A Question Of Agency?

[Crimson Longinus]

I believe that analysis of play firmly in meat space - the things the human beings are doing around the table. I think the perspective we take on during that act of play (and techniques for the feeling of it all being real) are also important, but they should not be confused for the actual processes occurring in real life.

I have hard time seeing what purpose does analysing a decision process while completely ignoring the subject matter of the decision process would serve. Perhaps it has some use, but it seems to be so far detached from anything practical that I really can't be bothered with it.

Justin Alexander's analysis might be fruitful for explaining the feelings that some people have about certain games. It has nothing to do with actual play processes and procedures. It also is so rooted in a very particular set of play priorities that it's entirely useless to people who do not share those priorities.

Any analysis is only useful for those who are interested in the things being analysed.

 

[FrogReaver]

Do you think your objection is because in the example offered of the chance encounter, it’s the player rather than the character who is making the request?

Nope. I started down that path of objection but was assured the character was making an action in the fiction that caused the friend to show up. So that's certainly not what I'm objecting to.

And if so, do you think this preference speaks about player agency in any way?

I do think this circles back into being about player agency.

 

[generic]

The food existed before my check. It's just a matter of if I was able to locate it.

No, the food has never existed, the very introduction of the foraging check is what creates it.

 

[FrogReaver]

No, the food has never existed, the very introduction of the foraging check is what creates it.

Your fictional worlds function quite strangely. In mine, my character foraging for food doesn't create any food.

 

[generic]

Your fictional worlds function quite strangely. In mine, my character foraging for food doesn't create any food.

Until you rolled for a foraging check, was there food?

 

[prabe]

Until you rolled for a foraging check, was there food?

My answer: "Not as far as my character knew."

 

[FrogReaver]

Until you rolled for a foraging check, was there food?

Depends on what the check showed.

See the more complete answer below:
Though I think instead of a one liner this can go a bit deeper. In my games if there is no food that can be found then we wouldn't even roll the check. If the check is allowed then there is food there and it's just a matter of finding it. So I guess the more correct answer is: if there was a check allowed then there is food...

 

[Ovinomancer]

QUICK ASIDE to address Crimson Longinus.

You've linked a post to the Alexandrian which accepts as foundational building block for subsequent analysis that his Dissociated Mechanics essay is (a) useful and (b) correct. You're not going to get much purchase here with that. The overwhelming number of participants here engaged in an ENORMOUS discussion on it long ago and almost all of them came to the conclusion that it is neither correct nor useful (in fact, its very much the opposite). I can't relitigate the entirety of the argument/thread at this point (it was 1000s and 1000s of posts), but the crux (from my recollection) was that it had enormous holes in evaluating the very nature of Roleplaying games (it would nonsensically cast 4e and Moldvay Basic "board games" - which was really the point of the initial iteration of the essay - and wouldn't recognize Pawn Stance play as TTRPGing) and it misunderstood certain aspects/deployments of authority distribution as being inexorably caught in the event horizon of "story advocacy"...therefore incapable of being "protagonism" (aggressively advocating for the dramatic need of a constituent part, a Character, of "the <possible> story") rather than recognizing the possible state of independence of the two (while, yes, acknowledging the likely interdependence) despite a given configuration of distributed authority.

Its initial iteration was an extremely controversial partisan hit-piece by someone who didn't understand games they clearly weren't familiar with/didn't like/took offense at, which I think was cleaned up later. Regardless, it certainly wasn't convincing then as a piece of independent analysis and therefore any work that depends upon it as a foundational piece will be compromised.

Cue Forest Gump (That is all I have to say about that).

---

I'm going to try to do some further explanation here which I hope will clarify how I'm intending to use each of these concepts in developing this matrix.

As a reminder (and Frogreaver addresses this in his 2nd paragraph above), I'm still unsure if there is sufficient utility and independence in separating Character (as a unique object within the gamestate separate from all of the other objects - which would be Setting) from Setting when it comes to (a) formulating a matrix to discuss agency when analyzing play and (b) formulating a matrix to derive agency when conceiving > executing the intentful design of a TTRPG. More on this below.

First...

THINK OF CHARACTER, SITUATION, AND SETTING AS GAME PIECES

Lets start here. This is ultimately what I was trying to get at with "vector" (or medium). Protagonism, Tactical, and Strategic are not game pieces. They are what manifests through the game pieces.

Yes, Situation will have dimensional parameters (the independence and interdependence of Goal/Intent < > Stakes) that can't be plotted as x, y, z coordinates. But for the sake of this effort, leverage those big brains of yours (everyone) to either (a) ignore that or (b) conceive of the possibility of plotting it if you must.

So...

* A Character is a Game Piece (through which a table participant will express/channel Protagonism-based, Tactical-based, Strategic-based agency).

* Any given Situation is a Game Piece (" above).

* The Setting is a Game Piece (" above).

This is where its going to get a little meta.

If we had sufficient vantage and could instantiate any game into infinity, we would see Character and Setting being in a state of Superposition, encapsulating every_single_concievable configuration of their collision (which would be a manifestation of initiating/inciting Situations and all possible downstream Situations similarly in a state of Superposition).

Take any one of those instantiations. Those are your 3 Game Pieces.

There will be ample interdependence between the 3 Game Pieces but is there sufficient independence between each 3 such that it is useful (or even required) to make them discrete when developing a matrix for analyzing play and designing games. I'm inclined to say "yes" but I could be talked out of it with sufficiently persuasive argument.

So...to Character as Game Piece. Again, immersion or habitation need to be set aside here for this analysis. "The sensory and (de)moralizing experience of remembering" and "the sensory and (de)moralizing experience of recognizing relations and having relationships" is relevant to the holistic experience of play. But we have to excise that to honestly engage in this analysis.

So I have this Character. They're here, now, in this space along with other objects (Setting). Now there is a problem where I want something (through my Character) but the relationship of objects (including my Character) in this space conspires to deny me it (my ability to make this what play is about is Protagonist Agency...my ability to advocate for that desire will manifest in Tactical or Strategic Agency). This is Situation.

I do agree that on the Venn Diagram of those 3 Game Pieces ("vectors" or the medium through which a participant at the table will give rise to their Protagonism, Tactical, or Strategic agency), there will be some "conceptual bleed" and overlap (I mentioned a few upthread, but the Mark aspect of a 4e Fighter's Combat Challenge has some meaningful differences from the Immediate Interrupt aspect of their OA which has meaningful differences from the initial, and best imo, iteration of Come and Get It). There is interdependence (but there are discrete things as well).

Lets contrast "Read a Sitch (or Discern Realities in DW)" in AW from a Passive Perception check in 5e.



My initial orientation here is through the Character Game Piece. I'm here and now in relation to all of these objects in this space and I'm in a situation.

I roll dice.

Any result of 7+ and my Game Piece is now either/or/both Situation or Setting (because of the structure of the move, the agenda of play, and the ethos that binds/informs GMing). Through this I'm expressing one or more of Protagonism, Tactical, Strategic agency by generating/directing/focusing content (and/or ensuring other content doesn't manifest).

On a 6-, I'm actually still expressing some agency through Situation or Setting...but it can_only_be_Protagonism Agency; I can, at least in part, dictate that play further interacts with the resolution my PC's dramatic need (because the prospects for erecting a move-based gambit have been wrested from me due to the fortune results and action resolution procedures).

My habitation or sensory experience can (and for those, like myself, who love AW) be entirely unchanged. But what is happening at the game vantage level is what it is.

Contrast with a 5e GM saying "what is your Passive Perception/Insight (?)" when you've unknowingly entered a provocative place or encountered a potentially volatile NPC and giving you an information dump.

Contrast with a 5e player saying "I go to the balcony and look to the northern night sky where the arresting BOOM came from" and the GM saying "Roll Perception."

EDIT - This may look superficially like The Forge's Pawn, Actor, and Director Stance makeup. But, unlike that essay, I'm not attributing a cognitive relationship. Its literally a question of "when looking down at the Game Board, which Game Piece do you pick up to do this thing?" There is fundamentally no need for a cognitive shift (eg from Actor to Director) when "Reading a Sitch" in AW above vs what happens in 5e. You can inhabit both Actor and Director simultaneously, one or the other, or neither (Pawn). Some players may claim that they are incapable of habitation/immersion with one or the other (and others may claim amplification of habitation/immersion)...but that is entirely beside the point to "which Game Piece do you pick up to do this thing?"

Okay, I think I see what you're saying, here, and that's when an obstacle is presented (however) that the player can move his Character to deal with it (I swing my sword at the orc!), or the Situation (the orc doesn't notice Bob crouched behind him and trips over him when he steps back!), or the Setting. To be honest, I'm not sure how Setting works here -- what does this entail that isn't in the Situation? To me, it would have to be those things that are the base genre assumptions, or perhaps already established fiction, but we've talked about the retcon and the lack of games that actually instantiate this.

I'm not sure I really agree with this, because there's so much overlap. There's almost never a Situation move that doesn't also move the Character. And, as I said, I don't follow what a Setting move would even entail that doesn't require a Situation move. This is why I argue that there's no real use in trying to establish different categories of agency -- at the end of the day all of this boils down to the simple question "was I able to make a meaningful choice and enforce it's consequences?" I've got a bit more to say on this formulation of agency, but I'll save it for the end. Your framework here looks like it's trying to split hairs to develop another partially useful framework that ultimately results in more arguments than clarity (sorry for the frankness).

To touch on your Protagonism, Tactical, and Strategic ideas, I still find these not coherent with each other. Protagonism talks to why you do a thing -- who does it serve? But both Tactical and Strategic point to when or how long a consequence of a choice operates. "I stab the orc" is pretty tactical -- it's now, solving an immediate problem. The Strategic problem would be more "what am I doing to eliminate the orc menace from X village?" It's a long term consequence that shapes multiple scenes or sessions of play. But, any student of war will tell you that Strategy is Tactics writ large, so this is a scales difference rather than a kind difference -- they're the same thing at different scales. Protagonism, though is different beast altogether -- it's not concerned with scale, but about what motivates play or what play is about, and saying that I'm going to make play about my character. This doesn't contrast at all with Tactical or Strategic, but is orthogonal to them. Having orthogonal categories is not a useful way to organize analysis. Also, there's a lack of a counterpoint to Protagonism -- what am I doing when I'm not engaged in Protagonism play? So, yeah, not at all feeling this breakdown, just on the merits of it alone and disregarding my issues with the idea that the breakdown into categories is useful.

--

So, the formulation of agency I put above, which was "was I able to make a meaningful choice and enforce it's consequences," is meaningfully different from the concept of agency in real life. The function difference is that real life enforces the consequences, while it's us that choose to enforce the consequences in the fictional world of play. Nothing else will do so. I think this difference is a key issue in a lot of the side discussions in this thread, where there are arguments about how those consequences should be enforced. Particularly, the arguments put forth that consequence enforcement should be as close to real life as possible (ie, the ones talking about finding friends when you look for them being out-of-bounds for what a character could do). These arguments fundamentally miss that there's no way to emulate the real life enforcement of consequence in a game -- there's only what the players do to enforce these. The real issue is the privileging of one player with the role to make these determinations rather than sharing it out, at least in certain circumstances. I think that this is also part of the impetus for the framework you're trying to build above. I don't think it's very helpful, though, because it also is hiding the fact that it is us, as players, that are enforcing consequences. I think there's a lot of merit in discussing how that's divided among players, but not in subdividing agency because that is, at best, a far downstream consideration when looking at agency.

EDIT -- although it appears that some of the point I'm making in this last paragraph has come up in the thread while I was replying. Good.

 

[Campbell]

What's the process by which the GM determines the food is there? Do they base on a check? Do they check against their notes? Do they think about if it should be there (make a judgement call)? Do they think about if it makes the game better? Do they have story or plot considerations? What's the real world process?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Until you rolled for a foraging check, was there food?

NAN. Which is your point, and the one being missed. The food didn't exist because no one thought about it, and so the fiction didn't contain it. When the foraging check was made, it forced people to think of it, and the natural assumption is that there is likely foragable food in a forest, so this natural conclusion is mistaken for the food always having existed to be found. It's a failure to recognize the cognitive paths that are working.

The case with finding a helpful friend is exactly the same, the only difference is that now there's a conflict between people as to whether or not the friend is a natural assumption in this case. Some note that it's just like the above case, so the natural assumption is really pointless, but others are fixed in the idea that whole NPC is a much bigger thing than a rabbit in a forest, so that shouldn't exist unless Bob the GM thinks it should. No one has a problem if Bob agrees such an NPC is nearby, it's just the idea that a player can charge the fiction in a way that doesn't require Bob to agree. Since Bob is the arbiter of natural assumptions about the setting, this must be a different thing! It is, however, not at all different, but represents a cognitive blindspot or play preference.