thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-23, Charles wrote:
I think this raises again the question of "What are the pleasures of being audience?"
While I agree that formally recognizing the contributions of "audience" players helps to keep them engaged as "audience," as well as acknowledging that players are never simply audience, it seems to me that that formal recognition is not the only way to maintain the interest of players who don't have a formal role in the scene.
The way that is probably the most common for maintaining player interest is the degree to which the scene being played will later affect the player's interests. If my character (or chunk of the world) needs for your character to succeed in this scene, then I am more likely to be paying attention to what happens in scene.
Another way of maintaining interest is by parallel thematic structure: if what your character is doing is parallel in theme to what my character is doing, then the scene is more likely to hold my interest: how do your choices reflect my choices? what sorts of doubles are we creating for each other?
A third way of holding audience interest is simply the quality of perceived story being created. If the story is good (including the presentation of the story), then it will hold the audience interest in the same way that any other story does.
If you don't give formal mechanical methods for players to register their interest in a scene, then you need to give non-mechanical methods. A play or a live musical performance is more easily engaging the more often we are allowed to appluad. Television is more fun to watch with friends, so we can register our pleasure or displeasure aloud and have it recognized. A game session is more fun if we can contribute commentary on a scene that we aren't in. Sometimes commentary during a scene can be disruptive, particularly if the comments become off-topic. Sometimes it can enrich a scene by giving a new perspective (the imaginary slash fic that often comes up in one of my games maintains heightened attention on the sexual and quasi-sexual tensions within the party in way that is very different than simply highlighting those aspects in play would). Some scenes may benefit from silence from the audience during play, in which case post-scene response from unempowered players should be supported. If I can't say something is cool while it is happening, I need to be supported in saying it is cool afterwards.
Digressing back to Jonas's game (which is a useful digression, since it gives a specific example to work with), I like J's idea of having the PC have sub-PC friends who are played by the other players. I think that the way to maintain tight player control over hir own story would be for the active player to have to solicit help from the non-active players, rather than having the non-active players free to offer support at any time. Such a structure, particularly if the non-active players have some sort of an incentive to refuse to give support, would nicely parallel the idea of the character having to make sacrifices for their love, particularly if friends is the only renewable resource (first you have to go begging to your friends, but if you can't cajole the other players into giving your character support, then you have to choose between failing your love or destroying your health or sanity, perhaps you would also have the option of demanding that your friend help you this one last time, at which point you burn that friendship, but don't have to burn samity or health). As long as you can keep your friends willing to support you, you are okay, but once they turn against you, you are stuck burning your points one by one, or failing your love.
Another option would be to make the actions of each player matter to the other players on a game level. If my character's decisions change the world for your character, then you are more likely to pay attention. Perhaps my character failing her love means that it is harder for your character not to fail her love, as we on the home front decide it just isn't worth it, and Dear John letters become more normal?
One problem I think I see with this design is that you are basically constructing a game in which most of the players will be unempowered audience for most of the game (depending on how many players you have). Furthermore, they will not apparently have an in-character investment in the results of the scenes they are watching (since the at-home characters don't know each other), so the only two aspects of audience they can enjoy are parallel theme and high quality narrative.
There will be lots of opportunity for parallelism since the theme is highly restricted, but meaningful parallelism isn't particularly well supported if we each have no influence on what sort of story the other chooses to tell. Instead, we will end up with something more like a game of Exquisite Corpse. The idea of having the players brainstorm about their characters together during char gen might help with this though, since part of what will make your character interesting to me is how they are set up to handle the issues that I find interesting. Possibly, the char gen could specifically highlight this aspect.
Audience pleasure in a high quality narrative is a dangerous basis on which to hang a game, since few players are skilled writers or skilled actors or skilled storytellers (and very few are some combination). Our hobby has never been much of a draw for spectators, and that isn't likely to change.
