Theme and GNS

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Ian,

I see it like this:

Using my ever-favorite "Aliens" as an example:

Someone coming out of the theater might say to his freind, with a lot of hand motion, "Wasn't it cool when she told the army guy to shut up, got the girl to buckle up and drove the ATV into the complex to save the marines when they were being chewed up by the aliens.  Man, she was so kick ass!"

Tha's a recap.  It's also a recap of a major revelation of premise revealed through Ripley's actions.

One could say, "How interesting that a woman who only 45 minutes in the film earlier refused to sign on to such a mission would be, at the mid-point, ordering around the people assigned to protect her, seizing control of a large vehicle and driving it straight into danger to save people from the monsters she swore she'd never go near...."

But the first "recap" revels in the fun of the moment.  It's still all about Premise, moral choices and whatnot.  It's simply done in terms of story.  Which is good, cause that means the story is working.

Players can do the same thing in recapping last week's session without doing a Disertation on why they had a good time or remembered certain scenes with fondness.

Christopher

[Alan]

I guess my point to Alan was - in what circumstances would you be able to read player engagement during play that wouldn't show up during the recap.  The idea that the players would be engaged with one thing during play proper and another thing during the recap isn't persuasive for me.

(During the recap we are establishing things into the shared imaginative space, pure and simple)

Your last statement is exactly why a recap can't be used to deterimine creative agenda.  After play, the human memory creates stories and connections that might not have been present (or at least conscious) during play.  (This is also, I think, why "creation of story" doesn't work as a specifier for creative agenda.)

In play, one can see the cues that Ron talks about - the encouragements and reinforcements, etc.   I also think there's the possibility of seeing Creative Agenda in the choices on a moment by moment basis in play.  The players make choices every time they decide what should become "fact" in the fantasy and also about HOW something should become fact.  If we could record a session, then for each decision point map out some alternatives that weren't chosen, we might begin to see a pattern.  Of course this is more subtle than just watching for what player's respond to.

Anyway, all that paragraph is about in play, not recap.

Recap strips off both the player reponse and those moment-by-moment decisions and presents a unified narrative.  Now, an exeception is, like you say, player commentary ON recap.  It may contain some evidence of that player's preferences.  Unfortunately, the player's responses to a recap (or what he emphasizes when he himself recaps) may be heavily influenced by Creative Agendas the player(s) find interesting at the moment of the recap rather than of original play.

Role-playing is one process, recapitulating events in the fantasy is another.

[Ian Charvill]

Something to clarify cos I think the thread's threatening to derail off on a recap tangent.

Diagnosis from recap is just a technique I use when GMing to gauge player engagement with various things.  It isn't solely a diagnostic tool for GNS (you can also use it to see if they're picking up the clues for the mystery and a thousand other things) but I find it a useful tool for doing so.  It's very much a milage may vary issue, from group to group.  For your group it may be useless, and that's cool.

For my group, when I'm running, the recap is as much a part of play as awarding experience, or calling for dice rolls.  It blends into what are we going to do this week, and calling for scenes, and calling for rolls.  It's not uncommon for rolls to be called for during the recap.  Anyone who is asserting that the recap is not a part of play, is merely asserting that they play differently from me.  And like I said, that's cool.

For your group, the recap may be non-diagnostic.  YMMV.  If someone thinks the issue is really worth delving into, I'd be happy to see a new thread, to recieve PMs or whatever.  But I really want to keep the meat of this thread on the realtionship of GNS and theme.

Chris -

Yeppers - I can see where you're coming from there.  If the pattern develops that they always refer back to the moral choice moments (or in play that they become emotionally engaged with moral choice moments) then you have indications of narrativism.  If they talk about the moment in the film and then spend the next three hours talking about the FX and saying things like "I'm not sure if this burger's cooked...  we're going to have to pull back to orbit and nuke it, just to be sure" a different pattern is emerging.

So are we saying that narrativism would focus on moments of moral choice, while theme-heavy sim would focus on moments of thematic resonance irrespective of whether choice was involved?

[John Kim]

Statements of approval, little grunts of encouragement, suggestions for dialogue, suggestions for actions, suggestions for scenes, body language, sighs, laughter (of dozens of different types) ... all of these occur very often during play, far more often than I think most people perceive at the time and definitely more often than they remember.
...
Unless everyone else at the table turns into a department store dummy while any person is talking, then you have data. Look at what the social reinforcement is directed toward (color? tactics? thematic showdowns?), and look at what is encouraged vs. what is discouraged.

It's incredibly simple and clear.

Well, but this depends on your ability to classify in-game events (i.e. what the social reinforcement is directed towards) as color, tactics, thematic showdown, or other categories.  But without an explicitly-devised Premise or Theme, how do you immediately categorize an event?    i.e. Something happens in-game, and people smile.  OK, so we know they smiled at that in-game event.  So now we have to classify that in-game event.  

How does that work?  In particular, how do you distinguish Nar addressing of premise to generate theme from Sim generation of theme?  It seems to me that this works fine if you have a Premise in mind.  You just check whether the event addresses the known Premise.  But if you don't have one in mind, then you have to do a sort of simultaneous double logic.  You work backwards from the in-game events to what the Premise might be (out of infinite possible Premises), then work forwards to decide if the event addressed that Premise.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Ian,

Glad that one worked for you.

Other examples of people getting different things from the same movie: a loving discussion of the guns featured; reviewing all the combat strategies; a spirited debate of the authenticity of hardware, military protocol and whatnot.  None of these things are the "wrong" thing to focus on... But clearly it's just a different focus.

Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Ian, you wrote:

So are we saying that narrativism would focus on moments of moral choice, while theme-heavy sim would focus on moments of thematic resonance irrespective of whether choice was involved?

Yes. That is your statement, which you had to come to. It strikes me as something I've said over and over, but now, that is your version, constructed for yourself - and you're all set. Treasure that phrasing.

It might not work as someone else's statement because the word "focus" is specific to the discussion we've been having. If I picked up this statement and popped it into (for instance) the Narrativism essay, there'd be a huge cross-eyed bitch session about "focus," and what it means, and what it means to me, and yadda yadda. But here, with an eye about toward all that emotional attention I talked about above.

And speaking of that emotional attention ... John, frankly I think you're talking yourself into all kinds of weird corners. It's no harder than deciding whether a small group of people, engaged in some social leisure activity, likes anything about whatever it is they're doing, and what the specific likeable features (or underlying "why we do this") might be. I find it extremely hard to believe that you have any practical trouble doing that.

Best,
Ron

[John Kim]

And speaking of that emotional attention ... John, frankly I think you're talking yourself into all kinds of weird corners. It's no harder than deciding whether a small group of people, engaged in some social leisure activity, likes anything about whatever it is they're doing, and what the specific likeable features (or underlying "why we do this") might be. I find it extremely hard to believe that you have any practical trouble doing that.  

Sigh.  Like I said, Ron, I have no trouble distinguishing visible features.  i.e. Things like, does the group like combat more than dialogue or vice-versa?  However, the definition of Narrativism is based on something not visible in my games -- namely Premise.  

Now, pehaps the definition of Narrativism could be simplified.  For example, "Narrativism is the mode where players socially reinforce moments of PC moral choice."  Then I can tag moral choices as Narrativist without knowing what the Premise is.  This eliminates Premise from the definition, although it could be held up as a useful technique to have an explicitly-worded Premise.  As it stands, though, what the definition says is that I first have to reverse-engineer what the Premise in question is in order to tell if one of my open-play games is Narrativist.

The key question, I guess, is "Are there moral choices which are not Narrativist?"

[Matt Snyder]

John,

"Are there competitive or strategic choices that are not gamist?"

When in doubt, convert to something you understand more easily. In nearly every case I can imagine, you can substitute Nar. questions with Gam. questions and the answer will be clearer. Then, just change it all back to Nar. Voila! Answers galore.

I'm saying that there's a helluva lot of hand-wringing going on over Narrativism. But, there's almost none for gamism. And yet, the two are so analogous it's almost alarming.

To answer your question, "Yes, there are moral choices when they're not priortized over time by the group."

[Valamir]

I think theres a couple of issues here.  One I think may be stemming from the word Premise itself.  In logical argument premise is what comes at the beginning.  It is a clear definable statement of presumed fact upon which everything else is built.  That other useage may well be part of the confusion regarding premise needing to be clearly established up front in advance in Nar play.

Second, I think the idea that you have to be able to tie a moral choice made during play to a premise at the time it was made in order to be sure it was "narrativist" is probably making things more complicated than they needed to be.

When you observe players during the game and are evaluating their spontaneous biomechanical feedback during play you don't need to pin that down to a premise right then.

So yeah, you can simply think in terms of it being the moral statement that was being made that was engageing their interest and then how much of that engagement was derived from their own personal choices on how to make or address that moral statement (as opposed to simply observing the statement).  One can then after the fact look back on those occassions and find the common thread and say "a-ha that was the premise we were addressing".

This is just as valid as setting the premise up front and making a concious effort to address it specifically.  

In fact, its a distinction that I think was made best by the Vanilla Narrativism vs. Pervy Narrativism distinction that for some reason fell out of vogue.