Case against continuity

[The-Magic-Sword]

One consideration is, you could play a series of vignettes that all call back to the same theme as well-- where the continuity is thematic rather than narrative. In terms of narrative continuity, it's a sleight of hand-- it's essentially a series of short stories as opposed to a novel because the actual continuity is self-contained in each vignette.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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).


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


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.

Well, I think you would be wise to consider the history of RPGs. I was around in the time frame they were invented, so I have some degree of perspective there. In the first place we had war games. These started out as quintessentially chess-like affairs with a fixed starting position and complete general rules, no narrative was required, nor arguably even implied.

Soon we reached stage 2, which was the 'scenario' stage. By the mid 19th Century this was well-established, as war game enthusiasts gamed out various battles using terrain, miniatures, and referees. Still, each scenario was disconnected, whether you won or lost your 'Waterloo' on the table top was merely a question of claiming victory and had no impact on tomorrow's version of playing out Valmy.

Of course stage 2 has continued to exist as a robust form of war gaming. At the same time stage 3, the stage in which the 'campaign' exists was an obvious evolution. Gamers didn't just want to play individual battles, they wanted to play out entire wars and campaigns. The rules for this level were always very fuzzy. It was the level of play which existed, in dedicated circles, up until the early 1970's.

Which is when Dave Arneson married the war game campaign to his experience with Braunstein 'structured RP' and invented the idea of an ongoing campaign focused on the player's alter-egos, characters which are both pieces in a war game type set of scenarios, and have a sort of dramatic life which links these scenarios together, much like military campaign games are linked.

I agree, Story Now has moved onward from that model of episodic scenarios defined by a 'Game Master' who authors the scenarios (albeit in response to the outcomes of previous scenarios and perhaps player input and interest). I'm not sure what makes one thing 'narrative' and another 'ludic', so I can't comment on that, the question seems kind of uninteresting frankly. However I think you're fundamentally correct about what @loverdrive is saying, and its interesting to ask if you can play a 'narrativist' game that way.

 

[clearstream]

I'm not sure what makes one thing 'narrative' and another 'ludic', so I can't comment on that...

While there are possibly many ways in which games are distinct from what would more traditionally be called "narrative", the quality I am thinking of is that noticed (or at least put in words) in the early 2000s. Taking Edwards as the most relevant, he ascribes to player the quality of being - simultaneously - author and audience. As other scholars have stressed (e.g. Miguel Sicart) that duality is distinctly "ludic"... or to put it another way, I am calling attention to that duality by applying the label. (To further clarify, I use "ludic" in the way it's sometimes seen in Game Studies, coming from ludus - game - to imply having the quality of i.e. gamefulness.)

Think of the predicate "game" in "story game", "narrative game", "nar game", or the "now" in "story now". Something is added to shift our idea of story on to the specific notion of story-game. The "ludic" quality is essential. That's at the heart of Edward's argument: he says that it is impossible to think of story in a ludic sense unless player is permitted that duality. Is author and audience. Thus I can go further than "calling attention to that duality by applying the label": according to Edwards (and others) what is referred to by the label has that duality as an essential quality.

"Narrative" alone does not yet have that implication. As Edwards describes, the author experiences authorship, and the reader experiences audience-ship. Why bother with stories in games? Edward says that if we're to do so, we should demand stories in their ludic form.*


*In fact what he says is more like - in order to do so genuinely, they must be in ludic form. (Edwards also takes a position on what counts as a worthwhile story, which he integrates into that form.)

 

[nevin]

Well, if by "never been a big seller" you mean "formula for all the most succesful videogames" from arcade era coin-guzzlers to modern day giants like Call of Duty and League of Legends...

Regardless. Whether "most people" like it or not is completely irrelevant. When someone talks about their love for jazz you don't need to chime in saying how hip-hop is more popular.

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Well, if by "never been a big seller" you mean "formula for all the most succesful videogames" from arcade era coin-guzzlers to modern day giants like Call of Duty and League of Legends...

Regardless. Whether "most people" like it or not is completely irrelevant. When someone talks about their love for jazz you don't need to chime in saying how hip-hop is more popular.

your argument is all emotion. first person shooters don't have stories beyond go kill things for x reason. The games that do have stories need the story to develop. don't care about your love of anything and thanks for your advice on how to conduct internet discussions. I'll file that in file 13....

 

[nevin]

I've recently rewatched Hardcore Henry and it still is very damn great movie. I'm not sure what the story is (there's this bad guy, and then there's a guy with a ton of clones that all have completely different personalities, one which is a cocaine addict and another is cpt Price reference? Idk), the main character doesn't say a word, but the fight scenes are exhilarating. Out of more niche things, EMESIS BLUE is a collection of well executed disturbing scenes that are, if connected, this connection buried so deep I can't grasp it.


I'm not so sure, to be honest. I read a lot of Miraculous fanfiction, and the characters in the show itself are practically non-existent. The main characters have one and a half superficial trait each, at best.

Team Fortress fanmedia is also going strong even after 15 years of the game launch, with hilarious skits featuring mercenaries, who also aren't particularly deep. Scout is stupid and bostonian, Soldier is stupid and patriotic and crazy, Pyro is crazy and childish, Medic is crazy and German... Yeah.


No, of course it doesn't. But you then have to deal with the consequences of that change, which may or may not be actually interesting.

If your character defeats (or befriend or falls in love with) her bitter enemy, congratulations, she doesn't have a bitter enemy anymore and you have to deal with it somehow.

I'd argue that a lot of fan fiction is because they want continuity and they generate it themselves. Some is obviously just creative filling in the holes but in General Fan fiction is the community filling in the sketchy story that left them in some way unfullfilled.

 

[Umbran]

your argument is all emotion.

We are, ultimately, talking about preferences in entertainments - personal taste. Emotional arguments apply.

 

[kigmatzomat]

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.

So you wanna be a war gamer, refighting the battle of Midway, or Agincourt or Thermopylae?

Well, I am sure there are people who like that but thr problem is it usually requires some source of material that people are engaged with to hook them. Could start with history and then move to alt-history.

I.e.Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna then alt-history, Talleyrand vs Atilla the Hun.

 

[pemerton]

So you wanna be a war gamer, refighting the battle of Midway, or Agincourt or Thermopylae?

That wasn't what I read in the OP:

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.

<snip>

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 thought @loverdrive was talking about being a "story" gamer, replaying a scene like (say) Jean Grey holding back Scott Summers' optic blast with her TK powers while they speak intimately (and perhaps do other things) on a butte in New Mexico; or Jean activating an alien ray gun to shoot herself while Scott tries to talk her down.

Personally I do enjoy continuity and character development in my RPGing. But I think I get where loverdrive is coming from.

 

[loverdrive]

That wasn't what I read in the OP:

I thought @loverdrive was talking about being a "story" gamer, replaying a scene like (say) Jean Grey holding back Scott Summers' optic blast with her TK powers while they speak intimately (and perhaps do other things) on a butte in New Mexico; or Jean activating an alien ray gun to shoot herself while Scott tries to talk her down.

Personally I do enjoy continuity and character development in my RPGing. But I think I get where loverdrive is coming from.

There are two different things that I mistakenly lumped together in the OP:

1. I have trouble caring about my own characters until I have played them (or maybe with them?) enough to figure out who they are through play; but at that point, there are lots of missed opportunities for things that I would play differently only if I understood the character's personality better.
2. Dealing with consequences of something can be a real pain in the ass. Like, a character can make a heroic sacrifice only once. Or finally confess their love to another character for the first time. Or embrace darkness within themselves. Or whatever. Things that fundamentally change (or recontextualize) the character are "expensive", and if they are rewinded back to the square one afterwards it, uhm, drives the price down.

The two are related: who the character was may become clear only after something irreversible already happened. In an S&V game my character, Photographer, didn't really have much personality until he rescued a girl in what amounts to a random encounter, paid her medical bills and took her, and several sessions latter something along the lines of:
— Why are you doing this? Helping me, I mean?
— I... I don't know. Repenting for my sins, I guess. I've did a lot of despicable things in my life, I'll never be a good man, but I can do at least something good.

Then, it clicked. He is a hardened criminal who knows that he can't be anything other than a hardened criminal, but is remorseful about that.

Too bad he was a "charsheet with legs" for the majority of the campaign and there was absolutely no foreshadowing of this development, and too bad I can't do jack about it now.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There are two different things that I mistakenly lumped together in the OP:

1. I have trouble caring about my own characters until I have played them (or maybe with them?) enough to figure out who they are through play; but at that point, there are lots of missed opportunities for things that I would play differently only if I understood the character's personality better.
2. Dealing with consequences of something can be a real pain in the ass. Like, a character can make a heroic sacrifice only once. Or finally confess their love to another character for the first time. Or embrace darkness within themselves. Or whatever. Things that fundamentally change (or recontextualize) the character are "expensive", and if they are rewinded back to the square one afterwards it, uhm, drives the price down.

The two are related: who the character was may become clear only after something irreversible already happened. In an S&V game my character, Photographer, didn't really have much personality until he rescued a girl in what amounts to a random encounter, paid her medical bills and took her, and several sessions latter something along the lines of:
— Why are you doing this? Helping me, I mean?
— I... I don't know. Repenting for my sins, I guess. I've did a lot of despicable things in my life, I'll never be a good man, but I can do at least something good.

Then, it clicked. He is a hardened criminal who knows that he can't be anything other than a hardened criminal, but is remorseful about that.

Too bad he was a "charsheet with legs" for the majority of the campaign and there was absolutely no foreshadowing of this development, and too bad I can't do jack about it now.

Its an interesting thesis, and I can definitely corroborate your core observations. Personally I'm less enthralled with the idea of replaying and reworking these things, but that's how it goes, we are each uniquely weird! I mean, it might be fun once in a while to perfect a particular scene or something like that. Mostly I just figure I'm going to go on and do something else similar instead. Not sure why to be honest.