Narrativism and Morality?

[M. J. Young]

O.K., I'm getting so boggled  by this thread that I'm having trouble keeping things in mind that need to be said; so I'm going to start writing while I'm reading and hope that I can make it all coherent without duplicating anything. Am I too late? (I really hate it when threads go by in mere hours.)

Is integrity or values a better description? Does every campaign/scenario in a narrativist game need to focus on the "moral" of the story?

Integrity is itself a moral/ethical issue. As to values, well, there are certainly different kinds of values, but we need to be clear what sort of values we're referencing. After all, if we ask why Jon's character Jack did something, the answer could be "because Jon wants to win the game", and that certainly is an expression of values--but it's not at all a narrativist approach. It says that Jon doesn't care whether the story has any meaning or even makes sense; he just cares whether he wins. Similarly, the value could be about maintaining the integrity of the character and the situation, which would be a simulationist value. If you're going to refer to "values" you do have to qualify the sort of values you have in mind, and moral/ethical values are the words which combine the right level of universality with the right degree of stricture. For example, "political" values turn out to be a subcategory of "moral/ethical" values, not something different. Similarly, what we do in our relationships with each other proves to be closely tied to moral and ethical values. Neither political nor relational issues encompass everything included in moral/ethical issues, but everything within political and relational issues are contained in moral/ethical ones.

The terms "moral" and "ethical" mean too many things in this way: what defines any particular event as a moral or ethical dilemma depends entirely on the value-code of the person using one or the other word. What this means is that in discussion, what qualifies as a moral dilemma (and thus narrativist) may not qualify at all to another person with different values.

Let's look at Oedipus. He killed his father and married his mother. Now, killing his father I think most of us would find appalling; but maybe there are people who have no moral or ethical qualms about a son marrying his mother. I remember reading a story in Omni decades ago in which some intelligent animal species explained to some human that the reason humans weren't telepathic and all animals were was because animals routinely mated with their own offspring and ate their own relatives. Take that as gross, if you like; but it suggests a rejection of the notion that it would be wrong to marry your mother. Still, Oedipus as told by Sophocles is a moral-driven drama, because even if you don't think it's wrong to kill your father and marry your mother, Sophocles does, and through him Oedipus does. You might discount the entire play with the words, "what's wrong with what he did?"; but even if you did that, you would still be confronted with the deeper questions raised by the play: what happens to the man who stumbles into doing exactly that evil which he tried to avoid?

All literature (presumably Narrativist, even if not a game) does not depend on moral or ethical dilemmas.

I don't think all literature is Narrativist.

I'm particularly thinking of Agatha Christie's whodunits and Columbo's howtagetems here. There are no moral issues involved, really. That is, someone has killed someone, and we accept that it's wrong, but generally we're not particularly interested in why they did it or whether they were justified or if we might have done the same thing in their position. In the one case, we're trying to figure out who did it before the author tells us; in the other, we're trying to spot the mistake the criminal made that's going to be his downfall. These are really Gamist stories--they're a challenge to the reader or viewer to beat the detective. I think there are also simulationist stories--certainly history is usually simulationist, in a sense, as it attempts to accurately present what really happened in an interesting manner without hiding or changing details.

Narrative is not narrativism. Narrativism is not about "interesting stories". It's specifically about stories that raise the kinds of questions and issues which we tend to call moral or ethical, and to wrestle with answers to these at some level.

I think that the division between Narrativism and the Simulationist exploration of Character are nebulous, and possibly not even important.

This, I suspect, is why you don't get it. It is because narrativists are wrestling with moral issues and simulationists are merely exploring character that the two areas are distinct. You might produce interesting "stories" either way. However, a simulationist story might well be that the One Ring was too powerful for Bilbo to resist, and he took it with him ultimately to wind up in the hands of Sauron; a Narrativist story would have to put moral choices into that--Bilbo makes a choice about giving Frodo the ring, and it's a moral choice ultimately, not a simple mechanical matter of whether the ring controls him.

I'm not sure I can see a moral dilemma in accounts of creation, but they're still engaging.

And I've read some fairly engaging math texts and computer manuals in my time. They're not stories, and they're certainly not narrativism. Quite a lot of mythology and quite a bit of the Bible is not at all narrativist in the sense that is meant (some of it certainly is). It can still be engaging. Poetry can be engaging without even being terribly meaningful--Ogden Nash captured a strong following with what is mostly nonsense. I love Lewis Carroll's fantasy dialogues, Humpty Dumpty or the Mock Turtle. They're about the peculiarities of language and the limits of logic and so many things, but they're not narrativist stories. They're bits of nonsense set to challenge our thinking about reality in new ways.

...using morality automatically limits that scope to only those religions or cultures that utilize morality.

I say surprisingly; perhaps I should say shockingly. I'm unaware of any culture which does not "utilize moralitiy". Certainly there are those that don't discuss or define it, but all humans recognize moral principles, and in the main we all recognize very similar core moral principles. See C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, for a cursory overview of the overall unity of moral principles across a very broad range of history, religion, and culture.

On Egri, although I can't be certain, it is my impression that his involvement is coincidental in the most basic sense of that word. That is, we were discussing narrativism some years ago, and talking about the importance of premise, and what that meant, and trying to refine it, and some concept of narrativism emerged, and then, after narrativism had been largely defined, someone pointed Ron to Egri, as a sort of "he's said this already in the field of dramatics", and it clicked because it fit, and Egri was credited because his work was so well connected to what was being said. Now, it could be that my memory isn't so good, but I was intimately involved in those discussions at Gaming Outpost, and did not follow the mass exodus to The Forge for quite some time, and had no idea who Egri was when I encountered his name here. So I think Egri was a later connection made because it fit so well. Put more simply, it isn't that we looked at Egri and said, those sound like the principles on which narrativism should be based, but rather that we had come to a coalescence of an idea about the kinds of principles on which narrativism is based and then discovered that Egri had already solidified a theory in a related field.

This also explains Fang's tendency to call them Edwardian premises, as indeed they do use them in something of the opposite direction from Egri.

I think one of the major problems in this debate is that terms like moral and ethical, especially in how you use them, end up being answers, rather than questions. They can be, but it's not certain that all ethical and moral questions (and especially not all Aesthetic questions) have answers, even for a given individual.

I'm not certain what you mean here. If you mean that a moral question can be difficult to answer to the point that for some people it doesn't have an answer, that doesn't invalidate it as a moral issue or a narrativist premise.

Let's imagine a narrativist game in which you're living in Germany during World War II. A Polish family living in Germany comes to you and begs for help. You know that the S.S. is systematically hunting down and arresting Polish families, and you don't know what's being done with them. This man has heard the rumors, and believes them. He is begging you to help him hide his children from the S.S. so they will not be killed in the pogrom. However, this is a quandary. If he is wrong, you could be involved in illegally hiding enemies of the state, and thus a traitor, and you have not accomplished anything because the terrible thing that is rumored is not really happening. If he is right, you condemn him and his family to death if you do not help them--but you risk bringing that condemnation on yourself and your own children if you do and you are discovered. Is there a morally correct answer to this problem? Maybe I don't know. Even if I think the morally correct answer is to protect these people, would I dare to do it? These are narrativist issues. If my only interest is what would it have been like to live in this place and time, and I give no thought the morality of the situation--I could do that, certainly. I could say, my character is the typical German householder who believes the stories are nonsense and doesn't want to get into any trouble with the police, and so he sees no moral implications of this matter, it's just about troublemaking foreigners, and ignore the moral issue entirely. Even then, there could be a narrativist story if as players we decide that this issue is going to come back and bite me in the rear. Bonhoffer wrote something to the effect that he didn't speak up when they came for the Jews, or the Poles, or the Catholics, and then when they came for him there was no one left to speak up. We could still get a narrativist story out of it by bringing the moral issue back even when the character doesn't recognize it. Or we could ignore the moral implications and just look at it as a simulation, or even a game.

But the fact that the moral question is difficult and might be unanswerable doesn't mean we aren't dealing with a moral question, or that it's not narrativism because we can't answer it.

The player who plays a seial killer in order to rack up huge body count (a condition of winning to the player) - that's gamism. If they play it out of a desire to see what being a serial killer is like - that's Sim. If they do it because of the effects on the story - that's Narr.

Bzzzt.

Sorry, it's not. It's actually still sim, in all likelihood--if we're exploring what having a serial killer does to the world, or the story, or the development of character, we're still in the simulationist domain, exploring setting or plot or character. It isn't until we start looking at whether the serial killer is acting morally or immorally that we've crossed over to narrativism. That's where the confusion lies--

Approaching Narr via the moral conundrum is simply another aspect of exploration of character, as I see it. That would make it Sim.

What he's described is sim. Narrativism not about understanding this character, or this situation; it's about understanding this issue.

Regarding why story was dropped: it was recognized that this word means too many different things to people. Many of us use the word "story" to mean nothing more than "the sequence of events". I could speak of "the story of my life", and then expound those elements of my biography which I think best characterize who I am and what has happened to me and how I responded--but unless my life is extraordinary or I have remarkable editorial abilities, that's not a story about a particular theme or issue. We could similarly tell the "story" of World War II, or the American Revolution, or any other war; but without editorializing, it's not about an issue, but about a sequence of events. In the Narrativist sense, stories are about exploring a premise (Egrian) or theme or moral issue. They have a structure--not just a beginning, a middle, and an end as Sesame Street teaches, but an introduction and increasing conflict which builds to a climax in which the conflict comes to maximum intensity and is then resolved (for better or worse) and flows into a denoument. It gives us insight into the issue at hand, because the entire story has been about that issue, was clearly about that issue almost as soon as the story started, continued to be about that issue as it grew, and ultimately attempted to resolve that issue. Whether successful or not, narrativist play is doing that; to the narrativist, if it doesn't do that (or at least approach it), it's not story. Narrativist players want that story to unfold through play, want not to know how it's going to unfold until it does, and want the result to address the issue in a meaningful way. But people use "story" in ways that are a lot looser than that in practice, including recounting unrelated events which occurred in a particular sequence.

Not every book, not even every great book, is a story in the narrativist sense. That doesn't mean they aren't good books, nor does it mean that the outcome of a simulationist or gamist game isn't a grand adventure that deserves telling. They just didn't start out to address a premise and focus on the premise throughout, so they aren't what the narrativist meant by story, and it led to fights about whether such accounts of sequential events were or were not stories.

As a theologian and philosopher, I object to this:

Morality (and ethics) both depend on a code. Morals are the code, and ethics are how the code is used and what effect the code has on the ultimate goal (being a good person, salvation, release from Samsara, etc.).

I believe that quite a few over the centuries have argued cogently that morality is something far more basic than the code; it is something that transcends codes, which is essential in all humanity, on which our codes are founded and by which they may be challenged. And as an attorney, I assure you that it has long been a principle in law that we can state the law is wrong because even if it is the code, it is immoral. Morality is greater than the codes; the codes are merely our efforts to express it.

As to the Ten Commandments, they are merely the first clauses of a Suzerainty Treaty between God and Israel: "I did this great thing for you, now you are going to do these things for me to pay me back." Israel had no doctrine of heaven at the time they were given that can be found in any of the contemporary texts. They had been delivered, and they were indebted. It is not even clear that they considered the rules themselves moral rules; the moral obligation was that they were indebted to their deliverer, and this was the payment He demanded. Even in that, we see that morality was something beyond the code: it was the reason to obey the code, and was not itself expressed within the code.

The presence of these elements does not eliminate the possibility of other sorts of play. They only enable it.

Put another way, if you include morality in a gamist game, you're using it as a limiter to increase the challenge: can I still win if I abide by these rules? If you include morality in simulationist play, you're merely saying that these are part of the generally accepted rules of the world which characters will not generally violate, but might, with certain defined consequences. You're not basing decisions on moral questions; you're really only increasing the system and setting rules imposed on play. In a simulationist or gamist game, "Thou shalt not kill" is no more a moral issue than "Never kill goblins on Tuesday." It's only a limit on how the game can proceed. In a narrativist game, "never kill goblins on Tuesday" doesn't make sense as a moral issue, and is clearly distinct from the issue of whether killing is right under any circumstance.

I do hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

[Wormwood]

M. J.,

To further expand my point:

It seems to me this entire discussion resembles asking whether the paint or the canvas is more intrinsic to a painting. When someone discusses values as central, there is an implicit sense that some how a conflict between values can be mediated. It's not unreasonable to say that morality and ethics is essentially this mediator. Likewise when someone discusses morality and ethics in a sense of decision, this necessarilly implies something being manipulated by the moral and ethical systems. These things are values.

It's not a certainty, but it often seems that the more general field of Aesthetics incorporates ethics and morality, especially in their manipulation of values. This is why I find the idea of values to be more useful to explain the situation, it also causes less grief to explain, which in my experience is well worth the effort.

Quite simply, we can always deduce (barring our abstract processing power) a morality for a given set of ethics, and a set of ethics for a given relation to values. Likewise the reverse is possible, typically much easier. (For example, it's easier to ask what values this moral code posseses, rather than to ask what moral codes correlate with this set of values.) This means there is no disjunction between your positions in any deep sense. It's a matter of which approach is more accesible, and which can be applied more directly in the analysis. For this reason I feel morality and ethics strongly fails to fit the bill.

For example, in your discussion of the value of winning, you argue that it's simply the same as gamism. This is somewhat rash. While gamism may possess the value of winning, it does so implicitly, as it is directed towards a collection of goals, which dominate the play decisions. The value of winning however has numerous applications in terms of moral quandaries and ethical considerations. In fact, it's one of the key values that is manipulated in the Lord of the Rings trilogy that seems to be archetypical of moral concerns.

All in all, I feel that it is more important to develop a functional description of narrativist play, to aid analysis and application. Why-centric decisions, i.e. those that focus primarilly on the reasons (and hence values) behind given options, seems a simpler, more direct choice.

  -Mendel S.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

M.J. and Mendel, I think that Aidan's concern is met on this thread. Let's take the morality, aesthetics, and narrativism issue to another one, or perhaps better, to some private exchanges to see whether a general discussion is necessary.

Best,
Ron