Transcript: Terminological suggestion

[clehrich]

I would like to propose a consistent alteration or expansion of terminology.

This started in Marco's thread on retroactive story.

Standing Definitions

I propose that "transcript" be used for a total account of play events, in SIS and otherwise. What Ron has been calling a transcript I'd tend to call a "redaction" or an "account."

Transcript, as I have used it, is a full accounting of the imaginary events in actual play.  i.e. There is no editing, embellishing, and re-writing what happened.  If there is no story during actual play, there is no story in the transcript.  This conflicts with contracycle, who suggests that Sim has story only in transcript but not in actual play.  If it wasn't in actual play, how can it appear in transcript?  To get over the conceptual divide, I'd like to suggest three terms:

[*] "Game Log" is the full accounting of EVERYTHING that happened in actual play (i.e. every word spoken, at a minimum).  On chat play, this would be a dump of all channels (OOC, IC, private message). [*] "Transcript" is a subset of game log which includes only imaginary events.  A full transcript includes every word spoken in character and every word of pure description.  It removes any mention of players, dice, and mechanics -- but has no editing of imaginary content. [*] "Re-telling" is how a player would verbally re-tell what happened in the game later, which may include editing, embellishment, and new commentary or description. [/list:u] It seems to me that contracycle is referring to "re-telling".  Thus, a game might not have story in actual play -- and thus not in the game log or transcript.  But when re-told, a story could be made.

For reference,

Transcript: An account of the imaginary events of play without reference to role-playing procedures. A Transcript may or may not be a Story.

And

Long ago, I concluded that "story" as a role-playing term was standing in for several different processes and goals, some of which were incompatible. Here's the terms-breakdown I'll be using from now on.

All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.

Let's say that the following transcript, which also happens to be a story, arose from one or more sessions of role-playing.

Lord Gyrax rules over a realm in which a big dragon has begun to ravage the countryside. The lord prepares himself to deal with it, perhaps trying to settle some internal strife among his followers or allies. He also meets this beautiful, mysterious woman named Javenne who aids him at times, and they develop a romance. Then he learns that she and the dragon are one and the same, as she's been cursed to become a dragon periodically in a kind of Ladyhawke situation, and he must decide whether to kill her. Meanwhile, she struggles to control the curse, using her dragon-powers to quell an uprising in the realm led by a traitorous ally. Eventually he goes to the Underworld instead and confronts the god who cursed her, and trades his youth to the god to lift the curse. He returns, and the curse is detached from her, but still rampaging around as a dragon. So they slay the dragon together, and return as a couple, still united although he's now all old, to his home.[/list:u]The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue.

Problems
The term "transcript" is commonly used to suggest a verbatim record, as in a court transcript or a transcript of a radio or TV program (which are not the same thing -- see below).  This is clearly not what Ron has in mind, as we can see from the Lord Gyrax example.  

In anthropology, it is common (though not universal) to use "transcript" to refer to a record of not only what is said (verbatim) but also what is done.  This leads into all sorts of problems, methodologically, because it is not at all clear that one can transcribe every action of any possible relevance, not only because the fieldworker may or may not notice them all, but also because the problem of "relevance" is a very serious one.  But this is a methodological problem: the issue is how to transcribe, not what a transcript is in principle.

Ron's definition above refers to a "transcript" as an "account," which as I see them used among field anthropologists and the like are quite different beasts.  An "account" presumes a reconstruction, redaction, or reformulation, the object being to render the transcript into an approachable form for some particular purpose.  The methodology of such redaction is again problematic and contested, and will always be so, but again these problems of method don't really affect us much in gaming (as yet, anyway).

Proposal 1
One possibility is that we should use terms something like this:

Transcript: An exact record of every event occurring in gameplay, potentially (but probably not practically) including gestures, food, and the like, as well as certainly everything spoken.  Such a transcript could be generated with reasonable fidelity from a tape recording with a series of running comments from participants of their memories of what non-verbal sounds were (e.g. "Oh, that was Phil tipping over the chips").

Verbatim Account: Or Full Account.  A redaction or edited version of the transcript, including everything spoken and done within SIS.  This is what John Kim is calling "transcript" above.  This is an ugly term -- see below.

Account: Exactly what Ron describes above with the Lord Gyrax example.  A redacted or edited account of all events occurring in SIS.  More or less I think what John means by "re-telling."  Not especially faithful to the spoken words of the game as played, but rather to the sequence of events.  Accounts tend to move toward becoming stories, though this is not required for the definition.[/list:u]Proposal 2
These terms are hardly fixed in stone, but as John has also noted, we certainly need at least these three levels of discrimination.

John proposed (my terms on left):

Transcript -> Game Log
Verbatim Account -> Transcript
Account -> Re-telling[/list:u]I'm not happy with this, because I feel strongly that a "transcript" is extremely detailed and not limited to SIS, partly because I'm used to seeing the term in the context of anthropology and the like.  Taking the model of a court transcript, however, John's definitions make good sense: a court transcript does not include everything, but only events considered officially relevant.  On the other hand, in ordinary usage, there is a distincion between the court

transcript and the court record.  One strikes certain statements from the latter, not the former, if the judge determines that they are officially irrelevant.  Thus one could quite reasonably replace the term "Verbatim Account" with "Record" on this model.

Since Ron constructed the Provisional Glossary (please, everyone, note that Ron insists that the word "provisional" is important, and that the glossary is not set in stone, but still) which currently anchors conversation on the Forge, it might be reasonable to continue using "transcript" as he has proposed.

My objection to this is that several threads, including the one that started this (see top of page), indicate to me some confusion about this term's precise meanings.  Further, I do not see that the Provisional Glossary definition is fully satisfactory or sufficiently rigorous.  Thus I'd rather see the terms revised as we move toward a more final version of the Glossary.

Final Proposal

Transcript: An exact record of every event occurring in gameplay, potentially (but probably not practically) including gestures, food, and the like, as well as certainly everything spoken.  Such a transcript could be generated with reasonable fidelity from a tape recording with a series of running comments from participants.

Record:  A redaction or edited version of the transcript, including everything spoken and done within SIS.

Account: Exactly what Ron describes with the Lord Gyrax example.  A redacted or edited account of all events occurring in SIS.  Not especially faithful to the spoken words of the game as played, but rather to the sequence of events.  Accounts tend to move toward becoming stories, though this is not required for the definition.[/list:u]It is entirely possible that further levels will be useful, but these three seem necessary.  These terms have also the advantage of not overlapping, and I think they carry relatively little baggage of the sort that terms using things like "story" would.

I think that adoption of these terms into common Forge terminology would resolve a number of debates about CA products and their post-facto analysis.  I also think that as we slowly move toward a better understanding of how to go about analyzing game sessions, i.e. the methodological problems, these terms will continue to serve us well.  I would prefer also to use terms in a fashion quite close to their common meanings in ordinary parlance, so as to avoid the "Forge jargon" problem; I do feel that Ron's usage of "transcript" is sufficiently far from the ordinary connotation as to cause this problem -- it certainly confused me for a while.

Comments and suggestions?

[Marco]

I am thinking on this. In my own conversations with someone else (who does not post here) I ran into the same issues. Here are my questions:

1. Where is Story Found? It cannot be found "in the transcript" since the ordering of pizza is unlikely to be thematic.

If it is to be found in the Record then there are still some questions about how to represent SiS: If a player with a fighter in a weapons shop asks the GM a hundred clarification questions about what he sees but takes no in-game action, does the 6 hours of play time for this event get compressed to "Thurd the Fighter looked around, bought the black plate armor, and left"?

If Story is found in the Account, then I think that everyone should drop 'story' as a GNS-qualifier, including Story Now, even as a catch-phrase. Narrativism may create theme with specific player impact in a Record--but by the time we get to an Account, I think Story-Anything has lost its relevance.

2. In the case of an IRC game, what is the log? Since we cannot reasonably know what the players at other computers were eating, can we--should we--include that for a Transcript or assume it is not included since the players couldn't know (otoh, if a guy runs to the bathroom and there's a long pause before he replies, that can be relevant in the game if everyone else thinks "Man, Joe's really thinking about that.")

It isn't a Record either (unedited, it contains game mechanics and OOC discussions or clarafication questions).

-Marco

[LordSmerf]

The IRC question is an interesting one.  What makes something part of Actual Play?  In a face to face game food, drinks, chairs, seating arrangements, and the like are part of the specific social setting.  They are undertaken socially.  In IRC they have an effect on the social setting, but are they actually a part of it?  This may be a topic for another thread though...

Thomas

[clehrich]

1. Where is Story Found? It cannot be found "in the transcript" since the ordering of pizza is unlikely to be thematic.

Obviously a rather contested issue, and one which I'm hardly going to solve here.  But I think these are really not commensurable terms.

Story strikes me as not something that one "finds" or discovers firmly embedded within one of these layers.  Story is something one constructs, interpretively.

Now this means that an Account may well be a story, as noted, because the person doing the redaction has made it so.  The same could be the case with a Record, though it is less likely because the quantity of data downplays the effects of the editor.

But at the same time, it may well be the case that story does not appear in any of these, because the editor or redactor at whatever level does not put it there -- consciously or otherwise.

My inclination is to think about story as something completely separate, its own issue.  Indeed, I think one of the main values of getting clear about terms for the "product" of gameplay is that it allows us to think about things like story, myth, challenge, dream, etc. discretely.

For example, it seems to me that a Nar player is looking for Story Now, which is to say that in this player's head, story is occurring while play is going on.  Depending on who constructs the Account at the very end, this may or may not be discernable there after the fact.  But especially if that player is quite vocal and explicit, we may be able to spot story happening for him within the Transcript.

Ultimately, then, these distinctions preserve Ron's point that Account tells us nothing about CA.  Transcript, in my definitions, would be an excellent data-point for discerning CA -- but that is because the Transcript itself attempts to be uninterpreted and thus lends itself to exterior interpretation.

2. In the case of an IRC game, what is the log? Since we cannot reasonably know what the players at other computers were eating, can we--should we--include that for a Transcript or assume it is not included since the players couldn't know (otoh, if a guy runs to the bathroom and there's a long pause before he replies, that can be relevant in the game if everyone else thinks "Man, Joe's really thinking about that.")

A Transcript always balances a certain sense of practicality against ideality.  The log is a Transcript.  That Transcript could be made more extensive by asking for editorial comments from the participants, post facto, on the log.  For example, "Oh, I dropped out here because I really had to pee; here at *** I got back."  There is no reason not to consider the log a valid Transcript -- it's just imperfect.  But every Transcript is necessarily imperfect, because it is in some sense always limited to exteriority, and that entails that someone (or multiple someones) is making decisions about what "counts", whereas a theoretically perfect Transcript includes absolutely everything -- and is thus impossible.

If you want to follow up that question, I suggest that you read Clifford Geertz's famous article "Thick Description," which is in The Interpretation of Cultures and collected many other places.  He essentially argues the limits of the transcript and wants to go much, much farther toward a complete understanding of what happens in the event -- and he ends up with something that is a kind of super-account, a carefully redacted and constructed object that contains far more information than any Transcript ever could.  This he calls a "thick description."  His article "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" is probably his best-known and most effective example of a thick description; note that it is a 50-odd page article about Balinese cockfights, each of which takes about 2 or 3 minutes.

But these are really methodological questions that need to be dealt with for us only if and when we start seriously considering how to go about studying and analyzing gameplay concretely.

[John Kim]

Final Proposal

Transcript: An exact record of every event occurring in gameplay, potentially (but probably not practically) including gestures, food, and the like, as well as certainly everything spoken.  Such a transcript could be generated with reasonable fidelity from a tape recording with a series of running comments from participants.

Record:  A redaction or edited version of the transcript, including everything spoken and done within SIS.

Account: Exactly what Ron describes with the Lord Gyrax example.  A redacted or edited account of all events occurring in SIS.  Not especially faithful to the spoken words of the game as played, but rather to the sequence of events.  Accounts tend to move toward becoming stories, though this is not required for the definition.[/list:u]

Well, I tend to prefer my terms, but I'm OK with these with one exception.  

I really, REALLY, REALLY don't like re-using the word "transcript" to mean something different than it does in Ron's glossary and previous discussion.  Surely you could coin a new word for that level instead?  Redefinition will cause unending headaches for people who read older threads but not this one, or people who miss this one, etc.  In fact, such redefinition is the root of all evil and is liable to cause apocalypse.  So seriously, for the fate of the universe, coin a new term for that level.

[Marco]

So seriously, for the fate of the universe, coin a new term for that level.

John, being a physicist, would actually know if this is going to speed up the heat-death of the universe or cause proton-decay or something. I think we should listen to him.

(I agree, although the glossary can be changed, unless we are going to change the Nar Essay too, I think we should try to stick with the terms and, now that we have a glossary, expand the concept there by adding other levels and explaining that Transcript has an example in the Nar essay as the basis for its definition).

-Marco

[clehrich]

Fine with me.  Anyone got a suggestion?  We're looking for a term that will indicate a full transcript of as much potentially meaningful activity -- speech, gesture, etc. -- as is practically or reasonably possible.  At the same time, we're likely to end up using this to mean the entirety of what actually occurred during the play session, whether recorded or otherwise.  If it's going to cause increased entropy and bend the nature of spacetime to use "transcript", we'd definitely better come up with a new term!

[ffilz]

Do we need a single word term? What about unedited record and edited record?

Frank

[LordSmerf]

"Record" seems to work for me.  Or possibly "Recording".  I can imagine eventually having actual audio or audio/video "records" of a session, and that's what I think of for that particular application.

Thomas

[Silmenume]

Here are some ideas - I don't know if any are helpful.

The following words are offered for the unedited complete "recording" of the game play session -

[*]omnigraph[*]omniscript[*]the omnis[*]omniparens (all producings)[*]omnigenus (of all kinds)[/list:u]my 2 cents.