Creative Agenda and behavioral disconnects

[Silmenume]

It appears to me the meaning of disconnect is not fully understood, especially in the context of my post.  I use disconnect in reference to a psychological state of cognitive dissonance.  The point of my original post was not that people don't understand creative agenda but rather they either refuse to acknowledge they have one, yet they do express one during play, or that they say they enjoy a certain "style of play" (which they may or may not accept as Creative Agenda), then express another during play.

It is recognizing that they have a cognitive dissonance in operation that humans have such a hard time with, including players.

Aure Enteluva,

Silmenume.

[Mike Holmes]

Right, and my point is that if you have the right system all this comes above board, and the problem ceases to exist. That very much the cognative dissonace occurs because the system is subtly driving activity which is counter to the player's stated goals. You can fix that in one of two ways. Either you can make the player aware of the dissconnect, or you can just alter the system so that he can't make inappropriate assumptions about what it will produce. As a designer, I choose the latter. As a GM I work for the first.

Mike

[M. J. Young]

Mike, I'm not sure whether I'm getting you clearly here. Let me attempt to present some distinct cases, and see if I have it right.

I understand that dysfunction occurs if the game system is incoherent enough that a player can draw the wrong message from it, for example trying to play narrativist against an engine that includes narrativist jargon in the text but whose design is strongly gamist. The solution you seem to be proposing here would be to play a game that is fully coherent, such that the player won't get the wrong message from the text, and thus will play in a manner appropriate to the rules.

However, doesn't dysfunction occur if the player brings contrary expectations with him which are not derived from the text? As an extreme example, couldn't someone fall into a Sorcerer game and play as fully gamist as possible, causing dysfunction as he crashes into the narrativist structure of the engine?

What I'm getting at is if the dysfunction is caused by dissonance within the rules text itself, obviously that is best addressed by getting a different rules text; but if the dissonance exists between player expectations and the game engine, having a fully coherent game engine which is fully at odds with the player's approach is going to be just as dysfunctional as having a fully incoherent game engine.

So do you mean that this case doesn't really happen because a fully coherent rules text will inherently cause people to find their ways into the mode of play the game supports? Or do you mean that if the dissonance is between a fully coherent game engine and a player's contrary play preferences the solution is to find a game that is fully coherent and supports the preferred style of play?

I find it difficult to accept that dysfunction caused by player expectations never occurs with fully coherent rules systems. Are you suggesting that?

--M. J. Young

[Tim C Koppang]

M.J.,

I'm not trying to answer for Mike--just presenting a case to see if I understand.

What I believe Mike to be arguing is that dysfunctional play is the result of both rules and players.  When the two don't match people become unhappy.  Nothing new here.

The rules of a game are always working to encourage a particular type of play.  In a coherently designed game, the rules of a game will encourage one of GNS.  An incoherent game doesn't know what the hell it's trying to do.

A player also confuses matters.  He has certain expectations that he might have derived from either the game text, his own personal experiences/past preferences, or the current group he's playing with.  When those expectation run up against a contrary set of rules, you get dysfunction.  Of course you can have perfectly coherent rules and dysfunctional play.  Both design and player-expectations have to get along.

The way I see it, you can fix dysfunction in one of two broad ways.  Either you get a new set of rules, or you get a new set of expectations.

This can be accomplished on either the design end or from the play/GM end.  All a designer can do is try his best to design coherent rules/game text (the whole package).  In this way, a plyaer receives no misconceptions about the game from within the text itself.  A well designed game will encourage a certain focus (read GNS priority).  If players try to use the rules for something else, then it's an expectation problem.

Now, on the other end, players can do quite a bit to fix dysfunction.  If the rules are dysfunctional, they can try to mend them or just plainly throw them out in exchange for something else.  If the rules run contrary to their expectations, then they can try to mold the rules or throw them out in exchange for something more in line with their creative agenda.

Alternatively, the players can change their expectations (if only for the duration of the session).  This is where things can get very difficult.

Sometimes, players are the product of years and years of expectation reinforcement.  As Mike said, one solution is to make the players realize that what they want and what the rules are built to do is very different.  Sometimes just knowing why things aren't working can help a player to adjust.  What happens if that personal adjustment is just too drastic for a group?  Well, then they have to change the rules.  Now, I'm kinda assuming here that all the players share the same expectations.  This is of course, rarely true.  If one player is on his own, then he may have to find a different group with expectations closer to his own.  Notice, that loner player is still just changing the rules (not his expectations), albeit in a more extreme way.

I think in the long run, finding the right group is a great way to go.  However, if players open themselves up to all sorts of play, and realize that any of the GNS priorities can be fun, then that goes a long way to creating successful play.  In reality, you probably need a little of both--an agreeable group with people that aren't locked into some vision of the one true way.

[Harlequin]

This focus on text-based incoherency puzzles me - yes, guys, we get it.  But see my previous post... IMO text-based incoherency may actually be the rarest form of CA disconnect.  I give a cascade of other examples in that text, none of which have yet been addressed; Mike, from this end it feels like you're dodging the question on this issue.

Let us assume that all the CAs we are discussing are, themselves, coherent; the CA makes sense and is fun for some of the players, it is intuitive to some of the players, and it flows naturally out of the text as written.  Mike asserts that this should "subconsciously" produce functional play; I deny the assertion, and point to my previous examples.

Tim, your expansion of the concept does seem to cover Mike's stance... but it again ducks the question of non-rules-based disconnects from the CA, suggesting only that the player "change expectations."  While this works, it's exactly what is made difficult by the point of this thread - that neither the sufferer, nor his fellow players, are necessarily in a position to identify the specific expectation which is being disappointed, because the verbalized expectation is often an incorrect reflection of the true desire.  Hence the question, how do we identify what needs to change?

Speaking of which - Silmenume, I think we should pick one definition for "disconnect" and stick with it.  I introduced the term afresh, I wasn't trying to mirror what you'd been talking about with the internal disconnection between true desire and expectation of desire; I was talking about the more prosaic disconnect between true desire and actual play, with the psychological disunity you describe as the corollary factor which makes fixing that disconnect seemingly impossible.  Does that make sense?  So, at least internally to this thread, we need to be careful about our terminology.  I suggest that a "disconnect" stay with my usage, a disconnect of this player from that existing CA, and that we use some other term (I was using "inarticulacy" but there's probably a better word) to reflect the internal dissonance.

Does that help get this thread back on track?

- Eric

[Mike Holmes]

There is no such thing as "text-based incoherrence." Never has been, never will. Incohrence is play that has these problems. Texts can be a contributing factor, as can player's preconceptions. There are loads of reasons.

That's not the point. I'm saying don't allow any of the reasons to interfere. Don't let bad text, player expectation, anything, prevent you from presenting a clear CA. Get the idea across, and then play that way. The disconnects will vanish.

It seems odd to me that the people here understand what Creative Agenda is, but then seem to assume that CA problems will still arise. If you know what the problem is, then you can address it, right? Since understanding the theory, the only times that I've had a problem with establishing a clear CA was when I was using a text that was confusing. OK, I'll say it, it was GURPS. If GURPS has a clear CA that it promotes, then it's my fault for trying to do something different than that with it. The difference between my agenda and the text's agenda was confusing.

Whatever the fault, if I'd only been playing a system that clearly supported the method of play that I wanted to establish, I don't think that I would have had any problems. Indeed, I haven't in any other game that I'd played in for years now since doing this sort of analysis.

So, what I'm saying is that all you need to do is present a game with a coherent CA, and players will know right off if they want to play it. And you'll have, after only one "instance" of play worth of "testing", an idea of at least one sort of CA that they'll be willing to accept.

Perfect example: I was playtesting Universalis, and I described (only described, didn't even need to play), the Creative Agenda to one of my players - all the standard hooha about it being Collaborative Storytelling, and what that means, etc, etc. Right away he told me that he wasn't interested. In a way, given what I'd discerned from his previous preferences, I wasn't surprised at all. Only his clarity on the issue surprised me.

Mike

P.S. Note that he's the kind of player that I find to be an exception to the rule about players being generally acceptive of CAs. He's got stong opinions about things, and even little differences become huge for him. Knowing that, I didn't even give trying to convince him to play a second thought.

[M. J. Young]

It seems odd to me that the people here understand what Creative Agenda is, but then seem to assume that CA problems will still arise. If you know what the problem is, then you can address it, right?...

Whatever the fault, if I'd only been playing a system that clearly supported the method of play that I wanted to establish, I don't think that I would have had any problems....

So, what I'm saying is that all you need to do is present a game with a coherent CA, and players will know right off if they want to play it. And you'll have, after only one "instance" of play worth of "testing", an idea of at least one sort of CA that they'll be willing to accept.

I have a group of players who have at least a basic conception of GNS--enough to know that the majority of their play has been gamist, but they've been exposed to some simulationist play and aren't entirely averse to narrativism. Everyone agreed to try playtesting a strongly narrativist game, one whose Creative Agenda was pretty much worn on its sleeve, to see how narrativist play worked for them.

There was at least one player, maybe more than one, for whom gamist tendencies started to creep in, and this threatened to derail play for the others. There was some concern as to whether we were all playing to tell the best popular story, or whether some in the group wanted their characters to win. Now, the game design was sound enough, I think, that this gamist creep had the potential to drive the story forward (by making the villainy of the villain much more powerful and more credible); but there were some tensions at the time, in which people who were trying to pursue the narrativist agenda felt their goals threatened.

I think it could have become quite dysfunctional, particularly as I was new to the game and not certain how to handle certain aspects of it.

Thus even if you have a group that agrees on a creative agenda up front, there is no guarantee that play will not become dysfunctional through the usual preferences and tendencies of the players. That's true even if you have a well-designed game that supports the agreed agenda.

I find it difficult to believe that you mean simply explaining the creative agenda to the group and gaining everyone's agreement to try it will eliminate dysfunction. We had a thread just recently in which one referee was very frustrated that she was trying to accommodate one player's desires to play something narrativist and despite her efforts and the agreement of the group at large to make that happen it kept falling apart. People do not always succeed in achieving that which they target as goals, and playing in an unfamiliar creative agenda can be a very difficult thing for a group--there are too many habits of play built into what we do that are not easily overcome.

--M. J. Young

[Tim C Koppang]

Eric wrote: "Hence the question, how do we identify what needs to change?"  In direct response, I would point to Mike's reply.  By establishing a clear CA from the get-go, you can help players to identify where the game is heading, how it's going to get there, and whether or not individual players are going to "mesh" well with the CA.  I do think that with and open mind, and some skill, it's possible for players to generate functional play from that discussion alone.

Here's a question: Do you think it's easier for players to voice their like/dislike for a CA during the pre-game CA discussion, or wait and see their reactions to specific instances of play?  I'm actually tempted to argue for the former.  Perhaps actual play would confuse the player, making it harder for him to differentiate between an overall creative agenda preference, and an in-game event that may not have gone his way?  Perhaps I'm talking about two things that are actually the same?

I think the question eventually becomes, how do you present a clear CA, and then how do you go about playing "that way?"  I tend to agree with M.J. when he says that even if all the players and the GM know and understand the goal CA, it's not going to guarantee functional play.  I don't necessarily think that Mike was arguing anything of the sort however.  By identifying what the group's collective goal (CA) is, it's much easier to work towards functional play.  Bottom line is, and this is what can become a very big problem, it takes skillful roleplaying to keep a CA on track if players are new to the style.

Testing for preference would become difficult if the players involved have a hard time making the understood CA properly come to life.  If players naturally and consistently drift back into Gamism for example, then you don't really have a very accurate test for Narrativist oriented play.  How can a GM or other participating players help to make that CA be all that it can be?

[Mike Holmes]

Thanks again Tim.

I find it difficult to believe that you mean simply explaining the creative agenda to the group and gaining everyone's agreement to try it will eliminate dysfunction.

Not always. But this is how you eliminate it if you can. All the talk about disconnects seems to say that we can get players to understand what they're doing and then they'll become able to make these things work for them. I'm saying that this is unlikely until you've shown them a clear CA. At which point you'll have done the most effective thing you can to solve the problem anyhow.

Sure, I suppose that there might be someone so detached from what's happening that a disconnect will still exist at this point. I'm going to guess that this person is irretrievable anyhow. They're certainly beyond my willingness to get them to change. If a coherent system can't straighten then out, I'm not going into session with their psychiatrist to get it to work.

Sorry for the snarky. I haven't seen it fail yet, however.

Mike