Hello all,

So, another creative agenda that's pretty common is therapeutic exploration of self. I'd say this occurs less frequently in recreational roleplaying, but could very easily be incorporated into the goals of a system or playgroup. Too much, mind you, and you've got a primal scream session of co-counseling transactional therapy on your hands, but used with moderation and judiciousness and could give you a powerful experience.

So what do I mean by this? If it's not pattently apparent, I'm referring to roleplaying where the goal is to engage the emotional and cognitive faculties of the player using the imaginary elements and events to 1)stimulate a particular experience of emotion, 2) trigger the recollection of past events or inner experiences, 3) allow the person to have a greater understanding of their own responses, opinions or emotional attachments/projections toward concepts, people, objects, events etc perhaps with the eventual goal of modifying these responses and feelings.

What does it look like? What would it look like in a recreational, rather than purely therepeutic context? Well, let's say I am someone who has been beat up a lot in life, or has been verbally harrassed and so tends to be shy and non-assertive. If I was aware of this and wanted to use roleplaying to help me work with this aspect of my personality, I could do so by my choice of character.

Many options of characters useful to this purpose present themselves: I could choose to play a character much like myself, but perhaps even more so. The character could be a charicature of these traits of myself. I could enter into playing the character to help myself become more aware of how I respond to abusive treatment, since in my normal life the responses are so automatic that they are below my thresh-hold of consciousness. Alternatively, I could choose to play a character who does not exhibit these traits, and put them into situations that simulate my experience but engage the support of the rules set I'm using, as well as the cooperation of the other game participants to help mirror and support my ability to choose other than I might be able to in real life. Or, I could choose to play a character that is an extreme in the opposite direction from me an extremely, perhaps overly, assertive person, to give me an insight into the experience of those I may be choosing or allowing myself to be pushed around by.

Key to all of this is the emotional experience of these situations or traits. Narrating them in a distant fashion is lovely, but will most likely not engage the deeper parts of my subconscious and consciousness that power my choices in life.

How is this distinct from simulationism or narrativism? Someone adopting this standpoint would prioritize their inner experience of the game world over issues of imaginary content.

I will have to think a bit more deeply on what distinguishes this from narrativist premise, but I need to run to class.

Thanks,
Emily

Emily,

I'm extremely interested in any possible responses to this thread (including your own expansion on it). I am preparing a small Sorcerer session for a friend who's never roleplayed before, and in our preparations I see a very strong emphasis on exploration of self. Her character is intentionally a darker version of herself, put in situations similar in theme to her own life crises but "cranked up to eleven". Hell, her character's Demons are arguably drawn from metaphors of her own inner struggles.

I've thought of all this input from her as powerful Narrativist leanings, and I think there's some truth to it. But after reading your thoughts, I feel that I should reconsider to what extent she is looking for a version of therapeutic roleplaying.

I wouldn't want to be a dunce and say something like "men roleplay like this, women roleplay like this", but I have noticed that many anecdotal experience with female players has included a heavy focus on exploration of character, with said character addressing some elements of the player herself. I wonder if that factors into this discussion. (If not, and it's off topic, please disregard, as I know this isn't a "gender issues in roleplaying" thread.)

Here's me playing the devil's advocate: Could the type of play you describe be considered Narrativist, with the Premise being some broad-sweeping statement about the human condition? I understand Premise has to be stated and answered for Narrativist play, but I feel like there's a largish grey area where a Premise about, for example, emotional committment to family shades into deep Exploration of Character with a character dealing with family issues. Does that sound at all on track?

Hello Emily,

Have you heared of Dramatherapy? This seems to be along the lines of what you're describing; where the context and overiding goal of the activity is the therapy and not the roleplaying. Said therapy involving first and foremost the exploration of self as you've explained it above.

In which case, maybe it's something outside the scope of the fora. (But very very interesting though.)

Edited to add:

Uhm. Sorry, Emily. I think I missed that part in your post where you're asking "What does it look like? What would it look like in a recreational, rather than purely therepeutic context?"

In which case, I can't imagine any difference from Narrativist play with strong character emphasis. With Premise here being customised to match those elements or landscapes of the self that the player wants to explore. The way Premise is addressed during the course of play become the means for that self-exploration.

- W.

Disclosure: Emily and I have talked about this in person, too.

Emily, my take is that explo:self roleplaying isn't Narrativism, but that it also isn't incompatible with Narrativism. Narrativist play might or might not give a player the experience you're describing. (Where Gamist or Simulationist play won't, because of the necessity of player authorship + problematic human issue.)

My take further is that explo:self play isn't a kind of Narrativism, but rather that Narrativism can serve the explo:self goal. Exploration of self is above, outside Narrativism. It's in the "why are we doing this?" section of the social contract.

It's like this: "Why do you write fiction?" "To exorcise my demons and grow past the pain of my experiences, by reliving bits of them and examining them from other points of view." Writing fiction doesn't equal exorcising and growing, but serves it, in this particular person's case. Narrativism doesn't equal explo:self play, but can serve it, if that's what the players want from it.

A Narrativist game designed with explo:self in mind might have a very different look and feel and sensibility, at the Technique level, from a Narrativist game designed with I-am-the-sword-of-God in mind (for random example). That's cool. A short story written to exorcise demons will be very different from a short story written to cut through an issue. The advice an experienced writer would give to someone wanting the first would be different from the advice she'd give to someone wanting the second. (That's like a game design: game design = advice.)

So! Explo:self is fascinating, powerful, potentially frightening, good. I don't think it's a competing CA, I think it's a big deal agenda at the social contract level.

-Vincent

Hello,

I'm with Vincent. In fact, It seems to me that this sort of self-analysis, catharsis, therapy, call-it-what-you-will, could see applications in any of the three currently-acknowledged Creative Agendas.

Best,
Ron

I do know of many roleplayers who consider their hobby therapeutic, and do roleplay as a means of self-exploration. It can be very useful to "play out" certain emotions or issues in the context of a game. In fact, I'd say most people do this to a certain degree. The classic hack-n-slash munchkin, to me, seems to be the player's way of working out his frustration at being bullied and looked down upon as weak and insignificant. Gaming gives him a chance to be a hulking barbarian who will kill all the orcish bullies and take their lunch money. But many people give their characters events and issues to work through in their background that the player is also struggling with.

Usually this is done within the context of the game, is not disruptive, and nobody even knows about it. I'd say most of my characters have come about by some philosophical issue that they represent to me and a way to resolve it. Like my cavalier character was a result of my questioning whether or not Chivalry was a good moral code or a barbaric throwback. I wanted to make it both. But I think you can learn a lot from characters. For one thing, you learn more from mistakes than from successes, and RPGs are a safe place to make mistakes, since the worst that can happen is you have to make a new character. I think this is one of the surprise benefits of roleplaying games.

Of course, I've also seen people take it too far, and if you're serious about using RPGs as therapy, you should make sure your group is aware of and comfortable with this.

I'm sure you all remember these (particularly considering two of these are Vincent's fault)...

Spawned from big ball of 'character existence' threads: Character and Our Weird Gamer Friends
Split from above, talking about the stuff in this thread: Characters as Therapy (split)
More on the above, but unfortunately it didn't develop: Personal Relevance and Multi-PC Play

I think I'm in agreement with Emily that this is something at the creative agenda layer. It's very much a reason for making specific in-game choices, not just a reason to roleplay in the first place. It is also an observable behavior, not present in all roleplayers. Since the threads above I've seen more of this behavior lately. I think that's largely because of some personal growth a couple members of my gaming group are struggling through, but it may also in part be the insights in the above threads helping to identifying the priority and my continual infusion of more heavy Nar into our group.

I do see Nar serving a personal issues agenda, but I don't see it conflicting. This implies to me that it is simply a style of Nar.

(However, I also don't see Sim conflicting with Nar, so maybe there's nothing wrong with the lack of conflict. I do not want to derail this thread by dragging in that ancient debate, I just want to state the perspective I'm coming from so communication is clear.)

Emily,

I'm with Ron and Vincent. This goal is definitely far more of a personal goal for a player than it is part of a group's Creative Agenda, at least in my experience. And I've seen it done, with varying levels of dedication, in games and groups with all sorts of creative agenda. I think it tends to be something the player brings into play rather than something the group brings to the table. That being said, there's no reason a recreational game couldn't have self exploration as a purpose or premise of some sort.

In fact, I think that was perhaps one of Ron's goals with Sorcerer. I read a thread here somewhere saying that Demons in Sorcerer represent disfunctional relationships. I think everybody has really had those in real life, and I get the impression that Ron was trying to build in the tools for reaching a kind of self-exploratory play level into the game by focusing on this kind of a social interaction as the primary struggle in the game. Not that you have to play Sorcerer in this manner, just that it lends itself rather well to doing so, in my opinion.

As for playing out power trips and working out frustrations, I always preferred Superhero games. I'm a bit of a pacifist, and in Superhero games the general consensus is that killing is actually wrong. Plus, you get the added bonus of playing in the modern day with godlike powers and abilities, mowing down henchmen and throwing cars at people. This is a bit off topic, though =)

Thank you for posting those threads, Jason. I have two to add:

Self-Revelation in Role-playing (or Educational RPGs)
Exploration of Player
Reading these reminds me that using exploration in this context is confusing. I'll use inquiry instead.

I found a paper on the topic available on the web to add to the mix:
Therapy is Fantasy: Roleplaying, Healing and the Construction of Symbolic Order by John Hughes. Anya, this contains an example of a play group making it their goal. I'd say Sorcerer is right on for self-inquiry. Puppies too, sneaky-sneaky.

This is from 1988. Not so new. Let me quote from it anyway:

Malori has gained more than a cognitive understanding of her gender models through her use of Jack. In a roleplaying environment, she uses the character to experience some of the personality attributes she is trying to develop within herself. This is achieved through her actions within the game, with the support and cooperation of her gamesmaster and fellow players.

“You practice facing things that bother you. Whatever happens in a game you’re physically safe, although obviously, having such a strong emotional identification, it would hurt me very much if he [her character Jack] were killed.

"I actively seek out things that bother me, that challenge me. I’m leading the party and so the decision is mine, and nobody else’s. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong, and I take responsibility for that. If it goes right, everybody’s pleased and they’re pleased with me as well. That for me is a terrifying situation, having to make a decision and stand behind it, to take the responsibility if it fails. Through Jack, I also have to deal with physical danger, to overcome passivity, and to stay cool in a crisis. It’s very challenging.”

With two friends, Malori has recently begun a campaign especially designed to challenge them as individuals rather than as characters. Malori, of course, plays Jack. A friend seeking to overcome shyness and social inexperience has designed a character to challenge her own inhibitions. The GM has introduced a new rule especially for this game, which is called the “psychodrama” campaign. The rule is called “The Rewind”. If one of the players feel that a given situation has gotten out of hand or that they have not responded as they should, they can request a “rewind” and the scene is played out once again. With the introduction of such techniques, roleplaying moves away from being a purely recreational milieu into something that is pedagogic and explicitly therapeutic.

In the Narrativism essay, Ron wrote: Story Now has a great deal in common with Step On Up, particularly in the social expectation to contribute, but in this case the real people's attention is directed toward one another's insights toward the issue, rather than toward strategy and guts.

I'm definitely with Ron on this. Self-examination is what I would term a social agendum, not a creative one, and although narrativism is particularly good for it, it is not inconsistent with simulationist or gamist play.

To put into perspective this idea of using play to explore who I am, let me step away from it. I've known players (one in particular, but others as well) who have used game play to explore the psyches of the other players, to try to understand what makes them tick, even perhaps where their hot buttons are and how to manipulate them. That has nothing to do with CA, and can be done in any CA you like. So, too, if you're focused on discovering your own psyche, this is what brings you to the table, and it certainly influences your play as any social agendum would (if you're there to get laid, that is going to impact your in-game choices, but it's not going to determine whether you're playing gamist, narrativist, or simulationist).

Not Creative Agenda; something above it--that's my view.

--M. J. Young

I cross-posted with Emily, but wanted to comment on this:

Emily Care wrote: The Rewind would cause problems for a gamist agenda. Replaying an event that didn't go how you wanted or needed it to undercuts challenge.

Hello,

Dana (Anyatheblue), you wrote,

I think that was perhaps one of Ron's goals with Sorcerer. I read a thread here somewhere saying that Demons in Sorcerer represent disfunctional relationships. I think everybody has really had those in real life, and I get the impression that Ron was trying to build in the tools for reaching a kind of self-exploratory play level into the game by focusing on this kind of a social interaction as the primary struggle in the game. Not that you have to play Sorcerer in this manner, just that it lends itself rather well to doing so, in my opinion.

AnyaTheBlue wrote: I'm with Ron and Vincent. This goal is definitely far more of a personal goal for a player than it is part of a group's Creative Agenda, at least in my experience. And I've seen it done, with varying levels of dedication, in games and groups with all sorts of creative agenda.

MJ,

I think I'd hesitate to call the baseball example addressing challenge. It seems to be a learning tool. There is no risk associated, other than the social reward of how many swings it takes to hit the ball. That may be what the kids are after, the challenge of how many swings it takes, but that doesn't seem to be the purpose behind the rules.

*****

I'll expand...

I dunno if this analogy will make sense to my audience, but I'm going to try. The rewind technique is like learning break falls. Break falls are a technique learned in martial arts, primarily of the grappling nature, where you learn how to safely hit the ground without rolling (most styles, but I don't want to get into details). The goal is to impact the ground with a maximum surface area that does not endanger your joints and vital organs, therefore reducing the actual amount of force that impacts any single area (according to those laws of physics things) and protecting you from injury during the fall.

Anyway, when you do a break fall wrong you should correct your body position after the fall before doing anything else. Why? You've already hit the ground right? What's the point? The point is to train your mind and body - to correct your error rather than accept it, so you do it right next time.

This applies to how you learn a great many things (do the math over again until you get it right), but break falls really stuck out to me because seemly there is no point in making the correction.

This is what's happening with the rewind. The decisions you made were not what you wanted, not what you wanted to express. You do over. You train yourself to behave in the correct manner if the need arises for you to respond to the stimulus in a real situation. The rewind is learning a social break fall, learning to react to social pressure (as the break fall teaches you to respond to physical danger). The rewind seems like a really powerful therapeutic tool to me.

Now, could this be the only agenda a rewind works for? No, because techniques do not equate 1:1 with creative agendas. However, this technique I would definitely include as a facilitator of a therapeutic agenda.

John Kim wrote: It seems to me that there isn't any natural split here, though. i.e. If my real personal goal for playing is psychological inquiry, then I will use Techniques as suits my purposes. Having a "middle layer" of Creative Agenda seems superfluous. If I have a real goal, I don't care whether or not my play falls into one of the GNS modes, and the mode may freely shift based on the circumstances even though I am consistent in pursuit of my goal.

John, Jason, the split you're looking for is right there in my "why do you write fiction?"

"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To exorcise my demons."

"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To try on different moral points of view."

"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To be the sword of God."

See it?

You might switch from playing Narrativist to playing Simulationist, with the same exorcise-my-demons goal, just like you might switch from writing fiction to writing autobiography. Maybe even midgame / midstory, if you're willing to do something that drastic. That just shows that there's a natural split there.

Each endeavor - playing Nar Sim or Gam, or fiction poetry or autobiography - gives you an angle of attack, like, on your expressive agenda.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: John, cruciel, the split you're looking for is right there in my "why do you write fiction?"

"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To exorcise my demons."
"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To try on different moral points of view."
"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To be the sword of God."

See it?

You might switch from playing Narrativist to playing Simulationist, with the same exorcise-my-demons goal, just like you might switch from writing fiction to writing autobiography. Each endeavor - playing Nar Sim or Gam, or fiction poetry or autobiography - gives you an angle of attack, like, on your expressive agenda.

lumpley wrote: See it?

You might switch from playing Narrativist to playing Simulationist, with the same exorcise-my-demons goal, just like you might switch from writing fiction to writing autobiography. Maybe even midgame / midstory, if you're willing to do something that drastic. That just shows that there's a natural split there.

Each endeavor - playing Nar Sim or Gam, or fiction poetry or autobiography - gives you an angle of attack, like, on your expressive agenda.

Hm.

I may be misunderstanding this horribly from Ron's GNS stuff, but here's my take on this.

Role playing is a social activity. In any given social activity, there is a tension between individual goals, and group goals. If the tension is too great, the group has no cohesion. If it's slack, everybody is on the same page and working towards the same goal. In my experience, it's usually in the middle somewhere.

When you're in the middle, there are n+1 goals, where n is the number of people playing. Each player has personal goals and motivations distinct from the others. "I'm playing because I hope to get a date with Tina." "I'm playing because my boyfriend is." "I'm playing to deal with internal personal demons." "I'm playing to let off steam." This goes on ad nauseum.

These individual goals and motivations, however, do have something in common. You need other people with which to pursue them. You can't do it all alone. This is where I see Social Contract and Creative Agenda leaping onto the scene.

The social contract is the agreed upon group goals, the thing that provides something everybody tacitly or explicitly agrees to sublimate their own personal motives to for the sake of there being a group of people doing the same thing at all.

This doesn't mean that anybody's personal goals can't be met, it just means that they have to be met within the guidelines understood to be the Social Contract. If that's not possible, then meta-game discussion and negotiation has to take place in order to modify the Social Contract suitably.

So, with all this taken into account, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a single individual can use any of the GNS techniques to meet a personal self-exploration goal without the self-exploration goal being part of the Social Contract (and, hence, the group's shared Creative Agenda as understood through that Social Contract). I think this is what Ron and Vincent were thinking. It's certainly what I was thinking.

At the same time, it's entirely possible to make this kind of exploration a part of the Social Contract -- it becomes a point of playing in the first place. But the GNS techniques are still the techniques you would use to meet this shared goal. This kind of 'embedding' of the goal into the Social Contract is what I think Emily is talking about. As I see it, the purpose of the game playing is agreed to include self-exploration, but it doesn't necessarily change the way in which that play itself is undertaken.

As an aside, John, that sort of chimeric shifting from one technique/GNS Mode to another is in fact something I've seen a lot in gaming -- where some players are gamist and others are simist or narist so the session jumps around depending on where the Authorial Mantle has fallen at any given time. I've even seen where individual players shift modes right there at the table as their immediate in-game goals change.

I don't see that as a problem, although I'm not sure if GNS really encompasses that as functional play.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think Emily was right from the get-go: this is a CA, not "merely" a goal of exploration.

To see this, I propose thinking for a minute of all the 3 standard CA's (and this wouldn't be a very common CA!) as playing with a net. The "rewind" option would be typical here: there is a tendency to want to do this self-analysis stuff only if there's some way to "back out" when it gets too crazy. If we imagine a hyper-personal CA (I'll get back to a name for it later), I see it as necessitating play without the net, without the option to back out or down. Thus the stuff quoted about Malori and her game would constitute incoherent therapeutic play.

Let me put that a little more clearly.

Coherent: You've decided that your purpose in playing, as a group, is to explore and challenge yourselves as personal subjects. You agree that the game is not a "safe space," that the really intense things that happen to you will be real in an emotional and personal sense. The only thing that makes the game even remotely "safe" is that nothing will happen to you physically, and the likelihood that you can later deal with the upshot of anything excessive by saying, "Okay, that shouldn't hurt me, I agreed to that, and everyone there was being supportive of the project." But that's not much of a consolation if it really, really hurt. You plan from the outset to explore your own limits, and break them. You plan to suffer, and be changed by the game, and you plan for these changes to affect you for the rest of your life, changing the way you act and think in the world. You concede that you will put everything on the line, not just your character; you yourself are at stake, and your character is just a way for you to put your neck on the block.

Incoherencies:

You've decided that this is your goal of play, but the group isn't necessarily on track with that
You've decided that there will be a safety zone that allows you to stop when the going gets too rough
You've decided that only certain subjects will be allowable as exploration topics
You've decided that all this exploration should occur as a function of Story
You've decided that the game itself is "safe" so that you can try out new things without their affecting you otherwise

What I think usually happens, then, is that people encounter the possibilities of such personal or therapeutic play while playing something else. They dodge around it, get some "vibes" off it, but don't dive in and say, "Let's do this." This is exactly what happens, for example, when people who see themselves as classic Immersive Simulationists find themselves addressing a Premise and wonder why that doesn't happen more often.

The whole point of GNS, as I understand it, is to work out what the discrete CA's really are, and then diagnose a confused situation in which a group of gamers want X effect but can't seem to get it more often, or a group keeps breaking down to some degree because people's goals seem at odds, and so forth. Furthermore, once the CA's are established, you can design your games to support them fully and not waste time on the stuff that isn't important to your group.

I see this as happening with this sort of therapy-play. If defined as a goal, a CA, you'd immediately know (1) why some people are experiencing things that others aren't and aren't interested in; (2) why some systems seem more supportive of people who want this sort of thing; and (3) some basic principles that underlie such play, so that people who want this sort of game (if it can even be called a game any more!) can construct systems that promote these effects.

Take Ron's comments on Sorcerer. Sure, because it's "intense" and focused on really creepy stuff, and founded on Narrativist principles, it can be used as a possible tool for therapeutic play. But at base, as Ron says, this isn't the point of the game, and if everyone in the game wants therapeutic effects they will ultimately find Sorcerer to be a hammer used to drive a screw. It works, but not well.

I made some remarks about the possibility of such play in my Ritual essay, where I proposed thinking about it in terms of ideology, politics, power, and whatnot; this is why I shy away from the "therapy" concept as such. That is, defining such play as entirely therapeutic in the psychological sense, or even in terms of exploration (which Emily has rightly pointed out confuses the issue), skews our perceptions. We miss the point that one could do this sort of gaming to encounter situations that are unlikely (or we hope they are) in real life: rape, brutal oppression, etc.

Why would we do this? Simply to know how we ourselves would respond in such a case? That's pure exploration in a rather Sim sense. To make a phenomenally good and meaningful story? That's quite Nar, I think. To defeat the situation, i.e. survive and be healthy at the least? That's a rather Gam solution. But is there another option? I think there is:

To experience the situation, at the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual levels, and to generate new possibilities in ourselves.

Put this way, it sounds sort of Sim, in the sense that we're "trying out" a new situation. But I maintain that one would also be quite focused on the out-of-game situation implied: you experience rape (from whichever side) to encounter emotionally a situation that may otherwise be purely intellectual, and from that to put your experiences into action within the world. Similarly, you experience an intellectual situation or construct that would otherwise be an unexamined emotional idea, and this leads you to think differently in all contexts.

I guess you could call this Examination, in the sense of Socrates' oft-quoted idea that the unexamined life is not worth living. If you've read Plato, you may have noticed that what teachers like to call "the Socratic method" has nothing to do with Socrates: it doesn't mean asking questions, it means deliberately painting people into intellectual, moral, and emotional corners in order to force them to examine the world and their own lives in radically new ways. I see the Examination CA (as I think it should perhaps be called) as a true agenda for this reason: unlike the other three CA's, it's utterly focused on the negation of the line between game and world.

I suppose this CA would be very unusual; indeed, I can't think of a coherent example of Examination game design. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In fact, I suspect that the lack of such game design and the lack of recognition of this as a true CA has something to do with the almost total insularity of the RPG hobby with respect to things like politics. Examination games could be designed -- even if they might well be unpopular -- and would perhaps have a salutary effect on their players as "examined" people.

As a final point, if you haven't checked it out, look at some of what Jonathan Walton has been up to in his RPG.net column, "The Fine Art of Roleplaying." Especially when he gets into Brecht, I think the Examination CA begins to raise its head. My rather excessive response to some of the argument ("Naturalized Slavery") should also give some sense of where I come down on this. I'd like to see Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, and their ilk coming into RPG's, frankly, and I think that this sort of work doesn't really fit any established CA coherently.

Chris Lehrich

John Kim wrote: OK, I'm trying to separate out "personal goal" from "group creative agenda" in my mind. i.e. Suppose that others know about this as a personal goal and try to act to support it. Does that make a difference?

xiombarg wrote: I was running an Amber game. Unknown to me, one of the players was using her character to work out certain personal issues in the game. Well, let's just say I was blindsided by the angry, accusatory reaction when her character died due to the strict interpretation of Amber's karma rules I was using...

Hi folks,

xiombarg wrote: was running an Amber game. Unknown to me, one of the players was using her character to work out certain personal issues in the game. Well, let's just say I was blindsided by the angry, accusatory reaction when her character died due to the strict interpretation of Amber's karma rules I was using...

clerich wrote: A lovely example of Examination-Incoherence. If everyone had been entirely on track for such Examination, then (a) the Karma rules wouldn't have been structured that way, (b) the situation wouldn't have arisen because the players would have seen that it led away from Examination, or (c) the death would have been a valid and shocking aspect of such Examination.

John Kim, talking about the GNS modes: wrote: They are at a sort of middle level between personal goals and techniques.

WDFlores wrote: It occurs to me that CA as it stands was meant to address how the game might be played as a game. It says nothing as yet about self-examination and so forth. Should it? I don't know. Perhaps not.

The self-examination angle (and similar matters) will no doubt color how the game is played, how the rules are structured, how social contracting plays out and so on. In that sense, it cuts straight through the 3 CA and co-opts them instead of emerging as a CA in the sense that the three are.

WDFlores wrote:

John Kim, talking about the GNS modes: wrote: They are at a sort of middle level between personal goals and techniques.

That's the clincher here for me. One one hand, you have the level of personal meaning -- ie: what a game means to you, what a game means to the people you play it with -- which is where Chris' Examination agenda comes from I think. The GNS Creative Agenda on the other hand refers to the nature of the game as a game, on a level lower than the "Why?" on a personal level.

Hey John.

You wrote: So how does GNS fit in this picture? The "middle layer" interpretation suggests that we should figure out how to structure our play based on G, N, or S -- and then try to get our goals out of that. If this is the case, it seems to me more straightfoward to skip the middleman. i.e. Choose/design your techniques to fulfill the actual goals of play. So if you are trying for Psychological Examination, you look at what techniques best accomplish this regardless of how they fit into GNS divisions.

Hello,

It strikes me that the "larger" (or from another viewpoint, isolated and thus smaller) goal represented by, in this case, psychological self-examination plays exactly the same role relative to role-playing as to any other creative/imaginative endeavor.

When that sort of thing comes up, I get a little suspicious of the Forge's ability to deal with it. It's exactly the same issue as, say, "Why does [name a musician] create music?" Sure, some reason or or reasons certainly exist, but dissecting that reason in question doesn't yield much meat at the general level. It seems to me the answer will always be, "Because he is this person with his given background at this phase of his life." Thus the answer to his individual take on "what to do" is always going to be, "It's his individual take on what to do" - i.e., a circular exercise.

Granted, I might be interested in the insights that emerge about a particular person whose music I like or whose influence captures my historical influence (Frank Zappa, for instance, as an example of both)> However, I think the answers are limited to that particular person and have value only to me as a particular person in dialogue with fellow enthusiasts.

Does this mean I dismiss such inquiry out of hand? Nah. I do think it represents exactly the point where the limits of the Forge-as-medium are met, though.

None of our theorizing about role-playing, here in these forums, can hope to address Mighty Big Questions about Humans, Life, and Art. Those questions ought to be relegated to those who are interested in them as such, and I certainly support the idea that role-playing is a worthy topic - right in place as an art form with cinema, comics, literature, music, et cetera. And if anyone wants to present a view on such a thing here at the Forge, as Chris Lehrich did with his Rituals paper, that's nifty too.

But resolve such things here? In disciplines such as metaphysics, myth-and-ritual theoretical anthropology, postmodern sociology, and similar?

Nope. Can't be done.

The Forge isn't an academic department, nor even a think-tank for issues at that level. We can provide meat for such analyses, but I really have a hard time imagining what sort of on-line environment might be expected actually to resolve them. That's an ideal I don't think this site needs to live up to.

Best,
Ron

Hi Ron,

I don't agree with you, I'm afraid. Either that or I'm misreading. It seems as though you're actually not getting the point of GNS, which seems odd....

Ron Edwards wrote: When that sort of thing comes up, I get a little suspicious of the Forge's ability to deal with it. It's exactly the same issue as, say, "Why does [name a musician] create music?" Sure, some reason or or reasons certainly exist, but dissecting that reason in question doesn't yield much meat at the general level. It seems to me the answer will always be, "Because he is this person with his given background at this phase of his life." Thus the answer to his individual take on "what to do" is always going to be, "It's his individual take on what to do" - i.e., a circular exercise.

However, I think the answers are limited to that particular person and have value only to me as a particular person in dialogue with fellow enthusiasts.

But resolve such things here? In disciplines such as metaphysics, myth-and-ritual theoretical anthropology, postmodern sociology, and similar? ... Nope. Can't be done. ... The Forge isn't an academic department, nor even a think-tank for issues at that level.

Hi Chris,

I'm good with all of that. I think I over-did my post - the point wasn't to shut down the discussion, but to express why I'm not especially able to contribute to it myself. But if you or anyone wants to keep going, who knows, I may go "spoit" and realize that all kinds of insights are appearing that I (and similarly-inclined individuals) can't reach on my own. I'll respectfully reserve an "I told you so" if the tail-chasing goes nowhere for a particular avenue, which has been known to occur regarding other media. But hey, that's always a possibility at any level of analysis. So yeah, I buy your point.

Best,
ron

Hey folks,

Thanks for _not_ shutting this down, Ron. Though I liked Chris' response, I'm not trying to get at philosophical questions here. I'm really trying to understand why a play/design goal that would cause somebody to choose particular types of techniques etc. and that can and does come into conflict with the big three ca's, is seen as occuring at a different level than them. If that question could be answered for me, I'd be content.

And I recognize this thread is re-treading some ground (see the threads posted by Jason and me), but it's also coming up because there are things we need to clarify about the theory.

heya Vincent,

lumpley wrote: I don't get this a'tall. You shouldn't structure your play based on G, N, or S. Why would you? How even could you?

Ron wrote: Here I suggest that RPG system design cannot meet all three outlooks at once. For example, how long does it take to resolve a game action in real time? The simulationist accepts delay as long as it enhances accuracy; the narrativist hates delay; the gamist only accepts delay or complex methods if they can be exploited. Or, what constitutes success? The narrativist demands a resolution be dramatic, but the gamist wants to know who came out better off than the next guy. Or, how should player-character effectiveness be "balanced"? The narrativist doesn't care, the simulationist wants it to reflect the game-world's social system, and the gamist simply demands a fair playing field.

One of the biggest problems I observe in RPG systems is that they often try to satisfy all three outlooks at once. The result, sadly, is a guarantee that almost any player will be irritated by some aspect of the system during play. GMs' time is then devoted, as in the Herbie example, to throwing out the aspects that don't accord for a particular group. A "good" GM becomes defined as someone who can do this well - but why not eliminate this laborious step and permit a (for example) Gamist GM to use a Gamist game, getting straight to the point? I suggest that building the system specifically to accord with one of these outlooks is the first priority of RPG design.

John Kim wrote: So how does GNS fit in this picture? The "middle layer" interpretation suggests that we should figure out how to structure our play based on G, N, or S -- and then try to get our goals out of that. If this is the case, it seems to me more straightfoward to skip the middleman. i.e. Choose/design your techniques to fulfill the actual goals of play. So if you are trying for Psychological Examination, you look at what techniques best accomplish this regardless of how they fit into GNS divisions.

That said, I think that the GNS categories do represent broad classes of personal goals. And I think those personal goals should be probed and examined, because those are the real things that people should be designing for.

Hey Em.

Nobody sits down to play or design and says "Narrativist, go!" They say "we serve Master, go!" or "we summon demons, go!" Everybody has goals for their games, and nobody's goals begin and end with "Narrativist." That's all I meant.

Any thoughts about the second half of my post? (Though of course I'm really asking John.)

-Vincent

lumpley wrote:

John Kim wrote: So how does GNS fit in this picture? The "middle layer" interpretation suggests that we should figure out how to structure our play based on G, N, or S -- and then try to get our goals out of that. If this is the case, it seems to me more straightfoward to skip the middleman. i.e. Choose/design your techniques to fulfill the actual goals of play. So if you are trying for Psychological Examination, you look at what techniques best accomplish this regardless of how they fit into GNS divisions.

I don't get this a'tall. You shouldn't structure your play based on G, N, or S. Why would you? How even could you?

No: what the "middle layer" interpretation says is that when you choose your techniques to fulfill the goal of Psychological Examination, you will find that the resultant play is G, N or S, in addition to fulfilling your goal.

All I'm saying is that GNS is a middle layer between "why are we roleplaying (at all)?" and "how are we roleplaying (in particular)?" which is what I've been saying all along.

Check this - if you're serious about it, there's a way to prove your position. Design a game that reliably gives its players the experience you're talking about, but doesn't reliably give them Gamist, Narritivist, or Sim play.

This is not a dismissive challenge! I'll be happy to contribute to the game in any way I can, and at the end, I'll be happy to change my point of view.

Just, getting a new CA acknowledged widely will pretty much require actual play and game design. I hope nobody expects otherwise.

-Vincent

lumpley wrote: Check this - if you're serious about it, there's a way to prove your position. Design a game that reliably gives its players the experience you're talking about, but doesn't reliably give them Gamist, Narritivist, or Sim play.

This is not a dismissive challenge! I'll be happy to contribute to the game in any way I can, and at the end, I'll be happy to change my point of view.

Ok, time to round up this thread and move on.

The question seems to hinge not on whether psychological inquiry or examination can be a meaningful part of play, but on whether it could be considered a creative agenda of its own. It can be pursued as a personal or group agenda within gns, and evidence has been asked for to show that play based on its prioritization could result in play that is clearly distinct and mutually exclusive with G, N or S.

Chris Lehrich's suggestion of psychological examination seems a reasonable moniker to me (though the thought of having to refer to "examinationism" is not one I face with relish). And I'll quote his phrasing of the desired goal of psych/exam play:

Clerich wrote: To experience the situation, at the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual levels, and to generate new possibilities in ourselves.