• About

northierthanthou

northierthanthou

Tag Archives: Context

Pardon My Geekitide – Frame Collapse at the Game Table

11 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by danielwalldammit in Gaming

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Context, Ethnography of Speech, Games, Narrative, Role Playing Games, RPGs, Social Interaction, Sociolinguistics, Stories

43746096_10217602333635242_4017497621105999872_o

Works in Progress

I could tell Player X didn’t like the plan. He’d been silent for awhile, and now he was asking a number of pointed questions. He had begun to ask who came up with the plan for the game in question, and knowing this player for the gruff sort of fellow he is, I could see it coming. His character would of course dismiss the whole idea, but would he also do insult the character who had come up with it? I’d seen this happen before, and I cringed.

Why?

It’s just a game, right?

That would be a common take on this sort of thing. It’s a role playing game. Whatever the player said, he would be saying in character, and he wouldn’t be saying it to a player. He’d be saying it character to character. So just let the whole thing roll!

Right?

The problem as I see it is this is just the sort of thing that’s hard to contain on within the game setting. Whatever player character had come up with the plan in question, a real person had actually come up with that plan and chosen to express it through that character. In-character, or not, any contempt shown to the plan could well have reflected back on the player. I’ve seen it happen before. One player says; “who came up with this idiotic plan?” and another player sitting there realizes he’s just been called an idiot, all in character of course, but the insult reaches right through the characters and into the room with the players.

A lot depends on wording of course. If the player characters have well-established personalities, and/or if the terms of criticism clearly touch on those personalities (“hey elf, your pointy ears look stupid!” or “you dwarves are too fond of ale!”), then the insult is likely to stay in the game. It can even be quite fun to role play such conflict, but when the in-game features are thin (when the plan is a real attempt to solve a problem in game and the criticism is coming from a player who clearly doesn’t like that plan), the conflict won’t likely be contained in the game itself. The result can be an argument, or it can be an uncomfortable player. These things can blow up, or they can fester.

They can also be the reason one or more players find something else to do next week.

Luckily, the insult didn’t happen.

***

This kind of problem interests me for two reasons:

  1. As the host of an RPG campaign, I am often faced with these little moments of social brinksmanship, and I feel a certain sense of responsibility for containing the carnage, so to speak.
  2.  It strikes me as an interesting example of a larger social phenomenon, namely, the tendency for some stories to skip out of their own narrative frame and into the social context in which they are told.

It’s the second of these themes that has me writing about the matter now. There are of course much more serious examples of the sort of problem I mention her, but this kind of thing happens a lot in Pen&Paper games. So, it’s not a terrible idea, I think, to meditate on this relatively light-stakes example of that problem a bit.

The activities in a pen&paper role playing game involve at least two very different contexts, one is an imagined context in which characters interact with each other in an imaginary world. The other is the game table around which actual people sit, devour snacks and narrate the actions of their own characters in response to challenges posed by the game master. Significantly, these actual players must cooperate to some degree in the construction of the imaginary world within which their character must operate. Even players choosing to role-play conflict must cooperate to understand the terms of the conflict and the potential means of playing it out. They don’t have to share exact interpretations of the imaginary world, but it does help if they share some understanding of the social rules by which their characters operate (and at the very least the mechanics by which the game will determine what happens when character A tries to punch character B in the nose). It is of course all supposed to be in good fun (at least at my games); everyone is supposed to enjoy themselves, even if their characters don’t.

In the example presented above, the imaginary interactions of a group of characters threatened to produce implications that stretched beyond the table and into the real world interactions. It’s not a hanging matter, no, but I did see real potential for one or more players to come away with a bad experience. Significantly, this problem was at least partly a question of contextualization. The metalinguistic framework which made it possible to understand the actions of one player in terms of the game world grew a bit too thin for my comfort. I’ve seen that framework break down entirely. If you’ve played pen&paper RPGs for long, you have too. It happens all the time.

***

Other examples?

Focus: scene -setting. I once had a pair of players who insisted on focusing on something other than my own narrative just about every time. If I asked them to set the characters up in a marching order, they began asking questions about the politics of the city we were headed to, how to build their characters, etc. If I introduced the to an NPC, they interrupted me to set up a marching order. If I told them no marching order was necessary, they focused on it anyway. Eventually, I realized that no matter what I was telling them, these two insisted upon talking about something else. The other players at the table were beyond frustrated, and so was I. We could not attain any kind of immersion into the story-line, because the narrative was constantly subject to pointless interruption. It was like trying to talk to someone on a static line.

It’s not that their questions were bad; it’s just that each question asked was consistently asked at the least appropriate time for doing so. In time, I came to see this as a control issue. Neither of these players were willing to let someone else take the lead. (Significantly, neither would let anyone else get the last word on anything, least of all each other), and preventing me from gaining any momentum when setting the stage served the same purpose. Simply put, neither of these players was willing to cooperate sufficiently to achieve a common narrative framework. I didn’t have a solution for this then, and I don’t now, except to game with someone else.

Which is what I do.

Killing Your Fellow PCs: Whenever a player character kills another player character, the chances that this will be taken personally grow rather high. That should be obvious, but I am amazed at the number of players who will swear that isn’t the case, or at least that it shouldn’t be. It is extraordinarily common to find players defending such actions by saying; “that’s what my character would do” or “my character is evil/selfish/greedy/etc.” …which of course begs the question; why did you role up a bastard in the first place? Simply put, this kind of thing isn’t an in-game problem; it’s an out-of-game problem. When you kill another player’s character, you are (at the very least) bringing to an end, a story-line into which that player has invested time and energy. There may be contexts in which that works out just fine, but most of the time, it just means that you as a player have placed your own fun above that of another.

Increasingly, I find myself saying to the players; “You can role-up any character you like, but please find a reason to cooperate with the others.” If you can find a way for your otherwise-evil character to bond or at least work with with their companions, then fantastic. If you can’t, then please come up with another concept.

Separating from the Group: Some players take great joy in sending their characters off on their own. A few minutes of side story is no big deal. It can even be fun, providing the player (and the GM) remembers that the sideline is a sideline and the character will eventually have to rejoin the others. When a player just keeps doing this, I will eventually stop coming up with reasons to get them back with the rest of the group.

The story-line goes this direction. Either bring your character back, roll-up a new character, or find another campaign.

Generic Disruptions: Along the same lines as the characters who wander off, some characters just keep generating pointless conflict. They pick fights with NPCs while the group is trying to keep a low-profile, steal things from others, knowing it will lead to retaliation, burn bridges with helpful allies, etc. There is a school of thought that says ‘let the players do what they like’ and some campaigns facilitate this nicely, but it doesn’t work well with a pointed plot. If the point of the campaign is to defeat the even bad guy, save the princess, or find the Magic MacGuffin, then each such sub=plot grows increasingly more irritating. These sorts of disruptions really pose much the same problem as the decision to separate from the group, except the problem isn’t an imagined physical space; it’s a sub-plot that will time and energy at the expense of the larger narrative.

Why not just let the player characters do as they like? Because each such diversion is effect a competing story-line. Imagine what this would seem like in a movie or a novel! One or two side-stories adds a little extra flavor to the story and fleshes out characters. Too many such subplots breaks up the main story-line and increases the odds that you’ll replace the movie with an old episode of The Tic or leave the bookmark right there on page 32 of your book until your grand-kids find it in the attic and end up throwing it away because it bored the Hell out of them too. More to the point, players who consistently generate such side-conflicts are effectively competing with the GM (and the rest of the group) over the story-line for the campaign. Why that is happening is another question. What to do about it is another still. The important thing is to realize that it’s not really an in-game problem. It is a form of inter-player conflict, not a quirk of any given character.

Bully-Characters: I once told a player his character had spent an entire hour given another crap about a failed action. He was shocked. He was even more shocked to find out I had timed him on the matter. The player said he could have sworn he had only spent a few minutes on it. My point was actually that the player had taken to causing his own character to bully that of the other player endlessly, though just about every game session. This could perhaps have been contained within the game setting, but the player doing the bullying often made some comments out of character as well, and he never let up, nor did he allow the second player ever to come out on top.  Once again, the rationale was “that’s the way my character would behave,” and once again rejected that explanation. When a player character consistently pushes another player character around, there is a point at which it will be frustrating for the second player. In my experience, a player who does this, does so for a reason, and that reason is NOT contained within the framework of the game world.

Fuzzy Rules and In-Character Conflict: If players turn their actual characters on each other, it really helps if the rules are clear at that point. Unfortunately, most of the time players do this they begin by grappling and grappling rules are usually a little wonky. The result can often be counter-intuitive. So, when player A says “I grab player B by the balls and squeeze”, the specific mechanics for resolving this are often less helpful than if the player had just said; “I shoot him in the head.” When player B decides to fight back, it gets uglier. A GM can finesse ambiguities much more easily when players are fighting non player characters. When two players go against each other, any benefit of the doubt given to one becomes a slight against the other player character player.

…and the resulting hard feelings are rarely contained on the table.

It’s tempting to look for a solution by improving game mechanics or at least reviewing the mechanics you have at hand to be as clear as possible while adjudicating the fight. In most cases, though, I find myself asking the players to simply stop.

GNR? I think you could treat the old distinction between gamism, simulation, and narrative playing styles as an example of this sort of problem. Where one player wants to tell a good story, another really wants to see if he can build the best tank possible under the rules, and another may really want to see what a particular setting would look like in this or that particular game system. I somehow doubt that account would pass muster at The Forge, but I’m not interested in debating the ins and outs of this old theory. Suffice to say, that I think the kind of differences Rod Edwards and company talked about could be looked at as factors contributing to the breakdown of an in-game framework. Whether or not they constitute an exhaustive, or even a robust, theory of the many ways a game breaks down is another question.

***

Okay, so that’s the end of a long-winded rant about role playing games. Writing these points out as I have, I am struck by how obvious the points might seem, almost as if they are not worth saying. And yet, I am also struck by how often players seem to overlook these kinds of problems, or more to the point, insist on trying to understand them within the context the game world. Players who consistently disrupt a campaign will often insist on in-character explanations for their own behavior. Yet, that behavior will persist from one character to next and even from one campaign to the next. It is a game of course, but there are real people playing it, and sometimes what’s done in the game really is about the people around the game table.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Shhhhhhh…

09 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by danielwalldammit in Movies

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

A Quiet Place, Context, Emily Blunt, Film, Horror, John Krasinski, Movies, Silence, Terror

MV5BMjI0MDMzNTQ0M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMTM5NzM3NDM@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,674,1000_AL_You learn pretty quickly how things work in A Quiet Place. Make a sound and you just may die of it.

Why?

For reasons left largely unexplained, the world has been overrun by creatures that quickly chase down anything making a sound and kill it. They are quick, powerful, seemingly indestructible, and completely without mercy. To survive in this world, one must be utterly silent, at nearly all times. A momentary lapse of discipline will bring a swift and cruel death.

The best part of this premise is that it reaches right through the screen and into the movie theater. Watching a family struggle to survive on screen in this world shaped by monsters, the audience itself struggles to maintain its own silence. It’s difficult. It’s especially difficult for a room full of people still settling into their seats and trying to enjoy their concessions. But we learn the cost of noise early in this film, and nobody wants to be the one who spoils the soundscape for the rest of us. The silence on screen demands silence from its audience. Every candy wrapper threatens to ruin the experience. Every sip from a soda pop  threatens to bring the monsters pouncing. So, we all try to be quiet, and we fail miserably. The whole theater is filled with sound, and with people trying desperately not to make those sounds.

As we all adjust to the need for silence, the restlessness of the audience comes excruciating. The teenagers in the row beside me keep moving about in their seats. They are trying to hold still, but they just haven’t found a comfortable position yet, and the results are excruciating. The sound of a straw sliding through a plastic lid somewhere in the room echoes through the whole theater. We can all hear that straw push through the ice and into the corner of the cup. Lacking a straw, myself, I quickly come to realize how much the ice in my own cup shifts with every drink I take. Taking those final gulps, I feel almost as though I’ve betrayed the whole back section of the theater. Someone down in the front is arguing with his neighbor. His words are soft, but we can all hear him; “No, you watch it!” I amazed this idiot hasn’t gotten us all killed. A woman behind me is extra startled by events on screen. She can’t help but vocalize her distress to her companions. It’s risky, or at least annoying, but who could blame her? That much drama demands an outlet! It’s an outlet that would get her killed up on the screen, but it’s understandable in itself, if also more than a little distressing to a room full of people trying desperately to be quiet.

…which is the genius behind this film. The premise doesn’t just threaten us with monsters; it transforms our own nature into a source of terror. It turns the focus of horror onto the very human quality that is our own noisy nature. We all make sounds. We bang on stuff. We cause our seats to creak, and the ground crackles beneath our feet as we walk. Every once in awhile, we want to say something, even to say it loudly. All of this is perfectly normal until you walk into a theater to watch THIS movie. Then it becomes terrifying. Most anybody can be quiet for little awhile, but can you live your whole life in silence? I know a theater in Anchorage full of people who didn’t manage it for an hour and a half. Oh sure, we achieved a modicum of silence at about the half way point, but not the kind of silence it would have taken to survive in the world up on that screen. Had these monsters entered our own world, I’m not sure any of us would have made it to the third act.

The woman behind me at least would have been toast!

It’s tempting to see political analogies in this story-line. Some have seen it as direct commentary on the present state of American politics. Both John Krasinski (who directed and star in the film) and his costar Emily Blunt have denied that was the original idea. Instead, they suggest the point was to say something about families.

Whatever messages the film-makers might have intended to bundle-up in this movie, it seems easy enough to understand why people would see this film in political terms. The pressure to remain silent is something just about everyone has experienced in one form or another. For most of us, that pressure has been limited to fears of looking foolish, losing friends, or perhaps some reasonable fear that one could lose a job. Others have lived through the very real terror that speaking up could cost them their lives. Perhaps, their loved ones too! The premise here thus has the power to resonate with all manner of audiences well across the political spectrum. Whether the threat was trivial or genuinely hazardous, most (perhaps all) of us can recall the experience of stifling our own voice because of someone out there. In A Quiet Place that message becomes any sound whatsoever and that someone out there becomes a monster ready to rip us apart. It’s a metaphor easily mapped onto all manner of real world problems.

You can really feel the power of this theme in the rare moments when character do speak in A Quiet Place. The transgression of actual sound is shocking; the sense of liberation is powerful. When someone actually does shout in this film, it comes across as a  supreme act of defiance. The character may have been shouting at a monster; but any one of us could well imagine the freedom to finally shout something at somebody or something in our lives.

…preferably without being ripped apart as a result.

Okay, so yes, I liked this movie

***

Also, the ending? The very last moment of this film?

Fucking brilliant!

 

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Today’s Kinda Loaded Question – How Do You Read a Bible?

31 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, History, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

atheism, Context, contextualization, Interpretation, Jesus, religion, Scripture, The Bible, The Holy Spirit

006I always wonder what it means to ‘read the Bible’. The question comes to mind when people tell others to read the Bible; when they say they’ve read the Bible, and when they ask others if they’ve read the Bible. These questions and comments often seem intended to pack an extra bit of punch; something of value always seems to rest on them. But the phrase ‘read the Bible’ could mean anything from reading random passages to a kind of epic cover-to-cover journey. It could also mean reading specific (and very deliberately chosen) sections at length. Hell, it could mean a few other things too, but for me those are the ones that come to mind.

We could also talk about different versions of the Bible. It certainly matters what translation you look at.

The random passage reading approach is always interesting to me.  People using this approach open the book randomly and read what’s in front of them in the belief that they may be led (perhaps by the Holy Spirit) to some significant passage that will help them resolve a question or a problem of some sorts. It’s a fascinating approach to reading, one which gives the process more than a little trace of divination.

…a bit like palm reading or crystal gazing.

Which reminds me that I’ve been told many times one must be guided by the Holy Spirit to interpret the Bible correctly. Whatever else this claim means, it usually also means that my own heathen reading skills won’t account for much on Biblical topics, at least not in the ears of the person telling me this.  This may be a trip down the fallacy highway with stops in the Cities of Petitio and Ad Hominem-Circumstantial. It’s also a world in which spiritual powers and personal authority cut right across basic reading and reasoning skills, and parsing a simple sentence becomes an act of communion.

Do we want to get into the whole question of sola scriptura versus the authority of the Pope or some other religious authority?

No.

I mean, we could, but seriously, let’s not.

I sometimes wonder at the degree to which the simple physical act of opening the book could skew this divination-reading approach to the topic. I mean just how often would you land on one of the first or last pages when you try this? And if you did, would it be due to a conscious effort on your own part or guidance by …you know who?

Ah well!

What actually started me down this path was a slightly more mundane question. Do you read the whole thing or do you simply read parts? People often claim to have read the Bible. I think some folks are just bluffing really. It’s a big damned sleeping pill of a book, and I somehow doubt that some folks could actually make it from cover to cover. A much more interesting question though would be whether or not it’s actually worth it to do that? To just read the Bible cover-to-cover.

Now a serious Biblical scholar might get something out of such a reading; he presumably already knows a lot about the context behind the text. I’m talking about your average Jane just sitting at home with as much knowledge of the text, it’s language, and its relevant histories as regular life gives your average Jane. Okay, I know the average Jane is itself a tricky concept, so let’s just say that in my mind she’s a middle-class American with a high school diploma (and perhaps a college degree). She watches a lot of TV, and she’s been to church a few times in herlife; perhaps she even goes regularly. You can skew this Jane-image in whatever direction you like. The point I’m trying to make is that their daily lives haven’t prepared most people (including I’ll warrant most people who claim to have read the Bible) to understand what they are reading as they go skipping along the pages of scripture. Without giving necessary consideration to the linguistic and literary traditions encompassed in the book as well as the (often murky) historical context in which the texts were written and/or translated, I don’t see how any substantive understanding (inspired or otherwise) could come out of the epic cover-to-cover reading quest. People have enough trouble getting the cool parts from Shakespeare. I somehow doubt this even older text is more transparent on first or even a third pass. No, I can’t see reading the Bible working without a lot of side reading as you go.

And somewhere in there, I can’t help thinking this ceases to be about ‘reading’ and starts to become an exercise in ‘studying’.

I’m not just saying you can do some extra study to get more out of the Bible. What I’m saying is that the exercise of simply reading that text is a rather meaningless ritual without the studying. …Okay, so perhaps the ritual does have meaning (Holy Spirit and all that) but if it does have meaning, that meaning has little to do with what we conventionally understand to come from the act of reading. I am accordingly unimpressed when people tell me that they have read the Bible cover-to-cover. When people tell me they have read the Bible, I figure this is either a hollow exercise or an occult activity with principles quite different from those of conventional reading skills. When someone tells me that they study the Bible, well that might be interesting…

It might be.

An evangelical Christian might be tempted to think that this meditation is a trap of sorts, because of course that process of study leads one to an awful lot of perfectly mortal sources of authority. How can one truly learn the word of God if doing so requires one to make decisions about alternative translations, assess the historical context based on books written by mere mortals (some of whom may not even be Christian!), and make a number of choices oneself about how to frame the context of understanding any particular passage. Far from a discrete project, the effort to study-up on the topic if a potentially infinite regress. Most believers aren’t going to want to do that any more than the rest of us. In any event, this process will never lead to anywhere near the conviction that this or that moral principle is the absolute and unvarnished word of God. For myself, I’m comfortable with that, and I suspect there are a few liberal Christians that could say the same, but I don’t think the notion that the Bible is the infallible word of god survives this process. More to the point, I don’t think that notion survives any serious attempt to think about what it takes to understand an historical text like this.

That’s my spirit-unfulfilled 2 cents.

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Print
  • Email

Like this:

Like Loading...

Top Posts & Pages

  • About
    About
  • Monument Valley
    Monument Valley
  • Santa Fe isn't Cold Enough (...but it Has Mad Arts!)
    Santa Fe isn't Cold Enough (...but it Has Mad Arts!)
  • When Farmers Plant Cadillacs
    When Farmers Plant Cadillacs
  • Arctic Graffiti!
    Arctic Graffiti!
  • Art Alley (Rapid City)
    Art Alley (Rapid City)
  • The Village of Wainwright, Alaska
    The Village of Wainwright, Alaska
  • Too Much Zoom for the Room!
    Too Much Zoom for the Room!
  • The Prayer of an Atheist
    The Prayer of an Atheist
  • The Ocean Wants to Be More Firm
    The Ocean Wants to Be More Firm

Topics

  • Alaska
  • Animals
  • Anthropology
  • atheism
  • Bad Photography
  • Books
  • Childhood
  • Education
  • Gaming
  • General
  • History
  • Irritation Meditation
  • Justice
  • Las Vegas
  • Minis
  • Movie Villainy
  • Movies
  • Museums
  • Music
  • Narrative VIolence
  • Native American Issues
  • Philosophy
  • Politics
  • Public History
  • Re-Creations
  • Religion
  • Street Art
  • The Bullet Point Mind
  • Travel
  • Uncategorized
  • Uncommonday
  • White Indians
  • Write Drunk, Edit Stoned

Blogroll

  • Bob's Blog
  • Deep Thoughts
  • Disaster Film Blogspot
  • Dr. Gerald Stein
  • Erica Gardner
  • Hinterlogics
  • Ignorance WIthout Arrogance
  • Just a Girl from Homer
  • Multo (Ghost)
  • Norbert Haupt
  • Nunawhaa
  • Padre Steve's World
  • Stop and Smell the Lichen
  • Stumble Northward
  • The History Blog
  • The Mudflats
  • Veleteen Snowbird
  • What Do I Know?
  • Where Everything is Music

Archives

  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011

My Twitter Feed

Follow @Brimshack

RSS Feed

  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 7,882 other followers

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
%d bloggers like this: