This week is National Storytelling Week which aims to increase public awareness of the art, practice and value of oral storytelling. Story is integral to many of the games that we play at the club, whether this is oral storytelling in roleplaying games or an implied narrative created in wargames. This inherent bond between gaming and storytelling is one of the reasons that we feel that libraries are a perfect location for promoting the playing of these games - I'll put up a post about the other reasons why libraries should support the playing of games sometime in the future.
There is a spectrum of disciplines that are used to tell stories, from acting, storytelling to roleplay. Actors typically play a single character having learnt a script with the fourth wall separating them from their audience. Storytellers will typically play multiple characters and interact with audience, typically reading their script. Roleplayers, with the exception of the Games Master, will normally play only one character without any script or audience. There is considerable overlap between these from improvisation theatre to storytelling with multiple storytellers. The only thing which is usually a constant is the fact the roleplaying will very rarely have an external audience.
Roleplayers are often familiar with the concept that the games they play are a form of interactive storytelling and whilst this view is most prevalent in players of rules light and diceless games the creation and telling of a story is integral to almost all roleplaying. Often storytelling games are considered to be a subset of roleplaying games, but I don't subscribe to this school of thought, even something as rules heavy as rolemaster is a game which tells a story no less so than something rules light like FATE. Roleplaying games do not have a single narrative, they have multiple characters each telling their own story. Though the skeleton of the game is created by the games master there is no single narrator, each player narrates their own storyline each affecting the direction of the others.
It isn't only roleplaying games that tell stories, every wargame in effect creates or re-imagines the story of a battle. The latest edition of the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook features a series of "Forging a Narrative" boxes which deal explicitly with telling a story within its science fiction battles. In an article within White Dwarf 400 Jervis Johnson describes the benefits of playing with Games Masters. In addition to the reasons he states GMs are also able to help forge this narrative in a way that the current set of mission rules isn't able to (the 2nd edition missions from Dark Millennium were much better at this kind of thing). One area we have yet to explore in the club is story based campaigns, hopefully this is something we can develop over the coming year. Even many boardgames tell a story, though in a somewhat abstract way. For instance when we played Chrononauts at University we created stories to show how we were changing the course of history or games of Risk simulate the story of colonial expansion.
Stories form an important part of what we do as libraries, in the last 3 months of 2013 Bournemouth Library issued just over 15,000 fiction books slightly over half of all our book issues, about a third of these were to children. Across all the libraries in Bournemouth the number of issues in this period was over 150,000 for fiction, around about three quarters of the total issues. As well as supporting reading stories we have regular storytelling events for children of all ages. The importance of these kind of events in the development and education of children is well documented (see for example this UNESCO course on storytelling in education). The gaming club is another way for Bournemouth Libraries to support the telling and creation of stories and the benefits that this creates for all involved.
