Hey gang,

You may have noticed my recent madness on the RPG Theory forum, about structuralism, myth, and gaming. It's at the tail-end of the "RPGs and Text [Long]" thread, and should really be its own thread but Ron apparently thinks (and I don't really want to argue with him) that it follows pretty smoothly within that one.

Now it wouldn't be terribly soon, but do you people think that would make a decent article for PUSH? I'm having a little trouble envisioning the range of what goes into it, you see.

Another thing I'm thinking about, a mostly separate project, is a thick description (a la Clifford Geertz's "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight") of a gaming group at work and play.

Thoughts?

If it matters, I foresee these as readable, good drafts for chapters of a mostly-academic book I would hope to write about 10 years from now about gaming. Yes, 10 years. Not sooner.

Works for me, and extremely well to boot. I always dig your theoretical bridges between roleplaying and humanistic principles. The understanding offered by the ritual article, for example, has influenced much of my design work during the last year.

The only caution in approach I have is uncertainty about whether you should base the work on GNS or not. I'm sensing that the argument would perhaps be stronger if you went on from first principles instead of dragging in the whole Edwardsian terminology like the thread does.

As to a case study -like game group description, I'd find that fascinating. Go to it! We have too little scientific talent as is, and should drive you mercilessly ;)

Chris,

I'd love to see that stuff make into the form of an article for Push. It's a very interesting thread that I've badly wanted to get involved with at some point but haven't had the time to even keep up with properly. So yes, yes, yes.

As for the thick description of a game group and session, I think that'd make an excellent article as well. And it gives me an idea. If we could get a recording of a session of a group playing. I'm fairly comfortable with conversation analysis and multimodal discourse analysis based in systemic linguistics, and it'd be pretty interesting to have two different analyses of the same game session coming from different analytic backgrounds. If you're interested in doing something like that, I'd be willing to commit to it for a future Push article.

Rich

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Works for me, and extremely well to boot. I always dig your theoretical bridges between roleplaying and humanistic principles. The understanding offered by the ritual article, for example, has influenced much of my design work during the last year.

The only caution in approach I have is uncertainty about whether you should base the work on GNS or not. I'm sensing that the argument would perhaps be stronger if you went on from first principles instead of dragging in the whole Edwardsian terminology like the thread does.

As to a case study -like game group description, I'd find that fascinating. Go to it! We have too little scientific talent as is, and should drive you mercilessly ;)

Rich Forest wrote: I'd love to see that stuff make into the form of an article for Push. It's a very interesting thread that I've badly wanted to get involved with at some point but haven't had the time to even keep up with properly. So yes, yes, yes.

As for the thick description of a game group and session, I think that'd make an excellent article as well. And it gives me an idea. If we could get a recording of a session of a group playing. I'm fairly comfortable with conversation analysis and multimodal discourse analysis based in systemic linguistics, and it'd be pretty interesting to have two different analyses of the same game session coming from different analytic backgrounds. If you're interested in doing something like that, I'd be willing to commit to it for a future Push article.

I'm fairly comfortable with conversation analysis and multimodal discourse analysis based in systemic linguistics....

For those who care, the rough outline of the book as I imagine it (remembering that we're talking about something that will probably not be a serious academic project for another 10 years -- I need to get tenure first) looks something like this:

I. Introduction: what this book is about
II. Role-Playing Games: a history (and historiography)
III. A Thick Description of a Game
IV. Games and Stories: GNS and the like, i.e. “emic” theorizing
V. Ritualization and performative practice/praxis
VI. Myth in gaming
VII. System, mechanics, and method
VIII. Gaming and Ideology: the subculture issue
IX. Toward a Cultural Critique of Gaming
X. Conclusions

So basically I-II sets up, explains to the academic reader what RPGs are and something of the range, and explains to the gamer reader what I'm doing and not doing. The latter is especially important because gamers will read this book very differently from the way academics will.

III gives hard detail, actually showing what gaming looks like in the doing, explained very thickly so that the non-gamer reader understands concretely what we're talking about. The gamer readers will, I hope, see their hobby from a very different angle, which might also be instructive.

IV gets into "emic" (old-fashioned term, but it really means internal to the culture in question) theorizing about gaming. For the academic, this helps formulate a sense of the total discourse of gaming. For the gamer, I would hope this would have some practical utility, in terms of thinking about theory and what it is and isn't.

V does a serious, in-depth analysis of gaming as both formulating a ritual space of performance and also constructing what you might call lenses or frameworks through which issues may be expressed and thought about.

VI gets into the whole structural analysis thing, with the explication of how symbols and mechanics and whatnot get manipulated to construct meaning, and from that what sorts of meaning are actually negotiated in play. It also discusses how those meanings are legitimated.

VII gets sort of technical about gaming mechanics, which have to be explained to the academic reader who doesn't know what I'm talking about. I talk about things like the Lumpley Principle and the distinctions that are both consciously and unconsciously made about legitimation, decision-making, and the use of Fortune, Karma, and Drama for these purposes.

VIII discusses the gaming subculture and its relations to other subcultures (scifi, anime, etc.). LARPS, SCA, and the like would also fall here.

IX considers the ways in which gaming does and does not participate in the larger discourses of American culture (yes, this would necessarily be limited to the US, though comparative information from Eero et al. would be very valuable here to show the possibilities that aren't taken up in US gaming culture). Basically the question would be why the stereotypes of gamers are what they are, the extent to which they have objective validity, and the reasons for them.

The rest is a wrap-up.


Just so's you know.

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Works for me, and extremely well to boot. I always dig your theoretical bridges between roleplaying and humanistic principles. The understanding offered by the ritual article, for example, has influenced much of my design work during the last year.

Ben Lehman wrote:

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Works for me, and extremely well to boot. I always dig your theoretical bridges between roleplaying and humanistic principles. The understanding offered by the ritual article, for example, has influenced much of my design work during the last year.

BL> I just wanted to second this. In all aspects. Please do write the article.

Sounds great to me Chris.

A few things have popped up in my life that threaten to further delay my own work on the wuxia article (fuckity fuck fuck), so I don't think time is really an issue quite yet, especially since we don't have a huge load of content banging our doors down. Do it when you can get to it and I'm sure that'll be soon enough.

More thoughts on Push and where we stand coming shortly.

Chris,

I’ll try to catch up with you someday on the RPGs and text topic – it’s something I’d like to contribute to. But man, right now, that thread is well over a hundred single spaced pages long when you print it out (I know, I’ve done just that), and I’m fairly busy working on an article, so it’ll be a while before I can turn any serious attention to it. These days I miss most topics on the Forge while they’re *hot* because I only manage to even really read threads every couple days. That said, RPGs and text will be on my mind.

On the close analysis of a game group, I have a picture of the sheer amount of work and time that an analysis of would require. I suspect we’d end up with two quite detailed descriptions, which would then make comparison all the more interesting. Context knowledge is tremendously helpful for my analysis as well, although some of what I’d be interested in would be stuff I could parse without needing quite as intimate a knowledge of the group as your approach would give. This is another way that we’d be producing analyses with different emphases, and ending up with (to some extent, I suspect) complementary interpretations that could be read profitably in comparison with each other.

Now to conversation analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. First, I should probably clarify what I meant by “conversation analysis and multimodal discourse analysis based in systemic linguistics.” I mean my base is systemic functional linguistics and it would be informed by conversation analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. I don’t mean to imply by this that conversation analysis itself is based in systemics. My way of doing it would be, though.

Conversation analysis itself is its own separate tradition – think “ethnomethodology of common, everyday conversation,” and you’ll have a broad idea of what the approach does and is interested in. Most work in conversation analysis is focused on analyzing turn-taking behavior, things like who gets to say what to whom, when, for how long; how the topic gets established, how the topic gets changed; and “adjacency pairs” that are typical of the organization of conversation, like question/answer, offer/reject, offer/accept, and so on. It started in the late 60s to early 70s among a group of American sociologists, and Sacks and Schegloff are a couple of important names. It’s not my core thing, but it is something that I’ve worked with a bit and that informs how I approach conversational interactions.


“Multimodal discourse analysis” is basically discourse analysis coming to terms with the fact that spoken/written language hardly exhaust the meaning making resources brought to bear in most real texts, and can't be hand-waved away in a principled analysis (take a print advertisement for example, with its use of layout and colors and images; or take the gestures and facial expressions and postures and other meaning making acts in face-to-face conversation). “Mode” in this sense basically means “meaning making resource,” including but no longer limited to good old spoken and written language. Other modes have been given some attention by other disciplines for a while now, but in discourse analysis and various strands of “linguistics proper,” the move away from doing lexicogrammar has been a bit slow. It’s really only since the mid-nineties that discourse analysts have started to take this stuff seriously, look at what other people are saying about it, and work out where and how their own assumptions and analytical tools fit in, where and how things may need to be changed, and so on. I’m tempted to go so far as to say that it’s still a bit in the “buzzword” stage as an analytic approach within discourse analysis and functional linguistics. You could also see it as discourse analysis taking another shot at semiotics, using current thinking in functional linguistics to re-create some ways of thinking about and talking about multimodal texts. It’s fairly empiricist and structuralist at heart, with some of the insights of post-structuralist thought taken into account. The dominant strands are “disciplining” themselves under the terms “multimodal discourse analysis” and “mediated discourse analysis.” The former is associated with Kress and van Leeuwen, and is very systemic influenced. The latter is associated with Scollon, and is more ethnographic in nature and has somewhat different interests – I haven’t read much of this, although it’s on my “need to get around to” list, so I won’t commit to being able to really talk about it much. Both “brands” are in close conversation, sharing journals and publications and conferences, etc.

So what’s this all mean, as far as what an analysis would look like on my end? It’d make for a very close analysis if I emphasized my strengths (a systemic description just of the language at relatively standard detail includes multiple lines of analysis of each *clause*, and can get very unwieldy very quickly). If I did that, practical concerns would limit me to doing close analyses of *chunks* of a game session and then relating these analyses to the context, asking how the world is represented in the language, how people interact using the language (think somewhat of semantics and pragmatics), and then asking what this can tell us about how playing an RPG is “being done” by this group of people in the analyzed portions of the text, and maybe relating some of this to what we know about spoken English and conversational interaction. The deeper contextual stuff would be limited by my own unfamiliarity with the group as well as by my inclination to really want to talk about patterns in the text at the level of the lexicogrammar (or in other modes, the relevant semiotic patternings there).

I think my analysis would make most sense when compared with the deeper contextualization that yours could provide, which is part of why I think this is such an interesting prospect for multiple threads of analysis. There would be the practical concerns of course of getting the data into a form I could make use of, but that’s a long-term consideration for if/when we try to carry this out.

Rich

Rich,

Wow. I have never even heard of this stuff, much less read any. Sounds fascinating. You actually do this?

Out of interest, would it in some way complicate matters if some people are speaking in-character and others speak sort of on behalf of their characters? This is a preference and style issue, not a mechanical one; I usually speak in character, with "I" referring to the character, but Rob for example is not comfortable with that and usually flicks back and forth; from context, it's always clear who's speaking, but I think if you just looked at a script, for example, not knowing much about gaming, it might be difficult to figure out how Rob can go back and forth with his pronouns.

Or is this all relatively simple?

clehrich wrote: Rich,

Wow. I have never even heard of this stuff, much less read any. Sounds fascinating. You actually do this?