A wild and an untamed thing - how literature refuses gaming

[Ben Lehman]

I would like to apologize to all the readers of the thread (including Ron, but not Moderator Ron, who doesn't like apologies, apparently) for getting off topic.  I'm done now.

Looking over the rest of the thread, I see that I have pretty much contributed what I need to say.  In brief, my experience in talking with fiction writers about gaming and gaming with fiction writers has been that their reactions to the subject are about as broad as any other creative person who already has a preferred outlet.

In terms of people using their worlds for gaming or fanfic or any such creative pursuit, most writers don't really like it, both because they feel defensive about their creations (and most people get it wrong, of course), and because they feel that their fans' creative energies might be better expended on something original.

And that's really all that needs to be said.

yrs--
--Ben

[Russell Impagliazzo]

I'm not sure that anyone has actually picked up on what Harrison is actually saying.

In my opinion, he starts with a statement about fantasy worlds that I agree with, but draws
a fallacious conclusion
about role-playing in fantasy worlds based on a limited understanding of role-playing.

I think what he is saying is that what makes a fantasy world distinct and gives it meaning and flavor is not a list of ``mythical facts'' about the world, but how myth is evoked to create a mood and  heighten the reader's awareness of issues that are taken for granted in everyday life.  For example, a key ingrediant of Middle Earth is the awareness of history and legend hidden within language and everyday life.  A story without this awareness might take place in a dark forest  called Mirkwood,  be populated with wood elves and hobbits, and involve an evil Necromancer, but it still would not be ``set in Tolkien's Middle Earth''.  There have certainly been a huge number of fantasy novels (even some good ones) that utilize
Tolkienesque features without feeling at all like Middle Earth.  

In this sense, the creation of a fantasy world is not very different from the work an author does in creating a work of ``realistic'' fiction.  Faulkner's South is as much a fantasy world as Middle Earth, in that another author could write about similar people and events, but would use them to evoke a different mood and highlight different issues.  

Since a fantasy world is a way of creating mood and awareness, and not a list of facts, some factual questions about the world are moot.  ``What is the dwarven word for smokeweed and why?'' is a proper Tolkienesque question for Middle Earth.  A story (or even a pseudo-academic appendix) answering this question
could be set in Middle Earth.    ``If a Balrog fought a Dragon, who'd win?'' is not really a
Tolkienesque question, so a story whose point was to answer this question would not
be ``set in Middle Earth'', even if Balrogs and Dragons both exist there, and both get into fights.  A story set in Middle Earth might contain a fight between a Balrog and a Dragon, but it would have to be addressing a different issue, such as, ``How would such a fight be remembered in local legend after 1000 years?''

So far, I believe that I am restating Harrison's position, and I agree with it.  He then goes on to implicitly reason that a role-playing game supposedly set in such a world must answer improper questions for the world, and hence that such a game cannot possibly be set in the world in the true sense.  I think this is false.  While role-playing games can and often do get lost in the minutia and lose the flavor of a fantasy world, this is not inevitable.  Role-players are aware that mood and issues are key to the flavor of a fantasy world, and sometimes successfully create a game that invokes the same mood and issues.  It is hard work, but it is possible.  (For example, I think John Kim's American Vikings game did a very good job of invoking the mood of the sagas, although I only played once.)   Even if improper questions get answered iincidentally n a role-playing game, that doesn't necessarily mean that the game is about these questions.  So providing stats for Balrogs and Dragons doesn't mean that the game is about which is more powerful.  

This leads to the obvious question:  what system elements or other role-playing techniques can assist in bringing the flavor of an author's world to the game?  

Russell

[John Kim]

John, in particular, I think you are assigning certain claims to others that they have not made.

Sorry.  I think I should back up to just this:  Le Guin did not state that there was some supernatural thing outside her head which was controlling her.  She was very clear that the character was inside her head.  So as far as I can see there is no factual error in her description.  She described correctly the objective reality, and presumably accurately described her subjective experience.  

I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth.  If anyone thinks there is a factual error in her description, then I'm curious to hear what it is.  However, that should probably go to a different thread.

[Mark Woodhouse]

This is not a tightly reasoned or theoretically rigorous response to the thread. Perhaps it is not entirely on-topic, I'm not sure.

It seems to me that the essential difference between creating a work of fiction and doing roleplaying in a fictional world is the process of negotiation.

An author crafts an entire, self-contained Thing, and releases it into the wild, where readers then interact with it. They interpret it by reference to their own particular library of signs and symbols, and construct their own "version" of the text. Perhaps they discuss this private version of the text with others, and adapt and revise their experience of the text by comparing notes. But the text remains. All the negotiation is after-the-fact, and necessarily subjective. The author has already committed their own meaning-making. They may approve or disapprove of the meanings made by readers, perhaps even participate in the process of shaping those meanings, but the text is there.

Gaming is a constant, iterative process, in which meaning is built publicly, in a shared space between multiple "authors". Meaning may even be created retroactively in imaginary time, as things that were not imagined by any single author are redefined by later input. There is no text that is authoritative, except that Social Contract makes it so.

I despair of much commonality between the creative process of writing fiction and the creative process of doing roleplaying. The closest parallel might be in workshopping a story - or better yet, a film or TV script - in that a proposed text is subjected to line-by-line, scene-by-scene deconstruction/reconstruction-by-committee. I know of few writers who really enjoy that phase of the creative process.

This is pretty notional. Does it inspire any insights by wider heads? Does it in fact address the topic usefully?

Best,

Mark

[John Kim]

So far, I believe that I am restating Harrison's position, and I agree with it.  He then goes on to implicitly reason that a role-playing game supposedly set in such a world must answer improper questions for the world, and hence that such a game cannot possibly be set in the world in the true sense.  I think this is false.  While role-playing games can and often do get lost in the minutia and lose the flavor of a fantasy world, this is not inevitable.  Role-players are aware that mood and issues are key to the flavor of a fantasy world, and sometimes successfully create a game that invokes the same mood and issues.  It is hard work, but it is possible.  (For example, I think John Kim's American Vikings game did a very good job of invoking the mood of the sagas, although I only played once.)

While I'm grateful for the note of confidence about the Vinland game, I'm not sure I agree with what is stated here.  It depends on what one considers "proper".  If there is any point to role-playing in Middle Earth, then it has to say something different than what Tolkien did.  Otherwise, you might as well just reread the books.  The point of the game comes from how it is different from Tolkien, not from how it is the same.  

So, to my mind, it is good to be improper.  As I stated in my minor rant earlier, I want to screw with Tolkien's vision.  That was, for example, very implicitly a part of, say, when I played Gudrid in the LOTR campaign.  She was a Beorning, a descendant of the clan of Beorn's wife.  This was a deliberate break from Tolkien -- filling in the role of women that is absent in his vision.  In principle, by how I played her, I was filling in my own statements which expressed themselves via context with Tolkien.  i.e. My statements were highlighted by how they contrasted with what happens in Tolkien.  Now, as it turns out, the campaign was something of a dud.  But I still believe in the principle.  

While my Vinland game kept some of the mood of the Icelandic sagas, it was also line-crossing.  I mixed American colonial legends (like the New Jersey devil and the headless horseman) with Algonquin and Iroquois legends with Icelandic sagas.  This is, I would argue, inherently improper.  Now, a game can try to be close to the original in many ways, and indeed the original author might even approve of the game.  (I suspect Le Guin would be intrigued by Mellan himmel och hav.)  But Harrison is right that the game is always going to have some screwing with the mood and issues of the original.  If it didn't, then it would indeed just be regurgitation as Vincent charged.  I largely agree with him about what is happening, but I consider it a good thing.  Tame animals are OK.  Tigers in zoos aren't a substitute for tigers in the wild, but they aren't inherently bad things.  

This leads to the obvious question:  what system elements or other role-playing techniques can assist in bringing the flavor of an author's world to the game?

Well, I talk some about the rules which I used in Vinland here:
http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/vinland/about/
This goes into why I chose RuneQuest vs other rules sets, as well as the changes which I made to it.

[clehrich]

My goodness, you turn around for a minute and all this happens!

For the record, I have read M. John Harrison, most of his books anyway, and I think he's one of the best fantasy writers around.  I also think that his fiction is weirdly, disturbingly unlike genre fantasy.  It riffs off of a lot of stock tropes and then twists them in truly strange ways, in part because it's not really about those tropes at all; as he says, it's about failure, loss, and degeneration of language and certainty.  One of these days we really have to get a panel going: Harrison, Gene Wolfe, and John Crowley.  Oh, and Iain M. Banks.  Now that would be something to hear!

Okay, so about gaming.

Well, first I think Mark hit the nail on the head.  A work of fiction is an object, a fixed thing, and you interact with it, challenge it, encounter it, in your own way and on your own time; at the same time, it doesn't talk back.  It does what it does, and you can't change it.  So you interpret, to try to make it change, and maybe you're successful and maybe you aren't, but it's still waiting for you when you get back, and maybe this time it's not quite the same.  And so on.

RPGs are not like this.  All this stuff about story and narrative really is a category mistake at this level; I've always thought this was the great abyss in the middle of RPG theory and I still think so, and I think further that Harrison has spotted it clearly -- as has Mark.  See, here's the thing.  You're not going to like this, some of you, but this is really very important.

A work of fiction is not a story.

Got that?  It may have a story, or tell a story, which are not the same thing, but it is not a story.  It's words.  That's all, just words.

Now if RPGs want to tell stories too, that's great, but that doesn't make them works of fiction.  That's not a question of good or bad; it's not that RPGs are bad fiction.  It's that they are not fiction at all.  This is what Harrison means by a "category mistake": it's a complete mismatch.

To take a deliberately somewhat silly example, but one that has some content nevertheless, consider the RPG fiction stuff that pads out a lot of games we like to pillory.  I think we can mostly agree that this stuff is crap fiction.  But why doesn't that bother the writers?  Why do they publish it anyway?  Why do a certain sort of gamers lap it up with their games?

Because all it is is story.  It just tells some things that happen, and expresses certain aspects of the world.  You know, how bits of the magic work, or the shtick of werewolves, or the Premise of the Great Battle, or whatever.

So let's put that together.  You've got a story.  You've got characters.  You explain the intricacies of your world through that.  You've got some inventive ideas about cultures and creatures and whatnot.  You've got a Premise to address.  You string it all together in a cohesive narrative.  Congratulations, you now have a book of fantasy fiction.

Okay, but guess what?  It's crap.  I don't have to read it.  Put together in that way, it's crap.  Because what never for a moment mattered in that construction process was the one thing that fiction can never, never, never lose focus on: words.

Now you may say, "Yeah, sure, but you know what?  RGPs happen entirely with words too."  True, and no I'm not going to make noises about body language and so on.  No, the thing is that the words don't matter.  It just doesn't matter whether your sentences, as you speak them in the moment right now, are graceful, elegant, and make people think about how they work.  It doesn't matter whether each and every character speaks in a peculiar and distinctive way, but ever so slightly, and that maybe if you look very deep you can see subtle resonances of Phil in the voice of Phil's son Matt.  None of that matters.  And a good thing too, because who can do all that on the first try?  Nobody!

Consider this: how come you can retell, with some effectiveness if you're good and you choose the right events, the story of a game?  You don't provide a verbatim transcript, you retell it.  Why?  Because the words do not matter.

See, we also don't revise.  And if you look at the way people talk about writing, all too often, on this thread for example, you'll notice that people forget about the most important part, which is revision.  By the time a text is really done, most of it probably doesn't look anything like it did the first time.  And maybe nothing has changed but the words -- but they're really all that matters.  The rest is just instruments for making the words resonate.

That is not true in RPGs.  And it never will be.  Get over it.

1. Any new art form requires decades to be recognized at all, and then more decades to be recognized as more than just a cobbled-together bastard of other art forms.

If you want your art form to be recognized as valid, don't sell it as another art form.  If film hadn't had a bunch of maniac artistes who decided that this new medium required completely new techniques and from that generated a completely new artform, it would have been stuck with filming plays, and basically sucking.

Your film teacher who thought comics were stupid was an idiot, or rather, a bigot.  He decided that there were only certain limited measures of artistic success, and on the basis of probably very limited data decided that comics didn't match up.  Well, nor should they.  They're their own art form.  And when I hear comics described as "great literature" I want to vomit: they're comics, damn it.  Sit up and be proud of comics, and do something with comics, and make them Comics.  I think the reason Japanese manga have in part succeeded at this is that they don't have this inferiority complex, that "oh god, what if we don't get recognized as really serious literature?"

2. By definition, most fiction writers are oriented toward what, in role-playing, I call Narrativism.

By whose definition?  I think this is flat-out nonsense.  Egri may have been interested in that, but who's Egri?  One guy who was apparently pretty good at teaching creative writing.  You can't tell me that all Ulysses is about is Premise.  Or V.  Or The Odyssey.  If it's all about Premise, what's the difference between The Odyssey and Ulysses?

Take Tolkien for a minute.  Consider the films and the novels of LOTR.  They tell the same stories, have the same basic Premises (mostly), and so on.  But they are very much not the same thing.  My favorite example of this is the scene when Gandalf "cures" Theoden of the repulsive influence of Grima Wormtongue (and through him Saruman).  You saw the flick, you saw the special effects.  Didn't you just want to hurl?  What a total misunderstanding -- or rather, no.  Actually, the thing is, the scene in the novels is not filmable, because it's about words.

See, Tolkien, as you recall, was a world-class expert on Norse eddas and sagas.  And he knew perfectly well that those things are very much about words, and are weirdly reflexive texts (weird because unusual in a culture as so-called "archaic" as that).  Now the Rohirrim are about as close to Vikings as you can get in horsemen, and what Gandalf does is to act exactly the way any decent edda hero wizard ought to: he uses words to play with truth.  He claims simply that it is already true that Theoden isn't old, just weary.  And he makes this whole stirring speech about putting one's hand on the hilt of a sword, and all that.  Meanwhile Grima Wormtongue (note name) has been feeding poisonous words into Theoden's ear, soft, sweet, womanly words about "you're old, you need a rest, take a load off...."  If I'd filmed it, Theoden would have looked exactly the same physically before and after, except that the lighting is such that in the dark, musty light he looks weary; when Gandalf opens the window and calls him (in words) to action, he straightens up and stands, and you see that he never really was decrepit -- it was all lies.

The scene is fully about words, and it's beautiful, one of the best scenes in the whole series, if you ask me, because it perfectly takes up the themes and issues of eddas and sagas and makes them live again in new words.  Tolkien's prose is weird: nobody ever really talked like that, but they talk in a way special and peculiar to Tolkien's world.

And in RPGs, you can take up the themes and such, but you really cannot do this with words unless you can go back and edit.

Get over it!  RPGs are not literature.  If we're ever going to take this art form forward, we've got to stop trying to pretend to be literature writers.  We're not.  If we were, you'd have seen a lot of games already that aim to construct poetry.  You don't, because that's simply not the point.  We use words to do things.  Literature is words.

What I'd really like to talk about, incidentally, is Harrison's fascinating comments on encountering a world as fundamentally alien, and his follow-up that attempting to live in that world is colonizing and thus destroying it.  He's right, but until we can swallow the apparently bitter pill that RPGs are not literature and never will or should be, we can't talk about that intelligently.

[John Kim]

Consider this: how come you can retell, with some effectiveness if you're good and you choose the right events, the story of a game?  You don't provide a verbatim transcript, you retell it.  Why?  Because the words do not matter.

The scene is fully about words, and it's beautiful, one of the best scenes in the whole series, if you ask me, because it perfectly takes up the themes and issues of eddas and sagas and makes them live again in new words.  Tolkien's prose is weird: nobody ever really talked like that, but they talk in a way special and peculiar to Tolkien's world.

And in RPGs, you can take up the themes and such, but you really cannot do this with words unless you can go back and edit.

Get over it!  RPGs are not literature.  If we're ever going to take this art form forward, we've got to stop trying to pretend to be literature writers.  We're not.  If we were, you'd have seen a lot of games already that aim to construct poetry.  You don't, because that's simply not the point.  We use words to do things.  Literature is words.

Well, on the one hand, I agree with your emphatic "RPGs are not literature" point.  However, I think your point about words is totally wrong.  And furthermore, by denying the value of words in RPGs, you are doing damage to RPGs as an art.  

Sure, you can re-tell what happened in an RPG game.  But just the same way, you can re-tell what happened in Tolkien's scene.  And in both cases, the re-telling does a disservice to the original.  You imply that somehow the re-telling of the game is just as good as the game.  i.e. The original words were irrelevant.  I think the words are relevant, and the re-telling is just as violent a change as Tolkien's scene.  

The fact that you can't go back and edit doesn't make the words irrelevant, any more than being unable to erase makes the lines irrelevant in drawing.  The spontaneous words are the role-playing, at least for online play -- in tabletop and LARP you add in bodily components of expression.  But role-playing is still an act.  The words, the gestures, the maps, the miniatures -- all of these are elements of the art, and they all matter.  Being spontaneous doesn't make them invisible or irrelevant.  

I'm not entirely sure about this, but my impression is that you are siding with M. John Harrison that role-playing in Middle Earth is bad.  Is that right?  Your comments about the movie sound like a purist argument.  i.e. Bands shouldn't do covers of older songs, they should write new songs.  Similarly, movies should come from original screenplays, not remakes or adaptations.  I'm curious if you could clarify.  For what it's worth, I didn't puke at the scene.  Yes, it was different than the book.  Yes, it devalues words.  However, the movie was... a movie.  It is a visual medium, not a textual one.  Trying to film a book literally is a category error.

[Ian Charvill]

Chris

A certain amount of what you wrote really works for me, but some of it has me confused.  You wrote that a work of fiction is not a story, it's just word.  Now, I'm guessing here, you meant something like, a novel is not a story it's just words.  Silent films can be works of fiction, and can contain no words whatever.

So are you saying that role playing games are not works of fiction like novels?  Or are you saying that role playing games are not pure works of fiction.  I mean in the sense of pictionary is not a drawing, it's a game part of which is to produce drawings.  In that sense roleplaying games wouldn't be works of fiction, they would be games part of which would require the production of fictional passages, dialogues and so on.

Ian

[Erling Rognli]

I said a lot of what I had to say about this topic in lumpleys Shakespeare-thread, but reading this, and in particular Chris' last post rang a bell or two for me. The notion of roleplaying as art in certain ways challenges the very concept of art. The artform that roleplaying might become will possibly be the first artform where the art-object is totally indivisible from both the acts of creation and appreciation. It represents quite a radical break with certain central features of art in the sense the word is used today.

The art-object of roleplaying has neither a performer/spectator-division nor features of relative permanence or reproducability. It's also interesting to consider how important equality of status and non-profit as part of the social contract is for functional roleplaying. Can roleplaying be professionalised and turned into a service without becoming something entirely different? (I have no idea what might actually be the case concerning the last question, but someone else might have relevant experiences?)

Anyway, I fully agree with Chris on the point that the question of roleplaying as an artform cannot be framed on the terms of another, entirely different form of art. Further I think that roleplaying, should it become an artform, would be so much more different from established forms of art than it struggling predecessors once were, that becoming so in the first place would be very, very difficult. If you see what I mean. When we also take the culture surrounding the phenomena today into consideration, things look kinda bleak.

Further, on the bleak train of thought: If roleplaying does becomes art some time, I'm afraid several things will have happened. The division between roleplaying as games and roleplaying as "expression within collaborative social context" - thing will have widened, to the point where these are different phenomena altogheter, probably with different names. Roleplaying as the latter will have become more professionalised. The conceptual links to fantasy and science fiction will have been severed. In short, I think that roleplaying would conform to art, being changed in the process, to a much greater degree than art would be changed by roleplaying. One of the most powerful ideas within art is the idea of the Artist and the audience. I am not sure that roleplaying would be able to resist the influence of that idea, given the prevalence of ideas about the GM as the artist. In the end, I think that the roleplaying-art that would result would be far less interesting than some of the roleplaying we see today.

Then again, I might be overly pessimistic and frustrated about the state of art in society.

-Erling

[Erling Rognli]

Damnit. Double-posted. Sorry. Please delete.

[ethan_greer]

John, you missed something. Chris didn't say that retelling a role-playing session was just as good as the original role-playing session. He said that retelling the story that resulted from a role-playing session can result in a story that is just as good as the one produced in the original role-playing session. Why? Because really it's the same story, told with different words. That's how the words "don't matter."

Words matter as elements of the art form. They don't matter to the particular story that gets told. The same story totally reworded is still the same story.

[Valamir]

Chris, a nice solid rant...but I'm wondering what its relevancy is to this thread.

I don't see anyone saying RPG playing and Literature writing are the same thing (or even all that close).

Rather what has been commented on is whether or not writers as people and potential roleplayers would have (based on their authorial background) have more in common while roleplaying with certain Creative Agendas over others.

The hypothesis that was put forth was that most writers abhor roleplaying because most roleplaying they will have encountered is Sim and the Sim CA is highly incompatable with the way writers think about stories.  While those same authors may well have / have had a better feeling about roleplaying if they had encountered Narrativist Groups because the Nar CA involves away of thinking about characters and story that is more compatable with the way authors already think about such things.

No where do I see anyone saying that roleplaying and writing are the same.

[Matt Snyder]

I note a key distinction in Ron's first requirement. Note that he deoesn't say it takes years for a thing to become art. He says it takes years for a thing to become recognized as art.

I think we have art here and now in role-playing. I'm not waiting around for PhDs to stamp it with approval or whatever. It's art, right here, right now. We just don't have a lot of people in the world agreeing that it is.

So, I guess the question might rightly be, What is the definition of art, and does it require a certain number of people to accept it as art? I say, no way. Others may say otherwise.

If I'm right that role-playing alread is art, then we're waiting around for people like Harrison to come around to us, not for role-playing to come around to them. I say that's an important distiction, and it has implications for what games we're designing, playing and talking about here on the Forge.

Note that when I say role-playing does not need to "come around" to Harrison (or whatever skeptic), I'm not talking about getting My Life With Master in his hands physically so he knows it exists. I'm saying that, should Harrison ever encounter a game like that, he would hopefully change his mind about this stuff ("come around" to it). The games are already here, though there's certainly more to come.

Also, I think Chris Lehrich is not saying role-playing can't be something like literature, it's just that we may be making mistakes to compare the activity 1:1 with literature. If I read him rightly, he's saying that role-playing can be an art on par with literature, in the sense that it's as "valuable" an art to those who experience it. Chris?

Chris, I'll note one other thing -- I think revision can and does happen all the time in role-playing, both during play and after play as we recount events. I've made posts on this previously, and Ron has made even more about this topic. I think these kinds of revisions are quite comparable, but not exact, to a writer working with an edtior, or even just revising his own text.

[daMoose_Neo]

Might I also add that the focus on words...seems awefully wrong, especially when looking to Tolkien's inspirtations. Tolkien himself, yes, his writing was about the beauty of his words.
However, Tolkien's words were inspired by the very thing you're saying RPG's are...retold, word-specific-less tales. The versions of nordic, celtic and other tales he referenced in creating Middle Earth were simply the latest, recorded, versions. Countless versions existed before that, before it was recording in fixed form.
Storytellers existed long before "literature" and writing, their stories changing with each retelling and with each person, some more flowery, others less. What you have in RPG PLAYING is a kind of 'discovery', after the fact you have a work of fiction, a story. It is told to others, much like the old legends passed from mouth to mouth. Alot of that became the basis for the written versions of the legends which Tolkien turned to when developing Middle Earth. He was a storyteller, same as say a tribal keeper of legends or a gamer telling of his defeat of a dragon. What Tolkien is, that they are not, is a writer, fixing one version of the story with a particular set of words.
Words do and don't matter. They do create a distinction between what Tolkien is and what we, as gamers, are. The medium will always be different, however both of us are Authors, Storytellers, Artists. Some gamers can be writers as well. If a gamer were to record a series of sessions, and fill it with flowery word-portraits and fill gaps, he would in that sense be no different from Tolkien taking the traditional legends and adding his own twist to it. Is the gamer, in the act of gaming, doing what Tolkien is? No. After the fact, however, could he? Possibly.

[ethan_greer]

Nate, you seem to be forgetting Chris's main point - That a work of fiction, literature, is not a story. Creating a story and creating a work of literature are two very different things. Tolkien may have been a storyteller, but he was an author also. The two are far from being the same thing.

To a work of fiction, and the author, the words are the most (if not the only) crucial element.

To a story, and the storyteller, the words are incidental.

Tolkein was a storyteller who produced literature. The fact that he retold some classic tales relates to his skill as a storyteller and isn't really connected with the fact that, as an author, he produced literature. A gamer is a storyteller too, but if he or she transcribed and gussied up a series of roleplaying sessions, it would not be literature.

So, the focus on words is crucial to Chris's point. At least, as I read it.