To a large extent I agree with you. I don’t really like the kind of fiction Shock is rooted in for the sterile reasons you mention. That’s why I was so surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed playing Shock a great deal. It’s about using short stories to drive the evolution of a setting. You invest in the setting, not the character which, like you, I don’t do easily.

I also agree that many games are “too tight” and there’s a lot to learn from games that manage to keep play about meaningful stuff without making the whole engine of play revolve around it so specifically. Burning Wheel, The Riddle of Steel and Sorcerer are all “about” things but give you room to “play” the way some other games don’t. In fact, one of the things I try to tell new Sorcerer players is to go Color First. DON’T define Humanity. Instead think about what Sorcery and Demons look and feel like. What do they do and need? Then when you’re done playing with all that raw *fantasy* ask yourself, okay so what does all this *mean*? That’s your Humanity definition and because you’ve organically derived it from the fun color stuff you won’t ever really need to think about it much in play because it’s built into the very fabric of everything you’re playing with.

Perhaps a bit ironically the problem you’re describing with Shock is the exact issue I have with FATE. Once I’ve built a character I have no desire to play him. His ten Aspects tell his story. It’s done. All that’s left is going through the motions of “Oh, OF COURSE, I’ll follow her blindly after all, ‘I’m a sucker for a dame’, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, take my Fate point for the Compel. And then later, “Hey you know what? I’m going to spend a Fate point to Invoke this Aspect because….” big grin, everyone nods because they already know what I’m going to say and in fact all say it all together, “‘I always charge in FIRST!’” or whatever.

Now, I full admit this is probably an application issue, however, I’ve seen the behavior enough times to really put me off the game.

Jesse

Of course the far-end extreme you’re detailing on the other end of the spectrum wouldn’t be healthy, but I think it’s a little silly to suggest that it’s the only shade of emotional connection possible.

You watch TV or movies, right? You emotionally connect with them, right? But then you leave the TV room or theater or whatever afterwards and still somehow manage to wash yourself, do your chores, work your job?

I’m glad to hear Shock: is about the world, because it’s *really good* at delivering world!

But its-a-comin’.

Especially, I like what the game is about to be an emergent property of play, not something decided on beforehand. For me, Dogs is best at that, but I’ve had very good results with DRYH too. While I claim what I’m looking for in a game is illuminating character through making hard moral choices that have consequences, I suspect what I’m really after is “What does it mean to be human?”

The more on-the-nose a game is, the less it suits my tastes I’ve found, but other’s milage may differ and I’m cool with that.

Thinking about Shock in FATE terms, I think I understand what you’re getting at. If you get the players to just put the shocks down, flat out, then the game becomes very confrontational and focused on trying to find those themes.

Shock: isn’t and can’t be about Shocks. They’re not themes. It’s much more about Issues — and curiously, it’s about those written down maybe 1/3 of the time.

Everyone here: I’d like to point out that, as players, you spend literally ten minutes with the Grid. There’s an entire game to Shock: that you’re not addressing at all. This stuff that you’re talking about as the beating heart of the game is more like its toes: important for keeping it upright, but certainly not central.

I’ll give a little primer so the discussion can be a little broader.

Praxis are how you get things done. They’re the “stats” of the game, and have everything to do with the characters and how they act. Not what they care about, not their Issues, not their feelings. Just their actions.

Links are people and assertions. They’re what the character cares about as a person. They’re often in tension with the Issue in play. They’re usually people and institutions (unions, religions, philosophies, very occasionally meaningful possessions). You threaten them in a pinch.

Minutiæ and Audience are the players’ sense of humor, given force. They texturize the world and make it a big, unpredictable place. The distribution of their authorship, both random and according to assignment on the Grid, means that the world is bigger than any player ever knows.

The Grid is also used from time to time to figure out who has authority on a topic— it’s for asking someone for little side stories about how things got this way. I’ve never seen any discussion of Shock: hybridization that addresses this, the way you use it most in play. Most of the time they say the equivalent of, “Oh! That object has a steering wheel! Let’s put a steering wheel on this other object so it will change direction, too!” without looking at steering linkages or how a car moves.

And the reason it’s like this is so you have actual protagonists (that is, not just in the technical sense of the game, but in the literary, “character morally and materially opposed by fit opposition”). Considering it, I can see only one possible way that your character wouldn’t be a protagonist, and the entire group would have to be in on the experiment. Your Protagonist might be unsympathetic, might even be a wishy-washy character, but they can’t help but make stuff happen when the chips are down. And by “stuff”, I mean “things that change the world forever”. (Included in that “change” is concretization of the world as it apparently exists.)

Ultimately, Shock: is about what happens to the world, including the *Tagonists. The Protagonists are points of view made complex through their cares and labors, but they’re constructed and played as parts of the world. It’s my particular take on science fiction (and this is where you and I just have different tastes): it’s not about the people. It’s about the world. The people are how we illustrate the world.

Now, I’ve been reading some SF I really like lately that you probably do too: Use of Weapons and Deepness in the Sky, most pointedly. They’re research for a game I’m working on right now called Human Contact, which is much, much more about the characters. In broad strokes, it’s my critique of Star Trek and its trivialization of the earth-shaking social and technological aspects of the series. At its heart is the unspoken assertion in Trek that contact with new cultures doesn’t change the explorer, only the explored, that enlightened society brings civilization to unenlightened society. And to address that, the characters need to be people. So you’ll be seeing some curious stuff from me at some point on the topic.

Shock: on the other hand, will remain about the world. Improvements in the game in future versions may do that better (including making people a richer part of the world), but it will remain about the world, because that’s what it’s for.

I’ve run the game far more than I’ve played it, and when I’m GMing I am less about getting emotionally involved with a particular character’s perspective and more about creating an experience.

I’m wondering if there is a disconnect between games-GMs-like-to-run and games-players-like-to-play?

Thinking about Shock in FATE terms, I think I understand what you’re getting at. If you get the players to just put the shocks down, flat out, then the game becomes very confrontational and focused on trying to find those themes. On the other hand, if a player puts elements of a shock onto their sheet as an Aspect, then the game very much becomes about that, but in the manner of the spiral.

Like if we want to do a story about cloning, then I’d suggest that players use Aspects like ‘Born in a tube’ or ‘Genetically enhanced strength’ Then when those come up, the story is about cloning. And I think Joshua Newman is right about antagonists. I could give the big bad a few clone aspects too, maybe make him upset about the cloning. But it’s never the driving thrust of a story, the characters are. We’re just spiraling around the issue.

I think you see this in Dogs in the Vineyard. You’ve got towns, and characters and connections, but I don’t think the game ever really states what it is about. Rather, you just enter conflicts are start spiraling around that unnamed thing which is the heart of it. In a Wicked Age is even better for this, but always gets overshadowed by Dogs. I really think it’s Vincent’s overshadowed masterpiece.

For a counter example, I’ve had very bad times with getting my own designs to fly and I think it’s because of the fruitful void. I have a bad tendency to state upfront what I want to accomplish and then putting in elements that dive right at it. I’d actually suggest that is missing the point. Call of Cthulhu isn’t about sanity or loss of it; confronting monsters that damage your psyche instead of your physical body is the spiral that swirls around the stories C0C is good at telling.