thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-19, JasonN wrote:
Ghoul:
One question I'm interested is "does the subset of games where Audience is limited in Engagement have some advantages or is Audience Engagement inherently and automatically a good thing?"
I'm going to take your "games" to mean "game designs" for a moment, here.
In the past, Vincent:
Somehow we have to grin together and cheer each other, enthusiastically embrace, while you're dedicated wholly to hurting my character and hurting her until she's transformed by grief and pain. This doesn't come instinctively to us! We won't just fall into it by treating the game as a natural conversation. To accomplish it, we need a well-designed, formal, unnatural structure.
The context here was system stuff which structures and mediates conflict resolution. Does it apply equally well to Audience Engagement?
Let's consider some examples.
(1) Players whose characters are off-scene (and thus Audience, as we've defined it here) can throw their character's dice on either side of any given conflict. Is this an unnatural social thing? To the extent that it permits a player to be adversarial ("super-constrictive", Vincent says), you bet!
(2) Players can give other players Fan Mail when they do cool things. Is this an unnatural social thing? Hmm. It doesn't seem like it, no. It's just a rulsey way of saying, "That, there? Cool." Does it have anything at all to do with conflict resolution? Sortof, yeah. Because giving someone Fan Mail is arming them with more dice for future conflicts.
(3) Who was it on the Forge who, in their PTA game, said the group agreed to give Fan Mail any time a kibitzed input was used? Anyway, that. To the extent that this encourages players to listen to other players, this is a departure from conventional RPGs where my Guy-ism tends to rule the roost. Is it related to conflict resolution? Not *really*, no.
-Jason
