it’s up to the cards to see who reaches it is different from a card game anime game where a small friend group challenge a man who would become god to save the city he rules with an iron fist. They’ve got different dynamics, different needs, and thus, different mechanizations that would be right for them.

As for which choice is correct, well, that depends entirely on what you prioritize! And your audience is gonna be the people who also look at the media or genre you’re emulating and go “yeah, this is the bit that’s important”. (Or, at least, that agree that it’s important enough to want to try out the thing you made.) That’s the actual meaning behind what “genre” something is – what dynamic you choose to make most important in it.

So, yeah!

So what was up with Champions?

So, I had a chat with my dad a bit ago, and, as our conversations are wont to do, it turned into ranting about tabletop roleplaying games. Specifically, as it had been on my mind lately, I expressed my retrospective bafflement at what exactly Champions, a superhero rpg that honestly doesn’t feel much like that, thought it was going for, when it so clearly did not capture anything that accurately modeled superheroics.

In response, my dad brought up a different game of the era, Villains and Vigilantes.

In Villains and Vigilantes, he explained, the characters begin as unpowered humans, and, they don’t know what powers they’ll get at the first session. They’re completely randomized, character creation is of the mundane stats and whatnot. This, obviously, makes it hard to plan things out or build up expectations, and, notably, it’s absolutely not an accurate portrayal of what superhero comics are like to read, nor does it mesh with a writer’s perspective of the same.

What it is emulating is the experience of the characters. Plenty of origin stories are things the character has no idea is coming, and, like, if you’d asked Peter Parker what superpowers he would imagine himself with, he probably wouldn’t say the athletic capabilities of a spider. Once that occurs, what you end up with is definitely not what superhero stories are like when there’s, y’know, a team of writers and a universe to create and play with that are planned around what is planned to happen, but that beginning step, the panicked confusion phase and awkward working out of how one’s powers work, that’s what it’s trying to capture.

Which brought us back to Champions. What Champions is trying to capture isn’t a character experience, but an audience experience. (I think those are the three obvious categories to fit things into – is this a thing that lines up with something the characters experience, something the audience experiences, or something the writers experience? Usually, it’s a mix, but it’s a mix with priorities and focuses.) Specifically, it’s going for the kind of audience experience that does distill superheroes down to a list of powers from generalized types.

It’s power-wiki fannishness. Who-would-win-in-a-fight fannishness. The approach of going “we’ll consider this person’s powerset to be Level X Energy Blasting, Level Y Energy Shielding, Level Z Physical Shielding, etcetera”. And, obviously, the upshot of this is you don’t really get something that fits the flow of superhero comics, and it especially stumbles into the problem that, lukewarm take alert, “who would win in a fight” is boring and dumb and the answer is, especially in superhero comics, always “whoever the plot/authors want to win”. So, this didn’t really increase my respect for Champions as a game. But it did make it more understandable to me, and, I think, for that as being the angle of what it’s trying to do, it’s not so bad at it.

This then came back to how we got on this topic. I’d been reading through Legacy, and was talking about some of its design decisions, and how while it looked pretty well-composed, it didn’t really thrill me to read. (Which is a far less tangible response, but, so it goes.) Being a writer, and as scornfully opinionated as I in his own way, dad presented his take on the various PbtAs he’s encountered as mostly being built from an authorial perspective, but, as he put it, a bad one. Specifically building things from “and then here’s what happens because it’s the plot beat this character archetype would cause”, like someone writing solely from having read tvtropes. I’m of the mind that this is a bit unfair, but, I do think it catches a bit of the thing with move design there – it’s making “here’s a thing that this character archetype does that affects the plot” into the explicit mechanics of it, and so the structure of the game and what approach it’s trying to emulate becomes building the arc of a story built around things like that. The comparisons to prestige tv writing have resonated the most with me there.

Cool! Now let’s talk about me

It’s been bandied about a few times, for good reason, the advice that to design a game you must capture the vision you’re designing for. What do mech battles look like and mean to you, and what parts do you want to emphasize? What about card games? Whatever your game’s premise, everything you mechanize is something you claim to be capital-i Important. I think part of the core of capturing this vision, as well as clarifying and extrapolating upon it, is determining the cocktail of perspectives it is from.

To use myself as an example, Draw Your Last, a game which is in progress but technically fully playable, is a card game anime rpg I’ve been working on for several years, and, at times, struggled with quite significantly. Specifically in this regard. What I’ve settled on, vision-wise, is in contrast with every other card game anime rpg I have encountered – there aren’t very many out there, but, there are a few interesting notes.

Specifically, most ones I encounter emphasize, as I aim to, the large thematic and motivational stakes present in any given card game. This is something that exists in all three perspectives – the writers must insert high stakes, often literal life or death, to give the card games “legitimacy”, the audience, similarly, is rarely there wholly for a play-by-play of card games, and the characters are obviously most invested in their own motivations being in conflict. Some of the games I encountered, one in particular, is there to construct a play-by-play of a card game – it operates one level of abstraction above simply building its own Yugioh-alike, and is explicitly made for the target audience of genuine card game players watching such an anime, those who would enjoy recognizing the specific strategies at play from a real-world card games perspective. This is, essentially, similar to what Champions does. It’s taking one section of the interest base, one category of fannish approach to a given subject, and saying, “here, this approach, this is what our game will be”. (I respect this choice of approach far more than what Champions aimed for, but, well, so it goes.)

One thing in which I definitely took a more authorial-perspective focus than any of the card game rpgs I examined were was the outcome of a given card game. In Draw Your Last, it is an explicit narrative certainty that the protagonist in a given card game wins. This is, generally speaking, how card game anime works. There are rare instances otherwise, at pivotal arc moments, and the game includes in the arc-building rules mention of how to construct such darkest-hour occurrences, but, from a structural perspective, that is the only context where such a thing occurs.

Obviously, however, from a character perspective, from trying to emulate fully what any given character experiences, the risk of failing the card game must exist. This yields something like the Villains and Vigilantes arrangement, where things do not go as a superhero story would, because, what happens in a card game with sufficiently drastic stakes, but then the hero loses? This must be papered over in some way to keep the story on its original track, but, doing so would be very inelegant, and so most card game anime rpgs I have seen take a concessional stance. This will not accept the grand stakes where heroes simply cannot fail, because, in the terms of the game, they can.

This is also one of those things I’ve seen come up in, like, tactical fighty rpg spaces. One of the easy GM issues to fall into is just not being prepared for what happens if the main characters lose, because in cool dramatic fight stories, when the heroes go off for a dramatic fight, usually, they win. This can depend from story to story, tone to tone, and setting to setting, of course, but a lot of the time for dramatic fights especially it’s common for less experienced GMs to end up floundering to avoid just having a game-over when things suddenly don’t go as expected.

Now, I’m a big proponent of “every outcome, every choice, in a given game should be worth making, otherwise why is it there” as a thesis. And to their credit, I’ve seen a lot of tactical rpgs put in work to communicate how to make the outcome of losing worth occurring, how to make it interesting if it happens instead of just “alright well I guess we stop playing now”. I do think it’s fair to include choices and outcomes that are conditionally bad, I won’t rail on Lancer for “I can pick talents for weapon types I don’t have and then have no usable talents” and whatnot, but especially for things like this, what possible outcomes of a given scenario, encounter, what have you, exist, they should all be, like, interesting and fitting.

And what “interesting” and “fitting” are loop back to the earlier thing – they’re entirely based on the vision, and the perspective, you’re building for! For something like the game trying to simulate actual card game play, having the outcome set from the beginning definitely would diminish that experience. But, hell, one of the core thesis statements I’ve been working under is that actual card games are boring as hell, and I’m trying to play to the experience of people who watch card game anime not at all for the mechanics of the card games, and, for that perspective, that level of simulation is absolutely a detrimental design choice! For someone who wants to build a game about superhero team-up episodes that emulates the classic structure of starting off with a fight and then teaming up once the confusion gets resolved, depending on what they want to focus on regarding the dynamic and tone shifts for each character involved, a “who would win in a fight” approach might grind it all to a halt, or it might be exactly what’s called for.

So… yeah! In short, thinking about what perspective and experience you’re trying to build for can tell you a lot about where to go with any rpg you make, and, it’s helped to parse a lot of design decisions I’ve found baffling in various contexts – usually because I absolutely do not share the perspective it’s built for! And that’s okay.

(Edit: The game being discussed was Villains and Vigilantes, not Mutants and Masterminds. M&M is a different superhero rpg with the alliterative naming scheme of Dungeons & Dragons. Whoopsie.)