thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-23, Jonas Karlsson wrote:
On 3-22-05, Ninja Hunter J wrote:
How is someone going to be interested if they don't have an investment in what happens?
That's a good question. I think the reason you willingly make yourself and audience in the case of cinema or theatre is because you expect to get something greater than the investment of time and money in return. You can go to the movies without having a clue what you're about to receive, and even if it's not that good you can still trash the movie together with your friends, complaining about bad acting and such. In the case of reading fiction you usually invest a lot of time in one book, and as a consequence are prepared to give it a more favourable verdict.
When you meet your friends and roleplay you don't prepare yourself to be only an audience, you want to contribute actively, more than if you hade gone to the theatre instead. If you happen to become audience for a while the important thing is that the scenes played should still have a meaning for you. The easiest way to give meaning to a scene is by having the consequences influence your character. A more effective way is by it having an influence on the player. In both cases you want to involve the player, it's only that the character is a statement of what's important to the player, and if you influence that you influence something important. You can't really use your time as an audience to find errors of continuity or examples of bad acting, since everyone present will already know they exist and are part of the game.
If you want the audience members to join the scene by playing a NPC, it has to be a character who means something. If you just play some random guy all you get is the pleasure of acting, but if it's someone important to you or one of the other players in the scene the character suddenly has more meaning.
I think the easiest way to make people invest in scenes where their character's not present is by giving the scenes consequences for the characters and their players and by giving the players a mechanical way of showing that it matters. Exactly what they should be able to effect or how to collect the resources to spend is of course up to the individual game design.
On 3-23-05, Jasper Polane wrote:
Empowering the audience would not be de-powering the player. The player still chooses which conflicts are important, and will invest in overcoming those challenges. Giving the audience some control over the conflict doesn't change that. What it does is giving the audience an opportunity to say: "Yeah, I agree! This IS important."
Yeah, what I wanted to avoid was players depending on the good-will of the others instead of actually using the sacrifices of the other character as the only way to get an edge. I wanted to give the player almost complete control over the fates of his two characters, but it doesn't work that way. The player would still need the agreement of the rest of the group for things to happen in the game world, and one obvious way of reaching that agreement is by giving the audience power to directly affect the outcome of the challenge.
