Notes Before Reading: Repairing Play

This is a little silly, but maybe it is useful to share a little of the sketch work around the folks I am reading? I finished the book a few weeks ago, so maybe extra silly to share the notes that preceded my reading. But I do want to get around to writing about the book, and this is what I went into it thinking about.

Phenomenology—the study of subjectivity as it is experienced and the description of the structure of that subjectivity, often opposed to a variety of positivist accounts that evaluate subjectivity with terms and structures alien to experience. It shares a conceptual standpoint and horizon with psychoanalysis, with its intuitions about how to illumine subjectivity from within itself and its shared origins in dialogue with experimental psychology's limitations.

Both break away from the constructed experiment into case study and analysis. Both break out of their self-imposed focus on subjectivity in itself to explore how it interpenetrates with (and is shot through by) "objective" social and material dimensions. Because of that tendency toward rupture, both have produced compelling insights that inform and inspire human creativity. Neither escapes their ties to positivism, and both easily produce accounts that are as likely to impose themselves on subjectivity as illuminate it.

As I prepare to read Aaron Trammell's Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology with friends, I have been thinking a lot about my experiences at the role playing game table and the function of "actual play" as a key concept in RPG discourse. It helps constitute a certain sort of "common sense" among gamers, and it is the sort of common sense that has stifled my own ability to engage with gaming creatively.

I mostly mean actual play in the old-fashioned sense of having actually played a game as opposed to have "just" read it, though the contemporary sense of actual play as games played for an audience isn't entirely separate from that. Having an actual play for an audience plays a parallel function to a reviewer having actually played a game, both serving to validate a game as playable for the audience-consumer and providing them with some idea of how to play it.

Actual play is also data. Thanks in part to the legacy of the Forge design community, many more designers tend to look at actual play as data to inform the experimentation of design work. Good play reports provide guidance for adjustment and proof of concept; good play has lucky accidents that inform novel game elements. It justifies playing the game as written, because as written, the designer builds the game off of good play reports, plays where people enjoyed themselves.

We see flashes of positivism's intersection with capitalist production and ideology here. Actual play forms a component of the social space in which a product becomes visible and desirable, in which it can be marketed and consumed. That space becomes an objective imposition on subjectivity, the more it makes of subjectivity a possession and the more it subjects those to dispossession and alienation.

Possession and dispossession, objectification—all entangled.

Precision is important here. Don't mistake intersection with identity. Think of the way actual play as a conversation emerges in this milieu as well, it's own kind of positivism. Subjective and affective questions are not centered—How are you feeling? What are you imagining? What fantasies do you bring to the session?—to focus what we can put our ear to, record, the words that pass back and forth between us. What we say, so the logic goes, that is what the point at which a game properly intervenes.

And again, a kind of common sense emerges about how those game conversations produce feelings and images in participants, so that the game becomes a way of structuring that. At its gentlest, the pervasive issue of getting everyone "on the same page," often by way of genre alignment, and the safety tools that articulate what we should or shouldn't say in the game session. At its most rigid, the sort of weird talk you get from some folks about game design as mind control.

Art.

I do like the Melsonian Arts Council's offhand definition of art, "something made by a human in pursuit of a line of curiosity." Curiosity links the work of art to the particular way the artist interacts with their subjectivity during the act of creation. It also captures a trajectory within the Old School Renaissance that pushes back on commercialization. Though I hope you appreciate the deliberate tension of quoting a more subjective approach to game creation from a page dedicated to selling you a product.

Actual play in its contemporary sense of play for an audience has invited theatrical innovations. While comparisons between players at a table and improvisational actors on a stage are fairly old, actual plays often bring actual actors and directors to the table with their own tools for play. Some actual plays have dramaturgs operating between players and game runners, articulating what they are personally looking to explore in the actual play and mediating tensions that might arise from different goals. The limits of theatrical innovations to actual play haven't been settled, and help direct us to art.