#rule 7

Never ask Director Fury about what happened to his eye, not only will he not tell you, but you’ll lose an eye as well.

This is as much my personal feelings on the matter as it is game design advice. Take that for what its worth.

Rule 7: Do not take the Piss. I don’t know the origins of rule 7, and I don’t particularly want to. It has an almost mythological quality, rule 7. It gets thrown around by almost all larpers I know, no matter what system. It is the cardinal rule of Larp. The one everyone is meant to follow.

It is of course not that simple.

In the author-reader community I take part in we call it Rule 7. It’s simple: Talk about what you like in a piece of media. Why? Because you aren’t going to get better if you critique and berate everything you hate in a book, movie, or serial. You want to focus on why you liked something rather than why you hated it. You aren't going to learn if all you stare at is the garbage and piss you stepped in. Look at the city in front of you.

We call it Rule 7 because as soon as someone starts insulting a piece of media, that's a Rule 7 violation in our discord and we gently chide them. It's unhealthy to hate and we learn nothing.

I enjoy writing fiction. Rather simple thing to say. Anyone’s tried to write would recognize that writing is hard. It’s a confluence of skills that need to be sharpened in order for a project to come together. 

There are all sorts of resources to learn how to write better. An endless slew of techniques and methods you can read about. But there’s another way, another way to learn how to get better at the Craft. 

Let me show you Rule 7, but first this: 

I hate Dune, it’s boring, it’s dry and we have a chosen one plot. There are ginger haired freaks (in the books) and they’re blatantly capital E evil. It’s all about ecology and the religious stuff isn’t interesting. The universal jihad seems fun but we want to experience it, who cares if it’s a vision from the spice. Like really? Space drugs that make the empire of humanity function? Seems like a bit of an issue to blow up all the mining facilities. 

Wow. Such deep insight, thank you. We aren’t really learning much about it are we?  It’s easy to dislike the first Dune book. It’s a dry read. We don’t want to be like Cinema Sins or a chud youtuber. Let’s use Rule 7. 

In Kuang’s The Poppy War I enjoyed how the author builds reader empathy for the main character. The MC is highly motivated, her agency drives her to study as hard possible to get into the nation’s prestigious military academy. The conflicts she face help ratchet the tension and make the MC more likeable. She is a war-orphan fostered by poppy traders and she works for their store at no pay. She owns nothing, has nothing, but her brain. We learn what’s at stake, she’s about to be sold off as a bride to a regional trader, he’s wealthy, but old, and her abusive foster mother wants the market advantage. Our MC dreads it, she imagines what it would be like to be forced to bed and push babies out for an old man who had gone through multiple divorces. We’d all love a bit of sugar, but it is at the cost of her agency—adopting the traditional female role in her society would transform her into a non-person. Her mother even gives advice to drug him with poppy until he is a human skeleton so that our MC may take over his wealth and power. The reader is presented with an alternative to the MC’s dream of getting into the academy by studying for a brutally difficult nationwide exam requiring knowledge of twenty-seven books challenging its takers with mathematics, logic, the classics, etc. We see her cleverly leverage her tutor and poppy trading foster mother into giving her the chance to study and make it into the academy. As an author, we learn that a motivated, clever, and intelligent character with their dreams on the line and multiple conflicts makes for a compelling read. This all takes place in the first (and maybe the second?) chapter. 

When we engage with media we have three modes of engaging with the content. We have our consumer brain. Am I enjoying this? We have our art brain: What does it mean? And we have the creator's brain: Why do I enjoy this? 

We want to learn why and how a movie or a book works. Why was Harry Potter popular? He has an abusive family, he’s trapped in the suburbs, he has no prospective future, he’s lonely, he’s a loser. He’s brought to the world of magic and all of it is flipped. Like one of those stories where a laboring girl learns she is a princess and her life turns around but instead of class war, now she’s gotta deal with a peeved uncle wanting the family fortune.

 The MC doesn’t need to be a particularly deep character; The conflict sometimes helps define the character. J.K Rowling hasn’t written anything particularly good since Harry Potter because she has nothing intelligent to say. But we can understand why it worked. Hermione and Ron are foils to one another, Ron born into the world of magic and doesn’t care much for it, while Hermione comes from the mundane world and loves magic and wants to learn all about it—just like us. She becomes an audience favorite because she is relatable. 

Rule 7 takes a little while to get used to. I still come into conflicct with it. Sometimes we watch a movie, we feel as if we wasted two hours of our life—*cough* 2001: A Space Odyssey *cough*— and all we want to do is rant about it. Give it the half-star review of Lettrboxd but find what makes it work. Crafted in the 1970s with scenes of spectacle that are decades ahead of its time. It’s certainly one of the films of all time. I have very little to say or learn from Kubrick’s magnum opus. Because—

Study what you want to write. 

You’d better crack down and do your homework. You want a gritty superhero story? Worm, Watchmen, The Boys. You want to write a war story? From whose PoV? Regular folk? The Pianist, Schindlers list. Soldiers? Saving Private Ryan, Generation Kill, Band of Brothers. Do you want it to be a comedy? Top Secret. 

But that’s one part of it. Because if you want to get better you need to be familiar with stories featuring other genres, themes and storytelling. 

A book doesn’t have to be good for you to learn from it. Using Dune and 2001 were bad examples which I immediately pivoted from. 

I’m currently reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I find it an uncompelling read. Yet there’re elements to learn. It’s originally a Polish book, other languages have different ways of thinking about the world and the people around us. Here’s a paragraph to show what I mean. The author and her character interrogate the concept of ‘useless’ and ‘useful.’ We learn more about how the main character thinks about the world. 

“But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.” 

It’s cool. We learn new ways to explore how a character thinks and reacts to the world in their head.