[Capes] Gamism and Narrativism
Eero Tuovinen:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on July 13, 2009, 05:58:28 PM
I am still interested in someone posting about Capes in these terms, because as far as I can tell, Capes does not promote Narrativist play at all regardless of a certain amount of promotional rhetoric suggesting it does. It is simply and flatly competing for story control, which seems a little bit like what you are talking about here. "Story control" is actually the last imaginable, and quite likely the most disruptive technique possible for Narrativist goals; it's basically railroading, and a game which competes for railroading privileges is just as un-designed for Narrativist goals as a game which grants them to one person throughout play.
When I've played Capes, it's been Narrativistic-coherent. I've also followed along on all sorts of incoherent Capes play; the game holds definite fascination among a subset of Finnish rpg theorists, who view it as a true hybrid or some such. Personally I'd say that Capes seems to work in practice as an incoherent Nar/Gam game which is likely drifted by a given group into something where the one maladjusted guy gets to flex his mojo by trying to ruin the story the others are building; this will be perceived as pleasing or non-pleasing basically based on how high the players set their expectations of play and how well they can play around the disruptive influences of the minority. It irks the hell out of me when the game text defends frivolous interruptions (that's what the non-committed and neutral rules on scene framing and character introduction boil down to; a right to be a jerk), but some players seem to absolutely adore the seeming autonomy they can have from what the other players are trying to do in the game. Ultimately the issue is that you can play a Pool-like vanilla narrativism very successfully, provided that a minority fraction of the players manages to take on a GM-like role to provide adversity; in this case the game quite resembles something like Fastlane, with a strict GM budget. However, if several players try to play adversity at each other with nobody taking on protagonist duties, a narrativistic situation does not emerge because everybody is basically just slinging points at each other, colored a bit by whatever narration they feel like including. It is notable that while Narrativistic Capes can be made to work quite successfully, I've never seen a Gamist version that didn't involve player dissatisfaction with the resulting story; could be that I just haven't seen a group that would have been uniformly committed to enjoying the competitive aspect. This is not surprising, as I don't really see an interesting Gamist hook in the game: there is nothing in the fiction that'd set up or encourage challenges, it all comes from players with a desire to railroad, just like Ron said.
Ron Edwards:
I split Eero's post from Gamism and Narrativism: mutually exclusive? because this topic is definitely worthy of its own thread.
Best, Ron
Alan:
I played Capes at Go Play NW last month. I have a half-finished actual play text somewhere, but I have to be brief right now.
My experience was this: 1) Investing debt chips in a conflict tended to produce emotional investment in that conflict. 2) the primary reward cycle ended with the conversion of debt into story tokens. 3) story tokens can only be used to add a character to a scene or take an extra turn. 4) extra turns lead to more ability to manipulate conflicts or resolve them.
I believe that the emotional investment focuses the players attention on the narrative events and may condition them when it comes time to decide what to do with story tokens. They nudge players towards Story Now.
Eero Tuovinen:
That's a good analysis, Alan. The opposite effect happens with story tokens when players revel in their ability to dominate the game socially; I fully admit that I might be misreading the people's intentions, but it has a whiff of sadism for me when somebody crows triumphantly about how he managed to gain resource superiority in the game and use it to ruin the story. I'm reminded of a campaign my brother played in Helsinki; the group included at least one player for whom the greatest attraction of Capes seemed to be the narrative perversity of being able to "play" an abstract concept like "forgiveness", which then allows one to force all sorts of influence on what the other players, playing characters with actual intent, were trying to do. We discussed the campaign in question pretty extensively over time with the people who played it, and my impression was that there was a definite clash between people who wanted a Narrativist game, and those who wanted to use narrative power to garner attention and bully others. This comes to the fore when a player gets a bunch of story tokens and can really dominate a situation; if that power is used merely because it is there, the end result conflicts with Narrativist goals.
Capes is not the only game in which I encounter this phenomenon of "narrative bullying", it can happen in any game that encourages absolute player right to self-expression. For example, just last week in my TSoY playtest a player went on an amok run in a manner very reminiscent of my second-hand Capes experiences. In TSoY this sort of thing ultimately ends with the character dying an unsympathetic death (caused by the consequences the Story Guide piles on his actions), followed by a frank group discussion of why the player's play failed to captivate or interest the other players. Capes can easily be read to actively encourage this phenomenon as the focus of play (as Ron does), so the dysfunction can be much longer-lasting as the players all, while playing exactly by the rules, try to achieve opposed goals. I suppose it could even be functional if all players were equally disinterested in character protagonism and just wanted to exercise some rhetoric with dice.
On the other hand, in my own play Capes was very clearly Narrativist. I don't necessarily ascribe much of that to the game itself; I'm nowadays rather accomplished with Narrativist games, and our group was pretty experienced overall, and we were expecting a Narrativist game (with a sideways eye open for Gamism), so it's no great surprise that what we got was Narrativistic. Probably the most important technique in making this work is a shared group concern for narrative continuity and firm player role apportioning; when we played, it was clear that scene framing and introducing character components to scenes had to relate meaningfully to the story we were developing; if players did surprising turns, others would demand explanations (and takebacks, though those were not needed in this case, as everybody was on-board). Perhaps the most important and non-obvious part of this playstyle is that everybody needs to either play a protagonist character in a scene or clearly commit to providing adversity for a protagonist; the narrative bullying phenomenon I describe above happens when and if players are just along for the ride and get to play whatever element of the scene they might desire, empty of meaning. The problem disappears if the whole group plays meaningfully instead of just trying to provoke others (which, as the rulebook of Capes correctly states, is actually rewarded mechanically).
Thinking about this in that way, it's actually really easy to understand what is going on with dysfunctional Capes - I mean, nothing in the rules or prep of the game actually encourages or supports the creation of protagonism, so if a player approaches the game without that presumption, it's actually completely reasonable to grab "the roof of that house" as your character for the scene and then proceed to disrupt other players as much as you can to provoke conflicts and get points. In this regard Capes is a sort of model example of an incoherent game; the players have to know why they're playing, and they have to be able to bring a protagonism model and a reasonable division of labor into it to make story emerge. This is so obvious to some people and so unclear to others that it's no wonder at all if the game gives different impressions to different people.
Ron Edwards:
I greatly appreciate this thread, and Eero, especially your attention to the distinction between text and play. The similarity to Once Upon a Time is quite striking. The main exception is that in the rules text of the card game, there is absolutely no encouragement to dominate the story in a ruinous way in order to win - but the fact is that you're playing a card game with ending win conditions, so how you do that in the crunch is certainly open to that interpretation. Whereas I find that element or instruction to be explicitly present in the Capes text, as you point out as well.
Best, Ron
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