clehrich

Design and Theory

Thu, 03 May 2007 20:38:09 GMT

For once, I will post some remarks about design, in response to a post on Ben's LJ and the initiating Forge thread and a followup thread, which is simply the order in which I read them. In essence, there has been some discussion --- and I gather there has also been reaction, some of it violent, elsewhere on the web --- of half-baked games being published too soon, the Forge’s possible and actual participation in this situation and the potential for improvement, what the Forge is and should really be for, and any given designer’s own personal emphases with respect to play, design, publishing, the community, and so on.

If I wanted to comment on these threads directly, with reference to their original contexts and debates and personalities and whatnot, I’d do so at the Forge, breaking my self-imposed omerta (which is mostly a matter of lack of interest combined with lack of time). This is just my own weird take on the issues from what is perhaps a peculiar perspective.

What I will propose here is an alternative theoretical direction that may perhaps be of some service with reference to these difficulties. Please be aware that this post is VERY LONG.

At base, I think there are two quite different issues here. One is purely a matter of the practical realities of community interaction, and quite frankly I think there isn’t a lot to be done here in the short run. But the other question really comes down to the intersection of critical analysis and game design, and here it is quite possible to do something --- but I think the way it’s been approached has not been effective and isn’t likely to get more so by itself.

As you may know, I have no ambitions when it comes to design or publishing of RPGs. Whatever I have designed, like Shadows in the Fog or Lévi-Strauss in Amazonia, I have designed because I was playing with something for my own reasons. If someone wants to pay me a dollar for Shadows, thank you. If someone wants to buy Amazon books through the Shadows website so I get a kickback, thank you. But I really don’t care one way or another. Any such ambitions for me are purely professional and have nothing to do with RPGs.

Furthermore, I have fairly often insisted that theory is not necessarily tied to practice, in design or otherwise, and a lot of folks have given me flack about that. Sometimes that’s because the person doesn’t understand why anyone would want to theorize other than for practical results; sometimes it’s because the Forge is a design site, which I reluctantly have accepted --- one of several reasons I no longer post there; sometimes it’s because of other reasons, such as a denial that theory in any form is valuable for design, which misses the point. In any event, my interest in this set of discussions is largely exterior and theoretical, but I do think it gets at the role (or potential role) of theory in design, something I have usually downplayed.

Beyond this, I am increasingly of the opinion that there has been a mismatch here between what I have been talking about as “theory” and what most of my various interlocutors have meant, and that it is simply not a question of one side being right. If I’ve said otherwise in the past, I’ve been wrong about that.

At base, I have generally taken for granted that the primary reason to study and analyze RPGs is for much the same reasons one usually studies and analyzes ritual, myth, and the like, which is to understand them but not especially to construct them. I continue to believe that there is no necessary reason that these things should be linked, but I have tended to argue as though it were invalid to link them, which is not the case. Mostly this has been a question of rhetorical over-statement: many people have argued again and again that theory without practical result is not valid, which is equally wrong and wrongheaded. But at a distance, I can see that simply formulating the opposing pole does nothing but entrench prejudices on all sides, including my own.

Let me start with the problem actually proposed in these threads.

Social and Structural Problems

Ben and others have suggested that there are social issues complicating publication and criticism. In particular, a given designer’s track record has a significant impact on patterns of purchasing and support, the latter ranging from playtesting to moral support to whatever. Furthermore, the broad social pattern of being supportive without criticism --- “Man, that sounds awesome, so although I haven’t seen the game, much less played it, I think it’s great!” --- interferes.

There seems to be some disagreement about the social impact of a track record, but it strikes me that there is an ambiguity here: are we talking about the impact within the Forge, or are we talking about buyers at GenCon or elsewhere? From where I sit, at a distance from all this, I think there can be no question that track record does play a role; I think it would be bizarre if it did not. But at the same time from my couple of years of heavy posting and reading on the Forge, it did not strike me that games from well-established designers were privileged to the exclusion of others. Privileged, yes: no question but that a new design from Ron Edwards would get immediate and enormous attention, at every level, and a lot of “wow, that’s so cool” stuff. But on the other hand new people also received support and assistance in considerable measure; Mike Holmes, for example, was always very ready to read any game thoroughly and discuss its various points at great length, and he was not unique. All this seems to me more or less as it should be: why shouldn’t a designer who has produced excellent games get more time and focus? That way all the readers know they’re not wasting their time, or aren’t likely to be. There is a danger of a certain “wow, it’s Ron, so it must be genius” thing going on, but I didn’t see that especially strongly.

As to ordinary buyers at GenCon or something, the question appears to be whether selling them a game that isn’t really ready is picking their pockets. I have two issues about this. First, if someone is dumb enough to buy something sight unseen with no way of knowing whether it’s any good, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for him. Second, I cannot see how this practice hurts anyone in the long run except the designer himself: surely the result is that the relatively intelligent buyers do not in future buy from this designer, and the dummies learn nothing and buy whatever strikes their momentary fancy. The only real result in the short run is that there is a lot of garbage out there, which is bound to be true in any publication arena. If you want to sell and continue to sell, you need decent designs.

Now the question arises: what should the community --- specifically the Forge, which is all I can speak to and all Ben asked about --- do about it?

I think the first question to answer is why the Forge should do anything about it:

1) Because the Forge has a responsibility to the gaming community at large to improve the general standards of gaming and thus of published work

2) Because actually good games are in some danger of being obscured behind a mass of trash

As to #1, I can see that some may feel this way. I think Ron does, since I think it’s one of the central reasons he set up the Forge in the first place, and my sense is that a lot of the most visible and active long-term posters there feel this way. So what can they do? Frankly, I doubt there is very much the Forge can do as a community here. This is not, on the whole, the Forge’s fault. The same “wow, that’s so cool, you’re so wonderful, I haven’t seen your game but I love it” culture we see all over --- and not, of course, just in gaming --- has its counter-pole in the denunciations of “the Forge as a bunch of elitists” and so on: in essence, not only do such people think “constructive criticism” means supporting absolutely everything, but they also respond violently to anything that is actually critical as automatically destructive. If the Forge community wishes to improve things through constructive criticism, there is a necessary limitation, in that such criticism can only be received with any positive result by people who are willing to accept criticism. The rest will simply ignore real criticism and denounce it as elitism, thought-policing, and so on.

As to #2, there are in fact some things that could be done, but they take a lot of time and effort that somebody would have to shoulder over and above other responsibilities. One cannot ask Ron to do it, for example --- he’s got enough to do.

For example, one might revive the Reviews section of the Forge, or alternatively set up a new site for reviews elsewhere. Establish this site with a track record for hard-hitting but fair and very well-written and well thought-through critical reviews based on intensive reading and playtesting. Review all comers, both published games and beta-tests or whatever, so long as they are generally available.

But of course, somebody has to write the reviews, and somebody has to do the playtesting, and these somebodies have to write effectively and well, and also have few if any really strong biases (games that look like WoD or AD&D or whatever should be reviewed on their merits, not because they do or do not fit preconceptions about “Story Now” or whatever). Then this has to go on for a couple of years at a consistently high level. Eventually, the intelligent and knowledgeable gamer will know that this is a place to look before buying a game, and that the judgments are valuable. Designers will hope to get good reviews, and will publish with this in mind; they will also, one hopes, release beta-tests in hopes of getting buzz. And so on.

Will it happen? I rather doubt it: it’s a hell of a lot of work, and any positive results will take quite a long time to manifest. I can think of other possibilities in this line, but they are even less likely because even more time-consuming and difficult.

In sum, pragmatically, I doubt very much there is anything the Forge community can do to resolve these difficulties effectively, except to say --- as everyone keeps on saying --- that designers really ought to submit their games for tough constructive criticism at the Forge.

Theory and Design

I do think, however, that the potential connection between theory and design is somewhat underutilized and under-thought, and that in the long run it might have a positive impact on these publication issues.

The most common uses of theory in RPG design, as far as I can tell, appear to come in two flavors.

Analytical: I have a game that has some problems. I align the game design to my theoretical model, and I see how it all stacks up. Now I find that there are some mismatches between the model’s predictions about effective design and what I actually have in hand. I therefore revise to accord with the model.

Implementation: I have a great game idea, and some ideas about how to write it as a game. As I go along my thinking and designing work, however, I run across something I don’t know how to implement. I look at the established models to find a range of possibilities, hoping not only to find a little toolbox of options but also some sense of what the implications will be of each choice. I choose the option that seems to accord best with what I want both in immediate effect and in larger implications.

I have no objection to these methods. It looks to me as though they have worked fairly well over the years. I think that on the design side these things were primarily what Ron had in mind with GNS and then the Big Model, and I think that a fair number of designers have found those models useful for the purpose.

Personally, I find theory much more interesting for other reasons, but with one exception I will keep quiet about this here; lord knows I have yapped about it enough elsewhere.

There is however another potential use for theory, and it is not one I have seen a great deal in design. I think, furthermore, that this potential use, if developed extensively, might well have a positive effect on published game quality, because it might have a positive impact on the reception of Forge community-based constructive criticism. This is because it should have the effect of dislodging the ossified, even paralytic condition of the theory itself.

You will note, in the two applications already mentioned, that the theory itself is a fixed object. That is, the design is not expected to have any effect on the theory --- only the reverse. But this has the necessary effect of suggesting that the theory use constitutes all that it is possible, or at least useful, to know about gaming insofar as design is concerned. Logically, however, such designs cannot provide data about the validity of the theory as a universal statement; they can only provide data suggesting that the theory works for whatever less-than-universal ranges it covers. Hypothetically, it is possible that a theoretically perfect game that stinks might undermine the theory, but there are always enough non-theorized factors in any game design that I think it very unlikely this would happen. So the theory remains impregnable, but there is no data support it broadly. This leads to a difficulty: people who do not wish to accept the validity of this theoretical model have grounds to do so, whether or not they are fully aware of this.

Now there is of course analyzing theory abstracted from design, which I like and Ron hates and lots of others are somewhere on one end or the other or in between, but let’s stick to design at the moment.

Another possibility in design is to start with a theoretical problem or question and develop a game design as a test-case for it. I have not seen this done very much, though I admit I do not read every game, nor anything like. Yet such an approach has a distinguished history in a great many other fields.

To take one example I know passably well and is very closely parallel in historical usage, we might consider the relationship between theory and compositional practice in music; here I am thinking of what is often called Western art music, also known rather problematically as “classical music.”

Traditionally, theory serves several functions in such music. First, it provides a constructive tool for implementation of ideas, telling a composer how to set about turning an idea into actual music that expresses the idea; this is parallel to the “implementation” approach in gaming. Second, it grants analytical purchase on music, either to fix a composition that isn’t working or to examine other works and acquire knowledge for future compositions, as for example in Schoenberg’s writings on composition and harmony in which he constantly refers to examples from Beethoven’s string quartets; this is not unlike the “analytical” approach in gaming, but is quite a bit broader than has commonly been employed, not least because the theoretical resources in music are a great deal more thorough and precise, allowing one to analyze a very small part of music with a high level of technical refinement, which is not currently the case with gaming theory. And third, theory in music has provided ideas of its own. That is, musical works generally begin with an idea to be expressed, and quite often this idea comes from theory, in the sense that the composer sees an incompletely-explored area of theory and develops an idea for exploring and developing that area, or again the composer’s analysis of previous works prompts a corresponding but transformed idea for his own compositions, and so on. The results of such theory-generated compositional ideas have sometimes produced what are often called “school works,” i.e. works of interest primarily to theorists and composers, lending themselves to intensive analysis and to theoretical development. Yet in other cases, the works produced have been masterpieces: Wagner’s Ring, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and many others, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and so on. Not all of these masterpieces have been modernist, either, though to be sure it’s more common in modernism: Beethoven’s late string quartets and especially the Grosse Fuge, Bach’s Art of the Fugue, arguably Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

I suggest that a move like this can and should be made in gaming design. In the short run, there are two obvious positive developments. First, it will produce new and innovative designs. Obviously this is not the only way to get such designs, but it is one legitimate way. Second, it will necessarily produce theoretical refinement and development, undermining what I see as the current paralysis in theory. For one thing, such a move must entail enormously greater analytical precision in theory, because otherwise there is no way to break down other works and understand their full functional (and dysfunctional) structures.

At the social level, getting all the way back to the threads that started this excursus, I think that a theoretical dynamism currently lacking will work to undermine the current perception of the Forge as a place where only certain kinds of games are supported. The question is not (for me) whether this perception is justified; the fact remains that it exists. To my mind, the proper worry is that some designers with interesting ideas may come to believe this perception and thus not contribute to the Forge as a critical community for game development and design. These designers will thus turn to other resources for criticism, and it appears that most of the other readily-available resources are not critical at all. Thus someone who began with interesting ideas ends up producing shoddy work. Practically speaking, of course, the changes of perception will take quite some time to manifest, but I think one has to think in the long term if one is interested in broad social change of any sort, even in a tiny community like this.

As to how exactly to go about such developments, that’s going to take a while to explain, even preliminarily. I will say that the only two games I have actually designed did work from something of this perspective, though I was not entirely conscious of it during the process.

With Shadows in the Fog, I had on the one hand a very clear sense of setting and general feel, but I also wanted to design a game that could not readily be boxed up as G, N, or S. Furthermore I wanted a basic mechanic that veered outside the norms of resolution mechanics, and would carry its own connotations intrinsically. Thus my various experiments with Tarot mechanics. Finally, I wanted a game that would take some rather fuzzy notions of bricolage in gaming and make them concrete throughout.

With Lévi-Strauss in Amazonia, the initial prompt was simply Eero Tuovinen suggesting that I write the game based on My Life With Master. As the design began to develop, however, I got interested in whether it might be possible to make setting construction an intrinsic part of the play of the game without making the elements of setting meaningful in a fixed way. Specifically, the tribe and its pattern of life would slowly evolve in a complex, organic fashion, but at the end of the day none of the players --- including the GM --- would entirely understand this tribe; on the contrary, everyone would be faced with an increasingly thoroughly-viewed tribal life and a growing sense that a great deal of what was going on was comprehensible but not yet comprehended. This would produce a tearing-apart sensation in the players, the half-breed native informants, in that they would have to choose between a lifestyle they could not comprehend but to which they were bound (the tribe), or a lifestyle that rejected them and their tribal roots but which was at least comprehensible (the whites).

In any event, I am of the opinion that this sort of design development would have a very positive impact in the long run, and might also produce some very peculiar and interesting games. Furthermore, it would help make theory change and develop in useful ways.

But how does one go about it?

Analytical Tools

The first point, I think, is that the analytical tools currently available simply are not all that good; properly, they are not especially precise, and they have wound up into them an awful lot of assumptions. That is not entirely avoidable from the outset, but as things stand there is also no mechanism for self-correction.

The most thorough (which is not necessarily to say best) model I know of currently is the “Big Model” (hereafter BM), which as you know has all sorts of little fiddly bits and various levels and whatnot. Now let’s suppose we apply it for purely analytical purposes to something like AD&D or Rolemaster or Champions. If you think about it for a minute, I think you will see that one can only take such analysis so far. For example, there is within this model very little means for differentiating among different editions of Champions, despite some enormous differences. Again, how closely can one evaluate differences in character design mechanisms between the various intersecting class, race, and whatnot systems embedded in AD&D? So the model is at the moment rather coarse, a blunt instrument.

Now so long as we recognize it as a useful step and not a completed tool, that’s perfectly fine. This is part of why I asked recently what you all thought about GNS/Big Model and its utility past, present and future. What I notice is that many people said they did not care whether the model changed. That wasn’t my question: I asked whether you thought it would or should change. The would part was intended to get at whether the current institutional framework for this model can allow it to change significantly in a relatively short period. The should part was intended to get at whether the model constitutes a useful basis for future work, or whether the whole thing should be scrapped. I took it for granted that some useful basis is wanted; I only wanted to know whether you thought GNS/Big Model was workable as such a basis. In any event, I’m going for the moment to presume BM as a workable foundation which may well in the end have almost no similarity to where we end up ten years from now. I just don’t see the point in reinventing the wheel.

So let’s suppose we use this model as a foundation for the sort of thing I described in music theory. Since the model isn’t very effective for things like AD&D, let’s start with successful games close to home, like Sorcerer or MLWM, where presumably the model has some reasonable grip. So we sit down to do some analysis, asking....

And then it hit me. You may be interested to know that I was sitting in the RMV waiting forever to find out why they didn’t mail me my car registration, taking notes about these issues on a little pad. I was thinking along --- actually I had gotten a hell of a lot farther than this --- and I imagined sitting down to compose a close BM-based analysis of Sorcerer, and I imagined the sort of analytical language in which articles might be composed, and I thought, “What the hell would the question be?”

“Why didn’t it work?” is only useful if it doesn’t, but the whole point of choosing successful examples is that they mostly do work. So that’s not a great starting-point.

“Why did it work?” is totally useless. Why did what work? For what? And in fact, the model is not very specific about this. “It was fun.” Okay, but how? Are we sure that all --- or even most --- factors have been accounted for here? Do we have a sufficiently clear definition of “fun,” or in fact any at all?

This is where the primary breakdown of theory for design lies, at present, in RPG theory. We simply have an insufficiently clear framework in which to express what it is we want to do other than grand-scale concepts like fun and coherence.

Let’s suppose we take a model from music theory that may actually work here. What I will argue is that it immediately points to a very serious problem in thinking about what theory actually is with respect to design and play. Fortunately, this problem is not in any sense unique to RPG theory.

The funny little field of musical semiology, of which probably the biggest name is Jean-Jacques Nattiez, works to understand how music works (mostly but not at all exclusively Western art music) through examination of the various little bits and pieces as signs. Nattiez is quite famous for arguing for a partition of semiotic analysis into three levels, all intersecting but also at least heuristically discrete.

He gives a nice example, from his teacher Jean Molino. You have an old parlor game that starts sort of like Mad Libs on a stripped-down level. Everyone writes down several random nouns on little slips of paper and puts them in a hat. Then you create a statement of the form, “A is to B as X is to Y,” and for each of the four terms you draw a slip out of a hat:

The toothbrush is to God as a wallet is to Finns.

The game is to come up with some way to make coherent sense of the statement. Fun, huh?

So Nattiez (from Molino) derives the following points here:

There is no intentional sense in the statement, since nobody intentionally put it together in this fashion.
There is apprehensible structure in the statement, in the sense that we can, with enough examples, derive a constant structure.
It is possible to develop interpretive meaning from such statements despite the lack of intentional sense, probably because of the compatibility of the structure with normative rules of our language.
With sufficient examples and analysis, it is possible not only to derive the structure from such statements but also at least a likely system of rules by which they were generated.

This leads to the tripartition, which has some horribly ugly terminology:

1) The poietic dimension, which is the process of creation by which the work was produced, and which may or may not include things like intentionality but certainly includes some definable and analyzable rules and structures arising from the history of production processes and the inherent limitations of the materials used;

2) The esthesic dimension, which is the process by which someone makes meaning out of a work, very often understanding him- or herself to be receiving meaning, but in fact necessarily creating an interpretation; and

3) The material trace, the symbolic form actually embodied physically and materially, which arises from the poietic dimension and is encountered in the esthesic. Nattiez is quite famous for insisting that analysis of the trace, which he calls “analysis of the neutral level,” is not only essential but also continually neglected in most musicological analysis. (Nattiez 1990)

Now I didn’t bring this up in order to introduce some horrible new terms for the hell of it, and in fact I don’t think we really need to live with these; even Nattiez admits they are somewhat “barbarous.” But let’s think about RPGs for a minute in this context, and see what happens.

We can clearly see the poietic dimension, which is (preliminarily) all the processes and methods that go into design, some of them highly conscious and many of them not. Clearly this process can be analyzed, and it can be helpful here to have author descriptions of the process. In many cases we have multiple editions (ashcans, betas, multiple final editions, etc.) and can trace the process; in some cases too we have playtest data that led directly to revisions, and so on. At the same time, it is extremely problematic to divorce the actual play manifestation of “the game” from the poietic, since the process leading to performance is also part of the poietic dimension, being constructive and constitutive of the actual material trace, which must include the performance itself.

We can equally clearly see the esthesic dimension, which is what happens when a group picks up the game and plays it. It is obvious enough that a group will necessarily inject its own interests and foci into the actual play, but that is expected: remember, the esthesic is not a question of receiving a message but of creating meaning in a dynamic relationship with the passive trace. Yet it is equally apparent that to some important degree the group will generally either understand itself to be “playing the game” or not doing so. More to the point, the ultimate “meaning” of the game is going to be markedly different from player to player, and in fact may be undefinable in a general sense. That is, it turns out once again that the performance exists simultaneously at three levels, just as does the material object that is the game book.

The natural tendency is to compare the interpretations and results in the former instance with the things we have found in the simple poietic dimension: the designer wants to know whether his intentions have in fact carried forth into the end-result. That is a legitimate question, certainly, and an essential one for the designer. But there is a tendency to presume that the process therefore goes idea -> design -> production -> reception -> play. Things are far more complicated than this.

What is missing here is that the neutral trace is distinct and stands sharply in between. Furthermore there is ultimately no way to demonstrate a passably full connection between the poietic and the esthesic via the neutral trace. To do so, we would need to create some sort of metric that evaluated the poietic independently of intent and compared this to the actual play result independently of understood reception. But this is not at all likely to work; certainly there is no parallel for it working in any other art form, so it would be bizarre to assume it here.

What we have without debate is analysis of the neutral level, and this can perhaps be compared systematically with one or the other side. It is possible in some cases that the two sides will align in some measure, but a theory of how gaming design works cannot presume this as normal.

Which takes us back to analytical tools.

If we analyze a game like Sorcerer at the neutral level, we have to analyze what is actually present in the book. But that is not all: in fact, as noted before, the performance of a group at some moment is also analyzable at the neutral level. If you think of music, for example, would we say that the composer’s “work” is the notated score, or the performance, or what is heard by a listener? Surely all of these. Just so, Sorcerer as the result of a poietic process is “the game.” But analyzed in terms of an esthesic process it seems clear that Ron Edwards drops out of the equation: we players have no direct access to him, and we begin our circular interaction with the game at the level of a physical trace in book form; nevertheless the game as it is encountered by us includes not only the book but also what happened in the room Saturday evening. So what of the neutral level?

On the one hand, there is the problem that game sessions are not notated thoroughly, so we cannot be confident that our data adequately reflect the lived reality. But in fact, the same is true with music: the notation may be very clear (although it isn’t necessarily so), but the esthesic process of meaning-construction is not equivalent to the notation. Just so, we might think that because the book in front of us does not fully reflect everything that Ron went through in writing the game, it is inadequate, but the same goes even for the poietic: Ron cannot tell us everything he went through, and even if he could this would not take into account the performative dimensions that went into the specific moment that was Saturday’s game. So if the neutral level seems an inadequate level of analysis, all that is revealed is that all levels are inadequate to the same degree.

On the other hand, the neutral level can at least be taken to be discrete and bounded. It simply is not necessary to know what the intentions were, although these may be useful clues. It is also not necessary to have a complete transcript of everything in the game session, although obviously the more detail the better. But neutral level analysis is quite possible with only the various books and some descriptions of play sessions, however partial and unstructured. Furthermore, it is at least possible --- if not yet practicable because we have insufficient theoretical depth --- to perform adequate neutral level analysis from the book alone. Indeed, this would be the ultimate hope for the designer and the consumer: simply by reading the text very closely, to know what was most likely to happen in the game session. This will never be sufficient as a full analysis of the neutral level, because it omits the performed moment, but on the other hand the performance is rather weakly bound to the textual trace, and so it is legitimate for practicality’s sake to seek some grounding in the text.

So what is the ultimate conclusion here? I submit that the first thing to analyze is the text of a game, and that the questions to be asked should indeed preliminarily come from the poietic and esthesic dimensions, mainly positive in the first case (“why/how does this game structure achieve the intended result?”) and mainly negative in the second (“why/how did this game not produce fun in this moment?”). Ultimately, with sufficient knowledge, the hope is to discard this.

Thus the first procedure, analytically, is to examine games close to BM bases that are established as successful, and to ask how specifically particular stated intentions of the designer are manifest in the game in all its parts. This last is crucial: we cannot rely on the designer to know where the concepts are present, nor indeed to know how best to break apart the work.

Tool Development

What I think will happen, when we come to a very close analysis of every piece of a game like Sorcerer or MLwM, is that we will find an inability to describe certain things sufficiently. More to the point, we will be unable to do so without presuming the total accuracy and completeness of the BM. Since the BM presumes from the outset a number of relations between design and play that must remain absolutely open (but not in any sense un-analyzed) within neutral level analysis, notably things like Creative Agenda, these concepts cannot be brought to bear as solutions to any descriptive problem. In fact, one hopes rather that thorough description can lead to a more effective analytical description of such concepts.

So where we run into descriptive weaknesses, the model will need to develop new grounds of sophistication. This will unfortunately tend, I think, to produce a lot of new terminology. Fortunately, most people who generate the really ugly terms tend to be thinking about very large meta-concepts, not fine details. In point of fact, I think it is very likely that most of the necessary terms can be borrowed directly from well-known games and their internal glossaries. There is already a very large technical vocabulary extant through such games, and no reason whatever to invent new words to do old work.

The next problem, I think, is going to be that such close analysis is going to reveal some variations and differences in relations between structures within games, whereas the BM is fairly simple in a hierarchical sequence of nested boxes. This simplicity is going to have to shatter, but there is no reason to do it until a particular example comes to hand. The question is going to be whether a given nesting is indeed normal, and if so, what the implications of violation tend to be.

The next stage, let’s call it Stage 2, is going to mean moving beyond the familiar. We simply have got to be able to analyze established, successful games that are not in any sense Forge-based or -similar, and given that we have no grounds for evaluating “success” apart from undefined esthesic notions of “fun” and a lot of anecdotal evidence of no real statistical worth, there is no way to know in advance that something like V:tM is not successful. Neutral-level analysis of this game will also be necessary, and of AD&D (various forms), and so on. These analyses are going to be much, much larger, because these books are very long and have a great many material qualities that are unusual (not to say absent) in independent games as a result of relatively high production values. As with Forge-based games, also, close analysis will require testimony from actual play sessions, which must be selected with fair impartiality: we cannot, that is, choose all success-stories with Sorcerer and all “I considered getting out of gaming, it was so bad” stories for V:tM. In addition, that testimony will have to be considered in light of a much larger range of play patterns and social contexts than is generally the case with major Forge-based games, given the much wider audience.

I suspect that by the time we’ve gotten that far, the analytical model in use is going to resemble the current BM in much the way milk resembles beef: there’s a cow behind them both, but that’s about all.

Now we will be ready for serious experimentation, because now we will be able to generate complex and clearly-formulated questions on the basis of analysis. For example, in some analysis it has been postulated that a fortune-based relationship between structure A and structure B will have the following implications. So now we set out to design a game in which such a relationship takes a central position and see what happens. But this need not be a “school work” or pure experiment: it is quite possible to accept the postulate and think, “that is exactly the sort of implication I want operative in my game, because it sounds just like this thing I adore in my favorite TV show,” and on this basis to design toward this goal. The resultant design manifests a physical trace which is subject to further neutral-level analysis, leading to refinement of the analytical theory, and so on ad infinitum.

The other thing we will have at this point is the possibility of an effective theory-based “design strategy” approach, much the same way you can learn to write sonatas or symphonies by taking classes. The classes give you theory, which you then implement in small ways, and then your implementations receive analytical criticism based on the theory, and so on. It simply isn’t a black box, and nor should RPG design be one. At the same time, it is worth recalling that the development of such a theory-founded rigorous design system is bound to lead to people denouncing the thought police again. I could give musical examples of why this is stupid and ignorant, but allow me to point to an obvious one in prose fiction: if you do not learn the technical skills of grammar and prose mechanics, all the scintillating wonderfulness in your head will not come out as successful fiction. Just so, what we are looking to generate here is a prescriptive system of theory; once it has been mastered fairly thoroughly, a given designer may of course wish to move beyond it, entailing alterations to the theory, and so on.

The End Result

Certainly, what I’ve written up here is rather Quixotic, and it is not terribly likely to come to fruition. But it’s worth doing: I think it (or something very much like) is probably the only really rational way to move forward with a fruitful relationship between theory and design. This is after all the sort of thing engineers do, as well as composers. If it’s all just a hobby, something you do as a pastime, then obviously there is no reason to put this much work into it. But I hear a lot of people saying otherwise.

I suppose the real point here is that I see a lot of discussion and not a lot of developing methods for analysis. Everything is based on a lot of pop psychology and personal experience-based rules of thumb. The BM is very much a creation from such a basis, and that is not unreasonable, but at some point forward motion is going to require getting out of rules of thumb. It is going to require not a lot of brilliant designs but rather development of ways to analyze brilliant designs. It is all very well to call for a spirit of critical analysis, but at the moment I see no clear way to go about it, and I don’t mean to call for it: I mean that I know of no way to do such analysis that would actually take into account even the surface technicalities of mechanics. Consider the fact that lots of people have worked out ways to explain how odds work with various kinds and combinations of dice in various rolling systems, but that we have no general model that incorporates these things at all smoothly or coherently.

So my suggestion is that people start by sitting down with games they admire and analyzing them, step by step, piece by piece, figuring out as best they can how the various bits and pieces actually work. Try not to make too many assumptions about what is and is not a “real” piece; look at what’s there. If you have to coin new terms to describe something, rack your brains and ask whether you have seen something similar or even identical in some well-known game --- there are few new things under the sun --- in which case call it by that game’s term (and if that’s not clear, call it “GameName Term,” as in “AD&D Character Level”). As soon as you have something you think works pretty well, post it somewhere and suggest that people not reply publicly except in the form of additional critical analyses of the same game or other games, in the former case looking to deepen (and quite likely challenge) your analysis, and in the latter to expand it in other directions. When we have a good library of stuff like this, we will also have a growing methodology and terminology that works quite well, and much of what we thought we knew will turn out to be hopelessly naive.

My suggestions for a better future.

Bibliography
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. 1990. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Trans. Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [He's written many others, and Eero Tarasti and David Lidov are good too, but this book is nicely comprehensive and in English, as well as coherently organized and available.]

My Goodness

Tue, 01 May 2007 03:13:45 GMT

My book is up to #30,003 on Amazon, which is very high for this sort of book, and you can now do the "search inside" thing. I have received fan email from several scholars, two of whom are actually sending me things by way of congratulations.

I don't really know what to say.

Wow!

Hope they don't all hate it when they read it, whoever they are, is all I suppose I can say.

Jeepers.

Not that it has anything to do with gaming. I thought I was logged in on the other blog. Oh well, I know you all care too.

A GNS Question

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 02:32:46 GMT

John Kim's blog had a post about GNS and his interest or lack thereof these days. I have, as you know, been somewhat absent from this whole little mad field, myself, and I found myself thinking, "So what do I think about it these days?"

As I turn that over in my head, possibly profitably but possibly not, I have some questions for you. Please insert "and the Big Model" after GNS if that is helpful to you; I don't really care.

1. Do you find GNS useful in your current play?

2. Did you find it so in the past?

3. If you design games, do you think about this while you design (including general mulling over)?

4. Did you do so in the past?

5. Do you think that GNS should change and develop significantly?

6. Practically speaking, do you think it will change noticeably in the next year or so?

7. When you see someone make a GNS-based remark somewhere on the web, do you react with interest, annoyance, or what?

8. What is your overall assessment of what GNS has achieved in the past?

9. What is your assessment of its future?

You don't have to answer all that, obviously, but I am genuinely interested to know, as I see very, very different things about this.

Oh, one more thing: is it worth creating a poll like this? I've never done one.

Stories?

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 16:46:04 GMT

jeffwik pointed me to this Forge thread on storytelling games, brain-damage, and whatnot. How very odd. I kept reading, because that's the kind of freak I am, and I just kept thinking that the whole thing was pointless for reasons other than the ones constantly stated. I mean, the whole brain damage thing was nonsense, and I have no brief for sociobiology in any of its ridiculous forms (not that it can't be well done, but it's certainly rare and this isn't a good example). But the whole thing starts with a false premise.

Here's Ron near the opening:

I'm going to start with a claim that a human being can routinely understand, enjoy, and (with some practice) create stories. I think most postmodernism is arrant garbage, so I'll say that a story is a fictional series of events which present a conflict and a resolution, with the emergent/resulting audience experience of "theme." I also think that stories concern a fairly limited range of possible conflicts, but the angles one might use for presentation, and the interactions among the range, make for quite a stunning array of individual examples or expressions of them.

Again, my claim is that this is a human capacity which is swiftly learned and shaped into a personal characteristic ("what stories I like") as a basic feature of the human experience, used as a constant means of touchpoints during communication, along the whole spectrum of polite conversation to icebreaking all the way to the most intimate or critical of conversations. I am completely unconvinced by the suggestion that what we call a "story" today is a local historical artifact, or that people in past epochs or in different cultures had or have utterly different fundamentals for stories.

(Related point: as far as I can tell, there is no meaningful "cultural gap" regarding stories. Differences in content and presentation which seem jarring at first contact are swiftly overcome with further contact. This is common. People refuse to do this, when they do, not because the foreign story makes no sense, but because they are invested in not paying attention for any number of reasons.)

A little later he makes a very funny (unintentionally) remark about how he likes deconstruction as an activity, blah blah, because he doesn't believe in authorial intent. Very nice. He thinks, of course, that this makes him radical but not someone who "buys in" on his postmodern academic models, and so on. But in fact, what shows here is not only misunderstanding of deconstruction -- a very minor point, although I wish people wouldn't pronounce gleefully and glibly about things they know nothing about -- but also his misunderstanding of what "postmodern" or whatever is all about. And that is, perhaps surprisingly, relevant here.

Based on Ron's statements here (the long block-quote, I mean), he thinks that it is relatively obvious what a "story" is, as a cross-cultural an in fact human-universal phenomenon. Furthermore, he thinks that the people who don't agree with him within the academy are a bunch of postmodern idiotic navel-gazers, presenting "arrant garbage." Based on other remarks here and elsewhere, the point seems relatively clear: in the heavy theoretical-turn postmodern whatnot movements of the 70s and 80s, the whole concept of "story" got undermined by people who mostly wanted to yap. At base, a story is a story, and throwing jargon at it doesn't make it not a story, or doesn't make us not know what a story is.

I'll set aside this blanket rejection of things like narratology. I will only note in passing that there is a blanket assumption that nothing that has been done by all those scholars interested in such subjects for the last 35 years or so has been of any value. How one could know that without very extensive critical reading and analysis is beyond me, but I'll let it go.

What's interesting, though, is that the undermining of "story" as a straightforward and relatively obvious human behavior and genre was not undermined by a bunch of pomo theory-heads. It was undermined in the first flushes of structural and morphological critique, going back to people like Vladimir Propp. Actually, when it gets down to it, the recognition that there are fundamental problems with the category "story" as a cultural universal predates Propp quite a bit: it is because the problem was recognized that Propp et al. started working on it.

The problem first cropped up with serious engagement with mythology, and attempts to define myth as a cross-cultural phenomenon. And that takes us back to, wait for it, the 19th century. Andrew Lang would be one of the biggest names here, but in fact Sir James Frazer and Edward Tylor and those guys all got into this problem.

Basically the point has been known and accepted in mainstream scholarship, primarily in the cross-cultural study of culture (e.g. sociology, anthropology, religious studies), for more than a century. To put it simply, these basic factors that allow Ron to define and recognize a story as a cross-cultural human universal phenomenon are not present in every case, or indeed perhaps in most. What Ron (and most others not involved in the study of culture, to be fair) takes to be universal is solidly proven not to be so. "Story" in the sense he means it is not, of course, an entirely modern, Western phenomenon; it has parallels in many other cultures and times. But it is not universal, or anything like.

(That's the end of the actual content material here; the rest is analysis of where Ron's argument should actually have led.)

So this whole argument, from my point of view, falls into what Ron likes to call "undergraduate debate." That's exactly what this is: you have a guy who thinks a lot of himself pronouncing glibly on story and brain and whatnot, but who doesn't know what the hell he's talking about in terms of the most basic first principles. If we take his argument seriously, we have to say that many of the cultures of South America, for example, are intrinsically brain-damaged, and not because they played WW games. Of course, from their point of view most of our stories aren't stories, or at the very least aren't any good as stories, for lots of reasons that don't even enter Ron's sphere of definition. The criteria are simply not as straightforward as he thinks, and they do in fact vary.

I suppose this makes me one of those postmodern purveyors of "arrant garbage." Well, so long as "postmodern" dates back to the mid-late 19th century, and so long as pretty much every piece of responsible scholarship on myth, ritual, religion, and culture is accepted as "arrant garbage," yeah, I guess I'll accept that. But it's a sad state of affairs when people take such a claim seriously because the guy touting it is a biologist, for Pete's sake.

Stripped to essentials, the argument is this:

Here is a definition of Story
Some games that claim to emphasize story do not follow this definition
Some gamers who have played the games in question appear to have trouble shifting definitions
Such gamers have been very strongly trained to think about story based on definitions other than the one posed
In some cases, they may actually be unable to change definitions
For this reason, they may well not "get" Story Now games
That's sad

Oh. And? If it weren't for the inflammatory rhetoric and the fact that it's Ron saying this, why would anyone respond? What's to respond to? It's a statement of opinion: Ron thinks this is sad. He calls it brain damage, for whatever weird reason, but what he's talking about is enculturation and training. He thinks that some games, notably WW games, train people to think about stories in a way he doesn't think is helpful, and that (1) makes their games suck and (2) keeps them from playing games that tell stories in a way he does think is helpful.

From this there are two basic responses worth making. On point (1), there are people whose games don't suck, for whom the whole argument is laughable. And for those whose games do suck, the question is simply how to re-train them so they will "get" games like Sorcerer. So we've stripped down to essentials:

There is a group, of unknown size, of gamers who fit the following criteria:

They have played a bunch of WW-type games
They think their games suck
They think they want storytelling
They have trouble with games like Sorcerer
The reason for this trouble is that they think about "story" in a WW-type way
Therefore

We need a training regimen to help these people rethink story and play

Okay. So write a new introduction to Sorcerer entitled "surviving 'storytelling' play," in which you explain how "story" here means something different, and how that means play is going to be different, and how and why you think this will be more satisfactory than WW has been. The assumption is that those people who actually like WW games won't be reading it because they don't have any reason to do so. You have some GM who's trying to help these unhappy players, and that GM encourages them to read this intro before designing a character or starting to play.

Has Ron actually written such a thing? Why not?

Spot That Thread!

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 04:04:55 GMT

On Malcolm Sheppard's blog, I found the following in a "looking back on 2006" post:

Anyway, we also got into "brain damage," which was Ron Edwards' borrowing of sociobiological rhetoric for gaming. Many gamers are giving Ron a pass on this as some kind of metaphor, but he's made it clear he believes it's literally true and I figure he's following a doctrine of neural Darwinism in doing so. What he has not done, however, is identified what a story is in a sociobiological context, which makes his critique kind of halfassed, even within its own rules. So Ron would do well to give the whole "just so story" on the sociobiology of the Big Model, or else it's just the arbitrary invention I believe it to be -- but *by his own standards.*

I don't read the Forge much these days, and I confess I don't know what Malcolm's referring to. It sounds fascinating. Anyone know the thread?

Mysteries

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:12:16 GMT

I just wanted to put this link here up, primarily for my reference. It's a thread from the Forge a couple years ago where I wrote a lot about how to run a mystery. Feel free to discuss it here, certainly, but I just wanted to have it somewhere I'd know where to find it.

Making Cultures: Chapter 2

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:32:39 GMT

Chapter 2. Beginnings: Identity and the Sacred

Master Narratives

A master narrative (metanarrative, grand narrative) is, in short, a total or totalizing cultural narrative that lends authority and structure to the way people think about, know, and experience the world around them. The list I gave at the end of last chapter for the United States—apple pie, mom, freedom, democracy, etc.—is an offhanded sketch of one American master narrative. There are others, and there are other parts of this one. But if you’re American, you know the narrative I mean; if you’re not, you know it anyway from Hollywood and the news, and furthermore you can quickly generate the same sort of thing for your own culture(s).

I believe that the term was first proposed by Louis Althusser, one of the big guns of critical theory, but I’m not absolutely sure. It has gone through many variations and reformulations, because it is such a useful notion. Jean-François Lyotard famously described postmodernism as a kind of “incredulity towards metanarratives,” which shows that it’s useful even backwards. I am quite fond, recently, of Michael Herzfeld’s notion of “cultural intimacy,” though I think the term is dreadful. Anyway, it’s around quite a lot.

Now practically speaking, no large culture has a single master narrative—there are lots. But there are always dominant tropes of some kind, because otherwise what would politicians talk about? And you learn a great deal about a culture by its narratives about itself.

Remember how a sacred thing is a concrete symbol of the way the society thinks about itself in the ideal? Well, a master narrative is a narrative version of much the same thing.

Now the reason this is practical is that it is very often the starting-point for a designer, whether she knows it or not. She thinks, “Hmm, I want a warrior culture, sort of like the samurai Japan thing, but I want human sacrifice.” The thing is, no actual culture works like this, in the sense that culture is not a salad bar from which some ruling group picks this and that element, but that’s not the point—and you likely have reasons for choosing what you choose. Practically as well, it may be important for your design, for whatever reasons, that this culture you’re designing match the description.

So the first thing to do is to write down a short list of the really big, essential points. These are the things you absolutely do not plan to change. Polish it as a sentence or two instead of a list. Maybe if the list is long, you might want to tick off which things are stuff mostly talked about internally and which things are a big deal in public rhetoric. What you now have is a rough outline of a master narrative.

The Purarken are an ancient warrior people who live in caves cut deep in the walls of canyons and arid mesas; they follow strict ascetic disciplines, have a strong honor-code based on a system of feudal lordship, and are infamous for sacrificing prisoners to their war god, Piruka.

Now this is from the outside, of course, but it works. We’ve got a good start, really: this sounds a lot like a fair number of cultures as described in RPGs. We’re off!

But before getting too excited, remember the basic principle of a master narrative: for all the same reasons as the little sketch of an American master narrative is really not at all true of America (and is entirely true, as well), this sketch of the Purarken is quite deceptive. But how, specifically?

We have begun to describe a little bit of the ideal of this society as it sees itself. We are in that sense beginning to understand, just a little, what they consider sacred. What we do not know, however, is how this plays out in actual practice. More to the point, remembering the division, this little narrative tells us exceedingly little about everyday life. We don’t know, that is, almost anything about how the Purarken live most of the time—we only know what gets bruited around at war rallies, big annual sacrifice festivals, and so on.

The Sacred Sword

Let’s think for a minute about the concrete symbols. We have a narrative; how does it manifest in things?

The Purarken are a “warrior culture,” but what does that mean? Apparently they think war is a big deal, but we don’t know why or how. We also know they have a war god named Piruka, and that prisoners (of war, perhaps?) are sacrificed to this divinity.

Let’s keep it simple, for the moment. How about swords? Swords are nice. They have a lot of nice symbolism all built in: blades, guards, shininess, steel, and so on. And fantasy cultures love swords. So let’s have them be into swords, and make Piruka have a big sword. Okay, so since this symbol, the sword, is pretty obviously linked to the master narrative, it’s clear that swords are sacred objects.

We now know that swords are hedged around with taboos: that’s one of the definitions of the sacred, that it can be profaned. Unfortunately, a lot of taboos on blades have already been done to death in fantasy: cannot be sheathed unless blooded is always popular. So let’s not do that, since we have as yet no reason to follow the obvious.

What does the Purark sword look like? Is it single-edged or double? What sort of hilt and guard? What’s it made of? Who makes it? We know that these things are not going to change a whole lot, because (a) sacred objects don’t usually change form and style rapidly, and (b) the god Piruka has one of these, so we have models everyplace Piruka is represented (assuming he or she is so—bear in mind that divinities, if that’s what Piruka technically is, are not necessarily represented).

Our designer said “samurai Japan,” so let’s go with something sort of like a katana. Single-edged, long, fast, very sharp, made of high-quality steel by an immensely complicated technical process, minimal guard, hand-and-a-half, nice and shiny.

Practically speaking, this cannot be all that common a weapon, because the technique of making it is too complicated. Sounds like this sword will be restricted to some sort of warrior class or caste, which is fine. Male or female—or both? Let’s go with both, to be all egalitarian.

Well, but now things get complicated at once. If both men and women carry these things, or can do so, sexual symbolism is likely to enter into representations of this sword. Not that it wouldn’t with just men or just women, but with both it’s going to get kinky. Could Piruka, the war god, be a goddess? Or ambisexual? I’ll go with goddess—gives me things to play with.

What about the human sacrifices? We have said that the sword is sacred, and that the Purarken sacrifice their prisoners to their goddess. Do they use the sword to do it? Wait!

Thinking Messy

Before we make another move here, we need to step back and think about method. I insisted, right at the beginning, that culture is a vast web of complicated stuff all bound together. Most of it is not especially conscious. And before we get too excited about the Purarken, we need to watch out, because we could very easily fall into the trap of simplicity.

Just tracking out the line I was starting above, we were all ready to have the sword used for the sacrifices because it’s the sacred sword and it’s the sacred sacrifice to the sword/war goddess, and on and on. Dull, yes. But more to the point, wrong.

I suggest that you hold clearly in your head a principle of messiness. Culture is messy stuff. People never agree about anything much—certainly not anything important. Not over time, anyway. If your design is getting simple, it’s going wrong.

The problem is that as a designer, one tends to get excited because things start to click. You’ve thought of ten weird things and been playing around with this and that, and suddenly you see that seven of them can link together perfectly, and you naturally want to run with it. Now here I am telling you not to do this.

Well, actually you can. But there is another explanation or reason you have to add:

If it is common and generalizable across the culture, it is part of the master narrative.

In other words, if you come up with one of these wonderful, neat bits of reasoning that makes the whole thing hang together perfectly, it is ideal but not necessarily real. It is possibly, even probably, something that these people, and especially various of their leaders, say is real, quite a lot. But that does not mean it is really so.

Here we get back to the dreaded emic and etic, in a way. There is a terrible tendency to design a culture etically, from the outside, and make that description transparent: here’s what they do, here’s what they believe, here’s what they’re like. But if that description is accurate, it is not transparent to the emic: the people do not think of themselves in the way you have described. My feeling is that you have to go the other way: here is what they say about themselves, here is what their leaders say they should believe about themselves, here is what they say the gods want them to do. As to what really happens, as observed by someone from the outside... well, that’s quite another matter.

This leads, indirectly, to a fundamental principle of mine. When you are working on designing some piece of a culture, you will often, even constantly, come across a choice. You can decide it in several ways, and you don’t really care that much what the answer is. Is the god male or female? I don’t care—just pick one. Okay, so here’s the principle:

Always pick the less obvious choice, and figure it out later.

Now this is more true the farther along you get, but on the whole I think it’s true throughout. If you follow this principle, you will get complication immediately and automatically. Of course, if you do care a lot about the choice, go with what you want. But most of the time it really does not matter a whole heck of a lot. That’s when you always go against your immediate gut reaction.

The basic problem is that you, like the people we’re describing, think in largely predetermined categories. What you think is obvious and natural isn’t so, at least when you’re talking about culture. You probably think religion is about faith and gods, for example. So if you are going to create a culture that is not a cardboard cutout, you have to suppress your presuppositions.

So let’s get back to the Purarken.

The Sacrifice

So do they use the sacred sword to sacrifice their prisoners to the war goddess? NO.

Why not? I don’t know, because I don’t know why they sacrifice, either. I don’t know anything about their thinking, their myths, their practice. But I do know one thing: I should not impose a simplistic notion upon them before I know what’s at stake.

In fact, let’s take up the whole problem in another chapter.

Making Cultures: Chapter 1

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:29:44 GMT

Chapter 1. First Principles: Sacred and Profane

I notice that religion is relatively often added late to fantasy worlds. It also seems to have consistent institutional and mythological forms: priests with temples dedicated to particular gods in a pantheon. Sometimes there is a significant attempt to integrate these into the game-world; more often, they seem tacked-on, something primarily the concern of religious professionals (clerics, druids, etc.).

All of this depends on a number of fundamental assumptions that are stunningly difficult for most modern Westerners to get around. And because these assumptions are so deep, and because they in some sense run right to the core of what we think culture is in the first place, I think the best way to start building something new and different is to challenge those assumptions.

From the perspective of RPG culture-design, it is actually exceptionally useful to start with religion. This is because that undefinable congeries we like to point to and call “religion” is essentially always bound up with a vast range of ideas and ideals that cannot be separated from the rest of cultural life. As a result, if we start with religion, we are intrinsically starting with core elements of what the culture is really like, deep down, rather than starting with trivia. To put it differently, we are starting with the why rather than the what. This goes back to my point about not constructing cultural elements as explanations.

The big assumptions are, first, that religion is basically about faith in divinities. Ritual is, as a rule, secondary, and often pragmatic: do ut des (I give so that you give) and so on. Very often people are identified with divinities, or what amounts to the same thing, pantheons. Hrorg the Barbarian is a worshiper of Krark the God of Steel—you can tell, because when he’s mad he says “Krark!” And if he follows The Way Of Steel, he may get special powers, especially against servants of Krark’s mythological enemy Gwanna, Goddess of Lizards. And so on—you know the drill.

The thing is that this is an exceedingly poor definition of religion.

Faith was largely introduced as a fundamental principle with the rise of Christianity. Go back and read Exodus, for example: God doesn’t say anything about the Hebrews believing in him, but rather that they should obey him and his laws. If they break those laws, they must be purified or punished (or both). And if you look around with open eyes, you will start to notice that if you read up on world religions (and don’t get it all from an apologist like Huston Smith or Joseph Campbell), faith is really not especially common as an important principle. Furthermore, faith is usually balanced against ritual, as sides of a single coin—at least, until the Reformation, with Luther yelling “sola fide” (faith alone) and all that. So nowadays it seems pretty much everybody is a Protestant, including Jews and Catholics. I always enjoy prodding undergraduates about ritual, because you can always get the Jews and Catholics to tell you that ritual is much less important than faith, which just goes to show you that Luther won in the end.

Divinities, in which category we can include various gods, spirits, and ancestors, certainly are pretty common, but they are not universal. And, as everyone in the business has been saying for a hundred years now, there is no proper reason to exclude this or that tribe from the broad category of “people with religion” just because they don’t happen to be interested in divinities.

Ultimately, there is no decent definition of religion, and there probably isn’t going to be one. I do not want to get into the details of the issue—it’s one of those nightmares that scholars of religion mostly avoid these days, because everyone knows it’s unsolvable.

So the first thing to do is to undermine this. We start by thinking about religion, broadly speaking, but we do not do this in terms of faith or divinities. The place to begin is with the brilliant division, first proposed seriously by Émile Durkheim in his 1912 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, between the sacred and the profane.

Nota Bene: I am going to maintain this division in Durkheimian terms for as long as I can in this series, because it makes everything much, much easier. In the end, it will have to break down, but for reasons that we cannot seriously discuss as yet.

The Division

People look at the world through eyes conditioned very largely by the cultures in which they were raised. It is true that significant structures of thought come embedded in the brain; it is also true that other structures are personally constituted in reaction to what one has encountered of the world on one’s own. But that said, it all really comes together in a framework primarily determined by culture. That framework is classically described (by Aristotle and so on) in terms of a number of categories of thought: force, number, genus, time, space, and so on.

Now most of these categories have analogues here and there in the world around us. So when we look around and say, “Well, obviously there are basically four directions, because front-back, left-right, and furthermore north-south east-west, and so on,” we see how the category matches the world, which confirms us, and so on. But at the same time, the particular structures and terms of these categories seem to vary wildly. There are societies which do not map the world in four directions, for example. And I don’t mean that they think that the four-direction system is a weak one or whatever: I mean that they cannot imagine the world that way. To them, it is perfectly obvious that there are X number of directions, because obviously you look around you and you see A, B, C..., and so what kind of moron doesn’t know there are X directions?

The point of this little sketch is really twofold.

First of all, the broad categories of human thought, i.e. the framework or lenses or whatever through which we think about our experiences, can often be so deeply molded by our societies that we simply cannot see that there is any other way to think. Very often, in fact, we project such certainties onto nature: obviously such-and-such because it’s like that in nature.

Second, those categories and those analogies to nature may be, from someone else’s perspective, quite bizarre, illogical, and plain wrong. The outsider may not even be able to see the distinction or parallel to which the native refers as obvious, natural proof of the right way to think.

Which leads us to what Durkheim considered the most basic division of all, the one that is actually the foundation of all the others: the division between sacred and profane. It is a kind of abstraction, a meta-division that sets the pattern for all the others. And that division has its roots in, and supports in its turn, religion.

The division between sacred and profane is (thought Durkheim) the purest and simplest division. We cannot say anything about this division in general, except that it is absolute. What is sacred is not profane, and vice-versa. To cross the line is very often blasphemy, a criminal act; at the least, it is exceedingly dangerous, and must be handled with extreme caution. But there is nothing else we can know in advance: everything depends on the particular culture.

The sacred is not necessarily superior: the Devil is a sacred being. The sacred is not necessarily awesome: a little personal talisman may be highly sacred to the one who wears it, but he may treat it with no especial reverence. The sacred is not necessarily old: a new event or object may be seen as miracle.

Apart from saying that the sacred isn’t the profane, we can say that, as a rule, the line or barrier between them is largely in one direction. That which is sacred is hedged off, protected from the profane. Only very rarely will we find the reverse. Normally we expect to find that the thing one cannot approach, cannot touch, cannot look at, and so on is sacred.

Now getting back to categories of thought, the distinction here is wholly cultural, just like the others, except that it has no clear natural base. To be sure, the natives may say it does, but there is no categorical parallel in nature.

Let’s be clear about this. At base, we can pretty much agree that time is going to have a relatively limited number of basic cultural structures, because the formulation is largely constrained by how the sun and moon move. So the analogies to nature, however varied, always have some basis.

But when a visitor totally unfamiliar with the native culture arrives, he has no way whatever to know what is and is not sacred. It is possible, of course, that exterior circumstances may help: a serious lack of a true necessity may make that necessity sacred. But let’s note that Islam does not especially mark water as a sacred substance, despite the desert. If there were water-worshipers in ancient Arabia and Persia, there weren’t many. Fire, yes, but not water. So although Frank Herbert in his Dune series makes the religion of the Fremen very plausible in its limited way, note that there is no intrinsic reason they should treat water with that kind of reverence—but nor is there any reason they shouldn’t.

(Incidentally, this is what I mean by explaining things: Fremen reverence for water “makes sense” once you know that Arrakis has no water; in real life, various ancient Arabian forms of fire-worship “make sense” once you know that… hang on. Yes, exactly: it’s not something you can find a singular answer for.)

Distinguishing the sacred and the profane, the objects and acts chosen and the reasons for them, is always and everywhere an arbitrary cultural system. And this system can be very useful for beginning to design a fantasy culture.

The Division in Action

Durkheim argued that the distinction between sacred and profane maps the distinctions between social and individual, ideal and real. Sacred things are representations of society’s ideal conception of itself. Profane things are individual, everyday, real-world things.

Now the point is that society is greater than the sum of its parts, if we take those parts to be the individuals and the institutions that constitute it. Society is, argues Durkheim, an entity of its own, with its own power and nature. And sacred things are representations of that abstraction.

People do not normally think in broad abstractions like Asociety,” you see. Mostly, they get on with their everyday concerns. But that doesn’t make society not exist. When a lot of people get together in agreement about something, whether it’s a war or a rally or a big party, we see this power of society manifest strongly. And sacred things are representations of that power.

For example, when a soldier crawls across the battlefield to rescue a flag, what is he doing? And why does his society single him out as a hero (and perhaps a martyr)? It’s a bit of colored cloth. But it represents the society, and thus it is a sacred object. When the soldier risks his life to save this representation, he is placing the concerns of the sacred over and above his everyday, profane concerns. And his society, which at some level understands what this representation is and means, salutes him for it.

Consider what happened in the U.S. right after the 9/11 attacks. Note the tremendous surge of patriotism: people flew flags who would never normally do so. Practically speaking, this is silly. Does it really help deal with Al Qaeda to fly a flag? What it does is to assert, very strongly, social identity. We are Americans. We were attacked—not just New York, not just those who died. Durkheim would have looked at all that surging patriotism and said, in essence, “You see? The attack on one symbol of American society prompted enormous displays of another such symbol. The flag is a representation of the society, and is a sacred object.” And the various discussions of Constitutional amendments against flag-burning and so on are further demonstrations of this principle.

Thus Durkheim argues that life is normally divided into two rough modes. Most of the time, we focus on our everyday, private, non-social, and profane concerns. We have to go to work, get food, and live our lives. But sometimes, under certain circumstances, we shift our focus to our society, and suddenly the symbols burst forth. In America, think of July 4, or the various displays during a baseball game (the “national pastime”). Here the collective trumps the individual, and the sacred manifests through symbols.

The final point is about the ideal and the real, and once again a baseball game is a nice case in point. When we salute our society by standing up and singing the national anthem, then by watching these guys play the national pastime, we aren’t saluting the real-world, bloody-minded and basically rather stupid society in which we (and everyone else in every country) really live. Let’s face it: the world is not made up of a lot of wonderful, saintly societies getting along and being decent. When we salute our flag, whoever we are, we aren’t saluting the reality: we’re saluting the ideal.

In America, this ideal is about a lot of things (as it is everywhere). Apple pie, mom, Superman, freedom, Ellis Island, baseball, picnics, kids with bikes playing stickball on quiet suburban streets—all that. Listen to politicians sometime: they argue, publicly, in terms of symbols of the ideal. The point is that you, the electorate, are supposed to stand up and say, “Yes, those symbols are true, they represent the society we love and honor, they are sacred, we will vote for you because you support these things.” Sure, we all know that politicians are up to something else, most of the time—if they weren’t, they wouldn’t get anything done, to say nothing of the various less savory parts of what they do. But talking in symbols like this is very powerful, because they hook up to the ideal, and thus they are really about the sacred.

Now how on earth are we going to make something concrete out of this? That is, how are we going to use this to start desigining a fantasy culture? Now that the basic principle of sacred and profane is clear, we can get started.

Making Cultures: Start of a long series

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:22:31 GMT

Preface

Over the last few years, I have run into quite a number of discussions about how to design cultures for fantasy games. To me the most interesting of these have centered on questions like, “How do you design a fantasy culture so that it isn’t Eurocentric?” And I’ve posted bits and pieces of a personal response to such things, here and there, especially on The Forge but also in other places. I keep pushing around this notion that someday I’m really going to lay it all out in one place, clearly, from beginning to end.

The problem is that it very quickly becomes huge. So I decided that maybe the thing to do is to compose a series of articles about it, dealing with various issues and problems as they happen to occur to me, but attempting along the way to present a reasonably clear method.

Then, of course, I realize that explaining a 12-step method is not really my forte. I am far better as a critic and analyst. When I propose something new, it is usually of a theoretical nature, not a practical one. So I’m not convinced that this experiment will be entirely successful.

Nevertheless, people keep emailing me and asking when I’m going to get somewhere on this. Apparently there is an audience, surprisingly enough.

Now the difficulty is also one of presentation in a more simple sense, i.e. in the sense of packaging. I hate most RPG packaging of text. I dislike the presentation and structure commonly used. But I can’t say that it’s because such packaging is bad: clearly it works pretty well for a lot of you, for example. So how the hell am I supposed to lay it out when I don’t even like or understand the usual way of doing so?

And then it hits me.

Those of you asking me to write these things aren’t asking for me to present a nice clean package. You’ve read my posts and articles, and you know that isn’t going to happen. You want me to present it my way, more or less, and then you want the fun of taking what works for you and packaging and composing in your own way, for your own purposes, for your own worlds.

So, with this spirit of liberation moving me, I’ll write things the way I usually do write them, and let you do what you’re best at. As always, discussion and response is very welcome; in addition, if you start a thread about it somewhere, please post the link as well.

Presuppositions

It’s pretty obvious that the readership here, especially with the aggregators or squids or whatever they’re called, is very disparate. I can’t speak to you directly: I don’t know most of you. But I can make some guesses, and I want to lay these out clearly so everyone will have some idea where I’m coming from.

First of all, I think when we say “fantasy world” we mean something where the baseline technology (including communication, transportation, industry, and everything else) is vaguely akin to early modern Europe or earlier. Movable type and gunpowder seem to be about the limit of development, if we were to assume (wrongly) that such developments are linear and consistent.

Second, I take it that we have a number of landmark examples in mind: The Lord of the Rings, most of all, but also things like Greyhawk, Harn, Glorantha, etc.

Third, I assume that we are interested in broadening our horizons more strongly away from European or Europe-like models. If you have no interest in this, you may find a lot of what I’m doing in these articles not only strange but pointless. Another way to put it, though, would be that we’re interested in designing cultures that don’t seem like the usual old run-of-the-mill fantasy cultures.

Now on this basis, it seems to me that the most efficient way to cut through the horrible complexity that is human culture is to work with the academic study of culture, particularly the study of what they used to call “primitive” culture. There are a number of serious methodological problems with making this connection, but I will deal with those considerably later in the series.

Finally, I want to note that my academic specialties are magic, science, and religion, to use the phrase made famous by Bronislaw Malinowski in the eponymous article (really a short book). Thus I tend to refer everything toward these bases, whereas someone else could quite reasonably do it all from a different direction. Furthermore, I have pretty strong likes and dislikes, as I suppose every academic theorist has, but I incline toward great classics—I’m not one to leap on the hot new thing, because I usually feel I first need to master most everything that precedes it.

Now the problem where audience is concerned is that I cannot reasonably assume that you have all read the same books I have. Some of you have—I’ll bet some of you have read a lot more in some areas of cultural anthropology, for example. But I have to assume you haven’t. On the other hand, I can’t sit here and lay out huge lectures on academic scholarship, because we’ll never get to the point, and besides it’ll be boring as hell.

So what I’m doing is walking through issues and concepts as they occur to me, thinking of my classroom experience as well as what I imagine to be your concerns. It is true that at times I will have to step into some academic texts, but I will try to do this such that (a) it is clear, (b) it is brief, and (c) I only deal with one, very famous text or thinker at a time.

Your responses are entirely up to you. Please don’t troll or flame or whatever, but you can respond as you like. Do not expect, however, that I will always be around to reply immediately. This is a hobby for me, and my profession and family come first.

On a related note, this series will be quite irregular. When something appears, that’s when it appears. I make no promises in advance: they keep not working out, and I hate that. I’ll shoot for once a month, but again, no promises. I’m also posting a bunch of these things at the start, but I don’t know when the next one will appear.

Perspective

Just a brief note, but one that I think is crucial. Bear with me.

Some of you, taking a cultural anthropology intro course or something, have run into a distinction between an emic [pronounced “EE-mick”] and an etic [“EH-tick”] perspective.

The distinction, first formulated by the linguist Kenneth Pike, derives from the linguistic division between the phoneme [adj. phonemic] and the phone [adj. phonetic]. To oversimplify somewhat, the study of phonetics examines sounds in spoken language as sounds, as constituent units of language, looking at the ways in which they are put together, interrelated, and so on—without reference to what they mean in a given language. By contrast phonemics looks at how sounds intersect meaningfully, that is to say with reference to how meaning is constructed in a given language. Pike proposed to generalize this distinction: the etic dimension of language would be that analyzable statistically and scientifically without reference to meaning; it would look at how certain elements or aspects of some language, language-group, or even language itself works, but not focus on how these same elements are used to construct meaning by users of the language. An emic perspective would consider elements or dimensions of language precisely insofar as they are constitutive of meaning. Necessarily an etic approach could be more objective than an emic one, because in the former case it makes no difference what the language-users think or believe about their language.

The anthropologist Marvin Harris proposed to extend Pike’s distinction to the study of culture. Essentially the idea is that structures, symbols, and whatnot of a given culture can be studied externally (etic approach) or internally (emic). For example, let’s suppose the members of a culture tell us for absolutely certain that a man’s mother’s brother’s wife’s sister’s daughter is considered the man’s sister, and therefore for him to marry her would be incest. By contrast the same man’s father’s sister’s husband’s brother’s daughter is a preferred marital choice. (This is by no means far-fetched, for those of you who don’t know much about kinship systems.) Now we do the numbers and we find that there are quite a significant number of the first type of marriage, and not a particularly large number of the second. So the etic approach reveals that there is a disparity between what the natives say and what they actually do. The emic approach would be less interested in the actual statistics of marital practices, and would be more focused on why the natives consider these two types of marriage so radically different.

Now this is all a rather simplistic way of explaining the issue, but if you sort of remember this from a class, you may have had your mind jogged. For those who don’t know this, the short version is simply that an etic perspective is a kind of “outsider’s perspective” on what goes on in the culture, and an emic perspective is an “insider’s perspective,” to oversimplify grossly—actually, this is not at all what the distinction means, but it’s how it’s usually presented.

I have my problems with this distinction in academic scholarship, but this is not the place to rehearse them. For the design of fantasy cultures, however, I think it is crucial to annul, at every level, any value in an etic perspective.

From my reading of RPGs and far too many fantasy novels, I think there is a tendency to think that if there is something “weird” going on in a culture, it has to have a “real explanation.” This is etic thinking, loosely speaking. And furthermore it is, quite simply, crap. If there is something “weird” going on, it is only weird because you aren’t in the culture, chances are. And if there is some cultural element that has a single “real” explanation, it is an extremely transient and probably transparent phenomenon.

Culture is a vast web, woven across centuries by everyone who lives it. When you grab hold of one string, the whole thing comes with you. Culture is not a bunch of independent bits and pieces. And if you try to design a culture by thinking of bits and pieces, of “explaining” why they are there, you will probably end up with something transparently shallow.

It can be done, of course. The obvious example is allegory. But my focus here is to think about designing fantasy cultures that are living, breathing cultures in their own right, not allegorical Star Trek-style analogies to teach us all a little life-lesson on a very special episode.

Well, enough preamble. Let’s get cracking.

Hi Gang

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 01:39:57 GMT

Long time, no post. You probably thought I'd never re-surface.

Well, I'm not entirely sure I have re-surfaced. I am rather swamped by professional work, and a career that is finally developing somewhat in a good direction. You can expect to see the odd posting here, though -- I doubt I'll go a year of silence again in the near future, anyway.

I am currently working, very slowly, on some bits and pieces of a "how to design a fantasy culture from the ground up" thing, which will be a string of very long articles. In the process, I'm trying to teach some basics of some classics of the study of culture. Expect to see some piece of this within a month.

I notice I'm still listed on the Squidoos and whatnot, so presumably whoever cares will see this message.

See you all soon.

Simulating Cultural Phenomena

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 19:32:19 GMT

I started this blog by asking questions, primarily hoping to spark discussion. So here's another question:

In designing RPG settings, especially "fantasy" worlds (whatever you take that to mean), to what extent, and for what purposes, should one work toward simulation of such cultural phenomena as religion, magic, and arts?

I haven't read nearly as many games as most of you have, but it does seem to me that the "classical" gaming traditions of fantasy (D&D, Runequest, etc.) place considerable emphasis on simulation in certain respects. Physics and biology seem particularly important. We can certainly debate endlessly to what extent any given system or setting is in any sense accurate about the physics of combat, falling, strength, and whatnot, or the ecology and biology of species and so on; on the whole, these things are rarely especially accurate. But a surprising amount of noise gets generated about such "accuracy," with all sorts of homebrew "fixes" imposed upon subsystems seen as insufficiently "accurate" to "real-world" physics and the like. You know what I mean, I'm sure.

But I have rarely seen such claims made particularly strongly about religion, magic, and the arts. There are some exceptions, of course:

Ars Magica at times made some (weak) claims about historical accuracy with respect to "hermetic" magic and medieval European life.

E. Gary Gygax has made all sorts of claims about accuracy in AD&D, though it's worth bearing in mind that in his books Role Playing Mastery and Master Of the Game he also indicates that he thinks the level system is an accurate reflection of how people live and learn.

Some pieces of Runequest material suggest an attempt at accuracy about religion, although this is not (as far as I know) especially strongly stressed.

Nevertheless it seems that the traditional mainstream gamer is, or is perceived to be, more concerned with "real life" and "accuracy" as they reflect limited spheres of the hard sciences, especially physics.

Now presumably an enormous amount of this comes from the comparatively low standard of awareness about things like religion and magic and arts in a comparative, cross-cultural manner; that is, most people -- including gamers -- do take for granted that religion is "obviously" about faith and gods and so on, and that the arts are in some sense "obviously" a possibly interesting but nonessential secondary dimension of culture, and so on. Presumably part of it also comes from the apparently relatively high standard of technical education: computers, math, and so on seem anecdotally associated with "geek" culture, and certainly the large military faction of players would have a good deal of technical training as well.

But I wonder whether that's the whole explanation.

In any event, I'm wondering what you all think about the possibility and value of "accuracy" when it comes to cultural phenomena in fantasy settings. (Obviously this is something I've been thinking about for these very slowly developing chapters on fantasy religions.)

Prompted by John Kim on Magic and Science

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 05:29:49 GMT

I’ve been swamped with work, grading papers, finishing the book, and all that—not to mention raising my baby, Sam, and trying to remain in a reasonably successful marriage. So you haven’t heard a lot from me lately.

I’m still working on the “how to design a fantasy religion” thing, but got a bit bogged down. Just this evening, however, I was re-reading John Kim’s Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems, and it sparked a couple of ideas.

This is all unrefined musings, of course....

John proposes five central principles that are worth considering, in the sense that he thinks (and I agree) that they are worth overturning. They are:

1. Magic is a known system and thus non-mysterious
2. Magic is a force separate from Nature
3. Magic happens as spells from deliberate users
4. Magic obeys conservation of (magical) energy
5. Magic works regardless of morality, ethics, or other intangibles

I’m not going to summarize in much detail, but to remind you:

#1 says that magic obeys rules, known to the players at least and quite possibly to the characters. These rules are generally mechanistic.

#2 is best summarized by John’s reference to “detect magic” spells: if magic isn’t operative, things work “normally.”

#3 says that people who do magic do it on purpose and know that they are doing it.

#4 says that magic is a kind of energy that works on a pool or battery principle.

#5 is pretty obvious from the title.

What struck me on re-reading was the constant reference to “myth” and to ethnographic or anthropological sources on magic. I want to note that these aren’t quite the same thing: what we usually think of as myth (Greco-Roman, Norse, etc.) does not arise directly from the kinds of cultures traditional anthropologists studied (Polynesians, Australian aborigines, African tribes, etc.). Nevertheless the point is well taken: in none of these do we find something so mechanistic as FRPGs usually propose as normative to magic.

First of all, let’s think about these principles in terms of the history of scholarship on magic.

#1, the “magical laws,” really comes most directly from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, although he had predecessors (especially Edward Tylor). Frazer said that magic had two basic laws: the Law of Similarity (similarity can entail causal relations) and the Law of Contact (once in contact, always in contact). For example, if I make a doll that looks like John Kim, I can stab it and he’ll feel pain (Similarity); if I make a doll and include his hair, the same thing will be true (Contact). And these are commonly mixed.

Interestingly, Frazer was not so simplistic about this as are RPGs. He said that such laws were absolutely not known to the practitioners; they were implicit but not explicit. As I put it to my students, simplifying a fair bit, if these laws were absolute and known, they would be obviously stupid. If I have a big piece of chalk, and I break it into two halves, the pieces are quite obviously both similar and previously in contact. Now if I do something to one piece, and nothing happens to the other piece, it’s obvious that these laws don’t work as stated. Frazer’s point, really, is that this sort of thinking—what I’ve just done—depends on my having abstracted a mechanistic and scientific-style law. Once that happens, it’s obvious that the law can and should be tested, and when that leads to failure I discard the law. The “savages” don’t do this, not because they’re stupid (Frazer doesn’t think they’re stupid) but because they do not think in higher-order abstractions, and thus they do not abstract mechanistic laws from the vast series of magical practices.

In a game situation, we can say that such a structure as proposed by type #1 could be read one of two ways: either it requires a radical disparity between the way the players think and the way their characters think, or it requires that magic in RPGs be utterly unlike magic in the real world of culture, because (as John says) it makes magic into a series of scientific-style principles.

#2, the separation from nature, has a fascinating analogue in the work of Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski proposed that magic is exactly what John describes: it is an extension of practical desires beyond the ability to satisfy them practically; its function is not actually to achieve the goal as such, but rather to produce psychological catharsis with respect to the desire in question. In other words, the natives have practical knowledge (science) that they employ quite rationally and effectively to achieve what they want: if they want to go sailing on the deep sea, they know how to build quite sophisticated boats for this, and they know how to navigate by the stars, and so on. But this practical knowledge has limits that do not encompass the totality of the risks and concerns in this action: a bad storm may overwhelm the boat however well-sailed. When the risks and stakes are sufficient, the natives perform magical actions symbolic of the results desired, and this gives them confidence and allows them to attack their practical work with greater surety.

I always use the example of the elevator. You’re late for an important appointment (an interview or whatever), and there are too many stairs, and you just simply have to get there, but there is nothing at all you can do. The elevator is presumably on its way, because you have pushed the button (the rational, scientific thing to do), but it’s not coming fast enough. So you push it a lot more times. This makes you feel better, because you’re doing something, even if that something isn’t practically speaking going to achieve the desired end. You could, of course, hop up and down on one leg and make chicken noises, but since this has no symbolic relation to the desired end you aren’t likely to do this; instead you do something that is (a) symbolically related to the desired end, and (b) socially approved—nobody will give you a hard time if you push the button a lot, and in fact people will correctly interpret your act as meaning that you are in a hurry.

The thing is, Malinowski insisted (though he didn’t do so as strongly as he might have) that the natives do not make the same distinction. It’s not that the natives do the practical stuff and then step back and say, “Hmm, that’s not enough, better add some magic.” For them, it’s all of a piece: all these things are normal and necessary to achieving the desired end. The anthropologist, standing outside the culture, can make a functional distinction: these acts have different results as empirically observable. But the natives do not distinguish in this way; rather, they distinguish on the basis of their own meaning-systems, which are extremely helpful but not determinate with respect to understanding the functions of these actions.

So here we get the same result as with point #1. To impose this rule requires that either (a) the characters think quite differently than the players do, or (b) the characters mean something by “magic” that is radically unlike what we modern people can actually observe in cultures that use magic.

#3, the deliberate spell-casting, is rather more complex. Here I think John is over-generalizing somewhat. A great many cultures do have such a thing as a professional magician, and these people really do perform magic quite deliberately as a matter of ritual. On the other hand, as he says, mythological characters very often do not act this way: they just sort of do things, or it turns out they have certain powers for no adequately explained reason (or because someone’s grandmother the sparrow taught it, or whatever).

What we’re touching on here is something deeper, and something I think underlies a great deal of RPG thinking about magic. What do we have in mind when we say “magic”? It’s all very well to point to Tolkien, but Tolkien is in turn pointing to a limited corpus of mythological material, and it’s not clear that what he has in mind is simulation (in the broad sense) anyway. If we say that we want “myth,” which myths? If we have in mind cultures that actually use magic—and these are rarely represented directly in actual myths, because that would make the myths oddly reflexive—then we’re talking about something quite different.

To take a relatively extreme example, consider the disparity between what Australian aboriginal peoples do (or did) and what they say their ancestors living in the dream-time did. The latter provide a precedent for the former, but the disjuncture between “then” and “now” is terribly important; indeed, Durkheim and everyone coming thereafter (Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, even Campbell in his vague way) generally recognizes that this disjuncture is quite often foundational for the whole local conception of the sacred, with all that this entails—including what magic is. To blur the distinction, as most RPGs do, means that you can’t have magic in the way it occurs in tribal societies, because you have annulled its theoretical foundation.

This takes us to #4, conservation, which John rightly relates to the Polynesian “mana.” I should note that the Polynesian usage is still hotly contested among specialists. But RPG uses of this term aren’t getting it from reading up on Polynesia; they’re getting it from Marcel Mauss and Émile Durkheim, who postulated mana as a general principle.

The idea is that mana is an abstract principle of power that extends beyond what we might loosely call normality (which is not the same as nature). By this logic, mana is discerned by its use—not the other way around. If someone does something powerful or extraordinary, it must be that he has mana, and this will affect how he is treated in the future. With this reputation, he may attempt to capitalize in a broader sense; this is not unlike the Arabic conception of baraka. In North America, the terms wakan, orenda, and the like are thought by some (including Mauss and Durkheim) to be conceptually cognate. And because of this fact that a lot of cultures seem to have a notion like this, Mauss and Durkheim postulated that such a notion is in fact the underlying minimal notion without which religion and magic could not exist.

There are any number of destructive criticisms of this argument, many of them powerful on one grounds or another. Perhaps the strongest point is that if you read the data carefully, you find that all these notions are not at all cognate, nor does any one of them mean what is stated here. So the idea that this is a minimal prerequisite fails because nobody actually seems to have that minimum. But I’d like to note that my pal Lévi-Strauss proposed, in 1950, an interpretation of these conceptions that I think is theoretically speaking accurate; it also gets at why these ideas are really not workable in RPGs in the way they usually appear.

In short, Lévi-Strauss says that when language first appeared, i.e. when people first came up with the vague, unconscious notion of using arbitrary symbols to communicate with one another about things in the world, this was earth-shattering. In essence it meant that the whole world was quite suddenly filled with potential meaning, because suddenly you could think about things as symbols. But just because things could be symbolized and thus understood in human terms did not mean that people already knew how to understand all these things; even now we don’t know how to do this with everything, in any culture. So there was a kind of gap: you had things that were filled with meaning, but you didn’t know what they meant. And Lévi-Strauss says that things like that had mana (wakan, orenda, etc.). In other words, these terms are ways of saying, “Yes, it’s a big deal, and it’s powerful and important, and we have no way of grappling with its qualities or nature, nor of classifying it; at the same time we refuse simply to bow in awe and frustration before this difficulty, so we’ll give it a temporary holding-term and get back to it later.”

As it happens, I think he’s wrong, but he’s on to something. What he has explained fairly well is why terms like mana and wakan and orenda have this strange not-quite-meaningful quality in their native usages, and perhaps more than anything his theory is supported by the ascription of these terms to white explorers with guns and so on. What he hasn’t explained, however, is why such terms should also be associated with extra-normal power—even, quite often, extra-natural power. The fact that we don’t understand them doesn’t entail this, unless (going back to point #2 in John’s list) we say that magic (=mana) refers to what is exterior to nature.

What he’s getting at, and at this level he’s right in my estimation, is that these terms refer to powers exterior to classification, and thus they are both powerful and threatening because they expose the instability and weakness of classification itself, by showing its limits. In short, magic (if we interpret it this way) is powerful because it shows that science (read here as knowledge in a classificatory sense) is limited and narrow, which means that we really don’t know what we think we know because magic could potentially undermine things. Thus we label such powers and notions “magic” as a way to avoid dealing with them, and thus we protect the system of knowledge upon which we stand.

Now this interpretation works great for lots of things—but it works very badly for mythical acts often called “magical” and it works stunningly badly in the context of most RPGs. But the latter, I’d say, is no bad thing: we’ve already seen that RPG magic systems are usually founded on scientific and even scientistic assumptions, as John rightly notes throughout the article (that’s the point, right?), and now we see that the whole construction of magic in RPGs fits a general pattern within scientific and other rigidly classifying systems.

As to #5, the relation of magic to ethics and so on, I have little to say except that John is dead right. Magic, pretty much however defined, is never independent of such variables. Mauss rightly noted that magic often marks outsiders and marginals, precisely because they are such: they are in a problematic social, structural, moral, ethical, legal state, and therefore they have magical power—and vice-versa. And I think on the whole everyone has accepted that insofar as “magic” can be used as a substantive category in ethnographic or historical work, it certainly carries this complex structure most of the time.

- - - - - - - - - -
So what have we learned, Dorothy?

I don’t really know. From my point of view, the first question you have to decide when designing a “magic” system is what you want to model or, on the other hand, what you mean by “magic.”

I remember having an argument with a player who may be reading this entry, a few years back. I said that the system was eminently flexible, and asked what he wanted. He wanted to know what the structure of the system was, so he could figure out what he could do. I said he could have more or less whatever he wanted. He insisted that, without limits, nothing could be said. And I think we were both right.

From a design standpoint, you cannot really create an entirely mutable and open-ended system and expect it to work, because the players will never have any idea what can and cannot be done with it. In the real world, people know what can be done by magical means (in whatever sense that may or may not be taken locally or ascribed by outsiders) because they know the myths and they have heard the stories about that guy over there and besides they learned some stuff from their grandmothers. All of this discourse—and I mean that technically—provides a solid and quite rigid framework in which to work, even when the work pushes the boundaries. Some things are obviously stupid or unworkable; others are perfectly plausible, even obvious, and if they don’t work this time there must be some additional reason for it. But your players will never have this complete knowledge and sense of the obvious because they do not live the system.

If you want to model something, I suggest not modeling myth—with apologies to John. Myth seems to me always to have some sort of parallel discourse running, usually not available to us, and without this we really don’t know what’s going on. In a game, the only parallel discourse would be that of the players, creating a weird sort of reflexivity that I think is not at all what John means about myth. Myth generally stands behind, below, and so on with respect to a living, dynamic culture; myth itself is created at a distance: things don’t happen in myth because of any direct and ordinary sense of how people and animals and the world actually behave. Myth is about the tellers, at base, and in an RPG the only tellers would be the players—thus the reflexivity.

To my mind the thing to model is the sort of culture that uses and tells myth—and performs magic. And that’s most cultures, really, including ours (note the powerful revivals going on over the last 40 years or so, which have had continuous precedents of one sort or another running back as far as you care to mention).

A last note: nobody has yet succeeded in defining “magic” satisfactorily as a general substantive category. Consequently one form of argument or explanation is simply out of court: that which says that magic is “obviously” anything. It isn’t. There are some common agreements in one field or another, but these days most anthropologists won’t touch “magic” with the proverbial 10' pole. I disagree with this approach, but that’s an issue for another day. So if we’re going to develop magic systems for our games, they have to be driven entirely by their own internal concerns and constraints; there isn’t a right or wrong, and not just in the usual mealy-mouthed “whatever makes your game happy” sense.

A Note on Evolution

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:20:36 GMT

I just read an entry in jhkimrpg's blog entitled "Evolutionary Stupidity" (I can't figure out how to set up a link to it). I made a remark in the comments, but I'll go on a bit here.

A fairly classic problem with the whole evolutionary psych. determinism thing is a combination of bad data and post facto restructuring. I'm sure there are clever people out there who do it better, but ultimately I find Levi-Strauss's criticism, in A View From Afar, pretty devastating.

Consider the family and kinship for a second, and the "selfish gene" argument with respect to ethics (as proposed by E.O.Wilson et al.). We can certainly accept that a culturally-determined system must within reasonable limits meet the fundamental restrictions laid down by genetics. Otherwise it would die out, after all.

Now Wilson says (he didn't coin the phrase "selfish gene," but it applies well) that genes try to survive, not individuals. For example, if a group of rabbits are grazing and one sees a fox, that rabbit thumps to warn the others, in the process making itself the most likely target of the fox; in addition, by delaying its own escape it lowers its own odds of survival. This gives the appearance of ethics: the rabbit appears to sacrifice its own life (or at any rate take a big chance) in order to save the troupe. But Wilson's argument says that an individual's genetic propagation can be valued fairly precisely. I don't know the formulas, but the idea is that Ego (the original individual with the genes) is equivalent to something like 2 parents or 4 siblings or 6 half-siblings or 8 first cousins. In other words, if Ego dies but 1 parent and 2 siblings and 4 half-siblings and 6 first cousins survive, for example, then the gene has propagated just fine. So the point is that the rabbit isn't being ethical but rather maximizing the defense of its genetic legacy. (I'm sure I have that slightly wrong, but the point is I think basically right.)

Supposing all that is true, and I certainly am in no position to challenge it, what this all means is that it is essential that a human kinship system establish parameters for genetic distribution. In particular, these parameters must prevent radical isolation, under which a bad flu in a household could wipe out a genetic legacy.

Fine, but the point is that of the many thousands of human kinship systems we know a fair amount about, every single one meets that requirement, yet there is amazing variability in such systems. There is no "natural" family, it appears; everything under the sun has been tried and made to work one way or another. And since every one meets this "selfish gene" criterion, that criterion ends up telling us nothing at all about kinship systems!

Furthermore the fact that any number of kinship systems allow for and even encourage radical genetic isolation (through required incest, usually) under certain circumstances, it appears that human beings can overcome even this most fundamental evolutionarily-determined drive. Culture trumps evolution, in short.

So whenever I start seeing a lot of tripe about how evolutionarily people or women or dark-skinned people or whatever are this or that or the other thing, I know I'm dealing with (a) an idiot, (b) an ignoramus, (c) a ideologue, or possibly (d) a deluded scientist. But I have not yet actually run into (d) except in books; usually it's a combination of the other three.

The piece John was ranting about (quite rightly) fits the usual structures. The guy doesn't know what he's talking about, and is using the pretense of science to disguise his prejudices -- probably, he is disguising them from himself as well, which is where ignorance and ideology meet on the playing-field of idiocy.

Rex Harrison sang, "Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?" I always wonder, "Why can't more people teach their children how to think?"

And To Cause Trouble...

I recently asked a large e-group of historians and philosophers of science a fundamental question about the Intelligent Design theory, and I got a lot of somewhat shocked replies.

Basically I said this. ID proposes a metaphysical explanation for known data; the various camps of post-Darwinian evolutionary theory propose physical explanations for the same data. There is no way comparatively to evaluate the validity of a metaphysical and a physical proposition, as Kant pretty much proved (but as was already largely known to the Pyrrhonists). Thus the question becomes quite simple: are metaphysical propositions considered legitimate within scientific explanation?

Now in the 16th century and the early 17th, when the Scientific Revolution was getting rolling, this was a major point of contention. Eventually people like Merin Mersenne laid it on the line. "We will take phenomenal truth, limited to phenomenal criteria. We refuse in advance to deal with absolute truth, i.e. metaphysical truth, and we will avoid making claims of this kind as well. By doing so, we have a position from which to evaluate, because everything is phenomena, and thus relative to phenomena and amenable to experimental verification." This became the essential foundation-point for scientific epistemology.

Meanwhile people like my old pal Cornelius Agrippa, but also a lot of others, said this was pointless. If you examine only phenomenal truth, you can only find relative answers about phenomena; you cannot learn the answers to big questions, like the meaning of life or whatever. For them, the only reason to study phenomena (or anything else, for that matter) is to get answers to these things. But these guys lost that particular battle.

What's striking about the ID debate is not, to my mind, that a bunch of religious zealots want to teach ID. No surprises there. What is interesting to me, actually, is the response of the scientists. A great many have said and continue to say that ID is bad science and so on and so forth, so it should not be taught in schools ever. I don't have quotes in front of me, but they're easy to find. The thing is that this is not technically correct: ID is not science at all. It proposes a metaphysical explanation. The scientists ought to say something different: they ought to say, it seems to me, "ID is not science at all, but an explanation for the metaphysical reasons behind the data we scientists examine. We have no way of knowing whether they are right or wrong, but certainly their explanation has nothing whatever to do with evolution. These are not comparable theories; they are not about the same things. We think this theory, if it is as good as these people say (and we can hardly evaluate it ourselves) ought to be taught -- in philosophy classes, where they deal with metaphysics. Teach it next to Plato or something. But science has nothing to say about God -- nothing at all. Never has, never will, ever." The sad thing is that so many scientists in this debate refuse to say this, because they think that science proves the non-existence of God. If they think this, they prove the ID people right: science is, in practice at least, a system propounding metaphysical claims without legitimate foundations, and therefore any other system working similarly should be entirely comparable. Interestingly, this also means that these scientists have turned their back on the Scientific Revolution and decided that Agrippa was right after all. I find this odd and more than a little ironic.

ID is silly, and what's more it's hardly new: this same wheeze has been around for centuries -- see Montaigne's "Apology for Raymond Sebon," which pretends to be a defense but is actually a scathing attack on this sort of thing. Evolution is not silly, but like all science it really ought to stick to what it knows and shut up about the rest. When evolutionists get on their high horse and start telling everyone they know everything about everything, and can make metaphysical pronouncements ex cathedra, they have fallen into the same ugly trap that Stephen Weinberg et al. fall into when they argue, "I have a Nobel Prize in physics so I can tell that X kind of philosophical discourse in some other discipline is stupid."

Don't scientists ever realize that by doing this stuff they shoot themselves in the foot? They alienate the people who would like to be on their side, and they make themselves deeply unappealing to the vast majority of undecided folks in the middle.

Okay, those are my rants for the day. See you soon with a thing about religion in RPGs.

Back soon

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 03:28:50 GMT

Sorry again; the start of the semester is always crazy, and I just got the second reader report on my new book, so I'm kind of backlogged.

The religion thing is progressing apace. Expect a chapter in a week or so.

Back from Xmas

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 04:44:50 GMT

Hi gang. Sorry about the hiatus, but the ISP in Vermont completely died.

So, now that I'm back, a question for you all. I've been working slowly on two closely-related articles about designing cultures for fantasy RPGs. One is about culture in general, soup to nuts, and the other is about religion in particular. Both seem to be turning out exceedingly long, and that's not just because I'm long-winded: I find myself having to explain a lot of "first principles" because most of what academics who study this stuff -- particularly religion -- is so drastically at odds with the assumptions that underlie mainstream designs in RPGs.

Here's my question.

Does anyone care? I mean, if I post a 10-page chunk of a much longer article, will anyone actually read it?

I'll get back to the current running topics soon, I promise.

How do the 'Big' RPGs Really Work?

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:59:08 GMT

Opened w/r/t jimhenley's post in the Whither Theory? thread/

This is something I think is stunningly important and under-examined in RPG theory thus far, so I want to open it big-time here. Note that there is a discussion of something like this at The 20x20 Room, 'Missing Link' thread.

I think it's also important to scan all the way back to the origins of D&D and Runequest and Petal Throne and so on, so anyone who has strong information about that stuff, please pile in. Links very welcome too.

Article Link - Structure and Meaning in RPG Design

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 08:27:25 GMT

At this link here you can find an interesting article about RPGs in a somewhat scientific vein: Rebecca Borgstrom, "Structure and Meaning in Roleplaying Game Design."

I'm not really sure what Borgstrom is trying to do here, actually. She's obviously borrowing from computational and so forth models, and it sounds like also from some kind of structural or Information Theory models. But it all seems like a prolegomenon, a setup rather than a result. That is, my reaction is something like this: "Okay, so now I see sort of what your model looks like, so... so what?"

That sounds really harsh, and I don't intend that. I mean the "so what question" some teachers inflict on students (I don't, as it happens, but I'm sympathetic). You get a paper in which the student says, "I have all this great data, and it fits really well into this model, isn't that great?" Yes, it is, but what you've just done is to set up a paper yet to be written.

Let me put it like this. Borgstrom seems to me to have taken a limited data-set for RPGs (I do think, incidentally, that she ought to be clearer about how and why she limited the data in this way, but that's a passing point), then constructed (on bases a bit unclear to me, but that seems to be more a question of what I have and have not read) a model to fit the data into. She has aligned an abstract, theoretical model with a set of (partly constructed) data.

So what's the payoff? She makes these remarks about epistemology at the end, which seem to have bothered some readers; they bother me too, because I don't know what she means by "epistemology" nor in what sense this affects it.

The whole article is so short, at least by comparison to stuff in my corner of academia, that I think she ought to expand by about double. I want to see her apply this model to actual data, not a string of hypotheticals used illustratively, and I want to find out what effect this has for the interpretation of that data. And at present, anyway, I cannot even guess what that rest of the article would look like.

I suppose I'm also tired of projects like this, constructing new models ex nihilo. That's what frp.advocacy did, and Ron Edwards, and most of the Forge material, and various others. At some point we need to see them do something. Classification is a necessary preliminary to scientific understanding, perhaps, but it is not in itself much of an achievement. That was one of my objections to the Big Model, in fact: it seemed to me that you had a lot of fascination with classification and not a lot with analytical implications. Of course, that's in part because what I mean by "analytical implications" has nothing to do with game design per se, thus the fundamental divide between me and Ron.

Borgstrom does something admirable in drawing on academic models to build her structure, and I salute that. But models are built to do things, and this kind of model is (in my experience, anyway) usually intended to do analytic work. So I'd like to know what sort of results and effects this model has for analysis.

To put it simply: what questions does this model help us to ask and answer about RPGs?

RPGs and Ideology?

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 01:44:43 GMT

I keep pushing around the big question: what would a solid basis for theorizing RPGs look like?

I’ve talked about ritual, myth, bricolage, and so forth. John Kim has talked about text and narrative. Obviously there’s also all that stuff about theater. Jonathan Walton has talked about art and aesthetic theory. The question, really, is the extent to which these things are analogy and that to which these are properly theoretical approaches, which is not entirely the same thing.

To go back to something I was talking about a couple of years ago on the Forge, there is this notion of “practice.” I’m thinking here of Pierre Bourdieu, as well as what came out of his work in the writings of Sherry Ortner, Catherine Bell, and so forth. Michel De Certeau did some nice things with this as well.

Unfortunately, Practice is stunningly difficult to summarize neatly or succinctly. But the basic notion is to take the structuralist mode of analysis, in which you perceive structures of a culture as systems of intertwined relations, and recognize that those caught within these structures can also manipulate them strategically. This strategic manipulation is fundamentally bounded by the acceptance of others caught in the same discourse: if they do not accept the manipulation, it is perceived as violation or even incomprehensibility; if they do accept it, it is as though the manipulation has never occurred because it was “logical” (or natural, or obvious). Thus we can talk about strategic practice as perpetually concealing itself from itself, which gets at the naturalization process under which entirely constructed, cultural perceptions are referred to nature.

It does seem to me that RPG play modes that emphasize some form of immersion, a kind of total experience (something I think is deeply embedded in Nordic larp discourse, although I do realize that the Turku Manifesto is an extreme), is surely an attempt to formulate a grounds of practice. But the interesting thing is that it does so in conscious recognition that games are not real life. There’s some sort of interesting ideological circle there, although I’m not sure how it works.

The thing is, I think some sort of procedure like this is going on in all RPG play that I know of, although immersion is clearly not generalizable. That is, if we take immersion to mean the kind of deep-in-character perception approach, clearly a lot of gaming isn’t interested in this. But the whole idea of an SIS (Shared Imaginary Space) presumes that there is some hypothetical perspective from which immersion would be obvious. To put that maybe a little more clearly, RPGs do seem to assume that immersion is always within the spectrum of possibility, even if we right here and now do not necessarily care to seek it as a goal. In some sense this is obvious, because role-play is at base a matter of entering into another perspective in which one could at least in theory immerse. But somehow this seems to me not quite so simple.

Thinking about it in terms of practice, the idea of constructing a common ground in which one could become entrapped, and of submitting to the arbitration of others for this purpose, is a somewhat strange thing to do, and it is stranger still when there is no specific point to it other than entertainment. The practice of everyday life, to borrow a phrase, is imposed upon us: the cultural situations in which we live impose these structures, and we have to make the best of it. But to choose as a mode of entertainment to further submit to this does seem odd, especially since it is commonly read as in some sense empowering.

People do talk a lot about story-telling and the like, usually with rather romantic notions of people sitting around campfires and telling stories, but that strikes me as an especially problematic notion where RPGs are concerned. Given that the story-telling is collaborative, that it has no lived implications (unlike myth, for example), and that it is structured by (usually) predetermined rules systems, it seems rather more unlike tribal story-telling than it is like it. Just so, comparisons to novels, plays, TV shows, films, comic books, and so on seem dramatically at odds with the form in question. All of which makes me wonder.

I’m not looking for a better metaphor or something. Who cares? What I wonder is why it should be these sorts of metaphors that seem to seize on RPG designers’ and players’ imaginations. I mean, there seems to be a kind of insistence that non-narrative art forms and practices are more or less out of court. Ron Edwards talks about playing bass and all, but he really doesn’t mean a whole lot by this: it’s an extremely limited analogy, and that deliberately so. By contrast, his insistence upon Lajos Egri seems founded on the assumption that at base, RPGs are a narrative form.

But are they? I increasingly doubt it. Narrative occurs, in some sense, but it seems to me that this is more the medium than the message, if you will. The idea of “narrativism” as an aesthetic agenda for play, in which all play is carefully tuned and honed toward creating stories, seems to me to indicate precisely that this is not normal and not intrinsic to the form. You can tell stories with RPGs, but that’s an arbitrary limitation.

I keep coming back to the notion of ritual and myth, which are in a loose sense flip-sides of the same coin. It seems to me that the one constant in RPGs is that they are a way of thinking, of setting up a kind of problem and then working through it. In myth or ritual, people do this sort of work to achieve something, but in RPGs the working-through is itself the point, and they are understood not to have larger implications. Why? Why the insistence on such a barrier, an insistence made the more forceful by the fact that almost nobody ever thinks about it otherwise?

By this logic, it seems that RPGs as a mode of practice within our various cultures help to entrench a number of fairly deeply-rooted assumptions about reality and fantasy, about culture and nature, and so forth. RPGs would, in that sense, depend upon an initial acceptance of a rough ideological framework. In my “Ritual Discourse” essay I noted that this kind of thinking raises the specter of Victor Turner’s freedom/constraint model, and I think it’s worth noting that in the many positive responses to that essay I have not seen people take up these more worrisome implications. Doesn’t that sort of demonstrate the point?

I’m musing in the abstract here. To be clearer, what I mean is that by constructing an artificial cultural framework in which certain kinds of rules apply, arbitrated by the group (and sometimes especially a GM), don’t RPGs ask us to transform a system of ideological dominance into a matter of entertainment? I find it particularly striking that so many RPG enthusiasts clearly think of themselves as in some sense counter-cultural, a subgroup. Certainly the hobby is, in the US, on the whole made up of people from the liberal, educated minority of Americans. This makes me wonder about the attraction. What is it that attracts this particular stratum of American society to an entertainment form of this kind?

In parallel to this, I find especially disconcerting the handling of culture within gaming. The possibility of free exploration should in theory permit serious engagement with cultural problems: race, gender, sex, religion, authority, etc. But if you look, most games are founded on stunningly naïve models of these things. Fantasy worlds tend to be made up of a series of “races” who are assigned cultures, whereas the human “race” is normally made up of a number of separate and distinct cultures—which are in their turn largely monolithic and more or less univocal. Religion is, just as the Bushies would insist, primarily a matter of belief in god or gods, with a series of fixed precepts tacked on, and the relationship between so-called “myth” and these precepts is normally projected as transparent. In the end, an awful lot of games accept, without even thinking about it, some really scary old notions that even elementary school social-studies classes ought to have transcended. And in order to participate in the games, normally, you have to buy into these notions yourself—and you tell yourself it’s just a game so it doesn’t count.

Anyway, just some mumblings.

Tabletop and LARP

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:15:29 GMT

I know little or nothing about LARPs, but the Nordic LARP community is pretty vibrant and exciting. How do things change analytically if we talk about one or the other form of gaming, or try to talk about all of it at once?

Texts and Objects

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:15:06 GMT

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?)

RPGs and the Arts

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:14:45 GMT

Is this a fruitful direction for thought and analysis?

Whither RPG Theory?

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:14:23 GMT

What directions should we be exploring in RPG theory?

(This is the first of a short set of topic-openers to get the ball rolling.)

Who Am I?

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 21:13:13 GMT

Every now and again, somebody decides to give me a hard time about my academic pretensions. I think maybe I should start with a brief autobiographical statement, just to get that out of the way. If you want to discuss my life and professional career, please take it to chrislehrich.

It would be nice if others could post some sort of statement on who they are in reply. Just so's everybody kind of knows each other.

Education
PhD 2000, University of Chicago, Committee on the History of Culture
AM 1994, University of Chicago Divinity School, History of Religions
AB 1992, University of Chicago, Tutorial Studies (Chinese Religions)

Book Publications
The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
Magic in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, under final review.
Composing Worlds. In progress.

Job
Boston University, College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program.

Now that that's done, let's get back to RPGs.

Initial Notes and Rules

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:59:51 GMT

A note of welcome and some rules.

“Theory” here is defined in three ways (for some account of this, see the entry For Greyorm and its immediate predecessors).

1. Practical or applied theory

Theory intended to form a basis for practice, specifically in the case of RPGs for play and/or design of RPGs. Analysis of play and design is an historical necessity here, in the same way as a theory of harmony is founded upon analysis of harmony as it has been used in previous musical works. This sense of “theory” is equivalent to current Forge usage.

2. Analytical or descriptive theory

Theory intended to constitute a relatively complete and comprehensive description of RPGs, in their functions, operations, and structures. This is the scientific sense of “theory.” As I have been arguing for some time, Ron Edwards’s Big Model (and its predecessors GNS and the frp.advocacy Threefold) is not this kind of theory. A full descriptive account remains to be formulated.

3. Theory as a form of reason

A mode of thinking that emphasizes abstract logic and seeks a general understanding of thought itself. In this context, RPGs have the status of a useful object for examining how social thinking operates in our various cultures.

- - - - - - - - - - -

A few rules and guidelines.

A. The argument, “That’s not practical so it’s stupid,” in any of its many forms, is banned here. If you feel this way, have the grace to keep quiet about it.

B. This is not the Forge, nor is every reader here necessarily an expert on Forge terminology. On the whole, I find much of the Forge terminology helpful, and I use it for that reason. The Forge’s “Provisional Glossary” may be found at this link.

B.1. If you do not understand a term used here, please feel free to ask for clarification.

B.2. I do not assume that Forge-based terms are absolute. Their utility is debatable here. But such debate needs to be founded upon data of some kind, which may or may not come from RPGs; for example, saying that a given term is problematic because it has a well-established theoretical meaning in mainstream academic discourse is a legitimate point. What is not debatable is “I don’t like that word because it means something else to me” on no basis other than your personal feeling.

C. I do not like metaphor-as-argument. I find that things generally spiral into silliness once we get into, “Well, to me RPGs are like deboning a chicken, see, because the wings are like dice and….” Let’s just not go there. If you have a point with your analogy, I’m open, but I for one will tend to jump off the analogy bandwagon early rather than late.

D. There are no absolute limits here, so long as we stick reasonably close to RPGs in some sense.

E. If you want to start up a new thread, there are a few obvious ways to do it.

E.1. If it’s connected to something under discussion, post it as a reply and when I get a chance I’ll start a new thread.

E.2. You can email me.

E.3. The best solution: post it on your blog or website or whatever, and post or email me the link.

F. I am not exactly a moderator here. I’d like you people to do the moderating. If someone is being a dick, do not reply. Just don’t take the bait.

G. I have a complicated and irregular schedule in my real life. I will not be reading this every single day. Some weeks, I’ll read and post constantly. Some weeks, I’ll just sort of disappear. Don’t worry about it, but don’t expect me to do the Ron Edwards Forge moderation thing, where he’s reading more or less everything all the time. Ain’t gonna happen.

H. Ultimately, I’d like this to be the basis for a kind of RPG theory community. If the ball gets rolling well, we can migrate over to some other site. But let’s hold off on public discussion of how things are and are not working until there really seems to be an actual need.

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If you have questions or concerns about these principles, please post them as replies to this post.