My first real introduction to participatory storytelling was through Dungeons and Dragons. There I was introduced to the idea of an alignment chart. The concept is both incredibly simple and incredibly powerful. It is a map to help define both the goals and behaviors of a character.
This is a 9 cell 3x3 chart with two axis. Dungeons and Dragons describes these axis as “Law vs Chaos” and “Good vs Evil”. In the middle of each is “Neutral”.
You probably have an idea in your head of Good and Evil. For descriptive purposes it’s easy enough to just work from the extremes here. Eradicate disease: Good. Stealing cake: Bad. Eating a nice dinner: Neutral.
Law and Chaos get a little murkier because it’s often easier to define behaviors next to goals. This can result in assigning value to the behaviors. So, let’s imagine a dinner party with nine people, where you’re the observer, playing the part of true neutral. We’ve got 8 others, one from each alignment, spread across the rest of the table.
The evil contingent wants to steal candy from children. The good contingent wants to eradicate disease. It’s not clear what the neutral contingent wants.
Dinner has been a total disaster up to this point, because none of these people really get along at all. It’s time for desert.
Some of this was lazy writing, but I hope you get the idea. You could probably also search for “(your favorite show) alignment chart” and get an idea of what nerds think about it.
Back to the original title, I’d like to suggest that it’s often best to separate ends and means. When you’re thinking about what a person or character might do, consider the behaviors and goals separately.
25th January 2016
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I'm Issac. I live in Oakland. I make things for fun and money. I use electronics and computers and software. I manage teams and projects top to bottom. I've worked as a consultant, software engineer, hardware designer, artist, technology director and team lead. I do occasional fabrication in wood and plastic and metal. I run a boutique interactive agency with my brother Kasey and a roving cast of experts at Kelly Creative Tech. I was the Director of Technology for Nonchalance during the The Latitude Society project. I was the Lead Web Developer and then Technical Marketing Engineer at Nebula, which made an OpenStack Appliance. I've been building things on the web and in person since leaving Ohio State University's Electrical and Computer engineering program in 2007. Lots of other really dorky things happened to me before that, like dropping out of high school to go to university, getting an Eagle Scout award, and getting 6th in a state-wide algebra competition. I have an affinity for hopscotch.