The ultimate goal of intellectual and artistic collaboration is to create together that which could never have been created alone. World vs. Hero embraces
this ideal and capitalizes on the intimacy of the two-player model to
make dynamic creative collaboration not only possible, but virtually
assured!
It's a kind of magic that
happens between two like-minded individuals - a spontaneous and improvisational joy that
never ceases to surprise. It is not simply the "bouncing of ideas off
one another;" it is the absorption and re-formation of ideas that become
realized in startlingly new and unexpected ways!
The
Surrealists of the early 20th century were well aware of the potency of
intellectual collaborative play and developed their own games to
liberate reason and discover the deeper wells of meaning within their
own minds. By designing simple rules for two or more players that encouraged
participants to supply written or drawn elements to the same whole
entity, the Surrealists quickly learned that something very unexpected
and special would almost always happen. In his Manifestos of Surrealism, poet Andre Breton wrote: In
the course of various experiments conceived as parlor games...we think
we have brought out into the open a strange possibility of thought,
which is that of pooling. The fact remains that very striking
relationships are established in this manner, that remarkable analogies
appear, that an inexplicable factor of irrefutability most often
intervenes, and that, in a nutshell, this is one of the most
extraordinary meeting grounds. Breton's "meeting ground" is the gaming table, and the "pooling" is the fusion of players' imaginations. Based on the above, World vs. Hero
and many other storytelling games and RPGs fit snugly into the Surrealists' mode of play and fulfill the promise
of that "strange possibility of thought."
A surreal landscape by Adam Otero
Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin commented on the same kind of merging of minds in his Discourse in the Novel.
Bakhtin searched for the "interanimating relationships with new
contexts" that emerged when creative collaboration occurred. He
believed that:When
someone else's ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us
and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up....
[I]n each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able
to reveal ever new ways to mean. In World vs. Hero, two players are constantly in a state of creative flux not unlike
that which Bakhtin describes. The discourse is the adventure story the
players are alternately creating. With each turn, different
possibilities emerge, and those possibilities along with new elements
shift the story's direction in meaningful new ways.
In order for collaborative creativity to be successful, both players must be possessed of: - a curious mind;
- a desire to see things in new ways;
- an openness to others;
- and the strength of character to share control.
I think, given the above, some long-time RPG Game Masters may not appreciate World vs. Hero
and other games like it because, in such games, narrative power is equally shared by the Hero Player and
the World Player. Some GMs prefer their players to experience a pre-planned story just the way it has been envisioned and with little deviation. Though such a goal in itself isn't a bad thing, it favors a passivity the relegates players to the status of "audience" rather than "collaborator."
When this happens, the magical synergy of collaborative creativity can never take place, and that GM will never know how much has been lost by not losing control.
- JF
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