On RPGs and Text [LONG]

[clehrich]

Christopher,

Thank you for this fascinating post.  We are definitely on the same page.  A few comments, however, as I go along....

As far as I can tell, his obsession with comparing RPGs to Text forms is to draw out what is unique about RPGs.  And to this I say, "Good."  As long as we eventually stop using Text based forms as the form the RPG experience aspires too.  (For the purpose of this post, like Chris' comments, I am specifically dealing with Narrativist RPG play.)

This is the one major place I disagree with you.  I do not think this is about Narrativism at all.  I'll get back to that.

I believe people in the RPG world keep turning to big fat novels because a) we're a literate lot and b) they are some of the books that made us want to play RPGs ("Wow, a rich world that goes even beyond the story! I'd like to hang out there for a while!")  But I think -- again, in terms of Narrativis -- the delight of watching a stage play (a good one, of course), or hearing a really great fairy tale -- has more to do with the audience half of being in an RPG session.

I agree with you.  I believe it's also because Tolkien in particular, as the undisputed Master of the really big fantasy novel, was drawing consciously upon mythic materials.  I think people are really grasping after myth, but they can't encounter that normally.  They perceive it, however dimly, in Tolkien, and try to reconstruct it.

Also, I think we live in a time of Text Fetishism

Yes.  And I do not think that's something we can really get over.  It's something we need to be conscious of and deal with, especially in an art form that is not textual, but we cannot really "get over it."  Textuality is here to stay.

(I have to say, Chris' obsession with the turning and twisting of the concept of "Fiction" and "Story" leaves me a little non-plussed.  I'm not talking about a transcript text here resulting in a publishable story.

I'm trying to formulate the ways -- and they are very limited -- in which a serious analogy between textual forms and RPGs can be formulated.  And if they leave you nonplused, that's good, because RPGs aren't textual and the analogy is therefore weak.  Yet in a time of textual fetishism those analogies are constantly made and bitterly defended.

I realized then that hard-core Narrativist play is a form of "live-wire" myth.  Not myth in the sense of "here's a cool old story that's cool because it's cool," but myth as in, "This is a story that says what we as a people value."

Yes.  With you there.

The same story produced in play might be meaningless to other people. And that's fine.  And this is the Great Strength and Value of Narrativist RPG play over moves and published lit.

But what makes this distinctive to Narrativism?  Everything you've said is intrinsic to the form, not to the creative agendum.

Remember that this fucking obsession with mimesis -- the idea that we're trying to reproduce the "reality" of the story as neatly as possible -- is a 20th century bugaboo in theater -- and only reinforced with the illusion of film to capture 'reality' and the high literary fiction's delight in the minutia of every day life.  Epic poetry, the language of Molieré and Shakespeare's plays, the staging of all theater up until the end of the 19th century and a host of other "false" conventions all depended on a poetic license (both oral and visual) to communicate their stories to the audience.

I'll see you and raise you one.  I think that the representational or mimetic dimension of such storytelling, in whatever medium, is conditioned by its displacement from the oral situation.  I think that epic poetry and Shakespeare and all that is at base struggling with mimesis as a problem; where they differ from us is in not yet having completely capitulated.  That capitulation brought us the novel, which I happen to love but which is about as alien to myth as anything could really be.  What I think was the case in myth was that mimesis wasn't really on the table at all, and that then in between you had mimesis as a serious problem, and then you had Mimesis Now as an exciting new creative agenda, if you'll pardon my putting it that way.

I have only one serious disagreement, and I'm going to have to postpone explaining my reasons for it because I'm struggling desperately with a long and complex essay that will lay it out as clearly as I can.

I think that the CA we're really talking about is Sim, not Nar.  I think that Nar is fundamentally conditioned by mimesis, and that's what makes it what it is.  It is at base interested in the production of something that stands somewhere between literary text and myth.  That is unique and disctinctive and valuable.  But it isn't myth.

What I think the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast is really about is that Sim really wants to tell myth.  It doesn't have any coherent sense of what that means or how to go about it, but it's that peculiarly structural and non-narrative mode that is mythic.

Consider the fact that everybody seemed traditionally to go first to Sim.  We've said time and again that this is an historical artifact, but is it?  How come everyone keeps desperately pleading that really they're doing Sim when they aren't?  How come all those "hybrids" of Sim and Nar turn out to be Nar -- why don't people happily celebrate their Nar natures?

I submit that it's because what they really want is myth, and, at some sort of deep, not-quite-conscious level, they can "feel" that Sim is a closer approximation.  So they want Sim, because it's myth, or could produce myth, and they keep struggling to claim that.  What is ouija-board play but the prayer that somehow, some way, myth will just sort of drop into people's laps like manna from heaven?  And why is ouija-board play so commonly connected to Simulationism?

It's because Sim is really much closer to the mythic root.  Really it is.  That doesn't make it better -- it makes it weird and alien if anything.  But it does touch something very deep in us: la pensee sauvage, the savage mind, feral thought.  Which is also, incidentally, the French term for what we call a Johnny Jump-up: that funny little pretty wild weed that causes a smile but we never cultivate, that is totally familiar and yet utterly untamed and savage.  That's myth.  And we feel that, in Sim.

Anyway, a sketch of where I'm going.  But otherwise I'm totally on the same page with you, Christopher.  Awesome!  Besides, you've put a number of things much more clearly than I did, so I hope some of my disagreements that are really confusions will melt away, and the actual disagreements out there will manifest clearly.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Chris,

For some reason I thought you made a note on one of these hydra-like threads that your were speaking specifically of Narrativism. Clearly I was mistaken!

Second, I can kind of "feel" where you're going with your point about Sim being closer to Myth.  All I can offer is that, as you've already touched on, Sim doesn't quite get there.  Nar, I think, does -- but in a little way. It's doesn't provide a shared cosmological reference -- as Sim so often does.  Nor does it have that, "The world is bigger than you know quality," that often so frustrates me with Sim play -- but, frankly, also has its appeal.  I look forward to seeing what you have to say about this.

I'll end on this point by saying, Narrativists could easily give up their concerns about "creating" something that feels like Text -- and be happier for it.  This is an agenda of my last post.  The bubbliest game around right now is Prime Time Adventures.  Which uses as its model what -- ? That non-Text medium of Television.  I think that's an important point.  Could you comment on that?

And, yes on your raise about mimesis.  But I'd add this:  One can have delight in the schism between the manufactured tale and reality.  Shakespeare's langague being one such a result.  This is part of the yolk I'm trying to remove from the RPG experience in that last post.  Everyone's trying all the time to make play transparent.  Why?  How about making the non-mimetic parts fun.  (And, clearly, many games do just this.)

(This all, by the way, has nothing to do with "metafiction."  Metafiction is a technique that constantly points to itself that says, "This is a story. In fact, what we're really writing and reading about right now is a little essay about story."  Shakespeare's language or Severians' memory is a technique used to tell the story.  If one wants to think about them, and go down rabbit holes -- which is fun! -- one can. But they don't make the tale metafiction (or, by that definition, all fiction is metafiction!). To see the classic example of metafiction, check out Barth's "In the Funhouse."  It's got charts that diagram the progress of the lover's romance embedded between paragraphs!)

Finally, on a contrary note (or at least a question), why do you consider Nar more mimetic in its goals than Sim?  Why do you think it is striving for something like Text by definition?  At this moment I just don't see it having to be this way.  I know your essay is coming, but at this moment it seems a strange jump.

The difference for me may well be this: These may not be the times for the Big Myth(tm).  And while Sim play may strive for it, times may be too fractured in terms of culture, faith and whatnot for Big Myth to be reached, Nar play offers the Little Myth(tm), something of import for those players, the small, temporary community at hand.

I'll agree that many Nar players are reaching for Text-based style validation (as are usually Sim players).  But I'd argue, again, there's no need to go there.  And all would be happier -- and perhaps amazed -- with the results if they cut that cord.

Best,

Christopher

PS I just realized that in issues of mimesis, we're talking techniques.  But, if I'm getting this right, the Big Three Modes are now defined independently of techniques!  So, what I'm referring to about Sim issues and Nar issues may not be such -- but only the "habits" or techniques I associate with one or the other.

For example, up until the 20th century, theater used aggressive scene framing.  When a servent needed to deliver a message to the king, he shot up on stage, the scene began.  In the 20th century, in an attempt to be more "real" -- you'd start with a character on stage, reading a paper.  The doorbell would ring.  The person onstage would fold up his paper, cross toward the door. Check himself in the mirror. The doorbell would ring again. The man would get the door.  Then pleasantries would be exchanged, (Hello. Hello, how are you...) and then, eventually, the scene would begin.  Now, I associate the aggressive scene framing of the first 2000 years plus of theater with Nar techniques, and the "We're going to live out every moment of transition if it kills us," of 20th century theater with Sim play.  But -- I'm getting this all wrong because we're not allowed to associate technique with the Modes anymore, right?  

Can anyone tell me how I can talk about this stuff anymore?  I'm honestly baffled -- since all issues of mimesis are ALL about technique as well as agenda.  (Fourth wall theater says, "This story is happening, and would happen even if you weren't here."  Storytelling theater (see Looking Glass example in my last post),  says, "We're addressing you, because if you weren't here, there'd be no story. We're all in this together."  One I associate with strong Sim abitions, the other a practical point of Narrativism -- but in fact, there's no reason to do this.  Right?

I'm a bit boggled on this.  But I may be misreading the need to be concerned about it.

[Alan]

Hi Chris L and all,

Two thoughts this discussion triggered:

Game rules have parts analogous to fabula and syuzhet:

These are 1) the visual and textual presentation of the rule book, and 2) the rules the reader constructs based on their understanding of it.  The writer's art is to form the physical text so a wide range or readers produce a similar set of actual play rules.  Or in some cases, to leave ambiguity in specific places that allows the reader to project their own content.

The point being: this dichotomy is a valuable thing to keep in mind when writing a rule book (or novel, essay, email, etc.)


Second: I've never held that the act of roleplaying was like a finished text.  However, I do believe that the act of roleplaying shares a great deal with the act of _creating_ a text.  

[EDIT]There's a process of producing and selecting elements, and a finished result.  Granted an rpg only produces a memory, usually boiled down to fabula, while writing produces a record which become the syuzhet for another person.  In a sense, roleplaying and writing are mirrors of each other.[/EDIT]

[clehrich]

I'll end on this point by saying, Narrativists could easily give up their concerns about "creating" something that feels like Text -- and be happier for it.  This is an agenda of my last post.  The bubbliest game around right now is Prime Time Adventures.  Which uses as its model what -- ? That non-Text medium of Television.  I think that's an important point.  Could you comment on that?

Yes, I think you're probably right, although I confess that I don't understand TV well as a medium, at least partly because I can't stand almost any shows I see these days and so don't watch them and so don't think about them.  I do think that if PTA is so successful, and it sounds like it is, then one thing very much worth doing would be to think about why from an analytical perspective.  That is, it would be worth delving into the nature of TV as a medium, its characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, and so forth, and considering carefully why and how PTA succeeds in capturing so many of these things.  This might help us clarify the nature of RPGs as a medium.

And, yes on your raise about mimesis.  But I'd add this:  One can have delight in the schism between the manufactured tale and reality.  Shakespeare's langague being one such a result.  This is part of the yolk I'm trying to remove from the RPG experience in that last post.  Everyone's trying all the time to make play transparent.  Why?  How about making the non-mimetic parts fun.  (And, clearly, many games do just this.)

Oh yes, no question that this schism is a site of play and development.  That's one of the things about artistic forms: they very often succeed precisely by capitalizing on the tensions intrinsic to the medium or its cultural development.  That was sort of my point about the novel and fantasy: the intrinsic absence at the base of language is a wonderful locus for the fantastic.

On metafiction, I only disagree with you about Severian's memory, which I do think throws us into the meta-dimension.

Finally, on a contrary note (or at least a question), why do you consider Nar more mimetic in its goals than Sim?  Why do you think it is striving for something like Text by definition?  At this moment I just don't see it having to be this way.  I know your essay is coming, but at this moment it seems a strange jump.

I think Narrativist RPGs  play on the schism between mimesis and some kind of transparency (but to what?).  Thus the connection of Narrativism to "story."  I suppose it's not exactly that Nar strives for textuality, but I do think that Nar is more adequately comparable to the kinds of texts you referred to (Shakespeare, Moliere, epic poetry, Chaucer, etc.) than to myth -- or to late prose fiction forms such as the novel.

The difference for me may well be this: These may not be the times for the Big Myth(tm).  And while Sim play may strive for it, times may be too fractured in terms of culture, faith and whatnot for Big Myth to be reached, Nar play offers the Little Myth(tm), something of import for those players, the small, temporary community at hand.

I'm not sure what you mean by this distinction.  To my mind, Narrativism is especially well suited to genres like tragedy and epic, which clearly have something of a mythic base but projected into specifically ethical spheres.  I think that's a good thing, incidentally.  You are correct, in my opinion, that Sim cannot succeed at its real goal, i.e. myth, while Nar can succeed, precisely because we have lost myth as an artistic form precisely through the developments that transmuted myth into things like tragedy and epic.  But I think that makes Sim a much stranger beast than we generally recognize.

One of the points I'm working on in my essay is a suggestion that this quality of Sim is why it doesn't fit comfortably into the GNS triad, prompting things like the Beeg Horseshoe and so on.  Somehow Sim doesn't really seem to be the same sort of thing; as an agenda for creation, it seems to be about something else.  I think that's true, because I think what we're looking at is a quite different artistic form -- one that is certainly related to later narrative forms but is ultimately not the same at a deep level.

I'll agree that many Nar players are reaching for Text-based style validation (as are usually Sim players).  But I'd argue, again, there's no need to go there.  And all would be happier -- and perhaps amazed -- with the results if they cut that cord.

I'd more or less agree.  I do think that Nar stands to gain rather more by the comparison, though, because of things like tragedy and epic.  But I think this is actually destructive, a category mistake, when we're looking at Sim.  To be sure, cutting the cord would help, but I don't think it's practically speaking possible because, as you say, we live in an age of text fetishism.  And that's why Sim really can't ever achieve its goals: it's trying to do something that requires a cultural situation that does not obtain any longer.

Can anyone tell me how I can talk about this stuff anymore?  I'm honestly baffled -- since all issues of mimesis are ALL about technique as well as agenda.  (Fourth wall theater says, "This story is happening, and would happen even if you weren't here."  Storytelling theater (see Looking Glass example in my last post),  says, "We're addressing you, because if you weren't here, there'd be no story. We're all in this together."  One I associate with strong Sim abitions, the other a practical point of Narrativism -- but in fact, there's no reason to do this.  Right?

Well, I do think that certain techniques are more supportive of particular CAs as a rule, but I'd generally agree with Ron that this is not intrinsic to the CA.  So while it's true that aggressive framing, like Director Stance, is probably more useful in Narrativist games, it isn't the case that those techniques cannot appear in Sim games.

What isn't well formulated, though, and what I think you may be getting at here, is that the techniques and so forth have different meanings dependent upon the CA being expressed through them.  Thus in a sense Actor Stance means one thing in Narrativism and something quite different in Simulationism.  One could in theory thus define three different kinds of Actor Stance, but Ron's model is phenomenological in the sense that it looks at the exterior structure of the technique rather than the meaning.  Thus Actor Stance cannot be distinguished based on CA because CA is not a phenomenon -- it's the one part of the model that isn't, which is why it cuts across the layers in that strange way.  To put it differently, an outside observer can identify every piece of the model in action whenever it happens... except for CA, which requires a different time-scale and in a sense a different sort of unit of measurement.

Any thoughts?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Chris,

"What isn't well formulated, though, and what I think you may be getting at here, is that the techniques and so forth have different meanings dependent upon the CA being expressed through them. "

I buy this completely.

As for this statement --

"...but I do think that Nar is more adequately comparable to the kinds of texts you referred to (Shakespeare, Moliere, epic poetry, Chaucer, etc.) than to myth -- or to late prose fiction forms such as the novel."

I do think this is where you and I are simply going to be going down different tracks.  I'm specifically not talking about the text alone in such matters.  I'm always -- always -- talking about this in terms of performance before an audience (or in production or rehearsal).  The experience of language ennacted is always what I'm talking about.  I read Homer out loud.  And -- I don't know about you -- I've always played my RPGs with mouths wide open.

To me the text in plays, movies, oral storytelling is to serve as a delivery system for social interaction -- interaction between characters, interaction between the storytellers and the audience, interaction between those in the arts who like doing things with other people people the arts.

This matters because I think it taps directly into why PTA is so successful, and perhaps why its success seems so opaque to you.  PTA has glommed on tight to the basic tools of straight up dramatic narrative.  Which is a different beasts entirely than "Text". Text is what fucking lies there waiting for the scalpel.  We have every reason to believe Shakespeare, when originally performed, was done at a clip twice as fast as we present it today.  And that no one could keep up with it all then as it flash by.  Just like today.  Yet the story was still clear.  Shakespeare, in peformance, is never under the scalpel.  It's quick and alive for the knife.  It bolts forward and delivers to the actors and audience a moment that's alive right now -- and then leaps to the next one.  That leaping is what dramatic narrative is all about.

Dramatic narrative is all about characters in conflict, manipulating each other through words and actions, to get what they want.  The intentions of the story were still clear.

Which, by the way, sounds a lot like players at an RPG session having a good time.

You're going to be approaching everything from this point of view of Text it seems.  I'm not saying its worth derailing where you're headed.  You seem to be having fun.  But I think it has everything to do with why you and I aren't going to be meeting up on this soon.

Imagine TV, Film, oral storytelling and theater as artifacts that you could only experience in performance.  Never with a text as a reference, and you'll get a clue as to what I'm on about.

As far as Severian goes -- you're speaking of a "meta-dimension".  Which, sure. It's there.  (Or not. Depending on how far the reader wants to go.)  And I know Wolfe put it there on purpose.  I mentioned "meta-fiction", which Matt brought up.  I wanted desperately to make sure we're making a distinction between meta-fiction and anything we can go rumaging around in that's there in addition to the story.  Meta-fiction doesn't have a story.  It is a discourse about story -- without an acutal, engaging story.  That ain't The Book of the New Sun.  

Finally, back to where you and I are going to diverge.... I'm not a theoritician. I'm a guy who needs to make stories work.  So, when you go on about fabula and whatnot, I'm immediately thinking of David Mamet, who would happily tell you (with passion and at greath length), that there's NO difference between the Plot and the Story.  What the actors do on stage is the Plot and the Story, and that's all you get.  If they're doing some story that has nothing to do with the Plot, you need to cut it.  And what the audience watches on stage is the Story.  There's nothing before the beginning of the play, there's nothing after. That's it.

I'm not saying he's right.  I am saying that this is master carpenter of the dramatic arts (who's read his Propp if I recall correctly; and certainly plenty of fairy tales), and had given lots of thought to "How do I build a play that holds them to the end."

In other words, the actual SHARING at the table between players is what matters more to me than what doesn't get said or does get said.  What gets evoked and shared is what matters, because RPGs are a social form.  Text consumption is a solitary form.

The Text issue drives me nuts, because if I think about all the extra stuff that happens, say, in a play, or when I've volunteere to tell stories at Children's Museums or Elementary Schools, the story would never get told. We'd be editing out all the lights up in the rafters, the crinkling of the candy next to us, the kids playing down the hall.... But somehow, everyone's still pulling some sort of narrative out of the events.

And here's the kicker: the active performance/telling is as much a part of the event as anything else.  I can't tell you how often I had adults sitting down next to their kids for a fairy tale, completely enraptured at a Children's Museum.  They were starving for the stuff.  And I think this form, and this hunger, is part of what certain RPG styles tap into.

This is a completely different expereience than the reader sitting down to consume a Text -- alone and focused.

See, I have this theory: Form and Function.  (Fancy, right?)

Solitary writer writes, delivers to solitary reader.  Ergo, the internal life, and calm minutia of detial is what the story focuses on, cause that's the experience of the reader and writer.

Compare this to the rough and tubmle SOCIAL process of making a play or a movie or TV.  Which is designed (for the most part), to be delievered to people who have hauled their asses up out of their homes, driven their bodies where they wound not normally be, surround themselves with strangers in a dark room.  And what do we get -- story that are dependent on character influencing each other through word and deed.  The internal life and minutia is swept aside for bodies and words in motion.

I'd offer RPGs have a lot more to do with the latter, and little to do with the former. And when they try to do the former, they derail.

This is where you and I will, I suspect, disagree on the future of storytelling.  I think Text will hold sway for those who want "clever" stories.  And I think clever writers will continue to write for clever reders. But I think when pure, old fashioned storytelling, is the providence of once again no-need-to-read performance.

Oh.  One last thing.  There is a text for dramatic narrative.  But in practice, for the experience of the audience, its non-existent.  That's why many (and I mean many) people think that their favorite actors are so wonderful -- because they make up those terrific lines.

What matters is the details adding up in the moment.  Just like RPGs.  And despite the distraction of the Stage Manager having a glass of water in the wings.

All of this, if you look at the experience of the cast and crew of a play or movie -- serving always as audience and makers -- is why I think the form of RPG is best served from examining standing on its feet dramatic narrative.  And epic poetry, and fairy tales -- which are all performance specific and altered by the audience when done in its pure form.

I'll leave the issues of myth for your next, thoughtful essay.

Anyway, back to making tables that stand up straight, as it were.

Best,

Christopher

[clehrich]

As for this statement --

"...but I do think that Nar is more adequately comparable to the kinds of texts you referred to (Shakespeare, Moliere, epic poetry, Chaucer, etc.) than to myth -- or to late prose fiction forms such as the novel."

I do think this is where you and I are simply going to be going down different tracks.  I'm specifically not talking about the text alone in such matters.  I'm always -- always -- talking about this in terms of performance before an audience (or in production or rehearsal).  The experience of language ennacted is always what I'm talking about.  I read Homer out loud.  And -- I don't know about you -- I've always played my RPGs with mouths wide open.

Yes, actually we're on the same page.  Those are textual forms that are in some way about orality, which isn't the case with the novel.

As far as Severian goes -- you're speaking of a "meta-dimension".  Which, sure. It's there.  (Or not. Depending on how far the reader wants to go.)  And I know Wolfe put it there on purpose.  I mentioned "meta-fiction", which Matt brought up.  I wanted desperately to make sure we're making a distinction between meta-fiction and anything we can go rumaging around in that's there in addition to the story.  Meta-fiction doesn't have a story.  It is a discourse about story -- without an acutal, engaging story.  That ain't The Book of the New Sun.

Oh, I see.  Sorry, my mistake.

Finally, back to where you and I are going to diverge.... I'm not a theoritician. I'm a guy who needs to make stories work.  So, when you go on about fabula and whatnot, I'm immediately thinking of David Mamet, who would happily tell you (with passion and at greath length), that there's NO difference between the Plot and the Story.  What the actors do on stage is the Plot and the Story, and that's all you get.  If they're doing some story that has nothing to do with the Plot, you need to cut it.  And what the audience watches on stage is the Story.  There's nothing before the beginning of the play, there's nothing after. That's it.

Yes, I'd tend to agree with Mamet.  I think what he's doing, which I've never seen before in reference to drama -- I'll have to read some more Mamet -- is saying that drama is all syuzhet.  There's no "something else really" in it.  It's all the telling, the as-it-happens, the process.  I don't know, I might have that very wrong, but that's my impression from this comment and from having seen a fair number of Mamet plays.

In other words, the actual SHARING at the table between players is what matters more to me than what doesn't get said or does get said.  What gets evoked and shared is what matters, because RPGs are a social form.  Text consumption is a solitary form.

Yup, complete agreement.

This is where you and I will, I suspect, disagree on the future of storytelling.  I think Text will hold sway for those who want "clever" stories.  And I think clever writers will continue to write for clever reders. But I think when pure, old fashioned storytelling, is the providence of once again no-need-to-read performance.

Well, this is the one place we'll disagree: I don't think we're going to get out from under the sway of text.  I think we're stuck with it.  But that doesn't mean that non-textual forms cannot struggle with the problem and make a stab at it.

Oh.  One last thing.  There is a text for dramatic narrative.  But in practice, for the experience of the audience, its non-existent.  That's why many (and I mean many) people think that their favorite actors are so wonderful -- because they make up those terrific lines.

Really?  Interesting.  I'll have to think about that one.

I guess I don't see that we're disagreeing about anything except that I'm more pessimistic about the performative and non-textual modes getting free of text.  This was something Antonin Artaud ranted about a lot, as in his Manifesto for a Theater of Cruelty, where the idea was that it was only through cruelty that we could get loose of the text.  And despite a lot of experiments, I don't see that we've really achieved what he hoped.  I'm not convinced that we can do so.  But that's a deep philosophical and historical issue, not a matter of what RPGs are or aren't.  On all of the rest, I think we agree.

I should say that in this post, because of the thread that prompted it, my concern has been largely with the relationship between texts and RPGs.  And my assessment is largely negative: the two really aren't particularly similar.  So what you're reading as my fixation or obsession with text is at least in part an artefact of this particular post and this particular context.

Does that help?

[Christopher Kubasik]

It does.

And let me clarify: I'm not talking about dramatic narrative getting away from text. I'm talking about the text of dramatic narrative being a delivery system for social interaction -- among all those groups I described above.

Trust me, you can't make a movie without a screenplay.  But no one wants to read screenplays.  Why?  Cause it's not a movie!  The director wants to be shooting it, the actors want to be peforming it.  The only people who actively read screenplays are other screenwriters -- looking for clues on how to do their job better.  

On the other hand, folks like Harold Bloom are convinced that performances of Shakespeare ruin the Bard's words.  Well, you know.  To bad.  The sloppiness of life is the sloppiness of theater is the sloppiness of life.  Shakespear's text, in my view, is tested in performance, not how well it stands up under way-too-thoughtful scrutiny in the study.

******

As for my misapprehending your main point:

I suppose the confusion I'm having with your words (and it's my confusion) may be this:

"my concern has been largely with the relationship between texts and RPGs. And my assessment is largely negative"

And I'm like, "Yeah. I know. Me, too."

I've been asserting for years that Text isn't the propper model for RPGs.  I know there are half a dozen posts on these boards of me saying, "Not the novel! Dramatic narrative! Epic Poetry!" and so on. So for me its a non-issue.  To even compare Text and RPGs, to my brain, always seems to be provoking this "Wha --? Why would anyone think this way???" out of me.

I see where you're coming from.  I'm just excited about what's coming next.

Oh, as far as the fate of text goes --

Please note.  I specifically referenced Fiction there.  Check your bookstore sales data: Fiction is down, Non-Fiction is up.  I think it's going to stay this way, and I think the trend will continue.  There will always be a few storytellers who stick it out in Text, but the critical and publishing apparatus is chock full of folks who want to know they know more than there is to know.

When it comes to delivering Story, there are a bunch of other outlets that don't depend on getting past (no offence meant to anyone here) sensitive introverts who prefer books to life.  But that's exactly what the audiences of Stories want -- life turned up to 11.  And they'll go where the storytellers are rewarded for delivering such tales -- Theater, Circuses, TV, Movies, and other socially driven, non-literate outlets.

Christopher

[clehrich]

I don't have anything much to say here, now that we're really very much in agreement.  Unless someone wants to join in on the thread, I think we're probably done here, but let's wait a few days for mulling-over.  That is, unless someone posts by Tuesday, let's call it quits.

Just one thing:

On the other hand, folks like Harold Bloom are convinced that performances of Shakespeare ruin the Bard's words.  Well, you know.  To bad.  The sloppiness of life is the sloppiness of theater is the sloppiness of life.  Shakespear's text, in my view, is tested in performance, not how well it stands up under way-too-thoughtful scrutiny in the study.

Does he really?  <laugh>  What a freak.  Can you give me a reference?  I'm really kind of boggled that even he would go quite that far, and I wonder what he means by it.  Veeeery strange.

[LordSmerf]

I would be extremely interested in pursuing the idea that Sim play wants to, and cannot attain, Myth.  Especially with the idea that Nar play isn't primarily concerned with Myth, but can attain it none the less.  I would also be exremely interested in pursuing the distinction between recorded story telling in which the audience does not feed back into the story (Film, Literature, Television) and "living" story telling in which the audience is able to feedback (RPGs, Theater, Oral Performance).  Both of these may be better suited to new threads, though I think that the latter is probably closely tied to textuality.

Here's my take on Sim play and Myth.  I believe that Primetime Adventures can be considered to be a Sim facilitating game.  The game emulates television melodrama, and every piece of the mechanics facilitates emulating that specific story telling medium.  Now, television melodrama, at its best, is chock full of Narrativist agenda.  That is, there's Premise, and Issues, and Moral Choice.  I have this feeling that playing PTA in a Sim mode may result in the creation of Story, but it results in the creation of a textual form of story.  That is, since you are emulating a format that tells story, and the emulation is what drives the story, the audience (the players) are not being "pricked".  This isn't their story, this is the story that the medium tells.

The result here is that while the object of Sim play may be ot emulate Myth, the very fact that it is emulating a form that tells story (instead of making story for story's sake) makes it impossible for Myth to actually be created.

Now, PTA can also be seen as a brilliant, Narrativist facilitating game.  The focus on character Issues, the way conflict is brought into play, the ways in which spotlight time is balanced all facilitate the concious creation of story.

My problem here is that I do not have a precise enough definition of Myth to make the connection.  I believe that Sim play can not create Myth because it can not create Story.  However, I do not think that Narrativist play's potential to create story necessitates the creation of Myth as well.

Now, the idea that recorded media is just another form of text.  While the fact that film is more chaotic (in that it has more oppurtunities for feedback and iteration, as in Chaotic Math) than "pure" text may allow it to achieve something closer to Myth (again, my definition here is rather fuzzy, and may be seriously clouding the issue), once it has been recorded the final audience has no oppurtunity for feedback.  For this reason I believe that film (and any other form of recorded media) is also misleading when used to describe RPGs.  I think Ron is dead on when he compares RPG play to a garage band performance, the audince feeds back in real time.  This form of feedback is present in any kind of live performance.

I would be rather interested to hear both Chris's and Christopher's takes on that.  I don't think either of you would disagree with the idea that recorded media is just another form of text (or that it at least acts very much like text), with the major difference being that it is often intended for audiences of more than one.

Thomas

[clehrich]

I would be extremely interested in pursuing the idea that Sim play wants to, and cannot attain, Myth.  Especially with the idea that Nar play isn't primarily concerned with Myth, but can attain it none the less.

I'm not sure if you mean to paraphrase me, but just to be clear I do not think that Nar play can construct myth in a strict sense.  I do think it can construct a peculiar form of artwork that negotiates the tension between myth and literature (broadly construed).

I would also be exremely interested in pursuing the distinction between recorded story telling in which the audience does not feed back into the story (Film, Literature, Television) and "living" story telling in which the audience is able to feedback (RPGs, Theater, Oral Performance).  Both of these may be better suited to new threads, though I think that the latter is probably closely tied to textuality.

I'm happy with them here.  If others feel this is very confusing, they should PM me and I'll take it from there in terms of splits.

Here's my take on Sim play and Myth.  I believe that Primetime Adventures ....

This all sounds very plausible to me.  I confess that I haven't read a lot of the Actual Play PTA threads; I'll do that fairly soon so I can have a concrete sense of what you mean.

My problem here is that I do not have a precise enough definition of Myth to make the connection.  I believe that Sim play can not create Myth because it can not create Story.  However, I do not think that Narrativist play's potential to create story necessitates the creation of Myth as well.

I will work on a clear statement of what I mean by myth, which should clarify at least where I'm coming from.  One point I can make quite quickly, however, has to do with Story.  If we take, for the sake of present discussion, Ron's definition of story

Story
An imaginary series of events which includes at least one protagonist, at least one conflict, and events which may be construed as a resolution of the conflict. A Story is a subset of Transcript distinguished by its thematic content. Role-playing may produce a Story regardless of which Creative Agenda is employed.

Transcript
An account of the imaginary events of play without reference to role-playing procedures. A Transcript may or may not be a Story.

If this be taken as read (and please note that I have not to this point been using these terms in exactly this fashion, which I should have), then I do think that myth necessarily creates story, but that the nature of "conflict" and "resolution of the conflict" are very different from what I'm pretty sure Ron has in mind.  In other words, while it is accurate to say that myth always contains "story" by this definition, I think that the connotations of the word "story" are very much at odds with what myth creates.  I think fabula is somewhat closer, but is again a somewhat different beast.  I realize that all this is negative, but I'm going to need a little time to generate an explanation of what I'm talking about.

Now, the idea that recorded media is just another form of text.  While the fact that film is more chaotic (in that it has more oppurtunities for feedback and iteration, as in Chaotic Math) than "pure" text may allow it to achieve something closer to Myth (again, my definition here is rather fuzzy, and may be seriously clouding the issue), once it has been recorded the final audience has no oppurtunity for feedback.  For this reason I believe that film (and any other form of recorded media) is also misleading when used to describe RPGs.  I think Ron is dead on when he compares RPG play to a garage band performance, the audince feeds back in real time.  This form of feedback is present in any kind of live performance.

I'm not sure I know exactly what you mean by "feedback."  I should say that I know next to nothing about chaotic math, apart from having some time ago read James Gleick's book on chaos, so I'll need a definition I can handle.

I would be rather interested to hear both Chris's and Christopher's takes on that.  I don't think either of you would disagree with the idea that recorded media is just another form of text (or that it at least acts very much like text), with the major difference being that it is often intended for audiences of more than one.

Unquestionably I'd agree that such recording of media produces text in some sense.  I'm not sure that the difference has to do with the size of the audience, but I think I see what you mean.

In just a minute, I'll post something about myth that can at least get things started on that front; a really detailed exposition from me will have to wait, but I'd like to open discussion enough so that it doesn't collapse into "what does Chris think myth is?"

[clehrich]

Mythology: Preliminary Notes

Okay, so here's a draft chunk of a very long essay I'm working on at the moment.  The point of the chunk is to define myth conceptually, using what I consider the current state of the art, which is to say the Mythologiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss.  I am happy to debate whether these texts are indeed the state of the art, but that should be another thread.

Ron, if you think this ought to start its own thread, feel free to shift it.

Lévi-Strauss really is a great deal more difficult and complicated than I make him out to be.  I have been struggling with these texts for some years now, and this is one aspect of my current understanding of his thinking on myth.  I have also read the majority of professional criticism about these works, I think with some understanding, and I believe that very few people have ever fully understood what Lévi-Strauss is up to.  I am not at all convinced that I have either, but I do think I'm well along.  The two most important and famous exceptions were unfortunately written before the final volume was completed, and thus are somewhat partial and preliminary; they are:

Edmund Leach,

Claude Lévi-Strauss (New York: Viking, 1970)
Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference, trans.  Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)[/list:u]Also very useful:

James A. Boon,

From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972)
Marcel Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, trans. Mary Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)
Andrew von Hendy, The Modern Construction of Myth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)[/list:u]If you want to read up on this stuff, I would recommend that you start with Leach.  Then read Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), unfortunately a dreadful translation but the only one available; if you read French very well you should read La pensée sauvage instead.  Then read The Raw and the Cooked, very slowly.  Bear in mind that a lot of serious scholars I know consider this book so difficult as to be unreadable, but Leach is an extraordinarily good (if rather hostile) guide.  From there, the rest of Mythologiques and these other references are the obvious place to go.

I apologize in advance for the length and complexity of this post.  The basic problem, apart from the complexity of Lévi-Strauss's work, is that "myth" is very much more complicated than is usually realized within our culture.  This is not an academic game, but an attempt to make sense of the myths told and manipulated by a large number of tribal cultures around the world, whose total corpus of mythology is larger by several orders of magnitude than that readily accessible to modern Americans and Europeans; the myths are also, as you will see, a great deal stranger to us.  The priority for scholars of myth has thus been to describe adequately what tribal peoples are doing; that there may be a partial mismatch with what we commonly think of as myth is a secondary or even irrelevant concern.

Please note a few things in advance:

[*]There is some context missing here, notably any explanation of why I'm doing this.  That's because this is only a piece of a larger essay.  Where I have made an alteration or insertion from the longer form, it is marked in double square brackets [[like this]].
[*]A few citations and one quote are partial.  I don't have the texts to hand at the moment.
[*]There are references to the odd term that may well not be familiar to you; the one that stands out to me is Gesammtkunstwerk.  I have tried not to use these much, but where I have you should be able to look them up on Google and find considerable material.  I do not think that I have ever used terms of art or jargon in any important way without defining them.  Please note that I consider any word that can be found in an ordinary college dictionary, not marked as archaic, obsolete, obscure, or technically restricted, as a legitimate word.
[*]This is not in its final form.  Please do not cite or quote from this text outside of the Forge.[/list:u]

----

In [[...]] the four-volume Mythologiques (roughly Mytho-logics), [[Claude]] Lévi-Strauss focuses intently on the myths of tribal America, beginning in the South and slowly expanding to encompass the North.  His analysis is rigorous, exceedingly difficult and complex, and demonstrates that the myths are anything but the grandiose morality-plays we have come to expect from Greco-Roman and Norse mythology.  Rather, these American myths appear as systematic workings-through of complex cultural and philosophical problems, rendered through a language and a system seemingly quite unfamiliar to us.  In order to effect this comparison between myth and roleplaying games [[which is the intent of the complete essay I'm writing]], then, we need first to see clearly what sort of "myth" he has in mind, and also to understand its historical relations to more familiar mythology. [[...]]

The following is what Lévi-Strauss takes as his starting-point for analysis in Mythologiques, the "key myth."  It is chosen, as he says, for contingent reasons; the myth is not more primary, or more complete, or more archaic, or anything of the sort.  He claims, in fact, that he could have started with any myth of the several hundred he ends up discussing and reached the same conclusions; that I doubt this particular claim does not invalidate the analyses.  This myth is one of many "told by the Bororo Indians of central Brazil, whose territory use to extend from the upper reaches of the Paraguay River to beyond the valley of the Araguaya."  The text is rather long, but is sufficiently detailed that we can see clearly what sort of artistic productions Lévi-Strauss means by the term "myth."  Note that the original text as recorded in his book includes a number of Bororo terms important to his later analysis; I have dropped most of these without editorial remark.

M1 (key myth).  Bororo: o xibae e iari.  "The macaws and their nest" [1]

In olden times the women used to go into the forest to gather the palms used in the making of [the] penis sheaths which were presented to adolescents at their initiation ceremony.  One youth secretly followed his mother, caught her unawares, and raped her.

When the woman returned from the forest, her husband noticed feathers caught in her bark-cloth belt, which were similar to those worn by youths as an adornment.  Suspecting that something untoward had occurred, he decreed that a dance should take place in order to find out which youth was wearing a similar adornment.  But to his amazement he discovered that his son was the only one.  The man ordered another dance, with the same result.

Convinced now of his misfortune and anxious to avenge himself, he sent his son to the "nest" of souls, with instructions to bring back the great dance rattle, which he coveted.  The young man consulted his grandmother who revealed to him the mortal danger that such an undertaking involved; she advised him to obtain the help of the hummingbird.

When the hero, accompanied by the hummingbird, reached the aquatic region of souls, he waited on the shore, while the hummingbird deftly stole the rattle by cutting the short cord from which it was hanging.  The instrument fell into the water, making a loud noise—jo.  Alerted by this noise, the souls fired arrows from their bows.  But the hummingbird flew so fast that he reached the shore safe and sound with the stolen rattle.

The father then ordered his son to fetch the small rattle belonging to the souls; and the same episode was repeated, with the same details, only this time the helpful animal was the quick flying dove.  During a third expedition, the young man stole some buttore; these are jingling bells made from the hoofs of the wild pig, which are strung on a piece of rope and worn as anklets.  He was helped by the large grasshopper, which flew more slowly than the birds so that the arrows pierced it several times but did not kill it.

Furious at the foiling of his plans, the father invited his son to come with him to capture the macaws, which were nesting in the face of a cliff.  The grandmother did not know how to ward off this fresh danger, but gave her grandson a magic wand to which he could cling if he happened to fall.

The two men arrived at the foot of the rock; the father erected a long pole and ordered his son to climb it.  The latter had hardly reached the nests when the father knocked the pole down; the boy only just had time to thrust the wand into a crevice.  He remained suspended in the void, crying for help, while the father went off.

Our hero noticed a creeper within reach of his hand; he grasped hold of it and with difficulty dragged himself to the top of the rock.  After a rest he set out to look for food, made a bow and arrows out of branches, and hunted the lizards which were abundant on the plateau.  He killed a lot of them and hooked the surplus ones to his belt and to the strips of cotton wound round his legs and ankles.  But the dead lizards went bad and gave off such a vile smell that the hero fainted.  The vultures fell upon him, devoured first of all the lizards, and then attacked the body of the unfortunate youth, beginning with his buttocks.  Pain restored him to consciousness, and the hero drove off his attackers which, however, had completely gnawed away his hindquarters.  Having eaten their fill, the birds were prepared to save his life; taking hold of his belt and the strips of cotton round his arms and legs with their beaks, they lifted him into the air and deposited him gently at the foot of the mountain.

The hero regained consciousness "as if he were awaking from a dream."  He was hungry and ate wild fruits but noticed that since he had no rectum, he was unable to retain the food, which passed through his body without even being digested.  The youth was at first nonplused and then remembered a tale told him by his grandmother, in which the hero solved the same problem by modeling for himself an artificial behind out of dough made from pounded tubers.

After making his body whole again by this means and eating his fill, he returned to his village, only to find that it had been abandoned.  He wandered around for a long time looking for his family.  One day he spotted foot and stick marks, which he recognized as being those of his grandmother.  He followed the tracks but, being anxious not to reveal his presence, he took on the appearance of a lizard, whose antics fascinated the old woman and her other grandson, the hero's younger brother.  Finally, after a long interval, he decided to reveal himself to them.  (In order to re-establish contact with his grandmother, the hero went through a series of transformations, turning himself into four birds and a butterfly, all unidentified.)

On that particular night there was a violent wind accompanied by a thunder storm which put out all the fires in the village except the grandmother's.  Next morning everybody came and asked her for hot embers, in particular the second wife of the father who had tried to kill his son.  She recognized her stepson, who was supposed to be dead, and ran to warn her husband.  As if there were nothing wrong, the latter picked up his ceremonial rattle and welcomed his son with the songs of greeting for returned travelers.

However, the hero was full of thoughts of revenge.  One day while he was walking in the forest with his littler brother, he broke off a branch of the api tree, which was shaped like a deer's antler.  The child, acting on his brother's instructions, then managed to make the father promise to order a collective hunt; in the guise of a small rodent he secretly kept watch to discover where their father was lying in wait for the game.  The hero then donned the false antlers, changed into a deer, and rushed at his father with such ferocity that he impaled him on his horns.  Without stopping, he galloped toward a lake, into which he dropped his victim, who was immediately devoured by the Buiogoe spirits who are carnivorous fish [piranha].  All that remained after the gruesome feast were the bare bones which lay on the bottom of the lake, and the lungs which floated on the surface in the form of aquatic plants, whose leaves, it is said, resemble lungs.

When he returned to the village, the hero took his revenge on his father's wives (one of whom was his own mother).[/list:u]Quite early in the thousand-odd pages of analysis extending from this key myth that make up the four volumes of Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss notes that the total lack of moral message is really there: "The myth itself...does not render a verdict, since the hero begs for and obtains help from the grandmother, thanks to whom he survives all the ordeals.  In the long run, it is the father who appears guilty, through having tried to avenge himself, and it is he who is killed."  In many ways, it is this "curious indifference toward incest" [2] that provokes the whole analysis.  And indeed the other myths, the ones he is able to render in this much detail at least, are not dissimilar in style: earthy, crude at times, seemingly incomprehensible, almost amoral, and apparently without purpose.  Yet if we are to understand Lévi-Strauss at all, and moreover to make the comparison to roleplaying games, we must have a working grasp of this sort of myth.

Without wishing to reduce any more excessively than is unfortunately necessary the complexity of Lévi-Strauss's many arguments, we might say, with Mircea Eliade, that "[myth as we generally get it is worked-over by lots of scholars of whatever period; we need to get back to the archaic – [[this is a paraphrase not a quote]].]" [3]  To put it differently, the sort of myths that we usually think of—Hercules, the Golden Apples, Ragnarok—have been put in a literary form, in fact a relatively fixed form, and thus their original spontaneous nature has to a great extent been lost.  If we are to make a serious comparison of what roleplaying games are about to what myth is about, we must set aside this preconception of literariness and move back into the spontaneous. [[....]]

For this purpose, Lévi-Strauss proposed a little-understood musical analogy.  He suggests that there is a kind of spectrum of developmental artistic forms (ones whose performative expressions develop over a span time, as is not the case with painting for example), ranging from music on one end to poetry on the other, with ordinary fiction, literary text that is, somewhere in between and shading toward poetry.

The first issue here is the relation of the form to language, a central issue for him.  Poetry is quite untranslatable; its effects are generated not narratively but in terms of the nature of a specific language itself.  The only translation possible is a new poem.  Music, however, is not linguistically bounded at all; it means (in whatever sense it may be said to mean) without regard to words, and may in some respects be said to be a universal art-form.  At the same time, poetry is ultra-representative, representing not only images and events but also sounds, feelings, concepts, and indeed the totality of its language, and very its boundedness in language is also what allows it to capitalize upon and transcend the ordinary limits of language.  Music, however, we might call infra-representative, for apart from some few musical movements that tried to render sound-pictures, music represents through only its own form and cannot generate images or language directly.  For this reason music is fully translatable but non-representative, while poetry is untranslatable but supremely representative.  Fiction thus stands between, but is closer to poetry, because it leans on language to provide representation.  And we may say that fiction is to poetry as myth is to music.

Myth, says Lévi-Strauss, is made up of a series of discrete elements of structure, and is non-representational.  Therefore it is almost fully translatable; you only need to know what "sun" means in a given culture to be able to render its relations to other things in the myth; at the same time, the totality of what "sun" means may well be an enormous body of connotations having to do with the daily lives and rituals of the culture.  Just as music is non-representational, so too are the signs and structures of myth not "about" what they seem to refer to.

Second, music runs on structure while poetry runs on words.  For example, the musical fugue is about laying out a theme and then putting it in relation to itself through a number of basic transformations that engender great complexity in the procedure.  The object of the game of fugue—once an improvisational form, let us remember—is to take this very difficult situation and, through a set of established rules, come to perfect harmony in all voices.  Poetry is not about this at all, says Lévi-Strauss.  The point of poetry is to manipulate words and meanings, not structures; the structures are used to generate meaning, not as an end in themselves.  In music, one can start with a meaning, but the logic of how the piece plays out is about rules.  In poetry, rules are made to be broken and challenged.

Myth, says Lévi-Strauss, is again more like music than poetry.  It plays with structure.  The objects and events of myth are structural, not meaningful in the representational sense.  The myth-teller proposes a difficult problem, not unlike the theme with variations in the fugue, and then he runs with that problem, drawing in everything he knows of the culture that seems to fit structurally—and regardless of apparent meaning in an ordinarily narrative sense—until he has resolved the problem coherently.

One effect of all this that does not seem to interest Lévi-Strauss (though he does not deny it at all) but is very relevant to our purposes with roleplaying games is that music and myth are naturally performed or improvised forms, bounded by rules, while fiction and poetry are naturally inscribed and revised forms.  The novel or poem strives for perfection as itself, an object, a totality.  Music and myth strive to be workings-through of something, and are in many respects non-repeatable.  Two great performances of a musical work will vary a great deal; this is called interpretation.  Two copies of Ulysses are identical.

Now analytically, all of this raises an important methodological point that will clarify the whole musical analogy at last.  Let us suppose, Lévi-Strauss proposes, that scholars from the far future were to dig over our crumbling remnants and discover a large library of texts, completely intact.[4]  They know nothing whatever of our language, and have no way of restoring meaning to its words and phrases.  But by very careful analysis, they should be able to discern a number of consistent structures of our written language.  First, it is written right to left, then top to bottom.  Second, the discrete words (marked by spaces) are semantic units of some sort.  Third, from careful analysis of the patterns of usage, they should be able to discern inflection, parts of speech, and eventually our whole grammar and syntax.  But lacking a pictorial dictionary, they can never restore meaning to the system—only the system itself.

But one class of texts would initially resist such analysis: orchestral scores.  This is because unlike other texts, these go left to right but they do not go top to bottom, since the complete column of all notes is played simultaneously by many voices.  And what Lévi-Strauss proposes, and this is very complex, is that myth is like such scores—except laid flat.

Put that baldly, this makes little sense, but it is essential.  Let us suppose that each myth is one long musical phrase, performed by a particular instrument.  And suppose further that the totality of the American mythic corpus is a vast symphony with a huge orchestra.  But all we have is individual voices playing independently: these are the individual myths.  If we simply play them all at once, we have cacophony.  If we play them individually, we never hear harmony.  So the task of the analyst is to discern, in the same way as he discerned the system of grammar and syntax that undergirded ordinary text, the way in which this harmony is constructed.  With that in hand, the analyst can, very slowly and with infinite pains, put all the pieces in their right order and their appropriate instrumental voices and restore the complete symphony.

Read correctly, Mythologiques is a prelude to such a construction.  A symphony in its own right, but only a tiny fragment of the total resonance of the complete work.

And, says Lévi-Strauss, the natives can hear this work, because they live it.  They cannot hear the whole thing, but they can hear rich sonatas and fugues, walzes and mazurkas, operas and lieder.  These compositions are woven of the texture and fabric of the rich depth and meaning of their lives, of the world around them.  Through an extraordinary and ongoing work that has taken millennia, the American natives have composed their whole world as a musical Gesammtkunstwerk to make Wagner shudder in humiliation and self-pity.

That is myth.  And to be clear: I think he's right.


   Notes
   1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1964), trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 35-37.
   2. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 48.
   3. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harvest, 1959), XXX.  Note that Lévi-Strauss and Eliade never appear to have referred to each other, although as the two dominant thinkers on myth, both writing in French, working at the same time, both voracious readers, they must surely have read each other.  It is perhaps not unreasonable to think that Lévi-Strauss would object very much to this use of Eliade to explain his ideas, but as Jonathan Z. Smith has noted, their methods are not at base dissimilar: Smith, "In Comparison a Magic Dwells," Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), XXX.
   4. This analogy is drawn from "The Structural Study of Myth," but I have developed it in a direction consistent with the later formulations in Mythologiques: Claude Lévi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), XXX-XXX.

[LordSmerf]

Okay.  I think I understand Levi-Strauss, at least as you've presented him here (which probably means I understand nothing, maybe I should learn French).  Let me see if I can summarize.  I realize that this is probably an over-simplification, so please correct me where I'm off.

First, there are really two uses for the word "myth".  There is the "individual myth" which is somewhat analagous to a single part in a piece of music (the first violin or the first oboe).  These are the myths that are turned into stories and recorded.

The second use is rougly analogous to the symphony as a whole.  It is not a compilation of all the individual myths (imagine playing all the parts from all of Beethoven's symphonies simultaneously), but is instead a careful reconstruction of selected individual myths that are structurally linked.

If the above is true, and there are two distinct uses of "myth", which of these are you saying that RPGs strive to create?

Thomas

[clehrich]

First, there are really two uses for the word "myth".  There is the "individual myth" which is somewhat analagous to a single part in a piece of music (the first violin or the first oboe).  These are the myths that are turned into stories and recorded.

Properly speaking, it wouldn't be the entire part, but only a section.  But I don't think that's a particularly essential difficulty here.  It's weirder than that -- I'll come back to it in a sec.

The second use is rougly analogous to the symphony as a whole.  It is not a compilation of all the individual myths (imagine playing all the parts from all of Beethoven's symphonies simultaneously), but is instead a careful reconstruction of selected individual myths that are structurally linked.

I think this would best be called "mythology."  Thus one Bororo myth is part of (tribal) American mythology, etc.  Levi-Strauss is talking about a totality here: the complete Mythologiques, in four volumes, takes on something on the order of a thousand myths, and claims that although this is barely scratching the surface they are all deeply intertwined.

If the above is true, and there are two distinct uses of "myth", which of these are you saying that RPGs strive to create?

They're not entirely separable, but I suppose a given RPG would be striving to create a myth.  Better, it would be striving to contribute to and perform within mythology.  Which, I don't know; I think the "totality" concept here is very different, as there isn't really a culture-complex in question.  

Okay, I need to clarify, but this is really hard.

At base, it's not easy or probably possible to slice up "a myth" as an independent unit.  Suppose we take the opening of Beethoven's 5th, as a bit everyone out there knows: da da da dummm.  Okay now just take the cellos in that.  Let's for the moment call that a myth.

Now we get the second iteration of the same theme, and we look again at the celli.  Is that the same myth, or a different one?  Or is it part of the same one?  What about the bassi, which are doing much the same thing at the same time, in unison?

Now skip let's say five minutes into the first movement.  Beethoven is a very elegant composer, and the work is really tightly woven.  So whatever the celli are doing right now has very complicated but clearly identifiable (to musicians, musicologists and enthusiasts, anyway) relations with the original theme.  So is that a new myth?  Or is that the same one with certain inversions and alterations?

See, I don't think Levi-Strauss thinks this is the right question.  He thinks this is exactly the question everyone always tries to get at: what are the units of "myth", as in how big are they, where do they stop and start, and that stuff.  And he thinks that the only answer is down at the level of the "mytheme," which is more or less equivalent to a note or perhaps a chord.

So when I say that RPGs are striving to create myth, I mean that in the same way as we might say a musician is trying to create music.  I don't really mean a piece of music, or all of music in its entirety.  Just, you know, music.  Just so, RPGs are trying to create myth -- not a myth, or a mythology, or whatever.  Just myth.

That's one of the many things I really like about this analogy.  The more you fight with it, the weirder and yet more illuminating it gets.

If you care, by the way, you don't have to learn French for this.  The Weightmans, who translated most of Levi-Strauss's work, are wonderful translators and did a brilliant job.  The opening (called "Overture", as you should have guessed) of The Raw and the Cooked is amazingly dense and intricate but it explains this analogy really beautifully.  You will need to know just a tiny bit about Serialism, the musical movement associated largely with Arnold Schoenberg, but the contents of an encyclopedia article will be sufficient.

And then you go on and start reading the actual book on myth and all of a sudden you feel like your brain is going to explode.

You know me, people.  I like this stuff.  I read Derrida and Levi-Strauss and Kant and whatnot for fun.  I wrote a whole goddamn book on a truly bizarre piece of linguistic occult philosophy.  But The Raw and the Cooked and it sequels, i.e. the entirety of Mythologiques in four volumes, is bar none the hardest book I have ever read.  Bar none.

Be warned.  Be afraid.  If you come whining, I will slap your silly behind.  Absolute genius, but pack a lunch and plan to stay for the day.

And do not, under any circumstances, ask me questions about this apologizing for not getting it quite right.  Ask any questions you want, and I'll do my best, which won't be good enough I suspect.  Nobody gets it quite right, certainly not the first few times reading through the entire series.  Nobody.

Except the late, great, Jacques Derrida, of course.

[LordSmerf]

Ah, sorry, I forgot to define "feedback" in the chaotic math sense.  Chaotic math is the basis for "chaos theory" and "feedback" is used to describe two things that must be present for a system to be deemed chaotic.

The first is that it is sensitive to initial conditions.  This basically means that two chaotic systems with however small a difference in their initial state will end up with a finite difference between their states and that two systems that are completely identical will remain identical.  This is dependent upon the fact that chaotic systems are iterative, which means that they repeat the same calculations over and over with the result being that any small difference in initial conditions is magnified with each iteration.  This is where we get the so-called "butterfly effect" where a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo causing a hurricane in New York.

The second part of feedback is that chaotic systems are transitive.  This means that any change to the system on any single iteration of that system will have an impact on the next interval, which in turn will have an impact on the following interval and so on.  Basically, any change to the system has a permanent (and generally increasing) impact on the system in much the same way as a small initial difference does.  The variations are amplified through iteration.

So, any live performance is subject to sensitivity to initial conditions and will tend to evidence transitivity.  There is no way to duplicate the initial conditions, and the conditions as the system (in this case the performance) progresses will further change.  These changes will in turn impact the remainder of the performance.

Once something is recorded (which I am basically saying is "text" regardless of the actual medium) the initial conditions are now fixed.  Additionally text is not transitive, changing the introduction to a text does not change the remainder of the text.

I should note here that chaotic math is a minor interest of mine.  As such I grasp only its most basic principles.  Therefore, if anyone who is better versed in it sees errors in anything I have put forward I would appreciate correction.

Note: Crossposted with Chris.

Thomas

[clehrich]

Ah, sorry, I forgot to define "feedback" in the chaotic math sense.  Chaotic math is the basis for "chaos theory" and "feedback" is used to describe two things that must be present for a system to be deemed chaotic.

Very interesting stuff.  Hmm.  I'll have to think about how that relates in more detail and with more time, but....

The first is that it is sensitive to initial conditions.  ....

The second part of feedback is that chaotic systems are transitive. ....

Let me make sure I have this right.

So you have a system in place.  Feedback is strongly reflective of the system in question; it doesn't just happen, but happens in a way structured by the system.  Second, change introduced at any point in the system will ultimately affect the whole system over the course of successive iterations.  And that in turn alters the way point #1 works, because the "system in place" has changed, and so on.

Have I got that right?

Assuming more or less so.... yes.  For Levi-Strauss, anyway, myth does indeed work like this.  I'd tend to agree.  Every mythic performance is completely dependent on everything else in the system, borrowing from it but actually more than that part of it.  Furthermore, every mythic performance necessarily introduces some changes, and those never completely damp out, as it were, but continue throughout the system in every level and iteration, forever.

So, any live performance is subject to sensitivity to initial conditions and will tend to evidence transitivity.  There is no way to duplicate the initial conditions, and the conditions as the system (in this case the performance) progresses will further change.  These changes will in turn impact the remainder of the performance.

Do me a minor favor and don't use "impact" this way; it drives me buggy.  Sorry, just a pedantry.

Anyway, yeah I think I get you, but I don't see why "the performance" at the tail-end of this quote is so restrictive.  Surely what is affected is the total system?

I think you're restricting unnecessarily, by thinking a little too much in terms of something like text.  Myth is part of a system that includes all of daily life as well as ritual and the natural environment (as humanly interpreted).  So every mythic performance evidences such transitivity and feedback, sure, but it also has effects on the whole system of the culture, from top to bottom, every single time.  Sure, it's small, but it's there.

This is, for Levi-Strauss, based on the structural theory of language, which it seems to me fits your description of a feedback system (term?).  Every time I use a word, it affects the meaning, weight, and value of that word in the entire system of the language, and by extension of all human languages.  Every single time.  Sure, it's a small effect, but it's real.  And so there is never a steady state, a baseline from which language proceeds, because the whole thing is perpetually in flux because of every performance of language.

Are we talking about the same thing?  I think we are; I'm just saying that this is MUCH bigger than you're making it out to be -- it's everything.

Once something is recorded (which I am basically saying is "text" regardless of the actual medium) the initial conditions are now fixed.  Additionally text is not transitive, changing the introduction to a text does not change the remainder of the text.

In the restrictive sense, yes, I see this.  In the larger sense, though, the text is part of a larger system and thus evidences this transitivity.  At the same time, the transitivity is not reflexive, or not mutual, or whatever.  I mean, the effects set in motion by the text can never really alter the text itself.  This is one of those odd alienated characteristics of writing.  And, incidentally, there are a few peculiarities of recording as "text" but in the main I think nobody serious about linguistic philosophy as it applies to text and writing would disagree that recordings are most certainly text.

It should be pointed out that because text is not active, and thus it has to be approached by people living in a sphere of language, the transitivity does affect text via interpretation, but that's a small point here.

I should note here that chaotic math is a minor interest of mine.  As such I grasp only its most basic principles.  Therefore, if anyone who is better versed in it sees errors in anything I have put forward I would appreciate correction.

Noted and seconded.

So what I want to know is:

1. Have I understood you correctly?
2. Can you explain again, based on our greater mutual understanding at the moment, how you read RPGs in terms of such feedback loops?