Sin Aesthetics

Moving...

Mo — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 01:09:00 +0000

You might notice that SA looks a little different. In the transition to new software, WordPress decided that it was hungry, so it's eaten my Blogger templates. Rather than rebuild, I'm moving, so please adjust your links and RSS feeds to the new site:

http://games.spaceanddeath.com/sin_aesthetics/

I had hoped to get the new site looking more like home before I moved there, but instead, y'all will just have to bear with me through the renovations.

Thanks for your patience.

Some Notes on Being Human

Mo — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 21:57:00 +0000

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.

Get thee to a Yud'sDicery!

Mo — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 01:43:00 +0000

Go read Brand's GNS and Genre Theory right now. All my stuff will still be here when you get back.

Getting in the Cockpit

Mo — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 06:09:00 +0000

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 Vera) 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.

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.

Cognitive vs. Impassioned Play

Mo — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 23:59:00 +0000

I've thought for some time that one of the reasons we get so bollixed up when we talk about play styles is because although we often assume that we approach game the same way, we really, very much do not. I think there are a couple of things that we've neglected in discussion that merit more focus: the manner of our engagement with the game and the method of influence we choose to affect the game. Right now, I'm going to be talking about the first one and will cover the other in later posts.

Earlier this year when Brand I were talking Myer's Briggs and gaming, we talked about whether a person, a player, or a character was a Thinking or a Feeling type. Since then, I've spent a lot of time, both online and IRL watching the trouble that pops up when strong T's and strong F's try to do, well… anything together, but especially when they are working on theory and design, or in game creating stories together. More than ever I am convinced that a further understanding of this area would help us build better play groups, create more compatible play, deliberately design games that could choose to foster a particular kind of play, or accommodate different kinds of play in the design.

That said, I've consciously ditched the words Thinking & Feeling because I think they misleadingly point towards quantifying intellectual or emotional capability, which is decidedly NOT what I'm looking to do. Instead, I'm looking for a way to measure to what extent we consciously construct our games, and whether our goals in game trend towards being visceral or cerebral.

Some things to note before I go any father:

This isn't an either/or proposition; I suspect most people will have at least a little of each, even if they have a very strong preference for one.

This isn't a question of capability. Just because a player has a habitual place on the scale doesn't mean in the right situation she couldn't act another way and do it well.

There is no value attached to either end of the scale; there is no better, just better for you or better for the situation at hand.

So, instead, I've gone with Cognitive and Impassioned as the two ends of the scale. The Cognitive side speaks to a certain amount of, well, cognition in game. Decisions in the game are made consciously, deliberately, sometimes strategically and are usually based on a specific set of data points. The cognitive manner of play hopes to cerebrally engage the player in the process of playing the game or creating the story. Conversely, the Impassioned manner of play hopes to viscerally engage the player in the moment of play or the context of the story. Decisions in the game are made holistically, intuitively, in reaction to the emotional context of the story and its game objects (characters, setting, plot, etc).

When you interact with the game, do you want it to make you think or do you want it to make you feel, or both and in what proportion? When you are playing a suspense thriller kind of plot, will you feel the story churning viscerally in the pit of your stomach, or will you be endlessly, cerebrally trying to figure out whodunnit? Through the course of the game, do you forecast ahead to optimize the effect of the story/moment/action or do you intuit it, letting the passion of the moment guide you? Of course, you can be in the middle, too, but how far in the middle, where do you fall? What kind of gratification are you looking for as a result of the game, and what techniques, methods, talents, and skills do you use to achieve it?

Hint: In determining where you sit on the scale between Cognitive and Impassioned play, it is helpful to understand your payoff, your goal and, to a lesser extent, your socket.

So, in the last post, I stated my payoff as: "to experientially feel a sense of emotional euphoria as a result of a powerfully engaging story". My goal in game is to experience as intense a catharsis as possible; the stories that churn my ovaries are full of deep visceral complications: tragedies, love, sex, betrayal, revenge and brutality. And in a character socket, I want to be down in the muck and the mire of the emotional messiness, and to live in and react to the moment of the game.

That's a pretty clear emotional agenda in the context of cognitive vs. impassioned play. It can be paraphrased as: "I want to create an emotionally charged story, experience it viscerally, and let it be transformative to me." On the scale between cognitive play and impassioned play, I'm closer to the impassioned edge than, well, most anyone I've ever played with (though I'm sure there are people with an even stronger tendency than I have). The purple dot is me:

Brand, the red dot, is an impassioned player too, but in his case, visceral intensity is not the whole end game: it's an important facet to payoff, but not the payoff itself. As a strong story socket player (with a massive and talented wealth of GM experience), Brand requires that the story that he's working on carries strong visceral resonance and impact because to Brand, that's what gives stories lasting value. He's intensely intuitive and non-constructed about the way he shepherds stories into existence, but he draws on an extremely impressive mental anthology of mythology, literary history and rhetoric which can't help but temper his impassioned participation with a cognitive influence.

So, I'll end this post quickly before Brand gets a big(ger) head. The point is that there is more than one way to skin, cook and eat your delicious payoff. You can deliberately construct it, which makes it a cognitive exercise, you can intuit your way by reacting to the emotionality of the moment in an impassioned pursuit of your goal, or you can fall somewhere in between.

Note: If you're reading along with this and you're nodding your head thinking "I'm a really smart and thinky kind of person, and I feel really good when/after roleplaying, I must be both!" Then you've missed the point. Scroll up and read the post again with this in mind: Mo's a competitively intelligent Process and Systems Analyst who's prone to deconstructive analysis, and she's all way over on the impassioned side of the scale.

Covering the Bases

Mo — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:06:00 +0000

I'm pretty sure that the three of you that read Sin Aesthetics understand me when I use words like sockets, goals or payoff, but just in case my Great Aunt Vera decides to check in on me and is having trouble understanding what the heck I'm talking about, this post is a quick run down. For the sake of my lazy ass, I'm going to quasi cut and paste some from a couple of public conversations I had with Thomas Robertson, who asks too many damn questions for his own good, but as such is useful in getting me to explain my damn self.

Sockets:

The socket is the place in the RPG which serves as the participant's locus of enjoyment. It's the place where people plug themselves into game and give and take their focus and energy to and from. Obviously character can be a primary socket, because immersion wouldn't be such a problematic word without the character being an extremely invested locus.

It's also easy to identify what some other kinds of sockets are. Setting is obviously a socket for a lot of people. System is an obvious one too. We can be pretty damn sure in our community that there are Story socket players. There are other kinds, too: Social socket people, Choice socket people, probably a lot of others too.

I think that many/most people have more than one socket, that is, more than one place that they can plug into the experience of the game, but I suspect that there is always a primary socket, one that is preferred above others. I would say of myself that character is my primary socket, but that I also have a distant story socket as well. Farther still, I could have a social socket and a setting socket, even a choice socket… but the farther down the road a game pushes me to go to find a socket, the less like an RPG it will feel like to me, the less it will fulfill the body of what I come to games to for, and if always pushed to a different socket, the less likely I will be to continue playing the game.

Payoff:

This one's simple, though figuring it out often is like pulling teeth. We all have one reason that we play RPG's. Regardless of the kind of player we are, or the kind of play we do, our reason is one in the same: We come to the game to get out of game what we want out of game. People talk about the concepts of "art" or "game" or "play" as lofty ideals but in reality, gaming has a payoff for everyone who engages in it, which is why we play RPG's rather than golfing, stamp collecting, worm breeding, singing in a choir or whatever else might have had an appealing payoff if RPG's didn't exist, or more importantly, didn't give us what we want.

That payoff will differ vastly from person to person. For some, the payoff is simply "completely forgetting I am me for a couple of hours", for others "engaging in an actively creative co-operative endeavor with people I like" might be the payoff. "Feeling fully, really challenged in a social engagement while making something that feels lasting to me" or "proving that I have the biggest dick at the table" might be the thing you want. "Being validated by other people recognizing my talents as a really good GM", or "participation in creating an epic that was worth telling" might also be what keeps you coming back.

If some of those sound more important than others, if some of them sound right and some wrong, then you're missing the point of why I am talking about payoff. There's no right/wrong/better/worse/worthy/not worthy/valuable/not valuable when it comes to you and what keeps you coming back to the game. You want what you want. It's whether or not you are being honest about what you want, both to yourself and to other people where things can get to being wrong. If my payoff is: "working hard, winning big, and lauding my victory" and your payoff is "non-conflict co-operation towards an emotionally engaging experience" we're not going to play well together unless we really, consciously work at it. That doesn't mean that either of our payoffs are better or worse, it just means we like different things out of the hobby.

You'll notice too, that many of those payoffs in the list up top sound like they would align really well with the kinds of sockets I was talking about earlier. Is that surprising? It really shouldn't be… we do most what works to get us the payoffs we desire, after all. In my case, with a primary character socket, a secondary story socket and a penchant for highly emotional cathartic play it shouldn't be at all surprising that my payoff is something like: "to experientially feel a sense of emotional euphoria as a result of a powerfully engaging story".

Goals:

Back in this post, I talked about some possible goals of play, though they were certainly not meant as an exhaustive list.

Goals in this context define what the end experience of the game is that you work towards, and may imply or suggest a method you use to move towards achieving it. Ideally, your goal should closely align with your payoff. I've seen lots of situations in reality where that wasn't the case, but each and every one described a very unhappy player.

I had a friend who came from a heavy competition war gaming background who stumbled upon and came to really like the social dynamic of the LARP scene. Playing in it drastically changed the kind of payoff he expected from RPGs. He went from a payoff of "validation of my intelligence and cunning through hard won challenge" to something like "escapist enjoyment of being someone else in a highly theatrical mode". The problem was that when he came back to table top, he employed his old high challenge, high competition skills and techniques towards his old goal, but could never, unsurprisingly, achieve his new payoff. He doesn't play anymore, and most of the people he used to play with (post LARP) aren't really sad about that.

So there you are. That there's the basics: sockets, goals and payoffs. There will probably be more as I ramble on, but that's where I'm starting from.

Abandoning Immersion

Mo — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 19:33:00 +0000

So I've been out of the country for four months, and there's nothing like being thrown into the unfamiliar for a prolonged time to clear the head. While I was away I had very little time to keep up with the sundry blogs and forums that I normally follow. When I could find some precious time to look around, I found that with distance, my brain was becoming more and more frustrated with the discourse of gaming in general, and in particular, with immersion. It's a word I've been using for a long time now, and a word I really was rather fond of once, but I think it's long lost any semblance of meaning.

So I'm letting it go.

Since last fall when I started shifting my focus towards specifics and away from some nebulous idea of the body immersive, I've found it more and more helpful in actually establishing some kind of communal understanding and explorative progress with the people who I'm talking to. So from here on in, (on SA and wherever possible) I will be using words like goal and socket and payoff as a kind of matrix to point to specific things rather than try and situate things that are clearly different in a catch all word like immersion. Rather than saying You are immersive or I am not immersive, which really tells you nothing because too many people assert too many conflicting qualities to immersion, I will talk about the means of play, the motivations of play, and the path of play, which hopefully can allow me to talk to the three of you quite clearly, at least for the next ten minutes.

This also means that if I get general questions about "what this means to immersion" in the comments, I'll likely be ignoring them.

While I'm on the topic of comments, I'd like to note that going forward I may or may not respond to any or all who comment. I'm doing this on my blog rather than on a forum for a reason which has little to do with you and a lot to do with me. If I wasn't doing it here, I wouldn't likely be doing it anywhere, and I've found over the last year or so since I started Sin Aesthetics that engaging in response is very powerful to me. It historically has the power to fuel or destroy my enthusiasm or my momentum and that I've given it the unmitigated power to do that pisses me off.

So, from here on in I will be attempting to engage with it selectively to feed my energy and momentum when it can and to let it go when it can't. When I will and when I won't probably has little correlation to the value of your response, so don't take it personally. Please ask questions and comment where you see fit. Even if I don't respond immediately, it doesn't mean I won't read it and let it influence me or that I won't get back to you as a later date.

GameChef '06 Volume I in print!

Mo — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 04:18:00 +0000

Technomancer Press, LLC will have the first print edition of the 2006 "Game Chef" challenge winners available by GenCon. Technomancer is happy to see 4 of the top 8 indie RPG design winners into this first print volume, including grand prize winner Moyra Turkington's 2-hour procedural drama/cop show RPG "Crime and Punishment".

Further, all profits from the GameChef series will be devoted to the Child's Play Charity, bringing games to sick kids in children's hospitals. As Game Chef lead Andy Kitkowski notes, "If it sells, yay, more cancer kids get Gameboys." Game Chef is also a nominee for the prestigous 2006 Diana Jones Award, to be awarded at GenCon.

"Game Chef 2006 Vol I" appears in stores and at the PAX convention on November 23, and a limited number of copies will be on sale at the Studio2Publishing booth at GenCon August 10th to celebrate the Diana Jones Award nomination. Distributors and retailers can order via their Studio2Publishing.com accounts. Information on Technomancer Press is available at www.technomancer-press.com, Game Chef details are at www.game-chef.com, and Child's Play at www.childsplaycharity.org.

PUSH!

Mo — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 04:57:00 +0000

PUSH is available for purchase, and having read an commented on all of it, there's some damn interesting stuff in there! Go buy it!

Get voting, you.

Mo — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 05:16:00 +0000

Our very own Sister Abigail, Jess Hammer has received an Ennie nomination by way of the book Everyday Heroes!

Go vote for her now.

Now why are you reading this line? I said now, didn't I? ;)

And don't vote for White Wolf, or I'll have to get a rolled-up newspaper.

Immersion Goals Borrowed from Literary Theory

Mo — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 03:00:00 +0000

Borrowed from the literary tradition, I'd like to put forward some new words for your perusal that might help explore the differences of goals that exist under the catch-all word immersion. There may be others that would help too, but I think these three are important.

Catharis: Yes, I know you know this word, but do you know what means in the context of literary theory? Catharsis (which was introduced by Aristotle in The Poetics and means either "purgation" or "purification" in Greek) is the emotional effect a tragic drama has on its audience. The audience of a tragic drama would experience an overwhelming feeling of exaltation or relief following the drama because either they formed a vicarious identification with the hero which cleansed the emotions as if they have themselves had undergone the trauma of the story, or because the audience becomes so engrossed in the emotions for the hero that they are removed from the context of their own lives and return refreshed and renewed back to themselves following the drama.

Kairosis: is associated with the epic novel (association with the Greek meaning "the right time", and represents the feeling of integration experienced by the audience with the protagonist. It is associated specifically with the moments of moral and psychologicical transitioning of the character in important, dramatically impacting moments. It is interesting to note that Kairosis is often achieved by challenging unique dynamic characters with typical, everyman dilemmas and emotionally engaging in the moments of change.

Kenosis: is associated with lyric poetry, and represents the audience's abandonment of the ego manifestation in favour of the immediate emotional body and sensory manipulation of the poetic. It comes from the Greek word for "emptiness" and is used to achieve a feeling of timelessness or transcendence.

(If you don't care about the words in their application in literary theory, you can skip this indented part.

***ETA: There's more discussion after the indented part. Pick up the post again in the paragraph starting with: "So, what the heck am I talking about?"**

When I look at these terms, I make some adjustments on them to compensate for the differences in the method and process of the act of roleplaying:

Where we in a widely literate, educated and media saturated environment have specified, culturally driven, inherited understandings of drama, and in a world where the lines between the novel the drama and lyric poetry have been distorted, deconstructed and blurred, it seems to me that goals may not cleanly align by the form but can still maintain similar extant resonance to the emotional outreach of the audience.

Where we, as roleplayers, serve as both the authors and audiences of our own characters, inside a dynamic, living drama rather than a static text, we can elect to chase the fulfillment of multiple goals at once.)

So, what the heck am I talking about? Well, I know for a long time I have been describing my particular brand of character immersion as an intense, cathartic connection with the character in which I feel the character's emotional state acutely, understand the mental process of the character acutely and objectively (rather than the character understands it: subjectively) and feel a vicarious emotional response of my own towards the character.

When I look at this in relation to the terms, I know Catharsis to be my primary goal: It is the place that the intense connection to the character is formed, in which I feel, simultaneously, the character's emotional state, my own emotional state, my character's inner workings, my own inner workings and my empathy for the character. Catharsis will make me physically weep when my character's lover dies in her arms even if she does not shed a tear, because while I feel her emotional state as acutely as she does, I am feeling it vicariously. I am immersed in who she is, but I am not her. The feeling of exaltation or relief is something I can validate. An intense, cathartic immersion experience can leave me feeling a little high in an emotionally-induced endorphin way. This goal, IMHO, is all about feeling (For you following the MBTI stuff, it is an immersive F gamer's playground).

I also know, although it is not part of my description above, that Kairosis is a frequent goal for me. It here that I go to for the moments of resounding transition; the moments that feel as if the soundtrack on the drama has picked up and the character's life and the story will never again be the same. The "right moment" of Kairosis is the one where the character and the story interact and change each other, powerfully and irreversibly. This one is both about thinking and about feeling. In order to do this reliably and intentionally it requires a thinking setup, but transitions to feeling mode in the actualization of the moment's resonance. I suppose it is possible to be setup and actualized both in T mode, but I'm not sure if it would lead to the immersive integration that the goal is looking for. This kind of immersion could serve story socket players as or even more effectively than character socket players. It is also, I believe functionally incompatible with Kenosis.

Kenosis is not a goal of mine, but one that is associated with the term immersion quite frequently in discussion, especially in association with larpers over the pond. Also called "Deep IC" or "altered state flow" or that I have been calling "submersion", the goal here is to feel completely like the character and to feel as little like yourself as possible. The feeling of timelessness or transcendence is something that a lot of these folks talk about, even sometimes going so far as to compare it to a religious experience. Again, this is also about Feeling, I think (MBTI note: and I would think that it is commonly a goal of "SF" immersive gamer types, who would require strong myth to make a full transition from self to character). Note: This kind of immersion goal would also work as well for a setting socket player as a character socket player: the goal would be to get out of the player's world and into the world of the player's character.

I also think it's interesting to note that when looked at this way, it's unsurprising that there is so much debate about the compatibility of the goals of nar games and the goals of immersion. A goal like Kairosis requires intentional dramatic framing and intention to achieve the synthesis of character transitioning in the right moment and as such would be perfectly compatible, whereas a goal like Kenosis may repel such deliberate constraint, or force the player back into his own head, making the styles incompatible.

Also, it gives some good groundwork for why immersive players are at odds as to what kinds of game processes or mechanics are counterintuitive to their immersion activity. A Kairotic Immersives might not have trouble discussing stakes or out of game strategy to optimize the “right moment”, Cathartic Immersives might have no trouble authoring to intensify drama but could have real trouble any time the game required transition from a Feeling to Thinking mode, such as crunchy calculation or resource management. Kenotic Immersives might find any out of game negotiation that draws them out of character unappealing.

[BitV] Session 4

Mo — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 05:50:00 +0000

Logs! Get your new logs here! Now complete with headpunching!

Session 4 - Whole Log
Session 4 - Fiction Only (No OOC)

Enjoy!

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

Mo — Sat, 27 May 2006 22:37:00 +0000

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.

[BitV] Session 3

Mo — Wed, 24 May 2006 04:30:00 +0000

And here are the logs for Session 3:

Session 3 - Whole Log
Session 3 - No OOC (fiction only)

Enjoy!

[BitV] Logs - Setup and Session 1

Mo — Thu, 04 May 2006 05:29:00 +0000

Hey all,

There were demands on Storygames for us to share the logs of the sessions of our All-Female Dogs game, affectionately called "Bitches in the Vinyard".

Here are the logs, edited for clarity:

BitV Setup Session

BitV Session 1 - IC & OOC

BitV Session 1 - IC Only

In case it isn't clear from the context:

Lines preceeded by "OOC" are out of character.

Lines preceeded by "Dogs: " are the dice and resolution effects.

"Sister Abigail" is "KJ" Jessica - kleenestar.

"Sister Clemintine" is "PJ" Jesica - peaseblossom

"Sister Hannah" is Nancy

"Sister Chase" is Mo

Also, we experienced some technical problems with our first conflict resolution tool, so if the numbers seem screwy, don't worry about it.

Cheers!