This post originated in a thread at rpg.net. I will be posting a parallel thread there as well, as I really want to hear from a few people who won’t see it here, but I won’t cross-link. I am really interested in this particular issue, as it’s been both a blessing and a curse in my efforts to get good gaming. I quote John Morrow with his permission.

I think that part of my problem with thinking about games "in terms of social transactions of imaginary material towards certain creative ends" is that it becomes a lot like reading a story in a literature class and being forced to analyze it for plot, theme, and character. You aren't engaging the story as something fun to read but as a crafted object to be critiqued and explained. At some point, I think the exercise becomes less about what's being created and more about the creation process and craft. And making people more aware of the craft often makes it harder for them to enjoy what's produced by the craft. And in many ways, I think trying to turn everyone into craftpeople is a heavy handed way to give people what they want.

Yes, a writer needs to think about theme, character, plot, pacing, etc. But a good writer hides those things from their audience because overt awareness of those elements as part of the craft detracts from the audience's ability to just enjoy the story. In fact, it's no mistake that stories that do hit the audience over the head with their theme, character, plot, pacing, etc. are often considered bad stories by most people.

Well, first and foremost, it's not an issue of aesthetics. It's an issue of fundamentals. Either style, Artifice or Escapist, is capable of providing an attractive game. Is it a split? Only as much as there is a split in the comic-book community between those that like the pretty pictures and words, and those that look at how framing can contribute to the overall effectiveness of the page.

I'm an artificer, but I do it when the game is done, or before it starts. As a game master, I consider such things as the plot and setting, pacing and character development, the establishment of a good scene, effective use of voice and tone in the setting of mood, the music I'll use... Everything, I try and think it all through. Then I play, and it comes into the game of its own accord. When the game is done, I pick it appart, this time for the character's actions and how those can be used symbolically, and how character interactions are comming along, I look for foreshadowing possibilities, and work it all into my thoughts for the next session.

I have a player who is exactly the opposite. When we presented him with Nobilis, he was really excited. He loved the premise, the setting, the book (that book is gorgeous... if only every book could look that good...). When we told him it was diceless, he immediately stated: "I hate it. I won't play it." For him, playing the game is an escapist thing, he wants the thrill of rolling dice and counting pips, leaving things to chance and seeing how things turn out, having a Game Master direct the flow of the game, and reacting to it as he feels it's appropriate.

Despite this, he and I game together without much friction. I have a creative agenda, he falls in line quite nicely. I have an idea of how he'll react to certain situations given the type of character he's playing, and I take that into account when working on the game in my head. Now if I can convince him to play Nobilis...

Cheers,
Kris

Mark wrote:
I am attracted to gaming as a creative process – as an opportunity to create imaginary situations and characters and put them through their paces in collaboration with other creators who are simultaneously my critics, my collaborators, and my audience. What I haven’t really gotten until recently is just how much this is fundamentally at odds with the conception of gaming as vicarious experience.

Does this ring true? How can players and designers address these aesthetic differences?

When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

Wow, Damballa. That was good stuff, and I'm glad you said it so I don't have to be the first to. Reading the original post, I thought, "this is setting me up to sound like a pretentious prick." (Not that you are... God, coffee now.)

Better now.

Anyway, I've had three stages in my role-playing experience. For many years, it was an escapist diversion. The thrill of getting together and rolling dice and hanging out too late and pretending to slay monsters was fun. It was like a videogame with friends.

About 7 years ago, I guess, I played in a Star Wars d6 game. This was the first time I played with one GM and only one other player. Looking back, I'd wander if most would call our game "power-gaming" or "twinky," but it was great for me. We played Jedi Knights, two of the last ones alive during the time that Palpatine was  purging the galaxy. We were hunted over worlds, and we grew powerful. The other character kept becoming an even more holy and pure Jedi while I started planning revenge after the Empire killed my parents. By the end of the game, we confronted them on our own terms, I overthrew Palpatine, and then the other character slew me. That was another first - character on character conflict, which I wanted. I actually had a whole discussion about it with the other player and we agreed that he should do it after we win - I'd slid too far.

This was my introduction to immersive play, and I'm glad I had it, because it's easy for some on the Forge to deny that it's a viable play option. I played this way for about three years, culminating in an awesome D&D saga run by Peter Seckler in which I did weird voices each week and the character literally wouldn't get out of my head for a good 15-20 minutes after the game.

I realized in that game I was struggling, though. At the beginning, I was excited about playing this character. At the end, I was exciting about what this character meant, about me and about universal truth.

I never played in a game I'd call immersive again. (To note, and this might be important, I started working with Ron on the Forge that year.) I missed it, too, for about a year. But my play experiences since then have been better and better. My games now are anything but immersive - we pause the game and talk about what just happened and its implications, or why I chose as GM to make certain things happen, all the time. But we're making art.

And that's the part that kills. Someone's going to read that one line and run off to their dark little weblog or corner of a forum and build that up and say, "Look at those elitists! Making ART! It's a game! What's wrong with them?" But I think role-playing game playing is a process, and you can't stay in one of these modes forever, or you stagnate. The stories you hear about scary gamers: they're stuck in the first mode, something that you should grow out of. The people who flip their pancake of reason every time theory or "meta-gaming" (whatever the heck that is) gets brought up: they don't want the bubble of immersion broken. But it's going to get broken if you're healthy: you can't keep that up; you'll either be fooling yourself that it's happening, or driving yourself disassociative.

Sooner or later, adulthood comes along. And what was childish games has to fall aside or be examined. Examination and then creation produces art, plain and simple.

Hi Clinton,

I like what you said, but don't you think the 'should' is a personal moral judgment, rather than a general one? I mean, I know a guy, who works with sexually abused kids, who plays hack and slash D&D. He plays it to loosen up, have a few beers, and he'd rather die than explore deeper moral issues in his gaming. It takes everything he has in this dimension to face the day to day realities of the good work he does for society.

Likewise and less seriously, but still to the point, when I was a mathematical physics undergraduate I had less than no interest in playing chess, because my homework took up that part of my brain, and I didn't want to calculate as a spare time activity. But later when I became a soft-brained humanities graduate student chess became extremely fascinating to me.

These are the words that set people off in this kind of conversation, so that's why I bring it up.

I also think that some forms of immersive play have some higher art-like qualities, though it's a different one than the kind I'm experiencing right now with Dogs, and that I experienced sometimes in my friend Del's Oceania campaign and running Lords of Creation for people playing themselves as characters in high school. Also, technically speaking, it's all art, since it involves imaginary transsubstantiation.

But anyway, again, a loaded word, art. And I don't think you can judge what kind of play will constitute progress for an individual person except in the context of the rest of their life.

So I agree that you're getting at important differences, and the whole idea of 'gaming on purpose', acknowledging the presence of the player in the game, is one I'm really down with, and after playing Dogs and Heroquest I'm not even sure it's necessarily as contra-immersion as critics like the rpg.net old guard seem to think it must be.

So anyway, the content of what you're saying is cool, these are important differences, and there's a great gift waiting for a lot of people here at the Forge with the alternative approach to role-playing that a lot of the games here offer. But the language you're using to talk about it (and not just you, obviously) has value-laden universal connotations that sure seem to put a lot of people off.

Clinton wrote:
Wow, Damballa. That was good stuff, and I'm glad you said it so I don't have to be the first to. Reading the original post, I thought, "this is setting me up to sound like a pretentious prick." (Not that you are... God, coffee now.)

Hello,

I do not find the "if I know how it works, it'll ruin it for me!" argument compelling in the slightest. Nor have I observed people who "know how it works" to tend toward more distanced, less intense enjoyment, for any medium. These are common objections leveled at the New (or new presentation/perspective) which, as I see it, indicate nothing but the presence of fear.

Another difficulty in discussing all this is the analogy with literature, film, or theater. Let's presume, for a moment, that me and a group of people do want that sort of content in our role-playing experience. By "that sort of content," you can look up my comments on "story" in the Narrativism essay.

But how do we get it? In those other media, we get it because (a) the author and other creators put enough craft into what they present that we can pick up on it, and (b) we have brought our prevailing interest in "that stuff" with us, to the experience.

You can do it this way in role-playing too. Conventions are full of skilled Call of Cthulhu GMs who speak in spooky voices and stalk around the table like hired magicians in restaraunts. They are good at eliciting in-character commentary from the folks at the table, who enjoy taking their cues and delivering good lines they can improvise. As long as you preserve the creator/audience distinction in role-playing that are nearly intrinsic to those other media ("nearly" because of some occasional participatory tweaks), then fine.

But you know something? I don't think most of the people who use arguments similar to John Morrow's are looking for this. I observe people playing, or trying to, sometime for years. I see Zilchplay, punctuated by painful surges and schisms. I see desperate slides into System-heavy or Setting-heavy or Character-heavy Sim, in which actual play becomes less frequent relative to (e.g.) the GM revising his putative novel. I see dysfunctional Gamism break out like a zoonotic parasite. I see Typhoid Marys and Stealth Narrativists locked in deadly social struggles.

But they use such arguments when presented with the opportunities for alternative approaches to play. They slam into the lit/thea/film analogy and identify it with enjoying the imaginative experience at all. It's a safe, easily-articulated, and erudite-sounding argument, and they seem to be happy, being unhappy and resentful of (say) Dogs in the Vineyard, there in that box.

Best,
Ron

Your characterization is certainly right for some cases, Ron.

The thing is, I think some people who argue this way really do know how it works, and don't mind thinking about how it works outside the experience of enjoying it, but don't want to think about it while they're in the act of roleplaying, which as you correctly note they analogize to lit/film/theater.

You're surely also right that a lot of people have learned to roleplay this way because there weren't any other live options well developed on the table, and I agree with your diagnoses of dysfunction based on this kind of conflict.

What's wrong with 'let a thousand flowers blossom', though? What does the word 'most' buy us here except trouble?

I'm surely not comfortable with the mass generalization of people's play as immature or denial-based. I think that an awful lot of my inability to 'get' the source of my conflicts with 'fan' players had to do with exactly that attitude on my part - being unable to genuinely credit that it could be fun. John's explanation of it in terms of the media analogy made it make sense to me.

I don't think that RPGs have to be creative endeavors to be worthwhile. They do for ME, but not in general. Part of what I'm wrestling with is more - can fans and creators both participate in the same game happily? How? Under what conditions?

John wrote: You aren't engaging the story as something fun to read but as a crafted object to be critiqued and explained...And making people more aware of the craft often makes it harder for them to enjoy what's produced by the craft.

Mark wrote: I'm surely not comfortable with the mass generalization of people's play as immature or denial-based.

Raven,

The answer to your questions is 'sometimes'.

John is guilty of the fallacy of false dichotomy in the text you snip. "You aren't engaging the story as something fun to read but as a crafted object to be critiqued and explained." Speaking generally, it is possible to do both at the same time. It is also possible to only be able to do one at a time, to only be able to do one ever (i.e. at all), or not to be able to do either ("I hate stories"). I know people in all four categories.

However, you're also saying something false when you say "gosh darn it, everyone is too in category #1, or could be if they weren't a lazy anti-intellectual American." (Though I agree with you that this is a common prejudice in the US and that it gets in the way of some people from enjoying a more theoretical understanding of things they like.)

That just isn't so. Some people have no interest at all in being in category #1. Including some brilliant literary critics; they turn off the critical apparatus while reading and turn it on again after the fact to analyze. Others analyze all the way through. They're both valid styles; and I don't actually even begrudge the person who doesn't want to think at all his preference for just experiencing the story without (or with a minimum) of analysis.

Again, John uses this word 'often' here: "And making people more aware of the craft often makes it harder for them to enjoy what's produced by the craft."

which bugs me the same way Ron's 'most' does above. They're both right in the sense that these are commonly noted phenomena and both rhetorically misleading because they suggest that their own position is the norm, or would be the norm in that world where everyone else was really like us, which they would be if they only knew how cool it was to be me.

Let me put it this way - are orchestral musicians and actors artists? Of course they are. Most of their art is scripted by someone besides for them, so they're not like the Genius Novelist or Painter of romantic Western myth. (Not that those people weren't geniuses, some of them.) But anyone who doesn't see art in their technique is just wrong. That's what being a great immersionist roleplayer is like; being satisfied with the intense experience of perfection in a relatively constrained kind of performance. Nothing wrong with that. I have a friend in NYC who left behind a promising orchestral career to do her own thing with the violin, and I don't blame her for wanting to feel more like an 'artist' in the sense you approve of. But damn it, that is not the only way to be an artist.

I am solely examining the logic of the argument used to defend that choice. "I don't want to see behind the curtain, because it will destroy my enjoyment" is bollocks. That's simply an indefensible position which does not hold up under scrutiny. Seeing behind the curtain, understanding what's going on, provably does not destroy enjoyment. Something else does.

I agree that the lit/thea/film analogy is flawed. Someone (in some thread I can't find now) once instead made the analogy to a band. And I think that is much more on point. People who play in a band can have fun just fooling around, but once they start to analyze their craft and learn about harmonies, rhythm patterns, musical styles, pacing, etc., their creative endeavors become much more efficient--and more fun at the same time!

Now, some people don't want to become proficient, they just want to jam with some equally untrained friends. And that's fine.

And others don't want to write their own songs, they just want to perfectly recreate Stairway to Heaven. And that's fine too.

But I want to make some new songs. I want to learn what makes a song good. I can stumble around and never learn anything about music theory and composition, and sometimes I'd be able to get a good thing going with my band, but not reliably. Or I could read up on music theory and study songs I love by taking them apart, but never actually PLAY very much, and I wouldn't get anywhere, either. The trick is to do both.

Sean wrote: However, you're also saying something false when you say "gosh darn it, everyone is too in category #1, or could be if they weren't a lazy anti-intellectual American."

I don't blame her for wanting to feel more like an 'artist' in the sense you approve of. But damn it, that is not the only way to be an artist.

Mark wrote: I feel kinda weird arguing for the validity of a perspective I don't share, but here goes. Maybe it really IS that way for some people.

Mark wrote: I don't think that RPGs have to be creative endeavors to be worthwhile. They do for ME, but not in general. Part of what I'm wrestling with is more - can fans and creators both participate in the same game happily? How? Under what conditions?

Hello,

A more-or-less empty post, to appreciate what both Raven and John have said. I agree fully.

Best,
Ron

And I'll follow Ron's approval of John's post - my own feeling is and has been that the majority of players do both, either in parallel or in sequence. I know I'm a bit of an outlier, and even I do something 'immersion-like' that involves strong identification with a character. But I have known and played with creative-immersive types in the past - I think that's part of the reason I've been so resistant to seeing and understanding the strong antipathy some players have to the creator role.

Up until very recently, I would have said "Of course there's no divide - there's a continuum, and people who try can work across it." I have more recently been confronted with stronger cases for exclusivity, and wanted to try to bring the split that I'd had such a hard time noticing into the light.

Does that make this a poll thread or one that's unlikely to go anywhere useful? I'm okay with dropping it if it feels un-useful. I feel I have at least some more understanding of how some of the Forgies feel about the issue.

Ok, well, let's go back to your original question: "How can players and designers address these aesthetic differences?" To me, the question has nothing to do with "Immersive" vs. "Creator" -- instead it has to do with whether or not someone wants to understand what they are doing, with all the hows and whys and so forth.

As John points out, one can be "Immersive" and yet fully aware of all the various techniques, approaches to, theory regarding, and tricks of Immersion. As the Scandinavian Larp theorists are. As professional actors are.

One can immerse and understand fully well what it is they are doing, and how to best go about it to both have and provide the best immersive experience possible, and one can create ("metagame") and have no clue what it is they are actually doing or how to consciously go about it. Wasn't Ron's understanding of Narrativism developed this way? "Here's what I've been doing all these years, now how do I describe and understand what I was doing?"

So, can you design a game to a population that explicitly does not want to understand what it is they are doing, and design the same game to those who do want to understand what they are doing? I don't know if that's possible.

Otherwise, are you asking: can you write a game that will satisfy both Creators and Immersives? Good question. The behaviors of each seem diametrically opposed. In order to provide support for a Creator, one has to include rules that would offend an Immersive by disrupting the experience (forcing thought outside the character).

It might be easier to go the other route, creating a game that is focused towards Immersives, because one can always think on the meta level and create in-character behaviors to match those decisions (though I'm open to hearing arguments to the contrary). Of course, such rules will not provide enough freedom for certain types of Creator who want to really stretch their roles in a game, to beyond those of being a character.

greyorm wrote:
Otherwise, are you asking: can you write a game that will satisfy both Creators and Immersives? Good question. The behaviors of each seem diametrically opposed. In order to provide support for a Creator, one has to include rules that would offend an Immersive by disrupting the experience (forcing thought outside the character).

Wow, I was going to close this thread, because it is Not Good to bring other discussions on the net here, especially verbatim and when the original author isn't inclined to do so.

But, well, it's worked out very well. Now I'd like to close it out of courtesy for John Morrow - it's simply not fair to talk about what he's saying in his absence.

Mark, please understand that I greatly appreciate your excellent take-responsibility approach to this thread, in that it's been about what you like/understand, not "hey let's talk about John."

Perhaps if you cast your current thinking into a new form, authored by you, and then we can proceed from there in a new thread?

Best,
Ron

Clinton wrote: I never played in a game I'd call immersive again. (To note, and this might be important, I started working with Ron on the Forge that year.) I missed it, too, for about a year. But my play experiences since then have been better and better. My games now are anything but immersive - we pause the game and talk about what just happened and its implications, or why I chose as GM to make certain things happen, all the time. But we're making art.

And that's the part that kills. Someone's going to read that one line and run off to their dark little weblog or corner of a forum and build that up and say, "Look at those elitists! Making ART! It's a game! What's wrong with them?" But I think role-playing game playing is a process, and you can't stay in one of these modes forever, or you stagnate. The stories you hear about scary gamers: they're stuck in the first mode, something that you should grow out of. The people who flip their pancake of reason every time theory or "meta-gaming" (whatever the heck that is) gets brought up: they don't want the bubble of immersion broken. But it's going to get broken if you're healthy: you can't keep that up; you'll either be fooling yourself that it's happening, or driving yourself disassociative.

Sooner or later, adulthood comes along. And what was childish games has to fall aside or be examined. Examination and then creation produces art, plain and simple.

John wrote:

Clinton wrote: I never played in a game I'd call immersive again. (To note, and this might be important, I started working with Ron on the Forge that year.) I missed it, too, for about a year. But my play experiences since then have been better and better. My games now are anything but immersive - we pause the game and talk about what just happened and its implications, or why I chose as GM to make certain things happen, all the time. But we're making art.

And that's the part that kills. Someone's going to read that one line and run off to their dark little weblog or corner of a forum and build that up and say, "Look at those elitists! Making ART! It's a game! What's wrong with them?" But I think role-playing game playing is a process, and you can't stay in one of these modes forever, or you stagnate. The stories you hear about scary gamers: they're stuck in the first mode, something that you should grow out of. The people who flip their pancake of reason every time theory or "meta-gaming" (whatever the heck that is) gets brought up: they don't want the bubble of immersion broken. But it's going to get broken if you're healthy: you can't keep that up; you'll either be fooling yourself that it's happening, or driving yourself disassociative.

Sooner or later, adulthood comes along. And what was childish games has to fall aside or be examined. Examination and then creation produces art, plain and simple.

I'm a highly immersive player who decided to look in on the discussion here, and can definitely say you are incorrect.  Not only do I have no objection to you calling gaming art, I also do.  I game in an exceedingly immersive fashion and have absolutely no interest styles of play that emphasize dealing with the artfice of gaming, and I consider gaming to be an art - an art that is (for me at least) very similar to that of the many novelists who talk about their characters having a "life of their" own.

Samuel R. Delany describes a parallel (and I suspect actually identical) creative divide between artifice and unconscious inspiration in Part VI of his wonderful essay The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism.

In any case, while I have absolutely no objections to your use of the term "ART", I have extremely strong objections to your suggestions that immersive players like myself are "immature", "childish", or mentally unbalanced.  Those sorts of attacks do nothing to help any discussion.  I understand that some people prefer games and styles of play that I find completely unenjoyable.  However, despite the fact that I wish to avoid playing with people who prefer such styles of play (in large part because their style of play actively hampers my own), I do not consider them to be ignorant or mentally damaged.  My "art" is different from yours, but it is not in any way inferior.

-John Snead
Professional RPG author and avid player 

EDIT: Aw crap, I missed the fact that the thread was closed. 

Hey, lest someone think I was being overly assholish above, seriously, I want a new thread with John's thoughts - on immersion, not just on "Clinton's wrong." This one just already happened to be closed. This was one of those cases where moderator and user mixed to a bad taste, and I wanted to clear the air on that.