Case against continuity

[clearstream]

I'm trying to think of any great work of fiction that is a product of good scenes without a good story accompanying it and I'm drawing a complete blank.

Assessing the OP's idea against what works for traditional linear narrative is inevitably going to draw a blank.

Continuity does not equal stagnation. You can certainly maintain continuity in a setting while simultaneously making changes. Just because the king has been around for twenty years doesn't mean he's going to be around for the next twenty.

If I understand it correctly (and the OP is of course better positioned to say what they mean) the idea is to embrace stagnation.

 

[clearstream]

If you’ve talked to me for more than fifteen seconds, you probably know that I’m quite firmly in a storytelling camp. I love Apocalypse World. I love Fate. I love MUJIK IS DEAD.

But the thing is, I kinda don’t give a crap about stories. I love cool, gripping scenes. Pretty much all the storytelling wisdom is about arcs, resolution of conflict, change. Maybe I’m a hack and I just suck at creating interesting characters, skill issue, yeah, maybe. Or maybe there’s something valuable in the distinct lack of change.

We’ve all played role-playing games. Pretty much regardless of the style, continuity is the king: fiction can’t, or at least, shouldn’t be retconned, shouldn’t be rewinded, it should triumphantly march forward, crushing all the words unsaid beneath it.

A leads to B to C to D.

But I’m a renegade. Screw this. A leads to A to A to A to A, until there’s nothing but a barren wasteland, devoid of feelings to extract, and only then we move to B to pick its bones clean. I crave stagnation the same way I crave suffering. Perpetual torture in a purgatory of an eternal song and dance, edging at the brink of release.


It's similar to fanfiction.

Fanfiction hinges upon the established, familiar characters, and that what allows it to cut to the chase: you don’t need to spend words upon words to make the reader give a damn about your heroine and her love interest, they already do.

Instead, you can focus on what happens to them, or who they are in your AU, or whatever, go nuts. Your idea can burn bright, so hot it would burn the story into ashes in seconds, and you can observe the inferno with a sadistic glee, without care in the world that you’ll have to clean up the mess you’ve created afterwards. Or it can be too modest to be interesting: “what if the main character worked at coffee shop” isn’t something you can mine for several seasons. You can mine it for fifteen minutes, though.


Inner Sanctum was my first stab at this general idea: it’s played in scenes, and these scenes don’t have to be connected to each other in any way, shape or form. You can play out the same conflict with the same characters over and over and over again, every time reaching a different climax.

I’ll work in this direction more, but for now, I’ll probably pause design work. Online play for Inner Sanctum ain’t gonna implement itself, after all.

Tangentially relatedly, I'm interested in challenging assumptions carried over from linear narrative to games, not just to contradict or ignore them, but also to explore what they are.

For example, I'm interested in non-sequiteurs - disjunctive situations or situations that are not causally connected. One reason I am interested is because my view on linear narrative is that - outside of games - casuality is merely a veneer or shared illusion. What I mean is consider this "Jo walked into the grocers. They looked around and saw the shelves bearing tins, cartons and all the usual products. They picked up a tin of beans and walked to the counter." Here, it might seem that Jo is able to look around and see the shelves in the grocers because they walked into that store. But there is no such causal connection. The second sentence could have as easily been "They leaned forward and uselessly smeared the pick-up's windowscreen as they drove south."

Whereas in a game, if my avatar walks into a room they are in that room. No pretence. But once you start down that path I think you very readily can accept propositions like yours.

 

[loverdrive]

I agree with @clearstream, to think about it in terms of published fiction is to wander astray.

Better venues would be other games (especially not cinematic single-player ones), but I also find a dance metaphor to be both pretty close and far enough to both convey the point and don't lose the forest for a tree in minutia.

I'm not really a dancer, but I've attended salsa classes with my girlfriend, and had a heap of fun! It's built on repetition: you drill moves into your head until you don't need to consciously think about them. And until your partner doesn't either, of course.

Then, when you are on the dancefloor and the music is booming, you lean onto that base, focusing instead on how you show off more flair. It's a wonderful feeling!

If I'm gently pushing your hand, I'm asking to switch places, and you don't need to think or consider all the possibilities, what did I mean, what should you do, you just know. If my character pulls out a cigarette and comments on the full moon with a detached indifference, I'm asking for your character to comfort her, recreating the events of the previous game.

But better. With less hesitation, less questions, less beating around the bush. A second draft.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well, he certainly didn't explain where in the canonical Middle Earth cosmology Tom sits, but Tom DOES explain himself, IMHO. He's unfettered free will. Good of his own nature, without attachment to any creed or desire to control anything but his own life and his little place in the world. This is why the Ring has no hold over him, he cannot be dominated or influenced because he's free, almost like a Bodhisattva. Elrond explains that, in the end, Sauron would crush him, physically, but not in spirit. And if you go all the way back to the Ainulindali, you see that the primary theme is will. Tom is the axis of the story, he literally embodies the concept of free will, the essence of self which the power of Morgoth, and thus Sauron his servant, opposes.

Sure, it can be excised from the PLOT, but Tolkien left it in for a reason, IMHO, even if he sometimes second guessed himself.

Extremely well put.

Lot's of people aren't going to like the same things you like. You shouldn't take it personally.

My initial response was to repeat this back to you, but replace “like the same things you like” with “agree with your take on a beloved work”.

But look. You were crappy about your dislike of a thing that other people love. No one is taking issue with the fact you don’t like it. It’s the smarmy “taking a dump on this thing as a cheap shot unrelated to the topic” that I replied to.

I've not heard that put better.

Thanks!

 

[MGibster]

But look. You were crappy about your dislike of a thing that other people love. No one is taking issue with the fact you don’t like it. It’s the smarmy “taking a dump on this thing as a cheap shot unrelated to the topic” that I replied to.

I was crappy about a work of art and you were crappy to a person. We are not the same. But, look, I'm done with this now.

 

[Jd Smith1]

If I understand it correctly (and the OP is of course better positioned to say what they mean) the idea is to embrace stagnation.

I think that's the current motto of the Chicago Bears.

 

[loverdrive]

Video games are an interesting comparison. Some games intentionally change across playthroughs. Others are more or less the same, and the reason one plays them again is to have the same exciting/dramatic experiences from the first time. This case is like rewatching movies.

Also games can be replayed in pursuit of perfection. I've recently started playing Sifu and beaten the game the same day I bought it. But I'm still playing it, grinding for a no deaths at all of the levels. And then I'll probably start grinding no-death run of a full game...

This case is like rewatching movies. Side note: this seems impossible with shared-narrative games, but who knows?

I can't see why not. If we approach it with an understanding that shared fiction should maintain similarity to previous iterations, it will work.

 

[Umbran]

No story, no journey, just the moment of interest as many times as it's interesting!

I like @loverdrive's thinking here. It's novel. Speaks to game as game.

With respect, what's been suggested here doesn't speak to "game as game" in and of itself. Whether it does that depends on implementation.

As described, with the phrase, "devoid of feelings to extract," and some other florid words, I didn't get the impression that this was about game. It sounded more like... drama exercises - replay a scene over and over until you've explored all the dramatic and emotional possibilities. This can be done with minimal "game" aspects.

Doesn't tie itself to serving traditional (read linear) ideas of storytelling.

Specifically doesn't tie itself to any story at all. Even nonlinear stories do have a continuity - they just reveal that continuity in a different order.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

With respect, what's been suggested here doesn't speak to "game as game" in and of itself. Whether it does that depends on implementation.

As described, with the phrase, "devoid of feelings to extract," and some other florid words, I didn't get the impression that this was about game. It sounded more like... drama exercises - replay a scene over and over until you've explored all the dramatic and emotional possibilities. This can be done with minimal "game" aspects.

Maybe, but it can be hard to parse all that. @loverdrive mentioned grinding a game to achieve certain objectives. I think in RP it is somewhat similar. As to how much mechanics that entails, really going to depend on the game system!

Specifically doesn't tie itself to any story at all. Even nonlinear stories do have a continuity - they just reveal that continuity in a different order.

I think even the best 'no story at all' sorts of fiction at least imply a story, or beg us to invent one. I think there's an interesting topic related to how system and process of play could be leveraged here.

 

[clearstream]

With respect, what's been suggested here doesn't speak to "game as game" in and of itself. Whether it does that depends on implementation.

I have in mind games like chess, bridge, Magic the Gathering, Warhammer 40K or AoS, and Street Fighter. Each iterates a short sequence of actions from constant or limited start positions. So in chess, I don't rethink or change the start position each game: I play and will in future replay the same situation; discovering with each play a new set of choices and responses.

It's common for games to iterate such sequences with no narrative linkage or progression. More complex games incorporate the results of previous iterations into future - yielding features such as snowballing in competitive strategy games and advancement arcs in RPGs. These arcs are optional: the heart of a game is very often its iteration on a situation with the same essential characteristics.

One way to picture it is that games have a) parameters, b) a start state for those parameters, c) rules for change, and d) the current state of parameters. A game like D&D inputs monster stat blocks and character sheets to form b), invokes the combat rules in fulfilment of c), and in turn-increments updates d). The outcome state of combat is captured on character sheets to form future b)s. Thus, TTRPGs frequently iterate a core sequence like combat, narratively linking and incorporating the results of previous iterations into future iterations.

Story now games have evolved from this sort of classical model into looser cascades of actions, dissolving the core sequence. However, they still must start from a situation and in (what I am labelling) classical game terms that situation amounts to a set of parameters b) and rules for change c). Here I will count principles and intentions loosely among rules.

I take the OP to be principally banishing the onward narrative linkage or progression. The start state is recorded. Results of the iteration - whether in system or fiction - are discarded at the close of each iteration. In this way, the exploration is more like that of addressing chess: every nook and cranny of the thematic space may be explored.

Hence I suggest it comes closer to game as game... and to clarify my thought I mean in a certain classical sense of what a game is (per session iteration of a core play loop from a common starting situation).

As described, with the phrase, "devoid of feelings to extract," and some other florid words, I didn't get the impression that this was about game. It sounded more like... drama exercises - replay a scene over and over until you've explored all the dramatic and emotional possibilities. This can be done with minimal "game" aspects.

Based on the above, it should serve to draw an analogy between chess and your envisioned drama exercise.

Specifically doesn't tie itself to any story at all. Even nonlinear stories do have a continuity - they just reveal that continuity in a different order.

Do you mean branching linearity? Or genuine non-linearity? In any case, I mean here to challenge what is meant by story: to imply that linear storytelling led to assumptions that are soon to be outmoded. In background, where a narratologist sees a game as a form of narrative, I as a ludologist take the view that narratives as known up to now have been a primitive and, perforce, limited sort of game.

Ron Edwards in his classic piece on narrativism emphasies that a crucial goal of story now is to ensure that player is in the same act audience and author. He bases his thinking on a specific idea about authorship of dramatic story that itself is about what the author should be doing at the moment of authorship. In a sense relegating audience-ship to some secondary or less interesting role. (Criticism of trad that proceeds from a desire to be more than audience, and that characterises play nearer the latter mode in negative terms, continues this.)

The virtue he urges be grasped - that of being simultaneously author and audience - is one that is especially available in play. It cannot be given up by removing the ongoing story arc! It might well be seen that @loverdrive's proposal enforces an even closer adherence to the crucial idea of story now... just so long as we take that idea to be an essentially ludic one.