Shelving away a bunch of character sheets from the dungeon crawl we had in spare evening in India. I have quite a few character sheets from the last few years that I’ve hung onto. It makes me think of two things:
Firstly, I’d like it if more games that are aimed at one-shots did away with the character sheet. and explored more elegant ways to provide that function. This is both for the in-game vibe, and also to produce a single memento of the single shared experience, rather than a dog’s dinner of half a dozen identically printed sheets with minimal personalisation. I can point to The Quiet Year as a great example of success here, as we walk away with a single map which epitomises the collective session of play. Meaningful and potent.
Secondly, I’m ready again to play a game for long enough that a character sheet does have meaning; equipment aggregated and refined, character changes encoded, nicknames, mottos, pieces of history and reminders of ambitions dotting up the Notes page. I want to get sentimental about a character sheet. Somehow it feels that I can only get sentimental about the sheet if the play extends over many sessions, making the sheet the artifact of play that ensures continuity, that brings us back into the ritualised space.
In which Alex and I struggle with Indian culture, the cult of factuality and substandard audio equipment. Forgive the occasional garbling and enjoy our Indian intellectual adventure! Oh, and also I rant about The Hobbit for about 20 minutes…
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It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
― Robert Hass
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When we talk about the brain, we have to choose between one of two models. When we describe or try to understand anything whatsoever, we do it by likening it to something else we think we already understand better. There are only two models available for the brain: the machine and the person. In the end we don’t have a language specifically for hemispheres. We only have the language we developed for people or for machines. Using the machine model is an approximation: so is the person model. A single hemisphere is capable of sustaining human life – and therefore being involved in the processes of ‘wanting’, ‘aiming’, ‘desiring’, ‘liking’, having ‘values’ – this is no more of a distortion than pretending it is simply a machine. When we see two hemispheres in the same person treating things quite differently – clearly valuing and favouring some things more than others – as can be seen in split-brain subjects, for example, it is almost perverse not to allow one to speak of the hemisphere as at least having some of the qualities of the person that relies on it. The fact is that we don’t know what sort of thing the brain is – or even what a single neurone is. The neurone is often modelled as a wire or a chip: however it is a vastly complex self-regulating partially autonomous system, with tens of thousands of channels and ports interacting with one another and the whole context of the body in which it lies, manufacturing, transmitting – it isn’t fully modelled as a wire or chip. Much is left out. Still less is the whole brain fully modelled as a machine.
More Gilchrist.
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‘Plenty of things that are certain are mutually contradictory; plenty of things that are false contain no inconsistency. Contradiction is not a sign of falsehood, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.’
Pascal, quoted by Iain Gilchrist in response to Kenan Malik
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I have some sympathy with McGilchrist’s claim that there is a growing tendency to decontextualise knowledge, to think of the parts as more important than the whole, which is often regarded as no more than the sum of the parts, to substitute information for knowledge. But this is only one side of the story. Another trend, equally important, is the downgrading of reason, the celebration of tradition, intuition and myth, the glorification of the holistic, the organic and the local. If we are forced to use McGilchrist’s terminology and imagery, we might say that the problem is not that the left hemisphere has control over the right but that there has been a tendency to develop both ‘left hemispheric thinking’ and ‘right hemispheric thinking’ in isolation and that both are, in isolation, equally troublesome. Or to put it anther way, the problem is increasingly that reason has become mechanistic, contextualisation anti-rational.
Kenan Malik, review/response to The Master and his Emissary. I’m pondering this one.
I’m in Goa on an intensive tai chi course. And I mean intensive! The practice is dragging up pieces of people’s buried past, awakening spine-archived lsd to engender days in an acid haze, generally reconnecting people with weird energy flows and uncomfortable truths. All by waving your arms around in circles and paying attention to your body. Crazy.
So of course, I decide to introduce a story game to unwind. Specifically The Quiet Year, which seems apropos because a significant portion of the course are going on to build a retreat in Guatemala where they will live, and that a general “critique of civilisation” vibe abides. We played it outdoors in a hippy vegetarian cafe space, and then on the front porch of our pal’s room once we were kicked out at 11pm. We finished the game about half-one am – the latest night out on the course so far! The group was a mix of people with trad gaming experience, no gaming and more new-skool design.
Firstly, the game is excellent. The design is elegant, tight and achieves what it needs to do. The physical elements are beautiful and fit the tone of the game perfectly, and the instructions are straightforward and accessible. We had some issues with the game, but they were purely of our own making.
The game was set in a tropical coastal setting not unlike our current surroundings. We aimed to increase the realism and impact of the game by doing so, but in retrospect the ‘mysterious jungle’ quality of it may have begun the road towards gonzo strangeness and mystery. You’ll see how that goes presently. I’m going to focus on the issues we had with the game, and skim over the game content (you had to be there), but these are no slight on the game. I think it might be useful for others to hear about.
What we got right:
-lots of use of the map, which became very rich.
-identifying and speaking for different factions
-extensive use of contempt, signifying our feeling for the community
What we got wrong
–trying to bite off too much within actions: discoveries, and also group discussions. It seemed to take a long while for some members to get that discussion was just to share an opinion, not to introduce facts or determine outcomes. I don’t know why this was, I had to re-explain it nearly a dozen times. Perhaps I’m just bad at explaining. Anyway it’s fundamentally a restraint issue, which the text does point to, but we still had issues with. Never with projects, perhaps because people were aware of the collective time demands consensus needed.
–table talk. I made a bad call at the start of the game: Six people were around the dinner table, all wanted to play. I offered to step out as facilitator, but one couple were keen to be playing as a pair, and another guy thought he might leave early and suggested pairing with me, so that’s what we did – two pairs and two singletons. It turned out to be a bad idea, as it made debate, especially in the other pair, inevitable, with that debate inevitably churning up speculative facts and reactions to other actions that the game is designed to address in other ways.
–overcomplicated following-story approach – a prophecy, something happening on this particular day with that particular person. From my point of view, there was a certain amount of ‘forcing’ the game to be about features that one player/pair found interesting, not maliciously but through enthusiasm/commitment.
–slow gos – related to all of the above. At one point late in the game virtually froze, with one member of the other couple unwilling to take their turn because they wanted to get it right. We basically sat there for 10 minutes, and every encouragement of “there’s no wrong move” “better to do anything than nothing” and “we need to keep this rolling, guys” was met by an affirmation and then back to perusing the mat.
– your standard absurdity curve – the supernatural dial just kept creeping up, and in fact it wasn’t so much supernatural as increasingly cartoonish. I think the instructions warn the facilitator to jump on this, but I didn’t; it was hard to detect the saltational steps (although the possessed possible ‘chosen one’ somehow guzzling the communities year’s supply of jungle honey, swelling to house size as he did so, was probably the moment!)
Even though the session suffered from these factors, we all enjoyed the game a lot, and several players are keen to play it again soon, maybe multiple times. Some are amateur game designers (more in the board/card field) whose minds were blown by the types of mechanics involved. Happy days, and kudos to Joe.
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Oh, and I have a specific contempt question that I took to storygames
Artistic collaboration is a profoundly strange business. Do it right up to the hilt, as it were, and you and your partner will generate a third party. Some thoroughly other. And often one capable of things neither you nor the very reasonable gentleman seated opposite would even begin to consider. Who…is the third who walks beside us?
The improvisation scene is great. The warmth, the inventiveness, the commitment to the craft, the welcoming atmosphere. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you agree.
Only… what scene are we talking about? I’ve found that we think about our scene in terms of our local area, or perhaps stretch it out to include the folk we encounter at the Edinburgh fringe once a year. Of course, we also pay tribute to the big hitters in North America, and some of us are privileged enough to make a pilgrimage out to one Mecca or other ( http://www.loosemoose.com/ ,http://www.secondcity.com/http://ioimprov.com/http://www.ucbtheatre.com/ ), but these are necessarily rare events. The thing is, it needn’t be that way. Almost every month of the year, you can stretch your improv horizons outside of the UK. Ladies and gentleman, may I introduce… Europe.
I myself got an introduction through mask-work, a somewhat niche activity that gathers nationalities together for an opportunity to play. (In other words, like in so many areas, I didn’t take the plunge, the plunge took me.) That opened my eyes to just how much activity is going on in Europe, highly accessible to foreigners through a developed festival circuit. A circuit on which you can both encounter celebrated international performers/teachers and be exposed to wonders previously unknown (such as Gregor Moder & Maja Dekleva Lapajne’s wondrous two-prov FM http://www.drama.si/repertoar/fm.html )
Yes, I know. We don’t speak the languages. We don’t like flying. We’re scared of currywurst. Not to worry! Many events, including most of the festivals, use English as their lingua franca. You can take a train or even a bus to a great many locations. And once you get past its gruff exterior, the wurst is a kindly beast.
Here’s a potted description of just some events coming up.
The next festival occuring for sure is the Amsterdam festival in January. The workshop lists haven’t been named at the time of writing, but with Patti Stiles and Rama Nicholas performing there is some guaranteed quality in the lineup. http://impro-amsterdam.nl/cms/
Not a festival, but an international location for good improvisational workshops, is the Odsherred Teaterskole in Denmark. Steen Haakon Hansen is a wonderful clown who has worked with Keith Johnstone extensively and teaches his work with his backing. And the site also sees an annual Easter mask-work retreat – 2013 will be my 4th year – which involves the most intensive and rewarding work I’ve ever done. http://www.nyscenekunst.dk/opslag.asp?page=29 (listings here)
[There must be more stuff going on in summer, but I can’t be speaking to the right people!]
October sees the annual Würzburg festival,http://www.improtheaterfestival.de/ which I’ve made twice in a row and is great (and tends to sell out). Workshop big hitters included the top flight of the Loose Moose Theatre, Patti Stiles, and many more. Shows (in English) included an experimental longform night, Theatresports cups, narrative plays, the works.
Bringing us full circle, December welcomes the Halle festival. This year it has hit some financial challenges and may not go ahead. Hopefully next year will prove better. http://www.impronale.de/
If you find something that takes your fancy, you might want to explore it with your friends, as it’s always fun to share such experiences. But even if you would be flying solo, remember: The improvisation scene is great. The warmth, the inventiveness, the commitment to the craft, the welcoming atmosphere. Go to one of these festivals, and I’m even more certain you’ll agree.
