Critical Narrative Essay Topics Caraoke Crystal Real
Taichi Reilly
Acknowledgments are due to Mike Holmes, Ralph Mazza, Christopher Kubasik, Jesse Burneko, Paul Czege, Clinton R. Nixon, Vincent Baker, Seth Ben-Ezra, M. J. Young, Chris Chinn, Pete Darby, Gordon C. Landis, Walt Freitag, and Matt Snyder for comments on the first draft of this essay. All mistakes or misattributions should be considered my responsibility.
This is the third of three essays building upon the topics addressed in "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory" ( -rpgs.com/articles/1/). The previous two essays were "Simulationism: The Right to Dream" ( -rpgs.com/articles/15/), and "Gamism: Step On Up" ( -rpgs.com/articles/21/). This series' purposes are to clarify the original essay and to develop and incorporate insights from discussions at the Forge.
This one is about Narrativist play, which is simultaneously the least and most problematic of the Creative Agendas I've described. It's incredibly easy in application, and the most difficult for discussion. I think that this difficulty lies mainly in some of the peculiarities of role-player/gamer culture, entrenched in the history of the hobby, rather than any particular logical or cognitive hitches in the mode of play itself.
In the first two essays, I began presenting an overall model of role-playing, but piecemeal and in stumbling verbal form. As of this writing, I've finished that model, and it is included here as well. It's a bit out of place, being more of a capstone or umbrella to the three essays rather than an intrinsic piece of the Narrativist one. More complete discussions about it may also be found in "The whole model - this is it" ( -rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8655).
At this point, since "Drama" as a resolution category in Tweet's schema and "Dramatism" as a goals-category in the Threefold referred to two different things, I decided that the names were confusing. Going by which set of ideas was first presented (Tweet's), I changed Dramatism to Narrativism. This terminological change was limited to discussions on the Sorcerer mailing list and later at the Gaming Outpost.
However, our use of the terms and ideas on the Sorcerer mailing list took on its own character almost immediately, such that in my first essay "System Does Matter" ( -rpgs.com/articles/11/), "story" was already its own distinct, process-oriented term.
The biggest change in my thinking about role-playing is represented in the essay "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory" ( -rpgs.com/articles/1/), in which the concept of Exploration becomes the underlying foundation for the three modes or goals of play. This new picture was startling: (1) potential story elements were now considered present for all three modes play, and (2)Narrativism now appeared to be a mirror image or twin sibling of Gamism, counter to older impressions shared by me and anyone else who ever wrote about role-playing that Gamism was the odd man out.
I've tried to emphasize this new outlook throughout these three supportive essays. Whereas I think most people think of Gamism with (or synonymous with) its Hard Core variant over in one ballpark, with Simulationism containing an internal "story" variant in another ballpark, my concepts are radically different. I hope to make this picture, and its implications, entirely clear in this essay.
Here's the big ol' model for role-playing that the previous two essays sort of fumbled at. Notice that "rules" are absent; I now consider "rules" simply to mean text, which may be about anything you find in the model. The brackets are very important: if B relates to A as [A[B]], then B is considered a part, application, version, or expression of A.
[Social Contract]. Social Contract encompasses everything else about role-playing. If these people happen to be role-playing together, then Social Contract crucially includes "Let's play this game." This crucial element is what's further subdivided throughout the rest of this model.
[Social Contract [Exploration]]. Exploration means "shared imaginings." The sharing has to be explicit and agreed upon, usually through the spoken word although any form of communication counts. The imaginings have to be the subject that is shared, which is why me reading aloud to my wife does not constitute Exploration. We are independently imagining based on the spoken word, but neither she nor I is telling the other what we imagine from that point. Exploration means that such communication is occurring.
The five elements of Exploration are interdependent: Character + Setting make Situation, System permits Situation to "move," and Color affects all the others. This concept applies only to the imaginary causes among the elements; the real people's actual priority or cause among these things, in social and creative terms, varies widely. See my essay "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory" ( -rpgs.com/articles/1/) for more about these elements.
[Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda]]]. Creative Agenda is the blanket term for people's demonstrated goals and desired feedback during play. In the past, I called it "GNS." Since all of this is enclosed in Social Contract, GNS-stuff is not only "what I want" but also "what I want from role-playing with this group of people." Since Exploration necessarily includes System, that means, as soon as we start talking about Creative Agenda, real play has begun.
On paper, I draw this term as an arrow, because this "step" or "level" in my model shifts out of the abstract and solidly into this group, playing this game, this way, at this time. The model instantly ceases to be a broad overview and becomes a diagnostic or description of a real play-experience among real people. Unless you are thinking of such a case, you will be left flailing at this point in the discussion.
[Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda --> [Techniques]]]]. The panoply of Techniques being employed over time either satisfy or fail to satisfy one or more Creative Agendas. Techniques include IIEE, Drama/Karma/Fortune, search time & handling time, narration apportioning, reward system, points of contact, character components, scene framing, currency among the character components, and much more. Each of these terms represents a range of potential play-methods. I consider the two most important Techniques to be reward system and IIEE (see glossary).
Techniques may be thought of as directly expressing the more abstract concept of System (way up in Exploration), except that System doesn't exist all by itself - it's fully integrated with the other components of Exploration. But if you keep that in mind, then yes, the arrow represented by Creative Agenda can indeed be "shot" from the bow of System.
[Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda --> [Techniques [Ephemera]]]]]. Ephemera refers to the smallest-scale interactions and activities of role-playing: anything that gets factored into or is expressed by play in the space of a few seconds. As with every level/box so far, fairly extensive combinations of Ephemera express or apply to one or more Techniques. They are the internal anatomy, if you will, of Techniques and hence (conceptualizing upward) of System.
Ephemera include individual Stances, in-character vs. out-of-character diction and dialogue, referring to texts, sound effects, taking or referring to notes, kibitzing, laughing, praise or disapproval, showing pictures, and anything similar.
Long ago, I concluded that "story" as a role-playing term was standing in for several different processes and goals, some of which were incompatible. Here's the terms-breakdown I'll be using from now on.
All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.
Lord Gyrax rules over a realm in which a big dragon has begun to ravage the countryside. The lord prepares himself to deal with it, perhaps trying to settle some internal strife among his followers or allies. He also meets this beautiful, mysterious woman named Javenne who aids him at times, and they develop a romance. Then he learns that she and the dragon are one and the same, as she's been cursed to become a dragon periodically in a kind of Ladyhawke situation, and he must decide whether to kill her. Meanwhile, she struggles to control the curse, using her dragon-powers to quell an uprising in the realm led by a traitorous ally. Eventually he goes to the Underworld instead and confronts the god who cursed her, and trades his youth to the god to lift the curse. He returns, and the curse is detached from her, but still rampaging around as a dragon. So they slay the dragon together, and return as a couple, still united although he's now all old, to his home.
The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue.
Developing the issue as a source of continued conflict, perhaps changing any number of things about it, such as which side is being taken by a given character, or providing more depth to why the antagonistic side of the issue exists at all.
Can it really be that easy? Yes, Narrativism is that easy. The Now refers to the people, during actual play, focusing their imagination to create those emotional moments of decision-making and action, and paying attention to one another as they do it. To do that, they relate to "the story" very much as authors do for novels, as playwrights do for plays, and screenwriters do for film at the creative moment or moments. Think of the Now as meaning, "in the moment," or "engaged in doing it," in terms of input and emotional feedback among one another. The Now also means "get to it," in which "it" refers to any Explorative element or combination of elements that increases the enjoyment of that issue I'm talking about.
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