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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9026423" data-attributes="member: 6671663">I’ve got Ludwig Wittgenstein right here…But seriously. There’s immense practical value to his idea of looking at family resemblances and applied usages, while expecting many exact boundaries to either flat out nor exist or to be so hard to define that they’re not worth the effort. People playing RPGs act like people playing games of various sorts, and what’s unique (if anything) about our play is no more remarkable than unique rules and practices for team sports played on fields. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. This. The best mode for a lot of social science work is the postmortem. Sometimes, if things line up just right, you can get a diagnosis of something in progress. Anticipation is hard to do, and hard for others to recognize when it succeeds. But not everyone who values immersion immerses most easily or enjoyably in a basically naturalistic framework. Many of us prefer to do so within a genre framework, in which expectations and events routinely diverge from naturalistic versions.For us, an in media res dramatic opener which will be explained along the way is a happy thing, welcome and familiar. We know where we are at the point. As Clive Barker puts it in the opening sentences of Weaveworld:“Nothing ever begins.“There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs. “The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes, the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. “Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys. “Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.”That’s the pure thing, for me. It’s pieces whose pattern will develop over time, and we can play in the expectation of it adding up to a story while knowing very little about what the story will be. (Lots of people talk about story as a goal in gaming, pro and con, in teleological terms. But actual authors writing actual stories seldom know what all the major moments and consequences and resolutions will be, so we don’t have to as gamers to share a determination to make as satisfying a story together as we can, either.)</blockquote>

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