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OK, so I've been thinking about Ron's "celebration" definition for GNS Simulationism and Chris' analogy about anthropology in The Basis for Criticism.  So here's my suggestion.  It may not have anything to do with GNS, or then again maybe it does.  

What about classifying games by their social function?  To see this, look at an actual game, but mentally blank out any reference to the Shared Imagined Space.  What is the game's function for the real people?  It seems to me that there are two clear paradigms suggested.  

One is Contest.  i.e. You invite a bunch of people over for an opportunity to exercise their skills and be awarded respect for achievement.  

Another is Celebration.  i.e. You invite a bunch of people over for a party to celebrate something.  Now, this is a pretty broad category (i.e. there are many different kinds of parties), but there are definite commonalities.  However, I don't think I can easily sum up the social function of celebration per se.  

There are a variety of other kinds of social function.  However, I'm not sure which directly apply to RPGs.  For example, there is Therapy like support group meetings -- i.e. invite a bunch of people over to express their inner issues and receive affirmation for what they are dealing with.  There is Work -- i.e. invite a bunch of people over to accomplish some task, from barn-raising to quilt-weaving.  Since RPGs don't have a product per se, I don't think that work applies as a function.  

The first two seem to correspond to GNS modes.  i.e. Contest as a social function equates to Gamism.  Celebration as a social function may equate to GNS Simulationism.  But I'm not sure if there is a parallel for Narrativism.  Then again, this idea isn't intended as purely GNS.  i.e. The idea of classifying by social function works on its own.  However, it might shed light on GNS or conversely be illuminated by GNS concepts.

Hmm, well, I follow the case you make and find it convincing at first glance.  I'm not suire I see a use for it yet but it's an interesting proposition.  It might go some way to identifying another way in which different groups experience their RPG play in quite distinct contexts.

Hi John,

Yes, this is an interesting beginning.  My only observation is that it lacks a category that describes narrativist play, which is neither therapy nor work.

Perhaps Myth Creation, in the Campbellian sense of the word myth as a story that exemplifies value choices, or Value Exploration or Confirmation.

Hi John,

I'm OK with this, and it makes a lot of sense to me - hell, it could even be a replacement set of terms for all the Creative Agenda modes (GNS), because it really hammers the point of social aesthetic priorities.

For Narrativism? Finding a term is tough not due to any definitional constraints but because Narrativist role-playing really is a new phenomenon, artistically.

I'm probably the worst person to weigh in with a candidate at the moment, and will do better to let others provide ideas. I'm really interested, though. I think this might be an important turning point.

Best,
Ron

A group of people getting together to write a screen play is work (in RPG's there is no finished product ... but people getting together to put on a play is still work and there's no finished product there either).

My mother attends story-telling groups. Although I don't know how that factors in, of the listed I'd pick a mix of Celebration, Challenge (there are prises for the best storytellers), and yes, even work.

I would say that virtually *any* game not only could but in some sense likey would move between competiton (check out my storytelling capability) to celebration (this story we're making is cool! And it's good to share cool with friends!) and work (okay, we're all here for the same purpose and making the experience come out this way).

I'm thinking ascribing a 1:1 match-up is a mistake.

-Marco

But the fact that every game includes moments of competion and celebration is no different than the fact that every game includes moments of naration, gamism, and simulation.

The question GNS CA is addressing is the overal intent of play.

If I have people over to play poker, is the goal to win money or to socialize? In both cases, we think we're playing the same game, but we really aren't.

So I think the real problem isn't so much the terms (which seem pretty useful to me), but in realizing what GNS CA is all about. I'm not sure these social aspect terms really help, though perhaps celebration is better than similation. Contest perhaps is better than gamism (since we're calling our play a game, no matter what the CA). I like story telling or myth creation for narativism, perhaps myth creation is best since a story is still created by any form of RPG play.

Frank

Quote from: ffilzBut the fact that every game includes moments of competion and celebration is no different than the fact that every game includes moments of naration, gamism, and simulation.

I'm saying that Narrativisim (or Sim, or Gam) could be either work, celebration, or therapy at different times.

-Marco

More thoughts...

Therapy and work may not fit the GNS description, but maybe they do correlate to separate CAs that GNS doesn't actually address. It certainly is possible to role play for theraputic reasons, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it outside of professional therapy.

Work as a CA might be what happens when you are playtesting as part of game development (as opposed to handing out playtest copies of your game, which I would expect to generally occur with one of the three GNS CAs), but in house playtesting is focused on "does this specific mechanic produce the results desired."

Of course sometimes we socialize just to socialize. Perhaps this compares to play that occurs without any CA.

Frank

Hiya,

Well, umm ... let's take it as a given that we are talking about CA, which is to say, the prioritized approach/agenda for the group (or arguably a person, let's not get into that) ... if there is one ...

In which case, the "little" versions of the categories (what Gordon likes to call g instead of G, n instead of N, and s instead of S) are just going to have to take care of themselves as usual, when we're using the GNS terms.

My impression from John's post, and correct me if necessary, is that we are talking about these big-ol', big-ass, What We Came to Do priority type things. The "littlun" versions which fade in and out as ephemeral features (and are indeed, Ephemera in the model now that I think of it) just aren't part of the topic at hand.

All of the above being provisional to John's response.

Best,
Ron

Quote from: ffilzSo I think the real problem isn't so much the terms (which seem pretty useful to me), but in realizing what GNS CA is all about. I'm not sure these social aspect terms really help, though perhaps celebration is better than similation. Contest perhaps is better than gamism (since we're calling our play a game, no matter what the CA). I like story telling or myth creation for narativism, perhaps myth creation is best since a story is still created by any form of RPG play.  

You're refering to this as a re-labelling of GNS terms, which it is not.  The social function completely ignores anything about the Shared Imagined Space.  I think Marco is absolutely right that we shouldn't allow surface similarities to become identity.  And real games will have a mix of social function, but different games will have different mixes of Contest, Celebration, Work, and any other social function.  

"Myth Creation" doesn't work as a social function, in my opinion.  A myth is fiction.  This scheme asks what is happening with the real people.  I don't think it is correct to call this "myth creation for the sake of myth creation".  The tough question is: what do you, as a real person, get out of your game (whether G, S, or N)?  So what is the real-world function of myth creation?  

A few notes on the other choices:  I initially dismissed Work because RPGs don't have a lasting product.  However, it seems to me that there is work like performance, or ephemeral media like sand art or ice sculpture.  I guess working on an ice sculpture has roughly the same social function as working on a stone sculpture or garden.  Also, in retrospect I don't like therapy as a label because it connotes a professional context.  I think maybe Support is a better label, because people can get together to sort through their problems.

Quote from: John Kim"Myth Creation" doesn't work as a social function, in my opinion.  A myth is fiction.  This scheme asks what is happening with the real people.  I don't think it is correct to call this "myth creation for the sake of myth creation".  The tough question is: what do you, as a real person, get out of your game (whether G, S, or N)?  So what is the real-world function of myth creation?

I also dislike the term "myth creation" fairly intensely, though oddly enough for quite the opposite reason.  I think scholarship on myth for the last 60-odd years has pretty clearly demonstrated that myth does indeed have social functions, which are horrendously complex and intricate.  

My objection to the term is that, as Alan proposed it, he has in mind explicitly a Joseph Campbell conception of myth.  The problem is that Campbell was and is flat-out wrong about myth, unless you're talking about his crypto-theology of myth-construction as something we should all do as part of following our bliss, which isn't really a claim that can be evaluated.  Apart from that, the several disciplines which continue to struggle with the problems of myth pretty much universally find Campbell a joke, someone whose name ought not even be mentioned, and while that certainly overstates the case it's not by much.

Please bear in mind that this isn't a swipe at Alan.  He was explicit about his reasons and sources, and I agree that in some respects myth in Campbell's sense does fit Narrativism.  The problem is that myth in Campbell's sense isn't myth; it's Campbell.

I too don't like "myth creation" much.  It was just the first thing that came to mind.

It seems to me that the social function of narrativist play includes intentionally having a relationship to a value standard or ethic.   The function seems to be to create personalized stories that address an ethic that players find interesting.  In a sense it's confirmation of the player's ethics, and also exploration of those ethics, and practice application of different ethical interpretations.

How about the term Fabulation - the create of fables.  At least one use of "Fable" includes a component of ethical exploration.

Quote from: AlanHow about the term Fabulation - the create of fables.  At least one use of "Fable" includes a component of ethical exploration.

Hmm.  Allegory would fit too, but allegorization means something else entirely.  I can live with Fabulation.

Quote from: clehrich

Quote from: John Kim"Myth Creation" doesn't work as a social function, in my opinion.  A myth is fiction.  This scheme asks what is happening with the real people.

I also dislike the term "myth creation" fairly intensely, though oddly enough for quite the opposite reason.  I think scholarship on myth for the last 60-odd years has pretty clearly demonstrated that myth does indeed have social functions, which are horrendously complex and intricate.

Sure, myths have various social functions in practice -- but I still contend that "myth creation" isn't a category of social function.  It's like having a category "scientification" for the creating of science fiction stories.  Do sci-fi stories have social functions?  Sure.  But specifying sci-fi doesn't specify a social function.  For example, real-world myths as studied by scholars are generally part of an oral and/or written tradition.  The same stories are repeated over many years, which passes values from one generation to the next.  But this is not the case for RPGs.  

Taking this from the other direction, I contend that you can have, say, a myth-writing contest.  Or you could celebrate a famous fable-writer's birthday by creating some new fables in honor of his tradition.  These might not be Narrativist, but they are myth creation.  So the act of creating a fable or myth can be used in a variety of social functions.  

Quote from: AlanIt seems to me that the social function of narrativist play includes intentionally having a relationship to a value standard or ethic.   The function seems to be to create personalized stories that address an ethic that players find interesting.  In a sense it's confirmation of the player's ethics, and also exploration of those ethics, and practice application of different ethical interpretations.  

Creating personalized stories is not a social function.  However, confirming player's ethics would be a social function.  This sounds to me very similar to the Support function.  i.e. A support group explores and confirms it's members ethics.  Indeed, they are often explictly formed to confirm particular ethical values such as not drinking alcohol.  This doesn't have to be follow any particular group formality.  i.e. A social function of all coming over to someone's house and offering confirmation/support can be informal.  

Quote from: AlanHow about the term Fabulation - the create of fables.  At least one use of "Fable" includes a component of ethical exploration.

Like Myth-Creation, this is not a social function.  You can create fables for any number of social functions.  Fables told repeatedly to children, for example, will have a very different function from fables told once among a group of adult friends.

Quote from: John Kim

Quote from: clehrich

Quote from: John Kim"Myth Creation" doesn't work as a social function, in my opinion.  A myth is fiction.  This scheme asks what is happening with the real people.

I also dislike the term "myth creation" fairly intensely, though oddly enough for quite the opposite reason.  I think scholarship on myth for the last 60-odd years has pretty clearly demonstrated that myth does indeed have social functions, which are horrendously complex and intricate.

Sure, myths have various social functions in practice -- but I still contend that "myth creation" isn't a category of social function.  It's like having a category "scientification" for the creating of science fiction stories.  Do sci-fi stories have social functions?  Sure.  But specifying sci-fi doesn't specify a social function.  For example, real-world myths as studied by scholars are generally part of an oral and/or written tradition.  The same stories are repeated over many years, which passes values from one generation to the next.  But this is not the case for RPGs.

I understand what you're saying, John.  Really I do.  But as it happens, you're quite wrong about myth.

I don't want to preach a big lecture about myth here, but those constantly repeated myths that you're thinking of are the products of incessant and continual reification by members of the cultures in question.  Epic, saga, all that -- that isn't myth as told by living mythic cultures.  What we find when we look at living mythic cultures, by which I mean cultures that still use myth and don't just repeat it, is that these things are highly flexible and change constantly.  It's a lot more like listening to jazz than it is like listening to different performances of a classical piece -- the improvisational is to the fore.

People seem to tell myths to work through social difficulties.  You have three clans, but then one has lost most of its members because nobody seems to be having boys much these days, and another clan has had a lot of boys lately, and suddenly there's an imbalance.  So where once you had the Eagle, Bear, and Turtle clans, now you split the Turtles (because there are a lot of them) and you end up with Eagle and Turtle, but there are two kinds of Turtle, Yellow and Gray.  And pretty soon you'll find that there's some myth about why there are two kinds of turtles, and it might mention something about bears being killed.  The thing is, what we see when we encounter myth is just a society with an Eagle and two Turtle clans, and a myth that says something about bears.  And if we don't know what happened in the past -- which usually we don't -- we can't figure out what the hell this thing is really about.  And the temptation is to read the myth as telling us something about the good Turtle cooperating with his brother and the bad Bear and so on.  But that has nothing to do with what the natives are actually on about.

Myths, as a rule, are not moral fables.  Not when told by living mythic cultures.  You get the apparent heroes committing incest and murdering their fathers and all of this has no explanation whatever.  Very close examination, if we're lucky, will reveal that these people are thinking through very complicated social problems (the above example is exceedingly simplified) in terms that we don't use.

The basic social function of myth appears to be to work through social difficulties and come up with social solutions.  If the best a people can work out through myth is that the Leopard clan and the Eagle clan really should be one clan, because by a kind of mythic logic the Leopard really needs to be the Eagle's brother, you will soon find that Leopard and Eagle clan members cannot marry, because this would be incest.  And so forth.

My objection to the notion of "myth" in narrativism is simply that myths are not "stories" in the sense meant by Story Now.  And using Campbell makes it worse.  But social functions of myth?  Oh yes.  That's the whole point, you see, and it's taken most of a century to even begin to understand what it's all about.

[Edit:

If you want to see just how horribly difficult all this is, read Claude Levi-Strauss's The Raw and the Cooked and go on through the remaning three volumes, From Honey to Ashes, The Origin of Table Manners, and The Naked Man.  His analyses are certainly not always correct, but I think on the whole it's generally agreed that we can't seriously talk about myths in the Americas without going through these books -- which is one reason why there isn't a lot of talk about myth in the Americas these days.]

Quote from: clehrichI don't want to preach a big lecture about myth here, but those constantly repeated myths that you're thinking of are the products of incessant and continual reification by members of the cultures in question.  Epic, saga, all that -- that isn't myth as told by living mythic cultures.  What we find when we look at living mythic cultures, by which I mean cultures that still use myth and don't just repeat it, is that these things are highly flexible and change constantly.  

OK, I think we're miscommunicating here.  You're objecting that repeated-myth and myth-that-people-read-about and myth-as-expressed-by-Campbell aren't the real myth, which is the ever-changing myth of "living mythic cultures".  But for a community of modern, non-anthropologically-folk (i.e. most of us here at the Forge), I think that trying to insist on a specialized use of the word "myth" that only applies to specific cultures isn't a good idea.  In other words, I was using the word "myth" in its more broad, layman's sense.  You can decry it as uneducated, which I'll freely admit to.  I'm sorry for any passing on of imprecise language regarding myth, but I suspect I'm reflecting my peers here.  

Quote from: clehrichThe basic social function of myth appears to be to work through social difficulties and come up with social solutions.  If the best a people can work out through myth is that the Leopard clan and the Eagle clan really should be one clan, because by a kind of mythic logic the Leopard really needs to be the Eagle's brother, you will soon find that Leopard and Eagle clan members cannot marry, because this would be incest.  And so forth.

My objection to the notion of "myth" in narrativism is simply that myths are not "stories" in the sense meant by Story Now.  And using Campbell makes it worse.  But social functions of myth?  Oh yes.  That's the whole point, you see, and it's taken most of a century to even begin to understand what it's all about.

OK, here's the meat of it for me.  So "working through social difficulties and coming up with social solutions" seems to me a good expression of social function.  So Problem-solving might be a simplified term for this.  Again, this sounds similar to my Support category.  Perhaps they should be merged, or conversely distinguished into separate categories.  

I really, really don't want to get into wrangling with you over the social function of "real myth" in real "living mythic cultures".  I will freely bow to your expertise in this regard.  The question concerning me is how do various role-playing games function in our modern culture.  This might be exactly the same, but I don't take that as a given.

Quote from: John KimOr you could celebrate a famous fable-writer's birthday by creating some new fables in honor of his tradition.  These might not be Narrativist, but they are myth creation.  So the act of creating a fable or myth can be used in a variety of social functions.  

John, I think this is not a valid dismissal.  I could have criticised your choice of "Celebrate" as a term with the same logic.  But I chose not to.  I worked within your concpet.  How about we make a pragmatic effort to find terms which can be defined into meaning, instead of looking for some ideal term which does not exist in the English language.

Quote from: John KimCreating personalized stories is not a social function.

You're wrong on this.  Creating personalized stories is the function of many social activities, paricularly those of pre-media cultures, where groups gather to confirm the identity of individuals in various rights of passage.  Such rituals are sometimes personalized.  Heck, a simple sermon in a church attemptes to personalize the fables of our culture.

Quote from: Alan

Quote from: John KimCreating personalized stories is not a social function.

You're wrong on this.  Creating personalized stories is the function of many social activities, paricularly those of pre-media cultures, where groups gather to confirm the identity of individuals in various rights of passage.  Such rituals are sometimes personalized.  Heck, a simple sermon in a church attemptes to personalize the fables of our culture.

I think we're still miscommunicating on this.  I completely agree that a sermon may be a personalized story, and that it has a social function.  But to the preacher, the story told is a means to an end.  The social function here is the real-world goal: i.e. what happens to the real people.  For the preacher, I think the goal is spiritual reflection or evangelization or somesuch.  i.e. A sermon which produces a personalized story but which has no impact on the listeners is a failure.  Another example of personalized stories would be scary stories told around a campfire.  I think these also serve a social function, but their function is not the same as the sermon's.  

Does that make sense?  I believe that creating personalized stories do have a social function, but I want to look at and classify what the social function is.  Chris had a good explanation, I thought, about the social functions of myth in some cultures -- how they would be used to suggest solutions to social problems.  The function here is the problem-solving.  

Again, the point is not to put new labels on GNS.  This isn't a re-labelling or replacement.  This is a different form of classification.  So, for example, if someone creates a story which might or not be a "fable" -- then a Fabulation category would concern itself over whether the fiction that was created constituted a "fable".  But the social function categories are different.  i.e. If a fable-creating game and another game have similar effects/roles on the real lives of the players, then they should be in the same social function category.

The terms "Therapy" and "Support" make me reflect on the games that served my LARP groups best in such a mode. I think a more accurate term for what we got out of it would be Catharsis. The game provided a safe environment in which to experiment with aspects of ourselves that we wouldn't usually express in day-to-day life.

Quote from: John KimOK, I think we're miscommunicating here.  You're objecting that repeated-myth and myth-that-people-read-about and myth-as-expressed-by-Campbell aren't the real myth, which is the ever-changing myth of "living mythic cultures".  But for a community of modern, non-anthropologically-folk (i.e. most of us here at the Forge), I think that trying to insist on a specialized use of the word "myth" that only applies to specific cultures isn't a good idea.  In other words, I was using the word "myth" in its more broad, layman's sense.  You can decry it as uneducated, which I'll freely admit to.  I'm sorry for any passing on of imprecise language regarding myth, but I suspect I'm reflecting my peers here.

We are miscommunicating, but I think in not quite the place you note here.  My point is that since there is such a strong disparity between a scholarly understanding and the "layman's" understanding, we should be extremely wary of coining a new term that uses "myth".  From my perspective, this can only lead to misunderstandings and complications that are totally unnecessary.

Quote from: John

Quote from: clehrichThe basic social function of myth appears to be to work through social difficulties and come up with social solutions.  If the best a people can work out through myth is that the Leopard clan and the Eagle clan really should be one clan, because by a kind of mythic logic the Leopard really needs to be the Eagle's brother, you will soon find that Leopard and Eagle clan members cannot marry, because this would be incest.  And so forth.

I really, really don't want to get into wrangling with you over the social function of "real myth" in real "living mythic cultures".  I will freely bow to your expertise in this regard.  The question concerning me is how do various role-playing games function in our modern culture.  This might be exactly the same, but I don't take that as a given.

No, I don't think they're the same at all.  I think there is definitely some fascinating overlap, but analyzing it closely is going to take a lot of time and work, and will require vast reading in a number of areas.  In the meantime, I am hesitant to use the term "myth" in reference to the social function of a quite different form, i.e. RPGs.

I think we're on the same page, really.  I'm just saying that "myth" is probably a term we should sidestep if possible.  Does that make sense?

Quote from: clehrichI think we're on the same page, really.  I'm just saying that "myth" is probably a term we should sidestep if possible.  Does that make sense?

I am 100% agreed.  So what do you think about Support and/or Problem-solving and/or White Rat's suggestion Catharsis.  Should they all be distinct?  On the one hand, I suppose Support and Catharsis are both ways of helping individuals through their problems.  i.e. So you might go to a support group only for a limited period of time.  The group is there to support the individuals through a process, but may dissolve thereafter.  Catharsis feels rather more specific, and it seems like it overlaps with Support (i.e. you can have a moment of release at least very much like catharsis within a group).  I'm not sure if Support is a good word, but I think these two belong together.  

The problem-solving you brought up is mucking with the relations within a permanent group.  So the function is to shape how the social dynamic works for all other interactions.  Your examples were on the level of clan or tribe.  But here we are more at an individual level, which I think is rather different.  

I guess I should bring up here forming friendships or other relationships through gaming.  For example, I got to know my wife through her playing in my Champions game and our going to Vampire LARPs together.  But this seems to overlap with at least Celebration.  Parties are often very pointedly intended as ways to meet people.  And "make friends" seems rather different than tribal negotiations of your earlier examples.  So I'm not what this category should be.  So subfunctions touched on may include:
- Making friends and/or courtship.
- Establishing ties and/or boundaries for existing friendships.
- Resolving problems/issues which are causing friction.

My inclination, since you ask, is to think that the social functions of different modes of gaming are not likely to be tremendously distinct.  There are, however, a few points worth considering if you want to follow this up.

1. Make a distinction between social function and psychological function

For the functionalist anthropologist, the latter is usually inaccessible; one can only guess, and the whole point of the functionalist movement was to get away from guesswork and move to the empirical plane as much as possible.  We can, however, discuss psychological function because (a) the informants are of our culture and speak our psychological language; (b) we are ourselves experienced informants, not participant-observers (you might say that actually the term "participant-observer" fits us rather better than it does the anthropologists who normally use it); (c) the informants are of a culture that psychologizes to a considerable degree, and thus are used to considering matters in such terms (which is not the case in most tribal cultures).

2. Social function must be related to larger social contexts

If you're looking for the social function of gaming, or of kinds of gaming, the issue is not primarily (though it is secondarily) the social function within the narrow group, but rather its function with respect to the larger social context.  For example, what effect does gaming have on people's involvement with their communities?  How do gamers behave differently at work because of their hobby?  Does gaming seem to have an effect on political (in the ordinary sense) motivation?  Does the formation of a tight gaming group appear to substitute for other social bonds, making gamers more insular and isolated?  Does gaming prompt the construction of larger gaming communities?  Does gaming construct a sense of identity, and if so what identity or identities?  Does gaming commonly affect choices among romantic/sexual partners?  This doesn't eliminate the kinds of function you're talking about, but for the functionalist anthropologist the narrow-group function is primarily meaningful in relation to the large-group function and context.

3. Three levels of inquiry

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, one of the two great functionalists (the other was Bronislaw Malinowski), suggested that there were three levels of inquiry.

Purpose, the ostensible reason for an activity as expressed by the participants.  For the functionalists, this was not in the main an important part of the data.
Meaning, how the symbols and structures of the activity work together to create meaning within the community.  For the functionalists, this was again not terribly important, but more so than purpose.
Function, both psychological and social, which is to say the actual effects empirically observed to result from the activity.  Malinowski did think that psychological function was essential, where Radcliffe-Brown felt that it was not empirically observable.[/list:u]In the ensuing many years (the functionalists were kings primarily in the thirties and forties), both meaning and purpose became increasingly important to analysis, largely because it was recognized that the natives might be a lot more aware of what they were doing than these earlier fieldworkers had noticed.

4. Types of gaming

It seems to me that Narrativism, because of its focus on a moral premise, can be seen to have a clear ideological function.  That is, the players work through important social issues (ethical questions are always social) and come to conclusions about them.  Thus a Narrativist game could be seen as (in part) an experimental site for ethical examination of significant issues facing the players as social beings.  This would be an exciting direction for future investigation, because it entails that Narrativism has a largely conservative social function (i.e. it tends to validate cultural ethical norms) whereas to the players it often seems counter to the mainstream; this dynamic tension would be well worth examining.

Gamism strikes me as a good deal more difficult.  The cheap pop-psych claim might be that by allowing players to feel they have won a victory, it creates a sense of empowerment.  But this is complicated: the victories do not as a rule extend beyond the game environment.  Indeed, one might argue that such empowerment leads players not to strive for other modes of victory in the larger social framework, thus having a largely conservative social function.  But again, we're slipping into psychological rather than social function, at base.  My sense is that this is much more complicated than it might at first appear.

Simulationism seems to me by far the most complex.  I am currently grappling with this problem, and will eventually post my analysis.  Let me say briefly -- if someone wants to discuss this it should go to another thread -- that I think Sim is very tightly related to myth, and in a sense strives to have similar social functions to those of myth in living mythic cultures, although in many respects it has been divorced from those functions.  Thus it serves the psychological functions of myth without retaining the social functions in a strong sense: these are myths to be thought rather than lived.  But this is an insanely complicated issue which I'm only beginning to get my mind around.

The upshot of this fast breakdown is that gaming is relatively conservative in terms of social function.  Nar reinforces ethical norms, Gam reinforces status norms, and Sim (if my preliminary analysis is correct) reinforces symbolic structural norms.  This is, I think, at odds with our usual feeling about gaming, which is why distinguishing social function from purpose and meaning is so important.  But this is a very sketchy analysis, and it is deliberately limited to a functionalist perspective, which will tend to bias the interpretation in the direction of conservatism.

5. Distinguishing functions

I don't think you need a one-to-one relationship of types of social function to types of gaming.  I would be very surprised to find that every social function of any type of gaming is not always present in all gaming; I think it's a matter of emphasis, but I also think that what is emphasized in social function is not necessarily what "the natives" might think -- which is to say it's not necessarily going to look much like CA.

6. Reading

Since this analysis leads to recapitulating some important anthropological discussions, let me make some suggestions for reading.

Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life really invented functionalism, although Durkheim himself should not be categorized that way.  The recent translation by Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) is brilliant and extremely readable, as Durkheim is in French for those more comfortable with that language.  He essentially argues that the function of ritual and religion is to create social bonds and thus a moral authority that enforces conformity to rules without the need for a lot of policing.  He thinks that we tend to project our society's moral force as a concrete object or set of objects (e.g. a totem or a flag) because we don't like to think in raw abstractions.  His theory of "effervescence" seems to me entirely applicable to gaming, with interesting ramifications for the whole theory of social function.

Bronislaw Malinowski's Magic, Science and Religion is very readable, and will offer some clear understanding of distinctions among types of function.  Magic is for him primarily psychological, religion primarily social, and science primarily technical/practical.  His distinction have been largely overturned, but in the case of gaming such distinctions might be well worth making, albeit along different lines of division.

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's Taboo, The Frazer Lecture, 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1939), reprinted many times in many places, is perhaps the clearest basic introduction to functional anthropology ever written.  It's not very long, either.

George Homans's "Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown," American Anthropologist n.s. 43 (1941): 164-72, is an exceedingly clear reworking of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown on psychological function and its relation to social function.  Less directly applicable to gaming than the others, it is nevertheless an admirable summary and analysis and may help a good deal in understanding the implications of these theories.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard's work on Azande witchcraft, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, is a marvelous example; his little book Theories of Primitive Religion is an exceptionally good introduction to the subject until about 1950 or thereabouts, and should be required reading if one is to go further with this.

Having read all that, I do think that Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (use the French La pensee sauvage if you can, as the translation sucks) burned the functionalist approaches to the ground and salted the earth.

If someone has a website I can use, I can make the Malinowski (excerpts, but good ones), Radcliffe-Brown, and Homans stuff available in PDF form.  There are few if any copyright issues, because the texts are quite old, but you might theoretically get an angry letter and have to take them down.

Hope this helps in some way.

Wow, Chris, that's everything I've forgotten since my Anthropology degree twenty years ago.

It's interesting, in the face of the anti-rpg statements made by religious groups that you assert role-playing has a conservative function.  I've often thought the accusations of "devil worshipping fringe behavior" were utterly wrong.  Even the geekiest players are looking for some kind of social confirmation.

But that's off topic.

Let's be careful not to confuse social confirmation of ethics important to players, with sorting through personal problems.  No Narrativist play I've ever observed, or participated in, appeared to be therapy.  While the ethical center of a particular narrativist play has to be meaningful to the players, it doesn't actually have to be directly relevant to the their current lives.

And I think Fabulation is an acceptable term for what you describe as the function narrativism.   We're getting together to confirm or explore our ethical beliefs by spinning fables with an ethical center.

Quote from: John KimI think we're still miscommunicating on this.  I completely agree that a sermon may be a personalized story, and that it has a social function.  But to the preacher, the story told is a means to an end.  The social function here is the real-world goal: i.e. what happens to the real people.  For the preacher, I think the goal is spiritual reflection or evangelization or somesuch.  i.e. A sermon which produces a personalized story but which has no impact on the listeners is a failure.  Another example of personalized stories would be scary stories told around a campfire.  I think these also serve a social function, but their function is not the same as the sermon's.

I don't like this example at all, because I think it confuses the issue, but at the same time I think you're dead-on in what you're saying.

Evans-Pritchard remarked that "for the social anthropologist, religion is what religion does," or something very close to that.  He was a functionalist, on the whole, and this is a nice statement of the primary thrust of that movement.  For the analyst of this stripe, gaming is what gaming does.  The preacher's sermon's purpose is likely to guide and elevate the minds and souls of his congregation toward God.  The sermon's meaning is a means to that end, couched in symbols and structures like the Bible, current events of interest to the congregation, and so forth.  The sermon's function may well be radically different, e.g. to unify the congregation as a group with an institutional identity.  And as John indicates, you cannot talk about the function of the sermon if there is no one to hear it: in that case, it does nothing, so though it may still have the same purpose and meaning, it has no function whatever except possibly a psychological function for the preacher.

If you want a church-y example, consider a mainstream Protestant Sunday service in toto.  There are a range of possible and active functions here: identification with the church, leading to congregational unity; dispelling of social anxiety (if I don't go to church people will think I'm immoral); expression and manipulation of status levels (who sits where, who wears the biggest hat, etc.); renewed contact with an extended set of neighbors and kin (look, little Johnny's getting quite big, and isn't that the Jones's baby?); expression of interest and importance (everyone wears their Sunday best); etc.  The preacher of the sermon can take a fair bit of this and "spin" it in a particular direction, using known symbols; for example, he might use the opportunity to make a political statement (abortion is bad, we should all welcome our gay congregants, etc.), or a general ethical point (you're all wearing very expensive clothing, but think of the needy), and so on.  The point is that the sermon takes a range of possible meanings and guides participant interpretation toward a narrowed range, strengthening social function in particular directions.  In Protestant churches, and more recently Catholic ones, this is often explicit and deliberate, in the sense that sermons very commonly do have a clear social real-world function which is very close to the meaning and purpose, but the function is rather broader: the preacher cannot close out all other possible functions through the manipulation of meaning.

QuoteAgain, the point is not to put new labels on GNS.  This isn't a re-labelling or replacement.  This is a different form of classification.  So, for example, if someone creates a story which might or not be a "fable" -- then a Fabulation category would concern itself over whether the fiction that was created constituted a "fable".  But the social function categories are different.  i.e. If a fable-creating game and another game have similar effects/roles on the real lives of the players, then they should be in the same social function category.

I'd take this just a little farther.  I think that social function is not going to be limited to CA in any way; there will be a wide range of functions that may be more or less emphasized by particular CAs, but will also be manipulated and emphasized by a lot of other factors.  One of the most interesting things here, and this is something the functionalists didn't generally recognize, is that a central operation in the formation of a ritual (including gaming) is to attempt to exclude some factors as extraneous; at the same time, those factors are always present, even if only by their exclusion, which is really a type of inclusion that creates what might be called a "haunting" presence.  

To put that more clearly, one factor present in any game is what the players wear.  But in tabletop play, this is commonly excluded as a relevant factor.  The point is that this is an assertion, not a fact: the clothing worn does matter, and affects what the game does, but it is a factor that the players generally agree to pretend does not matter.  And we see with the Big Model that clothing choices barely fit in at all; if they do, it's under that gigantic rubric "social contract," but there it would usually be something like, "Under this social contract, clothing choices don't matter."  But they do; this is an ideological claim, not an empirical one.

I hope that I don't muddy the waters by making this suggestion, but I've often likened Narrativist play as having the same social functions that getting together with various bands has had, when the specific goal of the meeting is to communally write original songs.

That being, everyone in the group is getting together to create something that they agree has artistic value or merit. Hard or simple, derivative or original, what matters is that at the end of the day, you're looking at what you think is a work of art. The conflicts inherent to that goal mirror the ones presented by the "hard question" in Ron's Nar essay: if Bill's our friend, but he can only really pull off a few basic rock guitar riffs, and it's messing with the artistic value of the songs we want to make, how do we deal with the possibility of kicking him out? It's a social problem. It wouldn't be a social problem (or not as big of one, or a different one) if the band was only interested in doing Nirvana covers, or if they were there to just jam out and see how well each person can play his own instrument (or see what the hardest song they can pull off is, etc).

In other words, I think it might be somewhat misleading to look at how people deal with the ethical/moral aspect of Narrativist play to identify it's primary social function among the participants, or at least to assume that it's got the lion's share. A Celebratory gathering (as per the category in the original post) can be just as theraputic or cathartic under the right circumstances, or confirming of mores and values solely through content. If everyone finds the stuff that villains do in a Call of Cthulhu game repulsive, it doesn't necessarily make it Narrativist.

And I disagree with the notion that playing a role-playing game produces no product, either. To me, a Transcript is a product despite its ephemeral nature. An evening of improvisational theatre, for example, certainly produces a product. If someone taped the performance, the performers could go back and watch it and do it over again for another audience. Doing so, however, would remove much of the original value to the performers of doing it the first time: instead of trying to create something of artistic merit spontaneously, they'd be trying to deliver an established work credibly.

I can't pin it to the wall because my command of social anthropology is pedestrian at best, but I think that there's more than semantics behind the social difference between the those two things. Yes, the analogy's a little off because in RPGs, the players are both performer and audience. However, I think the "getting together to make something of lasting artistic value" angle is an important one to think about, to explore the social function in terms of that.

I'm not sure that Gamist play traditionally incorporates concern for the artistry of the Transcript. I can see Sim as potentially (but not exclusively) being concerned with the artistic value of what's being called the Model/Ideal, but that's not something that's necessarily established in play, just confirmed by play. And while it's true that any play could produce a Transcript that, if written down, would be a story in the Lit 101 sense, the difference to note is that when the game is being played, it's the Narrativist who primarily cares about whether or not it's going to turn out that way (whether or not he realizes it, perhaps).

Ethical/moral issues, in my mind, are secondary to the social functions of getting together to do what's been awkwardly described above. Addressing them is a necessary function of producing a story's theme, hence it is done. And there may be secondary (and tertiary, ad infinitum) social things going on there... but these things strike me as a by-product, and not necessarily related to the social foundation of the interaction.

I realize that we're trying to decouple these "social function" terms from the Big Model CA's, but it struck me as an important thing to note. And I also realize that "artistic merit" is a hideously unhelpful term, but I don't think its subjectivity from group to group necessarily contradicts the rest of the post.

So... am I way off base here? Or on to something?


-Landon Darkwood

With the important reminder that Landon is talking about Narrativist play...

Quote from: Landon Darkwoodeveryone in the group is getting together to create something that they agree has artistic value or merit. ...
In other words, I think it might be somewhat misleading to look at how people deal with the ethical/moral aspect of Narrativist play to identify its primary social function among the participants, or at least to assume that it's got the lion's share.

I'll buy that.  But as I say, I don't really accept the notion of primary and secondary social functions; they're all functions.  So you've neatly identified a function here that is different from but complementary to the ethical/moral function.

QuoteAnd I disagree with the notion that playing a role-playing game produces no product, either. To me, a Transcript is a product despite its ephemeral nature.

This strikes me as hinting toward a third function, not a disagreement per se.  That is, I think it is not the case that all forms of gaming in any way emphasize the product, and indeed I think focus on the product of the gaming process (rather than the process itself) is often a serious problem in analysis.  But I agree entirely that Narrativist play seems to stress this constructive aim.  What is worth consideration beyond this is what the function of such a product might be.  As you say,

Quoteit's the Narrativist who primarily cares about whether or not it's going to turn out that way (whether or not he realizes it, perhaps).

Where I don't agree is:

QuoteEthical/moral issues, in my mind, are secondary to the social functions of getting together to do what's been awkwardly described above. Addressing them is a necessary function of producing a story's theme, hence it is done. And there may be secondary (and tertiary, ad infinitum) social things going on there... but these things strike me as a by-product, and not necessarily related to the social foundation of the interaction.

I don't see that there's any need to prioritize here.  All of these things are real effects, and all seem to be important.  To suggest that one is more important than the others strikes me as potentially leading toward One True Way-type normative claims.

QuoteI realize that we're trying to decouple these "social function" terms from the Big Model CA's, but it struck me as an important thing to note.

See, to my mind, the Big Model CA's are useful data, because they represent the way a number of designers and players have come to formulate how gaming actually works.  One might say, contrary to the functionalists,(1) that the Big Model constitutes an example of highly self-conscious analysis of purpose (the "why we do this" part).  But Radcliffe-Brown was right that we cannot elevate such claims to the status of certainty; to do so merely reinforces one ideology at the expense of others.(2)  Thus this "decoupling" (nice term, BTW) is indeed essential, but certainly should not make us lose sight of the value of the Big Model as data.

I have no problem with "artistic merit" as a term, because it is a claim made within the group; that is, it falls on the side of purpose and meaning, whereas the process of assessing such merit, within the group, is a process that must have some social function.

I should stress again that I'm trying to think like a functionalist here, albeit a rather broad-minded one.  I think that this is an important step in theorizing gaming effectively, so I want to see it work.  But I also think that there are very good reasons why functionalism is good and dead, so this is all provisional: once we have a functionalist model squarely laid down and understood, we can move on to more profitable directions.  Simply skipping ahead would require vast reading; I think this is a more practical way.  My point being that I don't think, in the end, that this is going to resolve anything, but what I hope is that the ball John started rolling is going to lead us to recognize questions we hadn't even seen before.

Notes
(1) "Contrary to the functionalists" because they didn't generally think that the natives were ever particularly self-conscious about what they did; social function was something the natives never considered.

(2) Radcliffe-Brown's reason for the objection was very different, but this one still applies.

Just a small departure here:

Quote from: clerichThis would be an exciting direction for future investigation, because it entails that Narrativism has a largely conservative social function (i.e. it tends to validate cultural ethical norms) whereas to the players it often seems counter to the mainstream; this dynamic tension would be well worth examining.

Personally, I'd say that, in exploring and challenging ethical scenarios, narrativism can equally serve a revolutionary, or at the very least revisionist, social function.

This, though, arises from my experience that cultural ethical norms are usually inducted into individuals without being critically considered by the individual: if critical appraisal is part of induction, then narrativist play will most likely be conservative, and indeed part of the process of induction. If not, the introduction of critical appraisal will likely be revisionist in nature.

Thats an interesting argument Pete.  Do you then think that the very act of Narratavism implies or requires some element of critical analysis as a necessary feature of "playing it out"?

Wouldn't sim have a similar relationship to statements of reality?

I would in fact take your formulation a step further and say that critical appraisal of most social norms is actively discouraged during the individuals induction into them.  And for this reason I have a very jaundiced view of RPG having a revolutionary function because it seems primarily to me to act as vehicle for reifying your uncritically accepted norms through the uncritical acceptance of the other players.  That is, there seems to be no point at which disconfirming evidence can be brought to bear on the analysis.

Only the possibly disconfirming evidence of the actions and judgement of the other players and, to a lesser extent, the authors of the printed game: as such, it may challenge individually held norms while re-inforcing a nebulous social norm. However, in such an instance, the social norms particular to the group are in a constant state of creation and, I would hope, challenge, arising out of a dynamic consensus of the individual norms, as those norms themselves are moderated in light of challenges arising from the address of premise.

The "challenging" nature of narrativist play, as typified in the RP mainstream response to premise rich games, arises from the general assumption that RPG's are not, in play "about anything", and when they become so, they somehow cease to be fun. There has been a general lack of will in most RPG communities to any address of issues in play, or to challenge any social norms at all.

Again, we're looking at discrete functions: while the address of premise is, in itself, a challenge to the gamer social norm of not exploring issues, the methods and results of address may well serve as re-inforcing cultural or social norms and values. It may, though, equally challenge them, as in my wishy washy liberal mind I hold the possibility that the act of actively examining a meaty issue, rather than passivley accepting the given cultural values for it, one may develop a new appreciation and appraisal of those issues.

addendum: Having re-read your response, Gareth,  I see where we disagree. You pepper your post with an assumption of the uncritical acceptance of anything introduced into the SiS during play, to which I would say an unconditional not true. In fact, the whole edifice of RPG's as a social activity must allow for critical appraisal of anything introduced by any player.

Now, if you're as sure of uncritical acceptance as I'm sure of critical assessment, I think we're at a complete disconnect as regards the mechanics of RP.

Quote from: Landon DarkwoodI hope that I don't muddy the waters by making this suggestion, but I've often likened Narrativist play as having the same social functions that getting together with various bands has had, when the specific goal of the meeting is to communally write original songs.That being, everyone in the group is getting together to create something that they agree has artistic value or merit. Hard or simple, derivative or original, what matters is that at the end of the day, you're looking at what you think is a work of art.

OK, so just to check -- this is a goal of "art for art's sake", would you say?  That seems like my Work category.  I think I gave an example before of getting together for quilting or some other art/craft project.  The focus is on the product.  This might be relabelled Craft, to make this explicit.  

I definitely see Chris' point about the split of "Purpose", "Meaning", and "Function".  i.e. In your case, everyone is getting together for the agreed goal of creating a work of art.  In the terminology Chris used, that is Purpose.  In general, I think that my categories of Contest, Celebration, Support, and Craft are somewhere between Purpose and Meaning, rather than Function per se.  For example, a Contest awards social approval on the winner.  However, it is not defined what effect that has on society.  i.e. After the Contest is over, how are people's lives changed?  For the moment, I think it's enough to relate Social Function to other events.  

Quote from: Landon DarkwoodI can see Sim as potentially (but not exclusively) being concerned with the artistic value of what's being called the Model/Ideal, but that's not something that's necessarily established in play, just confirmed by play. And while it's true that any play could produce a Transcript that, if written down, would be a story in the Lit 101 sense, the difference to note is that when the game is being played, it's the Narrativist who primarily cares about whether or not it's going to turn out that way (whether or not he realizes it, perhaps).  

Ethical/moral issues, in my mind, are secondary to the social functions of getting together to do what's been awkwardly described above.  

I think the distinction you're saying is important -- but it isn't Creative Agenda as defined in the essays.  GNS Narrativism is indeed defined by dynamic address of moral/ethical issues.  However, play is always important for any Creative Agenda.  It is not just confirmation, but rather creation.  Even if, say, all the spoken lines of a performance are written out ahead of time -- it is still pursuit of art to perform them.  Consider two hypothetical RPG groups.  Both get together with the intended purpose of jointly creating a work of art with a distinct moral theme.  However, one group jointly decides on theme in advance, while the other instead decides on other aspects but leaves theme undetermined.  Both of these might have the Craft social function, but the latter is GNS Narrativist while the former is GNS Simulationist.

What about Play?

The combined learning and social reinforcement of play pretty solidly describes the social function of RPGs, as far as I've seen.

Well except for someone really doing "art for it's own sake." But when was the last time an artist admitted that all she really wanted to do was accounting, and she hates painting, finds no passion in her work, and is completely fed up with it, but because there aren't enough portraits painted in a certain way, she will paint them anyway, so that art does not lack for them.  

Hope that helps,

  -Mendel S.

Quote from: WormwoodWhat about Play?

The combined learning and social reinforcement of play pretty solidly describes the social function of RPGs, as far as I've seen.

Could you describe what you intend that to mean a little more?  To me, the word "play" describes a number of different activities.  For example, I could play in a local league soccer game.  However, that is structured as a team contest -- i.e. each player on the team tries to do their best according to the rules, and recognition is given to the winner.  

I guess one interpretation I have of the word "play" is a temporary relaxing of social boundaries.  i.e. You can do a wider range of things than you normally would.  However, there are still boundaries which can be crossed, and at some point play ends and the normal boundaries are again in force.  I think this overlaps with Celebration, though, as such a loosening is also a part of many traditional celebrations (i.e. Mardi Gras).

Quote from: pete_darbyaddendum: Having re-read your response, Gareth,  I see where we disagree. You pepper your post with an assumption of the uncritical acceptance of anything introduced into the SiS during play, to which I would say an unconditional not true. In fact, the whole edifice of RPG's as a social activity must allow for critical appraisal of anything introduced by any player.

No, not of the uncritical acceptance of anything introduced to SIS at all, I can't see how you conclude that from my argument.

I am saying, the lumpley principle serves to keep disconfirming inputs at bay, because they can just be rejected by the players at the table.  That is, the broader ideology and weltanshaung of the players will; necessarily determine what the consider to be credible, and what they consider to be incredible.

This is unlike a finished, external piece like a movie or play - the author there has an opportunity to present you with details you had never come across before, interactions you have never seen, events you were not aware of.  And the only editorial power you have is to walk out.

Thus is seems to me much more likely that a viewer of a play or movie will encounter something contradictory to their beliefes, but compellingly presented, than is remotely poossible in RPG: because RPG is almost entirely conducted by small groups with near homogenous ideologies.

Now you may think I exaggerate with the term homogenous, but not much really.  This is especially so when the group concerned is already a group of friends with what amounts to a negotiated shared understanding of the world and its workings.  Of all environments, this IMO is the least conducive to an actual challenging of common assumptions, and the most likely to simply reinforce common assumptions via the lumpley principle.

Well, I'd say that the critical examination of the norms in play is something which is often unfamiliar to the participants, and that the act of exploring issues interactively can bring a criticality to bear that can change the concensus of the group; within the group, I don't think we can see concensus opinion as a monolithic entity, it's a dynamic equilibrium.

Really, it's like any other environment where substantive issues cann be raised: there can be a participatory, critical environment, where folks can pull their own and others assumptions in new directions, or it can become, as Chris typified sim play, a form of secular ritual to confirm a set of values. This is just the same as a debating society can be the source of new insights for the members and empowerment to express and develop ideas, or it can become a maoist style "conciousness raising" group where the party line is enforced, or a self-congratulatory "aren't we great" excercise". Having been a member of all three at various times, I can confirm the power of the group to either encourage or discourage independent thought, and I think it's foolhardy to say with any certainty that the tendency is for, for example, a nar group to merely re-inforce their accepted norms rather than challenge them.

Actually, I'm equally cynical about most debating societies, also for their local nature and tendency to reinforce local norms.

As it happens, your reference to "maoist consciousness raising" sort of gives me the point; its probable that you mean this in a very different way to the way I would mean it if I said, not least because consciousness raising and enforcing the party line are very different issues in that political context.  

The very fact that you place "consciousness raising" in inverted commas implies disdain, and to denigrate it as imposing the party line - not in itself un-virtuous, it should be noted - resorts to a particular and to my mind propagandist ideology, that of red-baiting, in essence.

But its rather unlikely that in your circle of aquaintances anyone would raise such an objection; I conclude this from your erroneous (in my eyes) uses of two specific terms.  And thus I think it equally unlikely that this error (in my eyes) would be raised during a similar RPG session; the error would likely be approved, endorsed, and pass unnoticed.

I don't dispute that individuals can have different ideas about various things; but I also think the RPG context is under almost all cirucmstances far too cosy and self-reinforcing to act as a venue for this sort of challenge.

Well, as I say, I've been inside (non-rpg) groups that I've typified as all three types: as to whether a game can literally raise conciousness, as opposed to merely enforcing concensus, my experience has been that it can. Yes, it has been rare, and yes, more often RPG's are a tool of reinforcement rather than challenge. That isn't to say that, even in a group of friends that broadly agree on various social and cultural values, they can't challenge those values and change them in play which engages their values critically.

And please, don't make assumptions about how my circle of acquaintances would react to things, especially given that I count you in that circle. The error, as you see it has not passed unnoticed and been approved: it appears my norms are challenged in a social environment!

Furthermore, please don't make assumptions about the breadth or depth of my experience with these matters: the scare quotes were related very much to my personal experience of the abuse of those techniques to enforce a party line. I note you have no problem with typifying another instance as an "aren't we great" excercise, which is just as disdainful to liberal, psychological trends in group consensus building, hippy baiting if you will. Yet since that seems to chime with your view of groups, you leave it unchallenged.

I'm, like you, cynical about the ability of almost any self selected debating group to substantively change the group opinion in an abrupt way (despite having seen it on occassion), but I'm also cynical about any blanket denial of the ability of a group to change it's concensus opinions under the effect of it's members. Any functional group only has a concensus opinion as an aggregate of the individual members: indeed, I'd say that it was a sign of a functional group that the group consensus can and does change.

I've a few observations about what the social function of narrativist play is not:

- it's not therapy or catharsis

- it's not getting together to do some sort of task work.

- it's not setting out to challenge existing value standards.

- it's not art for art's sake (If I understand that phrase correctly.)  The objective is not to create art, not to be hoity-toity we're-hipper-than-thou-creators.

On the contrary, it is primarily social _play_!  And the game chooses a value standard to use as a tennis net.  

In my experience, the joy of narrativist play (ie the ultimate reason to play) comes from two sources:

1) Seeing how many angles one can "attack the net."
2) confirming values: having things turn out in the game the way you think they should in the real world.

Aside from the play aspect, I think narrativist play is ultimately conservative, seeking to confirm the values of the players.  This conservative nature, is why I first suggested "myth" creation as a function.  

If for a moment, you can accept my personal use of myth as a story that demonstrates the values of a culture (and ignore all the other connotations), you may see that the function of narrativist play is to create these stories that demonstrate values meaningfull to the players.  Because "myth" is a loaded word, I suggest Fabulation as a term instead.

Alan, I think you're committing a little synedoche here: why you play Nar has been made why we play Nar. Certainly, challenging my own opinions is one reason I play nar rather than sim.

Also, looking down your list of what Nar play isn't, every single one of those reasons is as social as the one you accept. The creation of art, group therapy, challenging personal assumptions, even "a task of work", are all of social value, as much as the confirmation of values, if not more so. Saying that Nar play is social grants as much insight as saying you play to have fun: well, yeah, but it gets us no further in a substantive discussion of the social functions of Nar play, or why it's fun.

I fully accept that nar play is likely to confirm the concensus values of the group, but the possibility is there to challenge the values as much as to confirm them.

Sim play, by contrast, seems to me to be more in the mode of ritual use of myths, since it holds that certain aspects of play are to be held as the model to be celebrated. The relationship of nar to community myths is that of creation, both of the myths and the establishment of the values they epitomize. To my mind, in a nar group we do not know the group values for sure until they are established by the address of premise*, whereas in sim we do, since it's bound up in the choice of what is to be celebrated in play, and indeed contstrains what is acceptable in play.

In these discussions of the normalizing role of Nar, it's assumed that once the lines are drawn, they will never be redrawn by a group, and that a group will never consensually challenge their own values, except with a specific view to confirm them. And in my experience, that's odd.

*more accurately, play is driven by maintenance of illusion that we don't...

I certainly did not want to say that Nar definietly cannot act as a venue for challenging personal values.  That is, I fully recognise that it is possible.

My argument rather is that IMO it lends itself to this social function rather less well than wholly external works, which do not invoke the audiences consent until the end.  As a result there seems to me to be more room (in such works) to perform the kind of exercises where you set up up a challenge with an apparent solution and then demonstrate that this solution is actually worse than another, less conventional solution.  The reason for this is the audience has essentially no choice but to stick with the singular and remote author until they make it all the way to the conclusion, at which point they can then pass judgement on the implied argument as a whole.

But in RPG, it is not clear to me that play can ever proceed past a point which contradicts a sizable minority of group members, because they will probably not have been persuaded as yet to give up their existing position.  But if consent is NOT granted, then play probably cannot proceed to a point at which  the non-conventional solution can be demonstrated.

Anyway, the point was much more that I see inherent limits to such a necessarily consensual medium.  Strengths, too, in that the support of colleagues can facilitate exploring things that the group holds to as a subset of broader society, but which broader society does not.  That is, the very self-reinforcing nature of the closed group can act as a shield from what would otherwise be standing criticism within broader society.

Okay, I can see I was overstating your case. Yeah, radical change in views is unlikely, but not vanishingly so, in a consensual environment.

And to my mind, any active examination of accepted norms is all to the good, whether they end up confirmed or weakened.

Hmm... what I see as emerging after a chellenging Nar session is a stronger set of norms within the group than at the outset, whether or not the norms are the same as they were before the session, if that makes sense. The beliefs of the members of the group regarding the premise will be more clearly defined, if different from how they were at the outset.

I can contrast that to Sim play which, to my mind, serves to reinforce through acceptance, rather than reinforce through challenge.

Quote from: pete_darbyAlan, I think you're committing a little synedoche here: why you play Nar has been made why we play Nar. Certainly, challenging my own opinions is one reason I play nar rather than sim.

Also, looking down your list of what Nar play isn't, every single one of those reasons is as social as the one you accept. The creation of art, group therapy, challenging personal assumptions, even "a task of work", are all of social value, as much as the confirmation of values, if not more so. Saying that Nar play is social grants as much insight as saying you play to have fun: well, yeah, but it gets us no further in a substantive discussion of the social functions of Nar play, or why it's fun.

Hi Pete,

You'll note that my post said "In my experience" - and I admit, I edited out another such framing comment in rewriting the message.  I can see narrativist play as also exploring value standards to see what the player's think about them as well as confirmation of their accepted standards.  I still think the function is to affirm whatever conclusion the players come to.

But in your second paragraph you're confusing "social value" with value standards.  Sure, many things are of social value - but not everything focuses dirtectly on value standards - by which I really mean ethics (the word I've been avoiding because it's popular meaning is very fuzzy.)

Finally, we have to admit that _all_ of these "functions of roleplaying" are subcateogries of social activities and things of social value AND play activities.  We can't separate those things out as they are the realm containing the subcategories we're discussing.

I propose the following:

The social function of all play is to provide an arena where skills and ideas can be practiced and enjoyed without threatening harm to the participants or change to the greater society they are part of.

The social function of gamist play is to express competition through play.

The social function of simulationist play is to celebrate an agreed ideal context through play.

The social function of narrativist play is to affirm (or form) a relationship to a value (aka ethical) standard through play.  That expression may push limits, subvert, or confirm a particular standard.

The social function of therapy is outside the realm of play.  As is that of work.  Both of these endevour to make changes that are not isolated from the greater society.

Alan, I really, honestly, don't know why you're ringfencing play from social and personal change. You're statement:

QuoteThe social function of all play is to provide an arena where skills and ideas can be practiced and enjoyed without threatening harm to the participants or change to the greater society they are part of.

is weakened to my eye by the inclusion of the part I've italicised. The removal of the threat of harm is surely implicit in enjoyment, and the change to greater society may or may not occur, but is irrelevant to the definition of play by social function. Change to society may result from play, or may be expressly denied by the players, but to exclude it by definition seems odd to me.


As a result of that I see your last paragraph as circular reasoning: since play cannot include change to a greater society, it cannot also be therapy or work, as they imply change to a greater society. Take away the necessary irrelevance of a greater society to play, and therapy and work can also be potential functions of play.

Aside from that, the central functional definitions seem spot on to me: the one for nar especially seems to be an encapsulation of what I've struggled and failed to say in my exchanges with Gareth.

I'm inclined to support that ring-fencing.

What I mean by this is play behaviour is quite often behaviour that IN ANY OTHER CONTEXT would be threatening or socially unacceptable.

Under most circumstances, threatening a person with a plastic gun is play; but if you commit a real robbery by threatening a person with a plastic gun, that person may still have been in real fear of their life - not knowing it was plastic.  Thus you might be done for armed robbery even if technically speaking you were never armed.

The reason for this is that, of course, the social context of a real robbery is very different to the social context of pay.  Play DOES allow the freedom to explore behaviours that would not be feasible under any other circumstance.  Hence I greatly the favour of play as essentially an autodidactic process, and endorse Exploration as the underpinning motive of play in general.

Now its also the case IMO that a lot of play is aimed at equipping the players with skills and insight which they will subsequently use in and apply to the real world and its broader social context.  This it seems to me is the difference between Petes position and Alan's.  Play ITSELF has a social function that is IMO basically exploratory, educative, but it achieves that functionality by being a specially bounded space in which you have the freedom to do things that you would not be free to do otherwise.

Lastly, if you look at extreme sports, or even the safe entertainments like roller coasters, I think the actual or apparent threat of harm is NOT mutually exclusive with enjoyment.

Well, I still think in all cases the actual safety of all willing participants is still implicit in the enjoyment part of play, but I'm willing to grant that the appearance of danger is also a component of some play.

The important distinction in the above sentence, to distingiush it from, from Gareth's example, armed robbery, is that one party is not a willing participant. I don't think you can be an unwilling participant in play (you can be the unwilling object of another's play... as a father I know that only too well).

But I'm still not convinced by the ringfencing of wider social implications as specifically outside of play: if it's necessary for the enjoyment of the participants to ringfence their play from wider social implications, surely, again, that's implicit in the word enjoyment? And the fact remains that I don't feel that it's a given that the ringfencing is necessary for play.

I also want to make something else clear, before it's raised: I'm in total agreement with Chris Lerich's ritual theory that the play, especially in RPG's, takes place in a ritualised environment which is delineated as being "not the normal way we do things" (ritual space). This is in no way the same as saying that what happens in the ritual space does not or should not actively relate to mundane life outside the ritual space, but that the relationship is not the normal relationship of the participants to their non-ritual space. It can well be the case that ritual space is entered to deal with problems outside that space which ritual space is "better" at dealing with. Equally, it may be that ritual space is entered precisley to avoid difficult issues outside that space, or it may be that the relationship of ritual to mundane space is a gulf of irrelevance (actually, I personally think the latter is next to impossible to achieve, but may be a desirable fiction on the part of the participants).

Thinking of Gareth's comment that explorative functionality is primarily facilitated by being given a freedom to act without normal constraints: well, that's possibly a little overstated. I'm thinking about the games Violence and, especially, Power Kill, where the players are judged in real world terms for actions in the SiS. A comon reaction to these games are that they are not played, as they would be a violation of the very barrier that exists around the ritual space, but there's another factor. The events of the SiS are virtual, they have no consequences beyond the psychological effects on the players. Surely some of the freedom from consequence comes not just from the "ritual barrier" between play and not-play, but from the fact that nothing in the game is physically happening? And that the safety comes, at least partly, from that, quite apart form the "we're playing" signals that everyone's giving off? So when a player feels aggreived at being judged as if he'd really killed sentient beings, I feel that emotion is justified, as they have killed nothing but mental contructs.

I'd submit that RPG's are treated as a liberating, consequence free environment, because in physical terms they are.

Quote from: contracycleMy argument rather is that IMO it lends itself to this social function rather less well than wholly external works, which do not invoke the audiences consent until the end.  As a result there seems to me to be more room (in such works) to perform the kind of exercises where you set up up a challenge with an apparent solution and then demonstrate that this solution is actually worse than another, less conventional solution.  The reason for this is the audience has essentially no choice but to stick with the singular and remote author until they make it all the way to the conclusion, at which point they can then pass judgement on the implied argument as a whole.

This is an interesting point.  It seems that the style of role-playing would be a factor in how much this is true.  i.e. All role-playing is consensual, but there are varying degrees of centrality of authorship.  This is one of the axes of the 3D Model, though some centralized play includes Illusionism and Participationism.  So a game with greater centrality of authorship would mean that a point can be more completely made.  

This reminds me of the "Immortal Tales" game which I played with Chris Lehrich, Mark Kobrak, and David Covin.  That was played using a variant of Theatrix, and it was fairly centralized -- i.e. the GM pretty much controlled the plot.  However, we rotated in troupe style so each player took a turn as GM.  This perhaps would be a more effective forum for showing challenging points of view, as compared to games with a high degree of player control.  

Quote from: pete_darbyHmm... what I see as emerging after a chellenging Nar session is a stronger set of norms within the group than at the outset, whether or not the norms are the same as they were before the session, if that makes sense. The beliefs of the members of the group regarding the premise will be more clearly defined, if different from how they were at the outset.

I can contrast that to Sim play which, to my mind, serves to reinforce through acceptance, rather than reinforce through challenge.

It seems to me that this is a possible outcome of Narrativism, but not the only one.  GNS Narrativism doesn't define a relation to player's real-world social norms.  i.e. What is required is that the player make an answer that addresses Premise, but it need not be her real-world view.  So I think real-world beliefs aren't necessarily clarified to the group -- though there could be a subset of Narrativism where this is true.  So, some Narrativist play will challenge and clarify to the group what each players' ethics are.  

This is important because there is the alternate function of the game being a ritual space where the players can try on different beliefs or behaviors without judgement or consequence.  This is a contradictory goal, it seems to me.  i.e. If the goal is to expose, clarify, and reinforce the players' real-world ethics, then they should not feel free to act out differently from their real-world ethics.  

However, I feel that the relaxed ritual space still has consequences.  Yes, doing something in an RPG is not the same as doing it in real life.  However, playing in an RPG can and does affect people's relationships and outlooks.

Quote from: John KimThis is important because there is the alternate function of the game being a ritual space where the players can try on different beliefs or behaviors without judgement or consequence.  This is a contradictory goal, it seems to me.  i.e. If the goal is to expose, clarify, and reinforce the players' real-world ethics, then they should not feel free to act out differently from their real-world ethics.

On the contrary, this is a fairly classic way for ritualization to operate.

Victor Turner's theory of initiation rituals and what he liked to call "liminality" (following Van Gennep, Les rites de passage) emphasized exactly this dimension.  He gives the example of Ndembu kingship rites, what you might call "coronation" rites, called kanongesha.  In one stage of this, the king-to-be is stripped of all his badges of office (as a prince or whatever), and in fact stripped naked, then tossed into a muddy pit beside the road.  Everyone in the society is encouraged to come and revile him -- words only -- to the best of their abilities.  Spitting is occasionally observed.  Physical violence or degradation (e.g. urinating on him) is not permitted.

Now the Ndembu say that the point of this is to remind the man that he is only a man after all, so that once he gets to be king he will understand and defend the oppressed and the poor.  Turner was no functionalist, but you might call this the "purpose."

Turner's analysis suggests that at the same time (this would be function, not apparent to the Ndembu) this operates precisely to underscore the absolute authority of the king upon his coronation.  Very simplistically (just because I don't want to go into the details here) you might say that because ordinary folks have had an opportunity to "get in their digs" at the king during the kanongesha, they have to accept that they won't be able to do this again during his kingship.  In short, this ritualization process that distinguishes the kanongesha from all other times and spaces also stresses certain rules that must never be violated precisely by permitting their violation during the ritual.  To put it differently, the ritual, by giving the illusion of freedom, deceives the people into thinking that they have in some sense chosen to accept their king's inviolate position.

Thus ritual spaces are excellent places to do radical and unorthodox things without ever actually challenging -- and in fact actually strengthening -- social norms.  This was part of what I was getting at in my ritual essay (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/26/): from one perspective at least, gaming, by deflecting a desire for political action or change into a protected ritual space, gives the illusion of having actually done something and thus serves a potentially conservative social function.  I'm not wedded to that, because I think there are so many other dimensions at the same time, but it's worth considering.

Quote from: clehrich

Quote from: John KimThis is important because there is the alternate function of the game being a ritual space where the players can try on different beliefs or behaviors without judgement or consequence.  This is a contradictory goal, it seems to me.  i.e. If the goal is to expose, clarify, and reinforce the players' real-world ethics, then they should not feel free to act out differently from their real-world ethics.

On the contrary, this is a fairly classic way for ritualization to operate.
...
Thus ritual spaces are excellent places to do radical and unorthodox things without ever actually challenging -- and in fact actually strengthening -- social norms.  This was part of what I was getting at in my ritual essay (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/26/): from one perspective at least, gaming, by deflecting a desire for political action or change into a protected ritual space, gives the illusion of having actually done something and thus serves a potentially conservative social function.  I'm not wedded to that, because I think there are so many other dimensions at the same time, but it's worth considering.

Hmmm.  I agree with what you wrote here.  I also don't see how we're disagreeing, though.  It seems to me that the Ndembu ritual which you describe demonstates my point.  It does not, in fact, expose and clarify people's real-world ethics.  i.e. If there are tribe members who are actually rebellious will act the same as many others.  It may have an aggregate effect of reinforcing social norms, but it does not expose and clarify the true ethics of participants.  If anything, it hides them via the illusion you describe.  

Perhaps this is a miscommunication?  i.e. I said "expose, clarify, and reinforce" -- and you interpreted that I was saying that such ritual couldn't reinforce?  The "expose" and "clarify" are essential to my statement, and I agree that the ritual space can reinforce norms while also allowing such acting out.  

Gary Fine, in his book Shared Fantasy found that the role-playing games which he studied did not have this element of reversal.  i.e. The in-game power and status relations mirrored the out-of-game power and status relations.  This seems consistent with my experience.  The game would generally reinforce the existing relations.  Challenges could take place within the game, and these would be microcosms for a real-world challenge.  So, for example, if someone's character tries to take over as party leader, that expresses his desire to take over the status of the current leader's player.  

Now, this may not be true of all games.  Perhaps some games are reversals like the ritual you describe.  A game which encourages director-stance power for players might give the illusion of power while still implicitly reinforcing the social power of the GM.  Then there is troupe-style play, which may be similar.

I'm coming in late, and not to be too much of a bastard, but in terms of looking at the relationship of GNS modes to social reasons for performing them, previously the thought was that such motives were multi-variate. That is, I agree with Marco that there seem to be many social reasons why to play in any particular mode. In fact, GNS is strongly said to be a behavioral model, since it only speaks to where the conflicts in the observed behaviors occur, not in terms of why the person wants the behavior in the first place.

Which is to say that if this is true, then no one to one can be found. Indeed, it's likely that there are many reasons for wanting, say, simulationism. All GNS says is that, in not getting their desire met, the player desiring simulationism will be unsatisfied. It specifically does not say what that desire is.

So aren't we looking for something here that can't exist?

That's not to say that the social reasons don't exist - I'd say that every one mentioned so far does exist, in fact. Just that you're not going to find any subset that's creates a model of mutually exclusive drives. Meaning that, yeah, I might come to play a gamism sort of game in order to compete in order to feel supported by my peers in the competitive environment, and to have the catharsis of victory. Yadda, yadda.

Mike

Quote from: Mike HolmesIndeed, it's likely that there are many reasons for wanting, say, simulationism. All GNS says is that, in not getting their desire met, the player desiring simulationism will be unsatisfied. It specifically does not say what that desire is.

So aren't we looking for something here that can't exist?

That's not to say that the social reasons don't exist - I'd say that every one mentioned so far does exist, in fact. Just that you're not going to find any subset that's creates a model of mutually exclusive drives. Meaning that, yeah, I might come to play a gamism sort of game in order to compete in order to feel supported by my peers in the competitive environment, and to have the catharsis of victory. Yadda, yadda.

I thought I was clear about this from the start.  I am not looking exclusively for a one-to-one correspondence with GNS, nor do I expect to find one.  What I am looking for is some model and/or loose terminology to express distinctions in social function.  The categories don't have to be binary on/off or perfectly mutually exclusive.  But they have to say something more than a blanket statement like "all games serve several social functions".  

Not all role-playing games will have exactly the same social functions.  So I want to be able to talk about what social functions a game serves, and most importantly how it differs from a different game's social functions.  I think that these distinctions may be important for understanding games in practice.

Well, I understand that this was said at the start. Yet somehow lots of options have been rejected for "GNS-ish" reasons. Like it can't be catharsis, because that's a subset of support. Why aren't these both social reasons simply on different levels?

Put another way, it seems like you're trying to generate a model of some sort, but other than "it probably doesn't have anything to do with GNS" we don't really know what the model is supposed to be about. If it's just a lilst of reasons, why reject any? What criteria are being used here?

Mike

Quote from: Mike HolmesWell, I understand that this was said at the start. Yet somehow lots of options have been rejected for "GNS-ish" reasons. Like it can't be catharsis, because that's a subset of support. Why aren't these both social reasons simply on different levels?

Put another way, it seems like you're trying to generate a model of some sort, but other than "it probably doesn't have anything to do with GNS" we don't really know what the model is supposed to be about. If it's just a lilst of reasons, why reject any? What criteria are being used here?

Well, I'm open to comment on this.  However, my main criterion has been that it has to be a social function.  So I don't accept categories which are based on what happens in the fictional space (i.e. whether the transcript has a genre or theme, whether the theme was pre-created, etc.).  It has to be based on what happens to the people (and their social relations) after the game.  

I also want to at least acknowledge redundancy and overlap among suggestions.  That's not rejecting reasons, IMO, but rather trying to put them in relation to each other.  i.e. If there are two suggestions like "competition" and "contest", I'd like to at least note that they seem highly overlapping.  What I said about catharsis was just...

Quote from: John KimSo what do you think about Support and/or Problem-solving and/or White Rat's suggestion Catharsis.  Should they all be distinct?  On the one hand, I suppose Support and Catharsis are both ways of helping individuals through their problems.  i.e. So you might go to a support group only for a limited period of time.  The group is there to support the individuals through a process, but may dissolve thereafter.  Catharsis feels rather more specific, and it seems like it overlaps with Support (i.e. you can have a moment of release at least very much like catharsis within a group).  I'm not sure if Support is a good word, but I think these two belong together.

I don't feel like this is arbitrary rejection of Catharsis.  I'm just trying to establish the boundaries and/or overlap with Support.

Quote from: Mike Holmes... That is, I agree with Marco that there seem to be many social reasons why to play in any particular mode. In fact, GNS is strongly said to be a behavioral model, since it only speaks to where the conflicts in the observed behaviors occur, not in terms of why the person wants the behavior in the first place.

Which is to say that if this is true, then no one to one can be found. Indeed, it's likely that there are many reasons for wanting, say, simulationism. All GNS says is that, in not getting their desire met, the player desiring simulationism will be unsatisfied. It specifically does not say what that desire is.

So aren't we looking for something here that can't exist?

No, you're taking GNS as a known fact and a complete model, whereas the question of social function assumes as a given that GNS, like any other form of meaning or purpose, is important data but not itself a scientific model of what happens.

The whole point of a functionalist model would be to observe empirically what does in fact happen socially, and totally disregard everything else.  There may be problems with such a model, but your criticism misses the mark.  For example, "there are many reasons for wanting, say, simulationism."  Sure, that's probably true, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the social function of gaming.  It presumes that simulationism is a specific and absolute type of gaming, which is precisely what a functionalist model would have to assume was not true until proven otherwise.

For example, let's say the natives say there are three kinds of ritual: earth, air, and fire.  We then come along with our functionalist model and say that there are two kinds of ritual, clan-unificatory and tribe-divisive.  Your criticism in effect says that because there are three different reasons for doing ritual (earth, air, fire) this binary division misses the point.  The functionalists would in effect say that the native division is interesting but not decisive, and that the natives are focused on purpose and meaning and simply don't see the function at all.  I think they'd say that your critique falls into the native camp, denying function and promoting purpose and meaning in its stead.  But these things are simply not the same.

In essence, your criticism is that because a social-function model does not track onto GNS, it's invalid.  That's apparently not what you think you're saying, but please go back and read what you've actually said.  If you find that you didn't mean what you said, and want to clarify, I want to hear about it.  But my suspicion is that you're taking GNS as a known division within gaming, which is something that would have to be discarded as "native testimony" before beginning any serious functionalist model.

And if, by the way, you're thinking that a model that doesn't take into account native testimony is invalid, you have a point.  But to move forward, we'd have to go straight into Structuralism.  Until we have Functionalism down pat, I don't think we really want to make the move, and we'd have little basis for it anyway.

Quote from: John Kim
This is an interesting point.  It seems that the style of role-playing would be a factor in how much this is true.  i.e. All role-playing is consensual, but there are varying degrees of centrality of authorship.  This is one of the axes of the 3D Model (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12460), though some centralized play includes Illusionism and Participationism.  So a game with greater centrality of authorship would mean that a point can be more completely made.  

Yes, exactly.  Hence one of my driving interests, the attempt to formulate a methodology of organised, directed play that is neither scripted nor rail-roaded.  It is not that I want to create a better railroad, but rather that I want to find a structure that allows a gaming group to accept a package en bloc, go through it, experience it, and be able to comment on it.  

To a degree, we have a tendency to grant "credibility on credit" based on peoples social prestige.  One form of social prestige that is relevant here is that of the published author.  This is dubious on a number of levels but nevertheless, many are called but few are chosen to have their ideas mass produced in print.  I think that the credibility granted to a GM playing in the here-and-now may well be qualified by other, personal concerns arising from the players personal knowledge of the GM.  A sort  of "familiarity breeds contempt" argument.  And this can mean that the real live GM carries LESS credibility to make norm-challenging statements than a published author through their published work.

It is important that a GM aspiring to present players with ethical positions, appreciations of the world, that confront local norms should be able to DISclaim responsibility for the position, so that the position can be analysed WITHOUT reference to the GM's credibility.  Even if the GM's credibility is only masked by that of the published author, that at least allows an initially hostile reaction to be temporarily transposed to the author, hopefully for long enough for the whole peice to be executed, and the consuming audience to become fully equipped to follow the argument.

--

It has to be said though that I was hoping that someone would pick up the gauntlet I threw down in front of Pete and advance an argument that the very act of portrayal, of playing out, provides some grounds for claiming a genuine confrontation of worldviews even in the cuddliest of gaming groups.  It seems to me there is some truth to this, on the basis that THINKING a position is very different to STATING a position.  Your private thoughts are your own, and can be rationalised and adapted as circumstances demand.  But every word that comes out of your mouth takes on an existance independant of you, hangs around in other peoples memories.  Therefore, committing to an actual statement, a public pronouncement, requires (usually) rather more attention and deliberation than merely thinking a thought.  A case can be made, therefore, that the act of play in RPG prompts otherwise unlikely statements from players, and can thus serve to provoke introspection and the questioning of previous certainties.

Okay, taking on board all that gone on overnight, and to try to make this as short as possible...

I absolutely agree that, in address of premise, players may assume, personate or adopt externally value systems they themselves do not share. I also believe that, in assessing the play, they will bring to bear their own values and beliefs and test the one against the other, and, inside the group, I believe the tendency will be to reinforce the current norms of the group. While in play, while "freely" engaged in addressing premise according to or against their own norms, the norms will be applied in assessment of the events of the SiS.

In my old "actual play" case for this, I was improvising a dialogue with Polonius in Hamlet, where I was answering the question "If you saw Hamlet raping your daughter, would you stop him?" The answer was "Well, i certainly wouldn't watch." Now that was absolutley, 100% right for the interpretation of the character, but the director called a halt right there, as everybody was too freaked out, but oddly pleased with how right it was. The norms were brought to judgement of the imagined actions, but only when it was made clear that the protected space of the impro session was removed.

So even when there is a ritual space with "freedom of expression" (and some talk of lines is probably appropriate here, and possibly kpfs), there are limits to the expression, and a judgement of those expressions afterwards which has a tendency to normalize ethical or taste standards in the group.

However, back to Gareth, the act of conscious examination of troublesome external issues within the ritual space can, I think, cause at least a thoughful revision of attitudes towards those issues outside the ritual space, especially given the presence of judgement of those attitudes inside a "free" environment by others, who, in this environment, may be more likely to take up unpopular positions if they feel their not bound by the rules outside the ritual space.

So, over time, the attitudes may be normalized within the group, but this may involved moving away from the norms of greater society outside the group.

Quote from: clehrich
For example, let's say the natives say there are three kinds of ritual: earth, air, and fire.  We then come along with our functionalist model and say that there are two kinds of ritual, clan-unificatory and tribe-divisive.  Your criticism in effect says that because there are three different reasons for doing ritual (earth, air, fire) this binary division misses the point.  The functionalists would in effect say that the native division is interesting but not decisive, and that the natives are focused on purpose and meaning and simply don't see the function at all.  I think they'd say that your critique falls into the native camp, denying function and promoting purpose and meaning in its stead.  But these things are simply not the same.

I think this is sort of the whole GDS/GNS dichotomy in a nutshell. I don't know that GDS has anything to do with social function per-se but I think that the social function might best be examined in sort of GDS terms: i.e. techniques (under the Big Model).

-Marco

QuoteIn essence, your criticism is that because a social-function model does not track onto GNS, it's invalid.

Nope.

How can you say that after my further discussions with John? I'm arguing that there should not be a tracking, not that it doesn't track. Rather, I completely agree, and it was my point that two or more reasons could be attributed to any mode. What I'm criticizing is that, despite protests that we shouldn't think this way, I keep reading posts saying, "X isn't what narrativism is about, Y is!" When both could be the case.

John, I get your overlapping point, but, again, that seems to me like you're trying to create a model of atomic base elements so that we can discuss how X is competition categorized, and not Support. Well, I can't see any reason for this, since we all agree that multiple things could be behind any CA. Why not use all of the terms available? What is gained by limiting the terms in this case to a smaller set?

I may be way off base, but it smacks of trying to come up with a model that speaks to mutually exclusive bahaviors or something. If you can give me another reason, and what your criteria are for discovering the terms, I'll be right there looking for them.

How about some of the following:

• Human Contact (not for support, the mere presence of other humans is social)
  
• Building Relationships (sexual, platonic, networking, other)
  
• Education/Teaching
  
• Communal Creativity (if it's not the art created, it's the fun of making the art with others)
  
• Playtesting/Demoing (possibly for eventual monetary gain - is this support?)[/list:u]I selected the above in part because I suspect that many or all of these will not pass some criteria - but I'm not sure why. I think the fact that the thread started with "this may or may not have anything to do with GNS" has been problematic so far. Just what are we talking about here.
  
  To be clear, I think John is on to something important. It just seems that we're not sure what we're looking at at this point. At the very least, I'm not sure.
  
  Mike

Quote from: Mike HolmesWhat I'm criticizing is that, despite protests that we shouldn't think this way, I keep reading posts saying, "X isn't what narrativism is about, Y is!" When both could be the case.  

I agree 100% about this.  I guess I haven't been loud enough in disagreeing with these, but I meant that.  

Quote from: Mike HolmesJohn, I get your overlapping point, but, again, that seems to me like you're trying to create a model of atomic base elements so that we can discuss how X is competition categorized, and not Support. Well, I can't see any reason for this, since we all agree that multiple things could be behind any CA. Why not use all of the terms available? What is gained by limiting the terms in this case to a smaller set?  

Well, focus.  I mean, for the same reason that threads have topics, or any of the other models (like Stance or GNS or 3D) have a limited set of terms.  I mean, call me the oppressive hegemonist for stamping out the perfectly valid term like "chocolate" for describing games.  It's a valid term, but it's not part of what I want to talk about here.  The topic here for discussion is "social function" -- and I want to analyze and clarify suggested terms and how they relate to each other, not just make a random association word list of any terms that can be used to describe games.  

Quote from: Mike HolmesHow about some of the following:

• Human Contact (not for support, the mere presence of other humans is social)
  
• Building Relationships (sexual, platonic, networking, other)
  
• Education/Teaching
  
• Communal Creativity (if it's not the art created, it's the fun of making the art with others)
  
• Playtesting/Demoing (possibly for eventual monetary gain - is this support?)[/list:u]I selected the above in part because I suspect that many or all of these will not pass some criteria - but I'm not sure why. I think the fact that the thread started with "this may or may not have anything to do with GNS" has been problematic so far.

OK, I think that I see some disconnect, which is caused some by lack of clarity on my part.  It seems you're talking about personal reasons for gaming, i.e. why we play.  But I'm trying for something more like a functionalist view -- i.e. what is the effect of play on the players, rather than why the players choose to play.  

However, Chris Lehrich correctly pointed out that I wasn't clear about this.  i.e. There is Purpose (i.e. personal reason), which is different than Meaning and Function.  For example, in my first post I suggested Celebration as a category of function.  However, it isn't obvious what the effect of celebration is.  I think it does have effects -- for example, it may strengthen communal bonds by encouraging a shared sense of identity.  But I wasn't clear about that.  I chose it as a recognizable label for a type of social function, but without discussing much what that function is.  

So, considering your suggestions.  "Building Relationships" is definitely social function, and I think that needs to be mentioned.  It is pretty general, though.  I'd distinguish betwen "Establishing new relationships" (i.e. the game as a mixer) and changes to existing relationships.  For example, a Contest changes social relations by allowing status to be gained or lost.  

"Playtesting" is a focus on creating a lasting product -- i.e. the system or setting or module which is being written up.  It is definitely valid as a type, and in addition it seems related to my category of Craft (originally Work).  "Demoing" is also related, I think, though not quite the same.  "Education/Teaching" is a little tricky.  It is a lasting effect, but it is often a personal effect rather than a social effect.  

On the other hand, "Human Contact" doesn't imply an effect on the participants.  The same is true of "Communal Creativity".  Those are reasons why people might say the game is fun -- but they don't suggest any effect on the people or their social relations.

Quote from: John KimOK, I think that I see some disconnect, which is caused some by lack of clarity on my part.  It seems you're talking about personal reasons for gaming, i.e. why we play.  But I'm trying for something more like a functionalist view -- i.e. what is the effect of play on the players, rather than why the players choose to play.

When a group chooses to play a Sim game in a historical setting to learn more about that time, wouldn't then be Education the effect on the players? And if not, what else would be the social function of that game? I cant find any other matching category - unless you specify Education as subcategory of Work. But Education does not produce a product, as the new term Craft suggests, but improves the players.

I think Education is a category if its own. Since if someone is more educated not only the person changes but also its behaviour towards other people and its social environment. Especially if its some kind of "moral education" - and cant Nar play be seen as moral education? If you adress a moral permisse, you ask a moral question and get, trough play, answers to that question and hence become moral educated.

And futhermore, to get back to the example with the Sim game, if one of the players is an expert in historical weapons, the other in historical customs and even another in historical events - wouldnt then Teaching each other be the function of play? And maybe in addition, each of these players just learned that subjects for the purpose of that game, so we would also have Learing. As the reason why these players do that, I see "thirst for knowledge" (is that the correct term for "Wissbegierde"?) and not education, or its two subcategories teaching and learing, itself.



PS: I'm Swissgerman and this is my first longer post in English, so excuse my maybe a bit simple language.

Ok, thanks John. That's a bit clearer at least for me. Stil a tad abstruse, but I think I see where you're going.

I think that by including "Building Relationships" as a potential social reason, that you definitely sever this from any specific link to CA. That is, I don't see that reason for play being satisfied by any of the creative act itself, and so, as such, I see it as unrelated to CA.

So, what I propose, very simply, is that when identifying a social function, that it can be labeled as CA affecting, or non-CA affecting. Meaning that the function either "skewers" down the mode level (to use an Edwardsism) and perhaps further, or it resides enitirely at the social level of function. In fact, if one wanted, one could specify the particular level down to which the function was likely to skewer. Some might go as far as ephemera, even - I haven't thought it out that far.

I'm sure that it'll be hit and miss to start, and we might even find that you can't make such a specific linkage in each case. But it gives us a way to, I believe, coherently relate the subject back to the overal model.

Which is to say, that if I'm correct here, the proper thing to say is something like, "Catharsis may be one function that skewers down to CA level, and specifically calls for narrativism at that level."

Make sense?

Mike

I'd like to comment on the discussion that took place mainly between Pete and Gareth, on the question whether narrativist roleplaying can be an effective way of challening moral opinions, or tends to affirm the opinions already held by the players (or accepted by the group). It seems to me that both participants in this discussion use a curious model of the examination of moral issues. This model would be the following: everyone has a certain set of moral opions; one starts questioning these opinions only when one receives cotradictory opinions or situations from external sources. Hence roleplaying, argues Gareth, taking place in a social environment mostly populated by like-minded people and involving only statements which everyone agrees on, is not a likely candidate for challenging moral opinions.

Both parts of this model appear to me quite strange. First, most people do not have a fully or even largely articulated moral space. We do not know what our stance on most moral questions is. Even if we know, we often do not believe that we have looked at these issues in their full detail, and we believe that if we examine them more closely we might change our conceptions. Even where we have clear moral beliefs, we are often in doubt about the moral intuitions underlying them: why do we take the moral stance we do? We often feel that our fundamental values conflict, that our morality is built on different and incompatible intuitions. (For instance, we adore revolutionary thinkers and artists who strove for immortality through their work and wish to follow in their footsteps, and at the same time we affirm the supreme value of ordinary life.) Our moral stance is confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown to us.

So second, we do not in general change our moral outlook by being presented with outside information, in the sense that we generally change our beliefs about the physical world by being presented with external impressions. On the contrary, most of the change in our moral outlook is the result is introspection, articulation of our unarticulated moral intuitions, and a serious quest for moral enlightenment which essentially includes increasing the depth of our moral considerations: we try to view an issue from as many ways as possible, we try to understand all persons concerned, every different outlook. This will transform our understanding of the issue and thereby inevitably our relation to the issue. And we can do most of this using the moral intuitions, the empathy and the resolve to seriously pursue moral depth which we can find within ourselves.

To me it seems very clear that Narrativist roleplaying can serve a function in this quest of moral self-articulation. The concreteness of a story allows empathy to play its important role, which it never could in abstract discourse. One cannot empathise with 'terrorism', but one can empathise with an individual terrorist once the veyr particular story of his life unfolds. In addition, the input of other players can show you ways of approaching the subject which you had not thought of yourself. They do not present contradictory evidence, they suggest new ways of self-articulation. That last term is the one I would like to use to describe this function (not here intended in the way it has been defined in this topic) of narrativist roleplaying: self-articulation. Through telling these stories and addressing the premise they contain, we are forced to deepen our moral understanding by articulating out moral intuitions in the guiding light of empathy. And articulation of this kind always implies change, and is therefore inherently revolutionary, if not necessarily in any grand ways.

So I submit that narrativist roleplaying can have moral exploration as a very important function, even though (erronous) models of our moral beliefs may lead us to believe otherwise.

Quote from: Mike HolmesI think that by including "Building Relationships" as a potential social reason, that you definitely sever this from any specific link to CA. That is, I don't see that reason for play being satisfied by any of the creative act itself, and so, as such, I see it as unrelated to CA.  

I think I disagree with you here.  Real-world relationships can be built and altered through action in the imaginary space.  For example, a real-world rivalry can be enacted through competitive creative action within the space (i.e. showing who's better).  As another example, romantic relations can be initiated in-character -- i.e. my PC flirts with someone else's PC in-character, but that is actually real-world flirting as well.  Particularly in LARPs which have physical contact (esp. some of the multi-day Nordic events), this can go pretty far.  

Creative/imaginative acts are real and expressions of ourselves.  I think that seeing what someone creates and how they negotiate their creation is as real a basis for a relationship as, say, what someone says over drinks at a bar.  

Quote from: Mike HolmesSo, what I propose, very simply, is that when identifying a social function, that it can be labeled as CA affecting, or non-CA affecting.  Meaning that the function either "skewers" down the mode level (to use an Edwardsism) and perhaps further, or it resides enitirely at the social level of function.  

Hmm.  I could potentially agree with the idea that some functions reside entirely at the social level -- i.e. they are not affected by what happens in the SIS.  However, I disagree that building relationships is a case of this.  I've seen too much reflecting and playing out of real-world relationships within the imaginary space of the game.  Certainly this is an important issue to me about a game.

Victor: I pretty well agree with what your saying, and I was trying to articulate a similar point of view at the outset of the debate with Gareth. I don't think I ever implied that the ethical norms at the outset were particularly well formed or expressed, and certianly through Nar play I'd expect them to become better expressed and defined.

The dynamic that I and Gareth were exploring was, I think, one of normalisation of ethical norms within the group, and certainly the expression and definition of the personal ethical standards would be part of that process.

Would I be right in saying, then, that we'd expect a long-term nar playing group to have a better expressed set of values than a putative control group, and that the tendency would be for those values to be held reasonably commonly among the members of the group?

Sounds like a social function of nar play, if we take nar play to mean play in which address of issues is promoted.

Quote

Quote from: John Kim

Quote from: Mike HolmesI think that by including "Building Relationships" as a potential social reason, that you definitely sever this from any specific link to CA. That is, I don't see that reason for play being satisfied by any of the creative act itself, and so, as such, I see it as unrelated to CA.  

I think I disagree with you here.  Real-world relationships can be built and altered through action in the imaginary space.  For example, a real-world rivalry can be enacted through competitive creative action within the space (i.e. showing who's better).  As another example, romantic relations can be initiated in-character -- i.e. my PC flirts with someone else's PC in-character, but that is actually real-world flirting as well.  Particularly in LARPs which have physical contact (esp. some of the multi-day Nordic events), this can go pretty far.  

You are correct. Actually I just stated my idea poorly. What I meant was not that you can't get something in terms of relationships from the events in the SIS, but that I can't see any CA as particularly better for this goal. That is any CA might work to do this. As such, if the model includes things like this, it's not really saying anything about how the social functions skewer down to SA. Overall, that is. I'm sure that some of the other observations about particular functions may in fact be "desirous" (?) of seeing certain SAs.

Quote from: Mike HolmesHmm.  I could potentially agree with the idea that some functions reside entirely at the social level -- i.e. they are not affected by what happens in the SIS.  However, I disagree that building relationships is a case of this.  I've seen too much reflecting and playing out of real-world relationships within the imaginary space of the game.  Certainly this is an important issue to me about a game.

I agree. It was the principle that I was trying to get across, not the specific example.

Mike

Quote from: Victor GijsbersFirst, most people do not have a fully or even largely articulated moral space. We do not know what our stance on most moral questions is.... Our moral stance is confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown to us.

I disagree with that quite strongly; moral instruction is one of the primary forms of 'social conversation', and for most children in most cultures is starts as soon as they can talk, if not sooner.  Moral tests, such as whether or not it is right to steal medicine to save the life of a loved one, are used to test the developement of adulthood and the ability to recognises other humans as really existing people.

Of all modes of thought, morality appears to me to be the one most imposed by social convention, and least subject to critical analysis.  And I do not see that moral questions are any less affected by objectively external evidence than the precepts of physics.

Quote
To me it seems very clear that Narrativist roleplaying can serve a function in this quest of moral self-articulation. The concreteness of a story allows empathy to play its important role, which it never could in abstract discourse. One cannot empathise with 'terrorism', but one can empathise with an individual terrorist once the veyr particular story of his life unfolds.

But that, as I see it, is exposure to an external argument contradictory to the norm that "terrorism is evil".  That is, I can construct a story, from fact, that displays to you the way a person may come to resort to terrorism in such a way that you reconsider that position*.  But I cannot do that if you are able to revoke my credibility to make that argument WHILE I am making it; I need to be able to complete the story to show why this makes sense.

Therefore I ask: why cannot one empathise with terrorism?  I do - or more accutately, I refuse to distinguish between one form of blowing people limb from limb and another.  I do not understand why it is Terrorism to wear and explosive belt and a kaftan, but Not Terrorism to bomb cities from 15000 feet.  I do not understand why blowing up the twin towers was Terrorism, but blowing up the serbian national TV was Not Terrorism.  As far as I can tell, terrorism is a term that means nothing more than "the violence of the other side".  Or as I and others have remarked, a terrorist is a person with a bomb but no aircraft, and thats the only distinction.

Therefore I ask: WHY is not possible to sympathise with terrorism?  That requires certain ideological, and IMO hypocritical, assumptions to be operational.   And this is exactly the kind of self-reinforcement that RPG is prone to: it is highly likely that the presumption that terrorism is a special form of violence of lesser validity than other kinds of violence will NOT be questioned or analysed by many groups, because the vast majority are going to adhere to the locally prevailing ideology.

Pete Darby wrote:

QuoteWould I be right in saying, then, that we'd expect a long-term nar playing group to have a better expressed set of values than a putative control group, and that the tendency would be for those values to be held reasonably commonly among the members of the group?

Now that I agree with; they will indeed have a strongly expored, articulated, moral position.  And in some cases, ready answers provided by "case studies" they have already explored.  And this is not to be sneezed at; many people do not have any ability to discuss morality beyond what is, to them, "obviously" moral.  Which is of course no discussion at all, and I do think that Narr play will better equip people to actually discuss these issues with others in other social contexts.

* For example, that of Wafa Idris, the first female suicide bomber in Occupied Palestine.  Her notes indicate that, as a medic, she could not continue to treat the wounded only to send them out to be shot again.  How could she continue to treat the symptoms, and not the disease?  This was clearly a moral decision and she is in my eyes every bit as honourable and noble as any uniformed soldier, and probably more so than most.

Quote from: contracycle

Quote from: Victor GijsbersFirst, most people do not have a fully or even largely articulated moral space. We do not know what our stance on most moral questions is.... Our moral stance is confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown to us.

I disagree with that quite strongly; moral instruction is one of the primary forms of 'social conversation', and for most children in most cultures is starts as soon as they can talk, if not sooner.  Moral tests, such as whether or not it is right to steal medicine to save the life of a loved one, are used to test the developement of adulthood and the ability to recognises other humans as really existing people.

Of all modes of thought, morality appears to me to be the one most imposed by social convention, and least subject to critical analysis.  And I do not see that moral questions are any less affected by objectively external evidence than the precepts of physics.

Setting aside terrorism in particular, on which I basically agree with you, I do think that Victor has a good point here.  It's not that morality is unknown to us, something in which cultures do not instruct us, but rather that such cultural norms commonly remain unexpressed or ill-defined.  Your remarks on terrorism fit well here: we have this expressed moral value that terrorism is bad, but there is relatively little serious thought about what that means or how we define terrorism.  What I think Victor is saying is that certain kinds of gaming, perhaps especially Narrativism, construct means through which we are forced to analyze and express consciously those values which normally remain below the surface, taken as natural and obvious rather than the cultural constructs they are.  The point here is Victor's use of the word "articulated": it's not that we don't have moral structures ingrained in us by our societies -- of course we do -- but rather that they usually remain below the level of articulation.

This is fundamentally in accord with certain Marxian theories, as well as functionalist anthropological ones.  The point is that the social construction of the universe imposes structures, such as ethics, that we take as natural and obvious when in fact they are nothing of the kind.  Society then further imposes what Durkheim called "moral authority," which says that we ought to obey these things, to which Radcliffe-Brown added the idea of social anxiety: we feel nervous and anxious if we even consider such violations.  The point being that there is no reason we should obey, except that society tells us to, but we cannot usually think our way out of that bind because these structures remain unarticulated.

By this logic, narrativist gaming (among others) has the potential to challenge ethical norms, because it forces us to bring to consciousness -- and thus remove from naturalization -- ethical norms that we may, if we analyze them consciously, find ourselves disagreeing with.  E.g. your example of terrorism.

So I really think you and Victor are agreeing here.  Am I way off base?

QuoteSo I really think you and Victor are agreeing here. Am I way off base?

Well, I had proposed the idea that thr requirement to express a view in RPG, publicly, may well provoke some genuine introspcteion and the reconsideration of previously held values, yes.  In fact, part of my analysis above arose from watching players easily rationalise the most atrocious acts.  OK so its "only a game" but seeing that process happen before your eyes was quite instructive.  But from that angle, I was kinding of hoping for more attention to this being in some sense a public space, about the requirements of articulation, that would raise the prospect that real confrontational stuff can be done, but as I read it it seemed to depend more on the argument to an inner moral sense.  Perhaps I missed the point.

Quote from: contracycle

Quote from: Victor GijsbersFirst, most people do not have a fully or even largely articulated moral space. We do not know what our stance on most moral questions is.... Our moral stance is confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown to us.

I disagree with that quite strongly; moral instruction is one of the primary forms of 'social conversation', and for most children in most cultures is starts as soon as they can talk, if not sooner.  Moral tests, such as whether or not it is right to steal medicine to save the life of a loved one, are used to test the developement of adulthood and the ability to recognises other humans as really existing people.

Let me start by specifying that I am strictly talking about modern, Western society, and those non-Western societies that have been heavily influences by it. I can imagine that especially in 'primitive' cultures, the moral values held by the social group - and, presumably, by the individual - are coherent, clear, generally agreed upon and underpinned by strong background theory in the form of religion, myth, or whatever.

Our present culture is different from this in two ways:

* The sources of our moral beliefs and attitudes are very diverse, including traditional Christianity, the Greek-Roman heroic ethos, enlightenment rationalism, the individual expressionism of the the Romantic period, the modern emphasis on the value of ordinary life, etcetera. This makes for an inconsistent bunch of beliefs and intuitions.
* The background theories which we had or seemed to have, most importantly Christianity, but later also 'Reason', have lost their persuasiveness for a large part of the populace.

Hence, I contend that although we are indeed taught morality from an early age, the society we grow up in cannot give us anything else than what I called an "confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown" totality. Although there are some clear cases (killing babies is wrong), a surprisingly large part of our moral concerns is unclear, overseen by competing moral ideals that are themselves suspect because of the lack of a unified background. Social conditioning notwithstanding, our moral space is full of tension, largely unarticulated, and a rich ground for exploration, making choices and constructing a more coherent or at least clearer set of moral beliefs than we actually have.

QuoteAnd I do not see that moral questions are any less affected by objectively external evidence than the precepts of physics.

I disagree, because I believe that morality is closely connected to the self, which makes it very tricky to speak about 'objectively' and 'external' - but I think that would take us into realms of philosophy that have little to do with the topic under consideration. We can at least agree that there exists such a thing as moral evidence.

QuoteBut that, as I see it, is exposure to an external argument contradictory to the norm that "terrorism is evil".  That is, I can construct a story, from fact, that displays to you the way a person may come to resort to terrorism in such a way that you reconsider that position*.  But I cannot do that if you are able to revoke my credibility to make that argument WHILE I am making it; I need to be able to complete the story to show why this makes sense.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Of course, my fellow roleplayers can ensure that I cannot make my point, but I see no reason to expect that such a thing will happen. If I play my character convincingly, at every point of the story the choices he or she makes will be perceived as possible, plausible even. It is by showing how a chain of understandable, utterly human, maybe even applaudable choices can, in the right circumstances, lead to someone becoming a terrorist that we can show that "terrorism is evil" is a shallow judgement. At what point in this process will my fellow players stop me? Especially given the fact that they are hopefully willing to partly suspend moral judgement until the story is over, in the same sense that we partly suspend moral judgement when we read or watch Medea, even though we know that she'll kill her children in the end. Of course, given a narrow-minded and aggressively judging group of players, you will not be able to make your point; but I see no reason to believe that most groups will behave that way.

QuoteAnd this is exactly the kind of self-reinforcement that RPG is prone to: it is highly likely that the presumption that terrorism is a special form of violence of lesser validity than other kinds of violence will NOT be questioned or analysed by many groups, because the vast majority are going to adhere to the locally prevailing ideology.

I agree with you that if there is NO tension in the moral beliefs of the entire group concerning the issue of terrorism, then they will not analyse it. Granted. It is doubtful whether they will be persuaded by a book or a movie in such a state of mind either, but I'm even willing to grant, for the sake of argument, that this might be the case. So in such a situation, roleplaying can only enforce pre-existing moralities.

BUT, I do not believe that this situation obtains very often, certainly not among those interested in playing narrative RPGs that tackle moral topics. We are all only too much aware of the fact that every issue has two sides, if not many more; almost every conceivable moral question connects to our beliefs and intuitions in so many distinct ways that there is at least _some_ tension. For instance, I am a strong proponent of the wellfare state as it has been created in northwest Europe. There is little doubt in my mind that this is a great system, that ought to be adopted by every country in the world. But I can also feel the tension that exists between this belief which I (and all the members of my RPG-group) hold, and the strong attraction which Nietzsche's moral outlook (as described in Also sprach Zarathustra) has for me, including his rejection of pity. So there is a tension, even when I start from such a strongly felt moral truth as the good of the wellfare state, which means that there is a moral issue here which can be explored.

Quote from: clehrichThe point here is Victor's use of the word "articulated": it's not that we don't have moral structures ingrained in us by our societies -- of course we do -- but rather that they usually remain below the level of articulation.

Right on - and the fact that this articulation will reveal inconsistencies and other tensions.

QuoteThis is fundamentally in accord with certain Marxian theories, as well as functionalist anthropological ones.

Isn't it intriguing, how one and the same point is reinvented again and again from different perspectives? I got my point not from Marxism or anthropology, but from a certain strand in modern moral philosophy that includes such philosophers as Alisdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, and which might be described - if I had to do it in three words - as "Aristotle after Nietzsche". Had I not been reading Taylor's magnificent if difficult "Sources of the Self: the making of modern identity", I probably would not have posted in this thread - and I certainly would not have used the word 'articulate'. :)

Quote from: Victor Gijsbers
BUT, I do not believe that this situation obtains very often, certainly not among those interested in playing narrative RPGs that tackle moral topics.

Well perhaps not among that audience interested in playing narrative RPG's that tackle moral topics, no.  But thats a self-fulfilling sample selection; the presence of art house cinema does not have much impact on the business of hollywood mass production.

I don't think I should discuss anything further regarding this topic while the allegedly liberal and democratic west butchers its way across Falluja.

Hey.  The point about moral articulation and Narrativism is interesting, but I think it's really a split from Classification by Social Function.  So I've started another thread, Moral Articulation and GNS.  

I guess this thread has bogged down as far as the classification goes, though I might start a new thread on it as I have new ideas.

Quote from: contracycleWell perhaps not among that audience interested in playing narrative RPG's that tackle moral topics, no.  But thats a self-fulfilling sample selection; the presence of art house cinema does not have much impact on the business of hollywood mass production.

But if we are discussing RPGs, isn't the relevant sample selection - well, RPG players?

QuoteI don't think I should discuss anything further regarding this topic while the allegedly liberal and democratic west butchers its way across Falluja.

Combatting moral simplicity seems to be more needed than ever.

But I'll take any further comments to the new thread.