The Glass Bead Game
Inspired by the Hermann Hesse novel of the same name, “The Glass Bead Game” challenges players to find connections between the emotions they bring to the table, building a structure for the stories they will tell. Players create characters that express the themes found at the intersections of these emotions, and play out scenes where their control is limited only by the will of the other players and the constraints they themselves created. The stories they tell will culminate in a narrative that resides in the unmapped space between them.
Author?s Notes
Special thanks to Andy Kitkowski for running Game-Chef and this year?s great theme and ingredients, to the other competitors for their fascinating ideas (both as part of their own work and while commenting on each other?s) on the 1km1kt forums, and to Mike O?Sullivan for letting me know about the competition in the first place.
My muse didn?t get working on my Game-Chef entry until Saturday morning. I stared at the ingredients Friday night and very loudly complained that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. Sometime between then and the following morning, however, something must have clicked. Most likely it was seeing my new copy of Hesse?s novel sitting snugly on my bookcase.
Ingredients-wise, my entry is a storytelling-by-committee game based on connecting emotions via a system which is an attempt to emulate the one vaguely described in Hesse?s ?The Glass Bead Game.? The inital board is built purely by vote and negotiation, with later conflicts being handled by a combination of arbitration, point spending and chance. The concept of bounding the game in time, with the players literally working against the clock from movement to movement, prevents gameplay from becoming bogged down in the details. While building the maps which guide the story (and even acting out scenes), the ticking clock should remind players that they need to keep things moving.
The central intention of this work was to build a system for telling stories that guides and rewards players for using concepts and ideas that are half-way between their own and the other players?. It paradoxically gives more control to players who do not force their original vision onto the work, in the form of points. The original emotions the players put into the game are only ever worth a single point, and can only ever produce one further point during the course of the first session.
Concepts which link one more or player?s ideas, on the other hand, are worth far more, with the Trigger Node, the concept linking as many of the given themes as possible, becoming the basis for the story told. During conflicts the more a player?s desired resolution attempts to include the ideas of other players the more likely it is to succeed.
Meanwhile, the design attempts to evolve the structure of the stories told by using the ideas and concepts which were most popular with the players as the basis for future stories.
All of this hopefully adds up to a game which encompasses Hesse?s ideas on music, science, art and connection. Play involves a rigidly structure system which still allows a great deal of freedom and creativity.
In ?The Glass Bead Game?, Hesse notes that novices often begin their training by looking for connections between two seemingly incongruous works; for example, a piece of music and a scientific principle. By forcing their minds in new directions, by attempting to explore the strange space between the given points, they end up somewhere they never expected. I?m hoping players of my Glass Bead Game will end up in the same place.
- The_Glass_Bead_Game.pdf
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Tags: Dan Ravipinto
