This is a split from Forget Immersion: Sympathy vs Empathy. There may not be too much to this topic, but...

Valamir wrote:

Maybe I just don't get the whole Venn diagram thing, but as I've seen them used on The Forge, it's contrary to my understanding, which I admit is limited. A Venn diagram is some circles that overlap, like: [Sympathy (Identification with Character) Empathy], with the shared relationship/similarities expressed in the overlap. I know the definition of Venn diagram isn’t really relevant to the discussion, but it has been bugging me for a while.

So, a Venn diagram seems quite correct to me, because Sympathy and Empathy retain their independence while both contributing to another concept.

I agree that the whole nested boxes thing seems too structured for this concept.

I don't follow you here Jason. The Big Model is a Venn Diagram.

You have the circle of Exploration on the left, you have the circle of Technique on the right. In the area where they overlap you you Creative Agenda. Ron often describes CA as an arrow, which is a little different imagery, but its always been the case that CA was not just a "nested box".


That's how I've always understood the relationships anyway...

The circles in Venn diagrams can partially overlap, or can be one completely inside another, or can be completely separate, as needed to show the relationships of the sets that the circles represent.

Separate circles are disjoint sets (e.g. "horses," "cows").

A circle entirely within another circles is a subsets of the set represented by the larger circle (e.g. "horses," inside "animals").

Partially overlapping circles are sets with some elements in common and each set also having elements not in the other (e.g. "brown animals", "horses", with the overlap area being brown horses).

The diagrams of partially overlapping circles are the ones everyone remembers from grade school. But it's a misconception to assume that partly overlapping circles must exist in any particular Venn diagram. Most of the circles in Agenda Theory are nested so as to be entirely within the next larger circle. Just the same as if they were "nested boxes."

- Walt

Hiya,

Walt's nailed the basic idea, but just for clarity's sake ...

The Big Model is a Venn diagram which also happens to be composed of entirely-nested boxes. That means that any inner box represents a bunch of possible applications or manifestations of any outer one.

Creative Agenda is not one of the boxes. It is an arrow which may "bind" the boxes. I often think of it as a literal arrow penetrating into the boxes, but that is possibly misleading because there are an infinite number of such arrows, with a given Creative Agenda being a conceptual commonality among many of them.

You can think of Creative Agenda as such an arrow ("skewer") for a given instance of play, but not for the very general categories of the three types.

Best,
Ron

Walt,

Ahhh... subsets. Yep, that was what I was missing about the concept.

Walt, you rule da house!

*****

Ron,

All right, I just need a picture for this. (I know someone wants to give me free web space...ok there we go.)

I think you are saying this (It's a pdf, and I know it's missing bits). With my Creative Agenda circle being the "skewer", and there actually being three diagrams - with one of Sim, Nar, or Gam being in place of Creative Agenda on each.

This diagram grooves a little more with how I see things.

I just threw both of these together, so I'm at the 'working it out stage' not the 'committed to an idea' stage.

Hello,

Boy, you really like overlapping circles, don't you. It just so happens that I really hate them. Hate their little guts. It's the cladist in me.

Anyway, it also so happens that your second diagram is closer to my outlook than your first, which means we agree more than you might have anticipated.

Some people might wonder about just where the arrow "starts" and "stops."

If you draw CA as an arrow (he said, squinting menacingly, like Clint Eastwood), then for sure it extends from the System part of Exploration down into Techniques.

Whether a given Ephemera is part of one of the more relevant Techniques (relevant to CA, that is), is a moment-by-moment issue, and no single Ephemera is going to amount to a huge influence. So at least some of the time, you can see CA penetrating into Ephemera; it certainly does when a given very-relevant Technique is being employed (and hence multiple Ephemera are occurring).

I also think we can go back up (or "out"), and see that the CA doesn't begin in the Exploration box; it's actually traceable or observable all the way back into Social Contract in many cases. This isn't too hard to understand when you think of Exploration as a manifestation or expression of Social Contract, which is what it is.

Best,
Ron

Ron,

Silly question time:
If you have cladistic preferences (BTW, thanks, that was my new word for the morning), why not draw the model as a tree? We have a Social Contract node, with below it nodes for each of the Exploration types, with below them a multitude of nodes for the Techniques, etc.

The diagram expresses the nested hierarchy just as well as the Venn diagram does, but additionally gives you the ability to show the multiplicities at each level (3, 5, indefinitely many, etc).

It is a bear to do as ASCII Art, though.
SR
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I tend to think a Venn Diagram is the wrong way of looking at this. Venn Diagrams express 'is-a' relationships, that is anything contained in a circle on a Venn Diagram 'is-a' whatever that circle is called. Now it seems to me that 'techniques' isn't a 'social contract'.

I agree with the containing model offered by Ron, just don't think that a Venn Diagram expresses the concept correctly.

Hello,

Rob, a branching-tree cladogram expresses the nested-boxes diagram just fine, and if someone wanted to draw that, they could ... but the real problem is (in cladistic terms) a humongous amount of homoplasy at the Techniques level. You'd have to be working with a really awesome "character matrix," such that different combinations of Techniques take on distinct identities. I happen to think we have the tools to do that, and that it's the single most important issue facing our collective understanding of role-playing, but to date, nearly all discussions have floundered around babbling about "Sim is too" or "no Sim isn't" and similar.

Also, cladograms in my discipline are universally utilized to describe change over time, in real time, and that's not what the Big Model is - it's a conceptual framework of applied interactions (social, imaginative, representational, etc), and not a "this turns into that" history. So I'm a little afraid of the typical use for a cladogram being confounded with its basic visual representation (which is independent of use, conceptually, but that's damn hard to articulate).

Jack, I think that's basically a terminological issue, right? It seems to me that Venn diagrams may include the concepts implicit in, say, taxonomy: horses, bears, and weasels are mammals; mammals and birds and squamates are amniotes; amniotes and non-amniotes are vertebrates; vertebrates and many other critters are animals.

Hence a bear is (a) a mammal, (b) an amniote, (c) a vertebrate, and (d) an animal.

Not all Venn diagrams work like that, but if you keep the boxes nested rather than overlapping, and if you specify, as I have done all along, that all inner boxes are applications or specific manifestations of the outer box they share, then it works.

In other words, all Techniques are composed of combinations of Ephemera, although not every single Ephemeral item is necessarily making up a Technique. Similarly, all Exploration (shared imaginative space) is a particular piece of the larger Social Contract.

Best,
Ron

Hi Ron,

Yeah, it's a terminology issue - I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying; just how you're saying it.

Not all Venn diagrams work like that, but if you keep the boxes nested rather than overlapping, and if you specify, as I have done all along, that all inner boxes are applications or specific manifestations of the outer box they share, then it works.

Hi Jack,

I appreciate the link and the point. But as an equally technical specialist, we call'em Venn diagrams in evolutionary biology. The symbology of the overlap is simply not used, because it doesn't apply to evolutionary processes.* I don't see anything in your link which says Venn diagrams must concern overlapping sets, rather than inclusive/nested ones - just that when you do have overlaps, this is how they're notated.

Best,
Ron

* Except for the the "cenancestral" forms of living things, but trust me, you don't want to hear about that.

Hi Ron,

It's not about overlapping vs. containing. It's about what being inside a circle (not that they have to be circles, of course) means on a Venn Diagram.

In your biological example, "a bear is (a) a mammal, (b) an amniote, (c) a vertebrate, and (d) an animal" you'd have four circles there: animal being the largest, then vertebrate contained wholy inside it, then amniote, then mammal - each later one inside the earlier - and bear would be a point contained in all four circles.

You can do this because: "A bear is a mammal";"a bear is an amniote"; "a bear is a vertebrate" and "a bear is an animal" are all true statements. This is not true in your diagrams: 'pawn stance' is not a Creative Agenda, or an exploration, or a social contract - it's something used in those things, a building-block if you will.

That's what I mean by Venn Diagrams expressing 'is-a' relationships, and that's why your diagram is not a Venn Diagram.

Cheers,

Jack.

"We're not argumentative, but we play it on TV."

I'm shifting my position on you slightly, which is not fair, so here's how I'll put it: I agree with you. 'Cause I do. If Pawn Stance is not (for example) a manifestation of Social Contract, then I am wrong-wrong-wrong.

However, I do see Pawn Stance as Social Contract. It's a teeny bit of Social Contract, which operates in that moment, insofar as it affects play at all. With any luck and with some practice, you can see that moment of Pawn Stance help or hinder the use of a particular Technique (in combination with other Ephemera composing that Technique).

And then, does or doesn't that Technique play a role in the operation of the overall System? Usually, it does. Hence an event is now cemented into the Imaginary Space (so we're now in Exploration). Moving outwards, Exploration only happens insofar as the Social Contract permits and facilitates it.

We never left Pawn Stance through the whole example. It's like being in a room, then turning the walls into glass to see the other rooms, and then realizing the shape of the house. So yeah, you're in the Pawn Stance room, and being there is fundamental to being in this particular house.

(Quick point: you are absolutely right that Pawn Stance is not a Creative Agenda, but CA is not one of the nested boxes. CA joins the boxes as a different phenomenon, rooted in Social Contract and primarily manifested through System, influencing which Techniques are acceptable.)

Making sense? I especially want to acknowledge that you are 100% right in all your points, and that I'm not trying to refute them or bat you down. This thread should prove extremely helpful to others in the future.

We can take the bears/mammals to private email if you want; I think that my point stands if I shift my position to traits rather than taxa, but that's so off-topic that I can't even stand to hint at it further here.

Best,
Ron

Ron,

Heh, It's sort of funny. Right after reading your Clint Eastwood post I was going to post a cladogram with Sim branching off right after exploration and Nar/Gam branching off after metagame influence. It was all going to be in good humor. Well, work got in the way of my fun. Just as well, because now there is talk of taking the idea seriously!

Anyway, before getting into the cladogram, I've made a Venn-ish (it's the arrow that conflicts with my sense of propriety) diagram in response, it's here.

It needs a little explaining though. I never seem to be comfortable with where Creative Agenda is placed, sometimes I think it seems above Social Contract, sometimes is seems below Exploration, and sometimes it seems between them. Now that I'm looking at CA outside of the layers, that helps clear a lot up, but not everything. I think my placement of CA might have been shifting dependent upon whether I was look at CA as and observable phenomena (red arrow) or a player motivation (blue arrow). CA as a goal very much influences the shape of both Social Contract and Exploration, even though the behaviors aren't observable until System is engaged and play is actually happening. Make sense?

Another detail, which I've been avoiding getting into for some time, is the definition of Social Contract. How Social Contract is defined influences it's position in relation to CA.

I see at least two distinct layers to what we've been referring to as Social Contract. One layer is Social Contract, which is within the layer of Social Setting. I think there is a lot above Social Setting, but I don't think it's germane to this discussion. The term Social Contract implies to me that originally the concept was more narrow (more what I'm thinking), but it seems to have mutated beyond control into 'everything larger than Exploration' - from credibility to pizza.

Social Setting is the social makeup, everything outside the game. Like who wants to date who, who's whining about work, etc.

Social Contract is the mutual agreement that defines the boundaries for the activity. The laws of the Social Setting. Though Bob hitting on Sally is part of the Social Setting, the Social Contract may be that Bob hitting on Sally is acceptable/inacceptable during game time.

The key difference between the two is that Creative Agenda influences Social Contract, because it's part of what structures the play expectations. The Social Contract is necessarily part of roleplaying, and the Social Setting is independent of the actual activity other than being the medium in which the activity occurs.

Thus far I've just been assuming my definition of Social Contract, so as to avoid getting into this. However, it doesn't look like I have that luxury anymore. I've split this particular topic off into Narrowing the Definition of Social Contract. I just wanted to bring it up before getting to the cladogram, because trying to put Social Setting on the same cladogram as Techniques is like trying to put Alaska on the same cladogram as bears. Sure, Alaska has affected the development of bears, but it is not itself part of the phylogeny of bears.

Anyway, here is my attempt at an Agenda Theory cladogram. I don't know how I feel about this though. Kinda makes my teeth itch.

EDIT: Oh crap. Before anyone brings up the 'CA is not about intent' thing, what I mean by motivation is motivation inferred from observation, whether the motivation is conscious or not.

Ron,
I see your point about the time-bound nature of cladograms and while I might argue that only skews the perceptions of those who know about that type of diagram, I'd then have to shoot myself in foot and admit that family trees, absolutely the canonical tree structure example, are also time-bound. Since shooting myself in the foot is painful, I'll just agree with you :-)

In the Venn-diagram argument, what you did is a very common abuse of notation, mostly, I think, because most everybody has seen Venn diagrams, so they're the tool that happens to be handy. If you really want an accurate diagramatic representation, you're probably going to need something like a UML Collaboration diagram with the serial numbers filed off so the non-software people don't go into shock.

Now for the exciting part of your response, the homoplasy thing. I think I sorta get your point, but the last time I had anything to do with biology `Hotel California' was on the hit lists, so please bear with me as I try `say it for myself'.

I think you're saying that sets of Techniques form emergent entities at the Exploration level and that equivalent emergent entities can be formed from wildly different sets of Techniques.

If that is correct, I throw in a second interpretation: Creative Agendas are emergent entities from sets of events at the Exploration level and the same CA can be formed from many different sets of Exploration level events, making two levels of emergent entities to get from Techniques to CA.

Since I'm walking out on this limb anyway, I'll speculate that if all that is correct, the floundering of the ``"Sim is too" or "no Sim isn't"'' discussions can be explained as people conflating two levels of emergent behavior into one. The missing level of abstraction then reduces the available degrees of freedom below what you need to adequately model reality.

What I don't get yet is how your `character matrix' fits into this.

SR
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Cruciel,
What you're worried about with the CA arrow is why I suggested a UML Collaboration diagram. Those diagrams show both static structure (a bunch of labeled boxes with lines between them (actually a directed graph rather than a tree)) and arrows showing how activities run through the diagram. The static bit would carry the function of the Venn diagram and the dynamic bit could show how the behaviors and motivations run through the structure.

SR
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