I am often grateful to have the parents I do, but I think rarely as grateful as I am tonight.
We watched Deepa Metha’s Water tonight. It is an emotionally trying film centered around a fictional group of Indian widows in the late 1930s. And I found myself moved, which isn’t something that happens often with me in film. I tend to abstract to the point where fiction has little emotional impact on me. In some ways this is a benefit in that it allows me to dispassionately analyze things. But sometimes I am reminded that it can be a disadvantage.
By the end of the film my mother was crying. She turned to me and said, ‘The world is so cruel’. And it struck me just how fortunate I am to call such a compassionate woman ‘mother’. She has seen decades more pain and suffering and hardship than I have. By all rights she should be that much more immune to it. But this piece of fiction about a group whose plight is not her own moved her to tears when it moved me to nothing more than regret.
She went on, ‘I want to change the world’. Which is a phrse I’ve heard before in many contexts, but I think this time it meant something new to me. Personally I’ve always wanted to change the world, but I think I’ve always wanted to change the world to make it better for people like me. I want better educational systems and better social networks, but I want them situated in fundamentally the same society I live in.
My mother, she wants something bigger. And, I think perhaps, something nobler. She wants to make society itself better. More than that, perhaps. She wants to make the nature of the universe itself better. It is a goal that awes me in its audacity, while at the same time leaving me humble and feeling inadequate.
I have never been moved in that way. At least not that I remember. I’ve lived among crushing poverty, and intellectually I find myself outraged by it. But I have never engaged with the problem emotionally.
But in hearing my mother’s anguished cry that ‘the world is so cruel’ I felt, just for a moment, that the world indeed is cruel. For a brief period of time I grasped the emotional impact that recognizing that cruely can have. And even now that feeling is fading. In another half hour it will be but a memory. Perhaps worst of all, I won’t feel a need to recapture it. I will go back to clucking disapprovingly at the cruelty of the world, I will go back to doing what I have been doing, back to my comfortable unengaged viewpoint where I don’t have to deal with the fact that the world really is cruel.
It is on nights like this when I wonder if I’m not missing something important. My complacency with the world and my complacency with my view of the world… are they tools that allow me to accomplish great things, or are they barriers that keep me from doing so?
It is on nights like this when I feel almost unbearably young and immature. And it is on nights like this when I wonder if I’ll ever grow up.
Thomas
So now, three days later, do you remember it, can yuou make connection with it even for just having written it down?
This was a good post.
(I’m putting this in brackets to over-illustrate how much I don’t want to trivialize this post by bringing it into an RPG context… but this was also a very good post in illustrating to me excactly why I often feel like the forums and the blogsphere react to me like I am speaking a different language than the rest of the world. It’s because I am, in large part, speaking from a different emotional context, and I play on an alien playing field to most of the people I am talking to.)
The emotional connection? Not by myself. I’m pretty empathetic though, so I bet that I could capture it again if I were with someone who was making it. Which is something I hadn’t thought of before, and makes me grateful that you asked.
Do I remember it? Only vaguely, and at great emotional distance. It is much like pain that way for me. I can’t remember how it feels to be really hurt (it may actually be the same thing at work), I just remember times when I was in a lot of pain.
And I actually don’t feel that RPG discussion is trivializing, though I appreciate your sensitivity there. And, yeah, I think you’re probably right about discourse and emotional context. I think that the dominance of the Forge paradigm on so much serious discussion of play is a negative. It’s better than no discussion, but the Forge paradigm is high on analysis and low on intuition. That’s a huge weakness.
Thomas
Thomas, I think (ironically enough) you misunderstand me. It’s not the analysis or serious discussion of play that I am talking about….
I am saying that when I play, one of the goals is to have the game emotionally change me. Not just to intellectually engage, not just to emotionally engage, not just to be in the emotional vice grip of the moment, but to be emotionally revolutionized in the moment and in a lasting way.
In every game that works optimally for me, I am your mother in the final moments of watching Water.
That is ironic, and funny.
Now, I can’t speak for the great mass of people, but I can speak for myself: That is also the ideal I strive for in play. I am not yet good at it, and thus achieve it only rarely, but that is my ultimate goal in play too. And I read a lot of other people (Vincent, for instance) as doing the same thing.
Which is interesting since we almost never talk about it that way. Which means I could be misreading. It could also be a blind spot. We simply assume that everyone understands this, and we forget to analyze how it works (which is silly, of course).
Thomas
Oh, this should have gone in the above comment: I also think that this is what RPGs do best. The way that they allow for such personalized investment and the way that they react to us on such a personal level, it strikes me that almost no other medium can approach the impact that an RPG can.
Thomas
That is also the ideal I strive for in play.
Is it though? Is it really?
I mean… Hrm.
There’s no goal that’s more noble than any other in this context, and that’s something not everyone gets, or wants to get. We all have one goal when we come to play, regardless of the kind of player we are, or the kind of play we do. We come to the game to get out of game what we want out of game. People talk about the concepts of “art” or “game” or “play” or “creation” as if they are lofty ideals. In reality, gaming has a payoff for everyone who engages in it, which is why they come and do it rather than golfing or stamp collecting or singing in a choir or whatever else might have an appealing payoff from them.
This means, at least in my boat, that whatever it is that any particular person’s payoff is just as worthy as anyone else’s, as long as two people with diametrically opposed payoffs are not playing in the same game.
So all that to say, despite the fact that my language is loaded with devotional charge to my own payoff, I don’t consider it any more worthy than: “participation in creating an epic that was worth telling”, or “spending 5 hours in a fantasy world with my friends” or “forgetting that I am me for the next 3 hours” or “feeling fully, really challenged in a social engagement while making something that feels lasting to me.”
I’m rambling, but I wanted to make sure that I was clear that there was no bad/good, value/no value statement when I say that it doesn’t feel like
your payoff (or even Vincent’s) is the same as mine, Both of you feel however, like even if your payoff is different, that it is perhaps more compatable than mine than many others in the forums.
If the honesty and awe of your mother in your LJ post above is as heartfelt and true as I believe it is, then I find it really hard to believe that the payoff you get from games in the same emotional quadrant as the one I roll around in. If you strive for it in game, if you even achieve it sometimes, I don’t think that you could/would be as in awe of it as you so beautifully write above.
Just a gut thing.
Sorry to push at this, just something I’ve been thinking of posting about over on SA for a while.
You should totally post. Whenever you know what you want to say :) (Also, I’m totally with you on the ‘as long as you’re getting out what you want to get out you’re playing the best way’ thing.)
And… yeah… I think we aim at the same things. I don’t mind the pushing, it’s useful to make me think about it. Because, as you say, my reaction to seeing it in others suggests that I personally get it only from a distance.
But… I don’t think that changes my motivation. I see in RPGs this tremendous potential for direct emotional stuff (I need a better word for this). I turn to RPGs for it because I, for the most part, am unable to access it in other forms of media. I abstract to readily, I employ emotional distancing techniques. Emotional stimulation is something of a rarity for me, generally occurring when I read Kipling’s poetry while sleep deprived (which, shockingly, isn’t all that common an occurrance).
I think it is a goal that I often lose sight of, but that sits in the back of my mind. I am still at a point in my play history (I’m shocked sometimes to realize just how young I am) where I am trying to find what I want in play. My techniques are in flux, I don’t know what works and what doesn’t.
Now, I may be misdiagnosing my goals. I’ve done it before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again. But at this moment, having gone for nearly 24 hours without any sleep, I am mostly convinced that I play for the emotional thing. Catharsis, perhaps.
Thomas
Cool.
I’ll gret around to posting, once I’m back in Canada… which I will be in about… 32 hours or so! If I am comfortable and awake enough on the plane I might just work on something there to abate the boredom.
As a point of note… although most of the net world probably would be aghast to think of me this way, I too have been prone to emotional distancing, over-abstraction, and (not that you said this one) morbid introspection. I am substantially less so in the last number of years, due largely to Brand’s presence in my life, both because, well, the *lurve*… but also in no small part because of the amount of highly cathartic roleplay that I do in the games we play together.
And related to all of those other conversations we’ve had… character socket immersion is my conduit to get at the catharsis. Remember my Epicaric Virago Manifesto? I create situations to launch the character into terrible situations, then get in them to feel what it feels like. Maybe, if you, as you say, get it only from a distance, you are socially socketed and are best skilled in getting it vicariously through another player’s achievement of it? Like, the way you engaged powerfully with your mother’s emotional engagement of Water.
Hurray for travel! After you get back and settle in, don’t forget that I still fully intend to finish our interview ;)
So, this social socket idea is a very interesting one, and one I’ll have to consider carefully. My initial reaction is ‘nuh uh!’ but I’m not sure that that initial reaction is right. And even if it turns out that I don’t primarily socket socially, I think that the idea is tremendously useful for understanding why many people take traditional GM roles. Sometime at a later date you should totally ask me about this again because I’ll have it tumbling around in the back of my head for a couple of weeks and it’s possibly something fun will come out.
Thomas