Category Archives: Roleplaying Theory

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!

examining play, Games, Gender & Gaming, Roleplaying Theory

Gender and Game Mechanics: Part 5 – Hybrid Care and Justice (Powered by the Apocalypse)

Originally published by Mo on Gaming as Women September 25, 2013

Last time I talked about Nordic larps and provided an example of a game (Mad about the Boy) that had a care mediation bias, though did so not because it expressly provided support for care mediation, but did not constrain care-mediation values and did constrain justice mediation values.

This post will look at some mechanics in games Powered by The Apocalypse and how they are using interesting hybrid models that provide at least partial support to both. By Powered by the Apocalypse, I mean games such as D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker’s open source system Apocalypse World, and some of the other games that hacked its engine: Avery Alder’s Monsterhearts, Gregor Vuga’s Saga of the Icelanders, and Jason Morningstar’s game (in development) Night Witches.

The Apocalypse World engine and all of the various hacks have interesting design elements in them that manage, articulate and govern relationships between characters in the game. As relationship management is a core component of care mediation, it makes the suite of games a fruitful cluster for evaluation. In the original game, player characters earn Hx (history points) with other PCs whenever they engage in emotionally intense activity (E.g. sex, healing, harming etc.). You can use Hx as a modifier in certain rolls to help or interfere with their actions in the game, and earning Hx with others is a vehicle to earn experience points. In addition, through special mechanical moves on your character sheet, you can earn Hold on another character (PC or NPC) which allow you to influence mechanically them in play.

This is interesting, because it clearly combines several elements of both care and justice mediation. There is an external system that is built to support the resolution of dispute (justice), and provides tangible tracking for how the relationship is affected (care). It provides mechanical incentive to invest in relationships in the game (care) and mechanical incentive to build a sense of reciprocity when making others do what you want (justice and care).

Notably, while Hx tracks changes to a relationship and creates an idea of providing mechanical support for relationship development (and this seem likes care), what it actually doing is systematizing the relationship. This can actually be used with justice-oriented playgroups to shortcut over relationship management altogether. At the same time, the mechanic does not necessarily constrain care-oriented playgroups from deeply engaging in relationship management. So this mechanic may not interfere with each orientation individually, but by it’s nature it could create cohesion breaks in mixed groups. Also, I am willing to bet that many care-oriented individuals might conceptually struggle with the way Hx gets turned into XP (+3 Hx with a player automatically pays out in 1 XP but Hx returns to 0 as a result) because it conceptually violates the way relationships work (I know you better, it pays out, now I don’t know you at all.)

In Monsterhearts, Avery Alder’s “storygame about the messy lives of teenage monsters”, the relationship mechanics are changed. Hx and Hold are gone. Instead, player characters earn “Strings” on each other through a wide variety of interactions (that are served by mechanical moves) and those Strings can be spent in a variety of ways. You can hinder their actions, you can reduce their successes when they try to hurt you, when you successfully hurt them you can intensify the harm you do. You can use them to put conditions (which can act like hindrances or social stigmas) on others. There is no mechanic in Monsterhearts to manipulate another into doing something, but you can use your Strings as pull incentives to get the other player to make choices you want to see (note that this is both fair and reciprocal). Unlike Hx which is a feature of Apocalypse World, Strings are the driving force behind Monsterhearts. They drive drama and focus into the relationships at the table. It’s a really interesting mix of care and justice sensibilities, and as a care-oriented player, I love the tangible effects that Monsterhearts’ system gives relationships in play – especially as a GM.

In Saga of the Icelanders, Gregor Vuga does some interesting thematic things with gender that I’ll likely explore in another post outside this series, but for the purposes of this article, I’m concerned with the care and justice elements – again, around relationships. In SotI, Hx and Strings are all replaced by “Bond” (Hold is still present, acting as a measure of influence). Bond expressly represents intimacy and social connections and are intended to give the relationships mechanical weight. You get bond by time passing with characters, making moves that focus on your relationship, gaining leverage, giving them gifts, etc. The system asks you to define what about significant relationships are important to you, and asks you to update it with the fiction. This draws players to evaluate and reevaluate relationships over time.

Also, the system has mechanically driven incentives to use moves – essentially hard actions – against the characters that you have relationships with that will put pressure on them and drive social action and relationship change in the game. And while all of the AW hacks have community in their thematic core, SotI manifests it most cleanly. With its saga era settings, players are not just asked to build and maintain relationships with other individuals, but to maintain status, face, and relational standing with the community as a whole. In AW or Monsterhearts, threats and menaces that serve as your situation catalysts are outsiders, often monstrous. They demand your players stand together against the external threat. In SotI the community itself is the threat. It is the life and lives of the people that you live with, who themselves decide your fate and who you must mitigate conflict with.

Night Witches, by Jason Morningstar, is a hack that is still in development, so anything I say about it now may change by the time it gets to publication. Jason shared a copy with me due to our mutual love/obsession with the Soviet Female Fighting Aces of WWII. In the system there is a Bond mechanic which powers relationship management that is similar to SotI. However, what I’m interested in for this article are two differences he’s introduced. Like SotI, Bond is associated with significant relationships in the character’s life. In Night Witches while that includes other characters it also includes the plane you are invested in. Second, the menace/threat positioning models something closer to Apocalypse World in that threats don’t come from inside your community but from outside of it. Here though, a new mechanic is introduced which couples directly with Bond: Stress.

Stress is a measure of your relationship to your environment. For the night witches in WWII that means a charged, often oppressive and unbearable relationship. Characters get stress out of battle, when their close comrades or planes take harm, but more fascinating in the context of gender: they take stress when they act like a lady. This mechanic is set up specifically to underscore the struggling dichotomy that patriarchy exerts on women living and fighting in a world traditionally dominated by men, and (I hope) will serve to illustrate one of the reasons why relationship management is a core value for most women. Stress is relieved through intimacy, contact with family, by fulfilling your story (and also by acting like a hooligan). I don’t know if these extensions to relationship management (the plane, the environment) technically “count” as relationship management for the purposes of care-orientation, but they conceptually and emotionally line up for me on a personal level.

So yeah! I am loving on these games that all really put an intensely satisfying and system supported emphasis on care-oriented values, while respecting justice-oriented resolution. One day I plan to write a series on Gender and GMing, and I will come back to these games to talk about some concepts that are related to this post. But in the meantime: Onward!

Next up: Some of my personal experience around how Care and Justice can interact, in both not so bad and not so good ways. I’ll talk specifically about non tabletop forms of White Wolf: in Mind’s Eye LARP and MUSH play.

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.

Gender & Gaming, Roleplaying Theory

Gender and Game Mechanics: Part 2 – Care and Justice Mediation

3 Comments

Originally published on Gaming as Women by Mo on August 14, 2013

Note: The terms “women”, “girls”, “men” and “boys” in the articles of this series are assumed to be inclusive to transgender people who identify as each unless otherwise specified. While I can’t be sure my assumption is valid as none of the research I’ve read have specifically included trans-folks, I have chosen in writing the series to assume inclusivity: that trans-women and trans-men would exhibit the same gender trending as cis-women and cis-men. It’s an imperfect solution, but If I have to choose, I’d rather make mistakes while assuming sameness rather than difference.

One of the areas of sociolinguistics that I find particularly fascinating to read centers around observance and documentation of children at play. There’s a lot of research on this front as sociologists and linguists try to pinpoint the chronology of our psychological, behavioural and linguistic development. It’s fascinating to learn just how early in the process of language, identity formation and interaction that our behavioural patterns become entrenched.

These studies seem especially relevant to me when they are about observing boys and girls playing pretend. Just as our childhood language programming and practice informs our patterns of adult speech, it goes to figure that our childhood pretend play should inform our adult pretend play. As children, we began our patterns around what we think creating shared fiction looks like and how we work with each other to achieve it. As well, we began to form patterns that governed how we work with each other to resolve disagreements while playing our games.

As I understand it, as early as age two, girls and boys generally begin to exhibit a preference to same-gender play groups, and to exhibit behaviour called “benign hostility” towards children of the opposite sex (“Boys have cooties!“). From this point on, and for quite a span of developmental time, play and interaction styles become increasingly gendered. Playing with each other – especially playing pretend with each other – allows us to try on, play with and make sense of roles we might be called on to play, including gendered ones. As sociologists and sociolinguists compare and contrast different genders at play with each other, a lot about our differences are revealed. Conflict resolution styles are one of the major areas of focus.

One of such studies centered around and substantiated a behavioural theory that described two distinct forms of conflict resolution: care oriented mediation and justice oriented mediation(1). Both orientations are offered as two equally viable but convergent paths towards conflict management.

Care mediation is focused on relationships. It has primary concerns which prioritize interdependence, empathy, communion and affiliation. Working from this orientation assumes that those in conflict are connected, and working through conflict is about relationship management. This orientation generally encourages tolerance, compassion, and responsiveness to others. It emphasizes active listening and communicating. It values attention to the needs of everyone involved, including those who may not be central to the conflict. It is agreement seeking, is non-reliant on rules or laws (will also bend rules and laws for the sake of community or agreement) and greets things as particular or contextual and less as global or universal.

In short, when care oriented individuals come into conflict, they approach it this way: We talk through it with each other, we are responsible to each other to fix it together and internally, our relationship must come out in harmony, and there should be a sense of reciprocity.

Justice mediation is focused on self. It has primary concerns which value, autonomy individuality, agency, and self-assertion. Working from this orientation assumes separation, and working through conflict is about rights management. This orientation calls upon a universalized point of view rather than a particular one and centers on one individual’s rights vs. another’s; it aims to ensure those rights be maintained. This orientation calls on an external structure of connection. It values detachment, logic, rationality and control and attends to rights, respect, and status by appealing to rules, principles or laws.

In short, when justice oriented individuals come into conflict, they approach it this way: We assert our case to each other or to those present, we appeal to the external principle to fix it, our individual rights and status must come out intact, and there should be a sense of fairness.

It’s probably not surprising to discover that in terms of gendered play, girl playgroups exhibit a preference for care mediation and boy playgroups exhibit a preference for justice mediation. What makes it all more interesting is the observation that when girls engage in care mediation to resolve conflict, they generally do it through the fiction of the pretend, whereas boys more often step out of the fiction of their pretend space to engage in justice mediation while pointing to things within it(2).

So what does all this mean in terms of roleplaying and mechanics? I can’t of course say for certainty without laying the kind of groundwork in RPG study that sociolinguists do, but there are pointers there that I find very interesting. I think that ideas like this can become useful heuristic tools – we can apply them loosely as frameworks and use them to re-evaluate what we know about games. For example, traditional roleplaying systems have focused heavily on conflict mechanics. In their best known form, two or more individuals come into conflict (the GM and PC(s)) for the purposes of resolving a fictional situation.

Fiction is often suspended while procedure is discussed (who is involved in the conflict, who is taking what agency, what action, in what order, and how we should proceed). Individuals call on rights and privileges (what they are legitimately allowed to bring to the conflict based on the rules of the game and the stats on their character sheet). The participants defer their conflict to an external system of resolution that is separate from all participants and aims to ensure fairness in resolution (a dice roll). The participants return to the fiction and incorporate the judgement into play.

This sequence exhibits obvious justice orientation, and that’s not surprising given that the origins of the hobby were predominately male and strongly informed by other predominantly based male hobbies (e.g. war gaming). People generally and understandably build the systems they are best equipped to build, and which serve their needs to the best extent.

However, today, woman are (in many RPG communities) a pervasive part of the hobby. What can this mean to her relationship to the system, the game, the experience, the people she plays with and the hobby at large? And while women seem to exhibit preference for care mediation, there are male care-mediators too. What does this mean for them?

I’ll posit some potential impacts in the next up: How we fare in Care and Justice.

(1) Gilligan, Carol (1988) Two moral orientations: Gender differences and similarities, p. 223-237.
(2) Sheldon, Amy (1993) “Pickle Fights: Gendered Talk in Preschool Disputes”, Gender and Conversational Interaction, p. 98.

Roleplaying Theory, Theatre

Soaps vs RPGs

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Over on LJ, Jim Henley was talking about improv and its proximity to RPG’s and ended up asking me some questions about the improv soaps I used to do a lifetime ago. It made for an interesting brain dump, so I thought I’d post it over here in case y’all found it interesting (edited for format, readability and atrocious grammar).

Jim: It occurs to me that I need to know everything about your soaps. I know you’ve referred to them before, but they seem like a whole extra level of ambition beyond the creation of a play at a time, which is a level of ambition above “let’s make up a skit from scratch.” Some nosey questions that come to mind: Am I correct in inferring continuing characters across episodes?

Mo: Yup, constant characters. The soap would generally run for about 12-16 episodes. Sometimes they were like daytime soaps, sometimes Sci Fi, sometimes horror. When Vampire and Mage came out, we used their source material as a base… before they made them in to LARPS!

Jim: Were these performed for an audience or just within the troupe?

Mo: A faithful, if exceedingly rowdy and badly behaved audience. They would pay every week to see the next installment. Typically shows were late at night following another play (often other plays that some/all of the cast was in!), and had to be flexible enough to work off of whatever set and audience was in the theatre space at the time – which made for some fun challenges. Usually they were on Friday or Sunday nights, but one of them went nightly over the course of the week. In some of the soaps, the audience would shout out instruction or direction that the actors would feel free to take or ignore.

Jim: You had a set scene list to go through in performance? Would that mean that Scene X had to come out a certain way to justify Scene Y, but the actual beats of Scenes X and Y were still improvised? Did plans for scenes ever gang agley? What then?

Mo: We’d come in 1.5 – 2.5 hours prior to the performance, and do a quick physical warm up, then the director would post the scene list. The scene list would be skeletal, kinda like: “SCENE FIVE: X character encounters Y character in Z location. X tells Y this bit of critical information and leaves. Alone on stage, Y determines to do this thing about it.” Yes, often there would be subsequent scenes in the same episode that would directly depend on the outcome of your scene, but sometimes the scene was just for colour too, or set up something for next episode.

Usually scenes were between 1-3 people, thought sometimes we would have larger groups or the whole cast involved. Sometimes it would start with a couple, and one person would leave and another would come in. Each scene would take anywhere between 3 and 10 minutes, give or take, occasionally longer for very complex scenes.

After the director posted the scenes, everyone would crowd around and find out what they were doing that night, figure out which scenes they were in with whom and about what and have a few scarce minutes to talk about the scene, or block it out, if it were very physical.

I remember one particularly memorable scene where my character killed another character in a beat down drag out fight, complete with squibs and pre-scored costumes and props and stuff. We blocked it on an unfamiliar set in 10 minutes and never had time for a test run of course – crazyiness! For that scene, of course, because one character would be removed from play, it had been decided at the rehearsal three days before, so we had time to gather props and such. We didn’t know how the death would go down, just that it would. (edited: Of course, also when any scene where big props or big special effects were needed would have to known it was coming at least partly in advance. Once: homemade pyrotechnics!)

So we’d talk, brainstorm, block, then go get into costume and makeup, and then have five minutes of a voice warm up, often backstage as the audience was coming in.

Scenes occasionally went very wrong indeed, though much less than you might think. Someone once, because they were a late comer to the scene, missed entirely that he was supposed to be in that scene, and so the two people on stage ended up stranded. The funniest part about that one was that there was no backstage area in the theatre that episode, so all of the actors were sitting on a long bench in a darker nook but in full view of the audience. When it became obvious that something had gone awry, the other actors pointed him to the stage him, he got up, went to the post, read the scene made a “Well, here goes nothing” face and then jumped in… to gales of laughter from the audience, who always loved it when we’d fuck up.

If something went wrong, well, we’d just have to get it back on track, which demanded some quick thinking at times. Usually though, especially when there was a backstage, people would review their scene objectives just before going onstage, so when things went wrong they didn’t affect continuity of the whole show.

Jim: Let’s talk Socket Theory! Or maybe MB&G. Did you “attach” to the soaps differently than you attach to roleplaying games? Would you say your MB profile within the soaps was the same as your RPG profile, your real-life profile, or was it a third profile?

Mo: (What’s MB&G? Myers Briggs?) Hard to compare them, because at the time I did them, I wasn’t gaming. I came back to gaming (had played D&D as a kid) just at the tail end of them. Because the last few we did used games as source material, I ended up meeting a number of local gamers and started to play again. However, I would say my relationship to game grows directly out my time in the theatre in general, and out of the soaps in particular – especially my socket.

To prepare for the soaps, well before you’d hit stage, we’d have a couple of rehearsals that fleshed out the idea of the soap, the themes, the setting, the basic locations, the kinds of characters that would be needed. We’d play handfuls of characters in endless freeze games, and then pull characters we really liked, or were particularly effective (funny, scary, poignant, melodramatic, etc) out and make a cast of them, sometimes creating new characters to fill in the gaps.

Then there would be a whole bunch of rehearsals where we’d have character interviews. You’d literally go up on a hotseat, on stage, under a spot, and the rest of the cast and crew would rapid fire questions at you. In an hour they’d have dragged all this character history out of you and under pressure, you’d often find your character voice developing. There were also some funny, and always repeated questions like: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party?” or “So why do you want to join the secret service?” You were supposed to stay in character for the whole time and react to the questions as if they were really being asked. Some of the character history would be retained, some discarded.

Then there’d be a series of rehearsals where we worked on movement and voice, getting down the physicality of the character, the voice of the character, the idiosyncrasies and twitches. Then we’d have improv as your character in the world scenes that didn’t have to connect to one another – real sandbox stuff. Usually there’d be 1-2 months of ramp up before the soap, depending on the commitment of the director. By the time you got to the actual performances, you knew your character’s inner workings, and could slip in and out at a moment’s notice. Ideally, by the time it came to opening night you’d have done this so well you couldn’t really be caught off guard because you’d really immersed in the personage of the character. – So yeah my socket to character and my immersive tendencies both grew directly out of this world.

However, these days gaming is a deeply personal thing for me. The catharsis that I dig for is something very different than I used to have back then. The payoff of the soaps was performative, while the payoff of my games today is experiential. There’s more intimacy and nuance than ever would have been possible in front of an audience, even when that audience was very well behaved.

Jim: Hiding behind all the above questions is the ur-question of how the soaps were NOT essentially RPGs of some sort.

Mo: Really, I’d say that the biggest way in which I’d delineate RPGs and the soaps would be the expectation of a quality, finished and coherent product (that was worth purchasing). This idea includes the idea that you’d spend ten times the preparation time investing on the fiction than you’d ever spend inside the fiction itself. It also includes the “draft”ing of the fiction, or the willingness to input things that will never be incorporated, or will be edited and distilled down to a story that makes it something that’s not just worth doing (important!) but worth both having other people find it worth watching (the point) and worth paying to come and see (the way we keep afloat doing what we’re doing).

We look at RPGs in the rosy hindsight of post-interpreted narrative where we selectively remember the elements of play that make most sense to keep based on their retroactive meaning and importance in relation to the story that won out in the end. The soaps had to hit the ground running with a linear, developed narrative (for that episode) in place from the get go, no real room for (critical) error, and no second chances. (As a side note, it’s worth noting that a couple of times our soaps were then further distilled down into plays and re-performed like a traditional, scripted play after the season had ended.)

Also important to this difference is the collectivist approach to the process. There was no need to mitigate authority or have mechanical intervention to gateway events because our collective goal was the performance, and whatever you had to give up to achieve that goal, be it character autonomy, narrative input, spotlight time, whatever, the goal came first. RPGs, in my more general and current experience, have too much individualist practice/inclination to work the same way that the soaps did then.

That said, within the intimacy of my playgroups, be it solo with Brand or the small, cultivated playgroups I play in most and enjoy best, that collectivist impulse is still, mostly, beating it’s hummingbird’s heart.

Roleplaying Theory

Context

5 Comments

So my Great Aunt Gertrude keeps asking me to get on with writing more about that body of post-immersionist theory (thanks Mick, great way to put it!) I’d been working on last year, and it just so happens I have a couple more things I’ve been itching to talk about: The first of a pair is context. The second will come in a later post.

As you might have suspected, I’m really big on context – all my theory’s heavily invested in the idea that play success is wholly dependant on the contextual positioning of the player in relation to everything else: other players at the table, social contract, system, preferred payoffs, goals, modes of play, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But, for the purposes of this post, I’m going to use the word context contextually: what I’m specifically looking at here is the player’s requirement for context. Also, while I absolutely think this discussion has application with some of the other sockets, mostly I’ll be talking about character socket play, because, well, that’s what I like & know best, and so focus on. So in a nutshell, what I’m looking at is how much or how little contextual establishment a player requires for her character in a game, and how I think that might relate to her payoff, goals and modes of play.

So what is contextual establishment? Well it has to do with how a character relates to herself, the world, the story, the other characters. As a person, you have a context in every moment of every day. That context is critical to your understanding of the world and to your ability to interact in it. It is built by all of your past experiences, by an inventory of your present situation, by the expectations which you invest in the world, and your ability to forecast future outcomes.

Picture this: You and your friend John are walking through the mall. You’re looking to buy a new leather jacket which is going to cost 500 dollars and you’re planning on paying cash. You’re counting out the money on the way to make sure that you have enough.

Now picture this: You and your friend John are walking through the mall. You’re looking to buy a new leather jacket which is going to cost 500 dollars and you’re planning on paying cash. You know that John has compulsive habit of punching people in the head when he sees large sums of money and taking it because he’s done it to you a half a dozen times. Are you still counting out the money on the way? (Why, you’re probably asking, am I even with John at the mall?)

Now picture this: You and your friend John are walking through Compton. You’re on the way to the store to buy a new leather jacket which is going to cost 500 dollars. Are you carrying 500 dollars in cash? If you are, are you counting it there in the middle of the street? Are you still with John, given that he’s a reckless head-punching bastard?

So yeah, as a person, context affects how we feel about things when they happen and how we decide what to do in response to them. Most of the time we don’t notice our internal relationship with context. We have long-tuned instinctual processes built to deal with it like the one that makes you flinch in fear when that head-punching bastard moves his arm quickly but doesn’t when your cat Buster darts across your lap.

When context changes radically or inexplicably, the instinctual processes can totally break down. And as anyone who’s ever traveled extensively can tell you, being deprived of context (cultural context, for this example) over a long period of time can be disorienting or even frightening. Learning to intentionally work through differences in context (rather than instinctually coasting through sameness in context) causes a lot of cognitive dissonance.

When I lived in Brazil or India everything I did, no matter how simple, took energy and focus because I had to work to understand the cultural context of everyday life and try harder than usual to act within that model. The propensity for failure to understand the context and then act inappropriately also became greater, which caused a heightened sense of latent (and sometimes acute!) anxiety than I would otherwise feel.

So in roleplaying context is important too. All players need at least a little context to get traction in play, and some players need a lot more than that. At a broad and basic level, context is established through setting, system, genre, and past play (among others). Telling you the game we will play takes place in the real world, gives you different building blocks to build a contextual model than telling you it takes place in Narnia, Glorantha, or aboard the Millennium Falcon. Telling you that the game will be a pulp, will affect your mental model differently than if I’d said western, noir, or space opera. This is really why RPG’s loves them some genre and why games in general are prone to setting books, splatbooks, archetype lists etc. etc. They are all ways to shortcut communal context around the table and get people in position to play together.

You can cut context a thousand ways but where I want to get to in this discussion is that beyond the communal context at the table which everyone needs and which makes the game possible, some players require specifically higher degrees of context to achieve their goals in play, interact with their character in mode or get at their payoff. Some examples:

  • Higher context players might require historical context in character (like a background), to provide a contextual sense of where the character has come from and who the character is as a person whereas a lower context player may prefer the character to be a blank slate that’s fully open to interpretation.
  • Higher context players might require in character social freeplay to get a sense of the contextual relationship between their character and other personas (PC or NPC) in the fiction while lower context players might find it just as satisfying to invent those relationships on the fly.
  • Higher context players may need contextualization before conflict to position themselves to be able to experience the interaction whereas lower context players might more fully enjoy the experience if they’re given the thrill of in medias res scene framing.
  • Higher conflict players may prefer moment-to-moment or event-to event play while lower context players might find time lapsing or sudden time jumping a happier pace.

Of course, I shouldn’t have to say this because if you’re reading my blog you should already know that it’s implied, but: there’s no objective right or wrong, better or worse in this equation. Whether high or low, the threshold of context required by a player is relational to their enjoyment of play and the only place better/worse comes in is in how well the player’s payoff was realized.

Calibrating context correctly is an important process to enjoyment in game. Like me in India, the farther away you are from the context you’re expecting the less comfortable the game will be and the more detracting from fun. I suspect I understand how this trends with other elements of the emotional agenda, but I’m not ready to point at it until I’ve established the piece it’s (fraternally) twinned with.

Next up: Relief.

Roleplaying Theory

Disruptive Emergence & the Impassioned Character Socket

7 Comments

**Warning** This post will contain a spoiler about season 3 of The Wire. You’ve been warned. Also, if you’re responding, please don’t spoil seasons 4 or 5 of The Wire for me. K?Thx. **Warning**

So last night, Brand and I are watching the last three episodes of Season 3 of the Wire, and along comes the scene where Pryzbylewski is standing, gun in hand, looking at the dead body of the cop he’s just shot. (For those who don’t know and didn’t care if they were spoiled, Pryz is a misfit wildcard inept cop that got through the Academy on nepotism, who early in Season 1 nearly beat an innocent kid blind for sassing him, and ended up behind a desk. His becomes a real redemption story when turns out, despite everyone’s best guesses (including Pryzbylewski’s) that he’s actually “real po-leece” when it comes to the analytical trace work involved in Major Crimes. The first time he’s out of the office in like two and a half seasons, he gets involved in a random chase and ends up mistaking a cop for a perp and shooting him dead.)

At this point, I hit pause on the g-d-clickybox and turn to Brand. “That there is what Vincent’s looking for when he talks about mechanics that bring on undesirable emergent story.” There wasn’t really any lead up to the scene, just a few quick shots interspersed with the other scenes: McNulty and Pryz eating Chinese food and getting the call, McNulty running through a back ally while Pryz round out in the car to head him off. Then there’s McNulty on the walkie, and he hears the shot fired, and finally there’s Pryz standing there with his gun out, looking freaked out of his mind. The killing is out of the blue, and all the lead up and shooting itself don’t even happen on screen. It’s obviously the work of disruptive mechanics.

Brand loved it. I didn’t. …. Shocking, I know.

But it did make for this great two hour conversation before we ended up getting back to the show. There’s a lot from that conversation I won’t get to in this post, might get into later if I’m up to it.

There ensues this real clear articulation that happens over how we interact (differently) with media – mainly movies and TV, but touching on print stuff too. He likes this scene with Pryz because it’s dramatic, because it moves the story, and because it lends a kind of realistic satisfaction to the series. In real life, our shortcomings come out to haunt us in the moments we think we’ve overcome them. When life is at its most brutal it often is over before you know what’s happening. It’s swift and explosive and afterwards nothing is the same. The Wire also (mostly) strives to provide a sense of real-lifeness as cop dramas go, so this makes the presence of this kind of event even more satisfying, in his eyes. He feels this turn of events is full because it’s a value add. It provides another kind of drama that enriches the story overall.

Brand, through his story socket, connects with the event and appreciates it cognitively. It’s intellectually fulfilling.

While I totally get why he likes what he likes there (and see it as valid) I don’t like it because it feels empty. It feels like the show has witheld. I’m engaged with the show, and I’m very much enjoying it because it does a very good job of creating complex characters in all shades of grey, and then all of a sudden, it changes the rules on me and I’m not allowed access to the character experience. On a dime, the character’s life is changed forever, I have no access to understand what really happened, nor to make the transition with the character (because I have been sharply and emotionally decontextualized from him). All of a sudden Pryz feels foreign to me and I can’t empathize with him properly. Sure, I can step away from it and type now: It is an interesting narrative device. I can cognitively appreciate what they were trying to do, and even how they succeeded in doing it. I even mean it when I type that, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was unfufilling to me in the moment of engagement.

I, through my character socket, became unconnected to the event which prevented me from appreciating it in the impassioned moment. It’s emotionally unfufilling.

Roleplaying Theory

Character Disposability

15 Comments

(or, variations on an old theme.)

So Brand and I have been playing Vincent Baker‘s new game In a Wicked Age. It’s a load of fun, very intuitive, fiction forward and non-fiddly for those of us who like the system to get out of the way in the moment of play. I might write up some AP of the game at some point, but for right now I want to talk about one specific rule.

In a Wicked Age has Forms of action (Covertly, Directly, For Myself, For Others, With Love, With Violence), that serve essentially as your character’s stats. Two of these Forms (Covertly and For Others) can be injured and two (Directly and with Violence) can be Exhausted. When your aims in game are thwarted in a final (final in the scene, not overall) way you get injured or exhausted, which means that the dice size of those Forms are reduced by one level (e.g. a d6 becomes a d4). When two of your Forms’ dice size are reduced to 0, that character is out of the adventure. (There is room in the game for the players on either side of the dice to negotiate a different outcome than being exhausted or injured, where both sides are willing to give a little).

The game also has something called a We Owe List, which stores names of characters that the game commits to coming back to include again in further stories. Players get on the We Owe List by being the underdog in a fight and managing to stay in it until the end of the first round. That how doesn’t really matter one way or another to this post; what’s important is that there is the possibility that you can come back at some point if A.) You have managed to get your name on that list and B.) you get knocked out of the game by being exhausted or injured.

For me, this all brings up an issue around character disposability: at what point can a character can be removed entirely from play, and by who’s agency is that removal performed? In A Wicked Age, the player can make a character choice to walk away or narrate their character’s death (though that choice might be contested by another player) but it can also be determined by the mechanical system alone (exhaust or injure a character sufficiently to remove the character who is not on the We Owe List from play. These mechanics bother me a great deal as a player.

As an impassioned, other kind of player who makes deep emotional connections to the characters I play and who prefers, for the most part, gestalt over emergent play, this can be very disorienting. This isn’t a criticism to In A Wicked Age, which Vincent Baker designed (and pretty elegantly from what I’ve seen so far) to do specific things that aren’t necessarily targeted at me or the kind of player I am. It also isn’t a phenomenon particular to IaWA. Clinton R. Nixon’s TSOY has a similar mechanic that is triggered whenever a character achieved a Transcendent success (rank 7) which can only really happen once the character has become a Grand Master in the skill being rolled. When transcendence happens, the character is not immediately removed from play, but must be retired within 24 game hours. Of course, all of the combat oriented traditional games, such as D&D can bring on the immediate end of a character by attacking it, preventing it’s escape, and killing it.

The crux of the matter for me is that the work of my playstyle focuses on the loopback between myself and my character which is formulated via an intense emotional investment that enables the cathartic play I seek out. Even if the character is not a real person, even if the character and I do not share a meatspace, or know each other as people, my relationship with (most of) my characters is one of deep emotional connection. She may not be an actual person to be available to be known but I do know her, understand her, feel her, am her.

While sudden, seemingly random (read mechanically mandated) death might emulate the world as it really is or “should be” or provide a more tangible sense of verisimilitude into the danger of the world, I’m not looking to emulate or experience the world as it is but to tell the story of my character or tell the story my character is part of. I don’t need tangibility in danger, or to feel like the game world has gravity, but I do need to feel like the game is robust enough for me to push hard and hurt my character dramatically and drastically without feeling like the game’s going to just take her out from under me because I rolled too well, or just didn’t roll well enough in this moment right here. Knowing that condition exists actually serves to make me more guarded and inhibited in play. When we play TSOY, we hack the rule (currently we’re playing Fortune’s Folly, 7th Sea source material using TSOY’s rules and where Transcendence normally happens we have put a “fate lash” – a mechanic that seriously complicates the character’s life, but leaves her living) if I can’t hack it (heh), I never ever take a Grand Master skill. In IaWA, I’m just not comfortable until I’m on the We Owe List, and if death were to come up, I’d do my best to negotiate a different outcome.

I can also totally see how more emergent players might find this to be a satisfying game driving contribution to their story. But for me, I need time and space to find the closure of a character. Partly that closure provides time and safety to come back to the I before character death (ritualistically important, I think, in high emotional, serious or dangerous play). Also, that closure helps me to retain my emotional investment in the story overall because it gives me a chance to refocus the conduit into my secondary story socket.

None of this to say that mechanically mandated character disposability should never exist, but just to write out the experience to offer it as a design data point of interest.

Roleplaying Theory

Intimacy Enabling: Art, Kink, and the Virtual

10 Comments

So in thinking about my last post in the series, it occurs to me that there are a lot of things that enable intimacy in roleplay. This post is about three of them.

Art

Ages ago, on Yud’s Dice, Brand talked about how the word art was a power word…

“Art is a loaded term. Art is a word used to give value to one human endeavor or activity above another. Art is a way of saying ‘This thing is important to my stance on the human social condition and gives/takes power away from the part of society I inhabit.’ ” ~Brand, in Games, Art, Power, and Me

…and I’m entirely on board with that. I think discussions about what is and is not “art”, (just like those about what is and is not a “game”) are most often semantic wars used to legitimize one endeavor while marginalizing another. However, in thinking about the more extreme kinds of RPG situations where intimacy is strongly enabled, it occurs to me that “art” is a power word loaded in other, possibly more positive ways.

Just as I can legitimize or marginalize an activity that other people are doing by bestowing or withholding the word “art”. I can use the same word to bestow an activity I am participating in with a particular kind of freedom, not just to empower it from an objective cultural perspective, but to empower it socially within the activity itself. “Art”, we are taught to believe, is something of value that transcends the normative rules of human behavior. “Art” is something that is breaks us out of our mundane, human experience and compels us instead to move towards a sublime contemplation of the human condition; it’s a goal greater than value of its elements or of its participants.

So what does that mean to intimacy? Well, when an organizer of an RPG-as-art event uses the word art, most importantly, without even opening up an actual discussion, it begins a framework for a social contract between the participants. It says: this event is about seeking a sublime reflection of the human condition, and the product of it is greater than my desire or your desire, and aims to make a creation greater than the sum of our inputs. It mandates a particularly demanding level of investment on behalf of the participants, but at the same time promises a particularly powerful artistic license and bestows a lack of judgment in the process of, and a particular sense legitimacy on the participants as “artists”.

Similarly, several of these events, especially in the range of the Nordic Art-LARPS, span play over extreme periods of time (such as Europa, a five day, fully in-character LARP set in and simulated like a refugee camp in Eastern Europe) which demands a particularly intense level of intimacy not just with other participants, but with the story, the setting and the character. This is linked in with what I said above about the particularly demanding level of investment mandated to participants. I also don’t see it as a co-incidence that these mechanisms of intimacy are coupled with a pro-immersion mandate. After all, I started this discussion to explain how intimacy was a vital component of support for those playing in character-socketed Impassioned Other territory.

Now, I should be clear that I’m not at all interested right now in the discussion of whether the product of these RPG-as-art events actually are or are not art, nor whether the participants are or are not artists. What I am interested in is the way that the use of the word creates a specific cultural context drawn in a tight circle around these events that optimally should result in a powerfully intimate milieu to play in. I’m also not interested in the discussion of if RPG-as-art events are or are not better or worse than other kinds of roleplay. What I’m interested in is the way that the intimate milieu and cultural context drawn around these events facilitate the participants arriving at and achieving a common payoff.

Kink

Taking intimacy to the emotional and physical extreme, BDSM roleplay is replete with mechanisms to facilitate intimate play. Although this may not be the first thing that jumps to mind for you when considering roleplay, BDSM play certainly involves taking on characters, degrees of immersive activity, and story play to varying degrees of completion, spontaneous and organized, small and large from the episodic to the epic. Although it’s rarely discussed, there is a good deal of people involved in both activities independently, and I’ve also talked to a wide variety of folks who have described the BDSM activity that has spilled over from their LARP or tabletop experiences.

Participants in BDSM play put a strong emphasis on safe words and scene negotiation. Whether the event is between consenting partners or as part of a larger, organized venue, a vast, varied, and clearly defined vocabulary aids in the the identification of hard and soft limits for the participants (kind of like lines and veils in power sexual situations) and events are not only flagged to facilitate the understanding of the event’s social contract, but occasionally they come accompanied with fully explicit, written codes of conduct or actual legal contracts that must be signed before walking in the door. Also, not unlike NGH and IWNAY set up boundaries and support space, some BSDM scenes use SSC (Safe, Sane and Consensual) and RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink) philosophies to guide or inform their play practices and use ritual elements to transition into and out of the play space.

The tools in a BDSM context are, for the most part, better defined and the contracts more explicit because the potential for harm is considerably greater than it is with conventional roleplay, and so there is an absolute need for them to be more efficient and reliable. Here, like in RPG-as-art events, a particular investment and level of intimacy is demanded and created in a direct response towards supporting the achievement of a particular payoff. And like my conclusions above, I find it no surprise at all that BDSM events also have pro-immersion mandates. Even in situations where there are no distinct characters to play, becoming the *role* you play in the BDSM context is, well, the point, and for many involved, the pathway to sexual fulfillment; it’s the payoff.

The Virtual

Finally, and distinct from the previous enablers, virtual spaces such as MU**’s , MMORPGS, PBP and PbeM, by their very nature as anonymous gateways enable participants to achieve a heightened sense of intimacy. Here I am not talking about games like Bitches in the Vineyard, in which a MUSH was used to facilitate the play of a bunch of people who knew each other from another context (Story Games) but for whom physical distance made around the table play impossible (Brand and I are in Toronto, Jess Pease in Boston, Jess Hammer in New Jersey, Nancy in California). Instead, I’m talking about standard PBP, MUSH or MMORG play, where a participants logs into an interface to play a game and meets the (majority of) other participants through the game.

While you could argue that actually intimacy is impossible in such an anonymous environment, when you look at the reasons that intimacy are important to the Impassioned Other context, as an environment which supports personal vulnerability and unfettered social interaction, you can see what I’m getting at. When a participant in this situation engages with the game, who they are in actuality ceases to matter, and assumption of the Other is facilitated. An enhanced sense of safety is inherent both because of the anonymity of the medium, and also because the ritual is built in: to enter the game space, I logged in, to get back to the safe space, I log out.

Environmental factors may also enhance this, for all of these games are most played from the safest of spaces: your own home, they are often played while alone, without outside interruption, frequently in dim light looking at a bright monitor in a way that lends itself to a mildly hypnotic connection. Participants can fully be vulnerable to the game environment because their selves are fully protected, they can full give over to the character or the story they are “living”and because whatever information they give over can be carefully constructed, can express things that are of a more vulnerable, personal context. They have less fear of being judged, and can escape more effectively in a fantasy context.

Again, just like in RPG-as-art events and BDSM play, most of these virtual play spaces (all of them, I warrant, in which characters exist as more than an icon on the screen) are pro-immersion environments that encourage participants to act fully within the context of the character in reaction to the game world. I don’t find it surprising that intimacy and a permission to be vulnerable is found in the same context.

Whether its that Impassioned Others are drawn to intimate spaces or that intimate spaces are constructed to support Impassioned Other play, I’m not sure, but I thought this would be a good start to looking at the connection between the two to see how the qualities of the social interaction encourage particular modes of play. Also, if you abstract, you might glean how different qualities of social interaction might discourage particular modes of play. How, for example, would a person playing in a Cognitive I mode with a system socket fit into an Art LARP, a hardcore BDSM scene, or a strict IC MUSH?

Roleplaying Theory

Intimacy and the Impassioned Other

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So here I’m going to talk only about the upper right block, the domain of the Impassioned Other, where I spend the most and best of my play.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a strong masker. I maintain a distinct identity within the characters I play, but I have a powerful empathic connection with the character. I funnel my influence over the game through the agency of the character. I am influenced and informed by the character as a conceptual model, but because I can still maintain a sense of the character as a conceptual model, I can also assert influence over its development (with time and context) without denying my payoff. I willfully give the character a measure of transformative power over me as a goal of play, and for me, that transformation equals my cathartic goal.

All of these things are only fueled forward by my strong preference for impassioned play. Funneling decisions and actions holistically and intuitively via the character within the emotional milieu of the story and the character’s context in it optimizes the cathartic connection (open the floodgates!) and works to constrain any cognitive dissonance that might interfere with the empathic connection to character.

So, as you might imagine, out here where I play can be a really vulnerable place to be. There is a direct conduit between my emotional centre and the experience of the character, and I heavily invest in that empathic conduit. I feel things that my character feels as emotionally acutely as if I was the character, and although I maintain some degree of distinctive identity from the character, I am deeply affected by her plight even in situations where I personally do not agree or sympathize with her. When the games I play are the best that I can ask for, I have not just invited the game into my emotional centre to mess around, I have in fact, demanded that it do so.

Like Brand mentioned in his article on danger, some people would call this behavior in a game “dangerous play” or “edge play” because it is a willfully vulnerable state, and could possibly end up in the player getting hurt (I.e. psychologically or emotionally damaged, not “hurt feelings”). This is not what I consider “dangerous play” nor “edge play”; for the most part, it’s just “play”. I rarely get hurt in a game, but if I do it’s not because of this process, but because I’ve chosen to play in dangerous territory, with issues that I know are triggers or grey zones for me. Even then, because of the way I set up games, I don’t ever really get hurt, I just get shaken, and need a period of recovery (If people want, I can talk about this in a separate post, but I don’t want to go any farther here for fear of getting off topic).

However, the point is, that it is a vulnerable place to play, and that the structure that is required to support that vulnerability never happens incidentally. It requires a considerable amount of personal and emotional intimacy, both with the other players in the game and with the character & the story to make work. So I’m going unpack each of these individually for a bit.

In the post before last, I gave you an overview of My Gaming Census. The reason I needed that was to help explore how my gaming environment contributes the level of intimacy required to play where I play. I don’t think it’s necessary to go through each of the following and expedite how they might foster the kind emotionally intimate environment that would help somebody feel supported in being vulnerable in a group activity. So I’ll just repeat some key census data here:

  • I’ve known the people I play with for, on average, 10 years.
  • One of the people I play with most often is my husband.
  • I socialize with almost all of them more frequently than I game with them
  • I’ve been to all of their weddings, took care of their property, pets and/or kids. (and vice versa).
  • I know them all well enough to list that data off the top of my head.
  • We’ve played in intensive, high emotional, epic games with each other for years.

And a few more that might be suggested by the ones above but that I want to make explicit:

  • We’ve adjusted our play groups, meeting times and locations for game around, vacations, pregnancies, life events and baby raising.
  • We have had a thousand discussions on what we like and what we don’t like.
  • We’ve had a thousand wicked play experiences, and some really big play disasters.
  • We cook together, eat together, mind babies together, and clean up together, usually all in and around a game session.

And there are three things that I didn’t go into on the census. The first is that the more we play, the better, and more intentional our social contracts have become. Most of my games these days are based on IWNAY. Some are NGH with lines as clearly defined as possible. These clear policies help to define the boundaries at the table, or to mandate the expectation of support when things go badly, and strengthens the trust around the table.

The second, is that we make common use of ritual in our games. Each long running game has its own soundtrack, often has a theme song, has repeated key lead-in phrases, and environmental cues like incense or candles to help transition into and out of a protected space.

The third is that the majority of people that I play with are also Impassioned players, and a good chunk of those are Impassioned Others (notably, I believe, all of the women). While we are all not following precisely the same process or seeking precisely the same payoff, our shared preferences help us understand each other’s needs in the game, and so, for the most part, things in this area are pretty well protected (I by no means intend to say that my gaming group does not ever face obstacles or challenges, it’s just that in general we’ve done these pretty well, IMHO).

The second kind of intimacy that is (mostly) required to play where I play is an emotional intimacy with the character and the story. The answer to securing this one is usually just time, energy, and focus. For me and the majority of people I game with, emotional investment into the character and/or story compounds over the time played. It’s very rare for me to be able to plug in to a character immediately and have enough investment to seat in an emotional context and achieve the cathartic payoff I’m looking for. Sometimes it takes whole sessions to find, sometimes I get glimpses of it, sometimes it stutters in and out (Vincent, if you’re reading this, I’ve had more success in seating out the gate with Dogs than with any other game I’ve played).

However, in a long-run campaign, it’s rare that I don’t slide right into the emotional context of a character as soon as we start, even if it’s been a while since we’ve played a game. This is also a reason why “time lapsing” is disruptive to me in games. By that, I’m not implying any particular lapse of time, but instead a lapse over a critical period of time, whether that is 1 day or 100 years. In Exalted, if we just finished a plotline in which a sense of closure was achieved, skipping 100 years probably wouldn’t be a problem. However, if we skipped a day or week in the life of the same character where no closure had been achieved, I might have trouble with engaging the emotional context of the character. The same goes for the story.

And since this has turned into a really long post, I’m going to start to wrap up. The whole article is meant to say that playing where I play takes certain support parameters (as I am sure do many areas on the grid, especially along any given perimeter) and to explore the kinds of support my group employs. Also, this post has been meant to say that if you don’t recognize my play style, one possible reason could be that you just don’t encounter it. If your main source of gaming is pick-up play, convention play, or (tabletop) play in a public space, it’s possible that the environment is not conducive to people who play like me.

Roleplaying Theory

My Gaming Census

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This isn’t the post I set out to write. But it’s helpful in understanding that one, which I hope to write next, so I’m posting it anyway. I think that examination of the kind of gaming context you’re in can really help to identify where you’re coming from and help explain why things do or don’t make a particular kind of sense to you or someone else.

Some demographics from my face to face gaming world:

Life:

  • There are 11 folks who comprise the majority of my face to face gaming in the last five years or so, down from about 20 in the five years before that and 40 or so in the five years before that.
  • Six are men and five are women.
  • (edited to add: ) We fall, fairly evenly spaced, between the ages of 28 and 37. There’s a significant cluster of around 5 sitting at 32-33. The average age is 33.
  • All are “white”. Ethnicities represented are: Greek, Irish, English, Scottish and “Mutt” (their word, not mine).
  • At least four have some degree of self-identification with the word “queer”. At least one has been involved in committed same-sex relationships.
  • We cover a wide socio-economic band. Historically, we come from lower lower middle class to upper middle class backgrounds. Currently, we fit all fit somewhere between upper middle class and middle middle class.
  • Six of us have an identification to an organized religious group. None would be considered by the group to be particularly devout, only one would be considered adherent, one would be considered moderately adherent. Of the religious affiliations represented, we have: Mormon, Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Buddhist and Wiccan.
  • Ten of the eleven are married couples. Three of those couples have kids. Three of the couples own their own houses.
  • Two of us have graduate degrees, four more have undergrad degrees, two more are enrolled to complete or came close to completing undergraduate degrees, one has specialized training, and two have high school diplomas. Of all the degrees mentioned, all are in the arts, save for three degrees earned by the same person, two in science and one an MBA.
  • Three grew up in metropolitan centers with a population of a million of more. One grew up in a metropolitan center with a pop of 300-500K, and three grew up in cities with a pop in the band of 100-200K. We all have spent the majority of our adult years in Toronto.
  • Six have lived in other countries, and five have traveled the world fairly extensively.
  • Politically, every one of us is left of center, most moderately, a few extensively. At least half would self-identify as socialist, and at least a couple maintain communist leanings.
  • We have three teachers, two business professionals, one illustrator, one chef, and one contractor among us. The others have jobs in television arts and customer service.
  • Ten of the eleven are historically very good friends. Some of these folks I have known for 15 years, others only 5 or so. I socialize with them both in game and outside of game. I have been to all of their weddings, and I have looked after their kids, their houses and their pets. These ten folks make up about two thirds of the core folks that I consider good friends. The others are non gamers. The extra one is pretty new in the last year, however, I have no doubt that if we continue to play that we’ll end up there too.

Notable (and possibly related) Experience:

  • At least half of us have been involved in theatre at some point or other. Of these, at least five have been on stage acting (in a play that required purchased tickets to attend). Of those, and two of us have had extensive theatrical training including improvisational theatre, playwriting, directorial experience.
  • Three have a background in public speaking, one of which has been a radio broadcaster.
  • Four of us have been paid as published writers. Two of those have more than five publication credits and one of those have made a living on their writing alone.
  • Two are extensively trained in and make their living by fine arts.

Gaming:

  • Six have GM’d games in which I was involved, (five of the men and me).
  • Nine of these have substantial LARP experience, and most people met each other through that experience. Of those, five still play LARP at least monthly, and one of them runs the biggest (and most successful) LARP in Toronto.
  • Only one of those people is new to gaming in the last fifteen years or more.
  • Eight have played around in new fangled hippy systems or hybrid concepts and seven play there in a fairly regular basis.
  • Two play CCG’s competitively. Three more play occasionally, and two more have played frequently in the past.
  • All of them, save one loves them the boardgames.
  • None of them came out of a history of war gaming, only three of them have played any at all, and of them none play with any regularity.
  • Two are heavily into MMORPGS
  • About half have extensive online MU** experience.
  • Only two of us have a voice in any online forum, blog or community that centers around gaming (can you guess which two?) and only two more even occasionally read anything on said forums.

On the games:

  • The games I’ve played in the last five years with these eleven folks: Dogs in the Vineyard (4 games), Exalted (4 games), Unknown Armies(3 games), Crime & Punishment (2 games), Tribe 8, Truth & Justice, Witchcraft, My Life with Master, The Shadow of Yesterday, 7th Sea, Breaking the Ice, Mage: the Awakening, Buffy, Nine Worlds, and Nobilis.
  • Eight of these games (four of the Exalted games, two of the Unknown Armies Games, the Truth and Justice game, and the 7th Sea game) represent the majority of my gaming time, were/are very involved games running anywhere from 1-4 years in length with sessions averaging 5-6 hours. Most of those were played either weekly or biweekly.
  • Six of them (The Mage game, one Dogs game (still playing), one Unknown Armies game, the Nobilis game and the Tribe 8 game, Witchcraft) were mid-length games that had 4-15 episodes of play at an average of 3-6 hours per session played over a year and a half.
  • The rest (TSOY, MLWM, BtI, Buffy, Nine Worlds, the other Dogs games) were all in the 1-3 episode range, and were either meant to be one offs (MLWM, BtI, one DitV), short plays (Buffy, one DitV game) or just didn’t work for us (Nine Worlds). The sessions would range anywhere from 2-6 hours in length. The two C&P games were, obviously, playtests.
  • None of these games were based on pre-written campaign adventures.
  • Several of the long run games were shifted or hybridized to change the dynamics of the game or suit the social contract at the table.
  • All of the long run games, and most of the mid run games were very dynamic. Most told epic stories and had evolving characters that faced brutal challenges. Most of the stories had a novel-like structure with the longest of the games being serial novels. Their stories were, full, evolved, and well developed stories, each having a beginning middle or an end. The longest ones had multiple beginnings middles and ends, and felt kind of like like trilogies (quadrilogies, whatever). Of those games that are considered over, most of them ended at a completion point, rather than falling apart or abruptly ending mid-stream.

So as not to discount their experiences with me, I should say that there is another half dozen folks that I have played with virtually, in this time. In these cases, we come together to play TT games in a virtual environment, rather than coming together to play a game that exists virtually (like a MUSH or a MMORPG). I have also played in pick up, one-shot games with approximately a dozen other people in the last couple of years. These kinds of games do not form the bulk of my gaming time (as I know that they do for some) and so do not have nearly as much impact as my other body of games.

If you’re up for it, I challenge you to take stock of your own gaming census and post it in your own blogs or forums, to give others a better sense of where you’re coming from.

Roleplaying Theory

Putting it all Together

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So, if you noticed than in talking about Cognitive / Impassioned play and I / Other that I plotted one horizontally and one vertically and sussed that I might one day be working them together, it’s here that you get a cookie. 🙂

Why would I put them together? Because I think that there’s a link between these two dynamics that might help us talk about the way we engage with games. Also, I think it might help to illustrate that when we were talking about immersion, that we were covering a lot of exploratory ground. All of the components of the grid are related because they deal with the emotional matrix of how we get the fun out of our fun, but they vary (unsurprisingly) widely in goal and execution. Perhaps immersion isn’t this one thing that you are or aren’t, that you do or don’t, but is instead this big body of investment, response and technique that we all are and do to varying degrees.

I think it’s revelatory that so many people who are so obviously doing radically different things from each other have a decided commitment to the word immersion, and an invested stake in maintaining claim on it. It speaks to an alignment with a personal core value of play. For, despite the fact that there is most often little agreement as to what immersion is or is not, there is one thing that everyone who says they are doing it seems to agree on: it’s necessary to my enjoyment of the game.

So when we can identify that our investment is comprised of several different components, and that those components vary in ratio and degree from one another but work towards each individual player’s personal enjoyment in the game, then we can come closer to understanding what we each mean when we assert what we do and what we need to get our groove on. Once we have a look of at the field the components provide we can start to identify play areas where patterns develop into genres of investment response and technique, and come to a deeper understanding of our play.

p.s. I do realize that I put that grid up there and didn’t actually delve into it. That’s because this post is just meant to explain why I am going where I am going. In the future, I’m going to be talking about how things besides our Purple Mo and Red Brand fit into the grid. For now, just understand me when I say: This is a heuristic model.

Roleplaying Theory

Some Notes on Being Human

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Now of course, the place you find yourself on either the Cognitive / Impassioned scale and the I / Other scale is not a static thing. If you gamed 10 years ago and you’re gaming now, chances are that there are a handful of things about game back then that you’d just as happily not import into the present. Likewise, in next 10 years there are things you’re doing now that you probably won’t be doing then and vice versa. Like my Wargamer cum LARPer friend of a couple of posts ago, the things we do, both in life and in game change us (at least if we’re doing it right) and changing as a person often means a shift in goals and priorities. What makes us happy now may not make us happy tomorrow or next year; what made us happy last year may never make us happy again.

Also, just because you put a dot on the scale that is meant to represent you doesn’t mean that you are not capable of shifting to accommodate the situation at hand, or that you never act outside of the placement of that dot. When playing with strangers, I tend to play down the emotional scale to ensure that I don’t make anyone at the table uncomfortable. I also tend to play closer to the “I” than usual to ensure that I am making directive decisions that will foster the fledgling social situation at the table.

Why does my dot wander? Well, because in that situation, my payoff and my goal are different than they usually are. My payoff might be “advance the social milieu of the group at hand, and have a fun, un-awkward night in the process”. In that case, my goal isn’t a cathartic one, it’s entirely socially based goal that has little to do with the game. In that case I may not even be character socketed; I might adopt a social or story socket for the night, because the payoff is powerful enough to make it worth it.

Likewise, under constraints imposed by other players or by system, my dot might have to wander in specific situations. About six months ago, Brand and I introduced a group of our friends to My Life with Master. The point of the night wasn’t even really to game, it was just to hang out. The point of playing MLWM was not to get impassioned or cathartic, it was to introduce some of our traditional RPG friends to some of what the Indie scene had to offer. It was a one shot, with a lot of players, so there wouldn’t be a lot of time to create catharsis anyway. So my goal, my socket and my payoff weren’t what they normally are, so my dot was in an entirely different place.

This is all to say that there is a difference between what you have occasionally done, what you did all the time a long time ago, what you are capable of doing, and what you do on a regular basis. When you’re examining your goals, sockets and payoffs, it’s important to identify if the situation you are analyzing is atypical, and therefore not representative of what you normally do to get your RPG rocks off.

When you are looking to place yourself on the scale what you’re looking to do is to identify: when you are playing for the payoff you most often play for or the payoff you want most (note that these might not be the same thing), how do you want to experience the game and through what method will you interact with it? It may be very useful to you in the moment you are playing an atypical game to understand how your payoff is different than normal and how you respond to that shift, but to start with, it’s most useful to trend yourself over the course of the payoff that you are trying to achieve most of the time.

Roleplaying Theory

Getting in the Cockpit

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So, the second axis I wanted to have a look at is the place that you position yourself to drive your actions in the game. I’m going to talk about this a lot more in future posts, especially about the wording I’ve chosen to describe it: I and Other. For the sake of understanding this introductory post, remember that I am currently working on trying to map the body of play that I once (unsuccessfully) tried to shoehorn into the word immersion; Other could at some point have further application, and will definitely have a more detailed meaning than this, but for the sake of this one post, think of Other as your object in the fiction: your PC, a communal character that you inhabit in the moment, an NPC with which you drive the game as a GM. The I, of course is you as you (though even that will become a little more complicated later on).

You all (except maybe my Great Aunt Gertrude) will be utterly unsurprised to hear me say at this point that the first indicator of where you sit to drive your play is your socket. A person with a primary character socket and no secondary socket is likely going to sit right up at the top of this scale, especially if their goal is Kenotic, and their payoff has an escapist bent.

Likewise, a person who has, say, a primary system socket, a secondary social socket, and a tertiary story socket might never actually make their contributions to the game through a game object, but will instead, contribute directly to the game. I’ve heard some actual play recordings where the players involved never actually inhabited a character object all. Characters, PC or NPCs were never referred to in the first person, and never had an actual voice in play. Even if the character spoke and was not just paraphrased, the player narrated the speech as if it were dialogue in a novel, rather than a character to inhabit.

On the runway from the I to the Other, there are lots of ways to funnel participation through the character as a game object. I’m going to run some of them down for you using the best analogies I have at my disposal. I am peripherally aware that they are similar to some terms already in use in immersion theory. I want to be clear that I’m not at all trying to adopt those terms and their associated meanings (or baggage). Remember that I don’t read rpg.net or the Forge and I’m not a big forum girl. As such, please do your best when you read on to disassociate what you have been taught I might mean and to concentrate on reading them as simple analogies:

As a marionette, where the player does not inhabit the object, but dances it through the fiction with a directed will, there is a distinct emotional and sensory distance between the player and the character. The two share nothing; the marionette is nothing more than a tool with good aesthetic value.

As a puppet, the player inhabits the object only partially, all decisions are unmitigated by the puppet and are made for the direct, unencumbered benefit of the player or the story or something external to the character object (even if that benefit is the player’s sense of the character’s continuity in the story). The player has some amount of emotional investment in the character object and may have a very detailed blueprint of the puppet but is not influenced by the character object directly. Influence on the game is equally (qualitatively and quantitatively) made via the character object and directly without it.

As a mask, the player maintains a distinct identity within the character object, but has established an emotional, often empathic connection with the object and uses it as the primary vehicle to influence the game. The player is influenced and informed by the character object, and the character object is willfully given a measure of transformative power over the player as a goal of play. The player can take intentional action in the game that is uninfluenced by the character object, but optimally will do so only through the funnel of the character.

As a possessing force, the player abandons a personal identity and surrenders to the character object as a goal of play in order to directly, experience the full subjective reality of the character. The more intensely this is done, the less able the player is take any self-directed action as it does not originate from the (the player’s matrix) of the character’s subjective reality. This is all the way up the Other scale.

I / Other Scale

Once again, the purple dot is me (my trended behaviour, mind not an absolute that doesn’t exist). The empathic connection to character object is critical to my goal and my payoff, because it is in the ability to feel the emotionality of my character object’s response to the story that my impassioned engagement is fueled and the cathartic response is won. However, it is just as important to me to not then extend to allow the character to be a possessing force because to create really effective cathartic situations and get my Epicaric Virago on, I must have the freedom to manipulate the character and drive her towards badness and strife.Brand is the red dot again. He doesn’t need to be up close and personal with any particular character object in order to get his groove on. In fact, having to live within the confines of a character can sometimes hold him back from getting at his payoff. The character is a very rich source of story bits and momentum tools that make the story hot, but they are not usually gratifying to him in and of themselves.Also it’s worth noting that as a GM, Brand interacts with the Other as if it were a marionette, while as a player, he leans closer to being a puppeteer. I have a similar shift, though not as pronounced: As a player I solidly mask the Other, while as a GM I interact with the Other as both mask and puppet.

So, you can affect the game directly as your self, or you can affect the game funneled through an interaction with a character object. These modes of play are determined by the kind of payoff you are looking for, the kind of goal you set to achieve it and most importantly, by the socket that you use to engage with the game. Now that only two of you (of the original three) are still reading, I’d also like leave you hanging by noting, that while I’ve talked about the Other as character object, I do think it might be possible that other kinds of sockets can also become the Other. Setting is a particularly intriguing one when you think about how no-mythers might marionette the setting while deep setting socket folks (Elliot, I’m looking at you here) may well be considered to be possessed by the setting. If you have ideas on this, post them. Somewhere down the line I’ll likely be coming back to this.