Dram in Real Life

#1

The more I get into Dramatica, the more I try to look at my own life with it rather than just the lives of my characters. Since Dramatica is a problem solving theory as much as a story telling theory, its applications seem to be limitless for real world situations.

  1. Who else has looked at real life with it and have you found anything interesting?

  2. Anyone have thoughts on if real life is full of Grand Arguments or if it’s more of a string or “broken” or incomplete tales?

2b. The Dramatica experts have said that Dramatica can be used in real life and storyforms used to determine outcomes. I’m thinking of multiple articles by Melanie about work with the government or looking at trade deals or whatever. But if Dramatica can be used in its entirety in real life, and if Dramatica provides meaning, does this negate @jhulls statement that life is meaningless? (:grin:)

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#2

And just like in real life, the storytelling solutions are polarizing and all over the map…depending who is writing the story and the story goal…haha. That is why genre exists, so we can read something that will turn out the way we want.

#3

No, just the opposite. Life is life. We put meaning on it by arranging it into narratives.

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#4

Dramatica is fun to try and use for self-improvement, but there is one major problem with it: we’re blind, just like the MC in a story. So if we see something causing difficulties, is that the Problem or the Symptom? Or perhaps even the Solution? Looking solely from our own perspective, we don’t know. That’s why we have to try and find an Influence Character, someone outside of ourselves to help us grow and change. Though again, being blind, we never know if we’re “in” an Apparent Work, Actual Work, Apparent Dilemma, or Actual Dilemma story.

Life isn’t as simple as our stories. Stories have to make sense. :stuck_out_tongue:

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#5

Really I would think the meaning (or lack thereof) of life and the meaning that Dramatica offers would be two different types of meaning. One refers to a purpose or a lasting effect, and one refers to solutions to problems. Maybe that’s why I think I’ve seen (or read) where Mr. Hull claims he says that as a joke. But that’s probably getting above my head.

With that in mind, this next question is not meant to be argumentative, merely inquisitive. How would you explain the supposedly predictive powers of Dramatica in real world situations? I’m thinking here of the article about how ESPN (I think it was) had Dramatica applied to their business model and received a supposedly accurate prediction about their future sometime before it played out. (2 yrs stands out in my mind but not sure if that’s correct).

If “life is life” is to say that things that happen are neither good nor bad nor successes nor failures and only perceived as such by people (I may be putting words in your mouth, i apologize if this is the case), then it’s very interesting to consider why we would see the events leading up to something as following a certain path-that is, following one of the storyforms that leads to, say, a Success/Good ending for an event that we perceive to be a success and a good thing-and that any time we see a certain series of events, like the ones leading to a Success/Good storyform, we would then see the outcome as a success and as good presumably regardless of what the outcome is, for that is the only way I can currently conceive of a narratively meaningful theory having predictive power in a narratively meaningless world.

( I’m sure I’m making some leaps in there I shouldn’t, but I guess it’s just a bunch of meaningless pondering :wink:)

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Atypical use for Dramatica
#6

Well, history does repeat itself. Patterns in story theories are going to happen because they are based on human interactions. My 4 year old sister could predict what my 2 year old brother was going to do and advise him (actually rule his life…haha)

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#7

I would hope these are two different kinds of meaning, but I could see arguing that the meaning of life is also just some form of Concern. Nevertheless, having some kind of understanding of the world is how we encode our narratives, so either they are somehow talking about themselves, recursive, ouroborosy… or they are different things. I fall back on the golden rule here and punt.

I’m not sure I can state this clearly or succinctly yet.

Essentially, I think we enter unconsciously into a narrative when we encounter some problem, and then we want to solve that narrative. The narrative has a certain shape, and so we accept only certain kinds of things as a solution.

Metaphorically, it’s something like this: you are at home in your sweatpants watching TV. Someone calls and invites you out to a bar. You know this will involve changing into pants, putting on a shirt, etc. You know it does not involve getting out a bag of soil and planting a tree.

Taking a step back, if your problem is “you need a girlfriend” – you don’t know what this entails. You get suggestions (change things up by go out to bars and take classes in things that interest you) and follow through on them, and even though you reluctantly go with your mother to volunteer with her Forestry group and end up meeting a woman while planting a tree, you still get the thing that satisfies this narrative: you have met a girl, and wait – you also changed things up by doing things out of your comfort zone, which somehow everyone knew was a requirement of this narrative.

Something like that.

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#8

I’m thinking it has something to do with what can be considered a character in Dramatica. For instance, in a recent article from Melanie (apologies for not finding and linking), she explains how in a fictional story the rain falling on the ground could be considered a character. But in the real world, that wouldn’t be applicable. Or at least it would be subjective, I suppose, up to an individual’s perception. So Dramatica probably works best in the real world when limited to human interactions.

The scenario I kept thinking about last night was this. Imagine you have several diaries, documents, etc, and all you know is they are from an archeological dig at an ancient site. You might read through everything and say it’s all leading up to a success/good storyform because it’s following X path. But then you find out that the documents and diaries are all from Pompeii just before it got destroyed by a volcano. Now it depends on perception and goals and all, I know, but I would suspect death by volcano would likely be seen as a failure by most.

In that hypothetical scenario, Dramatica didn’t predict a failure outcome. So either the destruction of the city was forced to be seen as a success, or the destruction forces you to ignore the path the city was taking up to that point and forces the events into a failure path.

But then it hit me that in a narrative, the volcano would probably have to hold one of the antagonist or contagonist elements, or at least be a character in some form for it to add to the narrative in meaningful way. But in real life, it’s not a part of the story until it happens. So realistically, in the scenario above, the volcano wouldn’t force a failure outcome onto the story of Pompeii, it would cut the story short leaving any building narrative unable to complete it’s argument.

So I think that would be the answer. Dramatica doesn’t predict something like a car breaking down, but rather offers multiple journeys that the person can take that lead either to failure or success after the car has broken down. Both paths include the car breaking down as a point along that journey, but it’s not the car breaking down that matters as much as the mental narrative the person sees themselves in.

So Dramaticas ability to predict success or failure in the ESPN scenario (or any other) wouldn’t have been due to its ability to predict events in the physical world, but rather it’s ability to chart the path of human narratives-even if it’s a group of humans (many ESPN customers) rather than a single human mind.

Again, I’m just pondering and that may all be wrong, but it satisfies me anyway.

Sorry for the long post on something as silly as the difference between the meaning of life and the meaning of an argument as Dramatica applies, but I enjoyed thinking about how and why a theory that describes human perception seems to apply to the physical world.

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#9

Rather single mindset? Haha

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#10

Because of someone’s maintenance carelessness…just like world events, one can see that one coming…so, the writer can swap things around to create a desired outcome to entertain people.

#11

My understanding of meaning–in the narrative sense–is that the meaning of the story is the lesson, or moral communicated by the story. It is a particular understanding of the true nature of a problem that drives the main character, without which they can never truly be satisfied.

Since we all seem to face different problems and require different things to satisfy us, it would be fair to say that life has no (single) meaning. But it doesn’t mean that life is meaningless. Rather it has multiple meanings depending on one’s individual needs.

Unless…

One can show that all these apparent drives–one person’s need for fame, another’s need for fortune and a third’s need for love are merely symptoms of a single greater underlying problem we all share. Something along the lines of Tolkein’s works in the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings, where most of the human stories from the fall of Numenor to the fall of Denethor, the steward of Gondor were largely motivated by the knowledge and certainty of death.

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#12

Like a single quad of elements that exists at the heart of the storyform but appears as a different quad depending on the context/lens through which it is viewed? Like if all problems were the result of some inequity among ones knowledge, thought, ability, and desire?

#13

Dramatica predicts people problems, not plumbing problems. A car breaking down is mechanical and doesn’t involve the Mind and therefore, doesn’t involve a model of the Storymind.

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#14

Exactly, @jhull. But I’m slow so it took me a bit to figure that out. But that’s what I was getting at. Dramatica doesn’t predict a car breaking down, but rather gives a map of various paths that can be taken after the car breaks down.

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#15

I guess that’s the difference between “the meaning of life” and “the meaning of your life”.

#16

Yeah, pretty much. If there is a single meaning to life, it would probably be to find a meaning to life. :slight_smile: The desire to understand oneself and the world around them. Of course this is just for intelligent self-aware creatures.

A biologist would say the meaning to life would simply be to survive long enough to reproduce. Some people might fall into that category as well. :grin:

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#17

I suppose if there is a single quad that represents life itself, our individual search for meaning would be our individual justification of our collective justification (for however many layers you want to go) with billions of throughlines, each of us taking turns as the MC while playing different roles in everyone else’s story.

Such a situation would get very confusing. It’s no wonder one couldn’t find a single story form for life itself. One would have to be an amazingly wise full-time monk to unwind even a part of it.

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#18

Stories are supposed to allow one to see all 4 through lines at once. Real life, it’s said, only allows you to glimpse 3 at a time. And even then there is no OS story that anyone can see that covers the entirety of the human existence.

if there were a meaning to life, maybe we wouldn’t be able to see it without-and not to get overly religious here and thus too far away from the topic of this board-a being with that OS perspective handing it down to us through revelation, a book of stories, or otherwise.

If there is no meaning to life, I guess the next best thing would be to look at the purposes, methodologies, motivations, and evaluations of life.

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