[Primitive and others] In-character / out of character Ephemera

[Justice Platt]

Ron, can I check my understanding on a point?

When you say

Oh! That reminds me. The distinction between {in-character, suspension of disbelief, immersion} and {metagame, out-of-game talk, out-of-character} is bullshit. It's one of the worst and most obfuscating myths of gamer culture. Your own account shows exactly why: when the Techniques of play are forming a System which supports a Creative Agenda, then the System factors directly into experiencing the Reward, which is running back up that arrow into Social Contract. Therefore Reward-based interactions (emerging from the System in action) are going to be social, among the real people ... and fully consistent with engaged, imaginative, non-disruptive play.

I'm not sure I quite get what what you mean.

It seems like you're saying that the creation(?) of a system by a group playing with a real CA and reward cycle in place automatically means that whatever techniques are comprising that system will therefore be good and satisfying to them.  I don't see how it follows from that that the in-game/metagame distinction is bullshit so much as that it's likely irrelevant.  Which makes me think I'm missing something.

Can you expand a bit or tell me what I've missed?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Justice,

Thanks for asking that - the causality is in fact a little messed up in that paragraph. It's true that if CA and Reward are firing, then the Techniques are working, but that's kind of like saying if the car is going where we want, then the wheels must be moving. True but not exactly if-then in causal terms.

I'll try to say it all over, with my point up-front. I ask that you consider the "membranous beach balls" Big Model image, which is only a fancy way to say that Exploration is a procedural subset of Social Contract, Techniques are a procedural subset of Exploration, and Ephemera are procedural subsets of Techniques.

So, Reward is like a ... I don't know, neon light-up traveling from outer to inner, and then inner to outer. (You can see that I've been spending a lot of time at the jellies exhibit at the Shedd aquarium lately.) Which is only to say, "We're having fun doing what we're doing!" So if you want to see what we're doing which is so much fun, just look at System in the Exploration level, and more fine-grained, look at the Techniques, particularly the ones which seem to be conclusive or especially consequential, and particularly the ones which seem to generate the "fun!" light-up in the outer layers. So, sure, you don't get a Reward going among the group unless the Techniques are working well.

(A good reference: Roger's big post on the 3rd page in [Obsidian, Champs, Babylon Project] Incipient Narrativism and its discontents - which is interesting too, because what he calls "functional," I call "Zilch" or "barely functional," and what he calls "superfunctional," I call fun, functional, and reasonably to be expected.)

However, I need to remind anyone talking about this that the feedback going on here is still governed or dependent upon the outer-to-inner processes: Social Contract to Exploration to Techniques (with their Ephemera). It's way to easy to think the reverse: "Gee, if the rules do X, and we follow the rules, then we get our Reward! Awesome!" Which turns out to be quite false. Reward is a real-people, social creative thing - effectively, getting what we came to get, often with an element of joy and surprise at what actually happened in play. In other words, you need really to want it. System is crucial ("matters"), not for its own sake, but because it realizes* what previously existed as a desire and a possibility. You can't push procedural buttons and be handed the reward when you didn't really want it.

My primary example for relying on Techniques-out in the past would have been fake-Gamism which wrangles about rules in the absence of any real-people loss condition; today, it's the fake-Narrativism in which the analogous rules-wrangling is found in "I wrote a game!" drafts and all too often published products, all in the absence of any real-people drive to face a Premise.

All of which sets up to answer your question. The brief answer is that all the stuff about "in-character" is actually Technique, and nothing more. It cannot, ever, take the weight for providing the Reward, i.e., it can never be "the point" or "the fun thing," any more than one would say "touching the white keys" is the point or fun in playing the piano. Whether such techniques are important in making the Reward for a given group (which means they want something else we'd have to find out about) is a case-by-case issue, not the universal or overwhelming important issue that the "Role vs. roll" rhetoric would have us believe.

The long answer, if you can stand it, is available as a monster thread: Beating a dead horse? from late 2007. In there, I discuss immersion in great detail, and if I do say so myself, pretty well.

Does any of that help, or make sense? I wouldn't mind an actual-play based discussion of it; I can split your post and my reply into their own thread if you're interested in talking about it more.

Best, Ron

* Using "realize" here in its less common meaning of "successfully to bring about, to make happen."

[Justice Platt]

Hey, Ron, thanks.  I think I follow you now.  I has been reading you to say that the IC/OOC (being very loose in phrasing-you did refer to a bunch of different things in the original para) distinction is bullshit in the sense of "distinguishing things that aren't different" when you were actually saying bullshit in the sense of "deployed in profoundly mistaken ways and for toxic rhetorical purposes in many discussions of roleplaying." (And, grumble grumble, I was reviewing the "Beating A Dead Horse" thread and discovered I'd already read it.  Goes to show how my comprehension actually develops.)

So, I'm cool, but please let me know if I've whiffed hard on something.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Justice,

Ummm ... well, actually I mean both of your paraphrases. The second one (bad rhetoric, missed points) is the main one, true. But I would be dodging if I claimed the distinction between my bracketed sets was solid. I think it's very un-solid in practice, and that attempts to render it solid are very interesting design territory, and best done with fine tuning.

First, what I mean by "un-solid in practice." When a person speaks only in his or her character's voice, does that necessarily reflect or promote a more intuitive and emotional connection with his or her character than another player at the table has? I have experienced or observed no such connection. I have experienced such an intense connection which did manifest as speaking in the character's voice, more than once. But that was a local phenomenon, something that happens now and again, not a necessary relationship between the feeling and the speaking. I've felt quite intensely about my character's actions and dialogue without spontaneously adopting his or her voice, just as often. Similarly, I've observed manifestly lame and painful-to-watch results of enforcing standards for such speaking in the vain belief that it promoted the emotions/connections, as the mirror-example.

Also, all sorts of variables frequently flicker on and off across play - "I" vs. "he," in-character vs. out-of-character justification of actions (i.e. character knowledge), in-character vs. out-of-character vocal expression, body language connoting real-person attention to what's going on, body language expressing the character's emotional state, and more. I regard these as important Ephemera which come in and out of play in all sorts of ways, but without fixed relationships to such variables as "sincerity" or "engagement" or "in-character" in a thespian sense. I'm calling attention to the observation that each set (as widely conceived and as expressed by my brackets) isn't really a set at all, but rather unfairly shoving many variably-present actions together as if they have to go together, or cannot combine independently across the set-categories.

Second, although I think much role-playing would be more fun if we didn't try to nail down standards for these Ephemera and simply let them manifest as they will during play, per person, some designs have shown that fixing one or another can be productive. Primitive* confines a lot of play to in-character non-verbal vocal expressions, for example. Playing Zero** well relies heavily on privileging in-character knowledge and perspectives when announcing character actions; Lacuna takes this even farther and seems designed mainly for players who literally have no idea what's going on. But when I say "fixing one or another," I'm not talking about each set, I'm talking about specific variables like I've been listing all along, for just this reason - I think these designs actually show us unequivocally that we aren't talking about sets, but about a whole bucket of little variables.

Let's split this off! We can use [Primitive] Grunt! Grunt! I'm talking to you as an actual-play foundation, or any other account anyone wants to add.

Best, Ron

* Listed but not linked at Kevin's site; bug him to make it available again.
** Sadly unavailable except through places like Ebay and (so I'm told) Torrent.

[Ron Edwards]

All the above posts were split from [Call of Cthulhu] Creative Agenda: group/individual, and identifying it (split)

[Justice Platt]

So, I made a thread-neat!

I think I 'm with you in general-when I said "deployed in profoundly mistaken ways" I meant to imply at least some of your points about the ways in which the customary ways of using these distinctions break down very easily and don't really identify a coherent set of things.  Ditto with the notion that blind enforcement of "act in character" along some traditional lines doesn't guarantee any experience in play.  Of course, I didn't say any of that, so....

That said, I need to leave this thread and formulate some thinking til tomorrow or so.  I know that this isn't a problem (or wasn't at the forge), but you've been very courteous & speedy with your replies and I did not want to leave you with the impression that I had abandoned it.

[rgrassi]

I generally agree with your post Ron.
My theorization about (some of) these aspects is in my post of 2009.
The last topic is a resume and, at that moment in time, directions to be analyzed.
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php?topic=28197.msg266307#msg266307
Rob