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Slouching towards the Renaissance
Aug. 6th, 2013 02:40 amhttp://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Winter_is_Coming_(motto)
ok, well... I came across this idea and I've been obsessed with it for seven months. I'll expect I'll be at it until year's end, at least. *summarizing*
In any human endeavor, be it an empire or an individual's relationship with something important to him, there are four metaphorical seasons....
Spring is also called the Golden Age. You've just discovered X, and it rocks your socks. You want to tell everybody because New Idea X is gonna change the world. ... Spring= Golden = Simplicity.
Summer is the Silver Age. It's no longer enough to just have the idea and spread the idea. Now you need to get complex, to dig into the permutations of the idea, research related fields, make rules and guidelines and best practices. Summer = Silver = Complexity
then you get to Fall, the Season of Perplexity. the Dark Age. You doubt the rules you spent so much time learning, you question the wisdom of the whole idea, you begin to reverse the previous assumptions to see if the idea works with different rules. You begin to wonder if you know anything about x, really, and if you were even right to preach x to others. (You also see the flaws which were almost invisible to you during your earlier excitement.)
Finally, you stumble free of the darkness, and find yourself at harmony with your doubts. You enter a Renaissance wherein you look back on the previous ages and decide what was good and what was bad, what to keep and what to toss, and in this fashion you sustain yourself through the Winter of Harmony, and prepare yourself for the next transformation of the idea into something new. You wait for someone to invent Idea Y and start the cycle over again.
I didn't make this from scratch.
It's from Brian McLaren's _Naked Spirituality_ , where it's the seasons of faith an individual goes through. (Spring and Simplicity are the zeal of the new convert, for instance) and also (quite independently, I imagine) from Grant Morrison's _Supergods_ where it's the ages of the superhero comic (Golden Age, Silver Age, Dark Age, and Renaissance). Sister Moon helped me understand it's really the same as the literal Golden Age of Rome, or whatever... that it's universal.
I've noticed that pen&paper roleplaying games have also gone through the four ages, albeit twice as fast as comicbooks. Replace 'Superman' with 'D&D' and you have the First Generation of RPGs, when it was enough to have an ampersand and a gimmick, to stake out some new territory. Pick a genre, get a license for some geek-popular setting, or just have an angle (no elves! only elves! Christian chivalry! etc.) The default approach was Gamist (i.e. this is a variant of wargaming, like comics are a variant of pulp magazines. The means may differ, but the objective is to play, overcome ever-better challenges, and win.)
Then came the complexity of the Universal Systems, the Second Generation (e.g. GURPS, the Hero System), with rules for every likely aspect of common reality (falling damage, disease progression, bartering with merchants, hunting wildlife) and various variant realities (how undead work in a horror game, how the neural computer interfaces of the future work, and so on), joining the various genres and settings into large hegemonies, and gripping ever-more-tightly specific settings with elaborate rules specially tailored to match them. The approach became Simulationist (i.e. the objective is to experience fiction interactively, surrounded by a cocoon of rules so that no move takes you outside the illusion of the game-world)
This, naturally, led to the Dark Age of Gaming, exemplified by Vampire: the Masquerade. Rules-light replaced rule complexity, emphasis on story replaced emphasis on mechanics, and the sort of creatures you'd kill without remorse in D&D became the player character options. Some 3rd generation games even toyed with self-referential play, creative nonfiction, -- with breaking the fourth wall, piercing the cocoon, and bleeding 'reality' into the game world and vice versa. The approach became (quite militantly, at first) Narrativist (i.e. the objective is to cooperatively tell the best story you can, and the rules exist only to facilitate that.)
After the militant ascendance of Story subsided, gamers started to understand that the three approaches were not mutually exclusive warring camps, but separate elements of the overall gaming experience. That is, each player has some expectation that a game is a game, that these games simulate, and that stories are told using these games. A given player may prefer one over the other two, or two of them over the third, or some mixture of all three, but no one really likes a game that ignores or completely flunks one of the elements. When people began creating RPGs that balanced the three approaches, the Gaming Renaissance began --not that anyone ever calls it that.
Each game tends to sing its own praises, so far, but you can tell them by the way they use words like 'combine' and 'inspired': as in, _Icons_ is "inspired by the fast-playing old-school games and the new generation of narrative role-play". ('Old-school' gets mentioned a lot now, and tends to mean 1st generation games.) _Mutants & Masterminds_ has a similar frosting of narrative play mechanics but the cake is a detailed 2nd generation style ruleset. _Savage Worlds_ aims at being a rules-light universal system with a wargaming/gamist feel, promising detail where you like it but speedy simplicity where the math would get in the way. The Fourthcore movement strives to prove you can play in the old-school style even with the newer rules. _Munchkin_ and _Arkham Horror_ reap their riches by simulating the experience of gamist play (in a more rules-light way than the original sources). I've never played MMOs like WoW, but they might very well be the ultimate in complex gamist play. Small wonder that paper-gamers are moving in the opposite direction, ceding that pasture where they can't compete. Even D&D itself is retiring its WoW-wannabe 4th edition in favor of an edition described as a mixture of its first three editions.
Why do I tell you all this, aside from the possibility that I'm slightly crazy and only write what things demand to be written? Because I'm beginning to think that America itself, its pop culture zeitgeist, its politics, its economics ... has come, or is coming, into its Winter. Everywhere, we're looking back. Retro fashions and period-piece dramas on tv. Regressive politics drowning out the progressive. It's like we can't move forward, have a real 21st century way of doing things, until we've digested and come to consensus on what happened in the 20th century.
Assuming my hypothesis is correct, what benefit do we gain from knowing it? Can we win over the citizens of Pleasantville with some new sociopolitical movement that promises to combine the best parts of the past with the best parts of the present era, some kind of Society for Creative Americanism, founded to envision the 20th Century As It Should Have Been? Do we extrapolate Brian McLaren's advice for a personal winter to the society at large, calling for silent reflection and grateful inward meditation on what has passed? Do we tell them to Keep Calm and Carry On, confident that seasons will pass and a new Spring will come, in time? or do we struggle furiously to build something new to fill the void as old pillars crumble, fearful that the new empire won't be much to our liking unless it's the one we build ourselves?
p.s. the parts of American life that don't appear to be withering are the parts that tend to involve the Internet, which may well still be enjoying its Golden Age, or Silver at most. The initial dotcom gold rush may be over, but people are still discovering new things they can do with the Net, fueling bursts of new growth. Also, multinational corporations and financial sector manipulators are doing just dandy, but I'd rather they didn't inherit the earth from hapless governments that drowned in a bathtub. ... The urge to deconstruct is typical of Dark Ages, while the urge to reconstruct is typical of renaissances. A member of Occupy Wall Street told me once they were trying to 'reconstruct government'. This was before they were forced out and marginalized and vanished from the news. Things like that make it hard to Keep Calm.
ok, well... I came across this idea and I've been obsessed with it for seven months. I'll expect I'll be at it until year's end, at least. *summarizing*
In any human endeavor, be it an empire or an individual's relationship with something important to him, there are four metaphorical seasons....
Spring is also called the Golden Age. You've just discovered X, and it rocks your socks. You want to tell everybody because New Idea X is gonna change the world. ... Spring= Golden = Simplicity.
Summer is the Silver Age. It's no longer enough to just have the idea and spread the idea. Now you need to get complex, to dig into the permutations of the idea, research related fields, make rules and guidelines and best practices. Summer = Silver = Complexity
then you get to Fall, the Season of Perplexity. the Dark Age. You doubt the rules you spent so much time learning, you question the wisdom of the whole idea, you begin to reverse the previous assumptions to see if the idea works with different rules. You begin to wonder if you know anything about x, really, and if you were even right to preach x to others. (You also see the flaws which were almost invisible to you during your earlier excitement.)
Finally, you stumble free of the darkness, and find yourself at harmony with your doubts. You enter a Renaissance wherein you look back on the previous ages and decide what was good and what was bad, what to keep and what to toss, and in this fashion you sustain yourself through the Winter of Harmony, and prepare yourself for the next transformation of the idea into something new. You wait for someone to invent Idea Y and start the cycle over again.
I didn't make this from scratch.
It's from Brian McLaren's _Naked Spirituality_ , where it's the seasons of faith an individual goes through. (Spring and Simplicity are the zeal of the new convert, for instance) and also (quite independently, I imagine) from Grant Morrison's _Supergods_ where it's the ages of the superhero comic (Golden Age, Silver Age, Dark Age, and Renaissance). Sister Moon helped me understand it's really the same as the literal Golden Age of Rome, or whatever... that it's universal.
I've noticed that pen&paper roleplaying games have also gone through the four ages, albeit twice as fast as comicbooks. Replace 'Superman' with 'D&D' and you have the First Generation of RPGs, when it was enough to have an ampersand and a gimmick, to stake out some new territory. Pick a genre, get a license for some geek-popular setting, or just have an angle (no elves! only elves! Christian chivalry! etc.) The default approach was Gamist (i.e. this is a variant of wargaming, like comics are a variant of pulp magazines. The means may differ, but the objective is to play, overcome ever-better challenges, and win.)
Then came the complexity of the Universal Systems, the Second Generation (e.g. GURPS, the Hero System), with rules for every likely aspect of common reality (falling damage, disease progression, bartering with merchants, hunting wildlife) and various variant realities (how undead work in a horror game, how the neural computer interfaces of the future work, and so on), joining the various genres and settings into large hegemonies, and gripping ever-more-tightly specific settings with elaborate rules specially tailored to match them. The approach became Simulationist (i.e. the objective is to experience fiction interactively, surrounded by a cocoon of rules so that no move takes you outside the illusion of the game-world)
This, naturally, led to the Dark Age of Gaming, exemplified by Vampire: the Masquerade. Rules-light replaced rule complexity, emphasis on story replaced emphasis on mechanics, and the sort of creatures you'd kill without remorse in D&D became the player character options. Some 3rd generation games even toyed with self-referential play, creative nonfiction, -- with breaking the fourth wall, piercing the cocoon, and bleeding 'reality' into the game world and vice versa. The approach became (quite militantly, at first) Narrativist (i.e. the objective is to cooperatively tell the best story you can, and the rules exist only to facilitate that.)
After the militant ascendance of Story subsided, gamers started to understand that the three approaches were not mutually exclusive warring camps, but separate elements of the overall gaming experience. That is, each player has some expectation that a game is a game, that these games simulate, and that stories are told using these games. A given player may prefer one over the other two, or two of them over the third, or some mixture of all three, but no one really likes a game that ignores or completely flunks one of the elements. When people began creating RPGs that balanced the three approaches, the Gaming Renaissance began --not that anyone ever calls it that.
Each game tends to sing its own praises, so far, but you can tell them by the way they use words like 'combine' and 'inspired': as in, _Icons_ is "inspired by the fast-playing old-school games and the new generation of narrative role-play". ('Old-school' gets mentioned a lot now, and tends to mean 1st generation games.) _Mutants & Masterminds_ has a similar frosting of narrative play mechanics but the cake is a detailed 2nd generation style ruleset. _Savage Worlds_ aims at being a rules-light universal system with a wargaming/gamist feel, promising detail where you like it but speedy simplicity where the math would get in the way. The Fourthcore movement strives to prove you can play in the old-school style even with the newer rules. _Munchkin_ and _Arkham Horror_ reap their riches by simulating the experience of gamist play (in a more rules-light way than the original sources). I've never played MMOs like WoW, but they might very well be the ultimate in complex gamist play. Small wonder that paper-gamers are moving in the opposite direction, ceding that pasture where they can't compete. Even D&D itself is retiring its WoW-wannabe 4th edition in favor of an edition described as a mixture of its first three editions.
Why do I tell you all this, aside from the possibility that I'm slightly crazy and only write what things demand to be written? Because I'm beginning to think that America itself, its pop culture zeitgeist, its politics, its economics ... has come, or is coming, into its Winter. Everywhere, we're looking back. Retro fashions and period-piece dramas on tv. Regressive politics drowning out the progressive. It's like we can't move forward, have a real 21st century way of doing things, until we've digested and come to consensus on what happened in the 20th century.
Assuming my hypothesis is correct, what benefit do we gain from knowing it? Can we win over the citizens of Pleasantville with some new sociopolitical movement that promises to combine the best parts of the past with the best parts of the present era, some kind of Society for Creative Americanism, founded to envision the 20th Century As It Should Have Been? Do we extrapolate Brian McLaren's advice for a personal winter to the society at large, calling for silent reflection and grateful inward meditation on what has passed? Do we tell them to Keep Calm and Carry On, confident that seasons will pass and a new Spring will come, in time? or do we struggle furiously to build something new to fill the void as old pillars crumble, fearful that the new empire won't be much to our liking unless it's the one we build ourselves?
p.s. the parts of American life that don't appear to be withering are the parts that tend to involve the Internet, which may well still be enjoying its Golden Age, or Silver at most. The initial dotcom gold rush may be over, but people are still discovering new things they can do with the Net, fueling bursts of new growth. Also, multinational corporations and financial sector manipulators are doing just dandy, but I'd rather they didn't inherit the earth from hapless governments that drowned in a bathtub. ... The urge to deconstruct is typical of Dark Ages, while the urge to reconstruct is typical of renaissances. A member of Occupy Wall Street told me once they were trying to 'reconstruct government'. This was before they were forced out and marginalized and vanished from the news. Things like that make it hard to Keep Calm.
