The lesson of the genial Vikings

Last time I talked about the idea that roleplaying or storyjamming can profoundly change your life by allowing you to rewrite your soul pathways into new (hopefully healthier) patterns. But how’s that look in actual play? I offer myself as example:

I’ve been playing for a few months in a game of Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel, set in Medieval Ireland in the era of Viking settlement. We’re playing three denizens of a small fishing village north of  Dubh Linn, caught in the creep up the coast of Norse settlement and rule. Matthew’s playing a prince, coming home after being fostered by Norsemen, who wants there to be peace between everyone. David’s playing a vengeful raid victim, seducing and killing her way through the clan who violated her and took her son. And I’m playing a young tough who fought the Norse over in Caledonia with his uncle, and comes home to find the same Viking dogs infesting his hometown!

Now, I made this character with the full-on expectation of rising up in bloody and righteous revolt against some oppressive foreign bastards. Period, the end. I might succeed, I might fail. But a brave stand against vile oppressors was pretty much my only thought.

But this is the Burning Wheel. Our characters are defined by their Beliefs and Instincts. But it’s then Jim’s job as Gamemaster to challenge those beliefs through the events of play, creating situations with no easy choices. And that’s what happened.

When young Gabhrán returned home he was shocked to find the Northerners ruling in place of the hereditary chieftan, but even more shocked to find everyone pretty OK with it. His Ma and Da as well as the slain chieftan’s son all insisted that they’ve been well and fairly treated, and the village is prosperous and content. There was a rebellious faction stirring, but as time went on it became clear that they and Gabhrán have little basis for revolt beyond sheer bloody-mindedness. And when Gabhrán undertook to champion the cause of a grievously wronged woman–sexually assaulted and accused of murder–in truth this was the aforementioned vengeful seductress, truly guilty of the murder and not assaulted at all. This culminated in Gabhrán fighting a duel in defense of her innocence which ended in the death of a guiltless Viking dupe.

It began to dawn on me that I entered the game with some unexamined assumptions. When I considered playing a righteous revolutionary, I was unconsciously equating “righteous” with “revolt.” In other words, “”ruler” and “oppressor” were synonymous in my mind, and I was assuming that all that was needed for a righteous cause was someone, especially someone foreign, in power. That told me something startling about my attitude toward the world, and just how much of it is based on unconscious bias. Am I really that reactionary and unthinkingly contrarian?

I’ve been forced to reevaluate how I view the world. I’m examining how my principles–love, peace, justice–actually work themselves out in my personal universe. Answers aren’t easy, but I’d say they’re worth the work.

I want to point out that this wasn’t a hiccup or defect in gameplay–”Whoops, sorry guys, my personal biases mucked up the story, won’t happen again!”–but rather the game’s purpose in action. I did exactly right in choosing Beliefs that I care about, and Jim and the other players did exactly right in providing meaningful friction to those Beliefs. You play Burning Wheel to be challenged, and challenged hard, on a personal level. But at the same time, we weren’t playing for personal life lessons, as a substitute for therapy or something. We were playing to create a story with courageous honesty, and in so doing, told ourselves some of our own story.

The game is still in progress. The ultimate fate of the village of Tiráth is undecided. Gabhrán certainly hasn’t become an enlightened paragon of tolerance and understanding. But his revolutionary forays have become more and more troubled, and his incitement of the people less and less in his control. He is confronted at every turn by the humanity of his opponents. Will he become a fanatical monster, or will his Beliefs be strained to the breaking point?

We play to find out. We play to tell our story.

Peace,

-Joel

Reinventing “Us”

I’ve staked out some pretty lofty territory for the role of creating stories together in real time–”roleplaying,” in a word–that territory being no less than the reclamation our shared humanity through mythmaking.

But what good does that actually do for us, really?

Well, the short answer is that through mythmaking we tell ourselves who we are. We burn patterns into ourselves that make it easier to enact specific values. Just because the Labors of Hercules and the Death of Cuchulainn have been replaced by the Tale of the Spider-Man and the Goblin of Green, and the Death of Gwendolyn the Fair doesn’t mean we’ve escaped from that patterning at the soul level. Oral-tradition cultures believe that without stories, you can’t know who you are. And indeed we’re shaped by the stories we’ve received, whether it’s Sam and Frodo, Elizabeth and Darcy, Han and Luke, Scarlett and Snake-eyes, or Jack and Sawyer. Our experiences our contextualized by reflexive associations like “oh, like on Simpsons,” whether we like it or not.

Of course, we like to think that in the brave, bold 21st Century, we’re freed from the bonds of tradition and able to reinvent ourselves as we each see fit. After all, we’re all individuals. But really, isn’t that all the more reason to consciously work to define healthy patterns for ourselves? We’re blessed now with more ability than at any time in history to consciously redefine who we are, so why not take advantage of that?

There are several means available for rewriting our internal pathways. Religion is one; therapy is another. But roleplaying–the act of telling stories to and with each other–is an immensely powerful tool. It works on us in much subtler ways than an explicitly educational activity, because it tells a story rather than preaching a message, and yet acts much more dynamically and relevantly than passively receiving a story. And storytelling helps us swallow the pill of self-revelation and transformation smoother than a purely therapeutic process. Stories are perfect vehicles for receiving messages and processing our existence, as they allow us to live and breathe a thing, to take it into ourselves instead of merely talking about it. And this is no mere dodge from living an experience “for real,” but rather works hand in hand with our actual life experience to help us process and contextualize it.

How this works in passive media is, you receive the story, and it stirs something inside you. You identify with it, or you’re challenged by it; either way you contextualize your own experiences by the story’s metric. When you encounter an experience that evokes that story for you, you’re likely to act in resonance with or defiance of that story’s pattern. That’s powerful enough in itself.

How it works in roleplaying is even more potent. We choose. We choose. Together. That’s so dead simple and obvious, yet mind-blowingly revolutionary.

Playing out an experience at the roleplaying table is a unique activity–not amateur therapy and not wannabe novelization–that has its own peculiar quality. As I said, we make the choices in the story, and if we choose with integrity to our own hearts and to the vision we see, then we will make something TRUE. Something authentic, not “factual”, not “what it would be like if…” but something valid about us within a shared fiction that reveals our souls and bolsters our hearts.

This is who we are, as humans. This is the birthright we cast aside when we commodify entertainment. This is the mythic force we can reclaim.

Peace,

-Joel

Making it ourselves

I saw the Tim Burton film 9 last night with my wife. It was a movie that promised so much, yet failed to satisfy. In fact it was painful how breathless plotting, ponderous dialogue, and shameless clichés managed to rob a story that could have been heartbreakingly human. Instead it was a collection of fascinating ideas and themes that were ultimately lifeless.

This has always been a hazard of Hollywood, for seekers of substance. Every now and again a film is the real deal, but often it’s a pale, stilted imitation of authentic expression.

My wife and I noted that more and more of the promising movies we’ve seen have left that empty taste. The question hit us–are we witnessing a twilight of artistic depth? Is the age of personal human vision in art and storytelling passing from the earth?

I don’t know much about how 9’s vision germinated. I do know that the production processes of movies and television provide a wealth of material for consumption, but are not conducive to authenticity. Human-ness is not produced by committee. What are then chances that a creator will say something honest, and be heard, as content-as-product proliferates?

Perhaps this trend in movies represents a mere slump, a recession if you will, in creativity. But if it is indeed the birth pangs of a complete creative collapse in the “entertainment” industry, then I must conclude that if we want to have stories with integrity, we must make them ourselves.

This is why roleplaying and storyjamming are more than mere diversions for me.

This is the way we make our own myths, the way we keep the flame of story alight. This is the way we teach ourselves, over and over, to be humans. This is the way we celebrate who we are.

Occasionally, within the “system,” (or sometimes in defiance of it–Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, for instance) a fire will blaze up that speaks with integrity, that teaches us, that celebrates with us. We cherish these flames. But by and large, we’re on our own. So we write our own novels with a purpose beyond leveraging motion picture rights, we make our own comics which explore the endless possibilities, we make our own music in our living rooms and on our street corners for whoever is there to hear. . .and we sit down by the hearth to tell stories together.

Put like that, storyjamming is less a pastime and more a calling. A calling I mean to keep.

Peace,

-Joel

Fluency in the Forest

A couple of weeks ago I ran a storyjamming workshop for TrackersNW, the same group I worked with on middle Earth Camp. It was a great opportunity to get paid for doing something I love, but more than that, it was the perfect chance to put the Fluency Play model to the test.

Fluency is about working through levels of complexity organically, bit by bit, rather than dumping a whole ton of rules and technique on players at once. As such, it was a perfect fit for a bunch of back to nature types who want to tell stories around a campfire.

I came armed with techniques and procedures adapted from Vincent Baker’s In A Wicked Age, wedded with fluency tools from Evan Gardner’s Where Are Your Keys? language fluency game. By presenting key IaWA concepts–Oracles, Best Interests, Conflict–through ever-advancing levels of fluency, I figured I could facilitate a seamless experience with story creation from the ground up, and little to no brow-furrowing over rules or complex concepts.

I was right.

I divided our time into two segments: Oracle creation and play. For those unfamiliar, Oracles are roleplaying device for generating a situation pregnant with conflict, as fodder for an evening’s story creation. Write up a bunch of story elements, calibrated for action and instability, draw a few randomly, and you’ve got instant clay for a dynamic tale. We created Oracle elements based on the Trackers’ own experiences in the woods that week.

Then we moved on to play. I had a whole load of rules concepts to share, but I kept each one sheathed until it was needed and welcome. I knew we wouldn’t get to the highest level of all the rules in play, and that was OK. We progressed as far as was right for that group and that time. We ended up halfway through all the prepared procedures, but we got an engaging and satisfying story out of it, where everyone’s input mattered. We told a tale of a wounded hunter hounded by ancestral ghosts, of an ailing but charismatic tribal matron, in desperately in need of healing water, and of a fox and his forbidden he-beaver lover, plotting to drive all humans from the forest. Alliances were forged, treachery attempted, hatreds assuaged, loves rekindled! It was a beauty.

The feedback I received made it all worthwhile. “Those are really great techniques.” “That was just enough structure.” “I always wanted to tell stories but didn’t know how, until now.” Imagine if I had come to that campfire with character sheets and a bunch of polyhedral dice and made people wait while I looked up Particular Strengths in the rulebook. . .I shudder to think. Instead, we created a magic space where first-time storyjammers could weave a mythic tapestry out of their own experiences, and strengthen their connection with the land and each other.

When you learn fluently, learning is play. Play is good.

Peace,

-Joel

Fluency Play

So my friend Willem Larsen has developed this method for learning and playing story games which I’m in love with. We’ve struggled with finding a name that does justice to the process, until suddenly it hit me:

With respect to Willem, I’d like call this play method “Fluency Play.”

This cuts right to the heart of the method: basically instead of trying to assimilate an entire body of RPG procedures and put them into action from the get-go, you start at the most basic level and work your way up. The aim is to have a game experience with maximum creative flow, where the shared dreamspace is as unbroken as possible. So you only play at the level you’re fluent at.

See, the thing about fluency isn’t that you’re an “expert” in something. People say “I speak fluent French,” meaning they have a high level of mastery with complex vocabulary and grammar. But really, fluency means you’re comfortable and fluid in performing a skill. My baby girl is fluent in crawling but not in walking. You can be fluent in asking “Where is the bathroom” (i.e. you can say it without thinking or flipping in a phrasebook) without being fluent in discussing the social impact of human sanitation practices throughout history. You wait until you can perform the current level effortlessly, without a moment’s thought, to move to the next level.

So applying this to games? You don’t introduce all the rules at once. You don’t even introduce all the rules “as you need them.” (“Oh, you moved across a threatened square? Time to read the Attacks of Opportunity rules…”) You introduce new levels only when the group is FLUENT in the previous level. For instance, you might first do an intro scene for each character, with no conflict, getting comfortable with description and dialogue. Then do simple conflict scenes, with a simple card draw or die roll. Then run conflicts adding bonuses for traits. And so on.

The payoff, in a word, is FLOW: a seamless experience where collaboration is natural and effortless and that creative bubble isn’t “popped” by head-scratching confusion, flipping through a rulebook, or the sheer overload of trying to hold a dozen interlocking concepts in your head at once. This is largely–not entirely–uncharted territory in game design. We accept page-flipping and headscratching in our games, the way someone might accept knotted back muscles and chronic neck pain, little imagining that some proper massage therapy might release the tension and free up their body to perform fluidly, joyfully.

I wrote once about traction–about procedures having just enough granularity to give your feet purchase and your fingers a handhold, that your choices are meaningful in the game. So how does friction relate to fluency? Simply: fluency is the path to playing with teeth. Fluency encompasses all the steps from sitting in the car and turning the key, through putting it in gear and pressing the accelerator, to steering deftly along roadways and around obstacles–until at last you’re feeling the tires grip the blacktop as you swing around the corners of a winding road in a daring mountain race. That’s the sweet spot we’re aiming for. Not puttering around the parking lot forever, but also not falling into a trap like “Whoa, there’s a sharp turn coming up and another car ahead of me hugging the inside–now WHAT to the instructions say, again, about applying gas and brake to glide safely past him?” Flow and traction are two complimentary opposites.

So in the end I lose nothing–I can enjoy all the richness of robust mechanisms and sophisticated procedures that bolster my story and my play, without the jarring disconnect of breaking flow to learn. Learning shouldn’t be work, learning is play. And play is good.

Peace,

-Joel

Making Middle-Earth our own

I had a unique opportunity this month: I was paid to visit Middle-Earth.

I got to work for a week at Trackers Northwest’s “Welcome to Middle Earth” day camp for 8-10 year olds. The camp uses the trappings of Elves and Orcs and the One Ring to teach nature awareness and wilderness skills, by framing activities as a fantasy quest. I jumped at the chance to be involved.

I had a blast tromping through the woods with nine boys, practicing stealth, riddling with Gollum, finding clues, singing in Elvish. We journeyed to Rivendell (a cabin in the woods) for our last two days, met another group of adventurers and combined our quests–ours to destroy the One Ring, theirs to safeguard the Elven Ring Nenya.

I learned a lot about storytelling, group facilitation, and, well, kids. For instance, it was very important to establish that we were telling our own story, not recreating one from books or movies. This is especially hard when your story is based on a series of books and movies. People of all kinds are well versed in the use of knowledge for power and dominance–this is usually called “expertise.” With kids this is especially raw and potent: I’d say, “look, it’s a letter from Gandalf,” and a 10 year old would shout, “Gandalf’s dead!” this made it important to get all the kids on board with the concept that we’re all working together to tell our own story.

Next time I’ll lean hard on that right from the start. By the last day of camp, everyone was pretty focused and bought in to our “quest” and its fictional framework.  When I led the troop into the woods of Rivendell (our Rivendell) to find the Fires of Mt. Doom (our Mt. Doom) that had bubbled up there, that we might destroy the One Ring (our One Ring) and extinguish the flames from the land, nobody balked or heckled. In fact, I never saw so much focus. I’d been pleading in vain all week for these kids to practice moving quietly through the woods and watch for hand signs from the person in point. But this time, they did it. They crept in silence, the tension palpable. We moved as one, halting, crouching, looking and listening. As we neared the spot where foul Orcs guarded Mordor’s fire, the anticipation was nearly unbearable. Some kids whispered, “I know it’s just a story but I’m actually scared!” Then we fanned out with our foam arrows at clearing’s edge, and struck! When they were too much for our arrows, we drove them away with Elvish Song, and were victorious!

I think my young charges were slightly shocked that I was really going to let them throw my souvenir replica One Ring into a roaring fire, and not fish it back out. I saw the last vestiges of cynicism drain away as it sailed into the embers.

Imagine if I could get that buy-in right from the start. Imagine if, by the end of the first day, I had nine kids all committed, primed and ready to enter into a shared Dream together, to all shape that dream as equal partners. The emerging narrative of our week together was primarily shaped by me and my ideas and props, secondarily by the books and movies, and only tertiarily by the kids’ imaginations. I can only dream of what that would look like flipped on its head–children boldly and brilliantly seizing story in their hands, learning to break down and eventually ignore the constraints of popular culture and consumer entertainment they’ve been bred to. next year, I hope to see that firsthand.

That’s what I strive for, in all arenas, with Story by the Throat.

Peace,

-Joel

Beyond mere misery: playing Nicotine Girls

A couple of weeks ago I played a little game called Nicotine Girls, by Paul Czege. I was terrified. The game is modest enough in scope, but the subject matter is incredibly vulnerable: you play low-income young women aged 16-19, in desperate or dismal circumstances, trying to make their dreams come true.

I first found Nicotine Girls a couple of years ago, on Paul’s website. It appealed to me a great deal, but I shied away from actually playing it, especially since the one other gameplaying person I showed it to seemed to think it impossible to play seriously. So it just filed away in the back of my brain, because I was afraid.

I was afraid that I as a thirtysomething white guy would make some horrible sexist and classist blunder in play. I was afraid the game would degenerate into pure misery tourism under the guise of something deep. I was afraid it would take a more glib turn and degenerate into a disrespectful laugh-fest. In short, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do justice to the subject of the truly disempowered.

But some other recent play put it back to the front of my mind, and I began to gather the courage to try. At Go Play NW I polayed it with Michael, Ogre and Johnstone. I had a pang of guilt as we started, as I realized that I, as the Gamemaster, was not in as vulnerable a position as my cohorts. They would be putting a lot of emotional investment on the line with these impoverished and desperate characters, while I would be primarily piling on the adversity. It seemed unfair of me to ask of them what I would not do myself. but we began with a frank conversation of the emotionally vulnerable core of the game, and proceeded on a foundation of intimate trust.

The thing with Nicotine Girls, is that your actions are extremely constrained both by the situation–low-income girls trapped in their circumstances–and by the rules framework–you must act out of Hope or Fear, and you can only use Sex, Cry or Money to get what you want. And there’s a hope roll at the end of the game to attain your Dream that’s heavily stacked against the players. It seemed like a dismal setup that could only end in tragedy–Misery Tourism indeed.

But an amazing thing happened: there was a wonderful array of texture and nuance to the fiction we created. There were moments of misery, but also humor, of tragedy, but also hope. The characters were drawn as vividly and realistically as in a movie like Trainspotting or SLC Punk. And three girls’ fates ran across a whole spectrum, from the senselessly tragic to the deservedly dismal to the brutal but hopeful. What the nigh-impossible Dream roll did was ground the story–this ain’t no Disney movie, there isn’t a fairy godmother in sight,  but your life is what you make it.

I was moved. We all were. I was so gratified to put my trust in these guys and have it returned. Together we transcended the shallow or pretentious and moved beyond it to true beauty and unflinching truth.

Peace,

-Joel

How to (not) build community

Even once I recognized and processed what I what I wanted from roleplaying, it wasn’t easy to find Story Now play in practice. I had a lot of hiccups and false steps along the way, but I’m finally starting to figure it out.

When I stumbled upon the Forge, I devoured Ron Edwards’ essays and read a whole bunch of dense, extensive discussions, in an effort to figure out what the whole deal was about. In the process I found a system of thought that helped explain the dysfunctions in my roleplaying history, and I was able to put a name to the kind of play I wanted but wasn’t getting: Narratawatsi–I mean, Story Now.

Great, right? Only not so great. I approached a fellow roleplayer or two (mostly my brother) to explain the great new ideas I’d discovered, and I met. . .resistance. For one thing, I was still learning the concepts, and misrepresented them horribly. By the time I had things squared away, I’d already left an impression in my bro’s head along the lines of “Story Now means acting out of character for the good of the story,” which was justly repellent to him. And there’s no guarantee he and the others would have been interested in the play I wanted even if I had explained it properly.

So, while my gaming buds enjoyed the very occasional foray into hippie roleplaying land, they mostly wanted to play the same games the same way. So I had to look elsewhere for my Story Now fix. Through the internet I found a Yahoo Group of Portland indie gamers. We all met up and started gathering to try out new and different games, and evolved into Go Play PDX. I’d finally found my tribe, and all was well in roleplaying-land, right?

Nope, wrong again. Yes, I had fun and formed lasting friendships with a bunch of friendly, creative people who love shared story creation and trying new things. But I made this shocking discovery that–get this–even within the same “scene” people have different aesthetic preferences and creative priorities! Oddly enough, walking into a gaggle of self-professed “Story Gamers” and waving any old game around at anyone who’ll sit still is NOT a recipe for reliable, fulfilling play, of Story Now or any other agenda. Everyone needs to be on the same page, which means matching the right game with the right people AND clearly articulating the style and goal of play.

In the midst of a couple of games–Sorcerer and Red Box Hack–flopping with my friends because I approached it carelessly, I examined the experience with Ron Edwards at the Forge, and we explored the concept of BUY-IN: getting everyone on board for THIS activity, right NOW, with THESE people. Ron’s method for soliciting buy-in is to pitch Color and Reward, that is, what kind of story are we creating–space Nazis, political-intrigue elves, or post-apocalyptic cyborgs–and how does the game facilitate that experience? If you’ve got people on board for both those things, then you can look forward to a rewarding experience for all. If someone doesn’t get the color (“Whaddya mean political? I thought elves just shoot orcs with bows.”) or is turned off by the game method (“I gotta roll HOW many dice?!”) you’re headed for trouble.

I guess the bottom line is that there is no one monoculture of “Story” or “Indie” gamers one can gather around oneself. There’s a diverse community with a variety of interests. And there’s no simplistic “typing” to sort players into. different activities, different times, different people. All those things are mutable. The guys who indulge in immersive emo-porn one night might well be all over some board-gamey orc slayin’ the next. Just make sure you’re all on board for whatever activity is at hand. Don’t make the mistake of bringing your tenor sax to Death Metal night. And if you’re looking for Story Now gamers, don’t sweat so much assembling a “community” of monocultured, same-interest players. They don’t exist. Solicit interest for specific games with specific folks. You’ll have great games, and “community”–like the motley crew below, with whom I bonded over specific games–will happen on its own.

Peace,

-Joel

Story to the People!

Last week, I talked about a terminology shift some people are making in how they talk about roleplaying games. I jumped merrily on that bandwagon, and if you’re wondering why I bothered, this is it: I can now start to talk about the purpose I’m pursuing in RPGs, without getting bogged down in the clunkier and baggage-laden “isms” these things used to be described with. I can now talk about Story Now.

Waaay back in “So what the Hell does THAT mean,” I wrote:

“It’s Story Now, not Story Someday When We All Look Back Fondly, or Story Already Fleshed Out Fully in Our Mental Character Concept, or Story Already Worked Out in the GM’s Notes and We Just Run Through The Motions.”

This is the secret ingredient to shared story creation in roleplaying. There’s lots of roleplaying out there where story creation isn’t truly shared, or where it isn’t prioritized at all. In those cases, the managing of everyone’s creativity is arranged such that “story” is mainly one person’s deal that everyone else recieves and responds to, or else it’s at most a pleasant byproduct. In Story Now play, on the other hand, everyone’s creativity is on the line equally, as shared creators. It demands a lot of trust, and can be a bit frightening. But those who play Story Now attest that the emotional vulnerability is worth it.

Story Now is about focusing on Protagonists, not just “some characters who do some stuff.” It’s about playing characters with purpose, and making those characters the focus of the game. And above all it’s about allowing characters to change.

That’s why the Now, the ever-changing present moment, is the ground of Story by the Throat. Because if you’ve already got a 20-page history and a neat set of “my character would/wouldn’t do that” answers for every occasion, there’s no story to tell. It’s already told, in your head. It’s like this thing of diamond, impermeable, incapable of surprising you. The input of other players will break against your character as waves against rocks and you will not be moved. If that’s what you want. . .sure. But you might be better of just. . .writing that stuff down so a passive audience can receive it. Because in this case a passive audience is just what your fellow players are.

You’ll notice that the nicey-nice platitude that “all goals of play are equally good” or any notion like that is utterly absent here. I’ve found what I want to do, and I’m going to seize it. And I’m not going to mince words about it. So other ways are also fun for people. So this creative agenda ain’t for everyone. I’m not gonna come into your libing room and shit on what you enjoy doing, but here in my living room I’m going to be frank about what I love.

“Story Now!” is not so much a term with a definition (though it is a distinct thing) as it is a fist-pumping anthem. I’m cool with that. If you feel like pumping your fist with me, then great. If not, I’ll merrily march along. But I find enough value in the concept of voluntary and passionate trust in creative endeavors that I’m willing to get a bit aggressive in my appeal. I invite you to join me and live in the moment of Creation together, to putting our creations to the test and allowing ourselves to be changed. Our characters, yes, but us too, as we develop emotional resonance for these beloved imaginary parts of us. Story Now is a battlecry that keeps us all honest, as we hold ourselves to what we demand of each other, that we engage with each other Here, Now, and flinch not from the fire of change.

Peace,

-Joel

(for further reading, check out Jesse’s excellent dissection of the different types of story in roleplaying games, at Play Passionately.)

Jettisoned Baggage

Vincent Baker, author of Dogs in the Vineyard and In a Wicked Age and so on, is doing something interesting on his blog. He’s taking a term of RPG theory, a much-contested one with a ton of emotional baggage. . .and jettisoning it*. He’s saying, “everyone means something different by this term, so if you use it, be prepared to define it; as for me, I’m going to be calling the thing I’m talking about something else.”

(*PLEASE, don’t bother reading the article if you don’t have a dog in the fight. It’ll just be confusing and probably a drag.For awesome Vincent Baker talkings, read this page instead!)

The thing he’s talking about, it’s part of a set of proposed goals of roleplaying from the theory discussions at the Forge. The name he’s shedding is Simulationism, with its counterparts Gamism and Narrativism. In their place he’s using their more descriptive taglines: The Right to Dream, Step On Up, and Story Now.

I love it. I’ve also noticed Jesse Burneko doing this on Play Passionately, saying Story Now all over the place with nary a whiff of “Narrativism.” I intend to do the same. This is a great idea for two reasons:

First, it’s much, much clearer. This clears up all the confusion impressions people get like, “I like story, so I must be narrativist!” or “Realism is important to me, am I playing Simulationist?” The taglines make it utterly clear that we’re talking about specific, nuanced concepts, not just any ol’ thing that comes to people’s minds when they think of “Narrative” or “Game.”

Second, and this is the important bit–the term switch helps defuse the inflammatory history of the concepts. Identifying something as an “ism” is incredibly loaded and polarizing. It quickly becomes a matter of identity politics and battle lines. Story Now sounds to me like a cool and engaging thing to try. “Narrativism” sounds like a damned religion. You can easily get on board for a round of Step on Up play without having to invest your identity in being a “Gamist.” That means we can talk about these things in a healthy and nonthreatening context. That excites me a whole lot.

So I’m going to be trying Story Now on for size, seeing if I can use it as a fruitful line of conversation and exploration. I’m hoping Story by the Throat can benefit from bringing its core element into the foreground and taking a good hard look at it. Come join me!

Peace,

-Joel