by Evan Raskob, designer of The Peek games @evanraskob
This article looks at how science fiction storytelling can be used as a technique in gaming. Specifically, we look at how plot prompts can be used alongside characters and situations to help players intuitively craft stories in storytelling games like Peek. Then, we go ahead and tell a few stories using cards from the game to demonstrate the mechanic in action.
Peek is a game that allows people to look into the future. It provides a glimpse of a world shaped by people, entities, events, facts and feelings. Using these storytelling elements, they report back to the group about their visions of the future. The skill in playing the game is to make reports both convincing and also creative.
The game is a response to the disinformation prevalent in popular media, and in particular the difficulty in explaining AI and machine learning and their benefits and drawbacks to lay audiences. For example, as well as the obvious issue of automation taking human jobs, the precarious sustainability of large banks of power-hungry computers running AIs is a theme in the game. There is a real need to educate people about how these potentially disruptive technologies could transform society, one way or another.
As theorist Dan Hassler-Forest (2019) pointed out, science fiction is now transmedia: it takes place across different almost all forms of media, from comics to games to television to social media. As Star Wars creator George Lucas lucratively discovered, science fiction movies can expand into a larger world of books, toys, comics, card games, games — almost any form of media into which a character can be illustrated, or sculpted out of.
Science fiction novels can take place across time as well - Ingrid Burrington and Brendan C. Byrne’s “The Training Commission” (Burrington and Byrne 2019) explored a number of science fiction concepts through an email newsletter at irregular intervals and links to the distributed web. Given the perceived strangeness and dystopian feel of current times where formerly stable democracies have exposed the innermost thoughts of unhinged leaders online, a global pandemic has locked many of us into our homes and daily occurrence like online “armies” of Korean pop star fans battling American police organisations through social media attacks, a number of people feel like everything has become science fiction.
Science fiction, it could be argued, has become a frame of reference for dealing with the ways that digital technologies are accelerating changes in our world. A search for the phrase “This is the longest episode of Black Mirror” (referencing the popular and darkly humorous science fiction show “Black Mirror” originated by Charlie Brooker) turns up a number of tweets dating back to 2016.
Twitter search for this is the longest episode of Black Mirror
In Russia, it is alleged that President Putin’s advisor Vladislav Surkov secretly writes dystopian science fiction stories about non-linear war as a potential exercise in battle strategising (Komska, 2014). If so, he would be in good company as it is no secret that the United States used “scenario planning” in the 1950’s where Hollywood screenwriters were drafted into science fiction war-gaming exercises to help oppose the Soviet Union in the Cold War (Kleiner, 2003). Twentieth Century governments have long understood that “a critical… reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead” (Clarke, 1963).
Storytelling, like any form of art, has some basic tools of the trade. In Christopher Booker (2005)’s view, there are only seven fundamental storylines that can be worked with or against and combined in different ways. His work built on Joseph Campbell’s popular concept of the monomyth (Campbell 2008), and its concept of a story cycle following a main character called the “hero” on their journey through a series of challenges. Dan Harmon’s adaptation, which helps shape the plots of the popular science fiction cartoon Rick and Morty, was particularly influential in our work (Harmon 2013).
Stories have characters and settings. Interestingly, Charles Yu’s 2011 novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” describes pseudo-scientific theorem linking “science fiction universes” with imaginary physics and the resulting narrative trajectories and typologies of characters to be found in them.
Whilst we didn’t come up with a unified equation for characters and situations, we did put together a basic formula that worked well in our tests: Entity + Feeling + Reports.
Games often use the mechanic of collecting "points" to motivate players to do something, or to help decide a "winner". In Peek, you can win the game if you use the most game cards in your stories and also tell the best stories, as decided by your critically-sophisticated fellow players.