understanding reparative play . . ludonarrative hermeneutics . . kill gameplay.

[droqen]

1. i started re-reading  Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play
2. i looked up the phrase 'ludonarrative hermeneutics' and found this paper, Ludonarrative Hermeneutics: A Way Out and the Narrative Paradox
3. i bleeted about it a bit
4. Jason Grinblat, one of the authors on Reparative Play, replied with something i could barely understand at my current level of slippery comprehension and invited me to correct him if wrong
5. now i need to understand the hermeneutic strip so that i can understand jason's response so that i can understand ludonarrative hermeneutics so that i can understand, at last, emergent narrative and reparative play.

join me, on this journey to understanding! let us hope the rabbit hole does not go even deeper.

[droqen]

sorry, the hermeneutic circle:
Item A. What is the hermeneutical circle?

sorry sorry -- the hermeneutical circle???

[droqen]

My understanding of the hermeneutical circle is that it describes a process by which a player interprets parts of a work while holding in mind an image of the whole -- we may say contending with the 'objective' object in the context of their own 'subjective' object.

At first, this subjective object is -- in that it must be, to the player lack in in objective knowledge about the specific work -- constructed chiefly or partly out of the player's prejudices, presuppositions, imagination, and other personal/private elements, which is to say, elements not found in the shared or objective world.

The 'circle' itself seems to be a cycle, not a boundary that surrounds a space: this side of the circle's outline is a 180-degree arc that moves from objective parts to subjective whole, and that side is another such arc moving the other way.


I'm equipped with enough of an idea of the circle to move back to the hermeneutic strip.

[droqen]

moving on to
Item B. Ludonarrative Hermeneutics [..]

[droqen]

Item A describes at the end of page 3, without specifically attributing it to Plato but positionally in context of his thinking, the whole as either or any of "the entirety of a text, its purpose, scopus, or the intention, intentio, of the author". It is unclear whether 'the entirety of a text' is intended to be the first of three items (entirety, or purpose, or intention) or an alternative way of describing a work's purpose specifically (the entirety of a text == its purpose == scopus). I'd like to keep this in mind while attempting to understand what the hermeneutic strip is. In its description in item B, what is the whole of the whole of the strip? What is the whole of each sub-part of the strip (as the strip appears to be diagrammed as essentially just two hermeneutic circles which flow into one another)?

[droqen]

Item B is referring to two other papers which I may visit later, but for now I'll submit this one quote (from p6 of item B) for response:

"an IDN artefact is not itself a narrative, it is an interactive computer program with the potential of instantiating . . . a concrete and personal narrative product"

It is this product, and its here purported concreteness, that I wish to question.

[droqen]

the hermeneutic circle must contain intermediary steps between parts and the whole, that is, between the objective/public/actual parts of the work, and the subjective/private/projected/imagined image of the whole work. (Surely this has been discussed by e.g. Heidegger but i will not go rummaging around in those historical writings at present.)

then, what is different about an IDM's intermediary steps between these two extreme points? is it justifiable -- no, is it useful, is it necessary, is it the best possible approach -- to model two circles to describe the type of object which an IDM is, or can we more easily understand interpretation of a narrative-generating object by applying the singular unmodified hermeneutical circle?

if we reject the idea of a strip constructed out of two circles -- upper and lower -- then what do we lose?

[droqen]

Consider how in this very reading I am relating to not only the concrete parts of the work (i.e. what is actually written on the page) but also my local, small, interpretation of the part, which is being recorded here as a concrete production! Is a hermeneutical strip necessary for this reading? When an IDM generates a supposedly 'concrete' part, it belongs to neither the IDM-artist nor the IDM-player wholly, and may be comprised in some (unspecified) proportion of noise, i.e. total coincidence. Coincidence, and noise, can be quite useful and even beautiful. We should, however, still regard it as noise: something not produced by the artist directly, perhaps and perhaps not actually perceived by the artist, and perhaps and perhaps not seen and accepted by the artist and by the player.

I am interested in acceptance of noise! What does it mean? When do we do it and when do we not do it? Why? But thqt is a topic I'll put off for now.

[droqen]

near the end of the conclusion of item B, there is the claim: "Interactive narratives. . . are significantly more flexible in achieving what Barthes called the writerly text, in which the reader is located as a site of the production of meaning, and for which the goal is to make the reader no longer a mere consumer, but a producer of the text."

i would like to read more about what was meant by this. considering what i am doing here versus what is done by an IDM, this -- producing a written work while reading the source text -- would appear to be a much more flexible and powerful 'site' for my production of meaning than what is afforded to me as a player of a game, constricted to a more limited toolset.

[droqen]

item C. The Pleasure of the Text (Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller, 1975) retrieved from this link

i must understand Barthes' perspective.

p11-12: ". . . the author . . . cannot choose to write what will not be read. And yet, it is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives: has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust's good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.) // Thus, what I enjoy in narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again."

[droqen]

i straight up don't think item B is correct in claiming that interactive narratives are in any way special with regards to this dynamic described and desired by Barthes, or at least i do not believe it has been usefully argued. it is a nice idea, but i would very much need to see specific examples of where non-interactive-narrative works have less "flexib[ility] in achieving what Barthes called the writerly text", and by contrast where interactive narratives have more.

alright, that was a nice diversion, let's move on to the big time.

item D. Emergent Narrative and Reparative Play

[droqen]

jason wrote to me: ". . . the player interpretation can get (at least partially) reified back into the game systems, which then alters the next 'stage' of the work, to be interpreted again"

im bothered by the machine system being given responsibility for such, as grinblat puts it, reification -- im becoming such a tools-luddite. is this the next stage of the work? im bothered.

[droqen]

p1
"Recent work on ludonarrative hermeneutics . . has largely focused on the analysis of games in which a strong protostory has been deliberately embedded . . .

[but] how do players go about interpreting narrative meaning when the units of narrativity embedded in a game . . . are much smaller, much more abstract, and much more freely recombined . . .?"

My interest is half-overlapping with this paper's focus, and half in, perhaps, DIRECT CONFLICT. The act of active interpretation of something 'without a strong protostory' is an incredibly meaningful thing, but when we expend our energy as not only players but as human beings on making sense of the processes and outputs of uncaring machine systems, I wonder something that feels deeply, deeply dangerous to even wonder:

how much energy does that take away
from us making sense of one another?

[droqen]

p7-8
"4 Conclusion"
the conclusion made is not quite proven out from what i can tell. maybe however this is a paranoid reading? i want the text to connect the dots for me, but maybe i should fill them out myself.

in any case, what's being described is a dynamic where the player creates an interpretation, then enacts action as a result of this interpretation. so far so good. but, what is the benefit of the game producing different situations as a result of action? that is my point of investigation.

does the paper claim anywhere at all that there is a benefit to, or need for, the game-system's reaction (complex or otherwise) to the player's action? is it taken for granted? am i inferring it when it is never stated?