thread: 2012-11-21 : Positioning: Some Looly Pooly Groundwork
On 2012-11-21, Gordon wrote:
Longer than I expected. Two questions in here:
1) Interpersonal positioning - any more to say about that?
2) Agreement is complicated, right?
I think arrows amongst the players actually clean up a lot of stuff. First, for completion: in that most of a decade link, you say that in Chess, there are no right-pointing arrows out of the fictional cloud. The "my people will avenge their Queen" story I talked about in the last post would seem to refute that - a fictional thing that acts on a player. But actually no, because that story is best characterized as an exchange between players that happens to include imaginary stuff but does NOT hit the cloud (ah, our old friend synechdoce, confusing the part/something imagined with the whole/the cloud.) As you say, what happens in Chess does not depend on the agreement of players about that kind of imaginary stuff. It may have an effect on play, but play does not require it, so - not a trip to the cloud.
I'm thinking this might have impact on RPGs, even, with stuff happening in the "amongst players" arrows that doesn't get in a "to the cloud!" arrow. But my tries to write about that got all twisty (If it's fictional but play doesn't depend on it, it doesn't get into a cloud-arrow? But with RPGs, if it affects a player, doesn't that mean it must affect a cloud-arrow?), so - waiting until you say more about interpersonal, I guess.
Finally - I've no real doubt you're all over this issue, but maybe my understanding isn't quite the same as yours. Hidden in "the agreement of all the players" is a lot of messy detail, right? Partial agreement, misunderstood agreement, retracted agreement, provisional agreement ... not just "hey, we need 100% happy consensus to play - and look, we've got it! Yay!"
Arrows between/amongst the players (to me) helps reveal this important complexity, which I might otherwise think was missing from a statement like "RPGs are composed of and revealed by agreement amongst all players about fictional events."
