I think we game together in groups because we have
sympathy for one another. I mean "sympathy" in its old sense, of sharing all emotions, not just feeling sorry for someone.
Many rpg theories completely ignore this. In their view, each player wants different things in a game session, and you just have to put up with the other players blathering on and getting what they want until it's your turn again. If this were so, why would anyone be in a game
group? Why would anyone GM?
I've been looking at Adam Smith's
Theory of Moral Sentiments, and it reminds me a lot of what happens in a good roleplaying group.
A man is mortified when, after having endeavoured to divert the company, he looks round and sees that nobody laughs at his jests but himself.
[...]
When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty; we enter into the surprise and admiration which it naturally excites in him, but which it is no longer capable of exciting in us; we consider all the ideas which it presents rather in the light in which they appear to him, than in that in which they appear to ourselves, and we are amused by sympathy with his amusement which thus enlivens our own. On the contrary, we should be vexed if he did not seem to be entertained with it, and we could no longer take any pleasure in reading it to him.
This "fellow-feeling" or "sympathy" is something which is entirely absent in GNS, the Big Model, or any other rpg theory I have seen. Every rpg theory explicitly says or at least implies that any game group is a bunch of isolated individuals, who game with each-other simply as a last resort, each merely tolerating the presence of others until they can get what they want. The theories then go on to say that the best thing you can do is to categorise what people want, so that people with the same wants can find each-other, and game together, and then no more troublesome compromise will be necessary.
There's no talk of trying to fit
different wants together so they're
complementary rather than
clashing, and still less any mention of the fact that we get joy from others' joy. I don't have to be homosexual to be happy that my male friend has found a lover, nor do I have to be interested in physics to be glad that my friend has got an honour mark in his course. We can share a person's joys even when we don't share the
source of them.
I think that's also why the games written by these theorists try to eliminate the position of Game Master - because the very existence of a GM proves that some people are happy just to make others happy, they're not in it purely for their own selfish ends, incompatible with the wants of others. The existence of a GM proves that compromise, accomodation, and sympathy are all possible, real, and work well.
So, how about an rpg theory with some sympathy in it?