A Little Close to Home

I started a thread on Story Games asking folks what they'd look for in a game about exploration. I got a lot of good suggestions from that thread, but, at the risk of seeming like I just have an interest in patting the backs of people who follow my blog here and comment after yesterday's post thanking Michael Wenman, I really got a great suggestion there from Bill White. He wrote:

I think there was something powerful in The Fifth World's transformation of a modern landscape into a post-urban one. It's like that old Talking Heads song: "Here was a parking lot; now it's all covered with daisies." Make that a part of play: lay out a roadmap of the place you'd like to see transformed and have one output of play be alterations to the modern landscape. Another output of play then becomes integrating these newly defined zones into the post-urban politico-spiritual economy.

I could've jumped out of my chair when I read that. Yes! That totally captured what I wanted from the game. It captured what had excited me so much when I first saw Michael Green's Afterculture, that consideration of a future where the world has become magical—as Michael Green would put it, "cool"—again. A re-enchanted world, a world once again recognizably more-than-human.

So, now I wonder, what if you had to set every scene in a place you knew? Then, you had to tell us what that place looked like 400 years in the future? It seems like it could fit well with a mechanic built for awareness, where you have to spend points to add details to the scene.

I feel pretty excited about this. What do you think?

A Game of Movement

What do we mean when we call something "alive"? The very word biology means, in Greek, "the study of life," yet despite significant efforts, biologists have never managed to come up with a solid, scientific definition for life. The attempts invariably focus on the criteria for life, and the best shot so far points to homeostasis, organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli and reproduction. Perhaps the pursuit has so far failed because it fundamentally looks in the wrong direction--in seeing the universe as a collection of objects, each defined by its unique characteristics--if "life" indicates not an object but a process, might we have some better luck at figuring out what we mean by it? We could not say "that is alive," but we could say, "that lives."

In Ojibwa, the word "bema.diziwa.d" comes closest to our phrase, "living things," and translates literally as "those who continue in the state of being alive," though we might more accurately gloss it as "those who have power." (Black, 1977) That really just moves the question, though, to what we mean by "power."

Since we talk about roleplaying games here, I should begin with mana. Before it signified a wizard's pool of magical potency in games, it existed as a term in Oceania, and few terms in the world have ever suffered as much abuse. Anthropologists forced it into a linear model of cultural evolution, casting it as an impersonal magical force that pervaded the world, and that magicians could manipulate. They saw this as the most primitive type of religion, eventually giving way to polytheism that concentrated that magical potency in a pantheon of gods, then monotheism which concentrated that power in a single god, and finally, at the apex of cultural evolution, the enlightened, scientific atheist, who understood the truth that the world operated according to impersonal forces. But that theory had more to do with the imagination of Western anthropologists than what Oceanian peoples meant by the term. To them, mana meant potency, or "power." They would describe a skilled craftsman, a capable chief, or a talented hunter as mana-ful. Mana meant something more along the lines of skill, potential, power, or capacity, than anything as mystical or supernatural as the ethnographers dreamed. Certainly, I, too, have greatly abbreviated the full discussion here, and the native concept has many nuances and complications, but I think, in general, I can stand by the statement that mana, in its original sense, has much more to do with the kind of power you'd find in your muscles than the kind of power your level blood elf taps in World of Warcraft.

Closer to home, the concept of "orenda" has a similar history, having at one point seen use almost as often as mana and for much the same purpose. J.N.B. Hewitt's influential 1902 article in American Anthropologist, "Orenda and a Definition of Religion" (Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1902), pp. 33-46) offered the word and its reference to a mystical, impersonal force pervading the world. But Hewitt offers a mistranslation at best; the better term, uki, exists in tension withutkon (sometimes also spelled utgon in English). Hewitt's elevation of "orenda" over utkon fundamentally breaks the traditional Haudenosaunee perspective, which put the two in equal tension. Uki benefitted life, while utkon described the impacts of the Trickster. Too often, when Westerners have noticed both concepts, they have simplified them into a Manichaean good/evil dichotomy. My own understanding seems to put them more in relation as things that promote ecological succession, and things that cut it back. A world of only uki would become a stagnant forest of nothing but towering old trees, while a world of only utkon would look, well, distressingly similar to the world civilization has left us. But a healthy world emerges from the interplay of both forces. Seneca forestry, for instance, often used fire to clear out fields, in a clear wielding of utkon, yet that created forests with varied successional stages, which maximized edge and thus maximized biodiversity.

But I see one process running through Oceanic mana and Haudenosaunee uki and utkon: change. We asked before, what do we mean by "power"? I think this short analysis points us towards a clear answer: the power to change, or the power to move. Oceanic mana seems to take a unitary view of change, while the Haudenosaunee concept of uki and utkon specifies change in one of two directions. No doubt other traditions would see change along other axes; might the Lakota medicine wheel chart change going out to one of the four cardinal directions, for instance? But we fundamentally, always mean change, regardless of the direction of that change. "Those who remain in the state of being alive" means "those who keep changing." To live means to change, constantly, to engage a changing world, to open yourself for the world to change you, and for you to change the world.

Before, I asked about The Fifth World as a game of awareness, but now I see that awareness just means one kind of movement (Noë, 2005; Ingold, 2005). Dan Moonhawk Alford described native modes of perception by pointing to "watching the dancing rather than the dancers — the dancers fade back- into the background as you just describe the rhythms and the motions of what is." Or, according to Alford's account of a conference with American Indians and quantum physicists:

After listening to the physicists and American Indians talk for a few days, it struck me that the way physicists use the term potential, or quantum potential, is nearly identical to the way Native Americans use the term spirit. They all agreed there was something similar going on.

Potential, spirit, life means change and movement. When we stop changing, we stop living. It has such an elegant beauty to it, and it really refocuses my efforts. The Fifth World should focus to become a game of movement.

• Black, M.B. (1977). Ojibwa power belief system. In Fogelson, R.D. & Adams, R.N. (Eds.) The anthropology of power: ethnographic studies from Asia, Oceania and the New World. New York: Academic Press, pp. 141-151


• Ingold, T. (2005). Stop, look and listen! Vision, hearing and human movement. In Ingold, T. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge, pp. 241-287


• Noë, A. Action in perception. Cambridge: MIT Press.

A Game of Awareness

Reading Tim Ingold's The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, has forced me to re-evaluate some of my most basic assumptions about the animist mind. Most relevantly to the Fifth World, I've had to reconsider the atomic act of the animist world. In our world, everything comes down to conflict; beyond simply beating someone up, you fight off a disease, fight for your side of argument, fight the war on drugs, et cetera ad nauseum. But consider these:

• When Tim Bennett & Sally Erickson came to Pittsburgh, we talked about the Fifth World a bit, and we discussed how consensus building might play into it. It defied the normal RPG convention, which the Fifth World still followed at that point, because consensus doesn't mean beating your opponent's skill check, it means aligning your perspective to match each other, so that you come into balance.
• In his book, Ingold talks about the Cree experience of hunting and tracking. Tracking brings them into communion with the animal, but the kill itself takes place very quickly. The deer doesn't try to escape; it offers itself up to the hunter. Hunting does not involve violence. The hunter never tries to overcome the deer; rather, the challenge tests the hunter's awareness and empathy, to notice the gift at the crucial moment that the deer offers it.
• Shapeshifting actually occurs among animist peoples. It does not happen "symbolically" or "metaphorically." Animists experience an actual shape-shifting. Now, we might look on and call it trance or dream, but from the experiential point of view—the only point of view that actually matters—they experience true shapeshifting. But this does not occur by overcoming some magical hurdle, or beating the right Target Number; the difficulty lies in the shape-shifter's attempt to align his or her senses, outlook, and feelings with that of the animal he or she shifts into. The ornaments, dress and mask all help towards that end, but the challenge lies in aligning his own perspective to take on a different perspective.

Modern RPG's evolved out of wargames, and since we conceive of the universe as constant struggle, those mechanics worked well. You'll even hear, quite often, the mantra that "story is conflict." But what if that just arises, like so many other things we take for granted, from our cultural expectations, and the basic conflict required for our way of life? What if story could also trace relationship, based not on conflict, but on the attempt to synchronize two parties?

In tracking, different modes of awareness mean a great deal. Owl eyes sacrifice focus for breadth, while focus sacrifices breadth. So we already have there an idea of "resource allocation," if you will, where the "resource" simply means your attention. And we have different kinds of awareness: the synaesthetic awareness of the Flesh, the imaginative and intellectual awareness of the wind, our internal awareness expressed as emotions mapped onto the landscape, and so on. I've found this already mapped, quite elegantly, in the medicine wheel.

What if the "character sheet" took the form of a medicine wheel, with concentric circles, that fundamentally mapped your character's current awareness, and the game's mechanics mostly modeled different ways of shifting that awareness? What if, instead of beating a target number, you had to synchronize your awareness with some Other? What if, instead of conflict, this game modeled awareness?

I do not know how to do that yet, so I welcome suggestions.

Lurching Back to Life

Have I completely wasted my time since the last flurry of posts? No, not completely, though perhaps more than I'd care to admit. I have spent some time with some more traditionally rewilding activities, which I think I'll report on soon on Anthropik. And, I have (1) built up my RPG experience portfolio, and (2) practiced what I preach by beginning (and this past Saturday, resetting) a Savage Worlds campaign, using the Savage World of Solomon Kane setting: "Beyond the Elder Peaks." It involves the early history of Jamestown, and pulls the characters into the territory of the Allegwi; my brother plays a Jacobean super-spy that he described as "the seventeenth century Solid Snake" (from the Metal Gear video game series), so I think he's created a good mythical role model for himself there, and Giuli rolled up Virginia Dare, the original American rewilder. The movement from Jamestown into Allegwi territory ties in our cultural mythology as Americans, our origin myths like the Puritans, the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke, and Jamestown, the "Noble Savage," and even parallels my own family's travels, having once lived very near Jamestown, and then coming home to Pittsburgh. As mythology, I feel very pleased with it, and you can read more about that on the Obsidian Portal site if that interests you. As a game designer, I've enjoyed getting a chance to branch out and try something at least a little different.

But now I feel like I really do need to get back to the Fifth World, though I feel another round of heavy-duty research should come next. With this round, I picture the game's mechanics revolving around a bowl full of beads (the matter and energy, "life force," mana or orenda of the land, if you will), with players taking beads from it and throwing them back in, hopefully creating a gameplay occupied with questions of balance, and the conservation of mass/energy, and perhaps even some land-wide problems if the bowl becomes too depleted? But as I said, I want to do some research into questions of animist worldview before getting too far into mechanics. Specifically, I need to take a look at:

1. Skill, specifically the concept of "mana," and similar concepts, which I suspect will provide me with my best basis for how to handle skill in the game.
2. Awareness, and where that comes from. I plan to read a lot of Tom Brown on this question, and I suspect that this will tie in pretty strongly with the relationship system.

Some other game ideas I've come up with:

1. A lot of story games include a collaborative setting creation system, which I find interesting, but how does that fit into the Fifth World as an open source setting? And, with so many pernicious, ignorant stereotypes, misconceptions and outright misinformation about "primitive" peoples, does such a system ask for those stereotypes to come on in, make themselves at home, and become glorified and entrenched by the game? I want the Fifth World to provide an experience to counter those stereotypes, not reinforce them. But what if we had cultures defined in the wiki where they could receive attention from anthropologically-minded contributors, but then we have mechanics for groups to collaboratively create their own villages and bands? I think that idea just might work out. I normally harbor deep suspicions about myself when I find myself doubting the ability of a group of people to come up with something good on their own; it goes against my anarchist grain. But I don't think this really questions people's ability to figure things out for themselves, so much as it questions our ability to really understand how thoroughly civilized thought has poisoned the well. I know I can't accomplish the goals for the Fifth World directly, it has to come from emergent play. So how can you expect anyone else to figure all of that out on their own?
2. The idea of tracking relationships with beads on a string has really hit home with me. This will likely make it all the way to the final draft.
3. Tracking skills according to angles on a circle doesn't seem to work very well, but I still like the idea of the character sheet primarily taking the form of a medicine wheel. Perhaps concentric circles, representing tree rings or the energy potential orbits of an atom, and perhaps combined with four rough quadrants, might give me a better direction.