Picking Up Where We Left Off: The Blog So Far

There are three posts that I regard as marking out the trajectory of what I'm trying to do here.

In "Hell Upriver: Hite's Qelong," I tried to depict how an open-ended hexcrawl was structured for a certain narrative shape: a possibility structure that collapses, in play, to some version of Apocalypse Now. The goal was to take this web of unrealized narratives as an object of criticism. I don't know that I was successful, but the idea of this blog is essentially that you can look at all the choices that go into creating an adventure or RPG setting, connect them to a wider view of human culture, and then analyze them as you would any other cultural artifact, with no regard for whether it's "usable" or "playable."

In "Landscape Architecture for Gardens of Forking Paths," I took a pretentious run at expressing the blog's thesis. With tongue a bit in cheek, I observed that you can make a comparison between "fragmented" or inconclusive methods of postmodernism and the scenario design of roleplaying games, the latter of which can very intriguingly set up situations that could resolve in infinite ways. Jorge Luis Borges imagined reality as a "garden of forking paths"; reading RPG materials can be like looking down on such a garden from above.

In "Three Obstacles to Literary Realism in Roleplaying Games," I got at a thought that's stayed with me ever since, and developed further. In RPGs (and in interactive fiction), we don't see a ton of literary realism. But consequential choices are in fact a part of everyday life, and personally I think that there are some possibilities here: not necessarily as playable RPGs, but as larger "what-if" structures along the lines of, say, It's a Wonderful Life or Sliding Doors. I'm sure I'll be coming back to this, but basically I think you could experss the possibilities of a person's romantic life in the form of an RPG sourcebook, without expecting anyone to ever play it.

But before pulling on that literary thread, I want to turn to the first possibility structure I ever loved: the fantasy map. And while I'm contractually forbidden from analyzing a certain map of the Sword Coast and the Silver Marches, I have an even better map in mind. Next time: Glorantha.