On RPGs and Text [LONG]

[LordSmerf]

I will answer your questions and then ask one of my own.

Yes, I believe we understand one another when it comes to chaos.  You are correct to point out that all of myth collectively, like language, evinces feedback.  I would like to highlight that what actually happens is that chaotic principles are applied to myth on all levels.  Each individual performance meets the minimum criteria for a chaotic performance, and the behavior of myth on a large scale also meets those criteria.

So, again, I believe we understand each other.

Now, I have only just recently (in the past couple of days) begin to consider RPGs as chaotic.  The result is that I am not currently comfortable discussing RPGs as chaotic on the macro scale in the way that we can discuss the entire body of myth as chaotic.  That said, I would love to hear any thoughts you have on the subject.

On the micro scale, by which I mean a single role playing session, I believe that RPGs are chaotic in the same way that most active social activities are.  Every time I sit down to play a game of Go it is a different game.  Social activities are sensitivie to initial condition and transitive.

So it is not so much that RPGs are chaotic, but that social activity is chaotic.  I haven't considered the specific applications for RPGs, but I am slowly doing so.  This specific part of the topic may need to be tabled for a bit.

Now that I answered your questions, or at least dodged them, I have one of my own.  Would would you, or as you understand him would Levi-Strauss, say that myth is like language in that there is a highly structured system that at this point has not been identified.  For example, in music we have the note, the chord, the measure, the phrase, and a whole heap of other structure.  We are able to analyze music using the concepts.  Myth is probably at least a little bit fuzzier, but do you think that similar structures also exist in myth as a whole?

It may not really matter all that much to my next question anyway, but it might.

Using the music analogy, what is the size of a single RPG session?  Is it roughly equivilent to a musical phrase?  A movement?  A single measure?  If it is larger than a single note, which I suspect it is, then what constitutes the "notes" of RPG play?  Or am I taking the music comparison too far?

Thomas

[clehrich]

Yes, I believe we understand one another when it comes to chaos. ... Now, I have only just recently (in the past couple of days) begin to consider RPGs as chaotic.  The result is that I am not currently comfortable discussing RPGs as chaotic on the macro scale in the way that we can discuss the entire body of myth as chaotic.  That said, I would love to hear any thoughts you have on the subject.

I'm going to wait for your further meditations on that one, actually.  I'm not comfortable with chaos just yet.

Would ... you, or as you understand him would Levi-Strauss, say that myth is like language in that there is a highly structured system that at this point has not been identified.  For example, in music we have the note, the chord, the measure, the phrase, and a whole heap of other structure.  We are able to analyze music using the concepts.  Myth is probably at least a little bit fuzzier, but do you think that similar structures also exist in myth as a whole?

Yes.  And he does think he's identified these structures, to a considerable degree.  See, all of what I've discussed here is by way of preamble.  It doesn't get into the thousand-odd pages of actually working out how this stuff operates.  Just so, language is a highly structured system that is pretty well understood at the core -- that's what linguists do.  They don't understand everything, by any means, but they understand an awful lot.  Levi-Strauss certainly didn't get as far as all of linguistics has, but he went a pretty amazingly long distance into discerning the deep structures and manipulations of myth.

Using the music analogy, what is the size of a single RPG session?  Is it roughly equivilent to a musical phrase?  A movement?  A single measure?  If it is larger than a single note, which I suspect it is, then what constitutes the "notes" of RPG play?  Or am I taking the music comparison too far?

You're not taking the analogy too far, no, but you may be putting the cart before the horse.  I think the underlined clause is the right question.  If the "unit" of myth is the "mytheme," just as that of spoken language is the phoneme and that of written language arguably the grapheme, what is the RPG-eme?  (We'd need a nicer term than that, but still.)

And I don't know the answer.  It's the most important basic question, without which analysis on a structural level cannot really begin, but I haven't spotted it yet.  What I need to do is work through a lot of Actual Play and what people say about it, and try to figure out how the myth-music analogy would apply in an extremely narrow and specific manner.  Then I can apply Levi-Strauss's method and try to isolate a few of these.  If I can find them, and then see their manipulations over time and across games, then I will be a long way toward demonstrating with reasonable certainty my argument about myth and RPGs, especially Sim.  But it's quite a task.

For the record, my guess is that this is going to be very much smaller than a session, very much larger than a word spoken.  It's going to be something that, given an example, is really going to be quite meaningless without both system and play contexts, but will nevertheless be common, and indeed so ordinary that we don't even see it as a discrete thing unto itself most of the time.

I have played with character for this purpose, but I don't think it works.

[LordSmerf]

It appears that we understand each other.  It seems that we both need a good deal more time to think on the implications of chaos on RPGs.  That said, I would like to begin exploring the idea of the "RPG-eme".  I understand that you have not identified it to your satisfaction, but I would be interested in at least some exploratory discussion.  Unfortunately, after several attempts, I have been unable to figure out where to begin.  If you have any ideas I would love to discuss them.  If not then I guess we'll just have to come back to the topic after a while.

Thomas

[TonyLB]

Well, I've got some thoughts for discussion, which you can take or leave.

Can a Game-ete (or whatever it ends up being called) be an action by a single player, or must it be some sort of interaction between two or more?

Do Game-etes make up the entire substance of play, or are they distinct things that develop in the rich, nutritive broth of player-chatter and rolling dice?

Can a game occur without creating Game-etes?

[LordSmerf]

I think that I'm going to have to pass (for now) on your first two questions Tony.  I haven't had any time to think about them so any answers I gave would be pretty close to useless.

That said, I think the answer to your third question is important.  The "game-ete" (or whatever) is the building block of the game.  I haven't really had time to think about this either, but I think that if something doesn't have a game-ete then it isn't a game.  In the same way that I would say that something that has no notes or rythm is not music.  (Please, don't get too caught up on the music reference, it's imperfect here since music is a bit more complex than notes and rythm.)  Basically there is a certain something that games have.  Without that something you don't have a game, you have some other thing.  That certain something is whatever we end up calling the game-ete.

Thomas

[lumpley]

Chris (Lehrich), for the sake of me a mere dog-paddler, could you say briefly what's the "mytheme"? Or would it be more proper to ask, what are some example mythemes?

Like, if you asked me for some example phonemes I could make some for you and show you how sometimes they go together to build more complicated bits of speaking. Same with notes. Same with myth?

Why isn't "the conflict" the RPG-eme? It seems a lot like phonemes and notes to me, in that you build more complicated and meaningful RPG-structures out of 'em, and if you asked me I could show you some examples and how they might go together, and you don't have a game without 'em.

(The character would, then, be like the parts in chorale music: the basses are doing this note and the tenors are doing this other note, that's like my character doing this conflict and your character doing this other conflict.)

-Vincent

[ethan_greer]

My first stab at what a RPG-eme would be:

A single instance of negotiation of credibility. (Credibility as defined by the Lumpley Principle, of course.)

[clehrich]

Chris (Lehrich), for the sake of me a mere dog-paddler, could you say briefly what's the "mytheme"? Or would it be more proper to ask, what are some example mythemes?

Well.  Yes.  That's sort of the $64,000 question, isn't it?  This thread is getting a lot more deeply into myth than I'd predicted, and it might be wise to split it off starting with Thomas' queries that prompted the previous long block of text about a preliminary definition, but I'll leave that to Ron's judgment.

Okay, let me give a concrete example that I think is relatively graspable.  This is borrowed from chapter 2 of The Savage Mind.  He wrote it much better, but in a strange order having to do with the context of the chapter, so I'm revising in a more obvious order and a simpler style; I'm also dropping about 50% of the analysis.  Let's start with the data itself:

The Hidatsa, a Native American tribe, had a practice of hunting eagles.  The eagle-hunter goes out into the high hills and digs a deep pit, then climbs down into it.  The hunter places a bloody rabbit carcass by the edge of the pit, then covers himself up with sticks and leaves as camouflage.  And then he waits, often for days.  Eventually, an eagle spots the rabbit and dives for it.  When it hits the rabbit, the hunter grabs the eagle by the talons, drags it close, and breaks its neck with his bare hands.

This was actually done, unquestionably.

Now Lévi-Strauss points out that the Hidatsa say that their ancestor, a bear or maybe a wolverine or something of the sort, taught them to do this.  They have a myth about it, unfortunately not recorded in detail.  And he notes that the hunters made a point of having contact of some sort with menstruating women (such as their wives or sisters) before hunting both the rabbit and the eagle.  At all other times this is an absolute taboo before hunting.

Lévi-Strauss interprets as follows, keeping just to essentials.

First of all, the animal ancestor was not a bear but a wolverine.  Wolverines (

gulo gulo or gulo luscus) are much disliked by the Hidatsa usually, as well as by every other trapper, because they steal food from traps.  They will in fact head into a trap, spring it, and take the bait.  They do not care, and cannot be trapped.  "The only way to get rid of them is to shoot them," as one white trapper put it.  They are also vicious killers with very little good to be said about them.

But, says Lévi-Strauss, this is exactly the point in this case.  On the one hand, the wolverine is precisely he who can teach a hunter how to become a trap by getting into a trap without becoming entrapped, because he does this all the time.  On the other, the wolverine is understood to be a "low" animal—the metaphorical sense of low as both moral and physical works here—and the hunter is getting into a low position.  He is also killing a "high" animal, again in both a moral and a physical sense, as the eagle is both a high flyer and a sacred bird, and making himself low by contrast.  So the wolverine is the teacher because he is precisely analogous to the hunter.

Second, the way theories of pollution in North American tribes work is that they are violations of sphere-boundaries.  If you put earth in water you get mud, polluting by crossing spheres.  Menstruation is pollution because blood and fluids should stay on the inside, and they here cross over to the outside.  If fish walk, or birds swim (and do not fly), or pigs fly, these things are  pollution because adjacent spheres have been allowed to merge.  But in this case, the hunter is underground and the eagle is in the sky, so the hunter needs these two spheres to come into contact: he needs the eagle to come to ground-level and his own hands to come up to ground-level, or he fails his hunt.  Therefore menstruation-pollution is a useful device for the purpose, as it produces exactly this effect, normally not desired but ideal in this case.  It is also helpful when killing the rabbit, because the rabbit is the instrument of this sphere-crossing, the mediating element that effects the relationship by bringing the eagle to the earth.

So the wolverine has a number of meanings, and pollution has a number of meanings, and the clever Hidatsa see that eagle hunting is precisely analogous to those meanings.  So they mythically claim that the wolverine taught them, and they ritually contact menstruation-pollution, and this is intended to make the analogous effects take place in the hunt, netting them eagles.[/list:u]So here're some mythemes:

wolverine
eagle
menstrual blood[/list:u]This isn't an exhaustive list even within this hunting practice, by any means, but these are mythemes.

Now within the musical analogy, we might say that "wolverine" is a note or a small phrase.  By itself, it is meaningless.  But it refers to, is dependent upon, a system of harmony (including a scale) that is on the one hand natural and on the other cultural.

On the natural end, we can look at the physics of sound waves and note that consonance works out mathematically, as for example a perfect fifth involves the waves lining up perfectly in certain ways – this was in a sense already noticed by Pythagoras, thus the Pythagorean scale, which is about the mathematical relationship between a length of string and its vibration and the sound it makes on the one side, and on the other what happens when you shorten the string by a specific fraction of the total length and thus raise the pitch by a precise interval.  Within the mythic context, "wolverine" refers naturally in this sense, because a wolverine is an actual animal with particular habits, and the Hidatsa are extremely careful observers who note these habits.  So it would be odd, if not in fact impossible, for the wolverine ancestor to have taught us how to fly, since wolverines do not fly.  This is about the natural dimension of the mytheme.  You with me?

Now on the cultural end, within music you have the different scales and the different ways they're used by different cultures and by any one culture.  So the blues scale has one cultural association, the harmonic scale in the West is often associated with Arabic music just as the pentatonic scale is often associated with Chinese music, and so on – not that these things necessarily have anything to do with actual Arabic or Chinese music themselves, but if we want to conjure up a notion of Arabic music we might use a raised 7th, and so on.  Everything about the use of "wolverine" (low in the moral sense, for example) that does not come from the natural qualities of the animal, that is everything about how that animal and its behavior is interpreted by the Hidatsa, is this cultural end.

And the point is that a single note or phrase has no intrinsic meaning, but only has meaning by relation to the natural and cultural dimensions.  So if we play a harmonic scale, nature tells us that it is consonant, because the waves line up, and culture tells us to think "Arabia."  But the scale itself means nothing.  And if we have a wolverine ancestor, that in itself means nothing, but nature tells us it can't fly, and culture tells us it's low and disliked.  Or menstrual blood: nature tells us again that it can't fly, and that it's periodic, and that it's female; culture tells us it's pollution, and that it bridges spheres.

You can't tell me that's not cool.

Oh, and you maybe see why I'm really very unsure of how to spot "gamemes".

----

Why isn't "the conflict" the RPG-eme? It seems a lot like phonemes and notes to me, in that you build more complicated and meaningful RPG-structures out of 'em, and if you asked me I could show you some examples and how they might go together, and you don't have a game without 'em.

Because I think "conflict" is made up of far too many things.  It's perhaps a category of gamemes, or whatever, sort of the way "pollution" might be a category of mythemes (from which the Hidatsa might have chosen all sorts of things, but chose menstrual blood in particular because of the meaning of blood in general as a mediator in normal hunting, e.g. the rabbit, but not in this case, so it has a second function perfectly consonant with the practice) but we'd expect to find that there are a huge number of such gamemes, all quite discrete and manipulated differently.  I think they're going to look a great deal like mythemes, to be honest.  I mean, I could sort of imagine "Fighter" as a gameme in AD&D, or "10' Pole," or "10x10 room," or something like that.  But there are a million possibilities here, and I'm not at all confident that these things should be identified in that way.  But maybe.

[lumpley]

I think I understand. Thanks!

-Vincent

[clehrich]

As a follow-up to the Hidatsa, we can briefly discern the difference between "structure" and "mytheme" there, which may help us with gamemes.

Okay, so in hunting you normally have the following structure (among others):

hunter – weapon – blood – prey [/list:u]Lévi-Strauss usually would write this:
hunter : weapon :: blood : prey[/list:u]This is backwards of the usual way of doing analogies, where Giant : Midget :: Tall : Short.  But what Lévi-Strauss is getting at is that the relation hunter – prey is mediated by another relation, weapon – blood.  In other words, if the relation weapon – blood does not happen causally, that is if the weapon (let's say a bow and arrow) doesn't cause blood, then the hunter – prey relation doesn't happen because the prey never gets nailed.

Now the thing is that each of these terms (hunter, blood, etc.) is empty; it just describes a relation, and anything can be put in it so long as it fits the relation in question:
Hidatsa hunter : bow & arrow :: blood : rabbit[/list:u]Note that "blood" is no longer just an emptiness, because now it's really blood, actual red stuff.

Now in eagle hunting:
Hidatsa hunter : ??? :: ??? : eagle [/list:u]There isn't a weapon here, and there isn't any blood, so we have a problem: the relation desired (the hunter gets an eagle) isn't going to happen if we can't fill in the blanks.  So we notice some things:
Eagle : talons :: blood : rabbit
Hidatsa hunter : rabbit :: (-) blood : eagle [/list:u]So the eagle is a hunter too, and in the second series there isn't any blood.  So we want to fill in that blank by adding blood – and a

bloody rabbit carcass will fit pretty well.

But the thing is, the rabbit isn't really a weapon, now is it?  We'd have to make it into one.  So the structure is weak.  So we note another structure:

Man : penis :: vagina : woman [/list:u]And in fact, we find that the Hidatsa use the same expression for the eagle striking the prey as they do for sex.  Which suggests, in turn, that the desired hunting relation has a sexual element, where the left side is male and the right is female.  So now we can fill it in:
Hidatsa hunter : rabbit/hands (male [because the hunter is a man]) :: blood (female) : eagle [/list:u]And since there's an obvious kind of female blood around, we use menstrual blood.

So the mythemes here are especially the right sides of these equations, but really all the things you put into those slots: man, woman, eagle, wolverine, menstrual blood, rabbit (=prey), weapon, etc.  The structure is the set of slots and their relations.

When we put mythemes into the slots, and we choose appropriate mythemes for the slots in question (e.g. we can't put "wolverine" in the "blood" slot), then the whole structure is harmonious and confirms the whole system of our culture.

Please bear in mind that Lévi-Strauss did

all of this analysis, in the last post as well as this one, and made an argument about particular ethnographies of the Hidatsa, all in four very short pages.  And that Mythologiques essentially does exactly this sort of thing, at the same level of density, for about 1,000 pages.

All of which is by way of saying that gamemes would apparently be things, objects or events that we manipulate and play with in games, but which under closer analysis are actually clusters of potential meaning.  We then have structures, which are made up of binary relations, and when we drop a gameme into one of those slots in the structure we constrain the gameme to mean one particular binary relation which was potential in the gameme but couldn't be expressed except by relation to another gameme within a structure.

But since we're clever people, as soon as we express one relation (gameme A : gameme B), we notice that there are other reasons for this relation than were expressed by the larger structure A:B::C:D.  We may or may not choose to use these, but if we do then we find that A:B::C:D but also A:B::E:F, in which case C:D::E:F, which wasn't at all apparent before but is now because A:B is mediating the relationship.

Now please bear in mind that I do not as yet see the slightest practical use in this analysis.  I'm sure it's potentially there, but I have no idea what it is or how it would work.  I'm formulating all this in order to help us identify what the hell a gameme would be, and what sorts of structures we might be talking about.  And if we can do this, I think we'll have a very different way of analyzing gaming than we have had before, and one that I believe will have significant analytical and practical value.

One reason I think this is that this manipulation of structure seems to me to have a lot to do with what System is.  We know from the Lumpley Principle that all the negotiation of what is entered into the SIS is system, and we know of lots of ways this plays out practically.  I'm saying that this is the set of rules that determine whether a given structure is understood to be valid, and whether the insertion of a particular gameme into a particular part of that structure is understood to be valid.  And thus system is itself a set of structural relations, as we'd expect from this model.  By determining or pinpointing how that works at a structural level, we should be able to work out some of how system really works at a deep level, all without going into vague aesthetic criteria like "well, everyone thought it was cool."  Well, sure, but why did they think so?  This gets at how Creative Agenda really works, in short, and how it interacts very deeply with Social Contract.

[clehrich]

Can a Game-ete (or whatever it ends up being called) be an action by a single player, or must it be some sort of interaction between two or more?

Could be either, I should think.  The interaction is implicit, in the same way that "wolverine" appears to be a discrete object but really isn't because of the context.

Do Game-etes make up the entire substance of play, or are they distinct things that develop in the rich, nutritive broth of player-chatter and rolling dice?

Neither, I think.  I'd say that gamemes are fully constitutive of the total fabric of play, but that they interrelate entirely in a context of structures, and that therefore absolutely everything that occurs in a play session consists of manipulations of structure and gameme.  At the same time, there is a negotiation System in place that determines which of these infinite interrelations "count".

Can a game occur without creating Game-etes?

Creating?  Yes, certainly.  Can a game occur without manipulating gamemes?  No.  But you have to understand, creating such things is almost never necessary: you borrow them from somewhere else, just as the Hidatsa don't bother inventing owl-bears but instead just borrow wolverines.  And I think this process of borrowing has a lot to do with Social Contract negotiations about use of genre (in a very broad sense), source material, history of play, personal lives, and the much larger social spheres of players' lives.

One of the really brilliant things about how this structural analysis works is that it demonstrates that it isn't necessary really to invent mythemes or structures; this is the bricoleur who just takes crap out of his shed and puts it together.  The total result of this work is a new thing, and it's very much a creative act.  But the procedure does not create new pieces: for Levi-Strauss such creation of new pieces is distinctive to the scientific approach as opposed to the mythic approach.  I, like many others, am doubtful about this as a claim about science, but with respect to mythic thought it does seem to me that there is no need to invent anything because it's already provided to you by the vast totality of both nature and cultural context.

[Mark Woodhouse]

First, let me say that I am really resonating with Chris' approach here. He's putting into neat tidy - dare I say academic - form a lot of my own intuitions about What It Is That We Do. This could just be because I'm comfy with Structuralist approaches in myth & religion, but I think he' s cooking with gas.

Now then, a seed for elaboration.

Can a game occur without manipulating gamemes?  No.  But you have to understand, creating such things is almost never necessary: you borrow them from somewhere else, just as the Hidatsa don't bother inventing owl-bears but instead just borrow wolverines.  And I think this process of borrowing has a lot to do with Social Contract negotiations about use of genre (in a very broad sense), source material, history of play, personal lives, and the much larger social spheres of players' lives.

One of the really brilliant things about how this structural analysis works is that it demonstrates that it isn't necessary really to invent mythemes or structures; this is the bricoleur who just takes crap out of his shed and puts it together.  The total result of this work is a new thing, and it's very much a creative act.  But the procedure does not create new pieces: for Levi-Strauss such creation of new pieces is distinctive to the scientific approach as opposed to the mythic approach.  I, like many others, am doubtful about this as a claim about science, but with respect to mythic thought it does seem to me that there is no need to invent anything because it's already provided to you by the vast totality of both nature and cultural context.

Ah, but we contemporary Western gamers, living in a post-modern, global culture, where everything around us is already "distorted" by constant bricolage .... do we lack the vocabulary of mutually understood meaning that is necessary for myth-making? Or alternatively - to springboard off the notion that the creation of new mythemes is the work of empiricism - is it that we have too rich an array of possible signs and symbols?

This problem, then, might be the motive for all the accreta of roleplaying games - mechanics, setting-as-text, the "geek culture". A ritualisation of the mythmaking enterprise that defines and limits the symbol-sets deemed appropriate for use in this effort.

Thoughts?

[clehrich]

Or alternatively - to springboard off the notion that the creation of new mythemes is the work of empiricism - is it that we have too rich an array of possible signs and symbols?

This problem, then, might be the motive for all the accreta of roleplaying games - mechanics, setting-as-text, the "geek culture". A ritualisation of the mythmaking enterprise that defines and limits the symbol-sets deemed appropriate for use in this effort.

My goodness.  Yes, that's exactly where I'm going, anyway.  I don't know that I'm right, or you are, but this is precisely how I do see it.

Consider Narrativism for a second.  The bricolage procedure here is pre-constrained by an aesthetic criterion of structure: the manipulation of mythemes (gamemes?) must produce a particular kind of structure, which is any structure that is constitutive of Story.  Story is going to be defined locally, in reference to the kind of Story we want to tell and the sort of Premise and so forth we have in mind.  But not every sort of structure will serve this end, because we in a sense already have a larger structure into which the substructures must fit, and that larger structure is called Story.

I'm not exactly sure how Gamism works in this context; any suggestions would be very welcome.

But now turn to Simulationism.  This, as I've said before, is in its procedure the most like pure bricolage myth-making.  But as Mark says, our cultural universe is so insanely huge and (apparently, at least) ncoherent that we feel we cannot draw on everything.  So we impose other constraints -- but unlike with Narrativism, these constraints refer to the sources and types of gamemes, and not so much to the structures into which they must be fitted.  And what sort of sources do we choose?

Well, in one very common version of Simulationism, which engendered the name I would assume, the source-range is defined by a particular type of, wait for it, "source material."  We're not allowed to draw from elsewhere for our mythemes.  Furthermore, we generally draw the structures into which we embed these mythemes again from that source material.  Since the source material is often in the form of a story, it can seem as though we're doing the same thing as Narrativism -- building a Story Now.  But from this perspective, this is not the case; the overlap is only a surface identity.

In another common version of Simulationism, the source-range is defined by a history of play in some sense or other.  But this entails that the play material, the game texts first of all, must be extremely elaborate, because they must provide a lot of preformed mythemes and structures to play with.  Thus, I submit, the tendency of Sim games to generate enormous amounts of textual support, and furthermore the popularity of such support material with a given game's adherents.

But the thing is, in order for us to recognize and be able to manipulate all these structures and mythemes, we need to be able to analogize them.  They need familiarity.  In Narrativism, this isn't a problem, because the only structure-types that really matter are Story, and we've grown up with stories and are constantly bombarded with them.  But in Simulationism, this isn't necessarily the case.  So what do we do?

Well for one thing, we formulate structure as strongly and rigidly as possible -- thus a hell of a lot of complicated and interwoven rules.

For another, as noted before, we provide so much source material that it isn't necessary to draw on anything else.

And for another, and this is where it gets a little strange, we demand that the players immerse themselves (not in the technical sense of Immersion) in the source material so deeply that it becomes completely familiar.

Now the thing is, in order for this to work, in most cases it's going to be necessary to keep the constraints in place, otherwise we'll lose the sense of a limited body of mytheme and structure to play with, and we'll lose that deep knowledge and familiarity of the game-world.

But the implication is that we won't draw on the rest of the world or the rest of our lives.  Going back to Mark's point about ritualization, we pre-define the game universe and our manipulation of it such that we agree not to connect it with the rest of the world.  This has real practical value in terms of Simulationism as an artistic endeavor, because it forces us to work deeply with a relatively limited symbol-set rather than spread out across the vast postmodern lunacy that is our total experiential world.

And the danger, which I think is in fact empirically visible, is that ritualization imputes an ontological certainty to what it demarcates.  The Simulationist's world becomes real.

Now I don't mean by this that Simulationism lends itself to Mazes and Monsters nonsense.  I think we all know that the danger of that has been much exaggerated and has nothing to do with Simulationism (or any other kind of gaming): it's about mental illness, if in fact it occurs much at all.

But what I do mean is that the Simulationist provides himself with two universes, both real, both valid.  One is meaningful in an intellectually and emotionally satisfying sense, and is controllable to some degree through the ongoing process of bricolage; like the Hidatsa hunter, the Simulationist can perform an action, however mundane or peculiar, and have it "work" within a coherent system of meaning.  And the Simulationist has the challenge and excitement of making that work, which is much the same attractive quality that makes myth valuable to actual myth-making peoples.

On the other hand, the real world is not particularly like this.  We rarely have much control, and for many people there isn't a cohesive sense of meaning.  I don't mean something weird, I mean the basic sort of existential angst that lots of people (including me) often feel in the modern world, the sense of being adrift and more or less alone in a world that doesn't really mean a whole lot and over which one actually has little or no control.  We seek out small social groups and treat them as worlds -- everyone does this, not just gamers -- in part because such worlds are meaningful and coherent, or can be so.  And I think that the Simulationist gamer has a system by which to extend this from a loose, touchy-feely "getting together" sense of meaning into a deep, intricate, rich, and intellectually and emotionally satisfying world.

Thus, I submit, the attraction to the Simulationist gamer of subculture.  Or, vice-versa, the attraction to the subculture-identifying gamer of Simulationism.  It seems to me that V:tM played on this beautifully, as did in a weird way Werewolf, by correlating the same issue of subculture to the in-game world.

And thus the gist of my argument about what Simulationism is and how it works.  I hadn't really expected to be getting into this here, but there you are.  I'm working on a more precise and careful formulation at the moment, but it's going to be a while before I'm happy with it.

Thoughts?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi guys.

Thanks for this great discussion. Terrfic stuff.

I have some thoughts, Chris. And, really, they're questions.  However, I seems to have lost the ability to phrase things as questions these days, and everything's coming out as strong statements.  Please bear with me!

One

When you write,

I mean the basic sort of existential angst that lots of people (including me) often feel in the modern world, the sense of being adrift and more or less alone in a world that doesn't really mean a whole lot and over which one actually has little or no control. We seek out small social groups and treat them as worlds -- everyone does this, not just gamers -- in part because such worlds are meaningful and coherent, or can be so. And I think that the Simulationist gamer has a system by which to extend this from a loose, touchy-feely "getting together" sense of meaning into a deep, intricate, rich, and intellectually and emotionally satisfying world.

Couldn't that same desire condition and desire be applied to players who gather for a Nar session.  I'll refer you again to the "Moose in the City" game I mentioned upthread.  I don't think anyone reading the actual play thread of that game could believe it didn't deliver on the goods you describe here.  

I believe, again, that in either Sim or Nar play, a "community" is formed that answers the needs you desribe.  The methods differ, but I'm not seeing much difference in need and outcome.  Thoughts?


Two

How much do the methods really differ?  Yes, there are difference.  But let's be careful.

You suggest a Sim game works from a world different than our own.  But remember the Sorcerer One Sheet -- where the basic structure of a purposefully unique world, with rules and a thematic agenda are laid out for the players to riff on.  Nar players are also notorious for getting together for a session before actual play for character creation.  

While they may not be drawing on previously established "worlds" they are drawing on materials and mixing them up to their own end (no matter how original), to create a "world" with the bare bones of rules to "immerse" themselves in.  (Again, as you point out, not "Immersion.")

The use of Premise, whether named or not, also provides focus.  If I set up a HeroQuest character with torn loyalties between faith and a god, and make avenging my priest's death my goal while my family wishes I didn't puruse this (for 800 available reasons that'll make a good "story") I've set up a "focus" -- just like the Sim world.  It's all going to be right there on the Character Sheet.  It's what the game, and the attention of the players, will revovle around.  Same with Kickers, Mountain Witch Fates and so on.

I understand the specific of the "focus" objects are different.  But how different are they in Kind when it comes to actual effect?


Three

What about non-subculture play?  (And, again, I'm truly asking a question here.)  

When I played AD&D in high school, we were a bunch of bright, pretty socially functioning kids that play in "Duke" Schirmer's English class at lunch.  Few of the players I GM'd for were really into Fantasy lit at all.  (I had only read The Hobbit, and a bunch of SF, really.  Greek myths were what it was all about for me when it came to fantasy.)

There was no, "You're the outcasts" energy.  What energy there was came from Going into the Hole in the Ground and Discovering What's There.  I swear, the thought of reaching one of the dungeon enterances still makes me excited-fidgity like a little boy.  If you've got any ideas how to break that out with "meaning" I'd love to hear.  If just for kicks.

Ron make sure to point out he sometimes plays in public places.  In sunlight even!  Clearly, part of his agenda is to move this beyond sub-culture round up the wagons status.  And yet, as noted in my points above, there's still the a) creation of a unique world, b) rules of world and logic and story (including premise issues) to focus on, c) to create a little community that d) in turn creates a "deep, intricate, rich, and intellectually and emotionally satisfying" story [not "world" as for Sim, but "story."]

So, other than switchig out the word "story" for "world" what is the real difference?  (An honest question, not a rhetorical one.)


And if there is no other difference, what are the differences between the focus on "world" rather than all the focus elements of "story" (premise, plot elements that get build up throug play)?

And let's not forget that, as mentioned, there's world building going on in Nar play, too?  How's that figure into all this?

And what of the Floor Show?

Okay.  I'll stop.

Thanks,

Christopher

[Christopher Kubasik]

Oops.  Ignore this.