History, Meet Handheld

Armed with a site and an authoring tool, I stepped gingerly into the world of game design. I'd never designed a game before, though I'd played plenty. I had a basic idea of the kinds of games I enjoyed, and those I didn't; and of course, I'd been reading Zimmerman, Salen, McGonigal, Klopfer, Squire, Jenkins, to name just a few. I knew my game to needed to be situated (Harpers Ferry); it needed to incorporate role-playing, include authentic artifacts, encourage collaboration, and introduce emotionally compelling stories and challenges. No problem, right? Well, months of false starts suggested otherwise. The problem lay in dealing with actual historical events. How does one design a compelling game around events that are fixed? History happened, and it happened in a very particular way, and one wants players to understand what happened.

My first attempt at a game was to have the players play through the actual events of John Brown's Raid.  I struggled with this for a few months trying to create interesting game play, and though it's obvious to me now, I couldn't figure out why I'd hit a dead end. It all came down to choice. By having players play through a pre-scripted series of events in an attempt to steer them toward the inevitable end, it became clear that they had no choices to make. It was, in a word, BORING.

During a second attempt, I turned the players into outside observers of the raid with a decision to make: whether or not to join John Brown in his assault on the federal armory. This was a slightly better path; the players needed to evaluate evidence and make a decision. However, it was only one decision, and they were on the outside looking in. I was still trying to steer the players toward the inevitable historical end. Again, BORING.

Then I had a revelation: let go of the ending. Once I decided not to care how the story ended, everything opened up. I put the players back into their roles as (this time fictional) raiders and gave them a very simple objective: get in, get the weapons, and get out. And don't get caught. That objective was not so dissimilar to John Brown's. He hoped to acquire the large number of weapons stored at the armory and arsenal in order to aid in the liberation of slaves. But John Brown and most of his men never got back out, and that's what I had to let go. Once I decided that, in my game, it would be possible to escape, then it got interesting. Add in suspicion points and the possibility that players' interaction with the townsfolk could cause them to become suspicious enough to call in the militia, and it got downright exciting.