Friday, April 17, 2009
The Storyjammer's Journey (Index)
I've written lately about the experience of storyjamming and how it compares to the "rites of passage" outlined by van Gennep, and the "hero's journey" described by Campbell, inspired by Rane Willerslev's Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Since this involved a number of posts, this provides an index for that mini-series.
- The Storyjammer's Journey: Introduction
- Ritual Phrases: Ritual phrases and their use in games
- Separation
- Liminality
- Immersion & Flow in Storyjam's Liminal Space - "Immersion" as what Csikszentmihalyi called "Flow"
- Hunting Story - Story as something to pursue, rather than make up
- Story in the Landscape - Ideas for practical application
- Re-incorporation
- Coming Home - The importance of the final phase, and some thoughts on why we so often neglect it
- Finding Your Way Back - Ideas for practical application
Ritual Phrases
We encounter ritual phrases all the time, both sacred and secular. Any Catholic recognizes a meaning beyond what the words, "Peace be with you," communicates to the uninitiated. We all rely on ritual phrases when faced with the enormity of death, and the insignificance of anything we can say in such situations. Jews have a codified phrase: "May God comfort you among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem." The rest of us goyim often fall back to a more secular ritual phrase, like "I'm sorry for your loss," or with somewhat more religious inflection, "She's in a better place." We don't really mean what we say by these things, at least not fully; we really mean, "I want to offer you some kind of comfort, but I know I can't do much for you." Faced with another's grief, we rely on ritual phrases because they excel at the very thing we need at that moment: they give us something to say when we don't know what to say. That, in itself, says something; it confesses our inability to address the situation before us in the usual manner, instead relying on a vocal gesture towards something less easily defined. We point towards common experience, the context of our shared usage of that phrase, and all the meaning that it has accrued from all the times we've used it before.
As a student of permaculture, and as the kind of bioregionalist who looks for stories and language written in the landscape, I naturally tend to think of ritual phrases like oral swales. A swale stops the flow of water, giving the water time to build up in the soil. Ritual phrases interrupt the flow of regular conversation, building up deeper, underground aquifers of meaning that the swale points us to.
That kind of function not only helps us relate in times of great stress, it also provides an excellent means of moving from one "mode" to another. It won't take long for a church-goer to recognize the ritual phrase that marks the beginning of the service, or the much-awaited ritual phrase marking its end (I joked in my Catholic days that the congregation's concluding ritual phrase, answering, "Thanks be to G-d," had simply gotten some minimal clean up from the Church because they felt that everyone crying, "Thank G-d!" had gotten embarrassing).
Ben Lehman's Polaris uses ritual phrases to great effect. The game plays out largely as a negotiation conducted in a ritual language, giving the whole game a particularly ritualistic tone. Other games have played with this idea to one extent or another, including "Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan." Simon C. said of it:
Ritual phrases can establish tone, define the structure of a game, and delineate the social space of the game clearly and explicitly. It can mark the transitions from one phase to the next of the storyjammer's journey. They can serve as prompts when we don't know what else to say—in this case, not because we face the profundity of mortality, but simply because we have to tell a story and feel intimidated, or we just don't have any ideas at the moment.
As a student of permaculture, and as the kind of bioregionalist who looks for stories and language written in the landscape, I naturally tend to think of ritual phrases like oral swales. A swale stops the flow of water, giving the water time to build up in the soil. Ritual phrases interrupt the flow of regular conversation, building up deeper, underground aquifers of meaning that the swale points us to.
That kind of function not only helps us relate in times of great stress, it also provides an excellent means of moving from one "mode" to another. It won't take long for a church-goer to recognize the ritual phrase that marks the beginning of the service, or the much-awaited ritual phrase marking its end (I joked in my Catholic days that the congregation's concluding ritual phrase, answering, "Thanks be to G-d," had simply gotten some minimal clean up from the Church because they felt that everyone crying, "Thank G-d!" had gotten embarrassing).
Ben Lehman's Polaris uses ritual phrases to great effect. The game plays out largely as a negotiation conducted in a ritual language, giving the whole game a particularly ritualistic tone. Other games have played with this idea to one extent or another, including "Kazekami Kyoko Kills Kublai Khan." Simon C. said of it:
While I'm on the subject, Ritual Phrases! These are so cool! I think they really went a long way towards establishing tone for the game, and formalising the "gameplay" aspect. Each post felt like a concrete "move" in the game, like sliding forward a chess piece or playing a card. The joy of the game was in making a move, and then anticipating the other player's response.
Ritual phrases can establish tone, define the structure of a game, and delineate the social space of the game clearly and explicitly. It can mark the transitions from one phase to the next of the storyjammer's journey. They can serve as prompts when we don't know what else to say—in this case, not because we face the profundity of mortality, but simply because we have to tell a story and feel intimidated, or we just don't have any ideas at the moment.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Finding Your Way Back
If I'd had a bit more foresight, or done a bit more planning, I'd have saved "Coming Home" until now, to keep the pattern of "Theory, Application, Next phase." But I didn't, so for the re-incorporation phase, I'll have to refer you back to that article for the theory behind it, since I have little new to add to it just eight days later in terms of theory. Today, in keeping with the pattern so far and wrapping up this discussion of "The Storyjammer's Journey," I want to discuss some of the ways in which we might tackle the problem of using those ideas to design an endgame for the Fifth World.
Most groups will stick around to discuss their game after they've finished. In lieu of any real support, players re-incorporate as a matter of social convention. The challenge lies in formalizing that, and making this formalized game relevant to players who might not appreciate the importance of the activity. Like warm-ups, saavy players may recognize immediately what they help achieve, but other players may not appreciate how much they shape a storyjam until they've experienced them firsthand. Besides, it seems like simple good design to weave these elements ever more closely together. You'll recall that we integrated warm-up games into character and setting creation, tasks that the game needs to begin with anyway. By completing those tasks with warm-up games, we can weave them into regular play. So, what tasks do we need to accomplish at the end of a game session anyway, that we could turn into re-incorporation?
Perhaps, first and most obviously, the game could support an "epilogue" round. Like the "previews" from the end of a game of Primetime Adventures—a game which, as Giuli observed, does have some mechanics for a reflective endgame (though admittedly weak), a final round of short scenes without the usual restrictions could allow characters to wrap up any final threads and bring their storylines to a satisfying close.
At the end of the story, the main task we face involves what other games might refer to as "awarding experience." How do we quantify and apply the ways that the game session has changed the setting and the characters? Often, this involves no more than a tally of points, but the very nature of the task seems to invite us to expand it to achieve the task of re-incorporation: bringing us back to ordinary reality, reflecting upon and thus integrating our experience in the story.
Others have noted before that character creation generally takes the action of what happens in a game and condenses it into a much faster process, so looking back at character creation may offer some hints. Initiations can create connections, add new features, and introduce new places. Did a character act strongly in accordance with the theme of another place? Perhaps that justifies shifting a character's home. Or, it might justify establishing a new connection between that place and the character's home.
In an earlier version of the game, I used a "questions" mechanic to establish themes. It broke immersion entirely, yanking players violently out of the game, so I scrapped it. But here, where we want to pull out of the story's liminal space to observe and interpret, it may fit well. Perhaps a series of questions could guide some discussion about the game, by which the group would award appropriate options to change the setting and the characters.
Perhaps we should go back to the land once again—each place could have not only a stanza of poetry to prompt a creation story, and a list of themes to choose from, but a list of questions, as well. Each player can ask one question associated with her home at the end of the game, pertaining to that story; the table answers the question, and that answer decides what kind of change happens.
I have my weakest mechanical ideas on this front, but I see it as largely unexplored territory, so that doesn't intimidate me too much. I'll open it up for discussion: what kinds of mechanics do you see for re-incorporation?
Most groups will stick around to discuss their game after they've finished. In lieu of any real support, players re-incorporate as a matter of social convention. The challenge lies in formalizing that, and making this formalized game relevant to players who might not appreciate the importance of the activity. Like warm-ups, saavy players may recognize immediately what they help achieve, but other players may not appreciate how much they shape a storyjam until they've experienced them firsthand. Besides, it seems like simple good design to weave these elements ever more closely together. You'll recall that we integrated warm-up games into character and setting creation, tasks that the game needs to begin with anyway. By completing those tasks with warm-up games, we can weave them into regular play. So, what tasks do we need to accomplish at the end of a game session anyway, that we could turn into re-incorporation?
Perhaps, first and most obviously, the game could support an "epilogue" round. Like the "previews" from the end of a game of Primetime Adventures—a game which, as Giuli observed, does have some mechanics for a reflective endgame (though admittedly weak), a final round of short scenes without the usual restrictions could allow characters to wrap up any final threads and bring their storylines to a satisfying close.
At the end of the story, the main task we face involves what other games might refer to as "awarding experience." How do we quantify and apply the ways that the game session has changed the setting and the characters? Often, this involves no more than a tally of points, but the very nature of the task seems to invite us to expand it to achieve the task of re-incorporation: bringing us back to ordinary reality, reflecting upon and thus integrating our experience in the story.
Others have noted before that character creation generally takes the action of what happens in a game and condenses it into a much faster process, so looking back at character creation may offer some hints. Initiations can create connections, add new features, and introduce new places. Did a character act strongly in accordance with the theme of another place? Perhaps that justifies shifting a character's home. Or, it might justify establishing a new connection between that place and the character's home.
In an earlier version of the game, I used a "questions" mechanic to establish themes. It broke immersion entirely, yanking players violently out of the game, so I scrapped it. But here, where we want to pull out of the story's liminal space to observe and interpret, it may fit well. Perhaps a series of questions could guide some discussion about the game, by which the group would award appropriate options to change the setting and the characters.
Perhaps we should go back to the land once again—each place could have not only a stanza of poetry to prompt a creation story, and a list of themes to choose from, but a list of questions, as well. Each player can ask one question associated with her home at the end of the game, pertaining to that story; the table answers the question, and that answer decides what kind of change happens.
I have my weakest mechanical ideas on this front, but I see it as largely unexplored territory, so that doesn't intimidate me too much. I'll open it up for discussion: what kinds of mechanics do you see for re-incorporation?
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
The Story in the Landscape
I know that I promised yesterday to talk today about some game mechanics that would design for flow (often called "immersion" when experienced in an RPG), but I pulled a dirty trick on you. See, I already did. You might not have noticed it; don't blame yourself; I admit, I did it in a pretty sneaky way. I'll have to spend most of my space today just detailing what I mean.
Whether in the warm-up phase of a one-shot game, or in the first session of a longer-term game, we started off telling the creation story for the places where our story unfolds. David Abram uses the example of the songlines of Australia (1997). Aborigines sing the songlines as they travel, effectively reading them, written in the landscape. The criss-crossing lines weave into each other, creating a woven epic written into the landscape of the continent itself. Individual aborigines bear not only the right, but the responsibility to keep those songs, to walk those paths. Walking/singing those paths where the ancestors walked/sang before them, aborigines blur the line not between a primordial creation and the present, but between ordinary reality and a concurrent Dreaming. They become the ancestors, and they experience creation not as an event long past, but as a process they themselves engage in. Thus, they bear the responsibility to renew their little part of creation constantly (Harvey, 2006).
This viewpoint has no interest in the novelties of "the Age of Exuberance." (Catton, 1982). Instead, it prefers focus, attention, rhythm; it wants to plumb the depths of the world we live in, peel back the layers, and find the magic hidden in the everyday. For our purposes, it means that the story of creation we told at the outset has established the elements—the game centers on the joy of finding the stories, patterns and relationships that our creation story implied, and tracing some of the infinite possible twists on the basic framework—the landscape—we already established.
The strong identification of personality in the landscape, as well as emotion, intellect and imagination in the landscape as well, means that the game can unfold on one map. The map of the setting also provides the character sheet; each character comes from a particular place, and each place resonates with a particular theme. The paths that connect places also mark the relationships between characters, and the relationships between themes. A journey across the landscape means a social journey and an emotional journey as well. The layering of what we would normally divide into "internal" and "external' worlds also helps to create a sense of "magical realism," or "animist realism," a literary tradition that has arisen from the interface of colonial and native literatures.
I laid out the basic mechanics that could bring all of this together in my post from almost a month ago, "A Narrative Game Economy of Making You Look Awesome." To refresh your memory, I took inspiration from the "Banners" that Judd Karlman's 1st Quest, a hack of The Shadow of Yesterday. This can work well as a mechanic to explicitly establish the theme of a place, and thus, the theme for characters from that place. But, I want to take it a step farther. Karlman's Banners allow a character to gain reward when they act in accordance with their theme, or when other characters challenge their theme (thus giving the character the opportunity to act in accordance with it). The Shadow of Yesterday still has a GM, which solves the problem of adjudicating what constitutes acceptably acting in accordance with the theme. I want to take this idea farther: I want themes that only reward you when you give someone else the chance to act in accordance with them. This also helps solve the problem of GM adjudication: the player whose theme you challenge gets to decide if you've really given her that opportunity or not.
We've established these themes as we told the creation stories—place types have a set poem to prompt a creation story, and possible themes to choose from, derived from that poem. A template adds another stanza, and more options for themes to choose from. But by the time the regular game begins, each place has an established theme. Players can challenge those themes when dealing with characters from that place, or in scenes set at that place, or while traveling to or from that place.
And what of those paths, that double as relationships? They have a weight and a status—either Open, Closed, or Uncertain. As a relationship, Closed connections indicate hostility, while Open connections indicate friendship. You can have a relationship with an enemy every bit as intense as your relationship with your lover, which indicates that kind and depth deserve entirely separate scales. Uncertain relationships can go either way; you don't know if you can always trust them, but you might still need them. As a physical path, Closed connections indicate danger, while Open connections indicate safety. Uncertain connections could become dangerous, if a player wants to make them dangerous.
This opens up a consideration in play, because these statuses can change. You can build trust by making yourself vulnerable, or break it by taking advantage of it. In true magical realist fashion, and just as in traditional folk tales and fairy tales, when you break your sister's trust, the path connecting her home and yours becomes flooded out, blocked by landslides, or prowled by hungry predators. You can't open all your connections—some mutually oppose each other, so opening one necessarily means closing another—but you'll need to choose which ones to open and which ones to close. You may decide that based on your own concerns, or you may need to consider how things can flow through the whole region.
But what do you reward players with for hitting on the right themes? What do you measure the weight of a connection with? I first considered calling this your "wildness," or possibly "wilderness," but that term comes with far too much romantic baggage. I long ago came to the conclusion that the most common English words do the best to describe such important concepts—like "family" instead of the much-debated "tribe." In this case, looking at the etymology of the word "wild" proves a valuable exercise in itself. It comes from the same root as the word "will," and in fact, before the vowel shift, sounded just like "willed," as in, "willed land," or "willed animals." "Wild" describes a person with a will of its own—whether a human person, an animal person, or a place person. But like imagination, intellect and emotion, like I wrote about yesterday, will does not come from inside of us; we partake in it, like the air.
In some of the earlier versions of the game, a friend objected to the will mechanic. To him, he said, it suggested an anthropocentric power that belied the relational context of the rest of the game. Instead, I now imagine Will as something that inheres in the landscape, set at the beginning of each game by a budget based on the number of players. At first, each place has some amount of Fate, a resource that the Genius loci can use to introduce complications. Spent Fate becomes available for that player to award when other players challenge her theme. Once awarded, it becomes Will.
Games with no GM notoriously run into the problem of opposition. Either they must oppose each other, breaking down the camaraderie and cooperation that defines one of the RPG's greatest virtues, or it runs into the Czege Principle: "When the same person is the author of both a character's adversity and its resolution, play isn't fun." (Of course, a game with a GM doesn't really solve the problem if we want camaraderie and cooperation, either, since it just unites everyone else at the table against a common enemy, creating some of the questionable dynamics that others have already remarked upon.) We've seen two dynamics for creating conflict in this arrangement that don't rely on either of these problematic solutions:
At Dreamation, Ganakagok reminded me of ideas I'd neglected in designing the Fifth World, centering the game on the challenge of balancing conflicting forces to maintain the world and your relationships, and negotiating mutually exclusive demands from various relationships. The dichotomy of Fate and Will establishes another source of tension: places need a balance of Fate and Will, or bad things happen. Players must balance Fate and Will, which may require them to volunteer to endure adversity. Once again, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
This kind of environment gives us the opportunity to define very clear goals for a game.
I think this set up allows for other types of games, with equally clear goals and feedback, but I have developed this one most of all. If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear about them in the comments below. In addition to the feedback provided in that particular kind of game, players have feedback from the amount of Will they have gotten, the balance of Fate and Will in the game, and the configuration of Open, Closed and Uncertain connections on the map. With this, we have some potent ingredients to design for flow, so we can start making a game that creates the conditions for immersion to happen.
Whether in the warm-up phase of a one-shot game, or in the first session of a longer-term game, we started off telling the creation story for the places where our story unfolds. David Abram uses the example of the songlines of Australia (1997). Aborigines sing the songlines as they travel, effectively reading them, written in the landscape. The criss-crossing lines weave into each other, creating a woven epic written into the landscape of the continent itself. Individual aborigines bear not only the right, but the responsibility to keep those songs, to walk those paths. Walking/singing those paths where the ancestors walked/sang before them, aborigines blur the line not between a primordial creation and the present, but between ordinary reality and a concurrent Dreaming. They become the ancestors, and they experience creation not as an event long past, but as a process they themselves engage in. Thus, they bear the responsibility to renew their little part of creation constantly (Harvey, 2006).
This viewpoint has no interest in the novelties of "the Age of Exuberance." (Catton, 1982). Instead, it prefers focus, attention, rhythm; it wants to plumb the depths of the world we live in, peel back the layers, and find the magic hidden in the everyday. For our purposes, it means that the story of creation we told at the outset has established the elements—the game centers on the joy of finding the stories, patterns and relationships that our creation story implied, and tracing some of the infinite possible twists on the basic framework—the landscape—we already established.
The strong identification of personality in the landscape, as well as emotion, intellect and imagination in the landscape as well, means that the game can unfold on one map. The map of the setting also provides the character sheet; each character comes from a particular place, and each place resonates with a particular theme. The paths that connect places also mark the relationships between characters, and the relationships between themes. A journey across the landscape means a social journey and an emotional journey as well. The layering of what we would normally divide into "internal" and "external' worlds also helps to create a sense of "magical realism," or "animist realism," a literary tradition that has arisen from the interface of colonial and native literatures.
I laid out the basic mechanics that could bring all of this together in my post from almost a month ago, "A Narrative Game Economy of Making You Look Awesome." To refresh your memory, I took inspiration from the "Banners" that Judd Karlman's 1st Quest, a hack of The Shadow of Yesterday. This can work well as a mechanic to explicitly establish the theme of a place, and thus, the theme for characters from that place. But, I want to take it a step farther. Karlman's Banners allow a character to gain reward when they act in accordance with their theme, or when other characters challenge their theme (thus giving the character the opportunity to act in accordance with it). The Shadow of Yesterday still has a GM, which solves the problem of adjudicating what constitutes acceptably acting in accordance with the theme. I want to take this idea farther: I want themes that only reward you when you give someone else the chance to act in accordance with them. This also helps solve the problem of GM adjudication: the player whose theme you challenge gets to decide if you've really given her that opportunity or not.
We've established these themes as we told the creation stories—place types have a set poem to prompt a creation story, and possible themes to choose from, derived from that poem. A template adds another stanza, and more options for themes to choose from. But by the time the regular game begins, each place has an established theme. Players can challenge those themes when dealing with characters from that place, or in scenes set at that place, or while traveling to or from that place.
And what of those paths, that double as relationships? They have a weight and a status—either Open, Closed, or Uncertain. As a relationship, Closed connections indicate hostility, while Open connections indicate friendship. You can have a relationship with an enemy every bit as intense as your relationship with your lover, which indicates that kind and depth deserve entirely separate scales. Uncertain relationships can go either way; you don't know if you can always trust them, but you might still need them. As a physical path, Closed connections indicate danger, while Open connections indicate safety. Uncertain connections could become dangerous, if a player wants to make them dangerous.
This opens up a consideration in play, because these statuses can change. You can build trust by making yourself vulnerable, or break it by taking advantage of it. In true magical realist fashion, and just as in traditional folk tales and fairy tales, when you break your sister's trust, the path connecting her home and yours becomes flooded out, blocked by landslides, or prowled by hungry predators. You can't open all your connections—some mutually oppose each other, so opening one necessarily means closing another—but you'll need to choose which ones to open and which ones to close. You may decide that based on your own concerns, or you may need to consider how things can flow through the whole region.
But what do you reward players with for hitting on the right themes? What do you measure the weight of a connection with? I first considered calling this your "wildness," or possibly "wilderness," but that term comes with far too much romantic baggage. I long ago came to the conclusion that the most common English words do the best to describe such important concepts—like "family" instead of the much-debated "tribe." In this case, looking at the etymology of the word "wild" proves a valuable exercise in itself. It comes from the same root as the word "will," and in fact, before the vowel shift, sounded just like "willed," as in, "willed land," or "willed animals." "Wild" describes a person with a will of its own—whether a human person, an animal person, or a place person. But like imagination, intellect and emotion, like I wrote about yesterday, will does not come from inside of us; we partake in it, like the air.
In some of the earlier versions of the game, a friend objected to the will mechanic. To him, he said, it suggested an anthropocentric power that belied the relational context of the rest of the game. Instead, I now imagine Will as something that inheres in the landscape, set at the beginning of each game by a budget based on the number of players. At first, each place has some amount of Fate, a resource that the Genius loci can use to introduce complications. Spent Fate becomes available for that player to award when other players challenge her theme. Once awarded, it becomes Will.
Games with no GM notoriously run into the problem of opposition. Either they must oppose each other, breaking down the camaraderie and cooperation that defines one of the RPG's greatest virtues, or it runs into the Czege Principle: "When the same person is the author of both a character's adversity and its resolution, play isn't fun." (Of course, a game with a GM doesn't really solve the problem if we want camaraderie and cooperation, either, since it just unites everyone else at the table against a common enemy, creating some of the questionable dynamics that others have already remarked upon.) We've seen two dynamics for creating conflict in this arrangement that don't rely on either of these problematic solutions:
- Closed connections place conflict right into the landscape itself. To change those connections, characters must willingly "lose" encounters and make themselves vulnerable. In other words, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
- If the players need Will to complete their goals, the only way to open up Will requires players to first use Fate to introduce adversity. In other words, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
At Dreamation, Ganakagok reminded me of ideas I'd neglected in designing the Fifth World, centering the game on the challenge of balancing conflicting forces to maintain the world and your relationships, and negotiating mutually exclusive demands from various relationships. The dichotomy of Fate and Will establishes another source of tension: places need a balance of Fate and Will, or bad things happen. Players must balance Fate and Will, which may require them to volunteer to endure adversity. Once again, the system demands that you accept setbacks at first in order to prevail in the end.
This kind of environment gives us the opportunity to define very clear goals for a game.
- The Story of a Journey. The story begins in a specific place, and it must go to a specific place. You could expand this to an itinerary, or even a cycle, requiring successive scenes to move from one destination to the next, or to journey from home to a pre-determined place, and back home again. You have very clearly set goals: set a scene in each destination, in sequence. You have clear feedback on your progress, in knowing which places you have set scenes in so far, and which you have not yet visited.
I think this set up allows for other types of games, with equally clear goals and feedback, but I have developed this one most of all. If you have other ideas, I'd love to hear about them in the comments below. In addition to the feedback provided in that particular kind of game, players have feedback from the amount of Will they have gotten, the balance of Fate and Will in the game, and the configuration of Open, Closed and Uncertain connections on the map. With this, we have some potent ingredients to design for flow, so we can start making a game that creates the conditions for immersion to happen.
- Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage.
- Catton, W. (1982). Overshoot: the ecological basis of revolutionary change, Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
- Harvey, G. (2006). Animism: respecting the living world, New York: Columbia University Press.
Hunting Story
"Indeed, the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffability of awareness itself, and we should not be surprised that many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or 'mind,' not as a power that resides in their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with other animals and the plants, the mountains and the clouds." (1997) So writes David Abram in Spell of the Sensuous. The Hebrew word for "soul," ruach, also means "wind," as in Genesis 1:2, "and the ruach of God moved upon the face of the waters." Hebrew does not depict vowels—contrasted with consonants because vowels form simply from sounded breath. Thus, even reading in Hebrew demands interpretation, an active wrestling with the word of the deity like Jacob in Genesis 32; reading the Torah requires an interaction between reader and text, it requires the sounded breath of the reader to bring the text to life, to give it a soul. Our own word "spirit" comes from the Latin spiritus, also meaning "breath." The Latin word for soul, anima, gives us words like animal, animism, and animate, all words that share a common meaning of "bringing to life," but it also meant "breath." Our words like "psychology" derive from the Greek psychê, which meant "mind" or "soul," but also "breath" or "a gust of wind," and it came from the verb psychein, "to breathe" or "to blow." The Greeks themselves used the term pneuma to mean "spirit," a word that today forms the root for words like "pneumatic" because of its other meaning, "air." Obviously, we retain some understanding of mind, soul, spirit, imagination, intellect, whatever we may call it, as an interaction with our ecology, something we breathe in, effectively a kind of sense by which we perceive our environment just as effectively as we do with our eyes, ears or skin.
In Papua New Guinea, E. Richard Sorenson found that in "preconquest consciousness," people navigate the landscape by emotion, rather than abstract direction.
Closer to home, traditional Haudenosaunee assert a similar sentiment.
To put it more simply, intelligence, imagination, creativity and emotion do not occur inside a human skull; they happen in the world around us, and we participate in it. This turns our usual understanding of storytelling and creativity on its ear; while we can certainly "make up" stories, having had the experience of discovering a story instead, purely fictional stories immediately reveal themselves, and feel disappointing and uninspiring by comparison. Many writers have remarked upon their experience as an exploration or discovery, describing story as something they find rather than something they invent. In his diary in February 1895, for example, Jules Renard wrote, "The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it." Samuel Butler said, "Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such." E.L. Doctorow said, "Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." D.H. Lawrence warned, "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." All of these reflect a persisting understanding, however unconscious, that stories do not originate inside the skull of a single, human author; that they already exist in some form, and the task of the storyteller lies not in creating the story, but in finding it.
This brings us back to "The Storyjammer's Journey." Rane Willerslev describes the experience of traditional Yukaghir hunters in terms that shed light on the origins of the phases identified by van Gennep in rites of passage, and by Campbell in heroic tales (2007). If we accept this native view of story, then the parallel becomes stronger. We don't make up story; we hunt it. The "liminal space" we enter exists in the landscape we explore, in the relationships between us in the jam, and the relationships we have with the landscape. The warm-up games help to strip us of our self-censorship and hesitation, breaking down the impediments we rely upon in our daily lives, so that we can enter this space to hunt story.
In yesterday's post, I wrote about Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "Flow," and how it relates to the RPG player's experience of "immersion." With no single author, I think this perspective bears even more potential for roleplaying and story games than it does for regular storytelling. It also addresses one of the questions I left open yesterday: what "goal" do we pursue in a storyjam? We need to answer that question before we can even begin to design for flow—it will inform how we can more clearly define it, how we can provide clear feedback on our progress, and even what kind of skills it involves and what kind of challenges we face.
This view of story suggests a goal immediately: to hunt story. We can make it as clear and unambiguous as hunting a deer, with feedback just as clear as the tracks you might follow. Tomorrow, I'll get down to some solid game mechanics ideas on how the Fifth World can address the concerns of flow and immersion, using this perspective to inform goals and feedback, in the liminal phase of the storyjam.
In Papua New Guinea, E. Richard Sorenson found that in "preconquest consciousness," people navigate the landscape by emotion, rather than abstract direction.
Navigating such affect-space is not at all like barreling down the Beltway to Bethesda or even going to Mars. Feelings mattered, not hours, kilometers, or abstract directions. ... Among these people, feelings about locales were what mattered, and it was feelings that defined them. Arbitrary geographical divisions were devoid of such meaning, so had no relevance to them and were unrecognized. A locale’s name varied according to the numerous affect relations different people had with it. There were no abstract sectionings of space, no geometric projections onto space, no projected boundaries to undo their sense of interdigitation. (Sorenson, 1998)
Closer to home, traditional Haudenosaunee assert a similar sentiment.
From a Haudenosaunee or Mohawk perspective, we notice that minds colonized by these assertions concerning the universality of imagination’s origins and functions are contributing dimensions to larger conceits maintained by anthropocentrically biased cultures. Cultures colonized by these conceits tautologically confirm the interior sources of their intelligence. Minds colonized by such conceits think and conceive of themselves in this grammar of posessive individualism. Onkwehonwe (unassimilated, traditional Haudenosaunee), in contrast, regard any assumption concerning the existence of autonomous, anthropogenic minds to be aberrations that violate the unity, interrelation, and reciprocity between language and psychology, landscape and mind. The ecology of traditional Haudenosaunee territory possesses sentience that is manifest in the consciousness of that territory, and that same consciousness is formalized in and as Haudenosaunee consciousness. Of course, other beings manifest that consciousness in their literature of tracks, chirrups, and loon calls. (Sheridan & Longboat, 2006)
To put it more simply, intelligence, imagination, creativity and emotion do not occur inside a human skull; they happen in the world around us, and we participate in it. This turns our usual understanding of storytelling and creativity on its ear; while we can certainly "make up" stories, having had the experience of discovering a story instead, purely fictional stories immediately reveal themselves, and feel disappointing and uninspiring by comparison. Many writers have remarked upon their experience as an exploration or discovery, describing story as something they find rather than something they invent. In his diary in February 1895, for example, Jules Renard wrote, "The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it." Samuel Butler said, "Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such." E.L. Doctorow said, "Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." D.H. Lawrence warned, "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." All of these reflect a persisting understanding, however unconscious, that stories do not originate inside the skull of a single, human author; that they already exist in some form, and the task of the storyteller lies not in creating the story, but in finding it.
This brings us back to "The Storyjammer's Journey." Rane Willerslev describes the experience of traditional Yukaghir hunters in terms that shed light on the origins of the phases identified by van Gennep in rites of passage, and by Campbell in heroic tales (2007). If we accept this native view of story, then the parallel becomes stronger. We don't make up story; we hunt it. The "liminal space" we enter exists in the landscape we explore, in the relationships between us in the jam, and the relationships we have with the landscape. The warm-up games help to strip us of our self-censorship and hesitation, breaking down the impediments we rely upon in our daily lives, so that we can enter this space to hunt story.
In yesterday's post, I wrote about Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "Flow," and how it relates to the RPG player's experience of "immersion." With no single author, I think this perspective bears even more potential for roleplaying and story games than it does for regular storytelling. It also addresses one of the questions I left open yesterday: what "goal" do we pursue in a storyjam? We need to answer that question before we can even begin to design for flow—it will inform how we can more clearly define it, how we can provide clear feedback on our progress, and even what kind of skills it involves and what kind of challenges we face.
This view of story suggests a goal immediately: to hunt story. We can make it as clear and unambiguous as hunting a deer, with feedback just as clear as the tracks you might follow. Tomorrow, I'll get down to some solid game mechanics ideas on how the Fifth World can address the concerns of flow and immersion, using this perspective to inform goals and feedback, in the liminal phase of the storyjam.
- Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world, New York: Vintage.
- 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.
- Willerslev, R. (2007). Soul hunters: hunting, animism and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Immersion & Flow in Storyjam's Liminal Space
In roleplaying game fora, you'll find a great deal of discussion about something called "immersion." Most players seem to agree on a core concept that emphasizes staying in character strongly. The term "virtual reality" often pops up in these discussions, describing immersion in terms of the player's ability to lose his awareness of himself and slip as completely as possible into the character's experience. With regards to story games, "immersion" has become more contentious; some players say that shared narrative authority breaks immersion, because, as a story gamer might put it, moving from an Actor Stance, to an Author Stance or a Director Stance, involves removing one's self from the character. But by the same token, story gamers claim their own kind of immersion—an immersion in the story, rather than their character, which may suggest a crucial, defining difference between a "story game" (concerned with the immersive experience of the story), and a "roleplaying game" (concerned with the immersive experience of playing a role).
Emily Care Boss put it this way:
John Wallis describes "mask play" as "a virtual reality: when the player looks around, they see the game-world. They look at other players and see the characters. They look in a mirror and see their character's face. Only by doing this, by shutting out as much of the real world as possible, will the player be able to let their normal personality take a back seat, and allow the personality of their fictional character to take over. I can't describe what that actually means because it doesn't happen often enough to be analyzed, but personal experience makes me think it's worth striving for." (Wallis, 1995) In both of these descriptions, we see immersion described as something mysterious, almost magical. Moyra Turkington puts it in such terms quite explicitly:
I agree, and I find that "mystical" nature itself revealing. The essential experience of mystics carries the name "ecstasy," from the Greek meaning, "to stand beside." Ecstasy involves an altered state of consciousness with intense focus on a single thing, to the exclusion of other stimuli—just like we've already seen so many players define "immersion." One noted psychologist has written a great deal about "the sense of effortless action [many people] feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as 'being in the zone,' religious mystics as being in 'ecstasy,' artists and musicians as 'aesthetic rapture.'"
Except the psychologist who wrote that, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, did not have much to say about roleplaying games; he wrote that in an article titled "Finding Flow," for Psychology Today. Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" unites not just religious ecstasy and artistic rapture, but it also sounds very much like the mystical experience of "immersion" that players discuss, and points, as Emily Care Boss suspected, to a shared experience, despite the subjective means of attaining this altered state of consciousness. In fact, just as it did in Csikszentmihalyi's research, the word "flow" in its normal usage appears frequently when players try to describe "immersion." They talk of "going with the flow"; Csikszentmihalyi heard people describe "flow" experiences similarly, as well as "on the ball" or "in the groove." In the middle of a "flow" experience, we become fully engaged with what we do; other concerns fall away. Csikszentmihalyi cites many examples in which people became unaware of their body or the passage of time.
Others have previously noted the strong parallels between Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" and "immersion" in games; I would go so far as to say that "immersion" simply means flow in the context of a tabletop game, just as ecstasy means religious flow, and "aesthetic rapture" means artistic flow. I think this also describes the "liminal space" of a storyjam—at least, ideally. Whether we immerse in a character's experience, losing our sense of self for a moment to see the world through the eyes of a fictional person, or we immerse in a story, losing our sense of self for a moment to exist in a shared imagining, at the core of both lies that mystical experience of slipping outside of ourselves to "stand beside" and see the world from a different angle.
Does this definition help us at all, besides giving a name to what others, like Emily Care Boss above, already intuited? I think so. You will notice, too, that in the previous descriptions, players describe "immersion" as something they do not understand, and thus, something they cannot cultivate. Everyone has favored methods of creating "immersion," but no one can agree on what methods work best. Most players resign themselves to the notion that immersion either happens, or it doesn't. They have little control over it. A secret combination of the right time, the right place, and the right people might result in immersion, but duplicating the formula seems absurd. That uncertainty might heighten the thrill of hunting it, but many more players abandon the activity because of it. The really rewarding part of play—the immersion—happens much to infrequently. But the work that Csikszentmihalyi has done with flow has created a set of known techniques to help it along; as my permaculture teacher Larry Santoyo might put it, we can create the conditions for flow, or immersion, to happen.
Flow happens when we have clear goals and clear feedback. Roleplaying and story games alike often create impediments to immersion by design, then, if we accept that immersion simply describes flow in a particular context. They often eschew any clearly stated goal, and rarely provide clear feedback. The idea of setting flow itself as such a goal seems suspicious; we might design towards that as a goal, but we could best achieve that by setting the player towards some other goal that we have clearly defined, that has importance and value, and the player knows she has a chance to achieve. We'll also need to find better ways to provide feedback to players to let them know their progress.
Video game designers have focused on this for some time now. They have recognized that immersion in video games means maintaining flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as occurring in a narrow channel where your skills perfectly match the challenges you face (1990:74). If you have skills greater than the challenge, it becomes boring; if you face challenges greater than your skill, it becomes frustrating. But staying in the "flow channel" poses a challenge, since using your skills will increase them, so a steady level of challenge might produce an initial flow experience, but continuing the activity will slip into bordeom as your skills increase. By the same token, increasing the challenge too quickly will make the experience slip out of the flow channel and into frustration. To maintain flow, the game has to keep increasing the challenge in step with increasing skill.
In a recent episode, the College of Mythic Cartography podcast interviewed Evan Gardner about his language fluency game, "Where Are Your Keys?" Derived from the ACTFL levels of proficiency roadmap, the WAYK game has both diagnostic and educational capacities; it indicates how much fluency you have, and then begins instruction at that level. It provides immediate and constant feedback, another condition for flow, that thus allows for the challenge to constantly calibrate to the learner's ability. I find it no coincidence that WAYK teaches fluency—flow—rather than "language acquisition" or "vocabulary building." And in fact, Willem Larsen, inspired by WAYK, has gone on to write about a "learning revolution," that sees all learning in terms of fluency (flow).
So, rather than leaving the "liminal space" of a storyjam up in the air as something mysterious that we might achieve or might not, I think we have clear goals that can create the conditions for an immersive game experience, to allow the storyjam to flow:
Moreover, we even have a model to emulate and learn from in Evan Gardner's "Where Are Your Keys?" fluency game. This provides an exciting model for designing games, one that promises a game that, instead of just hoping that immersion might happen, could actually create the conditions to cultivate it. Tomorrow, I'll write about how I can use this to design the Fifth World, by setting clearly-defined goals, providing feedback, and adapting the level of challenge organically to the jammers' skill.
Emily Care Boss put it this way:
Immersion is subjective state of mind which each individual has unique requirements in order to enter. What helps me do what I call immersing might absolutely block you from being able to attain what you call immersing. Our experiences of it might also be mutually exclusive. If I could put it into words, what I describe as immersion (in character, game, world or other) might not accurately communicate what my experience is to you, or if it did what I described could be sufficiently different from your experience that you would not acknowledge my experience as immersion. ...
Having said that, my personal suspicion is that there is a shared experience among everyone who speaks about immersion, and the real differences are in what one requires in order to experience that. The differences include system, metagame and social concerns, description of setting, pacing, the whole gamut of what goes into role-playing.
John Wallis describes "mask play" as "a virtual reality: when the player looks around, they see the game-world. They look at other players and see the characters. They look in a mirror and see their character's face. Only by doing this, by shutting out as much of the real world as possible, will the player be able to let their normal personality take a back seat, and allow the personality of their fictional character to take over. I can't describe what that actually means because it doesn't happen often enough to be analyzed, but personal experience makes me think it's worth striving for." (Wallis, 1995) In both of these descriptions, we see immersion described as something mysterious, almost magical. Moyra Turkington puts it in such terms quite explicitly:
There seems to be this perception out there that all immersionists talk about their relationship to character as if it's a magical or mystical process that cannot be explained, and that this leads many of the theorists to get exasperated and decide that immersionists simply are obfuscating because object to the analysis of their play. I disagree with this, and I find it rather dismissive.
There's a reason why so many immersionists express their immersion experiences in mystical terms: the immersion process is in a secular sense, extremely mystical in that the process is enigmatic, obscure, and it often inspires a sense of wonder in the person who experiences it.
I agree, and I find that "mystical" nature itself revealing. The essential experience of mystics carries the name "ecstasy," from the Greek meaning, "to stand beside." Ecstasy involves an altered state of consciousness with intense focus on a single thing, to the exclusion of other stimuli—just like we've already seen so many players define "immersion." One noted psychologist has written a great deal about "the sense of effortless action [many people] feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as 'being in the zone,' religious mystics as being in 'ecstasy,' artists and musicians as 'aesthetic rapture.'"
Except the psychologist who wrote that, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, did not have much to say about roleplaying games; he wrote that in an article titled "Finding Flow," for Psychology Today. Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" unites not just religious ecstasy and artistic rapture, but it also sounds very much like the mystical experience of "immersion" that players discuss, and points, as Emily Care Boss suspected, to a shared experience, despite the subjective means of attaining this altered state of consciousness. In fact, just as it did in Csikszentmihalyi's research, the word "flow" in its normal usage appears frequently when players try to describe "immersion." They talk of "going with the flow"; Csikszentmihalyi heard people describe "flow" experiences similarly, as well as "on the ball" or "in the groove." In the middle of a "flow" experience, we become fully engaged with what we do; other concerns fall away. Csikszentmihalyi cites many examples in which people became unaware of their body or the passage of time.
Others have previously noted the strong parallels between Csikszentmihalyi's concept of "flow" and "immersion" in games; I would go so far as to say that "immersion" simply means flow in the context of a tabletop game, just as ecstasy means religious flow, and "aesthetic rapture" means artistic flow. I think this also describes the "liminal space" of a storyjam—at least, ideally. Whether we immerse in a character's experience, losing our sense of self for a moment to see the world through the eyes of a fictional person, or we immerse in a story, losing our sense of self for a moment to exist in a shared imagining, at the core of both lies that mystical experience of slipping outside of ourselves to "stand beside" and see the world from a different angle.
Does this definition help us at all, besides giving a name to what others, like Emily Care Boss above, already intuited? I think so. You will notice, too, that in the previous descriptions, players describe "immersion" as something they do not understand, and thus, something they cannot cultivate. Everyone has favored methods of creating "immersion," but no one can agree on what methods work best. Most players resign themselves to the notion that immersion either happens, or it doesn't. They have little control over it. A secret combination of the right time, the right place, and the right people might result in immersion, but duplicating the formula seems absurd. That uncertainty might heighten the thrill of hunting it, but many more players abandon the activity because of it. The really rewarding part of play—the immersion—happens much to infrequently. But the work that Csikszentmihalyi has done with flow has created a set of known techniques to help it along; as my permaculture teacher Larry Santoyo might put it, we can create the conditions for flow, or immersion, to happen.
Flow happens when we have clear goals and clear feedback. Roleplaying and story games alike often create impediments to immersion by design, then, if we accept that immersion simply describes flow in a particular context. They often eschew any clearly stated goal, and rarely provide clear feedback. The idea of setting flow itself as such a goal seems suspicious; we might design towards that as a goal, but we could best achieve that by setting the player towards some other goal that we have clearly defined, that has importance and value, and the player knows she has a chance to achieve. We'll also need to find better ways to provide feedback to players to let them know their progress.
Video game designers have focused on this for some time now. They have recognized that immersion in video games means maintaining flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as occurring in a narrow channel where your skills perfectly match the challenges you face (1990:74). If you have skills greater than the challenge, it becomes boring; if you face challenges greater than your skill, it becomes frustrating. But staying in the "flow channel" poses a challenge, since using your skills will increase them, so a steady level of challenge might produce an initial flow experience, but continuing the activity will slip into bordeom as your skills increase. By the same token, increasing the challenge too quickly will make the experience slip out of the flow channel and into frustration. To maintain flow, the game has to keep increasing the challenge in step with increasing skill.
In a recent episode, the College of Mythic Cartography podcast interviewed Evan Gardner about his language fluency game, "Where Are Your Keys?" Derived from the ACTFL levels of proficiency roadmap, the WAYK game has both diagnostic and educational capacities; it indicates how much fluency you have, and then begins instruction at that level. It provides immediate and constant feedback, another condition for flow, that thus allows for the challenge to constantly calibrate to the learner's ability. I find it no coincidence that WAYK teaches fluency—flow—rather than "language acquisition" or "vocabulary building." And in fact, Willem Larsen, inspired by WAYK, has gone on to write about a "learning revolution," that sees all learning in terms of fluency (flow).
So, rather than leaving the "liminal space" of a storyjam up in the air as something mysterious that we might achieve or might not, I think we have clear goals that can create the conditions for an immersive game experience, to allow the storyjam to flow:
- The jam needs a clearly-defined goal; something inherently valuable and something the jammers feel they can achieve.
- Jammers need frequent, clear feedback on their progress towards that goal.
- The level of challenge must constantly gauge the jammers' skill, and adapt to that level.
Moreover, we even have a model to emulate and learn from in Evan Gardner's "Where Are Your Keys?" fluency game. This provides an exciting model for designing games, one that promises a game that, instead of just hoping that immersion might happen, could actually create the conditions to cultivate it. Tomorrow, I'll write about how I can use this to design the Fifth World, by setting clearly-defined goals, providing feedback, and adapting the level of challenge organically to the jammers' skill.
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper Perennial.
- Wallis, J. 1995. Through a mask, darkly: Connecting players and roles. Interactive Fantasy, 3
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