[Unspeakable] Abashed or anti Czege principle?
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello
Ron: okay, too bad for the CA analysis then, I'll be sure to come up with a new AP by beginning of 2011 to untangle that point.
It was precisely because "amazement" is value-neutral, that you have a special interest in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and that you are the author of Spione (I'm not sure if it was in the text itself or in some other discussion where you said that you were fascinated by how people address certain political topics while role-playing versus how they do it in abstract debate) that I wanted to make sure what you meant. In my opinion it was definitely satire rather than bigotry.
Eero: if I had called the "hallucinations" something else, for example "visions", would you have had the same concerns? Did the name of the rule have negative implications for you? I've already changed the name of "nightmares" to "premonitions" (which includes any type of dream) because some people were annoyed by this being too restrictive. I ask because the three other types of Monologues didn't often come up in the discussion, as if "hallucination" drew fire because of the subtext this names caries.
Eero Tuovinen:
Yes, Christoph: I think that the in-fiction meaning of the Monologue as a phenomenon (as opposed to its contents) is something to consider. I wouldn't go so far as to say that you should remove all in-fiction meaning (rarely a good idea), but I do think that there is a Czege-like danger here: if a player perceives the mere fact of his character having a Monologue to be much more impactful for the game and the character's interests than any actual Monologue content would be, then the cart might well be before the horse. It would be like playing D&D in a world where revealing that your character is a wizard immediately and irrevocably derails all other concerns as the character becomes branded an outlaw heretic who spends the rest of the campaign hiding in the woods from the inquisition; the mechanical motivation for using a rules feature is overshadowed by the thematic content.
Unfortunately I don't off-hand have any flavourful suggestion for what the Monologue could "be" in the fiction aside from some sort of visions or hallucinations. I don't know, perhaps that is a fine thing for the player to introduce for his own character and my reaction was just an outlier. It's pretty obvious that if I'm forewarned about the game being such that my character will be hallucinating stuff, and those hallucinations are a good thing, then I obviously will be prepared for it as a player and won't hesitate about that so much.
Comparing the game to Dirty Secrets is interesting; the way I understand the role of mystery in the latter, the reason for why the players feel satisfaction when resolving the mystery is that they have bought into the various in-story facts and clues that have been floated during play; the mystery feels "real" despite being constructed out of whole cloth because the players have bought into the idea that they need to narrate an explanation that fits with the clues, and they feel rewarded when they manage to do so. I get this a lot in Zombie Cinema as well: one of the high points of the game usually comes around 50-80% into the game when somebody makes a connection between the disparate elements the players have been introducing and welds a perfectly reasonable, unexpected story focus out of it all.
Perhaps an useful hypothesis is that Unspeakable might not get this same creative rush to the same degree because the narrative powers are shared in a quirky and uneven manner, and the elements the players introduce are by nature symbolic, vague and easy to ignore. Dirty Secrets gets a more powerful creative tension because the players share more narrative authority, their contributions are more stylistically coordinated and the individual contributions are more difficult to ignore. I suspect that this is not a major issue for the game, but it might explain part of my own reaction to the game's shared mystery-building element.
It's pretty clear that I'll need to play the game some more. I'll take it with me this weekend to our gaming retreat, we'll see if there's an opportunity to get some more experiences with it.
Christoph Boeckle:
Cool, good things to think about, Eero! I hope you get to play the game and wish you a good session.
PSA: so as to minimize possible confusion with the InSpectre line (I'm of course thinking of the supplement UnSpeakable), especially now that there's going to be a movie, I'll rename the game into Unnam[e]able (the dictionary I used while translating didn't have this term! else I would have used that) or just keep the French title, Innommable (pronounced /inn?mabl/). Just so that you know for future threads.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Christoph,
My apologies for forgetting about the Creative Agenda question.
As a preamble, I want to clarify one point for anyone reading this: confounding the Czege Principle with Narrativism. There is no connection. The Czege Principle concerns play in general, regardless of Creative Agenda. So resolving the CP issue regarding your design, or recognizing that no such issue is intrinsically present, has nothing to do whatsoever with the specific CA issue.
Now for the CA thing.
Me:
Quote
I can't imagine its Narratism; the kind of design and play you're talking about isn't anywhere near Narrativist even if you swung a dead cat really, really far to try to hit it.
You:
Quote
... See, I decided not to care if this game came up sim or nar, I just followed a clear vision for what play was supposed to be like. As my recounting may point out, there is a lure to cry out "omg, narrativism in this game!" It seems like the characters face moral choices, and that the players are addressing some premise or engaging in social commentary, and I want more play like that. ... Nevertheless, if you'd care to expand on how my game is out of the reach of ballistic dead cats, I really could learn a lot on a theoretical level.
One reason I haven't followed up, besides forgetting, is that my observation or response about CA was based only on your first post, and about both games which at the time were not as distinct in procedure as they were clarified to be later in the thread. I submit that the first post's description of the game (i.e. combining the two instances), without your clarifying later post, looks like spontaneous wacky comedy with possibly-superficial stereotypes, along with Cthulhoid material for gamer spice, with no particular thematic tension beyond what one might find in, say, a medium-level-funny episode of Futurama.* There are lots of RPGs which do this well, Paranoia probably chief among them but also kill puppies for satan, and for play of this sort, it doesn't matter how much Director Stance, multiple narrators, and whatever other Pool-like or InSpectres-like Technique is thrown in, a Premise is not genuinely produced and processed in the cauldron of play - it's merely an enjoyable mix of irreverent components.
But your clarification changes that and my dead-cat statement doesn't apply.
Best, Ron
* Settle down, fellow geeks, this sentence isn't dissing the show.
Christoph Boeckle:
Hello Ron
No sweat, I had actually thought that my recent answers had also rendered the CA question harder and less relevant, so I was okay to wait for a new AP.
I agree that respecting the Czege Principle does not lead to Narrativism (or any other such connections).
Your explanation grabs my attention hard. I suspect that a lot of play, especially when not mastered by myself (as read in reports and experienced once), but also when I fail to do something, actually fits your description of wacky comedy without any premise being addressed. A recent trend I've been observing is that some testers tend to change the relationship between the antagonists and the source, up to confounding them in one sole entity from the start on. This seems to lead to more wacky stories, but I'll have to watch this point closely.
Something that I consider as a feature of the game is that the antagonists actually are humans, with human ambitions but trying to achieve them with inhuman means, by exploiting a discovery that radically throws conventional world-views on the head, questioning classical values, etc. In quite a few sessions, the antagonists have actually played the role of fore-shadowing the moral corruption that could befall the protagonists, and indeed, the rule allowing a protagonist to defect to the antagonist side has been used a number of times. I even heard of a game where a former protagonist rose to supplant the original antagonists as a much darker figure of inhumanity.
There's also an aspect of situation creation which I haven't clearly understood. I usually base them upon personal fears (or at least anxieties), which I often try to link with recent scientific research. In the game with the Palestinian biologist, the characters also brought something into the situation: hanging political and religious questions.
Somewhere between the GM's personal fears, the questions the characters bring in via their bonds and the way the antagonists are supposed to be defined, I sense a real possibility of addressing premise, via satire or otherwise. However, in the current form, this can easily be lost and play then moves into wacky funny stuff.
The game we played with Eero, Markku and Sami, is somewhere off the radar in regards to this discussion. The antagonist was not a human being and no horror was involved. They did bring in human questions with their character's bonds and motivations though.
I must confess to being slightly annoyed when play stays at exploration of wackyness and irreverence, so I'll try to do something about that in future developments.
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