I thought I’d sum up my position that I’ve tried to articulate recently, about what I look for in an Indie Story Game (also known as Role-Playing Games) design.

But first, some clarification. Why should anyone care what I personally look for? And why do I look for it?

If you’ve read my blog over the past year, you’ll know I came to the indie role-playing game scene via my interest in teaching storytelling skills (and what the hell: improving my own too). Jason Godesky, designer of the (in beta playtest) Fifth World game pointed out to me the possibilities of ritual re-enactment, and resuscitating our ability to maintain healthy oral/spoken traditions.

This priority created a kind of play so consistently in one corner of the field of activity that one could call “role-playing”, that I gave it a name to reinforce its single-minded identity: storyjamming.

Now, a kind of play with such single-minded focus needs game design that supports that focus. The fact that I consistently play with storyjammers with no or little role-playing game experience (aka newbies) narrows that focus even more.

I see this as a place of super-high growth: people, who have never heard of role-playing or story gaming (or storyjamming, for that matter), discovering this activity, picking up games and jamming story together. I run into a lot of people who find this an exciting idea.

So, I want games for these purposes; easy on newbies, and supporting the specific kind of activity I call storyjamming. My friend Jake Richmond tossed out the possible term “art games” to point to a certain subset of indie games which I think excellently support storyjamming.

I propose that “art games” with the needed design will incorporate:

1. To really sum up, just “Judge your Design by what you’ve left out”. That incorporates pretty much everything else. But if you need more details, this incorporates the following aims -

A. “Just enough rules” in the “Keep It Simple, Stupid”  spirit. Sleek, elegant, spare.

B. “Bite-sized pieces” of rules, delivered one at a time according to an intentional pedagogy, so that players can play an enjoyable game at every stage of learning (small-chunk modularity spins off of this too, I think). Even if you’ve designed a ridiculously complex game, never let them know!

C. “Show, Don’t Tell” using evocative, succinct oracles, setting generators, and actual stories and sequential art that embody the setting. Remember, ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’.

The learning curve for a new role-playing game presents a constant drag on the quality of play. When does the fun start? It starts once you learn the rules. Why can’t we enjoy learning the rules? And the more complex the rules, the longer it takes to start having fun. Some of my favorite indie games I still don’t know how to play (Ben Lehman’s ‘Polaris’ comes to mind). Some I think I know how to play, but friends of mine tell me I don’t play them correctly yet (as my friend Joel tells me about Vincent Baker’s ‘In A Wicked Age’).

Something seriously needs attention here. Why do we assume that to learn a new role-playing game, we must drudge through the learning curve of a new system? I in fact hear players of some role-playing games say “I don’t want to play those indie games - I don’t want to have to learn a new rules system” (though they don’t bat an eye at learning to play new video games or card games).

This to me indicates that too little focus in indie role-playing game design has gone in to the pedagogy of play; meaning, how can we make sure players enjoy every step of learning the rules? How can we give them such bite-sized pieces that they never notice the medicine going down? Once they’ve mastered one rule, we go on to the next, and the next, and the next…

In fact, Evan Gardner’s language fluency game ‘Where Are Your Keys?’ works exactly like this; I think any highly player-friendly game works like this.

For some games, learning the complex rules counts as the price of admission. This makes sense in the right contexts.

But for story games, where we want to remove barriers to play, where we want them accessible by more kind of players in greater amounts, where we want to tell stories and storyjam with all kinds of folks who haven’t experienced it before - as indie game designers aiming for this new crowd, we need to start learning the pedagogy of play.

Oftentimes the gaming convention ‘demo rules’ version of story games makes them much more accessible and easy to play (above and beyond the fact that personal interaction makes them much more easily learnt). Problematically, I’ve bought games that I’ve played at a convention, gone home excited, and then couldn’t figure the rules out. So I see a need for an intentional step-by-step design to get a person from holding the game in their hands, to playing a fully complex version of the game.

[Keep in mind, as I rant on this topic, that this mainly concerns what I and the growing group I play with personally need from an Indie Role-playing Game, and why we haven’t gotten it. I hope everyone continues to make the games they love to make; I also hope some people start making the kind of games that serve folks like us really well. Disclaimer done!]

I think most role-playing games, as a culture, have some very old and hard-to-shake traditions.  One has to do with designing according to what you put in (think traditional RPGs, with pages of charts, facts, magic items, abilities, setting, etc.), even though what you leave out makes an equally large impact. Designers have known this for a long time, and use it as a primary principle. What you leave out gives room for what you put in to breathe, to draw the mind and eye of your reader to what matters. I have noticed a very few indie game designers exploring this territory, not just graphically, but textually. That excites me; I want more!

Another traditional problem: role-playing game texts ‘tell’, instead of ’showing’. Switching the balance around, by ‘showing’ more often than ‘telling‘, would make RPG texts far more easy to absorb and enjoy (god forbid) for many people, including myself.

Imagine, you have two options to absorb the proposed setting for an RPG. You can thoroughly explore it in the form of a novel (or graphic novel), or you can ‘learn’ it in the form of a history textbook.

Which do role-playing game designers most often choose?

Funny enough, many new RPGs, based on novels or comics (a ’show’ medium if ever I saw one), immediately start ‘telling’, as if nothing could make more sense than to go from an enjoyable story that makes you want to inhabit its characters, to a history text about those characters that you must slog through and retain. Now, I think this has started to change (I just looked at the Mouse Guard Role-Playing Game, and it  does seem really promising!), but the pattern exists: “Oh,  you want  a role-playing game? That means stripping out the story and replacing it with lists of factoids and history”.

Now, many traditional RPG readers do absorb setting this way, and enjoyably so. I know some of these folks. We just need to expand the design values to include more of the rest of us. I sometimes hear that indie game designers want to pull in ‘non-role-players’ into the world of role-playing. Well, here lies one method: make  your books absorbable by a wider community of people.

I’ve learned the hard way that most newbie folks that I want to storyjam with me really cannot handle that many impediments to play itself; they don’t want to stop to have setting ‘told’ to them, they don’t want to look through lists and charts, they just want to play ASAP. If playing ever starts feeling like working, I immediately start losing them.

So, I propose that instead of creeping farther in the direction of including these kinds of people, we plant a flag in the place where design must end up to serve these folks. Rather than slowly shaving away traditional elements, or making RPG texts less text-like, we just jump over to that new spot and start designing the (at first) shockingly different games that those folks need.

I think Nordic role-playing game poems, though not exactly what I mean here in terms of visual presentation, do tend to ’shock’ traditional and indie game players and designers in the way that I want. They often question whether or not we can even call them Role-playing Games. But I see this as a good sign; if you’ve designed something that makes  you wonder that, then boy do I have an ever growing group of players that want to play your game.

Last fall I wanted to raise funds to interview someone I feel really excited about. We didn’t reach our goal then, but with the new year, I figure it justifies a fresh attempt!

“Where are Your Keys?”

Evan Gardner, who rewilds in Molalla, OR, has made a breakthrough. But does anyone even feel ready for it? Over a period of years, he pieced together all the most effective language-learning techniques into one, seamless whole; a game called “Where are Your Keys”.

Everyone knows about the epidemic of endangered indigenous languages, all over the world, and yet linguists and teachers continue to use old, academic and schooling methods, that for those many of us who studied foreign languages in school and college, we know they don’t work. We never achieved fluency, and we struggled to learn them. For those that did gain some mastery of their chosen language, they did it by actually traveling to its home and immersing themselves in the culture.

But how do we do that for languages on the edge of extinction, with one 90 year-old fluent speaker left? How do we create the experience of immersion, as best we can?

Evan has the answer. So far, he has struggled with getting the message out there. Since “Where are Your Keys?”, by its very nature, creates not students, but Teachers, he knows in only a matter of time the game will spread like wildfire, as Teachers make more Teachers. But will it happen in time to save the endangered native languages where you live?

Go to the fundable page to donate.

Why do I love Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr  Norrell? Why have I oft listened to the audiobook edition as I fell asleep at night?

“Just then a high mournful sound broke in upon Stephen’s dream — a slow sad song in an unknown language and Stephen understood without ever actually waking that the gentleman with the thistle-down hair was singing.

It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if the song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in rapture at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

Stephen began to dream again. This time he dreamt that the hills walked and the sky wept. Trees came and spoke to him and told him their secrets and also whether or not he might regard them as friends or enemies. Important destinies were hidden inside pebbles and crumpled leaves. He dreamt that everything in the world — stones and rivers, leaves and fire, had a purpose it was determined to carry out with the utmost rigor, but he also understood that it was sometimes possible to persuade things to a different purpose.”

…Fairies do not make a strong distinction between the animate and inanimate. They believe that stones, doors, trees, fire, clouds, and so forth all have souls and all are either masculine or feminine.”

I spent some time the other night ranting with some fellow players of story games about a subject that I feel very strongly about when it comes to Indie Role-Playing Games and RPGs in the mainstream too.

I think, for far too long, buyers, creators, and players of RPGs determine the buying value of a particular game dependent on how much text it has, and the complexity of its rules.

I think this has continued even into the indie renaissance, even with games that have dead simple rules, still padding them with distracting and eventually confusing explanations, side chatter, setting descriptions.

I think a possible next step for indie games awaits the adventurous indie designer in making games that look as dead simple, elegant, and beautiful as a well-made children’s picture book or graphic novel. Think Frank Miller’s 300, James Gurney’s Dinotopia, Will Huygen and Rien Poortvliet’s Gnomes, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

My friend Jana, a graphic designer, tells me design blossoms from what you leave out, not what you put in. Bruce Lee says the same thing about martial arts, by the way.

So why do I see even my favorite indie games with gobs and gobs of background and text that nobody but the evangelist for the game will read?

Instead of pages and pages of setting, provided a streamlined setting oracle.

Instead of descriptions of character possibilities and worldbuilding, provide awe-inspiring portraits and landscape panoramas.

Instead of trying to teach someone how to play with the book, know that people only really learn role-playing games face-to-face, and let the book support that kind of learning.

I of course see some designers experimenting with this already; Nordic RPG poems in a sense may already have the tiger by the tail for some of this ethic - Jonathan Walton’s Murderland contest produced a whole bunch of awesome possibilities for exploring this territory - Matthijs Holter’s Archipelago works this angle really well Judd Karlman’s Dictionary of MU rocks this idea - Vincent’s IAWA design seems within the realm of this kind of thinking too. For just rules simplicity, check out Creative Advantage’s Juicers deck.

To sum: rather than ensuring value by the thickness of the book, or the amount of text, ensure value by making it beautiful and elegant. If people will slap down $15-$25 on a short children’s picture book or graphic novel, potential players will do that for your indie game, believe me, if you design it beautifully enough.

Well, it looks like this blog still has some life in it yet. As I get the opportunity, I may post some about current projects and thoughts over the next few months, and even get a podcast up now and then, though the big podcasts (like interviewing grassroots luminaries such as Evan Gardner) will still await some chunkier donations.

In other words, my priorities have begun to change, but we haven’t wrung out all of this blog’s potential just yet.

As of now, I think this entry will number as one of the last posts here at the College of Mythic Cartography. For multiple reasons, including the shortfall in funding for the podcast at Fundable.com, I have decided to stop adding additional material here. I think the archive stands on its own as a wealth of podcasts and articles on things often left unexamined or unsaid in this culture, so please take advantage of them. I plan to leave the website up for a couple years yet, and do need monthly help in covering webhosting and podcast archiving, so please keep donating if you have benefitted from this resource.

If you would like to pony up legal tender to have me personally speak to your chosen audience about the many ideas and issues here, please contact me, mythic dot cartographer at gmail dot com.  I continue to explore this path of rewilding our language, bodies, relationships, and Land, and wish you the best of luck in doing the same.

Long Live the Rewilding Renaissance, and may it continue to flower amongst your Family and Land!

[I’ve decided to “reprint” and update an old article that I wrote in January 2008. Where its text ends, I’ve included a supplementary update of thoughts where I think this originally fell short.]

I just realized that I have abused Robin Dunbar’s intriguing model of how humans maintain social groups.

Not only me, but many others have ‘dumbed down’ Dunbar’s idea that the mean maximum for functioning human social groupings hovers around 150 persons (precisely 148, with a 95% confidence interval of 100-230).

What does this have to do with the College of Mythic Cartography? Hell, I don’t know. I mean, it has everything do with it. Ask me some other time. Let me get the issue down on electronic paper first.

Most folks hear this notion, and think one of several things (non-inclusively):

1) I can only have 150 human relationships

2) I can only have 100-230 human relationships

3) I can only have a mean maximum of 150 meaningful human relationships

4) Only 150 of my Myspace friends count

5) Companies should number no larger than 150 employees

6) Ideally sized Towns have 150 people in them, or neighborhoods of 150 people.

And the drivel goes on, with the magic number ‘150′ tossed around like a new-age talking stick. If you say someting, and include the number 150, you’ve said something profound.

All of this misses an important secondary assertion that Dunbar makes. Namely, that it takes substantial work to maintain a social network.

Dunbar’s number only refers to a tightly cohesive human social network, capable of efficient (and life-affirming!) collaboration. Villages, military units, highly focused groups that emerge in the presence of intense environmental or economic pressures. Each of those possible 150 relationships that Dunbar refers to operate at a high-functioning level that many folks in our culture have never experienced beyond a very small group of friends or family. For some, only a family member or two, and a couple of friends, have relationships with them that fit the profile.

Dunbar estimates that to maintain the (mean) 150 high-functioning relationships, intrinsic to original and indigenous human cultures (village and cultural lineage groups), one must spend 42% of one’s time ’social grooming’. This almost requires a certain level of constant physical proximity. The smaller the group you maintain, the smaller the portion of your time dedicated to maintenance (but also the less benefit you receive). A social network of 10 would not require 42% of your time spent in strengthening intimate social connections.

He coins ’social grooming’ from the behavior of primates who spend time bonding through grooming behaviors. This should give you some idea of the nature of the work involved in maintaining a high-functioning relationship, rather than an acquaintanceship. ‘Social grooming’ doesn’t mean ’spending time with’, it means creating and strengthening intimacy.

Think about this.

The fact that ancestral villages and cultural groups could get to, and maintain, a group of 150 tightly-knit individuals that stayed in relative physical proximity, constitutes an amazing achievement and a testament to the power of those traditional cultures.

This implies that most modern humans rarely experience these relationships on any significant network level. How much time do we spend bonding with others in a meaningful way?

And once we’ve started these bonded relationships (childhood and school friends, family, etc.), we can still lose those connections as the years pass, too, when we don’t know the value in them, and don’t maintain them.

Perhaps what has destroyed the landscape of modern american families, friendships, and workplaces, amounts to the problem that we have huge networks of acquaintances, but precious few fully human relationships.

Not families, but regularly interacting acquaintances.

Not friendships, but folks who ’share interests’ and ‘know each other’.

I don’t say this to pronounce dire and certain doom on our lives. I say this to so that we can go, “HEY! LOOK! A thing! A thing that matters.”

When your Grandma (if you luckily had one like this) said, “Family comes first - family matters most,” you may not have known the profound human survival wisdom embedded in that statement. When she, or any other relative or friend, pestered you to attend that party, or that event, that you passed up because it seemed such a waste of time, now you know you (and your children, and your family) have paid for that in the wages of depression, exhaustion, isolation, disconnectedness.

So hey. Let’s get together more often. And when we do, let’s play some games, sing some songs, and take some risks to do some stuff that actually brings us closer. And lets build up our little groups, and count our wealth one by one, in each deep and fully human relationship.

Because it matters. It really, really matters.

Update in November 2008:

I picked this article up to read it again, and I feel I didn’t “step” on the point I wanted to make strongly enough, a point still important today.

Most workplaces or groups that obsess with this “150″ number, do so thinking that their adherence to it (or lack thereof) will have an impact. It won’t.

It won’t have any effect at all, unless that group dedicates 42% of their time (and imagine a business or corporation doing this!) to SOCIAL GROOMING, quite literally the modern human version of relaxedly picking nits out of each other’s hair. This means 42% of their time spent playing icebreaker games, giving hugs, talking about their children, massaging each other, etc.

Dunbar’s number doesn’t mean squat without the social grooming aspect; humans can have countless acquaintanceships (although, sure, you will hit a ceiling even with those), certainly more than 150. No problem.

The number 150 indicates an achievement, something you’ve earned, because you have fully invested that 42% of your time to make this HUGE group of intimates and extended family possible, a group that can then move forward to accomplish amazing collaborative team goals together, because of your investment.

And, no matter how hard you work socially grooming the people in your network, beyond 150 people your ability to keep up with further additions to your intimate network drops. Either because of psychological capacity, or the simple logistics of grooming that many folks, maintaing an intimately connected group bigger than 150 becomes more and more difficult until it becomes impossible altogether. New additions remain that which, in the modern world, we see as “normal” relationships - they become acquaintances. Not “things”, or “its”, but just acquaintances.

Statistically speaking.

Dreams and the Spirit

in Eugene, OR

Friday Nov. 21 7 – 9 pm, and Saturday Nov. 22, 2008 9 am – 3 pm

Facilitator: Linda Neale, LMFT, LPC from Portland, OR

assisted by Willem Larsen & Toni Timmers

Location TBA

Dreams are a call to reality and to living life courageously. Dreams never lie. Called “the royal road to the unconscious” by Freud, some dreams prepare, announce or even warn about certain situations, often long before they actually happen. As Carl Jung said, “One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather the breath of nature.” You will learn the dream interview method, enabling people to interpret their own dreams, in a safe and secure setting.

This workshop is limited to ten people, in order to give enough time to learn this form of dream interpretation, and to allow participants to discuss at least one dream each in a group setting.
Cost: $75
To enroll: Email timmerst@lanecc.org if you are interested in participating and send in your registration below. If you have questions, you can call Linda at 503-452-4431.

Text: The text for this class is All About Dreams by Gayle Delaney, although other books will be used as well. This book can be purchased at most local bookstores or through Amazon.com. Please buy or borrow this book before the workshop.

Facilitator: Linda Neale is a licensed marriage and family therapist, author, ceremonialist, and the founder of Earth & Spirit Council. She has led dream groups for eighteen years, and is the author of The Power of Ceremony, a book on the role of ceremony in modern culture.

Download registration form.

Dear Friends, Readers, Listeners, Visitors, and Supporters:

I’ve always wanted to do more with the College of Mythic Cartography, ever since I had the vision of a jar of seed that would inspire a flowering of storytelling and cultural roundtables of folks bringing back the “ancient fresh ways” that marked our (for most of us) distant ancestors as wise sustaining villages, bands, and peoples.

I’ve already received much help from friends and contributers, and for that I thank you.

I believe strongly in the power of Open Source, collaboration and open access to ideas, experiments, and lessons learned.

Lately I’ve struggled with bringing the kind of attention and resources to the College that it needs to fully do this work. I know it needs more donations then I have so far received to keep it going, though honestly it doesn’t require much. And I can’t bring myself to “charge” for this cherished jar of seeds. That doesn’t seem in sync with the spirit of the College at all.

I truly believe that all of us stand in the first tremors of a great Rewilding Renaissance, and I dearly want to do my part and keep helping in the way that I know how. I also want to make sure that I create content that actually serves the needs and interests of supporters.

In that vein, I’ve recently come across a funding strategy that I plan to start experimenting with, using a website called Fundable.com. I think many small donations can make this whole endeavor fly, and I want to make sure that everything I create here actually has an audience that has declared their interest and expectation.

In Fundable’s words:

What is Fundable.com?

Fundable.com lets groups of people pool funds to raise money.

Each project has a description of how much money needs to be collected and what it will do. Once enough pledges (not payments) have been collected, Fundable turns them into real payments and sends the total to the project’s organizer.

No one takes a risk when making a pledge: if a collection expires before reaching its total in pledges, Fundable deletes all pledges and never charges money. This lets you participate in a group purchase or fundraiser without worrying about what other people will do. No one pays until and unless everyone else makes a pledge.

I’ll post a series of podcasts that I’d like to do, with a fundraising goal on each. We’ll start with this:

“Where are Your Keys?”

Evan Gardner, who rewilds in Molalla, OR, has made a breakthrough. But does anyone even feel ready for it? Over a period of years, he pieced together all the most effective language-learning techniques into one, seamless whole; a game called “Where are Your Keys”.

Everyone knows about the epidemic of endangered indigenous languages, all over the world, and yet linguists and teachers continue to use old, academic and schooling methods, that for those many of us who studied foreign languages in school and college, we know they don’t work. We never achieved fluency, and we struggled to learn them. For those that did gain some mastery of their chosen language, they did it by actually traveling to its home and immersing themselves in the culture.

But how do we do that for languages on the edge of extinction, with one 90 year-old fluent speaker left? How do we create the experience of immersion, as best we can?

Evan has the answer. So far, he has struggled with getting the message out there. Since “Where are Your Keys?”, by its very nature, creates not students, but Teachers, he knows in only a matter of time the game will spread like wildfire, as Teachers make more Teachers. But will it happen in time to save the endangered native languages where you live?

Please donate to making this podcast possible. 

Thursday, November 13th, 7pm-9pm at the First Unitarian Church (note location change), Portland, Oregon, Sobonfu Some will speak on “Fanning the Fire of Community,” as part of the 2008-09 Natural Way speaker’s series.

Sobonfu is a member of the Dagara tribe, Burkina Faso, Africa. Recognized by the elders as possessing special gifts, her destiny was foretold before her birth. She is an eloquent, profound speaker.

I strongly encourage all of you to attend Sobonfu’s talk. There are a great many parallels between her culture’s traditions and those of the native people of North America. Her book, “The Spirit of Intimacy,” is a best seller, and she leads workshops on spirituality, ritual, grieving and intimacy.

“My work is really a journey in self discovery and of building community through rituals,” she says.

Teachers and ambassadors from sustaining cultures, like Sobonfu Some, have the ability to remind us what it means to discover our own village nature again. I personally think Sobonfu has key insights that will help heal the wounds of cultural poverty that many of us possess. Bring your friends, attend as a community. You’ll feel glad you did.

I’ve set up a link in the sidebar to make it easier to find all the CoMC podcast episodes. Check it out:

COMC PODCASTS

I’ve also noticed the most popular podcast, “Rewilding Adulthood”, received twice as many downloads as the second  most popular. Ninety-five downloads and counting! I feel honored to have a readership with such mature interests (insert smiley emoticon here).

What does it mean to “hold space” for emerging social technologies, like Non-violent communication, Consensus decision making, Agile Teamwork, and Open Space Technology gatherings? What skills do we need to do so? What happens if we don’t choose to hold intention and attention around the social spaces that we create?

I interview Diana Larsen, of FutureWorks Consulting,  a world-class facilitator in teamwork and social technologies (and coincidentally, my mother). Together we explore the world of “holding space”.

 

 Holding Space With Diana Larsen - COMC Podcast Episode 22 [59:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I ran across a passage in Robert Bringhurst’s book, “A Story as Sharp as A Knife: the Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World“, that I think will get you active and potential storyjammers excited:

Chapter Ten: The Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu, page 217

We could describe the interaction of Skaay and Xhyuu as nothing more than banter - simply a way of passing the time and making a couple of bucks from a gullible anthropologist young enough to be the older poet’s grandson and the headman’s youngest son or nephew. That description is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. In the impromptu mythtelling contest staged by Skaay and Xhyuu there is a structure – just the sort of structure that often seems to spring up out of nothing when skilled musicians jam. Skaay and Xhyuu are telling jokes and spinning yarns, but that is not quite all; they are also working within a tradition as demanding in its way as the Virginia reel, the minuet, the ballad, or the twelve-bar blues.

In Scotland, such a contest between poets is known as a flyting. But the Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu is different in character from the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy or other familiar Celtic examples. Classical Haida mythtellers don’t  inflate their pride or anger artificially, nor do they confess even their subtler emotions directly; they speak through characters and events, the way musicians speak through notes, motifs and chords, and painters peak through colors, shapes, and lines….

…Just as the classical Haida poets avoid portraying or praising themselves directly, so they avoid the directly abusive language often found in Scottish flytings. Skaay and Xhyuu are survivors, not combatants: two old refugees from death who have somehow not forgotten how to laugh.

Myth is a language made of timeless, not of momentary forms. The themes of the Flyting of Skaay and Xhyuu are not concocted for this occasion; they are original in a different sense. They are thousand- or ten-thousand-year-old stories put to current use; they renew the present world by rehearsing what is known of how that world came to be.

[bold emphasis added by me]