The inner world (knowledge, desires, fears, moral etc.) of characters plays crucial role in most litterature. In litterature the reader is often given access to these inner worlds by some stylistic means like omnicient narration or inner focalization of a person or stream of conciousness. Even if the inner world of the characters in not explicitly represented in the text we assume they have one and make sense of the fictional events on the grounds of these assumtions. Sometimes a story is like a puzzle where we try to understand why a character did something.

In RPGs the access to the inner world of characters is usually quite limited. Normally players have access only to the inner world of their own PCs and the GM only to the inner workings of the NPCs. Because reception and production are interconnected in RPGs (a player is both an author and an audience member), this usually means that only players are allowed to determine the inner workings of their PCs and only GMs have the power over the inner worlds of the NPCs. Players even can become very territorial if somebody else is trying to determine the inner world of their character(s). There are of course significant objections to this rule like the mechanical handling of fear and panic or personality mechanics or social skills which can override the power of the player but the scope of these mechanics is usually limited.

I'm interested in hearing how has the usual, stereotypical pattern been broken in your games and how did the group react. I'm interested both in the reception aspect and the production aspect of this. I'm interested both in mechanics and informal cases. It would also be interesting to speculate about the significanse of this inner world convention, in the case of the plot for example.

Hello Johannes,

Interesting topic. I've not been in a game where there were specific mechanics addressing the internal world of a character, but I did act on sharing it a bit in a fairly free-form (rules light) campaign in which I took part.

Every so often, when inspired, I would do a monologue about what my character was thinking/feeling. This character was the newbie to the setting (Ars Magica covenant) and was tangled up in a murder mystery and various other plotlines, so the internal musings may have functioned similarly to a narrator's reflections in mystery fiction. The other players didn't seem to mind. I didn't hog spotlight time or anything. Just took a moment here and there. But I don't necessarily remember anyone else doing the same thing.

I actually only remember it because another player comment how I did that with this character, but never did it with my other main character: who happened to be an insane, telepathic former-serial killer. :) Ain't gaming grand.

Hope that is of some assistance.

Regards,
Emily Care

Matt Snyder has been working on a game called Dreamspires which is, essentially, nothing but inner world issues. The whole thing seems to be a symbolic representation of the character's subconscious issues.

Now if Matt would only get to finishing it...

:-)

Also, the InSpectres "confessional" mechanic comes to mind as giving us insights in exactly the same manner that reality TV shows do.

Mike

Hello,

I'd also call attention to the games which set characters' own attributes in opposition with one another, as in some applications of Sorcerer, and very definitely in Le Mon Mouri.

Best,
Ron

I'd also like to point out that aside from literature, cinema and television are excellent media to look at in terms of showing "inner" issues without necessarily going into an internal monologue.

Most notably, in both media, characters are very vocal about how they feel, as well as very expressive. In terms of games, this is often skipped past for several reasons:

-Conflict and character are usually authored by the same person. In roleplaying, they are often handled by different folks. Conflict serves as an excellent way of defining a character's inner motivations(that "meaningful choice, if you will).

-Control over narrating how things go down is usually where important details that give away attitude, feeling, etc. are usually only in the hands of the GM.

-Scene framing solo scenes to let that kind of stuff play out is also usually solely in the hands of the GM far too often.

I think between these 3 issues, is the reason so many folks choose to simply hand narration control over to players, to solve the 3 simultaneously with minimal effort. The ability to define conflict, narrate the imaginary "cinematography" of it, and the ability to set up scenes where expression can play out, are all key towards giving more detail than the classic marvel comics, "Oh I hate you Fire-guy! You killed my family, blah,blah,blah!"

Chris

Bankuei wrote: I'd also like to point out that aside from literature, cinema and television are excellent media to look at in terms of showing "inner" issues without necessarily going into an internal monologue.

I know what camera trick you're speaking of, but unless you're with a bunch of cinema heads, its probably not going to fly well as a description in game. My recommendation is to stick to expression through character.

Some examples:

Exampleman (Sharp intake of breath) body goes lax, arms fall at side, object is dropped....(In order to do this, the player's body language can communicate a lot of the expression)

"Zoom in close on Exampleman's face!" (player's face is a look of utter shock)

Player closes eyes, head curls down into hands

A lot of emotional expression is best down by the player, and conveyed as the character. I'm not one of those folks who advocates jumping around and screaming as a roleplayer, but simple facial expressions and body expression can give so much more non-verbal communication. A lot of the non-verbal communication gets used as internal monologue in literature, turns into verbal communication in comics, but theatre, tv, and cinema it stays what it is: visual.

Chris

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: The camera trick was a method of communicating the inner emotion of the character and it did so in a manner particular to the medium of film.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Wraith: The Oblivion. I haven't played it, but Seth (Ben-Ezra) raves about it at times. In many of the World of Darkness games there are mechanics attempting to drive the inner conflict of the characters, but in Wraith this reaches the level that another player at the table plays that aspect of the character's personality which is in conflict with his preferred desires. I don't know more about it than that, but it sounds like a fascinating experiment.

The closest I've gotten is the letters and journals approach. That is, when the game session is over, players are encouraged to write in-character "records" of the experience in a variety of media appropriate to their characters. I've done reports to a liege, personal journals, letters to a distant sister, and similar writings myself. At the beginning of the next session these are read aloud. It helps bring all the players to the same page of the story, as it were, as it recalls what happened "in our last episode", from the characters' perspectives. (It has a lot of other benefits. It helps players flesh out characters, as they have to think in character between games to write from the character's perspective; it cues the referee on what players are enjoying, because those are the things that will wind up reported, in general. It also encourages creativity, particularly if different characters in the party see events from peculiar perspectives, such as the fighter who thinks he carries the day and the wizard who thinks the fighter is all bluster.) Within the pages of these journals, players often express character feelings and perceptions, worries and tensions, sometimes creating fragments of personal history and expanding who the character is, which might not have been apparent in play--but once so expressed can be played upon during play. I remember once writing a journal entry in which I told how the equivalent of my character's high school girlfriend was killed in a sports exhibition accident, and in which I mentioned two other friends of ours who also were involved in such exhibitions. It was not long after that that my character heard that one of those friends was staying in a very strange place a mere two to three days away from the city in which he was staying, and began wondering about whether to try to reestablish old connections. So it does work, that is, it can enhance and expand role playing by revealing inner character thoughts and feelings even in so limited a context which later become important to play generally.

As to the camera example, what would be wrong with

As you scan the water, suddenly your eyes fall upon a boy, a familiar boy, clearly in trouble. For a moment, the rest of the world fades from view, and all you see is this child, desperately in need of aid that you are not sure you can render.

Bankuei wrote: I know what camera trick you're speaking of, but unless you're with a bunch of cinema heads, its probably not going to fly well as a description in game.

Hi,

Interesting things have emerged. However I'd like to point on to a artificial but usefull distiction between direct access and indirect access. They are not actually separate categories but opposing poles in a continuum. Here's my definitions:

Direct access: audience (the players) can trust the information they recieve - given that the narrator is reliable (not lying or mistaken). The information is absolute in a sense. Inner monologue falls pretty much into this group. I'd also put the camera example towards this end. Also "My guy is pissed of." phrases during the game fall into this.

Indirect access: audience can trust the information they recieve to the extent that their own interpretations of it are right. Reasoning the emotions of character from its behavior falls into this.

The in-game journals and such fall somewhere between.

The idea of mediums representing inner worlds in their own unique ways is interesting but I'm having trouble coming up with RPG examples. Perhaps the mechanical representation of personality and emotion (see my opening post) is such a thing. I personally usually find these mechanics just annoying.

I think that there are at least two more issues that hinder the development of inner world representation in RPGs.

First, the players have unlimited access to their own characters. Because the players already know the inner world of their characters they don't bother with its representation. It's enough that it affects the behavior of the character.

Second, the direct representation of inner world gives the player information that the characters don't have (unless they are telepaths :-). This is against the common ideal that players as audience should be limited to the PoV of their characters which is thought to simulate reality well. Giving direct access brakes the illusion of real life.

EDIT: I forgot to write that I think that indirect access is well developped in RPGs but direct access is not. My original interest was with direct access but all insights on any access are wellcome.

Johannes wrote: The idea of mediums representing inner worlds in their own unique ways is interesting but I'm having trouble coming up with RPG examples.

I think that there are at least two more issues that hinder the development of inner world representation in RPGs.

First, the players have unlimited access to their own characters. Because the players already know the inner world of their characters they don't bother with its representation. It's enough that it affects the behavior of the character.

Second, the direct representation of inner world gives the player information that the characters don't have (unless they are telepaths :-). This is against the common ideal that players as audience should be limited to the PoV of their characters which is thought to simulate reality well. Giving direct access brakes the illusion of real life.

I highly suspect that traditional oral history/storytelling probably has a good handle on the usage of oral description and communications that we're looking for. The problem is, we, as a written language culture, have moved away from the intimate familiarity in those tools.

Second, our visual culture is no longer based off of "real time" observables. Mentally, we have a whole new visual language of cuts, zooms, slow mo, sped up action, spin around matrix images, etc. Instead of comparing things to nature, we compare to movies, videos, tv shows, videogames etc. This area still has yet to define a common language(for the non-cinematographers, anyway).

While I doubt narration-wise("describing what happens") is much different than oral storytelling, I do know that our communal language of describing how it happens has certainly changed.

Chris

If your game foregrounds internal conflict issues (e.g. Sorcerer, apparently Wraith, etc.), one way to encourage internal narrative focus would be to stress the division between inside and outside. Suppose, for example, that you had a Sorcerer campaign in which all the PCs are apparently very stereotypical: pulp heroes, for example, or something of the kind. So upon meeting another sorcerer, you immediately know what he's supposed to be like. The thing is, as the game goes on you begin to discover that this guy does not always act as he should -- because of his demon(s). So part of the object of character interaction is to find out what's going on behind the mask.

This is a central design concept for my game Shadows in the Fog: every character has a mask, and pretty much tries to maintain the mask. As the other characters get to know him better, though, they begin to learn about what's behind the mask, and why he keeps it hidden.

Jack Spencer Jr wrote:
Perhaps there is no unique feature to RPGs but instead RPG is a unique collection or pre-existing features? Film is unique because of a technological development-- the motion picture camera. RPGs have not such development.

Were the examples that Ron and I posted not on topic?

Mike

I have been working again on The Court of 9 Chambers recently, trying to get a playtest PDF written up (I have some willing players,) plus I have been watching Godard and Truffaut for some background ideas, plus working on some animation projects, so I've been thinking a lot about camera movement, portraying inner character with external behavior, and many of the other subtopics bobbing around in this thread.

first, although actual camera angles aren't useful in an RPG (unless playing with cinemaphiles, as Chris mentioned,) you can study camera techniques to see what they actually do in order to translate the effect into an RPG. one comment I came across in another forum (for machinima, not RPGs) mentioned that the intensity of emotion in a shot is governed by how much an action fills the screen, while the focus of the shot is likewise determined by what's on screen. close-ups are used for reaction shots because the relevant action -- the character's reaction -- is thus made the focus of the shot and fills the screen.

second: this, really, is all that you can really translate from camera shots into RPGs: what action is "on the screen" and how long/how detailed that action is. it's a technique you can actually see in old medieval literature, especially things like the scottish border ballads. my middle english prof referred to it as "leaping and lingering". describe just a character's eyes and their changing expression to convey an emotion; gloss over a combat and focus on a death scene, as someone has already mentioned. anyone narrating could do this in the game to convey shifts in internal emotion.

other effects, as suggested, would involve inserting a lot of "color" into the scene. uniform color choices would clearly label the mood or meaning of a scene, while conflicting choices make the mood less certain... or paint an image of an actual conflict of moods. in Co9C as it stands now, this has become the actual game mechanic: players pit color against color, motif against motif, in an attempt to dominate a scene and thus move closer to their goal.

and, yes, actually labeling assigning numbers or game mechanics to moods or other inner issues is another important technique. Sorcerer (as Ron has stated) tends to cause actual play to reflect inner character issues because stats representing those issues are the most important mechanic in the game. and although I haven't seen InSpecters yet, the description of the confessional definitely sounds like it is combining inner character issue mechanics with an adaptation of a film/television technique (the cutaway.)

still, there's a caveat: some of the examples I've seen floated in this thread of using film technique tread pretty close on "GM tells player what player's character feels". I think the player should decide what the character feels. the GM -- or anyone else narrating -- can only present a description and hope that the player is affected in the desired manner.

Mike Holmes wrote: Were the examples that Ron and I posted not on topic?

Mike

Bankuei wrote: I highly suspect that traditional oral history/storytelling probably has a good handle on the usage of oral description and communications that we're looking for. The problem is, we, as a written language culture, have moved away from the intimate familiarity in those tools.
--
While I doubt narration-wise("describing what happens") is much different than oral storytelling, I do know that our communal language of describing how it happens has certainly changed.

Johannes wrote: [I assume that your examples were very much on topic but my problem is that I don't know the games. Short synopsis of the inner world ideas could be useful.

Hi Mike,

This definetly is the sort of thing I mean. Thanks for the explanations. All are clearly examples of inner world access. I have couple questions about them if you don't mind.

What is the position of the PCs in Dreamspires? Is the inner world which the PCs inhabit an outer world when related to them or is the inner world inhaited by them aslo the inner world of the PCs? Or is the position something else? I know this sounds confusing but this is the simplest way I manage to put it. I'm trying to determine if it is the inner world of the PCs which is given access to or is it an inner world as outer world (setting) thing.

Is it a convention (or rule) in Inspectres that the confessional narration is reliable? In other words, can the confession makers lie or make mistakes about the reality of the game world or is information given in confession absolute? I'm looking for clues to decide if this is more direct or indirect access.

Johannes wrote: What is the position of the PCs in Dreamspires? Is the inner world which the PCs inhabit an outer world when related to them or is the inner world inhaited by them aslo the inner world of the PCs? Or is the position something else? I know this sounds confusing but this is the simplest way I manage to put it. I'm trying to determine if it is the inner world of the PCs which is given access to or is it an inner world as outer world (setting) thing.

Is it a convention (or rule) in Inspectres that the confessional narration is reliable? In other words, can the confession makers lie or make mistakes about the reality of the game world or is information given in confession absolute? I'm looking for clues to decide if this is more direct or indirect access.

I think Mike's description of the InSpectres confessional is consistent with the dramatic "aside," in which a character steps aside and addresses the audience directly. It seems to me that this device could be more widely used where inner narrative is important. But I'm not sure that it is generally the case that such narratives -- subjectivity, really -- are always important or essential. Surely that's a stylistic choice? I usually see interior narratives being implied through action, with relatively little strong variance between the two.

Hi Mike,

Thanks again for your explanations they were just the thing I wanted to know. In Dreamspires it was important to me to hear that the in-game stuff represent the real world concerns of the PCs. This IMO makes it a radical case of direct access to the inner world of PCs (which usually is left to indirect access). Sounds like a cool if demanding game. Are players (as opposed to a GM) given authorial power in Dreamspires? This would make it even more radical I guess.

Your description of InSpectres is reliable narration to me. If the confessions affect the in-game reality theyy can be considered to tell the truth about it. At least by producing the reality by telling it. By reliability of narration I don't mean the honesty of the actual player. My concern was that are the confessionals sililar to Real-TV-confessional in that you cannot really trust them to describe the reality in an "objective" manner. Now it seems to me that the InSpectres confessionals are different. The difference is one of direct/indirect access.

Hi clerich,

I agree that direct representation of inner worlds is not always important or even desirable. It is a stylistic choice as you say. Like everything in RPGs it depends on the game and the story being told by it. But I think that it is important to make visible also this choice so that one more "truth" of the "right" way to play is relativized.

Johannes wrote: In Dreamspires it was important to me to hear that the in-game stuff represent the real world concerns of the PCs. This IMO makes it a radical case of direct access to the inner world of PCs (which usually is left to indirect access). Sounds like a cool if demanding game. Are players (as opposed to a GM) given authorial power in Dreamspires?

Your description of InSpectres is reliable narration to me. If the confessions affect the in-game reality theyy can be considered to tell the truth about it. At least by producing the reality by telling it. By reliability of narration I don't mean the honesty of the actual player. My concern was that are the confessionals sililar to Real-TV-confessional in that you cannot really trust them to describe the reality in an "objective" manner. Now it seems to me that the InSpectres confessionals are different. The difference is one of direct/indirect access.

Johannes wrote: Is it a convention (or rule) in Inspectres that the confessional narration is reliable? In other words, can the confession makers lie or make mistakes about the reality of the game world or is information given in confession absolute? I'm looking for clues to decide if this is more direct or indirect access.

Hi Jared,

InSpectres sounds like a interesting mix of reliable and unreliable narration. As it looks to me the confessions are just as reliable as the characters who is speaking (potentially unreliable, indirect access, just like real-TV confessions) BUT the confessions mechanically create in-game reality (Bob is mean in Mike's example) which is a case of reliability. However I cannot decide if it's a case of direct access also as it concerns the outer world of the character as well as the subjective perception of the confesser.

How stable is in-game reality in InSpectres? Can one confession make Bob mean and a later confession make him nice again?

Johannes wrote: How stable is in-game reality in InSpectres? Can one confession make Bob mean and a later confession make him nice again?

Jared A. Sorensen wrote: So while Mike can *say* my character is mean, I can just shrug it off and not play along if I choose.

Mike Holmes wrote: Which would have been funny, and would make Jared's point. Essentially, the only thing that the confessional does is change continuity, but not in a way that the character can't be a liar, just as in "normal" play.

Complex.

OK. So it is a peculiar case of indirect access which can have an impact on the in-game reality or not. It's up to the players but the systems encourages it to have the impact. Am I right here?

This is a interesting technique which has a name in literary theory: narrative metalepsis. That is discourse that is spoken across the borders of levels of reality/discourse. Fictional characters speaking to the narrator or implied reader or narrator speaking to the characters or implied reader etc.

In RPGs it has tremendous potential which is illustrated by InSpectres: Narrative metalepsis can affect the work in progress. This is of course very different from printed media where the story is already set and the metalepsis in one-way so to speak. In a book metalepsis is a communicative metafictional techinque butr in RPGs it's a creative/productive meta-game technique.

Avant-garde postmodern litterature is childs play compared to this. Damn I love these games! Isn't it interesting that the greatest leaps in story-telling are happening in an unprestigeous subculture and not in the high circles of "art"? Grass roots movement of gamers is subverting the pompous cultural snob intitutions of art in a carnival of new narrative. Forget the "postmodern"! Forget the hypertext! This is where it is happening. Kill the audience/artist dichotomy! Gamers of the world unite againts the opression of ... of .. - well unite anyway!