Did I forget to mention this? I think I did. The brilliant, cunning, and highly energetic writer and game designer, Keith Baker, asked me six questions for his recurring feature, called Six Questions, and so I answered six questions.
We have much to discuss, you and I, but that must wait for I have much work to do yet, too. Irons and fires, front and back burners, all surrounded by spinning plates—the life of the freelancer.
When is it too late to revise a creative work? Should publication freeze a work in place for all time? Is publication circulation or is it an enshrinement? What are the circumstances under which we in the audience accept or tolerate revisions after publication?
JRR Tolkien went back and revised The Hobbit to bring it in line with new details and the changing story put forth in The Lord of the Rings, for example. Is that okay?
Devin Faraci, over at Badass Digest, wrote about this recently in a post with this sort of sensationalist headline: How JRR Tolkien Pulled A George Lucas on The Hobbit.
I’ve been seeing this post get some circulation on Twitter, too, where people link to it without commentary, leaving me to wonder if they’re just sharing the potentially unknown facts about the Tolkien’s Hobbit revisions or what. Faraci’s actual post is measured and informative, and yet that headline makes me wonder if I’m supposed to read some implied judgment into it. (Though I often disagree with him, I’m also often a fan of Faraci’s writing.)
Never mind, I guess, that Tolkien’s revisions came before Lucas’s—Lucas has come to symbolize for many the creator whose revisions separate the work from the audience. Never mind that Lucas’s and Tolkien’s revisions result from different (but not wildly different) circumstances. (If Lucas made the Special Editions of the original trilogy to sync up with the prequels, that’d be similar but still different.) What’s interesting to me is the notion, shared by these two renowned world-builders, that the revision process doesn’t have to end with publication.
Separate, if you will, your feelings about the specific revisions that Lucas made from your feelings about an artist’s ability to continue working after a work has been released to the public. Then search your feelings. Is publication the entombment of a work, locking it for all time?
Ten years ago, now, I spent some time trying to devise a card game based on the magic system of Ars Magica. I was working at Atlas Games, home of such fine card games as Once Upon A Time and Lunch Money and I wanted to cook up a card game of my own. Ars Magica‘s great spell-building formula seemed like it called out for a quick pick-up game built on it. I called my design “Wizard’s Duel” and figured it would depict classic contests of sorcery between powerful wizards.
I imagined you’d have cards for the game’s magical Latinate verbs and nouns and build spells by combining them—playing a Creo card and an Ignem card to create a blast of fire, for example. Add in little details drawn from the art or keywords on each card and you might create arrows of fire which I would contest by conjuring a shield made of water or by transmuting your fire into air. Whatever. It remains, in my opinion, a pretty sound basis for a card game… but I could never quite crack the actual design. (Just writing about it now, after a decade of exposure to more and more games, has my brain percolating again, though.)
Last weekend, I played Cryptozoic‘s Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mount Skullzfire. This was my first exposure to the game. It’s a rambunctious multi-player wizard-dueling card game built to riff on (or satirize) classic fantasy spell tropes, like the dreaded spell with the wizard’s name right in it. (E.g., Melf’s acid arrow and Bigby’s crushing hand.) It’s got hit points and some dice rolling, all of which work quite smoothly with cards of sometimes wildly variable power levels—rare is the whiff in this game. While you do get booted from play temporarily when your wizard is slain, the game plays fast and crazily enough that a new match is likely to start up before long (and Dead Wizard cards mitigate death a bit, sometimes).
Where I had two components to every spell, Epic Spell Wars involves up to three: a Source, a Quality, and a Delivery. It’s a dynamic, flexible formula that yields all kinds of odd and entertaining combinations. Each spell card has an effect right on it and most effects are quick, clear, and satisfyingly effective.
The whole thing feels like it’s licensed from a Cartoon Network show that doesn’t exist. The card art is a tangled, wacky, and ridiculous collection of, let’s say, mirth and gore. Each card’s brimming with things to look at.
The set comes with lots of cards, some dice, plastic bags (thank you!), counters, and a cardboard standee (of Mount Skullzfire) apparently meant just to add an epic air to the action. Good stuff.
If the box tells me how many players the game plays, though, I couldn’t spot it. That’s a sad error.
Epic Spell Wars is filled with little design decisions that had me slapping my head at their simple effectiveness—things I wish I’d thought of a decade ago (or in any intervening year, really)—all combining to make a quick, action-packed game that I’m eager to play again. It makes me excited to try cooking up a dueling-wizards game of my own, one day, but is better in practice than my game was even in my imagination. This isn’t just because Epic Spell Wars exists and my game doesn’t, though that’s part of it. It’s also a better-designed game than I would’ve done with the same material. I can respect that.
The game that’s actually made trumps the game that’s in the head. In this case, it’s not only because the game exists and is good but because I laughed a lot while playing it. I don’t always like games that do something I wanted to, but better, because I’m a petty monster, but in this case? Dug it.
The Free Sequel idea: A sequel is inevitable, certain requirements are in the mix, and we want the best movie we can get while meeting those requirements. Full-on reboots are off the table but sequels that pass proverbial torches are allowed. These are not complete treatments. These are sketches.
This time: Terminator 5.
Requirement: Arnold Schwarzenegger
Requirement: Follow after Terminator: Salvation
Pitch: The war against Skynet rages on in the ravaged future. Humanity’s got some broken bones but is on its feet. Skynet has developed is plasma-rifle technology but we’ve stolen enough of them we can use to keep up the war effort. With John Connor’s reputation growing, he and a small group of believers in his time-travel story know that their success in the war is a matter of not fucking up the decisions he’s destined to make—a matter of not giving up the fight.
On this bleak battlefield, Connor discovers one of the Terminator design and production facilities where human skin and blood are grown. In this facility he finds living humans who have been used as the blueprints for Terminators. One of these survivors wears a familiar face—that of the Terminator that Connor knew back in 1991 (Schwarzenegger).
After verifying that these people are not Terminators themselves, Connor frees them, knowing now that there are Terminators based on these people roaming the land. Connor sets out to warn the resistance about these faces, to reveal the Terminators in their midst.
But all is not right with these survivors and, before long, Connor and his people discover frightening new information about Skynet’s reach and ambition. Ultimately, Connor must face his fate: is he sure he’s got his future history right? Can he leave humans to suffer now so he can win the war later?
In the finale, [Schwarzenegger] and Connor deal a painful blow to Skynet that serves to rally the human resistance to new levels of passion and organization. That leaves one more movie for Connor and his Tech-Com soldiers to smash Skynet and use her time-travel technology to save the world. Go forth, Connor, and make your fate.
I don’t meant that in any “These new movies are dead to me” kind of way. I mean that the through-line story of new Terminator movies should be written in such a way that it can be read as though the films are released in chronological order but not in order of temporal consequence. What does that mean?
The last Future War movie should lead into The Terminator and let Terminator 2 unfold in a way that says John and Sarah Connor were successful when they destroyed Skynet and the Second Arnold Terminator. The new set of movies (beginning with T3) happened to make the first two happen, if you will. In other words, in this model, T3 doesn’t actually follow on the events of the T2 we saw but on the events of adventures never put to film—an alternate timeline that doesn’t need to be filmed.
New Terminator films, then, tell stories set in the Future War time period, like Salvation did, building up to the moments when Connor sends his Terminators back in pursuit of Skynet’s time-traveling machine assassins. So when Connor is sending back the Second Arnold at the end of Terminator 6 (or whatever it’ll be called), he knows that he’s destroying the man he is and all the hard work he’s done for the last three or four films in favor of a better world created in the past—not because of his profound luck and leadership in the Future War but because of the things he’ll do in 1991 after learning lessons sent back to him, by himself in the future, in the form of a reprogrammed Terminator.
T3 will still be a bit of a fluke, an oddity caused by the changing timeline, but in the end the movies can unfold like this:
After which the movies suggest a happier future history in which the human-machine war never takes place and John Connor is a video-game designer or senator or something.
What this means is that all of the subsequent movies only sort of happened, in a causal sense, but are around for the sad and brave story of John Connor, who won a war so he could undo that war—and himself.
(I share this today (even though I wrote this literally years ago) to set up a miniseries of posts that’ll start next week here, on the Tumblr, and at G+.)
Music: “Samson and Delilah,” by Bear McCreary and Shirley Manson, et al
Will Hindmarch is a freelance writer, producer, and designer of fiction, non-fiction, and games.
It rhymes with "blind march."
Email: word(at)wordstudio(dot)net
Twitter: @wordwill
LinkedIn: profile
Co-Founder: Gameplaywright.net
