This week’s exercise of working with cards to construct a story was something that was putting Fullerton’s Working with Dramatic Elements into practice in sorts. My group started off with only the white cards of Cards Against Humanity and turning that into a narrative, which was easy enough since the cards already had words on them and spinning them into a semi-coherent story wasn’t too taxing. Things got harder once we switched to a standard deck of cards, because it’s just like how Fullerton describes checkers.

               “The game of checkers is very abstract: There is no story, no                characters, and no compelling reason why you would want to                capture all of your opponent’s pieces, except for the fact that it’s the                objective of the game.”

               This is something that applies to a deck of cards as well, to a slightly lesser extent, since the cards do have symbols and values to them. But the usage of the cards still varies, making it abstract. It’s that abstraction that allows for the for the wide variety of different games that use a standard deck of cards to exist. But turning that into a story was somewhat more difficult, especially since my group opted to try to incorporate each person, card type, and card value into the story. Our stories were closer to short stories that didn’t really go anywhere, so there wasn’t any chance to get invested in them. There was no character development, no story progression, and no attachment, and ended being like something you would see out of a writing prompt that goes ‘make a horror story in three sentences.’

               We also watched and played through a little of Virginia, which was one of the most linear games I have seen in a long while. Linearity isn’t something that is bad, because far from what EA thinks, linear games aren’t dead. It’s something that works for the game, as it’s supposed to a game that retells and recreates real life events. Despite being a game that doesn’t seem to hold much stake, and essentially is just a story that you go through at your own pace, there is suspense and the subverting of expectations. If I had to compare it to something, it’s like a game of DnD where we don’t get to roll for initiative and the DM is just going through the campaign like they’re telling a story.

                Sources

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games; Third Volume