thread: 2005-05-02 : Person vs. Protagonist
On 2005-05-03, Charles wrote:
I'll put in my usual plug for situations that don't resolve, situations where characters don't step up to the plate, situations where the characters just aren't willing to go through with it in the end.
Consider James Joyce's short story The Dead, or the IF game Rameses, or many of the sequences in the IF game Galatea, or the novels of W.G. Sebald, or to some extent the novels of William Vollman.
However, I'll agree that what matters is putting characters in situations where they have to think about stepping up to the plate. What is much more typical of everyday life is that we insulate ourselves from having to even think about it at all, not that we don't actually step up when the time comes (although mostly we don't do that either, but the process of not doing is interesting, while the process of being insulated isn't process at all). I just think it is important to not over-protagonize characters (by which I mean, create characters who are always "Do Do DO, must find the conflict, must have the confrontation, must face my dark past right now." Such characters may be fun for a short run, but even for that, there is no reason they should be the only flavor. For one thing, they are no more realistic than super heroes and wizards.
I also think that proceduralist and effectivist games are particularly well suited both to handle normal people, interesting normal situations, and also to support characters who won?t step up being interesting. In technical simulationist play, the flow of play is determined directly by in-game actions, so a character who refuses to act loses their player the ability to control the flow of the game, but a proceduralist game uses formal mechanics to handle game flow, so my character can refuse to have that confrontation, while I the player spend my points to ensure that we play out that refusal in detail.
Whether that refusal is interesting for the rest of you, and what you can do about it if it isn?t, is something a proceduralist game also supports in a way a technical simulationist game does not. My promise is that, given the mechanics to let me have the internal monologue, I will make my failure to engage interesting.
Oh, one more example, which may require a bit of back reading to understand the setting, but not the meaning. This is pretty far from normal people in normal situations, but it is beautiful, beautiful refusal to step up. Give me a game where a player delivers that internal monologue, and I really won?t care whether laser sharks are battling Santa?s mole-man army in the background, nor will I require that Jack someday overcome their refusal to engage, and win out over their antagonists.
