Tag Archives: push/pull

push/pull

Getting around to (one of) the point(s).

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So, 10 or so months ago I started Sin Aesthetics.

I did this post on immersionand this post on authorial intent and this post on push and pull.

None of them were supposed to be very groundbreaking, they were just setup posts to get everybody onto the page of a few things I wanted to talk about. The next one was supposed to combine some of these elements to having a discussion about how one could use pull techniques to help immersion-heavy players cope functionally and productively in push-heavy nar games. This seems like it’s kind of anti-climactic now after all the discussion that’s gone on about p/p. At least the post can be much shorter now, because we won’t have to sort through examples.

Basically, the point is that if the goal of nar games is to create drama by addressing premise, and if differential techniques (p/p) can equally be used to do this in a valid way then those techniques can be (and are) used intentionally to create a personal fit to a shared game, even if the game fosters a playstyle that is less friendly to the player using the technique. I’m an immersive player and find that many nar games with explicit push systems (read: mechanically supported) often interrupt my ability to immerse because the system requires me to toggle between IC-head and OOC-head too long or too frequently, or because they break (personal) character continuity over issues of ownership (e.g. winning narration rights).

The design intent over many of these explicit structures exist to create what matters. What matters might be drama through conflict, or to highlight the address of premise, or to reward giving over to the story. It might be simply to pre-negotiate the social system of the game so that there is less work or negotiation required to produce functional and enjoyable play. In any case, they are designed to produce.

In some cases, where the explicit structures prevent or deter a player from fully socketing to their locus of enjoyment in a game (so for me, to character, emotionally) the player can premptively produce what the explicit structure has been built to require in order to eliminate or minimize the negative impact of interacting with that structure, while still remaining functional and socially responsible to the game and the play group.

For example, say one explicit structure in the game is: once you have played to a point where crisis is coming, the players roll dice and the winner is given sole authority to narrate the outcome of the crisis. The point of this structure is to provide a means of resolving conflict and a clear direction of social authority. A player that sockets emotionally via character might find this structure impedes or prevents personal enjoyment in the game because when they lose conflicts the winning player is free to narrate what the loser’s character can do, and this creates static in the player’s personal sense of continuity with the character, knocking the plug out of the socket.

(Some of you might want to tell me that if this is the case, the player shouldn’t play this game. Sure, optimally we’d all be playing games with groups and in systems that fit us perfectly 100% of the time, but the reality is that we don’t. Sometimes we play games that fit other people’s preferences more than our own, because playing with the person is more important to us than the system we play in. Sometimes, everything else in the system makes it worth running into the occasional hump.)

So in this case, what can the player do to premptively produce what the system is looking for so as to lessen the impact of or eliminate the hump? Well, since it’s fresh, Brand’s moment of crisis post offers us one way. Since the structure is very FatE, a skilled player could pull to resolve the conflict and determine authority using social DitM. In order to succeed in the pull, the player must win the buy in of the other player, and in giving buy in (especially in a context in which going to the FatE is his mechanical right in the game) the other player is exhibiting an acceptance to what the pulling player has done (any of this could be an OOC explicit negotiation or an IC negotiation). Both players are happy, the premise has been addressed to the satisfaction of both players, and the drama rolls on. The transaction is functional and productive, and the pulling player has not had to experience the static produced by the FatE structure.

This kind of thing isn’t always going to be possible, of course, and could take considerable skill and finesse to make work, but it’s something worth thinking about.

It’s also an interesting consideration to take when designing. As the designer, if you want people to be able to use their personal skills to compensate for areas of your system they might have problems with, does your explicit system make room for them to do so? If you do not want this, how do you constrain this ability in your design? Is there other things we can do to expand the support for multiple playtypes, or multiple sockets or whatever? Do we even want to?

Anyway, it’s something I’m still musing on, so I thought I’d put it out there.

push/pull

Push and Pull – One Last Time

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(This was posted over on StoryGames, I thought since I put so much work into it, I should paste it in here, too. It helps me, continuity-wise, too.)

Chris and I have been knocking Push and Pull out very fruitfully over on Deep in the Game. Thanks Chris!

Here are your no-nonsense definitions:

Push is an assertion of individual authority.

Pull is a directed solicitation for collaborative buy-in and input.

Both Push and Pull are a part of fundamental human communication patterns. They are tools used in social interactions that provide movement to the interaction and provoke response and action within it.

In a RPG context, Push and Pull happen both as they do in a non game context (socially and incidentally because we are still people engaging in interaction), and as techniques used to affect the game, the social environment and the drama. Both Push and Pull can be mechanically or non-mechanically supported, functional or dysfunctional, effective or non-effective. Neither is inherently better or worse than the other, though people can have preferences for one or the other.

A player, using a Push technique, uses his own authority to put something out there. This something could be an assertion of an element or action into the fiction, it could be something in the social contract that causes or prevents something from happening (E.g. identifying that an NGH or TTP line has reached a hard stop) or in other ways (I’m not going to categorically list them here, that could be a discussion for a future time, suffice to say that although a push can be used as a technique to address the fiction, it’s not tied to it).

Push Example #1:

Game: Truth & Justice

Situation: The heroine has just found out that she has a long lost brother, and that her brother idolizes her secret identity for her work in the same science area that he is studying in. She, a precog, has a vision in which her estranged father and long lost brother are in a mall when a group of assassins break in and try to kill them. She could go save them, but if she does a whole busload of schoolgirls who have been captured by an evil cult will die terrible horrible sacrificial deaths. She chooses to go save the schoolgirls, because the ritual that they are being killed in may prove very, very bad for the world. In the vision where her brother and father are, the guns ring out, the bullets fly, and the father and brother are gunned down, their blood splattering.

The player (me) takes 4 hero points and hands them to the GM (Brand), declaring “Major Detect & Discover. Josh [the brother] is a mutant. He doesn’t die.” Brand cackles and gives time powers to Josh, so that when the reality of the precog vision comes true, he rewinds time in the second before he dies and uses his power to take out the villain, saving himself and their father.

I didn’t want the brother to die without having my character have a chance to interact with him, so I used a mechanic available to me to make it not happen.

Push Example #2:

Game: Unbreakable (A home-styled nar game) that’s loosely styled on the themes of M Night’s movie Unbreakable.

Situation: Our hero has been putting his ass on the line to make his Alphabet City neighborhood a safer place. In doing so, he’s pissed off a number of gangs in the area. In a previous bang, he had seen a member of the gang that has been hunting him down being shaken down by three guys of a rival gang over mule-ing drugs through their territory. Arjuna had interceded, scared the rival gangs off and saved the kid’s life. He even gave him back the drugs, as a show of good faith/bribe to leave his block alone.

The kid, afraid of what would happen if the leader found out about getting his ass saved by an enemy hadn’t passed the message on, so in another scene, when Arjuna’d come face to face with the sociopathic leader of the main gang, and had pointed out his show of good faith, the fit hit the shan. The gang leader thanked him for the interaction, and declared the feud between them over. He told Arjuna he would take care of the discrepancies.

Coming home that night, the GM (me) declares that in the vacant lot behind his house, the kid is dead – gutted – and has been left on display for him. The area has been police taped, and cops are on the scene. Alongside the body: the knapsack, likely still carrying his prints.

I put something down in front of him that said: Here, deal with that shit.

A player, using a Pull technique, solicits another player’s buy-in or input. This can happen by catering input to the other player’s tastes, by enticement, by reward, by negotiation, by collaborative mutual decision (and I’m sure there are other ways) Again, the Pull can be used to influence the fiction, but Pull techniques are not limited to the fiction.

Pull Example #1:

Game: The same Truth & Justice game as Push #1

Situation: Heroine encounters a villain for the first time. The game has a very graphic novel feel, and the social contract of the game has it established that there is (like many comic books) usually a pattern wherein at the first meeting, the villain will gets away, eluding the heroine.

The scene is set in a bank with a robbery underway, the mooks present are human goons for hire with lots of bad ass weaponry, the main villainess is a sexy succubus-y she-devil that is enrapturing the Bank Manager. The character comes in with great pith and daring do, and faithfully begins to kick the asses of the mooks en route to the main villainess. The mooks prove to be too numerous and too underhanded and threaten the innocents in the bank, but if she doesn’t do something about it, the villainess will get away with the booty!
The heroine takes the only action she has to spare to do a single attack on the villain, knocking her away from the bank manager, and into the vault and as part of her description says:

“Paper bank notes and bills flutter away from the hefty vault door as it slams shut with a satisfying THUD and a long series of clicks that lock the Hell Queen in its deep heart, keeping the bank’s patrons safely clear of her terrible, evil tactics!” The player (me), turns to the GM (Brand), raises an eyebrow and says in overly accentuated, sarcastic way:

“And Déjà Vu turns back and focuses her FULL attention on the members of Terror Inc, FULLY CONFIDENT that her “safe deposit” will be waiting for her once she has taken care of the gunboys!” Wink wink, nudge, nudge.

Brand, grins and says “Revolting Development?” and I agree, roll my dice and cash in on hero points which I then use to lay a righteous smackdown on the Terror Inc boys. When I get back to the vault to collect the villain, there is a hole melted in the floor, and the villainess and the booty are, of course, long, long gone.

If the villain got away, I wanted her to get away because something completely unexpected (to the character) had happened while my character continued to do the righteous smackdown. I was also low on Hero Points and knew that the Revolting Development would pay off. So, because I wanted these things, I created a situation where both requirements could be fulfilled, and one that I knew would be appealing enough for Brand to pick up on.

I wanted to go in a direction and so I made it a direction that Brand would like so that we could go that way together.

Pull Example #2:

Game: Breaking the Ice

Situation: It’s getting on to the end of the third date, and the fates of the lovers are being decided. They’ve racked up a pretty high attraction score, but their compatibility rating is low. This is reflected in the game’s fiction. The characters have never been ambivalent about each other; they’ve never fully managed to make it to a place where they click romantically, but they end up in bed despite that. Afterwards, one of the characters (mine) shows a bit of the desperation of the act by drawing a parallel between watching the woman he just lay with as she slept and the love of his life that died in a car accident (in which he was driving in heavy rain) a year ago. The other player (Brand) finding the earlier silly-ish game ending on too dour a note, wanting a chance at a bonus die, and knowing that I have a penchant for elegiac romance, wakes his character up and has her comfort him, saying in character:

“I can’t promise that I’ll be here forever, or even that I’ll love you forever, but I’m here now, and I love you now, and that’s enough. It’s a mistake to think you were driving then, or that you are driving now. Life is hydroplaning, and there isn’t any control to be had.”

And he earned the bonus die, and in their mutual comfort earned the one last compatibility (#3) that gave them at least a slim shot of making it.

Brand wanted something with more hope, and he wanted the characters to have a chance, so he found a way to appeal to my tastes in game to use a mechanically supported tool that allowed me to reward his pull.

Why is any of this important?

Well, if you’re designing, analysis of these kinds of social transactions and how they differ from each other helps you understand what kind of game you are creating, and who will be happy with it.

Now, I’ve never used the Power 19, because my brain naturally does this sort of thing without needing the tool, but it seems to me that if it represents a list of the things that are important to consider in game design and theory (which it seems to be, considering how many talk about it/use it), that discussion of social transactions such as Push and Pull are intrinsically connected to the following questions:

6.) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?
7.) How are behaviors and styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?
9.) What does your game do to command the players’ attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)
10.) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?
11.) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?
14.) What sort of product or effect do you want your game to produce in or for the players?
19.) Who is your target audience?

If the idea is to intentionally build games that cater to the target audience to maximize the potential fun that could be had by them, then it would be extremely helpful to consider whether the game coexists peacefully with the skills of your target audience and provide extra, explicit support to the skills that are not inherent to the group.

Conversely, if your target audience is “As many people as goddamn possible.”? Well, then, understanding the kinds of different play out there helps you to identify where support will be needed to get different players to peacefully co-exist in the same game while achieving the maximum potential for fun.

Example in Action:

I put my observations of Push and Pull into direct application in Crime and Punishment. In life, I like Pull. It’s energizing, it builds. I am less comfortable with Push, it feels confrontational and space invading. Now this doesn’t mean I don’t find Push useful… obviously I do, because I employ Push techniques in my games.

Crime and Punishment is designed to build collaborative environments that build investment between members of the player group to provide a basis and support for applying hardcore Push.

Huh?

Read the game. The entire first half is all built on Pull techniques, contributing ideas, soliciting investment, earning the approval and buy in of the other players to create a communal endeavor. The second half of the game is all Push. In this environment of investment and reinforced by the framework we have built together, players can now Push hard against each other to maximize the potential of the storyboard. To make the drama come to life. The mechanics support it here, too. You use the investment of other players that you have earned, to bid and buy and win how you want things to happen in the game.

Please go read C+P with all of this in mind.

While you’re at it, if all of this has finally made some semblance of coherent sense, you might want to go read a bunch of stuff again:

Push & Pull
Pull Clarification and Promises
Brand Pushes and Pulls and Blows Himself Down
Push & Pull on The 20×20 Room
Push | Pull The Moment of Crisis
I think that’s all I have for now.

Best,

~Mo

Games, Roleplaying Theory

Saurashtra – Actual Pull Play Examples

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So. Actual Play.

For the moment I’m going to stick with one particular game, because it’s a Nar game, even if it didn’t use a good system to support it’s Nar (Brand found it a pain in the ass, but frankly, I think it made us innovate), and because, well it’s full of examples, and I’m a lazy ass.

Part the first: Kika

There’s the (apparently) infamous one that Brand talked about on The Forge, and that is written up here in more story-like style. In this discussion, I’m going to talk about one critical pull transaction, but it will be important later in the blog to discussions about using pull techniques to create satisfying and functional immersion play in Nar games. So if I’ve referred you here from the future, this is the example I mean. If you’re reading this in the present, the previous sentence has nothing to do with the droids you’re looking for.

The critical pull, is, of course, the moment that I had Kika set aside her weapons and charms and put herself at the mercy of Jerzom. Over on 20×20 when we were talking about it today, Brand helped to explain that we were in what Polaris calls “freeplay” when I did these things. Brand was all expecting a war, either physical or manipulation-verbal. I did not need a conflict for Jerzom to come to me, I knew he was coming. Brand wasn’t sure what I wanted and so he asked what I was trying to accomplish, and I pulled.

In that moment, Kika was the hero I’d always hoped she’d be. I was happy with what she’d become, and nothing that Jerzom did to her was going to change that. I had complete trust in Brand, in the group, and in the story we’d made together. I opened up the space for Brand to fill up. It wasn’t a passive move, it wasn’t that I didn’t care, wasn’t engaged or was being passive aggressive. I’d brought it hard in this game for two years. I’d addressed the premise of the game to the fullest extent every step of the way and in the last moment I put her and everything I worked for on the table to be judged, for Brand to come in and tell me what it was that I’d accomplished, to agree with me that this is what the story was all about, and fill up the space I’d given him with everything he wanted Kika and Jerzom and their story, and the story at large to say.

Part the second: Taree

This one is not my character, its one of other players in the game, who played the flawed hero striving to live past his flaw to become a truly noble scion. By this point he had faced off against his family, against the Realm, against himself a lot. Throughout the game, Taree’s player pushed and pushed and pushed. He pushed exceedingly well from within the system – he killed everything that came in his way. He told a great story, and this was the end of it:

In his last scene, he faced off against his cousin, possessed by Malefeus, the biggest Yozi of them all. He pushed and pushed, speaking with the Yozi inside his cousin, and it was all really heartbreaking. Finally, he used knives that could suck the souls of their victims driving one into her gut and one into his own. Doing so, he trapped both himself and the Yozi within his body, and at last, he spoke the Rune of Unconquerable Self which, when invoked, kills the user instantly, ending both his life and the Yozi’s with him.

Sound like push play? It is. What came next wasn’t. Brand pulled Taree’s player. He asked him to roll his virtues and gave him the opportunity, for each success he earned, to describe the legacy that his life had brought to the world. Taree’s player accepted this, and described several, but what Brand offered him was a wealth of opportunity and a little overwhelming. Rather than just laming off the extras he couldn’t think up, or putting anything less than the game deserved, he turned to me and the other player and said: “You tell me. What kind of person has he been? What good or ill has he brought to the world?” and invited us to make strong, lasting statements about what he’d given to the story. He pulled his fellow players to have the last word on who his character had been.

There’s a couple.

I’m sure I’ll do more as I think of them, but I wanted to get something out.

One more note: I can’t say if this has anything to do with the pull examples above, but I think it has a lot to do with the pullish kind of social dynamics that we’d encouraged around the table over the entire duration of the game. Even if it’s irrelevant, it’s a cool success story about a former Sim junkie in her first Nar game, so I think you’ll like it:

The third player played Dae, a barbarian warrior woman who becomes the protector of the civilization she once despised. Her player had real trouble initially in the game with some of the concepts of Nar. She had problems authoring directly to the fiction, thinking of the story in terms of premise, and she had real trouble asserting desires or demands to the GM. At one point in the beginning, she even had brought some notes in on a piece of paper that she gave to Brand with some things she wanted because it made her so uncomfortable to tell him about it, and Taree’s player, (her husband) had told her that she must ask for it when they were discussing the previous episode. She even at one point pretended to lose the sheet to stall in giving it to him (though this may have been done comically). She’s definitely never been a particularly push player.

In her last scene, she realized in a fight with the Ebon Dragon, that she couldn’t kill him, and he couldn’t kill her, and that they couldn’t exhaust each other. The fight would be endless, her life filled with nothing but the endless, un-winnable war. In the entire two years of the campaign, the character had never walked away from a fight. She had only ever lost two fights, and those were when she was beaten so badly she really had no choice. She had to choose between letting him go free or giving up any chance at happiness, or a life. She chose life.

At the end of the game, all of our final scenes had ended, it had been brutal and beautiful and brilliant. Brand said “I think that’s it, unless there’s something else you need?” and (which, come to think of it, can be seen as a pull, considering where we were and how open it was, and what came of it.) Dae’s player, who had had such a problem asserting narrative desire, nevermind narrative control didn’t tell Brand what she wanted, she just started to narrate, giving the story the denouement that she needed it to have, that frankly, we all needed it to have and that none of us, Taree’s player, Brand or I could have given at that time.

Neat huh?