Brain Dump

Let this serve as a warning: today’s post is high-theory, and application is unlikely to be deeply discussed.

Last week I talked about tabletop game design as interface design.  I suggested that social interfaces are inherenly flexible because they do not require specialized knowledge to hack (or rather, that socialized people already have that knowledge).  This was contrasted with video games, which are more rigid and require less widely available resources (both knowledge and tools) to hack, thus making them less flexible.

Today I am going to examine things from a slightly different angle.  Today I am going to discuss why all multiplayer games are socially mediated.  Yes, this turns out to be pretty much a ‘no duh’ issue.  Games involving social interaction are socially mediated?  Shocking!

Still, maybe there is something to learn here.

Remember last week how I was talking about the fact that no game is able to completely convey all of the necessary interface to a social group and that groups are thus required to fill in the gaps on their own?  There is a similar phenomenon going on with non-roleplaying games of all sorts, only it is not as visible.  Speicifically, this filling-in process is harder to notice because there is an entire class of things that must be filled in, and thus the class itself is often overlooked.

That class of things is what I am calling (here, for the first time) ‘utlimate rewards’.  Many roleplaying games have a ‘what is roleplaying’ section in them somewhere (though this section is not always labeled as such).  This is the section of the game that explains at least some of the final rewards you get from play: social interaction, telling cool stories, making hard choices.  This is the section that tells you how play rewards you.

Compare this with most board and video games.  Their reward structures are primarily internal (you score points in Galaga, or you do damage to your opponent’s life-guage in Street Fighter 2).  There is not meta-consideration here.  There is no explanation of why you should care about points or life-guages.

I do not think that many people are going to suggest that scoring lots of points is fun in and of itself, while I do think that plenty of people are willing to buy into the idea that telling stories or interacting socially are.

So, while roleplaying games tell you what sort of ultimate fun the activity is supposed to provide, other forms of games rarely do.  Of course, for most games it is rather easy to analyze them and see that they are clearly designed to have social competition plugged into them.  That is what high scores are all about, after all: being the best.

But social competition is a high level bit of social interface, and it does not have to be employed.  That is, the reason for playing these games can be hacked (since that reason is not integrated into the interface).  Maybe you play a game like Galaga cooperatively, switching off between levels to see how well you can do together, for instance.

This suggests that the fixed interface elements are simply tools employed within a social interface structure.  Perhaps Galaga is especially well-suited for use in competative interfaces, but it is simply a tool that can be creatively employed in other sorts of interfaces too.

I could continue rambling about this for a while, and at some point it is possible that I will discuss smallest-unit interface elements, but I am pretty sure that you have heard enough for now.

My apologies for dropping off the radar last Thursday and this Monday. I had big plans to continue updating throughout the Gen Con thing, but those fell through in the light of the unabating awesomeness. Then I returned home to find that the draft of today’s article had mysteriously disappeared. This is constructed from memory, and as such is not nearly as polished as I might have liked.

Following my explanation of how I see games as interface, I believe that this article will be pretty obvious. One of the primary advantages of the roleplaying medium is its socially-mediated nature. Roleplaying can be ‘hacked’ using purely intuitive tools in real-time, which makes it extremely flexible.

Games are socially-mediated as opposed to being mediated through some other structure. A common mediation structure for games is computers. Console gaming and computer-based gaming are mediated through the structure of the computer’s hardware and software. Hacking games through this structure can require significant amounts of work. You need to have significant familiarity with hardware and software in question to even know where to begin your hacking. You must also have access to hacking tools and expertise in their use.

While writing a mod for a game like Half-life is not precisely an obscure process, not just anyone can do so. You need a team of programmers and artists and sound people, all of whom have specialized training in their field.

Contrast this with hacking socially-mediated acticities. Part of the process of socialization, which everyone undergoes, is learning about social interaction structures and at least some ways of modifying them. You are taught a set of authority structures (such as teaccher-student, parent-child, older sibling-younger sibling, and best friend-best friend), and are also easily able to swap between them. You are able to take the role of student in class, but then take on the role of teacher when helping a friend with their homework.

Further, you learn to pick up new power-structures, and how to modify existing ones. You might, for instance, learn to take a more friendly position with relation to favority teachers, or to mix a sibling relationship with elements of a friend relationship.

All of this is fairly intutive. It is likely not less complex than the set of skills required to make a computer game, but it is a set of skills that you learn in order to survive in society, and so it does not require ‘special’ training. In a sense, everyone is already well-trained to do this sort of hacking.

That is not to say that people could not be more-well-trained, for it seems evident that they could, and that is definitely a goal worth pursuing. But everyone who is socialized already has a significant amount of this training right now.

The point of all this is that games which are socially-mediated are subject to social hacking. This allows participants to be creative not just in the content of play, but in its very structure. Consider how many people play Monopoly with house rules like getting money when you land on the ‘free parking’ space, or not auctioning off property if it is not bought.

Players of socially-mediated games are able to, in some sense, create the game they are playing as they play. They can compensate for poor interface (with respect to their specific circumstances) on the fly, and may choose to use a process of trial-and-error to improve their overall gaming experience.

The flexibility that this imparts to socially-mediated games is enormous and important, and it forces us to look at game design from a slightly different perspective.  We are designing interfaces that may be less-than-optimal for any given group, and we must expect them to change what they need to change.  I plan to discuss (at least) two major implications all this has in the coming weeks: 1) All games are really socially-mediated, they just use complex tools, 2) We need to present games in a different, more transparent, way if we want to utilize games as teaching tools (that is, if we want people to use the existing interface structures in an effort to teach something).

This post has been in the works for a while, but Neel Krishnaswami articulated much of what I was going to say extremely well in a comment in the 20 by 20 Room discussion A Little Bit About Context:

o the setting description in the rulebook
o the rules of the rpg
o the GM’s notes about the game setting
o each player’s writeups of their PCs
o each player’s logs or journals about the game
o the improvisations and rulings accumulated during play

Usually, none of these will be consistent with any of the others! (Eg, the setting material in the rulebook includes references to wizards doing things that cannot be supported according to the game rules.) So a critical activity in game *play* is resolving inconsistencies between the different texts — that is, how the participants choose a normative interpretation out of all of the stuff created to date. IMO, a lot of what we call a “style of roleplaying” is just having different priorities about which are the master texts of the roleplaying game, and also when each takes priority.

Emotionally, I don’t come out of an rpg session with the idea that I understood what was going on at a deep level, in the same way as all the other players. Back in Boston, for one of my groups I was the writeup guy who put stuff on the web. Doing this pretty much cured me of the notion that I saw pretty much the same game, because the act of writing up a game helped jog my memory of the things that the players did while writing, and while doing every single writeup I found that way more significant dramatic action had taken place than I consciously remembered as significant. (Signficicant, as in, “Oh cr-p, she IS being mind-controlled by vampires!”)

So after having my nose rubbed in this fact 150 times or so, I was finally convinced that we won’t all be on the same page about a game, any more than we’ll be on the same page about a movie we all saw. That’s okay though, because yammering about our differing interpretations is hella fun.

Neel is pointing to something extremely important here: the narrative generated in a roleplaying session is much like the narrative generated in any other medium.  That is, they are open to interpretation.  This is due to the fact that it is simply not possible for a narrative to include all the relevant facts.  Things are just too complex for that.  So, instead, the narrative leaves holes for you to fill in.

In roleplaying this is complicated by the fact that the audience is in the position of the author as well.  This means that each player has a sort of authorial authority that lends itself to their specific filling in of those holes.  The ability to say ‘When I said X, I intended it to be in support of idea Y’ is an important one.  The social power dynamics of author-audience are rather confused in roleplaying because everyone is an author and everyone is the audience.

But this turns out to be a good thing!  Uncertainty of this sort is what allows us to enjoy stories in different ways, and what allows us to enjoy the same stories despite our different backgrounds.  And as Neel says at the end of his comment: it can be tons of fun comparing our interpretations.  I mean, I love explaining how I thought a character was being a jerk because I interpreted his actions in one way, while someone else thought the character was being heroic because they interpreted his actions totally differently.

The point of all this is that all authority distribution is about who’s version of the filled-in story we are going to use at any given time.  In ‘traditional’ play, this authority is divided up at the beginning of the game, and then locked.  One person has authorial authority over each aspect of the game.  No element is authored by two players.  Whenever any question about what a character’s motivations ‘really were’ arises, every player knows to turn to a single person for the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ answer.

A lot of more recent games have played with distributing this authority in a different way.  Specifically, authority over any given element varies based on a number of different factors, intead of being fixed at the beginning of play.  In Universalis authority belongs to whoever has most recently paid for it.  In Polaris authority is based on who is currently the Heart/Mistaken/New Moon/Full Moon as well as which ritual phrases have been recently employed.

I know I am not saying anything new or revolutionary here.  But I do think that, as much as we talk about authority distribution, we rarely think about what it really means.  The authority we are distributing is that of the author.  What we are divvying up is who gets to say what ‘officially’ happens in disputes.

One thing that is important to remember is that just because you have the authority to fill in a hole, does not mean that it will happen.  It may never get brought to anyone’s attention that there is a dispute.  While you may have been given the authority to decide motivations for a specific character, that does not prevent me from ascribing my own motivations to them if you do not make yours explicit.

Which leads me to an interesting question: how often in play do we specifically not seek clarification on an issue, how often do we fail to ask the authority what the official position is because we don’t want it clarified?  How much of our play involves skirting around official pronouncements because we are completely happy with our own private interpretations?