Game Design 101 from Gary Gygax
While Gary and John Beebe were looking for the Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Company (DDEC) mansion, Gary stayed in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. If you’ve never been there, you’ve seen it in a hundred films and TV shows. “The Pink Palace” has been the epitome of Beverly Hills and LA luxury since the 1920s. Everybody who was anybody cavorted in the cabanas, was photographed in the pool, and made deals in the Polo Lounge.
Somewhere in the winter of 1983, at exactly the same time as I was writing “The Puppy and the Badlands” and working with Jack Kirby, I had my first game design lesson.
Gary’s bungalow was well shaded by giant tropical plants, and I remember it as being art directed by Rousseau or Gauguin. Gary had presumably identified me as a promising noob and was now lecturing me in game design 101 while he smoked Camel straights and I smoked Camel filters.
He said, “The first thing you have to figure out is the ecology of the dungeon.”
“What eats what…” I said.
“Right. Who built the dungeon and why? Who moved in? What is it protecting? Start answering those questions and you have a dungeon.”
To this day, a hundred projects later, I think about this every time I approach a project. A dungeon is a microcosm of what any world is really about. A dungeon is about keeping things out, and in some cases, keeping things in. Most dungeons perfectly represent what is both valued and feared in a world. In a horror film, it can be a basement or attic. It doesn’t have to be huge. It just has to be the home of the fear and the treasure.
To me, there are basically two kinds of writers. There are some who see a story clearly, and the whole exercise is to figure out how to tell that story the best way. Every set, prop, character, event, etc. is there to tell that story. The other kind is a person who simply loves a “world” and can see twenty stories in a given world, and their biggest problem is figuring out which one to tell.
A dramatic script is about the biggest moment in somebody’s life. “Dramatic storytellers” build worlds in order to tell human stories. They’re really only trying to answer the question of “In what world could this story happen?”
“World builders” are people who tell stories as a means of exploring a world. The product of world builders tends to be “franchises.” James Bond is a world as much as it is a character or story. It is a world of secret headquarters, tropical islands, lavish casinos, beautiful women, henchmen, and menacing villains bent on world domination. Which is to say, franchise characters aren’t about arcs. We don’t want Captain America, Indiana Jones, Batman, Harry Bosch, or Jack Reacher to change. Everything in the real world changes; that’s why we go back to places where things don’t change.
Personally, I like figuring out worlds. If you know what’s valuable in a world, you know where a thousand plots come from. You know the look of a world, you know about who’s in it. You know the ecology, you know where your character is in it. But a world doesn’t start from nowhere.
Ironically, worlds can come out of dramatic situations. If you have a character or a situation, you can begin to create a world. Bruce Wayne’s millionaire parents are killed in an alley near an opera house during the Depression by a robber, Joe Chill, who apparently wants their money. Already we know quite a bit about the world. It’s the Depression. People get killed on the street for jewelry. We’re in a world of rich and poor. We’re in a lawless city where people get shot in alleys. It’s a desperate world. Even if we find out that the real motive was something quite different than robbery, we know we’re in a world where random robbery is rampant. We know that the value system of this world is money.
Even without the backstory footage about the ring, the minute Gandalf shows up in the Shire to inquire about a ring, we know that we’re in a world of magic and that certain rings are powerful (we can guess that from the title)—so powerful that even when an old Hobbit has one, he becomes a person of interest to the most powerful people in that world.
Even if your story is set in the real world, there is an ecology. There is a value system. If everybody in the story is a multimillionaire, then power in the social structure is what’s most valuable. James Bond, in any incarnation, operates in a world where technological superiority sets the victory conditions, where rogue billionaire sociopaths with beautiful girlfriends can threaten entire nation states. But strip down to the surface, and what is usually at stake is control of destructive or disruptive technology. (And as a side note, without getting too far into it, worlds can be largely defined by what is not in the world. I don’t think Walmart exists in James Bond’s world).
Scratch the surface of G.I. Joe, and it was a counter-terrorist force that took on a multifaceted terrorist group known as Cobra. Cobra was evil. But it was lawful evil; they had uniforms, a clear leader, rules, equipment, infrastructure. (I think of neutral evil as being more related to business, money, evil corporations, and mercenaries, while chaotic evil is things like the Dreadnoks, who were just chaotic and evil and weren’t even trusted by Cobra but were sometimes used by them. If the story played out, Cobra Commander would have as many problems with his own side as he has with Joe and the lawful good guys.)
Transformers was a product of the eighties, a period of fear of the global control of oil. The seventies had gas shortages, the threat of oil wars, OPEC, and an overriding existential fear that we were going to run out of oil. So when you’re structuring a story around a toy line of robots who disguise themselves as cars and planes, you have to figure out why they would do that. Why do they have to hide? What are they doing here? What do they want?
Well, the answer is simple. They want Energon. Their world is running out of it and Earth is basically an oil field. If they run out, they cease functioning. They disguise themselves both from each other (Autobots from Decepticons) and from humans, who have their own set of weapons and might, in aggregate, be dangerous to them for two reasons. First off, humans have primitive weapons, but they have a lot of them, and they might actually be able to defeat the Transformers. Second, humans might destroy the Energon reserves in order to get rid of them—though I can’t remember that we ever played directly with this implied threat, it was always lurking about. So the entire premise was based on a metaphor for our real-world worries during the eighties and a dramatic need to make sense of the toy line.
It’s important to have this in the back of your mind when looking at different franchises. What is valuable in the world? What is the ecology of the dungeon? It may be conscious, or it may be unconscious, but our fictional worlds somehow speak to our real worlds. What is the audience jeopardy here? What is this really about?
There would be many more lessons from Gary. And just like we probably adjourned from that day to the Polo Lounge, I’ll now adjourn back to Ruby-Spears, because that’s how life worked in those days.