Episode 27: The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying

[jared]

We've had this argument before,

We definitely have, and you're a true friend for suffering my horrible one-man parade as often a you have. (Also, as an important side note, I really didn't intend to drag the conversation too far away from the text-at-hand, I just found some interesting bits of language in the replies here and wanted to throw my little hat in the ring. Feel free to move on and leave me to my pseudo-mystical babbling anytime.)

but I think that relying on play at the absence of game requires a stringent definition of play—which, to me, seems significantly more difficult and elusive than a definition of game.

Does it, though? I agree it would be significantly more challenging to strictly define "play" than it would be to do so with "game" (not least because "game" is kind of a floating signifier, at base), but I'm also entirely comfortable leaving "play" as ill-defined as theology leaves "God" and aesthetics leaves "art." Which is to say, we can and should strive toward definitions (plural) of play, but with the understanding that it's always a local, limited version of the absolute envased bouquet that play encompasses. Similarly, we could attempt to approach play through its necessary qualities, or those it necessarily lacks, or by looking at its effects on the world or on people, or even God help me through metaphor—all the various strategies we use to talk about other things that are too expansive for thought or language.

For what it's worth, you're the one person who has gotten me closest to accepting that perhaps "game" is a real category with like... members. But it remains elusive, for me. I'm glad folks are out here attempting to do the damn thing, fwiw, even if I can't really get my head around it much of the time.

I admit I'm not very sure what that has to do with rules, in this context. I don't intend to claim that rules magically congeal into games.

No, of course you don't claim that. Sometimes when I'm talking, it moves from my mouth to my ass without me realizing. I think I only meant to gesture at a way that I've found useful to reframe the question—around rules instead—in a way that doesn't risk instantiating some needless platonic "game," because rules aren't sufficient for "game," it seems. That's all. 

How much I agree with you depends almost entirely on how you define game, I think. I definitely see things like RPG rule books as being only a single ingredient of the big mix of forces that create a RPG session, and would argue that basically every table of players is creating their own game on the fly (albeit with assistance from any rulesbooks and modules used).

Yes, I agree with this. That's part of what I mean when I propose that perhaps "game" is an emergent property of play. Remembering, of course, that play is very often play-with: for role-play, that generally includes play with books. 

Whether what they're creating is truly a 'game' or not just depends on what definition of game we're using. It feels like you have a specific definition of game in mind here that I haven't entirely picked up on yet

It's possible! I'm doing my very best not to assume some strawman "game," but I'm not immune to mistakes. I'm trying to imagine something (that is, some actual thing) that could exist separate from the book on the one hand and play on the other, and I'm always coming up short. I've had related conversations quite often, and I always end up concluding that we're either talking about play or about books, but insinuating this other category ("game") onto the subject in an attempt to... well, it depends, but to accomplish some kind of sleight-of-hand generally. It's not always as nefarious as that makes it sound, but sometimes it can be!

This all feeds at least a little into my hot take that there's only really one RPG system, and that all the books and goals and techniques people use are just plugins being added on top of it.

Yes! And maybe, hear me out now, maybe that "One RPG System" is just play.

[Randalf the Gray]

Sam: "If anything, I think it's the opposite. We can be moderately confident in at least some parts of the shared imagined world between us, just as we can be moderately confident in the continual [re]definition of the imagined world via agreed-upon hierarchies of character constructs and non-character constructs. We can be pretty sure in our roleplaying, and we can be pretty sure in our not-roleplaying-that-influences-roleplaying. 

But I'm less sure about the game of it: that is, in paraphrased-Suitsian terms, what our goals are, and what our constraints are. While most people are fairly familiar with the idea that each of our imagined worlds are subtly (or unsubtly) different, I think what's less familiar is the idea that that the game(s) we play in/with those imagined worlds are less clearly definable."

I agree, and this seems to be approaching a more concise, and less limiting, definition of what Roleplaying is in itself, without concern for the specifics of gamification or structure.

Misha: "I guess I can see two ways we can visualize this relationship.

First, we could just claim that only humans can be participants and the book/rules/etc are all just subsets of that 'hierarchy'--they constrain the ways human players can contribute to the fiction. Under this view, the human is still the one creating all of the game-world outside of their character (aka-storytelling, not roleplaying), but they are accepting strong bindings on their ability to do so--any change they make has to either be reading from the book or be mediated by a mechanic. This would fix your issue with awareness detailed above.

Second, we could just admit that the awareness bit is there to split off humans with a lusory attitude (ones knowingly playing) from ones without and update the description slightly to allow for non-conscious participants to play. I think that this actually makes all the forces at play in a RPG session a little easier to visualize, so it's the way I prefer."

Honestly, I'm torn on this. While I tend to prefer the second approach as well, it leaves room for some hard questions: Does a random table have enough agency to be considered a player-participant? The rules of a solo game? An AI player or GM? If my every action and response was randomly determined, do I?

Importantly, any answers to those questions feel like value-statements, and so my gut reaction would be just to say YES so as not to be exclusionary. And yet, there has to be a limit to what is or isn't a Roleplaying Game, so it seems that one's definition is no more or less concrete or valuable than a political stance. There can be no single, formal definition, because that requires a value-statement input of some kind by the definer, which may not hold true for others.

It reminds me of the ongoing debate about OSR. Ultimately, a game is OSR if someone says it is, as the defining factors are variable and divergent between perspectives. And I'm okay with that, so I think I'm okay with acquiescing to the defining of Roleplaying Games as being a matter of personal taste and inquiry.

Misha: "Where I disagree with you is where you claim that chess and badminton don't have the same split. We can't directly connect our psychic systems (thoughts), so on some level any time we interact with another person there are two versions of that game/conversation/whatever--one in the mind of each participant. We just use various techniques and tools to synchronize everyone's perceptions of reality--chess pieces in chess, clarifying terms in a conversation, asking questions in a RPG.

The difference between chess and a TTRPG, in my mind, is that a chess game contains way less data than an imaginary RPG world, while also recording nearly all of that data onto a persistent physical object (the board and pieces). It's possible for the two players of a chess game to both have the sum total of the chess game's state in their heads as they play, and for those views to be effectively identical. Even before cloture, RPG sessions are just so much bigger than chess boards and lack persistent physical depictions of the total game state (unless, potentially, you're playing via text)--that type of synchronizing isn't different in type, but is different in difficulty. With cloture, perfectly synchronizing player understanding of the game world becomes fully impossible."

You're right, the same split does exist in those games. I used them as examples because the games themselves are not ordered or structured around that split as Roleplaying Games often are, and they are more or less self-contained in that they have clear beginning and end states. Ordinarily, there are no expected discussions or extrapolations on one's actions and experiences whilst playing the games of chess or badminton, but that is a core fundament to how Roleplaying Games are played. But you're right, I kind of muddied the point with those examples.

Misha:  "...that type of synchronizing isn't different in type, but is different in difficulty. With cloture [sic], perfectly synchronizing player understanding of the game world becomes fully impossible."

I very much agree with this, though as in my response to Hexed Pressman, I would prefer to think of it as "depth" rather than "difficulty". While chess and badminton still contain the synchronization of understanding (psychic rapport) inherent to all human interactions, Roleplaying Games possess, and possibly require, a greater "depth" of this rapport by their very nature. Finding a floor to that hypothetical "threshold of depth" might serve well to differentiate Roleplaying Games as distinct from other games.

In response to jared:

This all reminds me of an old t-shirt I have, which I think about quite often.

Bear with me here.

Years ago, I found a secondhand t-shirt from The Matrix. It's a plain black t-shirt with with white print depicting lines of matrix code scrolling down from the phrase, There Is No Spoon.

But after decades of wear, the print has completely faded and disappeared, and so now, There Is No There Is No Spoon.

And eventually, when all memory has faded that it ever was, then, There Is No "There Is No There Is No Spoon".

Whether the spoon itself is objectively real or not is irrelevant in the sense that it exists in negation. There Is No Spoon creates the spoon to satisfy the logic of the statement, and so it exists in some regard.

From this an ontological hierarchy can be extrapolated: There Is No^x Y (TIN^x Y).

TIN^0 Y, where Y=Spoon, would be the first level of the hierarchy, the Spoon itself.
TIN^1 Y would be the original statement There Is No Spoon.
TIN^2 Y would be "There Is No There Is No Spoon", and so on.

If we consider Y = Play, the Structure of Play as TIN, and the Depth or Complexity of that Structure as the hierarchy (^x), it gets to a close approximation of my (current and tenuous) approach to a definition of Game. It is at once emergent yet integral, even necessary, for Play with Structure.

I don't know if this makes sense at all. I can attempt to clarify if necessary.

[sam_the_bold]

I admit you've lost me. What do these layers of pointing-to-the-pointing have to do with play and games?

[Randalf the Gray]

I admit you've lost me. What do these layers of pointing-to-the-pointing have to do with play and games?

Play with Structure is Game. The greater the Depth or Degree to that Structure, the more Game-like the Play is. And because Structure exists in Degrees, it can sometimes be at a level that is unapparent during Play. In these cases, Game still exists, even if only through implication, through the simple interaction of Play and Structure. Such an interaction "creates" Game to satisfy its nature, even if no Game defined as such is apparent to the participants.

[jared]

I admit you've lost me. What do these layers of pointing-to-the-pointing have to do with play and games?

Play with Structure is Game. The greater the Depth or Degree to that Structure, the more Game-like the Play is. And because Structure exists in Degrees, in can sometimes be at a level that is unapparent during Play. In these cases, Game still exists, even if only through implication, through the simple interaction of Play and Structure. Such an interaction "creates" Game to satisfy its nature, even if no Game defined as such is apparent to the participants.

Yeah! So, this idea jives with the idea that "game" is an emergent property of play (in role-play, specifically). That is, when we play, our play takes on form processually. The form shifts and changes with play in complex, fleeting ways. We can call this form "game," but I think it's worth pointing out that this conception of "game" runs deeply counter to the colloquial idea of what a game is and how game interacts with play. 

Looking around, we imagine that games exist in some persistent way in the world. We find a game, we choose it, and we play (with) it, and the game informs or even creates our play. When we stop playing, the game continues to exist, and we can go back and play (with) it again some other time. But if "game" is emergent from play, then all of that is false. Instead, play precedes game, and play persists after game has gone. Different moments or instances of play can resemble one another insofar as their structures (the "games" emergent from them) share some set of superficial similarities, but the whole is so complex and ineffable that it seems unreasonable to call these "the same game" in any meaningful way. Perhaps we could categorize various instances of play in this way to some degree—play with X characteristic, play with Y characteristic, and so on—but are these categories "games" by any reasonable gloss of the way people actually use the word? By this point we've gotten so far afield of anything that actually resembles what folks seem to mean when they say the word "game" (and what it can actually mean in cases like video games and board games that it cannot mean for role-play) that I suspect it's actually a net negative to keep the word around. This is an example of where the eliminativist position with regard to game comes from.

[KurlyJ]

Are there practical lessons to learn from the kind of theory being presented in the episode? I can kind of see how it makes me more focused on thinking about immersion in games and how I can enable that as a GM or player. But I was curious whether there are other practical aspects that are discussed, or maybe that the hosts or the group here feels emerge from it.

[Randalf the Gray]

Jared: "Yeah! So, this idea jives with the idea that "game" is an emergent property of play (in role-play, specifically). That is, when we play, our play takes on form processually. The form shifts and changes with play in complex, fleeting ways. We can call this form "game," but I think it's worth pointing out that this conception of "game" runs deeply counter to the colloquial idea of what a game is and how game interacts with play. 

Looking around, we imagine that games exist in some persistent way in the world. We find a game, we choose it, and we play (with) it, and the game informs or even creates our play. When we stop playing, the game continues to exist, and we can go back and play (with) it again some other time. But if "game" is emergent from play, then all of that is false. Instead, play [i]precedes game, and play persists after game has gone. Different moments or instances of play can resemble one another insofar as their structures (the "games" emergent from them) share some set of superficial similarities, but the whole is so complex and ineffable that it seems unreasonable to call these "the same game" in any meaningful way. Perhaps we could categorize various instances of play in this way to some degree—play with X characteristic, play with Y characteristic, and so on—but are these categories "games" by any reasonable gloss of the way people actually use the word? By this point we've gotten so far afield of anything that actually resembles what folks seem to mean when they say the word "game" (and what it can actually mean in cases like video games and board games that it cannot mean for role-play) that I suspect it's actually a net negative to keep the word around. This is an example of where the eliminativist position with regard to game comes from."[/i]

I can't say I agree with this. A game can exist in multiple degrees of Complexity or Depth simultaneously without those degrees being mutually exclusive. The game that is a physical object is just as real as the game that is an instance of Play with Structure. Even sharing the same terminology, they are separated in meaning by context. Language is often inefficient, with that I do agree, but it also imparts a fluidity that is ultimately to its benefit.

In that regard, I don't believe that "game" can only refer to the emergent categorization of Play with Structure. As Sam talked about in the episode, "game" can also encompass the objective components of that Structure, be they physical "toys", software, rules, etc. It can also refer simply to the name of a thing, to help distinguish it from other things, and associate it with other things of a similar nature. I think those distinctions are useful.

[jared]

Jared: "Yeah! So, this idea jives with the idea that "game" is an emergent property of play (in role-play, specifically). That is, when we play, our play takes on form processually. The form shifts and changes with play in complex, fleeting ways. We can call this form "game," but I think it's worth pointing out that this conception of "game" runs deeply counter to the colloquial idea of what a game is and how game interacts with play. 

Looking around, we imagine that games exist in some persistent way in the world. We find a game, we choose it, and we play (with) it, and the game informs or even creates our play. When we stop playing, the game continues to exist, and we can go back and play (with) it again some other time. But if "game" is emergent from play, then all of that is false. Instead, play [i]precedes game, and play persists after game has gone. Different moments or instances of play can resemble one another insofar as their structures (the "games" emergent from them) share some set of superficial similarities, but the whole is so complex and ineffable that it seems unreasonable to call these "the same game" in any meaningful way. Perhaps we could categorize various instances of play in this way to some degree—play with X characteristic, play with Y characteristic, and so on—but are these categories "games" by any reasonable gloss of the way people actually use the word? By this point we've gotten so far afield of anything that actually resembles what folks seem to mean when they say the word "game" (and what it can actually mean in cases like video games and board games that it cannot mean for role-play) that I suspect it's actually a net negative to keep the word around. This is an example of where the eliminativist position with regard to game comes from."[/i]

I can't say I agree with this. A game can exist in multiple degrees of Complexity or Depth simultaneously without those degrees being mutually exclusive. The game that is a physical object is just as real as the game that is an instance of Play with Structure. Even sharing the same terminology, they are separated in meaning by context. Language is often inefficient, with that I do agree, but it also imparts a fluidity that is ultimately to its benefit.

In that regard, I don't believe that "game" can only refer to the emergent categorization of Play with Structure. As Sam talked about in the episode, "game" can also encompass the objective components of that Structure, be they physical "toys", software, rules, etc. It can also refer simply to the name of a thing, to help distinguish it from other things, and associate it with other things of a similar nature. I think those distinctions are useful.

Sure, language certainly can do many things, and we can use it (hopefully carefully and courageously) to do a wide range of things. I just mean to point out that this particular use of language---using one term, "game," to refer to both the persistent game-object of a piece of entertainment software eg on the one hand, and the transient, ephemeral structure of a particular instance of role-play on the other---is precisely a main source (if not *the* source) of some really pernicious attitudes in our little discursive RPG culture regarding the fundamental capabilities, aims, and purposes of game texts and game designers in the specific case of role-play. We see it constantly: in the broad, entitled way authors talk about their books; in the impossible expectations readers have of game books, and the passive posture they take in response; in the obsequiousness of the books themselves, and the paternalistic way they position themselves with regard to play. This is what I mean when I call it a net negative, that despite any hypothetical positives that may come from this kind of linguistic arrangement, on balance it makes our books and our play worse. It's a justification for a change to our categories and language, not a truth-claim in itself.

I'm also skeptical that there's any meaningful ontic similarity between the game constituted by, say, a piece of entertainment software, and the abstract, emergent structure of what happens at a role-play table. But that's its own thing.

[misha]

Okay, I think your stance makes more sense to me now. Is it that games are largely defined by having rules and goals, while TTRPGs generally have open and ever-changing goals and rules that vary wildly by group in actual implementation/shift throughout play and are so incomplete that this variety is inevitable, so even when two groups use the same rulebook their goals and rules are different enough that they aren't really the same 'game'?

Like, if we were playing basketball but I changed the rules to allow for running without dribbling, it'd be fair to say that the game was no longer 'basketball' but some different-but-related game? And if three groups were playing D&D and all decided to build a defensive wall, one group might hand-wave it (you just do it), another might call for a single skill check, and another might turn it into an episode-long minigame (where are you sourcing the stone?). So, if I'm understanding your argument right, it'd be fair to say that those games have rules different enough that they're effectively different games?

I think I'd half-agree with that claim, in that I think it's technically correct but I think that getting all the players oriented towards the same style of play is enough of a challenge that having a rulebook you can point at as a shorthand is useful and calling it a 'game' is more likely to communicate your intentions than confuse them. The distinction between book and all of the system of forces that create actual play is very important, and I can see how framing the activity of roleplaying so hard about a book can blur that distinction, but I don't really have a better alternative at hand.

Like, uhh, if we tried to move all study of TTRPGs to the theater department of schools I think you'd lose way more than you gained.

[jared]

Okay, I think your stance makes more sense to me now. Is it that games are largely defined by having rules and goals, while TTRPGs generally have open and ever-changing goals and rules that vary wildly by group in actual implementation/shift throughout play and are so incomplete that this variety is inevitable, so even when two groups use the same rulebook their goals and rules are different enough that they aren't really the same 'game'?

Like, if we were playing basketball but I changed the rules to allow for running without dribbling, it'd be fair to say that the game was no longer 'basketball' but some different-but-related game? And if three groups were playing D&D and all decided to build a defensive wall, one group might hand-wave it (you just do it), another might call for a single skill check, and another might turn it into an episode-long minigame (where are you sourcing the stone?). So, if I'm understanding your argument right, it'd be fair to say that those games have rules different enough that they're effectively different games?

Well, no. Not precisely. The issue for me is I'm pointing to a thing that I think is a fundamental difference between tabletop role-play and many (most? all?) other kinds of games. So getting at it through basketball doesn't work. Let me see if I can be a little more systematic here.

So the question at hand is What bits of the mess of stuff that orbits play can we group together and call the "game"? In some situations, the answer is fairly simple. For instance, with video games I think it's really straightforward to point to the specific piece of entertainment software, the code and the ones and the zeroes and shit and say "Okay, so that's the game." That's a fairly naive conception of it, and we could trouble it to some degree I'm sure, but I think the initial basic intuition there that video games have some components that exist outside of play and are collectively constitutive of "the game" probably holds even given whatever scrutiny we want to give it. For something like basketball, it might be a little less obvious on first blush, but I think we can identify some set of stuff (the rules and regulations, the type of physical space required, whatever) that literally actually exists before we start playing, and that we can return to across arbitrarily many different instances of play. I'm not especially concerned with the question of whether changing one bit or several bits constitutes a different game or anything like that, I'm just trying to establish that there's some thing there that players are interacting with. And in the case of video games, and sports, and board games, I'm willing to intuitively just accept that yeah, there probably is. We might go so far as to observe that the game-object has some determining power over play, because it precedes play. Play, in these cases, might be comprised of any number of actions or attitudes or circumstances or other variables, but all of these must fit inside the game. 

But to me, and maybe this is me out on my own little limb, tabletop role-play doesn't seem to follow that pattern. Specifically, doing tabletop role-play seems to me like a full inversion of the standard formula of "game." Whereas with a video game, or a sport, or a board game, we can basically "pick up" some existing thing and play it, in tabletop role-play, we seem to be doing some other thing entirely, something that doesn't have its beingness in any set of rules or physical object or space. Colloquially in TTRPGs, we call the game book "the game," but that's obviously not even close to the reality of actual role-play: we're not playing the book, or even the thing described by the book. This is true partly because what we're doing is much weirder and larger than a book has the capacity to dictate or describe, but mostly it's true because the analogous things to what we call "game" in the case of video/board/sport games simply aren't static and reliable the way they are in those cases, and cannot be. When we do tabletop role-play, we're always shifting and changing and revealing and ignoring some things and not others, and which things those are change not only from table-to-table, and from play-to-play at the same table, but from moment-to-moment in the same instance of play. So I mean to say here that a book can't be the game of tabletop role-play first because tabletop role-play simply won't sit still long enough to be captured by a book. This is what I mean when I say that role-play is ephemeral and processual. Therefore, where many kinds of games contain and perhaps even produce play, tabletop role-play seems to me instead to be a kind of play that produces and re-produces itself by its own action, continually, as a definitional part of its beingness. 

Now, to be clear, I'm personally quite happy saying "Okay, lovely, so tabletop role-play has no game-object analagous to that of other kinds of games; instead, it has only play and the various bric-a-brac that clings play," and starting from there. But folks seem to hate when I say there's no such thing as "game." So I floated a hypothesis upthread: that perhaps, in the specific case of tabletop role-play, "game" is an emergent property of play. What I mean is (following on from some things Randalf said), perhaps we can understand the ephemeral structures that arise from the act of role-play as constituting the "game" of that particular instance of play. And perhaps, under certain circumstances, we could start to see patterns in what shapes those structures take on across multiple plays and tables and so on, specifically when we play alongside certain books or ideas or what-have-you, and we could build some functional conception of what "this kind of tabletop role-play" looks like, how it works, often and on average. And maybe it would be worth calling that conception a "game." We might find that, say, play alongside some certain edition of Dungeons & Dragons very often has some set of properties, which are related, semi-mysteriously, to the things described by the books, and also some broader cultural ideas, and these similarities crop up reliably enough across various tables and various instances of play that we can venture to hazard to perhaps declare them a Game. And that seems fine to me, except, as I said above, it's so far removed from our current colloquial use of the word "game" in this context (which colloquial use I find somewhat cancerous for books and play and authors and players across the board) that it's probably better just to not use that particular word. Because again, for video/board/sports games, "game" precedes play, but for the "emergent" kind of game we're describing here in the context of tabletop role-play, play precedes "game." This is a pretty fundamental difference ontically. To get a little Aristotelian on it, it would seem that a video game (etc) is the efficient cause of play, but play is the efficient cause of a TTRPG. This has some explanatory power as regards how a video (etc) game appears to be relatively stable ontically (that is, it persists across instances of play), and a TTRPG instead only comes into being processually---one is a cause, the other is caused. 

Embarrassingly, I don't know if any of that is helpful.

I think I'd half-agree with that claim, in that I think it's technically correct but I think that getting all the players oriented towards the same style of play is enough of a challenge that having a rulebook you can point at as a shorthand is useful and calling it a 'game' is more likely to communicate your intentions than confuse them. The distinction between book and all of the system of forces that create actual play is very important, and I can see how framing the activity of roleplaying so hard about a book can blur that distinction, but I don't really have a better alternative at hand.

Like, uhh, if we tried to move all study of TTRPGs to the theater department of schools I think you'd lose way more than you gained.

I think a book can serve to rally play just as well whether you call it a game or a book (which it happens to be). 

I don't really have an opinion about which department of various learning institutions tabletop role-play rightly belongs to, except to say that I'm not overly impressed with how game studies folks tend to treat TTRPGs, when they bother to acknowledge them at all (outside of my good friends Misha, Walid, and Sam, of course). I'd be fine letting the dramaturges have a go at it for a while. I bet the theologians would have plenty to say, to be honest with you.