the games we play
21 Feb 2005 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouI should be writing.
But this has been on my mind for awhile, the innate insecurity created by observing RPGs. Odd, eh?
I've never been into RPGs - roleplaying games - and in fact often shy away from RPGers when meeting them in person. Color me an introvert, but there are some pragmatic elements. Doing historical reenactment as an educational tool was the first time I landed on the periphery, and while the character sheets were fascinating and I loved the research, the act of becoming the person in public was somehow incomplete. I was always too aware that there was someone behind the curtain, even if that person was me, and my everyday, regular self. Every time I opened my mouth, I was reminded that I simply couldn't do a Scottish or British accent to save my life. The corrollary was that to be around someone else who could, would make me squirm--because not being able to identify properly whether or not the accent was truly accurate just reminded me again of the illusion. (I've spent my life watching Hollywood butcher Southern accents, so I'm probably a bit more sensitive to just how badly such things can grate on the ears of a native.)
At the Maryland Renaissance Festival--years and years ago, now--it used to be that people in costume wandered around and engaged the audience. (In the fifteen to twenty years since, a change in management and in insurance policies have rendered such crowd-engagement down to often nothing more than watching the people in pretty costumes walk past.) I think I was thirteen when I watched two young bucks with rapiers get into a cockfight over some woman, who grinned and giggled and blushed furiously through the whole scene. A crowd gathered, their attention drawn, and I recall watching the crowd more than the two young men strutting and threatening, playing it up. The crowd's faces reflected curiosity, humor at the woman's supposed predicament, and a good bit of longing. People jockeyed for position around the periphery, as though unwilling to speak up but waiting for that moment when they would be noticed as well, and drawn in.
To be on the periphery of such action, and not become part of it, leaves one incomplete, sometimes; the interaction is reduced to one-way. We watch television and movies and don't expect an interaction, and only those in fandoms feel the lack of such two-way. (I'm also suddenly thinking of Branch's comments about fandom's interplay with source material, now.) But even if the interaction is not overt, we still participate post-experience; after the second LotR movie came out, the conversations swirled around me in alternating criticism and praise of Jackson's handling of Faramir, for instance. We could not create a dialogue with Jackson, and our interpretations would not change the source/adaptation one whit, but by discussing it we were--if only vicariously--participating.
Recently I stumbled across a post on Tobias Buckell's blog, Authors Blog the Long Tail, discussing the fact that now that midlist authors have been effectively wiped from publishing houses, authors have to work just that much harder to draw in readers.
I'm meandering through this, so bear with me on my rather intuitive non-organizational pattern this morning. About six or seven years ago, I lived in New England, and it wasn't far to go up to Boston to club. I ended up in Boston one Wednesday night, I think it was, and a number of the regulars moving around me were discussing and interacting in rather unusual ways. Nothing I could put my finger on, but just something in the air. During one conversation with a friend, a second acquaintance joined us, and I ended up privy to a rather bizarre conversation of which I could make neither heads nor tails of their references (further complicated by drink and loud music, of course). I can't even recall if I asked for an explanation, but when the second person left, I asked my friend, who explained--because I had obviously walked right past the big huge sign declaring it a night for Masquerade LARPing, like the idiot I am--that I'd just ended up being drawn into the game, as a result of being 'recognized' or 'acknowledged' by two participants. This was mildly disturbing; I'd only come to dance and get tipsy and now I belatedly had to learn rules and guidelines and figure out where I stood?
Ah, no, my friend assured me. See, in this game, there's a slot for people like you. We call them believers--people who aren't involved but are aware our world (read: game) exists, and support it without necessarily participating on an active level. I asked, wouldn't that be burdensome, to have these ignorant folks wandering around intruding on your game? I had a visual of backseat participants in a game of scrabble: no, use that letter, wait, put it there! And my friend laughed and said, but if we didn't have an audience, we wouldn't have a game.
Recently I've been drawn into observing two different RPG sets, with the same morbid curiosity from a writer's POV. In stories, as the author, I can control everything. If it suits my purposes, I can make Tetsu so distracted by worry that for a few seconds he is less than his usual highly-attuned self, and gets clonked on the head by a Bad Guy. I can finagle the presentation in such a way that the pretty blonde--an otherwise sane and reasonable character--doesn't think that going to see the source of the noise might not be such a wise idea when alone in the house on a dark and stormy night. Now, in real life, Tetsu probably wouldn't lose track that thoroughly; in real life, the blonde would be on the cell phone and dashing to her car, calling someone else to go check out the noise while she waits in a brightly-lit diner a few blocks from home. The real pivot point of this, though, is conflict.
Tetsu and Keegan argue. I know by the end of the scene, I need them to be on the same page, and I'm willing to accept that not everything will be solved, but they can't be breaking up. Writing an argument is an exercise in 'choose your own adventure'. Keegan has options A, B, and C to begin the argument; options A and B will result in Tetsu's response of D--which will lead directly into someone packing up and walking out. So Keegan says C. At each juncture I must walk the balance between what will lead from the previous statement (or the character's mindset) most logically without hitting a wall in the argument, unless that wall is the goal of the scene.
Contrast this in real life, where I've had years of observation of inter-work and inter-personal conflict. The first person has an objective, often simple on the face but with complex motivations underneath, and the second person also has an objective. I can't see into the heads to know everything of where they're coming from--flaw number one in observations--but more importantly, there isn't always a unified goal. Even when there's a contract to complete Project X, the conflict can rip the project to shreds and it goes nowhere, or gets transferred elsewhere, or one person manages to get his way by squashing (or firing) the other person competely. One person's motivations, through sheer willpower, can end the conflict but this is more of 'might makes right' (or complete obtuseness wins the day) rather than a specific goal in mind that requires each person change their own perspectives to reach. Oh, it's possible to see that kind of compromise in the workplace and elsewhere, but it does make for boring conflict, because it's usually a case of one person saying, this is not important enough to me to push the issue. For characters, it must be both important enough to push the issue and still reach a point that furthers the storyline.
RPGers sit at the crux between author-run and person-run conflict. Most RPGers, from what I can tell, have a general plotline blocked out: at this point, these two will pair up, and that will impact this, and that external plotline will come into play at this point. After all, it's a story, and stories require plot and conflict along with characterization. So instead of the author manipulating from behind the curtain, the RPGers--while retaining the author-perspective of a final end-point--also act with the conflict-drive of individual personalities. Where an author may whack a character into going into the basement to find out about that noise, an RPGer--who predominantly acts with his/her own character in mind--may say, no. I'm not playing it that way, because my first priority is to the characterization, not the plot. Find another way to create this result.
This seems to render many RPGs much longer and more involved than the average story, because there is a great deal of time spent in which the characters muddle through--in an approximation of real-life conflict--trying to get to end-point 1, without compromising on their own personality and principles. Reading through the RPGs, there's a great deal more dancing around, approaching a conflict and backing away, than I'd ever write in a story. If Keegan and Tetsu spent half the time getting their act together that some of the RPGers spend jockeying into place, I'd die of boredom first, or possibly just shoot my characters. There is such a thing as too much verisimilitude.
I think the saving grace for an RPG's over-realism is the section two aspect, to use Buckell's terminology again. The audience participation reduces the level of boredom and frustration that could set in if we were forced to watch--over the course of a few days to a year or more--as two characters struggle with a conflict before reaching the end-point. The audience's boredom is alleviated by the real-time element of being included, I suppose.
Which brings me back to my original point, that there's an inherent insecurity when one stands on the periphery of an RPG. I say RPG, but from what I see elsewhere, this runs through much of our lives. People hovering around the edges of politics who want their fifteen minutes as a talking head on CNN or Fox; the endless reams of people sending in videos of themselves or friends doing unbelievably stupid things, just to see their face on the Godbox. To be seen is to be acknowledged, and to be made real. To stand at the edges of an RPG, to throw a comment out there and not be acknowledged, is to feel, if temporarily, less real. But the same thing can also happen with authors and finished products where the reader/viewer wants that interaction. I sent email to an author once, just to let him know I enjoyed his work. Despite his webpage proclaiming he answers every single email, I never heard back. It's hard to deny that flash, that momentary insecurity that asks: did I say something wrong, was I not interesting enough... What was the reason that my participation was not acknowledged, if the rules of the game stated that all speech would at least be recognized?
(Sometimes I ponder the fact that I can't and don't answer all email, myself. And there are posts on this journal and my others that languish, waiting for a reply. Would it be easier on that assumption of interaction to say that I won't answer the majority of email, so people know upfront the interaction is limited?)
And no, I don't want to hear from anyone--and I write it bluntly in case anyone is even thinking it--that it's my problem solely if I'm annoyed at the lack of a response when moving from observer-periphery into responder-periphery. I see such a defense as bullshit, because you can't have it both ways. If you're setting up a two-way interaction, and recognize that in an RPG (or any other interactive situation) the audience carries as much credence as the players, then you are obligated to at least acknowledge the audience's role. You can't show a play that calls for audience participation, and then get huffy when the audience feels slighted for having its participation ignored.
This kind of selective response is most noticeable in smaller RPGs, or newer ones that have yet to build a loyal following. When, in a public forum where all responses are viewed, and six observer-participants respond and only five get answers, the omission is as noisy as if the actor-participant had turned his/her back on the speaker. And lacking any additional venues for interaction, that public slap--of a sort--is enough to make many observers step back from the periphery and go in search of something else. After all, the entire exercise seems to me to hang on a simple requirement by both actors and observers: the wish to be acknowledged. The actors/RPGers don't want to stand in an empty room and say their lines to the wall, any more than I want to write stories and assume that no one will ever read them. And observers don't want to cheer for actors that will never hear them--this is why it's so rare when people do cheer and clap at the end of a movie. In a one-way situation, ninety-nine percent of the time, the lights come up and the audience leaves, with no feedback given. In a situation presumed and setup to be two-way, the audience craves recognition of their feedback just as much as the actors crave that feedback. This is why, when we stand and cheer at a play, the actors bow. They might not have the opportunity to speak to us, but their curtain calls of curtesies and bows show their gratitude in return for ours. If they just stood there, ignoring us, we would leave with an uneasy, disgruntled feeling. The interaction would be incomplete.
All this does get back to writing, and my own contemplations about posting an unfinished work for a few folks to read. It's good to have the encouragement--and I won't mention any names but you know who you are--and the pestering--and you DO know who you are--to get more chapters of the story as it unfolds. But criticism and deeper feedback (more than general cheering, that is) create a two-way interaction that does influence the creative process. I've read authors whose early work is well-done and enjoyable, but later works seem pendantic or predictable, and the more I interact with my own growing mini-fandom (if I could be so egotistical as to call it that), the more I have to question the influence of the two-way interaction. Are the reader-participants so vociferously demanding storyline A over the author's intent of storyline B that in the end, A gets written despite the author's heart being elsewhere?
I think I argued for several days with CP over the end of Dancing. I know I've discussed with other fans the end of Escaflowne (which moves on the same theme as Dancing), where Hitomi goes back to her world and leaves behind Van, who loves her as much as she loves him. As a reader, I want that happy ending, not some we'll-always-have-Paris crap. As a writer, I can see exactly where Escaflowne's creator came from, in making the decision to have her go back to her own world. I mention this because I've observed the two-way commentary that occurs on elists and forums in fanfiction, where reader-participants feel as much proprietory interest in the characters as the writer-participants--and a group of truly noisy fans can, and sometimes do, sway a writer into creating a story that isn't where the writer had intended it to go. Of course, this also happens in the opposite direction, with writers willfully creating a storyline to stymie the pushiest fans, but isn't this just as much a direct influence of the two-way interaction? If you read authors' notes on fanfiction, there's often a subtle digging-in that happens when a writer gets singled out by noisy readers: I'm not writing that pairing, this will remain genfic, I don't care if you like character X because I don't, character Y had to die for the storyline so stop giving me shit about it. It's a push-back on the part of the authors to reclaim the author's territory, to draw boundaries around what will and will not be acceptable influences.
Don't get me wrong; I think a writer is definitely entitled to drawing those boundaries. In fact, a writer must do so or risk losing the vision in the midst of a pseudo-collaborative work. Letting that happen has a further danger, too: if you write what the audience craves, the praise is still reduced in direct proportion to the amount the audience is busy patting itself on the back for its contribution. And that contribution--if you asked me, as a writer--is really somewhat null compared to the hours I spend at the computer laboring over a hundred and thirty thousand flippin' words. Too often some audience members see their own email of sixty to a hundred words as a substantial contribution and fail to acknowledge that their email doesn't measure up to jackshit compared to the quantity of my actual creation. And, of course, if the writer creates something that doesn't please the audience, let the skewering begin. That's when keeping your own territory becomes more important: I'll accept a story didn't work if I wrote it on my own terms. It's another thing altogether to participate in a pseudo-collaborative work via audience interaction, and be the lone skewered soul when the work fails.
And then there's the secondary element of a two-way interaction, which appears to be unavoidable: the first tier. As popularity grows around, say, RPGers, the early founders (or finders) close ranks in a circle so as to remain on the direct periphery of the action. I've been accused of letting that happen, myself, and from the outside it may appear so: I have a large group of folks who read my writing and have made it clear they'd read a flippin' grocery list if I wrote it. (I'm not saying they'd be happy, per se, just repeating the timbre of their compliments.) It's too easy to let that circle close around we authors/actors, but as the circle closes, the interaction is no longer truly two-way. It's now select-audience relating to creator, and not all-audience interacting. I figured out, finally, the key to knowing ranks are closing in: when I respond to feedback and the reaction is astonishment that I'd 'take the time' to reply. Or when I see public comments about my work with the addendum that the commentor will never be noticed/recognized. That's an oblique way of acknowledging the unconscious recognition that one stands too far outside the periphery to be noticed by those inside the tight cluster of first tier reader-observers. That's part of the reason I've always struggled to find the time to write folks who compliment me out of left field, and especially those whose words carry a tone of accepting that their cheering from the back section won't carry past the noise of the front rows.
How does that relate to RPGs? It's just a curious observation, is all, that sometimes I find more of curiosity in reading the observer-participant responses (such as on LJ) than in the actual posts by the RPGers. Look for not only who gets answered, but also for whose comments are answered by other observer-participants. Somewhere, down the line, the peripheral audience recognized ranks, and that certain individuals by virtue of noise, insight, or longevity, have created--purposefully or inadvertently--the appearance of influence. Yes, Virginia, this is called a clique, and it's a fascinating thing to observe. I add the notation of 'inadvertently' because sometimes an observer-participant may have earned that influence rightly, by simple respect or insight or skills of his/her own. The person didn't necessarily set out to gain rank in the tier around the primary action, but as the audience-participant rises in recognition points bestowed by the RPGer/creator/author, the rest of the audience recognizes this and gravitates in that direction.
One of the older RPGs I'm observing--going on for two years now, I think--has actually institutionalized the process, in a way. Audience-participants who interact on a regular basis are encouraged to enter the RPG itself, in a closer periphery (though never quite fully at the center where the original actors stand). Taking up roles and observing various rites of passage, the new audience-participants thus form an inner ring of observer-participants, and often the next concentric circle happily interacts with that immediate ring of audience-participants as a vicarious means of interacting with the main creators. The advantage is the addition of collaborative energies to move the churning RPG along; the disadvantage is that newcomer audience members must now wade not only through the first tier of audience, but a second, inner tier consisting of audience-participants, all just to get to the actors whose roles drive the entire mechanism.
That's a lot of work just to get a dose of recognition, which after all is the foundation of such a creative enterprise. And I think it's especially burdensome on those in the center, since those in the immediate step-down--the audience-participants now playing defined roles along the edges of the primary action--aren't about to step aside to make room for newcomers without a great deal of coaxing. Institutionalizing the process is one way to handle this: you must do A, B, and C, to get acknowledged as D; it's fairer than leaving it to the immediate observer-ring to open its ranks and accept newcomers. The more the audience craves recognition, the more it's likely to realize that 'growing popularity' means 'same amount of energy spread across more people' which becomes 'less time for me to be recognized.' Why else do so many people like being a big fish in a small pond? Time and energy to participate and provide feedback is limited, and it's only pragmatic to know, on some deep level, that the more people at the party, the less time the host will have to thank you for coming.
I guess that just puts the burden back on we creators. Draw the boundaries of what will and will not be acceptable levels of influence, and constantly seek to push past the self-formed first tier of active observers, and past the ring of inactive observers who interact solely with the first tier...and find those way on the periphery observing the whole thing and hoping for interaction as well.
Man. To think I just wanted to observe how a group of people, each focusing on his/her character's motivations and goals, might resolve story-line conflicts to reach an agreed-upon goal. But no, I gotta start noticing the dynamics between the actors and the audience, because I'm a twit like that. But then, if it's pure two-way interactivity, the storyline is as much about the observer-participants as it is about the actor-participants. And sometimes it makes for even more interesting watching, assuming I don't get bored of what can seem like incessant pandering and preferential treatment.
Or I may be bored of it already, in some cases, but it's a moot point, since I still have to beat up a few characters of my own. And on that note, here ends this day's lengthy ramble.
But this has been on my mind for awhile, the innate insecurity created by observing RPGs. Odd, eh?
I've never been into RPGs - roleplaying games - and in fact often shy away from RPGers when meeting them in person. Color me an introvert, but there are some pragmatic elements. Doing historical reenactment as an educational tool was the first time I landed on the periphery, and while the character sheets were fascinating and I loved the research, the act of becoming the person in public was somehow incomplete. I was always too aware that there was someone behind the curtain, even if that person was me, and my everyday, regular self. Every time I opened my mouth, I was reminded that I simply couldn't do a Scottish or British accent to save my life. The corrollary was that to be around someone else who could, would make me squirm--because not being able to identify properly whether or not the accent was truly accurate just reminded me again of the illusion. (I've spent my life watching Hollywood butcher Southern accents, so I'm probably a bit more sensitive to just how badly such things can grate on the ears of a native.)
At the Maryland Renaissance Festival--years and years ago, now--it used to be that people in costume wandered around and engaged the audience. (In the fifteen to twenty years since, a change in management and in insurance policies have rendered such crowd-engagement down to often nothing more than watching the people in pretty costumes walk past.) I think I was thirteen when I watched two young bucks with rapiers get into a cockfight over some woman, who grinned and giggled and blushed furiously through the whole scene. A crowd gathered, their attention drawn, and I recall watching the crowd more than the two young men strutting and threatening, playing it up. The crowd's faces reflected curiosity, humor at the woman's supposed predicament, and a good bit of longing. People jockeyed for position around the periphery, as though unwilling to speak up but waiting for that moment when they would be noticed as well, and drawn in.
To be on the periphery of such action, and not become part of it, leaves one incomplete, sometimes; the interaction is reduced to one-way. We watch television and movies and don't expect an interaction, and only those in fandoms feel the lack of such two-way. (I'm also suddenly thinking of Branch's comments about fandom's interplay with source material, now.) But even if the interaction is not overt, we still participate post-experience; after the second LotR movie came out, the conversations swirled around me in alternating criticism and praise of Jackson's handling of Faramir, for instance. We could not create a dialogue with Jackson, and our interpretations would not change the source/adaptation one whit, but by discussing it we were--if only vicariously--participating.
Recently I stumbled across a post on Tobias Buckell's blog, Authors Blog the Long Tail, discussing the fact that now that midlist authors have been effectively wiped from publishing houses, authors have to work just that much harder to draw in readers.
I'm going to posit that there are two parts to authoring. Section one is the work itself by the author. The second part is the relationship the author has with the readers, as readers often get interested beyond one book. Readers move on to read other stuff by the writer, some of them seek out more information about the writer, others go to listen to the author, or try to meet the author, or communicate somehow with the author. Often the relationship, the brand of the author, will carry on reading the author regardless of books that may not measure up intrinsically, or even books that are then ghostwritten (this isn't blanket, mind you, some authors don't want that part or consider it base, and many readers judge each book individually, but it's enough of a trend that I'd like to chat about it).If movies and television are entirely section one, then getting back to RPGs, we're dealing with a work-in-progress whose existence relies perhaps entirely upon the occurance of section two.
[...]
Book tours work not because you'll actually sell enough books on the tour to cover the tour, but because you are trying to spark section 2 relationships even if you don't realize it: readers who get something out of the experience of having a book signed, meeting the author, and then spreading the word to fellow people within their cultural peer circles that the author was an interesting speaker, or really pleasant, or totally cool to be around, or something, and brings more people into the reading circle.
I'm meandering through this, so bear with me on my rather intuitive non-organizational pattern this morning. About six or seven years ago, I lived in New England, and it wasn't far to go up to Boston to club. I ended up in Boston one Wednesday night, I think it was, and a number of the regulars moving around me were discussing and interacting in rather unusual ways. Nothing I could put my finger on, but just something in the air. During one conversation with a friend, a second acquaintance joined us, and I ended up privy to a rather bizarre conversation of which I could make neither heads nor tails of their references (further complicated by drink and loud music, of course). I can't even recall if I asked for an explanation, but when the second person left, I asked my friend, who explained--because I had obviously walked right past the big huge sign declaring it a night for Masquerade LARPing, like the idiot I am--that I'd just ended up being drawn into the game, as a result of being 'recognized' or 'acknowledged' by two participants. This was mildly disturbing; I'd only come to dance and get tipsy and now I belatedly had to learn rules and guidelines and figure out where I stood?
Ah, no, my friend assured me. See, in this game, there's a slot for people like you. We call them believers--people who aren't involved but are aware our world (read: game) exists, and support it without necessarily participating on an active level. I asked, wouldn't that be burdensome, to have these ignorant folks wandering around intruding on your game? I had a visual of backseat participants in a game of scrabble: no, use that letter, wait, put it there! And my friend laughed and said, but if we didn't have an audience, we wouldn't have a game.
Recently I've been drawn into observing two different RPG sets, with the same morbid curiosity from a writer's POV. In stories, as the author, I can control everything. If it suits my purposes, I can make Tetsu so distracted by worry that for a few seconds he is less than his usual highly-attuned self, and gets clonked on the head by a Bad Guy. I can finagle the presentation in such a way that the pretty blonde--an otherwise sane and reasonable character--doesn't think that going to see the source of the noise might not be such a wise idea when alone in the house on a dark and stormy night. Now, in real life, Tetsu probably wouldn't lose track that thoroughly; in real life, the blonde would be on the cell phone and dashing to her car, calling someone else to go check out the noise while she waits in a brightly-lit diner a few blocks from home. The real pivot point of this, though, is conflict.
Tetsu and Keegan argue. I know by the end of the scene, I need them to be on the same page, and I'm willing to accept that not everything will be solved, but they can't be breaking up. Writing an argument is an exercise in 'choose your own adventure'. Keegan has options A, B, and C to begin the argument; options A and B will result in Tetsu's response of D--which will lead directly into someone packing up and walking out. So Keegan says C. At each juncture I must walk the balance between what will lead from the previous statement (or the character's mindset) most logically without hitting a wall in the argument, unless that wall is the goal of the scene.
Contrast this in real life, where I've had years of observation of inter-work and inter-personal conflict. The first person has an objective, often simple on the face but with complex motivations underneath, and the second person also has an objective. I can't see into the heads to know everything of where they're coming from--flaw number one in observations--but more importantly, there isn't always a unified goal. Even when there's a contract to complete Project X, the conflict can rip the project to shreds and it goes nowhere, or gets transferred elsewhere, or one person manages to get his way by squashing (or firing) the other person competely. One person's motivations, through sheer willpower, can end the conflict but this is more of 'might makes right' (or complete obtuseness wins the day) rather than a specific goal in mind that requires each person change their own perspectives to reach. Oh, it's possible to see that kind of compromise in the workplace and elsewhere, but it does make for boring conflict, because it's usually a case of one person saying, this is not important enough to me to push the issue. For characters, it must be both important enough to push the issue and still reach a point that furthers the storyline.
RPGers sit at the crux between author-run and person-run conflict. Most RPGers, from what I can tell, have a general plotline blocked out: at this point, these two will pair up, and that will impact this, and that external plotline will come into play at this point. After all, it's a story, and stories require plot and conflict along with characterization. So instead of the author manipulating from behind the curtain, the RPGers--while retaining the author-perspective of a final end-point--also act with the conflict-drive of individual personalities. Where an author may whack a character into going into the basement to find out about that noise, an RPGer--who predominantly acts with his/her own character in mind--may say, no. I'm not playing it that way, because my first priority is to the characterization, not the plot. Find another way to create this result.
This seems to render many RPGs much longer and more involved than the average story, because there is a great deal of time spent in which the characters muddle through--in an approximation of real-life conflict--trying to get to end-point 1, without compromising on their own personality and principles. Reading through the RPGs, there's a great deal more dancing around, approaching a conflict and backing away, than I'd ever write in a story. If Keegan and Tetsu spent half the time getting their act together that some of the RPGers spend jockeying into place, I'd die of boredom first, or possibly just shoot my characters. There is such a thing as too much verisimilitude.
I think the saving grace for an RPG's over-realism is the section two aspect, to use Buckell's terminology again. The audience participation reduces the level of boredom and frustration that could set in if we were forced to watch--over the course of a few days to a year or more--as two characters struggle with a conflict before reaching the end-point. The audience's boredom is alleviated by the real-time element of being included, I suppose.
Which brings me back to my original point, that there's an inherent insecurity when one stands on the periphery of an RPG. I say RPG, but from what I see elsewhere, this runs through much of our lives. People hovering around the edges of politics who want their fifteen minutes as a talking head on CNN or Fox; the endless reams of people sending in videos of themselves or friends doing unbelievably stupid things, just to see their face on the Godbox. To be seen is to be acknowledged, and to be made real. To stand at the edges of an RPG, to throw a comment out there and not be acknowledged, is to feel, if temporarily, less real. But the same thing can also happen with authors and finished products where the reader/viewer wants that interaction. I sent email to an author once, just to let him know I enjoyed his work. Despite his webpage proclaiming he answers every single email, I never heard back. It's hard to deny that flash, that momentary insecurity that asks: did I say something wrong, was I not interesting enough... What was the reason that my participation was not acknowledged, if the rules of the game stated that all speech would at least be recognized?
(Sometimes I ponder the fact that I can't and don't answer all email, myself. And there are posts on this journal and my others that languish, waiting for a reply. Would it be easier on that assumption of interaction to say that I won't answer the majority of email, so people know upfront the interaction is limited?)
And no, I don't want to hear from anyone--and I write it bluntly in case anyone is even thinking it--that it's my problem solely if I'm annoyed at the lack of a response when moving from observer-periphery into responder-periphery. I see such a defense as bullshit, because you can't have it both ways. If you're setting up a two-way interaction, and recognize that in an RPG (or any other interactive situation) the audience carries as much credence as the players, then you are obligated to at least acknowledge the audience's role. You can't show a play that calls for audience participation, and then get huffy when the audience feels slighted for having its participation ignored.
This kind of selective response is most noticeable in smaller RPGs, or newer ones that have yet to build a loyal following. When, in a public forum where all responses are viewed, and six observer-participants respond and only five get answers, the omission is as noisy as if the actor-participant had turned his/her back on the speaker. And lacking any additional venues for interaction, that public slap--of a sort--is enough to make many observers step back from the periphery and go in search of something else. After all, the entire exercise seems to me to hang on a simple requirement by both actors and observers: the wish to be acknowledged. The actors/RPGers don't want to stand in an empty room and say their lines to the wall, any more than I want to write stories and assume that no one will ever read them. And observers don't want to cheer for actors that will never hear them--this is why it's so rare when people do cheer and clap at the end of a movie. In a one-way situation, ninety-nine percent of the time, the lights come up and the audience leaves, with no feedback given. In a situation presumed and setup to be two-way, the audience craves recognition of their feedback just as much as the actors crave that feedback. This is why, when we stand and cheer at a play, the actors bow. They might not have the opportunity to speak to us, but their curtain calls of curtesies and bows show their gratitude in return for ours. If they just stood there, ignoring us, we would leave with an uneasy, disgruntled feeling. The interaction would be incomplete.
All this does get back to writing, and my own contemplations about posting an unfinished work for a few folks to read. It's good to have the encouragement--and I won't mention any names but you know who you are--and the pestering--and you DO know who you are--to get more chapters of the story as it unfolds. But criticism and deeper feedback (more than general cheering, that is) create a two-way interaction that does influence the creative process. I've read authors whose early work is well-done and enjoyable, but later works seem pendantic or predictable, and the more I interact with my own growing mini-fandom (if I could be so egotistical as to call it that), the more I have to question the influence of the two-way interaction. Are the reader-participants so vociferously demanding storyline A over the author's intent of storyline B that in the end, A gets written despite the author's heart being elsewhere?
I think I argued for several days with CP over the end of Dancing. I know I've discussed with other fans the end of Escaflowne (which moves on the same theme as Dancing), where Hitomi goes back to her world and leaves behind Van, who loves her as much as she loves him. As a reader, I want that happy ending, not some we'll-always-have-Paris crap. As a writer, I can see exactly where Escaflowne's creator came from, in making the decision to have her go back to her own world. I mention this because I've observed the two-way commentary that occurs on elists and forums in fanfiction, where reader-participants feel as much proprietory interest in the characters as the writer-participants--and a group of truly noisy fans can, and sometimes do, sway a writer into creating a story that isn't where the writer had intended it to go. Of course, this also happens in the opposite direction, with writers willfully creating a storyline to stymie the pushiest fans, but isn't this just as much a direct influence of the two-way interaction? If you read authors' notes on fanfiction, there's often a subtle digging-in that happens when a writer gets singled out by noisy readers: I'm not writing that pairing, this will remain genfic, I don't care if you like character X because I don't, character Y had to die for the storyline so stop giving me shit about it. It's a push-back on the part of the authors to reclaim the author's territory, to draw boundaries around what will and will not be acceptable influences.
Don't get me wrong; I think a writer is definitely entitled to drawing those boundaries. In fact, a writer must do so or risk losing the vision in the midst of a pseudo-collaborative work. Letting that happen has a further danger, too: if you write what the audience craves, the praise is still reduced in direct proportion to the amount the audience is busy patting itself on the back for its contribution. And that contribution--if you asked me, as a writer--is really somewhat null compared to the hours I spend at the computer laboring over a hundred and thirty thousand flippin' words. Too often some audience members see their own email of sixty to a hundred words as a substantial contribution and fail to acknowledge that their email doesn't measure up to jackshit compared to the quantity of my actual creation. And, of course, if the writer creates something that doesn't please the audience, let the skewering begin. That's when keeping your own territory becomes more important: I'll accept a story didn't work if I wrote it on my own terms. It's another thing altogether to participate in a pseudo-collaborative work via audience interaction, and be the lone skewered soul when the work fails.
And then there's the secondary element of a two-way interaction, which appears to be unavoidable: the first tier. As popularity grows around, say, RPGers, the early founders (or finders) close ranks in a circle so as to remain on the direct periphery of the action. I've been accused of letting that happen, myself, and from the outside it may appear so: I have a large group of folks who read my writing and have made it clear they'd read a flippin' grocery list if I wrote it. (I'm not saying they'd be happy, per se, just repeating the timbre of their compliments.) It's too easy to let that circle close around we authors/actors, but as the circle closes, the interaction is no longer truly two-way. It's now select-audience relating to creator, and not all-audience interacting. I figured out, finally, the key to knowing ranks are closing in: when I respond to feedback and the reaction is astonishment that I'd 'take the time' to reply. Or when I see public comments about my work with the addendum that the commentor will never be noticed/recognized. That's an oblique way of acknowledging the unconscious recognition that one stands too far outside the periphery to be noticed by those inside the tight cluster of first tier reader-observers. That's part of the reason I've always struggled to find the time to write folks who compliment me out of left field, and especially those whose words carry a tone of accepting that their cheering from the back section won't carry past the noise of the front rows.
How does that relate to RPGs? It's just a curious observation, is all, that sometimes I find more of curiosity in reading the observer-participant responses (such as on LJ) than in the actual posts by the RPGers. Look for not only who gets answered, but also for whose comments are answered by other observer-participants. Somewhere, down the line, the peripheral audience recognized ranks, and that certain individuals by virtue of noise, insight, or longevity, have created--purposefully or inadvertently--the appearance of influence. Yes, Virginia, this is called a clique, and it's a fascinating thing to observe. I add the notation of 'inadvertently' because sometimes an observer-participant may have earned that influence rightly, by simple respect or insight or skills of his/her own. The person didn't necessarily set out to gain rank in the tier around the primary action, but as the audience-participant rises in recognition points bestowed by the RPGer/creator/author, the rest of the audience recognizes this and gravitates in that direction.
One of the older RPGs I'm observing--going on for two years now, I think--has actually institutionalized the process, in a way. Audience-participants who interact on a regular basis are encouraged to enter the RPG itself, in a closer periphery (though never quite fully at the center where the original actors stand). Taking up roles and observing various rites of passage, the new audience-participants thus form an inner ring of observer-participants, and often the next concentric circle happily interacts with that immediate ring of audience-participants as a vicarious means of interacting with the main creators. The advantage is the addition of collaborative energies to move the churning RPG along; the disadvantage is that newcomer audience members must now wade not only through the first tier of audience, but a second, inner tier consisting of audience-participants, all just to get to the actors whose roles drive the entire mechanism.
That's a lot of work just to get a dose of recognition, which after all is the foundation of such a creative enterprise. And I think it's especially burdensome on those in the center, since those in the immediate step-down--the audience-participants now playing defined roles along the edges of the primary action--aren't about to step aside to make room for newcomers without a great deal of coaxing. Institutionalizing the process is one way to handle this: you must do A, B, and C, to get acknowledged as D; it's fairer than leaving it to the immediate observer-ring to open its ranks and accept newcomers. The more the audience craves recognition, the more it's likely to realize that 'growing popularity' means 'same amount of energy spread across more people' which becomes 'less time for me to be recognized.' Why else do so many people like being a big fish in a small pond? Time and energy to participate and provide feedback is limited, and it's only pragmatic to know, on some deep level, that the more people at the party, the less time the host will have to thank you for coming.
I guess that just puts the burden back on we creators. Draw the boundaries of what will and will not be acceptable levels of influence, and constantly seek to push past the self-formed first tier of active observers, and past the ring of inactive observers who interact solely with the first tier...and find those way on the periphery observing the whole thing and hoping for interaction as well.
Man. To think I just wanted to observe how a group of people, each focusing on his/her character's motivations and goals, might resolve story-line conflicts to reach an agreed-upon goal. But no, I gotta start noticing the dynamics between the actors and the audience, because I'm a twit like that. But then, if it's pure two-way interactivity, the storyline is as much about the observer-participants as it is about the actor-participants. And sometimes it makes for even more interesting watching, assuming I don't get bored of what can seem like incessant pandering and preferential treatment.
Or I may be bored of it already, in some cases, but it's a moot point, since I still have to beat up a few characters of my own. And on that note, here ends this day's lengthy ramble.
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Date: 21 Feb 2005 08:18 pm (UTC)Hmm. Does that make me fairly immune to influence then, that I fired one entire first tier? Is that tribute to the strength of my characters, or to the fact that my brain chemistry largely renders me unable or unwilling to subvert my story in the interest of pleasing anyone but myself?
Or the characters, as the case may be.
Who, by the way, I also have to visit with.
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Date: 21 Feb 2005 09:25 pm (UTC)I'm not saying that as writers that we purposefully bend our work to the influence of readers, but it does happen. Hell, you can see it in our co-crits of each other's work, in that another person's take on a character or sub-plot opens doors we hadn't seen before. That's obviously the gentle influence, as opposed to the nasty-grams of "I can't believe you killed Kenny! He was meant to be with..." etc.
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Date: 21 Feb 2005 11:59 pm (UTC)I guess it's okay to take a pity pill now and then.
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Date: 22 Feb 2005 12:02 am (UTC)Sometimes just a question is helpful. "What's Yoshi doing at the climax?" I hadn't considered it, too wrapped up in my main pair. So I looked over at Yoshi, and he was grinning like the Japanese version of a Cheshire Cat. And then I knew there was a story there. Yoshi was a naughty boy.
Gotta love him.
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Date: 22 Feb 2005 04:13 pm (UTC)It's the noise-to-signal ratio. In crit, we're high signal. In general reader feedback, for better or worse, it's high noise. That's just how it is.
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Date: 22 Feb 2005 05:04 pm (UTC)*goes off to ponder, brainstorm, and accomplish tasks*
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Date: 24 Feb 2005 12:32 am (UTC)It's just the pushy ones that are to be avoided.