Creator or fan?

[Mark Woodhouse]

This post originated in a thread at rpg.net. I will be posting a parallel thread there as well, as I really want to hear from a few people who won't see it here, but I won't cross-link. I am really interested in this particular issue, as it's been both a blessing and a curse in my efforts to get good gaming. I quote John Morrow with his permission.

I think that part of my problem with thinking about games "in terms of social transactions of imaginary material towards certain creative ends" is that it becomes a lot like reading a story in a literature class and being forced to analyze it for plot, theme, and character. You aren't engaging the story as something fun to read but as a crafted object to be critiqued and explained. At some point, I think the exercise becomes less about what's being created and more about the creation process and craft. And making people more aware of the craft often makes it harder for them to enjoy what's produced by the craft. And in many ways, I think trying to turn everyone into craftpeople is a heavy handed way to give people what they want.

Yes, a writer needs to think about theme, character, plot, pacing, etc. But a good writer hides those things from their audience because overt awareness of those elements as part of the craft detracts from the audience's ability to just enjoy the story. In fact, it's no mistake that stories that do hit the audience over the head with their theme, character, plot, pacing, etc. are often considered bad stories by most people.

This post crystallized something that I've been struggling with a good deal lately in trying to explain my gaming preferences to some friends.

You see, I'm one of those other people. The ones who watch movies and look for the artifice - counting shots, picking out the edit points, playing spot-the-quote. The ones who obsessively catalog symbols and motifs in TV shows. The ones who like reading 40 versions of the same essential plot and grooving on the variations. I'm fascinated by the artifice, the creative PROCESS of fiction, almost as much as (sometimes more than) the content.

And I don't agree that the signature of quality is that the artifice is hidden. Works that still stand up to exploration over the long term do so because they have layers beneath the surface, and some of those layers are in the artifice. Hitchcock is considered a great director at least as much because of the ways he revolutionized the use of the camera as for the content of his films. Shakespeare's plays use the same plots as several of his contemporaries - it's the vividness and playfulness of his language and the heavy symbolic freight of his characters that set them apart.

Increasingly, I'm wondering if this isn't a fundamental split in the gaming world. Can someone who wants to dig around in and play with the artifice really collaborate with someone who wants to have the artifice as invisible as possible? I'm not just talking about stance issues – there's more to it. Thinking about genre as more than a package deal, doing critique or blending of genre elements – that can be really difficult when people are invested in genres as neat, stereotypical categories.

When I play, I think about characters in terms of issues, plot arcs, eye-kicks, references to pop culture, history, politics, or other games.... I think about my input in terms of providing hooks and levers for the other players to grab and yank on. When I GM, I think about pacing, audience, themes and motifs.

I don't LIKE immersion. Furthermore, I don't like dealing with it in others – it makes it harder for me to steer my own play actively when I have to do it covertly. I get that other people like it, but it really feels oppressive to me.

I don't have any Grand Pronouncement to make (well, not yet). I'm just hit very hard by really understanding on a gut level why I can't seem to get the games I want with most of the gamers I know today - the kind of games that came naturally to the crowd I used to game with 10 years ago.

I am attracted to gaming as a creative process – as an opportunity to create imaginary situations and characters and put them through their paces in collaboration with other creators who are simultaneously my critics, my collaborators, and my audience. What I haven't really gotten until recently is just how much this is fundamentally at odds with the conception of gaming as vicarious experience.

Does this ring true? How can players and designers address these aesthetic differences?

Best,

Mark

[SlurpeeMoney]

Well, first and foremost, it's not an issue of aesthetics. It's an issue of fundamentals. Either style, Artifice or Escapist, is capable of providing an attractive game. Is it a split? Only as much as there is a split in the comic-book community between those that like the pretty pictures and words, and those that look at how framing can contribute to the overall effectiveness of the page.

I'm an artificer, but I do it when the game is done, or before it starts. As a game master, I consider such things as the plot and setting, pacing and character development, the establishment of a good scene, effective use of voice and tone in the setting of mood, the music I'll use... Everything, I try and think it all through. Then I play, and it comes into the game of its own accord. When the game is done, I pick it appart, this time for the character's actions and how those can be used symbolically, and how character interactions are comming along, I look for foreshadowing possibilities, and work it all into my thoughts for the next session.

I have a player who is exactly the opposite. When we presented him with Nobilis, he was really excited. He loved the premise, the setting, the book (that book is gorgeous... if only every book could look that good...). When we told him it was diceless, he immediately stated: "I hate it. I won't play it." For him, playing the game is an escapist thing, he wants the thrill of rolling dice and counting pips, leaving things to chance and seeing how things turn out, having a Game Master direct the flow of the game, and reacting to it as he feels it's appropriate.

Despite this, he and I game together without much friction. I have a creative agenda, he falls in line quite nicely. I have an idea of how he'll react to certain situations given the type of character he's playing, and I take that into account when working on the game in my head. Now if I can convince him to play Nobilis...

Cheers,
Kris

[Damballa]

I am attracted to gaming as a creative process – as an opportunity to create imaginary situations and characters and put them through their paces in collaboration with other creators who are simultaneously my critics, my collaborators, and my audience. What I haven't really gotten until recently is just how much this is fundamentally at odds with the conception of gaming as vicarious experience.

Does this ring true? How can players and designers address these aesthetic differences?

The Self-referential aspect of "Over the Edge" banged this home to me – to make conscious that you are inside a roleplaying game.  This has had the effect that the "vicarious unconscious RPG" has become a lost country. And I think that, in some very real way, it's a country that I cannot find my way back to. The self-consciously run/played game is now THE ONLY GAME...   

It's like Frederic Jameson's "postmodern divide": that sense of loss, and that sense of Christmas morning, at the same time - making the act of playing the RPG the highly self-conscious and critical act of actually creating the RPG instead (like playtesting it); seeing the players all as fellow games designers; there to collaboratively create and not just be entertained (however artfully).

This can lead to a sort of Critical Theory-based set of RPGs (including using ideas from Marshall McLuhan to Jacques Lacan to Erik Davis etc); or using the RPG process as Movie-script creating improvisation sessions; like theatrical Devising - the imperative to create something external to the gaming experience – for future consumption or review.

This is counter to the idea of the act of gaming as being highly ephemeral, time spent with friends in mere amusing distraction; it is to raise the bar towards Art and justify the hard meaning of that precious time spent.

When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

The Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Wow, Damballa. That was good stuff, and I'm glad you said it so I don't have to be the first to. Reading the original post, I thought, "this is setting me up to sound like a pretentious prick." (Not that you are... God, coffee now.)

Better now.

Anyway, I've had three stages in my role-playing experience. For many years, it was an escapist diversion. The thrill of getting together and rolling dice and hanging out too late and pretending to slay monsters was fun. It was like a videogame with friends.

About 7 years ago, I guess, I played in a Star Wars d6 game. This was the first time I played with one GM and only one other player. Looking back, I'd wander if most would call our game "power-gaming" or "twinky," but it was great for me. We played Jedi Knights, two of the last ones alive during the time that Palpatine was  purging the galaxy. We were hunted over worlds, and we grew powerful. The other character kept becoming an even more holy and pure Jedi while I started planning revenge after the Empire killed my parents. By the end of the game, we confronted them on our own terms, I overthrew Palpatine, and then the other character slew me. That was another first - character on character conflict, which I wanted. I actually had a whole discussion about it with the other player and we agreed that he should do it after we win - I'd slid too far.

This was my introduction to immersive play, and I'm glad I had it, because it's easy for some on the Forge to deny that it's a viable play option. I played this way for about three years, culminating in an awesome D&D saga run by Peter Seckler in which I did weird voices each week and the character literally wouldn't get out of my head for a good 15-20 minutes after the game.

I realized in that game I was struggling, though. At the beginning, I was excited about playing this character. At the end, I was exciting about what this character meant, about me and about universal truth.

I never played in a game I'd call immersive again. (To note, and this might be important, I started working with Ron on the Forge that year.) I missed it, too, for about a year. But my play experiences since then have been better and better. My games now are anything but immersive - we pause the game and talk about what just happened and its implications, or why I chose as GM to make certain things happen, all the time. But we're making art.

And that's the part that kills. Someone's going to read that one line and run off to their dark little weblog or corner of a forum and build that up and say, "Look at those elitists! Making ART! It's a game! What's wrong with them?" But I think role-playing game playing is a process, and you can't stay in one of these modes forever, or you stagnate. The stories you hear about scary gamers: they're stuck in the first mode, something that you should grow out of. The people who flip their pancake of reason every time theory or "meta-gaming" (whatever the heck that is) gets brought up: they don't want the bubble of immersion broken. But it's going to get broken if you're healthy: you can't keep that up; you'll either be fooling yourself that it's happening, or driving yourself disassociative.

Sooner or later, adulthood comes along. And what was childish games has to fall aside or be examined. Examination and then creation produces art, plain and simple.

[Sean]

Hi Clinton,

I like what you said, but don't you think the 'should' is a personal moral judgment, rather than a general one? I mean, I know a guy, who works with sexually abused kids, who plays hack and slash D&D. He plays it to loosen up, have a few beers, and he'd rather die than explore deeper moral issues in his gaming. It takes everything he has in this dimension to face the day to day realities of the good work he does for society.

Likewise and less seriously, but still to the point, when I was a mathematical physics undergraduate I had less than no interest in playing chess, because my homework took up that part of my brain, and I didn't want to calculate as a spare time activity. But later when I became a soft-brained humanities graduate student chess became extremely fascinating to me.

These are the words that set people off in this kind of conversation, so that's why I bring it up.

I also think that some forms of immersive play have some higher art-like qualities, though it's a different one than the kind I'm experiencing right now with Dogs, and that I experienced sometimes in my friend Del's Oceania campaign and running Lords of Creation for people playing themselves as characters in high school. Also, technically speaking, it's all art, since it involves imaginary transsubstantiation.

But anyway, again, a loaded word, art. And I don't think you can judge what kind of play will constitute progress for an individual person except in the context of the rest of their life.

So I agree that you're getting at important differences, and the whole idea of 'gaming on purpose', acknowledging the presence of the player in the game, is one I'm really down with, and after playing Dogs and Heroquest I'm not even sure it's necessarily as contra-immersion as critics like the rpg.net old guard seem to think it must be.

So anyway, the content of what you're saying is cool, these are important differences, and there's a great gift waiting for a lot of people here at the Forge with the alternative approach to role-playing that a lot of the games here offer. But the language you're using to talk about it (and not just you, obviously) has value-laden universal connotations that sure seem to put a lot of people off.

[Larry L.]

Wow, Damballa. That was good stuff, and I'm glad you said it so I don't have to be the first to. Reading the original post, I thought, "this is setting me up to sound like a pretentious prick." (Not that you are... God, coffee now.)

Heh. You should have seen the first two replies I didn't post. Thanks Damballa! All I have to say now is:

Hi Mark! Welcome to the Forge. I think you'll find you're in good company here.

Regarding the "gamers you know today," a lot of long-time gamers come to the table with entrenched notions of what the "right" way to play role-playing games is, and sometimes it takes a lot of effort to convince them there's a whole spectrum of ways to play. Moreover, some of them may still genuinely enjoy the way they've always been playing. It's not like you should expect to "convert" them to your way of thinking.

You may find you'll have better luck recruiting players who don't think of themselves as "gamers." Creative people that you'd socialize with anyway, and particularly people with whom you can have an interesting conversation about the sorts of "artifice" issues in media you describe.

And by all means, read the Essays around here and check out the designs on all these cool new indie games, if you haven't already. It's a whole new world.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I do not find the "if I know how it works, it'll ruin it for me!" argument compelling in the slightest. Nor have I observed people who "know how it works" to tend toward more distanced, less intense enjoyment, for any medium. These are common objections leveled at the New (or new presentation/perspective) which, as I see it, indicate nothing but the presence of fear.

Another difficulty in discussing all this is the analogy with literature, film, or theater. Let's presume, for a moment, that me and a group of people do want that sort of content in our role-playing experience. By "that sort of content," you can look up my comments on "story" in the Narrativism essay.

But how do we get it? In those other media, we get it because (a) the author and other creators put enough craft into what they present that we can pick up on it, and (b) we have brought our prevailing interest in "that stuff" with us, to the experience.

You can do it this way in role-playing too. Conventions are full of skilled Call of Cthulhu GMs who speak in spooky voices and stalk around the table like hired magicians in restaraunts. They are good at eliciting in-character commentary from the folks at the table, who enjoy taking their cues and delivering good lines they can improvise. As long as you preserve the creator/audience distinction in role-playing that are nearly intrinsic to those other media ("nearly" because of some occasional participatory tweaks), then fine.

But you know something? I don't think most of the people who use arguments similar to John Morrow's are looking for this. I observe people playing, or trying to, sometime for years. I see Zilchplay, punctuated by painful surges and schisms. I see desperate slides into System-heavy or Setting-heavy or Character-heavy Sim, in which actual play becomes less frequent relative to (e.g.) the GM revising his putative novel. I see dysfunctional Gamism break out like a zoonotic parasite. I see Typhoid Marys and Stealth Narrativists locked in deadly social struggles.

But they use such arguments when presented with the opportunities for alternative approaches to play. They slam into the lit/thea/film analogy and identify it with enjoying the imaginative experience at all. It's a safe, easily-articulated, and erudite-sounding argument, and they seem to be happy, being unhappy and resentful of (say) Dogs in the Vineyard, there in that box.

Best,
Ron

[Sean]

Your characterization is certainly right for some cases, Ron.

The thing is, I think some people who argue this way really do know how it works, and don't mind thinking about how it works outside the experience of enjoying it, but don't want to think about it while they're in the act of roleplaying, which as you correctly note they analogize to lit/film/theater.

You're surely also right that a lot of people have learned to roleplay this way because there weren't any other live options well developed on the table, and I agree with your diagnoses of dysfunction based on this kind of conflict.

What's wrong with 'let a thousand flowers blossom', though? What does the word 'most' buy us here except trouble?

[Mark Woodhouse]

I'm surely not comfortable with the mass generalization of people's play as immature or denial-based. I think that an awful lot of my inability to 'get' the source of my conflicts with 'fan' players had to do with exactly that attitude on my part - being unable to genuinely credit that it could be fun. John's explanation of it in terms of the media analogy made it make sense to me.

I don't think that RPGs have to be creative endeavors to be worthwhile. They do for ME, but not in general. Part of what I'm wrestling with is more - can fans and creators both participate in the same game happily? How? Under what conditions?

[greyorm]

You aren't engaging the story as something fun to read but as a crafted object to be critiqued and explained...And making people more aware of the craft often makes it harder for them to enjoy what's produced by the craft.

I look at it this way, John is wrong (and I say and mean "wrong") in making two of his statements.

First, I would argue the problem of regarding the role/nature of the gamer in a game as comparative to being an audience existing to be entertained. A gamer is not audience. There is no writer creating something that whose inner workings need to be hidden from the gamer...the gamer IS the writer/creator. As such, shouldn't an understanding of his own art help him create better results?

Say, for example, if you're an artist. You have to learn how to be a good artist by learning and consciously using perspective, color choice, shading, etc.; and to be a good art critic, you have to do the same.

Even if you naturally adhere to good artistic practices, learning about them and how they work in a piece, how the perceptions of a viewer work, makes you a better artist because you realize what it is about your work that makes it enjoyable, and you can hit the high mark more often. Even if the odds were in your favor before, it was a crap shoot. With knowledge of the underlying structures and how they fit together into an aesthetic, it isn't a crap shoot.

To be a good or a great artist you have to think about the presentation, structure, color, layout, and all the little mechanical details of your work as you are creating it. But does that make the creative endeavor less exciting, less creative, less "fun"?

That is what John argues, isn't it? That the artist who can naturally paint well without consciously understanding things like perspective, color, etc. will enjoy his own work and the work of others more?

I doubt that is either remotely true, or remotely provable (despite the claim given about such a thing making it harder). I also doubt you will find a good artist or art critic alive who would make that claim. Rather, they will tell you the art becomes more enjoyable because the enjoyment now comes from more than one level. It can be enjoyed on aesthetic and creative levels, in addition to a structural one.

The claim that by learning and consciously using perspective, color choice, shading, etc., you can no longer enjoy your own or anyone else's work because of your knowledge; or similarly, that you can not be an art critic and gain any enjoyment from viewing a painting any longer because you know too much are just so far from reality that neither is remotely valid.

So, what we are really looking at is the argument that understanding equals dispassion. To showcase is the same idea in another context: I had a friend once who claimed that knowing how the universe worked made it less wondrous. That it made the universe static, dull, boring, and antiseptic. Knowledge of creation destroyed the wonder of creation, she said.

It appears John is expressing this same idea, and from what I've found, this is a traditional American/Western attitude: fear of understanding. The belief that understanding, scientific or procedural, somehow makes something boring and destroys its beauty. That realization destroys fun. The argument is that if I know why I enjoy something, I can no longer enjoy it. This idea is based wholly on an emotional and cultural set of beliefs that have no basis in reality. It is the idea that education is sterile and no fun, that it is very boring, disapassionate work.

I don't think it is a valid argument, however. When people make it, I happen to think something else is going on that has nothing to do with "beauty being destroyed". I'm considering that perhaps it is the fear of work: the cultural attitude that anything requiring effort from an individual cannot also be enjoyable, that one should be able to be entertained without exerting any effort, or one cannot be entertained. That's one possibility.

For example, critiquing a short story is work, thus understanding or working to understand the structure of a story makes reading the story less enjoyable. However, having just taken a Lit. class I have to say learning how to critique and understand the material structurally broadened my enjoyment of the works I was reading, because suddenly I was able to enjoy more than just "was it fun or not?"

It also helped me develop a set of criteria to help me enjoy a story on more than just the "events" level. I am able to look at the writing and see what's good about it, appreciate it on that level, and get excited about it as well. I can say, "Wow, that was a really cool trick he just did there" and add that to my enjoyment, the enjoyment of the writing itself, as well as the story.

To return to my original example, my friend's complaint was that she didn't want to (for example) look at the sun and just see the CNO cycle, she wanted to see a brilliant life-giving light. Now, notice the "just"...that's the key to it all.

When I look at the sun, or any part of the physical world, I'm not just seeing beauty and and wonder, I'm seeing a whole new level of beauty and wonder. I'm awed at the complexity, at the system, at the structural interactions taking place. I can enjoy a flower for more than its aesthetic qualities, I can look at them and be amazed aesthetically and intellectually.

Thus my counter-argument to my friend was that knowing what is going on in the sun makes it all the more wondrous and amazing because of the complex interactions I know are taking place. The CNO cycle is COOL, it is AMAZING, even more so that I can see a brilliant life-giving light AND the CNO cycle, and knowing the second is part of the first just makes it that much more wondrous.

It's that "just" from her that tells me everything: this all stems from the Western perception that scientists are stodgy, unemotional old farts with no appreciation for art, beauty, or wonder, that they are emotionless observers and recorders, and thus that science and intellect breed the same. That understanding somehow breeds dispassion and cannot possibly exist alongside enjoyment or wonder or fun.

People fear that learning about or understanding things, becoming intellectually aware, will somehow destroy their appreciation for the subject of their awareness, or make them into unemotional, dispassionate robots standing in a sterile white-room, as it is imagined scientists and intellectuals are, as education is percieved.

Yet scientists are, for the most part, fascinated, highly aware, constantly amazed and excited people, who think a whole ton of things that most people have no clue about are really, really cool. They have intellectual excitement.

Honestly, I have no idea how deal with this problem because it looks like a cultural phenomenon to me, existing from way outside the boundaries of our little hobby.

It's like going to a magic show. You find some people who are there who want to just be amazed, and they believe that if they ever learn the magician's secrets, they won't be able to enjoy the magic any longer. But then you'll find some people at the magic show who, if they ever learn the magician's secrets, will appreciate the show for the skill of the magician and be enraptured by that aspect instead.

The problem John brings up is the one where a person believes if the black curtain ever rises, if he sees how it is all done or what's going on backstage, he worries that he won't be able to appreciate it any longer because he'll be thinking about all the things happening behind the scenes instead of what's happening on stage. From where I'm standing, that's all attitude. I can know what's going on behind the scenes backstage and it deepens my enjoyment of what's happening on stage. In many ways, it makes it more miraculous, more interesting, more exciting, more wonderful, not less.

So, I can critique and explain the craft and enjoy the result of the craft. I can critique and explain FOR fun, too. The two are not mutually exclusive as argued. The black curtain can be peeled back without destroying or reducing the enjoyment, and such is done all the freaking time in literature, film, theater, sports, science, poetry, childbirth: you name it.

[greyorm]

I'm surely not comfortable with the mass generalization of people's play as immature or denial-based.

I don't believe Ron (or I) am generalizing people's pay as immature or denial-based. At least in my case, I am solely examining the logic of the argument used to defend that choice. "I don't want to see behind the curtain, because it will destroy my enjoyment" is bollocks. That's simply an indefensible position which does not hold up under scrutiny. Seeing behind the curtain, understanding what's going on, provably does not destroy enjoyment. Something else does.

[Sean]

Raven,

The answer to your questions is 'sometimes'.

John is guilty of the fallacy of false dichotomy in the text you snip. "You aren't engaging the story as something fun to read but as a crafted object to be critiqued and explained." Speaking generally, it is possible to do both at the same time. It is also possible to only be able to do one at a time, to only be able to do one ever (i.e. at all), or not to be able to do either ("I hate stories"). I know people in all four categories.

However, you're also saying something false when you say "gosh darn it, everyone is too in category #1, or could be if they weren't a lazy anti-intellectual American." (Though I agree with you that this is a common prejudice in the US and that it gets in the way of some people from enjoying a more theoretical understanding of things they like.)

That just isn't so. Some people have no interest at all in being in category #1. Including some brilliant literary critics; they turn off the critical apparatus while reading and turn it on again after the fact to analyze. Others analyze all the way through. They're both valid styles; and I don't actually even begrudge the person who doesn't want to think at all his preference for just experiencing the story without (or with a minimum) of analysis.

Again, John uses this word 'often' here: "And making people more aware of the craft often makes it harder for them to enjoy what's produced by the craft."

which bugs me the same way Ron's 'most' does above. They're both right in the sense that these are commonly noted phenomena and both rhetorically misleading because they suggest that their own position is the norm, or would be the norm in that world where everyone else was really like us, which they would be if they only knew how cool it was to be me.

Let me put it this way - are orchestral musicians and actors artists? Of course they are. Most of their art is scripted by someone besides for them, so they're not like the Genius Novelist or Painter of romantic Western myth. (Not that those people weren't geniuses, some of them.) But anyone who doesn't see art in their technique is just wrong. That's what being a great immersionist roleplayer is like; being satisfied with the intense experience of perfection in a relatively constrained kind of performance. Nothing wrong with that. I have a friend in NYC who left behind a promising orchestral career to do her own thing with the violin, and I don't blame her for wanting to feel more like an 'artist' in the sense you approve of. But damn it, that is not the only way to be an artist.

[Mark Woodhouse]

I am solely examining the logic of the argument used to defend that choice. "I don't want to see behind the curtain, because it will destroy my enjoyment" is bollocks. That's simply an indefensible position which does not hold up under scrutiny. Seeing behind the curtain, understanding what's going on, provably does not destroy enjoyment. Something else does.

I feel kinda weird arguing for the validity of a perspective I don't share, but here goes. Maybe it really IS that way for some people. Some people have crappy suspension of disbelief, or find that small details are disproportionately jarring. They do something they call roleplaying, and they can enjoy it only if they don't have anything messing with their SOD. It's just a different set of techniques and expectations, not necessarily a lesser one.

I do tend to agree with Ron that most of the Actual Play I've ever seen of this variety looked to me - as an observer or a participant - like long stretches of dull, Zilch-y nothing interspersed with fumbling snatches at fun. But I'm not sure I'm really qualified to evaluate that.

[xenopulse]

I agree that the lit/thea/film analogy is flawed. Someone (in some thread I can't find now) once instead made the analogy to a band. And I think that is much more on point. People who play in a band can have fun just fooling around, but once they start to analyze their craft and learn about harmonies, rhythm patterns, musical styles, pacing, etc., their creative endeavors become much more efficient--and more fun at the same time!

Now, some people don't want to become proficient, they just want to jam with some equally untrained friends. And that's fine.

And others don't want to write their own songs, they just want to perfectly recreate Stairway to Heaven. And that's fine too.

But I want to make some new songs. I want to learn what makes a song good. I can stumble around and never learn anything about music theory and composition, and sometimes I'd be able to get a good thing going with my band, but not reliably. Or I could read up on music theory and study songs I love by taking them apart, but never actually PLAY very much, and I wouldn't get anywhere, either. The trick is to do both.

[greyorm]

However, you're also saying something false when you say "gosh darn it, everyone is too in category #1, or could be if they weren't a lazy anti-intellectual American."

I agree my statement could be read that way; not the intent I was going for, however. Let's see if I can clarify my position to avoid that nasty rhetoric: rather than "Everyone could be #1 if they weren't lazy anti-intellectuals" it would be "Everyone could be #1 if they wanted to be." And when I say "wanted to be" I am trying to indicate that they may or may not have valid reasons for not wanting to be #1.

My problem is with the logic used to defend the choice: saying "Well, if I do that then I just won't enjoy it because that's the way things work!" is just false for all the reasons given above. Work better for you?

So, Sean, I agree with everything you've said, though apparently I came off more "it is THIS way and ONLY this way" than I meant to. I tried to get around that with my example of going to a magic show, but ah well, Christian hit that point better than I did.

I don't blame her for wanting to feel more like an 'artist' in the sense you approve of. But damn it, that is not the only way to be an artist.

???

The sense I approve of? What are you talking about, Sean? Did we have a conversation somewhere that I missed? Because this is completely off the radar for me...Who's talking about what being a "real" artist is? (Not me.) What does that even have to do with what I brought up?

You can drop orchestral musician or actor into the spot of artist or writer, and get the exact same argument from me. X needs to learn A, B, C to perform their activity well. Arguing that knowing about A, B, C will ruin the enjoyment of the activity is a false statement.

If you're an orchestral musician, in order to play you have to understand notes, timing, rhythm, conducting commands, equipment, etc. and how they work. This is a far cry from picking up a violin and just running the bow across it to make pretty noises, and then claiming that knowing how all that note and timing and tuning stuff works would ruin enjoyment of the music you're making (which is what I'm comparing John's argument to).

None of what I'm saying has anything to do with "making it yourself" or whatever the orchestra/not-orchestra thing was about.

WHOOPS -- EDIT:

I feel kinda weird arguing for the validity of a perspective I don't share, but here goes. Maybe it really IS that way for some people.

I agree, but that's also why I'm saying it isn't the act of understanding that creates the problem, it's something other than that act. If the act of understanding created the problem, then it would always create the problem. It doesn't. Understanding isn't responsible for dispassion. How you react to or feel about that understanding may be the culprit instead. Make sense?