Oracular Adventures
An encounter with the tarot should, therefore, complicate matters. In other words, we benefit most by approaching a tarot reading that amplifies the already intertwined relationship between symbols and our cluster of perceptual and affective tendencies. Tarot should be less about discerning a spread's salient meanings and more about embracing its generative effects.
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In its most sublime expression, tarot is a form of play. It not only opens space for the deepening of imagination but also facilitates the incursion of radical, unthought possibilities in a world dominated by the demands of uncompromising discreteness, rigid intelligibility, and imperious rationality.
-- Sereptie, Emotional Poker: Tarot and the Unfolding of Imaginal Realms
The assumption that RPG writing exists to transmit information is a superficial truth akin to saying that oracles (e.g. tarot cards, astrology, I Ching) do not work to predict the future.1
Oracles indeed fail to generate falsifiable propositions about future events in a way that can be systematically verified. But oracles "do" (i.e. perform or effect) "work" (i.e. effects, results, material change) insofar as exposure to random juxtapositions of semiotically-rich images & text can evoke a profound psychological response. Oracles "work" to pose questions, shift perspectives, disrupt repetitive thought patterns, & activate (or rewire) the Rube Goldberg contraptions that lie occluded within the murk of the unconscious.
In my experience playing & running RPGs, conveyance of information is only a small part of what a game text does. The notes, the adventure, the scenario are on some level as arbitrary as Pamela Coleman Smith's art; they are there not to transmit data but to evoke improvisational utterances. If the game is "working" these utterances are alive; if not, they dissipate, a prophesy unfulfilled. "Playing the world" taken seriously means allowing the parts of you that have lots of world in them to speak. This is what oracles are for. This is (perhaps?) what games are for.
What does your game/adventure do? What questions does it pose? What levers does it pull? Where does it inscribe its activity? What surfaces does it abrade or lubricate? In whose hands does it propagate 10,000 beautiful ludicules that scatter in a gust of westerly wind?
Into what strange new habitats can a game be released? Under what circumstances does a game wither & die? What material flows does it rely on to reproduce?
Or is it, in fact, a game-shaped object, filling heads with game-shaped dreams? Or perhaps, practicing animal mimicry to slink undetected up to the banks of the river Commerce & lap at its polluted eddies?
What voids are exposed? When does it run fast or slow, hot or cold? What worlds do you need to become to play?
When I'm in a contrarian mood, I increasingly see little value in debating at the level of "playability". Anything is playable if you want it badly enough. Judging a game text by how effectively it conveys information misses the other effects it can have. A game is not (only) a textbook or a technical manual or a set of instructions for a computer. It "works" in the same way that an oracle works, by evoking obscure psychic forces that cannot be easily directed by the conscious mind. Sometimes it is actually good when a game doesn't "run well" at the table.
On the other hand, this shouldn't be taken as endorsement of "games as inspiration" or "form over function". Things that are described as "games" can produce much that isn't "gaming". Vibes are not oracular; vibes are ready-made affects, oracles require assembly. Genre emulation is not oracular, but some types of pastiche are.
This post lacks a conclusion.
I have a hazy sense that this assumption is prevalent, but I may be tilting at windmills. In any case, take this post more in terms of me being excited about oracles than being mad at imaginary people who believe something I disagree with.↩