The existential camp of grim dark and thoughts on narrative skirmish games.

 I am trying to make myself work on stuff more but struggle to get started in the morning. I thought I would ramble about emergent narrative and see if anything interesting came out.

Emergent narrative is about choice players intemperate simple outcomes in context of each other and a story emerges from the filling in of the gaps of the narrative. What I struggle with is simplicity of a uniform system does not allow the game create narratives beyond the game. Think chess emergent narratives are the interactions of the players at the table.  But the game flow doesn’t change that narrative beyond the immediate results of the apposing wills of the contest.

Narratives games however are like secular tarot card reading… provocative symbols that provoke a story by simply being layed out in a sequence.  The rules are the pattern of how you lay out the symbols but the symbols are a series of a loose frame work of associations.  The emergent part is how those things interact.

A narrative game is simply fuel for the brain burn up in an act of interpretation. 

I been staring at this last sentence for several minutes and I think I need to talk about something else because I think I hit the nail on the head with what I was originally saying…  though instinctively I have more to say, even if it’s about something else. 

So this morning I watched the documentary The Grim & The Dark: The Search for John Blanche, which I have mixed feelings about it is goofy as a documentary which I understand the subject matter is something akin to existential camp but which a tad absurd is kind of the point of the expression. But they did get some of the better interviews with john I have scene getting him, not out of his self deprecating mode. But, kind  more articulate with the perspective that informs his humble nature.

At the heart of the grim and the dark is painful laughter wheezing at the futility of its amusement with its own pain. A place beyond understanding and more about laughing than laughing inspite of or because of anything in particular. The grim and the dark of it all is persistence without reason or objective, there is only persistence and the repercussions there of.

Peace and love.

Be safe out there friends.