Listening Games

A manifesto, if you must.

These are principles by which social roleplaying games could be understood:

The first system in all games is social.
Expectations produce the fictional world.
World simulation is genre emulation is world simulation.
Precedent is everything.
Games are interreactive.
Play is a process with no given product.
The last system in all games is social. 

Here we use "game" to primarily mean the specific instance of play, rather than the game-product as sold.

The first system in all games is social.

    Roleplaying games rely extradiegetic roles that are often established prior to play and reaffirmed through action. These roles are almost always embodied by multiple people, frequently by distinct people, and are sometimes in opposition to each other. The roles of adjudicator, performer, world simulator, and social facilitator are entangled within all the players but the division of rights and responsibilities related to those roles is then a product of sociality. 

   The Referee traditionally provides the adjudication, performance and simulation of the external world as well as social facilitation of the game via scheduling, venue management, and mediation.

    The Player traditionally assists with adjudication but is responsible for performance and simulation of the internal world of a single individual.

    These two specific roles are not intrinsic to games, but they are the most common. Some games divide world simulation and performance by domain. Some games intentionally abjure divisions of these rights and responsibilities and hold them in common. But the centralization of adjudication and world simulation within a single individual remains the most common because of its benefits as well as its historical momentum. 

    Centralizing responsibility for the fictional world and the shared rules expedites secondary processes to the act of imaginative play and produces more stable expectations.

Our expectations produce the fictional world.

    When we sit down to play Apocalypse World whether or not we've seen Mad Max 2: Beyond Thunderdome is highly determinative in what that fictional world looks like. Likewise for many traditional roleplaying games your exposure to Tolkien and Baldur's Gate 3 will produce specific imagined worlds. This occurs in every moment of the game not merely in the first instance. With each additive gesture we apply to the fictional world it accretes more and more expectations. These expectations constrain the fictional world and reduce it from the swirling morass of infinite possibility to an imagined world of discrete possibilities in which choice is possible and meaningful.

    Meaningful choice (and it's shadow, meaningful consequences) are the driving force that makes rules based games powerful. Shared imagination and world simulation is what makes roleplaying games powerful. If we want to produce the most impactful and interesting games at the table all players should be striving for honest representation of a world and the consequences produced by the events that occur within that world.

World simulation is genre emulation is world simulation.

    Genre is primarily a marketing term. Genre also describes the fundamental logic of a piece of media or a fictional world. When you simulate the world of Star Trek you are also performing genre emulation. This is true of all players. The uniting forces between genre emulation and world simulation is player expectation and precedent. If your meaningful fictional world simulates the same world we see in soap operas and the characters internal states likewise simulate that world there are no genre specific rules necessary to cause soap operative plots to follow. Genre is downstream from the fictional context of the world and if you want to emulate a genre start from the fiction.

    If the logic of the fictional world is well understood by all players and replicates the soap operative it may still become necessary to create tools for simulation. We may understand that the logic of the world is the logic of the deranged and overworked writers rooms interpretation of melodrama. We will still need spurs towards that world. We do not inhabit it natively and so we may rely on tools. Random encounter tables, maps, pre-written situations are all available tools that assist world simulation. But the tools are not the world. The world exists only in the act of play but it behooves us to act as if it doesn't.

Precedent is everything.

    Expectations produce our fictional worlds, which then produce the feeling of genres. Those expectations are fully established by precedent. Once play has begun it is therefore important to countermand precedent as little as possible. Doing so erodes the expectations that allow for a shared understanding of the world. While previously I have referred to a singular fictional world it is important now to identify that that is not quite correct. There are substantially more fictional worlds than players in any given game. There is ideally a shared fictional world, but that exists at the nexus of each players conception of the fictional world. 

    It is easier to maintain alignment with that shared fictional world when we maintain precedent and share expectations. Having an aligned fictional world between players allows for greater access to meaningful choice and consequences. When a Player understands the fictional world it gives them access to creative and meaningful decisions. When a Referee understands the fictional world it gives them access to powerful and interesting consequences. When they become disjunct the game degrades towards a state of snakes and ladders. One rolls dice and things happen but the logic has evaporated and been reduced down to nothingness.

    Retroactive continuity is a tool that is sometimes necessary even so. Because of the complexity of the fictional worlds we seek to emulate we will make errors. Decisions that we as outsiders to the fictional world failed to understand. Logical paradoxes will be created. It is best in almost every case to continue regardless. But if we cannot release that control, cannot bridge the gap in our understanding, do it slowly and intentionally with the full involvement of all players.

    Preparation is a tool for the construction of additional hidden precedent, under the classic Referee/Player model. It does two important things. It allows for the Referee to pre-emptively consider the scope of the world and therefore produce additional interesting and meaningful consequences for player actions. Secondly it improves consistency in play by solidifying and codifying the Referee's expectations. The Referee often has a much wider latitude in the definition of the world simulation (to the point that they could fundamentally override the choices of the other players if they chose) creating internal distance between the position of "I'm simulating a world with expectations" and "I'm you're friend and want cool stuff to happen" means it is easier to actually produce an understandable and meaningful fictional world.

Games are interreactive.

    Because of the nature of precedent shaping the fictional world these games are naturally interreactive. Traditional models of interactivity in game studies showcase the game responding to the player. Interreactivity posits that the player reacts to the game and the game reacts to the player. Let us instead identify that the game is the fictional world. Within the social system we have the fictional world and every action produces precedent, added to our shared memory of "how the world works", and expectations then tell us what happens next. And the cycle continues. We listen, and then respond. 

    The great beauty of these games when compared to their digital counterparts is that roleplaying games are truly interreactive. The game and the fictional world it contains are evolving in a way that no fixed digital or physical game can be. Precedent adheres and grows (and is occasionally forgotten) and with every session the world grows more impactful and interesting.

    It is fundamentally impossible to produce interreactive worlds and games wherein you choose to introduce whatever you like whenever you feel like it. The rule of cool is often interpreted to mean "do the sick thing" or "make things dramatic whenever you like" but that's a destructive and anti-social approach to shared fictional worlds. For the rule of cool to exist it must exist as a property of the fictional world. The alternative is a shallow denigration of what could be an interesting experience.

Play is a process with no given product.

    Play and games are distinct. Play is an action that often occurs within the context of our games. It is the act of imagination and exploration. It is taking the time to light-heartedly ask ourselves and others questions and see what happens. It is an experiment with no pre-defined outcome. Play is not reliant on entertaining others or creating a satisfying dramatic arc or even having fun. Game-products will attempt to sell you on a specific experience or product of your games.

    That is a lie.

    The only real truth about your games are the ones you discover yourself. 

The last system in all games is social. 

    You are a social animal in a social world. Do not instrumentalize other people in your attempt at the perfect game. Recognize distinct perspectives within and without yourself in play. We start games in the social context and we re-emerge from them into the social context. 

    Good games of any kind but especially of this kind change our perspectives. We re-examine what exists in the social world we emerge into and we realize just how wrong or simulation is. We catalog. We think. We call our friends and schedule another game. 

1d6 Antipoets

1. Sir Ghald, The Duke of Drearway (Fighter 4) - Runs a tollway and charges a silver per foot, wheel, hoof or book that passes his glowering keep. Charges five silver per book and a hundred for each poem, ever since a handsome young poetess stole away his heir. Nonfiction travels free. 

2. The Philosophizing Lion (As Bear) - Stalks the woods inanely repeating positivist philosophies and pawing at the soil to ensure that it remains real. Enraged by the sounds of music and meter. Bad free verse escapes its ire.

3. Anapex the Black (Black Dragon) - Intends to carve every poem in the world into the walls of its lair. Runs a school/prison for bards and poets to ensure no stray couplets escape its horde. Understands (ruefully/wrathfully) the impossibility of its goal.

4. Brindlecrook the Cat (As a domestic cat plus...) - Eats poems. Afflicted in a wizards experiment to create a familiar capable of storing magical texts. Its touch turns poetry into sardines. It is learning to smell them.

5. Guenon the Ungrateful - (Magic-user 9) - High in his tower he broods by the hour, glaring below. He covets all arcane power and so intends to destroy all books and writing outside of his possessions. Poems are merely the test case.

6. The Fabricated Being - (As Animated Statue) - Made of wire and wood, it has no intrinsic metaphysical bearing or worth. It is base matter that moves without divine spark or light, utterly and purely mechanistic. But it aspires to more. It will consume as many poets as it takes to understand their essential worth.