Tinytalk Episode 014: C'est Caillois

Intro

Welcome to Tinytalk, a podcast about MUSHes and other text-based virtual worlds. I'm your host, Javelin, and this episode looks at the four categories of games described by sociologist Roger Caillois in his 1958 book Man, Play, and Games – of course, with reference to playing MUSH, and particularly roleplaying. But before we get started, here's a promo for a new MUSH podcast that you might like to know about:

Caillois's classification

The first category of game, agon, refers to games that focus on competition. Caillois said that agon games are "always a question of rivalry which hinges on a single quality (speed, endurance, strength, memory, skill, ingenuity, etc.), exercised, within defined limits and without outside assistance, in such a way that the winner appears to be better than the loser in a certain category of exploits." I got that quote, by the way, and other quotes from Caillois's book, from a very good series on the application of Caillois's theory to video games on Chris Bateman's "Only a Game Blog" – link in the show notes.

Back to Agon. Agon is player-on-player or character-on-character competition. On a MUSH, of course, the limits are pretty severe. Players can certainly compete against one another in typing speed, mushing endurance, writing skill, memory, ingenuity, etc. Making characters compete, however, is a much more difficult proposition, if characters are not supposed to simply inherit their players' qualities or take advantage of them unfairly. For example, when two characters are to have an IC battle of wits, it's the players' skills that are likely to determine the outcome. One can imagine some coded mechanics to make a character appear less witty, but making a character more witty is unlikely to be solved short of very strong AI. This is the underlying problem that makes doing a public MUSH based on Princess Bride or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy hard – not everyone's witty all the time.

One approach that I haven't yet seen fully implemented on an RP MUSH might be to focus the game on the players, rather than the characters – this is essentially the approach taken in adventure-gaming muds. Use player skills to assign characters, and then the characters can compete using the skills of their players. Or adjust characters based on the results of player competition, so better players get better characters, either by their characters improving or by them being allowed to "buy into" better characters. The latter idea can be found in Piers Anthony's novel Steppe, which has other interesting ideas for MUSH design, by the way.

The second category of game, alea, refers to games of chance. Most RP MUSH mechanics, with the exception of those that use diceless approaches, tend to have strong aleatory components, so I don’t have much to say about this, except that it's a real advantage for players to understand exactly how the randomness works. For this reason, designers sometimes try to hide the underlying algorithms to avoid "roll-playing", but a sufficiently clever player can often reverse-engineer the system, so it may be better to maintain equality by making the system transparent to all players. Another important design tip: If you're going to introduce new probabilistic mechanics in a game in order to model some kind of system, consult with someone with a background in probability and statistics. Simply choosing some number of dice to roll may not really model the relationships you want.

The third category of game, mimicry, refers to simulations and roleplaying itself – games in which the players try to act out or simulate a world or an identity. This should sound familiar. Here's Caillois again: "Mimicry is incessant invention. The rule of the game is unique: it consists in the actor's fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead the spectator to break the spell."

Again, MUSH rp'ers are so used to this kind of game that I don't have anything original to say about it now, except – isn't there always an except? – to note that because most worlds aren't inherently competitive and most people don't enter into lotteries where they might experience a significant loss, there's a tension between mimicry, agon, and alea. If you're really playing a character well, you might be more or less competitive than the game structure allows, and more or less risk-seeking. On the other hand, a pure simulation of every moment in a medieval castle would likely not be very engaging to players for long.

The fourth category of game, ilinx, is particularly interesting. These are games that seek to give the player a temporary sense of vertigo or instability of perception, like spinning around in a circle. I'll broaden that out a bit to include instability of feeling. In many ways, this is exactly the kind of effect that I associate with really powerful roleplaying that evokes emotions. Of course, temporary is key here – you want to evoke strong gut feelings but also ensure that you have a way of providing closure and restoring stability to the player at the end of the session.

Sensory media, notably radio, film, and graphical video games, have well-developed vocabulary and grammar elements that can reliably evoke certain kinds of emotion -- horror, relief, sadness, joy, confusion. Books can do that as well, but MUSH storytelling involves multiple authors, few of whom have the mastery required to make this work consistently. The development of a guide to emotional evocation for roleplayers and GMs would be a great project. Anyone want to try it?