(Excerpt taken from "Good Play for Game Designers" by Jason Morningstar, creator of such games as Fiasco . It is directed at game designers chiefly but it useful advice for anyone seeking to be or build better players.) Players are underrated. As a community we spend a lot of time thinking about how to facilitate, how to lead, how to organize, how to design. These are high prestige, high status activities that require discipline and skill. A great game master can garner a lot of praise, and a great writer or designer can see their influence reverberate far and wide. While everybody loves a great player, they are often regarded as a happy accident, something precious and appreciated but not something to be celebrated or even made. Perhaps this should change. The skill of a great player—their playcraft—is foundational to a great game. Proportions will vary with style and approach, but in contrast to designer and facilitator, what do the players bring to a game, and how much attention gets paid to their contribution to its success? The skills that comprise solid playcraft are skills game designers should be paying close attention to, for obvious reasons. What follows is an outline of positive player behavior. The individual items run the gamut from highly social to highly procedural. Many of these suggestions overlap. If you are listening actively, for example, you are probably also listening more than you talk. If you are strongly advocating for your character, you are almost certainly also accepting gifts of adversity and confrontation. It’s worth noting that this is not holy writ, and not every item is going to apply to every game. Similarly, a design that deliberately and transgressively contravenes one or more of these rules could be amazing. If you are designing a game, this outline presents a list of behaviors your rules should probably support if you can, procedurally or otherwise. If you are facilitating a game, this outline presents a list of behaviors you should probably model and encourage. If you are playing a game... do this stuff. Be Generous Listen and share: Generosity means giving freely, sharing, and accepting what others share in return. Be patient and kind. Listen intently, all the time. Find the group’s vibe and go along with it. Listen more than you talk. Incorporate and reincorporate others’ ideas. Reduce, reuse and recycle the fiction. Think of yourself as a conservator of other people’s genius. Using someone else’s idea is a wonderful gift to them. Offer ideas when necessary or appropriate. Even a conservator needs to bust out and paint something occasionally, to stay fresh and keep their skills up. Your contribution is a gift to other players looking for things to reincorporate themselves. Grab the spotlight when appropriate, but shine it elsewhere more often. This is the performative adjunct to “listen more than you talk”: balance attention generously and gracefully. Happily give the gift of your interest and enthusiasm. Plot and Scheme Be interesting and make trouble. As a player you should constantly be looking for opportunities to complicate and challenge, judiciously acting on those opportunities in the service of a better experience for everyone. Make your character interesting to everyone, including yourself. Aim to delight. Use humor and pathos, strive for a well-realized and sympathetic character. Have strong, clear goals and motivations as a player and a character. Know what you want and know what your character wants. If those two things are different, so much the better. Explicitly and implicitly tie your character to others. If you have the opportunity to establish existing relationships, dive in—be sisters, be lovers, be rivals. If relationships are fixed, amplify and build and transform. Make it complicated and messy and interesting. Give your character weaknesses and hooks. Trust your fellow players to use your vulnerability to make the game (and your character’s life) more fun, by some definition of fun. Characters in safety may not lead interesting lives. Accept gifts of lower status, adversity and confrontation. Danger, humiliation and defeat are the finest tokens of esteem one can bestow on a player. That you are worth endangering, humiliating or defeating is the highest praise. Strive to return the favor. Build, escalate and break patterns. It is very common to form social patterns, and this is a fundamental play activity. Be aware of the patterns you build, and seek to intensify and ultimately transform them. An obvious example—if you begin with a rival, make them a murderous rival, and then fall in love with them. Embody It’s your game, too: Play it as hard as you can, including on the metagame level where appropriate. P lay transparently and honestly. Show good judgment. Play fair and play openly. Let people know what you are doing and what you want. Really sell character personality and emotion. Play a real character, according to the game’s fiction and theme. Respect genre and premise. Strongly advocate for your character and the elements you control. Advocacy does not necessarily mean the relentless pursuit of success. Allow in-game events to change your character. Don’t think too far ahead. Be open to the developing fiction’s transformative chaos. Absorb the rules and use them vigorously. Rules are there for a reason, so don’t avoid them. Note that “rules” exist on the social level, too. Lose enthusiastically and fail in interesting ways. If you are given the gift of failure, fail in an ignominious way that makes someone else look good and deepens their relationship with you. Facilitate Even if it isn’t your job, it is your job: Take metagame ownership of the game as it grows and changes. S hepherd the plot. Keep an eye out for fictional loose ends and tie them together. Troubleshoot. Identify and help to correct problems wherever they occur, on every level. This includes problems that develop in the fiction, of course, but also social issues between participants. Be a fan of other players characters and contributions. Empathize with every character in the game. Support their arcs and gift them with challenges, complications, and reversals. Respect cause and effect. Think ahead, too! Help pace the game. The very best way to maintain a satisfying pace is to edit judiciously but decisively. End scenes, shift time, and keep things moving. Strive to build a local culture of play that embraces and encourages editing by any player. When you are involved in a scene it can be difficult to see the logical edit point, but an otherwise unengaged fellow player may spot it easily. If they have social permission to end the scene, so much the better. Strive to build a stable of eager editors! This has the added benefit of keeping everyone involved at all times. Be Safe Keep your priorities straight: Remember that people are more important than the game. Use space wisely. Use personal space and volume to communicate appropriately, giving other players the physical and temporal space they need. Help others with rules and concepts. Be helpful generally, but particularly as a resource for players either newer or less adept at absorbing procedures than yourself. Work hard, but encourage occasional breaks. Come prepared to really invest some effort in making the game great. Ask for help, suggestions and feedback. Your idea is probably not the absolute best idea. Your frustration probably isn’t necessary. Feedback—on your own choices and involvement and on the game in general, can be a positive force for improving the experience for everybody.
