Resistance to the Text

I was alerted to this post over on Wordpress through my socials (in this case it was BlueSky).

It kind of touches on a lot of the stuff I've been thinking about in recent years, including the comments made by students in the TTRPG club I ran at school for a couple of years (before the troubles), my work to make game rules more "user-accessible", my studies in linguistics over the years, and my work in general as a teacher.

There's generally been a lot of discussion about literacy as an issue in various fields lately. This is not just gaming related, but also touched on media literacy, social literacy, political literacy, and how the decline in each of these has had ramifications on the world around us. It's not just about whether someone can read the words, but also about whether they understand the meaning being conveyed. In the case of music, it might touch on the idea that conservatives are calling Rage Against the Machine or Bruce Springsteen woke, because it's taken them decades to actually understand what the lyrics of their songs are about. The same could be said about the subtexts in cinema, and whether a viewer is able to look past the stunts and special effects to understand the deeper storylines, character motivations, and contexts of any metaphors or other narrative elements.

There's so much here to parse. 

 

In the three-way tension described several times here over the years, rule texts are more than just the words in the books; they are also the accumulated lore developed by the GM/Narrator, and the events accumulated through the course of play. Different players will vary in their levels of literacy in each of these areas.

I've seen players who've participated in entire campaigns without cracking open a rule book.

I've seen players confused by the motivations of antagonists even when they've been laid out in fine detail during the course of play.

I've seen players who never knew what was going on in the shared imaginary world of the game because they either didn't pay attention, or just didn't care beyond the imagined space of their character in the story.

I've written posts about aphantasia (or the inability to visualise concepts with one's mind's eye), which may be related to situational literacy, and according to some sources may be linked to comprehension and literacy levels in some forms. 

It could similarly be argued that the traditional agendas of play could be symptomatic of interacting literacy levels among hobbyists... where a "Gamist" struggles with narrative literacy and instead connects more strongly with the mechanisms of play, a "Simulationist" has deep literacy regarding the world rather than the game rules that govern play within it... (yeah, yeah, I know that I'm not using the words in the "Official Forge" sense, and know that a lot of definition about these terms has moved on in the decades since they were codified. I'm just trying to describe how different players approach the game here)

I'm seeing elements of literacy and understanding the evolving text of play, along with elements of empathy and understanding how the group is emotionally involved in the experience.

It all feels like scratching the surface, but maybe scratching a different part of the surface to areas that I've been scratching at, and that feels like it's worth investigating further. 

(Now I'm digging through the Roll to Doubt blog...and it's a veritable treasure trove of ideas.)