thread: 2006-09-08 : Ben on breaking tradition
On 2006-09-09, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
1. Tradition
Ben, my friend, tradition is "constantly breaking with tradition." Tradition is not a single, static body of wisdom transmitted intact through the ages: That would be "scripture," and thank you immensely for finally making me figure out what that term really means and how scripture and tradition are different. Tradition is dynamic, ever-changing and self-contradicting: That's its power!
When you sit down at your grandpa's knee, the story he tells you isn't the same story his grandpa told him: It's the story of how he changed the story his grandpa told him, which carries encoded within it the story of how his grandpa's grandpa changed the story his grandpa's grandpa's grandpa told, and on and on and on. For you to tell the story differently yourself isn't "breaking with tradition," it's keeping it alive: "Breaking with tradition" would be not retelling the story at all, or refusing to listen in the first place.
Which of course people do all the time, especially in our culture, where the pace of change makes old stories seem irrelevant. But more of them linger than you'd think. One of my favorite moments in The Matrix is (spoiler) when the heroine kisses the fallen hero and says, softly, "Get up." That's a little crystal of the Sleeping Beauty story, in all its power, yet inverted in a way that shows we now live in a culture where women can be the strong ones sometimes. I don't see that as tradition breaking; I see that as tradition growing.
That's the same with my gaming group, when we really get going. The new stuff, the stuff we invent from whole cloth, is the stuff that doesn't have much power to move us; the great moments come when we take ownership of some story out of our tradition and reshape it to meet our own needs.
2. Roleplaying
Now, even if I were proven wrong about tradition and its capacity for growth, I would still have very little fear about either playing or designing roleplaying games.
First, to remind everyone of Meguey Baker's marvellous essay on ritual once again (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=16661.0), RPG sessions lend themselves naturally to "intentionality"—we know we're about to do something special, even if we are completely ignorant of Forge theory and don't acknowledge that our characters are just expressions of ourselves—and to "containment"—even if we are hardcore immersionists, we know that we are pretending to be someone else, donning a ritual mask that allows us to explore dangerous thoughts a little more safely.
What's more, the "game" aspect of our hobby—all those weird wargame heritages like stats and dice and cards that we sometimes lament—serve as another distancing device, another measure of containment, by forcing us to process all even highly emotional context through the rational, calculating side of our brains.
