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lowkey13
Guest
*Deleted by user*
Is RPGing a *literary* endeavour?
(1) As the OP says, this thread is a response to multiple threads.
(2) Last time I did what you suggest here, I was criticised for linking the two threads. So this time I took a different approach. Apparently I can't please all of the people all of the time.
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lowkey13
Guest
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MarkB
Legend
Performance is also absent from literary works, so I don't see how your viewpoint makes RPGs un-literary. Engaging with the fiction is precisely the response that a literary writer is hoping to evoke in the reader, after all. And ultimately, if there's a fiction there in the first place to be engaged with, it's because the GM and players crafted it through playing - which, again, doesn't feel like the opposite of literary.
Literary work and artistic performance have something in common - the goal to evoke a response at least in part through the quality of form. (The two can overlap when the performance is, say, a play.)
Word choice, and meter, and assonance, and sentence length, and the like, are formal features of language that affect how a work evokes a response. Here are two opening sentences, by two different authors (REH and EM Forster). Each has a certain "something" to it:
One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
Torches flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night.
We learn that there is a character called Helen, who has a sister, to whom she writes letters. This establishes expectations, and - together with the construciton "one may" - sets a certain tone (middle class, for lack of a better term).
We learn that the events are happening in "the east", at night, presumably in some sort of urban area (it has a proper name - the Maul) but on a pre-modern street (it's lit by murkily-flaring torches) with sordid partying taking place - drunkenness, streetwalkers, pick-pockets, daggers in alleys are not mentioned, but we can certainly anticipate them turning up.
There are other ways to convey the same information. For instance:
These events concern Helen, and her sister. The easiest way to get a handle on them is to consider the letters the former wrote to the latter.
These events take place in a mediaeval city in the east, in an area called the Maul. At night, the streets are lit by torches. The Maul is a favoured place for thieves and similar sorts of people to hang out, and at night they really live it up.
From the point of view of literary endeavour, the difference between the quoted story openings, and my restatements, is big. My view is that from the point of view of RPGing, the difference between the quoted story openings, and my restatements, is small.
In a written medium, it's harder to convey the same point about performance, but I'll try. Consider the following two episodes of narration:
These events take place in a mediaeval city <pause> in the east <pause> in an area called the Maul. <pause for audience uptake> At night, the streets are lit by torches, which <increasing volume/emphasis> flare with murky light! <pause for audience to form mental picture> The Maul is a favoured place for thieves and the like to hang out <pause> especially at night when <increasing volume/emphasis> they really live it up!
These events take place in a mediaeval city in the east. <pause for breath> The area of the city is called the Maul. <pause for breath> At night, the streets are lit by torches. <pause for breath> The Maul is a favoured place for thieves and the like to hang out. <pause for breath> At night, they really live it up!
From the point of view of oratorical performance, I think there is a difference between these two - I hope I've managed to convey that, and to make it clear why the first might seem a more engaging performance than the second. Again, my assertion is that from the point of view of RPGing, the difference is not all that significant.
The writer's purpose is to lure the reader into the work and compel him/her to read on. I think both REH and EM Forster have successful openings in this regard. Moreso than my retellings.
But in my view an RPG is different. The player isn't being invited to read on - to learn more about this engaging work. The player is invited to adopt the perspective of the PC, and from that perspective to make a choice. This is a completely different from of engagement. From that point of view neither of the openings is a success, because neither invites action from a protagonist.
In RPGing, the fiction is engaged with qua fiction, not qua work.
Here's another sentence from The Tower of the Elephant, a little over a page in:
A touch on his tunic sleeve made him turn his head . . .
From the literary point of view we have multiple alliterations (touch, tunic, turn; his, him, his, head). We also have a series of short, mostly one-syllable, words that bring out this alliteration.
If we rework this as a piece of RPG narration, here are two possibilities:
You feel a touch on your tunic sleeve - their's somebody behind you.
There's a pull on your shirt sleeve. You can feel that the person who's pulled on your sleeve is behind you.
These are different works. I think they have different literary qualities: neither is anything special, but I nevertheless think they can be ranked from the literary point of view.
But from the point of view of RPGing they convey the same fiction and invite the same engagement by the player. My view is that when we think about things from the point of view of RPGing, this common invitation to engagement is much more important than the issue of which has more literary merit.
ParanoydStyle
Peace Among Worlds
Hey, I'm a writer with the gall to call himself a literary writer even though I write genre stuff--I don't think that genre fiction can't be literary by default like way too many lit crits still think, even in a post Neil Gaiman world. As a PC or a DM I can and do make up, on the fly, prose of a quality closer to those opening lines you quoted than your later examples, as well as other dialogue and descriptions which sound more like something you'd read in a novel. So yes, I freestyle novel quality prose to my table, which I realize puts me in the minority if not outright marks me as a freak. But does that mean MY roleplaying is a literary endeavor and no one else's is? (It's a rhetorical question, but my answer is I don't think so.)
For what it's worth, I also usually make an effort to ensure that my dialogue when portraying a character is delivered as well as it would be by a professional actor, including body language, accents, etcetera. Of course I'm a retired veteran LARPer and LARP, at least any one worth playing, is a theatrical endeavor.
How do we define "literary: some people use it to mean 'like a book', some people use it to mean 'like serious literature'. With the latter definition, I would say no, at least the VAST majority of RPG sessions and campaigns don't achieve (or aspire to) 'literary' status, although I also think a handful do (and I'm positive they're not the ones being streamed, but that's neither here nor there). With the former definition um, well...I think the OP answered their own question. It is different from a book in that it is interactive, which is kind of a duh. Well, I guess Choose Your Own Adventure books would be an exception.
Personally, my goal when I am GMing is to create an interactive but 'CINEMATIC' experience. Actually, what I'm going for is 'seriously good TV quality' but there isn't one word to define that like there is for cinematic. But basically the HBO/AMC pioneered hour-long drama is the 'format' I aim to make interactive. Those shows (Sopranos, Breaking Bad, True Detective, Legion, American Gods et al.) definitely manage to be art as well as entertainment, which is something else I go for in my games. The caveats here would be that I expect most GMs take their campaigns much less seriously, and I am totally fine with that, and also that I haven't been able to actually run a campaign to my own standards in a long, long time (going on two years).
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Manbearcat
Legend
Good OP for discussion!
If you broadly distilled TTRPGing down to its absolute minimum constituent parts, I think, as you've said, the answer has to be a firm "no."
However, I think there is going to be some overlap in specific moments of play that may not be possible to divorce entirely from an investment in quality of form.
For instance, a few things come to mind.
1) When I'm deriving a dungeon/adventuring site in Torchbearer, I'm using the content generation methodology expressed in the book. However, when I'm filling in blanks of theme and sorting out a unique Twists table, I'm referencing (a) PC build components (Beliefs, Nature et al) and (b) prior play resolution.
2) When I'm running a first session of Dungeon World, that Earthdeep Prison Colony that was cleaved in two by the Lightning Borne Cleft one of my players added to the map, and their subsequent ideas of what that may entail is central for setting and situation to come. It may also hook into the Druid's Defeat and Unnatural Threat.
When a Discern Realities requires a response from me and I ask a question about the familiar NPC chain-gang they encounter crawling from the cleft in the opening scene of play, I discover that the Fighter did hard time here and made enemies everywhere. I'm using that.
When we review the End of Session questions, resolve Bonds and Alignment and write down our answers about how they know this NPC that is running, the answers to these questions has relevance to future Front (merely because I know what they're interested in or how they see the fiction that just emerged from the last session).
3) I think understanding how pacing and a dramatic arc compels emotion and investment in content (even if you aren't scripting them to railroad a set of players through) are extremely important aspects of both GMing and writing a game (particularly a game like My Life With Master where you're running through a pre-conceived, but not pre-rendered, thematic arc with a diversity of ultimate outcomes).
How do you think the 3 above intersect (or not) with your premise?
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
if by literary you mean the creation of a cohesive narrative then yes, absolutely RPGs are a literary endeavour.
The particular quality and internal cohesiveness of the work might be debated but that doesnt change the fact of its existence as an imagined shared 'text'
The particular quality and internal cohesiveness of the work might be debated but that doesnt change the fact of its existence as an imagined shared 'text'
What you describe here is certainly what I have in mind by referring to a "literary endeavour" or a "performance in the artistic sense".
My view - which I think you disagre with?, though you also recognise that most RPGing won't live up to your aesthetic standards - is that this is inessential to RPGing in a way that it is not inessential to writing fiction or performing plays. That the core of RPGing is the invitation to choose from the perspective of a protagonist, and that this doesn't depend upon being entertaining and aesthetically pleasing in the way you describe. Those are, in a sense, "extras". (Analogous, in a way that I hope you won't take as derogatory, to the quality of finish of a board game's components.)
(An exception to how I describe RPGing would be classic skilled play dungeon crawling of the sort Gygax describes in his PHB. That's not about the "invitation to choose" I have described, but it's not literary either. It's much close to a wargame in the traditional sense.)
I think (1) and (2) are - at their core - about extrapolating from established to new fiction by reference to theme/interest. That fits well with my description, in my post not far upthread of your post, of the GM's narration inviting the players to engage as a protagonist. What stirs the player, what rouses emotion, is not the fluency of the GM's narration but the power of that invitation.
I think a GM can do this although s/he has no great skill as a writer (in the sense of writing beautiful prose). My belief here is grounded firmly in my experience!
I think your (3) puts more pressure on my contention - I would describe the source of this being that it puts pressure on the contrast between form and content - this is the contrast that [MENTION=6787503]Hriston[/MENTION] has helpfully articulated upthread, and that I also tried to capture (via some examples, and comments around them) in my post not too far upthread from yours.
This is because dramatic pacing (probably) can't be completely divorced from the words - the form - whereby the content is conveyed.
In the context of a RPG, though, where the pacing concerns - at least the sort that you refer to - are more at the "scene" level than the line-by-line level, I think the dependence of pacing on words becomes pretty lose. A GM who can't control his/her words at all is going to have troube wrapping up a scene, or cutting to the next situation, in a smooth way; but I think the threshold of skill to be able to do this falls well short of being able to write an evocative opening or closing line.
I'll finish this post by saying that, in denying that RPGing is a *literary* endeavour I'm not denying that it has an important aesthetic component. But I think that the aesthetic component is much more connected to a sense of motion and drama in human affairs, than to a sense of beauty in composition or performance.
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