Communities with Something in Common November 20, 2006
Posted by Ian in About blog, Actual Play, Applied, Community, Jargon, Manifesto, Methodological, Theory.trackback
This does not entail a rejection of the communities of gamers that are already out there, that subsume individual groups. Online forums and in-person conventions all have their place in the big picture. That place, however, is not the regulation of play styles but as trading zones for them.
The forum serves as a point through which different cloisters can appreciate each other, share their successes and failures. The appreciation should always come with a sense of distance. There needs to be less investment in the hobby or industry as a whole, as an individual thing whose well-being we need to care about. That focus makes it too easy to get invested in pronouncements that we feel must hold true for all cloisters. Instead, we need an ethic of appreciation, a willingness to just listen, read, and absorb the stories from other cloisters. Think of it as travelers from all over the world meeting in an airport. They come to the place with very different experiences, very different lives, and we can learn more by just sharing and interacting than by trying to offer advice about how to ‘fix’ what we perceive as their problems.
Conventions provide precious opportunities in which we get to encounter different playstyles. Rather than assuming that the playtyle with which we come to the table is the ideal one, we ought to come to the table ready to negotiate with different playstyles. The convention game is an actual play trading zone where we can experiment with new arrangements and share our styles. It is to accept that mediocre play may happen, but that mediocre play may be the first step toward a different and powerful play experience. Sometimes, too, it is just a lesson of how badly certain play styles go together, of how certai relationships need not be pursued. In short, it’s not unlike dating.
This ethic of appreciation is, again, not about some airy romantic love of the other. It’s an acknowledgment that a person’s play style is not simply a set of actions that they perform here and now, but a set of lessons which they have acquired from a great number of actual play experiences. Those lessons reflect layers of active social learning which cannot be easily summed up, learning which has to a great extent gone on outside of a strictly verbal framework.
Good stuff.
One point I’d mention is that my experience of con games is nothing like that of my “cloister.” The kind of emotional intimacy and safe space needed for a lot of our kinds of play are absent at cons, and so its unlikely that people who play with me at cons know much of anything about what I’m like to play with at home. There just aren’t a lot of good ways that I’ve ever found to get at the meat of my playstyle in that kind of environment.
Even if I were playing with the same group outside the con sphere my play would be different. It isn’t just that we change between play-groups, we also change between situations even inside the same play group.
That’s a good point about situation. I suspect the factors are similar. For me, at least, in both the change of group and context, I am far more keenly aware of the situation around the game rather than the game itself. I spend a good deal of attention just moderating myself in regard to it rather than sinking my teeth into the game.
I wonder if some people who do *a lot* of cons develop a comfort zone with that situation regardless of players?
Maybe.
However, I have a hard time seeing large parts of my personal “intimate” style ever working well in such a situation. I use mood, empathy, and player reading and freindship-bonded understanding to such a degree that replacing them with other skills almost inveriably results in a completly different type of game.