Impro and creative roleplaying

On impro theatre
You can read my introduction to impro theatre here.

Since impro is made in the moment, the actors have to remain in the moment, spontaneous and open to their own and others idea. If you get an idea, act on it; If you notice it feels right to tap your foot, then do just that, and then build on that. If you notice another player bringing an idea into the scene, accept it and then build on that.

In effect, you have to remain sensitive and open at all times. Never plan, never force the scene to become what you would like it to be. Impro is a collaborative effort, you need to get a feel for where you as a group are going right now, and go that direction.

Imagine that our story is a train, and that our ideas are it's fuel. Whenever someone brings an idea to the scene, they bring energy to the scene, moving it forward and energizing the other actors. You need to recognize energy when you see it, grab it and use it.

On blocking in improvisation theatre
Blocking, or rather avoiding it, is a central concept of improvisation theatre. When I introduce an idea and you reject it, that's blocking.

Let's say we're playing a scene about a burglary, and we're considering how to get through a security door. I say "I've got just the thing, I brought the dynamite!"

You could say...

"We'll have to find another way around!" which would be ignoring the idea. Perhaps you're not paying attention to the other actors because you're occupied with planning a window-break in-scene.

"No, this door is dynamite proof!" which would be cancelling the idea and making the last exchange pointless, not moving the story forward and thus dull. There is a tendency to add complications to stories in impro and roleplaying, to make them more exciting, but this is still blocking, putting a dead stop on the idea.

"You doofus, the door is wide open!" which would be sure to draw some quick laughs from the audience, but it would also be rejecting the idea.

All of these are blocking in some form. I've offered energy, but you've discarded it, pulling the brakes on our scene. That's bad. Energy and momentum is vital, our scene cannot live without it. Let's look at accepting:

"Great, let's do it!" Alright! You take my idea an add more energy. Let's go!

"The dynamite!? Whoa, that's dangerous! Can you handle it?" Here you take my idea and add a complication for more energy. Notice the difference between adding something to the idea and cancelling it. (The dynamite proof door-reply) The story is still moving forward! This is the proper way of adding complications.

So complications != blocking. Undoing other players contributions is blocking, and that can be both by providing roadblocks or solving their character's problems for them, if they were interested in exploring these problems.

Blocking in roleplaying games
What's funny is, while blocking is a deadly sin in impro theatre, traditional roleplaying games are built on blocking. The game master has complete control of the story and the players have complete control of their characters, what they do, etcetera. But consider this: If the control of the characters belong to the players, then all the numbers and dice rolls are a way for the game to say when they can't do whatever they like, effectively blocking them

So we're playing, and you say "I run across the roofs to escape, jumping from building to building, staggering on the slick roofing tiles in the moonlight" Cool! That's an idea that inspires me, it gives me energy, get's me engaged in the story and we're heading somewhere. Now the game master says "Roll for Athletics, difficulty 5", so you roll the dice, and they say... "No, you didn't".

And that's it! Talk about roadblock! All that investment and the game just throws it away.

Now, you could argue that it's up to the GM to keep the game moving even with failures, but the matter of fact is that games have traditionally been written so that;
1) If you want to act, you roll.
2) If you fail your roll, your action fails. The game doesn't give you tools or advice to keep the story moving from this point, at all. Hey, most players wouldn't provide the kind of creative input I quoted above, as it would be in vain anyway if your dice roll failed.
3) As a matter of fact, the game can punish you for failing. Injuries provide negative modifications to your stats, making future failure more likely.
As a matter of fact, I've seen GMs use dice checks with the purpose of blocking, so that the players doesn't stray from the pre-planned course or scenario, or to make sure the players doesn't get anything for free. I don't think these are rare cases, either.

Consider that: The players (the players, not their characters) want something, and it's your job as a GM to make sure they doesn't get it. Why should you do that? When the players want something, that's where their energy is, where their interest lie, that's how you get them fired up. You need to go there, give them what they want, add complications if you wish, but give them what they're interested in.

Forcing
In traditional roleplaying, the GM has a pre-planned vision to lead the players along with. In a tradition were communication between participants is seen as distracting from immersion, the only way for players to realize their vision is to force it through the rules.

Trad gaming is soaked in this philosophy of influencing the game through force.

When trad games implement player influence, it is usually in the form of points with which to buy your influence. When trad gamers discuss shared storytelling, it is in terms of authority, rules for when you as a player may force your vision on others.

But force never leads to creativity. Trust does. Forcing is blocking.

No wonder the game master doesn't trust the players to muck up the story by forcing their influence on the story, because force is all they have.

But enough with the critizism.

To play with creativity
Improvise. Collaborate. Keith Johnstone says in his books on impro that everyone is creative, if they just trust theirselves. Trust your players. Provide a clear, shared vision, and create from it. Don't use force, use openness. Let your character and your ideas be vulnerable, allow them to change. Find the ideas in the shared imagination, not in what you have planned out for yourself.

Listen, like really listen, to each other. Communicate. Do what you feel is fun and gives good movement to the game. If you don't like something, say so. You needn't have anything happen to your character if you feel it is tedious, unpleasant or not fun for you as a player. There aren't winners and losers in roleplaying.

Don't block.

Rules should be written not as laws or maybe even mechanisms of rewards, but as something to relate to, to make the story more tangible and inspiring.

Litterature
For now, I'll have to point you to further litterature rather than developing this theoretical body.

Graham Walmsley has written the book Play Unsafe on how to adapt Johnstones ideas of impro to tabletop roleplaying. The books, Impro and Impro for storytellers by Johnstone are just as relevant.

John Harper has written Lady Blackbird, a free quick-read game which is improvised, provides a clear and inspiring vision, minimalist rules, rules that inspire story-making a very non-blocking resolution system, and advice how to encourage collaborative creating. Harper is also working on the excellent game Danger Patrol, where a single scene is all the prep the GM does pre-game.

In Mouse Guard by Luke Crane, all actions are successes. If a roll fails, the GM either introduces a complication or gives the character a harmful condition - Sie gets what sie wants, but at a price. No blocking, just adding to the story. The condition mechanic is present in Lady Blackbird as well.

On traditional roleplaying games and indie games
As I critize the traditions of roleplaying, does that mean I wish to promote indie roleplaying games and devalue trad roleplaying?

No. Roleplaying as a hobby is just 30 years old. There is no money in roleplaying, and thus there are no professors of roleplaying and you can't go to roleplaying design college. Thus, the development of roleplaying games are happening right here, right now, and to me, challenging and analysing the assumptions of trad rpgs is how to develop trad rpgs.
Indie roleplaying is just 10 years old, and even moreso trying to find its form. Is creative roleplaying the same as indie roleplaying? Is it narrativism? Or is it something else? You tell me.

Meaning, story, understanding

I've been reading a book on school psychology. (Psykolog i skolan, Schad 2009) This is what Leif Strandberg has to say about learning (my translation and emphasis):

"Letters, symbols, thoughts and knowledge are the tools of freedom and creation of meaning: The freedom to move beyond the world they [the pupils] occupy right now; the freedom to visit strange places and visit people they otherwise never could reach; the meaningful experience that the air they breathe, the water they drink and the stars glittering above are not only wonderful sensory impressions - they can be understood (!), and when they understand one thing they will discover that there is still more to understand, there is always another step to take, and then yet another one..."

And it struck me like a bomb. No, not the point he was trying to convey, but a different idea made up with the same images:

Meaning = Story = Understanding

We can imagine early humans, gazing up into the sky and conjuring stories of what the stars were, from where they came, what their names were... For man must understand the world.

Understanding
In his book Psychological Therapy, Grawe cites Epsteins four basic human needs, the need for orientation and control being the most basic one. (The other ones being increasing pleasure and avoiding pain, the attachement need and the need for self-enhancement) This makes sense - What point would there be to all your mental processes if you couldn't use them to predict and exert control of the world?

So man conjured stories to explain and predict nature, and at the same time gave meaning to nature.

Story
Today we can explain and predict nature through science, but science cannot provide meaning. Meaning is the sign of storytelling, the idea that there is a point to what we just heard - Things doesn't happen for no reason in a story, they happen because there was a lesson to be learnt, symbolism we could recognise or themes we could relate to our own lives. Back in the day, the Pleiades were not just a random configuration of stars, they were seven sisters, transformed into stars for a reason; Zeus had put them there to protect them and comfort their father Atlas, and the reason one of them doesn't shine quite as bright as the others is because she is shamed eternally for having an affair with a mortal. Now that's a story, there is a point to it, and it relates to us  humans, our lives and our emotions.

Meaning
Humans are meningsskapande, (creators of meaning) that is, we seek to understand things in terms of what they mean to us, what emotional significance they carry for us. Events in our life must be interpreted in terms of meaning and emotion to be fully understood and integrated into our psyche. Thus, it can be said that every person has not only their own mental models, but also their own narrative (or story) of their life and the world around them. Psychologist Erik H. Erikson stresses our need to string our history of life events and choices together to make a coherent narrative. If we are unable to make sense of our actions and thoughts, predict them, find a meaning in them, this is a very distressing situation indeed - Our life doesn't make sense anymore!

Sense of Coherence
There is a questionnaire for measuring this in psychology, called Sense of Coherence, or SoC. It measures to what degree your life is characterized by comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness. Sociologist Aaron Antonovsky, who designed the model argues that everyone encounters stress in their life, but it is those with a sense of coherence that pull through and manages it, choosing to focus on health rather than disease in his model.

Our lecturer told us that SoC is a good asset when measuring therapeutic progress - Oftentimes other measurements and tests doesn't show improvement: There might be slight improvement on all symptoms and life issues, but no single factor has changed enough to provide statistically significant differences. With SoC you could show that that all these small improvements have lead to a point where the client now feels sie has control of hir life, can understand what's going on in hir life, and that there is a point to hir life - And in the end, that's the one most important thing.

Psychology, sociology, philosophy
In general, therapeutic psychology and psychological qualitative research stress understanding someone's narrative and and their feelings for the world, rather than the cold, hard and objective facts. To be understanding is to know what another person feels, to see things from their perspective.

I suppose this is obvious stuff to students of sociology, but this was the moment things fell into place to me - I suppose you could say I went from knowing it to understanding it, a process sought after in psychotherapy: When the client process something not only intellectually, but also emotionally, it becomes a real process. You need to activate the emotions and work with them to really make a difference. (Process activation)

I think you could also make a parallell to existentialism, the philosophy where mankind must find meaning in a world where science has replaced stories.

I don't really know much about narrative psychology or related sociology, but I think I should check it up. Anyone suggestions for good reads?

Oh, and I picked up Play Unsafe yesterday. Looking forward to it!

Färgen Sisu

I just have to tell you about last night. I was visiting Kulturhamnen where a friend of mine were playing and singing.

A small, nondescript door in a brick building by the water, with an old sign reading "Greek restaurant" hides the world's most secret music stage. Some people under the banner Färgen Sisu have taken this place and made it their own, a tiny little house of culture. Cramped together on odd, worn couches and chairs, munching on home-made chocolate balls, we sat and listened to David Bergkvist singing of the big human issues of existence - of love, regret, dreams and revenge in a way that felt ancient and new in the same time, to an audience completely captivated. (Sorry, I didn't have the presence to bring out my camera until at the end of night) Yliari, a band made up of eight young friends separeted by life conditions, played reggae full of love. There was a rock band called Fake Snakes as well, not my kind of music, but I was happy to see them there, nevertheless.

And I sat there, in a place people had made their own, listening to musicians singing their own songs and their own words to us (well, except this one, that was a cover), as I wrote of the healthy person seeking hir own way, actualizing hirself on another path than that of norms.

It was genuine, and the audience were with them all the way. It was magical, and when their time was up they didn't want to part with us. The singer said "Since you've all been such good listeners, we would like to play a song that just the two of us made". Just the singer and the guitar player stayed on the stage, singing a song very different from the rest of their program. This is that song. (In norweigan, not swedish)

When you give people your full attention, when you give them empathy, genuinity and acceptance, they will find the safety to show their true selves. To bring it out for you to see, to let it grow.

I'm introducing: Roleplaying games

Roleplaying is a collaborative hobby where four, five-something friends meet up regularly and play a roleplaying game for an evening, doing a one-night thing or picking up where they left their story the last time. It is a wholly verbal hobby, a kind of storytelling.

So what is these games all about? Well, there is a huge span of just what roleplaying games can be in terms of setting, theme and structure, but there are three components that are common to all roleplaying games:

1) It's a game
2) It's a platform for acting and immersing in a made up world
3) It's a collaborative storytelling

These three components have always been there, and players can switch between playing, acting and storytelling as they wish, and different players are attracted to different aspects of the hobby. I'm going to use these three components to sum up the history of roleplaying games, the simplified version:

Game
Roleplaying started with the game Dungeons and Dragons in the late 70s, which was kind of an offshoot of a wargame - But instead of two players pitting miniature armies against each other on a battlefield table, a bunch of players teamed up, each controling a single miniature, trying together to overcome the obstacles that a referee set up for you. (That is, kill his monster miniatures)

Immersion
At some point, someone realised that, hey, you could do whatever you wish to with these characters. The focus was moved from playing with miniatures trying to win a challenge, to playing a character placed in the context of a made up world. You figured out a personality and history for your character, and decided how sie should realistically act in a given situation, and then acted that out verbally. Instead of dungeons full of monsters, the settings became made-up worlds; historical, fantasy, future, or mirroring our present day.

The referee became a storyteller that prepared a story for the players to explore with their characters, and characters of hir own for the players to interact with. 

Instead of the win/lose rules of a game, the rules would either be very complex to simulate the laws of nature, or very simple and non-intrusive to leave room for immersion in the world. The main purpose of these rules where to realistically determine whether a given characters action would succed or fail, adding together the character's skill and an element of chance. (Roll a dice and add your skill number. Good enough? You succeed)

This is the playstyle that would dominate roleplaying games from the 80s to the 00s, and for a long time this game-immersion-story divsion was not seen as important, but rather if you prefered for "rules light" or "rules heavy" games.

Story
In the 00s there was a movement towards analysis of roleplaying and player dynamics, which resulted in a new design philosophy emerged where story took the front seat, the indie roleplaying games.
The story of the immersion playstyle of the 80s and 90s was often rather static, with the referee (or gamemaster) having planned the story out in advance and the rules in many ways actually serving the purpose of stopping the players from messing it up too much. (Oh, you wan't to seduce him? You'll have to roll a Seduction test, then! - Which is a textbook case of blocking in impro theatre)

The indie movement made the story about the characters rather than have them explore it, placed a great emphasis on story elements such as theme and premise, made storytelling more improvised and collaborative - Often the referee is done away with completely, and all players participate as equals.

The rules became guidelines for a particular style of drama rather than realistic success/failure laws of nature - You bought a game to tell this particular kind of story (that could be exported to different settings) rather than to explore a particular setting (in which you could play any kind of story)

In Scandinavia, there has also been a parallell development towards story called freeform or jeepform, pre-written scenarios built on a different structure than rules.

Summing up
I'd like to once more point out that all of these three components have always been present in some form in basically all roleplaying, even though the focus of them have shifted over time. For instance Dungeons and Dragons, which reached edition four last year, which has been a step back towards pure game, but more inspired and less clunky... Me and four friends play it regularly, but in addition to the game elements, we do lots and lots of immersion and storytelling in our playstyle.

Humanism
It is probably pretty obvious to everyone at this point what my preferred kind of game is, and what I consider to be the humanist sort of game: The story games. Story games are more improvised, there's less authority and more focus on communication between players - There is simply a much greater interest in human, personal issues and themes, and a much greater trust in the other players creativity, providing tools for them to use rather than subjecting them to a fixed world.

On a side note, it is a little interesting that the third force in both psychology and roleplaying games would be the humanistic one. In the end, the humanistic therapy sort of altered psychotherapy as a whole, merging with other kinds of therapy rather than becoming a separate tradition, and I can see hints of the same thing happening with roleplaying games and the indie wave.

Reflections
In a way, I think the indie games personal involvement of players and their characters is a vital part of what a story really is. A story is in the end about humans and humanity, a story must be meaningful and thus relate to the participants personally, because meaning is personal.

(I'll explore this in a future post)

When I bring up roleplaying on this blog, I will probably often be critical and harsh on general roleplaying design... But that's okay - I've grown up with this hobby, written for it, played it. I love it, and it's really for your own good, darnit!

Seriously though, roleplaying just doesn't have the history and research of psychology and theatre. Most roleplaying designers have "real jobs" on the side, writing games out of inspiration and love rather than to make a living, and the analysis and theory building of roleplaying games is a rather new one. There aren't any Rogers or Johnstones in roleplaying, though there are a whole bunch of very inspiring and bright people analysing and working with their hobby, so we all have a chance to critically examine and participate in forming the theory body of roleplaying games, which I'm doing here.

I suppose you could say that I'm very much exploring impro and psychology, relating it to my own life, while I already have the relation to and knowledge of roleplaying. What I'm exploring in roleplaying is rather how the hobby links with psychology and impro, and just what this means.

Humanism

I have realized that in many ways I am a flaming humanist and existentialist, and this is perhaps the very reason I have decided to bring together the seemingly disparate domains of psychology, impro and role-playing in this blog. It is high time to examine this link, I believe.

Humanism is a rather vague concept, but to put it rather simply: To me it means a trust in other humans, their kindness and their capability, both individually and collectively. A sense of respect of, and inspiration from what other people find meaningful or important in life.

Humanistic psychotherapy
I described humanistic psychotherapy (or client-centered therapy) very briefly in my introduction to psychology, now let's take a closer look. I will stay out of the techniques and and theory framework of the humanistic psychotherapy, and just detail the therapist-client relationship.

Genuineness, acceptance and empathy has been labelled "the Rogerian triad" (Carl Rogers) and is the core of how to a therapist should conduct hirself in client-centered therapy.

The therapist should trust the positive force of change within the client and just, well listen, basically. The therapist should create a warm and accepting atmosphere with the client, in which the client will allow hirself to explore hir thoughts and worries fully and with hir own words, without any fear of failing or "doing it wrong".

With careful prompting the therapist can encourage this, deepen the clients processing, encouraging hir to think more deeply and with more perspective on hir issues, reaching an understanding of hirself.
There is also an emphasis on picking up on the clients wording and thought structure: To understand the client through hir own understanding of the world and hirself, rather than through a cognitive or psychodynamic terminology - What is meaningful to this person?

My material on therapy exercises (A translation, I don't know the original source actually!) also mentions seven common worries the therapist should forget about, and instead focus on the patient in the here and now.

Rogers' research is the reason psychologists of today goes "mm-hm" and "I understand you felt angry at that point" all the time ;-)

Impro theatre
Now let's take these principles and compare them to the five guidelines of impro theatre I outlined in the last post. Take a minute to think this over, try to see the same connections that I see.

Don't worry, listen = Be spontaneous (1)
Empathy = Always make your partner look good (2)
Acceptance = Always say yes (3)
Genuineness = Don't try to be funny (4), be spontaneous (1)
and finally
Pick up on the clients themes = Listen to and pick up what the other actors bring to the scene (1-5, really)


What does this similarity tell us?


Both impro and client-centered therapy is about putting trust in your own and your fellow human's genuine and unadulterated capability for creation and understanding (impro) or inner potential for growth and insight (therapy)

It is about creating a warm, creative atmosphere together, where something can grow, given space, a little nourishment and a little encouragement.

It is about using one mouth to talk, but two ears to listen, picking up everything your fellow human contributes, carefully building something out of it, be it the story of this stage, or the story of this human being's life.

To me, this is trust and love for other people.

Impro and client-centered psychotherapy mirrors each other in philosophy, and thus impro is the humanistic theatre.

So, are there humanistic role-playing games as well? Next up I'll introduce the third pillar of this blog, role-playing, which now is long due.

I'm introducing: Improvisation theatre

Impro theatre is a technique drama teacher Keith Johnstone invented to teach his students to be more spontaneous. Impro turned out to be entertaining in it's own right though, and a new form of theatre was born. Most times it is done for comedic value, sometimes hysterical comedic, bu there is also a move towards more serious impro, such as Kenn Adam's book "How to improvise a full length play" and Johnstone's own stance on the matter.

Typically impro is done as Theatresports - Two teams face off in a good-natured and playful contest, taking turns of challenging each other to short scenes with given rules and themes. (Could be anything really, for example best enactment of a folk tale, best single actor scene, best scene with a audience member participating)

My experience is mainly from the local group gbgimpro (Gothenburg impro) and their after work impro nights. The formula here being:
1) The group explains the rules for the next scenes and then play it out (For an instance, whenever the audience shouts "Sounds like a song!", the actors has to do a music number of the line sie just said. Another example of rules would be that every actor has to speaks in three word lines)
2) The group asks for volunteers from the audience to play a scene according to the same rules
3) The audience provides a setting/mission for the scene (For an instance; robbing a bank or redecorating a house)
Costume and props are never used, except for chairs, whereas Johnstone is a strong proponent of using sets and props. This would probably clash with the audience participation of gbgimpro, though.

Kenn Adams sums impro up in the three following guidelines:

1) Be spontaneous
Don't plan in advance, act on your partner actors! In Johnstone's books, exercise upon exercise is spent upon training this very simple idea, to react in a second rather than trying to think up something "good".
2) Always make your partner look good
Stressing the collaborative aspect of impro. Beginner impro actors are often so caught up in their own performance and planning (Which they aren't supposed to be doing anyway) that they don't take notice of what the other actors are doing.
3) Always say yes
Don't block the story, advance it! There seems to be a great fear among the actors of impro of actually progressing the story, letting other actors take control, or even to accept their own spontaneous ideas, a sort of achievement-anxiety self-censoring.

Keith Johnstone doesn't provide distilled guidelines in his books, but if you boil it down, these two could be added to the guide to impro:

4) Don't try to be funny, just act on the moment 
Going for the quick laughs will only feel forced and won't let the scene develop. In his exercises Johnstone even has his student trying to be as bland as they can, and to stay within the circle of what the audience expects (Which is rather complex, actually)
5) Allow yourself be altered 
Johnstone describes how actors fear "losing", having the other actors get the drop on you. For instance, he describes a horror scene the victim takes delight in, instead of becoming horrified. The actor are striving to maintaining control for their roles instead of vanquishing it.

These guidelines captures the very essense of "letting something grow".
Impro is about being in the moment, being one with the scene together with the other actors - To let the scene and the other actors into yourself, so to speak.
Don't plan, listen instead.
Don't act like an actor would act, instead react, lend your body and mind out to the scene and just act on what happens around you, be natural.
Don't stop any ideas or events, let them come out, nourish them, and theatre will grow.

I'm introducing: Psychology

Whenever I feel like I need to provide some background before moving forward, I'll do one of these posts. See it as "getting the building blocks" before doing the actual building. Oh, and I use the word "client" rather than "patient", "sie" for "he or she" and "hir" instead of "his or her".


Psychology. It is the science of mind and behaviour, so you can tell the field is potentially vast. When I say this is a blog on "psychology", just what the heck do I mean? In this post, I will construct a crude map to orient yourself around the domains of psychology we're concerned with on this blog. 

Psychology can basically answer two questions.
1) How does people work?
2) What is your story?

How does people work?
Psychology can be the charting of common human traits and mechanisms: How does perception and thought process work? How does workgroups develop? Why do people get stressed out when stepping up on stage? We're looking for answers to generalise.

What is your story?
Rather than understanding people, I'm working to understand you. Rather than trying to find out the true answers, I'm trying to see how you understand the world, your story. We're looking for an understanding.

Now, imagine we draw a line between these two points, like so.

Now we can place different kind of psychological research and therapies (the application of research) on this continuum, based on how much focus they place on answering these two questions:

Let's go through the labels.

Quantitative research
Research with numbers, basically. If I tell people to administer electric chocks to hapless victims when they answer my questions incorrectly, how many people will obey? And to what extent? (Best experiment ever) The questions are already decided upon, and the research is about finding answers.

Qualitative research
Descriptive resarch, working towards an understanding, basically. "The qualitative method investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when. Hence, smaller but focused samples are more often needed, rather than large samples." (Quote wikipedia)


Cognitive-behaviour therapy
Therapy addressing the patterns of thought and behaviour according to which we operate. Maladaptive patterns (Such as "If I let other people close to me, they will hurt me, I must reject them before they got too close") are transformed into more adequate patterns. Often, these patterns and thoughts are automatic and not conscious.

Psychodynamic therapy
Rather than changing the patterns of thought and behaviour, the therapist and the client are working to expose the underlying causes to these patterns. Big emphasis on your past life, your relationship to your parents which you recreate in relation to other people, how you cope with/defend against anxiety...

Humanistic therapy
Rather than interpreting the client's story according to psychodynamic therapy, the therapist is encouraging the client to process hir own story deeper and more fully, and find hir own answers. Instead of using psychodynamic theory, the terapist tries to find the client's own concepts of what is meaningful and important in hir story.

(I'd like to point out right now that there is a very strong connection between the words "meaning" and "story".)

As I said, this is a rather crude map. Psychological theory doesn't really divide between Facts and Story in the way I've shown here, but it's a convinient way to present psychology in it's entirety on a blog that is concerned with stories, such as this one. I have left out a whole bunch of different therapies and research domains, but this will do just fine for now.