These discussions on Sim and Zilchplay have had a weird effect on my thinking.

The basic question that GNS puts to you, or put to me anyway, is: what do you want out of your gaming?

Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism are three good answers to this question. These are things that motivate real people to play role-playing games, and getting them satisfied is a big part of what's fun about this hobby. So all good there.

Some have protested, however, that they're non-exhaustive. That's interesting enough by itself. One view of why they're non-exhaustive, asI understand it, is as follows. Let's say individual decisions at the table tend to be interpretable as serving one of these three things. The broad tendency of the decisions being made tells you something about what the players in that game have. In addition to 'straight' tendencies, we have an 'incoherent' tendency, where multiple kinds of player-goal are being expressed at once. There are a lot of bad forms of incoherence (the hard-Sim GM vs. the Gam or Nar-inclined players is one that gets explored a lot here as particularly destructive, and Ron has tons of great examples of other kinds in his essays).

On the other hand, some people like incoherent play. Some of this is due to ignorance of other possibilities, but presumably not all.

One way to manage incoherent play that's been explored under the heading of 'Zilchplay' is the idea that you're not going to let the game intensify along any particular axis. That is, you're going to continue to make local decisions according to whatever creative agenda strikes your fancy at the moment, and intervene negatively whenever the game starts focusing too hard on G, N, or S. This is what I was calling 'casual play' in another thread, and some people do play this way.

On the other hand, if people enjoy this, we need to say something about what sort of desire such play satisfies. The idea that there are individual decisions made which satisfy no creative agenda makes no sense to me, since I believe that most human action is motivated by some sort of desire. What's the desire that motivates this kind of play?

One proposal, which I'm currently rather attracted to, is that the desire that's being satisfied is a desire to be social and hang out with friends; to engage in a low-intensity sort of interaction that facilitates social gathering.

Now, sometimes it's been suggested that this is 'outside the game', or that this is a game-external desire that people satisfy through roleplaying, in the way that one might use a roleplaying text to satisfy one's desire to scratch an itch on one's back.

It seems to me that, since roleplaying is a social activity, this seems misleading.

Rather, why not take Interest in the Social Space that Surrounds the Game as a fourth sort of creative agenda? And design games that facilitate it?

In fact, I think that some such design is already going on around the Forge - game design specifically designed to facilitate certain kinds of social interaction between the players. Some possible examples include Universalis' in-game regimenting of Social Contract issues and Sex and Sorcery's bringing the gender of the players into the game as game-mechanically relevant. Ethan Greer's anxiety disorder game and James West's gender role game over in the Indie Game Design threads might be other examples.

One can certainly imagine using all of these to facilitate a particular form of social interaction between the players: exploration of shared imaginative space is undertaken in order to do something to the real-world social interactions between the people.

This seems at least prima facie to be both a separate mode in the sense of addressing a fourth desire-type that people bring to the gaming table, and in the sense that one could design games - games that might be quite popular with non-gamers, I would think - specifically to facilitate this sort of social interaction, choosing that facilitation over the facilitation of G, N, or S desires.

Since S is already taken for Simulationism, I propose X for the new mode, if this analysis holds up, to distinguish it from the proposed Zilchplay, Omniplay, and Casual Play monickers that have come up discussing this issue in other threads.

What do people think? Does this analysis hold up?

Makes sense to me, but I'm not yet a fully-developed theorist. :)

I have to admit, I never fully understood why the social aspect of games is kept seperate from the creative aspects. I think most of the people I use to role-play with did it for social reasons more than anything else.

Hello,

I'm a little confused - Sean, are you not seeing that the Creative Agenda level of my model is included within and subsumed by the Social Contract level? Therefore any Creative Agenda is, ipso facto, a social agenda?

It seems to me that you're looking at a single level of the model, not seeing aspects of stuff that are in other levels (some of which include the one you're looking at), and wondering why they're not there. When, because the stuff you're looking for is in an "enclosing box," it is, in fact, there.

Best,
Ron

Sean,

While I certainly support the notion that what are generally called Social Contract issues are often in effect addressed in-game, that is at the Creative Agenda (or lower) level, I think that to formulate an alternative CA would sort of turn GNS -- or rather, the Big Model -- inside-out.

The Big Model, as you know, is formulated hierarchically, with Social Contract at the top and CA about halfway down. If you now make Social Contract and its effects an object of a form of CA, the whole hierarchy structure starts to shake. In point of fact, Zilchplay as a CA also has this effect, because it makes the levels immediately up and down from CA interdependent without clear dominance.

I think you're absolutely right about social focus, purpose, and agenda. But I think that to incorporate this into the Big Model is going to make that model horrendously complicated for a small gain. I mean, people complain about its complexity as it is; to drastically involute the model simply to incorporate a mode of play and interaction not usually privileged strikes me as destructive.

In short, I think that if you're going to focus on the ways social interactions and goals function and interweave in RPG's, you're not going to find the Big Model, or the GNS part of it, terribly useful except for preliminary classification purposes. I would actually quite like to see a social-function model developed, but in the end I don't think it's going to look much like the Big Model.

Just my suspicion, here, but (as you may know from the Ritual essay) it's something I've been contemplating for a while.

Chris Lehrich

Well, as far as I can see, it is in the model, there at the top, before you get to anything rmeotely resembling role playing: Social Contract. Where are we, who are we, how do we behave...

And from that, you hit exploration, where this group effort is directed towards exploring a role play system / setting / situation / colour through characters.

So it's there as the big foundation of things "before"* we get any more fixed aim in the form of an agenda. Now, in my experience, you can have a group bimbling around this bit for extended periods of time.... but it bugs the shit out of folks who have an agenda even more than the folks with a conflicting agenda do.

Yes, I'm talking about me, usually as a GM, getting the hell bugged out of myself about the group not "getting anything done this week."

And, like most aspects of "problems" as defined by the theory, it's a problem only as long as those involved are dissatisfied by leaving the game at the exploration level without developing an agenda: if, as in many sessions, the primary purpose of the game was to get friends over to my place once a week, it's no biggy if we do low grade exploration without recognisable challenge or change of situtation. Obviously, though, too many weeks of these, and we start to ask "why do we bother coming over," and we break the land speed record for a given heroquest adventure. Which gives us enough forward inertia to continue through another few weeks of "zilch play."

Could you find low-level CA at work in our zilchplay? Sure, with a flashlight and rubber gloves... a little establishment of premise here, a bit of additional backstory there, an occassional ramble about tactical use of abilities... but without the table pounding "hell, yes"-ness that grabs us on good play nights, what's the point of looking?

(looks down: cross posting with Ron...)

So I'm saying.... you're describing play right at that point before it gets a point with an agenda. The fact we've got a bunch of new words doesn't change the fact that this play was lurking in the model all along. I hope my practical experiences have helped clarify that bit of the model.

* please note: "before" doesn't imply you "must" develop through zilch play until you "discover" or "define" your agenda. If your social contract starts out as "this game, this way, for this reason", you got your CA, and there's little room for "social play" without CA. But, as Ron says, CA guided play, as most play is, is still socially guided play, but not just for the purpose of "hanging out." But, from my PoV anyway, analysis of zilchplay, just hanging out play, is ultimately uninteresting from the PoV of an analyst of players and games and a prospective designer, because it's at this point that, pace Ron, system does not matter. By which I mean, quite literally, it doesn't matter what you're nominally exploring, you may as well not be exploring anything for the contributions it's making to the fulfillment of Social Contract.

{edit: cross posted with Chris}
Hmmm... while I'd be kind of interested in seeing work on zilchplay as a part of the phenomenon of role-playing as a socializing past time or mode of social identification, or evne social ritual (as opposed to a social creative endeavour), it's at the same level for me as studying writing circles that never write anything, just meet and talk about what they're going to write. As a person interested in people, great. As a wannabe writer... I think I'd do better looking at writers who write.

pete_darby wrote: * please note: "before" doesn't imply you "must" develop through zilch play until you "discover" or "define" your agenda. If your social contract starts out as "this game, this way, for this reason", you got your CA, and there's little room for "social play" without CA. But, as Ron says, CA guided play, as most play is, is still socially guided play, but not just for the purpose of "hanging out." But, from my PoV anyway, analysis of zilchplay, just hanging out play, is ultimately uninteresting from the PoV of an analyst of players and games and a prospective designer, because it's at this point that, pace Ron, system does not matter. By which I mean, quite literally, it doesn't matter what you're nominally exploring, you may as well not be exploring anything for the contributions it's making to the fulfillment of Social Contract.

{edit: cross posted with Chris}
Hmmm... while I'd be kind of interested in seeing work on zilchplay as a part of the phenomenon of role-playing as a socializing past time or mode of social identification, or evne social ritual (as opposed to a social creative endeavour), it's at the same level for me as studying writing circles that never write anything, just meet and talk about what they're going to write. As a person interested in people, great. As a wannabe writer... I think I'd do better looking at writers who write.

OK. Real quick-like for now. (Which means that there are several sentences below which are in the form of assertions that ought to be in the form of questions.)

The social contract is the agreement, formal or informal, open to renegotiation or otherwise, that a given role-playing group comes to about what they're going to be doing.

Exploration is what they're doing: exploration of shared imaginative space.

The creative agenda is what they're trying to get out of what they're doing: the desires that they want to get met through play, conscious or unconscious.

If that's right, what I'm asking about in this thread is as follows - with the understanding that I'm caricaturing a little bit. Gamists want to get their Step on Up on. Simulationists want to get their Dream on. Narrativists want to get some Story on, which, according to the dominant version of the theory anyway, means addressing morally-charged Premise through play.

In the Zilchplay discussions we're confronted with people who want to role-play who don't want to get any of this on to the exclusion of the other two.

The question is: what do the Zilchplayers want, then?

I am totally unsatisfied with a theory that just says they want to bop around without any purpose whatsoever. (This is not what GNS says, but it does seem implied by some remarks on Zilchplay, though not ones I would actually attribute to any of its current defenders (by whom I mean Jay and Walt in particular).) So there are a couple options here:

1) They want it all, or two of the three, now. This is standard incoherence. Insert discussions about fun through incoherence vs. the dead hand of role-playing history, the possibility of getting your needs met in more satisfying ways by intense focus play vs. the way some enjoyable long-term games rely on a social contract which permits and facilitates congruent drift, the viability of that in turn as a general strategy for your typical RPG group, etc. etc. here. That's not what I'm on about in this thread.

2) They want something else out of their play. What is it?

My proposal, such as it is, and please keep in mind that I'm really trying to sort out my own thoughts here with a group of people I greatly respect, is that the 'something else' is social interaction with a peer group. Step on Up is one form of such interaction, as is shared Dream or Narrative activity. But they don't exhaust what people want out of their social interactions.

Or put another way: what are the elements of a role-playing game? The basic list includes setting, situation, character, system, and color. These are the elements of the shared imaginative space of the game. Well then, here are two more: the real world, just as it is and as we know it; and the people sitting down to play that particular game itself, just as they are and as we know them.

Of course we learn about those people by sharing G, N, or S, or incoherent, role-playing experiences with them. They're part of what's going on around the table. But - and here's the thing - ramped-up intensity in an RPG, it seems to me, could also focus on the exploring of just these people and the relationships between them. The RPG still has all the same elements, still has the little-g, little-s, and little-n moments that contribute to the big picture; but it also has little-x moments, moments where decisions in play are being made specifically to find out more about the real people who are involved in playing the game.

If this model is right, then, for example, I would interpret the rules variants in Sex and Sorcery as little-x in service of big-N, just as one might interpret the intense realism of The Riddle of Steel's combat system as little-s in service of big-N. Why? In Riddle of Steel as I understand it, the moments are there and being harnessed, but they are not serving a big-S goal.

The question of this thread is: why couldn't you write and design an RPG with a specifically big-X goal in mind? I don't know of a game like this offhand, but I do know that there are a lot of 'truth or dare' type boardgames and party games out there, where the purpose of the game is pretty clearly to get to know the actual people around you in the room, to test their borders and boundaries, and so on.

My proposal is that role-playing games could easily and effectively be adopted to serve this very function, where the shared imaginative space of the game is marshalled towards focusing on big-X ends: on exploring the people you are playing the game with and learning something about each other. I don't know of a published RPG that has explicitly aimed in this direction, though some of the text in Sex and Sorcery suggests it here and there. On the other hand, if we envision Ethan's imagined play situation in the anxiety disorder game, with a GM who has suffered from anxiety disorder and a player who has not, it seems pretty clearly like the orientation of this game would be big-X in character. Yeah, you might play it as big-S, trying to feel what it's like to be a person with anxiety disorder; but it seems to me that the real interest of the game is to let the player find out what it's like to be the GM of that game. That is, the creative agenda is to explore that person across the table from you, and the various gamist, simulationist, and narrativist moments of the game itself, insofar as there are any, are being marshalled in service of that creative agenda.

OK - I guess that wasn't real quick-like after all. But anyway, that's what I had in mind here. If this already fits in somewhere else in GNS, great.

Just a quick add on (really real quick this time!):

It may be useful to think about big-X in relationship to LARPing - has Jay been mentioning this for quite a while now, or am I mistaken? It seems to me that much LARP play has a big-X creative agenda, though whether LARP rules thus far have done much to facilitate this I question.

Some people may want to play a game to explore the participants and the micro-community they construct together. How can a game help fulfill this desire? How can RPGs in particular help fulfill this desire?

This is going to be a rather disjointed scattershot response to a lot of things in this thread.

We have actually discussed this idea before, of social motivation for role play; my search-fu is not particularly good, and I can't think of any good words to seek (social, obviously, is everywhere), but I recall a couple of key points.

The theory seems to suggest that people role play for no other reason than to be together. So, then, why do they role play? That is, why don't they do something else together? People watch movies to be together; they play miniature golf, board games, card games; they do cocktail parties and dances and mixers, laced with parlor games and vapid conversations (oops--my prejudices are showing). What is gained specifically by role playing? Why are we doing this?

The answer seems to be that someone is enjoying the activity itself (even if not everyone is doing so). That someone must be defining the creative agendum of the game--he wants something from this, and he is seeking to get it by playing in a way that facilitates that.

So, what is everyone else doing? Zilchplay? No, not necessarily.

One of the examples that was raised in the other thread is the idea of Bob's girlfriend playing because Bob likes to play, and she doesn't really care and doesn't have a creative agendum of her own, but she plays to support what he likes about the game. This led to the suggestion that there was active and passive (if I remember the terms correctly) address of agenda. Referees frequently take the passive side: their interest is in facilitating play by the others. Some drive play, others facilitate; but the question is still about what sort of play is being driven and facilitative. The active gamist player is trying to show what he can do, testing himself against the scenario; the passive gamist referee is trying to provide tests against which the players can shine. The passive gamist player is doing the same thing: facilitating gamist play by others in the game.

I would think that if everyone is there just to spend time together, and no one has a creative agendum, then no one particularly wants to play a role playing game. In that case, the game is going to end, because no one is getting anything out of it that they couldn't get out of talking over a couple of beers.

Now, Sean has raised an interesting point that I don't think was considered on that thread: role playing games can be a way of learning about each other. However, I think it begs the question. What do we want to know about each other? If we're trying to learn about each other's values and beliefs, we're going to push ourselves into narrativist play, because it is through narrativist address of premise that we are given opportunity to explore values and beliefs. Gamist and simulationist play reveal different things about us to each other. In fact, simply discovering someone's default creative agendum probably tells you a fair amount about that person. Play completely devoid of an agendum would tell you nothing; you would be back to sitting around drinking beer and shooting the breeze.

So I think that this social target CA is not a CA at all, but a reason to have a CA.

--M. J. Young

MJ wrote:

"What is gained specifically by role playing? Why are we doing this?"

I considered this question, but decided it was not a knock-down against X because it is not a knock-down against G. You can get your Step on Up on lots of ways besides through RPGs. (This is one of Ron's 'Gamist Hard Questions - why this form?)

Similarly with S by the way. N raises the bar higher - why this creative art form for addressing premise rather than one which can be shared (at least much more easily) with a wide group of people. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, the Narrativist has an answer which to my mind the Simulationist and Gamist lack: most art forms which address Premise/produce story are solitary. Narrativist role-playing is one of the very few venues in which a group of people can do this together.

So maybe N's in a better boat than X on this vector, but if S and G aren't, that's not a convincing answer to the question.

As far as subordinating what you're trying to learn about each other to mode, that's a more interesting suggestion. It bears a striking parallel, in fact, to the vanilla vs. pervy distinction - where Exploration of System is a subordinate but essential contributor to the game's GNS agenda, the game is pervy, and where not, vanilla.

If this turns out to be the right way of thinking about this then all we need is a name to signal whether a game thematizes the people playing it in some way, as we do with the vanilla/pervy distinction.

However, I'm not so sure this analysis is the end of the story. Because the reason I'm persuaded that vanilla vs. pervy is properly speaking a different sort of categorization within the big model, rather than a new mode, is that I can't imagine a game that would just be exploration of system in the absence of any other agenda. I mean, OK, I can imagine people doing such a thing, but it would be mathematics or anthropology (or just learning the system) rather than game-playing proper. And if you started playing the game on the basis of this exploration, then you'd have picked up a creative agenda in the process.

Whereas I think people do explicitly pursue, through their game play, exploration of the people that they're playing with, and this seems at least plausibly to be an entirely different sort of focus for play, and one which someone might well pursue independently of G, N, or S.

Just a comment on this: two of the more enjoyable games I ever ran were

(a) an old Avalon Hill game called Lords of Creation (Del was in this one), where everyone played themselves straight up, trying to stop John Cthulhu from being elected US president.

(b) 'new basic' D&D, with everyone going blind stats (playing their character off description - if only I'd had the foggiest damn idea that you could play this way without hiding the stats from the players back in '90!). I made the characters based pretty nakedly on my impressions of the various people playing as human beings, sort of prettied up because it was fantasy, but basically them. (The point of blind stats was to eliminate perviness from play, BTW, though I didn't have that term then.)

I submit that part of what made both these games really good was that the people who were playing them were excited about exploring themselves by way of the imaginative territory. This is safer than exploring each other this way, but the point here is that it seems like it could be something different. These two particular games might just have been Sim or Nar with a weird twist, too, but I need to think about it more before I agree to that analysis as a general one for the whole 'social mode'.

Sean wrote: It may be useful to think about big-X in relationship to LARPing - has Jay been mentioning this for quite a while now, or am I mistaken?

Sean wrote: MJ wrote:

"What is gained specifically by role playing? Why are we doing this?"

I considered this question, but decided it was not a knock-down against X because it is not a knock-down against G. You can get your Step on Up on lots of ways besides through RPGs. (This is one of Ron's 'Gamist Hard Questions - why this form?)

Similarly with S by the way. N raises the bar higher - why this creative art form for addressing premise rather than one which can be shared (at least much more easily) with a wide group of people.

Sean then wrote: I can't imagine a game that would just be exploration of system in the absence of any other agenda. I mean, OK, I can imagine people doing such a thing, but it would be mathematics or anthropology (or just learning the system) rather than game-playing proper. And if you started playing the game on the basis of this exploration, then you'd have picked up a creative agenda in the process.

Also, Sean wrote: I submit that part of what made both these games really good was that the people who were playing them were excited about exploring themselves by way of the imaginative territory.

M. J. Young wrote: Why couldn't exploring the way the system works be the creative agendum?

Hi Jay,

I think you and M.J. are splitting hairs, and that only arises when the discussion strays from actual play.

Let's see a person "Exploring System" as M.J. names it, and a person adding value to Exploring System as you're naming it. I'll betcher boots you're both saying the same thing.

Bob is playing, um, GURPS. He and the rest of the group take great joy in finding the various tables, sourcebooks, and concepts that permit them to know that (a) his howizter is fired at a time that makes sense relative to the other events going on, (b) its accuracy and extent-of=damage are correct for its time for that historical period on that planet, and (c) that the damage itself is commensurate with expectations regarding the body armor of the targets that are caught in the explosion.

This took effort. It took communication. And it sure as hell required more than one person at the table to be interested. And if this kind of interest turns out to be what floats this group's boat most - i.e., this was a "payoff" moment in social and creative terms - that I think I'm satisfied that it's a value-added situation.

Again, I'll betcher boots that you and M.J. are referring to this same sort of event and unnecessarily tugging over a vague "it" that properly belongs to you both.

Actual play, guys - it always solves this sorts of debates.

Best,
Ron

I have more to say on this topic, but not now.

Just wanted to reply to MJ on one thing in the meantime - I was not making a value judgment when I wrote the bit you quoted. I may have said something false, but in general I think it's probably bad policy to accuse others of making value judgments when they say false things. If a group of people can sit around a table and be roleplaying with Focus on Exploration of System - which they can in some sense probably, see for example the recommendation that you play TRoS first with a 'practice character' so you can get used to the combat system before playing 'for real' - then that's a valid way of playing. I tend to think of such play as 'learning runs', but there's no reason they'd have to be, and I suppose actually one of the joys of genuinely loopy systems like Palladium and Hackmaster (taken from open-ended, non official OD&D and AD&D, West Coast style) is that there's essentially endless Exploration of System possible. What that means for GNS I don't know - maybe nothing. Actually, I think what we're talking about here with focus on exploration of system is just Sim play, pretty straightforwardly, but my reasons for saying that will have to wait too.

MJ, I get paid to have my ideas shot down every day, and have a great respect for you and your posts here - I don't at all mind losing an argument to a person and thinker of your evident quality. (Actually, I don't mind losing arguments to anyone, because that's how you learn and get smarter.) Go ahead and take my stuff apart all you want - I'm flattered that you spend the time on it. But please don't accuse me of making value judgments - I consider that essentially to be an accusation of intellectual dishonesty on your part, and whatever I am, I at least try very hard not to be intellectually dishonest. I think you are right that what I said in that particular snippet was false, but could I persuade you to simply point out my error, rather than psychologizing my motives in making it? I promise you that all I had in mind was the way people 'play around' with games to learn the rules, and so generalized from that to the supposition that if you're just experimenting or reading a rulebook, you're still testing the waters, not playing. I was right about what I had in mind just then, but made a false generalization. I promise you I don't have an agenda for how people ought to be playing here and hope that in the future you can just tear apart my bad ideas without the other stuff.

Good enough as points, Sean. M.J., I trust you're all right with that.

Um, lemme know through private-message when this seems to happen, OK? Third-party mediation is a good thing.

Best,
Ron

Sure thing, Ron. No offense intended, MJ, and I meant everything I said about my respect for your opinions and character, at least as I know them through this board. I thought twice before posting that, but this general kind of thing seems to happen and generate bad feelings both here and on other boards from time to time, and I thought it was worth confronting directly.

By the way, MJ, I'd like also to apologize to you if my post seems like an overreaction. It may be that it just seemed obvious from where you were sitting that I was making a value judgment - impossible to interpret my words in any other way - and if so, then I understand completely where you were coming from. In that case, I ask you to please forgive anything overly aggressive in my reply, and simply take my word for it that that's not where I was going with that particular remark.

Collegially yours,

Sean

who will now get back to work, and return to this thread when he has time to explain what else he's thinking along these lines.

P.S. Apologies also to Jay for misattributing to him the point about LARPing - I'll go do some thread hunting and figure out who I was thinking of instead.

Heya Ron,

Ron Edwards wrote: Let's see a person "Exploring System" as M.J. names it, and a person adding value to Exploring System as you're naming it. I'll betcher boots you're both saying the same thing.
Bob is playing, um, GURPS. He and the rest of the group take great joy in finding the various tables, sourcebooks, and concepts that permit them to know that (a) his howizter is fired at a time that makes sense relative to the other events going on, (b) its accuracy and extent-of damage are correct for its time for that historical period on that planet, and (c) that the damage itself is commensurate with expectations regarding the body armor of the targets that are caught in the explosion.
This took effort. It took communication. And it sure as hell required more than one person at the table to be interested. And if this kind of interest turns out to be what floats this group's boat most - i.e., this was a "payoff" moment in social and creative terms - that I think I'm satisfied that it's a value-added situation.

I apologize, Sean, if I misinterpreted your words. The passage I quoted really sounded to me as if it said, "Exploration of system is impossible as a creative agendum; if you were doing that, you wouldn't really be playing, and if you really started playing, you would automatically move into another creative agendum."

I know I've written some things that were not at all what I meant, and that I've put some things badly enough that when they were quoted back to me I was shocked that I'd said anything remotely like what they heard--but there it was, in black and white. Anyway, getting called on those lets me fix the miscommunication, so that's a good thing.

And whenever I read anyone saying that such-and-such isn't really playing, the little bells go off.

Which worries me, because over on zplay - liberating Sim and embarrassing Exploration! (I hope that's where it was) I just declared that Zilchplay does not exist because it is not exploration, so someone might be hitting me with the same response before I get back here tomorrow.

However, to Jay, that's my response to anything regarding zilchplay at the moment: I don't think it exists.

(Like the ROUS, I'm sure.)

--M. J. Young

One question I think is missing from the social mode constructions is the following: why RPG?

I would suggest that the classic poker night probably discounts the gamist CA, as it were, in favour of "hanging out" mode. I grant that engaging in a low-confrontation social pastime as an excuse/vehicle for hanging out is perfectly reasonable. But, why then should any given group or individual choose this particular form of entertainment?

At a cursory glance, this migt imply there is one person with a strong interest and others who are just along for the ride. But, overall, I don;t see think that the prposed social mode falls with the remit of RPG so much as within the much broader social contract between the people.

Silmenume wrote: I’ll give a congruent example.
[Two people taking turns reading fiction at each other.]

Social mode, eh? I seen it. I'm somewhat nervous about trying to bring up too many RPGs in my group of friends; it's not the dominant activity, and it's associated with very time/focus/emotion-intensive campaigns and the like. The baggage associated with RPG is "major investment", and the college kids are skittish enough about commitment as is. So what then?

In part as a "pressure valve" for myself, I've ended up doing what could be considered a Social Mode, perhaps. An interesting example was when I introduced Donjon to some folks (and they loved it). I don't feel that heavy Nar or Sim was going on (there was certainly too much OOC/self-conscious joking, which fit the mood); there was a Gamist element, but I don't feel that it dominated. The atmosphere was exploring these Kewl New Rules I brought over, trying out the adventure, seeing where the dungeon ended up... And indeed, I feel that, since we weren't super-immersive, I could see more than a little of the players' own personalities. (Of course, this is usually true even in immersion.)

How do RPGs fit in? Why didn't we just grab a pint at the corner? Well, if nothing else, I see RPGs as possible engines of Cool-creation. Most mediocre example: a game that's just a large table of humorous events, where you roll a d1000 to see which one happens. Each player rolls the humorous events, everyone chuckles, and you pass the dice. The agenda is creating of Cool things, but we're talking Cool for the player and the social group. Perhaps some games of MLwM is this way: you choose to puruse small-N moral choices and angstin' and such, but this (along with the rules) are a mechanic for generating Cool events, which are experienced by individual players (as players), and thus integrated into the group's discourse; you can refer back to the wicked good time you had with the Cool events that were generated.

Indeed, I'm looking back to the ill-fated high-school D&D sessions; incoherence/zilchplay/omniplay? No social contract/shared-CA? Or was it the Social Mode?

Perhaps if we consider the Socializing mode, we can prioritize it properly and make better games. Just as prioritizing for G/N/S can give us a coherent direction, maybe focusing on a Socializing-specific game (I'm thinking about the talk of using RPGs to find hookups) then we can engineer a good different kind of game.

(Side note: I think it's debatable if the Social Mode I took was the best mode; presenting a more clear Sim Agenda that I want could lead to the coherent game I want, etc. But I think there's evidence regardlesss.)

Hello,

I think that I'm getting confused again. Are we talking about zilchplay? Or are we talking about socializing as a major feature of why people role-play? Or what?

Because I very strongly support the notion that the ultimate goals ("fun") and their success/failure are social. To dichotomize social goals apart from role-playing goals, particularly at any definitional level, strikes me as immensely mistaken.

I didn't think that was where the ideas on this thread were going, though ... until the last few posts. Jay or anyone, clue me in. Is this a tangent?

Best,
Ron

Thanks for your measured and thoughtful response, MJ.

My 2 cents on Ron's question: Ron, I think that if there is anything answering to Zilchplay, it's a Creative Agenda that says: let's dampen the G, N, S, and (if it exists) X (or whatever else remains to be discovered), all of them, because we prefer bumping along incoherently to focusing our play on anything in particular. 'Attenuated exploration is the best!' It's not my bag, but if it floats other people's boat, then hey.

I don't believe at all in play with no CA, which is what some defenders of zilchplay seem to support. An incoherent CA is based on not knowing better, or preferring brief satisfactions to longer-lasting ones, or wanting to keep a group of people who all want to hang out but enjoy very different parts of the experience together. (Except in that last case its an X CA, on the view I'm exploring in this thread anyway.)

But that's not what I wanted to discuss/defend/explore in this thread: what I was interested in was role-playing with the creative agenda of getting to know the people around you better/socialize with them/build community. This is present in all other modes, yeah, but I think there might be both a point and a payoff to explicitly thematizing a social interest in RPGs (which I would characterize as either community-building or deepening our understanding of other people, at least in a preliminary way) and building games which support this. I don't think such a focus on this necessarily reduces to Sim in the way that I do think a focus on Exploration of System reduces to Sim, because I don't think the payoff/motive is in the Dream, but in the greater community or shared understanding of individuals - in the real-world social relationships. This is a secondary payoff of role-playing in other modes as well, sure, but why couldn't you make it a focus? And doesn't that focus answer to a separate set of human desires and goals than those which underlie G, N, or S?

I think actually the casual poker game is a great example for the social mode, leaving off that it's not role-playing and so only partially relevant. It starts out as little-g and little-x in the service of big-X. But the very strong Gam-facilitating rules-system, and the fact that Step on Up is part of the competitive social interaction and is increased by increasing pots of money, tends to turn casual games over time into little-g and little-x in support of big-G.

I have some more arguments for X and some thoughts about it in terms of the Big Model but I seem to be strapped for time to write them up coherently now. I'm working on it and will post a new thread when I'm ready. In the meantime, there are other threads for talking about Zilchplay, but that's not what this thread's about - it's about whether or not the social dimensions of RPGs are the sort of thing one might wish to characterize in terms of a fourth mode.

----------------

One more thing though.

There are lots of ways you can

- compete/step on up
- make stories/address Premise
- dream/discover
- build community and get to know people better

inside and outside RPGs.

I would maintain that the way you do all four of these things in RPGs is different than the way you do it in other contexts; and that this difference itself constitutes the interest and importance of doing these things through RPGing.

I maintained earlier, falsely I now think as per MJ's rebuttal, that only the Narrativist had a special and unique thing to get to through RPGs that he couldn't get in some other way. MJ replied that there were unique Gamist challenges in RPGs as well; I think he was suggesting that Sim constraints provide this (little-s in the service of big-G).

What made me realize that MJ was right about this part was the following. My first reaction to what MJ said, as a chessplayer, was: bullshit. There is not a single tactical challenge I have ever met in RPGs equivalent to what a 1600+ rated chessplayer can put to me over the board. But OK, that's a statement of personal comparison; it's one I would defend, but I fully agree that the tactical challenges of the two types of game are different, and require somewhat different mental skills to cope with.

And it seems to me that that's all you need for a preliminary answer to the 'gamist hard question' - I like this form of competitive challenge. Of course, the follow up - why this form as opposed to some other - still may be hard, but if you described the unique features of RPG tactical challenges and said that these were the ones you liked, then you'd be on your way to a real answer, I think.

But once I've been through this kind of thinking on the problem, I become once again convinced that MJs (and Gareth's) answer on the social mode can't be sufficient. Because of course there are unique things that you can learn about people, unique tests you can put them, unique ways of building community and interacting, that come about through RPGing, too, and if you say that that's how you like to make friends and learn about people and build community you're essentially answering the "Socialist's Hard Question" in the same way the Gamist does.

This by itself doesn't constitute a defense of the social mode - to do that you have to explain why Interpersonal Interaction is separate from Focus on Exploration of Participants and therefore why this is not another form of Sim, at a minimum. On the other hand there may be the tools to do this already, by comparison to the work that's already been done on the other modes. That's what I'm trying to work out right now.

Whether or not there's "exploration of participants" as a fourth mode (I'm still doubtful, but I think there's more to bring forward before I'm persuaded), poker night is not that.

Poker night is definitely a social event; role playing game night is equally a social event.

However, the social game of poker is still fundamentally gamist. The decisions made in play are all geared to winning, to meeting the challenge presented in play. Certainly as you play and kibbutz, you discover each other--but you do so while making gamist decisions about play.

You can learn a lot about the people with whom you play role playing games by playing and kibbutzing, but the in-game raison d'etre for play is going to have to be something other than trying to get to know the other players. What the character does is going to reflect the creative agendum the player is using--eventually, if not immediately. The fact that the expression of creative agendum is so attenuated that we can't identify it does not demonstrate that it is absent, but rather that the player hopes to get what he likes from such play without pushing for it. That's where we are, I think--creative agendum attenuated. I am still, at some level, expecting play to be about something in particular. It may not be the thing that got me to get in the car and drive over here, but it is the thing that drives my character decisions in play.

Looking back at poker night, when that full house comes down, everyone groans, throws down their cards, and says, "Take it." They aren't there for some high Nevada National Poker Championships, but they are playing for the win. That isn't the motivation for why they're together, but it is the motivation behind the actions they take in the game.

To look at it a different way, when you're dealt the cards and you look at them, why do you bother? In a moment someone is going to ask if you want to swap some cards, but why would you care? You're making in-game decisions that are geared toward winning. You don't "care" whether you win or lose in the sense that it's going to spoil your night, but that's still the agendum that defines your approach to play. Almost you can't play poker without that. (I say almost, because a computer can play poker by being programmed to consider the odds and make the most advantageous choices. The computer is not really trying to win; but it has been programmed to emulate the conduct of someone trying to win. This leads back to the active and passive versions of the modes--someone playing poker who isn't trying to win isn't any fun to play with, so if you're going to play poker, you either actively undertake the challenge, or passively work to make the challenge enjoyable for those who seek it, and either way that's gamist play.)

--M. J. Young