Here's a draft of something I knocked together a while back in response to people's yammering at Jonathan about Brecht and gaming on his RPG.net forum. I'm a little hesitant about this seeing print, but I wonder what you folks think; Jonathan seems to like it, but I'd like a wider perspective.

If you haven't read Artaud, and/or know nothing about the Theater of Cruelty, this may seem a little bizarre, but that's OK.

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Toward An RPG Of Cruelty

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds. — Antonin Artaud, The Theater of Cruelty (first manifesto)

When RPG writers talk about theater, drama, story, and narrative, they talk about television and film. Further, they emphasize the element of entertainment in all such media: the point of gaming is to have fun. When someone proposes a “new” radicalism, he is shot down. “I don’t need this in my hobby,” they say. “I get enough of it in my real life.” But they are wrong: if they got enough in their real lives, their real lives would change.

Why, if they suffer enough, do they bear it? How do we tolerate the intolerable? By sucking on sweets: just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. So long as RPG’s provide such sugar, we are prostitutes who sell an illusion of happiness to serve our clients’ continued toleration of enslavement. And we too are enslaved, because we make ourselves pimps.

Look to other media. Are they supportive of the mainstream? Would authorities regulate them in the name of family values if they were not? To aspire to their eminence seems the height of most game-design ambitions. What joy! To earn a pittance for processing the sugar that rots the teeth of our culture. This is the limit of success.

But gaming is worse than these, a true criminal, a traitor within the gates. We are not rewarded for our pains, and are derided for our cringing wish to be allowed to pant at the doors of “real” media. We have not the excuse of big money, of advertising contracts, of entertainment infomercial television coverage and support. We cannot blame others, cannot avoid or shift the responsibility. And we beg to be whipped yet fawning curs. Other media are cynical and hypocritical, but we have been bought and sold.

We must seek transformation. Without this, art has no value. The only meaning or power in our peculiar art lies in its excruciating, damaging, powerful closeness to the players. Those who would sell this to the highest bidder are beneath contempt, for they are not only slaves but worshipers of their masters.

If truth be told, every power and every danger of gaming lies in the question of immersion. Considered clearly, immersion is a powerful technique for hurting players. We can trick them, lie to them, deceive them, seduce them, and they will enter “the story” like lambs to the slaughter. To send those sheep to be shorn by others prostitutes our art, makes us the pimps of the establishment. We must not only shear but slaughter the sheep ourselves.

Here lies the distance Brecht wanted. If a player is led into immersion, and then subjected to cruelty, the player must both suffer and watch his own suffering. But Brecht never imagined the escalation of the pornographic that has conquered our culture of “fun.” He believed that if we watched others suffer, and saw ourselves in that suffering, we would be driven to act. People are not so constituted. They watch suffering, and like it. They visualize torture, and imagine themselves the torturer, and do not see or feel the whips that descend on their backs.

What is needed is a gaming that will break all bounds, that will shatter all preconceptions, that will shock players out of their easy half-immersions. This is the RPG of Cruelty.

The players must be forced into immersion, but not the half-immersion that has become emblematic of “interesting” gaming. This permits a distance between intellect and body that all too easily accepts schadenfreude and cruelty as an amusement. They must become one with their characters. This must be enforced by rules, a system of iron law that binds the players into the characters and permits no escape. This has been designed, again and again, but to no purpose worth serving. It is a matter of setting the blade to the bone.

Having achieved this immersion, the players must be subjected to a cruelty they cannot withstand. Their sufferings must be terrible. They must bleed, and their bones must be broken. No agony is sufficient: they must move beyond suffering until pain is their only reality. Siberian shamans are torn apart, boiled alive, rendered down to bare bones. Only then can their skeletons be rebuilt, and they be made men who cross the worlds. Players must become shamans, guides for others. This can only happen through their destruction.

The problem is to create a metaphysics of speech, rules, and expression that will rescue gaming from its servitude to entertainment. It is not a question of bringing metaphysical ideas into the game; it is a question of forcing players at knifepoint to sacrifice themselves upon the altar of higher truth.

This cannot be achieved by boring the players to death with transcendent cosmic preoccupations, with shallow, semi-human characters engaged in facile, meaningless struggles with imaginary opponents for the sake of a world not worth saving. The World of Darkness is the worst traitor among us; it trades upon the willingness to play at meaning and serves only to cauterize the desire for it. The angst of such abominations is pandering and lies: when characters suffer and their players feel good, this is masturbation packaged as masochism. It achieves nothing but the ecstasy of the establishment.

Without an element of cruelty at the root of every game, gaming itself is not possible. All that remains is sterility, masturbation, and servility. Gaming must castrate.

Hi Chris,

I think you would have a stronger document if you laid out some specific do's and do-not's, prescribing and proscribing specific techniques. The Dogme 95 Vow of Chastity is an example I find very inspiring; it ties artistic ambition to the practice of film-making in a very clear manner. Without a tie between philosophy and craft, I just can't find an artistic manifesto very compelling.

I'll use myself as an example. When you mentioned Brecht, I started to tune out, because well, I get the giggles at the thought of anyone who can accept the Stalin Peace Prize in good faith. (For that matter, the Dogme 95 manifesto is also hilariously self-important, considered without the Vow of Chastity.) But if you had specific technical recommendations, then I have to take it a lot more seriously, because even if I disagree philosophically it's just plain fact that constraint is one of the roots of art, and knowing your philosophy is important for considering the craft form you advocate as a whole.

Does that make sense?

What Neel's saying is sorta what I said when Chris showed it to me. I was like "here's an interesting little philosophical claim about the nature of art and roleplaying; now show us what kind of play this would lead too." I think it should be somewhat clear, too, that you don't necessarily subscribe to the opinion you're layout down (at least not most of the time), but that this is more of an exploration of concept. So a sort of "roleplaying doesn't have to try for X, it can take Y as a guiding priciple, and create valuable experiences D, E, and F." Maybe you have to lay it down thick in order to make a point, but I don't think this is necessarily true.

Examples from Dogs would probably be a must. And kill puppies. Heck, most of Vincent's games. And perhaps some of the better or more complex "Argh, I'm a monster!" angst from White Wolf concepts. And you could show how most existing game mechanics don't really support playing in such a way that the player is really challanged. And you could talk about how to make it happen on a meta Social Contract and then in-the-guts mechanical level. It would pair nicely with the stuff Shreyas and I were pondering about wuxia and creating emotional trainwrecks of broken hearts, suffering, and death.

BL> Okay, I'm going to seperate for a moment my problems with your article's structure and my problems with your article's content. In particular, I'm going to take the latter and punt it into the future. Frankly, I don't care if what you are saying is something I agree with. I'll hopefully get a chance to argue it with you on the pages of Push

Mostly, I agree with Neel's point -- I would really like some sort of focus on craft. Frankly speaking, there are already RPGs that shatter, sever, cut and maim in the manner that you're speaking of. Like Brecht's work, they aren't very popular, but they persist. The first two that come to mind are Greg Costikyan's Beastial Acts, which is quite consciously a Brechtian RPG, and Vincent Baker's hungry, desperate and alone which, while its philosophical purpose is more psychological than social, seems to cover the same ground in that it is most certainly a direct attack on the psychology of the players.

clehrich wrote: Why, if they suffer enough, do they bear it? How do we tolerate the intolerable? By sucking on sweets: just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. So long as RPG’s provide such sugar, we are prostitutes who sell an illusion of happiness to serve our clients’ continued toleration of enslavement. And we too are enslaved, because we make ourselves pimps.

The name of Costikyan's game is Bestial Acts and it is linked here.

Hungry, Desperate, and Alone is here.

yrs--
--Ben

Maybe the logo on the cover of the journal should be buttons? (drumroll... and here come the groans, right on cue. Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Seriously, my initial reaction is not specifically about this article alone, but about it in light of Eero's first draft. My response to Eero was to argue that making the style less like a manifesto would make the article more effective. Now that this second piece is out here (even if you are unsure about it), it makes me wonder whether a few more manifestos might round out the issue nicely. For example, I could (I'm not volunteering just yet) see myself writing a "you know all that stuff about gamer geek culture being horrid? All that anti-mainstream publishing stuff? I'm not convinced, and here's why..." manifesto/rant to round out the issue a bit if we wanted to do something like that. I'd mostly even believe it, or at least part of me would.

With "Toward an RPG of Cruelty," there doesn't seem to be much to gain by toning it down. However, if we have a few manifestos anyway, why not have a real plurality of manifestos, including ones that disagree almost entirely with one another, sort of like the occasional journal article + "a response to soandso" exchanges, or a point-counterpoint news article. I get the feeling Ben might have a counterpoint article of that sort in him. I'm still trying to get a handle on the editorial vision, and I'm not rushing it. It'll come. So I'm not sure whether/how an idea like this would fit into it. Thoughts?

</brainstorm>

(Also, Chris, I'll try to take a more detailed look at the piece sometime the weekend and give you some feedback.)

Rich

Actually, my normal inclination isn't to write manifestoes like this. I was reading Jonathan's forum about Brecht and all these people raving that gaming is just about fun and everything else is nonsense, and simultaneously reading Artaud's Le theatre et son double (The Theater and Its Double), and it sort of sparked something. The thing I'm working on now is also a manifesto, but couched in much more normal language and it's about methodology and such, so it probably won't read as a manifesto. Just so's you know.

Out of interest, has anyone else read Artaud here? I thought he was fairly common reading, but maybe not.

As a counterpoint, I kinda liked the tone and the content here. The only problem I'm seeing is that the text isn't going deep enough; I'm seeing "theater of cruelty" and I'm going aaalright, I've seen this one, we have these discussions in Helsinki, and then I'm going through the article to see the point. And then it's just a straight explanation of what a roleplaying of cruelty would be. In a word, too basic if you're familiar with the concept, and apparently too abstract if you're not.

For the record, the Finnish immersionist school of thought characterized by the Turku manifesto (find it here, if you're interested) is based on Artaud and the whole reach-the-audience gig AFAIK. It's kinda familiar here, more than in US I believe, because we have all these theater people who develop the stuff still. Jouko Turkka for one, a famous Finnish actor/dancer/director who's a focus for a kinda artaudian artistic movement here.

So I'd say that my response to the text is skewed by some quite different expectations and background. This is already familiar ground, and I'd kinda expected more.

Anyway, from my expectation springs the same advice others have given, curiously enough: show us the application. Not because I don't understand or because I'm not interested, but rather because we'd like to see how you'd do it. The Turku people have their methods of confrontation, but how about you? From what games Jonathan chose I'm seeing a wholly different approach compared to the Nordic style. Dogs in the Vineyard? WTF? That's a distancing kinda game if something is, and would be classified as hopelessly dramatist by the Turku school. I'd be interested if the article went on to explain how this kind of game can be used for cruelty. Or was it just Jonathan's pick?

Alternatively, you could get together with Mike Pohjola and write about the Nordic application of Artaud with the authority stuff and all. That's an interesting issue too, and one that's not been put to writing very effectively.

Still alternatively, you could accompany the article with a review; do a review of a dishonest game (say, D&D and it's accompanying fantasy of accomplishment) from the artaudian perspective to show concretely how such a game inoculates us against reality, offering entertainment in stead of meaning.

Just some thoughts; I'm probably pulling for too narrow interest here, so it's better to listen to those who aren't philosophy buffs. The text works fine as an introduction to liberating art, so I wouldn't necessarily touch it if that's the goal. It's funny how I'm constantly seeing this journal drifting farther towards intellectualism; I like the stuff, but it could limit the audience.

Ben, about the prostitution thing: Chris is saying that the roleplayer is prostituting himself to conventional media by feeding expectations and needs as dictated by the establishment. He's saying that although the pure form of roleplaying is indeed personal and independent, the gamer who lets the game book in the door is inviting the bourgeoisie interest to sit at his gaming table.

The assumption in this kind of rhetoric is that everybody's life is a lie, to the extent that the person has compromised with the system and bartered away his dreams. Everybody's. Thusly art that comforts or explains is not liberating, but instead making the bondage just a bit more bearable. This is not the truth, but instead just lies of the person's own choosing. The only true art is the one that causes pain and discomfort, because it's a transformative experience. This has nothing to do with the separation of artist/audience.

Or at least, that's how I understood it.

Eero Tuovinen wrote:
The assumption in this kind of rhetoric is that everybody's life is a lie, to the extent that the person has compromised with the system and bartered away his dreams. Everybody's. Thusly art that comforts or explains is not liberating, but instead making the bondage just a bit more bearable. This is not the truth, but instead just lies of the person's own choosing. The only true art is the one that causes pain and discomfort, because it's a transformative experience. This has nothing to do with the separation of artist/audience.

Or at least, that's how I understood it.

clehrich wrote:
Why, if they suffer enough, do they bear it? How do we tolerate the intolerable? By sucking on sweets: just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. So long as RPG’s provide such sugar, we are prostitutes who sell an illusion of happiness to serve our clients’ continued toleration of enslavement. And we too are enslaved, because we make ourselves pimps.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Tuovinen"]Ben, about the prostitution thing: Chris is saying that the roleplayer is prostituting himself to conventional media by feeding expectations and needs as dictated by the establishment. He's saying that although the pure form of roleplaying is indeed personal and independent, the gamer who lets the game book in the door is inviting the bourgeoisie interest to sit at his gaming table.

So, I am the outside.

I don't know Brecht, or Artaud, or the Theatre of Cruelty.

How am I to approach this? What am I to get out of this?

If the answers are, "You aren't; you won't," then I think there is a problem.

Okay, now that conversation has tailed off....

One thing I had thought was obvious, but apparently isn't, is that one cannot really take a manifesto like this entirely seriously. That is, at the same time as I am quite serious, I am also deliberately exaggerating and overstating the case, the purpose being to spark response and a kind of grappling with the claims made.

Having read a certain number of such manifestoes written by people like Artaud (not to mention Marx and Engels), I was trying to follow in that tradition. But the thing is that you cannot "break frame" in such writing. You can't, that is, say what I'm now saying as an introduction or epilogue; that undercuts the whole point of the manifesto as manifesto. Nor can you "get down to specifics," because that narrows the possibilities of interpretation and interaction.

What has become clear to me from this thread, however, is that this mode of writing is not clear or readily accessible to the majority of the audience. I don't mean that as a slight; it's just a question of whether you "get" this kind of manifesto, on the basis of others, or not. That being the case, I think the chances that our readership will "get" the thing are extremely small. So I'm going back to straight-up analytical writing (when I get a chance), and pulling this thing from Push (and probably from broader circulation ever).

If you want to discuss it further, let's do so, but it's not going in.