Creative Agendas, Aesthetic Purism, and 'the' Social Mode

[Sean]

This thread is a follow-up to two previous threads I posted on the Social Mode: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9808 and http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10493 .

Thinking more about Simulationism, I realize that I was wrong to think that 'focus on exploration of (elements of) the real world' is just another version of Sim. Insofar as one has a learning RPG or a social change- effecting RPG, and insofar as those are essential, system-facilitated goals of play, one has taken up a different CA than that of the Simulationist, who focuses on integrity of in-game cause.

That 'in-game' is key.

All three of the core creative agendas focus on what one is doing with/within the imaginative space of the game as the means of satisfying certain human needs. It certainly does not separate this action from the social reality of the game group: on the contrary, the Big Model's virtue is that it makes that reality, the social psychology of the play group, the core of its conception of gaming.

But the model treats the shared imaginative space, as an integral whole, created by game play as the vehicle for fulfilling those desires.

That is, focus on story, on the dream, or on challenge are all understood as aiming for certain things within the shared imaginary space of the game. It is actions in that imaginary space which fulfill the different CA of the different players.

In the Big Model, the rewards of play are human and social, and human desires (or posited goals which would explain observed behavior, if you're an empiricist) are put at the basis of each CA. But the means for addressing these desires and providing these rewards are within the imaginary space.

The extra-imaginary space is, by contrast, treated as (1) a space in which rational agents pursue their desires, which (2) in the case of 'hard core' Narrativist play can lead to bursts of extreme real-world behavior in response to soul-challenging in-game events. In other words, as disjoint from the shared imaginary space of play.

I think this is (1) a good simplifying assumption for the theory which (2) reflects a certain aesthetic prejudice: the prejudice for the integrity of the art-object characteristic of romantic and formalist aesthetic theory. At its extreme limits, this approach to art is a kind of aesthetic purism: efface from the art object all signs of its relations to the world outside it, so that its integrity as a self-sustaining reality can be upheld. People who prefer 'unpretentious stories' have this prejudice, as, interestingly, do many highbrow abstract and formalist painters, who eschew representational elements in their paintings to the limits of their ability so that the play of line and color, light and texture, will be the primary agents of the viewer's experience.

However, it seems to me entirely reasonable that one could have a shared imaginary space as a tool to accomplish things quite outside it, and the positing that learning about or affecting something outside the imagined space in a guided way is in fact the desire of some gamers (certain 'zilchplayers', perhaps, or the (well-skewered) 'casual gamer', or the person who tolerates the nuts and bolts of play to satisfy their primary fascination with the anthropological dimension of this curious communal exercise).

Such gaming would not be satisfying to those pursuing any of the three traditional CA, but it might be satisfying for other reasons. I believe that I have observed its satsifactions in my own play, though mostly evanescently and without having the goal explicitly in mind (I don't have much more to say on this though than what I said in the two previous threads, with respect to games where I've had players play 'themselves' or characters based on themselves, with the intent of making them identify with the character so that I could challenge them about some issue that I thought they needed to think about).

Ethan Greer's game about mental illness, and Vincent and Emily's recent 'dating game' posted about in actual play, both strike me as designs pushing in this same direction.

It's not Nar because there's no special emphasis on addressing story or theme through play. It's not Sim because in-game cause is not of concern to the players beyond its pedagocial or socially transformative purposes: exploration as always, but not exploration squared. And it's not Gam because Challenge/Step on Up are not addressed at all.

But it is roleplaying, and it is filling certain kinds of needs. Just not needs which are likely to be addressed solely by what happens in negotiating the imagined space itself.

Again, if your aim is to learn about or change the people you're playing with in some focused way, and the system facilitates that, I think that's a different (or two different) Creative Agenda. The negotiation of the shared imaginary space is being put to a different purpose.

The only thing I can think of that might be wrong with this is that maybe I'm defining Nar too narrowly. On the other hand, if your goal is really to educate or transform people in the real world using the imaginary space basically as a tool (as the wargamer who moved to D&D did for Gamism), that doesn't seem like Nar. And if this is stuff 'handled at the level of social contract', then it seems like we have the other empty spot that Walt Freitag likes instead: play which has no special goals for what gets focused on in the shared imaginative space of the game. I prefer the positing of extra CA to Walt's solution for reasons I've already discussed though.

That there are many things I can't think of that are wrong with this I have little doubt.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Some random thoughts on the matter, to spark discussion...

Using the imagined space for agitating purposes is commonplace in both arts and philosophy, where it's a common illustrative argument for an abstract thesis. For certain art theories "art" is largely philosophy in action, such that a given work of art always endorses given philosophical claims. In a similar way, for any ethical theory we can test and illustrate it by constructing imaginary situations resolved by the theory. This is largely the same as using a roleplaying game as vessel for such agitation.

I believe I've said it before that I do support the idea that exploration of shared imagined space can be used for purposes outside the CAs. These all however seem to be outside the model because they do not concern roleplaying as itself. They are details of the social context roleplaying is done in. They include, but are not limited to
- Dating (assuming this happens)
- Teaching fellow players (through a game that dresses the material in an easy and fun form)
- Learning about self/others (psychiatrical roleplaying, icebrakers)
- Agitation/propaganda (overlaps teaching, really)
- Passing time, entertainment (the source motivation for the three modes?)
- Pissing off parents (a spurious example for illustration of possibilities)

The key question is, which of these are concerns for a theory of roleplaying? It's not as if anything anyone ever cares to use games for is sensibly an issue, but likewise one cannot throw all social possibilities away. Consider the following:
- A game is started on a dare, to resolve who is the best.
- A common interest in ancient Rome is discovered, and game commences.
- A philosophical question is under heated argument, and is illustrated through game play.

The above are all examples of how given general social motivations can trigger play in a certain mode. It's common for roleplaying to commence as simply entertainment, in which case the agendas are up for grabs; however, if a different social trigger would launch the game, conceivably the resultant action would be focused based on the reason play was started. It might even take the game outside the three modes used for entertainment!

Now, the abovementioned social motives for roleplaying might trigger creative agendas other than the three that we know of, but only if you can show that a given social motivation results in actual play decisions that are remarcably different from those of the three. It's a given that people might roleplay for different reasons, but whether this will affect the play itself is an open question.

Remember the relevant definition of a creative agenda: it is the basis for creative decisions in-game. Now, as an example, a player playing as a rebellion against his parents might purposefully make decisions that would shock those parents (demon-worshipping characters, for example). Is this narrativism? Yes it is, as the player has a premise ("is demon-worship an acceptable act?") and he addresses it. A social motivation is subsumed into an agenda.

Or is it that simple? If the player is only interested in rebelling against bourgeoisie values, he won't be in a dialogue with the other players about demon-worship, but with his parents and himself. He will accept only affirmative opinions from the other players, and deem critique as a betrayal. Maybe this is genre simulationism with a punk theme?

Let's say that our demon-worshipper gets an ingame opportunity to sell his soul for power. This is a losing proposition in the game world, his character doesn't look like he'd do it, and there is no protagonism to hook a premise in. What's going on when he does it anyway? The player makes the choice because he expects that roleplaying should include demon-worship, as otherwise he's just wasting his time when he could shock his parents by smoking dope. This is a choice concordant with his chosen theme: it's clearly genre simulation, as the player wants to play a game about satanism.

The given example is explainable as "the player wants to play a game in a parent-shocking genre". Is there examples of social motivations that do not fall within a given agenda? Yes there are, but those do not seem to support any in-game decisions at all. Let's say that you play a roleplaying game as an icebreaker. The fact that you started play to get to know each other doesn't control play decisions, so it's not an agenda. Ice-breaking, dating, teaching.... these do not trigger specific agendas per se, as the players are left free to make decisions according to any agenda even when playing these.

The key word is creative. While you might call a pedagogic goal an agenda of play ("I'll go to the winter palace to illustrate to the other players the excesses of the revolution."), it's not a creative one. I might approach teaching through socratic method (narrativism), illustrative method (simulationism) or through testing and action (gamism) (I've coincidentally written one of each, as I noted some time ago). Teaching as an "agenda" doesn't constraing the play decisions I make, it just constrains methods.

We could conceivably analyse possible social motivations of play (entertainment, philosophy, pedagogy, social exploration) and add them into the Big Model as constraints of ephemera and technique, as far as they limit anything (is pedagogy possible without a strong GM? Yes it is.). Social Motivation might be an alternative or additional classification, instead of an agenda.

If we posit a creative agenda corresponding to a social motivation, one would except it to be quite dull to play in, as Sean point out. The same however holds true with the agendas, too; if you aren't interested in pursuing a premise, it'll be dull if the other players are not supporting. If there were a new agenda, it'd have similar features.

So my final analysis seems to be that the so-called social agenda is really a bunch of diverse motivations of play that might get the game going but not control agenda. What the players do in the game is still a question of gaming, exploring or philosophy.

[Sean]

Thanks, Eero. That's one of the most personally useful responses I've gotten to date, and it essentially rejects the hypothesis, so I'll have to think about it.

If your argument is incorrect, here's where I think you too may be guilty of aesthetic purism. If the social mode is understood as a mere motivation to play, where the play itself is understood as creating a shared imaginary space in some way, then yeah, sure, it's not a CA. I grant that, and on that picture one would say that this sort of thing 'is handled at the social contract level', or even at the personal level prior to establishing a social contract.

But if particular social goals are affecting your in-game decisions (as we see with Step on Up when 'it's personal' between two players); if the game is written to facilitate the achievement of certain social goals; if the dream, the story, and the challenge all get muted in order to favor some kind of exploration or transformation of the real world; then that seems like a different CA. It's one which violates the integrity of the shared imagined space essentially, I think, but integrity is not the only value one might have.

Again, if play-decisions and rules support changing people's attitudes, or even just educating them about the real world, and do so at the expense of other kinds of decisions one might make, that's a CA.

If you stop to look things up in a historical game all the time to support period-fidelity, that's hardcore Sim. But if the point of your historical game is to learn more history, that's something different, and I think one could tell them apart pretty easily.

Similarly, if you want to challenge players to address mental illness-based premises, moral and narrative questions, through play, that's Nar. But if you think your players are mentally fucked up and want to use the game as a form of therapy to fix them, and the game provides techniques for examination of play-decisions as a tool for correcting one's dysfunctional mental habits, that's something different, and again, I think one could tell them apart.

Certain 'hard core' Gamist creative agendas are also experienced by many as undermining the integrity of the shared imaginary space too. Those people want to Step on Up more like the way they do in a boardgame; all but a few forms of exploration just get in the way of that, forms that a lot of us need for our enjoyment even playing with our Gamist hat on. I don't think they've moved outside roleplaying in so doing.

Anyway, thank you very much for your thoughtful response, and I hope I haven't put words in your mouth - insofar as I have it's for the sake of carrying the discussion forward only, and I apologize.

Sean


P.S. I'd distinguish 'conceptual' theories of art (e.g. Joseph Kosuth) from what might be called 'rhetorical' or 'propaganda' theories of art (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu, who at least put it on a sociological basis, but also a lot of gerede 'everything is political' stuff you hear in the US academy). But as with the constant threat of veering into philosophy of science, I think we'd best stay way from art theory.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Let's return in more detail a little later, but I'll give a fast reply:

I didn't mean to imply that social motivations couldn't be differentiated - I believe they can. I just meant that they most likely are not of the same abstract category as the creative agendas. Like with a therapeutical game: you could try to therapeutize by disputation (narrativism), by situation therapy (simulationism) or even harnessing competitionary spirit (gamism). Choosing a social motivation is separate from choosing a CA.

[Sean]

Crap.

Damn hell, [very long string of expletives deleted].

There's a way of looking at this which sort of dissolves the problem, which I expect is sort of like what some of you have had in mind for quite some time. If I'm right then 'Narrativism' is the most misleading of the three terms for the CA, but not for any reasons anyone was able to make clear (to my poor addled brain anyway) in any of the past threads - namely, because Narrativism not only has nothing to do with story, it has nothing to do with narrative, or even necessarily with players addressing Premise through play. Addressing Premise is a Nar-facilitating technique, nothing more. I've thought that for a long time even in the grip of my false understanding of Narrativism but gave up fighting over it because it wasn't worth another beating like the one I took when I first showed up here.

But OK. So maybe I wasn't wrong then in that second Social Mode thread to identify pedagogical play as a subset of Sim. The nature of the interest in the in-game cause is different, but the focus, in the imagined space, is still on that in-game cause, and the way it lets you open onto the aspects of reality you want to use the game to explore.

If that's right, then maybe the kinds of things I've got in mind for socially transformative play really are just Narrativism, at least where they're not friendly Gamist team-building activities. That would make sense, actually.

The key is appreciating what the nature of the charge you're getting out of the shared imaginary space is. If you're leading people through a kind of moral or psychological self-actualization, that's still a Nar-type charge.

'Dramatism' is actually a better name for this in some ways than 'Narrativism', though worse in others, and both are bad. 'Humanism' and 'Moralism' are misleading in a variety of ways though. 'Significantism'? 'The attraction of the human soul to that which challenges it to be itself?' Why is there no English word for this basic concept, that of moral and emotional challenge? (Rather than competitive challenge, which is to say challenge in the Forge sense.)

'Valuism'?

This is incredibly frustrating. I think I know a few other people on this site who are frustrated with this particular terminological issue though.

Conclusions from this round of excogitation:

(a) I think there is a mode of play, call it 'the social mode' in which the Exploration is focused on aspects of the real world. There is a parallel here to the 'pervy' mode of gaming which focuses on Exploration of System. However, exploration of system is not a separate CA, and neither is the social mode.

(b) In order to think (a), however, I also have to commit to the belief that not only the story-quality of the game-text, but even the ability of all players to create 'narrative-effecting' decisions through play, is not really essential to narrativism. Rather, all that's essential is that the primary charge people are getting out of play is that they are able to explore psychologically/emotionally/morally significant issues in some way though their in-game decisions.

(c) Almost everything I've thought about how to categorize my own gaming since I joined the Forge is wrong. Basically, except for a few occasional forays into murderous gamist D&D, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Narrativist, who occasionally gets off on his own descriptive abilities (and flatters himself to think that his players get off on that stuff too) to the point where he has Sim-like interludes in his gaming, but the driving force behind my games is almost always Narrativist in character.

(d) Narrativism is indeed extremely common. In fact, the majority of gamers I know IRL even through D&D are narrativist-inclined, though in my high school RPG club I think there was a pretty even split between the three modes (the Sim types mostly being the older kids who had come up through wargaming), and I'm certainly aware of lots of Gamist D&D being played all around me.

(e) Calling Narrativism 'Narrativism' is going to continue to lead, in perpetuity, to the same endless fights we have about it here. I started enumerating issues here at length but just deleted it because I don't want to bug up the post with complaints. But let's just look at "Story Now". "Story" is bad for commonly cited reasons; explaining story in terms of "addressing Premise" is worse as long as the idea of story or narrative stays anywhere in the background as what 'addressing Premise' is supposed to accomplish. "Addressing Premise through play" without any reference to story or narrative at all, while psychologically impossible unless you've gone through heavy Forge dialogue, is OK, but still somewhat tendentious prior to a discussion of human values and psychology, morality and emotion, and how they fit together and what we get out of dealing with them through role-playing. "Now" is also irrelevant, or nearly so anyway: not everyone is impatient in getting the damn thing addressed, and anyway this impatience really has more to do with the historical frustration many of us felt in getting clunky old Simulationist-facilitating systems to deliver the premise-laden goods, then anything essential to the psychology of the Nar-inclined gamer. If one could, contra reality, make big clunky tables that really would address Premise well, then I suspect I at least would sit through the jam to get it so addressed.


Does any of this work for anyone?

I'm going to go back and look at some of the posts on the earlier Social Mode threads and see if anyone was trying to say basically this same thing to me.

[M. J. Young]

Rather, all that's essential is that the primary charge people are getting out of play is that they are able to explore psychologically/emotionally/morally significant issues in some way though their in-game decisions.

What I'm not seeing is how that's different from "addressing premise".

I think it isn't. I think you just didn't get what "addressing premise" meant until now. But "explor[ing] psychologically/emotionally/morally significant issues in some way though their in-game decisions" and "addressing premise" mean pretty much the same thing.

So I guess in the main I agree.

--M. J. Young

[Sean]

Hi, MJ. I really appreciate the time you take to talk to me about my posts.

Maybe. The thing is, addressing Premise is often discussed around here in terms of pretty specific techniques and approaches.

If one thought that treating psychologically, emotionally, and morally significant issues through play always involved posing certain kinds of thematically loaded question to players, then yeah, you could at least say that "addressing some premise or other" was always there in this kind of play. That needs argument, but I think one can make a rough argument that establishes the connection near enough for practical purposes at least.

Here's the thing, though: once you start connecting Premise to theme and 'creation of story', let alone the lit-theory ideas that are often used to work those out, I maintain the important thing about the kind of play we call 'narrativist' gets lost. A lot of that stuff is really (in my view now) just a set of particular aesthetically useful techniques for getting greater intensity and, perhaps, 'literary' character out of Narrativist play. Maybe that's pointed out explicitly somewhere, but I missed it if so.

So I think there's an ambiguity ('synechdoche') in the way that "addressing Premise" gets used at the Forge which is deeply misleading. Maybe there are a subset of you that use it correctly in all cases, but many times the general idea gets all mixed up with a lot of particular techniques and ephemera for doing it.

And this is connected with the bad understanding of "Narrativism" that connects it to story-creation. I guess thinking about this for a couple days now I've sort of come to feel that "Narrativism" used in the way GNS uses it is exactly the same sort of red flag that Ralph put up recently when he defined "Deep Immersion" in an ambiguous way "to make people think" or "challenge their ideas". It's on the one hand certainly true that a lot of people who are strongly attracted to the 'story value' of their play will have a great interest in the theory, practice, and design of 'emotional/moral challenge-facilitating' games. So there's a rhetorical efficiency in using the word.

On the other hand, it's pretty clear that at least half the fights, and many of the most bitter fights, the ones that lead people away from some of the goals that some posters at the Forge are trying to promote, that people get into over GNS both here and at rpg.net are directly due to the ambiguity that the word 'narrativism' introduces into thinking about this mode of play. I'm not sure it is enough to dispel this ambiguity to say, as Ron does in the Narrativism essay, that the story quality of game transcripts does not tell you what GNS mode you're playing in. The story quality of the game-play itself doesn't count, if the way I'm looking at it now is right.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Sean, with great respect, I think you've managed to talk yourself into a very strange set of constricting corners in this thread.

I don't understand why anyone disconnects "narrative" from Narrativism. Let's talk about clay cups and pots.

1. Can clay cups and pots come about through a wide variety of activities or perhaps even who-knows-what events that have nothing to do with pot-making? Sure. They "can." In the fullness of time, perhaps even a few do.

2. Can one bring a cup or pot to a group of cup/pot-makers and say, "Hey, let's make a pot," then the group proceeds to gild and polish the pot? Sure. They may even end up with a pot that is a color no other pot has ever seen.

3. Can one bring a very organized pot kit to the same group, and walk them through each step, carefully, and with full authority over each person's decisions (however subtle that authority might be)? Sure.

But ultimately, there is only one way actually to make pots - (a) not to have one to start and (b) to carry out acts which reliably get pots.

That's Narrativism. You can't start with a narrative, nor have one in mind to lead others to or through. But you must have the components, the guiding aesthetic, and a set of procedures in order for new narratives (whatever they may be) to emerge reliably.

Components: same as any role-playing game, with (like Gamism) a strong focus (now or later) on Situation

Guiding aesthetic: Address Premise (and perhaps the Premise will arise very slowly, and the way it's addressed must be unknown at the start)

Procedures: System Does Matter - with the very strong point that the reward system elements of the System are key. In fact, I see everything in Chris Lehrich's discussion of "ritual" as "shrug, reward system."

Thus narrative (story) and Narrativism. It's reeeeeally easy - and I submit that no non-gamer I have met has ever had any difficulty understanding this. I strongly suggest that gamer culture has produced at least two generations of hobbyists who are, for lack of a better word, stunted and malformed in their ability to grasp what nearly everyone else is perfectly capable of.

To sum up ...

1. Does Narrativsm always produce a story? Damn near. When it fails, it's because System breaks down for whatever reason (bad internal construction, Social Contract breakdown, etc).

2. Must one play Narrativist to make a story? Nope. You might admire the shiny one that the GM brings, or that he or she maneuvers into existence despite your presence. You might "just get" one, conceivably.

Therefore, does Narrativist play concern, centrally, narrative? You damn well betcha. In my worse moments, I'd like to hunt down whoever said "Narrativism doesn't have anything to do with narrative!" and beat him stupid. Or, if he said that because he was thinking about narration instead of narrative, just dunk him in the horse trough.

Best,
Ron

[Ian Charvill]

Ron, and with great respect, but that's just crazy talk.

A narrative is just a description of a sequence of events.  Describe a game of Cluedo (do you guys just call it Clue over there?), you've got a narrative.  Describe a trip to the laundry room, you've got a narrative.  Describe the stuff you see out of the train window as you commute to work, you've got a narrative.

Your use of "transcript" in the Narrativism essay could without question and equivocation be substituted by the word "narrative" without any damage to the meaning of any of the lines.  I can understand not using it for the strict purpose of not clouding the meaning of "narrativism".  It's a smart writing choice.

Whenever you narrate you produce, unsurprisingly, a narrative.  If narration can be independent of narrativism, a fortiori narrative can also be independent of it.

There is a slightly stronger claim to a link between narrativism and story - a lot of sim play would more resemble travelogue or day-in-the-life-of than a play or novel - but, as the draft glossary currently does, a distinction should be kept between "story" and "story now".

[M. J. Young]

Ron, more on the point of the thread, do you disagree that what Sean is describing as

the primary charge people are getting out of play is that they are able to explore psychologically/emotionally/morally significant issues in some way though their in-game decisions

is essentially the same as addressing premise, and is foundational to narrativist play? Also, would this apply whether or not a story happens to be produced in the process?

I think Sean may underestimate the degree to which doing what he proposes will produce story (if you're exploring such issues in your in-game decisions, you're bound to create theme by whatever choices you make, and will probably build toward climax inexhorably), but I'll concede that you can address such issues without creating complete stories around them, and that this is still narrativist-driven play. Am I missing something?

--M. J. Young

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Ian, you and I are using very different definitions of the word "narrative." The definition I'm using concerns a fictional series of events which include at least one identifiable protagonist engaged in an identifiable conflict, and the events resolve that conflict. The terms protagonist, conflict, and resolution all presume a real-person audience who is emotionally engaged. This fiction can be vague, incredibly complicated, or ambiguous, but these elements will all be there, or it's not a narrative. Your "description of series of events" doesn't qualify.

My definition is exactly the same as "story" in my Narrativism essay. Stories are narratives. Lives are not, "any" set of fictional events is not, and whatever is narrated is not.

Why not that latter? "Narrated" goes with narration, not with narrative. Two very, very different words as I see them.

I don't present all this to lecture you, but rather to explain just what I'm using these words for, why I'm not mouthing crazy talk, and why the concepts I'm discussing here and in my essays are so astoundingly easy. If necessary, just replace the word "narrative" with another in your head. I'm not saying my definition is uber-right-dictionary-perfect, but I don't think it's unreasonably specific, either.

M.J., I agree with you that what Sean describes and "address Premise" are synonymous. You stated that very well in your previous post. Furthermore, I also think that the degree to which the processes we're talking about do not create story is negligible. Such events are exactly analogous to a group of people who do set up teams, do dribble the ball around the court, do try to score more points than the other team, and do follow a number of known rules, but who can be said to "fail" to play basketball. Pretty hard to do.

Sure, it might not be very good basketball; depends on the people. And in Narrativist play, it might not be a very good story, for the same reason. But even if it's "Jack tried to kiss Jill, Jill ran away to join a lesbian militia, and Jack fell over and busted his head open," it's what they got, lame as it might be - just as watching a bunch of crappy basketball might make the local jocks double over with laughter, but hey, the players did indeed do that deed.

And yeah, my little one-line story there does have a theme.

Best,
Ron

[Eric J-D]

Just to elaborate a bit further on what Ron and M.J. have said (and, in the process, to reiterate the well-worn point that all of these definitions really do matter), the difference between "narrative" as Ian is using it and "narrative" as the narrativism essay defines it is fairly simple.

The "narrative" Ian is describing as "just a sequence of events" is what I would call a kind of naive reportage.  This is "narrative" that simply reiterates (in the strict literal sense of the term) the detritus of daily events. I like to think of this kind of "narrative" as the equivalent of a recorder that simply records everything and distinguishes nothing.

This does not a "narrative" make, not at least in the way Ron is using the term.  While no one would deny that retelling this sequence of undifferentiated events is a "narrative" in the most basic sense of that word, no one would similarly deny that these are not the "narratives" that writers of fiction or makers of film aim to produce (some of Warhol's film experiments perhaps being arguable exceptions to this).  "Narrative" in this second sense must be about   something, and that something is more than just a transcript of events, encounters, conversations, etc.  This "something more" is what the players supply in narrativist play.

I agree with Ron that this is not a difficult idea to grasp, not for non-gamers and certainly not for kids.  When I ask my 9 year old daughter what a movie like "Whale Rider" is about, she doesn't regurgitate the sequence of events that make up the movie.  She tells me that it is about how a leader of the Maori comes to understand that the thing he has been looking for (the leader who will instill his people with hope and a sense of possibility) is right under his eyes but that he can't see it because he doesn't expect it to look like THAT!  That's the "narrative" for her.  That's what "narrative" is in the sense that Ron is using.

So, I guess all this is to reiterate the obvious point that we need to be careful to understand the meaning of the terms that people are employing.  

Cheers,

Eric

[Ian Charvill]

Ron

The reason it's crazy talk is that it runs contrary to your stated desire to get past continually redefining and re-explaining GNS to newbies to the detriment of other projects - doing more work on technique combinations.  Using "narrative" as your using it will lead you inevitably to thread after thread of newbies not getting it - because you're using narrative in a counter intuitive sense.

Now, if you want thread after thread of explaining to people that just because your play produced a narrative that doesn't mean your playing Narrativist, that's your call.

Eric

By "a recorder that simply records everything and distinguishes nothing" I take it that they made you read Joyce's Ulysses at college and it burned your ass.  Joking aside, that's a great exaple of how a comprehensive narrative recording doesn't need to be naive - and how you can have a narrative without a story in any kind of classical sense (ironically Ulysses does have a classical structure).

But, assuming you're one of the lucky ones that doesn't know Joyce from a girder, "story" can be easily seen as a subset of narratives: you can't have a story that doesn't clearly constitute a narrative but you can have plenty of narratives that would suck as stories.  The words aren't close synonyms.

But, like I said before, you can enshrine Ron's heavily jargonised use of "narrative" within The Forge lexicon - in which case it requires an entry in the new glossary but let's not pretend we're talking about the ineluctable modality of the gamable (sic).

[Eric J-D]

Ian,

Obviously you see problems with the term that I do not, so help me out here.  When you say to Ron

Using "narrative" as your using it will lead you inevitably to thread after thread of newbies not getting it - because you're using narrative in a counter intuitive sense.

I think, "only if one understands the term 'narrative' in a very restrictive sense."  I think the essay is pretty clear that "narrative" is being used in the literary sense of the term.  This understanding of narrative is neither counter-intuitive nor, I would submit, unfamiliar to people.  It is well-enshrined in any number of dictionaries, and is a commonplace of most literary education.

To insist that "narrative" doesn't mean "a fictional series of events which include at least one identifiable protagonist engaged in an identifiable conflict, and the events resolve that conflict" is to attempt to arrest--or, more accurately--roll back the language, wouldn't you agree?  When you say that Ron is using it in a counter-intuitive way, are you suggesting that the only defintion of "narrative" that people are walking around with is "a sequence of events?"  If so, I suppose I just don't share that assumption.  Perhaps, I am wrong.  I don't know.  But are you certain that the intuitive understanding of the term is restricted to "a sequence of events?"    

You are absolutely right that "narrative" may not be identical with "story"--I think I said as much in my post when I said that an account that merely reiterated an undifferentiated series of daily events would not amount to a "narrative" or "story" in the second sense of the term--but as I said above, the term "narrative" cannot be restricted simply to "just a description of a sequence of events" as you suggeeted in your previous post.  Ron's use of the term in its literary sense is widely acepted and understood, and has behind it the authority of that least radical of entities, the OED.

Newbies should read the essay if they lack any understanding of the term "narrative" beyond " a sequence of events."  If they do, they'll find it pretty clearly defined.  But I think more of them are acquainted with other meanings of the term than you seem willing to grant.

As for Joyce's "Ulysses," it wasn't at all what I was thinking of when I wrote "a recorder that simply records everything and distinguishes nothing."  Frankly, no work of fiction fits this bill, especially not something as highly patterned as Joyce's "Ulysses."  God, it's the exact opposite of the "recorder" I described.

I had in mind something more like a diary entry that described in excrutiating detail even the most mundane of daily activities.  We'd agree that this is a "narrative" according to one sense of that term, but not according to its literary sense.  That's all I had in mind. Joyce's "Ulysses" clearly doesn't fit the former sense of the term any more than all transcripts of an evening's gaming are guaranteed to fit the latter.

Cheers,

Eric

[Sean]

This is getting interesting. I'm going to try to stay with the original issues though.

1. Possible Progress: I'm satisfied that the 'social mode' is not a CA. The reason is that role-playing always involves the shared imagined space and that the features of the shared imagined space which are getting emphasis are what constitute the CA of the game. Therefore, even in the applications I've been imagining, there's a clear reason to label the examples I've thought of as Gam, Nar, or Sim.

On the other hand, I still think that the social mode (not a CA, but a particular focus on the Exploration to bring it towards real-world stuff) is a really important and interesting part of gaming that deserves more exploration. We make friends out of gaming: how do we do that? Can we design games that are better at bringing people together in a friendly spirit? Can we design games that help kids learn history or biology or mathematics as part of their play? Can we make games which challenge us to reevaluate our own psychology on a fundamental level? All kinds of games do do this, but it's a direction one could focus on, if one was so inclined, and explore in a lot more detail than it's been explored so far.


2. Current Confusion, Possibly Dissipating: Ron, I think I see what you're getting at now. The corner I was in goes like this: if the primary charge you get out of gaming is the emotional/moral one, that's pretty flexible: you can deliver all kinds of charges of that type that don't necessarily add up to a story with any coherence. (Counterpoint: OK, so it's a bad story: isn't it still a story? Maybe; or maybe it's a sequence of episodes. But then there's a sense in which an episode itself is a story, so the counterpoint is pretty strong here.)

And then I think about the "Sim/Story" people who use lots of GM force and so on to keep the players on a track that leads to a story, and about players who are happy to be led along like sheep to find out the 'cool story' (and let's be fair, sometimes it is cool) that the GM 'has created for them'.

If those people are actually playing Nar - if Sim/Story is just a bad label based on mistaking certain Narrativist techniques for a Narrativist CA more generally - and I think they are now - then I'm not sure much disagreement remains on my end. The argument here would be that the players in a high-GM-force, low-player-agency, often-played-with-Sim-facilitating-rules game that aims at producing a good story, full of moral and emotional challenge, are getting the Narrativist charge out of the game, and are identifiably playing with a Nar CA; they just don't, either because they're bringing in a spectator's attitude from other popular art forms, or because they're lazy, or because they haven't encountered rulesets or techniques that let them shift the play burden differently, do very much to get more than one of the players at the table (the GM) involved in the decisions that the group makes to address premise.

If this all makes sense I'm not sure there's much more of a problem here on my end. I still might regard "Narrativism" as ambiguous, but I'd be much less inclined to find the ambiguity in the theory, and much more inclined to find the ambiguity in the English language, which we're stuck with for better or worse here. The issue is the inflection we put on 'story'. I won't say there aren't any serious discussions to be had about that, but I think they can be worked out.

(So I withdraw the charge about ambiguity - I don't think I was crazy to see it, since a lot hinges here on the specific interpretation of flexible words, but looking closer I think it disappears. On the other hand this post may turn out all wrong too - we'll see.)