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[META][REDUX] Unfiction is Out of Game
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Phaedra
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Joined: 21 Sep 2004
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Location: Here, obviously
weephun wrote:
Phaedra wrote:
SpaceBass wrote:
Feel free to flame me any time you want, Phaedra. Shocked


Oh, feh, but most of the time I agree with you. There's no irritation factor there.


pssst SpaceBass, just mention that belly-dancing is sexy, that'll get you roasted up nice and tender Wink


Le sigh.

I don't have a problem with men finding bellydance sexy. I have a problem with men believing that the purpose of bellydance is to titillate men.

It leads to things like strifey, for example, asking a bellydancer when she was going to take off her shirt. Evil or Very Mad
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 16, 2005 11:18 pm
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xnbomb
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Joined: 13 Oct 2003
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 		Games people play
I've wanted to get some thoughts on this topic off my chest for some time. Some of the discussion that has already taken place really cuts to the chase:

SpaceBass wrote:
We hold these boards to be a) out of game and b) for collaboration and cooperation purposes.

Max Steele wrote:
The people running UF may not like it, but it doesn't make the ARG "flawed" because of it.

There's something important that is implied in SpaceBass' statement that may not be inherently obvious: When he uses the pronoun we here, he is speaking for me, and probably for a quite a few other users here (although I will not presume precisely who or how many). This is not just about unfiction's management deciding how it goes. This is about what expectations we, as players who post on unfiction, can have regarding how information/ideas posted here interact (or to be more precise, do not interact) with game realities. I, and countless others like myself, have the expectation that puppetmasters will respect the nature of these forums, as SpaceBass has loosely (but more than adequately) defined it.

Max, with all due respect, if a puppetmaster chooses to take information/ideas that I posted here with an expectation of privacy from characters/game reality and use it without some rational in-game explanation, then that is a serious problem. If the suggestion is that I shouldn't even be expecting that privacy/disconnection, then we have an even more fundamental misunderstanding. For a game to succeed, players and puppetmasters need to have some kind of understanding, even if it is implicit, of this sort of thing. The unfiction policy, as expressed and upheld by the management here, sets some of the basic expectations. If a puppetmaster has something very different in mind, the thing to do would be to express those expectations clearly early in their game and put together their own forums to support their alternate vision.

strife777 wrote:
Its a matter of etiquette, where most PM's choose to respect Unfiction's OOG stance, and if they don't, I'm guessing they won't respect the players either and I wouldn't want anything to do with them.

GuyP wrote:
You have all your players working together on the game you've created, when suddenly you create conditions wherein it's *impossible* for them to collaborate and discuss and the game.

Max Steele wrote:
Well, I think that's a contradiction, because people make ARGs for the players.

strife777 and GuyP have expressed this really well. What goal is served by violating players' trust? Puppetmasters *do* make ARGs for players to play. One hopes that they want their players to enjoy the experience. Betraying my trust is not likely to cause me to enjoy a game. It is likely to cause me to head straight in the other direction and not look back. If a puppetmaster doesn't have my enjoyment in mind on this sort of fundamental level, then maybe that puppetmaster is not really thinking about the enjoyment of their players, and the goal that is being served is something different, and frankly not something with which I'd want to be associated.

Max Steele wrote:
So where's the line drawn for responsibility?

There are some significant asymmetries in the responsibilities of players versus puppetmasters. To vastly simplify the situation: Puppetmasters bear a lot of responsibility for what happens in a game, and players bear very little. This is because of the relationship between responsibility and authority. Ultimately, puppetmasters get to decide where a game will go. They know what they have in mind for the story, and they are the ones that are empowered to make it happen because they are in control of the characters. They decide when players' actions can affect the game reality to some limited extent, usually by providing opportunities to interact with characters that lead to carefully controlled possible outcomes. The responsibility of a player is to play, and to potentially do unpredictable, creative, and interesting things. But it is the puppetmaster's responsibility to work the players' contributions into the game relatively seamlessly, so the game marches on towards wherever the puppetmaster has planned to take it. This includes ignoring/sidestepping/curtailing player input when it runs contrary to the planned direction.

I have a suspicion that part of the confusion here arises from the blurring of the role of characters and players in this system. To extend the analogy a little, the puppetmaster's strings are attached to the characters, not the players. Players are going to do whatever they want to do, and it is the puppetmaster's problem to make it work. If that sounds like it can be a hard job for the puppetmaster, that's because it is. It takes tremendous skill and creativity on the part of puppetmasters to channel the energies of players in a direction that is congruous with the plan for the game. It takes a combination of careful planning beforehand and great decision-making on the fly to make it work. To suggest that players are responsible for following instructions to the letter is to remove the players' opportunity to play, to ignore the fact that they have free will, and to treat them like characters.

SpaceBass wrote:
Besides, instructing players on a large scale not to share information is antithetical to the entire collaborative community philosophy that underlies ARGs.

I'll return to my earlier notion of expectations, and that common understanding that puppetmasters and players must share for a game to succeed. One of my expectations is that I can collaborate and discuss freely on unfiction without consequence in the game, because of the total disconnection of unfiction from the game reality. If a puppetmaster has a different vision for a game, than that has to be made clear to me early on, because to be blunt, the collaborative community model is (as far as I am concerned) the default model for ARGs, and the model that unfiction was designed to support. Now, if the puppetmaster's argument is 'I want access to unfiction's large player base and existing forum infrastructure, but I want to ignore its designed purpose and culture', I have no sympathy for that. If a puppetmaster wants to do something different, by all means ... but that puppetmaster has to respect prospective players enough to signal those differences clearly early in their game, and to provide another forum for discussion that does not have the expectations that are attached to unfiction as a result of its longstanding (at least on the ARG genre timescale) culture.
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 5:27 am
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Wolf
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 		I think this sums it up nicely.

Quote:
If the game still maintains that it is not a game, then to it a place like unfiction cannot exist at all, otherwise you'll have a paradox and Durga will have to go "Whuh? I'm being voiced by someone named Kristen?" I think this is what Space means by "internal consistency". Any game that insists that it is not a game cannot intersect with a place where it is a game - it can only be one or the other - or it really is fundamentally flawed.

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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 11:56 am
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Phaedra
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Joined: 21 Sep 2004
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 		Re: Games people play
xnbomb wrote:
There's something important that is implied in SpaceBass' statement that may not be inherently obvious: When he uses the pronoun we here, he is speaking for me, and probably for a quite a few other users here (although I will not presume precisely who or how many). This is not just about unfiction's management deciding how it goes. This is about what expectations we, as players who post on unfiction, can have regarding how information/ideas posted here interact (or to be more precise, do not interact) with game realities. I, and countless others like myself, have the expectation that puppetmasters will respect the nature of these forums, as SpaceBass has loosely (but more than adequately) defined it.


Well said.

xnbomb wrote:
What goal is served by violating players' trust? Puppetmasters *do* make ARGs for players to play. One hopes that they want their players to enjoy the experience. Betraying my trust is not likely to cause me to enjoy a game.


This trust is all-important for the functioning of the game. Players give the PMs an immense amount of trust.

The beekeepers did absurd things in public. They gave out their phone numbers and pictures to the PMs. They traveled (in some cases flew) great distances to the end-game events.

Art of the Heist players got on a boat.

These are not things that I, as a reasonably cautious individual living in the 21st century, am going to do for just anyone. I trust that the PMs have my entertainment first and foremost in their minds, and that they are not going to do anything nefarious to me or with the information that I give them.

I am able to have this trust because I know that it is a game, and I know that the PMs know that it is a game. The essential formality of the game structure, underlying the 'reality' to which it pretends, is all-important here.

As Elan put it:

Elan Lee wrote:
The importance of a game is the formality. It's a lubricant in that it provides structure in a way that most people are not comfortable performing without.


I enjoy the fact that the game pretends not to know it is a game, but as a player, I need the essential reassurance that it is a game, and the knowledge that all non-character parties realize it is a game, in order to have to freedom to participate in the game-world. The more real the in-game world is, the better and more seductive it is. But that is only because it is still essentially within my control.

An ARG may flirt with the borders of that control -- it may call you unexpectedly, it may appear on your TV, it may involve a real-life event in which you do not know which players are plants.

But while that flirting is exciting, it is only so because it draws attention to the boundaries, not because it blurs them. You can still stop playing, if you wish, and the game will leave you alone. In the end, if you assert boundaries, the game will respect them.

People enjoy roller coasters, but sane people don't drive their cars off cliffs. For most people, the illusion of risk is where the excitement comes from. Most people do not want it to be real.

So again, the job of the PM is to create something that looks real, but has visible boundaries.

That is the purpose the Unforums serve, besides being a central community hub for players. They delineate clear boundaries between in-game and out-of-game. They create a neutral zone between real life (where most of us have other things to do, like school, work, family, etc.) and the illusory world of the game, a place where we can talk about the game and take it seriously but where the illusory nature of the game is acknowledged.

Regarding the enjoyment gained by knowing where the boundaries are, I refer you to Jane McGonigal's A Real Little Game paper.

Specifically:

Jane McGonigal wrote:
Michael J. Apter, a psychologist who studies adult play, proposes that pleasure in play is dependent upon a sturdy "protective frame" around a perceived challenge [2, p. 22]. According to Apter, this frame assures the player that real world problems cannot intrude on play and that the game will have no real world consequences or effects. A kind of guarantee in the vein of Bateson's metacommunications ("Don't worry, this is only play"), it allows players to enjoy what would in everyday life be experienced as painfully frustrating or disturbingly risky. Apter uses a three-part analogy involving a crowd, a tiger and a cage to make his point, an analogy that I find quite relevant to immersive game design. An empty cage, Apter suggests, will produce boredom in a crowd of spectators; a tiger without a cage will produce anxiety; and a tiger in a cage will produce a pleasurable excitement. This pleasure, for Apter, represents the safe arousal we experience during play.


Jane also discussed it with Elan.

Jane McGonigal wrote:
During a discussion of other pervasive games currently in development by Lee and his collaborators, I related Apter's analogy to Lee, curious for his perspective. I offered my own interpretation: that perhaps the central goal of successful immersive game design is to communicate to players that a cage is in place, while
making it as easy and likely as possible for the players to pretend that they don't see the cage. In other words, I suggested, give the audience a tiger, build a sturdy and always visible cage, but give the crowd both the means and the incentive to say, "What cage? I don't see a cage" even as the spectators are oohing and aahing over the cage's lovely gilt design and breathtaking size. This slight twist on Apter's analogy resonated deeply for Lee. "It's a really beautiful way of describing many of the thoughts I've had for such a long time," he said, vowing to keep it in mind during future projects [personal correspondence]. The key to immersive design, we agreed, is to realize that the clear visibility of the puppetmasters' work behind the curtain does not lessen the players' enjoyment. Rather, a beautifully crafted and always visible frame for the play heightens (and makes possible in the first place) the players' pleasure – just as long as the audience can play along, wink back at the puppetmasters and pretend to believe.


This is one of the reasons why I feel a profound lack of enthusiasm, and even a certain amount of distaste, for ARGs that attempt to be "subversive" or "revolutionary" by "blurring the lines" between the game and reality.

Most of the time, they don't actually succeed, despite their bravado, which is why it's not a serious problem. Most of the time, the games are badly designed, so they don't attract a great many players.

But an inherent component of that bad design is their philosophy itself. Games that behave as if they're trying to blur the lines, while winking at the players and keeping the game structure both firmly intact and firmly visible have the potential to be fun. Games that actually blur the boundaries and dismantle/deny the visible boundaries will, most likely, be frustrating and possibly frightening.

They erode the all-important trust that players give to PMs. That trust -- that profound trust in invisible, nameless strangers, that willingness to do for them what you would not do for a random person on the street, that willingness to give them information that you generally wouldn't entrust to any stranger -- is only possible because the game structure is visible.

Bringing this back to Unfiction, using these forums to gather information to be used in-game violates the boundaries. It destabilizes the visible structure that says Even though it claims full-throatedly that it is not a game, this *is* a game and there are spaces outside it. We all know that the PMs are reading these forums. But the PMs are out-of-game. The game itself cannot come here.
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 12:39 pm
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Dorkmaster
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Joined: 27 Jul 2004
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xnbomb wrote:
Everything that needed to be said. (paraphrased by that sexy Master of Dorks)


Rock on, xnbomb... rock on hard. Dude is always speaking intelligently about many subjects, regardless of game. Much respect from the Dorkmaster, dear sir... much respect.

Max, I honestly respect your opinions in this matter (and I know you have withdrawn, so please do not see this as an attack)... The truth is that this kind of idea, is just NOT what unfiction is about. However, immersionunlimited (IU) is based completely on your idea there. So while I am glad to have you here, if that's the kind of experience you're looking for, then perhaps that's where you should call home (but visit back with us here at UF often)! Anyway, I know that sounds really harsh, and I really don't mean it to... Just stating that a "completely immersive forum" does exist. While it's not my cup of tea, some people really like it, and um, yeah. So just throwing that out there...
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 3:28 pm
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addlepated
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Joined: 17 Aug 2003
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Location: Austin, Texas

 		xnbomb and Phaedra both put everything I wanted to say down in writing for me. I am so glad I have you two to communicate for me! Wink

PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 3:48 pm
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Phaedra
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addlepated wrote:
xnbomb and Phaedra both put everything I wanted to say down in writing for me. I am so glad I have you two to communicate for me! Wink


LOL, oddly that's how I usually feel about yanka. But thank you. Smile
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 4:46 pm
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jamesi
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Joined: 25 Sep 2002
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Location: Canadia

 		Just so you all know, I've used all of the player information contained here of UF in my upcoming Garfield ARG. Dorkmaster, I have cloned your profile information and recreated it within an in-game forum -- you are now playing the part of Jon. I have yet to cast the role of dumb-but-lovable Odie, but there are plenty dumb-but-lovable people who hang around here that I will be able to choose from.

All your profile are belong to me. Me and my quality product, that is.
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 8:34 pm
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konamouse
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Joined: 02 Dec 2002
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Location: My own alternate reality

 		/me volunteers to be Odie
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 9:09 pm
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Phaedra
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jamesi wrote:
Just so you all know, I've used all of the player information contained here of UF in my upcoming Garfield ARG. Dorkmaster, I have cloned your profile information and recreated it within an in-game forum -- you are now playing the part of Jon. I have yet to cast the role of dumb-but-lovable Odie, but there are plenty dumb-but-lovable people who hang around here that I will be able to choose from.

All your profile are belong to me. Me and my quality product, that is.


I'm one of Jon's hopeless dates, I assume.

<sigh>
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 10:27 pm
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hkdl
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Joined: 29 Oct 2004
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 		Can I be nermal?
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 10:54 pm
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Wolf
Decorated


Joined: 26 Sep 2002
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Quote:
there are plenty dumb-but-lovable people who hang around here that I will be able to choose from


You talkin' to ME, punk?

(*smooches jamesi, runs away)
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 11:16 pm
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RobMagus
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 		shit, I just know I'm going to be one of Jon's crazy relatives that exist only in the photo album.
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 5:16 am
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rowan
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RobMagus wrote:
shit, I just know I'm going to be one of Jon's crazy relatives that exist only in the photo album.


I had you pegged as more like his hayseed brother. Very Happy
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 1:54 pm
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Mikeyj
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Joined: 18 Oct 2004
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 		Re: Games people play
Phaedra wrote:

This trust is all-important for the functioning of the game. Players give the PMs an immense amount of trust.

The beekeepers did absurd things in public. They gave out their phone numbers and pictures to the PMs. They traveled (in some cases flew) great distances to the end-game events.

Art of the Heist players got on a boat.


There's a film plot there...something between Final Destination and Hackers with a smidgeon of Scream, and, just because there's now a play and I'm desparate to see it, Theatre of Blood. A dumb jock takes revenge on all the geeks and nerds that used to laugh at his lack of academic aptitude by creating an ARG and luring them onto scuttled boats, into electrified phone boxes, and to meetings with non-existant characters late at night on Hampstead Heath. I envisage cubes filled with nitroglycerin and Perplex City card packs full of rusty razor blades.

Must make sure my tetanus booster is up to date.
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 2:00 pm
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