Towards a Semiotics of Roleplaying Games

[ejh]

I tried to work this out years ago but there was no Forge then.  I'm going back to it now in my blog.  Please feel free to comment, but don't be too surprised if I am a little self-absorbed and immune to critical input on this, because I'm trying with great difficulty to piece together ideas that I have worked out inside me but which are pretty inarticulate.

First article:

http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/archives/001080.html

Second article:

http://www.puddingbowl.org/ed/archives/001085.html

As far as I've gotten, I have barely touched narrative and I haven't touched roleplaying at all, I'm just articulating the background concepts that I'm working with.

This is all mostly orthogonal to GNS theory; it's more about the mechanisms of Exploration itself (which is the bedrock of G, N, and S) rather than about the higher level of motivations and focus for Exploration, but I might have a chance to throw in some input on ideas that have been floated around the forge, e.g. I think that the Lumpley Principle may only get it half right.

[Hunter Logan]

Your ignorance about art is repellant and your choice of terms is offensive. I particularly bristle at your inarticulate use of the term "art-fags."

Edit: Sanitized for your safety.

[Gordon C. Landis]

hmm, I'm not an art expert myself, and I confess I got very lost reading those passages, but  . . .

Anyway, let's go back and look at representational art. I said that representational art was all about what it was about, that you looked through it and not at it, and so on.

Every working representational artist who read that paragraph, be he or she a photographer, a painter, a cartoonist, or an illustrator, yelled "BULLSHIT!"

Logan, isn't he calling bullshit on his own earlier (to my ear) faux-ranting?  Perhaps agreeing with you that the early terms are ignorant and offensive?

Now, I have no idea if the later clarifications are actually better and less ignorant to someone who knows about art, but it looked like a pretty clear self-dismissal of the first approach (representational *through*, abstract *at*) to me . . .

Gordon

[ejh]

Hunter --

I can't be sure, but I think what you're telling me here is that I have to more clearly mark where I'm being ironic and where I'm being sincere.

If I read you correctly, you are reading as sincere a section where I present a naive understanding of representational art, which I proceed to demolish in the subsequent paragraphs.  But the irony wasn't clearly marked -- and because of that I came across to you as sufficiently ignorant and offensive that you tossed it aside in disgust before you got to the point where I rebutted everything I'd said up till that point.

Thanks for giving to me straight what a negative reaction that caused.

If you did in fact read through the whole thing and disagree with all of it, not just the first bit, that's a different matter, but it doesn't look from your post like you found it worth pursuing that far.

I appreciate the feedback.

Ed

[Walt Freitag]

[Edited to note: cross-posted with Ed's post.]

Well, I found the articles an interesting start. I think I can see where this is going, toward examining role playing gaming as "shared imaginative space" in a new way -- not just shared between the participants, which is our usual meaning of that phrase, but also shared (or as the articles call it, occupying a "middle space") between the tangible representations of play (concrete in form, abstract in meaning) and the imagined world seen "through" play (abstract in form, concrete in meaning).

Hunter, perhaps you didn't read far enough to realize that the simplistic view of "two types of art" outlined in the initial paragraphs were just a straw man rhetorical device, to be refuted and replaced with a more sophisticated idea later on. And I agree that "art-fags" might be ill-advised and insensitive (especially since its context as part of the ignorant-view-to-be-refuted is apparently not clear to all readers). However, I don't think insults in return are called for. The piece and the theories it outlines are obviously far from finished. I'd be interested (and I'd wager that Ed would be even more so) in your views of where Ed has erred or oversimplified in his statements about art. A blunt declaration of his ignorance, by contrast, adds nothing to the discourse.

- Walt

[Ben Lehman]

So far... well... you've defined semantic spaces (I think) but that's it...  So I must withhold judgement.  I like your writing style.

Any hints as to where you're going with this?

Well, to take the one, I also suspect that the Lumpley principle is half right, so I'm wondering if we're on the same page.  Some day when I'm not stupidly busy I'll post about that.

Of course, I'd use the language of calculus, not semiotics, but I'm a science geek.

yrs--
--Ben

[ejh]

OK, Walt, you can just write the rest of the damn piece, cause you're already following my thoughts ahead of me. :)

But seriously, I'm not sure where it's going to end up.  Maybe nowhere, maybe retreading the obvious, I'm seriously just trying to sort out in my own head what it all means.  We'll see if that turns out to be anything that's enlightening to anyone else. :)

[lumpley]

Yes.  Write more.

(But don't leave me in suspense!  Somebody start a thread about why the Lumpley Principle is half wrong!  I gotta know!)

-Vincent

[Hunter Logan]

Hi Ed,

Okay. Yes, the irony could have been better marked. I agree with the discussion about frames. The rest...

I have to say that I don't "look through" any work in the manner you describe. I look at all work with a formal eye. I don't discriminate between abstract and representational. I always look at how it is regardless of what it is. I look at composition, craftsmanship, use of shapes, value, color, etc. I try to do the same thing when I look at a game design, though I admit my patience for game designs is far less than my patience for art. I never met a painting that demanded me to read through a hundred page manual.

As the discussion that follows might make your eyes bleed, you are free to run away and I will take no offense at all. Yet, I think all this should be said.

To the rest, I can only say that the subject matter is not as cut-and-dried as the article suggests. Abstract painters may use recognizable objects in their abstract compositions, and realist painters certainly use abstract design in their compositions. The advantages of photographic techniques have been explored in painting, and photographic techniques have been used as a basis for traditional work (both abstract and representational); but fine art aesthetics have been applied to photography as well. This has resulted in some very interesting work. For the quickest way to see all this in play, I suggest that readers look at the work of Charles Sheeler. He was a Time/Life photographer and he used his photos as a basis for drawings and paintings. He cropped photos and rendered wonderful scenes, but whether his work was abstract or figurative, his primary interest was always to create strong abstract designs.

To the issues of photographic cropping, I suggest looking at the work of Surrealist artists who used the human torso as monster or as a subject meant to suggest other things. You've probably seen cropped images of  a female torso with no arms, head, or body below the waist and similar works using cropped images to suggest a lot of repressed sexuality. The Surrealists were a weird bunch, but some of them made excellent art.

Now a comment: All art, 2d or 3d, representational or not, has an underlying abstract design. This is the collection of shapes and colors placed next to each other to produce a composition. It is this underlying composition that resonates with people and causes a piece of work to look good or bad.

If you're still reading, set aside perceived limitations. Even though an image is placed on a 2d plane, the image can create a surprising sense of depth or space. Look at DuChamp's The Bride (1920s). It's an abstract painting. At first glance, it looks like a jumble of shapes rendered in neutral greens and reds. Yet, further study reveals a great illusion of space, strong sense of 3D form, and intelligent use of value and composition - All that in an abstract painting.

Now, you have to realize that the sense of illusionistic space has been present in art since Giotto painted his rendition of the Madonna Enthroned in the early 14th century. Even the "blend space" is subject to invasion. Caravaggio and his Baroque contemporaries tried to use perspective and sense of space to blur the lines between the illusionistic space in the painting and real world space. 19th century painters embraced the idea of Trompe L'oeil, a French term meaning "To fool the eye." They would create illusionistic paintings of scenes in shallow relief. These would be rendered as realistically as possible. When viewed from a few feet away, the images don't look like images; they look like the real thing.

If you're really interested, I could add detail. For the Trompe L'oeil work successfully, the viewer must look at the thing from the front, and it must show a shallow space. This is because of the eye's optics. When the eye looks into a deep space, it must make adjustments to focus on objects in the distance. When looking into a shallow space, the eye doesn't have to make those adjustments. Of course, early perspective painters like Masaccio didn't know this; but it didn't matter because people were still impressed with the representations of illusionistic space on a 2d plane.

These realizations lead to understanding of some problems. The "hey, that guy's got an arm sticking out of his head" problem happens because the camera doesn't adjust the value of the offending arm to push the arm back in the picture's illusionistic space or do anything to make the arm part of the composition. It does much the opposite, gathering several shades of value into one solid tone. So, if the arm was pale and well-lit, it will show as a very bright, solid shape that appears to float over the picture.

Now, how does all this relate to game design? I don't know, but DuChamp probably did. He stopped painting in the late 1920s and went off to play chess. You might also want to look into the fluxus group. They did a lot of investigation of art and games, patterns, some really nifty 3D design. And any other thoughts I had about this topic are  http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6541&start=45">here.

I'm tired. Thank you and good night.

[ejh]

Hunter -- thanks for giving me another chance.

What you're talking about at length is exactly the sort of thing that I was trying to suggest in my article: that the "looking at" vs "looking through" distinction is a false one, that we are doing neither and both, or rather something more complicated than either.

I guess what I'm saying about visual art is such extremely old news to a working artist that it sounds kind of silly.

[Valamir]

Hey EJ, thanks for starting this discussion.  I haven't gotten through all of your article yet and quite honestly my brain is so underwired in the art appreciation arena that I don't know whether I'd be able to contribute anything useful to it.  

But this is definitely the kinds of discussions we encourage here and about a topic I don't remember ever coming up before in this format.  So kudos and please continue.  When you get the articles into a more finalized form I hope you consider submitting it as an article here.

[Hunter Logan]

Hi Ed,

No harm. I didn't really need to respond so abruptly. Anyway, I think you're on the right track, but to make your point with authority, I think you'll need to expand your research. More sources, more references, bibliography, lots of notes. You should defintiely look at Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, too. It's a real eye-opener with respect to cartoons and sequential art.

[ejh]

Hunter --

I just read Understanding Comics about two weeks ago and that's right in the back of my mind.  I didn't go into great detail on this because all I was interested in was establishing was the notion of a third space which is linked to, and is a blend of, both the expression and the content planes of the representation.  Visual art is not the topic of the discussion, it is only a useful source of examples.  I want to move away from visual art and towards roleplaying games as I go on.

Valamir --

As I just mentioned to Hunter, the art thing is just an area I want to use to establish concepts before moving on to RPGs.  You'll note that in the latest article I try to move from visual representations to textual representations.  I'm getting closer!

[John Kim]

This is an excellent pair of articles.  

It is approaching RPGs through the metaphor of visual arts, which I think is an interesting take.  On the flip side of this, we can approach it through narrative theory, which is an approach I was considering.  Narrative theory has in the past been focussed on the novel as a form, but there have been efforts over the past several decades to expand the form.  

Anyhow, a parallel to your representational/abstract dichotomy would be the distinction made by formalist critics between "fabula" and "sjuzhet".  These are Russian terms taken from the early Russian formalists such as Victor Shklovsky and Vladamir Propp.  Here "fabula" is the underlying story, i.e. the characters and world as conceived in a pre-verbal state.  "sjuzhet" is the discourse, i.e. the expression/representation of those.  

Now, in the same way that you say that representational/abstract is not valid, we can poke holes in the concept of fabula/sjuzhet.  It is not necessarily true that the author has a complete nonverbal conception of the story which he merely tries to represent.  The process of expression changes what is represented.  Our conception of the objects and events described is structured by the manner of telling.  Historians discovered this as well: that there is no such thing as a neutral telling of events.  Inherently a story is made out of the events.  

However, even though the dichotomy is not strict, it is still useful.  Traditionally, I think that these splits offer considerable insight into many of the struggles between story/drama/narrative and simulation/exploration/world.

[ejh]

Thanks, John!  I've heard of that distinction secondhand through Umberto Eco, who kept the term 'fabula' and mercifully used another term for the "sjuzhet" concept -- a term I can't remember though.

I hadn't thought of these as parallel to the distinctions I was drawing, but I can see the resemblance.

Hopefully I'll get to the point where I'm actually discussing RPGs soon. :)