20 KiB
[Challenge Companion] The Gamer
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5ie7gf/challenge_companion_the_gamer/
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Score: 23
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Created: 2016-12-15T00:04:55
Post:
tl;dr: This is the challenge companion thread, post recommendations, ideas, or thoughts below.
Games tend to be abstractions of the real world, both because control schemes aren't terribly precise, because it plays better, and because it's simpler to implement. So instead of a nervous system, circulatory system, muscles, respiration, etc. you have a numerical health bar which represents that nebulous concept of "health".
The central conceit here is that the abstraction gets mapped back onto the real world; the protagonist becomes a "player character" with some access to all the things that exist in videogames (or table-top games) for whatever reason. The protagonist then either benefits from these abstractions or attempts to munchkin them.
(This is slightly distinct from the ever-popular RPG-Mechanics Verse, since there everyone is under the influence of these abstractions. But if you'd like to write something like that for this challenge, go for it, it's just hitting a slightly different button.)
I'd strongly suggest against a narrative where the protagonist simply levels up at regular intervals and the Gamer trope is used to give rewards out for plot developments, since in my view that this can cheapen the narrative somewhat; the protagonist is getting more from their victories than they otherwise would. If you're going to power up the protagonist, they need to be facing actual challenges, and challenges are always better if their met through internal strength rather than external ones. But if the story largely revolves around the character gaming the system, that's a conflict which is solved through internal strengths. (Note that this is just my view on the matter, and I'd welcome an alternate take on how to make this trope work from a narrative perspective.)
Comments:
u/over_who [+11] Aleph you are going to die (3 hours later)
While I am no writer, this is my second favorite genre of fanfiction. For those who are more creatively minded, I wanted to write up notes on what the strengths of the trope are, as well as traps I've seen writers fall into.
Pros:
Discovery - One of my favorite parts of any fantasy/SciFi is discovering the world it is set in. While it can be hard to inject a sense of novelty into fanficiton outside of characterization, The Gamer is a simple way to add novelty in world-building.
Writing Rational Decisions - In many rational stories, characters stopping to think through options, evaluating possibilities and opportunity costs is awkward to read, or comes off as preachy. However, the distribution of scarce resources is forced to the forefront for Gamers, and we as readers expect the character(s) to spend time trying to optimize.
Traps:
Growth as Plot - If The Gamer is the only thing changing in your story, it can feel like you have to keep exploring new spaces, and thus leveling up your character to do so. This kind of speedy growth is the white sugar of Gamer stories, as it burns away all of the ability space you can create to explore without seeing how the choices The Gamer makes affect the world around them.
Bigger Badder Baddies - I'm sure there is a TvTropes page for this, but I didn't want to go digging. Basically, this entails The Gamer having to slowly fight bigger and bigger to keep the plot alive. Having more powerful fights sequenced in order requires good explanation for the ordering, and in many times the bigger bad characters are completely flat.
Everyone Is Blind - Another thing I am sure is somewhere in TvTropes, but when no one notices or cares about the characters growth. Often this appears avoided because The Gamer will reach out to 'masters' for training, or enlist a confidant. However, unless The Gamer starts out as a hermit, eventually everyone is going to notice something is different, be it school attendance or being home late for dinner or accidentally not breathing. Also, if mmagic is completely foreign to the world, please model the confidants for The Gamer as rational as well, even if they are not that effective because of limited experience. No one should suddenly discover magic exists and never wonder about its limits or its safety.
Breaking the Game - Letting the character break the game is a double-edged sword. It can be an interesting climax, especially if it was effectively foreshadowed and presented as a clever solution, and not just appeared out of nowhere. While it is not well foreshadowed, and not technically a Gamer fic, The Waves Arisen has a good game break at the end. Usually this must be the ending, or precede a hasty denouement, as the rest of the story tends to be wish fulfillment. If people want to break the game for longer, I recommend it is done in the style of Time Braid, with a broken antagonist to force real conflict.
TL;DR Writing is hard, but writing about writing is easier. Also, if someone wants an idea, Madoka: The Gamer from the perspective of Homura.
Edit: Well, I can say that this is my favorite genre, but I should probably provide a few recs. I would check out Shinobi: The RPG at Spacebattles for a good take on the genre that mostly avoids the above issues. The Games We Play is fun, but does not remotely qualify as rational fic.
u/nobody103 [+8] (19 hours later)
I'm going to add a few traps/mistakes I seen in these kinds of stories, if you don't mind.
Excessively Lucky Protagonist: Too often, the Gamer in these kinds of stories receives a whole string of incredibly good items, skills and opportunities right at the beginning of the story. I'm talking mid-game or even end-game content here. Often they don't even purposely seek these out – they just sort of fall into his or her lap. Setting aside that this is narratively unsatisfying and just plain bad storytelling... it's also bad game design. No game is that generous with loot (and for good reason, too) so it's not like this is even faithful to the material that inspired the story. The Gamer should have to work for their shinies.
Excessively Convenient Grinding Opportunities: The way many Gamer stories are structured (in terms of their game system), rewards the protagonist from essentially cutting themselves off from the world at large until they have grinded their abilities and skills into something great. This is, of course, not very fun to read about beyond a first couple of chapters. As such, the authors often have to make the protagonist a reckless idiot or fabricate a very contrived set of circumstances to make the Gamer quit grinding for a while and do stuff. I can't help but think that this is just a band-aid, and that a much better solution would be to simply make grinding a lot less convenient. Make the Gamer want to interact with the world because it has something they want, which they cannot get in their Instant Dungeon or whatever.
In my opinion, these two issues are the primary cause of most of the flaws you listed. The author powers up their protagonist excessively and unrealistically quickly, and then has to scramble to provide him some kind of challenge. This challenge is invariably some super tough opponent that they have no business in fighting, even with their broken-as-hell items and abilities… but which they succeed at beating anyway. From this victory they get another round of lucky loot that make them even more broken, necessitating an even stronger opponent next time, which will give more lucky loot… you get the idea.
Throughout all of that, they use their Convenient Grinding Method^TM to avoid scrutiny from everyone, which is used as a justification for Everyone is Blind problem you listed above.
Anyway, a few more issues:
Irrelevant Game System: Gamer stories have a tendency to make the protagonist excessively broken, and many people have noted that. However, I find that a lot stories that don't fall into that trap actually go into another extreme and make the Gamer power borderline worthless. The protagonist grinds and trains all day long without stop or rest, and when they finally meet their enemies/rivals/classmates/whatever... they find that these people have advanced their abilities lockstep to match theirs. Like they’re rubber band AI or something. The Gamer system should be an actual boon for the protagonist, not just a cosmetic quirk, IMO.
World-Altering System: This is may be a personal preference, but I dislike it when the Gamer power has the ability to silently edit other people and even the world itself to help the gamer. The Luck attribute and the money conversion function of the inventory are primary offenders in this regard. Many authors point out the problems inherent in this, but then they promptly ignore it. Personally, I’d prefer the Gamer power to be ‘self-contained’, as it were.
(I’ve been meaning to write a Gamer story for quite a while now. It’s harder than it looks.)
u/ToaKraka [+5] https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png (5 hours later)
Bigger Badder Baddies - Having more powerful fights sequenced in order requires good explanation for the ordering, and in many times the bigger bad characters are completely flat.
Beef Gate? Or maybe that's a way to avert what you described, since a Beef Gate exists only when the bosses aren't placed in a strict order: The player in theory is allowed to decide which boss he wants to fight next, but in practice is strongly discouraged from attacking the Beef Gate first.
Everyone Is Blind - No one notices or cares about the characters growth.
u/EliezerYudkowsky [+2] Godric Gryffindor (19 hours later)
All things already exist. Gamer Homura: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/puella-ludio-homura-magica-pmmm-roguelike-inspired.21940/. (Not necessarily recommended.)
u/nerdguy1138 [+1] GNU Terry Pratchett (6 days later)
Madoka the gamer, is that a real story, or a prompt? It's a little ambiguous.
u/over_who [+1] Aleph you are going to die (6 days later)
I was suggesting it to anyone trying this challenge, although if you look below at EY's comment, apparently someone already tried.
u/None [+10] (5 hours later)
[deleted]
u/abstractwhiz [+8] Friendly Eldritch Abomination (7 hours later)
I'm going to plug The Games We Play, a RWBY fanfic that turns Jaune Arc into the Gamer. Loads of fun.
The fanfiction.net link is apparently old and incomplete, but SpaceBattles has the whole thing.
u/ZeroNihilist [+9] (8 hours later)
The Games We Play really shows that it was written on an absurdly fast schedule. It's riddled with spelling errors, overuse of words and phrases, and dangling plotlines and characters.
It's also not remotely rational. The protagonist is theoretically the most intelligent person in existence, but is really only Sherlock-smart. Whether a strategy works or not is down to whether the author wanted to insert a training montage or have a hail mary moment, not due to any metric that could be predicted in advance.
It's more or less a fanservice power fantasy, which is fine if that's what you're looking for going in. I would never recommend it for the writing, however.
u/abstractwhiz [+7] Friendly Eldritch Abomination (8 hours later)
Yeah, for the most part I agree with this. It's a fun read, but doesn't really qualify as rationalfic. It's still one of the bigger works in the genre, as it were.
u/None [+2] (13 hours later)
I stop caring when the power level became ridiculous.
u/gabbalis [+4] (14 hours later)
That's kinda the direction that the original cannon Gamer webcomic is headed too though. The newest antagonist is literally a newborn Deity.
u/Cariyaga [+3] Kyubey did nothing wrong (20 hours later)
Cough cough Two Year Emperor cough cough
u/Draconomial [+2] Sunshine Regiment (17 hours later)
An original Gamer story that I recently enjoyed Gam3, has really skillfully caught onto the trend from The Gamer and Legendary Moonlight Sculptor.
u/Abpraestigio [+1] (a day later)
I have been on a litrpg trip lately and Gam3 is one of the ones I have enjoyed, even though I have found the main character very frustrating at times, especially in regards to his (arguable) lack of agency and his tendency to ignore advice for no good reason and to just forget the lessons he's learned.
Sometimes I think the MC's starting AI should have been the MC instead.
I do like the reason why the game is important in the physical world, though.
u/gabbalis [+5] (15 hours later)
My favorite gamer fiction is a manga called DICE: the cube that changes everything.
Where a bunch of people are competing for Gamelike powers, but really the DM is toying with them all. The whole story has Transhumanistic vibes and makes statements about human nature.
And those two things: competition, and an actual message beyond "this guy has awesome game powers" make it into an engaging story.
u/trekie140 [+6] (18 hours later)
What if the Game existed in-universe as a way to control artificial intelligence? An AI could essentially see the world as an RPG where humans are NPCs that give them work to do. All the rules of the Game are artificial restrictions we place on AI to prevent them from getting too powerful, and the rewards they receive are designed to incentivize good behavior in exchange for more power to do more work for humans.
u/over_who [+3] Aleph you are going to die (a day later)
Relevant SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2286
u/trekie140 [+1] (a day later)
Considering that an AI's values are already going to be determined by whoever is programming it, that isn't exactly a unique problem to the scenario I present.
u/xamueljones [+5] My arch-enemy is entropy (9 hours later)
I'll say this much, one of the things that Danmachi did amazingly well is changing the level up mechanic. Instead of leveling up after earning X amount of exp, the adventurers had to face a life-or-death challenge and go beyond their limits to 'earn' their level up. This meant a guarantee of no level ups acting as a Deus Ex Machina to save the heroes and made for a more satisfying thrill when we see the heroes gaining a level.
For recs, there are:
Gamer Arc is a RWBY Gamer fanfiction where a very OOC Jaune receives a very stripped down Gamer ability but I really like how he explores the ability and how it affects his character and interaction with others.
Multiplayer which is another RWBY Gamer fanfiction where we have multiple characters with the Gamer power hence the title with a Reset ability. I'm not going to say anything else to avoid spoilers.
u/Tetrikitty [+1] (11 days later)
The Games We Play is another RWBY/The Gamer crossover fic that's pretty long and quite good.
u/gabbalis [+2] (14 hours later)
I've been tossing around the idea of a Gamer fic where the Gamer is also handed Cheat Engine 6.6, or a Hex editor. Cheat to win baby!
The process of loading up one of those programs and using them to set yous stats to infinity doesn't sound particularly fun to read about though. So I'm not sure where to begin. And of course, gaining omnipotence in act 1 isn't going to allow for anything much longer that a short story.
u/Afforess [+4] Hermione Did Nothing Wrong (16 hours later)
I've been tossing around the idea of a Gamer fic where the Gamer is also handed Cheat Engine 6.6, or a Hex editor. Cheat to win baby!
Isn't this essentially the plot of "Off to be the wizard" (note: not rational)
u/Dragonheart91 [+1] (16 hours later)
I really wish that series was remotely rational... Actually, reading that is one of the reasons I got into rational fiction because I was doing google searches related to how frustrated I was with the main characters failure to solve their problems when given basically unbeatable god-powers.
u/AurelianoTampa [+2] (14 hours later)
I have an incredibly off-topic question:
The central conceit here
This is the third time today that I have read this phrase (the others were in an article and a different Reddit post).
Is this an actual saying, or are people intending to say "the central concept"? I'm wondering if there's an auto-correct issue at play. It just stood out to me after seeing it so often.
u/gabbalis [+6] (14 hours later)
In drama and other art forms, the central conceit of a work of fiction is the underlying fictitious assumption which must be accepted by the audience with suspension of disbelief so the plot may be seen as plausible.
-Wikipedia
... Actually that's from a really bad Wikipedia stub with no sources. But it's still the definition everyone's using.
u/AurelianoTampa [+1] (15 hours later)
Thank you!
u/Terkala [+2] (17 hours later)
This exists as a Korean web comic already. Its called....
The Gamer.
Its about a typical modern fantasy world, where there are mages and hidden conspiracies and such. And one new mage gets a unique power which causes his interactions, and only his, to work via rpg rules. So he gets loot drops, and everyone flips out and asks where he got a stack of cash from. And he can send party invites to people, and force them to work via rpg rules as well. He gets shot and his hit points go down, while other people who get shot have to go to the hospital. Ect ect.
u/GlueBoy [+4] anti-skub (20 hours later)
The Gamer's quality has fallen of a cliff in the last arc, and it already wasn't that high. Go to the /r/manga chapter threads to see people shit on it, week in, week out. Example. In short, not recommend.
u/Terkala [+1] (a day later)
I felt it was good up until 100 or so.
Few webcomics stay good forever. Many just run out of ideas after the first main plot is resolved. But that doesn't mean the first plot arc wasn't worth reading.
u/None [+3] (a day later)
Tower of God, while it's had its ups and downs, still consistently manages to feel fresh for me. If you haven't checked it out, I'd highly recommend it
Season 1 does a good job subverting some typical shonent tropes, but Season 2 falls more into typical arcs / motifs. Now, though, it's taking a darker turn again, which is interesting. I love the artwork, and the characters are all quite compelling.
u/PL_TOC [+1] (a day later)
Some abilities and limitations of The Gamer power to help with your writing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/respectthreads/comments/3q6sqi/respect_han_jeehan_the_gamer/
u/Tetrikitty [+1] (11 days later)
http://imago.hitherby.com/2015/04/respawn-star/ Not mine, but pretty good.