Objective/super-objective and the role

[Brian Hose]

Hi,
Brian here. This comes from the "New guy has a question" thread.  I have no idea about how to create links back and forth.  If someone wants to tell me, I'll gladly learn.  Sorry.  I think  this discussion could go under 'game play,' 'theory' or here.  So here I stick it cos this is where I was inspired.

The discussion moved onto what would call the methodology of actual role-playing with a GNS rpgs.  Now this interests me a great deal because having recently graduated from Univeristy, I am an actor by training if not yet by profession (its coming).

Chris Kubasik made some very interesting and very accurate comments about about role-play and "actor stance".  But I think I have to make a few points and let anyone who wants to, take a swing.

1)  An actor in character has knowledge of the charcter's over all goal which we call the super-objective.

2) But that the actor-in-character must also bear in mind the goal for each scene or the objectives.

3)This is the crux of the matter, well in my mind anyway, much of acting and the dramatic tension of a scene arrises from the actor-in-character encountering and dealing with obstacles.  These things an actor and a player character rarely and should rarely know.

So how do we reconcile this with G/N/S play?  Is there an ideal?
I think not given the multitude of individual tastes within each G,N, and S play.  But is there a common middle ground from which people can begin exploring their tastes?[/b][/code]

Anywho, just had to spit this one out - acting is my life. Let he who is without sin...

be cool, be happy and have fun y'all,
Brian.
(Hey, I figured out how to bold-face type!)

[Laurel]

GNS specifically tackles the goal of each decision a player makes via their character.  A scene could have dozens of these GNS decisions, and a game system hundreds.  GNS really only looks at the objective of each individual decision, suggesting (inherently in the model) that gamers have one of three and only one of three objectives possible underlying each "act of play".  Stances address the mode in which the player addresses the act of play, primarily from the wants/needs of the character (actor) regardless of what the player thinks is a good story or strategy; primarily from the wants/needs of the player to create a good story or for strategic reasons (author); or by primarilly manipulating not the character but other objects/events surrounding the character to achieve the player's own goal (director).

If I expressed this poorly or mis-applied something, someone else will kindly correct me... and don't worry if GNS and related game theory is confusing.  I've been around here since last summer and its only been in the last month or two that it all has really started to come together for me.    

In a flimsy nutshell, Narrativism puts priority on story over realism & strategy... Simulation puts priority on realism over story & strategy, Gamism puts priority on strategy over realism and story.  People get really bogged down trying to define what a story is, what realism is (by which I mean emphasis on the sensation of being the character and preforming 'believably') and defining and redefining all the terms.   There are plenty of people here who can provide more precise information than I have.

So how does this compare with acting, and the goals an actor faces?  In my opinion, the actor is attempting to convey the words and intentions of a script,  whereas a roleplayer is conveying words and intentions which could become a script.  So the goals may very well be the same, but the platform is different.

Laurel's weird 8 am ramblings on her 23rd day without caffeine or candy

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Fang and I hashed out some of these issues a while ago ... I'll do some hunting for threads.

The use of "Actor" to describe one of the Stances is not my invention, but that of the people who brought up the issue of Stance in the first place, on the r.g.p.a discussion group. Their use, which I have altered a little, is definitely not consistent with the profession or act of "acting" in theater terms, as Fang pointed out.

As Christopher has pointed out, the actor in theater terms is, in RPG Stance terms, pretty much in Author stance. [I refuse to get into a more elaborate debate about this, but my reading of Stanislavsky puts even his "method" approach into the same basket.]

So please, no one with theater experience should try to correlate their knowledge in that medium with the term "Actor" as a Stance, in the RPG medium. Laurel has stated the differences among stances quite well, and I request that we all recognize that they are specific to the RPG discussion, per se, and by itself.

Best,
Ron

[Brian Hose]

Hi,

Well, first let me say thankyou Laurel.  I've been groping around this whole G/N/S thing and I can see that I was going in the right direction but you've made the journey a lot faster.  Hang in there, caffeine/candy addiction can be a bitch to beat...I'm going through caffeine withdrawl at the moment myself.

OK, I'm sometimes guilty of circulocution and muddy thinking, especially when I'm thinking on the fly (and it seems to me that you've got to move fast around here or the discussion will leave you behind).

So I should clear some things up:

1) I'm not trying to say that role-playing, as in rpgs, is like acting.  To me its more like group inprovisational storytelling in a certain theme based on certain characters and with rules.

2) All the expressionistic arts share certain fundamentals.  And yes, I consider rpgs to belong to the arts as an abstract expression of ideas.  My coments about acting arose from the similarity in expression.  to forward my humble oppinion: yes it is author stance but not completely.

I'm sorry if I'm rehashing old ideas but my interest was fired by the ideas (and probably a mild ego surge that people thought my stuff was worth replying to).  It just seems to me that one can't completely disassociate the more formal performance arts from rpgs.   If we could, then why are we using the same words? I dunno, I guess Ijust feel that there are some related basic concepts (stress related and basic, I agree they're not the same thing).

Anywho, thanks muchly for your input.
And...ah...Ron? What's a BBC?  Sorry.

'ave a good one,
Brian.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Brian,

No need to apologize! These are all good questions, and when someone says, "We discussed this already," they aren't saying, "... you moron."

As for the terminology thing, that's the hell of it. Plenty of terms in my essay are "inherited" rather than "derived" - stance, actor/author, exploration, Gamism, Simulationism, and lots more. Some of them mean exactly what their original authors used them for, and some of them don't. Some of them, as terms per se, have created no trouble, some of them have. The problem with (a) developing new theories and (b) writing about them, is that no one knows from the outset which of these terms and meanings are going to be problematic and which aren't.

And then, once the new theory or essay or presentation is there and being discussed, it's extremely dangerous to start retro-replacing the terms with new ones - if other disciplines offer anything to go by, going too enthusiastically in this direction is disastrous and the basic principles get lost or muddled very quickly. Such terminological shifts are best saved for real fundamental shifts in the line of thinking.

So I use fairly academic standards of precedent  to avoid these problems, which relies on (1) citing where the terms come from originally, (2) defining them as carefully as possible (including relative to their source, if the meaning is changed), and (3) expecting readers to accept that the terms have local meanings, and to abide by them.

Does that create jargon? Sure. Is it meaningless jargon? I hope not. Does it create a learning curve for understanding? Sure. Is that curve too steep? I hope not. Is this situation kind of a pain in the ass? Yes. However, is this situation better than freely revising terms left and right as current debate dictates? Much.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

3)This is the crux of the matter, well in my mind anyway, much of acting and the dramatic tension of a scene arrises from the actor-in-character encountering and dealing with obstacles.  These things an actor and a player character rarely and should rarely know.

Could you clarify that a bit? In an RPG are you refering to what is commonly called Out of Character (OOC) knowledge? And are you refering to players or characters?

If so, be aware that many people here believe that players should know things that their character does not, and, more contoversially, act on that knowledge (in a responsible fashion).

Mike

[Danny Cline]

Hello,

This is my first post, as well, though I have been reading the page for some time.  I haven't, however, read all of the old discussions, though I have read the GNS paper on the site.  
I believe there is a problem in the use of the stances as they are used here.  The stances, as they are written and as they are being described in the article here are being used to answer two different questions.  First, why a player does what he or she does in a session, and secondly how the player goes about it.  The real problem is that actor stance (at least in this post) is being used to describe a behavior and an intent which may not always be concurrent, and as intent is already covered by the main body of GNS theory, I question the reason it has been included in the concept of the stance.
As I see it, as an intent:
Actor stance is being used to describe a particular aspect of simulationism, that of character exploration (or deep immersion in the character.)  Author stance is basically being used to describe narrativism (or possibly the decision making process in general) and is only being used in this manner.
And as a behavior:
Actor stance is being used to describe the player's use of only his character's own actions (for whatever reason those actions are taken) to influence the environment or outcome of the session.  Director stance on the other hand is used to describe the player's active use (not through the actions of his character only) of other characters, events, objects and such to influence the outcome of the game, and is only being used in this fashion.
As I have explained it, I question the need for the first two examples of stance (first Actor and Author) as they describe the intent or reason behind decision-making, something that the main theory of GNS already describes, and possibly inappropriate for being called a stance.  Further, when combined with the other two examples of stance as written (second Actor and Director) they fail to partition either intent or behavior, particularly arising from the confusion caused by naming the two Actor stances identically, when they describe different things entirely.
As I see it, the first Actor and Author stances are not able to coexist, clearly forming a partition of intent (at least those intents that they are able to describe), and second Actor and Director likewise form a partition (and in this case I would put forward that they actually partition all in-game behavior of this type - either a player uses other characters, items, events, or not).  
I'd like to write more now, but I have to meet with my advisor for research, but I will try to expand on the subject later.  Please post replies/commentary.

[Brian Hose]

Hello again,
Ron, I've got to hand it to you.  YOu really know how to present a very cogent arguement.  And I can't say that I really disagree with anything you said.  All I might say is why are those particular terms the ones that are inherited?  I hope you didnt get the idea that I was offended to references about topics already being covered - I was just trying to be polite and oppologise for any social faux-pas.

To mike,
I have to be honest up front and say that I'm an actor so that colours my perspective on role-play.  I want truth in character because truth is the core of an actor's profession.  I don't think that's a bad thing because I believe that truth in character role-play does more to advance the idea of narrativist-story telling (I hope I used that right).

This is not to say that I think that any other point of view is worthless.  I have no beef with out of character knowledge, I just like to present a reason for that knowledge existing (some sort of precognitive ability is one that we used once when a player had played the adventure with another group).

I do think that there is player knowledge and then there is character knowledge.  The example that springs to mind is most likely a very tired one: in D&D a player will understand how magic works (limitations and so on...) but would their fighter character have that knowledge?  Depending on character history maybe, but then again, maybe not.  So what do you do?

I am very curious about using OOC and why people think they should.  I'll admit that while I've been role-playing for about twenty years its all been in only about five different games at different times and they've mostly been gamist.  I supose that my arguements  could be said to better fit a simulationist model but I still think its relative to narrativism.  Comments?

God, its 5:03 am here in Brisbane.
May the Schwartz be with you,
Brian.

[Danny Cline]

Hello,

This is my first post, as well, though I have been reading the page for some time.  I haven't, however, read all of the old discussions, though I have read the GNS paper on the site.  
I believe there is a problem in the use of the stances as they are used here.  The stances, as they are written and as they are being described in the article here are being used to answer two different questions.  First, why a player does what he or she does in a session, and secondly how the player goes about it.  The real problem is that actor stance (at least in this post) is being used to describe a behavior and an intent which may not always be concurrent, and as intent is already covered by the main body of GNS theory, I question the reason it has been included in the concept of the stance.
As I see it, as an intent:
Actor stance is being used to describe a particular aspect of simulationism, that of character exploration (or deep immersion in the character.)  Author stance is basically being used to describe narrativism (or possibly the decision making process in general) and is only being used in this manner.
And as a behavior:
Actor stance is being used to describe the player's use of only his character's own actions (for whatever reason those actions are taken) to influence the environment or outcome of the session.  Director stance on the other hand is used to describe the player's active use (not through the actions of his character only) of other characters, events, objects and such to influence the outcome of the game, and is only being used in this fashion.
As I have explained it, I question the need for the first two examples of stance (first Actor and Author) as they describe the intent or reason behind decision-making, something that the main theory of GNS already describes, and are possibly inappropriate for being called a stance.  Further, when combined with the other two examples of stance as written (second Actor and Director) they fail to partition either intent or behavior, particularly arising from the confusion caused by naming the two Actor stances identically, when they describe different things entirely.
As I see it, the first Actor and Author stances are not able to coexist, clearly forming a partition of intent (at least those intents that they are able to describe), and second Actor and Director likewise form a partition (and in this case I would put forward that they actually partition all in-game behavior of this type - either a player uses other characters, items, events, or not).  
I'd like to write more now, but I have to meet with my advisor for research, but I will try to expand on the subject later.  Please post replies/commentary.

[Brian Hose]

Hi Danny, and welcome,

I've only been here a few days myself and while you were posting your article I was  writng my last one.  So having just read your post I have to say that I like it.  I especially like your comments about actor vs author in relation to sim vs nar.  Your later comments about the need for these stances in relation to the style of role-play (sim vs nar) I think is interesting too.   It makes me think of something someone said somewhere (its too early in the morning to anything other than vague, sorry) about practical crossover from style to style during play.  

Happy gaming, and may the schwartz be with you,
Brian.

[contracycle]

how the player goes about it.  The real problem is that actor stance (at least in this post) is being used to describe a behavior and an intent which may not always be concurrent, and as intent is already covered by the main body of GNS theory, I question the reason it has been included in the concept of the stance.

Because we also have to account for the distinction between player intent and character intent - we have two layers of intent to describe, IMO.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Danny,

Welcome to the Forge, and I'll start by saying that you've nailed the intent/action distinction precisely. Using Actor stance during play something a person might do - how it fits into that person's GNS preferences during that instance of play (say, a session just to have a nice big instance) wouldn't be clear unless we knew a lot more information.

For example, I might play in a very Narrativist fashion, and part of that goal would be met by hitting Actor stance in a crucial moment of role-playing the character's words and actions. How that related to Author stance during the other moments of play, and how those two stances worked together for my enjoyment (and hopefully that of everyone else), is worth a whole thread of its own.

Contrast that example with this one: another fellow might play in a very Simulationist fashion and part of his goal is met by hitting Actor stance in a crucial moment of role-playing the character's words and actions. As an isolated moment of play, this isn't anything different from the above example. But if we consider when during the session the moment came, and what decisions (and stances) were involved in the moments before and after this one, a whole different pattern will emerge such that his goals, very different from mine, are being reached.

Just to be efficient I'll toss my answers to Brian into this post too.

About the terms, it's kind of a long story, but suffice to say that I originally simply planned to adopt the Threefold Model (Gamism, Simulationism, Dramatism) without much or any modification. As time went on, my construction of those terms and their relationship to things like Stance and Exploration became very distinct, to the extent that many who'd constructed the Threefold considered me to misunderstand it. I realized that (rather than misunderstanding) I'd essentially created a new model entirely and decided to go with that, because I thought it made more sense than the Threefold had in the first place.

I think that none of the existing terms are bad for the role they play in my ideas, so precedent has remained pretty much my default choice. I also think that the essential construction of the ideas and their relationship to one another is what matters more than the label we pin on a given idea, as long as the local definition of the term is well-presented and understood.

About OOC discussion and/or knowledge, one of the things that has been worked over pretty thoroughly is that historical Gamist and historical Narrativist play have generally abandoned the traditional approach (from late-80s games, anyway) that "you are your character." Both of these modes of play are all about player goals (where "player" refers to both GM and everyone else), so nothing seems to be detracted from play if OOC conversation is included and integrated with IC conversation.

You mention your familiarity with the Gamist version, which I think is pretty common - the player makes "his guy" go here and do this without apology, so to speak, or worrying much, if at all, about what "the guy" might fictionally want to go. The Narrativist version might be summed up as the idea that I can play my character's ignorance of his uncle's murder better, and with more ability to bring an excellent situation into future play, if I, the player, am fully aware of both the murder and the presence of said uncle's corpse in the trunk the character is sitting on. The emotional response of the character, when he finally does realize it, can now be maximally timed, placed, and enjoyed by me and everyone else.

I have to emphasize that I'm talking historically. Therefore (for instance) Narrativist versions of IC knowledge or (for instance) Simulationist versions of OOC knowledge, neither of which is terribly common historically, are certainly possibly and certain constructions of them might well be very successful.

I also have to emphasize that the IC/OOC distinction is not a Stance issue.

Hope that helps and/or is interesting!

Best,
Ron

[Lance D. Allen]

Hey, thought I'd toss in my two copper marks' worth..

Though I'm not totally sure I fully understand Actor/Director/Author stances, I think I've got a pretty good grasp on what they mean, as well as the GNS model. So here goes.

 I believe I'm mostly a Simulationist/Narrativist, in my game play... I find I get the most enjoyment out of playing up character faults, ignorances, and personality quirks. I do like to do things using the contrasts of IC/OOC knowledge (like sitting on the trunk where the dead uncle is hidden, etc.) but for the most part, I do my damnedest to keep my characters from acting on OOC knowledge. If it's something I really, really want them to do, I always try to find some way to get the OOC knowledge that would bring about the desired action to become IC knowledge in a feasible manner. In this, I think I flit between Author and Director, when I'm trying to arrange such things, but I find the most satisfaction out of getting into Actor stance, where I ignore anything my character doesn't know, and play up their perceptions, biases, flaws and quirks.
 This is due, in large part, to the fact that I am an avid participant in a quality Freeform Roleplay forum on AOL. Sometimes I play just to play, and therein I am fully the Actor. Other times I play for story, and there I take on the stances of Director and Author, all while attempting to not compromise the Actor stance which is being played out in the roleplaying chat-room. I've done this for quite some time, and since I've begun, I've noticed that my tabletop RP has been effected by it.

 My point in describing this is to point out that it is possible and highly entertaining to play narrativist and simulationist styles without ever having your character act upon knowledge they do not have. I consider it a mark of skill as a roleplayer to be able to forego opportunities which only exist by taking advantage of OOC knowledge.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi everybody,

This is kind of embarassing, but I have to do it.

Ron wrote:

"So please, no one with theater experience should try to correlate their knowledge in that medium with the term "Actor" as a Stance, in the RPG medium."

He's right, of course.  Since I started this awkward discussion last night I'm going to apologize.  It was one o'clock in the morning.  I had spent the day hammering out 20 pages of screenplay...  And wasn't thinking quite straight.

I managed to conflate issues of IC/OOC, Stance, and GNS mode -- all while talking about actual acting, and not the use of Actor Stance in RPGs.

Oops.  Sorry about that.

I'll try to make only bold statements from now one when I'm pretty certain I'm actually engaged in the specific topic at hand, and not just typing because of caffeine induced momentum.

Take care,
Christopher

[Danny Cline]

Hello again,

Thanks to everyone for their replies and commentary.  Also, I'm sorry about the double posting - an accident due to my unfamiliarity with these boards.

I got to worrying about what I wrote last time after I went home, and it seems that my description of the two actor stances was incorrect.  It seems that only the ACTOR INTENT stance and not the ACTOR MEANS or BEHAVIOR stance is included in the definition.  Perhaps I was also wrong about exactly what AUTHOR stance means as well, but in looking over the definitions, I am still forced to conclude that the notion of stances as they are written (and I guess as they were traditionally written) does not go well with GNS.

In the case of ACTOR INTENT stance, the only information provided is superfluous, describing as a stance what is by its definition one of the types of Simulationism (Character Exploration).  In the case of AUTHOR stance, I see I was wrong yesterday in tying it to Narrativism, as it could easily be used in a Gamist or even Simulationist way also.  However, I still believe that the information provided is unnecessary, and perhaps even completely meaningless - in AUTHOR stance I do what I do for my reasons, and not my "character's" - simply describing all methods of play other than that described by ACTOR INTENT stance.  (Which does contradict my worries over these stances not partitioning all possible intents - though what they seem to partition the field of intent or decision into is, for lack of better terms "Certain types of Simulationism" and non-"Certain types of Simulationism," which is clearly superfluous information within the GNS framework.)

On the other hand, DIRECTOR stance actually does proivide new information.  It says not anything about the player's decisions (which are covered more or less completely under GNS I think) but about what means he or she takes to implement those decisions.  As such, DIRECTOR stance is unrelated to the other stances as they have been defined traditionally.  One can easily see someone in AUTHOR stance also being in DIRECTOR stance, or someone in AUTHOR stance not being in DIRECTOR stance.   Though one in ACTOR INTENT stance is usually not in DIRECTOR stance, I suspect it is possible for  one to be in both stances.  (The example I would propose is one of the traditional "hemchmen" scenarios - the player controlling multiple characters at once, as in Ars Magica - but none of them necessarily acting on anything but the perceived desires or knowledge of the characters themselves.)  I won't discuss ACTOR MEANS stance here, as it was apparently due to my misunderstanding of the definition, but as I described it, it fits with DIRECTOR stance and not the other two.

My suggestion about the use of these stances which Ron says are holdovers from other models is that they should probably either be modified so they provide some sort of useful information or discarded.  As it is, I think they confuse the more important things discussed by your model (the GNS structure particularly) while not providing any new information in any kind of coherent useful way.  AUTHOR and ACTOR INTENT stances are unnecessary (and perhaps in the case of AUTHOR stance meaningless) creating an arbitrary division of something that has already been divided in a clearer and more natural way.  DIRECTOR stance could be made useful, with the addition of other stances, but seems right now to be a mere add-on to a structure that is otherwise ill-placed in your model.

Anyway, I hope that this doesn't seem like useless complaining.  I know that coherence in your model is a goal of yours Ron, and I think some changes in the stance definitions would be helpful in order to avoid confusion.