Musings on New Projects
As always, I am using RPGs to muse about my professional work.

Some time back, I got very gung-ho about Levi-Strauss's bricolage as a lovely way of thinking about how RPGs work. I still maintain that this is largely accurate, particularly when it comes to the vexed question of Simulationism. But there is a problem: Levi-Strauss's methods presume, for excellent reasons, that the data as it presents itself will be synchronic, i.e. independent of time. Presumably bricolage happens over time, but the ethnographer rarely if ever has enough longitudinal data to be able to see how it was done over time. He can infer backwards into the logical processes but not the chronological. Thus analysis of bricolage is a matter of examining a process that has always already been completed. And this means that RPGs, which we enounter diachronically (over time), are very difficult to examine by these structural means.

In theory, you could take a kind of snapshot of a large-scale campaign and look at it as a set of structured relations. This would certainly be interesting, but you'd have to have excellent data, and it's not at all clear that the results would be of much value by themselves. If you had the same sort of rich campaign data for many campaigns, you could work comparatively as well, and get at the logical procedures and so on. But first of all we pretty much don't have this data. And second, it would necessarily tell us nothing about play or about how the game operated from the player perspective. This is not the case when we're dealing with myth and ritual and so on, i.e. the usual objects of structural-anthropological analyses, because the structures in question are lived: they structure social relations and so on. But with RPGs the method would appear to eliminate exactly what is most interesting.

And, of course, from anything resembling a practical perspective, i.e. for talking about playing and designing fun games, such a method really is useless. So do we have to scrap this useful analogy?

I don't think so.

First of all, I think this is very revealing about certain important founding games, namely D&D, Runequest, and so on. The stories we hear about how these games happened seem to suggest that they started with a sketchy rules-set and a detailed world (Greyhawk, Glorantha, etc.). Wonderfully exciting and rich gaming happened somehow or other, and a very intricate and dense rules-system evolved in the process. Then the creators codified and polished the rules-systems and published them as a kind of quick-start for others to do what they had done.

One way of thinking about this, in terms of bricolage and myth, is that these gaming groups (or at least their public spokesmen) believed that the wonderful gaming rested on those mechanics. Thinking like engineers, they figured that if they had had those great rules to start out, they would have had wonderful gaming right away. But if we think of such gaming as like mythical thought, then this is precisely not true: the mechanics were a by-product of good gaming, not their cause. Like myth, their play went from structure (good play) to concept (rules) to structure (more good play). To engineer this, to start with concept (rules) and go to structure (good play) might work, but it could not produce the same sort of play, for the same reason as modern science and mythical thinking are not the same thing even if they can at times produce comparable results.

My current thinking is that this type of gaming, which I think is reasonably accurately defined by Ron's Big Model as Simulationism, is thus intrinsically resistant to engineering, which is why the whole Forge approach (System Does Matter, so design a system that will consistently generate the desired play results) seems to have a terrible time with Sim, and why the Forge keeps having all these battles about what Sim really is and so on. It's just not definable in Forge terms. Which isn't to say that Nar and Gam, which are indeed engineer-able, aren't good things and can't be produced in those terms.

For some reason Ron and others keep thinking that what I'm talking about here (I talked to Ron recently) is what they like to call the Beeg Horseshoe Theory, which puts Nar and Gam as two prongs of a horseshoe with Sim weirdly in between. I don't mean this at all: I mean that Nar and Gam may well be two prongs of a horseshoe, if the horseshoe in question is engineered play. And Sim is something quite other, something quite radically at odds with this, not the same horseshoe at all. If you look at Sim from Nar/Gam (engineering) eyes, it's intrinsically incoherent and inefficient. If you look at Nar/Gam from Sim (bricolage) eyes, it's pointless, limited, and unsatisfying -- it's essentially not the same activity at all, and thus defined in Sim terms it's worthless.

Now all that said, Levi-Strauss isn't the be-all and end-all of understanding this epistemological issue. There are other ways of handling it, and what I'm grappling with right now is that in classical music they fought with precisely this divide since before Bach, in some ways resolved a lot of things when they got to Schoenberg's Harmonielehre (1911), and along the way produced some fabulous art. So I'm going to be musing for a while about whether you can design a Sim game by borrowing from musical models.

Which is also what I'm doing for my next book project: examining the complex analytical problem of historical and structural analysis as they relate and entwine within particular materials, notably witchcraft phenomena cross-culturally examined. And I'm going to try to solve the problem, to some degree anyway, by seeking the ways people involved in witch-hunting were themselves grappling with the same problem I am, and using Schoenberg's theoretical intersection of harmony and polyphony to model it effectively. Ultimately the result should be a book that in some sense is structured as a work of music -- which also allows me at last to take up Levi-Strauss's discussion of music (and challenge it).

So anyway, you should expect to hear a lot more about this over the next year or so as I struggle to create a Sim game and a book on witchcraft (and perhaps a sonata), all at the same time, for the same reasons, and by the same methods.