Brain Dump

I realized the other day that my specific take on roleplaying, especially roleplaying design, stems from a somewhat odd outlook on interaction in general. I see games as social interfaces. Literally, not metaphorically.

The game\’s mechanics are the points of fixed interface. In \’Monopoly\’ the rules tell you that you gain money in certain situations and lose them in certain other situations. This is a point of interface. It shapes the sorts of interactions you have with your fellow players. They must pay you in some situations, and these payments hurt them and help you.

This is important stuff, and it explains precisely why system does matter. Interfaces shape interaction. A \’good\’ interface is one that shapes actions in a positive way for whatever purpose you have. In the same way, a good system is one that shapes play toward whatever it is you play for.

It is important to realize that games can only fill in part of the necessary interface for social interaction. They do not provide all the necessary tools. Games don\’t teach you to talk, or use non-verbal stuff. Instead games provide a part of the interface needed for interaction. They provide some mechanics and some goals, but are not sufficient for interaction on their own.

This is where things get interesting. Since any given game can only provide part of the social interface necessary for interaction, the game has to plug in to the existing social interface of the group playing it. This is where you can run into trouble: the game-interface that works great among people with certain types of existing social interfaces can crash and burn in social interfaces that are even slightly different as long as that difference is in the \’right\’ place.

Of course people can develop new pieces for their core social interface such that they can successfully utilize the game-interface in question.  In fact, this is one of the important functions of games: they provide new methods of interaction and enforce them.  This creates a forced learning environment in which the players use and absorb the new methods and are able to evaluate from experience whether those methods are worth incoporating into more general interactions.

So, I see games as interfaces for social interaction.  And it struck me that not everyone else does, and that I might make more sense if it was understood that I\’ve got an odd view of things.

Thomas

I touched on this extremely briefly on Thursday, sort of by accident.  Mendel then pointed it out in passing.  Here’s where I expand a bit on one of the things that theory is good for.

The purpose of playtesting is to provide you (the designer) with some sort of understanding of the emergent properties of the rules.  We call these properties “emergent”, generally because they’re fairly unpredictable to us.  It’s not that these properties are unpredictable by nature, but rather that we don’t have solid models to predict them.

A solid theoretical model of roleplaying helps us to predict how the game will work in action.  At the moment, rather than predicting, we are generally reduced to trial and error to figure out what’s going to happen.

But contrast that with modern engineering, or even marketting.  To some degree there’s still trial-and-error, there’s still a lot of “get out there in the real world and see what happens”, but there’s also a lot of accurate modelling and prediction.  You want to build a bridge?  Well we can build an extremely accurate computer model before putting down the first bit of concrete.  You want to market a product to a specific demographic?  We’ve got techniques that are effective for that.

Contrast this with roleplaying: for the most part we have only the vaguest idea of what a specific mechanic will do in play, and there are lots and lots of unpredictable emergent things.  This is why playtesting is so important: we don’t really have solid models for predicting complex interaction of various mechanics.  We don’t even have very many solid models for the impact of specific mechanics on play.

Now, to be fair we do have some very broad things, and we’re getting more stuff all the time.  There’s a pretty good understanding of some of the dangers of using certain techniques (such as “Task Resolution” mechanics), and we’re starting to see that there are powerful techniques out there like explicit scene framing, but…  To be honest, we don’t have a lot of good models that help us understand when we should use explicit scene framing and when we should use some other technique.  We don’t, generally understand the advantages and disadvantages of many techniques, or the alternative techniques we could be using.

For me, one of the big things theory does, is teach us about that.  We can use the models developed by theory-heads to better design games up front, to reduce the length of the playtest cycle.  Since roleplaying is a fundamentally human endeavor, and humans aren’t really fully predictable, playtesting will always be necessary, but I imagine a day in the future when we have a good enough grasp of theory that first draft designs do, for the most part, what the designer intended.

Sure they’ll be imperfect, and sure new techniques will be developed that don’t fit into the existing models, but people will be able to look at a design and see the sorts of behaviors it is supposed to promote in much more detail than we currently can.  I can look at Dogs in the Vineyard and pretty clearly see that it’s set up to test for escalation, I can look at Capes and see that there’s a strong economy between “winning” and “losing”.  But the deeper details?  I can’t see them from the text alone, I’ve got to see those rules in action.  Maybe one day, I’ll see much more without the action.

That’s one of the things theory is for.