thread: 2005-03-18 : Audience?
On 2005-03-23, Emily Care wrote:
Alternatively, you could give the audience more say in what kinds of questions or issues they want to see they player explore by making scene framing collective. I've been thinking about giving rewards to non-active players who come up with juicy situations in one of my games. Essentially, making it group brainstorming that gets edited by the current lead player.
I don't know if you have already considered and discarded the idea of having people play each other's sweetheart. That might not be the resource distribution you want, but it would likely invest people in the other characters, and make the decisions about sacrificing even more agonizing.
Two more thoughts, what is important about what happens when you let the other players (non-gms) have input on what happens to your character is that suddenly everyone is directly giving their feedback on what happens. You've got a live, multilateral system that is responsive in ways the connections between players mediated primarily by a gm can't be—it's a network instead of spokes leading to a central hub. Where you draw the connections is where there will be energy exchanged. For you, Jonas, this would mean that when you give the other players input on an outcome, rather than taking energy away from your active player you are instead allowing everyone to instill some of their energy into the exchange.
And of course what is needed for this is a structure that allows contributions to work together, allowing conflict to feed the flow of the story, rather than bogging down the group in miscommunications.
Also, where you give the other players input allows the story or game experience to be steered by group vision in those areas: if it's in resolution, it steers outcomes towards what folks might support. if it's in scene framing, it steers the situations that arise toward what more folks would like to see. If it is between characters, it gives players the ability to contribute to eachothers stories. So, you can look at your structure of rules and see where it makes sense to give everyone input, and where it makes sense to mediate it or reserve it to one party, or restrict the connections to certain parameters like trust between characters.
A big leap Ron made when he started consciously talking about player-empowered thematic play, was to focus the discussion on allowing players to author theme. It looks like we are making a transition here to finding ways for group to co-author directly on the many story threads presented by character, situation etc. hm.
And I know I'm concentrating on empowered audience-ship, but I just wanted to say "hear, hear" to the ways that Charles noted to engage a mechanically unempowered audience. Witnessing is critically important even if the only action taken is to simply listen.
