Yudhishthira’s Dice

Introduction to Genre Theory

Everyone knows what a genre is, right? It’s a way of dividing up literature, putting it into categories like western if it has cowboys and SF if it takes place in the future, right?

Well… from the standpoint of Genre Theory that’s only part of the story, and one that is often inaccurate to boot. So, before I go further into the RP theory part of this article I’m going to have to take a few moments to explain what I mean when I use the word “genre” and why it can be a useful word to use, especially when analyzing GNS and playstyles. Also, note that I’m going to be talking about things in terms of rhetorical Genre Theory, and so other schools of thought may say other things about the issues I’m addressing. Many people, for example, put a big emphasis between “genre” and “media” — whereas I’m going to talk about media as just another division of genre. This isn’t to be absolutist, its simply to be coherent.

In terms of Genre Theory genre is a classification of material (”texts” in rhetorical academic circles) that is socially constructed as part of people’s attempt to frame, interpret, and understand the material. It is, in essence, a conceptual framework that helps enable people to use intertextual comparisons in order to understand the current text both internally and in terms of how it relates to the world around it. Genres are defined both in terms of the similarities between texts within the grouping and in terms of the differences of the texts within the grouping, because the series of repetitions and differences is one of the primary ways that people build classifications and use them to cement understanding.

Okay, that was brutal to anyone who hasn’t had Barthes and O’Sullivan shoved in their left ear by sadistic rhetoric and semiotics professors. So let me try to break it down into some easier to follow ways.

First off, it means that a genre is not an absolute. They are based on factors of social understanding and not scientific classifications like those used in biology. As Steve Neale says, “genres are not systems: they are processes of systematization.” What this means is that some people may call Little House on the Prairie a Western and others may say it isn’t. Neither is objectively correct, both are simply using the genre terms to explain how they view and understand the material. In addition a genre work that plays against genre expectations can still be seen as being in the genre, because it is specifically using the tropes of the genre as a way to construct and communicate its meaning.

This is because the people that define genre are “all of us.” Now, who that “us” is and how democratically that definition is split up among “us” can vary a lot between situations. In movies, for example, movie critics opinions of what genre a movie falls into are probably going to have a lot more to do with its public classification than Joe Bob of Brooksbirdge Alabama’s will. However, two hundred years after a work has been written and entered the public consciousness the weight of public opinion on a work may change the genre it is seen as being a part of. (This happened with Shakespeare.)

The key to it is, as Robert Hodge said, “genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them.” So as to if LHotP is a western or not is going to depend on who has the social weight to make decisions about that at the given moment that you’re trying to understand what LHotP is, means, and where it fits in your view of the world. Which yes, also means that part of genre classification is personal – as the construction of meaning is always split between the world and the group and the self.

Second, it means that genre cannot be determined by a simple listing of surface factors that populate works in the genre. So just because someone is wearing Stetson, riding a horse, and shooting a gun does not inherently make the work a Western. It takes more than that to really situate a work as a Western. However, at the same time many genres are heavily signaled by their surface factors — so the moment you see a six shooter and a cowboy hat your brain will probably, at some level, start trying to figure out if you’re dealing with a western. How important this is depends on the surface symbol and how central it is to a genre. A cowboy hat and six shooter have a lot more value to one genre than, say, lipstick has to another. So while you can’t fully separate the surface symbols of a genre from a genre, you can’t fully rely upon them to situate it either. After all a Garth Brook’s video is, in most people’s mind, not a Western, even if it is country western.

Third, in Genre Theory the “genres” we’re talking about aren’t only the standard literary and cinematic ones you’re probably used to thinking about. Western is a genre, certainly, as is Science Fiction. But movie is a genre as well, as is novel. This is because the medium of a work has a vast effect on the way the work is classified, understood, and systematized in our world. Just as you can go into a bookstore and look up “western” vs. “horror” you can go into a WalMart and look up “DVD” vs. “Book.” And if that breaks your brain, some rhetoricians extend the meaning of genre even further to include nearly all types of communication that are systematized (which, arguably, is all of them).

To give an example of this, I’d heard it argued in the past that a prescription is a genre. Yea, sounded funny to me at first too. Then I went to India and got a prescription from a doctor there while I was having allergic reactions to stuff in the air. When I went to look for the prescription the next day I had trouble finding it, my eyes passed over it three times before I realized it was right in front of me. The reason for this is I was looking for a prescription – you know, something written on a doctors pad with (usually) letterhead, official stamps and times, and the doctors signature, probably on a piece of paper of a size between a postcard and a half sheet of paper. All my life that’s what a prescription looked like. This, however, was a scrawl of the names of some medicine on a blank sheet of A4 paper. No signature, no specific numbers of pills, no letterhead or date or anything. So even though everything that mattered was there (it was a note from a doctor that would get me medicine from a pharmacist) because it had so many differences from my idea of the “genre” of a prescription I couldn’t recognize it when I wasn’t consciously thinking about it.

Now the thing that ties all of this together in Genre Theory, and the reason anyone thinks this crazy crap is important, is that under this model looking at how and why people construct genres tells you a lot about what they value, how they construct meaning, and the ways in which they communicate. At the less ethereal edge of such studies people have spent a lot of time learning how genres help us communicate, share information, and work together to build meaning and collaborate on communication and creative endeavors.

Which brings us at long, long last to….

GNS and Genre Theory

If you’ve stuck around this long it should come as no surprise to you that I’m about to suggest that GNS are, in fact, genres. Specifically, they are genres of play direction. Surprise! Now what does that actually mean and why am I wasting your time in saying it at such length?

First, I am specifically calling them genres of play direction because they are genres about how we structure and understand the play of the game at the creative and social level, rather than the content genre of the game or the genre of creativity we’re using. Our genre of creativity, we mostly agree, is “Roleplaying Game.*” Our genres of content are things with the more familiar genre labels: Western, Horror, Sci-Fi, etc. GNS aren’t about those.

Also, GNS aren’t (directly) linked to specific techniques that are used in play, in much the same way that literary genres aren’t directly linked to surface content. Shared narration, for example, does not make a game Narrativist – it might be a clue pointing towards it, but in and of itself is not a defining feature or even particularly good clue as to Nar play. Ron Edwards recently put it this way:

We are talking about whatever goal/priority/agenda is shared among all of you at the table, and mutually reinforced throughout the rises and falls of play… My take is that, in discussion of our own actual play, we always tend to focus on the distinctions and differences among us, which is why people are always asking me if Bob scratches his ass during play and Jane doesn’t, isn’t that some kind of CA clash? The answers you get to direct questioning about goals will vary, because people are always focusing on style and technique, not on expressed/active goals and shared priorities.

I recommend looking over my discussion with Levi and the bicycle racing analogy that seemed to work so well for him. If you ask bicycle racers why they do it or what they want, they can potentially go on about all manner of wild extrapolations or focusing on some technical or organizational detail - completely missing the fact that they are all, actually, engaged in racing against one another. It’s so obvious to them that it presents no target for reflection…

You will find that a CA, if present, operates more like a “value system,” or a context for standards that apply in some way to all parts of the Big Model in action. Another way to look at this is to say, “What is so functional (consistently fun) about this activity that this group continues to play this game together?”

So what we’re looking at isn’t ways to all have cowboy guns together, or even to all play immersive together. What we are looking at is a way to build a shared understanding of the goals and boundaries of play and communication in play that results in a game that we are all playing together, working at one and the same time towards the same goal. They become genres because they give a set of forms, tropes, and materials the systematization of which gives guidance and understanding to how we structure play.

In that mode I have to argue that GNS have been very successful for a lot of people. GNS genres give valid, functional ways to play. They build shared understand and so give a thing to play with or off of that gives coherence. They give us, in short, a way to systematize our understanding of play in a way that lets un know how to use it to accomplish specific goals and actions as well as the limitations of what we can and cannot do as part of the game.

Want to know why it is so important that we have these genres, why, in my opinion, it has been worth the sound and fury around their discussions to get to the definitions we’re now developing? Well let me refer to an article by Thomas Erickson about people collaboratively writing limericks on the internet, and why it was possible for strangers to get on and quickly start writing poetry together. He says:

Limericks are a genre. As a consequence, they have a regular form with well understood patterns of rhymes and meter; their content is less well-defined, although they are often about people and they are often funny, or at least absurd; and while perhaps classified as poetry or verse, their purpose is primarily entertainment… Because limericks are a genre, most people understand these things. All that they really need, in addition, is to understand the turn-taking protocol, and once that is grasped, everyone knows what can be done. At almost any point in the conversation, it is possible to say where the conversation is with respect to its goal, and to understand what must be done next to move it in that direction (or to disrupt it!).

Genre is useful because it shifts the focus from issues such as the nature and degree of relationship among “community members”, to the purpose of the communication and its regularities of form and substance. To the extent that people understand a genre - what it’s for, how it can be used to accomplish particular actions, and what allowable moves are - they are able to participate in coordinated, coherent interaction within it.

That sounds pretty much like what Ron has said about GNS. They move the game from being about what each person does to “what we are doing together” and they give regularities and understanding that allow the people at the table to do it all together. They form a genre of play expectations and goals that allow us to work together to build coorditnated, coherent interaction.

Now, an RPG is obviously more complicated than writing a limerick. However, that only increases the need for people to have a goal, structure, and social focus that allows them to move forward together rather than pulling against each other in different directions. G, N, and S all allow for such a goal, give that structure of play that allows us to know where the “conversation” of the game is and to understand what must be done in order to move it in a given direction.

The thing about it is that, in my view, GNS are not three exclusive ways of doing this. They are simply the three most publically developed ways of doing this. I see them as modes of play that have been communicated, codified, and given coherence and explination — but I also don’t see them as being essential nodes of contact that are the only way to play. Just as you can find a lot of genres between a poem and a novel, and off to either side, I think there is the potential to find other genres around GNS.

For example, there is the possibility that individual groups of people working together for a long time (Communities of Practice) need such over-riding genres less. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, they know each other and so may be able to build coherent play based on mutual understanding. If the members of the group are either willing to share time or have a strong sense of negative capability they may never develop a genre of play direction, but still have functional play. Sure, it’s “genre incoherent” but if the result is fun for everyone, then its their choice to go with it. There may be “wasted energy” as they move in different directions, lacking that coordinated, coherent interaction - but not everyone seems to need that. These groups could be seen, according to Erickson’s definition above, to be playing genre-less, or at least genre-light, and so they don’t have the same structure to guide the coordinated effort towards a common goal.

However, and more importantly in my eyes, building a joint language based around common group practices with shared goals over any length of time will, I argue, lead to the development of a new genre of play specific to that group. I know that, for example, my Exalted play with Mo, Nicole, and Gary was a thing very specific to us and not always recognizable as the same game that other Exalted players were experiencing around their tables. And yet if we were to sit down and play another such game we’d be able to do it quickly and easily, because we developed a genre of play direction. At the same time, however, I have never been able to comfortably fit what we did in that game into a GNS slot. It was a “hybrid” game as far as I can tell. However, when a hybrid game becomes a way to play in and of itself, hasn’t it actually become its own genre? Its own way of systematizing and understanding the forms that we work with and use while we play?

Given that I think we should look at the fact that limericks worked better than elegies in the online poetry example above. The more tightly a genre is focused the easier it is for people to work together to complete a good example of the genre — or for that matter to play against the genre and succesfully make something that isn’t genre normal but is still coherent and meaningful. To this date GNS, because they have been the only three, have all had to be wider and less specific than they perhaps could have been if there were more directed genres to fill the space. Sim play is particularly damaged in this regard, as even among longterm Forgeites there is a lot of honest confusion and disgagreement as to what makes the genre we know as Sim. It has so many things, so little systemitization, that it becomes almost useless except to use to look back on a game after the fact and say, “Oh, maybe that was sim.”

I have to wonder if this lack of specificity is one of the reasons we’re seeing more call towards games that blurr the lines between boardgames and RPGs. Because in a very specific heavily designed game the game itself has more of an ability to specify and control the genre of play. That such specific control is needed may, in part, be due to the fact that there isn’t enough structure found elsewhere in the discourse of the community and so it has to be implemented at the level of the individual game. The current level seems rather unhappy, with Nar’s “address premise” being both too narrow and too vauge in some ways and Sim being a floundering mess in most discussions. (Ironically most people seem to grock Gamism no problem — possibly because its the genre that shares the most definition with the “comman man” definition of game.)

So why, to this point, have we been so concentrated on these three genres if there are more possible genres out there to develop? And especially if we aren’t getting the most milage out of the potential by having only three? Well, there are three reasons, and how good or bad they are I’ll leave up to your judgment.

The first is that people have been willing to work both very hard and publicly to develop these three genres into coherent, functional sets of tropes that build functional games when used in a more or less straight-forward way. Ron, for example, has busted his ass over and over in order to help other people learn this new genre of play in which they have protagonists who address premise, and he and guys like Vincent have put a lot of work into explaining how and why and wherefore this group of tropes and ideas builds functional play. At this point G, N, and S are all (with S being slightly less so) developed genres that have strong structuring principles that can be used with comparative ease and confidence. (Comparative, mind you.)

The second is that these three genres fall into three general areas where people have been historically playing, trying to play, or wanting to play. They sort of were formed up in the center of a big stew of ideas, each taking a point in the vast sea of it and shoring up their slopes until they were built into castles. So, this history of RPGs and RPGers interests has also had a helping hand in defining where people put their energy and focus. Really, it isn’t like the Forge or RGRPGA invented these out of nowhere. They saw things people were doing and wanting to do and developed systems for classifying, systemetizing, and understanding them. That they then got the line between “things we’ve seen” “thing that work” and “things that are essential to the division of meaning” a little blurred is not only natural, but pretty much the default for emerging schools of thought.

Finally, let us remember that “genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them.” There have been organized communities of practice and design that have put a lot of their time and effort into defining and enforcing the definition of these genres. This has had effects both good and bad, and how it will play out in the end is very much still in question. However, I think it worth noting before some of our anarchist tendencies get to up in arms about the idea that “those guys” evilly “enforced their rules on us” that in genre theory we’re all enforcing rules on each other all the time. There isn’t any malice in it, its just the way social communication and the development of ideas happens. In fact, like it or lump it, I still feel we owe a debt of gratitude to the people who did such hard work over so many years.

So, at the end of this long, long clump of ramblings, these are the ideas I want you to take away:

GNS are genres. They are systematizing modes of forming RPGs into regular methods of joint communication and creative building that have been regulated and pioneered by groups of people working to understand and systematize the vast morass of RPG play. They have given us powerful and important tools to use, play off of, and learn from about the ways that we can us genre to form coherent ways of playing game. And most amazingly of all, they can do that even if we reject the current models. I personally see them as being very valuable and as useful tools to getting a group into a place where they can communicate together rather than working apart. However, I also believe they are only three of a multitude of possible genres and that we need to be open to the idea of other modes of play becoming full genres in and of themselves.

Okay, now if you’re still awake, go ahead and ask the questions.

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*Although it makes for an interesting study to see the shift in terms to “Storytelling Game” and how that relates to the rule that “genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them” and the idea that genres help us order and understand the world. Think there may be an agenda there? It’s also worth noting the constant debate that goes on around how we are to understand RPG in the context of other creative genres like film or literature – and the struggle over how much theory we should import from other genres to define and structure our own. We always are getting power by defining our world the way we want to rather than the way others want to, its just inherent to the way human monkeys work.