Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play

[droqen]

Regarding Jason Grinblat, Cat Manning, and Max Kreminski's
"Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play"

[droqen]

Note that this is not a summary of the paper, but an attempt to capture the most central thread of my own thinking regarding and understanding of it.

[ A. How do sandbox narratives function?

  B. People are drawn to repair that which is in a state of disrepair.* Therefore players fill in the gaps themselves.
      If the tools necessary for the repair are not given, then players must use the tools which they already have available to themselves.
      If the narrative to be repaired is not preexisting and buried but in fact does not even exist, then players will repair something that never existed in the first place, filling in the gaps with stuff they already have available to themselves.
]

*[ C. Are people, in fact, drawn to repair anything that is in disrepair? Where does this instinct come from?

   D. This is not much further explored, but it appears to be related to a nurturing instinct. Eve Sedgwick is quoted, "Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding [the thing in disrepair] is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self." I suppose all I can do is list a few features which, together, may come somewhat closer to what inspires the reparative instinct:

     - It is in disrepair,
     - In its current state it will not become repaired without intervention, and
     - Once repaired, it will be capable of self-repair.

[droqen]

Reparative
a. Repairing, or tending to repair. Jer. Taylor.
n. That which repairs. Sir H. Wotton.

-- https://www.websters1913.com/words/Reparative

[droqen]

Eve Sedgwick's theory of reparative reading offers a mode for interpreting text that is "additive and accretive" and "wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object". It was developed in response to . . . the desire to locate a stable, canonical meaning . . . [which] Sedgwick calls "paranoid reading"

. . . deliberately incomplete artifacts that facilitate a diversity of reparative meaning-making processes by the player; they invite repair by arriving in disrepair.

Ludonarrative hermeneutics

[droqen]

The reparative process is active; the reader turns to the "part-objects" of a text and assembles them to engender a kind of personal meaning. . . . Repair involves reassembly into, as Sedwick says, "something like a whole--though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole" [15, p. 128].

Sedgwick notes that "the desire of a reparative impulse [...] is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self."

Because narrative sandbox games contain no pre-assembled narrative, only fragmented pre-narrative bits of structure for the player to manipulate and interpret, they invite the practice of repair, first in the interpretative act of making sense of the raw, real-time experience of the interaction loop, and then in the effective act of guiding the further development of the emerging narrative.

[droqen]

I'm missing something, I perhaps perceive a disconnect. The authors of this paper haven written:

"Because narrative sandbox games contain no pre-assembled narrative . . . they invite the practice of repair"

"they invite repair by arriving in disrepair"

This is not sufficient for me. I don't disagree -- in fact, I am performing a reparative act now: attempting to interpret this paper as complete and encountering an incompleteness, I am actively seeking to make sense of a perceived disconnect.

*In light of Sedgwick's 'paranoid reading,' I center myself in the understanding -- implicit but which I wish to make explicit to my self -- that I am not seeking to unveil the authors' intention or original understanding, but that I am engaging in a personal meaning-making, making sense of a part of the world that does not fully make sense to me.*

In this sense I might draw the surface conclusion that I am having this reaction in response to a paper which is 'in disrepair.' However, my point is that being in disrepair does not comprise the total sufficient precondition for provoking, in me, the reparative impulse, whereas this paper (so far) appears to present it as such.

[droqen]

Sitting in contrast to narrative discovery games [e.g. Obra Dinn, Outer Wilds, Her Story -- which "position the player as investigator ferreting out a narrative truth"] are narrative sandbox games, typified by genre examplars Dwarf Fortress and The Sims. For these games, there are no prefigured narratives to discover . . . [droqen: There is a heap of terminology here which I will at this point choose not investigate further, instead rewriting the latter part of this sentence into something more reparative-play-centric, even if it is not what was originally intended, and which may in fact be incorrect.] Narrative coheres only via [the player's act of active reparative play & reading]

Sedgwick writes [of reparative reading], ". . . it is possible . . . to use one's own resources to assemble or 'repair' the murderous part-objects into something like a whole--though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole"

The narrative project of the Sims player is to take the pre-narrative part-objects of the game and assemble them into "something like a whole". This cannot look like any preexisting whole because there is none. The narrative must be repaired, because it arrives in disrepair

     How does this repair happen, and what, in this mapping, are "one's own resources"? They are, oddly, the narrative connections that sit outside the game's systems.

Emersiveness ahead...

[droqen]

. . . the tools of repair, in the Sedgwickian formulation, are furnished from "one's own resources" and cannot be shipped with the game object as part of its suite of mechanics.

The Sims. Its story volume is open, a sketch of a sanitized version of 21st century suburbia. Within that story volume, the game does not dictate to players what they ought to be doing or what their sims' narratives will be; the furthest it goes is to suggest potential actions . . .

     Because The Sims doesn't prefigure its narratives, narrative must cohere as the player . . . take actions, witness[es] their effects, and interpret the results. The player must interpret why a specific action is happening at any given moment. . . . in making narrative sense of Sims play, players do not simply transcribe the series of game events as it unfolds. Instead, they confer additional layers of interpretation on these events, adding extra details to the narrative-as-perceived. . .

Sims' speech bubbles are a common intervention point for this extrapolative narrativization. . . . In roBurky's Alice and Kev -- a notable Sims 3 retelling centered on a homeless father and daughter -- the author looks at Alice's first real adult conversation with an NPC as a site of potential meaning, suggestion that a lake might represent her sleeping rough in parks and a Yeti figure might be her ogre of a father. . . . the author confers meaning on this conversation by attributing referents to the otherwise ambiguous dialogue icons . . .

I've noticed that I have gently cropped out the same thought twice on the same topic in these past two quotes. ". . . which then influences what actions the player is inclined to take next" and "The same speech bubbles interpreted differently might lead players to take two very separate sets of actions".

This is a very interesting thing to think about. Why did I do this? I think it's quite frightening, as a developer, perhaps as an artist.

I have no trouble allowing many 'reparative' interpretations, but when it comes to handling wildly different resultant courses of action, that seems to require either a very complicated system of emergence, or an active creative mind capable of responding to such courses, as we have in tabletop roleplaying games (and perhaps other similar genres -- LARP, or online roleplaying).

The work of creating such a complicated system of emergence is immense, and perhaps not the type of work that I even enjoy doing.

[droqen]

As the player reifies an ever-evolving interpretation of events and takes further actions that stem from that emerging interpretation, a disparate mass of narrative parts, player-provided resources, and player-conferred meanings coalesce into a satisfying narrative: "something like a whole".

As we move into the conclusion, one of my ongoing issues has not yet resolved. Is it enough for an object to come in disrepair, to provoke the reparative impulse?

Reflecting upon this last sentence, what comes to mind for me is that perhaps it is enough, but it is not desirable. In the end, I do not care much for interpretations, even personal interpretations, except for the effect which they have on the player, on a person, especially on the person having the thoughts and making the interpretations. The in-game "reification" of the player's interpretations is not at all important to me; if a whole is to coalesce, then let it belong to not the game or the storyworld-bounded narrative, but to something real.

[From the Abstract.] . . .Narrative sandbox systems function by producing deliberately incomplete artifacts that facilitate a diversity of reparative meaning-making processes by the player; they invite repair by arriving in disrepair.

Suppose that I take my earlier doubt off the table and I assume that it is enough to perceive a thing in disrepair, an unwhole thing, to provoke the reparative impulse, to invite reparative practice.

If this is true, then we can present players not only with simulated narratives that are in disrepair, but anything at all that needs fixing.

As I mentioned, I do not believe that 'awareness of disrepair' is a full and sufficient precondition. It is obvious, through this lens, that it is not. There are many different ways to present a person with things in disrepair, and it is easy to imagine a person turning a blind eye, because it happens all the time. I do it, you do it. What in our lives has ever not been in some state of disrepair, at some point? And yet we cannot spend our energy repairing everything.

[droqen]

Sedgwick notes that "the desire of a reparative impulse [...] is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self."

Inchoate
a. Recently, or just, begun; beginning; partially but not fully in existence or operation; existing in its elements; incomplete.

https://www.websters1913.com/words/Inchoate

[droqen]

i am embarrassed to state such an innocent and sincere position so plainly, but i am interested in inviting the player to repair themselves, in inviting the player to make themselves whole, to apply a reparative practice -- rather than a paranoid one -- to their own self.

my fear is that culture surrounding people, surrounding us, is in part inadequate or inimical to our nurture. i want to assemble and confer plenitude on every one in the world, but i am incapable -- not only because of the issue of numbers (there is one me, and everyone is billions) but also because we are not one. perhaps this is even what makes culture inadequate or inimical. i cannot confer plenitude or wholeness directly on even one other person. no one can.

every one must offer resources to their own inchoate self.

[droqen]

4     Conclusion

. . . rather than narrowing in on a canonical, designer-intended narrative meaning, the player instead constructs an assemblage of narrative part-objects whose meaning is derived partly from the resources that this player in particular has brought to bear.