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February 19, 2006
Fictions of Every Stripe
People invest in fictions of every stripe, whether it's character identification, a narrative or a political process. That one's pretty much a baseline, and if someone wants to say "This fake thing you care about is less valid than this fake thing I care about" well, that's just asking for trouble. So questions of mental masturbation are just nothing I can ever take that seriously. I have already bought into the value of play, and things build from there.
UPDATE 2/22/06: I discover it's crucial to point out that the word "fun" nowhere appears in the quoted passage. That's important. Please carry on.
Comments
Hallelujah.
Posted by: Vaxalon at Feb 19, 2006 9:15:22 PM
Just to voice my dissent: It turns out that some types of fun are not as good as others. In fact, some types of fun are straight up bad.
Here's a simple example: smoking is fun (hurray for nicotine), but I don't think you'll find much argument over whether it's a good thing to do or not, what with all the terrible side effects.
Now, I'm not saying (because I'm not sure) that some types of fiction are actively bad, but I am pretty sure that some types are at least not as good as others. Of course, I'm not ruling out that some actually are bad, I just don't know.
The big problem with proclaiming one form of fiction better than another is that, to date, I haven't seen any solid justifications. I've seen plenty of "this is why I like this form better than this other form", but not any "here's a good reason that this form is better than this other form".
I guess this is just a long-winded way of me saying: "but some forms of fiction are worse than others, I just don't know how to tell the difference... yet".
Thomas
Posted by: Thomas Robertson at Feb 20, 2006 12:20:33 PM
I think a discussion of what WrongBadFun actually IS would be interesting to watch.
Everyone agrees that it exists and noone seems to agree on what it looks like.
Posted by: Vaxalon at Feb 20, 2006 12:43:02 PM
Everyone agrees that it exists and noone seems to agree on what it looks like.
That's not entirely true. I'm pretty sure that everyone agrees on at least some of the features, like: "It harms someone against their will". (Disclaimer: lurid example follows) For instance, I imagine that the rapist has fun doing his thing, but I don't think anyone is going to say his fun isn't bad.
But gaming isn't rape, and I am not convinced that that's a valid analogy. But what about an abusive relationship? One in which the abused partner is a willing participant? I imagine that the abusive partner is having fun even if the abused is not (and I do hear from abused partners that they are glad they're in said relationship), and this doesn't happen against the abused partner's will.
So I don't think we're really confused about what WrongBadFun is, rather we're not sure what types of fun fall within WrongBadFun. (Please do not discuss the following example, I hesitate to make it, but it's just so dang illustrative...) Ron Edwards had a recent thread over in the Adept Press forums in which he claimed that some subset of gamers playing some subset of games were literally brain damaged by doing so.
That obviously would fall within our definition. The problem is, of course, that not everyone is convinced that Ron's claim is an accurate one. I think we can all agree that if Ron is correct, then that subset of gamers is having WrongBadFun.
So, the question isn't "What is WrongBadFun?" (definitionally), but rather "What is WrongBadFun?" (in the sense of what constitutes it).
Thomas
Posted by: Thomas Robertson at Feb 20, 2006 12:56:19 PM
It's a pathetic comment on the state of internet RPG discussion that Rob's comment was even necessary. In any healthy discussion of RPGs, everyone would be working from that assumption.
As to WrongBadFun...this is just another way of sneaking in judgementalism under the guise of analysis, and another opportunity to preach the One True Way. Now, it doesn't have to be used that way, but it always is. So I'm not really seeing what it adds to the discussion.
Posted by: Lee Short at Feb 20, 2006 1:56:03 PM
Lee, if discussion of WrongBadFun (or whatever we want to call it) does not have to be used as a tool of propaganda (which is what I think One-True-Way-ism is), then doesn't that suggest that it has a valid use?
I suppose you could be saying, "Discussing this topic is, based on all observed data, bound to devolve into uselessness", but I personally would really like to have such a discussion that didn't do that. I mean, the question of whether or not it is good/okay to pursue a given activity just because it is fun is, to me, an interesting one.
Of course, that's beyond the standard scope of roleplaying games, but it does apply to roleplaying games.
I'm not really interested in simply expounding my position on the subject though, so if no one else thinks it's worth discussing then I'm sure not going to try "discussing" it alone... :)
Thomas
Posted by: Thomas Robertson at Feb 20, 2006 2:33:48 PM
I suppose you could be saying, "Discussing this topic is, based on all observed data, bound to devolve into uselessness",
Yeah, that's pretty much it. It's also a warning of sorts: if you want to have a discussion of this topic that doesn't devolve into uselessness, you're going to have to be pretty damn careful about how you do it. Because this topic has been used so regularly for propaganda, people are going to (perhaps unfairly) link the topic with propaganda.
I also think you really need to ask yourself this question: what specifically do you hope to gain by this discussion? A way to recognize dysfunctional games in their early stages? A way to design games to mitigate the probability of dysfunction? A taxonomy of the way in which games can be WrongBadFun? IMO, a lot of people think they are after these things, when most of what they are after is propaganda. I think there's a whole lot of self-delusion in the theory community about how inclusive their theories are.
Posted by: Lee Short at Feb 20, 2006 3:33:35 PM
Lee,
I'm definitely with you there. I do want to have a serious discussion on the subject, but your warning is a good one. I'm going to step back and figure out just how I want to frame such a discussion to minimize the chances of it devolving into useless screaming and hand-waving.
Thomas
Posted by: Thomas Robertson at Feb 20, 2006 3:55:10 PM
Thomas, it's a good question. Obviously Ron's brain-damage thread is the poster child for maximizing the chances of devolving into useless screaming and hand-waving. But negative examples only mark boundaries, not paths.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Feb 20, 2006 6:00:51 PM
Thomas, if I may offer you some advice based on my experience of many many flamefests...
If you want to assert that a kind of fun causes harm, you really need to have your explanation of what kind the harm is and evidence to support it. If you are speculating, you must make that clear and you may expect to be challenged on it. If you are relying on a philosophical syllogism or something other than physical evidence, ditto. Just be prepared with the best support for the claim you can make.
If your claim is essentially a moral one, you can expect to run into a whole lot of skepticism and a fair amount of heat - to the point that I personally would seriously question whether it's worth saying in any terms stronger than "I dont' go for it." There are ways of phrasing things so that people know to count you out without inviting what they are likely to see as defenses of their basic humanity and good character.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Feb 20, 2006 11:06:44 PM
Oh, yeah, the other thing I meant to say...
Sometimes a temperate, well-presented case meets with unexpectedly intense response, let alone a case that isn't as mellow as it could be. What's happening there is usually that you're getting targeted by proxy for other frustrations that have built up in the audience. I know, for instance, that I once blew my top when being introduced to the Forge's then-prevailing views on dysfunction, and not just because the argument wasn't being made with charity or courtesy. It was that I was in a health slump, suffering from bad writer's block, missing my girlfriend, and otherwise messed up, with gaming as one of the few real satisfactions I could count on right then. To have someone watlz in and tell me that I couldn't be having fun taht way, or that if I was it could be only at the expense of any serious consideration and with massive self-denial, triggered an eruption in which all that other stuff spilled out. The "White Wolf play is dysfunctional" advocate did not, in retrospect, deserve all that I gave him, and I've tried not to do that sort of thing again.
However, not everyone has my sense of appropriate self-policing, and even those who do may lose it. Before you embark on a stern critique of someone else's gaming, it may be worth some careful thinking about the role gaming may be playing in your audience's lives. Not everyone can really approach it from a detached, confident, secure vantage point, not if there's serious hurt in some other part of their experience and gaming is a way of dealing with it, or just escaping it.
This isn't to say that it cannot be worth proceeding anyway. Just...go softly. You are, necessarily, treading on their dreams, and this is a task calling for sympathy, empathy, and considerable craft, if you want to do anything other than alienate them.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Feb 21, 2006 1:34:04 AM
I should say that my own concern with such discussion isn't so much "someone's feelings might get hurt." Instead it's the inherently self-serving nature of such advocacy. The "brain-damage meme" is a case in point. It's absurd on its face.
One of the few fora that ever fitfully transcended self-justification was rgfa in the mid-1990s and even there the truly dispassionate voices were few. (Mine wasn't one.) I've been thru the esthetics wars in poetry ("expansive poetry" maps reasonably to Forgeism - it even had a "new narrative" component); anyone who knows her literary or art history has seen this kind of thing innumerable times over the centuries. I can spend time explaining why I suspect, on balance, that "authorial play" is inferior to "experiential play," but I suspect all it comes down to is a difference in emotional response - where do the endorphins kick in?
Posted by: Jim Henley at Feb 21, 2006 10:12:17 AM
Bruce, you pretty much nailed it.
I almost had to ban someone from my journal recently because he was so insistent on taking something I said in a WrongBadFun way. In rereading his comments, I came to the conclusion that one of my favorite metaphors (sex=gaming) was extremely problematic for this person. It alienated the person and the person's response alienated me. The experience put me off discussing game theory for a couple of months. I think today may be the first time I've commented on game-related stuff since then--partially because I've been busy, but also because taking that kind of shit is low on my list of ways to spend my time and reading too much "brain damage" and WrongBadFun talk involves taking it.
Posted by: Ginger Stampley at Feb 22, 2006 12:07:48 PM
Thanks for bringing this up and in such a thoughtful manner. I've been thinking for decades about where this could help game design.
I need to start with a few bullet points I think passionate people might miss:
- Dysfunctional does not equal harmful in all cases.
- Everyone can get on board with what is 'harmful fun;' no one is trying to defend that kind.
- Most often I've seen 'wrongbadfun' as a defensive term used in response to what an 'onetruewayist' says insultingly about someone else's fun.
- I've never seen 'wrongbadfun' used to excuse 'harmful fun.' (Passionate people seem to just assume it is.)
- Conflating 'wrongbadfun' with 'harmful fun' makes the discussion pointless.
But would it be possible to discuss 'wrongbadfun' which is not 'harmful fun' in any way and, in specified examples, isn't dysfunctional? I, for one, would welcome opening up the topic of episodically non-dysfunctional 'wrongbadfun' (which isn't the 'harmful fun' kind); I think it would be a rich mine of ideas and theory for role-playing game design when considering the non-dysfunctional points.
At that point I think we can equate all that kind of fun is as valid as any other kind of fun and that relative differences are only matters of taste.
That's just me though.
Fang Langford
Posted by: Fang Langford at Feb 22, 2006 2:39:40 PM
Everyone: Please see today's update to the post.
Posted by: Jim Henley at Feb 22, 2006 3:34:26 PM
Fang, I don't think you can get everyone on board about what constitutes dangerously wrong play, because beyond the clearcut cases of unconsensual physical harm, you get ambiguities about "real" consent, and about moral harm.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Feb 22, 2006 11:59:00 PM
I think there are two kinds of activity that could fall under the category WrongBadFun: (1) reprehensible material and (2) unrefined/destructive practice. By the first, I mean the kinds of play elements and themes that I've over-read being treated when people "play" KPFS. And I'm reminded of a GenCon DitV play report in which play became uncomfortable, to the point that they had to check whether to continue; it dealt with rape.
Still with (1), I guess it's about the strength of your stomach lining. To use a personal example, I can't hardly finish a sentence without aggravating my brother. His sensibilities are just too delicate for me to draw a breath. More generally, I cleared one side of a Starbucks last year by saying the word "demon" 20+ times, explaining what Sorcerer was about. Who's to say where the comfort level should be set? I should think it's the players. Even if you can take it, is it bad for you? Well, acting against your beliefs is probably feeding the wrong wolf; so there may be a zero humanity risk. On the other hand, there may be therapeutic value to exploring your belief-restricted interest in a relatively safe way, i.e. role-playing. I guess if it's a strain, then it's not good; if it's a growing pain, that might just be part of it.
For (2), I was talking with my cousin last week about how a certain type of praise music sets my soul on such an edge that I have to leave the room. Whereas, with traditional hymns and Amy Grant pop tunes--to continue the Christain music theme--I really enjoy, Jesus aside. (I listen to secular rock, mainly, BTW.) Here, my gripe against repetitive praise music (and I apologize if you play in just such a band; this is all IMO) is that the aesthetic value of the music is very poor. Yes, praise Jesus; but as though we were kindergartners? Sorry if this sounds egotistical, but I'm too refined to stand it.
I think I'm echoing Frank Miller's gripe about comics when he was trying to break into the industry; everything was for kids. And with Sin City, we saw just what he meant by adult.
So maybe for Ron, WoD is like having to watch Romper Room. Just like when I play with a new RPG group and they're still doing that damn thing where everyone holds hands as they go to the next room before anything can happen, I just groan and say, "RPG gods, deliver me!" The consensus I sense is that you get nowhere by saying what doesn't work for you plain doesn't work. We need different things. (Let me abandon Romper Room; that's probably too loaded.) How 'bout this: Willow. It's not Jackson's LotR; but should one go so far as to say you're dumbing your aesthetic sense by viewing such fare? Whether such a comment will be productive (if that's valuable) depends on the individual.
Posted by: Bill Cook at Feb 23, 2006 3:18:42 AM
For me, at least, one important thing to keep in mind is that anything can be made to sound bad. English is a great language for invective, and we have a rich, strong heritage of it. With a little judicious swiping, you can make absolutely any target you want look bad.
And it proves nothing. Because, well, that can be done right back at you.
I think this is a very major part of why Forge concepts haven't penetrated as far as they might have - whatever his strengths, Ron has a lousy ear for the impact language will have on others not pre-disposed to agree. And then he reacts with genuine surprise when others are nasty back, because he hasn't realized how his stuff sounds, and tends not to listen to explanations of how or why it sounded that way to some listeners. (Particularly someone like me, who feels about language the way Ron feels about system, basically.)
I'm obviously not free from this myself, but I'm working hard at it - I do try to couch descriptions in terms that I wouldn't mind if used about my favorite things. It's sometimes very, very difficult. But when it works right, the exercise of separating basically neutral description from personal and passionate commentary actually does help me better understand things that have been mysterious to me.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Feb 23, 2006 3:41:35 AM
Re: the update yesterday...
I must accept the blame for taking this discussion into the "fun" territory, but I think I may have been justified. Rob uses three different terms: "invest[ment]", "valid[ity]", and "value".
The first term is an action rather than a normative descriptor. As such, it does not speak to the worth or moral/aesthetic/whatever status of the thing being invested in. So I don't think it's really relevant for discussion of whether your choice is as good as mine.
The second term requires an end-point, and I don't see one articulated here. That is, something can't be valid or invalid purely on its own, but only in relation to some criteria. Your fiction may be a valid way to bring to light serious social issues, but an invalid way to amuse children for instance.
The third term is where the real interesting stuff happens, and the reason I immediatley thought about "fun". The vast majority of people who I have talked to about roleplaying claim that the value of roleplaying is that it is fun. This may be true, or at least fun may be a value of roleplaying.
However I, and others I hope, believe that roleplaying is also valuable (at least potentially) for more than the fun it provides. Maybe it teaches us to tell stories, maybe it's emotionall cathartic, maybe it improves relationships, whatever. The thing is that if fun is the entirety of the value you are getting from roleplaying then you are missing out on these other things that you could be getting at the same time.
And that's what I mean when I claim that someone is having WrongBadFun (or whatever). Specifically: you are settling for mere fun when you could have fun and make yourself a better person at the same time. You are wrong for doing that.
Wow... that's pretty dang judgmental and high-horse of me... But does it seem valid to anyone else?
Thomas
Posted by: Thomas Robertson at Feb 23, 2006 2:52:43 PM
Heh. So this was my laugh for the day.
Thomas's post points most to what I was thinking about. When i say I think play is valid, that means that I have decided, for myself, that play is a valuable, meaningful end in and of itself. This does not mean I will not examine it, nor does it mean I will resist things that can make it better or more meaningful, but I think fun is a reasonable end, so I'm pretty strongly opposed to the idea of "mere" fun.
I tend to look at the need to _make_ gaming valuable as a reflection of the shame that comes from a pretty dorky hobby. We say we play RPGs and people think "So, you like to pretend to be a mighty barbarian warrior with a magical sword who goes into dungeons and kills goblins?" and we get immediately defensive because that's a pretty demeaning way to describe what we do, though there's some accuracy to it technically and MY GOD WHAT IF THEY'RE RIGHT? I'M WASTING MY LIFE! EVERYTHING I LOVE IS A LIE! :)
Intellectually, its no sillier than football or 10,000 other pursuits. People find what they love and then they find value in it. Sweet god, take some time to go to the Chess, Go and Checker enthusiast sites sometime and you can listen to 3 different variants on why all kids should learn to play their game for basically the same reasons.
That said, I don't consider that a problem, and anyone who wants to think gaming isn't worthwhile is welcome to do so, and we can even have reasonable debate on the subject, until they expect me to apologize for my position based on some imagined proposition of value. If that happens, my only recourse is to lock the offender in a room with Emily D-T and tell them to explain the irrelevance of college sports.
Hi. My name is Rob, and I like to pretend to be a mighty barbarian warrior with a magical sword who goes into dungeons and kills goblins.
-Rob D.
Posted by: Rob Donoghue at Feb 23, 2006 4:57:16 PM
Thomas,
Yeah, that's pretty judgemental of you. If you want to get those other things from your gaming, fine...but not everyone wants that, and they are not Bad and Wrong for not wanting it.
In other words: what Rob said.
Posted by: Lee Short at Feb 23, 2006 5:57:09 PM
Rob's got this one covered. It's not that wishing for more than a straightforward entertainment is bad, it's just that not wishing for it isn't bad, either.
I'm going to drag out here my defense of fluff.
One of the biggest problems that anyone who tries to lead or coordinate Good Deeds of any kind runs into is burnout. Bluntly, it is hard to be deeply engaged with everything you feel a moral obligation to all the time, whether the cause at hand is political, religious, ethical, or whatever. It's too easy to burn yourself out, and in the end cost your cause - you'd have done better to pace yourself all along.
The fact is that we're both very robust in some ways and very frail in others. We need rest. And that's more than adequate sleep and nutrition. It includes time not to be serious, not to be on call, but to do something purely and only because you and the folks you're doing with like it. A decent life requires time spent blowing things off for a while, I believe. You best serve your duties and commitments when they don't consume you.
And I include in that the duty to lead an examined life. It's good to learn from gaming things that may help us be better people in real life. But it's not good to make gaming just be that kind of tool. We are better people when we also have some time to kick in doors and hack up goblins.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Feb 23, 2006 9:44:19 PM
