How to yell a poem & tell a game.

I like poetry. I especially like performance poetry.
But sometimes it feels like we’re playing to format (*) and not to content.

I’ve often gone to poetry slams and seen good poems put down by bad poems that are delivered as per the form’s standard: exactly three minutes, build-and-then-invert-your-message-and-then-crescendo, get jittery as you lead up to your climax, address it to “you” (that never-a-stranger, always-a-stranger audience member that sits inside the spotlight.) When you have 12 poets going up in a row, you have the following happening: an overdose of imagery and impact, leaving the audience desensitized to a soft voice or a subtle line; a culture of confessional one-upmanship, in order to keep the audience’s attention and to distinguish yourself as somehow more than the other poets who’ve come and gone; a shift over the course of the evening from poetic appreciation to frenetic, untargeted energy. And sometimes you lose track of what you’re actually looking for. The result is that you feel cheated by the moment.

Poetry Slams are not an anomaly in this regard. They just seem to have a bit more self-awareness of this condition than do other social art forms. Another place where I’ve seen this rear its head is in story games, in two specific ways. The first is a “push to conflict” mentality. Many games necessitate each and every scene to build up to and resolve a conflict mechanically (popular examples: Primetime Adventures, Shock: Social Science Fiction). The second is a “bring the awesome” mentality, where rocket-mecha jesus is a better addition to the story than a soft-spoken preacher, because it’s MORE AWESOME!!!!!

Sometimes, we deny ourselves the moving experiences we’re looking for, while simultaneously paying lip service to them. I’ve talked to people about their experiences with Dogs in the Vineyard, and many have told me about game sessions where people rushed into conflict with each other, escalated to guns and decimated the first town they walked into, because other people’s excited play reports had informed them that the game was about destroying innocent people. Dogs in the Vineyard is actually about trying to resolve difficult situations, and watching ideologies come face to face with real life. Which sometimes results in the destruction of innocent people. We’ve (for any values of “we” you find useful) established a culture of play that revels in the dramatic reveal over the dramatic tension, the breaking point over the establishing point. We push to conflict, we make it awesome, we bring the pain, we play close to home, we… miss the point. We put characters we don’t know into conflicts that don’t mean anything to us as people. We get lost in the fever of it all.

How do you facilitate better play over bigger play? How do you remove the one-upmanship of poetry/story games/social interactions? How do you keep your focus on the elements you’re actually looking for? Christian talks about games that focus on non-competitive/escalative elements. Jonathan talks about a culture of play that puts fiction first.

I’m going to suggest something: that the issue is a focus on format over content. In the example of slam poetry, people write the 3-minute angry poem that builds-drops-builds-twists-explodes, even if the content doesn’t demand it. In the example of story games, people push to conflict and race to face-stabby play, even if the content doesn’t demand it.

The tricky thing is that I’m not talking about transitioning away from any school of game design (from focused-structure to open design, for example). “Format” doesn’t simply mean “rules”. To suggest that freeform, story jamming or “rules lite systems” will avoid the pitfall of format-over-content is to miss part of the point. Format includes: rules, expected structure, expected pay-off, assumed roles and genre stand-bys. We are eager to affirm that what we’re experiencing conforms to and exceeds our expectations. The trap in this is that we begin to live in our expectations rather than our experiences. And then we begin to create affirmations of our expectations, rather than just focusing on creating our art.

We get excited about the promise of good content. We create formats to deliver the best content possible. And then we get lost in the format, to the point where some of our best content gets washed over and disregarded. The questions: How do we keep our expected outcomes from dictating our actual play? How do we appreciate elegance in the face of something easier? How do we keep fiction first, and stay rooted in what we’re actually creating? How do we put content before format?