Looking at the idea called 'system' again
contracycle:
Quote from: Caldis on October 29, 2009, 08:37:39 PM
A few things need to be straightened out. The System does matter article predates the Lumpley principle so what that article is talking about and what system has come to mean may not be exactly the same thing. Look to the provisional glossary or better yet check out http://www.lumpley.com/opine.html
Well of course that begs the question, "has come to mean to whom, exactly?".
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It may be by negotiation between players and gm, it could be up to the gm to decide or it may be determinable by expending resources. All of it makes up system.
Yes. And each of those will be (or should be) textually specified, and thus constitute system in the formal and organised sense.
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If you are using ad hoc decisions to determine what happened in the game then that is part of the system the game is using. And yes Contra there is only one system and your definition nails it "People sit around and agree what happens in the game." That is exactly the definition of system the question is how do they get to the point of agreement. If they dont agree about what happens in the game it's impossible to have a game.
I don't buy it. If that is true, then the corollaries I have pointed out necessarily follow, and game design as such is a waste of everyones time and effort. If all of RPG can be reduced to childhood make believe of the "there's a boogeyman in the closet! And he has sharp dripping fangs!" variety then it has regressed to the point of nothingness.
If system is not organised, and cannot (or need not) be written, and cannot be reproduced by other people reading that text, then the very idea that systems can and do have different outcomes, and be built to produce particular kinds of experience, to address a potent premise or present a challenge, in short matter, is also invalidated.
I think you have a serious case of category confusion going on. The rules of the road do not, of course, tell you how to drive in every specific situation, but they do provide a rule based method for figuring out what to do, or what to expect others will do, when you encounter real situations. Of course in driving from point A to point B you will be required to make many ad hoc and specifically situational decisions, but those things do not supplant or invalidate the general rules of road conduct you have learned. The ad hoc decisions you make are executed within the framework of, and with reference to, the general systematic rules. "You steer the car to get where you're going" is not a useful method by which to determine who should give way at a roundabout.
I think you have drawn completely the wrong conclusion from the valid observation that not all operational rules are explicit. You seem to have concluded that therefore any decision carries the same weight as a rule, whereas what should have been concluded is that the non-explicit rules should be identified and made explicit.
Caldis:
Quote from: contracycle on October 29, 2009, 09:32:50 PM
I think you have a serious case of category confusion going on. The rules of the road do not, of course, tell you how to drive in every specific situation, but they do provide a rule based method for figuring out what to do, or what to expect others will do, when you encounter real situations. Of course in driving from point A to point B you will be required to make many ad hoc and specifically situational decisions, but those things do not supplant or invalidate the general rules of road conduct you have learned. The ad hoc decisions you make are executed within the framework of, and with reference to, the general systematic rules. "You steer the car to get where you're going" is not a useful method by which to determine who should give way at a roundabout.
That's the thing though. There are rules of road conduct and they govern how you should act on the road however does anyone follow all of them all the time? If we want to look at how someone is driving do we look at the laws of the road and then determine that obviously this is the way the person is driving? If the person drives for years, speeds, parks illegal, doesnt shoulder check but has always gotten to work and back how safe without causing any accidents cant we say that he has a system where sometimes he follows the rules and sometimes he ignores them? It's repeatable, he's done it multiple times and it always works out despite no written rules that show exactly how he was driving.
In a more role play fashion. I've played several games basically free form. We get together come up with ideas and run with them. When characters come into conflict we've sometimes negotiated the outcome or sometimes we'd roll dice and compare to help us decide what happened. There are no written rules anywhere but we are able to resolve what's happening in the game, we have some kind of system going on since we're able to do it repeatedly.
Maybe system is the wrong word maybe it should be thought of as process because essentially that's what we are talking about. What steps happen that take us from point a to point b and this is why design is important, why system matters, and where creative agenda comes in. You cant just look at the mechanics of a game and think you have everything figured out. You can try and make mechanics that tell you exactly how to play but if you dont also tell the person what the goal of the game is they're quite likely to abuse them or misuse them. If you only consider the mechanics of a game system then you are missing out on what's going on simply because no one has created a mechanic for it before such as setting and situation creation which are absent in the vast majority of games.
contracycle:
Quote from: Caldis on October 30, 2009, 07:54:47 AM
That's the thing though. There are rules of road conduct and they govern how you should act on the road however does anyone follow all of them all the time? If we want to look at how someone is driving do we look at the laws of the road and then determine that obviously this is the way the person is driving? If the person drives for years, speeds, parks illegal, doesnt shoulder check but has always gotten to work and back how safe without causing any accidents cant we say that he has a system where sometimes he follows the rules and sometimes he ignores them? It's repeatable, he's done it multiple times and it always works out despite no written rules that show exactly how he was driving.
No. even someone doing all those things benefits from the prevailing system, because they make other driovers predictable. Even if he, individually, doesn't always drive on the correct side of the road, the fact that everyone else does means the roads as a whole are not one huge traffic jam of random drivers.
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In a more role play fashion. I've played several games basically free form. We get together come up with ideas and run with them. When characters come into conflict we've sometimes negotiated the outcome or sometimes we'd roll dice and compare to help us decide what happened. There are no written rules anywhere but we are able to resolve what's happening in the game, we have some kind of system going on since we're able to do it repeatedly.
Sure; but I bet you could write them down if pushed, just as you have attempted to describe them here. I've played games myself not too dissimilar, in which the only really functional rule was that thr GM had all authority. But that was the rule, and we all knew it and were all signed up to it.
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Maybe system is the wrong word maybe it should be thought of as process because essentially that's what we are talking about. What steps happen that take us from point a to point b and this is why design is important, why system matters, and where creative agenda comes in. You cant just look at the mechanics of a game and think you have everything figured out. You can try and make mechanics that tell you exactly how to play but if you dont also tell the person what the goal of the game is they're quite likely to abuse them or misuse them. If you only consider the mechanics of a game system then you are missing out on what's going on simply because no one has created a mechanic for it before such as setting and situation creation which are absent in the vast majority of games.
That is not the problem. The problem is that you are failing to distinguish between the process, whatever it may be, and the decisions made according to that process. Thus "how you do things" and "what you actually do" have become an inchoate mass. In your schema, the "steps... that take us from point a to point b" can't be separated out from the fact that a happened and b happened. Instead of a and b being indicators or results of system at work, they have become manifestations of system itself.
Callan S.:
Quote from: Marshall Burns on October 29, 2009, 03:43:42 PM
All right. This is probably gonna get me into arguments, but what the hell.
There is no such thing as "shit just happening." If something happens, it happens because something caused it to happen. Gravity, momentum, Newton's second law of mechanics, and conservation of energy caused the beach balls to behave as they did (what causes gravity, et al? Fuck if I know, but before we get into anything like that, such theoretical physics are a bit beyond our scope here, yes?).
Likewise, if some people are sitting around a table, anything that happens at that table happens because one or more of them caused it to happen.
Such a collection of causes and their effects, and the events that prompt causes into action, among a specific group of players for a specific unit of play comprises a specific System (as defined by the LP). Therefore there is no way for System to not exist. There is no way for things to happen at the table without someone causing them to happen.
Bold mine.
This is probably the core dissonance here, Marshall - you've switched from 'something', to 'someone'. Treated them interchangeably, just as I was talking before about confusing and mixing up darwinistic system and man made system.
Is someone at the table causing gravity to exist? Is someone at the table causing momentum to exist? No. But none the less you say gravity exists, and you call that a system - then you go on to use that as support in saying "There is no way for things to happen at the table without someone causing them to happen". There's no way for gravity to happen at the table, without someone causing it to happen? No, the system of gravity and momentum and sound waves, etc goes on and on regardless of whatever anyone at the table causes to happen. Indeed, sound waves stimulating auditory nerves, stimulating synapses, simulating vocal cords, vocal chords making sound waves, sound waves stimulating auditory nerves...it all keeps on keeping on even if no one causes it to.
There being a darwinistic system involved at the table is in no way an indicator or evidence that there is a man made system at the table.
But your post starts off trying to prove that a system of physics exists (which I'd agree with that proof). But then you try and use that to try and prove there's always a system between men at the table.
The system of physics 'allow' me to lift a sword and hack a man down to bloody kindling, to give a OTT but clear example. There is a darwinistic system between me and the man. Is there a man made system between me and him? And by that I mean is there a moral system between me and him? The system of physics allow all sorts of amoral activities. If you don't draw a line between the system of physics and a system for men to live by, your moral code will start to erode. Because without a distinction, you start to treat all physically possible acts as moral ones. And so you get the painball gun, or the 'spoofing' of the GM, etc.
Indeed I think it's rather like the brain damage hypothesis - where peoples sense of story can be eroded and perhaps even destroyed by repeated exposure to something that says it's story, but isn't. Same with repeated exposure to something that says it's system, but is nothing more than raw, amoral physics. But that's probably a long draw of the bow - feel free to ignore this paragraph.
Hi Caldis,
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I think you guys are getting messed up because you are thinking of system as something you use to help you play out a session.
How about this - I'm giving the nod and acknowledging you think this is the case. In return, will you give the nod and acknowledge that I think your confusing two types of system for the one? I'm thinking if we can establish atleast that mutual acknowledgement, that's something and A: if we stop, we stopped on something, which is good or B: if we continue, its something to continue from. But if there is no return acknowledgement, there's nothing to continue from.
JoyWriter:
Hoo boy, it is the word police! Well at least we're still trying to act for the benefit of other human beings, and that should give us something to work with.
Callan, you make a valuable point about the dangers of stating a system; it can encourage people to stick with crap just cos they have a name for it. Why? Because people can confuse structure for necessity; just because a group of people do create a repeating or continuous pattern of behaviour, doesn't mean that's the only way for them to do it. That sort of fatalism is what can be really dangerous about creating a picture of the world, but they can be a force for change, because even if the picture was true a moment ago, the very fact that you can see it now means that the pattern itself may change.
That's one important reason why it is valuable to spot patterns in behaviour, whether pre-arranged or otherwise, because you can change it.
Another good reason is because as you suggest, you can see an awesome series of events that happened, and try to replicate them.
But there is no need to fear "systems". So to answer your very first question, yes a verbal abusive man on a train + your lack of response to it, or a husband who physically abuses his wife, and her response to it, or a GM who damages your investment in a game + your response to it, can be considered a set of systems, with potentially quite different dynamics. Not from the (perhaps fictional) "forge consensus" perspective, but from any number of people out there who model social structure. But those structures might not be fixed, there may be ways to resolve them, and perhaps recognising their structure and their persistence will help to remove both of them. The assignment of blame wouldn't change, but maybe it wouldn't happen again.
And I wouldn't push the brain damage idea too far either, a simpler explanation of why people "already have story" is because your words are butting into each other. Perhaps in deference to their language you could say "a better kind of story, which I find so much better I don't call the other stuff story at all", or the same for system. You may find when you start comparing your's and their' versions of story and system, that you both have something to learn from each other, and their not brain damaged so much as unconvinced.
Contracycle, generality is only dangerous if we stop there; we do not complain about all books being in the same library because "I got a book from the library" is not a very informative statement. In the same way, a general definition of what happens in a game is only a problem if it stops there, and we say "stuff happens, hallelujah" or something equally uninformative. The alternative is to look at different kinds of system (subdividing like looking through the library's filing system), and ask which are better, and if the better ones can be shared etc. For example, supposedly David Donachie GMs his game Solipsist very well, but other people can't get the same goodness out of it. If the definition of system is broad enough, we have a big net to catch facts about how he GMs, and develop explicit systems from them.
Now when you compare explicit systems to inexplicit ones, a funny thing occurs; sometimes following rules that specify your entire behaviour doesn't result in the same experience for those doing it. In the beach balls example, replaying a series of events is basically just setting up the original starting situation again and letting it run to it's conclusion, or it is constraining a different pattern of change to the previous one, perhaps with lots of guiding wires attached to the balls.
This is a challenge I have experienced in game design, sometimes it's not about getting someone to replicate what someone else did, as that will only lead to external correctness, but about getting them to the same place or a similar one to that of the original you are modelling, more like method acting or something. I expect that such additional structures are irrelevant for those who can already do the core thing they are supposed to encourage, so I also hope to build them so that they fold away as neatly as possible when not in use. Tricky!
I wouldn't be surprised if almost no-one takes issue with the rather simple idea that we can do things unconsciously or consciously, and we don't pick out and choose every event that happens by perfect scanning of the future. The full consequences of events are almost always more than we plan, than the human activity systems we agree to between each other. I don't think labouring this point will solve the disagreement, because I'm not sure if anyone was making this error to any substantial extent.
I think we could however pick out some interesting stuff about the difference between tolerance and agreement, and predictive capacity in decision-making.
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