Session transcript for purpose of analysis

[matthijs]

Hi all!

I haven't seen this question posted before: Has anyone ever tried to take notes during a role-playing session, focusing on crowd response/audience reaction?

An example of a transcript might run like this:

________________________________

Ann: "Adalbart the Barbarian runs through him with his sword!"
Bert + Cindy giggle. Dorian rolls his eyes. The GM ignores the event, busy making notes about something.

________________________________

Such a transcript might be very useful in analysing group dynamics, and what is actually appreciated in a group (in contrast to what members claim to enjoy).

[Jack Spencer Jr]

That's sort of what ACtual Play forum is form, just not everyone puts that information into their posts.

[clehrich]

This is quite difficult to do, actually, if you want all that background information (giggling, winking, etc.).  The best ways would be either to film and then transcribe, which might produce a strange reaction in the first place ("we're being taped?  aaah!"), or else to have an additional person present whose sole job is to transcribe.  Either way, it's going to take a few sessions before it all becomes smooth and the players forget about the transcription that's going on.

If actual players have to do the transcribing, they're going to be less engaged in gaming, and you'll produce confused results.

Chris Lehrich

[orbsmatt]

I definitely agree that it would be very difficult to transcribe all the details of each happening in the group.  This would detract a bit from the overall gaming experience.

If you really want to know how your team is doing, just ask them!  Players are usually brutally honest about what they like and dislike.

[matthijs]

If you really want to know how your team is doing, just ask them!  Players are usually brutally honest about what they like and dislike.

Yes and no. People sometimes say they like one thing, but actually seem to enjoy something else. Moviegoers, for instance, might say they wish there were more "quality" movies, but end up always going to whatever seems fun on a saturday night.

In my experience, the same is true with games. Players might claim they want to immerse themselves in a realistic game world, or create believable and dramatic narrative, while the sessions they end up enjoying and talking about later are the ones where they get railroaded from one smash-bang action encounter to another.

I'm thinking maybe it would be fun for all involved if the GM tailored a session not to what the players claim to be interested in, but to what they actually seem to be enjoying. Such a transcript - or, at least, some notes of the kind - could help.

[John Kim]

In my experience, the same is true with games. Players might claim they want to immerse themselves in a realistic game world, or create believable and dramatic narrative, while the sessions they end up enjoying and talking about later are the ones where they get railroaded from one smash-bang action encounter to another.

I'm thinking maybe it would be fun for all involved if the GM tailored a session not to what the players claim to be interested in, but to what they actually seem to be enjoying. Such a transcript - or, at least, some notes of the kind - could help.

I'd sort of agree, but I also think there are a lot of potential pitfalls in this approach.  First of all, long-term appreciation is different than moment-to-moment thrills.  So a game which gets them going at that moment, they might find empty and uninteresting later.  For example, I went to see the new "Dawn of the Dead" movie.  It was well-directed, and I jumped at all the right spots.  But intellectually I found it terribly thin -- as opposed to a movie which I can think back over and keep finding new angles to consider it by and enjoy.  

Second, by focussing only on outward signs, you can miss the internal process of enjoyment.  So I might watch the audience of a comic's monologue, and I notice that they smile and laugh at the punchlines.  I then conclude that punchlines are what they enjoy, and I give feedback that there should be more punchlines and less of setup.  But of course that's wrong.  The monologue is a whole, not just a collection of isolated cases of statement-reaction.

The moment of laughter tells us when that tension is relieved, but it doesn't tell us about the full process of enjoyment.

[Rich Forest]

I like this idea, but I wonder if it would be difficult to put into practice. Take transcription--if someone is taking notes while playing, that is going to slow the game down, and the transcriber will inevitably miss a lot of possible GNS cues (it isn't possible to go back and replay it). So you almost need to videotape, but where are you going to put the camera to get all the visual cues equally? And as Chris points out, people are likely to not act naturally if they're on camera, especially at the beginning. Audiotape? Again, you can't get the visual cues. And in any case, once you have the recordings, you have to decide whether it's worthwhile to actually transcribe it or whether to just try to work from the tapes. Both have problems. For one thing, accurate transcription, hell, even sloppy transcription, is an enormous amount of work. I'm not kidding. You're looking at hours of work to transcribe even a short conversation well. Now think about what happens if that's a game session.

IRC chat game auto-transcribe themselves, which is nice, but I've noticed in my own experiences a couple challenges/problems with this as well. A lot of people keep the "in-game/in-character" and "system/OOC" chats in separate rooms. That makes it more difficult to analyze how people are reacting to things. And of course, people won't always type in their reactions, depending on the game. I tend to, usually within parentheses, include things like (heh) and (cool). But a lot of people don't. And even though I do it, I rein myself in--I do it less than I would in a live session. Also, you don't get the physical reactions. I know I often physically react to something that happens in the chat, leaning back in my chair, smiling, etc.; or IRL I'll often react out loud to things in-chat, saying things like, "wow," or "yeah." But you wouldn't know it unless I then typed it in. You'd need a self-aware group that included everything in one log, dedicated to transcribing all the feedback/reactions (if I lean forward in reaction to something, I type in something like "leaning forward"). And they're still going to miss things they themselves do, and it's going to distract them from the game and make them self-conscious of what they're doing (thus making them act less naturally), and even once you've gotten past that, there's a chance they've already been influenced by the theory and will be transcribing to support it (or their understandings of it).

And this is all in addition to the issues John has brought up. Actually, I think it's an interesting idea in theory. Actually carrying it out, however... would be A LOT of work and still might not produce an accurate picture of what's going on unless you were exceptionally careful and could work out all the issues that are being raised in this thread. Now all that said, it's not like you're doing this for academic publication or anything, so you may not need to hold yourselves to ridiculous standards of rigour. Even so, without a certain amount of rigour, you might end up doing a lot of work to get results that aren't really more generalizable than just thinking about it, talking about it, and reflecting on it after the game. That's not to say you shouldn't try it, though. Go for it. I'd be interested in seeing what came of it.

Rich

[clehrich]

If you really want to do this seriously, you should take a look at some texts on anthropological fieldwork.  It's not my area, but I can ask around if you care.  What you're trying to produce here, in effect, is a "thick description"¹ of a gaming session.  You'd need a trained observer to do this, and that observer could not be also a participant without a whole hell of a lot of training -- and probably not even then.  

If you had a serious anthropologist-fieldworker doing this, it would be better than a camera, actually, because the first step would be to establish rapport, partly by getting together and chatting so everyone's comfortable with the fieldworker and what he's doing, and then almost certainly by playing a few sessions with the fieldworker as player.  Then he'd shift to a background role as transcriber and only occasional contributor, and you'd be surprised at what he'd detect.  Then he'd also go and analyze it, which you wouldn't get with a camera, and you might be startled (and occasionally amused) by the results.  But it would sure as hell be interesting.

I'd love to see this done, but I'm not sanguine about its real possibility unless and until some anthropologist decides to do RPG groups and gaming as a dissertation project.

Chris Lehrich

1. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description," The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, XXX [I forget the date offhand]), 1-~25.

[Gordon C. Landis]

Chris - I think this is what Gary Allen Fine tried to do in the 80's with his Shared Fantasy.  I'm not sure I'm qualified to judge how successful he was, but I found the book to be interesting as a historical snapshot if nothing else.

So I guess I'm saying, some folks may have gone down this road a bit before - in case anyone decides to seriously persue it, they do have some stuff they might look at.

Gordon

[Callan S.]

It would be interesting if a RPG game was designed so as to give the GM information like this. It would have to be each player creating some sort of log, but make it a possitive/paying off part of the game and stream line it, so it's not intrusive.

It'd be an RPG that provides solid feedback to GM's to help them run better games. </random thought>