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For an enlightening fictional glimpse into the governing mindset, see Linden MacIntyre’sThe Bishop’s Man. When it won one of Canada’s top literary prizes, the Giller, I was skeptical on a couple of counts. MacIntyre is better known as a broadcaster and investigative journalist. It’s as if one of Robert MacNeil’s novels won the Pulitzer. Given the subject matter, you might suspect that something unbearably issue-oriented is afoot. MacIntyre brilliantly finds a new angle on the story by making his hero a sort of priestly Michael Clayton. His protagonist is the fixer the bishop brings in to investigate, resolve, and cover up incidents of abuse by the clergy under his command. As the action begins, his contradictions are starting to unravel him. Look past the American cover design, which would have you believe you’re picking up an Andrew Greeley-style ecclesiastical potboiler.

The piece, percussively rung in Mametian pentameter (NOT TO MENTION ALL-CAPS), is primarily a jeremiad against the evils of exposition and the penguin-suited development executives who demand it. If you’ve ever twiddled your thumbs through a dead sequence of over-explanatory dialogue, you know what he’s inveighing against. Sometimes when characters stop to explain away plot points that really should be swept aside, the trained ear can hear the studio notes echoing faintly on the soundtrack. While plots should make sense, they shouldn’t have to stop and lay out precisely why and how the logic falls into place. To steal sentence structure from Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being confused is not being confused at all.

As I’ve said before, though, one of the chief advantages of the RPG as a story form is its friendliness to exposition. In gaming, exchanges of information become interactive. If a player cares about something enough to ask a question, he is by definition engaged with the proceedings. We don’t have to fit all information into a dramatic context, simply an interactive one. Dully reading great wodges of prepared text is still a no-no. Feeding information to one rapt player while everyone else snoozes is also problematic. But informational scenes are not not inherently poisonous, as it is in TV or movies.

Even so, Mamet’s breakdown of dramatic scenes and what makes them tick is still worth considering. For example:

Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

(Lower casing is mine.)

The beat analysis system divides stories into dramatic or procedural modes. Mamet’s dictum applies to both. We follow stories because we want to identify with an imaginary person as he pursues a goal. In simple terms, we hope that he achieves it and fear that he might not. (Sometimes our responses are ambiguous or inverted, for example when a hero pursues a goal we fear will destroy him if attained.)

The gathering of information can be part of the hero’s quest so long as he’s overcoming an obstacle and the facts supplied further or complicate his goal.

When a roleplaying scene starts to go wrong, you’re probably facing either a problem with the obstacle, or with the goal.

More later…

View series to date here. Updated archive soon.

Pisani shows how AIDS went from being underfunded to overfunded, in the process getting enmeshed in the institutional prerogatives of various UN stakeholder agencies. Preoccupations of both left and right combine to ensure that much effort is expended solving the problems ideologues want to tackle, as opposed to the one at hand. On one hand, early assumptions about the best methods of community outreach developed by affluent, educated first world gay men in the early days of the epidemic have been exported to circumstances that don’t support them. Peer outreach proved itself in its original context, but doesn’t work so well with risk groups like junkies and prostitutes, whose members see each other as competitors. Early efforts to paint AIDS as a general development problem led to gigantically funded programs that have little or nothing to do with the disease.When the Bush administration made its vaunted AIDS in Africa effort, the right added its agenda items to the stew, from sweetheart deals for big pharma to a laughably pointless focus on adult abstinence.

Ultimately the problem is that effective prevention requires frank discussion about sex and drugs in societies that want neither. Preventing AIDS means helping outcast groups, an activity which politicians the world over, no matter what the type of government, see no upside in.

If you find it as bracing as I do to have your preconceptions demolished, you’ll find this a compelling read.

An interesting question I haven’t looked at in great detail yet is the curve of the horror story.

My guess is that many of them still vary the up and down beats as the tension arising from the threat facing the protagonists is built up and then released. Alien certainly works this way, giving Ripley a series of small victories as the creature chews through the rest of the crew and finally comes to her.

The underrated recent horror flick The Ruins plays it another way. Once the first world hubris of its pretty young protagonists leads to their entrapment in a site of ancient menace, they never catch a break. There are momentary respites, but no victories. If you were to map out its beat structure, you’d see downward arrows mixed with lateral ones. I admired its commitment to the slow, grinding destruction of its main cast, but wonder if the refusal to provide contrasting upbeats has withheld from it the popularity it deserves.

Not having mapped The Ruins I reckon that any given section of it, once the characters get to the pyramid, looks something like this: