Writing Every Day 03: Visual Texture

So, what do I mean by visual texture?

It's a term that I think of to describe the kinds of complex environments you can see in some films and TV shows. It's a complex, layered sort of look that feels authentic, particularly in modern slums and futuristic environments. The sorts of sets on display in Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Akira's fantastic backgrounds, and even oddly the Super Mario Brothers movie.

My favorite settings for RPGs tend to be dense urban environments, and my preferred genre skews to science fiction, gritty modern, and cyberpunk. The backgrounds in most of the media set in those genres have these brilliant, textural environments that lend all sorts of interesting set pieces for action scenes, chases, and tense negotiations.

In my daily life, I drive through an industrial district on my way to work, over a thick-sided concrete canal bridge that spans a shipping lane. To either side I have crumbling shipping cranes, graffitied warehouses made of corrugated aluminum, railroads, massive cargo cranes, and generations of old advertising plastered on the street posts. It's a highly-textured, messy, organic scene. When I'm describing a scene to my players, in my head the environment probably looks something like that, mixed with the genre conventions of whatever setting the game takes place in—cracked screens playing advertising for a massive corporation's new product, that kind of thing.

Getting the players to have that same sense of a complex environment can prove to be a challenge, though. If you ramble on about the setting for too long, you run into the danger of losing the interest of the audience. They won't care about the massive scaffolding that fills the back of the alley unless it can be used to their advantage or has some sort of relevance to their goals or current situation.

What I try to do is give a concise description of the environment that includes references to the kind of visual texture in the environment. Something like the description of my commute above. Enough for the player to get a sense of how filled out the area is without burdening them with too many specifics. Then, as the scene unfolds, I look for things that fit within the texture of the scene to exploit and force their relevance.

Back to the example of the alley and its scaffolding. That's probably not something I'd include in the initial description unless I had a player skulking around looking for an alternate method of entry into a building. It's a perfect bit of terrain to mix up a foot chase, though, so I may have the player's quarry sprint down that alley and into the scaffolding in an attempt to reach an adjacent rooftop. Not only does it break up the chase and offer a different series of challenges to the players to surmount, but it also helps to fill out the texture of the background and make the environment seem more fleshed out and lived in.

When keeping track of a complex encounter, particularly when running a theater of the mind game, I sometimes find myself losing the level of environmental complexity that I picture when I start the scene. Finding ways to make those details a part of the challenges of the scene help me to keep the bigger picture in mind, and give me a touchstone to return to when the setting begins to feel too sparse again.

Sorry if this post rambles a bit. I'm getting to it a bit later than I'd hoped to and didn't spend as much time preparing as I'd hoped to. It is a topic that interests me, so I may try to revisit it in the future.