From: jtn@nutter.cs.vt.edu (Terry Nutter)
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca
Subject: Atmosphere and atmospherics
Date: 11 Jan 93 21:11:02 GMT
Followup-To: rec.org.sca
Organization: The Rialto

Greetings, all, from a recently pretty quiet Angharad ver' Rhuawn.
Several people have been discussing atmosphere, authenticity, and
restrictions, and I have kind of the feeling that neither side quite
hears what the other is saying, so I thought I'd give a reasonably
quick try at saying what I'm hearing, and seeing whether any of you
find it interesting.

There are three general points here, which work out kind of longish, 
so here's the "cut to the chase" first, so that people who aren't
interested can skip by their best means to the next article.

(1) The people who are complaining have a real problem, which is of
    the same basic nature as the problem those who are afraid of being
    legislated into submission have.  Waving it off, ignoring it, or 
    automatically devaluing it -- as many posts can be read as doing --
    is as intollerant as anything any of them have ever proposed and 
    been fired on for.

(2) Several partial compensations have been proposed, and in their simpler
    forms, many of them are appealing, and have little cost attached.

(3) Unfortunately, none of them really solves the global problem, and
    I don't think they can be extended to do so without doing real harm
    to *everyone's* game.  So I think this is one of your basic "life
    sucks" facts.

*****

Okay.  Here's the longer version.

Here's what I see as the real problem.  Our current approach, with a very
diffuse focus, punishes learning, and punishes it in about the most effective
way I can imagine: by taking the romance out of our game.

You see, the authenticity mavens came for romance too.  They -- *we* -- were
also drawn in by the sense of being transported to another time and place,
where what we value personally more closely matches what is valued generally.
That, I think, is the primary draw for a huge proportion of our newcomers.

But think about how that sense gets through.  One of the strongest influences
at someone's first event, I suspect, is just that everyone is in garb.  Now,
most U.S. types I know have a reasonable sense (from TV and movies) of what 
clothing looks like back through, say, the American Civil War, and a somewhat
more attenuated sense back through the beginning of the 19th C.  Before that,
it all kind of melds together in a fuzzy haze of "real old".

So at your first event, all that clothing just looks real old and romantic.
The atmosphere is medieval-renaissance.  You feel transported.

But say you stick around, and say you get interested in garb.  By the end of
a couple of years, that haze is gone, and seeing a 9th C Norsewoman chatting
with an Elizabethan gentleman contains such internal tension, that the original
"other time and place" atmosphere vanishes.  What you are left with is not
a medieval or renaissance atmosphere, but an unmistakably 20th C atmosphere of
"SCA event at the site that the Branch Of the Clueless seems to think is so
great".  

This isn't just a garb problem.  It cuts through many of the issues we
discuss here.  Nobody wants to argue for unfair and preferential practices.
Yet, the more you learn about medieval statecraft, the more the reality
of our practices in dealing with and relating to our "upper reaches" also 
destroys any sense of medieval reality -- or romance.  So maybe you still 
try to remember to bow, and to think of those in the medieval hierarchy
as special, but you've had 20th C views of what that should mean so pounded
into you that the King isn't a king any more, he's a stick jock; that the 
local Baroness isn't a local noble any more, she's just this figurehead that
the group settled on to get the election to come out without a sh*tstorm.

Real romantic, right?

I won't go into how I feel at most feasts, after reading a lot of medieval
cookbooks....

In the really bad cases, the only sense in which you feel transported any 
more is that you vividly remember driving here, and in case you didn't, 
people are asking you how the trip down was.  No more romance.  No more 
*atmosphere*.

When people ask for a narrower focus, what they are generally asking for is
their romance back.  They want an atmosphere they can enjoy as something
other than a 20th C fantasy; and the more they learn about the middle ages,
the less they seem able to find this in the SCA.

I believe that we should respect the desires of *all* those who want their
romances protected.  It seems to me that too many recent postings have only
respected that desire when it is coupled by a call for a broader rather
than narrower focus.  That seems both inconsiderate and intollerant to me,
and I would like to see a little less of this inconsideracy.  That is my 
first (and longest! whew) point.

So.  Move on.  How can we make it better?  Well, one of the neat ideas is
narrow focus events ("theme events").  People who have only heard of them
seem to think they're threatening or mean.  Maybe somewhere or other someone
is doing them that way.  We've had several in Atlantia, mostly either 
Elizabethan or Italian Renaissance.  I've been to two Elizabethan ones, and
I've talked to people who've been to some Italian ones.  Everyone I've
spoken to had a hoot and a half.  Nobody gets turned away; just, they say,
"Hey, if you got it, wear it!" and people do, 'cause it's neat.  Some even
make it. 

The two I went to did have a special "feel" that was, well, more real, and
more romantic than most events I've been to.  They are a good thing.

"Period encampments" are another move -- and can be combined with the
"theme" idea to get things like "Elizabethan encampments", which the 
Southwarke group has done at Pennsic for several years now.  If you 
haven't visited, and you go to Pennsic, you really should.  It's just 
neater than I can readily say.

These are partial answers.

Why aren't they complete answers?

(a)  Theme events work best if more people are dressed appropriately than
not.  As things stand, to "play along" in _that_ way in Atlantia, you need
two extra outfits: one Elizabethan, one Italian Ren (assuming you didn't
already have either one).  In a year or two, it's not hard to pick up
both.  BUT -- if theme events became the norm, and covered, say, ten times
and places rather than two -- hey, that's more sewing than _I'm_ going to
do....  It starts being too much work to maintain the themes, and they
fall back to what we have now.  So this is not a long term solution.

(b)  Anyhow, theme events make things look visually better, but complicate
long term persona development, encouraging instead "persona-for-a-day",
which doesn't have much long-term payoff, for those for whom persona-reality
is part of the magic (I'm one; but I realize that much of the Society isn't
with me on this).

(c)  Period encampments assume that most of what people do is organized
camping.  In much of our geographic area, much of the time, that's just
not possible.

(d)  People suggest split-off organizations.  But most of us have very
limited time and energy, and I for one could not put what I do into the
SCA _and_ put similar energy into an "Early 14th C British Isles" group
too.  Without that, either the SCA loses, or the split-offs do.  Anyhow,
lots of what the SCA has and does is supported by our sheer numbers.
None of the split-offs would have that -- which is why far more splinters
form than survive.

I don't think there's a solution.  But I do think there are lots of ways
we can make the game better, put more of the romance back for those who
have learned enough that our current level of illusion is too thin to
support it, and make learning rewarding rather than its own punishment.
This isn't to say there are no rewards for learning -- but the main
thing we do is hold events, and *in terms of enjoying events* learning,
at this point, sets you back, not forward.  That isn't a good thing.

None of this has to cut into anyone else's fun in the slightest.  I don't 
want to see anyone -- on either side -- driven out.  I don't think that 
the ideal state for those who, like me, would like a more supported, 
_really_ medieval atmosphere can be achieved.  But I also don't think that 
the pressure toward it should be written off as either obsessive or 
authoritarian, either.  The problem Tadhg and others are pointing to has 
motivated some really excellent developments.  I would rather see us 
promote that than punish it.

Cheers,

Angharad/Terry
Newsgroups: rec.org.sca