One of the problems in testing RPGs during design is the difficulty in simulating the processes behind play. While playtesting can never be replaced, effective pre-play testing can remove many of the problems which find their way into playtest drafts. And in doing so can free up the playtesting phase to deal with deeper and subtler concerns about the RPG.
RPG theory has many uses, whether to aid design or to understand play better. But one of the less studied areas is the motivations of players as they take part in RPGs. Certainly taxonomies of players have been a corner stone of RPGs for decades, but these serve to simplify things for easier social interaction. Recognizing that someone is, say, an actor or a powergamer, can help streamline your interaction with them.
But all a classification like that gives you is an idea of what a player tends to do. Not why. It doesn't open up the motives underneath. Stereotypical archetypes can even gloss over important distinctions between motives. A powergamer may seek social acceptance or be fascinated by the game mechanics. Both may behave the same way for one game, but completely differently for another. And you cannot predict which unless you can delve to the deeper level of player motives.
Gestalt Aesthetics
One theory of player motives comes from the RPG theory developed at the Forge. Specifically, the concept of creative agenda acts as a common thread to many of those developments. But what exactly is a creative agenda, and how does it link to player motives?
The most important thing to do is to recognize what creative agendas don't do. In a sense they cannot be isolated: they aren't something a player can have alone or something a game can contain. And creative agendas are not overarching limits on the game. They specifically influence important decisions of the play group as a whole. In a very real way they are aesthetics, criteria by which options and valued. And they are the aesthetics of the play group as they are playing.
A great deal of work has been done with creative agendas, but for our purposes they are very simple. To simulate with creative agendas means to assume that a play group has a consistent aesthetic for play, that on some level the players all agree to certain values or can negotiate out fairly easily any differences. This gestalt is not always easy. It is a socially emergent state, not something that can always be expected.
Some aesthetics may be more feasible for an entire group than others. An important component of GNS and Big Model theories (both developed at the Forge), is those specific classes of creative agendas which are feasible for a play group to follow. This can be a fairly limiting view, but these categories (GNS has Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism, while Big Model has Step on Up, Story Now, and Right to Dream) are open enough to support a wide class of design goals.
Unfortunately, the idea of creative agendas falls apart when you turn to single players, or even player groups where no unified aesthetic emerges. If we want to look into those situations we need something that reveals these motives of by the player.
Sockets, Goals, and Payoffs
One of the most succinct break downs of player motives for RPGs are the three concepts of sockets, goals, and payoffs, as developed by Moyra Turkington. Rather than attempting to produce a monolithic scheme of group decision making, these concepts break down player motives into various pieces, sometime cooperating and sometimes at odds.
Sockets are the "locus of enjoyment", the aspects of play which engage a player. Different players can easily work together with quite different sockets, as long as the play dynamics can respect each of them. However, differing sockets can produce quite a different sense of play. Playing with a story socket, a character socket, or a social socket will bring up different aspects of play. And players often tend towards and even adopt in play multiple sockets. Sockets are also related to innate channels in the Channel Theory of Role-playing.
Goals are fairly direct. These are the goals a specific player works towards. Admittedly the loosest part of this theory, it offers a place for explicit or concrete goals to influence a players decisions. Interestingly enough the success of a goal may or may not be part of the reasons to play. Having a goal simply means working towards it. One may have a goal to kill another player's character and will have great fun trying, but succeeding on that goal may not be something the player in fact wants.
Payoffs are the other side, those are events in play which you want to experience. Generally positive, if you consider the denial of a desired payoff a negative payoff, then this concept links quite closely with rewards in the Process Model of Role-playing. The important thing about payoffs is that players will want to achieve their desired payoffs, but may not recognize others. Payoffs are perhaps the simplest player motive, and my original Ur-Game simulation used a theory of player based solely on success and failure payoffs.
Dynamic Views
So far I've discussed a variety of theories of player motives, one for groups of players, and others for a single player. But none of these theories deals with a common circumstance in play. Namely how players change their motive, whether they be sockets, goals, or payoffs. The problem is none of these theories suggests when a player simply becomes frustrated with play versus when a player adapts to find a different way to enjoy play.
One approach to this problem is the theory of views, which I discussed earlier. Views are much like sockets, except generalized to any way of pulling out a small piece of everything that is going on during play. The theory states that you want a certain level of complexity from that piece of play, too much and you get frustrated, too little and the simplicity is boring.
But views are always in flux, since each piece is connected to the rest of the game. In a sense, you have edges which come in and out of view as you play. If you are unsatisfied by your current view, because, say, it is too simple, then a bit of complexity on the edge of that view can draw your view towards that complexity.
This process will naturally move you towards better and better suited views, up to a point. It could be the case that your ideal views are simply too far removed for you to even know which way to adjust your own views. In that case, rather than adapting you'll find yourself becoming bored or frustrated, and ultimately the game will not satisfy you. If you are focused on a character, it will be easier for you to notice that the character's story, if not the character itself, is interesting. However, the fiddling of another character's mechanics will likely be too far away to engage.
So to facilitate adaptation you want to make sure that there is a taste of the best views far outside, leading back to the perspectives you, as a game designer, want your players to adopt. Perhaps they still won't partake, but at least you've shown a way to better enjoy the game.
Next Month: Returning Home
