|
Yesterday I had quite a journey in teh interwebs and the archives of RPG theory miscellany. The highlights included me finally getting the concept of fruitful void and system as Vincent Baker describe it.
I started from an innocent-looking discussion on Story Games titled The Fruitless Structure. The main point of that discussion was that reward mechanics, in time, often make people blind to the actual virtue that is promoted but try to play the mechanics itself to maximum gain. Relating to RPGs it is not enough to follow the mechanics but to look and negotiate around them to find out where they are pointing towards. And also to have common goals and expectations related to the game at hand in your group. Seems pretty logical and many of my own early experiences with story games provide evidence of this effect.
From there I was directed to an anyway post about about The Fruitful Void (anyway is the blog of Vincent Baker of Dogs in the Vineyard and In a Wicked Age fame among other things). You'd best see for yourselves, the actual post isn't that long. I didn't get it at first. I mean I couldn't relate to it; my most recent experiences on playing RPGs was Shell Shock, and I couldn't pin-point the fruitful void(s) of that game even after a little thinking. It probably didn't help that the other game we are playing right now is PTA, which allows for a void but doesn't drive you towards a specific one.
The photo by Steven Fernandez (Creative Commons, attribution)
But, upon reading the comments, clicking links, heading back to the
Fruitless Structure discussion on Story Games the notion slowly opened
up to me.The fruitless structure discussion outlined above certainly
helped me. It helped me to see what The Fruitless Void in RPGs is all
about. The raison d'etre of these games is not the mechanics and the
processes they create, it is something that grows from these processes
and is parallel to it, but is not the processes themselves.
For example in Shell Shock the processes are:
- the conflict mechanics which are
tied to
- the wounds and stress mechanics and also
- the trauma mechanics.
- There's also the notion of soldiers' relationship to the conflict and
to the army.
But the game itself is about being a small cog in a machine of war and also a
human being and a member of a social group in the midst of it. There
are no rules for interacting within the group. There are no procedures
to determine whether one acts according to commands or just tries to
stay alive. Furthermore, the game allows leeway for many kinds of
decisions related to survival and ethic options with the conflict
mechanic, wound system and the trauma system, but it's the sum of the
parts, not a distinct mechanic. The real stuff is in the fiction, and in this game, in these particular parts of fiction highlighted by the focus of the game. That,
for me, is the Fruitful Void of Shell Shock.
So, the fruitful void, as Mr. Baker implied in his blog post from 2005 (!), rises from all the processes in the game system, but is not a direct result of them. As implied in the Fruitless Structure discussion one can play according to all the mechanics and still miss the void if he's not paying attention. Because of this I think it is important not to just engage in the processes described in the rules of the game but also to try to complete the experience by engaging in the fiction and trying to fill the gaps. Also, it is important for a game designer not try to solve all the thematic interactions in a game with mechanics but leave room for exploration, negotiation and ambiquity.
Vincent Baker's illustration of the fruitful void in action. The arrows are the system and it's procedures.
Also, the fruitful void is an emergent quality of a rpg game. Meaning that it comes into effect through play (if at all). And any game design is the art of designing the emergent properties of a game-playing experience through manipulation of the structured elements known as the game's rules. That part applies to any kind of games as I surely know through my game design research.
A couple of loose remarks to wrap this up:
The Fruitful Void seems to be tied to the narrativist agenda. On the other hand it seems to not be tied, but then we are talking about the broad meaning of the term, for which there is a better term emergent qualities of a game.
A good fruitful void demands that the structured aspects to the game will lead the game towards the one void common to the whole group. In PTA, issues and their (non-) relation to the show format and the conflicts provide a kind of a meta-void. One of the players' tasks is to find and acknowledge their void.
Old-school RPGs have voids too, but often they are not fruitful - meaning that the procedures leave holes to be navigated through but they are many and not so well coordinated. But this got me hinking about the fruitful void of a (as of yet fictional) Call of Cthulhu game: The Fruitful Void in CoC is why on earth do those people get interested on those otherworldly gods, beings and tomes and why do they continue on with their investigations. I would like to play that game but I'm not sure if there's a game available that ould let me play it. The old CoC would have to be streamlined and I'm just not sure about The Trail of Cthulhu (probably pure prejudice, I know).
I was going to write about my other adventures later that day, exploring systems in RPGs and the on-going debate on RPG critique, but I have decided that they are worth another post another day.
Fhtägn-Dazs image by xtopher42 , licensed under creative commons (non-commercial, share-alike, attribution)
|
