Category Archives: Design

Design

All Design is Political

(Originally posted on Imaginary Funerals, August 24, 2015)

Let’s start here: All choices that you make and all actions that you take carry some degree of political ideology. You do not have to intend to be making a political statement to make one.

Some choices aim to reject some ideologies and create change, and some decisions are passive or active choices to reinforce the existing ideologies and maintain the status quo. This is not a new idea, but the second part of the concept is often and easily overlooked. Most recently, I’ve seen it explored in Kaisa Kangas’s excellent article (but too short, I wanted more!) Processing Political Larps in The Knudepunkt 2015 Companion Book, which you can download for free here : http://rollespilsakademiet.dk/webshop/kp2015companionbook.pdf.

Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait here until you get back.

As a creator of intentionally political games, Kanga’s article was the first I jumped to read in the KP book. There are so many meaty design considerations to discuss about these kinds of games: the level of transparency or duplicity in the approach of the game, the design and crafting of political delivery, the level of control maintained over the message, the complexity around creating a happy balance for the player between continued engagement and political exploration, and the challenges in creating lasting post-game effect are some of the things I’m increasingly fascinated with.

This article isn’t about any those things, but hopefully I’ll get around to writing about some of them eventually. This article is about recognizing that our basic choices are political. Practice shapes thought and action.

Let’s design a game about supers:

– Design 1: This game is about super-human defenders; people who uphold the law, work with the police, support the government, and use their super powers righteously to combat evil doers – not unlike Superman.

– Design 2: This game is about super-human issues; people who are working towards a goal to effect change. Sometimes that goal requires working with or against the government, sometimes that goal requires working with or against other interest groups that do or don’t align with their own – not unlike the X-Men.

Human beings have a cognitive bias which favours the status quo. This causes us to see the current state as normative and natural, and in general influences our decision making towards maintenance and against change. It influences the way we think, and how we define the concept of “political”. In the games above, the one we are most likely to define as political is the second one, because it focuses on issues and the idea of changing the status quo which mirrors issues in our own status quo. It’s easy to see politics in it: these supers are trying to change the world: they have an agenda, they pursue it, they have debates and disagreements that are focused on the issues, and they try to influence the way people think, how they act, and who has power. They try to move people, and invest power to the new idea.

When we look at the first design, we don’t think of it as political because it’s just real life with super-powered cops. Good is good, evil is evil, normal is normal and the super defends it – nothing political about that! Right? Except there is… the idea that the status quo is good, those that oppose it are evil and that what we see as normal is natural, is absolutely a political stance. The characters in this game are also trying to influence the way people think, how they act and who has power. It’s just that they are just trying to move people’s beliefs and the investment of power into maintain the current idea.

So both are political. So why do we care? Well, first we care because when we are dealing with a cognitive bias that favours the status quo and we don’t realize we are being political when defending that status quo, then being political conveniently becomes a bad wrong thing that others do and we don’t. Second we care because just because we have a bias to maintain the status quo doesn’t mean we necessarily agree with everything in it. If we don’t understand that maintaining the status quo is a political action, then we might unintentionally be advocating things we do not actually believe in.

And what does this matter to designing games and play experiences?

Well, design influences the narratives people play in, how people engage with that material and what we take away from them. We know this, of course, but we normally think of it in terms of fun or experience: the designer makes a game that allows people to tell a kind of story or give them a kind of play experience, this allows for people to have fun, and hopes that they walk away from the experience feeling like they’ve had a good game. Nothing wrong with that, right? That’s the point of making a game.

But that same system of engagement is true for people’s experience with the political aspects of the game. The designer makes a game that carries a political message, the players engage with that political message, and walk away affected by it. When that game is the larp System Danmarc that Kaisa Kanga describes in the article I linked to above, that process aims to be intentional: The players play a story about post-apocalyptic world that lacks infrastructure and support that drives home the alienation and vulnerability of that world, players get very engaged in playing it, really explore how it feels, and then players walk away with a different understanding of the state of homelessness.

When the designer does not consider political intent in design, the game will still influence, just not in a way that is intentional. People may play righteous defenders of the state taking down bad guys who oppose it, get very into that engagement, really explore how that feels, and then walk away with a reinforced understanding about status quo methods of control, the righteousness of violence, and the justification/authority of the police/military (as an example the extent of which of course depends on the play experience).

The point is, that the game will have a political direction, even if the designer does not account for it, and as so, is a political action in itself even if action was not intended to be taken. The designer could, personally and separately be politically aligned with that action, and could personally and separately be political against that action. In either case, the designer is creator of that action. The designer called it into being, and invited others to play in and practice in it.

The players of course, have a part too: they shape that experience with in the input they put into the game, in the meaning they make from the game, and in the way they integrate it with their lives and actions after the game. The designer has made a structure with an implied ideology, invited people to practice within it, and the players engage or resist it as agents do within systems, but regardless of their actions, it neither replaces nor eliminates the design action already taken, but only changes the degree or quality of success of the political action.

So if you design, your game will be political whether you want it to be or not. The only question is, will it be political in a way that you really want it to be?

Design, examining play, Gender & Gaming, Roleplaying Theory

Gender and Game Mechanics: Part 7 – The X Card as Care Overlay

Originally published by Mo on Gaming as Women, October 23, 2013.

Last time I talked about ways that care and justice players could come into agenda conflict in games while discussing some personal experiences in White Wolf LARP and MUSH. I’m reaching the end of the care and justice part of the series (at least for now) as it’s only one of the topics I wanted to explore and has gone on longer than I had originally intended! In this last article I’ll be talking about the X-Card, how it relates to care and justice, and how discussing it reveals things about our orientation.

For those unfamiliar with the X Card, it is the brain child of John Stavropoulos. John is the President of NerdNYC, one of the team leads for Games on Demand GenCon, and was part of the team (along with fellow GaWdians Jessica Hammer and Meguey Baker) that went to Ethiopia last year to develop practical social justice development games for Girl Effect. He is an all-around awesome guy and a GM for literally thousands of players a year. The concept of the X card is simple: There’s an index card with an X on it. It sits in the middle of the play table. At any time, if any person involved in the game becomes uncomfortable, they can tap or pick up the X card and the thing in progress will stop – no questions asked, no explanations required.

The X card is a mechanic – one that negotiates social play. But it’s a mechanic that is independent and transferable. It can be used in conjunction with any system. It serves as an overlay to the game as it exists – a rule zero over every other mechanic in a game’s system. The X card works functionally at several levels:

First and most powerfully (IMO), the X card frames play and shortcuts social contract of the game. Introducing the X card initiates a conversation among all participants at the beginning of play. It sets (particularly when introduced as recommended) a clearly communicated set of priorities to everyone involved. Directly from the X Card document: “The people playing are more important than the game we are playing.” Participation within this framework – effectively achieved only via buy-in – establishes a firm group commitment to tend to the emotional and social needs of the people at play, even, if necessary, at the expense of the fictive outcome, the flow of play, the play experience, or the game’s design.

Next, the X card enables and facilitates social safety at the table. It is a particularly important and powerful answer to dealing with hard psychological triggers being set off in or around the fictive content of the game (e.g. rape, child abuse, addiction) which could slide an otherwise happy play experience towards trauma. However, it is also fully legitimate to use the X card to overcome barriers to social enjoyment (e.g. undesirable subjection to in or out of game racism or sexism) or personal comfort (e.g. a player experiencing too much bleed).

Thirdly, with most playgroups, even talking about the X card in a way that frames the priority up front will influence the social environment in a way that makes the participants more mindful of monitoring comfort and distress around the table. This can create an environment that is more inter-personally supportive, and in which the X card is actually less likely to be used(1).

I shouldn’t have to explain too much at this point about what kind of facilitator this overlay can have for care oriented people, especially in unfamiliar groups where relationships are not pre-established (e.g. con games, first time groups) or where relationships may be known but the system is unknown or may feel dauntingly justice-oriented. It states upfront that even if the rest is unknown, the priority is that we as a group will take care of you, and will make sure our relationship with you is OK. This kind of overlay can literally make access possible for some players and some games or communities. I personally don’t think it’s a co-incidence that the X card grew out of John’s wealth of experience in communities of play that have an explicit – and successful – agenda of attracting and promoting diversity among participants.

Unsurprisingly, the X card does also have its critics. As an example, players who find their fun in an agenda that prioritizes brutal (but consensual) brinksmanship legitimately don’t want safety nets to overlay the game. Players who find their fun in unsafe (and again, consensual) edgeplay with strong bleed and do not want anyone to have an out(2). There are many games that are at legitimately at odds with X card use. That’s not surprising! All mechanics, both core and overlay should serve the goals of the participants and their desired outcome of play. The X card can actually help clarify terms for players that like these kinds of games. Right up front, the X card is a clear and present signal that the game does not support their kind of play, and allows them to opt out.

But back specifically in terms of care and justice: some (often strongly) justice oriented people find the concept of the X card deeply uncomfortable. Remember that justice orientation assumes separation, prioritizes self , serves goals around autonomy, agency and is deeply concerned with rights management as mitigated and enforced by an external system. This all means that the X card inserts a fundamental short circuit into their desired game structure. It says: “At some point in the game, I may suddenly and unexpectedly lose my right to safely proceed in pursuing my goals without any explicit justification”. And because justice oriented individuals reach to universalized principles or points of view rather than localized ones, creating a mechanic that specifically prioritizes the needs of an individual in the moment over the global laws of the game can seem extremely arbitrary, and feel violating to their base need for fairness – and justice – in the game.

Notably, this is a barrier for some justice players and not others, largely because as an accepted overlay it is part of the express and explicit mechanical system of the game, and as such can comfortably fulfill many justice-based players’ conceptual understanding of what fairness means as the course of the game. But if that is not that case, and we come across a game where there is a critical divide between actual players at the same game, what then? This is the point that things become political. To quote Leonard Cohen: (i)“it’s the homocidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat”(/i). Whose needs will get met, how will they be met and why? (3)

To me, it’s critical to evaluate these situations contextually. As an overlay to an existing system it should be contextually compared to that system’s degree of support for care or justice. For example, an X card may be a small ask when used as an overlay on a system that offers strong justice support, especially one that also restricts care orientation. But when the situation is reversed (strong care support with strong justice restriction) the X card may further disenfranchise a justice player at the table. Whose needs are more consistently being met, who needs more support, and what is the X card doing in service of those goals? Also, worth considering is the context of the game. Within the community of practice (organization, con, single group’s history) what is the level of systemic support for players of each orientation? Will offering concessions like the X card create an environment where fair access and inclusion can be more equitably be distributed until more care supported games are designed and offered?

It’s also important to contextually evaluate the whole X card frame structure rather than just looking at individual moments of its mechanical invocation. The X frame as asserted in the social contract emphasizes a responsibility to tend to the communal social environment. This means that as well as creating opportunities for players to invocate their safe space, it should socially influence the participants towards containing misuse. In practice, those that have greatest opportunity to report on the X card’s use in actual play (like John) report that the X card itself gets used very infrequently. I personally think that people who have been socially conditioned towards care orientation are by the same conditioning more likely to invoke the X card, more likely to respect the boundaries of accepted use, and more likely enact autonomous acts of reciprocity(4).

And that’s some of my thoughts on the X card! Next up: Who knows? I’m going to choose a new topic for the next chapter of posts.

(1) For an first hand use of the xCard in game, see Brie Sheldon’s article on her X card experience
(2) There are strong similarities between the X card and the Nordic larp safewords Cut/Kutt and Brake/Brems both in terms of desireability (for use in emotional situations), and in the mechanisms themselves.
(3) This conflict is also at the heart of many of the con harrassment policy debates.
(4) Please be clear that I am not implying that care orientated people are any more immune from personal dysfunction, transgressive or coercive behaviour than justice folks. A person’s quality of behavioural interaction is not determined by their orientation, the orientation is only the paradigm we see their choice of actions enacted through. There will always be assholes on all sides!

Design, examining play, Gender & Gaming

Gender and Game Mechanics: Part 6 – Self Organization with Care and Justice

Last time I talked about how care and justice models can come together in harmony and I used Powered by the Apocalypse hacks as examples. This post I want to talk about a few experiences I’ve had where care and justice disputes were at play, what players did about it, and how play environment was affected. This post is where my personal experience meets the heuristic model I’m using to explore, so mileage may vary.

When I was a kid, I played D&D at a creative cultural centre. There were several groups that played at the venue weekly. I was the youngest of all the players, and the only girl. Eventually there came a time where I couldn’t return, and since I didn’t know anyone who played at school or my neighbourhood, I drifted off. I had a brief sojourn into Paranoia in high school after discovering the box set in a bookstore, but my friends weren’t into it. It wasn’t until university, when I was deeply involved in theatre that I came back to gaming.

My coming back story is a little unusual: I had acted in a number of “soaps” (improvisational serial theatre in which a dedicated audience would come back to watch week after week). In many ways, they were not unlike modern Nordic art-larps, but staged for a paying audience. One of my friends from the soaps who happened to be a gamer decided to make a new soap out of a tabletop game that had just been released, Vampire: the Masquerade. The series ran for 12 episodes, had a consistent audience and was a lot of fun to do. Later when Mage: The Ascension came out, we did a five-part “miniseries” based on it, too. So when V:tM (Mind’s Eye Theatre) LARP was released, it seemed natural to get the cast and some of the old audience together to give it a try. Back then, we played pervasively in a square six block radius in the city we lived in, and used our theatre and an art gallery as safe spaces to play scenes that might otherwise “spook the norms”. I was hooked.

Over the years, I’ve encountered a lot of women who talk about coming back (or to) gaming through these games, and when people talk about this, it seems most often attributed to theme and genre. This was a draw in my era, for sure. Back in the first wave of V:tM most of us had been fans of Lost Boys, the Buffy movie, The Hunger and Dracula, and most of my female friends were die hard fans of all things Anne Rice. For the group of women I re-entered gaming with, dark romance was absolutely core to the attraction. I am sure is still true of young Twilight, Vampire Diaries and True Blood fans today. Genre and theme can not be underestimated, but I also don’t think it’s the whole story. While many of the women who came to LARP went on to play tabletop White Wolf games, a good many more did not. So what was sticky for us about LARP?

The feature of pervasive play was an important factor to the new-to-gaming female players in these particular games. Because respecting the “masquerade” was critical to your in-fiction survival, the everyday people surrounding you at the bar, cafe or city street shouldn’t really be able to tell that you’re a vampire. Because being subtle and pervasive was critical to the smooth continuance of the game, random cops, business staff, and private property owners shouldn’t really ever get concerned about your behaviour in their space. This generally meant a large volume of quiet play in small groups with a close focus on relationships, social structures and political maneuvering. It also meant considerably less physical combat overall and less invocation of the formalized system. It also meant that private zones (like the Masquerade-lifted theatre and art gallery, and their rooms occasionally used for blackboxing) were often intense, full of combat, and where the “main plots” and Storyteller attention were focused.

In general, many more women than men held a sort of stationary court in the bars and the cafes, and many more men than women roamed from site to site and filled up the space in the masquerade-lifted zones. I think that’s significant, and that there were probably a lot of causative factors involved in that behaviour. Most of the female players were brand new to gaming, and public spaces probably felt more accessible. The Masquerade-lifted zones were often loud and aggressive, and you knew if you hung out there that you would end up drawn in to conflict eventually which for some was less desirable. Many women were drawn to the transgressive nature of pervasive play (being in a place that expected you to be yourself, and being able to subvert that by being someone else) and I remember a lot of discussion about how doing it changed the way people felt about the places themselves and their relationship with other people. I also remember that when complaints came about pervasive play, that the complaints were always from guys and usually about how having to think about who was watching / listening in public spaces and act accordingly limited their play. I see some Care and Justice themes in many of these factors.

I also have a sense that MET LARP, as a very loosely governed system provides some freedom due to a wide player to storyteller ratio. That gap means that there’s plenty of room for characters to cultivate pockets of play that suit their their own micro-cultural preferences. If a subgroup is content to be non-demanding of Storyteller time and not to feature in the main spotlight , they’re mostly free to do their own thing on their own terms. As we looked at before, care-orientated folks may navigate more comfortably within the fiction through freeplay(1) and choose to engage the justice-oriented system as they have desire and confidence. Because LARPs are so big and populated, and particularly geographically dispersed pervasive LARPs like this one, they give room and rise for care-oriented players who are good at this kind of thing to go do it on their own.

But while the nature of LARP allowed micro-communities of care to be symbiotic at times, this structure could also create conflict. As the Camarilla organization rose up, and LARP tourism started to occur, status mechanics were introduced to track and enforce social status within Vampire society. I remember this being a particular place where care and justice oriented players would end up coming to hard odds. Care players, deeply concerned with the cultivation of relationships, necessarily awarded characters who did the in-game social work a natural respect and social status independent of the game’s mechanical system. Meanwhile, some justice-oriented players who had high Status stats (and were therefore mechanically supported) expected that their social standing should be in effect even though they did not invest in the social fostering of the relationships with other characters (and players) around them. Mechanical system status and social system status – even though they were ostensibly supposed to be the same thing in the game’s context – were obtained, enforced and respected at the expense of one another.

I’m going to switch here to MUSHing, another form in which I played White Wolf games (here primarily Changing: the Lost). Here we have an even greater player to storyteller ratio. MUSHes (online, text based multiplayer games) have a few staff members that interact as Storytellers with players to varying degrees, but in general would do so very rarely. More commonly, the staff would play important QPCs in the setting that maintained the status quo, and occasionally run special events or code more play area on the in-world game map.

MUSHes of this type had a consent-based policy (you could consent or non-consent to aspects of play) with strong caveats about the need to accept in-character consequences for your in-character actions. Interaction on these MUSHes were primarily social, mostly via in-character interactions about the characters’ relationships, and were exploratory of the tropes of the setting. Each player had a private “home” space to go to and invite people into, and gathering places like cafes, bars and freeholds became the local hotspots to meet-up and talk with other. This is an extremely different model for play than WW tabletop with a focus on plot that is driven by a Storyteller, but closer in nature to the micro-culture freeplay in LARPs as described above. However unlike LARPs, where low-system, personal freeplay developed as an ad hoc alternative to the systemically supported play, this kind of cooperative freeplay was the primary mode of the MUSH. As an example, a quick search online found me the consent policy at War Dawn that was typical of the MUSHes that I am referring to. The end line of the policy says it all: “Please be aware that no combat system is a substitute for cooperative RP.”

However, this was complicated by the idea that despite the fact that this was the primary mode, these games were also ostensibly based on the mechanical system of the tabletop games: Your character had character sheets and stats, you could use the system to roll dice, but where the system was (rarely) invoked it was done autonomously and negotiated by the players in conflict. Also significant to the consent-based play, XP was earned by earning other player’s votes for good roleplay. This dichotomy often created a strong clash of agendas in the game. Often this clash was described disparagingly as “roll play vs. role play” or “plot vs inertia” some times this plot was about “playing grim” vs. “playing light”. There were a lot of agendas smacking uncomfortably into a lot of other agendas, but underpinning many of these clashes was the idea that the ethos on a MUSH often boiled down to concepts such as “we work things out between us” or “we build harmonious relationships” or “everyone must make room for one another” and the value/reward system tied to it coming at harsh odds with “This should be arbitrated by staff/system”, “I am pursuing my goals/plot/development” or the “the system says I can” of independent players.

Now one last note: I’ve spent a lot of time talking here and in the series so far about freeplay, or micro-cultures, or ungoverned space as a place that care oriented players can make their own way in. These spaces may not restrict care oriented play, but they also don’t systemically support care play either. Those two concepts are very different things. I believe that while the former might sometimes suffice care players, that the latter is a vast and largely unexplored design space that could bring real innovation in RPG game design and in doing so, open up a whole new level of appeal to care oriented folks that are already players, and a powerful new draw to new players.

Next up: the X card and how it relates to care and justice.

(1) I personally think there are all kinds of people who take advantage of micro-culture LARP space to find fulfillment for kinds of fun that the system can restrict, or just don’t support – not just folks concerned about care-orientation. ↩

Design, examining play, Gender & Gaming, Roleplaying Theory

Gender and Game Mechanics: Part 4 – Care in Action?

Originally published by Mo on Gaming as Women on Sept 11, 2013

This is part four of a series. In the previous posts I talked about how sociology and sociolinguistic studies on gendered communication styles could be useful heuristic tools to evaluate game systems and mechanics. I began with discussing two conflict resolution styles that trend differently by gender (care and justice). I looked at how traditional modes of RPG conflict resolution seem to be justice-oriented, and had a look at how that might affect the experience of care-oriented players at the table. In this post, I’d like to look at mechanics or systems that might have a stronger care-oriented bias, and at hybrid models which seem to combine elements of both.

As a reminder, care mediation is focused on relationship management. It assumes: connection between individuals, prioritizes modes of resolution that are internal to the community (rather than external rules or laws) and emphasizes the need for reciprocity. Tolerance, empathy, and active listening are encouraged and each conflict is seen as particular and contextual (rather than universal). Also, in pretend play, it was noted that girl playgroups generally used care mediation through the fiction rather than stepping outside of it.

So in terms of RPG conflict resolution, what would this look like? I think we could assume that a “pure” care-oriented system(1) would likely not depend on an external arbitrator like a dice roll. We would for certain expect that the system would help make it clear how the relationship of the participants (possibly including any and all of: the characters in conflict, any characters observing the conflict, and all players involved in the game) changed as a result of the resolution. We could assume that conflicts would resolve through a process of talking where being heard is prioritized, and all the participants’ needs are understood, and met equitably well. The conflict in question would likely be understood and considered by participants as a particular conflict (examining context) rather than a “genre” of, or universalized conflict. And ideally, given the tendency to play through the fiction, players should as much as possible be able to reach a resolution on conflict without stepping out of character, or at least out of the fiction of the game.

Are there systems that employ something like this? Recently I played in an all-feme Nordic larp in Sweden called Mad about the Boy(2). The larp was (for the most part) a 360 degree immersive drama game set in a real-world near-future post-apocalypse involving strong emotional themes. The in-game play spanned two full in-character days and the vast majority of conflicts were not governed by mechanics. at all Conflicts between individuals not involving a weapon were handled naturalistically.

When characters came into conflict, they resolved it through discussion in character, much like one would do in real life with another person. Characters did not have stats or abilities, players did not roll dice, roshambo, or do anything but talk. Any player in the vicinity could weigh in as an interested party. No GM/Storyteller/Producer monitored, mediated or interfered with the conflict’s resolution. There was no way for one character to force another character to do anything that they didn’t want to do without the support of, or consequences of the community, unless the character was armed and ready to use explosive violence to do it. Even where weapons were involved (limited to three guns present in the fiction of the game), the rules governing their use were extremely simple:

  • One person pulling a gun assumed control of the room.
  • A second gunholder pulling a gun on the first before the first could train the gun back overtook control of the room.
  • Where two people with guns ganged up on a third with a gun, numbers ruled.
  • A person shot at would be hit, but had the right to determine the severity of the wound received.

    • Is this care mediation? Let’s see: This system is based in talk. It allows players through their characters to negotiate their needs and the needs of others. Meta-techniques in the game like windowpaning (drawing a window to make a dramatic aside to your fellow players) are even present to ensure that where your character is unable to ensure their needs (or your as a player) are articulated, the player can still enter them into the fictive space for consideration. It encourages active listening and tolerance of other players (even when not their characters). It places a strong emphasis on, and provides a strong approval power to the community of play and it’s self-regulating skills (both in and out of character). Because all fiction is expressed naturalistically, the players must confront the changes evident in the relationship as a course of play, or not, as to the dramatic action.

    It certainly supports a lot of care-mediation values, or put more aptly: it does not constrain them. It does constrain some justice-mediation values. While characters in the game could logistically appeal to the authoritative body in the fiction to be a point of resolution the conflicts (there is a government entity in the setting but one that does not have immediate martial power to exert) the game does not provide a source of systemic resolution that clearly determines outcome. Autonomy and independence are constrained by the need to garner and maintain community support to keep power. Reciprocity might equal out to fair but it might not; rights of any individual may not be respected as a matter of community interest inside a charged situation powered by a collective.

    Is it surprising to find a structure which has a care-mediation bias written in large part by women (2 of 3 larpwrights were women) for an all-female cast that prioritizes themes about women and their values and communities? I don’t think so.

    Also, it’s worth noting to find that this kind of structure is not uncommon among art larps coming out of Nordic countries, all five of which rank in the top 10 in terms of gender equality(3).

    Just sayin’.

    Next up: Hybrid Care and Justice in Powered by the Apocalypse games.

    (1) By “system” I am talking about the process play is resolved including social system rather than just mechanics. ↩
    (2) Trine Lise Lindahl, Tor Kjetil Edland, and Margrete Raaum, Mad about the Boy, 2010 ↩
    (3) UN International Human Development Indicators for Gender Equality 1-10: Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, Germany, Slovenia, France, and Iceland ↩

Design, examining play, Gender & Gaming, Roleplaying Theory

Gender and Game Mechanics: Part 3 – How we fare in Care and Justice

Originally posted by Mo on Gaming as Women on August 28, 2013

Last time, I discussed care-oriented and justice-oriented mediation, and had a brief look at how the conflict resolution in traditional RPGs exhibited principles of justice oriented mediation. I ended by asking the questions:

What does engagement with justice oriented systems mean to a woman with care orientation? What does it mean to her relationship to the system, the game, the experience, the people she plays with and the hobby at large?

To understand this, the first thing we have to consider is what being care-oriented means – not in terms of gender, nor in terms of how we prefer to resolve conflicts – but in terms of what we need to do to communicate with those that don’t think the way we do. I think it’s helpful to think of this in terms of language as the two things work similarly. We learn them both in the same stage of development. Both are learned in an iterative process of observation and repetition that teaches us how to be in the world, forming a bridge between our identity and what our community tells us that should mean for us.

The longer we spend exercising our patterns, the better we are at working in them, and the more strongly we prefer them. At the same time, as we get older we obtain more exposure to new environments and learn what they expect from us. When we encounter communities that want different things from us than we have practiced and prefer, we learn (to varying degrees of success) to “code switch” or move between the language and orientation that we have practiced and try to “speak” the new community’s “language” in an effort to fit in. So even though we have learned default modes, we try hard to pick up other modes like second languages, and use them when we need to. However, as ESL speakers could tell you: even when we can become highly skilled in a new language, communicating outside your native tongue is never as easy, natural, comfortable, or as advantageous for you as communicating inside it – it’s fighting what you have learned as a default state.

This is not about capacity, it is about struggle. Any given care-oriented person may learn enough fluency and skill in justice mediation to perform as well as any given justice-oriented person, however they must struggle through and overcome cognitive friction to do so.

So if care-oriented folks can learn to work in justice-oriented systems, why do we care? Well, friction is an essential component here because we are talking about engagement with our hobby. We are not saving ourselves from legal strife, feeding our children, or making our lives out of the practice of RPGs. Rather RPGs are the place we come to play. To explore, create, dream, experience, relax and restore. Energy lost in overcoming friction translates to fulfillment and engagement loss to the participant in a place where fulfillment and engagement is the point. It’s like going for a leisure bike ride with your breaks half engaged.

Fluency gap isn’t just a matter of an individual’s struggle to perform in accordance with the activity, it’s also a matter of the quality of an individual’s interaction with other individuals engaging in the same activity.

Here we should go back and re-visit the definitions of the care and justice orientations from my last post where the value priorities of the two modes are revealed: relationship based communion, harmony and reciprocity (care) vs. individualistic autonomy, agency and fairness (justice).

These value systems as priorities are not just a product of the of each orientation, they are a causative factor of the orientation. Our community builds systems to fulfill goals, and goals are determined by what we value. We latch on to those systems that match values that sync with our identity. If I am a justice-oriented mediator, it is core to my interactional satisfaction that my rights as an individual have been met and respected. If I am a care-oriented mediator, it is essential to my interactional satisfaction that the harmony of our relationship has been attended to. These outcomes are often at odds with each other, and made more complicated in a RPG context where “my” means both me-as-player and me-as-character and me-as-storyteller and “our” means us-as player community, and we-in conflict, and us-as-characters-together.

Where a system favours one mode over another, the person who defaults differently than the one the system supports has their needs met less often. As a result, small beats of alienating interaction will accumulate over time. Strife between the system and the outlier will compound, and satisfaction will wane. Players will need things from the game, and from the community of play that others in the game are getting, but that are denied to us, and this may be acutely felt when the values of reciprocity and communion are core to the outlier.

We can not bring our best selves to, or take away the best experience from an environment that contradicts or denies our core values.

This kind of thing could net care-oriented players less satisfaction of experience, and lowered interest in play. It could mean less willingness to engage with the game-as-artifact, more alienation from systemic interaction and more desire to circumvent the mechanical system altogether. It could mean less engagement in the community, and more friction between her and her fellow players. It could mean less constructive ability to represent at the table because something’s in the way. This would all hold true for justice-oriented players playing in a system that had a strong care-orientation bias.

Where playgroups are composed of justice-oriented players playing games with a justice-oriented bias, none of this may matter at all. That game may fit that play and play-style like a glove. However designers who want their games to appeal to and be played by care-oriented players, communities that desire to be inclusive to women (and encourage their participation), and playgroups that have a mix of care and justice oriented individuals (be they men or women) might want to have a look at what and who their systems are supporting.

Next up: I want to move for a bit away from meta-analysis and towards some more practical and specific examples. I’ll try and highlight some games that that may aim to support care-oriented players, and have a look for games and/or system mechanics that seem to be exploring opportunities to satisfy the needs of both care and justice oriented players as a hybrid model. I’ll likely loot Nordic larps, Powered by the Apocalypse games (like Monsterhearts), and White Wolf games for examples and analysis.

Design, Games

[C+P] Playtest Shilling + P/P

6 Comments

[xposted on SG]

Now that I’ve let it slip that my design for Crime and Punishment was partially an experiment in mechanically supported pull/push, and there are folks out there revving to see push/pull in action or to talk about the application of the model as it applies to design….

Can I get any takers to do playtesting? Huh? Huh? Pretty please? Crime and Punishment will restore receeding hairlines! Help you lose 10 pounds! Liven up your sex lives! Enlarge your…. well you get the idea. ;P

Easier than anything, you only need three players and 2 hours to play!

I’m going to go with playtesting for the moment based on the Game Chef version of the game which can be found here. So if the answer is yes, let me know and just snag a copy from the link!