[AE.Gamedev] We Are Not At Home To Mrs. Fish
The most recent episode of HBO's prestige TV show The Gilded Age presented one particularly memorable scene drawn at least loosely from actual history: Mrs. Fish, wife of Stuyvesant Fish and grand dame of New York's fabled 400 glitterati, invited the favored members of her social circle to a tea party for dolls.
The show did not dwell long on the logistics or visuals of the scene, but what we saw was enough to suggest the event as a whole was awkward and unsettling as you might have imagined, attended mainly by those who did not dare miss the opportunity to curry favor with a mover and shaker of the 400 and her other guests but would have much rather preferred a grown-up tea party for grown-ups.
My very brief research into this event suggests that the kernel of truth behind this scene was somehow even more outre: in real life, it seems Mamie Fish invited her friends and favor-seekers to a dinner party for dolls, where she required guests to speak in baby-talk. A tea party at least has an air of childhood whimsy going for it, and dolls are not eerily out of place at one.
There have probably been children who got all their toys together to play dinner party, but it's never caught on in a game in the same way that playing tea party has, has it?
And while it's unlikely any guest at such a Fishy shindig had spent much time crouched over a miniature tea set with their own children, it would perhaps have been a bit easier to get into the spirit of the thing, knowing that doll-sized tea sets are a thing.
I don't know that the fictionalized character of Mamie Fish considered her party a failure or success, because I do not know what her goals were. I'm given to understand that her real-life inspiration was considered something of a fun-maker among taste-makers, though, and I am comfortable saying that she failed to make things fun for most anyone who wasn't her.
Her mistake... if it was a mistake... is similar to the issue discussed in this blog post, on the subject of when adults try to impose "Play With A Purpose" on children, who rarely need a reason to play... or rather, rarely need an external reason to play, as play has its own purposes.
Indeed, childhood play typically arises organically from purposes. A child who for whatever reason tries to play without having any purpose to be satisfied is likely to appear listless and bored, and wander away in search of something else.
I've been thinking about that The Gilded Age scene ever since I saw it because it fits in with something I have been thinking about a lot recently, about the nature of play and the structures and strictures that govern play as we grow into adulthood.
I say "recently" but I suppose I mean "for the past few years", as I found that blog post I linked to on a Twitter thread where I was musing on it back in 2019:
There was a conversation at the bar in WisCon a few years back about being an adult and realizing you had just lost the capacity for play. Too much restraint, the wrong kind of creative muscles, no social license, I don’t know.
— Alexandra Erin (she/her) (@AlexandraErin) August 30, 2019
Multiple people voicing a shared internal milestone
No one tells you that you’re too old to play, you just get to a point where you’re busy and you have put away childish things and you don’t even think about it… and then, at some point you do, and feel like something has been lost.
— Alexandra Erin (she/her) (@AlexandraErin) August 30, 2019
There's a bit of modern-day folk wisdom I allude to in that thread, one which has been stated on the internet so many times by so many people that I wouldn't care to try to pin down an original source, especially as it was certainly stated off the internet before that, but which amounts to something like:
"If a little kid hands you a toy phone and says, 'It's for you,' I don't care who you are, you stop what you're doing and answer it."
Or as I put it myself on Twitter, earlier this week:
Dungeons & Dragons may be the most popular TTRPG, but in terms of analog RPGs in general, it loses out to a popular LARP.
— Alexandra Erin (she/her) (@AlexandraErin) March 2, 2022
It turns out that most played RPG in the world is “Ring, Ring! Hello? Who’s this? Oh, it’s for you.”, a game for one small child and one or more adult.
That tweet came about because in recent years I have found myself thinking about this bit of actually twilit liminal activity -- children play-acting at being adults, and thereby drawing adults into acting in play with childish abandon -- in terms of its wider implications for the possibilities of imaginative play stretching into adulthood, and in particular its applicability to my favored hobby of roleplaying games.
Because the thing is... one would need a heart of stone to refuse a call from Elmo in front of an earnest toddler with a talking Sesame Street phone toy, but it doesn't even have to be an actual toy telephone, does it? It can be a wooden block, or a juice box, or nothing at all.
Even those of us who never took a semester of mime training or an improv class on object work can and will mime taking a telephone call if a small child goes "Ring ring!" and then thrusts an empty hand at us while announcing that a call has come through for us.
And this is not because we all have any great regard for talking on the telephone in real life.
The telephone call, though, is a structure we're familiar with. The child pushing the "phone", whatever form it may take, in our direction is providing permission or even a provocation for play. And while there are a million different ways a phone call can go... which is a source of anxiety for many of us... we know exactly how they start:
"Hello?"
Imaginary telephones are not unique in posing this kind of invitation to play. There are plenty of grown adults who will fence or have lightsaber duels toy swords or cardboard tubes, or who will pretend anything reasonably microphone-shaped is a microphone when the urge to sing along to something strikes them.
I've been thinking about this subject lately as I work on my tabletop RPG projects, and particularly as I work out how to put them out in the world in a form both where others can play them and where others want to play them.
An early highlight of my year was my first in-person playtest (with the other members of my household) of one of my tabletop projects, which I went into 100% expecting one or both of my testers to bounce off it hard for being too weird and wonkish a game.
But to my surprise and delight, they were both very invested in it, very early on... long before they had internalized the rules or any of the metagame, which meant they stuck around long enough to figure those things out.
I could write a whole separate post about that experience and how and why I think it worked, but pursuant to this topic, I think it's because the setup process for the game -- something I had approached as a necessary step that was also a major hurdle in terms of being a chance to lose my audience -- handed them the equivalent of a toy telephone.
Thinking back on that experience, I think two of the necessary (or at least useful) components of drawing adults into imaginative play are what I would term permission and purpose... or perhaps more specifically, permission and provocation.
Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish's elaborate entertainments ostensibly provided permission, but in practice, that kind of a scenario is more like pressure than permission; it isn't that her guests were given space to be child-like so much as they were compelled to enter a space where it was expected of them.
Permission would be more like... well, think of a masquerade ball with only the loosest of theme, if any. The guests would know they are expected to dress up, but given license to affect whatever form of fancy dress they might fancy, with the added dynamics of at least potential partial anonymity and the freeing psychological shift that can occur when one understands that one is not acting as oneself but as a persona or role.
But simply inviting all the members of a gilded age circle of hangers-on to a costume ball won't result in all of them -- or necessarily any of them -- actually embracing the spirit of the thing. Permission is useful and perhaps necessary, but not sufficient in itself to guarantee a playful mindset.
This is where provocation comes in. I'm not sure if that's the best term as it has a rather charged and almost negative connotation in everyday use, but I have a weakness for alliteration and "play" and "permission" both begin with "p".
Children tend to play to learn, to practice, to pick things apart and figure them out, in spite of rather than because of all the adults in their lives who strive to make playtime educational and make learning fun.
But adults... I don't think it's so much that we have everything figured out as much as it is that outside of specific contexts that vary from person to person, we're out of the habit of learning by hunkering down and messing around. Finding out how something works by fooling around and trying different things can be stressful as an adult. We're too aware of the stakes. We find it regrettably easier to engage with our anxieties and insecurities and misplaced certainties than with the fun and freedom of finding out.
The reason a provocation works as a purpose for adult play is that it is an engagement that gets past all that. It is an emotional challenge: like, are you really going to disappoint this child who just handed you the empty Tic Tac case they pretend is a toy phone?
The guests for a masquerade ball generally have to provide their own provocations, which might be a chance to impress someone or express something, or to show off how clever they are, or to be part of a shared jest with their friends. Those who lack a provocation are unlikely to find a purpose in the play, and thus are unlikely to actually engage with it as play. They will wear a costume because it's a costume ball and that's what one does.
For people who already enjoy roleplaying games, the chance to have playing one can be enough of a provocation to get them to the table and help them engage with the game.
But if one desires to bring people to the table and into the game regardless of their prior experiences or existing investment in the game, it is necessary to provide provocation.
In the aforementioned test session of my ghost game, the players found a provocation I hadn't counted on or considered in the creation of the household. By the time we were ready to play, they knew things about the living non-player characters in the house and they were invested in harrying some of them and helping others. They wanted to play the game for the chance to learn more about these people they had helped to dream up, and for the chance to interact with them.
Game designer Ron Edwards once used the term "Premise" to describe the kind of baited hook used by a game to catch a player's engagement, though I believe he replaced it with the term "Creative Agenda", which has the advantage of being more evocative and also being more obviously a term of art. Most people who know the word "premise" wouldn't immediately associate it with "whatever it is about the game that catches your attention and earns your engagement", which is roughly how he used it, as I understand.
I'm not saying that if you want to run a roleplaying game, you have to trick your players into having fun at your table. I'm saying that you should make room for them to have fun and you have to be prepared to accept that the fun they have might not be the same as the fun you envisioned. You should think about what in the game might catch their interest, but you shouldn't force it.
As the blog post said,
"Children's play is always purposeful even if we can't tell what that purpose is and it's always educational even if we don't know what they are learning. The moment the adult imposes her own agenda, play comes to an end no matter how playful their top-down agenda tries to be. Children will always lose interest because the questions are not their own and without interest 'learning' becomes a chore for everyone."
Substitute the word "roleplayers" for "children" and that's solid advice for a game runner. If you want players to engage with the story you're telling, you have to be willing to let it be their story. They will care more about it the more of a stake they personally feel they have in it, regardless of what kind of stake you tell them they should.
With sufficient pressure and enough "aw, come on, guys, will you take this seriously?", you might be able to get a room (or chat server) full of adults to go along with a game for a time, at least in the manner of Mrs. Fish and her house of dolls... but if you want to see play, you have to invite it.