Facilitative Play

[Wormwood]

I've been working on bridging the gaps between the standard model and the technical play re-casting of it, and one of the major concerns I've encountered is facilitative play.

I consider facilitative play to be play which observably fails to directly advance any creative agenda, but improves the capacity of other players to advance their creative agenda.

Examples of this play type can be seen in all three CA's. Objective referring in gamism, character foils in narrativism, and archivist player roles in a simulationist setting. In many of these cases these players are important to advancing the CA, they just lack any direct investment in it.

Since these players are rarely the ones with direct dysfunction, there is little need to address them from a diagnostic perspective. However, it is not entirely clear where they lie in the theory.

Are they simply variants of other players in those CA, or is this a question of techniques? Is there any consensus in the theory? I'm looking forward to the answers, as technical play has a fairly precise interpretation of facilitative play, and I'm hoping that the results are not too disimiliar.

    -Mendel S.

[Walt Freitag]

According to my recollection of past discussions, consensus is that facilitative play shares the Creative Agenda that it facilitates.

Finding references to support that is going to be difficult, though, as there are no distinctive terms I'm aware of that "point out" the topic in searches. Also, I believe it's been a while since this was discussed explicitly. But there are many comments sprinkled around like this one from this post:

At this time [ed. -- two and a half years ago], I look at Gamism as simply the enjoyment of competition in an extremely broad sense. People can have different roles in that competition, up to and including a referee-role (he does not compete with the players, but his presence means the competition can happen in a certain way).

- Walt

[M. J. Young]

Walt's right.

If I remember aright, I was calling the two forms "active" and "passive" modes of the agenda, and there were numerous examples of the passive modes. It came up also in the context of consideration of the so-called "social agendum", the idea that some people play merely to facilitate the play of others, to be part of the game. The girlfriend or sister that does everything to set up opportunities for her boyfriend or brother to show off is playing passive gamist; opportunities to show off are still what the game is about for her (as for the referee who creates such opportunities), but she is not the one showing off.

You'll notice even in your own examples that there are distinct differences in passive or facilitative play between the three agenda. That which facilitates one could actually be dysfuntional with the others.

--M. J. Young

[Ron Edwards]

For clarity's sake:

The text Walt quotes is 100% up-to-date if you substitute Step On Up for competition. The term competition turned out to have too much baggage attached to it in readers' minds to be useful.

Best,
Ron

[Wormwood]

Well, I essentially concur that facilitative play isn't in a separate mode (I resolved the social mode concern as it links into technical play, so there isn't a need for such a creative agend  in that model.) The question I had was more in what way does the theory address the difference between facilitative and standard play, or active and passive play.  Is facilitative play a set of techniques, or are they sub-modes such as high-concept sim or purist sim. Or are they something else, such as partitions of creative responsibility within the CA.

As an aside, I dislike active and passive as terminology, especially since the needs of facilitation can cause the "passive" player to be significantly more active than the "active" players. I'd consider passive players to be "audience" style players, which is a different phenomena than facilitative ones.

I hope that helps,

    -Mendel S.