anyway.

A couple of days ago I was in a pretty heated conversation about whether I'm opportunistically and self-servingly bashing the Forge. That accusation's off-topic for this thread and I'll treat it severely.

However, if you'd like to register your objection to the way I've characterized the Big Model here, I understand, and I offer the marginalia of this comment as the appropriate place for it.

Keep it brief. Keep it to this comment's marginalia.

Thanks!

That looks like a good marriage of the two definitions. Are you looking to supplant the conception of positioning as a character component with the concept of player positioning? Or are they parallel, one referring to the other?

An interesting, kind of sensitive question.

In my personal thinking, the new definition here replaced the Big Model's definition long ago, it's just that I've fallen back on the convenience of "me and my character" when I've talked about it. So: I'm looking for this to supplant the Big Model's definition, utterly and finally, with the Big Model's conception surviving only in the provisional "me and my character" case.

But I'm not the editor or arbiter of the Big Model.

So either the Big Model will change to agree with me, by its own processes and following its own needs and interests, or else this represents a break with the Big Model. Either way, it's fine with me and it's not my call.

Can you say a little more about what is and isn't a "legitimate gameplay option" in this context?  Does it require interaction with currency?

I think that'll need to be the next installment. It's the same as Evan's question about system here, and it gets into the wet, wet wilds of whose turn is it when it's my turn?

Is it intentional that the definition of positioning makes no reference to it being the consequence of other prior things? This definition seems really forward looking! For example, at the end of a campaign that we're not continuing I'd say that all players have the same total set of legitimate gameplay options available to them. Do the player whose warrior retired to become a mayor and the player whose warrior's died in action really have the same position?

I mean, I can see how if positioning is all about currency then it has to be forward looking, but it feels like a drift away from what I would have intuited the term to mean.

Causality is being invoked in fictional positioning. However, (and this is a big however), what it makes available to you is what is acknowledged by the other players. Cues, especially mechanical ones, have the great virtue of clarifying and simplifying the resources available to a player or a character based on the players' shared understanding of what those might be. And those are likely completely separate from any causality (it may or may not exist, it may be something you make up as you go along etc.).

But, also, whether and what type of causality is upheld varies from group to group. Fictional positioning is essentially a narrative rhetorical device, which is invoked to make stronger an argument that something later can or cannot be established. Having said you have the gun makes it harder to argue against you being able to shoot it later.

@Tim R.

I'd say that the mayor's player has additional options available to them, simply because they still have some authority over that character in the game world in a way that the dead player's character does not.

Similarly, if this is a world with the ability to raise and speak with the dead, the positions are quite separate.

Re: Campaign ending, that seems to be a weird question. When we are no longer playing the game, obviously we have the same positioning with respect to that game (i.e. none at all.)

As far as forward or backward in time, I don't suppose it matters much. I see the broader definition (vesting positioning in the player, not the character) as including past actions as much as the narrower definitions. The consequences of past actions bit is hiding in the word "legitimate."

yrs—
—Ben

So "positioning" can be boken down into axes like "fictional positioning," "cue/currency positioning," and "interpersonal positioning." It might be possible to think about "gamer types" in terms of what kind of positioning is most comfortable for a player.

I feel like there's still a need for a corollary term that describes position from the point of view of an element (particularly, but perhaps not exclusively, a fictional element); that is, the total set of all legitimate moves that any player can make re a given element. This would be something like "passive position" (moves that can be done to a thing) instead of "active position" (moves that a player can do).

Because I usually think of fictional positioning in terms of modifying the things that can be done to an element, rather than modifying the things that other players can do (including to that element). They are one and the same, of course, but it's not an intuitive frame of reference for me.

This strikes me as something in a gray area between clarification and disagreement, but:

Isn't it possible to have positioning without a position?

In other words, what if you flip that definition backwards, saying:

A player's positioning is the set of factors and processes (including in-fiction, cue-mediated, and interpersonal) that act towards creating a set of defined and legitimate gameplay options available to her at this moment of play.

'Cos like rhetoric, these things don't always coaless into an argument, with a defined and coherent point, but arguing is still happening.

I think this view preserves your argument in a slightly more nitpicky form (with positioning acting to construct that set of options, to clarify as much as support or negate), so hopefully it looks basically identical to you.

Does thinking about fictional positioning in this way provide concrete support in your process of game design?

Or, is this an abstraction / extraction to theory from your practice of game design?

And, I recognize the reality is their inter-relationship is more dynamic than my question implies, just wondering if it weights heavily more one way than the other.

Thanks Ben! (and Josh for your further clarification.)

I've found a much better way of expressing my confusion than an appeal to forward and backward perspectives. It's this: Are we saying that if a fictional element does not give rise to gameplay options then it's not a part of our position?

The whole campaign end question is me struggling to think up an example of this happening. But having written out the question like that, I'm quite satified if the answer is "Yes, that's exactly what we're saying."

I'd certainly agree with that statement.

I'd elaborate further that if a fictional element does not give rise to gameplay options it is an indicator of a flawed design.

Tim, Ben, TMC: Let me jump into this and say that since we're including freeform, "legitimate gameplay options" just means "you say something and people agree that it's true, or consider it a legit thing to have said even if it turns out to be false, or they use it as a jumping-off place to say something else that turns out to be true instead, or whatever."

We could probably put our minds to it and come up with cases where there's a fictional element that doesn't give rise to gameplay options - that is to say, something's true in the game's fiction but nobody can ever possibly build on it in any way. I'm comfy saying that such a thing wouldn't be part of anybody's position, but it's kind of an unusual case. "If somebody says something that nobody can build on, nobody can build on it."

To me, then, Ben's saying that "if somebody can legitimately say something that nobody can then build on, it is an indicator of a flawed design," which is kind of a weird direction to me to take the question, but sure, I can see that. It doesn't seem like a very strong statement to me at all, though, since something must be going pretty wrong if people are saying things that they can't follow through on.

It's not the same as the case where something's true in the game's fiction and we could build on it, but nobody happens to do so. In that case, it IS part of our positioning, just like the opportunity to castle in Chess can be part of your current position even if you don't, then, castle.

Josh, too: don't add "defined" to your thinking about a player's selection of legitimate gameplay options. In roleplaying, the selection's almost never defined.

(Otherwise, yes, your construction reads as identical to me.)

When I talked about Color in my Marginalia, I was refering to detail in description.  For instance, how many times has a GM gone on describing a tavern by saying stuff like "The countertop of the bar is made from oak."  The fact that the countertop is oak never comes into play.  He's just painting the scene for the players.  Sure, someone could somehow make the oak important, but 999 times out of a thousand, it's just setting Color and quickly forgotten.  It's not an indication of design quality, IMO, at all.

JLeigh: Dynamic and interrelated, right on, but right now this is theory, not design, yeah. A way to examine game designs that already exist, not a way to create new designs.

TMK: I'd argue that detail matters but also I'm not really willing to defend my statement re: game design. It's probably wrong, for reasons you point out.

JLeigh: Absolutely 100% this is about design for me, for thinking about new design or analyzing existing games and game play. I wouldn't ascribe value to one design over another simply based on how they use the fiction vis a vis the mechanics, but I would say that this element is often overlooked and is more important than people realise.