Social science fiction: how story-telling games can help us dream our green future

Last weekend we played a story-telling game called Shock for the first time (available free for download here). Billing itself as social science-fiction, the idea is a simple one: the players decide on a shock – the big idea that changes the world as we know it. They jointly create a world that reflects that shock, then pick lead characters and collaborate in telling a tale which explores it further.

Science-fiction is a literature of ideas – even if some of it is in the business of recycling old tropes – so gamifying science-fiction story-building makes a lot of sense. You could go high-brow, looking at, say, identity loss in a world of uploaded consciousness. You could use it to give space opera an infusion of purpose. Or you could do what we did after several glasses of wine on Saturday night and decide that what the pulp end of the genre was really missing was a  a Nazi hollow-earth empire hidden beneath the earth's crust. With giant mechs. :-)

We really liked Shock, although the conflict-resolution mechanism needs a bit of practice. But it got me to thinking that the game might have value outside the tabletop hobby. Its rules would work well for group story-telling online, such as via a shared blog or discussion forum. And its ability to imagine possible futures could be a great creative tool for those seeking to achieve them.

Like environmental activists, for instance.

As speculative fiction is to literature, so environmentalism is to politics – even at it's most nostalgic it's a discourse of change and of big ideas. The kind of stuff that Friends of the Earth are calling for - renewable energy, the closed loop of resource use, the localisation of food supply and economy – these are big ideas that would change the world as we know it.

These are as much science-fictional ideas as they are green ones.

What story-telling can give environmental activism is a way of imagining that future and giving us hope that it can be realised. It makes impersonal social forces personal through plot and characterisation. It dramatises both conflict and resolution. It makes the future feel real, however briefly.

Story-telling also matters because we know that when seeking to persuade people that a big idea is worth reaching for, facts are necessary but not enough. We know that positive campaigns fare better when we're inviting someone to share a narrative – The Big Ask and The Bee Cause have both met that need well.

Story-telling as collective ownership

And contributing to the creation of that narrative can be very powerful. I have found that volunteers and activists respond much more positively to a national campaign when we create a space where they can explore and take ownership of it. Then they take it to places which its creators never thought about. 

So, we know story-telling has a great deal to offer campaigning. And I'm suggesting in particular that science-fiction could provide a great framework for making our near-futures of environmental (and thus political, economic, social) change more tangible to ourselves and to those we want to reach.

But there's only one way to test this...

and that's to suggest running a game of Shock online with an environmental theme, perhaps via another blog or on Campaign Hubs, where others can see it and (hopefully) be inspired. Looking at Friends of the Earth's next major campaign, could we perhaps tell a story about what might happen 1, 10, 50 years from now when community-driven renewable energy comes to Anytown, England?

Thoughts? Players, even?

Interactive world creation - Atlantis: Years One and Two

In a couple of weeks, for the first time in several years, I'm running a role-playing gaming session, as opposed to 'just' playing one.

I've decided to start by trying a bit of interactive world creation with the players, as an exercise in creatively surrendering the gamesmaster's control to make something together.

In this post, and the comments that follow, we're going to start to create the setting together. If you're not in the game, don't hold back from making your own suggestions; we can't guarantee we'll use them, but if you're inspired by what you read we'd like to hear your ideas too.

The gameworld

For those of us with finite time, it's good to start with some published material, and then start adding to it and remixing it.

The starting point for this world creation exercise is Progenitor, a source book for the Wild Talents game. It's one of the best pieces of work in this area that I've seen in gaming for a long time - broad enough in its canvas that there are many places and times you can slot in a campaign; original enough in its detail that you find inspiration in many places.

It starts with the idea that the first superhuman, an American woman named Amanda Sykes, is discovered in the late 1960's and slowly begins to infect the population with strange powers while fighting for the US in Vietnam. The world slowly starts to get very weird indeed.

Hot-spots for infection this early in the time-line are Washington DC and the Vietnam War.

The interview after the jump with Amanda sets the scene well and makes it clear that you're not dealing with world where everyone with powers has to dig spandex and capes. It's reminiscent of Aberrant, which I loved despite its material being wildly uneven in quality.

 The setting

For the game, I'm focussing in on Atlantis, a small island in the Atlantic created in 1969 in the Progenitor timeline by a superhuman with earth control powers. Woozy from the bitter end of the summer of love, Cynthia Carls creates the island as a refuge from the conflicts of the United States, for humans and metahumans alike.

There's a great image from the book of this staggering act of creation here.

But the Progenitor material leaves lots of questions usefully unanswered, which is where we come in.

Some useful dates

April 1968 – Blurry footage from the Vietnam War leads US military to admit to the use of “metahuman soldiers”

May 1968 – reports from the war indicate that the Viet Cong also have strange destructive powers on their side.

June and July 1968 – battles between metahumans in Boston and New York - the first of their kind... certainly not the last.

August 1968 – North Vietnamese metahumans begin sabotage operations on US soil, apparently through teleportation.

March 1969 – Cynthia Carls creates small Atlantis – an island outside US territorial waters in the Atlantic.

July 1969 – The first monster created by Tina Shaw – a tiny homunculus created when she heals the sick – appears live on television

September 1969 – Atlantis now has approximately 100 citizens, as Cynthia Carls quietly spreads the word of her new utopia.

Key questions for players and anyone else who fancies suggesting ideas? Please reply in the comments

• What striking features, flora or fauna might Atlantis have? Give us one example.
• Suggest a character with superpowers who has sought sanctuary in Atlantis. What is their main power and why are they there? Who were they before they had powers?
• Suggest a normal human character who has sought sanctuary in Atlantis. What did they do before they came to Atlantis and what did they do there?

It probably makes most sense at this stage for these initial characters to be American - but if you can think of a convincing reason why you might have come across an infected superhuman elsewhere, or have heard about Atlantis through other means than Cynthia and her rainbow nation of American refugees be my guest!

Don't worry at this stage whether these are the characters you want to play - your role here is to make sure the island is an interesting place and help to give it a ferret-sack-full of interesting people

I'm going to do this too over the weekend. Looking forward to seeing your ideas. :-)