“I was offered a place in the palace, but I could not accept. I wanted to be with the mountain; I felt it move under my skin as I knew part of me was in the mountain too.
— Generated by the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator. via Fair Game.
“I was offered a place in the palace, but I could not accept. I wanted to be with the mountain; I felt it move under my skin as I knew part of me was in the mountain too.
— Generated by the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator. via Fair Game.
“If this isn’t the most brilliant thing ever said about playing role-playing games, I’ll eat my shoe.” Clinton comments on Rebecca Borgstrom’s paper, “Structure and Meaning in Roleplaying Game Design”.
I just read it last night, and I recommend it. Some long words, yeah, but actually well-paced and (to me) clear. Let me quote the part that got CRN so excited:
This paper views gaming as a computational process.
Gaming is work, in the sense of effort over time. That work takes the form of processing the raw data—-the set of possible stories applicable to the story’s premise. The players generate additional structure until a single story remains.
Structure is stuff that whittles down the possible stories down to the one that the players end up telling.
I also appreciated reading about her Fair Folk book, and seeing how the in-game structure of the surreal faerie world was to some extent a justification of making those metagame structural problems amongst players now explicit, and under the domain of the rules.
‘So summing up “a scene, plus some conflict” as “bickety-bam, narrativism” seems to me like summing up “you have a plant, it grows” as “bickety-bam, salad.”’ —the arguably vegetarian Ben Lehman on Clinton’s story thread.
“A story is a linked series of events which contains one or more conflicts.” – Clinton R. Nixon on “the most important post ever on my weblog”.
We almost have a sensible, non-objectionable answer to the question What Is A Story?, at least relative to the kinds of stories we want from of our games.