A Question Of Agency?

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Crimson Longinus

What you and @FrogReaver are talking about seems more like a sense of ownership than a sense of agency to me. You are talking about feeling that you have complete control of what belongs to you. Agency is about action. Acting on the external world. It's about affecting change in the outside world rather than protecting what you already have.

So I do not think you need specific mechanics to have a sense of agency. What you do need is a shared expectation that everyone at the table is committed to respecting and following the shared fiction over their personal conception of the things they "own". Those expectations are very much a part of the rules of many games. When we can disregard fictional positioning anytime it is convenient than there is no real agency.

Right, so I think we CAN talk about classifications of agency with respect to specific ELEMENTS of a game. That is, the game is a progression of states (@Manbearcat described this in his last post above). There are 'conditions' which must appertain to a transition from one such state to another. Players can have agency over those transitions by virtue of what fictional statements they can make ("I walk down the corridor and turn left at the T intersection"). They can also have agency with respect to the nature of the following state (maybe in some game a check can be made to see if I 'found a treasure', and if I invoke that and succeed then I have entered the 'found a treasure' state). Usually that kind of agency comes with 'strings attached', which 'drive the story'. Maybe in this hypothetical game failing 'Found a Treasure Check' means 'found a monster' state is entered. This is what we mean by 'staking something', the monster is dangerous, the player staked the character's existence on the check to find a treasure.

Thus it isn't totally unfair to say that there are "agency with respect to describing/taking an action" and "agency with respect to inventing a new game state". So the difference between 'classic RP', 'story teller RP', and 'narrative RP' involves some differences in the allocation of this to participants. In all forms of RP the players have the first type of agency WRT their PCs, with the caveat that there may be 'special game states' which suspend that, and that the conditions which must be met to transition from one state to another are not to be understood as 'voiding agency' but merely to 'giving it narrative force'. Without these conditions the RPG is not a game, because the 'game' part mostly involves those conditions, the problems that must be overcome by the characters. When we consider the Czege Principle then we find that primary authority over those conditions needs to rest with a party which doesn't face them, so game master (or maybe some rules process, such as in combat in D&D). The second type of agency is much less constrained, potentially, at least in game design terms. Instead it is constrained by the desired material content, theme, genre, etc which the participants wish to experience.

It is the second type that we have been mostly debating about here, except for this aside about "mental states", which if you analyze the model above you will see is not really important.

 

[prabe]

In which case I don’t see how calling it a game state does anything to show that framing a character as “lusting after the queen” isn’t an agency reducing game state.

I believe the contention is that if there isn't some mechanical restriction that derives from "lusting after the queen" then it's not really a game state.

 

[FrogReaver]

I believe the contention is that if there isn't some mechanical restriction that derives from "lusting after the queen" then it's not really a game state.

Possibly different contentions from different posters. That’s definitely not how I read the last post.

 

[Campbell]

I believe the contention is that if there isn't some mechanical restriction that derives from "lusting after the queen" then it's not really a game state.

I would not say that. I would say if your play is not being constrained it is not really part of the shared fiction. Like if you as a player can just ignore it without anyone else calling you out for it not part of the game state / shared fiction.

 

[prabe]

I would not say that. I would say if your play is not being constrained it is not really part of the shared fiction. Like if you as a player can just ignore it without anyone else calling you out for it not part of the game state / shared fiction.

I believe I am reading you as saying that strong table norms/expectations can adequately constrain play in the absence of mechanics? Having seen it happen, I'd agree.

 

[Aldarc]

First, I don’t think it matters how people experience such things in real life. We aren’t trying to replicate real life IMO. At best we are trying to replicate our perception of real life and those perceptions can be dramatically different.

I thought verisimilitude was also a core value for those who ascribe to this sort of in-character agency? But here, emulating a human being's psychology is regarded as non-consequential for roleplay. Strange.

 

[FrogReaver]

I thought verisimilitude was also a core value for those who ascribe to this sort of in-character agency? But here, emulating a human being's psychology is regarded as non-consequential for roleplay. Strange.

The contention was that doing such does NOT lead to verisimilitude. It depends not on how human psychology actually works (which we are still a long way from fully understanding) but how one perceives it as working.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I believe the contention is that if there isn't some mechanical restriction that derives from "lusting after the queen" then it's not really a game state.

It doesn't have to be 'mechanical', it just has to 'have consequence'. If it doesn't impose some sort of condition on the transition to a new game state, then it doesn't have any salience. It is, at best, color. There's nothing WRONG with color, and I'm not knocking it at all, but color is not the same as substance in the game. It is like saying you can RP Monopoly because you can talk like a real estate tycoon. Yes, it is RP, but it isn't part of the game. It has no salience. Even if the player now explains his further actions on the basis of that color, that's just a preference he has for what his next move is.

IMHO at least, 'RPG' means the RP part has salience in the G part, it matters. If the Player just says "My character lusts after the Queen, so he leaves court." that's fine, but its color. By the rules of the game he can just come back and forget about it, or just imagine resisting his own impulses. There's no condition here, either a genre rule nor a mechanic, which gives it salience. It attains salience if, for example, the GM rules that when he comes back he has to overcome a 'lust check' or else he's going to lose control! Now something is at stake! There's a condition, an actual thing in the game that makes his choice matter, just like if he ran into a wall, he'd have to choose how to negotiate that, and climbing it might involve some risk.

 

[Aldarc]

The contention was that doing such does NOT lead to verisimilitude. It depends not on how human psychology actually works (which we are still a long way from fully understanding) but how one perceives it as working.

So we are NOT trying to replicate real life per your earlier assertion?

 

[FrogReaver]

It doesn't have to be 'mechanical', it just has to 'have consequence'. If it doesn't impose some sort of condition on the transition to a new game state, then it doesn't have any salience. It is, at best, color. There's nothing WRONG with color, and I'm not knocking it at all, but color is not the same as substance in the game. It is like saying you can RP Monopoly because you can talk like a real estate tycoon. Yes, it is RP, but it isn't part of the game. It has no salience. Even if the player now explains his further actions on the basis of that color, that's just a preference he has for what his next move is.

IMHO at least, 'RPG' means the RP part has salience in the G part, it matters. If the Player just says "My character lusts after the Queen, so he leaves court." that's fine, but its color. By the rules of the game he can just come back and forget about it, or just imagine resisting his own impulses. There's no condition here, either a genre rule nor a mechanic, which gives it salience. It attains salience if, for example, the GM rules that when he comes back he has to overcome a 'lust check' or else he's going to lose control! Now something is at stake! There's a condition, an actual thing in the game that makes his choice matter, just like if he ran into a wall, he'd have to choose how to negotiate that, and climbing it might involve some risk.

Unlike monopoly, details about my character are salient to the game.