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A proposed statement:

If a story is the recounting of past events, then a story cannot be a present nor future occurrence, and can only exist after those said events have ended.  Thus a story cannot be told or exist in a live event and can only be produced from it.

Assuming this to be true, one could say that a role-playing game cannot tell a story unless it is successfully completed, thus they do not exist in the realm of RPGs and are only produced from them.

I don’t agree with this idea because I have a different view on what a story actually is.  I never really thought deeply about what a story was until I was working on a project for a design company that wanted to create a service that allowed individuals to be able to share stories with each other.  While interviewing my uncle (who is a well-known philosopher in the afghan community and fell within the company’s user base), when presented with the question of if he was interested in telling stories, he said no and regarded them as being childish.  He was not interested in telling the story of Sr. Isaac Newton’s observations of the falling of an apple but instead his opinions on Newton’s theories that were later developed from that occurrence.  I said well that can be a story too.  And he did not agree, and we had an interesting discussion, both of us learning from the other, and broadening our scope of what we defined as stories.

So if I were to define stories, I would expand on them to say that since they include one’s opinions, they can also include all occurrences of one’s life, including the one that they were currently living.  Thus the story of telling a story is also a story, and the act of living life could be the telling of that story.

Though this might seem confusing, we could look to Goffman’s (1974) and Fine’s (1983) breakdowns and descriptions on social frames and see that blurring can occur when one does not know exactly which frame she is currently in at any given moment: outside, game, or diegetic.  Delving deeper into this, we could also argue that the second a thought occurs in ones mind, it is now no longer in the present and thus in the past.  So all of the thoughts, utterances, and situations leading up to a game can be included in the over all story of playing the game.  Thus there can be an outside, game, and diegetic story.  So the guy delivering pizza to your game is part of the on going story.  The ideas going on in ones head only spoken to herself can also be a story leading up to that specific second in time.

In addition to this the game master also has a set storyline that she is trying to describe and create as the game progresses.  This outline contains a story, even if the players never play the game.  The story still exists, even if fragmented with no one to read it aloud, like a book of ideas that is never opened.

If we were to combine these ideas, we can easily see that the act of living in the present moment is the continual creation of a story that I am telling through this text, and as each word is created it now becomes part of the past and further extends the story of me writing for lecture #2 of understanding games.

Things to ponder on:

Does a story have to end?  Does it exist if it is never told?  If it is my life, does it end when I die?  What if I’m talked about till the end of time?  What if the stories change each time they are told?  Am I immortal?  I have no ending therefore I have no story?

REFERENCES TAKEN FROM LECTURES SLIDES #2

Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Fine, Gary Alan (1983): Shared Fantasy. University of Chicago Press.