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Well, a couple of tar-baby threads are rolling around, and they seem to be waiting for repsonse from various people before continuing, so I'm going to muddy the waters by popping my addled ramblings on a new thread.

The major sticking point of applying literary / textual theories to the process of role playing is that lit crit proceeds from the assumption that the interaction between a (relatively) active reader and a (relatively) passive text is the matter that is of interest to the analyst.

This is, quite plainly, not the case in role playing: if there is a text, it is being constantly created and modified by the participants. The players are not readers, they are co-authors in a way that readers and players of computer and board games are not: in those cases, there is plainly a separate, but to some extent reactive, text that exists separately and independently of the reader / player. There is physical text, code, components, etc, and possibly discrete virtual objects, and all these have an existence separate from, but potentially interactive with the reader / player.

In role playing, as in writing, the production of the text is intimately tied into the actions of the writer / player. Without the writer / player, there is no text. A fundamental assumption of literary criticism plain does not apply to criticism of role playing as an active pursuit.

Which is why, to my mind, Egri and Johnstone, theorists of drama as a creative act, and Costikyan as a theorist of games as creative recreation, are more useful than theorists of literature as interaction with an extant text for the construction of a critical apparatus for role playing games.

Damn good question.

What do the lit-crit folks say about ...

- radio theater?

- improvisational theater?

- oral storytelling?

- music which includes a degree of improvisation?

In all cases, it seems to me that the text is Shared Communicative Space, which in some cases includes fictional content (i.e. music does not). But I'm not a lit-crit expert. Would anyone help me out about these? Because it seems to me that role-playing's text would be very much like these.

Best,
Ron

Quote from: pete_darby
The major sticking point of applying literary / textual theories to the process of role playing is that lit crit proceeds from the assumption that the interaction between a (relatively) active reader and a (relatively) passive text is the matter that is of interest to the analyst.

The forum software ate my message, it seems, so I'll give a shortened version:

There are other parts to literary theory than classical author-audience interaction. What you are looking for is the intertextual theory; one of the central ideas of postmodern critique is that there is no evaluative difference between text and intertext. The reader decides what background he uses in interpretation.

Now, this is central because the basic meme imparted in roleplaying is still a text in the classical sense: "You see a cottage" is author speaking to an audience, and when the audience answers, it's just a role-reversal. This isn't too useful, though, as long as we cannot consider the interaction between these snippets the players produce.

That's where intertext comes to the rescue: the actual communication, what Ron from a sociological perspective calls a Shared Communicative Space, is the intertext between these almost meaningless statements. There is a continuum from single author, single text to the almost seamless communication of roleplaying where the texts have lost their meaning, and all meaning comes from the interrelation of said bits and pieces.

My own example in the crossposted (Ron's message shot it out of the sky, it seems ;) posting was a writing experiment where different writers each write a chapter of a novel. Most of us would consider this to still be literature, but it can as easily be seen as roleplaying (or interactive storytelling, if you think one has to have a role to roleplay). Ron's examples are as good, though; they each have a place in the continuum from the Pure Text (impossible in real life, as the audience will interpret it anyway in some context) to the Pure Intertext (likewise impossible, as there has to be some way the symbols are enjoined to the intertextual memes).

So radio theater is simply a text with added non-textual meanings, like theater or movies. I'm of the school that considers textual art only a part of the possibilities, but at the same time deeply different from the instinctual forms of music and visual art.

Improvisational theater is to my mind essentially similar to roleplaying, I don't see the differences as important. The difference is of course in who your audience is, but for this topic it's not pertinent, I think. Same amount of text to intertext, roughly, although the actors are trained to make their monologues longer ;)

Oral storytelling has a little more intertext than most traditional literature, as it is acceptable in most cultures for the audience to interject their own commentary on the story. Additionally many storytelling genres include strong intertext in relation to the other stories of the genre (e.g. fairy tales).

Music isn't text to my mind, but I accept it that others disagree (and it's true that you can give it meaning by making a language out of it, which is what most mean about music as text anyway). This doesn't of course mean that the notion of interactivity isn't applicable. Improvisation in itself is not important here, as it just decides whether the work is created on the spot or not. If the improvisation is predicated on interaction, that is, someone else affects the work, then it's very similar to the textual situation in this sense.

So, to recap, I see roleplaying when considered in the art theory sense as just another form of communication, which can be stylized into art. I actually find it a little counterintuitive to think otherwise.

If you are doubtful about the essential similarity of text and intertext, consider the actual creative process: most of us would agree that when you write something, you are actually in dialogue with yourself about what to put in and what not to. The single /words/ that go into the text have an intertextual relationship to the words that came before, and it's that intertext your writing manipulates. There is no difference but scale and psychology when compared to almost any other text.

Hello,

Eero, that makes a lot of sense to me. For example, I consider a great deal of mathematical and statistical content to exist at the intertextual level as you've presented it.

The question that remains for me is whether a role-playing publication (sometimes called "the game") qualifies as a text at all, relative to the actual activity (dare I say "art form").

Based on Tomas' recent post in another thread, he'd say "yes." Others, I suspect Vincent or Walt, might say "no."

Certainly the publication is a "text" in the sense that it presents words which may be read. It is a text in terms of written rules, relative to the history and uses of written rules. But is it text in the same sense that a film's visual and verbal story is its text? Or that a particular sequence of grammatical representations is a novel's text? I tend to think not.

Best,
Ron

I say, "No."

By anology, to say "Yes" is to say a saxaphone *is* the music.  It isn't.

The printed rules of an RPG are the "tools" offered to create the experience of play (the improvised performance).  Just as the type of instrument you use (and how well designed it was), will impact what sort of music you can and will produce, it is still only a tool.

When studying improv, you will be working with other people.  Rules will be established.  There is no "right" way to improvise, and different schools have their own approach.  In an improv class or school, the "players" will share these rules.  Critiques will often be offered along the lines of whether or not someone was playing by the rules.

Even here, the "rules" are not the text.  The play produced is the "text."  The rules will have an impact on the range of scenes, situations, actions (System Matters!) but, like the saxaphone, they provide limits and opportunities, but are invisible, to anyone who isn't familiar with them.  In the same way, the reader of novel is reading a novel, but not aware of the writer's "rules" for writing (outlining or not, character backgrounds or not... and so on.)

By my defintion then (working without any academic theory, I'm afraid, only lots of practice is different creative disciplines), the "text" is "What we know without knowing anything else."  (Using Ron's examples, I can see and understand the "text" of a movie without knowing anything about the L.A. casting process.)

Thus, someone could play an RPG with the GM or fellow player saying, "Roll this die" at different points.  She need never know the rules.  But she could still be involved with the results, still invovled with the other players, still experience the creation of the text and relate all the happened to someone else -- without ever getting under the hood of the rules and really knowing how the game was played.  (See Lumply's current game with his kids in Actual Play.)

Christopher

OK, I'll chime in here.  I think that there isn't a single definition of "text" for RPGs.  In fact, by making a particular definition of "text" -- you are defining a metaphor for how RPGs relate to other narrative forms.  I discuss this in  my essay, http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/narrative/paradigms.html">Story and Narrative Paradigm in RPGs.  There I suggest that by defining "text", you form what I call a "narrative paradigm".  

Quote from: Ron EdwardsThe question that remains for me is whether a role-playing publication (sometimes called "the game") qualifies as a text at all, relative to the actual activity (dare I say "art form").

Based on Tomas' recent post in another thread, he'd say "yes." Others, I suspect Vincent or Walt, might say "no."

Certainly the publication is a "text" in the sense that it presents words which may be read. It is a text in terms of written rules, relative to the history and uses of written rules. But is it text in the same sense that a film's visual and verbal story is its text? Or that a particular sequence of grammatical representations is a novel's text? I tend to think not.

Right.  This is what I call paradigm clash.  Tomas' more expansive view of text is what I call "experiential"; as opposed to only Shared Play as text which I call "storytelling".  

So the storytelling paradigm sees only Shared Play as "text", and thus tends to pattern the game such that the Shared Play by itself is similar to narrative in books and movies.  This gives a strong model for what play should be like (i.e. Shared Play has theme and structure just like a film or novel).  However, it also ignores the experience of things which aren't "text".  The storytelling paradigm tends to say that the rules only matter insofar as to how they change the Shared Play.  i.e. The influence goes rules -> Shared Play -> players.  

But really, the players know and experience the rules directly.  So there is also influence of rules -> players.  I give as an example: we play a game where the combat rules are horribly nasty and bloody.  Knowing this, the players decide against a fight at some crucial point and instead negotiate.  Even though no combat has taken place, I would say the combat rules have influenced the experience and the narrative.  The more expansive experiential paradigm considers the rulebook, the book of world background, GM notes, maps, and so forth all part of the text.  The problem with this is that it has no model for structure.

Quote from: Ron Edwards
Eero, that makes a lot of sense to me. For example, I consider a great deal of mathematical and statistical content to exist at the intertextual level as you've presented it.

Yep, although for me (and the hard core subjectivists as well, I suspect) the differentiation between text and intertext is just in facility of manipulating the texts, it rarely comes up in actual analysis whether something should be this or that. The difference is largely in presentation: the Bible can be seen as a text, in that it is given to us as something you should read in it's entirety, but it's more properly a collection of texts in intertextual relation to each other. If you are critiquing it in it's entirety, it's a text, but if you want to analyze it's meaning aside from the christian assumption of it's coherence, you'll have to consider the parts in their relation to each other, thus the intertext.

What I'm saying is that this intertextual interpretation has always been almost axiomatic for my consideration of roleplaying. And it's that for everyone else, as well; when anyone uses terms like "genre", "theme", "plot", "protagonist" or any other literary term, they are implicitly accepting that there is a textual object these terms apply to.

Quote
The question that remains for me is whether a role-playing publication (sometimes called "the game") qualifies as a text at all, relative to the actual activity (dare I say "art form").

I'd say that it's "text" by the virtue of it being a text. That is, if it's words (or other symbols) that carry memetic meaning (that is, the word in isolation means something), then it has to be text for literary science. You cannot differentiate for function (although you can delineate between "art" text and "functional" text if you wish) or quality, as the "text" in litsci sense is just a communication. If they analyze phone books, why not roleplaying rules?

The question is, as Ron probably meant, what is the relationship of this roleplaying game text to it's progeny, the play intertext? This is potentially a difficult question, but my gut says (always listen to your gut) that the general answer lies still in the realm of text interaction. In roleplaying we have these intertextual minirelationships between what players communicate to each other, but there's of course meaning culled from the general culture as well. These higher order intertexts are where the game text belongs: when a player tells another to throw the dice, he is referencing the game text as intertext to his own demand of diethrowing. Similarly, when a player demands a character to keep his wows, there might be intertext to the genre expectation of knights being honorable.

From this viewpoint, the game text is a central element the players' communication references. Some intertextual theory claims that there cannot really be invalidating intertextual reference, only conflicting ones; when something is referenced, the reference automatically validates the existence of the referred in the imaginative space (between the author and audience, or between players). Thus the meaning of the rules text for play is that constant referral makes it an integral part of the web of meaning: it's an aesthetic mistake to break the rules, exactly the same as the Dork Tower guys make when they slay Frodo and use Gandalf as a battering ram. There's a disconnection for the audience (other players) when the author disregards his own intertext ("own" in the sense that it's established somehow; the effect is the same if the intertext is for some reason embedded independent of the author), regardless of it being rules or other material.

Edit: I'll clear Christopher's argument while I'm at it: he claims that the rules are not text because one need not know the rules to play. This is true, but it's just a case of the intertextual relationship being different: instead of rules -> player A it's -> rules player B -> player A. That is, the rules are intertext for the player that decides based on them when the other player should roll. The other player's statements are the intertext for player A, who doesn't know the rules. Actually, player B's statements are the rules for A, because that's what he bases his play on.

Eero,

You're right.  Thanks,

Christopher

For those of us in the cheap seats, could someone kindly clarify the terms Text and Intertext.  I'm forced to admitt that the word "intertextual" is entirely devoid of meaning to me.  

I'm afraid that the dictionary definition of "Relating to or deriving meaning from the interdependent ways in which texts stand in relation to each other. "  Is complete word salad to me at this point.

Quote from: ValamirFor those of us in the cheap seats, could someone kindly clarify the terms Text and Intertext.  I'm forced to admitt that the word "intertextual" is entirely devoid of meaning to me.  

I'm afraid that the dictionary definition of "Relating to or deriving meaning from the interdependent ways in which texts stand in relation to each other. "  Is complete word salad to me at this point.

Intertext is actually maybe the simplest concept in lit-theory, so this shouldn't be hard.

When you read an adventure novel and there's a sentence like "Pete roared like a lion and jumped of the balcony, swinging from the cable like he thought he was Tarzan.", you have the classic example of intertext. The probable reader finds nothing in that sentence hard to understand, but how is that possible? The book has said nothing about Tarzan previous to that one sentence.

The answer is simple and selfevident: the meaning of the sentence is affected by what the reader already knows. He knows Tarzan, and thus knows what Pete is being compared to. This is clear.

What is called intertext is this effect, but it's seen from the textual viewpoint. So instead of focusing on the singular reader and his Tarzan experience, we focus on the original text this experience stems from. This is probably either Burrough's book or the American movies. We don't say "this reader has this experience of Tarzan" but "this text has an intertextual relationship to the Tarzan books and movies".

But for hard core subjectivists, there is more. How does the reader know what a lion is? Or a balcony? There is nothing that can be understood withour referral to the intertextual relationships common to the reader and author. The only thing that defines "chair" is the family resemblance of different chairs, as Wittgenstein would say, and this resemblance is constructed out of numerous intertextual relationships the reader has in his head.

There's a chance, by the way, that some other poster has a different understanding of the word, as the humanist terminology is quite messy. It could even be that my Finnish "interteksti" really isn't the same thing they teach in american colleges ;) Anyway, if that didn't clear it up, ask more insistently.

Is there a decisive established definition of "text" in literary theory?

Specifically... must "text" be something tangible in form? Obviously "text" is not limited to visible alphanumeric characters, because films have a text, but film frames are also identifiable tangible objects, as are the bits in a digital memory device containing a piece of audio to be played. But can unaided human memory be text? If I say something aloud to someone else, is what I say text? What if I just make random lunatic gestures at someone -- is that text?

If tangible form is not required, then it would seem to me that any witnessed utterance or action whatsoever is text, and the text of an RPG session would be everything that was said and done in the session. (Which doesn't sound very useful for any analytical purpose.) If text must have tangible form, it seems likely that many of the most important aspects of the experience of role playing have and create no text at all, unless and until someone writes down or otherwise communicates an account of some kind.

- Walt

Quote from: Walt Freitag
Is there a decisive established definition of "text" in literary theory?

Depends who you ask, as far as I know...

I myself have found it useful to deem any symbolic construct text. Here "symbol" is something that has attached meanings, "construct" is a web of relationships (in math meaning) and "symbolic construct" is thus a set of symbols that have some kind of relationships with one another.

As I've intimated elsewhere, I'm not really competent to explain the fine grain of other people's theories. Suffice to say that all literary theories I know of include actual literature, as well as anything else having aesthetic meaning, where "aesthetic" is the philosophical aesthitism of literary arts, not the instinctual you find in abstract visuals and music.

Quote
Specifically... must "text" be something tangible in form? Obviously "text" is not limited to visible alphanumeric characters, because films have a text, but film frames are also identifiable tangible objects, as are the bits in a digital memory device containing a piece of audio to be played. But can unaided human memory be text? If I say something aloud to someone else, is what I say text? What if I just make random lunatic gestures at someone -- is that text?

These are all text, definitely. Derrida is widely accepted in this regard, afaIk. There is no ontological difference between a text spoke aloud or written, for example.

Quote
If tangible form is not required, then it would seem to me that any witnessed utterance or action whatsoever is text, and the text of an RPG session would be everything that was said and done in the session. (Which doesn't sound very useful for any analytical purpose.) If text must have tangible form, it seems likely that many of the most important aspects of the experience of role playing have and create no text at all, unless and until someone writes down or otherwise communicates an account of some kind.

Indeed, everything said and done is a part of the whole, but if that whole is a text is a harder question. As I've intimated, I'd probably view it as a textual web where the important content (themes, plot) is embedded in the intertext, but on the other hand, I see no logical reason not to view the whole as a text as well, if that is deemed useful. This is common in modern liberal sciences, where the terminology is fitted to the situation to reveal hidden connections, and the best theory is the one that explains the most and the best.

It's the same case you have with a printed book, roughly. Most would say that the layout and binding of a book don't have a real meaning for the aesthetic value of the text, but the demarcation isn't simple (why else would a publisher care about the looks?). Different schools have tried to solve this in different ways, but it's best you solve it for yourself. In what sense is this red leather, handbound, illustrated version of the Chronicles of Narnia same/different from that old loose leaf edition? What parts of the actual play experience we can remove from consideration without losing analytic accuracy? The pizza toppings? The fact that you're GM's fiancé? The weather outside?

As to how useful it is to talk about the play as text, it depends on what you are going to do. I for one find it useful to think of my statement of premise as an open text waiting for interpretation from the other players. Their interpretation becomes a base text for mine, and so on. That way everything ever written about literary theory applies to my play. If there is some use to be found in this view, we won't know it before trying, preferably with someone who understands these things in the lead.

This is fast developing into a crash course on literary theory, and I really am not competent to be giving it. Don't we really have anyone who has recently read the classics on the matter, or better yet, gained an academic degree about it?

Thanks, Eero. Sorry to bombard you with questions on the basics, when you'd probably rather be discussing the finer points and implications.

I'm going to do a bit more homework on this. I found the following definition in the glossary of "Semiotics for Beginners" by Daniel Chandler (http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem-gloss.html):

QuoteText: Most broadly, this term is used to refer to anything which can be 'read' for meaning; to some theorists, 'the world' is 'social text'. Although the term appears to privilege written texts (it seems graphocentric and logocentric), to most semioticians a 'text' is an system of signs (in the form of words, images, sounds and/or gestures). It is constructed and interpreted with reference to the conventions associated with a genre and in a particular medium of communication. The term is often used to refer to recorded (e.g. written) texts which are independent of their users (used in this sense the term excludes unrecorded speech). A text is the product of a process of representation and 'positions' both its makers and its readers (see Subject). Typically, readers tend to focus mainly on what is represented in a text rather than on the processes of representation involved (which usually seem to be transparent). See also: Complex sign, Representation, Textual codes

It appears my question about tangibility relates to recorded texts versus texts in general.

The chapter on intertextuality is here: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem09.html.

Perhaps it will help if I just read the whole book all the way through. However, every time I come across a little poo-nugget like this:

Quote from: In Semiotics for Beginners, ChandlerIt would be pure idealism to regard Balzac as 'expressing himself' in language since we do not precede language but are produced by it.

... the Emperor loses one point from its "Has Clothes" stat.

- Walt

Eero is on to something, certainly, in asserting the totality of the symbolic universe as "text"; this is pretty broadly accepted in a wide range of fields (as Derrida puts it, "Il n'y a pas dehors-texte" [There is nothing outside the text]).  Unfortunately, the very fact that it's all text entails that the specific nature of RPG text is going to get blurred away unless we're very, very careful.

To be honest, this was part of the reason I wrote my Ritual essay: I wanted to point out a means of reading RPG text as a particular mode of human textual/symbolic behavior, and furthermore as a specific mode of a particular class of such texts (i.e. rituals).  Not a lot of responses there....  :-<

If we're going to formulate RPG play as text, we need boundaries, we need to differentiate comparatively from other text-forms, we need evaulative structures for interpretation, and so on.  In fact, we're going to need an entire apparatus for examining such a text.  I'm convinced that this is just going to be reinventing the wheel.

For starters, I say drop any model exclusively founded upon literary text, however much it emphasizes intertextuality.  Ultimately, there is always going to be a haunting sense that "text" is supposed to be something fixed.  But there's no reason to accept that, even in literature, and certainly not in RPG's or other oral media.  This is part of logocentrism, actually: the fixed nature of the graph is supposed to entail its authority, as evoked into presence by some interpreter who thereby claims that authority (think of someone literally thumping a Bible to emphasize his moral worth).

For those who care, I think we'll need to go onward and reconstruct the specifically graphic nature of RPG's (yes, they have it) in order to see how various discursive modes arise, but this seems like sort of a weird pipe-dream.

But I'm certainly interested to see the excitement being stirred by textual theory!

Chris Lehrich

P.S.
Walt, I understand why the poo-meter went off there, and I don't know the book in question.  When I get home, I'll look up some classic references if you like.  But what was meant, I think, was that Balzac's relation to the text he wrote cannot be understood as a formula with two variables -- author and text, and it also cannot be seen as simply causal (author produces text).  Balzac's writing process was conditioned by his environment, culture, and language, for starters.  Furthermore, what we read when we read Balzac isn't Balzac, but a text associated with a name ("Balzac").  The old claim used to be that you could infer backwards: if Au. produced Tx., then you could read Tx. and find Au.  But this is (in syllogistic terms) the inverse: Cows produce poo, that there is poo, therefore it's cow-poo.  The text (or the poo!) is so loosely linked to an author that there's no possibility of total reconstruction.  At the same time, literary poststructuralists do have a bad habit of taking this MUCH too far, in effect saying that there is no author-text relation at all, and thus any text is only constructed by the reader.  This is sometimes called the "death of the subject."  Let me put it this way: if I say "bite me," you can't perfectly determine what I mean.  But you know I don't mean, "Gosh, I like McChicken sandwiches!"

Anyway, I'll get back to you with some references that may perhaps not track so much on your carpet.

First of all - in a previous life (well, 16 or more years ago, anyway), I had a . . . glancing collision with academic lit-crit stuff.  That has as many minuses as pluses in an attempt to comprehend/apply it to RPGs, IMO.  I actually started to wonder how to map paratext and metatext into RPGs, then I wondered if my rememberance of those concepts was even remotely correct, and - well, long story short, I think MOST of what I know is way behind even Eeros' or Chris' knowledge.  And I still occassionally have that nightmare where The Complete Workes of William Shakespeare thunders out in the voice of Karl Marx "Reject the reification of the text!  Reject the reification of the text!" . . .

That said - yes, I bet there's some benefit to be derived here - though there are also philosophical blind alleys like the language/Balzac thing Walt ran into.  Since for RPG purposes I think we have to head down the "everything is a text that influences other text" streets (where some of the most troublesome blind alleys spring from, IME), it may not be worth it.

But when Pete says "if there is a text, it is being constantly created and modified by the participants," he's aligning (appropriately, I'm afraid) RPGs with that area.  There is no THE text, there are a lot of texts (one/a set for each participant?  Each participant/instance?), all of which influence each other.

And when Ron asks "But is it text in the same sense that a film's visual and verbal story is its text?" the answer is there is A sense in which they are the same - if you allow that the "text" of a film's story is just part of an equation that involves a huge number of other texts.  As Chris and/or Eero point out, some theorists take that to extremes, and say that the "basic" text of the film is thus essentially a meaningless concept (which I find to be distasteful intellectual grandstanding), but you need not take it to that extreme.

So - like I said, there may be some cheese here, despite the important insight Pete points to that there is no THE text in roleplaying.  Lit theory has played with the idea of there being no THE text in most works, so that keeps it applicable (maybe) - my only personal shiver is that it also brings us face to face with that distasteful intellectual grandstanding stuff.  I have (thankfully) forgotten which names use which swear words at which other names in the field, so I'll look forward to whatever references folks can scare up . . .

Gordon