Narrativium

I’ll warn you now: this could get very abstract and weird. It’s half-past three in the morning as I start writing, I had dental work yesterday, and my brain was semi-fuzzy from the anesthetic for most of the day. But I’ve been thinking about narrative. I think a lot about narrative; it’s one of the concepts that comes up again and again for the last twenty years or so. It comes up so much because, peculiarly for someone who spends so much time in fiction, I don’t always like narrative, and I am suspicious of it in a number of situations.

I suppose I should do some defining. I am not going to resort to the Oxford English Dictionary here; I’m going to have Ursula K. Le Guin provide an outline of what-narrative-is.

I’m pretty sure some of you are rolling your eyes and going “oh gods, he’s off again”, which is fair. But I haven’t covered that ground in this newsletter yet, or at least I don’t think I have. Le Guin provides an alternate model of narrative in that essay, as opposed to the spear-throw of “traditional” stories. She does so far better than I could, so go read that.1

So, narrative in the spear-throw sense is applied to a lot of things. It’s applied to history, where I have the most problem with it, and marketing, where I have less, and to games, where I don’t have a problem with it per se, but kind of wish it wasn’t as dominant.

In history, we get it all the damn time. We have the story of how this happened, and the story of how that happened, and the story of what caused the other thing. The very best example of this is the beginning of World War I, wherein the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand topples the dominoes that lead inevitably to four years of brutal warfare which changed the world. It is a compelling narrative, but it is also bullshit. World War I didn’t happen because one not-terribly-relevant figurehead noble was shot. He very nearly wasn’t shot, because the group who assassinated him were quite thoroughly incompetent, and were only matched in that by his driver, who was the kind of guy who in this century would click on every phishing link he ever got, and be constantly puzzled as to why his credit cards kept getting maxed out. The war happened due to global situations of economics, technological development, and clashing ideals of government. That statement - modulo the word “global” - is possibly universally applicable.

But people don’t appear to be very good at holding that in their heads. Economics and trade and technology and government are complex, and a nice neat story about how their Gavrilo shot our Franz is much easier to grok. And the story isn’t untrue, as such, but it places far too much emphasis on the cause being simple and easily understood and kind of inevitable. We don’t actually learn very much from history-as-story. History-as-complex-system-of-inputs-and-outputs is where we can get some real understanding. It makes for very poor TV, though.

This explains, a bit, why I’ve never really been keen on computer RPGs which have established narratives. Mass Effect is the big one of recent years here; you play the role of Commander Shepard, whose story is largely pre-written, and you can’t, for instance, decide that they’ll make the sensible choice of heading off to a different part of the galaxy to open a noodle bar. I like games like the Civilization series, like Dwarf Fortress and Cities: Skylines and Dorfromantic and EVE Online, where the narrative isn’t set, and you can do more or less anything within the context of the game. And, bringing this back to the actual topic of the newsletter, I like, or think I like, RPGs that follow this model, which is usually in this context called a sandbox.

(I say I think I like this, because I haven’t had a chance to verify it. The games I’ve played in, which are few enough, have been pre-written modules, or games in which the GM had a pre-written or written-as-the-game-ran plot, or possibly pretended they had.)

I don’t really get to run this kind of game either. Most people have had enough of the thrown spear narrative in their lives that when they engage with fiction, they are looking for the plot train that will carry them from Station A all the way to Station Q. Some of the stations might happen out of order, and you might have to choose between Station D and Station E, but you do not get any chance of Station Alpha, Station 3.14, or the Station at Little Whittington. And if you want people to enjoy the game - which is the point, after all - you need to provide that to some degree.

I get around this, these days, by providing things that are happening, and reasons for which the player characters are concerned by the things that are happening, and let it go from there, making sure that some of the more interesting questions that arise get answered, and that there is sufficient conflict with identifiable opponents to provide some friction along the way. This gives rise to a narrative, but it’s really not the narrative. I’ve had some puzzled players from time to time, who ask “Were we supposed to do X? It looked like that was where the plot was…”, but mostly this doesn’t arise. I’ve had one player more or less flatly refuse to believe that the whole direction and structure of the campaign was decided by the player characters in Session 4 or so, and that it could have been totally different if they’d been more interested in war or trade instead of pilgrimage. It doesn’t matter, really; they can tell themselves they’re playing The Plot, and I can tell myself they’re playing through a world reacting to their decisions.

The thing I’d like to see in games I run is players consciously making “narrative” choices. This ties back to the last issue and collaboration, in some ways, but what I mean here is having the player character go “I want to establish a trade company”, “I want to topple the Empire”, “I want to start a noodle bar on the far edge of the galaxy”, “I want to find the mythical land where the two-faced cats come from”, and so on, and then setting out to do that. Not being given a mission to do so; deciding it themselves. I feel that this would provide the best of both worlds; it gives the players a definite plot, a thrown spear which follows a course, and it also gives me an entity charting their own course through the scattered contents of the carrier-bag-setting.

What would be absolutely fantastic, from my point of view, would be two player characters making different such decisions, and then going about supporting each other in the follow-up. PC A’s trade company providing cover for the weapons-shipping necessary for PC B’s empire-toppling, while PC D establishes a bardic college which writes anti-Imperial ballads and gets free rides to exotic locales from PC A’s ships. I feel that would be genuinely challenging to run, and I don’t know how well it would work in D&D. You might need one of the more collaborative systems to make sure that everyone gets a share of the spotlight. But I really do love the idea of such things happening within the familiar framework of fireballs and sendings and liches and fiends.