On the time of narration

[epweissengruber]

Do you intend to handle subject and person in your thesis of RPG narrative?  The choice of 1st 2nd and 3rd person has significance for both the player and the other players listening.  A player who repeatedly says "I swing at the dragon" may be emotionally investing in the game far more than someone who says "My guy" or "He swings at the dragon."  I guess no one ever says "You swing at the dragon" (unless playfully interacting with a mini or a counter -- such as "Come on you plastic sonofabich, you have to hit the dragon!).

You could also explore the confusions between different types of "I."  A player saying "I wanna kill that werewolf" might be improvising an in-character bit of dialogue, or expressing a meta-game intention to the other players.  The moments when it becomes difficult to distinguish will, of course, be the interesting ones.


P.S.  You might want to look at Gerard Genett's "Narative Discourse" and "Narrative Discourse Revisited."  He believes that most of the language of narrative theory is inapplicable to dramatic art.  RPG is an interesting situation where players are performers ("Have at you, Razlark, you perfidious fiend"), and Narrators ("Kolar has crawled many miles across the burning sands of Rith to slay his rival Razlark.")


P.P.S  You might want to consider performance theory.  You could look at the RPG session as ritualized performance.  Trouble is, Shechner and Turner never really examined closely the significance of narrative structures inside a ritual context, much less the creative development of new, improvised narratives in a performance situation.  Kenneth Burke's examination of rhetoric and human actions -- his concept of "dramatism" -- might give you some insights.


Best of luck on the thesis.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I suggest that the often-stated link between first-person diction and emotional investment or identification is not actually valid. I do think that people might communicate different things to one another when they say "He does it" vs. "I do it" during play, but I also think that what is communicated (if anything) can vary greatly.

Best,
Ron

[epweissengruber]

Most RPGs have strictly linear narratives.  This linearity is embedded in the concept of character advancement as measured by levelling up.  It is the rare RPG that allows for jumps in narrative such as flashing back or flashing forward.  Ron's Sorceror and Sword gives some hints about how a campaign can (like a good comic book or pulp serial) jump back and forth between the various parts of a hero's career.  These episodes may be tied together by an over-arching goal (Conan becomes a king), but the events in each episode are not determined by this goal.  

Some GMs have come up with there own techniques for playing with narrative flow in their campaigns.  I wonder how many do it in the context of individual episodes?  Hero Wars offers a mode of character generation that is sensitive to the narrative of a particular episode.  You can gradually fill out the key words and the stats measuring those key words in the context of play.  The simple decision "Bren is a Heortling raider" is later filled out with specifics.  For example: the players are spying on an enemy camp.  The player then decides "Yeah, Bren has really mastered the art of infiltration.  I will make one of his major skills "Sneak into enemy camp," with a rating of 5W1 (or 25 in regular terms).  Neither the players nor the GM knew that Bren had become the number 1 sneak in his tribe, but this part of Bren's past is decided on in the present play situation.  I once knew a GM who let his DandD spellcasters keep a couple of spell slots open.  When the character ran up against a salamander he could always say, "Lucky I prepared that Freezing Ray this morning."

To sum up: individual episodes and campaigns could make freeer use of temporality than they usually do.  Why they usually follow a linear pattern is a question you could look at in your thesis.

Re: Ron's comment
"I suggest that the often-stated link between first-person diction and emotional investment or identification is not actually valid."

True.  A player improvising interesting narration or involved in meta-gaming aspects might be enjoying play, or helping others enjoy play, to a greater extent than someone who is always saying "I do this" or
I do that."  Johannes could investigate empirical instances of the use of "I" in the context of play.

But -- when I suggested that pursuing "immersive play" or sticking to the "I" pronoun are not the only ways of participating the RPG experience, I got head slammed by the RPG.NET crowd.  If Johannes does get sidetracked into the subject of the subject in narration, he could set out to explain the myths surrounding "immersive play."

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi guys,

I might be dragging this thread far from its purpose, but I see a topic here I'm interested in... And that's the obsession with the imersive.

Truth to tell, people can say "I" in a game all they like, but might not either be emotionally engaged nor all that emotionally engaging.

On the other hand, if we assume that one can't be engaging in the third person, then most of the world's written and oral literature has a lot to answer for.

Finally, in a strange, concrete example of the mix of dramatic and narrative working fantastically well outside of the RPG hobby:

At Northwestern University there's been a lot of work done with "staged texts" -- where you use the actual text of a book (or whatever) and have actors be the "narrators" as well as characters of the text.  The idea is that the actors actually embody the text... So you are more than a character, you are the style of writing.  (Which, in my view, is an actor's job anyway.... But I digress.)

The point is: Mary Zimmerman (NU protegee and part time prof) has directed several wildly successful works along these lines, including staged adaptations of "Arabian Nights" and "The Metamorphoses."  Both are incredibly engaging, and have lots of narration.  (Metamorphoses got Zimmerman a Tony on Broadway last year.)

In John Lahr's reveiw of the Metamorphases in The New Yorker, he admitted the production had usually hard-as-nails New Yorkers weeping.  But he didn't like the play because it was -- too narrative.  In his view, it's lack of *dramatic* narrative made it somewhat limp.  Now, Lahr is the son of Burt Lahr (who play the Cowardly Lion in the MGM Oz), and I'll just guess the guy knows Dramatic Narrative out his ears.

But here we are faced with the problem of people ie. critics who know their stuff perhaps too well.  They live and breath their yardsticks of critical correctness... and sometimes fail to see how something new (or the blending of two things old) still  work.  And how does it work?  Because it's engaging.  To a priori know something wrong because theory says otherwise turn out not only to be bad science, but bad creativity.  It's also a bit fearful and sheepish... But that, again, is another story.

Christopher

[talysman]

I agree with Ron and Christoper about the pronoun usage: there's no link between first-person and character immersion. specifically: I habitually use first-person myself, but I don't like character immersion.

I think people become immersed in their characters when they become immersed in their characters. sounds lame, but it's true: people get the experiences they seek.

[M. J. Young]

I don't suppose we need another Amen to Ron's pronoun comment, and I hate "me too" posts if it's not part of an effort to reach a consensus; but I think I can add something to this digression.

When I'm running games, I will often tell a player "you do this" or "this happens to you". Clearly I am not immersed in his character; and I don't do it to involve the player in the character in an immersive way. I do it because it's quicker to say "you" than to say "your character" or "Lothias" or some other third person identifier, and clearer than "he" given the number of characters I have to reference. I note that I never use "I" for a non-player character I'm running, unless involved in dialogue as the character; even then, it would be more like:

"I'm going to grab a drink." He walks over to the bar and pours himself a beer.

I use "I" for my characters when I'm a player rather frequently; but again, it's simply more convenient. Even in written games, I'll say "Eric is doing this" or "I will do that", clearly meaning the character. It's not immersion; it's convenience.

Pronoun usage is a red herring; it proves nothing.

And there's an excellent thread on immersion around here somewhere, still active as recently as last week.

--M. J. Young

[Johannes]

I too first thought that the pronoun usage has something to do with immersion or emotional investement or just "better gaming" in general (guess which pronoun I tend to use :)). However when I did my first (small) paper on RPG-narratology, I did not find anything to support this. Also discussions with my gaming buddies came to the conclusion that you cannot say that "I" is a sign of immersion etc.

I think that it is more justified and interesting to say that to a certain extent the player is a symbol of the character in the gaming situation so that reference to the player in the narrative discourse (using I and you narrations) becomes reference to the PC by arbitary convention. Using the player as a symbol of his/her PC doesn't exclude refering straight to the PC with "s/he" pronoun on another occasion on the same narrative discourse. This approach doesn't address the immersion etc. problem at all and so avoids all the swamps in the matter.

I think this view is good also because it relates nicely to another aspect of tabletop gaming: Sometimes (in our group at least) the players do not use verbal narration only but also physically act like their characters (knocking on doors is a common example). Here the player is again acting as a symbol of his PC. It's different from LARP because the connection between the player's actions and the PC's actions is not necessery.

I'll give an example:
In a tabletop game a player has actually knocked on the door of the room where the rest of the group is. Everybody in the group understand that his knock is a symbol of a in-game knock on the tavern's door where the rest of the PCs are. Then the player steps in (like his PC in the game-world) but falls down because someone had left his bag on the way. The group then doesn't think that the PC fell also but continues the game as if the PC had just walked in without any additional dramatics. In LARP the connection between player and his/her character is necessary (by convention). If you fall down then your character has fallen down also. It's against the "rules" of the game to decide that the PC didn't fall.

The same phenomennon of actual objects acting as arbitrary symbols of fictional objects is also encountered in hand-outs. GM gives the players a map which symbolizes a in-game map which the PCs get. Then a anti-social player burns the actual map. Do the PCs still have the fictional in-game map? -- Yes. Destroying one symbol of the signified doesn't destroy the signified itself if there are other sybolic means (verbal in this case) left to represent it.

I notice I'm getting seriously sidetracked here... Well my point is that the relation between pronoun, player and character is not necessary but arbitrary (symbol). Player can act as a symbol of the character without becoming that character.

[Johannes]

You could also explore the confusions between different types of "I."  A player saying "I wanna kill that werewolf" might be improvising an in-character bit of dialogue, or expressing a meta-game intention to the other players.  The moments when it becomes difficult to distinguish will, of course, be the interesting ones.

This is a good point which I will have to pursue to some extent.

Genette and his taxonomies of voice and focalisation will have a major part in my paper (just like other classics of narratology) but they will not form the theoretical backbone of my thesis. I'm thinking more on the lines of Ryan and her modal logical approaches to narrative and on the lines of Bakhtin and his concept of dialogisation and polyphony.

Thanks for the tip on performance theory. I'll have to look at that.