[The Forge, Sorcerer] Interview with Coralie David for her dissertation

[Ron Edwards]

Coralie David, a Ph.D. candidate at the Université Paris, has contacted quite a lot of RPG designers and publishers for interviews. I understand that they will all be made public eventually, but here's what I sent her if you're interested. One of the answers seems to have been cut off so I'll have to recover or reconstruct it eventually.

All thoughts and comments are welcome.

[Moreno R.]

To see  other people's answers to some of these questions (these are all G+ comments threads from Paul Czege's stream, but they are tagged "public" so you should have no problem seeing them)

https://plus.google.com/+PaulCzege/posts/SNFhTjpy1Rx
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PaulCzege/posts/8tGUn8SwhNE
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PaulCzege/posts/EpK93XjHQFR
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PaulCzege/posts/HXRRpkwtfuk
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PaulCzege/posts/KmYiBf4PhXo
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PaulCzege/posts/b7ZWB9b45Dk
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+PaulCzege/posts/3x5VjhpB6tX

[Ron Edwards]

Let me put it a little differently.

I put a lot of fucking work into that interview. If I'd wanted to see "sub" "sub" "sub" in response to posting it, I'd have stayed with the threads at G+. I posted here in the thin hope that thinking people would have something to contribute in response to what I wrote. Can we do some of that, please?

[Jesse Burneko]

Hey Ron,

I was most struck by this paragraph:

"It is yet again polluted by identity purchasing. For a while, between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s, the internet exploded some of the infrastructure that had led gamers to purchase things by brand alone. However, in the past eight years, a new and probably equally toxic infrastructure has arisen in its place, yet again favoring brand-identification, fashions of the moment, and nigh-hysterical imitation rather than trusting to one's own experiences and enjoyment as the primary guide for design and marketing."

To what are you referring?  Are you talking about the tendency for people to latch onto Fate and Apocalypse World?  I know that Vincent is rather proud of the community built up around AW and Fred similar so around Fate.

Or are you talking more about the whole "story games" crowd.  That's more where *my* frustration lies in that more and more I'm finding very interesting things in games like In Dark Alleys, Abandon All Hope and In Flames all which seemed to be largely ignored by "story games" pretty much because they happen to have rules for drowning and falling.

Jesse

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron!

It's easy to write a detailed reply listing points where you disagree with what someone has written. If I go in full-rant mode I can go on for pages and pages, as you know. It's much more difficult to add something worthwhile when you basically agree with every point: writing a long list of "I agree", "it's clear", "I couldn't have said it better" usually don't produce a reply very interesting to read... 

[Ron Edwards]

Hi, thanks guys.

I'm not frustrated with or disapproving of either FATE or the Apocalypse Engine. In each case, there's a lot for people to work with and clearly itches to be scratched. I think nothing is worth adulation, and that each has received adulation which is worth scrutinizing without sentiment; also that both are worthy of sharp critique but that's what I say about everything. My annoyances are more with GURPSizing them, when both have features, not a  generic lack of features.

What I'm referring to in that paragraph certainly includes the absurd "story games" tag, which has reached epic heights of dumbness - in fact, in the Bleeding Cool interview I cribbed from, I refer to the terms "Forge game," "story game," and "indie game" as - I quote - "so much yellow runny dogshit." I'm also talking about the illusions tied into the term OSR, which obscure the genuine worthiness of much work that hides behind the name. And don't even get me started on the slavering idiocy of "D&D Next" yipyap which when all is said and done is one role-playing game among thousands, published by one company among hundreds, and - if 3rd and 4th are any indication - may well be a fine and useful RPG as if anyone would notice in this haze of identity politics about it.

I want to find a phrase about RPGs which matches the fine German saying about this-or-that type or quality of person: "Get over yourself, we're all born naked and we all shit in the toilet."

And another thing, the yet again ridiculous buzz factor of Kickstarter, as if kickstarting gaudy reprints of games actually means anything. As if a light rewrite of, say, Unknown Armies is any better than simply reprinting it and maybe promoting and playing the thing this time. Or as if, as I've written before, the world needs a seventh edition of Call of Cthulhu.

[Miskatonic]

Thank you for taking the time to put this someplace less... ephemeral.

[Ian Charvill]

When is the fiction a story? Two things make it a story. First, if the fiction gets real people's
attention, which happens if a recognizable real-life human problem is somehow involved or invoked,
even if the characters and situation are incredibly fantastic or impossible. Second, if the fiction
includes escalating events which ultimately resolve the problem, in any way. (All this is Lit 101,
boring version. I'm not pretending anything different.)

The point after "First" is tripping me up a little bit.  I can't come up with a fictional sentence, that isn't a nonsense-sentence, that doesn't involve or invoke real life human stuff.  And where that sentence is about a conflict, or struggle, or problem, it's not necessarily going to get people's attention. "The vampire goes to the dentist", maybe that gets your attention, but "the mouse stubs her toe", maybe that doesn't.

So, provided you accept that, what is it for you that changes a fictional conflict that relates to actual human problems, into an attention-getting fictional conflict that relates to an actual human problems?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ian,

That's a matter for literary theorists. I didn't specify that the cut-off had to be a hard one which applied for every person. It might or might not be, and even if it's different for everyone, that doesn't change my point. Unsatisfying as it may seem, I really don't care whether I've provided the grand definitive pronouncement about what a story is or not. People debate all the time whether statements without such human interest/attention are stories, but all I care about is that we experience statements with those things as stories, without controversy or any need to process it.

I don't think sentences are good units for discussing my point. I initially provided a sentence which met your "can't imagine" criteria, but I realized that it was counter-productive to do so, because it would validate focusing on sentence content.

That's why I can't assess either of your examples for whether they are "worth" human attention, assuming such a threshold of worth can be discussed as a general thing. I can give either one a paragraph to sit in which would put it over that threshold as I see it, and I'm sure you can too, as it's not hard.

[Ian Charvill]

Hi Ron

Sorry -- something in the way I phrased that seems to have distracted from the question I was trying to ask.  I didn't expect you to give an ex cathedra on "what is story?" I was hoping for a more personal answer to something like:

For you, Ron Edwards, what is it about the fictional content that makes a story interesting or not interesting?

(It could be that you find all kinds of stories equally interesting, I don't know.  It seems that each game you make is about a different kind of story.  The unhealthy codependency stuff in Sorcerer, the Spy vs Guy stuff in Spione, etc.  And it's a much bigger issue than the simple question I'm asking, but it seemed to me to connect back to the deep urge you describe having to write a particular game-- that part of the urge is maybe to tell/support the telling of particular kinds of story as well as being the urge to write a game.  So I think it would be interesting to see if the kind of stories you like map to the games you've written -- or games you might write in future.)

Couple of examples for clarity, from my own tastes:

• I find stories in which the protagonist is missing key bits of information about themselves compelling in some way -- whether it's Rebecca, or Pale Fire, or Chandler's Marlowe stories, or A Sense of an Ending.
• I like romantic comedies -- that combination of subject matter & approach -- straight romances I tend not to like as much. I would happily watch The Fault in Our Stars if it had been done as a black comedy, I'm not that bothered by it in its current form.

Are you aware of similar patterns in your own tastes

[Ron Edwards]

Oh thank God.

For you, Ron Edwards, what is it about the fictional content that makes a story interesting or not interesting?

Answering this without an ex cathedra is difficult. Also, "interesting" isn't easily defined. Since you focused on the personal, I'll specify it to "will return to it." I'm a person who re-reads and re-watches constantly, so it's worth considering stuff I not only do this with, but do it regularly.

I also think I can answer best in the negative: when fiction completely loses me.
- If what I call the core is presented falsely. This is a content issue relative to reality, and it's by far the most important.
- If what I call the core is abandoned/picked-up in a careless way. This is a techniques issue, experienced as "what was this about again?" A cinema/literary person calls it a failure of rising action.
- If the integrity of events and characters isn't honored. This is a content issue within the fiction alone.

I've found that any genre, any style, any theme, any point from simplest to most complex, anything at all, works as a story to me as long as those don't happen. I may not like its theme and call it a "bad story" on that basis, but that's not really fair in technical terms.

After that, it seems to me you're asking about taste and personal affiliation, and you're absolutely right - the list from my reading and viewing library are the same as my design aesthetics.

TOPIC
anti-Establishment
the human animal
history as cause
history as time-and-place
hallucination and vision
excess
a peculiar sort of humor
failure or helplessness
grief
manhood as it relates to responsibility and violence
sex especially in a 70s way which isn't easy to describe
coincidence without purpose
physical pain
the boundary between connection and isolation
the difference between perceived and real boundaries

On reflection, I don't very much like schadenfreude, power fantasy, "the power of love," patriotism of any kind, or team spirit.

TECHNIQUE (I found that I always think in dynamics across the slash marks)
Criss-cross of contributions among real people / Designated non-negotiable spheres of contributions
Designated lists or options / Created-improv content
Non-consensus of input / Expected acknowledgment and use of input
Challenging familiar boundaries / Finding the real ones
Irreverence / Moral breakpoints

Best, Ron

[Erik Weissengruber]

That's a matter for literary theorists.

No help there.

Stanley Fish would tell you that it is a community of readers that decides what the text is.

[Ian Charvill]

Cool - thanks, Ron.