 Hello, I'm Kyle and this video is brought to you by the Old Road Zine, which just finished up its funding period on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 3. I wanted to talk about this map and this map. So these are the first two maps that I did for the Kickstarter to get everything going, to kind of get the juices flowing and figure out what it was that I was actually going to be making. And I stumbled upon a little problem. So this map turned out really, really well. And this map is also very nice, but it has a glaring problem with it. It's easy to fix. I figured out how and I'm going to tell you how I figured out how to diagnose the problem. This all comes down to me trying to articulate to myself, what are the rules? What are the criteria that I can use to critique my own work and understand what I respond to in the work of other map makers and illustrators that inspired me to do this project in the first place? So my big question is what makes a map gameable? And so of course we have to start off with what our definition of games is. So my personal favorite, the one that I find is most useful and adaptable and applicable to the kinds of spaces I operate in is this one by Bernard Soots from his book Grasshopper that reads Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. And it's that word obstacles that we are going to really focus on. Because especially in tabletop RPGs, anytime the GM says you face 20 owl bears, the player is not allowed to just say, I win. There are rules. There are obstacles. There is struggle. There is the possibility of failure. There are all these things and that is chiefly from where we derive the mystique of games is that uncertainty of outcome and playing around in this unnecessary obstacle space. So the question then becomes, how do you define a gameable map now that we have defined games? I find that the most gameable maps have two major qualities. Gameable maps are evocative and convenient. I warn you now, I am a recovering academic. I actually get a lot of inspiration out of studying words and their roots and just understanding how we kind of arrived at the language we use to describe our world today. We're going to start with evocative. Okay, so what does evocative mean? How do I define evocative the way that I mean it? I have split it into two other academic words needlessly. Evocative in the sense of gameable maps means that it indexes materiality and sensoriality. Sensoriality is not a word that I commonly use, so I'm probably going to say it wrong a couple of times. But let's start with materiality. So Christina Murdoch Mills describes materiality as materiality in works of art extend beyond the simple fact of physical matter to broadly encompass all relevant information related to the works physical existence. This is all from her wonderful article called materiality as a basis for aesthetic experience in contemporary art. So when we're thinking about materiality, we need to think about not just the structure of the matter, but sort of the meanings associated with it. So for instance, right before us we have some post-it notes and an index card, right? And sort of like the workbench drawing desk in front of us. All of this gives us not only information, this is not just useful and handy. And actually would have been handier for me to type all this stuff out and put it in a PowerPoint presentation, right? So I have chosen the specific materials, not just for their material density or their ability to, you know, to interact with pens and pencils, right? I chose them because they kind of look scrappy. They're what people use when they take notes. We'll look at how this gets into maps in just a second. But first I want to talk about sensor reality. Sensor reality is just means of or relating to the sense or the power of sensation. So anything we can put in visual media that makes us feel cold or sticky or kind of gives us, it evokes that sense of temperature or other senses that you can't just get through the eyes. Any of those kind of clues that we can put into our maps is going to help that game be more runnable. So the evocative aspect of this definition of gameable maps is mostly pointed at the Game Master. As you have this map out in front of your players, the Game Master is going to be able to look at it and really pull a lot of the description and cinematics and everything just from the map without having to go to notes and block text and all of these things. It will be evident just from the visuals on the map page itself. So with evocative out of the way, what do I mean by the word convenient? It simply means literally coming from without. It has the same root word as adventure. So Roland Bartz put it this way in his book, Camera Lucida. In this glum desert suddenly a specific photograph reaches me. It animates me and I animate it. This is what creates every adventure, right? So when you are out in the world with a camera, which is what he's talking about, photography, and you're out in front of a bunch of boring stuff that everyone can see whenever they want. But when you have a certain eye for it, there is an convenience, an adventurism that comes from certain compositions as you're looking through your viewfinder trying to figure out what photo to take. That is from where that sense of discovery comes from is just through the looking and kind of listening to that moment to see what calls out to you. So a map that is convenient is going to be a map from which adventures spring and calls both players and game masters to look closely at the map just to interact with it. Just to find out different ways they can play with the information that's on it. I also want to talk about verbs. So this concept of verbs as I understand it comes from this wonderful book called A Game Design Vocabulary from which I probably caught this whole like vocabulary definition disease originally, right? So this is written by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark and it is a must read for game designers and artists everywhere. There's just so much great information in there. It is mostly targeted towards digital game making and video games, but there's so much more there than just its direct application. So in this quotation we see what is meant by verb, but we can't design the player or her behavior. We design the rules that shape her experience, her choices, her performance. Rules are how we, the designer, communicate. Verbs are the rules that allow her to communicate back. In other words, what you can do in a game is how we operate through the language of interactivity, through the interaction, through the rules text. There is a back and forth. This is especially true, I think, of tabletop games where we have the rule text out in front of us and we are talking about what is and is not allowable within that space. And if you think about a character sheet, skills, attributes, spells, I cast a spell, I attack the alabar. These are rules that we use to interact with the game world. I have brought verbs into the conversation because I believe that it belongs in contact with this idea of advenience. We want advenient verbs. We want the verbs, especially in adventure games, especially in kind of like high fantasy role-playing action-oriented stuff. We want the verbs that are available for our players to be exciting, to be fun, to be adventurous, right? So to illustrate what I mean, let's take a look at this first map that I really am very so pleased with. It turned out that I accidentally did exactly what I'm describing the first time because I hadn't articulated it or wrote it down or made a silly video about it. I didn't really know how to do it again reliably, but I think I figured it out. So let's judge this map according to how evocative it is and how advenient it is, alright? So what are the materials and what are the senses that we see here? We see kind of crumbling stones. We see creaking wood. We see moth-eaten banners. Like all of this, we see a corroded bell atop a tower. We see that this tower has a hole in it. It's not just set pieces. These are all, they carry with it a certain meaning. We also have several visual cues. We have this kind of creeping mist that kind of gives us this muted kind of mountaintop-cold environment, right? We can kind of feel that dew sticking to the backs of our nicks and kind of seeping into our socks as we walk up the mountain, right? Don't worry, this is not the original map. This is just for demonstration purposes only. What are some other senses that we have? We have sort of the sense of sound from that big bell. We have the sense of taste from this tiny little apple here. We have kind of like the sense of what it would feel like to walk up these stone stairs and into the grass and across this. So all these sounds and tactile sensations come from the specificity of the materials that I'm indexing through the work. But how does it compare in terms of advenience? What are the verbs associated with this place? So we have the stairs, so we get climb through the stairs. We have a bridge, so we get cross with the bridge. We have some kind of like giant monster eggs, so maybe we get defend or attack or steal, right? Or search, we get these monster nests really have a lot of different things you can do with them, depending on what is actually nesting here. And even if we look closely, we see that there are dead men's bones in one of these nests. So this is indeed a perilous place for some. What else do we have? We have some more crumbling stairs that go up to this statue. The statue is missing ahead. And there's another statue hidden beneath here with an offering plate. So we get perhaps restore or defend or offer, worship, right? We have all of these associated verbs. We have a ladder that you can climb up. We have birds that you can free. We have a bell that you can ring. We have cliffs that you can climb or fall off. So many verbs are just built into this, just from trying to make a visually appealing map in the first place. And stories come out of this evidence. Stories come out of the evocative and vibrant materials on this map. So I could very easily think that we would look at this map as a group and we would plan out a story where we had to climb up the stairs, cross the bridge, fight the orcs, climb the tower and ring the bell to alert our neighbors that the orcs have arrived and that we need help. I could also see something where you climb the side of the cliff and you sneak past the guards and you interrupt a profane ritual that is happening at one of these altars. Or maybe you've come up the stairs to actually make an offering to this statue, but you found out that the head is missing. Where's the head? Oh, the head's over here. So if we have to sneak in here to get the head to fix our statue so our harvest is good, like all of this stuff is perfect for one shot and it's perfect for impromptu stuff. Read the map as a group and decide what kind of story you think you can tell with it. Now this map might seem very similar, but I think I sort of had a Final Fantasy tactics map stuck in my head too much. The idea of this is like you could very easily imagine two opposing forces kind of sitting up on opposite sides of this board and maybe the archers are going to fire upon you from these higher places and you have to kind of pick and dodge in between here and maybe like move some mine carts around for cover and that kind of stuff. There's a lot of wonderful tactical combat to be had on this map, but not so much in the way of evocative materials. But let's think about this in terms of verbs. We have stairs that we can climb. We have carts that we can maybe push along these tracks. We have lots of exploration verbs, but not much else. It is basically set up for combat, but I think there's only one thing I need to fix about this. We put a door here and suddenly it becomes about stopping someone from opening up the gate to the Abyssal Plane or reinforce the door to keep whatever's on the other side from breaking out or we have to get through here and this way is guarded or maybe the door was discovered during the process of mining out this cave and we have to stop someone from opening it up to look for more riches. There's all of this stuff just by putting some mystery, by putting an obstacle. That is the issue with without this door you could just freely come and go and kind of go across here. Sure you can put enemies on here, but there's nothing that is giving us this advenience from the map itself. So we have to put unnecessary obstacles on the map in order to really squeeze out the juice of advenience from these maps. Well I hope you've enjoyed this video and I hope I've said something that's at least a little bit useful. I know it really helps me to sit down and figure out how I would explain this to somebody else. Instead of relying on my instinct to get me through this, I want to come up with a plan that is going to reliably result in the kind of maps that I want to make people and I'm so excited to get these maps done and get them into people's hands all of my thanks again to all of my wonderful backers for the Old Roads campaign. Now I've perhaps over complicated all this, but that's what I enjoy doing. That's what you're going to get here. But it's all so much more eloquently put and easier to remember in this piece by Yoko Ono. It's one of my favorites ever and it just says draw a map to get lost.