What makes a good celebration?
I was inspired by Chris Lehrich's "RPGs and Ideology?" and Nathan Paoletta's "Simulationism". The various GNS takes on Simulationism don't form a coherent whole to me, but one of the more recent formulations was Ron Edwards' definition which put it in terms of celebration. There is a brief outline of this in the TheoryTopics Wiki Entry on "Celebration".
Particularly as we have Christmas, New Years, and my own birthday coming up, this makes me wonder: What makes a good celebration? How is a celebration important, and how can we apply those principles to role-playing games?
Here are my preliminary thoughts: A good celebration is constructive and also transformative. For example, these days a wedding is generally celebrating a couple who are already together. However, the wedding is a powerful symbolic transformation of that relationship. At a more casual and minor end to that scale is a birthday party, which is a celebration of growing up.
Now, the sorts of role-playing games which Ron is thinking of are celebrations of source material. These are not personal like a wedding, but still have a place in people's lives. My life is strongly affected by the books I read and the movies I watch. In role-playing games, I think two recent games of my were my eighties James Bond 007 campaign and my Conan convention game.
What I look at here is how they are about something other than themselves. The Bond game was filled with eighties references as well as James Bond references. This had some nostalgia to it, but also a lot of questioning and revisiting to it. So, for example, when the PCs were fighting Kamal Khan in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, it inherently called into question how we now see this. It was also definitely transformative, such as by having Jim's gay character. This was a celebration of James Bond in a sense -- as he encountered sexy NPCs like Phil McCrevis and Ivan Moorcock. But clearly that was also enormously transformative by doing so.
The same is in many ways true of my Conan OGL game, "Brawny Thews". It is a celebration of male sexuality as based in the Robert E. Howard stories. However, the focus on sexuality, and empowerment through sexuality, made it transformative.
But all of this was more of an art for me, rather than a prescriptive method. What principles are there that make a game a more effective celebration? Just throwing in a lot of references doesn't do that. You need to integrate and extend what you bring into the game, which transforms it. Yet celebration is not criticism -- it is in many ways the opposite. Rather than deconstructing, it positively builds on what came before.
As a first principle: you have to put the players at the center of what you are celebrating. The PCs should be James Bond's replacements, not rookies hoping to someday get there. The players need to have license to interpret and enact the tropes themselves.
In a Forge thread, "The Secret of Sim", Mark Woodhouse wrote: I completely and unreservedly endorse the definition of Sim as celebration/intensification of input, AND I like it. I don't like it as much as I do N - it's definitely candy and not steak for me - but I do really enjoy it. My particular brand is adventure stories - pulp, superhero, and action. My characters don't face or engage with genuine Premise - to the extent that genuine human issues are important in the material that I'm celebrating, the protagonists hardly ever engage them in any problematized way. Captain Crusader (yes, I've really played a character by that name) doesn't have a second thought about his ideals - and indeed, I'd be annoyed if a GM kept throwing him moral dilemmas. His universe doesn't have them. You beat the bad guys, they go to jail until the next time. You're a Hero. I'm not deconstructing, I'm not challenging, I'm revelling in something fun that I love with other people who love it too.
This seems in line with what I am trying to get at here. That is, celebration shouldn't feel deconstructive -- it should come across as encouragement rather than challenging pressure. In my run of the Conan game, I inserted a moral dilemma at one point for one of the PCs -- but the results didn't actually turn out that well. In retrospect now, I think that I should not have done that. The players were creatively showing themselves in their open revelling, not in question and answer from me.
I'm not sure how to formalize more principles of this, however. Any thoughts from readers?
Particularly as we have Christmas, New Years, and my own birthday coming up, this makes me wonder: What makes a good celebration? How is a celebration important, and how can we apply those principles to role-playing games?
Here are my preliminary thoughts: A good celebration is constructive and also transformative. For example, these days a wedding is generally celebrating a couple who are already together. However, the wedding is a powerful symbolic transformation of that relationship. At a more casual and minor end to that scale is a birthday party, which is a celebration of growing up.
Now, the sorts of role-playing games which Ron is thinking of are celebrations of source material. These are not personal like a wedding, but still have a place in people's lives. My life is strongly affected by the books I read and the movies I watch. In role-playing games, I think two recent games of my were my eighties James Bond 007 campaign and my Conan convention game.
What I look at here is how they are about something other than themselves. The Bond game was filled with eighties references as well as James Bond references. This had some nostalgia to it, but also a lot of questioning and revisiting to it. So, for example, when the PCs were fighting Kamal Khan in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, it inherently called into question how we now see this. It was also definitely transformative, such as by having Jim's gay character. This was a celebration of James Bond in a sense -- as he encountered sexy NPCs like Phil McCrevis and Ivan Moorcock. But clearly that was also enormously transformative by doing so.
The same is in many ways true of my Conan OGL game, "Brawny Thews". It is a celebration of male sexuality as based in the Robert E. Howard stories. However, the focus on sexuality, and empowerment through sexuality, made it transformative.
But all of this was more of an art for me, rather than a prescriptive method. What principles are there that make a game a more effective celebration? Just throwing in a lot of references doesn't do that. You need to integrate and extend what you bring into the game, which transforms it. Yet celebration is not criticism -- it is in many ways the opposite. Rather than deconstructing, it positively builds on what came before.
As a first principle: you have to put the players at the center of what you are celebrating. The PCs should be James Bond's replacements, not rookies hoping to someday get there. The players need to have license to interpret and enact the tropes themselves.
In a Forge thread, "The Secret of Sim", Mark Woodhouse wrote: I completely and unreservedly endorse the definition of Sim as celebration/intensification of input, AND I like it. I don't like it as much as I do N - it's definitely candy and not steak for me - but I do really enjoy it. My particular brand is adventure stories - pulp, superhero, and action. My characters don't face or engage with genuine Premise - to the extent that genuine human issues are important in the material that I'm celebrating, the protagonists hardly ever engage them in any problematized way. Captain Crusader (yes, I've really played a character by that name) doesn't have a second thought about his ideals - and indeed, I'd be annoyed if a GM kept throwing him moral dilemmas. His universe doesn't have them. You beat the bad guys, they go to jail until the next time. You're a Hero. I'm not deconstructing, I'm not challenging, I'm revelling in something fun that I love with other people who love it too.
This seems in line with what I am trying to get at here. That is, celebration shouldn't feel deconstructive -- it should come across as encouragement rather than challenging pressure. In my run of the Conan game, I inserted a moral dilemma at one point for one of the PCs -- but the results didn't actually turn out that well. In retrospect now, I think that I should not have done that. The players were creatively showing themselves in their open revelling, not in question and answer from me.
I'm not sure how to formalize more principles of this, however. Any thoughts from readers?