Your Kung Fu Is The Best Kung Fu

[robotnik2004]

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?

Comments

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

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?

[mrteapot.livejournal.com]

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?

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

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.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

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.