From Narrativist games and "winning"? :

Ron wrote:
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Fred, I recommend considering that looking into one's own head and trying to identify Creative Agenda through "how did it feel" thinking is almost always futile.

Hi Fred,

Your #1 is the case, I'm afraid - at present, you simply do not know what the term is referring to, and that tends to show up in your posting about it in other threads. I am very, very glad to see you asking this question in this forum, and I'm looking forward to helping.

So let's start from the beginning. From The Provisional Glossary:

The aesthetic priorities and any matters of imaginative interest regarding role-playing. Three distinct Creative Agendas are currently recognized: Step On Up (Gamist), The Right to Dream (Simulationist), and Story Now (Narrativist). This definition replaces all uses of "Premise" in GNS and other matters of role-playing theory aside from the specific Creative Agenda of Narrativist play. Creative Agenda is expressed using all Components of Exploration, but most especially System.

If creative agenda is, at its heart, about what the group wants to achieve in the game, isn't what *I* want at least relevant to the consideration?

Hey Fred,

I'll give you my take.

Historically, there's been a bit of inconsistency in using the term "Creative Agenda." In some threads I have seen it defined as "One of the three: Gamism, Simulationism, or Narrativism." But in other threads, there has been the whole issue of additional CAs, which would undermine the convenience of that definition. :)

So, here I go:

One's individual Creative Agenda involves a goal-state, or a set of goal-states, for the SiS. This goal state is with reference to some specific in-SiS conflict(s) and the events that must take place to deal with them. However, post-play knowldge of the goal-state is not sufficient to identify a CA in action - a CA depends on a goal state, but is more than a goal-state. The fitness test for a particular goal-state is something that takes place in each individual's mind and is defined by the player's personal perception of the meaning of that goal state: Gamism goal-states are evaluated on the basis of whether or not the player will increase his ability to effect the SiS by setting up and resloving these particular conflicts;  Simulationism goal-states are evaluated on the basis of whether or not setting up and resolving these particular conflicts demonstrate causal relationships WRT to some element(s) of the SiS; Narrativism goal-states are evaluated on the basis of whether or not setting up and resolving these particular conflicts make a moral or ethical statement of personal meaning to the player.

When goal states are mutually exclusive you have disfunction.

This means several things. First, it means that a person's own Creative Agenda is not something that is hard-coded into his system. It is not a long-term, "live with it or stop playing RPGs" kind of a thing. A person's creative agenda can change whenever that person begins a new game, or whenever one of the goal states he's been working for is achieved (or failed). Also, I suppose, you could just get bored with what you've been doing and change CAs whenever you feel like it. I imagine that this would make for some choppy play. :)

Second, satisfaction derived from play doesn't necessarily depend on the success or failure of a particular conflict. In-game failure for one's own character can be a part of a desireable goal-state. (In Shadows, for example, a lot of times you root for the bad die to win.)

Third, if conflicts are not set up and resolve druing play, no Creative Agenda is present. (This doesn't seem to happen very often, but it seems theoretically possible). I believe this is what they call Zilchplay.

Fourth, if a player has no particular goal state in mind (i.e., he doesn't really care how things turn out, one way or another) but participates just because he likes making stuff up, I don't see how a CA can be said to be at work. (No one else seems to agree with this, though.)

Fifth, if a particular goal state can support more than one (maybe all three) CAs, then transcripts of actual play are not trustworthy sources of information for identifying what CAs were active. A player may have been evaluating the goal state based on any one of the three fitness tests when he made his choice.

Sixth, as per Fifth above, several players in the same game may be using different fitness tests but still arrive at compatible goal states. That is, they're working towards the same thing for different reasons. This is why the original "instance of play" term was vaguel defined as "we don't know exactly how long, but a while." It had to be however long it took for those players to run into a goal-state that was incompatible with one player's fitness test.

I think that's all.

When I eliminate the "GNS Box" definition of CA from Ron's quote, I get "The aesthetic priorities and any matters of imaginative interest regarding role-playing."  I don't understand what that means.

I understand that CA isn't what I say I want, or what I think I want.  It's also not what the members of the group, or some hypothetical summation of the group, says it wants or thinks it wants.  But a negative definition is no better than an exemplary one... perhaps worse.

(As an aside, I'll state that the word "agenda" is a poor choice of words because in non-Forge usage, it is a statement about what a group intends to achieve.  Whether that is actually achieved or not is immaterial.)

Instead, the Creative Agenda, if I understand correctly, is what the group, in summation, values enough to act upon.  It's only there when the rubber meets the road.  Creative Agenda isn't a plan, it's a result.

Nate, did you have a definition of CA in there somewhere?  If so, I didn't catch it.

CA is not immutable.  Fun doesn't depend on success.  CA depends on conflicts.  CA can be absent.  You can't always determine CA from play.  Different CA's can be compatible with each other.  All are most likely true, and most are likely interesting, but these statements are failing to coalesce for me.

Fred,

Heh, yeah, I guess that was a little fragmented. The Creative Agenda is the combination of goal and test. The goal is the Agenda part. It's what I'm working to achieve. The test is the Creative part. It's the impetus that propels me along the path to the goal. "Working to achieve" in practical terms is "making stuff up." The test tells me what kind of stuff I need to make up to get closer to my goal; it informs my imagination.

Nate, is Creative Agenda something that an individual has, or a group?  It seems like you're saying that it's an individual attribute, whereas Ron says it's an attribute of the group.

Hi Fred,

Creative Agenda is what the group does to support one style of play(set of aesthetic priorities) over all others.

Stop and digest for a moment.

Okay?

Okay.  It's not hard to see personal examples for yourself and others where game groups make choices that support one thing over another, for example, many times a group will choose to roleplay a scene instead of rolling Negotiation, or vice versa.  These small decisions are based on a larger set of values- there is something being supported or not everytime one of these decisions is reached.  Over a period of time, you can begin to see a pattern of what things are supported and what things are not.  

For a group that is all on the same page, very often they won't even notice what values they are supporting as they have nothing to contrast them with.  A fish may not be the best source of information about water, as much as you or I might not know much about air, though we use it all the time.  The reason most people look to CA conflict as a source of what's going on, is that you see two different sets of values being consistantly represented and both highlight each other and become more visible as people try to negotiate what's happening.

But you don't need conflict to tell what's happening- you simply need to know what to look for.  As I mentioned in a different thread- knowing that an ice cream is made by Dreyers' doesn't tell you it's flavor.

If this concept makes sense to you, then the next thing would be to look at the basic identified GNS CAs and see if you can match any of what is being said to personal experience in play.  The theory here is grounded in concrete observation and examples- it wasn't made up by thinking- it was formed by watching people play, over and over in many different ways.  Just as much as gravity is an abstract concept unless you connect it to the action it has everyday, the theory here won't mean much unless you can connect it to actual play.

For most people, this is where the disconnect happens, as we've been taught to focus on the imaginary stuff and not the act of playing.

Does this help at all?

Chris

I don't think I understand, because what you describe doesn't match my own experience of play.  You state that you begin to see a pattern of what things are supported and what things are not, but in my experience, in long campaigns, a group settles into a rhythm of supporting different things from scene to scene.  If CA is to be meaningful to me, it has to be an attribute of SCENE rather than the entire group-history.

Hello,

Fred, I'd like to confirm that you've looked over my post above, and perhaps turned it over twice. You tend to skim and then rapidly type responses off of fast reactions.

Second, do recognize that much of what gets called "role-playing" tends to fail to achieve a coherent CA. I do not claim, and have never claimed, that any role-playing can be tagged by CA. Incoherence is probably the norm.

Third, your current struggles with understanding reward systems are absolutely linked to your struggling with the concept of Creative Agenda. They are the same issue.

Best,
Ron

Ron: Today, I'm sitting at work with nothing to do. If it seems like I'm responding quickly, it's because I have little else going on.  Recognize that I have plenty of time to read and digest every word to the extent that I am able.  Maybe I'm a little dense when it comes to understanding some of the things you post.  It's hard for me to respond to a big post that I don't understand, so I respond to the parts I understand and ask about the parts I don't understand. 

I can confirm that I have read the entire post, and made an attempt to understand the whole thing.

What do you mean by "what gets called "role-playing"?  Is a coherent CA a requirement for roleplaying?  Is adherence to one CA the only way to achieve coherency?  Is incoherency synonymous with "CA conflict"?

Hi Fred,

If CA is to be meaningful to me, it has to be an attribute of SCENE rather than the entire group-history.

Hiya,

What do you mean by "what gets called "role-playing"?  Is a coherent CA a requirement for roleplaying?  Is adherence to one CA the only way to achieve coherency?  Is incoherency synonymous with "CA conflict"?

Okay... Those answers make sense to me.

I'm building up to a CA that I see a lot in DnD play, but not a lot in other games, nor do I see it talked about on the Forge.  Provisionally, I'd like to call it "Adaptive."

Using a bit more shorthand than perhaps is wise, it works like this:

During combat scenes (and certain kinds of puzzles) we have a gamist agenda.
During most social scenes, we have a narrativist agenda.
Sometimes, we step into a kind of quick-time description, detailing events in a wider scope around the PC's.  This usually happens during "downtime" scenes in between more structured groups of scenes.

Each type of scene has its own reward cycle.

This creative agenda is never stated, but everyone seems to understand it.  Only rarely does anyone contradict it.

Hi Fred,

You're describing incoherent play.  D&D3e combat does tend to reward gamist play (at the most basic level, the risk inherent in the rules can provide lots of opportunities to Step On Up.)  Meanwhile, the rules for social interaction rewards are much vaguer (XP rewards determined by GM)  It's not suprising that this mechanism can be drifted to any of the three CAs.  Finally, the kind of "quick-time description, detailing events in a wider scope around the PC's you describe could easily be exploration without agenda, or it may sometimes be in service of developing situation so your group can further some agenda or other. This is a perfect example of un-unifed reward systems. 

I think you might recall that there are instances when you or the group have to compromise between the results you like in combat and those you like in the social arena.  This is the sort of conflict that arises from an un-unified reward system.  This kind of incoherance, can, but does not always, lead to inter-player conflict.  Most groups are used to this kind of schizophrenia and do compromise to produce game sessions they each can enjoy some of the time. 

However, if the game has a unified reward system, focussed on a single CA, more people enjoy themselves more.  The value of such focus is twofold 1) less opportunity for inter-player misunderstanding, and 2) greater concentration of enjoyable moments.  I gotta tell you, from personal experience, playing a game with a consistent reward system is a step above even the best managed incoherent play.

Adaption is a response to CA incoherence.  I don't think it qualifies as a CA in itself.

Vaxalon wrote:
Okay... Those answers make sense to me.

Hey Nathan,

Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism are three distinct styles of play.

Creative Agenda is an abstract term used to randomly reference a member of the set {G,N,S}.

Therefore, a Creative Agenda is a style of play. A style of play is what I - an individual gamer - do during a game to maximize my entertainment. This entails identifying what I enjoy, and taking action to bring it (whatever it happens to be) about.

Okay, I came up with another metaphor for Creative Agenda today.

You know business meetings? The agenda is the sheet that gets passed out listing the things that are going to get talked about at a given meeting. Or more often, it's just sort of understood what's supposed to get discussed, because whoever's running the meeting gives you a funny look when you get off track. It's the business at hand. It's the common reason you're at the meeting to begin with.

Incoherent play is kinda like if everyone's sitting around, vaguely uncertain why they're here, so somebody gives a presentation on fourth quarter returns... then somebody else gets up and sings "My Funny Valentine"... then everyone takes five minutes to grumble about the cafeteria food. Sure, people are technically meeting, and maybe even enjoying one another's company. But if anything actually gets accomplished, it'll be dumb luck.

(Of course, incoherent, agenda-less meetings occur all the time in business, but that's another subject...)

Hmm. This metaphor is falling apart for me already, since CA is the aesthetic priority, not the content priority. But I think it's illustrative.

Ron, is this at all useful?

Hello,

Larry, that's OK, but I am using "agenda" in a different (although normal and common) sense of the word. I'm using it in the way that someone can tell you what his or her motive or plans are, but you cannot be sure of their agenda until you see the person actually do stuff, especially in regard to the other people involved.

Folks, this thread is getting jacked left and right. It was Fred's, and if I'm not mistaken, Fred has reached some satisfaction with it. If anyone else has some CA-definition questions, make new threads.

Also, although it was OK in this instance, I'd prefer specific questions rather than "what is it." For example, I've already received one PM which makes it clear that most people are not understanding the terms "aesthetic priorities" and therefore are blowing past my Glossary definition, filling it with weird replacements like any goals at the table, and so on.

Fred, anything else? I think you and I get much, much further in on-line dialogue when we make sure to state where we agree as we go along, and this thread was very successful for me. If you want to keep it going, that's great - but if not, say so and we'll take new questions to new threads.

Best,
Ron

Actually, no, I haven't.

I've come to the realization that Ron has one understanding of the phrase "Creative Agenda", and other people have different understandings of it.... and not just clueless newbs like me, but veterans of the Forge.

I don't think using the word "agenda" to mean results rather than plans is normal or common.  I agree with Larry, and furthermore I think the word "agenda" is confusing people.  "Creative pattern" maybe?

I'm also confused with the term "incoherent".  What sense is that word used?  I'm sure it isn't used in the sense of the half-mad mumblings of the insane.

You've said that my problems understanding reward are related to my problems understanding creative agenda.  If the two concepts are so linked, then why doesn't the definition of CA talk about reward at all?

Hi Fred,

Boy, you respond fast. I really would appreciate you taking more than a minute to think about a post before replying.

I'll take the points one by one, which is not typically my approach, but in this case they're kind of separate issues.

I don't think using the word "agenda" to mean results rather than plans is normal or common.  I agree with Larry, and furthermore I think the word "agenda" is confusing people.  "Creative pattern" maybe?

I'm also confused with the term "incoherent".  What sense is that word used?  I'm sure it isn't used in the sense of the half-mad mumblings of the insane.

Play which includes incompatible combinations of Creative Agendas among participants. Incoherent play is considered to contribute to Dysfunctional play, but does not define it. Incoherence may be applied indirectly to game rules. Abashedness represents a minor, correctable form of Incoherence.

You've said that my problems understanding reward are related to my problems understanding creative agenda.  If the two concepts are so linked, then why doesn't the definition of CA talk about reward at all?

Okay, I'll drop the complaint about the word "agenda"... the roots of confusion aren't as important as clearing it up.

The glossary definition of incoherent isn't applicable to the adaptive creative agenda.  That's why I asked.  First, the sub-CA's are not incompatible... the different sub-CA's coexist in harmony, perhaps even synergy sometimes.  Second, the differences are not among the participants, but scene-to-scene; in any one scene, all of the participants are on the same page, CA-wise.

Also, I should mention, the sub-CA's don't disappear entirely, it's more of a shift of importance.  It's like running... right foot, left foot... one foot doesn't disappear when the other is acting, but its influence is much diminished.

Hiya,

Yeah, we can talk about that in the reward system thread you've started. It's a good and interesting point and will have to call upon some very specific instances of play. I'll see you there.

Best,
Ron

Vaxalon wrote:
I've come to the realization that Ron has one understanding of the phrase "Creative Agenda", and other people have different understandings of it.... and not just clueless newbs like me, but veterans of the Forge.

I don't think using the word "agenda" to mean results rather than plans is normal or common. I agree with Larry, and furthermore I think the word "agenda" is confusing people. "Creative pattern" maybe?

Hey Larry,

The thing is, Forge veterans do carry authority in the sense that they're responsible for presenting an authoritative version of the theory. Ron, in spite of his 11k+ posts, can't teach this material to every new member of the Forge. Historicaly, that job has naturally fallen to whatever bunch of Forge veterans who felt like doing it. This is one of those threads. So, I'm a little frustrated, because I feel like in this thread Ron is implying something like "This is how it's been all along! You guys have just been explaining it wrong for 4 years!"

Ron wrote:
"Style" is a terrible word and I've never used it for CA-stuff, not even back when I first started writing about it. This is not merely a semantic preference. As long as you keep using "style," you'll be focusing on things which, relative to CA, are trivial.

Creative Agenda is an abstract term used to randomly reference a member of the set {G,N,S}.

Again, no. For one thing, I have no idea what the term "randomly" is doing in that sentence.

But more substantively, you have it backwards. Creative Agenda, as a phenomenon, has been observed to be classified into G, N, or S. If something cropped up tomorrow that really fulfilled the same role that G, N, or S fulfils, in practice, then whammo, we'd have GNSX or whatever. There is nothing sacred about G, N, or S. They are merely Creative Agendas (and perhaps combinations of them too) which have been observed.

Therefore, a Creative Agenda is a style of play. A style of play is what I - an individual gamer - do during a game to maximize my entertainment. This entails identifying what I enjoy, and taking action to bring it (whatever it happens to be) about.

Um. I suggest that this is way too broad. If my entertainment is maximized by aggravating Bob, as we play, and if I take all manner of actions to do this, this fulfills your criteria, but it is not a Creative Agenda, it's at the Social Contract level outside of Creative Agenda.

You are also a  bit too focused on "me me me" in all of this, as well as focused on any moment of play, even very short ones; you should instead consider (a) how group members reinforce one another's participation in play, and (b) full reward cycles rather than "any action."

You did see the definition I quoted from the Glossary? Is it totally babble to you, or perhaps you need it broken down?

Hiya,

Nathan, this thread really oughta be retired now. I'll finish up with some responses to you, but please take further points to further threads.

Point #1: A lot of what you're presenting is basically a complaint. "Someone used a term a while ago." Yeah, OK, they did. A lot of that is legacy from the Threefold, where the term "style" was a big deal. And ... here it is ... no one could tell this was a problem until after it showed itself to be one. I can't help you with this sort of complaint. If you wanted me and everyone else to use the best possible term for you and everyone to learn, from the git-go, then you have unrealistic expectations. Especially when nothing like this has ever been done for the hobby (no, "player types" talk doesn't count.) If you wanted to benefit from being here, then you should have approached it with a more flexible understanding of what was happening. That still goes for today.

Point #2: Nope, I don't buy it about annoying Bob. I think that the concept of aesthetics is straightforward, unless one is hopelessly mired in PoMo babble in which anything is aesthetics and everything is economics and so forth. Now, I'm willing to meet you halfway and say that the Glossary definition doesn't work for some percent of readers. It works a hell of a lot better than anything we had before, which was the sole purpose of the Glossary anyway. But yeah, I'm going to help people who want to talk about it, just as in this thread.

But "I don't get it" isn't going to fly. People have to try to get it, as written, and then ask specific questions. Like, "what's imaginative interest," and so on, like you just did. Those are good questions. Maybe you could have tried asking them a long time ago.

Actually, I have a more general point, which Fred mentioned rather than you, but which I see quite a lot: "But if all these veterans say different things, then how can we even say there's a definition?" (read this with a very aggrieved tone and a triumphant flourish, as if it were a devastating point of debate)

This comment is, frankly, arrant bullshit. There is no degree or certificate of comprehension at the Forge. Much as in medical school, some people "pass" with Cs and Ds. Sure, they're veterans of med school but they aren't any great shakes as doctors. And the Forge doesn't even have a "pass" point. You could participate here for years and still just not get it. I can't wave a magic wand and make that not happen.

Secondly, people who do wield a considerable understanding of the issue are often trying to rephrase it in a way that will help a given person understand. They may use different phrasing, or they may choose to focus on techniques which, for that person, are going to flip a switch in his or her understanding. The public nature of the internet leads onlookers (who are coming at it from a different angle) both to misperceive what the point is, as well as to misperceive that, in this case, the person who's talking and (for instance) me do not disagree about the point being made.

Anyway, this thread's done, so let's move on.

Best,
Ron