Exclusivity of Creative Agenda

[Ben Lehman]

Yo.  To people who have been around for a while, I apologize.  I've brought this up before, and this is spurred by some recent conversations with another friend (hi, Dave!) who has been reading the Forge and some "Yes, that did actually happen" about some of our previous play experiences.  To those who have not been around a while, welcome to Ben's big problem with the Creative Agenda section of the Nesting RPG model.

The basic question that I have on the table is: Do the three big creative agenda span the entire space of role-playing creative agenda?  For those who aren't math geeks: are there any other creative agenda out there?  If so, what are they like?

All explanations of GNS I have seen so far are: "Taking these as our 'basic three' for right now." or "Let's not talk about other things right now" or some such.  I think this is because most of us who look at the theory know that it isn't in the right shape to say "This is at, nothing more, everything is classified by this, that's it, good night."

I have my own experiences with this, and my own ideas, but my main point in this thread is that I'd really like to hear from other people, if they have any play experiences that don't seem to have prioritized challenge, premise or exploration.

yrs--
--Ben

P.S.  My own experiences have led me to look at both a "social mode" where people are using the game primarily to hang out / gain social favor, and the prioritization of decisions is "do I get to hang out with the people I really like / gain favor with my present crush" and at a "humorous mode" where the prioritization of decisions seems to be "can I make myself and the other players laugh like a pack wild hyenas in heat?"

P.P.S.  I have an ulterior motive, as well, which is that Dave said he would post an account of our apparently "humor-moded" play, thus getting him started on the deadly cycle of Forge participation.

[WiredNavi]

Hallo, hallo.  I'm the aforementioned 'Dave'.

I don't really want to post an account of the 'humor-oriented' play Ben's mentioned in this particular reply, because it probably belongs more in the 'Actual Play' section.  However, the gist of it is this:  While playing TFOS, our group managed to turn what was originally going to be a GM-driven game into a player-driven game, essentially by changing the agenda of play and deliberately ignoring the cues the GM was giving us until she decided that what we were doing was funnier.

Short description, because it might actually be relevant:  Our TFOS characters decided, through the machinations of one of their number, to start a Sentai team ala Power Rangers, which is something that none of our characters had any real interest in doing, although the players thought it was funnier and funnier as we went along.  There was no particular reason for any of our characters to want to belong to a Sentai, except the one who started the idea.  The game went wonderfully, thoug

What we ended up with was a group of players who were running their PCs entirely for laughs, each of us attemting to make our PC's actions as funny as possible.  And it worked.  We were in gales of laughter for about two hours - I will never forget hearing one character, after witnessing some of the farce, lamenting that "We're NEVER going to get syndicated!"  There was no coherency at all.  We were roleplaying, but we were essentially roleplaying a constantly evolving, multi-part running gag, in which each player added whatever details they thought would be the most humorous and the only GM response that was needed was really to laugh and give us something to play off of.

Now, from what I understand - and I'll be the first to admit my grasp of the GNS theory is a limited one - this doesn't really fit into either Gamist (we didn't particularly care about our characters' success), Simulationist (as we were wildly making stuff up all the time, without any sort of predetermined situation), or Narrativist (there were no moral/ethical/philosophical questions of any kind involved).  Yet we were roleplaying - or at least, we were playing roles, and we kept control of our characters to a certain extent.  So where would this fall?  Am I right in thinking that it doesn't fit too well into the G/N/S trio?  If so, what kind of category would it fall into (Ben has suggested 'Aestheticism', to indicate that there was a particular artistic style we were attempting to evoke through the game - in this case, humorous anime).

The only GNS subset I can think that this even potentially fits into is a weird form of Simulationist, if we count the 'setting' as 'loony Rumiko Takahashi-esque anime' and operated under the assumption that in that particular setting, things _do_ just appear out of nowhere, and things _do_ happen for no good reason other than to be funny.  But that wasn't anything acnowledged internally by the PCs or in the game - it was not systematically or thematically part of the setting.  So - where should this fall?

[Jack Spencer Jr]

I think you guys are stretching, really. The whole model is this:

[Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda --> [Techniques [Ephemera]]]]]

So "social mode" would be all the way up in the social contract box and "aestheticism" would be down in the technique & ephemera boxes. It's hard to say, but based on what you described, it sound like your play was pawn stance with Step On Up to make their character do funny things and, more importantly, to make the others laugh. But I may be wrong about that

[Paganini]

I think you nailed it, Jack. That sounds exactly like what it is, with the usual caveat that it's hard to identify CA without an extended period of observation.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Welcome to the Forge, Dave!

Two things ... humor first, then diversity of Creative Agenda second.

HUMOR
Ben, I'm getting a dose of deja vu: Non-3fold based play analysis. I never did get a response from you to my post in that thread, and now I wonder whether you ever saw it. I also expanded on it fairly extensively in the Narrativist essay.

I think it's easy to see that humor operates/happens outside of the imaginary events - it's a judgment or evaluation of the imagined stuff. So far so good, right? And it's also a communicated judgment, not easily defined as a "feeling" one happens to have.

And finally, most importantly, it has to be about something, its "meaning" if you will (a term that Jay [Silnemume] finds helpful in talking about GNS, although I think it's squishy). Funny cannot be trivial. If it's funny, then it's an "it" in the first place, before it's funny.

Therefore the humorous response around the table is a Social Contract means of confirming and judging the current stuff happening to the characters. The current stuff happening to the characters is the "shared imaginary space," or the profile of the five components of Exploration you're working with. It has meaning: it's "it," the Creative Agenda you all have going.

Bear in mind that I'm working only with your description of play, and taking you at your word that the imagined-stuff is actually funny - not just that Bob puts french fries up his nose and cracks everyone up. That'd be Social Contract stuff alone, little or nothing to do with the Exploration.

All this is a really long-winded way of saying, Creative Agenda alone is not going to answer your question or account for humor in the game. It (and its associated outer-box Exploration) only provides the necessary platform for humor. As I see it, any of the three currently-named Creative Agendas are suitable for this platform.

DIVERSITY OF CREATIVE AGENDA
Are there Creative Agendas besides Gamist, Narrativist, and Simulationist play? I don't know. Bluntly, I've never seen any. All other "priorities of play" people talk about either hop up to the Social Contract level or hop down to Techniques and Ephemera.

Confusions about the levels of the model is a big deal. It leads people to talk about "Audience Stance," and wrongly to think that the model must exclude audience-type behavior - when in fact it's central to defining Creative Agenda; it's utterly crucial to understanding how Creative Agenda, Exploration, and Social Contract interact. But talking about it as a fleeting piece of a Technique (i.e. a Stance, a form of Ephemera) makes the whole discussion into babble.

I've always thrown the door open for people to add potential other candidates for Creative Agendas. So far, I haven't seen hardly anything except confusions about the levels of play: humor and audience being the top two culprits. Sometimes someone proposes an idea which turns out to be a feature or sub-set of one of the three, too.

Am I, personally, wedded to the Big Three? Not especially. But I haven't seen anything besides them which plays a similar role relative to all the other aspects of role-playing.

Best,
Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

[crossposted with Ron; as one can see, he pre-empts most of my post :(]

As I see it, the Creative Agendas are the inner structure for this thing called Exploration. Whether there are any other agendas than the three depends entirely on the overall shape of Exploration. I say this because that'd be the theoretical tack I'd take when searching for really different modes. Otherwise it's relatively easy to stumble on something that goes under a different mode or doesn't go under Exploration at all, signifying another kind of social phenomenon from roleplaying games.

Before going further, I'll give my interpretation of Jinx's story: it seems to me that this is vanilla narrativism, with the exception that the GM thought to play something else. You seem to be confused because your premise is the comedy one, not the kind of philosophical tragedy premise we usually see. Keeping this in mind, the example seems clear; one player decides that he wants to actively take on the comedy premise (there is actually a couple of different ones, but that'll wait for a dissection) in the form of the Power Rangers gag, and the other players agree and start pointing their play towards the comedy, making others laugh. There'd be little point in narrativism if you'd have to decide beforehand by committee that you are, indeed, playing narrativist, and you have this and this premise. Not so; if the players are so inclined - and humour is the most natural of forms for us childe of the Romans - it is quite easy to do comedy without at any stage saying "let's do comedy, bubs!"

Anyway, about the missing modes: there is indeed, as far as I've seen, no guarantee nor proof for the list of modes being complete. Only proof is that nobody has yet been able to construct a fourth mode. Let's take a look at Exploration, to see if there is room for new modes...

Exploration is a definitive technical term, that demarcates roleplaying from other social activities. 'Socializing' is not a Creative Agenda in this model because it cannot be done inside the act of exploration; it's a different part of Social Contract, and thus supernumerary to the act of roleplaying. To find real alternative modes we have to ask what this thing, this Exploration, can be used for.

It can be used as a fictional battlefield (Gamism), a theatre for storytelling (Narrativism), or for simple entertainment for the sake of it (Simulationism). Think of a Star Trek holodeck: what else would you use it for?

One, albeit trivial, option is naming a 'Passive' Agenda: depending on how exactly you want to parse Exploration (as many other terms in the theory, it's not yet defined too rigorously), there could be the Agenda of being a passive consumer of others' play. It is trivial that the decision of not acting on a choice is an act in itself, and thus a player participating in the game as an audience (which would still have the choise of acting) could be in a fourth mode. This is a clearly observable phenomenon, and the only question is whether it is a part of Exploration, or of some other part of the Social Contract. Right now I'd say that this is Exploration, as otherwise we'd have the strange situation of being forced to define the act of Exploration through active choices: a player wouldn't be doing exploration if he consistently made the most passive choise possible, even if it were defensible by some other mode (like the Turku school player locked into a closet for the duration of the larp). So  we have our fourth mode, don't we? If a player makes a choice to minimize his own participation in the creative act, he isn't certainly in any other mode, but by the formal requirements he still is a part of the Exploration (the choices are posited to him, so he isn't just an observator). One could perceive this 'Passive' mode to be the exact same state of mind an appreciator of passive arts goes to: a guy watching television is in an Exploratory contract with his television; the TV shows him things, and he consumes them. The only difference is that the guy has a really limited set of choices compared to a passive player in a roleplaying game.

This is of course, despite it's commonality, a quite useless mode (although I see possibilities in analysis of illusionist and participationist play, where it is assumed by the GM in simulationist mode that players are indeed largely passive). Is there any more useful ones? I cannot readily say. Exploration happens when Character, System, Setting, Situation and Color are utilized in a shared imagined space. Is there any other Agendae, considering the word in natural form? One could have a political or pedagogical agenda in the normal sense of the word, but I don't feel that this is a basis for any agenda of 'Pedagogy': if a player wants to make a point of something for erudition of the other players, he is quite clearly playing in the Narrativist mode. Right now I cannot think of anything else, but maybe something surfaces later.

I should note that I've retracted my earlier position that the multichannel nature of larping would posit a mode peculiar to larping; this mode of 'Experiencing' is actually a feature of passive consumation, and is possible in monochannel play as well.

[james_west]

Hello, all -

It may not be a creative agenda in our shared terminology, but Ben and Dave's comments, as well as those of others brings up an important point. A lot of folks, when they talk about agendas among role-players again and again bring up social agendas that have little to do with the content of the game (picking up girls, making folks laugh, hanging around with their friends).

Moving to the other end of the scale, some folks really, really like a particular set of techniques; some players, after some experience with directorial power, strongly prefer games in which they have it. Others find it uncomfortable and won't play with it. I've heard a lot of people say they won't play diceless; others swear by it.

My point here is that folks can show up at a game with all sorts of agenda outside of their creative agenda. There is no reason why you can't focus your design around satisfying preferences at any other level of the model besides GNS, even those that lie outside of exploration.

[It occurs to me that it might help to talk a bit about what other things fit into the slot that exploration fits into]

- James

[M. J. Young]

My gut reaction agrees with Jack. It sounds like the players were in a friendly competition to make everyone laugh--who can be funny next? The reward is being perceived as a funny person, a sort of glory of success that is central to gamism.

Yet, Ron and Eero have both pointed out that all modes do support humor. You can have funny simulationism and humor-based narrativism. (Eero's suggestion that this is an effort to do a satire of anime has a lot of merit, and without more we couldn't be certain whether it was thus simulationist or even narrativist, raising an issue about the legitimacy of the values of anime by mocking the medium).

Regarding additional modes, I'll echo Ron: periodically people propose them, but thus far nothing has found its way to the model. Can we prove there's no fourth mode? No, but that's because it's basically an argument from science. It's like trying to prove there's no life on Mars--we can prove that the conditions are hostile to life as we know it, and we can prove that our survey equipment has yet to find any extant life, but we can't really prove that there is no enclave somewhere on or within the planet where life exists--only that we haven't found any proof that it does, and we keep narrowing down the possible places where it might be hiding. In the same way, we keep narrowing down the possible concepts of a fourth agendum, and although social mode, humor mode, and audience mode are often suggested, no one has ever made a compelling case that these are legitimate agenda. Current discussion is examining the question of whether there is a "Zilchplay" mode, but it is not looking too impressive.

On Eero's point regarding passive play, some time before he arrived we examined social mode and in the process recognized that all three agenda (before they were called that) had both active and supportive forms. In gamism, the players are generally active, rising to meet the challenge; but the referee is passive, supporting their play by creating challenges for them to meet. Supportive gamism is still gamist, and supportive narrativism and supportive simulationism are still narrativist and simulationist play, respectively. If you're playing because you want to address premise, you're playing narrativist. If you're playing because your girlfriend wants to address premise and you want to play in a manner that supports her ability to do so, you're still playing narrativist, because you're playing in a manner that supports and encourages address of premise and the premise is being addressed even if you're not directly addressing the premise yourself.

--M. J. Young

[Eero Tuovinen]

I agree with everything Ron and M.J. have said on general terms - this is indeed a question of proving the negative, as far as epistemology goes. If you don't mind, I'll however develop the idea of Audience stance a little bit more, to see if it really has been drawn dry...

On Eero's point regarding passive play, some time before he arrived we examined social mode and in the process recognized that all three agenda (before they were called that) had both active and supportive forms. In gamism, the players are generally active, rising to meet the challenge; but the referee is passive, supporting their play by creating challenges for them to meet. Supportive gamism is still gamist, and supportive narrativism and supportive simulationism are still narrativist and simulationist play, respectively. If you're playing because you want to address premise, you're playing narrativist. If you're playing because your girlfriend wants to address premise and you want to play in a manner that supports her ability to do so, you're still playing narrativist, because you're playing in a manner that supports and encourages address of premise and the premise is being addressed even if you're not directly addressing the premise yourself.

I noticed the discussion at the time (I've read these fora much longer than I've been registered), and vaguely remembered it when writing this. However, as I see it, passivity in a given mode is distinctly different from a true Audience (or Passive) stance, assuming there is such a thing. As I see it, differentiating between active and passive gamism, for example, is just a matter of preference and expectations. You think something is passive when you don't see the significance of a given move, but there is no reason for this being an absolute quality.

On the other hand, consider the truly passive player, passive in the same sense audience of a play is passive. The player comes to the game, has a character, does the expected thing when prompted - but never rises to make a game affecting decision himself. I've taken to calling these players zombie ducks, and I'd say they are quite common. Now, you'd probably say that this is simple shyness or some other such social condition, but what if it were a gaming preference? What if this player prefers passivity to really affecting the game? Haven't you ever wondered how some people come to play again and again without ever seeming to "get it"?

Remember, Agendae are judged per individual decisions. What if we have a player, who consistently, when facing the horde of orcs or whatever, makes the easiest, simplest decision? He early on picks up the correct forms of play for minimum agravation and lets the other players take the lead in play. You could say that such a player isn't really interested in play, but what if this isn't the case, what if the player avidly follows the GM's narration and laughs at the antics of other players? If this were the passive form of a given Agenda, surely it would support the execution of the said mode? I don't see how this would be the case.

I'll give some examples, to make sure we are talking about the same phenomenon. First, the orcs are approaching, let's see how players of different modes might respond:
"I'll hide in the underbrush, and surprise them when they pass us."
"I'll try to perceive their clan markings, to see if they are Skull Orcs."
"I'll hide from them, because they are monsters and mightier than men."
"I'll attack."
The last one is a Passive player. Note how he picks the choice he's learned from experience as the simplest one. I wouldn't say that this supports any other mode of play, unless it just so happens that in this case it's tactically sound to attack, or charasteric for the character, or appropriate conserning the premise of racial supremacy of orcs. If none of these is the case, the decision to do the expected thing (as the player perceives it) is simply a wish of getting on with it - by charging, the player let's GM move the encounter along, and thus satisfies the wish of the player to see how the story ends.

Other example decisions for this mode would include a character agreeing to help the villagers, or waiting for some other player to make a choice, or clamming up altogether when neither experience nor GM hint provides the 'correct' route.

Remember how each of the modes can be backed by the (rationally much stronger) sociopsychological arguments in addition to the empirical fact of observing the phenomenon? It is quite clear that drive to compete, curiousity and philosophical thought are important parts of the human animal, and it's believable that Exploration is used in service of these. In a similar way simple observation is a natural trait that gives rise to this passivity in play.

Now, I don't say that this must definitely be a Creative Agenda, but I'd like someone to clear it to me why it would be a passive form of some other agenda. As far as I see it, the player is not supporting anything, but is rather conserned with preserving his passive role and audience status to what the other players (or most likely GM) are doing. Or is this perchance the passive form of simulationism I'm talking about? If so, how does it support anything but the wish of other players to have an audience (not a normative simulationist trait, as far as I know)?

[Ben Lehman]

HUMOR
Ben, I'm getting a dose of deja vu: Non-3fold based play analysis. I never did get a response from you to my post in that thread, and now I wonder whether you ever saw it. I also expanded on it fairly extensively in the Narrativist essay.

BL>  Read, yes.  Fully digested, no.  Reading it again.
 For those who haven't followed the long, tangled history here, my opinions regard Creative Agenda have changed significantly since that thread, largely due to the clarifications in The whole model - this is it

I think it's easy to see that humor operates/happens outside of the imaginary events - it's a judgment or evaluation of the imagined stuff. So far so good, right? And it's also a communicated judgment, not easily defined as a "feeling" one happens to have.

And finally, most importantly, it has to be about something, its "meaning" if you will (a term that Jay [Silnemume] finds helpful in talking about GNS, although I think it's squishy). Funny cannot be trivial. If it's funny, then it's an "it" in the first place, before it's funny.

Therefore the humorous response around the table is a Social Contract means of confirming and judging the current stuff happening to the characters. The current stuff happening to the characters is the "shared imaginary space," or the profile of the five components of Exploration you're working with. It has meaning: it's "it," the Creative Agenda you all have going.

BL>  With you all through here, with the caveat that generation of an outside judgement can be the driving force behind a creative agenda, right?  (like in Narrativism, the meaning is what the players get out of it).  

But see, there's the thing.  We had meaning to our humor.  There were a couple of different threads running through the game.  Dave can confirm these:

1) Inheritance and Parentage (Can a son be as good a superhero as his parents?  Can a rich kid from the burbs find individuality?  Can the One True King of California realize his destiny?  Is a robot girl real?  Can a cloned super-soldier ever do anything but try to conquer the world?)
2) Teenage competition (a few sessions were devoted particularly to finding prom dates.)
3) Riffing on Genre Conventions (We have to hire our own monsters to fight, "we're never going to get syndicated, giant monster turns out to be a busboy etc.)
4) Geek-humor (we have to go destroy the everglades because, you know, swamps generate black mana.)
5) and others (including 19th centery american imperialism, oddly.)

The thing is, I count all three creative agendas being present here and, in play, they were essentially coexistent.  This doesn't surprise me.  All creative agendas are present, to some degree, in all modes of play.

The thing is, when it came down to a crucial decision point -- "What action do I take here?" the decision was not necessarily towards one of G, N or S, but towards "what do I think is the funniest?"

Bear in mind that I'm working only with your description of play, and taking you at your word that the imagined-stuff is actually funny - not just that Bob puts french fries up his nose and cracks everyone up. That'd be Social Contract stuff alone, little or nothing to do with the Exploration.

BL>  Yup.  I think that social contract level humor is always present.  I'm talking about something a little different -- more like when a comedy group sits down to write skits.  Except, perhaps, less polished.

Whether it is actually funny is, of course, in the eye of the beholder.  The point is that the group's main creative goal seemed to be, quite simply, to be funny.

All this is a really long-winded way of saying, Creative Agenda alone is not going to answer your question or account for humor in the game. It (and its associated outer-box Exploration) only provides the necessary platform for humor. As I see it, any of the three currently-named Creative Agendas are suitable for this platform.

BL>  My point, above, is that the creative agenda (other creative agenda?) seemed submerged and wholly supportive of the humor.  Or, perhaps, that the focus on humor made the essential lack of coherent creative agenda functional.  Which seems to me to be symptomatic of what a "new" creative agenda might look like.

DIVERSITY OF CREATIVE AGENDA
Are there Creative Agendas besides Gamist, Narrativist, and Simulationist play? I don't know. Bluntly, I've never seen any. All other "priorities of play" people talk about either hop up to the Social Contract level or hop down to Techniques and Ephemera.

BL> Could I get a clarification of "hop up to social contract level?"  Isn't creative agenda already a part of social contract, like the whole shebang?

Confusions about the levels of the model is a big deal. It leads people to talk about "Audience Stance," and wrongly to think that the model must exclude audience-type behavior - when in fact it's central to defining Creative Agenda; it's utterly crucial to understanding how Creative Agenda, Exploration, and Social Contract interact. But talking about it as a fleeting piece of a Technique (i.e. a Stance, a form of Ephemera) makes the whole discussion into babble.
[/qupte]

BL> I agree that the confusion about levels is a big deal.  With the caveat that I may still be confused.

I've always thrown the door open for people to add potential other candidates for Creative Agendas. So far, I haven't seen hardly anything except confusions about the levels of play: humor and audience being the top two culprits. Sometimes someone proposes an idea which turns out to be a feature or sub-set of one of the three, too.

BL>  So, my question may really be, what would be symptomatic of a "new" creative agenda?  I would imagine it would be that we would see all the other threads of the CAs, while still existing, subservient to some other creative drive, similar to how there are still elements of Gamism and Simulationism present in Narrativism, and so on.  Does this seem like a reasonable jumping off point?

yrs--
--Ben

[Ben Lehman]

and "aestheticism" would be down in the technique & ephemera boxes.

BL>  Why do you say that aesthetics are down in the technique boxes?  If the whole purposes of play is to produce, say, a certain aesthetic feeling, why isn't that a creative agenda?

I must confess to being somewhat inspired by "On the Art of Noh Drama," a Japanese classic of theatrical theory, in theorizing about the presence of "Aestheticism."  Zeami, the author of text, distinguishes between "Role-Playing," in which you attempt portray your character as 'realistically' as possible, and "aesthetic form" in which you portray a stylized form of your character, not necessarily to convey any particular message or anything, but just because its pretty whilst the real world isn't.

It's hard to say, but based on what you described, it sound like your play was pawn stance with Step On Up to make their character do funny things and, more importantly, to make the others laugh. But I may be wrong about that

BL>  The thing is that, by and large, the game was not competitive, by which I mean we would help each other set up comic scenes with a sort of "trust me on this, it'll be worth it" vibe when people started establishing set pieces.

Was there some competition for excellence at the social contract level?  Undoubtably.  Was there any more competition then in a narrativist RPG, and simulationist RPG, or any other human endeavour?  I don't think so.  Diagnosing this game as Gamist seems to mean that all Narrativist games must also be Gamist, because there is some level of competition to create story by addressing premise.

At least for myself, I don't ever recall looking across the table at Dave and Ethan and thinking, "drat them, they're funnier than me again."

Before going further, I'll give my interpretation of Jinx's story: it seems to me that this is vanilla narrativism, with the exception that the GM thought to play something else. You seem to be confused because your premise is the comedy one, not the kind of philosophical tragedy premise we usually see.

BL>  I think this might have more fruit, but the lack of strongly identifiable premise (see above post for the mangled mess of the "why") makes me think that it might not be.  Because the game very much "felt" narrativist to me -- in that there was a strong sense of "story now," just "humor now" instead of "drama now" -- I might classify it there but, again, no premise, so no GNS narrativism.

Oddly, I don't have difficulty classifying this in the "old 3 fold" model, likely because that model is considerably more vague -- we were playing dramatist, in that we were subverting everything into the story.  It's just that the story was, by and large, not about moral struggle, and more about ridiculous.

If you get the feeling that something is unsettling me here, you're right.  I can't put my finger on what.

My point here is that folks can show up at a game with all sorts of agenda outside of their creative agenda. There is no reason why you can't focus your design around satisfying preferences at any other level of the model besides GNS, even those that lie outside of exploration.

(It occurs to me that it might help to talk a bit about what other things fit into the slot that exploration fits into)

BL> Dude.  Yeah, that might be it at all.  The question of this thread then would -- does a focus on non-creative agenda level of the big model, at least to some degree, obliviate need for strong coherency of creative agenda?

yrs--
--Ben

[Eero Tuovinen]

As classification of humor in GNS is a part of the thread's question, I'll address it a little:

Before going further, I'll give my interpretation of Jinx's story: it seems to me that this is vanilla narrativism, with the exception that the GM thought to play something else. You seem to be confused because your premise is the comedy one, not the kind of philosophical tragedy premise we usually see.

BL>  I think this might have more fruit, but the lack of strongly identifiable premise (see above post for the mangled mess of the "why") makes me think that it might not be.  Because the game very much "felt" narrativist to me -- in that there was a strong sense of "story now," just "humor now" instead of "drama now" -- I might classify it there but, again, no premise, so no GNS narrativism.

Now, you had a bunch of different things you made fun of. Doesn't change the premise, as far as I see it. If your premise were for example "human superiority over nature?" and the game ranged from protecting forests from cuttings to killing dragons as different tacks on the premise, would you say that the agenda is submerged?

Why "What is funny?" isn't a good premise in your mind? Admittedly we handle only simple dramatic premises here, but I've understood that this is only a preference, and the normal literary theory of meanings still holds. Comedic premises are ones of the most complex around (for analysis; in action they are quite natural), so it's no wonder we have avoided them.

I'll give an incomplete characterization of comedy: comedy as a premise is the worldview that finds unexpected connections between things in such a way that shows them in new light. Meaningful addressing of this premise is creation of humor. Meaningful is of course relative, as the 'message' of humor is complex and hard to understand. It's probably connected to postmodern philosophy, actually, in it's incessant deconstruction of everything.

Of course there could be different premises that skirt the pure comedy. "Life isn't funny!" is a good one, and has generated some great tragicomedy. It should however be noted that comedy can be a deconstructive technique as well in service of some other premise, in which case of course we have a different situation. You'd of course know if this was the case, so I'll bet on your game being narrativist on a comedy premise.

[M. J. Young]

Eero, I'm thinking about your suggestions; there's a lot of merit to them, but at least a few problems.

I can imagine someone who comes to the party and doesn't play the game. He sits there, eating pizza, socializing, watching what happens, but never creates a character or gets involved. In fact, with one gaming group, my wife would watch on nights when she was off, but didn't create a character because her work schedule was erratic and she couldn't be at games regularly.

I had a player once who created a character who just sat at the bar the entire time, despite efforts by the other player characters to get him involved. Perhaps he just wanted to be with the guys and watch the game without actually playing, and he thought he wouldn't be welcome if he didn't have a character. I don't know that that would be true in our group, but it might be true in some; also, if he didn't have a character there would have been some pressure on him to create one, or else to sit further from the center of the action so others could be more involved in the game (limited number could actually crowd around the table, and we exceeded that limit).

You're proposing someone not much different from this, I think--someone who is along for the ride, watching the game and doing what is expected just so he can be a spectator. If the group attacks, he fights; if they retreat, he runs. He's just there for the get-together; play is incidental, but required to be present. Are there players like that? Probably. What does that mean?

In terms of whether this is a creative agendum, let me raise some questions. I am not saying that these are all necessarily relevant to the matter, but rather that these questions approach aspects that the known creative agenda appear to share.

[*]Can a group have real, coherent play if they're in this mode? Can it be the drive behind the entire game? My impression already is that it can't; but I'm open to evidence on that.[*]Can this mode clash with the others, such that it creates incoherent play? We know that all three known agenda are able to clash if situations create conflicts between them. This doesn't seem as if it does.[*]Is this an existent agendum that dictates specific choices, or is it a gray area between "not really playing" and "supportive play in agendum"? That is, if a player is doing something because that's what the rest of the group expects and he wants them to have fun, that is inherently a supportive pursuit of the agendum, trying to help people have fun by identifying what they want and making it possible; if the player is just letting his character do whatever the other players say he should do next because he doesn't care about his character's actions at all, then he's really a non-participant audience member to whom the rest of the group has attached a character which ultimately they run.[/list:u]I though I had another question, but these are a good starting point, I think. I don't know that this social mode gets past these questions, but I'll entertain arguments that they are not relevant to whether it's a creative agendum.

--M. J. Young

[Eero Tuovinen]

Eero, I'm thinking about your suggestions; there's a lot of merit to them, but at least a few problems.

Certainly; as I've intimated, I don't really understand the epistemology of the model exactly enough to be authoritative about what makes something a creative agenda. Just flapping my lips, as it were.

The greatest problem with this Passive mode, as far as I see it, is that one could conseivably just be a spectator without any part in the play of the game. To be in this mode a player has to be so foolish that he doesn't realize his own wish to just watch. I'd laugh at this if I hadn't seen so many passive players who are just begging for some explanation. Social habit can be a powerful thing, and if someone sees himself as a roleplayer, has people he plays with, and gets satisfaction from watching, he just never might realize his more proper role as a spectator. This is, fully apart from GNS, a conceivable explanation for some people who show up again and again to games in which they really don't seem to do anything.

[*]Can a group have real, coherent play if they're in this mode? Can it be the drive behind the entire game? My impression already is that it can't; but I'm open to evidence on that.

I'd say it's not necessary for the whole group to be able to be in a mode for it to be a mode. Anyway, this can be parsed thusly: the passive form of the passive mode is of course active representation (remember, the guy in the front of the tv needs that television). The passive mode is thus playable by the whole group when part of the players do things for the other part's entertainment. This is exactly the same situation that reigns in passive art forms, except assumedly the passive players have the choice of interfering (need more thought to resolve whether this is significant).

[*]Can this mode clash with the others, such that it creates incoherent play? We know that all three known agenda are able to clash if situations create conflicts between them. This doesn't seem as if it does.

The passive player is frustated when there is no active spectacle going on for him to consume. When play turns inwards, as when gamist players start to shuffle weapon lists to choose the best one, the passive player gets bored. Similarly for any other content that doesn't serve entertaining, or entertains in an inappropriate way. The passive player has an inbuild expectation of what "should" happen next (usually latched on the GM and his story, as the GM is the primary entertainer), and when some other player happens to distrupt that inner image, there is a conflict (or not, as this type of player would likely be so passive that it'd take extreme aggravation for him to start throwing popcorn).

[*]Is this an existent agendum that dictates specific choices, or is it a gray area between "not really playing" and "supportive play in agendum"? That is, if a player is doing something because that's what the rest of the group expects and he wants them to have fun, that is inherently a supportive pursuit of the agendum, trying to help people have fun by identifying what they want and making it possible; if the player is just letting his character do whatever the other players say he should do next because he doesn't care about his character's actions at all, then he's really a non-participant audience member to whom the rest of the group has attached a character which ultimately they run.[/list:u]

But the passive player does care about what his character does, he just isn't interested in making any real decisions about it. This is the player that likes it when the GM tells that his character has fallen in love, because he feels that it isn't his place to do the decision.

The player certainly isn't interested in supporting others' play in any active way. He provides the audience for the others, and that supports passive passives (the players in the performing mode I suggested above), but hardly anything else.

I though I had another question, but these are a good starting point, I think. I don't know that this social mode gets past these questions, but I'll entertain arguments that they are not relevant to whether it's a creative agendum.

Those questions are at least indicative, as it's unlikely that a new mode would just happen to break symmetry, if it really be a mode at the same abstract level and in the same sense as the others. The assumption is that these similarities between the three modes come from some inner similarity between modes, and thus a new mode should have that attribute as well.

Anyway, I'm not so sure that this mode wouldn't pass on these questions. What's more, one could conseivably design and play a game in this mode, now that I recognized that this is essentially performance art. A better name for the mode would maybe be the Performance mode... Although it is of course clear that this doesn't prove it to be a Creative Agenda. If this were a creative agenda, we'd mainly have an alternate name for illusionism (although interpreting illusionism as a mode opens interesting possibilities in changing the magician in mid-stride, as players move from passive to active form of the mode).

It should be noted that I'm playing the devil's advocate here. I could see the model with this kind of null-mode that explains non-interactive entertainment in relation to interactive, or without it, just stating that one needs to make decisions to play roleplaying games (that is, explore). Both interpretations are logically sensible, as far as I see it, and there really isn't too much interpretative use for the Passive mode. You can as well recognize that the guy wants to be in the audience, and that is that.

[Ron Edwards]

Arrgh! Why is it that every GNS thread these days seems to veer off into discussing "null play" of some kind?

Ben, let's get back to your play-experience and try to make some sense of it. First, don't be distracted by Jack's quick call about Gamism; I think it's best understood as a possible example ("it could be ...") and left there. Second, let's also consider that you might be unpracticed in recognizing Premise - it's not a widespread skill, and in fact most people who love stories, and can quickly tell you that a given movie (e.g.) "sucks" or "rocks," cannot articulate its Premise. And third, it's perfectly all right to consider that you and your group used sentai as a topic in and of itself - "Hey, let's do sentai and have a damned funny time!" - with any thematic content being a matter of agreement-for-setting rather than a focus of creative attention.

In fact, I suggest considering that third possibility strongly. Funny Sim - easy, rewarding, enjoyable, and mutually-reinforceable. Again, I'm not saying that's what you guys were doing; I'm suggesting that you consider how "funny" is easily mapped onto that kind of play.

Finally, about your real question (a damn good one):

... my question may really be, what would be symptomatic of a "new" creative agenda? I would imagine it would be that we would see all the other threads of the CAs, while still existing, subservient to some other creative drive, similar to how there are still elements of Gamism and Simulationism present in Narrativism, and so on. Does this seem like a reasonable jumping off point?

It could be a jumping off point for this question, sure. However, I tend to think more in terms of definitive and identifiable differences. In other words, for diagnostic purposes, a given Creative Agenda ought to be able to stand alone, without relying on features of the other modes.

Best,
Ron