Holism – Final Assignment



Holism in Role-Playing Game Analysis

Preface:

I design Role-Playing Games (RPGs from here on), and have been playing them since the third grade. As such, this is a field near and dear to me, and so it came to mind when I’ve had to find a subject to write about regarding Holism.

I am especially connected to what is called “Independent RPG design”, which aside from an economic and artistic manifesto had also ended up with the creation of a wealth of theoretical knowledge and a theoretical framework for analyzing RPGs called “The Big Model”. I will explain and simplify the terms I will use in this assignment, as learning the whole body of information is a considerable undertaking, and understanding it is an even bigger task. I do not understand it fully myself.

Roleplaying games are, as per a dictionary’s definition[1]:

a game in which participants adopt the roles of imaginary characters in an adventure under the direction of a Game Master.

I will not talk too much about the definition, as it’s more of a “family” of things, as explained by Wittgenstein, and any single definition will miss some games or be so wide as to cover too much. I am talking specifically of a game where people sit around and tell of a factionary world and characters within it, with them taking on the role of the characters. I furthermore, will speak of “Table-top” RPGs, and not those played on the computer.

The Big Model:

Before discussing the Lumpley Principle proper it may be wise to begin with the famous diagram of The Big Model, the model within which the principle had defined.

As per the Provisional Glossary[2]:

A description of role-playing procedures as embedded in the social interactions and creative priorities of the participants. Each internal "box," "layer," or "skin" of the model is considered to be an expression of the box(es) containing it.

As you could see in the diagram in the first appendix, you can also begin to see the way in which this represents a holistic approach to analyzing the act of role-playing.

One cannot merely look at Exploration, which stands for the “story” or “Role-playing” part of the game, which is the section where most things, which can be described as “play” occur, nor one can simply look at the Techniques, which comprise the “Game” part of the activity, the part where people roll dice, make tactical choices and engage with the rules of the game (which often have elements reminiscent of board-games).

In two layers, both the innermost and outermost, we have things which are often not considered part of the role-playing activity at all, but which are intrinsic to all activities. This is what we call the Social Contract, which encompasses the social and interpersonal experience between the people playing the game. This applies to everything from who brings the snacks and beverages to the game, to who is allowed to say what.

This is the other side of the social aspect of The Big Model, the innermost box, Ephemera, which is affected by the three layers before it and directly contributes to the Social Contract itself. Ephemera is basically our behaviour as people during the game, as relates to the role-playing activity itself. How we narrate, who is allowed to narrate and when, are we allowed to open a book and search for rules (which can hinder others’ ability to enjoy Immersion[3]), etc.

The Holism in this model can be seen in that though there is a primacy to the activity of “role-playing”, which is defined differently by different groups, we see that when we try to break down the activity to its core components we cannot simply analyze role-playing, either where the characters engage in activities within the fiction (Situation and Shared Imagined Space within Exploration), nor can we look only at the activity done by the players, or the “game”, as expressed in Techniques and also in Ephemera. Instead, in order to understand the activity we must look at it both as a whole, and we must also look at each of the other segments in order to understand the other parts.

Moreover, it is not just that we have to look at all aspects of the activity, the new thing introduced was that we have to look at the non-RPG aspects of the activity in order to understand the role-playing and game aspects.

Note, though it doesn’t show it in the model diagram, I hold that the Ephemera feeds back into the Social Contract. How you behave in the game regarding the game can affect your relations with the other players, even outside the game. In the model the note under the diagram, that an internal box is an expression of an external one represents this. I go slightly further; the Ephemera box feeds into the Social Contract box, and thus also holds it within, forming an endless cycle of containers.

The Lumpley Principle

"System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play." The author of the principle is Vincent Baker, whose Forge username is "Lumpley"[4].

A logical conclusion of the above combined with the discussion of The Big Model is that where before people had thought that the events imagined in play happen merely as a result of the mechanical rules of the game, and that imagination occurs within each individual player’s mind, now we see it is not so simple, it is not so discrete a component.

I think the key word in The Lumpley Principle is “agrees”. Though in most theory circles the focus is on “Shared imagined Space” which is implied at in this definition, which means there is a portion of the fiction, which is shared by all the different players, not as an attempt at psychologist view, but as an attempt to explain how different people can have intensional relations to fictional content. I think that the concept of agreement is the important part.

Agreement means that on one hand, no player can do whatever they want without acceptance from the other players, because every action that player carries out which affects the fiction, which is every action, both inside the game and outside it, must be at least implicitly accepted by the other players. On the other hand this also shows that when we look at what a player or a player’s character does in a game cannot be analyzed merely in term of that player’s actions, but also in terms of the acceptance of the other players. Either the explicit call by a game’s moderator of “You can do that” or by the implicit acceptance of no one objecting. There is also the issue of precedents; things which had been agreed to before become a part of the particular’s game’s Social Contract.

This is in regards to the holistic approach of the social situation of the game, where any player’s contributions to the fiction must be looked at from a position that looks at all of the players. But The Lumpley Principle does not apply only to players’ actions, or at least not directly.

The Lumpley Principle had put into focus everything aside from the rules as playing a part, but the rules are the other half of the equation. People use rules in order to adjudicate what happens in the game when there is conflict or uncertainty, for example, whether a character can diffuse a bomb before it goes off or whether the character fails. But this can easily be seen to feed back into the social aspect, as the players playing the game choose which game, that is – which rule set, to use in the game, and same as they can accept or reject a contribution by a player, they can also reject a rule; either before a game begins (house-ruling), or when a rule results in ‘unrealistic’ or ‘unfun’ results in the game.

The Social Contract feeds into how the group picks up a game, and how it chooses which rules to accept and which to reject. The rules of the game are combined with the rules of the group (Ephemera) in order to produce fiction and agree on what contributions are valid – who can speak when, who can call for the need of a mechanical resolution and gets to interpret the results. And the content within the game feed back into the Social Contract, both in regards to the group as a group of people, and both to the super-structure that regulates Ephemera, the rights of different players and which actions are allowed and which are prohibited.

The Process Model:

I bring forth The Process Model of Role-Playing[5] to touch upon the last point made in The Lumpley Principle and tie it to something touched upon in class, Quine’s network of beliefs[6].

As you can see in the image in appendix 2, this model loses most of the hierarchy in Edwards’ Big Model, and moves more towards a model of interaction (which is how I understand The Big Model, as explained above). Most aspects that have a relation between them are connected by bi-directional arrows (all except “Results”, which is only lead to).

Since the arrows are bi-directional, when one aspect changes it will lead to a change in other aspects. A change in the Social Processes (Social Contract in The Big Model’s terms) will lead to a change in Methods (part of the Ephemera), and vice versa.

The Shared Imagined Space, which holds several aspects within its area, is both the result and the origin of these aspects. When the authors talk about the fiction of the game, of the events occurring within it, they are talking about the Shared Imagined Space (SIS). SIS makes up those aspects and is made up by them: When anything changes in the Methods, Roleplaying Processes, or Circumstances, the SIS changes directly, without it being mediated through the arrows. And vice versa, when the SIS changes, it leads to a change in these things.

This is also where the hierarchy in this model comes to the fore, in the form of a bi-directional arrow between the more encompassing layer and anything within it. ‘Results’ appears to not lead to anything else, but as it lies within ‘Shared Space of Imagining’, any Result feeds into the Shared Space of Imagining, which feeds into all other layers.

What you do as a player affects the fictional content of the game and the social relations between you and other players. What happens in the fictional content of the game, affects what you will do as a player; if someone shoots your character, you will have your character do different things than if someone offers your character money, to give a trivial example.

Conclusion:

When looking at and analyzing role-playing games using the modern theoretical framework presented by Ron Edwards and those that followed, one can see that the holistic approach had been brought to the fore.

When before people had either rejected mechanics for reasons of personal taste, or saw mechanics as the sole judge and arbiter of what happened in the game, now the focus is more on the interaction of elements, especially the inclusion of the social aspect. Mechanics help shape what will happen in the game, but they are shaped by the players and their interactions, which in turn are also shaped by the mechanics of the game played and what happens in the game.

Looking at all aspects, and understanding that you cannot analyze them as separate from all the other aspects, and that a change in any of the other aspects will also lead to a change in the one you are looking at now. That is a holistic approach to looking at Role-Playing Games.

Appendices:

Appendix 1: Edwards’ Big Model Diagram

[pic]



Appendix 2: The Process Model of Roleplaying Diagram

[pic]

Bibliography:

1. “The Forge Provisional Glossary”, Ron Edwards, Adept Press 2004.



2. “The Process Model of Roleplaying”, Eetu Mäkelä, Sampo Koistinen, Mikko Siukola and Sanni Turunen, Dissecting Larp - Collected papers for Knutepunkt 2005.



3.

4.. “Two dogmas of empiricism”. W.V Quine, In W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.

5. RandomWiki, a wiki with a section dedicated to Forge Theory.



6. A definition of “Flow theory” according to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, on Wikipedia (minor point)

(psychology)

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[1]

[2] The Provisional Glossarry, Ron Edwards, 2004, Adept Press.

[3] A form of “Flow”, whereas one “becomes their character”.

Flow, on Wikipedia: (psychology)

[4] RandomWiki definition.

[5] Eetu Mäkelä, Sampo Koistinen, Mikko Siukola and Sanni Turunen, Dissecting Larp - Collected papers for Knutepunkt 2005

[6] Quine, W.V. 1961. “Two dogmas of empiricism”. In W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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