Cults and Gaming -- suggestions?

[clehrich]

Digging among the various Mainstream and whatnot threads in the Big Five, including Gay/Gamer especially but also a lot of others, I stumbled on a weird thought.

Most of that discussion is about how to get gaming in a sense out of the closet, to appeal to the mainstream, and so forth.  Now from a practical, economic standpoint, that seems to make sense.  You figure, more purchasers = more sales.  And that's true, of course, but I think it misses one element of gaming culture that's very important.

Which is that lots of gamers, like members of many subcultures, identify strongly and in a sense proudly with their own freakiness.  I should say, "our" freakiness.  You see this if you visit a con, where people "come out" dressed up in chainmail and the like, or as favorite anime characters, or whatever.  They're proud of being weirdos, ill-understood, and the like; it's the same kind of attraction that made The Cure so powerful for so many listeners: nobody understands me, I'm different, I have to hide who I really am.

For old U of Chicago refugees, you might remember a comic strip called "Misery Loves Comedy."  There was a funny one where there are fifteen or so people walking along the street with their heads down.  Each one is thinking the same thing: "I'm all alone, nobody understands me, nobody is like me, I'm different."  Yes, exactly!

I think this is one of the big selling-points about V:tM.  Your character is a super-powered geek, and nobody knows it but others like him.  He's dark, and dangerous, and evil, and full of angst.  Just like geek culture, except empowered.

I bring this up for two reasons.

First, I didn't see (though I didn't read every post carefully) a defense of this marketing strategy in those threads, nor a defense of the "we're not mainstream and that's the whole point" perspective.  But it must have come up before.  Any links?

Second, I'm trying to design Shadows in the Fog in such a way as to produce this "in-group" effect, a kind of tunnel-vision that I associate with occultists and conspiracy-theorists.  The idea is that the players rapidly generate an insanely complicated private universe of references and sub-surface meanings.  They have the power to manipulate these things for personal (character) power, through magic, and for personal (player) power, in that the more of this stuff they mess with at a time, coherently, the cooler they are and the more accolades they get.  This was the theory behind the old "vote for the best" system, now dropped with some rueful thoughts.  And if it works right, within a relatively short time it will be impossible to explain to an outsider what the game is really about, and why it's cool, because the thing has become wildly insular.

If you're thinking, "You're trying to create a cult," there's a lot of truth in that.  The one big difference is that there isn't a charismatic leader who makes freaky demands.  The whole cult-like phenomenon is supposed to happen within the group, without a top-down force.  My ideal case would be a game that gets rolling so powerfully that the players are prompted to write enormous emails to each other, essays, analyses, and so on.  They start doing a huge amount of private research on how "it's all really true".

I've seen hints of this even in Jere's Age of Paranoia espionage version, even though that deliberately stripped off a number of systems intended to promote such effects.  Jere has been sending us the "Secrecy News" posts, which are recent analyses from the intelligence community about what's doing in (mostly) US intelligence agencies and in Washington.  A number of times, people have replied, "Gee, it sounds like X character is still up to his old tricks."  And one player has been grappling with the personal difficulty of playing his character because he seems just too damn real – and a neocon asshole who sort of invented push-polling.  Why should that bother him?  Because reality and fiction have begun to blur, I suggest.

Now with all that in mind, I'm wondering if anyone has thought about this phenomenon and how to encourage it deliberately within gaming.  I realize that's in some ways contrary to the "get out and sell copies" approach, since it's deliberately constructing an isolated community, but surely this has been thought of before?

Suggestions?

Concretely, of course, even if nobody's done it before (or you in particular haven't), any ideas for doing it effectively in this game?

Thanks.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Chris,

My take on the issue is that this strategy has already been thoroughly established as the default for role-playing commerce, to the extent that those who have fully exploited it don't even realize that it's a strategy - to them, it's "how it's done," or even identify the strategy with "the environment," with no further reflection.

The difference between this outlook and my own is the core reason why no really useful dialogue occurs between me and folks who currently work for White Wolf.

A useful parallel to consider is superhero comics, in which a love of superheroes was perceived as the defining feature of people who like comics, and thus many companies dashed to "own the market" through glutting these customers' needs. It was disastrous, frankly, and now, both comics companies (the ones which sell comics, rather than license for movies) and stores are most successful when treating this particular market as the adolescent introductory material it is.

So, back to your question, I think that the outlook you're describing so well does exist, that it is extremely pervasive through most role-playing companies' marketing and creative strategies, and that it is commercially vulnerable to "interference competition" tactics. In other words, the bigger and flashier company automatically wins, mainly by dominating the attention and shelf-space of the middlemen (distributors and retailers) before the customer-based market sees anything.

From my perspective, this is no big deal, as the market that they're sewing up isn't my target market in the first place. But that's my take on the issue, anyway.

Best,
Ron

[Matt Snyder]

Chris,

I think this has come up before, but no specific threads or links pop into my brain.

I view the dividing line between "mainstream" and "geek culture" as a major and significant one, so much so that I designed a game and (badly) marketed it to span this dividing line deliberately. All along, I intended Nine Worlds to be a game that used ideas from games and theories that rejected traditional notions (read: "geek notions) of what RPGs should be like, but appealed to "geek culture" in terms of content and genre.

That is, I created a game targeted at, say, Mage: the Ascension fans with the goal of showing them how they could have more control and bring more "magic" to their gaming with a radically different system approach.

The game sold well at GenCon, and has had lukewarm success since. My marketing aims are, frankly, weak, but I'm hoping to change that with some new approaches.

I don't have any ideas for you in terms of your system. It sounds to me like you've already built a system that does what you want.

But, now you've got to get people to "bite." How do you help them create identity? Do you provide them a medium? (For example, a forum for your game where they can assume personas.) Do you create content outside your game product/publication that reinforces the identity? Do you provide them a place to post their own content?

I think these are some ways to make it happen. Unfortunately, I'm not doing much of this. I hope to. And, I hope this helps spark some ideas for you!

[clehrich]

But, now you've got to get people to "bite." How do you help them create identity? Do you provide them a medium? (For example, a forum for your game where they can assume personas.) Do you create content outside your game product/publication that reinforces the identity? Do you provide them a place to post their own content?

I don't think I've expressed myself well.  I don't actually care much about marketing as such, though I think it's an interesting issue; I do care about getting some people to play the game, but that's for me a secondary concern (this may be odd, but there you are).

My "cult-like" interest is in play itself, making the play-group act this way.  I think that in order to create that effect among play-groups would require a large established background and a meta-plot, very much the way WoD did things.  This allows members of different play-groups to communicate within the cult by giving them pre-established "in facts" to discuss, about let's say Clan Malkavian and the like.

What I want Shadows in the Fog to do is get players to make this stuff up within play, then get deeply into it as a small-group dynamic.  This creates insularity and isolation, but it also creates (I hope) a kind of weirdly inbred, paranoid, claustrophobic sense that "we're the only ones who really know the truth."  And that's exactly the mood I want for the game, you see.  

Basically what I'm trying to do is to manipulate the small-group dynamic to produce the sensation among players that the characters themselves are feeling.  To the extent that it works, this would generate a kind of immersion without immersion.  Everyone knows that it's just a game, of course, but somehow it seems like there's more to it.  And only we know this.

Compare this to Nephilim or Unknown Armies, two games I know fairly well.  They create a fictional background world, the Nephilim or the Avatars, and set up a character world that participates in it.  That's fine, but you have to like the background world as presented.  Note that games like this (CoC is another example) sometimes -- often -- stress a difference between what the GM knows and what the players know, so as to create the mystery: they have to figure it out, you see, but the GM knows all about it.

What I'm trying to do is construct a play-mode in which all that background world is generated in play.  The GM doesn't know the real truth either.  Eventually, you may not need a GM at all; that's certainly the hope, although I do think starting out with one helps.  I want to displace the "secret background world for GM eyes only" stuff into history that can actually be researched, as well as the imaginative ability to make connections that aren't entirely sane and the character ability to affect history.  So I have this discussion of alternate history, in which I say that the ideal is a game that constructs a secret history which, if it were viewed from a modern (sane) perspective, would look absolutely identical to how it actually does look.  We, the players/characters, know that there is other stuff going on, and that some of the things modern historians or whoever see in Victorian London had other causes and reasons than are apparent.  But we're the only ones who know, because we were there.  We figured it out.  And nobody will ever believe us.

Does that help?  Or maybe I didn't understand your comments.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi,

Chris, are you very familiar with InSpectres? Although the tone, experience, and thematic questions of the game are very different from what you're talking about, the "questions and investigations by the players create the back-story of the mystery" process sounds very similar.

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

My take on the issue is that this strategy has already been thoroughly established as the default for role-playing commerce, to the extent that those who have fully exploited it don't even realize that it's a strategy - to them, it's "how it's done," or even identify the strategy with "the environment," with no further reflection.

I both agree and don't agree.  I agree that the strategy has been to create a kind of cult-like fascination with the background worlds.  But what that does, I think, is to displace fan/otaku behavior toward selling supplements.  You need supplements, you see, to find out "the real truth."  And in the end, that kills itself because the supplements start to suck ever harder because the writers start to run out of ideas; in addition, the more information the writers construct, the more differences between what players want and what they get become apparent and foregrounded.  There's no way out of that cycle.  I'm interested in generating the madness out of play, and trying to prompt play-groups to turn into underground conspiracy-theorists.  Basically I want to blur the very fine line between two different kinds of geek.

As I'm sure you can guess, I'm much more sympathetic to the occultist/conspiracy nut style of geek than the "dress up as your favorite character" style.  But I think there are a lot of the former among the latter, and I don't see a lot of marketing interested in sparking that particular kind of attention.  This is why, I think, so many occult conspiracy games keep cropping up, gathering some attention, then slowly declining into obscurity.  People just get bored with some writer-group's constructed realities.  I'd like to encourage them to generate their own out of historical weirdness.

A useful parallel to consider is superhero comics, in which a love of superheroes was perceived as the defining feature of people who like comics, and thus many companies dashed to "own the market" through glutting these customers' needs. It was disastrous, frankly, and now, both comics companies (the ones which sell comics, rather than license for movies) and stores are most successful when treating this particular market as the adolescent introductory material it is.

Can you expand on this?  I have never "gotten" the whole comic thing anyway, so this is all a little abstract for me.  

The one comics example I can think of that fits my conception well is the history of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  The comic was cool, and funny, and based on manipulating comics and ninja/samurai shtick.  And it was B&W, and underground, and so when you read it you knew you were one of the cool kids.  Then it went mainstream, both through the Palladium game (which was pretty neat, in its way) and through (ugh) the kiddie TV show.  Suddenly the thing became uncool.  Sure, you can point to the crappy stuff the show did to the characters and the shtick of the comic, but I think the big thing that killed it was simply that now everyone knew about it.  It lost its whole "secret cool underground stuff" thing and became ipso facto uncool.

Is that at all relevant to what you're talking about?  I honestly don't know.

So, back to your question, I think that the outlook you're describing so well does exist, that it is extremely pervasive through most role-playing companies' marketing and creative strategies, and that it is commercially vulnerable to "interference competition" tactics. In other words, the bigger and flashier company automatically wins, mainly by dominating the attention and shelf-space of the middlemen (distributors and retailers) before the customer-based market sees anything.

See, I think this can be broken, for the same reason as the turtles thing.  Because the competition is at the level of the big company flash, it's inherently uncool.  And they have to work overtime to try to make it cool, which I always find patronizing.  What I want is a spreading rumor: the secret game, the secret history, and all that -- which it is simply impossible to present with flash or gimmicks because it's real history and provides no "super-cool background" crap.

Let me put it this way.  Here's my dream.

Ten years from now, I do a search for "jack the ripper shadows in the fog" on Google.  I turn up a bunch of blogs and websites of obsessed lunatics who've dredged up an amazing amount of weirdness and tried desperately to link it all together into some sort of coherent plot.  Wiki's and the like proliferate.  Game-groups have begun to talk to each other across the web, where the line between "this was a fantasy game we played" and "oh my god, it's really real" has broken down entirely.

Ever read Foucault's Pendulum?  Remember how they start this as a game, mucking about with historical stuff to generate The Plan, but then all these nut-jobs start making it reality to kill for?  Like that.  I want players of my game to become those nut-jobs.  More accurately, I want them to start wondering whether The Plan as they have generated it might actually be true, really really really, and whether through what they thought was a game they have stumbled on deep, dark conspiracies.  What they thought was in their minds is actual history.  And they start to wonder what that means, and who's the nut-job around here, and who's just a little naive....

Theoretically speaking, I suppose this is the ouija-board style of play in reverse.  As I understand it, the problem with ouija-board play is that everyone keeps trying to pretend they're not moving the planchette, and when someone does move it they get all pissy because that's cheating, and so they just sit there and wait for the bolt of lightning.  What I'm trying to produce is a way to get the planchette to move by itself.  Really.  What I like, and what I have seen happen in the variants of this game, is when somebody goes to dig up some piece of information that seems helpful and discovers "evidence" that actually the conspiracy and occult weirdness was actually there all along.  And it went like this, so what does that mean?  And suddenly the planchette has just moved, all by itself.  The GM didn't know about that particular piece of strangeness, nor did anyone else, but we walked into it anyway; when someone did research, it turned out that it was all true.  The occult forces of history have just moved the planchette.

Does any of this make sense?

[clehrich]

Chris, are you very familiar with InSpectres? Although the tone, experience, and thematic questions of the game are very different from what you're talking about, the "questions and investigations by the players create the back-story of the mystery" process sounds very similar.

Any guesses where I stole the Confessional mechanic from?  :-)

[Matt Snyder]

No, Chris, I think the fault it mine and my misreading, not yours. Sorry. I think I paid more attention to the earlier portion of your post, like:

First, I didn't see (though I didn't read every post carefully) a defense of this marketing strategy in those threads, nor a defense of the "we're not mainstream and that's the whole point" perspective. But it must have come up before. Any links?

I read that and it got me thinking, especially about how people seemed to me to conflate a game and its design with a game and its personal identity. Does that make sense? You mentioned the allure of Vampire, and yet from my perspective the game system and its design doesn't create that cult-ish identity.
But, the tail end of your post was appropriately focused. (And, incidentally, my opinions on the matter are very similar to Ron's.)

To attempt to bring myself 'round to the conversation, you're trying to do something that most games consider, well, "outside the game." Things like inter-player emails and such. Now, I think it's very interesting to make that an actual part OF the game. My question, then, is how do you encourage that behavior. What rewards exist. I ask because I'm ignorant. I haven't done more than skim Shadows, but maybe my question will get you thinking more consciously about carrots and sticks to get people acting like a buch of cultists! Then again, maybe you're already there .... can't say from my uninformed position.

Also, how can you write the text in a way that helps people do what you're saying. Could you have instructive text or even examples that show people the various ways, including various communicative tools, they might create their own conspiratorial community? For example, maybe you have a section on email exchanges, or maybe one on actual written correspondence. Are there things to avoid (I dunno, like writing out of character or something)? Are there techniques that help increase the mystery? Etc.

I think one of the keys in getting players to do this is making sure everyone knows all the pieces on the table. THEN, they can use whatever mechanism exists to figure out which pieces are actually "REAL." So, how do all the players actually communicate with one another about all these pieces and strands of possibility?

[clehrich]

... how people seemed to me to conflate a game and its design with a game and its personal identity. Does that make sense? You mentioned the allure of Vampire, and yet from my perspective the game system and its design doesn't create that cult-ish identity.

Yes, I agree.  The only thing that in any way prompts such behavior in V:tM (or Mage, etc.) is the backstory and metaplot, plus of course the piggybacking of material onto Anne Rice et al.

To attempt to bring myself 'round to the conversation, you're trying to do something that most games consider, well, "outside the game." Things like inter-player emails and such. Now, I think it's very interesting to make that an actual part OF the game. My question, then, is how do you encourage that behavior. What rewards exist. I ask because I'm ignorant. I haven't done more than skim Shadows, but maybe my question will get you thinking more consciously about carrots and sticks to get people acting like a buch of cultists! Then again, maybe you're already there .... can't say from my uninformed position.

Yes, this is tricky, because I think over-mechanizing this dilutes the effect.  What seems to work is the correlation of narrative power (to make a spell work, etc.) with the aesthetic "cool" factor of how much exterior historical and interior referential material you can bring to bear.  This needs to be made a good deal more explicit in the game, with examples and such, but in my experience it does work.  Basically the better you act like a lunatic conspiracy-theorist, the more powerful your character is as a magician and the more powerful you are as a narrator.  The other thing is that I use Tarot cards (with all that that connotes) and require their interpretation to work on the same basic principles as this kind of conspiracy-theory thinking.  That gets everyone practicing such strategies as a basic mechanic.

Also, how can you write the text in a way that helps people do what you're saying. Could you have instructive text or even examples that show people the various ways, including various communicative tools, they might create their own conspiratorial community? For example, maybe you have a section on email exchanges, or maybe one on actual written correspondence. Are there things to avoid (I dunno, like writing out of character or something)? Are there techniques that help increase the mystery? Etc.

This is one thing I need a good deal more of.  Mike Holmes recently hit the nail on the head: he suggested (and it's been seconded by various other folks) that there should be a running "How I set up my particular campaign and what happened" thing all throughout the text.  This wouldn't be horrible RPG fiction, nor a bunch of hypothetical examples.  It would show the kind of fun weirdness that the game prompts and how I suggest going about encouraging this.  

As to things to avoid, well, Mike's always breathing down my neck about that.  Yes, there are several things to avoid, and I state them pretty openly.  This ticks off a bunch of readers, but I do think it's essential.  For example, if you let this sort of thing slide into pulp, it collapses.  If you're trying to figure out what really happened, the true conspiracy behind it all, saying that it's actually all vampires who run the Vatican is silly because it's obviously pulp fiction.  The point is to skirt that line, to propose things that are plausible, but just barely so, and then to discover that they might actually really be true.

I think one of the keys in getting players to do this is making sure everyone knows all the pieces on the table. THEN, they can use whatever mechanism exists to figure out which pieces are actually "REAL." So, how do all the players actually communicate with one another about all these pieces and strands of possibility?

Well, they are invented in the course of play, through interpretation of Tarot cards.  If you have done background research, what you do is interpret a card to make use of that research, which gets you cool points for bringing in more real historical material and thus gives you power.  And having done that, you have also tossed that material into the seething cauldron for others to play with -- or research.  So it's all on the table, but at the same time there is a lot of encouragement to find new stuff not on the table yet and weave it in.

[Ben Lehman]

Don't all gamers do this, all the time, with all their games?

*blinks innocently*

Apparently not.

Seriously, though, I think that creating a tiny-little-community who has their own cultural reference is really really easy, because that is the natural order of the RPG group.  All you have to do is make the game engaging, and have big styles and themes (or generate them in play) which the players can parse into the real world.

Here is an anecdote from my play.  I was a secondary GM for a game called Threshold -- so I worked on some of the background with the main GM and helped run the first few sessions.  Threshold was a really successful game in a social context -- the players just really dug the whole thing, because there were easy symbols to attach themselves to and also because the GM was doggedly committed to running the game come hell or high water.

Threshold, despite being a surreal science-fantasy world, had a lot of precedents in both literature and modern cultural stuff, including (heavily) a Japanese TV show called Serial Experiments Lain.  At one point, unrelated to the game, a large number of us got together to watch Lain.  The Threshold players (well, some of them) rendered it literally unwatchable because every time there was something that they percieved as "Thresholdy" they blurted it out, loudly, to each other and laughed.  Or at least giggled.

I was in on the jokes, even, and I couldn't stand it.

RPGs naturally create subcultures.  All you need to do is let them thrive.

yrs--
--Ben

[clehrich]

Ben,

Yes, they do.  But what I want to do is encourage this to become obsessive and basically crazy, and to blur the distinction between reality and fiction.  In-jokes are one thing; paranoia is another.

Sure, if gaming didn't already do this to some degree, this would be insanely difficult to produce.  But since the do, I want to capitalize on it.  I do not see a lot of gaming consciously designed around this effect, but that's precisely what I'm up to.

Do you see?

[Ben Lehman]

Do you see?

BL>  Yes, I can see what you're getting at.  I just think that you don't necessarily need anything special to do it.  Simply create a game that works for long-term, engaging play and you're already there.

yrs--
--Ben

[Silmenume]

Hey Chris,

I don't really have much to add to this conversation, but one possibly misaimed question.

Are you interested or trying to create a game that "purposely" tries to break the game experience out and beyond the inherently delimited "life-space" of recreation to something that extends more directly and concretely into the daily or "real" lives of the players?

[clehrich]

Ben,

I know what you're saying, but I don't think it's that simple.  Not every game I know produces this effect.  Not by any means.

Jay,

Yes.  Which is also by way of answer to Ben.  If it works, this creates a cult-like effect that isn't really quite the same thing as anything but Vampire fandom, and yet it's so totaly insular that it's obsessive and manic.  Isn't that fun?  :-)  I'm overstressing this, but it's interesting me right now.

[M. J. Young]

One thought that might help with the referee aspect: when E. R. Jones was starting Multiverser, he created his own character (himself) and began play as himself run by himself. A day or two later he brought the other players in as (themselves) friends of the one character who was already there, and his character informed their characters of what he had already learned.

He still handled the mechanics, which were in their infancy, and most of the description of the fantasy world, but I think there was a degree to which being one of the characters made him less like the referee, and having been their first made it natural that he would know things the others did not.

--M. J. Young