Casting Shadows

New Normals.

Consider long, long ago when the dews of creation were still wet upon the earth, and two people approached each other and felt the stirring that they should offer greetings. We have no idea what they did. We don’t know if they did or didn’t bow, or did or didn’t shake hands. We do know that eventually, however those behaviors developed over time. Now, greetings often include speaking because we’re largely verbal creatures, and in some cultures some kind of physical contact is necessary. There’s the kiss on the cheek or kiss on each cheek, or a handshake, or a hug, or something like a hearty slap on the shoulder. In other cultures, more distance is maintained with some kind of nod, bow, or gesture.

These things are passed on, largely by demonstration and observation. As kids, we become aware that this is what people do to greet one another and this is what people say to greet one another, and we emulate them. Some kids need some reminding from time to time, so there are some parents who reinforce the emulation and then later the correct execution of the desired behavior. They say things like, “You didn’t say ‘hello’ to that person. You need to say ‘hello’ because it’s polite,” Maybe they frame it as ‘the right thing to do,’ or perhaps more relevantly to this post, ‘it is what we always do.’

I see this a lot here in Korea because of the culture and the relative complication involved in what in many other cultures is a simpler thing. Kids are constantly told when and how to greet their elders. The greeting behavior is taught and the teaching of the greeting behavior is taught. This is something that virtually everybody does with their kids here, and to a greater or lesser extent elsewhere in the world depending on cultural factors. Both kids and parents who do not display the proper response according to their society are judged by other members of that society who were taught and who do adhere to it.

Outside of the common aspects of life that on one or more levels are communicated to and imprinted on us, does this dynamic hold true? Looking around we can see the conformity and lack of questioning of greeting people the way your culture greets others, or speaking the language that your culture uses, or using the vocabulary word they have for a piece of fruit or a piece of furniture. Teaching, reinforcing, and using these things ourselves seem like automatic behaviors within communities.

Does this behavior hold true in groups within the group, such as the group of people who choose to play roleplaying games?

I think what’s kind of interesting about this is that when there is an awareness that there is a specific skill or behavior that no one will know how to do unless they’re taught, there’s an equivalent awareness that explicit teaching must be done. If the resources exist for that teaching to occur, then generally speaking, that explicit teaching is given, and you are guided in how that skill or behavior is to be done.

Later in life you discover that there are actually other ways that that thing is done, and often the approaches are all arbitrary and equivalent within the subset of that activity. How you hold your utensils while eating, is an example. I’m sure that some combination of your culture, your family, your social status, and your region, has a distinct opinion on a ‘good way’ and a ‘bad way’ to hold your eating utensils, or perhaps some acceptable range of good ways and bad ways to do it. To be clear I do not mean good and bad in terms of function, like the degree of success in getting food into your mouth. I mean purely variations of grip, utensil orientation, speed of deployment, amount of food to be transported per use of the utensil and so on. In terms of pure consumption, they’re all equal. If we’re talking about social expectations, however, you may be informed that you look uneducated if you hold the utensil one way, and you look properly educated if you hold it in the approved way. Those distinctions of form not function are arbitrary ones. At the most fundamental level at the root of the activity these details simply do not matter.

So, if we can apply this kind of observation to other activities like people learning how to play roleplaying games, what we end up with seeing is that from the start of the hobby and on until about the turn of the century, there was limited awareness among the general gaming population that there had to be explicit teaching and even less awareness about what form that should take. Even now, if we take YouTube out of the equation, and take the general Internet out of the equation, we see that new gamers are still left to fend for themselves – generally speaking. Few game lines have effective support for new players, and few of the ones that do communicate anything beyond what is needed to navigate a simplified on-ramp to one specific game. They were given, or they found, or they heard about and sought out an RPG, but then in the privacy of their own homes they had to open the book, read it, and then try to figure out how it works. This would be like training a new miliary recruit how to salute by giving them a picture of what a salute looks like and sending them on their way. They will definitely be able to figure out how to get the salute to look right, but what else? This was pretty much how it tended to work in the past and that trend hold true today.

Once those first newcomer problems were handled, and you had a group to play with, observation, discovery, and experimentation were the teachers of the past. They still are, but with the introduction of the Internet and specifically with the ability for observation provided by YouTube, people are increasingly learning how to play from strangers that they do not play with, without much context, and with a sort of one-size-fits-all philosophy which can be suboptimal. Even Average Joe is a range of variations where that single size fits only with a generous interpretation of ‘fit.’

In the past, once part of a group that was into learning new games or getting the one they were playing to better match the rules, observation, discovery, and experimentation as we noted above were the route to greater understanding – but in isolation unless some sliver of contact with another group was possible. If Little Billy had Star Frontiers and wanted to play it, we would all learn to play it. There isn’t much teaching in this model, it’s mainly discovery. It was reading the book(s) and leaping into play with the rules in mind and assumptions about how to apply them drawn from whatever previous game or games we had played. Maybe somebody had a subscription to some kind of gaming magazine. Maybe somebody else had gone to a gaming convention and there were some roleplaying games there. Maybe, we might have started to hear about how other people played and we started to compare how we had basically reinvented play. We had reinvented the wheel at our own table, just as that other group had done at theirs. How does our wheel compare to the wheels of these other tables that we have played with or heard about or seen?

When we get the sense that one particular way of doing something is more common than another way of doing something, certainly at particular points in our lives, it becomes easier to accept that popularity as an argument for the correctness of that behavior. Here is where the Internet and the pseudo-friendliness of YouTube demonstrates a massive force multiplier. We have this so common it’s cliché discussion with teenagers about everyone jumping off a bridge. Why is this a common trope? The average teenager tends to go with the flow. They tend to follow the herd. They’re trying to figure out what their identity is. They’re trying to figure out what they like and don’t like, and what there even is for them to like or dislike. This pattern tends to hold true for newcomers of whatever age figuring out a new activity and its associated social group. People navigate through emulation, experimentation, and of course, observation. The less organized and self-aware the community is of what it is, the less chance there is of there being formal instruction about being a member. Of particular interest among younger newcomers is that they don’t tend to want to stand out for ridicule by getting things wrong or making mistakes, which pressures them toward emulation and away from experimentation. I mean, here the average teenager – not the proto punk or goth or whatever seeking to emulate a smaller and more obvious social group to gain easier acceptance within it. Obviously, it’s still the same behavior, just with a smaller group and different details. Sometimes this behavior of fitting in endures throughout your life and often, regardless of doing so or blazing a trail, it seems people tend to settle into some comfort zone that becomes more and more impervious to the changes around them.

We start to laugh at grandpa’s fashion choices because he was a fashionable young man in the jazz era and has a fondness for long watch chains, bright colors, baggy pants, and spectator shoes – and he still wants to wear those now when he hobbles out to WalMart. Maybe instead of Jazz Grandpa, we have a die-hard AD&D gamer who mutters about 3d6 down the line, ignoring Gary’s suggestion for 4d6 drop the lowest because as a 10-year-old in the 80s he got his understanding of chargen from Basic D&D and didn’t read the reference in the AD&D PG to check page 11 of the AD&D DMG for all the variations on how it could be done, or that the game expected his character to have at least two Attributes of 15 or better and the odds of doing that with that method are around 12%. Both of these examples, as different as they appear, are equally set in their ways. They don’t think they are right. They don’t evaluate their preferences higher than others’ preferences. They know they are right. There are no other preferences.

Anyway, a great term for what I am taking my sweet time to build up to, is norms. Descriptive norms are what we can observe and describe about a group, or approach to a task, and how it is commonly seen and explained. If we are in the group, these observations play a role in how we behave or at least in how we expect others to react if we behave differently. If we fully buy into or if we have no idea that there are other ways, these descriptive norms – the what we’ve heard everybody’s doing part – become prescriptive norms. The norm becomes de facto truth. It stops being a way to do something and becomes THE way to do something.

What does that mean? It means that this goes from shaking hands, to how you hold your fork, to chewing with your mouth open or closed, or burping or not burping, or elbows on or off the table, standing up straight or slumping, the sports you like, the teams you like, what you think looks cool in terms of clothing, what you think looks stupid in terms of clothing, what is or is not good music –  all of these things. It’s not just what you come to see as correct or good, but can be what you are even able to recognize as correct or good. All of these things and more are influenced by this aspect of the human, group-animal dynamic.

Okay – it’s time for turning our attention fully to RPGs, right? If you are familiar with me at all, a particular point I raise repeatedly is about the major divide in roleplaying games, in terms of how they are conceived of by the people who play them. I reference here the Story Divide where on one side of this gap we have those who play RPGs as a Storytelling activity of some kind, and on the other we have those who play RPGs as the exploration of an imagined world. In combination, we have the full spectrum of what an RPG can do regardless of the way that you play.

We do not have that full spectrum before us to explore easily as gamers anymore. Newcomers may never have heard anything other than the incomplete idea that RPGs are storytelling, or if they have seen a game where this is not accurate, they have not been able to recognize it. It’s far easier to recognize a difference we are looking for than to invent a classification for a thing which lies outside our experience. We tend to fit things into understood and established patterns rather than break those patterns.  

The spectrum of choice in gaming has been and continues to be arbitrarily abbreviated and shrunk down into a lesser range of options bound up within this understood norm that RPGs are Storytelling. Because of this kind of group induction and largely accidental, but occasionally intentional, indoctrination, the descriptive norm of RPGs can be a form of storytelling has become a prescriptive norm – it dictates behavior, it dictates description of the activity, and it can shape thought about the activity to such a degree that the full range of opportunities for play are obfuscated. The elements of RPGs which do not require one approach or the other and equally accommodate both become invisible. For most gamers, not just those of a certain age, RPGs ARE storytelling, and any conversation which suggests there is more to that story, is misunderstood.

These days, in the hobby at large, we are only talking about the hobby in terms of one side of the Story Divide. We are only talking about – and many are only able to talk about portion of the range of possibilities. Why this is important is not to preserve a faded type of gaming that I appreciate more than the survivor. It goes much deeper than that. When we say, that there aren’t that many people to play with, or that the only gamers you can find are incompatible with you, this may be the result of the unfortunate lack of exposure to the full breadth of what roleplaying games cover, because only this one aspect is being reinforced and modeled in roleplaying game books, actual plays, explainer vids, casual conversation molded from those sources, and whatever magazines, periodicals, blogs or vlogs or whatever still exist. How many people never find their game? How many never feel the lure of the hobby?

What we see as the hobby is what people reinforce about the hobby. What we can express about the hobby is what gets expressed about the hobby. It’s a self-fulfilling and self-limiting cycle. Newcomers join, observe, emulate, and possibly experiment. Established gamers keep on doing what they enjoy from what they think of as the hobby. From the 90s onward, what that has meant is that the core books, observation of others playing, and discourse based on all of that has built the self-reinforcing, copy/paste assumption that play is a storytelling activity.

Unfortunately, the other half of the spectrum connects with the hobby as an experience of another world, possibly as another person and when play is approached as a Storytelling Activity, that play gets harder in degree the further into storytelling we go. Until it becomes impossible. That of course, is long after play has become unsatisfying.

Using myself as an example, according to my personal preferences, my enjoyment rapidly decreases when play allows influencing things on the Story Layer. It rapidly increases as we move toward adopting the perspective of being in the situation of the character. So, if I were to be a starting gamer now, and if I were dropped into how gaming is commonly done and spoken about, where you will collaborate on an epic story, where your character is a protagonist, the hero in their story, I never would have become a roleplayer.

Think about that, if you would be so kind.

I’ve been a roleplayer for 41 years to date. That’s a very long time to maintain a hobby as a primary focus of my leisure and sometimes my working time, right? Four decades is a very long time, especially for a hobby as time and resource consuming as this one can be. I think that speaks to its importance to me and its ability to fulfill me in ways that other hobbies have not been able to. To say, that if I had been introduced to the hobby in the way it is conceived of now, I would have drifted away from it very quickly, is telling. How many others have already left, or opted not try? How many have given up gaming but still labor away on trying to find the perfect design to express an idea that they can’t quite touch, or to find a way to express an idea they can see but it seems like no one else can?

The whole range of RPG opportunities from both sides of the Story Divide is necessary. Developing techniques for and understanding of the whole range of possibilities within what roleplaying games can be is necessary in order to make this a viable hobby for the largest number of people. We can better enable them to identify what they do and don’t like about play; to identify what a particular game does and doesn’t do for them, gets in the way of or facilitates doing; to better realize why they enjoy it when Little Billy is the GM but have less fun when his brother Todd is – all of this stuff. We are far less effective when we consider only half of the equation.

When we consider how the dominant games and their imitators are written and how those in the production of games so often unthinkingly copy, paste and adopt descriptions from other games to use in their own, this accidental in some cases, and intentional in other cases, use of terms programs people to accept one single aspect of play as the norm. Once adopted as the understanding of what a roleplaying game is, it becomes the norm. This prescriptive norm passively and unobtrusively blocks newcomers from discovering or accepting more. It can render the rest of the range of possibilities invisible, or makes it seem like it’s something else – something it is not. It can make description of it seem preposterous, like ‘how could anyone even play that way?’

So, is it possible to forge a new and more accurate norm? It’s time to try, before it’s too late. Action is needed before those of us who started playing before this prescriptive shift became so pervasive that new gamers have practically zero chance of being exposed to the full range of what roleplaying games offer, pass on. We aren’t without hope. Though there are many who find no satisfaction on the opposite side of the Story Divide than their preferences dictate, me on the side of RPGs as Experience and my opposite number on the side of RPGs as Storytelling, there are those among us whose preferences bridge these gaps. It is through them that diplomacy and interpretation can be fostered, and the barriers of stubborn bias and preference can be pushed back. Will it be enough to expect more from the text in our games and explain what is missing? Will it be enough to share more about how we play, what we do when we play, and how the games we play affect the experience we have? Will it be enough to be open and explicit about the game we are playing now, the people we are playing it with, the way we are playing it, and the circumstances in which it is being played, and sharing the effect of all of that on the experience?

I don’t know.

It’s time, regardless, to start pushing back against the unquestioned acceptance of Story-as-Product as the only description of the hobby.

Storytelling is good, but there is more to gaming than storytelling and we shouldn’t have to settle for half of great by accepting just a slice of good.