Classifying By Social Function

[Victor Gijsbers]

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.

[John Kim]

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.  

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.  

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.  

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.

[pete_darby]

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.

[Mike Holmes]

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.  

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.

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.

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

Mike

[contracycle]

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.... 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.

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:

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?

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.

[clehrich]

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.... 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?

[contracycle]

So 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.

[Victor Gijsbers]

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.... 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.

And 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Victor Gijsbers]

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.

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

This 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'. :)

[contracycle]

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.

[John Kim]

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, http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13335">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.

[Victor Gijsbers]

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.

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

I 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.