P is for Plot Snake

[This is the 16th of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

Back in letter B, I blathered a bit about narratives and plots, but the search for order in storytelling chaos is neverending...

The idea of diagramming a plot goes back to Aristotle, and probably earlier, with the basic idea of "something" (call it tension?) that goes up, then comes back down.  It builds up, then it is released.  A famous playwright called it the tying and untying of knots.  Some say that the whole is divided into three parts (protasis, epitasis, catastrophe) and others argue that it's really five acts (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement).  Up until the middle of the 20th century it was rare to see anyone questioning this basic idea.

Enter Professor Allen Tilley.  He claims the old Aristotle up-down just characterizes one "episode" in a more complete narrative.  The minimum necessary sequence for a truly satisfying story isn't a single mountain, it's a SNAKE:

(He's got one book from 1992, a more recent one from 2009, and also an active web page at his university... lots to see there!)

He calls the vertical axis "entropy," with upward motion meaning more order, and downward motion more chaos.  The story ends on a "higher" plane than it began, but the characters had to go through their highs and lows to get there.

I'm particularly fond of Tilley's plot snake because it's such an infectious mind-worm... once you know it, you start seeing it everywhere!  Let's briefly break down a story that everyone probably knows:  Cinderella.  Compare these steps with the ups and downs in the snake diagram above:

1. Initiation:  Her parents dead, Cinderella is stuck with her horrible stepmother and stepsisters. The main conflict is set up: her own self-worth clashes with how the others see her.
2. Burnt Fingers:  The conflict begins to come to a head.  She wants to go to the ball. The stepmother says she can, if she accomplishes an impossible amount of work.
3. Temporary Binding:  The fairy godmother helps Cinderella attend the ball and she falls in love with the prince.  Everything seems to be working out perfectly!
4. Infernal Vision:  Not so fast...  It's midnight!  From the heights, to the depths:  Cinderella has seen love, but is now even lower than before.
5. Final Binding:  Of course, the prince is searching for the owner of the glass slipper. Through many travails, he finds her.
6. Termination:  And they live happily ever after.

See the flow?  The transition from stages 3 to 4 is pretty much required in modern-day romantic comedies, usually about a half-hour before the end of the movie.  You've seen it, I'm sure:  3 is the stage of a happy musical montage... frolicking in the park, trying on funny hats, and so on.  But then the big bad secret is revealed, and we're into despondency and stage 4: will they break up forever?  Of course they won't; there's still stages 5 and 6.  Sometimes stage 6 is only shown in snippets in the end-credits, or with freeze-frames on the characters with words telling how they ended up (Senator and Mrs. Blutarsky).

Of course, there are other templates.  Joseph Campbell's monomyth is often visible through the cracks of modern film making. (I know what example you're thinking about, but I would bet money that George Lucas didn't know about it until 1986 at the earliest, despite what he says now...)  There are also companies who sell software that supposedly does this work for you.  Some of these don't seem to be that worthwhile, but others do seem to be doing their homework on comparative dramatic theory.  But Tilley's plot snake is compelling because of its simplicity and unintentional ubiquity.  I dare you to NOT think of it in the next movie you see!  :-)

Musical Intervals and the Glass Bead Game

This blog has been quiet lately because I've been preparing for the big fun of SoSA, but I wanted to not neglect the Glass Bead Game (GBG) side of things.

In January I posted about tension and release as a kind of "universal mechanic" for so many kinds of creative activities. If we ever do build a common symbolic language for a GBG, one could reasonably expect that tension and release would be somehow written into its DNA.

A few years ago, I began thinking about using the intervals of western tonal music as building blocks for a possible GBG language of tension and release. Over and over again, people describe the various intervals as having specific emotional connotations.  A perfect fifth is majestic, a minor third is sad, and so on. I was going to list some links, but there are just too many... just Google music, intervals, and emotions to see dozens. (German speakers, see also "Affektenlehre.")  The lists don't always match up exactly with one another, but they have many commonalities that I've encapsulated into the following table.

Click for bigger version. Yes, I'm aping 1e AD&D trade dress.

The emoticons were built up from the 4 categories listed by a music teacher named Dan Jones in an online PDF book: nice, nasty, neutral, and nostalgic. It's also interesting that Tufts University's Music Cognition Lab did a study where they found that people's speech patterns often used the intervals that correspond to specific emotions -- when speaking with those exact emotions. These associations may not be arbitrary conventions, but really worked into our own DNA!

For GBG design, the full set of 12 semitones may be too complicated to start with.  Most musicians pick a key in which to compose, where there are only 7 out of the 12 to play with. In rock and pop, sometimes the musicians just rely on "three chords (I, IV, V) and the truth!"  :-)

One thing I did was to take the 7 standard intervals of a key and try to create a list of generic "plot development" tropes, or generic narrative steps that occur in most stories. Here's what I came up with:

I.  EQUILIBRIUM:  Presentation of an equilibrium situation. At the beginning of a story, this equilibrium is likely "unstable," and at the end it may be "stable." Also, this chord can be used when new characters/themes enter or exit.

II.  AID:  Characters are helped, or are given information.  This aid propels characters closer to resolving tension.

III.  INTERLUDE:  A "non-functional" episode that neither increases nor decreases plot tension. Used for ambiance, comic relief, diversion. (Songs in musicals?  Asides to the audience?)

IV.  COMPLICATION:  Characters are hindered by something external, which raises tension.

V.  ACTION:  Characters take decisive action with the goal of resolving tension. (Actions may inadvertently raise tension, however; e.g., "tragic flaws" or melodramatic misunderstandings).

VI.  EVALUATION:  Characters make a decision, formulate a desire or goal, or recognize the problem at hand.

VII.  EXPOSITION:  Revelation of information to the audience, via direct exposition, foreshadowing, flashback, tying up loose ends. Not explicitly functional from the characters' point of view, but needed for the audience to experience the story properly.

I didn't list the octave (VIII) since that's just a flavor of the tonic (I).  I used the emotional characters of musical cadences to help figure some of these out. For example...

V-I is an "authentic cadence" that corresponds to traditional ending of an action-driven story. The protagonist takes the final action, and wins!

II-V-I is a jazzy "turnaround cadence" that is a variant on the above. Han Solo flies in to help Luke survive the battle, and Luke then goes on to destroy the Death Star.

IV-I is a "plagal cadence" that is less satisfying than many others. In stories, it's probably the Deus ex Machina where everything is wrapped up with an unexpected bolt out of the blue.

V-VI is a "deceptive cadence" that really doesn't end the story. Scarlett O'Hara says "I'll never go hungry again!" and the music swells, but then there's a few more hours of movie left to watch!

What to do with these?  I certainly wasn't interested in plodding through dozens of stories and diagramming them.  (If anyone else is interested in doing the work, more power to ya!)  The big goal is to build new forms of art using these kinds of universal building blocks, but my stumbling block is always with the form that will take. Are we really talking about a completely new art form (which would require viewers/readers to be wholly re-trained in how they appreciate these things)? Or can we present these associations using standard media? I've already blathered about some of the tradeoffs one must think about, so I'll just stop here for now.

Tension and Release

I'm not sure how many posts I can make that give examples of common features of role-playing games and the Glass Bead Game, but this one is a slam-dunk.  :)

Over a wide range of human creations, there is a common aspect of tension and release. In other words,

1. Something happens to build up tension. People get increasingly anxious about what will happen next.
2. Then something happens to "resolve" or "release" the tension. The people become relaxed and satisfied at the outcome.

The above sounds vague and general because it is. Some examples may help....

In STORIES, tension is increased and decreased by things that happen in the plot. Since the ancient Greeks, people have talked about plots as "rising" and "falling" when the tension level goes up and down. There are entire theories of dramatic structure that attempt to analyze the flow of tension in plays, films, and novels. Playwright William Gibson described it as the tying and untying of complex knots, and Prof. Allen Tilley described the rising and falling as a "plot snake" that undergoes some predictable twists in many kinds of stories. Even modern sci-fi authors are getting into the act by cleverly unpacking some "classical" ideas of narrative structure in new ways.