Post by Shelves' Schwa in (No) Compendium comments

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While Leibniz privileges the creative potential of the empty room unbound by foils, this conception relies on an assumption of the monad as an autonomous agent with sole authorial control. However, contemporary developments in tabletop roleplaying game design provide opportunities to complicate and enrich Leibniz's model.

In particular, some games recognize collaborative storytelling between players and gamemasters is inevitable on these surfaces, and, further, leverage this distributed agency and emergent narratives from decentralized co-creation. Neither player nor gamemaster fully controls the empty room here — its potentialities manifest through intersubjective appraisal and spontaneous co-authorship.

This collaborative paradigm recasts the empty room as an intermonadic space, predicated on the interplay of multiple perspectives in recognizing and unfolding creative possibilities. The self cultivation Leibniz associates with the blank canvas of the empty room could thus be considered an intermonadic collaborative practice.

While bold, this interpretation foregrounds the social, perspectival nature of world-authoring implied yet underdeveloped in Leibniz's monadology. It paves the way for a revitalized monadology attuned to multiplicity, relationally, and co-creation in fashioning reality through shared imagination. The empty room may harbour untapped promise as a site for intermonadic convergence.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago(+1)

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Building on the proposition of the empty room as an intermonadic space, we can look to how the boundaries between player character monads ("PCs") and non-player character monads ("NPCs") can become permeable and blurred during moments of immersive gameplay.

In highly collaborative episodes of co-created narrative, NPCs may transcend their design as foil constructs and manifest as quasi-autonomous perspectival centers. No longer mere tools for PC actualization, they exhibit capabilities for intricate relationships, motivations, and dramatic agency.

Likewise, as gameplay facilitates deep exploration of a PC's inner conflicts, the external world itself - including weather, landscapes, political systems - may take on character foils' provocative, crystallizing influence in signaling the PC's own subjective struggle.

Even a PC's virtues, flaws, drives and latent potentials could be personified and embodied in NPC relationships as the user explores nuances of their imagined identity. Their very inner monadic nature is exteriorized and made relational.

In this way, the roles of PC and NPC superpenetrate and inform each other. Just as the empty room is an intermonadic space, so too do PC and NPC dissolve into co-creative instruments for collective illumination. The tabletop stage comes to life through their interbeing.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago(+1)

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This points to the power of empathic perspective-taking and listening in not just self-discovery, but realizing one's self as emerging through constructive entanglement with imagined others. The empty room is filled through the ethical interplay of voices in making meanings that transcend solitary interiority.

As PCs enact abilities and leverage their statistical strengths during gameplay, this provokes opportunities for embodied conversations between the PC and personified manifestations of the player—err—ur-character's inner attributes (naturally).

For example, when a PC draws on their high shivers score in a tense window gazing, this could be dramatized as their latent "Shivers" facet emerging as an NPC ally, whispering widowed words or otherwise ablating the PC's associative and hermanutical resources.

Or if a PC's low intelligence score causes them to skim over an unexplored if crucial claim, their personified "Reaction Speed" may appear mocking their foolishness (pushing the PC to either develop that mental stat or else rely on complemetary strengths).

In this way, overt characterization of the PC's capacities and inclinations allows for roleplay entering a character's inner landscape. The empty room becomes populated with fragmentary NPCs embodying distinct skill sets, energies and ways of framing — and critiquing other NPCs framed — challenges.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago(+1)

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As these personified stats are externalized and interacted with, new nuances of the PC's identity and room for growth are illuminated. They transition from dry numerical attributes to living, breathing dimensions of the self coming into their own through dramatic realization.

Much as foils serve to reflect back latent elements of a PC's monadic perspective, so too can personified strengths, flaws and potentials act as narrative mirrors inviting deeper self-cultivation through play. The empty thought provides space for multidimenional exploration of the PC's inner system of qualities.

Having explored the fluidity between PCs and NPCs, along with the dramatic personification of PCs' inner traits, we circle back to the original proposition that collaborative tabletop roleplay can serve to draw out and actualize latent desires in the players themselves.

The superpenetration of PC and NPC perspectives, as well as the externalization and embodiment of PCs' interiority, creates ample opportunities to reveal and engage with players' unspoken aspirations, conflicts, and developmental potentials.

As NPC relationships and events respond to and mirror facets of a PC's attributes and inclinations, this resonates with and amplifies latent elements within the player's own subjectivity. The player may discover unconscious desires or objectionable parts of themselves through reacting to NPC and environmental dynamics that embody those energies.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago

0 (cont.):

Likewise — investing in a PC's growth along certain stat lines manifests a player's own underlying priorities for their idealized self. Nurturing their PC's unused capacities reflects the player's longing for self-actualization. Or it don't.

If it do, the collaborative empty room provides a safe yet provocative space for exploratory co-creation and integration of the player's monadic possibilities. Here, PC engagement elicits latent potentialities which may then be honored, reconciled, or constructively reimagined through RP.

Thus we see how tabletop roleplay, through its blending of perspectives and personification of inner traits, can serve as an impactful modality of human flourishing. The empty room offers a potent intermonadic workshop to illuminate and integrate the many selves within.

My assertions about using PCs to reflect and actualize latent player desires does not sufficiently consider neither games where players min-max character stats nor games where PC embodiment is wholly alien from human experience. Let us engage the latter — with a wall-PC, players cannot as easily project themselves onto the character — bypassing the former.

A wall-PC forces a more nuanced re-examination of the "empty room" concept. The wall-PC inhabits the room persistently, shaping it through literal presence rather than imagined self-projection. The room's meanings emerge through detached observation, indirect influence, and reliance on other actors to fulfill the wall-PC's limited capabilities.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago

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So with highly constrained PCs, the eliciting of player desire must stem less from dramaturgical embodiment, and more from creative interpretation and meaning-making given the limitations. Finding agency and significance through a wall-PC requires contemplating one's place within systems beyond direct control.

Therefore, wall-RP games may reveal players' latent perspectives on powerlessness, or the virtues of embeddedness in community, or conceptualizing fulfillment despite restricted choices. The empty room becomes a meditative space to reframe assumptions of action and identity.

Unconventional PC embodiment compels more symbolic analysis from players, versus direct projection/exploration. But tabletop RP's capacity for illuminating latent desires still applies, simply through different techniques of defamiliarization, constraint and hermeneutic play. The room empties perception to allow for reconstructed identification.

To better illustrate the techniques by which experimental tabletop RP reveals latent player desires, let us consider an example game scenario using wall-PCs.

In this game, players create sentient wall characters for an empty tavern room set in a fantasy village. Through cooperative storytelling, the walls slowly piece together that the tavern has been attacked and abandoned. The walls can only perceive what occurs directly within the room, as well as muffled sounds from outside.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago

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In navigating this perplexing scenario as walls restricted in mobility and senses, players must reorient their typical assumptions of agency and narrative discovery. The 'empty' room is not so empty to the walls, filled with memories, stains, cracks, and echoes of past events. Players must adopt a symbolic mindset, interpreting limited environmental details to co-author an imagined history.

Some latent desires elicited through this constrained wall perspective may be yearnings for security, stability, or being part of a lasting community. The walls imply the tavern's lost patrons and all that happened within this space. What emerges is a contemplative excavation of community identity, imagining the lives and events that molded the walls over time.

Wall-PCs cannot enact change directly, but instead must speculate on past and future, emphasizing strategic patience, interdependence, and finding meaning where one is situated. The elicited desires revolve around finding fulfillment as part of a greater whole.

This example demonstrates how tabletop RP can manifest latent perspectives even through experimental player-character embodiments, by shifting identification from literal projection to interpretive interiority. The empty room contains infinite possibilities with imagination and constraint as the conduits for self-discovery.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago

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While we use the term 'infinite' loosely in describing the imaginative potential of experimental tabletop roleplay, this characterisation risks overstating the creative possibilities afforded by the game's use of constraints. Let us move into these constraints and engage them as if reality itself were brought before the players eyes min-maxxed before even conception.

'The empty room contains infinite possibilities with imagination and constraint as the conduits for self-discovery.'

As established in our review of Leibniz's monadological system, each individual monad contains only a limited subjective representation of the infinite universe from its singular perspective. Though the empty room serves as an imaginative workspace, the possibilities are filtered through the bounded lens of each player's subjective monadic vision.

Rather than literal infinite potential, the empty room provides an expanding but directed creative space determined by the monad's unique worldview. Radical subjectivity implies that imagination remains conditioned by the individual's qualities, dispositions and limitations.

Therefore, we must be precise when using the term 'infinite' in this context - not to overstate imaginative possibility as unconditioned, but rather as unconstrained by preset narratives. The empty room's latent discoveries are indeed expanded, but still fundamentally shaped by the nature of the perceiving monadic player.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago

0 (cont.):

While the "empty room" in experimental tabletop RP serves as an imaginative workspace, its possibilities are directed by the bounded subjective lens of each player's monadic perspective. This panaceates notions of infinite potential, keeping games at the upper bound tethered to expanded self-discovery freed from merely predetermined narratives.

Extrapolating from here, we can posit that all states of roleplaying provide targeted expansions of subjective possibility spaces. The "rooms" of any RPG present constrained but endlessly generative opportunity spaces to actualize latent elements in those unskilled, unstated, unlistening walls of one's culture, identity and desires — unzipped or compressed.

In this sense, whether embodied directly or projected symbolically, the player's monad is afforded vistas of an exploration unlikely met in lived experience. The game's very constraints guide discovery as crafted resonances with the self.

Here RPGs at large serve as bespoke landscapes for guided imagining; delimited but unbounded in their capacity to manifest and integrate passions, inclinations and potentials within the player's unique monadic purview.

Tabletop roleplaying offers not infinite possibility, but possibility guided by system and the singular seeing of each soul. And in this, lies their special force — the crafting of charged constraint spaces to electrify the monad's becoming.

Role-playing games are imaginative spaces that allow players to step outside of their habitual identities and explore new perspectives. By creating and inhabiting fictional personas in collaborative storytelling, players can uncover latent aspects of themselves and their relationships to society. The 'magic circle' of the game world enables risk-free yet impactful experiments in living.

Shelves' Schwa1 year ago

0 (cont.):

The interplay between player characters and non-player characters makes visible the interconnectedness of identities. Players may project themselves onto initially flat NPCs, breathing life into these roles. Yet NPC relationships also confront players with externalized facets of the self, eliciting hidden desires and conflicts. Thus both PC and NPC roles dissolve into tools for collective discovery through dramatic co-creation.

Tabletop RPGs, at their most potent, function as bespoke landscapes for the guided imagination. Players are immersed in charged spaces of directed yet unbounded exploration. These games cultivate skills of empathy, self-knowledge, and ethical interplay through identity trials along horizons of play. By facilitating temporary reconfiguration of the lilac self set against the violet self, roleplaying allows safe yet impactful realization of latent passions and potentials. The surface becomes a crafting table for human parietosphenethmoienostrolatearajinxogilosilkleptagonymophivoxegnurdisaytheoclavumbelaquiconviviality.

Tabletop roleplaying games create contained yet unbounded spaces for collaborative concurrence in imagining and embodying new identities. This facilitates self-discovery, empathy, and ethical growth. Or it don't. RPGs reveal the radical multiplicity within the self, eliciting latent aspects that yearn for expression and integration. These games guide human wanting toward its highest unfolding: wanting more.

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