Anti-Lore: Social Knowledge in TTRPGs
Everything is discourse, it just does not need to be Discourse
I am anti-lore. In my creative endeavors of all kinds, on my work, on my outlook, I'm aggressively anti-lore.
This does not mean I have an antagonistic relationship with lore, far from it. It is just where I position myself towards lore, the position we are in dialogue with it. I absolutely love lore; it is just like most of the things I love, I prefer them with an expiration date.
What is Lore?
We live in the age of Lore, which may be why it makes sense and is also do frustrating that one cannot easily define it; Lore has kind of overtaken Culture, because no matter how insufficient our definitions of Lore will be, it seems to be something you can charge rent on.
Lore evokes the idea of social knowledge, of communal traditions passing on. What other people learned and what they transmitted, lessons that unite us in community across time and space. An accumulation of mistakes and how we have dealt with them. That seems to describe more what we colloquially consider “play culture” - having a session zero, hosting protocols, game debriefing and aftercare procedures, house rules and homebrew, etc; this is not something we on this artform, fandom folks or IP lawyers would consider Lore.
The simplest explanation for this disconnection probably has the same source as many similar disconnects: in psychopolitical neoliberal hell, where everything that remains has to be ripped from communal participation and financialized, so has lore become Lore.
So Lore is still a body of knowledge and tradition, but in lieu of a communal discourse, it is something transmitted through or despite a “market”. This extraction requires a transformation from that living body into dead artifacts; these conversations without voices become the objects that many of us think when they imagine what Lore looks like.
Severed from community and sharing; tradition becomes inertia, knowledge becomes dogmatic paradigms, recognition begets gatekeepers. Lore, not only dead, also may never be allowed to expire — un-dead, marching on.
This is all the things we recognize: sourcebook #13, weird stuff buried in page 296 of the rulebook, setting details, etc. But I also include things like wikis, subscription services, Word of Auteur, and 7 years of video recordings of Your Actual Play Actual Friends (TM), the consumption of the hegemonic culture assumed by the game’s systems, etc. Anything on this art form they can be turned into some artifact can become Lore or a Lore generator.
Anti-Lore as Reaction
If one accepts some value in the insufficient attempt at understanding Lore above, it is easy to see how Anti-Lore — even definitions of it that vary wildly from my outlier — are a reaction to this divorce from communal knowledge and tradition.
A thing that one can perceive as present in different form is a desire to recuperate Lore; restoring what is seen as financialized artifacts to a community. Breathing life into stagnant lore.
That is a positioning towards Lore most of us that see value in Anti-Lore take. Where we diverge is how aware we are of this desire and the ways in which we pursue it.
Producing Anti-Lore
A very popular interpretation — perhaps the most popular — treats the Lore/Anti-Lore dialogue as an essentially epistemological problem. That the data, its treatment, its presentations can change what Lore can be, into more dynamic objects.
That you can write, design, create Anti-Lore objects.
I think you can see my problem with this and why I don't find it personally useful: it still sees in terms of essential objects, they can be rotated onto other conformations as needed. You can't restore communal discourse and knowledge from objects alone.
Another issue I have is that my positioning and my relationship with Lore does change because the lore is not “factual”, it includes lies, contradictions or is presented at a random table. Nor when the lore is familiarity with the consumption habits of middle-class children in the 90s in the Imperial core. I am rotating the object, but it is still an object.
I am not dismissing the value of said objects, in fact, I appreciate them as what they are and love Lore is being created like this; I’m just acknowledging that the fundamental nature of the perception of Lore — namely, that there is one — is still present in this form of Anti-Lore approach. There is a lot of social value in this refining; since the inception of the modern incarnation of the art-form and Lore became a thing, there have Lore involving contradictory “facts”, incompatible artifacts, randomness and outright lies. As someone that cut their teeth in Big Lore games like Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, Runequest and Old World of Darkness, part of the allure was that there was not a canon body but a rich collection of apocrypha and deutorocanonical artifacts. It may not have been living, but the things this puppet could do!
I love this Anti-Lore movement because they make Lore I love. Lore that is dynamic, responsive, that not only invites questioning and thought, it rewards you for doing so. When so many objects of this art form are hostile to interaction, how can I not adore these objects that facilitate the same way which I want to interact with Lore?
The thing is, why they are so great Lore objects is that they facilitate this ongoing discourse with them. They may not be Anti-Lore per se, but they are made in a way that hopes to generate said Anti-Lore through dialogue rather than the essential nature of artifacts.
Anti-Lore as Dialogue
So, how does social knowledge, that is shared and embodied by a community, differs from other categories of knowledge? Well, it is a wide family, but here are some of the colours of this palette — namely, those more important for our art-form and the place of Lore in it.
Social knowledge Anti-Lore should be critical of taken-for-granted knowledge, generalized assumptions, perception biases, inherited classifications and distinctions, and any textual information that has no reflection in its social context. It benefits from understanding the context of the Lore it is discussing with, as well as the cultural and historical reality in which the community sharing this knowledge exists. It must understand it is not analysing existential or “realistic” knowledge, but it is in dialogue with the Lore, in what is itself a social process; in fact, the entire Anti-Lore knowledge is inseparable of its social element and social participation. This is not knowledge you can hoard, that you can possess and own; unlike the Lore artifacts, this is a form of knowledge that is embodied, being, done in community and in social processes. That’s the Anti-Lore I value and seek to cultivate, to restore new life to enclosed domains of the human soul, seeds of reclaimed socialization.
“But Ludo, you complete ignoramus, that’s just this art form. You’re just describing role-playing games.”
Yes, some Anti-Lore discourse is kind of a requirement for the art-form as is imagined now, a crucial part of all play even from just flipping the book and shelving it; the most divorced from this social knowledge I can imagine is a hypothetical game where the art comprises of a string of scripted scenes, with a pre-generated essentialized cast of characters, with very precise goals and scoring mechanics that would be reached by very specific procedures (Think something more akin to other art forms, such as a play or a boardgame). This is why I consider Anti-Lore discourses an essential aspect of understanding and critical interactions with this art-form; that Lore is only so good as much Anti-Lore it allows to bloom.
A Practical Example
Enough with musings and vague theoretical differences. How does this look in ways people actually socialize?
Let’s look at a Big Lore game, Legend of the Five Rings. It is full of Lore artifacts like this:
The Soshuro and the Ikoma keep the secret history of the Empire
Two noble families, which while both have oral traditions and historical and scholastic niches, that often find themselves on opposite sides, still come together to preserve history that the Empire would rather see forgotten.
As an essential, intrinsic, epistemological object, it is a passive note to sit in a paragraph of text. As Lore artifacts go, it is not very easy to engage in discourse with — it just is, and being “secret” only makes it more difficult to discuss. It needs to be incorporated within the current social context, adapted to the historic and cultural moment in which tool and art come together. That requires coating the Lore, incorporating it in more familiar forms, that can be easily discussed and fit ongoing discourses.
In this example, there is something the players have heard about, that has gone through multiple conversations of Lore/Anti-Lore
The One Thousand Demons Door
Now, these two things are brought together, somehow, through the maelstrom of socialization.
Playing through this is a process of transmitting and creating a social reality, a social knowledge, that does not exist in isolation or is owned by an individual but is part of the whole, defined by ongoing relationships. This creates the following Anti-Lore discourse.
A player is interested in finding the location of the 1000 Demons Door
But social knowledge and social action are one and the same. As part of this art performance, player characters play requisitioning a document from the Secret Library, and all this back and forth of Lore and Anti-Lore leads to the synthesis between new Lore artifacts.
There is a new Lore artifact.
There is a text from the Secret History Library in the world at large
However, unlike the Soshuro and Ikoma keeping the secret history of the Empire, this Lore artifact has not been enclosed and detached from a community, its social knowledge and its cultural context. It is immersed in the medium which created it; as such, it is primed to — while an object itself — to immediately take part in active discourses and propagate social knowledge — or, as I see it, Anti-Lore.
This Anti-Lore manifests through social processes and quickly, it comes to pass that the discourse is that players have lost the document, and now where can it be?
And so on and so on…
Like ideology, you know it is working the less you think of it, much less perceive it. Good Lore is like good yeast — not the bread, but what allows the bread.
And just like yeast, there is nothing that compares with cultivating your own.