Eidetic Reduction, is it only for LARPs?

[J. Tuomas Harviainen]

Okay, "interimmersion" sounds interesting, where can I read more about that?

Again, in Beyond Role and Play :). The article is here: http://www.ropecon.fi/brap/ch8.pdf

In a high-immersion table top game can the players be said to eidetically reduce all of their physical surroundings away?  In order to fully experience what they are trying to experience, do they do the same sort of "imagining things not to be there"?

I'd say that in a (theoretical) situation like this, the result would indeed be a combination of tabletop all-imagining and eidetic reduction. How likely such a state would be happen is a matter of another debate.

Is it the same sort of eidetic reduction that we commonly see in LARP play?  I think so, but I'd be interested in hearing other takes on the subject.

My gut instinct - not any true deductive reasoning - says to call them "functionally identical", and leave it at that. (Going further would be like asking "Are the shaman using a drum and the dancer at a rave reaching the same state, or just a similar state, as the other?" Our tools do not go that far.)

Do we ever see the technique of eidetic reduction utilized for any prupose other than immersion?  I'd be curious to explore what other applications we can come up with for it...  That may be a bit problematic since the technique is so intensely personal.  How might we apply eidetic reduction to the group?  How might we factor it into design?

Actually, its originally one of the two hermeneutic methods suggested by Edmund Husserl (epokhe being the other). It's also sometimes called "transcendental reduction", as Husserl's original intent is to use it as a method for researchers to peel away social and ideological layers from religious material in order to reach the core, transcendent, essence of the text or experience at hand.

So what it's actually about is the temporary, conscious or subconscious removal of all dissonant elements we do not want to recognize from our perception so that we can appreciate and/or analyze ("encounter" would probably summarize it all best) an experience or subject at its purest. And in that sense, it's happening all the time. One very common example is the psychological defense mechanism of Denial (Side note: A psychologist friend of mine has suggested that there's a heavy correlation between defense mechanisms and role-playing methods, but I'm not the right person to speculate on it far enough.)

The system most larpers use is thus actually a combination of semiotic resignification and eidetic reduction, which is why I usually (read: whenever I remember to do so) call that approach "eidetic reduction based".

-Jiituomas

[Sean]

Tuomas -

I'm a little surprised that you emphasize religion wrt Husserl. Certainly his work (and moreso Heidegger's extension of it to the social) has been very influential among some theorists of religion, but Husserl's work that I'm familiar with is mostly concerned with 'pure phenomenology' and science and mathematics.

Also, I see how you're using Husserl's concepts, and it's not _wrong_, but it does seem to be a pretty major extension out of the kind of thing the phenomenologists were interested in. For phenomenologists, these techniques (bracketing and eidetic reduction) are about getting to the 'core' subjective experience (they would reject the label, but I'm not a phenomenologist) one has of  a thing. So that you don't experience e.g. a tree through the lens of Cartesian analytic geometry or (with Heidegger early and late) experience a forest through the social lens of material accumulation, but rather just 'take it for what it is', where 'what it is' is 'how it emerges to your consciousness once you get rid of all the assumptions etc. you have about it'.

(I think this whole approach is methodologically hopeless in philosophy, incidentally, but I make it a point not to go one step farther into debates on abstract subjects than I have to to keep the material rpg-relevant.)

Anyway, the point I wanted to make about your use of Husserl and phenomenology for rpging is that the objects and world to which the experiencer-player is oriented on your view is manifestly not anything 'real', but rather something emerging in the imagination (singular or collective, let's not go there except to note that if you're a Heideggerian phenomenologist there's no reduction of the 'shared' in the SiS to the individual, since being-with-others is a basic way of being for Dasein). So that it's pretty radical to say that people are (a) constructing something in their mind and then (b) using phenomenological techniques to strip everything innessential from that something. This is a big step away from Husserl exhorting us to understand the differences between the geometrical intuitions of the lifeworld and the world of science or even Heidegger radically misinterpreting van Gogh's boots.

It's also one that seems to need a lot more theoretical clarificaiton at a pre-RPG level. I mean, superficially, if we're constructing all this stuff, how does the extra baggage that we add to it get stripped away through the reduction? How do we determine what's 'essential' and 'inessential' with respect to the contents of our own imaginings? And what does it mean to hold something in epoche which is in your head, rather than out there in the clearing or the lifeworld or whatever phenomenological term of art floats your boat?

I think though that you're partly, with all this high vocabulary, circling around a point we've discussed a lot here - what is immersion, as a technique? How does it work and how is it similar to and different from other techniques?

Your claim seems to be that immersion is incompatible with the bricolage-like reassemblage of elements that Chris is exploring.

I remain unconvinced, because (a) I've known real-life 'schizophrenics' (scarequotes because I don't know if that's their technical classification) who seem to effortlessly reassemble elements of the 'real' world into tokens in their own private fantasy, without breaking out of the mindset that constitutes their madness, and (b) I just don't see why there's anything more breaking of the immersion for a player to resignify some object on his or her own authority than for a player to have to accept some GMs ruling, or even just to remember that some real object has already been given some signification in the game, etc.

But I've never been in a Nordic LARP. I hope I have the experience someday so that I can at least see more clearly what you and other practicioners think you're getting at. Even if I'm not persuaded by your theoretical arguments, I'm very open to the idea that some really powerful and interesting techniques, which have not or perhaps even cannot be used in tabletop gaming, have evolved in the Nordic LARP style of play.

P.S. Xenopulse, if you're reading this, I got your PM and the computer ate my reply. I'll try again later.

[J. Tuomas Harviainen]

I'm a little surprised that you emphasize religion wrt Husserl. Certainly his work (and moreso Heidegger's extension of it to the social) has been very influential among some theorists of religion, but Husserl's work that I'm familiar with is mostly concerned with 'pure phenomenology' and science and mathematics.

Three reasons, really. The first one is that I happen to be by training a theologian whose specialization is applied hermeneutics. The second one is my firm belief on the idea of exploring methods that have been discarded in other fields as possibly being applicable here. The third, and most important here, is that the mehodological principles of eidetic reduction really do seem to correspond to the way people (at least here) experience their gaming. More than that, they seem to match it better than many other theories of explaining the larp approach.

Also, I see how you're using Husserl's concepts, and it's not _wrong_, but it does seem to be a pretty major extension out of the kind of thing the phenomenologists were interested in.

You're quite correct. I'm saying that the method used is identical, even though the purpose it's used for, and thus not the steps on the way to that goal, are not. Thus the fact that some elements are constructions and not "real" doesn't matter.

I think though that you're partly, with all this high vocabulary, circling around a point we've discussed a lot here - what is immersion, as a technique? How does it work and how is it similar to and different from other techniques?

Actually, it's the differences in the ways in which players approach SIS that I'm interested in, and whether or not elements like game-culture background or type of game played affect it. Immersion (for me) is both an incidental side-effect, and not truly relevant to the question at hand. (Studying the approach issue has so far produced several useful tools, such as a functional set of guidelines for using deception as a larp design device.)

The main problem I see as certain narrative methods having is that they break continuity, not that they interrupt immersion. The mentioned "schizophrenic" does not have more than one level of continuity to care about, that's why the integration doesn't "break" the continuity for them.

b) I just don't see why there's anything more breaking of the immersion for a player to resignify some object on his or her own authority than for a player to have to accept some GMs ruling, or even just to remember that some real object has already been given some signification in the game,

Beacuse the level of negotiation differs. Any reassignment does indeed break an immersion, but it doesn't necessarily interrupt the continuity. Experienced players learn to ignore the break - that's a part of the eidetic reduction process. In tabletop, however, bigger breaks happen all the time, both due to real-world issues like going to the bathroom and due to a heavier reliance on systems than in (at least "Nordic") larps. It's seen as an inevitable part of the structure of the tabletop rpg continuity.