yet when I cruise up on kaufman's website which has a few brief images of his work, and like a description of his life, I get excited about poetry again
when I go to a d.i.y. poetry reading that has a lot of college age poets, surrounded by twenty supportive college age people, in a fire hazard basement, that's good poetry too even though I would hardly stop to read any of these poems written in a journal
basically NO journal holds any appeal for me, and like as I page through them or e.g. a book of poetry I continuously get the sense of "the joke"
I really wholeheartedly believe that for me at least there is no point in conventional publishing, and for the most part most poets and most especially print publications seem unenterable
there are exceptions, rare and few, and even these don't hold indefinitely--
I'm finding that the holding off on poetry that happens in my life is wise, real wisdom, connection to reality, it's always been that way... and I'm finding that the connections that I do have with poets and poems are often spurred on by nepotism
but even nepotism can't win every battle... unable to wage through my friends proof... continuous question of giving
but even like the idea of a rich tradition or history of like online lit or chapbooks seems ugh, gross considering they'll all be full of head-turners
I am still able to recognize and at minimum share in those moments where a poem happens and a small group of people create the appropriate social atmosphere to receive it
Poetry is about callowly manipulating an audience like any medium, but um I was impressed last night at the d.i.y. show when an artist was able to turn what I thought was a callow sarcastic tone into like a real, legitimate one
(I still get high off my own "callow sarcastic tone")
this person had like what I consider "harry potter tumblr"-tone new york connotations all the bad things filtering into my head
I was twisting my scarf at intervals to measure how much my predictions were being borne out by the poem
halfway through the first poem I stopped twisting the scarf and got confused
I was like, some magical thing happening? Then I got real anxious, couldn't tell if it was the self-harm theme, or like the very forward, pressing insistence of the writer
wanted to be in another room, I imagined an old big wooden classroom, by myself, listening to this poem through an intercom on my desk
then got pulled back in by the writer during a poem about pulse
seemingly sarcastic... but not at all... totally infront of us, performance artificial seeming but very real... mentions of new york
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Hi! I'm assuming you're the Peter Webb I know. (And then I realized I could check your email address to confirm, and you are.)
ReplyDeleteI don't really get poetry, but am surrounded by poets. For me, words are a tool for saying things, and the art I usually care about is in the things said, not in the words used to say them. But, my wife is a poet, as is my mother-in-law, as is my brother-in-law (though his is the lyrics of weird, absurd music).
I found this blog through a comment on a chronology of RPG writer internet drama. So I'm thinking about that as I read your post.
Your dissatisfaction seems to be with the community of poetry, and not with poetry itself? I can identify with that, I think. The community of RPGs is obsessed with game design and with prepared game content, when the real art is game play. But RPG play is an ephemeral performance art - the art only exists at the time of play, and only among participants. The audience is limited to the artists. Everything else is a by-product of play, not the real art. But since play doesn't extend past the moment or the group, the community takes those by-products and exalts them and those who create* them. And then gets obsessed with those creators' interpersonal conflicts.
I say those who create them, but really it's those who write them down, and publish them. Those by-products - design and prepared content - are made by most people who play RPGs. But most people use them themselves and never publish them.
A few years ago, I tried to get involved with that RPG community, and found it both stressful, and mostly irrelevant to RPG play. I may be on my way towards getting involved again.
I have a blog, and one of the things I put on it is RPG design. I don't design for anyone I don't play with - I design for me, and people I know personally. When I post it publicly, it's for two reasons - to help clarify my thoughts, by putting them into words that can be understood by a stranger, and in the hope that what I find useful might be useful to someone else.
Re: nepotism - I have come to believe that that's just how humans are. We are ultrasocial animals, and the most real things to us are our connections to other humans. We live through cooperation. Cooperation is built on trust, and trust comes from an existing social relationship.
A tiger can live without relationships, only for itself. All but a few humans cannot. We have an instinct for nepotism.
I would not have found this blog, I would not have read this post, I would not have felt a connection to your experience with an art-form not my own, I would not have chosen to comment, if I didn't recognize your name, if we had no relationship.
I guess I hope to re-establish contact, so I don't want this to be a sad comment, but it's a comment on something of a sad post.
Your final section isn't sad, but it's difficult for me to connect to - and I think that's my point from earlier. RPG play is an ephemeral, performance art, and it's very difficult to talk about it, to one who wasn't there. Your experience of that poem, in that place, among that audience, I think it's the same.
The art of a live music performance is not in a recording, nor is it in the instruments used to play. Nor is it in a studio recording - that's a separate art. But even in a society obsessed with writing and records, art still exists in the experience of ephemeral performance.
hey bothos how's it going mane
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so: art, performance, artistic communities
art: rpgtexts like A Red & Pleasant Land, books of poems
performance: getting together and playing rpgs, reading the poem
artistic communities: the zak-scrap-patrick-james g+ supercollider, the pittsburgh poetry scene
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>>>>>>>>>for rpgs:
art: I love buying rpgbooks and reading them. With e.g. The Maze of The Blue Medusa there is an inbuilt desire for the book "to be art" as it says on like the intro. it's not just supposed to be transformed into performance.
performance: almost across the board, more time is spent making jokes about rules than serious roleplaying, or rather, the serious roleplaying happens in the cracks of the jokes about rules... this isn't universally true because many people play rpgs different ways but like there still seems to be an intense serious discrepancy between the self-serious rules of say dnd 3.5 and typical play I know of
artistic communities: in a way that belies my own fan status I'm more interested in interrogating Zak than using his products. Or rather I'm interested in both. The weird closeness of the rpg community can be leveraged for a sort of human intimacy. Or really just like staring very closely at a human statue.
>>>>>>>>>for poems:
art: as I've said it somehow seems that all written poems don't hold appeal to me. that some do shows that the real issue isn't me, it's all of written poems. this seems doubtful but as the years roll by it seems clearer. it may have to do with my geographic location. examples of written poems that I like are luke kennard's "the solex brothers" and jon leon's "the malady of the century". the previous sentence is a near complete list.
performance: poetry readings tend to be very boring with many bored people politely paying attention. even if they are not bored they still may be politely paying attention. despite this there are some performances which are genuinely interesting and capture people's attention. my own personal performances tend to be riding on the edge of failure in the hopes that I can harness that anxiety and I often do.
artistic communities: because most poets are bound up with entirely boring sets of values typically ascribed to e.g. hellopoems it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff by google search. I haven't found an online community of talented writers I like since Alt Lit, which was dead by the time that I found it. I used to be worried that my values were an issue before I got too bored to care.
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as for all the above you maybe can see that I'm seriously interested in rpgs as a nascent group of talented people, mostly and especially scrap princess patrick stuart james raggi and zak sabbath, my interest in them being perhaps mostly tied to my reptilian desire to be in the contemporary which they are, indeed, running on. as for poets I have not found this contemporary energy. I think both my interests in rpgs and poetry end up coming to this same energy, which I would classify as "sex death fantasy psycho terror adult reality humor" or something, probably summarizable in the film "Eyes Wide Shut."
I would say that much of my g+ posting about rpgs can be said to be apostrophe to you, as you were a person I had seriously involved conversations about rpgart with. In the back of my mind I have known it was possible that with my involvement, however minor, in the rpgcommunity that I would catch on your attention again. That this has occured shows to me the power of public internet diaries i.e. blogging as intersection between communication self-reflection publication and indeed vesseling the unconcious.
I've got to admit - I also love buying RPG books and reading them. I don't mean to say they aren't or can't be art, just that they're not _the_ art of RPGs. I keep trying to come up with a metaphor from another art form to explain this, and I keep falling short. The best I've got is, yes, a Stradivarius is art, and so is sheet music, but their subordinate arts to actually playing music. I don't think it's perverse that the RPG community values RPG books as art - I think it's perverse that the community seems to value them over play.
ReplyDeleteI think this happens because play has a very limited audience, usually just the group of people who are playing. Some people do public or recorded play, often on youtube, and I've done it myself, but I'm not sure that listening to and watching people play actually gives you the real experience - do you actually build a diegetic world in your head, an imagined space in forge terms, if you're just watching people play and not playing yourself? I'm not sure you do. Also, I know that my publicly recorded play is some of my worst play.
It's recorded play that I'd actually analogize to written poems. And that's still not right, because recorded play is a recording of a live performance, as opposed to a static piece of art that has had the opportunity for editing. RPG Books are books about how to play RPGs or books of stuff to put in your RPGs, or some combination of the two. They don't have the same relationship to RPG play that written poems have to poetry readings. Except that the best RPG books arise out of play, even if they're intended to be used prior to play. So it's complicated - like I said, I have not yet found a satisfying analogy to a traditional artform.
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I think poetry reading are a pretty good analogy to rpg play, though. I think that all artistic performances, of any peformance art, have similar issues in fact. RPGs are unusual in that there is no distinction between artist and audience, but not unique. They have that in common with comedy improv, with jazz improv, with freestyle rap battles, etc. Any improvisational performance art involving multiple artists. I don't think RPGs work as well with an extra non-participating audience, though.
But that's a digression - what I intend to say is that RPGs are like any artistic performance - you need the right conditions for it to be good, and even then it's hard for it to be great. You need a group of people who all take the game seriously as a creative endeavor. They need to mesh well together, socially. They need to agree, more or less, on artistic goals. They need to not be too exhausted by the rest of their life. They need to be in an environment conducive to playing. Only after that do skill, technique, inspiration, ambition, etc. matter.
What you say about "serious roleplaying happens in the cracks between jokes about the rules" - I find that's true, but in most of my games now it's no problem. There's still some jokes on the side and other table talk, but not much, and it's rarely disruptive. I've played lots of games where it did get in the way, though. Just not much any more. Here are some reasons why:
1) a small group, who all know each other well.
2) taking time to interact socially before the game, then playing after that
3) In online games, over google hangouts or PBEM, a second channel of chat messages for making jokes and side comments
I'd guess that it's the same for poetry readings - I don't know what the specific conditions you need are, but I'm certain there are some. It's probably more difficult to achieve, though, since you have less control over who's there, and no expectation that the same people show up every time?
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DeleteI think Zak is very smart, and unusually articulate. I find him interesting because he talks about how he actually plays better than most people do. Certainly better than me. His goals in play, and his style of playing, I think, are very different from mine, though - and I've found it irritating when he's talked about the styles of play that are close to mine and oversimplified them.
I've got Vornheim and A Red and Pleasant Land on my shelf. Bits and pieces of Vornheim occasionally see use - particularly the library rules. Nothing from A Red and Pleasant Land ever has, even though I found it a lot of fun to read through. I'm sad I missed out on a print copy of Maze of the Blue Medusa.
Jim Raggi on the other hand, I've just straight up run several of his adventures. In fact, I think he's the only adventure writer I can say that for. I like his early modern Weird milieu a lot, and most of his adventures do something structurally interesting as well - such as The God that Crawls having only a single, basically unkillable monster.
Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess I'm less familiar with. I've got copies of Deep Carbon Observatory and Fire on the Velvet Horizon, but I haven't actually read them as yet.
I'm not sure what contemporary means, or why one would want it. Or why it's not the case that anyone making RPG books now isn't contemporary. Is Numenera contemporary? Is Pathfinder? What about Fate, Godbound, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, Blades in the Dark, Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands?
If you like those four writers, I'd also like to recommend to you: David McGrogan, Geoffrey McKinney, Rafael Chandler, Paolo Greco, Kabuki Kaiser, and Chris McDowall. Each of them (except Paolo Greco) has written something I've actually used at one point or another, and I think they're related in aesthetic to the writers you name.
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Have you seen this: http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-i-am-smarter-than-you-new-game-on.html
I love the contrast in style, particularly between Zak, Joesky, and Courtney Campbell.
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I don't go on google+ any more. It was more stressful than useful for all sorts of reasons. Blogs and blog comments are much better.
Except I hate every comment engine I've tried. blogtrottr has a character limit. Disqus flags everything as spam.
ok do you wanna talk about unplayable games? I think they're really good-- perverse like haut fashion is perverse, this perversion actually a wellspring of innovation and coolness, this wellspring being what I refer to as "contemporarity". So MOTBM was like a haut fashion suit that you could wear but was really tailored to be flashy more than comfortable... more concerned with its image than shaped by years of use. Imagine wearing this suit, not exactly tailored to fit you, with a stiff front, starched to puff out, and with a lot of intricate painted-on designs which looked cool but felt rough against your skin. And if you wore the suit for a couple weeks the paint and starch would wear out and it would become more like a normal suit which you would have to adjust yourself with a thread ripper, but it would still look really cool and have all these innovative suit-techs and also be finely crafted to last a while.
DeleteI'm kinda unsatisfieed by the default market of audience members and critics of currently played rpgs so I value the experimental stuff even if it trades off on playability. Also being willing to view these games as for fashion rather than convenience is a good thing. But also secretly I want rpg texts to spin off from playability altogether and just become crazy arcane spellbooks which are overdetermined descriptions of other worlds... but I realize this is basically where Gary Gygax ended up, RIFTS, etc...
It feels weird but basic rpg play feels so hopeless that I just want to overdetermine the abstracts, which are all I can really lay into as an adult... same with videogames... probably same with poetry if only because there's no market in pittsburgh... will take a look at those other authors you mentioned
Nothing I've seen by Zak is unplayable (but I haven't read Blue Medusa). Certainly nothing I've seen by Raggi is unplayable.
DeleteA lot of the value in RPG books for me, is to get me to do things I otherwise would not do, to try playing in different styles than I naturally would. When I first began playing RPGs, I and basically everyone I knew were in a rut of cartoonish comedy. Some people could do a cartoonish game well, some people couldn't, but it felt like no one I knew could do anything else. Except railroading, and that definitely isn't anything I want. I eventually wanted to do other things. I'd read enough to know that other things were possible, but not how to do them.
I learned other styles of play by taking RPG books, abandoning the Golden Rule, and doing my best to play them RAW. First Mouse Guard (which went well), then Sorcerer (which crashed and burned), then Apocalypse World (which went well, and each successive campaign went better). I didn't get where I really wanted to be, though, until after I moved away from Pittsburgh, around the time that I ran Sorcerer successfully, and then The Clay that Woke. So, the value in all of those games I played, was that they taught me playing and GMing techniques, that did not come naturally to me. Now that I'm there, I'm doing weirder things - experimenting with modular and modal gamesystems, with rotating GMs, with games that work for very small numbers of players, with mixing exploration-adventure with narrativism, and mechanics operating at the "physics in fiction" level with mechanics operating at the "physics of fiction" level. Also, recently, procedural generation and bibliomancy. I can also tone it down and play less seriously sometimes.
What I have never had a problem with is coming up with weird fantastical imagery. Zak's stuff is not that useful for me, because I do not want to run a game like he does, and because I'm both capable of coming up with weird stuff myself - and my weird stuff is often not compatible with his. I do enjoy reading it, though.
What makes Blue Medusa unplayable? Your metaphor seems to describe playing it.
I'm also unsatisfied by the default market of audience members and critics of currently popular rpgs. I think probably for different reasons, though. I think that the RPG community forms cults around designers - conceiving of themselves as fans rather than artists. I think that elements within the RPG community are reactionary, and look at anything different as wrong. I think that many people within the RPG community, when they are interested in stories, are more interested in characterization than in motivation, conflict, decision, or consequence. I think that many other people within the RPG community think that playing seriously means playing without having fun. I think that a lot of the default rules within mainstream RPGs exist to facilitate railroading and illusionism, even now. I think that many of the people doing interesting things with RPGs set up a dichotomy between what they're doing and the mainstream, and don't recognize anything outside of that dichotomy. Some of these thoughts are things I don't like about the RPG community, some of them are things I think are actually bad.
I'm not at all worried about unplayable games. I can't name an unplayable game. The closest I can come up with off the top of my head is "Hungry, Desperate, and Alone". And that's not unplayable, it just requires you to break the rules if you want a satisfying ending. I don't think my "usefulness" is even the same as "ease-of-play". Some of the RPG books I've found most useful, actually describe games that are very difficult to play. Experimental is definitely not at war with useful - in fact, banal is. I have less use for books that are just like other books I've seen before.
Continued:
DeleteI'm not interested in fashion, in the sense of the Cult of the New. I completely missed the points in time where the game styles I like most were fashionable. I think following fashion can be toxic if taken to the extreme. It can distract one from what one actually wants to do, or could do if one focused. It also can make one a consumer of things that one has little actual value for. It can hide what's good and old and obscure, behind what's mediocre and new and talked about.
I am interested in fashion, in the sense of presenting an identity to people. I love it when someone looks through my bookshelves and finds something they're interested in that tells them more about me. As it happens, I have every Lamentations of the Flame Princess t-shirt, and I wear them pretty often, because I love the imagery of women in early modern clothing fighting or surrounded by doom metal monstrosities. (oh man, I'm lying - two new LotFP t-shirts just got released.)
I definitely don't think Gygax was writing unplayable games. I think he was doing his best to write down the game he played, the way he played it. Sometimes he valued things most other people didn't value, and sometimes he was just not very good at explaining things. I think OD&D and AD&D formed something of a Rorschach test that was very valuable for design creativity.
The example I'd give of useless RPG books is 90s and early 00s White Wolf. They had a business model that required people to buy every new book that came out, and since you don't actually need more than one book to play a vampire, they were essentially publishing coffee table books and not RPG books. They weren't for the most part experimental - they were just not very useful.
I don't think Zak's books are much like them. Zak's books aren't banal, and aren't useless - I personally don't find them useful, but I'm sure a lot of people do.
With your last paragraph, I'm not sure what you mean? Particularly by the phrases "basic rpg play" and "overdetermine the abstracts". I'd be interested in reading an elaboration?
My pattern these days is, lacking a professional or academic outlet, just to invest the intellect I can get into entertainment, hobbies, books. TRPGs are really interesting from a theory or faux-academic perspective, and also from a personal perspective as they are a four hour conversation with six other people every week.
DeleteBut with like most entertainment it isn't supposed to be that profound, and trying to draw profounditiy from the hobby is pretentious. At least very hopeful, for "basic rpg play" like the cartoon humor you talk about.
I don't think RPGs are "supposed" to be anything, except what their players want them to be. I'm not sure I think anything is "supposed" to be anything.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what profundity means. I do think you can get intense experience from RPGs, and you can also get thematic reflection of the real world. That is to say, a story that makes a philosophical statement about real things, not just a story that makes a philosophical statement about fictional things. I think that RPGs are an artistic medium, and you can use them for all kinds of artistic goals.
Some goals are easy with RPGs, such as looking backwards and seeing a story, or making your friends laugh. Some are harder, such as having an unplanned story that you can see in the present, or making your friends scared.
What I like about RPGs as a medium is a certain livingness. They are unpredictable, kind of like a serial drama, but for the artist as well as the audience. They're also collaborative - at it's best, whatever story you get is something that no individual player would have written on their own.
I have tried more traditional media. They don't do it for me. RPGs do.
To achieve more difficult artistic goals, one has to put in more work. Also, you can't have players who aren't pulling their weight - it has to be everyone's goal, not just someone's goal.
That said, many RPGs follow a GM as artist, other players as semi-passive audience model. There are artistic goals for which that works, such as presenting a living world, or a difficult puzzle. I think that's what Zak S typically actually does? It's probably what Gygax did. It's very difficult to tell what gaming groups other than my own are actually doing, or trying to do.
I don't mean to say that one shouldn't pursue easy artistic goals, or should pursue hard artistic goals. Just that hard artistic goals are not impossible, if they're what one wants to pursue.
It sounds to me like you'd rather be putting your creative energy into something other than RPGs, except that you enjoy the social aspect. On the other hand, you sound dissatisfied with RPGs as well?
There's a common experience, for people for whom Forge theory was helpful, that they were certain there was something they could get out of RPGs, but that no RPG they were playing was giving it to them. The Big Model is primarily useful for identifying it, though, I currently think, only if it's narrativism. That was my experience, but I don't think it's quite yours?
Also, would you rather be having this conversation over e-mail? It seems pretty personal for blog comments.
sure b email me at peterbowensewebb at gmail
Deleteto answer your question publically though I really don't believe in the ability for rpgplay to be "art" not that because I don't believe that you can have experiences which trip into that place but because I don't want to contain those experiences in such a pretty box. This is mostly a naive argument considering it's about what can't be "art" but I'm just trying to get my point across.
DeleteSo uh I dunno it means different things to different people but it is after, all a game. Just like athletics the beauty's all ephemeral and the transcendent's stuffs emergent. Not easy to plan or whatever and most design .docs are better when they are just a cool wand you can wave around that occasionally explodes into something cool. I mean you told me that nothing in rpgs always works twice, right?
This is why rpgtexts are actually very cool for me because they get away from play which is messier. I can point to the art contained in like A Red & Pleasant Land and consider it cool art especially since it's oestensibly for play, which brings out all this cool stuff about e.g. videogames and textual analysis which is what they taught me in college. So to the extent that I'm in it not acheive that ephemeral emergent "awesome game" experience and more like to just try to position rpgtexts as a critically cool target, you can see my position for the above.
I'd add that this position of considering rpgtexts themselves as good art and not just for the play they could potentially produce is in particularly good positioning right now off of the back of Maze of the Blue Medusa which was made "to be art" and also the upcoming Patrick Stuart/ Scrap Princess text "Veins of the Earth" which seems to be written in a similar, indeed, vein.
So as you pursue play and I pursue text I think the question for your email is, where can we meet? I'd love to run Maze of the Blue Medusa for you someday even online. I got through a few sessions with Scrap (she ran her own game, not the maze, but it was online) a while back and had fun. And I DM'd the whole thing (the Maze, in person) once so it would be easy. Any ideas you have send me via the email ------thread closed-----