Name the phenomenon: Inter-player SIS incohesion
Hans:
Quote from: Danny_K on January 30, 2008, 11:32:50 AM
I have to agree with Hans, what I'm seeing in that example (and I may be making way too much out of one example) is not divergent imagined worlds, but rather blatant privileging by the GM of Joe over Adam -- Joe's input is acknowledged, Adam's is not, everybody else follows the GM's lead.
Ouch.
As the GM in question, this hits the bone. Because the GM you describe...wow, I REALLY don't want to be that GM. I had not considered the idea of Making a Racket being a strategy to deal with a GM that sidelines you. That is a brilliant insight. In fact, that is the exact kind of GM that tempts me to Make a Racket!
Of course I never actually Make a Racket, because everything I do is so interesting and awesome. That's like the joke about being drunk. The first stage of being drunk is that you speak REALLY LOUDLY. But that's ok, because in the 2nd stage of drunkeness, everyone is so very interested in what you have to say.
So now I have to think through my own behaviour and consider whether I'm doing this or not. Is "Adam" being a Fishmalk, or am I, as the GM, essentially screwing "Adam" over by not listening to him? Or is the truth somewhere in between?
Thanks for this, Danny. Self-examination is a good, if painful, thing.
lachek:
It might well be that what I'm seeing as recurring problems with SIS incohesion are actually a large number of completely separate issues arising from problems with social dynamics. The reason I hypothesized that they were potentially the same issue in different manifestations, potentially with similar underlying causes, is that they tend to manifest similarly and exhibit the same symptoms:
1. Dyadic communications player <--> GM with little or no group communication2. An objectively disjointed narrative
To put this in context of Hans' terminology:
Suspension seems separate from this phenomenon. It is by definition #2, but doesn't have to stem from #1 at all. Further, it is easily resolved as soon as the problem has been identified.
Cacophony is much closer to what I'm intending to describe. Like Marshall's mention of improvised music, everyone is playing the tune they (think they) want to hear without riffing off each other at all, with aesthetically unpleasing results. They do this by engaging in #1 and the result is #2.
Making a Racket can, but doesn't have to be done by engaging in #1. In fact, it appears more likely to me that a Prima Donna would be pushing hir ideas onto the other players directly for maximum effect. #2 follows only if the other players ignore the input given. However, if a Cacophony or some other phenomenon has previously damaged the SIS, a player may be Making a Racket involuntarily because they genuinely believe it's what people want to hear.
So primarily, I'm interested in solving the problem of Cacophony.
As an example of a design that limits Cacophony, I suggest the conflict rules in Spirit of the Century. An Aspect can be put onto a scene or character by one PC, which another PC can subsequently Tag for a bonus. The design provides benefits to the player for listening to and understanding what another player is trying to achieve, which promotes a coherent SIS.
Another example is hardcore-gamist D&D with players who have carefully tuned their characters to work well together - they need to be able to communicate with the group in order to time when to be outside a fireball's radius or which hydra head has already been damaged.
An example of negative reinforcement contributing to a strong SIS is any system where the GM is given arbitrary control over success or failure, dependent on how well the PC's action corresponds with the GM's interpretation of SIS. Here, all players must ensure they are all on the same page - the GM's - to ensure they don't get penalized. Obviously, such a system may have negative consequences, but does contribute to a strong SIS.
I would love to hear other approaches and/or analyses.
lachek:
Quote from: Hans on January 30, 2008, 12:29:21 PM
I had not considered the idea of Making a Racket being a strategy to deal with a GM that sidelines you. That is a brilliant insight. In fact, that is the exact kind of GM that tempts me to Make a Racket!
Of course I never actually Make a Racket, because everything I do is so interesting and awesome. That's like the joke about being drunk. The first stage of being drunk is that you speak REALLY LOUDLY. But that's ok, because in the 2nd stage of drunkeness, everyone is so very interested in what you have to say.
So now I have to think through my own behaviour and consider whether I'm doing this or not. Is "Adam" being a Fishmalk, or am I, as the GM, essentially screwing "Adam" over by not listening to him? Or is the truth somewhere in between?
Thanks for this, Danny. Self-examination is a good, if painful, thing.
I'm not going to stop you, Hans, but I don't think you need to self-examine too much. In this particular case, we were all guilty of ignoring Adam's input. By virtue of consensus, I think that means it was a genuine case of "Making a Racket" - which isn't necessarily something one does by malice, but rather by an attempt at Bringing The Awesome that's been sabotaged by one's misinterpretation of the SIS.
For our game, this is what the problem boils down to for me. I (the player) really want to care about Sand's dead wife and the fact that his recent freakout caused him to take yet another life. I really want to care that Mullethead's perception of how to treat women is shaped by the constant extreme violence surrounding him. I really want to find out what's in El Diablo's Damn Briefcase and why he kills anyone who asks about it.
(To be honest, I haven't been able to peg down the Devil Clown.)
The problems for me are two-, maybe three-fold. One, I'm stuck in the paradigm of "what would my character do", and frankly, these are human issues. He hates humans. Wants them all to die in a horrible radioactive conflagration, in fact. Two, I'd like to change the way he views things and what he cares about, but our sessions are pretty fast-paced and conflict-to-conflict (which is all well and good, from how I understand Dust Devils). Not a lot of room for, as we call them, 'Royale with Cheese moments' and accompanying character growth (I gave it a shot with the "offal discussion" I had with the techno-fetishists, but it didn't repeat). Three, there appears to be a kind of consensus at the table that we don't do story-180's - we're there to get in the face of Osiris Christ, and unless we're thrown a curveball, that's the path we will follow. To use yet another inside joke to make this whole post completely incomprehensible and useless to anyone else, we don't suddenly decide that we want to "dabble in human trafficking", or take some other off-path approach towards inducing character change.
So for me, it might well boil down to an idiotic stubbornness against "breaking character", but that still doesn't explain why other players do not appear to interact much.
Hans:
Quote from: lachek on January 30, 2008, 12:54:05 PM
1. Dyadic communications player <--> GM with little or no group communication2. An objectively disjointed narrative
Point 1 got me thinking.
Lets take a situation of two players in a game I was involved with, call them Amy and Beatrice (names changed to protect, etc.) Amy and Beatrice both want positive feedback of their peers; laughter, gasps, rapt attention, all those signals that tell us that other people think what we are doing is cool. That positive feedback, I am convinced, is the fuel on which ANY good game, regardless of creative agenda, rules system, etc., really runs.
Here is the problem, pretty much everything Amy says, Beatrice thinks is boring and stupid. Is everything Amy says REALLY boring and stupid? I don't think so, but these are asethetic judgements, not principled ones. Beatrice is entitled to Beatrice's opinion. Beatrice is enough of a mensch to not actively harsh on Amy. She doesn't (usually) come out and say "Amy, that was boring and stupid". But, lets face it, Amy NEVER gets props from Beatrice. Amy is lucky to even have Beatrice pay attention. So, whenever there is an interaction between Amy and Beatrice's characters, what happens?
"Dyadic communications player <--> GM with little or no group communication".
That's because the GM IS providing that positive feedback to Amy, or at least more of it than Amy is getting from Beatrice, and Beatrice isn't really that interested in what Amy is saying anyway and doesn't honestly care for any positive feedback from Amy.
This can definitely lead to an "objectively disjointed narrative" because Amy and Beatrice aren't really listening to each other, only to what is happening as filtered through the GM.
Point #2 also has me thinking.
Cacophony either exists or not, but its effects are heavily contingent on the attitudes of the players. Even if all the players agree there is an "objectively disjointed narrative", some may say "That's awful!" and others might say "yeah, so what?", or even "Wow, that's awesome!" I think its importance is also contingent on the type of story being told; the faster the pace, the more frenetic the action, the less the details matter compare to the big picture, the more tolerance for Cacophony, I believe. If you are playing Call of Cthulu in heavy investigation mode, whether or not people picture the knife as in the kitchen or the dining room could be absolutely vital. If you are playing Dust Devils in whacked 1980's exploitation movie post-apocalyptic mode, it could be that Cacophony might even ENHANCE the fun, as everybody wonders what the hell everybody else is talking about.
Actual Play moment from the game Mikael and I are talking about: the devil clown player in one scene suddenly started talking about his character wanting to "suck the soul" out of one of the NPC's. It was a bit left fieldish. I asked the player what his intention was...."Do you want to kill the NPC?" "No" "Do you care if the NPC has any reaction at all, or is it enough for your character to think that the soul is sucked?" "I'd like there to be a real reaction." I though for a second. Say yes or draw the cards is the rule in Dust Devils...so I said yes. So we role-play out a scene in which the Devil-Clown character and the NPC kiss, and then the Devil-Clown acts as if he has just sucked in a tasty soul, and the NPC shudders and reacts as if something horrible has just happened. Another player suddenly says something like "What the hell just happened?! Did that Devil-Clown really just suck that guys soul out? What the...that's crazy!" He said this in a tone of voice that said a) that was cool but b) you guys are confusing the crap out of me here!
Was this an "objectively disjoint narrative"? I don't know. It wasn't for me and the Devil-Clown character, but I think it was for the third player (although I think he thought it was cool anyway). Was this Cacophony? Probably. Was the Cacophony in this place a bad thing? I don't think so.
lachek:
I'll make this brief to give others a chance to chime in (if they want to) without derailing too much.
I don't think devil-clown-boy's soul sucking was an example of an objectively disjointed narrative, because no fictional character reacted counter to the logic of the reality that player had created. For example, I suggested that my peyote-hopping hippie would "see" a green, putrid mist moving from the NPC to the devil-clown at the moment of, um, consumption, thereby confirming that I recognized that player's action beyond the confirmation you'd already given as the GM.
For two crewmembers on a starship to attempt to fix an engine problem in complete silence and entirely in parallel, as if the other character was not even present, is an example of an objectively disjointed narrative. And although I sort of backtracked from the example as representative of the phenomenon, one character lighting a room on fire while everyone else just stands around talking, that's an objectively disjointed narrative.
This may be personal taste, but I don't find pleasure in being confused, on the player-level, as to what is actually going on in the narrative, or being forced to accept entirely illogical protagonist behaviour. I think it's awesome when the story takes a different direction than I suspected, of course - that's why I play with other people rather than write novels - so whenever I riff off of the actions of others, I do so to confirm and make sense of the events that just occurred.
That should give some insight into my motives for condemning disjointed narratives, so y'all can tell me that I'm just trying to promote my own uncultured and inflexible playstyle. :)
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