clehrich ([info]clehrich) wrote,
@ 2005-12-19 16:15:00
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Texts and Objects
What’s the text in an RPG? Is it the rules, the game as it played out, the post-game transcript or summary? Given that all these make sense, how would analysis be affected by a given choice? When we say we are analyzing RPGs, what object are we talking about? (I don’t mean a definition, but what’s the object of study, primarily?)

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[info]victorgijsbers
2005-12-20 10:40 am UTC (link)
You can analyse the rules text, you can analyse what I have called the Shared Text, you can analyse the total gaming situation, you can analyse the transcript. The latter seems the least interesting - it also seems more a task of standard literary analysis than of the study of roleplaying games.

Analysing the rules text is in itself not that interesting either, unless you want to research things as sexism in roleplaying game texts. (John Kim has an article about this; it is one of the few interesting analyses of RPGs that doesn't refer to play at all, if I remember correctly.)

The main object of study seems to be the game as it plays out (the ST being a theoretical construct that captures part of this). This is where roleplaying games differ from other media: in the process of generation. The end result (if such a thing can be identified) is a story, the starting point is a set of (mostly social and cultural) rules - but the generation of story by action filtered through the rules, that seems to be our main object of study.

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[info]darklordforhire
2005-12-20 08:34 pm UTC (link)
I would say, yes, they all are the text (or perhaps texts) of RPG play.

RPGs are constantly evolving, first the rule text is introduced, then a number of play texts are induced from that first text, other contexts which can be found, as well as each other. And then, each play text is crystallized into a transcript, which potentially joins the rules text in the next cycle.

If you must focus on one, concentrating on the observable events of play is likely the most sound. This however has the disadvantage of being entirely dynamic, while transcript and rules text remain more static. But, they are all windows onto the unobservable aspects of play, it seems wasteful to neglect any of them.

- Mendel

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[info]foreign_devilry
2005-12-21 01:24 am UTC (link)
Ron's model is, by admittance, based on observable player behavior. One of the possible texts which you didn't mention, and Ron mostly ignores (aside from discussions on the Actual Play forum), is individual players' experiences of play (or, at least, their memories and later descriptions of this). Obviously, getting a good or even vaguely intelligible and accurate record of player experiences is even more difficult than any of the texts you've already mentioned, but, especially if we're going to analyze immersion, this seems pretty critical.

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[info]clehrich
2005-12-21 02:54 am UTC (link)
An excellent point. Methodologically a nightmare, but nevertheless important.

I am reminded here of Victor Turner's analysis of what I think is called mukanda, the Ndembu boys' initiation/circumcision rite, which he observed during the long period of English colonial rule. Turner noted that there was a strongly idealized picture of how the rite should be (and presumably would be) performed, and that he was quite surprised to see major divergences in the actual performance when it finally occurred. He took this, to put it simplistically, as a demonstration of Ndembu cultural collapse in the face of colonialism.

But Jonathan Z. Smith, in Imagining Religion, has an article called "The Bare Facts of Ritual," in which (among other things) he discusses the difference between what Altaic bear-hunters say they do and what they actually do. They say they have this face-to-face, mano-a-mano fight with the bear, sing it songs, and so forth. In fact, they usually go after the poor bear while it's asleep in its den, chase it into a pit filled with stakes, and these days finish it off with shotguns. He argues, to my mind convincingly, that the hunters cannot actually believe they do what they say they do. Rather, they ritualize the hunt in conscious tension to the actual performance as they know it will occur, and thus ritual becomes a site of meditation on the difference between the ideal and the real.

I wonder to what extent this also plays out in RPGs -- I think really quite a lot, but I'm not sure.

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[info]foreign_devilry
2005-12-21 06:35 pm UTC (link)
I would tend to agree. Mike Mearls recently made the point that published game texts are notoriously bad at describing what play should actually look like, to the point of berating players who seem to be working with the rules. I think there is certainly a strong difference between ideals/conceptions of play and what actually happens, and that this is propogated by published game texts themselves. Examples Of Play are also a culprit in this, since they are often created out of game writers' imaginations and not based on actual play experiences. I remember too, that Rebecca Borgstrom talked about the Example Of Play in Nobilis, saying that, in actual play, she imagined things would happen rather differently (less combat, for one), but that she wrote the Example to demonstrate different aspects of the mechanics, not really to mirror an actual game.

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[info]yeloson
2005-12-21 07:57 pm UTC (link)
Hi Chris,

I tend analyze in terms of a chain of play:

1. Rules as written (provide instructions for)
2. What people do at the table (in play creates)
3. What we imagine (as a means to get)
4. Stuff that matters (according to our tastes)

I see all 4 of these as being important to look at, especially noting where the chain is strong or weak.

For instance, I believe a great many people out there, and the game texts as well, tend to focus on the imaginary content in the hopes of getting the stuff that matters, while missing out on the role the first two steps have in facilitating step 3 to step 4.

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[info]benlehman
2005-12-26 12:31 pm UTC (link)
I differentiate "RPG Book," "RPG Book Text," "RPG Play," and "Accounts of RPG Play," as seperate objects, all of which can be subject to artistic concerns as well as other concerns (like, for the book text, "how well does this teach you how to play?" may be more of a concern than the aesthetic appreciation of the text itself.)

(GM Prep notes fall into the category of "RPG Book Text," btw. Should they be a seperate box?)

I think that all of these things are seperate, yet related. I think that they should be analyzed both seperately and in the context of each other.

Here's a line of thought, tangential to your post: The actual play of an RPG is strikingly non-textual. It is impossible to recount to anyone who didn't directly experience it, and is experienced simultaneously as creator and audience. It lacks many features common to (other) texts. It is purely experience, mostly without artifact.

Should we be seriously talking about it as non-textual art? What tools, if any, could we use to analyze it?

yrs--
--Ben

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[info]neelk
2005-12-27 09:47 pm UTC (link)
My sense is that the most productive avenue is to take what we do with rpgs as having many, many texts in play at once. A small subset of these are:
  • the setting description in the rulebook
  • the rules of the rpg
  • the GM's notes about the game setting
  • each player's logs or journals about the game
  • the improvisations and rulings accumulated during play
The reason that this plurality is important is that all of these texts will replicate and quote from each other imprecisely and inconsistently. And the game will still (usually) make sense to us! This is something I find profoundly astonishing. I think that Derrida's ideas about the iterability of signs might shed some light on this, but I really am not conversant enough with that stuff yet....

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[info]losrpg
2005-12-30 02:51 am UTC (link)
As I have noted recently on my LJ, I think that the relationship between the game text and the players' various intepretations of the game text also has some pretty important implications. For one, the idea that there is a canonical interpretation would seem to be at odd with pretty much all of modern philosophy (though I confess to being *way* behind in my reading in that area).

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