Fiction

Roleplaying Games as a Microcosm of Free Will, Part I

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In this post, I’m going to use an analogy (or set of analogies) to describe the various philosophical schools of thought on free will. Being a nerd and avid gamer, I’m of course going to find that analogy in the world of gaming. Specifically, in that corner of the gaming world that is possibly the nerdiest (and also my favorite): roleplaying games (RPGs). Here, I mean RPGs that are played with pen, paper and dice (or some other mechanic) in a face-to-face situation—not video games that would be classified as falling in the “RPG” genre.

If you’re not sure how a roleplaying game works, I’ve written a basic explanation here.

Here begins the analogy:

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that written literature represents pure determinism (at least when you are the reader). The story is already set, the characters are going to take the actions that they have been written to take, and you’re just along for the ride.[1]

On the other end of the spectrum is when you tell a story to others and have no set requirements about the content or nature of the story. This is pure free will. No outside force determines the course of the story and no logic need constrain your characters; you are the sole captain of your ship.

Somewhere between pure determinism and pure free will, things get interesting. Here we find a debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. The latter believe that any element of determinism destroys the existence of free will, while the former believe that some determinism and some freedom of will can peacefully and logically co-exist.

In a RPG, the GM is a little microcosm of a god, though GMs who take this seriously usually fail to keep in mind that they’re playing a game that the Players are there to have fun, and that being forced to act out a story over which they have no control is neither fun nor interesting. Players generally call GM behavior that forces them down an inevitable story arc “railroading.”

When a GM railroads his players, they may be choosing their actions, but the consequences of their actions will always lead to the same result. The meaningfulness of choosing is lost; only the illusion of meaningful choice remains. Don’t look at the man behind the curtain or that illusion will itself disappear.

Railroading in a RPG, then, represents something more akin to the deterministic nature of Fate in Greek theatre—the characters seem free to do what they want, but they will always reach the same result no matter what they do—just ask Oedipus. Like Greek tragedy, this is depressing; it’s only real meaning is the paradigm’s tautology that Fate is unavoidable, so no matter what you do, you cannot avoid Fate.

Both Greek tragedy and poorly-run RPGs represent incompatibilist theory—it’s plain to see here how the determinism of the situation makes the existence of the remaining modicum of free will ultimately meaningless.

Roleplaying games, when run by a skilled GM, fall firmly into the compatibilist free-will philosophy. There are some—indeed, many—things outside of a Player Character’s control. From the very conception of a game, the determination of the setting to be used for the game naturally precludes certain options for characters, both ontological and practical. Once the game begins, at least some of the events that occur are predetermined by the GM.[2] What has happened before the game begins, for instance, is usually dictated solely by the GM.

Once the story begins, however, the Players and their characters have true agency. When a PC acts, he has the capacity to enact change in the (fictional) world around him. The things he does influence the story in a tangible way as the GM incorporates the results of the character’s actions into the plot and narrative as they progress.

What we end up with is a back-and-forth, a give-and-take between Players and GM where both influence the course of the story. Determinism—the actions of the GM in setting the stage for the characters’ actions—and free will—the actions of the characters in pushing the story along—live side by side and feed off of one another. This scenario is clearly the most meaningful. We’ll explore why in the next post.

For part 2, click here.

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[1] I understand that many writers, myself included, would argue that a story takes on a life of its own during its creation and wanders in directions we never initially considered. Nevertheless, once put down, the story is immutable.

[2] It has become popular in the last decade to focus on building narrative in an RPG and, thus, to foster “collaborative storytelling,” in which the players have greater control over the story in a more cooperative relationship with the GM. Even games without such a focus have become less “adversarial” in their depiction of the relationship between GM and players. Nevertheless, the analogy for our purposes focuses on the situation where the GM has ultimate narrative authority but allows the actions of the characters to alter the story as it moves forward.

What is a Roleplaying Game?

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Roleplaying games, at their heart, differ from most other types of games because they are about telling an interesting and enjoyable story in a medium that combines traditional storytelling techniques with improvisational theatre, speculative problem-solving and statistics (found in whatever “resolution mechanic” that decides actions that could succeed or fail—and, according to modern RPG theory, both success and failure are interesting and appropriate to the story).

There’s no need to detail the venerable forty-some-odd-year history of “modern” roleplaying, but a few notes might prove useful for those drawn here by subjects other than gaming. The mother-of-all-roleplaying-games (as we think of them today) is of course Dungeons & Dragons.[1] In that game, as in most other RPGs, one of the participants takes on the role of the Gamemaster (GM), while the others take on the roles of the Player Characters (PCs). We’ll call the latter the Players.

As in a theatrical performance, a Player seeks to play his Player Character as well as can be done. What “as well as can be done” depends heavily upon the group and the RPG, but for our sake we’ll stay highbrow and assume that this means immersing oneself in being someone else for a while, learning how someone other than yourself might feel and speak and act and exploring an alternate reality through that lens.

Under normal circumstances[2], each Player has only one character to portray. With a typical group, that means the Players are supplying three to five PCs to the game. While they may have intricate backstories, complex psychologies and all of the other traits that well-thought-out characters in fiction have, there’s not much for them to do without a situation for them to be in.

This is where the Gamemaster (GM) comes in. In an RPG, the GM represents all forces external to the characters—the weather, the setting, things that happen, all the other characters in the story that are not the PCs, etc. This gives the GM broad authority over the nature and course of the story that will be told over the course of the game.

So, the PCs find themselves in a situation over the creation of which they had no control. Once the “scene,” the playing out of the situation, begins, however, it is the agency of the PCs (and other characters involved in the scene—known as NPCs or non-player characters and controlled by the GM) who move the story forward.

This brings us to a feature of roleplaying games that separates the genre from other storytelling games—rules and mechanics. A Player Character has “statistics”, values that determine the character’s strengths and weaknesses. When the PC takes an action that could potentially fail, that character’s statistics are used along with the rules and mechanics to determine the result of the action. The mechanics of most RPGs use dice to add the element of chance to the action—representing all of the little factors that could come together to ensure success or conspire to assure defeat. This prevents the game from being determined by GM fiat, leaving some things to chance.

The rules may allow for possibilities that do not occur in our reality (such as wizardry and magic), but they may also prohibit certain actions (like hacking a computer to which one does not have access, or succeeding at sprinting down a tightrope in gusting winds and pouring rain).

Once the dice have fallen, the results of the action (its success, failure and side-effects) become part of the story, which now moves forward having incorporated that event. The “structured unpredictability” of the game both separates it from other types of storytelling and adds drama to the story. If, as occurs in Dungeons & Dragons, a brave hero confronts a dragon, he cannot be assured of success. When played as intended, neither does the GM have the ability to absolutely determine the outcome of the battle (although, as the controller of the dragon, he may try his best—using the rules—to defeat the hero).

Who wins? Some RPGs focus on an adversarial relationship between the GM and the Players, with each attempting to outwit the other for control of the story. Fortunately, the mainstream approach is quickly becoming that of “structured collaborative storytelling.” Here, everyone wins or loses together—either the story is a good one or it falls flat. Well-developed and -played characters can improve a poor plot; conversely, a rich setting with an interesting plot can cover for two-dimensional characters. But the game only takes on the transcendence sought by its Players—it only becomes meaningful as something more than mere game, something closer to art—when Players and GM all do their jobs to the best of their ability and everyone’s benefit.

Stories can be long or short, they can be played in a single session of a few hours or stretched into many sessions over the course of months or years that create truly deed and epic narratives.

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[1]Thoughts about Dungeons & Dragons, RPGs and Sci-Fi/Fantasy as they relate to Christianity are (or will be) addressed in other posts.

[2] Much to my delight, creators of roleplaying games have brought us a wide variety of approaches to gaming, some quite avant-garde in pushing the envelope of what the genre of game can do. There’s far too much variety (and I have far too much to say about that variety) to address such things here. So, when I say “normal circumstances,” just know that I intend the most common approach used by current RPGs. There will always be variation.

What Tom Clancy’s The Division Teaches Us About Humanity

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I’m a big fan of Tom Clancy games in general, but The Division really hit a chord with me. I don’t usually devote much time to MMO games, but I’ve remained steadily involved with the game since its release back in March. This is partially because I have good friends to play it with; friends make everything better.

But this is not a review. Instead, I want to talk about some of my observations in the game.

If you’re not familiar, the game has a place called the “Dark Zone”, a smallpox-contaminated part of Manhattan quarantined from the rest of New York City. The Dark Zone is the game’s PvP (Player versus Player) area. Some of the toughest computer-controlled bad guys are in the Dark Zone, as are some of the best rewards. To eliminate these bad guys and reap the rewards, one typically needs to form a group with other players. Once you’ve grabbed the loot, you have to go to a special area and call in a helicopter to extract the items before you “own” them. They are contaminated, after all.

Before you’ve extracted items, any other player can kill you and steal those items. Lone wanderer players make easy targets to teams of other players and—especially when you get the drop on them—are often easier to kill than the non-player character bad guys.

This is supposed to be part of the draw of the game—the cat and mouse of stalking and evading other players, the team-on-team direct combat against player opponents and, most of all, the tension the system creates. There are few people you can actually trust, and I’ve had more than a few encounters where, randomly encountering another player, we both have to scope each other out, not wanting to fight, but unsure of the other’s intentions. That nervousness is in some way satisfying because it is so immersive; it brings you into post-disaster New York in a personal and experiential way. I like that.

On the other hand, particularly because I’m introverted and often avoid linking up with random players (only joining teams of people I actually know in real life), I often find myself navigating the Dark Zone by myself. Consequently, I often find myself getting killed and my stuff ganked because I’m outnumbered, outgunned, or simply stabbed in the back by an opportunist while I’m trying to defeat the Zone’s tough computer-controlled hostiles.

My time playing has taught me that there are three groups of people when it comes to the Dark Zone. The first is where I find myself, reluctant to “go rogue” to kill and steal from other players even when I’m in a group and confident I can get away with it. I’ve encountered only a few other players with this view. The second group is probably largest. They understand that this is a game—there are winners and losers, and those who play have agreed to the rules that govern the game. This group probably enjoys the game the most because they fully play out the game’s possibilities—sometimes going rogue and killing other players in ambushes or pitched battles. But they don’t strike me as the type who would probably act that way were the game real life. They know the difference in the stakes and consequences of a game versus the real thing.

The last group is the one that I find so simultaneously fascinating and infuriating. These are the bullies, those whose primary joy in the game is picking on players less powerful than themselves. These are the ones who, having killed you in an unfair fight (usually extremely so—four to one odds and they strike when you’re otherwise occupied) come up and stand next to your body to laugh and mock you until you’re able to respawn. These are players with malice aforethought.

At the end of the day, it’s still a game, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to make a presumption about a stranger’s moral capacity in the real world based on behavior in a digitally-manufactured world. On the other hand, I’m a believer that the anonymity of the internet (including multiplayer games) allows people a release from the social conventions that normally restrain their baser selves.

When playing the game (admittedly, perhaps more to relieve my own frustration than any objective reality) I am constantly reminded that maybe there really is a fine line between social order and the chaos of those with more power and less restraint.

Review: Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft

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A Great Course Taught by Professor Brooks Landon

In this thirteen-hour lecture series, Professor Brooks Landon guides us through the crafting of long sentences, long sentences that please the ear and capture the rhythms of speech and nature, that use free modifiers to add information to a sentence in ways that remain coherent to the reader, carefully contemplated and structured to maximum effect, whether suspensive sentences that delay their impact until the last moment or those that start with a bang from which they build; these are sentences that—when done well—shape the consciousness of the reader as she readers by carefully ordering a succession of thoughts and images while marrying substance and style.

See what I did there? It’s not a great example of the kinds of sentence that Professor Landon teaches in this course, but it does on a rudimentary level combine many of the techniques he discusses. The secret, of course, is doing it well.

I’m a huge fan of the Great Courses series. If you’re not familiar, Great Courses is a company that records—as you might imagine—great courses from highly-accomplished university professors. You can purchase courses as audio CDs, as DVDs (in some cases) or, and this is my personal favorite, as audiobooks through Audible. I don’t believe that Audible carries the full catalog of Great Courses, but their selection is broad and the price is lower than the alternative formats. Great Courses scratch the perpetual student itch I find myself constantly plagued by.

Free advertising aside, let’s talk about this course in particular. Upon explaining to K what I was listening to, her response was an emphatic, “Nerd!” The exclamation continued when I explained that the course contained thirteen hours of lectures on sentence-writing. But I own my nerdom and, besides, K knew what this was when she married me.

The foundational lectures of this course drew me in and, I think, were alone worth the price of admission. Prof. Landon argues that sentence structure is a matter of influencing consciousness. We know that words have power, and being able to hack people’s brains by writing seemed like a cool ability, so I was on board from the get-go.

After discussing the implied premises that sentences contain[1], briefly mentioning Noam Chomsky’s “deep structure theory”, and busting some myths about the primacy of the short sentence (take that Strunk & White!) Landon goes on to provide many practical techniques for lengthening sentences while maintaining or increasing readability. For Landon, well-written sentences provide more information, flow better and better structure the progression of ideas that move forward in steps than short sentences do.

The major technique Landon explains is the use of “free modifiers”, phrases that can be placed in (almost) any part of a sentence and remain grammatically correct. Once establishing the concept, he goes on to demonstrate advanced techniques using free modifiers, from suspensive sentences (and the various effects of different locations of a free modifier) to duple and triple rhythms as rhetorical and poetic tools.

Throughout the way, Landon provides numerous examples of the concepts he discusses—many from famous and well-respected wordsmiths but also some of his own or his students’ creations. Even more, he makes many references to other writers on the nature of writing, providing many additional resources for continuing to explore Landon’s ideas and good writing in general.

Like most writing techniques, the stylistic mechanisms preached by Landon are easy to learn but quite difficult to master. You’ll likely see me experimenting on this blog with certain of the techniques to develop my own proficiency with them.

Landon is well accomplished in his field and clearly passionate about good writing. And he sounds a bit like Jimmy Stewart, which made absorbing his lectures all the more amusing.

If, like me, you’re on the lookout to improve your writing game, this course represents a relatively small investment of time that could pay dividends in the long run. I highly recommend it.

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[1] For instance, in the first part of this sentence: (1) there are things called sentences, (2) there are things called premises, (3) sentences imply premises.

Review: Pawn

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Pawn by Aimée Carter

Audible Narration by Lameece Issaq

We find ourselves at some time in the near future, after the fall of the United States led to the rise of the Hart family as the dictators over an America subject to economic collapse and resource shortages. As a result, all citizens take a test on the day that they turn seventeen. The results of the test determines their number—one through six, with sevens being reserved for the Hart family—which thus determine their futures. Fours occupy the middle class, with fives and sixes serving as the administrators of the government and management of production. Threes serve as skilled or semi-skilled labor in maintenance jobs and other services needed to keep the country operating. Twos live in poverty, working those jobs too dangerous or taxing to give to anyone of a higher number. The ones—well, let’s just say that no one wants to be a one. The availability of goods and services is restricted by a citizen’s number, and those who break the law or attempt to buck the system are sent “elsewhere.”

Into this situation comes “extra” (second child) seventeen-year-old Kitty Doe. She has just taken her test and had her result, a three, tattooed and scarified on the back of her neck as with all other citizens. She has orders to travel from Washington, D.C. to Denver, where she will serve in sewer maintenance for her entire life. She struggles to find a way to ignore her fate, hoping to hold out for at least a month so that her boyfriend Benji can take his test and they can figure out a way to stay together (it being expected that Benji will be a six).

By a strange twist of events, Kitty finds herself inducted into the circle of the Hart family, where she becomes a pawn in the interfamilial strife of the family’s members. As a result, she discovers that little of what government tells the citizenry to ensure their docility is true. She has a choice: fight for the people or go along with her puppetmasters to ensure her own safety—and the safety of those she loves.

Pawn is a young-adult (read: teenager) novel. As you’ve probably surmised, it bears a striking resemblance to The Hunger Games—post-apocalyptic America ruled by a dictatorship, a female protagonist with a feline-sounding name being forced to choose whether to become part of the system or struggle to end it and, of course, questions of romance and love with several potential suitors. I believe that this also coincides with much of the Divergent series, but I know too little about those works to be sure.

I would say that Pawn is slightly more adult in tone than The Hunger Games, as early in the story Kitty seeks to sell her virginity to the highest bidder at a brothel in a plan to make ends meet until she and Benji can find a more-permanent solution to her “three.”

I found Pawn to be an enjoyable read (or listen, as the case may be). Kitty and the members of the Hart family are well-developed, with complex and sometimes conflicting motivations sometimes driving them to do the unexpected. Over time, as Kitty discovers them, we learn the history and secrets of the Harts, seeing just how deep the deception, manipulation, and spite goes. The close proximity of the themes and general thrust of the plot to The Hunger Games series ultimately does not detract from the novel, as plenty of unexpected plot twists and a focus on character interactions gives Pawn a different place within the subgenre of (perhaps Feminist?) Teen Dystopian Drama that both works occupy.

The politics of the nation and the far-reaching consequences of the actions taken by Kitty and the Harts remain largely on the outskirts of the story, almost a MacGuffin to drive the more important familial politics upon which the story turns. By keeping things focused on the personal conflicts, the story manages to largely brush aside its lack of development of a believable setting.

My only other significant criticism is that Kitty’s male “love interests” (it should be mentioned that the romantic subplot of this novel provides an undercurrent rather than a central force) remain less developed than the other characters. Lennox Creed, who plays an essential role within the plot, never really gave me enough to understand him or believe his motivations. Benji proved even worse for me—Carter writes him such that he is uninteresting and of little consequence to the story except as someone who Kitty desperately wants to protect. The fact that Issaq voices him as an oafish dullard doesn’t help.

The characters of Lennox and Benji are forgivable if they are meant to serve as a critique of the writing of female characters by male authors in similar tropes of fiction (i.e., the need to save the girlfriend, who appears to be entirely helpless to take care of herself). I can’t be sure, however, that such a pointed critique was intended and that they are not simply sloppily written.

Pawn remains at least moderately interesting throughout its twists-and-turns, though I will not be spending any time on the rest of the series. For a teen audience, I think that this is a solid book that bridges the gap between the “classic” literature that most of us studied in high-school and the ultimately more interesting works of fiction we read in high school on our own time (instead of what we were supposed to be reading for class) or found in our adulthood.

Review: Under the Amoral Bridge

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By Gary A. Ballard

Audible Narration by Joe Hempel

A cyberpunk backdrop of 2020’s Los Angeles sets the stage for Under the Amoral Bridge. This novella follows the exploits and misadventures of one Artemis Bridge, a former hacker-cum-fixer linking seekers with hard-to-find or not-so-legal goods and services, all the while trying to stay above any ethical quandary about his profession by never touching the goods or services directly. When a piece of information that could determine the results of the first election in Los Angeles since corporation Chronosoft purchased the right to govern the city, Bridge knows that he’s unwillingly been inserted into a game of life and death.

Bridge reminds me vaguely of Lenny Nero in the film Strange Days (one of my favorites and one of few arguably mainstream films in the cyberpunk genre). While Nero’s character gives you a man of some conviction struggling to survive an increasingly corrupt world—with a likeable personality to boot—Bridge simply is. He’s not sardonically witty enough to amuse the reader with his cynicism, too self-interested to hold our interest as an exemplum of the “man against the world” theme, and too petty for us to pay him much respect. After meeting him in the world of this novella, I find him an ultimately-forgettable example of the all-too-common lowlife hustler that appears in cyberpunk.

Had Under the Amoral Bridge been written and published in the 80’s, I would probably find it more difficult to be so hard on the story. But, the book first appeared in 2009. Coming so late to a genre so well-explored in print, film, anime, roleplaying games and video games, a modern cyberpunk book needs to bring something new to the table. I’m not saying that no one can write good cyberpunk anymore (Richard K. Morgan wrote Altered Carbon, a masterpiece of both cyberpunk and noir, in 2003), but we’re well past the point of using a plot arc known by wrote with a cardboard façade of corporate control, ubiquitous technology, topped with a healthy dose of paranoia, slapping it all together and throwing it out like it’s something special.

Looking at Amazon, the book enjoys pretty positive reviews, so I ought to defend my general lack of enthusiasm for the work. I discussed the flatness of the protagonist above, but it’s the rigid and predictable nature of the plot that really gave me fits.

Cyberpunk descends in many ways from noir: the gritty feel, the moral ambiguity, the selfish motivations of the bad guys, the protagonist who we cannot expect to succeed. This doesn’t mean that every cyberpunk story must be a mystery, although many are—again Altered Carbon comes to mind, as does Snowcrash. The best writing within a genre uses the conventions of the genre, but not rigidly, and not always expectedly.

Instead, Under the Amoral Bridge follows convention too closely, making everything feel caricatured. As I stated above, the cyberpunk background of the story feels too canned and too well-trod, coming across like an original Star Trek set piece that will topple if pushed too hard. To be fair, there are a few places where convention is toyed with: the role of the “femme fatale” (if this story really has one) is a relatively unattractive woman who only truly steps into the role when masked behind her net avatar—there’s interesting stuff about identity that could have been explored here, but the opportunity is lost. Then there’s Artemis’ bodyguard, affectionately referred to as Aristotle. He’s a large black man with a penchant for philosophizing and as much brains as brawns, both of which seem to be considerable. I can’t help but think of him being played by Ving Rhames as the story plays through my mind. Aristotle is by far my favorite character in the novella (perhaps the only one I actually liked), and his relationship with Artemis has enough nuance to break away from being a half-hearted twist on convention (as most of the other minor tweaks throughout the novella come across).

Ultimately, the story plays by the numbers, remains relatively predictable to the end, and contains plot “twists” that the characters themselves should have been able to see coming. This culminates in shameless exposition by the bad guy at the end to make sure that the reader gets what’s happened—even though it’s already painfully clear to everyone except Bridge himself.

The work leaves a bit to be desired stylistically as well. In particular, I found myself often distracted by the use of the passive voice where just a smidge of effort could have crafted a stronger sentence. That said, the craft of writing proves exceedingly difficult, and a less-skilled wordsmith can be forgiven if she tells a powerful and satisfying story. The author skilled in technique but without solid storytelling skills is not so lucky. I see a potential in Ballard to rise to the occasion, and it is quite possible that his later works prove that he has improved his technique and storytelling, but I have only read this small part of his corpus.

In full disclosure, I found that the narration of this book on Audible lacked as well, and that might have contributed to my rather harsh assessment of it. The narrator mispronounced a few words, and his accents and voices for characters failed to bring them to life, only adding to their cardboard cut-out feel.

Overall, this is not a bad book. But neither is it extraordinary in any way. With a world so full of amazing works of fiction (and more created every day) and lives so bereft of time in which to enjoy them, I have to recommend picking up something else before Under the Amoral Bridge, unless you want to continue in the Bridge Cycle (currently a four book series) in hopes that Ballard constructs something more grandiose upon this rather plain foundation.