Metered Games and the Importance of Formal Experiment

 

Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Liza in High Cotton by Romare Bearden (1978)

It is this line that consummates the love, and it is this central spondaic foot that is the metrical consummation of the whole structure. The meter conducts the argument. The meter is the poem...It is thus possible to suggest that a great metrical achievement is more than the mark of a good technician: it is something like the signature of a great man.  -  Fussel's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

Way too short for the task at hand

This is (partially) a response to a much older post written by Marcia B but the actual inspiration for it comes from her recent one analyzing the math of Long Live HD. I read it this morning, liked it, and moved on...until I picked up The Poem's Heartbeat again over lunch. I've been studying it over the past couple weeks in an attempt to work out some prosodic characteristics for the mock-epic side of my current project, but in combination with the new post on dice math and the release of the second half of Ava Islam's interview with Third Kingdom Games, the idea for this thing began cooking. Ended up banging the post out within an hour of coming home from scanning packages for the Bald Emperor. I'm sure that I'll regret this later, or at least write a version that doesn't require people to read a long-ass essay to engage with it, but I feel pretty good about it for now. 

Craft in Games

The title of this minipost is adopted from an essay on The Reading Experience, a blog written by unusually insightful and predictably curmudgeonly literary critic Daniel Green, which forms an accidental companion piece to Marcia B's Critique of the Conversation Surrounding Lyric Games. Going through Marcia's Critique and Green's Disassembling Empire (a spun-off and lengthened version of the similarly titled segment from ...Formal Experiment) together, Green's description of the redirection of the aims of prose towards self-expression and an impoverished realism really doesn't need a mediator to enter conversation with Marcia. I strongly recommend reading through both before coming back to this. Green, I think, gets to the core of why many creators of lyric games in the style that Marcia analyzes in her post see the process as an inherently generative one despite the oddness of the concept to folks outside MFA programs or the like. It's an outgrowth of the professionalization of literary production and the dominance of Craft (tm) with its native modes of "writerly action" over Experiment.  This makes it all a little more dire - the desire to produce games in the vein of those that Marcia looks at in her paper doesn't stem from dilettantism and unfamiliarity with literature. Quite the opposite! In all likelihood, formal training in writing would magnify tendencies towards making games that look rather similar to the lyric games she studied, if not ones that fit the mold entirely. 

It's neither here nor there, but I suspect that the reason why Marcia's critical essay was so successful at breaking down the lyric game phenomenon is due to her training is as a classicist, which she mentions near the top of the post:

"I am a Classics scholar-in-training specializing in Greco-Roman poetry. I've analyzed the seminal works of Hesiod, Lucretius, and Ovid...I wanted to share my credentials upfront because I am someone who is not just well-versed in poetry, but well-versed in poetry whose very structure is instructional. I'm not going to entertain anyone who thinks that because I am criticizing lyric games, I must not be equipped to understand them from a literary point of view. In fact, if we are to accept that lyric games should be read as texts rather than practiced as games, then understanding them as literature is the only way to understand them."

Crucially, this is a field of study that requires close study of literature (or a subset of it at least) but doesn't expose the student/practitioner to current trends in the creation of literature: unless her program is a very weird one, Marcia was likely taught to understand, analyze, appreciate, etc. poetry but not to write it. This is the furthest thing from a dig, to be clear. There's a sweet spot between a marginal involvement with literary analysis and immersion in Craft (tm) that almost certainly provides the best vantage point for clocking trends of this nature. In last month's UN-THOUGHT post, Sofinho over at Alone in the Labyrinth writes: 

"What I love about the indie-OSR RPG scene: things are made with love. Sometimes that love is careless, but it is always passionate. The luminaries of that scene (for me this would be Patrick Stuart, Zedeck Siew and Emmy Allen) are the inverse of the WotC staff writer: they could be writing conventional literature but instead they're making RPG material. We are the richer for it (not that we wouldn't if we were consuming their literary output, but I am grateful for their choices.)" 

Sofinho is right, of course, but I'm not sure if their literary output (assuming Emmy, Patrick, and Zedeck started out within Anglophone lit-fiction in this evil timeline) would even end up containing the hallmarks that make their work so incredible to us right now. 

There's also an interesting connection between Marcia's stance on the capitalist innovation of the lyric game form and Green's mordant observation that some training books intended to inculcate good style have adopted the language of artistic revolution while reproducing the conventional Program's wisdom and hewing to conservative stylistic conventions:

"The most conservative of these books is Salesses’ Craft in the Real World, even as it presents itself as something of a revolutionary manifesto...[b]ut however much Salesses professes to want a different version of craft than the one putatively dominating creative writing workshops, he does not propose doing without craft as either an approach to the creative writing classroom or to the critical consideration of fiction in general. It is somewhat difficult to see why: Salesses objects to the way craft-talk excludes writers with a different understanding of fiction’s purpose and possibilities that traditional craft does not accommodate, but such writers include not only those with non-Western cultural inheritances but many writers from within the Western cultural tradition who also find the imperatives of craft confining and alienating. Many of these writers deliberately avoid the institutional machinery of the academic creative writing Program (although some are just excluded), but even those holding out for the benefits of a creative writing degree might ask of this book and its author why exchanging one set of restrictions on the writer’s creative judgment and imagination for another is necessarily an improvement...Something tells me, however, that this is not what Salesses has in mind. Too much of the work would be left to the students to read widely and discover how other writers have redeemed these possibilities. The teacher could no doubt assist in this process of discovery, but that would require suppressing narrow beliefs about the function of literary art. While many creative writing teachers would certainly be able to accomplish such a task, it seems unlikely that Salesses, for one, with his stringent view of developing writers who 'think critically about how they are working with and contributing to culture' would be prepared to discard this imperative."

Green, in the original essay under consideration, ties this to the self-reproducing drive of Craft writing:

"But in publishing a book like The Writer's Notebook, Tin House is putting its imprimatur on the "craft" approach, and one might presume that those writers who heed the kind of advice dispensed in the book might ultimately be producing the kind of work that could find its way into print in this journal. That this work would be safe, formally "sound" and stylistically "fine," would only conform to the mission of journals like Tin House: to a) reinforce the existing structure of academic writing programs and workshops, providing their graduates with a place to publish, and b) associate themselves as much as possible with "quality" writing, which can't be just anything and everything and thus needs to be narrowed down to its embodiment in "craft," the boundaries of which are laid down in The Writer's Notebook. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Tin House or other high-profile literary magazines are actively hostile to adventurous or experimental fiction (sometimes an unconventional story or two can be squeezed into the mix), but the discussions of the nature of fiction and the writing of fiction in The Writer's Notebook assume a form that is relatively fixed, comprising such staple elements as "dialogue," "scene," and "character motivation," a practice that is subject to improvement through increased skill with these tools. Such a conception of fiction as a handy collection of pre-approved devices doesn't much encourage departures from standard practice or questioning of the place of these devices in composing works of fiction. It shouldn't be surprising that most issues of Tin House don't feature short stories that seem to question the short story as a stable, identifiable thing reproducible through the application of 'craft.'"

Once we move away from seeing the lyric game phenomenon as one tied to the vulgarization of a specific literary movement (although Marcia was entirely right to locate "modern lyric" as the proximate cause) towards an understanding that locates it within much broader trends in literature overall, I think the analytical lens opens up dramatically. A pretty obvious direction to take it in may also be slightly heretical - the "rules-light" movement as it currently exists could and prob should be understood as a parallel Craft-forming trend. I'll cycle back to this briefly, but for now - Ava mentions, in the first of her Third Kingdom Games interviews, feeling constrained by the dominance of the rules-light mantra in the "late OSR era": 

"So the second half of that tag line is "Rules-light, procedure-heavy". The birth and evolution of that particular little marketing slogan is something I find quite amusing, as its metastasized out of my little sphere of influence, but the tag-line itself, for effective as it has been, is something I feel a little constrained by. The 'rules-light' part definitely feels like it arises out of my insecurity of having begun writing a ruleset in the late OSR era, a time where ultralights such as Into the Odd, The Black Hack, Maze Rats & Knaves were en vogue and the game I was making by comparison felt large and ungainly (similarly, I often feel this way about myself; coincidence? Sometimes I self-deprecatingly refer to both Errant and myself as Rubenesque, and perhaps one day I could say that without self-consciousness). While I do thing Errant's length actually belies its simplicity (I aimed to ensure that the overhead and complexity of each individual rule was on its own quite simple), it is still a good deal more complex, mechanically dense and interwoven, than most ultralight RPGs with only a few, discrete, hermetically separated rules; rules-medium would perhaps be a more honest appraisal."

Ava's reflection here feels to me like a cousin to the great Angela Carter's angry defense of her work against Craft-y criticism comparing her writing with that of other British feminist contemporaries:

"I've got nothing against realism. . .[b]ut there is realism and realism. I mean, the questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality. I would like, I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS, but I, I haven't. I've done other things. I mean, I'm an arty person, ok, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose - so fucking what?"

Metered Gaming 

If lyric games can be called...lyric, then I can call these games metered! 

The label grows out of the wonderful book Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics by Ben Glaser. Glaser makes the argument that, contra accepted narratives of poetic development, the evolution of free verse was not a breaking free and burning down of some Victorian metrical straitjacket but part of a long and troubled process which involved deep engagement with the ways meter worked within genre:

"Meter’s afterlife in twentieth-century poetics is both unstable and inescapable. It channels a range of aesthetic pleasure, taxonomic impulses, literary-historical imaginaries, and literary-critical beliefs. For many modern poets and critics, and in the dominant story bequeathed by them, meter appears increasingly as acoustical debris clung to by sinking poets and conservative readers. Iambics in particular were reconceived as the too-easily mechanically heard and reproduced verse substrate that Pound (following F. S. Flint) famously rejected as the 'sequence of a metronome' in favor of 'the musical phrase.' ... meter’s uncanny and ambivalent persistence make it a constant 'protagonist,' or tragic hero, whose charge is to critique those forms, dogmas, and institutions that would transcend a flawed metrical poetics and culture. It is what Raymond Williams calls an “actively residual (alternative or oppositional)” form, straining against the hegemonic vision of poetry and poetic tradition instilled by and on behalf of modernism... The study of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its historical prosody manifests the surprising frequency and intensity with which poets reevaluated the legacies of poetic culture and poetry as cultural capital by returning to the medium of meter and diagnosing its modern function. Meter turns out to be neither “missing” nor a “ghost” but the phantom limb of a genre uncertain about its mediation and purpose in a fragmented literary and auditory culture."

The wrestling of poets like Pound and Eliot with the phantom limb of meter, imo, carries deep connections to the procedural turn amongst a subset of designers in The Scene: folks like Ava Islam, Marcia B, Ben L, Nick Whelan, Gus L, and others of their stripe. I think the relationship between the two is made clearest by Ava's own description of Errant's creation:

"Errant started as a collection of house rules for The Black Hack 6 years ago, after I had given up on my experiments of trying to align 5e with a more OSR playstyle. However, despite consuming blogs and OSR books at an insatiable rate, I often found that I had a hard time grasping exactly how an OSR style game was supposed to be played, on a moment-to-moment basis...Errant evolved mostly out of a method of me trying to answer these questions for myself as I played and ran games, my grant experiment in trying to teach myself to understand OSR play, which practically looked like me stealing any interesting methods for adjudicating or running particular kinds of scenarios out of any and every blog or rule book I came across, and synthesizing it into the chimerical mass that eventually became Errant. After a certain point my odd little collection of gaming bric a brac had enough weight that it began hypertrophically morphing into a bespoke ruleset somewhat of its own accord."

The aforementioned UN-THOUGHT post has Sofinho asking if "poetry in games [is] the opposite of system first?" I don't think I have anything like a definitive answer for this, especially without devoting an independent post to the question, but I'd suggest that the systemically-inclined approach discussed above shares a number of concerns with poetry at its best. There's more than a little that ties something like Marcia's mechanical explorations of weird-ass DnD economy to Marianne Moore's ceaseless tinkering with historical verseform or Sara Teasdale's "labor of the line." Errant and other forays into procedurally-minded gaming are formal experiments in the same way that T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land or Bearden's collages or Scriabin's Symphony No. 4 are formal experiments - innovative artistic products born from thorough engagement with capital-T tradition. Canonical texts are analyzed and broken down into sets of tools for reshaping/reconstitution into freaky and cool new work. The concept as applied to games is more expansive than proceduralism, of course: Dan's Mother Stole Fire is a metered setting by any measure and Demon-Bone Sarcophagus participates in formal experiment. Conversely, I see little difference between the bulk of rules-light games (as in, those without merit beyond fitting within gameCraft) and the bulk of university journal-bound free verse built on a deeply flawed understanding of modern literary creativity's roots. With any luck, history doesn't rhyme in this stanza.