What is Right to Dream for?
Simon C:
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You seem to be arguing that Sim should be downgraded to merely being a subset of Narr, and that Narr is "true" roleplaying.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be more accurate to say that what I'm trying to do is show that there's no kind of play that occupies a special and unique position. There are just themes, and techniques for realising those themes.
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I've often seen people interested in and excited by a setting as such; it is the setting which engages their interest. What they therefore want is an excuse to go and wander about in that setting, explore its internal causality and consistency. This is exploration for its own sake not in service to addressing or questioning some alleged theme.
Why are they interested in that setting? You seem to be saying that for people who want this kind of play, one setting is as good as another. But my experience is the opposite. People are interested in experiencing a particular setting, for a particular reason.
Furthermore, if the purpose of play is internal consistency and causality, why are these people roleplaying? Aren't there better places to observe and experience that in, for example, real life?
There is a reason that people are interested in experiencing and interacting with a particular setting, and I think that is because the setting is meaningful to them. Meaningful means theme.
Perhaps a more useful word that theme would be "metanarrative"?
contracycle:
Quote from: Simon C on March 25, 2010, 03:58:41 PM
Nothing could be further from the truth. It would be more accurate to say that what I'm trying to do is show that there's no kind of play that occupies a special and unique position. There are just themes, and techniques for realising those themes.
I'm not sure that's really a rebuttal.
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Why are they interested in that setting? You seem to be saying that for people who want this kind of play, one setting is as good as another. But my experience is the opposite. People are interested in experiencing a particular setting, for a particular reason.
Because it's got lightsabres, or elves, or whatever. Becuase it is interesting in any number of ways that happens to grab them. For me, a strong draw is historicism, exploring the different ways in which different societies have lived.
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Furthermore, if the purpose of play is internal consistency and causality, why are these people roleplaying? Aren't there better places to observe and experience that in, for example, real life?
Because real life has neither lightsabres nor elves. Because the control implicit in RPG allows you to construct your own experiment. Becuase the feedback from other players can validate or challenge your own interpretations and conclusions.
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There is a reason that people are interested in experiencing and interacting with a particular setting, and I think that is because the setting is meaningful to them. Meaningful means theme.
Meaningful, yes. Theme, as you use it, no. As I have, I would have thought, quite forcefully made clear, the kind of things which you bundle into theme excite no interest in me whatsoever. Sure it's meaningful, it's meaningful as a representation of an environment which is alien and interesting, something worthy of exploration. That has nothing to do with story or narrative.
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Perhaps a more useful word that theme would be "metanarrative"?
No. A setting is just a setting - any number of stories could be told within it, assuming that telling stories is what interests you. You can maybe make the case, tenuously, that there is an implicit metanarrative for the properties prebviously mentioned, but if you look at an established sim game like L5R it seems pretty clear that the prime draw is the setting and colour: tools and weapons, clothing, different ideas of social good and right behaviour, even right thought. No doubt story of the type you describe can be constructed in such a game, and the text certainly attempts to encourage that, but I'd confidently bet that that what attracts people is its other-culturalness. And for many people, that is quite enough.
Simon C:
We seem to be getting to a point where I'm saying "I think it's like this" and you're saying "no it's not it's like this", and we've given our arguments for why we think that's the case. I think maybe any further discussion is just going to be us restating the same opinions more emphatically.
How about you keep using the terminology you like, I'll keep talking about games the way I like, and we hope it's not too confusing?
contracycle:
Well of course. You're entirely free to coin your own iconoclastic terminology or develop a personal point of view. Neither I nor anyone else can prevent you from doing so. That said, you would presumably not have begun a thread to discuss the point unless it was your intention to make your case more generally. Furthermore, this being a public discussion, you can't then demand that your argument be priviliged and protected from counter-arguments or illustrations of (what I see as) its weaknesses or incompleteness.
I'm quite struck by your inability to respond to my description of my own experience of play. I'm not sure what that means, but for your position to hold one of two things must be true: either I don't play as I describe, or I'm not actually capable of reporting my own experience of play. Neither is a proposition I'm likely to accept any time soon.
And that underlines the problem with the premise of your argument, the essential unity and likeness of all RPG play. As a historical artifact, GNS arises from the Threefold Model of r.g.fa, which itself arose from the fact that when gamers were introduced to direct contact with one another through the internet, it rapidly became clear that everyone certainly did not share a common idea of how RPG should be done and what constituted good and bad play. That is to say, both the Threefold and later GNS are attempts to grapple with the observable fact that people do not all play the same way. This split in opinions is not something that GNS proposes, it is something that both models have attempted to reconcile into a comprehensible framework.
You claim that the distinction that GNS makes between forms of play is a distraction, but I suggest that this is a faulty perception. Theme does not IMO offer the same explanatory power. A given group might play games 1, 2 and 3 with themes A, B and C, but then that helps us not at all with what makes these games, played by this group, similar to each other and distinct from those played by another group. Either groups have set of universal themes which they always apply - in which case theme simply becomes a rephrasing of GNS - or theme is independent from play style, as the current view would have it. Your theme-based concept does not, to my mind, sufficiently explain either this similarity between instances of play, or differences between groups.
Consider, you propose the very decision to play 2000AD implies a theme of some sort. But it seems to me, one could detach 2000AD and its setting of the 5th Mech Inf bogged down in Poland and write a Sim game, a Narr game, and a Gam game that all made use of the same setting and the same theme. Doesn't that seem plasible enough?
(And incidentally, Frank and Simon, I was around in 2001, and on r.g.f.a before that.)
Simon C:
It certainly is my intention to make my case more generally. I was just suggesting that the discussion was getting into point-by-point rebuttals which I don't think are good for productive dialogue (and are also specifically disapproved of on this forum), and maybe it would be better if it was carried on by other people.
Regarding your desription of your experience of play, I think that you're missing my point more than I'm missing yours. Presumably, the experience of play is meaningful to you. Forget any GNS implications of the words I'm using here. As a human being, you construct meaning by producing narratives. By narrative, I mean a series of events put in a sequence. Like, "This happened, then this happened". I want you to understand that narratives don't just happen, they're constructed by us. Narratives are sensible to us (i.e. we are able to make sense of them), they become more than just "things happening", because they refer to cultural metanarratives, to "deep structures" to quote Levi Strauss, or "grammar of narrative" (Barthes and Greimas). I'm calling that "theme". I hate to be all "argument from authority" with those references, but I want to make it clear that what I'm suggesting isn't my own crackpot theory, it's how (some) people understand the process of human understanding. I think it's a compelling and useful way of understanding this.
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Consider, you propose the very decision to play 2000AD implies a theme of some sort. But it seems to me, one could detach 2000AD and its setting of the 5th Mech Inf bogged down in Poland and write a Sim game, a Narr game, and a Gam game that all made use of the same setting and the same theme. Doesn't that seem plausible enough?
Yes, I propose that the decision to play 2000AD implies one or more themes. There are many different techniques for handling those themes, some collections of those techniques will look like what gets called Story Now, and other collections of techniques will look like what gets called Right to Dream. Those techniques will affect the theme of the game, and how it feels to play. It's possible that one game will focus on one theme strongly, and all the moments of play will be relevant to that theme. The other game might focus on a number of themes, and have large portions of play that don't strongly reference one of those themes. That's a thing that happens, and it's how some people like to play. I'm not saying that it's a thing that doesn't happen, I'm saying it's a quantitative, rather than qualitative difference.
So yeah, people play differently. I argue that it's a difference in techniques to adress themes, and a difference in the kinds of theme that are preferred in play.
What makes something worthy of exploration? What's cool about lightsabres? What do you find interesting about the different ways societies have lived?
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