Games for the Mind

Next up, let’s start talking about Actual Play. I’m a big fan of it. I like to do it, I like to talk about it. Yet, there is a fetishization of it that is problematic. It has become too much like evidence and is used to support arguments rather than develop more actual play. As evidence in a debate, it is torn and analyzed, subjected to abstractions (see discussion of common language).

Most discussions of actual play are already abstractions, rooted in what people remember and can describe from a session. Of course, full recordings of actual play would go a long way to remedying this, but that places a high demand on time. A participant of a discussion would have to sit through many viewings of a single session just to begin to parse out its complexity. Unless you happen to be lucky enough to be paid to do research on games, you won’t have much time to actually play yourself.

The research scenario, of course, comes with its own problems. Researchers don’t approach the data as unbiased viewers but as experts with a set of theoretical concerns. This doesn’t make them blind. Quite the opposite, it makes them quite alert to certain things, most often descriptive theoretical things which have only a little to do with what players want out of actual play.

What we need is a new way of approaching actual play that is reflective without being argumentative, an account that explores the way in which actual play is experienced by the people at the table. We need an actual play discussion that reconnects us with the affective dimension of play, that puts us ‘in the game’ if only briefly, suggestively. This is difficult—we risk at all times fictionalizing actual play into what we imagine it to be, but it is worth the effort to try.

To do this, though, requires a significant shift in level. It is a local, intra-group approach to actual play whose primary audience is other members of the gaming session. It involves not just talking about the game, but the players, their likes, their dislikes, their habits, their behavior. This is not to label them one thing or another, but to establish them as personalities, forces of actual play. Look at who jokes, who doesn’t, who laughs, who gets distracted, who comes for the intense roleplaying moment, who comes to joke around.

Second, it involves accounts that border on being play themselves. Accounts that discuss the hopes and fears players have for the game, accounts of what they thought might have happened, could happen, and might yet happen. In other words, actual play that ‘dreams the dream forward’ rather than breaking it down into component elements.

Again, for the theory-minded, I am talking about a synthetic approach to actual play rather than an analytic one. If you are feeling particularly groovy and bold, go read some chunks of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. For the truly hearty, look to Theodor Adorno’s “Subject and Object” (which can be found in Blackwell Publishers’ The Adorno Reader) for an account of the lower, more personal dimension of the social.