RPGs and Bricolage: Theory and Practice
In Jay’s recent thread on a 1/3-baked idea, a surprising (to me, anyway) agreement was reached about Simulationism, reflexivity, and so forth. In many other threads lately, there has been some discussion of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous analogy of bricolage, which also came up in the 1/3-baked thread. One thing that has been borne in on me by these discussions is that a lot of folks don’t see the point of this analogy, at least in RPGs.

There are two reasons for this. First, it’s not entirely clear to everyone what bricolage is anyway. Second, it’s not at all clear what if any application this has to RPGs; I have discussed it mostly as an analytical category for understanding how some gaming activity happens, but haven’t tried to turn that around and see it in practice at all.

So I want to do three things here:

• Explain bricolage in (as soon as possible) strictly RPG terms
• Give some practical applications, including some from my own game Shadows in the Fog (see weblink)
• Open it up for more general discussion and argument

Now this quickly became an essay, which I hope eventually to polish and put up in the articles section or something. I've cut it into two VERY LONG pieces. The first lays all the groundwork, both (briefly) not in reference to RPGs and the second (longer) strictly about RPGs. The second moves directly into actual concrete issues about actual play.

My hope is that after these first very long posts, this will not be a “Chris teaches everyone” thing but a “let’s all think about what sorts of implications this might have practically” sort of thing. But posts requesting clarification are certainly very welcome, at the very least because they will help me polish it to be more effective as an article.

Lévi-Strauss and bricolage
The first thing to get is not what bricolage is, but what it is intended to explain. Although I consider that Lévi-Strauss altered his conception of these issues significantly over the course of his later career, I will try to remain faithful to the first comprehensive formulation, that in La pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind). If nothing else, this means that if you should want to follow up these ideas and dig deeper into them, you only have to deal with that one book, and most particularly the first two chapters. I am not covering the whole range, or all the implications, or anything like that. This is a teeny fraction.

Note: this section is not about RPGs directly; see the next sections for that.

So, a little background on the question.

An old difficulty in studying “archaic” peoples (e.g. Australian aborigines, South American and African tribal cultures, etc.) is magic. It seems that the natives think a rain dance, for example, produces rain; to us, it’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t. (I’m setting aside modern magical and occult perspectives here, and sticking with a kind of baseline materialism.) So the first theory is that the natives are stupid, in part because they’re the wrong color. That explains nothing, and is unlikely to boot; it’s also of course racist.

Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, proposes something he never gets credit for. He says that they do believe these things, but not because they are stupid. It’s because they do not think abstractly or theoretically, two qualities of thought that he largely equates to scientific thought. So let’s say the natives have a hundred different magical practices, including curses where stick pins in dolls, and rain dances where you pour water on the ground, and so on. To the natives, these are a hundred distinct and not especially connected practices. But we, with our learned tendency to abstract, collect all the data into one big pile and infer (induce) a rule or principle: the Law of Similarity, for example, which says that two similar things may affect each other at a distance because they are similar, thus the doll looks like the target, and the falling water is like falling rain, and so on. The point is that we have made a significant abstraction, which we learned from historical developments in our intellectual history, beginning way back with early religion and so on. The natives do not do this, their intellectual history not having developed significantly, so they do not see that all these practices are founded on one principle. If they did, they would stop doing the practices, because the principle is, as a law of nature, quite obviously ludicrous. If you have a Law like that, it’s obvious how you test it, and then you quickly see that it doesn’t work, and so you discard the practices.

Now Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, says that this is wrong in principle. “It is a basic postulate of sociology,” he says, “that no human institution can be founded on error.” In other words, if these practices don’t do anything, people will stop doing them. Since the rain dance doesn’t produce rain, it must do something else, or nobody would do it, and chances are it wouldn’t have been invented in the first place. And what he suggests is that these practices promote the unification and cohesion of the social group.

Bronislaw Malinowski, in many works but especially Magic, Science and Religion, goes another step. He, and the later functionalists and structural-functionalists, says that there are three possible functions (empirically observable effects) of a practice, which may or may not correlate to their purposes (why the natives think they do it). The purpose of the rain dance is to make rain, but it has functions the natives don’t know about. There are basically three kinds of function: practical, psychological, and social. Something that has a practical function achieves what it claims to achieve, empirically: you ameliorate soil to get a practical effect, i.e. better-growing plants. A psychological function is usually catharsis of anxiety, and is definitive of magic: you perform a rain dance or a weather-charm because you are worried about drought or storms, and the magical rite helps you feel you are doing something about what you cannot control. If you’ve ever pushed the elevator button again and again to make the elevator come faster, that’s what Malinowski is talking about: it doesn’t do anything practical, but you feel as though you’re doing something, so you feel better. Then the social function is to maintain order, stability, and continuity in the society; for example, men perform couvade (ritual simulation of labor and/or confinement) in order to express paternity (which he can’t prove) and have that be accepted socially.

Now an implication of Malinowski’s theory, accepted by later thinkers in the main, was that there is a third component: purpose, function, and meaning. Meaning is rooted in myth, but includes also all the weird symbolic structures that appear there. What myth does is provide a precedent for the practice, whatever it might be. So you ameliorate soil that way because the gods did it first; you perform the rain dance that way because the gods created rain that way; you perform couvade because some god told you to; and so on.

All of this leads to a problem. From the natives’ point of view, every practice is rooted in myth; the distinction of function is not theirs but the analyst’s. Yet some of these practices have practical effects, such as soil amelioration or pottery or copper-smelting, which are extremely complex and could not have arisen randomly. And the natives seem to think that rain dances and soil amelioration are in some sense the same thing. So how did they learn to ameliorate soil? Why don’t they see these as different, since one is totally practical and another isn’t? How come these blur and blend in native life?

So Lévi-Strauss takes all that and goes back to Frazer’s idea. The natives do not think in abstractions. Except that they do, as the invention and testing of the amelioration of soil proves. So he proposes that they think in abstractions by means of concrete objects. Which is totally at odds with any normal sense of “abstraction.”

Bricolage is an analogy intended to show that this kind of abstract thought with concrete things is not in any way bizarre or unusual. We do it too, but don’t recognize it.

To remind you quickly, bricolage is a hobby in which you build complicated and beautiful things using only what you already have, including taking apart previous projects. You may not acquire new things, except by stumbling on them in your neighbor’s trash. So you interrogate every object to see what it could be used for, and then work to make whatever use you want applicable to the machine you’re building. Because these objects have intrinsic qualities and properties that have nothing to do with what you want, you have to build around those, making the machine very complicated, with all sorts of self-correction methods, again using more objects, which then carry their own oddities, and so on. You are allowed to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate your objects, but you cannot undo that, so any change now means that change has already happened the next time you build something.

Lévi-Strauss contrasts this with normal abstract engineer-thinking, which analyzes the problem and comes up with a required effect, then constructs an element of the machine, from raw pieces, that does this and only this, efficiently. Thus what the engineer constructs ideally has no extraneous properties, and its elements are perfectly tuned to do exactly what is required and no more. This is an ideal case, but the distinction should be clear.

For example, to get a local heating element, the bricoleur might use a toaster (cut open) or an iron, and whichever he chooses carries baggage, i.e. the many other properties of the object. The engineer would sit down and design a local heating element that is ideally suited to exactly what he wants, and no more. Suppose we want a machine to heat something, and we want it to be lightweight. If the bricoleur only has an iron, he has to compensate for its weight by other means, because the iron is heavy. The engineer designs a lightweight heating element.

And to be clear, a myth or a ritual is the machine. It is the result of such a process. The concrete objects are things in nature, like flowers and animals and such.

Bricolage and RPGs
What I’ve been ducking in all that discussion, apart from RPGs per se, is the question of structure. That’s because the concept is both so difficult and abstract, and also so simple, that it is very difficult to explain through more abstraction. Rather than get into Lévi-Strauss’s examples, which are mostly irrelevant to us in RPGs, I’m basically going to stick to RPGs from here on in.

Let’s set up the analogy. I’ll use some Big Model terms, because they’re so useful, but this really isn’t quite a Big Model theory; it applies without respect to CA, for the nonce anyway.

So everything described by the Big Model, with the notable exceptions of CA and Social Contract, is a concrete thing. A Technique, for example, might be likened to an iron: it can be used in various ways, in various contexts, to do a range of things, but it cannot be used at all times to do absolutely anything at all. Remember that Setting and Character are also elements of the Big Model, and are perhaps the most obvious “things” and sets of things. But any mechanic, let’s say a way of resolving bullet to-hit probabilities, is also such a thing: it does something, it is applicable in a range of ways and situations, and yet it cannot do everything nor be applied always.

Consider gaming as a process, the way we usually do. When a particular situation (not capitalized) arises, we need to decide how to resolve it. And so we interrogate our shed (the total game system) of things to decide what is appropriate. Maybe we decide that although this is an arrow being fired, the best way to resolve its to-hit probability is to apply the bullet system, but we have to make some modifications because arrows are not bullets. The bullet system has now changed, ever so slightly: every time we use it to resolve bullet to-hits in the future, it is a specific application that we have retained, of what is now a larger and slightly differently constructed mechanism.

Now we might eventually decide that this mechanism is so clever and so useful that we want it to apply to any ranged combat. But the problem is, maybe laser guns don’t work the same way, so we cannot simply apply it directly. One way to do this would be to construct a completely new system, from first principles, to handle laser guns. In play, as opposed to design, we find this practically a pain in the ass; in design, we may find it aesthetically annoying, because it seems more elegant to have one mechanic rather than a zillion different ones. Now in design, which is nearer the engineering end of things, we may just go back to the drawing board and invent a whole new general to-hit system. But in play, we don’t want to stop and do this, because as I say it’s a pain, and it distracts from what was the point of all of this, which was to figure out whether Dave’s laser shot did indeed take out Big Fred’s kneecap. So we use the good old-fashioned chewing-gum-and-twine method: we adapt the projectile to-hit system to apply to energy weapons. And maybe we announce, “Okay, so the first two steps are the same always, but from now on in the third step projectile combat goes on table A, which we already were using, and energy combat goes on table B, which is just like table A except without lines 1-3 and 12, which leaves 8 options instead of 12 so roll a d8 instead of a d12.”

I’m not going to ramble on here. I hope it’s clear why we can treat both mechanics and the imagined objects of SIS (characters, weapons, monsters, etc.) as concrete things in the sense of bricolage, and have some practical sense of what that entails directly in play.

All we have done, thus far, is establish the analogy. This is something my students constantly get wrong: by establishing the analogy, you have done no analytical work, really. You have laid the groundwork for it, but actually achieved nothing. We now know that bricolage can be applied to RPGs, and we could go on and on demonstrating this, but all that would have no effect. So what? It’s just another model. This is an important point I’ll be returning to.

So now we have to take into consideration what bricolage is for, theoretically and practically. Theoretically, we’ve seen that bricolage is an analogy intended to explain the nature of a special kind of abstract thought in the concrete; so what does that entail for RPGs? Practically, we’ve seen that bricolage produces myths and rituals, but what if anything does that say about practical RPG play?

Remember how I set CA and Social Contract outside the realm of things? That’s because they’re best understood as structures. (If you’ve read Lévi-Strauss, you know there’s something wrong here, but I’ll get back to that. This is heuristic, for simplicity’s sake.)

Essentially a structure is two things. First of all, it is a pre-made machine, already pretty well tuned and running just fine. We can slap it into any machine we want to build and know it will run in particular ways. Second, it is the abstract formulation entailed by the machine. This is the hard part.

Suppose we step back from the actual machine for a minute and look at it like the engineer. Yes, that thing there is an iron, but from the perspective of the machine in which it is placed it is really a meaning: it means “local heat, heavy, etc.” We may only be using “local heat,” but it’s still heavy. But from this perspective it isn’t “iron.” So the structure of “iron” put this way is (Local Heat)&(Heavy). If we look at a whole big elaborate machine, we’ll see a long column of such meanings intersecting. We’ll also see some apparently contradictory meanings: because we wanted the heating thing to be light, we have both Iron (Local Heat)&(Heavy) and Helium Balloon (Really Big)&(Delicate)&(negative-Heavy). In this machine, Heavy and negative-Heavy cancel out, so we get a light total. You see?

The thing is, any structure like this is a horrible mess if it takes into account every single potential meaning, because every thing we use has a huge raft of potential meanings, i.e. is structured densely. This isn’t true with engineering, because you design things to have one meaning and little else, but in bricolage you’re stuck with the vast entailments of actual things as they really are.

So in addition to structure being a quality of the machine, it’s also an aesthetic constraint on what the machine ought to look like. This has many, many layers—which we can roughly break down into those functions (practical, psychological, social) and some intellectual and aesthetic ideals of how we like things to be.

Back to RPGs. I did promise, I know. And yes, I’m getting on toward practical implications.

So CA is basically this kind of aesthetic constraint structure. It says that of the many possible games we could play with our mechanics and characters and so on, we only want a limited set of them. Others will be counted failures, even if there are no rules-violations or anything like that. So every time we dig into the shed of System or whatever to get something, we choose not only what could work but what works well under these constraints.

Now that means we’re always thinking CA no matter what we’re doing. It’s no good trying to build a light heating machine with an iron if we don’t actually own a helium balloon. Just so, it’s no good trying to develop an on-the-fly rule for handling energy weapons in a Gamist game if it creates a “you automatically win if you have an energy weapon” rule. But on the other hand, that might be just fine in other games: maybe part of the Premise in a Nar game is about the uses of absolute power, so by creating a new absolute power we actually encourage the addressing of that Premise.

Over in Social Contract, we have the real crux of the matter. Unlike CA, we really cannot fully understand social structure, because it entails too many things. Thought of as a machine, it has just far too many bits and pieces that extend way out into stuff we don’t want to deal with, like culture and history and sociology sorts of things that we don’t want to make a point of debate or contestation within play. So Social Contract constrains how we think about what is and isn’t in the shed of things to play with, but it does so without calling attention to itself as much as possible. As soon as you go and make explicit the fact that you’re not going to draw in national politics during the game, you make that a point of debate, which the whole point of such constraint was to avoid.

In the Big Model, this works largely top-down. Social Contract lays down big constraints, then CA narrower ones, and so on. One implication of bricolage is that this is not actually the case. In fact, bricolage as an analogy entails that this all works cyclically and dynamically, so as to construct the notion that this is top-down.

The way this works is by further analogy, but this time analogy within the bricolage process. That is, it’s a kind of analogy we actually draw in play, usually without really knowing we’re doing it.

When we look in our range of mechanics and so on, seeking something to accomplish a given purpose without violating CA, we’re apparently thinking theoretically. But this is not the experience of actual play. We don’t, that is, reach in there and say, “Hmm, how about this?” “Nah, that’s going to violate that aesthetic principle.” “Oh, right, how about this other thing?” “Hmm, maybe, but we’d have to twist it.” We just do it, in the main, and we do it oddly well. Now partly this is because we’re very clever, really, and we have a lot of practice at doing this stuff. But we know of all kinds of examples where this process doesn’t work, where in fact we do get an aesthetic violation. Can it really be that there are only perfectly successful and thus invisible manipulations, and total failures that show? The bricolage analogy proposes otherwise.

In order to ask the question, “Will this work without violating CA?” we must apply the structure of the thing to the structure of CA, in a hypothetical sense. But if we’re doing that, then we’re already putting it into practice, and if there’s a failure, it will arise as a failure, cocking up the play moment by drawing attention to exactly what we don’t want.

So instead, what we do is ask a different question. We ask, “Is the structure of this thing analogous to the structure of (part of) my CA?” And “Is the structure of this thing analogous to the structure of (part of) my Social Contract?” We can answer this question immediately, because the way we got that thing into the game in the first place was by understanding it as a structure, as range of possibilities rather than an iron, so we’ve already done the structural work. We just say, “structure A, structure B: are they close?” Sort of like saying, “this is blue, that’s blue, they’re both blue.” For the same reason as we can see that both are blue, or both are trees, or both are mechanics, we can also see that this mechanic will not violate CA without ever posing the question directly.

But... wait a minute. That means that there is no difference in kind between Social Contract, CA, and all those things that lie under them. Correct. All of these are things and they are also structures of relations. Any difference in kind is something we impose, not something intrinsic. (The Lévi-Strauss readers just said, “Oh, is that how you got round that one, gotcha.”)

But, again, wait a minute. That means that absolutely everything here, from soup to nuts, is a vast structure made up of lots of intersecting structures, each with its own entailments and weirdnesses, and it’s also a big machine made up of things interacting dynamically and yet carrying their own histories and peculiarities. So what’s the total structure?

Let’s hypothesize for a moment that the total structure is the Big Model. The whole schmear. Does that work?

Well, in a sense it does. The only immediately apparent problem is that the Big Model does not include any actual play things, only classes of actual play things. To some degree we can get round that by pointing out that a class of actual play things is itself a thing, because a structure made up of structures (which is all the things are) is also a structured thing. But somehow that seems like a weird answer. And it may sound also like I’m saying that the Big Model is perfect or something, which I’m not. Let’s look again.

We’ve said that particular things have entailments constituted by their intrinsic properties and their prior uses in bricolage, but I’ve been avoiding somewhat the issue of such entailment. Now we have to get into that, and suddenly the rubber is going to hit the road. In order to do this, we have to stop using large-scale structures (like those described in the Big Model) and get down to small-scale structures (like “Fred the player” and “+2 Bastard Sword”).

RPGs and Bricolage: Theory and Practice, part II
Practical Applications and Issues
In my game Shadows in the Fog, all this mess is quite deliberate and conscious, because I designed it significantly on structuralist principles. So it makes an easy example. Here’s a piece of the game-rules text explaining it concretely:

Sir David Fulsham (played by Sarah) is trying to break into a house, and he ends up with a lot of Concessions [negative effects that must be narrated by the player]. Sarah decides that a policeman has seen Sir David entering, and is coming up the steps to discuss it with him. In the course of the conversation, Sarah plays [the Tarot card] The Emperor, and says that she means this in terms of authority: Sir David asserts his authority, as a member of the nobility, to make the policeman bow to his will.

Now what does The Emperor mean? As always, it’s a relation, in this case between two kinds of authority. There is the policeman, an authority in one sense, and there is the nobleman, an authority in another. So it seems that The Emperor here indicates a power-relationship between types of authority.

A little later, John Keightley (played by Janet) encounters a policeman and wants him to do something. Janet plays The Emperor, again asserting authority. But based on the last use, it seems that John Keightley must already have some authority to assert. Fine, suppose Keightley is a Barrister, i.e. a courtroom official; he thus asserts that his authority as such should make the policeman do what he wants.

Now what does The Emperor mean? Much the same as before, but now it seems that the relation is specifically legal. In this last case, it was a relation within the law; in the previous one, it was also a legal relation, because as a Lord, Sir David is inherently a power under the law.

A little later, John Keightley again wants to make a policeman do something, but this time the policeman is a Detective Inspector. Simply asserting that Keightley is a Barrister isn’t going to help, because the Detective Inspector is an important legal authority outside the courtroom, and can’t be pushed around so easily. Okay, so Janet plays the Emperor again, and says, “Detective Inspector, I think you’ll find that the situation here is entirely level and square. [I give him the grips and handshakes of a Master Mason – he’s a Mason too, but not at that rank.]”

Once again, The Emperor has come to mean the assertion of one authority over another. The legal aspect declines a little, but on the other hand it’s an assertion of a higher authority than the law, and draws on the fact that Masonry represented a kind of higher power within the law because senior policemen were so often Masons.

Now let’s look at another example. Sir David Fulsham encounters a lady at the opera, and he’d like her to switch boxes. Sarah plays The Emperor, and says that Sir David is asserting his authority to make the lady move. But this jars considerably with the sense we’ve developed of The Emperor. The ploy may not work, or it may produce a kind of backlash: the lady leaves the box, but then summons an attendant (a local authority) to complain about this man’s boorish behavior. When we started the campaign, The Emperor could very well have been used in this way, but now it seems contrary to its meaning. Thus the accretion of history to the meaning of the card as a relation changes and narrows the way it can be used.

One final example. John Keightley encounters a gentleman at a bar who has some information, but the gentleman is not very willing. Janet plays The Emperor, and says, “I’m John Keightley, barrister-at-law; you’ll find my offices in Thavies Inn. The information you have could be critically important in a criminal case, and I urge you not to impede the law. <Noting that he’s wearing a Masonic tie-tack, I give him the grips of a Master Mason.>” Because Keightley is asserting the majesty of the law, and furthermore the gentleman is a Mason (a legitimate invention by Janet here), The Emperor fits perfectly, and the gentleman promptly tells all. Because the history of the card’s prior uses are so exactly in accord with this present usage, Janet’s invention that the gentleman is a Mason carries considerable weight, and furthermore this card-play should be tremendously successful. If Janet had done this without any history to the card, it’s possible that the man might (quite reasonably) have said that Keightley had no right to assert this sort of authority over a private citizen. Thus the history of card-use has both narrowed its future uses and also increased its power within that narrower range.

One essential point about cards, then, is that they don’t represent single things or situations; they are relations, not objects, signs and not meanings in Lévi-Strauss’s terms. This is, in fact, one of the weaknesses of the Assumption alternate rule (see next chapter): it encourages thinking of cards as specific things or ideas. When it comes to magical forces and powers especially, this greatly limits the ways in which a card can be used.

Let’s consider a famous card, The Tower, often taken to mean disaster. The imagery is of two people falling from a high tower which has been struck by lightning.

Now if we think of the card as simply a meaning, it’s difficult to see how it can be used in any but a limited number of circumstances. For example, in a combat situation, it could be taken as disaster for one of the combatants. But if we think of it as a relation, there are lots of possibilities opened up to the cunning player.

Suppose the card has been used for the following:

• A thug came to grief in a gunfight with a middle-class professional
• A spell to summon power from the Thames went catastrophically wrong, and the spell-caster was flung from the docks and drowned.
• An attempt to climb the tower of Big Ben went wrong; the climber fell to his death.

Okay, so clearly all these fit the description, Disaster. But there are other possibilities if we think of it as a relation. In every case, two adjacent spheres have commingled disastrously: the lower-class thug with the middle-class professional, the caster on the docks with the Thames beneath, the climber in the air with the land beneath. So we could in fact read this card as meaning a bringing-together of separate spheres. If the spheres are close together, this is disastrous, as we’ve seen. But suppose the spheres are far apart, and bringing them together is a good thing?

Sir David Fulsham (a Lord, as we know), confronts a thug (lower-class). The spheres here are far apart. Rather than interpret the Tower as disaster for the thug, Sarah could interpret it as bringing the two spheres into conjunction, making the thug feel higher-class than usual and read Sir David as a guy like him. This could cause the thug not to attack Sir David, but in fact to unbend and deal with him in a more constructive manner.

Now of course, it takes a cunning player to make this sensible, and Sarah’s going to have to do some fast footwork to get the idea across. To do this, she’s going to have to draw on all that history of the card’s usage: this is what Interpretation is really about.

Now that we see a practical application of bricolage by a cunning player, what does this mean more generally, i.e. in a game not deliberately constructed on these principles?

In order for any of these applications of Tarot cards to work properly, the player must assert that the card already carried these proposed implications. But this always happens in all RPG play. This is the Lumpley Principle, in fact. Every time any action is submitted to the SIS, the group must accept together that this is an appropriate analogy: the structure of what you are doing matches the structure I have in my head of the total game. We may think we are doing this exclusively at a Situation level, in terms of characters and physics and mechanics and so on, but in fact it’s happening at the total level of the whole game. If we consider it at all, and remember that this implies at least a possible breakage—that is, most of the time we don’t even consider it deliberately, because it’s automatically accepted and cannot break anything—we consider it at a narrow level, not as a totality. On the rare occasions that we consider it in terms of the whole thing, right up to CA and Social Contract, there is a tremendous potential for breakage. That’s when instead of getting a potential failure like “No, that spell requires 3 seconds to cast and you have only 2”, you get a potential failure like “No, that’s not acceptable to me personally and you need to stop it or I’m leaving,” for example “I am not comfortable with this, in a personal way, and you are breaking the game for me.” You know, big problems.

Now this means that any normal submission to SIS confirms that the game works. But what do we mean by that? Under ordinary, successful play, this means simply “That’s cool, now I do this here.” After the game, or in a minor potential break-point well resolved, this means “These rules work, this is a good game/system/setting/GM.” But what rarely arises is “This group plays together well, we make this game work.” It’s there, and can be discussed of course, but it’s in the background; it’s a high-level abstract concern that we usually set aside.

So consider instead breakage. Under ordinary play, this means “You miss.” “Oh, bugger, I coulda sworn....” Under minor potential-break play, this means “You can’t do that, the mechanics say no.” “No way, see here on page 87 it says d8, not d20.” “No, hang on....” Under the high-level concerns not normally expressed, this means “My game sucks, I hate this, I don’t want to do this any more.” We hear a lot of this, or used to, in Actual Play.

Now the Big Model diagnosis system kicks in. We first adequate the Model to the situation, by analogy (bricolage at work). Then we say (we hope), “This is not a high-level concern, but a second-level concern: you have a CA difference, not a personal difference.”

So just like in regular play, the Big Model operates diagnostically to shift down the level of concern away from straight-up Social Contract. If it’s really Social Contract that is disastrously breaking the game, we have to say, “Get new friends, these people and you will never get along,” or “You’re an asshole, it’s your fault, go away.” Nobody wants to say that, if nothing else because it’s not tactful.

But why not? That sounds like a stupid question, but it’s quite serious.

Answer:

Because the whole elaborate structure here is socially constituted from the start to the finish, bottom to top and in reverse

Which means...

The whole structure of gaming is socially reinforcing

Eh?

Every time the Big Model succeeds in formulating a strong analogy between described play and the Model’s structure, we think we have done something. Analytically, we haven’t; that’s just the grounds of analysis. So why do we think we’ve achieved something? Because by doing so we demonstrate the adequacy of the model. Now this makes no sense if we are talking about proper analytical abstraction. That’s fallacious. But if we’re talking about bricolage, about the Science of the Concrete, treating the Big Model as a structured and structuring thing, the very formulation of the analogy reinforces the structure itself. That is what bricolage is really for, you see: to demonstrate the adequacy of the structures already present (in the shed, the social system, the game, the discourse) by reducing apparent change to something always already within the structure.

In ritual or myth, this means that the ability to think through concrete objects to analyze an apparent contradiction in cultural or natural reality proves that the social structure is just fine and doesn’t need to change, so now the social structure is better than it was because it’s the same as it always was.

Within gameplay, as I’ve said elsewhere about Sim play especially, this means that the ability to handle apparently trivial problems of gameworld physics and such proves that the Dream or the system or whatever was already perfect and complete, and we just didn’t yet see that, so now the Dream (or whatever) is even better than it was because it’s the same as it was.

Within RPG theory of the Big Model form, with its deliberately practical gameplay and diagnosis orientation, this means that the ability to explicate apparent social problems as aesthetic problems (for example) proves that the Big Model was already perfect and complete, and we just hadn’t seen this particular example, but this change in the Big Model isn’t a change but a demonstration that we already knew this.

Really Actual Practical Implications
So this probably all sounds still very abstract and pointless. It probably also sounds like a criticism of the Big Model, which it isn’t, especially. So the question becomes, how if at all does this actually affect gameplay and design questions?

Gameplay
First of all, absolute in-play incoherence is not possible except as an extra-RPG issue. That is, the only way you can get absolute breakdown at the CA level is if it is founded on a breakdown at another level, outside of gaming itself. We would rather not recognize this, of course, because it pushes those Geek Fallacy sorts of buttons: just because you play well together doesn’t mean you’re friends, and just because you don’t play well together doesn’t mean you’re not friends. The problem is that the latter sort of isn’t exactly true. If there is no possibility of two players agreeing at a CA level, your disagreement extends well outside gaming; you may be friends in other ways, but as you even near the kinds of broad aesthetic and other concerns that inform gaming, including lots of social issues we don’t want to deal with in gaming most of the time, you simply cannot get along. The only way to solve such a problem is outside of the game: you’ve got to sit down and hash it out, and you may not end up friends, because you discover you weren’t to begin with but thought you were.

But this is actually very rare, because if we agree that we like to play RPGs, chances are we are sort of close enough to get along in play. What do we do about CA incoherence in play?

Here’s where I think bricolage puts the rubber to the road. Our natural tendency, stemming from a long intellectual history in the West (circling all the way back to poor old Frazer), is to abstract the problem up to higher-level structures. There’s a disagreement at a low level (“I hit him,” “No, he hits you first”) so we shift up the hierarchy to handle it through higher-level abstractions: (“Initiative rules say his dex is higher so he goes first,” “Oh crap”). And in fact, that’s a pretty good way to handle things, as we know. But it isn’t the only way.

Remember that this hierarchy of abstractions is an imposed structure. The difference between “low level” and “high level” concerns is not intrinsic, but an adequation of the issue to a structure, through analogy. Now think about it as the machine made of bits and pieces. Changing a big chunk of the machine is difficult, because it’s got all those bits. Changing one thing is easy—but it ends up changing everything, because if we replace the iron with a feather-light hair dryer the helium balloon is going to pull the whole machine up into the stratosphere. So we in the West, with our engineering-type tendencies, get into the habit of practicing assiduously at changing the larger structures without much changing the small, unless a big drastic change is needed in which case we retool from scratch. But in “savage thought” you do it the other way around: you change the iron for the hair dryer and deal with problems as they come, perpetually deferring the need for a drastic retooling.

Putting that concretely in gameplay terms, this means that sharp disagreements about nearly anything need not be dealt with in the abstract. You can do it that way, but you don’t have to. If we have a disagreement at a low level (“I hit him,” “No, he hits you first”), we do not have to shift up the structure to resolve it. For example: “I do too hit him first,” “Okay, you hit him first, because his swing took him past your sidestep, but he gets a backswing you can’t parry, okay?”

This is such a slight and silly example it seems like nothing. But think about what you’ve just done. You’ve chucked the mechanics—the part where high dex goes first—by creating a variation that accepts both that he has higher dex and swung first and the player’s insistence that his character hits first. You’ve done this entirely piecemeal, case by case; there is no higher-level retooling done.

But now that helium balloon is lifting the machine. Next time any situation analogous to this one—remember the importance of analogies—arises, we have a new possibility: what if I get a sidestep that allows a first hit but leaves me open to his backswing? Well, tactically, if my strength and weapon are so devastating that I can kill him at one blow, I want this to happen; if my back is badly defended and my front heavily armored, I don’t want this. And the whole combat system is beginning to alter, bit by steady bit.

What’s going to happen, in the end, is Drift, broadly construed. We’ll end up with a weird mess of house rules and strangeness that works only for us, that no sane person would have designed (in fact, we didn’t design it either), and may in fact be totally incoherent if looked at from a design stance. So why does it work at all? Because each piece has now been tooled by us, ever so slightly, and that tooling and tweaking has told us, deep down, that we are okay as a game group. The fact that it’s a horrible mess means nothing; we don’t care. What we care about is that on a case-by-case basis, we can handle things in a way that makes us feel positive about our gameplay, which means that we feel positive about ourselves, individually and especially as a social group.

And you know what that implies? It implies that the longer a group plays together, even if overtly they switch systems and settings and so on, the more their play will become self-affirming and socially reinforcing. If, as is often (unfortunately) the case, at least some of the players do not feel so positive about social interactions and structures outside of RPGs, the game will increasingly come to feel like a safe haven. Does that sound familiar?

The practical point of this is you can let it happen. There are far too many specific variations on the theme to classify, but there is a social technique here that is devastatingly effective to long-term gaming health. Every disagreement can be handled locally. It does not need to be, of course; clearly in a great many cases, even in the majority, a quick reference up the imposed structural hierarchy to mechanics or something will resolve the problem without difficulty. But in every case, at least theoretically, such a choice to refer upwards is a matter of efficiency not necessity.

There are always, somewhere deeply embedded in the vast nightmarish mess of little fiddly bits of a game as it gets actually played by actual people right here and now, a great many possible ways to chewing-gum-and-twine any disagreement whatever without referring upward in the hierarchy. Many of the GM techniques discussed here over the years clearly demonstrate this. The GM, in such a formulation, is emphatically not merely an arbiter, the mechanics guy who decides the implications of a higher-level set of concerns to the lower-level specifics of the moment. Rather, the GM becomes a facilitator of ongoing bricolage. His job, and it is a difficult one, make no mistake, becomes rather to see in every disagreement the possibility of a choice: to refer up, or to tweak across. Every choice to refer up carries immediate danger, because the more of the structure we expose to consciousness, the more obviously a house of cards it becomes. Every choice to refer across, however, carries very long-term implications. The GM’s job, then, would be to balance these.

My suggestion, practically, is that the local tendencies and preferences of the players be observed and followed. It’s going to turn out that this group here tends to refer these kinds of questions up the chain, and those across to other bits. Don’t violate that. If you are referring upward, by checking the rules or saying “No, there aren’t any telephones in Victorian London,” be very watchful: look for signs of discontent. If you see them, tweak your way out, and encourage other players to help in this. Keep track of such twists and turns and tweaks, too, and encourage players to do so. Taking the sidestep-backswing as an example, remember always that having set this up once, having cut the toaster in half to get its heating element to an object too big for the slot, you cannot put it back again. To do so will, in this case, prompt higher-level thinking at a social level: “Is he just playing favorites with Janet because she’s his girlfriend?” “Is Janet just being a whiner and a cheat?” You don’t want those questions ever to be asked. So when Dave proposes to use the sidestep-backswing trick, he must be permitted to do so.

And, at a higher level of concern, in between games, stop worrying about whether you are sticking to the system, or whether there are CA conflicts. The more you think about these abstractly, the more you can’t manipulate them concretely. And the more they become abstract, the more they have to have social implications.

Design
Here I am much less confident in my analysis. I do think that Fang Langford’s Scattershot was moving in a valuable direction, but it never really came together. I also think my Shadows in the Fog works pretty well for this, but it’s not applicable to everything.

I guess my first suggestion is that designing for CA coherence isn’t always a good thing. It’s an approach that can generate very successful results, for much the same reasons that a good engineer can make a really efficient machine. But that machine will be of quite limited application. If you’re okay with that, if you don’t mind that the game is carefully tuned to require a narrow range of play methods and results, that’s great. But not everyone wants this.

If you want a much more wide-ranging game, you kind of need to set aside CA in favor of stuff. You need a lot of little bits and pieces for people to screw around with. The clean, stripped-to-basics system cannot do this easily; it’s possible, but difficult.

I see two basic ways to handle it. One is the old-fashioned way: write lots of bits and pieces, especially lots of setting bits and lots of mechanics bits. AD&D was masterful at this, and I think the anecdotal history of play demonstrates the social reinforcement through house rules and tweaking. Champions was less good on the setting bits, but exceptional at the mechanics, because they were simultaneously very precise and intricately intertwined and also very open-ended and fiddly. It was obvious in Champions that you were supposed to fiddle with the bits, which prompts bricolage. I’m sure you can all think of lots of other examples.

The other way seems to me to follow Champions’s lead rather farther, which is what I’ve tried to do with Shadows in the Fog. What’s needed is deliberate ambiguity. You need some bits in there, which are clearly powerful and important, that are sufficiently constrained that people don’t say, “Um, I have no idea how to use this at all,” but are sufficiently open that players can readily bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate. You also need a system that, in its mechanical and rhetorical design, makes clear that such mucking about is intrinsic to play. This is what I’ve tried to do with Interpretation as a core rule.

My next suggestion is that the “Golden Rule” is a big, big mistake. It tries to do something useful, by saying that the system isn’t rigid and inflexible, but it does so not constructively but destructively: it says “throw it out if it doesn’t work.” You don’t want to get rid of the things in the shed. What you need is a New Golden Rule: “If it doesn’t work, bend it, but do not throw it out.” The practical upshot is likely to be the same at a basic level, but the conceptual point is very different. My proposed New Golden Rule essentially says that if you think the encumbrance rules don’t work or are silly, you should keep the system around and see if at some later point you can’t mine it for the new “carrying unconscious friends out of danger” rule. Obviously these are very old-school examples, but I think the point can be generalized.

Finally, I suggest that design encourage on-the-fly tweaking rather than systemic changes. This is a variant of the New Golden Rule, of course. Basically I mean that you want to encourage groups to bend rules when the need arises in actual play; what you want to discourage is the group sitting around outside of play and coming up with a whole new system to handle initiative. The thing is, if they do that, then the next sessions are basically playtesting, to some degree, and necessarily operate at a higher level of abstraction. Somebody pointed out recently that playtesting often doesn’t work well as an actual play session, and I think this is why. So encourage players to screw with rules during play rather than between sessions. Encourage them to do bricolage, that is, not engineering.

I’m sure there are other implications, but I’m going to leave that to people who do a lot more design and have more experience with it than I do.



Sooo....

Anyone actually get this far? Responses? Questions? New applications and suggestions?

clehrich wrote:
Anyone actually get this far? Responses? Questions? New applications and suggestions?

Eero Tuovinen wrote: One question people will probably have concerns the desirability of the bricolage effect. We're many of us designers here, and there's really deep roots to what that means. Bricolage easily becomes the antimatter of rpg design, and much of what we think of as good design - unified rules systems, flexible and covering techniques - is very much about bricolage control. They're there to ensure that bricolage does not and need not happen.

The question is: considering the difference between how bricolage happens in AD&D and SitF, for instance, is it a desirable effect in the former? The latter uses the effect intentionally, but for AD&D it's not nearly so clear-cut.

clehrich wrote:
Anyone actually get this far? Responses? Questions? New applications and suggestions?

See, this is precisely the sort of thing I mentioned in the "too much theory" thread. I was reading it and just when I was a little bit into it, I found myself wanting to talk not about gaming but about philosophy, and the interpretations that Chris uses.

To talk about the gaming part of his post, then, requires me to accept his theoretical postulates, which I don't. So I can't really talk about what he is talking about without talking about something that is not gaming. To enter into his discussion about bricolage and gaming I have to accept his various interpretations. If I don't accept his interpretations, to discuss them moves the conversation away from gaming.

I see this as a system of control. The front end of the discussion is padded with a lot of authority based ramblings that one must accept in order to talk about the gaming part of the post.

Chris,

I think you need to take some session transcripts (or just actual plays) and apply the ideas here to them. I hink some mroe practical application would be valuable.

Clinton R. Nixon wrote: First, great job. This is exactly the sort of article I've been wanting to see.

So, you've reassured me on my design aesthetic, which is (to me) a good thing. See, all the games I design have these huge gaping holes in them where I'm really thinking "This sort of thing right here is usually established as a hack by the game group anyway, so let them go ahead and do that." In The Shadow of Yesterday, there's a good example: the range of actions taken within one intention, and the specific-ness required in a stated intention. Of course, I release the game and someone immediately says, "Hey, what about that?" and I feel like a schmuck.

CPXB wrote: See, this is precisely the sort of thing I mentioned in the "too much theory" thread. I was reading it and just when I was a little bit into it, I found myself wanting to talk not about gaming but about philosophy, and the interpretations that Chris uses.

To talk about the gaming part of his post, then, requires me to accept his theoretical postulates, which I don't. So I can't really talk about what he is talking about without talking about something that is not gaming. To enter into his discussion about bricolage and gaming I have to accept his various interpretations. If I don't accept his interpretations, to discuss them moves the conversation away from gaming.

I see this as a system of control. The front end of the discussion is padded with a lot of authority based ramblings that one must accept in order to talk about the gaming part of the post.

Jere wrote: I think you need to take some session transcripts (or just actual plays) and apply the ideas here to them. I hink some mroe practical application would be valuable.

I've wondered before whether any theory discussion would say anything about the rapid acceptance and widespread fun reports of Guardians of Order's games. To establish that the games have had remarkable success, I'll summarize the basic history.

In 1996, Mark MacKinnon, grad student in chemistry, started Guardians of Order. In 1997, he took his second book to Gencon. The name of the book was Big Eyes, Small Mouth, an anime themed game. It was nominated for Origins Best RPG in 1998. The second edition was nominated for Origins Best RPG in 2000. By 2003, I bought the revised second edition in the local Barnes & Noble. My local game store continuously stocks the book, and other GoO titles.

Even though the game was written with an anime theme, very little in either edition was tied to anime. So many people played supers with the rules that Silver Age Sentinels was written for the supers market. People play these games, they aren't fluff books for reading or collecting. The company has books about specific anime called Anime Fan Guides, but no show content is in the regular game book. Given that so many people report having fun, what can we see in the text?

The games are sometimes called "rules lite". The first edition of BESM was 96 pages and was almost entirely rules. The revised second edition BESM is 208 compact pages and is almost entirely rules. For comparison, my Hero System Sidekick has 128 pages of larger size and double column text. My friend's Champions 3rd is also about that size. The mechanical system in BESM, called TriStat, is a point buy power system. You put points into three stats(Body Mind Soul) and attributes (powers, perks, talents, advantages and so on are all mixed together). Disadvantages return some points. You roll under your stat on 2d6 plus difficulty modifiers to do things.

clehrich wrote:
The other way seems to me to follow Champions’s lead rather farther, which is what I’ve tried to do with Shadows in the Fog. What’s needed is deliberate ambiguity. You need some bits in there, which are clearly powerful and important, that are sufficiently constrained that people don’t say, “Um, I have no idea how to use this at all,” but are sufficiently open that players can readily bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate. You also need a system that, in its mechanical and rhetorical design, makes clear that such mucking about is intrinsic to play. This is what I’ve tried to do with Interpretation as a core rule.

John,

Wow. Cool! I've heard of this game, but not being an anime fan all that much never looked into it.

Do you happen to know, anecdotally, whether it tended toward long campaigns or toward one-shots? Actually, anyone out there have an impression on this, in general?

It sounds to me like something that would have a steep learning-curve and then run smoothly for quite a while---when it ran at all, but it also sounds like groups that didn't like it didn't like it real quick.

Any GoO players out there want to pitch in with examples of what this beast actually ran like? I just love the fact that you've got 208 pages of dense mechanics that don't quite explain things clearly, and it's billed as "rules-lite." :)

The other thing I wonder is what it was like if you had an ongoing GoO campaign or group, and you tried to introduce a new player.

Wow.

Chris, you continue to blow my mind, in the best way possible. What's even better, is I think I'm starting to see some very useful applications of this whole bricolage thing to my game, Timestream. So thank you.

clehrich wrote:
Any GoO players out there want to pitch in with examples of what this beast actually ran like? I just love the fact that you've got 208 pages of dense mechanics that don't quite explain things clearly, and it's billed as "rules-lite." :)

clehrich wrote: Anyone actually get this far? Responses? Questions? New applications and suggestions?

Eero Tuovinen wrote: [
As far as I've seen by reading Tri-Stat rules (SAS, Authority RPG, the free lite version), it's unambiguously nothing special in the rules department. The ambiguousity of the rules is just the same as it is in GURPS, Hero or the Storyteller system. I would classify the examples John supplies as resulting from the universal nature of the system; of course you have to give guidelines for rating powers and items when it's not practical to list all the quazillion possibilities. GURPS and Hero do this, too. Any system with room for adaptation does. All those system emphatically want you to do the adaptation between sessions and with the GM in the lead.

Hey Chris (Lehrich),

Just let me do a quick recap of the gaming related parts of your posts (in order to make sure I understand them):
So, what you are saying, basically, is that there is people out there who enjoy fiddling with rules (and setting) bits while roleplaying. This is because it reinforces the social structure of the given group and thereby makes them feel good. If I read you right, you imply that most people engage in this kind of behavior and/or would like that.
As for design you suggest that one could try to intentionally design games that provide a lot of bits to fiddle with, leave some gaps and provide intentional ambiguity.

Is that about it (related to gaming)? And if it is: Why didn't you just say so, fer chrissake?! I have to agree with (the other) Chris: this is waaaay to much theory (well, gaming unrelated theory, that is) and way to little application to gaming. And if I missed something... could you please explain it in a way someone without a Ph.D. in Anthropology or something can understand?

Anyway, I think the point is interesting (though not very new). Roleplayers seem to like the "fiddling with the rules" part. Well, I would like to add: some roleplayers like it. Some are very much turned off by it. And looking outside of the hobby, I would say that almost everyone is turned off by it. The amount of rules and lack o clarity are one of the main points that keep "normal" people from playing.

But anyway, I think that the notion that some people actually enjoy incoerence or ambiguity is interesting to explore, especially from a design point of view. How does one design a game that caters to those needs? And does it even make sense since d20 is already out there? Those are the thing I would very much like to read more about (and less of the ethnology class stuff).

Chris -

Thanks for this - I found it educational and useful. Also slightly subversive!
The subversion, of course, comes in with the idea that the process of groups doing weird stuff with games and getting off into their own isolated mutually incomprehensible spaces is actually a feature, not a bug, or at least can be a feature if you want it to be. The pros and cons of that sort of play is worth a thread or five of its own, I think.

With respect to AD&D - I agree with you about the three-step process and think your article is helpful in explaining it, on two levels (the mechanics-fiddling and the act of play, which you bring together nicely and convincingly for that example at least). The 'success' issue is more complicated, though, as I guess you ultimately concede. I'll add that D&D, as a more vaguely specified game, essentially involved the same process but with less frontwork at step 1.

Vagueness and ambiguity are one set of tools for designing mechanics for games that help with using the game as an open platform for individual groups to make meaning together. Another is the design of endless situational rules and an encouragement to your players to do the same: the baroque, which eschews the lawless for the recondite. What are some others? This is an important practical question for design, I think. I'd actually like to see some narrow and even 'accumlulationist' mechanics for this sort of thing, like a Collection of Meaningful Facts, the character as a curiosity cabinet. More magical than the list of magic items maybe.

I think this article also may shed some indirect light on the curious need of many role-players to feel like a 'game' or 'campaign' is open-ended and indefinite even though in practical fact they know that it's unlikely to last more than six months. The feeling of open-endedness or indefiniteness is necessary for many minds to get into this kind of meaning-making process, I think.

Nicolas Crost wrote:
Is that about it (related to gaming)? And if it is: Why didn't you just say so, fer chrissake?! I have to agree with (the other) Chris: this is waaaay to much theory (well, gaming unrelated theory, that is) and way to little application to gaming. And if I missed something... could you please explain it in a way someone without a Ph.D. in Anthropology or something can understand?

Anyway, I think the point is interesting (though not very new). Roleplayers seem to like the "fiddling with the rules" part. Well, I would like to add: some roleplayers like it. Some are very much turned off by it. And looking outside of the hobby, I would say that almost everyone is turned off by it. The amount of rules and lack o clarity are one of the main points that keep "normal" people from playing.

But anyway, I think that the notion that some people actually enjoy incoerence or ambiguity is interesting to explore, especially from a design point of view. How does one design a game that caters to those needs? And does it even make sense since d20 is already out there? Those are the thing I would very much like to read more about (and less of the ethnology class stuff).

Hi Eero,

thanks for the reply. I usually miss half of the discussion around here with the Amercians posting while I sleep... :)

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Furthermore, understanding the why helps the designer/gamer when considering whether to address the phenomenon in his work.
[...]
Chris makes a case for explaining fiddling as a part of a larger phenomenon

Okay, this was a long read, I made some notes...

First, I think you've got some solid stuff here Chris. I think your analysis is solid, I'm going to try to spring-board off of this...

This isn't really an analysis so much as a "connect the theory dots" type of thing, but... Chris (Lehrich) talks about CA focused design, and hints at design that does not facilitate bricolage. Vincent Baker talks about "Brittle" systems (and of course his site is down so I can't give a link). Brittle systems are (paraphrased): "Systems which only work within a narrow Social Contract (context)". Vincent also talks about "strong" systems which are good at getting people to do what they say (so Strong/Brittle is good at getting players into that narrow context). Just thought I'd point out this cool parallel.

When you say that as we approach higher and higher levels of abstraction we come closer and closer to analysis of the underlying social structures, I read that as (admittedly simplistic): bricolage and immersionism are very closely related. This highlights the idea that bricolage is a really great idea, for pursuing a specific type of play. It also seems to indicate that bricolage is not good for certain other types of play. From my reading of the article this was not clear. Chris, would you agree that for certain groups bricolage is actually a huge negative?

I would be really interested in a discussion of the different types of play in relation to bricolage: what kind of play (or group) really loves it, and what kind of play (or group) really hates it? Is there a middle ground? Can you find bricolage okay, or do you either really like it in play or really dislike it?

One of the interesting implications I see in this is that "System doesn't matter as much" because it is going to be messed with anyway. Now, that is not to say that the system does not need to be carefully designed, perhaps as carefully as a system not designed to facilitate bricolage. Rather, the crafting of the system does not suffer as much from (and may even benefit from) some defects in design.

Quick note, not yet well considered: Bricolage seems to be a sort of antithesis to the idea that system is used to export a certain type of play since we are fully expecting the system to get messed with and altered to do what the group already wants it to do. This does not mean that the system does not impact their play though.

I'm not actually familiar with bricolage, but apperently it's a hobby. People like to make things, it's fun. This raises the question: is there some subset of RPG players who are primarily motivated by the exercise of mental bricolage? Do they tend to play together, or do they gravitate to the GM role (which is traditionally very focused on bricolage)?

One of the interesting things about bricolage is that it seems to be self-reinforcing in this context. I think that this could be one of the reasons that RPGs have traditionally had so many things in common with other oral traditions (taught by other players the "right way" to play). I think that a lot of work at the Forge has been to break away from the idea of bricolage, and with that break I don't think much analysis has occurred. So, Chris, I think you're onto something really interesting here.

Nicolas Crost wrote: Anyway, I think the point is interesting (though not very new). Roleplayers seem to like the "fiddling with the rules" part. Well, I would like to add: some roleplayers like it. Some are very much turned off by it. And looking outside of the hobby, I would say that almost everyone is turned off by it. The amount of rules and lack o clarity are one of the main points that keep "normal" people from playing.

Chris, this was great. Reading it felt like coming home. I loved reading...:

- The positive stuff ("The longer a group plays together (...) the more their play will become self-affirming and socially reinforcing")
- The stuff that's so obvious only when you think about it ("Every disagreement can be handled locally")
- The stuff that isn't that obvious, but will make for better play ("So when Dave proposes to use the sidestep-backswing trick, he must be permitted to do so")
- The design tips ("write lots of bits and pieces" or "deliberate ambiguity")
- The insights about the Big Model and how it's used ("by doing so we demonstrate the adequacy of the model")
- The notes about Shadows in the Fog

So far, not much critical comment. There's a lot to think about in there - this is the kind of essay that has to mature a bit in the mind so the different angles and points can be connected to all the other stuff that's already there.

Chris,

What's interesting to me is that it offers insight into how fantasy heartbreakers get created, and why they fail in the market. You can engineer a product for sale to bricoleurs, but the products of bricolage can't be sold outside the local context in which they were created. And I suspect it's characteristic of bricoleurs to over-estimate the size of the local context.

Paul

Chris,

I, for one, appreciated the background on bricolage – it was very interesting. However, I am confused as to what bricolage looks like in RPGs. It seems what you are saying is that the evolving application of mechanics is itself part of the shared imaginary space, hence constitutes a complementary narrative (or game, or whatever) to the, uh, plot. Your prescription,

stop worrying about whether you are sticking to the system, or whether there are CA conflicts. The more you think about these abstractly, the more you can’t manipulate them concretely. And the more they become abstract, the more they have to have social implications.

What’s needed is deliberate ambiguity . You need some bits in there, which are clearly powerful and important, that are sufficiently constrained that people don’t say, “Um, I have no idea how to use this at all,” but are sufficiently open that players can readily bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate. You also need a system that, in its mechanical and rhetorical design, makes clear that such mucking about is intrinsic to play. This is what I’ve tried to do with Interpretation as a core rule.

Nice. Very nice.

I suggest that when polishing up to article status, you enhance the prescriptive at the expense of the descriptive. And that you either define "adequating" as a verb, or dispense with it in favour of more intuitive terms like "confirming" and so on.

As for followups to this, your prescriptive suggestions - in particular about designing games which would appeal to all of us who became game designers, bricoleurs tous, by leaving loose ends hanging for like-minded players to grab on to - are excellent.

I seem to have a thing for robot game examples lately, but I'm inspired by this piece to consider making a robot game specifically intended for applied bricolage. One where the characters start out extremely limited in terms of their capabilities, but where in-character bricolage serves as the vehicle for a high level of player-scale bricolage as well. I'm thinking robots who, to begin with, have little capability except to modify themselves by adding parts, devices, and capabilities... none of which would come predefined by the game. Junkyard Bots, with each new arm/leg/buzzsaw you slap on coming with its own rules-level interpretations the group invents at the time. Hmmm...

Thank you. This implementation has legs - pun intended.

Hi Chris,

I thought you might be interested in an example of LARP gameplay that included a subsystem that's about as close to literal bricolage as I can imagine getting in a role playing game. To understand it (or rather, its significance in its own context, if it has any), a bit of background may be needed on how items possessed and carried by player-characters were handled mechanically in SIL (Society for Interactive Literature) LARPs.

Most portable items in SIL games, including (especially) weapons, were represented by 3x5 cards printed with the name and description (if a description was needed) of the item. If an item could have an effect on other player-characters, instructions for how to resolve the effect were included on the card. Since we wanted players to be able to resolve as much as possible without requiring GM arbitration, the instructions on the card were the only authority players had available, so item effects were usually very specific and straightforward. A typical example might be, "Smoke Bomb. Tear up this card when used. Usable at any time in or out of combat, but not usable when restrained. When used, the user may leave the area without hindrance, and no one may follow for two minutes. If the user does not leave the area, it has no effect. This item is transferrable."

Most items in most games didn't have direct uses like that. They were important for other reasons, such as having monetary value. Many of the items were "components" of various sorts -- that is, objects that were needed, usually in specific combinations, to do specific things or create other items. Depending on the game style, such components might bits of SF tech that could be used to build or repair important devices (such as, constructing a weapon that can blow up the planet, or repairing your spaceship so you can escape the planet before someone blows it up), or ordinary objects needed to cast powerful ritual spells, or a set of symbolic tokens needed to claim the throne. Such combinations of components, that needed to be collected by players, were generically known as "recipes" and were one of the earliest tropes of the SIL style of LARP, having been a prominent feature of the original SIL LARP game Nexus/Rekon-1 that I designed in 1982. There were good reasons for this: trading items was one of the most straightforward ways of giving characters with diverse goals and interests a reason to interact with each other, and their use in recipes gave items direct in-game value that helped to drive a game's overall economy. However, during the mid 80s, components and recipies were overused and people got sick of them. Play involving components and recipes became known as "widget hunts," an occasionally affectionate but usually derogatory phrase (akin to "dungeon crawl" or possibly "hack-fest").

So by 1987, when I wrote Show Biz, I was rebelling artistically against the widget-hunt cliche I'd invented myself five years before. Show Biz was a LARP about cartoon characters, exactly like the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit except that the movie wouldn't come out until several years later. All the player-characters were toons; the humans (such as Mr. Acme, the head of the studio -- yeah, I did say exactly like Roger Rabbit!) were NPCs and GMs.

Show Biz was set up to look exactly like a typical LARP of its era, right up until the moment the game started. The apparent ultimate goal of the game appeared to be to compete for the best slots in the Saturday morning TV schedule. There was a cartoon combat system (not called combat, of course; combats were "dramatic scenes"), through which the victors could win or lose "ratings points." There were clues to mysteries concerning stolen Oscars and embezzling of studio funds. There was gossip about various PCs' secret vices and marital problems, ready to be used as leverage or blackmail. The usual blend of strategy, trading, diplomacy, and intrigue appeared to be in the offing.

But, when actual game-time began (on Saturday morning, as it was the usual weekend-long event format), all of the PCs discovered that all of their shows had been cancelled, and replaced with toy merchandising shows. Furthermore, there was no way to change that using the game rules that we'd presented the players with. It was almost as if there was no "game" any more, just the player-characters and the setting.

Actually, we did throw them one bone. Also released on Satudray morning was a newly issued copy of Variety which listed the schedule for that day's auditions for talent (weatherman, news anchor, hosts for cooking shows and science shows, radio DJ, kids' educational show cast, and so forth). But beyond that, we GMs had no plan whatsoever for what the characters were supposed to do or accomplish during the game. We wanted to leave that up to the players. And to help them do it, whatever it would turn out to be, we gave them the Prop Room.

"Props" were this particular game's name for item cards. The cartoon combat ("dramatic scene") system involved the players using props, but a bit of experimentation was enough to show that which props a player used in a Dramatic Scene didn't really matter in the mechanical outcome. To a seasoned SIL LARPer, it was obvious that the props were just points; by limiting the rate that the players could acquire props during the game, the GMs could control the pace of play or adjust the balance.

We didn't do that. Instead, we designated a room of the game space the Prop Room, and we filled it with thousands of props. We printed up cards for every object of every description we could recall ever having seen in a Warner Brothers cartoon. Then we added a few hundred more that we hadn't seen but might be worth a try. We dumped sackfulls of these all over the room. Then we dumped out the pieces of every construction toy I owned, including my large Tinkertoy collection, and covered a few tables with arts and crafts materials, telling the players that if they couldn't find the prop they wanted, they could make it for themselves. And that they could come into the prop room whenever they wanted, and take as much as they wanted.

This was our anti-widget-hunt, around which we had conceptualized the whole game. Instead of giving players a mission or an arena and telling them to go find the resources they needed to deal with it, we were telling them, "here's all this stuff, everything you've ever seen in a cartoon and more; what are you going to make out of it?" (And there are two different senses of "make" there, both "what game-usable devices are you going to assemble, Wile E. Coyote-like, out of all these Acme parts?"; and "what are you actually going to use it for in the game?" -- which is very close to posing the question, what meaning can you give this stuff?)

So this doesn't turn into an Actual Play post, I'll just report that it all worked. On the "make stuff out of parts" end of things, we had, for example, one character (one of those auditioning for the science show host gig) make a particle accelerator out of a pea shooter, a pair of perpetually vibrating cymbals, a long tunnel, a giant magnet, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember except that it was all stock items and all just right for making a cartoon version of a particle accelerator. (No irons or helium balloons, though, sad to say.) On the larger scale, one faction of player-characters put on an original Broadway musical (fortunately in their reflexive cartoon world they didn't have to travel to Broadway to do this, just construct a Broadway set), making excellent use of pre-made and custom-made props. In the end the toons all got their Saturday morning shows back by having bought out the studio, and the Bugs Bunny character won all the Oscars.

I'm pretty sure you can see why Show Biz's Prop Room came to mind while I was reading about your bricoleur's shed.

When I started this post I didn't have a particular point in mind; I just wanted to bring this unusual example to your attention. But it does seem to raise a question for me, which is whether bricolage is really fundamental to all role playing, or whether it's one of two opposing approaches to play, the other being some kind of "engineering" approach, perhaps exemplified (in the context of the LARPs I've described here) by the widget-hunt.

- Walt

When I first saw Chris 's posts loudly claiming that 'Simulationism is Bricolage!', I said to myself, "Hmmmm..... What the heck is bricolage?"

Eventually I decided that it was ridiculous that a relatively well educated person like myself had simply no idea what this word meant, so I looked it up in Google and read an article with the same 'build something new from the junk in someone's basement' paragraph explained as a metaphor for the creation of culture in all societies. We create ideas, stories, myths and religions by promiscuously remaking them from the detritus and poorly understood practices of our neighboring cultures.

And then I said to myself, 'Ah, I know that sort of gaming - Rifts and Torg. Nope, not Simulationism to me.' Several hundred words later, I still can't get over that simple first impression.

Now, I guess Chris has backed off from claiming that this is unique to Simulationism, and has identified it more as sort of process - a means of enjoyable play and design that’s independent of CA, and I certainly can see bits of that in old style AD&D (not d20), my own GURPS Psychosis campaign (essentially take 250 points, every GURPS book I own, and make whatever monstrosity you like), and most especially Rifts. Rifts is the perfect example; it combines bricolage of setting that plunders all RPG genre sources happily with bricolage of system. The Palladium system agglomerates D&D combat (heavily tweaked) with percentage skills, ‘Feat’ like skills, separate damage tracks, a complete handful of magic systems and much more. Perfect Bricolage and in my experience very prone to needing heavy local interpretation.

To me the old-school bricolage that Chris talks about is almost a synonym for what Robin Laws called Crunchiness. This goes a lot farther than Robin did in identifying why it’s popular and how it works, but at heart it seems to me more or less the same thing.

The newer approach of deliberate ambiguity mentioned immediately reminded me of Lumpley’s proto Skiffy Game, where the players collectively define and are rewarded for defining the details of the rules and setting in a science fiction exploration setting. Stuff like “Dilithium crystals work like this and are stored like this.” gives you challenge points to use as a GM. One of the basic ground rules is that you are only rewarded for building on another player’s contributions

Am I missing the point here- taking it too literally? Is the simple process of taking one cultural form (say Wu Xia movies) and gluing them to another (Tabletop Role Playing Games) inherently Bricolage, even though it's largely just bolting one intact thing onto another? How about the raft of recent 'D20 Blah' games where the D20 system is more or less directly grafted on to some other genre with an absolute minimum of retooling of either the genre or the system?

Tony Pace

Dang--two long posts starting a long thread, it's a good thing it's still early and I'm reasonably awake here. I hope I can contribute something.

Citing Émile Durkheim, Chris Lerich wrote: “It is a basic postulate of sociology,” he says, “that no human institution can be founded on error.” In other words, if these practices don’t do anything, people will stop doing them. Since the rain dance doesn’t produce rain, it must do something else, or nobody would do it, and chances are it wouldn’t have been invented in the first place.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: I suggest a new thread if any of you want to discuss GoO design (or their financial problems) in more detail. The interesting question here is whether Tri-Stat is a bricolage-friendly environment regardless of my above points.

And does this mean that actually any of the '90s mainstream games are that? Would we see bricoleuring commonly taking place if we looked for it in GURPS or WW games? And if so, then does that mean that bricolage is really the status quo, and we've just not noticed it as important because the Forge draws only engineering-type people to discussions?

J. Tuomas Harviainen wrote: - You forgot the "define rpg" clause again. :)

Where it doesn't functionally apply are games using eidetic reduction as their primary approach to how the in-game "reality" is seen. (Exeperience creation -oriented larps, mostly) In those games the bricolage tools are not within the reach of the interpreters. They may actually exist, of course, but cannot be accessed during play without the play being interrupted.

- The key problem I see with this model is that when a game moves into more and more acceptance of bricolage, the need for conracts increases. For example, as soon as the possibility of interpreteting cards as relations is accepted, other incompatible uses (especially that of them as symbols of meaning) have to be ruled as "not acceptable". If that's not done, system elements become just replacements for contract-interpretation arguments instead of tools that solve such arguments. In a sense, to enable further bricolage, you actually have to engineer new parts. How do you get past this?

Sean wrote: Thanks for this - I found it educational and useful. Also slightly subversive!
....
...explaining it, on two levels (the mechanics-fiddling and the act of play, which you bring together nicely and convincingly for that example at least).

Vagueness and ambiguity are one set of tools for designing mechanics for games that help with using the game as an open platform for individual groups to make meaning together. Another is the design of endless situational rules and an encouragement to your players to do the same: the baroque, which eschews the lawless for the recondite.

What are some others? This is an important practical question for design, I think. I'd actually like to see some narrow and even 'accumulationist' mechanics for this sort of thing, like a Collection of Meaningful Facts, the character as a curiosity cabinet. More magical than the list of magic items maybe.

I think this article also may shed some indirect light on the curious need of many role-players to feel like a 'game' or 'campaign' is open-ended and indefinite even though in practical fact they know that it's unlikely to last more than six months. The feeling of open-endedness or indefiniteness is necessary for many minds to get into this kind of meaning-making process, I think.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Continuing on that vein, I got to thinking about the different kinds of roleplaying bricolage. Is there a synergy between narrative bricolage (what's been discussed as mythmaking sim) and mechanical bricolage (outlined here)? Chris suggests that mechanical bricolage is a GMing technique that can be reinforced by repeated use. The same holds true for myth-making, if I'm fit to judge that. But if a game applies large amounts of bricolage in rules construction, will that have any affect on it's narrative quality? Or vice versa?

Nicolas Crost wrote: The problem I have is the following: I think that Chris' posts do not help a great deal in answering that question. This may just be the particular type of scientific training in my field speaking up. But I don't find pages about irons and helium balloons and other analogies very helpful. Neither are pages about native tribes and their behaviour (to me).

I would rather stick to the facts we observe: some people like it, some don't. Why is that? How are they different? What processes underlie the enjoyment of "fiddling"? And the answer "they like it, because it reinforces the social structure of the group" could have been given in a paragraph or two, without the rather longish analogies.

LordSmerf wrote: I think your analysis is solid, I'm going to try to spring-board off of this...

Vincent Baker talks about "Brittle" systems (and of course his site is down so I can't give a link). Brittle systems are (paraphrased): "Systems which only work within a narrow Social Contract (context)". Vincent also talks about "strong" systems which are good at getting people to do what they say (so Strong/Brittle is good at getting players into that narrow context). Just thought I'd point out this cool parallel.

When you say that as we approach higher and higher levels of abstraction we come closer and closer to analysis of the underlying social structures, I read that as (admittedly simplistic): bricolage and immersionism are very closely related. This highlights the idea that bricolage is a really great idea, for pursuing a specific type of play. It also seems to indicate that bricolage is not good for certain other types of play. From my reading of the article this was not clear. Chris, would you agree that for certain groups bricolage is actually a huge negative?

I would be really interested in a discussion of the different types of play in relation to bricolage: what kind of play (or group) really loves it, and what kind of play (or group) really hates it? Is there a middle ground? Can you find bricolage okay, or do you either really like it in play or really dislike it?

One of the interesting implications I see in this is that "System doesn't matter as much"

One of the interesting things about bricolage is that it seems to be self-reinforcing in this context. I think that this could be one of the reasons that RPGs have traditionally had so many things in common with other oral traditions (taught by other players the "right way" to play). I think that a lot of work at the Forge has been to break away from the idea of bricolage, and with that break I don't think much analysis has occurred. So, Chris, I think you're onto something really interesting here.

I think that Nicolas is onto something good here, especially with "normal people are turned off by this". If RPG play has traditionally been very heavy on bricolage, how has that contributed to the current mainstream view of RPGs? How has it contributed to the gamer's view of RPGs? How are these views changing?

Paul Czege wrote: What's interesting to me is that it offers insight into how fantasy heartbreakers get created, and why they fail in the market. You can engineer a product for sale to bricoleurs, but the products of bricolage can't be sold outside the local context in which they were created. And I suspect it's characteristic of bricoleurs to over-estimate the size of the local context.

shaheddy wrote: I am confused as to what bricolage looks like in RPGs. It seems what you are saying is that the evolving application of mechanics is itself part of the shared imaginary space, hence constitutes a complementary narrative (or game, or whatever) to the, uh, plot.

The only examples I can think of off the top of my head are when there is an unhealthy dynamic amongst the players (favoritism, someone who is picked on) which over time is reflected in and amplified by the evolving system.

I like the idea, but I’m not sure what you mean. There seem to be different ways systems can be deliberately ambiguous.

Harlequin wrote: I suggest that when polishing up to article status, you enhance the prescriptive at the expense of the descriptive. And that you either define "adequating" as a verb, or dispense with it in favour of more intuitive terms like "confirming" and so on.

Walt,

I love that example. I need to think about it really hard for a bit, though. Back soon....

----------------------------------------------

Dobamine wrote: When I first saw Chris 's posts loudly claiming that 'Simulationism is Bricolage!', I said to myself, "Hmmmm..... What the heck is bricolage?"
....
Now, I guess Chris has backed off from claiming that this is unique to Simulationism, and has identified it more as sort of process - a means of enjoyable play and design that’s independent of CA, and I certainly can see bits of that in old style AD&D (not d20), my own GURPS Psychosis campaign (essentially take 250 points, every GURPS book I own, and make whatever monstrosity you like), and most especially Rifts. Rifts is the perfect example; it combines bricolage of setting that plunders all RPG genre sources happily with bricolage of system. The Palladium system agglomerates D&D combat (heavily tweaked) with percentage skills, ‘Feat’ like skills, separate damage tracks, a complete handful of magic systems and much more. Perfect Bricolage and in my experience very prone to needing heavy local interpretation.

To me the old-school bricolage that Chris talks about is almost a synonym for what Robin Laws called Crunchiness. This goes a lot farther than Robin did in identifying why it’s popular and how it works, but at heart it seems to me more or less the same thing.

Am I missing the point here- taking it too literally? Is the simple process of taking one cultural form (say Wu Xia movies) and gluing them to another (Tabletop Role Playing Games) inherently Bricolage, even though it's largely just bolting one intact thing onto another? How about the raft of recent 'D20 Blah' games where the D20 system is more or less directly grafted on to some other genre with an absolute minimum of retooling of either the genre or the system?

Finally, one I can answer directly! (Of course, as usual, it's because I haven't expressed myself clearly.)

M. J. Young wrote:

Citing Émile Durkheim, Chris Lerich wrote: “It is a basic postulate of sociology,” he says, “that no human institution can be founded on error.” In other words, if these practices don’t do anything, people will stop doing them. Since the rain dance doesn’t produce rain, it must do something else, or nobody would do it, and chances are it wouldn’t have been invented in the first place.

....
Looking at the rain dance example, we'll accept arguendo that it doesn't really work. What you say Durkheim says is that the natives must know this; but there's no reason why they must know this. Obviously, nothing works every time.

Also, this doesn't take away from the possibility that these people who believe it really does work are also unwittingly doing other things through the practice, such as reinforcing societal unification.

After all those response-posts, a few comments.

1. I need to talk a great deal more clearly about the totalizing nature of this kind of process. I am struggling with this, but it's important. I want to make clear, as I did not I think in the first two posts, that mechanical examples are only examples; they do not reflect the breadth of the issue. We're really talking about a model that is somewhat larger in scope than the Big Model; much larger, if we recognize that the Big Model deliberately sets aside the broad and deep questions about Social Contract. My applications to mechanics are isolations of particular effects in what might be concretely illustrative fashions.

2. I am genuinely very interested in all the various sorts of data people have suggested posing here. All of it. Maybe some should go in other threads; you're as good at figuring that out as I am. I was not fooling around when I said I don't want this all to turn into "Chris teaches everyone." I don't want that. I want to think with you.

3. A number of you have raised very difficult and complex questions for which I do not as yet have good answers. I will work on this, but it may take time. Please don't feel you have to wait for me. Jump right in, if you have ideas. I personally find that grappling with multiple really different perspectives on an issue is very helpful for understanding something, and I too am trying to understand. Academics always say they learn the most from their students. This is not because their students figure out the good stuff or something; it's because the students ask questions and propose arguments that depend on completely different perspectives than the academic is used to, and that forces him or her in turn to think through all the issues all over again in a new and illuminating way, not bounded by traditional disciplinary constraints. While I am not trying especially to teach you all, that's the position I'm in: the weirdest, silliest, most seemingly trivial example or question will help me, because you are not bounded by my disciplinary presuppositions and assumptions. But I also think it will help the broader discussion. So please, just dump it all out here.

4. I am not a genius. Claude Levi-Strauss is. I use the term advisedly, and it is not one I like, any more than I like "masterpiece." But The Savage Mind is a masterpiece by a genius. It is not compressible. I teach writing, as some of you know, and I hold that book up as an example of compression taken to its ultimate extreme. Therefore in explicating some bits and pieces in the context of gaming, in what may seem long but isn't the 269 pages of that book, I am cutting the overwhelming majority. I just want to state that directly right here and now, so you understand my constant apologies. As I've said in PMs to some folks, this is a book that I think all responsible scholars in the many relevant fields should be re-reading for the umpteenth time when they are in their 80s. It really is that deep, and that important.

5. Following from that, nobody I know of has completely mastered the thought of Levi-Strauss, with the possible exception of Levi-Strauss himself. Reading him is sort of like dealing with the aliens in 2001: they're just so damn much beyond it's hard to understand anything. I would urge you, if you find this stuff interesting, to read The Savage Mind; if you read French, read La pensee sauvage instead, as the translation is bad. It could be much better, but it could never be perfect or even fully acceptable; I have discussed such a translation with Carol Cosman, who I think has the best chance of doing it really well, and she is considering it---maybe in a few years there will at last be a good starting-point! But there is no doing him justice; it's like a brief summary of Ulysses standing in for the work.

6. That said, I don't agree with everything he argues. I am not a Structuralist by inclination, really. That the work is a masterpiece does not mean it is right. Nor is my argument about RPGs entirely one I think he would agree with. One particular point about this is that Levi-Strauss thinks history and anthropology, the latter including everything I explicitly talked about here, are totally opposed. I think he is wrong, and importantly so. But I am trying to constrain what I am doing so that I don't write a vast book just to be a little bit helpful here and there about gaming. My next big professional project is going to do nothing at alll but try to work out why history is not at odds with what Levi-Strauss (and Eliade) mean by anthropology (or morphology); that book will be long and deep, and I'm not sure what it's going to look like.

All that said, what I'm asking is for you all to think with me. I don't mean agree with me. I mean that I am thinking along in steps. I haven't reached the end. I laid out a solid block at the start, to get things going, but I don't know where this all goes ultimately. Join in, ask for clarification as it helps, propose conflicts and debates, give examples (hypothetical or actual). Everything, and anything, is welcome, so long as it tries legitimately to think with me about the extent to which this works as a basic modeling, and the implications of that model for gaming.

I am confident about one thing only: I do believe that RPG play is a procedure that could be classified under the heading of "savage thought." That is at base at odds with Levi-Strauss, though he might agree in a weird way I don't want to get into just at the moment as it would take us very far afield. If you don't agree, I want to know why in very concrete terms. But for the rest, anything you can offer is very welcome.

Good night!

Hi Chris,

thanks for putting up with my rather negative post. I really appreciate it because I think understanding the process beneath the fact that some people are really into the whole fiddling thing is necessary to improve RPG design. In some discussions on my German board it always struck me as strange that some people insisted on liking incoherent RPGs better than “Forge type” rather narrow games (which in my eyes are often real design masterworks). So I think you really might be onto something here.

Nicolas, what is your field?

So, quickly, to recap and see if I'm understanding-

bricolage= Found Art+ constraints on materials ( limited choice of materials, reuse of materials) ?

bricolage as applied here is basically doing the same thing, but with ideas rather than physical objects?

If this is essentially correct, why are we using bricolage instead of the (arguably) more accesible Found Art?

I find this interesting because over on the History of the GM thread, a tangent had come up regarding the evolution of RPGs. I stated that rpgs had not, in fact, solely evolved from miniature wargames. FFilz responded ( correctly) that, in fact, D&D ( as our origin point for the RPG) had in fact directly evolved from miniatures wargaming, and provided a brief summary of why that is also true. Strangely, I don't think this is exactly the paradox it appears to be.

What I'm getting at is that RPGs appear to be a product of bricolage themselves, with miniature wargames being the primary core object/material used in the first thing that we recognize as being an RPG (D&D) and not something else.

If that is true, it would seem to imply that bricolage has always been a part of rpgs from the conception, and does perhaps point to a source for the apparently common urge to tinker with them.

clehrich wrote: First, can you explicate this distinction (eidetic reduction vs. detachment-based? Or give a reference? I don't quite follow.

... In a sense, to enable further bricolage, you actually have to engineer new parts. How do you get past this?

But that is an error, or artefact, of my weak formulations. I just cannot, as yet, think past it. I know from the examples of tribal societies that this is not necessary. I know that it is almost disturbingly self-sustaining, in a sense formulating exactly those contracts in the very procedure, such that you don't have to jump out at all. But I cannot see how to do this in gaming.

Tuomas -

Superficially, I'm inclined to disagree with you. What you see as a difference in kind I see as simply an additional technique: the reassignment of functional roles within the imagined space to real objects. Not much different than waving a pencil around as a magic wand, or handing out a 'scroll' or similar widget, in a tabletop game. Just a matter of degree.

In a game of mud pies, pieces of mud get reassigned roles as pies, according to rough rules (size of mud glob is roughly equal to size of pie; ingredients gradually get correlated to the bits of junk you put in your mud glob; etc.).

But the rules get formed as you go, of course, especially during the first few games. Acorns don't become raspberries until someone makes it up; they seem to me to do this within the mud-pie-space, without breaking out.

So anyway. I agree that in a certain kind of immersive LARP there's going to be relatively less bricolage-in-play than in an RPG, but it seems to me that it still happens, and has to. You don't leave the real world in your immersive LARP, so you have to reinterpret its objects in terms of the SiS. Even if most of the time this interpretation is 'it's nothing, ignore it', surely the room for creative transformation of these entities is there, and is at times taken advantage of.


Chris - thank you in return once again. Whether this stuff turns out to deal with specific techniques or exploration as a whole or something weirder and more wondrous with respect to the Big Model, I think it's really interesting. I also think I understand a certain mindset brought about by many early RPGs, and especially D&D, better than I ever did before; and the importance of the social group not only to actual play but to mechanical tinkering. Really interesting stuff - it's helping a ot.

Wow, that was a lot to read. both in terms of the article (which I read completely) and all the comments (which I tried to read completely, but failed :). I do think it was valuable written like this, with enough theoretical background, but then, I also spent a lot of time in academia. Here are my comments, both less sophisticated than most others and more from my particular perspective.

First, I think you are right in that bricolage exists and is a factor in many RPG groups. Especially the part about taking elements with all their attributes struck home with me. My actual play example: The current AD&D 2e group I am playing in (which is completely dysfunctional regarding CAs, but that's another story) decided, before I joined, that crossbows really should be more dangerous. They doubled the damage for them. Now, when I played, I was the first character in their group to be a thief. I used a heavy crossbow, being hidden in a tree, to shoot at a Frost Giant. I was level 5, the backstab tripled the damage. Therefore, my character suddenly did 6 times the damage of a regular crossbow, which killed the Frost Giant outright (I rolled high). There was a moment of astonishment. Oops--this is what we've done by changing the rules. Here's an unintended side effect, because this element works with these others. Do we need to do something about this? More fiddling? (My question usually is, does it really matter? But I'm a lone Nar-longing player among Sims and Gams.)

That's where, I think, this whole idea of bricolage has an important point to make. We often don't think things through when we design mechanics or fiddle with the rules, and that leads to more fiddling. Now I know bricolage has this whole aspect of reinforcing the social group, but I think this particular point emphasizes the need for thorough analysis and playtests of systems.

Secondly, it helped me to understand this phenomenon when looking at it from the perspective of my own field. I have my M.A. in Political Science. It seems to me that what we're seeing is a constitution--i.e., the social contract--and the specific laws that are created based on that. We always check: Does this specific law (action, mechanic, IIEE distribution) violate our constitution? If so, it needs to be changed. Now, people change, groups change, and so the interporetation of the constitution changes. And sometimes the damn thing just needs to be rewritten. The important part about it is that it's vague. It has some clear guidelines, but overall, the implications and implementations are open to discussion, testing, and fiddling.

AND--the process itself of voting for lawmakers, writing laws, arguing about them, and most of all, always referring back to the constitution, in itself reinforces the society. A BIG part of what it means to be an American is the support of the constitutional-representative democratic-republican process. Even though I am German, I live in the US and have studied American culture, and in an immigrant society like this one which is not a Nation-State, the support of the process (expressed most often through voting and working) is the defining feature of belonging. This might be a more chronologically-direct analogy than ancient cultures.

Blah blah, I could of course blabber on and on about it, but I'll spare you. My RPG-related point is that as a gaming group, you need a social contract like this country needs its constitution. There might be other factors that keep the group together--friendship, blood relations, etc.--but it all works best when people make explicit their basic tenents and agree on the process of working through problems, always with reference to the basic contract.

So much for now. Thanks for sharing, the article did make some things clear for me (e.g., I always misunderstood what you mean by "myth").

P.S.: As to your point about translating the French originals, translations never perfectly work, actually for bricolage reasons. Language is a prime example of bricolage. You cannot export ideas one-on-one in every aspect from one culture to another (see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science). I am frequently frustrated with English translations of Kant and Hegel. But there are just basic cultural interpretations in there that are really tough to translate properly. I guess we all just need to learn more languages and spend some time immersed in other cultures :)

Sean wrote:
I'd actually like to see some narrow and even 'accumlulationist' mechanics for this sort of thing, like a Collection of Meaningful Facts, the character as a curiosity cabinet. More magical than the list of magic items maybe.

Sean wrote: Superficially, I'm inclined to disagree with you. What you see as a difference in kind I see as simply an additional technique: the reassignment of functional roles within the imagined space to real objects. Not much different than waving a pencil around as a magic wand, or handing out a 'scroll' or similar widget, in a tabletop game. Just a matter of degree.

So anyway. I agree that in a certain kind of immersive LARP there's going to be relatively less bricolage-in-play than in an RPG, but it seems to me that it still happens, and has to.

J. Tuomas Harviainen wrote: This is where your (well-refined and presented, I must admit) interpretation is wrong. An accurate description would be that the possibility of negotiation exists, but is not availlable to the players, just the GM. Thus bricolage does not actualize. Think of it as the difference between a communal ritual where everyone may participare in their own way (tabletop rpg) versus a ritual where everything is up to the shaman who has esoteric knowledge he won't share (experiential larp). While both contain the same theoretical potential for negotiation, only one features the possibility of the negotiation really happening without a huge risk of the ritual being broken.

LordSmerf wrote: Perhaps this needs a new thread, if the answer isn't a simple "Yes" then I will kick one off if you don't.

Is this a feature exclusive to a type of LARP play, or do you see this in certain types of table top play? I think that this is a feature of extremely high Immersion table top games. Where the players are so deep into the characters that this is exactly what you're talking about. Or am I missing something about eidetic reduction?

Seth - yes, that's what I'm on about. I think Universalis play, especially in the hands of less experienced groups, involves this kind of process. I wonder though if it starts to slip away for skilled Uni groups with a clearly Narrativist CA. Still, the play example in the text with the Meadow seems like a really solid example of what you're talking about and what I had in mind both.

Christian - as it turns out, I knew Peter Winch rather well before he passed on. Paraphrased in his terms, I think what you're saying is that we have to understand not only the 'behavior' of people in a culture, but the kinds of understanding and reason they themselves give for that behavior - its 'point' as they see it. And since languages involve (on your view) a culture-wide process of bricolage, translation necessarily leaves out the non-cross-cultural aspects of another culture's group piecemeal construction. Interesting...

Tuomas - if the players are robbed of all authority to negotiate stuff, then yeah, I guess I'd have to agree with you - only the GM is doing anything like this. But:

(1) Doesn't what's being said still hold for the GM?

(2) Wouldn't it be possible to give players in such a LARP the authority to do this for themselves? If I was immersed as, say, an alchemist, I'd much prefer to be able to pick up a coffee cup and say it was an alembic or the like - that would free me up like mud pies does.

(3) Some tabletop GMs arrogate similar authority to themselves, and likewise in the name of immersive play sometimes, or so it seems to me. It seems like the main difference in LARPs is just the whole-body character of it.

So I think I see a little better where you're coming from but I'm not persuaded. We should probably pursue this in a new thread if it's worth pursuing though.

xenopulse wrote: My actual play example: .... crossbows really should be more dangerous. ....

Secondly, it helped me to understand this phenomenon when looking at it from the perspective of my own field. I have my M.A. in Political Science. It seems to me that what we're seeing is a constitution--i.e., the social contract--and the specific laws that are created based on that. We always check: Does this specific law (action, mechanic, IIEE distribution) violate our constitution? If so, it needs to be changed. Now, people change, groups change, and so the interporetation of the constitution changes. And sometimes the damn thing just needs to be rewritten. The important part about it is that it's vague. It has some clear guidelines, but overall, the implications and implementations are open to discussion, testing, and fiddling.

P.S.: As to your point about translating the French originals, translations never perfectly work, actually for bricolage reasons. Language is a prime example of bricolage. You cannot export ideas one-on-one in every aspect from one culture to another (see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science). I am frequently frustrated with English translations of Kant and Hegel. But there are just basic cultural interpretations in there that are really tough to translate properly. I guess we all just need to learn more languages and spend some time immersed in other cultures :)

Chris,

Sure, feel free to use the example.

I don't want to clutter up your thread with more discussions on structural analysis of politics and difficulties of translations, so maybe we'll do that via PM sometime. Just let me add that Hegel's Geist is probably comparable to the La pensee sauvage pun in its multiple meanings. And that I get irritated when people conflate words to one translation as well; even such usually meticulous scholars as Mary Gregor translates Kant's Zufriedenheit and Befriedigung both as "satisfaction," even though that's a core differentiation between "being at peace and positively content-ness" and "satisfaction."

Anyway, back on topic. I do think that there are positive and negative ways that bricolage can work. My own example is not a positive one. I don't even think it reinforced the group. Why not? Because we have power structures in our group. The GM and the longest standing player make all of these sorts of decisions. Sure, they publicly state that anyone can say whether they'd like rules changes or more input, but when it comes down to it, I am just not as willing to put the time and effort into trying to fix something as broken as AD&D 2e. And switching systems has been flat out rejected.

Positive examples clearly include your SitF. Actually encouraging bricolage in-game and giving guidelines and currency for people to make these changes (also apparent in Universalis, of course) and adopt the game to their own interpretation has great potential. It sounds like Multiverser has similar potential, though in a more reactive rather than proactive way.

Actually, today, I finally understood your game. Not just how it works, but why. And why that is a good thing. It seems to strike a balance between focused constraint and creative potential, and that balance is player-driven. Actually, that's very cool.

My apologies for coming to this rather late.

That was very interesting. But also interestingly, it was not at all what I was hoping for. I was not thinking so much of mechanics but the rest of the game space, and I fear that emphasis may have been unfortunate. It would seem to me to probably be more useful to detach the concept of bricolage from Levi-Strauss and examine instead only the procedural similarities. Recognising that bricolage as applied in mythology is useful as precedent and referent for the argument that this process also characterises RPG’s but then we should move on to discussing it in RPG’s.

So here’s my rough take on the topic to date. My brief survey of bricolage as art technique shows some very simple mechanisms such as addition, subtraction, juxtaposition and so on. With the analogy to native mythology in mind, I think it seems reasonable to see the use of similar techniques in RPG, and spaces for them to be used further. Whenever an object is introduced into the game space – such as, for example, the text establishing “the elvish kingdom” – it becomes one of the objects in the bricoleurs shed and can be manipulated. The incorporation of “the elvish kingdom” into a character concept or motivation or locale in the game space is such a usage. In the case of incorporation into characters I think this takes us back to one of Sil’s earlier points regarding representation.

Well, Sean's remark on "subversive" certainly hit some chords, now didn't it? I have to think about this. Put that way, out of context, it sounds so anti-Levi-Strauss it's got to be wrong. But given that the phrase "System does matter" means something specific here at the Forge, I have to wonder whether you may not be right, or whether it entails a different conception of "system," or what.

I think this article also may shed some indirect light on the curious need of many role-players to feel like a 'game' or 'campaign' is open-ended and indefinite even though in practical fact they know that it's unlikely to last more than six months. The feeling of open-endedness or indefiniteness is necessary for many minds to get into this kind of meaning-making process, I think.

bricolage= Found Art+ constraints on materials ( limited choice of materials, reuse of materials) ?
bricolage as applied here is basically doing the same thing, but with ideas rather than physical objects?
If this is essentially correct, why are we using bricolage instead of the (arguably) more accesible Found Art?

Hey Contracycle,

Wow. I'm not sure of all the implications or nuances of what you have posted, but by and large you have nicely summarized virtually all the ideas I have been overtly and subconsciously playing with. My tuning fork is resonating very strongly with what you have presented here. I'm in love with the notions of "the shed", and how it is "filled" (the "movement of items in and out" of the "shed") as being extremely important (highlighting the importance of "time") and an excellent place to focus on in game design and play execution/process.

I wish I had something more constructive to add, but alas all I can say is, "Right on!"

Fantastic, I had hoped that was the case and am glad to see your confirmation.

Very interesting, especially in relation to my gaming obsession, Glorantha and it's metaplot.

The metaplot has only been related from diagetic, unreliable narrators (until very recently); hence it is available for small groups to manipulate, form relationships between their own characters, etc, while remaining within "canon".

Meanwhile, published scenarios relating to major events of the metaplot (the cradle, the skyship) have been criticised for being too "railroady": they don't seem to afford the same opportunities to forge meaning, as the plot is imposed. The suggested solution, to make the story about the raltionshop between the PC's and the immutable elements of the canon plot, attempts to use the same process of creation covered in bricolage, but with a large new component imposed from outside the group. Since this is quite different from the way that HeroQuest has encouraged folks to interact with Glorantha previously, this comes as somewhat of a culture shock, een though it's the default method of running metaplot in other games (white wolf, for instance).

I'm personally just kicking myself that, being passing familiar with this area of cultural theory, and having referred to all elements of rpg's as either a toybox or a toolbox, and I never made the connection between the two.

Gareth, referring back to a previous thread where we thrashed out that Nar play would tend to be ethically normalising within the group, would you agree that the process called bricolage here would also tend to be culturally normalising within the group?

pete_darby wrote:
Gareth, referring back to a previous thread where we thrashed out that Nar play would tend to be ethically normalising within the group, would you agree that the process called bricolage here would also tend to be culturally normalising within the group?

A quick post to follow:

What’s needed is deliberate ambiguity. You need some bits in there, which are clearly powerful and important, that are sufficiently constrained that people don’t say, “Um, I have no idea how to use this at all,” but are sufficiently open that players can readily bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate. You also need a system that, in its mechanical and rhetorical design, makes clear that such mucking about is intrinsic to play.

clehrich wrote: ]Yes. I think this is because designers think like engineers. As Levi-Strauss predicts, the engineer and the bricoleur are fundamentally at odds. The thing is, I think bricolage a basically self-policing mechanism. Once it gets rolling as a social process of thought, it handles itself just fine, thanks. Derrida's sly shot that the engineer is another invention of the bricoleur is very, very telling. Practically speaking, I think a lot of this bricolage damage-control in game design is unnecessary and potentially limits the range of possibility undesirably. As I say, if you want a game that's engineered, that reliably produces X with a minimum of fuss and trouble, you engineer it. But I think a lot of gamers like the fuss and trouble, and even find that among the most fun bits of gaming, and engineering may be counter-productive for that.


But you want my honest opinion?

I think there is very good reason for why AD&D was such a success. Sure, Ron is dead-on about the cultural situation, and Xero has made some lovely additions to that with his remarks on the rise of the popular notion of the auteur in George Lucas and such. But I don't think that's a full answer.

Honestly, I think AD&D has an enormous learning curve, and I don't mean what you think I mean, or rather, I don't mean what people would usually mean if they said that.

I'll start again.

I think AD&D has a steep learning curve, because you have three quite independent things to learn, and only one of them is in any way explicit in the texts.

First, you have to learn the rules as a system of messy and not entirely coherent or cohesive bits and pieces. This is sort of explicit, though I think the idea that players should not read the DMG and so on undermines this; I do think a lot of players went right ahead and read it anyway, sensing somehow (from their neolithic minds, perhaps) that this rule should be observed in the breach.

Second, you have to learn how your group plays, and the ethos of the group and its context of other groups, and how all of that works as a social system. Nothing about this, that I know of, is explicit.

Third, you have to learn how to bend the system. In other words, you need to learn how to do bricolage with it. Not only is this not explicit, I'm pretty sure it's explicit that you shouldn't do it. Again, it sounds anecdotally as though an awful lot of gaming groups, probably including the very first originating groups, observed this in the breach.

The thing is, there is just so goddamn much to parts 1 and 2, and they are so powerfully riddled with fractures and intricate weirdnesses that just beg for exploration (how do you use the magic item creation rules, anyway?), and there are so many inconsistencies just waiting to be put to good use somewhere. And so once you get to stage 3, it's like a whole world opening up. And I think that because there were so few other choices, and those groups had a social structure that kept their core players bound tightly, a surprising number of players did reach stage 3.

And I deeply believe (I hope I am never proven wrong!) that players who got to stage 3 of this process, with that game or those sort of like it, are the tiny but fabled minority who played those endless, year-after-year games, the ones that people still tell stories about. They genuinely did create something disturbingly similar to myth, in a ritual process. And that is so powerful that it created a legend of its own, without which this hobby would long since be dead.

I love seeing all this cool engineering and cleverness going on in design around here. It's fantastic. It keeps the hobby vital and vibrant and exciting. But those guys were doing something very different, and I think we are painting ourselves into a corner---a very exciting and fun and valuable corner---from which we can barely even see that stuff.

Loads of good stuff here, firing ideas all over the place.

I'm reminded of the IT dictum that "no system survives contact with users", which is often mimicked in RPG terms as "no scenario survives contact with the players".

Although there is a subtle difference here, I'm starting to think that Game Design/Engineering seems not to be a social activity whereas Bricolage/Play does. And then we get caught in a deconstructionist loop that says "hang on, but engineering is a social activity too. It's not really performed in ivory towers but against a social context". I don't think this loop necessarily destroys the thought process that attempts to separate engineering and bricolage, design and play, but it is very chicken and egg.

Even in well engineered systems like MLwM, there always seems to be some bricolage. Most of it that I've encountered is about Sim issues. And I think that this is because most players are used to Sim and feel deprotagonised when moving away from it. There is a strong association between ownership and identification with the PC and control over each action. Rolling the dice is often a physical proxy for whatever the PC is doing. In these cases, reference to the original design intent, which is strongly stated in MLwM, usually prevails.

But it's not always about Sim issues. Sometimes there are worries over the boundaries of deprotagonising in a Nar sense. Local arrangements then come into play.

So can Game Design exist without Bricolage? Je pense que non.

I also get the vague uneasy feeling of a tautology lurking somewhere in the midst of this discussion, something along the lines of "roleplaying, that is a social activity, is always resolved socially." But as with any equation, the terms usually need much more explanation before we can all nod our heads and say, "well, it's obvious really."!