thread: 2011-01-10 : Social Context and Design
On 2011-01-13, Jeff Russell wrote:
I think you are onto something pretty interesting, and possibly important, Mike. I'm not *sure* if the direction I'm going with it is applicable to social context and thinking of it in design, but I'll throw it out there anyhow.
I recently ran a game for some friends of mine that asked for a lot of player input in characters and setting and initial situation generation (I stole a lot of technique from AW, for one thing). None of these friends had tried anything other than 90's style trad games and a bit of 4E D&D, and one of them has self-described as just not that into roleplaying (but I don't believe him from the way he creates characters for his side in Twilight Imperium, individual guys in wargames, et cetera).
At any rate, I was *amazed* at the awesome sauce they all came up with for juicy, conflict-ridden interpersonal relationships with the potential to launch into some cool story. It was great! The trouble came in actually, you know, going somewhere with it. The game ended up stalling a bit in that regard.
So, to try to bring it into line with the topic of Vincent's post here, is it useful to approach a game with the social context in mind of people who have the requisite component desires/experiences, but haven't assembled them into the final product (err, meaning 'play style', I guess) that you're shooting for?
To refer back to my specific example, I had a group of people who came up with their own situation, ready for conflict, and who are interested in those kinds of stories, and who like to play games (and most like to play RPGs specifically) but when it came to actually playing/performing, it was a bit awkward. Should I attempt to design the game to draw out the performance aspect, or is that a social context factor I should assume needs to be present already?
(Not to turn this into a 'help me with my game!' thing, just trying to use a specific example to explore the way social context effects game design in more detail, cos it's an interesting and new-to-me topic)
