ENRICHING ONE’S LIFE, HONING PATTERN RECOGNITION ABILITIES, MYTH AND FANTASTICAL LITERATURE

Marion Woodman once wrote: We live in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. To survive in it, we need think that somehow, it all means something. Where does that meaning come from? That's the myth.

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote: Legends and myth are largely made of truth, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be perceived in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

John Clute once wrote: Stories have a habit of getting tied in knots, and then unfolding. First they entangle their protagonists, whose actions sometimes seem dictated by the needs of the story in which they have become engaged; then the light dawns, and the labyrinth becomes a path. . . . the literatures of the Fantastic positively glory in the fact that they present and embody Story-shaped worlds. . . .
For Aristotle, Recognition marks a fundamental shift in the process of a story from increasing ignorance to knowledge. . . . It is at this moment of Recognition that the inherent Story at the heart of most fully fantasy texts is most visible . . . most revelatory. At this moment in "the structurally complete fantasy tale" (Brian Attebery’s phrase) protagonists begin to understand what has been happening to them (he may have been an Ugly Duckling awaiting the moment he becomes king; she may have been re-enacting a Creation Myth in order that the Land be reborn; they may discover what Archetype serves as an underlier figure and defines their fate; etc.). They understand, in other words, that they are in a Story; that, properly recognized (which is to say properly told), their lives have the coherence and significance of Story ; that, in short, the story has been telling them.

Henry Jenkins once wrote: fans cease to be simply an audience for popular texts ; instead they become active participants in the construction and accumulation of textual meanings.

Hi Doc,

All the above leads to one possible conclusion : that the sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment which comes from those, all are impossible in those campaigns in which the gaming reality can be changed at any time by a player.

Welcome back, Doc. It's good to see you.

I see a lot of merit in your ideas, but think there is a fundamental flaw in your reasoning.

The flaw would seem to be that you create two opposed categories but assume that these are fully inclusive, when there is a large middle ground that you overlook.

On the one side, you suggest games in which truth is fixed--someone knows the details of the setting, the answer to the mystery, whatever the facts are, they are facts within the world known to one person before the others learn them. This, you say, makes possible discovery.

Against this, you set a concept in which all things are mutable. Perhaps you don't mean it quite so seriously, but the way you present it, it sounds as if my character could be a gunfighter standing in a saloon finishing a whiskey, then set down the glass, pass through the swinging doors onto the bridge of the spaceship where he's the navigator, who never was that fellow in the saloon. Nothing can be discovered, because nothing that is true right now will necessarily be true in a minute from now. Someone might change it.

An awful lot of role playing follows a model identified here as "no myth" play. This doesn't fit either of the concepts you've suggested. In no myth play, nothing is fixed or real until it is introduced within the shared imagined space--and thereafter, it is immutable. Thus it isn't about changing the past--it's about writing bits of the past that have never been stated before. The world isn't really mutable; it's incomplete, and someone is going to fill in the gaps.

If you've actually got the ability to pregenerate entire universes in which there is nowhere the characters can look that you do not already know what they see, you're a better world creator than I. When I put my players in castles, I know a lot of general things about those castles--things like there are usually tapestries on the walls and these are decorative, frequently with scenes that have significance. I don't, however, know which walls do and do not have those tapestries, or what scenes are on which ones. I make that up if it comes up in play. That means the world is not really complete before play--it's only framed sufficiently that I can create the rest consistently with what already exists.

You further assert that players cannot "discover" the world if they themselves are "creating" it. As an author, I think this is entirely incorrect. When I create a world, I begin with a few starting points, and then I build on them. Gradually the world unfolds. There is a genuine meaning to the idea that I am discovering this world as I write. I realize that those few foundation stones are the beginning of a pattern, and my efforts to create the world are a continued discovery of that pattern, an unfolding of something that is in my mind unrecognized.

There is no reason why that same process of creative discovery cannot be corporate. As the foundation is laid, each player perceives aspects of the world that come alive for him. He contributes those to the shared imagined space, and the other players in turn say, "Yes, I see how that fits the pattern so far; and indeed, if that's the way it is, then this must also be so within that world." The pattern grows and expands. The players discover the world as they create it.

A great deal of my Multiverser play has a lot of this in it. I have a framework of facts about the world, but of necessity it is little more than a sketch. As the player makes choices, I respond to those choices by filling in details. Sometimes the dice guide the way those things are realized. Sometimes the player suggests part of a reality that fits the pattern and becomes part of the world.

I am thus persuaded that creation and discovery are not mutually exclusive in this context. I believe authors do it individually, and that gamers can and often do do this together.

--M. J. Young

Hello,

Your discussion of pattern recognition and myth is excellent but, like M.J., I must disagree with your conclusions.

Players can not discover a pattern if that pattern is one which they have just spontaneously cast onto the gaming reality.

Furthermore, this means that empowerment within the gaming reality becomes impossible. Why? Any person’s empowerment which pre-dates a specific spontaneous pattern manufacture is now lessened because his or her empowerment could not have possibly incorporated the at-that-time-not-yet-in-existence pattern unless the player has precognitive powers in real life. Worse, any empowerment which incorporates this spontaneous new pattern will become outdated the moment someone else imposes yet another new pattern.

In a cooperative campaign, surfing chaos, not discovery and not cooperative storytelling (both of which depend upon pre-existing patterns), becomes the norm for such a campaign. Perhaps each player focuses on his or her own isolated fiefdom of gaming reality, or perhaps the players enjoy the instability. Or perhaps they institute a voting council to edit spontaneous alterations to preserve some pattern after all.

Doc

Let me preface what I am about to say with the fact that I am not one of the more scholarly types and generally consider myself a mere spear carrier, awaiting the latest theory to incorporate into design to try another crack at the fortress of Game design.

I had to read the post backwards before I finally got the true gist of it and saw where you were going with it, at least where I think you were going with it. The last sentence sums up the direction pretty well and was one of those "aha" moments. Frankly my first reaction is "What does this have to do with Narrativism and Simulationism again?"

It seems that you are trying to solve an issue that does not exist. Yes some people have a hard time nailing down GNS in general and the difference between N & S in particular. There is the illusion that GNS is a bit of a moving target and hard to pin down. When in reality the different ideas are simply evolving, which I would say is a natural state of such affairs.

I really am not sure what your ideas, as well thought out as they are, are trying to solve. People still debate Time & Space but most people have a good grasp of what they are at the basic level needed for our current level of civilization. I think the same can be said of Nar and Sim. Most people have a basic grasp of the concepts but it does not stop debate and evolution.

Now if you had billed this as an alternative to Nar & Sim, then I think it takes on a life of its own (obviously) and has more merit. I am not sure I could agree with your assessments, based on my own sort of ad-hoc way of thinking, but it doesn't mean I or someone else could never be persuaded. It just does not seem to have much connection to Nar, Sim, and understanding them that I can see.

As far as patterns, I defer to Emily's post as she explains very well what I am sure I would hash up and I generally agree with it. My own perception of what you are saying would, in my mind, preclude any form of Play because patterns added before hand or right now are still products of imagination and environment.

Players can not discover a pattern if that pattern is one which they have just spontaneously cast onto the gaming reality.

Bankuei wrote: I'd like to present an alternative idea to this statement- the sense of pattern that comes from thematic myth can only exist if the group as a whole is participating in it, whether that means one person being the primary author of the mythology as in illusionism and the rest of the group assenting to that, or the whole group applying input to produce the myth.

I wrote entirely about that here:

http://www.chimera.info/daedalus/articles/fall2003/power_of_myth.html

Chris

M. J. Young wrote: The flaw would seem to be that you create two opposed categories but assume that these are fully inclusive, when there is a large middle ground that you overlook.
---snip!--
Perhaps you don't mean it quite so seriously, but the way you present it, it sounds as if my character could be a gunfighter standing in a saloon finishing a whiskey, then set down the glass, pass through the swinging doors onto the bridge of the spaceship where he's the navigator, who never was that fellow in the saloon.

M. J. Young wrote: If you've actually got the ability to pregenerate entire universes in which there is nowhere the characters can look that you do not already know what they see, you're a better world creator than I.

M. J. Young wrote: That means the world is not really complete before play--it's only framed sufficiently that I can create the rest consistently with what already exists.

M. J. Young wrote: You further assert that players cannot "discover" the world if they themselves are "creating" it. As an author, I think this is entirely incorrect.

ADGBoss wrote: Frankly my first reaction is "What does this have to do with Narrativism and Simulationism again?"

ADGBoss wrote: My own perception of what you are saying would, in my mind, preclude any form of Play because patterns added before hand or right now are still products of imagination and environment.

ADGBoss wrote: The way I am reading it, almost suggests that you are saying is that Tolkien perceived that Pattern (or truth or whatever) that was Middle Earth and then wrote it all down.

Hmmm, it occurs to me that I have been working off the assumption that players will be predominantly proactive players rather than reactive players (cf. John Kim http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/plot/proactivity.html ). I haven't had much experience with players who weren't predominantly proactive, so I had forgotten about the predominantly reactive type.

For a proactive player, a shared imagined space based in a Framework of Interaction with continuity feels and plays discernibly differently from a shared imagined space based in a Framework of Independence from continuity.

However, I'm not so certain that a reactive player would notice or really even care about the difference between whether a house the player's character encountered was pre-generated or spontaneously generated in the shared imagined space.

Does this differentiation between proactive and reactive players seem relevant? If so, what new thoughts or questions does this evoke?

Doctor Xero

I find problems with the approach that begins with stating the extremes and assuming a continuity between them.

One is that the extremes seldom if ever exist in reality, and so become straw men almost inherently. It makes discussion of the spectrum more challenging, because you have to recognize that the endpoints don't really exist, or at least are not represented.

Another is that individual biases always impact the perception and definition of the endpoints. One endpoint almost always appears more reasonable than the other, both in the way it's defined by the person proposing the spectrum and by the perceptions of those responding to it. In this case, the structured end of the spectrum has been placed somewhere shy of the extreme, while the flexible end seems to have been made into something inconceivable by the most flexible of gamers.

In any event, with a hypothetical spectrum the possibility that something can be described that is outside the proposed end points invalidates those as endpoints of the spectrum. That has to be recognized and handled.

Regarding mysteries and puzzles, you have a special case problem there. I certainly agree that a mystery in which there are specific clues pointing to a unique solution is an entirely different kind of play from a story in which players are going to create the solution from their character investigations and discoveries. I'm in the camp that believes the film Clue invalidated itself as a mystery genre piece by offering three different endings without changing any of the details leading to them. That recognizes "mystery" as a literary puzzle in which there must be one unique solution (I believe Dorothy Sayers maintained that as definitive). That's entirely different from a mysterious atmospheric piece such as a thriller in which who does it matters from a character perspective but not so much from an audience perspective. In writing the materials for the forthcoming Vorgo scenario in The Third Book of Worlds, I've created six possible solutions to the crime--but in each case the facts and events must play out slightly differently, such that only one of those solutions is possible when everything is known. The other type of "mystery" campaign, in which the referee invents the clues and the outcome based on player input, is certainly a valid way to play, but that it runs counter to expectations. Those who object to such games do so not because these cannot be a fun way to play, but rather because they were expecting something different.

The mystery and a number of other puzzle-type approaches to games find their appeal in the fact that there is one unknown unique solution. It's a gamist appeal, in the main--the players are challenged to prove that they can solve the puzzle. If in the midst of this you tell them that there is no puzzle, they realize that they've been wasting their time and energies attempting to get an answer to a question that doesn't exist. It would be entirely different if the referee made it clear up front that the players were not facing a challenge to solve but rather writing a story. It's a completely different sort of play.

--M. J. Young

Doc,

I too disagree that some rpg fact has to have been created by someone _before_ it is discovered by the players. My objection comes from the point of view of the creator: the very act of creation is a discovery.

Contrary to common myths about the creative act, ideas, whether in science, humanities, or art, do not emerge full grown from the swollen head of a god. A new idea is the collision of several old ideas, either in one human mind, or in a conversation. In a sense, we all carry around a huge archeology of ideas intrelated in ways we have not yet discovered. The "aha!" is the discovery of relationship between the ideas in collision. That discovery is the same discovery that players experience in role-play, whether the original idea is created by the GM then presented later, or whether the idea is conceived by group process.

In fact, I would go further - as others have mentioned- spontaneous group discovery (by creation) is more consistently meaningful for the participants than GM presented discovery. This is for the very fact that the players have contributed the root source ideas, and shared the revelation moment together. Just think about what players talk about in post game conversations: is the detailed setting, or the new interactions that were invented in the group process. I think you'll find the latter dominates.

Like M.J. and Emily, I cannot agree with your conclusions, in particular those regarding construction and independence.

Doctor Xero wrote: One of (several) primary functions of myth and fantastical literature involves the discovery and then recognition of the primal Story pattern(s) which underlies all of that reality. It is not the manufacture of Story but the recognition of Story and, with that Recognition, the empowerment within a person’s world when Story becomes inflected through a person ; in other words, when the character has an empowering epiphany and, through the metaphor of the character, so does the reader or roleplayer.

That sense of discovery, recognition, and subsequent empowerment is possible only when there is an a prior pre-existing pattern to be found -- in the case of gaming, to be found within the campaign reality.

All the above leads to one possible conclusion : that the sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment which comes from those, all are impossible in those campaigns in which the gaming reality can be changed at any time by a player.

Players can not discover a pattern if that pattern is one which they have just spontaneously cast onto the gaming reality.
First, they can’t discover the pattern for the obvious reason that the pattern has no pre-existence to its manufacture -- it has not been there to find.
Second, they can’t discover the pattern because, as something which has burst into spontaneous existence, it can not possibly have fashioned and structured any “reality” which pre-existed it.
Furthermore, this means that empowerment within the gaming reality becomes impossible. Why? Any person’s empowerment which pre-dates a specific spontaneous pattern manufacture is now lessened because his or her empowerment could not have possibly incorporated the at-that-time-not-yet-in-existence pattern unless the player has precognitive powers in real life. Worse, any empowerment which incorporates this spontaneous new pattern will become outdated the moment someone else imposes yet another new pattern.

In a cooperative campaign, surfing chaos, not discovery and not cooperative storytelling (both of which depend upon pre-existing patterns), becomes the norm for such a campaign. Perhaps each player focuses on his or her own isolated fiefdom of gaming reality, or perhaps the players enjoy the instability. Or perhaps they institute a voting council to edit spontaneous alterations to preserve some pattern after all.

So it seems to me that, in roleplaying gaming, the sense of myth and metaphor and the sense of empowerment is only possible in those campaigns which do not allow player introduction of new patterns which supersede or retroactively rewrite the a priori patterns.

M. J. Young wrote: I find problems with the approach that begins with stating the extremes and assuming a continuity between them.

after going into the differences apropos solving a mystery, M. J. Young wrote: It's a completely different sort of play.

Alan wrote: The "aha!" is the discovery of relationship between the ideas in collision. That discovery is the same discovery that players experience in role-play, whether the original idea is created by the GM then presented later, or whether the idea is conceived by group process.

Alan wrote: In fact, I would go further - as others have mentioned- spontaneous group discovery (by creation) is more consistently meaningful for the participants than GM presented discovery.

clehrich wrote: Let's use an example here. Suppose we play a game set in Tolkien's Middle-Earth during the Third Age. Now I, as a player, can construct and invent anything I like, so long as I build it out of the structures handed to me by Tolkien's mythic construction. For example, we don't know all that much about most of the Istarii (the wizards), but we know some basics. So if I formulate a whole bunch of material, quite freely and without GM input, about Radagast's interactions with the Entwives, I only have to be sure that I do not violate what is already given. Further, at a deeper level, the construction must be patterned in a fashion that fits the way Tolkien works. But I can do this all completely openly and freely. Far from constructing instability, I have helped to extend the sense of strength and cohesion of the world -- so that's what happened to the Entwives!

M.J., Alan, Clerich, thank you for your thoughts.

However, I would like to read some thoughts about the ideas themselves rather than whether or not this is a subject worth having ideas about.

I've played in games in which people who want to solve mysteries and tease out from the game master realistic hidden dimensions of NPCs are playing next to people who want the game master to alter the reality of the campaign to fit whatever solution they want the mystery to have, and such players do not combine together well. I am striving to introduce terminology, in this case the Framework of Interaction with continuity and the Framework of Independence from continuity, both to help us explain this conflict with the shared imagined space and to help us as game designers to take these differences into account.

I'm also curious about whether my theory is significantly altered by reactive players rather than proactive players.

Clerich, I hope you understand why my thoughts do not dispute bricolage but rather deal with a different axis of the creative/mythic process. In case you've forgotten, such ideas are part of my Ph.D. program, but it always helps to be reminded of them -- thanks! That I am already aware of the communal aspects of discovery is, I hope, obvious from my signature at the bottom of my posts.

Doctor Xero

I found an article about narrativist gaming http://www.geocities.com/devil_bunnys/mindset.html which might work well as a further example of my theory.

in their article, devil bunnys Meghann and Jesse wrote: Writing the back-story is where the Narrativist GM focuses his time and effort. He creates all the major non-player characters in much the same way the players create their characters. He makes sure they fit the Premise and that they have passions of their own. Then, he develops a back-story explaining all the events that have come before the game actually begins.

I admit I'm confused, as I did think I was addressing your points rather than saying the question is not worth discussing.

Let me ask for clarification by way of a reference.

In this thread on mysteries, a couple posts down, I proposed a semiotics-based method for running mysteries. In this, the GM knows only the basics, and nothing else: he knows who dunnit, and basically how, and has an initial scene-of-the-crime or the like established. Everything else is generated quite freely through the inventiveness of the players.

So with that thread in mind, would you classify such mystery-solving as independent of interacting with continuity? I genuinely do not know what your answer will be, and I think it will help clarify -- for me at least -- what's at stake in your proposal.

[deleted]

Hi Doc,

I don't think anyone is arguing that there is enjoyment that can be had from either playing with predetermined setting elements, flexible ones, or completely spontaneous ones. What I believe is causing a great deal of contention is "conclusions" as the one I've quoted before:

All the above leads to one possible conclusion : that the sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment which comes from those, all are impossible in those campaigns in which the gaming reality can be changed at any time by a player.

I'm fairly sympathetic to Dr X's argument here. I think that pattern recognition is an automatic process in animals; there are some problems in computer cognition that imply this, I think. And this pattern recognition, as Dr X argues, is fundamental to our ability to understand the world.

Bankuei writes:

You are declaring those elements to be completely absent from play utilizing spontaneous elements being introduced.

Hi Gareth,

I, nor anyone I've seen on this thread have argued for a Dada-ist approach to play. What I am saying is that even with zero predetermined elements, and the potential for each and any player to declare, "It was all a dream...", the elements that Doc is saying are impossible given those conditions- do happen.

One word: Universalis.

The key that keeps it from falling into the trap of the structurelessness is that Universalis gives explicit techniques for the group as a whole to enforce a collective will to protect any patterns and themes produced in play. Narration trading games such as Dust Devils or Inspectres though technically could suffer from a player choosing to abuse the narration rights are almost always kept in check by the collective will of the group, though without the formal mechanics(Lumpley Principle, Social Contract, in full effect).

The coordinating principle is set up in Social Contract, and applied through system as a vehicle of expression for the group to create the myth on the spot. The sense of discovery is "How will our collective ideas fit together?", the pattern recognition is the theme developed through play, "Hey, this is turning out to be a love story!" and the personal empowerment is, "We all contributed to making this really good game."

Chris

edited for clarity

clehrich wrote: In this thread on mysteries, a couple posts down, I proposed a semiotics-based method for running mysteries.

clehrich wrote: In this, the GM knows only the basics, and nothing else: he knows who dunnit, and basically how, and has an initial scene-of-the-crime or the like established. Everything else is generated quite freely through the inventiveness of the players.

So with that thread in mind, would you classify such mystery-solving as independent of interacting with continuity? I genuinely do not know what your answer will be, and I think it will help clarify -- for me at least -- what's at stake in your proposal.

Bankuei wrote:

All the above leads to one possible conclusion : that the sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment which comes from those, all are impossible in those campaigns in which the gaming reality can be changed at any time by a player.

Emphasis mine-

Bankuei wrote: But as far as producing pattern and myth- whether predetermined or not, people do it all the time, sometimes in play, sometimes after play.

clehrich wrote: I genuinely do not know what your answer will be, and I think it will help clarify -- for me at least -- what's at stake in your proposal.

Here's what I think is going on. (I doubt this theory will be well received, but I think it's on the money.)

I think Doc has simply had very different play experiences than Chris (or me, or Ron or a host of other people here at The Forge.)

I don't doubt for a second that in Doc's experience, when the players can add details to the game, all hell breaks loose. Internal logic is tossed out the window, chaos reigns, and dogs sleep with cats.

And I don't doubt for a second, from the write-ups of plenty of Actual Play games, that when a lot of Forge regulars give plenty of authorial power, chaos doesn't break out. In fact, the story is stronger for it.

I get the feeling (especially with Doc's emphasis on Con games), that a DM with a strong hand is often needed to keep any kind of world and story logic on the rails.

I know for certain that many people have found players for their group where this isn't required. That more power to the players adds immensely to the game. And I know this addition to the game has none of the effects that Doc claims come about if the players behave in this way.

The fact that Doc conflates players having authorial power and lack of interest in continuity shows he's had some bad experiences with players having authorial power. However, those are his experiences. There is no reason to conflate player authorial power and lack of concern for continuity. For many people, having a group share the adding of detail atop of each others ideas, building with an absolute fidelity to contunity is part of the pleasure of the game… And many people do it very well.

I know that when people have been playing RPGs for a long time its easy to fall into the "nothing new under sun notion." But the existence of The Forge is predicated on the notion that many players of RPGs have not yet visited many different ways of playing RPGs. From this thread and other posts by Doc, it seems to me that despite the years in the hobby, there's lots of ways of playing (successful playing) he has yet to encounter.

As for the Myth aspect of this… It seems to me that since everyone's realized Story is now too slippery to lay claim to, everyone's going to rush after Myth to justify "My games are better than your games." The fact that Doc is waving his graduate thesis doesn't help matters. As far as I can tell, even the scholars disagree on what the term means. I don't see it as a word that tells me much.

What I see so far is Doc saying, "The way I play is the play that produces the kind of play I like, which I call Myth. This play depends on the players not losing track of the continuity I have created, and keeping their input to a minimum to keep it from going off the rails."

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. Except when it lays larger claims to how RPGs "work" that are contradicted by dozens of threads in Actual Play.

(In particular I would recomend looking at the climatic moment in the Moose in the City thread -- a stroke of thematic and fucking beautiful genius place into the story by a player. Anyone who is baffled by the threat of Player's ruining a game with authorial input really needs to read, and then re-read that thread. But there are tons of other examples floating around this site.)

Best,

Christopher

Hi Doc,

You missed a key phrase -- "which comes from those" -- and without that key phrase, my meaning is lost. To what does "from those" refer?

Christopher Kubasik wrote: I think Doc has simply had very different play experiences
---snip!--
However, those are his experiences.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: As for the Myth aspect of this? It seems to me that since everyone's realized Story is now too slippery to lay claim to, everyone's going to rush after Myth to justify "My games are better than your games."

Bankuei wrote: Theory only holds if it matches with observation.

Bankuei wrote: Theory only holds if it matches with observation.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: I don't doubt for a second that in Doc's experience, when the players can add details to the game, all hell breaks loose. Internal logic is tossed out the window, chaos reigns, and dogs sleep with cats.

And I don't doubt for a second, from the write-ups of plenty of Actual Play games, that when a lot of Forge regulars give plenty of authorial power, chaos doesn't break out. In fact, the story is stronger for it.

Oh, for goodness’ sake. Must we do this?

The Argument
As I understand it, there are really three points here:

• Fidelity/adherence to continuity vs. independence therefrom
• GM authority vs. player authority/dominance
• Myth vs. freeform/improvised story

What all three of us Chris’s are saying is that you have yet to demonstrate that these things are necessarily linked. Various examples have been provided to suggest that they aren’t. My experience is also that they aren’t. And I see no argument particularly in your posts to demonstrate that they are.

To be sure, we may be altering our experiences and observations to fit preconceived theory. But as you are proposing not so much new terms as a particular regular formation in gaming, the onus lies with you to demonstrate such a linkage, since our experience belies this.

Myth

Doctor Xero wrote: I have studied mythology and folklore for more than two decades, and in all those years, without exception, what is produced in games with high levels of immediate ad-libbing fails to qualify for the term "myth" according to every definition for myth by any scholar or scientist I have yet encountered.

(Before someone points out the phenomenon of children and adults spontaneously generating mythic tales utilizing archetypes and other universal motifs and tropes, I point out that this only occurs when there is some fidelity, unconscious or not, to said archetypes et al. Many is the time I've also heard children spontaneously generating nonsense or playing merrily ignoring each other except to argue. As for adults : stream of consciousness may be brilliant in the hands of a master such as Joyce, but it is still not myth.)

If I had seemed at all aggressive, Chris, if comes from my frustration at seeing the word "myth" misused so badly by those who claim to create it in their games of high spontaneous play. I am no more nor less perturbed by this misuse of the word "myth" than a political philosopher might by the persistent application of the word "anarchy" to a medieval absolute monarchy -- unless said use were ironic, of course.

Chris K wrote: As for the Myth aspect of this… It seems to me that since everyone's realized Story is now too slippery to lay claim to, everyone's going to rush after Myth to justify "My games are better than your games." The fact that Doc is waving his graduate thesis doesn't help matters. As far as I can tell, even the scholars disagree on what the term means. I don't see it as a word that tells me much.

Doc Xero wrote: The player who likes to build a character that starts out intermeshed with the campaign continuity is the player who wants to operate from a framework of interaction with continuity. He or she wants the game master or the collective group to pre-construct a continuity or framework within which the player might ground his or her character

Doctor Xero wrote: The player who likes to build a character but who has very little interest in knowing or fitting into campaign continuity is the player who operates from a framework of independence of continuity. He or she doesn't care what sort of world the game master or the collective group pre-construct so long as it doesn't get in the way of playing his or her character. Anything which gets in the way of his or her character gets in the way of his or her fun, so he or she wants the authority to remove it immediately, within reason.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: What I see so far is Doc saying, "The way I play is the play that produces the kind of play I like, which I call Myth. This play depends on the players not losing track of the continuity I have created, and keeping their input to a minimum to keep it from going off the rails."

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. Except when it lays larger claims to how RPGs "work" that are contradicted by dozens of threads in Actual Play.

Bankuei wrote: And as I've stated before, and in line with what Chris K is saying- you're making blanket statements about roleplaying that several people, not just myself, have personal actual play experience that contradicts it. Producing those elements that you have mentioned has happens on a common basis with Universalis, Dust Devils, Inspectres to name a few games that have have the possibility of players altering the SIS at will, along with minimal or no discussion or planning to the myth patterns to be produced.

Dr. Xero wrote: This is painfully close to an ad hominem approach. Instead of countering the logic of my argument, you simply set it aside while grotesquely straw manning it with comments about dogs sleeping with cats.

Also, I get the distinct impression from your comments that you would prefer that everyone on The Forge hide his or her degrees and accomplishments under a bushel, for every time I support my creds by mentioning anything, you tend to choose to take it as an attack. I find that a very odd way of looking at the world, personally. If someone is telling me something I find hard to believe, I would prefer that he or she give me some reason why I should find his or her words more important than those of a child or the village idiot -- and, in that spirit of presenting credibility, I respectfully make reference to my own background.

For example, are you claiming that you have never observed any gamer, whether on The Forge or not, express dismay when it turns out that a mystery doesn't really have a solution and the game master will let anyone make one up if it sounds reasonable? Are you claiming you have never observed any gamer care whether the puzzle he or she is working through has a real solution or not? Are you claiming you have never observed any gamer who insisted he or she know all about the campaign world before he or she built a character? Are you claiming you have never observed any gamer who didn't care one whit about the campaign world so long as he or she was able to play the character he or she wanted to play?

I also wonder how you or Christopher can state that your observations go against the idea that some people choose to embed their characters within a game's continuity and others choose not to? I would like a logical explanation of how a person can simultaneously not notice and not ignore continuity, followed by why you would consider said person the norm for roleplayers.

There are gamers who want to intertwine their characters into the official continuity of a campaign even before character creation. If there is no continuity prior to character creation, they can not do so. And there are gamers who don't care about any official continuity.

Unless you are claiming you have never observed gamers such as those above, yes, such people exist, and yes, my theory explains the phenomenon.

Hi John,

To try to take this in a positive direction: Christopher, Bankuei -- how would you characterize the strengths and weaknesses of encouraging director stance in players? Are there any weaknesses (i.e. qualities like "sense of discovery")? Or would your position be that player director-stance is superior in every way for all cases?

Hi Doc,

For example, are you claiming that you have never observed any gamer, whether on The Forge or not, express dismay when it turns out that a mystery doesn't really have a solution and the game master will let anyone make one up if it sounds reasonable? Are you claiming you have never observed any gamer care whether the puzzle he or she is working through has a real solution or not? Are you claiming you have never observed any gamer who insisted he or she know all about the campaign world before he or she built a character? Are you claiming you have never observed any gamer who didn't care one whit about the campaign world so long as he or she was able to play the character he or she wanted to play?

I also wonder how you or Christopher can state that your observations go against the idea that some people choose to embed their characters within a game's continuity and others choose not to?

I would like a logical explanation of how a person can simultaneously not notice and not ignore continuity, followed by why you would consider said person the norm for roleplayers.

All the above leads to one possible conclusion : that the sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment which comes from those, all are impossible in those campaigns in which the gaming reality can be changed at any time by a player.

Well, Chris and Chris already... you know, said everything I possibly could have said in reply. And said it better than I could have.

But I feel compelled to point out those bits in the last post where Chris (Bankuei) says, "I never said that" -- I never said those things either. I have no idea where Doc's coming from in those last couple of posts of his.

John,

I do think there's something interesting to be said about the different sense of "discovery" that occurrs in a Participationsim game. I know of a group that is more than happy to let the GM guide them through all sorts of astounding locations, situations and set-pieces one session after another. And certainly I've enjoyed that sense of interacting with the world beyond my ability to retro-fit it to my own designs and piece together the GM's imagination and thinking.

But in this thread the discovery of what exactly is a tangle of yarn. (For example, I'd have no idea if I was finding "mythic" thinking; I always assumed I was piecing together what the GM's brain was like last Tuesday when he prepped the game.)

Perhaps the discussion of this one specific aspect of play could be brought up somewhere else. For now, I think there's too much vague and muddled baggage attached to the concept. (cf. all of the points made by Chris and Chris above.)

Best,

Christopher

Christopher Kubasik wrote:
John,

I do think there's something interesting to be said about the different sense of "discovery" that occurrs in a Participationsim game. I know of a group that is more than happy to let the GM guide them through all sorts of astounding locations, situations and set-pieces one session after another. And certainly I've enjoyed that sense of interacting with the world beyond my ability to retro-fit it to my own designs and piece together the GM's imagination and thinking.

Best,

Christopher

Hi Marco,

Like I said, if someone wants to get a new thread going on this specific matter, I'll add what I can in terms of observations.

But I don't think this is the thread to do it.

Best,

Christopher

Bankuei wrote: Here is my only argument, restated for clarity, for you:

-"A sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment" are possible to acheive with little or no prepared or previously agreed upon elements and/or director stance shared by the group as a whole. I personally have experienced them as a regular feature of play.

World Book Dictionary wrote: Discover, invent mean to find something not known before. Discover means to find or find out something that already existed, but was not known about or had not been seen . . . Invent means to make or work out something that did not exist before . . .

Duin in the Pattern Recognition Files wrote: Pattern recognition is the research area that studies the operation and design of systems that recognize patterns in data.

Hi Doc,

You are correct, it is impossible to actually discover something that does not yet exist. The key point is "A sense of discovery". The sense, or feeling of, does not need to correspond to the actuality of it. As you yourself pointed out- a GM could totally make up the clues on the spot, and the group can accept those and have the "sense of discovery" without actual discovery.

How does this work when the group consciously knows that things are being made up on the spot? The fact is, that each person capable of producing input is already strategizing ways to fulfill their personal agendas, either within the immediate moment, or the future.

I may not, for instance, know what kinds of events are going to happen in Universalis, but I do know that you, as a fellow player, may already have a scheme, plan, or series of plot points that will lead somewhere interesting. My sense of discovery manifests in seeing where you are trying to take events in play, your input, your take on things. Likewise for every other player at the table concerning every player's input.

As far as pattern recognition goes- you have already pointed out that many things people do reference and echo pre-existing archtypes and patterns. The pattern that is recognized is the one produced in play. To give an example, people playing Go have no idea what the final result or board will look like. As they play, patterns are created, that they recognize and react to. Likewise, in actual play itself, players produce archtypes and patterns in behavior. The interaction of the players and the events create patterns to be recognized.

So what is the difference between a predetermined set of elements to create a pattern and one created through play? As far as recognizing a pattern- there is none. If the GM has a set of clues for us to find- we see a pattern and we recognize it. If the GM makes up the clues, we recognize a pattern(either being spontaneously produced by the GM, or imagined and projected on our part). If we all produce the elements in play, patterns emerge and we as a group recognize and either reinforce or attempt to change the patterns that emerge. This happens in Universalis on a fairly regular basis.

There are many kinds of personal empowerment. That specific personal empowerment which comes from discovery and/or pattern recognition is not possible in situations which lack both anything to discover and any patterns to recognize. Now you have, as plainly as I can put it, the chain of reasoning through which I dispute your claims.

Doctor Xero wrote:

Bankuei wrote: Here is my only argument, restated for clarity, for you:

-"A sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment" are possible to acheive with little or no prepared or previously agreed upon elements and/or director stance shared by the group as a whole. I personally have experienced them as a regular feature of play.

Sorry, Chris, but the above is logically absurd.

A person can not discover something that does not already exist. To claim otherwise is logically absurd. To discover something is not the same as to invent or create.

Levi-Strauss wrote: Nature is not in itself contradictory. It can become so only in terms of some specific human activity which takes part in it; and the characteristics of the environment take on a different meaning according to the particular historical and technical form assumed in it by this or that type of activity. On the other hand, even when raised to that human level which alone can make them intelligible, man's relations with his natural environment remain objects of thought: man never perceives them passively; having reduced them to concepts, he compounds them in order to arrive at a system which is never determined in advance: the same situation can always be systematized in various ways.

Bankuei wrote: Hi Doc,

You are correct, it is impossible to actually discover something that does not yet exist. The key point is "A sense of discovery". The sense, or feeling of, does not need to correspond to the actuality of it. As you yourself pointed out- a GM could totally make up the clues on the spot, and the group can accept those and have the "sense of discovery" without actual discovery.

Bankuei wrote: How does this work when the group consciously knows that things are being made up on the spot? The fact is, that each person capable of producing input is already strategizing ways to fulfill their personal agendas, either within the immediate moment, or the future.

Bankuei wrote: As far as pattern recognition goes- you have already pointed out that many things people do reference and echo pre-existing archtypes and patterns.
---snip!--
So what is the difference between a predetermined set of elements to create a pattern and one created through play? As far as recognizing a pattern- there is none.

Bankuei wrote: If you are claiming that there is a specific brand of sense of discovery, pattern recognition and personal empowerment that comes from predetermined elements- that is specifically different from other types of sense of discovery, etc. - then I would say we're not in disagreement and we have suffered a confusion in communication.

Bankuei wrote: I would be interested in hearing exactly how, for the purposes of play, this brand differs from the others other than simply play preference and what effects that has in terms of play.

Bankuei wrote: If, on the other hand, you are saying that sense of discovery, pattern recognition, and personal empowerment are completely impossible for games that utilize conscious director stance on part of the group- then no, you have still to produce solid examples counteracting several accounts to the contrary.

Hi Doc,

A question.

You wrote:

"For the record, I have focused on the importance of framing via an interaction with continuity because a large proportion of the threads I have encountered indicate that many Forge posters are already quite familiar with framing via an independence from continuity. I have run both healthy games with a strong pre-existing continuity and healthy games with a malleable continuity. Although I prefer to play characters who are embedded within the game setting, I have also occasionally played characters who could be easily transferred from one campaign to another."

Now I may be misreading this. Or it may be a matter of different ideas being packed into a single paragraph... So I want to check.

Are you saying that in the threads you've read on the Forge, many posters are running games where characters could easily be transferred from one campaign to another?

Thanks,

Christopher

Hi Doc,

Seems like a big ballyhoo of miscommunication for both of us. I apologize for taking such a harsh stance- I was completely misreading what you were saying. I concur that for players(also counting GMs) who enjoy having a prescripted mystery or imaginary elements to be uncovered that it is contingent upon those things already existing, and I recognize that there is a type of enjoyment to be had from that.

I am claiming specifically that technical discovery is impossible in such situations, not that sense of discovery is impossible, as you yourself point out at the beginning of this post. I am stating that pattern recognition of the sort which occurred in the first vampire game and of the sort which occurs in character creation when a player is aiming for a character who is already embedded in the setting or already embodies the premise before even the first moment of play, that this pattern recognition is impossible in such situations. I am arguing that personal empowerment which comes from those specific phenomena of discovery (not sense of discovery) and pattern recognition of the sort described is dependent upon those phenomena and therefore logically is impossible without them.

Doctor Xero wrote: A person can not discover something that does not already exist. To claim otherwise is logically absurd. To discover something is not the same as to invent or create....

A person can not recognize a pattern if there is no data within which to find said pattern. To claim otherwise is logically absurd....

That specific personal empowerment which comes from discovery and/or pattern recognition is not possible in situations which lack both anything to discover and any patterns to recognize. Now you have, as plainly as I can put it, the chain of reasoning through which I dispute your claims.

If you can explain to me how you avoid the above logical absurdities, perhaps I will know how to translate more effectively into terms you would be more comfortable with.

Doctor Xero later wrote: However, I have also encountered a large number of players whose enjoyment of a game hinges upon their believing that both sense and the actuality are one and the same in a particular game.

I think the terms "sense of discovery" vs. "discovering" may be a bit misleading since the primary element of roleplaying is seen (here) as exploration. In other words, all roleplaying (exploration) must (in the lexicon) lead to some sense of discovery.

In this thread the concept of dice being used to "objectify" 'the challenge' came up.

The idea, if I understood it (it was advanced by Gareth) was that dice served to give the players (and GM) a sense of a reality that existed beyond their control.

Now, I realize this only applied in the thread to 'challenge' but I think that this concept applies across all interactions of a person (GM or player) and with SIS.

I think this is a more valuable way to look at player's relations to SIS than "discovery" or even "sense of discovery."

The mystery game is a perfect example of this. I have a book called The Dollhouse Murders which is a text, with pictures, of training scenarios used for forensic pathologists. In each picture (in the class they are dioramas) there is a crime scene with a murdered doll. Although I have not gotten through it yet, I believe that as a reader and observer, I can solve these murders or reach logical conclusions about 'what happened' in the imaginary crime.

In other words, there are patterns of information (visual and textual clues) and a imaginary reality behind them.

If the patterns match to the later-disclosed (seemingly reasonable) reality, we say the game is consistent or plausible.

If we do not create the patterns then (as we do not, when dealing with such things in reality) then it becomes more "objectified" (to borrow the term).

How one relates to this says a lot though.

Let's say I examine the evidence and come up with a conclusion. It does not match the author's but is still (somehow) consistent with the clues.

Joe: "That's absurd. Nothing really happened. It's all an imaginary construction."
Fred: "Something specific happened. Your answer, although logical, is not correct."
Jones: "Well, if it matches the clues then it's right. It doesn't matter that some author guy had a different idea."

In 'reality' only Fred is right. In an RPG, any of them may be right--but how we react to the game and to patterns of information in the game will say a lot about how we play.

I think rather than 'discovery' this has to do with 'immersion' or, if you don't like the term immersion, with my relation to the SIS as a real space.

Yes, I need a GM moderator, but if I'm making up who the murderer is and I 'can't be wrong about my conclusions unless we all decide I'm wrong' then I'll relate to it far less as an "objective reality" than as a book I'm writing.

I think there is a tendency to conflate one of these views with some kind of GM Force or Participationism (although I don't know if that's what happened here).

-Marco

Hi Marco,

I have returned, to pull back the curtain and reveal my big answer to your question! (Swish!)

I am not conflating what you're talking about, and what Doc's talking about, with Participationsim. I'm sorry if I gave that impression.

If we had continue this matter on another thread, I would have said that your issue (and one of the MANY issues Doc has brought up) can be summed up with Bankuei's word: "uncovering."

I think "uncovering" is perfect here.

I think that this notion of unocovering, however, whether it be a murder mystery, a metaphysical issue, or whatever, is easily independent of so many other factors that I cannot for the life of me see how much else got tied to it.

That's it, dude. No big ta' do. I refered to a specif Participationism game covered other aspects of Doc's requests: games where the PCs fit the environment; games where the Players didn't muck about with the game world very much at all.

This aspect of "uncovering" -- while part of the thread since the murder mystery example -- has not been what the whole of the thread has been about. For example, Doc referenced the Torg Cards early on. Well, none of those Cards would (or could) influence either a Murder Case or the underlying Metaphysics the GM had put on the world.

As Bunkuei has just pointed out, this specific matter -- the idea that there's something concrete to be uncovered simply isn't that big a deal. Whether you're playing Sorcerer, Riddle of Steel, The Pool, HeroQuest and a host of other games that allow (if not demand) plenty of player empowerment, the GM can create a murder mystery or underlying metaphysics that the players can uncover without any of them bumping it iota from the place where the GM placed it.

Other games would not allow this, for a variety of reasons. Universalis, for examples, allows the players to bid on the nature of reality. And even if "rules" are established for the murder or reality, there's nothing for the players to uncover.

In the case of HeroQuest with Glorantha, the setting itself demands the metaphysics is in flux. It is a war to determine the the metaphysics of the place. So the players can determine the metaphysics. That's why the group would choose to play the Hero Wars. (However, the GM could still, if he wished, impose a meta-metaphysics the their players either pursue or don't. (This would be to the group's tasted.))

Significanly, again, even in Glorantha, a murder mytery would be a murder mystery would be a murder mystery -- if the GM set it up as such. The rules simply would not allow the players to "make up" the solution, and if the group simply didn't use techniques that allowed the players to make up the solution, then it wouldn't happen that way.

And people -- on these boards, in the actual post threads, play in the aforementioned ways -- all the time. And I'm sure Doc plays this way.

The difference is where one sets the dials on play to make it work.

But all these things -- murder mysteries, metaphysical mysteries, character design connected to setting, directorial and authorial stances in play, prepared narratives ahead of time, loose preperation of backstory ahead of time, "patterns" of "mythic" stories -- are all different dials that Doc says need to be linked.

I say no. They don't need to be linked. They do need to be linked enough to satisfy the Creative Agenda of the group (as Doc has done to satisfy his group). But that is a completely different matter.

That's why, Marco, I reffered to a Partitcipationism game. Because I was discussing Doc's strong preference for continuity that couldn't be broken by players. I was saying great. I hadn't even touched on "uncovering". But let's do that now.

"Myst"-like, a GM could run a group of players through an astounding series of adventures and, in the offering of images, encounters and idea, let them uncover the world's underlying metaphysics.

But the GM could do the same thing wihtout any metaphysical agenda.

In another case, the uncovering of a game world's metaphyisics could be offered up with the players engaged in full Narratvist play, tossing in all sorts of details via author and director stance -- that "bumped into" the world's concrete metaphysics -- and these would be clues, too.

But its just as important that a group of cosmic misfit PCs (as silly as the players could concieve them -- the ninja, the dragon, the space cowboy) could still uncover a mystery carefully laid out by the GM. The fact that the PCs had no business being together would probably blow a metaphysical mystery, but not a murder mystery. The murder mystery would go off without a hitch -- though aethestic sensibilities would probably suffer.

In other words, you can get freakish with some aspects of the continuit dial, and still have a honet to god murder mystery to solve. (Could Bugs Bunny solver an actual murder myster, zipping off screen to change costumes, with Basil Rathbone showing up in a one second cameo for a laugh? Yes.)

As M.J. just pointed out, and others have pointed out before, there a ton of independent issues that Doc has joined at the hips.

I'm not saying he shouldn't do this. He's found his dials for a type of play he enjoys. That's a good thing. But there's nothing inherently connected about them. The balance of the dials he's found works for him. But it's not the only way to set the dials.

When he says he's read all these threads around here where everyone apparently has a preference for ignoring "continuity" and inherently precluding any sense of "discovery" I am boggled. (If that's what he means. I look look forward to his anwer to my question in my last post.).

Whether or not other people have said the GM Force is required to build a solid murder mystery, Marco, I am not one of those people. I am, in fact, arguing something quite the opposite: that there a gazillion ways to set all this stuff up.

What's at stake is not the techniques and whether or not they'll work together. What's at stake is the sensibilities and tastes of the players: they'll pull together the pieces that satisify them. It may not be what another group needs or wants, but to that group it works just right.

The strange part is only when someone says, "This is the only way to provide a game with X is to do A, B, and C." when a bunch of people reply, "Actually, we can get X by doing C, D, and E." Then the first person says, "No, you're not doing X. You're doing Y. I've read your posts, you're doing Y."

Best,

Christopher

Bankuei wrote: With the misunderstanding cleared up, this is as obvious as stating "People who like chocolate, like chocolate." Obviously if a major point of play is the uncovering, then anything else won't be as satisfactory(in that regard). Did you have something further to elaborate on, or did you happen to see confusion about that somewhere?

Christopher Kubasik wrote: the idea that there's something concrete to be uncovered simply isn't that big a deal.

Marco wrote: if I'm making up who the murderer is and I 'can't be wrong about my conclusions unless we all decide I'm wrong' then I'll relate to it far less as an "objective reality" than as a book I'm writing.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: But it's not the only way to set the dials.

Doctor Xero wrote:

Bankuei wrote: As far as pattern recognition goes- you have already pointed out that many things people do reference and echo pre-existing archtypes and patterns.
---snip!--
So what is the difference between a predetermined set of elements to create a pattern and one created through play? As far as recognizing a pattern- there is none.

Again, I concur, but . . . (I hope this pattern is not bothering you. *wry half-grin*)

In terms of game play, well, it depends upon whether the player wants to tease out or puzzle out the theme or underlying patterns of the campaign because, well, knowledge is power. If I understand how something works, I am empowered by that understanding. If I understand it and another player does not (or his or her character does not), I have a level of empowerment he/she does not, which I might either use to my advantage (a classical gamist response) or might use through my character's mentoring his/her character (more of a simulationist response) or either (narrativist? I'm unsure).

In the writings of the scholars of mythology and the fantastical whom I had quoted at the beginning of this thread, one point made was the idea that understanding a pattern empowers -- knowledge is power. (Of the multilayered definings of myth, that is the layer to which I referred, as I imagine my choice of quotes had made clear.) Identifying this pattern for material power has been a recurrent thread in writings on magic and alchemy.

I will provide you two gaming examples. I recall being in a game in which the players were vampire hunters interested in spell-casting (not a World of Darkness campaign, so there were no libraries of gaming books and supplements for us). One of the players played an atheist who considered vampirism a physical condition ; one played a nontheist metaphysicist who saw vampirism as magical not spiritual ; one played a religious Christian who saw vampirism as a spiritual blight ; another played a religious Christian who saw vampirism as demonic possession of a corpse ; etc. Our characters were reluctantly cooperating, not a team, so there was an element of competitive discovery among characters despite player cooperation. In this game, the key to empowerment over the vampires was the discovery of the metaphysics under which they functioned -- in doing so, recognizing the mythic or metaphysic pattern of the game world. After all, if your character has proof positive that the vampire has met Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ has power specifically as the Messiah etc., you through your character have recognized that this campaign operates under a Christian metaphysics, which will empower your character in a way denied to characters who try to utilize Babylonian metaphysics in this Christian campaign setting.

Later on, we played under a different game master. She loved the basic motif of vampires, but she really had no investment one way or the other in the metaphysics underlying them. If we had decided simply to kill off the vampires with fire and stakes, it wouldn't have mattered. However, after playing under the first game master, we were primed to look for an underlying metaphysical pattern to empower us against those vampires (and in all subsequent magic-working in this campaign). So she admitted to us that she had no idea what the metaphysics was, and whatever metaphysics we could convince her (or the group), that would turn out to be the correct one. Now we went from puzzler mindset to persuader mindset! It was great fun, but it was still a quite different experience from the earlier vampire game, and while the first had rewarded players who were skilled with investigation and logic games, this second one rewarded players who were skilled with argument and persuasion.

I label these differences as frameworks primarily because it seemed the least loaded term I could find (so many good terms already have specific meanings on The Forge!).

The other difference comes from my experiences, and the experiences related to me by others, of character creation.

Sometimes game masters will ask each player to build a character which fits in particularly well with the theme being explored (narrativist) or the setting (simulationist). They want players to make sure their characters are constructed to interact with or inflect those premises or settings.

Sometimes game masters will ask each player to build a character which is not dependent upon any particular setting (this often means we will be playing duck-out-of-water or strangers-in-a-strange-land campaigns) and/or which is not dependent upon any particular theme.

If I want to build a character which fits in particularly well with the theme or setting, I need that theme or setting to already be there. And, like many of Allston's gamer types, I often enjoy building characters who fit in well. I've met many others who feel the same.

If I want to build a character who fits in anywhere, I don't need to know the theme nor setting. This can also be fun, although for me it's not as much fun. In such cases, once the campaign is being played out, I will go out of my way to create relationships between my character and other PCs and NPCs so that I still feel as though my character is connected into this campaign.

Okey-dokey.

Now that the unfortunate early miscommunications have been solved, let's try this again.

This theory will help game designers, campaign designers, and scenario designers remember the variety of player interests and desires.

I.
SOME REASON TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT MYTH

Many researchers argue that myth and folklore help individuals develop a vital, necessary existential ability -- the ability to recognize underlying patterns. This pattern recognition ability is the basis of science, scholarship, and appreciation of the Arts. For example, empirical science is grounded in recognition of patterns of frequency, the scientific method in recognition of patterns of cause-and-effect ; I do not think it is a coincidence that people with little background in myth (of some shade!) often demonstrate a poor grasp of the recognition of underlying causal patterns (although over-awareness is just as bad, wringing superstition from happenstance). The modern scientific equivalents of the mythic Great Story might be Bohm's theory of implicate order and/or the morphogenic field theory.

INTERLUDE:
WORKING DEFINITIONS OF MYTH AND OF
ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE STORYTELLING
TRADITIONS THAT FIRST INSPIRED RPGS

Marion Woodman once wrote: We live in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. To survive in it, we need think that somehow, it all means something. Where does that meaning come from? That's the myth.

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote: Legends and myth are largely made of truth, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be perceived in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

John Clute once wrote: Stories have a habit of getting tied in knots, and then unfolding. First they entangle their protagonists, whose actions sometimes seem dictated by the needs of the story in which they have become engaged; then the light dawns, and the labyrinth becomes a path. . . . the literatures of the Fantastic positively glory in the fact that they present and embody Story-shaped worlds. . . .
For Aristotle, Recognition marks a fundamental shift in the process of a story from increasing ignorance to knowledge. . . . It is at this moment of Recognition that the inherent Story at the heart of most fully fantasy texts is most visible . . . most revelatory. At this moment in "the structurally complete fantasy tale" (Brian Attebery’s phrase) protagonists begin to understand what has been happening to them (he may have been an Ugly Duckling awaiting the moment he becomes king; she may have been re-enacting a Creation Myth in order that the Land be reborn; they may discover what Archetype serves as an underlier figure and defines their fate; etc.). They understand, in other words, that they are in a Story; that, properly recognized (which is to say properly told), their lives have the coherence and significance of Story ; that, in short, the story has been telling them.

Henry Jenkins once wrote: fans cease to be simply an audience for popular texts ; instead they become active participants in the construction and accumulation of textual meanings.

clehrich wrote: The question that arises here is this: if Sim wants the Dream, and wants it intact and complete and lovely, then why are Sim players willing apparently to break from the Dream in order to emphasize seemingly trivial details about the Dream? Practically speaking, wouldn't it be preferable to gloss over the difficulty in order to stick to the Dream, which presumably is what is really wanted anyway?

This entails, assuming we're agreed here that such Sim players are not totally incoherent and insane, that such details cannot be glossed over. There is a quality to them which actively damages the Dream. Therefore if they are allowed to stand, as for example if the GM says, "Yeah, doesn't matter, anyway he blows a hole in the wall, what are you doing?" and the group doesn't agree that this detail doesn't matter, you have damage to the Dream that such players find unacceptable.
---snip!--
If the Dream were seamless, there would never be any need to break from Situation-Focused play, because the answer to every potential question of fact, however picayune, would already be known to all the players as it is in fact known to the characters. In such an extreme ideal, there would also be a near-total adequation of player to character, which would probably manifest as extreme Turku-style immersion.

The trick is, such perfection (which is unrealizable) has a number of different factors. Any game group must decide, usually largely unconsciously, which factors to prioritize. Some groups prioritize immersion, and gloss over slippage elsewhere in order to maintain this. A group like that Ron describes does not do this; they prioritize the depth and facticity of the Dream. Thus when a slippage occurs in facticity, it requires external handling. Similarly, an immersion-oriented group would presumably consider techniques to assist immersion when it fails, such as enforcing a rule that players must speak in-character and so on.
---snip!--
I'm pretty sure that this is part of what Dr. Xero describes in his games: the aesthetic of the game is that the players do not construct the Dream, but discover a story or pattern or whatever within it, already present and waiting for them.

Now because we have accepted this in advance (which you notice is not typical of Nar or Gam aesthetics), any construction is undesirable. When we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true. For example, we the players may not know whether phazer-fire induces current sufficient to wipe a memory disk, but the world already does know this. It's built-in, a fact of nature. When we debate the point, we're not inventing something new but figuring out how it always already worked. The players did not know the answer, but it was already determined.
---snip!--
Provided, then, that your dominant aesthetic agenda is to reinforce the Dream, which more properly would be to bolster the claim that the Dream was and is and always will be seamless and complete, the handling of fine detail not only isn't CA-irrelevant but is in fact powerfully constitutive of CA.
---snip!--
All of which also goes some way toward explaining why Sim often seems incoherent and weird to non-Sim-committed players. It seems as though Sim players keep stepping outside of exactly what they think they want, i.e. the Dream, in order to focus on detail that really doesn't matter very much. Furthermore, they keep doing this even when there does not seem to be a very strong reason to do so, i.e. when the details seem trivial. My proposal here implies that such players may be doing this because they want CA-meaningful activity, which is difficult to effect without an apparent break from the Dream. From their point of view, such activity is not a break from the Dream, only a break from the ideal perfection of interaction with the Dream, which isn't the same thing. By reinforcing the Dream by these means, they help constitute for themselves the certainty and perfection of that Dream.

Okay, so honest confusion here. I admit, right up front, that I haven't gone and re-read all of the posts on this thread since you just posted that bit. I'm sure my memories are confused.

But....

We seem in some sense to have swapped positions. I'm now mostly talking about a kind of rigid consistency and constancy, and you're now talking about construction and contribution.

I know more or less what I meant, and the ways in which I have and haven't changed my mind. We can talk about that later if you care. But it sounds like you haven't changed yours. So can you explain how this formulation, this stuff about haiku (or bricolage in the other thread) and construction and so on fits into this whole thing about frameworks?

Or have you changed your mind?

Sorry, a bit lost.

clehrich wrote: So can you explain how this formulation, this stuff about haiku (or bricolage in the other thread) and construction and so on fits into this whole thing about frameworks?

Doctor Xero wrote: Rather, they both deal with the solidity of the grounds (or ungroundedness) which one uses as a springboard for one's creative construction.