kill the camera in your head

12 Nov, 2025

In my last post I tried to frame elfgames as primarily let's pretend rather than (primarily) games or fiction.

But this is just a subjective preference. Enjoying dnd with the fictional frame as primary is not really objectively wrong, in same way as murder, or homophobia, or structuring one's fictional frame on the basis of television and film.

Every medium has formal constraints. Television and film:

• employ a third-person point of view (while let's pretend relies on a first-person POV)
• relatedly, address themselves to a passive spectator
• operate in real time (except through such devices as bullet time or montage)
• use the senses of vision and sound
• show rather than tell; speak to the senses rather than intellect

Until they were recently replaced by something worse, television formed the McLuhanite base medium of western culture. There's a bias, I believe, in our descriptive tools towards television. In some of the actual plays I listen to, description is not uncommonly explicit about this - talking about the "camera panning back to reveal..." and so on. In overwritten trad prose descriptions, visual details are more likely to come up than olfactory ones, and so on.¹ The language of "flashbacks" and "montage" are televisual in their assumptions.

time is experienced at many different rates

From vol. 1 of Knausgaard's autobiography with the stupidly edgy title:

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty... Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.

Now, in some sense Knausgaard is serving as an advocate of the televisual approach here: his autobiography is (at least by volume) an attempt to reconstruct as honestly as possible real-time experience in all its vivid "meaning." But he can't help but zoom out and deal with abstractions and the work is stronger for it. But also: he's right that as you get older you start having experiences and making decisions on longer timescales. Televisual language is ill-suited to this.

In osr spaces I think we do tend to want to move towards the concrete rather than abstract, and especially to avoid the abstractions of rules eliding our interaction with pretend concreta. But pretend objects (such as the political systems, trade routes, and weather systems existing in pretend worlds) can also be perfectly abstract.

all of the classic spheres of dnd are unfilmable

The dungeon is unfilmable: you can't see a fucking thing. You've got to rely on other senses.

The wilderness is unfilmable: the decisions are made at the the scope of hours or days.

Downtime is unfilmable: decisions and especially objects are at the scope of days or weeks or months.

touch, embodiment, smell, memory

Touch is what convinces us of something's physicality, so I think it can be especially useful to evoke if the goal is to pretend that things are real.

Likewise, smell is closely linked to memory. Senses in the immediate environment are great excuses to prompt memories (which can be the subject of private imaginings, not just public narration.)

joesky: haptic encumbrance audit

This replaces the exhaustion result of a standard hazard die. When the relevant result comes up on your hazard/event/overloaded encounter die, roll for a random party member. The person pretending to be them must describe what they're carrying, with what carrying devices and where on their person, and what it feels like. They should get up and demonstrate posture.

If they or others can't find it convincing, they'll need to drop some stuff.