Any models competing with the Threefold?
Peter Knutsen
The news:rec.games.frp.moderated people are compiling a FAQ for
the newsgroup, and I suggested that they included a pointer to
the Threefold Model. This was recieved favourably (in fact 100%
of the 1 replies I've gotten so far were totally in favour) but
then it occured to me that the FAQ explicitly states that it
wants to avoid making absolute claims, or presenting any one
point of view as the Truth(tm).
So if there are any good, serious and well-written models
competing with the Threefold, I'd like to be informed of them.
I promise to pass anything that's written in English on to the
FAQ maintainer, without excercising any censorship, so there's
no need to worry.
--
Peter Knutsen
Rick Cordes
Christopher Pound <po...@is.rice.edu> wrote:
>
>I like the Threefold, but I explain it in terms of Kenneth Burke's
>pentad. Burke was a rhetorician, interested in how people use
>language, and his pentad is a scheme for quickly identifying
>different emphases in different explanations of an event.
>...
>1) People talking about "the culture" feature the SCENE.
>2) People talking about the killers feature the AGENT(s).
>3) People talking about the guns feature the AGENCY (the means).
>4) People talking about the goals/ends of the killers feature the PURPOSE.
>5) People talking about the act in itself or by itself feature the ACT.
>
>...Obviously, these terms were designed_ to be combined.
Your method seems to differ from the threefold by verging
on a method for analysis (rather than just taxonomy) like the "who,
what, when/where, how, why" of news reporting, right?
It's interesting you observe these terms are designed to
be combined. My problem with the threefold model is its being
more a descriptive than an analytical method: I am more
interested in the relations between the pigeonholes rather
than the pigeonholes. Taking binary combinations of three
pigeonholes, you wind up with three combinations which I
think more than not effectively return you to the original
three pigeonholes. Still, while your method is not susceptible
to this reduction, are more pigeoholes an improvement, or better
assist analysis or design of a better RPG paradigm?
The appeal of the threefold model is its reliance upon
it being a Role(dramatist) Playing(simulationist) Game(gamist)
but by the same token it is tautological. One set of terms might
be combined, better to define the other set of terms or pigeonholes
but what does either that or adding more pigeonholes achieve
beyond labeling and divorcing one aspect of the game from another?
Will more finely defining the anatomy ever amount to physiology?
The relationships between the pigeonhole might be more
important than defining the pigeonholes, and the threefold model
is nothing but pigeonholes, and as you point out, "pauce" in going
about fitting round pigeons to square holes. The motivation
becomes to devise a set of RPG parts and a set of relations.
Here is a attempt at a model incorporating both objects
as well as the relations between them. I used triads instead of
pentads because of the larger number of combinations generated
by a pentad, each requiring some kind of reasonable label.
Parts: Characters, Backdrop, Scenario;
Relations: Integration, Development, Influence.
The Characters are PCs or NPCs. The Backdrop is the world, genre,
or "multiverse." The Scenario is the planned campaign or drama.
Integration relates how Parts jibe with one another; Development,
how a Part can develop, and Influence, to what extent participants
may influence or be influenced by a Part. I'm trying to submerge
the "Drama Simulation Game" dissection to the extent its better
to think of the integration of the whole rather than parsing it into
the mother, the father and the holy ghost, and becoming entangled with
what roleplaying might be to a Gamist but not a Dramatist. However a
style or design may be pigeonholed according to the threefold, an RPG
design can be analyzed with respect to how its mechanics accomodate
the Relations between the Parts. In the spirit of taking combinations,
rather than speaking of taxonomic preferences, an RPG design can be
analyzed in terms defined by how it enables (something like):
Simulation = Backdrop Development
Playing = Character Development
Plot = Scenario Development
Casting (Accomodating?) = Character/Backdrop Integration
Acting = Character/Scenario Integration
Drama = Backdrop/Scenario Integration
Roleplaying = Character (Player) Influence
Motivating = Scenario (Referee) Influence
Directing = Backdrop (Collaborative) Influence
Equating these terms to the Parts and Relations is somewhat
arbitrary but the intent is not to pigeonhole but to suppose
all the elements imaginably comprising an RPG can be analyzed in
an integral model. [Some of these terms are intentionally
equivocal, e.g. for a Gamist and Dramatist, Acting and Roleplaying
might respectively surplant one another, but maybe not, if they
prove equally useful fictions, regardless the perspective.]
For example, in Character/Backdrop Integration: are the
actions of a character to governed by an objective mechanic or by
player autonomy? What then about Character/Scenario Integration?
I suspect decisions based upon a preference for a particular
threefold pigeonhole for Character Influence necessarilly limits
the choices for both those Integrations. A mechanic devised
to maximize choice might accomodate preference better than a
mechanic devised to accomodate preference may maximize choice,
if choice can be taken as being synonymous with versatility.
My suspicion is there are only a few ways to maximize
choice: The Few True Ways. The out of hand objection to this is
these maximizations will not be optimal with regard to specific
preferences but prejudices aside, the idea is for a model
to talk systematically how RPG elements effect one another
rather than just labeling and freely associating them.
-Rick
Neel Krishnaswami
to apply this model to a specific campaign that I'm working on, to see
if it shakes loose some ideas about how to proceed. First, I'll
describe the game in some detail, and then see what pieces of the
pentad I'm using.
The game is an In Nomine demons campaign called EMPTY CALORIES. It's
partly a response to a certain type movie that I've seen a lot of
recently, all which seem to lack any kind of moral center.
Some examples are _Waking Ned Devine_, _The Big Hit_, and _Young and
Dangerous_. _The Big Hit_ is a crime comedy about an assassin who is
set up by his fellow killers to take the fall for a screwed-up
kidnapping/ransom scheme. The lead (Mark Wahlberg) eventually realizes
what's going on, and after killing a lot of people he and his kidnap
victim (who have fallen in love) leave with a big bundle of loot for a
life of wedded bliss and consequence-free violence. In _Waking Ned
Devine_, every inhabitant Irish village decides to get together in a
scheme to bilk the government lottery out of a prize worth several
million dollars. They do so, without apparent moral qualms -- the
only inhabitant who refuses to participate does so to spite her
neighbors rather than out of a moral sense. _Young and Dangerous_
follows a small group of young Triad gangsters as they become loyal
friends and kill, steal and bribe their way to the top.
A characteristic feature of all these movies is that they have a
stunted moral sense -- in all of these movies the characters are
vaguely aware that what they are doing is wrong and hurts other
people, but they don't really care and they prosper anyway. Also,
social controls are usually very very weak -- in _The Big Hit_ and
_Young and Dangerous_ the police were more or less wholly absent from
the entire movie, and in _Waking Ned Devine_ the entire town was a
party to the scheme. Comic scenes were used to blunt the moral
response to what these people were doing.
This is different from another sort of crime comedy (typified by such
movies as _Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels_ and _Go_) in which
some (usually rather dim) novice criminals attempt to embark on some
shady get-rich-quick scheme that quickly becomes an enormously
complicated affair that ends with lots of dangerous hair's-breadth
escapes that finally leaves all the protagonists in exactly the same
position as they were in at the start of the movie. (Supporting
characters and antagonists may prosper or die, though, depending on
how deserving they are. For example, in _Lock, Stock and Two Smoking
Barrels_ successfully Big Chris made off with all the money because he
wanted it to raise his son Little Chris, but the gangsters who tried
to squeeze the protagonists ended up dead. There were enormously
intricate convolutions in the plot to explain all this, but at a
metalevel it happened that way because some characters had heart and
some didn't.)
So I don't fully understand what's going on in these movies (the first
group, with _The Big Hit_ in it) and I want to run a roleplaying game
that shares as many of the characteristics of these movies as transfer
over to an RPG.
Making the PCs demons is a deliberate choice. First, it establishes a
rationale for why almost all the PCs and their cohorts act amorally.
Second, it's a fantastic element that can justify why consequences
never seem to catch up with the PCs. Finally, it gives the PCs a
handle with which they can get can get an edge over other humans and
each other.
Also, I'm not 100% sure I want to avoid the tropes of the criminal
comedy genre -- I'm a bit afraid that a purely amoral game (in the
sense of characters without morals and no consequences for evil acts)
would become depressing if it ran for too long.
Christopher Pound <po...@is.rice.edu> wrote:
>
> 1. SCENE... What's happening in the gameworld guides your thought
> of what's happening in the game. Perhaps your game features an
> elaborate setting, and your adventures are essentially tours of that
> setting. Perhaps you determine the ongoing events in the world
> independent of character action, and the players get involved
> incidentally. Perhaps you create characters primarily with the
> thought of opening a perspective onto a strange world (a SCENE/AGENT
> ratio?). It's quite possible you decide what happens in a game
> based on what you think is most interesting for that setting, rather
> than what is most likely in that setting.
The Scene aspect of this game is relatively deprivileged. I'm setting
it in the nominal modern day because it's familiar to all the players.
It's just backdrop, so consistency will be subordinate to maintaining
the status quo -- the city will always be the city, no matter what
happens.
> 2. AGENT... Who your character is matters a lot. You think about your
> characters feelings and emotions frequently. You like designing characters.
> Your actions in the game are generally guided by the question "what would
> this character do?"
I think for EMPTY CALORIES, the players should have substantial
investment in their characters. I think that it would be hard to do
any substantial moral examination without felt characters.
I-as-GM don't really plan on doing the same for the NPCs, until some
of them get promoted to quasi-PC status via their interactions with
the PCs.
This promotion process exists mostly to help support the PCs'
development -- IOW, what happens to them and their reactions will be
somewhat at the mercy of the larger needs of the game. I'm planning by
going by the principle of "if it seems interesting it will happen"
until the NPCs get deeply involved with the PCs, when deeper character
motives will take front stage.
I hope to justify this a little bit by establishing that making poor
decisions is common to demons, and not usually fatal. Eg, poor impulse
control, drug addictions, greed, lust and insanity are common, and
even if you die you come back. In debt, of course -- bodies aren't
free -- but still you come back. So weird decision-making is not
unheard of.
Style, fashion and humor also matter a whole lot. Partly, this is to
emphasize the moral shallowness of the characters in the game, but
it's also to keep the nihilism of the setting out of sight. (This
sounds contradictory when I say it like this, but it seems to make
sense to me anyway.)
> 3. AGENCY... More or less the same as Gamist. Note that
> "gearheads" who build GURPS Vehicles and whatnot would probably have
> an agency component to their ratio, though they might primarily be
> interested in realistically playing out the combats between their
> designs. I'm just pointing out the strange convergence between an
> interest in technology (a major part of the category of "agency")
> and an interest in the game (the means, also part of the category of
> "agency"). Of course, some people design characters the way
> gearheads design vehicles -- they might speak in terms of an
> agency/agent ratio when talking about their motives and interests in
> a game.
I'm pretty sure that weakening consequences in general will decrease
the utility of strategic play, both in individual combats or during
high-level intrigure.
> 4. PURPOSE... More or less the same as Dramatist. I'm tempted to
> put all social gameplay here too, from social gaming to cathartic
> gaming. Someone who just plays a game to pass the time
> (purpose/act?) is not as involved in it as someone who plays to
> experience catharsis through their character (purpose/agent?
> agent/purpose?), but like "storytellers," they expect a big payoff.
> The same is true for Gamists who describe an agency/purpose ratio
> when they talk about the rules a lot in expectation of reaching
> imagined victory conditions.
I guess this one gets pushed up a lot, in the sense that this game is
a deliberate experiment. I don't know if catharsis will happen, or if
the events will fall neatly into a plot -- I'm mostly curious to see
what happens. I hope there is some kind of discovery about violence
and morality in gaming, but
> 5. ACT... Your interest in the game is pulled along not by the
> backstory for the setting but by the unfolding events to which you
> are witness and by their fundamental adherence to a locally-defined
> reality principle. The outcome is not as important as the event.
> The relationship of the event to the setting details is not as
> important as its relationship to a reality principle.
I'm not sure what a "reality principle" is. Logical consequences are
deliberately weak -- if a PC shoots a slow waiter in the face, as long
as they flee the scene immediately they won't ever get caught. No
man-hunts, no APBs, nothing like that. Events should tend to fade into
a blur fairly quickly. I think of this as paralleling the choice of
the modern day for the world -- it's a convenient way of reducing
cognitive load.
Also, there will be a fair bit of emphasis on humor -- evil acts will
be more likely to be excused when they are funny at the player level.
This will help
> OK, that extends the vocabulary for describing how people talk about
> their motives and interests in a game. Obviously, these terms were
> _designed_ to be combined. If someone says, "my current game is
> built around a particular storyline I envisioned, which led me to
> create such and such a gameworld; the characters are minor players
> in this story, but they have a chance to influence the outcome,"
> that would pretty clearly be a purpose/scene ratio, even though
> there's room for the agents (the characters) to interact with the
> guiding ratio.
So EMPTY CALORIES would be described as a purpose/agent mix? That
seems to fit -- better than the threefold, at any rate. I'm not sure
it is a perfect match, but that could just be my own uncertainty about
how I'm going to run the game.
Neel
Christopher Pound
Rick Cordes <cor...@Hawaii.Edu> wrote:
> Your method seems to differ from the threefold by verging
Sure thing. It's from Kenneth Burke's _A Grammar of Motives_,
and it's not supposed to be a taxonomy but a heuristic -- a method
of discovery. Burke was a rhetorician, and discovery/heuristic is
the first part of rhetoric according to one famous scheme
(Cicero's ... a rhetor has to hit on the right thing to say,
after all). The pentad schematizes the topics people
usually discover when they talk about motive. So it also lays
out possible angles for a rhetorical analysis.
>Still, while your method is not susceptible
>to this reduction, are more pigeoholes an improvement, or better
>assist analysis or design of a better RPG paradigm?
In the back of my mind, I kind of have the idea that propagating
a more general framework such as Burke's might be nice, because
I like it when I see people generally prepared to do rhetorical
analysis. This is a questionable motive, because probably
any particular scheme can be generalized for other circumstances.
I can easily imagine someone using the threefold to talk about
the different styles of interaction in their workplace (it's no
less likely than using a list of operating systems as an extended
metaphor for different religions or whatever). Still, I've seen
the pentad used on a lot of different things, and I've seen the
threefold used on only one thing; so I guess if the pentad does
the work of the threefold, I'd choose to give an audience the
pentad instead of the threefold, being more sure of the pentad's utility.
> The appeal of the threefold model is its reliance upon
>it being a Role(dramatist) Playing(simulationist) Game(gamist)
That's an interesting sort of "folk etymology" (meaning the
not-necessarily-historical basis given for a term). I've read rgfa
off and on since it began, and I don't remember the threefold
originating from that division of r.p.g. -- I could easily have
missed that point (maybe it's even in the FAQ, for all I can
rmemeber :). But yeah, I think that it's important not
to translate some terms that get their sense from the circumstances
in which they evolved. The vocabulary of the threefold clearly
gets its sense from being about rpgs, and I agree that's appealing.
The pentad is a more remote vocabulary.
>what does either that or adding more pigeonholes achieve
>beyond labeling and divorcing one aspect of the game from another?
>Will more finely defining the anatomy ever amount to physiology?
Cool -- with this anatomy/physiology metaphor, you're right on
Kenneth Burke's wavelength. The first half of his _A Grammar of Motives_
is about the pentad. The second half of the book is about dialectic.
For the uninitiated, Burke gives a lengthy set of traditional definitions
of dialectic (I recall it being a very confusing term when I was an
undergrad, being familiar only with the Hegelian
thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis meaning of dialectic):
"Other definitions of dialectic are: reasoning from opinion;
the discovery of truth by the give and take of converse and redefinition;
the art of disputation; the process of 'interaction' between the verbal
and the non-verbal; the competition of cooperation or the cooperation
of competition; the spinning of terms out of terms, as the dialectician
proceeds to make explicit the conclusions implicit in key terms or
propositions used as a generating principle [...]; the internal dialogue
of thought [...]; or any development (in organisms, works of art, stages
of history) got by the interplay of various factors that mutually modify
one another, and may be thought of as voices in dialogue or roles in a
play, with each voice or role in its partiality contributing to the
development of the whole; or the placement of one thought or thing in
terms of its opposite; or the progressive or successive development and
reconciliation of opposites [i.e. Hegelian dialectic]; or so putting
questions to nature that nature can give unequivocal answer" (pg. 403).
Quite a few of these definitions of dialectic seem pertinent to
roleplaying, but I'm not sure I've ever heard the word used to
talk about rpgs. (Where's Red these days?)
Anyway, this seems like what you're after, and it's a great idea:
the dialectics of role-playing games. I wish I could tell you
Burke was already successful in his parallel effort, but honestly
I've never been happy with the second half of his book, and I haven't
read its sequel (shame on me!) which has, I hear, some revisions to
his arguments about "the temporizing of essence" and whatnot.
> The relationships between the pigeonhole might be more
>important than defining the pigeonholes, and the threefold model
>is nothing but pigeonholes, and as you point out, "pauce" in going
>about fitting round pigeons to square holes. The motivation
>becomes to devise a set of RPG parts and a set of relations.
In "relations," you have processual matters of identification or
merger, transcendence, and motivation (all keywords for Burke too),
but let me point out that what you term parts could be (maybe just
for kicks) considered a less important side-effect stemming from
forces of merger and division. In other words, if you really want
to get away from the pentad and into dialectics, it might be neat
to question the use of "parts" as a primitive concept.
For example, it would make no sense at all to disregard the concept
of "character" in an rpg, but it's very easy and perhaps useful to
relativize what a character is to the processes of characterization
specific to a game. What is a character in Baron Munchausen?
What is a character in a D&D game? What is a character in a "systemless"
game? You could say there's a common process at work (characterization,
role-playing, or whatever), but that it works differently to produce
substantially different subject positions for players to adopt.
I mention this not because it's a sophisticated academic move (it's
really a tired trick, philosophically :), but because it's probably
something anyone talking about parts and relations ought to consider.
(Sigh. I admit it. I was slagged in print by a famous anthropologist
for utterly failing to discuss a similar point -- and more.)
> Here is a attempt at a model incorporating both objects
>as well as the relations between them. I used triads instead of
>pentads because of the larger number of combinations generated
>by a pentad, each requiring some kind of reasonable label.
>
> Parts: Characters, Backdrop, Scenario;
> Relations: Integration, Development, Influence.
>
>The Characters are PCs or NPCs. The Backdrop is the world, genre,
>or "multiverse." The Scenario is the planned campaign or drama.
>Integration relates how Parts jibe with one another; Development,
>how a Part can develop, and Influence, to what extent participants
>may influence or be influenced by a Part.
Talking about the pentad has me geared towards translation, so
I'll go ahead and show you what I'm seeing:
Terms: Agents, Scene, Purpose (or maybe Purpose+Act)
More Terms: Identity, Time, Cause
The translation of the parts probably needs no explanation. I guess
I could point out that the agency (the rules of the game) seems to be
missing, but presumably you've processualized it -- spreading the agency
into the things the agency does (integration, development, influence).
The translation of the relations goes like this. What are the key
metaphysical terms backing up these concepts? An identity is also
always a difference, so that covers how things jibe with one another.
Swapping development and time is probably straightforward. And influence
is often thought of as a weak sort of cause (as are permission,
negligence, and so on); the question of influence seems to be which parts can
be the cause of what other parts (e.g. time may allow ... purpose may
influence ... agents may cause ... the scene may encourage ... etc.).
OK, agents and scenes have a real "object" feel to them, but you're
familiar enough with the pentad now to see that they're no less
determined as a system of *positions* than are identity, time, and cause.
What I'm getting around to is that I'm not sure of the fundamental difference
between a term like character (a part) and a term like development
(a relation) in this scheme. I mean, of course there are everyday
referents to character and development that differentiate them, but in
a closed system of positions (as in a constructed set of terms or
reference points) that everyday differentiation is a distant memory.
The possible combinatorics of the scheme enables alternative differences
where the part/relation business is primarily an external impression.
For example, what is the development of influence in a game? What is
are its integrative influences? Integrative developments? And
could you have disjunctive rather than integrative developments?
Could you have character/backdrop issues that are open questions,
non-integrative, undeveloped, and so-far undetermined in their influence?
(The implication of that last question is that the open question
of character/backdrop could be important, i.e. emphasized as an
agent/scene ratio, while its specific relation remains unrealized.)
One problem with the pentad -- as with any apparent metalanguage -- is
that you can really screw it up by offering alternative "primitives."
For example, the pentad has agent and act. Your scheme has character
and development. Both of these distinctions would get sort of messed
up by focusing in on a notion of "living" as a terminological
primitive. A set of primitives is only primitive from its own frame
of reference and can usually be translated into another frame of
reference in which former primitives appear complex.
That is a "secret" problem with dialectics: reference points change and
change the game. :) So, all this goes to say I really like the idea of a
scheme that comprehends role-playing as dialectic, and this scheme is
certainly propaedeutic.
>In the spirit of taking combinations,
>rather than speaking of taxonomic preferences, an RPG design can be
>analyzed in terms defined by how it enables (something like):
>
> Simulation = Backdrop Development
> Playing = Character Development
> Plot = Scenario Development
>
> Casting (Accomodating?) = Character/Backdrop Integration
> Acting = Character/Scenario Integration
> Drama = Backdrop/Scenario Integration
>
> Roleplaying = Character (Player) Influence
> Motivating = Scenario (Referee) Influence
> Directing = Backdrop (Collaborative) Influence
I quote all this because it's at least as good as the threefold
and more overtly dialectical than the pentad.
--
Christopher Pound (po...@rice.edu)
Dept. of Anthropology, Rice University
Christopher Pound
Neel Krishnaswami <ne...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>So EMPTY CALORIES would be described as a purpose/agent mix? That
>seems to fit -- better than the threefold, at any rate. I'm not sure
>it is a perfect match, but that could just be my own uncertainty about
>how I'm going to run the game.
Great example! I may have to cite it some day. :)
It's true that the pentad doesn't help much with the
moral/experimental/appropriative features of Empty Calories.
I mean, what could it say about the game's relationship to the movies?
Is _The Big Hit_ backstory (scene)? Is it for you a meditative vehicle
(agency)? Is it a metaphor for the kinds of event (act) you're arranging?
Is it a source of amoral character archetypes (agent)? Is its amoral
ending something your narrative will drive at (purpose)?
I imagine the answer is "all of the above, sorta," which is no
help at all. There are two things to remember about the pentad:
first, it's not great at describing complex situated knowledges
or practices, because all it does is schematize emphases; second,
anything can potentially be emphasized in terms of any pentadic
element, meaning that you can always argue from a different ratio
(raise the emphasis of a different ratio).
But as you went through the pentad, it seemed like you didn't have too
much of a problem with the idea that there had implicitly been an emphasis
of one ratio over others in your prior thoughts about the game.
Furthermore, the pentad poses a question for you: do you want to
think about other ratios in this game? Would it be worthwhile to
raise the emphasis of a different ratio at some point? That's the
strength of the pentad as a heuristic, or method of discovery.
There was one question I think I can answer with respect to an act-focus:
> I'm not sure what a "reality principle" is.
I suppose I was thinking of a reality principle as whatever "reality"
is modeled on for a particular game, where reality is not the world
but the nature of the world. If your game has a big emphasis on
modeling the nature of a world, such that every event is a model of
how things would happen "realistically," then that'd be an act focus
of some kind.
To be more technical about it, I guess the question is how self-consciously
do you emphasize your metaphor for "event"? Here are two agency-focused
examples. If you have minatures and action points and whatnot, that'd be
one metaphorical event structure. If you have stunt rules, like Feng Shui,
that's a different metaphorical event structure. An agent-oriented example
would be someone talking about the action in terms of character "choice";
that's a metaphorical event structure too. One scene-oriented example would
be talking about how the gameworld is all very detailed and planned such
that it's available to be "explored." These are all metaphors for "act"
or "event." People who talk a lot about using their metaphorical event
structure to "model" something or to "let things happen" or to "see what
happens" are emphasizing their game's event structure. That'd probably
be an act focus of some kind.
Of course, every game has acts/events. But not every gamer is motivated
by the act, as such, or gives it attention at every moment of play.
(They certainly don't all talk about it as the central feature of the game.)
Now, I suspect you may start thinking about the metaphorical event
structure of Empty Calories and, at least temporarily, work through
some of the act ratios explicitly. The pentad still works! :)
Though it can do all the work of a taxonomy (thanks to people
falling into ratios habitually for some reason or other, e.g. when
encouraged to a ratio by the game system), the pentad's a heuristic --
a discovery procedure or a sort of taxonomy in motion.
Rick Cordes
Christopher Pound <po...@is.rice.edu> wrote:
>In article <8ibia0$f1$1...@news.hawaii.edu>,
>Rick Cordes <cor...@Hawaii.Edu> wrote:
>
>In the back of my mind, I kind of have the idea that propagating
>a more general framework such as Burke's might be nice, because
>I like it when I see people generally prepared to do rhetorical
>analysis. This is a questionable motive, because probably
>any particular scheme can be generalized for other circumstances.
>I can easily imagine someone using the threefold to talk about
>the different styles of interaction in their workplace (it's no
>less likely than using a list of operating systems as an extended
>metaphor for different religions or whatever). Still, I've seen
>the pentad used on a lot of different things, and I've seen the
>threefold used on only one thing; so I guess if the pentad does
>the work of the threefold, I'd choose to give an audience the
>pentad instead of the threefold, being more sure of the pentad's utility.
Propogate away. A generalized method might be the needed
breath of fresh air. As you conclude, the utlity of the pentad
will reside with representation of the RPG thing as a pentad.
What do you want the pentad RPG to do for you? I'm looking for
a pragmatic philosophy for RPG design, ethics, and aesthetics.
>> The appeal of the threefold model is its reliance upon
>>it being a Role(dramatist) Playing(simulationist) Game(gamist)
>
>That's an interesting sort of "folk etymology" (meaning the
>not-necessarily-historical basis given for a term). I've read rgfa
>off and on since it began, and I don't remember the threefold
>originating from that division of r.p.g. -- I could easily have
>missed that point (maybe it's even in the FAQ, for all I can
>rmemeber :). But yeah, I think that it's important not
>to translate some terms that get their sense from the circumstances
>in which they evolved. The vocabulary of the threefold clearly
>gets its sense from being about rpgs, and I agree that's appealing.
>The pentad is a more remote vocabulary.
A rose is a rose is a rose. The threefold focuses on
defining things in those three terms and defining those three terms.
The names and their divisions do not accomplish much beyond the
thing being identified as an RPG, i.e. being a DSG'. Certainly
insights may be achieved by juggling the definitions but because
it is just descriptive, while some people may have decided for
themselves P=DS and others P=DG', and talk about how they are 45%G,
25%S, and 30%D, that is it. At this point the pentad suffers from
being "remote" but it has a chance of pointing toward something
better.
>>what does either that or adding more pigeonholes achieve
>>beyond labeling and divorcing one aspect of the game from another?
>>Will more finely defining the anatomy ever amount to physiology?
>
>Cool -- with this anatomy/physiology metaphor, you're right on
>Kenneth Burke's wavelength. The first half of his _A Grammar of Motives_
>is about the pentad. The second half of the book is about dialectic.
>For the uninitiated, Burke gives a lengthy set of traditional definitions
>of dialectic (I recall it being a very confusing term when I was an
>undergrad, being familiar only with the Hegelian
>thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis meaning of dialectic):
>
> "Other definitions of dialectic are:...
For me, it is reification, and with the pentad we're at
the thesis stage?
>...
>Anyway, this seems like what you're after, and it's a great idea:
>the dialectics of role-playing games...
Dialetical Metarialism? Sorry. This is quite correctly
the millwheel I would chain the pentad. Did you have an eviler
purpose or was your interest in applying the pentad to RPGing
academic?
>> The relationships between the pigeonhole might be more
>>important than defining the pigeonholes, and the threefold model
>>is nothing but pigeonholes, and as you point out, "pauce" in going
>>about fitting round pigeons to square holes. The motivation
>>becomes to devise a set of RPG parts and a set of relations.
>
>In "relations," you have processual matters of identification or
>merger, transcendence, and motivation (all keywords for Burke too),
>but let me point out that what you term parts could be (maybe just
>for kicks) considered a less important side-effect stemming from
>forces of merger and division. In other words, if you really want
>to get away from the pentad and into dialectics, it might be neat
>to question the use of "parts" as a primitive concept.
I've heard these terms in the context of dialetics but I
am equipped to use them just lexically and impressionistically,
and you'll have me picking folklore entymology out of my hair again.
Still, even at the level of abstraction -at least at the level of
representation- I think Parts and Relations can be distinguished
as well as the pentad is used to map.
>For example, it would make no sense at all to disregard the concept
>of "character" in an rpg, but it's very easy and perhaps useful to
>relativize what a character is to the processes of characterization
>specific to a game. What is a character in Baron Munchausen?
>What is a character in a D&D game? What is a character in a "systemless"
>game? You could say there's a common process at work (characterization,
>role-playing, or whatever), but that it works differently to produce
>substantially different subject positions for players to adopt.
This is where reality corrupts our ideas but however a character
is uniquely defined in any particular game will not I suspect answer
many questions. There are a number concepts in RPGs "it would make no
sense at all to disregard," and an approach would be to define them
by their sparsest commonality, likewise seek the plainest relations
between them, stir, and bake. Perspectives and preference, "subject
positions," input by common processes, I think, more than the other
way around.
>I mention this not because it's a sophisticated academic move (it's
>really a tired trick, philosophically :), but because it's probably
>something anyone talking about parts and relations ought to consider.
Perhaps viewing them as dependent and independent variables
or inputs answers these concerns.
>(Sigh. I admit it. I was slagged in print by a famous anthropologist
>for utterly failing to discuss a similar point -- and more.)
Jeez, I hate it when that happens but at least when you hunt
them down in some forsaken place, they're usually no witnesses around.
Actuaries, though -Kee-reist!- they never go home and they're never
alone.
>> Here is a attempt at a model incorporating both objects
>>as well as the relations between them. I used triads instead of
>>pentads because of the larger number of combinations generated
>>by a pentad, each requiring some kind of reasonable label.
>>
>> Parts: Characters, Backdrop, Scenario;
>> Relations: Integration, Development, Influence.
>>
>>The Characters are PCs or NPCs. The Backdrop is the world, genre,
>>or "multiverse." The Scenario is the planned campaign or drama.
>>Integration relates how Parts jibe with one another; Development,
>>how a Part can develop, and Influence, to what extent participants
>>may influence or be influenced by a Part.
>
>Talking about the pentad has me geared towards translation, so
>I'll go ahead and show you what I'm seeing:
>
> Terms: Agents, Scene, Purpose (or maybe Purpose+Act)
> More Terms: Identity, Time, Cause
Eeeeeek! What have you done to my baby? Why would you
do such a thing? Would you use your pentad on itself?
>The translation of the parts probably needs no explanation. I guess
>I could point out that the agency (the rules of the game) seems to be
>missing, but presumably you've processualized it -- spreading the agency
>into the things the agency does (integration, development, influence).
The mechanics would represent the relations. "Playing a Character"
is synonymous with "Character Development." "Running a Scenario" is
synonymous with "Drama." Whether these are the best definitions
or not, taking these with the others presumably will guide how
all may be optimally integrated, if this is what you mean by
processualized. When I said the pentad verged upon a method of
analysis, my inclination was the analysis it verged upon would
be the thing to represent in the mechanics. On the otherhand,
you might want to construe the Agency as being the differentiation
of Parts and Relations.
>The translation of the relations goes like this. What are the key
>metaphysical terms backing up these concepts? An identity is also
>always a difference, so that covers how things jibe with one another.
How does it?
>Swapping development and time is probably straightforward.
To what end?
And influence
>is often thought of as a weak sort of cause (as are permission,
>negligence, and so on); the question of influence seems to be which parts can
>be the cause of what other parts (e.g. time may allow ... purpose may
>influence ... agents may cause ... the scene may encourage ... etc.).
Parts are Influenced, and indirectly this may Influence
other Parts but at best in the first approximation, Parts do
not Influence.
>OK, agents and scenes have a real "object" feel to them, but you're
>familiar enough with the pentad now to see that they're no less
>determined as a system of *positions* than are identity, time, and cause.
>What I'm getting around to is that I'm not sure of the fundamental difference
>between a term like character (a part) and a term like development
>(a relation) in this scheme. I mean, of course there are everyday
>referents to character and development that differentiate them, but in
>a closed system of positions (as in a constructed set of terms or
>reference points) that everyday differentiation is a distant memory.
>The possible combinatorics of the scheme enables alternative differences
>where the part/relation business is primarily an external impression.
I think this gets back to the relation between what may usefully/
metaphysically be identified as dependent and independent inputs.
Inverting the dependent function of independent variables does not
turn dependents into independents.
>For example, what is the development of influence in a game? What is
>are its integrative influences? Integrative developments? And
>could you have disjunctive rather than integrative developments?
>Could you have character/backdrop issues that are open questions,
>non-integrative, undeveloped, and so-far undetermined in their influence?
>(The implication of that last question is that the open question
>of character/backdrop could be important, i.e. emphasized as an
>agent/scene ratio, while its specific relation remains unrealized.)
We're in Wonderland now. "What is the game of Influence in
the development? Can we have Integration in undeveloped games?"
Such confabulations discard the differentiation inherent in the
model. Beside the joy of abstraction, what purpose is served in
applying the pentad to the ditriad or the threefold? How would
you apply it directly to RPGs?
>One problem with the pentad -- as with any apparent metalanguage -- is
>that you can really screw it up by offering alternative "primitives."
>For example, the pentad has agent and act. Your scheme has character
>and development. Both of these distinctions would get sort of messed
>up by focusing in on a notion of "living" as a terminological
>primitive. A set of primitives is only primitive from its own frame
>of reference and can usually be translated into another frame of
>reference in which former primitives appear complex.
Character Development = Playing = Living. At least in this
example, metaphysically or metaphorically, what's the problem?
>>rather than speaking of taxonomic preferences, an RPG design can be
>>analyzed in terms defined by how it enables (something like):
>>
>> Simulation = Backdrop Development
>> Playing = Character Development
>> Plot = Scenario Development
>>
>> Casting (Accomodating?) = Character/Backdrop Integration
>> Acting = Character/Scenario Integration
>> [Running?] Drama = Backdrop/Scenario Integration
>>
>> Roleplaying = Character (Player) Influence
>> Motivating = Scenario (Referee) Influence
>> Directing = Backdrop (Collaborative) Influence
>
>I quote all this because it's at least as good as the threefold
>and more overtly dialectical than the pentad.
I think the idea is to identify the elements and dynamics common
to RPGs and use that to distill a more cogent model. In light of the
threefold, I think it is important, and perhaps dialetically antithetically
proper, to use a language neutral with respect to preference and perspective.
-Rick
Christopher Pound
Rick Cordes <cor...@Hawaii.Edu> wrote:
>What do you want the pentad RPG to do for you? I'm looking for
>a pragmatic philosophy for RPG design, ethics, and aesthetics.
Hm, I suppose the pentad could be turned toward that end.
Though primarily a heuristic for boiling down what other
people are saying, I suppose it could be used to index the
"completeness" of a game (where completeness is a funny
measure defined entirely within the context of the pentad).
You could, for example, check off whether the written
presentation of a game addresses all possible ratios of
the pentad. Does it have setting material that is the basis
for character construction (scene/agent)? Does it have
advice to the GM about how to guide the storyline (purpose/act)?
Does it have rules for resolving specific setting issues (agency/scene)?
Etc. I'm not sure what this would accomplish other than,
perhaps, resolve some tedious Usenet arguments about FUDGE,
but I guess you could place value on the strength of certain
ratios and call that a design philosophy.
One perverse idea that occurs to me is to use the pentad to
construct various anti-RPGs. You could have a no-scene game,
where it's absolutely crucial that no one ever describe the
history, geography, social life, or appearance of the setting;
you could describe what your character is wearing, but in the
game, you couldn't be sure if you were in the court of Queen
Elizabeth or attending a costume party in 1950s America.
You could have a no-agent game, where it's crucial that the
persons doing the action (characters and NPCs) are never
described; you might say "This gun shoots toward the door"
(I think William Golding wrote a novel like that ... reminds
me of the nouveau roman as well). Etc. These would be
radically incomplete RPGs, of course, but (to me) interesting language
experiments and possibly a twisted sort of fun with the right group. :)
BTW, to anyone just dropping in on this conversation, if you
thought those were dull or irrelevant or self-involved thoughts,
you ain't seen nothin yet. Caveat lector.
>>the dialectics of role-playing games...
>
> Dialetical Metarialism? Sorry. This is quite correctly
>the millwheel I would chain the pentad. Did you have an eviler
>purpose or was your interest in applying the pentad to RPGing
>academic?
That depends on what counts as evil. I think the threefold did
a fine job of settling for rgfa readers the near certainty of radical
difference in interests among a group of gamers. I also wonder
if it doesn't constitute a sort of retrenchment of interests.
What reason does it give to think of alternatives?
>Still, even at the level of abstraction -at least at the level of
>representation- I think Parts and Relations can be distinguished
>as well as the pentad is used to map.
Sure, I only meant to point out the distinction is easily vitiated.
It's not hard to muck around with the pentad's coherence either,
but it has some resilience in that it borrows on logical concepts
of causation as well as a few intransigent philosophical contrasts:
Burke's Pentad Aristotle Philosophy in general
-------------- --------- ---------------------
scene material cause materialism
agent efficient cause idealism
agency instrumental cause pragmatism
purpose final cause mysticism
act formal cause realism
Burke's the one who identified the basic elements of the pentad
with the familiar philosophical positions and with Aristotle's
causes (he says Aristotle does give a fifth cause, the instrumental,
but assimilates it to the final cause, which is why only four
causes are given in most textbook discussions of Aristotle).
I'm not making this up! :) Anyway, the point is that if you
find a good angle for spoiling the pentad, you're really onto
something that works away from what is philosophically dull and predictable.
That could be merely academic, or it could be kind of inventive
(where inventio is another name for heuresis, which is what the
pentad is all about).
>>> Parts: Characters, Backdrop, Scenario;
>>> Relations: Integration, Development, Influence.
>>
>>Talking about the pentad has me geared towards translation, so
>>I'll go ahead and show you what I'm seeing:
>>
>> Terms: Agents, Scene, Purpose (or maybe Purpose+Act)
>> More Terms: Identity, Time, Cause
>
> Eeeeeek! What have you done to my baby? Why would you
>do such a thing? Would you use your pentad on itself?
Of course I'd use the pentad on itself! Burke repeatedly points out
that the pentad features the act. It asks whether the stated motive of an
act relates to scene, agent, agency, purpose, or the act itself.
Burke makes no attempt to hide his act-focus.
>>The translation of the relations goes like this. What are the key
>>metaphysical terms backing up these concepts? An identity is also
>>always a difference, so that covers how things jibe with one another.
>
> How does it?
When you equated integration with how things jibe, I got a kind of
lego-block image in mind: interlocking positive and negative spaces,
which is a standard metaphor for identity and difference. That
could be far from what you had in mind! But it was an interpretation
that seemed to work with respect to what you said.
>>Swapping development and time is probably straightforward.
>
> To what end?
Well, if you're clear on the non-primordiality of traditional
metaphysical terms and have chosen a word like development with
that in mind, then no end at all, but otherwise, the end would
be to point out what might be lurking around in the scheme.
> And influence
>>is often thought of as a weak sort of cause (as are permission,
>>negligence, and so on); the question of influence seems to be which parts can
>>be the cause of what other parts (e.g. time may allow ... purpose may
>>influence ... agents may cause ... the scene may encourage ... etc.).
>
> Parts are Influenced, and indirectly this may Influence
>other Parts but at best in the first approximation, Parts do
>not Influence.
OK, I take this to mean a part is inherently passive. A part
does not influence another part? A part does not develop another
part? A part does not integrate other parts? I'm now confused
about the actual workings of your scheme! Could you expand on
what does the action in the clause "Parts are Influenced"? If
what you intend is some sort of middle-voiced quality (neither
active nor passive) for either parts or relations, I'm all ears.
> I think this gets back to the relation between what may usefully/
>metaphysically be identified as dependent and independent inputs.
>Inverting the dependent function of independent variables does not
>turn dependents into independents.
I think I agree and only meant to ask questions about the arbitrariness
in the assignment of dependencies.
>Beside the joy of abstraction, what purpose is served in
>applying the pentad to the ditriad or the threefold? How would
>you apply it directly to RPGs?
I've mentioned in other articles how you could use it to explore
less-examined byways of a game, and I gave a couple of other
answers to this question back at the beginning of this article.
But I'm also gonna stand by Burke's original purpose for the pentad, which
was to explore what people say about acts (acts such as playing a game).
The ditriad and the threefold are certainly things said about rpgs,
and the pentad discovers weaknesses in the threefold (conflation of
scene and act, plus no mention of agent) and mediations for the
ditriad (familiar names for the parts, and an identification of the
relations as a dispersal of the agency). That's not so much a pleasure
of abstraction as it is a therapy of possible understanding.
I think that if someone tackles rpgs as a rhetorical issue (as rhetorical
situations), they have to keep in mind that games are not entirely
objects available for disinterested reflection. Analysts ought to be able
to analyze the game as rhetorical construct (its play as a rhetorical
situation) and the rhetorical construction of the game (its secondary
elaboration, also rhetorical). (From what little I know of "game theory,"
it constructs games primarily as purpose games, e.g. as optimized outcomes,
which the pentad reveals to be a single-minded translation relative
to the possible motives of different games.)
>>One problem with the pentad -- as with any apparent metalanguage -- is
>>that you can really screw it up by offering alternative "primitives."
>>For example, the pentad has agent and act. Your scheme has character
>>and development. Both of these distinctions would get sort of messed
>>up by focusing in on a notion of "living" as a terminological
>>primitive. A set of primitives is only primitive from its own frame
>>of reference and can usually be translated into another frame of
>>reference in which former primitives appear complex.
>
> Character Development = Playing = Living. At least in this
>example, metaphysically or metaphorically, what's the problem?
If they're all equiprimordial, maybe nothing. But people who pick out
elementary terms (agent/act/scene/purpose/agency or integration/development
and so on) tend to think their terms -- or at least the positions occupied
by those terms -- are in some sense primordial, that a particular set
of reference points is really indispensible, and that the metalanguage
really describes that undelying set of reference points.
>>>rather than speaking of taxonomic preferences, an RPG design can be
>>>analyzed in terms defined by how it enables (something like):
>>>
>>> Simulation = Backdrop Development
>>> Playing = Character Development
>>> Plot = Scenario Development
>>>
>>> Casting (Accomodating?) = Character/Backdrop Integration
>>> Acting = Character/Scenario Integration
>>> [Running?] Drama = Backdrop/Scenario Integration
>>>
>>> Roleplaying = Character (Player) Influence
>>> Motivating = Scenario (Referee) Influence
>>> Directing = Backdrop (Collaborative) Influence
>>
>>I quote all this because it's at least as good as the threefold
>>and more overtly dialectical than the pentad.
>
> I think the idea is to identify the elements and dynamics common
>to RPGs and use that to distill a more cogent model.
With respect to common elements and dynamics, I don't think it would be
hard to map the family of resemblances between rpgs (just boring, if it
were to be a comprehensive map). On the other hand, I'm not optimistic
about modeling those resemblances in a few terms. I'm not sure the
pentad models much more than itself and Aristotle's four (really five)
causes. Like you said at the start, the pentad is not so much a model
or taxonomy as a short list of standard questions like who, what, when,
where, why, and how. (Speaking of how, I think Burke eventually added
a sixth term to the pentad: manner.) The only tricks are that the pentad
has been relativized to what is said about the "what" and that its elements
are combined into ratios.
>In light of the threefold, I think it is important [...]
>to use a language neutral with respect to preference and perspective.
I'll definitely go along with that. :)
Rick Cordes
Christopher Pound <po...@is.rice.edu> wrote:
>In article <8ip768$35v$1...@news.hawaii.edu>,
>Rick Cordes <cor...@Hawaii.Edu> wrote:
>>What do you want the pentad RPG to do for you? I'm looking for
>>a pragmatic philosophy for RPG design, ethics, and aesthetics.
>
>Hm, I suppose the pentad could be turned toward that end.
>Though primarily a heuristic for boiling down what other
>people are saying, I suppose it could be used to index the
>... I'm not sure what this would accomplish other than,
>perhaps, resolve some tedious Usenet arguments about FUDGE,
>but I guess you could place value on the strength of certain
>ratios and call that a design philosophy.
In this context for me, "boiling down what other
people are saying" is synonymous with analyzing the completeness
of the design philosophy being discussed. The resolution of
tedium perhaps withstanding.
>One perverse idea that occurs to me is to use the pentad to
>construct various anti-RPGs. You could have a no-scene game,
>where it's absolutely crucial that no one ever describe the
>history, geography, social life, or appearance of the setting
... These would be
>radically incomplete RPGs, of course, but (to me) interesting language
>experiments and possibly a twisted sort of fun with the right group. :)
In this jade's opinion, probably not really
>>>the dialectics of role-playing games...
>>
>> Dialetical Metarialism? Sorry. This is quite correctly
>>the millwheel I would chain the pentad. Did you have an eviler
>>purpose or was your interest in applying the pentad to RPGing
>>academic?
>
>That depends on what counts as evil. I think the threefold did
>a fine job of settling for rgfa readers the near certainty of radical
>difference in interests among a group of gamers.
It is a matter of rgfaith differences are irreconcilable
rather than otherwise if this is what you mean by radical.
>I also wonder if it doesn't constitute a sort of retrenchment of
>interests. What reason does it give to think of alternatives?
Effectively, a restriction of interests and elimination
of alternatives.
This is a curious point. The terms of the threefold and
the relations between them are not a matter of agreement, rather,
the agreement is only the individual may fairly or objectively
talk about their manner of play. Each individual fine tunes the
definitions and relations to their persona, then speaks about
themself in those terms. It is a taxanomy of solipsistic mysticism.
>>Still, even at the level of abstraction -at least at the level of
>>representation- I think Parts and Relations can be distinguished
>>as well as the pentad is used to map.
>
>Sure, I only meant to point out the distinction is easily vitiated.
How necessarilly?
>It's not hard to muck around with the pentad's coherence either,
>but it has some resilience in that it borrows on logical concepts
>of causation as well as a few intransigent philosophical contrasts:
>
>Burke's Pentad Aristotle Philosophy in general
>-------------- --------- ---------------------
>scene material cause materialism
>agent efficient cause idealism
>agency instrumental cause pragmatism
>purpose final cause mysticism
>act formal cause realism
The incoherence would seem to be in its application being
more or less straightforward or difficult, not in it not being
a fine idea based on others. My inclinbation in mucking around
is to get the most out of an idea and improve upon it...
>...Anyway, the point is that if you
>find a good angle for spoiling the pentad, you're really onto
>something that works away from what is philosophically dull and predictable.
>That could be merely academic, or it could be kind of inventive
>(where inventio is another name for heuresis, which is what the
>pentad is all about).
...rather than find some inconsequential exception.
>>>> Parts: Characters, Backdrop, Scenario;
>>>> Relations: Integration, Development, Influence.
>>>
>>>Talking about the pentad has me geared towards translation, so
>>>I'll go ahead and show you what I'm seeing:
>>>
>>> Terms: Agents, Scene, Purpose (or maybe Purpose+Act)
>>> More Terms: Identity, Time, Cause
>>
>> Eeeeeek! What have you done to my baby? Why would you
>>do such a thing? Would you use your pentad on itself?
>
>Of course I'd use the pentad on itself! Burke repeatedly points out
>that the pentad features the act. It asks whether the stated motive of an
>act relates to scene, agent, agency, purpose, or the act itself.
>Burke makes no attempt to hide his act-focus.
But why would you use the pentad on itself tangentially intriguing
as it is the pentad is act-focused?
>>>The translation of the relations goes like this. What are the key
>>>metaphysical terms backing up these concepts? An identity is also
>>>always a difference, so that covers how things jibe with one another.
>>
>> How does it?
>
>When you equated integration with how things jibe, I got a kind of
>lego-block image in mind: interlocking positive and negative spaces,
>which is a standard metaphor for identity and difference. That
>could be far from what you had in mind! But it was an interpretation
>that seemed to work with respect to what you said.
By integration I envisioned something less abstract and more
physically intuitive like fundamental particles and fundamental forces
rather than black and white abstractions.
>>>Swapping development and time is probably straightforward.
>>
>> To what end?
>
>Well, if you're clear on the non-primordiality of traditional
>metaphysical terms and have chosen a word like development with
>that in mind, then no end at all, but otherwise, the end would
>be to point out what might be lurking around in the scheme.
Exactly, and what might be lurking around in the scheme
according to your purposes, or in your opinion, the threefold?
>> Parts are Influenced, and indirectly this may Influence
>>other Parts but at best in the first approximation, Parts do
>>not Influence.
>
>OK, I take this to mean a part is inherently passive. A part
>does not influence another part? A part does not develop another
>part? A part does not integrate other parts? I'm now confused
>about the actual workings of your scheme! Could you expand on
>what does the action in the clause "Parts are Influenced"? If
>what you intend is some sort of middle-voiced quality (neither
>active nor passive) for either parts or relations, I'm all ears.
I think my thesis is RPGs may be understood as a triad of
variables all dependent on a triad of independent operators. The
antithesis of this is the identification of each of those
combinations with an element common to both games and fiction.
The synthesis is then the elucidation of elements inherent
to an RPG.
>> I think this gets back to the relation between what may usefully/
>>metaphysically be identified as dependent and independent inputs.
>>Inverting the dependent function of independent variables does not
>>turn dependents into independents.
>
>I think I agree and only meant to ask questions about the arbitrariness
>in the assignment of dependencies.
Well, characters and campaigns are not going to exist without
referees and players, are they? I also think choosing three of each, and
the arguements for the three of each I picked, also make contextual sense.
Being less arbitrary makes the next steps easier, I think.
>>Beside the joy of abstraction, what purpose is served in
>>applying the pentad to the ditriad or the threefold? How would
>>you apply it directly to RPGs?
>
>I've mentioned in other articles how you could use it to explore
>less-examined byways of a game, and I gave a couple of other
>answers to this question back at the beginning of this article.
>But I'm also gonna stand by Burke's original purpose for the pentad, which
>was to explore what people say about acts (acts such as playing a game).
>The ditriad and the threefold are certainly things said about rpgs,
>and the pentad discovers weaknesses in the threefold (conflation of
>scene and act, plus no mention of agent) and mediations for the
>ditriad (familiar names for the parts, and an identification of the
>relations as a dispersal of the agency). That's not so much a pleasure
>of abstraction as it is a therapy of possible understanding.
All right, but how would you apply it to RPGs? Could or
would you as an exercise define each of the RPG pentad in
terms of the elements common to both games and fiction?
>I think that if someone tackles rpgs as a rhetorical issue (as rhetorical
>situations), they have to keep in mind that games are not entirely
>objects available for disinterested reflection. Analysts ought to be able
>to analyze the game as rhetorical construct (its play as a rhetorical
>situation) and the rhetorical construction of the game (its secondary
>elaboration, also rhetorical). (From what little I know of "game theory,"
>it constructs games primarily as purpose games, e.g. as optimized outcomes,
>which the pentad reveals to be a single-minded translation relative
>to the possible motives of different games.)
I think it is limiting to think either of RPGs as just games,
as not being games, or that their components are disparate or mystical,
and we can leave that to that, don't you think?
>> Character Development = Playing = Living. At least in this
>>example, metaphysically or metaphorically, what's the problem?
>
>If they're all equiprimordial, maybe nothing. But people who pick out
>elementary terms (agent/act/scene/purpose/agency or integration/development
>and so on) tend to think their terms -- or at least the positions occupied
>by those terms -- are in some sense primordial, that a particular set
>of reference points is really indispensible, and that the metalanguage
>really describes that undelying set of reference points.
I think the proof will be in the synthesis. Does it produce
the complete set of elements common to both games and fiction? Are
these identifiable with the defining components of an RPG? Is
anything new discovered along the way?
>> I think the idea is to identify the elements and dynamics common
>>to RPGs and use that to distill a more cogent model.
>
>With respect to common elements and dynamics, I don't think it would be
>hard to map the family of resemblances between rpgs (just boring, if it
>were to be a comprehensive map). On the other hand, I'm not optimistic
>about modeling those resemblances in a few terms. I'm not sure the
>pentad models much more than itself and Aristotle's four (really five)
>causes. Like you said at the start, the pentad is not so much a model
>or taxonomy as a short list of standard questions like who, what, when,
>where, why, and how. (Speaking of how, I think Burke eventually added
>a sixth term to the pentad: manner.) The only tricks are that the pentad
>has been relativized to what is said about the "what" and that its elements
>are combined into ratios.
Refreshing as it is to find inanition masquerading as
skepticism in another, seriously, I think by applying the pentad
directly to the RPG thing, one may well discover a model or set
of models better suited to the proposed reification. Perhaps
it is the conflation of referee and player or game and fiction
that "doubles" some of the elements of the pentad in my model.
-Rick
Philip R. Hammar
wrote on 7/1/00 1:40 AM:
> I've mentioned in other articles how you could use it to explore
> less-examined byways of a game, and I gave a couple of other
> answers to this question back at the beginning of this article.
> But I'm also gonna stand by Burke's original purpose for the pentad, which
> was to explore what people say about acts (acts such as playing a game).
> The ditriad and the threefold are certainly things said about rpgs,
> and the pentad discovers weaknesses in the threefold (conflation of
> scene and act, plus no mention of agent)
Why is this a weakness? From what you had seemed to describe about the
pentad, it was a tool for figuring out the rhetorical standpoint of a
description so that one could better understand the viewpoint from which the
rhetoric came. Weakness seems to be a value judgement that doesn't fit into
this understanding.
I can sort of seeing calling a weakness when a model leaves something
out that should be considered, though I would rather put it more positively
and say the model only applies to a subset of the possible situations.
Now on to responding to the actual comment on the Threefold. From
reading the thread here on the pentad, I disagree with the assessment that
the agent is left out. Rather, the Threefold is about the priorities in
resolving the act, and it is the act itself that is integrated out to allow
applicability to all acts (to whatever degree of success you feel applies).
I feel that of the four remaining elements in the pentad, the position at
each corner holds two at about equal value and one it nearly disregards in
its priorities for resolving an act. Specifically, I would describe the
Simulationist as concerned with following the rules (agency?) that allow
evaluation of the local reality principle while maintaining consistency in
the world as established (scene?) giving a unity ratio for agency/scene and
only minimal concern for purpose. The Dramatist care about the dramatic
necessities of the character (agent) and engaging them to establish lines of
tension (purpose) with little care about the actual rules (agency). The
Gamist want to provide effectual decision points (purpose) and rules
(agency) to enforce a framework, but don't care so much about the character
(agent).
This translation could be wrong because of a misunderstanding on my part
about what the terms mean/how the tool should be used. It also shows that
there may be some descriptions missing. Counting the pentad gives twelve
unique possibilities in this arrangement (4, pick 2 order doesn't matter
times 2, pick 2, order does matter). I suspect that it is much smaller and
more depends on what is left out: Simulationists start to bristle when
ascribed purpose, Dramatists tend to go rules light (lack agency), and
Gamists tend not to discuss character (lack agent) except by the tactical
decisions that were made through them (all gross generalizations of the
extremes).
The one that is left out doesn't care about the scene, and I would give
that to the mythical Socialist that gets discussed but never added to the
Threefold. They don't care about the setting in which they play, but want a
venue to reinforce social ties (agency?) with the self expression of
imagination (agent?).
This explanation also points to why the Socialist axis never gets added.
The threefold model seems to built upon the assumption that the world
(scene) is the game (act (the rpg act, not the one being resolved :-)) -
other concerns are meta-game. The three corners in the model all give some
importance to scene, and therefore make sense within this assumption, while
the would be Socialist corner is *completely* meta-game: scene doesn't
matter. There is no game so it doesn't belong.
Later,
Phil
--
Philip R. Hammar, Code 6345 jac...@alum.mit.edu You've entered another
Naval Research Laboratory (202)767-4632 (off) dimension, a dimension
4555 Overlook Ave.,SW (202)767-1697 (Fax) of heat and flame.
Washington, DC 20375-5343 You've entered Usenet.
Warren J. Dew
Now on to responding to the actual comment on the Threefold.
From reading the thread here on the pentad, I disagree with
the assessment that the agent is left out.
Actually, I rather think that the agent is, in fact, largely neglected in the
triangle, and rightly so.
The triangle serves to differentiate between alternative approaches to
roleplaying game event resolution. Since it is about alternatives, it focuses
on differences, not similarities.
If there is one thing that is shared about all approaches to roleplaying games,
it is the character - the 'agent', in pentad terminology. While different
camps may claim 'character based play' as their own, none will admit to
ignoring the character; in truth, all roleplaying is 'character based'. That's
what makes it a roleplaying game, after all.
Since the character or 'agent' is commonly important to all approaches, it
cannot be a differentiating point between various roleplaying gaming styles,
and thus is not normally going to be a focus of a model that serves to address
stylistic differentiation and tradeoffs.
Rather, the Threefold is about the priorities in resolving the
act ...
Yes. The triangle is exactly about approaches to resolving events, or 'acts'
in pentad terminology. It has little to do with the rest of the pentad; the
models seem rather orthogonal.
Warren J. Dew
Powderhouse Software
Christopher Pound
Warren J. Dew <psych...@aol.com> wrote:
>While different
>camps may claim 'character based play' as their own, none will admit to
>ignoring the character; in truth, all roleplaying is 'character based'.
I think you have a bias showing here. As I've mentioned previously,
my own style of role-playing definitely does not focus on the character
as such. I couldn't care less about the character, as opposed to the
rest of the pentad (well, perhaps I care even less about the system).
I'm happy to play whatever character I roll, whatever character is given
to me, or (in a game where you design characters) whatever character
will be interesting or useful to the group. It's just a setting-specific
position as far as I'm concerned. I don't favor playing 'red' or 'black' in
checkers either. I do play the role appropriately (that is, in accord
with the expectations of the gameworld or gaming group), but it's not an
interesting part of the game for me, and I know I'm not alone.
Of course, every role-playing game I can think of *has* characters,
just as every role-playing game I can think of has acts/events. The question
for the pentad is whether the game emphasizes characters over acts
(or over the scene, agency, or purpose). I think I've mentioned I have
a scene/purpose interest, regardless of whether I'm the GM or a player.
One of my best friends (often the GM) has more of a scene/act focus.
As a player, he will tend to play the most average or most typical
representative of the setting, but he too doesn't care what character
he gets -- he will simply act realistically based on the scene, whatever
character he winds up with.
I know that a whole bunch of gamers, perhaps the majority, really care
a lot about their characters' personal qualities. The most egregious
case would be the guy who comes up to you and says "Oh, you play RPGs?
Let me tell you about my character!" (Um, yes, if you'll allow me to
nod my head for a minute before I make a run for it.) I also know that
quite a lot of people really care even more about equipment and vehicles
and tactics and simulations and other things that similarly bore me.
Just as it's possible to care a lot about your character but not
his equipment, it's possible to care a lot about his equipment but not
who he is as an agent. Neither style of play is to my taste, but oh well.
>Since the character or 'agent' is commonly important to all approaches, it
>cannot be a differentiating point between various roleplaying gaming styles,
I have to disagree, based on personal experience. Moreover, I think
there's an inconsistency in your argument. With respect to the agent,
you point out that since all RPGs have 'em that can't be a point
of differentiation. With respect to the act, you say "Yes. The triangle
is exactly about approaches to resolving events, or 'acts'" where all
RPGs are presumed to resolve events. Which is it? Does the omnipresence
of a feature really disqualify it as a point of differentiation or what?
>Yes. The triangle is exactly about approaches to resolving events, or 'acts'
>in pentad terminology. It has little to do with the rest of the pentad; the
>models seem rather orthogonal.
What did you think of my initial translation of the triangle into
the pentad? I'll do it again, referencing the FAQ explicitly:
From the FAQ:
|
| OK, here is the short definitions:
|
| "dramatist": is the style which values how well the in-game action
| creates a satisfying storyline. Different kinds of stories
| may be viewed as satisfying, depending on individual tastes,
| varying from fanciful pulp action to believable character
| drama. It is the end result of the story which is
| important.
In Burke's pentad, purpose is the word for a _telos_: an end that
is projected into the future and toward which acts are directed.
The end is the reason or motive for the act. When the FAQ says
"It is the end result of the story which is important," that is
_very_ clearly a purpose in Burke's vocabulary. In Aristotle's
vocabulary, which Burke's pentad explicitly references, we're talking
about the _final cause_ -- the thing at the end that causes the
thing at the beginning. You may remember David Berkman being very
insistent in this group about Aristotelian definitions, claiming
that every story drives toward an end (and therefore _Theatrix_ must
be the best thing since sliced bread). Well, what I'm saying is that
in Burke's pentad, Berkman clearly featured the purpose. I don't
particularly remember him highlighting the agent. In fact, I seem
to recall that he whipped out lines like "story *is* character,"
meaning something like you only know what your character is really
like by the stories you can tell about what the character did/does/would do.
I don't agree with that at all, but I think it's a plausible
gaming style, and it is an explicit denial that the agent is what
really matters to the game.
| "gamist": is the style which values setting up a fair challenge for
| the *players* (as opposed to the PC's). The challenges may be
| tactical combat, intellectual mysteries, politics, or anything
| else. The players will try to solve the problems they are
| presented with, and in turn the GM will make these challenges
| solvable if they act intelligently within the contract.
I've been translating gamist in terms of the agency, but this
definition of gamist leaves room for debate. The way I see it, what
is essential to this definition is that there be some means available
to meet the challenge: intelligent use of equipment, or unexpected
uses of the magical spells available to you, or opportunities to use
language as a means of persuasion on the NPCs, or (depending on the
contract) opportunities for smart rules-lawyering. The rules of the
game are the means of play. The tools, vehicles, and spells are the
means of action. Character abilities, if they may be "gamed" cleverly
as in many superhero games, are also agencies in Burke's vocabulary.
Most RPGs have characters who have certain abilities, but I think I've
met tons and tons of people who care more about cleverly manipulating
a character's abilities than about "being" that character. That would
be an agency focus, and (I think) a gamist stance.
| "simulationist": is the style which values resolving in-game
| events based solely on game-world considerations, without
| allowing any meta-game concerns to affect the decision.
| Thus, a fully simulationist GM will not fudge results to
| save PC's or to save her plot, or even change facts unknown
| to the players. Such a GM may use meta-game considerations
| to decide meta-game issues like who is playing which character,
| whether to play out a conversation word for word, and so
| forth, but she will resolve actual in-game events based on
| what would "really" happen.
In terms of the pentad, this definition conflates two things:
"game-world considerations" and "actual in-game events." The
former is the scene, and the latter is the act. I think there
are folks out there with very different styles of play who've
been agreeing to one part or the other of this definition. For
example, there are Runequest players who love Glorantha
to death, but whose interest in playing Runequest is motivated
*not* by what would "really" happen in the gameworld (act),
but rather by their interests in reaching a satisfying end (purpose),
in the strange and perspectivally-detailed characters (agent),
in the quirky dismembering results of the game system (agency),
or most importantly in the exotica of the setting (scene). As a
matter of fact, the game does *not* reflect what would actually
happen in Glorantha -- I understand there's far more healing
magic in the game than in the setting. A player with a scene-focus
might or might not care about that. A player with an act-focus,
who cares about what would "really" happen, probably would care.
For a different example, I've seen GURPS games get started with
the direction "OK, this is a standard fantasy setting. Make some
characters, and we'll get started." I suspect a lot of
GURPS players care about what would realistically happen in a
swordfight or what rule realistically models languages and accents
or whatnot -- things I don't care about, myself, but which are
discussed in great detail on gurpsnet, rgf.gurps, etc. Yet they
may or may not care much about "game-world considerations." I mean,
yes, there is presumably some setting for every game, and obviously
GURPS players buy a lot of worldbooks. The point is that there's
a difference between having a scene and emphasizing the scene.
So I've been translating simulationist by splitting it into two
different aspects of the pentad: a scene focus and an act focus.
OK, I hope that clarifies why I don't understand the pentad and
the threefold to be, as you say, orthogonal. Let me draw a very
rough picture, ignoring the combinatoric qualities of the pentad:
Threefold: |-Dramatist-|-Gamist-|-Simulationist-|
Pentad: |-Agent-|-Purpose---|-Agency-|-Scene-|-Act---|
How is it that these sets of terms are at right angles to one another?
Actually, backing up for a moment, I'll now agree with you that
the *threefold* exhibits no contrast with respect to Agent: the
agent is everywhere in it, but nowhere emphasized especially in
contrast to another stance. It would be fine to say that Dramatist
could be translated as purpose+agent, that Gamist could be translated
as agency+agent, etc. Maybe that is what you meant about the
terminologies being orthogonal. However, if you understand the
threefold in terms of the pentad and begin to characterize the
ratios of a game (scene/purpose emphasis or agent/act emphasis
or whatever combination of the pentadic elements is *most*
emphasized in a game), then yes, there is a contrast in terms
of which styles seriously emphasize the agent. A scene/purpose focus, which
is very familiar to me, does not particularly emphasize the agent.
I happen to play the character's role appropriately (I guess), and events
occur, and the game happens to have rules (agent, act, and agency,
respectively). But the character I play is primarily an extension of the
game-world and a moth drawn to the light of a fun story specific to
that setting, because those are the features I'm really interested in.
The pentad comprehends these emphases as 1 of 20 possible ratios. What
does the threefold say?
If someone tells me I'm not really role-playing, I'll sure wonder what
I've been doing with all these rpgs these past 20+ years. If someone
says I exhibit a mix of dramatist and simulationist styles, I can
rest my case about the threefold having a "weakness" with respect to
its ambiguities. :)
Warren J. Dew
Since the character or 'agent' is commonly important to all
approaches, it cannot be a differentiating point between
various roleplaying gaming styles,
Christopher Pound posts, in part:
I have to disagree, based on personal experience.
Care to talk about the experience?
In my own experience, attempts to differentiate playing styles based on the
importance of the character generally leads to everyone saying "well, my style
is to roleplay my character, and yours is to ignore roleplaying". No one ever
says, "I ignore roleplaying, it's just you that roleplays your character."
I'm very interested in others' experiences if they differ.
Moreover, I think there's an inconsistency in your argument.
With respect to the agent, you point out that since all RPGs
have 'em that can't be a point of differentiation. With
respect to the act, you say "Yes. The triangle is exactly
about approaches to resolving events, or 'acts'" where all
RPGs are presumed to resolve events. Which is it? Does the
omnipresence of a feature really disqualify it as a point of
differentiation or what?
This is a good point. I don't have my entire original post here, but I can try
to clarify what I think now (as opposed to yesterday).
The Pentad cannot be a differentiating model, at least with respect to actors
or, by your analysis, acts, because those features are present in all
roleplaying games.
In contrast, the triangle is a differentiating model, because it treats things
- in particular, event resolution approaches - which are not present in all
roleplaying games. A roleplaying game can ignore story concerns, or fairness
concerns, or world consistency, in event resolution, for example, and still
remain a roleplaying game.
Given that the Pentad is not a differentiating model, and the triangle is,
there isn't a mapping from one to the other.
I do agree that one might have differentiating models that focus on the
'actor', or character play. In fact, I think the narrative stances model might
qualify.
What did you think of my initial translation of the triangle into
the pentad?
Actually, I responded to your original post.
I'll do it again, referencing the FAQ explicitly:
Be aware that pretty much no one is happy with the FAQ definitions of their
preferred positions on the triangle. I feel that the FAQ definition of
'simulationist' is useless to those who don't already understand what
'simulationism' is, Brian has an even lower opinion of the FAQ definition of
'gamist', and several story oriented advocates have been so upset at the
threefold that they've left r.g.f.a because of it.
Regarding your specific points in this post:
Berkman ... whipped out lines like "story *is* character,"
meaning something like you only know what your character is
really like by the stories you can tell about what the
character did/does/would do. I don't agree with that at all,
but I think it's a plausible gaming style, and it is an
explicit denial that the agent is what really matters to the
game.
I read him in quite the opposite way: my reading was that he was equating
story and character, and arguing that the story/character was what was really
important to the game. By this reading, if the character didn't matter, the
story wouldn't matter either, since the story and the character were the same
thing. Obviously, the story did matter to Berkman, and so I think the
character did too.
As a side note, I didn't care for Berkman's play style either, but I do feel
that his position - or at least my reading of it - was self consistent, at
least.
Most RPGs have characters who have certain abilities, but I
think I've met tons and tons of people who care more about
cleverly manipulating a character's abilities than about "being"
that character.
Manipulating a character from the author stance and immersing in a character
from a deep character stance both still focus on the character.
In terms of the pentad, this [FAQ] definition [of simulationist]
conflates two things: "game-world considerations" and "actual
in-game events."
It doesn't conflate them, it explains the relationship between them that must
hold when adhering to the world oriented aesthetic. Or rather, it attempts to;
I haven't actually seen someone understand the world oriented aesthetic based
on the FAQ yet.
Threefold: |-Dramatist-|-Gamist-|-Simulationist-|
Pentad: |-Agent-|-Purpose---|-Agency-|-Scene-|-Act---|
I don't think this mapping has any validity.
For example, I am pretty certain that a story oriented gamesmaster would argue
that his approach places high importance on all five elements of the pentad.
Certainly setting the scene is important to the story; in many stories, it may
be more important than any purpose, such as a moral to be drawn. Similarly,
some action is necessary to any good story, and the agency may be critically
important to some stories, for example mysteries.
Indeed, given that the Pentad seems to be a framework for analyzing narratives,
it's not surprising that all five aspects are important and relevant to the
story oriented approach. The focuses in the other two corners of the triangle
are less amenable to pentadinal analysis; the world includes both locations and
characters, and the game player has no obvious place in the pentad.
But the character I play is primarily an extension of the
game-world and a moth drawn to the light of a fun story
specific to that setting, because those are the features
I'm really interested in. The pentad comprehends these
emphases as 1 of 20 possible ratios. What does the
threefold say?
If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that you seem to be emphasizing the
story, and would guess that you prefer the story oriented aesthetic. But I
have too little data on your playing style to have any confidence in that guess
at all. I would trust your own self evaluation more.
Christopher Pound
>
> Since the character or 'agent' is commonly important to all
> approaches, it cannot be a differentiating point between
> various roleplaying gaming styles,
>
>Christopher Pound posts, in part:
>
> I have to disagree, based on personal experience.
>
>Care to talk about the experience?
>
>In my own experience, attempts to differentiate playing styles based on the
>importance of the character generally leads to everyone saying "well, my style
>is to roleplay my character, and yours is to ignore roleplaying". No one ever
>says, "I ignore roleplaying, it's just you that roleplays your character."
>
>I'm very interested in others' experiences if they differ.
OK, I'll take that challenge. Roleplaying is an excuse to make
the setting come alive for me in ways I can't predict or control,
though I do anticipate that everything will lead to an interesting end.
The character as such is no fun, no matter what the particulars.
Oh, I'll make the character useful or fun for others in the group,
but this is exactly the same to me as running an NPC when I GM.
My little enjoyment of the character is purely vicarious (if other people
enjoy what I do with it, then that's fun) and essentially remote
from my interests in the game. But entertaining the others is
also incidental to my interests.
I would be just as happy to ignore roleplaying entirely, play
a matrix game (http://rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_2553.html
or better yet http://members2.easyspace.com/warog/mlmg.html), and
directly address aspects of the setting that are hard to see from
a character's on-the-ground perspective. However, this is clearly
a minority interest. Other people do care about their characters,
and they care about them in different ways.
Some people care that their characters are representative of the
setting. Some people care a lot about their characters' inner motives.
Some people care that their characters manipulate interesting
abilities or technologies. Some people really want their characters' to wind
up at an interesting dramatic climax, where they'll prove to be heroes
or anti-heroes. Some people care that their characters'
lives unfold exactly as they would, according to the nature of things.
Translating into the pentad, I would probably describe these motives as
agent/scene, agent, agent/agency, agent/purpose, and agent/act, respectively,
assuming that roleplaying the agent directly is the foremost issue.
Some people, on the other hand, have little interest in their characters
directly. Bear with me while I develop a more general example before
coming back to the specific question of roleplaying.
In her book _Biographical Objects_, anthropologist Janet Hoskins describes
how the Kodi of Eastern Sumba (Indonesia) talk about themselves -- or
rather do *not* talk much about themselves directly. Of course, everyone
can describe a their own life history, if pressed, but it's not an ordinary
discourse genre among the Kodi. They won't ordinarily tell long
biographical stories. However the Kodi do tell each other a lot of
stories about objects as *metaphors* for persons. A man tells stories about
his betel bag (a pouch full of betel nut, but also the receptacle for his
soul, IIRC) as a way of talking about himself and his brother and his
grandfather. A family tells stories about the patriarch's funerary cloth
as a way of talking about the patriarch. A woman dies, and several people
talk about a green glass bottle as a metaphor for her. Women tell stories
about animals, but not about themselves. And so on, and so on. Hoskins
connects all this to culturally-specific ideas about gender to make a
larger point, but what I'm getting at is an illustration of people
emphasizing the agency (the equipment or tools or means of existence)
instead of the agent. The Kodi way of speaking about agents is commonly
mediated through talk of the agency. In Burkean terms, this is an
agency/agent ratio. It is also an example of emphasis and style in ways
of thinking about persons.
You see, persons may be emphasized in different ways, from different angles.
I think you were off the mark a bit when you said that all role-playing is
character-based. Character is a necessary condition for role-playing,
but not its basis.
A lot of roleplayers emphasize not their characters as such -- their life
histories, their feelings, or personal perspectives -- but they emphasize
their characters' cool weapons (a +12 Hackmaster Sword, for example) or
special abilities (a superhero defined by his powers, for example). In
Burkean terms, these emphases are certainly agency-focused and, assuming
the agencies are what really define the character for the player, they
would amount to an agency/agent ratio. Again, I'll point to the example
of _Living Steel, which a friend of mine described as "the game where you
play a gun," meaning the details about your weaponry were essentially what
defined your character. In that case, the agent is predicated on the
agency. The weapon is primary, the person secondary: agency/agent.
Me, I don't emphasize persons much at all. I certainly understand people who
do, and I of course empathize with a really good description of a person,
but it's not what I'm hunting for. When I read an ethnography, such as
Hoskins' book, I look for setting details. (A lot of ethnographies are
written as life histories. I like the idea of life histories, theoretically,
but I don't read them if I can help it, because the setting descriptions
are all broken up by stories about a person.) When I read a novel, I really
just do not care about the characters -- I only want them to get on with
the business of showing me the world in some clever way. And when I play
a roleplaying game, it is to encounter the setting in a lively way
(meaning the encounter should ideally unfold with climactic purposes in mind,
at least as a secondary issue).
>The Pentad cannot be a differentiating model, at least with respect to actors
>or, by your analysis, acts, because those features are present in all
>roleplaying games.
This doesn't make sense to me. Now, I really don't know what you think
the pentad is, but I can tell you for sure it is very often used to
"differentiate" matters where all five elements are presumed to be present.
The thing is, presence is not the same as emphasis. Presence is not
the same as primary motive. But emphasis and motive are not bad points
from which to being talking about roleplaying "styles."
The pentad differentiates emphases and motives. If someone exhibits a
scene/purpose ratio (e.g. me), that does not mean they don't *have*
characters and acts and agencies. It means they do not exhibit a pattern
of *emphasizing* such.
Of course, if someone considers a topic long enough, they will probably
hit upon every ratio at one time or another. But it is certainly possible
to identify patterns of emphasis with the pentad: what ratios come up
most often, and what ratios does someone associate with words like "main,"
"primary," "basic," "real," "important," and so on.
>In contrast, the triangle is a differentiating model, because it treats things
>- in particular, event resolution approaches - which are not present in all
>roleplaying games. A roleplaying game can ignore story concerns, or fairness
>concerns, or world consistency, in event resolution, for example, and still
>remain a roleplaying game.
OK, now I see what you are saying. You think each element of the triangle
permits total *absence* of defining features of other elements. If you worked
at it for a while, you could probably turn this into a system of binary
features to describe the paradigmatic examples of each position.
But this is the most serious fallacy I've heard of with respect to
the triangle. In fact, rpgs do generally have goals, rules, and
worlds -- as well as agents and acts. The triangle is not what you
call a "differentiating model," because story concerns represent a
high investment in a projected goal, fairness concerns represent a
high investment in the game set-up, world represents a high investment
in the setting, and consistency represents a high investment in
the realism of the events. The triangle is an emphasis model that
uses, as reference points, exaggerated investments in matters common
to all or nearly all role-playing games.
So, I think the FAQ has this right: "Which one am I? A Dramatist, a Gamist,
or a Simulationist? Most likely, none of the above. Your individual style
cannot be pigeonholed into a single word. More to the point, you probably
use a mix of different techniques, and work towards more than one
goal. You may tend more towards one corner of the triangle, but
you probably value a mix." I think if your explanation of the triangle were
correct, there would actually exist many "pure" examples of its categories.
What I'm explaining is exactly why there aren't. Of course, we have
numerous examples of people who absolutely deny their games have "story
concerns," and I believe them wholeheartedly. But the big difference
between them and a so-called dramatist is that their games have projected
ends that have been naturalized with respect to the setting, characters, and
the realism of the game (the ends may or may not be reached, depending on
the dictates of realism), whereas the so-called dramatist emphasizes that
an important end will be reached, regardless of realism: there will
be a climactic battle with the badguy or some big cathartic moment for
the character or whatever. In both cases, the game involves concern for
a *future* -- which is why I don't agree with you about what a game can
ignore and still be a role-playing game. Neither sort of game can ignore its
projected future. The difference lies in how that future is constructed.
So-called Dramatists use "story" as a *metaphor* to construct the game's
future. So-called "story-concerns" are obviously metaphors, because
(as so many people have pointed out) a game is a game, not a story.
The story metaphor definitely has effects in the game, but the effect
is simply to construct the game's future in a way that so-called
Simulationists probably wouldn't (unless they were playing in a reality
where destiny really existed).
>Given that the Pentad is not a differentiating model, and the triangle is,
>there isn't a mapping from one to the other.
In your terms, I attempt to disbelieve the assertion that either one of them
is differentiating model. :) They're both structures of possible emphases.
I also think you've picked a very peculiar term. By any ordinary
understanding of the word "differentiate," the pentad differentiates
just as much as the triangle.
>I do agree that one might have differentiating models that focus on the
>'actor', or character play. In fact, I think the narrative stances model
>might qualify.
Sure, let's look at the narrative stances model in terms of the pentad.
Now we have to introduce the pentad's sixth term. When Kenneth Burke
wrote _A Grammar of Motives_, he only had five terms: the pentad. But in
an addendum to a later addition, he mentioned that, oh yeah, the pentad
should probably include a sixth term -- manner. Rhetoricians still call
it the pentad (and often omit the sixth term), and I've followed their
example so far. :) But here's an opportunity to put it to work.
I'm looking at http://www.sff.net/people/neelk/roleplaying/glossary.html ...
The Actor Stance is heavily invested in manner. If someone said to me,
"What I really get out of role-playing is acting out the mannerisms of
my character and portraying that characer well," then I would think of
that as a manner/agent ratio. Manner, in role-playing games, might
cover concerns with acting, mood-lighting, sound effects, quality of
miniature representations, and so on -- the manner in which the game is
played, insofar as it might be a special concern or interest.
The Audience Stance references the doubling of the agent in rpgs:
there is both a player and a character. It is a primary consciousness
of the presumed split between one type of agent and another. It is
therefore an agent/agent ratio. I can't see someone being motivated to
play rpgs based on this ratio, but it comes up frequently as a reason
why this or that happens in rpgs -- e.g. in the separation of in-character
and out-of-character knowledge.
The Author Stance references the "meta-game" agent as the source of
other elements of the game. In the discussion of the Author Stance,
world-building, character creation, and the introduction of plot
elements are all relativized to the meta-game agent. I would call
these agent/scene, agent/agent, and agent/purpose ratios, respectively.
The In-Character Stance is one that effaces the meta-game agent (the player)
in favor of the in-game agent (the character). Therefore, this is
simply a focus on one agent, as such: agent with no secondary element.
But the pentad ordinarily addresses act by default, says Burke; agent
would rarely stand alone. Then, unsurprisingly, the discussion of the
In-Character Stance goes on to say it is the stance associated with
"play itself," which would be an agent/act ratio.
Note the differentiations:
Actor => manner/agent
Audience => agent/agent
Author => agent/scene, agent/agent, and agent/purpose
IC => agent or agent/act
It's worth pointing out that the only overlap, in pentadic terms,
is between making a character and running it from a distanced perspective.
I realize there's some debate about IC versus "deep" IC, and the pentad
would *fail* to describe that difference. That's why I introduced the concept
of investment. IC is modestly invested in agent or agent/act. "Deep" IC
is heavily invested in agent or agent/act.
> What did you think of my initial translation of the triangle into
> the pentad?
>
>Actually, I responded to your original post.
Sorry -- it never made it to my news server. Deja shows nothing for
"Dew pentad" before July, but they've been spotty lately. (They do
have the post of yours that I responded to in June, reintroducing
the topic of the pentad.) If you still have a copy, I'd love to read it.
> I'll do it again, referencing the FAQ explicitly:
>
>Be aware that pretty much no one is happy with the FAQ definitions of their
>preferred positions on the triangle. I feel that the FAQ definition of
>'simulationist' is useless to those who don't already understand what
>'simulationism' is, Brian has an even lower opinion of the FAQ definition of
>'gamist', and several story oriented advocates have been so upset at the
>threefold that they've left r.g.f.a because of it.
Yeah, I'm pretty selective about which threads I read, but I've been
reading this group since it began, and I'm moderately aware of differences of
opinion in these matters. I actually like to see people resisting
essentialization in the threefold. Oh, I know, I come off sounding like
I've pronounced the essential meaning of the threefold in the pentad,
but I'm sounding out what the threefold begins with (what all games have
in common) and proceeds to *obscure* through essentialization and exaggeration.
I'm very aware of the pentad's limitations too, but the pentad's
flexibility lies in putting the problem into motion. I tend to start with
thoughts about a setting and move from their to thoughts about reaching an
interesting goal in that setting: that's scene/purpose. But it's also
only a tendency. Like everyone else, I play characters or run NPCs,
I occasionally debate rules, and the game of course involves unfolding events.
These are matters of concern for nearly every RPG. Even Peter Knutsen's
games involve intricately projected ends -- there's just no guarantee that
the most interesting ones won't be obstructed by the realistically unfolding
chain of events that he cares about. And I may care about that too, from
time to time. My having a pattern of scene/purpose interests does not
exclude other ratios from my thoughts.
But this is not orthogonal to the threefold. The threefold begins with
the same range of patterns or styles people play by, and it tries to
describe what people focus on. You cannot, of course, construct an
essential definition for a style or an "ism," because it came into the
world incrementally in different places and with different reference points:
it is at best a family of resemblances, but (even worse luck for definers)
a family of resemblances thrown into a fast-moving dialectic of players,
groups, game designers (always tossing in new things to consider), and
publishing trends. The pentad begins with the same material and the
same goal of describing what a person's playing style emphasizes.
So when you point out that pretty much no one is happy with the FAQ
definitions -- that's no shock, because describing "isms" is fundamentally
a misguided way to go about describing styles of play. The reference points
for the pentad (Aristotle's causes) are a whole heckuva lot less debateable,
and they more flexibly characterize patterns in styles of play. The pentad
as such is full of holes: it could not be used to discover many differences
between people who all care desperately for identifying with their character;
that is, "agent focus" could not differentiate people who want to play
angry characters and people who want to play happy characters. But insofar
as the *threefold* describes styles of play and their motives, the pentad
can do much the same with (I suspect) greater success.
> Berkman ... whipped out lines like "story *is* character,"
> meaning something like you only know what your character is
> really like by the stories you can tell about what the
> character did/does/would do. I don't agree with that at all,
> but I think it's a plausible gaming style, and it is an
> explicit denial that the agent is what really matters to the
> game.
>
>I read him in quite the opposite way: my reading was that he was equating
>story and character, and arguing that the story/character was what was really
>important to the game. By this reading, if the character didn't matter, the
>story wouldn't matter either, since the story and the character were the same
>thing. Obviously, the story did matter to Berkman, and so I think the
>character did too.
_Theatrix_ says this best: "Action defines who a persona is -- _action is
character_. Personality is action defined by a _purpose_ ... You have to
know what your character wants to do, and why she wants to do it." That's
from page 45, the section titled "General Theory of Character Creation."
So, I think I was pretty much correct to say Berkman's position privileges
purpose. The meaning of purpose in _Theatrix_ and in Burke is pretty much
a constant; in both cases, it could be translated as _telos_, the projected
end. _Telos_ is also the basic concept lurking behind the injunction in
_Theatrix_ to always keep the resolution in mind (e.g. "How will the story
move toward its conclusion? ... How will it end? ... Having your resolution
in mind gives your plot direction" from the summary of the final chapter).
Purpose is frequently privileged in _Theatrix_.
However, I mis-spoke when I said "the agent is [not] what really matters"
in Berkman's game. What I should have said was the "agent is a *secondary*
consideration in Berkman's game." Purpose is what comes first. It defines
personality. That's very clearly a purpose/agent ratio. The projected end
is what the personality is based on.
The quote from _Theatrix_ includes an act/agent ratio as well: "Action
defines who a persona is -- _action is character_." That's not the quote
I remembered, but it too puts the agent in the second position. It too
is a denial that the agent is what defines the game. (Which is in clear
opposition with your argument that "in truth, all roleplaying is 'character
based'." _Theatrix_ says, No, character is based on action, and personality
is based on purpose. The pentad comprehends this possible thought about
role-playing games, as well as your agent focus when you say all role-
playing is character-based.)
>As a side note, I didn't care for Berkman's play style either, but I do feel
>that his position - or at least my reading of it - was self consistent, at
>least.
Sure, I think his position was very consistent -- very familiar too,
from so many painful hours of reading Aristotelian theories of narrative!
> Most RPGs have characters who have certain abilities, but I
> think I've met tons and tons of people who care more about
> cleverly manipulating a character's abilities than about "being"
> that character.
>
>Manipulating a character from the author stance and immersing in a character
>from a deep character stance both still focus on the character.
Um, yeah, see my translations of the narrative stances, which all put
agent first. But what I was saying about "manipulating a character's
abilities" was that superhero games for example, played as a gamist
would play them, tend to involve thinking about what a *power* can accomplish.
If the character is only interesting as an assemblage of abilities
available to him, then that is an agency/agent ratio. The agency comes
first. The agent second.
People who focus on "being" the character put the agent first, and may
or may not give a crap about the agency.
> In terms of the pentad, this [FAQ] definition [of simulationist]
> conflates two things: "game-world considerations" and "actual
> in-game events."
>
>It doesn't conflate them, it explains the relationship between them that must
>hold when adhering to the world oriented aesthetic. Or rather, it attempts to;
>I haven't actually seen someone understand the world oriented aesthetic based
>on the FAQ yet.
OK, what I'm telling you is that I have a world-oriented aesthetic,
and I can comprehend it in terms of the FAQ. There are two things:
the world (the setting, the background, the history, the cosmology, and
so on) and the action (which is limited to what can/should happen, given
a certain set of probabilities). Aesthetically, there is no necessary
relationship between them, but the FAQ conflates them. Aesthetically,
the world can be twisted to dramatic ends, even if those ends are not
probable or realistic in that world. Aesthetically, I'd rather play
in a purely "simulationist" game with a good setting than a purely
"dramatist" game with a thin background, even though I have *no*
interest in simulating what would actually occur in a given setting.
That's how I understand my own world-oriented aesthetic in terms of the FAQ.
I gave two examples before, but perhaps they were unclear.
First, I like Glorantha a lot. I like to play in Glorantha and explore
setting details, eventually arriving at punctuating goals (but there's
no rush on that; I'm mainly interested in what's going on in the world
as such). But I do not care at all whether the action unfolds "as it would"
given the premises of Glorantha. I do not care that the rules
permit acts such as magical healing which would be uncommon if the
scene were being played out exactly as Stafford imagines it. I do not
mind if the future of the game is guided on purpose. I do not mind if
the setting is tweaked to yield an interesting outcome -- I'd encourage
that -- but I am primarily interested in the setting, so I would
rather not play a game that is *primarily* directed toward a dramatic end.
I like that characters in Glorantha are based heavily on setting details,
but I'd be just as happy playing a matrix game in Glorantha (or the
computer game, the fonts for which come out fine on my Mac at work but
screwy on my Mac at home).
Can you see how I've implicitly ranked the elements of the pentad?
Scene: #1
Agent: don't care (vaguely prefer setting-appropriate)
Agency: don't care (vaguely prefer minimal rules)
Purpose: #2
Act: don't care (would in fact prefer things be purposely made dramatic
but not at the expense of the setting)
Second, I gave the exampe of the GURPS game in a "standard fantasy" setting.
The players can be totally absorbed in the realism of combat and whatnot
*without having given any serious thought to the game-world*! *That* is
why I say the FAQ conflates game-world considerations and in-game events.
From where I sit, the "standard fantasy" GURPS game minimizes game-world
considerations and maximizes simulation of in-game events. They're too
separate issues.
> Threefold: |-Dramatist-|-Gamist-|-Simulationist-|
> Pentad: |-Agent-|-Purpose---|-Agency-|-Scene-|-Act---|
>
>I don't think this mapping has any validity.
>
>For example, I am pretty certain that a story oriented gamesmaster would argue
>that his approach places high importance on all five elements of the pentad.
>Certainly setting the scene is important to the story; in many stories, it may
>be more important than any purpose, such as a moral to be drawn. Similarly,
>some action is necessary to any good story, and the agency may be critically
>important to some stories, for example mysteries.
>
>Indeed, given that the Pentad seems to be a framework for analyzing narratives,
>it's not surprising that all five aspects are important and relevant to the
>story oriented approach. The focuses in the other two corners of the triangle
>are less amenable to pentadinal analysis; the world includes both locations and
>characters, and the game player has no obvious place in the pentad.
Now you have me thinking you've not really got the right idea about
the pentad. First of all, as I said before, that mapping ignores the
pentad's combinatoric qualities. Someone who is purpose-oriented, like
David Berkman often was, would of course raise purpose/scene issues,
purpose/agent issues, and so on -- even act/agent issues and every other
ratio from time to time. But they might still be *purpose-oriented*.
Everyone, not just the story-oriented GM, wouldn't just argue they
place some importance on all five elements; they would absolutely know
they place some importance on all elements. The question is, which
element comes to mind first most often? Which element is emphasized?
I thought we'd been through this enough already that that was understood.
Second, a Simulationist approach may be either scene-focused or act-focused,
and yes a Simulationist does deploy all elements of the pentad all the
time: they have a setting, characters, rules and technologies, goals,
and (most important to them, I think) realistic acts. Third, with
respect to "the game player [having] no obvious place in the pentad,"
Second, a Simulationist approach may be either scene-focused or act-focused,
and yes a Simulationist does deploy all elements of the pentad all the
time: they have a setting, characters, rules and technologies, goals,
and (most important to them, I think) realistic acts.
Third, with respect to "the game player [having] no obvious place in
the pentad," I'm wondering if all my posts about the pentad in the past
month have made it onto your news server. As discussed many times, the
game itself is a means -- it is an enabling instrument of play, action,
and whatnot. The player who primarily wants the game to be a fair game
is primarily focusing on the means of play, that is, the agency. Gamists
highlight agency -- not exclusively, not without secondary elements, but
usually and foremost.
In other words,
Dramatist is a catchall category for agent/purpose
purpose/scene
purpose/agent
purpose/agency
purpose
purpose/act
scene/purpose
act/purpose
Gamist is a catchall category for agent/agency
agency/scene
agency/agent
agency
agency/purpose
agency/act
Simulationist is a catchall category for agent/scene
scene
scene/agent
scene/agency
scene/act
agent/act
act/scene
act/agent
act/agency
act
With no term of the threefold laying any special claim to the agent by itself.
That's a mapping that doesn't ignore the pentad's combinatoric qualities.
Of course, one problem I have with such mapping is that no one has
to "stick" with a pentadic ratio, in contrast to the (bad) assumption of the
triangle that styles can be essentialized and that a person will stick
with their position in the triangle (even if it's usually a blended position).
> The pentad comprehends [my]
> emphases as [scene/purpose], 1 of 20 possible ratios. What does the
> threefold say?
>
>If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that you seem to be emphasizing the
>story, and would guess that you prefer the story oriented aesthetic. But I
>have too little data on your playing style to have any confidence in that guess
>at all. I would trust your own self evaluation more.
I would prefer not to play a story-oriented game with a thin setting,
and I usually focus on the gameworld. I'm glad you agree, here, that
the threefold is really an emphasis model too. It has no real criteria
for exclusive essentializing "differentiation" (in the odd sense in which
you seemed to be using the word before). The triangle's not a matter of
what one style has that other styles have in no way, but a matter of which
game elements (common to nearly all rpgs, as they are played in real life)
are emphasized and how they're constructed. Note, again, to the folks who
would be terribly upset to hear that their games involve "story-telling":
I'm not saying any such thing. I will say that every rpg session is long
enough that the following "reasons" for things will eventually turn through
everyone's thoughts:
The formal cause of an act, i.e. the act itself
The material cause of an act, i.e. the scene
The efficient cause of an act, i.e. the agent
The instrumental cause of an act, i.e. the agency
The final cause of an act, i.e. the purpose
These causes or reasons are likewise reasons for the act of role-playing:
they pique interests. They are reasons in a very literal sense too
(cf. http://www.msu.org/intro/content_intro/texts/aristotle/4causes.html ),
but in the pentad, they are not exclusive reasons. They're always in motion,
in combination with one another, very specifically for a specific position
or point in time, but overall in dialectic. I think it's nice that the
definitions of these terms pretty much are what they are. I can identify
with a scene/purpose ratio -- or not -- but there's only one definition
of "material cause" and "final cause."
I know there are people whose interests cross-cut the pentad in ways
that elude the basic ratios, but those interests don't seem to be
described in the FAQ! :)
Brian Gleichman
news:20000707212454...@ng-mb1.aol.com...
> With a few notable exceptions, that seems to be the most common approach
to
> the triangle among those with a strong preference for analyzing things in
terms of
> stories or narratives. Maybe some day I'll figure out why.
As a guess, I think it might be related to the fact that those trained or
educated in the narrative structure are unable to consider limits to their
models in anything dealing with 'fictional' worlds.
Since it (an rpg campaign) exists only in the mind, their reaction is that
all their models for mental creation *must* apply. After all, stories are a
thing of the mind and so are rpgs.
Such a self-centric view of the world is common to nearly every walk of
life, but while most of it leads to pointless debate- us engineers at least
build really useful things like Usenet (to keep such people occupied) and
really cool game systems.
:-)
I do think that such focus on the narrative structure is nearly completely
responsible for the state of today's games. From badly flawed mechanics to
the mega-plots and dark tone of current offerings, the hype of the story has
grown more important the quality of any mechanical concepts.
It seems to be what people want, and so we must live with constant attempts
to define non-narrative elements of the hobby in narrative terms.
--
Brian Gleichman
glei...@mindspring.com
Age of Heroes: http://gleichman.home.mindspring.com/
Free RPG Reviews: http://gleichman.home.mindspring.com/Reviews.htm
Warren J. Dew
I'm afraid I only have time to skim it, so I'll just touch on a few points
here.
OK, now I see what you are saying. You think each
element of the triangle permits total *absence* of
defining features of other elements.
Yes, exactly. While these extremes may be rare or nonexistent, they are at
least theoretically possible. All the people who have found the triangle
useful have first had to come to recognize the importance of tradeoffs between
the three extremes. Without understanding that there are tradeoffs involved,
one cannot truly understand the triangle, and without understanding the
triangle, it cannot be useful.
But this is the most serious fallacy I've heard of with
respect to the triangle. In fact, rpgs do generally have
goals, rules, and worlds -- as well as agents and acts.
None of which is of any significant importance with respect to the triangle.
Read my paragraph again, and you will find "world" used only as an adjective,
and "goals", "rules", "agents", and "acts" used not at all:
In contrast, the triangle is a differentiating model,
because it treats things - in particular, event resolution
approaches - which are not present in all roleplaying games.
A roleplaying game can ignore story concerns, or fairness
concerns, or world consistency, in event resolution, for
example, and still remain a roleplaying game.
In your analysis of concerns:
story concerns represent a high investment in a projected goal
Not necessarily. The story can be stream of consciousness, with no projections
at all.
fairness concerns represent a high investment in the game set-up
Not necessarily. A good ref can make a fair game up on the fly.
consistency represents a high investment in the realism of the events
Not necessarily. A totally unrealistic world can still have perfect internal
consistency.
In your terms, I attempt to disbelieve the assertion that
either one of them is differentiating model.
With a few notable exceptions, that seems to be the most common approach to the
triangle among those with a strong preference for analyzing things in terms of
stories or narratives. Maybe some day I'll figure out why.
Neel Krishnaswami
take the time to think about and respond to all of your posts, I'll
never finish. So accept my apologies for responding to a tiny fragment
of your post. :)
Christopher Pound <po...@is.rice.edu> wrote:
>
> What I'm explaining is exactly why there aren't. Of course, we have
> numerous examples of people who absolutely deny their games have
> "story concerns," and I believe them wholeheartedly. But the big
> difference between them and a so-called dramatist is that their
> games have projected ends that have been naturalized with respect to
> the setting, characters, and the realism of the game [...]
Bing! A light just went on. Permit me to talk about EMPTY CALORIES (my
In Nomine demonic game of sex, violence, drugs and no consequences)
again. One of the mechanics I've invented for this game is to give
every character three extra attributes.
Each character has three stats, named Heroism, Cool, and Villainy.
Whenever a PC does something moral and genuinely felt, they gain a
point of Heroism. Whenever a character commits some crime or atrocity
in a way that makes the other players laugh or admire the style of it,
then the character gets a point of Cool. If they do something nasty
that the players find repulsive, they get a point of Villainy.
At any point during the game, the GM can spend a point of Heroism to
change external circustances to completely and arbitrarily hose the
PC. Likewise, a PC can spend point of Cool to do something cool
automatically. When the GM spends a Villainy point, then the PC must
do something (even if out-of-character) both villainous, cliched,
stupid that results in a disadvantage to themselves -- some examples
would be to tie up an enemy in a deathtrap and explain your plans, or
accept a challenge to a one-on-one fight with your main rival, and so
on.
These rules are naturalized into the setting with the explanation that
each century a new demon ascends to the throne of the Lightbringer and
becomes lord of this world. The new century is ruled by the prince of
the Media, and he changed the rules to force demons to behave like
life is the (shlocky) movies. So a character busy explaining his
master plan could *know* it's a bad idea, but be helplessly forced to
play by the rules. The Heroism stat exists because heroes don't play
well to the audiences in Hell -- no one wants Tom Mix when they can
have the Punisher. Note that this implicitly brings the audience
aspect of gaming into the setting -- what the players laugh and admire
at will affect how the world evolves.
Partly this is a mechanization of three of the most interesting pieces
of gaming for me. (That's the subject of another essay, though.)
Partly, it's an attempt to try and fix one of the problems I had in a
prior game with unclear focus. But now that you've pointed out how
this naturalization process happens, I'm rethinking whether I should
reify quite that much -- there are explicit mechanics as well as an
in-game explanation for them.
Neel
Christopher Pound
>
> Christopher Pound wrote:
> In fact, rpgs do generally have
> goals, rules, and worlds -- as well as agents and acts.
>
I disagree entirely, but I'll re-read your characterization of the triangle
and go through every case before I say why:
>Read my paragraph again, and you will find "world" used only as an adjective,
>and "goals", "rules", "agents", and "acts" used not at all:
>
> In contrast, the triangle is a differentiating model,
> because it treats things - in particular, event resolution
> approaches - which are not present in all roleplaying games.
> A roleplaying game can ignore story concerns, or fairness
> concerns, or world consistency, in event resolution, for
> example, and still remain a roleplaying game.
>
>In [Pound's] analysis of concerns:
> story concerns represent a high investment in a projected goal
>
>Not necessarily. The story can be stream of consciousness, with no
>projections at all.
That would be a Modernist concept of story, sure. A story without projected
ends can be a stream of consciousness story such as _Ulysses_. In
terms of the pentad, the way _Ulysses_ unfolds is mostly covered under
agent/act (that is, you follow the consciousness of the 3 agents through
their everyday acts with only local, agent-relative goals -- _Ulysses_
is full of such goals). Or a story without ends can be a
_roman fleuve_ such as _Remembrance of Things Past_ (also primarily
agent/act) or my favorite _The Man Without Qualities_ (also primarily
agent/act), in which the projected goals are not toward the end of the
novel (it has no ending), but nevertheless there are tons of futures
that have been naturalized relative to each well-drawn character.
Those are *not*, in Aristotelian terms such as are used by Berkman and
the FAQ's description of the triangle, story concerns. An Aristotelian
concept of story is all about the projection of a _telos_ for the story
as a whole; an Aristotelian narrative by definition has a beginning, middle,
and *end*, and as the FAQ says, it is the end of the story that is of primary
importance for the dramatist (who is accordingly an Aristotelian).
But role-playing games, whether they are stream-of-consciousness
games modeled on _Ulysses'_ agent/act ratio (I'd love to hear
about that one) or games like _Theatrix_ modeled on the Aristotelian
purpose-oriented concept of story, generally project goals -- games
generally presume that there is a future within the game, just as
the agents in _Ulysses_ often think of the future. You say
some games can do without "story concerns," and therefore the triangle
embodies exclusivizing differences. I say very few RPGs ever had
anything but a *metaphor* of "story concerns" in the first place:
what they had were projected goals, and some of them (dramatist games,
that is) have a very high investment in projected goals, such that
they may override other concerns and reach an exaggerated condition
where the *metaphor* of story makes some sense. Agent/act games
(including the hypothetical _Ulysses_ game) have little investment
in a _telos_, and the _telos_ is easily overridden by the random
thoughts or actions that prevent it coming about.
> fairness concerns represent a high investment in the game set-up
>
>Not necessarily. A good ref can make a fair game up on the fly.
I know. A good ref can set up a fair game on the fly. My choice of
words was poor, but I did not mean "set-up" in the sense of something
happening beforehand, I intended "set-up" in the sense of the instrumental
structure of the game itself: the game as agency, as a tool for making
things fair (e.g. fair point distributions in point-based character creation,
or in-game puzzles structured for fairness) or unfair (e.g. Ars Magica magi
vs. grogs, or Grimtooth's Traps) or however you want things structured.
All of those are ways in which the game itself is an agency -- a means.
Note: insofar as games are rulesets or structures that can be manipulated,
they have the potential to be instrumental causes. I think an entirely
systemless RPG (if you agree that it's still an RPG) might not have much
in the way of an agency -- unless of course you believe in a reified
"contract" as the instrumental condition for play even then.
So, you say that some games may be entirely innocent of fairness concerns,
where I say that a game's synchronic structures are generally engineered
to be instruments (on the fly or otherwise) and "fairness concerns" are
simply a high investment in the particulars of such engineering, e.g. in
the rules or point allocations or puzzle designs or instrumentalized settings
(e.g. Birthright, which has a large agency/scene component) or
instrumentalized plotting systems (e.g. the gameability of "fortune" points
or Whimsy Cards or whatever, which are agency/purpose issues). RPGs,
perhaps barring systemless RPGs, *are* agencies. Some people focus in on
that fact (Gamists, I think), and others don't.
> consistency represents a high investment in the realism of the events
>
>Not necessarily. A totally unrealistic world can still have perfect internal
>consistency.
OK, realism does *not* mean "mostly based on the real world." In art and
literature, it signifies vividness, precison, and seeming non-arbitrariness.
My previous statement stands: consistency represents a high investment
in the realism of the events. I of course agree entirely that a world utterly
unlike our own can be played out in a perfect simulation. We're talking
about simulationists, here, right? A bizarre quirky world that totally
fails to be our own "natural" world can nevertheless give rise to vivid,
precise, and apparently non-arbitrary events.
Apparent non-arbitrariness is probably key. A realist's mantra in art might
be "ars est celare artem" -- art lies in concealing artfulness. This is
an ideological position, of course, and in it you may recognize the
simulationist prohibition against "authorial intervention" (note the story
metaphor) and against "fixing" the situation (against manipulation of
it -- against tinkering with the available instruments such as the dice or
the rules). But of course their games occasionally require what you
would call an Author Stance, and of course their games have agency conventions
(e.g. rules). But the realism of the work lies in not being able to see
the man behind the curtain once the work is produced: the artwork (or in
games, the act) should appear to reflect the world and not its own artistry.
You say a game can do away with world consistency, and therefore
world consistency is the differentiating hallmark of the simulationist.
I think world "consistency" is artfulness, concealed (be it in Dostoevsky
or in a highly simulationist GURPS game). All games require similar
artfulness, but simulationists are high investors in its concealment
or naturalization into the setting, where others simply don't invest
so much in the apparent non-arbitrariness of the event.
I also think "world" and "consistency" are mostly different things. A world
need not be consistent, and consistency may be entirely predicated on
the rules of the game -- the agency. You could easily play GURPS set in a
featureless gray void without defining anything else about the *world* at all.
Of course, the GURPS players would have to ask what *rule* applies to
unfolding events in the world: Zero-G rules? Magic rules? Etc. Yes,
that constitutes consistent information about the nature of the world
(the naturalized conventions for this world, that is), but it tells you
virtually nothing about what I, personally, care about -- the world as
such, its history, meanings, and so on.
Now, let me go back to the paragraph you thought I should re-read:
> In contrast, the triangle is a differentiating model,
> because it treats things - in particular, event resolution
> approaches - which are not present in all roleplaying games.
> A roleplaying game can ignore story concerns, or fairness
> concerns, or world consistency, in event resolution, for
> example, and still remain a roleplaying game.
I really think I did not mis-read at all. I translated it into
my own terms with a full understanding that you and I disagree.
Maybe that was mean of me, and I apologize for doing it telegraphically,
I mean, without clearly pointing it out. Allow me to explain.
You told me to ...
>Read my paragraph again, and you will find "world" used only as an adjective,
>and "goals", "rules", "agents", and "acts" used not at all
Right. What I did was find elements common to most games that you
had obscured with metaphors like "consistency" or "story." "Story"
makes it seem as though simulationist games (act-focused games, that is,
including agent/act games like our _Ulysses_) and dramatist games do
not have a common issue in the construction/obstruction of goals.
"World consistency" is the metaphor that buys into the myth of realism:
that it is not artifice, that it is a non-arbitrary *reflection*, when
of course it's shot through with poetic ("makerly") considerations.
With its many common elements in view (e.g. goals, instruments, agents,
acts, and worlds), it seems to me that the triangle makes an
implausible leap from emphases or high investments to what you call
"differentiation" (I think polarization may be a better word, even
if there are three poles in this case). I rather agree with the
FAQ on this; the "poles" probably don't exist. Even you agree that
they are "rare or nonexistent," so why you would stick to a model
of actual events that fundamentally references points that do not exist?
Enough of me! Good night. :)
Mary K. Kuhner
understand it correctly, which is certainly doubtful) is that
it seems to present things in terms of "I care a lot about X and
Y and I'm pretty indifferent to U, V and Z."
One of the observations that drove the construction of the triangle
is that some players (and GMs) require the *absence* of certain
tactics in game resolution in order to enjoy the game fully and/or
to make it work at all. This is not modelled very well by indifference.
In my own household's games it has been incredibly helpful to have
a structure for talking about the taboos--the things that will
destroy the game if they're allowed into it more than on a very
rare and carefully circumscribed basis.
For example, in the current game we've observed that PC survival
is necessary for the game to continue, so we have script immunity.
We've very, very seldom had to invoke it (it would itself become
a major violation if invoked often). When we *do* use it, we do
retcons, often throwing away a fair hunk of play. These
have obvious drawbacks, and each time this happens (three times in five
years) we have a discussion of why we can't just say "Okay, he
didn't do X, he did Y instead" for either a PC or an NPC.
The conclusion we always come to is that we'd run too great a risk
of breaking the GM's or player's mental model of the character,
and that such breakage (a) is too high a price to pay for *anything*
and (b) may not be able to be fixed.
I suppose that this fits into the pentad as a very strong emphasis on
Agent, yes? But the script immunity *also* comes from a very strong
emphasis on Agent--it is driven by the fact that the player is
interested, first and foremost, in character relationships, and is
not willing to deal with the shattering of those relationships by
one principal's death. And yet they are in conflict here. Twice
in the game the GM has said "I will have to withdraw script immunity
here. The PC is doing something which, if it goes a certain way,
he cannot survive without breaking my mental model and destroying
the game. Just so you know." (In neither case did events take that
course; if they had and my PC had died, I would just have had to
grit my teeth and cope, or abandon the game.)
I also feel that this differs from your description of the
simulationist stance in that you emphasize the *appearance* of
"realism". In the retcon I remember most vividly, having the
NPC change her decision would have seemed just as realistic--
just as internally consistent--as what she actually did. However,
the GM "knew" what the NPC actually did, and even though the
alternative would have appeared just as realistic (to me and
also, I think, to him) we both felt that violating his sense of
what had actually happened was too high a price to pay.
This is clearly not a pure simulationist game--strict simulation
would never allow the script immunity. But it's a game that
places a huge negative weight on the use of certain tools, *even
when their results would otherwise be desirable*. I would
much rather, personally, have had that NPC do things differently
rather than backing up the whole scene. I suspect the GM would
much rather have had me say "Okay, Markus doesn't kill himself
in response." But both of us realize that if either of us loses
our intuitive mental model of the characters and setting, the
game is belly-up at that point and won't be recoverable.
My experience as a GM is that I can run a campaign which is very
sparing in its use of dramatist tools, or I can run one which
is quite liberal; but the subjective experience of the two games
is strikingly different. The relatively simulationist game
(I don't think I have ever run a strict sim game, and I also don't
think that the triangle is useful only at its corners) is
harder to make work in some ways--it can bog down in over-
or under-sized events, it can go off in troublesome directions--
but in return, once the world model is established I hardly have
to do any work to figure out what's happening in the game world
that will impact the PCs. Events just come bubbling out, NPCs
take on lives of their own, and it's relatively easy to keep
things going.
Conversely, the dramatist-slant games are easier to get going,
and easier to keep in the range of challenges and scenarios that
will work well in play. (It's easier to avoid opponents who are
way too weak or way to strong, for example.) But they never
develop any real event-generators of their own; I have to make
everything up. In one of my Feng Shui games I resorted to having
martial arts tournaments and private challenge matches because
coming up with scenarios was becoming more and more crushingly
hard work. I know, now, not to promise a long campaign with a
drama slant, because I will invariably become too exhausted to
continue after a few dozen sessions.
I cannot see the differences between these games purely as a matter
of more or less emphasis, because subjectively there is a huge
phase change between them. The whole way I have to go about
making up scenarios changes. I don't have conscious control over
where that phase-shift is; I can't say "I'm going to do quite a
lot of contrivance this game, but I'm still going to get events
from a living world model and not 'make them up'." It just doesn't
work. There are certain limited sorts of contrivance I can get
away with, and do; there are many more sorts I can't do at all
without having the phase shift immediately to the dramatist
style and its attendent problems.
My husband works exactly the same way except that the phase-
change point is considerably further over toward the simulationist
end; that is, he has less ability to use drama tools without
being forced into running in the no-world-model style, and he's
also a lot less willing to actually run games in that area.
He finds the work involved so great as to spoil his enthusiasm for
the game.
I'd be interested in seeing a pentad analysis of this (do I need
to provide more details?) but as it now stands, I'm not seeing
any tools I could use to clarify or examine this situation, and
as a result I don't think the pentad is too useful to me. (I
did, however, find the description of an "I care about the setting
but not the PC" style insightful and useful. I hadn't met such
a player before; I'll have to bear their existence in mind.)
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Christopher Pound
Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>The difficulty I'd have with the pentad approach (assuming I
>understand it correctly, which is certainly doubtful) is that
>it seems to present things in terms of "I care a lot about X and
>Y and I'm pretty indifferent to U, V and Z."
>
>One of the observations that drove the construction of the triangle
>is that some players (and GMs) require the *absence* of certain
>tactics in game resolution in order to enjoy the game fully and/or
>to make it work at all. This is not modelled very well by indifference.
Oh, indifference to certain ratios is how I think of my *own* style,
but there's nothing about the pentad to say you can't actively
de-emphasize certain ratios -- ward off certain thoughts and questions
during the game. That doesn't mean those thoughts or questions would
be irrelevant to your game, viewed from outside the game, but simply
that there's a strong injunction against their consideration during the game.
It may help if you think of rudiments of the pentad this way:
What are the circumstances of the act -- its when, where, etc.?
Who are the folks doing the act?
By what means does the act come about?
Toward what ends is the act directed, or what futures belong to it?
What is the act, exactly, as such?
Combined into ratios, the questions get complicated:
Do the circumstances define the character? (scene/agent)
Is there a mechanical way to bring an end about? (agency/purpose)
Et cetera.
If you find yourself repeatedly asking a question, it is emphasized.
If a question makes you go "Don't ask that question!" it is de-emphasized
or restricted or whatever. But such restricted or de-emphasized questions
would probably have answers for almost any RPG, if they were asked. That is,
the matters they address are not absent from the game. It's the question
that is temporarily off limits.
Since you asked for pentadic translation, I'll try to do it at
some key points in your article.
>For example, in the current game we've observed that PC survival
>is necessary for the game to continue, so we have script immunity.
Translation: agent/purpose issue necessitates agency/purpose consideration.
That is, in order to ensure the agent reaches a desirable end
(survival), you introduced a mechanism whereby that end may be assured.
>We've very, very seldom had to invoke it (it would itself become
>a major violation if invoked often). When we *do* use it, we do
>retcons, often throwing away a fair hunk of play.
Translation: agent/act is of great importance but may on rare occasions
be discarded for agent/purpose reasons. Meaning you ordinarily follow
the agent through a realistic chain of events, but on rare occasions,
you break the chain and re-work it so that the agent reaches a more
desirable end (surviving some critical juncture).
>The conclusion we always come to is that we'd run too great a risk
>of breaking the GM's or player's mental model of the character,
>and that such breakage (a) is too high a price to pay for *anything*
>and (b) may not be able to be fixed.
Translation: we think of the agent primarily in terms of the agent/act
ratio, and interrupting that ratio with agent/purpose considerations
endangers our whole sense of the agent.
>I suppose that this fits into the pentad as a very strong emphasis on
>Agent, yes? But the script immunity *also* comes from a very strong
>emphasis on Agent--it is driven by the fact that the player is
>interested, first and foremost, in character relationships, and is
>not willing to deal with the shattering of those relationships by
>one principal's death. And yet they are in conflict here.
Right, the agent/act ratio and agent/purpose ratio are at odds.
>Twice
>in the game the GM has said "I will have to withdraw script immunity
>here. The PC is doing something which, if it goes a certain way,
>he cannot survive without breaking my mental model and destroying
>the game. Just so you know."
Translation: The GM says, "Don't even think about agent/purpose here.
I'm sticking with agent/act, because that's the only ratio that
makes sense to me for this agent and this act."
>I also feel that this differs from your description of the
>simulationist stance in that you emphasize the *appearance* of
>"realism". In the retcon I remember most vividly, having the
>NPC change her decision would have seemed just as realistic--
>just as internally consistent--as what she actually did. However,
>the GM "knew" what the NPC actually did, and even though the
>alternative would have appeared just as realistic (to me and
>also, I think, to him) we both felt that violating his sense of
>what had actually happened was too high a price to pay.
Um, what I *think* I said was this: realism is the appearance of
non-arbitrariness, and the simulationist stance places value on
it. By that definition of realism (which is a common definition
in matters of art and literature), a choose-your-own-adventure
novel probably wouldn't count as a realist novel, because it
shows too much of its own artifice -- its arbitrary mechanism.
That makes a big difference in accounting for your example.
By the average ordinary understanding of "realistic," both
possible NPC actions would be realistic, but by a slightly
more literary definition of "realism," revising the NPC's decision
would highlight the artifice and arbitrariness of the game too much.
A possible analogy comes to mind: suppose you look at a landscape
painting that the painter has divided into two -- one half is painted
realistically in a greener palette, and the other half is painted
in a browner palette. Both sides of the painting are realistic,
but is this painting an example of realism? No, the artifice shows
up too much. It looks like a "test" painting.
>This is clearly not a pure simulationist game--strict simulation
>would never allow the script immunity. But it's a game that
>places a huge negative weight on the use of certain tools, *even
>when their results would otherwise be desirable*.
Yes, it sounds like an agent/act game (which I've associated with
simulationist) that on rare occasions contemplates agent/purpose
and agency/purpose ratios, e.g. "This character needs to live" and
"How are we gonna make the character live?"
>But both of us realize that if either of us loses
>our intuitive mental model of the characters and setting, the
>game is belly-up at that point and won't be recoverable.
This almost sounds like act/agent and act/scene: your understanding
of the agent and the scene is predicated on the action. I have no
idea whether act/agent comes up more for you than agent/act, but
that's OK -- there's no law against moving between ratios in any case.
>My experience as a GM is that I can run a campaign which is very
>sparing in its use of dramatist tools, or I can run one which
>is quite liberal; but the subjective experience of the two games
>is strikingly different.
Yeah, there's no reason why your whole personality has to be
invested in one ratio, such that it's always the guiding ratio
for every game you play. It's quite possible to pursue one
ratio vigorously for one game, limiting the ratios you allow
yourself to consider, then turn around and use the restricted
ratios in another game. That is, you can exclude a *ratio*,
even if the things it asks about are in some sense still "there."
(Remember, the ratios ask about pretty basic things.)
>The relatively simulationist game
>(I don't think I have ever run a strict sim game, and I also don't
>think that the triangle is useful only at its corners) is
>harder to make work in some ways--it can bog down in over-
>or under-sized events, it can go off in troublesome directions--
>but in return, once the world model is established I hardly have
>to do any work to figure out what's happening in the game world
>that will impact the PCs. Events just come bubbling out, NPCs
>take on lives of their own, and it's relatively easy to keep
>things going.
Translation: the relatively simulationist game sometimes bogs
down in the act, but once the scene is established, it generates
acts and agents with no problems. Now, this last part is more
scene/act and scene/agent -- the scene is determinative.
Taking inventory of the ratios that have come up, I see we have ...
agent/act, which you talked about first and which seems to be primary
agent/purpose, a very rare and special consideration
agency/purpose, only considered if agent/purpose is already in view
act/agent, insofar as continuing action makes the agent be who they are
act/scene, insofar as continuing action makes the scene what it is
scene/act, generating ideas of what's happening
scene/agent, giving NPCs lives of their own
I associated almost all of these ratios with simulationist, except
for the two ratios where purpose is a secondary consideration.
For the triangle, this is an ambiguous "mostly simulationist" game.
For the pentad, it's a fairly specific set of ratios in dialectic
(sort of in conversation with each other).
>Conversely, the dramatist-slant games ... never
>develop any real event-generators of their own; I have to make
>everything up ... I know, now, not to promise a long campaign with a
>drama slant, because I will invariably become too exhausted to
>continue after a few dozen sessions.
Translation: purpose/act is a difficult ratio for me; for me, a focus
on ends just cannot be sustained in primary position. I.e. I'd
*guess* you would say much the same about purpose/scene and purpose/agent.
>I cannot see the differences between these games purely as a matter
>of more or less emphasis, because subjectively there is a huge
>phase change between them.
Sure, for one game you have one set of ratios as reference points,
and for the other you have to change all the reference points to
a different set of ratios. I'm not changing the terms of debate
on this -- I still think of "reference points" as emphases, and
I think both games occupy much the same "space." Just imagine trying
to get a very practiced astronomy nut to think of our sky as an
entirely different set of constellations, or imagine the stars from
a point some light years away, where the constellations would look
fairly different ... A change in emphasis or perspective or reference
points can be significantly disorienting or disruptive.
>The whole way I have to go about
>making up scenarios changes. I don't have conscious control over
>where that phase-shift is; I can't say "I'm going to do quite a
>lot of contrivance this game, but I'm still going to get events
>from a living world model and not 'make them up'." It just doesn't
>work. There are certain limited sorts of contrivance I can get
>away with, and do; there are many more sorts I can't do at all
>without having the phase shift immediately to the dramatist
>style and its attendent problems.
My version of this is that I fairly consistently think in terms of
a scene/purpose ratio. I'm always in its gravitational pull.
Continuing with the astronomy metaphors, I can easily imagine the
space of the pentad having, for you, two gravitational wells.
When you're in the pull of one, you're not in the pull of the other.
>I'd be interested in seeing a pentad analysis of this (do I need
>to provide more details?)
More details would doubtless uncover more ratios -- a person or style
is often plural in the pentad -- and might yield interesting information
about what ratio is "primary" and when.
>but as it now stands, I'm not seeing
>any tools I could use to clarify or examine this situation, and
>as a result I don't think the pentad is too useful to me.
Maybe it's not! :)
>(I did, however, find the description of an "I care about the setting
>but not the PC" style insightful and useful. I hadn't met such
>a player before; I'll have to bear their existence in mind.)
Hey, cool, my mom always said I belonged in a zoo.
David Alex Lamb
> think I've met tons and tons of people who care more about
> cleverly manipulating a character's abilities than about "being"
> that character.
>
>Manipulating a character from the author stance and immersing in a character
>from a deep character stance both still focus on the character.
I interpreted Christopher Pound's remark as differentiating people treating a
character as a game token vs people treating a character as an individual with
a consistent personality. Characterizing the "game token" approach as
"author" misses a key distinction. The author/audience/actor/IC stances were
all about experiencing a "narrative"; I don't think that someone taking a
"game token" approach is thinking much a narrative.
--
"Yo' ideas need to be thinked befo' they are say'd" - Ian Lamb, age 3.5
http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~dalamb/
Warren J. Dew
own experience is greatest; on the rest, I've had my say. I've pretty much
despaired of getting my meaning through to Christopher, but I'm hoping that
further elucidation may be of some use to lurkers.
Christopher Pound posts, in part:
OK, realism does *not* mean "mostly based on the real world."
In art and literature, it signifies vividness, precison, and
seeming non-arbitrariness.
Yes; this is why realism has little to do with the world orientation.
Apparent non-arbitrariness is probably key.
No. Apparent non-arbitrariness is only useful for art and literature, for
things for which there is an intended mode of presentation. Appearances assume
a point of view; points of view don't matter to the world orientation.
I also think "world" and "consistency" are mostly different things.
Yes, exactly. And it's the consistency that is really important to the world
orientation, not the appearance - the mere appearance - that there is a world.
You could easily play GURPS set in a featureless gray void
without defining anything else about the *world* at all.
Of course, the GURPS players would have to ask what *rule*
applies to unfolding events in the world: Zero-G rules?
Magic rules? Etc. Yes, that constitutes consistent
information about the nature of the world (the naturalized
conventions for this world, that is), but it tells you
virtually nothing about what I, personally, care about --
the world as such, its history, meanings, and so on.
Yes, exactly. It tells you virtually nothing about what you personally care
about - and it tells me virtually everything about what I personally care
about.
Right. What I did was find elements common to most games
that you had obscured with metaphors like "consistency" or
"story."
It is your insistence on assuming - incorrectly assuming - that I am using
these terms metaphorically that hides my true meaning from you. I am being
literal, not literary.
I think polarization may be a better word, even
if there are three poles in this case
Yes, that is an excellent observation. The points of the triangle are most
definitely poles. If you do not understand the polarization, you do not
understand the model.
Christopher Pound
>own experience is greatest; on the rest, I've had my say. I've pretty much
>despaired of getting my meaning through to Christopher, but I'm hoping that
>further elucidation may be of some use to lurkers.
I'm sorry if I'm being thick. Perhaps you will bear with me a bit longer to
explain a few things. I kind of suspect that I have understood you, so far,
though some of what you say below gave me pause. In fact, I should hope I do
misunderstand you, because if I don't, you're one of those people who
arrogates a "world orientation" only to your own style of play. That would
be much as if your own cautionary words about character (that a lot of
people make the mistake of arrogating "character-based" only to their own
style of play) had come back to bite you on the butt.
> OK, realism does *not* mean "mostly based on the real world."
> In art and literature, it signifies vividness, precison, and
> seeming non-arbitrariness.
>
>Yes; this is why realism has little to do with the world orientation.
Um, who said that it did? I was saying that realism has to do with the
simulationist orientation, which I would differentiate from
a world orientation. I mean, look at the word itself: a simulation
is supposed to be a non-arbitrary model of something else, e.g. reality.
A simulation is generally supposed to reflect something, non-arbitrarily.
(Perhaps it's worth noting that the nature of the reality and the
facts of the world are philosophically very distinct: the
relevant opposition is between what is "necessary" and what is "accidental.")
Some folks want to encounter a gameworld based mainly on the necessary
manner in which its events would unfold (i.e. as act/scene).
A gameworld, on the other hand, can be re-interpreted as you go
along to fit a story (purpose/scene, in Burke's vocabulary), so the
world/scene may be revealed as arbitrary in the course of play.
Me, I'd rather that the gameworld come first, but re-interpretation
and arbitrary directions are good, as long as new details are forthcoming.
According to Kenneth Burke's pentad (and not any idiosyncratic definitions)
that would be a scene/purpose ratio. Yet you failed to describe where
that fits in the triangle. It's not a story orientation -- it's primarily
a world orientation. Perhaps there is a problem with the triangle?
> Apparent non-arbitrariness is probably key.
>
>No. Apparent non-arbitrariness is only useful for art and literature, for
>things for which there is an intended mode of presentation. Appearances
>assume a point of view; points of view don't matter to the world orientation.
See, this makes me think you think simulationist and world-oriented
are the same, and I assure you that I for one love richly detailed
worlds -- it's my primary interest in gaming -- but don't mind
entraining that interest to a point of view, to an engineered storyline,
or whatever it is that may shift world bits around from time to time.
I have no interest in modeling the world, but hey, whatever the GM likes,
if it keeps the richness of the world in play.
When you say what does and doesn't matter to the *world* orientation,
I think that's sort of funny, because the world is all I really care about,
so I feel like I might have some idea what a world orientation would be.
On the other hand, if you would say what does and doesn't matter to
the *simulationist* orientation, that would make sense to me. Then,
I would understand perfectly well that the confusion in our discussion
stems in part from the conflation in "simulationist" of world and reality.
Besides which, the "point of view" for arbitrariness/non-arbitrariness
that I was talking about was what you'd call the "meta-game" perspective.
I rather imagine that you do have a point of view, in that case, else
you're not really there playing the game. What I was saying was that
(for example) the GM's rulings or thoughts about what's happening in
the game should appear non-arbitrary to the players, who will
understand that a given GM judgment is predicated on well-established
precedent judgments about how events work, i.e. the judgments are not
arbitrary. You still think you're the one being misunderstood?
The analogy with realism in art and literature is this: a realist
painting or novel or description of a real-world culture or whatever is to be
perceived by its audience as being in a minimally mediated relationship
with the nature of things. Metaphorically speaking, a game has an
audience, right? The GM and the players are their own audience,
in a sense. So a realist game is to be perceived by its audience
as being in a minimally mediated relationship with the nature of the
matter portrayed -- if the GM doesn't just let events unfold based
on established premises, there's a danger of showing her intermediation.
Hiding it is a matter of appearances, because the GM always
intermediates. It's pretty much the definition of being a GM.
> I also think "world" and "consistency" are mostly different things.
>
>Yes, exactly. And it's the consistency that is really important to the world
>orientation, not the appearance - the mere appearance - that there is a world.
There you go. In pentadic terms, you are describing an act/scene focus.
Acts occur as they "should" all the time, yielding a consistent world.
In pentadic terms, I have a scene/purpose focus: when I GM, I think about
what the "cool" things are in the world, and bend and twist them to make
a good story based on them. Perhaps you would say I am concerned with
the "mere appearance" that there is a world, but I don't know what that
would mean -- that it's just a prop? I never said that the simulationist
cares for the appearance of the _world_; I said that the simulationist
would probably care for the appearance of the world's _non-arbitrariness_.
That is, they wouldn't much appreciate a lot of authorial manipulation
of the world as the game unfolds. I must not have explained that well
the first time, because Mary Kuhner gave it the same reading you did.
Anyway, when you go telling me what is "really important to the world
orientation," you presume that I do not have it myself. I find that peculiar
for any reasonable meaning of "world," because that's exactly what I orient
myself toward -- but what you say is "really important to the world
orientation" isn't important to me at all. Hm.
> You could easily play GURPS set in a featureless gray void
> without defining anything else about the *world* at all.
> Of course, the GURPS players would have to ask what *rule*
> applies to unfolding events in the world: Zero-G rules?
> Magic rules? Etc. Yes, that constitutes consistent
> information about the nature of the world (the naturalized
> conventions for this world, that is), but it tells you
> virtually nothing about what I, personally, care about --
> the world as such, its history, meanings, and so on.
>
>Yes, exactly. It tells you virtually nothing about what you personally care
>about - and it tells me virtually everything about what I personally care
>about.
Right. I understand that, at least. And in that case it's for sure
your perspective translates into the pentad as primarily an act focus.
Seriously, you can object to being translated -- I know it's a twisted
process, and I object personally to be translated into the triangle.
And, I'd be very interested in an argument that shows how the pentad
misses something really important. But, with the pentad, Burke would
say "act/scene" to describe consistency of events revealing a consistent
world, or would say "scene/act" to describe a well-established scene
that runs according to its own well-defined reasons to produce necessarily
unfolding events. Do either of those sound familiar? Burke would also
say "scene/purpose" to describe a well-established scene that is used
as the basis for stories that may involve some authorial manipulation.
What Burke would say seems fairly clear. Tell me what he's missing!
Let's look at this again:
You care about consistency of action, given the nature of the world.
I care about the world as such, its history, meanings, and so on.
Which of these do you think is "the" world-orientation? I'd rather do
without the presumption that one of these is "the" world-orientation.
I'd rather call the first an act focus and the latter a scene focus.
By the way, don't try to tell me that simulationist and world
orientation have always been equated in this newsgroup. Or rather,
feel free, but then you'll be the one who needs to be reminded
that this debate has come up several times before. I recall folks
who equated the two being the most *vociferous*, which only goes
to show your earlier point to the effect that relying too much on what one
person thinks of the triangle is presumptuous and misleading.
> Right. What I did was find elements common to most games
> that you had obscured with metaphors like "consistency" or
> "story."
>
>It is your insistence on assuming - incorrectly assuming - that I am using
>these terms metaphorically that hides my true meaning from you. I am being
>literal, not literary.
OK, tell me this: when you said a game may have "story concerns," how is that
not a metaphor? I mean, it's a _game_, not a story. To say that the
game is a story is just what exactly if not a metaphor? Metaphors
are not mere literary embellishments -- they have effects in everyday
life. For example, to call someone a pig to their face would quite
likely have an effect. And to say that your game will be a kind of story
will likely have the effect of making you project its resolution,
as you play (a la Theatrix). Both of these examples show what is often
called the rhetorical construction of everyday life, in which metaphor
is a key process, not just something you see in a haiku.
In other words, metaphors ain't necessarily literary. When you call
a Usenet post a "flame" -- that's a metaphor. In fact, when you call
it a "post" -- that's a metaphor (as in "Post no bills"). Metaphor
is an elementary fact of linguistics. It's an integral process for
even the most common meanings of words, but it's especially relevant
to the often imaginary aspects of stuff like, oh say, Usenet and RPGs.
The only thing close to a "literal" meaning for "story concerns" in
rpgs would be concerns with the prose bits a lot of gamebooks begin
with, or perhaps an in-game storytelling contest between characters
where they each make up a story (either in a game like Runequest or
through a game like Baron Munchausen). But to concern oneself with the
metaphor of story may have profound effects on the structure of
an rpg, e.g. engendering Theatrix or so-called story-telling rpgs.
> I think polarization may be a better word, even
> if there are three poles in this case
>
>Yes, that is an excellent observation. The points of the triangle are most
>definitely poles. If you do not understand the polarization, you do not
>understand the model.
I think I do understand the polarization and the model. I suspect you
think simulationist is "the" world orientation, which is why you
incorrectly described me as having a story orientation. Yes, I'd
prefer that a "story" (metaphorically speaking) be the secondary goal
of the game, and no, I don't care about "modeling" the world;
however, my primary interest does lie with the world -- Glorantha, Tekumel,
or Jorune for example -- and its richness or strangeness. I don't
give a fig about any story set in a dull world -- no matter how intricate
the plot or how compelling the characters. Start with a detailed
world, *then* tell a good story (or at least tell me more about the world).
So tell me again how imaginary polarization is useful in describing
my style of play?