What is Right to Dream for?
David Berg:
Here's a little thought experiment, that I hope will illustrate some common ground:
I dig lightsabers. I might pick up, buy, and sit down to play a game because it has lightsabers. So then we play, and I want to enjoy my lightsaber. Part of this might be asking the GM how it works and what it looks like, and maybe trying to build my own. Maybe everyone else in my group feels the same way, and we have a lively and exciting session! Maybe the next session we do the same with Star Destroyers!
But this can't go on for too long, can it? I mean, I've never heard of a group actually maintaining shared interest and excitement in this sort of unchallenged exploring and learning. I guess it might be possible, if the GM was really adept at hooking curiosity, and then milking it, and creating suspense over the ultimate reveal. But I've never seen it, nor heard of it.
Usually what happens is that I want to do something with my lightsaber. Why did I like it in the first place? Probably because I liked the idea of waving it around and looking badass. But to look badass, you need an audience, right? And you don't know how they'll respond. So now you have a goal, and some uncertainty. Maybe this goal is trivially easily met, but then I probably want to form another goal. "Now that the PCs agree I look cool waving this blade around, I bet I'll look really cool killing stormtroopers!"
In theory, this could continue indefinitely as pure wish fulfillment. "You kill stormtroopers! Describe how awesome it looks!" But, again, I've never seen that. I suspect it's a social dynamic issue. What's the likelihood of a few friends wanting to all learn about Star Destroyers and live out lightsaber-waving fantasies together, and really appreciating each other's contributions?
Maybe there are 2-person games that work this way, where a single character-player asks and performs, and a single GM answers and gives audience approval. I guess that could be fun. But it'd clearly be an extreme outlier for our hobby, right?
What normally happens is conflict. You can't always just get what you want, at least not without some uncertainty and struggle. And once you have that, you have narrative. "Want, try, fail, try again, succeed, celebrate" is narrative. And, as with any narrative, you have the option to view it in terms of theme. At this end of the play spectrum, thinking about theme probably isn't terribly useful. But who knows? You might not have to go very far into the conflicts of characters played by real people before some narrative adds up to resonate with the real people's real lives.
It seems at least plausible that a certain degree of human familiarity and relevance might be more conducive to a shared group endeavor than educational touring or living out wishes. And, y'know, maybe that gets more conducive with a little theme-nurturing.
Personally, most of the exploration-of-setting type games I've played in have gotten boring when the characters weren't also pursuing goals that the players were jazzed about.
Ps,
-Dave
P.S. I am not claiming this says anything about GNS.
P.P.S. Simon, I'd like to continue discussing types of thematic influence in play, but I'm not sure if this thread's the place.
Simon C:
Dave,
That sort of thing is exactly what I want to be talking about, and arguing about semantics and shit is exactly what I don't want to talk about. I seem to keep letting myself be drawn into those arguments though.
I would be an enthusiastic participant in a new thread if you started one, or you're welcome to keep posting it here.
Needless to say, I agree completely with your characterisation of play. That sounds like something I've done too.
contracycle:
Simon, although I have some quibbles, I don't have any particular objections to the arguments articulated by the writers you mention, but I still think you're confusing applications. Essentially you seem to be imposing the process of understanding story onto the process of drawing insight from experience. David, I think, highlights precisely what I think is a mistake when he asserts that if you have conflict you automatically have narrative. That is true IN STORIES, it's not true of practical experience of reality. If I get randomly mugged in the street, I may well go on to locate that experience in some broader narrative about what I think about society and modern life, but I can also just go, "huh, shit happens". Likewise if I slash my finger wihile slicing an onion. There is no need to apply social narratives to such prosaic events in order to understand them.
You ask what it is about historical societies that interests me, and it's specifically the point that their metanarratives are not ours. Their perceptions of their world and the logic which governs it is not identical to those with which we are familiar, not because of any inherent difference in psychology or physiology but because of the social constructs which surround people. For my purposes, then, interpreting events in the light of my, modern, metanarratives is counterproductive - what I want to do is learn and internalise theirs. This is the point at which mechanics enter - the mechanics themselves attach logic and consequences to certain actions which endows them with a meaning that probably would not have naturally arisen in my mind, aculturated as it is to modernity.
You propose that the selection of Twilight2000 as a setting implies selection of theme. But doing that, having a sort of theme-before, would totally defeat the purpose from my point of view. If there is something, a schema, which endows action with meaning to be derived from this setting, then it is a schema I wish to discover in play. As I've already pointed out upthread, if theme is to be a meaningful term when applied to this sort of play, it can only be something that arises from play itself and is only understood post facto, and if you can even be bothered to distill it out of the action. So I think your assertion that the selection of setting implies theme is groundless.
David, you say that ""Want, try, fail, try again, succeed, celebrate" is narrative" but I think you are making an erroneous normative statement here. That is indeed a common structure of narrative, that doesnt mean that all actions are automatically narrative. So yes, absolutely, games like this are powered by conflict, by goals about which the players are jazzed. But they are jazzed through the prism of the character and the mechanics. It is absolutely the case, as I have also already pointed out upthread, that I think this sort of game can indeed make use of some aspects of narrative structure to avoid certain pitfalls of this style of play. But thats a long way from saying that because of the utility of these concepts as tools, the fundamental nature of the activity has become story-like.
Motipha:
So, I'm wondering what you gain by removing GNS. Yes, you now talk about games in terms of a unified continuum, but what does that actually afford you?
Let me explain. I'm not arguing that Simon is incorrect in his underlying premise, that all game can (should?) be described in terms of the premise, narrative, metanarrative, theme or whatever descriptor you want to assign to it. But what does it get you to identify or focus solely on that level of the game? I've always seen the Big Model theory as being useful for providing us a set of tools of analysis by which we can talk about games meaningfully. By saying that I enjoy playing Story Now, I'm providing a description of how I enjoy gaming. Same thing with Right to Dream or Step on Up. Regardless of what the deep, underlying arcs or premises of the game session, by using those terms I'm saying something about HOW I want to approach the game. It tells me which techniques and stylistic choices I am more likely to enjoy, or less.
Removing those terms doesn't seem to win me anything. Perhaps this is because I don't see the three categories as being ABSOLUTELY mutually exclusive, and perhaps thats part of where I tweak Eero's alarm at theory heterodoxy. For myself, I am coming more and more to realise that I have much more Right to Dream motivation than I thought I did (in part because of this thread and the exploration it has sent me on) while I still believe my greatest interest is towards Story Now. But I can talk and identify different play preferences of my own and my groups because I have terminology and referents that highlight significant difference.
I just don't see what you get by dismantling that framework. Yes, you can talk about things in terms of phatic versus engaging themes. But now you are asking people who do not see things in those terms (and to whom those terms are intensely disinteresting) to reframe their perspective in those terms that seem explicitly contrary to what they enjoy. And more to the point, I don't think you could use those terms to really talk about play in a way that would work for them, regardless of how you interpret the nature of their play: If it doesn't jibe with their own interaction, and doesn't provide a way for them to identify and work with what they want in a game that is at least as useful as what the Big Model provides, then it provides less material for productive discourse. What use is it for me to talk about the thematic nature of the right-of-passage events of my characters play when I at no time, while playing or thinking "this would be fun" ever did or wanted to address that directly? Just because it was a cool thing I realised about the game after the fact doesn't mean I would have had mroe fun playing towards that, rather than towards my own perceived goals of constructive denial and simulationism, or whatever my Right to Dream style happens to be.
So, recapping one more time. GNS theory provides you a method of analyizing and describing games. Are you claiming that the model provides no benefit to discussion that is not covered by simply talking in terms of following premise and theme, and is in fact hurting discussion by making false distinctions?
Or perhaps I just don't buy in to "what is roleplaying all about" as a universal.
David Berg:
Hey Contracycle, I can't tell if we're actually disagreeing here. I'm just saying that once there's conflict we have the option to think in terms of theme, and that maybe doing so helps people play well together.
When I said "...then we have narrative" I just meant that we have the raw material for a story. The potential is there. I'm not saying we must realize it. Just that we often do, and maybe there are good reasons for that.
Maybe I'm misusing the word "narrative"...
I totally hear you on experiencing an alternate reality without the filter of a familiar paradigm. But I have no idea whether that means no theme, weird theme, familiar theme, or says nothing about theme at all. In some ways, stripping away familiar context can pare priorities down to the basic concerns of sentient beings (as far we understand those), which could be a thematic goldmine if a play group was so disposed. If you have a good AP example, I'd love to discuss it in a new thread.
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