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September 09, 2004
Revolutionary Gaming
My Wife, Jess, has some interesting thoughts on Revolutionary Gaming on her Livejournal. I'm not sure if I have a response to her yet, but I felt it worth posting here.
Comments
Hi Jess, can I assume you're reading this?
I'd like to invite you to read my (and Ron's, Gordon's, Alexander's and Calder's) Moose in the City writeup.
That game was pretty revolutionary. It highlighted for me just how much social power the shared and immediate creator-audience arrangement of roleplaying can have. If it's not revolutionary in the "burn and overthrow" way, it's still very subversive. As the roleplaying games I play become better able to deliver high-quality fiction plus intense social bonds, on short notice and without preexisting relationships, I become faaar less tolerant of mediocre movies and TV.
I'm going to even take a feminist plunge here and say also: for five men to connect, emotionally and openly, about issues of failure, loneliness, identity vs. fitting in - that's sticking it to The Man for sure.
I also wonder whether you'd consider our breaking with adventure fiction more revolutionary or less. Is mainstream the opposite of revolutionary, in today's roleplaying? It seems to me that staying in our genre ghettoes restricts our ability to make real commentary or accomplish something cool.
I agree with you that lots and lots of roleplaying is non-revolutionary. I'd even say regressive. But the potential is oh so there, and fulfilling it is fun fun fun, not squicky at all.
Thank you. Interesting stuff.
Posted by: Vincent at Sep 11, 2004 9:01:26 AM
Funny you should point Jess to that thread, Vincent. I was knocked over by how great the Moose in the City game sounded and by how much enthusiasm for it came through in everyone's discussion of it in that thread. So I emailed a link to it earlier this week to our local ad hoc gaming group, of which Jess and Jeremiah are both members.
I was talking about a "Forge thread of the week" in the comments to Bryant's last post: your thread would definitely have been my personal favorite Forge thread of last week.
Posted by: Rob at Sep 11, 2004 5:00:12 PM
That's an interesting thread. I read it and said "Wow, I'm not at all sure that would have been as transformative or important an experience for me," because... hm. It read to me like a very very story-driven session, which is not incompatible but which is orthagonal to what I roleplay for. Would it be fair to say that your revolutionary experience was in some part because the rules supported what you wanted out of the session so very well?
(Hm, I just realized: when I play MLWM, I don't ever particularly care about getting to the bit where we fight the Master. In fact, I kind of don't look forward to it, because it seems like it'll be long and drawn out and get in the way of interaction with my Connections...)
Posted by: Bryant at Sep 12, 2004 9:56:09 AM
Hey! Yeah, I read that thread after Rob pointed it out. It sounds like you guys really had a great time, but not exactly what I was thinking of when I was talking revolutionary. Probably my fault for not defining what I meant by revolutionary, but then I was just posting some random musings in my livejournal and I didn't think they'd end up anywhere else.
In my mind, in this case, revolutionary means a denial of modern/pop culture and artistic convention, a striving for something other, perhaps ineffable. So, while I totally support the emotional connectivity of your Moose in the City experience, and I think it's really cool, I think the sitcom scenario of the game is pretty much a culture-affirming exercise.
Posted by: peaseblossom at Sep 12, 2004 1:02:17 PM
Ah, Jess, I think I see. You're looking for the in-game fiction to be revolutionary, wrt fiction.
Nope, you're right, Moose in the City wasn't that.
Posted by: Vincent at Sep 13, 2004 9:10:35 AM
Bryant:
That's an interesting thread. I read it and said "Wow, I'm not at all sure that would have been as transformative or important an experience for me," because... hm. It read to me like a very very story-driven session, which is not incompatible but which is orthagonal to what I roleplay for. Would it be fair to say that your revolutionary experience was in some part because the rules supported what you wanted out of the session so very well?
Story-driven? Not at all. Moose-driven. Intensely, unflinchingly Moose-driven.
What the rules did especially well is free each of us players to throw our whole enthusiasm into a Moose-driven session. They did it by promising each of us a session driven by our own character. Interestingly, the promise was enough, even knowing that we wouldn't play more than the one session and the promise would go forever unfulfilled.
Can you say more about what you roleplay for, that it didn't sound like we got?
Posted by: Vincent at Sep 13, 2004 5:23:49 PM
I'm not sure I see a discrepancy between "story-driven" and "Moose-driven." But hm.
I think (and I have not played the game) that laying out the Story Presence for the arc beforehand would result in me feeling overly pre-scripted. IMPORTANT NOTE: This is /me/. I am not perfect. This is not a criticism of the rules.
If you look over in the thread Ginger posted about research? That's very much related. I don't like predetermination in my games, and if I know where my big moments are going to be, I am less happy.
I like being surprised. A lot.
And then I get to the last posts in the thread, where Ron and nikola are talking about how the structure of the game helps define the story. That's very cool and it's definitely an advancement in RPG technology, but story is not generally what I roleplay for.
OK, so what the hell do I RP for?
Here's the account of the best single RP session I've ever had:
http://popone.innocence.com/archives/2003/10/12/dear_brother_13.php
From the player point of view, I had no idea that Waylan was about to die. It came as a surprise to me -- the player knew, and the GM knew, but nobody else knew it was coming. That really hit me right between the eyeballs.
The surprise I felt got turned around and plugged right back into the character. Which is what I play for; the moments of immersion. I just get better immersion when I'm as surprised as my character. Again: that's me, not a general principle.
Posted by: Bryant at Sep 14, 2004 1:31:48 PM
Just a note. Jonathan Walton had a column on Rpg.net called something like The Art of Roleplaying, which played around with some theories and such. He got into these big arguments with folks who wanted to say that RPGs are, must be, and should be solely and completely for entertainment and anyone who thinks differently is some kind of pseudo-intellectual freak. I have no stake in that, it's a totally unbiased opinion. :>
Anyway, somewhere along the line I got into this spitting frenzy and wrote a reply called "Naturalized Slavery," and that sparked some responses too.
The link below is I think to the table of contents of Jonathan's column discussions. Quite a number of topics other than "Naturalized Slavery" touch on similar issues, because Jonathan was talking about Brecht and RPGs and, well, you can imagine where that leads.
The column was interesting too, but I can't seem to get RPG.net to produce the column instead of the discussion lists.
http://www.rpg.net/forums/phorum/pf/list.php?f=137&t=340&a=2
Posted by: Chris Lehrich at Sep 26, 2004 8:41:12 PM
Wow! Excellent rant! I liked the column, too, but then, I like Brecht.
Posted by: peaseblossom at Sep 27, 2004 5:31:21 AM
