|
Writing a scenario game isn’t
just a matter of throwing two opposing armies on a field and shouting “Go!”
Producing a true, plot-based scenario event requires imagination, ingenuity, and
resourcefulness—many of the same traits that make up a successful scenario
player.
“A lot of people come up with a
storyline and that’s it,” says scenario writer Wayne Dollack, who has written
over 145 games. “It’s a massive war out there. They’re throwing paint. No one’s
paying attention to what players are doing.”
Dollack insists that the best
scenarios have more than just a catchy title. “You can’t just give a scenario
game a name,” he says. “It has to have a plot, something that the players can
get involved with.”
Catching Lightning in a Jar
Much like a blockbuster movie, a scenario game needs more than just action;
it needs a plot. It all begins with a reason why two armies are fighting each
other. It’s possible for the struggle to contain more than two sides, but as
Dollack points out, a multi-sided game creates some tricky dynamics. “You run
into problems because they begin making alliances,” he says. “If you run five
teams, you end up with three versus two.” This adds an interesting facet to a
game, but can be more difficult to manage.
Scenario writers look to many
different sources for inspiration. “You can read pocket books, science fiction,
war books, watch movies, turn on the History or Discovery channels, anything you
want,” Dollack says. “I’m 64, so I’ve done a lot of reading. A lot of ideas for
games just pop into my head.”
Books, movies and history
provide an already-defined shape for a scenario--a plot outline that the writer
can follow, tightly or loosely, to create a game. Popular games have been
derived from epic series’ such as The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars.
BlackCat Paintball Productions
has worked with funnier material to adapt Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles and
even Warner Brother’s Looneytoons into paintball games. Other scenario
writers find source material in reality, such as the popular re-enactments of
World War II and the Vietnam War. Dollack has adapted more modern subjects into
paintball games, such as his Street Gangs and Eye of the Storm
games, which were based on the military enlistment of gang members in the United
States army.
When scenario writers are
adapting copyrighted material, like Lord of the Rings and Blazing
Saddles, they must create plots and characters that are similar to the
original but don’t infringe on the author’s copyright. When Dollack was working
on Star Wars, he created his own character names, as well as fictitious
planets and systems. “People who’ve seen Star Wars got the gist of it,”
he says.
BlackCat, which often works
with comic material, relies on the laws that protect parody to shield them from
copyright infringement. “We change all the names around, so we’re making fun of
the whole thing,” explains BlackCat producer, Spiro Mamaligas.
Player Participation
The top scenario writers rely on feedback from players to keep their plots
fresh. For instance, Diane “Mother” McKinnon of Mackz Extreme Sports (MXS) talks
to the people who frequent fields that host MXS games to find out what would
interest the players. MXS produced an Area 51-based game in Nevada, because it’s
a topic that interests local players.
BlackCat Productions gathers
player input and ideas through their website in order to make sure that their
players are interested and involved in the game, from conception to final
product. “When players participate, they feel a sense of belonging and
ownership,” says Mamaligas. “They care about the game much more. They want it to
be the best game possible.”
The terrain of the field may
also come into play when choosing a scenario idea. “We produce a game every year
in Nevada,” McKinnon says, “which, of course, is not wooded. It’s a desert
terrain. So we would not be doing a game based on a rainforest there; we must
try to do a game that fits the field. We’ve done a Star Gate-type game there;
we’re fixing to do a Tomb Raider-type game there. On a field in, say, New
England, which has lots of woods, canopy, and perhaps even castles, we would do
more of a medieval or fantasy or fortress theme.”
The shape and size of the field
also influences what kind of missions take place there. Long and narrow fields
may make it difficult for armies to penetrate one another’s front lines; square
and round fields make defense difficult. Search and destroy missions require
larger fields with enough cover to hide mission objectives or props.
Ninety-Nine Percent
Perspiration
After the concept for the game is established, scenario writers convert the
raw idea into a playable paintball game. Dollack sits down with his wife Jackie
to make that important transition. “I come up with great creative ideas and my
wife expands them,” Dollack says. He and his wife do a lot of pre-planning to
create a playbook. They walk through the missions, the return times after the
missions, and what might happen when the teams interact on the field.
For Black Cat Productions, the
game is a huge group effort. The creative staff reads the players’ ideas,
generates feedback, and posts their responses on the forum to get the players’
reactions. After a few rounds of interaction and refinement, the concept is
turned over to a storywriter who creates a prologue for the game. The team then
creates the characters that will take part in the battle and posts their
biographies online, where registered players can volunteer for the roles.
Props to You
Almost as important as the storyline are the props. Dollack first explores
what the field already has on hand—including fortified trucks, armor and
aircraft—and plans missions around those objects. “Then I figure out certain
times when props will be on the field,” Dollack says, “approximately when
they’ll be dropped, and how to give both sides equal opportunity to find them.”
Props can bring life to a game.
“When we did a game based on John Travolta’s Battlefield Earth, we built
the spacecraft on the field,” Dollack remembers. “In a game last month that was
based on a World War II submarine, we built the upper deck and conning tower
with three rooms.”
BlackCat Productions uses props
to bring out the humor in their games. “In “Ohio’s Gone Looneytoons,” instead of
having normal helicopters, we had Daffy on one team and Tweety on the other,”
says Mamaligas. “They had giant cardboard wings with feathers on them and when
the team wanted to transport themselves across the field, the birds would fly
them around. Instead of helicopter fuel, the teams had to have a giant bag of
bird seed.”
A prop can be the goal itself –
such as “find the antidote” or “capture the enemy plans.” Props can also spice
up the game by creating missions where cleverness or intuition can outgun
massive firepower. For instance, a prop can give an advantage to whichever team
finds it first. The producers might hide pieces of a bomb and allow whichever
side can assemble the weapon to detonate it.
Props can also create
non-military challenges, such as puzzles. Dollack recalls a game he authored in
which players wandered the bottom level of a pyramid collecting clues so that
they could unlock the King’s treasure above.
In one Black Cat Productions
game, players used a treasure map to trace the location of a hidden trove. After
the players discovered a pile of fake gems beneath a statue, they stopped. They
failed to notice the newly-upturned earth beside them. Had they dug deeper, they
would have found gold coins buried below. In another Black Cat game, teams
played tug of war with a giant cable. “We challenge players mentally and
physically,” says Mamaligas. “That’s one of the reasons our players enjoy the
games – mental challenge. We have people who come and don’t shoot all weekend;
all they do is run around trying to solve problems and subplots and create
havoc.”
A recent Black Cat Productions
game called Contagion forced players to make difficult moral decisions.
The game was set in a military research center in Africa which had been
experimenting with the Ebola virus when a containment breach loosed the virus on
the base population. Mamaligas and his team arranged for an infected platoon to
discover a vial of antidote – just enough to cure a single person. This created,
as Mamaligas put it, a Sophie’s choice. Should the general take the serum and
save himself, leaving his troops to die? Should he throw away the antidote and
die with his troops? Should he go to the opposing general (who was leading an
army under orders to confine the infected troops until they died) and combine
their forces and knowledge to try to replicate the serum?
In the end, the general took
another option. He decided to inject the antidote into an infected scientist who
had been working to develop it, then get him onto a helicopter to the United
States where he could expose the military decision to allow American troops to
die.
The Meat of the Game
Once the scenario writers know what range of props they have available to
integrate into their games, they can go on to creating the meat of a scenario –
mission objectives. Objectives can be as simple as “find a downed pilot” or the
old standby, “capture the flag.” Advanced scenario writers create more intricate
plot points, which allow players to make choices to forge alliances, seize
outside help, defy orders, or select an unexpected route.
“Players get creative,”
Mamaligas says. “That’s part of what we try to inspire. We want people to think.
At BlackCat, we create the storyline and have an idea of where we’d like the
story to go, and then allow the players the flexibility to take the story in any
direction they want by developing the storyline with their actions. Too many
people don’t know how to look outside and use their imaginations. We want to
spark that in players.”
A player’s creativity might
cause a game to take a path the producers never planned. Mamaligas says the key
to keeping an unpredictable game running smoothly is understanding human nature.
“It’s being one step ahead of the players,” he says. “When I create these games,
I throw in my experience and creativity, my deceitfulness – my twisted and
warped mind as players like to call it. These games are much more
psychologically based than people realize. If I throw a bomb and let one of the
teams get that bomb, then I know that A) they’ll detonate it, or B) they’ll try
for some kind of allegiance. I know what kind of options are available to the
players before I put out a choice, so that when they implement their decision,
I’ve already got that base covered.”
This technique has worked well
for Mamaligas. He describes situations when he’s exploited what he knows about
human psychology to drive his players in the direction he desires. “In a game
called Resurrection, I lined up two armies on either side of a field.
They were in sight of each other, like a giant Foosball game. For their main
objective, I showed the players a handful of green emeralds. Each one was worth
ten points. They watched me put the emeralds on a dirt road right in the center
of the two teams. It must have been about twenty emeralds, 200 points. Then I
said, ‘Here’s the kicker. You see that person right there? He’s carrying a
laptop computer. Whoever can get to him and steal it gets to keep the laptop.’
“The computer was worth zero
points. But every single person out of 250 went after the laptop. There were
players standing right on the emeralds and they all forgot about them because
they had tunnel vision. I sidetracked them.”
What does Mamaligas do when
players, like the general in the Contagion game, make unexpected choices?
That’s another job of the scenario writer – to fix the game when it goes astray.
Mamaligas remembers one time
when his players made this duty very difficult. “Once, I had two generals who
formed a truce well before the game. They wanted to create a third entity called
the Masons and they included about a dozen people on each team. Whenever these
guys went out to run missions, they would cause the missions to fail. Eventually
there was so much chaos in the game that the general’s own players started to
get frustrated because they were being double-crossed. I had been tipped off by
some of the players, so I sat back and let them do their own thing.
“Then the two generals came to
me, complaining about how no one would listen to them. I sat back and said,
‘Well, do you want to give me my game back now? I’m a producer and director for
a reason. I keep order.’ What players forget is that I’m scanning five hundred
channels at once, listening to all the radio chatter from the production office.
The two generals looked surprised that I knew about their plan. I repeated, ‘Are
you willing to give the game back to me? It didn’t work when you ran it your
way.’ They agreed and I made it work again.”
Despite the best planning,
emergencies happen. A game can be derailed or brought to an early end by a
creative decision if the scenario writer isn’t quick enough to compensate. Games
can be ruined by storms, altered by a key group of players that gives one side
an unbalanced advantage.
According to Dollack, it’s
inevitable. “Let [your original plan] go,” Dollack says. “It’s the player’s
game. They’re the ones really that control what’s happening on the field.”
Life isn’t Fair, but
Paintball Should Be
Scenario writers have an obligation to keep things running smoothly from a
technical as well as creative standpoint. To keep play flowing, they rely on
rules and sportsmanship. Producers have the ongoing task of making sure that the
two opposing sides are carefully balanced so that no game becomes the equivalent
of the Roman army attacking unarmed villagers. “This is one of the toughest
things we have to do at the last minute,” McKinnon says. “We try to grant side
requests from players who pre-register because they may have a favorite person
that’s commanding or a sister team that they need or want to play for. We try to
balance out the possession of specialty items, like paintball tanks, and of
technology, like night vision. We also try to balance out experienced players
and experienced teams. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but we’ve
been very fortunate to have a lot of experienced players that like to work with
new ones.”
It’s also the producer’s job,
to some degree, to eliminate cheating and make sure both sides play fair.
Fortunately, scenario paintball has a high level of sportsmanship. “Everybody
comes away smiling, whether they’ve won or lost,” Dollack says. “A lot of the
success comes with the field, the representatives of the field, the referees,
and the way you treat your players. Treat players with respect and hopefully
they treat us the same way. When we started in the eighties and nineties, we
didn’t even have referees.”
Mamaligas says that the high
level of player involvement in creating Black Cat scenarios makes the atmosphere
positive--the players have a personal investment in the game. He also believes
that BlackCat’s humor encourages players to be sportsmanly. “It takes the
serious edge out and brings out the sportsmanship. Too often, people want an
excuse to be stupid. Put them in an environment where it’s okay to be goofy and
they put their guard down and concentrate on having fun, not on winning.”
“There’s no remorse or
animosity on the field in scenario games,” says Dollack. “At the very end,
they’re all laughing and telling stories to each other.”
|
