I’ve been thinking about how much I like question-and-answer as a game mechanic. It’s a gentle yet powerful way to get deep into story without the players having to perform actions that feel more like performance or improvisation, things that might feel difficult or vulnerable, a barrier to play or story.
By
question-and-answer mechanic I just mean that the game is written as a series of questions. That
mini-game I made is a very simple example. The games that inspired it,
In the Air Tonight and
Big Fight Feel, are more developed versions.
Pull Me From the Earth, the game I'm talking about here, is one layer more complex.
But in essence, all these games are just sets of questions. On the page, they hardly seem like games at all, and yet they work.
If you and I enter into the contract that we will ask and answer these questions with sincerity and attention, magic happens.
To get granular, we could notice different ways the questions can be offered to the players: in a prescribed order, in an order chosen by the players, or randomized using a tool like dice or cards. Each of those methods will create different affordances. Randomness allows the most player surrender, which can give a sense of safety; a prescribed order imposes a certain narrative; a flexible order lets players adapt the flow of questions to the story they're telling.
(Do you have a preference, or an intuition about your possible preference?)
Working on that solo journalling
game has made me notice how a question makes a strong prompt. I think a good prompt offers just enough specificity to start the imagination going, and then as little as possible that blocks that momentum. For example, say I write this:
You meet six moon fairies. They take you on a journey down the river.
That’s a pretty good prompt, but by the end of the sentence the event's already over. What about this:
You meet six moon fairies. Where do they take you? Do you ever get home?
Just that question mark pushes the energy beyond the end of the sentence, whereas the period stops it.
The second prompt is a little more vulnerable because it’s less defined, but I think it's also more likely to spur something really rich for the player.
I think letting in metaphor and meaning slippage is important, too, because that's invention happening before you consciously invoke it. So
A ghost overturns your car. What do you do?
--Fun, but what about
A ghost upsets something essential. How do you recover?
It's potent to add a slightly unexpected second question, one that swerves a little or raises the stakes, like “do you ever get home?” That invites the player to think about a story that's less safe, and therefore more vulnerable and with more possibility of going somewhere deep.
Speaking of deep, let me tell you about
this game where you play a bog body in love.
Q&A really comes to life in a two-player game, particularly when the players ask each other the questions in turn (rather than pulling the card and answering for themselves). Something about invoking the cross-exchange, the formalities of real conversation, gives another layer of momentum, and almost always careens you towards some kind of intimacy.
( Review: Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game for Two ){rf}
All quotations taken from Pull Me From the Earth: A Romantic Role-Playing Game by Corvyn Appleby, copyright 2020, downloaded from https://corvynappleby.itch.io/pull-me-from-the-earth in January 2022.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
