[Narrativism essay] Concept & excerpt

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I wonder how many people are going to find this surprising. It's a teeny excerpt from my upcoming Narrativism essay.

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Let's say that the following transcript arose from however many sessions of role-playing.

Lord Gyrax rules over a realm or county or something, and a big dragon has recently begun to ravage the countryside. The lord prepares himself to deal with it, perhaps trying to settle some internal strife among his followers or allies. He also meets this hot, mysterious woman named Javenne who aids him at times, and they develop a romance. Then he learns that the dragon and this hot babe are one and the same, as she's been cursed to become a dragon periodically in a kind of Ladyhawke situation, and he must decide whether to kill her. Meanwhile, she struggles to control the curse, using her dragon-powers to quell an uprising in the realm led by a traitorous ally. Eventually he goes to the Underworld instead and confronts the god who cursed her, and trades his youth to the god to lift the curse. He returns, and the curse is detached from her, but still rampaging around as a dragon. So they slay the dragon together, and return as a couple, still united although he's all old-like, to his home.

The real question: reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved in the production of these events during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. Making a story can be accomplished through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue.
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What do you think? "I knew that," is one possible response. "What?? You're kidding!" is another. What's yours?

For those who are interested, the Narrativism essay is one draft away from being sent out to readers. However, a nasty cold and the holidays are conspiring against that final pre-read draft.

Best,
Ron

[xiombarg]

Well, Ron, "I knew that" was my response.

In fact, perhaps I've been reading you too long, but as I read the story, I said to myself: "This story has no GNS content to it at all, since it says nothing about how this story was arrived at."

I mean, I, too, can easily imagine how that could come out of Simulationist play, Narrativist play, and, with some stretching, Gamist play.

[jdagna]

Well, I'll give a second "I knew that."  As the question came up in the except, my first thought was "Well, it has a lot of Narrativist potential"

And, I can particularly see this example coming out of play in which two modes are clashing or combining.  For example, my first thought in analyzing this is a GM who wants Nar play, but a player who insists on using Sim priorities.  The GM keeps wanting a theme-based decision (and thus keeps throwing hard choices a the player), but the player keeps falling back to "my guy would..." as a way to dodge making a theme statement.  

Hopefully, the rest of the essay will help put to rest the concerns various people have over why some reports from games are hard to pin down in a GNS sense.

[John Kim]

The real question: reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved in the production of these events during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. Making a story can be accomplished through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue.
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What do you think? "I knew that," is one possible response. "What?? You're kidding!" is another. What's yours?  

Well, I knew that.  You've said that GNS is really about how participants nod their heads and other signals.  While I'm still not clear on how you interpret the head-nodding, I at least knew that the GNS classification doesn't have anything to do with the fictional narrative.  

However, I think that there is something of a disconnect between frequent usage and what you say here.  As you say, Creative Agenda is unrelated to the story produced.  It also is unrelated to techniques -- i.e. it is readily admitted that Actor-stance play isn't Sim, nor is Director-stance Nar.  Nevertheless, people frequently use GNS terms to refer to other things.  For example, in http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9049">this concurrent thread you say:

I think first edition Vampire takes a mainly Simulationist approach toward resolution, but a fairly Gamist one toward character creation and improvement - but confusingly, a pretty Narrativist set of rhetoric about one's character.

Here you are using the same terminology, but the words refer to things which have as little to do with Creative Agenda as the story did.  i.e. Purely "Simulationist" resolution like Vampire's can be used for a Narrativist game.

[kalyptein]

I read the story and thought "sounds like a narrativist game".  Then you pointed out that there was no way to know just from the finished story and I said "oh yeah, good point".  This fits well with my hard won, if somewhat dull-witted epiphany that Story Now does in fact means story NOW, i.e. decisions are made during that game with an eye to creating story as opposed to any other concern (versimilitude, winning).

So it was surprising but I knew that when you pointed it out.

I've lost a lot of sanity points to this theory, so if what I wrote doesn't make sense, I guess I'll go beat my head against the essays some more.  Definitely looking forward to this one.

Alex

[Halzebier]

What do you think? "I knew that," is one possible response. "What?? You're kidding!" is another. What's yours?

You're kidding. =)

I know you're not, but I think the example is somewhat artificial. Yes, this may technically result from G, N or S-play, but...

I'd expect the write-up to be very different for a gamist game:

"So they slew the dragon together" seems as if the outcome was based on choice ("Should we kill him?"), rather than about overcoming terrible odds or outwitting it on the battlefield.

Had there been a real chance of defeat and an unhappy ending, I'd expect this to be stressed in the recounting of the story. I'm not talking about victory probabilities and tactical details, but some mention of the grave danger they were in (or weren't, as may be the case).

Regards,

Hal

[John Burdick]

Ron,

I wouldn't call that a transcript at all. It was an outline. In sotware development there is graphical tool called a Data Flow Diagram.  It consists of bubbles connected by lines. The bubbles represent stages of the program, while the lines represent movement of data between stages. This type of diagram is intended to omit all policies and mechanisms that determine which lines are used at any time. It ignores all decision making. The way your outline  connects nodes of a story reminds me of a Data Flow Diagram and the other similar diagram types. Different kinds of diagrams focus on other issues like decisions, timing, or record keeping.

I don't know if that helps, but I want to say more than "I knew that".

John

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I'm glad everyone "knew that" so far. It's an important starting point for the essay.

John, I littered that post you quoted from with the most explicit qualifiers I could regarding "text is not play." I didn't put the qualifiers into that post for no reason. What you've quoted takes on a very different character in their absence, which is not what I wrote.  

I disagree with you that Creative Agenda is unrelated to Techniques and, in fact, think you're pretty off-base about that. What's unrelated are single Techniques to single Creative Agendas. Sure, Author Stance (a unit of Ephemera) isn't Narrativism. Neither is a dice mechanic permitting point-tweaks to the outcomes through a resource. But in combination with certain other techniques (looking throughout the whole system), they indeed facilitate Narrativist play in, say, HeroQuest or Legends of Alyria.

It's pretty basic to me that specific combinations of Techniques do, in fact, facilitate various specific Creative Agendas. Is it guaranteed? No. "Can" those Techniques be used in play for other Creative Agendas? Depends - you'd have to look at all the features of the system in action, not just those alone.

Best,
Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Whoops, missed a couple of replies.

Hal, I suggest that you're looking for clues as to what decisions were made by the real people in the prose ... and not seeing them, because they're not there. My point is that an account of the fictional events in a role-playing game can be given any sort of "feel" post-hoc through how it's recounted, entirely independently of the decisions made by the creators at the time. If I'd put "Only by making a risky dive through the flames of the dragon did Javenne place herself to catch the ring that Gyrax tossed to her, and to activate it as he hacked at the monster to distract it ..." it still wouldn't mean a thing in terms of however the group actually played that session. It would still just be how I wrote it up, and hence meaningless regarding Creative Agenda during the process of play.

John, I'm afraid you'll have to endure my use of the term transcript as "account of the fictional events during play." The complete lack of process (i.e. what decisions were made by the creators) is deliberate.

Best,
Ron

[greyorm]

Heh, my response while reading it was, "Hah! There's no game context. Can't say what it is." Then, before I finished it I said, "Either I've got Narrativism really wrong, or this is an object lesson about how a 'story' doesn't equate to Narrativism, because game events don't map to GNS priorities."

Looking forward to the essay, Ron!

[Gordon C. Landis]

I knew that - but only because of hard-thought puzzling in threads like this one and this one .

I'd add that while the events (story-bits, plot points, Explorative elements, etc.) themselves tell us nothing about the creative agenda of those who created them, the fact that these particular bits are the ones that did get created does have impact on the creative agenda as play continues.  And they might thus be part of what causes or keeps a particular creative agenda prioritized.  That is, establishing Javenne as the dragon and a curse-victim is not a meaningless thing in GNS terms, it's just that determining what the particular meaning is requires information about the context of play and the interaction of the individuals participating.  The more info, the better

In other words - that this info, by itself, tells us nothing about GNS does not mean that this info is entirely useless.  Combined with other info, I'd think it could be very useful.

Gordon

[ethan_greer]

Hmm.  In my mind, I upgraded "I knew that" to "yeah, no shit."  :)  Looking forward to reading the rest of the essay.

[Walt Freitag]

What Gordon said. Ron has carefully provided just exactly the kind of information that preserves ambiguity about CA. Add any other sort of information, and you can start drawing conclusions or at least assessing probabilities.

For instance, if we knew for sure that the plot related in the transcript was not pre-written and front-loaded into play in some way, then the quality of the story (middling, as these things go) tells us that at least one participant was probably putting effort into authoring during play and was permitted to do so by the system and the other participants. That might not prove or rule out an overall Narr, Sim, or Gamist CA, but it would say something about the Creative Agenda that I'd consider pretty important.

- Walt

[Jack Spencer Jr]

What do you think? "I knew that," is one possible response. "What?? You're kidding!" is another. What's yours?

Well, I would say that clears some things up a bit. I remember a couple years back on these very forums there was some debate about a story coming out of any of the modes of play. I'm glad to see this has been resolved.

I wonder. Maybe there's a difference worth exploring between the desire to create and the ability to appreciate the end results. That is, not everyone may want to create a story in the Story Now sense, but I would put forth that anyone can appreciate a story. It is one of our oldest art forms after all.

[Silmenume]

"I knew that!"

Yeah!

As I was reading I was thinking, this is a story, not something specific to roleplay.  I was somewhat confused as to what the point of the narrative was...then I got to the following paragraph and all became right in the world again.

I CAN NOT wait to read the Narrative essay!!!

Hope you feel better soon, Ron.

Aure Entaluva,

Silmenume