The Storyteller's Lament
Here's something a little different than my normal blog posts. I promise it's at least tangentially RPG-related.
“All I dream of is breaking free/ from all the spells chained to my head.” – Manilla Road, "Lost in Necropolis"
I am a storyteller. Storytelling is one of the things I do best. It is something I do everywhere I go.
Storytelling is the use of narratives to entertain, explain, and persuade. Storytelling is one of the primary ways that human beings make sense of the world.
A good storyteller knows their audience, some stories, and some tricks. Storytellers find the narratives that their audience wants. Then the storyteller remixes those narratives into a story that feels original but still rings true. Storytellers may use surprise or subversion of expectations, but the goal is ultimately to satisfy by repeating those tropes and elements that the storyteller knows the audience wants to see.
Storytelling is a craft, not a fine art. The quality of art is subjective. The quality of storytelling is objective and can be measured in many ways. Does the audience think the story is true? How engaged and entertained was the audience? Do they choose to keep coming back for more story? Did the story get them to take the actions the storyteller wanted? How much will they pay for this story?
I use storytelling every time I run an RPG. I use storytelling at social gatherings, to pass time and make friends – there are other social skills better suited for making friends, but I can always fall back on storytelling when I’m tired. I use storytelling constantly at my office job. My manager asks me to report on metrics and explain what they mean – that’s storytelling. Storytelling is neither good nor bad. The human mind needs storytelling to make the complicated world simple enough to make decisions. In simplifying the world, storytelling always misrepresents it at least a little bit, and sometimes a lot. The stories that spread fastest are those that get the strongest reactions, not the most believable or the most useful. Even the most believable stories are not the most true. This problem has been known since ancient times. We try to fix it by warning against gossip and rumors, but that never seems to help.
We live in a world saturated with stories like never before. Once upon a time, storytelling required a gathering of people. Today, a person can listen to storytellers in every waking moment. Social media can boil down stories into their most basic components – a single twist, a single surprise, a single narrative beat of a hero’s rise or fall. On the other end of the spectrum, fandoms and franchises turn stories into lifestyles, into all-encompassing alternate realities that can be easier to research than our own. We design buildings and cars to tell stories.
In this world, I am constantly reminded of the power of stories to do harm. Advertising is storytelling. Propaganda is storytelling. Pseudoscience is storytelling. Scams are storytelling. Conspiracy theory is storytelling, often fantastic and compelling storytelling. Preconceptions and prejudice come from storytelling. Storytelling in the office can hide behind data and graphs, masquerading as objective truth, better able to fool even intelligent and skeptical leaders. Stories are addictive, stupefying, irritating, hazardous drivers of fear, greed, and cruelty.
And then along come the large language models. They’re storytelling incarnate. Every tale humanity has ever told, reduced into tokens, rearranged in response to what the audience wants to hear.
Not a day goes by that I do not wish to be free from the chains of narrative. I wish I was able to see the world only as it truly is. I wish I was able to make decisions only from a place of genuine, field-tested expertise instead of having to pick the most convincing story. I wish the beauty of running water, the joy of fast music, and the taste of salt could be enough without needing to tell tales about them. These wishes lie beyond the realm of possibility. Human minds need to tell stories.
I find a partial consolation in roleplaying games. RPGs sit somewhere between John Henry and Don Quixote – a low-tech, human way of storytelling that defies the machines, yet also a fevered mashing together of ever-more-self-referential fantasies. At their best, they can show better, healthier ways of storytelling. When they go badly, they can be so grotesque that they serve as inoculation. That sounds like a win-win situation, doesn't it?