A more formalized Social Contract

[Drew Stevens]

So, while I'm sure that several people have already seen this, I imagine some haven't.  And in any case, it's an interesting read on a way to formalize a social contract for a game.

http://home.attbi.com/~b.gleichman/Theory/Interaction_Model.htm

Gleichman's other essays also have more than a little bit of useful thought in 'em

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Drew,

When presenting a reference post like this one, it helps a great deal to lay out issues that you'd like to see discussed, or to raise questions of your own, rather than merely to point and say "discuss." What issues or questions can you offer?

Best,
Ron

[Drew Stevens]

Mm.  I suppose just the idea of a more formalzied social contract, weither or not such a thing is actually helpful (as a stated, rather than unstated item- especially one called as such), and how you can go about presenting such an idea to your group.

For example.  Nobilis was the first game I've seen that really went into some detail about the idea of a social contract.  It was a neat idea, but one of the relatively few things that my friends and I just utterly ignored.  Nothing seems to have suffered, despite this- including our recent addition of a new member.  We have a definite contract of general politeness, but nothing explict about either how we as players will act or what the tone of the game will be.

As an additional note, is there an approrpriate forum for posting things that others may find useful/interesting, without any direct topic in mind?  Along the lines of my passign around the various games I've been aquiring lately to my circle of friends (without any definite intention of running them, but with a definite interest in seeing the ideas in them get out).  I imagine there is a fairly high yet untapped 'needs obscure reference' and 'has obscure reference' amongst folks at the Forum...

[Mike Holmes]

Resource Library at the top of the page, Drew.

There is actually some debbate over whether or not it's useful to talk about the social contract at all. Ron did say that he thought that the inclusion of details on this subject in Universalis seemed odd to him (and there are now less than there were in some playtest versions).

Also, some of what Gliechman has as social contract issues can be dealt with by the system. PC Death, for instance should be covered by the system, or, at least by text that speaks to things like Illusionism (the latter which may actually cause Gliechman to put it in the contract, possibly).

The more the game is clear about these things, the less the everyday social contract (politeness, etc) has to stretch to cover in-game occurances.

Mike