02 Development - When Do Characters Get to be Happy?

I was talking on my Twitter recently about happiness in games. It brings up a question for me - how does emotion actually work in stories? Sometimes I hear people talk about how they write RPGs to inspire certain emotions in people - like "I want this game to make you feel angry!" or "I want to make you cry!" Those have always let me down - either you end up making me feel a flat, fairly uninteresting single emotion, or I don't and I'm disappointed in that manner. I'm not sold that a game should try to promise an emotional experience, or what you can gain from that. 

One of the largest inspirations in my life is M Grant, a former Wayfinder staff and a really important figure to me. They talk a lot about games as an experience - i.e, that the purpose of games is to create processes that players perform that facilitate what they want to be doing. In tabletop, this feels less relevant. During campaign play, players will feel a huge variety of emotions as they engage in a ton of different processes, or often the processes aren't interested in being immersive. LARPs have the luxury of creating an immersive narrative. You get suckered into them. And in that way, transformative experiences are allowed to happen.

I haven't written a game that's "gonna make everyone cry" in a very long time - maybe ever? Instead, I think a lot more about what I want everyone to experience, and the range of emotions those experiences can create. For example, I ran a LARP very recently about vampires. The vampires weren't the interesting part. The part that was actually really fun and exciting was a group of mortals who were supposed to be food for the vampires. They were birdkin who met on a forum and believed that they were the exiled traitors of the Prince of Birds (based on a very beautiful Avery Alder solo LARP). They spent all game engaging in rituals, guided by the Prince of Birds, to transform themselves back into sparrows and escape the world of violence and chaos.

When designing that narrative, I wasn't thinking about how the players would feel. I was thinking way more about the experience they would have - what sorts of rituals could they engage in that would bring them closer together? Of course, the group had as much fun as they did thanks to a very talented PC Leader, an excellent group of players, and a rockstar Prince of Birds, but an important part of it was the promise of an experience. This experience led them all to feel the emotions I was going for - happiness and togetherness in the face of transformation and wonder. But it was a byproduct of a larger process, not the intended goal.

The games that make me cry are the ones where I get to have the experience that sets me up for that. I tend to "get got" by feelings of loss. This loss is most painful to me when it's a loss of something I know I'll never really understand - maybe I learn I'll forget all about the people I care most about, or that someone I didn't know very well had a complex life that has been snuffed out. It's the experience of having something huge taken away from me that makes me feel. I'm never going to cry because someone told me to, just in the same way that I'm never going to be scared in a horror game just because someone told me it was a horror game.

So, when do characters get to feel happy? I kinda wandered off track, but I think happiness in LARPs isn't something you can avoid. Players will feel happy, regardless of what you say. I think what's important to me is making sure that that happiness is supported and shaped by experience. There's a happiness you feel when you're dancing with someone you know you'll never see again that is both much happier, much sadder, and much more powerful than just a simple dance. I don't want to keep my players from feeling happy, I want to guide them to feel happy in a way that ties into the greater themes of the game itself. 

I don't think this is always true, but I think in some ways one-shots and Adventure Games are always tinged with loss - that's the last time you'll embody this character, the last time you'll view the world that way in this universe. That's what makes that special "LARP happiness" so melancholy and interesting to me - you know, out of character, that it's not permanent. You're going to have to let go of all this soon enough. Why not work that into the game?

I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this, especially people who write more upbeat things than I do. I don't think I write anything that isn't colored by that feeling in some way, and I wonder if other people notice it in their own work.