Antimimetics - Gaming in theory
This section is for discussion of how the text might contribute to our thinking about ttrpgs - character creation, rule systems, etc.
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So I have quite a few ideas here, but I'll start with the most pressing thing that occurred to me: The relation between what happens when we play ttrpgs, and what happens when we remember / forecast what playing them is like.
At one level the GM provides antagonists for PCs, and the players try to defeat them, while at another level the players around the table (everyone who is playing, including the referee) are co-operating to produce a stress cycle (https://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/news/stress-cycles-what-they-are-and-how-manage-them) through imagined conflict and resolution. Storybooks provide imitations of that cycles:
1) Resting ground state = the characters before the story;
2) Tension and strain phase = something that happens to the characters;
3) Response phase, which can be passive and/or active = how the characters deal with the something;
4) Relief phase, which is both physiological and psychological = the characters settle into another ground state, perhaps like the old one, perhaps quite different.
I'm suggesting that playing is about practising these cycles. However this isn't what we usually talk about when we talk about the play, instead we talk about it as if we were the characters.
What I found interesting about this story was how it was pretty clearly an episodic "monster of the week" story that has a so-called "background myth" that provides a larger scale stress cycle. I got thinking about how nesting has worked in some of the stories we have read, and wondered if anyone else noticed this. Is pretending this something that anyone includes when they are preparing a game? Is it something that people include in their sessions, e.g. the opportune moment to break until the next session?
I also wondered about one-shots. I suggest a successful one-shot follows this pattern. I don't play ttrpg one-shots at all (except what I would call disasters, usually when I am supposed to be the GM), but I do play card and board games like this, so I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences. Thanks, BC
I’m not sure what you mean when you say we talk about play as if we were the characters. We do say ‘I do this’ or ‘I do that’ during the game - this is the play itself, not talking about the play of the game. Except I guess we might say ‘I hit for 10 points of damage’ which is both in one shot - maybe that’s what you mean. Perhaps that’s just short hand. I think we mostly know how to separate in-character from out-of-character things.
TINAMD is definitely monster of the week. But it’s also taking different views on the same topic. The stories propose different horrors which can be experienced. This is consistent with its speculative fiction nature - it’s about approaching one issue from different angles. This bears a similarity to Monster of the Week in that the monsters encountered must have different ways of attacking the players, and different skills/approaches must be used to defeat them. However, I don’t think TINAMD is so much about defeating the monsters as it is about exploiting the readers fears. So more like Horror of the Week.
The stress cycle definitely plays into where we break, but the bigger deciding factor is ‘how long will the next segment take to resolve, and can we do it before we need to go to bed? We will break at a convenient lull, or just before switching to ‘combat mode’, or sometimes right after something shocking seems to happen but before it is resolved (a cliffhanger).
One shots follow the pattern more tightly because you know you only have one session to resolve. Campaigns can be looser because you aren’t on a schedule. But I think one still tries to hit some highs and lows (of tension) each session regardless of campaign length.
I think your description of the RPG cycle of play is accurate for action-adventure based games with traditional roles around the table (one GM, one PC per player, character monogamy, limits on who can contribute what to the shared fictional space, etc.).
The nested cycles is an explicit part of several RPGs. The most recent example that comes to mind is Girl by Moonlight (a "magical girl anime" RPG) that I used for K-Pop Demon Hunters. That has an explicit season structure, where the overarching threat gets more dangerous as the PCs discover more about it until they are able to meet it in the final confrontation. Within that, there's the FitD Mission structure, where each session alternates between the "situation of the week" and the downtime, where people heal and forge connections with each other.
Fight with Spirit (sports anime) does something similar, with matches interspersed with free-er play.
And this is far from the only structure of RPGs.
Where I think this story adds to RPGs is where the notion of memory comes in. You get things like Penny for your Thoughts, which is where amnesiac characters rediscover their pasts. Psi Run does something similar. In those games, the non-GM player gets to contribute to the shared fiction as the result of mechanical outcomes, sometimes creating bits of backstory for the group or individual PCs.
Interested in the discussion but I don't have any relevant recent experience to add
@NeilNjae That's pretty interesting about the anime ttrpgs. I'm not into anime, so I don't really know much about it. What's been the historical relation among TV and comic books in that genre?
Likewise I've not tried any of the FitD games. There's only so much money I can justify spending on games, and I suffer from the sunk cost fallacy. Not just money, but also the time spent to learn new systems - I already grok the ones I grok, so I stick with them. I've been trying out new games over the last six months, but the communities seem pretty siloed. I blame late stage capitalism. (That was a joke),
@Everybody I guess when I read this it became apparent to me that I wasn't getting how the large scale structure was supposed to be working. I could read the words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, but the connections among chapters started to elude me, which I feel was intended, but as the book went on I thought it might be eluding qntm as well. I'm not saying it was, I'm just saying I didn't feel that I was in safe hands.
But I have tried to play some RPGs over the internet in the last while, and I can say that there were certain similarities. I found that the groups I was with had trouble moving to something that worked for more than an hour or two. At the moment I'm putting it down to a lack of flow. And right now I think the jerkiness was due to mechanics and systems as much as anything else. Games are now made for these new media, but that media isn't truly episodic, but it isn't like face-to-face gaming either. That's what I'm trying to say about structuring and synchronising the breaks - the breaks in game time, the breaks in player time.
Edit - moved to practice heading. Sorry about that.
Tl;dr: What do people think about how they think about ttrpgs?
What I meant to post here was another question about how we think about rpgs. My educational background is in music and language teaching, both of which have several theories, all of which are based on practise - the theory needs to be able to explain whatever musicians / speakers - listeners are doing. A theory that can't do that gets relegated to a kind of "sub-theory" status within a larger theory. This means that theories need to be able to helpfully answer questions about what is "that" doing "there"?
For language I was first taught a classical grammar, that I think developed out of teaching classical languages to English speakers. Those languages share a common root with much of English, and so it is easy to map "things" by categorising letters, words, phrases, etc. across them. However when I started studying Central Asian languages these categories broke down, And I as taught students how to translate them I switched to a different grammar theory called functional grammar, where the deep question is no longer what a "thing" is, but what does it do? This starts getting formalised in the late 19th century.
I found this easy because I had already studied music theory as it struggled to deal with what was called "electro-acoustic" music, which briefly was formally organised around "things" other than pitch and rhythm, e.g timbre. This was already encoded in classical music theory, which had been working since the mid 19th century to talk about "folk" musics, e.g. jazz. At its base the theory already recognised that things like notes and chords were named by function - e.g. C# and D♭ are the "same" note (regarding pitch: they are in terms of even temperment, regarding function: they're not in terms of key), C6 and Am7 are the "same" chord (likewise). What a thing is depends on its function in the system (language) the music is performed within.
As I was ready this text I was thinking about the function of the story elements in ttrpg language. Looked at this way makes talking about the story in terms of "worldbuilding" make sense - there was a Pc death (TPK?) at the end of the first part (Marion), and then the players made another PC (Adam) to continue. To handle this PC Marion became NPC Marion on another "plane" to justify continuity of knowledge, which again had to be restored because of Adam's loss of memory.
For me a lot of the "holding together" of the text worked because of these functional elements, especially the "theme" of recovering the lost / forgotten, and what distinguished it from say Gospodinov's book was the "tone" with which the theme was presented.
Gotta run to do some stuff. I'll continue later today.