Bagpuss asks,
Are you allowed to turn up and just have fun without thinking to hard about it?
Absolutely. The game is a failure if it requires metatextual or mechanical play. The whole point (for me) is to write games that are fun no matter what level(s) you're experiencing them on.
clark411 asks,
can we please have a concrete definition of what "metatextual" is?
A metatextual reading of a novel or a a campaign world is about decoding the symbol system the author/GM uses in order to hypothesize about what is going on.
Example #1:
When I began reading George R R Martin's
Game of Thrones, I was struck by the emerging civil war between the Lannisters and the Starks and its obvious echoes of War of the Roses. Given that I knew Martin was referencing the War of the Roses, obviously the character of Tyrion was some kind of figure of Richard III. I then wondered what aspects of Richard III, aside from physical appearance Martin would invest in him. Obviously, the character wouldn't be an exact correspondence because Richard III was a York not a Lancaster. So, when he ended up in charge of King's Landing and his two nephews' care, I was quite delighted, especially the way Martin ended up inverting the Richard III myth and having Tyrion end up imprisoned in the tower.
Of course, all this got more complicated when we met the Dornishmen later in the series and realized that what Martin was actually doing was overlaying the Seven Kingdoms of the Reconquista overtop of the Seven Kingdoms of the Heptarchy so that Cornwall and Granada were synthesized into Dorne.
Example #2:
This is my favourite long gaming anecdote that I have tried to reduce so that it doesn't take 30 minutes to tell. This is the experience which sold me on metatextual gaming.
I played in a game in which the characters lived in a world called Midgaard. It was one of the nine worlds which were, in this specific order, Vanaheim, Elfheim, Midgaard, Asgaard, Jotunheim, Svartelfheim, Niflheim, Utgaard and Hel. There is no way I can replicate the incredible richness and genius of this campaign-- it is the second-best campaign I have ever been in. There were many stunning realizations that I cannot do justice to. But eventually, we the players figured out that the nine worlds actually corresponded to the outer nine planets of our system; once we removed Mercury from the model, suddenly, we saw the alphabetical correspondence.
Venus,
Earth,
Mars,
Asteroid Belt, etc. The only thing that didn't fit was Hel. This profoundly informed our reasoning as players-- the home of the gods was not a planet. Had it been destroyed in Raagnarok as our myths implied?
We hypothesized like mad about this, as players, because our characters lived in a magic-rich medieval-style society on Midgaard. Our characters could not experience the realization that the adventure was taking place sometime in the past or future of our solar system.
Eventually, our characters were captured and enslaved by Dark Elves and taken to a special building they had discovered that they needed our magical affinity to understand. The building was millions of years old; the back room was occupied by some kind of enormous magic engine that seemed to affect time in some way. The front room was occupied by a series of high seats looking out at the sky through an enormous bay window and spread out infront of the seats was a huge computer system which seemed to glow in all colours of the spectrum that we couldn't figure out either.
We went away puzzled from the session, feeling like we were on the verge of figuring out what was happening. In the shower, 5 days later, it occurred to me that even though the building was rooted to the ground, the engines in back indicated that it was not a building but a ship. And what is that part of the ship faces out into space? The bridge. And what colour is the computer? ...Obviously, we had located the Rainbow Bridge -- the building's purpose, therefore, was to take us to Asgaard!
Sure enough, armed with this understanding of the significance of where our characters were, we focused all our energy on getting the computer to run because we knew it was the Bifrost Bridge. (We later discovered the Dark Elves' code name for their archaeological dig was Project Heimdall.) Sure enough, the building transported us back in time to when (based on the Russian Phaeton hypothesis) the Asteroid Belt was a planet; and, living there were the creatures our characters called the gods. At every stage, our characters' motivations were justified in terms of their own world's events but, as players, our choices were based, to varying degrees, on our understanding of the world's metatext.
[/end examples]
Most fantasy worlds resist a metatextual reading because they are not designed to be figured out in this way. Most people who create fantasy worlds use the Jungian/HP Lovecraft method of reaching into the collective unconscious and pulling out whatever jumble of myth, history and invention they find. But I think the best writers and GMs create worlds that can be understood on both a textual and metatextual level. In my best games (ones where I'm not hampered by the D&D rules system), every puzzle I create is solveable on both a textual and metatextual level. The brilliance of the Midgaard campaign is that we still could have used the ship to take us to Asgaard without the realization of what it was.
Joshua Dyal says,
If you're refering to games that have Narrativist rules that are specifically story-oriented, I'm not a fan of such systems, and my experience with them is that they are more intrusive rather than helpful. They also tend to work on a metagame level, which leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Here, we are in full agreement. Such rules systems are crap because they are actually designed to tell a particular story that is not necessarily the story you want to tell as a GM. No. If I want to run a story-oriented game, I design a small rules set specifically for that game.
I see a real disparity between enjoying a book because you can discern the pacing, symbolism, or what have you the author uses, and being OK with players making decisions for their characters that are completely irrationaly from their characters' point of view.
People keep putting these words in my mouth. If you cannot offer a
credible justification for your character doing something, they shouldn't do it. So no -- I don't think people's characters should make decisions that are "completely irrational from their characters' point of view."
Well, I've blathered on enough. Thanks everyone for discussing this with me.
But that is just my style. I think I would need to know more about your criteria for what passes as metatextual and what is "mere" metagaming, or disallowed. How credible does something have to be to be credible justification?
