PTA does need a certain amount of cognitive play. It can have impassioned moments, between framing and resolution and cut, but the strict structure does – in my experience – impose a degree of constraing on how far down the impassioned scale you can slide without getting friction.

Not yet. We’ve had it on the list for a while, but haven’t been able to muster a group. Brand’s played, I believe, but not me.

~Mo

Reason I ask: PTA seems to me to require play pretty far toward the Cognitive end of your scale.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?referrerid=&t=279623
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=279614

The second being a bit more opaque in its relation to this topic, but rhetorically there is a connection.

Some people have played RPGs for 20 years with multiple groups in cons and everything and have never seen and cannot imagine that a game would generate any kind of deep emotional response (other than maybe excitement at getting a good dice roll at a critical moment). Not only that, they so don’t understand it that they think it cannot possibly exist, or that if it does it’s unhealthy.

I’ve heard similar rhetoric from others at other points about everyone else’s play at other points. “I don’t do it so it doesn’t exist” or similar. We saw it a lot about the artist formerly known as immersion, we see it a lot about people who have deep emotional play. However, if you hang out in the right circles you’ll also hear it going the other way. I have, on private mailing lists, had discussions with people who insist that anyone who claims to RP and isn’t deeply emotionally engaged in it is either lying to protect themselves or is just playing a boardgame.

Which makes it ironic that I think a lot of the problems we’re having here is that many of us have a spread that has at least one edge somewhere close to the middle. (Maybe not Mo, but I think she manages to overcome the gap based on the fact that she’s such a cognitive person in everything outside game that she can bridge the modes.) Because of that we’re getting a lot of worry about “where exactly in the middle am I? how middle am I? if you and I are in the middle does it exist at all?”

Middle is middle, and how much it matters would require more talk between two people planning to actually play together. For the moment, however, I think it can help to look at the ends and think about what happens when Zoomba “I have never seen anyone have an emotional reaction to an RPG in 20 years and would find it unhealthy if I did” of RPG.net tries to play with Goldeneyes “I play to dredge out and experience my innermost pain, in 20 years of RP I’ve never had a session where I didn’t cry, and I think anyone that can’t get to that point is emotionally broken” of my old Changeling list.

I don’t think we really need to do a longer email. What you’re saying above is all consistant with what I’m saying, and seems to confirm my guess that you’re a “mirror image” of me. The only thing I’d say you’d need to do is analyze your play over the span of years (either going forward or reflecting backwards) to see if when you put all of those “game to game variences” into a total context if you get some kind of mean or median average.

Cause my red dot? Not where I play every game. Some games I can change radically. But over the whole course of my gaming history and in the games where I am most comfortable, happiest, and most likely to get my chosen payoff I’ll be somewhere in the area of that red dot.

Also, for the record, and I hope clarifing our last area of real confusion, the people that I was talking about cognitively and only cognitively addressing premise in a strong way? They differ from you right here: “Playing with idea: check, but more often out of game. In game, ‘playing with the idea’ is more like reverie, more mantra-like. Although it is pretty cool when the action makes addressing the content of the idea necessary in some way.” Where their answer would be something more like “Playing with the idea is the point of game. I may want to deal with the emotional meaning of it, but only after or out of game.”

So yes, you can flip between the two and use one to feed the other. (I do.) But it is possible to make strong address of premise in a way that isn’t about playing with the emotion (at least not until afterwards) and is only about playing with the idea. In fact I know a lot of folks that do that. My highly impassioned friends almost always end up asking them why they don’t just play chess instead. To which the answer, correctly and inevitably, comes as a variation on “because chess doesn’t get me my payoff.”

Here is how I am thinking of it:

The ideas and the emotions are on a feedback loop for me. I get emotional responses to the ideas, which sets up for some emotional charge in the game, which gets fed back through the ideas and amped up, and so on.

In terms of what is in game and what is out of game, well, that really does vary (widely) from game to game, although I’m happiest when both are humming in game. Ideally, cycling from emotion to reflection, then back out again in game. That tends to work best when I have done some idea prepping ahead of time.

Responding emotionally to ideas: check. The ideas are sort of inspirational–to choose a relationship, it’s like looking at the sunrise and then writing a sonata (or something). There is not a desire to ‘represent’ the idea in game so much as to light it on fire.

Playing with idea: check, but more often out of game. In game, ‘playing with the idea’ is more like reverie, more mantra-like. Although it is pretty cool when the action makes addressing the content of the idea necessary in some way.

If you want, oakesis, at the gmail dot com, and we can try phone or longer email. Maybe dig into AP a little more.

I don’t think you’re mapping that onto Mo’s model. As I understand it, that is Mo’s model. Because I certainly fluctuate based on situation. That, um 6.5, that my dot is sitting at is just my most comfortable and most common aggragate place to sit.

Let me try this way, to see if it helps before I suggest I just call you on the damn phone: in game is what you are interested playing with the idea or is it playing with your emotional response to the idea, or is it some mix of the two?

Mark,

As for being character socket based… egh, maybe. I have a strong story socket and I have no problem trending myself across years of play to figure out a sort of baseline interaction that forms a defualt mode for me at this point in my life. And considering the sorts of things I’ve done in and with game and story I’d have to say my relationship to it is pretty complicated too. Its just that even complicated things can be trended into loose categories. It isn’t like you need to be able to point at a decimal place accurate place on the scale and say “THERE” so much as its generally useful to be able to say, “I like to play like this or that” where this and that have a general sense of self-awareness about what it is you actually want in a game. In that way I think Jonathan’s “5 to 8 on a 1 to 10 scale” isn’t far off. It certainly would be a useful contrast to someone whose a 1 to 4 on a 1 to 10 scale, at least.

-I don’t know if it’s huge and complex, but it is just a corner.

-If there’s a lot of interplay between the two, maybe you’re in the middle or maybe you’re analyzing your play over different payoffs.

It may make you feel better to know that I deliberately rejected “Intuiitive” as the word for the right hand side of the scale because I recognized it was problematic. It will probably disturb your sleep to know that I used intuitive purposefully, but yes, what you’re engaging with matters.

Ian: What Brand said.

Jonathan:

While I get that people are all unique snowflakes, I also see that snowflakes contain water, only show themselves when it’s cold and fall from the sky. Identifying these trends does’t make them any less unique, just better understood.

Trending behaviour for analysis begins with pinning individual behavioral interactions down in a situationalized context and then over time and analysis discovering where they clump.

I can put Brand and myself on a scale because I’ve got enough examples in the last eight years to make trending meaningful in terms of our preferences and behaviours.

Note that I said preferences and behaviours, not capabilities. It’s about what people want and what they do not who they are.

Please go back and re-read, or just hang on and see if things manifest more clearly for you as the posts roll on.

I wrote a lengthy response, but I realize it boils down to a simpler question: what makes having a strong emotional response to ideas not impassioned?

‘Cause I have direct, immediate, strong emotional responses to ideas (like, say, Marxism). I’m not thinking through the ideas to get to an emotion, but interacting with ideas emotionally. Why is that more cognitive than impassioned and not just a peculiar brand of impassioned?

One clue: I can see this making sense from a strongly character-socketed perspective. I’m rarely character-socketed, so my relationship with the fiction is a lot more complex than this model seems to permit.

You’ve talked about you and Brand, but when I think back about the games I’ve played in the past week (Exalted Hack, PTA, playtesting a game about slavery narratives), I don’t see Jonathan’s Primary Socket. I see a whole bunch of sockets that I enjoy and how I used a different set for different games based on what everybody else was doing. I found my fun not by insisting “this is what’s fun for me” but by being all Plug And Play.

I guess I can imagine that some people have very strong feelings about Fun and Not Fun, but, honestly, I’m not sure that I’d want to play with them. Flexibility is an ideal quality for a potential roleplaying partner.

So I can deal with GNS because it doesn’t classify people or even games. It classifies swaths of play in retrospec or tendencies and preferences. But while I can guess where I fit on the Kinsey Scale, I have no idea where I fit on the Turkington Continuum.

When I’m in church, for example, I’m way, way left (analytical) except in certain kinds of services that really speak to my right tendencies (outdoor services or ones with a small group of close friends). But in play? It totally depends. If I’m playing with people I know well and we’re grooving, I’m way right. If I’m with strangers, it requires more thought and planning, so I swing more left.

I guess I don’t feel like these are fixed things. Can I claim a comfort zone instead? Somewhere around 5-8 on a 1 to 10 scale?