<i>Post Ludem</i> GNS Analysis

[M. J. Young]

I probably shouldn't start this thread; I'm too far behind on what was posted over the weekend as it is. But if I don't, I'll forget, and it will be lost for some time.

Walt recently wrote http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8730">Questioning the "few key decisions" paradigm, and I commented there that that particular method of GNS analysis only worked if (and you can read the rest in that thread, because it's not particularly relevant here).

Yet it stirred in my mind that I had several times spoken of basing an analysis of creative agenda on the nature of the stories told by the players. I'm the more persuaded that this can be one approach to diagnosing creative agendae among the players.

The basic approach would be to ask the players to tell you about their games, but not to tell you in log format what happened--rather to ask the players to tell you what was really good, exciting, or memorable about the recent game sessions they played. I think (and this is a bit theoretical here, but it comes from watching a lot of people tell game stories) that whatever excited the players about the game, whatever they thought worth repeating the next day or the next week, that's going to reflect their creative agenda significantly.

Thoughts?

--M. J. Young

P.S.--my Latin isn't so good, but my son suggests that Post Ludem means After Game.

[Harlequin]

I'll weigh in with a solid opinion, if nothing else:  I think that's a fantastic idea.  Cracking the black box that is the C.A. has been a hope of mine for a long time (cf. old threads about Aesthetics & Design, which discuss something different but which swayed into trying to crack the C.A. for playgroups too).  And I think that this insight may present the first real fissure we could get our collective theoretical icepicks into.

I would suggest that as a first-order approach, we might begin with a tabulation of Post Ludem styles.  Try to compile a list of the ways and forms used by players to describe their games, a la the Robin's Laws dissection of player types, although I'd much rather launch from a blank slate than work by extension of that taxonomy.  (That dissection is, however, probably connected to what I'm proposing - maybe, in fact, these Player Types are closer to fave Creative Agendas and only GNS-linked because of the intrinsic connection between C.A. and GNS.  This might explain why his taxonomy ends up sitting outside/beside/disconnected from the Forge body of theory, as exemplified in Ron's This Is It... because Laws is addressing Creative Agenda primarily, which we've left dark and spooky up 'til now.)

Then, in the second-order step, I'd throw out the taxonomy we just wrote.  It's the exercise of generating such a taxonomy that I think would be useful, not the product; indeed, IMO spurious taxonomies are the death of many a strong theoretical debate, and more frequently misused than anything else except statistics.  But I would hope that, in the process of listing and brainstorming the forms of Post Ludem experience, some patterns would emerge which we could seize on as the beginning of something more general.

I'll definitely have to sleep on this... but it feels like an extremely worthwhile exercise.  

As a first cross-reference (since I just finished reading it), I recommend (and will type up if asked, though it's long) the beautiful dissection of "the forms of written history" in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, page 734 in the paperback edition.  In brief, scholar Zhu Isao dissects all writings on history according not to their content, but to their form, painting four broad categories with wide strokes... "dharma history" or the progressive mode, "entropic history" or the satiric mode, "comedy," and "tragedy," the latter two subject to particular redefinitions inside this monologue.  It is less the content of this analysis that I recommend, though again I'll have to sleep on it - there might be some direct correlations or inspirations there - as the shape of the analysis... the way in which he manages to (mostly) sidestep content and focus on the way the stories are being told, with the assumption that the same history could be told in any of the four modes.  The same trick could serve us very well...

- Eric

[jdagna]

MJ, I almost posted exactly this same strategy over in that thread.  Whenever I have a new player in one of my groups I always ask them to describe the best gaming experience they've ever had (and identify elements that made it good).  The results always scream GNS, even if the actual behavior during play might have been convergent.  The fact that memories are imperfect causes the unimportant or incoherent elements to drop out, highlighting priorities and preferences beautifully.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi M.J.,

Yes.

I don't know what else there is to say.

Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

Hi M.J.,

Yes. That people don't do this baffles me and always has.

I do it all the time, both with potential fellow players and with people on-line.

Does no one read Actual Play threads? I consider it to be the most significant and important forum at the Forge, for many reasons. I bring it up here because you can see me and others practicing this principle over and over, especially when someone is crashing and burning over some messed-up situation in their game.

Best,
Ron

[John Kim]

MJ, I almost posted exactly this same strategy over in that thread.  Whenever I have a new player in one of my groups I always ask them to describe the best gaming experience they've ever had (and identify elements that made it good).  The results always scream GNS, even if the actual behavior during play might have been convergent.  The fact that memories are imperfect causes the unimportant or incoherent elements to drop out, highlighting priorities and preferences beautifully.

Cool.  Why don't we try it here?  I'm a little busy, but I'll try coming up with a list of my best gaming experiences.  What about you, Justin?  Post your own response, and others can judge the GNS significance.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

The best place for such posts is Actual Play. That's what that forum is for, with the GNS-side of the current topic being an add-on.

I extremely strongly agree with you, John. The more such posting, the better the Forge becomes. People might be interested in my Arrowflight and Haven posts, for instance - "Ron goes Simulationist and talks about it."

Best,
Ron

[joshua neff]

Actually, I've found those posts very interesting Ron. Actual Play is almost always the first forum I hit when I log in to the Forge. I don't always have anything useful or insightful to say or ask, though.

[Paul Czege]

Hey M.J.,

The basic approach would be to ask the players to tell you about their games, but not to tell you in log format what happened--rather to ask the players to tell you what was really good, exciting, or memorable about the recent game sessions they played.

Can I ask if you consciously chose the "about their games" and "recent game sessions" wording out of a perception that a similar "good, exciting, or memorable" inquiry about favorite characters is of less value? If so, why do you think? For reference, I give you Christoffer Lernö's http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5889">What's your favorite character of all time? thread from the inactive Forge Birthday forum. How do you think his "favorite character/why/favorite moment" inquiry does at producing useful information about Creative Agenda?

Paul

[M. J. Young]

Can I ask if you consciously chose the "about their games" and "recent game sessions" wording out of a perception that a similar "good, exciting, or memorable" inquiry about favorite characters is of less value? If so, why do you think?

Particularly regarding the referenced thread, I'll confess that I was not a serious participant at the Forge Birthday Party. My posting is a once-a-day visit to hit everything that's been done, and that particular forum exploded overnight from non-existent to impossible number of posts, and then closed. It was not really conducive to my style of forum reading.

Thinking about it, I'm not certain whether I have a favorite character. I can remember the first character I ever created, but that game didn't last long because the referee didn't really find Metamorphosis Alpha to be what she wanted to run (she switched to Star Frontiers, which was what she wanted). The first character I ran for a long time has a fond place in my heart, but I really found the game rough (Gamma World); in fact, I ran a parallel character who eventually got killed in action, and I almost cried over his death--but there's nothing really to tell about him. Probably I'd pick the one I ran in E. R. Jones' D&D-clone game, but it's a tough call--the last D&D character I created had a lot of promise, but the referee was too busy to keep the game going; and of course, I play myself in Multiverser.

So I'd say that it wouldn't have occurred to me, personally, to suggest that talking about your "favorite character" was a good approach--I'm so much more often behind the screen that a lot of my favorite characters are NPCs, and I like them for how the players interact with them.

Interestingly, looking at that list, I realize that many of my favorite game stories surrounded characters who didn't make the list. I tell great Multiverser stories, mostly about what happened with other people's characters; I tell some old Star Frontier stories, but it wasn't the characters that really made the difference there. I tell some great D&D stories, too, but always about what other characters did either while I was playing but not involved or while I was running the game.

People like their characters for many different reasons, and those reasons don't always relate to what they like about games. Tiras was a great fighter, but what I really enjoyed about him was his ability again and again to defuse a situation and so keep his people out of a fight. That game forced me to think intensely about the best way to achieve particular goals, but it also was rich in character relationships and moral questions.

I don't discount the likelihood that many people will reveal their preferences through identifying what they liked about their characters. It does require that they have played a lot of characters--perhaps more than the dozen or so I've played (as player), and in a lot of different contexts. On the other hand, I think if you ask someone what made a game particularly good, exciting, or memorable, the degree to which the identity of the character was relevant to that will come out in the story.

Also, I think "recent" is significant, because people tend to approach the past with a touch of nostalgia, and because sometimes their preferences shift or expand over time. My earliest stories probably have a strong element of "how we got around the referee" or otherwise beat the system by outsmarting it; my later stories are much more about wild and crazy things that happened (Chris and the Teleporting Spaceships made Dice Tales). The things that make great moments for me are pretty varied, but they're different today than they were twenty years ago. Particularly in contrast to characters, there are always new game stories. Not one of the characters I've mentioned is less than ten years old (maybe one, but not less than seven if she is) because I play looooong campaigns and frankly haven't really created many characters recently. I've got some more recent characters who are interesting and may develop into exciting, but those games are on hold at the moment (referee lost his books and papers when he moved and hasn't found what box they're in yet).

Overall, I'd say that if it's the character that makes it interesting, that will come out in the telling of the game story, so it's kind of covered.

Am I missing something?

--M. J. Young