Neurotypical RPGs and Virtually Autistic CommunitiesAspergers and other high-functioning points on the autistic spectrum are associated with nerdy pursuits, but that’s not the point of this post. That’s usually slung around as pop psychology (which this post can be accused of – that’s pretty much what it is) and insults. I want to say this: Online communities can be level playing fields between folks with autistic spectrum (AS) neurology and neurotypicals (people without autistic traits) because most communication strongly privileges text, to the virtual exclusion of all else. AS communities have noticed this characteristic, and it’s about time we noticed it too. (Before you ask: No, I’m not and yes, I know people who are.) Most RPGs are neurotypical texts. This sounds weird (how can text be neurotypical?) but hear me out. Until recently RPGs were meant to be read as something to be explored in the context of face to face verbal interactions, where irony and areas of ambiguity would quickly get resolved one way or another based on the local social consensus. Nowadays, so much new game design and community activity occurs online that this “neurotypical” work is found to be confusing. Of course, people reading blogs and forums are not really all autistic, though they don’t have access to the usual neurotypical tools to conquer mindblindness. So they root around for persons behind texts (genuinely AS folks usually know better) and get angry. One example of this is Mage: The Ascension’s Guide to the Technocracy. In this book, the authors tell you all about how great the Technocracy (a secret society of fascist super-scientists) is and how they invented everything good, and that to defend everything good they have to do some bad things. Eventually it reveals that this is all from the viewpoint of people who are routinely brainwashed, and how torture and other very bad things are commonplace. In face to face play people get the whole concept pretty fast, and it’s fun to see a bunch of agents do their best to maintain a moral even keel against a genuinely evil regime. Online, it’s not so easy. In chat games players either use the book to play straight up bad guys, or they ignore all the bad stuff the Technocracy does. It’s very difficult for them to process the book the way people do in a face to face game. The medium not only makes a certain form of communication possible, but it “primes” us to value a certain setup. We don’t value ambiguity and subtle irony (subtle irony) as much online as we do offline — and we’re blind to what we don’t value. (You can make a similar observation about big LARPS. The old Mind’s Eye Theatre was designed with the idea that small groups would negotiate results around a loose set of rules, but once big networked games rose to prominence the community preferred strict systems. This is because big LARPs force you to deal with people you’re not as familiar with in a competitive context, combining low trust with less of a sense of another person’s mind, because that mind belongs to a stranger. The influence of gaming with strangers might also be seen in games where a significant amount of play happens at conventions instead of regular sessions.) Writers and designers have to think about how much of an offline versus online presence their writing has and adjust it accordingly. One example is the use of guiding statements. Pushing a mission statement or instructions about things you’d normally leave unsaid is helpful when the game goes online. Clear instructions about disobeying the mission statement help too. You’re laying down hard channels of interpretation which you wouldn’t want in other situations but that’s a limitation of the medium. They also need to think about the nature of online feedback. As I said, the Internet primes us for a different set of values based on references and broad hypotheses instead of the output of interpersonal relationships. People say they want things on the Internet that they don’t really want offline, or want for the sake of doing things that you don’t consider to be the default purpose of the game (chat games, online worldbuilding, recreational game hacking, etc.). Here’s an online/offline bullet point list to get you started. It’s a bunch of dichotomies. They’re ultimately false, but useful.
Is one worse than the other? No — each has a medium. In a big game you can do an all-arounder, because you have room to explore both sides. (Those bullet points are false dichotomies, remember?) Drop the temptation to think that the best online communications tactics are less emotive. Oh, and don’t think that you’re not that guy, being mindblind online. You are. 4 comments to Neurotypical RPGs and Virtually Autistic Communities |
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Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this is one of the things that led to the Fourth Edition. People are losing some of their imaginative and interpretive communication abilities, and I think this is a loss, overall(and here’s why). Being mindblind and exhibiting pseudo-autistic symptoms in digitally mediated communications is expanding into our RL interaction.
I can’t say this is my experience. With regard to 4e the combat system is pretty hardwired, but the skill system isn’t; it behooves many people (though not all – remember, this post is inspired by the fact that online interaction works very well for some people) to try it face to face.
Western society is undergoing a shift in how we socialize, due to the decline of close friendships compared to 20 years ago. I think this does drive many people to go to online discussion first.
I’d like to put to be in this comment the idea that mindblindness is a character defect. There’s a difference between the information we have access to and the moral choices we make.
We’re all that guy/gal sometimes.
Anyway, its interesting to think about this vis a vis my own experience of online play. It was often the case that in many stable online environments you’d develop a subtle and ongoing structure of play, but that such environments were often disrupted by new additions or random interactions. Thus folks would look for hard system structures in places where they weren’t often helpful in ongoing play.
Or to put it less hypothetically, we’d have a “clique” on a MUSH or talker — a stable group of people who played together often — among whom things like reputation, ongoing mutual appreciation of subtle interactions, and many of your binary issues of the offline sort were common. But because we were playing on a public MUSH or talker there would always be someone who wasn’t part of the group who we’d end up playing with, and they didn’t get any of that. (And there is no special reason they should, its subtle and thus hard to get at first blush. Some didn’t get it, and some never tried. Some were actively hostile to it.)
When they didn’t get it we, and they, (“them and us” talk about not subtle) would often fall back to the less subtle online forms. “I have Rank 5, and you have Rank 4 so I have precedence” type stuff.
For some folks this formed a bridge from which they were able to move increasingly over time into the more subtle forms that we actually valued in play. But much of the time it didn’t. The interaction stopped there, and lead to mounting frustration on both sides as none of us were able to clearly articulate to each other what the problem was. Then the accusations of elitism, system mongering, and all the rest would start.
Over time there was a cumulative effect of all this even on members of the clique. We’d become more and more focused on the exoteric systems of the game — grubbing XP to buy up stats as it were — despite the fact it wasn’t where our joy was. But we felt we had to do it because it was the only way to make sure that we’d have enough clout to maintain our position when the folks who weren’t part of the subtle and backgrounded play would come into the picture.
As a result there were plenty of times when we’d fuck our own play because we’d started shifting focus to things we didn’t actually want. We were playing on the defensive, trying to avoid bad play rather than actively seeking good play.
And that’s something that’s been haunting me recently: the difference between designing/running/playing to avoid bad play and designing/running/playing to create good play. I’ve an unfortunate feeling that a lot of modern game design is, subconsciously, focused more on the former than the latter.
I’m not really trying to say that one mode is better/worse than the other overall, though it’s better or worse for some. I think what we’re seeing is a function of the medium and something separate from the purity (or screwed-upedness) of our intentions. But these are fuzzy contrasts, and problems do arise when we’re not sure of what we’re capable of in a medium. On the flipside, the distance in online play has allowed many people to explore themes they’d shy away from face to face, like romance. The implementation can suck, but that it happens is significant.
Another thing that interests me is how players work around the limitations of a medium. For example, many MUSHers simply state emotions and intentions that would arise nonverbally. “She looks at her like she’ll stand by her no matter what.” Nobody “looks” that way, really, and there might be a third person subjective that does as good a job, but this is a challenge to write, so simply using expression as a tag for bringing forth subtext is a valuable tactic.
Is modern design focused on patching bad play? In many cases, yes; the mechanics at serve as a signal for expected behaviour, and as we shift to a less intimate gaming culture some of this has to happen to get things up and running at all.