In a couple of running threads, I’ve emphasized a radical divide between textual media and RPGs. Ron has suggested that this may be dragging at least one of those threads away from its focus, and that as I have a lot to say maybe it would be worth my just stating it head-on. So here goes.

First, in case someone searches for this later on, the threads in question:

A Wild and Untamed Thing
Revision and Interpretation


First Principles

The written word stands in a peculiar relation to the spoken, partly because of intrinsic reasons and partly because of the history of conceptions of writing in our culture. I’m primarily going to focus on the intrinsic issues, because they don’t require a lot of background to debate, but I’ll mention some of the other points as I go along.

When I speak, it is a normative convention that you not speak at the same time, although of course we know this is violated all the time. But in what we might call the normative spoken situation, that of rational discourse, the speaker dominates the moment in time when he speaks. When I have concluded, it is now your turn to speak, at which time you dominate and I am supposed to shut up.

Further, when I speak my linguistic production exists in time and appears serially. In order to know what I’m saying, you have to listen to it in order and at that time. After the fact, only memory exists: if you misremember what I said, there is nothing to correct you.

In addition, in an oral situation normally a conversational model applies. If you don’t understand what I’m saying, you can ask for clarification, and I will construct a new linguistic production, a new saying-my-point as it were. And over the course of the conversation, it seems that we will likely eventually come to some sort of clarity: we will agree that we have understood one another, whether we agree or disagree about the content.

None of this is true of written text.

There is a normative convention to the reading situation, which says that you will read left-to-right and top-to-bottom, in that order (if we are talking about English, anyway). But there is nothing to control this: you can, if you like, read backwards. Of course, it may not make a lot of sense, but I can’t shout at you for violating the norm the way I can if you start to interrupt my speaking.

Written text does not appear serially or in time. It is, a fixed object, a thing to be dealt with as you choose. After you have read, you may read again. You may read pieces, then put the book down and come back to it. Any seriality or temporal bounding in text comes from the manner in which you choose to approach the text, not from the text itself.

No conversational model holds for reading texts. If you do not understand, the author is not present in the text to reply. All you can do is try to read it again, to converse with yourself about the text. You can of course write marginalia, or shout at the book, or write criticism or a letter to the author. But none of this changes the text itself.

Now all of this is generally accepted in the many academic discourses about writing, which range from linguistic philosophy to deconstruction to literary criticism to semiotics. What was relatively new a century or so ago, largely in the work of Nietzsche, was the realization that this meant that there was no fixed meaning in texts, that text has no means of grounding itself because of its autonomy. Thus “God is dead” is in part the moral or ethical implication of the realization of this total absence of fixity in text. And this caused, in the 1960s and beyond, the various dramatic pronouncements about “the death of the author”: the point being that once an author has composed a text, the meaning becomes divorced from whatever the author intended because there is no means by which the text can incorporate such intentions.

A Passing Note

Computer-developed textual orality, you might say, such as bulletin boards like the Forge, have introduced new wrinkles into this old situation. Some philosophical work has been done on this, but the main result as I understand it has been the recognition that the situation produced is really the classical textual problem which Jacques Derrida pinpointed and indelibly labeled the logic of the “supplement”.

In essence, the point is that we all really recognize that orality is not actually the absolute communication we really desire, the meeting of minds, a point Plato already noticed. So what we do is to supplement our orality to convince ourselves that really, we are communicating. We keep on speaking, again and again, until eventually we claim that we understand one another. But in fact we have no evidence of this: the only way we could have evidence is for one of us to produce yet another speaking — and that is just as open to interpretation. It merely supplements one text with yet another, and so on.

So the result is that it’s all really text, even when it seems not to be. As Derrida put is, “Il n’y a pas dehors-texte” — there is nothing outside the text.

Reflexivity in Fantasy Text

One result of these various realizations has been the increased development of conscious reflexivity in text. In the sense I mean this here, we have a lot of written texts which reflect upon their own status as texts, as peculiarly absent and autonomous objects lacking fixed meaning. It has been said that the author “haunts” the text, and indeed one common trope of this reflexivity has been the literature of fantasy, particularly Magic Realism but elsewhere as well, in which the author works to capitalize on this strange absence to produce a sensation in the reader of disjuncture and alienation. M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books and stories are good examples of this effect, as are Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Arete and The Urth of the New Sun and John Crowley’s Little, Big and Ægypt.

RPGs and Text

RPGs arise within a conversational, oral situation. Thus the haunting absence of language is not apparent the way it is in text. It’s there, of course, because it always is in language, but it seems as though we understand one another.

Furthermore, in RPGs we have all sorts of modes of supplementing the certainty of understanding. Mechanics decide whether an event occurs, or the GM decides by fiat, or the group comes to an agreement. Therefore we feel that we know whether the event has or has not occurred, that understanding and agreement have been reached.

At the same time, we know from first principles that language is not capable of such certainty. We have agreed on something, but what? In order to answer this, I need to get a little bit technical for just a moment; I won’t go too far, but a little detail will be necessary.

Syuzhet and Fabula

Victor Shklovsky, one of the founders of Russian formalism, made a distinction between syuzhet and fabula that is importantly applicable here. I’d like to point out, in passing, that such formalism was an essential groundwork for Vladimir Propp’s work on folklore, Roman Jakobson’s work on linguistics, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth and ritual in the “savage mind.” All of these are applicable to gaming, though I believe Lévi-Strauss is the most so; I’ll get back to that briefly at the end.

[Incidentally, I have no idea how to pronounce “syuzhet” – I always hear it pronounced “soo-zhay,” like the French sujêt, but maybe someone who speaks Russian could help?]

We can roughly translate fabula as “story” and syuzhet as “plot” or “discourse”. To take one of many examples, the fabula of The Scarlet Letter is the story behind the events of the novel; that is, it is the complete story of what “really happened.” But the novel does not actually reveal the fabula: we never know exactly what Hester has or has not done. What the novel reveals, what the novel actually is, is syuzhet. Thus fabula is the meaning we grasp after when reading a work of textual fiction, but it may or may not be available within the text.

To take another famous example, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, we never actually know what has happened at all: is the governess crazy? are there really ghosts? We never know this. And the attraction of the novel is in part the fact that we do not know. The disparity between syuzhet and fabula creates a sensation of fascination and depth, of alienation and interest. Once again, fantasy (for this is a kind of fantasy) often plays upon this disparity.

By way of contrast, Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne (I’m working from the film here, but I understand that it’s pretty similar) in the end tells us what the fabula is: yes, the father did abuse the daughter, so almost certainly Dolores’ memory of him as an abusive beast is accurate. This gives us a nice sense of closure, but makes the book a very different thing from The Turn of the Screw.

RPGs, Syuzhet and Fabula

I claim that the “text” that is constructed and negotiated in RPG play is fabula. It’s the “what really happened” that we must negotiate. After the game is over, we can debate and argue about the meaning, importance, or whatever of this fabula.

In Narrativist play, the object is to construct a fabula that is morally and personally significant, by orienting it around a Premise. This creates Story Now — or better, Fabula Now.

In Simulationist and Gamist play, the criteria of value are not intrinsically rooted in the aesthetic qualities of this fabula, but in other aspects of that fabula: whether it is challenging, whether it adequately represents the source material, and so on. Oddly, Simulationism actually has a further criterion, which is that the syuzhet not interfere with this formation, but that’s a subject for another essay entirely.

Now all of this means that the disjuncture between syuzhet and fabula is not an intrinsic structure in RPGs. Unless we formulate special rules that permit the violation of fabula in the syuzhet, it really makes no difference how we produce the fabula, so long as we come to agreement about it.

Of course, the syuzhet is where much of the affective dimension of play occurs, the fun value and so forth, just as it is in literature. We can recite the fabula as series of bald events after the fact, but without the experiential syuzhet that constructed it the recitation is not equivalent to the actual play. So doesn’t this put RPGs back into the realm of the literary?

Not at all. What we have here is very peculiar, and I think relatively distinct, a special (though not unique) quality to gaming. We have a double layer of syuzhet. One is the construction of the fabula in mechanical terms (the die-rolling, the decision-making of arbitration, and so on) as well as the special social performances that are part of any human interaction (body language, eating and drinking, etc.). The other is everything else that goes into the construction of fabula through exploration in gaming, the affective dimension. In reciting the fabula after the fact, we make an automatic distinction between these two layers quite automatically, in most cases: we retell the fabula and try to pick up as much of the affective dimension of syuzhet as possible, but we usually drop as much of the first layer as possible. Certain exceptions do arise — a very high roll at a critical juncture, a very funny bodily noise, etc. — but in the main we recite only the fabula with the secondary affective dimension of syuzhet. In other words, a post facto retelling attempts to reconstruct the game as a work of literature.

Now all of this entails that it is difficult, if not perhaps impossible, to approximate the reflexivity of postmodern fantasy within RPGs. The inaccessibility of fabula which is central to such works is simply not possible for us, because without fabula there is no social agreement whatever and thus no game. To render same effects possible, it seems to me, we would have to seek absence elsewhere—quite possibly between the two layers of syuzhet, though there are certainly other possibilities.

The Problem of Myth

By way of conclusion, I’d like to take up the Tolkien problem again for a minute. I think it is not too gross a distortion to say that Lévi-Strauss argued that myth is very largely constructed out of an enormously complex system of fabulation (the construction of fabula) to which the syuzhet is not especially relevant. More accurately, he would I think say that the syuzhet is terribly important but almost never accessible to the ethnographer or anthropologist. Further, in order to understand even the fabula of myth it is necessary to make comparisons, and syuzhet is precisely what is not comparable among myths, in the same way that Ulysses and The Odyssey are really not comparable in a simple sense except at the layer of fabula, at which they become largely the same and their literary value (which resides in syuzhet) is lost; therefore it is necessary to analyze at the level of fabula. This of course entails stripping myth of a good deal of its affective dimension, but it’s a question of getting much of what’s going on instead of getting nothing at all.

Now I think what Tolkien (who was no Structuralist, if he even read Lévi-Strauss which I doubt) was trying to do was to recapitulate the special mode of fabulation that occurs in a certain kind of myths, primarily the Norse sagas and eddas—which I would argue aren’t really myths either, but works of literature, but that’s a side issue. Insofar as he succeeded, it was by reconfiguring textual language to approximate these ends. We can debate the nature of his success elsewhere.

But one interesting point for us is that if fabula is the essential core of myth, in a way that it is not in literature, that is also the case in RPGs: we have seen that fabula must be formulated in RPGs or we have no game at all.

Now based on this peculiar fact of RPGs, and the common fascination with essentially myth-oriented source material (Tolkien, sagas, Greek epic, Arthurian material, etc.), I would like to suggest that RPGs are really seeking to construct myth, not literature at all. I am currently working on an essay that gets into the details of how and why this works, and the degree to which success might be possible. But for the moment, I would like to toss the idea into the air and suggest that if this is the case, it explains exactly why so much discourse about gaming (here on the Forge as well as elsewhere) is so insistent on its ability to create stories and to generate “real” literature and art.

In our culture, myth has essentially been lost as a form; it simply doesn’t exist. The only thing we’ve got in its place is essentially literary-like forms that have this potentially radical disparity between fabula and syuzhet (literature, film, etc.). And so we think we’re striving to do what they do, but ultimately we never really succeed because our art form is not constructed that way. I’d like to see gaming come to clarity on what it actually is, and what it can do that is special and unique to it. I believe this is the mythic dimension, and a kind of revival of myth as an art form. I do not think that gaming can ever really produce myths, but I do think that by understanding its relationship to myth, and the dialectical relationship between myth and literature, our art can generate something uniquely its own that is of real value.

Fascinating, Chris!

I got all excited when I read about fabula and syuzhet, but reading on I got confused. I was thinking that syuzhet could be the shared imaginary space -- the events we collectively picture in our minds together as we play and afterwards. But, a transcript of play would be the fabula -- the whole story of what happened.

I then thought we could say that revisions happen to the syuzhet, but not the fabula. Cool!

However, you later points seem to indicate that the fabula is not what I thought it was. So, I've confused myself. Any ideas on this line of thinking? I don't want to get too committed to those terms, because I've never encountered them before. So, if I'm misapplying them, correct me. We can use other terms or phrases -- that's fine with me either way.

EDIT: Now, I'm thinking we can say we revise the "second layer" fabula, but not the "first layer" fabula -- yes?

In reciting the fabula after the fact, we make an automatic distinction between these two layers quite automatically, in most cases: we retell the fabula and try to pick up as much of the affective dimension of syuzhet as possible, but we usually drop as much of the first layer as possible.

Reflexivity in Fantasy Text

One result of these various realizations has been the increased development of conscious reflexivity in text. In the sense I mean this here, we have a lot of written texts which reflect upon their own status as texts, as peculiarly absent and autonomous objects lacking fixed meaning. It has been said that the author “haunts” the text, and indeed one common trope of this reflexivity has been the literature of fantasy, particularly Magic Realism but elsewhere as well, in which the author works to capitalize on this strange absence to produce a sensation in the reader of disjuncture and alienation. M. John Harrison’s Viriconium books and stories are good examples of this effect, as are Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of Arete and The Urth of the New Sun and John Crowley’s Little, Big and Ægypt.

Well, I have to say that I'm pretty appalled at this. I took on the issue of fabula and syuzhet in my essay for "Beyond Role and Play", Immersive Story: A View of Role-Played Drama. There I used Gérard Genette's terms instead: discourse = syuzhet and story = fabula. However, they have roughly the same meaning. I would highly suggest this and it's predecessor, Story and Narrative Paradigms in RPGs. Both of these have visual diagrams of the relation between discourse and story which may be helpful (and the latter has diagrams for tabletop role-playing as well).

clehrich wrote: I claim that the “text” that is constructed and negotiated in RPG play is fabula. It’s the “what really happened” that we must negotiate. After the game is over, we can debate and argue about the meaning, importance, or whatever of this fabula.
...
Now all of this means that the disjuncture between syuzhet and fabula is not an intrinsic structure in RPGs. Unless we formulate special rules that permit the violation of fabula in the syuzhet, it really makes no difference how we produce the fabula, so long as we come to agreement about it.

clehrich wrote: What we have here is very peculiar, and I think relatively distinct, a special (though not unique) quality to gaming. We have a double layer of syuzhet. One is the construction of the fabula in mechanical terms (the die-rolling, the decision-making of arbitration, and so on) as well as the special social performances that are part of any human interaction (body language, eating and drinking, etc.). The other is everything else that goes into the construction of fabula through exploration in gaming, the affective dimension. In reciting the fabula after the fact, we make an automatic distinction between these two layers quite automatically, in most cases: we retell the fabula and try to pick up as much of the affective dimension of syuzhet as possible, but we usually drop as much of the first layer as possible. Certain exceptions do arise — a very high roll at a critical juncture, a very funny bodily noise, etc. — but in the main we recite only the fabula with the secondary affective dimension of syuzhet. In other words, a post facto retelling attempts to reconstruct the game as a work of literature.

Matt Snyder wrote: I got all excited when I read about fabula and syuzhet, but reading on I got confused. I was thinking that syuzhet could be the shared imaginary space -- the events we collectively picture in our minds together as we play and afterwards. But, a transcript of play would be the fabula -- the whole story of what happened.

Now, I'm thinking we can say we revise the "second layer" fabula, but not the "first layer" fabula -- yes?

Interestingly, the Forge, and Ron especially, has made an effort to include the first layer when recounting these "stories." He rightly acknowledged that without this material we (1) knew nothing about what the game was really "about" and (2) without this first layer, we utterly miss what makes role-playing unique.

(That's why I said, in another post, that I think this common lack of recognizing role-playing as a unique form is more of a pot-hole than an abyss. Of course, that's only a matter of perspective.)

Reflexivity in Fantasy Text

John Kim wrote: Well, I am violently opposed to this. What you're saying is that everything that happens during the actual game is irrelevant -- i.e. what dice are rolled, what the real people say, what the setting is. That the "text" is the imaginary storyline which was produced. So regardless of whether I play out a love scene in detail or just say "she seduces him" -- it's the same "text" to RPGs. And regardless of whether I use D&D or Amber, the text is the fictional facts, not what was actually done at the gaming table.

You're trying to make an arbitrary distinction here over the layers of the syuzhet. But this same thing applies in literature. For example, a written story may contain many asides by the author or narrator which are not part of describing the fictional action. These are non-affective, but they are nonetheless an important part of the discourse.

I'm going to be harsh here for a moment. This attitude seems typical to me of self-hatred in the arts. For example, an early comic book writer might be ashamed of the chinsy four-color art and try to say that despite what is actually on the page, the story was really good. In the same way, gamers are often ashamed of rolling dice and written character sheets. They try to say that these aren't really what's going on -- that they're irrelevant. They then make a big deal out of re-telling what happened without that stuff.

Hi Chris, first thanks for making the effort to take this discussion somewhere good.

Second, I basically completely disagree with you. :-)

Basically, I don't think rpgs have a fabula. Another way of thinking about this is that I don't think there's any such thing as shared imaginative space. There's a whole bunch of stuff, most of which are inconsistent with each other and even with themselves -- here's a small selection:

o the setting description in the rulebook,
o the rules of the rpg,
o the GM's notes,
o the GM's improvisations and rulings during play,
o the players' writeups of their PCs and background material,
o each player's understanding of their PCs' motivations,
o the actions players say their PCs are doing
o the players' improvisations and understandings
o any journals or logs any of the players or GM keep

All of these are inconsistent, all of the time. The process of play is in large measure a negoatiation to resolve these inconsistencies moment-by-moment -- but such resolutions are NEVER final or total; we've just created more material that's potentially inconsistent with the rest. Play is a continuous process of citation, quotation, adaptation, and argumentation based on other texts, some of which we wrote and some of which we haven't, in written and spoken form.

Personally, I find the notion that rpgs are more certain than, say, novels weird. A novel is usually the product of a solitary mind and is a unitary object; that's what makes it an interesting literary strategy for a novelist to meditate upon unknowability. By way of contrast, in an rpg we start in such a desperate and total state of uncertainty that it's artistically fascinating that we are able to have -any- unity at all.

It helps, Chris. I'm still a little fuzzy on it, but mostly getting it. By that, I mean I suspect I wouldn't recognize it myself while reading a book, but sorta get it when its explained to me -- I hope I can think on it some more a better absorb the concept. And, then, recognize it in a text sometime.

(And thanks for the other clarifications as well, by the way.)

Ah! I just had a new thought on it, Chris. I may still be misunderstanding the matter, but bear with me.

By creating Severian's memory and winking at the reader that the text understands "itself," Wolfe is creating meta-fiction (which I'm reasonably aware of in formal literature studies, but nowhere near as informed as you seem to be). That is, he's writing a text that is about text and what it means. All well and good (though my man John Gardner hates that stuff -- another aside, sorry).

So, it would seem to be a really bad idea to take, say, Viriconium, turn it into a game that features as a major part of its "aboutness" text and words. Hence, Harrison's claim that doing so is a category error. I get that, even more so than when you first made the point in another thread. Hopefully, Viriconium is about other stuff, too. So, we might still have a pretty convincing game "about" Viriconium stuff, as well. Just not the textual commentary as much. Maybe.

Anyway, what can we say about this as it compares to role-playing games?

If we have meta-fiction, can we have meta-gaming? A self-reflexive game?

I think I created one, quite deliberately.

I wrote Nine Worlds explicitly to carry this idea. I think it is a meta-gaming role-playing game.

Read this excerpt from an old thread (which is interesting, perhaps because I'm such an asshole in the thread. Yikes. Took me forever to find it, too.)

Matt Snyder wrote: THE MUCH DELAYED NINE WORLDS PREMISE:

Nine worlds can be summed up thusly:

Create or perish.

The game's setting and mechanics force the players to craft creative solutions that go a step beyond "beating up the bad guy." Fail to do this, and you will cease to be, cease to exist in the game (as you're carted off by the Furies). The game codifies creativity in such a way that it forces players to solve situations to explain their incentified use of mechanics. Most importantly, in terms of mechanics, the game converts narration into a kind of winnable currency. This, as I see it, is the game's primary (perhaps only) innovation.

Another take on the premise: How can you inflict your identity on the universe to save it from oblivion?

This is a game about art, the creative processes of art. It's about creation, and therefore in its way, it's meta-hobby game. It's a creative game about creativity -- one aim (though not the only) is to examine the creative process, deconstruct it and parcel the process out in a challenging game format.

Matt Snyder wrote: By creating Severian's memory and winking at the reader that the text understands "itself," Wolfe is creating meta-fiction (which I'm reasonably aware of in formal literature studies, but nowhere near as informed as you seem to be). That is, he's writing a text that is about text and what it means. All well and good (though my man John Gardner hates that stuff -- another aside, sorry).

If we have meta-fiction, can we have meta-gaming? A self-reflexive game?

Nine worlds can be summed up thusly:

neelk wrote: Second, I basically completely disagree with you. :-)

Basically, I don't think rpgs have a fabula. Another way of thinking about this is that I don't think there's any such thing as shared imaginative space. There's a whole bunch of stuff, most of which are inconsistent with each other and even with themselves....

Personally, I find the notion that rpgs are more certain than, say, novels weird. A novel is usually the product of a solitary mind and is a unitary object; that's what makes it an interesting literary strategy for a novelist to meditate upon unknowability. By way of contrast, in an rpg we start in such a desperate and total state of uncertainty that it's artistically fascinating that we are able to have -any- unity at all.

clehrich wrote:

John Kim wrote: Well, I am violently opposed to this. What you're saying is that everything that happens during the actual game is irrelevant -- i.e. what dice are rolled, what the real people say, what the setting is. That the "text" is the imaginary storyline which was produced. So regardless of whether I play out a love scene in detail or just say "she seduces him" -- it's the same "text" to RPGs. And regardless of whether I use D&D or Amber, the text is the fictional facts, not what was actually done at the gaming table.

I didn't say that, John. I said that insofar as we can talk about textuality in RPGs, all we have is fabula. And that is absolutely different from literature, because in literature all we have is syuzhet. But in fact, we don't deal with RPGs as text at all -- we deal with them through all the layers you're talking about. Of course we do. But those are not textual layers -- they are conversational. I am trying to undermine the notion that RPGs are a textual medium -- they aren't. Insofar as they are, they are stripped of the vast majority of what is valuable or interesting about them, such as why we enjoy them or care about them.

clehrich wrote:

John Kim wrote: You're trying to make an arbitrary distinction here over the layers of the syuzhet. But this same thing applies in literature. For example, a written story may contain many asides by the author or narrator which are not part of describing the fictional action. These are non-affective, but they are nonetheless an important part of the discourse.

Those asides are part of the text, part of syuzhet. Viz. Tristram Shandy, which is nothing but an aside. The distinction I'm making is exactly the same as the "ritualization" dimension I made in my ritual essay: we, the players, make an arbitrary distinction between what does and does not count.

Hmm, well, I'm not sure how obvious my intention is, and therefore whether Nine Worlds fits the bill.

The passage I quoted in my previous post is old stuff. The "new" premise of the game is: "Whose world will you live in? The one you create, or the one created for you?"

Now, in-game, it's all about these Archon fellows working for and against the immortal gods of the universe in various ways. It's a game about authority. Who gets to do what, when, and how do they get to do it? Will they support the god who rules the planet? Or not? Will they use magic? Or will they do something else? Will they fail, and let others decide their fate? Etc.

I don't know that I threw in any clever allusions to self-awareness in the game book. (I can't consciously remember anything in the game that's an analog Severian's memory, for example.) But, I really did think about how the Archons in the game and their actions are quite comparable to the process of the players "out of the game." That is, the players are deciding "whose world they will play in -- the one they create or the one created for them" (by a GM, for example).

John Kim wrote:

clehrich wrote: I said that insofar as we can talk about textuality in RPGs, all we have is fabula. And that is absolutely different from literature, because in literature all we have is syuzhet. But in fact, we don't deal with RPGs as text at all -- we deal with them through all the layers you're talking about. Of course we do. But those are not textual layers -- they are conversational. I am trying to undermine the notion that RPGs are a textual medium -- they aren't. Insofar as they are, they are stripped of the vast majority of what is valuable or interesting about them, such as why we enjoy them or care about them.

I'm struggling with what your saying here, because it makes no sense to me. Yes, tabletop RPGs are oral rather than written -- just like plays or oral storytelling. They are also interactive, as many performances are. But that doesn't change the nature of what they are. In the end, there is still a sharp distinction between (1) the words and gestures expressed at the gaming table by real people, and (2) the fictional events which are imagined to occur. (1) is the syuzhet, and (2) is the fabula. It is still true that the syuzhet is the only physical component, the only thing we "have".

And if we discuss play-by-mail or play-by-email games, then the parallel is even more exact. There it is clear that just like in a novel, all we have is words.

clehrich wrote: Those asides are part of the text, part of syuzhet. Viz. Tristram Shandy, which is nothing but an aside. The distinction I'm making is exactly the same as the "ritualization" dimension I made in my ritual essay: we, the players, make an arbitrary distinction between what does and does not count.

Sure. Just like in a theater, noises from the lobby aren't considered part of the performance -- although they may still be distracting. But you put the die-rolling and the decision-making of arbitration into the first layer of syuzhet which is ignored. But the die-rolling is most certainly a part of the ritual. It is a vital part of the text of role-playing, just as much so as the asides in a novel.

...I kinda got lost, I'm just glad to see that you're going with the "we're trying to create Myths", which is what I was saying quite a time back ^_^

daMoose_Neo wrote: ...I kinda got lost, I'm just glad to see that you're going with the "we're trying to create Myths", which is what I was saying quite a time back ^_^

When Chris started his recent round of discussion about Text and RPGs in the "Wild and Untamed Thing" my gander got up (surprise!) and I started typing out notes for a new thread.

This thread beat me too it and -- surprise! -- I misread where Chris was going and see now he was on the same bead I was on.

As far as I can tell, his obsession with comparing RPGs to Text forms is to draw out what is unique about RPGs. And to this I say, "Good." As long as we eventually stop using Text based forms as the form the RPG experience aspires too. (For the purpose of this post, like Chris' comments, I am specifically dealing with Narrativist RPG play.)

Since Chris is well underway here -- with cool new terminology, no less -- I'm going to simply run down my notes in the hope that they'll provide some new angles to view this matter.

[By the way, I'm not claiming I'm agreeing with Chris on all points. In part because he's making so many rejoinders to so many people, on occassion I'm not sure if I know what he's talking about. For example, when he speaks of "retelling" the PRG sessions' story, I can kind of see the value in doing that -- but honestly, it holds no interest for me. It's a case history, like a corpse I might learn something from. But as far as I'm concerned, the living experience of the session is where the action is at. For all i know, Chris thinks the same thing. Even after reviewing his posts, I'm not sure where he stands on some of these matters.]


Let the Text Go

It's been my contention for a while that the RPG experience (in both the making of the session by the players, and the experience of the session as audience) has a lot more to do with the oral forms of drama and oral storytelling. Everybody always references novels (well, Ron and I keep going to movies, but the Big Guns of Fantasy are what people usually grab for). No one seems to have caved under my admonishments about this matter, but I'm hoping to see more headway on this because of this thread.

The conflict of the novel is so often an internal matter. This makes sense in terms of the novel's production (the lone writer), and consumption (the lone reader), all of the transfer of ideas, via text, taking place silently in the writer and reader's head.

Not so RPGs. To really make the conflict (and thus the action, and thus the -- you -- anything that's happening) engaging for everyone at the table, it needs to be in the public sphere. That is, when we play RPGs we're pricking at each other (even if just in play). If the situations are not rising out things said and done between and to characters you're in Turku land -- which is not what most Narrativists are looking for. It's the story revealed between characters that matters. And that's the form of dramatic narrative (movies and staged plays), and epic poetry, folk and fairy tales.

I believe people in the RPG world keep turning to big fat novels because a) we're a literate lot and b) they are some of the books that made us want to play RPGs ("Wow, a rich world that goes even beyond the story! I'd like to hang out there for a while!") But I think -- again, in terms of Narrativis -- the delight of watching a stage play (a good one, of course), or hearing a really great fairy tale -- has more to do with the audience half of being in an RPG session.

Also, I think we live in a time of Text Fetishism -- a time that's winding down. And I think people aspire to making their games like Big Fat Books -- because that's the best thing one can aspire to. Or so goes the common wisdom. I disagree. And I especially disagree about this matter for RPGs. The games aren't like books. They're like an epic poem told to a community that cares about the tale, where the audience adds in details that becomes part of the narrative woven by the Poet that night. (A common practice once, for epic poets, and clearly a distant uncle of the Narrativist RPG experience.)


Stop Focusing on All the Stuff

Yes, there are character sheets. And yes, there are rule books and maps. But to say that's what an RPG is is like saying a movie is the camera, film stock and make up. You might view movies this way. But I can guarantee you most audience members don’t. And what at stake here, as far as I'm concerned, is the reception of the RPG play in his audience member half. We do all the stuff with the dice and the maps to make something happen. And that making something happen is receiving a -- well, I'm going to say -- story.

(I have to say, Chris' obsession with the turning and twisting of the concept of "Fiction" and "Story" leaves me a little non-plussed. I'm not talking about a transcript text here resulting in a publishable story. I'm just saying, in Narrativism, there are characters, doing things, with a piling up of details, that influence the next set of details. The fact that there's chatter doesn't change this, nor do all the tools and toys that let the game occur. A film crew making a movie is the audience as well as the makers of a story in progress, with tons of "distractions" from the "story." BUT, if everyone is doing their job right, they're feeling their way through the story, even if it's shot out of context. For some reason the idea that there's a compass called "The Story" that is the guiding element of all the actins (IC/OOC/Whatever) doesn't seem that complicated to me.)


Myth -- the Real Stuff, Not the Dusty Stuff

This occurred to me after reading the Moose in the City Actual Play thread posted after GenCon. I didn't say anything about it, cause I thought no one would take it seriously. But now seems the time.

Ron, in one of the posts, commented on the thread, "Think about how much TV is crappy and how much everybody really would like to be able, week by week, to watch at least one excellent show. Think about how fast word spreads through our culture when such a show appears."

I thought several things quickly reading that:

1) "Yeah, of course you thought it was great. You were your own focus group!"
2) "Yeah, of course great shows spread the word fast -- and then they're cancelled in three weeks." (One of the reason, honestly, I simply stopped thinking about TV as a fun thing to do with my time.)
3) "Uh. You know. That focus group thing. That's important. There's really no way to believe Moose in the City would get enough audience nationwide to last on the air. But it sure as hell meant a lot to these guys."
4) "Oh. Jeez. They are their own focus group. They are a community, at least for the duration of the story, telling a story, creating a story, with each of them having input, that creates a story that means a lot to THEM."
5) "Like myths use to do. Where the nature, subject matter and telling of the myth was defined by the community needs and desires."

I realized then that hard-core Narrativist play is a form of "live-wire" myth. Not myth in the sense of "here's a cool old story that's cool because it's cool," but myth as in, "This is a story that says what we as a people value."

The same story produced in play might be meaningless to other people. And that's fine. And this is the Great Strength and Value of Narrativist RPG play over moves and published lit. Movies and publishing, for the most part, mind you, strive to reach the greatest market possible. And in striving for that, you often end up with the kind of TV that Ron decries the quote above. Most TV gets by on technique, but not meaning that cuts to the heart of the viewer. Narrativist Gaming can go directly to the heart of the audience, because the makers are the audience, and they have no responsibility to anyone but their own community.

I'd offer that this is why playing with "one-person-removed" (those people who are actually people you like, like you, in your life) are the people you'll probably want to be playing Narrativist games with. Because it isn't about using the rules "right," nor is it about getting the "details" right ("This is how you play Treck," "This is how the story is supposed to end"). It's about sharing and forming a unique tale on the fly that reveals what the group values -- as individuals and as a community.


RPGS are Not Mass Media. Deal with It

As noted above, RPG sessions are not geared to being reproducible commodities.

Good. That's one of their strengths.

They draw on traditions that existed before mass media became the ubiquitous goal.

Like that performance of Hamlet opening night that everyone is still talking about 30 years later, the unique artifact is not an artifact at all but the experience of the event.

There's no shame here. It's just what it is.

RPGs are also unique in that the makers are the audience. But anyone who's acted in a play will tell you -- no big whoop. I know (going back to what I said before about our fetish with Text and obsession with The Big Fat Book) we're used to thinking of story, or art, or whatever, being this "constructed" thing handed down from on high, received for consumption by strangers. But the act of acting gives us another model.

I'm not talking about the audience's reception of the event. And I'm not concerned about whether or not the performance was improvised or scripted.

What I am saying is that to be on stage, in character, in the middle of a dramatic narrative, is at once to be In Character and Out of Character. To be at once making the story happen and watching the story happen. To be able to admire what your fellow actors are doing and be busy doing your job. To be alert to the needs of mechanical business ("Have to set that glass here," "have to catch my light here,") and involved enough to have a emotional life that compels your fellow actors, as well as the audience.

And I'll invoke oral storytelling here as well. We've been trained in the last century to be very respectful and polite when a tale is being told. But the oral storyteller knows he's telling a story, and the audience knows he's telling a story. There would be asides for the community of the audience, as well as, perhaps, specific references to people in the audience ("His hair was as fair as that baby's right there.") The story was not "weakened" by this breaking of the story's reality, but the significance was heightened by the connection to the world of the people. And -- as mentioned -- the audience would also call out details, or ask questions, "And what of Bearhand?" and the storyteller would take a side trip and build that as well.

Remember that this fucking obsession with mimesis -- the idea that we're trying to reproduce the "reality" of the story as neatly as possible -- is a 20th century bugaboo in theater -- and only reinforced with the illusion of film to capture 'reality' and the high literary fiction's delight in the minutia of every day life. Epic poetry, the language of Molieré and Shakespeare's plays, the staging of all theater up until the end of the 19th century and a host of other "false" conventions all depended on a poetic license (both oral and visual) to communicate their stories to the audience.

[Quick notes: the transition from trusting poetic expression of narrative to the preference of literal presentation began centuries before the 20th century. But the domination of literal presentation won out in the last century.]

[For more contemporary but poetic storytelling performance, check out Mary Zimmerman's work with The Looking Glass Theater Company. Their productions of "The Arabian Nights" and "The Metamorphosis" involve scenes played between actors who also slip in and out of character as narrators to the audience. They move between being emotionally engaged in the story, and imploring the adience, with poetic words and motions, to be aware a stor is being told. Again, I have no idea how Chris would see "story" fitting -- or not fitting -- in here. But by god, the audiences weep.]

RPGs have rougher conventions, but I don’t think they are deal breakers. If the group playing Moose in the City could successfully touch each other's hearts so well, the Dice, Rules, and so on somehow served to support the narrative events. They are part of the Narrativist RPG experience, but not the purpose. The purpose is to share with the community of players -- a small group community, perhaps -- the intensity of bringing to the fore, "This is what matters. This is what we value. This is what we create together."

And how cool is that?

Christopher,

Thank you for this fascinating post. We are definitely on the same page. A few comments, however, as I go along....

Christopher Kubasik wrote: As far as I can tell, his obsession with comparing RPGs to Text forms is to draw out what is unique about RPGs. And to this I say, "Good." As long as we eventually stop using Text based forms as the form the RPG experience aspires too. (For the purpose of this post, like Chris' comments, I am specifically dealing with Narrativist RPG play.)

I believe people in the RPG world keep turning to big fat novels because a) we're a literate lot and b) they are some of the books that made us want to play RPGs ("Wow, a rich world that goes even beyond the story! I'd like to hang out there for a while!") But I think -- again, in terms of Narrativis -- the delight of watching a stage play (a good one, of course), or hearing a really great fairy tale -- has more to do with the audience half of being in an RPG session.

Also, I think we live in a time of Text Fetishism

(I have to say, Chris' obsession with the turning and twisting of the concept of "Fiction" and "Story" leaves me a little non-plussed. I'm not talking about a transcript text here resulting in a publishable story.

I realized then that hard-core Narrativist play is a form of "live-wire" myth. Not myth in the sense of "here's a cool old story that's cool because it's cool," but myth as in, "This is a story that says what we as a people value."

The same story produced in play might be meaningless to other people. And that's fine. And this is the Great Strength and Value of Narrativist RPG play over moves and published lit.

Remember that this fucking obsession with mimesis -- the idea that we're trying to reproduce the "reality" of the story as neatly as possible -- is a 20th century bugaboo in theater -- and only reinforced with the illusion of film to capture 'reality' and the high literary fiction's delight in the minutia of every day life. Epic poetry, the language of Molieré and Shakespeare's plays, the staging of all theater up until the end of the 19th century and a host of other "false" conventions all depended on a poetic license (both oral and visual) to communicate their stories to the audience.

Hi Chris,

For some reason I thought you made a note on one of these hydra-like threads that your were speaking specifically of Narrativism. Clearly I was mistaken!

Second, I can kind of "feel" where you're going with your point about Sim being closer to Myth. All I can offer is that, as you've already touched on, Sim doesn't quite get there. Nar, I think, does -- but in a little way. It's doesn't provide a shared cosmological reference -- as Sim so often does. Nor does it have that, "The world is bigger than you know quality," that often so frustrates me with Sim play -- but, frankly, also has its appeal. I look forward to seeing what you have to say about this.

I'll end on this point by saying, Narrativists could easily give up their concerns about "creating" something that feels like Text -- and be happier for it. This is an agenda of my last post. The bubbliest game around right now is Prime Time Adventures. Which uses as its model what -- ? That non-Text medium of Television. I think that's an important point. Could you comment on that?

And, yes on your raise about mimesis. But I'd add this: One can have delight in the schism between the manufactured tale and reality. Shakespeare's langague being one such a result. This is part of the yolk I'm trying to remove from the RPG experience in that last post. Everyone's trying all the time to make play transparent. Why? How about making the non-mimetic parts fun. (And, clearly, many games do just this.)

(This all, by the way, has nothing to do with "metafiction." Metafiction is a technique that constantly points to itself that says, "This is a story. In fact, what we're really writing and reading about right now is a little essay about story." Shakespeare's language or Severians' memory is a technique used to tell the story. If one wants to think about them, and go down rabbit holes -- which is fun! -- one can. But they don't make the tale metafiction (or, by that definition, all fiction is metafiction!). To see the classic example of metafiction, check out Barth's "In the Funhouse." It's got charts that diagram the progress of the lover's romance embedded between paragraphs!)

Finally, on a contrary note (or at least a question), why do you consider Nar more mimetic in its goals than Sim? Why do you think it is striving for something like Text by definition? At this moment I just don't see it having to be this way. I know your essay is coming, but at this moment it seems a strange jump.

The difference for me may well be this: These may not be the times for the Big Myth(tm). And while Sim play may strive for it, times may be too fractured in terms of culture, faith and whatnot for Big Myth to be reached, Nar play offers the Little Myth(tm), something of import for those players, the small, temporary community at hand.

I'll agree that many Nar players are reaching for Text-based style validation (as are usually Sim players). But I'd argue, again, there's no need to go there. And all would be happier -- and perhaps amazed -- with the results if they cut that cord.

Best,

Christopher

PS I just realized that in issues of mimesis, we're talking techniques. But, if I'm getting this right, the Big Three Modes are now defined independently of techniques! So, what I'm referring to about Sim issues and Nar issues may not be such -- but only the "habits" or techniques I associate with one or the other.

For example, up until the 20th century, theater used aggressive scene framing. When a servent needed to deliver a message to the king, he shot up on stage, the scene began. In the 20th century, in an attempt to be more "real" -- you'd start with a character on stage, reading a paper. The doorbell would ring. The person onstage would fold up his paper, cross toward the door. Check himself in the mirror. The doorbell would ring again. The man would get the door. Then pleasantries would be exchanged, (Hello. Hello, how are you...) and then, eventually, the scene would begin. Now, I associate the aggressive scene framing of the first 2000 years plus of theater with Nar techniques, and the "We're going to live out every moment of transition if it kills us," of 20th century theater with Sim play. But -- I'm getting this all wrong because we're not allowed to associate technique with the Modes anymore, right?

Can anyone tell me how I can talk about this stuff anymore? I'm honestly baffled -- since all issues of mimesis are ALL about technique as well as agenda. (Fourth wall theater says, "This story is happening, and would happen even if you weren't here." Storytelling theater (see Looking Glass example in my last post), says, "We're addressing you, because if you weren't here, there'd be no story. We're all in this together." One I associate with strong Sim abitions, the other a practical point of Narrativism -- but in fact, there's no reason to do this. Right?

I'm a bit boggled on this. But I may be misreading the need to be concerned about it.

Hi Chris L and all,

Two thoughts this discussion triggered:

Game rules have parts analogous to fabula and syuzhet:

These are 1) the visual and textual presentation of the rule book, and 2) the rules the reader constructs based on their understanding of it. The writer's art is to form the physical text so a wide range or readers produce a similar set of actual play rules. Or in some cases, to leave ambiguity in specific places that allows the reader to project their own content.

The point being: this dichotomy is a valuable thing to keep in mind when writing a rule book (or novel, essay, email, etc.)


Second: I've never held that the act of roleplaying was like a finished text. However, I do believe that the act of roleplaying shares a great deal with the act of _creating_ a text.

[EDIT]There's a process of producing and selecting elements, and a finished result. Granted an rpg only produces a memory, usually boiled down to fabula, while writing produces a record which become the syuzhet for another person. In a sense, roleplaying and writing are mirrors of each other.[/EDIT]

Christopher Kubasik wrote: I'll end on this point by saying, Narrativists could easily give up their concerns about "creating" something that feels like Text -- and be happier for it. This is an agenda of my last post. The bubbliest game around right now is Prime Time Adventures. Which uses as its model what -- ? That non-Text medium of Television. I think that's an important point. Could you comment on that?

And, yes on your raise about mimesis. But I'd add this: One can have delight in the schism between the manufactured tale and reality. Shakespeare's langague being one such a result. This is part of the yolk I'm trying to remove from the RPG experience in that last post. Everyone's trying all the time to make play transparent. Why? How about making the non-mimetic parts fun. (And, clearly, many games do just this.)

Finally, on a contrary note (or at least a question), why do you consider Nar more mimetic in its goals than Sim? Why do you think it is striving for something like Text by definition? At this moment I just don't see it having to be this way. I know your essay is coming, but at this moment it seems a strange jump.

The difference for me may well be this: These may not be the times for the Big Myth(tm). And while Sim play may strive for it, times may be too fractured in terms of culture, faith and whatnot for Big Myth to be reached, Nar play offers the Little Myth(tm), something of import for those players, the small, temporary community at hand.

I'll agree that many Nar players are reaching for Text-based style validation (as are usually Sim players). But I'd argue, again, there's no need to go there. And all would be happier -- and perhaps amazed -- with the results if they cut that cord.

Can anyone tell me how I can talk about this stuff anymore? I'm honestly baffled -- since all issues of mimesis are ALL about technique as well as agenda. (Fourth wall theater says, "This story is happening, and would happen even if you weren't here." Storytelling theater (see Looking Glass example in my last post), says, "We're addressing you, because if you weren't here, there'd be no story. We're all in this together." One I associate with strong Sim abitions, the other a practical point of Narrativism -- but in fact, there's no reason to do this. Right?

Hi Chris,

"What isn't well formulated, though, and what I think you may be getting at here, is that the techniques and so forth have different meanings dependent upon the CA being expressed through them. "

I buy this completely.

As for this statement --

"...but I do think that Nar is more adequately comparable to the kinds of texts you referred to (Shakespeare, Moliere, epic poetry, Chaucer, etc.) than to myth -- or to late prose fiction forms such as the novel."

I do think this is where you and I are simply going to be going down different tracks. I'm specifically not talking about the text alone in such matters. I'm always -- always -- talking about this in terms of performance before an audience (or in production or rehearsal). The experience of language ennacted is always what I'm talking about. I read Homer out loud. And -- I don't know about you -- I've always played my RPGs with mouths wide open.

To me the text in plays, movies, oral storytelling is to serve as a delivery system for social interaction -- interaction between characters, interaction between the storytellers and the audience, interaction between those in the arts who like doing things with other people people the arts.

This matters because I think it taps directly into why PTA is so successful, and perhaps why its success seems so opaque to you. PTA has glommed on tight to the basic tools of straight up dramatic narrative. Which is a different beasts entirely than "Text". Text is what fucking lies there waiting for the scalpel. We have every reason to believe Shakespeare, when originally performed, was done at a clip twice as fast as we present it today. And that no one could keep up with it all then as it flash by. Just like today. Yet the story was still clear. Shakespeare, in peformance, is never under the scalpel. It's quick and alive for the knife. It bolts forward and delivers to the actors and audience a moment that's alive right now -- and then leaps to the next one. That leaping is what dramatic narrative is all about.

Dramatic narrative is all about characters in conflict, manipulating each other through words and actions, to get what they want. The intentions of the story were still clear.

Which, by the way, sounds a lot like players at an RPG session having a good time.

You're going to be approaching everything from this point of view of Text it seems. I'm not saying its worth derailing where you're headed. You seem to be having fun. But I think it has everything to do with why you and I aren't going to be meeting up on this soon.

Imagine TV, Film, oral storytelling and theater as artifacts that you could only experience in performance. Never with a text as a reference, and you'll get a clue as to what I'm on about.

As far as Severian goes -- you're speaking of a "meta-dimension". Which, sure. It's there. (Or not. Depending on how far the reader wants to go.) And I know Wolfe put it there on purpose. I mentioned "meta-fiction", which Matt brought up. I wanted desperately to make sure we're making a distinction between meta-fiction and anything we can go rumaging around in that's there in addition to the story. Meta-fiction doesn't have a story. It is a discourse about story -- without an acutal, engaging story. That ain't The Book of the New Sun.

Finally, back to where you and I are going to diverge.... I'm not a theoritician. I'm a guy who needs to make stories work. So, when you go on about fabula and whatnot, I'm immediately thinking of David Mamet, who would happily tell you (with passion and at greath length), that there's NO difference between the Plot and the Story. What the actors do on stage is the Plot and the Story, and that's all you get. If they're doing some story that has nothing to do with the Plot, you need to cut it. And what the audience watches on stage is the Story. There's nothing before the beginning of the play, there's nothing after. That's it.

I'm not saying he's right. I am saying that this is master carpenter of the dramatic arts (who's read his Propp if I recall correctly; and certainly plenty of fairy tales), and had given lots of thought to "How do I build a play that holds them to the end."

In other words, the actual SHARING at the table between players is what matters more to me than what doesn't get said or does get said. What gets evoked and shared is what matters, because RPGs are a social form. Text consumption is a solitary form.

The Text issue drives me nuts, because if I think about all the extra stuff that happens, say, in a play, or when I've volunteere to tell stories at Children's Museums or Elementary Schools, the story would never get told. We'd be editing out all the lights up in the rafters, the crinkling of the candy next to us, the kids playing down the hall.... But somehow, everyone's still pulling some sort of narrative out of the events.

And here's the kicker: the active performance/telling is as much a part of the event as anything else. I can't tell you how often I had adults sitting down next to their kids for a fairy tale, completely enraptured at a Children's Museum. They were starving for the stuff. And I think this form, and this hunger, is part of what certain RPG styles tap into.

This is a completely different expereience than the reader sitting down to consume a Text -- alone and focused.

See, I have this theory: Form and Function. (Fancy, right?)

Solitary writer writes, delivers to solitary reader. Ergo, the internal life, and calm minutia of detial is what the story focuses on, cause that's the experience of the reader and writer.

Compare this to the rough and tubmle SOCIAL process of making a play or a movie or TV. Which is designed (for the most part), to be delievered to people who have hauled their asses up out of their homes, driven their bodies where they wound not normally be, surround themselves with strangers in a dark room. And what do we get -- story that are dependent on character influencing each other through word and deed. The internal life and minutia is swept aside for bodies and words in motion.

I'd offer RPGs have a lot more to do with the latter, and little to do with the former. And when they try to do the former, they derail.

This is where you and I will, I suspect, disagree on the future of storytelling. I think Text will hold sway for those who want "clever" stories. And I think clever writers will continue to write for clever reders. But I think when pure, old fashioned storytelling, is the providence of once again no-need-to-read performance.

Oh. One last thing. There is a text for dramatic narrative. But in practice, for the experience of the audience, its non-existent. That's why many (and I mean many) people think that their favorite actors are so wonderful -- because they make up those terrific lines.

What matters is the details adding up in the moment. Just like RPGs. And despite the distraction of the Stage Manager having a glass of water in the wings.

All of this, if you look at the experience of the cast and crew of a play or movie -- serving always as audience and makers -- is why I think the form of RPG is best served from examining standing on its feet dramatic narrative. And epic poetry, and fairy tales -- which are all performance specific and altered by the audience when done in its pure form.

I'll leave the issues of myth for your next, thoughtful essay.

Anyway, back to making tables that stand up straight, as it were.

Best,

Christopher

Christopher Kubasik wrote: As for this statement --

"...but I do think that Nar is more adequately comparable to the kinds of texts you referred to (Shakespeare, Moliere, epic poetry, Chaucer, etc.) than to myth -- or to late prose fiction forms such as the novel."

I do think this is where you and I are simply going to be going down different tracks. I'm specifically not talking about the text alone in such matters. I'm always -- always -- talking about this in terms of performance before an audience (or in production or rehearsal). The experience of language ennacted is always what I'm talking about. I read Homer out loud. And -- I don't know about you -- I've always played my RPGs with mouths wide open.

As far as Severian goes -- you're speaking of a "meta-dimension". Which, sure. It's there. (Or not. Depending on how far the reader wants to go.) And I know Wolfe put it there on purpose. I mentioned "meta-fiction", which Matt brought up. I wanted desperately to make sure we're making a distinction between meta-fiction and anything we can go rumaging around in that's there in addition to the story. Meta-fiction doesn't have a story. It is a discourse about story -- without an acutal, engaging story. That ain't The Book of the New Sun.

Finally, back to where you and I are going to diverge.... I'm not a theoritician. I'm a guy who needs to make stories work. So, when you go on about fabula and whatnot, I'm immediately thinking of David Mamet, who would happily tell you (with passion and at greath length), that there's NO difference between the Plot and the Story. What the actors do on stage is the Plot and the Story, and that's all you get. If they're doing some story that has nothing to do with the Plot, you need to cut it. And what the audience watches on stage is the Story. There's nothing before the beginning of the play, there's nothing after. That's it.

In other words, the actual SHARING at the table between players is what matters more to me than what doesn't get said or does get said. What gets evoked and shared is what matters, because RPGs are a social form. Text consumption is a solitary form.

This is where you and I will, I suspect, disagree on the future of storytelling. I think Text will hold sway for those who want "clever" stories. And I think clever writers will continue to write for clever reders. But I think when pure, old fashioned storytelling, is the providence of once again no-need-to-read performance.

Oh. One last thing. There is a text for dramatic narrative. But in practice, for the experience of the audience, its non-existent. That's why many (and I mean many) people think that their favorite actors are so wonderful -- because they make up those terrific lines.

It does.

And let me clarify: I'm not talking about dramatic narrative getting away from text. I'm talking about the text of dramatic narrative being a delivery system for social interaction -- among all those groups I described above.

Trust me, you can't make a movie without a screenplay. But no one wants to read screenplays. Why? Cause it's not a movie! The director wants to be shooting it, the actors want to be peforming it. The only people who actively read screenplays are other screenwriters -- looking for clues on how to do their job better.

On the other hand, folks like Harold Bloom are convinced that performances of Shakespeare ruin the Bard's words. Well, you know. To bad. The sloppiness of life is the sloppiness of theater is the sloppiness of life. Shakespear's text, in my view, is tested in performance, not how well it stands up under way-too-thoughtful scrutiny in the study.

******

As for my misapprehending your main point:

I suppose the confusion I'm having with your words (and it's my confusion) may be this:

"my concern has been largely with the relationship between texts and RPGs. And my assessment is largely negative"

And I'm like, "Yeah. I know. Me, too."

I've been asserting for years that Text isn't the propper model for RPGs. I know there are half a dozen posts on these boards of me saying, "Not the novel! Dramatic narrative! Epic Poetry!" and so on. So for me its a non-issue. To even compare Text and RPGs, to my brain, always seems to be provoking this "Wha --? Why would anyone think this way???" out of me.

I see where you're coming from. I'm just excited about what's coming next.

Oh, as far as the fate of text goes --

Please note. I specifically referenced Fiction there. Check your bookstore sales data: Fiction is down, Non-Fiction is up. I think it's going to stay this way, and I think the trend will continue. There will always be a few storytellers who stick it out in Text, but the critical and publishing apparatus is chock full of folks who want to know they know more than there is to know.

When it comes to delivering Story, there are a bunch of other outlets that don't depend on getting past (no offence meant to anyone here) sensitive introverts who prefer books to life. But that's exactly what the audiences of Stories want -- life turned up to 11. And they'll go where the storytellers are rewarded for delivering such tales -- Theater, Circuses, TV, Movies, and other socially driven, non-literate outlets.

Christopher

I don't have anything much to say here, now that we're really very much in agreement. Unless someone wants to join in on the thread, I think we're probably done here, but let's wait a few days for mulling-over. That is, unless someone posts by Tuesday, let's call it quits.

Just one thing:

Christopher Kubasik wrote: On the other hand, folks like Harold Bloom are convinced that performances of Shakespeare ruin the Bard's words. Well, you know. To bad. The sloppiness of life is the sloppiness of theater is the sloppiness of life. Shakespear's text, in my view, is tested in performance, not how well it stands up under way-too-thoughtful scrutiny in the study.

I would be extremely interested in pursuing the idea that Sim play wants to, and cannot attain, Myth. Especially with the idea that Nar play isn't primarily concerned with Myth, but can attain it none the less. I would also be exremely interested in pursuing the distinction between recorded story telling in which the audience does not feed back into the story (Film, Literature, Television) and "living" story telling in which the audience is able to feedback (RPGs, Theater, Oral Performance). Both of these may be better suited to new threads, though I think that the latter is probably closely tied to textuality.

Here's my take on Sim play and Myth. I believe that Primetime Adventures can be considered to be a Sim facilitating game. The game emulates television melodrama, and every piece of the mechanics facilitates emulating that specific story telling medium. Now, television melodrama, at its best, is chock full of Narrativist agenda. That is, there's Premise, and Issues, and Moral Choice. I have this feeling that playing PTA in a Sim mode may result in the creation of Story, but it results in the creation of a textual form of story. That is, since you are emulating a format that tells story, and the emulation is what drives the story, the audience (the players) are not being "pricked". This isn't their story, this is the story that the medium tells.

The result here is that while the object of Sim play may be ot emulate Myth, the very fact that it is emulating a form that tells story (instead of making story for story's sake) makes it impossible for Myth to actually be created.

Now, PTA can also be seen as a brilliant, Narrativist facilitating game. The focus on character Issues, the way conflict is brought into play, the ways in which spotlight time is balanced all facilitate the concious creation of story.

My problem here is that I do not have a precise enough definition of Myth to make the connection. I believe that Sim play can not create Myth because it can not create Story. However, I do not think that Narrativist play's potential to create story necessitates the creation of Myth as well.

Now, the idea that recorded media is just another form of text. While the fact that film is more chaotic (in that it has more oppurtunities for feedback and iteration, as in Chaotic Math) than "pure" text may allow it to achieve something closer to Myth (again, my definition here is rather fuzzy, and may be seriously clouding the issue), once it has been recorded the final audience has no oppurtunity for feedback. For this reason I believe that film (and any other form of recorded media) is also misleading when used to describe RPGs. I think Ron is dead on when he compares RPG play to a garage band performance, the audince feeds back in real time. This form of feedback is present in any kind of live performance.

I would be rather interested to hear both Chris's and Christopher's takes on that. I don't think either of you would disagree with the idea that recorded media is just another form of text (or that it at least acts very much like text), with the major difference being that it is often intended for audiences of more than one.

Thomas

LordSmerf wrote: I would be extremely interested in pursuing the idea that Sim play wants to, and cannot attain, Myth. Especially with the idea that Nar play isn't primarily concerned with Myth, but can attain it none the less.

I would also be exremely interested in pursuing the distinction between recorded story telling in which the audience does not feed back into the story (Film, Literature, Television) and "living" story telling in which the audience is able to feedback (RPGs, Theater, Oral Performance). Both of these may be better suited to new threads, though I think that the latter is probably closely tied to textuality.

Here's my take on Sim play and Myth. I believe that Primetime Adventures ....

My problem here is that I do not have a precise enough definition of Myth to make the connection. I believe that Sim play can not create Myth because it can not create Story. However, I do not think that Narrativist play's potential to create story necessitates the creation of Myth as well.

In The Provisional Glossary, Ron wrote: Story
An imaginary series of events which includes at least one protagonist, at least one conflict, and events which may be construed as a resolution of the conflict. A Story is a subset of Transcript distinguished by its thematic content. Role-playing may produce a Story regardless of which Creative Agenda is employed.

Transcript
An account of the imaginary events of play without reference to role-playing procedures. A Transcript may or may not be a Story.

Now, the idea that recorded media is just another form of text. While the fact that film is more chaotic (in that it has more oppurtunities for feedback and iteration, as in Chaotic Math) than "pure" text may allow it to achieve something closer to Myth (again, my definition here is rather fuzzy, and may be seriously clouding the issue), once it has been recorded the final audience has no oppurtunity for feedback. For this reason I believe that film (and any other form of recorded media) is also misleading when used to describe RPGs. I think Ron is dead on when he compares RPG play to a garage band performance, the audince feeds back in real time. This form of feedback is present in any kind of live performance.

I would be rather interested to hear both Chris's and Christopher's takes on that. I don't think either of you would disagree with the idea that recorded media is just another form of text (or that it at least acts very much like text), with the major difference being that it is often intended for audiences of more than one.

Mythology: Preliminary Notes

Okay, so here’s a draft chunk of a very long essay I’m working on at the moment. The point of the chunk is to define myth conceptually, using what I consider the current state of the art, which is to say the Mythologiques of Claude Lévi-Strauss. I am happy to debate whether these texts are indeed the state of the art, but that should be another thread.

Ron, if you think this ought to start its own thread, feel free to shift it.

Lévi-Strauss really is a great deal more difficult and complicated than I make him out to be. I have been struggling with these texts for some years now, and this is one aspect of my current understanding of his thinking on myth. I have also read the majority of professional criticism about these works, I think with some understanding, and I believe that very few people have ever fully understood what Lévi-Strauss is up to. I am not at all convinced that I have either, but I do think I’m well along. The two most important and famous exceptions were unfortunately written before the final volume was completed, and thus are somewhat partial and preliminary; they are:

Edmund Leach, Claude Lévi-Strauss (New York: Viking, 1970)
Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)

Also very useful:

James A. Boon, From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972)
Marcel Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, trans. Mary Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)
Andrew von Hendy, The Modern Construction of Myth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)

If you want to read up on this stuff, I would recommend that you start with Leach. Then read Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), unfortunately a dreadful translation but the only one available; if you read French very well you should read La pensée sauvage instead. Then read The Raw and the Cooked, very slowly. Bear in mind that a lot of serious scholars I know consider this book so difficult as to be unreadable, but Leach is an extraordinarily good (if rather hostile) guide. From there, the rest of Mythologiques and these other references are the obvious place to go.

I apologize in advance for the length and complexity of this post. The basic problem, apart from the complexity of Lévi-Strauss’s work, is that “myth” is very much more complicated than is usually realized within our culture. This is not an academic game, but an attempt to make sense of the myths told and manipulated by a large number of tribal cultures around the world, whose total corpus of mythology is larger by several orders of magnitude than that readily accessible to modern Americans and Europeans; the myths are also, as you will see, a great deal stranger to us. The priority for scholars of myth has thus been to describe adequately what tribal peoples are doing; that there may be a partial mismatch with what we commonly think of as myth is a secondary or even irrelevant concern.

Please note a few things in advance:

• There is some context missing here, notably any explanation of why I’m doing this. That’s because this is only a piece of a larger essay. Where I have made an alteration or insertion from the longer form, it is marked in double square brackets [[like this]].
• A few citations and one quote are partial. I don’t have the texts to hand at the moment.
• There are references to the odd term that may well not be familiar to you; the one that stands out to me is Gesammtkunstwerk. I have tried not to use these much, but where I have you should be able to look them up on Google and find considerable material. I do not think that I have ever used terms of art or jargon in any important way without defining them. Please note that I consider any word that can be found in an ordinary college dictionary, not marked as archaic, obsolete, obscure, or technically restricted, as a legitimate word.
• This is not in its final form. Please do not cite or quote from this text outside of the Forge.



----

In [[...]] the four-volume Mythologiques (roughly Mytho-logics), [[Claude]] Lévi-Strauss focuses intently on the myths of tribal America, beginning in the South and slowly expanding to encompass the North. His analysis is rigorous, exceedingly difficult and complex, and demonstrates that the myths are anything but the grandiose morality-plays we have come to expect from Greco-Roman and Norse mythology. Rather, these American myths appear as systematic workings-through of complex cultural and philosophical problems, rendered through a language and a system seemingly quite unfamiliar to us. In order to effect this comparison between myth and roleplaying games [[which is the intent of the complete essay I’m writing]], then, we need first to see clearly what sort of “myth” he has in mind, and also to understand its historical relations to more familiar mythology. [[...]]

The following is what Lévi-Strauss takes as his starting-point for analysis in Mythologiques, the “key myth.” It is chosen, as he says, for contingent reasons; the myth is not more primary, or more complete, or more archaic, or anything of the sort. He claims, in fact, that he could have started with any myth of the several hundred he ends up discussing and reached the same conclusions; that I doubt this particular claim does not invalidate the analyses. This myth is one of many “told by the Bororo Indians of central Brazil, whose territory use to extend from the upper reaches of the Paraguay River to beyond the valley of the Araguaya.” The text is rather long, but is sufficiently detailed that we can see clearly what sort of artistic productions Lévi-Strauss means by the term “myth.” Note that the original text as recorded in his book includes a number of Bororo terms important to his later analysis; I have dropped most of these without editorial remark.

M1 (key myth). Bororo: o xibae e iari. “The macaws and their nest” [1]

In olden times the women used to go into the forest to gather the palms used in the making of [the] penis sheaths which were presented to adolescents at their initiation ceremony. One youth secretly followed his mother, caught her unawares, and raped her.

When the woman returned from the forest, her husband noticed feathers caught in her bark-cloth belt, which were similar to those worn by youths as an adornment. Suspecting that something untoward had occurred, he decreed that a dance should take place in order to find out which youth was wearing a similar adornment. But to his amazement he discovered that his son was the only one. The man ordered another dance, with the same result.

Convinced now of his misfortune and anxious to avenge himself, he sent his son to the “nest” of souls, with instructions to bring back the great dance rattle, which he coveted. The young man consulted his grandmother who revealed to him the mortal danger that such an undertaking involved; she advised him to obtain the help of the hummingbird.

When the hero, accompanied by the hummingbird, reached the aquatic region of souls, he waited on the shore, while the hummingbird deftly stole the rattle by cutting the short cord from which it was hanging. The instrument fell into the water, making a loud noise—jo. Alerted by this noise, the souls fired arrows from their bows. But the hummingbird flew so fast that he reached the shore safe and sound with the stolen rattle.

The father then ordered his son to fetch the small rattle belonging to the souls; and the same episode was repeated, with the same details, only this time the helpful animal was the quick flying dove. During a third expedition, the young man stole some buttore; these are jingling bells made from the hoofs of the wild pig, which are strung on a piece of rope and worn as anklets. He was helped by the large grasshopper, which flew more slowly than the birds so that the arrows pierced it several times but did not kill it.

Furious at the foiling of his plans, the father invited his son to come with him to capture the macaws, which were nesting in the face of a cliff. The grandmother did not know how to ward off this fresh danger, but gave her grandson a magic wand to which he could cling if he happened to fall.

The two men arrived at the foot of the rock; the father erected a long pole and ordered his son to climb it. The latter had hardly reached the nests when the father knocked the pole down; the boy only just had time to thrust the wand into a crevice. He remained suspended in the void, crying for help, while the father went off.

Our hero noticed a creeper within reach of his hand; he grasped hold of it and with difficulty dragged himself to the top of the rock. After a rest he set out to look for food, made a bow and arrows out of branches, and hunted the lizards which were abundant on the plateau. He killed a lot of them and hooked the surplus ones to his belt and to the strips of cotton wound round his legs and ankles. But the dead lizards went bad and gave off such a vile smell that the hero fainted. The vultures fell upon him, devoured first of all the lizards, and then attacked the body of the unfortunate youth, beginning with his buttocks. Pain restored him to consciousness, and the hero drove off his attackers which, however, had completely gnawed away his hindquarters. Having eaten their fill, the birds were prepared to save his life; taking hold of his belt and the strips of cotton round his arms and legs with their beaks, they lifted him into the air and deposited him gently at the foot of the mountain.

The hero regained consciousness “as if he were awaking from a dream.” He was hungry and ate wild fruits but noticed that since he had no rectum, he was unable to retain the food, which passed through his body without even being digested. The youth was at first nonplused and then remembered a tale told him by his grandmother, in which the hero solved the same problem by modeling for himself an artificial behind out of dough made from pounded tubers.

After making his body whole again by this means and eating his fill, he returned to his village, only to find that it had been abandoned. He wandered around for a long time looking for his family. One day he spotted foot and stick marks, which he recognized as being those of his grandmother. He followed the tracks but, being anxious not to reveal his presence, he took on the appearance of a lizard, whose antics fascinated the old woman and her other grandson, the hero’s younger brother. Finally, after a long interval, he decided to reveal himself to them. (In order to re-establish contact with his grandmother, the hero went through a series of transformations, turning himself into four birds and a butterfly, all unidentified.)

On that particular night there was a violent wind accompanied by a thunder storm which put out all the fires in the village except the grandmother’s. Next morning everybody came and asked her for hot embers, in particular the second wife of the father who had tried to kill his son. She recognized her stepson, who was supposed to be dead, and ran to warn her husband. As if there were nothing wrong, the latter picked up his ceremonial rattle and welcomed his son with the songs of greeting for returned travelers.

However, the hero was full of thoughts of revenge. One day while he was walking in the forest with his littler brother, he broke off a branch of the api tree, which was shaped like a deer’s antler. The child, acting on his brother’s instructions, then managed to make the father promise to order a collective hunt; in the guise of a small rodent he secretly kept watch to discover where their father was lying in wait for the game. The hero then donned the false antlers, changed into a deer, and rushed at his father with such ferocity that he impaled him on his horns. Without stopping, he galloped toward a lake, into which he dropped his victim, who was immediately devoured by the Buiogoe spirits who are carnivorous fish [piranha]. All that remained after the gruesome feast were the bare bones which lay on the bottom of the lake, and the lungs which floated on the surface in the form of aquatic plants, whose leaves, it is said, resemble lungs.

When he returned to the village, the hero took his revenge on his father’s wives (one of whom was his own mother).

Quite early in the thousand-odd pages of analysis extending from this key myth that make up the four volumes of Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss notes that the total lack of moral message is really there: “The myth itself...does not render a verdict, since the hero begs for and obtains help from the grandmother, thanks to whom he survives all the ordeals. In the long run, it is the father who appears guilty, through having tried to avenge himself, and it is he who is killed.” In many ways, it is this “curious indifference toward incest” [2] that provokes the whole analysis. And indeed the other myths, the ones he is able to render in this much detail at least, are not dissimilar in style: earthy, crude at times, seemingly incomprehensible, almost amoral, and apparently without purpose. Yet if we are to understand Lévi-Strauss at all, and moreover to make the comparison to roleplaying games, we must have a working grasp of this sort of myth.

Without wishing to reduce any more excessively than is unfortunately necessary the complexity of Lévi-Strauss’s many arguments, we might say, with Mircea Eliade, that “[myth as we generally get it is worked-over by lots of scholars of whatever period; we need to get back to the archaic – [[this is a paraphrase not a quote]].]” [3] To put it differently, the sort of myths that we usually think of—Hercules, the Golden Apples, Ragnarok—have been put in a literary form, in fact a relatively fixed form, and thus their original spontaneous nature has to a great extent been lost. If we are to make a serious comparison of what roleplaying games are about to what myth is about, we must set aside this preconception of literariness and move back into the spontaneous. [[....]]

For this purpose, Lévi-Strauss proposed a little-understood musical analogy. He suggests that there is a kind of spectrum of developmental artistic forms (ones whose performative expressions develop over a span time, as is not the case with painting for example), ranging from music on one end to poetry on the other, with ordinary fiction, literary text that is, somewhere in between and shading toward poetry.

The first issue here is the relation of the form to language, a central issue for him. Poetry is quite untranslatable; its effects are generated not narratively but in terms of the nature of a specific language itself. The only translation possible is a new poem. Music, however, is not linguistically bounded at all; it means (in whatever sense it may be said to mean) without regard to words, and may in some respects be said to be a universal art-form. At the same time, poetry is ultra-representative, representing not only images and events but also sounds, feelings, concepts, and indeed the totality of its language, and very its boundedness in language is also what allows it to capitalize upon and transcend the ordinary limits of language. Music, however, we might call infra-representative, for apart from some few musical movements that tried to render sound-pictures, music represents through only its own form and cannot generate images or language directly. For this reason music is fully translatable but non-representative, while poetry is untranslatable but supremely representative. Fiction thus stands between, but is closer to poetry, because it leans on language to provide representation. And we may say that fiction is to poetry as myth is to music.

Myth, says Lévi-Strauss, is made up of a series of discrete elements of structure, and is non-representational. Therefore it is almost fully translatable; you only need to know what “sun” means in a given culture to be able to render its relations to other things in the myth; at the same time, the totality of what “sun” means may well be an enormous body of connotations having to do with the daily lives and rituals of the culture. Just as music is non-representational, so too are the signs and structures of myth not “about” what they seem to refer to.

Second, music runs on structure while poetry runs on words. For example, the musical fugue is about laying out a theme and then putting it in relation to itself through a number of basic transformations that engender great complexity in the procedure. The object of the game of fugue—once an improvisational form, let us remember—is to take this very difficult situation and, through a set of established rules, come to perfect harmony in all voices. Poetry is not about this at all, says Lévi-Strauss. The point of poetry is to manipulate words and meanings, not structures; the structures are used to generate meaning, not as an end in themselves. In music, one can start with a meaning, but the logic of how the piece plays out is about rules. In poetry, rules are made to be broken and challenged.

Myth, says Lévi-Strauss, is again more like music than poetry. It plays with structure. The objects and events of myth are structural, not meaningful in the representational sense. The myth-teller proposes a difficult problem, not unlike the theme with variations in the fugue, and then he runs with that problem, drawing in everything he knows of the culture that seems to fit structurally—and regardless of apparent meaning in an ordinarily narrative sense—until he has resolved the problem coherently.

One effect of all this that does not seem to interest Lévi-Strauss (though he does not deny it at all) but is very relevant to our purposes with roleplaying games is that music and myth are naturally performed or improvised forms, bounded by rules, while fiction and poetry are naturally inscribed and revised forms. The novel or poem strives for perfection as itself, an object, a totality. Music and myth strive to be workings-through of something, and are in many respects non-repeatable. Two great performances of a musical work will vary a great deal; this is called interpretation. Two copies of Ulysses are identical.

Now analytically, all of this raises an important methodological point that will clarify the whole musical analogy at last. Let us suppose, Lévi-Strauss proposes, that scholars from the far future were to dig over our crumbling remnants and discover a large library of texts, completely intact.[4] They know nothing whatever of our language, and have no way of restoring meaning to its words and phrases. But by very careful analysis, they should be able to discern a number of consistent structures of our written language. First, it is written right to left, then top to bottom. Second, the discrete words (marked by spaces) are semantic units of some sort. Third, from careful analysis of the patterns of usage, they should be able to discern inflection, parts of speech, and eventually our whole grammar and syntax. But lacking a pictorial dictionary, they can never restore meaning to the system—only the system itself.

But one class of texts would initially resist such analysis: orchestral scores. This is because unlike other texts, these go left to right but they do not go top to bottom, since the complete column of all notes is played simultaneously by many voices. And what Lévi-Strauss proposes, and this is very complex, is that myth is like such scores—except laid flat.

Put that baldly, this makes little sense, but it is essential. Let us suppose that each myth is one long musical phrase, performed by a particular instrument. And suppose further that the totality of the American mythic corpus is a vast symphony with a huge orchestra. But all we have is individual voices playing independently: these are the individual myths. If we simply play them all at once, we have cacophony. If we play them individually, we never hear harmony. So the task of the analyst is to discern, in the same way as he discerned the system of grammar and syntax that undergirded ordinary text, the way in which this harmony is constructed. With that in hand, the analyst can, very slowly and with infinite pains, put all the pieces in their right order and their appropriate instrumental voices and restore the complete symphony.

Read correctly, Mythologiques is a prelude to such a construction. A symphony in its own right, but only a tiny fragment of the total resonance of the complete work.

And, says Lévi-Strauss, the natives can hear this work, because they live it. They cannot hear the whole thing, but they can hear rich sonatas and fugues, walzes and mazurkas, operas and lieder. These compositions are woven of the texture and fabric of the rich depth and meaning of their lives, of the world around them. Through an extraordinary and ongoing work that has taken millennia, the American natives have composed their whole world as a musical Gesammtkunstwerk to make Wagner shudder in humiliation and self-pity.

That is myth. And to be clear: I think he’s right.


Notes
1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1964), trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 35-37.
2. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 48.
3. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harvest, 1959), XXX. Note that Lévi-Strauss and Eliade never appear to have referred to each other, although as the two dominant thinkers on myth, both writing in French, working at the same time, both voracious readers, they must surely have read each other. It is perhaps not unreasonable to think that Lévi-Strauss would object very much to this use of Eliade to explain his ideas, but as Jonathan Z. Smith has noted, their methods are not at base dissimilar: Smith, “In Comparison a Magic Dwells,” Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), XXX.
4. This analogy is drawn from “The Structural Study of Myth,” but I have developed it in a direction consistent with the later formulations in Mythologiques: Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), XXX-XXX.

Okay. I think I understand Levi-Strauss, at least as you've presented him here (which probably means I understand nothing, maybe I should learn French). Let me see if I can summarize. I realize that this is probably an over-simplification, so please correct me where I'm off.

First, there are really two uses for the word "myth". There is the "individual myth" which is somewhat analagous to a single part in a piece of music (the first violin or the first oboe). These are the myths that are turned into stories and recorded.

The second use is rougly analogous to the symphony as a whole. It is not a compilation of all the individual myths (imagine playing all the parts from all of Beethoven's symphonies simultaneously), but is instead a careful reconstruction of selected individual myths that are structurally linked.

If the above is true, and there are two distinct uses of "myth", which of these are you saying that RPGs strive to create?

Thomas

LordSmerf wrote: First, there are really two uses for the word "myth". There is the "individual myth" which is somewhat analagous to a single part in a piece of music (the first violin or the first oboe). These are the myths that are turned into stories and recorded.

The second use is rougly analogous to the symphony as a whole. It is not a compilation of all the individual myths (imagine playing all the parts from all of Beethoven's symphonies simultaneously), but is instead a careful reconstruction of selected individual myths that are structurally linked.

If the above is true, and there are two distinct uses of "myth", which of these are you saying that RPGs strive to create?

Ah, sorry, I forgot to define "feedback" in the chaotic math sense. Chaotic math is the basis for "chaos theory" and "feedback" is used to describe two things that must be present for a system to be deemed chaotic.

The first is that it is sensitive to initial conditions. This basically means that two chaotic systems with however small a difference in their initial state will end up with a finite difference between their states and that two systems that are completely identical will remain identical. This is dependent upon the fact that chaotic systems are iterative, which means that they repeat the same calculations over and over with the result being that any small difference in initial conditions is magnified with each iteration. This is where we get the so-called "butterfly effect" where a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo causing a hurricane in New York.

The second part of feedback is that chaotic systems are transitive. This means that any change to the system on any single iteration of that system will have an impact on the next interval, which in turn will have an impact on the following interval and so on. Basically, any change to the system has a permanent (and generally increasing) impact on the system in much the same way as a small initial difference does. The variations are amplified through iteration.

So, any live performance is subject to sensitivity to initial conditions and will tend to evidence transitivity. There is no way to duplicate the initial conditions, and the conditions as the system (in this case the performance) progresses will further change. These changes will in turn impact the remainder of the performance.

Once something is recorded (which I am basically saying is "text" regardless of the actual medium) the initial conditions are now fixed. Additionally text is not transitive, changing the introduction to a text does not change the remainder of the text.

I should note here that chaotic math is a minor interest of mine. As such I grasp only its most basic principles. Therefore, if anyone who is better versed in it sees errors in anything I have put forward I would appreciate correction.

Note: Crossposted with Chris.

Thomas

LordSmerf wrote: Ah, sorry, I forgot to define "feedback" in the chaotic math sense. Chaotic math is the basis for "chaos theory" and "feedback" is used to describe two things that must be present for a system to be deemed chaotic.

The first is that it is sensitive to initial conditions. ....

The second part of feedback is that chaotic systems are transitive. ....

So, any live performance is subject to sensitivity to initial conditions and will tend to evidence transitivity. There is no way to duplicate the initial conditions, and the conditions as the system (in this case the performance) progresses will further change. These changes will in turn impact the remainder of the performance.

Once something is recorded (which I am basically saying is "text" regardless of the actual medium) the initial conditions are now fixed. Additionally text is not transitive, changing the introduction to a text does not change the remainder of the text.

I should note here that chaotic math is a minor interest of mine. As such I grasp only its most basic principles. Therefore, if anyone who is better versed in it sees errors in anything I have put forward I would appreciate correction.

I will answer your questions and then ask one of my own.

Yes, I believe we understand one another when it comes to chaos. You are correct to point out that all of myth collectively, like language, evinces feedback. I would like to highlight that what actually happens is that chaotic principles are applied to myth on all levels. Each individual performance meets the minimum criteria for a chaotic performance, and the behavior of myth on a large scale also meets those criteria.

So, again, I believe we understand each other.

Now, I have only just recently (in the past couple of days) begin to consider RPGs as chaotic. The result is that I am not currently comfortable discussing RPGs as chaotic on the macro scale in the way that we can discuss the entire body of myth as chaotic. That said, I would love to hear any thoughts you have on the subject.

On the micro scale, by which I mean a single role playing session, I believe that RPGs are chaotic in the same way that most active social activities are. Every time I sit down to play a game of Go it is a different game. Social activities are sensitivie to initial condition and transitive.

So it is not so much that RPGs are chaotic, but that social activity is chaotic. I haven't considered the specific applications for RPGs, but I am slowly doing so. This specific part of the topic may need to be tabled for a bit.

Now that I answered your questions, or at least dodged them, I have one of my own. Would would you, or as you understand him would Levi-Strauss, say that myth is like language in that there is a highly structured system that at this point has not been identified. For example, in music we have the note, the chord, the measure, the phrase, and a whole heap of other structure. We are able to analyze music using the concepts. Myth is probably at least a little bit fuzzier, but do you think that similar structures also exist in myth as a whole?

It may not really matter all that much to my next question anyway, but it might.

Using the music analogy, what is the size of a single RPG session? Is it roughly equivilent to a musical phrase? A movement? A single measure? If it is larger than a single note, which I suspect it is, then what constitutes the "notes" of RPG play? Or am I taking the music comparison too far?

Thomas

LordSmerf wrote: Yes, I believe we understand one another when it comes to chaos. ... Now, I have only just recently (in the past couple of days) begin to consider RPGs as chaotic. The result is that I am not currently comfortable discussing RPGs as chaotic on the macro scale in the way that we can discuss the entire body of myth as chaotic. That said, I would love to hear any thoughts you have on the subject.

Would ... you, or as you understand him would Levi-Strauss, say that myth is like language in that there is a highly structured system that at this point has not been identified. For example, in music we have the note, the chord, the measure, the phrase, and a whole heap of other structure. We are able to analyze music using the concepts. Myth is probably at least a little bit fuzzier, but do you think that similar structures also exist in myth as a whole?

Using the music analogy, what is the size of a single RPG session? Is it roughly equivilent to a musical phrase? A movement? A single measure? If it is larger than a single note, which I suspect it is, then what constitutes the "notes" of RPG play? Or am I taking the music comparison too far?

It appears that we understand each other. It seems that we both need a good deal more time to think on the implications of chaos on RPGs. That said, I would like to begin exploring the idea of the "RPG-eme". I understand that you have not identified it to your satisfaction, but I would be interested in at least some exploratory discussion. Unfortunately, after several attempts, I have been unable to figure out where to begin. If you have any ideas I would love to discuss them. If not then I guess we'll just have to come back to the topic after a while.

Thomas

Well, I've got some thoughts for discussion, which you can take or leave.

Can a Game-ete (or whatever it ends up being called) be an action by a single player, or must it be some sort of interaction between two or more?

Do Game-etes make up the entire substance of play, or are they distinct things that develop in the rich, nutritive broth of player-chatter and rolling dice?

Can a game occur without creating Game-etes?

I think that I'm going to have to pass (for now) on your first two questions Tony. I haven't had any time to think about them so any answers I gave would be pretty close to useless.

That said, I think the answer to your third question is important. The "game-ete" (or whatever) is the building block of the game. I haven't really had time to think about this either, but I think that if something doesn't have a game-ete then it isn't a game. In the same way that I would say that something that has no notes or rythm is not music. (Please, don't get too caught up on the music reference, it's imperfect here since music is a bit more complex than notes and rythm.) Basically there is a certain something that games have. Without that something you don't have a game, you have some other thing. That certain something is whatever we end up calling the game-ete.

Thomas

Chris (Lehrich), for the sake of me a mere dog-paddler, could you say briefly what's the "mytheme"? Or would it be more proper to ask, what are some example mythemes?

Like, if you asked me for some example phonemes I could make some for you and show you how sometimes they go together to build more complicated bits of speaking. Same with notes. Same with myth?

Why isn't "the conflict" the RPG-eme? It seems a lot like phonemes and notes to me, in that you build more complicated and meaningful RPG-structures out of 'em, and if you asked me I could show you some examples and how they might go together, and you don't have a game without 'em.

(The character would, then, be like the parts in chorale music: the basses are doing this note and the tenors are doing this other note, that's like my character doing this conflict and your character doing this other conflict.)

-Vincent

My first stab at what a RPG-eme would be:

A single instance of negotiation of credibility. (Credibility as defined by the Lumpley Principle, of course.)

lumpley wrote: Chris (Lehrich), for the sake of me a mere dog-paddler, could you say briefly what's the "mytheme"? Or would it be more proper to ask, what are some example mythemes?

Why isn't "the conflict" the RPG-eme? It seems a lot like phonemes and notes to me, in that you build more complicated and meaningful RPG-structures out of 'em, and if you asked me I could show you some examples and how they might go together, and you don't have a game without 'em.

I think I understand. Thanks!

-Vincent

As a follow-up to the Hidatsa, we can briefly discern the difference between “structure” and “mytheme” there, which may help us with gamemes.

Okay, so in hunting you normally have the following structure (among others):

hunter – weapon – blood – prey

Lévi-Strauss usually would write this:

hunter : weapon :: blood : prey

This is backwards of the usual way of doing analogies, where Giant : Midget :: Tall : Short. But what Lévi-Strauss is getting at is that the relation hunter – prey is mediated by another relation, weapon – blood. In other words, if the relation weapon – blood does not happen causally, that is if the weapon (let’s say a bow and arrow) doesn’t cause blood, then the hunter – prey relation doesn’t happen because the prey never gets nailed.

Now the thing is that each of these terms (hunter, blood, etc.) is empty; it just describes a relation, and anything can be put in it so long as it fits the relation in question:

Hidatsa hunter : bow & arrow :: blood : rabbit

Note that “blood” is no longer just an emptiness, because now it’s really blood, actual red stuff.

Now in eagle hunting:

Hidatsa hunter : ??? :: ??? : eagle

There isn’t a weapon here, and there isn’t any blood, so we have a problem: the relation desired (the hunter gets an eagle) isn’t going to happen if we can’t fill in the blanks. So we notice some things:

Eagle : talons :: blood : rabbit
Hidatsa hunter : rabbit :: (-) blood : eagle

So the eagle is a hunter too, and in the second series there isn’t any blood. So we want to fill in that blank by adding blood – and a bloody rabbit carcass will fit pretty well.

But the thing is, the rabbit isn’t really a weapon, now is it? We’d have to make it into one. So the structure is weak. So we note another structure:

Man : penis :: vagina : woman

And in fact, we find that the Hidatsa use the same expression for the eagle striking the prey as they do for sex. Which suggests, in turn, that the desired hunting relation has a sexual element, where the left side is male and the right is female. So now we can fill it in:

Hidatsa hunter : rabbit/hands (male [because the hunter is a man]) :: blood (female) : eagle

And since there’s an obvious kind of female blood around, we use menstrual blood.

So the mythemes here are especially the right sides of these equations, but really all the things you put into those slots: man, woman, eagle, wolverine, menstrual blood, rabbit (=prey), weapon, etc. The structure is the set of slots and their relations.

When we put mythemes into the slots, and we choose appropriate mythemes for the slots in question (e.g. we can’t put “wolverine” in the “blood” slot), then the whole structure is harmonious and confirms the whole system of our culture.

Please bear in mind that Lévi-Strauss did all of this analysis, in the last post as well as this one, and made an argument about particular ethnographies of the Hidatsa, all in four very short pages. And that Mythologiques essentially does exactly this sort of thing, at the same level of density, for about 1,000 pages.

All of which is by way of saying that gamemes would apparently be things, objects or events that we manipulate and play with in games, but which under closer analysis are actually clusters of potential meaning. We then have structures, which are made up of binary relations, and when we drop a gameme into one of those slots in the structure we constrain the gameme to mean one particular binary relation which was potential in the gameme but couldn’t be expressed except by relation to another gameme within a structure.

But since we’re clever people, as soon as we express one relation (gameme A : gameme B), we notice that there are other reasons for this relation than were expressed by the larger structure A:B::C:D. We may or may not choose to use these, but if we do then we find that A:B::C:D but also A:B::E:F, in which case C:D::E:F, which wasn’t at all apparent before but is now because A:B is mediating the relationship.

Now please bear in mind that I do not as yet see the slightest practical use in this analysis. I’m sure it’s potentially there, but I have no idea what it is or how it would work. I’m formulating all this in order to help us identify what the hell a gameme would be, and what sorts of structures we might be talking about. And if we can do this, I think we’ll have a very different way of analyzing gaming than we have had before, and one that I believe will have significant analytical and practical value.

One reason I think this is that this manipulation of structure seems to me to have a lot to do with what System is. We know from the Lumpley Principle that all the negotiation of what is entered into the SIS is system, and we know of lots of ways this plays out practically. I’m saying that this is the set of rules that determine whether a given structure is understood to be valid, and whether the insertion of a particular gameme into a particular part of that structure is understood to be valid. And thus system is itself a set of structural relations, as we’d expect from this model. By determining or pinpointing how that works at a structural level, we should be able to work out some of how system really works at a deep level, all without going into vague aesthetic criteria like “well, everyone thought it was cool.” Well, sure, but why did they think so? This gets at how Creative Agenda really works, in short, and how it interacts very deeply with Social Contract.

TonyLB wrote: Can a Game-ete (or whatever it ends up being called) be an action by a single player, or must it be some sort of interaction between two or more?

Do Game-etes make up the entire substance of play, or are they distinct things that develop in the rich, nutritive broth of player-chatter and rolling dice?

Can a game occur without creating Game-etes?

First, let me say that I am really resonating with Chris' approach here. He's putting into neat tidy - dare I say academic - form a lot of my own intuitions about What It Is That We Do. This could just be because I'm comfy with Structuralist approaches in myth & religion, but I think he' s cooking with gas.

Now then, a seed for elaboration.

clehrich wrote: Can a game occur without manipulating gamemes? No. But you have to understand, creating such things is almost never necessary: you borrow them from somewhere else, just as the Hidatsa don't bother inventing owl-bears but instead just borrow wolverines. And I think this process of borrowing has a lot to do with Social Contract negotiations about use of genre (in a very broad sense), source material, history of play, personal lives, and the much larger social spheres of players' lives.

One of the really brilliant things about how this structural analysis works is that it demonstrates that it isn't necessary really to invent mythemes or structures; this is the bricoleur who just takes crap out of his shed and puts it together. The total result of this work is a new thing, and it's very much a creative act. But the procedure does not create new pieces: for Levi-Strauss such creation of new pieces is distinctive to the scientific approach as opposed to the mythic approach. I, like many others, am doubtful about this as a claim about science, but with respect to mythic thought it does seem to me that there is no need to invent anything because it's already provided to you by the vast totality of both nature and cultural context.

Mark Woodhouse wrote: Or alternatively - to springboard off the notion that the creation of new mythemes is the work of empiricism - is it that we have too rich an array of possible signs and symbols?

This problem, then, might be the motive for all the accreta of roleplaying games - mechanics, setting-as-text, the "geek culture". A ritualisation of the mythmaking enterprise that defines and limits the symbol-sets deemed appropriate for use in this effort.

Hi guys.

Thanks for this great discussion. Terrfic stuff.

I have some thoughts, Chris. And, really, they're questions. However, I seems to have lost the ability to phrase things as questions these days, and everything's coming out as strong statements. Please bear with me!

One

When you write,

I mean the basic sort of existential angst that lots of people (including me) often feel in the modern world, the sense of being adrift and more or less alone in a world that doesn't really mean a whole lot and over which one actually has little or no control. We seek out small social groups and treat them as worlds -- everyone does this, not just gamers -- in part because such worlds are meaningful and coherent, or can be so. And I think that the Simulationist gamer has a system by which to extend this from a loose, touchy-feely "getting together" sense of meaning into a deep, intricate, rich, and intellectually and emotionally satisfying world.

Oops. Ignore this.

Oh. And this one, too.

Christopher Kubasik wrote: I have some thoughts, Chris. And, really, they're questions. However, I seems to have lost the ability to phrase things as questions these days, and everything's coming out as strong statements.

....
Couldn't that same desire condition and desire be applied to players who gather for a Nar session. I'll refer you again to the "Moose in the City" game I mentioned upthread. I don't think anyone reading the actual play thread of that game could believe it didn't deliver on the goods you describe here.

I believe, again, that in either Sim or Nar play, a "community" is formed that answers the needs you desribe. The methods differ, but I'm not seeing much difference in need and outcome. Thoughts?

How much do the methods really differ? Yes, there are differences. But let's be careful.

You suggest a Sim game works from a world different than our own. But remember the Sorcerer One Sheet -- where the basic structure of a purposefully unique world, with rules and a thematic agenda are laid out for the players to riff on. Nar players are also notorious for getting together for a session before actual play for character creation.

While they may not be drawing on previously established "worlds" they are drawing on materials and mixing them up to their own end (no matter how original), to create a "world" with the bare bones of rules to "immerse" themselves in. (Again, as you point out, not "Immersion.")

The use of Premise, whether named or not, also provides focus. If I set up a HeroQuest character with torn loyalties between faith and a god, and make avenging my priest's death my goal while my family wishes I didn't puruse this (for 800 available reasons that'll make a good "story") I've set up a "focus" -- just like the Sim world. It's all going to be right there on the Character Sheet. It's what the game, and the attention of the players, will revovle around. Same with Kickers, Mountain Witch Fates and so on.

I understand the specific of the "focus" objects are different. But how different are they in Kind when it comes to actual effect?

What about non-subculture play? (And, again, I'm truly asking a question here.)
....
Ron make sure to point out he sometimes plays in public places. In sunlight even! Clearly, part of his agenda is to move this beyond sub-culture round up the wagons status. And yet, as noted in my points above, there's still the a) creation of a unique world, b) rules of world and logic and story (including premise issues) to focus on, c) to create a little community that d) in turn creates a "deep, intricate, rich, and intellectually and emotionally satisfying" story [not "world" as for Sim, but "story."]

Hey Chris,

Did you edit anything except the last few lines? I responded only to the initial version. Don't reply if you only edited the last few lines, OK?

To go back to where this thread started, we can connect this up with literary concerns to do with texts and the process of writing. In other words this is not so much moving forward as going back and rounding up the stragglers.

Where I think people were having difficulty with connecting ideas of roleplaying with the production of literary texts is in terms of the relation between the text produced and the act of producing it--that is to say the act of writing. While the product of role-playing games has relatively little to do with the actual textual product of writing--ie novels and short stories--I see a far closer relationship between the act of writing and the act of role-playing.

I need to qualify that statement carefully, because obviously they do not operate in anything like the same way. Rather writing and its finished product and role-playing and the stories it creates (and also myth-making and myths) are alike in the similar sorts of relationship they produce between the act of making and the product of the act.

Post-modern fiction often deals with this relationship by reflexively referring to the act of its own creation, but this is an act of representation in and of itself (ie the self-referential parts of such texts are themselves representations of acts of reflexivity that may or may not be going on, rather than the acts themselves). A great example of this in action is an essay by Jerome McGann called "The Textual Condition" (in the book of the same name, or as I have it in David Lodge's _Modern Criticism and Theory_ 2nd ed.), which is basically an account of the process of writing the essay that you are in the process of reading.

The point is that the seemingly smooth surface of the text (or even the apparently broken surface of post-modern texts) is the product of a very different process from the text itself. Similarly, in role-playing the 'pure story' produced by gaming (such as we might re-tell to others) is different from the process of creating it. And as Chriis suggests, we can play with and enjoy both levels of this experience simultaneously--both the 'story' and the story-making process--indeed we have to, because we experience both at the same time.

It is in this context that I want to connect up with Chris' argument about the effects of bricolage, structuarlism and simulationism, and in particular the differentiation between a (relatively controllable) myth-making system, and an uncontrollable world. I want to suggest that our role-playing systems do something similar--that on one hand we have ordered, manipulable systems (this is to a certain extent why gamism can work) and we also have the story-output of those systems which is to a certain extent uncontrolled and uncontrollable. At the end, we match this output--the text, the story--with a variety of criteria for the sort of story we were trying to make, and we match the experience of creating it with another set of criteria. I think this has an obvious relationship with the way in which Chris suggests that Sim is like structuralism in that it moves from things to structures, and that by contrast Gamism and Narrativism move from structures to things.

Piers

I'm going to take this off into my own academic territory here. What we're looking at is interestingly similar to one of the other great myth-management systems of our experience: religion.

clehrich wrote: Consider Narrativism for a second. The bricolage procedure here is pre-constrained by an aesthetic criterion of structure: the manipulation of mythemes (gamemes?) must produce a particular kind of structure, which is any structure that is constitutive of Story. Story is going to be defined locally, in reference to the kind of Story we want to tell and the sort of Premise and so forth we have in mind. But not every sort of structure will serve this end, because we in a sense already have a larger structure into which the substructures must fit, and that larger structure is called Story.

clehrich wrote: I'm not exactly sure how Gamism works in this context; any suggestions would be very welcome.

clehrich wrote: ...ritualization imputes an ontological certainty to what it demarcates. The Simulationist's world becomes real.
...
But what I do mean is that the Simulationist provides himself with two universes, both real, both valid. One is meaningful in an intellectually and emotionally satisfying sense, and is controllable to some degree through the ongoing process of bricolage; like the Hidatsa hunter, the Simulationist can perform an action, however mundane or peculiar, and have it "work" within a coherent system of meaning. And the Simulationist has the challenge and excitement of making that work, which is much the same attractive quality that makes myth valuable to actual myth-making peoples.

Mark,

Have you read my article on ritual? (Forge Articles section) I go into some of that territory, albeit only relatively broadly and not particularly taking on GNS sorts of categorical issues.

I think what you're proposing about mysticism makes some sense, but I'd need to be convinced that Nar is an experiential priority. To me the formulation of story is something quite different from the achievement of mystical experience, but I may be misunderstanding or taking the analogy too far.

Chris

Chris,

Yes, I've read your article, although not in the immediate past. A re-read is on my list before I delve into this much more. (I feel like I should go back and dig into L-S again (and maybe Berger), too, but then it would be 2008 by the time I got back).

My notion on Nar=Mysticism leans more heavily on the Now in Story Now than the Story, if that makes any sense. The Nar player wants the meat, the Premise, the direct access to the juice. Aggressive scene-framing. Stripped mechanics. Kickers & Bangs. All techniques that can work in any mode, but they're lifeblood to Narr play, because they get you straight to the Story.

Mark

Mark Woodhouse wrote: Yes, I've read your article, although not in the immediate past. A re-read is on my list before I delve into this much more. (I feel like I should go back and dig into L-S again (and maybe Berger), too, but then it would be 2008 by the time I got back).

My notion on Nar=Mysticism leans more heavily on the Now in Story Now than the Story, if that makes any sense. The Nar player wants the meat, the Premise, the direct access to the juice. Aggressive scene-framing. Stripped mechanics. Kickers & Bangs. All techniques that can work in any mode, but they're lifeblood to Narr play, because they get you straight to the Story.

clehrich wrote: I presume we're talking about mystical (ritual) techniques, more than the theological underpinnings, yes?

I think Mark has the right of it. But, then, I think that Ron had the right of all of this way, way back.

That is, I think that any reading of Ron as saying that narrativism is after a literary, or worse, textual, content is completely incorrect. In fact he explicitly rejects that. Yes, he starts with Egri, but then alters him dramatically precisely because RPGs are not literature. He drops "Story" too. Note that he's repeatedly said that "story now" has little to nothing to do with "story" as defined here or elsewhere.

Narrativism is about making a certain kind of decision. I think it's interesting that Ron has had trouble getting the definion of the qualities of that sort of decision out. But generally it's something like a decision that creates theme by answering a morally or ethically or emotionally interesting question.

Kinda like myths do. No?

What I think you've discovered here, Mr. Lehrich, is precisely the correct definition of what narrativism seeks, which is creation of myth. From all that I've read in this thread it sound so correct that I'm surprised it took me to note it.

Is it "Myth" per se, or per Levi-Strauss? I'm no expert. But it's something with such a similar goal that I can't imagine a reason to create a dichotomy.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: Narrativism is about making a certain kind of decision. I think it's interesting that Ron has had trouble getting the definion of the qualities of that sort of decision out. But generally it's something like a decision that creates theme by answering a morally or ethically or emotionally interesting question.

Kinda like myths do. No?

What I think you've discovered here, Mr. Lehrich, is precisely the correct definition of what narrativism seeks, which is creation of myth. From all that I've read in this thread it sound so correct that I'm surprised it took me to note it.

Is it "Myth" per se, or per Levi-Strauss? I'm no expert. But it's something with such a similar goal that I can't imagine a reason to create a dichotomy.

Chris, again, it's the point that when put to task that "morally and ethically and emotionally" didn't stand up. It became "that thing that Ron is talking about that he doesn't have a term for." Which I think is Myth per your definitions.

Mike

I (at least) envision what Ron's talking about as stories that can stand on their own, with individual meaning for the human condition.

Whereas what Chris seems to be talking about are myths that often make no sense on their own, but take on vibrancy and life in the context of the myth-structure as a whole.

Can you clarify where you think the similarities are?

See, when you look at narrativism in terms of decision making, what do you get? Do you get plot automatically? No. Do you get "Story" in any sense? No. You merely get these little bullets of "theme." Points of random meaningfulness.

This very much matches my play. Yeah, sometimes the stories come to a good conclusion, but I think that's us putting our own expectations on top of the play. That is narrativism can be pushed into being something more "textual" seeming. But at it's core, it's really something entirely different.

I ranted to somebody just yesterday that narrativism wasn't at all about narrative really. It's about player power in the act of creation, but we've never really known in creation of what, precisely. Every time I read Chris's definition of Myth, it seems that's precisely what's happening in my games.

Well, not precisely. I'd put it this way, it's parallel to myth. As we used to say that there were parallels to story creation in narrativism, I'd now say that the parallels are to myth creation. I think that the extra level of self-reference is somehow key in the difference. I mean, what's the act of making a myth? You speak it, no? In RPGs we do the same thing, except we do so according to a set of rules that intend to create myth. Instead of a more reflexive act.

So I guess I'd say that it's the RPG equivalent of creating Myth.

As another argument, Chris, what's the "use" of Myth, socially (ala the thread from a month ago)? I think that the reasons for having myth will match the reasons for playing Narrativism pretty closely.

Mike

My take is that all role-playing attempts to create myth, but the different CAs approach the creation of myth from entirely different angles.

But then you're using Myth locally like we used to use story, Ethan. Meaning that it loses a lot of usefulness as a term. In any case, I'd agree with Chris that gamism doesn't attempt to create myth (assuming he agrees with that).

Mike

Mike,

You've completely lost me. I don't get what you're saying.

Mike Holmes wrote: Chris, again, it's the point that when put to task that "morally and ethically and emotionally" didn't stand up. It became "that thing that Ron is talking about that he doesn't have a term for." Which I think is Myth per your definitions.

TonyLB wrote: I (at least) envision what Ron's talking about as stories that can stand on their own, with individual meaning for the human condition.

Whereas what Chris seems to be talking about are myths that often make no sense on their own, but take on vibrancy and life in the context of the myth-structure as a whole.

Mike wrote: See, when you look at narrativism in terms of decision making, what do you get? Do you get plot automatically? No. Do you get "Story" in any sense? No. You merely get these little bullets of "theme." Points of random meaningfulness.

This very much matches my play. Yeah, sometimes the stories come to a good conclusion, but I think that's us putting our own expectations on top of the play. That is narrativism can be pushed into being something more "textual" seeming. But at it's core, it's really something entirely different.

....I'd put it this way, it's parallel to myth. As we used to say that there were parallels to story creation in narrativism, I'd now say that the parallels are to myth creation. I think that the extra level of self-reference is somehow key in the difference. I mean, what's the act of making a myth? You speak it, no? In RPGs we do the same thing, except we do so according to a set of rules that intend to create myth. Instead of a more reflexive act.

As another argument, Chris, what's the "use" of Myth, socially (ala the thread from a month ago)? I think that the reasons for having myth will match the reasons for playing Narrativism pretty closely.

But then you're using Myth locally like we used to use story, Ethan. Meaning that it loses a lot of usefulness as a term. In any case, I'd agree with Chris that gamism doesn't attempt to create myth (assuming he agrees with that).

clehrich wrote: I'm sorry, Mike, but I think you're caught up in a notion of myth that derives from a very narrow range of textually-formulated tales, notably the Greek myths as normally available to us, or to a lesser extent the Norse myths.

clehrich wrote: To classify and grip intellectually the objects of the contextual world, such that one confirms the social structure in which one lives by demonstrating that everything in the universe proves the certainty and ideal state of the social world. Something like that, anyway.

clehrich wrote: Simulationism, it seems to me, is not about stories at all, in any sort of dramatic or ethical or whatever sense. It's about the manipulation of structure and symbol to construct a sense of order, classification, and totality in the formulated universe it renders. Thus the focus on causality, rules, and consistency, as well as the potential emphasis on faithfulness to a particular set of source materials. That description matches myth a great deal better than it does anything else,

Christopher Kubasik wrote:

clehrich wrote: I'm sorry, Mike, but I think you're caught up in a notion of myth that derives from a very narrow range of textually-formulated tales, notably the Greek myths as normally available to us, or to a lesser extent the Norse myths.

Chris,

Mike may or may not be caught up in this.... But I certainly am. Could you break down what you mean by myth?

I was sort of expecting the break down in the Myth article you were preparing... but, here we are, on page 5 and the subject is all around us like swamp water.

I have my guess from the posts you've made so far.... But why guess?

clehrich wrote: To classify and grip intellectually the objects of the contextual world, such that one confirms the social structure in which one lives by demonstrating that everything in the universe proves the certainty and ideal state of the social world. Something like that, anyway.

How does one know if things are "confirmed"? How does one test the ideal state of the social world? Are there examples of people doing things in myths that suppport or break against the social world? Is there not choice in this? Is this not Nar?

And if not, are Myths -- as your defining them -- actually not stories at all, but simply models of how the world is supposed to work? And the purpose of the myth is tell us how we fit in the world and do what the myth says, and that's it?

And if that is what Myth is, what's all the Greek and Viking stuff called?

PS I don't know if the Greek and Viking thingees have moral agendas -- though they have moral issues. That is, they bring up the difficulty of choices in life -- often, as far as I can tell, in no win situations. But not being moralistic is not the same thing as not addressing moral issues. This may or may not be something you'd agree with, but really, I'm having trouble teasing out where you're going with your distinctions here, so I thought I'd get it on the table clear and square.

Michael Brazier wrote: This is where I have difficulty. As you describe it (and, I must suppose, as Levi-Strauss defined it) myth is not an artform, it's a form of inquiry; the purpose of telling a myth is to explain some aspect of the real world. Myth in this sense is a close kin to philosophy and (in modern times) science -- and bears no resemblance to literature, drama, or any other art. The act of formulating, or constructing, a universe out of structures and symbols (that is, making a fiction) is no part of myth at all.

But that act is the essence of role-playing -- every group of role-players, during a session of play, is making a fiction together. Moreover, in Simulationist play the making of the fiction is the focus, the reason why the players are there. Sim players aren't trying to discover structures in the real world. They are creating a structure, not attempting inquiry. It is Narrativist play in which the players are engaged in an inquiry; in Nar play the fiction is a tool, used to expose and examine a difficult question from the real world. Hence, if Levi-Strauss is right about myths, and mythmaking is an inquiry, then no creative agenda is much like myth; but Narrativism comes closer to it than the others, for only in that agenda are the players inquiring into anything.

The distinction between Sim and Nar play is not, by the way, confined to roleplaying. There are works of literature and drama, and treasured works at that, that make no attempt at all to "address Premise", and have no deep moral significance. Examples that come to mind are Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Buster Keaton's The General, and the whole ouevre of the Marx Brothers. The pleasure in watching these works comes from their internal structure, not from their relevance to difficult moral problems -- the same desire Simulationist play tries to satisfy. (And do these works resemble myths? Surely not.)

Chris,

Thanks so much for that amazing reply.

Done and done.

And now, an apology. That post on page 2 you mentioned. I somehow MISSSED it. I really haven no idea how. It's as big as the fucking Pacific Ocean. Yet, I did.

But, by missing it and being all confused, I got the new big post... and now I'm down with you.

Thanks again.

Christopher

Christopher Kubasik wrote: And now, an apology. That post on page 2 you mentioned. I somehow MISSSED it. I really haven no idea how. It's as big as the fucking Pacific Ocean. Yet, I did.

But, by missing it and being all confused, I got the new big post... and now I'm down with you.

clehrich wrote: Levi-Strauss would insist that the division between art and investigation/philosophy/science is a modern one, and it doesn't apply to myth. Myth is both, simultaneously. That's why myth-tellers have to evaluate myths on aesthetic terms, not practical ones.

clehrich wrote: The Importance of Being Earnest is an excellent example of a work of art produced by a guy exceedingly conscious of the modern division between art and inquiry: "art for art's sake." This is very much a modern conception, and it became a rallying cry for the decadents -- such as Wilde. He's trying to create the extreme opposite of myth, if we put something like tragedy or whatever in between. Myth is basically inquiry and/as art. Tragedy is art that inquires in a limited sense, because it inquires about the human moral situation, where myth inquires about everything, such as the structure of the universe. Wilde's work is about art that's art which is about art and produces art and means art. It's completely divorced from utility; as he notes at the opening of Dorian Gray, "All art is quite useless."

clehrich wrote: And so, naturally, they write down a whole bunch of mythic material that's getting lost, because they love it so, and they tell stories with it in the exciting new ways that are possible now that we have writing. See, writing allows you to be very detailed about stories in a way you can't be orally; you can make actual words matter, and play with double meanings and intricate poetic devices, and all that cool stuff.

Michael Brazier wrote:

clehrich wrote: Levi-Strauss would insist that the division between art and investigation/philosophy/science is a modern one, and it doesn't apply to myth. Myth is both, simultaneously. That's why myth-tellers have to evaluate myths on aesthetic terms, not practical ones.

If so, he's flat wrong -- I'm sorry to say it, but I must. The myth of the Bororos you quoted is certainly a narrative (in the sense that it describes a sequence of events) but considered as art, judged aesthetically, it's a total failure. I'm not thinking of the moral defects of the protagonist; the trouble is the formlessness of the narrative, as a narrative. Judged practically, considered as an inquiry into the structures of the world, it may have merit; but what value it has must be practical, for it has none of any other sort.

Michael Brazier wrote:

clehrich wrote: Levi-Strauss would insist that the division between art and investigation/philosophy/science is a modern one, and it doesn't apply to myth. Myth is both, simultaneously. That's why myth-tellers have to evaluate myths on aesthetic terms, not practical ones.

If so, he's flat wrong -- I'm sorry to say it, but I must. The myth of the Bororos you quoted is certainly a narrative (in the sense that it describes a sequence of events) but considered as art, judged aesthetically, it's a total failure. I'm not thinking of the moral defects of the protagonist; the trouble is the formlessness of the narrative, as a narrative. Judged practically, considered as an inquiry into the structures of the world, it may have merit; but what value it has must be practical, for it has none of any other sort.

I agree that Wilde tried to create pure art, and that The Importance of Being Earnest is at the diametric opposite of myth -- that's why I brought it up. I don't agree that myth is "inquiry and/as art". Your account of myth is inquiry and/as narrative: an attempt to make sense of the world, in the medium of a recounted sequence of events.

Now, that kind of intricate detail is what Wilde, and I, and practically everybody I can think of, mean by art. And it's that intricacy in the details which is the most obvious feature of Simulationism. That's why I equated Sim play to Wilde's drama: "art for art's sake" is Sim's basic principle. The agenda of Sim (the integrity and elaboration of an imaginary world) is as far removed from the agenda of myth as any endeavor can be.

(I do wonder whether Levi-Strauss, or anyone of his school, has analyzed the Kalevala -- which was, after all, an epic poem created from the oral tradition of the Finns, in modern times. Could Levi-Strauss have compared the Kalevala with the Finnish myths out of which it was made?)

Ian Charvill wrote: Chris is writing in English, Levi Strauss was writing in French, the Bororos were speaking in Boe Wadáru. That assumes a French anthropologist with the Bororos in Brazil. You might have to add translated from Boe Wadáru into Portuguese, then into French, then into English. You have to take into account that several people along the translation chain had ethnographical rather than artistic priorities.

[For example, I'm guessing that the bear/wolverine confusion is an artefact of translation]

The second thing is, especially within an anthropological framework, basing an argument on western judgements of indiginous arts may not valid in any case. If the Bororos like that kind of art...

Hi,

I'd like to recommend that those interested in this subject, of myth and structuralism and whatnot, check out the following book:

Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (New York: Shocken, 1995 [1979]).

It'll run you about $8 new and about $6 used, not counting shipping; you can probably find it cheaper if you're willing to search a bit.

The whole text by Levi-Strauss himself is about 50 pages. It's a series of five semi-lectures delivered on Canadian radio in 1977. They were given in English, and he says that forces him to say things very simply. The book is exceedingly readable and approachable, and he explains very clearly what he's all about. And when I say "readable and approachable," I don't mean "insanely difficult but not as nightmarish as some of his other books." I genuinely mean that the book is readable.

Myself, I find the text not terribly satisfying in the end, because he doesn't really explain the intricate theorizing that lies behind all this, but I think it cannot be superseded as an introduction to his thinking. And the fact that each lecture is a little under 10 pages makes the whole thing readable right there: you can read a lecture, think about it, re-read it, and then go on to the next. The whole book can be read in about an hour or so, but it'll take a little longer to really understand.

From my perspective, having read Myth and Meaning, you should probably go on to Tristes Tropiques (get the Weightman translation) and The Savage Mind. But if you're really mostly interested in art and the like, you should first read Look, Listen, Read, then the other two. When you have read The Savage Mind and feel fairly confident about it, go on to The Raw and the Cooked, and take it from there.

But assuming most folks won't want to do this, and I can't say as I blame you, you should definitely read Myth and Meaning. I don't entirely agree with Wendy Doniger's introductory statements, but if you find them useful I don't think they're particularly inaccurate -- I just always disagree with a number of things Wendy does, stemming back to my grad school days in her classes. But in any event, the book is wonderful, approachable, short, and cheap. How can you miss?

clehrich wrote:

Michael Brazier wrote: The myth of the Bororos you quoted is certainly a narrative (in the sense that it describes a sequence of events) but considered as art, judged aesthetically, it's a total failure.

If your aesthetic standards are about narrative, yes, it's a failure. But that's precisely the point: the aesthetic criteria of myth have nothing to do with narrative. They have to do with the adequation of form to content to exterior constraints.

clehrich wrote:

Michael Brazier wrote: I agree that Wilde tried to create pure art, and that The Importance of Being Earnest is at the diametric opposite of myth -- that's why I brought it up. I don't agree that myth is "inquiry and/as art". Your account of myth is inquiry and/as narrative: an attempt to make sense of the world, in the medium of a recounted sequence of events.

But what makes that not art? Is it impossible for an art form to be inquiry in a narrative form?

clehrich wrote:

Michael Brazier wrote: That's why I equated Sim play to Wilde's drama: "art for art's sake" is Sim's basic principle. The agenda of Sim (the integrity and elaboration of an imaginary world) is as far removed from the agenda of myth as any endeavor can be.

I don't agree about the nature of detail in Sim, in the sense that I don't see Sim mechanics and game-world design as equivalent to an intricate poetics and so forth. I do agree that much of Sim would like to claim that it does what it does for no reason other than the activity itself, but I also think this is not actually true. It's part of the ideology of Simulationist play.

Michael Brazier wrote:

clehrich wrote:

Michael Brazier wrote: The myth of the Bororos you quoted is certainly a narrative (in the sense that it describes a sequence of events) but considered as art, judged aesthetically, it's a total failure.

If your aesthetic standards are about narrative, yes, it's a failure. But that's precisely the point: the aesthetic criteria of myth have nothing to do with narrative. They have to do with the adequation of form to content to exterior constraints.

I suspect we are now in violent agreement. Would you accept this as a paraphrase of your point: a myth is judged, in the society from which it came, not as an invention of the teller, but as a hypothesis about the real world; its value is its significance as a discovery, not its structure as an artifact?

Michael Brazier wrote:

clehrich wrote: If your aesthetic standards are about narrative, yes, it's a failure. But that's precisely the point: the aesthetic criteria of myth have nothing to do with narrative. They have to do with the adequation of form to content to exterior constraints.

I suspect we are now in violent agreement. Would you accept this as a paraphrase of your point: a myth is judged, in the society from which it came, not as an invention of the teller, but as a hypothesis about the real world; its value is its significance as a discovery, not its structure as an artifact?

To which Ian wrote: Hmmm. I'm kind of curious about Chris's response at this point, because if that's true I've been significantly misunderstanding things. I thought the whole point was that the value was derived from the structure -- that the value was in recognising, confirming and reinforcing the structural relationships between things.

clehrich wrote: But what makes that not art? Is it impossible for an art form to be inquiry in a narrative form?

If there is no invention, no work of construction, involved in an endeavor, its result cannot, I think, be called "art". And in an inquiry, no matter what medium or form one uses, one wants as little invention as possible. Any structure in the final product that is not an image of the thing one was examining, is a mistake. So, if myth is an inquiry in narrative, it isn't art, because inquiry in general should not be art; it's a category error to judge inquiry as if it were art. (And isn't that part of Levi-Strauss' point? That ethnographers before him treated the myths they recorded as stories, that is as artworks, and thus misjudged them completely?)

clehrich wrote: I don't agree about the nature of detail in Sim, in the sense that I don't see Sim mechanics and game-world design as equivalent to an intricate poetics and so forth. I do agree that much of Sim would like to claim that it does what it does for no reason other than the activity itself, but I also think this is not actually true. It's part of the ideology of Simulationist play.

That's a highly debatable proposition -- it means, after all, that Sim players are basically mistaken about what they think they're doing. So why do you think this?

Also, in what way -- other than the difference of medium -- does Sim differ from a play of Oscar Wilde? Or a Marx Brothers film, another of my examples?

The bricoleur myth-maker, however, doesn't work this way. He starts with the objects he already has, not with principles. And for him, it's the levels of interrelated meaning that are most interesting. So it may well be that you can achieve the desired end with any of the following four objects -- blood, excrement, menstrual blood, toenail parings -- but the thing is that menstrual blood carries a hell of a lot more excess baggage, and if we can get that baggage to support the desired end, demonstrating a kind of subtle homology between eagle hunting and sex, then menstrual blood is a cooler thing to use. In effect, the ideal mythic process would draw on absolutely everything in the entire known universe and set it all to work achieving one end. That's impossible, of course, because the universe is just too damn big and these tribal people pay insanely close attention to very fine details, but that's a sort of hypothetical ideal.

Michael Brazier wrote: If there is no invention, no work of construction, involved in an endeavor, its result cannot, I think, be called "art". And in an inquiry, no matter what medium or form one uses, one wants as little invention as possible. Any structure in the final product that is not an image of the thing one was examining, is a mistake.

clehrich wrote: Mike,

You've completely lost me. I don't get what you're saying.

Mike Holmes wrote: Chris, again, it's the point that when put to task that "morally and ethically and emotionally" didn't stand up. It became "that thing that Ron is talking about that he doesn't have a term for." Which I think is Myth per your definitions.

Okay, but I think Ron does think that this moral/ethical/emotional dimension is central to Narrativist play. Now, are you saying that Narrativism does not have this dimension? Forget about story for the moment. Is Nar play focused on this sort of thematic issue? My understanding is that it is, and Sim isn't. Since myth isn't either, I'm not seeing the link you're making.

If you look back at the descriptions that Ron gives of what it is that "Premise" means as locally defined, he starts by saying it's a moral question. And then people questioned that statemtent, and he backed off to "moral or ethical." People questioned that, and he backed off to "emotionally engaging." People said, "But gamism is emotionally engaging." In the narrativism essay, Ron neatly sidesteps the issue, by using the term theme, and saying simply that premises are the questions that when answered produce theme. But then he's altering the definition of theme from Egri to start as well. So that's almost tautological. In the essay it's about "value-judgements" or even more vaugely, a "point."

So "Premise" at that point became like Obscenity is to the Supreme Court - something without a definition, but Ron knows it when he sees it. Yes, this really is the state of narrativism.

To whit, instead of defining it, Ron has instead taken to relying on people making their own restatement of what premise is to understand it. That is, he's come to understand that his definitions do not suffice for most people, and that the only way that they can come to grips with this is for the individual to restate it in his or her own words. This is even in the essay.

How like myth as defined by Levi-Straus is that?

I've personally often used the term "meaning" as in "giving something a narrativism context means that the decision made will have meaning." Which doesn't suffice, because, of course, simulationism also has it's own sort of meaning, and what's more meaningful than the personal accomplishment of gamism? So it's a poor term, but it drives on something. That goal is what you said the goal of myth is above - to make sense of the world.

Simulationism is concerned with the "otherworld" (to use Stafford's term) of the RPG to have a feeling of "realness" for the player. To the extent that this is a part of the ritual required to produce myth that "sticks" with the soul of the person playing, it could be a requirement, I don't know. But the "explanation" provided by the myth seems distinctly the narrativism part of play.

Heck, if I wanted to get really out there, I've often said in an uncomfortably half-joking way, that I think that Greg Stafford believes that the scenarios he writes are actually heroquests that the players go on to forge myths. I think Greg has a unique insight into Levi-Strauss's concept of what myth is about, as I believe that he experiences it on a day-to-day basis as a practicing shaman (just talk to the man for ten minutes, and you'll know what I mean).

The "self-referential" part of it is that the characters in Hero Quest go on heroquests to "change" myth. The interesting thing about this is that myth in the game exists in a state of no-time. So you aren't ever really changing myth, you're just becoming a part of it in your telling of the myth. I think this is just Greg's way of getting we, the modern western reader, to come to grips with what myth is. And some people don't get it, by the way; I've been confused by it quite a bit myself at times.

I don't think that it's any mistake that I, Ron, and others associate Hero Quest with narrativism. Or that Hero Quest is about myth. Is it a perfect treatise? No, it's got huge gaping holes in it. But I do think that Myth is what narrativism is about.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: But then you're using Myth locally like we used to use story, Ethan. Meaning that it loses a lot of usefulness as a term.

I can see some serious support for that in the phenomenon of trying to explain a story from the game to someone who wasn't there, even another roleplayer who knows the genre and system very well.

I always have this constant barrage of "Oh, but I have to explain this first!" moments as my literature-wired, analytic brain tries to chop off one little bit of the sticky, interconnected morass of the game.

contracycle wrote: Hmm, I'm not so sure I see the distinction as that large. That is, a theory is good to the extent it explains not just this issue here, but also has implications that explain other isssues. At the very least, it must not be contradicted by any existing known thing. Surely the ideal scientific process would also "draw on absolutely everything in the entire known universe and set it all to work achieving one end."

Mike Holmes wrote: If you look back at the descriptions that Ron gives of what it is that "Premise" means as locally defined, he starts by saying it's a moral question. And then people questioned that statemtent, and ....

So "Premise" at that point became like Obscenity is to the Supreme Court - something without a definition, but Ron knows it when he sees it. Yes, this really is the state of narrativism.

I've personally often used the term "meaning" as in "giving something a narrativism context means that the decision made will have meaning." Which doesn't suffice, because, of course, simulationism also has it's own sort of meaning, and what's more meaningful than the personal accomplishment of gamism? So it's a poor term, but it drives on something. That goal is what you said the goal of myth is above - to make sense of the world.

Simulationism is concerned with the "otherworld" (to use Stafford's term) of the RPG to have a feeling of "realness" for the player. To the extent that this is a part of the ritual required to produce myth that "sticks" with the soul of the person playing, it could be a requirement, I don't know. But the "explanation" provided by the myth seems distinctly the narrativism part of play.

I don't think that it's any mistake that I, Ron, and others associate Hero Quest with narrativism. Or that Hero Quest is about myth. Is it a perfect treatise? No, it's got huge gaping holes in it. But I do think that Myth is what narrativism is about.

ethan_greer wrote: I think I see the point you're [Mike] making, but I don't see it quite that way. I think what we're doing is searching for the "It" of role-playing - what it's about, what it produces, what it is. Story was proposed and fell short. Myth seems closer to the mark for me. So, yes, I'm using Myth locally - but that's sort of the point. It loses usefulness as a term to distinguish the different CA, but that's not what I'm going for. I could be misreading what you mean by "locally" though.

Here's the thing: I think that role-playing (Nar and Sim, at least) is about producing Myth - I think Myth is the motivating factor that drives people to participate in the activity. But I think the Myth produced is like a terrarium. From inside (i.e. during play among the participants), the Myth is functional and meaningful. From outside, the Myth is observable but inaccessible and ultimately unable to fulfill any useful purpose to the observer. It's like trying to evaluate the Bororo myth.

Or, better yet, a role-playing group effectively becomes a micro-culture in which (and only in which) the resulting Myth is functional and meaningful.

In effect, in order to understand role-playing you have to do it. Only then are you tapped in to the Myth as part of that micro-culture.

clehrich wrote:

ethan_greer wrote: I think I see the point you're [Mike] making, but I don't see it quite that way. I think what we're doing is searching for the "It" of role-playing - what it's about, what it produces, what it is. Story was proposed and fell short. Myth seems closer to the mark for me. So, yes, I'm using Myth locally - but that's sort of the point. It loses usefulness as a term to distinguish the different CA, but that's not what I'm going for. I could be misreading what you mean by "locally" though.

I may also be misreading what both of you mean by "locally." If I understand you, you're arguing that myth is useful for understanding gaming in general, not for distinguishing CAs. If that's your argument, I think you're right. My initial proposal was that Sim is especially about myth, where Nar and Gam are to a significant degree also doing something else. I suppose that's sort of like the Horseshoe theory: Sim is the mythic baseline, and then Nar and Gam spin off of that to add a further dimension. Thus at that level I suppose it would be best to say that what Ron calls Exploration is myth, but that doesn't seem to match what he has in mind. Am I getting you right, though?

clehrich wrote:

In effect, in order to understand role-playing you have to do it. Only then are you tapped in to the Myth as part of that micro-culture.

This I don't agree with, actually. I think one can analyze these myths from the outside, but first one has to get clear on what the process is -- which is all this stuff about myth and so on. Once you have that in hand, I don't see why you can't analyze RPGs the same way an anthropologist can analyze a tribal culture. Certainly it can't be done without a lot of work and a lot of encounters -- you can't do it just by reading about it -- but I don't see that RPGs are in principle so difficult to analyze.

ethan_greer wrote: Sure you can analyze it. But you won't be able to understand what role-playing is really like based on that analysis, in the same way you can't know what being a Bororo is like based on analysis of their myths. You'd have to go and live with the tribe, learn the language, etc. It's the difference between theory and practice.

That's what I meant by "understand" in the quote above. Maybe I should have said "grok." :)

clehrich wrote: I'd really like to hear what Ron has to say on this one.

This should probably go off and be its own thread, though, because it seems to me that the implication is that Narrativism is not particularly distinguished from Simulationism at all.

If so, then you're right -- Narrativism would be very much comparable to myth. But it seems to me that this would be the case because Narrativism is Simulationism wearing a funny hat.

It seems to me as though these two things are very tightly bound together: the explanation is what validates the system that describes the world, so explanation builds realness prompts explanation and so on.

For me, that was why I thought Sim was the obvious analogy, since as you say the reality of the otherworld is very much the point. But as I see it, any myth necessarily asserts the validity of the culture that produces it, which in RPG terms means that any effective gameplay necessarily builds the reality of the otherworld by legitimating our understanding of it. Something like that, anyway.

Would you agree with Ethan, then, that myth is what RPGs are about?

Mike Holmes wrote:

If so, then you're right -- Narrativism would be very much comparable to myth. But it seems to me that this would be the case because Narrativism is Simulationism wearing a funny hat.

Not getting your argument. Sounds like:

1. Sim gets Myth.
2. Nar gets Myth.
3. Therefore sim and nar are the same.

It seems to me as though these two things are very tightly bound together: the explanation is what validates the system that describes the world, so explanation builds realness prompts explanation and so on.

Well, they're both required, yes. But that's saying that all RPGs require exploration. The question is, when it comes to a point where you have to choose between whether to make the player feel that the process of myth creation is "real" or whether or not to get an "explanation" this is where the two modes break with each other.

Put another way, for sim players all the explanations come from the GM generally, since to have somthing else means that they are creating the myths themselves, which takes away that special value that they have over just any old everday explanation of something. For narrativism, story now becomes "myth now," meaning that the player creates the meaning of the myth, as often as the GM does.

For me, that was why I thought Sim was the obvious analogy, since as you say the reality of the otherworld is very much the point. But as I see it, any myth necessarily asserts the validity of the culture that produces it, which in RPG terms means that any effective gameplay necessarily builds the reality of the otherworld by legitimating our understanding of it. Something like that, anyway.

Sure, but where's the meaning? Sim is about the player acting in a way to create the validity, not the myth itself. The GM creates the Myth with sim.

Um, sim is leader lead myth production, and nar is collaborative myth production. Which is the real method ala Levi-Strauss? Sounds like the latter to me.

... I think that some players play completely divorced from the attempt to create such meaning. A theoretical form of play exists where the players really only want to experience a valid atlternate reality, which might have no "mythic" quality at all (and it's a form of sim). Just to start. Then there's the social aspect which can serve all manner of functions outside of meaning production as has been discussed. I'm sure there's more.

I think we're meaning two different things when we say Myth, Mike. I think this because your arguments about Sim and Nar don't make any sense to me. Total left field here. It's rather disconcerting.

Here's what I mean when I talk about Myth: Myth is an underlying cultural phenomenon. Its purpose is the communication and sharing of abstract cultural ideas. Its importance is diminished, has diminished, with the advent of text and the birth of a text-based society. Role-playing hearkens back to the time before text, when Myth was how we discovered, processed, understood, and internalized culture and one's identity within a culture. People perceive this more basic means of communication at a level that approaches unconsious; they've been doing it since before they knew words. The role-player, intrigued by the hobby's outward appearances or expressed concepts, tries it out and is moved by the experience of role-playing beyond any considerations of "let's pretend" or "let's tell a story together." That's Myth. If I had to place Myth somewhere in the Big Model, I wouldn't. I'd put it outside Social Contract.

Of course, it's possible I'm going on a metaphysical bender.

So, in that light, I make the following observations (which are invalidated if we're talking about different things):

Of course a Sim player is creating Myth - he/she is in the terrarium (from my post above). There's as much Myth creation in a single instance of a player's Pawn Stance as there is in all of a Sim GM's behind-the-screen machinations. It's not about explanations or validity, it's about taking part in a process, a "system" if you will, whose byproduct is Myth, or an attempt at it.

The concept of "Myth Now" is also very problematic for the same reasons - Myth is a much bigger factor in the process of role-playing than "Story Now," which is merely a factor of one of the Creative Agendas.

clerich wrote:

I've personally often used the term "meaning" as in "giving something a narrativism context means that the decision made will have meaning." Which doesn't suffice, because, of course, simulationism also has it's own sort of meaning, and what's more meaningful than the personal accomplishment of gamism? So it's a poor term, but it drives on something. That goal is what you said the goal of myth is above - to make sense of the world.

If so, then you're right -- Narrativism would be very much comparable to myth. But it seems to me that this would be the case because Narrativism is Simulationism wearing a funny hat.

Now this part I don't get. You're making a subtle distinction here and I'm not quite following it. It seems to me as though these two things are very tightly bound together: the explanation is what validates the system that describes the world, so explanation builds realness prompts explanation and so on. For me, that was why I thought Sim was the obvious analogy, since as you say the reality of the otherworld is very much the point. But as I see it, any myth necessarily asserts the validity of the culture that produces it, which in RPG terms means that any effective gameplay necessarily builds the reality of the otherworld by legitimating our understanding of it. Something like that, anyway. I thought this was the point of Sim, but not so much of Nar; by your argument, I think, the explaining and the realness are in effect simply preferential strategies that get labeled as Nar and Sim, respectively, but really they're the same process and ultimately produce the same thing -- which is to say myth.

Hello,

Small and short note: I despise the entire idea that anything is defined as "I know it when I see it." To me, definitions are concrete, transferable, and socially useful, or they aren't definitions at all.

I've never used that phrasing or logic in dealing with Narrativism. To have it attributed to me is not tolerable.

Best,
Ron

ethan_greer wrote: Here's what I mean when I talk about Myth: Myth is an underlying cultural phenomenon. Its purpose is the communication and sharing of abstract cultural ideas. Its importance is diminished, has diminished, with the advent of text and the birth of a text-based society. Role-playing hearkens back to the time before text, when Myth was how we discovered, processed, understood, and internalized culture and one's identity within a culture. People perceive this more basic means of communication at a level that approaches unconsious; they've been doing it since before they knew words. The role-player, intrigued by the hobby's outward appearances or expressed concepts, tries it out and is moved by the experience of role-playing beyond any considerations of "let's pretend" or "let's tell a story together." That's Myth. If I had to place Myth somewhere in the Big Model, I wouldn't. I'd put it outside Social Contract.

Of course, it's possible I'm going on a metaphysical bender.

Of course a Sim player is creating Myth - he/she is in the terrarium (from my post above). There's as much Myth creation in a single instance of a player's Pawn Stance as there is in all of a Sim GM's behind-the-screen machinations. It's not about explanations or validity, it's about taking part in a process, a "system" if you will, whose byproduct is Myth, or an attempt at it.

The concept of "Myth Now" is also very problematic for the same reasons - Myth is a much bigger factor in the process of role-playing than "Story Now," which is merely a factor of one of the Creative Agendas.

Matt Snyder wrote: But, I have read Mike as saying the meaning in Narrativism is in making sense of the real world, to us the humans. By comparison, meaning in Simulationism is making sense of the imagined world. Of course, we might strive to do both in both Agendas, but the emphasis remains. In Narrativism, we're emphasizing results meaningful to our real, human lives. In Simulationism, we're emphasizing results meaningful to our explored, shared environment.

Now this part I don't get. You're making a subtle distinction here and I'm not quite following it. It seems to me as though these two things are very tightly bound together: the explanation is what validates the system that describes the world, so explanation builds realness prompts explanation and so on. For me, that was why I thought Sim was the obvious analogy, since as you say the reality of the otherworld is very much the point. But as I see it, any myth necessarily asserts the validity of the culture that produces it, which in RPG terms means that any effective gameplay necessarily builds the reality of the otherworld by legitimating our understanding of it. Something like that, anyway. I thought this was the point of Sim, but not so much of Nar; by your argument, I think, the explaining and the realness are in effect simply preferential strategies that get labeled as Nar and Sim, respectively, but really they're the same process and ultimately produce the same thing -- which is to say myth.

.... I'm lost as to the how you found (but perhaps no longer do?) Simulation more ... relevant (?) than other modes as it relates to myth. I don't understand, for example, how Simulationism accomplishes what you describe above in a way that other agendas do not. My uninformed position says, "Hmm, sounds like just ol' Exploration to me, so myth is applicable to all agendas here. Neat!" Indeed, that seems to be what you're getting 'round to thinking, maybe?

I rather like the comparison to myth, the notion that RPGs create myth. I think it's a fine way of expressing what has long remained "that unamable thing" that RPGs produce or share like no other media.

Ron Edwards wrote: Small and short note: I despise the entire idea that anything is defined as "I know it when I see it." To me, definitions are concrete, transferable, and socially useful, or they aren't definitions at all.

I've never used that phrasing or logic in dealing with Narrativism. To have it attributed to me is not tolerable.

In "Story Now," Ron quotes with approval the following, originally written by Langdon Darkwood:

In Narrativism, by contrast, the major source of themes are the ones that are brought to the table by the players / GM (if there is one) regardless of the genre or setting used. So, to sum up, themes in Nar play are created by the participants and that's the point; themes in Sim play are already present in the Dream, reinforced by the play, and kind of a by-product.

clehrich wrote: Now I think this is a pretty subtle distinction, a very fine line. The thing is, Sim may claim not to be bringing that exterior stuff into the game, but of course it is -- unless of course the players are actually robots.

Mike Holmes wrote: Well, again, see my comments about this in Beeg Horseshoe 2. I don't actally believe in sim all by itself. I think all play is to some extent actually hybrid, or described in other ways, depending on your opinion of what sim is. Basically they are occasionally mutually exclusive, but otherwise both constantly present.

Anyhow what this points out, however, is that two players may be getting their myth in ways that displease the other as a member of the group. Again, is the player creating meaning in an external (metagame) fashion, or is he only doing so as an internal part of the game process?

Mike Holmes wrote:

clehrich wrote: Now I think this is a pretty subtle distinction, a very fine line. The thing is, Sim may claim not to be bringing that exterior stuff into the game, but of course it is -- unless of course the players are actually robots.

Well, again, see my comments about this in Beeg Horseshoe 2. I don't actally believe in sim all by itself. I think all play is to some extent actually hybrid, or described in other ways, depending on your opinion of what sim is. Basically they are occasionally mutually exclusive, but otherwise both constantly present.

Okay, so just a few "predictions" from this myth model. Obviously they're not really predictions, because I know the results in advance, but this is how the mythic thought approach really pays off for me: it makes comprehensible and even obvious a number of odd factors about gaming that usually seem to require independent explanations.

1. Gam and Nar must recognize from the outset that the guiding aesthetic (the CA principle) is not logically part of the terrarium-world, but rather imposed to give it better order. Thus Gam and Nar are also somewhat less concerned with the coherence and consistency of the terrarium-world, because they have already accepted an overriding concern from outside of it. This also entails that Gam and Nar can be somewhat more overt about the effects and meanings of the myths they create upon their own actual lives.

2. Sim takes it as a fundamental priority that the game-world be tightly constrained, because without this you have no guard-rails to keep myth within sane bounds and the whole thing collapses. This leads to a certain amount of overstatement and a kind of haunting fear of the lines being crossed. For example, I think things like Mazes and Monsters pick up a very real fear in Sim gaming, but invert it: they do exactly what is in a sense least likely to happen in Sim.

3. The fact that we usually associate this kind of thinking with a type of myth that has, for us, become very much a literary form, entails that there is a tendency to want the game to turn into a story. That is, we think that if our game generates a story of some kind of literary quality, this will demonstrate that we have really succeeded mythically. This is not in fact the case, a matter of category error, but it stems from our historical association of myth with moral allegory and tragedy and the like. Thus perhaps the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.

4. The fact that mythic thought really does tend naturally to incorporate everything entails that RPGs, perhaps especially long-running campaigns, increasingly become rich worlds of their own. This can lead to all sorts of subcuture behaviors, because in a sense it is increasingly difficult to see why the terrarium-world is not considerably superior to the real world, at least in the sense of having rich depth and meaning at a human level. I think this is one of the things that is particularly attractive about the fantasy genre, e.g. Tolkien: meaninglessness and existential angst and so on just don't really happen there, and the smallest person (literally, in the case of hobbits) and his personal peculiarities have a real place in the cosmos.

5. To throw yet more confusion into the mix, I should note that the construction of the terrarium, as a limited sphere within social discourse and within which mythic thought will happen in a constrained manner, is exactly what Catherine Bell means by "ritualization," and it has many of the same effects. In particular, the division tends naturally to acquire claims of radical difference or distinction. For example, gamers quite naturally seem to see a hard division between in-game and out-of-game, in-character and OOC, and so on. None of these things would be immediately obvious to an outside observer with no prior experience of gaming, but they are extremely so to any gamer.

6. I suspect that this ritualization, read here also as the assertion of the impermeability of the terrarium walls, will tend to reach its most extreme expressions in Sim, because of the lack of other constraints. Thus we would predict, and I suspect it's the case, that Sim games will be particularly inclined toward rules about speaking in-character, to rigidity about character knowledge, and so forth. AD&D's demand that certain manuals -- such as the Monster Manual -- not be accessible to the players fits this well.

7. One thing that I think is particularly interesting here is that because Sim is naturally inclined, as a relatively "true" form of mythic thought, to run loose, I think the tendency toward very strong GM control is a way of imposing constraint. At the same time, from this analysis it would seem also to undermine the whole point of Sim; this is something I think is very important, and it needs to get worked out. To put it directly, why do Sim games lend themselves to authoritarian GMs constructed as godlike?

8. Given the contradictory nature of the imposition of Gam or Nar preferences over the internal cohesion of the game-world, I think it's not surprising to find, anecdotally at least, that such games do not as a rule run on extremely long. Sim games, by contrast, develop their validity through the ongoing construction of cohesion and complexity, and thus you have the sort of Holy Grail traditional sprawling campaign that runs for years. What's important here is that Sim games often do hold this up as an ideal, whether they achieve it or not, while I do not generally see this in the rhetoric of Gam or Nar.

9. Lévi-Strauss made a weird argument that myth is classifying and ritual unifying. In RPGs, this works simultaneously at contrasting levels. Within the game-world, classification is very important, in the sense that we want to divide up the initially similar into different things. We encounter “a policeman,” and we have a choice whether to keep him vague like this or make him specific, a person. More specifically, this is mechanics: instead of “well, you shoot him,” we want to know what happens in particular. How does this shot happen? How much damage is done? How do we assess the meaning of the shot? All that. So the mechanics assist us in dividing up the bits and pieces we encounter and giving them specificity and structure. By contrast, the unifying ritual effect occurs socially, because the ritual process here is about that terrarium we set up. So at that level, the desire is to come to full agreement and unity about what is happening in the game world, and for us as a group to be a group. Thus the tendency to think that gaming makes us friends, the Geek Fallacy.

Anyway, enough rambling. Thoughts? I feel like we’re getting somewhere, but that could just be me.

Regarding your point 7, why do Sim games lend themselves to authoritarian GMs? Historically, I think this may stem from the style of Gamism that went on in the early days, when games really did need a "referee" in the literal sense of the world. As Sim priorities came to the fore over the years (which occurred as a result of the propensity toward Mythic thought in role-playing) this concept of a GM as final authority was carried along. From a practical standpoint, having one person watching over the terrarium and maintaining the Mythic consistency could be quite liberating for the players, who can push and prod the Myth to discover its boundaries while knowing that someone will keep the whole business from collapsing.

In general, I'm in 100% agreement with you, Chris. I'm also with you on the feeling that this is an important conversation.

For me, my understanding of Myth makes it unmistakably the "It" of role-playing. This is a pleasing discovery to have made.

I guess my question would be, what do we do with this information? Are we navel gazing? Or is there practical application for all this theory stuff? I guess for me the application is my own understanding of and new appreciation for the form. But if we can somehow apply these concepts to game design and/or play, that would be super duper.

Regarding Gamism: I have two thoughts. 1) Gamism doesn't fit in with Myth; it's something else that from the outside looks the same as Myth-based play. I'm not very satisfied with this, but I mention it as a point for discussion. 2) Gamism is about Heroes, Campbell's "Hero's Journey", and that sort of stuff. I don't know if that's particularly valid, but it's an association that I can't seem to shake so I'm airing it.

First, it's not precisely inaccurate, but misleading to say that my version of the Beeg Horseshoe says that Sim is a fundamental part of Nar. What I say is that either Sim does not exist alone in a vacuum, and all play is hybrid, or Sim does not exist at all. To the extent that Sim does exist, it's as a support level for the "realness" of the game world, a threshold below which the player is not willing to go.

Because I don't think that Sim creates meaning in, if you'll pardon me, any meaningful sense. You have it here:

To put it directly, why do Sim games lend themselves to authoritarian GMs constructed as godlike?

I've been following the discussion all along and it's been fascinating, thanks for taking the time to start it and bringing your knowledge of Levi-Strauss to us Chris. I still have a problem in understanding how mythmaking worked for the tribes that employed it and I think my problem relates to the distinction between nar and sim agendas.

I'll quote a little bit of your last example.

clehrich wrote:
One solution is the cargo-cult, but Hainuwele is another. Through myth, we think it through, and we come to a solution. The gifts are shit (thus excreted), and not valuable, so we don't owe the Dutch anything. And if we use the gifts for other purposes (such as trading with our neighbors), we can make them into yams (thus the planting of the body and its turning into yams) which do have value, therefore getting something for nothing. The trick is thus to transform shit into food, and in order to do that we have to refuse direct relations with the shit-givers.

Mike Holmes wrote:
Simulationism - validation of the ritual space in which the myth is created (consecration)

Mike, I think I can I see where you're coming from now, which is a big relief. I don't agree with all of what you're saying, but I can at least understand it.

One disagreement I'd like to discuss:

In sim play, the players do not add meaning, any more than one adds mythic meaning through day to day living.

ethan_greer wrote: Regarding your point 7, why do Sim games lend themselves to authoritarian GMs? Historically, I think this may stem from the style of Gamism that went on in the early days, when games really did need a "referee" in the literal sense of the world. As Sim priorities came to the fore over the years (which occurred as a result of the propensity toward Mythic thought in role-playing) this concept of a GM as final authority was carried along. From a practical standpoint, having one person watching over the terrarium and maintaining the Mythic consistency could be quite liberating for the players, who can push and prod the Myth to discover its boundaries while knowing that someone will keep the whole business from collapsing.

In general, I'm in 100% agreement with you, Chris. I'm also with you on the feeling that this is an important conversation.

I guess my question would be, what do we do with this information? Are we navel gazing? Or is there practical application for all this theory stuff? I guess for me the application is my own understanding of and new appreciation for the form. But if we can somehow apply these concepts to game design and/or play, that would be super duper.

2) Gamism is about Heroes, Campbell's "Hero's Journey", and that sort of stuff. I don't know if that's particularly valid, but it's an association that I can't seem to shake so I'm airing it.

But if we have a clearer sense of what it is we're doing, by really delving deeply into mythic thought, we have a better chance of having our Sim games work actively (rather than what Ron calls "ouija board play," where you wait for "it" to happen).

Mike Holmes wrote: First, it's not precisely inaccurate, but misleading to say that my version of the Beeg Horseshoe says that Sim is a fundamental part of Nar. What I say is that either Sim does not exist alone in a vacuum, and all play is hybrid, or Sim does not exist at all. To the extent that Sim does exist, it's as a support level for the "realness" of the game world, a threshold below which the player is not willing to go.

Because I don't think that Sim creates meaning in, if you'll pardon me, any meaningful sense. You have it here:

To put it directly, why do Sim games lend themselves to authoritarian GMs constructed as godlike?

Because the meaning element has to be added by someone. In sim play, the players do not add meaning, any more than one adds mythic meaning through day to day living. In sim play, the player rejects the metagame, and, sans some other controlling factor, all you get is a facsimile of life in another place.

To the extent that you insist that all creation is, in fact, meaningful, you agree with me that all play of this sort is actually narrativism. This is why I come to Beeg Horseshoe from Ron's theory. When it comes down to it, narrativism is about players creating meaning of some sort from what I can tell.

Here's where you and John Kim have always had a problem with the theory, because you rightly don't see any play by the players as being devoid of meaning. So all play that you, he, and I observe is narrativism to some extent. The only question is to what extent power is given to the players to do this in a somewhat metagame way, or to which they are required not to be storytellers, but merely the interpreters of the acts of characters inside the game.

What I can see are thresholds for these things set at such levels that play of one player will still annoy play of another player. So the model still has predictive power just as it did before. And still, IMO, explains the problems of incoherent play. My "adjustement" to the model is only to get people to understand that narrativism never, ever does with less than complete plausibility. The only question is whether or not the players have powers that make them not only actors in the otherworld, but also "gods" like the GM.

Gamism and narrativism can be completely as plausible as sim. Where they differ is in the maintenence of the illusion that the player is in-game, and that in-game world has some "real" existence. That is, as soon as a player starts making myth, he's no longer the character only, but a god as well. To the extent that this is obvious it may step over the sim threshold.

To put this all in another perspective, if we say that sim can create meaning, then what is it that nar does? Your argument is that it "textualizes" or makes more like literature the myth being created? Well, I simply don't see it that way, that's not my experience at all. Nar is about how obviously metagame the player's power is to create meaning.

Ron, in Story Now wrote: All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story. ...

• Establishing the issue's Explorative expressions in the game-world, "fixing" them into imaginary place.
• Developing the issue as a source of continued conflict, perhaps changing any number of things about it, such as which side is being taken by a given character, or providing more depth to why the antagonistic side of the issue exists at all.
• Resolving the issue through the decisions of the players of the protagonists, as well as various features and constraints of the circumstances.

So I see you as shifting the GNS paradigm here in a way that's confusing. Separating meaning from how meaning is created vis a vis the metagame seems intuitive to me. Saying that they're both creation of meaning, but that one then goes on to make that meaning specialized in some way seems to be creating definitions that weren't there before, and, worse, lose GNS it's predictive powers.

That is, the use of GNS is in predicting incoherence. If we go with your model, we now have to suppose that the players in sim somehow reject the "textual story" that's created by narrativism, because they want to create myth instead. Well, again, if that's the case, then all of the power that I've given to my players has been used to create myth, and my players are all sim. In fact, there are no players who play using narrativism that I've ever seen.

Again, this shows where you and John have a problem understanding narrativism, because you both assume it's something that you've never seen, when, in fact, you have. The people who claim to play narrativism don't sit around the table saying things like, "It would be really cool to end the story with a Faulkner-esqe twist, so let's try to maneuver things so that we can accomplish that." Making a protagonist out of a character merely means making him someone who creates meaning for the players. And nothing more than that.

Where I agree with you and with what John has pointed out so many times before, is that RPGs are not literature, or other media. What they create is, in fact, more mythic than these things, from what I can tell.

Caldis wrote:

clehrich wrote: One solution is the cargo-cult, but Hainuwele is another. Through myth, we think it through, and we come to a solution. The gifts are shit (thus excreted), and not valuable, so we don't owe the Dutch anything. And if we use the gifts for other purposes (such as trading with our neighbors), we can make them into yams (thus the planting of the body and its turning into yams) which do have value, therefore getting something for nothing. The trick is thus to transform shit into food, and in order to do that we have to refuse direct relations with the shit-givers.

My question is one of process. When would the myth be created? In this example you seem to be saying that the myth is created and used to help make the decision on how to use the Dutch trade goods. That would seem to be narrativistic to me, using the created 'story' to make a point.

On the flip side you've mentioned that two entirely different stories can be the same myth, "rotting lizards and exploding grandmothers". It seems unlikely that both could have been used at the same time to make the decision so it would seem likely that they were created after the fact as an oral history. This would seem simulationist to me, with only the gm knowing how the story works out and the players taking the part of the meaningful players in the story. They are expected to act as the symbolic thing they represent, warrior, healer, scoundrel, vampire, etc.

contracycle wrote:

Mike Holmes wrote:
Simulationism - validation of the ritual space in which the myth is created (consecration)

Apart from general agreement with your post, this looks very juicy to me. I think it can be expanded somewhat to explain to the auteur-GM role as well; just as in most cases where an object or space is rendered sacred by some form of ritual specialist, one could see the game space being rendered 'live' by the game-specialist.

And actually it occurs to me further that this insight and knowledge are themselves alien, possessed of an even greater super-legitimacy than that of the presiding officiant simply by virtue of existing as published work, as being From Afar, as being handed down by a Higher Power - the designer. The GM is moses come down from the mountain.

All of which makes the cargo-cult phenomenon of RPG seem inevitable.

I'm not going to comment on the gamist angle just yet but I'm champing at the bit.

Mike Holmes wrote:

But if we have a clearer sense of what it is we're doing, by really delving deeply into mythic thought, we have a better chance of having our Sim games work actively (rather than what Ron calls "ouija board play," where you wait for "it" to happen).

No, see, if we have a "clearer view" of what's happening, then we're playing narrativism. That's precisely what Ron is saying here. Without an intent to create meaning, none is created.

Ethan, no, Sim isn't purer, it's not creating myth at all. That's what I'm trying to get at. Myth requires that the audience, the players in this case, recieve some sense of something like "place in the world" or the like. That's what I mean by "meaning" in this context - precisely what Myth is trying to get at. Which requires only creating the meaning, if you assume that the ritual space is already consecrated. That is, you can create myth with a low sim threshold (what would traditionally be called narrativism) as long as all of the participants agree that it's OK for players to do it in the visible metagame. Uh, call it "somewhat less sacredly" or something.

Sim alone I say doesn't or only rarely exists. What's called sim is simply a high respect for the "in-gameness" of the characters, and does not reject completely the player creation of meaning. But to the extent that it doesn't reject this, it's hybrid narrativism.

clehrich wrote: One thing I could see coming out of this is in mechanics development. Instead of working strictly on causality and "realism" sorts of issues, it might be worth trying to build mechanical models that guide bricolage. This would allow one to construct myth sort of with a net, which helps in a society that's less familiar with the process as a basic activity.

All I can say, Chris, is that you're reading into Ron's statement a whole lotta stuff that isn't there. Ron has specifically said on more than one occassion that "Story Now" is merely the creation of meaning by the player at the moment it happens. It seems to me that all of the other constructs of literature or "story" are added on afterwards, making play like this, if it exists, a subset of the whole of narrativism.

Sim is not about "classifying" or any of that. Exploration does that on a basic level before we ever get to sim or nar. Sim is just the appearance or lack of it, of metagame (or any other such "disbelief suspension" breaking thing). This is why in the 3D model, the only question is that of control of "theme". That is, who's making it.

One purpose of GNS is in discovering GNS incoherence, or rather how to understand the issues so that you don't have a text that promotes such incoherence. It may do other things, too, but it has to do that, or it's not GNS anymore, given that the "mutual exclusivity" of the modes is what makes it a valid theory. Making it adjust to fit your view of it, so that it loses this capacity is, to me, essentially creating an entirely new model that addreses other issues entirely.

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: All I can say, Chris, is that you're reading into Ron's statement a whole lotta stuff that isn't there. Ron has specifically said on more than one occassion that "Story Now" is merely the creation of meaning by the player at the moment it happens. It seems to me that all of the other constructs of literature or "story" are added on afterwards, making play like this, if it exists, a subset of the whole of narrativism.

Sim is not about "classifying" or any of that. Exploration does that on a basic level before we ever get to sim or nar. Sim is just the appearance or lack of it, of metagame (or any other such "disbelief suspension" breaking thing). This is why in the 3D model, the only question is that of control of "theme". That is, who's making it.

One purpose of GNS is in discovering GNS incoherence, or rather how to understand the issues so that you don't have a text that promotes such incoherence. It may do other things, too, but it has to do that, or it's not GNS anymore, given that the "mutual exclusivity" of the modes is what makes it a valid theory. Making it adjust to fit your view of it, so that it loses this capacity is, to me, essentially creating an entirely new model that addreses other issues entirely.

clehrich wrote: Well, I guess to me this doesn't seem particularly narrativistic because the story itself isn't much of a story. I mean, it doesn't seem to have much narrative meaning. You get this chick born from a coconut, and then she shits trade-goods, and then we kill her and get yams. Eh? I don't think this is really what Story Now is about. But at a deeper level of symbolic meaning, what Levi-Strauss calls mythic thought, there is a negotiation of the real world happening here, and that has meaning and implications.

Caldis wrote: On the flip side you've mentioned that two entirely different stories can be the same myth, "rotting lizards and exploding grandmothers". It seems unlikely that both could have been used at the same time to make the decision so it would seem likely that they were created after the fact as an oral history. This would seem simulationist to me, with only the gm knowing how the story works out and the players taking the part of the meaningful players in the story. They are expected to act as the symbolic thing they represent, warrior, healer, scoundrel, vampire, etc.

I don't quite follow the part about the GM and so on, but the clause I've underlined is precisely incorrect. The thing that makes myths so goddamn difficult to understand is that both can be used at the same time, because to the natives it's obvious that these are the same thing. Of course, each also slots into different other parts of the culture, but the core meaning relevant to the myth directly is identical: these are the same relation expressed in different terms.

Caldis wrote: It may not be much as a story but it is an arguement for how the people should act. So if at the point the Dutch showed up and offered the trade goods someone stood up and created this story to try and influence the other tribesmen, it would be like narrativism. They are trying to give the story a moral meaning, teaching others on what is the correct action.

But both would not be created at the same time is what I was getting at. They both may tell the same story but they are kept as oral history, retellings of what happened without value judgement. They were not both brought forward at some tribal meeting as arguements on how to treat the situation. They are artistic endeavours to retell what happened in an interesting way unlike the greek myths that told stories designed to highlight cultural beliefs like valour and courage and show the dangers of pride and arrogance. Those are more like narrativism.

The parallels that I see with simulationism is that players take on characters that act as the symbolic elements in the myths. ... The players try and accurately portray the meaning of the character as initially designed. The gm is the real myth maker and it's his job to bring in symbolic elements such as monsters and bandits in such a way as to create the artistic version of what really happened. Of course there is no what really happened, it's all imaginary, in the gm's mind and it tells a real 'story' at his whim. Of course the problem becomes if peoples ideas of what certain things mean doesnt mesh with the others then no meaningful tale can be told.

My parallels may be off but the point I was trying to bring up and that I feel is still causing a lot of confusion here is that the stories themselves are not meant as tools to make a meaningful statement. The elements within them have meaning and together they tell what happened but they aren't intrinsically designed to say whether this was good or bad. They are artistic documentaries, oral histories.

Summary

Okay, so let me see if I can sort of wrap up the current GNS debate and see where we are. It's time to evaluate whether this thread should keep going, whether we are getting somewhere, or whether we've started to slip into round-and-round stuff. I do think we're getting somewhere, but I think we're starting to get sidetracked. My hope is that we'll all take a breather and think about it for a day or so, then come on back and go for the next big push. I'm not the moderator or anything, but I'm planning to keep quiet for about 48 hours on this thread, starting now.

I started this all off by talking about Nar and text (remember text?), and I don't think I ever made particularly clear what I was on about. I still think that some of Shklovsky's terms might be useful, but I'm going to set that aside. Then we got on to Sim and myth, which for me was intended largely as a contrast from Nar and text. And we've been hammering at myth ever since.

So basically here's where I think I stand at the moment, and then maybe you guys can tell me where you all stand, and we'll take it from there.

On the basic GNS divisions, I think Mike and I are not going to agree, so I'm just going to lay out where I stand and Mike, you take it how you will. If we're pushing for mutual clarity, that's cool, but if our definitions are just not going to meet in the middle we've gotta pass on that one.

Narrativism and Story

Narrativism, Story Now, is easy-peasy. We tell stories all the time, we read them, watch them on TV or at the movies, and so on. We've grown up with them. I don't think Story Now means some peculiar sense of Story, but rather the exact same ordinary off-the-cuff sense that some Joe walking down the street would mean. So if said, "Hey, you saw Terminator, how'd you like the story?" I would expect him to answer me in exactly the same sort of sense as Story is meant in Narrativism. You know, plot and character and stuff happening that leads up to some kind of climax and so on. And stories grip us, maybe because we care about the characters, or maybe because the issues seem important, or whatever. But at any rate, it's a totally normal thing. RPG discourse has gotten rather wound about this, for a lot of complicated historical reasons, but at base there is nothing peculiar whatsoever about Narrativism. It's just playing a game such that you tell stories with it.

Now where I was going about text is just that these narrative forms I think of as primarily textual, mostly for historical reasons. And I think syuzhet and fabula are useful concepts to analyze that with. But I think that at this point going back to the problem of text and orality would just confuse matters; I'll do my deconstructive take on all this some other time, OK? (And, no, before you start, I haven't even gestured in that direction here.)

Simulationism and Myth

Simulationism, however, is extremely peculiar. We just don't really have anything quite like it in our culture these days. It's very much rooted in mythic thought, which died out quite a while back, largely with the advent of writing. Myths aren't at a surface narrative level necessarily about anything, and what they seem to be about often isn't what they're really about. It seems like the myth of the wolverine marrying our distant ancestor and teaching us how to kill eagles maybe sort of means something as a story, but really it's not about that at all. It's about how wolverines are symbolically analogous to the hunter going after an eagle in a precise ritual hunt. It's a way of explaining how eagle hunting works, and why it has to work that way, and also of influencing the hunt to make it actually work practically. None of which is apparent from the story-level content of the myth.

The musical analogy is one of Lévi-Strauss's many attempts to force us to recognize just how strange all this is – and yet how familiar. To us, it's very strange to talk about a narrative form as though it were a fugue, because it seems like it should matter what exactly we say, word by word. But it doesn't matter a damn. All that matters is that the wolverine and the eagle and the rabbit and the blood and the pit all line up and make a good chord progression. The rest is largely incidental. This is why Lévi-Strauss insists on calling this stuff "savage": he never wants you to lose sight of the alienness of all this. Because if you do lose sight of that, you start turning the myths into stories (à la Narrativism) and transforming what they do into what we do. You're in effect trying to tame them, to take their myths and bring them home and tidy them up and make them not dangerous or threatening or freaky any more. They're just a bunch of silly tales told by a bunch of foolish primitives. But Lévi-Strauss is trying to say that these things are nothing of the kind: they're a sophisticated kind of philosophical work that is immensely difficult and demands our intellectual respect. The fact that some myths are also things we can respect aesthetically, even without a lot of experience, just proves the genius of the savage mind.

Now I maintain that Sim is quite close to this central conception of myth. The problem is that we're really not very good at it, and we keep wandering off the mark. So a number of factors get brought into Sim play to keep us focused. These can and should be understood in ritual terms, as a number of you rightly pointed out. And they tend to lead to such things as authoritarian GM's, intricate and overdetermined rules systems, enormously complicated background worlds, and so forth. I think there's a great deal more to be said about this, particularly with respect to mechanics, but we've barely started that conversation – which is a pity in part because I'm convinced that this is where somebody's going to crack open Gamism.

Mytheme and Code

As I try to put all that together, I find myself staring at a problem we raised some pages back, which is what mythemes are. Caldis notes that PCs can be mythemes, and while I think that makes sense I think they're a somewhat unusual example. I'd tend to think that any recurrent object or object-type would be a mytheme, like a gold piece, a sword, a goblin, a dungeon, a 10x10 room, and so on. The trick is that these things mean something a lot larger than themselves, because they are embedded in systems, especially mechanical ones but also historical ones. So for example a gold piece is also worth 1 x.p., which because we know it is relevant. A dungeon and a 10x10 room have a lot of historical weight: they're parts of the classic history of our art form, and so when we walk into a 10x10 room we think,"Oh, I know where we are," even if of course we don't. We just associate a lot of things with it. How long is the wooden pole with probe for traps with? 10', obviously. Paladin? "Detects evil! <ha ha ha>" All of this is incoherent nonsense to any normal person, but to a long-time gamer this stuff is like a vast network of in-jokes and inside meanings. And in hard-core Sim, the point is to develop exactly that network so strongly and cohesively that every damn thing that happens in-game is a signal, a code, that can be interpreted by the culture (that's us, around the table) to have enormous meaning and significance. So what you want is to ride around that bluff: "You see a tall, armored man on a white horse." "Oh shit! Does he cast any shadow?" "No." "Oh my god, it's HIM!!" Now none of this means anything to anyone but the crew of the game, but to them, that's meaning. And it's not a story – it's just a thing, a mytheme. A story might, obviously, stand behind it, or be made out of it, but it's just a thing. In Sim, that's where meaning really happens, just like in myth.

To put it directly, I'd contrast story with code. I was re-reading some Lévi-Strauss trying to figure out what we're all talking about, and I noticed that distinction. He doesn't always stick to it, but for our purposes I think it's very useful. Basically if Nar is Story Now, Sim is Code Now. If that helps, maybe?

Mechanics and Structure

The next question would be what the structures are, and this seems to me the crucial and insanely difficult problem. Certainly mechanics are extremely important structures, but so are a number of other factors about the way we play, the way we talk, and so forth. And I think that the fact that so much of this procedure is so damn difficult for us encourages us to want rigidity and rigor in our structures – which prompts the development of increasingly determinate mechanics. Another point about this is that it divorces the mythic structures from the ritual structures; that is, if the GM authority is a way of keeping our free play within constrained bounds, that's a ritual constraint, but the structures of how combats work or whatever should be structures operative at the mythic level. In order to keep those apart, we formulate rules-systems that we at least claim to interpret as determinate and not up to the GM – he just interprets and arbitrates. So his job is to keep the ritual boundary impermeable; the mechanics' job is to provide us with the structures we need to do our myth-telling. But I really think this is the biggest and hairiest problem to crack: how precisely do mechanics really work to formulate and manipulate mythemes to construct coded meanings? The Lumpley Principle tells us that they do, and that everything that happens in negotiation is part of mechanics or system, but how precisely that works is I think quite another matter.

GNS and Meaning

On the broader GNS question, I think that there has been a confusion of different kinds of meaning. I think it is certainly true that Nar-style stories have meaning (story), and that myths have meaning (code), but I maintain that these are not the same thing. To assert that they are is to claim, as did early scholars of myth, that the natives are just bad story-tellers. They tell these incoherent and confused stories, because they're stupid and aesthetically primitive. Because if what you want is story-meaning, you're not going to be happy with a lot of myths. But if you accept that myth really works at a different level, and that it can only really be judged at that level, then suddenly you're talking about something very different from story. And to my mind, that entails that Nar and Sim are really not at all the same thing, although of course they have common roots and lots of overlaps in actual practice.

A final point is that I maintain that Nar is a functional and reasonable approach to dealing with mythic material in modern times. You do much the same work, but you use it to tell a story, which is basically what Aeschylus or Shakespeare or whoever did. That makes good sense to me. But Sim is basically impossible, as got discussed in Sim-Diceless Thread Search some weeks back. What I mean by this, in terms of myth, is that we can't do myth like this. Myth doesn't work like this. It can't be constrained, and it can't be done on the fly without a cultural "net" to bounce off of, and it can't have someone deciding by personal fiat whether it's OK or not. Myth in a box isn't myth; it's messing about. But I think that Sim wants to do myth, and I think that's in a sense a noble goal. Unfortunately, I think it's also one doomed to failure.

Still Hanging Fire

Where does Gamism come in, anyway? I think it's all about structure instead of objects, but I'm really no further forward on that one. Contracycle? You still champing? C'mon man, I'm waiting with bated breath!

clehrich wrote: Are we on the same page, or am I misreading you? Sorry, I'm just a little lost.

This is somewhat late, and the central discussion is clearly winding up, but nonetheless ...

clehrich wrote:

Michael Brazier wrote: If there is no invention, no work of construction, involved in an endeavor, its result cannot, I think, be called "art". And in an inquiry, no matter what medium or form one uses, one wants as little invention as possible. Any structure in the final product that is not an image of the thing one was examining, is a mistake. So, if myth is an inquiry in narrative, it isn't art, because inquiry in general should not be art; it's a category error to judge inquiry as if it were art.

As in the Michelangelo example, it really depends on what you mean by "invention"; he certainly invented something new, but not a single element in the Pieta is new. As to inquiry, I don't know why we wouldn't want invention in any medium; surely the whole point of inquiry is to find something new?

clehrich wrote: If you mean that we don't want invention but rather discovery, I'm not at all convinced that these are completely at odds; Einstein's discovery of relativity certainly also had an element of invention, of creating something new.

clehrich wrote: Scientific work starts with rules, theory, and whatnot, moves down to things in the actual world, and then comes back up to more theory. [...] what makes scientific explanation really valuable, its ultimate criterion of interest, is the implications for a larger range of questions. This isn't about an explanation's validity, which just has to do with the explanation of the thing itself, but of its value, which is the implications for more theory.

clehrich wrote: mythic thought [...] starts with things, moves up to theory and rules, and then moves back to things in the end. So the validity of the myth, we might say, is again the adequation of theory to object. But the larger value, which is mostly aesthetic rather than practical, is the other things manipulated in the process. The goal isn't, you might say, to explain anything (since the whole process presumes that explanation is possible without significant change to the system) but to connect things satisfyingly.

clehrich wrote:

Michael Brazier wrote: Also, in what way -- other than the difference of medium -- does Sim differ from a play of Oscar Wilde? Or a Marx Brothers film, another of my examples?

On Oscar Wilde, the primary difference it seems to me is that myth is not art for art's sake; it's art that is highly functional, and for which in fact some of the aesthetic standards are functional ones. As to the Marx Brothers, I'm not quite sure what you mean to point to with the example; again, my sense is that those films are pretty much entertainment (art) for its own sake, whereas myths have a deep functional dimension.

It's interesting that I once said to Greg Stafford that Science was simply another religion, and he corrected me. Science answers "What?" and religions answer "Why?"

Science can never help us explain our place in the universe - it doesn't even try. That doesn't make it pointless; it makes it something else.

Mike

Hmm, I may have given the false impression that I had lots to say, when what I mean rather is that I have a lot of nebulous things that have not crystallised and I am looking forward to others input.

But there are some thoughts to raise. Firstly I recall the explicit bounding that occurs in games - the chess board is finite, we draw lines around the football pitch. We mark out spaces and attribute significance to those spaces in accordance with a formal system.

So yes I am interested in structure, although it might be better to discuss process rather than structure, because the hallmark of games are that they are venues for Doing, rather than appreciating.

Hello.

Thread is closed.

Sub-topics should be defined in new threads.

Best,
Ron