Re: Participation versus Interactivity

[WFreitag@aol.com]

Brandon wrote:

>My experience doing freeform PBEM RPG concurs with this.  It is *very*
>difficult to get people to tell the same / a similar story that actually
>goes somewhere.  It takes more than just Gamemastering, I think it would
>ideally take several talented and committed authors who are also practiced
>and good at improvising with other authors.  The common rabble, and even
>the above-average rabble, cannot manage it.

In my experience, gamemastering is exactly what it takes. In fact, "getting 
people to tell the same / a similar story that actually goes somewhere" may 
be the best _defintion_ of gamemastering I've ever seen.

Of course, operationally, "gamemastering" is a pretty broad term. It 
encompasses far more dimensions than, say, "writing," which is an awesomely 
multidimensional acitivity already.

My guess is that it was the egalitarian nature (rather than the free-form 
nature) of your PBEM RPG that caused the eventual decline of interest. Most 
successful gamemastering practices embrace a clear asymmetry between the 
gamemaster and the other participants, both in their activities and in their 
goals. Typcially gamemasters have creating a coherent story as a major goal, 
while the other participants do not. (This is not to say that their 
activities do not help create a coherent story, or that they don't wish a 
coherent story to be created. But their main goals lie elsewhere.) Creative 
interaction derives from this asymmetry. 

A marketplace only functions if some want to sell apples for money and others 
want to pay money for apples. If everyone is there to sell their apples for 
money, market activity will quickly become unrewarding.

In a typical gamemastering situation, gamemasters "sell" story-coherency to 
the other participants. It's less clear what gets traded the other way. I 
think the creative value the gamemaster receives from the others is a form of 
"intelligent noise," comprised of incremental story events that are neither 
coherent nor random, but in between. In a manner analogous to the infor
mation-theory phenomenon of stochastic resonance, the gamemaster can 
construct coherent story more easily from this type of input than he could 
construct a story of comparable quality if given no input, random input, or 
input consciously designed to "advance the story."

This is when everything goes right. When the balance breaks down the result 
is poor gaming. If the gamemaster cannot process the intelligent noise into 
story coherency (either because the gamemaster lacks the skill to generate 
story coherency, or the other participants overwhelm the gamemaster with 
excessive random noise), the result is chaos. If the gamemaster fails to 
respond to the other participants' contributions (either because the 
gamemaster is too inflexible, or the other participants too passive), the 
result is a story that appears (or actually is) immutable to the participants 
and thereby alienates them.

>I'm an elitist, I believe the audience should be
>shoved back quite a distance... 

Almost all gamemasters would agree with you, including me. Indeed, you may be 
surprised how much discussion in role playing game forums focuses on the GM 
screen, the vertical folding cardboard barrier originally intended to block 
players' view of secret information located on the table in front of the GM. 
The screen's symbolic importance as the line of division between player and 
gamemaster long ago overshadowed its mere utilitarian functions. Discussing 
the screen is a sideways way of examining the relationship between players 
and gamemasters, which is the inexhaustible topic (practically the sole topic 
of interest) in discussion of tabletop RPGs.

>...because it's thoroughly incompetent

No, because the distance is needed to maintain the asymmetry that creates the 
gradients that power the interactive creative system. They may perhaps, in 
any given instance, be incompetent, but that's irrelevant. A competent 
gamemaster who participates "on the other side of the screen" (as a player) 
in a game with a different gamemaster must be shoved back the exact same 
distance as the average joe. Nothing changes even if every participant is 
also a skilled GM (which happens fairly often, in fact).

Meaningful interactivity implies asymmetrical transaction between the 
parties. The best chance of successful medical diagnosis comes from a doctor 
talking to a patient. Two patients talking to each other won't do very well. 
Is that because the patients are "incompetent?" Well, two "competent" doctors 
talking to each other and ignoring the patient won't do very well either! 
Competent vs. incompetent is a red herring. What's important are the 
contrasting roles in the process. I'm an elitist, but elitism has its limits 
beyond which it becomes counterproductive.

- Walt