[Theory] Let's have a good look at Colour, again
JoyWriter:
Quote from: Ben Lehman on October 15, 2009, 10:54:16 AM
Simon: My thought (and this is just my thought, at the moment) is that color results in ad-hoc decisions, whereas setting (and character) result in principled decisions.
I don't think they need to be distinct in that sense; these distinctions weren't created to answer that question. If I'm not mistaken they were a characterisation of what happens in a moment of roleplaying in a general enough way, even though the character<->setting distinction still reminds me a little strongly of the player GM divide. In actual fact I think it's probably just the classic living/unliving divide applied to the SIS. Although which has more "history" to it?
Warning, language change
Personally I'd rather grab all the "history" and "what is this game world about" and stuff and stick it in a separate category called setting, with situation and character meaning living and unliving stuff that is "within the setting" and is changing together. To put that a bit clearer, you can think of my version of setting being the "potential grab box" for situation and character, not actually existing in the SIS except as limits on what can be introduced.
So you have situation and character effecting one another, and changing in various ways according to the system and sharing similarities according to colour. The setting is in the background, setting what is possible or not possible.
Unfortunately this "rigour" of definitions grabs the word situation, which is a nice helpful word to describe any moment in time. It's a shame because the distinction I want to make is between the background stuff and the setting right now which is what the characters are interacting with, but is not itself a character, which currently use the same word.
This clears up the problem with understanding colour I think, because you can have what is "possible in the setting" (whichever word we end up using for that), and the mood and feel of the thing right now. A setting can be fixed to a specific colour like "always grimdark", or you can have it so that it is capable of varying. This means then that the situation right now might be dark, composed of characters and [situation/now-setting/environment/context/whatever] that share those traits in combination, even though the setting doesn't always need to be this way.
In this way Ben, your gut impression is exactly right, if the setting is the principles/potential of the SIS, and colour applies only to stuff we are sharing and imagining in this specific situation.
I'm sure you get what I'm going for, the question is how to change the language if this is a good way to see it. Or if this is a good way to see it!
For example, do people say "my setting is a world where centaurs from the future have conquered everything" or do they say "the setting for this scene is a trendy bar called war"? Well when talking to them about game design, they generally say the former, or qualify the latter sufficiently for us to be able to understand it.
On the principle of letting people be right as much as possible, I say we should shift "setting" to refer to the former only, if we want to preserve this distinction between the general/historical and the specific/now in our conversation. One nice thing about this is that "setting" could then refer to character backgrounds as well, which is in my experience exactly what happens sometimes; players create character backgrounds, and I weave them together with my own setting stuff to make what we draw on in play, it's all bits of setting that we put together to make the shared setting we play from.
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello everybody
A lot of good things have been said and I need some time to reflect, so I'd like to ask you to hold off from posting until I can sort through your ideas and my thoughts, please. I'll try to be back before Sunday evening (European time).
Cheers!
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello to the newcomers
To all those bringing in their own models! My concern is really only a minor squabble with respect to the bigger picture: either we agree to redefine Colour to take into account the potential it has to be transformed into other elements of Exploration, or we acknowledge this same dynamic as another, acquainted, notion. Nobody seems to contest my basic observation, and I see no reason to re-engineer the whole Big Model from the ground up to take it into account. If any of you insist that we need to go beyond the Big Model or change other aspects of it, I'd like you to take those issues to new topics of their own, please, or at the very least relate it to my actual play snippets in some way, asking questions along the way when necessary.
Josh in particular, I'm not understanding where you're going in your last post and why you need to redefine the other Exploration elements (it seems to me like you're making it more complicated than necessary), most probably because you haven't grounded it in any AP.
Jay, I too believe that you agree with the Big Model, beyond the mere names given to the concepts. Which is to say that I believe that we agree.
Simon, from my point of view, your questions have been answered by Josh and Ben. If you have the feeling you're still struggling to get the point I'm putting forward, it might be best that we have a thorough look at Colour in a thread of your own. I'd participate to my best capabilities. This does not mean that I'm "throwing you out", just trying to develop the discussion to related threads if necessary.
Josh, yes, my preferred mode of decision-making is "in the moment" rather than "what could happen", as your comment reflects. I find it is much more satisfying in the long run, but I understand this is a matter of personal preference. In this case, the time-travel component arose purely from play and, I believe, Colour. A bit after the beginning, we had a scene where one of the characters sees a pot with four varieties of flowers, one supposed to blossom for each of the four seasons (the rules of the game demand that the first scene of each episode be explicitly set in one of the seasons), but all were actually in bloom. This notion of a frozen time was a subtle hint to the problem of the souls that had to be given back to whom they belonged. Some pseudo-physicist talk and overt surrealism impregnating our play all along, so that in the end nobody took it as a far stretch to travel backwards in time (as opposed to merely readjusting the flow of time and see what comes from there).
Ben, your posts bring forward a nice connection. And I think I see how it goes back to Vincent's post. A richer Colour also allows easier material referring to the fiction (also this and that), in some way. My Polaris character flying away was inspired by the end-game rules, in a given situation. The time travel in Prosopopée was a way to bring a solution to the imbalance (this is what playing the game is about) manifested by the four blossoming flowers and the trapped souls of the seafarers.
So maybe another way of describing my initial point is that Colour gives context to rules application (and vice-versa, having some rules will coax out specific decisions from a given Situation).
I'm not quite sure if I'm really doing a new formulation of the same thing, pointing out at related aspects or beginning to realize that I'm mixing together a number of notions that are best left separated, I'll need some more time and discussion for that.
Thanks to everybody for having let me catch up! Feel free to post again.
JoyWriter:
Quote from: Christoph Boeckle on October 18, 2009, 10:43:24 AM
Josh in particular, I'm not understanding where you're going in your last post and why you need to redefine the other Exploration elements (it seems to me like you're making it more complicated than necessary), most probably because you haven't grounded it in any AP.
Interesting you should say that, most "definitions" I've seen of the exploration elements is done on a phenomenological basis, trying to see what definitions are the most natural given the differences of how we interact with stuff. In other words I haven't seen Creative Agenda as being integral to the definition of exploration, (in that exploration can be categorised just fine without mentioning it) and it'd be cool to see how that viewpoint works. In terms of necessity, most of that post is one of those foul-ups of language and vocabulary more than anything, as I try to explain the value of separating past history+setting possibilities from the current situation. Basically I think it clears up nicely the difference between the different elements, dodging a lot of sillyness while building in some of the lessons I've learned about situation generation, pre-made setting and the mood of a moment, but clearly I have a long way to go before I've made that case!
I'm happy to scrap it too if I understand something else as better, it's just that at the moment that's where I am. Your explanation of exploration as creation (creative agendanation?) may be able to change that!
Quote from: Christoph Boeckle on October 18, 2009, 10:43:24 AM
The time travel in Prosopopée was a way to bring a solution to the imbalance (this is what playing the game is about) manifested by the four blossoming flowers and the trapped souls of the seafarers.
How lovely, I didn't know how much of that related to the core of the game, nice to see something pointing in that direction.
Almost sounds like someone in your group was pushing the edges of the world a little there; "oh we have to have different seasons do we?", but in a way that went very well. Sometimes I've found this happens because people push the edges only to find the core flow is more fun, or because everyone just shifts with them a bit, I imagine it was the former, with the seasons being strongly reinforced by the end of the game. If so that's probably a good sign for the game design.
chance.thirteen:
I am terrible with the specific vocabulary here, but I thought I would take a stab at it:
Color can just be details, or more hopefully, details that reflect the genre and/or the themes of a game. It helps the player get in the right frame of mind.
Color should .... well, color situation and resolution if you can, much like many systems would like resolution to reflect the theme.
For example: in a noir styled (or is that a genre?) game, color might be "garish neon reflected on the rain slicked streets" or "quaint homes with neat little lawns, their human warmth locked behind doors and pulled curtains". This does not address thematic elements for the characters like betrayal, vice, or ambiguity. It does however suggest those themes. It might include some terms to use (like naming a kill class Torpedo, or including a list og cant, slang, or vocabulary). Likewise, to me at least, color is the low end of that "poetic" feel that says a situation feels right, or a resolution is on the right track.
So in specific, as part of a game product, color could be carried in snipets of fiction (some Chandler) , the artwork (some photos or dark illustrations, the layout and graphics (looks like a typed report with old style typwriter font like Smash), as well as a good list of topics, images, news items, trends, terms, etc., to throw in as a narrator. You might include advice like if you are going to address isolation, the big city, or the idea of either cynicism or that the characters are tainted by their own choices you could mention those houses with their families locked away as part of an opener, but also return to that image as part of some resolution where it reflects how it is for the characters.
Do that right, and the author(s) has helped carry your mind to their vision of play or possible play, much as suggesting certain guidelines for behavior has also shared a vision of how they wish players to play.
Is that what everyone has been saying?
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