Oh man. Yes. I am in complete agreement.

I think that the most useful comparisons for gaming are to improvisational performances, whether it's improv comedy, jam sessions, cooking for friends, or what have you. Any after-the-fact description should bog down in "you hadda be there", and we need to encourage skepticism that any textual or verbal recitation will get at the essence of how the experience felt, good and/or bad.

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You say "nobody does X", and "you never hear about Y" in this a lot, but I've seen people do X and heard about Y in many an actual play report -- though usually I've seen that happen on the Forge.

I think you're a lot harder on the idea of whether or not these things have value than is warranted. Yes, we should be skeptical about whether or not an edited, subjective medium is accurate about what it conveys -- but that's true about EVERYTHING we get in text, and is not particularly unique for actual play reports.

But this I'll grant: this is the "story later" effect, where the story of a game emerges in how it is retold rather than how it occurs. I'm kind of fine with that. How a play performance is going matters to me while I'm watching it, but how I'll remember it is very much affected in its story as I tell it to myself and others afterwards. (Forgies could then move forward from this observation and start talking about the Story Now imperative inherent in Narrativism, but I do not feel qualified to do so as an at-best marginally Forge oriented dude.)

We could be making the same observations about old cartoons. Thundarr the Barbarian is pretty mediocre as I might experience it today -- but in the retelling of my experience of it in my childhood, it is awesome. And I don't have a problem with that.

Edited at 2008-06-22 04:18 pm (UTC)

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Well, part of my reaction is largely formed by someone admitting to me that one of the Forge APs of a game they played was bullshit. The Heroquest game, which I both witnessed and read the AP for, was similarly inaccurate.

I do think it's more than the difficulty of expressing things in text. I can for example trust book reviews more than AP reports. In the context of theory is that "story now" is not really "story now." It's "stuff I could describe in text faster." That's why it uses literary models instead of oral ones and why I think it's incredibly destructive to a proper understanding of gameplay. Using words to describe other words really does work better than using words to describe things that are not words.

I mean, as cool as our memories of old cartoons were, the lesson is not that we were wrong. The lesson is that there was a dynamic context in which we absorbed them that is not amenable to being fixed by text, while remaining accurate.

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I dunno, man. Rob Donoghue just posted an AP account of the D&D game I was in yesterday and while he got some of the facts wrong, the conclusions and observations he makes are still very relevant for the game and for my play experience.

http://rob-donoghue.livejournal.com/303263.html

Even with all the inaccuracies, I still think there's a lot of value there, and it's pretty hard for me not to read your reaction as coming out of just a little crankiness. Which is not to say it's not valid, but ... I dunno. It's like, a lot of folks out there aren't very good at writing. So you blame the practice of writing, rather than blaming the folks doing the writing. Doesn't scan for me.

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I'm not saying APs are totally useless. They're often entertaining and even read wrongly, can provide an extra bit of input into one's own evolving perspective -- but they don't really seem to do this by really sharing anyone else's experience. Instead, we interpret the raw text for ourselves. Now I could go all pomo and say this is inevitable with all texts, but the shift in medium really does matter, I think. That does make the practice of writing about RPG sessions a problem, and even if one can get some use out of the result, I'm skeptical that these work as real representations of game sessions.

Sometimes it's somebody's fault, but the limitations of the medium matter.

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Somebody's fault or nobody's? Having a parse error there.

If anyone is reading actual play reports as a "real representation of game sessions", they are practicing self delusion. This has always been true, so I'm now left with a "... what is the point of this observation, again?" feeling.

Ah, well. I should bow out, because I keep not liking this conversation, but it's proving far too elusive to pin down why, and I'm not sure that if I did it would be constructive to my gaming life.

I like actual play reports as entertainments and reminders and wonderfully faulty records. I like historical dramatizations for the same reasons. I don't think it needs to change. I think readers who react to them without an appropriate awareness of their fictional nature do.

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Somebody's. I'm saying that sometimes poor communications skills are a big problem, sure, but even good writers can't really overcome issues with the medium of AP descriptions,no matter how god their skills and intentions are.


If anyone is reading actual play reports as a "real representation of game sessions", they are practicing self delusion. This has always been true, so I'm now left with a "... what is the point of this observation, again?" feeling.

There sure would be no point if APs were routinely examined in that light, but they aren't. I'm glad to see we're in agreement, but when I read reactions to APs (like the thread Jim Henley linked to) we're not seeing a critical evaluation or an acknowledgment of these limitations. We're seeing community affirmation gestures that are pretty credulous.

I don't see how we can really treat it as assumed and dealt with, then. Plus, we already know that authentic reporting is a known and debated issue in other artistic/social fields, so I don't see how games get a goodwill pass.

Still, they are often fun to read and can spark ideas. No debate there.

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Tossing out a first-person example that I think relates to some of Malcolm's points.

I played in the trollbabe session described here. Note how impressed Ron was with the "stick puppet" plotline, and that one reader declares that this thread made him determined to buy Trollbabe. The stick-puppet plot line bored and annoyed me no end. My recollection of conversation with the other players, and observed behaviors around the table and the fact that the campaign sputtered to an end within weeks, lead me to believe that the others felt substantially the same way. (Though it's to my point that I could be wrong about their feelings, actually.)

But it would have been rude to barge into the thread and say, "Actually, the stick-puppet cult feels like a complete detour from the things I created my character for," so I didn't. As a result, readers of that thread have a distorted view of what that Trollbabe campaign was actually like.

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I gotta put some of the blame at your doorstep, then, unless you don't share Malcolm's reservations about the "distortion" in actual play.

If the problem is that actual play reports don't provide the full picture, absent of players speaking the hell up, it amounts to an expectation that the poster needs to be telepathic, or at least very, very good at reading people.

From where I stand, that makes it a social issue (players not speaking up when they didn't like something) and not a problem with the practice itself.

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But see, I don't think the distinction you're trying to draw in the last sentence is as clean as you think. Do I get "blame" for shying from possible unpleasantness and confrontation in the linked thread? Sure! Is shying from confrontation and unpleasantness a unique failing of mine? No. It's a widespread social phenomenon. Because it's a widespread social phenomenon, it will frequently distort "the full picture."

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Yep, it sure will frequently distort the full picture. Society really needs to get the fuck over itself.

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I *ran* that session of Trollbabe.

I have almost no recollection whatsoever of the events of that session. It sounds cool to me, but I don't remember it at all. I posted it as more of a "here's a way I managed to wing it when I was caught unprepared" than "here was a great session" and certainly not "here was a great campaign" because it wasn't a great campaign by any stretch of the imagination.

Jim's boredom and annoyance makes me sad. :(

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I couldn't agree with this more. I do think there's value to "Actual Play" in that it seems to be a way of recording what you, personally, remember from the experience and how you reduce it to be describable and shareable. I'm fine with having "Actual Play" as a secondary genre related to improvisational performance. What really bugs me is when people talk about "Actual Play" as though it had something to do with play itself. It's mostly just post-hoc invention.

One of the things I'm really interested in is finding a way to archive and analyze play experience as-it-happens. Right now my theory is to mike & record each player, transcribe it into parallel columns, and then have each player annotate the transcript with what they can describe about their personal and internal experience. It's a lot harder than writing what passes for "Actual Play" these days, but i think it's far more worthwhile.

If nothing else, I don't really think people can learn much from "Actual Play" reports that they didn't already know - because "Actual Play" reports are precisely about recording and analyzing only what's salient to you in the first place. Bah.

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For those who don't follow indie RPG discussion boards, like myself, what is the definition of "Actual Play" and "the experience of the game"?

A convention game and a playtest are both highly dissimilar to an ongoing game because an ongoing game has comfort levels and/or assumed interaction levels between players and characters whereas a convention or playtest has it only between players at best. The recording of a gaming session only records one of the senses that can be triggered at the table (making it more difficult to record what took place). Story replicated between near-identical parties takes different directions because the experience varies with the life abilities of each player put behind a fictional construct of the character.

To put it differently, I don't think we as a race have to tools to analyze interpersonal chemistry and explain it. The ineffable interaction of a good game is indeed "you had to be there". I don't know if we'll ever be able to recreate that away from the experience as it happens.

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Sure, we will always miss stuff, but we have to potential to miss *less* by destroying the assumed need for a unitary shared play experience. Dave Brookshaw's mage AP on RPGnet stands out because of commentary from other players and the way he explores multiple frames of reference. Ultimately, though, we now have the technology to per into other people's games better than we did.

Edited at 2008-06-23 02:05 am (UTC)

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Those frames of reference are the point, as far as I'm concerned. I began writing Actual Play threads for what I take to be the normal reasons - a desire to showcase the niche game I'd just bought, a need for some kind of note system to aid my own faulty memory and a certain amount of showing off.

I've long since realised that I get far more detailed examination of my games from my own group by sending them a transcribed audio recording to annotate than I do by simply asking "what did you guys think about that?". For some reason, a player who tells me to my face that a session was wonderful will admit over email a week later that they thought it was railroaded. And I'm just not socially perceptive enough to spot the discontent unless it's pointed out. I'm busy and distracted - I'm running a game.

That's the attraction to me - writing my Mage APs takes a lot of work, but the knowledge, even delayed, of what my players were experiencing is worth the effort if it makes my GMing better. Over the years, I've been trying to refine the way the sessions are captured to emphasise accuracy. Currently, we record the entire session as an mp3 and I transcribe it, leaving out the worst 15-minute digressions into pop culture.

There is always the urge to whitewash, and gloss over problems in the game. I have to make the effort to say, in my opening notes for a session "I had an off night this time". It's worth doing, though.

I'd just put the recordings up on the web if it were my decision alone, maybe with explanatory notes edited in, but my players draw the line. Already there is the assumption in our "social contract" that when I'm GM the game will be dissected at length on the internet.

-Dave Brookshaw

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I've listened to a number of episodes of Mel White's Virtual Play podcast. And I find that when I've also played the same game that what I hear of their game experience has a high degree of congruence with my own experience.

Yes, perhaps Actual Play posts, somewhat contorted into dramatic retellings by our want of story, aren't directly reflective of the "actual" play experience. Instead they're an articulation of immediate reactions, frustrations, enthusiasm, later reflective thought, and intensity of appreciation for the actual experience. And when the actual experience is as congruent across groups as I've found it to be, then the Actual Play post does represent real value. I may not be able to mentally construct a model of what play of an untried game will be like from an AP post. But I know from the post some of the range and quality of reaction, frustration, enthusiasm, and reflection the game represents for me.

Paul

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And besides, the best actual play posts aren't the ones that aim to be wholly comprehensive and reflective evaluations of the experience of play. They're the ones where the poster zeroes in on something they learned, something unique about the play experience, or some issue they solved. The best actual play posts are the ones where the poster and players are operating not at the level of consumers, but at the level of vision expansion and design.

Paul

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What makes you think one mode is "consumerist" and another one isn't? I mean, either perspective is based on a relationship with a product. One mode isn't more passive than the other, though it may involve selling yourself to some meta-textual set of ideas like Forge theory or D&D fandom. Hell, promoting this pretense is one of the primary goals of Web 2.0-based marketing, but it is still the winnowing away of aspects of what really happened, so even though a sense of product/scene loyalty may provide a sense of satisfaction, it's still got the whiff of bullshit.

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It sounds like you're wanting actual play posts to be something the folks who started the activity never intended them to be. They were never meant to be unwinnowed representations of the play experience. The winnowing was the point. The tradition of actual play posts comes from the efforts of folks to examine their play and share what they'd learned and accomplished.

Paul

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Dude, I was there. AP came from:
1) A lack of grounded game discussion.
2) Doubts that some guys who talked about RPGs a lot really played them much. In at least one case, these doubts proved to be correct, but the tradition never helped uncover it.
3) The development of the dogmatic position that mainstream game designers/writers/players didn't really play RPGs much. AP was put forth to express that you/we were a different breed.

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It might well have been fathered by those beliefs. But in practice it was as I describe, an effort by folks to examine, understand, talk about, and experiment around their own actual play.

Paul

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Well, one obvious problem is that play experience is not really "congruous across groups." There are groups that buy into the social contract rhetoric to create a sameness of experience, and charitable readings that derive from a sense of scene affiliation. The former is a real aspect of play, but from my point of view it pretty much exists to adulterate the medium for easy community digestion. The latter should not be counted at all.

Plus of course, describing an AP as a reflective exercise alone ignores the great number of them that aim to represent play as it happens, and besides, demonstrate that they aren't really descriptions of "actual play."

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agreed. I've been tinkering with a sort of theory of RPGs that define what they are and how they work, specifically with the aim of distinguishing them from fiction, public performance, and of course simple board games. I put everything that happens in play into either the immersion bucket or the decision-making bucket; actually describing the scenes is kind of banal, and as you point out, misleading.

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My AP's are pretty faithful to what actually happens. I only mentioned rules-stuff when it makes enough of an impact for me to notice.

And incidentally, I'm not blackhatmatt over here on LJ. :)

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Heh. I forgot.

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Put aside the issue of posting illuminating tales about your game to online forums, and tell me if your criticisms don't apply to how your own group decides what actually took place in the game world last session. The "recap" is the one actual play report you always have to make, and having all your players pitch in during the telling just means that the unreliable narrative is fabricated by consensus. At least that's my take.

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No, different criticisms apply to those, because AP reports are text, and recaps and verbal, conversational, rely on group contribution, and can be changed on the fly as perception of the past changes, while a text AP is one person's fixed recollection of a single perspective. Recaps are also bereft of the motive of pleasing anyone outside the group, where many APs are driven or at least influenced by community affirmation motives outside the group.

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