Seth Ben-Ezra/Q3: Why the black?

Seth Ben-Ezra

Why do you always wear black?

 

It started when I was young. I’ve always liked the color black. After all, it’s the color of space and ninja! So I wore black a lot and became comfortable wearing black. I don’t really like having to think about clothes and fashion and the like. I get very uncomfortable when people look at me. So, wearing black makes getting dressed easier for me.

Over time, though, I’ve discovered other reasons that I wear black.

I want to be the kind of person who is honest with those around him. When I wear black, I feel like I’m presenting my true self, the person that I really am. I’m not trying to fool you or impress you or dress myself up. I’m simply what you see, and hopefully that will be a good thing for you. But if not, at least I was honest with you.

And black is the color of my inner self because I look at the world and see so much pain. I see all the hurting people and the oppression and the injustice, and I weep for those who are crushed. Black is the color of mourning, and so I wear black. I weep for the drug addict and the single mother and the battered wife and the unemployed husband and the family driven from their home by war and the baby torn apart in the womb and the prisoner warehoused like an animal and the woman raped in her home and the man whose masculinity is slowly crushed by the casual cruelty of his employer.

It’s only recently that I discovered the music of Johnny Cash. So, you can imagine my surprise when someone pointed me at “Man in Black”:

Well, there’s things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin’ everywhere you go,
But ’til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.

Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything’s OK,
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.

Yes. This. This is exactly what I mean.

That’s why I wear black.

Seth Ben-Ezra/Q2: Creating an RPG

Seth Ben-Ezra

Q2. Explain the process of creating an RPG.

First, I have to give a disclaimer. I’ve published three roleplaying games, am on the verge of releasing a fourth, and have three or four others in various stages of design, and each process has been a different experience. So, rather than give a general answer, I’ll tell you about the process I went through for two different games to give a sense of the different ways that a game can come into existence. First, I’ll talk about Dirty Secrets, which had a fairly standard production process. Then I’ll talk about A Flower for Mara, which was a very different animal altogether.

Dirty Secrets is my detective noir roleplaying game. Think Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, and you’ll be in the right vicinity. However, Dirty Secrets isn’t intended to be a period piece. Rather, you create a detective story in your home town, last week. So, when I play Dirty Secrets, it’s set right here in Peoria, where I live, in modern times.

The seeds of this game were planted in my mind a number of years ago when I was exposed to the works of James Ellroy. Game designer John Tynes had listed Ellroy as an influence, saying, “If you want to read the best in new horror fiction, avoid the ‘horror’ book rack—Ellroy is fighting on the front lines of the human nightmare, and has handily left the sad remnants of the horror field in his wake.” After reading Ellroy’s Los Angeles quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz), I understood what Tynes was talking about. These were dark stories of crime, corruption, and depravity, where everyone is hiding something and no one is truly clean.

Sounded like the perfect stories for Christians to be telling. After all, we’re the ones who proclaim that man is truly fallen, right? But do we really know what that means? Have we really accepted how twisted we are? It is only in this context that the goodness of the Gospel shines forth. When we see the darkness for what it is, the light is all the more precious.

I didn’t do anything with this idea until August 2006. That was a fairly stressful period in my life, and I often deal with stress by being creative. So, one Sunday afternoon, I sat down and banged out my first draft of the game rules.

They were awful. But that’s part of the process. You write some rules, see how they don’t work, and then you write new ones that work better.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

During Dirty Secrets I consciously developed a creative technique that I’d used unconsciously in the past. I call it “media immersion”. Basically, when I’m in full-on design mode on a game, I will immerse myself in all kinds of related media and, as a corollary, avoid all media that is unrelated. My thinking is that this will better enable me to internalize the various aspects of the genre I’m working in. I’ll be more in touch with the “rules” and general feel of the genre (e.g. the first-person narration of many detective stories or their generally melancholy tone) if I’m spending lots of time around that genre.

For Dirty Secrets, this meant that I read a lot of books. I read all Raymond Chandler’s novels. I read Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I read everything by Ross MacDonald that I could acquire. (I have nearly all his Lew Archer novels now.) I watched the classics (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Chinatown) and discovered new works (Brick). On the musical front, I assembled a personal soundtrack of jazz, trip-hop, and chillout, featuring artists like Portishead; Bitter:Sweet;Esthero; and Medeski, Martin & Wood. This way, as I was listening to music, I was surrounded by the sort of stylish, neo-noir urban vibe that I wanted for my game.

For nearly a year, I lived in a noir world. My wife is incredibly longsuffering.

Someone once compared designing a roleplaying game to the deconstruction of literature. That may not be always true, but it’s a fair description of how I usually design my roleplaying games. While I’m doing my media immersion, I look for common threads between the various stories. Then I design rules to try to recreate those particular themes, tropes, or experiences. For example, in Dirty Secrets, all the narration is from the perspective of the detective. The players are only allowed to describe what he can sense. This is because the detective genre is ultimately about an single detective pursuing the case. It’s a very lonely genre, actually, and I reflect that in my game.

At this stage, I’m feverishly reading books, scribbling ideas, brainstorming rules, and then seeing if they accurately reflect the stories that I’m reading. Then, at some point, comes the dreaded necessity of playtesting.

Game design is ultimately a cycle of creating rules, testing them, and then changing them based on your testing. The fancy term is “iterative design”, and it can be a real drag sometimes. This is where most designers fall short. It can be a whole heap of Not Fun to gather people who will play your unfinished game and then get them to tell you where it isn’t working.

For Dirty Secrets, we decided to be hyper-organized about playtesting. My wife, my sister, and I playtested twice a week for two or three months. Each night I would lay out the new rules that I’d made. Then we’d play while I took notes on what was and wasn’t working. Then, at the end, my wife and sister would tell me what they thought of the game so far. Then I’d go off and write new rules. Repeat for a while.

At this point, I wrote up a beta playtest draft and put the word out on the Internet that I was looking for outside playtesters. I managed to land a couple of outside playtests and listened carefully to what these players had to say. This is an important step, because these people are learning to play the game only from the document that I wrote. This is when you find out all the bits that you thought you had explained well enough or that you assume that “everyone knows”.

With this information under my belt, I sat down to write my manuscript. This was sometime in early May. Our goal was to publish and release at GenCon, a major game convention held in mid-August in Indianapolis. Three months isn’t really enough time to do the job, so there was a lot of cramming. I actually took a week off work to help around the house so that Crystal could finish laying out the book. Even with that, I remember sixteen-hour days as we rushed to get everything ready to go.

However, we eventually got the books printed and were able to release the game as planned at GenCon in August 2007. All told, the game took just about a year to produce.

It was at this particular GenCon that my particular Internet community became exposed to Jeepform, a  different form of roleplaying that was being developed in the Scandinavian countries, particularly Sweden. As I heard about some of these ideas, I thought about a languishing project of mine about a dead woman named Mara.

A Flower for Mara started as someone else’s idea. Ben Best, a friend of mine, was working on a screenplay about a man and daughter who were haunted by the ghost of his dead wife. But really, the point of the story wasn’t to be scary. Rather, it was about this man learning to move on with his life and maintain a good relationship with his daughter after the death of his wife. Well, I thought that it was a great idea, and I had all kinds of opinions. For instance, I named the wife. “Mara” is the Hebrew word for “bitter”, which seemed like an appropriate name in a story about death.

Over time, the project was increasingly my project. So, Ben and I traded ideas. I took the Mara story, and he took a different idea that I’d had which interested him. So now I could take the Mara story and run with it however I wanted! But, um, what did that mean? I’m no screenwriter, and I didn’t really think that I’d ever be able to see it through to film anyways. I started the process of adapting the story to the stage. I even had a friend write a draft because she is much better at writing dialogue than me. But the logistics of putting on a play were beyond me.

And the project languished. Every so often, someone would look at it and say, “You know, we really ought to do something about the Mara play.” And we’d all nod, and that would be it.

But, when I started hearing about Jeepform, I suddenly thought, “You know, this would be perfect for the Mara play.” After all, I’m not a playwright; I’m a game designer.

The process for this game was very different from Dirty Secrets. Because I had three years of background for the story and a draft script for the play, I almost felt like I was adapting the play to game form. So, for example, the game has four acts for the four seasons of the year when the story takes place. Each character gets a scene in each season where he is in the spotlight. And so on. The final result feels a lot more like a free-form play than a traditional game.

The playtest cycle was shorter on A Flower for Mara than Dirty Secrets, though this is mostly because there are fewer rules in A Flower for Mara. We playtested three times, though the changes made between iterations were fairly minor.

In light of our experience with Dirty Secrets, we set specific deadlines for production of A Flower for Mara to avoid a last-minute rush. The fact that the manuscript was only a third of the length of Dirty Secrets probably helped.

Once again, we managed to get the books produced in time for GenCon, so we released A Flower for Mara in August 2008. Again, the game took about a year to produce.

Designing and producing my games is a lot of work. But it’s all worth it when the proof shows up from the printer and I’m holding the final product in my hand. When I am touching the book that we’ve worked on and I find that I’m giddy and excited, then I know that we’re finally finished.

Seth Ben-Ezra: RPG designer

 

Seth Ben-Ezra

Seth Ben-Ezra doesn’t just play role-playing games–he writes them. By day, the 32-year-old mild-mannered (and I mean mild-mannered) Peorian with a wife and six children is a systems team leader at Samaritan Ministries. Apart from that, Seth blogs here and creates a variety of role-playing games. But what goes into that creation? Glad you asked … Here’s Seth’s answer to Question 1. The next two or so will follow in coming days.

Why are you so entranced with role-playing games?

In order to answer the question, I should probably explain what a roleplaying game is. The simplest explanation is that a roleplaying game is a game of make-believe, similar to what children play. However, unlike the children’s game, a roleplaying game is organized make-believe. The rules tell the players what kinds of things they are allowed to say in the game, and oftentimes the rules add uncertainty or randomness to the imaginary events to keep things interesting. For example, in my detective roleplaying game Dirty Secrets, the game randomly determines the murderer so that all the players are surprised at the outcome.

So, what is so appealing to me about a bunch of grown-ups playing make-believe? The answer rests in the power of stories.

One reason that we tell stories is to try to explain life to each other. This isn’t necessarily a difficult concept. Consider the story of “Little Red Riding Hood”. This is a story about the dangers presented by strangers and outsiders, especially to young women. (This is particularly apparent in the French version of this story, where the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood. No rescue from the woodcutter in this version!)

Or, for that matter, consider the classic film Die Hard. John McLane is so sympathetic because he is putting his life on the line to protect his wife. (His estranged wife, I might add.) As such, Die Hard actually exemplifies a honoring of marriage that is somewhat surprising for a Hollywood film.

But these are all stories told to the masses by “professionals”. What roleplaying games allow us to do is create homebrew stories formed from the thoughts, questions, and concerns of our immediate community. Through roleplaying games, people can make stories about the things that they care about. Through these stories, the players can talk to each other about their hopes, their dreams, their fears.

I have this nagging sense that some examples would be helpful. So, I’ll talk about some specific stories that arose from roleplaying games to show what I’m talking about.

If you’ve never heard of Japanese mecha anime, then the idea of Bliss Stage is going to sound more than a little strange. In this game, you all pretend to be teenage resistance fighters who survived an alien invasion of Earth. Since the aliens exist in a dream world, you fight them by forming a large robot in the dream world from your relationships with the people around you and using it to attack them. Thus, the damage that your robot suffers in combat is reflected in your relationships with those people.

I told you it was a little strange.

So, our resistance cell was located in the ruins of Peoria, which is where I live. Over the course of the game, it became increasingly obvious that the group was fighting a losing battle. There were simply too many threats to this little community in the city. So, at the end of the story, they pulled up stakes and left, heading north into the country to find a safe haven.

This ending bothered me. I didn’t want the cell to leave. I wanted them to stay and fight, to the death if necessary! But why?

Upon some reflection, I realized that this story had connected with me because I saw parallels with my experiences with Christians. I look around at the choices being made by Christians to leave the city and live in “safety” in the country. This really bothers me, because you’re supposed to stay and fight. Right?

But, what if you’re not in a good position to fight? What if you’re so hopelessly outnumbered that the wisest course is to withdraw in order to regroup? Could this be what my fellow Christians are doing?

I have found that I have a lot more patience now with the Christian agrarian movement, specifically because of the story we created by playing this game.

Okay, the next game is a bit easier to understand.

Breaking the Ice is a game for two players, where you play two people who have just started dating. Together you play through their first three dates and then, based on how the relationship developed, determine their final fate, either together or separate.

I played this with my wife once. Her character was Candy, a high-strung programmer, working long hours at her stressful job. (If you imagine this character being played by Meg Ryan, you’re on the right track.) My character was Lester, a poor black single father living in the projects, selling drugs in order to support his kids.

In the end, this romance ended up being about so much that is important to my wife and I. Love overcame both race and class divides; it also overcame resistance from her family. The two characters found shared experience in their separate struggles, and they came together to support and carry each other. And sure, they had to sacrifice so much in order to be together, and it certainly wasn’t a picture-perfect ending. But, in the end, they had each other, and that was truly a beautiful thing.

And this is an example of the very personal nature of these stories. This romance arose partly out of the memories that Crystal and I have of our own developing relationship, which was born in fire and shaped by sorrow. So many stood against us, so few stood with us. And yet, we have each other, and it is a beautiful thing.

Lester and Candy’s story was really our story, told to each other to remember where we came from and to reaffirm our love and devotion to each other.

(If you’re interested in reading a fuller write-up of this story, you can go here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=24600.0)

I wrote A Flower for Mara partly as a memorial to my mother, Linda Ben-Ezra, who died suddenly in July 2003 at the age of 51. This wasn’t the first death of someone close to me. In the first half of 1997, four people who were close to me died, including my paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather. As a result, I’ve had ample opportunity to grieve and to watch others grieve. 

So, A Flower for Mara is a game about the family of a woman named Mara who died suddenly in the spring. The group plays through the first year after her death, dealing with the grief and pain and relational fallout. The game is set up to be performed like a play. Instead of sitting at a table, the players stand, walk around, and talk to each other as if they were on-stage. The physicality of the game provides the players with additional emotional connection to the story.

But that’s not all.

At the beginning of the game, each player is given a flower that he will carry during the game. This flower represents his character’s grief over the loss of Mara. During the game, if he decides that his character has begun the process of overcoming his grief, he puts the flower down in a designated place. However, at the beginning of the game, the player also wrote down an actual experience of his that caused him sorrow, grief, or pain. In order to put down the flower, the player must break character and tell the rest of the group about that experience.

In this case, the story functions differently. As we tell each other this story of sorrow and grief, we create a safe place to talk about the things that have hurt us, sometimes quite deeply. And then, we talk.

I don’t repeat the stories that I’ve heard while performing A Flower for Mara. It wouldn’t be right. If you weren’t there, you haven’t earned the right to know. At the same time, I feel responsible somehow for those I’ve performed A Flower for Mara with. They were open and vulnerable with me, for even a moment, and now I feel like I owe it to them to care for them.

I know that roleplaying games often have a bad reputation associated with them. You know, a group of pimply nerds huddled in a basement pretending to be wizards instead of doing something social or useful. However, I actually believe strongly in the power of roleplaying games to enable people to tell each other stories and, in the process, learn to speak to each other honestly.

Gerik the Great

Adam Gerik

I’ve always been a little jealous of Adam Gerik. He’s a talented photographer, but also a consummate skinny nerd who is not ashamed of the fact. Adam, who is 26, describes himself as a “visual journalist” for the Peoria Journal Star daily newspaper. He’s been a photographer there for nearly four years and now oversees video production for pjstar.com, the paper’s Web presence. When I was religion editor at the JS, I was always grateful to work with him. He was able to capture images that complemented the story but still stood on their own. In fact, I became so impressed over the years by his work that I took to calling him “Gerik the Great.” It just seemed to work. And it just seemed right that he would be the first subject of 3 (or so) questions. — MM

1. Why do you ride trains instead of fly or drive?

Perhaps it’s my way of rebelling against my Kansas roots, where the pavement is king and trains only roll through in the middle of the night. I had never ridden Amtrak before moving to Illinois. In fact, I was so absolutely train naive that a smartass conductor told me the toilets were $3 and I reached for my wallet. (http://ofadam.com/2005/11/announcement-2/) Oddly enough, I had only flown as a little kid before making Peoria my home… and although flying as an adult seemed magical at first, it soon lost its appeal after I saw a video of cattle being led to pasture and I now avoid it if I can. Time is valuable, but I consider train time to be twice as valuable as plane time.

And if you’re an anachronistic fetishist, the rails win every time.

 2. What about video can never give you the satisfaction of still photography?

Well, video can’t stroke my ego like a still photo can (or at least not yet!). I’ll pretend that I’m kidding, but it’s nice jamming newsprint stained with my byline into a person’s face when meeting for the first time. I suppose I could haul my laptop everywhere, or actually use the YouTube application on my phone, but there’s something about paper that screams importance. We’ll have to get past that if there’s any hope for journalism surviving in a state we recognize.

I think we tend to remember events as photographs and not as moving images. Video presentation online leaves a lot to be desired, and if we keep improving the quality and size of the display, this may make me more satisfied in producing videos. I have my fingers crossed.

 3. How will photography suffer when daily print dies?

If you’d asked me this question a few years ago, I would have agreed with you. But sites like Boston’s Big Picture (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/) really show that web presentation can equal or even exceed traditional print presentation models. We here in Peoria are fortunate to have a printing press that won a Top 50 color in the world award a few years ago, but we’re definitely in the minority… most communities suffer on printing presses designed for black and white, not color. It’s just a matter of getting newspaper editors to realize that running large photos online is just as worthwhile as doing it in the print editions.

What I am concerned about is the devaluing of content online. When everything is free, how can you pay people what they’re really worth?

 4. Why do men without shirts often pop up in your photos?

Is this an ambush interview?!

ofadam.com is Adam Gerik’s blog and includes many of his photos. adamgerik.com is more photo-heavy.