Communities with Something in Common November 20, 2006
Posted by Ian in About blog, Actual Play, Applied, Community, Jargon, Manifesto, Methodological, Theory.3 comments
This does not entail a rejection of the communities of gamers that are already out there, that subsume individual groups. Online forums and in-person conventions all have their place in the big picture. That place, however, is not the regulation of play styles but as trading zones for them.
The forum serves as a point through which different cloisters can appreciate each other, share their successes and failures. The appreciation should always come with a sense of distance. There needs to be less investment in the hobby or industry as a whole, as an individual thing whose well-being we need to care about. That focus makes it too easy to get invested in pronouncements that we feel must hold true for all cloisters. Instead, we need an ethic of appreciation, a willingness to just listen, read, and absorb the stories from other cloisters. Think of it as travelers from all over the world meeting in an airport. They come to the place with very different experiences, very different lives, and we can learn more by just sharing and interacting than by trying to offer advice about how to ‘fix’ what we perceive as their problems.
Conventions provide precious opportunities in which we get to encounter different playstyles. Rather than assuming that the playtyle with which we come to the table is the ideal one, we ought to come to the table ready to negotiate with different playstyles. The convention game is an actual play trading zone where we can experiment with new arrangements and share our styles. It is to accept that mediocre play may happen, but that mediocre play may be the first step toward a different and powerful play experience. Sometimes, too, it is just a lesson of how badly certain play styles go together, of how certai relationships need not be pursued. In short, it’s not unlike dating.
This ethic of appreciation is, again, not about some airy romantic love of the other. It’s an acknowledgment that a person’s play style is not simply a set of actions that they perform here and now, but a set of lessons which they have acquired from a great number of actual play experiences. Those lessons reflect layers of active social learning which cannot be easily summed up, learning which has to a great extent gone on outside of a strictly verbal framework.
Cloisters of Gamers November 20, 2006
Posted by Ian in About blog, Applied, Community, Jargon, Manifesto, Methodological, Theory.2 comments
So, what does the community of these actual players look like? What we have is not a central agency that helps standardize play, but a number of productive, small centers each fostering their own mode of play. Given some broad similarities in temperament and opportunity, there will probably be a great deal of overlap in the sort of play that these groups create. I like to think of these small groups as ‘cloisters’—small locally-minded groups with connections to a broader movement curious to explore the diversity of play.
Such cloisters are not isolated, but nor are they entirely exposed. We might term this a ‘peninsular’ model, in which they are connected to the main body of gamers by common texts but not determined on all sides by the community of gamer’s activity. They focus upon their own members and their own play more than on the major currents in gaming. There is a certain sense of distance and choice from the large currents, a feeling that they could embrace them or not as they prefer.
This will likely lead to a certain peculiarity in the way each cloister uses and develops terms to describe its play. Those peculiarities are not kinks to be straightened. They are like the stretching of your favorite jeans—not a sign that the jeans are ruined, but that they now fit your body’s actual shape. The peculiarity is a virtue, the outward expression of the group’s efforts to come to terms with each other, to compromise and bolster each other.
The cloister should be proud of its cloister speech, its inside jokes, and ingroup language. It should also appreciate that other cloisters have struggled to produce their own pidgin and creoles. When they go out from their cloister or seek entrance into a new cloister, they should understand that there will be no common language with which to begin. They will have to approach the new cloister with a mixture of reverence and commitment. Reverence for what the group has achieved, reverence for the fact that it will take time to pick up on that group’s peculiarities. Commitment to furthering that group, not just accepting what they have done and accommodating to it, but bringing to bear their own personality, their own virtues which can contribute to the cloister’s development.
Actual Play November 19, 2006
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Applied, Manifesto, Methodological, Theory.2 comments
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.
(S)mother Tongue November 19, 2006
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Applied, Jargon, Manifesto, Methodological, Theory.add a comment
The emphasis on shared goals and practices comes with a tendency toward rigorous and systematic language. Common goals and habits are translated into common terms which identify them. As this happens, too, you get a secondary practice in regards to the way in which language is deployed, which only further removes it from the individuals’ participants’ aims. It also brings in a new sort of participation—that of theory wonks like me. While, clearly, people like myself are not bad in and of themselves, the rewards of theoretical discourse about roleplaying is a good deal different than the rewards of roleplaying. It makes very good sense to keep that in mind.
As soon as you move toward forming a common language about a common practice, you begin to set discourse conventions. These are the rules, implicit and explicit, according to which contributions may be made to the discourse. Much like an examination of common practices, this has its positive dimension. Common languages form one of the lynchpins of communities that cannot be based upon frequent, personal contact.
One of the early, positive dimensions of the D&D franchise was its ability to serve this function. In contemporary discourse, the internet has provided a more controlled version of this. Forums provide groups with a more responsive means of developing these common languages. They become more robust and more refined. Again, there is a positive feature to this. It allows for people who may never see each other, or see each other only briefly at conventions during the year, to develop a common frame of reference for play, to develop a mode of play that they don’t have to negotiate anew each time they play with a new group.
However, it also makes it easier to elide the individual’s motivations for playing. The theory takes on a regulative dimension—”this is how we play, this how you play in order to participate in our discussions.” Moreover, the common language doesn’t just describe play, it structures it. It educates the person who acquires it, teaches them to focus on certain facets of play more than others.
Now, all you theoried smarties out there are probably going to start talking about the problem of private language. You will think, “but language is just such a social exchange and that is one of the primary mediums we have to communicate about these things. We are already social before we are individual, that we are already compromised before the get go.” Well, welcome to the party—no one said this was going to be easy. But, as in the previous post, I’m suggesting we need to start thinking about the individual side of the social. We need to think about how flexible the common language is, how much it can be productively distorted by its users to get at their personal desires and motivations for gaming.
So, what does this mean in terms of language? First, it means we need to be open to less systematic expressions of gaming theory. We ought to be more comfortable with ‘low to the ground’ metaphors and comparisons. We don’t need a science of gaming, but a craft of gaming, one that gives us a bag of tools we can use to tune up play experience, not explain it. Yes, systematic accounts can sometimes do this. But they are not a precondition for it. The best solutions are often more local, more native to the place in which they emerge, and are thereby less overarching and universal.
Second, we need to acknowledge the proper place of highly systematic accounts of gaming, what they do best. They are not best where they regulate and make normative statements abotu gaming, but where they provide a description of a common set of practices through which individuals can begin to interact with each other. They provide something akin to a neutral zone, a medium more amenable to first interactions, but which ideally becomes more local and personal the more it is used by the individuals who begin with it. In other words, it is best where it can become the basis for a pidgin and creole local language.
