Memento Part 4

Apologies for the long hiatus between episodes. I won't bore you with all the details of my life, but it's been crazy. Hoping to put out the last memento episodes quickly so our Halloween episode doesn't end up sliding into the spring.

The best and most powerful force in these Memento episodes, and really what makes it such an enjoyable storytelling tool for me, is the assumption that the previous player must have put you where you are for a reason. Wherever you happen to be facing when you start gets inevitably charged with undeserved weight, when really in most cases the previous player was flailing just as much as you are. The result is the accumulation of imbued importance over multiple generations into objects or people or locations that are essentially random; they're the products of circumstance. This is essentially a super-charged version of what I already enjoy doing with the reroll, which is exploding the importance within the story of elements that were not intended to be important. That's one of the most fun aspects of doing the reroll. In collaborative storytelling, when done well, you always end up in places that no one intended to go to, but in Memento, the player doesn't even realize that no one intended to go where they've gone.

And Leonard is a highly motivated character. I think most of the players, if they understood anything about the character, it was his drive. He will always move forward through the story with purpose. But now you plunk him in a random scenario, in which no direction is possible which effectively moves his personal story forward, and you end up swimming forcefully through random story threads in which he is a catalyst of chaos. It's a very interesting effect. Add to that, the players have a certain sense of genre knowledge, that the events they've been dropped into should have some kind of narrative reason; the fact that Leonard is there is sign enough that he belongs here within the story. And of course if this were a show carefully crafted by a writer, then they would probably be right. But their location is only a consequence of the vicissitudes of their predecessor's play, and the ever-fickle dice. The result is a constant finding of importance within the mundane.

And of course you add to that the fact that I have built them a world filled with interest and interconnection. So pulling on random threads can lead to fun, rather than just walking randomly around LA without purpose. Some threads of course, do tie back to elements of Leonard's life. But the majority do not. There is a lot of overlap and interoperation between threads: a lot of backstory to be found, much of which could have thematic weight for Leonard, or a profound impact on his future. But a world filled with threads that were actually relevant to Leonard's past would feel like it was a world filled with convenient coincidence. 

Anyway, another one in the can. Hope you enjoy it!