This thread is a follow-up to two previous threads I posted on the Social Mode: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9808 and http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10493 .

Thinking more about Simulationism, I realize that I was wrong to think that 'focus on exploration of (elements of) the real world' is just another version of Sim. Insofar as one has a learning RPG or a social change- effecting RPG, and insofar as those are essential, system-facilitated goals of play, one has taken up a different CA than that of the Simulationist, who focuses on integrity of in-game cause.

That 'in-game' is key.

All three of the core creative agendas focus on what one is doing with/within the imaginative space of the game as the means of satisfying certain human needs. It certainly does not separate this action from the social reality of the game group: on the contrary, the Big Model's virtue is that it makes that reality, the social psychology of the play group, the core of its conception of gaming.

But the model treats the shared imaginative space, as an integral whole, created by game play as the vehicle for fulfilling those desires.

That is, focus on story, on the dream, or on challenge are all understood as aiming for certain things within the shared imaginary space of the game. It is actions in that imaginary space which fulfill the different CA of the different players.

In the Big Model, the rewards of play are human and social, and human desires (or posited goals which would explain observed behavior, if you're an empiricist) are put at the basis of each CA. But the means for addressing these desires and providing these rewards are within the imaginary space.

The extra-imaginary space is, by contrast, treated as (1) a space in which rational agents pursue their desires, which (2) in the case of 'hard core' Narrativist play can lead to bursts of extreme real-world behavior in response to soul-challenging in-game events. In other words, as disjoint from the shared imaginary space of play.

I think this is (1) a good simplifying assumption for the theory which (2) reflects a certain aesthetic prejudice: the prejudice for the integrity of the art-object characteristic of romantic and formalist aesthetic theory. At its extreme limits, this approach to art is a kind of aesthetic purism: efface from the art object all signs of its relations to the world outside it, so that its integrity as a self-sustaining reality can be upheld. People who prefer 'unpretentious stories' have this prejudice, as, interestingly, do many highbrow abstract and formalist painters, who eschew representational elements in their paintings to the limits of their ability so that the play of line and color, light and texture, will be the primary agents of the viewer's experience.

However, it seems to me entirely reasonable that one could have a shared imaginary space as a tool to accomplish things quite outside it, and the positing that learning about or affecting something outside the imagined space in a guided way is in fact the desire of some gamers (certain 'zilchplayers', perhaps, or the (well-skewered) 'casual gamer', or the person who tolerates the nuts and bolts of play to satisfy their primary fascination with the anthropological dimension of this curious communal exercise).

Such gaming would not be satisfying to those pursuing any of the three traditional CA, but it might be satisfying for other reasons. I believe that I have observed its satsifactions in my own play, though mostly evanescently and without having the goal explicitly in mind (I don't have much more to say on this though than what I said in the two previous threads, with respect to games where I've had players play 'themselves' or characters based on themselves, with the intent of making them identify with the character so that I could challenge them about some issue that I thought they needed to think about).

Ethan Greer's game about mental illness, and Vincent and Emily's recent 'dating game' posted about in actual play, both strike me as designs pushing in this same direction.

It's not Nar because there's no special emphasis on addressing story or theme through play. It's not Sim because in-game cause is not of concern to the players beyond its pedagocial or socially transformative purposes: exploration as always, but not exploration squared. And it's not Gam because Challenge/Step on Up are not addressed at all.

But it is roleplaying, and it is filling certain kinds of needs. Just not needs which are likely to be addressed solely by what happens in negotiating the imagined space itself.

Again, if your aim is to learn about or change the people you're playing with in some focused way, and the system facilitates that, I think that's a different (or two different) Creative Agenda. The negotiation of the shared imaginary space is being put to a different purpose.

The only thing I can think of that might be wrong with this is that maybe I'm defining Nar too narrowly. On the other hand, if your goal is really to educate or transform people in the real world using the imaginary space basically as a tool (as the wargamer who moved to D&D did for Gamism), that doesn't seem like Nar. And if this is stuff 'handled at the level of social contract', then it seems like we have the other empty spot that Walt Freitag likes instead: play which has no special goals for what gets focused on in the shared imaginative space of the game. I prefer the positing of extra CA to Walt's solution for reasons I've already discussed though.

That there are many things I can't think of that are wrong with this I have little doubt.

Some random thoughts on the matter, to spark discussion...

Using the imagined space for agitating purposes is commonplace in both arts and philosophy, where it's a common illustrative argument for an abstract thesis. For certain art theories "art" is largely philosophy in action, such that a given work of art always endorses given philosophical claims. In a similar way, for any ethical theory we can test and illustrate it by constructing imaginary situations resolved by the theory. This is largely the same as using a roleplaying game as vessel for such agitation.

I believe I've said it before that I do support the idea that exploration of shared imagined space can be used for purposes outside the CAs. These all however seem to be outside the model because they do not concern roleplaying as itself. They are details of the social context roleplaying is done in. They include, but are not limited to
- Dating (assuming this happens)
- Teaching fellow players (through a game that dresses the material in an easy and fun form)
- Learning about self/others (psychiatrical roleplaying, icebrakers)
- Agitation/propaganda (overlaps teaching, really)
- Passing time, entertainment (the source motivation for the three modes?)
- Pissing off parents (a spurious example for illustration of possibilities)

The key question is, which of these are concerns for a theory of roleplaying? It's not as if anything anyone ever cares to use games for is sensibly an issue, but likewise one cannot throw all social possibilities away. Consider the following:
- A game is started on a dare, to resolve who is the best.
- A common interest in ancient Rome is discovered, and game commences.
- A philosophical question is under heated argument, and is illustrated through game play.

The above are all examples of how given general social motivations can trigger play in a certain mode. It's common for roleplaying to commence as simply entertainment, in which case the agendas are up for grabs; however, if a different social trigger would launch the game, conceivably the resultant action would be focused based on the reason play was started. It might even take the game outside the three modes used for entertainment!

Now, the abovementioned social motives for roleplaying might trigger creative agendas other than the three that we know of, but only if you can show that a given social motivation results in actual play decisions that are remarcably different from those of the three. It's a given that people might roleplay for different reasons, but whether this will affect the play itself is an open question.

Remember the relevant definition of a creative agenda: it is the basis for creative decisions in-game. Now, as an example, a player playing as a rebellion against his parents might purposefully make decisions that would shock those parents (demon-worshipping characters, for example). Is this narrativism? Yes it is, as the player has a premise ("is demon-worship an acceptable act?") and he addresses it. A social motivation is subsumed into an agenda.

Or is it that simple? If the player is only interested in rebelling against bourgeoisie values, he won't be in a dialogue with the other players about demon-worship, but with his parents and himself. He will accept only affirmative opinions from the other players, and deem critique as a betrayal. Maybe this is genre simulationism with a punk theme?

Let's say that our demon-worshipper gets an ingame opportunity to sell his soul for power. This is a losing proposition in the game world, his character doesn't look like he'd do it, and there is no protagonism to hook a premise in. What's going on when he does it anyway? The player makes the choice because he expects that roleplaying should include demon-worship, as otherwise he's just wasting his time when he could shock his parents by smoking dope. This is a choice concordant with his chosen theme: it's clearly genre simulation, as the player wants to play a game about satanism.

The given example is explainable as "the player wants to play a game in a parent-shocking genre". Is there examples of social motivations that do not fall within a given agenda? Yes there are, but those do not seem to support any in-game decisions at all. Let's say that you play a roleplaying game as an icebreaker. The fact that you started play to get to know each other doesn't control play decisions, so it's not an agenda. Ice-breaking, dating, teaching.... these do not trigger specific agendas per se, as the players are left free to make decisions according to any agenda even when playing these.

The key word is creative. While you might call a pedagogic goal an agenda of play ("I'll go to the winter palace to illustrate to the other players the excesses of the revolution."), it's not a creative one. I might approach teaching through socratic method (narrativism), illustrative method (simulationism) or through testing and action (gamism) (I've coincidentally written one of each, as I noted some time ago). Teaching as an "agenda" doesn't constraing the play decisions I make, it just constrains methods.

We could conceivably analyse possible social motivations of play (entertainment, philosophy, pedagogy, social exploration) and add them into the Big Model as constraints of ephemera and technique, as far as they limit anything (is pedagogy possible without a strong GM? Yes it is.). Social Motivation might be an alternative or additional classification, instead of an agenda.

If we posit a creative agenda corresponding to a social motivation, one would except it to be quite dull to play in, as Sean point out. The same however holds true with the agendas, too; if you aren't interested in pursuing a premise, it'll be dull if the other players are not supporting. If there were a new agenda, it'd have similar features.

So my final analysis seems to be that the so-called social agenda is really a bunch of diverse motivations of play that might get the game going but not control agenda. What the players do in the game is still a question of gaming, exploring or philosophy.

Thanks, Eero. That's one of the most personally useful responses I've gotten to date, and it essentially rejects the hypothesis, so I'll have to think about it.

If your argument is incorrect, here's where I think you too may be guilty of aesthetic purism. If the social mode is understood as a mere motivation to play, where the play itself is understood as creating a shared imaginary space in some way, then yeah, sure, it's not a CA. I grant that, and on that picture one would say that this sort of thing 'is handled at the social contract level', or even at the personal level prior to establishing a social contract.

But if particular social goals are affecting your in-game decisions (as we see with Step on Up when 'it's personal' between two players); if the game is written to facilitate the achievement of certain social goals; if the dream, the story, and the challenge all get muted in order to favor some kind of exploration or transformation of the real world; then that seems like a different CA. It's one which violates the integrity of the shared imagined space essentially, I think, but integrity is not the only value one might have.

Again, if play-decisions and rules support changing people's attitudes, or even just educating them about the real world, and do so at the expense of other kinds of decisions one might make, that's a CA.

If you stop to look things up in a historical game all the time to support period-fidelity, that's hardcore Sim. But if the point of your historical game is to learn more history, that's something different, and I think one could tell them apart pretty easily.

Similarly, if you want to challenge players to address mental illness-based premises, moral and narrative questions, through play, that's Nar. But if you think your players are mentally fucked up and want to use the game as a form of therapy to fix them, and the game provides techniques for examination of play-decisions as a tool for correcting one's dysfunctional mental habits, that's something different, and again, I think one could tell them apart.

Certain 'hard core' Gamist creative agendas are also experienced by many as undermining the integrity of the shared imaginary space too. Those people want to Step on Up more like the way they do in a boardgame; all but a few forms of exploration just get in the way of that, forms that a lot of us need for our enjoyment even playing with our Gamist hat on. I don't think they've moved outside roleplaying in so doing.

Anyway, thank you very much for your thoughtful response, and I hope I haven't put words in your mouth - insofar as I have it's for the sake of carrying the discussion forward only, and I apologize.

Sean


P.S. I'd distinguish 'conceptual' theories of art (e.g. Joseph Kosuth) from what might be called 'rhetorical' or 'propaganda' theories of art (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu, who at least put it on a sociological basis, but also a lot of gerede 'everything is political' stuff you hear in the US academy). But as with the constant threat of veering into philosophy of science, I think we'd best stay way from art theory.

Let's return in more detail a little later, but I'll give a fast reply:

I didn't mean to imply that social motivations couldn't be differentiated - I believe they can. I just meant that they most likely are not of the same abstract category as the creative agendas. Like with a therapeutical game: you could try to therapeutize by disputation (narrativism), by situation therapy (simulationism) or even harnessing competitionary spirit (gamism). Choosing a social motivation is separate from choosing a CA.

Crap.

Damn hell, [very long string of expletives deleted].

There's a way of looking at this which sort of dissolves the problem, which I expect is sort of like what some of you have had in mind for quite some time. If I'm right then 'Narrativism' is the most misleading of the three terms for the CA, but not for any reasons anyone was able to make clear (to my poor addled brain anyway) in any of the past threads - namely, because Narrativism not only has nothing to do with story, it has nothing to do with narrative, or even necessarily with players addressing Premise through play. Addressing Premise is a Nar-facilitating technique, nothing more. I've thought that for a long time even in the grip of my false understanding of Narrativism but gave up fighting over it because it wasn't worth another beating like the one I took when I first showed up here.

But OK. So maybe I wasn't wrong then in that second Social Mode thread to identify pedagogical play as a subset of Sim. The nature of the interest in the in-game cause is different, but the focus, in the imagined space, is still on that in-game cause, and the way it lets you open onto the aspects of reality you want to use the game to explore.

If that's right, then maybe the kinds of things I've got in mind for socially transformative play really are just Narrativism, at least where they're not friendly Gamist team-building activities. That would make sense, actually.

The key is appreciating what the nature of the charge you're getting out of the shared imaginary space is. If you're leading people through a kind of moral or psychological self-actualization, that's still a Nar-type charge.

'Dramatism' is actually a better name for this in some ways than 'Narrativism', though worse in others, and both are bad. 'Humanism' and 'Moralism' are misleading in a variety of ways though. 'Significantism'? 'The attraction of the human soul to that which challenges it to be itself?' Why is there no English word for this basic concept, that of moral and emotional challenge? (Rather than competitive challenge, which is to say challenge in the Forge sense.)

'Valuism'?

This is incredibly frustrating. I think I know a few other people on this site who are frustrated with this particular terminological issue though.

Conclusions from this round of excogitation:

(a) I think there is a mode of play, call it 'the social mode' in which the Exploration is focused on aspects of the real world. There is a parallel here to the 'pervy' mode of gaming which focuses on Exploration of System. However, exploration of system is not a separate CA, and neither is the social mode.

(b) In order to think (a), however, I also have to commit to the belief that not only the story-quality of the game-text, but even the ability of all players to create 'narrative-effecting' decisions through play, is not really essential to narrativism. Rather, all that's essential is that the primary charge people are getting out of play is that they are able to explore psychologically/emotionally/morally significant issues in some way though their in-game decisions.

(c) Almost everything I've thought about how to categorize my own gaming since I joined the Forge is wrong. Basically, except for a few occasional forays into murderous gamist D&D, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Narrativist, who occasionally gets off on his own descriptive abilities (and flatters himself to think that his players get off on that stuff too) to the point where he has Sim-like interludes in his gaming, but the driving force behind my games is almost always Narrativist in character.

(d) Narrativism is indeed extremely common. In fact, the majority of gamers I know IRL even through D&D are narrativist-inclined, though in my high school RPG club I think there was a pretty even split between the three modes (the Sim types mostly being the older kids who had come up through wargaming), and I'm certainly aware of lots of Gamist D&D being played all around me.

(e) Calling Narrativism 'Narrativism' is going to continue to lead, in perpetuity, to the same endless fights we have about it here. I started enumerating issues here at length but just deleted it because I don't want to bug up the post with complaints. But let's just look at "Story Now". "Story" is bad for commonly cited reasons; explaining story in terms of "addressing Premise" is worse as long as the idea of story or narrative stays anywhere in the background as what 'addressing Premise' is supposed to accomplish. "Addressing Premise through play" without any reference to story or narrative at all, while psychologically impossible unless you've gone through heavy Forge dialogue, is OK, but still somewhat tendentious prior to a discussion of human values and psychology, morality and emotion, and how they fit together and what we get out of dealing with them through role-playing. "Now" is also irrelevant, or nearly so anyway: not everyone is impatient in getting the damn thing addressed, and anyway this impatience really has more to do with the historical frustration many of us felt in getting clunky old Simulationist-facilitating systems to deliver the premise-laden goods, then anything essential to the psychology of the Nar-inclined gamer. If one could, contra reality, make big clunky tables that really would address Premise well, then I suspect I at least would sit through the jam to get it so addressed.


Does any of this work for anyone?

I'm going to go back and look at some of the posts on the earlier Social Mode threads and see if anyone was trying to say basically this same thing to me.

Concerning Narrativism, Sean wrote: Rather, all that's essential is that the primary charge people are getting out of play is that they are able to explore psychologically/emotionally/morally significant issues in some way though their in-game decisions.

Hi, MJ. I really appreciate the time you take to talk to me about my posts.

Maybe. The thing is, addressing Premise is often discussed around here in terms of pretty specific techniques and approaches.

If one thought that treating psychologically, emotionally, and morally significant issues through play always involved posing certain kinds of thematically loaded question to players, then yeah, you could at least say that "addressing some premise or other" was always there in this kind of play. That needs argument, but I think one can make a rough argument that establishes the connection near enough for practical purposes at least.

Here's the thing, though: once you start connecting Premise to theme and 'creation of story', let alone the lit-theory ideas that are often used to work those out, I maintain the important thing about the kind of play we call 'narrativist' gets lost. A lot of that stuff is really (in my view now) just a set of particular aesthetically useful techniques for getting greater intensity and, perhaps, 'literary' character out of Narrativist play. Maybe that's pointed out explicitly somewhere, but I missed it if so.

So I think there's an ambiguity ('synechdoche') in the way that "addressing Premise" gets used at the Forge which is deeply misleading. Maybe there are a subset of you that use it correctly in all cases, but many times the general idea gets all mixed up with a lot of particular techniques and ephemera for doing it.

And this is connected with the bad understanding of "Narrativism" that connects it to story-creation. I guess thinking about this for a couple days now I've sort of come to feel that "Narrativism" used in the way GNS uses it is exactly the same sort of red flag that Ralph put up recently when he defined "Deep Immersion" in an ambiguous way "to make people think" or "challenge their ideas". It's on the one hand certainly true that a lot of people who are strongly attracted to the 'story value' of their play will have a great interest in the theory, practice, and design of 'emotional/moral challenge-facilitating' games. So there's a rhetorical efficiency in using the word.

On the other hand, it's pretty clear that at least half the fights, and many of the most bitter fights, the ones that lead people away from some of the goals that some posters at the Forge are trying to promote, that people get into over GNS both here and at rpg.net are directly due to the ambiguity that the word 'narrativism' introduces into thinking about this mode of play. I'm not sure it is enough to dispel this ambiguity to say, as Ron does in the Narrativism essay, that the story quality of game transcripts does not tell you what GNS mode you're playing in. The story quality of the game-play itself doesn't count, if the way I'm looking at it now is right.

Hello,

Sean, with great respect, I think you've managed to talk yourself into a very strange set of constricting corners in this thread.

I don't understand why anyone disconnects "narrative" from Narrativism. Let's talk about clay cups and pots.

1. Can clay cups and pots come about through a wide variety of activities or perhaps even who-knows-what events that have nothing to do with pot-making? Sure. They "can." In the fullness of time, perhaps even a few do.

2. Can one bring a cup or pot to a group of cup/pot-makers and say, "Hey, let's make a pot," then the group proceeds to gild and polish the pot? Sure. They may even end up with a pot that is a color no other pot has ever seen.

3. Can one bring a very organized pot kit to the same group, and walk them through each step, carefully, and with full authority over each person's decisions (however subtle that authority might be)? Sure.

But ultimately, there is only one way actually to make pots - (a) not to have one to start and (b) to carry out acts which reliably get pots.

That's Narrativism. You can't start with a narrative, nor have one in mind to lead others to or through. But you must have the components, the guiding aesthetic, and a set of procedures in order for new narratives (whatever they may be) to emerge reliably.

Components: same as any role-playing game, with (like Gamism) a strong focus (now or later) on Situation

Guiding aesthetic: Address Premise (and perhaps the Premise will arise very slowly, and the way it's addressed must be unknown at the start)

Procedures: System Does Matter - with the very strong point that the reward system elements of the System are key. In fact, I see everything in Chris Lehrich's discussion of "ritual" as "shrug, reward system."

Thus narrative (story) and Narrativism. It's reeeeeally easy - and I submit that no non-gamer I have met has ever had any difficulty understanding this. I strongly suggest that gamer culture has produced at least two generations of hobbyists who are, for lack of a better word, stunted and malformed in their ability to grasp what nearly everyone else is perfectly capable of.

To sum up ...

1. Does Narrativsm always produce a story? Damn near. When it fails, it's because System breaks down for whatever reason (bad internal construction, Social Contract breakdown, etc).

2. Must one play Narrativist to make a story? Nope. You might admire the shiny one that the GM brings, or that he or she maneuvers into existence despite your presence. You might "just get" one, conceivably.

Therefore, does Narrativist play concern, centrally, narrative? You damn well betcha. In my worse moments, I'd like to hunt down whoever said "Narrativism doesn't have anything to do with narrative!" and beat him stupid. Or, if he said that because he was thinking about narration instead of narrative, just dunk him in the horse trough.

Best,
Ron

Ron, and with great respect, but that's just crazy talk.

A narrative is just a description of a sequence of events. Describe a game of Cluedo (do you guys just call it Clue over there?), you've got a narrative. Describe a trip to the laundry room, you've got a narrative. Describe the stuff you see out of the train window as you commute to work, you've got a narrative.

Your use of "transcript" in the Narrativism essay could without question and equivocation be substituted by the word "narrative" without any damage to the meaning of any of the lines. I can understand not using it for the strict purpose of not clouding the meaning of "narrativism". It's a smart writing choice.

Whenever you narrate you produce, unsurprisingly, a narrative. If narration can be independent of narrativism, a fortiori narrative can also be independent of it.

There is a slightly stronger claim to a link between narrativism and story - a lot of sim play would more resemble travelogue or day-in-the-life-of than a play or novel - but, as the draft glossary currently does, a distinction should be kept between "story" and "story now".

Ron, more on the point of the thread, do you disagree that what Sean is describing as

the primary charge people are getting out of play is that they are able to explore psychologically/emotionally/morally significant issues in some way though their in-game decisions

Hello,

Ian, you and I are using very different definitions of the word "narrative." The definition I'm using concerns a fictional series of events which include at least one identifiable protagonist engaged in an identifiable conflict, and the events resolve that conflict. The terms protagonist, conflict, and resolution all presume a real-person audience who is emotionally engaged. This fiction can be vague, incredibly complicated, or ambiguous, but these elements will all be there, or it's not a narrative. Your "description of series of events" doesn't qualify.

My definition is exactly the same as "story" in my Narrativism essay. Stories are narratives. Lives are not, "any" set of fictional events is not, and whatever is narrated is not.

Why not that latter? "Narrated" goes with narration, not with narrative. Two very, very different words as I see them.

I don't present all this to lecture you, but rather to explain just what I'm using these words for, why I'm not mouthing crazy talk, and why the concepts I'm discussing here and in my essays are so astoundingly easy. If necessary, just replace the word "narrative" with another in your head. I'm not saying my definition is uber-right-dictionary-perfect, but I don't think it's unreasonably specific, either.

M.J., I agree with you that what Sean describes and "address Premise" are synonymous. You stated that very well in your previous post. Furthermore, I also think that the degree to which the processes we're talking about do not create story is negligible. Such events are exactly analogous to a group of people who do set up teams, do dribble the ball around the court, do try to score more points than the other team, and do follow a number of known rules, but who can be said to "fail" to play basketball. Pretty hard to do.

Sure, it might not be very good basketball; depends on the people. And in Narrativist play, it might not be a very good story, for the same reason. But even if it's "Jack tried to kiss Jill, Jill ran away to join a lesbian militia, and Jack fell over and busted his head open," it's what they got, lame as it might be - just as watching a bunch of crappy basketball might make the local jocks double over with laughter, but hey, the players did indeed do that deed.

And yeah, my little one-line story there does have a theme.

Best,
Ron

Just to elaborate a bit further on what Ron and M.J. have said (and, in the process, to reiterate the well-worn point that all of these definitions really do matter), the difference between "narrative" as Ian is using it and "narrative" as the narrativism essay defines it is fairly simple.

The "narrative" Ian is describing as "just a sequence of events" is what I would call a kind of naive reportage. This is "narrative" that simply reiterates (in the strict literal sense of the term) the detritus of daily events. I like to think of this kind of "narrative" as the equivalent of a recorder that simply records everything and distinguishes nothing.

This does not a "narrative" make, not at least in the way Ron is using the term. While no one would deny that retelling this sequence of undifferentiated events is a "narrative" in the most basic sense of that word, no one would similarly deny that these are not the "narratives" that writers of fiction or makers of film aim to produce (some of Warhol's film experiments perhaps being arguable exceptions to this). "Narrative" in this second sense must be about something, and that something is more than just a transcript of events, encounters, conversations, etc. This "something more" is what the players supply in narrativist play.

I agree with Ron that this is not a difficult idea to grasp, not for non-gamers and certainly not for kids. When I ask my 9 year old daughter what a movie like "Whale Rider" is about, she doesn't regurgitate the sequence of events that make up the movie. She tells me that it is about how a leader of the Maori comes to understand that the thing he has been looking for (the leader who will instill his people with hope and a sense of possibility) is right under his eyes but that he can't see it because he doesn't expect it to look like THAT! That's the "narrative" for her. That's what "narrative" is in the sense that Ron is using.

So, I guess all this is to reiterate the obvious point that we need to be careful to understand the meaning of the terms that people are employing.

Cheers,

Eric

Ron

The reason it's crazy talk is that it runs contrary to your stated desire to get past continually redefining and re-explaining GNS to newbies to the detriment of other projects - doing more work on technique combinations. Using "narrative" as your using it will lead you inevitably to thread after thread of newbies not getting it - because you're using narrative in a counter intuitive sense.

Now, if you want thread after thread of explaining to people that just because your play produced a narrative that doesn't mean your playing Narrativist, that's your call.

Eric

By "a recorder that simply records everything and distinguishes nothing" I take it that they made you read Joyce's Ulysses at college and it burned your ass. Joking aside, that's a great exaple of how a comprehensive narrative recording doesn't need to be naive - and how you can have a narrative without a story in any kind of classical sense (ironically Ulysses does have a classical structure).

But, assuming you're one of the lucky ones that doesn't know Joyce from a girder, "story" can be easily seen as a subset of narratives: you can't have a story that doesn't clearly constitute a narrative but you can have plenty of narratives that would suck as stories. The words aren't close synonyms.

But, like I said before, you can enshrine Ron's heavily jargonised use of "narrative" within The Forge lexicon - in which case it requires an entry in the new glossary but let's not pretend we're talking about the ineluctable modality of the gamable (sic).

Ian,

Obviously you see problems with the term that I do not, so help me out here. When you say to Ron

Using "narrative" as your using it will lead you inevitably to thread after thread of newbies not getting it - because you're using narrative in a counter intuitive sense.

This is getting interesting. I'm going to try to stay with the original issues though.

1. Possible Progress: I'm satisfied that the 'social mode' is not a CA. The reason is that role-playing always involves the shared imagined space and that the features of the shared imagined space which are getting emphasis are what constitute the CA of the game. Therefore, even in the applications I've been imagining, there's a clear reason to label the examples I've thought of as Gam, Nar, or Sim.

On the other hand, I still think that the social mode (not a CA, but a particular focus on the Exploration to bring it towards real-world stuff) is a really important and interesting part of gaming that deserves more exploration. We make friends out of gaming: how do we do that? Can we design games that are better at bringing people together in a friendly spirit? Can we design games that help kids learn history or biology or mathematics as part of their play? Can we make games which challenge us to reevaluate our own psychology on a fundamental level? All kinds of games do do this, but it's a direction one could focus on, if one was so inclined, and explore in a lot more detail than it's been explored so far.


2. Current Confusion, Possibly Dissipating: Ron, I think I see what you're getting at now. The corner I was in goes like this: if the primary charge you get out of gaming is the emotional/moral one, that's pretty flexible: you can deliver all kinds of charges of that type that don't necessarily add up to a story with any coherence. (Counterpoint: OK, so it's a bad story: isn't it still a story? Maybe; or maybe it's a sequence of episodes. But then there's a sense in which an episode itself is a story, so the counterpoint is pretty strong here.)

And then I think about the "Sim/Story" people who use lots of GM force and so on to keep the players on a track that leads to a story, and about players who are happy to be led along like sheep to find out the 'cool story' (and let's be fair, sometimes it is cool) that the GM 'has created for them'.

If those people are actually playing Nar - if Sim/Story is just a bad label based on mistaking certain Narrativist techniques for a Narrativist CA more generally - and I think they are now - then I'm not sure much disagreement remains on my end. The argument here would be that the players in a high-GM-force, low-player-agency, often-played-with-Sim-facilitating-rules game that aims at producing a good story, full of moral and emotional challenge, are getting the Narrativist charge out of the game, and are identifiably playing with a Nar CA; they just don't, either because they're bringing in a spectator's attitude from other popular art forms, or because they're lazy, or because they haven't encountered rulesets or techniques that let them shift the play burden differently, do very much to get more than one of the players at the table (the GM) involved in the decisions that the group makes to address premise.

If this all makes sense I'm not sure there's much more of a problem here on my end. I still might regard "Narrativism" as ambiguous, but I'd be much less inclined to find the ambiguity in the theory, and much more inclined to find the ambiguity in the English language, which we're stuck with for better or worse here. The issue is the inflection we put on 'story'. I won't say there aren't any serious discussions to be had about that, but I think they can be worked out.

(So I withdraw the charge about ambiguity - I don't think I was crazy to see it, since a lot hinges here on the specific interpretation of flexible words, but looking closer I think it disappears. On the other hand this post may turn out all wrong too - we'll see.)

Ron Edwards wrote: Ian, you and I are using very different definitions of the word "narrative." The definition I'm using concerns a fictional series of events which include at least one identifiable protagonist engaged in an identifiable conflict, and the events resolve that conflict. [snip] Your "description of series of events" doesn't qualify.

I wanted to get to this thread sooner, but time has been slim and work has been plenty.

*****

I think Sim is screwing things up a little again.

The Discovery agenda I mentioned in the second thread is not the same the agenda discussed in the essay Simulationism: The Right to Dream. Though they are both being called Sim, Exploration squared/internal causality and understanding/knowledge are different priorities.

I think you're totally right that a social or therapeutic agenda is not Exploration squared. I'm still up in the air on whether or not it is Discovery, a different agenda, or two different agendas. I'm waiting to see what becomes of Emily's dating game.

*****

The problem with the Nar definition is not just you - it was my problem with the definition. The new essay makes decent steps to fix this, but I think it's still a little too narrow. The essay pulls from one author's point of view on play writing. Novel writing is different, short story writing is different, ballad writing is different, and different authors have different takes on theme (Premise).

I quoted Jerome Stern in The roots of Sim II which might help a little with the Nar definition thing.

Stories have themes, themes make stories, and that's really all there is too it. I went to see Troy last night (liked it btw, but was kind of let down that I wasn't sad at the end) and they had the Spiderman 2 preview on before it. That preview is nothing but theme. At one point the announcer guy says, "One man will challenge his destiny" or something else equally silly sounding. That little phrase is the theme, or part of it anyway. The Spiderman advertising folks expect that to interest you, and it probably does, because it's a theme and it'll make a story.

Now I'm just babbling.

I think you have something different than Nar with a social agenda. Because the social agenda isn't a motivation to create a story. Behaviors created by different agendas often appear the same - something I've recently noticed is more common than not. The underlying agenda, the motivation behind the player's decisions, will ultimately make the final product quite different even if individual moments seem like they could be any agenda.

I'm still where I was before on the issue of a social agenda - open minded, seeing it in play, but not seeing it as a primary motivation in any of the players I know. I feel the same about Discovery. The fact that I think I've seen traces of it gives it credibility for me, but I just don't have enough data to make a decision.

I just reread the thread start to finish and I seem to have helped take it off at something of a tangent. It might be worth starting a subthread if people think there's much mileage at all in the drama/narrative/story thing but I can't think of much else to add on that issue.

Just to help bring it back to Sean's original concerns, I think the best way to establish a fourth mode would be with an actual game (maybe Emily's) or detailed actual play examples. I think if people could generate one or both of those it would aid theorising tremendously.

And Crucial (Jason isn't it, but I'm bad with names), I'd agree strongly that the Spiderman II trailer (and indeed the first film) foregrounds the subtextual issues the story (i.e. theme) to play to two markets: voiceover gets the adults visuals get the kids kind of thing. The visuals are saying it's about a guy who can climb walls and shoot web and this nifty keen supervillain with like mechanical tentacles and the voice over is saying it's about real world issues.

Doyce,

I fear you've misunderstood me, and I think that is largely my fault because when I wrote my most recent post it was 4:00 AM. Here's what I meant to say: it isn't that the definition of narrative as "an account of a sequence of events" is restrictive. Obviously it is about as broad a definition as one can get, encompassing as it does recognizably literary stories, non-literary ones, reports, diary entries, travelogue and so forth. What I meant to say (and I should have known better than to be up at 4 am writing) is that it was overly restrictive to reduce the meaning of narrative to a single entry in a dictionary. The OED recognizes several definitions of narrative in its second edition, one of which refers clearly to fictional narratives like those under discussion. So it seems unduly restrictive to say that narrative means only "an account of a sequence of events" when the most authoritative dictionary in the English language recognizes that this is one among many meanings of the term. Same goes for story.

That's all I was trying to say. I'd go further and say that I don't think most people out in the world understand "narrative" and "story" in anything like the ways you described. Do people really think that when they open a novel or watch a film unfold that they are merely observing a sequence of events, sans theme, sans premise, sans conflict? As I was trying to point out in the example of my 9 year old's response to the film "Whale Rider," you don't even need exposure to the most elementary literary concepts to know that story means more than simply a sequence of events unfolding in time.

Sure, there are plenty of writers who argue that their stories are devoid of theme and might appear to take the position that they are really nothing more than accounts of events. Twain has a famous line about this in one of his works; but often this is nothing more than a false front.

So, I guess I disagree that the term is as misleading to people as some are suggesting. I also think that even if this understanding of narrative weren't contained in any dictionary, it would be perfectly legitimate for Ron to define and use it in this way in his essay. After all, this is common practice in theory. Derrida is a perfect example of this. He routinely uses the words "writing" and "trace" in his early works in ways that are quite different from their commonplace meanings. Of course, he goes to great lengths to try to explain the way he is using these terms, so it is not a legitimate objection to say that he can't use them in these specialized ways because that is not how the terms are commonly understood.

I think we probably agree that the Forge ought to limit the amount of specialized language it creates and uses so as not to utterly intimidate newcomers, but isn't part of the agreed upon social contract of the Forge that there are some terms that have specialized meanings and that it behooves newcomers who wish to participate in certain fora (like RPG Theory and GNS Model Discussion) to try to acquaint themselves with it.

[Aside: as I was typing this it occurred to me that a term like Thematism might be a bit closer to what Narrativism is all about, but it somehow strikes me as too reductive and tendentious]

Anyway, all this is pretty far from the original topic of the thread. So let's get back to Sean's questions.

Eric

Irene Tanke and I recently wrote an article for the swedish larpzine Fea Livia concerning meaning and messages in larps. It will also appear in the june issue of The Larper. Admittedly, it is not rooted in Creative Agenda theory and it concerns larp, specifically of the scandinavian political type. Yet, I feel there are a few points in it which might be found relevant to this discussion.

One of our central points is that meaning is communicated from the play experience to the individual participant when the participant makes a retrospective interpretation of events in the shared imaginary space (diegetic events in scandinavian larplingo). As we see it, meaning does not exist before it is found through interpretation by the individual participants. The gamemaster (or larpwright) can attempt to control the flow of events (Illusionism and use of Force, if I understand the terms right) to get a spesific story told. However, to define the meaning of the play experience, in effect giving it a message, the individual interpretations must also be controlled. Those individual interpretations are made within the context of three different perspectives on the diegetic events; as a character within the fiction, as a player in that particular process of roleplaying (participant in the social contract), and within their greater personal frame of reference. The percieved meaning is, along with the experience of the social contract at work, what the player brings with her into the rest of her life. It is therefore these two things that might spark changes in a players life.

Now, as I see it, the adressing of premise in narrativism might also be understood as making in-game choices with the consideration of what is expected to yield meaning in retrospect. (Meaning here understood as percieved intellectual or emotional relevance.) This means that those choices are also made within the personal frame of reference of the player. Therefore, both in the choices of actions and in the retrospective interpretation of those actions and their consequences, issues that are relevant to the player will surface, affecting both choice and interpretation. If not done on purpose, this will very often happen subconciously. In effect, narrativism that works out will always yield meaning of some kind, it will always be relevant to you, and it will therefore affect your outlook and the rest of your life. This does of course not mean that all groups with narrativist creative agendas are really therapy groups. The issues that surface might be more or less pressing and dramatic, depending on the players level of personal development. They might primarily be of intellectual relevance, rather than emotional.

Now, I think this shows us that the possibility for personal development is inherent in narrativism. The interesting question is if it is inherent in all roleplaying. After all, any roleplaying will create some kind of sequence of events that might be interpreted as a story. Any story might be seen as meaningful, and affect some kind of change, on some level, in a player. Issues that are pressing might bleed into the players in-game choices subconciously, independent on mode of play, although narrativism is the only mode that actively supports and encourages it. However, as I said earlier, meaning is not the only thing brought over into the rest of a players life. The experience of the social contract at work also has the potential to affect a players life.

As a conclusion I think I rather agree with Eero, that there is no social agenda that exists alongside the three creative agendas. Rather, I think that desire for affecting social change is an alternative source motivation for the different creative agendas, an alternative to wanting to have fun of some kind, either in the G, the N, or the S flavor.


Erling

It has to be said there is something sueful to be had from using the extremely broad/vague use of the term 'story' for certain RPG applications, but beyond that would like to propose we begin referring to "formal story" to indicate that we are referring to story as it is understood in rough academic terms.

Hi Erling,

Welcome to the Forge! Thank you very much for posting a synopsis of your article. This is a sophisticated analysis of the creation of meaning role play. I'm glad to have these words to help think about these topics.

Erling Rognli wrote: One of our central points is that meaning is communicated from the play experience to the individual participant when the participant makes a retrospective interpretation of events in the shared imaginary space (diegetic events in scandinavian larplingo). As we see it, meaning does not exist before it is found through interpretation by the individual participants.

Like Ian, I’d like to step away from arguments about what is and is not narrative, story, plot, fiction, and whatnot, and get back to Sean’s issues with respect to a social mode. It seems that Sean has now decided that the social cannot itself be a CA, and while I agree with him it’s not, I think, for the same reasons. My feeling is that what Sean is probing at is something that cannot really be handled intelligently within the Big Model, because of the formal, hierarchical relationship between Social Contract and Creative Agenda.

Sean started with an excellent point about SIS, one that I think hasn’t been taken up strongly enough:

[T]he model treats the shared imaginative space, as an integral whole, created by game play as the vehicle for fulfilling those desires. ... That is, focus on story, on the dream, or on challenge are all understood as aiming for certain things within the shared imaginary space of the game. It is actions in that imaginary space which fulfill the different CA of the different players.

As Sean wrote: At its extreme limits, this approach to art is a kind of aesthetic purism: efface from the art object all signs of its relations to the world outside it, so that its integrity as a self-sustaining reality can be upheld.

Sean then wrote: However, it seems to me entirely reasonable that one could have a shared imaginary space as a tool to accomplish things quite outside it.

In response to Eero’s points about pedagogy and so forth, Sean wrote: I think you too may be guilty of aesthetic purism. If the social mode is understood as a mere motivation to play, where the play itself is understood as creating a shared imaginary space in some way, then yeah, sure, it's not a CA. I grant that, and on that picture one would say that this sort of thing 'is handled at the social contract level', or even at the personal level prior to establishing a social contract.

Eventually, Sean wrote: [T]he social mode (not a CA, but a particular focus on the Exploration to bring it towards real-world stuff) is a really important and interesting part of gaming that deserves more exploration. We make friends out of gaming: how do we do that?

To clarify a bit, I note that Jason [Cruciel] wrote: I'm still where I was before on the issue of a social agenda - open minded, seeing it in play, but not seeing it as a primary motivation in any of the players I know.

Ron wrote: I see everything in Chris Lehrich's discussion of “ritual” as “shrug, reward system.”

In the course of play, Jane’s character, Linda, gets raped. Jane is extremely upset about this, and she complains to the group. Adam thinks she is not recognizing that this has happened to a character, and is taking it too personally. Bill thinks she should make this situation into a kind of Premise, grappling with it as a social and moral problem. Chris, the GM, decides that a line has been crossed, because social relations are getting hairy, and lays down the law that in future there will be no rapes.

In the course of play, John’s character, Phil, gets into a fight with Sally’s character, Megan. John has the hots for Sally, and everyone knows it. In fairly short order, Phil, a known hothead with a stubborn streak, backs down. Dave thinks that John is bending his character inappropriately because John wants to get into Sally’s pants. Ernie thinks that John should make Phil’s conflict with Megan into an important issue for them, which will smooth over relations by making this interesting rather than a pissing match. Fred, the GM, decides that GM intervention would cause more trouble than it would solve, and so does nothing.

Hello,

Chris, I think you're entirely wrong in your assessment of the model, and that you've been wrong about this issue from the start.

There is nothing in the model that is not social. Every time you say something like "separated from the social situation," I have to stare, and usually, merely throw up my hands. There is nothing in the model that is not social.

All Exploration is kind of interaction which is describable in terms of the Social Contract. That's what the box-in-the-box means; otherwise, I'd draw it as one box with an arrow leading to the next one.

Once generated, a moment of the SIS doesn't exist separately from the Social Contract. It was created within it, remains in it, is assessed for "success" within it (and in Social Contract terms), and, significantly, it affects it, or rather, affects the rest of it.

A given technique is part and parcel of the SIS, and as such, is socially constructed, socially carried out, and socially assessed.

I really can't make head nor tail of your whole "separation from social" criticism - as I'm reading your post, and looking at the model, what you're saying is flatly wrong.

Would it help if I identified your discussion of ritual with the way the Reward System can be traced from its social outer layer through every layer, down to the moment (Ephemera) when, in a particular game, a person tallies some experience points onto his character sheet? And that one could also stay in the Social Contract level while looking at this event, and point to the interactions of the other people about it? 'Cause that's how I see it.

The "from" and "to" in that description are not temporal - they are merely conceptual layers, of a single social event which happens to include (a) communicating about an imaginary event, (b) a set of techniques which brought it into a state of agreement, and (c) a set of specific and momentary acts associated with each technique.

Creative Agenda describes how all of this is nailed together in mutual priorities, which is why it's so intimately associated with the reward system, and again, I see conducting that reward system, in action, as precisely the ritual element that you've written about.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Chris, I think you're entirely wrong in your assessment of the model, and that you've been wrong about this issue from the start.

Would it help if I identified your discussion of ritual with the way the Reward System can be traced from its social outer layer through every layer, down to the moment (Ephemera) when, in a particular game, a person tallies some experience points onto his character sheet? And that one could also stay in the Social Contract level while looking at this event, and point to the interactions of the other people about it? 'Cause that's how I see it. ... Creative Agenda describes how all of this is nailed together in mutual priorities, which is why it's so intimately associated with the reward system, and again, I see conducting that reward system, in action, as precisely the ritual element that you've written about.

If I may be so bold, I believe I can paraphrase Chris' position.

The fact that everything in the model is a subset of the social interactions of the group doesn't seem to be the difference of opinion. Instead, Chris' issue is that the social interactions are not also a subset of Exploration. The nesting implying that the feedback between layers is unidirectional - from largest to smallest. The model says that Social Contact shapes Exploration and Exploration shapes Techniques; but the model doesn't appear to say that Techniques shape Exploration and Exploration shapes Social Contact, because of the nesting.

This would require some sort of weird Escher-esque picture where Exploration is nested within Social Contact while Social Contact is nested within Exploration, or the abandonment of nesting.

As an analogy:

I believe Ron is describing a wolf as Organism -> Organ -> Tissue -> Cell.

While Chris appears be describing a wolf as something that eats deer, and because of this a deer is something that runs away from wolves, making wolves something that chases deer.

Sean is noticing that wolves chase deer, and trying to fit that into the model. The model is saying, "Of course wolves can chase deer they are predators". So Sean says, "But, why to they chase deer?" So the model says, "Aren't you listening? Of course they can chase deer!"

Hmmm... that analogy kinda sucks. Oh well, best I could come up with.

I hope I haven't put words in anyone's mouth.

This post is not necessarily the opinion of the author, but is instead just an attempt at clarification.

I just now realized that this dull thread about "story" and "narrative" is actually the thread about the social mode that started so promisingly. Talk about your tangent, I've read this for a week now without realizing that there's actually a point buried in there.

Sean wrote:
1. Possible Progress: I'm satisfied that the 'social mode' is not a CA. The reason is that role-playing always involves the shared imagined space and that the features of the shared imagined space which are getting emphasis are what constitute the CA of the game. Therefore, even in the applications I've been imagining, there's a clear reason to label the examples I've thought of as Gam, Nar, or Sim.

Emily wrote:
Eero and Erling, you may (or may not) have more experience both of didactic oriented games and ones that may fit the "psychological examination" profile (ie where the focus is specifically on the personal development or internal experience of the player than many of us reading here. If you do, do you have any specific examples you may speak of? Or anyone else, of course.

In your experiences with either of these types of games, have participants in them recognizably engaged in one of the three known creative agendas? Are there differences/similarities with standard entertainment oriented gaming that stand out to you? For example, what might the relationship be between didactic games and railroading, or with traditional games where the gm presents the challenge or premise to be addressed?

Just a brief followup to Chris and Jason's posts (sorry Eero to exclude yours, but I am still trying to digest its claims).

Would it help things at all if we understood the various boxes as being bounded by semi-permeable membranes rather than impermeable ones? This is how I have tended to think of them. In other words, does the nested boxes model work if we recognize that things flow from the boxes inside to the ones that surround them and vice versa? Or are there other objections to the model that I am not seeing?

Now, I have always assumed that Ron intended the boundaries between the boxes to be semi-permeable rather than rigid, so if I am wrong about this I trust he will correct me. However, I don't assume that understanding them as such will automatically resolve the difficulties Chris is trying to articulate.

Eric

I think this has been touched on before in the exploration of self thread, and in particular Ron's third post to it.

While the model allows that there can be social effects from Creative Agendas and Techniques, the model basically cannot say anthing about them. Because of the hierarchical nesting, all of the detail of the model is inside of the Exploration box. The social is a vast sea of undescribed space. As for the rigidity of the boxes, they are definitional and thus inherently rigid in a sense. i.e. If a Creative Agenda "leaked" out of the CA box and into the non-CA portion of the Social Contract box, then by definition it is no longer a Creative Agenda.

I would point as an alternative diagrams such as the information flow diagrams at the end of Liz Henry's Group Narration essay or from my Narrative Paradigms essay. These differentiate among meta-game level structures, such as between participants. In contrast, all of the detail in the Big Model is inside of the Exploration box.

I think this is reflected in much of the emphasis of the Big Model. For example, I personally have always been puzzled by discussion of reward systems. In the Big Model, reward systems are defined as being inside the Creative Agenda box. But to me, the only motivating rewards are outside of the Exploration layer. i.e. A game can define "brownie points", but that doesn't mean that I am motivated to collect them. For example, in games of Paranoia and/or Call of Cthulhu, I have often seen players delight in losing points and collecting penalties like damage, insanity, and treason points.

cruciel wrote: If I may be so bold, I believe I can paraphrase Chris' position.

The fact that everything in the model is a subset of the social interactions of the group doesn't seem to be the difference of opinion. Instead, Chris' issue is that the social interactions are not also a subset of Exploration. The nesting implying that the feedback between layers is unidirectional - from largest to smallest. The model says that Social Contact shapes Exploration and Exploration shapes Techniques; but the model doesn't appear to say that Techniques shape Exploration and Exploration shapes Social Contact, because of the nesting.

John wrote: While the model allows that there can be social effects from Creative Agendas and Techniques, the model basically cannot say anthing about them. Because of the hierarchical nesting, all of the detail of the model is inside of the Exploration box. The social is a vast sea of undescribed space. As for the rigidity of the boxes, they are definitional and thus inherently rigid in a sense. i.e. If a Creative Agenda "leaked" out of the CA box and into the non-CA portion of the Social Contract box, then by definition it is no longer a Creative Agenda.

Hello,

In other words, does the nested boxes model work if we recognize that things flow from the boxes inside to the ones that surround them and vice versa?

Okay, I can't claim to have very good comprehension of what's been discussed in this thread so far. I'm going to try to follow what seems to be the crux question and see where it leads.

The Big Model has a big Social Contract box, and a (less) big Exploration box that nests inside it. That nesting expresses two simple ideas:

1. That some things in the Social Contract box are not included in the Exploration box.

2. That everything in the Exploration box is also an expression (or instantiation, if you will) of the stuff in the Social Contract box.

The question is whether that nesting is an accurate and adequate description of the relationship between these two components of the Model. (And, by analogy, whether the other layers of nesting in the model are similarly valid.) So let's look at the two assertions expressed by the nesting of Exploration within Social Contract.

The first assertion seems noncontroversial to me. An argument over who pays for the pizza, or a tradition of not touching one another's lucky dice, are Social Contract aspects that are not elements of Exploration (or near-equivalently, are not part of the Shared Imagined Space.)

But, one might point out, an argument about pizza can affect the process of Exploration -- for instance, in an extreme case, it might cause Exploration to cease due to the group breaking up. Does that make the nesting of Exploration inside Social Contract invalid? No, no more than observing that hawks and tigers can affect (eat) rabbits invalidates nesting the concept "rabbits" inside the concept "animals." The fact that Social Contract issues that are not part of the Exploration box can affect things that are inside the Exploration box is part of the reason Social Contract is in the model at all. Yeah, the stuff in the Social Contract box outside of the Exploration box is important, that's why the model includes it.

What is being proposed appears comparable to arguing that because one aspect of rabbit existence is the possibility of being eaten by hawks or tigers, the "rabbits" category cannot be expressed without including the "animals" category containing hawks and tigers in it, and that therefore the "rabbits" box and the "animals" box must mutually encompass one another. (And eating plants is also an important part of rabbit existence, so let's churn the "plants" box into this commingled concept as well...) That seems to be an argument against ever categorizing anything. Which leads straight to "There is no System, there are no Techniques, there is only The One" and the end of all analysis.

The second assertion is arguably more open to debate. Refuting it is simple: point out some part or aspect or instance of Exploration that is not a Social Contract matter. I don't believe that's possible, given the Big Model's definition of Exploration and its close association with the shared imagined space.

However, a hyothetical alternate or extended model that included boxes for individual "private imagined space" and "private mental/emotional experience" for each participant, on the same hierarchy levels as Exploration and Social Contract respectively, could permit the description of private feelings or thoughts, arising from (shared or private) imagined space, that are outside of Social Contract. That would be a different model, perhaps one using the individual participants' motives, goals, and internal experience of play, rather than the neutral observer of play, as the primary lens.

- Walt

I find one thing interesting here.

For those who wonder whether we're ever going forward, I think this is an example of going forward. Just as when Scarlet Jester introduced the concept of Exploration which ultimately gave the model a new framework, so too this idea fits somewhere, and is important, but I don't yet see where or how.

It's the idea that the role playing game experience reverberates back into the social level in that it impacts the participants in ways that reach beyond anything related to the game. It is the idea that role playing games change people and their relationships.

Of course, the same could be said for books, movies, baseball games, church services, and a wealth of other expressions of human thought and interaction. Perhaps it is something underexamined overall, or perhaps it is just something about which I'm less informed. I recognize that what happens within the game inherently happens within the social layer; but I think that it is at least underexpressed that these effects can reach outside the boxes.

That's the point. It is the case that the use of certain techniques can reverberate in such a way that John's character is killed, and John won't chip in for pizza because he's too upset about his character. Who pays for pizza is completely outside the exploration box, and therefore completely outside the shared imaginary space, the creative agendum, the techniques--and yet it is impacted by it.

I'm not saying that's not in the model. I am saying that I've not seen discussion of the model that recognizes this aspect of effects beyond the bounds of the boxes.

--M. J. Young

I wrote:

Would it help things at all if we understood the various boxes as being bounded by semi-permeable membranes rather than impermeable ones? This is how I have tended to think of them. In other words, does the nested boxes model work if we recognize that things flow from the boxes inside to the ones that surround them and vice versa?

Yup, that does it for me. I've tried to emphasize the flow in everything I've written; sometimes I call it "reverberating" because that's what it literally feels like.