Is RPGing a *literary* endeavour?

pemerton said:

(2) all communication is literary in the sense of governed by concerns about, and expected to live up to, certain standards of formal quality/excellence of wordcraft.

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Literary doesn't require those standards of excellence. Any old piece of junk sentence is also literary.

Hussar said:

OTOH, it is not sophistry or equivocation to point out that in role play we distinguish between in character and out of character speech. Something you would never do in a conversation. You would, however, make that distinction in a literary sense - narrator and narrative. The constant switching between first and third person is also something you typically don't do in a conversation about yourself.

Well, not often anyway.

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I don't know man. Maxperson does some weird things.

You, as a GM, need to be aware of literary techniques and how to apply them or you will simply never reach your intended audience.

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Maxperson said:

I don't agree with that. When I put my mind to it, I can write very well. Not because I have learned all of the rules and how to apply them, but because I love to read and I just know what looks and feels right. There are directors that way as well. Some directors learn all the tricks of the trade before making movies. Others don't have that learning, but have an instinctive feel for what looks good. DMing is the same way. Some DMs may need to read and learn the rules and tricks to running a good game. Others will just know how to do it without the formal learning.

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Literary doesn't require those standards of excellence. Any old piece of junk sentence is also literary.

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But can you see how the equivocation matters now. You might have a very broad all encompassing view of literary, but this is an instance where, after that broad view is used to establish that RPGs are a literary Endeavor, Hussar advocates utliizing literary techniques as a GM (techniques that arguably fall into the camp Pemerton and I am emphasizing----the 'especially' part of the literary definition).

Also, does it really disrupt play if a GM is not talking like lines from a novel? I personally have always found it much more jarring when GMs shift into 'narration mode' than when they just keep talking in their natural style without worrying about sounding as if they are narrating a book.

Hussar said:

I'm just not seeing the parallel between conversation and what we do when we play an RPG. Other than turn taking and back and forth, it generally isn't a conversation. It's too artificial. Playing in first person, you are choosing language, not based on what you, the player would say, but, what you the player think that your character would say which is far closer to an author writing dialogue than someone talking to a friend.

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This is not universal though. If you spend any time in OSR discussions, the idea of players who just play themselves comes up a lot, and many people are generally fine with it. The only line of disruption here would be something that breaks immersion. But talking as yourself is something some people are fine with. You can do that and still be playing a roleplaying game. Personally I do like a line between character knowledge and player knowledge. But we just had a whole thread where half the posters here were arguing for allowing players to use their real world knowledge of things like the monster manual for example.

Bedrockgames said:

But can you see how the equivocation matters now. You might have a very broad all encompassing view of literary, but this is an instance where, after that broad view is used to establish that RPGs are a literary Endeavor, Hussar advocates utliizing literary techniques as a GM (techniques that arguably fall into the camp Pemerton and I am emphasizing----the 'especially' part of the literary definition).

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It's not equivocation as I am not attempting to conceal the truth or avoid committing. Before a discussion can move on, people have to understand what is being discussed. Misuse of the term "literary" is an issue. Once that is settled, and yes the term is broad, then you can move on to what subsets of literary you like and dislike, the "especially" part being one of them, and the conversational dialogue you like being another.

Also, does it really disrupt play if a GM is not talking like lines from a novel? I personally have always found it much more jarring when GMs shift into 'narration mode' than when they just keep talking in their natural style without worrying about sounding as if they are narrating a book.

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Not necessarily disruptive, no. However, if the DM is just being incredibly bland and saying, "There are 3 orcs on a hill" and "You see a room," it is disruptive to me. I cannot enjoy a game like that. What is also disruptive to me, is if a player has his PC turn to mine and say, "Hey, this reminds of a scene out of Aliens. I saw that on T.V. the other night." If that happened to me in a regular game I play in, I wouldn't come back. If it happened during a one shot at a game convention, I'd get up right then and walk out.

pemerton said:

The interest results from the emotional power of the imagined circumstance: I'm dangling by my fingernails over an abyss! My ATV is about to be blown up by the orbital bombardment unless I can find some sort of cover in the rocks! It turns out my brother probably wasn't the nice guy I thought he was - which means that in trying to redeem him I've just wasted half my life! Darth Vader is my father!

As I read your posts, you see the power of these situations as coming from their portrayal. To me that seems like an "external" source of power. I see their power as arising internally, because the player is imaginatively projecting him-/herself into the situation as protagonist. I'm largely indifferent to first person vs third person narration at the table, but I think a type of first-person orientation is pretty fundamental to RPGing. My character is me! If the player is just an external observer, I think that generating that motivation to act becomes much harder.

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This is a central point for me. I don't really need the GM to do much to get me to imagine things. In fact, I get very quickly frustrated and bored with description. I think some of this may actually be a communication social style issue rather than just purely playstyle. There is an idea in sales that people can be divided into Drivers, Amiables, Expressives and Analyticals. You sculpt your sales pitch based on personality. An expressive and certain kinds of amiables would probably respond well to more descriptive sales pitches. Drivers would not. Drivers want you to get to the point. Analyticals want information. So they would want informative description. There is more to it than that. But I am basically a driver, with some amount of analytical when I've taken the tests they have for these things. My point I am trying to explain, that I think some people are having a hard time understanding, is not everyone processes information the same way, not everyone communicates in the same manner. And when it comes to GM descriptions our personalities and how we think shape how we respond to things. I have a very negative response to prose-like descriptions. And part of the reason is it annoys me and interrupts the flow. I am not a jerk about it. I don't berate a GM who does long descriptions. I just know I would rather we move things a long. I don't need your 3-5 sentence description to picture a tower.

Permerton said:

But authorship doesn't take us to literary endeavour in the sense intended in the OP, ie quality of wordcraft.

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Ahh, ok, so, we're at the "literary=Shakespeare" end of the spectrum. Ok, fair enoguh. As I said, I agree with you, if that's the definition of literary you want to work with.

Hussar said:

Ahh, ok, so, we're at the "literary=Shakespeare" end of the spectrum. Ok, fair enoguh. As I said, I agree with you, if that's the definition of literary you want to work with.

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For what it's worth, my sense is that you don't agree!

I think you've appreciated that, in the OP, I said that RPGing requires narration and description. And as I've read your posts, I think you are saying that that narration/description should aim, or be conditioned with an eye towards, formal quality.

Even if I've misunderstood you in that respect, I think there are people in the RPG sphere who do take that view.

Or in other words, I think there's a real discussion here as opposed to debating about where to draw the line on what counts as well-written work.

And speaking of pointless debates . . .

Maxperson said:

Literary doesn't require those standards of excellence. Any old piece of junk sentence is also literary.

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Maxperson, here is the OED definition of "literary":


Here are some of the examples of usage given for definition 1:


I only quote these to make the point - obvious I think to everyone in this thread except apparently you - that there is a usage of literary in which not all communicative acts, not all uses of words, constitute literary works. That is the usage that occurs in the OP of this thread, which asserts that the narration and description in an RPG performs its function largely independently of its literary quality.

Maxperson said:

Not necessarily disruptive, no. However, if the DM is just being incredibly bland and saying, "There are 3 orcs on a hill" and "You see a room," it is disruptive to me. I cannot enjoy a game like that.

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So you consider everything written or spoken to be literature, but here you indicate concern about the quality of the description given by the GM.

Would you consider this a question of literary quality?

If so, do you assume that if major focus is not given to this element, then the game will be bland and unenjoyable? Does literary quality have to be the primary focus in order for a game to be playable to you?

If it is, would you then assume that the content of your game would by default be bland and banal since it is not the primary focus?

You seem to imply that only that which is the primary focus of the game will be of worthwhile quality. Is that truly your contention?

Or would you agree that something that may not be the primary focus in a game may actually still be of acceptable quality?

So in your game, with the literary quality of description and narration being of primary importance, I assume the content isn’t dull, is it?

Bedrockgames said:

This is probably a separate discussion, but I would argue these are still very different mediums and that is really important to keep in mind. RPGs do borrow heavily from many entertainments mediums (not just written ones, but also movies, music and theater). I think it can be misleading to see that connection and then try to adopt the structures of those mediums. This is how many people become insistent on things like railroads or having the GM tell the players a story. True some people like that, but lots of us felt that didn't fit the strengths of the medium in practice. I think where these kinds of discussions become an issue isn't seeing the connections, it is when people equivocate to create general rules about what RPGs should be like for everything (especially around matters of playstyle taste)---i.e. RPGs are like stories, therefore RPGs should play out like good stories; RPGs are like history, therefore RPGs should play out like history, RPGs are like real life, therefore they should play out like real life......these are all fundamentally playstyle statements that usually find some point of comparison between the two things and then argue for bigger structural emulation that is good for all.

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These comparisons also gave rise to things like aspects in FATE, Rising Drama difficulty in Heroquest, mechanics such as insight in D&D or fate points in SotDL which are devices/mechanics for simulating the cadence or flow of these other media in rpg's.