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Gaming and the Social Contract
Feb. 10th, 2006 09:41 amSince some issues related to this have come up lately, I wanted to post a few snippets quoted from an article written by Ron Edwards.
The full article is available here.
But it's just a game!
This phrase is an alarm bell. Oh, it looks like an attempt to reconciliate disagreements by calling attention to fun and the shared, social context, but it disguises something far more unpleasant.
The ugly truth is that this phrase is not reconciliatory at all. Rather, it is code for, "Stop bothering me with your interests and accord with my goals, decisions, and priorities of play." I strongly urge that individual role-players not tolerate any implication that their preferred, enjoyed range of role-playing modes is a less worthy form of play.
What's a GM and what's a player?
Like it or not, among any group of people contributing to some constructive activity, there exists a the aforementioned Balance of Power: some hierarchy and way to organize who gets to influence and approve of outcomes. For the activity to succeed, some form of social contract, or reciprocal obligations, must be in place.
In role-playing games, the issue of the social contract becomes quickly confounded with the distribution and difference in the roles of GM and players. Entirely aside from any formal rules-oriented or procedure-oriented authority, what kind of authority or status does a GM have over or with the players anyway? Is he or she the physical host, using physical living or work space for the game? If not, does that change or limit the GM-ness? How about a faculty member running games with students in a campus club? How about romance issues; if single, is he or she automatically the focus of personal attention from other single people in the group?
More difficult incompatibilities also exist within each of G, N, or S. People may share the the large-scale GNS goal, but be accustomed to or desire different standards for balance of Power, preferred stances, notions of character depth, the distinction between player success and character success, and many related things. In this case, dysfunction arises from (a) trying to resolve the differences during play itself, and (b) anyone being unwilling to compromise about the differences.
Emotional tensions between people may override the role-playing. It can be romance, or money issues, or who's giving whom a ride home, or any number of similar things. My claim is that a lot of times, people get all upset at one another about game stuff (tactics, rules, etc) when the real problem is this people stuff. Such problems must be dealt with socially and above-board, because no in-game mechanisms can help; in-game issues are symptoms rather than causes.
The full article is available here.
But it's just a game!
This phrase is an alarm bell. Oh, it looks like an attempt to reconciliate disagreements by calling attention to fun and the shared, social context, but it disguises something far more unpleasant.
The ugly truth is that this phrase is not reconciliatory at all. Rather, it is code for, "Stop bothering me with your interests and accord with my goals, decisions, and priorities of play." I strongly urge that individual role-players not tolerate any implication that their preferred, enjoyed range of role-playing modes is a less worthy form of play.
What's a GM and what's a player?
Like it or not, among any group of people contributing to some constructive activity, there exists a the aforementioned Balance of Power: some hierarchy and way to organize who gets to influence and approve of outcomes. For the activity to succeed, some form of social contract, or reciprocal obligations, must be in place.
In role-playing games, the issue of the social contract becomes quickly confounded with the distribution and difference in the roles of GM and players. Entirely aside from any formal rules-oriented or procedure-oriented authority, what kind of authority or status does a GM have over or with the players anyway? Is he or she the physical host, using physical living or work space for the game? If not, does that change or limit the GM-ness? How about a faculty member running games with students in a campus club? How about romance issues; if single, is he or she automatically the focus of personal attention from other single people in the group?
More difficult incompatibilities also exist within each of G, N, or S. People may share the the large-scale GNS goal, but be accustomed to or desire different standards for balance of Power, preferred stances, notions of character depth, the distinction between player success and character success, and many related things. In this case, dysfunction arises from (a) trying to resolve the differences during play itself, and (b) anyone being unwilling to compromise about the differences.
Emotional tensions between people may override the role-playing. It can be romance, or money issues, or who's giving whom a ride home, or any number of similar things. My claim is that a lot of times, people get all upset at one another about game stuff (tactics, rules, etc) when the real problem is this people stuff. Such problems must be dealt with socially and above-board, because no in-game mechanisms can help; in-game issues are symptoms rather than causes.
