Modes of Existence Chapter 2 - What Documents Matter

In the previous post, I tried to outline the reason for doing this work and ultimately focus on defining my object of inquiry which is Charisma. We can define it mostly as starting here:

“Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, and so forth. Its primary function is to determine how many hirelings of unusual nature a character can attract. This is not to say that he cannot hire men-at-arms and employ mercenaries, but the charisma function w ill affect loyalty of even these men. Players w ill, in all probability, seek to hire Fighting-Men, Magic-Users, and/or Clerics in order to strengthen their roles in the campaign. A player-character can employ only as many as indicated by his charisma score” – 0dnd

And ending up here:

“Charisma measures your ability to interact effectively with others. It includes such factors as confidence and eloquence, and it can represent a charming or commanding personality. Charisma Checks A Charisma check might arise when you try to influence or entertain others, when you try to make an impression or tell a convincing lie, or when you are navigating a tricky social situation. The Deception, Intimidation, Performance, and Persuasion skills reflect aptitude in certain kinds of Charisma checks. Bards, paladins, sorcerers, and warlocks use Charisma as their spellcasting ability, which helps determine the saving throw DCs of spells they cast.” – 5e (text taken from Roll20).

The shift from the underlying aspects of a wargame being akin to playing an officer in a military unit to playing a super hero in a fantasy world capable of great feats alone is exemplified across the various editions of D&D, but also across the various digital games that use the user training that D&D provides.

In defining our object of inquiry to be Charisma, we have an object that travels across time, interpretation, space, and mode of interaction.

It is a difficult thing to trace a concept across a game’s history. It is altogether something else to capture its history as it shifts back and forth between white box and black box media.

The veridiction of Charisma or the truth according to worldview is as such that it is nearly impossible to trace from simply reading the definitions alone. As a result, we have to focus on what the documents are for our inquiry. As a result, we now have a new chapter of Modes of Existence to read and provide guidance for.

In chapter 2, Latour provides us with a variety of locations of interest in the introductory map of the chapter. Terms of interest:

1. Cateogry Mistakes
   • First Degree:
   • Second Degree:
2. Veridiction
3. Pivot Table
4. Law vs. Religion

The point of the chapter is to discuss how we can collect documents to piece together a network. Latour notes that:

TThe source of these documents is perfectly ordinary, and the method we shall follow is quite elementary. To begin, we shall record the errors we make when we mistake one thing for another, after which our interlocutors correct us and we then have to correct-by means of sometimes painful tests…

Essentially, we are meant to do much as Qualitative Media Analysis from Altheide suggests and allow us, as researchers, to not only learn as we study, but to retroactively recategorize and reinterpret everything as we do so. While Altheide suggests this simply for media-based work, he commits the error of sociology wherein non-human and human entities acting in concert cannot be separated and so all media-based work is the same as non-media based work.

As researchers, we simply cannot properly understand a thing in the space we allot ourselves to study it.

I have been obsessing over this concept for a few days now. At the core of it is the fact that I simply do not know how to trace an idea across multiple modes of interaction. I cannot trace, for example, how Charisma might have been used in practice in 1e dnd versus how it was operationalized as a mathematical equivalent in something like the original SSI goldbox games.

And yet these concepts are related because at the core, we have a translation of how the game itself is being played by players versus how the videogame translation is being used within the game world.

What this means for the study of Charisma is that we need to ensure that how a particular edition of D&D defines charisma needs to juxtapose it agains video games that use D&D at similar times. We then need to comb through things like message boards, zines, collections of oral history, instruction manuals, reviews, kits for the tabletop game, and interviews with players and creators.

Each mode of interaction will have its own verifiable truth and the fun of this approach is that we can treat them as different ends of a spectrum related to the actual definition of charisma (which is very, VERY interesting). There are two definitions:

A free gift or favour specially vouchsafed by God; a grace, a talent.

and

A gift or power of leadership or authority (see quot. 1947); aura. Hence, the capacity to inspire devotion or enthusiasm.

But this definition, attributed to Max Weber, essentially is picking up on a rather elusive aspect of leadership in the form of an “it” or what we’d call an “x-factor” now. In fact, in a book from John Potts called, “The History of Charisma” the author notes that:

Contemporary charisma maintains, however, the irreducible character ascribed to it by [Max] Weber: it retains a mysterious, elusive quality. Media commentators regularly describe charisma as the X-factor. . . . The enigmatic character of charisma also suggests a connection — at least to some degree — to the earliest manifestations of charisma as a spiritual gift.[8]: 3 

And still further, we see how Weber described the impact of charisma as exemplified through a leader when he notes that:

[Charisma] describes a type of authority rooted in a leader’s perceived exceptional personal qualities.

Or in other words, the charismatic leader has a gift of grace as noted by its original use wherein the Charis or Graces embodied beauty and grace.

And so now we have 3 modes of interaction with this concept: tabletop games, video games, and society writ large which results in the ancient greek meanings, the ancient roman meanings, Weber’s meaning, and its current embodiment called, “rizz.”

This is easier to set up as a conceptual map. You simply need to seek definitions from the era being studied and catalog them along with various kinds of trace data. Further, there is the potential of different games using different definitions and different definitions showing up at different times as it is rare to see a usage completely die.

Now, each mode contains within it, its own method verifying truth. They are rarely in agreement. For example, in something like No Man’s Sky, I might seek Oxygen to help me breathe. In a tabletop game like Kill Him Faster we might seek Oxygen to blow up so we can kill the object of interest faster. In society, we might use the concept of Oxygen as a way to describe someone being extremely dominant in an area thus making other discussions of other topics impossible.

So we see 3 of the same idea being deployed in very different ways.

Charisma is no different and its gets even more complicated through concepts like Rizz. We simply need to use the definition and keep it within the space of either entertainment media (e.g. D&D vs games) but also keep in mind that this word will shift as it is translated, re-translated, and also shifted in meaning.

Further, in situ, every meaning of charisma may be involved as the charismatic player might find themselves also playing a charismatic character who may be beset by players who self-define what a ttrpg is all about by the various computer-based games they play.

So what exactly are the documents we need to perform this inquiry?

We turn to the concept of Felicity and Infelicity. These can be defined as:

The notions of felicity and infelicity conditions, now solidly established in our intellectual traditions, make it possible to contrast very different types of veridiction without reducing them to a single model.

Or to be more succinct, these terms allow us to gather information from a specific mode of existence which then allows us to evaluate or make sense of a variety of ways that truth is created. For example, while Charisma may have been an extremely powerful stat when D&D was more connected to wargaming, it is now being used in reference to Weber’s definition but augmented by religiosity. In contrast, Charisma being used in something like Dragonquest originally:

Determines the chance that an enemy will lose a turn as a result of the character’s appearance. It also affects the accuracy of character attacks that inflict status ailments. Originally, this was called Style but was only used to determine scores in a “Global Style” contest. Starting with DQ8, it became charm and offered chances to stumble creatures.

This is somewhat different from something like Oubliette (later plagiarized and called Wizardry) where it is a:

measure of the ‘leadership’ potential of a character. This characteristic also takes into account the ‘sexual’ appeal of characters which is important for Courtesans and Valkyries.

Which stands in stark contrast to many of the D&D-based definitions which often allowed for gender-based choices allowing for very different styles of play.

And so, it might be easier to simply quote from Modes of Existence where Latour notes that:

Every course of action, let us say, every situation, can be grasped, as we have seen, as a network (noted [NET], ass soon as we have recorded the list of unexpected beings that have had to be enrolled, mobilized, shifted, translated in order to ensure its subsitence. the term “network” reminds us that no displacement is possible without the establishment of a whole costly and fragile set of *connections *that has value only provided that it is regularly maintained and that it will never be stronger than its weakest link.

So we have to constantly remind ourselves what network we are in. Inquiry of this kind is not so much multiple networks, but multiple collections of nodes within a network of networks. The connecting pieces themselves are a network of sorts.

So our documents end up being, from the earliest days, later accounts, primary accounts, zines, books, reviews, interviews, documentaries, scanned ephemera, receipts, accounts of chance meetings, and more.

When the net appears, we begin to get archival data, various components as it relates to web forums, mailing lists, archives of newsgroups, BBCs, and more. From the video game era, this also becomes important as well as those accounts of charisma as it grows and recedes from the popular lexicon.

In all events, we must collect a path that allows us the capacity to see not only how the idea of charisma changes in culture, in languages, but how it is operationalized within computer languages, logic, and played with.

It is a fun project!