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DISCLAIMER: I have not played it yet! Take this review with a grain of salt compared to a review by someone with a few sessions under his belt. Actual play wins over reading the rules. Despite that I've given a decent amount of brainpower & time to grokking the rules and will try to represent them clearly & well here. END DISCLAIMER.
What is science fiction about? Things that are, or things that aren’t? One understanding is that science fiction is about both: things that are, considered in the context of things that aren’t, or things that aren’t, considered in the context of things that are.
Shock uses such an analysis explicitly: you create a context for your fictions by choosing things that are, and things that aren’t, to create a story about. Things that are, that really exist in our world (like religion, corruption, or identity), are “issues,” and things that aren’t, which only exist in the fictional world (like self-aware robots, post-apocalyptic societies, or star-spanning empires) are called “shocks.”
How many shocks and issues do you choose? The rules don’t say, but you can infer that there have to be at least, perhaps exactly, as many issues as players, since each player gets to “own” an issue and to have his character “confront” a different issue. The rules also don’t give any particular procedure for deciding what issues exist and who owns what issue -- you apparently just hash that all out before playing.
Each character has one Shock and one Issue. What does this mean in the context of play? Well, nothing, mechanically; it apparently just guides you in creating the character and his Antagonist.
Besides Shocks and Issues, there are Minutiae, which are interesting details about the world. The only context in which there are rules for coming up with Minutiae is in conflicts, where a player who is neither Protagonist nor Antagonist in a conflict can affect it by offering up Minutiae. Therefore, you apparently need three players to play Shock or you’ll never have any Minutiae generated because there will never be a player who is neither Protagonist nor Antagonist in any conflict.
Another set of things which presumably the group hashes out, because there are no particular rules for how it’s created, are the “praxis scales.” For each game of Shock you set out two pairs of choices for ways of acting, and each Protagonist and Antagonist gets a number along each scale, biasing them towards one of the pair of choices and away from the other, or else balancing them out. You freely choose your character’s number (or “fulcrum”) on the praxis scales. At least, I assume you do, since no other procedure for generating that number is mentioned in the rules....
I’ve started with these examples of “the rules don’t say, but you can infer...” and “apparently” and such to point up one of the big problems I had reading Shock -- the rules were not always explicit on points I would have liked them to be explicit about. It wouldn’t have hurt to spare a sentence or two to say “the play group should hash out Shocks and Issues together by consensus,” “you need at least three players,” “you need at least one Shock and as many Issues as Players,” or “you may choose your character’s number along the Praxis Scale.” Stating those possibly obvious things is what rules are for.
For all that, I have some enthusiasm for the game, based on the really improbably excellent example-of-play story. Improbably because on the face of it, the “vacuumorphs” the story is about don’t grab me at all, but despite that I really got into it as I read through it, and it left me wanting to learn the game system that had helped generate such a cool little tale.
Loosely set within the superstructure of Shocks and Issues is a fairly simple “distributed GM-ing” role-playing game. You take turns giving scenes to your protagonists. Your protagonist’s antagonist (sitting on your left) is required to make trouble for the protagonist. When a conflict arises, you and your antagonist each get to state an Intent for what happens in the conflict, and to allocate dice towards it happening or not. One or both Intents may come to pass.
It seems to be vital that the Antagonist be what separates the Protagonist from his Story Goal, since the Antagonist has a diminishing number of Credits (one credit is used up every time the Antagonist rolls a die in a Conflict) which trigger a resolution of the Story Goal when they get low enough. I was a bit confused about this too, because in the first Conflict in the example of play, the Antagonist player’s Intent is for the Protagonist to do something bad. What? I thought the Antagonist was supposed to be an independent entity? We are never told what the sheet for that Antagonist looked like. Was it internal to the Protagonist character, a force for nastiness within him with which he struggled? That would make sense, but without something explicit on that point I am left wondering. If the Protagonist happens to act in such a way that the explicitly created Antagonist character isn’t what’s opposing him, does the Antagonist player still get to oppose him? With the same Fulcra and Features as the Antagonist character? Does that make sense?
But that’s a “these rules could be more explicit” tangent. The point is that the core conflict system is pretty simple and straightforward, and looks sleek and usable during play. It’s loosely coupled to the “shocks and issues” superstructure and I can even imagine pulling it out and using it on its own, or stealing it and writing another kind of game around it. Nice.
OK, the chewy conflict resolution center is nice, but what about what defines the game, that big shocks-and-issues system? If its ambiguities were once and for all clarified, what of it?
I like it a lot, with a qualification. The qualification is the nature of the issues.
In the book they’re described as “social issues” -- “Issue” is in fact stated to be short for “social issue” -- and that’s a bit of a sticking point to me. Maybe it’s my “Gen X slacker, non-activist” background, but I can’t get excited about Social Issues as Social Issues. When I tried to create a Grid with a friend yesterday coming up with Social Issues we cared about doing a game about was a big sticking point. Pondering it later I came up with issues that I would have found compelling in a game, but on later analysis they turned out not to be very “social” -- things like “selling out vs. artistic integrity.” That’s a personal issue, not a social one, no? Things like that.
I guess inevitably in character generation a social issue is going to become a personal issue -- that’s kind of the point. But in the game you’re supposed to come up with the Social Issues first and condense them into personal involvement second, and that was kind of hard for me. I was only really able to think of social issues by construing them personally first and moving outward.
But you know, I’m not sure that’s even true. Maybe I was being a bit too abstract. If I look at, for example, current American politics, you’ve got “immigration” as an issue (you could call that issue “xenophobia” or “eliminationism” but that might be prejudicing the issue just a tad...) You’ve got “war as public policy,” that’s a kick ass issue I could have some fun exploring in a game. You’ve got “descent into fascism” if you want to get a bit more pessimistic. You’ve got “media as propaganda” if you start thinking about Rupert Murdoch... You’ve got “privatization of war” if you start thinking about Blackwater Security, you’ve got “suppression of dissent” if you start thinking about the use of “anti-terrorism” tactics against political protest, you’ve got all kinds of stuff.
OK, I take that back. I could have come up with social issues that were pretty charged for me and would have had some story oomph. I just didn’t when I gave it a try yesterday.
For some reason the formulation “social issues the players care about” didn’t provoke my imagination the way it would have if it’d been phrased “issues in current society or politics which make the players angry.”
Anyway, down to a summary.. the Example of Play sold this game to me very powerfully and gave me considerable motivation to like the game itself. What stood in the way for me were, first, numerous lapses of clarity in the rules and, second, my personal difficulty thinking in terms of Social Issues. Despite these obstacles, my enthusiasm prevails.
Overall I recommend the game to anyone for whom the phrase “a roleplaying game of social science fiction” provokes any curiosity. Just be ready to seek out online sources of rules clarification, and to challenge yourself to find something that gets you mad to make it “about.”
