When engaging in creative problem-solving, especially engineering problems, human nature tends to primarily focus on solutions that ignore interpersonal, historically sensitive, and ethical approaches. This is true on a micro or macro scale: the failure of one gender to understand another and the repetition of total war scenarios in human history can in some sense be traced back to this single root. The story of human civilization has been told recurrently by the historians of the actual past and the “predictive historians” of the fictional future with the same moral: it is easy to misunderstand and to hate.
The value of collaborative storytelling, especially tabletop roleplaying games, can be especially revealing in this regard. Within the RPG environment is revealed not only the purposed implications of a storyline driven by a single author, but the chaotically combined collaboration of sub-authors with little investment in the direction of a story or world outside their own place in it. Thus the results are generally more “realistic” than non-collaborative fiction, in that they represent an amalgam of interests and the ever-present appearance of randomness and unexpected developments. This realism can often be disturbing, or at least revelatory.
One such experience I was privileged to witness came during my creation and decade-long continuation of the homebrew roleplaying game Displacement, a science-fiction adaptation of the fifteenth-century Turkish conquest of Byzantium. The historical details of my setting were basically unknown to my players, who represented a team of alien soldiers marooned on a foreign earth in 1450’s Constantinople (which they did not recognize). From this Geworfenheit was born what I found to be the most sincere possible reaction of “other-to-other” ever witnessed in science fiction. As a medieval historian, I will share my own reflections upon the ethical and historiographical ramifications of how this story unfolded.
About the presenterAndrew Jacob Cuff
Andrew Jacob Cuff, originally a California native, is a PhD student at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His research centers around the intellectual history of late antiquity and the middle ages.