Decoupling "Story Now" from "Narrativism," and rethinking Creative Agendas.
Callan S.:
Who's the jargon to be understood by in this case - non gamers or people who've gamed for years?
Ron Edwards:
The key to explaining it is to start with the topic: creative agenda. Which is not the product of play, but rather the process. Therefore the issue of "hey! we made a story!" is immediately removed from the conversation. I've found that people are perfectly able to understand the point once that's established.
That's also why I am not pleased by the recent enthusiasm about Story Before, Story Now, Story After, because it holds Story as an equivalent term for all three. Whereas the Before and After terms are expressly concerned with product, and Story Now is expressly concerned with process - specifically the priorities of the human process, i.e., not merely some "when someone accumulates 10 black tokens, the GM initiates the Climax scene" mechanic. I only posed those two other terms as dysfunctional failures of Story Now, which may be snooty and biased of me, but maybe it would have been better to stay with that - and the historically observable fact that attempts at either are not particularly successful - than to indulge David's bandwagon for what is merely an unrealized ideal at this time.
Bluntly, I no longer care about whether the technical and historical way we've talked about it here is clear to anyone, ever, with or without being a gamer, or any other qualifiers. I'm working on the post-Forge wiki right now, and one of its primary features is that initial text of each entry is in plain language, period. You have no idea how happy I will be once the actual Forge discussions of most of the terms become referential library stacks, of interest only to those who'd like to know the history of how we got to the ordinary, plain, and clear material in the wiki. The Glossary was provisional back in 2004, and as of this minute, it is obsolete, obsolete, obsolete. So wrangling over what term in it is or isn't clear without that plain-talk introduction to it, is gone from my mind.
Best, Ron
Chris_Chinn:
I wrote something awhile back, trying to give short CA descriptions as process:
http://bankuei.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/creative-agenda-processes/
Chris
Marshall Burns:
One think that made this issue click for me is that, in a certain brand of RtD play exemplified in various ways by Spirit of the Century, Fiasco, and kill puppies for satan, a story gets generated during play, but it is frontloaded by system, chargen, and other prep to the point that the participants don't actually address premise themselves. It's model trains, basically; by the time you're starting the actual play, the track has been set up, and playing consists of enjoying the model trains run properly. That's the distinction that the theory makes between this type of play and Story Now.
Gordon C. Landis:
Hey, how 'bout that: Ron's point is (no surprise) key. A functional Story Before/After is just a totally different kind of beast than Story Now. I can imagine lots of useful stuff growing from Before/After, but it is the absence of clearly establishing just how distinct they would be from Story Now that bothered me the most about the initial post.
I'll look forward to plain-talk - developing a degree of skill with old technical terms makes them familiar, but by no means preferred.
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