"Getting It": Threat or Menace!

[Christopher Kubasik]

Mike,

I think your reduction is wonderful.  (I can so go on; it's my love of Emerson peeking through, I like to think... but perhaps not.)

John,

Good, good points.  I really don't like saying "new"... And yet something new is going on.  From now on I'll be saying "new in published games" or somesuch.  Thanks for calling me on that.

Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Christopher, I'm going to expand on John's point a little, and talk about the problem of audience.

For whom is a game text written? That's a damned hard question, considering how butt-stupid the necessary parts of the answer are. Obviously, if a given group plays the thing, someone had to read it.

But who? If it wasn't everyone, how did the one or ones who did communicate X about the game to the others?

And what did they play? That game, in terms of the points you are talking about? Or their plain old game with bits and pieces of this one?

And now let's think about the communities in question. I submit that hoping your game is being (a) bought (b) read and (c) played by Bob and Janet of the Middle Class, who have no connection into gamer culture, is ... unreliable. It so happens that I think role-playing games would be mighty nifty for Bob and Janet (or at least for a large subset of them, in their multitudes), and that frankly, that's a better market than gamer culture. But that's not relevant at this moment in history.

What's relevant is that people will be coming to the game mainly through the filter of gaming as a hobby. And frankly, I think they are mainly a horrible audience. Communicating any unfamiliar point to such an audience is like trying to get the attention of stampeding, not-very-bright cattle. It's even worse in the context of the three-tier system in which the games are subjected to brutal selection in terms of profitability to the middleman per unit.

As I've said before, I think the most reliable and rewarding role-playing audience are the Bobs and Janets who, through whatever luck remains to us the publishers, happen still to be peripherally involved in gaming. They will be open to new points and "how to play" as an actual, usable, important piece of a game text.

But how do you write to them? How do you speak to a minority audience-within-an-audience, who may not even be the purchasers?

It's a very difficult problem.

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Guys,

Sorry it took me so long to respond.  I've been mulling this over a bit, and this is what I've come up with.

The Audience:  Yes.  The audience matters a great deal.  As far as reviews go, the audience of a publication (and I consider different web sites to be like different magazines), dictates the style of writing, the type of writing, the pov of taste.  The same would apply to matters of online communication and rules texts.  Which leads to...

The Act of Communication:  I would really love to say that if only I really, really focused on getting the words right, everyone would get what I'm talking about.  Clear example: On RPG.net, I've often said that Nar play depends on using the dice as they fall, using the rules as written.  People had no idea what I was talking about, and went off on all sorts of tangents—getting into a tizzy when they said, "So you're saying Nar play is the only style that plays by the rules?"  Not at all what I was saying, and my point was missed completely.  Was I clear enough when I wrote those posts?  My guess is, no.  And I say this because Jesse, in the "player authority" thread, so clearly laid out exactly what I meant by my words in a way that was clear and to the point.  I didn't do that.  On the other hand, I knew exactly what I meant, other people who already "got it" knew what I meant.  So, as someone here has pointed out, it's sometimes hard to see what extra explanation is required if you already get something.

Which still leaves the mystery of why some people are "getting" one set of words and made or make the leap from one way of thinking to another.

The Need to Get Something:  This is what it comes down to for me.  I'm studying how to draw.  Every few months I get a "break through."  I understand how to "see" and how to translate what I see to the page in a whole new way.  However, seldom is this out of the blue.  It's something I've been told to look for by teachers or books, but I could not see it at the time.  But because I'm relentless in my pursuit to draw well, I keep going and then one day, after I've forgotten all about it, I see it.

Many people who don't "need" to draw well will have given up earlier.  I'm desperately looking for something "new" – that is, the ability to draw that isn't the way I draw now.

I offer that many people are quite cozy in how they play.  They're not looking for something new—and when something new comes along they're quite comfortable saying, "That doesn't make sense," because they don't NEED to find the next thing on their journey to getting what they want.

I don't like typing that, because it seems like a cop out—but there it is.  No matter what the words are, sometimes someone is going to translate them back into the mode he's already familiar with, and that's going to bring him right back to where he started.  He's not looking to get out of where he is, and so—ta da!  He stays exactly where he is.

"Getting" then, is the right words meeting the need to find the right words--with a huge, fuzzy area of interpretion between those two points.  

It's an ugly and inelegant truth, but I think that's where it lies.

Christopher

PS Dear God, I almost forgot:  Just as not everyone needs to learn how to draw, there's nothing wrong with anyone being content with how they play play RPGs.  There's nothing particularly noble or interesting about "pressing on" for something else.  It's an itch in some folks, a dissatisfaction -- and bully for them for trying to do something about it.  But it's not a "better" way to be.  In fact, the image I've created -- a kind of "advancement" is all wrong.  Sometimes the goal is something simpler or easier -- a giving up of complication or what not.  It's a search for something *different* -- because what is at hand isn't working.  And when you find what you've been looking for, or something close -- you "get it" -- whether you could have articulated it before or not.

[Bill Cook]

It seems to me to be the human condition (and healthy, at that) that there is a pendulum swing between being pleased with what you have and wanting more.  Newbies that post with questions can be assumed to have reached the point of need you describe.  And your point is to meet them with plain speech of what to expect in application.

I don't know if it's an equally well-suited guideline for tone in writing a game text.  I do know that stories sell.  Maybe that's a useful reduction.

[RaconteurX]

This discussion, especially the portions dealing with audience, remind me of postmodernism and its fundamental difference from modernism: that meaning is ultimately the audience's purview, not the artist's, and that an attempt by the artist to say "no, this is what it means" (which is a standby of modernism and its antecedents) demeans the role of the audience such that it becomes pointless.

Even those here who supposedly "get" GNS fail to "get it" at times... just look at some of the HeroQuest discussion going on. There is only so much one can do to encourage people, beyond which all you can truly say is "here is how it works for me, but don't let that discourage you from finding your own 'best answer'". There is no one absolute truth.

[John Kim]

Even those here who supposedly "get" GNS fail to "get it" at times... just look at some of the HeroQuest discussion going on. There is only so much one can do to encourage people, beyond which all you can truly say is "here is how it works for me, but don't let that discourage you from finding your own 'best answer'". There is no one absolute truth.

Absolutely true. :-)  One of the things that I dislike about the phrase "get it" is that it implies there is a single "it" to get.  It has happened over and over again in earlier RPG discussion.  White Wolf players would experience a genuine change in their gaming, and they thought that was "it".  The proponents of Theatrix similarly thought that their way of gaming was "it", and those who didn't play their way just didn't get it.  

Really, there are lots of different "its" to get.  Someone who I think doesn't "get it" may have an entirely different "it" which I don't get.