The Social Mandate
GreatWolf:
Well, since Dirty Secrets was invoked, I must now appear.
Jesse's read on the Handbook in Dirty Secrets is dead on. A large chunk of it is trying to express that Social Mandate (or whatever we're calling it), because I didn't want to assume that I had a roleplaying audience when I wrote it. So I spent a lot of time thinking about precisely this point. I've also been reading Rules of Play, a textbook on game design. (Recommended, by the way, if you're interested in this sort of thing.)
Which leads me to Ron's statement:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 03, 2008, 06:24:46 PM
The reason I've always avoided terminology for this stuff is that its lack is, as I see it, a specific flaw or pathology in the culture of role-playing. Because all that stuff you're describing is expected and normal in the pursuit of any other social, leisure activity. You don't find it in the text describing rules for card games, for instance. But without it, any card game is impossible.
Yes, but...
One of the points the authors of Rules of Play make is that no rule set is completely explicit. They use Tic-Tac-Toe as an example. Technically, there's no time limit on taking your turn. However, if I were to refuse to take my turn (thus preventing you from winning) and claim the support of the rules, I would be demonstrating bad sportsmanship. I'm "breaking the rules" somehow, even though they aren't formally stated. Where did these "other rules" come from?
Culture.
Culturally, there's a shared understanding of what a board game or card game is about. As such, these understandings are coded into the implicit rules that we understand as a result of our shared culture. For example, the idea of trying to "win". Pushing for victory is the assumed reason for a game. Of course, we all understand this, but that's because, at some point in our lives, we were taught this.
I don't think that there's the same level of cultural support for roleplaying (independent of our own issues). For storytelling? Sure. But we're not about "storytelling" broadly. Rather, we're about the collaborative creation of emergent narratives through both controlled and random means. I mean, from a certain perspective, we're like the John Cages of storytelling. People show up, expecting a straight-forward narrative, and they get cards and dice and I-Ching readings and the like.
Now, I understand why those things are there and why they actually reinforce quality play. But, from an outsider's perspective, these things are foreign enough to create confusion about the Social Mandate.
Add to that the fact that roleplayers can't actually agree on the basic "thing" that we're doing, and you have a recipe for disaster.
In other words, roleplaying and other "fringe" activities need to enunciate the Social Mandate of what they are doing since they lack strong, widespread cultural support. As these activities gain this cultural support, we can increase the assumptions that we make within our rules, relying on the unspoken rules of conduct that we carry with us.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Seth,
I agree with your basic point about role-playing. I believe it was at GenCon 2005 that I had a discussion with about 18 people, at the Embassy Suites, about precisely this issue, and how "the hobby" wouldn't actually be one until that cultural understanding took hold in some venue that wasn't defined as "gamer." I also thought, and still think, that when that happens, gamer culture will in fact be left behind.
But that last bit is getting away from the point, which is about the text of a game book. You and Jesse have read Spione and you've played a bunch of it, so you know about how I did it: write a book, and put a little game in the form of procedural instructions into it. The interesting thing for the social mandate text is that I focused on CA rather than on enforcing the SIS. That's where I deviated strongly from the very definition of what "an RPG" is, in the physical sense. You did the same with Dirty Secrets, and I notice that some related works (carry, Grey Ranks, Steal Away Jordan, Lacuna, The Drifter's Escape) have found their own ways to deviate from that long-standing definition too.
It's a hard place to be designing and writing in. Yes, the social mandate stuff has to be in there, because we are trying to design and write in a context which just isn't our home game-culture any more. We know that many gamers won't like what we're doing or want to read it. We also know that we are working more in a context that many non-gamers might like if they ever encountered it. How do you design and write for that? There are lots of possibilities for attempting it (for instance, the approach to Spione that I didn't take that would have looked a lot like a German board game), but no known, empirically strong answers, yet.
But ultimately ... one day, probably in a context that will care not one bit for who any of us may be or what our work was like, the really functional game of this kind will not need social mandate text.
So for the present, it's tricky as hell. The audience is composed of (1) gamers who have no social mandate text because historically gaming has missed and even gone into nigh-pathological denial about that particular boat (and in my view suffered badly for it), and (2) non-gamers who are not used to social mandate text because they have never needed it for the activities they're familiar with.
This is a big deal. As far as the conflicts, issues, and how-to concerns that faced the Forge in 2000, we have effectively triumphed. Back then, publishing your own game was considered a vanity act for people who couldn't "get their game published for real." Back then, doing so was fraught with horrible production pitfalls, and typically was conducted in isolation, and aimed at "being like a real game" i.e., the non-independent ones. Back then, what creative dialogue existed was wrapped up in rhetorical failures (balance, roll/role, realism, and lots more). Due specifically to the Forge, the subculture has been transformed, including any number of people and companies who curse its name.
So what now? It's this new task. For one thing, games which treat history and the present as real rather than as fictional settings; for another, drawing directly upon participants' personal histories and values as part of prep and play; and for another, driving toward transformations of attitudes and values as well as enjoying the creation of fiction. And of course, how actually to design, write, and market these funny new things.
Maybe it's time to get all Spione here at the Forge. The German translation is now in layout, and the website is finally approaching the level that I wanted. But it's not just about this one thing! This is something a lot of people are grappling with (examples in development: Black Cadillacs, or more developed, The Face of Angels). I talked with Julia, Nathan, and Jason about our four parallel attempts at GenCon 2007, and our shared enthusiasm for this new sort of thing is really strong. How will social mandate text be constructed? Is this a transitional skill, or effect? Into what?
These are exciting times. I love the Forge and what it does relative to the existing gaming culture and (finally) industry. I want that to keep going, and as I've said before, yield a million stars once its Big Bang has faded. But maybe, now, I see another kind of Big Bang slowly gathering force. This discussion of social mandate text is one such item.
Best, Ron
David Berg:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on January 04, 2008, 02:38:53 PM
How will social mandate text be constructed?
I'd like to see it done with pictures and diagrams. That just seems inherently more user-friendly, fun, and game-like to me. Gonna try this myself once I get through Scott McCloud's work.
Callan S.:
In terms of cultural discussion, games which end with a win/lose condition would assist tremendously I think. Yeah, sure pretty much all roleplayers have gone 'oh, in roleplay no one has to win or lose' at some point. Not to mention nar and sim prefering people probably moving away from win lose in an attempt to break away from wargaming/boardgame/gamist roots.
But the thing is, when the game has a win/lose condition, anyone who wasn't at the session can ask 'Did you win in the end?'. And for the participant, there's no hiding in the mysterious 'oh, there aren't winners or losers', where they can ignore rules but act like they didn't and the amazing amount of murk that goes with it. Someone else, someone from outside the group KNOWS one of the rules, and that rule is that it ends with a win or a loss. That can't be ignored conveniently while acting like they aren't ignoring it "Well, did you win or not?". That outsider will not support the participants illusion of following the rules. And even if he tries to keep the illusion up, he'll just run into more and more people who's question will crack it. "Did you win?". Even if the group tries to keep the illusion of rules following going during the session, the fact that general outside culture insists on one rule being followered (by asking 'Did you win?'), stops any group from developing a complete illusion of rules usage. That one rule, they can't control - and that spoils the rest of the illusion.
I think sim and nar have, thanks to the forge, enough of an identity of their own to be in a game with a win/lose condition, yet still be the main feature (you can kill or fail to kill the master in 'My life with master', can't you?).
Oh, and I think it makes them easier to read - all the options have more context to remember them by, in relation to an overall win/lose condition.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Callan,
I think you're correct in that some kind of culturally-understood statement will have to be involved. However, plain old win-lose isn't going to cut it. I agree that "no one wins or loses" has often been a little dicey or dishonest in RPG texts. Still, win-lose simply cannot apply to Narrativist and Simulationist play. The key for them, or at least the beginnings of thinking about that key, lies in terms of successful vs. unsuccessful play, much in the sense that a musical performance might be.
For instance, regarding My Life with Master, the answer to your query is functionally "no." The rules about that are subtle and superficially appear to support the possibility of the Master's survival, but successful play does mean his or her death. It was even a key point/principle during the game's design: "The Master must die" (I know, because I briefly debated about that point and lost).
Due in part to my own post, which began as an aside, the topic is now drifting. Jesse, where are we? I think the bigger picture of gaming (or more accurately, recent developments in gaming) and the larger culture is diminishing your point about the social mandate in existing games, in gaming as we know it and not what it might be. Can you provide us some direction for the thread from this point?
Best, Ron
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