Let's talk

Over at the PNI Institute, we are holding our very first "Hangout" this Friday, July 5, at:

• California 7 00
• New York 10 00
• London 15 00
• Amsterdam/South Africa 16 00
• Melbourne 24 00

Our hangouts will be:

• Social: Connecting; networking; talking about what's going on in the world
• Practical: Helping each other solve problems and seek opportunities
• Collaborative: Discovering new ways we can work together
• Aspirational: Advancing the field by exploring new ideas

To avoid the inevitable problems using Skype with more than a few people, we will be using our new Mumble server. For details on how to connect, and to read more about what we plan to talk about in this and future hangouts, see my announcement post on pni2.org.

If you can't make this hangout, we will be holding more, so keep it in mind!

The Holy Roman Empire was a complex adaptive system

So a few weeks ago my son and I were watching the Crash Course World History series. In it John Green mentioned Voltaire's famous statement that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

A few days later, I found that the phrase "Holy Roman Empire" was still bouncing around in my mind. It seemed like it was trying to tell me something. The pattern of the name, its rhythm, felt similar to something I was familiar with. After a while I realized that "Holy Roman Empire" sounds a lot like "complex adaptive system." Two seconds later, I realized that a complex adaptive system is neither complex, nor adaptive, nor a system.

I wondered if there might be some connection between these things, so I began to explore.

Magic words of power

First I read about why Voltaire said what he said. Here's a very brief summary:

1. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as emperor in 800, but this was a purely political move, a quid pro quo. The word "Holy" was not used to refer to the empire until 1157, when it was added to remove any implied dependence on the papacy (as if to say, we don't need the Church to make us holy).
2. The Holy Roman Empire did include Italy at first, but most of it was located in Germany and France. In fact, in 1512 the name of the empire was changed to "The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation."
3. The Holy Roman Empire was for the most part a symbolic institution with little centralized power. It was more like a loose confederation among independent states than a true empire. 

So why did people call a loose secular confederation of independent European states the Holy Roman Empire?

I'm no historian, but my guess is that the name makes use of what I like to call "magic words of power." People have been using such words for thousands of years because they tap into deep currents in society. Think of a word that, if you walked into a room full of people and said it loudly and clearly, would start a fight or a cheer, or would clear the room, and you've found a magic word of power. Curse words are magic words of power, because they attack things we hold sacred -- religion, health, sex, family. Their power comes not from their attacks but from the things they attack.

So, I thought, the three words of the Holy Roman Empire might act as a sort of incantation, a way to draw power from deep sources.

What we want to know

The next question I asked myself was: how did each of these words contribute to the power of the whole phrase? As I thought about each word, I ran into a familiar construct: Robert F. Bales' empirical work on how strangers talk to each other in task groups.

Bales found that the people he observed constantly evaluated others in three dimensions:

1. Is this person dominant or submissive? (power)
2. Is this person friendly or hostile? (safety)
3. Is this person useful or useless (to me)? (effectiveness)

So, calling a loose secular confederation of independent European states the Holy Roman Empire says:

1. We are powerful. Who's in charge? (Remember: it's the middle ages.) God. We are in good with the big guy.
2. We are safe. Remember the Romans? They did things right. They had roads and plumbing and great parties. We are the tried and true solution. You can trust us.
3. We are effective. What unifies peoples, brings stability, and provides protection? That's right, an empire. Don't worry, folks, we have everything under control.

Thus, in the context in which they were used, these three words hit all the "what we want to know" points that would lead people (that is, princes and other local powers) to support the Holy Roman Empire. So it was both an incantation and an advertisement.

By the way, does "safe and effective" remind you of anything? Perhaps something medical? Maybe you've heard the phrase "potent, safe, and effective?" That phrase hits the same three evaluation points.

Now let's consider the term "complex adaptive system." I should probably explain first why it's none of those things.

Complex or complexicated?

Complexity refers to self-organization, where the interactions of (at least somewhat) independent agents lead to emergent properties, patterns that are more than the sum of their parts. Complex systems exist in theory and in simulation, but nothing that actually happens in nature or in human life is purely complex. In reality, organization and self-organization intermingle and interact to create a complex-complicated tangle of aspects and influences.

Consider an ant colony. Each ant follows simple rules, and complex patterns appear. But that's not the whole story. In most if not all social insects, the queen exerts pheromonal control over other members of the colony. Centralized organization and complex self-organization intermingle and interact in their effects on what happens in the ant hill.

The same is true for everything people say "is" complex: cities, traffic, the weather, the mind, the body, and so on. Every real situation has both complex and complicated aspects that intermingle and interact. I call it "complexicated."

Adaptive or reactive?

Is a complex adaptive system adaptive? Sort of. There is adaptation in the world, but maladaptation is just as important a force. Having complexity in a system does not always make it work well; sometimes it can lead to disaster. If you don't believe me, google "ant mill." A circular ant mill, in which ants follow their simple rules into a spiral of death, is a complex maladaptive pattern. (In a cruel example of complexication, you can find instructions on the internet for creating ant mills.)

I don't think it works to use the word "adaptive" to mean "sometimes better, sometimes worse," because that's not what people think when you say it. The popular meaning of "adaptation" is "getting better all the time." An example: Blogger's spell checker knows the word "adaptation" but not the word "maladaptation." Why is that?

A better word might be "reactive." Swarms and flocks react to perturbations. Sometimes they adapt, but sometimes they crash, or they dissipate into something that is no longer a flock or a swarm. The result might be better, or it might be far worse. At least the word "reactive" doesn't imply a "better and better" value statement. Even chemicals react, and nobody thinks every chemical reaction turns out well.

System or frame?

Now to the final word: system. This one's easy. All boundaries are decisions. Ask anyone what is included in the "health care system" or the "educational system" or the "legislative system," and you'll get as many answers as people.

The online etymology dictionary says "system" comes from the Latin systema, meaning "an arrangement," and from the Greek synistanai, meaning "to place together." Wikipedia says that the word originally meant "something to look at."

So the word "system" originally meant the choice of components and the creation of a frame or perspective. It still means that to me. Every time I hear the word "system," I can't help thinking of the archetypal image of a movie director making little frames with their hands as they look around. That's all a system really is, a frame, with some things included and some excluded.

But we run into problems when we try to use the word "system" to mean "frame," as it originally meant. That's because today, "system" no longer means a thing we create. It means a thing that exists, a thing we can rely on. Something solid. Like an empire.

A modern-day incantation

If the term "complex adaptive system" is, like "Holy Roman Empire," an incantation, what is it meant to invoke? If it is an advertisement, how does it persuade? Here is my guess.

1. We are powerful. Complexity is like magic: it's order for free. Look! All of the awesome (and awful) things in the world run on complexity: hurricanes, the internet, snowflakes. This is powerful stuff, and you're going to want to get yourself some of it.
2. We are safe. Remember evolution? That's rock-solid science. Adaptation is one of the things that makes evolution great. Evolution led to us, didn't it? You want things to get better and better, don't you?
3. We are effective. Stop worrying. Complexity is not crazy or unpredictable. It's a system. We have everything under control.

Thus, in the context in which they were used, these three words hit all the "what we want to know" points that would lead people (that is, academic institutions, corporations, and other local powers) to support the Santa Fe Institute (who coined the term).

I don't mean to blame the Santa Fe Institute for coining a term that probably made perfect sense to them. I just wish they could have come up with a name that wasn't so easily misunderstood, given the popular connotations of the terms they used.

How we use it

After thinking about this for a while, I began to wonder how people actually use the term "complex adaptive system." I wondered: If these words are an incantation, to what purpose is its power applied? If it's an advertisement, what does it sell?

So I did one of my tiny Google research projects. I googled "is a complex adaptive system," then tallied up what came before the word "is." I got up to 252 mentions before Google cut me off, and this is what I found.

Let me ask you: is language more complex than knowledge? Is health care more complex than the internet? I don't think so. I don't think this graph reflects what is complex and what is not. It represents in what areas people most feel a need for incantations and advertisements. Evidently for language and for health care, there is great need. What does that say about language and health care? Are these areas in which we need to create power, achieve safety, and gain control? Given the fact that language underpins education, social society, and international relations: probably.

Actually, language is a perfect example of organization and self-organization intermingling and interacting. Yes, every human being has an impact on language, and there are emergent properties involved. But there are also clear organizers in the world of language: dictionaries, thesauri, style manuals, publishers, universities, governments, Google. All of these organizers exert centralized control over the evolution of language. It's complexicated.

Side note: I also searched for "was a complex adaptive system" and "will be a complex adaptive system." I found too few matches to draw any graphs (8 for "was" and 5 for "will be"). What does it mean that we only use the CAS term to describe things in the present tense? I don't know. Something.

You can't whisper with a megaphone

At this point, if I were you, I would be asking: What is your point? Do you think we should stop using the term "complex adaptive system?" 

Of course not. Every public-facing campaign needs a slogan, a tasty sound bite. The Holy Roman Empire needed one, and the Santa Fe Institute needed one. "Complexicated reactive frames," or some other more accurate term, doesn't have the same punch.

The danger is not in the fact that people need to create slogans to sell ideas. The danger is in the fact that people come to believe that the slogans are accurate descriptions of reality. They're not. Slogans are like megaphones. They carry messages fast and far, but they also distort.

From what I've seen, popular usage of the term "complex adaptive system" is distorted. I'm not sure how usage of the term started out, but today it appears that anything with even a hint of complexity in it qualifies to be called a complex adaptive system. The term has degenerated into meaning nothing more than "something I'd like to talk to you about."

I've been listening to people say "X is a complex adaptive system" for a while now. I haven't looked into this systematically, but my sense is that when people use the term, they tend to mean one of three things:

1. You need what I'm selling. 
2. We need to change the way we do things.
3. I know a lot, so you should let me handle this.

If you've been reading carefully you will have noticed that these statements match Bales' evaluation points: power, safety, effectiveness. In other words, the slogan is being used as a slogan. It is not being used as an explanation or an exploration. People are using it to get other people to sign on to things. If people were using the term to explain complexity, my graph above would have a different shape, because everything on that list has some complexity in it (and lots of things that are not on the list as well).

Here's what I think. Anyone who uses a slogan to sell an idea bears a responsibility to understand when it's time to pick up the megaphone and when it's time to put it down and speak carefully and quietly. At some point we need to move past slogans to explanations that are useful and informative. If we never move past our slogans, our efforts risk becoming caricatures of themselves: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Paired images

I hate it when people write critical, demanding essays that don't include positive solutions. So I sat on this blog post for a while, waiting for it to become more hopeful. One evening I noticed a book my husband had bought, called Electronics for Biologists, by Timothy J. Gawne. I know this sounds unrelated, but bear with me.

The first chapter of the book starts with a paired set of images: a photograph of a battery connected to a resistor, and a circuit diagram representing the elements in the photograph.

First Gawne describes the items in the photograph:

Voltage varies continuously at all points, both through the wires and inside the different parts of the battery and resistor. Currents flow through the wires and components in complex patterns, much as water flow varies with position in a river, and some current leaks out of the wires to flow through the air and table-top. The circuit elements act as antennas, and so external electromagnetic sources like radio transmissions or electric lights affect the operation of the circuit. The currents flowing in the wires create external magnetic fields, which can interact with other objects. Different parts of the circuit that are not directly connected to each other can nonetheless affect each other via the electric field.

I love this description. It captures the messy, fascinating details of real electromagnetism. This is the kind of thing people should be learning about complexity. That it's rarely the only phenomenon taking place. That it can be miraculous and disastrous. That what is seen depends on who is looking. That what looks like self-organization can turn out to be organization, and vice versa. That the state of affairs can switch unexpectedly between placid stability and wild turmoil -- or not switch, for far longer than you thought possible. Some of the most exciting things about complexity, to me, are the messy, fascinating parts that never make it into a simple term like "complex adaptive system." Maybe that's why I don't like the term, because it's complexity with all the fun parts sucked out.

The second image in the electronics book is of a simplified circuit diagram. Here's how Gawne introduces it.

However, the simplified model circuit in panel B is easy to analyze. We say that this is a lumped quasi-static model. Lumped, because the full complexity of the 3D geometry is reduced to simple lumped elements connected by uni-dimensional nodes. Quasi-static because, even though such models can handle time-varying signals, they do not model the true dynamics of how electric and magnetic fields interact through space.

In panel A [the photograph], voltage is a continuous function of space. In panel B [the circuit diagram], there are only two voltages: the voltage at node 1 and the voltage at node 2. In panel A, the resistor is a physical object with real size and where current and voltage can vary in complex ways inside it. The abstract resistor in panel B has no internal structure at all, and is completely specified by its value of 1000 ohms, and by the fact that it connects node 1 with node 2. The model resistor has no other properties.

Likewise, the term "complex adaptive system" is a lumped quasi-static model for the ways in which complexity manifests itself in the world. It's like a circuit diagram: abstract, with no internal structure and only two states (complex or not; in the system or not).

I have a question for you. What would happen if people laid the messy, fascinating reality of complexity next to its simplified model and showed how they were similar and different? Would that give the model more power or less? More, I think, because people would then see it for what it is: a stepping stone, a way point on the path towards greater understanding, a tool.

Gawne explains that the circuit diagram is useful in certain contexts.

For all its simplification, the model can often provide very accurate predictions of what the real circuit will do. When is the model good enough, and when does it fail to give a sufficiently accurate model of the world? This is a tough question with no precise answer. 

He goes on to examine specific cases where a circuit diagram does fail to provide accurate predictions, such as when frequencies are high, or changes in voltage are rapid, or the circuit is physically large, or when external magnetic fields are strong. I would love to see people do that with the term "complex adaptive system." The places where the term breaks down are well known and easy to summarize (and fascinating).

I'm not saying an electronics textbook holds the key to explaining complexity. I might have been able to find a similar pairing of reality and model in dozens of other books about any number of topics. I just happened to pick up this book. But what it says to me is: It's not necessary to give up on slogans, and it's not necessary to give up on helping people understand what's really going on. The way past slogans lies in juxtaposition, in paired images. We shouldn't give people only slogans, but we shouldn't give them only the messy, fascinating details either. When it's time to put down the slogan megaphone, we can give people both views, side by side. We can help people use slogans when they are useful and put them aside when they stop being useful.

The ideas of complexity were once confined to a small number of scientists, but now they are roaming in the wide world, and they are being widely misunderstood and misapplied. I don't know if this is bothering anybody else, but it's bothering me. I think this could be a way out. What do you think?

The snail rushes in

Imagine you're at a party. You went there because somebody said you just had to be there. But when you got there, you found out that everyone was talking in a strange way. Say they were all clapping when they talked, or affecting an obscure accent, or hopping on one foot. Confused, you tucked yourself into a corner, nursed your drink, and watched the room.

After some time, you began to make sense of what was going on. You kept sneaking off to the bathroom to practice the strange talk. Finally you felt that you might be ready to try talking. But as you looked around at the lively room, you felt unable to start. Should you jump into a conversation and announce yourself? Should you attempt to pretend that you'd been speaking all along, maybe across the room, and had just drifted over to a new group? Or should you give up and leave?

I've been tucking myself away in a corner of the Twitter party for a few years now, trying to make sense of what's going on. I look at Twitter every week or so, but I always come out of it like the snail who rode on the back of the turtle ("Whee!"). 

Just now I looked at Twitter, and I saw:

a poem

a cat

a fascinating quote I would need an hour to absorb

something about toilet paper

a call to action

a prediction

a picture of a doll 

And then I had to stop. I don't know how you people do this.

I am not a fragmentary thinker. When I read a book, I read every single word in the book, and I read the words in the order they appear. Twitter feels to me like a giant book I can never read from beginning to end. I find that almost physically painful. But I also can't help feeling intrigued, attracted to the light.

New people follow me on Twitter all the time, even though I never say anything. I suppose they think I might say something. I feel like I've done something wrong by being at the party but not in the party. Also, to be perfectly frank, I would like to tweet once in a while, for example when I want to ask people to help me with something (like my new card game). And I wouldn't mind putting up tweets that say "new blog post" instead of hoping somebody else does. But I don't feel right crashing the party only when it suits me. I feel I ought to contribute.

This led me to think: How could I contribute to Twitter, so that I give to it as much as I (might like to) take? I don't have much to offer the fast-paced crowd. I don't get out much, and I usually have the same thing for breakfast, and I average one thought a week.

Then I thought: What if I did post one thought a week? I do sometimes have thoughts, ideas, questions, explorations, that never grow into full essays. Writing an essay takes a lot of time, so probably only about ten percent of the essays I'd like to write get written. I could write the rest of these proto-essays to Twitter. But it should not be a thought per week; that's presumptuous. It should be a question. A question people might like to ponder. That could be my contribution.

So I thought: Okay. I'll start writing one question a week (or thereabouts) on Twitter. I'll join the party.

But then I thought: How can I tell Twitter that I'm going to post one question a week to Twitter? How can I possibly explain what I want to do in 140 characters? And then I thought, if I can't even explain why I want to post on Twitter using the rules of Twitter, do I deserve to be part of Twitter? And the whole idea got stuck there for a long time.

Finally I decided that I will have to forgive myself and start tweeting by not tweeting. So, as of this week, I intend to start posting one question per week (or thereabouts) on Twitter. To save you the trouble of going to check Twitter to find out what my first question was, I'll post it here too.

Q1. Online bandwidth is a trickle. Can we adapt to compensate? Are we trapped or have we learned helplessness? Is the cage door open?

That's a super condensed version of a blog post I have thought about writing, where I explore the ways in which people have used customs and traditions to widen the trickle of bandwidth in media from stone engravings to telegrams to penny-post letters. I don't know if anyone has already written about this issue. Finding that out would be the first part of researching the essay. I usually read for several hours before I even begin to translate thoughts into words.

I have to say, it feels mentally bruising to release a fledgling question into the world with no protection from its parent. But that is the nature of the Twitter world, as I understand it. Who knows, maybe my questions will be improved by early exposure to the world. Maybe I've been too coddling, a helicopter thinker.

You will have noticed that I gave my tweet a number. It's the only way I can bear the fragmentation. I will have to write my tweets in a coherent series, or I'll go insane. I can't read the book of Twitter from beginning to end, but I can read my contributions to it from beginning to end. Maybe I'll even keep the list of tweets here on the blog somewhere. Yes, that's the ticket. If I can write my tweets as part of a growing page, I will be able to enter into the Twitter party in perfect serenity.

I'm excited, if a bit nervous, to give myself this new challenge. I hope to see you at the party. I might stumble around a bit and get the accent wrong, but I'll give it a try.

[Edit: A week later I realized that I didn't tell you how to find me on Twitter. I'm cfkurtz there.]

Oops

Ahem. As you may have noticed, I changed the appearance of my blog. It was kind of an accident. It might have been a good one.

What happened was, a while ago I posted some old files, and while doing that I looked again at the presentation whose name I reused for the blog. I remembered how much I liked the little joke of the glasses with "story" written on them. (Get it, that we fill in the missing details of stories in the same way we fill in the missing "o" in the glasses?) I intended to poke around a bit with how the blog looks without changing anything. I must have clicked something I shouldn't have. Now the blog looks this way.

If the blog is now unbearably ugly or unreadable, please tell me.

But it's probably a good thing. That photograph of my glasses (those are my real glasses, though they are one pair back at this point) on top of a sheet of paper with a (true) story about encountering a grouse in the woods ... was starting to annoy me.

For those who are coming here years later (or even days later) and have no idea what I'm grousing about, here's what the old header looked like.

 So here we are in our new place. Let's see what happens next.

Welcome to Narratopia

I hinted a few months ago that I had a few secret projects in the works. This is one of them, and I'm excited to tell you about it.

[Note: If you're just discovering this blog post, you might also want to look at the follow-up posts in November 2015 ("Back to Narratopia") and May 2017 ("Narratopia Revisited") where I describe what happened after this post got things started.]

A new idea

As I've mentioned here a few times already, I went to a conference in October in Washington DC, of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. An aggregation of discoveries there led me to get excited about an idea for a new project. It happened like this.

1. Before the conference, looking up the attendees and what they do, I discovered the Group Works Deck, a set of pattern language cards people play with together to explore ways they can work together. 
2. At the pre-conference get-together, I met Galen Radtke, who gave me a copy of his card game Wamerjam. The game is designed to help people build better conversational skills. When I got home, my family tried it, and we liked it a lot.
3. During the conference, I heard a rumor that Joan Blades, a co-founder of moveon.org and livingroomconversations.org (who was at the conference), had been part of the team that built the popular trivia game You Don't Know Jack. The rumor turned out to be true, but even if it hadn't been true, it got me thinking.
4. On the last day of the conference, there was a talk about gamification as a way to get people to do pretty much anything they should be doing already. (It says on the NCDD web site that the talk was given by "Josh Lerner of the Participatory Budgeting Project, Amy Lee of the Kettering Foundation and our moderator Gene Koo of iCivics and Good Games Group.")

So all of this got me thinking about games, gamification, and story sharing.

My first reaction was (predictably) to get all holier-than-thou and say (only to myself, thank goodness) that you can't gamify story sharing because sharing stories is a game and has been since prehistoric times. I even started a blog post about how gamification is built in to story sharing and how it's silly to try to gamify a game.

Then I got off my high horse and asked myself: If I think people don't share stories as much as they used to, isn't that a perfect fit for gamification? Why shouldn't I consider gamification as a way of reintroducing people to story sharing? What if I actually built a game for story sharing? What would it look like?

What's out there

The first thing I did, being the researcher I am, was to look at all the games people have already built that have anything to do with sharing stories. I spent days poring over the voluminous resources at boardgamegeek.com, reading about hundreds of games with "storytelling" or "stories" mentioned anywhere in their titles or genres or gameplay dynamics.

I was surprised by what I found. To begin with, the great majority of the story-themed games that exist are about the creation and performance of fictional stories. Players compete to tell the best story, or to craft a story that matches certain criteria. For example:

• In the game Rory's Story Cubes, players roll dice, then combine the story elements they get into coherent stories. 
• In Nanofictionary, players compete to assemble the best stories from plot elements. 
• In Once Upon a Time, players compete to change the plot of a collaboratively told story to match the cards they hold.

There are lots of imaginative, and fun, games in the genre of fictional storytelling. But I am primarily interested in helping people share stories about things that have actually happened to them, because I think we have forgotten how much fun that can be.

I did find several games where people recall and tell real stories, but I didn't like them very much, for a few reasons.

First, they're too simple. Most of the prompts for telling stories are factual and superficial: people, places, things. Also, the game is the story prompts. For example, the game Rememory consists of over 200 prompts like (the ones I can see on the advertisement) "the tree," "summer," and "joy." I found several other games that were made up of similar lists of things you might tell stories about. Lists don't seem much like games to me, even if you add a few gameplay rules.

I also found quite a few games in what I'll call the stories-as-lies genre, where players compete to trick each other into believing things about themselves, sometimes by telling stories. These are also simple. For example, in the game Are You For Real? players gain points by getting people to believe stories that never happened. In The Secrets Game, players gain points by guessing whether other people are telling the truth. While it's true that people evaluate the truth values of other people's stories, that's only one aspect of what stories are for. I'd rather support every reason people share stories, not just one of them.

Second, the non-fiction story games I've looked at make story sharing seem like a chore, the kind of thing parents make children do "for their own good." For example, the description of a game called The Ungame at boardgamegeek.com includes the sentence, "As you share thoughts, ideas and feelings, you will develop a deeper understanding of others and of yourself." That's pretty much what I would like to help people do in my game, but I wouldn't want my game to say that (or feel like that). I would want people to play the game because it's fun, not because it's good for them. One of the most shocking moments during my exploration of story games was when I found a photograph of a similar "sharing" game being roasted on a barbecue. The caption said something about this being the only use somebody could come up with for the game. I don't remember what game it was; but it was a very useful image of the kind of game I don't want to create.

But the worst problem with non-fiction story sharing games is that none of them make sense in light of the way people actually share stories. The rules of the game LifeStories are described on boardgamegeek.com as "Basically, roll the dice, move, draw a card, and share something about your life as directed on the card." But story sharing doesn't work that way. People don't think of one story to tell, tell it, then move on to another topic. In actual conversation, stories flow in linked chains through reaction and reminding. One of my sisters tried the game Rememory, and she said she found it frustrating because every time she heard a story she thought of several she wanted to tell in response, but the game wouldn't let her. Any game in which people tell stories about themselves has to work with the dynamics of natural story sharing; but most of the games I saw in this genre worked against it.

The challenge of natural story sharing

So I started to think of what sort of game might work with the way people naturally tell stories in conversation. I thought about how:

• Storytellers negotiate for the floor by submitting a story abstract to the group. Audience members accept, reject, or modify proposed stories during the story abstract.
• Storytellers embed in their story evaluation statements that prove the story is worth listening to, and communicate their intent in telling it. Audience members redirect stories as they are being told by providing feedback, questions, and corrections.
• Storytellers negotiate the end of their story (and the return to the normal conversational rhythm) in the story's coda. Audience members participate in fitting the story into the conversation by asking questions about it and discussing aspects of it.
• Audience members respond to stories with related stories, building chains of connected stories in collaborative exploration of a topic.

This all happens without anyone being fully aware that it is happening. You can watch people do all of these things in any casual conversation anywhere in the world, and probably could watch the same thing happen thousands of years ago.

Based on this, I realized that what should matter most in the game are connections and explorations, because that's what people do when they share stories. They connect their experiences together, and they explore what their experiences mean.

To get past the "good for you" problem, I read about what makes some games more compelling than others. I read a lot of game reviews and discussions about great and awful games, and I read essays by game designers about how to build games people want to play. My husband bought me the book Game Design Workshop, which I devoured. (I especially liked the book's interviews with real game designers.)

What struck me most in all of this reading was the fact that every good game presents a challenge to its players. People vary in whether they prefer to compete or cooperate, but everyone likes to achieve a sense of accomplishment and mastery. If a game is too easy or too hard, it's not fun. It has to be just hard enough.

So I thought about what skills I would like people to feel mastery over. I'm not interested in storytelling skills, and besides, there are lots of good games about those already. I'm interested in helping people master the art of narrative conversation, of being able to work (and play) together with other people to create webs of exploration and connection by sharing stories in interesting ways. This is the challenge I want to present to players; this is the skill I want to help people develop.

So I wrote this "challenge" for Narratopia players:

Peer with me, if you will, into the mists of the past, to a time when people had superpowers we can only dream about. They could read maps. They could write words on paper with things called pencils and pens. They could fix their own cars. 

But let us travel even further back, into an age of powers beyond imagination. Verily I say unto you: there was a time when ordinary people could sit in the dim light of hearth and candle for hours, weaving dense, complex, fascinating webs of stories. 

These masters of the tale didn't "stream" stories; they remembered, created, and shared them. I know it's hard to believe, but small groups of people could once entertain, instruct, and enlighten themselves without the aid of a single electronic device. 

It is time to bring back what has been lost. Can you rise to the challenge, revive the ancient art of story sharing, and become a master of the tale? If you yearn for the days of legend and lore; if you crave creative anachronism; if you thirst for magical powers of wisdom and wit; your journey awaits. Open the doors to time travel. Welcome to Narratopia.

It's over the top, I know. I'll have to hide this particular write-up in a nook of the web site to avoid sounding very strange. But that's my ultimate goal.

Now I'll tell you how the game works, and you can think about whether it works.

How Narratopia works

Every game of Narratopia starts with something that happened to someone. The game includes some story prompts to get started, but their use is optional. Players can start with any event or memory, even just something they remember happening that morning. (The "this morning I was surprised by" method works pretty well.)

I did decide to include the possibility of telling fictional stories in the game. I didn't mean to do this at first, but on one of our first play-throughs of the game, my son fluidly switched to a fictional story in mid-game. It didn't ruin anything, and the flexibility to walk in and out of reality made the game more fun. So I loosened up and opened the door to fiction, either for the whole game or for parts of it, as the players choose and agree. It's more important that people enjoy the exchange than that they keep strictly to what actually happened. Besides, people used to drift into telling tall tales and folk tales during everyday conversation; so that's nothing new.

Back to the gameplay. After the first story is told, its teller gives it a name, and somebody writes the name on a sticky note and sticks it on the table.

Then the question cards come in. There are two sets of 24 question cards in the game. Each player keeps three question cards in their hand at all times. These cards are questions people might naturally ask about stories other people tell. I've drawn them from my experiences asking people questions about their own stories, and from my observations and readings about how people respond to stories in conversation. Each question card has at least one blank, which players fill in (as they read out the question) with relevant words.

Some example question cards:

• Details - Can you tell us more about _____?
• Needs - What do you think _____ needed?
• Response - What do you think _____ would say about _____?
• In Charge - Who was responsible for _____?

The question cards have three levels of difficulty (easy, medium, and hard). The easiest questions require little thought, while the hardest are subtle (for both storyteller and audience). For example, the "details" card is easy to think about, while the "in charge" card is more difficult to ask and answer.

After each story is told, the other players ask up to two questions each, using the cards in their hands. The storyteller answers the questions as they come up. When all of the chosen questions have been asked and answered, the storyteller chooses their favorite question, the one they were most glad to have been asked. They hand that card to the questioner, who keeps it (as part of their score) until the end of the game.

Then it's the next person's turn. For each story told after the first turn, players must use a link card to connect it to any previously told story. The link cards help people build chains of connected stories (the way people normally do in conversation). As with the question cards, there are two sets of 24 link cards in the game. Everyone gets three link cards at the start of the game and replenishes their set anytime they use one.

Some example link cards:

• Reminding - That reminds me of the time when....
• Mistake - _____ made a mistake like that once when....
• Warning - Be careful about _____ because once....
• Behavior - When I think of how _____ behaved, it reminds me of the time....

As with the question cards, these are rated by difficulty ("reminding" is easy, "behavior" is hard). The difficulty ratings translate to point values, and they also make it easy to adapt the game for beginners or more advanced players.

The game goes on in this way, with stories linked to stories and questions asked about stories, until everyone has told three stories. The table ends up looking like this:

To end the game, each player chooses their favorite links, choosing only from those links that followed their own stories. Whoever placed those links gets the points marked on them. Finally, whoever gets the most points (questions plus links) wins the game.

The game can also be played cooperatively, with the whole group guessing together which question or link each storyteller likes best, and the whole group gaining points by guessing correctly. In that case the whole group meets the challenge of proving their skills in conversational narrative. Multiple groups can compete for the highest collaborative scores.

You could say that Narratopia is a no-pressure party game, since judgment is based on preference and not adherence to fixed criteria. But if you understand how stories work in conversation, and if you listen attentively while stories are being told, you will be able to guess which questions storytellers will most want to answer and which linked stories they will most appreciate. I've tried a lot of different point schemes, and other motivational elements, in my testing so far. I think this one works best because it rewards mastery of the art of conversational narrative. But I need more testing to be sure.

Here's another picture of the game with all of its parts. (Ignore the fact that the box and card back colors are too dark. I'm still working on the color balance.)

If you're curious about how I'm producing the game, by the way, I'm using the print-on-demand service thegamecrafter.com. The Game Crafter is not the cheapest service of its kind, but I like the quality of their products and service. The game will eventually sell for US$20. I will get very little of that, because production costs are high for print-on-demand (nearly $14 of the $20 is production cost). If I am wrong and the game becomes very popular, I might be able to produce it in bulk for a better price and/or profit. But right now I'm not thinking that far ahead. I'm just thinking of the whole thing as yet another who-knows-what-will-happen project that I've done because it wanted to be done.

A test of conversational story support

Now I'll go back to the elements of natural story sharing I mentioned previously and try to prove to you (and to myself) how Narratopia supports all of them.

In natural conversation	In a Narratopia game
Storytellers negotiate for the floor by submitting a story abstract to the group. Audience members accept, reject, or modify proposed stories during the story abstract.	In Narratopia, players submit story abstracts by placing link cards on the table. Players don't stop each other from placing link cards (unless the fit is very bad or obnoxious), but badly matched link cards aren't chosen at the end of the game. Looking over your link cards and deciding which to use (and how to fill in the blanks on the card) is similar to deciding what story you will tell in a group and how you will introduce it.
Storytellers embed in their story evaluation statements that prove the story is worth listening to, and communicate their intent in telling it. Audience members redirect stories as they are being told by providing feedback, questions, and corrections.	All of this happens naturally in the game, without explicit connection to the cards. (The game doesn't limit or shape the conversation while a story is being told.) However, players who are paying attention can use elements of evaluation and negotiation to guess which questions (of those available to them) the storyteller might find most interesting to answer.
Storytellers negotiate the end of their story (and the return to the normal conversational rhythm) in the story's coda. Audience members participate in fitting the story into the conversation by asking questions about it and discussing aspects of it.	The phase of each turn where players ask questions about the story and the storyteller answers them (and some other conversation might ensue) works with the natural dynamic of story codas. People are guided to make sense of how the story relates to the other stories and to the topic at hand.
Audience members respond to stories with related stories, building chains of connected stories in collaborative exploration of a topic.	Using link cards to think of new stories to tell prompts people to participate in this natural process. Because choosing each storyteller's favorite link gains points, people work to create connections others will enjoy. The result is that the whole group will explore topics together.

The question that remains in my mind at this point is: How well do each of these assertions about what Narratopia is designed to do play out in practice? Does it really support natural story sharing, or have I not yet hit on the best means of support through gameplay?

What it's for

At this point those who are still reading this will be wondering about my intended audience. Do I want people to use this game in story projects? It certainly could be a useful means of story collection about a topic, and I can see it being used in that way. But that application is low on my list of ambitions for the game.

The thing I want most for this game is for ordinary people to play it simply because it's fun. I may be far from realizing that goal, but it's a little hard to tell at this point. We have played the game in my family several times, and we love it. I thought we three couldn't possibly get to know each other any better, but it seems like every time we play the game we discover all kinds of new things about each other. We also dive into some complex discussions about whatever topics we happen to fall into exploring, like mistakes or miscommunications or the vagaries of chance.

Of course I don't believe this game will be useful only for fun. A few possible uses that have come up so far in conversation include:

• work teams using the game to bring out tacit knowledge about lessons learned
• retirement homes using the game to help elders share stories about their lives (with relatives and each other)
• families using the game to remember family stories
• new groups using the game at "kickoff meetings" to get to know each other
• caregivers using the game to learn more about patient needs
• novices and experts using the game to from each other

And so on. I can also envision expansion packs with questions designed for particular contexts (health care, education, development) or even for particular communities or organizations. But exploring all of that will come later as the game matures. Right now I am more concerned with creating a firm foundation for later work.

The part where I ask you for help

Aside from one useful trial with relatives over Christmas, I haven't yet play tested the game outside my immediate family. This is where I need your help.

I have bought ten copies of the game for play testing. Three are spoken for already, but (as of this writing) seven are still available. So here's the deal. If you promise to play the game, tell me what happened, and answer a few of my burning questions, I will send you a free (physical) copy of the game as it stands right now. If you are interested, send me an email: cfkurtz at cfkurtz dot com. When I'm out of games I'll post an update here. EDIT (April 4): I'm out of games. Thanks to all who play tested the game!

I would like to get at least ten play-test results so I can tweak the game further before I start to actually sell it. If the first play-test run goes well, I might go straight to sales, but I might need another test run afterward. Some people test their games a hundred times before they sell them; some test far less. I usually find that products tell me when they are done, and Narratopia will probably do the same.

If you aren't interested in play testing the game, your opinion of the game instructions would also be useful to me. I can send those to you via email (only please don't redistribute them; this is one of my rare projects that is not open source). I would love it if you could poke some holes in my ideas and trip me up where I feel secure.

I have also created a web site for the game, narratopia.com, which I'd love to get feedback on. (There is a gameplay video there as well as lots of other information.) Please send feedback via email or in the comments here. I am eager to find out what you think!