Designer Interview: Alexander Cherry
Alexander Cherry is the owner of Twisted Confessions Game Design, through which he has released Fastlane and Snowball. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona and works as a customer service rep for GoDaddy.
What are some of your favorite games and why?
A lot of this depends on the day and heck, even the minute. But let’s go through a few that are catching my eye recently, and I’ll bow to humility (and objectivity) by leaving out my own games.
First, Dogs in the Vineyard. One of the finest examples, I think, of conflict resolution I’ve seen in quite some time—it manages everything from an argument to a gunfight, and even something containing both, with an elegance that I think a lot of other games would behoove themselves to learn from, and which sacrifices none of the complexity I sometimes want in gameplay. Combine that with a setting that’s full of places where you can grip and shake, and it’s quite a thoroughly enjoyable game to both read and play.
Nobilis is another game that’s quite firmly enchanted me, and a lot of Fastlane’s mechanics are inspired by what I found in there (at its most basic level, Fastlane can almost be played diceless). The sweeping epic scope of the game’s concept and setting both just grab me and scream “PLAY THIS” yet, unlike Dogs in the Vineyard, I haven’t found as many other people who’ve reacted to it the same way, and thus have had only brief brushes with the game, to my chagrin.
The Shadow of Yesterday. It’s cheesy, but one of the things I like about it is that the creator was able to show me in practice that just because something is in a game I cannot bring myself to enjoy, doesn’t mean it can’t be turned into an enjoyable thing in another game. TSoY managed to do that, taking Feats from D20 and recreating them into something that made sense in the setting he was creating (Secrets). Besides that, it’s just a hella game. I recommend it on everyone’s read/play list.
Wraith the Oblivion. Here I’ll admit to quite a bit of nostalgia—it was quite frankly my favorite thing to ever come out for the World of Darkness, a game where you get to play a ghost trying to resolve the things that kept it behind, and where you also get to play the dark side of another player’s character. Mechanically less than stellar (old-school Storyteller system, nothing to write home about there), the basic concept still continues to entrance me. I still hold it near and dear to my heart.
Sorcerer. Despite what the author says, it’s a universal system. But it’s not a generic one—it all about the whole demon/sorcerer dysfunctional relationship thing and everything that goes along with it whether it’s in fantasy, space, or somewhere even more bizarre. I pretty much took a few pages from its goal as I understood it when making Fastlane, which was also meant to be a universal, non-generic system. Kind of an interesting game to wrap your head around.
The Pool. Probably more of a mind-blower than Sorcerer and more gently to boot, I’ve paid homage to the Pool directly with Snowball and also throughout pretty much the rest of my designs. Frankly, you either read it for free online and you get it or you don’t, although I hate saying that. Dividing up narrative rights, distilling characters down to their essence, my experiences with The Pool is where some of the biggest impetus to become a game designer myself came from.
Is there some key element that you feel is necessary for an enjoyable session of role-playing?
Other people. :) Besides that, I’ve tried coming up with a key element, and whenever I do, I immediately come up with a counter to it (either extant or as a theoretical possibility). Apart from the required presence of other people (which I think is necessary, even if they’re just an electronic presence), there’s nothing else that is required to make it enjoyable.
What game has most profoundly impacted your development as a role-player or as a designer?
As a designer? Most definitely The Pool. As a role-player? There’s too
many to count. Most recently, Dogs in the Vineyard, but I’ve cannibalized several score of games just over the past few years, not to mention my entire career as a gamer.
Do the games you’ve designed share any common themes or features?
I want to write the games that I’d enjoy playing but aren’t being written. I want to experiment with things and ideas, both mechanically and setting-wise, whether or not they’re necessarily successful (Fastlane was a very successful experiment with a roulette wheel base; my less successful experiments wind up buried at the bottom of my stacks, waiting to be cannibalized for other ideas). Both my games do share the common feature of mixed/shared narrative power, something that will probably continue in future games.
What’s the most important thing a game needs to do in order to be successful?
Things I expect out of my own games:
- To be fun (both to me and to others).
- To be known, even if just to a small group (a great game can still fail if nobody knows about it).
- To make people remark upon it.
- To be different enough from existing games to be worth the effort sunk into it.
What advice would you give to aspiring game designers?
Don’t stop. Keep going. But look at everything that’s been done. Are there games out there that have already solved a problem you’re tackling? Take pages from the games you like, splice them into your own ideas. Nothing gets created in a vacuum.
Is there any major change that you see the hobby going through, either now or in the next few years?
Besides a gradual move towards greater and greater pdf sales? I’m not that much of a prognosticator.
Is there anything you’d like to see happen within the hobby?
Movement away from the “hardback, full-color interior art” glitz-and-glamour print designs I keep stumbling into and running over. I’ve been quite a fan of GURPS, but SJ Games’ move to full-color hardbound books with 4th edition has ensured I won’t be buying very many (if any) GURPS books in the future. Of course, my aesthetic tastes do run in the minority, so I don’t actually expect this to happen but I have done at least one small part. I made a conscious decision to have Fastlane created and printed with no interior art at all and I don’t think the book or the game suffers anything at all for its lack. Future books of mine will likely have some interior art but not nearly the space-filling glut I’ve seen it become in other game books.
Thanks, Alexander!
Mar 08, 2005 | Filed in interviews