I learned about System from Munchkins
Jasper Flick:
Is my understanding correct, that lighting the candle is part of system, but deciding at whose house to play is not? I simply lump the candle ritual with rolling dice, filling in the relationship diagram, taking turns in order, and so on. But I leave the social level stuff like planning the meeting, buying snacks and generally behaving socially functional out of its scope.
lumpley:
Jasper: In Polaris you're right, but that's just Polaris, not any theoretical bounds. There's no reason why whose house you play at, or who buys the snacks, or how people behave, couldn't be specified by a game's rules.
My game In a Wicked Age specifies that you should play it with some of your bravest, most creative, and hottest friends, and that you play it for multiple sessions on a regular schedule. If you play it with your dullest friends instead, or without having committed to an ongoing game, you're playing by a different system than I designed.
-Vincent
lumpley:
I'll say a bit more. When you design a game, you design it for a certain particular social context (Ben Lehman's term), inevitably. You have a choice:
1. Leave your intended social context implicit, and hope or expect that the people who pick your game up will already have the social context you've designed for. "Hope and expect" means marketing, or luck, or fat chance, depending on how savvy you are and how common your intended social context is in the wild.
Funny story! Someone once wondered whether I'd ever played my game Poison'd with women in the group (because of shocking subject matter delicate sensibilities something something, I guess). I was quite taken aback - it plain hadn't occurred to me that anyone might play the game in a men-only group. I mean, bleh, what would be the point of that?
2. State your intended social context upfront and leave it up to the eventual players to create that social context for themselves. For instance, In a Wicked Age tells you to have hot friends who can and will commit, sight unseen, to an ongoing game, but it doesn't tell you how to make such friends.
3. Include rules in your game that create the social context you've designed for. This can include rules that reach right straight into the eventual players' purely social interactions, like Polaris' candle ritual.
Now, so: system is what actually happens in play. It's within social contract, a subset of social contract: everything in a game-in-action's system is part of the group's social contract, but the group's social contract includes much that isn't system. That's plain Big Model. This idea of social context, though, means that any particular element of social contract - whose house you play at, who's hot for whom, how you schedule your game - is available to system. It might be part of system, or might not, depending upon the particular needs of the particular game.
Which is precisely Daniel's insight. So right on, Daniel.
-Vincent
Jasper Flick:
I never considered the requirement that you should play with some of your bravest, most creative, and hottest friends to be part of System. I considered it part of the Social Contract, in this case codified in the game's design, and System manifests from that. Mulling it over a bit, I believe it's a chicken-egg thing, so saying it's part of System to begin with works too. So I can just flip my mind, and...
Right on, Daniel!
Thanks, Vincent (that's your second thanks for 2010). I really begs the questions whether the Glossary should be updated to more "modern" terminology.
lumpley:
Should schmould! The function of the glossary is to get people prepped to participate in the conversation, not to keep track of every most current development or opinion.
This is a live topic in the ongoing conversation, right here.
-Vincent
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