Scene framing -focused game about global media attention

[Kaj Sotala]

For a while now, I've been playing around the idea of a game where the act of scene framing was the main content.

Since scene framing tells us the things that the group considers important, such a game would actually be about attention. In this case, the attention of the global media: the scenes that are played out are those that end up in the evening news. When a player interrupts an old scene to frame a new one, they are focusing the media's attention on a new headline, leading the old one to be quickly forgotten. Each player would play a specific political faction, trying to draw the media's attention to something else whenever the media was about to see something the faction in question didn't want them to see. (Think Wag the Dog.) Of course, drawing the media's attention would require increasingly big events, and each scene switch might backfire on you.

I liked this idea: it combined the rules and content of the game in a way I felt was particularly elegant. However, as initially envisioned, the players could attempt to force scene changes - and pretty much do nothing else. It didn't seem like that was going to work, because you have to get the content for the scenes from somewhere. I couldn't simply give that task to a separate game master, either, as he would too easily have ended up taking sides in what was supposed to be purely a struggle between the players.

Today I finally had some insights about how it could work. Taking a page from Donjon and Univeralis, I realized I could use narrative facts for this. The player who succeeds in forcing a change in scene can specify a number of facts that need to come true in the new scene. Somebody else then does the actual scene framing, possibly twisting the given facts until they result in a situation that's just as bad to the other player than the scene they forced a change out of in the first place.

That seems like it'd work nicely, but I'm still a bit vague on how the actual events of the scene ought to unfold. I could simply lift some mechanics from Universalis or a similar game, but I don't want the emphasis to be on conflict mechanics of a traditional kind. Ideally, I'd like to see a situation where the different players follow and watch the way the scene is developing - and then at some point there's a desperate scramble, where some players try to change the scene, with others trying to keep the media attention just where it is. Of course, there could also be things like trying to shift the attention back to the previous scene of your competitor's juicy scandal before the public has forgotten about it entirely.

One alternative might be to use some of the mechanics from Universalis, but ditch the rules for Challenges, Takeovers and Complications. If your opponents have control of the majority of components in the scene, and are using them in a way that's going to cause your cause a lot of political fallout, then your only hope is to change the scene and quickly. (And the player who forced the last change of scene gets less coin to start out with.) That needs work, though. Alternatively there could be a non-sceneswitch -related conflict mechanic, but a very quick and simple one.

How would the actual attempt of forcing a scene change work? A bit fuzzy on that one, as well. Perhaps scenes would have an importance rating based on how much coin had been spent in it, and how much coin had been spent to cause the change to it (if any). The higher the importance, the harder it is to force a scene change. You have the option of getting extra bonuses to your attempt, at the cost of having a higher chance of the next scene backfiring on you.

Then there also needs to be some way that actually damages the players when the scene they are in does go badly. I was thinking that they'd each be accumulating "damage points" - when that total reached some pre-determined amount, they'd have lost all political credibility and be out of the game. I need some semi-objective way of quantifying how bad it is if the whole world sees a certain scene, and how many damage points should be dished out to the players that were seen in a negative light. To keep things even, there should probably be an automatic scene switch once a certain player accumulates enough damage points from any given scene. Don't want them to lose the game because of just a single scene. Of course, if you're taking a large risk in forcing a scene change, then that means that your personal "safety limit" for the next scene is higher as well.

Possibly the game could also involve positive attention for some cause, to give the players something else to do than just try to frame scenes that hurt their competitors the most. To prevent the game from dragging on too much, with a player's damage going up and down, perhaps positive attention would award extra coin but would leave the damage track untouched.

That's a lot of text, and not much that's concrete. So some of the things I could use feedback on are:

* How the actual content in the scenes should be produced
* How the exact scene switch conflicts might work
* How the player damage (and reward) mechanics might work
(* Whether any of this sounds like a cool or workable idea in the first place)

[Dan Maruschak]

I think this sounds like a very interesting idea for a game. I'm assuming that it would tend to play out as a satire of the news media and the way political debate happens. Is that your intention? Do you imagine the players taking the role of "pro" and "anti" on particular issues, or do you want the players to be advocates for different orthogonal issues (e.g. player 1 is climate change, player 2 is taxes, player 3 is health care)?

One thing I'd suggest is that sometimes the way that stories shift is by changing perspective or focus on a topic rather than switching topics altogether. For example, in the current debate in the US on healthcare reform, there have been a series of anti-reform protests. The pro-reform side wants the story about these protests to be either whether they are "too angry" or whether they are artificial "astroturf" protests, while the anti-reform side would like to discuss the issues that the protesters are bringing up. Similarly, in the 2000 presidential election, the story coming out of the debates wasn't on any of the issues, but about whether Al Gore sighed too much. If you have multiple ways of "beating" an opponents story (either switching topic entirely, or changing the "spin" with which a story is covered) you might get some more layered and interesting interactions. I also think it works with your vision of "scene framing" as central to gameplay since how a story is told can be just as important as what is told.

For mechanics, you might want to look at the card game Fluxx for inspiration. In the game, players play cards which change the victory condition, move themselves toward the victory condition, or change the rules by which cards are played. I think that has parallels to the "changing the topic", "winning the debate", and "changing the way the issue is reported" areas in the game you're considered. I don't think a straight lifting of the mechanics from Fluxx would work, but it might give you some ideas.

[Kaj Sotala]

I'm assuming that it would tend to play out as a satire of the news media and the way political debate happens. Is that your intention?

Yeah, that's correct.

Do you imagine the players taking the role of "pro" and "anti" on particular issues, or do you want the players to be advocates for different orthogonal issues (e.g. player 1 is climate change, player 2 is taxes, player 3 is health care)?

I was originally thinking about orthogonal issues, for variety's sake. They could play "pro" and "anti" sides of specific issues as well, though in that variant they wouldn't be able to receive positive effects from the scenes. After all, if you're pro-Green and the other player is anti-Green, then everything that benefits your position harms your opponent's position, and vice versa. So you couldn't have positive publicity that only awarded you with coin, without affecting your opponent's position.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, though - it might create for some interesting tactical maneuvering if players were allowed to come up with a mixed list of agendas, with some of them being orthogonal to each other, some of them opposed. If you for some reason suddenly want to start earning extra coin from positive attention, then you need to get the others to ally with you to discredit your opponent and get him eliminated from the game. Once no agenda in play is directly opposed to yours anymore, you can start earning the bonuses.

Of course, all of this is more advanced stuff, for when I've got the basic mechanics worked out.

One thing I'd suggest is that sometimes the way that stories shift is by changing perspective or focus on a topic rather than switching topics altogether. For example, in the current debate in the US on healthcare reform, there have been a series of anti-reform protests. The pro-reform side wants the story about these protests to be either whether they are "too angry" or whether they are artificial "astroturf" protests, while the anti-reform side would like to discuss the issues that the protesters are bringing up. Similarly, in the 2000 presidential election, the story coming out of the debates wasn't on any of the issues, but about whether Al Gore sighed too much. If you have multiple ways of "beating" an opponents story (either switching topic entirely, or changing the "spin" with which a story is covered) you might get some more layered and interesting interactions. I also think it works with your vision of "scene framing" as central to gameplay since how a story is told can be just as important as what is told.

An excellent point. This might work as a "mini-shift" inside the scene itself, with each shift serving to hilight a specific way of framing (no pun intended) the issue. That'd be far easier than changing the topic entirely - as a result, you'd probably only want to cause a full shift once you knew for certain you were losing. (Which fits the satirical side quite well. What does every political group in the game do once they realize they're losing a debate? Try to make the others forget about it entirely!)

For mechanics, you might want to look at the card game Fluxx for inspiration.

That's an interesting suggestion. I've played a bunch of Fluxx, but it never crossed my mind to consider that game as a possible inspiration for this one. I'll have to give it some thought.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[Mike Sugarbaker]

Kaj, have you read Moral Politics by George Lakoff? It, or possibly its little brother Don't Think Of An Elephant, might inform your design in interesting ways. I've long suspected that the two moral models of politics that Lakoff lays out may be of use in a game design; they are certainly active in the media, so there's that.

Just to throw a bit more into the mechanical soup, Ben Robbins is working on a game called Microscope that does something a bit interesting with scenes: what is actually going to happen is already known at the start, and after inventing and choosing characters for the particular setting and time in which the scene takes place, players come up with some question about how the scene's conclusion is going to happen. The scene plays out as free play, ending as soon as the scene framer judges that the question has been answered. The players then collectively judge whether the tone of the just-concluded scene was "light" or "dark."

I bring this up because it's an example of how to do a scene without conflict mechanics, but still have a lot going on mechanically. I also have WHFRP 3's custom dice on the brain, and it makes me think of maybe preceding a scene by agreeing on what relative advantage each side has from how the scene was framed, then rolling some dice (or something) accordingly and playing out the scene as informed by the results of the die roll. The side that was disadvantaged in the scene as framed would then of course want to get access to more advantage somehow... perhaps some dice would have symbols representing political wild cards that might impact the situation if they come up in a reroll.

Also, it would probably be worth stealing from, or at least inspecting carefully, the Duel of Wits mechanics in Burning Wheel.

[Bill_White]

It also seems like Drew Westen's The Political Mind and, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, Frank Luntz's Words That Work would be good references.  You also might find some value in W. Lance Bennett's News: The Politics of Illusion although I'm starting to think it's dated. But it does emphasize how political operators use strategic communication techniques of "message management" to influence political discourse via the mass media.

I'd love to use a game like this in the "Introduction to Media & Politics" course I teach; I already have them play Executive Decision to good effect. Gamewise, I'm reminded of Tim Koppang's Mars Colony, a two-player game in which one player has to interact with representatives of factions

So I can imagine a game in which players are political communicators of various kinds: campaign operatives, policy advocates, PR people, and so forth, each with a client or a cause that they support. The GM (or a designated player) identifies a situation, issue, or crisis: a national policy debate, the run-up to a war, an election season, and so forth: at stake is what policy is followed, what political consensus forms about the issue. Each player gets a chance to frame a scene relevant to the issue; other players are allowed to add complications to the scene, the point of which is to illustrate or showcase their side of the issue.

Winning the scene is about affecting public opinion; I imagine a semantic network (concepts linked by ties that ultimately point at one policy outcome or another) that gets strengthened or weakened based on the scene framing and complication raising. At the end of the game, the resolution of the political stakes is determined by the valence of the semantic network: you try to associate going to war with patriotism and security while I try to connect it to pain, loss, and spilled blood. We roll dice, and maybe it goes my way, and maybe it goes yours.

Just a suggestion; it's a neat idea however it's implemented.

[Kaj Sotala]

Sorry for taking so long to reply, real life caught up. Plus I thought many of the ideas mentioned here sounded like good starting points, but didn't have the time to develop anything more concrete (and post-worthy) around them.

Mike: I haven't read those books (or played the games, though I do know Burning Wheel), but they do sound like worth taking a look at, assuming I get the time. Thanks for the pointers.

Bill: I haven't read those books either (I probably should, as I'm somewhat involved in politics myself), but my background is in cognitive science, so the concept of a semantic network is familiar. I like a lot the idea of maybe having some sort of a basic "starting network" that represents the way things are seen by "the general public", with the players then fighting to build the associations that support their own agenda. It would also make the game a lot more organic, as new scenes and objectives could emerge directly out of that network. Plus that'd be a lot more interesting than just having a boring score counter. It would also allow for adjusting the length of the game based on how much time you had - if the players were short on time, pre-generate some starting network where all the causes are near the crucial tipping points.

I also like the idea of the GM mentioning a specific crisis and the players then framing scenes around that. It's somewhat different from how I first envisioned the game, but that's okay - changes to the original concept are good if they improve the game.

I just have to ponder how to implement those things in practice, hmm...