Today I’m taking a bit of a break. Last evening I completed an excellent course on crowdfunding with Jason Furie of BackerKit, a class coordinated with GenCon, and I think I’ve more or less caught up on sleep after a rocky long weekend. You can still follow along with the crowdfunding campaign for my game Chancers over here, and I’ll be tucking in to about a solid month of work on the game tomorrow.

One of the things I’m especially going for in the game is the reduction of ludonarrativistic dissonance, which is the extra fancy way of talking about the tension we sometimes feel when we’re playing a game and the game asks us to do things that add a bit of grit to the system. I feel this way about grimdark games to a meaningful degree, since many of them simply position the player as a doer of grim things in order to prevent some other critter from doing things we might consider grimmer. Ideally–and in an equally fancy way–we want to engender valuative abdication in the reader or player, a willingness to let go and abandon themselves to the spirit of the story, even if it asks us to do things we might not do as our everyday selves.

One of the first lessons I learned about game design at the level of formal instruction is perhaps the most commonsensical one–design, really design, the sort of game you would want to play yourself. I had that concept duly reinforced in a prior GenCon class with Eloy Lasanta, who taught us plenty of ways to guide players at the level of mechanics. In the case of Chancers, for instance, I’ve never been particularly inspired by the Murder Is Learning model of progress in most games (which I say after about two hours of murder to get ready for the release of Shadow of the Erdtree). Because I want a game that is more hopepunk than grimdark, I designed a scheme for Reputation that opens up quests based on the prosocial behavior of the characters. Rather than navigating a world of corruption, decay, rot, and ruin, they find themselves in a world on the upswing, where their positive contributions give them a chance to encourage the outcomes they want to see in the world. I think that’s a sort of role-playing prospect we don’t see all that often, as the game sphere likes to pit good against genocidal evil in fairly stark zero-sum terms.

What does this have to do with apes? Quite a lot, really. I think the sort of distinction I have in mind is vividly realized in the difference between the first reboot of Planet of the Apes, Tim Burton’s 2001 edition, and the narrative arc that begins with Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which might feature some of the best screenwriting I’ve ever come across. Spoilers abound in the paragraphs to come, so reader beware!

Burton’s film features Mark Wahlberg as Captain Hotshot Contemptington (I’m pretty sure), an astronaut who is currently awaiting for simian testing to conclude so he can ply his maverick ways in some hardcore space flight. We’re introduced to him as he does the classic jerk move with one such ape, Pericles, who is meant to pilot a shuttle to probe an electromagnetic storm. He pretends to have a treat for Pericles and asks the ape to guess which hand it’s in, but of course he has no treat. If we didn’t understand how to read that sort of game, one of the primatologists on the mission tells Wahlberg that it was an uncool thing to do. Pretty soon, of course, Pericles is lost in the aforementioned storm, and Wahlberg hotshots right in there to find out what happens.

What happened, as it turns out, is deferred until late in the movie. What happens, however, is that our hotshot pilot crashes on a planet which, luckily enough, has an atmosphere he can breathe. He soon learns that the planet he’s on is run by apes, and–for reasons Burton or the writing team don’t dwell on–the apes in question have taken on a simplified form of speciesism that looks a lot like racism. The script is a mess, but suffice it to say that the writing team wants us to side with Wahlberg but gives us no reason to. He rejects the smug superiority of the apes because he’s smugly superior himself, and even though he seems to take a shining to the progressive ape played by Helena Bonham Carter, it’s awkward and not especially believable. He finds himself caught up in what seems like a scheme to liberate the humans, but in reality he just wants to get to the site where his sensor picks up a beacon from his old ship. Some of the folks who accompany him thinks he has their welfare in mind, but it seems all he wants to do is skedaddle.

I did my best to buy in, but ultimately I ended up playing a game on my phone for most of the movie’s runtime. At bottom I simply didn’t care what happened to Wahlberg’s pilot, nor was I invested in the writing team’s awkward exploration of race relations through species relations. Burton’s apes arrive at racism as if it were a logical extension of apes possessing intellectual gifts and not a very specific cultural formation of our modern era predicated on a number of catalyzing historic conditions. It’s a time-saving move but a dumb one, as we don’t get to see how the apes formed cultural sensibilities that made them all militaristic racist jerkbags. There’s a basic line of desire in the film–we want to see apes relating to human in a non-exploitative way–but we understand that Wahlberg’s pilot is poorly equipped to usher that age into being.

The more modern arc is brilliantly realized in the new sequence–Rise of, Dawn of, and War for the Planet of the Apes. Instead of clumsily exploring racism via an underqualified white savior, the movies instead center on the moral formation of Caesar, the ape leader played by Andy Serkis. At every step–and I do mean every step, almost literally–the screenwriters, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, teach the viewer what to want. The lines of desire are vivid and sensible. When Will Rodman, a chemist, wants to move from animal trials to human trials for his Alzheimer’s treatment, he meets with disaster. The chimpanzee on whom he’s pinned his dearest hopes, Bright Eyes, erupts in violence on the day when the pitch for the next stage of the experiment was to be made. We soon learn, however, that she’d given birth, and that her violence was little more than an effort to protect her newborn. (I like to think the failure to notice Bright Eyes was pregnant was a bit of snide commentary on the myopia of the techs, but there’s not much meat on those bones.) All the other apes in the trial are euthanized, as the pharmafolk assume that the violence was a side effect of the drug, but the lead veterinarian can’t bring himself to euthanize the newborn. He hands off that job to Will, which is the first domino to fall. Of course we don’t want to see the adorable wee chimpanzee killed, and the next scenes find Will taking the chimp home and teaching him, caring for him like a doting father. We also get to see Will move on to human trials with his own father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s himself. It’s the sort of recklessness the viewer can roll with because we want to see the father recover; it’s not recklessness justified by a pilot’s desire to do cool pilot stuff.

Things go reasonably well until the chimp, named Caesar, gets some exposure to the wider world. He is effectively a rebellious teen who wants his freedom, which goes against the grain of Will’s need to keep his illicit experiment a secret. Soon that secret gets out, and the writers hit us with two whammies: we learn that the father is becoming resistant to the drug, and we learn that the updated version of the drug (which the pharmafolk hasten into production) has more disastrous effects on humankind. An assistant dosed with it gets sick, and he soon coughs up blood on a pilot. The cleverness of the film is that we’re deeply invested in the welfare of Caesar and later Koba, the test chimpanzee for the new drug variant. Even though we realize that the effect of the drug is contagious and will likely eradicate humankind, we’re still on board as long as things turn out well for Caesar. Serkis’s performance, coupled with our awareness that the problems were ultimately man-made, yields a rare apocalytpic mulligan.

And what happens in Dawn of and War for doubles and triples down on the lessons we’ve learned and desires we’ve hatched. At every turn the writers strum the strings, letting us see how Caesar’s nobility is worth preserving and exploring. What Caesar wants, at least initially, is a benign separation, a distance from the humans he quite reasonably mistrusts. But he’s not wholly averse to humans; he just prioritizes the welfare of his apes. And though the story entangles his fate with the fate of humans again and again, we arrive (by the end of War) at a glimpse of something that looks wholesome and optimistic–a second-generation wave of illness for mankind that arrives just before the apes make their way to a glimpse of their own promised land, well away from the arena of human conflicts.

This post feels overlong, but even so I’ve overshot about fifty subtle and unsubtle inflection points, places where the writers let us know what we might want and why we should prefer certain outcomes over others. And it’s seldom a simplistic picture–they make clear that Caesar’s nobility is not a trite, trivial thing, but a batch of qualities that is challenged and tested. The home stretch of War is especially astute, as Caesar overcomes his desire for vengeance after struggling with the impulse for the lion’s share of the film’s duration. And at day’s end he’s shot by a human to whom he showed extraordinary mercy and rescued by an ape that had aligned itself with the humans, convinced he had chosen the winning team.

Understood in that light, what I’ve done with the design of Chancers seems simplistic; I’ve created a mechanic for Reputation that opens up hundreds of ways for players to realize the ambitions of their characters but discourages violence and mayhem as a recourse of first resort. The scale only goes up, with a dozen tiers; going below zero, as it turns out, puts the players on the radar of the authorities and causes some sociocultural doors to close. In a game world that is, as it turns out, largely functional, it seems deeply problematic to encourage a play style that centers on murder and looting. There’s genuine peril to be had, of course, but it’s out in the wilds of the game world, where different principles hold sway. And even in the safety of the capital city there’s adversity to be had, enemies to fight, and danger to face. But there is stuff worth fighting for, too, which is I think where most of the grimdark games miss the boat.