Dream (split) gamer taste?

[Jack Spencer Jr]

From this thread

The first time I read Perelandra, back in college, I was starting to get bored with the long descriptions of the oceans, the floating islands, the color of the skies, the total darkness at night, the strange plants--I had never had trouble sticking with a C. S. Lewis book before, and frankly if this had been the first I'd ever read (and it wasn't a course assignment) I don't know that I'd have finished it, or picked up another. I went back to it a couple years ago (twenty some years later) and was absolutely enraptured by the scene he painted, a world I am so dying to convert to game play, because it is so utterly different and fascinating.

I had been dwelling on this for a bit. I'm still not sure what to think. What sticks out for me is "a world I am so dying to convert to game play" were it not for this little thirty-five letter phrase, I would have simply figured that MJ's tastes had changed in twenty years and forgotten about it. But, as it turns out, MJ did say it and I'm wondering if there's something more significant here.

Could there be a "gamer taste" when it comes to other entertainments where the person in question views these things as source material for play, as much as any world book or the like.

This is similar to some "splatter movie" fans who were less interested in plot or frights but in seeing the cool, gorey effects.

[M. J. Young]

You may be onto something here, Jack.

I remember when I was working on Multiverser I read a book called Asgard Run, by Steve Vance. It was a fun bit of science fiction fluff, really, into which I could probably have poked a million holes--but at the time I thought it would be great for game adventures.

I remember in college and immediately thereafter reading quite a bit of science fiction. I had an Omni subscription for a while; I read some Niven specifically; Bradbury, Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, a number of fantasy authors long forgotten, Herbert--all on my reading list. I read, I enjoyed, and I even sometimes wondered how I could go about creating such stories of my own. But I always thought of this in terms of creating original worlds; I was never thinking in the fanfic terms of writing another Star Trek story or a new Narnia book or anything like that.

I started gaming sometime around then, but I was running D&D games and not reading as much fantasy, so I wasn't particularly interested in the worlds and settings I read as game fodder.

Now I'm often reading and watching things with part of my mind thinking about how this could be used as a game world.

I might credit that to the fact that I run so much Multiverser, so I'm chewing up game worlds quite a bit; but this might be more common than I think, particularly among players who don't do campaigns (I've always been more of a campaign-oriented player) and so are looking for ideas for one-shots and minis.

Anyone else?

--M. J. Young

[Marhault]

Umm. . .  Yeah.  Put me down for a serious case of "Gamer Taste."

Just about everything I watch or read, I think of in Game Terms.

I am always looking for characters, settings, details, plotlines & story seeds to steal and use for my own campaigns.

More than that, I'm always thinking about what system you would use to tell a particular story.  I ask myself, if I was going to put the group through this, would I want to use Call of Cthulhu, or Chill, or maybe some WoD variation?  Is there a system that showcases the right elements?  If not, what kind of mechanic can I use to tweak those rules that best fit (or form the basis of a new game if there aren't any) in order to make them work better?

I bet there are a lot of gamers that think this way, to some degree.  That's one of the reasons there are so many discussions about how to capture the flavour of J.R.R. Tolkiens stories in a game going on here at the Forge lately.

Oh, and one more piece of anecdotal evidence:  A few years ago I went to see the movie 3 Kings with my regular gaming group.  During a battle scene which was edited in such a way that you saw each character act, then the results of that action, then the next character, etc., one of my friends turned to the rest of the group, chuckled, and said simply "turn based combat."  We all burst out laughing, drawing some pretty strange looks from the rest of the movie-going crowd.
At least we're not alone. . .

[Edited to clarify format]

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Funny how the recent Narrativism has something parallel to this:

I suggest that both Gamist and Narrativist priorities are clear and automatic, with easy-to-see parallels in other activities and apparently founded upon a lot of hardwiring in the human mind (or "psyche" or "spirit" or whatever you want to call it). Whereas I think Simulationist priorities must be trained - it is highly derived play, based mainly on canonical fandom and focus on pastiche, and requires a great deal of contextualized knowledge and stern social reinforcement. This training is characterized by teaching people not to do what they're inclined to. No one needs to learn how to role-play, but most do need to learn to play Simulationist, by stifling their Gamist and/or Narrativist proclivities. Such training is often quite harsh and may involve rewards and punishments such as whether the person is "worthy" to be friends with the group members.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Jack,

Do you mean specifically the bit about

based mainly on canonical fandom and focus on pastiche, and requires a great deal of contextualized knowledge

?

Best,
Ron

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Ron,

On the one hand, yes. On the other, I also mean the entire paragraph.

That is, we will never know what MJ's opinion of Perelandra might have been if he had never gotten involved in roleplaying. Would he have had as positive a reaction to the "long descriptions of the oceans, the floating islands, the color of the skies, the total darkness at night, the strange plants?" Maybe he would have. Perhaps twenty years later he might have been able to appreciate this description. But the fact is, that is not what happened. He did get into roleplaying and probably went through a similar indoctrination you describe.

Now, far be it from me to poo-poo someone elses fun and all, but part of me can't help but wonder if MJ would have still found Perelandra boring if it weren't for the Simulationism training of roleplaying culture.

Adding another random thought: this may go hand-in-hand with reading the book being part of play. Perhaps roleplayers with a Simulationist preference are always playing.

[Ron Edwards]

Wow, that is way farther into wide-ranging human motivation and outlooks than I would dare to go.

You get the "damned interesting" award from me, Jack. I have no idea how valid (or better, how consistently valid) that notion is, but it sure says something.

Best,
Ron

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Well, today at work, this was bouncing around in my head, along with various other things like that damned Mammy's little baby loves shortening bread song, and something occured to me. I recalled reading an article written by someone who was A) alive and B) an avid comic book reader during the golden age of comics, that is, the thirties. I forget where I read this article. It might have been a special issue of Wizard or something. In any case, he said that at the time, that is, when he was a kids reading these things and waiting impatiently for the next issue of All-Star Comics and whatnot, the comics were more for research purposes. Research for things like whether the fin on the Atom's head was at a right angle or slightly angled (depending on the skill of the artist, obviously)

The point here is that this fellow  is demonstrating this same "canonical fandom and focus on pastiche, and requires a great deal of contextualized knowledge" or whatever it is we're talking about, and this was some forty years before Dungeons & Dragons was published and longer before the roleplaying culture was developed. So this is something more basic to human behavior and certainly not a roleplaying-only phenomenom.

So maybe MJ would have enjoyed Perelandra the second timeeven if he had not gotten into RPGs. Again, who knows?

[M. J. Young]

I, too, have been pondering this thread quite a bit.

It occurred to me that this idea of seeing things in terms of a framework is not so unique.

I remember that when I read Dune, I was often struck by aspects of structure and style to which I was sensitive in large part because of having taken a course in writing fiction and trying to do it myself. In later years, when I was working on multiverser, the concept of multiple staging emerged as a phrase, but it was already a concept I'd developed before I was gaming as a tool for creating compelling fictional narrative.

It also occurs to me that when I was much more immersed in music than I am now, everything around me was potential fodder for songs I wrote; I was always looking for inspiration for the next song, and never thought there were enough already written.

It might just be that[list=1][*]creative people see everything as fuel for their creative outlets and[*]in the end, everyone really is creative.[/list:o]As to Perelandra, I think perhaps I would have enjoyed the second reading anyway. The first time I was waiting for someone to happen; the second time I knew that things were going to happen, and the wait was different. Also, in the interim, even before the idea of using it for gaming had come to mind (which didn't really happen until I started working on Multiverser in the early 90's) I had often thought about what a marvelously interesting world it was, so I'd have enjoyed going back for an imaginary visit through reading all the same. I suppose I can compare it to Narnia or Winnie the Pooh, in some ways. What brings readers back for the next book is the possibility of hearing a new story in the same world. If there were another story set in Perelandra, I would have read it for the opportunity to go back and see it again, I think.

Make sense?

--M. J. Young