robotnik2004 | Your Kung Fu Is The Best Kung Fu

Entry tags:

Your Kung Fu Is The Best Kung Fu

First, I need to apologize to those of you reading this LiveJournal for my wordy and shall we say remedial series of blog posts this week on Playful Historical Thinking. I'm writing those a) to figure out for myself what is worth saying about the topic and b) to find the language to talk about play with an audience whose playing muscles are a little more atrophied. But the people reading this LiveJournal, I'm pretty sure, already get the idea of playing with history without a whole lot of wordy hand holding. Several of you are black belt playful historical thinkers if not world masters.

Which is why I could use your input.

So I know that many of you are familiar with that thing that happens, that pattern recognition / apophenia / confirmation bias thing, when you're doing playful historical research, especially for an RPG you're playing or running or planning to run. You start flipping through books, and Google and Wikipedia, concocting some deranged historical theory, and then suddenly you start finding facts and evidence that are too perfect, that seem to confirm the very goofball theory you just yourself made up!

princeofcairo has written a bunch of "how to" columns on the subject, Umberto Eco built a whole novel around it, and

mgrasso seems to have it happen about once every three days.

What I'm trying to do is to concoct some kind of game, activity, or demonstration exercise for a group of, say, 6-12 academics that would in the space of 30 minutes or so let them have this experience themselves. Basically I want to turn sober professional historians into paranoid conspiracy theorists. Temporarily.

I thought about giving them a bunch of interesting and allusive historical sources and asking the group to come up with a theory connecting all of them, but I worry that if I choose the sources in advance it will seem like I'm stacking the deck, and they won't get that uncanny "nobody planned this and yet clearly somebody planned this" feeling. At the other extreme, I thought about hitting the Random Page link on Wikipedia a few times and asking them to connect all the things that come up--but the random pages on Wikipedia can be extremely random and farflung and it's quite possible they could not be connected. I also wonder if it would help to frame the exercise inside a mini-roleplaying game, but that's a level of artificiality that my audience just might not go for. Maybe I should just run a session of InSpectres?

Anyway, that's my current conundrum. And I know your playful historical kung fu is extremely advanced. Any ideas, suggestions, warnings, conjectures?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Stack the deck so as to give them the illusion of choice? Random wikipedia is awesome but may not work out in the time allotted. Maybe make up a deck of cards that you *know* have connections and have them choose a couple.

Or possibly play "Six Degrees of MK-ULTRA". Have one fixed point and then pick random Wiki pages from there.

I'm assuming that your d6+6 academics will all have different areas of expertise within the humanities and social sciences (history, economics, sociology, etc.), and even within subjects, they will have different focus areas (time periods, etc.)?

If that's the case, have them bring their own subjects of expertise. Maybe even the title or subject of a course they've taught. Or have them write down one or two subjects they are experts in on an index card, and then shuffle them up and try to get "from sausage to Plato in five steps" as Eco put it. Maybe you have Wikipedia on hand to help with the links, or let them extrapolate themselves. Or maybe you as the instructor add some wild cards to the deck to give things that conspiratorial flair. I'm just sort of brainstorming here.

Maybe I've attended too many cheesy corporate training seminars where encouraging reticent managers in "audience participation" is key, but that's how we in the private sector training world would do it. :)

Good points, all.

I've had enough documentary premieres with Q&As at the end to know that there is one thing academics like to do is bloviate ad nauseum about what *they* know about, and they never get around to asking a question of the filmmaker. ;p

And if they all bring their own areas of expertise, they won't have to rely as heavily on Wikipedia which I always feel is a good thing.

Actually, I'm thinking maybe a three-pointed progression would be best. You get three academics together and their subjects are:

Western railroad expansion during the Gilded Age
the economics of early Venetian banks
the social status of Yakuza in modern Japan

And you basically say get from A to B to C and back to A again. This way it's not a simple linear link-up, which you can do pretty easily for most social science areas. Again, just brainstorming.

Just lock them in a room with James Burke for an hour.

Yes. Have to use the academics own expertise. Depending on where I do this little experiment, it will either be all historians or a mix of tech-friendly humanities types.

My snarky, knee-jerk answer: Yes, just run a session of InSpectres. It works for me. ;)

But seriously, I'll ruminate on the nuts and bolts some more. This is a very intriguing and potentially very cool thought exercise, and one a lot of academic historians could really benefit from, I think. Are you planning on doing this at a conference or something?

I think that InSpectres (or something like it) could do the job very nicely. Take a piece of interesting hole in the historical record, and place the historians as the players involved who know what really happened. Each historian can pull in genuine historical knowledge that they have to get some sort of mechanical bonus, but no one knows for certain what happened behind closed doors.

The issue there is that you need to pick a good moment in history where the unknown is interesting, known decently to the academics who don't cover the timeframe, and which can have that conspiratorial sense that it explains more about history than what actually happened.

Or start the situation off with something explicitly non-historical. Perhaps you play Executive Decision and take the roles of President Truman's cabinet dealing with the UFO crash at Roswell. Or would that wind up too out there for stuffy academic types?

Ah, I forgot about Executive Decision. I probably don't have time for a real game, but that could be a nice model for something.

InSpectres does indeed work for you. The way I love that game from afar makes

chrisgoodwin's love for Dungeon Majesty look like dirt.

Yeah, it's for a conference or two. I might do it at this, if there's time, and I'll definitely do it at this.

30 minutes isn't long enough to run a game of anything -- especially if you have to explain rules, and overcome hesitancy -- so that's out.

I think

mgrasso is right that you should capitalize on the participants' own expertise.

Playing the "connections game" is, I find, a less reliable method of STIPS (Sudden Tim Powers Syndrome) than picking a theory and "proving" it. Perhaps the way to do it is something like: everyone puts in the name of one historical person from their area of expertise. Everyone swaps the names around. The goal of the group is to determine how many of those people were actually vampires. (Or Templars, but that won't work if you have a medievalist in the group. Plus, lay academics are more likely to know the signs of vampirism -- mysterious "death," nocturnal habits, blood fixation, etc. -- than Templarism.) I guarantee you that with a group of seven historians, you'll get two vampires, minimum.

Wow! "Spot The Vampire" sounds like a *great* and very simple framework to throw down in front of a group of academics. Could benefit from having some means of rewarding any given player for having their contribution "unmasked" (thus encouraging them to make the case with the information that they personally know most well).

Although if you're really trying for STIPS, you need to encourage people who didn't know the topic area ahead of time to suddenly see the connections.

Maybe give one gumdrop to any participant who proves that the person he contributed was a vampire, but two gumdrops to any participant who provides the clinching evidence that someone else's subject was a vampire.

Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious before: You get the participants to submit the names before you ever use the word "vampire."

Nice. Yes, that makes sense that trying to prove a given theory is going to be more likely to produce the magic.

So maybe I ask them all to come up with names, of historical persons they know well and won't be offended by "thinking playfully" about. Then I tell them that they are on the trail of the ancient vampire conspiracy that has manipulated history for aeons, let them fire up their laptops (or just unload their knowledge on us), and ask them which ones are vampires.

Or I could just have everyone do a couple of bong hits and then watch the Wizard of Oz / Dark Side of the Moon deal.

I'm not gonna pretend to understand all this "gaming" that you speak of, but I can offer a generic warning. Sounds like you're possibly uhhh overthinking this. Go with your gut and feel secure your enthusiasm will be contagious. Then again, you _want_ them to be paranoid so mayhap _you_ should be paranoid, too. Stacking the deck? Hell, man, _somebody's_ gotta steer the ship. Maybe their activity should somehow mirror your activity, that is, the types of decisions they will have to make should follow the types of decisions you're making now in planning this thing, if that's not too uhhh ouroborosy/deus ex machinery.

But overthinking stuff is what I do!

And I like ouroborosy.

Talk about overthinking [and undersleeping], I've been mulling over the Viking/Samurai thing. The Vikings weren't fond of clearing forests, and coastal raids became more risky and less profitable in Europe. Christianity outlawed paganism and slavery while serfdom became the new new. It would have been neat if the Vikings could have made a new home Vinland ways. It would have been even neater if, instead of Commodore Matthew Perry dragging Japan out of isolationism, but North American Vikings. What if Meiji was unsuccessful at doing away with Satsuma 'n' Samurais? What if Samurais had developed and put to use arquebuses much earlier? What if the divine winds never came, or if the black plague hit mainland China and Samurais were forced to abandon asia and sail east Californy-way? Would have been interesting to see if Native Americans would have been treated more or less respectively, seeing as they're all about honor 'n' nature 'n' stuff. Cumination towards an 18th century Man in the High Castle situation; Samurais 'n' West Coast/Plains Native Americans vs. Vikings 'n' Algic 'n' Iroquoians. Think about it.

See, everybody? This is what I'm talking about.

Maybe rather than giving them the historical items, you give them a scavenger hunt of categories which they pick the details for themselves, and then give them the challenge? Like a Mad Lib, almost. "Pick a world leader of the last 1000 years, an insect, an Oscar-winning Best Picture, one deity from an established pantheon, the most famous piece of art you can think of, and a type of weapon."

(Maybe you could use focused-but-subjective terms like "the best", "the worst", "the most famous" for all the categories, so that there is opinionated variety among the participants but not totally random divergence.)

Also: I fail to see the point in making anyone a paranoid conspiracy theorist "temporarily". ALL OR NOTHING, BABY!

Also: I fail to see the point in making anyone a paranoid conspiracy theorist "temporarily". ALL OR NOTHING, BABY!

Well, I want to set modest goals to start.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Your Kung Fu Is The Best Kung Fu

no subject

Abulafia 2.0

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Abulafia 2.0

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject