Willing Suspension of Disbelief

I am inclined to be a strong advocate of verisimilitude in art, by which I mean, that good art has to be believable even if it is about super heroes, or dragons.  It vexes me for instance, when people discussing even so trivial a matter as a game world say, "the magic can be whatever we want it to be!" with no care as to what it is about or what it means.  The "magic", is whatever the conceit of the fiction is, whether it has to do with fantasy wizards, or pseudo-science zombie apocalypse, etc.

On the one hand, they are quite right.  As a matter of entertainment, you can do whatever makes you giggle.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  It is just a game after all, and (with rare exceptions) it does not provide you with food to eat, or clothes to keep out the cold, and all your fictions are so many paper leaves that will never love you back.  Games are certainly trivial in that regard.

On the other hand, I keep recalling something about games as art that Jenova Chen (founder of That Game Company) said.  Writing in his grad thesis, he reveals that it was a disturbing fact that as he got older, he found the (video) games he loved so much as a child to be less emotionally satisfying the older he got.  He wanted to find ways to make them more emotionally compelling.  He wanted to deepen the experience to be something that could be satisfying to adults as well.  I would agree.  For me as well, (tabletop) games provided a large part of my social grounding growing up, and I would add, a fair amount of grounding for my intellectual development as well.  I'm not sure that I would have been so interested now in the history of the early twentieth century had I not first discovered Call of Cthulhu, and began to wonder more about the world that these cryptic terrors inhabited, for I had been exclusively steeped in pseudo medievalist fantasy games prior to that.

So I came across this interesting quote by the scintillating Mr. Aristotle in The Poetics:

"With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible."

He is talking about the use of possibilities and probabilities in fiction (more precisely in drama) mattering in evaluating the quality of the art (and I wondered if Theater History I would ever be useful!).  In other words, dramatically satisfying fiction must be bolted to things that are believable to the human experience.  Another way to look at it, is that the most convincing lies are 9/10 true.  Zombies?  Fine.  Dragons?  OK.  Light speed space ships?  Great.  Verisimilitude must still have people that behave like people are actually known to do when confronted with dead things, gigantic scaly predators, and in a vast, empty expanse inimical to human life.

Mitigating the unlikelihood does not change this rule; it merely means that you have added subjective misunderstandings to the characters, but not to the objective "reality" of the fiction.

It has been years since I read Poetics, and I forgot that I'd read this, but I cannot recommend enough the reading of this book for narrativist minded games because of gems like this.