Hi folks,

Has anyone writen/seen a good description of the Social Contract that does not require a previous knowledge of the Big Model? I'd prefer something that is not too jargon heavy as well, if possible.

I want to try and get accross to my players how important I think it is and make sure the players understand that it's there and can be changed without having to write up a description myself.

Social contract is just the agreements between players about what they're going to do and how they will delegate control about what goes into the shared imagined space (in the jargonless definition, that's deciding who gets to say what happens).

It can include:
- who buys pizza
- what rules to use
- what to do if someone can't attend
- how to create characters (i.e. group design vs. show up with your finished character sheet).
- who the GM is

Hell, even the decision to play at all is part of the social contract. In the Big Model terms, it's the largest and outermost box because every single component of gaming is included in the social contract, whether spoken or otherwise.

jdagna wrote: - who buys pizza
- what rules to use
- what to do if someone can't attend
- how to create characters (i.e. group design vs. show up with your finished character sheet).
- who the GM is

I'm going to attempt (and likely fail) to give a definition that doesn't rely on examples. Wish me luck!

"Social Contract consists of the rights and responsibilities of each person in the activity. No activity occurs where people don't believe they have rights and responsibilities. Many activities occur where people believe they don't need to state these rules, because everyone will share the same assumptions, perhaps by telepathy. In reality, not talking about social contract just assures that everybody has a different idea of what they're supposed to do and what they can expect in return."

Close?

I just want to add that social contract also includes all exploration, creative agendas, techniques and ephemera - what might be called the the rules of play as well. It's every agreement that's made by a group in order to play, from where and when to how.


Ron has a diagram that shows this:
http://indie-rpgs.com/_articles/bigmodelpic.pdf

As you know, I'm almost always the guy pulling hardest for abstract definitions and so forth, but in this case I'm on the opposite side. I do have a rough notional definition of social contract in mind, but to make it really work it's so abstract as to be totally unhelpful to anyone not already deeply involved in the academic study of culture and society.

For my money, a definition of social contract most of all must be useful to the people who need it. And the people who need such a definition need something practical. So I'd really pull for as many examples of the kinds of things that are part of social contract as possible.

Gordon, basically everything everyone's said here is dead-on, but this is going to be easiest to understand and explain by sitting around talking about it. The point of social contract is that every part of gaming happens because there is a social contract that says, "Here's basically how things are going to work among us, as people sitting around a table talking about stuff." The value of a clear and explicit contract is not that it's comprehensive; it's that when problems come up, you have a baseline for discussing how to fix them.

In the Age of Paranoia game Jere is running, an espionage cold war thing, we have discussed this stuff pretty explicitly. Here's an example.

At the end of 1971, all our characters reach the end of a story-arc, and Jere announced that next session we would skip ahead to October, 1974. So he asked us all to figure out what we'd done since, and where we were in 1974.

Now a game like this necessarily runs into alternate history sometimes. And Tom decided that his character had been grappling with the fallout (in both senses) of the Yom Kippur War, which had gone rather differently than in real history. In fact, it had gone nuclear; I think Israel fired nukes at Egypt.

Of course, this makes the whole Middle East situation a frighteningly different thing. I mean, it's bad anyway, but this is the nightmare. Tom's point was that it's alternate history, and grappling with a radically changed situation would liberate the players somewhat from the grip of history. That is, there wouldn't be so much concern about "getting it right," because clearly significant things had changed.

Jere, however, felt that this historical change altered everything so drastically that he just couldn't see how the cold war would run -- that is, it wouldn't really be a cold war any more, having gone very hot indeed.

So what Jere did was to go back to social contract and discuss it with the whole group. He felt that this would be playing a radically different game than the one he'd said he wanted to run. I think he was willing to be convinced otherwise, but actually not everyone was enthusiastic about this change, and Tom was certainly amenable to a different solution. So we worked it out, the Yom Kippur war didn't go nuclear, and the game went forward on a firm foundation.

That's what social contract is all about: it's who gets to decide what, and what to do when there's disagreement, at every possible level from a single die-roll to a big campaign shift to who buys the pizza.

Hi,

One point off of Chris' two posts:

In the first, Chris, you wrote: 'In many respects, the entire point of the Big Model is to try to come up with ways of saying, "Alfred wants X but Bob wants Y, so maybe they shouldn't play together." '

Certainly this is one aspect and use of the Big Model and Social Contract. (Certainly, its how many people obsess on the matters Ron has brought up in general.)

However, Chris' second post point out that by being aware that all this stuff a) exists (see bullet points above), and b) is negotiable lots of people can find ground to continue playing with each other, aware of what agreements and lines need to be drawn and respected.

The "not playing together thing" comes about when people, being AWARE of what they want and don't want, discussing these matters openly -- come to realize they have no business playing with each other. But that's simply one possible result of Social Contract awareness.

Christopher

Yes, thanks Christopher -- good clarification. What I meant by "Alfred wants X and Bob wants Y" would be better put, "Alfred wants X and not Y, and Bob wants Y and not X."

mindwanders wrote:
Has anyone writen/seen a good description of the Social Contract that does not require a previous knowledge of the Big Model? I'd prefer something that is not too jargon heavy as well, if possible. I want to try and get accross to my players how important I think it is and make sure the players understand that it's there and can be changed without having to write up a description myself.

At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all other persons formerly took the name of city, and now takes that of Republic or body politic; it is called by its members State when passive, Sovereign when active, and Power when compared with others like itself. Those who are associated in it take collectively the name of people, and severally are called citizens, as sharing in the sovereign power, and subjects, as being under the laws of the State.

Gareth,

I would offer the disconnection between what you assume to be "basic equipment" of social engagement is often not presumed between people. I offer that many folks in my country (the U.S.) apparently DON'T want a modern social democracy after all. (If you read Ron Suskind's piece in last week's New York Times Magazine you'll be amazed -- as I was -- to discover who's in that group.)

And by extension -- Gamers.

Think of how much RPG baggage and tradition actively PRECLUDES any discussion of how things are supposed to be done. How much "training" in RPG groups invovles the supression of spontinaity, impulse and even pleasure in sacrfice to the presumed rules and traditions.

Think of how much the power distribution between the GM and Players is usually nothing like a modern social democracy at all. ("You want to play," says the GM. "Well, I'll make up the world, the story, and the little free range areas you can run around in. Stick with what I'm giving you, and you can play." "Okay," say the players... cause, you know, they do want to play.)

In both the social/political sphere as well as RPG hobby sphere there are elements of tradition and habit that actively work against even questioning whether there's anything to discuss.

While I share your desire everyone would respect the need for such social agreement -- I'm not quite stunend, as I see the desire to retreat from full engagement on this matter all around me all the time.

Christopher

In order to explain the Social Contract, I'd begin with the Contract part.

So, I might say:

"You know what a contract is, right? It's just an agreement that if I do this, then you will do that. If you bring me a pizza, then I will give you twenty bucks. If I give you this book, then you will write a review for me. If you marry my daughter, then I won't kill you."

"The Social Contract is exactly the same sort of thing, except that a lot of it is assumed and unspoken. Which means that if we have different assumptions, we can run into problems. For example, I might assume that part of the Contract is 'If I play my character well, then the DM won't kill him off undeservingly due to some random dice roll.' You, however, might be under the impression that the Contract is 'If I am the DM, then I won't fudge the dice to protect characters from random happenstance.'"

"You can see how that can result in problems, right? We both think that the other person is the one breaking the Contract, and so we both get all angry about it. And we both think 'Well, of course that's in the Contract!' And that's why the Social Contract is so important."


It's a bit more of a dynamic description (this is how it looks in action) rather than a static description (these are all its bits and pieces.)




Cheers,
Roger

Stop!

I don't have a problem with what the social contract is. I understand it just fine. I was asking if there was anything out there already, not for a big discussion on how best to put it accross to my players.

I appreciate all the help, but the answer seems to be "no", and that's all I needed.

I sugest if you want to continue this discussion you start another thread on the subject and we kill this one.

Gordon, I don't understand just what you're looking for...?

First, you said

I want to try and get accross to my players how important I think it is and make sure the players understand that it's there and can be changed without having to write up a description myself.

I was asking if there was anything out there already, not for a big discussion on how best to put it accross to my players.

The problem is that everyone seems to have latched on to the reson for me asking the question rather than the question it's self.

Has anyone writen/seen a good description of the Social Contract that does not require a previous knowledge of the Big Model?

At the risk of continuing a dead thread, let me clarify this for myself. Gordon, you're not asking us to describe what a social contract is, or whether there is a good description of a social contract somewhere. You're asking whether someone has put a social contract in writing that you could use as an example or possibly a starting point on which you can write your own. Thus if I had written up a sort of "house rules" that explained things like what was expected of the players who come to my game, how we were going to play, who was responsible to chip in for pizza, under what circumstances players were allowed to leave my living room and visit other rooms in my house (whether the bathroom or the kitchen or the room with the video games), you would be interested in a copy of that, so you could show it to your players and use it as the inspiration for one of your own.

Is that the point?

I think that's a noble effort; but I think that one of the reasons the social contract is what it is is that you really can't put it all on paper like that. I expect as part of my social contract that no one will spit on my floor; that no one will remove all their clothes during the game; that the players will not suddenly assault my children. Those are so fundamental to my expectations of the social contract that it would not occur to me to mention them--and there are so many items in that level of the social contract that you would be writing a book (or perhaps incorporating a book by reference: everyone will follow the rules of courtesy dictated by Emily Post). At the same time, if I were to present a document to players that said I expect they will respect my property and not steal things from me while they're visiting, most players would be offended--yet I have had gamers steal things from my house during games, a fundamental violation of the social contract which ended gaming in my house for quite some time and resulted in several people still banned from our property on suspicion more than a decade later.

A social contract is a massive thing. Obviously you don't want the entire thing on paper--just a few points that people have used to facilitate games.

Am I on the right track here?

--M. J. Young

I have posted on my site a small essay regarding what I am looking for in my gaming experiences. It's not a social contract (as it's only my side of things), but it can (and is intended to) be used as a jumping off point for discussion of the formation of a social contract, as it addresses mainly game-specific issues (frex, I didn't feel it necessary to state that I expected people not to spit on my floor). You can find it here.

-- Ben

At the risk of continuing a dead thread, let me clarify this for myself. Gordon, you're not asking us to describe what a social contract is, or whether there is a good description of a social contract somewhere. You're asking whether someone has put a social contract in writing that you could use as an example or possibly a starting point on which you can write your own.

Hi mindwanderer,

At the risk of seeming like I'm not paying any attention to your requests (I think I am), does not this thread offer each of the elements you asked for?

It's not an article. I know its not what you expected. But each of the posts total a discussion on the concept of the social contract, explains the fact it's generally not noticed by players, gives examples, and shows some of the things that happen when it goes wrong.

We might have just been offering up what we thought was the best answer at hand when there was no direct link to an article to offer up.

I'd offer up that the recent discussions on One True Wayism touch on this matter as wel.

Christopher

I found an old article by Harlequin with extensive plain language social contract elements. It's here. I hope it proves useful to you.

Scott