The Experience of Conversation

Many role-playing games, in their rulebooks, assert that playing the game takes the form of a conversation. Even games like Pathfinder, which tends to use grid-based tactical combat, lets the game master give bonuses for things that aren't covered in the written rules, which keeps the conversational element that separates RPGs from board games. Now, the premise of this blog is that your humble critic does not play role-playing games, but I have had quite a few conversations in the course of my life, and I believe I know something about them. This morning, I discovered a recent essay entitled "An Analogy About Rules for Sickos," on a blog called To Be Resolved. The essay asks whether conversation games that are defined by rules leave space for infinite human creativity, or whether the rules function by subtractioin, marking off a bounded set of conversations from the set of all possible conversations. The writer uses the infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set's border as an analogy for how creativity isn't dampened by limits. ("Cantor Dust," created by the infinite removal of middle thirds of line segments, has some properties that could enliven the analogy further, but it's not so pretty to look at.) Now, I like this analogy and I think it does the work it needs to, but for the blog, let's try pushing a little further.

The first thing to note is that fractals, or the fractal-like border of the Mandelbrot Set, require properties of continuity. The "zoom" has to be infinite; if there's a lowest level of resolution, you have to end your recursive process when you reach your atoms. Now, an in-person role-playing game or a face-to-face conversation partakes of enough sensory experience that I'm willing to hypothesize fractal-like continuity, but people also play by post, or play by chat, and digital text is ultimately discrete rather than continuous. The space of possible human interactions may be uncountably infinite, but the space of possible digital texts is countable and, given an arbitrary upper bound of length, finite. So if play-by-post is a valid instantiation of a conversation game, we aren't in a situation of fractal-like possibility.

What Borges was getting at in "The Library of Babel," a story about a library that contained all possible texts of a certain length, is that a large enough set of possible texts is functionally infinite for human cognition. And meaning does not automatically adhere to a text; a random generation gives you an ocean of gibberish with a drop of meaning. The Library of Babel is what I think of when I try to conceptualize the space of possible conversations.

In the era of chatbots, the large language model (LLM), is something like a structure for generating semantic paths through the space of possible texts. The Library of Babel finally has a decent card catalog. And, given how intellectual history tends to go, I believe we're entering a stage of culture where it's as seemingly obvious to us that the human mind is a kind of large language model as it was to Freud that the mind was a kind of steam engine, dealing with all sorts of explosive internal pressures. Which is to say, we always reimagine ourselves in light of our dominant technologies.

But human beings are not actually known to be procedural text generators. For all of our science, we don't understand our minds particularly well, and we seem to be stuck with the "hard problem of consciousness," insofar as internal experience is self-evident but incurably internal. And, after introspection: how does our conscious reasoning relate to what we actually say and do? When we speak or write fluently, where does the next phrase really come from? The unconscious in mysterious and not obviously algorithmic.

Perhaps most importantly, for our purposes, is the question of how social expectations, laws, and rules function in our unconscious minds. Learning to participate in a social practice, such as a conversation game, means that our unconscious or subconscious minds can effectively present our conscious minds with reasonable options for action, so that we can deliberate rather than feeling lost in the rules. We experience the rules of even a finite game as positive options rather than constraints on our freedom: the strong chess player doesn't waste time consciously discarding invalid moves as options.

So, to sum up, the fractal-like border of the Mandelbrot set is a wonderful image for illustrating infinite creativity within bounds, but the "space of all possible conversations" is an abstraction with little relationship to how we speak and think. Besides, so many creative endeavors involve adding things to an empty space, whether it's paint on a canvas or words on a page, that "subtractive" arts seem like an exception. A noble exception, to be sure: heaven forbid that I cause any offense to stonecarvers or practitioners of Moog-style subtractive sound synthesis.

Landscape Architecture for Gardens of Forking Paths

Me detuve, como es natural, en la frase: "Dejo a los varios porvenires (no a todos) mi jardín de senderos que se bifurcan." Casi en el acto comprendí; El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan era la novela caótica; la frase "varios porvenires (no a todos)" me sugirió la imagen de la bifurcación en el tiempo, no en el espacio. La relectura general de la obra confirmó esa teoría. En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras; en la del casi inextricable Ts'ui Pên, opta – simultáneamente – por todas. Crea, así, diversos porvenires, diversos tiempos, que también proliferan y se bifurcan. De ahí las contradicciones de la novela.

- from "El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan" by Jorge Luis Borges

In Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths," a man learns to understand the real structure of a book which he had previously seen as a chaotic, self-contradictory mess. The book is about the nature of time, and how distinct choices and circumstances can all lead to the same result, like different routes through a garden that all converge at the central fountain. These moments of convergence, in the book-within-a-story, resonate with the full range of possibilities that could have led to them:

He read with slow precision two versions of the same epic chapter. In the first, an army marches to a battle across a lonely mountain; the horror of the rocks and shadows makes the men undervalue their lives and they gain an easy victory. In the second, the same army traverses a palace where a great festival is taking place; the resplendent battle seems to them a continuation of the celebration and they win the victory. [...] I remember the last words, repeated in each version like a secret commandment: Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

It is, perhaps, another way to express the ancient human sense of fate, that certain things are bound to happen no matter what we do. And, of course, the man who discovers the book soon finds himself in such a resonant moment ("It seemed to me that the humid garden that surrounded the house was infinitely saturated with invisible persons"). It is classic Borges, and it is wonderful.

It is interesting that Borges seems to imagine this Garden of Forking Paths as a disjointed work of high modernism, like Finnegans Wake or The Waste Land. To those without the key, it appears to be "chaotic manuscripts," "an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts," a labyrinth.

What if a garden of forking paths does not have to be chaotic? What if a bunch of wargaming nerds accidentally iterated their way to a tidier version of the literary form which Borges prophesied? This is the literary nature of the role-playing game adventure.

The original role-playing gamers began with procedures and probabilities, using dice to randomly determine the progress of improvised narratives. They developed rules and systems for delineating the potential capabilities of their fictional characters, defining ranges and options for their skills and motivations. Eventually, they wrote scenarios: texts that laid out possibilities, some of which a particular session of a game would actualize. The gamers believed, and usually still believe, that the texts existed to as aids to the actual game, which occurs "at the table."

But texts escape their authors, and these gaming books have found an audience beyond those who merely played the game. It is thought to be a shameful thing to admire these books without attempting to use them to extract a particular narrative. For this reason, role-playing texts have generally eluded formal aesthetic evaluation. Yet...

There are formal gardens that include high balconies, so that a visitor may climb the stairs and see the entire garden from above. A beautiful garden may also be beautiful when seen from a height. One can easily imagine a garden so beautiful that the pattern of its paths is sufficient for contemplative delight, perhaps even a garden where one's memory of the sight of all paths enriches any single perambulation among the flora.