Casting Shadows

Words are a double-edged sword, and much like that expression, surreptitiously change their meaning over time – often as a result of assumption, ignorance, or a combination of both brought on by changes of circumstance and context. While some people do intentionally twist words to new meanings to serve their own ends, we cannot truthfully say that all people do. What this leads us to when examining RPGs is what I have previously described as the Story Divide, and its widening and the greater share of player focus on the side of the gap concerned with RPGs as storytelling. Unless we choose to expose a misguided and sad crusade to narrow the focus of what RPGs can be, we have to proceed with the understanding that that narrowing of focus is an unintentional and unnecessary misrepresentation through the repetition of certain words.

“You keep using that word… I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Inigo Montoya

Two Quotations, One Source, Several References

Let’s start with a quick look at an easily accessible resource which offers a summary of thought on the subject of RPGs and look at two important paragraphs which first describe the activity and then describe the purpose respectively:

A role-playing game (sometimes spelled roleplaying game, or abbreviated as RPG) is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making regarding character development. Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.

Wikipedia

Both authors and major publishers of tabletop role-playing games consider them to be a form of interactive and collaborative storytelling. Events, characters, and narrative structure give a sense of a narrative experience, and the game need not have a strongly-defined storyline. Interactivity is the crucial difference between role-playing games and traditional fiction. Whereas a viewer of a television show is a passive observer, a player in a role-playing game makes choices that affect the story. Such role-playing games extend an older tradition of storytelling games where a small party of friends collaborate to create a story.

Wikipedia

There is a lot more we could look at than these two brief quotations, and a discussion of the Story Divide with Che Webster and a survey of some relevant text from great game books old and new can be heard in two episodes of Roleplay Rescue that I was a guest on (On the Story Divide, and What is an RPG?), but for the purposes of this post these two paragraphs give us a lot. A third episode using the changes in D&D over time as a reflection of the state of gamers’ thoughts on the hobby will be along soon. Keep your ears peeled!

Content of the Conversation vs the Description of the Activity

Comparing the “What is an RPG?” paragraph to the “Purpose of an RPG” paragraph what stands out to me is a significant divergence in what is reported as the content of the conversation which serves as the medium of the game. Compare ‘take on the role of characters’ to ‘storytelling’ and you find it is possible for these to map together, but it is not required that they do. It might not even be obvious to some asked to make this comparison how it could even be possible for them to connect. Likewise, others might not be able to immediately figure out how they could be seen as unconnected.

This schism is the Story Divide.

It is the difference between thinking that an RPG session is a story before, during, and after it happens, versus thinking of the events of play as suitable for relating as a story after the fact or remembering certain sequences of play in coherent segments in the way we do about our real lives. While preparation, means of characterization, the influence of rules and player roles such as the GM all matter in a person’s positioning within or to either side of this Divide, the fundamental split cracks the bedrock of conception of what play actually is. Is it play that inevitably produces experiences which can then at some point be linked with or without the explanations and embellishments of plot and/or narrative into a coherent story, or is it storytelling that draws on the game and its players to variable degrees?

As we look at RPG text from the earliest days through to now, the spread of awareness among those writing this text about what play is, what it can be, and what the act of play requires, can be seen to form, spread, cross-pollinate, and then continue the twin processes of derivation and innovation that led to the games which came before. Many of the same ideas are rephrased repeatedly, many are recombined or differently emphasized in some games, whereas other games are written in reaction to something missing, something overshadowed, something misrepresented, or something too dominant. Old ways to play are intentionally and unintentionally preserved or intentionally or unintentionally created or recreated, while new ways to play also crop up with focus and intention or with luck and inspiration. Through all of these we can find games that have a clarity and coherence of vision about what that given game is and those which present a muddled or even contradictory description of what they are and how they do what they do.

To this we add the readers and players of games and their varied abilities to interpret and implement the material in these texts to varying degrees of fidelity, confidence, and success. Some groups can make the most incoherent games sing while some other groups fail with even the most clear-cut games – experienced or not.

The Conversation about The Conversation

For readers who use terms like story, narrative, and plot interchangeably (as many do) and who therefore use storytelling, narrate, and plot similarly, the quotations shared above tell a different story than they do to those who read them with some degree of nuance or with a specific difference in their understanding of those words. Where these two sets of readers conform to each other can be seen on either side of the Divide. This post, however, is about how the specific and sometimes ambiguous intentions and meanings of our words matter more and more in some very specific cases, not the least of which is their effect on newcomers.

Does it really matter?

If I spoke about creating a story and then spoke about telling that story, I don’t think anyone would have trouble recognizing these as statements about two activities which are separate in time and different in procedure. They are obviously distinct and dissimilar activities.

In RPG writing, however, in an accelerated fashion through the 80s and 90s, the explosion in the number of RPGs and the number of people writing them leads to a blending of the separate notions of incidental story creation, intentional story creation, and storytelling into part of one description of what an RPG and its play are. We see the text move from the incomplete idea that RPGs are about taking on a role, to an expansion of it to include taking on a role with a personality different from one’s own, to branches that include varieties of preparation and type of system, to certain sudden leaps to roleplaying gaming as being storytelling.

While it might be easy to leap on White Wolf and its Storyteller System as the genesis of that conflation, we can see that those ideas were already in place and in some notable cases, like Prince Valiant, were far more advanced than they were in Storyteller products, more coherent, and self-aware. In general, however, we can still see before and during the rise of White Wolf in the 90s, that the text in the games themselves, the many new types of games and systems already out and steadily being released, the discussions in the articles and letters sections of gaming magazines, and the experiences of the people who lived through those years, that more and more connections with literature, cinema, theatrical means of presenting fiction, and oral traditions of passing on tales were being forged. These things show us that the expansion from the hobby’s start, with its forms and expectations more amenable to the experience side of the Divide, toward forms that included or were only in line with the story side of it were well-established. White Wolf was perhaps the loudest and farthest reaching herald of an already established preference for the Story side of the Divide. The first and second edition books dripped with passion for the art, skill, and instinct toward telling stories and these books inspired many to want to be “storytellers” and see the hobby as another link in a great tradition and human drive for telling stories.

Long ago, before movies, TV, radio and books, people
used to tell stories. Tales on the hunt, legends about the gods
and the great spirits, or gossip about the affairs of others all
drew rapt attention. They would tell these stories aloud, as part
of an oral tradition of storytelling, but this tradition has been
mostly lost. Other forms of storytelling have taken its place.
We no longer tell stories, we listen to them, we sit
passively and wait to be picked up and carried to the world they
describe, to the unique perception of reality they embrace. We
have become slaves to our TVs, and passively permit others
to describe our lives, our culture and our personal reality
through the stories that are constantly being told.
However, there is another way. Today the ancient
art of storytelling has been rediscovered. A new movement
is slowly growing. People are bringing stories home, making
the ancient myths and legends a more substantial part of
their lives. Storytelling on a personal level, rather than on
the big screen or on TV, has become increasingly a part of
our culture. That is what this game is all about, not stories
that will be told to you, but stories that you will tell yourself.

Vampire: the Masquerade – Storytelling, page 20

Where Storyteller and most other games lagged behind this shift, however, was in the direct mechanical support for the act of story creation. Systems, and a great deal of the rhetoric and description of the hobby still included elements which favored viewing the hobby as an experience of other places as other people. While it might seem from the quote from VtM1e above that White Wolf’s self-proclaimed Renaissance in Gaming was a fully-formed and coherent idea about telling stories it was as full of contradictory descriptions, directives, rules, procedures, and attitudes as most of the games of its time.

The desire among gamers to have characters that could survive longer, that could grow and develop over time, that could fulfill heroic or other arcs through long-form or at least differently-structured play was already in place and had been growing from the birth of the hobby. Games had already started appearing which innovated in many different ways to try to meet those desires and that in turn refined, shaped, and inspired those desires to develop further.

That is good and the sort of creativity and growth imaginative people should probably celebrate.

Where things go awry is that as more and more people wrote more and more games with varying levels of awareness about the hobby, their own and others’ preferences, and the extent of the hobby in their time, each with varying resources for page count – the message got a little mangled. It stopped explaining in the ways that we see in early games like BRP and Traveller where the authors survey what they know of the hobby and how it is played. It started being more certain, even when it would also contradict itself in subsequent paragraphs.

“RPGs are storytelling, and you can be a part of that great tradition.”

Why can’t it be both?

That’s the thing really – it already has been both, at least in terms of points along a spectrum of possible approaches and understandings, but as I attempt to briefly show in the paragraphs above has been oddly growing less so over time. The terms used in describing what we do, and the text newcomers are most likely to encounter in their formative interactions with the hobby, have now effectively placed this storytelling term forward as the central concept mostly likely to be heard and encountered, and they essentially emphasize that roleplaying is storytelling. The goal is to tell stories. That, combined with the spread of mechanisms from more story-focused games to those games which had previously been focused on other things, has blurred the lines and variations once visible to newcomers, hiding them more and more from sight. Mechanisms which operate from the Out-of-Character stance to directly affect the Story Layer of play through such things as point spends for retcons, or round-table discussions for intentional collaboration as players, plus the widespread importation of literature, cinema, and video game terminology to teach and explain the act and realities of play as stories, lead us away from what had been an admittedly disjointed and often confused but ongoing broadening of perspective on what the hobby can encompass, toward a sadly little-recognized narrowing of focus down to that singular and inaccurate assessment that “RPGs are Storytelling” – and nothing more.

When we dig into research into storytelling as an academic subject, we find resistance to the notion that RPGs are storytelling – they are something different. When we listen to what our fellow players express about what they enjoy about playing, we hear so many different things from a love of rolling dice, to a desire for immersion in a moment, to the joy in connecting clues and solving a mystery, to tactics and drama, to self-expression, and a chance to escape. We hear so very many things to love about RPGs, not the least of which is the simple camaraderie they foster, and among them is of course the stories we tell afterward of the moments our characters, the situations, the interplay of the rules and rulings and the creativity of the players all conspired together to create as we played. Among them we can find the stories we made and among those we can, of course, find those we made as our whole goal of play. Only by accident and innocent repetition, however, do we find storytelling in the list, and when it is there, it drowns out the other voices.

“RPGs are storytelling!” it says over everyone.

And when people accept the claim without thought, that makes all the difference.