What does the term ‘pliction’ refer to?

Pliction is the narration of a player’s experience in a game in the form of a story. It differs from fiction in that fiction is more or less story telling for the pure joy of story telling, usually around non-real events and designed to fill out a world or perspective on the world. Fiction is the picture from the inside. Pliction on the other hand fiction focused on the interaction between social worlds. The internal world of the game and the player experience.

Now of course fiction can be based on real events but often the intention is to more or less change facts and adjust these to build a great story focused on a fantasy world or series of events based in the real world. Pliction contrasts with this kind of storytelling because it is much more realist. It is a way of directly exploring the content and meaning of one’s own interaction with the medium of the game. It is designed to take one’s own experience and turn it into a narrative and ‘ground’ this experience in the game as a game. Pliction therefore crosses mixes creative writing with the game content and the player experience. It is effectively a form of autoethnography with added creative writing.

What does this mean? Autoethnography is effectively the use of one’s own experience to critically explore aspects of daily life and experience. You write from your own point of view and critically evaluate it that experience from various different perspectives. For example, you can write about free swimming or jazz music from your own experience as someone who takes part in these social worlds. What is a social world?

A social world is described as a unit of social organisation that is meaningfully important for those who interact in it. It is composed of the things they say, the activities they engage in as well as the technologies and routines they become involved with (1). As a concept it covers the social arrangements that are studied by symbolic interactionists – effectively social organisations that are not formal bureaucracies but which we can discern fairly easily by looking at everyday life. Eve is one such social world. Dog walking is another, as is cycling and running. All of these are effectively social worlds.

Pliction is basically turning your interaction with the social world into a story, engaging with your in game experiences through creative writing. It gives you time to reflect on what the game is about, how it works and most of all what its key dynamics are. In my last few posts, for example, I was able to reflect on my experience as an old player returning to the game after 9 years away. You can see I noticed through the writing that there is an awful lot of ‘mansplaining’ in Eve. I only noticed that when narrating the interaction between Karen and Moriarity, I didn’t intend that really to happen. It just did and it seemed appropriate at the time.

I didn’t intend initially to do pliction when I started this blog, the blog is after all a bit of fun. But I do think it is working to help me see something new about the game I did not anticipate when I had started at first. I don’t even think pliction as an idea is that new either. I have played MMO’s since they first hit the universe (Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft and many many others). There has been plenty of this this kind of narration before. But sometimes it is better to give something a name. Then people will know what you are about eh! I remember lots of fictional stories based on gameplay in Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft (though I never quite got into the story of the latter). I think many of the roleplaying fraternity are very familiar with this kind of thing. But I am not entirely sure they really care about the idea as a form of social criticism or exploration.

Let’s see where it leads.

References

(1) Unruh, D. 1979. Characteristics and Types of Participation in Social Worlds. Symbolic Interaction, 2, 115-130.