"unnecessary for the personal narratives of the players to harmonize"

[Rafu]

Eero,

this is something you dropped as an aside in some other thread:

It is also an interesting design direction where a game is structured in a way that makes it unnecessary for the personal narratives of the players to harmonize. Many newer games are such that there is no need whatsoever for a singular narrative to reign triumphant in all details, as long as the key points are agreed upon. I've noticed that this has led to a pretty ironic style of play in my own circles, as we hypersaturate the narrative space with alternative viewpoints and colorful detail that might or might not be "really in the story".

It sounds like it should really be obvious to all readers which "newer games" you're talking about, but it's not obvious to me. Which games have you played with "your own circles" which share this feature? Would you care to expand? I'm just curious...

[Eero Tuovinen]

Oh, it's basically any games with a heavily "formalistic" design - that is, games where the fiction is only queried about a limited number of formal issues, which in turn trigger rules mechanics, upon which a majority of the play choices are made. Most Forge games go on this list.

My observation was intended to point out that a game like say Dogs in the Vineyard (for the sake of example, this is a very common property) enables more ironic play than your average traditional game simply because it cares less about incidental details of the fiction - it's less about persuasion, as certain friends of ours might say :D As long as we know that you intend to escalate conflict, it doesn't matter whether each individual imagines this as a brutal or elegant event, for example; the game can go on regardless. This property of the game enables irony, because players comfortable with each other and confident about the shared vision can start to "play" with the shared perceptions, introducing intentional ambiguity into what objectively happened. We know as an objective mandate of the system that character A triumphed over character B, but the game does not actually need us to settle upon a singular narrative regarding how it happened.

This is not, of course, to say that this sort of ironic ambiguity is impossible in more organically designed games. In fact, the supremely ironic group I play with up north tackles D&D with a very ironic, postmodern attitude despite the game relying on objective fictional detail so much. We've simply played so much together that we have a very keen sense for the extent to which individual narrations can be relied to build upon. I've found that when I play with other groups, it is very important to joke and heckle and "alternatively narrate" a bit less so that the rest of the table doesn't get confused about when I'm being serious and when I'm not.

There are many practical uses for this property in the art form of roleplaying. For example, you can cast doubt upon the veracity of the official narrative by assaulting the supposedly official story with sotto voce commentary (tastefully, of course - we don't want to disrupt by talking over others); you can put words in other characters' mouths when a player hesitates a beat, for comedic effect or to explore an alternative possibility; you can let other players' narrations pass without comment, leaving your potential disagreement tastefully vague; you can develop entire narrative branches that have not been openly acknowledged by the ordinary procedure, but that you nevertheless reference as if they were accepted truth.

While one might analyze this sort of table talk as merely incidental, it can elevate to a level where it is truly unknown which of the alternative narrative realities is the more important one. For example, in a TSoY campaign we played a lictor (police officer) of the city of Kalderon got hold of the "Triangle Manteau", an artifact of major magical powers. We had two alternate narratives of the events of her adventures, playing with the themes of superhero genre (she chose to keep the cape and wield it for the good of the city) in parallel with the general pulp fantasy atmosphere of the campaign. This was largely accomplished by ironic alternative narrations of deeds and dialogue that did not strictly speaking happen "for real", but that nevertheless was acknowledged by the table as entertaining. Most significantly, it was quite clear that the attitude of the sacral hero of the horse nomads (a sort of Namor-like figure) towards this heroine of the city was necessarily colored by the superhero tropes, complete with antagonistic arch-rivalry, despite the superhero stuff not being formally acknowledged a part of the story's stylings.

I should note that if the above sort of ironic dialogue at the game table seems obvious and a matter of course to the reader, then I do agree with that - it is obvious where I play, too; it's the sort of thing that's entirely natural for a group where it happens, while being quite alien to a different group that doesn't have the chemistry required for this type of narrative playfulness. My original point was mostly to note that recent progressive game design has to my eyes encouraged this type of play: reducing GM authority and making rules systems more formal and less organic has allowed more people to open their mouths at the game table, with more rich variety in the possibilities of what is said and acknowledged.

[Ron Edwards]

It's been a tough day, or I would have posted to this sooner.

This thread isn't what I need to deal with in this forum. You guys both have blogs or similar venues to hash out details at this level of abstraction.

For what it's worth, here's what I think. (1) obviously if people at the same table cannot manage to understand at all what one another consider to be happening in the fiction (imagination, made-up-stuff, whatever you want to call it), then play in the medium which relies on such communication cannot happen. That links all play of this sort more than any nuances of "how much" create subdivisions. (2) A self-referential or ironic (or whatever you want to call it) relationship to that material has nothing to do with "traditional" or any other distinction among games in terms of design/function families, but may be seen during any sort of play of anything imaginably in this category. Eero, your single (and the only) touchstone to actual play so far supports this point.

And exercising my raw privilege, the thread is now closed with a post containing what I think.