Premise Revisited - Educate Me

[M. J. Young]

Ralph is right that the word "story" is a landmine here. It is one of those words that means nothing precisely because it means everything. I was very surprised that "story now" became the slogan of narrativism, precisely for that reason, and I agree that these terms tend more to obfuscate than to clarify when used the way they have been. At one time we had to say, "Narrativism, which means"; now we have to say, "Narrativism, which means Story Now, which means".

Sean, there's a serious problem with your use of the word "story" in this context; the problem is that it's hard to imagine any form of play that wouldn't produce some kind of story. A travelogue is, in a sense, a story; but it is a particularly simulationist story. An adventure is a story, but it frequently is (or can be) a gamist story, about obstacles overcome and challenges faced. A narrativist story is specifically one in which moral and/or personal issues, questions of right and wrong, are addressed as the central conflict of play. It is not a story in any other sense.

That does not mean that every minute of every game session has to be about that; but it does mean that even when play at this moment is not about that, that is still the thing that looms over play and drives it forward--in the same sense that not every minute of play in gamist D&D is about beating the dragon (or whatever great beast lives in the heart of the present dungeon or ruin), but that dragon still looms over everything and everything is moving toward it.

The only question is whether conscious development of a Theme on the part of player-authors is constitutive of Narrativsim, or play-aiming-at-Narrativism, or whatever.

(Emphasis mine.)
The answer is no. Development of a theme on the part of the player authors is constitutive; conscious development is not. A travelogue is not a narrativist story, unless it diverts far from the path of what was discovered and into moral choices and ambiguities along the way. An adventure is probably not a narrativist story, unless the challenges take a back seat to some moral issue or issues that are unfolding in the process. No one has to choose to play narrativist; some just do. If you are aware of the possibility you can so choose.

Hope that helps.

--M. J. Young

[Calithena]

M.J. if you accept that

"The answer is no. Development of a theme on the part of the player authors is constitutive; conscious development is not."

then that's all that's left of my original point, and we agree on the only thing that matters. Although I'd immediately add that you're selling things short in the follow-up, because when you write

"A travelogue is not a narrativist story, unless it diverts far from the path of what was discovered and into moral choices and ambiguities along the way..."

I'd immediately add, and I think others should add, "as all travelogues of literary merit do." In other words, for a travelogue to be a good story, it needs theme.

----------

There is almost no point of disagreement left in this thread. I accept that all forms of RPGs and much else produce stories, although I deny M.J.'s assertion that 'story' is a useless term due to vagueness; stories, and compelling stories, are real things for which there are related but non-identical theories for characterizing/evaluating and producing, and Theme is one of the terms of said characterization.

Greyorm, your argument was already made by Ralph, Ian, and others: I understand it and do not find that it addresses my point, which has been whittled down through this process quite nicely. I'll try to say more on that later.

[Paganini]

Coming in a bit late here, but check this out:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=4738

It may help out. Basically When Ron & everyone else talks about Premise, it's a local code word for "conflict" in the old LIT101 sense. Egri had a method of looking at handling (both in terms of creating and analysing) conflict in a way that is more developed than your standard LIT101 presentation. Egri recorded his ideas in a book called the Art of Dramatic Writing, using an obtuse, obscure, obfuscatory writing stlye that Ron happens to read the way most of us read normal English. (Yes Ron, I'm talking to *you* boah!) Egri's statements of conflict (he called it Premise... now you know) were complete, in the sense that they included resolution. Ron turned them into questions that demand resolution through actual play.

Basically, at its heart, conflict deals with human values, or the ascription of human values to non-human things. In order for there to be conflict between parties, there must be something in contention - the parties have to *care* about something for it to matter what happens. This is why narrativist games often center around emotional relationships - it's such an easy way to produce narrativist play. And that's basically it. In role-playing, any time the players make it a point to set up, resolve, or otherwise explore such a conflict it's narrativism. Doesn't have to be concious, or constant. A narrativist-facilitating game is one that makes it easy to deal with such conflicts (or, even better, mechanically encourages this). A narrativist game session is one where the thematic question drives play, even though some (maybe even most) of the players' decisions are driven by oher priorities.

Sim priorities are very common in this context; in fact, the reference thread I posted above is on the subject of imbedding premise into a character during creation so that just *playing your character* will address a premise.

So, hope this helps. I want to add one other thing though. Like everyone else has said, "story" is a useless term. It has no useful meaning unless without being locally clarified, because it is so vague. I'm infering from your comments that, when you say "story," you mean "a sequence of events generated by play." And in thta case, I have to take exception to your claim that all good stories require theme. I say BAH! If that's your contention, you've completely missed the point of GNS. You are essentially claiming that the narrativist mode is the only valid way to play. Bah! Bah, bah bah! [1]

A story is "good" if the participants are entertained by producing it. Period. You, Sean, are not the judge of what is acceptable, or desireable, to others. All you can say is what *you* want.

[1] Chris taught me how to do that! ;)

[Calithena]

That last sort of comment doesn't help, Pag. We're trying to engage in a theoretical discussion here, so it's a premise on both sides that we're trying to characterize an objective state of affairs. I'm not trying to 'promote' any kind of storytelling, nor any particular kind of play, and if you could demonstrate that I was, I would cede the argument. Your reinterpretation and the conclusions you draw from it are highly uncharitable: I do not hold the positions that you attribute to me.

I don't accept your equation that by 'story' I mean 'sequence of events generated in play'. I would accept that most sequences of events generated by play are stories, and that some of those stories have a theme, premise, conflict, whatever. It's arguable that most of the good stories (qua stories; not qua play sequences, where 'good' means something between 'enjoyable' and 'expressing some of the elements of the game being played to the highest degree') will have one; that's a lit theory discussion I'm trying to avoid. (But note that this is ground I've ceded to my interlocutors to avoid getting into the discussion about what makes for a good story in the first place.)

I think that you know stories perfectly well when you see them, even if there are some vague borderline cases sometimes.

I'll try one more time in my next post to make what I'm saying clear. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me about this stuff.

[greyorm]

Greyorm, your argument was already made by Ralph, Ian, and others: I understand it and do not find that it addresses my point, which has been whittled down through this process quite nicely. I'll try to say more on that later.

Ahhh, well, you should have said that in response to my last post, then! (being that this was only an attempt to clarify that one). Anyways, it appears we're talking past each other.

Also, in that same vein, I'm apparently completely missing what you're attempting to get at in the second half of this disucussion. Thus, I'll await the next thread you plan for clarification, and sorry for the redundancy in this one!

[Calithena]

Here's my last, best attempt to say what I've been trying to say.

GNS, as I understand it, is a theory about various modes of play of RPGs, which can in turn be characterized by various goals that the players have in mind. I think it’s a good theory, FWIW, and increasingly find myself thinking about role-playing in its terms.

But theories are not self-contained, except perhaps (though I don’t believe it even there) in mathematics; they are about various things in the world, and GNS is a subtheory of social psychology. We have to be able to identify role-players and role-playing for it even to get off the ground.

Now: you CAN categorize RPG activity any way you want: those who play with pizza in hand, those who play with the old ‘caltrop’ yellow d4’s, those who turn their stories into publishable fiction, those who play out of love for their crusty old uncle. But these categories are boring. We want to know if there is any natural segmentation of the activity, or if there’s no more informative characterization in real terms than ‘role-playing’.

I take it that GNS says that there is; that we can observe players with goals of different kinds, behaving or getting frustrated in behavior aimed at achieving those goals, and that those goals can be specified in informative terms. I agree with this: my agreement is part of why I’m spending my time discussing this. If I didn’t, I’d regard the whole thing as conceptual wanking and ignore it.

Now: when we’re talking about Narrativism, what is the best way to characterize the goals of players who are playing to achieve Narrativist goals?

Ralph, Ian, Greyorm, and others all jump on me at this point and say: “We define Narrativism this way, so it’s a tautology….”; but that is a form of conventionalism. Some scientific definitions are just conventions, but not all: good scientific definitions carve reality at the joints, as Aristotle said long ago. They pick out natural kinds. I think that GNS picks out three natural kinds of human behavior, enduring tropes in the social psychology of RPGing.

(If you’re a die-hard Foucaultian, Kuhnian, Toulminian, or whatever in the philosophy of science, you can stop reading now, because in that case we disagree on basic philosophy, which is so far outside the scope of the present discussion that it makes lit theory seem like core material.)

Greyorm, my ‘bass ackwards’ way of doing things follows from what I believe GNS to be a theory of. I think we can and should build our definition of Narrativism from the ground up, because Narrativism isn’t a desideratum of the theory – play of RPGs with Narrativist goals in mind is observable behavior, part of the theory’s data.

This point ought to be reinforced by M.J.’s answer to my question in the other thread: he claimed that there was no a priori argument for thinking that Gam, Nar, and Sim were all there is – it’s just that every other proposed mode of role-playing behavior has turned out to reduce to one of these. Fine. So once again, the reality of these modes is empirical, not a matter of our definitions.

I claim that the goal of the narrativist player is to tell, or be involved in a joint-authorly kind of way in telling, stories.

At this point M.J. and Paganini claim that ‘story’ is so vague as to be useless. I don’t agree; I also don’t think this is a fertile point for further dispute.

Let’s then turn to examining an argument which has been implicit in certain postings. It goes like this:

(1) All stories have a Premise, or
(1a) All stories that players with Narrativist goals have as their goal to tell have a Premise

(2) Players with narrativist goals have as their goal to tell a Story.

Therefore,

(3) Players with narrativist goals have as their goal the telling of stories with Premises.

EVEN GRANTING 1 or 1a, the actual truth of which is not relevant to the point I am making, I STILL THINK 3 HAS A POTENTIALLY MISLEADING AMBIGUITY. Why? Because descriptions of goals are inherently dual-aspected; they can be taken as descriptions of the objective situation, but they can also be taken as descriptions of the way a subject would characterize their situation. And as numerous interlocutors have conceded, THAT reading of 3 is in error.

Let’s say literary theory determines that 1 is true or empirical GNS determines that 1a is true. Again, I have no preconceptions about whether this will happen or otherwise. Would it then be better to encourage players to put premise front and center, consciously – that is, to accept both aspects of (3) as equally true?

This depends on a theory of artistic creation rooted in the same sort of self-aware, clear-about-motives behavior that some of us tend to think real-world decisions ought to be made on the basis of. As a theory of artistic creation, this is highly tendentious. Housman recommends having a pint of beer at lunch and walking in the woods. On the other hand, some people do create this way.

Now, the final point: as a PRACTICAL matter, for game designers and players alike, I’m totally willing to take almost all the force of the above conceptual points back. That is, I think, right now, in the real world of role playing and game design,

(A) Designers who want to design games that facilitate Narrativist play are well-served to design their games around a Premise, as a matter of design coherence, and to help players determine whether that’s the sort of game they actually want to play. If 1 or 1a is true, and if game design is an activity always best served by rational clarity about the ends one is trying to achieve, then this gets elevated to an absolute and not merely a practical constraint.

(B) Players who have Narrativist goals may very well be well served, when play bogs down, by considering what they take to be the Premise of their play, and trying to move the story along an axis determined by it, along with several other things. In fact, this is probably excellent guidance for role-players, based on what I see at the table.

But it is practical advice, not an a priori constraint on Narrativist play from the player's point of view, a matter of the definition, or whatever. And thinking that it is relies on inferring across the equivocation in (3). I don't know what helps people who want to make stories with their role-playing do that best, as a psychological matter. I strongly suspect that many players in many cases will be helped by attention to Premise, but not all in all.

[Paganini]

Edit: Whoops! Crosspost!

Edit 2: Hah! I just noticed! This is the Post of the Beast!

That last sort of comment doesn't help, Pag. We're trying to engage in a theoretical discussion here, so it's a premise on both sides that we're trying to characterize an objective state of affairs. I'm not trying to 'promote' any kind of storytelling, nor any particular kind of play, and if you could demonstrate that I was, I would cede the argument. Your reinterpretation and the conclusions you draw from it are highly uncharitable: I do not hold the positions that you attribute to me.

Yes, you do. You said:

I'd immediately add, and I think others should add, "as all travelogues of literary merit do." In other words, for a travelogue to be a good story, it needs theme.

It's not for you to say what I should do. It's not up to you to say whether or not the stories I produce via play are good. They are mine (and my groups'). If I enjoy them, then they are good, whether they have theme or not. Your attitude is presumptuous and condescending. Whether or not you intend it to be arrogant, it is arrogant.

Furthermore, how about this: Please refrain from commenting on my posting style. I'm a long-time Forge member. I know all about the theoretical discussions that take place here. I have created and contributed to many of them. Any posts I make are offered in the spirit of that intent. If I call you out on your objectivity, don't tell me it's "not helpful" because it's a theoretical discussion. You are *not* being objective. Either answer the challenge, or accept it. But don't devalue my input again.

I don't accept your equation that by 'story' I mean 'sequence of events generated in play'. I would accept that most sequences of events generated by play are stories, and that some of those stories have a theme, premise, conflict, whatever. It's arguable that most of the good stories (qua stories; not qua play sequences, where 'good' means something between 'enjoyable' and 'expressing some of the elements of the game being played to the highest degree') will have one; that's a lit theory discussion I'm trying to avoid. (But note that this is ground I've ceded to my interlocutors to avoid getting into the discussion about what makes for a good story in the first place.)

I think that you know stories perfectly well when you see them, even if there are some vague borderline cases sometimes.

Yeah. And this is exactly what everyone has been saying. "That's not what I mean by story. No, I don't mean that by story either. Well, I dunno what a story is, but I can recognize one when I see it, although there's a grey area."

Not too useful is it?  Until you can offer an exact definition, discussion is pretty much at a dead end.

It's also interesting to note that you completely ignorred the meat of my previous post, to focus in on a tangetial point that you personally disapprove of!

[Paganini]

Everything is good until you get to here:

I claim that the goal of the narrativist player is to tell, or be involved in a joint-authorly kind of way in telling, stories.

See, it doesn't matter what you claim. Narrativism is not a tree. You can't go outside and look at it, cut it down, take it apart, and make arguments based on your observation. Narrativism is a convenient tag. A code word. It's an identifier associated with a particular class of observed behavior. It was coined and defined by Ron. Your claim that it is about story is supurfluous - "story" was intentionally excluded from its definition. In consequence, the remainder of your post is a wild goose chase!

[greyorm]

I claim that the goal of the narrativist player is to tell, or be involved in a joint-authorly kind of way in telling, stories.

Ok, so I do understand what you're saying, and I disagree for the reasons stated already.

Your claim is invalid for one reason: we can't discuss what you claim the goal of Narrativist play is, only what the goal of Narrativist play actually is. We won't get anywhere because we aren't discussing the same thing, just using the same terms.

Narrativism isn't about producing a story, and this is why GNS has moved away from that as a definition. Narrativism is about riffing on Premsie. The goal of a Narrativist player is to riff on a Premise, thus eventually producing a Theme. The goal of a Narrativist player is not to tell or be involved in telling, a story.

You're redefining the goal of Narrativist play if you say that the definition is "tell, or be involved in a joint-authorly kind of way in telling, stories." Like I said, the word "Story" is precisely what is tripping you up.

BTW, it appears you are also confusing the definition by including Stance in the definition, because Narrativism does not require joint authorship -- that is, Author or Director Stance utilized by players -- even though Narrativism supports those Stances best, and plays most easily when they are utilized.

Make sense?

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Ever get the idea that people are tussling for a brass ring, and when they grab it, they don't notice and keep tussling?

For my money, reading the last six or so posts, everyone wins. The points of contention are beginning to be about phrasing and (unfortunately) etiquette.

So with some firmness, how 'bout everyone take a little while, put aside the "need to rebut - must, must rebut!" and parse out specific and definite concerns that still remain, if any. Then we can have new threads about those things.

Yours for a nice clean forum,
Best,
Ron

[Calithena]

Hey guys!

I would agree that the discussion has reached equilibrium. I'll keep reading what people have written and if I come up with something new to say maybe I'll come back with a new thread. In the meantime, thank you very much for your help.

Pag, I don't read the line you quoted the way you read it, but rather than indulging in depth hermeneutics on a bit of text that was mostly present to assauage the concerns of earlier interlocutors anyway, let me just say this: I don't, as a matter of fact, think that there's any one way people ought to game, nor any one kind of story they ought to look for when they're gaming, etc. etc.. If anything I said implied that, then I recant it; but I swear to you I never thought that, and none of my posts were aimed even indirectly at arguing that there is. I apologize if I misread your reply; I assumed that you were putting words in my mouth to set me up as a straw man and then knock me down, a common enough rhetorical tactic. Evidently this is not what you intended, and I apologize for attributing such behavior to you.

Greyorm, I think our disagreement is more straightforward: we're down to bedrock, and I don't think either of us is budging on the basis of what's been said so far. I'll keep reading what all of you have written, and if I find a productive way to take the discussion forward from here, I'll post a new thread.

Thanks for the good thoughts, both of you and all others who took the time to help me out here.

Best,

Sean

[M. J. Young]

I promised I'd be back on Sunday, and here I am. I think perhaps I can shed a last bit of light on this, so I'm going to go ahead and answer Sean's comments to me.

"A travelogue is not a narrativist story, unless it diverts far from the path of what was discovered and into moral choices and ambiguities along the way..."

I'd immediately add, and I think others should add, "as all travelogues of literary merit do." In other words, for a travelogue to be a good story, it needs theme.

Does it? What do you mean here by "theme"?

Michael Palin did a fascinating television series for A&E/BBC entitled Around the World in Eighty Days (it was so successful that it was followed by another, From Pole to Pole, based on the same concept). In it, he essentially left England following the same rules as followed by the book of that name (no air travel, travel east until you're back where you started, try to make it in eighty days), and gave us a look on camera at all the places he visited--riding a train through China, eating snake in Hong Kong, and more. There were no moral issues, no personal issues, no emotional issues raised. It was a travelogue. It was a very good travelogue, if you like travelogues--but it was simulationist, not narrativist, in design. It was all about exploring places, and when we left one place and moved to another, we didn't really care where we had been before because we were discovering something new.

Now, a man traveling around the world is a story, of sorts; it is a particular kind of story called a travelogue. It has no Premise in the Egrian/Edwardsian sense; there is no conflict in it beyond whether we're going to make our train or miss the boat or find the food edible wherever we go. Yet a lot of people tuned in to watch it, because it was engaging. Palin made it fun and interesting, but it was from start to end an exploration of the world, and not an exploration of a premise.

If your concept of "story" says that Palin's production is not a story, then you're saying that only narrativist play produces stories because it's not a story if it doesn't address a Premise (which will get you into huge arguments with gamists and simulationists who know that what they've produced is a story--goodness, on Monday in school they can hardly wait to tell their friends the story of how they beat the giant, or found the entrance to the hidden vault).

If you're saying that that is a story because it has a theme (traveling from place to place and discovering things), and that it's therefore narrativist, then you're in essence saying that any sequence of events retold is a story, and all play is narrativist, such that gamism and simulationism are consumed.

If you're saying that the only games worth playing are those that produce stories with "literary merit", and that a story like Palin's is not a story in the roleplaying game sense, then you're being exclusive--you're saying narrativism is the only valid form of roleplay. What is the theme of Keep on the Borderlands or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or a hundred other role playing game modules? If the "theme" is kill the monsters, get the treasure, survive the encounter, beat the traps--that's not a story with "literary merit", I'd wager. It needs something more.

Pag is right, Sean. If you're saying that play that produces "stories" that have no "literary merit" because they're about beating the game or exploring the world, (gamist and simulationist "stories") are not roleplaying games, then you're making yourself judge of what constitutes the "right kind of play". I love a good narrativist game. I also enjoy gamism and simulationism immensely. I play with people who would have no clue how to play narrativist; they're up for the challenge. That's perfectly valid. Not all games produce stories "of literary merit", and it's not bad if they don't.

I agree with you that saying "we define narrativism this way" is not the answer to your question. Obviously, gamism, narrativism, and simulationism are not categories created into which to fit gamers, but rather labels attached to specific categories of conduct. But narrativism isn't attached to "all games in which the players produce a story that they want to retell the next day" (or we'd have to conclude that baseball is a narrativist pursuit); it's attached to "games in which the players are exploring personal, moral, ethical, and/or emotional issues". It is by this distinguished from gamist and simulationist play. It's not about telling stories; it's about exploring themes or premises that have moral value.

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

[Calithena]

M. J. - once again, you may consider the comment you quote withdrawn. It wasn't posted even initially as part of any thesis I was advancing - it was there because some earlier posters, criticizing some earlier versions of my claim, had been advancing against me the view that you and Pag are criticizing - that all stories have Theme, Premise, or whatever. The only reason that was even in my post was to defuse discussion of this very issue. In the quotation you and Pag object to I wasn't intending to advance any theory of stories, but rather conceding ground to interlocutors who I thought at the time had such a theory.

I'm sorry for confusing matters. That sentence was no part of any thesis I cared about at any point in this thread, and was only offered as a way to shift the center of argument to what I really cared about. I've explained my position pretty clearly in my last long post; let me just retract everything I said before that for simplicity's sake.

I also apologize for taking up more space in this discussion, but since this was bothering various people so much I wanted to make clear why I said what I said. Recall that earlier I was questioning whether all stories have theme, saying that was a question for lit theory to decide, and I still hold that view; that claim got attacked separately from the other points I made, so I dropped it, hence the offending sentence. Which I have now disavowed. Your counterexample is somewhat persuasive, though the wonder of experience, or the Journey itself, might be offered as a kind of loose 'theme' (though not a conflict) that goes along with any sort of travel narrative. Or not. The point is, I'm not defending that sort of claim here. I do have a very slightly different conception of what Narrativism is about than the majority seems to. But I'd appreciate it if we could just agree to disagree for a while until someone comes up with some genuinely new reasons here: I think you guys are hell of cool, and this fight is not getting us very far right now, and I don't want to be a drag on the community.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

You see how nice that was? Group hug.

Stern look. Group hug.

This thread's closed, so let's take up the details later. But relevant details, please, no tug-of-war.

Best,
Ron