In the interests of disclosure (and because it’s just plain interesting), this post was primarily spawned by a thread over on Story Games. Specifically, Tony Lower-Basch’s How much should we get to see?, with special interest to be called to this post by Brand Robins. I’d be thinking about some of this already, but this helped clear up some of my thoughts.
Everything I am about to talk about is specifically in the context of face-to-face play. Some of it holds true in other mediums, but the big important thing here is the fuzziness of record keeping. We have only our memories of play, rather than a hard-copy record, upon which we base our interpretations of what is going on in the narrative of the game at hand.
As much as we talk about the “Shared Imagined Space”, any given instances of play will be interpretted differently by each player. This does not mean there is nothing shared, in fact there is a lot shared. However, there is a lot of stuff that is not shared as well, and a lot of it is important.
An example from my own recent play: We have a local game of Capes that we started rather recently. We play when we get the chance to. The game draws (extremely) loosely on Arthurian themes, so the main character is Art. The first introduced villain was The Black Knight. That is mostly an aside, the point is that Will (who came up with Art) and I view Art quite differently.
First, a disclaimer: Will and I have not seriously discussed how we view Art, so I am going to be doing a lot of conjecture here. He may come in and correct me. That said, I think the point I am trying to illustrate will still be valid.
As far as I can tell, Will sees Art as mostly heroic. A sort of Batman-esque character. Betrayed by friends and loved ones, with little support and a tortured past, he still does what he has to to keep the city safe. His methods may be somewhat extreme, but for the most part they are necessary.
I see Art as being much darker; more of a Punisher character than a Batman. Art is brutal. He takes violence farther than he has to because he is a terribly violent individual. He uses tactics of pain and fear not because they are effective, but because he likes to cause pain and fear.
I can point you at the in-play events that lead me to my beliefs about Art, and I bet Will can do the same. I would not be at all surprised if many of them were the same events, simply interpreted in different ways. I would also not be surprised if I were giving a lot of weight to some events while Will was mostly ignoring them, or if Will were giving weight to events that I had completely forgotten.
Now, we do share an understanding of the things Art has done (beaten up some muggers, defeated The Black Knight, etc.), but we differ in how we interpret those events, and in how we ascribe motivation to the various characters. Part of this is, no doubt, attributable to the fact that the game is young yet, and the number of events we have to draw on is small.
But these first impressions are important, and they will shape the way we view the characters for the rest of the time we use them.
I could easily come up with an entire array of similar situations in various other games involving various other players. Further, I bet you could do the same. It is not like this is some isolated phenomenon; in fact it is a fundamental element of play, and there is nothing wrong with that.
The important thing to recognize in all this is that while many things in play are shared there are a lot of things that will be different. This can lead to some interesting problems. An action taken can appear inconsistent for a character to one player, while completely logical for that character to another player.
I believe this may be one of the primary reasons that most games tend to put a character under the authority of a single player. That way when disputes over which version of the character is the “real” version, and which are misunderstandings, are simple to resolve. However, allowing one player to be “in charge” of which interpretation of a character to use in you game you lose some elements of collaboration. Each character becomes more unified, but also less of an amalgamation.
Which can weaken one of the coolest thing this varied perspective brings to play. There is just something fun about discussing your different views of a character. The recontextualization that happens when you suddenly realize the viewpoint that another player has been playing with can be awesome. Suddenly certain decisions they made make an all new kind of sense and take on an all new thematic consequence.
So, play is chaotic, we each have different views about what is going on in play. And that is, ultimately, a good thing. I, for one, would have it no other way.
Tags: Theory
That’s a lovely post, Thomas!
I’ve had a somewhat a random and tangent thought, but I thought I’d mention it for the records anyway.
You know multi-table play? Where two “parties” mess around in the same situation, but only occasionaly interact with one another?
In these kinds of games, each table definetly develops a different view of the global story (which would emerge from the times the parties do meet).
This leads to some serious fragmentation of the SIS, but it adds a definite richness to play I’d say.
Especially when you start to exchange individual members between the parties.
my 2 cents
Christoph,
Spot on. The big example I tend to think of is LARP. Where you have too many people for everyone to follow what everyone else is doing, but also in which you have a group of GMs who are ostensibly weaving everyone’s contributions into a single story. No one person sees everything, but there’s that really cool sense of discovery when you realize that that major event that you had to deal with was instigated by some other player.
Thomas
[...] What I call “color”, those contextualizing little bits of the narrative, is important for a number of reasons, but primary among them is that players need context. If there is not a shared context provided the players will simply provide their own, not-so-shared context. My post suggesting that Play is Chaos? This is precisely what I was talking about there. [...]
[...] Thinking back to my old post Play is Chaos, I am beginning to think that a lot of roleplaying actual play can be interpreted as a bunch of single-protagonist stories mashed together into one. Where each player has a radically different character-centered interpretation of what the story is about. Of course in a functional game the ‘what it’s about’ will mesh across all the stories in some way, but we’re still looking at different interpretations. [...]