Good Taste in Gaming (from Useless Detail)

[clehrich]

Christopher,

This is a whole 'nother thread, but I'm getting really confused about this.

Yes, I think it is probably another thread.

Just to recap:

It seems to me I keep depending on some sort of aesthetic sensibility to carry the day (which, we all know doesn't make any sense, since System Does Matter). On the other hand, building the rules set that would Encourage GMs to Respond to Players Bits and all other items I think make a great session ad nauseum would be as clunky and patched at AD&D -- except with a Narrativist slant.

At some point isn't it on the heads of the players to have -- christ, I don't know what to call it -- Good Taste? Generosity? Creative Spirit?

I like Good Taste, myself; it hits the nail on the head for me.

A lot of us were less lucky than you.  All our friends when we started wanted to do something different than we did, and while we enjoyed the game it wasn't really deeply satisfying; we knew we wanted something else, but couldn't imagine clearly what it was.  Maybe we liked hack-n-slash at the time, but we changed with time and age and now what once seemed like a rip-snorting good time has come to be deadly boring.  Maybe we still like hack-n-slash, but now that we know about all these other insanely cool options, we'd like to give those a run for our money too, because who wants to live in a teeny box when there's a big cool world out there?

Now that we know our options, is it on the heads of the group to have Good Taste?  I think it's on their heads to be self-conscious and self-reflective about their aesthetics.  I think it's on their heads to be open about this with each other.  If everyone in the group knows what they mean by Good Taste, and can pretty much agree on what that's like, then everything's cool.  But if the group isn't self-conscious and there's a problem, because one person's sense of Taste is way off from everyone else's, then there's no way to discuss this directly, and it quickly lapses into "No, George, you're doing it wrong."

But the second part of your question is: are mechanics the way to do this?  I really think it depends on the group's idea of Good Taste.  I don't think mechanics need to be seen as barriers against bad taste; in fact I think mechanics set up that way are going to do exactly what you don't want here: take the responsibility away from the players.  

But there can be mechanics that help you do tasteful things.  In my game Shadows in the Fog (check it out in the Indie forum), I use Tarot cards for magic, where the players (note: not PCs) interpret Tarot Trumps as an analog of the PCs casting spells.  This mechanic encourages players to think occult thoughts, to think in occult terms -- in short, to do tasteful things.  It does this by drawing an analogy between player activity and character activity.

This is, for me, a really important part of game coherence: the mechanics should either be pretty transparent, or they should facilitate an analogy between player and character activity.

Here's what I mean:

Take classic D&D (not the way you played, but the way the game is written).  What do the characters do?  They work tactically to kill monsters and get treasure.  Their focus is on "solving" the situation as a tactical exercise in employing known resources to maximal effect.  What do the players do?  Exactly the same thing.  Theoretically the characters are trying to get gold and in-world power, while the players are trying to get XP and a different sort of in-world power, but the two situations are precisely analogous.  For me, this makes D&D entirely coherent as a game; the only problem is that it sometimes looks as though the designers think you should be doing something else.

Now take Unknown Armies (which I like, incidentally).  What do the characters do?  They try to build up magic power and resources, manipulate paradoxicality to create magic, agonize about their weird obsessions, and try not to get wasted by other freaks like them.  What do the players do?  On the one hand they agonize about obsessions and try not to get wasted, but on the other hand they don't do things like manipulate paradoxicality: they replace that with mechanics instead (pick spell off list, roll dice).  Sometimes they wing it with magic, but this too is carefully made mechanical.  So on the central Big Thing about UA, the paradoxical chaos magick, the players and the characters aren't doing the same thing at all.  For me, this means that UA is incoherent.

To sum up this very long post:
1. Good Taste is a mutally-agreed quality.
2. Good Taste should be self-conscious and reflexive.
3. A game which has the same sense of Taste as you do will be more congenial.
4. Game mechanics should facilitate Tasteful play.
5. Game mechanics should do this by being either (1) as transparent as possible, or (2) facilitating an analogy between player and character in terms of the essential core of the Taste issue.

[Jake Norwood]

This is, for me, a really important part of game coherence: the mechanics should either be pretty transparent, or they should facilitate an analogy between player and character activity.

I think that's pretty profound. When I think of the games that I really like, there's an element of this. I, for one, like Deadlands. Not the game itself all that much, but I love that when you use magic, you play cards. You throw chips...you gamble, which is part of what I think of when I think of the Old West. It's this kind of thing that make mechanics stick out. I dig that. (Incidentally, Dust Devils does the same thing for me.)

Just thought I'd chime in a "yeah!"

Jake

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Call me crazy

YOU'RE CRAZY!

But isn't all of this just GNS all over again? Isn't it just dealing with priorities in play and playing with people who share similar or the same priorities? If so then this puts an odd spin on the System Does Matter statement, since apparently it *doesn't* matter as much as the players sharing GNS priorities. But how can the players be certain they share GNS priorities unless they play a game that encourages their GNS priorities?

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Jack,

Well, yes.  Hence my confusion.

If we're talking something called "taste," that apparently exists independent of the rules (if it does), then these shared priorities are more important, in some ways, than the rules.

Like I said, I'm not sure what to do with this right now.

Christopher

[clehrich]

Okay, well, there's two things here from my perspective.

One, the thing that's very similar to but not quite GNS all over again, is I think what Fang means by Approaches.  But I'm just starting the process of reading through all the Scattershot stuff carefully, so I'm not absolutely sure.  I'm pretty confident, though, that there's a difference between what I mean by taste and what GNS is about; as Fang just pointed out over in GNS, in a thread started by John Kim, GNS is about fixing problems, not about conscious choices made going into play instances.  <Note: I won't defend or respond to that remark --- take it to Fang, take it to GNS, etc.>

The second is this issue of analogy between mechanics and character activity, which I consider a way of thinking about mechanics in aesthetic terms, i.e. in terms of taste.  I do not see how this grafts onto GNS except in the specific case of focused Gamist play in a universe which for some reason actually works according to Gamist presumptions.

See, D&D is a weird example here.  If you've ever read Gygax's little books on how to play and how to be a GM, Role-Playing Mastery and Master of the Game, you begin to realize that Gygax actually thinks like D&D (or claims he does).  He talks about playing in this size group as level 1, then playing with this kind of group is level 2, and then becoming a DM is level 3, and then starting a club of newcomers is level 4, and then (and so on and so on).  So the D&D universe actually functions according to the same principles as are simulated in the mechanics: the characters actually do think about progressing through ranks, the guilds actually use those special names for the levels, and so on.

But this is abnormal.  Take Champions, for example.  Forget about GNS for the moment; does the Champions universe actually work like the rules?  I mean, do the characters actually talk about how many points their powers are worth, and how they're crocking with psych-lims?  They could, of course, making a very strange kind of self-referential game, but that's not the expectation.

Now on the opposite extreme you have something like Theatrix, which has essentially no mechanics at all.  You just do it: "I'm prying off the air-duct cover and scrambling out."  Air duct?  What air duct?  Well, there is one now.  And so forth.  But again, does the characters' universe actually work this way?  Do the characters know that they can do anything they want if they just have enough faith?  No, or else they'd never have any emotional reactions.

So in all but the weird (but very famous) case, there is this big disparity between character and player.  Larps try to get over this, but I hate larps; sorry.  Just a turn-off for me.

I'm proposing thinking about the aesthetics of mechanics in a way that has nothing whatever to do with GNS.  It has to do with drawing analogies between players and characters in narrow, specific, and self-conscious ways.

Does that help?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi guys,

It seems to me that you are discussing GNS, or rather, what GNS as a category or level describes. I hate to say it, but in many ways, you're pointing at the wheels of the car that we've been talking about and saying, "Look, look!"

Aesthetic engagement. Social agreement about it. Creative input and feedback. Repeat.

All of this, all of it is necessary for role-playing to be fun. None of it can be established or ensured through "rules." Rules and system cannot make it happen.

That's why I say System Does Matter, not System is the God-King of Creation as Well Incidentally of Role-playing Games. Sure it matters. It can fuck the process up (for that group of people, or in some cases for practically anyone), or it can facilitate a particular aesthetic realm very nicely. But System isn't play, it's not people, it's not communication, and it's not imagination.

It's the Lumpley Principle all over again: rules are the means of agreeing upon what happens in the imaginary situation/world. But agreeing upon what we want is another, bigger, and more important category.

GNS refers to the very broad (I think the broadest) categories of social aesthetics in the hobby, that's all.

Best,
Ron

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Do the characters know that they can do anything they want if they just have enough faith?  No, or else they'd never have any emotional reactions.

Not to ignore the whole of your post, but something here struck me a bit. You tell me if it fits.

You see, the characters never have an emotional reaction. They aren't real. They are just figments of the player's imagination.

Therein lies the rub and seems to be what you're talking about here. As figments of the players imaginations, the players can then have the character react, and feel this reaction too, which is what some people want.

It reminds me of a description in the Fantasy Role-Playing Gamer's Bible of a Monopoly game where one guy had gotten way into character. "Oh my financial empire...ruined!!" and the other players who were just playing a board game.

(I don't know why I pointed that characters don't exist except that I've read posts, not here, where people use the term "player" and "character" interchangably. They're not.)

[clehrich]

Ron (and Jack, I think this responds to your post as well, later on),

I don't agree with you on this.  If we're talking about general aesthetic engagement and agreement as part of a model of gaming, of course GNS deals with this.  Whether it does so sufficiently or perfectly is another matter, but it's not my point here.

I'm trying to focus on a particular issue about mechanics and their aesthetics.

It's the Lumpley Principle all over again: rules are the means of agreeing upon what happens in the imaginary situation/world. But agreeing upon what we want is another, bigger, and more important category.

The Lumpley Principle is absolutely correct, agreed.  So I'm asking you to consider a style of mechanics, focused on an aesthetic principle, for which I can think of very few examples but think there ought to be more.

These are mechanics (i.e. ways of formulating agreement at a player level) which are deliberately analogous to the activities to which they refer within the imagined world.

Here's an example of why I don't think this has much directly to do with GNS.  You are on record as saying that AD&D was GNS incoherent (which doesn't mean unplayable, or bad, or whatever --- just incoherent).  I'm saying that in terms of this single question of analogy, this is the only example I know of where a game actively produces such an analogy, and does so nearly seamlessly.  If I were proposing a spin on GNS, I would be arguing about whether D&D is coherent or not by GNS standards.  But this does not strike me as to the point.  Okay, so it's gamist and kind of sim and kind of all over the place, but the analogy is there.  I think perhaps my use of the word "coherent" at the start of this thread is causing problems.

The reason I happen to be interested in this is that there has been a longstanding move towards some sort of a very loose "realism" (please don't jump on the term, I just can't think of a better one right now) in terms of magic.  A variant of the same question came up in the recent flurry of threads about religion.

Take Unknown Armies, or Mage, or Ars Magica, or whatever.  The shift here is to have the magic that the characters are doing "feel" magical, i.e. occult.  They don't cast spells off a magic list as they do in D&D, they Rego Corporem, or manipulate bibliomantic paradox, or whatever.  The concept is purely aesthetic: they want the magic to "feel" occult.  [Note that this does not necessarily have anything to do with whether it's historical; linking this aesthetic feel with historicism is fallacious.]

Okay, I applaud the move.  I like my magic to feel pretty occult my own self, at least partly because I'm an academic specialist in the history of magic and the occult in Europe.  But the players are still doing the same damn thing: pushing numbers.  The occult "feel" is just Color.

So I'm interested in the possibility, which I'm trying to realize in Shadows in the Fog, of having the players do something that "feels" occult, just as the characters do.  But that doesn't mean we're going to require physical enactment --- that's a whole other ball of enchanted wax, and leads to lawsuits.  We want an analogy.  So in Shadows, the players interpret Tarot cards, to put it simply.

Now on one end you have Shadows mucking about with Tarot cards and doing some pretty standard Narrativist stuff, and on the other end you have D&D doing classic Gamist things, but the analogy is present clearly in both cases.  I think this is one of the reasons D&D worked so well, actually, and I think we can learn from it.

So what does this have to do with GNS?  Nothing much, if you ask me.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Ron,

Yes, I suppose, to your post.  But I think you're missing the point of at least my questions.

You reference the lumpley principle and then add: "But agreeing upon what we want is another, bigger, and more important category."  Well, true.  But reading greyorm's post in Actual Play, it's clear that greyorm tapped that bigger, more important category.  And it's just as clear the group never got around to "agreeing" upon what they wanted.

Greyorm did his homework.  He implemented new ideas.  Everyone is happier. Where did the agreement take place?

I'm offering in both the game I ran in High School and in Greyorm's current game, certain "wants" were met by *something* which offer pleasure that people want more of -- but that specifically were not covered by the rules.

I'm at least am not pointing at the wheels going, "Look, look."  I'm pointing at the car's design and paint job and asking, "If all cars go, why do I prefer some cars to others?"

A fair question I think.

I've put up a post about potential answers over on the Useless Details thread.

(I get so confused when topics spread out all over the board like this.)

Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Chris (clehrich) - now I get it. You're talking about something a little different from Christopher's and Raven's points here and earlier, I think. And yes, I think that's not a GNS issue at all. It's Color, and very important Color at that, as well as System.

Christopher, I think we're agreeing. That "something" is what I was driving at throughout all of the Infamous Five threads, and it is also the topic of a fourth essay I'm working on, jokingly pre-titled "Our gaming, ourselves." A more accurate title would be something awful like "Implementing Aesthetics" or similar.

Best,
Ron

[contracycle]

Came across this the other day on an odd page here: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec670/BoardGameDesign1.html

This is part of an article on educational board game design; hack back to ..670/ to get a top page.  I have not fully explored site but theres a slew of mechanics to browse.  However, I digress:

Step 4: Aligning
The next step is to look for specific patterns, elements and structures within the content that you wish to teach, and match them with possible analogs in the structure of a game. Look over the list of content elements that you just chunked out and see how you might align them with typical structures found in a board game.

In doing this, remember the two rules of congruence:

Whenever possible, the structures of the game should mirror the structures of the content.
The structures of the game should never contradict the structures of the content.
As you examine the content elements that you've listed and chunked and match them with game structures, jot down ideas that seem as though they should be a part of your game.

My emphases.  "Chunking", alluded to above, is the process of trying to identify natural linkages, paths, processes etc that connect the elements of the content.  All of this is structured in a highly didactic manner, but I think this is appropriate on the basis that we are attemptiong to obtain a sort of common vision.

Applied Aesthetics?  Expository Methodology?   Anyway, I'm really interested in this sort of colour, especially when fleshed out into living systems as it can be in RPG.