The Gaming Den

I was going to put this IMHO at first, but then I realized that my observation extends to media outside TT games, so it goes here.

Anyway, it seems to me that the base of consumers loooove high school as a setting. They love the hell out of it. And not just people actually in or about to get into it, but grown-ass adults, too! I mean, really, what's the favorite setting of fanfiction authors? High school.

So I'm like, 'fuck it, let's give people what they want'. If you were designing your own series or whatever, how would you maximize the high school stuff to appeal to the audience? The easiest things to me, judging from fanfic, would seem is to
1) crank up the snobbery and elitism of the cool kids
2) increase the number of bullies and gangs in the school
3) make it a boarding school or something with ridiculously long hours with little opportunities to escape
4) crank up the amount of sexuality going on in the school, especially with your protagonists.
5) crank up the sadism/apathy/misunderstanding of teachers. Not all of them, but there should be at least one Snape.
6) make it so that any attempt to dodge or solve problems is either doomed to fail or only solves them in small increments
7) Crank up the angst. Seriously, turn up the angst dial as far as it can go without causing the audience to become depressed and without killing anyone (important).

What do you think?

Sounds incredibly depressing.

But then, I'm not a big fan of the high school setting (which, I guess, puts me in the minority).

However, in the interests of appearing helpful, I would suggest the following additions to your list:

8) Ensure that there is at least one (but not more than 2) sympathetic teacher-figure who the protagonists can rely on for help and advice - said teacher-figure should be of strictly limited power, though, and really only useful for advice and an emotional tissue.

9) Enforce cliques. The Cool Kids don't associate with the Nerds; the Jocks and the Slackers have little in common, etc. Naturally, or protagonists would either defy the cliques (Gasp! Jenny the Cool Kid is talking to Dan the Nerd!) or be on the low end of the clique totem-pole and striving to climb higher.

Edit: Damn smilies.

Pointless angst sells, Talisman. At long as it's plausible (to avoid laughter or disbelief) and doesn't get much worse than 'my parents sometimes smack me around' (to avoid depressing people), you can pretty much add as much as you want to and people will eat it up.

Remember, quality, not quantity. Having Charlie Brown-style angst of having a hundred things go wrong is not a effective way of squeezing interest from the audience as a Raven-style angst of NO FRIENDS and I CAN'T LOVE myself at night WITHOUT HURTING PEOPLE.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Pointless angst sells, Talisman. At long as it's plausible (to avoid laughter or disbelief) and doesn't get much worse than 'my parents sometimes smack me around' (to avoid depressing people), you can pretty much add as much as you want to and people will eat it up.

I hate to say it, but Lago is right. We Americans are quite an odd lot - we'll look for trivial, meaningless angsty dramatic bullshit to get all worked up about, yet we're more then willing to turn a blind eye to the atrocities our oligarchs create both home and abroad. We definitely have some messed up priorities...

I'm a fan of Sigil Prep (hilarious D&D boarding school antics equal to Uni, so bring on the sex and drugs) and Wandering Monster High School (exactly as it sounds). Not so much the bleak setting you describe there. Oh, and Ikkitousen is awesome for a high school thing, too, but I don't recall anyone actually attending a class... or for that matter, ever seeing a teacher.

But if you're going to have a school setting:

Uniforms should be mandatory, but with some degree of customisation - like Japanese high schools where the students decide to be non-conformist by wearing different socks. Skirts should be stupidly short.

Try to minimise time actually spent in classes, because that tends to be boring for the players. The game is about the antics they get up to, not actually teaching Geography to your players. This is also a convenient way of keeping the players together for anything relevant to the game while letting them have different classes.

Naturally, make it an all-girls boarding school. Er I mean, nevermind.

Chances are you really want to play up (overplay, even) one of the following: comedy (even the bizarre "there's a giraffe stampede in the hallway!" kind that you might see in Revolutionary Girl Utena or Jungle wa Itsumo Hale no chi Guu), romance (whether flighty crushes and journal-scribblings ala Azumanga Daioh or more erotic stuff), plotting, betrayal and shadowy alliances (such as in Utena), fitting in, what-happens-here-determines-your-entire-life!

High school and junior high are popular settings because animu is primarily marketed to high and junior high students. It should be no surprise that in fan fiction the characters tend to inhabit their usual environment.

What do you think?

I think you're on to something, it might sell well.

But I also think that I am not part of the target market and am unlikely to buy it.

Try to minimise time actually spent in classes, because that tends to be boring for the players. The game is about the antics they get up to, not actually teaching Geography to your players. This is also a convenient way of keeping the players together for anything relevant to the game while letting them have different classes.

Koumei, this post wasn't for an RPG or any tabletop game, otherwise it would've gone to IMHO. I meant designing a high school hijinx setting in the general sense. It's completely appropriate and to some degree necessary for this setting to do things that would be completely inappropriate in a tabletop game.

Koumei wrote:
Try to minimise time actually spent in classes, because that tends to be boring for the players.

Actually, a format where every adventure or whatever starts and ends with a class that teaches the lesson of the day could work pretty well, as long as you keep it short.

Lago: ah, right. Well even so, I'm not going to watch a high school anime that's about a Professor droning on about right angles/second impact. Although Azumanga does a pretty cool job of it, where they are seen in class from time to time. Just, never actually doing any work.

There was a game completely like this done in the early 80s; can't for the life of me remember what it was called but some Canadian guys wrote it. Your classes were things like nerd, jock, gang banger, loser, and things like that. It included drug use and addiction, grades, pregnancy, fighting the works.

... Found it Alma Mater: The High School RPG
Some of the art can be found here which is pretty funny (slightly pornographic be warned)
Here the cover

Question for everyone here who has already graduated from High School. Do you remember anyone from there? Seriously, do you remember anyfuckingone you knew back then?

Yes, I am getting at something.

Roy wrote:Question for everyone here who has already graduated from High School. Do you remember anyone from there? Seriously, do you remember anyfuckingone you knew back then?

Yes, I am getting at something.

Yes. A handful of good teachers, some friends, some people I knew in general. I'd list names, but that's just be boring.

Maxus wrote:

Roy wrote:Question for everyone here who has already graduated from High School. Do you remember anyone from there? Seriously, do you remember anyfuckingone you knew back then?

Yes, I am getting at something.

Yes. A handful of good teachers, some friends, some people I knew in general. I'd list names, but that's just be boring.

And how long ago was this?

Roy wrote:

Maxus wrote:

Roy wrote:Question for everyone here who has already graduated from High School. Do you remember anyone from there? Seriously, do you remember anyfuckingone you knew back then?

Yes, I am getting at something.

Yes. A handful of good teachers, some friends, some people I knew in general. I'd list names, but that's just be boring.

And how long ago was this?

Four years. Which, yeah, isn't that long.

High School was 12 years ago for me, and about 1/3 to 1/2 of my current social circle are friends from that time. When I went to my 10-year reunion I remembered both a lot of names and a lot of faces, though it was hard to put the two together in many cases.

Mind you, I live in a city. The smaller the town you go to high school in, the greater the tendency to flee to the four corners of the world afterwards. Or so I'm told.

Well, the point I was trying to get at is that High School = bunch of fickle and useless bullshit, and that you seriously wouldn't even remember the fucking people from then accordingly. But then I had to go and get the people that do responding. So that didn't work. x.x

Well, the point I was trying to get at is that High School = bunch of fickle and useless bullshit, and that you seriously wouldn't even remember the fucking people from then accordingly.

And I think that's the fascination with high school settings in fanfics. It's angst, but it's inconsequential angst--certainly nothing like war or even having a 'real' job. Getting sexually harrassed at work or being ostracized by coworkers is really depressing and no one wants to see that.

Roy wrote:Question for everyone here who has already graduated from High School. Do you remember anyone from there? Seriously, do you remember anyfuckingone you knew back then?

Yes, I am getting at something.

Well, I graduated about 12 years ago. My prom date is currently my best friend and lover. I was at one of my close friends from high school's 30th birthday party last Sunday (and if I could make it, I'd be attending 2 more 30th birthdays in May). I attended the same guy's wedding (and before that, bachelor party) about a year and a half ago. I see my high school friends fairly often (and I live about 100 or so miles from the nearest one). All of my close friends from high school use Facebook to keep in contact, probably because one of them works there.

Of the other people from high school, I remember most of them pretty well. I ran into someone from my high school at a sushi bar last summer, hadn't seen him since graduation, but I certainly didn't forget him. Of course, he sort of started a riot at a pep rally (he was unhappy that they had rallies for sports but not for things like the chess club. It's more complicated than that but whatever), so that might just be because it was him.

I flipped through a yearbook a while back, and I still remember everyone I knew even somewhat well, more or less.

Also, I know Frank from about that time, though we went to different high schools. Still see him sometimes. When he's in the right country, that is.

My class only had thirty-eight people in it, so I could probably name most of them.

I am currently in contact with no one I knew from fifteen years ago, however, so that means pretty much every friendship I've had hasn't lasted longer than a few years at a time.

However, high school time period is when you do everything for the first time, so it's experimental and heady, hence I think being a popular point. History is negated, as there's very little of it, and the future is far off, which means it's easier to write about.

-Crissa

Aren't most fanfic writers in highschool anyway? Write what you know, what's familiar to you, etc.

I hated high school yet the majority of my best friends are from that time (heck half are from elementary or earlier) while I loved university but only kept in touch with a handful of people from that then. But having met a bunch of my classsmates recently I definitely couldn't care less if I see most of them again; not ill will just disinterest.

What pisses me off about pop culture fascination with high school (especially sports movies/shows) is the meme that the best part of your life is in high school. If the best part of your life ends up being high school; you fucking suck.

If you watch sports shows, chances are your life fvcking svcks.
If you write fanfiction, chances are your life fvcking svcks even more.

I fail to see a discontinuity.

If I believed the best part of my life was in high school, I would have blown my own brains out by now. Twice.

Anyway, I graduated at the end of '02, and there is one friend from high school that is on my MSN contacts list. Occasionally I'm in the area and I catch up with 3 or 4 of the people from high school.

By the same token, there are a handful of people I remember from high school and, were I to meet them again, would probably try to find a way to provoke them into attacking me so I could make the world a better place by crushing their windpipes. Although I'd be willing to bet money that one of them is already dead or in prison for opening his mouth one too many times, given he had the kind of attitude where his closest friends wanted to go paintballing just so they could point-blank him in the danglies.

Roy wrote:Well, the point I was trying to get at is that High School = bunch of fickle and useless bullshit, and that you seriously wouldn't even remember the fucking people from then accordingly. But then I had to go and get the people that do responding. So that didn't work. x.x

Even the geeky elitist jerks of TGD made friends in high school. I still see the my high school friends.


Its the best time in your life because its so easy. Unless you had a seriously shit childhood school is less stressful than having a real job so you can pay real bills. Most people should be able to look back at school and realise that teenage agnst is way less important than the possibility of getting fired during the financial crisis.