[Theory] Let's have a good look at Colour, again
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello Chance
Since you ask, we're not really talking about that. My observation is that Colour has a profound influence on System, Situation, Characters and even Setting, yet the definitions people give of Colour is usually one more or less like yours, completely skipping or even indicating contrary notions ("details that do not change resolution") to what I observe.
My question is, should that aspect of Colour be added to the definition of the beast itself or should it be acknowledged as another, related, phenomenon?
Actually, some thinking about how these things usually work has led me to not especially want to answer the question right now. I mean, there's no official regulatory organism who can validate any term anyway. So the best I can achieve is to generate healthy discussion on the topic and see how (if at all) it influences people's way of talking about Colour in the long run.
A lot of good points have been made in this thread and I was able to connect to some other topics. My thinking has been enriched and now I need some time and further play to reflect.
Maybe it turns out to be a very minor point in the end: a lot of "philosophical" problems are often just a matter of wording. Maybe it's more fundamental and I'll include it in my future designs and feedback (AP and discussions of other designs). Time will tell.
JoyWriter:
Chance, most of that is about a game text, rather than a game in play. I've seen colour used to refer to that before, but Christoph was referring more to an experience of poetic logic created in play that becomes sufficient to significantly define how people play.
So it's different from your description in two ways, scope/power/substantial-ness, and because it's a description of the stuff they were creating then and not a predefined thing they started with.
What I've tried to do is create a positive definition of colour, ie what it is to those who love it and put it square in the centre of their vision, rather than being the "everything else" of someone else's model. Now you can draw analogy to how "right to dream" has grown into a specific thing in forge terminology/understanding, but there is an important difference:
When you define a creative agenda in terms of "it's" own logic, that's fine, because they are supposed to be separate, they don't have (or aren't currently defined as having) any outsides where they must interact or coexist with the other agendas.
But system/colour/situation/character must behave differently, because even when they are not centre focus, they are supposed to be there doing backup for the others, character must be both complex characterisations, and the fact that some player is using a character as a vehicle, because in the first situation the player is focusing on it, and in the latter they are not, but it's still supposed to be there. In the same way, a system could be an intricate mass of interlocking calculations and judgement calls backed up by checks and balances, or it could be "John's word goes", and colour could be vague washes of rom-com lightness, or the kind of barely spoken and complex magic symbolism Marshal loves.
They have to be able to be the "everything else" for the other elements in different games, because between them they are supposed to encompass the entire shared creative act!
So colour, like all the other elements, should be defined so that it is able to vary in play between different poles of importance for different people. And we should be able to distinguish between colour defined going into the game; background colour (I finally found the word for what I was going at) and the colour of the moment in play.
Now all of that assumes you actually want to define terms in a model to that degree of accuracy!
chance.thirteen:
How do you think the model, or any model, deals with something that goes from background color to the color of the experience itself? And how does that relate to giving an award?
Is there some fine insight to be gained? I could see the "poetic" end of the spectrum being a goal in itself, where the experience feels right to the player. Where does that fit?
Lior Wehrli:
Sorry to resurrect a kind-of dead thread. But reading this really pulls me to post the thoughts I had for a while concerning color. Let me propose the following definition:
Color is detail of character, situation or setting that inspires.
It is not important if the detail matters in terms of system or if it is without systemic consequence. What matters is that it inspires play. The more color in a detail, the higher the chances that it will inspire a change of SIS in some way, even if the systen does not give the detail per se influence to character, setting or situation.
So Christoph, your character walking around with his head under his arm influenced play because that was a colorful detail (of character). If you had narrated him as just being dead without adding any color, that detail would have played out much less importance.
Similarly, by choosing the sextant you chose a colorful object which inspired the players to add more color and derive story elements from that.
Does that strike a chord with anybody or am I way off off how everyone else sees "color"?
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello Lior
What you just said... I think that with such a definition as you propose I'd never have opened this thread in the first place. Of course, Colour inspires! While I might want to be more precise in the long run (but maybe not), this is really a good summary of what I've been trying to say, it captures all I described. I've been even formulating some of my ideas in French with this word, but didn't realize it was so central. Yeah... really simple in fact. Excellent, thanks for weighing in.
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