TROPEQUEST: The Holy grail of games
Over the top? Perhaps! But I created TropeQuest with a mission in mind. The mission was, nay is, to create a game that can be played…
FOREVER.
No, it does not trap its players in a cruel mockery of their lives, keeping them ever conscious and tormenting them in a realm where time has no meaning. It also is not updated quarterly with new and more powerful cards in a never-ending cycle of obsolescence. Nor is it so hopelessly complex, that to master it would require more than a lifetime, or access to a computer that can condense countless lifetimes of experience into nanoseconds of real-time which is what our reality is. Additionally, I do not mean that a single playthrough of the game lacks both victory and loss conditions and therefore such a game cannot be solved in an and/or logic universe.
What I mean is that I want to create a game that changes as its player changes. A game that is never properly “solved.” A game where the whole point is to create something unique. A game that’s as much about interpretations as it is about decisions.
There already is a game that can be played forever. A whole category of games, actually. The first of its kind in our present civilization was called Dungeons and Dragons, and, currently, it is the best exemplar of what that I’m describing. There are limitations that I will get into at a later time, but it is, in the playing of it, becoming something of an art form these days. (see: Critical Role or basically any of its wannabe livestreams) It is, in its essence, a simulation. One run on the world’s most powerful computer, the human brain. But what it longs to be, what it is reaching for, is the element that emerged out of the wargame it started out as: performance, expression, storytelling.
Maybe I’m aiming a bit high here, but what I’d like TropeQuest, or whatever line of games it may inspire, to become is a next step of sorts towards that new medium. It’s improvisational, cooperative, iterative, but also structured. There are already some storytelling games out there on the market that use cards, or dice. These elements have words or pictures on them, like “wizard” or “enchanted ring” and other things that are basically tropes. (I could argue that most board games and cards games on the market are basically math with tropes attached.) What sets TropeQuest apart from those other storytelling games is the structure. In a way, you can tell a story with a group of people without any structure or common elements. In the same way you can form a government without writing any laws or having a constitution. But the truth is, whether due to atrophy, apathy, or a lack of self belief, most people don’t know how stories work.
And it’s not their fault! We’ve become a society that consumes stories, repeats synopses of stories, watches reworked versions of safe, familiar tales. We’ve become a society of people with nothing to talk about but work, few adventures to relay besides the ones we picked from a curated brochure of experiences.
It’s no wonder the art of storytelling is becoming lost. I can barely find my way to the corner store when I leave my phone at home. And like your sense of direction, you have an instinct for stories, but if you haven’t used it in a while, you might need a map to get you started.