Play to Find Out What Happens: Insight Through Reflection
Play to Find Out What Happens: Insight Through Reflection
Play to Find Out What Happens: Insight Through Reflection
By Jason Cox
June 7, 2021
Summary
In D. Vincent and Meguey Baker's tabletop RPG Apocalypse World players are urged to let go of their control of the narrative and to "Play to find out what happens," an approach that is associative, collaborative, and oriented towards emergent play instead of a pre-existing plot or story-world into which characters are placed.
1 When applied to larps this philosophy fosters a community where players are stakeholders in and co-creators of the diegetic world that emerges through play.
These larps allow for an exploration of community and interconnection that supersedes the limits of their designers and organizers, though those explorations are always particular to the players that are involved.
In this paper I examine ways to think about, create, and play these games that foregrounds the emergent experience and examines scholarly works that apply similar approaches.
Playing this way can offer unique insights through personal reflection, and can offer a gaming community the agency and opportunity to decide who they want to be.
3 They have an internal logic that dictates how play proceeds, often follow a timeline that progresses from beginning to end, and emphasize the concepts laid out by the designers and/or facilitators.
Emergent narratives urge players to "Play to find out what happens."5 Though the contexts, characters, and situations encountered in a role-playing scenario may suggest a particular ending, that result is not a foregone conclusion.
In other words, the way a narrative is "Constructed and experienced cannot be predicted a priori."6 In these narratives players are co-creators of the diegetic world, though players in a role-played scenario have more agency in that act than in literature or other non-reactive media where the co-creation exists entirely in the mind of the reader.
While there are commonalities in the diegetic world, such as its setting or cultural understandings, a player's experience of the game is highly individualized and determined by their own actions during the game.
As Costikoyan notes, in a game the outcome "Will differ depending on your decision. The game interacts with the players, changing state as they play. [] That's true of every game. If it isn't interactive, it's a puzzle, not a game."7 Even ergodic literature, which is to say texts or games that ask a reader to make a decision, has a pre-planned response to the choices it offers.
Reference
Cox, J. (2021, June 07). Analog game studies. Retrieved June 21, 2021, from https://analoggamestudies.org/2021/06/play-to-find-out-what-happens-insight-through-reflection/