The Inviolable Fortress of the Player's Emotions

I hate boxed text in an adventure. I know a lot of you do. Others don't. But there's something special a writer can do with boxed text that's worse than pulling toenails. Sadly, I was reminded of that while reading the otherwise excellent Wheel of Evil adventure by Jeff Sparks. Let me explain.

I know a lot of DMs and adventure writers take seriously the commandment to engage as many of the reader/listener's senses as possible. Thus, in addition to seeing walls and ceilings with precise measurements in feet, the players should be led to hear the whistle of the dungeon wind, feel the dungeon sands underfoot, smell the dungeon dung and taste the dungeon luncheon.

Well, sensations are feelings, right? And feelings are emotions, right? So why shouldn't we describe the characters' rising gorge, crawling skin, or sense of peace and serenity? Why shouldn't it be OK to chase a short description of disgusting stuff with "A feeling of revulsion fills you as you view the scene"? To specify that you feel the malevolence of an area "deep down in your bones"? Or just write something like "this room smells foul and repulses you with its slimy aspect"? (All examples from Wheel of Evil, by the way.)

I'll tell you why not.

This has so many other uses than telling players how they feel.

Firstly ... The first thing you learn in Serious Writer Boot Camp is to show, not tell. Instead of writing "He felt disgusted" say "He wrinkled his nose" or "He turned away, holding his mouth." Or better yet - just describe the scene, subtly tweaking the descriptive language to communicate the point-of-view character's emotions. This is so easy to do with disgust in particular that there is absolutely no need to say anything about the player's or character's reaction. "A pulsing, ridged coil of glistening ochre paste, stinking faintly of sweaty feet, snakes forth with a gaseous hiss from the chapped orifice atop a slivered nipple of bone-white plastic..." Put you off your Easy-Cheese there, but you get the point.

Secondly ... As Craig Heir forcefully and concisely argued here, second person presumes the sort of emotional, bodily or sensory reaction the addressed person is going to take. This violates the mind and soul of your player-listeners, and doesn't respect their characters' special senses or reactions.

Shawn Merwin's excellent advice: use third person when writing descriptive text. This leaves it to the DM to translate this into second person, which is great in many ways. It lets the DM adjust for the special abilities, states or knowledge of the characters. And, basic presentation skills only improve when you go from reading text off a page to improvising from notes. Boxed text enables the stereotypical awkward middle-school dungeon master, monotonously reciting from behind the screen without eye contact. It's okay as training wheels, but fatal to any sense of spontaneity.

I don't mean to single out Wheel of Evil, which is otherwise a very cool, varied and inventive adventure. A while back I bought a CD including Bits of Darkness: Caverns, a play aid filled with creative and well-researched ideas about natural underground caverns. But then there's that encounter ... the one where your players are reminded of the horror of being so deep underground and the horror then invades the characters' minds (no magic, just spontaneous claustrophobia and boxed text) ... and they actually have to make a Will save to avoid running around like decapitated chickens.

What a blemish on an otherwise fine product! Make the players scared, I say. Have them lose their way, blow out their light, make them think the ceiling is about to cave in. Do anything, but leave alone the inviolable fortress of their minds!

Old School As A Gamut Of Emotions

What's the essence of Old School style GMing? noisms thinks it's in being a dispassionate, deistic god who lets the world have its own reality. Telecanter weighs in with a comment: it's all about letting the players have fun.

I don't think it's about control, or fun. Simply put, it is to run the game so that the players can have a chance of feeling as wide a range of emotions as possible, vicariously through their PCs. Not just pleasure or mild challenge, but grief, anger, remorse, fear, side-splitting laughter. On a higher level, this experience translates into more than just the fun of completing an easy crossword puzzle, and evolves into the deeper enjoyment of engagement with serious literature or drama.

The autonomous world then becomes a necessary adjunct to this goal.

• Sometimes it hands the players the fruits of their actions - pride, remorse, satisfaction.
• Sometimes fate throws undeserved misfortune their way, whether they can see it coming - fear - or have to pick up the pieces afterwards - sorrow.
• Sometimes they get more than they deserve - joy! 
• Sometimes the world gives enemies - anger, hate - and other times allies - gratitude, respect, concern. 
• Sometimes the universe lets them know just how enormous it is - opening up the twin feelings of awe and terror. 
• Sometimes it's the people underfoot who get to them - pity, compassion, contempt.
• And it's only against the serious backdrop of all these concerns that the true release of world-shaking laughter can come ... not the continual, gassy snickering that some hope to engineer through a relentless parade of ridiculous characters and cheap puns.

If you are fudging things or setting them up in the first place to make the game's outcomes fall within a certain range of cautious success, you are denying your players these experiences. If the players suspect that you are fudging things, you are denying them even the stage-managed satisfactions you intend for them to enjoy. If the world is not autonomous, it cannot inspire these emotions.

But also, the players must keep their feelings within the world in order to have the higher-level enjoyment that comes from experiencing even painful feelings as "theatrical emotions" or rasa (see here for an explanation of the Hindu concept). They must be mature enough to respect the separation of the world from the person of the Game Master.

If their grief is aimed at the dice, their anger at the GM's rules or interpretation, their gratitude at the module designer, then they are missing the point. Equally so, it is the GM's responsibility to demonstrate that all his or her choices are made out of necessity, drawing on the logic of the rules system and the logic of the imaginary world.

That, I think, is what distinguishes the old school GM from the balance-gamer who is trying to keep everything fair and manageable, and from the rail-greasing story-gamer who is denying the emotions that come from confronting meaninglessness or exerting true agency within the world.

The old school systems allow these heights and depths, but - like a psychedelic drug - can also go horribly wrong if not experienced in the right company. This is why they are and always will be an underground phenomenon.

The Fantastic Through Weirdness

Moving beyond written setting elements to create surprise and wonder for your players, we have already seen the ease and limitations of the random way.

The way of Weirdness is just to pull things out of your imagination. The better and more informed your imagination, the more wondrous things appear. Think of a Renaissance wunderkammer ....

The museum of Olaus Wormius

Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and the pictures that inspired it ...

Lord Dunsany's jewel-like story vignettes ...

Each one perfect in its self-containment, the artistically described miniatures of Weirdness are best described from the surface going inwards... beginning with an impression, a synaesthesia, an emotional feeling, a sensory package that only then takes form by association.

To take an example: the image of rainbow colors on a black background. What does that bring to mind?

Gems against black velvet
Bright eyes, multicolored, curious in the night
Small bright-eyed skittering creatures, hoarders of gems
Halls of black volcanic rock, the creatures barely visible unless they open their brilliant eyes
Smoke thick in the air, black and billowing, multicolored sparks of magic, fireflies
Bright cascade of tones, hurtling in the void
The Rainbow of Midnight, unnatural, a black-skinned queen resplendent in gleaming enamel and polished stones
Darkness and serenity, then sudden bedazzlement, a brittle, tinkling surprise quickly enough gone

We have here the set design and cast for a whole area in an adventure; its appearance, creatures, ruler, hazards, inconveniences and treasures. Self-contained, without deeper meaning, the variety can be sustained for one session or two before boredom sets in and we're off to the next.

The trouble with this method? The same as with random generation, but on a larger scale. Random generation gives you a seeming variety that eventually resolves into a gray mud, like an array of randomly colored single pixels. Whimsical sensory environment generation gives you bigger pixels - about the size of mosaic tiles - but with enough time and distance the variety here, too, resolves into patternless gray.

We need a way to arrange the pixels, to pick meaning out of the random impressions. This is the deeper meaning of Resonance, and the method of the fantastic I'll explore next.

Emotion Dice Chart

And now, here is my one page emotion dice encounter reaction chart. You can use the emotion dice if you have them, or substitute regular d6; as an aid to memory, the odd numbered faces are negative (vs. positive) reactions, and the high-numbered ones are strong (vs. weak) reactions.

Click to enlarge

And one example.

The party, led by a charismatic warrior with a +1 bonus, runs into some orcs with a Hostile disposition.

The orcs greatly outnumber the party (so circumstances favor a move to the right) and the party quickly throws a couple of sacks of gold at them, which is deemed fitting tribute (circumstances favor a move down).

An ANGRY (5) and a NEUTRAL (1) are rolled.

First, the hostile orcs get angry, moving one to the right.

Then, circumstances come into play. The orcs stay in the rightmost column, but shift one down to CONFIDENT. The orcs laugh and bid the party begone, scooping up the gold.

Next time I'll show what one-page format has done to my more traditional-style reaction table using two rolls of 2d6. I think the format has changed it for the better.

Emotion Dice

In Amsterdam this summer I picked up a pair of these dice that are meant to teach kids about emotional expressions. What a great way to mingle gaming with my research into emotions ...

The 6 faces of each die.

Scanning across from top left, let's number them 1 to 6. Four of the expressions are easy to label: 1 is sad, 2 is happy, 4 is indifferent and 6 is angry. But 3 and 5 are interesting because they're expressions that emotion researchers haven't paid much mind to - yet here they are in a set of basic emotion dice for kids, which tells me someone needs to pay closer attention to them.

Number 3 is the wink. A facial expression, yes, but an emotion? The wink to me communicates something more intentionally than an emotion does; amusement, affection, a secret ... I know of no papers on winking.

Number 5 is the "mean smile." At another conference this summer I got into a conversation with a fellow psychologist about this one. He pointed out that the muscle groups for frowning and smiling are rarely activated together. But every child knows the meaning of this expression. It combines the powerful, hostile message of furrowed brows with the pleased expression of the smile, and it means "Ha ha! I gotcha!" Is it just that people often don't show this expression to pictures in a lab? Or that it's more a caricature expression than one found in the wild - combining elements of hostile frown and smile that are understandable when combined, but rarely actually expressed together? These questions require further study.

Anyway, for gaming purposes I also noticed that expressions 1, 2, 5 and 6 vary in two ways: mouth grimacing/smiling and eyebrows frowning/lifted.

Eyebrows are an interesting way of signaling dominance. Some research finds that frowning actually makes you look physically more mature and masculine, because grownups and men have heavier brows. Likewise, the raised eyebrows you see in expressions of fear, surprise and sometimes happiness convey that the person is temporarily feeling less powerful, because children have more space from eye to browline. In gaming, they can represent whether the person is feeling more or less powerful than whoever they're facing - in other words, a morale roll.

As for the mouth, that's used to communicate agreeableness - in other words, a reaction roll.

If you've been following this space for a while, you may see where this is going. Stay tuned - I'm going to adapt that table to use with the emotion dice.

Moral Disgust III: The Perverse

There's one last feature of moral disgust that might be worth exploring. It has to do with desire.

An up-and-coming theory in moral psychology says that we can make three morally relevant judgments on any behavior: the desire of the actor, the action he or she actually took, and what the consequences are. For example, someone might want to do something that hurts someone (bad desire), nonetheless carries out an action to help them (good action), but without meaning it, that helpful action actually backfires and hurts the person (bad consequences).

What this research tends to find, with a few exceptions and glitches, is that people tend to base recommendations about punishment and reward on consequences; base judgments of the action on what the action did; and base judgments of the person's character on his or her desire.

WHH: big in Japan

I want to focus on this link between character and desires because disgust, responding to people as "things" rather than actors, seems to have a link to desire. Those who are aficionados of weird literature know of William Hope Hodgson, and maybe have read what I consider his best story, The Voice in the Night. Without giving away too much, at one point one of the characters in the story gives in to a physical need that he knows will doom his humanity. What is particularly horrifying about this is the desire with which he succumbs to this temptation - "immediately filled with an inhuman desire" in Hodgson's words - and his struggle and self-loathing.

Meanwhile, on the social science side, some colleagues and I have been running a study that, if it works out, will back up some ideas we had about they way people can be seenless than fully human based on the emotions they feel ... well, now that the corpus callosum between the gamer and psych sides of my brain has fully fused, I can present this to you guys as a fully fledged villain-ology.

There is the Misguided Villain, who has the full range of human emotions - including the ability to feel disgust, remorse, hope. This one may be doing the wrong thing, but has the right desires.

There's the Animalistic Villain, with none of the higher emotions, only the bestial ones - lust, anger, fear, pleasure.

There's the Mechanistic Villain, with no emotions at all. Perfectly rational, with cruelty only as a side effect.

Finally, and most relevant, there's the Perverse Villain. This one has all the emotions but feels them at the wrong times: joy at people's suffering, disappointment at their success. This is the classic stage villain, and the one who most forcefully reveals the wrong desires that I suspect lead to moral disgust.

Horror - fear and disgust - both these emotions compel someone to flee. The more distance you put between yourself and the scary or disgusting thing, the more the emotion subsides. The horror of desire - of sweet-smelling corruption, of the desirable body with the skeleton face - is that you willingly bring yourself closer to the vile thing. But the vile thing is not so disturbing as what your self-conscious mind reveals about you. You are perverse. Your desire is corrupt. Like Hodgson's castaway, you yourself are the monster.

Do I use this in my campaign? Well, my players may remember an amorphous thing with mouths in the cellar of the millhouse ... a thing that radiated a smell of honey and fresh meat.

Moral Disgust II: Purism

In the last disgust post I went over some of our research showing that moral disgust mostly protects moral codes concerning the body. But I don't think that's all to disgust. I just haven't figured out the experiments to prove it.

See, there's a grab bag of other things from various other published studies out there that elicit disgust. One study of the role of emotions in attitudes toward various social groups found that disgust was predicted by two things. One is kind of obvious: the perception that a group threatens physical health (so, HIV patients, for example). The other is less obvious: the perception that a group threatens important values (gay men score high on this as well as, via the HIV perception, the disease kind of threat).

And then there's esthetic disgust, or I guess esthetic-moral disgust. This is not the esthetic disgust from a painting of rotting meat, but the disgust that comes from seeing something as "contaminating" a moralized esthetic category. And what sets apart a moralized esthetic category from the usual kind? Fortunately, Zak has just drawn a cartoon that explains this very point.

It's the disgust face that fans of black doom grindcore metal make when confronted with symphonic black doom grindcore. It's the disgust face that fans of the game with clerics and no thieves make when they come across the game with thieves and no clerics.

The second most subdivided form of entertainment there is.

Values, moralized preferences, cultural norms about sex and food and body decoration ... I suspect that what binds these all together, what throws those who violate them on the midden of disgust, is that these are learned primary associations to the concepts of "good" or "bad" that are hard to justify.

After all, it's hard to articulate why freedom is good or why your country is or why the greatest band in the world is that way or why exactly men get circumcised in your culture. There's always some after-the-fact reason like "it's just good" or "it's more healthy." But the truth is, you probably learned all these things as a primary, Pavlovian link between whatever it is - the flag, the band, the physically weird - and the concept of "good" or "bad." And you probably prefer to associate with people who share the same associations.

This is why, in our studies, people specifically have a hard time explaining their disgust at sexual transgressions, apart from self-referential concepts like "it's just disgusting" or "they're just evil." Other studies show that people also have a hard time explaining why their core values, like freedom, equality or tradition, should be followed.

Extending this to all kinds of values, it then stands to reason that you're less likely to be disgusted with someone who who agrees with you that racial equality is good, but thinks that school vouchers (or whatever solution you prefer) are not the way to get there; you're likely to feel anger, because that person is at least in your community and just being frustrating. But if the person comes out and says that racial equality is not a highly valuable thing, not even good - they're an outright racist - that's more likely to feel disgusting. That person has shown themselves to be outside your true community.

Would you rather people play XBox?

One thing I find interesting about this moral-preferences-esthetics-values disgust is that it has a very weird reaction profile. If my esthetics are pragmatic, then (let's say) I love strawberry ice cream, will make do with raspberry cause it's kind of like strawberry only raspier, and just loathe chocolate. But if they're moralized, I will actually love strawberry, hate raspberry because it's a pathetic imitation and mockery of what strawberry is supposed to be, and be indifferent to chocolate. I think this is a vestige of contagion fear that comes from applying disgust to these moralized preferences. But this has abolutely nothing to do with nerds, fans, and gamers right?

All this is because the disgust reaction forms the boundary of the community. (I don't set these posts up, I swear...) So I won't give suggestions for working today's lesson into your game, because really, it applies more to your life as a gamer.

Moral Disgust I: The Body

One theme of my lab's research that is smashing into print in a esoteric, university-library-only journal near you this year (4 papers out or in press, 3 more under review) is the distinction between moral anger and moral disgust.

Two of Paul Ekman's research faces.

The first thing to recognize is that anger and disgust correlate highly across moral situations. So, if someone sees something and says they're "disgusted" they're also likely to say they're "angry." A less finicky language might just call both emotions of moral condemnation something like "outrage" and leave it like that.

Except what people call "disgust" also seems different for different kinds of outrage. What our research tends to find, using carefully varied scenarios, is that moral violations that involve harm or unfairness attract high levels of anger, and a kind of "disgust" that's very highly related to anger. But when you factor out the effects of anger, disgust really stands on its own mainly as a visceral response to moral codes about the use of the body.

In other words:

• I tell you about greedy corrupt politicians - and you may say you are disgusted, but go "grrr".
• I tell you about someone who has cloned his or her own muscle cells in order to eat a consensual, harmless, ethically sourced human steak - now you say you're disgusted, and go "yuck" - nobody is harmed, so you only go "grrr" a little - but importantly, most people (not all) feel there's something morally wrong about this technical cannibalism.

Jack Chick's "Gay Blade"

We came up with examples like the human steak to test, even for the most liberal of our respondents, the true limit of moral tolerance. If you're liberal and you want to know how conservative people feel about sexual immodesty or same-sex marriage, think about your own reaction to the human steak. Nobody's rights are violated, but there's a sense of wrong about it.

Back to imaginative literature and gaming. There's a tendency, most pronounced in works that aspire to  "epic" or "traditional" storytelling, to stack the deck with both moral anger and moral disgust - and to help that along with liberal lashings of physical disgust. Think of Frank Herbert's Baron Harkonnen, with his boils (physical disgust), catamites (moral disgust) and underhanded cruelty (moral anger/disgust/outrage). That works, if the reader plays along with the assumptions of the work. If the reader doesn't, this all-in-one moral universe becomes a nagging flaw. I mean, I love me some Jack Vance and in particular Lyonesse, but damn if "queer = villain" doesn't get tiresome in that series.

The body is often also moralized, and overlaid with disease and deformity arguments, to feed a dehumanizing and xenophobic political agenda. Just one very obvious example: the Nazi caricature of Jews encompassed disgust at alleged physical uncleanliness, strange dietary practices, physical abnormality, and sexual licentiousness. All this came to a sharp and pointed end with the final accusation to justify the Holocaust; Jews were not just gross but dangerous and malicious. Indeed, some of our recent unpublished studies implicate fear and moral anger, as well as disgust, in the tendency to dehumanize members of other social groups.

Yeah, yeah, so fantasy heroes are little Nazis slaughtering orcs. We've all heard that before, so that even the counter-cliche itself is at risk to get worn out. In my creations, I'd prefer to keep to hand the power of bodily-moral disgust, avoiding both cliches, letting the audience draw its own conclusions. These strange customs, they are weird and gross; the high priest marries his sister, ritual scars are salted to a fine purple hue, here's a feast to which everyone contributes a slice of their own flesh. Are these marks of villainy, or of mere strangeness? Our explorers of the unknown have signed up for encounters with both, in any event, and the interpretation is up to them.

Gore Disgust

There seems to be a trigger of disgust with a biological function that goes beyond protecting us against infection. Known picturesquely as "violations of the body envelope," and more prosaically as "blood and gore," such revolting things include blood, viscera and other signs of injury. Far from being infectious, these things instead are in danger of being infected, if the person is still alive, so it kind of makes sense to keep your distance from them, which the disgust emotion encourages. Extreme forms of gore disgust have been implicated in blood and injection phobias.

Researchers have found one interesting biological marker of gore disgust that's different from others; when most people react to blood and injuries, the heart rate goes down, rather than up as it does when seeing infectious or immoral things. This makes some sense as an automatic reaction to blood that could be your own; if that's true, you need to stop pumping it out so quickly.

Blood and gore is also fear- and anxiety-provoking. It reminds us of our bodies' mortality and tells us that right here and now, we could be next. This blend of disgust and the fear emotions has been identified as horror. Although research is lacking on this topic, I believe that many people see the ability to feel horror as a marker of moral standing, a guarantee that the person will not resort to violence because of revulsion at its consequences.

Certainly, lots of parents are OK with their children killing hundreds of people or creatures in a video game, as long as there's no blood or gore. It's hard to convince someone by reason not to be disgusted, but one of the better ways is to repeatedly expose them to the disgusting stuff until they get used to it. The concern aroused by gore in games and earlier media, such as comic books, is that children will become hardened to the disgusting signs of violence, and become more violent as a result.

The infamous EC Comics baseball story.

Is this concern justified? I'm not so sure. One group of people that needs to get used to blood and gore is doctors, nurses and EMTs, but this lets them help people more effectively. I do believe that many people have an effective, emotional brake on committing violence, but this doesn't respond to the aftermath of violence; that would be too late. Rather, it responds to the act of physically harming another person.

Army psychiatrist David Grossman made this case in the book On Killing, gathering historical and clinical evidence that many soldiers actually avoid directly harming the enemy - an aversion eliminated in US ground forces since Vietnam through human-target conditioning. His concern, which made the media around the time of the Columbine massacre, was that first-person shooter games were doing the same job on the youth of America. More solid experimental work in recent years has pinpointed an emotional reaction in the brain that makes people reluctant to end one human life even to save five others. This reaction is strongest if the scenario forces the person to actually apply personal energy to the killing, as opposed to pushing a button. Both these lines of research identify the key aversion as happening before the violence, not afterwards when gore is strewn around.

One of the few RPG systems that acknowledges this is Lamentations of the Flame Princess, with its portrait of the fighter class as someone who has become accustomed to violence, and as such can uniquely deal it out most effectively. Indeed, part of military training from Roman times on has involved not just teaching soldiers how to strike accurately, but how to overcome their aversion to doing so. Rather than indulging in blood-soaked wish-fulfillment, a mature approach to combat in games will acknowledge this unpleasant moral fact in one way or another.

Getting back to the topic of evoking emotions in a game, signs of death and gore should evoke horror in your players, but more on the fear side than the disgust side. They're a time-honored way to signal that Something Nasty is about ... the encounter may not be level-appropriate ... your characters may want to consider turning tail and running. In any event, apart from the odd grindhouse edition, gore in tabletop games remains enacted in the theater of the imagination, of little moral danger to anyone.

Why, then, the moral concern about the gruesome and macabre? All will be revealed - when I conclude the disgust series with a look at the moral uses of repugnance.

The Emotions: Disgust

My posting is going to be less frequent over most of the summer as I hit the conference trail, a Powerpoint-spangled stairway to the stars that's already taken me to Limerick and Amsterdam and will end up in Kyoto (and probably, complete exhaustion) after four or so more European venues. At the same time, all this activity makes me think about those magic moments when my scholarship and fandom identities merge.

I mean, when my hosts at a three-day course google me and find my number three hit is as a talking head expert on the indie documentary "True Fan" (I tried to explain the social identity of convention Klingons and stormtroopers) .... and then I end up talking D&D with one of the grad students over beers ... that's got to be telling me something.
There's no doubt that the most interesting emotion my lab studies is disgust. We find that disgust is an irrational emotion that defies our attempts to explain it reasonably. Disgust is also a many-branched emotion. Many different things that we learn by association set it off, and there really is no one way to sum up the kind of perceptions that will and will not cause disgust.

Really, any kind of environment creator - game designer, author, filmmaker, game master - works best with a ready handle on the audience's emotions. One of the easiest to manipulate is disgust. I mean:

This gimmick from the Modern Toilet restaurant chain in Taiwan relies on the inflexibility of disgust. Even though you know you are eating from a clean metal dish in a clean porcelain bowl, the toilet shape brings up all kinds of associations and disgust can't help but happen (worse if you are eating splashy, green-brown curry).

It follows that, while it may be hard to get angry, feel pleasure, or fall in love as your character in a game, disgust more readily pierces through the "Just a game" barrier. We feel disgusted even at blatant simulations of things that make us disgusted.

But does this mean we really get disgusted in character? Or just that we transfer our own revulsions to the setting? I'll explain how to work with this gap next time, when I write about Basic Disgust.