I would be willing to bet that you’d find some interesting variations in socket preferences in the same individual in the different play modes described. That Cognitive I / System-socket tabletop player might very well be a Impassioned Masker, story-socket (getting invested in the lives of the characters they are revealing post-by-post) player when they are working with a trusted PBP buddy, or an Impassioned Possessing Force / character socket sort (even if that ‘character’ is pretty typic, ‘bad boy,’ ‘vixen,’ etc) when playing with their bestest bdsm play partner.

I suspect, too, some nice portraits in that regard would go a long way to drive home the multi-faceted, we are human beings not sockets/points on a graph issues that crop up from time to time around these sorts of discussions…I think once you get this ‘big model’ in place, you will be in a crazy cool place to start mapping out the more subtle complexities of personal motivation and social negotiation!

I have a whole list of motivations that I see for virtual space players; I’ll have to cross-reference them with your sockets and see how that matches up.

For one, though, there are plenty of people who use virtual spaces like BDSM scenes: for safe sexual experimentation and fulfillment through characters.

That’s funny, same goes for Brand and I - a Changeling MUSH.

Looking forward to seeing that list/cross up, please do come back with observations.

Absolutely! When my environment is most intimate, say in the year and a half long solo game of Truth & Justice I just finished with Brand, I’m as much an Impassioned Other as I ever really want to be. It’s the sweet spot where my best RPG happens. But when I’m playtesting with brand new people or con-like games, I’m very Cognitive I.

Speaking of von Sacher Masoch, while writing this, I couldn’t help but wonder if there might be an interesting discussion to be found in comparing the “suprasensuality” that Masoch described or the more current “subspace” or “domspace” in relation to the “flow state” often described in discussions of immersion.

Anyway… you’re definitely looking down the same road I am here. Any suggestions on how to best to get to the meat of it?

Which means you can start talking about someone’s payoffs in, say, a scene less as a matter of what happens (spanking, check; name-calling, check) then as to the sort of engagement of the participants. Which also says a lot more about what the *actual* payoff is for the behavior, in a way that participants can really recognize and identify with.

So, cognitive domspace, person who is getting off on the intellectual ‘game’ of working their way through someone’s subspace. Impassioned domspace, someone who is working out some deeply emotional issues in the play…and so on. I feel like there is a joke to be made about how easily you could substitute GM for dom, but that’s because there are real structural similarities at work here, so I’ll not sully it ; ).

Start elaborating the more personal dimension of the experience, things like George needing a good purging impassioned masking session when he is really stressed, needing that intensity to shake him out of that cycle, but preferring a genial, cognitive-marionette game when he is all chill and calm because he enjoys the puzzliness of it…and, wow, see, sick rambling.

Exactly! And can I really blow your mind? What would happen if we could tie reward systems of our games to the actual payoff rather than to a fictional one?

I should also say, just in case it isn’t clear that domspace is not necessarily cognitive and subspace not necessarily impassioned. I think there are a lot of impassioned Dom/me’s, and cognitive subs.

So, what you want to see are scenarios?

Your model seems functionalist–it answers questions like “what function does this behavior serve?” There is a real risk to them–namely the elision of the particularity of each account beneath a blanket notion of payoff. On the other hand, though, functional models potentially do a better job of capturing particularity of behavior than a lot of other approaches.

Trying to be more concrete: the more specifically described the payoffs, the better. I want to get a sense of the *different* reasons behind socket preferences, an idea of the range of behaviors certain sockets support and reinforce, as well as the sorts of things that happen when someone tries to get something poorly supported out of a socket.

I’d love to see user histories, describing the active way in which people explore sockets. Heck, maybe the coolest thing would be for the final result to be something like a user’s guide–a map of different play styles, of interactions, of the sorts of reasons different people engage in them. Something that people could use to find their play, not just identify their play.

(I’m sorry, I can’t seem to think in a straight line

I’m currently planning to write a Master’s Thesis in Drama/Theater at the local university. I’m writing about immersion in RPG’s as an alternative and closed form of improvised theater. Can I use/quote material from your website/blog? Do you want your name mentioned in the thesis if I can and do use/quote your material? I think a lot of the material here is really good and very relevant for me.

Please reply on this address: grumejl [at] hotmail [dot] com

Thanks in advance for your reply (and hopefully, your consent).

Not sure if this is the right article to put this comment on, but… I ran into the ’socket’ stuff a while back, and I’m rereading it this morning.

I’m not sure, but *think* I’m talking about some (not all, even remotely, just some) of the same things you are, in different language, over here:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=361725

-Levi