Narrativism for the Soul

[Calithena]

Hi, Ejh. I'll respond to this once just because I misspoke in my previous post, but this is really on to a new topic - Vance's fiction and the Dying Earth stories in particular - and since the Forge has no 'Off Topic' section (intentionally from what I can tell) I think we won't be able to continue the discussion to its bitter end.

First of all, Vance himself (qua author) does have an ethos, and it's one that's projected fairly consistently across most of his stories (most of which I have read). It's rather like the ethos of Odysseus, viewed through a lens consisting of twentieth century America (fast receding), science fiction and fantasy, and P.G. Wodehouse.  

The only thing that causes problems is that when one talks about Vance's fiction that includes the Cugel stories, and those are different. They're IMO a hard case for the 'Egri school' of fiction no less than for Narrativist play, unless I'm just being obtuse - and the fact that Ron has suggested that DERPG is a kind of complicated case of Narrativism seems to support at least some kind of acknowledgement of that claim.

The Cugel stories and Vance's other fiction do actually contain very many value judgments, including a negative one on the very hut-dwelling contemplators of the Overworld you mention in your post. But the Cugel stories do not pass judgment on Cugel and indeed suggest that everyone in the Dying Earth is either amoral or a rube. That's part of the joy of that setting (not Vance's work more generally, however).

However, what I'm calling 'amorality' in the Cugel stories is actually a form of morality according to the Socratic conception - self-interest informs all decision-making, without any sort of veil or compromise. So again, the stories are driven by certain kinds of conflict - will indolence, arrogance, rakishness, sloth, or pettifoggery prevail? As well as the narrative conventions, themselves involving certain kinds of conflict, Ron observed in a thread where we discussed this previously, etc.

I'm really tempted to say that the glory of the Cugel stories just is the glory of being a Dickweed Protagonist, at a high and stylish level that leaves the less sophisticated and less clever dickweeds in the dust.

But now I'm outside the thread, and I'll stop, and won't discuss Vance here any longer. Let me just say that when I wrote 'Vance' in my previous post I should have written 'Vance in the Cugel stories', and that in those stories a slightly different ethos is at play than in most of Vance's other fiction. Though there are plenty of "NPCs" in Vance's other books that fit the Cugel mold, because Vance has a certain view of human nature more generally that informs his work as well. OK, enough.

Great post to start the thread, Paganini!

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi all,

I'm not sure if "passing a moral judgement" is vital for Narrativism.  I haven't read any Vance, but I've read a lot of Shakespeare and from his texts, I have no idea if Shakespeare was  a very moral man or a fantastic story teller  who knew how to grab his audience by the throat with moral issues.

And that, for me, is the key.  What matters is the *exploration* of the moral issues -- Which Shakespeare does in spades.

(That all said, I must say this: I'm beginning to see how referencing fiction can really gum up the works of understanding these RPG modes because the game modes are really quite unique kinds of experiences.  The examples of fiction, while sometimes relevant in illustrating an idea, often cloud what the actual event of *playing* Sim or Nar RPG mode is like.  I'm starting to discipl;ine myself away from such references, because my head gets filled with the experience of reading a novel or seeing a movie -- and that experience has nothing at all to do in a concrete and blunt way, with the experience of playing Nar or Sim.)

Referring to the experience of play, Ian wrote:

"Narrativism seems to me about being jazzed that you get to be the one who make the moral decisions, who gets to engage with the moral questions. In concrete terms, this seems to require heavy player authorship - either by author stance play or by front-loading the character with sufficient potential for moral issues to arise."

I would add to this, the enjoyment of seeing how other people are exploring the Premise at the table.  Because everyone has a character (or characters), and each person is playing from a different point of view (either from his or her actgual point of view, or simply, to provide thematic counterpuncture, purposefully exploring the Premise in ways no one else at the table is exploring it), it's possible for me to see the Premise explored in ways I would never thought of exploring it.  (In fact, I truly think that by definition, a GM and two players will definitely provide exploration of Premise that will surprise each other.)

This to me is a major component of Nar play -- and it produces those "leaning in" moment I keep referencing.  By exploring a single Premise, and then discovering all the permutations possible in responding to the Premise, I find myself surprised moment to moment.  This in turn feeds my next choice for for my PC in ways I might not have thought of had I not seen the player of a PC in another scene do something uncanny with the premise.

Best,
Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

The judgment issue should be confined to the persons experiencing the Premise emotionally. The notion of what an author intends to convey by providing fictional material is I think a horrible gaping abyss to be avoided at all cost.

The fact that all members of the role-playing group can be considered audience* in these terms is what we should focus on for Narrativist play.

Best,
Ron

* This has absolutely nothing to do with Stance.

[Walt Freitag]

All right, I'll play along. I've had to think hard about my own "I get it" wording, because it's different from how I portray Narrativism and other creative agendas when I write about them. (IOW, I've been doing a lot of filtering and translation back and forth.)

At the time I was absorbing GNS, I was also very interested in transactional models, and thought that there might be benefits to combining the two. Didn't really get very far with that. Nothing new seems to be added to GNS by incoporating a transactional perspective. The space is already covered.

But the effort had one lasting effect on my "my-own-words" for Narrativism (and other Creative Agendas). Which is that I think of the totality of a participant's behavior in play (in character and out of character) as a form of expression -- speech, if you will.

Creative Agenda asks, what is the participant speaking (expressing himself) about, through play?

If it's primarily about the participant's own capabilities, it's Gamism.

If it's primarily about the shared imagined space itself, it's Simulationism.

If it's primarily about a Premise question of emotional or moral import, it's Narrativism.

The difference between asking, "how is a player behaving?" and "what is the player's Creative Agenda?" is similar to the difference between asking "what is (a speaker) saying" and "what is (the speaker) talking about?" The first has to be interpreted in context to determine the second.

Coherence/incoherence: Think of a conversation. If two people are talking about the same thing but saying different things about it, you've got discourse (as long as they're also listening to each other). If two people are talking about different things, you've got noise, even if they appear to be agreeing about what they're saying.

Instances of play: If you want to interpret what someone's talking about, it's not enough to focus on a word here and there, or a sentence or two. A full expression of an idea can take time -- perhaps a paragraph, perhaps a novel. Analogously, the instance of play is an amount of play sufficient for participants to clearly express themselves.

It makes it all seem very simple, to me.

- Walt

edit: Oh, and "address" as in "address Premise" then just means "to express one's thoughts about through play."

[M. J. Young]

Yeah. O.K. What was it for me?

Shortly after System Does Matter appeared at GO, we were debating it rather vigorously. Ron appeared at that time to be saying that every player played to one primary CA (then they were called "goals") rather consistently; I insisted that, as far as I could see, I played to all of them. This probably was debated for a while, up through the When the Rubber Meets the Road post, and immediately after that I pointed out that those tests put me gamist, simulationist, and narrativist (whether those are valid tests is now doubtful, but at the time they seemed to fit). So I again said that I played to all three goals.

Ron's response was, but not all at once.

That was it. I got it. He was absolutely right--I would shift between trying to win, exploring the world, and addressing moral issues all the time, but I was clearly shifting.

Looking back at those games, what happened when I shifted?

[*]Sometimes, such as when Bob and I were the only players, he shifted with me, and we tackled whatever came as a team that worked together. Similarly, I would follow his lead when he shifted to something else. It was all fun, and whatever we did next was fine with both of us.[*]In other groups, I tended to be a dominant player--if I shifted what the game was about, everyone followed me. By then I had a decade on everyone else, so there was a tendency for people, even referees, to see what I did as "the right way to play" (particularly as most of them learned to play by playing at my table). They didn't necessarily want to go everywhere I went, but they always followed my lead when I was a player.[*]I think in many cases if I drifted the game somewhere they didn't like, a good chunk of the group just dropped out for a bit--watched, or refilled their sodas and opened more snacks, or wandered to the other end of the room to talk about other parts of the game or something.[/list:u]It has only been within the past few years that I've been in any games in which I wasn't either the referee or the party leader, so I tend to play pretty aggressively in terms of setting the tone of what was happening; even looking at a few of the recent games where I wasn't in one of those two positions, I tended to be in the forefront of what was happening. In one case, I played "the cavalier who didn't realize he wasn't the party leader just because they let him walk in front", technically always taking his cues from the hobbit thief whom everyone was actually following--but here, the grand sweeping dynamic personality of that character tended to set a lot of tone there. Later, I was playing a young female Wizard, and constantly giving everyone advice on what we should do, or asking them what we should do, or otherwise pushing the players through character interaction to move forward and do something.

It's not always so; in the last Gamma World group we started a couple years back my characters were both rather quiet background characters; but I think the players largely looked to me for some sort of help creating cohesion and moving the game forward (novice referee and all teenagers in the group other than me). But in the main when I drift I take everyone with me or leave them behind.

That's probably a bit incoherent, but most of the players have stayed with me over the years so it hasn't been too bad.

Anyway, that was the thing that made it clear to me: that although I played to all three agendae, it was always one at a time.

--M. J. Young