Alternative Definitions: Desire, Outcome, Play, Story

[deadpanbob]

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.

Johannes -

This is an interesting take on the taxonomy of story as applied to RPGs.  If you've read Ron's essays regarding his theories of RPG design, you know that he (and a lot of folks around The Forge) seems to totally eschew the use of the term Story as meaningful in any sense when discussing RPGs.

I think that finding a way to functionalize this term, so broadly accepted by the RPG community as part of (if not the point of to some) role-playing.  Of course, the argument could be made that ascribing any meaning to events that occur in an RPG setting is not necessary to having a good experience.

It seems to me, that using your definitions above, Discourse is really the only sufficient condition required within the context of role-playing.

Thanks for the good thoughts.

Cheers.

[Bruce Baugh]

To illustrate a point about the interpretation of events, I'd like to point folks at this way cool page about a http://www-bcs.mit.edu/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html">checkerboard illusion - it shows how much of what we deal with is things we do to the world rather than properties of the world itself.

My personal feeling is that there's a big warning sign of trouble when folks feel that they ought not use words like "story". The gaming public at large will continue to do so, for one thing, and I want to talk to gamers at large about what it is we do when we game. Hence my efforts to use an absolute minimum of jargon, and to shape the usage of common words in directions that I think a lot of the folks I share a hobby with can grasp with minimal effort. There is, obviously, a place for far more specialized thinking and analysis - I'm drawing on rather jargon-laden work in history, literature, philosophy, and biology for this kind of thing. But I'm happiest in the role of synthesizer and popularizer.

[Mike Holmes]

That sounds fine. What would you suggest is the definition of Story that most RPG players will be able to grok best? What do they mean when they say story?

Mike

[Ian Charvill]

To illustrate a point about the interpretation of events, I'd like to point folks at this way cool page about a http://www-bcs.mit.edu/people/adelson/checkershadow_illusion.html">checkerboard illusion - it shows how much of what we deal with is things we do to the world rather than properties of the world itself.

I've always felt optical illusions are a bad example of the influence of interpretation on perspective.  Optical illusions are striking precisely because they are exeptional - ordinarily, a sqaure would look darker or lighter because it is darker or lighter.

Kurosawa's film Rashomon, the sequence it influenced in Tarantino's Jackie Brown, Nabakov's book Pale Fire, and so on, are probably better examples in terms of perspective and story.  There are probably better pop culture examples, but my brain won't come up with any.

I'm tempted to reference CNN vs the Iraqi information minister, but I'd say someone there is conscious of distorting the story.

[Bruce Baugh]

Mike, I think that most gamers mean something very much like this when they talk about the story of a game:

Everything that happened that led up to an interesting climax - or led up to its absence, if the game fizzled - and any incidentals that strike the teller as interesting or cool or otherwise memorable. It usually includes however the game got started, even if those early events don't bear much on what happened later, and how the game ended, if it's not still going on.

That is, it's the parts of the game that had intellectual or emotional appeal, and very often without a lot of separation between "so there we were, poised on the brink of the Canyon of Sighs as the first of the waking dragons flew into view..." on the character level and "there I was, still sick as a dog and with terrible luck all night, but this one time I pulled out a critical..." on the player level. At least I find that in routine conversation most gamers flip around among the levels without much fuss.

It's worth noting that I'm in search of a taxonomy which easily fits to vague and haphazard priorities, as well as accommodating more precise focus.

[Johannes]

I believe that to most "story-oriented" gamers Story is a chain of caused events that have significance from the PoV of their characters. (Here I use tha word Story in a more general sense than above trying to illustrate what people usually mean by it. )
 
Narratologist Marie-Laure Ryan has a paraphrased it by saying that a change in the thruth values of the fictional world (an event) is plot-functional if and only if it causes a change in the thruth values of the inner world(s) of at least one character.

Here's an example that will clarify the modal jargon of Ryan:

1 GM describes that a leaf falls from a tree.
2 GM describes that a leaf falls from a tree and a PC realizes that she will also have to die some day - like the falling leaf.

See the difference? 1 is not plot-functional and 2 is. The events themselves are not enough to make a plot. It is usually up to each individual player to make a story out of the events.  Events are produced collectively in discourse but they become a story in the private concretization. Prototypical GM regulates the discourse like a benevolent dictator but he rarely has power over the inner worlds of the chracters which rarely even directly surface in the discourse.

Games with lots of personal relations and social interaction offer themselves to plot-significance easily because social life is about the conflict, communication and change of inner worlds. That's why these games are felt to be more story-like. Dungeon crawling on the other hand rarely puts the inner worlds of the characters on the stake. Conflict is moslty external and physical. That's why hack n' slash is not felt to be story-like even if it usually involves lots of caused events.

Sorry for bringing in more jargon...

[Zamiel]

Games with lots of personal relations and social interaction offer themselves to plot-significance easily because social life is about the conflict, communication and change of inner worlds. That's why these games are felt to be more story-like. Dungeon crawling on the other hand rarely puts the inner worlds of the characters on the stake. Conflict is moslty external and physical. That's why hack n' slash is not felt to be story-like even if it usually involves lots of caused events.

Yes, but doesn't that then directly point to this as, not only a false, but unduly pejorative stance as regards "dungeon crawling?"

After all, traditionally, crawling dungeons is done for the express purpose of creating truth-value changes in the world. My character gains a new toy. My character gains a level. My character kills the monster. My character stops the Big Bad. All of these are very completely and directly changes in the truth-values in a character's experience and PoV. In fact, that change in innate status is why people pursue them.

At heart, I think this debate, on this particular issue, comes down to what can best be described as "snotty prejudice."  "Story" gets ascribed by the "hoity-toity" crowd as all about feelings, and drama, and wrist-to-forehead, while, really, its not tied to any of those things and the "just a series of events" of a good ol' fashioned dungeon delving massacre is just as valid a narrative as that created by the "series of events" that occures in the most convoluted Soap Opera.  They both represent what is simply a series of events concretized after the fact.

(Donjon, incidently, may be the perfect counter-example to the unfair bashing of dungeon crawling -- its specifically designed to facilitate the crawling of dungeons while, simultaneously, being mechanically all about all the things the Operatists are always claiming for themselves, to wit narrative control, interpersonal characterization, and representation.)

[Ian Charvill]

In films, in the absence of a voice-over or similar device, you never get to see the inner worlds of the characters.  At all.  You see what the characters do, and how they react to things, but these are all external.  Any assertion about the "inner life of film characters" is inference.

So the claim that events are plot-functional rests on inference of a change in the inner world of the character drawn from their actions, speech, facial expressions.  Hence any event is plot-functional that we can argue is plot-functional.  If that circularity is bad, it gets worse in gaming.

In role playing we get to say what is and isn't important to the inner lives of our characters.  In author stance this is overt and explicit; in actor stance this is covert and implicit.  Thus, whatever we assert is plot-functional is plot-functional.

I'm going to suggest that we're going down a blind alley making appeals to literary theory or cognitive theory, especially if we're pulling jargn in.  For the taxonomy to be useful, it needs to be accessible.

[Blake Hutchins]

Hello all,

Interesting thread.  Some thoughts follow.  

"Story" in roleplaying games is, due to the number of variables engaged, an emergent property.  The players as characters all will have, of necessity, differing viewpoints on the story, much as multiple POV characters in a nove.  However, the added dimensions include (1) the player viewpoint suspended over the character viewpoint, and (2) the dance of the various narrative voices and resolution mechanics in controlling the development of events.  Every observer to the game will come away with a different take on the story.  To the extent common perception of events create a narrative skeleton, you have a "core" story.

Depending on the transparency and maturity of the group, you can absolutely have access to internal character and player voice and motivation as part of the story development, but for these elements to become story, I think the group needs to be intentional or at least consciously aware regarding characterization and audience mode.

The dungeon-style game resembles a wargame more than a story per se.  There's no intent to produce a try-fail cycle, little connection to character motives beyond loot-kill-steal, no emphasis on characters undergoing emotional or spiritual changes, no increase in stakes as events go forward.  The characters remain static pieces except for their "will to power."  Players in these games may look back and put the events into a retrospective narrative framework as they communicate their experiences to other people, but that's less about an in-game story and more about post hoc anecdotal interpretation.

So I suggest this emergent quality of "story" can be intentionally invoked via conscious play and mechanics optimized to facilitate that emergence.  Further, I think it obvious that different layers and angles of story result from the viewpoint differences of character/player, GM/player, playerA/playerB.  For story to exist contemporaneous with play, I would expect the group members to be aware of both an evolving structure and the significance of their decisions on that evolution, AND that the decisions and their outcome are significant to the PLAYERS and GM.  Ron's jazz analogy evokes some parallels, with "melody" equating to what I've called "structure," "musician" equating to "player," and "instrument" equating to "character."

Getting deeper into definition, here is my somewhat lumpy suggestion: an RPG story is an emergent narrative structure resulting from a sequence of events holding significance to players AND characters, wherein escalating tension and character growth can be seen and intentionally evoked by players as events proceed toward a resolution of the significant conflicts raised during play.

Best,

Blake

[Bruce Baugh]

I think it's extremely unwise to overlook the story possibilities in dungeon-crawling. Here are our heroes, who start off at 1st level with more determination than ability. These are heroes! Or at least they've got the potential to be. Here is a mysterious and threatening environment. Here are monsters. Bad monsters! And they get worse the further you go!

Drawing on Scott McCloud's notion of "iconic" characters from Understanding Comics, I'd say that this is a setup that is really, really easy for a lot of players to identify with and to derive satisfaction from. The characters are detailed in capability but not in (so to speak) their features, which makes it easy for players to write themselves into that equipment and those abilities. There's a reason that so many dungeon-crawlers speak of their experiences in the first person rather than the third when they're telling their frienda bout the game later - there really is an immediacy there.

To the extent that games support and encourage the development for more nuanced personalities, we actually make this particular kind of identification harder and have to compensate for it with other satisfactions. In the meantime, there they are having exciting times in exotic places and doing cool stuff, and I'd call that success in building stories. Simple, usually - though not always, there are some quite sophisticated plots in dungeon crawls these days, with room for moral ambiguity, significantly different outcomes in response to different character choices (not just happenstance of dice, actual IC choices), and so on - but engaging. And that matters to me, when I think about the story potential in gaming. I want folks to have that much fun, in more dimensions.

[Zamiel]

The dungeon-style game resembles a wargame more than a story per se.  There's no intent to produce a try-fail cycle, little connection to character motives beyond loot-kill-steal, no emphasis on characters undergoing emotional or spiritual changes, no increase in stakes as events go forward.  The characters remain static pieces except for their "will to power."  Players in these games may look back and put the events into a retrospective narrative framework as they communicate their experiences to other people, but that's less about an in-game story and more about post hoc anecdotal interpretation.

Now, how is this not a deliberate bias made flesh? What you're suggesting here is that movies like Saving Private Ryan and Blackhawk Down are "not stories; both of them reproduce in most ways the central direction of the "dungeon crawl." The central goal, the boat-loads of violence on the way (and the way back), the simplistic motives.  Unless you're suggesting the entire genre of "war films" contains nothing but storyless series-of-events, you're just saying "I don't like dungeon-crawls" and trying to couch it in terms that imply "and neither should anyone else."

Let's examine the meat of your claom though, from the simplest possible counter-example: the fact that, indeed, wargames do create stories.  Ask any wargamer what happened in their last game -- it'll not only come out as a series-of-eents narrative, but often (very, very often) as a narrative about characters making choices, about characters failing when they could have succeeded (your try-fail cycle), characters making moral choices sometimes, immoral choices others.  No, you're not going to get characters talking about their spiritual epiphanies (though you could), but you will get people talking about these stories that have occured to them in their experience animatedly, enjoyably, and with a lot more pleasure than you seem to imply is possible.

So, let's take your closing paragraph here:

Getting deeper into definition, here is my somewhat lumpy suggestion: an RPG story is an emergent narrative structure resulting from a sequence of events holding significance to players AND characters, wherein escalating tension and character growth can be seen and intentionally evoked by players as events proceed toward a resolution of the significant conflicts raised during play.

How is this not exactly what we see when we examine the after-action reports of wargamers? The narrative emerges from the structure of events which are experienced, which are important both to the players and the characters (since death and dismemberment are quite important events in a character's life). There is escalating tension as the characters approach their objectives, get embroiled in life-or-death conflicts. There is even character growth, if you look at wargames with morale rules ("I never expected 3-5 platoon to hold onto that ridgeline as long as they did; it was a damned miracle.") If instead you're saying that you need to see character growth in the sense of material change in a character rather than just perceptual surprise -- well, I'd refer you to entire large swaths of literature to counter that position, all of which pretty much everyone but the extremists say possess "stories." And wargames definitely come to a clear and obvious resolution, one way or another, at the achievement of the objectives or failure to do so.

In end end, really, I can but see you saying "these are stories I don't like" as a subliminal message under "these are not stories."  They're stories by all the criterion you give.

[Matt Machell]

Zamiel,

the point I think Blake is trying to make, is that these events were not stories until they were told later (and you're agreeing this, as far as I can tell). They weren't stories as they happened, just events. They had story thrust upon them retroactively, when they were recounted.

It's the difference between a person relating an anecdote, and a person setting down to write a play that addresses a theme.

The writers of Saving Private Ryan might have set out to write a story that threw into sharp relief the question "What is one man's life worth?", they probably didn't run a tactical scenario and work out the probability of the main characters dying.

Both can produce the resulting tale, but only one aimed to do it from the start.

You can apply the same theory to a roleplaying session. You can have the events happening from the result of a tactical game or you can have the thematic question in mind at all times, grounded in the system and directing flow of play towards dealing with that question.


-Matt

[Bruce Baugh]

Matt, writers like Peter Straub and film makers like Mike Leigh sit down with the intent to produce drama but without any firm sense of how things will go. And clearly, judging from their reception by readers and viewers, they succeed. Scripting is demonstrably not necessary for the achievement of rich and satisfying work. And I've been suggesting that in any event planned and crafted works don't have an innate "story" which trumps all other possible stories in them; every reader creates their own story in the act of reading or viewing, sharing some things with creative intent, adding others of their own. Zamiel has alluded to the extent to which all memory works this way, and the body of study about perceptual mechanisms is at this point very large and well-established. Nothing in the nature of the dungeon crawl makes it any less suitable fodder for storytelling than other types of gaming situations, as nearly as I can tell.

Like Zamiel, I think we're seeing personal preferences for some kinds of art conflated with thoughts abut what's possible or desirable overall.

[Blake Hutchins]

Bruce and Zamiel (mostly Zamiel),

Let me offer a couple of points of clarification before I answer the "it's all story" argument.

1.  I did not assert that dungeon crawls rule out story.  Please parse exactly what I wrote.  The players may imagine their characters to be heroes, but the prototypical dungeon crawl offers players tactical decisions to the exclusion of anything else.  While these types of decisions can certainly be story-significant in the proper context, in the context of dungeon crawls, it is my contention they don't constitute "story."  The players may indeed view their avatars as heroes and enjoy the personalized tactical challenges from gameplay, but I think story in this case is only created after the fact via telling and embellishing one's recollections of play to another person.  This point is purely anecdotal: most of the conversations I've heard about this style of play are less about, "... and then Father Pincus realized his faith in Flurlangegghl was reawakened, which allowed him to BLAH," and more like, "...and then I made my saving throw against BLAH and got off my Wompous Blessing of Flurlangegghl...." I don't think the "post hoc story" distinction is unreasonable.  It's like the difference between telling a story and telling someone what happened when you went to the store.

2.  I am aware that some dungeon style adventures, particularly in recent years, have increased the complexity of the encounters and the "dungeon" setting, adding social or political dimensions to raise the stakes and move the context beyond loot-kill-steal.  However, I think this kind of effort underlines my contention about the lack of satisifying story structure in the baseline dungeon crawl and shows the desire to embed more opportunities for "plot-based" character growth (as opposed to leveling up).  I can sure see a lot of interesting story situations with some resemblance to dungeon crawls (confined environment, tactical threats resolved via combat and stealth) - and I've run some, as has probably anyone who has run a session of Shadowrun.

3.  Some of my best friends are 3E fans and enjoy the hell out of dungeon crawl style play.  More power to them.  I also hear great things about Rune.  I think some of these games produce in-game stories and some are little more than dressed up tactical exercises - which is fine, but the latter are not stories.  The suggestion that I've argued no one should like dungeon crawls misreads my post very badly, and it boggles the heck out of me.

Now to the meat of the response:

First, I'm puzzled by the assertion that I must hate war stories.  If I dislike dungeon crawls, and dungeon crawls focus on combat, then I must dislike any kind of story that features combat as a central experience, and therefore I must hate war stories, of which there are a plethora of excellent works in literature and film.  This line of reasoning doesn't make sense.  It assumes bias on my part and then expands that bias to reach a conclusion about works that no one would possibly confuse with the original idea.  The corollary that dungeon crawls are equivalent kinds of stories to Saving Private Ryan seems like a stretch to me.  By the same token, a game of Chess would qualify as a story under this thinking.  Actually, any game that uses non-abstract pieces makes story with this definition.  Even Poker would do so if the player imagines himself to be, say, an Old West gambler.  I have to disagree and say this definition is overbroad in the extreme.

What this analysis tells me is that we have vastly different criteria on what makes a story.  If "story" is generalized to be anything a person deems a story, then we can forget about crafting a common definition.  A game of Diplomacy doesn't tell a story.  One can, after the fact, tell a story about the game of Diplomacy one played, but that doesn't make the events of the game a story, at least not in my view.  As a writer, I conceive of story as a sequence of events that presents a character in a setting with a problem to overcome, along with some significant stakes that depend on the outcome of the problem.  The character attempts to address the problem, but meets with failure or complication.  Eventually, the character comes to some insight about the problem and makes a final attempt that either succeeds or fails in the course of some kind of climactic confrontation.  That final insight usually involves some kind of emotional or spiritual growth and a decision that flows from the resulting new perspective.

I've just described a prototypical story structure using a try-fail cycle.  It doesn't map perfectly to roleplaying games because RP games have a decentralized structure compared to the typical story in literature or film, with many authors/directors/actors contributing to the whole.  There are also issues about multiple perspective.  Players (and I include GM here for this part of the discussion) are simultaneously creators and audience, most often interacting through the agency of their characters under the guidance of the rules and the social contract.

So my contention is that wargames don't produce story.  The unit that holds out on the hill is a piece and thought of as a piece.  There's no question about it being a character with its own agenda, there's no character growth, and to the extent there's a try-fail cycle, it's purely tactical.  If you look at war stories in film, the actual themes and issues aren't about who wins or loses, especially in the historical context where we know damn well how it comes out.  War stories - the great ones - offer commentary on the human spirit, about suffering, about courage, about moral choice, about barbarity, about hope, about faith, about love and tragedy and coming of age and duty and nationalism and - well, you get the idea.  Sure, the uncertainty about major characters' survival is an important source of tension, especially when you see something like Das Boot or Enemy at the Gate.  But films and stories like that don't move their characters around like pieces on the board.  I can't imagine coming away from a game of Tactics II or Chess and saying, "What a great story."  Wargames don't have characters; they have pieces.  A player may affix personality to a piece, but that imaginative act doesn't make it a character, and it doesn't transform a wargame into a narrative.  Nor does a wargame piece undergo "character growth."  If I win a game of Chess, my surviving rook isn't a better rook for it.  The rook made no decisions, and I'm not even close to identifying myself as the noble rook.  Character growth is a lot more than "perceptual surprise," whatever that means.

But let's take a more specific example and look at Black Hawk Down.  BHD was, in large part, a story about the limitations of modern military power, focusing on a force trapped in hostile territory and pitted against vastly superior numbers under confusing circumstances.  It was about survival, and it was about leadership and the kinds of erroneous strategic assumptions that can cause incredible havoc.  It was about cultural differences.  It was about the difference between "elite" troops and the more "average" grunts.  It was, you might say, very much about the fog of war.  I'd call very little of it simplistic.  In fact, it was a hideously complex situation from start to finish.  And it turned out to be a hell of a story - because the original events in Somalia were compiled and written into a book, which was then made into a film, both of which presented it as a story, not a documentary.

So let's review the basic differences between wargame and story, at least on my level.  Story has the components of plot, character, protagonist, antagonist, situation, problem, try-fail sequence, character growth, resolution as an outcome of growth.  The character growth doesn't need to be profound, incidentally, and some stories focus on showing how the character doesn't grow - in my experience, these are almost all tragedies, because the reader/viewer gets to see how the character's growth would have made the story world a better place, had the character actually given in to change.  Wargame has pieces, exclusively tactical decisions, the player controlling multiple pieces, a board/map, victory conditions, player v. player contest.

Another point to consider is that the discussions of roleplaying game and story strike me as being concerned with conscious creation or experience of "story" during play, not after play is done.  Any RP experience can be retrofitted into a "story" if someone applies a broad enough definition, but that makes the whole story thing sort of pointless in the first place, doesn't it?

Finally some little disclaimers I shouldn't have to put out there, but will do for the sake of making sure this "bias" thing goes to its grave.

Disclaimer #1:  Wargames are fine and good.  Lots of people enjoy them.  Lots of very sharp people.  Ever looked at the rules for Squad Leader?  I don't have the fortitude to absorb them; they frighten the bejeezsus out of me.

Disclaimer #2:  Dungeon crawls are fine and good.  As I wrote above, lots of my friends love 'em to death and subsequent resurrection.

Disclaimer #3:  Stories are fine and good.  Lots of folks like 'em.

Thanks for the discussion, folks.

Best,

Blake

[Bruce Baugh]

Blake, when you say that you don't think of "war stories" as "stories", then I do read that as a matter of taste being reified.

Also, it's by no means true that dungeon crawls are purely tactical exercise. Ever since I started roleplaying at all, I've seen folks dealing with personality, alignment, and other matters besides optimized efficiency for combat and related tasks. Other games do a much better job of supporting it than D&D, but people have always done it, in varying degrees of regularity and reliability, and it looms large in a lot of gamers' stories about their games.