Ron Edwards (part 1): Listening is the medium

🇮🇹 click here for the Italian version 🇮🇹 clicca qui per la versione in lingua italiana 🇮🇹

Former biology professor, Ron Edwards designed great games like Sorcerer and Trollbabe, and he published many influential works as a theorist, including the Big Model. He was also one of the founders of The Forge around 1999-2000. In 2018, after relocating from US to Sweden, he started the Adept Play academy.

Being the originator of the ‘lines and veils’ concept, Ron is a mandatory source for my research on ‘safety tools.’ Interviewing him is an intriguing journey, leading, as you’ll see, to multiple surprises.

Of course, he already discussed the topic many times. He was so kind to point me to one in particular, a conversation on ‘safe spaces’ with the high school teacher and podcast author Keenan Kibrick. There, Ron says: “We have to recognize that fiction and system aren’t an enclosed unit. We are part of something bigger, a group of people with social needs and priorities. We are human beings, so any activity, not only RPGs, occurs inside these social dynamics.”

Sounds true to me. But what’s so special, about RPGs, that makes us feel the need to specify this, to debate about this, and even to develop specific techniques? For everything else, it seems quite obvious: we don’t expect people to put aside their social dynamics and relationships when it comes to practicing sports or going shopping.

This is the first question I ask Ron.

[If you can tolerate my horrible English, you can see the complete interview at this link: https://adeptplay.com/2023/06/23/once-again-with-feeling/]

A very special medium

“When we look at this activity,” he says, “we can’t properly call it by any familiar term. ‘Game’ is not enough. It’s a distinctive medium with very little analogy with the others: it’s its own thing. When we discover that this medium is capable of doing things that we didn’t realize, we’re disoriented.”

The medium, he explains, is not imagination (nor ‘theater of the mind’), as many seem to think. The medium is active listening: we listen to other people and we reincorporate what they said, so that our contributions interact. “We are not creating a single ‘movie’ that we are all supposed to be imagining the very same way. The overlap among us is not the similarity of the imagination, it’s what has been heard and utilized.”

Time for an example. “Let’s say our fiction includes this pen,” Ron says, “If we follow this pen through the events of play, we see people saying things about it at different times.” For example, one might say that the pen is on the table, another might say “I take the pen,” then another might say that the pen breaks. “Different people have different responsibilities regarding the pen: there are things that only a certain person can say about it. The word I use is authorities: people have different authorities, not over each other but towards the pen. Same for any object, information, or event in play. When you have this going on, the only way the play can proceed is if you listen to what other people say.” And, if I said something about the pen, that was my responsibility to say, when other people will contribute they must do it in light of that. They can’t ignore what I said, they have to reincorporate it: this shows that they heard me, that they are listening to me. Ron has a word also for this: “That is the agency.”

Another peculiarity of roleplay is that “it’s a fiction-creating medium.” Consider that Ron uses the term ‘fiction’ in the most basic sense, with no literary meaning: the game just happens to create some fiction, good or bad. “In other media, the fiction is made first, then it’s experienced by the audience. Here, instead, we are in the position of enjoying the creative process.” And the real gratification, the actual “artistic experience” comes from that, not from some sort of ‘finished product’ that we get after playing: there’s no such a thing.

“Due to the necessity of listening, and to this special relationship that we have towards the making of the fiction, we’re in a fairly unique position concerning the appropriateness of its content,” Ron says, “and people have trouble with it because nobody has done it before.”

Learning ‘how’ isn’t difficult

So, I say, all problems come from the fact that we are not accustomed and trained to this novel activity? Here Ron makes a distinction: often, he says, these conversations tend to slide towards the concern “what about new players?” – as if it was a huge issue, but he doesn’t think so.

“Most people actually pick up on the properties of this activity very quickly and easily. Once they experience agency, they get it. They have no problem with it. Let’s just take it as a given that it’s possible for them to encounter this activity, to learn to do it fairly quickly, and then be competent enough to carry it out.” Ron even goes so far to say that new people, in fact, should be training us: they usually grasp most concepts better than self-appointed ‘experts.’

Then, of course something like a learning curve do exist, as in any other activity. There’s a difference, Ron explains, between learning how to do this thing (the basics, the principle) and learning what to do with it. This second thing (including handling certain ‘sensitive’ contents) can be developed over time, and it involves certain risks, for which we need proper methods: we’ll expand this point later. What was important to him, now, was to specify that ‘new players’ are not the concern.

“We don’t have a good vocabulary for the process of learning to roleplay: even ‘roleplay’ is a legacy term,” says Ron, “And, about the techniques that people have proposed so far… I find most of them to be uninformed and ineffective.”

Lines and veils: how and when

So, let’s get to that famous technique described by Edwards himself: lines and veils. Most people I spoke to, in Italy (not everyone, though), described these as things to be pre-defined, as much as possible, before playing.

Personally, while reading the original text from Sex and Sorcery, my impression was that it wasn’t describing a procedure, a game mechanic, but rather a situation occurring at the table, however we made it happen: like, whenever we decide that a certain thing should not be part of the game, that thing is a line, regardless when and how we came to that agreement.

I already knew Edwards’s opinion before the interview, since I found this comment that he wrote on a forum: “You know what’s weird about lines and veils? Everyone seems to think I’ve advocated setting that through discussion prior to play, and bluntly I think it’s a fucking terrible idea.” It was 2006.

“I like the way you put it,” says Ron today, “that it doesn’t really matter when and how lines and veils are established. But writing them all up in advance is a terrible idea because people don’t self-assess very well.” You could write down something that you sincerely feel you’d never want, and then you are creating a false prophecy that make you feel committed to never wanting it. With everyone doing that, the group might end up with an enormous list of excluded topics, leaving only a tiny safe zone. That’s a real problem, for Ron. Which doesn’t mean that he completely rejects the possibility of pre-defining some lines on specific, isolated content, if it’s important for the table. “I think that a certain looseness is intrinsic to the way I had presented these concepts originally.”

So, how did the opposite approach prevail?

Ron’s point of view is that there’s a lot of anxiety built into the hobby. Fear that somebody might encounter roleplay and not like it, especially our friends. Fear that, due to certain cultural legacies, if something bad happens, ‘villagers’ will rise against this activity, as happened during the so-called Satanic Panic in the ‘80s. “People are very defensive,” he says, “because they think they’re protecting the hobby.” But in fact, when they talk about ‘safety,’ they are somehow saying “this is dangerous!” – so they end up sounding just like those anti-satanists.

We’ll clarify this point further in the next parts of the conversation.

A few examples

I was curious about some examples of how lines and veils are used at Ron’s table.

He told me about a play where he was the Game Master for Khaotic, a science fiction game. Characters were traveling in an alien dimension, where scary experiments were having place. When they entered a laboratory of a heinous NPC, Ron described tubes containing test subjects of such experiments. Then a player said: “Can we not look into the tubes?”

“I said ‘I’d better veil that’ to myself,” explains Ron. The scene proceeded with the characters being shocked by the tube’s content. Players knew enough about the situation that each person could fill in the content privately, with no need of describing further details.

Regarding lines, instead, they are usually called about the possibility of rape: an episode like this happened while he was playing Circle of Hands. “It’s an ordinary vocabulary for the people I play with.” (You’ll see another, more detailed example going forward.)

A very interesting reading

Circle of Hands is another game designed by Ron, published in 2014. In chapter 1 it presents a clear overview of the social contract around game, while in chapter 4 it contains a new explanation of lines and veils, with a more precise description of how they are supposed to be used at the table. It’s a reading I really recommend.

It also incorporates a famous concept, observed for the first time by Meguey Baker: the two basic ways a group can approach roleplay games, “nobody gets hurt” and “I will not abandon you”.

“I have played with Meg Baker,” Ron says, “I know for sure that she was not advocating one way or the other: they are both fine ways to play. It’s just clear that they’re very different things.” Circle of Hands is explicitly leaning towards the second way.

Don’t set lines for other people

Another important statement in Circle of Hands caught my eye: “do not set lines for other people.” Which is surprising, since I know that several voices, in the RPG community, recommend the opposite.

In response, Ron reminds me of an example made by Kibrick in the other recorded conversation. Students were playing The scarlet letter, and a particular group was going into “inappropriate social space,” surrounding the person who was playing the targeted woman, accused of adultery. “They were really laying it on how terrible it was, and (from the teacher’s perspective) she looked miserable and hurt, like she was in trouble,” Ron remembers. The teacher, scared, went over there and tried to intervene. And everybody, including the person playing the victim, turned on him: “Get out of here, we’re fine!”

“When you see somebody who looks in trouble,” says Ron, “it’s easy for your little savior button to be pushed. When that person may indeed have been affected, but in a way that in their eyes is aesthetically and emotionally acceptable.”

Which is, in fact, another reason why pre-defining lines and veils in detail often leads to failure. “You might write down things based on how you want to be seen. Or you might be worrying: ‘well, this doesn’t bother me, but I don’t want it because it might hurt other people.’ Which ruins the whole point.”

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[See the next page for the second part of the interview.]

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