OK, so I've been thinking about Ron's "celebration" definition for GNS Simulationism and Chris' analogy about anthropology in The Basis for Criticism. So here's my suggestion. It may not have anything to do with GNS, or then again maybe it does.

What about classifying games by their social function? To see this, look at an actual game, but mentally blank out any reference to the Shared Imagined Space. What is the game's function for the real people? It seems to me that there are two clear paradigms suggested.

One is Contest. i.e. You invite a bunch of people over for an opportunity to exercise their skills and be awarded respect for achievement.

Another is Celebration. i.e. You invite a bunch of people over for a party to celebrate something. Now, this is a pretty broad category (i.e. there are many different kinds of parties), but there are definite commonalities. However, I don't think I can easily sum up the social function of celebration per se.

There are a variety of other kinds of social function. However, I'm not sure which directly apply to RPGs. For example, there is Therapy like support group meetings -- i.e. invite a bunch of people over to express their inner issues and receive affirmation for what they are dealing with. There is Work -- i.e. invite a bunch of people over to accomplish some task, from barn-raising to quilt-weaving. Since RPGs don't have a product per se, I don't think that work applies as a function.

The first two seem to correspond to GNS modes. i.e. Contest as a social function equates to Gamism. Celebration as a social function may equate to GNS Simulationism. But I'm not sure if there is a parallel for Narrativism. Then again, this idea isn't intended as purely GNS. i.e. The idea of classifying by social function works on its own. However, it might shed light on GNS or conversely be illuminated by GNS concepts.

Hmm, well, I follow the case you make and find it convincing at first glance. I'm not suire I see a use for it yet but it's an interesting proposition. It might go some way to identifying another way in which different groups experience their RPG play in quite distinct contexts.

Hi John,

Yes, this is an interesting beginning. My only observation is that it lacks a category that describes narrativist play, which is neither therapy nor work.

Perhaps Myth Creation, in the Campbellian sense of the word myth as a story that exemplifies value choices, or Value Exploration or Confirmation.

Hi John,

I'm OK with this, and it makes a lot of sense to me - hell, it could even be a replacement set of terms for all the Creative Agenda modes (GNS), because it really hammers the point of social aesthetic priorities.

For Narrativism? Finding a term is tough not due to any definitional constraints but because Narrativist role-playing really is a new phenomenon, artistically.

I'm probably the worst person to weigh in with a candidate at the moment, and will do better to let others provide ideas. I'm really interested, though. I think this might be an important turning point.

Best,
Ron

A group of people getting together to write a screen play is work (in RPG's there is no finished product ... but people getting together to put on a play is still work and there's no finished product there either).

My mother attends story-telling groups. Although I don't know how that factors in, of the listed I'd pick a mix of Celebration, Challenge (there are prises for the best storytellers), and yes, even work.

I would say that virtually *any* game not only could but in some sense likey would move between competiton (check out my storytelling capability) to celebration (this story we're making is cool! And it's good to share cool with friends!) and work (okay, we're all here for the same purpose and making the experience come out this way).

I'm thinking ascribing a 1:1 match-up is a mistake.

-Marco

But the fact that every game includes moments of competion and celebration is no different than the fact that every game includes moments of naration, gamism, and simulation.

The question GNS CA is addressing is the overal intent of play.

If I have people over to play poker, is the goal to win money or to socialize? In both cases, we think we're playing the same game, but we really aren't.

So I think the real problem isn't so much the terms (which seem pretty useful to me), but in realizing what GNS CA is all about. I'm not sure these social aspect terms really help, though perhaps celebration is better than similation. Contest perhaps is better than gamism (since we're calling our play a game, no matter what the CA). I like story telling or myth creation for narativism, perhaps myth creation is best since a story is still created by any form of RPG play.

Frank

ffilz wrote: But the fact that every game includes moments of competion and celebration is no different than the fact that every game includes moments of naration, gamism, and simulation.

More thoughts...

Therapy and work may not fit the GNS description, but maybe they do correlate to separate CAs that GNS doesn't actually address. It certainly is possible to role play for theraputic reasons, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it outside of professional therapy.

Work as a CA might be what happens when you are playtesting as part of game development (as opposed to handing out playtest copies of your game, which I would expect to generally occur with one of the three GNS CAs), but in house playtesting is focused on "does this specific mechanic produce the results desired."

Of course sometimes we socialize just to socialize. Perhaps this compares to play that occurs without any CA.

Frank

Hiya,

Well, umm ... let's take it as a given that we are talking about CA, which is to say, the prioritized approach/agenda for the group (or arguably a person, let's not get into that) ... if there is one ...

In which case, the "little" versions of the categories (what Gordon likes to call g instead of G, n instead of N, and s instead of S) are just going to have to take care of themselves as usual, when we're using the GNS terms.

My impression from John's post, and correct me if necessary, is that we are talking about these big-ol', big-ass, What We Came to Do priority type things. The "littlun" versions which fade in and out as ephemeral features (and are indeed, Ephemera in the model now that I think of it) just aren't part of the topic at hand.

All of the above being provisional to John's response.

Best,
Ron

ffilz wrote: So I think the real problem isn't so much the terms (which seem pretty useful to me), but in realizing what GNS CA is all about. I'm not sure these social aspect terms really help, though perhaps celebration is better than similation. Contest perhaps is better than gamism (since we're calling our play a game, no matter what the CA). I like story telling or myth creation for narativism, perhaps myth creation is best since a story is still created by any form of RPG play.

John Kim wrote: "Myth Creation" doesn't work as a social function, in my opinion. A myth is fiction. This scheme asks what is happening with the real people. I don't think it is correct to call this "myth creation for the sake of myth creation". The tough question is: what do you, as a real person, get out of your game (whether G, S, or N)? So what is the real-world function of myth creation?

I too don't like "myth creation" much. It was just the first thing that came to mind.

It seems to me that the social function of narrativist play includes intentionally having a relationship to a value standard or ethic. The function seems to be to create personalized stories that address an ethic that players find interesting. In a sense it's confirmation of the player's ethics, and also exploration of those ethics, and practice application of different ethical interpretations.

How about the term Fabulation - the create of fables. At least one use of "Fable" includes a component of ethical exploration.

Alan wrote: How about the term Fabulation - the create of fables. At least one use of "Fable" includes a component of ethical exploration.

clehrich wrote:

John Kim wrote: "Myth Creation" doesn't work as a social function, in my opinion. A myth is fiction. This scheme asks what is happening with the real people.

I also dislike the term "myth creation" fairly intensely, though oddly enough for quite the opposite reason. I think scholarship on myth for the last 60-odd years has pretty clearly demonstrated that myth does indeed have social functions, which are horrendously complex and intricate.

Alan wrote: It seems to me that the social function of narrativist play includes intentionally having a relationship to a value standard or ethic. The function seems to be to create personalized stories that address an ethic that players find interesting. In a sense it's confirmation of the player's ethics, and also exploration of those ethics, and practice application of different ethical interpretations.

Alan wrote: How about the term Fabulation - the create of fables. At least one use of "Fable" includes a component of ethical exploration.

John Kim wrote:

clehrich wrote:

John Kim wrote: "Myth Creation" doesn't work as a social function, in my opinion. A myth is fiction. This scheme asks what is happening with the real people.

I also dislike the term "myth creation" fairly intensely, though oddly enough for quite the opposite reason. I think scholarship on myth for the last 60-odd years has pretty clearly demonstrated that myth does indeed have social functions, which are horrendously complex and intricate.

Sure, myths have various social functions in practice -- but I still contend that "myth creation" isn't a category of social function. It's like having a category "scientification" for the creating of science fiction stories. Do sci-fi stories have social functions? Sure. But specifying sci-fi doesn't specify a social function. For example, real-world myths as studied by scholars are generally part of an oral and/or written tradition. The same stories are repeated over many years, which passes values from one generation to the next. But this is not the case for RPGs.

clehrich wrote: I don't want to preach a big lecture about myth here, but those constantly repeated myths that you're thinking of are the products of incessant and continual reification by members of the cultures in question. Epic, saga, all that -- that isn't myth as told by living mythic cultures. What we find when we look at living mythic cultures, by which I mean cultures that still use myth and don't just repeat it, is that these things are highly flexible and change constantly.

clehrich wrote: The basic social function of myth appears to be to work through social difficulties and come up with social solutions. If the best a people can work out through myth is that the Leopard clan and the Eagle clan really should be one clan, because by a kind of mythic logic the Leopard really needs to be the Eagle's brother, you will soon find that Leopard and Eagle clan members cannot marry, because this would be incest. And so forth.

My objection to the notion of "myth" in narrativism is simply that myths are not "stories" in the sense meant by Story Now. And using Campbell makes it worse. But social functions of myth? Oh yes. That's the whole point, you see, and it's taken most of a century to even begin to understand what it's all about.

John Kim wrote: Or you could celebrate a famous fable-writer's birthday by creating some new fables in honor of his tradition. These might not be Narrativist, but they are myth creation. So the act of creating a fable or myth can be used in a variety of social functions.

John Kim wrote: Creating personalized stories is not a social function.

Alan wrote:

John Kim wrote: Creating personalized stories is not a social function.

You're wrong on this. Creating personalized stories is the function of many social activities, paricularly those of pre-media cultures, where groups gather to confirm the identity of individuals in various rights of passage. Such rituals are sometimes personalized. Heck, a simple sermon in a church attemptes to personalize the fables of our culture.

The terms "Therapy" and "Support" make me reflect on the games that served my LARP groups best in such a mode. I think a more accurate term for what we got out of it would be Catharsis. The game provided a safe environment in which to experiment with aspects of ourselves that we wouldn't usually express in day-to-day life.

John Kim wrote: OK, I think we're miscommunicating here. You're objecting that repeated-myth and myth-that-people-read-about and myth-as-expressed-by-Campbell aren't the real myth, which is the ever-changing myth of "living mythic cultures". But for a community of modern, non-anthropologically-folk (i.e. most of us here at the Forge), I think that trying to insist on a specialized use of the word "myth" that only applies to specific cultures isn't a good idea. In other words, I was using the word "myth" in its more broad, layman's sense. You can decry it as uneducated, which I'll freely admit to. I'm sorry for any passing on of imprecise language regarding myth, but I suspect I'm reflecting my peers here.

John wrote:

clehrich wrote: The basic social function of myth appears to be to work through social difficulties and come up with social solutions. If the best a people can work out through myth is that the Leopard clan and the Eagle clan really should be one clan, because by a kind of mythic logic the Leopard really needs to be the Eagle's brother, you will soon find that Leopard and Eagle clan members cannot marry, because this would be incest. And so forth.

I really, really don't want to get into wrangling with you over the social function of "real myth" in real "living mythic cultures". I will freely bow to your expertise in this regard. The question concerning me is how do various role-playing games function in our modern culture. This might be exactly the same, but I don't take that as a given.

clehrich wrote: I think we're on the same page, really. I'm just saying that "myth" is probably a term we should sidestep if possible. Does that make sense?

My inclination, since you ask, is to think that the social functions of different modes of gaming are not likely to be tremendously distinct. There are, however, a few points worth considering if you want to follow this up.

1. Make a distinction between social function and psychological function

For the functionalist anthropologist, the latter is usually inaccessible; one can only guess, and the whole point of the functionalist movement was to get away from guesswork and move to the empirical plane as much as possible. We can, however, discuss psychological function because (a) the informants are of our culture and speak our psychological language; (b) we are ourselves experienced informants, not participant-observers (you might say that actually the term "participant-observer" fits us rather better than it does the anthropologists who normally use it); (c) the informants are of a culture that psychologizes to a considerable degree, and thus are used to considering matters in such terms (which is not the case in most tribal cultures).

2. Social function must be related to larger social contexts

If you're looking for the social function of gaming, or of kinds of gaming, the issue is not primarily (though it is secondarily) the social function within the narrow group, but rather its function with respect to the larger social context. For example, what effect does gaming have on people's involvement with their communities? How do gamers behave differently at work because of their hobby? Does gaming seem to have an effect on political (in the ordinary sense) motivation? Does the formation of a tight gaming group appear to substitute for other social bonds, making gamers more insular and isolated? Does gaming prompt the construction of larger gaming communities? Does gaming construct a sense of identity, and if so what identity or identities? Does gaming commonly affect choices among romantic/sexual partners? This doesn't eliminate the kinds of function you're talking about, but for the functionalist anthropologist the narrow-group function is primarily meaningful in relation to the large-group function and context.

3. Three levels of inquiry

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, one of the two great functionalists (the other was Bronislaw Malinowski), suggested that there were three levels of inquiry.

Purpose, the ostensible reason for an activity as expressed by the participants. For the functionalists, this was not in the main an important part of the data.
Meaning, how the symbols and structures of the activity work together to create meaning within the community. For the functionalists, this was again not terribly important, but more so than purpose.
Function, both psychological and social, which is to say the actual effects empirically observed to result from the activity. Malinowski did think that psychological function was essential, where Radcliffe-Brown felt that it was not empirically observable.

In the ensuing many years (the functionalists were kings primarily in the thirties and forties), both meaning and purpose became increasingly important to analysis, largely because it was recognized that the natives might be a lot more aware of what they were doing than these earlier fieldworkers had noticed.

4. Types of gaming

It seems to me that Narrativism, because of its focus on a moral premise, can be seen to have a clear ideological function. That is, the players work through important social issues (ethical questions are always social) and come to conclusions about them. Thus a Narrativist game could be seen as (in part) an experimental site for ethical examination of significant issues facing the players as social beings. This would be an exciting direction for future investigation, because it entails that Narrativism has a largely conservative social function (i.e. it tends to validate cultural ethical norms) whereas to the players it often seems counter to the mainstream; this dynamic tension would be well worth examining.

Gamism strikes me as a good deal more difficult. The cheap pop-psych claim might be that by allowing players to feel they have won a victory, it creates a sense of empowerment. But this is complicated: the victories do not as a rule extend beyond the game environment. Indeed, one might argue that such empowerment leads players not to strive for other modes of victory in the larger social framework, thus having a largely conservative social function. But again, we're slipping into psychological rather than social function, at base. My sense is that this is much more complicated than it might at first appear.

Simulationism seems to me by far the most complex. I am currently grappling with this problem, and will eventually post my analysis. Let me say briefly -- if someone wants to discuss this it should go to another thread -- that I think Sim is very tightly related to myth, and in a sense strives to have similar social functions to those of myth in living mythic cultures, although in many respects it has been divorced from those functions. Thus it serves the psychological functions of myth without retaining the social functions in a strong sense: these are myths to be thought rather than lived. But this is an insanely complicated issue which I'm only beginning to get my mind around.

The upshot of this fast breakdown is that gaming is relatively conservative in terms of social function. Nar reinforces ethical norms, Gam reinforces status norms, and Sim (if my preliminary analysis is correct) reinforces symbolic structural norms. This is, I think, at odds with our usual feeling about gaming, which is why distinguishing social function from purpose and meaning is so important. But this is a very sketchy analysis, and it is deliberately limited to a functionalist perspective, which will tend to bias the interpretation in the direction of conservatism.

5. Distinguishing functions

I don't think you need a one-to-one relationship of types of social function to types of gaming. I would be very surprised to find that every social function of any type of gaming is not always present in all gaming; I think it's a matter of emphasis, but I also think that what is emphasized in social function is not necessarily what "the natives" might think -- which is to say it's not necessarily going to look much like CA.

6. Reading

Since this analysis leads to recapitulating some important anthropological discussions, let me make some suggestions for reading.

Emile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life really invented functionalism, although Durkheim himself should not be categorized that way. The recent translation by Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) is brilliant and extremely readable, as Durkheim is in French for those more comfortable with that language. He essentially argues that the function of ritual and religion is to create social bonds and thus a moral authority that enforces conformity to rules without the need for a lot of policing. He thinks that we tend to project our society's moral force as a concrete object or set of objects (e.g. a totem or a flag) because we don't like to think in raw abstractions. His theory of "effervescence" seems to me entirely applicable to gaming, with interesting ramifications for the whole theory of social function.

Bronislaw Malinowski's Magic, Science and Religion is very readable, and will offer some clear understanding of distinctions among types of function. Magic is for him primarily psychological, religion primarily social, and science primarily technical/practical. His distinction have been largely overturned, but in the case of gaming such distinctions might be well worth making, albeit along different lines of division.

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's Taboo, The Frazer Lecture, 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1939), reprinted many times in many places, is perhaps the clearest basic introduction to functional anthropology ever written. It's not very long, either.

George Homans's "Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown," American Anthropologist n.s. 43 (1941): 164-72, is an exceedingly clear reworking of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown on psychological function and its relation to social function. Less directly applicable to gaming than the others, it is nevertheless an admirable summary and analysis and may help a good deal in understanding the implications of these theories.

E.E. Evans-Pritchard's work on Azande witchcraft, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, is a marvelous example; his little book Theories of Primitive Religion is an exceptionally good introduction to the subject until about 1950 or thereabouts, and should be required reading if one is to go further with this.

Having read all that, I do think that Claude Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (use the French La pensee sauvage if you can, as the translation sucks) burned the functionalist approaches to the ground and salted the earth.

If someone has a website I can use, I can make the Malinowski (excerpts, but good ones), Radcliffe-Brown, and Homans stuff available in PDF form. There are few if any copyright issues, because the texts are quite old, but you might theoretically get an angry letter and have to take them down.

Hope this helps in some way.

Wow, Chris, that's everything I've forgotten since my Anthropology degree twenty years ago.

It's interesting, in the face of the anti-rpg statements made by religious groups that you assert role-playing has a conservative function. I've often thought the accusations of "devil worshipping fringe behavior" were utterly wrong. Even the geekiest players are looking for some kind of social confirmation.

But that's off topic.

Let's be careful not to confuse social confirmation of ethics important to players, with sorting through personal problems. No Narrativist play I've ever observed, or participated in, appeared to be therapy. While the ethical center of a particular narrativist play has to be meaningful to the players, it doesn't actually have to be directly relevant to the their current lives.

And I think Fabulation is an acceptable term for what you describe as the function narrativism. We're getting together to confirm or explore our ethical beliefs by spinning fables with an ethical center.

John Kim wrote: I think we're still miscommunicating on this. I completely agree that a sermon may be a personalized story, and that it has a social function. But to the preacher, the story told is a means to an end. The social function here is the real-world goal: i.e. what happens to the real people. For the preacher, I think the goal is spiritual reflection or evangelization or somesuch. i.e. A sermon which produces a personalized story but which has no impact on the listeners is a failure. Another example of personalized stories would be scary stories told around a campfire. I think these also serve a social function, but their function is not the same as the sermon's.

Again, the point is not to put new labels on GNS. This isn't a re-labelling or replacement. This is a different form of classification. So, for example, if someone creates a story which might or not be a "fable" -- then a Fabulation category would concern itself over whether the fiction that was created constituted a "fable". But the social function categories are different. i.e. If a fable-creating game and another game have similar effects/roles on the real lives of the players, then they should be in the same social function category.

I hope that I don't muddy the waters by making this suggestion, but I've often likened Narrativist play as having the same social functions that getting together with various bands has had, when the specific goal of the meeting is to communally write original songs.

That being, everyone in the group is getting together to create something that they agree has artistic value or merit. Hard or simple, derivative or original, what matters is that at the end of the day, you're looking at what you think is a work of art. The conflicts inherent to that goal mirror the ones presented by the "hard question" in Ron's Nar essay: if Bill's our friend, but he can only really pull off a few basic rock guitar riffs, and it's messing with the artistic value of the songs we want to make, how do we deal with the possibility of kicking him out? It's a social problem. It wouldn't be a social problem (or not as big of one, or a different one) if the band was only interested in doing Nirvana covers, or if they were there to just jam out and see how well each person can play his own instrument (or see what the hardest song they can pull off is, etc).

In other words, I think it might be somewhat misleading to look at how people deal with the ethical/moral aspect of Narrativist play to identify it's primary social function among the participants, or at least to assume that it's got the lion's share. A Celebratory gathering (as per the category in the original post) can be just as theraputic or cathartic under the right circumstances, or confirming of mores and values solely through content. If everyone finds the stuff that villains do in a Call of Cthulhu game repulsive, it doesn't necessarily make it Narrativist.

And I disagree with the notion that playing a role-playing game produces no product, either. To me, a Transcript is a product despite its ephemeral nature. An evening of improvisational theatre, for example, certainly produces a product. If someone taped the performance, the performers could go back and watch it and do it over again for another audience. Doing so, however, would remove much of the original value to the performers of doing it the first time: instead of trying to create something of artistic merit spontaneously, they'd be trying to deliver an established work credibly.

I can't pin it to the wall because my command of social anthropology is pedestrian at best, but I think that there's more than semantics behind the social difference between the those two things. Yes, the analogy's a little off because in RPGs, the players are both performer and audience. However, I think the "getting together to make something of lasting artistic value" angle is an important one to think about, to explore the social function in terms of that.

I'm not sure that Gamist play traditionally incorporates concern for the artistry of the Transcript. I can see Sim as potentially (but not exclusively) being concerned with the artistic value of what's being called the Model/Ideal, but that's not something that's necessarily established in play, just confirmed by play. And while it's true that any play could produce a Transcript that, if written down, would be a story in the Lit 101 sense, the difference to note is that when the game is being played, it's the Narrativist who primarily cares about whether or not it's going to turn out that way (whether or not he realizes it, perhaps).

Ethical/moral issues, in my mind, are secondary to the social functions of getting together to do what's been awkwardly described above. Addressing them is a necessary function of producing a story's theme, hence it is done. And there may be secondary (and tertiary, ad infinitum) social things going on there... but these things strike me as a by-product, and not necessarily related to the social foundation of the interaction.

I realize that we're trying to decouple these "social function" terms from the Big Model CA's, but it struck me as an important thing to note. And I also realize that "artistic merit" is a hideously unhelpful term, but I don't think its subjectivity from group to group necessarily contradicts the rest of the post.

So... am I way off base here? Or on to something?


-Landon Darkwood

With the important reminder that Landon is talking about Narrativist play...

Landon Darkwood wrote: everyone in the group is getting together to create something that they agree has artistic value or merit. ...
In other words, I think it might be somewhat misleading to look at how people deal with the ethical/moral aspect of Narrativist play to identify its primary social function among the participants, or at least to assume that it's got the lion's share.

And I disagree with the notion that playing a role-playing game produces no product, either. To me, a Transcript is a product despite its ephemeral nature.

it's the Narrativist who primarily cares about whether or not it's going to turn out that way (whether or not he realizes it, perhaps).

Ethical/moral issues, in my mind, are secondary to the social functions of getting together to do what's been awkwardly described above. Addressing them is a necessary function of producing a story's theme, hence it is done. And there may be secondary (and tertiary, ad infinitum) social things going on there... but these things strike me as a by-product, and not necessarily related to the social foundation of the interaction.

I realize that we're trying to decouple these "social function" terms from the Big Model CA's, but it struck me as an important thing to note.

Just a small departure here:

clerich wrote: This would be an exciting direction for future investigation, because it entails that Narrativism has a largely conservative social function (i.e. it tends to validate cultural ethical norms) whereas to the players it often seems counter to the mainstream; this dynamic tension would be well worth examining.

Thats an interesting argument Pete. Do you then think that the very act of Narratavism implies or requires some element of critical analysis as a necessary feature of "playing it out"?

Wouldn't sim have a similar relationship to statements of reality?

I would in fact take your formulation a step further and say that critical appraisal of most social norms is actively discouraged during the individuals induction into them. And for this reason I have a very jaundiced view of RPG having a revolutionary function because it seems primarily to me to act as vehicle for reifying your uncritically accepted norms through the uncritical acceptance of the other players. That is, there seems to be no point at which disconfirming evidence can be brought to bear on the analysis.

Only the possibly disconfirming evidence of the actions and judgement of the other players and, to a lesser extent, the authors of the printed game: as such, it may challenge individually held norms while re-inforcing a nebulous social norm. However, in such an instance, the social norms particular to the group are in a constant state of creation and, I would hope, challenge, arising out of a dynamic consensus of the individual norms, as those norms themselves are moderated in light of challenges arising from the address of premise.

The "challenging" nature of narrativist play, as typified in the RP mainstream response to premise rich games, arises from the general assumption that RPG's are not, in play "about anything", and when they become so, they somehow cease to be fun. There has been a general lack of will in most RPG communities to any address of issues in play, or to challenge any social norms at all.

Again, we're looking at discrete functions: while the address of premise is, in itself, a challenge to the gamer social norm of not exploring issues, the methods and results of address may well serve as re-inforcing cultural or social norms and values. It may, though, equally challenge them, as in my wishy washy liberal mind I hold the possibility that the act of actively examining a meaty issue, rather than passivley accepting the given cultural values for it, one may develop a new appreciation and appraisal of those issues.

addendum: Having re-read your response, Gareth, I see where we disagree. You pepper your post with an assumption of the uncritical acceptance of anything introduced into the SiS during play, to which I would say an unconditional not true. In fact, the whole edifice of RPG's as a social activity must allow for critical appraisal of anything introduced by any player.

Now, if you're as sure of uncritical acceptance as I'm sure of critical assessment, I think we're at a complete disconnect as regards the mechanics of RP.

Landon Darkwood wrote: I hope that I don't muddy the waters by making this suggestion, but I've often likened Narrativist play as having the same social functions that getting together with various bands has had, when the specific goal of the meeting is to communally write original songs.That being, everyone in the group is getting together to create something that they agree has artistic value or merit. Hard or simple, derivative or original, what matters is that at the end of the day, you're looking at what you think is a work of art.

Landon Darkwood wrote: I can see Sim as potentially (but not exclusively) being concerned with the artistic value of what's being called the Model/Ideal, but that's not something that's necessarily established in play, just confirmed by play. And while it's true that any play could produce a Transcript that, if written down, would be a story in the Lit 101 sense, the difference to note is that when the game is being played, it's the Narrativist who primarily cares about whether or not it's going to turn out that way (whether or not he realizes it, perhaps).

Ethical/moral issues, in my mind, are secondary to the social functions of getting together to do what's been awkwardly described above.

What about Play?

The combined learning and social reinforcement of play pretty solidly describes the social function of RPGs, as far as I've seen.

Well except for someone really doing "art for it's own sake." But when was the last time an artist admitted that all she really wanted to do was accounting, and she hates painting, finds no passion in her work, and is completely fed up with it, but because there aren't enough portraits painted in a certain way, she will paint them anyway, so that art does not lack for them.

Hope that helps,

-Mendel S.

Wormwood wrote: What about Play?

The combined learning and social reinforcement of play pretty solidly describes the social function of RPGs, as far as I've seen.

pete_darby wrote: addendum: Having re-read your response, Gareth, I see where we disagree. You pepper your post with an assumption of the uncritical acceptance of anything introduced into the SiS during play, to which I would say an unconditional not true. In fact, the whole edifice of RPG's as a social activity must allow for critical appraisal of anything introduced by any player.

Well, I'd say that the critical examination of the norms in play is something which is often unfamiliar to the participants, and that the act of exploring issues interactively can bring a criticality to bear that can change the concensus of the group; within the group, I don't think we can see concensus opinion as a monolithic entity, it's a dynamic equilibrium.

Really, it's like any other environment where substantive issues cann be raised: there can be a participatory, critical environment, where folks can pull their own and others assumptions in new directions, or it can become, as Chris typified sim play, a form of secular ritual to confirm a set of values. This is just the same as a debating society can be the source of new insights for the members and empowerment to express and develop ideas, or it can become a maoist style "conciousness raising" group where the party line is enforced, or a self-congratulatory "aren't we great" excercise". Having been a member of all three at various times, I can confirm the power of the group to either encourage or discourage independent thought, and I think it's foolhardy to say with any certainty that the tendency is for, for example, a nar group to merely re-inforce their accepted norms rather than challenge them.

Actually, I'm equally cynical about most debating societies, also for their local nature and tendency to reinforce local norms.

As it happens, your reference to "maoist consciousness raising" sort of gives me the point; its probable that you mean this in a very different way to the way I would mean it if I said, not least because consciousness raising and enforcing the party line are very different issues in that political context.

The very fact that you place "consciousness raising" in inverted commas implies disdain, and to denigrate it as imposing the party line - not in itself un-virtuous, it should be noted - resorts to a particular and to my mind propagandist ideology, that of red-baiting, in essence.

But its rather unlikely that in your circle of aquaintances anyone would raise such an objection; I conclude this from your erroneous (in my eyes) uses of two specific terms. And thus I think it equally unlikely that this error (in my eyes) would be raised during a similar RPG session; the error would likely be approved, endorsed, and pass unnoticed.

I don't dispute that individuals can have different ideas about various things; but I also think the RPG context is under almost all cirucmstances far too cosy and self-reinforcing to act as a venue for this sort of challenge.

Well, as I say, I've been inside (non-rpg) groups that I've typified as all three types: as to whether a game can literally raise conciousness, as opposed to merely enforcing concensus, my experience has been that it can. Yes, it has been rare, and yes, more often RPG's are a tool of reinforcement rather than challenge. That isn't to say that, even in a group of friends that broadly agree on various social and cultural values, they can't challenge those values and change them in play which engages their values critically.

And please, don't make assumptions about how my circle of acquaintances would react to things, especially given that I count you in that circle. The error, as you see it has not passed unnoticed and been approved: it appears my norms are challenged in a social environment!

Furthermore, please don't make assumptions about the breadth or depth of my experience with these matters: the scare quotes were related very much to my personal experience of the abuse of those techniques to enforce a party line. I note you have no problem with typifying another instance as an "aren't we great" excercise, which is just as disdainful to liberal, psychological trends in group consensus building, hippy baiting if you will. Yet since that seems to chime with your view of groups, you leave it unchallenged.

I'm, like you, cynical about the ability of almost any self selected debating group to substantively change the group opinion in an abrupt way (despite having seen it on occassion), but I'm also cynical about any blanket denial of the ability of a group to change it's concensus opinions under the effect of it's members. Any functional group only has a concensus opinion as an aggregate of the individual members: indeed, I'd say that it was a sign of a functional group that the group consensus can and does change.

I've a few observations about what the social function of narrativist play is not:

- it's not therapy or catharsis

- it's not getting together to do some sort of task work.

- it's not setting out to challenge existing value standards.

- it's not art for art's sake (If I understand that phrase correctly.) The objective is not to create art, not to be hoity-toity we're-hipper-than-thou-creators.

On the contrary, it is primarily social _play_! And the game chooses a value standard to use as a tennis net.

In my experience, the joy of narrativist play (ie the ultimate reason to play) comes from two sources:

1) Seeing how many angles one can "attack the net."
2) confirming values: having things turn out in the game the way you think they should in the real world.

Aside from the play aspect, I think narrativist play is ultimately conservative, seeking to confirm the values of the players. This conservative nature, is why I first suggested "myth" creation as a function.

If for a moment, you can accept my personal use of myth as a story that demonstrates the values of a culture (and ignore all the other connotations), you may see that the function of narrativist play is to create these stories that demonstrate values meaningfull to the players. Because "myth" is a loaded word, I suggest Fabulation as a term instead.

Alan, I think you're committing a little synedoche here: why you play Nar has been made why we play Nar. Certainly, challenging my own opinions is one reason I play nar rather than sim.

Also, looking down your list of what Nar play isn't, every single one of those reasons is as social as the one you accept. The creation of art, group therapy, challenging personal assumptions, even "a task of work", are all of social value, as much as the confirmation of values, if not more so. Saying that Nar play is social grants as much insight as saying you play to have fun: well, yeah, but it gets us no further in a substantive discussion of the social functions of Nar play, or why it's fun.

I fully accept that nar play is likely to confirm the concensus values of the group, but the possibility is there to challenge the values as much as to confirm them.

Sim play, by contrast, seems to me to be more in the mode of ritual use of myths, since it holds that certain aspects of play are to be held as the model to be celebrated. The relationship of nar to community myths is that of creation, both of the myths and the establishment of the values they epitomize. To my mind, in a nar group we do not know the group values for sure until they are established by the address of premise*, whereas in sim we do, since it's bound up in the choice of what is to be celebrated in play, and indeed contstrains what is acceptable in play.

In these discussions of the normalizing role of Nar, it's assumed that once the lines are drawn, they will never be redrawn by a group, and that a group will never consensually challenge their own values, except with a specific view to confirm them. And in my experience, that's odd.

*more accurately, play is driven by maintenance of illusion that we don't...

I certainly did not want to say that Nar definietly cannot act as a venue for challenging personal values. That is, I fully recognise that it is possible.

My argument rather is that IMO it lends itself to this social function rather less well than wholly external works, which do not invoke the audiences consent until the end. As a result there seems to me to be more room (in such works) to perform the kind of exercises where you set up up a challenge with an apparent solution and then demonstrate that this solution is actually worse than another, less conventional solution. The reason for this is the audience has essentially no choice but to stick with the singular and remote author until they make it all the way to the conclusion, at which point they can then pass judgement on the implied argument as a whole.

But in RPG, it is not clear to me that play can ever proceed past a point which contradicts a sizable minority of group members, because they will probably not have been persuaded as yet to give up their existing position. But if consent is NOT granted, then play probably cannot proceed to a point at which the non-conventional solution can be demonstrated.

Anyway, the point was much more that I see inherent limits to such a necessarily consensual medium. Strengths, too, in that the support of colleagues can facilitate exploring things that the group holds to as a subset of broader society, but which broader society does not. That is, the very self-reinforcing nature of the closed group can act as a shield from what would otherwise be standing criticism within broader society.

Okay, I can see I was overstating your case. Yeah, radical change in views is unlikely, but not vanishingly so, in a consensual environment.

And to my mind, any active examination of accepted norms is all to the good, whether they end up confirmed or weakened.

Hmm... what I see as emerging after a chellenging Nar session is a stronger set of norms within the group than at the outset, whether or not the norms are the same as they were before the session, if that makes sense. The beliefs of the members of the group regarding the premise will be more clearly defined, if different from how they were at the outset.

I can contrast that to Sim play which, to my mind, serves to reinforce through acceptance, rather than reinforce through challenge.

pete_darby wrote: Alan, I think you're committing a little synedoche here: why you play Nar has been made why we play Nar. Certainly, challenging my own opinions is one reason I play nar rather than sim.

Also, looking down your list of what Nar play isn't, every single one of those reasons is as social as the one you accept. The creation of art, group therapy, challenging personal assumptions, even "a task of work", are all of social value, as much as the confirmation of values, if not more so. Saying that Nar play is social grants as much insight as saying you play to have fun: well, yeah, but it gets us no further in a substantive discussion of the social functions of Nar play, or why it's fun.

Alan, I really, honestly, don't know why you're ringfencing play from social and personal change. You're statement:

The social function of all play is to provide an arena where skills and ideas can be practiced and enjoyed without threatening harm to the participants or change to the greater society they are part of.

I'm inclined to support that ring-fencing.

What I mean by this is play behaviour is quite often behaviour that IN ANY OTHER CONTEXT would be threatening or socially unacceptable.

Under most circumstances, threatening a person with a plastic gun is play; but if you commit a real robbery by threatening a person with a plastic gun, that person may still have been in real fear of their life - not knowing it was plastic. Thus you might be done for armed robbery even if technically speaking you were never armed.

The reason for this is that, of course, the social context of a real robbery is very different to the social context of pay. Play DOES allow the freedom to explore behaviours that would not be feasible under any other circumstance. Hence I greatly the favour of play as essentially an autodidactic process, and endorse Exploration as the underpinning motive of play in general.

Now its also the case IMO that a lot of play is aimed at equipping the players with skills and insight which they will subsequently use in and apply to the real world and its broader social context. This it seems to me is the difference between Petes position and Alan's. Play ITSELF has a social function that is IMO basically exploratory, educative, but it achieves that functionality by being a specially bounded space in which you have the freedom to do things that you would not be free to do otherwise.

Lastly, if you look at extreme sports, or even the safe entertainments like roller coasters, I think the actual or apparent threat of harm is NOT mutually exclusive with enjoyment.

Well, I still think in all cases the actual safety of all willing participants is still implicit in the enjoyment part of play, but I'm willing to grant that the appearance of danger is also a component of some play.

The important distinction in the above sentence, to distingiush it from, from Gareth's example, armed robbery, is that one party is not a willing participant. I don't think you can be an unwilling participant in play (you can be the unwilling object of another's play... as a father I know that only too well).

But I'm still not convinced by the ringfencing of wider social implications as specifically outside of play: if it's necessary for the enjoyment of the participants to ringfence their play from wider social implications, surely, again, that's implicit in the word enjoyment? And the fact remains that I don't feel that it's a given that the ringfencing is necessary for play.

I also want to make something else clear, before it's raised: I'm in total agreement with Chris Lerich's ritual theory that the play, especially in RPG's, takes place in a ritualised environment which is delineated as being "not the normal way we do things" (ritual space). This is in no way the same as saying that what happens in the ritual space does not or should not actively relate to mundane life outside the ritual space, but that the relationship is not the normal relationship of the participants to their non-ritual space. It can well be the case that ritual space is entered to deal with problems outside that space which ritual space is "better" at dealing with. Equally, it may be that ritual space is entered precisley to avoid difficult issues outside that space, or it may be that the relationship of ritual to mundane space is a gulf of irrelevance (actually, I personally think the latter is next to impossible to achieve, but may be a desirable fiction on the part of the participants).

Thinking of Gareth's comment that explorative functionality is primarily facilitated by being given a freedom to act without normal constraints: well, that's possibly a little overstated. I'm thinking about the games Violence and, especially, Power Kill, where the players are judged in real world terms for actions in the SiS. A comon reaction to these games are that they are not played, as they would be a violation of the very barrier that exists around the ritual space, but there's another factor. The events of the SiS are virtual, they have no consequences beyond the psychological effects on the players. Surely some of the freedom from consequence comes not just from the "ritual barrier" between play and not-play, but from the fact that nothing in the game is physically happening? And that the safety comes, at least partly, from that, quite apart form the "we're playing" signals that everyone's giving off? So when a player feels aggreived at being judged as if he'd really killed sentient beings, I feel that emotion is justified, as they have killed nothing but mental contructs.

I'd submit that RPG's are treated as a liberating, consequence free environment, because in physical terms they are.

contracycle wrote: My argument rather is that IMO it lends itself to this social function rather less well than wholly external works, which do not invoke the audiences consent until the end. As a result there seems to me to be more room (in such works) to perform the kind of exercises where you set up up a challenge with an apparent solution and then demonstrate that this solution is actually worse than another, less conventional solution. The reason for this is the audience has essentially no choice but to stick with the singular and remote author until they make it all the way to the conclusion, at which point they can then pass judgement on the implied argument as a whole.

pete_darby wrote: Hmm... what I see as emerging after a chellenging Nar session is a stronger set of norms within the group than at the outset, whether or not the norms are the same as they were before the session, if that makes sense. The beliefs of the members of the group regarding the premise will be more clearly defined, if different from how they were at the outset.

I can contrast that to Sim play which, to my mind, serves to reinforce through acceptance, rather than reinforce through challenge.

John Kim wrote: This is important because there is the alternate function of the game being a ritual space where the players can try on different beliefs or behaviors without judgement or consequence. This is a contradictory goal, it seems to me. i.e. If the goal is to expose, clarify, and reinforce the players' real-world ethics, then they should not feel free to act out differently from their real-world ethics.

clehrich wrote:

John Kim wrote: This is important because there is the alternate function of the game being a ritual space where the players can try on different beliefs or behaviors without judgement or consequence. This is a contradictory goal, it seems to me. i.e. If the goal is to expose, clarify, and reinforce the players' real-world ethics, then they should not feel free to act out differently from their real-world ethics.

On the contrary, this is a fairly classic way for ritualization to operate.
...
Thus ritual spaces are excellent places to do radical and unorthodox things without ever actually challenging -- and in fact actually strengthening -- social norms. This was part of what I was getting at in my ritual essay: from one perspective at least, gaming, by deflecting a desire for political action or change into a protected ritual space, gives the illusion of having actually done something and thus serves a potentially conservative social function. I'm not wedded to that, because I think there are so many other dimensions at the same time, but it's worth considering.

I'm coming in late, and not to be too much of a bastard, but in terms of looking at the relationship of GNS modes to social reasons for performing them, previously the thought was that such motives were multi-variate. That is, I agree with Marco that there seem to be many social reasons why to play in any particular mode. In fact, GNS is strongly said to be a behavioral model, since it only speaks to where the conflicts in the observed behaviors occur, not in terms of why the person wants the behavior in the first place.

Which is to say that if this is true, then no one to one can be found. Indeed, it's likely that there are many reasons for wanting, say, simulationism. All GNS says is that, in not getting their desire met, the player desiring simulationism will be unsatisfied. It specifically does not say what that desire is.

So aren't we looking for something here that can't exist?

That's not to say that the social reasons don't exist - I'd say that every one mentioned so far does exist, in fact. Just that you're not going to find any subset that's creates a model of mutually exclusive drives. Meaning that, yeah, I might come to play a gamism sort of game in order to compete in order to feel supported by my peers in the competitive environment, and to have the catharsis of victory. Yadda, yadda.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Indeed, it's likely that there are many reasons for wanting, say, simulationism. All GNS says is that, in not getting their desire met, the player desiring simulationism will be unsatisfied. It specifically does not say what that desire is.

So aren't we looking for something here that can't exist?

That's not to say that the social reasons don't exist - I'd say that every one mentioned so far does exist, in fact. Just that you're not going to find any subset that's creates a model of mutually exclusive drives. Meaning that, yeah, I might come to play a gamism sort of game in order to compete in order to feel supported by my peers in the competitive environment, and to have the catharsis of victory. Yadda, yadda.

Well, I understand that this was said at the start. Yet somehow lots of options have been rejected for "GNS-ish" reasons. Like it can't be catharsis, because that's a subset of support. Why aren't these both social reasons simply on different levels?

Put another way, it seems like you're trying to generate a model of some sort, but other than "it probably doesn't have anything to do with GNS" we don't really know what the model is supposed to be about. If it's just a lilst of reasons, why reject any? What criteria are being used here?

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Well, I understand that this was said at the start. Yet somehow lots of options have been rejected for "GNS-ish" reasons. Like it can't be catharsis, because that's a subset of support. Why aren't these both social reasons simply on different levels?

Put another way, it seems like you're trying to generate a model of some sort, but other than "it probably doesn't have anything to do with GNS" we don't really know what the model is supposed to be about. If it's just a lilst of reasons, why reject any? What criteria are being used here?

John Kim wrote: So what do you think about Support and/or Problem-solving and/or White Rat's suggestion Catharsis. Should they all be distinct? On the one hand, I suppose Support and Catharsis are both ways of helping individuals through their problems. i.e. So you might go to a support group only for a limited period of time. The group is there to support the individuals through a process, but may dissolve thereafter. Catharsis feels rather more specific, and it seems like it overlaps with Support (i.e. you can have a moment of release at least very much like catharsis within a group). I'm not sure if Support is a good word, but I think these two belong together.

Mike Holmes wrote: ... That is, I agree with Marco that there seem to be many social reasons why to play in any particular mode. In fact, GNS is strongly said to be a behavioral model, since it only speaks to where the conflicts in the observed behaviors occur, not in terms of why the person wants the behavior in the first place.

Which is to say that if this is true, then no one to one can be found. Indeed, it's likely that there are many reasons for wanting, say, simulationism. All GNS says is that, in not getting their desire met, the player desiring simulationism will be unsatisfied. It specifically does not say what that desire is.

So aren't we looking for something here that can't exist?

John Kim wrote:
This is an interesting point. It seems that the style of role-playing would be a factor in how much this is true. i.e. All role-playing is consensual, but there are varying degrees of centrality of authorship. This is one of the axes of the <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12460">3D Model, though some centralized play includes Illusionism and Participationism. So a game with greater centrality of authorship would mean that a point can be more completely made.

Okay, taking on board all that gone on overnight, and to try to make this as short as possible...

I absolutely agree that, in address of premise, players may assume, personate or adopt externally value systems they themselves do not share. I also believe that, in assessing the play, they will bring to bear their own values and beliefs and test the one against the other, and, inside the group, I believe the tendency will be to reinforce the current norms of the group. While in play, while "freely" engaged in addressing premise according to or against their own norms, the norms will be applied in assessment of the events of the SiS.

In my old "actual play" case for this, I was improvising a dialogue with Polonius in Hamlet, where I was answering the question "If you saw Hamlet raping your daughter, would you stop him?" The answer was "Well, i certainly wouldn't watch." Now that was absolutley, 100% right for the interpretation of the character, but the director called a halt right there, as everybody was too freaked out, but oddly pleased with how right it was. The norms were brought to judgement of the imagined actions, but only when it was made clear that the protected space of the impro session was removed.

So even when there is a ritual space with "freedom of expression" (and some talk of lines is probably appropriate here, and possibly kpfs), there are limits to the expression, and a judgement of those expressions afterwards which has a tendency to normalize ethical or taste standards in the group.

However, back to Gareth, the act of conscious examination of troublesome external issues within the ritual space can, I think, cause at least a thoughful revision of attitudes towards those issues outside the ritual space, especially given the presence of judgement of those attitudes inside a "free" environment by others, who, in this environment, may be more likely to take up unpopular positions if they feel their not bound by the rules outside the ritual space.

So, over time, the attitudes may be normalized within the group, but this may involved moving away from the norms of greater society outside the group.

clehrich wrote:
For example, let's say the natives say there are three kinds of ritual: earth, air, and fire. We then come along with our functionalist model and say that there are two kinds of ritual, clan-unificatory and tribe-divisive. Your criticism in effect says that because there are three different reasons for doing ritual (earth, air, fire) this binary division misses the point. The functionalists would in effect say that the native division is interesting but not decisive, and that the natives are focused on purpose and meaning and simply don't see the function at all. I think they'd say that your critique falls into the native camp, denying function and promoting purpose and meaning in its stead. But these things are simply not the same.

In essence, your criticism is that because a social-function model does not track onto GNS, it's invalid.

Mike Holmes wrote: What I'm criticizing is that, despite protests that we shouldn't think this way, I keep reading posts saying, "X isn't what narrativism is about, Y is!" When both could be the case.

Mike Holmes wrote: John, I get your overlapping point, but, again, that seems to me like you're trying to create a model of atomic base elements so that we can discuss how X is competition categorized, and not Support. Well, I can't see any reason for this, since we all agree that multiple things could be behind any CA. Why not use all of the terms available? What is gained by limiting the terms in this case to a smaller set?

Mike Holmes wrote: How about some of the following:

• Human Contact (not for support, the mere presence of other humans is social)
• Building Relationships (sexual, platonic, networking, other)
• Education/Teaching
• Communal Creativity (if it's not the art created, it's the fun of making the art with others)
• Playtesting/Demoing (possibly for eventual monetary gain - is this support?)

I selected the above in part because I suspect that many or all of these will not pass some criteria - but I'm not sure why. I think the fact that the thread started with "this may or may not have anything to do with GNS" has been problematic so far.

John Kim wrote: OK, I think that I see some disconnect, which is caused some by lack of clarity on my part. It seems you're talking about personal reasons for gaming, i.e. why we play. But I'm trying for something more like a functionalist view -- i.e. what is the effect of play on the players, rather than why the players choose to play.

Ok, thanks John. That's a bit clearer at least for me. Stil a tad abstruse, but I think I see where you're going.

I think that by including "Building Relationships" as a potential social reason, that you definitely sever this from any specific link to CA. That is, I don't see that reason for play being satisfied by any of the creative act itself, and so, as such, I see it as unrelated to CA.

So, what I propose, very simply, is that when identifying a social function, that it can be labeled as CA affecting, or non-CA affecting. Meaning that the function either "skewers" down the mode level (to use an Edwardsism) and perhaps further, or it resides enitirely at the social level of function. In fact, if one wanted, one could specify the particular level down to which the function was likely to skewer. Some might go as far as ephemera, even - I haven't thought it out that far.

I'm sure that it'll be hit and miss to start, and we might even find that you can't make such a specific linkage in each case. But it gives us a way to, I believe, coherently relate the subject back to the overal model.

Which is to say, that if I'm correct here, the proper thing to say is something like, "Catharsis may be one function that skewers down to CA level, and specifically calls for narrativism at that level."

Make sense?

Mike

I'd like to comment on the discussion that took place mainly between Pete and Gareth, on the question whether narrativist roleplaying can be an effective way of challening moral opinions, or tends to affirm the opinions already held by the players (or accepted by the group). It seems to me that both participants in this discussion use a curious model of the examination of moral issues. This model would be the following: everyone has a certain set of moral opions; one starts questioning these opinions only when one receives cotradictory opinions or situations from external sources. Hence roleplaying, argues Gareth, taking place in a social environment mostly populated by like-minded people and involving only statements which everyone agrees on, is not a likely candidate for challenging moral opinions.

Both parts of this model appear to me quite strange. First, most people do not have a fully or even largely articulated moral space. We do not know what our stance on most moral questions is. Even if we know, we often do not believe that we have looked at these issues in their full detail, and we believe that if we examine them more closely we might change our conceptions. Even where we have clear moral beliefs, we are often in doubt about the moral intuitions underlying them: why do we take the moral stance we do? We often feel that our fundamental values conflict, that our morality is built on different and incompatible intuitions. (For instance, we adore revolutionary thinkers and artists who strove for immortality through their work and wish to follow in their footsteps, and at the same time we affirm the supreme value of ordinary life.) Our moral stance is confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown to us.

So second, we do not in general change our moral outlook by being presented with outside information, in the sense that we generally change our beliefs about the physical world by being presented with external impressions. On the contrary, most of the change in our moral outlook is the result is introspection, articulation of our unarticulated moral intuitions, and a serious quest for moral enlightenment which essentially includes increasing the depth of our moral considerations: we try to view an issue from as many ways as possible, we try to understand all persons concerned, every different outlook. This will transform our understanding of the issue and thereby inevitably our relation to the issue. And we can do most of this using the moral intuitions, the empathy and the resolve to seriously pursue moral depth which we can find within ourselves.

To me it seems very clear that Narrativist roleplaying can serve a function in this quest of moral self-articulation. The concreteness of a story allows empathy to play its important role, which it never could in abstract discourse. One cannot empathise with 'terrorism', but one can empathise with an individual terrorist once the veyr particular story of his life unfolds. In addition, the input of other players can show you ways of approaching the subject which you had not thought of yourself. They do not present contradictory evidence, they suggest new ways of self-articulation. That last term is the one I would like to use to describe this function (not here intended in the way it has been defined in this topic) of narrativist roleplaying: self-articulation. Through telling these stories and addressing the premise they contain, we are forced to deepen our moral understanding by articulating out moral intuitions in the guiding light of empathy. And articulation of this kind always implies change, and is therefore inherently revolutionary, if not necessarily in any grand ways.

So I submit that narrativist roleplaying can have moral exploration as a very important function, even though (erronous) models of our moral beliefs may lead us to believe otherwise.

Mike Holmes wrote: I think that by including "Building Relationships" as a potential social reason, that you definitely sever this from any specific link to CA. That is, I don't see that reason for play being satisfied by any of the creative act itself, and so, as such, I see it as unrelated to CA.

Mike Holmes wrote: So, what I propose, very simply, is that when identifying a social function, that it can be labeled as CA affecting, or non-CA affecting. Meaning that the function either "skewers" down the mode level (to use an Edwardsism) and perhaps further, or it resides enitirely at the social level of function.

Victor: I pretty well agree with what your saying, and I was trying to articulate a similar point of view at the outset of the debate with Gareth. I don't think I ever implied that the ethical norms at the outset were particularly well formed or expressed, and certianly through Nar play I'd expect them to become better expressed and defined.

The dynamic that I and Gareth were exploring was, I think, one of normalisation of ethical norms within the group, and certainly the expression and definition of the personal ethical standards would be part of that process.

Would I be right in saying, then, that we'd expect a long-term nar playing group to have a better expressed set of values than a putative control group, and that the tendency would be for those values to be held reasonably commonly among the members of the group?

Sounds like a social function of nar play, if we take nar play to mean play in which address of issues is promoted.

John Kim wrote:

Mike Holmes wrote: I think that by including "Building Relationships" as a potential social reason, that you definitely sever this from any specific link to CA. That is, I don't see that reason for play being satisfied by any of the creative act itself, and so, as such, I see it as unrelated to CA.

I think I disagree with you here. Real-world relationships can be built and altered through action in the imaginary space. For example, a real-world rivalry can be enacted through competitive creative action within the space (i.e. showing who's better). As another example, romantic relations can be initiated in-character -- i.e. my PC flirts with someone else's PC in-character, but that is actually real-world flirting as well. Particularly in LARPs which have physical contact (esp. some of the multi-day Nordic events), this can go pretty far.

You are correct. Actually I just stated my idea poorly. What I meant was not that you can't get something in terms of relationships from the events in the SIS, but that I can't see any CA as particularly better for this goal. That is any CA might work to do this. As such, if the model includes things like this, it's not really saying anything about how the social functions skewer down to SA. Overall, that is. I'm sure that some of the other observations about particular functions may in fact be "desirous" (?) of seeing certain SAs.

Mike Holmes wrote: Hmm. I could potentially agree with the idea that some functions reside entirely at the social level -- i.e. they are not affected by what happens in the SIS. However, I disagree that building relationships is a case of this. I've seen too much reflecting and playing out of real-world relationships within the imaginary space of the game. Certainly this is an important issue to me about a game.

I agree. It was the principle that I was trying to get across, not the specific example.

Mike

Victor Gijsbers wrote: First, most people do not have a fully or even largely articulated moral space. We do not know what our stance on most moral questions is.... Our moral stance is confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown to us.

To me it seems very clear that Narrativist roleplaying can serve a function in this quest of moral self-articulation. The concreteness of a story allows empathy to play its important role, which it never could in abstract discourse. One cannot empathise with 'terrorism', but one can empathise with an individual terrorist once the veyr particular story of his life unfolds.

Would I be right in saying, then, that we'd expect a long-term nar playing group to have a better expressed set of values than a putative control group, and that the tendency would be for those values to be held reasonably commonly among the members of the group?

contracycle wrote:

Victor Gijsbers wrote: First, most people do not have a fully or even largely articulated moral space. We do not know what our stance on most moral questions is.... Our moral stance is confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown to us.

I disagree with that quite strongly; moral instruction is one of the primary forms of 'social conversation', and for most children in most cultures is starts as soon as they can talk, if not sooner. Moral tests, such as whether or not it is right to steal medicine to save the life of a loved one, are used to test the developement of adulthood and the ability to recognises other humans as really existing people.

Of all modes of thought, morality appears to me to be the one most imposed by social convention, and least subject to critical analysis. And I do not see that moral questions are any less affected by objectively external evidence than the precepts of physics.

So I really think you and Victor are agreeing here. Am I way off base?

contracycle wrote:

Victor Gijsbers wrote: First, most people do not have a fully or even largely articulated moral space. We do not know what our stance on most moral questions is.... Our moral stance is confused, contradictory, overwhelmingly complex, and largely unarticulated and unknown to us.

I disagree with that quite strongly; moral instruction is one of the primary forms of 'social conversation', and for most children in most cultures is starts as soon as they can talk, if not sooner. Moral tests, such as whether or not it is right to steal medicine to save the life of a loved one, are used to test the developement of adulthood and the ability to recognises other humans as really existing people.

And I do not see that moral questions are any less affected by objectively external evidence than the precepts of physics.

But that, as I see it, is exposure to an external argument contradictory to the norm that "terrorism is evil". That is, I can construct a story, from fact, that displays to you the way a person may come to resort to terrorism in such a way that you reconsider that position*. But I cannot do that if you are able to revoke my credibility to make that argument WHILE I am making it; I need to be able to complete the story to show why this makes sense.

And this is exactly the kind of self-reinforcement that RPG is prone to: it is highly likely that the presumption that terrorism is a special form of violence of lesser validity than other kinds of violence will NOT be questioned or analysed by many groups, because the vast majority are going to adhere to the locally prevailing ideology.

clehrich wrote: The point here is Victor's use of the word "articulated": it's not that we don't have moral structures ingrained in us by our societies -- of course we do -- but rather that they usually remain below the level of articulation.

This is fundamentally in accord with certain Marxian theories, as well as functionalist anthropological ones.

Victor Gijsbers wrote:
BUT, I do not believe that this situation obtains very often, certainly not among those interested in playing narrative RPGs that tackle moral topics.

Hey. The point about moral articulation and Narrativism is interesting, but I think it's really a split from Classification by Social Function. So I've started another thread, Moral Articulation and GNS.

I guess this thread has bogged down as far as the classification goes, though I might start a new thread on it as I have new ideas.

contracycle wrote: Well perhaps not among that audience interested in playing narrative RPG's that tackle moral topics, no. But thats a self-fulfilling sample selection; the presence of art house cinema does not have much impact on the business of hollywood mass production.

I don't think I should discuss anything further regarding this topic while the allegedly liberal and democratic west butchers its way across Falluja.