Coming Home

I left off yesterday with the question: where do you find the storyjamming equivalent of re-incorporation and the hero's return? This forms a crucial part of the journey; the separation meets us in the ordinary daily life we inhabit, and then breaks us away from it to enter the liminal space where we participate in the raw power of ambiguity and plenipotential—where "anything is possible." But then, all too often, our stories stop. Instead of an ending that brings us back into the ordinary world, enriched by our experience, we cut the story off right there. Freytag's classic pyramid of dramatic structure seems lopsided against time: we spend nearly all of our time with rising tension, then hit our climax, and fall precipitously towards the end. If a story has a denouement at all, it happens quickly, like an epilogue. Many writers say that falling action has an inherently boring quality. But a meaningful story—a story worth telling—leads you along a journey. What does it say if it picks you up for a ride, shows you incredible things, and then abandons you in an unfamiliar neighborhood at the end of the night?

I think we have trouble with the re-incorporation phase of stories in our tradition because we come from a people who have spent the past 10,000 years homeless and rootless. In his book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning outlines the history of agriculture and its ancient unsustainability. As Derrick Jensen put it, "Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels." The center of Western civilization keeps moving west as the consequences of our actions chase us around the world, and we move west to find some place that we haven't yet turned into lifeless desert. We have told our children for generations now, at an increasing pace, that fortune and opportunity lie not at home, but over the western horizon. It has turned us into rootless wanderers, so our myths and legends honor rootlessness and wandering. Our classic heroes come, like Beowulf, from somewhere else, and when they have solved our problems, like the the classic hero of Western films and books, he rides off into the sunset—into the west.

We romanticize our pathology. Because of our experience of rootlessness, the theme of coming home holds little allure for us. We don't know what it means. I think that goes a long way to explaining why we have allowed this crucial part of our art to atrophy so severely. In a very real way, we've gotten to the very root of rewilding here—how to perform this grand group therapy to heal this wound and reconcile our abused Land and our dysfunctional Family. To become native means to come home. If we knew a good story about how to come home, we could follow it—and come home.

The Fifth World tries to tell a story about coming home from start to finish. Its strong bioregional focus keeps tying the way we live and the stories we tell back into the landscape. I have no excuse to neglect re-incorporation. Warm-up games seem comparatively easy—they move us towards the liminal storyjamming space we want to go. But a good re-incorporation moves us in the opposite direction, back towards our daily lives. In Soul Hunters, Willerslev describes storytelling itself as the re-incorporation of returned Yukaghir hunters. The return to human language re-humanizes them, and putting their experiences into human terms allows them to synthesize what has happened, and bring it back with them into the human community. From this perspective, the entire game seems like an act of re-incorporation; but even if it does work that way, we still have a complete journey sub-set into that re-incorporation, which still requires some re-incorporation of its own.

Willem has suggested a few techniques that provide some excellent starting ground for our explorations. Like warm-up games, you can think of re-incorporation in terms of the "cool-down" needed after exercising your other muscles. Willem also suggested using the ORID debrief method:

• Observe. What happened for you? What happened for the group? What critical moments did you experience? What did you learn from success and failure?
• Reflect. How did what happened compare with your expectations? With stories you had heard? With your interests? What personal "a ha" moments did you experience? Work group "a ha" moments?
• Interpret. What in this applies to your daily life? What defined this experience for you? For the group? What got in the way?
• Decide. Do you want to do some things differently in your daily life as a result of this?

As Willem points out, this weaves the story back into our real lives, and brings it home. I think most gaming groups already do something like this, sticking around to discuss their game experience for some time after it has finished. But I also think that most gaming groups could get a lot more from that discussion with a framework like this. Just like we've had to find clever ways to weave warm-up games into the game itself, so that we don't feel like we haven't started the real game yet, or that we can cut this part, it will also take some clever design work to weave this part, too, into the game experience, so that players don't just throw it aside as good advice at best.

This pattern sets some clear design challenges, but I've done a lot of theorizing now. Tomorrow, I'll get down to some game ideas, and what kind of clever, elegant techniques we might come up with to make this work.

The Storyjammer's Journey

Arnold van Gennep worked as an ethnographer and folklorist at the turn of the last century in France. He gets credit for founding folklore as a field in that country, but most today remember him for his 1909 work, Rites of Passage. In it, van Gennep described three phases to any rite of passage:

1. Separation. This phase focuses on the end of the participant's old life and identity, sometimes put in terms as extreme as the death of their old self.
2. Liminality. Separated from the old life but not yet initiated into the new life, the participant enters a delicate liminal state, neither this nor that. This amiguity and plenipotential makes the participant powerful, giving them the power to achieve the initiation required.
3. Re-incorporation. In the final phase, the participant re-enters normal society in her new life, and relieves recognition and acknowledgment in the new identity.

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), Joseph Campbell introduced what some have called "the hero's journey" or "the monomyth," a basic, archetypal template that, Campbell argues, all heroic tales follow. In the book, Campbell summarizes this template: "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." Campbell identifies three stages in the hero's journey—departure, initiation, and return—and further details many of the various sub-themes and archetypes involved in each (for example, "the call to adventure" and "refusing the call" under departure), which occur often, but not always.

The similarity of Campbell's monomyth to van Gennep's rites of passage does not happen accidentally. Campbell studied van Gennep and relied on his work to describe the stages of the hero's journey, making the story of any hero the story of our own rites of passage. The separation from the old life becomes the hero's call to adventure; the adventures of the hero becomes the experience of liminality; and the re-integration following becomes the hero's return.

In Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, Rane Willerslev offers a different template for them both. Like Ingold, Willerslev "takes animism seriously," refusing to take the "easy answer" of metaphor or myth, and thus conclude that every traditional person has either lied to us, or has severe psychological problems. Instead, Willerslev looks for the roots of animism in the lived experience of people.

For the Yukaghirs, hunting means seducing an elk to give itself up, and that requires a process of mimicry, entering a liminal state where the hunter becomes not elk, but also not not elk. The difference proves crucial in both directions—a perfectly identical elk would have no power over the prey to kill it, but such an identical performance would also mean a hunter had lost touch with his humanity, and would become lost to elkhood forever.

To perform this dangerous dance, hunters must first isolate themselves from the normal human community. They must expunge the smells of humans, particularly women and children, and the smells of sex. They must also abandon normal human language. Hunters must not speak of killing animals directly, lest the animals overhear; so instead, they must speak a ritualized and indirect hunting language. For the Yukaghirs, speech and scent mark critical identifiers of their humanity, but in order to succeed, hunters must leave those things behind, separating themselves from their humanity.

The liminal space Willerslev describes—a space where every animal perceives itself as human—reminded me a great deal of Calvin Luther Martin's description of the world just past the skin of the earth in Way of the Human Being, which had in turn reminded me strongly of the stories of Faerie in Ireland and other Celtic countries. In this liminal space, profound things happen. Power comes from one's moments spent here. Most basic of all, here the dance of seduction becomes possible, and the Yukaghirs can kill their prey and feed their people.

The return plays an important part as well, precisely because the hunter has no guarantee of it. Willerslev relates the story of the "wild men" who remain lost in that liminal state, the ultimate anti-social creatures, they walk on two legs like people, but grow fur all over them like animals. The description reminded me of stories of Bigfoot, and even moreso, Pat Murphy's short story, "In the Abode of the Snows." Willerslev describes storytelling among hunters as a humanizing activity, precisely this last part of re-integration, giving the hunter a chance to become human again.

So, the hero's journey and the rite of passage, in this light, seem to spring from a much more basic source: the experience of the hunt itself.

Naturally, all of these things reminded me of storyjamming. Willem Larsen introduced the notion of using "warm-up games" used in improvisational theater in his articles for the College of Mythic Cartography, "Warming up and Working with Energy" (I, II). Since then, we've both worked on ways to weave these more tightly into the experience of play itself, rather than leave them so seemingly extraneous. I can personally vouch for the separating experience of these warm-up games. They push me towards a very different frame of mind, separating me from my normal day lucidity, and priming me to not censor myself, to reach for eloquence, and to allow the story to flow through me.

With that separation, I can much more easily see story as something to discover, rather than something that I "make up." The separation of these "warm-ups" moves us into a liminal state, a shared imagining, where we can track, stalk, and seduce the story together in the jam itself.

This, to me, raises an interesting question that I'll return to in tomorrow's post: where do you find the storyjamming equivalent of re-integration?

Not Me, Not Not Me: The Dilemma of Animism as Mimesis

I lied. I said I hadn't worked on The Fifth World in the past month. But I love the Fifth World so much in part because it fits so nicely with everything else I love and cherish that I can't help but work on it just by doing other things. In this case, reading Rane Willerslev's Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Willerslev has read a lot of Ingold's work, and applied it to an ethnographic work. If Ingold's prose proves too dense for you, Willerslev's ethnography will hit some of the most important points in writing that I found much easier to digest.

It also suggested a dramatic tension to design into the Fifth World. Willerslev makes the argument that we should see animism in light of mimesis. He begins his account with the image of a Siberian Yukaghir hunter coaxing out an elk. He wears skis bound in elk skin, a costume of elk fur and antlers that make him look like an elk. He smells like an elk, he moves like an elk. He doesn't appear perfectly like an elk—in fact, Willerslev emphasizes the importance of the gap between them. The hunter becomes no longer human, but also not not human.

Yes, they live in a world where everyone expects that those who have much will share with those who have little, and yes, animism puts everything in terms of relationship. But a world of sharing and relationship does not mean a world without conflict or drama by any means. Willerslev's account highlights the tensions that those seemingly idyllic elements leave. Hunters take every animal offered to them, but by the same token, they become afraid of their own good luck. When in need, they expect the animals and forests to share with them. But when their own communities prosper, the animals and the forests may demand the same of them. Then, bad luck, disease or other things will kill humans, and the animal masters will take hunters back to repay all the game they provided before.

A hunter can only take an animal willingly, so a hunter focuses on making the animal willing. To the Yukaghir, hunting takes the form of seduction. Hunters must mimic an elk enough to seduce their prey; when the elk comes out, they can kill her. But this involves mortal danger. The hunter may go too far, losing himself to elkhood, and never find his way back to the human world. He may accidentally slip across that line, from seduction to true emotion, and the elk will lead him away forever. Even in their liminal state, not human, but not not human, if the hunter stays away for too long, he may become trapped in that state, one of the hairy "wild men" of the woods (which sound remarkably like legends of "Bigfoot") who became lost and never returned.

Willerslev offers a great many insights into how the Yukaghir live, how to "take animism seriously" (as his last chapter says), and about the common themes in animist belief and phenomenology. But as far as The Fifth World goes, I think this provides a rich angle for the game to explore. Animism as mimesis sets a number of challenges—to shift into a liminal state, to maintain a liminal state as long as you need to, to avoid the excesses and pitfalls that might drag you irrevocably into another world, and in the end, to find your way back to the human world. This provides the basic fodder for fairy tales, myths and legends across time and space. In fact, as I'll discuss in greater length in tomorrow's post, it hits upon the archetypal "Hero's Journey" that Campbell discussed, and the basic structure of rites of passage that van Gennep observed.

Status Update

I haven't worked much on The Fifth World over the past month. Fans of Anthropik prevailed upon me to assemble a "best of" collection for quick, online publication. But I quickly found that my work doesn't work like that. I never did much real writing. I mostly collected relevant quotes and arranged them in a certain order. I couldn't publish this, even on Lulu; I don't have anything but a collection of "intellectual property" violations!

But I do plan to write longer, better pieces for a monthly e-magazine of local, bioregional rewilding called Toby's People. (As an aside, if you did read Anthropik, and look forward to Toby's People, I've started a Twitter feed for Toby's People already.) Giuli gave me this idea: since each issue has a theme, and a number of different columns on that theme, why not assemble those and put them up on something like Lulu, so you could order a physical copy? And since each year, or volume, has a larger theme, I could produce year-end books that assemble all that year's features. I'll produce all kinds of cheap, easy, online-available books that way, and I can do it while working on other things I have to work on, instead of putting all of them off while I compile a book.

Things like The Fifth World (you started to wonder when I'd get back on topic, didn't you?)

I'll have some updates here on the design blog this week on some of the things I've had rattling around my brain in the hopes of prompting some discussion, and I'll get back to designing and playtesting.

The next public appearance will happen at Camp Nerdly. I registered earlier today, and fully plan to have a playtest-able v0.7 there with me.

A Narrative Game Economy of Making You Look Awesome

In discussing lessons I'd learned from Ganakagok, the question of the game economy came up. I really like the balance of good and bad medicine in Ganakagok, and thought of something very inspired by Primetime Adventures. The game starts with an amount of fate determined by the number of players. The Genius loci spends fate to introduce obstacles. Spent fate becomes a pool from which players can award one another will, and spent will goes back into fate.

This has a lot to recommend it, including the dynamic of will vs. fate and good medicine vs. bad, and a tested narrative economy (tested by Primetime Adventures). It allows the Genius loci player to complicate the story without breaking the cooperative feel; since you'll need will to complete the game, the only way to free up will involves facing adversity. So you choose to introduce adversity in order to free up will—you make things harder not in an adversarial way, but because facing adversity now offers the only route forward. You choose the harder path on purpose. I find that alone a good enough reason to do it. But it also addresses another issue that one of my close advisors raised: namely, that will in the game seems to reflect a very modern, anthropocentric view of it. This dynamic makes will (and fate) something you find in the region, something you breathe in and breathe out. I could even add something so that when fate runs out, really bad things start to happen, so you need to keep a balance between will and fate—again, like that balance of good medicine and bad medicine I liked so much in Ganakagok.

But, Willem raised an important concern about this. Does Primetime Adventures' fan mail mechanism create a "punishment by rewards"?

In his 1993 book, Punishment by Rewards, [Alfie] Kohn argued that rewards are ways to manipulate student behavior. He cautioned teachers that rewards can be most damaging when the task being rewarded is already intrinsically motivating to the student. A student who is praised every time he or she completes math facts may lose interest in the task, especially if math comes easily for him or her. (Powell & Caseau, 2004, p. 180)

Or, to quote Marshall Burns in a recent post to Cultures of Play, "They're supposed to be reward mechanics, but I don't see the reward. I don't want points for doing dynamic, interesting character stuff. That's fun by itself! What could I possibly gain from points?" A very interesting point; one I didn't really get fully at first, but chewing it over longer, I began to really understand.

That made me start thinking about Keys in The Shadow of Yesterday. If you haven't spent a lot of time with indie games, these provide a means for a character to declare, at creation, what kinds of things he or she wants to advance in. In Dungeons & Dragons, every character has the same Key: they kill monsters to advance. In The Shadow of Yesterday you could advance from killing monsters, or from protecting someone or something, or from acting in a certain manner, etc. Characters get XP when they act in accordance with their Keys. It contains rules for changing keys, so that the game can provide a pacing mechanic for character development through the story—not just characters becoming more powerful, but characters changing through the story.

Which brings me to this morning, listening to the latest episode of The Voice of the Revolution. In the Pravda section, Paul Tevis—I apologize again—I got his name wrong when I met him briefly at Dreamation, too—Ennie-award-winning Paul Fucking Tevis—discussed playing Judd Karlman's hack of The Shadow of Yesterday, 1st Quest. Instead of Keys, 1st Quest uses "Banners." They act like Keys, except that in addition to your character advancing when you act on your Banner, other characters also advance when they act on your Banner. So, your Banner to protect a little girl allows you to advance whenever you protect the little girl, but it also allows my character to advance whenever I threaten that little girl, giving you the opportunity to protect her.

"I'm gonna make you awesome" has a long history in improvisational theater, and Story Game hippies have talked about it for a long time. Most recently, a great thread on Cultures of Play got started discussing this.

Say someone is playing the incredible hulk. The hulk yells, screams, roars, and flexes his muscles. This helps sell that he is very strong and not to be messed with. But it is thin and fragile. Say the hulk punches a car. That's pretty strong. But if the car doesn't react, doesn't break, doesn't move, then the hulk looks weak. I'd say in contrast all his previous muscle flexing now makes him look like an idiot in context to not being able to break the car. On the other hand, if the car exploded into a million pieces, that sells to me waaaaay more than anything the person playing the hulk could have done. The reaction cements the perception being communicated.

I'd much rather the 5 other players in a game try to make me look cool rather than me trying to do so alone. Hell, if the other 5 were making me look cool, I wouldn't have to. They would do a better job and I can focus on making them look cool.

In wrestling, the villain is in charge of making the hero look sympathetic. And the hero is in charge of making the villain look like a threat. This codependent relationship works amazingly. And way better than if the villain was primarily interested in making themselves look like a threat independently.

1st Quest's Banners offer a brilliant mechanic to provide precisely that kind of play, and it suggests a brilliant solution to my own problem of the narrative economy in the Fifth World. An "RP reward" falls into the trap of "punishment by rewards," because good roleplay has intrinsic rewards. But what about selling your character concept—making you look awesome? What if, instead of getting will from the pool of spent fate for "good RP" in general, I can reward you with will whenever you hit my issue? You can never award yourself will; you can only give it to other players, and you give it to them when they sell your pre-established issue, your "Banner."

I really like this idea. I think, taken all together, this solves a lot of problems, and could really come together to make something great. What do you think?

• Powell, R.G. & Caseau, D., 2004. Classroom Communication and Diversity. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Creation Stories & Character Creation

Every tradition includes its creation myth. In literate societies, the perception of the universe as a collection of objects raises the question of where those objects came from. These can offer meaning and become matters of dogmatic devotion, but they really offer little for everyday life, particularly in comparison to the role creation myths play in oral societies. Orality trains people to see the world as a process. That makes creation crucial, because it never ends. Creation becomes the chief occupation of all living things, and creation myths set the patterns that we continue to work out constantly.

I've had this on my mind as I've considered the One Map idea, character and region creation, and the problems with tone and direction that I've noticed with the game. I want the region creation to involve the recounting of the creation story—set that mythic tone right from the start. You should feel the depth of myth and history that gives rise to the region, gives rise to each place, and in the end, gives rise to each character. At the same time, it should emphasize that all of this has come down to your character, and it falls on you to make sure that it will all come down to your children the same way. The creation myth should set the patterns that play explores and recapitulates, and it should leave enough room that you could spend years exploring and recapitulating the various possible combinations.

I think I might use ritual phrases, the way Polaris does. The example of Polaris brings up another point about region and character creation, something that Willem wrote about recently on The College of Mythic Cartography: creation should involve warm-up exercises, and incrementally adding more complex rules (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). I've encountered some serious resistance to warm-up games when billed as such, but I think that warm-up games could sneak in under a different guise as part of the region creation. Maybe "Color/Advance" could play out as you describe your initiations, with the players on your left and right prompting you?

I have these as goals, but I haven't figured out how to accomplish them. If you have any ideas, advice, encouragement or other feedback, please comment!

One Map

At GASPcon and Dreamation, I used a pre-generated region for the playtests, in order to get into regular play as quickly as possible. I do subscribe to the philosophy of Fred Hicks that character creation should play like a game unto itself, but for the purposes of conventions, sometimes compromises become necessary. Since I had a pre-generated region, I produced a map with all the information printed directly on it, invested some time into making it look nice, and had it printed at FedEx Office (the copier chain formerly known as Kinko's). At both cons, the map seemed like a big hit. It happened at Dreamation, too; plenty of people remarked on how unique and evocative they found the map.

In native cultures, that "native" part plays a big role. E. Richard Sorenson describes the sense of space in "preconquest consciousness", saying, "Geographic sensibility was simply affect relationships thrust out onto surroundings. Such geography was haphazard and rarely uniform. It fluctuated over time, from place-toplace and from individual-to-individual." (Sorenson, 1998)

In indigenous societies such as the Native Americans and also the Australian Aborigines, great importance attaches to the relatedness of a person to a particular named place. Such a person might introduce themselves by saying: "I am from this place, and my father's family comes from these mountains, and my mother's from this river." It is only after describing in some detail their relationship to that place, that land, that they can proceed with the business at hand. In Euro-American society, we are much more likely to introduce ourselves and friends by saying "what they do," their profession, accomplishments, and the like. We don't know where we are "from" very often; even if we own a house somewhere, we might not really be "inhabiting" that place with consciousness, or feel at home and rooted there. The Indo-European tribes have always been nomads, wanderers, emigrants and invaders. They invaded Europe, conquering and dominating the aboriginal civilization known as Old Europe, thousands of years before they set sail for the so-called "New World." It has been aptly said, that as the Euro-American descendants of the European invaders and colonizers begin to understand the true story of what happened, perhaps the time for the real discovery of America has now come. (Metzner, 1999).

That "real discovery of America" lies at the heart of the Fifth World. David Abram (1997) also writes powerfully about the centrality of place in the native sense of self, going so far as to claim that "[t]he local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind."

Naturally, with sentiments like that, a map of the setting has to play a major part in the Fifth World. But the v0.6.0 game that I ran at Dreamation has other maps, as well. The character sheet really presents a relationship map in disguise (I use the term "relationship map" here in its most generic sense, not in the same sense as, say, Ron Edward's Sorcerer). You have a character built up from relationships, so your character sheet really just shows you one nexus in a relationship map. Putting all the character sheets together, you could draw a single map for the story.

I also took an initial step towards another dimension of the setting map in v0.6.0, an admittedly weak step, but an attempt to define each place as an affect, as Sorenson describes it. Abram (1997), Ingold (2005) and Sheridan & Longboat (2006) all discuss the differing assumptions about where imagination comes from. While we assume that imagination comes solely from the human brain, native cultures experience imagination as an ecological function, something that belongs to a place, and they get to participate in it while at that place. In other words, they do not make up stories; they discover them in the landscape.

I wanted this to become an important part of the Fifth World; by defining places with themes, a story moves across a landscape of not just geographical changes, but changes in tone and emotion. I don't think v0.6.0 accomplished that very well, but the movement across the map could still become a movement through the story. In fact, that kind of mirroring of internal and external seems to strike precisely the magical realist tone the game needs.

Biologically, you don't go too far wrong to call an animal a bit of soil ecology that wraps itself up in a skin so it can go for a walk. And when you die, you go right back to living as soil ecology. So, the setting map has places connected by paths; the relationship map has characters connected by relationships; and then you can have a theme map, with themes connected by transitions. In the modern viewpoint, these all need to have their own maps; people don't map to places, and neither map to themes. In the native viewpoint, people exist as places, which express their theme.

So, why not have everything on one map?

You don't need a character sheet—everything you would have on your character sheet already exists on the map. When your relationship with your sister sours, the path connecting your place to hers becomes difficult—which again, strikes precisely the magical/animist realist tone the game needs. Themes arise from the place, and apply to a character like issues in Primetime Adventures. The issue map could also help generate the story. In a collaborative game, you may not want to throw trouble in the way of other players, but blocked paths and conflicting issues on the map can do that for you.

In v0.7.0, I think I can work out the whole game on one map. I don't know if any other game could do this, but because of the native perspective that the Fifth World aims to recreate, I might have a chance at it after all. Ambitious? Definitely. But I don't think this particular game will settle for anything less.

Do you have any ideas, advice, encouragement or feedback? I'd love to hear from you—please comment!

• Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage.
• Ingold, T. (2005). The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge.
• Metzner, R. (1995). The place and the story: where ecopsychology and bioregionalism meet, The Trumpeter, 12:3
• Sheridan, J. & Longboat, R.D., The Haudenosanee imagination and the ecology of the sacred, Space and Culture, 9:4, pp. 365-381
• Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness, In Helmut Wautischer, Tribal epistemologies: essays in the philosophy of anthropology. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.