thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-18, Charles wrote:
JasonN, actually, that wasn't nearly as incoherent as you think it was. It was actually very nicely put.
I?m also writing from work, so this may be a muddle (okay, that?s my excuse anyway).
Expanding on your points about character immersionists and the good silent audience, a noisy audience can be hell on immersion, particularly an audience providing commentary rather than contributions (and I think we are all in agreement that a player who is making contributions is only audience in the sense of no character in play, which I agree is a poor definition of the term).
One proof of the fact that we can be audience whenever we are listening is that a two player session in which the players play out a conversation between two characters (to reduce it to as simple a structure as possible) can be hugely satisfying from an audience perspective. On the other hand, I think it is also possible to have immersive scenes in which the audience experience enters into it very little. I have had IC conversations that lasted for hours that were hugely satisfying for the development and experience of character that they allowed, but probably wouldn't have been that interesting to an audience. An audience would probably have liked the scenes if they had been edited down (actually, it is possible that, by only switching into audience mode intermittently, an effect like editing is produced, where I only view the highlights of the conversation as audience, while I experience the entirety of the conversation IC).
One thing that I have been thinking, that I think relates to what you are saying, is that the more interesting question concerning audience is not how can they contribute to the game, but how does the game support the audience experience.
For instance, one of the things that I think is a definite plus to the techniques of giving players without a major authorial authority in the scene (having a character, being GM, having a stake in what happens with the faerie forest are all major authorities) a small authorial stake in the scene is that it is much more likely to keep them sufficiently involved in the scene that they stay in attentive audience mode in between their chances to contribute authorially. I think if you know that you won't have any way to directly contribute to the scene for a long time, you are much more likely to lose interest at some point.
Digressing back to the question of audience experience as the source of the pleasure of gaming, I'm not sure I'm willing to agree that the only satisfaction from gaming is in relation to Audience mode (if you can't hold the audience, the game is a failure). I'd argue for all four narrative stances having their own pleasures from gaming (although Narrative Stance Theory's Actor stance pleasures are usually pretty thin in non-LARP games), and that even within the goal of making stories that have meaning, authorial pleasure is probably as important (although interlinked with) audience pleasure. Also, IC pleasure can be a huge component of the pleasure of gaming, even within the framework of making stories with meaning (if the story has meaning to the audience, it often has meaning to the characters, so the experience of meaning via IC mode can also be important). On the other hand, I can see saying that if the game sucks from any of the perspectives, it is definitely much less of a game than it would be if it didn't suck from any perspective, so if you can't hold audience attention then you are probably doing something wrong.
However, I've found that whether you can hold the audience attention of players without an authorial role in the scene is mostly a player level thing, not a play quality thing. Within my various current and past play groups, holding John's attention as audience is virtually impossible (since he views it as interfering with his ability to function IC), and holding Kip's attention as audience is pretty hard (if you're holding his attention, then your scene is definitely running hot, but not every scene needs to run hot for a game to be good). If your play isn?t deadly boring, then you probably have my rapt attention, and as long as your play doesn?t have tons of mechanics, then it probably would have Sarah?s attention. The first case brings up the fact that some people don?t want to be audience, and the last case brings up the fact that not everyone is interested in all types of games.
Sorry for the muddliness! That is actually edited a bit from the initial muddle.
