[Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents
Ron Edwards:
Hey Roger,
Excellent.
I hope I'm not derailing the thread with this, but rather rounding out my point ... I'd like to address your point about Waiting for Godot. Two things.
1. A play on paper is merely a script, which is one of the instruments utilized in the medium of theater. Therefore we'd have to talk about a given production - especially for a play like this one - in order to get at whether it's a story or not. Some productions really work at the "absurdist" thing in order to negate any such experience for the audience, whereas others do not.
2. At the risk of contradicting my point #1, and basing this point on a production which unfortunately you didn't see (at a local community college; my friend played Vladimir) so may not be fair to use here, I suggest that the play's story isn't what you describe, but rather, "Two very-tight-friends guys wait for another guy to come, he doesn't, they have to decide whether it's important to them whether he does or not, this puts the bite on their friendship in a big way, and so their eventual decision is actually more about whether they care about one another rather than about the guy." (I'm also sayin' their verbal decision not to wait, while not budging, is actually a cover for the fact that they don't mind waiting as long as they do it together.) Which matches my model exactly.
Again, I'm not talking about The Play in some huge academic all-ways way, but regarding one way to stage and perform the play which is at least consistent with its script.
Best, Ron
Erik Weissengruber:
Is there some productive way to link the play analogy to gaming out pre-scripted events, or working with metaplots.
A script may be presented in various different ways. Different actors may rise to the challenge, some will falter but we applaud their brave efforts, etc. Some folks will just flub lines (a.k.a "fail" or "do it wrong" or "lose").
Don't some people find satisfaction being good actors in presenting the script? There is a lot of work to be done and a lot of challenges to face even in mounting the simplest play. Learning lines, working out blocking, creating costumes and sets, etc.
Is there a way to make enactment of a pre-plotted sequence of events a fun, challenging, engaging play experience and not just an unspoken social contract, or illusion/social bullying, etc.?
Actual Play Experience:
I took part in a long D&D session where everybody was playing along with the scenario, working with the outlines of the story, groaning when the villain turned out to be the pawn of an even greater threat, etc. And they were all digging it.
Are there other rules sets that make such a group improvised elaboration of a pre-set structure explicit, full of explicit rewards for doing all the little sub-tasks, really nailing a part, building up a good set, "costuming" the characters in interesting details, etc?
Is Fiasco this game?
Ron Edwards:
Hi Erik,
That's what Participationism is all about! David's wrestling away with it in his threads now, regarding the "story before" procedural outline in my latest essay. There is a very distinguished history of discussion about it, regarding how it does rely on Force but isn't Illusionism, here at the Forge.
I've brought it up in this thread in two related ways: when a GM begins to use it, expecting exactly the player enthusiasm you're talking about, only to encounter resistance due to players' desire for Story Now, a Creative Agenda which dedicated Participationist techniques cannot support.
Does that help?
Best, Ron
Roger:
So it turns out this is the thread in which I finally "get it." I'll try to get back to the topic of this thread eventually in this message, but I need to wallow in this a bit. It's only taken me 7 years to get here, after all.
So, Creative Agendas. What's the big deal? Why do people care? Why do some people so actively resist caring?
I think it comes down to functionality. At the end of the day, that's what a lot of people care about. One of the problems with that is that most people are not very well-equiped to estimate how functional their own play experiences are, for a variety of complex reasons.
People are slightly better at recognizing pathological levels of dysfunction, however. Hence the common reaction: "Coherence and incoherence doesn't matter -- our group plays incoherently all the time, and we're not dysfunctional. Theory: busted."
There's two errors in this line of thought. One of them is their fault, and one of them is our fault.
1. Incoherence == dysfunctional play. If people would just read the theory and pay attention, they would realize that no one is saying this. Incoherence does not always lead to dysfunctional play. It can be functional. We can pin this one on them.
2. Coherence == functional play. This is our fault, I think. Maybe every science is like this -- we start off focusing on the instances of broken people (medicine, psychology, etc) and only very eventually get around to considering the healthy scenario.
Coherence doesn't lead to functional play. It leads to superfunctional play.
If you've never experienced superfunctional play, you probably can't believe it exists. It sounds like I'm just making shit up to prop up my own theories. You can't really get away from thinking that functional play is just as good as it gets.
Superfunctional play exists because coherence is a positive feedback loop. It is synergistic -- the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The total energy produced is greater than the contributions of the participants.
The metaphors are obvious and useful. It's like harmonic resonance -- if everyone is marching in step at the right tempo, the bridge oscillates until it explodes. A laser is special precisely because it is coherent -- and it has radically different properties than incoherent light. Someone who has never seen a laser will not understand what you're talking about.
This is why incoherence is a problem: not because it leads to dysfunctional play, but because it stone-cold kills superfunctional play. It's that one guy jumping up and down on the bridge at random. It's noise and attentuation in the signal. If there's any truth to the notion that game theory destroys gaming groups, it's this: once you've had superfunctional play, you're not likely to tolerate anyone who gets in the way of it again.
If you believe in superfunctional play, and you desire it, then everything in the theory makes sense. If you don't believe in it, then the theory just seems like a bunch of nonsense. And it's all our fault. We haven't been good about spreading the gospel on this.
Now that I've said all that, I need to also say: Creative Agendas are the wrong end to start at when you're ingesting game theory.
No one learns how to cook by first taking a year-long course in the theory of how the brain constructs the sensation of flavour from the signals sent to it by specialized receptor cells on the tongue. They start by learning to chop, fry, hard-boil an egg.
They start with technique. And this happens everywhere -- musical instruments, martial arts, calculus. It's obviously the right way to do it.
Consider adopting that mindset for a moment. Shove theory down and make it a second-class citizen. Elevate technique to the primary object of study.
What does that look like? It looks an awful lot like Actual Play should be the most important subject and forum. Funny how that works. Of course 'Actual Play' is a compressed way of saying 'Show us your actual techniques and their actual results'.
It provides a way out of the "Hey my steaks always taste awful please help" maelstrom of responses:
"Try cooking only t-bones"
"Is your oven hot enough? It should be hot"
"Steaks suck become a vegan you bastard"
"Angus beef is the only cow worth eating"
"By 'awful', do you mean overdone, underdone, too salty, what are you talking about?"
"OMG I just had a steak at Outback it was so good"
"Put down the fork you fat pig"
I don't really need to convince anyone how unhelpful all of that is, do I? The first step has to be determining what this person is doing -- what techniques they are using and how they are performing them. We must start there.
Smash cut to: what is System? What does System actually do? Here it is: System is nothing more or less than encouraging and supporting certain techniques, while discouraging and suppressing other techniques. That's it.
Now it all becomes clear. One example: why it drives people to pull out their hair when everyone talks about any particular game being Narrativist or Gamist or whatever. If a System relates primarily to techniques, then of course it doesn't make any sense to talk about a Narrativist game.
Another example: why that old old myth of "System doesn't matter" still persists. Here's the truth of it -- if you're always going to use the same techniques, then you're absolutely right: System doesn't matter to you. Or if you confine yourself to 'different' Systems that all share essentially the same techniques, then it again doesn't matter.
That brings me around to the topic of this thread, which is all about the relationship between Technique and Creative Agenda. More accurately, it's all about *a* relationship between *a* Technique and *a* Creative Agenda.
All this thread consists of, really, is:
1. Hey guys there's this technique I call 'underbelly'. This is what it looks like. This is how I've used it.
2. Hey guys turns out that the underbelly technique does not support, and in fact actively undermines, the Story Now agenda.
I'm not trying to be dismissive -- I think the most important work yet lies ahead in really getting into techniques, and how they relate to the various Agendas. Play Unsafe was a good start, but there's much much more.
Especially since, as I've suggested, that System is a big box of techniques. There isn't anything in 'game design' other than an understanding of techniques. (Okay, that isn't quite true, but it's true enough.)
Which brings me around to the part of this post in which I actually contribute something to the actual ongoing discussion in the thread. Hopefully.
Waiting for Godot: I'm not sure anything useful lies down this topic of discussion. I agree with you, but I don't think it matters that I agree with you.
But on the topic of story, let me shoot this phrase into your brain: "Story Never". Let it roll around in there a bit. Does it seem intriguing? What if I told you that it's the key to understanding what the fabled "Sandbox Play" is really all about? We can spin this off into another thread if it sounds like a productive avenue.
On Mandating Story: Yeah, turns out that it's not artistically-rewarding to complete a Paint-by-Numbers set. Of course I agree with you.
This seems very clearly related to Fruitful Void, although I'm not entirely sure if it is exactly equivalent to Fruitful Void. But I suspect it may very well be.
I'm going to call you out on something: you seem to be leaning on the crutch of "theme" and "thematically-intense" an awful lot, and I'm not sure you've really discussed what you mean. I'm pretty sure I can just search-and-replace it with 'Premise' and get to exactly what you're trying to express, but I'm not entirely sure.
Feeding my doubts are concerns that by 'theme' you might mean something closer to 'Premise + Colour' (ha, did you wake up this morning expecting to be contemplating that?), or possibly something like 'the allowable Premise space'. The latter bearing a very close relationship to what is traditionally called 'genre', although that term has seen so much abuse I'm not sure it's redeemable. Anyway, help me out here.
Whew, that's a whole lot of post. I'm feeling the happiest and most-optimistic about roleplaying that I have in years and years. Thank you for that.
Cheers,
Roger
Erik Weissengruber:
Yeah, I was hoping to prod the discussion towards the area of application:
* where are we seeing participationism realized well in a few well-known examples?
* who has designs brewing where it is at play
* can we dig down and talk about some reward me?chanisms or examples of currency that encourage functional participation?
I was thinking in autumn-phase terms: pulling together early massess of discourse into distilled insight.
Recent FATE experiences seem to be all about Participationism. Throwing down a FATE chip to encourage a player to accept a complication in a character's life; spontaneously flipping a player a coin for playing out a character's batshit crazy motivation -- they are functionally the same. A reward token is being brandished saying "good job, give me more of that to embellish what is going on" and the dopamine reward circutry is getting juiced.
The passing of dice in Fiasco seems to work the same way. I frame a scene for me to strut my actorly stuff (or storytelling prowess, or descriptive abilities, or knowledge of cannon) and I am angling to have public recognition of my clever invention when someone grabs a die (positive or negative). The particular ending my partners choose for the scene -- positive or negative -- doesn't matter. What matters is that someone else at the table has, through the token of the die, given a public validation that, yes, the scene you came up with and played out was engaging enough to get me to want to join in by choosing a category of ending for it. And with that die in my hand I can angle for future actions on the part of particular players around the table, or reward them for previous actions. Much reward juice firing all around our monkey brains.
I have enjoyed a lot of narrativist play over the years. But I have found a kind of satisfaction in Fiasco and FATE as complete as I got from real Story Now gaming. And Dresden Files couldn't be clubbed into being a Story Now game but there was some nice participation going on there.
This probably deserves a new thread, but these questions might provide a cap to this one.
* Who out there has come across Participation-friendly techniques where they didn't find them?
* Who set out to do some Story Now, but because of some the techniques and reward mechanisms at work in a particular game, you ended up dreaming away. And liking it?
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