A while back I ran a Cthulhu like horror game in which the players were on a river boat which ran aground on a small island. There were two players. They were with an NPC friend who had just suffered a great loss - girlfriend died by drownding I think. The fellow was at great risk of harming himself. Before the boat ran aground (a predetermined event meant to isolate the players) I started showing them odd events. Reality was worped by the grief stricken friend's mind. They realized that they could not trust their senses. It was effective at making the players freighten.

Once the boat ran aground the firend jumped off onto the island in pursuit of an image of his dead girlfriend.

What I had planned was for the players to run after him to stop him from killing himself. Unfortunately they really were scared by the opening scenes of the game and balked. They did not follow him.

As I see it the premise was "Do we protect a firend at the risk of losing ourselves?" I'm certain other premises could be pulled from this set up. I assumed they would follow him. Had they done so I would have led them through a series of terrifying situations but in the end I would have allowed them to save him. The goal was for them to overcome their fear. As it was they didn't.

I was very annoyed. But I didn't know what to do. I did not have the idea that the game could shift to the consequences of their failure to act.

This game was run in 1990 so I'd never heard of GNS theory (which didn't exist then anyway) now though I see that I wanted the players to make a tough decision and trust that they would come through. When they didn't the game collapsed. This is an instance where Narrativism ideas would have saved the game and made for a kick ass session. I was annoyed - they had really whimped out. Just think of the implications from that choice!

In an earlier successful game I trapped two players in a cave slowly filling with water. The evil ghost spoke to them. "I only need one. Give me one." The players had to decide who it would be or they would both die. As it was they both died but it made for a great half hour of play (which told the other players how nasty this ghost was.)

I think these are two examples of narrativist play (or near narrativist play).

As I recall them I remember that I dropped this line of gaming because it was emotionally draining. It was very hard to set up and as I reported here - easy to short circuit. I moved to Engle Matrix Games because it was so much easier to run. The players picked their own poison. The emotional intensity is not there but that is not a problem since I want games to be light and relaxing more than gripping anymore.

So my questions:

1. Am I right that these were narrativist play (or near misses)?
2. How do Nar games now deal with the problem I encountered with balking players?
3. How do you handle emotionally draining games? I abandoned the field because I deal with this kind of stuff every day at work (social worker).

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

1) Um, maybe it was Narrativist.  I've gotten pretty tired at trying to discern if something fits the label or not, especially since I don't find the label terribly descriptive anymore.

2) As for your balking players, I suspect they were missing both of the two things that they needed in order to make that jump: (a) a reward system that would offer them an incentive to do so, and b) a safe arena in which to make dangerous decisions.  Your prior narration where you took away their confidence in their own senses probably eroded this, as well -- the NPC took off after an illusion; how were the players to know if he himself was an illusion and going over the rail would be a "stupid move"?  But it all boils down to that sense of "stupid move".  I presume the game would be over if the players made enough "stupid moves" (they'd die, or they'd lose their sanity, and the game would end), so in order to preserve the "fun" of the game, they needed to make as few stupid moves as possible.  Breaking that assumption is tough with seasoned gamers; we're the lot of us conditioned to think in terms of survival-performance. It takes some bold mechanics or very explicit talk to make it clear that any new game does not measure success in terms of "making the right (safest) decisions."

3) Have you read the threads about ritual and gaming?  If you have not, I think most of the answer lies there.  You were most likely opening up the can and playing with its contents, but had no portion of the experience where you put the pieces back and closed things up.  You also may have had no ritual barriers between "real" time-and-space and "game" time-and-space.  Basically, you were traumatizing your players (and yourself) without context that allowed you to walk away from it -- you sustained the same emotional impact (or perhaps a trifle less) as if you were deciding which of your real-life friends had to die to let the other live.

Chris,

I'll start with your first question and see if I can get around to the others.

1. Am I right that these were narrativist play (or near misses)?

What I had planned was for the players to run after him to stop him from killing himself. Unfortunately they really were scared by the opening scenes of the game and balked. They did not follow him.

As I see it the premise was "Do we protect a firend at the risk of losing ourselves?" I'm certain other premises could be pulled from this set up. I assumed they would follow him. Had they done so I would have led them through a series of terrifying situations but in the end I would have allowed them to save him. The goal was for them to overcome their fear. As it was they didn't.

I was very annoyed. But I didn't know what to do. I did not have the idea that the game could shift to the consequences of their failure to act.

now though I see that I wanted the players to make a tough decision and trust that they would come through. When they didn't the game collapsed. This is an instance where Narrativism ideas would have saved the game and made for a kick ass session. I was annoyed - they had really whimped out. Just think of the implications from that choice!

Thanks for the replies. I know I was not thinking in narrativist terms at that time. I clearly had a script in mind when I set the game up. It was a one shot adventure so it didn't lead to prolong dysfunctional play - thank God - only a very short session.

I muse that had I been open to following the consequences of their choices that play could have been more narrativist. That would have required me to abandon my script, which I do now pretty easily but back then would have been very hard on me. I was very early in the Matrix Game project and hadn't realized how much easier it is to run a game when you aren't committed to any one course of action.

I agree that the opening rounds of play stripped the players of certainty. They said as much. They were frightened about getting off the boat - very Heart of Darkness like. I ran this series of games in the seven or eight years after my father committed suicide and the horror illicited in them was very close to the bone. They were "fun" for those who like terror, and cathartic/theraputic for the rest of us (one of my brothers was one of the players). Part of the goal of the game was to get to a real emotion. I used description and a few enviromental props to do this. The gripping human conflict was not one of these - it was more a matter of putting players in between the cliff and the abyss and having them walk the narrow path out. I have to say that these games were almost all successful and well liked by the players - In Call of Cthulhu terms we all took some sanity checks and failed a few. They were straight lines though and I see that that is not narrativist.

Like I said, not long after that I abandond this line of gaming. I personally had gotten the catharsis I needed and didn't want to dwell in that place.

Interestingly my move into less emotionally intense games seem to come a lot closer to narrativist play because I give players a starting set up with many possible stories and allow them to go off in the direction they want to. Each game has a suggestion of what actions probably need to be present (like find clues if its a murder mystery!) but the players decide and the referee uses the rules to facilitate the exploration they pick. The referee can use "trouble arguments" and "conflict arguments" and "tying up lose end arguments" to add intensity to the game - much like a director in a movie - but largely the game is up to the players.

I had imagined that narrativist play would focus on emotional intensity - like my game illicited. I'm intrigued that it doesn't always.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

Nah, narrativism does not equal emotional intensity.  If anything narrativism equals all participants being able to "say" what they want through the medium of the game.  I put the "say" in scare-quotes because what is said is in terms of thematic content, not things like "Green is pretty."  Because participants are enabled to say what they believe, it can lead to emotional intensity, especially in games that prompt other participants to challenge and qualify those statements.

But hell, gamism probably leads to more emotional intensity than narrativism.

This thread is on the GNS forum so I'll ask about this part of gaming - emotional intensity.

How does it play into various creative agendas?

For instance: Playing a competitive game can bring up all kinds of emotions, anger, shame, embarrassment, fear. Depending on the game, the emotional rush of play is what players are there for.

Narrativist games can get intense when people disagree over beliefs - as Joshua describes. This makes them sort of competitive games. They beg the question "Who will win?"

What about emotion and the simulationist agenda?

I like some emotion in games. The thrill of competition. The concentration of min maxing. The uncertainty of plotting a course of action in an open system (like a Matrix Game). I just don't want it to get too intense. My manhood is not on the line, nor any other major stake - it's just light entertainment.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

MatrixGamer wrote:
What about emotion and the simulationist agenda?

MatrixGamer wrote: What about emotion and the simulationist agenda?

Emotions are a red herring. You can't map emotions to any CA directly. Even if certain emotional states are more likely with a given CA (that would be interesting discussion...), none of them are unique to a given CA.

Chris, I know you have conceded that this probably wasn't Nar, but realize that its extremely difficult to analyze such things our the 'net. First, to properly discuss CA, one needs to consider an entire "Instance of Play"---in other words, you must look at the session or campaign wholistically. You can find thematic *moments* in both Gam and Sim, just as you can tactical moments in Nar, or celebratory/emulational (or whatever) moments in all three CAs. Discussing single scenes will tell us nothing of a groups CA.

Second, discussing a game's transcript---the imaginary events of play---by itself (*) won't tell us much of the group's CA either. To discuss CA, we need to discuss the behaviors of the real world players. What types of events did the playes react to, and how? What made them cheer? When did they get real quiet and sit up straight? When did they lean in listen more attentively. Also valuable, when did the players stop paying attention, or what turned them off? These are the types of things we need to know to discuss CA. Looking out for this stuff is really obvious once you start paying attention to it, but gaming culture in general teaches us to ignore it.

(*) Knowing the transcipt is helpful as a supplement to the discusssing the player's behaviors, but isn't much by itself.

Chris:
At a very basic level, it sounds like you were running into an issue of mechanics not supporting the style of play you desired. Given the timeframe you are discussing, I'm not surprised by this. There were many attempts to pound square pegs into round holes for a very long time in rpgs. If I'm not mistaken, your own EMGs were an attempt to deal with similar issues in wargames initially.

I would also guess that your players, given their reactions, were probably used to some more trad, perhaps even dungeoncrawl, style games. CoC type games, from my experiences, can be very hard for dungeon-crawlers to understand, since the style flies fairly hard in the face of normal 'crawl behavior. Depending on the system, it might also not support the very style of play you were attempting to bring about.

One impression that I've gotten from discussions of Narr supporting game designs is that there is a big emphasis on the idea that the outcome of any course of action must be interesting to the player whose character is taking that action. To that end, some designs seem to emphasize that the player has some imput into likely outcomes, good or bad for the character.

That idea is a bit different from the culture of gameplay in the time period you are discussing. At that point, there was a cultural emphasis on the GM deciding results ( with more or less reference to rules and scenario needs). GMs were commonly expected to withhold information, rather than discuss possible outcomes. Throw in the fact that many game designs, even those ostensibly moving towards a more Sim emphasis, still had huge vestigal Gam supporting subsystems, and there is a ready made situation for player paralysis.

At a guess, I would tend to say this is more likely a clash between Sim (horror) and Gamist rules support than anything else. When discussing game sessions, it is sometimes easy to forget that the "game design technology/game culture" present at a given time has a huge impact on the ability to reach a CA agreement.

With the caveat that it's very difficult to analyze creative agendum based on so little information, I'm going to put a different spin on things.

I think that you, as referee, were aiming for narrativist play; but you were trying to do it with more of a trailblazing technique. It is not impossible to address premise through a trailblazing technique, but in general it tends to devolve into dysfunction. That is, you wanted them to make a statement about a premise, but you believed that they should make the statement that you planned for them to make. That would work, but only if 1) they understood that they were making a statement about an issue, instead of trying to beat the situation, and 2) they wanted to make the statement you expected.

It is often said that illusionism is inimical to narrativist play, because the players cannot address their agendum when the referee has taken away the force of every agendum-relevant choice they could make. I always counter that this is true of all agenda, that illusionism is about taking away the force of every agendum-relevant choice the players can make and thus prevents the genuine expression of agendum. Trailblazing also restricts player choice, and to that degree stifles the ability to pursue agendum.

More fundamentally, however, a group agendum must be shared. The fact that you were trying to initiate narrativist play only means that this was the agendum you hoped the group would adopt. The fact that they stayed in the ship and allowed their companion to charge onto the haunted island without backup suggested that they were locked into some sort of gamist (the best chance we have of winning this is to stay right here and see what happens next) or simulationist (the characters would not leave the ship, given what they already know) agendum. What I think you had, then, was dysfunction in which no shared agendum was ever reached, the various participants each expecting something different from the game.

As stated, I could be way off; but game agendum does not occur until the participants have something of the same idea about what they are doing in that regard.

I will note that I disagree with much of the current thinking about narrativism, particularly expressed in posts in this thread. Front-loaded narrativism is not at all uncommon, and that appears to be where you were headed. (This is the idea that the referee is going to begin the game by introducing a situation in which a premise is strongly latent in the starting point, with the result that players playing completely in character will almost certainly have to address it.) There is no requirement in any agendum as to how much the players are empowered to make agendum-related decisions, only that in every agendum they must have some power to do so or they are not actually playing the game. Narrativism thrives with greater credibility given to the players, but it also works in games that from a mechanical perspective seem extremely simulationist/traditional (credibility heavily focused in the referee, task resolution, character knowledge limits, ordinary character control limits). There is no inherent reason you could not have a narrativist trailblazing game; it's just more difficult to do it that way.

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

MJ:
I'm a bit confused by some of your post. Don't a number of Narr supportive designs have front-loaded premise? I was under the impression that Sorceror in particular had front-loaded premise, and sort of thought that Burniing Wheel did, too.

I would contrast those games with Universalis or PTA, which seem to support a more open Narr style in which participants may discover premise during play.

Mind you, my undrstanding of current thinking on the CAs and support in design is at best limited, so I may be wildly off track.

M.J. wrote:

I think that you, as referee, were aiming for narrativist play; but you were trying to do it with more of a trailblazing technique. It is not impossible to address premise through a trailblazing technique, but in general it tends to devolve into dysfunction. That is, you wanted them to make a statement about a premise, but you believed that they should make the statement that you planned for them to make. That would work, but only if 1) they understood that they were making a statement about an issue, instead of trying to beat the situation, and 2) they wanted to make the statement you expected.

[snip]

The fact that you were trying to initiate narrativist play only means that this was the agendum you hoped the group would adopt. The fact that they stayed in the ship and allowed their companion to charge onto the haunted island without backup suggested that they were locked into some sort of gamist (the best chance we have of winning this is to stay right here and see what happens next) or simulationist (the characters would not leave the ship, given what they already know) agendum. What I think you had, then, was dysfunction in which no shared agendum was ever reached, the various participants each expecting something different from the game.

[snip]

I will note that I disagree with much of the current thinking about narrativism, particularly expressed in posts in this thread. Front-loaded narrativism is not at all uncommon, and that appears to be where you were headed. (This is the idea that the referee is going to begin the game by introducing a situation in which a premise is strongly latent in the starting point, with the result that players playing completely in character will almost certainly have to address it.)

Joshua wrote:

MatrixGamer wrote: What about emotion and the simulationist agenda?

Fitting in, and having your interpretation of the source material or inspiration accepted by the others at the table.

timfire wrote:
Emotions are a red herring. You can't map emotions to any CA directly.