Classifying By Social Function

[John Kim]

I don't want to preach a big lecture about myth here, but those constantly repeated myths that you're thinking of are the products of incessant and continual reification by members of the cultures in question.  Epic, saga, all that -- that isn't myth as told by living mythic cultures.  What we find when we look at living mythic cultures, by which I mean cultures that still use myth and don't just repeat it, is that these things are highly flexible and change constantly.  

OK, I think we're miscommunicating here.  You're objecting that repeated-myth and myth-that-people-read-about and myth-as-expressed-by-Campbell aren't the real myth, which is the ever-changing myth of "living mythic cultures".  But for a community of modern, non-anthropologically-folk (i.e. most of us here at the Forge), I think that trying to insist on a specialized use of the word "myth" that only applies to specific cultures isn't a good idea.  In other words, I was using the word "myth" in its more broad, layman's sense.  You can decry it as uneducated, which I'll freely admit to.  I'm sorry for any passing on of imprecise language regarding myth, but I suspect I'm reflecting my peers here.  

The basic social function of myth appears to be to work through social difficulties and come up with social solutions.  If the best a people can work out through myth is that the Leopard clan and the Eagle clan really should be one clan, because by a kind of mythic logic the Leopard really needs to be the Eagle's brother, you will soon find that Leopard and Eagle clan members cannot marry, because this would be incest.  And so forth.

My objection to the notion of "myth" in narrativism is simply that myths are not "stories" in the sense meant by Story Now.  And using Campbell makes it worse.  But social functions of myth?  Oh yes.  That's the whole point, you see, and it's taken most of a century to even begin to understand what it's all about.

OK, here's the meat of it for me.  So "working through social difficulties and coming up with social solutions" seems to me a good expression of social function.  So Problem-solving might be a simplified term for this.  Again, this sounds similar to my Support category.  Perhaps they should be merged, or conversely distinguished into separate categories.  

I really, really don't want to get into wrangling with you over the social function of "real myth" in real "living mythic cultures".  I will freely bow to your expertise in this regard.  The question concerning me is how do various role-playing games function in our modern culture.  This might be exactly the same, but I don't take that as a given.

[Alan]

Or you could celebrate a famous fable-writer's birthday by creating some new fables in honor of his tradition.  These might not be Narrativist, but they are myth creation.  So the act of creating a fable or myth can be used in a variety of social functions.  

John, I think this is not a valid dismissal.  I could have criticised your choice of "Celebrate" as a term with the same logic.  But I chose not to.  I worked within your concpet.  How about we make a pragmatic effort to find terms which can be defined into meaning, instead of looking for some ideal term which does not exist in the English language.

Creating personalized stories is not a social function.

You're wrong on this.  Creating personalized stories is the function of many social activities, paricularly those of pre-media cultures, where groups gather to confirm the identity of individuals in various rights of passage.  Such rituals are sometimes personalized.  Heck, a simple sermon in a church attemptes to personalize the fables of our culture.

[John Kim]

Creating personalized stories is not a social function.

You're wrong on this.  Creating personalized stories is the function of many social activities, paricularly those of pre-media cultures, where groups gather to confirm the identity of individuals in various rights of passage.  Such rituals are sometimes personalized.  Heck, a simple sermon in a church attemptes to personalize the fables of our culture.

I think we're still miscommunicating on this.  I completely agree that a sermon may be a personalized story, and that it has a social function.  But to the preacher, the story told is a means to an end.  The social function here is the real-world goal: i.e. what happens to the real people.  For the preacher, I think the goal is spiritual reflection or evangelization or somesuch.  i.e. A sermon which produces a personalized story but which has no impact on the listeners is a failure.  Another example of personalized stories would be scary stories told around a campfire.  I think these also serve a social function, but their function is not the same as the sermon's.  

Does that make sense?  I believe that creating personalized stories do have a social function, but I want to look at and classify what the social function is.  Chris had a good explanation, I thought, about the social functions of myth in some cultures -- how they would be used to suggest solutions to social problems.  The function here is the problem-solving.  

Again, the point is not to put new labels on GNS.  This isn't a re-labelling or replacement.  This is a different form of classification.  So, for example, if someone creates a story which might or not be a "fable" -- then a Fabulation category would concern itself over whether the fiction that was created constituted a "fable".  But the social function categories are different.  i.e. If a fable-creating game and another game have similar effects/roles on the real lives of the players, then they should be in the same social function category.

[Adam Cerling]

The terms "Therapy" and "Support" make me reflect on the games that served my LARP groups best in such a mode. I think a more accurate term for what we got out of it would be Catharsis. The game provided a safe environment in which to experiment with aspects of ourselves that we wouldn't usually express in day-to-day life.

[clehrich]

OK, I think we're miscommunicating here.  You're objecting that repeated-myth and myth-that-people-read-about and myth-as-expressed-by-Campbell aren't the real myth, which is the ever-changing myth of "living mythic cultures".  But for a community of modern, non-anthropologically-folk (i.e. most of us here at the Forge), I think that trying to insist on a specialized use of the word "myth" that only applies to specific cultures isn't a good idea.  In other words, I was using the word "myth" in its more broad, layman's sense.  You can decry it as uneducated, which I'll freely admit to.  I'm sorry for any passing on of imprecise language regarding myth, but I suspect I'm reflecting my peers here.

We are miscommunicating, but I think in not quite the place you note here.  My point is that since there is such a strong disparity between a scholarly understanding and the "layman's" understanding, we should be extremely wary of coining a new term that uses "myth".  From my perspective, this can only lead to misunderstandings and complications that are totally unnecessary.

The basic social function of myth appears to be to work through social difficulties and come up with social solutions.  If the best a people can work out through myth is that the Leopard clan and the Eagle clan really should be one clan, because by a kind of mythic logic the Leopard really needs to be the Eagle's brother, you will soon find that Leopard and Eagle clan members cannot marry, because this would be incest.  And so forth.

I really, really don't want to get into wrangling with you over the social function of "real myth" in real "living mythic cultures".  I will freely bow to your expertise in this regard.  The question concerning me is how do various role-playing games function in our modern culture.  This might be exactly the same, but I don't take that as a given.

No, I don't think they're the same at all.  I think there is definitely some fascinating overlap, but analyzing it closely is going to take a lot of time and work, and will require vast reading in a number of areas.  In the meantime, I am hesitant to use the term "myth" in reference to the social function of a quite different form, i.e. RPGs.

I think we're on the same page, really.  I'm just saying that "myth" is probably a term we should sidestep if possible.  Does that make sense?

[John Kim]

I think we're on the same page, really.  I'm just saying that "myth" is probably a term we should sidestep if possible.  Does that make sense?

I am 100% agreed.  So what do you think about Support and/or Problem-solving and/or White Rat's suggestion Catharsis.  Should they all be distinct?  On the one hand, I suppose Support and Catharsis are both ways of helping individuals through their problems.  i.e. So you might go to a support group only for a limited period of time.  The group is there to support the individuals through a process, but may dissolve thereafter.  Catharsis feels rather more specific, and it seems like it overlaps with Support (i.e. you can have a moment of release at least very much like catharsis within a group).  I'm not sure if Support is a good word, but I think these two belong together.  

The problem-solving you brought up is mucking with the relations within a permanent group.  So the function is to shape how the social dynamic works for all other interactions.  Your examples were on the level of clan or tribe.  But here we are more at an individual level, which I think is rather different.  

I guess I should bring up here forming friendships or other relationships through gaming.  For example, I got to know my wife through her playing in my Champions game and our going to Vampire LARPs together.  But this seems to overlap with at least Celebration.  Parties are often very pointedly intended as ways to meet people.  And "make friends" seems rather different than tribal negotiations of your earlier examples.  So I'm not what this category should be.  So subfunctions touched on may include:
- Making friends and/or courtship.
- Establishing ties and/or boundaries for existing friendships.
- Resolving problems/issues which are causing friction.

[clehrich]

My inclination, since you ask, is to think that the social functions of different modes of gaming are not likely to be tremendously distinct.  There are, however, a few points worth considering if you want to follow this up.

1. Make a distinction between social function and psychological function

For the functionalist anthropologist, the latter is usually inaccessible; one can only guess, and the whole point of the functionalist movement was to get away from guesswork and move to the empirical plane as much as possible.  We can, however, discuss psychological function because (a) the informants are of our culture and speak our psychological language; (b) we are ourselves experienced informants, not participant-observers (you might say that actually the term "participant-observer" fits us rather better than it does the anthropologists who normally use it); (c) the informants are of a culture that psychologizes to a considerable degree, and thus are used to considering matters in such terms (which is not the case in most tribal cultures).

2. Social function must be related to larger social contexts

If you're looking for the social function of gaming, or of kinds of gaming, the issue is not primarily (though it is secondarily) the social function within the narrow group, but rather its function with respect to the larger social context.  For example, what effect does gaming have on people's involvement with their communities?  How do gamers behave differently at work because of their hobby?  Does gaming seem to have an effect on political (in the ordinary sense) motivation?  Does the formation of a tight gaming group appear to substitute for other social bonds, making gamers more insular and isolated?  Does gaming prompt the construction of larger gaming communities?  Does gaming construct a sense of identity, and if so what identity or identities?  Does gaming commonly affect choices among romantic/sexual partners?  This doesn't eliminate the kinds of function you're talking about, but for the functionalist anthropologist the narrow-group function is primarily meaningful in relation to the large-group function and context.

3. Three levels of inquiry

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, one of the two great functionalists (the other was Bronislaw Malinowski), suggested that there were three levels of inquiry.

Purpose, the ostensible reason for an activity as expressed by the participants.  For the functionalists, this was not in the main an important part of the data.
Meaning, how the symbols and structures of the activity work together to create meaning within the community.  For the functionalists, this was again not terribly important, but more so than purpose.
Function, both psychological and social, which is to say the actual effects empirically observed to result from the activity.  Malinowski did think that psychological function was essential, where Radcliffe-Brown felt that it was not empirically observable.[/list:u]In the ensuing many years (the functionalists were kings primarily in the thirties and forties), both meaning and purpose became increasingly important to analysis, largely because it was recognized that the natives might be a lot more aware of what they were doing than these earlier fieldworkers had noticed.

4. Types of gaming

It seems to me that Narrativism, because of its focus on a moral premise, can be seen to have a clear ideological function.  That is, the players work through important social issues (ethical questions are always social) and come to conclusions about them.  Thus a Narrativist game could be seen as (in part) an experimental site for ethical examination of significant issues facing the players as social beings.  This would be an exciting direction for future investigation, because it entails that Narrativism has a largely conservative social function (i.e. it tends to validate cultural ethical norms) whereas to the players it often seems counter to the mainstream; this dynamic tension would be well worth examining.

Gamism strikes me as a good deal more difficult.  The cheap pop-psych claim might be that by allowing players to feel they have won a victory, it creates a sense of empowerment.  But this is complicated: the victories do not as a rule extend beyond the game environment.  Indeed, one might argue that such empowerment leads players not to strive for other modes of victory in the larger social framework, thus having a largely conservative social function.  But again, we're slipping into psychological rather than social function, at base.  My sense is that this is much more complicated than it might at first appear.

Simulationism seems to me by far the most complex.  I am currently grappling with this problem, and will eventually post my analysis.  Let me say briefly -- if someone wants to discuss this it should go to another thread -- that I think Sim is very tightly related to myth, and in a sense strives to have similar social functions to those of myth in living mythic cultures, although in many respects it has been divorced from those functions.  Thus it serves the psychological functions of myth without retaining the social functions in a strong sense: these are myths to be thought rather than lived.  But this is an insanely complicated issue which I'm only beginning to get my mind around.

The upshot of this fast breakdown is that gaming is relatively conservative in terms of social function.  Nar reinforces ethical norms, Gam reinforces status norms, and Sim (if my preliminary analysis is correct) reinforces symbolic structural norms.  This is, I think, at odds with our usual feeling about gaming, which is why distinguishing social function from purpose and meaning is so important.  But this is a very sketchy analysis, and it is deliberately limited to a functionalist perspective, which will tend to bias the interpretation in the direction of conservatism.

5. Distinguishing functions

I don't think you need a one-to-one relationship of types of social function to types of gaming.  I would be very surprised to find that every social function of any type of gaming is not always present in all gaming; I think it's a matter of emphasis, but I also think that what is emphasized in social function is not necessarily what "the natives" might think -- which is to say it's not necessarily going to look much like CA.

6. Reading

Since this analysis leads to recapitulating some important anthropological discussions, let me make some suggestions for reading.

Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life really invented functionalism, although Durkheim himself should not be categorized that way.  The recent translation by Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) is brilliant and extremely readable, as Durkheim is in French for those more comfortable with that language.  He essentially argues that the function of ritual and religion is to create social bonds and thus a moral authority that enforces conformity to rules without the need for a lot of policing.  He thinks that we tend to project our society's moral force as a concrete object or set of objects (e.g. a totem or a flag) because we don't like to think in raw abstractions.  His theory of "effervescence" seems to me entirely applicable to gaming, with interesting ramifications for the whole theory of social function.

Bronislaw Malinowski's Magic, Science and Religion is very readable, and will offer some clear understanding of distinctions among types of function.  Magic is for him primarily psychological, religion primarily social, and science primarily technical/practical.  His distinction have been largely overturned, but in the case of gaming such distinctions might be well worth making, albeit along different lines of division.

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's Taboo, The Frazer Lecture, 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1939), reprinted many times in many places, is perhaps the clearest basic introduction to functional anthropology ever written.  It's not very long, either.

George Homans's "Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown," American Anthropologist n.s. 43 (1941): 164-72, is an exceedingly clear reworking of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown on psychological function and its relation to social function.  Less directly applicable to gaming than the others, it is nevertheless an admirable summary and analysis and may help a good deal in understanding the implications of these theories.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard's work on Azande witchcraft, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, is a marvelous example; his little book Theories of Primitive Religion is an exceptionally good introduction to the subject until about 1950 or thereabouts, and should be required reading if one is to go further with this.

Having read all that, I do think that Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (use the French La pensee sauvage if you can, as the translation sucks) burned the functionalist approaches to the ground and salted the earth.

If someone has a website I can use, I can make the Malinowski (excerpts, but good ones), Radcliffe-Brown, and Homans stuff available in PDF form.  There are few if any copyright issues, because the texts are quite old, but you might theoretically get an angry letter and have to take them down.

Hope this helps in some way.

[Alan]

Wow, Chris, that's everything I've forgotten since my Anthropology degree twenty years ago.

It's interesting, in the face of the anti-rpg statements made by religious groups that you assert role-playing has a conservative function.  I've often thought the accusations of "devil worshipping fringe behavior" were utterly wrong.  Even the geekiest players are looking for some kind of social confirmation.

But that's off topic.

Let's be careful not to confuse social confirmation of ethics important to players, with sorting through personal problems.  No Narrativist play I've ever observed, or participated in, appeared to be therapy.  While the ethical center of a particular narrativist play has to be meaningful to the players, it doesn't actually have to be directly relevant to the their current lives.

And I think Fabulation is an acceptable term for what you describe as the function narrativism.   We're getting together to confirm or explore our ethical beliefs by spinning fables with an ethical center.

[clehrich]

I think we're still miscommunicating on this.  I completely agree that a sermon may be a personalized story, and that it has a social function.  But to the preacher, the story told is a means to an end.  The social function here is the real-world goal: i.e. what happens to the real people.  For the preacher, I think the goal is spiritual reflection or evangelization or somesuch.  i.e. A sermon which produces a personalized story but which has no impact on the listeners is a failure.  Another example of personalized stories would be scary stories told around a campfire.  I think these also serve a social function, but their function is not the same as the sermon's.

I don't like this example at all, because I think it confuses the issue, but at the same time I think you're dead-on in what you're saying.

Evans-Pritchard remarked that "for the social anthropologist, religion is what religion does," or something very close to that.  He was a functionalist, on the whole, and this is a nice statement of the primary thrust of that movement.  For the analyst of this stripe, gaming is what gaming does.  The preacher's sermon's purpose is likely to guide and elevate the minds and souls of his congregation toward God.  The sermon's meaning is a means to that end, couched in symbols and structures like the Bible, current events of interest to the congregation, and so forth.  The sermon's function may well be radically different, e.g. to unify the congregation as a group with an institutional identity.  And as John indicates, you cannot talk about the function of the sermon if there is no one to hear it: in that case, it does nothing, so though it may still have the same purpose and meaning, it has no function whatever except possibly a psychological function for the preacher.

If you want a church-y example, consider a mainstream Protestant Sunday service in toto.  There are a range of possible and active functions here: identification with the church, leading to congregational unity; dispelling of social anxiety (if I don't go to church people will think I'm immoral); expression and manipulation of status levels (who sits where, who wears the biggest hat, etc.); renewed contact with an extended set of neighbors and kin (look, little Johnny's getting quite big, and isn't that the Jones's baby?); expression of interest and importance (everyone wears their Sunday best); etc.  The preacher of the sermon can take a fair bit of this and "spin" it in a particular direction, using known symbols; for example, he might use the opportunity to make a political statement (abortion is bad, we should all welcome our gay congregants, etc.), or a general ethical point (you're all wearing very expensive clothing, but think of the needy), and so on.  The point is that the sermon takes a range of possible meanings and guides participant interpretation toward a narrowed range, strengthening social function in particular directions.  In Protestant churches, and more recently Catholic ones, this is often explicit and deliberate, in the sense that sermons very commonly do have a clear social real-world function which is very close to the meaning and purpose, but the function is rather broader: the preacher cannot close out all other possible functions through the manipulation of meaning.

Again, the point is not to put new labels on GNS.  This isn't a re-labelling or replacement.  This is a different form of classification.  So, for example, if someone creates a story which might or not be a "fable" -- then a Fabulation category would concern itself over whether the fiction that was created constituted a "fable".  But the social function categories are different.  i.e. If a fable-creating game and another game have similar effects/roles on the real lives of the players, then they should be in the same social function category.

I'd take this just a little farther.  I think that social function is not going to be limited to CA in any way; there will be a wide range of functions that may be more or less emphasized by particular CAs, but will also be manipulated and emphasized by a lot of other factors.  One of the most interesting things here, and this is something the functionalists didn't generally recognize, is that a central operation in the formation of a ritual (including gaming) is to attempt to exclude some factors as extraneous; at the same time, those factors are always present, even if only by their exclusion, which is really a type of inclusion that creates what might be called a "haunting" presence.  

To put that more clearly, one factor present in any game is what the players wear.  But in tabletop play, this is commonly excluded as a relevant factor.  The point is that this is an assertion, not a fact: the clothing worn does matter, and affects what the game does, but it is a factor that the players generally agree to pretend does not matter.  And we see with the Big Model that clothing choices barely fit in at all; if they do, it's under that gigantic rubric "social contract," but there it would usually be something like, "Under this social contract, clothing choices don't matter."  But they do; this is an ideological claim, not an empirical one.

[Landon Darkwood]

I hope that I don't muddy the waters by making this suggestion, but I've often likened Narrativist play as having the same social functions that getting together with various bands has had, when the specific goal of the meeting is to communally write original songs.

That being, everyone in the group is getting together to create something that they agree has artistic value or merit. Hard or simple, derivative or original, what matters is that at the end of the day, you're looking at what you think is a work of art. The conflicts inherent to that goal mirror the ones presented by the "hard question" in Ron's Nar essay: if Bill's our friend, but he can only really pull off a few basic rock guitar riffs, and it's messing with the artistic value of the songs we want to make, how do we deal with the possibility of kicking him out? It's a social problem. It wouldn't be a social problem (or not as big of one, or a different one) if the band was only interested in doing Nirvana covers, or if they were there to just jam out and see how well each person can play his own instrument (or see what the hardest song they can pull off is, etc).

In other words, I think it might be somewhat misleading to look at how people deal with the ethical/moral aspect of Narrativist play to identify it's primary social function among the participants, or at least to assume that it's got the lion's share. A Celebratory gathering (as per the category in the original post) can be just as theraputic or cathartic under the right circumstances, or confirming of mores and values solely through content. If everyone finds the stuff that villains do in a Call of Cthulhu game repulsive, it doesn't necessarily make it Narrativist.

And I disagree with the notion that playing a role-playing game produces no product, either. To me, a Transcript is a product despite its ephemeral nature. An evening of improvisational theatre, for example, certainly produces a product. If someone taped the performance, the performers could go back and watch it and do it over again for another audience. Doing so, however, would remove much of the original value to the performers of doing it the first time: instead of trying to create something of artistic merit spontaneously, they'd be trying to deliver an established work credibly.

I can't pin it to the wall because my command of social anthropology is pedestrian at best, but I think that there's more than semantics behind the social difference between the those two things. Yes, the analogy's a little off because in RPGs, the players are both performer and audience. However, I think the "getting together to make something of lasting artistic value" angle is an important one to think about, to explore the social function in terms of that.

I'm not sure that Gamist play traditionally incorporates concern for the artistry of the Transcript. I can see Sim as potentially (but not exclusively) being concerned with the artistic value of what's being called the Model/Ideal, but that's not something that's necessarily established in play, just confirmed by play. And while it's true that any play could produce a Transcript that, if written down, would be a story in the Lit 101 sense, the difference to note is that when the game is being played, it's the Narrativist who primarily cares about whether or not it's going to turn out that way (whether or not he realizes it, perhaps).

Ethical/moral issues, in my mind, are secondary to the social functions of getting together to do what's been awkwardly described above. Addressing them is a necessary function of producing a story's theme, hence it is done. And there may be secondary (and tertiary, ad infinitum) social things going on there... but these things strike me as a by-product, and not necessarily related to the social foundation of the interaction.

I realize that we're trying to decouple these "social function" terms from the Big Model CA's, but it struck me as an important thing to note. And I also realize that "artistic merit" is a hideously unhelpful term, but I don't think its subjectivity from group to group necessarily contradicts the rest of the post.

So... am I way off base here? Or on to something?


-Landon Darkwood

[clehrich]

With the important reminder that Landon is talking about Narrativist play...

everyone in the group is getting together to create something that they agree has artistic value or merit. ...
In other words, I think it might be somewhat misleading to look at how people deal with the ethical/moral aspect of Narrativist play to identify its primary social function among the participants, or at least to assume that it's got the lion's share.

I'll buy that.  But as I say, I don't really accept the notion of primary and secondary social functions; they're all functions.  So you've neatly identified a function here that is different from but complementary to the ethical/moral function.

And I disagree with the notion that playing a role-playing game produces no product, either. To me, a Transcript is a product despite its ephemeral nature.

This strikes me as hinting toward a third function, not a disagreement per se.  That is, I think it is not the case that all forms of gaming in any way emphasize the product, and indeed I think focus on the product of the gaming process (rather than the process itself) is often a serious problem in analysis.  But I agree entirely that Narrativist play seems to stress this constructive aim.  What is worth consideration beyond this is what the function of such a product might be.  As you say,

it's the Narrativist who primarily cares about whether or not it's going to turn out that way (whether or not he realizes it, perhaps).

Where I don't agree is:

Ethical/moral issues, in my mind, are secondary to the social functions of getting together to do what's been awkwardly described above. Addressing them is a necessary function of producing a story's theme, hence it is done. And there may be secondary (and tertiary, ad infinitum) social things going on there... but these things strike me as a by-product, and not necessarily related to the social foundation of the interaction.

I don't see that there's any need to prioritize here.  All of these things are real effects, and all seem to be important.  To suggest that one is more important than the others strikes me as potentially leading toward One True Way-type normative claims.

I realize that we're trying to decouple these "social function" terms from the Big Model CA's, but it struck me as an important thing to note.

See, to my mind, the Big Model CA's are useful data, because they represent the way a number of designers and players have come to formulate how gaming actually works.  One might say, contrary to the functionalists,(1) that the Big Model constitutes an example of highly self-conscious analysis of purpose (the "why we do this" part).  But Radcliffe-Brown was right that we cannot elevate such claims to the status of certainty; to do so merely reinforces one ideology at the expense of others.(2)  Thus this "decoupling" (nice term, BTW) is indeed essential, but certainly should not make us lose sight of the value of the Big Model as data.

I have no problem with "artistic merit" as a term, because it is a claim made within the group; that is, it falls on the side of purpose and meaning, whereas the process of assessing such merit, within the group, is a process that must have some social function.

I should stress again that I'm trying to think like a functionalist here, albeit a rather broad-minded one.  I think that this is an important step in theorizing gaming effectively, so I want to see it work.  But I also think that there are very good reasons why functionalism is good and dead, so this is all provisional: once we have a functionalist model squarely laid down and understood, we can move on to more profitable directions.  Simply skipping ahead would require vast reading; I think this is a more practical way.  My point being that I don't think, in the end, that this is going to resolve anything, but what I hope is that the ball John started rolling is going to lead us to recognize questions we hadn't even seen before.

Notes
(1) "Contrary to the functionalists" because they didn't generally think that the natives were ever particularly self-conscious about what they did; social function was something the natives never considered.

(2) Radcliffe-Brown's reason for the objection was very different, but this one still applies.

[pete_darby]

Just a small departure here:

This would be an exciting direction for future investigation, because it entails that Narrativism has a largely conservative social function (i.e. it tends to validate cultural ethical norms) whereas to the players it often seems counter to the mainstream; this dynamic tension would be well worth examining.

Personally, I'd say that, in exploring and challenging ethical scenarios, narrativism can equally serve a revolutionary, or at the very least revisionist, social function.

This, though, arises from my experience that cultural ethical norms are usually inducted into individuals without being critically considered by the individual: if critical appraisal is part of induction, then narrativist play will most likely be conservative, and indeed part of the process of induction. If not, the introduction of critical appraisal will likely be revisionist in nature.

[contracycle]

Thats an interesting argument Pete.  Do you then think that the very act of Narratavism implies or requires some element of critical analysis as a necessary feature of "playing it out"?

Wouldn't sim have a similar relationship to statements of reality?

I would in fact take your formulation a step further and say that critical appraisal of most social norms is actively discouraged during the individuals induction into them.  And for this reason I have a very jaundiced view of RPG having a revolutionary function because it seems primarily to me to act as vehicle for reifying your uncritically accepted norms through the uncritical acceptance of the other players.  That is, there seems to be no point at which disconfirming evidence can be brought to bear on the analysis.

[pete_darby]

Only the possibly disconfirming evidence of the actions and judgement of the other players and, to a lesser extent, the authors of the printed game: as such, it may challenge individually held norms while re-inforcing a nebulous social norm. However, in such an instance, the social norms particular to the group are in a constant state of creation and, I would hope, challenge, arising out of a dynamic consensus of the individual norms, as those norms themselves are moderated in light of challenges arising from the address of premise.

The "challenging" nature of narrativist play, as typified in the RP mainstream response to premise rich games, arises from the general assumption that RPG's are not, in play "about anything", and when they become so, they somehow cease to be fun. There has been a general lack of will in most RPG communities to any address of issues in play, or to challenge any social norms at all.

Again, we're looking at discrete functions: while the address of premise is, in itself, a challenge to the gamer social norm of not exploring issues, the methods and results of address may well serve as re-inforcing cultural or social norms and values. It may, though, equally challenge them, as in my wishy washy liberal mind I hold the possibility that the act of actively examining a meaty issue, rather than passivley accepting the given cultural values for it, one may develop a new appreciation and appraisal of those issues.

[pete_darby]

addendum: Having re-read your response, Gareth,  I see where we disagree. You pepper your post with an assumption of the uncritical acceptance of anything introduced into the SiS during play, to which I would say an unconditional not true. In fact, the whole edifice of RPG's as a social activity must allow for critical appraisal of anything introduced by any player.

Now, if you're as sure of uncritical acceptance as I'm sure of critical assessment, I think we're at a complete disconnect as regards the mechanics of RP.