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The Party Hydra, Bearing Witness, and Let Me Tell You About My Character
Oh my god, Becky, look at his RPG Theory post!
So this was the essay I promised in the notes of the last one.
The party hydra is, briefly, the phenomenon that most RPG parties act like a single unit, rather than like a group of individuals. All argument and decision making is down within the party, which then makes a single unified decision about what they are going to do.
I'm speaking here, for what it is worth, in terms of both Gamism and Narrativism (for Forgites), or in terms of tactical interest and plot interest (for those who you who aren't.) In a tactical situation, like say a D&D combat, the party is working together in an uncanny way, like it is a hydra (hence the name.) Likewise, we only see one decision at any important decision point, rather than a bunch of different reactions.
It isn't that the party can't act like a protagonist, or like a gutsy game player. Party hydra phenomenon can be present in a lot of successful play. It is just that it acts like one character when it does so.
(Personally, I think that the decision making gets a little watered down in the process, too...)
In this post and this lumpley article, I talk about bearing witness, and why that is important. I would like to note that I think it is important for both Gamist and Narrativist play (don't know about Sim. Frankly, don't care.) Non-forgies can just ignore the previous sentence, except for the point that everyone needs a witness. Go read the damn things, if you care!
For the reasons I outline in that post, I don't think that the GM can be a witness in that way that is necessary. Two reasons -- first, because the GM is an equal contributor to the protagonism of the player/character, and so just like the player cannot bear witness, because what is cool is not the protagonist but the protagonism. Secondly, I think the standard position of the GM as neutral arbiter of the world requires the GM to "break character" if he wants to observe and understand the protagonism in the necessary way. The witness needs to be able to say what was cool. The neutral GM cannot.
(Not saying that they can't be the same person. Just that they can't be the same person at the same time.)
So, if we take these two things together, we can understand why gamers want to tell you about their character all the time, and why it is usually dead boring.
See, in a party hydra game, there is really only one character, which all the players are playing, plus a GM for conflict. Let's say that it is a good game, and that the players all do really well and there's cool stuff going on. Because the players are all caught up in the same character, they can't really witness each other's triumphs in a serious way. Likewise, the GM is unlikely to be able to provide the necessary validation and sympathetic understanding that a witness provides.
And, god-damn-it, something cool happened! They want to tell someone about it.
So they do. At length. And it doesn't work, of course, because you didn't witness it. Gamers who are doing this are essentially groping in the dark for someone to provide them witness. Sadly, they are doomed, because there was no witness except for them, and that comes off as braggery, not triumph.
Thoughts?
P.S. to Forgites: I think that protagonism and protagonists apply to both Gamism and Narrativism. Seperate post, m'kay?
So this was the essay I promised in the notes of the last one.
The party hydra is, briefly, the phenomenon that most RPG parties act like a single unit, rather than like a group of individuals. All argument and decision making is down within the party, which then makes a single unified decision about what they are going to do.
I'm speaking here, for what it is worth, in terms of both Gamism and Narrativism (for Forgites), or in terms of tactical interest and plot interest (for those who you who aren't.) In a tactical situation, like say a D&D combat, the party is working together in an uncanny way, like it is a hydra (hence the name.) Likewise, we only see one decision at any important decision point, rather than a bunch of different reactions.
It isn't that the party can't act like a protagonist, or like a gutsy game player. Party hydra phenomenon can be present in a lot of successful play. It is just that it acts like one character when it does so.
(Personally, I think that the decision making gets a little watered down in the process, too...)
In this post and this lumpley article, I talk about bearing witness, and why that is important. I would like to note that I think it is important for both Gamist and Narrativist play (don't know about Sim. Frankly, don't care.) Non-forgies can just ignore the previous sentence, except for the point that everyone needs a witness. Go read the damn things, if you care!
For the reasons I outline in that post, I don't think that the GM can be a witness in that way that is necessary. Two reasons -- first, because the GM is an equal contributor to the protagonism of the player/character, and so just like the player cannot bear witness, because what is cool is not the protagonist but the protagonism. Secondly, I think the standard position of the GM as neutral arbiter of the world requires the GM to "break character" if he wants to observe and understand the protagonism in the necessary way. The witness needs to be able to say what was cool. The neutral GM cannot.
(Not saying that they can't be the same person. Just that they can't be the same person at the same time.)
So, if we take these two things together, we can understand why gamers want to tell you about their character all the time, and why it is usually dead boring.
See, in a party hydra game, there is really only one character, which all the players are playing, plus a GM for conflict. Let's say that it is a good game, and that the players all do really well and there's cool stuff going on. Because the players are all caught up in the same character, they can't really witness each other's triumphs in a serious way. Likewise, the GM is unlikely to be able to provide the necessary validation and sympathetic understanding that a witness provides.
And, god-damn-it, something cool happened! They want to tell someone about it.
So they do. At length. And it doesn't work, of course, because you didn't witness it. Gamers who are doing this are essentially groping in the dark for someone to provide them witness. Sadly, they are doomed, because there was no witness except for them, and that comes off as braggery, not triumph.
Thoughts?
P.S. to Forgites: I think that protagonism and protagonists apply to both Gamism and Narrativism. Seperate post, m'kay?
no subject
Some people say 'if there isn't more than one person involved, it isn't roleplaying!' To me, this is silly, and wrong. I and many other people I know have experienced scenes that were entirely internal, IC mental processes or lone rants or things a character did when there was no one around to see at the time -- usually in LARPS, of course -- which were a major part of the gaming experience and critical to a character's arc.
But would these things be meaningful if we didn't have the overlooking presence of the player noticing, or able to say later from experience on the spot, "ah, here is where character X is facing issue Y and coming to a resolution that sends them in a new direction"?
I don't think this is necessarily the same thing as an external witness. But it does cover some of the same area. And for a witness to actually 'witness', don't they need to have some idea of what they are witnessing, or why it matters, or that there's even a story going on? In some cases, isn't, therefore, the player, despite their excessive involvement, a better 'witness' than an ignorant outside audience might be?
Does this get into the area of whether the witness idea applies to simulationism? I've never been able to get quite whether 'character development simulationism' is or is not something that falls under Simulationism as considered in GNS.
no subject
Not that this can't lead to interesting characters and characterization, if you have good RPers, just that the focus of the story may be less about the characters.
Sort of. Don't think I'm quite articulating it here.
Matt
no subject
(Anonymous) 2005-02-04 08:38 pm (UTC)(link)It depends.
In Simulationism, what's important is that the players are chiefly there, and chiefly jazzing, off the details of and [shared?] contributions to some element of the game. (GNS identifies five possible elements, being Character, Setting, Situation, Colour, and System.)
So it's perfectly conceivable to do "character development sim." For instance you might come up with a game which brought education PhD's on board the design crew, and put together a system which actually reflected the learning process in interesting detail, extending it to cover life-lessons with some kind of neat generalization or something. Then the process of characters learning those life lessons would be the element explored in play. An example might be the Arabian Nights LARP that got discussed here (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=4646).
That would be sim:character development. Would work fine.
And I'll go beyond Ben's assertion and say that hell yeah, witnessing is just as necessary in sim as it is in the other two. A sim game with no witness is the incredibly detailed game universe, backstory, maps, economic system, artificial languages... that your little brother put together and never showed anyone who cared. It's necessary to share "Isn't this universe cool?" just as much as the other aspects of gaming.
- Eric F.
no subject
I don't think that you have protagonism of the sort that I am discussing here in FGS-style sim play. I don't think that characters in that sort of play are protagonists.
The dictionary definitions of protagonist are:
1) The lead character in a play or fictional work.
2) The initiator of great things.
I don't think that either of these two qualities are possessed by a character in FGS-style sim play. At least, not necessarily possessed. It isn't the focus. Whereas in, say, Sorcerer-style Nar play, you have to be both of those things to make any sense at all, as a character.
When I talk about witnessing, yeah, I'm talking about someone who can see and understand and judge. I go into a lot more detail in the lumpley thread, if you care to read that.
There may be something *like* witnessing in that sort of play. I just don't know. It's really difficult to get a theoretical handle on. A lot of players seem to be so caught up in "character as independent actor with no real player input" thing that it is hard to figure out what the players contribute, what the GM contributes, and what both sides get out of it. I mean, I can talk for me, but I'm clearly a slightly abnormal case.
yrs--
--Ben
P.S. Apropos of the last paragraph, and nothing else, what do you think of The Turku School (http://users.utu.fi/mijupo/turku/)? A good idea too far? Not far enough? Totally orthogonal to anything fun about role-playing?
no subject
Anyway, I read the Turku manifesto a while ago and was totally turned off by its ranting about how other play styles are Bad and Lame and Unreal and Not Art. As was, largely, apparently its point -- to be totally over the top. Mostly I think it goes too far -- some of the Chastity vow is reasonable stuff in moderation, but I do think (more these days) that taking OOC stuff into consideration is a better bet for everyone's fun, and that that is an important consideration for RPGs too. And the ritualistic/sensory ways to fool ones own mind (mood music, 'not exactly real' props) are, I think, useful for better immersion/experience, not cheaty-outside-world things opposed to it.
I haven't had a chance to read it entirely through, but some of the stuff in Autonomous Identities seems more like what I'm used to.
no subject
"Simulationism" is often talked about as a terrible misnomer: one of the alternatives, which I consider far superior, is "Emulationism". That is, that is is about emulating something. Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a genre, maybe it's a specific characterization you think is cool. The key thing is that you are trying to get as close to whatever thing you are emulating as possible.
As to what you've experienced, I think Ben's point is partially muddled by the fact that what you are talking about is almost definately Simulationism (which he doesn't really care about, and thus his statements may not apply). Further, I'm not sure that it's really role playing without and audience, it seems to me that what you are talking about is more akin to authorship. You are writing this character.
I can't really speak on the subject of "character development simulationism" since I'm not sure exactly what you are talking about there, but a discussion of that might very well derail Ben's discussion here.
Thomas
no subject
I take the brunt of the culpability for not explaining this, but: Kendra is a part of my old LARPing crew. We did a lot of heavy immersion stuff back in the day. Immerseive LARP (well, LARP in general) is something that Forge theories apply to only vaguely. Hence the "not caring."
yrs--
--Ben
no subject
no subject
In terms of LARP, I'm sure that some of the Forge theory that this is based on applies, and that some does not. Sort of like taking critical framework for novels and using it for plays, sometimes it is going to be correct and sometimes it is going to fall flat. I don't know which is which, so I tread carefully, with caveats.
yrs--
--Ben
no subject
I, on the other hand, think it works perfectly well, but certain things get conflated (for instance, IIEE gets squished together pretty hard).
no subject
Thomas
no subject
Thomas