Caveat: This stems from a post by Lisa, here. For the purposes of these threads the moral implications of deceit should be ignored. This is really the only way to reasonably discuss these matters.

Self-deception is a very common phenomena among players. This may originate due to miscommunication, willful ignorance, or as a defensive measure to external valuations on how play should happen (i.e. the one true way). However, the end result is much the same. We arrive at a player, and possibly groups of players, who believe they wish to play in one manner (such as Nar) but who in actuality wish to play in another manner (such as Sim).

The typical response of the Big Model to this behavior is to attempt to correct the personal mis-evaluation that these players want to play in a particular manner. In essence this comes to stating that the therapist (Big Model expert) knows more about how the patient plays, then he or she does. The problem lies in the fact that the benefits the therapist presents all rely on the acceptance of this judgement.

Contrast this with many currently successful games:

D&D is considered incoherently designed because it supports gamist play (especially 3 and 3.5) while claiming to support Sim play. Rather than incoherence this could be construed as matching Sim-faux Gamists, who believe they wish to play Sim, but instead wish to actually play Gamist.

The WoD has a similiar incoherence, with purported Nar play constrasting with actual Sim support. Likewise this matches Nar-faux Simulationist, who, likewise, believe they wish to play Nar, but actually wish to play Sim.

A third example, which departs from CA perspectives is GURPS. In this case GURPS purports to be generic, but actually supports a specific tactical / realism form of play. This supports players who believe they wish to play a certain genre, but actually want realistic "crunchyness" instead.

In each of these cases the incoherence can actually cause a "have your cake, and eat it too" situation. This may help explain the reason why incoherent games are popular, rather than claiming that coherent games have simply been to rare or too unlucky.

Considering this the dynamics of player self-deception are certainly relevant to design. On a more positive note, understanding this self-deception is also necessary to learn to gradually remove it. Rather than using jolting corrections, a gradual coming to terms with self-deception will likely aid many players in learning what they actually want in play.

I hope this is food for thought,

-Mendel S.

Mendel,
Discussing player perceptions of how a game should be designed or how someone might want to approach roleplaying is, IMO, good and profitable. I think that's the meat of your post. I don't like the way you've set up this discussion though.

I think that for everyone who found the games you listed to be problematic in some way there's at least one other person who found them desirable for exactly the same reason without any self-deception (i.e. the mix of mechanics and setting or mechanics and description of play. D&D doesn't use the term 'Simulationist' in its how-to-play section. People decide for themselves how to interpert those chapters).

I'm also not clear exactly what claim GURPS makes about it's generic-ness but I expect that although SJ Games might concede that they didn't hit all their design goals in terms of infinite scalability they would consider the 'genericity' of GURPS to apply across a reasonably broad range of geners--enough to earn it that title without saying it's deceptive.

Finally: talking about what other people are decieving themselves about seems like bad form to me. I'd find the conversation much less condescending in tone if discussions of precieved self-deception or miss-reporting were kept to real people who actually exist. Even if one's experience is that 'everyone is self-decieving,' unless you are prepared to say 'everyone but me' then it's hard to profitably take that position to analyze anything.

-Marco

Marco,

I'm not saying that people must be self-deceptive to enjoy these games, rather that incoherence in a design can actually prove a benefit.

As far as self-deception is concerned, people have an inherent and very valuable ability to decieve themselves. I certainly don't claim I'm not self-deceptive and I must admit that a claim that someone does not use self-deception should be faced with significant skepticism.

Remember self-deception is not placed in a moral context, it is like saying that people walk or eat food, it is a natural behavior, and I am proposing we examine this behavior in terms of game design.

Using explicit people as examples risks the compartmentalization of self-deception, rather than the consideration of it's full effect. I consider this at least as bad for the discussion as appearing to be condescending. I apologize for this. In such a touchy subject there are rarely any good ways to engage discussion.

-Mendel S.

Mendel, as far as I am aware, incoherence means exactly one thing: that the game as written supports conflicting modes of play. Because the game is incoherent, you have one of two results: dysfunction or drift.

Dysfunction occurs when different players in the same gaming group are looking at different parts of the rules and trying to play the game they see there, with the result that they struggle for control over the game and accuse each other of playing "wrong", or at least (in a milder form) vy for screen time to do what they think they should be doing.

Drift occurs when the play group agrees which rules to follow and which rules to discard, and so finds a way to play together that works and is based on part of the rules, believing that they are playing "by the book".

One advantage incoherent games have from a publisher's perspective is that players with incompatible agenda will buy the game and then customize it to fit what they want from it. A functional group will then play the game they have designed from the rules, and credit the book with the fun they've had. A dysfunctional group will fight about how to play, and in the end blame each other for not understanding how the game should have been played. Either way, the game comes out with a good reputation, despite the fact that the players actually wrote the game they really played based on a menu selection from conflicting rules recommendations from the publisher. In D&D I think this was inadvertent; World of Darkness seems to have claimed it as a feature.

Thus for example Sorcerer will appeal to narrativist players very strongly, while gamist players will probably complain that their strategic analysis didn't matter and simulationist players will complain that it didn't really model a world to explore. Meanwhile, simulationists will find an interesting base for exploration in World of Darkness, narrativists may find the issues of vampire humanity worth examining, and gamists will build supervillains, each thinking he's doing what the game intended, each happily playing, as long as his gaming group plays the same way.

Does that clarify this?

--M. J. Young

Wormwood wrote:
D&D is considered incoherently designed because it supports gamist play (especially 3 and 3.5) while claiming to support Sim play. Rather than incoherence this could be construed as matching Sim-faux Gamists, who believe they wish to play Sim, but instead wish to actually play Gamist.
-Mendel S.

I dunno.. I think Wormwood is on to something.

I played V:tM for many years, and enjoyed it immensely, all the while thinking it was a "storytelling" game. I didn't know better, and had I heard the terms without going into their full meanings, I'd have called myself a narrativist.

Now I realize that I primarily enjoy simulationist gaming, and that is my habit. I enjoy telling stories too, and I'd like to increase my narrativist abilities and experience, but at the heart of it, Sim is what I do. The best I can hope for is a game that manages to blend the two in ways that work together without clashing, such as TRoS.

The idea of people deceiving themselves has merit, even if it's offensive. Admitting it is the first step to finding games that do what you want, and gamers who play the way you do; Finding them by design, rather than luck.

Wolfen wrote:
The idea of people deceiving themselves has merit, even if it's offensive. Admitting it is the first step to finding games that do what you want, and gamers who play the way you do; Finding them by design, rather than luck.

Marco wrote:
See, yer makin' a mistake right away: Sim play is storytelling.

You can call it story-before if you want or story-driven-from-established-theme if you feel like--or you can use whatever language you wish to try to get at what you're trying to convey.

contracycle wrote:

Marco wrote:
See, yer makin' a mistake right away: Sim play is storytelling.

No it is not.

Marco wrote:
I think claiming absolute authority over what 'storytelling' cannot mean in an RPG context is a big mistake.

contracycle wrote:

Marco wrote:
I think claiming absolute authority over what 'storytelling' cannot mean in an RPG context is a big mistake.

Really? Like claiming the authority to define sim? As big a mistake as that, you think?

Marco wrote:
That's not even getting into looking at the term story as defined here. Go back and look at the Retroactive Story thread. It seems pretty clear that if players are making decisions during play that put thematic elements into the transcript then under our specific, exacting, and non-universal definition of story that 'storytelling' is a reasonable fit for that activity.

Gareth, man--I'm with you: Story-in-Sim is hard to discuss. I think that GNS theory should (and, IMO, profitably does) avoid Story as a distinguishing factor of anything (including Nar).

This was stated in the Retroactive Story thread and I'm not even sure I'd say it was contested: I agree with it. I think that was the conclusion of the thread. But if you start couching Nar in terms of 'Story' then I think you unavoidably do open that can of worms.

This is off topic here, though.

But what isn't is where you say:

In fact, no RPG activity is like story TELLING.

Marco wrote:
If that's true (and I think it's reasonable to make that assertion!) then when people like the Wolfen discuss "storytelling games" are they self decieving or are they simply using the closest-fit word that exists in the language?

Wolfen wrote: I dunno.. I think Wormwood is on to something.

I played V:tM for many years, and enjoyed it immensely, all the while thinking it was a "storytelling" game. I didn't know better, and had I heard the terms without going into their full meanings, I'd have called myself a narrativist.

Sure thing, John..

The self-deception has nothing to do with Forge-jargon. The self-deception lay in what I believed were my play goals, and how I defined why I enjoyed V:tM. I believed the prose saying that V:tM was about telling stories* and addressing certain themes, and the methods that character points were given reinforced that belief. I believed that I enjoyed the game because I liked to address those themes in a narrative, storytelling sense.

Looking back, after getting the words and concepts to critically think about it, I realize what I enjoyed was the experience of being a vampire. Of thinking of how I, by extension of my character, might react to things in the world, including those much-touted themes about humanity. I also enjoyed the ass-kicking. The fact is, the themes and stories were secondary in my esteem, but I believed, like a good many people I have known since, that they were first.

Since becoming aware of the G/N/S theory, and gotten past my initial resistance to pigeon-holing (which I know isn't the point, but it is convenient for that, as well) I've become more aware of the things I enjoy in gaming. I'm also slowly coming to grips with how to explore the narrativist side of things, which I always was interested in. If I still believed that what I was doing was all about the story and the themes, I wouldn't be able to do either.

*mini-rant: I am specifically using the word "story" in the more literate sense. While what I used to do with V:tM could be called storytelling in the same loose sense that recounting the events of my day can be called storytelling, that is not the sense I am using. Stories intimately involve themes and follow certain guidelines, having a beginning, a middle and an end, usually with resolution of some conflict related to the theme of the story. While the broader definition isn't incorrect, I think it mostly without value in most forms of discussion. The broader a definition, the less certainly it can be applied, and if it cannot be applied with a reasonable amount of certainty, then it is useless.

Wolfen wrote: Sure thing, John..

Looking back, after getting the words and concepts to critically think about it, I realize what I enjoyed was the experience of being a vampire. Of thinking of how I, by extension of my character, might react to things in the world, including those much-touted themes about humanity. I also enjoyed the ass-kicking. The fact is, the themes and stories were secondary in my esteem, but I believed, like a good many people I have known since, that they were first.

Wolfen wrote: I am specifically using the word "story" in the more literate sense. While what I used to do with V:tM could be called storytelling in the same loose sense that recounting the events of my day can be called storytelling, that is not the sense I am using. Stories intimately involve themes and follow certain guidelines, having a beginning, a middle and an end, usually with resolution of some conflict related to the theme of the story.

Marco wrote: It's my understanding that if you are thinking about the issues of humanity that confront a vampire--either imagining yourself as a vampire (that is, imagining the vampire as an extension of you) or considering it as an author--'theme,' as the glossary means it, is still the 'primary subject of consideration.'

First, thank you Lance, that's exactly what I'm getting at. I suppose you also can imagine what most players in a similiar situation would do if they were simply told they were playing "wrong" (i.e. not playing how you think you're playing).

Second, a bit more on where this shows up.

Self-deception is that way that we handle contradictions in our lives, most especially between our perception of self and our actions. Ask a hundred people what sort of player they are, and then watch them play. Discrepancies will arise, whether it's the difference between goals and practice or caused by social pressures, or simply having not introspected on the subject.

However, self-deception isn't necessarilly a bad thing. If we idealize ourselves it lets us become able to do things we otherwise would be to discouraged to do. By using self-deception we can do what needs to be done without allowing social pressures to self-destruct us. Removing self-deception in general is a pipe dream. In the natural pace of things we decieve ourselves and discover our self-deceptions periodically. Meeting both the percieve and actual allows us to provide a double happiness, supporting the contradiction, rather than pulling at it. If we wish to ease away the deception we can simply introduce a gradual force to pull them apart.

Consider as another example, the illusionist / participationist divide. How hard is it for the illusionist player to "out" the GM? Usually not too difficult, but in practice this only happens when significant dysfunction occurs (the contradictions of illusionism become insurmountable). Most players do not want to change their view of the game, even with evidence to the contrary. Sometimes this moves to an unwritten rule of play, which basically becomes silent participationism. Everyone knows what is going on, but it is impolite to mention it. This layering of the truth is what self-deception is all about. And as a whole, it can be a very positive thing for a group, especially when overt communication does not solve all the problems. I've played this way quite a bit, for one, and I think it works better with most groups that overt Participationism.

I hope that helps,

-Mendel S.

John Kim wrote:

Marco wrote: It's my understanding that if you are thinking about the issues of humanity that confront a vampire--either imagining yourself as a vampire (that is, imagining the vampire as an extension of you) or considering it as an author--'theme,' as the glossary means it, is still the 'primary subject of consideration.'

Well, the question is whether he was deceiving himself at the time. His view at the time is independent of glossary definitions. The important thing is what he thought, and how the reality differed from what he thought.

I don't think it's self deception, I think it's a misconception of role-playing.
That there's a right way to role-play. Let's be honest it's just amateur dramatics with rules.
Which is no bad thing.

Essentially role-playing games follow a continum - many people who have never played a PnP rpg before are introduced via DnD or WoD. To them that system IS rpging.

The biggest self deception I'm familiar with is the 'My character would have done that"... Which usually is added after the player has blatantly acted with munchkin tendancies. It's OK to powergame if your character would have done it.
Bollocks.
Role-playing depends upon a social contract.

Part of that social contract is the implication that you will follow the sim guidelines of a system without striding into gamism - harsh but true.
Well it don't work.
The last time I played V:TM I realised this.
You know it's got silly when the GM says "Ok there's only 2 garou, no point rolling, you beat them up".

Which leaves us with coherent vs non-coherent systems.
Which is where the self deception lies - players believe (often through no fault of their own) that the system they are playing is coherent role-playing or even worse 'The One' - but like the Matrix 2&3 they soon realise the uncomfortable reality. It's crap.

JJ

Marco wrote: Yeah, I see what you're saying. If his play matched his definiton of storytelling at the time then it wasn't self-deception.

John Kim wrote: However, even at that time, you conceived of "storytelling" in the narrow, literate sense -- and you thought that your V:tM games fit that narrow sense. Thus it was self-deception to think so. Right?

Wormwood wrote: The WoD has a similiar incoherence, with purported Nar play constrasting with actual Sim support. Likewise this matches Nar-faux Simulationist, who, likewise, believe they wish to play Nar, but actually wish to play Sim.

After reading this whole thread with some care, I'm struck by a thought.

Mendel, would The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast fit what you mean by "self-deception"?

I have never played a WoD game, though I have read a few (and hated them, which is why I didn't play, but that's irrelevant). What I hear Lance and xiombarg describe is fascinating, and sounds very much like what I always thought Ron had in mind with TITBB.

Basically the game says, "You're in control! You have the power! You will tell stories, and they'll be stories, not a bunch of one damn thing after another! And it will come from you, not the GM, and it will be totally unlike other games!"

And then the game plays, "I (the GM) am mostly in control, I have the power, and the sequences of events we construct will only be stories if I structure them so and not otherwise, and it will be pretty much exactly like every other mediocre Sim game out there."

So what happened to Xiombarg was that he said all the things the game says, but he meant it where the game really doesn't, and so the veteran WW players were furious but the newcomer had never thought for a minute that the game didn't mean what it said.

What happened to Lance was that he liked the sound of all the things the game said, and liked playing the actual game, and somewhat later he realized that actually he didn't like the reality of what the game said, but only the sound of it, while he liked the reality of what the game did, which was completely unlike what it described.

Seems to me the mismatch is: You, the PCs and players, will tell the story, completely freely. And that story will already have been the GM's story, of which he is the sole author.

Which is The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.

Yes? No? Am I totally lost here?

clehrich wrote:
Seems to me the mismatch is: You, the PCs and players, will tell the story, completely freely. And that story will already have been the GM's story, of which he is the sole author.

Which is The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast.

Yes? No? Am I totally lost here?

Hm.. I'm not totally grooving on what you're saying, Clerich. Where Xio's story and mine has similar aspects, we had self-deception from opposite sides.

I've only been a player in WoD a couple times. The vast majority of my WoD experience is from the Storyteller's side of things.

clerich wrote: Basically the game says, "You're in control! You have the power! You will tell stories, and they'll be stories, not a bunch of one damn thing after another! And it will come from you, not the GM, and it will be totally unlike other games!"

And then the game plays, "I (the GM) am mostly in control, I have the power, and the sequences of events we construct will only be stories if I structure them so and not otherwise, and it will be pretty much exactly like every other mediocre Sim game out there."

Lance,

We're completely in agreement, I think. At least, I agree with everything you've just said.

Basically what I was trying to argue is that what you correctly call the "heart of Sim play" is not at all what WoD games describe as their shtick. They say they're all about stories, and player-controlled ones at that. To my mind, if you actually try to tell stories with WoD games, and don't permit Drift, that means that you end up with a GM-controlled story and probably TITBB.

The thing is, I believe that this is the heart of Sim play. Sim isn't, unless I've vastly misunderstood, about telling stories at all, either the GMs or the players, so much as experiencing something through play, whether it's experiencing the system, the setting, the character or the situation. Any "story" (using the loose term) that happens along the way is incidental, and is likely to be more like the loose collection of causal events that makes up everyday life, only generally more exotic and exciting.

clehrich wrote:
If you ditch story and play WoD games Sim, you'll be happy. And the self-deception comes in if you tell yourself that really this is storytelling.

If you hang on to story hard and play WoD games, you must either Drift into Nar (which means altering the system), or get GM-controlled stories, or get unhappiness. Or all of the above!

All I'm saying is that this mismatch, Nar-Sim constructed this way, is I think what Ron really means by TITBB.

xiombarg wrote: So, the idea that there are players out there who like to talk about playing a game one way, but actually play it another way, is very resonant to me. Being brutally honest about one's play preferences is HARD for most people, even outside GNS.

Marco wrote:

clehrich wrote: If you hang on to story hard and play WoD games, you must either Drift into Nar (which means altering the system), or get GM-controlled stories, or get unhappiness. Or all of the above!

I haven't fully studied the WoD rhetoric (I read the 1st Ed Vampire and found it a little preachy). However, I understand that GURPS is considered Sim-supporting in the same fashion as the Vampire rules and I did play GURPS V:tM in what I would describe as a Narrativist fashion.

If what you are saying is true, this must be self-deception or drift.

John Kim wrote:

xiombarg wrote: So, the idea that there are players out there who like to talk about playing a game one way, but actually play it another way, is very resonant to me. Being brutally honest about one's play preferences is HARD for most people, even outside GNS.

So this brings us back to Wormwood's original topic about self-deception as a design consideration. Let's assume that I want to design my game to be easy and fun, rather than hard and brutal. I don't want to psychologically interrogate my players to strip their barriers, nor do I want them to revolt. What can I learn from, say, Wolfen's fun experiences with WoD.

I'm going to postulate for a moment that for some players, the idea of "story" is psychologically comforting. So they find it easier to identify with "story" even when -- like Wolfen -- that isn't really what they're enjoying. This is probably because stories (as in novels and movies) are more respectable than association with games, dreams, or make-believe. This is particularly important as gamers get older, and typically wants to disassociate himself from "childish" games.

So how does this influence design? If my postulate is correct, then this suggests that rhetoric about "story" (or perhaps other forms of rhetoric) may help players enjoy a game independently of its mechanics.

Hmm, is the need for the game to claim to be about story even though it's really Sim or Gam heavily due to the unfortunate mantra of "role playing not roll playing"?

I've been reading Monte Cook's DMing column in Dungeon Magazine and it's interesting reading in the light of the Forge and this thread in particular. I see a lot of self-deception in those articles.

I know I got caught up with this mantra, and burned by it. In my recent recruitment, I have stopped using that mantra, and been upfront about what my games are about (though perhaps I am stretching things by indicating that perhaps there will be some political intrigue - but then I'm not promising - though I also know people can read "I hope" as "I promise").

Frank

Frank,

Is there anywhere I can read some of this material you cite? I don't get Dungeon Magazine. Or can you transcribe a little of the self-deception you see?

My horizons are pretty limited to the Forge these days....

clehrich wrote: This leads to two questions, for me:

What sort of play style is this, that likes the rhetoric of Story yet actually wants something else? To put it differently, what is the something they actually want?

Are there other rhetorical or conceptual points, apart from Story, that might equally have positive self-deceptive effects for particular gaming styles?

Hmm, so I'm not sure my comment about Monte Cook's articles is supportable. I guess it was an off the cuff response to this thread based on the fact that while he has been covering a lot of game theory, he has missed bits and pieces. For example, I see bits of Sim and Gam, but no real acknowledgement of the existence of Nar.

In his latest article, he does actually highlight one area of self-deception though. The latest article is dividing campaigns between "quest oriented" (i.e. GM scripted - railroading) and player driven ("where do you want to go next"). And then he suggests the combination. At the end of the Player Driven section he says:

Monte Cook wrote:
Sometimes, though, players don't want to be in the driver's seat - even if they think they do. The players sit around the table and wonder what their characters would do next, secretly (or not so secretly) wishing that some NPC would just show up and tell them what to do. Even the most motivated player can feel this way.

Marco, I want to thank you for sticking with us here through a lot of arguments about the various agenda. I think your contributions have often assisted me in clarifying my own thoughts.

I want to focus for a moment on the notion of a simulationist game.

First, it's pretty clear that we mean a simulationist-facilitating game, that is, one whose mechanics tend to reinforce simulationist choices and produce simulationist-friendly outcomes.

Second, and this I think gets lost in the shuffle, it must also be recognized that we're talking about a game that facilitates a particular variety of simulationism. We're very clear that gamist-facilitating games can facilitate or impede different styles of gamism. The same is true of narrativist-facilitating games, although we don't see it as much perhaps. It makes perfect sense that some games would support one type of simulationism, but not all types of simulationism.

Third, a game might be engineered to facilitate one specific agendum, or even a specific type of a specific agendum, and yet neither impede nor facilitate a different type of play, even a different agendum. A great deal of narrativist play took place within simulationist designs before narrativist games were developed, and it is entirely likely that some still does.

There are a couple of spots at which simulationist mechanics impede narrativist play to a significant degree.

One of those is in character death. It is extremely rough on narrativist play for the referee to announce, "The hero of the story just got killed by a lucky shot from the villain's henchman." Narrativist games often include mechanics which prevent protagonists from being killed without player approval; simulationist games rarely if ever do. In a narrativist game, when the character says, "It doesn't end this way; I don't die like this," he's probably right. In a simulationist game, he's probably wrong.

You are absolutely right that mechanics that support verisimilitude do not force a game to be simulationist, nor do they necessarily impede narrativist play. However, such a game is more likely to be simulationist, because the mechanics provide the sort of reliability of outcomes on which simulationist play is largely built, and narrativism requires something other than reliability of outcome--it requires injection of premise in a way that impacts play.

This is why the Spiritual Attributes of The Riddle of Steel are recognized as narrativist: suddenly the issues at stake to the players impact the outcomes of game events. Without those, the system is extremely good at reproducing "who would win" in fights. Those introduce into play a notion of "who should win", based on who cares about this enough to win.

So a game that is perfectly simulationist in design can be played narrativist without removing rules if things work right (e.g., the hero doesn't happen to get killed). It can also go narrativist if it is drifted unconsciously--for example, if the referee would never think of having some lowly henchman take a cheap shot at the player character when his back is turned, we've got a narrativist-facilitating decision interfering behind the scenes and we don't even realize it. (Of course, in a solid simulationist game, the henchman would take that shot, and he might just succeed.)

--M. J. Young

MJ,

I think this is a bit off-topic but I very much appreciate the reply. We should take this to another thread (the Nar-with-Sim mechanics).

-Marco

Chris,

I agree, faux-Nar Sim does tend towards TITBB. I think that behavior is one of the classic examples of TITBB, but I also think that TITBB has some self-deceptive behavior of it's own.

The way that a group resolves the GM has total control vs. the players have total control is to partition the range of control. However, this can be done using implicit self-censorship, making it so that players and GMs have well placed blind-spots in each other's main arena of control. This sort of self-censorship adjusts over time, which can explain why the dysfunction of TITBB can disipate in long term play. The balance of power hs become defined, but not consciously, as on the face each side is in "complete" control.

In essence TITBB is the realization that something is being left unsaid, that the balance of power cannot be what is on the surface. The real balance comes from trainging yourself to think inside a particular box. When playing it never occurs to you that you could step outside of it. However this network of self-deception is fragile, but self-correcting. A new player, or even an exposure to another type of play, can destabilize what is going one, this may be adjusted to, end the game, or change things to a more overt social dynamic (such as open social contracts). Retaining this self-deceptive conditioning is often a very important trait of keeping a game stable, even when somethings are overt. The unconscious limits of what would not even be considered to be done in play exist in any game, to some extent, past the boundary of what has been said aloud. In essence this is conditioning, which explains why OOC traditions, such as a particular site or food choices encourage stable games. The assumptions of each game are reinforced by these trappings, and recalled upon their re-encountering. As always, it matters not only that we decieve ourselves, but that we decieve ourselves about the right things.

I hope that helps,

- Mendel S.


Note: This is why in the GNS Deceit thread I was talking about an OOC version of the SIS, which contains the fictions accepted by the group outside of the imagined world. This is reminiscent to frames as discussed by Gary Fine in his Shared Fantasy book.

A side comment:
This thread makes me a tad uncomfortable.

In some ways, people could be seen as declaring the right to adhere the label of "self-deception" to anyone whose personal experience disputes their own in these matters. By what authority does one declare whose testimony and experiences can be dismissed as "self-deceptive"?

This becomes even more problematic with those people who hate it when others present their credentials like a gentleman -- now they can deny personal experience as "self-deception" while discounting any other form of credibility beyond personal experience. In the wrong hands, this enables some people to construct a most efficient means of filtering any and all inconvenient challenges.

I don't intend to derail the thread, but I think this is a concern which should be recognized.

Doctor Xero

On the aside:

The study of deception does make people uncomfortable, but that doesn't make it a subject we should ignore. As far as I'm concerned, self-deception is only determined in any definite way by the continued cycle of conceal and reveal by which we live our lives. On the decieved can say that they were, in fact decieved. Also, remember at the beginning that self-deception is a natural human process, it has no necessary moral component.

As far as the impact of this on practical concerns, it is always the understanding of uncertainty. This is the difficulty with asking someone's CA preference, this knowledge may, quite explicitly be unavailable to the person. What you need is reinforcing information. Usually self-revelation comes from this exact procedure of checking for confirming information. Do the consequences match my hypothesis? To add to the complexity in a situation with as much uncertainty as RPGs, it is often easy to support incorrect hypotheses. A study in Kahnman and Tversky (Decisions under Uncertainty: Biases and Heuristics) indicates that a belief in a correlation can be increased faster by a random distribution of confirmation and disconfirmation, than by simply consistent confirmation. For example, my belief in a way to select grapefruit is increased more by failing about as often as it succeeds, rather than by succeeding all the time, as long as I look at each event as a single instance and refine my belief each time. (What happens is that the failures get explained away, and the successes confirm, but since explaining failures is an active cognitive activity it associates the hypothesis more strongly with correctness.) As a result RPGs are a rich soil for self-deception to grow, not to mention the fact that it encourages fiction creation as a skill.

Far from being a bad thing, I would go as far as to suggest that self-deception is responsible for more of the fun of RPGs than openess and total honesty. If it can be such a valuable tool, shouldn't we learn to harness it?

-Mendel S.

Note: Among other things, this implies that it is at least as important for a design what is said as what is left unsaid. For example, storyteller tells the player that you are in control, but doesn't say anything about how to control the "story".

Doctor Xero wrote: In some ways, people could be seen as declaring the right to adhere the label of "self-deception" to anyone whose personal experience disputes their own in these matters. By what authority does one declare whose testimony and experiences can be dismissed as "self-deceptive"?

Wormwood wrote:
Far from being a bad thing, I would go as far as to suggest that self-deception is responsible for more of the fun of RPGs than openess and total honesty. If it can be such a valuable tool, shouldn't we learn to harness it?

-Mendel S.

Note: Among other things, this implies that it is at least as important for a design what is said as what is left unsaid. For example, storyteller tells the player that you are in control, but doesn't say anything about how to control the "story".

Mendel, let us know if we're going off-thread here, but I wanted to comment on self-deception and its exterior assessment.

From my perspective, self-deception is not only potentially beneficial, but is in fact absolutely normal to human social behavior. For example, people constantly do things that manipulate others in order to get something they want, but they feel strongly that they are not doing this at all. For another example, people tell themselves that they choose the clothing they wear because that clothing "expresses who they are" or whatever, when in point of fact the whole range of choice and meaning is constructed by a society. At base, this is the social theory of knowledge: the basic categories of human thought -- space, time, genus, etc. -- appear to us as natural and normal, "just the way things are," when in fact they are fully constructed by social conditioning.

Now the thing is, to challenge such social construction continually is difficult and painful. It makes you not fit well into the society in which you live, for example, and makes you uncomfortable. Humans are social animals, after all, and they want to feel in some sense that they are like other people. They also want to feel special and individual, of course, when in fact they are basically just like everyone else. So what do we do?

We deceive ourselves. We construct notions of individual choice that conceal the fact that our choices are largely constructed for us. We construct a sense of what really is "natural" that allows us not to have to question our society constantly. All of this in fact helps a society function well, and helps people lead happy, productive lives.

Now all of these things can, of course, become dangerous. If everyone becomes convinced that it is the order of nature that black people are inhuman beasts, despite all the glaring evidence to the contrary, then people don't feel guilty about enslaving black people.

But most such self-deception is just how society functions.

Consider patriotism and the issue of the flag. Now people do have these arguments: should flag-burning be illegal? And there are arguments on both sides. But what you don't hear a lot of is, "Hell, it's just a piece of cloth, who cares about the flag, flags are stupid." Some people probably do feel this way, but that's not a significant part of the discussion. But in fact, that happens to be true: it is just a piece of colored cloth. What sort of idiot would die for it? Why do soldiers crawl across battlefields to save them? Because they're focused on the symbol, on what it represents. Now they are deceiving themselves if they think that saving the flag saves America. But because of that deception, they are able to make symbolic, meaningful, and powerful statements about how they feel about America by their actions toward a piece of colored cloth.

In other words, when we say that some gaming involves self-deception, I think there is a serious problem with the statement. That problem is the word "some." All gaming involves self-deception, because all social activity is predicated on such self-deception.

As Mendel keeps saying, that's no bad thing.

The question, then, is what deception is at work in a given situation? And that's a methodological question: how do we identify it?

Consider the Big Model. In many respects, the initial impetus for the model is precisely a matter of clearing up self-deception. People think they want to do X, when in fact they don't, and when they try to do X they are unhappy. Alternatively, people think they want to do X, and are correct about that, but they also think they are actually doing X, when they aren't, and they can't understand why they are unhappy. The point of the Big Model (at least at first) was to help people un-deceive themselves about what they want and what they are doing.

Mendel is, if I read him right, pointing toward a complication of that model that will have far-reaching consequences. He is suggesting that now that we have a basic sense of what sorts of choices, desires, and consequences are most likely in gaming, we need to look at the confusions and misrecognitions and misperceptions.

To my mind, that is an essential and long-overdue analytical move. I am deeply shocked that I didn't think of it quite a while ago, since it's so basic and fundamental to exactly the sorts of things I like to think I know something about. I am rather disappointed in myself, in other words, because Mendel has done exactly what I keep doing to my students: pointing out something so glaringly obvious and so just plain big that one tends not to see it -- a forest-for-the-trees sort of thing.

Right now, the difficulty appears to be that folks don't accept the general universality of such self-deception. I think that this is primarily because you're not thinking about it large terms. Back up a step. This isn't something limited to gaming in any way; the question is what forms of self-deception and mystification are normal to gaming, not whether they exist. Once we recognize that we're talking about a very ordinary principle of how social action and thought operates, I think it will be easier to swallow the idea of self-deception in gaming.

I hesitate to suggest a jargon term from another discipline yet again, but I wonder if "mystification" might carry less baggage than "self-deception." Mendel, you know what I mean, and I do realize that Marxian mystification isn't the same as self-deception in your sense, but do you think they overlap closely enough for jazz, as it were? Or can you think of another term that might be less loaded? I just think that a lot of the difficulty here is that "self-deception" is being read very pejoratively, when that is not at all necessary, and it's getting in the way.

Oops. Accidentally hit "send" at the start.

A brief comment: I think most people are actually agreed that self-deception has occurred. However, I also think most people are agreed that discussing it involves a serious methodological problem. How do you diagnose self-deception? Simply put: would you accept it if someone else stated that you were engaging in self-deception?

As I said earlier, I think that the safe way to approach this is to stick to self-diagnosed cases like Wolfen's. If you want to take up cases like xiombarg's, then you have to consider at least two sides. (i.e. Maybe xiombarg's players were deceiving themselves, or maybe xiombarg was deceiving himself.)

John Kim wrote: A brief comment: I think most people are actually agreed that self-deception has occurred. However, I also think most people are agreed that discussing it involves a serious methodological problem. How do you diagnose self-deception? Simply put: would you accept it if someone else stated that you were engaging in self-deception?

As I said earlier, I think that the safe way to approach this is to stick to self-diagnosed cases like Wolfen's. If you want to take up cases like xiombarg's, then you have to consider at least two sides. (i.e. Maybe xiombarg's players were deceiving themselves, or maybe xiombarg was deceiving himself.)

I think there are a few places I disagree with this analysis--but, on the whole, I think it's good.

1. Safe vs. Nice
It's okay not to be nice. But I think it's a mistake to assume bias in our subjects and not in ourselves. This makes observations of self-deception very, very suspect. It takes an extreme case (alcoholism) or some specific training (psychonalysis) and conversation (therapy) to make that statement in real life.

Here, I think it's not supportable. Bringing pop-psychology into the theory is going to be problematic on a number of levels. For instance, it's going obscure questions about the model itself,

I think that your interpertation of the model does have a flaw: getting story is not as rare as Monkeys Flying Out of My Butt so long as there is an organizing principle at work.

That principle need not be meta-game on the part of the players and can, in fact, be had from the position the WoD player take. So while we could assume they are deceiving themselves, we have to have a basis for that.

Before we can do that, we have to agree on that--and that hasn't happened.

When someone says "I decieved myself" we have a case where that clearly happened (well, as clear as we can be) and so it's better for examination.

Now let's set aside the possibility that the model is wrong, because it's tangential to the point at hand.

clehrich wrote: So take our imaginary WoD game.
...
(This is not intended to be skewed or tweaked or anything; it is intended to be a description that fairly matches a happy group of committed WoD players. Please do let me know if I've bent it unfairly.)
...
So what's occurring here is this: the players' engagement in meta-play is being mystified.
...
Here's an off-the-cuff set of first guesses. Since this isn't a real group, and we don't have serious data, we can do no better. If we were analyzing a real group and had good data, we could get specific.

clehrich wrote: Some aesthetic or other principle, espoused consciously or otherwise by the players, tells them that meta-play is a bad thing. Possibly they perceive this as "cheating," or something of the sort, which may arise from the culture of gaming as it extends from earlier games such as D&D which made this explicit. Possibly they feel that something about "story" requires non-construction; that is, they feel that "story" should tell itself, or be discovered, rather than being deliberately invented. At any rate, they believe that if they engage in meta-play, they are sufficiently violating some basic principle that their results -- having fun and telling stories -- will be invalid.
...
It seems to me more plausible that they are having fun and are telling stories, but that they wouldn't be having fun, and would consider their stories illegitimate, if they felt that these results had been generated (in part) by meta-play.

Thanks for articulating what I didn't have time to, John. While I see Chris' example as possible, and even valid, it isn't what I was describing. Nor, given my knowledge of WoD and a decent sampling of WoD players, is it particularly likely.

I have seen groups that are hard against "meta-play" as well, though. They feel it's unfair, unrealistic, etc. Yet, in fact, there is a lot of meta-play going on.

But this is a theoretical example. I can't give solid cases to back me up, so that's that.

Marco wrote: 1. Safe vs. Nice
It's okay not to be nice. But I think it's a mistake to assume bias in our subjects and not in ourselves. This makes observations of self-deception very, very suspect. It takes an extreme case (alcoholism) or some specific training (psychonalysis) and conversation (therapy) to make that statement in real life.

Here, I think it's not supportable. Bringing pop-psychology into the theory is going to be problematic on a number of levels. For instance, it's going obscure questions about the model itself,

I think that your interpertation of the model does have a flaw: getting story is not as rare as Monkeys Flying Out of My Butt so long as there is an organizing principle at work.

That principle need not be meta-game on the part of the players and can, in fact, be had from the position the WoD player take. So while we could assume they are deceiving themselves, we have to have a basis for that.

I think it's critical to question whether or not this is correct before concluding self-deception. As I pointed out in the thread on Storytelling, there are many ways your group, as described, could get Story on a reliable basis without self-deceiving or mystifying their meta-game involvement.

John Kim wrote: In your imaginary group, the WoD players reliably generate story by mystifying their engagement in meta-play. In Wolfen's description of his experience, they were not generating story in a literate sense -- the self-deception was in believing the WoD rhetoric about story, when in fact he was enjoying the experience of being a vampire.
....
So, here you are suggesting self-deception contradictory to what Wolfen reported. In Wolfen's experience, his group did not generate literate story. While he thought he was enjoying story, in retrospect he realized he was enjoying something else -- i.e. the experience of being a vampire. This was the basis of my suggestion of an alternate self-deception: i.e. that "story" was really the goal.

To contrast these two,

1) Lehrich hypothesis: WoD players have the false belief that meta-play isn't fun, when in fact it is. They engage in such meta-play to create stories in the literate sense through their games -- and this story creation is indeed the basis of their fun. However, they deceive themselves into thinking they do not.

2) Kim hypothesis: WoD players have the false belief that their enjoyment is derived from storytelling. Their play does not create stories in a literate sense. However, they deceive themselves into thinking that the transcripts are indeed literate stories. In fact, they are enjoying other facets of play. However -- because society values literate story over games, dreams, and/or simulation -- the players feel better about themselves by telling themselves that they are "storytelling" rather than simply "gaming" or "dreaming".

clehrich wrote: Of course, it's based solely on a single data-point, so I don't know how reliable it is as a hypothesis, but it's interesting. Like you, "I'd be interested in other data."

But none of this is dealing with the question you actually asked, in reply to which I posted that hypothetical example. You asked about method. I supplied one. Why is a hypothetical example now suddenly a mis-interpretation of Wolfen's game? That makes no sense. Apparently you like the method, in fact, since you just applied it. What the hell?

clehrich wrote:
Marco and I seem to continue to disagree about whether mystification (or self-deception) is a workable concept.

Mendel, you can come on back now, I think the air is clear again. We're all on board with self-deception, although Marco has doubts.

[Edit: in reply to John Kim's post]

Why would this cause a flamewar?

Because you're hooked on the notion that self-deception or mystification is a bad thing. Which Mendel and I keep saying it isn't. This is completely normal, healthy, appropriate behavior, performed by healthy, normal, happy people.

Actually, it's part of how healthy, normal, and happy occur.

Here's a little experiment. I'm telling you, right here and now, that you are deceiving yourself about a number of things in your games, your life, and so forth. You've accepted that already, so there's no bone of contention. I'm also telling you that there's nothing odd, unusual, or undesirable about that. I'm also telling you that I don't think there's necessarily any reason to change any of that. Any bones of contention there? Okay, last part: I'm interested in trying to figure out some of how that works in you, based on what you say and do, because I'm interested in people and what makes them tick. So far as I can tell, this is what sets you off. Apparently that's something we shouldn't do without express permission. Why not?

Here's a hypothetical about method and its implications, but the question, the real question, remains: why is this in any way something we shouldn't analyze? Why should this be set aside and out of bounds? Anyway, the hypothetical. Since the last one didn't work for you, I'm going to get quite serious about this one:

Let's suppose you post a long, detailed piece of actual play, with lots of detail and crunchy bits to work with. I analyze this. Among many other things I find interesting, I conclude that you, the GM in this instance, are invested in a notion of some kind of free-market economics, or free competition, or something like that. I find that a lot of how you as a GM arbitrate complicated situations appears to rest on an implicit notion of what's "fair" or "plausible" which in turn appears to fit this sense of competitive equilibrium. And I suggest that the way you GM involves interpreting situations such that this conception of how competition "ought" to work is imposed consistently.

Now let's suppose you deny this. You say that in that particular game, you were actually being scrupulous about not imposing some sort of framework, but were, for whatever reason, quite consciously doing nothing but arbitration by dice: you just roll, you don't interpret, and you let the chips fall as they may.

So are you right?

I say that we cannot know. Further, there is little to suggest a likelihood here. The fact that you were the GM in question is worthless. Just because the opnion you express is about yourself doesn't make you particularly likely to be right. The fact that I'm looking at it from the outside doesn't make me particularly likely (or unlikely) to be right.

So what we have is two plausible, but unproven, hypotheses. And the chances are, we won't ever be able to prove one or the other.

So then what?

Well, suppose I now use this interpretation, and this data, in an examination of the game system you were using. And I use a couple of other pieces of actual play. And I propose that this particular game system, and in fact a number of others closely related in some way, are founded upon this notion of free competition as necessarily leading to fairness and equity. And this leads me to contextualize the games in question as specifically part of American cultural life, prompting me to ask questions (the sorts of questions Eero Tuovinen has asked here and there) about the expansion of American cultural hegemony in the RPG hobby.

Now suppose you, or some other gamer (probably American), respond by saying that I've got it all wrong. The RPG hobby is counter-culture, and not at all an instrument of the expansion of American late capitalism. And you know this because you don't like extreme capitalism, vote Democrat, and so on.

Now I think I am on pretty solid ground. Now I really can say that I think you're caught in a web of mystifications. Of course you disagree, but so what? That's the whole point of mystification: to allow you to feel reasonably decent about yourself.

If you are in fact promoting American capitalist hegemony through a hobby close to your heart, and when put that way you don't like the sound of it, of course you're going to tell yourself you're not doing that. Because what else are you going to do? Stop playing? You like playing. Change your style radically? But it's fun!

You may consider this a bizarre example, but somewhere Eero posted something about American cultural hegemony in RPG culture in Europe, and everyone got very freaked out and confused. To him it was obvious; to American posters it was bizarre. Well, sure --- he's outside the system that has a vested interest in that particular mystification.

Remember over on Jonathan Walton's "Fine Art of Gaming" forum at RPG.net, when all those people jumped on him for suggesting that gaming could have a serious purpose of any kind? Remember how they all said, "Hell no, fool, it's just entertainment"? That's mystification. Of course gaming participates in larger cultural processes.

Which gets to the heart of your objection: you think that this all may be true, but we shouldn't say so unless people give us explicit warrant to do so.

Um, no. Not at all. The entire point of mystification is to conceal itself from those who do it. If you sit back and wait for people to say, "Hey, I'm deceiving myself," the only things that will pop up are necessarily quite unusual examples, or examples entirely from hindsight. And if, as in these two examples (one hypothetical but extremely plausible, and the other not at all hypothetical), someone happens to find the larger implications problematic (i.e. if one thinks it's a problem that American counter-culture is complicit in spreading McDonald's late capitalist culture among people who think they hate that), then you could reasonably argue that it's immoral to keep quiet about it.

But what usually happens in these sorts of situations (as we saw with Jonathan's colum) is that people get very angry. They furiously denounce the idea of anything resembling such complicity. They furiously denounce the idea of analyzing gaming seriously. They denounce the idea that they themselves might be complicit in some things they don't like. All of which reveals rather clearly how powerful mystification is, why it's interesting, and why it's worth analyzing.

Since when did "making nice" become a legitimate reason to accept the command, "pay no attention to the man behind that curtain"? Since the man behind the curtain hasn't given you explicit permission, and has in fact told you not to look, should you pretend you don't see him? Should you in fact pretend you don't see the curtain at all, and that asking questions about the curtain is automatically illegitimate?

clehrich wrote: [Edit: in reply to John Kim's post]

Why would this cause a flamewar?

Because you're hooked on the notion that self-deception or mystification is a bad thing. Which Mendel and I keep saying it isn't. This is completely normal, healthy, appropriate behavior, performed by healthy, normal, happy people.

clehrich wrote: Which gets to the heart of your objection: you think that this all may be true, but we shouldn't say so unless people give us explicit warrant to do so.

Um, no. Not at all. The entire point of mystification is to conceal itself from those who do it. If you sit back and wait for people to say, "Hey, I'm deceiving myself," the only things that will pop up are necessarily quite unusual examples, or examples entirely from hindsight. And if, as in these two examples (one hypothetical but extremely plausible, and the other not at all hypothetical), someone happens to find the larger implications problematic (i.e. if one thinks it's a problem that American counter-culture is complicit in spreading McDonald's late capitalist culture among people who think they hate that), then you could reasonably argue that it's immoral to keep quiet about it.

But what usually happens in these sorts of situations (as we saw with Jonathan's colum) is that people get very angry. They furiously denounce the idea of anything resembling such complicity. They furiously denounce the idea of analyzing gaming seriously. They denounce the idea that they themselves might be complicit in some things they don't like. All of which reveals rather clearly how powerful mystification is, why it's interesting, and why it's worth analyzing.

Since when did "making nice" become a legitimate reason to accept the command, "pay no attention to the man behind that curtain"?

I simply don't think there's nearly enough data here to make any kind of self-deception assessment based on the evidence we have here. In most real RPG scenarios the person doing the assessment has a stake in the outcome (i.e. being right about something or feeling victimized or finding themselves superior or whatever). There's observer-bias built into the system.

We simply do not have the conditions or the tools necessary for there to be assessment of self-deception.

If we want to analyze IRC logs (and have the kind of real knowledge of the participants to understand some basic context) then, you know, maybe we could talk about what we see in those games.

Outside of that, I think your example of the analyist telling the guys that they were not storytelling and hated the game is exactly what that conversation is gonna look like if we don't stick to self-assessment.

And for what it's worth, I think there is a difference between rationalization and denial and a position that hasn't been thought about a lot. A WoD gamer who was asked if his transcripts would make a story that wasn't in need of any editing for publication might go "Well ... no, I think most efforts at story-writing need editing and paring down for publication so, no--in order for this to be a publishable story you'd need to trim down that bit with the fire-fight in the sewers and cut out that long pointless excursion that didn't pan-out."

Since our language is so impercise on this point (storytelling, for instance) I just don't see how generalizing about what "people" are doing is gonna be anything but wild speculation and our own personal biases (for a lot of people, here, I think "someone doing 'storytelling'" without playing Narrativist is 'TITBB').

-Marco

Oddly enough, I think we're pretty close to agreement here.

John --

I think there is a disjuncture here between what it seems to me is interesting about mystification and what you expect such analysis to produce. You may well be right, practically speaking.

To me, what's interesting is the ways in which the various strategies of mystification that are pervasive in our culture --- whichever one you feel like taking that to be --- are reflected and manipulated in gaming. It's a matter of cultural analysis, really. I'm quite interested in things like the ways in which RPG culture mystifies its participation in mass-media extension of American cultural hegemony, and the ways in which it constructs itself as a counter-culture, and so on. If you want to demystify these things for me, about me, go right ahead; god knows I've read enough analyses of academic mystification. You want to add one about academic mystification in the analysis of RPGs? I want to read that! Really -- this isn't irony. I don't think it's going to get written, by anyone, but I'd love to read it.

Conversely, I really couldn't care less whether this or that gaming group does or doesn't think it's using meta-techniques or whatever. Is their game working fine? Good. Glad to hear it. Anyway, back to cultural analysis. Is the game not working fine? Okay, let's all talk about that and try to get it working. Does it work now? Good, back to cultural analysis. Like that. That's an overstatement, but the point is accurate: that stuff is only interesting to me when I can hook it up to larger concerns, or when I can be involved in trying to help folks get their games going well -- and that does include me, of course, getting my games going well.

I think that the problem is a difference of perspective on the Forge, one I've found myself on the teeeeeny minority end of many times. I personally think that all the practical analysis in the world is of very limited interest. It's great when a game is broken, and everyone piles in and tries to help. It's fantastic when that succeeds. But ultimately, that's all you can do with it. What to me is genuinely interesting and exciting is to work at opening up the analysis of RPGs to the much wider world of culture and its various discontents, which is something that has happened very little anywhere, but has a real place here.

So I think I'm saying "wow! cultural analysis!" and you're hearing "oh god! you're going to do this to some actual person?" We're both right. Really different focus. If you're going to think about mystification as a practical tool, god help you. That's sort of like trying to start a nice Marxist-Leninist revolution by walking into the GOP national convention and handing out copies of the "Communist Manifesto." Eeep. No, I had nothing whatever practical in mind, and I think that's exactly where we're talking past each other.

---
Marco --

You're right about linguistic and terminological imprecision, though I certainly think shifting to the analysis of words and rhetoric --- necessarily the heart of mystification and whatnot analysis --- would help. As to rationalization and denial, I think those are both strategies of the same thing. To be sure, one would have to analyze carefully, to avoid the total miscommunication you describe. But I do think it can be done.

But the base point, about having a stake in the outcome, is a variant of the same point John's making, and gets the same response. For me, there is no stake. I just don't really care all that much except insofar as this is part of a larger cultural discourse that I want to understand. But here on the Forge, the usual assumption is the contrary: the assumption is that if I say "there's mystification going on in your game," I'm making a statement that is intended to have a practical result. Now if that were the case, then HOO BOY would I have a stake, and boy howdy would there be all sorts of problems at work in even posing the question.

-------
To me, this is a purely analytical question about hooking up the analysis of RPGs to the analysis of other modes of culture. Apparently it doesn't sound that way to you folks -- it sounds like a practical concern. So long as we agree within those respective domains, I think we're on solid ground together.

As a nice concrete example, which just maybe will finally wind all this up, you may recall that I brought up the question of ritualization, in the big essay on ritual. I was very insistent, in that article and in discussions of it, that the whole analysis has few or no practical implications, or that if it does, I have no intention of thinking them out.

Now interestingly enough, a bunch of people did that. There has been some talk about formally delineating spaces, for example, and things like that. None of that really comes from me; it's practically-minded folks spinning out some practical ideas that are sort of inspired by some theoretical, analytical points I made.

The thing is, ritualization is a particular kind of mystification. That's the whole point. I didn't use those terms in the essay, because it didn't seem relevant enough to want to define more terms. But the basic idea behind the ritualization concept is that the distinction made, a distinction of real ontological difference between in-space and out-, in-time and out-, sacred and profane, etc., is based on nothing but people saying it's so. Nothing at all. The thing is, if you really knew that, really accepted that deep down in your heart of hearts, the whole thing would die. You'd look at something sacred and say, "Yeah, well, I just called it that on Thursday, so what the hell." So all the power would go out of it. And thus one of the really powerful things we do as people is to conceal this from ourselves, because we like having that distinction, for all sorts of interesting and complicated reasons.

So when I say that all RPGs are founded in part on mystification, that's one of several reasons. There's a ritual distinction being made, so it's mystification. QED.

But the thing that fascinates me is that nobody had this reaction to all that about ritualization. Why not?

Frankly, because "ritual" sounds cool and interesting, and "deception" or "concealment" or "mystification" sound like lying. "I'm doing rituals" sounds like a good thing; "I'm lying to myself" sounds bad.

And the other big reason, of course, is because I was explicit (as I wasn't here) that this is all totally impractical, a purely analytical structure that has powerful implications --- but few practical ones I can see apart from some potential for some really unpleasant misunderstandings, as John points out.

---------------
So here's what I want to know:

Does Mendel think this is a practical mode of analysis? Does any of this fit what Mendel is interested in? Would Mendel like to continue this discussion, or redirect it?

I'm now going to keep mum on this thread unless and until Mendel comes back. I think we've all done enough damage, don't you?

Sorry for the delay, I've been focusing on work deadlines and design deadlines in the past few days.

Well, to answer a question from a while ago, mystification works for me, assuming it relates, as I suspect it does, directly to the building of a mystery (that which cannot be explained/concieved).

I see there being three different ways to use mystification.

First, in a practical regime, mystification is not useless, but the attempt to extract specific events or properties is hazardous, as John and Marco point out. But the real practical take home of the whole business of mystification is that it is not something to be reviled. It is very easy from a therpeutic perspective to attempt to remove self-deception, but if we truly care about doing therapy and not simply conversion we must concentrate on letting the self-deception lie unless it is actually malignant, and try to honestly portray our inability to be certain of the diagnosis. In essence this later part is the acceptance of uncertainty into the model, and the carrying of it into the practice.

Second, is the arena of cultural studies, which Chris has given a great deal of exposition already.

Third, is an experimental science approach. Perhaps this is not too far from what Chris intends, but I'm still working through my reading list on interpretation and cultural matters. My background is as a scientist however, so I feel I can voice that view most simply. By scientific, I mean specifically the forming of theories and models which can then be tested. In the studying of cognitive science and algorithm theory, one of the very interesting things about mystification is that it can save vast amounts of computation. If I keep myself from conceiving some portion of possibilities, then I don't need to retain the algorithms to handle these possibilities. Thus mystification, especially benign mystification can serve as a method of computational conservation.

What is interesting is that there are actual ways to take behaviors and play content and turn them into approximate algorithms, even accounting for random elements. What I am interested in is developing models of these algorithms over time, observing the dynamics of play as actual dynamics. Mystification with it's ability to change the very context of the algorithms we use to make play decisions is a vital layer to explaining what is happening in play. And assuming that they behave approximately as expected they can be found as boundaries and shadows in the dynamics of play.

I hope that helps,

-Mendel S.

Apart from the quibble that I don't like the term "cultural studies" because it has a specific valence I personally disdain, I think I'm on the same page with Mendel. What do you guys think?

Well I'm pretty much on board.

I'd like to say though that the value of the recognition of self-deception or mystification in an analytical process is to essentially limit how much self-reporting we take literally. In my mind this is already inherent to some of the earliest work on the GNS model becuase of Rons recognition that people say they play "by the rules" but in fact often introduce house rules, or ignore rules, without considering these to be significant deviations from playing by the rules.

This has already been discussed, but I thought I would reiterate that this is the primary virtue of recognising the possibility, never mind the probability, of self-deception when engaged in a play analysis.

I also reckon I could discuss self-deception in relation to America at some length, but that would probably be provocative. I think the ideology of "American Exceptionalism" would be directly relevant, though.