In a late-breaking comment it took me a while to spot, Sergio M asks:

What are the sources for your model of story analysis? Is it your personal creation? Where you inspired by any books or whatever? Which?

None of the major concepts are original to me, although I find myself wanting to change their frame of reference as I look further into these issues. It’s an evolving process.

Provenance of story terminology is tough to pin down sometimes.This is particularly an issue with procedural/adventure/serial/adventure fiction, which we are mostly emulating in RPGs. Most writing texts and workshops skew toward the standalone and literary side of things.Terms and concepts of use to working creators percolate out from writer’s rooms into DVD commentaries and out into the blogosphere. Perhaps someday an intrepid scholar will track the origins of such bedrock terms as “laying pipe” for exposition or “backstory” for a character’s past. Like roleplaying practice, it is in large degree an oral tradition which is codified haphazardly and in retrospect, and is subject to ongoing innovation and revision. The movie and TV industries have a several generation head start on us in the generation of useful story-making techniques and the jargon to go with them.

The pass/fail cycle is a well established term for adventure plotting, and not unique to me. Inconveniently, it’s used in other fields as well, and if you Google the term, you get one of my blog posts.I’m now leaning toward hope/fear as more useful for RPG-focused story analysis; that is my variation.

For scene analysis, I draw on a work written for actors, Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. Its analytical techniques were then broken out by acting teachers to be more broadly applicable than its original remit suggested. The book itself focuses on how you break a scene for a dynamic, killer audition. A mutated Shurtleff approach was all the rage in the York University (Toronto) theater department when I was taking a Fine Arts Studies degree there in the mid-80s.

The terms petitioner and granter, for the participants in a dramatic scene, are used by the legendary film editor Walter Murch, as interviewed by Michael Ondaatje in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. He doesn’t claim them as unique to himself, but for all I know they're his variation on a familiar concept.

Tags: beat analysis, gaming hut, turning points

(18 comments | Leave a comment)

Thanks to everyone who helped me out with my enigmatic query.

To those worried that I might be about to embark on another odyssey in which I analyze a canonical work four beats at a time every Friday for nearly a year, consider your fears allayed. There will be more beat analysis, but you will not be subjected to it in a slow motion deluge here. An announcement will come in the fullness of time.

My money would have been on Glengarry GlenRoss for the win, on the grounds of second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired. I wasn’t sure this crowd would reach back all the way to the 40s and Casablanca. Glad to see a love for the classics. I also assumed a strong showing for There Will Be Blood, which came in third.

On the other hand, I am led to suspect that there are film fans among you who have not yet seen Nicholas Ray’s 1950 masterpiece In a Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. If you dig Bogie in Casablanca you owe it to yourself to check out this, his best performance. It’s also by far a career highlight for the smoky-voiced Grahame, who usually played molls, femme fatales and assorted other bad girls.

Bogart is embittered screenwriter Dixon Steele. He brings a hat check girl back to his apartment to recount for him the plot of a bestselling novel he’s too jaded to read himself. When the girl is murdered, Steele finds himself the chief suspect. His world weary new neighbor, Laurel Gray, supplies an alibi. They fall in love, but the unexpected happiness they find is threatened by her growing fear that he might have done it after all.

The screenplay is based on a serial killer novel, but the thriller elements have been largely stripped from the story to leave a haunting, heartbreaking drama of fragile love between a pair of damaged souls. The pervading heartache is all the more poignant knowing that Ray and Grahame’s own marriage was disintegrating even as they made this movie together.

The trailer does its best to make it look like a thriller, rather than a drama with a murder investigation in it:



Ray is best known for Rebel Without a Cause. Also worth checking out on DVD is the early lovers-on-the-run movie They Drive By Night, the snowbound noir On Dangerous Ground and, in some regions, the gray flannel psychological freakout Bigger Than Life. I keep hoping that The Lusty Men, a melancholy rodeo drama from 1952 featuring Robert Mitchum’s best performance, will someday show up on home video. When we caught it at the Cinematheque Ontario during a Ray retrospective a few years back the audience was told that only three prints of the film were known to exist. It wasn’t clear who owned the rights, a necessary step to any restoration effort.

Tags: beat analysis, cinema hut, turning points

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

Tags: blegs, gaming hut, narrative structure, turning points

(26 comments | Leave a comment)

I started the process of breaking down Hamlet by calling it a turning point analysis. Now that it's finished, I find myself revisiting my terminology. Many of the story units that clearly present themselves when you study the text for narrative movement aren't necessarily branch points in the storyline. Instead they're modulations of tension and release. Every time Claudius schemes against Hamlet, we mark it as an emotional down moment, because our fears for our protagonist have taken momentary precedence over our hopes for him. Claudius is not necessarily taking a new decision each time. He's not moving the plot in a new direction, but redirecting it back toward one of its established or implicit possible outcomes.

Most narratives present an opposed pair of possible outcomes: Hamlet succeeds in avenging his father, or fails. Benjamin Braddock finds a meaningful future for himself, or fails. The crew of the Enterprise comes together and defeats Nero, or the Federation is destroyed. The adventurers kill the monsters and take their stuff, or suffer a TPK. Simple narratives focus all of our attention on a single throughline: one hope, one fear. Complex or episodic structures frequently change up the focus of our hopes and fears from one scene or sequence to the next. An episode of Mad Men or a Robert Altman-style ensemble drama cycles unpredictably through a large set of hope/fear pairings.

The beats we've been looking at in Hamlet are oscillations between likely outcomes. True turning points that spin a story in a completely different direction are rare. What we've been looking at with Hamlet might then better be termed beat analysis. (For consistency’s sake, I'm going to keep using the turning points LJ tag to mark the posts in this series.)

Our primary hope and fear as we experience a narrative may be orthogonal. These allow for mixed endings. We hope that Hamlet will kill Claudius and fear that Claudius will kill him. In the end, both come to pass. Shakespeare gives us a tragedy with a happy ending or, as I now prefer to see it, a doomed hero story.

Popular adventure storytelling threatens us with a negative outcome, making us believe that the hero might fail, then ultimately delivers victory in a surprising or otherwise satisfying way. Each procedural up beat takes us closer to our desired ending. Each procedural down beat takes us closer to our feared ending.

The emotional direction of a procedural narrative is often called the pass/fail cycle, a term I've borrowed for games like HeroQuest 2. What this analysis suggests, however, is that it might be better termed a hope/fear cycle.

In a roleplaying context, this distinction shows us that not every down beat corresponds to a failed roll on the part of the PCs. Any revelation, piece of description or other narrative event that increases tension can also be considered an emotional down beat. Our fear for Hamlet when we see Claudius and Laertes scheme against him increases. However, his “player” hasn't failed a roll. (In a game, of course, you'd typically ratchet that sense of threat in a player-facing way, rather than than showing NPCs interacting without the PCs’ knowledge.)

When deciding difficulties or making other narrative choices based on our players' position on the hope/fear cycle, we might factor in emotional down beats that aren't failed rolls. If the players are feeling oppressed simply by your description of their circumstances, even though they've been succeeding at their rolls, you might still want to lighten up the opposition to increase the chances of an emotional up moment. And if they've been failing left and right but are still feeling invulnerable, it will likely prove emotionally satisfying to keep cranking up the difficulties until they finally raise a sweat.

Tags: gaming hut, heroquest, narrative structure, turning points

(10 comments | Leave a comment)

Tags: 4e, d&d, gaming hut, gumshoe, heroquest, iconic heroes, narrative structure, turning points

(11 comments | Leave a comment)

Before I broke for the fest, I wrapped up Turning Points Hamlet breakdown. Let’s see what if anything can be concluded from the process.

First of all, thanks for everyone who hung in with it, and everyone who went back and caught up once the exercise was over. If I’d stopped to realize how many posts this would take, I might not have done it. Yet the readership drop on Hamlet Fridays was not so steep as I worried it might be. In fact, it might have been the Friday part and not the Hamlet part that accounts for the slight dip in hits.

As I expected, when we map the play according to its emotional up and down beats, we get a line which differs significantly from the standard one you see in high school English class. That’s the one that measures the escalating stakes of the narrative, like so:



It’s also a different curve than the contemporary three-act screenplay, with its notoriously over-worked end of act two low point:



What we get is a line closer to a stock tracker measuring the progress over time of a slowly deflating security. The overall movement is downward, but there are continual ticks up and down along the way. It’s these continual modulations of tension vs. release and vicarious pleasure vs. fear & pity that keep us engaged with the story as it unfolds.



(This doesn’t mean that the other two lines are wrong, so much as they’re measuring different things. But I guess I am arguing that the rhythm of up and down beats is the more useful line, for RPG purposes and perhaps in general.)

The overall line might be spikier if I assigned a separate quantitative value to each up and down moment. As it is I’ve only made a few very big disastrous turning points larger than the others. I’m not sure the level of added complexity would have told us much, though.

It did not surprise me to see that we rarely see more than three beats in a row with the same emotional direction. This happens only once, during the sequence at Ophelia’s grave, where I count four consecutive downward beats. Interestingly, this is the moment when our sympathy for Hamlet is at its lowest ebb. We can afford to see him lose a lot because we’re no longer sure we’re with him.

I was surprised, but should not have been, to see that the lowest point occurs not with Hamlet’s death, but with Gertrude’s. After this, an upswing occurs, starting with Laertes’ confession and implication of Claudius. This enables Hamlet the certainty he has always needed to fulfill his goal and kill Claudius.

Another surprise was the series of post-mortem victories Hamlet scores, leading me to think he’s more of a doomed hero than a tragic one. He redeems himself in death, which is an anagnorisis more appropo to the end of a John Woo movie than to the classic Aristotelian model. This was the most significant change this exercise brought to my understanding of the play. Before I started I’d always assumed he was a tragic hero, though in an oblique and incomplete way. Now I see him as a sacrificial hero: you can’t kill a king and get away with it, so he must die. But it is equally imperative that he kill Claudius to restore order. You can’t say the same thing about Macbeth’s decision to kill Duncan, or for that matter, Lear’s decision to abdicate in favor of his insincerely flattering daughters or Othello’s to strangle Desdemona.

Part of me wants to explore other famous works in this manner—perhaps a straight procedural like Dr. No or Star Wars, followed by a full-on drama like The Graduate or Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Then there are the genre-specific cases: horror stories probably show a different curve than the norm, as do comedies. However with the extra time investment required to both study the source material and then make and copy and upload the diagram, I don’t plan on jumping back in those waters anytime soon.

Next up, instead of doing that crazy thing, I’ll zoom in to take a look at the various types of scene outcome.

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, turning points

(11 comments | Leave a comment)

Continuing a previous discussion...

In addition to putting us on the upside of an emotional rollercoaster by placing its heroes in the win space, sequences of premise exploration fall into two other categories: exposition and spectacle.

Scenes in which the characters tool around in the setting without apparent plot advancement may seem aimless and consequence-free. At least, that’s what the storyteller hopes, because he’s really laying pipe for later developments and doesn’t want you to notice. So the veneer of the emotional up arrows conceals the provision of info you’ll need later. If a prolonged sequence shows the hamster heroes zipping around in their tube city, you can bet that the climax will again feature the tube city, and that a detail slipped in during the set-up sequence proves pivotal to its resolution. This may be pitched to the studio guys as a trailer moment, but (assuming a well-constructed story that wasn’t twisted into a pretzel of unrelated elements during the development process) serves a vital purpose.

In the turning points notation, a scene of pure exposition would be marked as an observational scene, with our handy-dandy binoculars symbol.

Adroit writers avoid pure exposition by working it into a scene that accomplishes something else, either dramatic or procedural. In the investigative genres, the heroes gain access to exposition as the reward for their victories.

One of the advantages of the RPG form is its high tolerance for exposition. Exposition is deadly on screen or onstage—or, for that matter, in a video game. It’s easier on the printed page but still must be presented in carefully regulated doses. In a tabletop, exposition can be inherently interactive. The GM provides a few sentences of basic narration about a new person, place or thing. Then the players can jump in, asking the clarifying questions they need to fix the situation in their heads.

Moments of pure spectacle, in which we see the visual awesomeness of the world, are a third component of premise exploration. They’re tricky to successfully pull off in any narrative format. In films, you need to get dramatic beats in there awfully quickly, no matter how stunning the CGI. Otherwise you’re in “let’s drool over the Enterprise” mode, as seen in the interminable sequence from the theatrical cut of Star Trek: the Motion Picture.

Players may make your descriptions of a setting interactive by asking questions about it. If not, you need to cover it in a few sentences, and then give them low-consequences ways of interacting with the new place until they’ve established its relevance to the premise.

Ideally, these occur in scenes or conflicts that advance a story as well. For example, the eponymous scenario in the Mutant City Blues adventure anthology Hard Helix allows the players to encounter the conceits and major figures of the setting in the course of cracking a case.

(An intriguing example of pure spectacle occurs in the experimental novel Hebdomeros, by surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. It consists entirely of spectacle and exposition. Images and snippets of exposition flow past the reader without ever resolving into a plot or narrative. The effect is like strolling through a dreamscape resembling his classic paintings, albeit with more people in them.)

Tags: cinema hut, exploring the premise, gaming hut, literature, mutant city blues, narrative structure, turning points, visual art

(Leave a comment)

Act V, Scene 2g: A) Fortinbras reacts with shock and horror to the scene of carnage at the Danish court.

This beat heightens our sense of the tragedy’s awful impact. We might feel a little better about this Fortinbras guy now that we see that his reactions to the events parallel ours. Still, this is a down emotional moment.

B) An ambassador arrives with the news that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

Here Shakespeare sounds an ambiguous note: Hamlet was sure that R & G deserved the fate he arranged for him, but we never quite see them through his eyes. Their deaths seem out of scale with their crimes, a fact Tom Stoppard will later make brilliant absurdist hay of in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Hamlet has achieved one of his procedural aims, so it warrants an up arrow. At the same time, the unease we feel at this particular victory deserves an emotional down arrow. It doesn’t erase our empathy for Hamlet, but does remind us of his personal imperfection, and of the collateral damage done by these events. Neither strictly speaking a dramatic or procedural interaction, this post-facto bit of wrap-up exposition is marked by our infrequently-used commentary icon.

C) Keeping his promise to Hamlet, Horatio begins to tell his story.

This might be chalked up as a posthumous victory for Hamlet, as his friend makes good on his vow, rather than killing himself. I’m surprised to see a procedural up arrow here, but here it is, nonetheless. As nothing impedes Horatio, this gets a decision point icon.

D) Fortinbras claims the throne; Horatio indicates that he’ll later explain that this would be in accordance with Hamlet’s wishes.

This beat also reiterates an earlier one, putting a period on Hamlet’s second posthumous victory. Another procedural up arrow. It’s surprise discoveries like this that make the whole breakdown process seem worthwhile.

E) Fortinbras commands a hero’s funeral for Hamlet.

Hamlet didn’t ask for a splendid funeral, so this isn’t a procedural victory. We’re glad that he’s being treated with respectful fanfare, but mourn his passing. Thus we end the play on a mixed emotional moment, with dramatic arrows crossed.

If you look at the combined beats from Hamlet’s death onwards, you see a downward curve that bottoms out in the ambiguous announcement of R&G’s death, and then moves steadily upward to the end. That’s your diagram of catharthis, right there—the wrenching demise of our doomed hero, followed by the release of purged emotion.



And whew, that’s the end, at last. Speaking of denouements, though, starting next week after the film festival we’ll take a step back and see what broad observations we can make, having completed our map.

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, turning points

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

Tags: cinema hut, exploring the premise, gaming hut, narrative structure, turning points

(12 comments | Leave a comment)

Act V, Scene 2g: A) Hamlet hears the warlike approach of Fortinbras’ men.

This is the briefest of beats, but if played according to the meaning of the line, we should feel some apprehension over the arrival of the oft-foreshadowed Fortinbras. Are things about to get even worse, if that’s even possible? This new element of possible danger is a procedural moment, and warrants a down arrow.

B) Hamlet tells Horatio that Fortinbras is his choice to become king of Denmark.

This being the denouement, beats are quickly resolved. Hamlet allays our fears by passing the throne along to Fortinbras. In modern productions, in an age skeptical of autocratic power, this is often played as an ambiguous or sinister moment. In its original monarchical era it was meant to be reassuring—legitimate order has been restored.

This also represents Hamlet’s sole act of governance as king, after killing Claudius. He exercises power, if only once, if only while dying, and therefore scores a final procedural victory, complete with up arrow.

C) Hamlet dies.

And here is his last procedural down arrow, after he finally fails the last-ditch saving throw that allows him to linger mortally wounded.

D) Horatio mourns his passing.

Hamlet is more doomed hero than a tragic hero deserving of his cathartic fate, so it’s appropriate that, through our last surviving PC, we should pause to mourn him. Horatio’s emotional response to the death of his friend moves the action back from the realm of the procedural and into the dramatic. It’s a down moment for us and for him.




Full map here.

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, turning points

(2 comments | Leave a comment)

Act V, Scene 2f: A) Laertes reveals Claudius’ role in the poisoning scheme.

Hamlet’s attempt to win Laertes over at the beginning of the scene, coupled with Laertes’ essential decency, grants him this procedural victory, unequivocally identifying Claudius, in the presence of many witnesses, as a poisoner.

In gaming terms, this represents something we should see more often—a success which pays off in a later beat. In D&D, it would have been a Diplomacy check; in GUMSHOE, it would have been a use of the Reassurance investigative ability, which yields a delayed core clue after a second condition is met.

This warrants a procedural up arrow.

B) Hamlet kills Claudius.

Hamlet has now achieved his final procedural objective, completing the mission handed him by his father’s ghost at the end of Act One. This warrants marking with an oversized procedural up arrow.

Everything from here on out is denouement.

C) Laertes seeks Hamlet’s forgiveness, dying before Hamlet can speak. Hamlet grants his absolution posthumously.

Neither of them has anything left to lose, unless they plan to keep on fighting in the afterlife. So it’s a dramatic, not a procedural interaction. Here an NPC is the petioner, with the PC as a granter. Laertes calls on Hamlet’s sense of sympathy, a tactic that proves successful. This doesn’t cost Hamlet anything, and in fact makes him appear nobler to the audience. It’s neither a win nor a loss, and is scored with a lateral dramatic arrow. It has been eighteen beats, since Hamlet’s mocking of Osric, since we last had a purely dramatic interaction.

D) After granting Laertes posthumous absolution, Hamlet, knowing that he’s doomed, asks Horatio to bear witness to his cause. Horatio responds by declaring his intention to commit suicide. Hamlet successfully dissuades him by invoking their friendship.

In the course of this beat Hamlet adds a second intention. He starts out with a procedural request, to have his case fairly aired after he dies. When he realizes that Horatio intends to kill himself, dramatic stakes are added—he also wants to save his friend. He succeeds in both. Although Horatio technically loses the exchange by backing down from his suicide threat, the audience doesn’t feel it as a defeat for him. Accordingly the beat calls for double up arrows for Hamlet, with no countering down arrow for Horatio.



Full map here.

Tags: d&d, gaming hut, gumshoe, hamlet, turning points

(Leave a comment)

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, heroquest, turning points

(3 comments | Leave a comment)

Individual beats are spaced closer together than ever before as the tragedy spirals to its climax.

Act V, Scene 2d: A) Gertrude toasts Hamlet from the poisoned cup; Claudius tries to stop her but is too late.

Hamlet has always sought to protect his mother. We see her as a flawed but sympathetic character, and don’t want this to happen to her. (Ironically, our failure is also Claudius’; we are allowed a moment of sympathy for the villain, too. At any rate, it’s a major procedural down arrow.

B) Laertes assures a doubtful Claudius that he can hit Hamlet.

A minor antagonist fails in his attempt to reassures the main villain. We’re not so much rooting for Laertes to fail as enjoying Claudius’ conclusion that Hamlet will win. This gives us hope, and even though Hamlet isn’t directly involved, scores one of our last procedural up arrows.

C) The two duelists resume the match, neither hitting the other.

See how Shakespeare drags out the suspense with this even-steven moment. A lateral procedural arrow. At the right moment, a whiff factor can be powerfully engaging.

D) Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned rapier.

The moment we’ve been dreading since Act IV comes to pass. Our hero is doomed. You don’t get a bigger procedural down arrow than that.

Note our string of all-blue arrows. We’re in action territory now, with no dramatic arrows in sight.



Full map here.

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, turning points

(Leave a comment)

Act V, Scene 2c: A) Claudius recapitulates the terms of the wager and offers a toast to the duelists. He offers a pearl to Hamlet if he scores the first hit.

Claudius acts the benevolent king as part of his ongoing deception. Hamlet, presumably preoccupied with his choice of blades, doesn’t challenge him. Claudius’ speech makes us more uneasy, reminding us that Hamlet still hasn’t twigged to the scheme. It’s a suspense scene, and one in which Claudius has the upper hand, procedurally, over Hamlet. So we mark it with a procedural down arrow.

B) Hamlet scores the first hit, winning the pearl.

Hamlet scores a procedural victory by hitting Laertes first. It may be an equivocal one, since he doesn’t know about the scheme, but a win is a win. So he gets a procedural up arrow.

C) Hamlet declines to drink from the cup, which we know to be poisoned—perhaps by the supposed pearl itself.

Another unknowing win for Hamlet, this allows us to take heart in the possibility that he won’t be poisoned. He scores his second procedural up arrow in a row.

D) Hamlet hits Laertes again.

Another procedural victory! Our hero is winning!

Of course, the laws of rhythmic variance being what they are, a bunch of wins at the beginning of a suspenseful sequence bode ill for our hero—just as a series of losses is likely to lay the groundwork for a thrilling come-from-behind triumph.

Note also how many separate beats Shakespeare devotes to this climactic sequence. The more important it is, the more finely grained its portrayal. In HeroQuest terms, we’re be looking at an extended contest—and will soon see its climactic results.



Full map here. Prepare to scroll horizontally!

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, heroquest, turning points

(Leave a comment)

Act V, Scene 2b: A) Horatio tries to talk Hamlet out of the duel with Laertes, but Hamlet dismisses his concerns.

This is a procedural beat in which both of our remaining PCs debate Hamlet’s tactical situation. Horatio’s goal is practical, not emotional, so it’s a persuasion interaction. Horatio loses; Hamlet wins. But the audience, knowing that Claudius intends the duel as cover for a murder attempt, feels a sense of heightened anxiety. That makes this a downbeat moment, so we’ll enter the down arrow for Horatio as the more accurate indicator of the story’s direction.

B) Hamlet seeks Laertes’ pardon for wronging him; with some reservation, Laertes seems to grant it.

Here we have a mixed beat, where one participant pursues an emotional goal and the other has a procedural goal. Hamlet’s intent is dramatic; he wants forgiveness from Laertes. Laertes wants to conceal his intention to harm Hamlet, and so pretends to accept his attempt to make amends. As audience members, we know that Hamlet’s victory is only apparent, and that he remains ignorant of the plot to kill him. This is the second beat in a row in which his apparent victory in an exchange conceals a threat of defeat—and is again scored with a downward procedural arrow.

C) Hamlet offends Laertes by praising his reputation for swordsmanship in overly lofty terms. Laertes accuses him of mockery, which he denies.

This brief exchange can be played two ways—either Hamlet is cleverly provoking Laertes or has innocently triggered his opponent’s dangerous temper. All else being equal, the strongest choice is the one that provides contrast and rhythmic variance. After three successive procedural setbacks, Hamlet could use a win, if only a minor one. Let’s treat this as an intentional and successful attempt to rattle Laertes. (If Hamlet was a player character, he’d certainly be trash-talking his antagonist.) Hamlet’s victory is both procedural, rendering Laertes more prone to error, and dramatic—Hamlet establishes his dominance and superiority by so casually setting Laertes off. It’s his first procedural win in a long time—since before Ophelia’s death.



Full map here.

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, turning points

(Leave a comment)

Although Michael Mann’s Public Enemies raked in an acceptable box office haul and scored a fresh Tomatometer rating, the film—which I quite liked—has been the subject of much concern trolling in movie blog land. Allegedly it’s too arty, too redolent of the filmmaker’s personal vision, to justify its budget in an era of tentpoles and CGI giant robots. I’m still puzzling that out: the Public Enemies I saw follows the conventional arc of an outlaws on the run flick. Mann’s adoring HD camera lovingly serves up the movie star charisma.

( Mild spoilers... )

Tags: cinema hut, gaming hut, turning points

(5 comments | Leave a comment)

Act V, Scene 2b: A) To a doubtful Horatio, Hamlet defends his decision to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths.

As noted last time, Horatio is the character who doesn’t push back against Hamlet. So it’s significant that he now privileges his role as audience stand-in over his position as Hamlet’s supporter and confidant. Like us, he protests the harshness of R & G’s fate. Stung, Hamlet simultaneously concedes the point and shifts the blame to Claudius. If he hadn’t killed Hamlet’s father and married his mother, he wouldn’t have set Hamlet on this corrupt path, letting “this canker of our nature come in further evil.”

This beat ends in dramatic defeat for Horatio, who, failing to get the assurance he seeks, shifts to the more comfortable pragmatic issue of how quickly Claudius will get news from England. If only by default, that makes it a victory for Hamlet. So we score this with one up and one down dramatic arrow for our two remaining PCs.

B) Another oleaginous courtier, the buffoonish Osric, shows up to issue an invitation. Hamlet befuddles him with a stream of contemptuous verbiage.

Once again, an apparent intrusion of comic relief introduces a darker note. Just as Claudius has corrupted Hamlet, he’s turning the court into a haven for clowns like Osric. Osric has no choice but to cheerily deflect Hamlet’s scorn, giving him a (somewhat cheap) emotional victory. But since Osric is a ridiculous lackey figure, we feel he deserves it.

C) Osric lays out the terms of the wager and duel with Laertes.

A pure procedural beat, this exposition sets up the final confrontation. We know that Claudis and Laertes are scheming to secretly kill Hamlet, so his acceptance of the duel increases our fear for him and thus counts as a procedural down moment.



Full map here.

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, turning points

(Leave a comment)

Act V, Scene Id: A) Gertrude and Claudius temporarily smooth the waters as the scuffling Laertes and Hamlet are separated.

Hamlet is spared immediate repercussions for his outburst, which is good for him as far as it doesn’t get him into further procedural trouble. On the other hand, he’s spared by his enemy, which can’t be a good thing in the long run. Laertes responds easily to their entreaties, presumably out of his procedural alliance with Claudius. That makes this a persuasion interaction, not a dramatic one, and one between NPCs to boot. This brief beat momentarily arrests the deepening tragic spiral without reversing it, so we represent it with a lateral procedural arrow.

Act V, Scene 2: B) Confiding in Horatio, Hamlet reveals that he had a restless night, and justifies his graveside indiscretion as possibly useful.

Hamlet seeks assurance from Horatio and, as is usually the case with this confidant character, easily gets it. All along Horatio’s role in the narrative has in large part been to give our hero the emotional victories that every other character withholds from him.

This could easily be played by actors as an emotional down moment, however, with Hamlet’s self-assurance seeming like a rationalization, and Horatio’s acquiescence coming off as worried or otherwise double-edged.

Under the theory that the choice that a doubtful interpretation should be decided in favor of the one that grants the greatest rhythmic variation, let’s treat this as an actual emotional victory for Hamlet, and give it a dramatic up arrow.

C) Hamlet reveals further details of his escape from exile, culminating in the news that he’s sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths.

Another powerfully equivocal moment. This news fills in a procedural victory for Hamlet we already knew about. However, his decision to doom his erstwhile friends doesn’t actively further his vengeance against Claudius. He does it out of a sense of betrayal, satisfying an emotional goal by external, active means.

This raises the prospect of a victory for the protagonist that we in the audience don’t share. If we found R & G to be buffoonish poltroons, we probably feel (as Horatio will in the forthcoming beat) that they met a harsher fate than they deserved. The character we’re identifying with feels a sense of emotional victory, but our sympathies are split. Looks like another crossed dramatic arrow.

If this had been a game, we would have seen this sequence play out rather than hearing it in retrospect. That would have made it a suspense scene, as we wonder whether Hamlet escapes, and whether he succeeds in dealing with R & G as he wanted. (And face it, the spite and overkill of his decision is classic player character behavior.)



Full map here.

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, turning points

(1 comment | Leave a comment)

Act V, Scene Ic: A) Confronting a priest, the priest in charge of Ophelia’s funeral, Laertes demands greater ceremony for Ophelia’s funeral, and is rebuffed.

If we were treating Laertes as a PC, this would be a failed persuasion interaction for him. Since we’re concerned about Hamlet, who watches unseen, we have to see this from the vantage of his procedural or dramatic progress. It serves as another reminder of Laertes’ temper, and thus his danger to Hamlet. The reminder of the threat he poses is procedural, and because it intensifies, we score this with a down arrow. It’s been awhile since we had a suspense beat, and the last one also underscored Laertes’ menace.

B) Hamlet realizes that the funeral is for Ophelia.

The dramatic irony completes itself: Hamlet now shares the audience’s knowledge of Ophelia’s death. He undergoes the shock and horror we’ve anticipated from him since the previous scene. As armadillo_king pointed out earlier, her death represents both a dramatic and a procedural setback for him. He loved her (if we accept the dramatically strongest choice for the actor playing him) and tried (though perhaps half-heartedly) to get her out of the way of his campaign of vengeance. So we mark this with both arrow types, both pointed down.

In an RPG, this would be the moment when the character gains information that the player already had. This is how our form resolves dramatic irony.

C) Seeing Laertes leap into the grave, Hamlet follows. A fight ensues as each seeks to proof the greater magnitude of his grief.

By allowing himself to be overcome with grief and anger, Hamlet sabotages his procedural goal in the course of seeking his emotional goal. He’s seeking emotional absolution, but impulsively employs an aggressive tactic. Not unexpectedly, he fails to get his emotional goal, too. Another pair of matched down arrows.

This scene reminds us of games like Pendragon or Dying Earth (and soon, Skulduggery) where characters must roll to avoid acting on their emotional impulses. It seems as if the player has been forced by his character’s emotional qualities to act against his procedural interest.



Check out the full map here.

Tags: dying earth, gaming hut, hamlet, skulduggery, turning points

(2 comments | Leave a comment)

In this week’s exciting episode, we are forced to add a new symbol to our map key—forced by clowns!

Act IV, Scene VIIb: A) Gertrude describes Ophelia’s drowning.

In a game, this would be our first player character death. Clearly Ophelia has been completely removed from play after failing her Sanity check. In a game we’d describe it directly rather than hearing it through an NPC.

This is clearly a down moment, and a big one (marked with another double-deep arrow.) But is it a procedural or a dramatic low? I’d argue that this is a point where the two strands dovetail, as is appropriate at especially important moments. Ophelia is an unintended casualty of actions taken by Hamlet to further his procedural aims—his mistaken killing of Polonius, and perhaps his feigned madness. Yet we also anticipate that her death will take an emotional toll on Hamlet. If anything, we feel more pity (the hallmark of a dramatic down moment) than suspense (the marker of a procedural down beat) at this moment. Our concern for how this will affect Hamlet’s s plans are pushed to the background.

The scene is also a choice point, in that a character takes action without resistance, and we see the result. In this case, Ophelia has chosen to kill herself.

B) Laertes’s rage flares again, prompting Claudius to fear that his success in calming him will now be undone.

This beat brings the procedural suspense back into play. This is something of a wild card moment. On the surface, it might seem that anything that worries our antagonist is good for our hero. But we know that Laertes’ fury won’t be good for Hamlet, even if it prevents also scotches Claudius’ exact plan for cleverly disposing of his nephew. If we’re worried for Hamlet, this must be a procedural down beat.

Act V, Scene I: A) The two gravediggers (billed as First and Second Clown) engage in Elizabethan badinage, casting satirical doubt on the decision to grant Ophelia a Christian burial, despite her apparent suicide.

Whether this scene, featuring previously new characters who promptly vanish again after popping up to comment, chorus-like, on the action, constitutes an up or down moment is a matter of interpretation. If you buy the idea that their Elizabethan badinage is pure comedy relief, it provides an up moment for the audience—one that none of the main characters, as the story spirals toward tragedy, is now capable of providing. GMs often throw in comedy relief walk-ons and underlings to lighten the proceedings, but rarely need to keep all the PCs offstage while they do it.

However, this is a prime example of a Shakespeare clown scene that is darker than it might appear on the surface. In mocking the decision to bury Ophelia on consecrated ground, the gravediggers cast a jaundiced eye on the privilege of our entire main cast. They cynically undercut the proceedings in general, and our sympathy for Ophelia’s fate in particular. In this interpretation, they offer another twist of the emotional knife, confronting the audience with a subtle but troubling irony. That would make it an emotional down note arising from the drama, but not from any of the main characters. In a game, a GM might convey this with a quick aside, for example a description of cynical or doubtful onlookers to the main action.

Let’s map the irony by giving this jarring comic moment both an up and a down arrow; by crossing them we show the mixed emotion. This beat mixes unease and relief and relates more to the emotional than the procedural thread of the story.

As a scene of commentary on the action, as opposed to action itself, this beat creates a need for a new symbol. Let’s make that a pair of observing binoculars.



If you refer to the full map to date in all its sprawling splendor, you’ll see that we’ve reached our lowest point ever.

Tags: gaming hut, hamlet, turning points

(2 comments | Leave a comment)