Mahjong Story Work Thread, 2024-12-30 - 2024-12-30 09:11
Look who’s up early! I definitely should be working on other things, but nonetheless I would love to finish up outlining this story, so I’m going to get on it, but I’m also going to talk some about how I’ve made decisions so far…
One of the things about writing about a game is that you basically get to decide what happens in the game for the sake of the story rather than what happening being based on the game state and skills of the players. You don’t need to sit through a bunch of hands where you just never get any good tiles to get to that one lucky hand. That drought comes up to increase the tension, and that lucky hand is the release. It’s all planned…
However, you are still limited by the rules of the game. If you were writing a story where someone was playing Super Mario Brothers, you couldn’t say that they had Mario pull out his gun unless you wanted to draw attention to how that broke the rules. It might not be caught by someone very unfamiliar with the game, but those who know the game will know.
Nobuyuki Fukumoto, the author of Akagi, the premier mahjong manga knows this well, and dances right at the edge. His main characters are preternaturally, perhaps even supernaturally good. The fact that they are so often able to have extraordinary strokes of luck, both bad and good, as well as make very clever reads is definitely not “realistic”, but it’s exciting. Nonetheless, he does very good at showing each hand in such a way that a knowledgeable player can actually try to play along with the hand, and while he introduces extra elements, they vibe well with the basic rules of the game.
OK, but what about me? Well, it’s been pretty simple, to be honest. I have been going hand-by-hand and trying to think what I want to happen in the story, and then picking a winner of the hand based on that. Do I need a character to lose so they transform? Well, they lose. Do I need another character to get a chance to gloat? Then they win off of a discard. It’s really that simple.
Or so I thought, when I began to realize that I needed to actually track the scores so I could remember what everyone was at. In Akagi, the stories take place over multiple games in a match, so sometimes Fukumoto can just let one game unceremoniously finish up to set up something completely new for the next game. I don’t have that advantage because I am writing a single game match. I don’t get a reset point.
I wrote the first few hands just using my memory but then I realized that I was constantly having to look back to remember what happened in earlier hands so I had a rough idea of what character’s scores were. Then I just grabbed my handy clipboard and wrote out the scores, complete with catching a transformation that I jumped too far into. That helped so much with future hands, because I could just look at my notes and then decide better what I wanted to happen.
A big part of this, beyond who wins, is by how much they win. The scores for a winning hand can be anywhere between 1500 points to 48,000 points. You also need to decide if the winner wins off of someone else’s discard or their own draw because it changes who pays those points. Another thing that I’ll definitely have to think about as I get to actual writing is what tiles I give everyone and what discards they make. I could very well end up having to get out the tiles and looking at what is possible.
But this is what is kind of exciting about writing this. I think it may even help me at the table. Honestly, reading Akagi did.
Well, let’s get back on it.