May

19

Hunting Rabbits (Shh…)

Promotion / Telling Stories Together

I’m currently working on a story game called Ribbon Drive. It’s taken my heart by storm, and I’m really excited about its upcoming release. Ribbon Drive is a game where you tell a story about a road trip, and all the meaning and contemplation that pours out of it. It’s a game about letting go on the open road. The game uses mix CDs as a driving force to shape play.

One of the most successful parts of play, I’ve found, is the opening. We shuffle the mix CDs. We draw one at random, put it in the machine, and press play. We listen to to the first song in silence. Afterwards, we pause the CD and interpret how that first song lends to a road trip premise. We use it as a foundation point for our story. Why has this stage been successful? Well, all we’re asking is that you listen to a song (which had an equal opportunity of being your song, and might well be) and think about it. Participation seems to require very little.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: being both present and silent is very hard for some people, myself included. There’ve been games of Ribbon Drive where I’ve put down the lyrics to the song while it played; people who felt most comfortable tracking the words would do so. In games where I didn’t offer this thing to do, where your options were to either close your eyes or look around the room, the vibe I got was significantly different. It was a bit anxious, in that people seemed a little less comfortable in their own skin. There was reservation about sharing their opinions afterwards.

Being both present and silent is hard. Experiment: try to meet and hold someone’s gaze for fifteen seconds, without either of you saying anything. You can repeat this experiment as many times a day as you like. See how many people break this gaze. See how often you break this gaze. Does it feel comfortable and natural? My answers are, pretty invariably: almost everyone; almost every time someone else doesn’t; no.

Silence, as a form of communication, is underexplored, because it is difficult and often misread. I’m not talking about shutting up, nor am I talking about the silent treatment(ie, using silence to communicate how you are unengaged), but rather silence as a tool for active, engaged participation. Before I get farther into why this might be difficult for us, let’s look at how silence could be used as a tool.

Silence Can Demonstrate Agreement. Silence can demonstrate the absence of objections, the support of the speaker. It can demonstrate your belief that their argument is without necessary additions or revisions. Danger: this silence can also be a sign that a communicator lacks confidence that they and their concerns will be met fairly.

Silence Can Demonstrate Engaged Listening. Silence can demonstrate that one is focused on listening and appreciating. If the speaker has paused or stopped, and the listener is still silent, this could be seen as a signal that the listener is interested in hearing more. Danger: this silence could also be seen as non-participatory listening, and might be used when the listener is incapable of meaningful engagement.

Silence Can Demonstrate Ongoing Consideration. Silence can demonstrate that one is taking time to mull over the idea and consider its applications before challenging it or moving on. Silence could signify that one is interested in this idea to the extent that they would prefer to stay with it, rather than keep advancing the conversation. Danger: this silence could also mean that the ideas aren’t worth engaging, or that the silent party is unsure how to engage a response.

Silence Can Demonstrate Your Priorities. Silence can carry the very powerful message that you care more about hearing another’s ideas than sharing your own. This is a form of permission-granting similar to Silence Can Demonstrate Agreement, but coupled with a statement of preference. Danger: this silence can also demonstrate that you feel your priorities are invalid, or that you won’t be given due spotlight (and so are resigned to another’s communicative priorities).

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May

11

Discord, Discourse and Meaningless Interactions

Telling Stories Together

I go hurtling forward, and for a second there it must seem like I’m going to hit him, because in a flash he’s got both of his hands wrapped around my neck. Panic floods my vision; we make eye contact. His grip loosens and he slowly pulls his hands back. We communicate as much with our eyes and body language as we can, considering we’re in a dark room packed with people. “Sorry,” he yells, “I thought you were about to punch me.”
“No. I was only going to shove you.”
“Yeah, okay.”
We start dancing again, timidly at first. We’re back to moshing within a handful of moments.

I don’t think there’s a universally-established code of conduct for moshes. I certainly haven’t heard of one. Some people go in looking for a friendly, physical release; others go in looking for a fight. Some people will be really upset (in the “dude, wtf, that’s not cool” way) if you throw a punch at them. What’s even more disparate than the assumed conduct of a mosh is the assumed point. I’ve definitely collided with people who I could tell were going into it with something very different in mind. At a Mindless Self Indulgence concert two years ago, the guy next to me whispered to his friend, “next song, I’m totally going to hurt someone.” At the start of the next song, he ran, jumped into the air, and planted both of his feet squarely in the small of someone’s back. She hit the ground hard. I still have no idea what the hell was going through his head.

Moshing is a discourse that takes place with no meaning. It could be argued that there is some hidden language to moshing, some collective consciousness that we are exploring. I refute these arguments. What goes on when someone moshes? I’d argue that the only universal constant is release. Release does not equate meaning. There is no significance to the interactions that take place during moshing.

Evidence to support this claim, that these interactions take place without meaing:
1.) “I thought you were about to punch me.” “No. I was only going to shove you.” “Yeah, okay.”
2.) The same evening, there was a guy who I was moshing with. He’d hit me really hard, attempting to knock me off my feet, and then extend an arm to help me stabilize so I wouldn’t fall and get trampled. He was straight-up attempting to knock me over, but then was counter-balancing that by keeping me upright. Knocking me over solely for the sake of knocking me over.

I’d like to suggest that release can be a goal, and achieving meaning can be a goal, and that expressing meaning can be a goal. And I’d like to suggest that even when goals work in tandem, the more goals that you have, the less energy you are able to devote to each. In order to achieve the strongest release, you need to isolate and remove meaning (at least as a goal, preferably also as an in-the-moment side-effect).

Where do we see this happening? Moshing, as I’ve argued. As far as musical genres, breakcore and extreme noise. In movies, some avant-garde surrealist work. I’d argue Eraserhead. Certain drugs. What does these things have in common?

Discord.

Let’s use games as a lens for analyzing discord and the reduction of meaning. Sociologist Roger Caillois identifies, as one kind of play, ilinx. Ilinx is defined as play “…based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist[s] of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.”

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May

06

The Internet Already Exists

Telling Stories Together

I’m not a fan of people expecting other people to prime themselves for internet conversations.
Come as you are.

But! If you’re interested in reading some of the things that have inspired my thinking lately and in the past…

Play Passionately: Introduction
“To me, a game is most fun when there’s an element of social risk. When playing passionately there are two layers to that risk. The first is the same as any collaborative creative endeavor: Failure. Simply, the game or some part of the game and the created fiction might suck or be no fun. It might take some practice or critical thought to understand exactly what went wrong and how to avoid disappointment in the future.

The second layer of social risk is, perhaps, a bit more controversial. Plainly, you might get hurt or offended. Playing passionately involves an element of emotional vulnerability, putting a little of yourself out onto the table for others to poke and prod. It’s about finding the uncomfortable spaces inside us and deliberately bringing them out into the light. That kind of honesty brings us closer together through vulnerability, trust and shared pain.” – Jesse Burneko

The College of Mythic Cartography: What Does Fluency Mean?
“Notice the distinction there; in our modern culture we value the amount of facts you carry. In an animist culture we value the amount of questions.

In a modern sense, to “know” something means to have an intellectual understanding of it, though the execution of it may elude you. In an animist sense, to “know” something means you feel comfortable in your skin about it, that you can implement this knowledge easily and gracefully. Essentially, this underscores the difference between learning a language, and gaining fluency in a language.” -Willem Larsen

M: The Way It Is (this post is, in my opinion, absolutely beautiful. I don’t read this blog, though.)
“You are not sharing an experience. You are alone. You are not a fucking “protagonist” awaiting contrivances. You can’t have what you want in character. You can’t have what you want out of character. Nobody says yes. You do not get to roll the fucking dice. It isn’t safe, and when I say that I don’t mean the vapid, pathetic usage of “unsafe” that is in fact very fucking safe. You do not know if you are angry, or if the character is angry.

You don’t get to choose.

That’s when you’ll abandon the geek-guilt and stop trying to ape the idiotic 19th Century, High School English conception of story. That’s when you will embrace the form for what it can do. That’s when you will remember. Not invent. Remember.” -Malcolm Sheppard

Roleplaying Theory, Hardcore: A Small Thing About Suspense (scroll down to find it)
“Suspense doesn’t come from uncertain outcomes. I have no doubt, not one shread of measly doubt, that Babe the pig is going to wow the sheepdog trial audience. Neither do you. But we’re on the edge of our seats! What’s up with that?
Suspense comes from putting off the inevitable. What’s up with that is, we know that Babe is going to win, but we don’t know what it will cost.” -Vincent Baker

The Centre for Nonviolent Communication: List of Needs (also, the List of Feelings)
[This list] is meant as a starting place to support anyone who wishes to engage in a process of deepening self-discovery and to facilitate greater understanding and connection between people.

Maybe in spots these are disparate. One is a bitter rant where a designer calls out people from a different school of design. One is story theory. One is a philosophy of learning, another a philosophy of shared narrative. The last is a laundry list of legitimate needs (linked to a list of feelings). But, anyways, I wanted to link-drop them all, so as to give avid readers a common ground to build with me upon.

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May

05

Trust, criticism and traipsing

Telling Stories Together

As far as I can tell, there are two types of creative criticism. The first is preference. To look at a situation and say, “I would like this more if  X.” The second is approval. To look at a situation and say, “I think this is good, because of Y.”

As far as I can tell, one is harmful to the artistic process. That one is approval, and the reason lies in the negative space it creates. Approval suggests the existence of disapproval. Even worse than that, approval suggests the legitimacy of seeking external validation for your contributions. To unpack both slightly…

Approval suggests the existence of disapproval. It says, “This is good, because of Y.” It also implies, “If you didn’t do Y, it might not have been good.” This can cause creative paralysis: if you do Y again, it will be good again. If you try something new, it runs the risk of not being good.  It creates safety zones based on what we’ve already seen, and in doing so undermines the safety zone of the unknown. And the unknown is what we’re seeking, right?

Approval suggests the legitimacy of seeking external validation for your contributions. If you give someone approval, you suggest that approval is a useful thing. You also suggest that they didn’t begin with approval. You also suggest that the approval of their ideas is in your control. What do these three things work in tandem to create? A hierarchy.

But, don’t people really like approval? Yes. And if approval didn’t exist as a filter for what is good and what isn’t, wouldn’t our world be saturated by useless shit? Yes. So, doesn’t it stand to reason that approval should be part of the artistic process? No. Approval stunts creativity, creates hierarchies and embellishes fears. It creates a dependency which is not helpful to the artistic process.

Approval creates a dichotomy. Your contributions to our creative endeavour now have the potential to be good or bad. Those are your choices, and they are static. Preference is a language of improvement, of bridging the gap, of movement. It suggests that there is no black or white, just gray. It suggests that you are on the right track, and that there is room to grow, and that the expectation is on you to grow. It puts just as much pressure on you as approval does, but it gives you an avenue for achieving expectation (“how about adding a bit of X?” is constructive; “now do something else to earn my love” is alienating and scary).

Oh! Check this out: Approval builds safety zones around what has already happened, and undermines safety zones around what comes next. Preference builds safety zones around what comes next. It also suggests that, since no approval process is happening, you have intrinsic approval. It eliminates the concept of disapproval. There is only what you have done, what others hope to see next, and what you do next.

Now, some of you are going to notice that approval and preference are just different ways of framing the same thing, and some of you are going to notice that preference has pitfalls as well. And the wisest of you are going to notice that the type of judgment you’re expressing matters less than your words and your attitude. Whatever. None of these are particularly interesting avenues of exploration to me, so perhaps we can just skip them.

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May

01

Imaginary Funerals

Telling Stories Together

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.

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May

01

Setting new priorities

Housekeeping / Telling Stories Together

Now is a good time to start writing somewhere new. I want a place to explore a few things which have recently come to dominate a lot of my mental real estate. These things share a lot of common ground: they are all rooted in making the most of experience, they are all tied into shared narrative, they are all about living more intentionally, and they are all underused arts in our society.

The first is shared story creation. Predominantly, this takes the form of story games. Story games are, to me, about a structured exploration of experiences we’ve never had the opportunity for. I’m going to post again soon sharing some more ideas about the roots and the purposes of story games. This notion of shared story creation also takes other forms though. I’m interested in exploring Theatre of the Oppressed, Guerrilla Theatre, and other forms of participationist and activist theatre. Also, things like how we can use storytelling to re-interpret and re-imagine our everyday lives.

The next is still searching for a definitive tag, but I’m interested in rewilding and urban foraging and stepping out of the binding structures that come with civilization. Basically, how do I live in a city (where I want to be) and yet determine the events of my own life (as opposed to being driven by imposed needs, like money and job security, etc). This is tied into urban foraging, scavenging, gardening, guerrilla gardening, activism, working less, squatting and resourcefulness. It’s also tied into how alternate structures alter our understanding of society, and the narrative we collectively and individually form about our existence and our role in the world.

The third is intentional, narrative-grounded communication. I want to learn from my friends who practice/study Nonviolent Communication, I want to continue to explore Appreciative Inquiry facilitation, and I want to look at other methods and approaches to communication which prioritize sharing experience and finding common ground. I am interested in exploring consensus decision-making and other models of representation. I want to explore how different methods of communication can inform our daily activities.

The final thing that I want to explore in this blog is poetry (performance/slam poetry, mostly) and spoken word. Because I like it a lot.

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