Coherence

[Moreno R.]

From http://big-model.info/wiki/Coherence

The degree to which one or a combination of Creative Agendas are accepted and reinforced among members of a role-playing group. Coherence may also be applied to game design, but only indirectly, in terms of whether it does or does not facilitate such a shared agenda.

What do you mean with "combination"?

[rgrassi]

My two cents.
For "combination" Ron probably means the 'mixing' of more than one Agenda (i.e. aestetic priorities) at the table, probably due to:
CASE 1) The group shares an Agenda but this agenda changes in time
CASE 2) Each player in the group have different agendas and each player never changes agenda
CASE 3) Each player in the group have different agenda and players modify their agendas

An "high coherence of combined agendas" means that these 'mixing' agendas (whatever is the reason) are strongly accepted and reinforced at the table through some mechanism.
A "low coherence of combined agendas" means that these 'mixing' agendas (whatever is the reason) are poorly accepted and reinforced at the table through some other mechanism.
Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

That must be legacy text from Walt, I think. His discussion of Coherence (or "Coherency," God help us all) occurred back in a very messy time ... e.g., when everyone was talking about percents of GNS and I was crying "stop the madness." The problem is solved by eliminating the "combinations" text altogether. Good catch!

Adding this in: This is a good example of how gross, messy, mixed-up, and generally chaotic a lot of the discussion could become. Please don't think of anything you see in that wiki as refined, perfect, expressive of exactly what I mean, or anything like that! The closest you might get is a recent addition by me, and even that may just be a placeholder using whatever I managed to type in while kids were crawling on me.

Therefore: never mind "what I mean" by anything you read there. If it doesn't make sense, say so, and consider yourself fully empowered to suggest something that does.

Best, Ron

[rgrassi]

Thanks Ron.
My post was a bit "low profile" because (Moreno will testify) I am still not completely convinced about the validity/consistency/integrity of the whole model (as it is described) and, more important, in some cases I'm not sure to have completely and properly understood all the terms and meanings so I fear to 'say something not compliant with the glossary and the model itself' because I evaluate myself as a "newbie" with respect to it.

About the question of Moreno, I think that my comment should fit in, as long as 'shifting and mixing agendas' (of the group or of the single player) are taken into account.
I usually make large use of images to better explain what's in my mind (and probably this should be better in this case if I have been not so clear and precise), but I don't want to break the policy.
Cheers,
Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rob,

Use all the images that you want. The way to do it is to use links. It's very easy. The policy here is not intended to eliminate the power of diagrams in discussions.

I think your or anyone's view toward the Big Model as a whole is irrelevant. You can agree, disagree, love it, hate it, or whatever you want. As long as what you say here makes sense to me, I will at least provide a reference to it in the relevant Wiki page, and who knows? You might even become the author of a crucial new principle or clarifying revision. Unless, of course, your priority is to gain social points from labeling yourself a dissenter, in which case seeing your views productively incorporated into the Wiki would be the last thing you wanted.

In this case, unfortunately, after a solid four years of considering the possibility of GNS-hybrid play of all kinds (2001-2005), the general conclusion at the Forge was that all such talk was in vain. Shifting Agendas, maybe (which has its own name, Drift), but not mixing. One can imagine a "mix of Agenda" at the table much in the same way that one can imagine letting go of a rock in the air and seeing it hover there, but in practice and in considering the individual/group relationship in everything from music to sports, we decided that such imaginings were not helping us understand role-playing at all. Play was either Coherent relative to a single Agenda, or it was Incoherent in some fashion, with or without dysfunction, and that's what the Wiki will reflect.

Two game designs played a special role in these conclusions. One was The Riddle of Steel, which on paper seemed like the most beautiful possible fusion or compatibility between Narrativist and Simulationist play, but which in practice showed that different groups threw out very distinct and ultimately predictable sets of the rules in order to play one or the other. The other game was Capes, which seems to have the unfortunate property of undercutting both Gamist and Narrativist priorities by trying (pretending?) to be both.

Here's a thread that might interest you about the topic: Gamism and Narrativism: mutually exclusive?. Note that the initial poster did not follow up on my posts and thread references until several pages of fruitless yipyap had passed, and when he did, he acknowledged my point.

Best, Ron

[lumpley]

I have a proposal for coherence too.

A game design is incoherent if its subsystems don't all serve the same creative agenda, and so compete, baffle, undermine, or interfere with one another, instead of cohering.

A game in play is incoherent if its subsystems in play don't all serve the same creative agenda, in just the same way. Subsystems in play - per the lumpley principle! - can be formal or informal. If one person in the group is pursuing a different creative agenda than the others, that person will create incoherence in play by messing up the coherent interplay of the game's formal and informal subsystems.

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

Hey Vincent,

I was inclined to say, Yes, just like that, but then I realized I wasn't sure what you meant.

My concern is whether you're verging back into that old atomic territory, in which people would talk about whether players' narrating dice outcomes was inherently Narrativist, or whether using percentage dice was inherently Gamist, and stuff like that.

My current take is to focus on Reward at the most social and basic level: the old question I used at the Forge all the time, "How did you enjoy yourselves and about what?" And if the answer turned out to be anything but "Holy shit, we didn't," or "I enjoyed myself once in a while but there was no 'we,'" then it was easy to find a procedural, systemic aspect of the Reward right there in their answer, which effectively captured their CA. And often it would be tied to reward mechanics, depending on the game, but it's OK if it wasn't, i.e., it was totally social.

Therefore my question to you is whether your "subsystems" are (i) atomic CA bundles of Techniques, (ii) the same as my "procedural systemic aspect of the Reward," or (iii) something else. And you probably see this coming like a mutant bat from Hell, but here it is -- can you answer this question with reference to some actual play?

Best, Ron

[rgrassi]

Hi Ron,

Hi Rob,
Use all the images that you want. The way to do it is to use links. It's very easy. The policy here is not intended to eliminate the power of diagrams in discussions.

Thank you very much. I'll use images, then, when I think that a picture may clarify things better than many lines of word. :)

Unless, of course, your priority is to gain social points from labeling yourself a dissenter, in which case seeing your views productively incorporated into the Wiki would be the last thing you wanted.

Don't worry. My social agenda is not "Step on up". :)
Ok for the "single agenda" and for the "drift" but probably, then, there' something important missing in the "Creative Agenda" definition that led me to misunderstanding.
It seems to me that an important concept about the agenda is the "instance of play". That's the moment in which a unique Creative Agenda can be observed. Has the "instance of play" concept been analyzed and defined in some way?
That is, is my figure below right? If so, what is an "instance of play"? In my opinion most of the yipyap about the "agendas" is caused a clarification needed about this argument.

Rob

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Rob,

Well, I see the issue here: you're stuck in 2004, at the publication of my last GNS essay.

The topics of instance of play, reward cycle, and their relationship to coherence received a thorough discussion and clarification in the years 2007-2010.

Bluntly, I don't see much point in shepherding you through them here. I'm working on the phrasings of all these things for the wiki, and that's an ongoing task that doesn't need to use the 2004 platform, but rather the assumption of new eyes. I am certainly willing to keep discussing the topics with you, but I lived through every single discussion at the Forge, and recapitulating them is of no interest to me whatsoever, especially since referencing them thoroughly is one of the priorities in building the wiki.

My response to you here is intended to be read in parallel with  my response to you in the Authority thread, because they are related. If you cannot see the difference between Social Contract and Techniques, then the whole concept of Reward will be opaque, and from there, both "instance of play" (properly stated as Reward Cycle) and Creative Agenda will be inaccessible.

I ask that you start with the diagram and specifically the point in "The Big Model" wiki entry in which I describe it in three dimensions. Please examine the key concepts, especially Reward, and if you'd like, the embedded links. I think your participation here will go much better if you resolve any questions about those before getting into nuances of Techniques or second-order concepts like Coherence.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

One thing to clarify: I love your diagrams. They completely help me understand what you're saying. Don't stop using them, just link to them rather than displaying them in the posts.

Best, Ron

[lumpley]

Ron -

It's been a long-ass time since I've played an incoherent game but I can maybe try.

Oh wait! Here's an example of a minor incoherence at least. It's Apocalypse World, I'm GMing, I'm playing with Meg, Julia, Elizabeth, Rob.

In Apocalypse World, the stats are linked to in-character actions. Cool is linked to going into danger, Hard is linked to attacking other characters, Hot is linked to negotiation. At the beginning of each session (more or less) the players "highlight stats" for each other. You get XP when you roll one of your highlighted stats, so your fellow players get to choose which of your characters' actions earn you XP.

For a while, Rob had his Hard highlighted, which suited him very well, as he liked to have his character deal with problems by attacking them. In this session, though, the other players highlighted his Hot instead. They wanted to see him deal with problems by talking to somebody, maybe.

Now, attacking someone in Apocalypse World has its own subsystem. It's very quick and direct, but it takes this character action, treats it in a unique and specific way, taking particular things into consideration, putting the players involved (including the GM) into a particular negotiation with one another, and coming out at the end with an outcome impossible to get from any other subsystem. This subsystem connects to the reward cycle through the highlighted stats - if your Hard is highlighted, you get XP for attacking someone; if it isn't, you don't.

It should be clear now: I definitely don't think that any subsystem is CA-atomic in any way. Subsystems serve the whole, they aren't whole in themselves. Apocalypse World is about fit characters in escalating conflict across moral lines, and this is the subsystem for handling just one of the arenas the characters might pursue resolution in. The subsystem of changing highlighted stats plays a relatively minor CA role, adding some diversity and texture to the characters' arcs.

When the other players highlighted Rob's Hot, they were offering him XP for negotiating with people instead of attacking them. Rob, however, (a) wanted to keep attacking people, but (b) wanted to keep getting XP for it. What happened in play was that he tried to figure out how to roll his Hot to attack people. He wanted to roll his Hot to manipulate an enemy into passivity while one of his gang members murdered him, and got really frustrated when I had him roll his Cool because approaching the enemy counted as going into danger, and had him roll his Hard because having a gang member attack someone counted as attacking someone.

To put words in his mouth: "when you highlighted my Hot, I thought that you wanted to see how I'd use my Hot to murder people! But then Vincent wouldn't let me use my Hot to murder people. I'm in a bind. What gives?"

We've talked before about within-CA creative differences at the table vs CA differences at the table, and this is really an example of the former, not the latter. But I think it does show what I mean by subsystems in play, and how one player can introduce incoherence by approaching the same subsystems with a different agenda than the other players do.

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Vincent,

I apologize for the delay. Part of my problem was that I grappled with the relevance of the account. This doesn't strike me as incoherence so much as a Social Contract violation, specifically of "let's play this game." Uh, I'm trying to find a way to say it without out-and-out calling Rob names ... um, OK: One player doesn't want to play this game because its rules include others' ability to call him out from sticking with his favorite combo. I was sort of hoping for more classic incoherence regarding Agenda Clash.

But then I realized that wasn't really the issue. I do see your point about staying away from the atomic fallacy, so that's good. And I think your example does work with my concept of "procedural, systematic aspect of the Reward," and how someone not wanting to do it produces a fragmenting of that Reward, or its potential. Thanks!

Moreno, has your initial question been answered?

Best, Ron

[lumpley]

Excellent! I have a followup about CA, I'll start a thread.

-Vincent

[Moreno R.]

Moreno, has your initial question been answered?

Yes!  I already deleted the "combination" part from the wiki page.