Matthew talks about running an RPG (role playing game) that lasts 10 years. Topics: ethics, cooperative play, imagination, decision making, & masks.

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Monica: What’s the longest game you’ve ever played? As a kid, my sister eventually stopped playing Monopoly with me because it took too long. That’s maybe one hour of play which is excruciating for a 10-year-old, but nothing compared to a notorious chess game played in 1851. It was the 4th game in a London match between Elijah Williams and Henry Thomas Buckle. Williams reportedly spent so much time thinking through the 25th move of the game that Buckle was able to write an entire chapter of his history of civilization while waiting for him to play.

Impressive, but Williams has nothing on our guest for this week, Matthew from Milwaukee, who has been playing the same game for 10 years. This week we ask, what happens when a game becomes a second life? What is it like to play without having a sense of an ending? And can games teach us to be better humans?

Welcome to Knucklebones, a narrative podcast where we talk about the impact of games in our everyday lives. I’m your host, Monica Felix, and for today’s episode, we took a deep dive into a game that became more than just a pastime. It becomes a second life, a fully fleshed out experience lasting 10 years or more with its own chronicle.

I had a chance to sit down with Matthew from Milwaukee who has a pretty unique relationship with games. Now, in just a few minutes, we’ll hear about how Matthew has managed to create, maintain, and chronicle a game with a group of friends that has run for 10 years. And not just once, but actually twice.

Two 10-year stints for these games.

But before we get to that, you have to understand what games mean to him. It all started with trying to organize a game night with a group of friends, something that ended up being a lot harder than it sounds.

Matthew: Finding games that everyone would be comfortable playing was always a challenge. Because you have the competitive people, you have the very uncompetitive people like myself, you have people who like weird, gnarly rules to explore. And people who want things to be simple so they can sip a glass of wine in peace and not worry about messing things up. Some people enjoy the thrill of competition. Some want to be casual.

But for everyone, part of the fun of playing the game is you get to be someone different from who you normally are. The way that we present ourselves normally is just a mask. And you can take that mask off and put on a different mask of choice.

And that freedom to experiment, to extrapolate, to experience different aspects of the world.

Monica: And so what Matthew ends up building for his friends is this dynamic place where they meet every week or every now and then. And while they’re there, they get to experiment with this alternate version of themselves.

Monica: And so it’s almost like a sandbox. It’s safe space, like you were saying, where you can take off a mask or put on a different mask from what you normally wear and maybe compete with your friends because we’re supposed to be such good people, good citizens, get along with everybody, support your friends. But in a game space, it’s okay to try to take them down.

Matthew: I’ve appreciated playing a lot of different kinds of games, but some games allow for different styles of play and different people find different styles of play interesting. I’m a very cooperative person and I love games where you’re not forced to be at each other’s throats. And that means that games that have at least options for cooperative play are much more satisfying to me.

Monica: So now we hear how it all began. Matthew has had an interest in creating unique game experiences with friends from an early age. And that’s a skill he hones over time and eventually brings to creating this 10-year game.

Matthew: When I was a teenager, I invented a lot of game systems. A lot of role-playing game systems from scratch. Some of them weren’t that great, I will admit. But I also invented entire settings, entire cosmologies from scratch, which is a lot of fun. And that led me to a series of games that I developed or redeveloped.

Monica: Matthew’s path took him to the world of “role-playing games” or RPGs. For anyone new to this, the basic definition is that it is a game in which players take on the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Each player then has the chance to act and make decisions as that character. Their actions can succeed or fail based on different rules and guidelines. There is no board; there are no pieces. Based on whatever variations you are playing, there may be dice to help decide how successful an action is. Perhaps the most widely known role-playing game is Dungeons and Dragons. Matthew plays a few variants of role-playing games, but ends up developing his own elaborate games over the years.

Matthew: Then some of my friends got involved in the World of Darkness games, all this sort of modern horror semi fantasy vampires and werewolves and whatnot. And that became the basis for a game that I ran for 10 years with a revolving cast of players and revolving cast of characters for those players. But that taught me to really invest deeply in that world building so that I could share that with people. And they knew they had this robust sandbox.

Monica: He runs this game for a while and it’s pretty successful. People love getting lost in the game. Where they could explore and play and just dive into the story wherever they wanted to go.

Matthew: There was no such thing as running off the page.There’s enough setting material. There’s enough content in my head. I can just keep on painting and they can keep on exploring.

Monica: Eventually though, the game runs its course and he retires the game. He dabbles in Dungeons and Dragons for a while with another friend, then adds his own narrative to it. When his friend steps away from the game, Matthew’s story lives on. He makes new friends who are also interested in games, but not into the Dungeons and Dragons setting.

Matthew: I had some new players who wanted to come on board and they didn’t really like the whole high fantasy thing of the D&D setting. And I said, well, I have this other setting that I’ve been thinking about revisiting. That’s a modern setting. Would you be interested in that? And they said, yes. I said, great. Now I have to finish putting it together. But I’ve been running that game now for about 10 years, and I have a completely new set of players than when I started. We’ve gone through several generations of characters, and there’s a lot of story to tell. And now these players are experimenting with side stories and again, just gleefully running off the page, getting into their own stuff. But this allows us to explore all sorts of different ideas and themes. And it really gives us a fun space to dabble and to play both for really serious in-depth mystical investigations and dealing with heavy ontological and metaphysical aspects of the game or just having a wild romp.

Monica: Now, if you’re new to role-playing games it will probably help to have a few solid examples of a character and scenario. If you are going to join Matthew’s group, then the first thing you will need is a character. You’ll be given a character sheet which is a template that tracks your character’s personality traits, background information about them, and other information that can be used during the game to determine how your character will respond to different actions. Imagine you start the game and Matthew will decide you are playing as a character called Miss Seeker. You read through your character sheet for Miss Seeker and learn that she is a ghost who is curious – she loves to dig into mysteries and uncover secrets. She also insists on trying to solve problems herself without any help from others.

So now the game begins and Matthew narrates a scene. He tells you that you, Miss Seeker, see a man on a path and you need to sneak by him. I asked Matthew what the player does next in that situation.

Monica: So just to give it a shot, would I just immediately roll the dice and say, I try to sneak past and then get a number? Or could I do something a little tricky and say, I’m going to try to, I don’t know, drop something in his drink so that he passes out when he’s not looking, and then I’ll sneak by.

Matthew: Exactly. So now you’re starting to think about that a little bit. Instead of saying, this is a thing I want to do, I’m just going to go walk up and do that thing and say, well, maybe I’m not a terribly dexterous person. Maybe I’m not super skilled at sneakiness, you know, maybe I have two left feet, or maybe I’m wearing the wrong shoes for the job. But you can say, what can I do instead? How can I accomplish that goal? What are my means to do so?

Monica: After asking a few questions from the storyteller, you decide what action Miss Seeker should take that aligns with her character and is most likely to have the best outcome. For example, I know that Miss Seeker is a ghost, she is very perceptive, and she is a self-reliant investigator – I also learned that the man is standing on a dirt path alone and that there is soft grass behind him. I decide that I will try to walk past him quietly on the grass. After choosing an action, I roll dice to see how successful my actions are. For example, I might have to roll four 6-sided dice and add up the numbers. If the number adds up to 8 or higher, then I have successfully made it past the man without him noticing.

This is just a basic example of one simple encounter in a game. The games can build into more complicated situations that often touch on surprising ethical questions. These actions and situations all build into stories that are preserved in the game’s chronicle.

Monica: You know, I’ve never had the experience of playing a game for years at a time, and it opens so many interesting questions for me because you’re running it without having a sense of an ending. I mean, hypothetically, this could just go for as long as you’re alive to run it, right?

Matthew: Exactly.

Monica: Maybe even beyond, you could pass it off to someone else.

Matthew: Sure, absolutely. In particular with this campaign, this system, the term is chronicle in this game system for the entire arc of the story. So the entire setting is my chronicle. And this, I have it divided into story arcs. And when a bunch of story arcs resolve at the same time, then I call that a season. But there is no boundary for how many seasons or what is going to happen in each season. It is all just determined by what the players want to do and where the story goes. And that could theoretically go on forever. But I also instituted in this game a really rigorous system of keeping notes. I publish session notes before the beginning of the next session. And that becomes canon for what has officially happened in the story.

And any of us at any point can go back into the canon and review the story and say, what did that person we talked to say for the characters, this was a couple of weeks ago.

For us as players, this was two years ago, whatever it might be. I sure don’t remember, but the rule is if it’s in the session notes, then it happened. If it wasn’t in the session notes, then no guarantees.

Monica: And is this a Google Doc and a Drive that is shared?

Matthew: Eventually, that’s what it became.

Monica: So I’ll just jump in again here to say that if you’re imagining simple notes, something short that you could skim and get up to speed quickly, it’s a little more complicated than that. Back to Matthew.

Matthew: So I broke things out, because the master document at this point is about 500 pages. I broke it out into separate docs for people with a little dramatis personae at the beginning so they can see, okay, what’s the cast of characters? What are the important places and other things going on in the story? 

I also have a little convention of bolding characters’ names and italicizing the names of places and important objects. So when people are just scanning through the document, it’s a little bit easier for them to identify, oh yeah, so-and-so is here.

Monica: There’s no board, there’s no pieces. It’s just people interacting, you’re telling stories, but there’s still rules to the interaction. And it’s so interesting to me to hear that there’s a longitudinal view to this, that you can have a 10 year, 15 year or longer game. I think one of the questions I would have is, is it in any way goal oriented?

Matthew: Oh, definitely. Because if you’re playing and you have no goal for your character or you have no personal goal in the game, then you don’t really have any motivations for any particular action. You’re just reacting to whatever’s laid out in front of you, which is okay for the moment, but it’s not long term sustainable. My goal as the person running the game, the game master, dungeon master, the term for the system we’re using is storyteller. My job as the storyteller is to give people the hooks to say, hey, here’s an interesting thing you could explore.

This is something your character might be interested in. This, I think, appeals to you personally as a player as an interesting mystery to go explore. I give you something that might entice you to dabble and to engage and to get invested.

Monica: You can hear that for Matthew, there’s so much depth to this shared gaming experience. He’s really trying to understand how people think and find ways to get them to engage with this shared narrative using emotion and psychology. He shared a little more about how he creates that experience.

Matthew: My personal objective as the storyteller is to make people feel invested enough in the characters that the characters find their way into the player’s dreams. That’s when I know I’ve done my job. And it does eventually happen. You spend enough time thinking about these characters, the setting, and what’s happening that those work their way into your subconscious and they pop up in your own nightly wanderings, which are essentially role-playing games under a different color.

Monica: Can we take that even farther though, and ask, what does it really take to do well in these games? To become the kind of person who’s able to thrive in an ever-changing world that exists only in a shared imagination with a group? Matthew draws an interesting connection between the mentality of this kind of person and how they function in the world.

Matthew: I’ve said many times personally that if I were stuck on a deserted island, you know, if I were shipwrecked somewhere or the zombie apocalypse or whatever, I would want to be surrounded by people who had experience playing tabletop role-playing games because they are creative problem solvers.They can look at a situation and look for out-of-the-box solutions, not the paint within the lines, what is expected solutions. And they have enough improv experience that they can adapt and adjust as the situation changes. Now, of course, that’s not the only kind of person that could develop those skills. But it’s a really simple separation.

And I love how getting into role-playing games can just be dumb fun. But it can also be a great way to analyze and interrogate and deepen your understanding of the world around you, the real world.

Monica: So I think right away about narrative. Just from what you’re saying, you’re playing the role of the storyteller. Everyone has a character. You even have a dramatis personae at the start as a reference. If we compare it with someone’s experience, for example, of reading Dostoevsky, I’m going to read The Brothers Karamazov. I have a list of the brothers and everyone in the story. I know that there’s a beginning. There’s going to be rising action, a resolution, and then an end. I know it’s written by one person. And then he probably had a message, a few messages that he wanted to communicate through this long narrative.

And you take that experience of me as a reader, taking in that text and interpreting it and activating it in my mind in a particular way, and compare that against the experience of playing your game. Just kind of thinking out loud. I mean, what comes to mind for you about why someone does that or how they’re experiencing fiction in that way?

Matthew: You know, actually comparing it to something like the Brothers Karamazov is great because that is such a layered, nuanced story with a lot of gnarly granularity and real personalities. But what really comes to mind here is that an open format role-playing game like what I run is in many ways more like the real world experience in that in the real world, we don’t have nice tidy boundaries to people’s stories. There’s always something coming up and oh, here’s an interesting thing, but nobody bothered to ask a question. The people that we’re focusing on didn’t engage with that interesting detail. They just let it pass. And, you know, a classical novelist would say, you know, Chekhov’s gun problem, you introduce a thing, you have to follow up on that thing. But running a role-playing game like mine, every clue, every interesting detail is an opportunity to explore. It’s not an obligation to explore. And so you have all of these things coming and going and you can see who interacts with things, who chases the leads. And every once in a while, a little hint will pop up here. Nobody does anything. And then drama comes up here because of that. But it’s much more like the real world in that you have all these people’s stories playing out with their own arc.

Monica: It seems like you and the players probably have a deeper emotional investment in that game narrative experience that you’re creating than someone would playing a video game or playing checkers. When you ended the previous 10 year game that you were running, did you have any feelings of loss? Were any of the players sad?

Matthew:  Oh, definitely. Definitely. It’s a hard thing to work through because you do feel that sense of now we’ll never know what happened with those people. And I have a big chunk of my brain dedicated from a pretty young age to world building. And all of the characters, all of the worlds that I’ve ever played in or explored are all somewhere in that space. And every once in a while, there will be some game that ran for a little while and I was a player. That character that I created or a relationship between these characters just comes back to me and I remember, oh yeah. Just like you’ll occasionally have some random memory from your childhood, something reminds you of something. But I have all of these world cues that remind me of things that never happened to me directly. They happened to somebody who exists in my imagination. And all those cues are still out there in the world. So when you have a long running game like that, you have all of these invested stories that you can remember you carry with you. It’s not OCD per se. But, you know, when you build something you love, you don’t want to just toss it when you’re done.

In this case now, I have these rule systems, I have this documentation that I can carry forward for myself or for other people to enjoy. And that becomes a useful artifact. And also, we’re all learning things along the way.

My players are learning how to improvise better, how to deal with random situations better, how to put themselves in other people’s shoes in ways that they wouldn’t normally have to do. That empathy work to me is a huge potential asset for games like this. It’s not a required asset. Most games function perfectly fine when you don’t bother getting into your character’s head. But you can. And when you do, when you let yourself go there, you can get into some really, really powerful experiences that you share with people.

Monica: So maybe a good last question then. Do you in some way feel like you are training people to be better humans in a way? Because it almost sounds like there’s some empathy training happening. You know, I think it comes down to the notion that that’s a big part of what it was for me at the outset. And I think of what I have taught myself along the way. And we all love to learn interesting things. To learn something that’s approached from a sense of play, that’s when the real magic starts to happen. I’m not forcing my players to take away anything from the table, but it’s really neat to see what they can get out of it when they do invest and when they see each other investing and getting the payoff. But you do that by a partnership of sharing the load of me helping people understand what they need to know and not forcing them to deal with the unnecessary baggage and taking that journey together to create powerful stories together. And that’s what keeps people coming back. We’re all there to help each other get through that and it pays off. When we’re not necessarily a slave to the rules or forced to play something that somebody coded and decided long ago, but rather exploring and extrapolating together.

Monica: Well, it has been a real treat hearing about this. Thank you so much for sharing more about the world of role-playing and your unique twist on it.

Episode written and produced by Monica Felix. The music throughout this episode is by Eric Matias and downloaded from http://www..soundimage.org. If you want to get in touch or have a great story to share about how games have been a part of your life, you can e-mail us at info@knucklebones.org.  

If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll consider subscribing to Knucklebones wherever you get your podcasts.

Matthew kindly shared a few recommendations for two resources that may be of interest: 

Creating Rounded Characters (with Lou Wilson), link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pURrup121Xk&list=PLObfuAmZm9pDMHtb0drlb8b6hC3FG_A5r

Matthew says: “Some of the episodes on the channel are more technical, geared toward specific games or situations, but there’s some genuinely good content to reflect on, related to some of what I brought up in our interviews. “

He also recommends reading:

Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. Matthew: Matthew says: “The book helped me to appreciate aspects of my own childhood, but also to appreciate all the experiences I’ve lived through roleplaying games, and how much larger and richer my world is because of those experiences.“