{"id":5835,"date":"2017-11-16T10:00:30","date_gmt":"2017-11-16T15:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/?p=5835"},"modified":"2017-11-16T01:22:15","modified_gmt":"2017-11-16T06:22:15","slug":"irony-an-outcome-contrary-or-converse-to-the-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/2017\/irony-an-outcome-contrary-or-converse-to-the-expected","title":{"rendered":"Irony: An Outcome Contrary or Converse to the Expected"},"content":{"rendered":"

The heart of every moment in Shock: is its potential for irony. That irony comes from the toothy compromises you make as you create your world, as your *Tagonists resolve Conflicts, as Audience alter outcomes, as a Protagonist approaches their Terminus.<\/span><\/p>\n

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These articles are part of the process of working toward Shock:2 and I’d love your help. Subscribe to the xenoglyph Patreon to start getting stuff playable!<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But those moments aren\u2019t where the players decide that they\u2019ll concede a point \u201cfor the sake of the story\u201d or \u201cfor the sake of the game\u201d. They\u2019re compromises between the ideal outcomes of the players, in a proportion determined by the outcome of the mechanics of the game.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not a Cost, but a Compromise<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

In a game of G\u014d, players don’t compromise because they want the game to go on longer, or because they want to savor the drama. They make compromises because every move you make necessitates a response from one\u2019s opponent, and eventually you see on the board a drawing of your compromise: the borders between your areas of control that (along with the pile of captured stones) tells the story of the conflict.<\/span>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a roleplaying game, those open, internal spaces might be moral stances. Above, Black might have had to give up the moral assertion on the right (\u201cFamily comes first\u201d) in order to capture the top center (\u201cI can only do right if I\u2019m in a position of power to do so,\u201d) and the bottom right (\u201cOne must pay for one\u2019s wrongdoing.\u201d) White has made compromises appropriate to its own context that has evolved in play.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where, exactly, in the imagined moral space one winds up by the Terminus in a game of Shock: is determined by the play. Your plans do not give you a right to specific outcomes.<\/b> That means that the outcomes can be different from your intentions though you may find the outcome satisfying.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Concession is not Compromise<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Despite the position Shock: is given in the history of Story Games, it does some things really differently than many of its descendants do. A lot of that misinterpretation comes from my inability to describe my objectives for the game at the time. A lot more comes from the obfuscatory language the Story Game scene wound up using, like \u201cThe object is to have fun,\u201d or, \u201cThere\u2019s no way to lose,\u201d or, \u201cThe object is to tell a story.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Those assertions are untrue of Shock: Like many roleplaying games, you can lose a game of Shock: in two ways: by your Protagonist failing to get what they were after (or, more often, the achievements of the Protagonist not changing the world in the way they expected), or by the story turning dull to the players.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second failure mode, dullness, comes about as a result of player inflexibility, of making demands of the events of play other than those that evolve. The game fails to gain momentum when players exceed the recommended setup time, building a world with no room for characters or events to influence it. At other times, it shakes apart when players refuse the outcomes of the dice and softpedal the resolution of stakes. When I discover techniques that might reduce the likelihood of the dull kinds of failure, I can implement them, but Shock: is a toolkit for making personally affective science fiction stories. If you break it, it will stop being personally affective or, if it is, you\u2019ve just designed yourself a new game and should tell everyone how it works so they can do it, too. (See: Mars Colony, by Tim Koppang) And sometimes there\u2019s simply no creative chemistry, or there was a misunderstanding between players that sapped their social courage. Or players can\u2019t agree on the tone of the game.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the case of Protagonist (as opposed to player) loss, though, my job, as designer, is to make it so that pursuing your objective, hard as it may be to accomplish, is a fun game to play. Like, I don\u2019t want to make a game that\u2019s only fun to play when you win, right? <\/b>Who would want to play that? That\u2019s a game that breeds bad sports who I don\u2019t want to have to sit down at a convention table with.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shock: finds that fun in the spaces between \u201cWhat I want\u201d and \u201cWhat I thought I wanted.\u201d Those spaces, the vacuums and eddies induced by players moving the fiction in ways that don\u2019t directly oppose each other, are where Shock: play takes place. Figuring out how to maximize those moments is my challenge as I move toward Shock:2.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Fun Of Grudging Acceptance<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Compromise is interesting because it is difficult.<\/b> If a game features co\u00f6peration without compromise, the game does not include co\u00f6peration at all, but some sort of social dominance. It might effectively be a single-player game where the players come to a social agreement through an undesigned procedure to decide what to do based on the social consequences of pursuing one\u2019s extraludal interests. That is, you do what the most experienced player or the player with the most forceful personality says to do because the consequences of defying them is that you\u2019re the reason you all lost <\/i>or you’re the reason we got in an argument<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n

But as soon as players need to compromise with each other’s in-game interests<\/i> with in-game currency<\/i>, things get interesting. You have the means and opportunities to thread needles, to plainly defy each other, to seek advantage in your plurality. That can only come about in non-zero-sum games, which is why Shock: requires all Intents to be mutually compatible.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is, a game that says, for instance, \u201cWhen your character trusts another character more, add a die to your ability to help them. If they move against you, though, they roll those dice against you,\u201d might be an emotionally difficult, affective game that requires informed consent to play, but it\u2019s far safer for the players than actually betraying your real friend where there are no apparent bounds on means or motive.<\/span><\/p>\n

You play Shock: to find where that compromise happens <\/b>and what unintended consequences show the nature of the compromise; what the Protagonists were, in the end, willing to accept in pursuit of their objectives; what they gained; what they lost, perhaps including their objective. And those compromises only matter in the context of those objectives, the relationships of the *Tagonists, and their Links. Generating that context is the reason play works. It\u2019s the reason that Antagonist players don\u2019t say, \u201cOK, you want to convince the Replicant leader that you\u2019re a Replicant. I want the universe to get sucked into a black hole.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The black hole, in that context, is a smaller, more distant, and irrelevant threat. But if the Antagonist says, \u201cThe Replicant leader wants to send you back to the police station,\u201d suddenly you have an opinion. The police station is a bigger threat than a universe-swallowing black hole because it\u2019s within the context. <\/b>To go big in Shock: is to go close.<\/i> To go small and personal and fine-tune the threats to the interests of the Protagonists.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like many indie RPGs from the mid-200*s, the Shock: text is ambivalent about the nature of those compromises. Specifically, it was a time when players were glutting on tragedy after decades of experiencing RPGs as a tension between triumphalism and frustration. But Shock: gives you the tools to cast a person you really dislike as a Protagonist, conspiring with the Antagonist player to make their character bleed, or redeem themselves, or make right the wrong they\u2019ve committed. <\/span><\/p>\n

But what happens if your shitty Protag wins? Sometimes that happens! And what about when your Protagonist represents your hopes and dreams, and then they all turn to smoke?<\/span><\/p>\n

It took me a long time to start feeling good about the question of whether it was legit \u2014 if it would result in a fun game \u2014\u00a0to \u201cplay to lose\u201d. But I\u2019ve experienced many Shock:games where this stuff happens and they come out just fine specifically because we don’t have to agree that we want it to agree that it happened, that it was a powerful set of events. The shitty Protag reflects an injustice that the player feels is real, and the game turns out to be an example of that injustice, with the fiction as a metaphor that describes it. And when your Protagonist represents your hopes and dreams and they fail in their objective, it says much the same thing.<\/span><\/p>\n

In those cases, it is the outcome of the character\u2019s arc, cast against the player\u2019s explicit hopes, that give the game teeth of irony.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The way it doesn\u2019t<\/i> work is when you try to do \u201cwhat\u2019s right for the story\u201d, not angling for what your Protagonist wants. Let the Audience do their job: make sure things fit together according to their editorial impulses. Let the Antagonist do their job: place self-revealing choices in front of you.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then pursue your Protagonist\u2019s interests.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Do Not Adjust Your Set<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

At each moment in Shock: the Protagonist<\/i> players ask themselves these questions to make sure they\u2019re doing what they set out to do:<\/span><\/p>\n