An alternative to 'the System is the Physics of the World'

[Ian Charvill]

The System is the Grammar of the World.

I'm posting this from the point of view of starting up a new gaming group and explaining how I'm looking at things.  I'm not invested in whether people agree with it or not.  I mean, with what it implies about the Lumpley Principle and the Big Model, I would suspect most people will disagree with it.  That's fine as long as people are disagreeing with what I mean.

So, does it make sense to people, as a way of framing things, that one would look at system as primarily a way of structuring what is said during a game session -- both about the imaginary and non-imaginary elements of play.

[Ben Lehman]

How about "The System is the Grammar of the Game?"

yrs--
--Ben

[John Burdick]

Grammar is a problem word. "The Chinese language has no grammar." I've seen people sincerely take this position. It is the language equivalent of claiming to play without system because you don't use tables. People also mix social class and politeness into the concept of grammar. Anyone thoughtful enough to understand the word grammar can understand the Lumpley Principle as normally stated. The analogy is close enough to reproduce the same sort of issues you already have with system.

The idea of a story or imagination constituting a world isn't the standard dictionary usage. The world of say, LUG Star Trek, isn't an actual world. Two distinct games that start with contemporary American society aren't in the same world despite being based on the real world. Ben's use of game is much more natural.

John

[epweissengruber]

I don't know if this is any closer, but what about syntax?

You could say that rules are syntax in that they are the conventions that rule how discrete elements may be combined to make a meaningful statement.

The order in which ideograms are placed and their relationship to the topic announced early in a statement contribute to the meaning of the whole statement.

Slang, formal declarations, subjunctives, interrogatives, meaningful fragments are all ruled by syntax.

(Note: I only got a 79% in 1st year Semiotics, so I might be way off)

[lumpley]

Well, Ian, I don't see what it implies yet, and I'm not most people, but this?

So, does it make sense to people, as a way of framing things, that one would look at system as primarily a way of structuring what is said during a game session -- both about the imaginary and non-imaginary elements of play.

Absolutely.

-Vincent

[Bill_White]

"System is the grammar of the game" makes sense to me; it invokes the idea that the "rules of the game" are rules for making reference to and establishing relations among [shared, imaginary] things in the game-world and the things that represent them on the table-top.  Making a further linguistic parallel, it also suggests there is a "pragmatics" of gaming:  pragmatics is the aspect of language having to do with how people actually use it to do things.

[MikeSands]

"Syntax" seems misleading to me because it implies that the rules themselves don't hold any meaning and are just used to relate the elements with meaning to each other.

[Ian Charvill]

I thought about the 'system is the grammar of the game' and to an extent I like it, but remember I'm trying to get across a basic idea and to people -- I don't know if they've read the Forge or not -- certainly some of the people I'm trying to get involved have never gamed before.   So to say the 'system is the grammar of the game' may sound quite like 'the system is the grammar of the system' to some people.

But I'm in agreement that 'world' is suboptimal.

Syntax also, for similar reasons,  from a casual point of view syntax kind of means grammar.  So if I were in a phase of nailing down this idea I might be asking which is the best word in a technical sense.  I'm kind of asking, which is the least techical word I can use and still be understood.

I'm going to throw out two actual play examples that might give a sense of what I mean:

Something horrific happens in a game of Call of Cthulhu a player either makes a sanity roll or they don't, loses sanity or not.

So the game will structure what happens -- the declaration of the horrific thing happens before the call for the sanity roll, the sanity roll comes before the loss (or not) of sanity, the amount of sanity lost is determined before we can say if there is temporary insanity or not.

The system is structuring the order in which things can come and still makes sense.

"Lose 8 sanity, make a sanity roll" makes no sense in a game of Cthulhu but "make a sanity roll... lose 8 sanity" does.

Flip over to Unknown Armies.  Compare the level of the stress to the number of hardened notches, maybe call for a roll, mark off a notch, maybe decide if it's fight, flight or freeze.

So 'it's a level 8 stress, make a roll" makes sense within UA grammar, but 'make a roll, mark off a notch' doesn't (absent establishing whether a roll is needed).

The system is effectively telling us what we can and can't say, the order in which things make sense.

InSpectres we get it both ends -- it's a level three Stress test, take three points of stress damage.  But asking a player to always choose between three choices for what happens if a test is failed, or applying a specific insanity for a specific number of in game minutes, makes no sense -- is allowed to make no sense by the system.

That's what I want people to get before we start playing.  In a sense the system is acting in a parallel way to keys in music, metre and rhyme in poetry, grammar in prose, the rules in a sporting event.  I don't want to reference past roleplaying games, which people won't have played, or poetry that people don't write and so on.  I'm looking for a plain English way of explaining of, I guess, why we have rules.

So, explicit question: the examples I gave, do they make sense in the context of 'the grammar of *whatever*'?  And is there a simpler way of putting that.

(Vincent

As for the implications I mentioned, I'm kind of going to ignore them, because maybe that's for another thread, maybe that's for never.  I was just trying to head off the thread being 'how does this fit into the big model' before it hit the point of settling what 'this' is in the first place.)

[Mike Holmes]

Uh, what's wrong with the Lumpley Principle here. Layman it to "System is how we decide on what we're imagining together?"

Mike

[Ian Charvill]

Uh, what's wrong with the Lumpley Principle here. Layman it to "System is how we decide on what we're imagining together?"

Mike

Hey Mike,

'The text is how we decide what we're imagining together' -- 'the movie is how we decide what we're imagining together'.  Except it isn't.  We don't imagine the same thing.

Check out the last few weeks of Vincent's blog and the stuff he's written about Master and Commander.  When he imagined it was telling one story, he was pretty down on it.  Ben Lehman told him a different story.  He went back to it, imagined that different story while watching, and enjoyed it.

But he movie didn't change, only the thing Vincent was imagining changed, and that was caused by something external to the movie.  I primarily sympathised with Maturin during the movie, because he's played by Paul Bettany, who I rate as the best English actor of his generation.  That may explain why I liked the movie more than Vincent did right off the bat.  Again something external to the movie.

What we say, combined with the symbols we use (dice rolls, cards, miniatures, sketches, etc.) combined with the preconceptions we bring with us decide on what we're imagining together.  System structures what we say and the symbols we use.  System only affects some of our preconceptions, and a pretty small slice of some.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, I don't think that the two statements are the same.

[Mike Holmes]

Ian, layman's version, layman's version.

Yeah, it's not quite accurate. But it's good enough for government work.

Mike

[Ian Charvill]

Mate,

I work for the government, we say anything is a straightforward way and they send us for reeducation.

Part of what I want to do is convey the differences I'm taking about, though.  Maybe it's too complex to simplify without making sacrifices somewhere.

It needs more thought.

[Shreyas Sampat]

"Syntax" seems misleading to me because it implies that the rules themselves don't hold any meaning and are just used to relate the elements with meaning to each other.

I am not really sure how you consider this misleading. Are you suggesting that rules have a function other than to control relationships between elements?

[MikeSands]

Are you suggesting that rules have a function other than to control relationships between elements?

Yes. They can contribute meaning to the game.

They aren't just meaning-free pieces of glue for the stuff that actually matters (which is my understanding of the technical use of 'syntax' - that might be wrong, of course).

[Simon Marks]

Rules are the specialised language we use to tell stories better?
Rules are the specialised language we use to play games better?
Rules are the specialised language we use to describe the world better?

Any of those work?