RPG Social Mechanics, Player Agency, and the Fantasy of Free Will

 I was listening to the most recent episode of Happy Jack's RPG Podcast while walking in to work today, and once again the topic of social mechanics in games came up. Specifically, the conflict between player agency, through their characters, and using social mechanics on other player-characters. On the one hand, if someone creates a socially adept character, you don't want to make that decision dependent on their own roleplaying skills, or make it a far less valuable choice than creating a character who is adept at magic or combat. (Of course, in almost every RPG ever written, the social stat is still the dump stat). On the other hand, there is a concern about a player's agency - that if their character loses a social conflict over something important, and has to act against their wishes, then that is a serious problem.

Full disclosure: I don't think it's a problem for a player to lose control of their character periodically, and I think it's odd that we focus on social mechanics in this discussion. I mean, if your D&D character is critically hit by a Dragon and dies, or by a Beholder and is turned to stone, no one complains that they have lost "player agency" or anything of the sort. Those are the rules, the dice were rolled and that's it. Similarly, if a character is chasing an NPC and the NPC uses a spell to become invisible and escape, no one complains about player agency. The character wanted to catch the NPC, but they couldn't, because rules.

But then, in a game with a social mechanic, a character gets into an argument with an NPC, and the NPC wins the argument, and suddenly if the character has to behave any differently, that's a big problem for many players. When I'm a player, I just roll with it, and it doesn't bother me at all. I come up with a reason my character is convinced, s/he acts against their better judgement, and the game goes on. Maybe later there will be a reckoning and maybe not, but the story moves on. We do things against our better judgment all the time, and one big reason for this is the influence of other people close to us.

As I was thinking about this, I thought about free will. Specifically, what philosophers call libertarian free will, which is not something to do with Ayn Rand, but rather the term for fully free will in contrast to determinism. Basically it says that free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe, and therefore determinism is false.

Inside all of us, I think, is a sense of someone in charge of everything. There is an inner sense that we deliberate and make choices and remember and so on. We think of this inner sense as our true self, or soul, or free will, or mind, etc. Particular with regard to punishment, we have an intuition that people make free choices, and that it is fair to punish them for those choices.

This is in direct contrast to actual research on the topic. There is a lot of research that shows how free will is limited, and may not even exist. Our brains make some decisions before we are even consciously aware of them. Our perceptions are filtered unconsciously. Our memories are re-interpretations rather than recordings of past events, and they change over time. We are primed to see what we expect to see.

And while we have the intuition of a decision-making self, we also all probably have had experiences where we have not been able to choose what we wanted to choose. We've consciously, or semi-consciously, made the wrong choice. Maybe it was because of an altered state, or because of the influence of others, or being in the grip of a strong emotion or whatever - but there are choices we are not able to make, even if we theoretically have the capacity to make them.

This should also be true of our characters - they aren't just sitting back making rational decisions. And I think this should be reflected in play and in the use of social mechanics. Libertarian free will does not seem to be the reality we experience, but I think the fantasy persists in the way we play games. We want total control over our characters even when we do not experience total control of our own lives.

Fun Theory and RPG Theory

I was turned on to a Scandanavian group called The Fun Theory. The theory that the espouse is that it is possible to encourage people to change their behavior for the better by making the behavior more fun. The three behaviors they try to change are: encouraging more transit customers to take the stairs rather than the escalator, encouraging more people to recycle their glass bottles, and getting more people to throw away their trash rather than throw it on the ground.

In all three experiments, they seem to have been successful. There is a video for each one showing what they did and explaining some of the short-term impact that what they did had.

I realized that each example applies to roleplaying games as well. RPGs are ultimately about different kinds of fun. Many use the GNS theory or Big Model to talk about what those kinds of fun are. I am going to propose a very simple model describing three kinds of play that I personally enjoy: exploratory play, competitive play and conceptual play. I will also try to give examples of when these kinds of play come up - not in games that exemplify them, but when in a game that the various kinds of play emerge and what I find fun about them.

Exploratory Play: The Piano Stairs

Exploratory play can take three different forms in my experience. The first is exploring your character. This process happens through the decisions that your character makes when a lot is at stake, and is supported by whatever advancement system is in place in a game system. Your character's capabilities, relationship to self and relationship to the world change over the course of a game, and this is a lot of fun for me.

The second way that exploratory play functions is exploration of the setting. This is the classic sand-box method of running a game, where all of the NPCs and set-pieces are in place, and the PCs get to run wild and interact with everything, learning as they go. This also comes up a lot in movies, when the main character is suddenly initiated into a new organization or is transformed, and there are big reveals for the character and the audience as to what is really going on (examples: Men in Black, Transformers, Interview with a Vampire, etc.)

The third way I see exploratory play happening is exploration of the game system itself. This happens a lot with games among my friends because we tend to love house rules. It can also be fun to explore a new game system, to see how the various rules and methods work (or don't work) and why. If I had unlimited free time, or was independently wealthy or something, I would try playing through the same story with the same character concepts but using two different systems in order to see how the story elements changed.

Competitive Play: The Bottle Bank Arcade

Competitive play is simple - you are trying to "win". This is what the majority of people probably think of when you say the word "game", and applies to football, Monopoly and chess as examples. There is a winner, or winners, and a loser, or losers. On the surface it seems like a zero-sum game, where one side's loss is another side's game.

Even a zero-sum game can have some emergent fun, however, whether one wins or loses. When my wife and I play a game, and she wins, I get some enjoyment out of her winning. I can also enjoy being just barely beaten in a closely-fought game that comes down to the wire. I'd probably enjoy winning more, but the tension over what will happen is in itself fun.

I really love games where the players collectively play against the game itself, like Shadows Over Camelot or Pandemic. In this case, you get all of the competition, but fewer of the hard feelings that might come up when people compete against each other (except for the filthy traitor of course!).

Conceptual Play: The World's Deepest Trash Bin

Conceptual play in my experience is when I am using a game to work something out that isn't necessarily related to the game. I might be using the game to work through what happens when a character is made a messiah against his will by an oppressed people, or to think through what it is like in the day-to-day life of a vampire. I might be using a game like Mage: the Ascension to play through metaphysical theories or to express what I really think about the world and our place in it.

Exploratory play is playing a game for it's own sake. Competitive play is playing a game for the sake of the thrill of victory and, in some ways, the agony of defeat as well. Conceptual play is using the game as a vehicle for something else. Unsurprisingly, collaborative games are an excellent way to do this conceptual work. Role-playing is used in therapy, for example, to work through relationship issues, and some games have been designed with the expressed purpose of working through a game-designer's issues (I am thinking of Clyde Rhoer, Paul Czege or Vince Baker as examples of designers with this goal).

Things don't have to be that deep either. A conceptual game might be something like "Hey, how about zombies in a Western?" and hence, Deadlands is born. Genre mash-ups can work out really well, like Eberron, the fantasy-pulp-noir setting by Rich Baker for D&D.

Anyway, those are the thoughts I wanted to get out there based on what I saw in The Fun Theory. So far, this is a more helpful way of thinking about games than GNS has been for me, in part because these are three kinds of fun that I have had in a game that I can identify. I still don't think I've experienced 'pure' Narrativism, and I've never heard Simulationism defined by someone who actually does it and enjoys it (only with, at best, well-hidden contempt).