Personality Games vs Life Narratives | Podcast 540

2 comments

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  • Adam
  • June 15, 2024 at 3:03 pm

  Hi! Best fit type is INFJ.
  Y’all are speaking my language! Personality profiling systems are a hobby of mine. And so are storytelling and games. This episode was made for me!
  I believe in what you touched on so passionately that I’m designing a role-playing game that uses John Bebee’s model with Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey to help players play through archetypal energies that resonate symbolically to their life. This episode helped me feel like I’m on the right track!

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  • TJ (35M INTP)
  • June 11, 2024 at 5:22 pm

  Hey guys, great topic. I think that there is no gameplay without story and there is no storytelling without gameplay.
  Story gives meaning to gameplay, it is also very important in knowing how the game begins, what plays were made, and when the game ends. Without any aspect of story, games are nonsensical really. You can’t play a monopoly piece on a chess board. I think what you refer to as gameplay when talking about living your personality/life is more like “free play” in first person games where there is less of a problem to solve or goal, it’s just practice mode. This definitely frees up characters from having to play a certain way. I think in life when we treat it like gameplay, we are DIRECTING the story, but it is not absent of story. Everyone is always telling themselves stories of what their experience means.
  There is no storytelling without gameplay. In similar ideas to Ludwig Wittgenstein, language itself is gameplay. We are choosing our “moves” carefully as we use words to give people images in their mind. I think stories are only successful when the storyteller does it well, and to do that I believe the more meaning that can be derived from story; the better it is.
  I still think I understand the point you were getting at though. It’s not healthy to blindly subscribe to a narrative in life without checking it against your own experience and beliefs. In that sense we are being TOLD a story.
  On an MBTI note, I think that the perceiving functions are very gameplay driven, while the judging functions are story driven. The gameplay “P” functions are about gathering information, it doesn’t have to have meaning to us at that point, it’s just intaking information. The storytelling “J” functions let us decide what story we ascribe to when structuring that information. Because stories are just information structured in a way that gives meaning. We constantly live in the gameplay of narrative experience as told from our first person perspective. We gather little tokens of information and make moves based on what we decide to do with that information.
  Last thought, I swear. I’m not familiar enough with Jung to know if there is an archetype he mentioned that would be “The Winner” or “The Loser”. But I think, in a way, we constantly live in a reality where one or the other is played out in our consciousness, and it probably takes lots of meditation to find a state of mind where neither apply to one’s experience.