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[personal profile] 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! [livejournal.com profile] princeofcairo  has written a bunch of "how to" columns on the subject, Umberto Eco built a whole novel around it, and [livejournal.com profile] 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?

Date: 2010-03-11 09:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] princeofcairo.livejournal.com
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.

Date: 2010-03-11 09:31 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] crisper.livejournal.com
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).

Date: 2010-03-11 10:49 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] princeofcairo.livejournal.com
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."

Date: 2010-03-12 03:24 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] robotnik.livejournal.com
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.

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