There are several threads running concurrently that I want to respond to, and I have an awful lot to say, so I thought it would be best as its own thread.

The threads in question:

What is the text?
On the term “interactive”
Real life
And earlier,
Jason’s Unified Theory

Please note that this is emphatically not the “lectures on theory” that Eero asked me for. First, I’m not convinced that anyone would read them, and second, I think it’d be more than a little arrogant for me to speak as some sort of authority. Yes, I do have advanced training in these things, but the argument from authority is weak in any context and exceedingly dangerous and unpleasant on the Forge.

My suggestions and arguments here should in no way be taken as “authoritative.” I know a fair bit about these things, but there are certainly others who know more. Furthermore, the application of such theory to RPG’s is something about which nobody can be an authority, because it hasn’t been done. And even if it had been, one could only be an authority on what had already been done, not on what should be done or who’s right.

I’ve broken all this into four posts. This one is just a brief outline, so that later searches (if any) can find things more readily. I’ve given headers along the way for navigation purposes.

Outline
1. Useful readings in theory

a. Hermeneutics
b. Structuralism and poststructuralism
c. Semiotics
d. Ritual

These are some suggestions for what you might read and why, broken into 4 categories. I have tried to indicate the general difficulty of any given text; as is well known, some works in these areas are sort of impenetrable, and while I’ve tried to steer around them there are a few that are unavoidable. So when I say, “Very difficult,” I mean (1) the book is going to take a lot of work to get through and understand, and (2) it’s unfortunately important to do so for whatever reason is at hand.

2. On deconstruction and RPG’s
Mostly a response to the “What is the text?” thread. I put a bibliography of “how to get the hang of it” at the end. I am of the opinion that deconstruction may never be useful to us, but if we’re going to talk about it we need some basis for discussion.

3. On semiotic logic and RPG validation
In both the “interactive” thread and the “text” thread, as well as earlier in “Jason’s Unified Theory” thread, the question of validation of statements has arisen, explicitly or implicitly. I thought I’d explain some of the basic terminology a bit more clearly than I did before, because I think semiotic logic has a lot of potential for us.

Here’s hoping somebody finds some of this useful. Please feel free to ask questions, disagree, add things, and so on. If you want to take up something, though, like for example you want to discuss semiotic logic and RPG’s in detail, I think it will be easier for future readers if that becomes a thread unto itself.

Note that this stuff was written quite rapidly, so there might be some confusions or errors here and there, though I have proofread. If you find something here that doesn’t make any sense to you, please ask: I may have explained badly, or explained erroneously because of a typo, and I also might be just plain wrong.

Thanks for reading whatever you decide you’re going to read!

Chris Lehrich

Useful Readings in Theory

There’s nothing comprehensive about this. These are some things I like that I think could be useful.

My suggestions, for those interested in theoretical tools for (1) examining Shared Play as text, and (2) examining how that text is produced, reproduced, and interpreted, would be the following:

Hermeneutics.
This is essentially the philosophical study of interpretation. Hermeneutics has the disadvantage for us that it is primarily focused on textuality in particular, but the idea of the hermeneutic circle is one that could very profitably be applied to RPG’s. In short, you have 4 objects: the reader (player), the reader’s self-projection (in immersive actor-stance, the character), the world in front of the text (the shared imaginative space), and the text itself (notes, rules, system, etc.). The reader, through the self-projection, enters the world in front of the text and attempts thereby to make inferences about the text itself; the self-projection then returns to the reader for reflection, as it has changed by the experience and will need to be re-integrated, changing both reader and projection in the process. Then you go and do it again.

Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. The idea of the hermeneutic circle could be very helpful here for understanding the productive and dynamic relationship between player-as-author and player-as-reader. Not, overall, a difficult book.

Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism?. A very difficult book; a collection of lectures on post-structuralist philosophers. Frank's rebuilding of the subject and the issue of "style" could be very valuable for thinking about players as independent authors, often working through projected characters, in a sophisticated fashion. You’ll need some background in philosophy, esp. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. I don’t like Gadamer myself, but some may find his discussions of art useful. Difficult, but not all that bad. Read Ricoeur first!


Structuralism and Poststructuralism.
The nice thing about structuralism is that it’s rigorously logical, a nearly mechanical methodology that can be particularly appealing for those trained in the sciences or engineering. I don’t mean that as a slam; it’s both structuralism’s glory and its primary failing. But while seeking underlying structure in RPG’s is useful, it is far more interesting to understand how and why such structures are manipulated by actual players in-game. This is where structuralism is brilliant – as always, outside of literary criticism.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. A very difficult book, but genius. The idea of players as bricoleurs seems to me the starting point for any really serious understanding of RPG manipulation of concepts and texts.

——, The Raw and the Cooked and its three sequels. Insanely difficult, really some of the hardest books you might ever read. Note that I don’t think pure jargon constitutes “difficult,” it constitutes “pain in the ass” most of the time; this book is flat-out HARD. But if you want to see how structuralism gets applied to improvisational construction of stories, which I think is obviously relevant to RPG’s, there is no substitute.

Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Writing and Difference. Derrida on Lévi-Strauss. Lucid and devastating. But remember always that Derrida essentially begins by saying, "We are all structuralists now" -- anyone who thinks he or she is a postmodernist or poststructuralist who hasn't mastered structuralism is deluded.

See the next thread for more on Derrida in particular.

Semiotics.
To my mind, the conclusion of all that brief gesturing toward deconstruction at the start of this post indicates that what is most important for RPG's is the issue of validation: how do we evaluate a statement, how do we decide to validate it, how do we validate it, what statements or propositions do we use to do so, how are those evaluated, and so on. To examine these questions, such classic issues as Icon-Index-Symbol, Sign-Object-Interpretant, Deduction-Induction-Abduction, and It-Thou-I will be useful.

Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation. Eco is not at all hard to read, most of the time (A Theory of Semiotics is uncharacteristically turgid.) These are fascinating essays that give a good sense of the range of semiotics.

Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs. A good introduction, very clearly written.

Thomas A. Sebeok, The Sign and Its Masters. Another very good introduction.

See the next-but-one thread for more on semiotic logic.

Ritual Theory.
As I’ve said in my article on the subject, I think that ritual theory is among the most profitable possible directions for RPG theory. I’m not going to reiterate those arguments here. I haven’t yet found a good intro text on the theory of ritual, but I’m looking. Here’s a brief list that might in a sense bring you up to speed. That is, if you read these texts through, in this order, you’ll come out with a pretty strong understanding of the basics of ritual theory as it currently stands. My opinions are stated overtly, but you needn’t agree by any means, nor are they “standard” in the disciplines in question.

Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, chapters 3 & 4. What you need to understand is the types of magic and their relationship to religious ritual. Frazer’s definition of religion as compared to magic simply doesn’t work, but his insights are not trivial.

Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Cosman’s translation is slightly abridged, but enormously superior to both of the other translations. It’s worth reading the whole thing through, but you can certainly skim here and there. Durkheim is very good about making clear what he’s doing where, so you’ll know if you’re skipping over essential arguments.

George Homans, “Anxiety and Ritual,” American Anthropologist 43 (1941), 164-72. Reprinted in numerous anthologies, including William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, eds., Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach. 4th ed., which is a wonderful but very expensive anthology. Homans neatly summarizes the entirety of the functionalist approach to ritual.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. A very difficult book, but genius. The idea of players as bricoleurs seems to me the starting point for any really serious understanding of RPG manipulation of concepts and texts. His analysis of ritual is fantastic, if occasionally bizarre; the discussion of Hidatsa eagle-hunting in chapter 2 is the clearest example of how structural anthropology works, and if you master it you’re a long way toward getting what he’s on about.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane. Not Eliade’s best book, but his best introductory one. If you get the concept of ritual reactualization, you’re pretty much home free. Note that Joseph Campbell is mostly a knockoff of Eliade with a more overtly theological bent.

Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols. Includes “Betwixt and Between,” which will get you going on liminality and whatnot, but the whole book is excellent.

Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” Imagining Religion is wonderful and clear, and a distinctive approach almost unique to Smith. His book To Take Place is also about ritual, but less helpful.

Ronald Grimes, Research in Ritual Studies (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press and The American Theological Library Association, 1985); Ritual Criticisim: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory (Columbia: U of South Carolina Press, 1990); and Beginnings in Ritual Studies (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982). I dislike Grimes’s work, which I find naive and romanticizing. So I give fuller references in order not to prejudice things. Note that Richard Schechner is very much like Grimes, and particularly interesting to people who like theater and ritual as a concept.

Stanley J. Tambiah, "The Magical Power of Words," Man, n.s. 3 (1968), 175-208; "Form and Meaning of Magical Acts," in Robin Horton and Ruth Finnegan, eds., Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies (London: Faber and Faber, 1972); "A Performative Approach to Ritual," Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979), 113-69; and Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). An important approach to performance on a linguistic/semiotic basis. Unfortunately, Tambiah is a moron who completely misunderstood the theories he borrowed, the criticisms leveled at those theories, and the rituals he studied in the first place.

Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. If you’ve read all of what I’ve just reeled off, Bell is comprehensible but dense. If you haven’t, stay away! The book is a brilliant attempt to rethink ritual on a “practice” basis, founded on a very slick concept called “ritualization.” I don’t agree with her, but I think this is certainly the best thing yet in the field.

For what it’s worth, in my own work, I’m trying to go one step further than Bell by employing a textual approach founded on Derrida. I see this as a corrective to the “practice” approach which, without having a textual polar opposition, deconstructs itself. But that’s my shtick, and it’s not done yet. Don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, there are some readings in various sorts of theory that might potentially be useful to RPG’s. I don’t think anyone particularly has to read any or all of this. It’s just that if you do want to delve into other modes of theory for doing RPG theory, the vast library of stuff can be kind of daunting. I’m just trying to clear out some of the undergrowth and point out a few nice specimen trees along various paths, if you’ll pardon an overextended metaphor.

Chris Lehrich

On Deconstruction and RPG’s

In What is the text? the subject of deconstructive approaches has come up. First of all, I should note that I like Derrida’s early work very much—I’m a fan, even—although I find his later work on religion dull and misguided. Still, I do not think that we are ready for a deconstructive revolution in RPG theory, nor am I convinced that one will ever be necessary.

pete_darby wrote: ...we're still going down the route of focussing on the relationship of reader to text, the construction of an intertextual space by the reader, and the infamous death of the author. Which puts the relationship between these theories and RPG's in play in a bit of a bind, because we have far more in common with the author than the reader.
....
Now, if someone can point me to where Derrida etc address the actions of an author rather than a reader, that may hold more gold for us than reader-text centred lit crit. I get the feeling that the absence of this in modern lit crit is perhaps why I'll get better ideas for a theory of roleplaying from Stephen King "On Writing" than Derrida "Of Grammatology."

In the nearly forty years since the first publication of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie, deconstructive sensibilities and approaches have waxed and waned in the fashions of various academic disciplines. And yet, the programmatic conception of grammatology itself remains largely unexamined and unexplored. Without staging yet again the by now well-rehearsed critique of Derrida’s overwhelmingly literary reception in this country, we may nonetheless attribute part of this neglect to the institutionalization of literary deconstruction. For by subordinating grammatology to the disciplinary program of textual theory, literary deconstructionism has, ironically, served to found a new and no less reified institution of “literature.” The deconstructive gesture, underscoring the insistence of the graphic in the literary “voice,” then emerges as a thinly-veiled homage to a (post)modernist literariness, the “text” qua autotelic movement of écriture.²

On Semiotic Logic and RPG Validation

I said some things about C.S. Peirce’s logical categories in the thread on Jason’s Unified Theory, but I wasn’t entirely clear. In fact, I think I wasn’t quite clear on all of that myself! Recently, I’ve been fighting with this stuff in my own work, so I’m going to give a little breakdown. I’m going to start with Peirce, then move to Sherlock Holmes, then move to RPG’s.

Peirce’s Categories
I’m only dealing with the big 3 logical-inferential categories, the means by which statements can be produced on the basis of other statements as a logical process.

Peirce has this example case he likes. There’s a bag of beans and a pile of beans. Now there are three types of statement: Rule, Case, and Result.

Deduction
Suppose we know that all beans in the bag are white, and we take some beans out of the bag.

Rule: All beans in this bag are white
Case: These beans are from this bag
– Result: These beans are white

Deduction is certain, given that the Rule and Case are valid.

Induction
Suppose we take some beans from the bag, and they’re white.

Case: These beans are from this bag
Result: These beans are white
– Rule: All beans in this bag are white

Induction isn’t certain, but it’s plausible. You can test Induction by inserting the Rule into a Deductive structure, and producing more cases, i.e. taking more beans from the bag. You can never be absolutely certain that your Rule is accurate, but it does get more certain the more times you get white beans.

Abduction
Also called Guess, Hypothesis, and lots of other things, but Abduction has gotten pretty well known by now. Suppose we have the bag of white beans and some white beans.

Rule: All beans in this bag are white
Result: These beans are white
– Case: These beans are from this bag

Abduction is very slippery, and exceedingly uncertain. In particular, it can’t be tested within this limited framework; you need additional data. If you use an Abducted Case to produce an Induction, you get circular logic, which happens very fast indeed.

Abduction-Induction Circularity

Rule: All beans in this bag are white
Result: These beans are white
– Case: These beans are from this bag
. . . .
Case: These beans are from this bag
Result: These beans are white Navy beans [note added data, necessary]
– Rule: All beans in this bag are white Navy beans

If you look, you’ll note that we have exactly zero evidence that there are any white Navy beans in the bag.

Sherlock Holmes, Semiotician
In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes discusses “reasoning backwards”:

Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically

I'll just post to say that this is the kind of content I like mixed in with my Forge experience. We'll all have to take our time to work around the material you represent (I've read some of these, but it's been over five years for most), but I've no doubt that this will become a popular reference if the continental trend catches on.

Anyway, there's many interesting viewpoints here; I wrote yesterday somewhere about some of these, and here they come again. Pre-Inscription (which I've known as validation of genre/architextual expectation, incidentally) especially is interesting, as it focuses on the discussion about the RPG text we had; rules and genre are essentially predating expectations that limit possibilities in adding to the text (or deny validation from a given text as intertext, as I parsed it yesterday).

I like Gadamer... might be I'm misremembering something, but would you care to elucidate on the matter? Being I'm only half literate on these matters, I've still some trouble pinpointing your exact allegiance ;)

Roleplayers as bricoleurs (been thinking about this myself, actually): isn't that the same thing Doctorxero intimated in his theory here? VoInt players are explicitly bricoleurs, working with the elements presented to produce their art. Depending on your take on bricoleuring it could be that the other kind aren't bricoleurs (I seem to remember that it's possible to produce art sufficiently independently to not be a bricoleur).

I'm feeling you have something interesting going with semiotic logic there, but I'll have to let it get processed before formulating anything. The same holds true on the other points as well. I just wanted to post and tell that I at least appreciate the effort of educating us.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: I like Gadamer... might be I'm misremembering something, but would you care to elucidate on the matter?

Roleplayers as bricoleurs (been thinking about this myself, actually): isn't that the same thing Doctorxero intimated in his theory here? VoInt players are explicitly bricoleurs, working with the elements presented to produce their art. Depending on your take on bricoleuring it could be that the other kind aren't bricoleurs (I seem to remember that it's possible to produce art sufficiently independently to not be a bricoleur).

Oh, I'm finding it enormously useful... I always go into these discussions with the attitude that I'm probably wrong about something, perhaps everything, but I really need help to see where.

I think I'm finally seeing where Doctorxero was coming from, and that, as was said in blunter terms on his thread, VoInd play cannot exist, but in a completely different sense to what was emerging there.

Chris, as you're probably guessing, it's been over 12 years since I engaged with this area (and, if you listen to my lecturers, you may not believe I engaged with it at all), at that was at undergrad level, which basically amounts to arguing loudly in bars. This was while I was doing a Drama & Philosophy degree, and, creatively, I was hearing a lot more sense from the drama courses than where the philosophical theories touched on the arts.

I think that a derridean reading of role-play would be an interesting excercise philosophically, but I think it would be more interesting for what it said about Derrida than role-playing, hence not for here.

But, from me at least, a hearty thank you... for at least saying I was both right and wrong (I was talking about the Derrida wannabes, not Derrida, wasn't I?)

Hello !

Thoroughly readable set of essays - nicely done.

I particularly liked the last section, which was quite convincing, as to the logical structure inherent in RPG.

However, it has occurred to me that I'm not really willing to do the work to be able to meaningfully discuss RPG theory from this angle. I'm not saying it's not worth the effort; it probably is. Just saying that under the current circumstances I can't make the effort.

However, there is one thing that has struck me strongly about this type of discussion; it's about as far removed from practice as you can get, and still be meaningfully discussing RPG.

- James

james_west wrote: However, there is one thing that has struck me strongly about this type of discussion; it's about as far removed from practice as you can get, and still be meaningfully discussing RPG.

Ritual and RPG's -- A Follow-Up

In the brief discussions of my article on ritual in RPG's, I mentioned that there isn't really a good introduction to the subject of ritual. But thinking again about the question, I want to point to a valuable text:

Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).

Catherine and I just had a very lengthy conversation about ritual, and I was struck to find that we are on very much the same page. For years, I totally misread her book Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, as did just about everyone I know in the field. The problem with that book is that it's incomprehensible without a good deal of background. Catherine has noticed that people seem to be assigning it in classes, however, and so she wrote Perspectives and Dimensions as a more appropriate substitute.

The book isn't exactly a light read, but then she's covering the totality of discourse on ritual in 270-odd pages! So if you are interested in ritual (for whatever reason), you should definitely check out Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. Among many other fine qualities, the book not only discusses everyone quite evenhandedly, but also presents one of the best bibliographies of ritual ever constructed.

For what it’s worth, I’ll point out that gamers who like to think about theater and improv. might find Richard Schechner’s various works useful. I don’t like his work, but that doesn’t mean it mightn’t be useful for practical purposes.

--

Now as to the application of ritual theory to RPG's in particular, I was drawn to say a few more words by james_west’s remarks about practicality. I know what he means, don’t get me wrong. But it’s funny it should be put this way, since I actually think the best theory of ritual is in fact what’s called “practice” theory — it’s by definition practical!

Bell, in Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, makes an extraordinary and brilliant move, one which I think few if any scholars have even recognized, much less taken up.¹ She suggests that the practice of analyzing ritual is in fact a kind of ritual activity, and analyzes this correlation in some detail. In a sense, this is the whole point of her book, but nobody noticed. Okay, so it’s not the clearest book, but she did assume that her readers would already know a lot about ritual, and was surprised that anyone else bothered to read it.

Now what I’ve been up to in my own work reverses this move, and when I discussed it with Catherine, she seemed quite struck by the simplicity and potential value of this switch. What I suggest, in fact, is that we can read ritual as a mode of theorizing, a way of thinking and analyzing in relatively abstract terms.

Why do I mention this, though?

Well, if we think about James’s remarks on practicality, or in fact the whole drive to make RPG theory a practical art rather than an analytical science, what we see is a demonstration of my point (and Bell’s, indirectly). In RPG theory, “the natives” (that’s you – and me! How does it feel to be one of the natives?) theorize what they do in practical terms. How can that be? Well, note the fundamental discomfort with my tendency to shift over to an analytic remove. Why should that exist? Because gamers do not want to distance themselves from what they do; the proof is in the pudding, after all, so whatever theorizing gets done is done for the purpose of improving the activity.

Now traditionally, scholars have wanted to avoid this. They want to avoid being this involved, because that’s what scientific distance is all about. But these days, such objectivity is generally accepted to be impossible anyway. As a result, a number of major scholars have decided to go whole hog in the other direction: they jump into the discourse and participate. It’s as though somebody you never heard of who’s writing a book on the theory of gameplay in general decided that he should not only participate in Forge discourse but also try to change the gaming industry from within.

I have a real problem with that. As a gamer, I’m happy to stand in both positions, but under normal circumstances the scholar has to project himself as a “native” in order to do this. This trivializes the natives: it makes them into simpletons whose shoes you can imagine yourself into quite easily. And furthermore, the same is not actually on offer to the natives: they can’t join in on academic discourse.

What I suggest, instead, is that ritual is itself a kind of theory, a way of thinking about all sorts of things analytically. Similarly, RPG theory, Forge-style, is a legitimate mode of theory, an analytic method suited to a specific object (which shouldn’t be news around here, right?). The procedure is actualized, made into effective thought, under specifically ritual (i.e. gaming) conditions, which marks it as a ritual mode.

All of which then suggests a further, somewhat more radical proposal.

If you recall, in the ritual article I talked about the old initiation-rite model, made most famous by Victor W. Turner: Separation, Liminality (or Margin), Aggregation. This is really a specific version of an older division: the Sacred and the Profane (on which see Durkheim especially, but also Eliade’s book of the same title).² The idea is that “ritual space” and “ritual time” are in some sense different, distinct from other kinds of space and time. Now that notion of “sacred” shouldn’t be taken to mean “holy” — as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown pointed out, it really just means “marked” by special interest; Lévi-Strauss drew an analogy to terms that are “stressed” in language.³ Okay, so the three-part model is really a means by which we get from one stage to the other and back:

Ordinary — Separation — Ritual Time — Aggregation — Ordinary

The total process from separation to aggregation can be taken as the totality of the actual ritual.

All clear so far?

Okay. The problem is that everyone fights about how to define ritual, how to define sacred, and so on. There’s no agreement at all, really, and everyone just picks examples that support their points.

Bell makes this very slick move of making “ritual” in effect a verb: she calls this “ritualization.” Ritualization is the process by which a group, culture, or even individual projects some form of practice as somehow different from others. In particular, it is a means by which people reify (make objects out of) practices not inherently distinct from other practices. In short, ritual is not a thing; it doesn’t have a different ontological status [status with respect to being or not being a thing] than any other practice. But people treat ritual as though it had a radically different ontological status than other practices. That is, it’s the natives who make ritual into a thing; by treating ritual as a thing in scholarship, we simply sign on to local ideology and power structures, and don’t actually analyze the world as it is. Furthermore, by then debating the “right” meaning of the term, we perform our own ritualizations! We’re not just parroting native ritualization, but doing it ourselves in our own special way.

So back to RPG’s, what does this mean? Well, it means that from an exterior standpoint, there isn’t any absolute way to define “play” as something inherently different from other modes of behavior. This is why, for example, nobody has yet come up with a workable and fully accepted definition of RPG’s or “play”: there’s nothing there to define! Sure, lots of folks are happy to propose working definitions for the purpose of argument or whatever, but an absolute category hasn’t been arrived at satisfactorily. This is because “play” isn’t a thing: it’s just practice, like all other practice. Why do we think of it as different? Ritualization. That’s precisely what makes RPG gaming fundamentally ritual action: we are quite deeply invested in the idea that such practice is distinctive and different, and are even willing to go to considerable lengths to prove this.

This gets us into “the logic of the supplement,” as Derrida calls it. (For those who care, I’m now moving well beyond what Bell is up to.) Given that there is no inherent ontological status to ritual or gaming (or text, quite importantly, or to take another example, law), that is, there is no absolute difference between these things and other modes of practice, why do we see them as so different? Furthermore, how do we keep them distinct and discrete, to such a degree that in fact we will stake identities and other things on this dubious basis? For example, in law, the status of legal conclusions as certain is so strong that we’re willing to kill people on its basis, but logically speaking there’s no justification for this. How come we’re willing to behave this way, and how do we protect the law (or text, ritual, gaming, etc.) from the possibility that we ourselves might begin to doubt its differential status?

A couple posts back in this thread, I talked about semiotic logic, and a circularity that arises when you move from Aabduction to Induction. Let me recap for a sec:

Abduction: Given a Rule (x -> y) and a Result (y), we Abduce a Case (x)
Induction: Given a Case (x) and a Result (y), we Induce a Rule (x -> y)

Now this becomes circular if done in this order, because:

Abduction: Given a -> b and b, therefore a
Induction: Given a and c (some other present factor), therefore a -> c
But we’ve never actually established certainly that a is actually true. We now have a rule that associates an uncertain Case with a potentially random, unrelated fact about the current example.

The thing is, we’re not stupid. We recognize, not exactly consciously perhaps, that this logic is dubious. So what we do is go look for d, e, f, and g – further factors that occur in the present instance. If we get lots of these, we feel justified about our logic, although it’s totally invalid.

For example:

Rule: All the beans in the bag are white
Result: These beans are white
Case: These beans came from the bag
--
Case: These beans came from the bag
Result: These beans are Navy beans
Furthermore: they’re wrinkly, and they’re dry, and they smell funny
Rule: All the beans in the bag are wrinkly, dry, funny-smelling Navy beans
--
But we haven’t established that there are any Navy beans in the bag at all. So what we’ve done is to add more conditions (wrinkled, dry, funny-smelling) to make ourselves feel more specific and certain about what we’re doing. What we’re not doing is checking this against the contents of the bag

Getting back to ritualization, this is how we reinforce our feeling that a given mode of practice is special and different. Ritual is special and different, for example – I can tell because I have all these examples of ritual that are special and different. But how do you know they are really ritual?

I would argue, in fact, that GNS (for example), and indeed the whole Big Model, is a supplement for uncertainty. That’s not to say it’s not useful! It’s very useful, given that you accept the division in the first place. In fact, what it produces is an authoritative discourse about the nature of gaming. Which is all very well, but it’s never been established that gaming is a thing about which one can argue in the first place!

Again, this isn’t a slam. I’m happy saying that ritual or law or text are real things, just like gaming, and thus have their authoritative discourses. But they are only real things because their practitioners, the cultures that depend upon them, project them as such.

So coming full circle to james_west’s remark on practicality...

I think it would be worthwhile to think about the techniques – yes, this should be added to the list – by which we actively demarcate gaming from other spaces and times. What do you do before the game starts? Is ordering pizza a separating factor, for example?

Hypothetically, let’s suppose that your gaming group meets weekly at 6:00. Most of us don’t eat a lot of pizza at other times; that’s a special gaming treat, along with the other special snacks and whatnot. So at 6:00, the GM orders the pizza. Some chatting happens, some discussion of what’s going to happen shortly. The pizza arrives. Everyone gets a slice or two, the boxes are put somewhere where everyone can get at them without trouble. Meanwhile, a table has been set up. Books are out and ready. Dice are in bowls or whatever. Pencils are distributed (nobody ever brings their own, have you noticed?). Mood music, if any, is put on (see OctaNe). Now the GM goes into some sort of intro speech that in effect says, “Ordinary time has now ended; we are separated from it. We are now in special gaming-time. Outside considerations are no longer valid; we are focused on the game.”

Among other things, this explains the annoyance factor of players who insist on talking about favorite TV shows during the game. Again, it makes almost predictable the normative nature of Immersion and Illusionism in traditional gaming: these techniques enforce the separation of spaces.

Now how do we move to aggregation? One common method, when it seems like time is up, is to distribute experience points or their equivalents.

Why is this practical for game design? Well, it might be useful to think about the separation and aggregation stages formally, and design to produce those effects very strongly. This might go some way toward avoiding frame-breaking behaviors. Not that this hasn’t been done, of course, in various games, but it’s worth recognizing that this isn’t something special and distinctive about gaming, and that it might be useful to learn from other ritual techniques for how to slice up space and time to produce the desired effect.

Anyway, as long as I have this thread of heavy-duty theory, I thought I’d spin some of this out. Thanks for reading – anyone who’s gotten this far! (Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)

Chris Lehrich

Notes
1. And I’m very proud of myself, actually, because I took a big chance in summarizing what Bell was up to when talking to Bell herself. Not only did she say I had it right, but she also said, “It’s about time somebody got that!” So here I am tooting my horn. Toot toot!

2. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1959 [I think!]).

3. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Taboo, The Frazer Lecture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1939). Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966 [I think!]).

clehrich wrote: I want to point to a valuable text:

Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997).

clehrich wrote:
Ritual and RPG's -- A Follow-Up

Chris, this is all looking like solid gold to me... and, you'll note, getting down to some pratical tips on how to make a game, well, nore immersive is not by definition better, as some would no doubt argue, but it explains why so many of my sessions fizzle, why they "go up to 11" when they do, and why it's so damn important to get a regular slot for a long running game. Also, to an extent, why convention gaming can feel "heightened" (you've already built up the ritual journey, the weeks of planning, etc).

It also explains why the rehearsals for the play I'm in sometimes fizzle and sometimes fly, but that's another matter!

One thing I know your saying, but could make certain folks jumpy, is the association of ritual and "sacred space/time" with religion per se. But the act we're talking about is the act of putting aside a space and time and saying "In this space & time, things are not mundane, especially not me." This is done, I think, by most succesful game groups, pretty much all succesful acting groups, and many succesful writers. It's not the preserve of religions, it's a basic human act of removing yourself from the everyday by concious effort. Some great actors, as well as some mystics, can acheive this with a simple act of, for example, moving onto a stage, or just refocusing their vision. Paul Scofield, for example, could famously start telling a dirty joke to a stagehand as he was waiting to enter for Lear's last scene, walk on stage and capture the whole theatre, bringing grown men to tears, stagger off, and as soon as he was out of sight and earshot, stand up straight earshot and continue "...so the Nun says..."

So, to get to the practicality: like a chaos magician, create your own rituals for your group, a certain day, a certain time, a certain room, a certain soundtrack, a certain food. Maybe even get in the habit of getting the GM to start in a certain fashion (a recap from last week, a cinematic "teaser" sequence, a new job offer on the system bulletin board, whatever).

And, ripped from Johnstone, a simple excercise to place your head into "ritual space/time": look around the room you're in. Point to random objects and say, out loud, the wrong word for it. Do that for about a dozen items. Most often, you'll find that colours seem brighter, and everything in clearer focus (I've just done it and noticed my spectacles are filthy, and must have been for some time, but I didn't notice). It works by forcing the brain to rely a little less on "passive processing," "that's 'a desk', that's 'a TV', that's 'a picture of your son'", and more on actively, conciously processing the signals you're receiving.

Psychologically, I think that's what "ritualising" does, it forces the brain out of reliance on the world being mundane and easy to rake for granted, and into a place where it can forget the assumptions and concomitant hang-ups of the everyday. Which is why it helps with role-playing and acting, because, thinking about it logically, both are "crazy" or at least unacceptable behaviours: pretending to be people we're not, and acting out stories that probably never could happen, never mind never did happen. And, to add another level of craziness, both have to achieve a level of internal consistency, and perhaps what actors like to call "emotional truth", in order to be satisfying. Which is where ritual time/ space help: as Chris noted, analysis of oour pastime as ritual helps to see those nights where it falls flat, and, in the most perceptive phrase there, you start feeling silly when you try to play. That's because you're not in ritual space/time, you're in mundane space/time (I prefer mundane to profane, but I don't have to get any papers published about this!), where your self esteem is tied to your self image which values your normality, the fact you don't act like a crazy person who pretends he's a hill barbarian or starfleet officer.

Again with the cross medium example, I just came out of a very long rehearsal for a musical this afternoon, which involved a lot of dancing. Did I mention I'm over 250 pounds, and very little of that is muscle? So I go to see the in-laws after, and they're teasing me that I should do them a bit of the routine. I felt embarassed, and in these terms, it's because I'm outside of the ritual space of the rehearsal room (and outside the protective pack of the chorus!), and into the mundane space of the in-laws house. I'll be in front of 2000 people within a month, and won't be embarassed ("you'd be crazy not to be scared, though!"), because I'll be in the ritual space of the theatre, I'll have gone through the ritual of make-up & costume, the audience will have gone through the ritual of ticket buying, queuing, uncomfortable seating and overpriced confectionary, and we'll all be in a ritual state of mind where 250 Lb men dancing is not forbidden or censured.

Anyway, this is hugely ramblling, and Chris is saying this stuff much better, so I'll go practice my steps.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Great to see you parse this more clearly - I think that the idea of focusing on the social context play necessitates is an interesting one, and I'll be using in in the future. However; didn't you already say all this in the article itself?

please keep this up, better still, make an article from it so it stays around. I'm getting a lot out of this discussion, though I can't yet nail it down for myself, apply it or anything. Still, I'd like more of these "dangerous new ideas".

Just wanted to let you know that while I can't contribute I'm reading/listening and benefiting (and I guess that goes for others as well.)

... and I'd like to invoke etiquette rule III G in my defense ;)

Hi Markus,

Until Ron suddenly catches on and comes down on me like a ton of bricks, my current plan is to post these occasional rambles and such, and respond to comments, so long as I actually have something serious and theoretical to say, or (even better) people start challenging back and we can split to sub-threads. I will be going away mid-May, and at that time will go into very intermittent contact with the Forge until September (I'm sort of like a vampire on an annual coffin cycle). During the summer, I'll try to collate my notes together to say something lengthy, coherent, and focused, then submit it as an article.

In the meantime, the more questions or challenges I get, the more stimulus there is for me to keep at this. I'm very surprised, but thrilled, to see how many positive responses there are already. Here's hoping I don't screw it up next big post....

Thanks for the kind words. It's really Ron who might carp about the etiquette, not me, and on such a small matter I don't think he's very likely to do so. He really only cares about etiquette when it causes problems; the rest of the time rule-bending is dandy so long as the conversation goes on positively.

Chris Lehrich

P.S. I feel like I'm writing a column here, but it's great because I don't have an editor or schedule so I can do what I want as long as I don't break the Forge's rather flexible rules. My current expectation is that the next piece is going to be something about sacred space and space-delineation. Other things I plan are (1) something on textuality that tries to make Derrida's formulation useful for RPG's, and (2) something about authority structures and Illusionism. But who knows!

Hey Chris, I think I'm starting to get the difference between abduction and induction. I'd like to test it. I haven't finished reading this whole thread (I'm doing it very slowly, to insure I absorb it all), but I want to spit this out before it slips away.

I'm not exactly a genius at evolutionary theory, but I'd like to use it as an example, because it'll put things in context for me.

*****

Let's see... I'm sure this is floating around on the internet for me to cut and paste... Yep, ok (I've trimmed out the expanded descriptions):

Darwin's Explanatory Model of Evolution by Natural Selection

Observation 1:
Organisms have great potential fertility.

Observation 2:
Natural species populations normally remain constant in size, except for minor fluctuations.

Observation 3:
Natural resources are limited.

Inference 1 (Inferred from Observations 1, 2 & 3):
There exists a continuing struggle for existence among members of a population of a given species.

Observation 4:
All populations show variation.

Observation 5:
Some variation is heritable.

Inference 2 (Inferred from Inference 1 and Observations 4 & 5):
There is differential survival and reproduction among varying organisms in a population of a given species, favoring advantageous traits.

Inference 3 (Inferred from Inference 2):
Over many generations, differential survival and reproduction generates new adaptation and new species.

*****

Ok, exam time.

Each inference is an Induction. Because the theory of natural selection is induced it cannot be proven in the mathematical sense, hence it cannot be a fact, even though the induction is so plausible as to be relatively irrefutable.

Though, if we had started with an inference, then sought out observations to support it, that would be Abduction (which Darwin may well have done for all I know).

Right or wrong?

(If I'm right, I might just hit myself in the head. I would then consider Deduction and Induction to be logical, and Abduction to be intuitive, but those labels are simply reflective of my personal perceptions as opposed to any sort of technical definitions.)

Chris,
Combined feedback time. I like both your theory thread and this one[1]. Please keep'em coming! The practical aspects are great, but I also definitely enjoy a good theory `for its own sake'.

I am _definitely_ going to do something with your separation and aggregation stuff. Sessions fizzling because they never managed to get properly started and nobody quite knew what to do about that are an annoyance and this may just be what the doctor ordered...

Off the topic for the Forge, but seeing the study of ritual as a ritual... Wow! Shades of Goedel. Hope this will be as fruitful a train of thought as that was.

SR
--
[1] EDIT: obviously the silly fool who wrote this post was confused as to what thread he was reading. Oh well.

Good choices of theorists, Chris. I've taught some of them in my classes, so I recognize their value. I know you weren't attempting a definitive listing, but I would also have included Ferdinand Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin and John R. Searle, Erving Goffman, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and James J. Gibson. I also think some narrative theorists would have been useful, although my memory is blanking on the names of some key ones.

The works of the scholars you mentioned and the ones I've mentioned contributed considerably to my thoughts and to my approach to relationships to notional structures as explicated in my VoINT and VoIND threads; in fact, they're the sources for my choice of the term "interaction". The fact that you mention them surprises me since you had seemed uncomfortable with my choice of terminology yet cite some of my sources.

I wonder how theoretical or abstract we can be on The Forge and remain within the parameters of the overall forum purposes. I could comfortably go on about these topics for millennia! I regret that midterm season seriously curtails my participation in this thread!

Doctor Xero

cruciel wrote: Inference 1 (Inferred from Observations 1, 2 & 3):
There exists a continuing struggle for existence among members of a population of a given species. ...
Inference 2 (Inferred from Inference 1 and Observations 4 & 5):
There is differential survival and reproduction among varying organisms in a population of a given species, favoring advantageous traits.

Inference 3 (Inferred from Inference 2):
Over many generations, differential survival and reproduction generates new adaptation and new species.
....Though, if we had started with an inference, then sought out observations to support it, that would be Abduction (which Darwin may well have done for all I know).

Doctor Xero wrote: I know you weren't attempting a definitive listing, but I would also have included Ferdinand Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin and John R. Searle, Erving Goffman, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and James J. Gibson. I also think some narrative theorists would have been useful, although my memory is blanking on the names of some key ones.

Chris,

Awesome, I think I finally got it (attempting to apply the knowledge will determine if I have). My confusion appears to have been a matter of scale. I was thing deduction/induction/abduction were a specific type of reasoning (logic, personal definition: drawing conclusion from fact), instead of reasoning in general.

Thanks ever so much for taking the time.

*****

Chris wrote: This has an interesting potential result for Illusionism and strong-GM play. By putting all real narrative control in the GM's hands, you make abductive action riskier. That is, there is a greater real chance of having a failure, of having the result you infer from your abducted SIS blocked by the GM. By raising the risk, you produce two results:

1. Players are less likely to go strongly against the obvious deductions
2. Players are more likely to find the SIS convincing as a total experience

Therefore strong-GM play tends to support Illusionism and Immersion. If you want those things, a strong GM control of narrative may be useful. On the other hand, you are less likely to get flexibility and wide variance in player/character action, and if you want that, you may want to distribute control of narration.

Way back up in his section on Hermeneutics Chris wrote: This is essentially the philosophical study of interpretation. Hermeneutics has the disadvantage for us that it is primarily focused on textuality in particular, but the idea of the hermeneutic circle is one that could very profitably be applied to RPG’s. In short, you have 4 objects: the reader (player), the reader’s self-projection (in immersive actor-stance, the character), the world in front of the text (the shared imaginative space), and the text itself (notes, rules, system, etc.). The reader, through the self-projection, enters the world in front of the text and attempts thereby to make inferences about the text itself; the self-projection then returns to the reader for reflection, as it has changed by the experience and will need to be re-integrated, changing both reader and projection in the process. Then you go and do it again.

A note on Separation -> Ritual time.

In our group, after everybody is seated, we go around the circle and do the "in-character exercise". Which is, that everybody says something in-character (doesn't matter what about), until we've went through all of the characters.

It's been surprisingly effective at reducing "ramp-up time" (slow, kind of disconnected play at the beginning of the session). The ritual theory explains why.

Doctor Xero:

I wonder how theoretical or abstract we can be on The Forge and remain within the parameters of the overall forum purposes.

Well, time for another little theory rant before this thread gets too old to revive.

Something that’s come up recently in Tomas’s thread on choice is the issue of practice, specifically the position of the human actor between freedom and constraint. Here’s a very brief sketch of “practice theory”, which emphasizes precisely this distinction.

Practice

The social world is made up of an extraordinary number of intertwined structures, slowly shifting over time as people use them in different ways and for different purposes. Everything from language to basic orientations, social relations and personal goals, is made up of such structures.

This is the social theory of knowledge, which really begins with Durkheim. The old fight was between the a priorists, e.g. Kant and his followers, and the empiricists, e.g. Hume and his various types of followers-up. Durkheim proposed the encounter with "savage" tribes as a way to challenge both views and propose a social theory.

Very simplistically, the a priorists argued that most major categories of human knowledge arose from inherent, hard-wired, a priori structures of the mind. The problem posed by "savages" is this: if it's hard-wired, how come there are so many radically different views of things like time, space, and so forth?

Similarly simplistically, the empiricists argued that major categories arose from contact with empirical reality; that is, you encounter real things and you come up with your ideas in reaction. The problem posed by "savages" is this: if it's all empirical reaction, how come people agree about so much?

In short, Durkheim argued that the a priorists and the empiricists had proposed radical alternatives, but that real people live in between. They have categorical notions sort of semi-embedded, and they encounter real things and think about them, but most of all and most importantly, they are told what to think by their cultures. If this seems obvious, that's because Durkheim was so devastatingly important: he was pretty much the first to argue this perspective effectively, and one of the engineers of the "culture" concept.

So given that, we see that there are a bunch of structures in place in our heads, arising primarily from social cues. Whenever one acts,[1] one therefore manipulates structures already in place. Such manipulation is generally strategic, in the sense that it aims to accomplish something not already true. This is dependent on such structures already being in place, because without them it is impossible to predict the outcome of behavior.

Let’s take a concrete (if a bit silly) example. Consider the recent fashion among young women of wearing midriff-revealing shirts, low-rider pants, and high-riding thong underpants, such that the thong can be seen above the waist.

Now when a young woman gets up in the morning, she can opt to dress like this. Why would she do so?

To look sexy
To piss off more conservative people
To fit in with a desired crowd
To show off her body
To show that she feels sexy
To show that she feels free about her body

And all of these might be true, simultaneously, or only some, or possibly others.

Now in a loose, simple sense, showing off your underpants has something to do with sex. If a rather conservative person were to characterize the style, he or she might call it “slutty,” meaning that in some sense it implies the young woman’s sexual availability.

But of course, this reading cannot be taken strongly. If a viewer decides on the basis of a woman’s clothing choices that she is sexually available, that viewer may well be over-interpreting the symbol; to put it bluntly, “I could tell from her clothes that she wanted it” is no excuse for rape. So what does the symbol really mean?

Well, it clearly plays on the notion of sexual availability, as well as lots of other issues, like in-crowds, pop stars, female bodies more generally, and so forth. When a woman chooses to dress like this, she necessarily plays on all of that.

The trick is, she doesn’t have to be conscious of any of this. And if she is conscious of any or all of it, that changes nothing. Consciousness has nothing to do with it.

So what’s this got to do with freedom and constraint?

Let’s imagine that the same young woman goes for a job interview at a relatively conservative place. If she chooses to wear a conservative suit, what does that mean? Well, for her, it is a choice to indicate various things, including some directly in opposition to her choice on Saturday night to wear a thong and low-riders.

I can conform to your sense of the appropriate
I am not a radical
I will not make my sexuality part of this workplace
You will not make my sexuality part of this workplace

And lots of others. The point, though, is that she chooses her dress based on what she wants to say with it.

So if that’s some sort of freedom, the free manipulation of existing structures, where does constraint enter? Well, in order to employ a symbol effectively, you have to conform to existing structures. Total nudity would actively challenge the existing structures, but would also land the woman in jail, indicating that her radical challenge is simply not read as such—it’s just read as abnormal.

When we employ structures, to sum up simply, we both produce and reproduce structures. That is, every time a woman wears a thong and low-riders, she helps to make that fashion acceptable to the mainstream viewer. At the same time, she reinforces the point that women’s fashion is about women’s sexuality and, possibly, women’s availability. There’s no escape from that circle. But within it, there is considerable room for play, for manipulation, for strategic use of symbols to say what you want.

---

In an RPG context, the application is I think obvious. Structures are handed to us, most obviously in everything from social agreements to rules systems to setting to whatever. We permit ourselves only a limited range of movement. At the same time, every manipulation of any structure within that system necessarily changes its meaning, however slightly; over time, a longstanding game may conform entirely to the rules system and yet be entirely personalized to the group because of a kind of social memory of practice.

So what is “railroading,” then? By this reading, it is the delimitation of how certain structures may be used in a manner determined primarily by authority structures. To put that in English, it’s what happens when the GM alone (usually) determines how certain structures may be manipulated, without the consent and agreement of the players, and the willingness to police conformity. Using the dress-code example, it’s the school principal announcing that low-riders with thongs may not be worn because that style is inappropriate for a school setting. The important point is that “railroading” is non-consensual, and thus requires policing. Interestingly, it also tends to provoke counter-measures to the degree that the players accept such railroading as in principle acceptable but in this particular instance annoying; thus strong railroading can produce a tendency to have the players hare off after the most trivial clues precisely because it’s so obvious that this is not what they are “supposed” to do.

---

I could ramble on interminably about practice, but I’ll just make one further point. As noted before, a few posts back, one of the practice points about ritual is that ritual is not in fact discontinuous with the rest of human life. What Bell calls “ritualization” is the process of asserting that certain modes of practice are discontinuous, in deliberate tension with the fact that practice is inherently continuous. Thus it is a deliberate imposition of a strong constraint, for some purpose, with some authority.

In the RPG context, this fits quite well: we see this every time someone says, “You have to speak in character when you play,” just to take an overly-strong example. We have here an overt authoritative statement about how a mode of practice is to be expressed discontinuously with other modes. A less extreme one would be, “You can’t just talk about your favorite TV show; either play or buzz off.” The issue here is not whether such ritualization is reasonable or appropriate; Bell’s theory suggests that it is neither – it is merely human. Instead, it invites us to analyze the hows and the whys of our ritualization, the ways in which we delimit special modes of activity as distinct and discrete, and what effect this produces on the practices within that so-delimited space. One interesting one would be that it appears many cultures assert that time within ritualized space may be homogenous, in fact identical, in the sense that every instance of time within sacred space may be deemed equivalent sacred time: all Masses may be the Last Supper in actual fact, for example. We seem to have a variant of this in the campaign: all time and space within game-space is contiguous; even if it’s been two weeks since we last played, and we have moved from Phil’s house to Bob’s game store, it’s the same space and the same time as last time.

---

Anyway, just some thoughts that somebody out there might, hypothetically, find interesting. I’ve given references for all this stuff before: Bourdieu and Bell are most important here, though bear in mind that Bourdieu’s The Logic of Practice is a nightmarish read. Marshall Sahlins’s The Islands of History is worth a look as well, though he’s not always explicit about what he’s doing.

[1] I’m avoiding the hairy problem of thought/action, and calling it all action. It has been pointed out (by Bell and others) that this distinction is nonfunctional, so when I say “action” you should not think of it as distinct from thought – thought is a kind of action. If you prefer “behave” for “act”, feel free to swap the terms. Return