Creative agenda

[Josh W]

About a month ago I emailed Ron with some ideas, and he suggested I post them here for more general discussion:

Hey Ron, haven't got round to setting up an account but I was reading your wiki, particularly the part on creative agenda and I felt that it didn't yet include the heart of what I thought was cool about the subject, so I thought I'd just email you straight.

Here's the thing; focusing primarily on "priorities" just seems too dry, and bakes in the least important point of creative agenda to me (GNS incompatibility) to the exclusion of the most important stuff, which I'll just state below as if I was doing my natural response and doing a straight edit:


Creative agendas - the pulse of a functional game, that comes in many flavours. This is where some set of [[techniques]] for dealing with [[imaginary stuff|exploration]], that people have agreed to go with, pay off, and form a machine of creativity that pushes out stuff that is [[valuable|reward]] to the people playing.

This doesn't have to be agreed beforehand, it can just happen, but it keeps happening. A creative agenda is a set of habits or strategies aligned with a values system, a way of approaching gameplay that is identified by the way it effectively produces payoff according to that values system. It is [[reward]]ing.

There are many different ways for it to be rewarding, but all creative agendas centre around the imaginative [[exploration]] at the table. This is in contrast to other social reasons for playing that although valuable have no relationship to the content of the [[shared fiction|Shared Imaginary Space]].

Creative agenda incompatibility - where the strategies or habits associated with a certain value system clash with those associated with another value system, so that you must separate them or prioritise one over another.

[Then moreno's bit about playing well playing wrong, with some punchy title.]

[then the section about the pigs]

The three types
These incompatibilities were used to define three types of creative agenda:
[[step on up]], [[right to dream]], [[story now]]

and then on as normal with the rest of the page.


Looking back at that, the format of a wiki edit might seem an odd way to present ideas, but it was the natural reaction!

What do you think? I was never a part of the original conversations, but I based it on the same few threads you always link to on the forge, as well as other similar conversations. To me, as I said, the important part about it is that creative agendas are about trying to say what is good in games (conan), and we are actually quite ahead of computer games in that respect, who are still struggling to define the various inherent values of the medium, and here we are with three sets!

Hope this is valuable to you,

Josh W

Reading that back, I love the mixed metaphors (flavours of a pulse?), anyway there they are, discussion away!

[Ron Edwards]

Hi! And thanks. I agree the entry needs work, and this may be the turning point. I'm the last person to point fingers at mixed metaphors, what with my pigs and platforms and beach balls.

Back when GNS, by that name, was a going intellectual concern, I used that exact term "value system" because I thought it really captured the combination of preference (and taking responsibility for it), ongoing application, the potential for lacking self-knowledge, and social expectation that I was looking for. Unfortunately, it pushed hot-buttons all over the place. Apparently the term has been used in a preachy or punitive sense too often, at least in some venues, which led people to reject it. If I recall correctly, I think I came up with "creative agenda" specifically because this more ordinary, familiar term apparently carried so much baggage.

So I might have to work with that part, as well as maybe reconsider some of the poetry ("pulse?"), but for the moment, yes, I think I'll be 'porting your recommendations into the wiki, with a link back to this thread.

Thanks!

Best, Ron