Improvisation & All That Jazz

It's been a good month for me creatively. Two one-page games, a short module, and two PbtA-inspired moves for various jams going on over at itch. Most of that happened because of the critical work I have been doing privately to leverage my imagination out of the ruts that I keep finding myself in.

I am going to talk about that here. I am going to show my work here.

Too often, my creative work is misdirected by assumptions about what role play looks like and what role play materials should look like. I fail to live up to my own ideals about what imagination can do and should do.

Wayward,

And to do that, I need to thoroughly embrace the influence and inspiration that Black American life has for me. I am white, yes, but I have to acknowledge the ethical and existential possibilities that Black critics like Saidiya Hartman articulate in the present are essential for my own creative being in the world. I chase a waywardness premised on her insights:

Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the one created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different life. . . . an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe. . . . of trying to live when you were never meant to survive. (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 228; italics in original, boldness is mine)

I can't lay claim to the sort of extremity to which Black life has been subjected, to its restriction and violence. But the world that creates and sustains antiblackness is the same as the world that animates the restriction and violence that constrains my own, and I can't find a way forward that doesn't take to heart strategies that oppose it.

(a)

It is strange to realize that tabletop role playing games form a significant part of both the social constraints and the terms of possibility for my creativity. But they do. I grew up thinking with them and have spent a good deal of my adult life playing with them.

Recently reading both Fredric Jameson's formulation of postmodernity and Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy has helped me to see how postmodern and too-late modern tabletop role playing games are as a whole, how the are embedded in the centering of the aleatory and the glorification of bricolage and intensity that Jameson traces to the 1970s and that Kornbluh follows into the contemporary moment. While not often esteemed as a medium for creative work by many critics, tabletop role playing games emerge and are defined by this era even more so than well-considered media like television.

There are good reason for that, of course. The commonplace that role playing games are just so new and haven't had the time required to establish a full critical apparatus is partially true. I suspect stronger reasons for the lack of critical treatment can be made for the sites of emergence for role playing itself. It emerged within games and in communities with few strong ties to critics in either journalism or the academy. And it emerged in historical era that has increasingly devalued the critical in favor of the actual (what Kornbluh identifies as immediacies).

That has changed somewhat over the last couple of decades, but the games remain largely "just" games to most critics and their players. Tabletop gamers themselves generally have a great deal of ambivalence about critical appraisal, even from insiders to the community. The tendency to link criticism to theory further drives a wedge between would-be critics and a community that prefers to talk about actual products and actual play. That drive toward the actual is part and parcel of the era with its emphasis on fungibility and unmediated engagement.

Which is to say: my intimacy with tabletop role playing games is an intimacy with a form deeply structured by the contemporary moment. My effort to find an other avenue for expressing myself creatively with that sort of play forms an essential component of my navigating through this acute moment of global historical crisis.

(b)

And reading through critics like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney that Kornbluh criticizes, I realize how my practice better aligns with their solutions. I orient myself toward an alternative and minor key exploration of ways to gather together and relate differently to each other.

For all the ways that role playing games are often overdetermined by the structural violence of the present, they nonetheless present opportunities otherwise than that. I found some of the descriptions in Sarah Jane Cervenak's Black Gathering helpful toward this end, a series of encounters with writing and sculpture that open up toward the heavens and welcomes the press of creatures and objects into the circle.

There are two pieces of Hartman's waywardness that I am pulling together in my current work: (1) the exploration of occult visions and dreams and (2) improvisation. I draw on two very different traditions to do that, what George E. Lewis calls Afrological improvisation and what Jean Moréas called Symbolism. In many ways, I am subjecting Moréas's Symbolism to Lewis's improvisation, so let me begin with Lewis.

Improvised,

Lewis's account of improvisation focuses on jazz, but its key elements all apply to the way I want to produce role playing material:

Working as an improviser . . . emphasizes not only form and technique but individual life choices as well as cultural, ethnic, and personal localization. . . . the possibility of internalizing alternative value systems is implicit from the start. The focus . . . shifts from the individual, autonomous creator to the collective—the individual as a part of global humanity. ("Improvising Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives," Black Music Research Journal 16, no. 1 (1996): 234; bolding mine)

In other words, when you are subjecting work to improvisation, you allow your personal experience and present moment to weigh fully upon it and choose how to modulate the work in response to all of that. And that can happen both during composition and play, as well as be furthered by improvisation-sensitive and animated criticism.

Improvisation is creating by and with people who are present to their era and modulating it with their whole self.

At each stage, other people can be involved, and as they are involved, the improvisation can play back and forth between all of the participants where each participant introduces their personality and localization into the moment. Hence why Lewis's notion of Afrological improvisation demands both history and memory as well as creative lineages, for it is in all three that communal, global dimension of his improvisation acquires its proper scope and specificity:

[The] more salient differentiating characteristics [of improvisation are] its welcoming of agency, social necessity, personality, and difference, as well as its strong relationship to popular and folk cultures. ("Improvising Music After 1950," 234)

While many of these characteristics are partially represented in various role playing communities and the industry, I don't think they are collectively realized in any pervasive way. Especially when it comes to difference and alternative value systems (key for the integration of all this with waywardness), most creators, game runners, and play groups fail to rise beyond play habits in a way that achieves the dynamic and historical possibilities of improvisation.

To be fair, I don't even think most gamers want that. They (just) want a game. And I don't think that is necessarily an issue in and of itself. But it is not good enough for me and the work I want to do. I suspect that requires emphasizing the potency of play and putting much less emphasis on the situation being a game. Role play, without so much game, or game that is subsumed into the play rather than the other way around.

Occult Visions & Dreams

For me, my preferred medium is the fantastical, but not that of J. R. R. Tolkien or Lord Dunsany. Rather, I favor the fantastical that treats the fantastic as metaphysical conceit or imagistic expression of strongly experienced affective encounters. The point is not to end up with a rich and coherent secondary world but a parade of more or less connected characters, scenes, and milieus animated by strong emotions and ideas.

Enemy of education, declamation, wrong feelings, objective description, symbolist poetry tries to dress the Idea in a sensitive form which, however, would not be its sole purpose, but furthermore that, while serving to express the Idea in itself, would remain subjective. The Idea, in its turn, should not be allowed to be seen deprived of the sumptuous lounge robes of extraneous analogies; because the essential character of symbolic art consists in never approaching the concentrated kernel of the Idea in itself. So, in this art, the pictures of nature, the actions of human beings, all concrete phenomena would not themselves know how to manifest themselves; these are presented as the sensitive appearance destined to represent their esoteric affinity with primordial Ideas. (Jean Moréas, "Symbolist Manifesto," Le Figaro, September 18, 1886; translated by C. Liszt; bolding mine)

I emphasize the subjective and analogical dimension of these elements because it is precisely as subjective that we can share them and modulate them between ourselves as a sort of attunement to each other, our situation, and the encompassing present. As "sensitive appearance" they are responsive appearance, and their responsiveness does not undermine their relationship to what animates them but rather makes them better vehicles to attune with and through.

In my writing for play, this means producing arrangements and riffs. These are produced largely by improvisation upon my feelings, my situation, and the peculiar images that emerge through playing with them. Arrangements being the fictional milieu in which the sort of play I am preparing will transpire with riffs being images, characters, and scenes that allow for the people playing to play with, to modulate expressively. In play, all of these can be (and hopefully will be!) subject to improvisation.

For the Appendix N module jam, the referee takes a lot of the responsibility for improvising with the materials I provide, those playing characters introducing those as riffs to which the referee must respond.

For my one-page duets, I put the emphasis on dice rolls that produced opportunities around which each player would introduce their own riffs and respond to each other in ways that built up an arrangement.

And whatever the responses between players, those responses should ideally emerge through mutual attention and consideration, through listening and looking at each other with the fictional milieu between them. I hope they are all materials through which players come to feel themselves, akin to how I felt myself writing them.