Make-believe is the game: text-world theory and RPGS

I was chatting recently with The Revenant's Quill who has written a post about the "unspoken mechanic" of most RPGs: creating and manging the shared model wherein the game takes place. 

His post, and some of the resulting chat on Discord, interestingly matches a lot with the ideas from a theory I read as a literature student: text-world theory. Of all the theory I have ever read, this one captured in Joanna Gavin's book, is perhaps best placed to describe RPGs. 

The feeling of being so immersed in a text-world as almost to lose sense of who and where we are is familiar to just about anyone who has ever read a novel [or played any RPG]. We can populate our text-worlds with living, breathing, thinking characters, carrying out complex physical and mental activities, in authentic material surroundings.

I'm going to briefly describe it in this post as a prelude in other posts to thinking about how it applies to RPGs. 

Let's start with a simple sentence from Oz Browning's OZR: 

'A strange key glints beneath slimy water'

What you have just read is a text-world. It might seem a bit excessive to call this a "world" but when we apply some of the ideas of text-world theory we can see why. 

The main idea is that language is processed via a process of simulation or modelling within the mind. Essentially, your brain creates an imaginative space where it combines 'world-building elements' (the words: a strange key, slimy water, glints, beneath). This allows you to think, criticise and reflect on that imaginative space.

In order to build that text-world (the imaginative space) you draw on the "context" of the discourse, meaning the actual real-world communication.  This context can be literal, such as in: 'the screen you are looking at is super cool'. When you read that, your brain creates atext-world where "the screen" in question is the one in front of you.

However, if I write: 'the martian spaceship descended beneath the iron-clouds', your brain draws from a wider context of "knowledge": experiential, cultural, learned, emotional and so forth, rather than something that is part of your actual environment. This often what a lot of gaming relies on as it also includes knowledge of genre conventions. 

The hall is dark above the trees.

When we do this, we do not remain separate or outside of the text-world. Instead, our brain projects our origo into the text-world. The origo is our central point of perception, it is the strange part of us that allows us to say "me" even though we could never physically touch that point. I think of the formless camera in a first person shooter. 

This experience of being inside a text-world, is the feeling of being engrossed in a film, or losing onself in a book. According to text-world theory, this is actually actually happening, our "me" leaves the real-world and escapes to the text-world. Within that we are actually experiencing a sensory and conceptual simulation of that world.  

It is worth pointing out that this isn't some passive process of "reading" - it is an inherently creative process of world-building that will be unique to each person. For me, I think this is the key part of RPGs: we are hoping to spend time creating and playing inside the text-worlds. For me, this greater emphasis on the shared playful aspect of text-worlds in RPGs might be better captured by using an alternate term of game-world. 

Due to the mind's power to draw on a huge range of context to create them, these game-worlds can be created from very little.

Let's return to the quote and think about this in action.

I am actually only going to describe how text-world theory might understand the creation of a world only from the first phrase of  'strange key'; I invite you to think about the other words in the same way if you want. 

The key is "strange". Strange implies that the key is different from the norm. Now, I know that the OZR adventure is a piece of low fantasy. Drawing from the context of my genre-knowledge, I would guess a normal key to be big, made of metal, with quite a simple design. 

That feels like a small visual library to draw on, but the text or game-world is not just visual. It is sensual in all aspects. I could focus on the smell of the key, the taste of the metal, the feel in my hands and so on. It is also conceptual or knowledge based. What other threads are there when I consider the word 'key'.

I could think about the things the keys go into: types of lock, the types of things that are locked: chests, cloister doors, palace screens. There is also the idea of why they are used, the sense of what is being protected or imprisoned. I could think of cultural and social conventions: how they are stored, valued, and used. 

From text-world theory's perspective this is all happening unconsciously when I read the word key. I am drawing on the almost limitless knowledge that a mind possesses in order to generate this one part of the text-world in this case. I could possibly draw an entire planet from the associated threads of this one sentence. 

So, to return to the idea of 'strange' I chose an image of a contemporary yale key with a keyring as though for a newly purchased property. This would be strange in the context of this text-world.

"You see a group of welders working on jerry cans"

There are a few things to emphasise with this. The creation of text-worlds doesn't require a "good imagination", it is an innate feature of language processing in each person. There is also a sense of uniqueness with each text-world, the context of knowledge we are drawing on with is unique to each individual. 

The other thing is that the text-worlds are communicative. They are created and changed in order to achieve a real-world communicative purpose. 

This, for me, is a key point. In RPGs we communicate the text or game-world for the purpose of creating and then "playing in" the game-world. We create game-worlds in order to create game-worlds. This, at least for me, gives a sense that the 'game' of RPGs is to create, explore and interact within these game-worlds.  

For me, this is what the FKR methodology is about (though definitions do vary). It recognises that if the way the game is played (the way the game-worlds are created and explored) is satisfactory to the table, then the game is being played. 

I hope you enjoyed a little theory. I'm probably going to stay on this theme for a little while longer as I have seen a few other blogposts that I think this applies to. I also want to do a bit of text-world analysis of some actual plays and see if there is anything to learn from its use. 

Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts about this theory!