It began with my youngest off on one of his incredible flights of fancy. This time he was telling me how we could make a fortune if we could just find someone who would pay two dollars apiece for the caps that come off my Coca-cola™ bottles. I attempted to show the practical flaws to such a scheme, but he kept looking at these as obstacles to overcome. It all reminded me somewhat obliquely of a very funny movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, and I proceeded to summarize the central story of this film for him.
“How do you remember so many movies, Dad?”
The question took me aback. Apparently my ability to recall and recount scores, perhaps hundreds, of films that I have seen over the decades was thought to be impressive. It’s flattering when your kids see you as having extraordinary abilities; but I think it’s better for them to see that they have the same abilities themselves. I suggested that he, also, knew many movies. No, he didn’t think he did. I asked if he could remember The Lion King.
He recounted the plot to that film, including the names of several characters which I would have missed, quite well. Could he do the same for The Little Mermaid? With less certainty (and a name he could not recall) he did so. Then he agreed that there were several other Disney™ and Pixar™ films he remembered, which he attempted to write off as just cartoons–but he also recognized that there were a few movies that were not cartoons, including The Last Starfighter and a number of Jackie Chan films, which he could recall and recount. By the time he left, he was persuaded that he, too, had this ability to remember many movies he had seen.
(On reflection, as much as I enjoy Jackie Chan films, I’m not certain I could recount very many of these; they’re fun to watch, but the stories all seem to blur together, and I often find myself in the video store holding one and trying to ask people whether we’ve seen it already. I once heard Jackie Chan in an interview say that in his early martial arts films, plot was not terribly important, but was merely a thread to provide an excuse for the fight scenes that were the real selling point of the movies. Even today, we don’t watch those movies for the stories, but for the stunts (and the gags), and I’m impressed that anyone can remember any of the plots specifically.)
I don’t think that the ability to remember hundreds of movies is a terribly impressive nor even terribly useful ability; however, it is part of a larger picture about us as people. We remember. We remember many things, some of them important, but perhaps most of them at best trivial, any importance they have being derived from our emotional connection to them. I remember moments from my childhood, moments from the early years of my children–Kyler saying that the trees were turning into roses one autumn, Tristan’s famous first words (Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!), Evan’s first solid food (sitting in his car seat sideways in the booth at Wendy’s stuffing chili in his mouth when no one was looking). Books I’ve read, stories told by my parents, classes as far back as grade school, significant moments before that. I remember climbing out of my crib; I remember looking through its bars at the light on the nursery bedside table.
No one remembers everything; there are some things I remember only as dreams, recurrent dreams recalling events that had happened when I was even younger than I was when I dreamt of them, colored by my limited childhood understanding of those events. There are things I know must have happened but cannot recall at all–I remember where I lined up outside my elementary school for third grade classes, but nothing whatsoever about the classroom or the teacher, the only grade school teacher I cannot at least vaguely image in my mind. I don’t remember Ryan’s first words (although I’d wager his mother does), or Kyler’s first solid food. In Ladyhawke (a movie I have seen many times and of which I can recount much even of the dialogue, with varying accuracy), Phillipe “the Mouse” Gaston passes through a tight tunnel, and remarks, “That was rather like escaping mother’s womb–God, what a memory.” That’s certainly more than I remember, and probably that’s a good thing. My eldest son Ryan broke his collarbone “escaping mother’s womb”, as I recall (a not uncommon injury which leads to cranky infants when untreated, but otherwise has no danger; he had to have his sleeve pinned to his shirt for a few weeks so he wouldn’t move it around too much and aggravate the shoulder). Some things are better forgotten. Memory is selective. I can’t say how many movies I pick up on the shelves at Blockbuster only to have him remind me, “You saw that. That’s the one in which–” whatever it was that should have made it stand out. Sometimes my memory is incredible, as it was the other day when I flipped to a channel, saw Demi Moore’s face, and said, “This is Ghost” based solely on that moment’s expression. Other times I’ll watch half an hour of a film saying, “I know I saw this; what is it?” We don’t know what we will remember, or why we remember what we do. In Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the entire family is stunned by the fact that Harry’s Aunt Petunia remembers what a Dementor is (the magical creatures who serve as guards at the wizard prison, who feed on the hopes of others and so subdue their charges by sucking all happiness from them) from an overheard conversation between Harry’s parents (whom she despised) years before. Of everything she had tried to suppress, forget, and ignore, she remembered that.
We’re here this week to remember the articles of the past quarter, and before we delve deeper into this idea, we’d better get to the business of remembering those before we forget.
- Societies continued our sporadic examination of alignment with a look at the meaning of law, and its emphasis on nations over people.
- Sounds Like suggested a few tricks for misleading players with names that aren’t spelled the way they sound.
- Blanks was about finding a way to fill a game when you’re short on ideas.
- Prepaid was an economic consideration of different ways people pay for things, what the logic is behind whether we pay before use or are billed later, and how that can be different in different worlds.
- Moderation took us back to alignment, and the great diversity that proves to fall within the category of neutral.
- Copying Ravel reminded us that all the advice in the world, as useful as it is, falls second to finding who we are and where our strengths lie individually.
- Idiomatic delved again into language, this time providing a way to bring the problems of misunderstood statements into a game.
- Weather looked at the fact that real weather systems are often strange and unexpected, and thus we need not try to make our fictional ones too rational.
- Hospitality considered a common aspect of many ancient cultures, why it exists or doesn’t exist in various times and places, and what its ramifications are to play.
- Du Jour started with soup, but got into a stew over non-random events that feel random.
- Fog suggested that some combats should be confused and unclear, and that giving the players an accurate picture of everything that is happening can lead to unrealistic outcomes, while providing only fragmentary information can inspire decisions that are so much more poignant.
- Dedication was about what are called side alignments in Dungeons & Dragons play, those part-neutral beliefs which, it is asserted, must therefore be the more strongly devoted to that one thing to which they are committed.
We last looked back three months ago, when we considered the value of hitting, or not hitting, the Reset button in our game worlds.
It happens that each of those titles brings back to mind the contents of the article to me; it may be that for some of you, the description does what the title does not, or even that you have to look back to read again what you know you read before. This current article, number one hundred fifty-six, finishes three years of articles which began on June first, two thousand one. I don’t recall them all; sometimes I’ll jot down an idea, and then in looking back realize that I’ve covered something very like that already. Sometimes I’ll go back to read one that I’ve forgotten.
This discussion of memory, of how much we remember and how at times it seems so random, should point us to our characters, and to the mechanics of our games. None of us have so detailed our characters that everything they remember is on the sheet; in fact, many of the games I have played have been spread over so many sessions over so long a period of years that often I cannot remember things that my character could not have forgotten–names of people who were near and dear to him, or who tried to kill him; moments of severe pain or pleasure; great successes and great failures. Our characters’ memories and our own rarely coincide. Often games will have mechanics to see whether a character “knows” something about a particular aspect of play, such as a legend lore roll in D&D or an Education Level check in Multiverser. This is simply a technique to determine whether the character ever heard the information in question, but also whether he retained that information in his mind such that he can recall it now. Such rolls can be used at times when certain information might have been known to the character but never to the player, and when such information was mentioned during the game at some point but the player didn’t jot it down or can’t find it at the moment. After all, what is known to your character, and what is important to him, matters little to you on Monday morning when you’re drinking that first cup of coffee, and it’s little wonder that the following Friday night you need your memory refreshed before the game can continue, even if it’s mere seconds for your character.
The fact that memories are so spotty and so surprising can be used in other ways as well. Characters can suddenly remember things which haven’t come to mind for years (never, as long as the player has been aware of the character). In many games it would be appropriate for the referee to feed these bits to the player as something of which his character is suddenly reminded; more rarely, players can invent stories about how their character knows something. Personally, I think it would be fun to have a bard in the game who every time he made a successful legend lore roll he went into some story about a professor, heavily laced with his peculiar idiosyncrasies, who talked about this in some class years ago, and what he said about it. It’s the sort of characterization I would enjoy.
The concern, if there is one, is that players might abuse this to solve their in-game problems by what might be termed metagame means. That is, if every time I face a problem I create a reason why I know this solution, I’m going to spoil the fun of solving the problems (if that’s the fun). That doesn’t mean the technique can’t be used to make the stories a lot more interesting for everyone; it only means that the players all have to agree that the game is more fun if people don’t resort to trying to use memories that way.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
