The flâneur, literally a "stroller" or one who "wanders without purpose", is the word for a man (or woman) of leisure who saunters idly through urban streets observing his surroundings with detached curiosity. Though a part of the scene, he stands apart from the activity around him, choosing instead merely to watch, as though from behind a glass screen. Tourists often engage in flânerie, but of course it encompasses a wider range of behaviours than that - think about the last time you went for a stroll along a high street, promenade or shopping mall, or sat at a cafe watching the world go by. You were engaging in flânerie then, and you liked it.
A lot of what we do as RPG enthusiasts is the equivalent of this. We buy campaign settings and modules not necessarily to play them, but really just to dip in and out of - to read at our leisure, flipping from one page to another, becoming absorbed in a text box here, an illustration there, a table, a hexmap. In one sitting we might look at 10-20 pages, not necessarily in the right order, and rarely all contiguously. Thoughts and images pass through our mind as we briefly imagine what the places described really look like and what would happen in them. We enjoy turning the potentialities over in our own minds, knowing that they will never be realised: what it would be like to run a game in this setting, to create a character for it, to interact with the contents. I could reel off a list of RPG books I have bought and only ever really used for flânerie: Changeling: The Dreaming, most of the Planescape stuff, that time travel game whose name escapes me, Maze of the Blue Medusa, and many more.
There is nothing wrong with this. In fact it places RPG materials in a venerable and rich tradition of literary forms which are best enjoyed through flânerie. Travel guide books are the best example of this: I own dozens, but I don't believe I have ever referred to one 'in anger', so to speak - they are spurs for the imagination, not sources of useful information. Ordnance Survey maps, of course, are another example; road maps likewise. (I still keep a big A3 road map book in the glove box of my car just so I can gaze at random pages when bored, muttering things like "Oh, so that's where Wednesbury is?" or "Hmm, Derby is further north than you would think..." under my breath.) Then there are all those thick tomes about dinosaurs, animals, tanks, and the like that you always used to see on people's bookshelves before there was an internet to speak of, and which now primarily seem to exist only in the context of holiday rentals. There's encyclopedias, too, of course, and all those 501 Beers to Drink/Albums to Hear/Paintings to See/Cheeses to Eat Before You Die books which grow up from nowhere, like weeds, in garden centre bookshops in the run-up to Christmas. And let's not forget cookbooks - I can't tell you the last time I cooked something from out of one of them, but I can tell you the last time I looked through a Hairy Bikers book and imagined eating wild boar in Corsica.
I am not ashamed of a bit of flânerie, and I like to think that Yoon-Suin has given something to its own select audience of flâneurs, too. We sometimes take all this 'at the table' stuff too seriously - what happens at the coffee table matters also.
there's also of course the tradition of "closet plays"-- works of theater which are not actually meant to be staged, but only read in textual form (or perhaps read aloud, but never fully realized in the way their own text seemingly "demands"
ReplyDeletethey "should" be staged). they may be literally impossible to stage, a character may be stripped nude and flailed alive or the like.
I know games in a similar vein exist in indie storygamer circles, literary artifacts which take the APPEARANCE of something "playable" but which are in fact very deliberately not so. (never actually came across one of these tho! just heard by reputation)
It's a matter of perspective I guess. To me, use at the table is much, much more important.
ReplyDelete"We sometimes take all this 'at the table' stuff too seriously"
ReplyDeleteIndeed. Howsoever he does it, if a man derives pleasure from an RPG book, then he is doing something right.
Same, man, same.
ReplyDeleteHaving watched my kids pore over picture encyclopedia-type books of animals, dinosaurs etc, I wonder if the flaneurist impulse and delight you describe reflects something deep within our nature.
I think I get a bit too sniffy about the indie storygamer games that Captain Crowbar mentions above. Despite their often-threadbare nature, the delight to be had from these indies is perhaps on the spectrum with the flaneur-like joy of parsing a weighty campaign sourcebook. The latter is a stroll through a city, whereas the former is a passing fancy, a gossamer vision (of LGBTQ+ pirate/ninja/lumberjack crabs/gingerbreadpersons/kaiju) that would disintegrate if you dared to seize it.
Yeah, you might be right about that, although it must be said most storygames are so flimsy and lightweight it's hard to envisage oneself getting 'lost' in one.
DeleteI think you have a great point. And I also think it can be said of creating one's own RPG stuff as well as reading what others have created. There is a very real chance that stuff I write won't be used in actual gameplay, especially my attempts at world building. But it is still fun to stroll around the world in my head and write it down.
ReplyDeleteI agree. Worldbuilding is itself an enjoyable activity.
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