thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-19, Ghoul wrote:
Jasper, I'd agree that it is possible to be Audience even when you have a character is in the scene. It happens whenever the focus on the current conflict is outside your character's influence, as in the bodyguard at a political confrontation example earlier.
And I've seen people who leave (physically or mentally) whenever their character is not on-stage, but I've seen it both be a disaster and be a glowing success, depending completely on the player and their ability to effectively re-engage upon return. As a general rule, though, the "transition cost" from disengaged to engaged (re: my car idling at the corner example above) is too high for the game to bear.
But I'd agree, for discussion purposes, "Audience" is (to propose a definition that covers these points) the set of people participating in the game who do not have a character currently in the spotlight. The person "out for a smoke" has ceased to participate in the game. The bodyguard's player at the political debate is (though may not remain) out of the spotlight despite being in the scene. More questionable is the player flipping through the rules (are they looking for the exact mechanics for what they're planning to do when they next act or are they detached from this game and thinking about another? The former is probably a good thing in rules-heavy games, the latter is almost certainly a problem) or commenting how this scene reminds him of something cool in a movie (OK and even laudable as commentary/feedback, probably becomes bad quickly if it leads to distracting side-conversation that drags others out of the game).
The disfunctional stages Audience can enter (I have to believe the reasons it was considered potentially pejorative earlier in this discussion) are, in effect, often the result of people leaving Audience and becoming, to coin a term, Observer. The Observer isn't part of the game at all, they just happen to be there. Observers don't have to be a problem (I have run and participating in successful games with observers present before), but players shifting from Observer to Spotlight have further to go than Audience to Spotlight. Audience has remained (to some degree) engaged because they are still participants in the game. Transition cost again.
So I think I'm coming around to the idea that "engaged" is a prerequisite for successful Audience. Failing that, you become non-participant (or unimportant participant, as in Vincent's statements about Engagement in another thread). But a caveat... Audience Engagement is usually (though not always) limited beyond that of the on-stage, spotlight characters' players. As such, I'm not sure it meets Vincent's "unabridged" requisite. This would seem to say Audience cannot be "Engaged", even when given the level of influence they have in PTA, because they have less influence than on-stage characters' players (i.e., are abridged).
So I'm not sure I'm at a conclusion yet. It seems possible that the definition of Engaged does not allow for Audience Engagement, and yet I think we all have agreed that a disengaged audience is almost certainly a problem.
So, what is the resolution? Do we have "Abridged Engagement" now?
