Alternative Definitions: Desire, Outcome, Play, Story

[Bruce Baugh]

Ever since several games of the late '80s and early '90s made an issue of it, there's been a fair amount of talk in gaming circles about where the "story" is in gaming - what it is, how you make it, what you give up to do this, and so on. At one extreme there are the folks who emphatically deny that there is anything story-like at all about their games. Events unfold, tactics are applied to situation, and there may be an after-action report, but emphatically lacks any quality one might think of as literary. At another, there's the school that says that story is the only crucial thing, and which in extreme cases actively encouraged the GM to override players' preferences to whatever degree is necessary to make a fully constructed literary structure happen in play. (This is often attributed to Vampire, but in fact Vampire 1st edition clearly and strongly stated that preparations should yield to player invention and desire. The worst case I've seen with my own eyes was the GMing advice in Amber.)

Lately I've been thinking that "story" may be most productively treated as something outside the game as such. In play, things happen. A player or GM introduces an element into the scene, others respond to it, the mechanics governing the resolution of efforts apply, and then everyone deals with the updated situation. (More on the matter of response and mechanics in a bit.) This collection of inventions, introductions, responses, and resolutions is the raw material of the story of the game. The story itself actually happens in the minds of participants, then and later. As with both real life and entertainment of many sorts, you select and arrange the parts that interest you and give lower priority to the rest. Dull stuff just fades; depending on what sort of person you are, annoyances may as well, or they may loom large. Interesting bits loom large and get loving detail, and perhaps embellishment. The stuff in play is a pool of data, from which you extract information that adds up to the story you want to tell yourself or someone else.

I distinguished in the preceding paragraph between the intention of a participant to have their character do something (or to have some other part of the environment under their control ditto) and outcome of the intent. The evolving theory/theories at the Forge place a lot of weight on the matter of control, and set up a necessary tension between player control and the ability of the GM to maintain a planned narrative. The same thought occurs in other efforts at building a general theory of gaming. I've never been entirely persuaded by this, but only recently figured out that this is why. Apart from powers of outright fiat, all attempts to do things in the game are mediated by mechanics. There is a force outside the intention of the player or GM which modifies the attempt, and which limits the extent to which the desires of a participant are feasible at all.

Whenever the rules apply, there is no unmediated force of will active in the game. Assuming that the GM applies any mechanics to, for instance, NPCs' ability to search, evade, fight, and the like, to factors like weather and so on, this is true of the GM's plans just as much as it is of the wishes of any other player. The GM's preparations are in this sense not qualitatively different from whatever schemes players come up with before and during play - more elaborate, perhaps, but likewise subject to mediation through mechanics. And stats for NPC, environmental, and other factors constitute limits of their own for this purpose. Rather than adjudicating on the fly, you get bright lines of possibility and impossibility, but the basic principle is the same. Not everything you might wish for can happen, and some things you don't expect are pretty well guaranteed to happen. This is entirely as true of games which remove randomizers and spread around the power to make authoritative declarations as it of games with a strong element of randomness and which concentrate authoritative power in the GM's hands.

So a few terms for a new taxonomy.

An event in play is the combination of a participant's desire to have somthing happen and the mechanics applied to it to determine the extent to which that desire becomes achieved.

Plans include all the schemes that participants make: the in-character desires of PCs and NPCs to make things happen, the timeline a GM might prepare of what NPCs will do in the absence of PC intervention, and the like. All of these are subject to mechanics of some sort when they actually lead to events in play.

Mechanics contribute two crucial factors: expectation and surprise. The definition of what characters and outside forces can do lets participants build up a sense of what's reasonable to expect - what's likely, what's possible, the tradeoffs of risk and reward, and so on. I'm going to get a little hyperbolic and say that this amounts to sanity for the participants; total chaos would make any expectations irrelevant and consistency impossible. Games differ in how much and what sort of variation they like and what overall scale of power is available to characters and their world. They also differ in what sort of variation applies to character efforts: whether there's a consistent minimum and/or maximum result possible, how much things vary from the average result, how much outside forces can modify the return on a character's exertions, and so on. But all roleplaying games allow for things to gum up the works in translating character desire into action.

The experience of play, from the point of view of any given participant, is what you have in mind for your character plus all the stuff that happens to your character and everyone else. The observation of play for bystanders tosses out what's in your head, and just includes expressed desires and their resolution. After-the-fact observations might well include passed notes, whispers, and the like that folks didn't know about at the time, depending on how the game gets recorded.

The story is what part of the experience you invest with significance. No participant takes away precisely the same story, and the odds are good that you will change your own story of the game over time. No game can hand you a story, because no game lives in your head along with you. What a game may do is offer advice and mechanics which help you create more desires and outcomes of a sort you're interested in - goose the data pool, that is, so that you're more likely to have stuff you're interested in to tell a story about. But the events are not the story, nor are your plans the story.

[Ian Charvill]

You rightly observe that your ideas of story can be applied to other entertainment media.  A movie is simply a sequences of images, sounds and dialogue.  No member of the audience takes away precisely the same story - each member of the audience invests particular sequences with significance.

However, The Thing is about a group of men in the Arctic battling against an alien menace and Three Colours: Blue is about a woman reacting to losing her husband and child in a car crash.  You might have multiple interpretations of the story, but there is still the core story embedded in the images and sounds of the film.

The limitations placed by the work itself - in this case the role playing session or session - upon the number and scope of different stories will mean that only one story will be told, but in multiple versions.

[Bruce Baugh]

I dunno. I've listened to folks describe the same movie and come away with wildly different impressions. Obviously literary critics end up reading wildly different things out of the same manuscript on a regular basis, and the reinterpretation of existing data is a major part of every humanities discipline. And this is assuming that everyone is in fact drawing on the same pool of data - if they forget something, or mingle in other things, it's anyone's guess what may emerge.

[Ian Charvill]

I suppose what I was trying to reach towards is that there is a core story involved, even if there can be different interpretations of it.  So I might say for example: "The story of Clueless is the same as that of Emma.  Ditto similar comments about Romeo & Juliet and West Side Story." or Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Cruel Intentions.

Same story, retold, modernised, told with a different perspective.  Beowulf and the John Gardner novel Grendel really hits on the change of persepctive issue.

'Story' is a fairly loose word and there are some definitions of story that are applicable to what happens in the session itself.  I would hold that these are susceptible to in-game mechanics.  Conversely there are aspects of 'story' that happen at other levels, and trying to attach mechanics would be fruitless.

[Bruce Baugh]

Oh! Sure, if you define story loosely enough to cover modernization and remake and stuff, then I've got no disagreement. And I think there are some definite merits to doing so.

[M. J. Young]

I've got a web page which treats the Terry Gilliam/Bruce Willis film http://www.mjyoung.net/time/monkeys.html">12 Monkeys as if it were a time travel film. I get a lot of mail about it. Most of the people who write to me also treat it as a time travel film. They argue with me about details of my analysis--whether this movie demonstrates a fixed time theory, whether the woman on the plane has traveled from the future, whether the virus would have been released by Dr. Peters had Cole not traveled to the past, stuff like that. Some just thank me for explaining it so well. However, every once in a while I get a letter from someone who says that 12 Monkeys is not a time travel film. I've been told that it is actually:

[*]the delusions of James Cole, an inmate in an asylum in the late twentieth century;[*]the delusions of James Cole, a mentally unbalanced resident of an underground complex in the mid twenty-first century;[*]a retelling of ancient Egyptian mythology not intended to be understood as real at all but as a poetic presentation of the relationships between Egyptian deities--[/list:u]Well, those are the ones that leap to mind. So it seems that it's possible for a million people to watch the same movie and not come away with the same basic story--but does this mean that 12 Monkeys is not a time travel story? Almost everyone who sees it believes that James Cole is traveling between the future and the present. Anyone who does not believe that will concede that he appears to be traveling between the future and the present, and will either argue that this is his delusion or that he doesn't exist and it's all a parable--which still leaves us with a time travel story, albeit one that is supposed to be understood as fictional even within its own frame. The story is about time travel, and people agree about the events presented far more than they disagree.

On the same site, I've recently added a page addressing the Tom Cruse film http://www.mjyoung.net/time/minority.html">Minority Report. I address it initially as if it were a time travel film, and ultimately argue that it is not, that no one sees the future and no future information is transmitted to the past at any time. One of my site's regular readers heard that I was working on such a page and asked why I was wasting my time on a movie that had nothing to do with time; when he read the page, he understood. Yet some people think it's a time travel film, that the psychics see "the future". Perhaps in this case we've got a confusion because the film is a bit unclear about what is really happening, requiring the viewer to fill in a lot more gaps with his assumptions. That, though, suggests that the story is only partially told, and that the viewer must tell himself the story based on the pieces he's been presented.

So perhaps in many role playing games, we have a sequence of events that tell part of a story, and between the participants the gaps are filled either by exposition (the referee who ties the actions of his players into a story by creating the bits they don't know) or by individual reconstruction (the players who write character journals in which they tell stories that expand beyond what was obvious in play). Other games actually do tell complete stories, such that everyone who came away from the table would know the story that was told. They would all tell the same story. They certainly would do so in different words, but in the end each would recognize it as the same story.

As to perspective, well, that happens. Some years back as I passed through a yellow blinking light in a fifty mile per hour zone, the elderly woman at the stopsign on my left suddenly slammed her foot to the floor and, despite my best efforts to get out of her way, smashed my left rear corner, spun around, and destroyed her front end on the telephone pole that had been on my left and her left before we had entered the intersection. Her daughter, apparently in another car behind her, rushed over to see if she was alright, and as she got out of the car she said, "I don't know how that young man managed to hit me." The daughter said, "Yes, mom." Perhaps being inside the events demands that we see things from individual viewpoints; yet apart from the old woman and her daughter, it was clear to everyone else at that intersection that she had hit me.

I suppose, though, Bruce, that the question is,

No participant takes away precisely the same story....

If you mean that we'll always quibble over the details, like who is the woman on the plane or would Dr. Peters have released the virus had Cole not intervened, that hardly seems relevant. If you mean that we'll never agree as to whether 12 Monkeys is actually a time travel story, I think (dissenting opinions aside) that's not a defensible position. Just how much agreement or disagreement must the observers/participants have before it's,

precisely the same story

in your estimation?

--M. J. Young

[Bruce Baugh]

"Precise" is a trouble-making word here, and I should use another. How about "substantial" agreement or something of the sort? I mean to suggest a spectrum from agreement as to major things that did or didn't happen in play and passing on to shading about which individual bits were significant, whether something was cool or just useful, and so on. I'm also thinking of the possibilities for divergent experience in LARP, PBM/PBEM, and other kinds of gaming where the basic experience differs significantly even though the characters are all in some meaningful sense in the same game.

[deadpanbob]

...What a game may do is offer advice and mechanics which help you create more desires and outcomes of a sort you're interested in - goose the data pool, that is, so that you're more likely to have stuff you're interested in to tell a story about. But the events are not the story, nor are your plans the story.

Bruce,

This is an interesting take on what consitutes a story.  For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that as you stated in your post, neither the events nor the plans of the players are the story.

As an actual published game developer/designer, I'm interested to hear your take, from a design perspective, on how much a game should advise the players vs. how much mechanical structure should the game provide?

As a case in point, from the Storyteller system, I contrast a game like Abberant vs. Adventure!.  In Adventure!, you've actually provided a framework to allow the players to take some control of the setting/backstory/plot elements of the game through the mechanic of Dramatic Editing.  This framework seems highly appropriate to the (Ron forgive me) genre of Adventure!, but also seems desireable as a mechanic that spells out how and when 'control' of a story can pass among players and GM.  Whereas in Abberant, we find the rather standard Storyteller fare about the division of responsibility between storyteller and players, without any rules that directly impact this division.

I think that this issue IS important, in so far as providing such mechanics give permission to the players and GM's to engage in a kind of power sharing, that in my opinion, provides an even richer data pool that increases the chances that the participants will all walk away with enough 'stuff' to consturct a good personal story from.

I'm curious to see you thoughts on this.

Cheers.

[Jason Lee]

"Precise" is a trouble-making word here, and I should use another. How about "substantial" agreement or something of the sort? I mean to suggest a spectrum from agreement as to major things that did or didn't happen in play and passing on to shading about which individual bits were significant, whether something was cool or just useful, and so on. I'm also thinking of the possibilities for divergent experience in LARP, PBM/PBEM, and other kinds of gaming where the basic experience differs significantly even though the characters are all in some meaningful sense in the same game.

To me (you can call be Tangent-Man if you like), this implies a wacky parallel you can draw between someone's actual life and the biography of that person.

Which, from that angle puts the actual roleplaying session into the category of 'an experience' instead of 'a story'.  You're not trying to create a piece of media, but a piece of life - how Simmy is that?

[Zamiel]

Which, from that angle puts the actual roleplaying session into the category of 'an experience' instead of 'a story'.  You're not trying to create a piece of media, but a piece of life - how Simmy is that?

"Simmy?" How is the recognition of the fact that a roleplaying game IS, in fact, an experience (composed of a series of experiences) "simmy?"  That's a confusion of the medium for the message in the most egregious of ways, willfully and with malice aforethought.

Even most forms of media are, in fact, composited in construction as a composition of experiences.  Movies are broken into scenes, books into chapters (and, for the true analytical devotees, scenes within the chapter less often), even oral storytelling is very clearly not only a recitation of facts but an effort to create a series of immersive experiences for the listener.  The focus on the "story," as the primary componant, then is revealed to be the more artificial construct and perhaps that primary focus there is counter-productive from the position of creating "good roleplaying," whatever that is.

Bruce's "taxonomy" (I hesitate to use to pretentious a word, truthfully) goes to the heart of what cognitive researchers have known for a while -- given a series of images/experiences, a story arises spontaneously from the events.  It needn't be intentional and it won't necessarily be predictible.  It happens automatically in the act of observation and is finalized in the act of communicating it.  Show someone a series of three photographs and they can spin a narrative tying them; show them the same ones in a different order and you get a whole different story, possibly with entirely different actors.

The key differentiation between game-forms, and I mean that as a very loose differentiation, is how much emphasis is the GM/Host/Director/Holyhock God putting on creating a series of experiences that seem to implicate their desired retelling.  In some genres/games/systems, like superheroes, the original medium itself is highly directed, very strongly near-linear in storytelling experience, so its just and proper the things that seek to emulate that feel do so.  Other genres (typified by games like Sorcerer, with a heavy emphasis on character-specific experiences) focus on more organic growth of experiences whose final form is less based on an overall direction and more on "where you end up," with the "story" weaving itself retroactively (and cooperatively).

I'll come out and reveal myself to be a Forge heretic by not suggesting the latter is somehow more spiritually pure or more fun than the former, just different.  And that difference can be leveraged to enhance the overall experience of the game (ie. more people leave the venue saying, "Damn, wasn't that cool?").  Ultimately, this is the only important measure.

[Bruce Baugh]

I think that this issue IS important, in so far as providing such mechanics give permission to the players and GM's to engage in a kind of power sharing, that in my opinion, provides an even richer data pool that increases the chances that the participants will all walk away with enough 'stuff' to consturct a good personal story from.

I'm curious to see you thoughts on this.

Well, given that I'm very happy with Adventure, you've already seen most of my thoughts on the subject, really.

I think it's good to discuss such things explicitly even without mechanics for them, that's the other thing. So the society chapter of Gamma World includes advice on ways to involve players in creating the environment and community their characters will operate in, and encouragement to experiment some, without really needing to change the rules about how such things actually do get built whoever does the building.

(I think Aberrant had other problems, most importantly the presence of too-powerful NPCs and a developer who was too enamored of them and not nearly enough interested in rad opportunities for the PCs, but that's a separate sort of failure.)

I suspect, though I do not feel deeply confident about saying this for sure yet, that when players and GM think about the story of the game as something about the game rather than something in the game, power-sharing of this sort becomes easier. When the GM realizes that neither the setting nor the plots and plans are the story, then there are fewer hang-ups there. Obviously this is not the only reason to favor power-sharing, since people discuss it for other reasons. QED. :) But it's one of the reasons I personally find it interesting and fun.

[Jason Lee]

"Simmy?" How is the recognition of the fact that a roleplaying game IS, in fact, an experience (composed of a series of experiences) "simmy?"  That's a confusion of the medium for the message in the most egregious of ways, willfully and with malice aforethought.

Welcome to Forge!

Now that that's out of the way I can yell at you! ;).

The Simmy bit is my interpretation of roleplaying as the creation of a piece of life, or a mini-life, that you can then use to weave into a story in the literary sense but didn't originally unfold in that fashion.  The Simmy bit is my angle on the definition of story, and the bits of Bruce's point that appeals to me.

Funny, I thought I'd feel more like yelling considering how malicious I actually am.

[Mike Holmes]

The definition of Narrativism is that the player be allowed to make decisions that are pertinent to him, the player (not the character, neccessarily), in terms of emotionally compelling material. Thus, Narrativism points out precisely that "Story" by it's definition is metagame.

The difference, if any, between what you describe and Narrativism, is that with Narrativism, the story is created in-game, by concentrating on what makes a good story for the players moment by moment. Instead of looking back at play, and assembling the story from elements that were of interest, all the elements that occur are what would be assembled post play.

Now, that doesn't mean that all Narrativism creates all "story" all the time. Mixed in with play are Sim events. But what the player demanding Narrativism wants is the ability to be able to create story whenever they feel like it.

As a possible tangent, note that this does not in any way mean that a player has to be able to influence anything in the game besides their character. The "traditional" power split can remain for the most part in Narrativism. What cannot be controlled by the GM, however, are the answers to the relevant questions. The player must be free to choose any direction to go on any decision of moral weight to the character.

This is the area often reserved for the GM. The "right" to manipulate the environment in such a way as to be able to control the story. To promote Narrativism, the GM must nevr use this power to take away player control of such decisions.

Mike

[Johannes]

Hi,

I think that some terms used in narratology and literary reception theory/phenomenology of reading could be useful. These are basic consepts that have been renamed a dozen times by various scholars. I hvae chosen the words arbitarily from the tradition and I know the concepts have other names for them also. By this post I am NOT saying that you use the word story in a wrong way. I just want to contribute by suggesting a clerarer terminology.

Story = a fictional (imaginary, pretended) world with a temporal dimension (events). The event-matter of the narrative. This includes also all the inner worlds of characters.

Discourse = the representation of the story. In a novel this is what is written on the pages. In a RPG this includes the in-game narrative discourse and in-character dialog and possibly stuff like maps and illustrations.

Concretization = the individual reading of a work of art (novel, RPG etc.). This is what the reader/player gets when he uses his imagination and interpretation to fill in the gaps of the discourse.

Some interesting debates:

Which is first story or discourse?
- No consensus here. I would say that if you are the author then story will come before discourse but if you are the reader then you contruct the story from the discourse.

What is the difference between story and concretization?
First of all concretization includes also other stuff than just the fictional event-matter. Concretization is the "meaning" of the text which emerges in the mind of the reader. Not just events and characters but interpretation also. (LoR is about hobbits and elves but it is also about courage and the nature of good and evil.)

It is also arguable that you cannot have story without concretization because concretization is automatic during the reading of the discourse. However it makes sense that you must have something to tell about before you can tell anything. Maybe it is best to associate the term story with player as author and concretization with player as reciever (reader).

[deadpanbob]

I suspect, though I do not feel deeply confident about saying this for sure yet, that when players and GM think about the story of the game as something about the game rather than something in the game, power-sharing of this sort becomes easier. When the GM realizes that neither the setting nor the plots and plans are the story, then there are fewer hang-ups there. Obviously this is not the only reason to favor power-sharing, since people discuss it for other reasons. QED. :) But it's one of the reasons I personally find it interesting and fun.

Thanks.  It's interesting to try and parse out the elements of the story (setting, plots, plans, events etc) and think about how those elements come together to either spontaneously form a story either during play or afterwords in the minds of the players.  I've been trying to conceptualize not only what these elements are - but think about how control of those elements have traditionally been split between players and GM, and to what degree providing an explicit mechanic within the game context to share control of those elements helps produce a more satisfying experience.

One of the interesting things I've run into with the group of people that I traditionally play with is a hesitancy to take up control of elements traditioanlly reserved for the GM.  I've got a game design I've playtested with a fairly strong and explicit set of mechanics that facilitate this type of sharing - and the players have rarely made use of the mechanics.  Interestingly enough, the times we've played Adventure! produced similar results - with the players seemingly afraid to use the Dramatic Editing feature - almost like they expected me (the GM) to punish them or their characters for doing so.

Perhaps that's the price I pay for having subtly and not-so-subtly forced my group to tell my stories - with little regard for my players tastes and/or desires.

Cheers.