Aesthetics and Conveying Reality

[clehrich]

Baseline vs Vision seems to me to be the beginning efforts of a way to break open that black box and look around inside.

Yes, precisely.  It's been a black box, and now we'd like to take a look at what's inside.  

If I am on track, than I say fantastic! Sounds like an interesting avenue to examine, although I'd recommend dropping some of the more esoteric philosophizing and getting down to brass tacks a bit with it.

I really wish we could, Ralph.  Eric and Emily and I have been calling for this for some time now.

Alright, here goes....

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This is a rant.  Please don't read it -- you've been warned!










Instead, unfortunately, it appears that because this black box is within an entirely naturalized and thus non-dynamic model, all other formulations cannot be raised.  Oh no, it's been touched on indirectly and not discussed in any way, but even without any references this is clearly covered implicitly and thus cannot be discussed.

Therefore, they fall under the Creative Agenda

So the hell what?  You call them that, but it's still a damn black box!

where you're (perhaps?) seeing something new and outside creative agenda to talk about,

Where we're talking about the same goddamn thing we've been talking about for post after post, and keep getting sidetracked by this nonsense about how to label it.  If we just say that this is part of Creative Agenda, will you be quiet and let some discussion happen?

PLEASE -- Moderators!  We've got a thread hijack in progress, APB, it's been going on for DAYS now, and the originator of the thread has called for you to deal with it.  So DEAL with it!  NO MORE!!!

Every damn time somebody tries to discuss the implications of this potential model, somebody else jumps in to say "yeah, but what are the implications, HUH?"  This is childish and pointless, and should have been closed down long since.

I'm sorry to see that a perfectly interesting and valid intellectual discussion can be hijacked, and I must say that it's starting to look to me like it's a problem that the model in question does not entirely seem to align with GNS, the ruling ideology.  That's totally unfair -- I hope.  So prove me wrong, and cut this off!

Do you know I got a private email thanking me for the last post about dividing the thread, noting that now maybe the poster would be able to contribute to the discussion?  That poster has not contributed since.  Why?  Because this thread is still hijacked.

I hereby call for a sit-in.  Do not respond to or discuss anything that I've called a #1 thread, from here on in.  Just ignore it.  If the moderators refuse to do something about it, we'll learn something interesting.  If they do, then maybe we can actually have an intelligent discussion here.

I'm sorry to be like this, you know I'm not usually like this, but I'm sick of it.  We've been trying for 3 threads now to have a reasonable discussion, and every damn time it gets hijacked.  I'm fully hoping to get an angry email about this post, and I will respond appropriately -- because this is an appropriate post.  It's angry, but names no names.  I want this thread-hijacking to stop, and for those of us who want to discuss Harlequin's (Eric's) questions and issues to get down to it, with no interference from a lot of nonsense.

[clehrich]

Back to the topic:

How do we, as designers, spot places where the Tension will arise, so we can decide whether to tweak it or not? How do we look ahead and say intelligent things about the Tension-spots in our emerging game, and design for it, or are we doomed to merely use this as an editing tool? I think we can look ahead at least somewhat; take the organization of the work as a whole. If you have a "miraculous deeds" chapter and a "mundane life before you were EnNobled" or whatever chapter, think about sequencing... do you want them (a) high-Tension, by placing them bang up against each other and giving them similar systems, or (b) low-Tension, with a buffer of unrelated material and dissimilar systems? High-Tension focusses attention on the dichotomy, and helps make the overall Vision feel more estranged from reality; low-Tension hides and diffuses attention, makes the overall Vision feel more familiar. Which do I, in this game, want? That's the question we should be asking ourselves.

What I'm curious about is how we spot such instances in the first place, so as to ask it at all. Preferably in advance. Any comments?

Yes, I think this is the essential question.  My sense is that by defining the two ends of the spectrum, we know in what domain the tension questions lie, and from there we can start prioritizing.

I'm not sure that invoking high and low tensions for purposes of strange/familiar dichotomies is the way to go about it, though.  What do you think we gain by doing so?  It seems to me that this just adds a second level of extrapolation, without a specific result, but I may not be getting this.  Could you provide an example?

My inclination is to keep it simple until we have a better grasp on the pieces.  You've got Baseline as one of a number of possibilities (Emily proposed a list, and this is just a variant):

1. How the players generally perceive reality
2. How the players perceive the reality of this sort of game
3. What the players expect within the game's framework

Then you've got Vision, which is in tension with this.  I can see that high-tension could be used to refer to points in the scale that are important to the designer, GM, or whoever, and need emphasis on that basis.  But it seems to me that low-tension is really just a matter of priority selection, of choosing those things that just don't matter much to the person with the Vision.

Or am I misunderstanding?  Let's get back to this.  We're trying to open the black box of exploration and focus, and I want to hear ideas on this score.  For me, the whole advantage of Vision/Baseline is that it gets us away from things like Genre and Reality and so forth; I'm not exactly sure where high and low tensions come into it in your assessment.

[clehrich]

Another load of #2.  :)

Getting back to the start, and walking through:

If I read the conclusion of the Aesthetics and Reality thread correctly, then Chris and Emily tried to pin down a specific tension, between two things: a Baseline, which is basically reality-as-understood-by-the-participants, and a Vision, which is the endpoint of perfect emulation of "source material" if any, or the analogue if no source material exists.  (Interestingly, one could make a case for the latter as being reality as understood by the characters, but that's a different riff on the subject.)

I'm not sure that last is such a radical or problematic subject.  I think there's an important blurriness here, because I think the distinction between player and character has become so naturalized as a dichotomy that we are unwilling to challenge it.  This is my deconstructionist stuff coming into play, I suppose, but the fact is that I think the characters and players both often have a similar or related comfort zone, or Baseline, and that the Vision aspect is intended to be equally alienating.  CoC is a great example here: the characters don't live in our modern world (they live in the 20s or 30s), but the alienness and horror of Mythos stuff is intended to be a major challenge to both players and characters.  I think the problem here is often that one side or the other of that particular divide slips, such that the characters are running screaming while the players say, "Oh gee, fishy smell, sounds like Deep Ones, whatever."

I like this a lot and would like to pin it down to a little bit stronger frame, and then move from there to talking about the tension and balance between these two, because I think that this is where we'll find tools for aesthetic design emerging.

I'm repeating this because it bears repeating: this is the whole point.  We're trying to work out some structures for the aesthetics of design, i.e. treating RPGs as an art-form.

By a stronger frame, I mean that I think these two terms apply to a single act, and that rather than leaving them hanging in air, we can pin them down to that act and discuss them in that context only.  Both terms apply to the process of conveying the game reality.  I don't know if this has a place in the current understanding or not, but it means that these apply to conveying something slightly more encompassing than Setting as we dissect things... they apply to conveying the Setting, the Colour, the appropriate Situations, the physics (Rules), and the appropriate types of Characters.  Conveying the game reality.

Not quite sure what you mean by "more than setting."  Isn't this really an expansion of the nature of setting in the first place, a way of pushing its boundaries to get at a more comprehensive and synoptic view?  Or is this not what you mean?

(I postulate that even hyperrealistic settingless games of GURPS or whatever have both of these elements, it's just that in this case the Vision differs from the Baseline on only a very few points - primarily the ones concerning what kinds of stories get told.)

Yes, I totally agree.  Hyperrealism is itself a vision, because hyperrealism is never actual reality.  Actual reality requires no game, and in fact cannot be played, because it is precisely what happens outside of the game.  So when you construct a "realistic" game you are postulating a vision that is supposed to be so close to the ordinary that it can be entirely absorbed into the player's perspective without comment.   And yet, this is supplementation: if the realism is so real, why do we need description and rules at all?  Answer: precisely because it it not realism.

I think that conscious design of the learning curve is one thing we will want to crack open, not necessarily in this thread, but not necessarily not.)

Let's give it a stab.  How would you go about it?

In terms of aesthetics, I think there's most meat on the bone of tension between Baseline and Vision, used to strengthen the game reality as a whole.  You might build up that tension in a few ways... you could stress the constrasts between the Baseline and this game's vision, not only textually but coherently with the message of the entire book.  Or you could play subtler games by allowing the tension between the two to increase through play.

I'm not sure I follow.  Are you saying that one can stress tension or not, and that both will be functional?  It seems to me that you have to stress tension, whether you like it or not; the design issue for me is exactly how you go about prioritizing what's important to that tension.  Thus you want to set up various tensive factors such that there is a challenge to the player when certain non-Baseline things (i.e. things tending toward or arising from Vision) come up.  If you avoid this strongly, aren't you really just (1) being unfaithful to your Vision, or (2) dodging the whole point of the design?  Or, again, have I missed your point?

Does anyone have any thoughts on specific guidelines as to how to convey this balance, where to choose the balance point(s), or how to increase/manipulate/make use of the tension, between Baseline and Vision in the composition of a game reality?

Yes, I do; see my remarks on Ars Magica.  I think this is most interesting and profitable where you're dealing with historical reality, but that's just a special case of Fang's Genre Expectations, which after all was what I hoped to get around through the Vision / Baseline terminology in the first place.  So while I think there is tremendous possibility here, we may need to pick a stock example everyone can be happy with.  I'd put forward Shadows in the Fog, of course, but that's a bit cheesy as it's my game.  If on the other hand we choose Ars Magica, we need to set some Baselines of our own.  Maybe the best example is one that has no apparent historical referent, but then we may lose track of the whole possibility of challenging differing realities, because we don't have something to force Baseline toward.  I'm not sure.

Em?  Eric?  Any suggestions for game examples to continue the discussion?  I really think there's good potential here, but we do need something concrete.

[Matt Snyder]

I'm not sure that invoking high and low tensions for purposes of strange/familiar dichotomies is the way to go about it, though.  What do you think we gain by doing so?  It seems to me that this just adds a second level of extrapolation, without a specific result, but I may not be getting this.  Could you provide an example?

Chris, this is PRECISELY what I have been asking for at every turn. Please, for the love of god-of-rants, go back an re-read my posts and queries with a calmer mind. I agree with the above paragraph (indeed, much of this post of yours) 100%. I am less convinced that the 5 aspects of exploration have been black-boxed and therefore in need of new terminology to explore. But, I do agree they all could use some more careful examination.

[clehrich]

(Interestingly, one could make a case for the latter as being reality as understood by the characters, but that's a different riff on the subject.)

Just a followup.  Supposing that you actually wanted to blur the lines between player and character, I think you could read Baseline as player expectations about the disjuncture, and Vision as some sort of identity between the two.  By that logic, the game in question would sit at a tension point.

I think you could plausibly argue that this occurs anyway, since people do tend to get wrapped up emotionally in their characters.  Should this be factored into the model inherently?

Suppose we did this -- and I'm not sure it's a great idea, but just throwing it out to see what happens -- you'd have Baseline associated primarily with players, and Vision primarily with characters.

To take Ars Magica again, this would mean that Baseline contains what the players think medieval Europe was like, what they expect in a fantasy RPG, and their basic sense of ordinary reality.  Vision would thus include whatever version of medieval Europe the designers/GM want, however play and exploration is desired, and also the characters' sense of ordinary reality (that is, they don't see magic as so bizarre as all that).

Now if I've got tension correct, it's going to be the strong disjunctures between Baseline and Vision that will produce dynamic gaming.  So:

medieval Europe (Baseline / Vision)
I used the example of the Inquisitor who's perfectly decent and well-intentioned.  This produces dynamism in the game, because the players expect something different from what the world provides, provoking odd reactions from a medieval perspective.

play expectations
Ars Magica is a good example here, because of its push for Troupe play.  You have multiple characters, and depending on the session you shift around character to character, or even GM the session.  So expectations about "my guy's thing" are challenged to some degree, since in a given session you may not do anything with that guy.  Ars Magica doesn't, however, lean much on this tension, as a rule.  If you wanted to do so, you might do something sort of like my http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6014" target="blank">Soap Opera notion, in which you keep leaving players in the lurch by backgrounding their current favorite characters and pushing them to play grogs.  This could be interesting, but could also become extremely annoying.

ordinary realities
This is pretty much straight exploration, I think, where the players are finding their way into the perspective of their characters.  At the same time, it's the foundation of the Baseline / Vision issue, I think, so it probably needs considerable specification.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

[clehrich]

Just a quick note here.  It has been pointed out to me that Ron seems to be away, so my remark about lack of moderation was, well, immoderate.  Sorry about that.

[clehrich]

Matt Snyder and I have had a lengthy and very valuable exchange by PM, and I think we've pretty much cleared the air between us.  Hopefully now discussion can get going profitably; probably a new thread will be necessary, but for the moment let's stick to what we've got.

Matt asked for an example from the design perspective, as in, "Here's my game and here's how I did it using Baseline/Vision, and here's what specific effects that had in the design process."  So, using Shadows in the Fog (see web link below), here goes.

Baseline
1. Player expectation of reality in Victorian London is to a considerable degree founded upon so-called Victoriana, i.e. romance-novel style pseudo-history with lots of people wearing complicated clothing and being pompous at each other.  This is not entirely a modern phenomenon, but significantly so.

2. Player expectation of characters is very hard to pin down, but character depth does often slide into shtick.

3. Player expectation of player/character divide is pretty much absolute.  Since the early D&D days when lots of crazies thought their kids would start hitting people with axes, gamers have been extremely reluctant to consider the identification with characters as valid, even for hypothesizing.

4. Player expectation of ordinary reality in terms of things like physics is pretty much valid, as Shadows in the Fog does not involve things like superpowers and ultra-tech, for example.  If you get shot with a big ugly gun, you tend to die.  At the same time, normal people don't shoot one another.

Vision
1. Victorian London was immensely complex, with layers upon layers of intricate class and status consciousness.  If you consider how Sherlock Holmes works, he reads a person at a distance, and can instantly pick up exactly who that person is.  This is strikingly different from our modern world.  If you see a guy in a t-shirt and jeans, you don't know he's not an immensely wealthy banker who's on vacation today.  In Victorian London, this pretty much can't happen.

2. Victorian characters are going to do what Holmes does, only not necessarily as well.  When they meet somebody, they will pigeonhole that somebody instantly, as a matter of course.  See Shaw's Pygmalion, for example.

3. Player-character divide is something I want to see challenged and reversed, where the players' powers (esp. Author/Director Stance) become something that the characters actually do.  That is, the characters become increasingly empowered to take an Authorial stance toward their own world.  This is called magic.

4. Ordinary physical reality is mostly legit, and needn't be challenged much.

Tension
For me, the whole game lives on a few of these tensions.  Here are some examples:

1. The characters are divided within themselves.  Each has a "mask," a way that others will perceive him or her, and also a depth which is somewhat at variance with the mask.  This makes them somewhat hypocritical, and necessarily deceivers; in a broad sense, it also makes them traitors to their world.  This is the very tension that will drag them into the occult, since magic in this universe is essentially a kind of treason against ordinary reality.

2. The players will seek to rewrite the universe by manipulating Tarot cards.  The thing is, the Tarot card uses are essentially a direct analogy to what their magically-active characters are doing.  In the game, I call this the Trump Card Analogy.  In some games, you have a mechanistic magic system: a list of spells, or powers, or whatever.  While eminently playable, this does not capture the feel of occultism.  In other games, you try to add the flavor of occultism, but generally keep the mechanism (see Ars Magica and Unknown Armies).  In Shadows in the Fog, however, the players are doing something directly analogous to what the characters are doing.  Both are manipulating complex but somewhat limited sets of meaning-structures in order to create effects.  Ultimately this will encourage a blurriness between player and character, but the reverse of the traditional blur: instead of the player thinking he's the character, the character starts to become a player.

I could go on at some length, but I'll cut it off there.

The point I want to make is that the tension between Vision and Baseline forces me to make a number of aesthetic choices, and in turn has pushed me toward a piece of what I consider mechanical elegance.

In order to keep the historical flavor of the game, which for me is based on extensive research, I have leaned on the tension between expectations about Victoriana and the actual Victorian world; by making this a significant issue for the characters, I encourage the player disconnect with real Victorian London to be a character issue and a source of good stories.

In order to keep the occult feel of historical magic, I have shifted the baseline rather than the vision.  Usually, what you do when you want a "historical" magic system is you change the vision.  Instead, I shift the baseline, making the players manipulate Tarot cards with essentially no rules about how to do this.  This creates a different locus of tension.  

As far as the related tension between player expectations about magic and how it works in this game at a mechanical level, this is not something I want to lean on; to do so would encourage scientism about magic, which is precisely what I don't want.  So instead I go to considerable lengths about how you'll have to do some work and practice using the cards intelligently, and in essence suggest that if you can't be bothered you can't play the game.  That's a harsh way to do things, but the point is that I want to eliminate this potential tension in order to shift to one I want instead.

I'm really hoping this clarifies what Baseline, Vision, and Tension mean for me, and how they contribute to game design.  In my opinion, at least, the Tarot analogy thing creates an elegant and graceful mechanic, and some of the initial readers felt this very strongly.  I think that whatever elegance is there comes precisely from the tension between baselines and visions with respect to magic.  By that logic, this way of looking at things encourages aesthetic design rather than merely functional design.

Comments?

[Bankuei]

Hi Chris,

I waited on saying anything in this thread, simply because I wasn't sure what was being said.  Now that I have a clear idea of what is being stated about Baseline and Vision, may I ask how critical or what role you feel that Tension plays in the gameplay experience?  Is this Tension, as you've defined it necessary?

For example, let's say I play a game involving two warring factions in medieval history, along the lines of as much history as we know.  I use TROS, or some other system that's fairly "realistic" and bar all magic.  What defines the Vision, and where is the Tension between Baseline and Vision occurring?

Here, I see the Tension isn't really the draw, but rather the conflict(as defined by Situation). Likewise, consider some Fantasy Heartbreakers where there's tons of Kewl Powers, the Vision has noticible and nifty differences from the Baseline, but no conflict is really visible, as a contrast to the first.

I'm interested to get a better handle on what Tension "does" in terms of pushing play in the direction you're looking for.

Chris

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that part of the problem with dealing with this is that both Baseline and Vision are moving targets.

[clehrich]

....Is this Tension, as you've defined it necessary?

For example, let's say I play a game involving two warring factions in medieval history, along the lines of as much history as we know.  I use TROS, or some other system that's fairly "realistic" and bar all magic.  What defines the Vision, and where is the Tension between Baseline and Vision occurring?

For me, the Tension in question goes back to the "what if?" question that's often invoked in traditional discussions of RPGs.  That is, you get to imagine what it would be like if you were involved in the situation, which is clearly at a remove from your lived reality.  I don't know that defining it this broadly helps design, of course, but see below.

Likewise, consider some Fantasy Heartbreakers where there's tons of Kewl Powers, the Vision has noticible and nifty differences from the Baseline, but no conflict is really visible, as a contrast to the first.

I guess here I would think that if there were a strong Tension, you wouldn't have a Heartbreaker but a successful Fantasy game.

I'm interested to get a better handle on what Tension "does" in terms of pushing play in the direction you're looking for.

Yeah, that's a biggie.  To me, it's the central question of the model.

Let me give an example from ritual theory, where I spend most of my intellectual effort.  Sorry if this seems tangential; you're asking a really tough question, and one to which I have only the glimmerings of an answer.  I'd like to draw on other theoretical discourses to help clarify the discussion, and expand RPG theory in general.

There's a famous ritual among Siberian hunting peoples, which is basically about bear hunting.  To put it very simply, you have two rituals.  One, there's the actual going out and killing a bear ritual, which occurs just prior to the hunt.  Two, there's a periodic (sometimes annual, but not necessarily) festival in which a pet bear is killed.

1. The hunters gather just past the edge of the village, and everyone goes out to see them off.  They describe in minute detail how they will deal with the bear.  Notably, they will sing to it, ask its permission to kill it, and they will not confront the bear unless it is in a particular posture.  They will kill it mano a paw, as it were, with a knife, and they won't allow the bear to bleed all over the place.  If the bear doesn't act in exactly the right fashion, they will leave it alone.

2. The village captures a very small bear cub, raises it as a favorite pet, and eventually they set up an elaborate mock hunt and kill the bear, usually by strangling it.  This is accompanied by extensive ceremonial both before and after.

Now the weird thing is that in case #1, the hunters actually go out in the winter, when the bears are hibernating.  They cut their way into the back of the cave, and they also dig a big pit with spikes in it in front of the bear's den.  They use spears through the cut hole to drive the sleepy bear out, where it falls into the pit.  They then kill it, these days with shotguns.

So the distinguished scholar Jonathan Z. Smith proposes that we have to recognize that people are not stupid, nor are they hypocrites.  They know that they are not behaving here as they say they will.  So why do they do it?  And why the village pet thing?

Smith suggests that the hunters are performing a ritual that expresses how they think the world should be (what I've called Vision) in conscious tension to how things actually are (Baseline).  They know that the world is supposed to be one way: the Master of Game is supposed to provide an appropriate bear, and that bear is supposed to behave according to certain rules.  Unfortunately, bears just don't behave that way.  So the people are saying, to themselves and the universe, that this is not their fault.  They thus use the tension between Vision and Baseline (ideology and reality) as a springboard for ethical thought, and they express their thinking on these subjects through ritual activity.¹

So what does this have to do with RPGs?

Well, I maintain that we play in RPGs in conscious tension to how things actually are.  I've never heard of a game in which you play yourself as a mundane person living your mundane life.  I don't mean "and then you're translated to an alien world," I mean playing Papers and Paychecks and all that.  Who'd want to do this?  You live that; you don't have to play it.

So if we play in conscious tension to ordinary lived reality, we are saying and doing something.  We are, in fact, thinking through our imaginations, through our characters and their actions, about the nature of reality and the nature of the possibilities of a larger imagined space.

Thus I'm very interested in certain tensions, particularly those between player and character, as ways of thinking about what gaming really is, and why it's fun, and I believe that serious consideration of such issues will not only advance game design (a sufficient goal in itself) but also clarify why we play.

To put it in somewhat famous terms, I'm suggesting that RPGs aren't only good to play, but good to think.

Chris

Notes
1. Jonathan Z. Smith, "The Bare Facts of Ritual," Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).  This is a grotesquely oversimplified account of Smith's very complex and important article, which I highly recommend.

[Harlequin]

(Wow.  I left for a LARP quite soon after my last post, and look what happens.  Chris L., quite simply and inclusively, thank you.)

There has been enough content added here that I'm just going to address facets of it in individual posts over the course of the next day or two; lots of good thoughts, here, although we still have some essential disconnects in our definitions.  Chris/Bankuei, I think I have to mention that IMO b/v does indeed apply much more to the Setting than the conflict/Situation within that setting or game world.  Tension is between elements of the design and its created world, not between things within that world.  I like Chris L's "what if" phrasing... the Vision is the "what if" and the Baseline is the (among kids unspoken) set of assumptions we choose not to change in our "what if."  The fact that we postulate a Vision which has tensions and conflicts within it is a separate issue; we could postulate a Vision of a true utopia with only the tiniest interpersonal IC tensions (boring game, but possible), and we'd have a very large B/V Tension to work with in the design, between the Baseline and this Vision.

But the main thing I wanted to address, in this case by counterexample, is the idea of associating Vision with "what the characters believe to be true" and the like.  The main reason I have a problem with this is that the characters are often ignorant about their own world; the Vision elements of the game are, however, generally not.  

The counterexample I thought of originally, which is why I dismissed Vision=CharUnderstanding with strong caveats at the time, was of a strongly modern/realistic game whose Vision concerned, say, psionics, but did so in such a way that the PCs remained unclear on the existence of such powers throughout, even as they used them.  Even those who believed (a minority even of those who used it) probably wouldn't understand psi very well, certainly not as it is communicated in the Vision.  This could be quite an interesting Gamist game if, say, the players were blindly exploring "what factors do boost psi use?" from a checklist that each GM created anew per campaign, tending to include elements like "relationship dysfunction," "lack of sleep," or even "slavic origins."

The Vision in such a game is quite clear - the psi, the lack of IC understanding of psi - and shows how, to me, the Vision has to have to do with that which is true-and-strange in their world, regardless of what a character (PC, NPC, nigh-omniscient, whoever) understands to be true.  Now, rereading Chris' posts on it, I see that he intended it to be the statement about Vision=CharUnderstanding to be an included element, not the whole, of the definition of Vision, in which case I have no problem with it at all.  As part of Emily's two-sets-of-four checklists (which, although their emphasis isn't where I'd have placed it, are nice summaries), it serves quite well indeed, but we should make sure it doesn't dominate our definitions.

On the other hand, I quite like the idea about a weak correspondence set between Baseline and players-playing-a-game, and between Vision and players-immersing-in-characters... though I'm not sure whether I can do anything useful with it at the moment.  It touches on GNS somewhat, which makes me leery, but I'm also just too sunburnt and tired to go quite that abstract. :)

I'll talk about Chris' examples from SitF, Fang's game, and my own work and how I'm applying these things (hint: take the Shadowrun example and choose not to do what I spotted there), in a bit.

- Eric