thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-19, Ghoul wrote:
So, if Audience isn't the right term, what does one call "players who have no character presence in the current scene"? Audience seems like the natural term for that. Or, to a lesser extent, as Jason sais, for the situation where your character is in a non-active role during a scene (say you're playing the bodyguard of the prince and he finally gets to the political confrontation with the evil Vizier... your role is to stand back and let the confrontation happen; your CHARACTER is audience until the nature of the scene shifts). As such, I don't see Audience as a pejorative, at least not unmodified. As Vincent said at the top, "being audience is the same as acting." It's just a state you'll find yourself in as the story flows places your character isn't at, either directly or implicitly (the bodyguard during the political discussion).
Still, there is "empowered audience" if they retain the ability to influence the scene despite their character's absence from it, "engaged audience" if they are fully focused and part of the scene, even if not actively empowered to influence it except through social support/reaction. This with all the layers and degrees discussed earlier.
Now, "depowered, disengaged" audience is a bad thing. This means they have had their power of influence reduced even from the level of simple social support (the classic "shh, you're not here, just sit on your hands" approach) and so have wandered off in their minds (if not in reality, toward the fridge or some such). But I'm not sure you can't survive one of those two negatives as long as you avoid them both at once. It isn't easy, of course, because being depowered leads naturally to disengagement, but I can imagine it being achieved.
I think what's critical here is that we mean Audience as in Theater (where the Actors can sense and respond to the Audience's mood and attention) not as in Cinema (popcorn-crunching drones just taking it all in, to stereotype extremely). This is Audience that gasps and applauds and cheers and heckles and kibitzes, right where the Actors can take that and make that energy and those suggestions part of the story. And, of course, because it's an RPG, the Audience has their own roles for other scenes. An Audience made up of other Actors who just aren't on stage (or are on-stage but not doing anything just now). That seems a perfectly valid description of the inevitable situation when your character is absent or just out-of-spotlight, and so talk about how to keep the player part of things when in that state seems quite worthwhile to me. Game mechanics that encourage engagement or empower Audience to directly influence the scene are, of course, only a subset of this part of the RPG toolbox.
