Episode 27: The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying

[Randalf the Gray]

First off, Sam, I recommend an intentional rewatching of The Man Who Knew Too Little, because I believe it is one of the greatest satires ever filmed. What elevates it above the level of a mere spoof is precisely its meta narrative framing, which hints at a sort of phantom fourth wall that exists only on the level of the diegesis created by the film. This phantom fourth wall is seen by the audience, but can only possibly be experienced by the protagonist within the narrative, and it is this tension which fuels the comedy, and which allows the premise to facilitate the audience's identification with the protagonist. A lesser film would have eventually lifted the veil and devolved into antics, but Bill Murray's charming Everyman Spy plays it out to the very end. I believe it is a masterful addition to the surprisingly diverse subgenre of spy comedies, rivaled only by Rowan Atkinson's own bumbling Everyman Johnny English.

This actually relates to my comments on the episode as a whole, which I found quite interesting, as always.

With special regard to Walid's statements concerning a "Perfect Roleplaying Game".

Imagine a person, playing a game, who has taken on the role of themselves within this game. The game is called Life, and the rules are quite harsh, but this person has faith in the good intentions of the Designer, and so when the difficulty ramps up this person doesn't blame the game, they seek only to improve their playing.

Now this is absurd to a degree, I know, but it illustrates the point that what constitutes a "Game" or "Roleplaying" is only a matter of perspective, intent, and behavior.

Now imagine there's a different person, playing a different game, who has taken on the role of the Designer of a game called Life, which has one player, though they do not know it.

Do you see where this is going?

If the Designer has gamified the game of the Player, who is playing their own game in which the Designer unknowingly takes part, who is the player and what is the game?

They each exist as people playing games (Exogenous), who have taken roles within their games as Player and Designer (Endogenous), and the actions taken by each within their respective games affect their own game and the game of the other (Diegesis).

As for the Invisible Rules:

1. Role-playing is an interactive process of 
defining and re-defining the state, properties 
and contents of an imaginary game world.

While "interactive" has social implications, its use here refers to the interaction between players and the imaginary world, while a more precise wording would emphasize that the interactive process of defining and re-defining the imaginary world is also shared between the player-participants. I also disagree with the necessity for an "imaginary" world. "Imagined" would be more accurate, however I don't believe that an imaginary overlay is ultimately required in all cases for a Game to qualify as Roleplaying.

2. The power to define the game world is 
allocated to participants of the game. The 
participants recognize the existence of this 
power hierarchy.

Again, this doesn't necessarily apply in all cases. A GM-less game played from a prewritten module using oracles to address unknown variables, as many solo games are played, would provide no power to define the world itself. Though the characters and their actions could be freely defined, the hierarchy then would exist purely between the players and the game itself, which is also doing the allocating through its very structure. Over-reliance on closure to fill this gap feels incomplete, because as stated in the paper, closure is often unconscious, and such an automatic process would be better suited to a term with less connotations of intent as "power". I'm being pedantic on terminology because I find it lacks precision, but it may just be a translation issue with the paper as a whole.

3. Player-participants define the game world 
through personified character constructs, 
conforming to the state, properties and 
contents of the game world.

I feel like this is just an extension of Rule 2, though it does seem contradictory in a sense. Rule 2 states that the "participants" have the power to define the world, but Rule 3 states that they do so through "personified character constructs". Is Rule 2 then merely stating that "power to define" exists and it is allocated between the participants, and Rule 3 then describes how that power is actuated? I don't believe that can be true, because the allocation of power in Rule 2 is what grants authority to the GM to freely define the world, which they do (mostly) without use of a "personified character construct". The GM role is further explored in the "optional or additional" rules later in the paper, but since these three Rules are supposed to be applicable to "all role-playing in general" I feel they must bear the burden of that claim in all cases, which they clearly do not.

By these Rules, my absurd Designer and Player are playing the same game. More importantly, while the Designer exists and continues to play, the Player is playing a game whether they know it or not, much like our Everyman Spy from above.

Is the phantom fourth wall "real" in the sense that it exists irrelevant to whether it is perceived or interacted with, or does it only exist insofar as it is perceived and interacted with by some agentic entity, on either side of the wall?

Whatever the answer, if any, I'm definitely using Personified Construct as my definition for PC going forward.

Thanks for the awesome and inspiring discussion on the podcast! And thanks for bringing these thought provoking works to our attention!

[Hexed Pressman]

A GM-less game played from a prewritten module using oracles to address unknown variables, as many solo games are played, would provide no power to define the world itself.

I’m not sure this is true. In play with oracles, the questions that you ask, how you ask them, and the ones you choose not to ask, all define the world.

[misha]

Again, this doesn't necessarily apply in all cases. A GM-less game played from a prewritten module using oracles to address unknown variables, as many solo games are played, would provide no power to define the world itself.

I don't think the definition draws a distinction between the player characters and rest of the game world when saying "define the world". When I say that "my character gives the elf a thumbs up", that's me making a claim as to the state of the world--and that's something I'm still completely capable of within a GM-less game.

The hierarchy here in question is that the player in a solo game can't dictate the state of the world outside their character or the results of their character actions except by consulting oracles--it's a hierarchy of power between player, dice, book instead of one between human players, but I think that still works.

The power-as-conscious-intent thing is interesting. Is unconsciously wielded power still power?

The GM role is further explored in the "optional or additional" rules later in the paper, but since these three Rules are supposed to be applicable to "all role-playing in general" I feel they must bear the burden of that claim in all cases, which they clearly do not.

I actually think that under this book's framework, a lot of what a GM does is not roleplaying. Hell, a lot of what players do in a roleplaying game is not roleplaying--as I said in the episode, in almost every game there's also both collaborative storytelling (even if just in the form of picking your character's name and gimmick) and board-gaming (fussing with the mechanical backend). I think the claim is that roleplaying games are ones orienting around players roleplaying, not that they're games in which the only action taken is roleplaying.

[sam_the_bold]

I agree with Misha: I don't think Montola's definitions care about the distinction between PCs and the rest of the game world, and I certainly agree that I think much much much of what happens at a given game table during a session of an RPG [as we colloquially know it, as distinct from "roleplaying game" in isolation] is not roleplaying. 

If the Designer has gamified the game of the Player, who is playing their own game in which the Designer unknowingly takes part, who is the player and what is the game?

This still just sounds like two (or more) different games. We've hinted towards it this episode (and others) and I've made this point in various other media, but I think if you take Suits's definitions to the extremes, nobody is ever fully playing the precise, exact same game. The minute differences between our goals and constraints—plus all the unstated rules we can't fit in the book and thus just kind of have to go on gut instinct (cf. Sniderman's "Unwritten Rules")—mean that while we can get very close to our proverbial Venn diagrams forming a circle, we can never quite get there.  

I think in general, it's more accurate to describe most RPG sessions as a series of overlapping and interlinked games, rather than one strictly distinct game that we can clearly define. That's true of all games, as I said, but I think if you compare an ordinary RPG session to a match of, say, chess, the latter is far more well-defined and well-understood than an RPG. That doesn't mean we can't play RPGs together, and it certainly doesn't mean that our own individual games don't interact with each other, but rather just that we are all not playing the exact same game. This Player–Designer overlap seems similar: it's still multiple distinct games, they just happen to influence and intersect each other. 

In that light, I stand by what I said in the episode about Bill Murray in The Man Who Knew Too Little or The Truman Show: voluntary action requires at least some degree of foreknowledge and awareness, and so if you aren't aware there's a game you cannot play it. The actions of non-players can still influence play, even unconsciously: think about maintenance work on the playground influencing the bounds of our game of tag.

I do quite like the distinction between "imaginary" worlds and "imagined" worlds, it's very elegant.

[Randalf the Gray]

A GM-less game played from a prewritten module using oracles to address unknown variables, as many solo games are played, would provide no power to define the world itself.

I’m not sure this is true. In play with oracles, the questions that you ask, how you ask them, and the ones you choose not to ask, all define the world.

To drive the point further, these questions or lack thereof could all be provided by the module.

If, at the end of this long chain of effects dictated by the structure of the game, the only resultant "power to define" is the semi-conscious process of closure, it feels like that is the true root of the "power to define" itself, with different levels of "depth" to that power potentially being allocated among both the player-participants and the game itself.

[Randalf the Gray]

Misha: "I don't think the definition draws a distinction between the player characters and rest of the game world when saying "define the world". When I say that "my character gives the elf a thumbs up", that's me making a claim as to the state of the world--and that's something I'm still completely capable of within a GM-less game."

Sam: "I don't think Montola's definitions care about the distinction between PCs and the rest of the game world."

While I agree conceptually, my only argument would be against the phrasing of the Rules in regards to this. There is a clear distinction made between "participants" in Rule 2, and "player-participants" in Rule 3, which implies that Rule 2 is applicable to all participants in the game, regardless of their potential status of player in said game.

This leads to a sort of flow-chart of requirements that must be satisfied for one to be considered a Player in a Roleplaying Game. For instance, such a person must:

A] Be involved in an interactive process of defining and redefining the state, properties and contents of an imaginary game world

B] AND recognize the existence of a power hierarchy within that process and be allocated some degree of that power by the game structure or any number of other participants

C] AND be capable of exercising that power through the means of a personified character construct, which itself conforms to the state, properties and contents of the game world.

I like this in that it means that you're a P-P even at character creation, but I dislike it because it means that in the case of solo games as discussed, the game itself is also a P-P, which Misha addressed as still workable, but I find circuitous and counterintuitive.

Which leads right into:

Misha: "Is unconsciously wielded power still power?"

Sam: "...voluntary action requires at least some degree of foreknowledge and awareness, and so if you aren't aware there's a game you cannot play it."

I agree with both of you, power is power, whether aware or not, but awareness is required to play a game. A game can possess neither foreknowledge nor awareness, thus it must either be disqualified from consideration as a Player-Participant in the Game that is itself, or allocation of power being a determining factor for status as Participant must be reassessed. I tend to favor the latter case, and I believe the reassessment should emphasize power and agency being coequal. If the former is the case, then the Rules cannot apply to all existent Roleplaying Games, and thus either fail totally as an all-encompassing definition, or become needlessly exclusionary.

One final point:

Misha: "...in almost every game there's also both collaborative storytelling (even if just in the form of picking your character's name and gimmick) and board-gaming (fussing with the mechanical backend). I think the claim is that roleplaying games are ones orienting around players roleplaying, not that they're games in which the only action taken is roleplaying."

Sam: "I think in general, it's more accurate to describe most RPG sessions as a series of overlapping and interlinked games, rather than one strictly distinct game that we can clearly define."

While I tend to agree, doesn't this imply that Roleplaying Games are inherently only "Games of One"? Can we never be said to be playing the same Roleplaying Game in the same sense as when we play a game of chess, or badminton? Are the parts we call "The Game" and which we all agree we are playing together only the collaborative storytelling or board-gaming parts, while the true Roleplaying sits only with each individual participant and can never be truly shared?

Thanks for the awesome responses! Much food for thought.

[sam_the_bold]

Are the parts we call "The Game" and which we all agree we are playing together only the collaborative storytelling or board-gaming parts, while the true Roleplaying sits only with each individual participant and can never be truly shared?

 
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.

[jared]

Are the parts we call "The Game" and which we all agree we are playing together only the collaborative storytelling or board-gaming parts, while the true Roleplaying sits only with each individual participant and can never be truly shared?

 
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 think in general, it's more accurate to describe most RPG sessions as a series of overlapping and interlinked games, rather than one strictly distinct game that we can clearly define. That's true of all games, as I said, but I think if you compare an ordinary RPG session to a match of, say, chess, the latter is far more well-defined and well-understood than an RPG. That doesn't mean we can't play RPGs together, and it certainly doesn't mean that our own individual games don't interact with each other, but rather just that we are all not playing the exact same game. This Player–Designer overlap seems similar: it's still multiple distinct games, they just happen to influence and intersect each other. 

One might be tempted to take an eliminativist position toward "game," in the specific case of role-play, insofar as our colloquial attempts to wrangle play into some systemic shape seem not only to fail, but to some degree close us off to understanding play in-itself. Or, if one were reticent to jettison "game" entirely, one might posit "game" as an emergent property of play, one that appears systemic, but only to the degree that any human activity is systemic (like conversation, or buying a new pair of shoes)—entirely attributable to our specific psycho-biological make-up. In this second arrangement, "game" becomes merely an artifact of the ways players understand their own play, rather than a source of play, or a limiting device upon play, etc. And in both arrangements, the "game designer" becomes entirely irrelevant to play, except perhaps as a chronicler of play (in some specific context, over some specific period of time) from whom we might gain more general insight into other kinds of arbitrarily similar play. As I've said at least once: there are books, and there is play.

Anyway, this is why I tend to talk about "rules" rather than "game," because rules are prima facie merely utterances. They have rhetorical weight, but not ontological weight. I'm not convinced that rules ever congeal (in role-play) into "game," or that they ever could. But none of this is especially relevant to the topic—my apologies—except to point out that game studies, or what I've seen of it, generally leaves me cold.

[sam_the_bold]

We've had this argument before, 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.

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.

Game studies leaves me cold, too, sometimes! But very often, I also find it excites and invigorates me, pushes my thinking and ideas in new directions.

[misha]

I agree with both of you, power is power, whether aware or not, but awareness is required to play a game. A game can possess neither foreknowledge nor awareness, thus it must either be disqualified from consideration as a Player-Participant in the Game that is itself, or allocation of power being a determining factor for status as Participant must be reassessed. I tend to favor the latter case, and I believe the reassessment should emphasize power and agency being coequal. If the former is the case, then the Rules cannot apply to all existent Roleplaying Games, and thus either fail totally as an all-encompassing definition, or become needlessly exclusionary.

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.

While I tend to agree, doesn't this imply that Roleplaying Games are inherently only "Games of One"? Can we never be said to be playing the same Roleplaying Game in the same sense as when we play a game of chess, or badminton? Are the parts we call "The Game" and which we all agree we are playing together only the collaborative storytelling or board-gaming parts, while the true Roleplaying sits only with each individual participant and can never be truly shared?

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.

I'm not convinced that rules ever congeal (in role-play) into "game," or that they ever could.

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). 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

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.