thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-18, JasonN wrote:
A collection of possibly comments which might or might not be provocative.
1) I don't think we want to turn the term "audience" into a pejorative. Or maybe we do? But I'm not convinced yet.
2) On a technical level, any time you're listening to someone else make contributions to play, you're audience. This I think we can all agree on. And I think as a result, we can say that *listening* is a fundamental skill of roleplaying. We've all played with bad listeners, I'm sure, and they suck.
3) And when you're the one making contributions, you are doing so *to* and *because of* your audience. In the styles of play that Vincent espouses, you are taking your audience into account, deeply. (I think. Comments?)
3a) Here we divide into certain play styles. The character immersionists will insist that they will play their characters the same way, no matter what. People who take audience into account will say that if you have different people in the audience, their play will change accordingly. (Right?)
4a) When we're doing analysis and trying to decide if Engaged Play happened, it doesn't matter if any player made contributions or not (at any given moment in time). What matters most is that they had the choice. Looking at someone who didn't participate, it's very easy to say "they were just an audience"—but that's the pejorative use of the term. Sometimes, silence is a well-chosen reaction, and a meaningful creative choice in the moment.
4b) Consider a bit of play in which a player, in character, gives an impassioned monologue, and nobody tried to stop her, and after she's done everyone sat silent for a while. Further, let's say that this moment would become a highlight of the game, and part of the group culture. We *could* say that the person who gave the speech was the sole author of the speech, but that doesn't do justice to the experience that people are really talking about: the experience of the moment indelibly includes the silence which followed, during which everyone was enjoying their reactions. The people who sat silently made the *choice* to give the roleplay the space they felt it deserved. The people who sat silently were making contributions to play, if you ask me.
5) The fuzziness we have about where "contributions" stop and "commentary" starts is interesting. Suppose Bob and Sally are shooting the breeze, waiting for a couple other players to show up. Bob says, "Boy, I've had a really hard week at work. I have all this pent up rage. My boss SUCKS." This is just a non-game comment. But if Sally takes this as an *input* and provides Bob, in game, with opportunities to shoot, say, an authority figure with a Very Big Gun—does this non-game comment remain become a contribution, in hindsight?
6) Having the term "audience" hinge on whether you have a character in the scene seems overly formulated to me. Vincent's thread-starting statements above include not only character, but "creative property" as well—like if you're playing Ars Magica and you tend to look after the Faerie Forest, that's the kind of stuff I think he means to include here. I think when we say "audience" we're trying to refer to a state where the permissions and expectations work in such a way that you're creatively suspended while others aren't. For most games that means you're PC's not on scene, but that's by far not how it works.
I think there's something socially sophisticated going on here. There are these fluctuations from moment to moment and scene to scene in a game. Kindof like how in playground games, kids take turns. When the social flow of things says it's not your *turn*, you step back and let the others have some space to play. When you're letting other people have their chance—maybe that's what we mean by "audience"?
Sorry for the long and meandering post.
-Jason
