Shared Fantasies
The game for my queer little girl can't ignore the act of fantasy. Fantasy defined so much of her unfulfilled relationship to Dungeons & Dragons. But for all the common sense discussions of role playing games having their roots in "let's pretend" play, there isn't a lot of discussion about the substance of that.
"Pretend" seems to be taken as a pretty simple and straightforward activity, but my childhood fantasy is anything but. My fantasy was murky, a dense and tangled mesh of haptic intensity, symbol-making for sentiments and almost-ideas that I had no concepts at hand for, the development of logical thinking, stumbling through ideas of social relation through imaginary role taking, yearning, and playful whimsy.
To be honest, I am not so far from that queer little girl. While fantasy itself plays a less central role in accessing that dense and tangled mesh, I frequently return to the mesh in order to reconnect with myself and my place in the world. My primary tools of navigation these days are an odd mix of the spiritual (consecration, divination, prayer, and ritual) and the psychological (cognitive, behavioral, and somatic most often), but the place remains.
When I am most engaged in role playing games, I play at returning to that experience of fantasy being the center of my relationship to the mesh. I create worlds and characters that emerge from that mesh and try to respond to others from that fuller place that I am. I have had some wonderful experiences doing that, but more often it falls flat. I have learned to be more guarded and to approach gaming in a more superficial fashion so that I can at least have fun.
But for my queer little girl's game, I want to embrace fantasy in a way that she would recognize. So I decided to reread James Hillman's The Dream and the Underworld. I thought that I might come at fantasy sideways through an account of dreams and dream work.
It was a mixed bag.
I had forgotten how disciplinary the book is. First and foremost, it is staking a disciplinary claim about the proper scope of analytic psychology's relationship to the dream, and in so doing staking a claim about the privileged access of his analytic method to approaching the dream. It is also about encouraging the analyst to discipline the dreamer, teaching them to approach their dreams in a narrow and specific way.
And I care little about that. I have no interest in what the proper scope of Jungian analytic psychology is, and while I still appreciate the approach to dreams that he offers, I have no interest in reducing my relationship to dream or fantasy to it.
Some of Hillman's critical work en route to that approach does help me think through fantasy better, though.
Hillman's core idea is that we don't need to interpret the dream; we need to dwell and explore the dream on its own terms. Applying this more loosely to fantasy (because I am not interested in his discipline) and especially to fantasizing as an activity we engage in during role playing, I see a path toward further unlinking role playing from the war games that it emerged from.
Hillman suggests that most treatments of dream eliminate what is proper to the dream and give the dream relevance only insofar as it serves our practical or daily needs. Freudian analysis connects the dream to unconscious complexes that can be understood and released by interpreting the dream. A neurological approach may identify the role dreams have in storing memories for later access. We might see some dreams as simple forms of release, an escape from the stresses of daily life.
All of these can be applied to fantasy in role playing games. While D&D is less likely to ask players to understand themselves, the core loops of D&D play focus on competency and achievement, often overcoming challenges and obstacles to win treasures and acclaim. The OSR loves to talk about player skill, and the importance of failure in the game being legible as a sort of correctable incompetence.
What happens, though, if the obstacles, challenges, and treasures develop another aspect in which they become vague portents, intimate nemeses, and inchoate hopes?
We talk about the storied hooks and rumors that provide player and character motivation to engage with a module, but what happens if those are thickened into obscure compulsions and tenuous fates?
For one (1), I think we move toward thinking about Expressionism gaming from a different angle than that suggested by Jay Dragon. Whereas she suggests an expressionist game where
negotiated experiences [are] shaped by the unresolvable tension between mechanically-imposed external worlds and passionate inarticulate internal worlds.
this approach suggests an Expressionist game in which negotiated, shared fantasy becomes the medium through which intense, inchoate inner experience expresses itself in affect-rich characters and situations. We don't need the intermediary of the mechanically limited character to experience passionate inner worlds, we just need a shared fantasy in which our own inner experiences can find expression in characters and situations.
And I want to emphasize that there can be some ambiguity between where that intense, inchoate inner experience occurs. We share the intense, inchoate inner experiences expressed in the game with those we're playing with, and sometimes find multiple sources commingling in the same shared fantasy. That commingling itself enriches characters and situations with affect.
In this light, I think a lot of folks have already played games in a pseudo-Expressionist manner. A GM or a player who pours more emotion and intensity into a setting or character than the people they are playing with are comfortable with or were prepared for is trying to use the shared fantasy Expressionistically. But the table as a whole hasn't negotiated in a way that supports and develops a steady link between inner experience and shared fantasy such that affect-rich characters find affect-rich situations, and vice versa.
When that happens to us, of course, we encounter a frustration that emerges from the impact of mechanically and socially imposed external resistance to the expression of our own inner experience. But I don't think that experience is Expressionistic; rather it is the frustration of the Expressionistic effort to find a means of expression for inner experience despite the way external factors frustrate it.
An Expressionist game shouldn't mechanize that frustration; it should facilitate negotiation that allows for a shared exploration of the fantasies produced by intense, inchoate experience. The Expressionist game must provide an occasion where societal constraints on inner experience are loosened and support the sort of rush of sometimes inchoate symbols and affect into the shared fantasy.
For two (2), emerging from this, Hillman troubles valuing fantasy as play. Too often, play is understood to be recuperation from and for workers, an activity valued because it improves productivity or, perhaps, provides an opportunity for a commodity to be sold. This allows us to disregard our fantasies easily and avoid working with our unexpressed experience.
Games produced for maximum sales or for social and political agendas often have much the same function. Making a game for the bottom line subjects fantasy directly to the systems of social legibility that obscure inner experience; even when the creative fantasy inspiring a game begins in inner expression, it is unlikely to continue once it is tuned toward marketability. The same holds true for games that hope to deliver a social or political message. While intense, inchoate inner experience can be the seedbed of forms of social awareness, a game that begins in social messaging also begins in the field of social legibility that fails to provide expression to inner experience.
Hillman suggests an alternate frame of work, one that sits more firmly on concepts like working on and working through. This kind of working is artistic and aesthetic, working a material to create and shape rather than doing a job. It entails patience with the fantasy, a willingness to explore what it could and can support from inner experience, exploring novel arrangements of its characters and situations to reveal other dimensions of it.
Now, if Hillman can reclaim an alternative form of work modeled on art and craft that passes between the dichotomy of play and work, I think we can do the same with the Expressionist game. Just as we talk about artistic working, we talk about playful arts and crafts that produce release and delight through a structured (or negotiated) process like rules, rulings, and procedures.
For three (3), Hillman puts forward the notion that the objects and peoples in dreams can't be treated as representations of those objects and people. Rather, they are radical transformations of them for the sake of the dream underworld's own ends; they are divorced from their everyday use and meaning.
Many trajectories of OSR play center the importance of inventory as the defining aspect of what a character can do. As I mentioned, I have been reading a lot of Cairn 2e lately and that explicitly takes the stance that a character is their inventory with a few background details added in.
That inventory is very much the representation of useful mundane objects. What happens if we nudge the inventory toward Hillman's fantasied objects? What happens if the inventory is a character in an even more intensive fashion, such that they are elements that recur in the character's story again and again, sometimes in ways that make more affective and symbolic sense than practical sense?
In others words, the woman with the knife is the woman with the bloody knife, then she is the woman with the rusty knife, then she is the woman with the lost knife, and. and. and. Each moment of her with the knife being a kind of situation within whatever other situation she finds herself, a situation toward which she must find a relationship toward, just as an adventurer in a traditional OSR game must find their relationship toward each situation they are in according to the tools at hand.
Except in this case, the tools contain latent moods waiting to be activated, moods that provide the player with ways to explore the situation in which their character finds themselves.
Anyway. This helps me orient myself better. I will be thinking about some of this as I proceed, but I'm not sure quite where it leads yet.