Bricolage and Continuity

AKA Bricolage Post #1

This is one things that Emily and I talked about this weekend.

In Chris Lehrich's excellent essay Ritual Discourse in Role-Playing Games (which, as an aside, could be regarded as a design bible for much of Polaris), he identifies the concept of bricolage. Much as I would like to make you go over there and read Chris's essay, which you totally should, I will quote from his definition here:

Lévi-Strauss's idea, in simple terms, is that cultures think like oddly artistic hobbyists. Imagine you have a basement full of stuff from which to build whatever you like. You have bits of old machines, things your neighbors threw out, scraps of wood, and tail-ends of old projects, as well as the taken-apart bits of all your old projects. Now you decide to build something, and you have some ideas -- aesthetic and practical -- about how that should be done; you are very skilled and talented, and can see possibilities in all sorts of things. But you do not have a Home Depot available, or you consider it "cheating" to go buy things. At any rate, you have to build the thing you're going to build from what you already have in your basement.

A nice example is a Rube Goldberg cartoon, though those are deliberately silly. You fly a kite, and the kite string pulls a lever, and this pushes an old boot, and that turns on your iron, and the iron burns some old pants, and smoke goes into a tree, and.... A brilliant example is the recent Honda advertisement called "the cog," which can readily be found on the Internet. The point is that one constructs an elaborate machine out of bits and pieces already owned.

Lévi-Strauss's point is that each object used contains its own history; that is, the iron has already been used for something and the bricoleur then gives it a new use. The iron, to focus on the single example, is a local source of heat; it can burn pants, or make a grilled-cheese sandwich, and of course can press a shirt. But it cannot be a refrigerator. And if, clever person that you are, you pull the heating coil out of the iron for some project that requires a heating coil, your iron now contains the history of its usage: it is now a heating coil and a heavy weight.

I think that this idea is desperately important to role-playing games, to a degree that has hardly been touched on by theorists, and I have been sorely disappointed with the discussions on the Forge about this topic, which have been largely isolated to trying to relate the idea of bricolage, in some arcane manner, to the Simulationist creative agenda.

This is deeply dissatisfying to me, because I believe that bricolage is a key element to all role-playing, because role-playing is pretty much art, and art's interconnection to other art is pretty durned important.

There is no way I will be able to summarize this in a single blog post. Millions of very smart people have devoted their lives to the study of reference in literature and haven't even come close to exhausting it. This is a starting point for discussion, a thing for us to look for, to help us see and understand our own games.

Back in the 1970s in the dawn of modern role-playing games, it was considered par for the course that players would and should move their characters from game to game, playing the same character in different worlds without any sort of excuse or justification. With the publication of serious canonical settings and also with a new wave of role-playing games fundamentally incompatible with each other, this practice has essentially died out, although it continues in an artificial and top-down form in the "Living ____" projects of the RPGA. There was a real feeling of interactivity between games. This was brought to mind recently by the reactions of the participant / observer / non-gamer in Ron's recent Trollbabe actual play. Check out the bit about her reaction to Trollbabes and Ghost Wolves.

Do you see that this is exactly bricolage, and further that it is fulfilling to same role of giving additional meaning to whatever is repeated? A character repeated throughout games gives meaning to the character, and that meaning is given regardless of whether or not the world changes around them. It is the same in ritual and the same in myth -- repetition gives power.

This is continuity in, I think, a truer sense of the word than it is normally used in geek circles (Rich, you can come bite my ass for that). Continuity in modern games is about making sure that everything lines up perfectly with everything else and that nothing is out of place, and that all things implied by previous play are, in fact, carried through. I think that this sort of play misses the point. Role-playing is enormously ill-suited to picky continuity fixation -- novels and TV shows are much better at it. The powerful continuity in role-playing games is that things that are important to us will be repeated, because we remember them, and that things that are not important will be forgotten and lie, easily contradicted, by the wayside.

What do I mean by "strength" or "continuity?" I mean something that you have an intuitive sense of -- you can clearly tell what is the right thing for it or the wrong thing for it without having to think about it at all. Essentially, your knowledge of this imagined thing has left the realm of conscious thought and entered the intuitive and the reactive parts of your brain -- where most real objects are. I think it is something like what Vincent means by "robustness of the game's fiction" in his recent posts about immersion.

This isn't just about character. It can apply to any content of the role-playing game. My Chorus setting has been used, in various forms, since I was 12. That's well over a decade of games. Only two characters in that time have managed to gain real weight and importance, and a third may be sneaking up on me, but the setting has grown and changed and shifted and been effected by all that play. Now it is living and strong -- I know all about the history 1000 years ago not because I wrote it down in a notebook once but because I have actually played it. And it shows.

So we have this idea -- if you keep doing something, if you keep reiterating it from week to week and session to session and game to game -- it gains power. But, speaking for myself here, I'm a lazy bastard. That sounds like a lot of work just to have powerful play. Surely, there must to some other route to this sort, which involves less effort on my part.

Oh, yeah. And its a biggie. We can steal.

To draw back to Chorus for a second, when I bring in a new element from some other art -- say, the Jabberwocky or Vecna or Inanna -- I am bringing all the the strength and continuity of that object with it into the setting. It makes it more real, more intuitive. We can draw on what we have read before, but also on what other people have made before us, and push it, sculpt it, make it our own and gain our own intuitions about it.

A lot of good games do this and encourage this. It is the primary draw of Rifts -- you can bring anything in. (Of course, you can do this in any game, but Rifts gives you permission to do so.) Sorcerer encourages you to draw on fiction for not only genre elements and color trappings, but also for situation and plot structures via the relationship map technique. PTA does some encouragement to steal from other shows, and more generally to adopt and take the language of television.

I want to see more games where you can do things like this -- move characters around, pull things in from literature, and make it all mass together into a bricolage.

Do you? Why or why not? How can we encourage this?

P.S. To those who are interested in the Big Model, I think that this is about a very interesting part of the Exploration level. Thoughts?

(stealth edit: AKA)