thread: 2006-05-17 : Six straightforward examples
On 2006-05-18, Vincent wrote:
IF YOU ARE NOT A FORGIE, DON'T READ THIS COMMENT. IT'S FULL OF MASSIVE FORGE SHORTHAND AND YOU'LL MISREAD IT, TO ALL OF OUR GRIEF.
In fact, I'm going to white it out. Highlight with the mouse if you're a Forgie.
Sadly, lines of character ownership are all illusion. All roleplaying is fundamentally collaborative, so all ownership is fundamentally contingent and flexible.
If our procedures of play allow me to cross lines of ownership - if I'm not breaking the game to do so - then I haven't really crossed any lines, have I? I've stayed within the lines our game's established.
No, I have a harsh assessment of push/pull if it really depends on lines of ownership. Harsher even than "it doesn't exist." It exists, but it sucks; it's worse than useless, it's actively destructive.
Ready? Push is how other people play. The appearance of push and pull is based on me taking the lines of ownership in our game and looking at your game as though my game were the only true game. In your game, you have different lines of ownership; they look to me, from my provincial view, transgressive. I say you're pushing solely because you're playing by different rules of ownership than I am.
Now, while this exact provincialism may be a tension in some of the push/pull discussions, I think push/pull is a better idea than that.
Thanks everybody.
Oh, and please, respond to my Forge-only remarks in marginalia to this comment. Non-forgies, you might want to skip the marginalia here too.
This makes WMW go "Ding! Win."
Yeah. If all the "ifs" = true, your thinking matches mine. As usual, though, your Diplomacy score exceeds mine.
This makes BL go "This is particularly interesting"
In light of "sole narrator" games like Trollbabe, the Pool, Nine Worlds, Dust Devils, and so forth.
This makes mneme go "I don't"
think it's about lines of ownership.
I do think it's about investment, and that Tony's commments about pants are really, really important in identifying "push".
This makes TER go "I think ownership is a red herring"
As far as I can tell, it's not about who has authority over what elements of play, it's about who's exerting that authority. If we both have authority over element X, I can just say "Then this happens to X" or I can say "Hey, what if this happened to X?"
In the one case it happens to X and that's that, or we fight over it, or whatever. In the other case the idea of something happening to X is floating around, but nothing has happened to X at all.
This makes VB go "TER, I agree."
This makes Chris go "seconded"
This is sort of why I wanted to focus on the way the fictional elements get handled first, though Mo has pointed out that this also deals with how groups work out Social Contract issues as well.
This makes CS go "I cheated, but actually I'm okay."
I think I agree with TER, except that that is a matter of ownership. The idea that ownership is all bright lines is a red herring, but push and pull are (as TER says) about how joint ownership is handled and how authority is exerted over jointly owned things (which is, as you say, everything).
Total agreement that provicialism (on both sides) produces most of the noise in these discussions.
This makes XP go "Help me understand something"
When you say, "lines of character ownership are all illusion... all ownership is fundamentally contingent and flexible," are you saying, "The way in which games and groups distribute authority is absolutely unimportant and a total illusion?" That's how it reads, but I can't fathom that's what you mean.
This makes ecb go "ownership is a line of authority..."
like any other rule we use for the purpose of clarifying who says what when.
XP: I read this to mean that the way people commmonly conceive of ownership (ie "its my character I'm the only one who has say over it") is wrong (ergo "ownership is illusory").
BUT, push and pull are two examples of why and how ownership is shared, different ways of alloting authority and of enacting collaboration. That don't mean people don't invest within those lines of ownership & position themselve for push & pull with respect to it.
It does suck to look at push as how other people push your stuff around, but what makes something a crisis point? You have to care about the outcome. Something is at stake. That is 95% (right now) clustered around issues of ownership. Eg you said that about "my" character. I don't want it. How do we deal?
This makes lpl go "Oh!"
Why didn't somebody just say that earlier? Thnx VB.
This makes XP go "Thanks"
for the response, Emily. I think I agree with CS up there, and basically with what you're saying about the 95%. The lines aren't uncrossable, but the pure fact that we drew them in the first place has an effect on the way we handle things. Saying the're "all illusion" just seems a bit too strong.
