An interesting phenomena in recent fiction is the tendancy of writers to write in the present tense. (“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” sparked this thought, though there are many others — “A Great and Terrible Beauty,” etc.) I’m not going to pretend that I know whether or not this directly makes a book better or worse, only having read two books that use it. And, frankly, having read “Beauty” is probably a bit of a stretch; I didn’t make it that far at all. I’ll just say that I like it in some cases and not in others. (And that I look forward to the day a book is written entirely in the future tense. Hm… an interesting challenge for NaNoWriMo ‘08.)
Now, the present tense at the physical game table has been around from the beginning. It’s encouraged by the environment: when you’re explaining what your character’s doing, you tend to explain it as if they were doing it right now — IE, in the present tense. But this is different in play-by-post campaign. Players write in a more literary style, and a post could easily be either in the past tense or the present. (I have found, personally, that the longer a post is, the better it looks in past tense.) However, most players choose to write in the present tense; indeed, many PbP sites encourage or even require it.
The sites with those policies explain them by saying that the present tense makes one player’s action easier for another to invalidate and doesn’t assume success. (The idea being that it’s not okay for me to say to you, “I stabbed your character and he fell over, dead;” I should instead write “I attempt to stab your character.” The rules for how this kind of thing is resolved are archaic, complex, and entirely beyond my capacity to explain in my current “splitting-headache” state.) However, that reasoning is pretty flimsy to me: I could just as easily say “I attempted to stab you” as “I attempt to stab you.” I understant the reasoning as to why a tense is established — after going through a game or two where someone was using a different tense than everyone else, I’ll establish one too if I feel the need. But why present instead of past?
I suspect that the reason’s cultural. (It’d be no fun if it wasn’t.) We live in an age of accessibility — please stay; unlike most people who use that phrase, I’m not going to actively persecute the modern era. In times past, we listened to records of what people did: for example, as most RPGers know, the earliest stories were epics and myths of time immemorial. These were of course written in the past tense; they were stories of our ancestors and had happened long ago. In the modern era, however, the emphasis is on what people are doing: TV news gives us up-to-the-minute information, and YouTube covers whatever it missed. And, when it’s time to title a news story or a YouTube clip, the modern man chooses the present tense to cover these current events. It’s only logical to conclude that today’s culture influences (there, I did it) how we write for our play-by-post games.
But then, I play Fourth Edition. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me in the least.
