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The CCG of Lot 49
By Corvus | January 12, 2009
Re-imagining literature as games has been an idle pastime of mine for some time now. I’ve loosely designed games for works as diverse as Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass (logic puzzle chess), Clive Barker’s Abarat(MMO), the traditional folktale of Jorinda and Joringel (strategy/sim), and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (inverse Civ style game, and well before the arrival of Bioshock, if I may *ahem* toot my own horn for a moment).
As I was dusting off some of these ideas in preparation for this month’s Round Table, Ms. Z dropped a gauntlet. “You’ve already designed those games,” she pointed out. “You should do something new. Something like The Crying of Lot 49,” she added, referencing one of my favorite, and most re-read, novels. The very idea is utter and total madness. The challenge of pre-imagining any Pynchon novel, much less this short treatise on paranoia and hidden agendas, as a game is certain to drive any designer to the brink of insanity.
So, of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d pull it off. The resulting thought process led me, not only outside my game-design comfort level, but beyond the pages of Crying of Lot 49 and into the rest of Thomas Pynchon’s work as well.
First, let’s take a look at the book. Crying of Lot 49 is the shortest, and possibly most accessible, of Thomas Pynchon’s works. The protagonist, Oedipa Maas, learns that she has been named co-executor of the will of a now-dead wealthy ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. This leads her on a satirically-presented exploration of 1960’s counter-culture, where she uncovers an ancient conspiracy involving a fictional mail-carrier dispute between the historic Thurn und Taxis and the fictional Trystero. The latter, driven underground by Thurn and Taxis, is still operating secretly via the W.A.S.T.E. (We Await Silent Trystero’s Empire) network, which caters to society’s outcasts and fringe groups. The book ends before the story does, leaving the reader with a vague sense that something is still going on, just outside their range of perception. I contend that the ending, as well the books’ syncopated prose, is specifically designed to coax the reader’s mind into react as if they were suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.
The book riffs on sixties culture, but it has also helped establish elements that run through today’s popular culture today as well–most notably The Yoyodyne Propulsion Lab, which appears in a variety of sci-fi films. I could go on and on about The Crying of Lot 49, but suffice to say the book is excellent and at under 200 pages, it represents a pretty low investment of your time.
While exploring meaningful ways to interpret the book’s postmodernist themes as gameplay, I hit upon a card game mechanic that I thought would work. I explored it a bit and it wasn’t long before I realized that in order for the design to really sing, it needed to be a collectible card game with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cards. This sprawling design would create the sense that a large part of the story is happening outside the realm of the game currently being played, much like the feeling you have while reading the novel. This approach also opens up the possibility of themed expansions to the core game–adding cards expressing concepts from V, Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and the forthcoming Inherent Vice. This idea supports Pynchon’s tendency to cross populate his novels with characters and locations from previous books. For example, Mucho Maas, Oedipa’s husband, has a cameo appearance in Vineland and the defense contractor Yoyodyne, as the company’s fictional California home-town San Narciso, appear in both V and The Crying of Lot 49. In fact, the expansion packs need not stop with the work of Pynchon. Given his inclusion of pop culture references in his novels, I’m certain that the author would approve of incorporating references to pop culture into the game–just as I’m sure he’s pleased that Yoyodyne has popped up in shows as diverse as Star Trek, Angel and the The John Larroquette Show.
Now that I’ve spent more than half my post’s word allotment on establishing the goals of the game, I guess it’s about time I actually explain how The CCG of Lot 49 is played.
Winning the Game
Players agree how many emotional progress points a character must earn in order to win the game. 32 points would be a very short game. 100 points, an average game. 500 points, a grueling ordeal. The player occupying the role of Pierce Inverarity at the game’s conclusion is the winner.
The Cards
There are four basic card types in the game–Characters, W.A.S.T.E. Horns, Locations, and Baggage.
- Characters have one or more connection types, including Romantic, Professional, Antagonistic, etc. Characters collect Baggage, which adds or subtracts from their emotional progress points.
- W.A.S.T.E. Horns are relatively rare cards that can be played to remove Baggage and Locations from play. These cards also have a special use that is critical to winning the game.
- Locations cards are played in the center of the table and force all players to add or remove Baggage cards from play.
- Baggage cards are by far the most abundant cards. They are played as modifiers of character cards, adding or subtracting to their emotional progress points, creating connections between characters, or amplifying the effects of certain Locations. Baggage cards fall into numerous categories, including Technology, Secret Organizations, Professions, Romantic Complications, etc.
Beginning Play
Players begin by separating out the character cards and shuffling them. Each player draws a single character card and plays it by placing it face up on the table before them. The remaining cards are then shuffled back into the deck. Seven cards are then dealt to each player from the deck. Players may look at these cards, but should not reveal them to the other players.
Some character cards have special bonuses, such as the Mucho Maas card that allows the player to play 5 Baggage cards on his character before play begins. Players must fulfill the card requirements before play begins and may discard cards from their hand, drawing new cards until they can do so. Other character cards have special rules that allow the player to play an additional character card, play a Location card, or add a connection to another character.
Once the players meet their initial character requirements and draw their hands back up to seven cards. Play then begins, starting with the player to the left of the dealer.
Continuing Play
If a Location card has been played since the player’s last turn, she must attempt to meet the requirement of the Location card by playing cards from her hand. If she cannot meet the requirements, she may not draw new cards. If a Location card has been removed from play since her last turn, she must remove the appropriate Baggage cards from play and place them in the discard pile.
The player may then play a single card by placing it face up on the table. Whenever she plays a Baggage, Location, or Character card, she must try and meet the requirements of the card from the cards in her hand. Unless the rules of the card state otherwise, she may not draw extra cards in order to fulfill the requirements of the played card.
Any cards removed from play as a result of the turn are placed in the discard pile. To signal the end of their turn, the player must discard a single card from her hand and draw new cards from the deck until she once again has seven cards in her hand.
W.A.S.T.E. Horns/Becoming Pierce Inverarity
The only exception to the “play one card per turn” rule is if the player has three Horn cards. Playing three Horns allows the player to become Pierce Inverarity and either remove a card from play, or play any card from the discard pile. This is the only action allowed during this turn.
On subsequent turns as Pierce Inverarity, she may not do anything other than play Horn cards. Playing Horn cards after the first turn as Inverarity, allows her to remove any non-character card from play. Removing Location cards reverses the effect of the card as described under Continuing Play. Removing Baggage cards played by other players is allowed.
While filling the role of Pierce Inverarity, she may not draw new cards, but must continue to discard one card at the end of every turn.
The player ceases to be Pierce Inverarity when she discards her last card, or when another player plays three Horn cards and takes over the role. The player may draw their hand back up to seven cards immediately after losing the role and resumes play as normal on their next turn.
If the player is filling the role of Pierce Inverarity when any player gains enough emotional progress point to end the game–she wins the game. If no one is filling the role of Pierce Inverarity, the game ends without a winner.
Expansion Packs
As expansion packs representing other Pynchon works are added to the game, new card types, win states, and turn actions will likely be introduced.
This is clearly a very rough overview of gameplay, but I feel it successfully reflects the seemingly-arbitrary madness that surrounds Oedipa Maas as she unravels the thread of conspiracy left her by Pierce Inverarity when he appointed her, without her knowledge, as co-executor of his will. Hidden connections between people, places, and events take on special significance as they are played, building new lines of tension and dramatically altering the balance of power between the characters. Perhaps more importantly, the design of the game utilizes clear symbolism and themes, but also allows the audience to make their own connections between the elements, highlighting new details of the original “text” with every play. This is much the way I feel Pynchon’s works are constructed and I can only hope he’d approve of my humble attempts to pre-imagine his authorial intent.
Tagged:Blogs of the Round Table, crying of lot 49, literary conversions, thomas pynchon. | 5 Comments »
January 12th, 2009 at 7:42 am
I’m going to Borders after I get out of work, to see if they have this book. I’ll read it swiftly, and return for another epic comment. I have a good feeling about this.
January 12th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I like that this is a CCG. I’ve always felt that CCGs have a bad reputation because of the actions of one little hussy, M:TG. Plus the idea of expanding the narrative to the other books is a clever way to utilize Pynchon’s tendency to reuse characters. While I haven’t actually read this book, I definitely will now.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Corvus,
You are an inspiration. I hope this (or indeed one/more of your many other ideas) translates into some vast and huge public adoration for you
Unless of course the joy is just in the creating, ha ha. Then double kudos!
Stu
January 27th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Oh right, I was supposed to comment.
It’s interesting, because I didn’t really ‘get’ Crying of Lot 49. I understood a lot of its points, but I personally feel as though I’m missing the context of those points.
However, after re-reading your idea for a CCG based on the book, I have to applaud. It’s exactly the kind of happenstance which parades every which way through Pynchon’s pages.
Better yet, I want to play it!
January 31st, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I’m having troubles understanding that game. Maybe it’s because I haven’t read the book.
I think having a short example session would help. The cards you’ve prepared look intriguing but I’m not quite able to make out the text.
Also: If this is a CCG, how would that work? Would there be deck-building?