Happy New Year to all.
My only resolution is to post more than once every two months. The rest of my life is going well enough, so maybe now I can start treating this blog like something other than an occasional brain dump.
Before I get into my post general, let me say that much of the work on this idea was done by my wife. Without her insight I wouldn’t ever have started to realize this stuff. The good ideas are hers, the errors mine.
I will also say that if you don’t care about or believe in personality typing tests, this post will probably not help you a lot. I am not interested in debating the validity of personality typing, I’m interested in talking about how to use it for people who already have interest in the field.
There is a personality typing test known as the Myers Briggs system. If you don’t already know about it, you need to read that link before you go on. I’m going to be jargon dropping hot and heavy through this article and not explaining what an NT is, so if you want to get it, go read. (There is a more feeling, less thinking version here.)
I know some people have done work with MB in RPGs, from typing themselves and their group to typing their characters and seeing how they should work as a unit. Some of the elements of MB tests have immediate application to RP groups – especially in understanding why people want what they want. Something that became very quickly clear to me, for example, was the difference between players who have a Judging bias vs. those with a Perceiving bias. Think about the following descriptions in terms of RPGing and Forge Theory:
“J-types tend to prefer a step-by-step (left brain: parts to whole) approach to life, relying on external rules and procedures, and preferring quick closure and discrete goals. P-types, on the other hand, are more interested in meeting life as it comes. This can result in a “bouncing around” approach to life (right brain: whole to parts), relying on subjective judgments, and a desire to leave all options open.”
So some people will like narrow, focused games with definite goals and objectives, strong mechanical and logical processes, discrete goals, and quick closure. Others will want more free flowing games, less mechanical structure, long running and ongoing campaigns, and want to leave all options open all the time. Does this sound like a familiar dichotomy?
Seems really basic, right? Different people like different things. Well, remember those posts I made about Intensity and how I thought many Forgeites approach to game was too focused on mechanics and PUSH, while many people I play with like intuitive play, generalized systems, and long running games? Yea, it’s all about the J/P split. I’d be willing to bet droughts that a lot of my Forge friends are J types, while my RPG.net friends who cringe at the very idea of a game that has preset limit conditions are P types. (NOTE: This is not just a NAR/SIM divide – more on that later.)
You’ll find a similar split in other divides, especially the F/T. How many times have we heard someone on the Forge talk about the amount of thought he puts into game and the ways that he constructs theme in a very logical, solid, and step by step manner. Yea, that’s almost text book T behavior. OTOH, the folks that react harshly to the logical process of it and want theme to be something organic, something that grows naturally out of game, and want it be something birthed rather than constructed? Yea, that’s F behavior.
BTW, I think that one of the classic misunderstandings about Nar talk is that Nar can easily go either F or T (or N or S for that matter), but because of the medium of communication it is easier to talk about it in terms of T modes of approach. Which makes all the Fs out there feel like they are being excluded because the methods being used to talk about the process are not how they think about it, nor what they want in their games. Which leads people getting exasperated and saying, “Of course you don’t have to think through the process all ahead of time. Theme comes out of game, it isn’t set before it. I never said it was.” And its true, they never said it was. But because of the T (and J) based methodology (and bias?) used to explain it, the whole process feels very alien to F thinkers. OTOH, once they have a chance to play through it rather than just forum-chat about it, they tend to get it fast.
As Mo and I were talking about this it occurred to us that while knowing a persons MB type could help in running games for/with them and in understanding why they react as they do to game, it can be incomplete because it only shows how they are interacting with game on one level.
As a result we started looking at different “levels” of MB typing – typing ourselves, and typing our characters. Typing yourself is just basic MB stuff, find your type and you get a rough indication of how you prefer to deal with life. Typing your characters was a bit harder, as we didn’t type all of our characters as individuals. Rather we came up with a rough composite of the kinds of characters we generally play and made a rough archetypal MB type for them as a unit. It then occurred to us, however, that there is an extra level that we were missing completely.
As we all know from the Big Model the first thing that happens at a gaming table is real people interact with other real people. For that reason it’s obvious that the most important MB types are those of the actual players. One of the very last, and least important things, that happens is the characters interacting with each other – so the character MB types are only of minor interest to give direction to the other types. What we realized was missing in our analysis was that there is a middle step in the psychological type process of gaming: how the real people interact with the game as a game, and what they are looking to get out of game that is different than what they want to get out of life.
At first this seemed counter-intuitive because a person’s MB type should often determine how they want to interact with game. But in game we are usually a particular type of people, and we usually want to interact with things that are not part of our world in ways that we would never actually want to do in real life. So while our MB type is important, and while our Character MB type is of interest, the level between must focus on identifying how we come to game differently than how we come to life. So Mo and I worked out a system to type ourselves in terms not of what we wanted from life, but what we wanted from game. To do this we came up with some rough correlations to the MB scale for priorities in gaming that go as follows:
I/E: Introverts are those that approach a game primarily through their character. Extroverts are those who approach the game primarily through the world, setting, or situation. If you want to play in the world of Wheel of Time, you’re going the E road. If you want to play a farmer who grows into a great leader, in whatever setting, you’re going the I road.
N/S: Intuitives are basically No-Mythers, and Sensers are big Mythers. If you want the game to focus on tangible, repeatable, discrete elements you’re walking the road of S. If you’re more interested in the concepts, themes, and abstracts of the game then you are embarking on the path of N.
T/F: This one changes very little between standard and game. If you think your way through game, want to focus on the logic, an intellectual appreciation, then you are on the Tower of T. If, otoh, you want game to be about feeling you way through, focusing on the emotionality, and having a gut level appreciation of game then you’re on the ship of F.
J/P: Mo and I called this one Pressure (J) and Flow (P). Judging gamers want to hit it and quit it, they want discrete goals, short run games, quick closure, and games full of pressure that they can make statements about and through. Perceiving gamers want more flowing games, stories that flow into each other, long running campaigns, either no closure or closure that flows into a new story, and games that are about enjoying the flow rather than increasing the pressure.
When we typed ourselves by these formula, we found out that we have different modes of approaching game than we do life and reality. Mo is a INTP in real life, an INFP towards game, and most of her characters are ENTJs. I’m a ENFP in real life, ENFJ towards game, and most of my characters tend towards ESFJ personalities.
Looking at the differences we decided that places where there are big switch-offs between character, game, and self are areas that need special attention because they show a division of desires that could easily be misread by others in the game. After all if you’re one type of person who becomes another when playing a game, it’s understandable if your friends don’t get it. Areas where all three are the same are also important, as they tend to form core areas that are necessary for someone to be happy in a game. Someone who is T in all three areas is not going to be happy in a emotional game with emotional people, and a triple J isn’t going to like games that never come to a head ever.
From this we started looking at how the pairs match up against each other, top to bottom, looking like this:
Mo
Life: INTP
Game: INFP
Character: ENTJ
See how Mo is a P type, who likes P type games, but J type characters? Pretty much this indicated that she is a “go with it” person who wants to be able to flow with the game rather than having to set up goals and objectives OOCly, but who likes to play characters that do themselves make judgments and have strong goals. This should be a pretty familiar type to most GMs: Mo wants to relax and have fun in game playing characters that do big strong things. To make her happy the GM should give her character big things to react to, without forcing her to OOCly plan or judge the character out.
Also, notice the IIE first column. That shows an introvert with a character bias, who likes playing characters that are out loud and proud. The TFT column means that while in life she thinks her way through things, in game she wants to feel her way through things. She doesn’t want game to be a logical, cognitive process – she wants it to be an emotional process. Her characters, however, are T types – which means that they can be confronted with things to think through, but Mo herself doesn’t want to have to OOCly figure them out. Giving her character a big mystery to solve is cool, but she better be able to roll her skills to figure it out, because if you expect her to get all OOCly thinky her desires for the game will be frustrated. The mystery had also better have big emotional stakes in it, because the intellectual thrill of solving problems (mechanically or not) will not satisfy her either – she needs EMOTION damnit.
That last point is significant BTW. Mo is a problem solver in real life, and most of her friends know this. She plays problem solving characters, and most of her GMs know this. So it would seem to be a logical conclusion that she would want to have problems to solve in game. It is, however, a very wrong conclusion.
Finally, I’d speculate that as Mo has a IIE and a PPJ (first two rows the same, final row opposite in both columns) that she has some big time escapism going on in her choice of characters. She’s an introvert who is focused on her characters, and a flowing person who wants a flowing game – but she wants to play big loud characters who have big plans and make hard descisions.
Now lets pick on me:
Brand
Life: ENF*P
Game: ENFJ
Character: ESF*J
(The asterisks indicate that I flop frequently between modes on that point. I have an F preference, but years of graduate school left me with an unavoidable T default in any kind of intelligence based pressure situation.)
Okay, I’m an extrovert who likes worlds and situations and plays extrovert characters. No big shock, but it does reveal something that has been a problem for me for years in trad RPGs: I can’t character immerse. I am not about my characters internal world or mode or thought process, so things that require me to be will not leave me happy. OTOH, I love Pendragon because in it the character’s internal world is externalized by the Personality system. I bet most III players hate that shit.
So far as I can tell my NNS is about me being a big intuitive/concepts guy who wants to deal with intuitive concepts in game, but has characters that are all about digging up the details of their world. This results in my making poses like “Yes, this is the third volume of the Red Cycle of the Sage Kings of Nat Lum, who in the Fifteenth Dynasty rose to overthrow Hushan of the Seven Slaves” followed by people saying OOCly, “Who the hell are the Sage Kings of Nat Lum” and me just shrugging. My characters love detail, but I want to be able to make it up OOCly rather than following a canon.
The F straight down is pretty straight forward. I’m a big heart on legs who wants emotional games for his characters that are big hearts on legs. The only trick there is that both I and my characters can flip to T, which has to be a pain for my GMs as my normally emotionally centered world occasionally goes all intellectual. (Mo notes that I am also an F that talks like a T, so it is easy to confuse me as a guy who wants intellectual challenges in game.)
PJJ is actually easy to understand. I’m an easy going guy who doesn’t feel like he can control his life by application of will, but who wants his game to be full of things he can attempt to control with characters that dynamically impact their world. That’s my big point of escapism, both IC and OOC – the ability to do in game and in character what I cannot (or do not want) to do in real life. It also has one other significant tell: I like games that are challenging and that challenge my character – but I’m not interested in being challenged to judgment myself. This manifests in reaction to a mode of generating explosive stories that Ron Edwards has put forward. Basically he advocates putting people’s real life issues into game as things their characters face, getting them involved at every level (personal, game, character) in the emotional issues at the table. This mode rocks many, many people’s socks. However, it mostly just annoys me – because of that first P. If I was a J up there and a P everywhere else it would probably work, but because I am not myself in my real life a Judge, the technique tends to fall flat when used on me. Engage me in the game, yes: engage me in the character: fuck yes. Engage me OOCly with my real life issues? It’ll slide, man, I’m telling you – I’ve seen it and seen the looks of consternation and confusion on the faces of my GMs that it didn’t work.
Obviously all of this is still in its early stages. We need to get lots of other people to do this and talk about it and see what we can see. What do the common patterns mean? Is anyone with an IIE going to have a pattern similar to Mo’s? Is it indicative of a character-immersion escapist? Is a TJ TJ TJ going to be someone who needs combinations of both Story Now with pressure cooker conflicts and a degree of Step On Up to make getting what they want even after they have made the decision a hard challenge? Do triple Ts primarily engage in the game by looking back at it after it is over and making a decision about the product then, while triple Fs don’t give a shit once the game is over but must be feeling it at the time?
And we haven’t even got into the thing that MB tests are primarily used for: to build functional groups. Once we know how the levels interact and what they mean about players and their wants we can start to build from there and do what business councilors do and find ways to use the tests to build stronger teams (or to make strong teams stronger by giving them better modes of production), and to teach people to expand and develop. Really, just because you’re an ESTJ towards game now doesn’t mean you might not like to play more INFP if you learn what makes it fun.
For some starting examples and looks at the types of trends I’m talking about, check out this page, especially the “type towards other types” at the bottom of the page. That kind of stuff done specifically for game could be a godsend to many groups.
There is a lot of work to go, but I think there is some promise here.
Final note: I do find there to be a heavy slant towards ENTJ play in a lot of Forge theory. Look, for example, at this excellent post about the Big Model and how it makes Sim “more equal” to the other modes by switching it to a TJ focus from the previously assumed P focus. The emphasis on push, on intellectual appreciation, and discrete segments is very much in the T and J columns.
This isn’t a bad thing, save that I do sometimes think that because most Forge theorists are most comfortable explaining things in TJ mode an incorrect assumption is made that Forge games, and Nar play, are all essentially TJ based. This is false. You can play FP Nar very easily, thanks, you just have to do so in modes not well supported by the TJ bias that has so far dominated the field.