This post is an attempt to sketch why story games are significant to me.
Before I do that, a quick breakdown of the term: story games are tools we use to have fun, tell stories and roleplay. They use rules (many centered around chance) and structures to guide players to the same creative page, and to shake things up and provide the unexpected. Someone once described them as “instructions for using your imagination” (Nathanael Phillip Cole, though he was being ironic) and someone else once described them as “stories you play” (Matt Snyder). I like both of those descriptions.
Alright, for those of us who are invested in the definition of the term, let’s not get caught up on it right now.
There are a lot of different explanations about what story games do, and about why we care about them. Some people say they create stories, and that stories are really important to us, and that this is the utmost truth of the matter. Well, in truth, story games produce some pretty sub-par stories. We leave critical situations up to chance (we literally hardcode this into most games), we divide authority across the moving parts rather than across lines of movement (which helps keep things concrete, but does not help create meaningful stories). While we are definitely creating stories, this is not the most important thing. Games which generate almost no plot, but have plenty of minutae and dialogue, are often really rewarding. Some people say they inhabit roles, and that roleplaying is really important to us, and that this is the utmost truth of the matter. But, we distance ourselves from these roles almost intentionally. We ask people to stay seated while playing, much of the time. We use numbers and papers and resources to give ourselves a comfortable, protected distance. While we are definitely roleplaying, we have clearly put that second to something.
Here is something that I find a lot more accurate and resonant than either of those suggestions. Roleplaying games create experiences. Experiences that we haven’t had the opportunity to live through. They allow us to recontextualize our paradigms, challenge us to see things in a new light, explore the casaulity of something, regardless of how realistic that something might be.
This was put really well by a man named Malcolm Sheppard. I quote:
Memories are unkind. Even the sweetest ones are tinged by the fact that the experience has fled. A memory is a funeral for experience. Roleplaying games are designed to create those funerals. It’s the way they work.
Awesome. I’ve been using the moniker/label Buried Without Ceremony for various projects for a while. When I read that quote by Malcolm, I was suddenly filled with this sense of “yes!”. This is the very same sentiment I wanted to communicate.
Roleplaying games/story games create experiences. We live them for a moment, they die as we return to our actual selves, and we promptly bury them without ceremony. These are phantoms that have existed for us alone, and the joy of it all is two-fold. We owe them nothing. We can take from them what we want to.
Do we feel the need to draw something poignant out of our sessions of play? No. Could we? Yes. No matter what we choose to do with those experiences, we cannot be accused of being selfish. We created them in order to bury them. Everything else is what we want to make of it.
It’s a pretty heady feeling.
Joe,
I really enjoy the direction you’re going with this. I think that what you’re raising is a really awesome and important part of what we do. In psychology, we talk about simulation, mental time travel, and mental models of reality.
That being said, I think that it’s a mistake to dismiss the value of the construction of narrative and of the perspective-taking entailed in role-playing. I think that these things are, both of them, also very important parts of story games. There’s a lot of research evidence for the value of these two things.
In my game circles, we strive to create awesome stories, and we strive to get extremely close to our characters.
I think that these things are a part of games for a reason, even if, in most games, they are dumbed down considerably.
I was thinking about this and I just wanted to drop this out there.
I think that gaming, for me, acts as a stand in for these activities:
Watching a Movie with Friends
Attending Group Therapy
Artistic Brainstorming
For me, I think a big part of its appeal is that it does all of these things so well, and can therefore leave me feeling accomplished, inspired, entertained, and wise.
Hey Julian, thanks for commenting. Can you unpack what the phrase “mental models of reality” means?
I am not suggesting that we dismiss story/the construction of narrative, nor the assumption of roles. These are necessary and vital parts of the experience. But check this out: when you design a story game to deliver upon acting + immersion firstmost, you often have a flat result. When you design a story game to deliver upon story + structure firstmost, you often have a contrived result(best argued here: http://mightyatom.blogspot.com/2009/03/why-i-always-use-term-story-games.html). Ultimately, these turn out to be quite hit-and-miss goals for design or play.
They exist best when they are allowed to be emergent to some degree.
Because neither is the fundamental activity. The fundamental activity is creating and handling experiences. This isn’t something that I’m suggesting (and I am merely suggesting it, despite strong wording) idly; designing games to provoke a certain experience (as opposed to a certain story or a certain roleplaying modality) leads to strong results. My best design work (namely Ribbon Drive) was experience-oriented. The best roleplaying poems are experience-oriented. My favourite games are experience-oriented.
Think about Don’t Rest Your Head. “What’s Your Path” is the single uninteresting thing on the character sheet. Don’t Rest Your Head is not about creating fundamentally powerful stories. It’s also not about inhabitting a role in a particular way – I’ve played many DRYH games with many different styles of acting/immersion. It’s about capturing an experience – the experience of being frazzled, of being burnt out, of being confused, of being bombarded. The game is engineered to deliver an experience (story and immersion be damned!), and this is its shining glory. Story definitely emerges (sometimes poignant and wonderous), as does roleplaying (sometimes heated and loud, sometimes exploratory, sometimes receptive, sometimes really driving).
Just as an example.
Joe, I’m very interested in what you’re saying here.
“Mental models of reality” is one way that psychologists talk about predictive simulations which we run in our heads. It’s generally believed that these models have offered a strong survival advantage to humans, by allowing us to symbolically predict occurrences and what we would feel about them, and thereby to make decisions which better prepare for difficult choices in the future. According to some, this is the sole function of narrative. Personally, I certainly don’t think that’s all that narrative (or storygames) does for us by any means, but I suspect that the evolutionary piece there is *part* of the puzzle.
It seems to me that this “experience” that you’re talking about is a physiological state, or filter, through which we receive the story and our characters. Some might call it the “tone” of the game.
It also seems to me that this way of receiving is, when it’s working, really what focuses the players so that they are on the same page. Without that shared lens, that shared world that comes about through that way of viewing, collaborative stories often fall flat because we all pull in different directions.
What you’re talking about almost seems to me to be the “Deep Theme”. This is not a kind of theme that can easily be expressed in words, and it is why very different kinds of occurrences and plots can sometimes feel like they are appropriate in in the same story. If they are both tied into this elusive “experience”, then they can fit regardless.
I think that when we strive to be explicit about what our story is “about”, we are grappling with trying to all look through the same lens. It is very satisfying when achieved, but getting there from scratch can be the source of frustration.
Let me know how you jive with this, or if we are ships sailing by in the night.
Wow. I totally commented on this thread days ago but my comment never showed up. Oh well.
I agree: create (no, even better: discover) and share experiences. Story and character will emerge from this. Currently I want to remove all the impediments to experiencing fully the SIS possible, from rules learning, to wanting to say something “clever”.
My original comment concerned the fact that when we give birth to these experiences, perhaps we do owe them some recognition; perhaps “buried without ceremony” refers to our past trespasses, not our future commitments? Would honoring our shared experience with ceremony enrich and empower it even further?
#1: I believe that offering substantive “ceremony” to these experiences we create would empower and enrich them. I really do. In this sense, perhaps (perhaps!) “buried without ceremony” refers to a our historical relationship to these dream-beings we create together, now possibly transforming before us.
What would it look like if we gave thanks and gifts to the experience itself? What if we gave the story credit for our new relationships with each other, rather than to our playmates, or the story engine?
I like your explanation of Deep Theme, and to an extent that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Caveat: I think this experience/deep theme thing is less about lens and more about what we’re trying to see. It’s a filter, too, DEFINITELY, but it’s predominantly our goal.
Really good example: In this game of Ribbon Drive I played at Gamestorm, when I sat down with the group I was to play with, I was leery. Rather, I didn’t feel a huge amount of trust for the 3 players I’d never played a game with before. Almost immediately, however, they had earned my full and absolute trust. What caused that? There was a moment where one of the characters was muttering about how the radio was busted. Two other characters were having a bickering moment over something inane, and then the first character chimed back in with “fucking radio.” Then there was a moment where we were all kind of silent, and it was obvious that we were all imagining ourselves in this car, with nothing worth saying, listening to a busted up radio try to work. And we ended the scene there, with everyone satisfied. And I knew, RIGHT THEN, that they understood the experience we wanted.
When we got to the big finale scene, it was so downplayed that it barely happened. Someone introduced the situation, and suddenly we all had it. And while Gilbert did introduce a really interesting and powerful ending narration, what was more important was that we’d set our lens to this one particular experience, and in that moment he underscored the entire thing with this new context. The “ideal experience” was our lens and our goal.
Hm, Willem.
I like that notion. And in an interesting way, I find it congruent with what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is that the experiences which we might find most valuable are the ones which we hold no responsibility to. Story games produce these experiences. The burial I speak of is two-fold: of the RESPONSIBILITY to respond to the experience; of the experience still existing in our present life (though it’s memory is with us, it’s implications and presence isn’t). The use of the word ceremony here does not imply “respect”, but rather “expectation” and “custom”.
So, burying without ceremony: a right to do what we want with what we’ve created, because our obligation to it died the moment we stood from that table. We emerge free of custom, free of duty, free of shackles.
I am pretty sure that can dovetail splendidly with your sentiment.
*is silent as according to the rules of The Very Quiet Council*
The post which makes me want to respond regards our Ribbon Drive session. Was it awesome? Yes, but not in a way that almost any other story game tries to be. This is going to ramble a bit.
I think I am falling into questions of attribution here. In the OP you frequently give credit to the game for the creation. I think this is a trap. The players create the story and the structure of the game is the guide, the underlying influence to help foster and align creative thinking. By this thinking, we discover experience through the structure, not the structure creating experience with and for us (this is where that distniction is falling for me Willem. given our discussion on definitions, I feel this is important).
I think Julian’s point about what the story is about is both highly important and partially misguided. I think in the context it was intended, this issue of alignment is key to understand if we are to improve our play. Something I think was missing from the OP is the idea that these activities are essentially collaborative. When I read what Julian said I think about how to encourage the collaboration to work toward commonly desired experiences which, as our experience shows, frequently fails to happen.
The misguided bit relates how story is beginning to come together in my mind as a powerful structure which engages our thinking in deep and powerful ways, but perhaps not the important structure to ultimately focus on. I think that Joe is right when he says that we often make bad stories but have good experinces. This makes me want to dissect what Julian said regarding the relationship between experience and story. He proposed that experience is the “tone” of play through which story is experienced. I think that is almost perfectly backward and that the story is the “tone” of play and through that tone we discover experience.
To bring this back around to Ribbon Drive, the structure didn’t create the experience, but the total structure (pointing at your desire to not publish games) aligned our creativity, the story set and reinforced a tone through which we were able to create a sustained series of meaningful experiences. I think all of this is something we both would like to be able to reproduce effectively, but I also get the feeling we don’t really understand what exactly it took to bring it all together as effectively as it did that day.
Hey Elegua, I’m glad you’re here.
I’m confused about how “tone” could possibly be the story, as opposed to the experience. But I think that maybe it’s just getting too esoteric for me, so maybe an explanation wouldn’t be useful… hm.
I totally wasn’t meaning to say “good design creates good experiences”. I was meaning to say “good design guides players toward creating good experiences”.
This post was inspired by a few very specific gaming events: playing The Prince’s Kingdom at Gencon 06, playing Ribbon Drive at Gamestorm 09, playing In A Wicked Age last weekend. These three games have fundamentally rocked. The Prince’s Kingdom had a good story. Ribbon Drive had good characterization. But all three had… something, and whatever that something was, it was the key thing. That’s what got me thinking (again) about the creation and processing of experience as the core activity of story gaming.
I agree that we aren’t at a point where we recreate our best work often enough. This blog is my attempt at getting closer.
I don’t think I am in the state to try an explanation which would make it any less esoteric for me, but perhaps a statement of the relationship might help.
Ideas of “tone”, “story”, and “experience” are all highly interrelated. They each influence the others in interesting ways. In story games our experiences add to the story and the story guides us to make certain types of experiences. I think that this story to experience transfer happens through what I conceive of as tone. The tone of the story tells me if it is appropriate to have my character do a pratfall, or kill a stranger and hide tho body, or whatever. Experiences can cause the story’s tone to shift. Really, this is coming back around to my feeling that “story” is an important element to what we are doing, but perhaps not the central element, which is I think in the same direction you are headed here.
“Experiences can cause the story’s tone to shift. Really, this is coming back around to my feeling that “story” is an important element to what we are doing, but perhaps not the central element, which is I think in the same direction you are headed here.”
*is silent for at least one minute, as per the rules of The Very Quiet Council.*
Reading this makes me happy. I don’t have any more ideas to engage here, I just want you to know that we’ve found common ground.
Cool.
Also, these reply windows are getting VERY narrow at this point. Maybe I’ll have to adjust the width of the main column (CSS people? how does that happen?)
Just a quick note to say how much I appreciate this discussion. After a couple of great gaming experiences I was inspired to write a game that would encourage more such events. Unfortunately my attempts have been very mixed in playtesting, and I haven’t been able to figure out why. But now I think you folks have expressed something that gets to the heart of the matter. If you’re right, the best games will be those that effectively encourage certain types of experiences. How to do that? That’s where I’ll be focusing my next fumbling game design attempts, and not quite so much on story structure. Thanks!!!!
Manu,
Welcome.
“How to do that?”
Well, what kind of experience are you going for?
One thing I’ve found really helpful is to think about the around-the-table behaviours you are looking for, and try to facilitate them.
As an example, I wanted my game Ribbon drive (about road trips, mix tapes, and letting go) to be really slow-paced and meandering. There are rules that give you mechanical rights if you are the last person to speak up during a scene. Scene framing depends on listening to the song that’s playing at the time. In order to be successful at overcoming Obstacles later in the game, you need to share parts of your character through straight exposition now (but there’s always the option to just avoid an Obstacle, instead). These are things which try to facilitate slow scenes, simple exposition, awareness of the music playing, etc.
What’s your game? I don’t think we should get into it here, but my email is joethomasmcdonald at gmail.
Thanks! I sent you a personal email on this subject. Best Wishes, Manu