Hunting Rabbits (Shh…)
I’m currently working on a story game called Ribbon Drive. It’s taken my heart by storm, and I’m really excited about its upcoming release. Ribbon Drive is a game where you tell a story about a road trip, and all the meaning and contemplation that pours out of it. It’s a game about letting go on the open road. The game uses mix CDs as a driving force to shape play.
One of the most successful parts of play, I’ve found, is the opening. We shuffle the mix CDs. We draw one at random, put it in the machine, and press play. We listen to to the first song in silence. Afterwards, we pause the CD and interpret how that first song lends to a road trip premise. We use it as a foundation point for our story. Why has this stage been successful? Well, all we’re asking is that you listen to a song (which had an equal opportunity of being your song, and might well be) and think about it. Participation seems to require very little.
But here’s what I’ve noticed: being both present and silent is very hard for some people, myself included. There’ve been games of Ribbon Drive where I’ve put down the lyrics to the song while it played; people who felt most comfortable tracking the words would do so. In games where I didn’t offer this thing to do, where your options were to either close your eyes or look around the room, the vibe I got was significantly different. It was a bit anxious, in that people seemed a little less comfortable in their own skin. There was reservation about sharing their opinions afterwards.
Being both present and silent is hard. Experiment: try to meet and hold someone’s gaze for fifteen seconds, without either of you saying anything. You can repeat this experiment as many times a day as you like. See how many people break this gaze. See how often you break this gaze. Does it feel comfortable and natural? My answers are, pretty invariably: almost everyone; almost every time someone else doesn’t; no.
Silence, as a form of communication, is underexplored, because it is difficult and often misread. I’m not talking about shutting up, nor am I talking about the silent treatment(ie, using silence to communicate how you are unengaged), but rather silence as a tool for active, engaged participation. Before I get farther into why this might be difficult for us, let’s look at how silence could be used as a tool.
Silence Can Demonstrate Agreement. Silence can demonstrate the absence of objections, the support of the speaker. It can demonstrate your belief that their argument is without necessary additions or revisions. Danger: this silence can also be a sign that a communicator lacks confidence that they and their concerns will be met fairly.
Silence Can Demonstrate Engaged Listening. Silence can demonstrate that one is focused on listening and appreciating. If the speaker has paused or stopped, and the listener is still silent, this could be seen as a signal that the listener is interested in hearing more. Danger: this silence could also be seen as non-participatory listening, and might be used when the listener is incapable of meaningful engagement.
Silence Can Demonstrate Ongoing Consideration. Silence can demonstrate that one is taking time to mull over the idea and consider its applications before challenging it or moving on. Silence could signify that one is interested in this idea to the extent that they would prefer to stay with it, rather than keep advancing the conversation. Danger: this silence could also mean that the ideas aren’t worth engaging, or that the silent party is unsure how to engage a response.
Silence Can Demonstrate Your Priorities. Silence can carry the very powerful message that you care more about hearing another’s ideas than sharing your own. This is a form of permission-granting similar to Silence Can Demonstrate Agreement, but coupled with a statement of preference. Danger: this silence can also demonstrate that you feel your priorities are invalid, or that you won’t be given due spotlight (and so are resigned to another’s communicative priorities).
In my opinion, silence can be used as a powerful tool. The list above is by no means comprehensive of its possibilities (and I’d urge readers to suggest additional ways that it can be used as a tool, in the comments section). Why isn’t it used more often, explored in a wider variety of contexts? The reason that feels most true to my experience is that silence is both difficult and often misread. It’s difficult because it is less direct than voiced communication, meaning that we have to work to be as clear and as expressive as we would normally be. It’s often misread because, again, it is less direct, and also less explicit. We run the possibility of expressing the very opposite of our intent (see how closely linked the dangers are to the possibilities). It is also difficult because it requires a lot of trust to work effectively.
Its strengths? It is non-intrusive communication. Many people can communicate silently at once, without disrupting each other. On top of being non-intrusive, non-disruptive and simultaneous, silence can be used in tandem with voiced communication, meaning that it also offers us contrast. So, considering the dangerous pitfalls of silence (appearing unconfident, unengaged, uncertain or unempowered; being unclear and misread), how do we utilize its strengths? Certainly it offers too many possibilities to discard as being unsafe.
The dual keys to using silence effectively seem to be establishing both trust and some meta-definitions about what silence means in a given social space. Establishing trust is a difficult and tenuous thing when we’re talking about silence, because the ultimate concern is that you might be mistreated by a more powerful, more intrusive, more obvious medium (namely, talking). Establishing meta-definitions about silence means having a clear understanding in a given group about what silence means in that context, and how it can be used, and what signals seperate engaged silence from disengaged silence.
The opening to Ribbon Drive, it works because it establishes trust through shared silence (thus eliminating the threat, in that moment, of being overruled/stomped on by voiced communication) and clear meta-definition (you are being silent in order to consider this song). It also introduces into the social space the notion that silence is something that we’re going to be handling directly. Throughout play, silence is given a different definition, through the Obstacles rule: if you are the last person to join/speak in a scene, you have the option to (at any point during the scene), introduce an Obstacle. This gives an assurance (similar to trust) of being heard (in a unique role, this time). Its handling of definition is a bit more open (you might be silent in order to gain a certain narrative advantage, or, you might be appreciative and prioritizing someone else’s spotlight over your own). This rule has the really nice feature of giving new space to players who are naturally quiet (but have good ideas to share), as well as educating loud, yippy players (like myself) about the weight that your words can gain if you simply stop using so many of them.
If you manage to build trust around and definitions for silence within a group, you can begin to use it as an additional layer and mode of communication. It’s quite a powerful thing, when you know what it means.
Note: I’m preparing a Skills Workshop on effectively using silence in story games. Ask me about it at Go Play NW.
Posted by mcdaldno | 11 comments
Julian Michels
Joe,
This is good stuff. As you know, a lot of these are things I’ve been thinking about and some that we’ve already talked about. I am very much with you on the potential of intentional silence, when it can be achieved. That’s most of why I was (and still am) a fan of your The Very Quiet Council.
I like the idea behind your “last person to join a scene gains something”. That’s very clever. I’m going to play around with how to work that sort of participation into our method of play without falling into some of the potential risks of that mechanic.
Joe McDonald
To Julian,
I’m planning on running The Very Quiet Council as part of a skills workshop on silence (at GPNW/elsewhere). You should throw down with moi.
To others,
The Very Quiet Council is an educational/problem-solving game that uses a sort of silence-as-consensus mechanic. I could post about it if prompted.
Julian Michels
Joe, I’d love to chat with you about/attend your workshop. As far as TVQC I have thought some about the procedurally generated Matters vs a preset agenda, and I still feel that I’d personally like some form of complete procedural generation of what the group finds is truly important as they play. I’m thinking about some form of token system to introduce issues, but I don’t know. I’d love to hear your reasons for wanting that preset agenda, though, if there are any reasons beyond intuition or just a different vision of the game. But, it may be better to chat about all that on email.
Joe Murphy
Damned interesting!
A friend’s game, ‘The Hammer Falls’ has a surprisingly tricky first scene. It’s like the opening shot in a movie. But not only is there no conflict in the scene, there’s no dialogue.
So you can start describing how your ‘guy is going about an ordinary day, when…’ but absolutely no dialogue, conversation or in-character monologues are allowed.
buriedwithoutceremony
Joe Murphy,
(welcome!)
Eric Provost’s zombie game The Infected has a similar set of stipulations for the opening scene. Essentially, he was hoping to create a “credits sequence” kind of feel with his opening scenes, as well as set a strong visual impression of the characters.
Jason Godesky
This silence demonstrates agreement.
Daniel
Here I go being all picky again but: I think that for most of the examples you are discussing silence is part of verbal communication, not a separate type of communication.
Silence without context is meaningless; it is just an absence of noise. If the context is a conversation then the silence is part of that conversation. If I say: “And when she found out what I had really been doing with my Saturday afternoons, well…” and trail off into silence, that silence is part of my verbal communication. It is a particular kind of verbal space with some interesting properties but it is not above or beyond or beside the conversation — it’s part of it.
When you talk about meeting someone’s eyes in silence and communicating it seems to me you are talking about non-verbal communication, not silence per se. But again it depends on the context: let’s say we are at a dinner party and someone is telling a terrible joke that just goes on and on and on and our eyes meet across the table — what our glance communicates is going to operate in the context of the verbal communication. It’s part of the conversation, and if I roll my eyes (subtly) or smile or whatever I am depending on the context of the joke-teller to help me communicate, via body language.
None of this is to say silence is not a fascinating part of communication, but I don’t think it makes sense to isolate it as though it were its own method of communication — because I don’t think it is. I don’t think you could communicate anything using only silence, whereas right now I am communicating something using only words.1 As a tool, silence depends more than average on context, because it cannot provide its own the way active tools can. Talking about how silence can operate in addition to verbal or physical communication seems likely to confuse what is really going on — better to talk about how it operates as part of that communication.
1 It is also true that words depend entirely on context but they depend on a larger social context — silence depends (in most cases) on a very specific context. There are some places where silence means particular things in the same way words come to mean particular things but those places are fairly rare (and maybe worth exploring.)
Daniel
To expand on my footnote that seems to be what you mean when you say ‘meta-definition’, though the meta- seems kind of gratuitous. I definitely like the idea of games that consciously think about how to incorporate silence into their structure, and I think you are right that this is best done through demonstration and obvious contextual cues. But also silence will continue to mean all the things it can normally mean, and I think that in general a more specific context overrides any general social context.
A useful thought experiment might be to think about what silence means in a library and then try to think of an example where that would actually confuse somebody about the meaning of silence in a particular conversation — it seems unlikely. On the other hand there might be some confusion about what silence means outside a verbal context; for example, why doesn’t that guy I have been making eyes at come over and talk to me? Is it because we weren’t actually flirting or because you’re not supposed to talk in a library? Etc.
I think many of your dangers boil down to the fact (as in the example just given) that it is impossible to tell the difference between engaged and disengaged silence without some additional communication (whether it comes from a high-level social definition or a more specific cue). I think Dan Bern said it best, actually, just replace ‘look at’ with ‘talk to’:
when certain girls don’t look at you
it means that they like you a lot
when other girls don’t look at you
it just means they’re ignoring you
how can you know
how can you know
which is which who’s doing what?
I guess that you can
ask ‘em
“which one are you, baby
do you like me or are you ignoring me?
do you like me or are you ignoring me?”
Okay maybe he didn’t say it best but I can never resist an opportunity to quote Dan Bern lyrics.
buriedwithoutceremony
Sure, Daniel.
I don’t think the distinction you’re drawing is one that I have any issue with. I tend to be a touch imprecise with my use of language.
At the same time, though, I want to stress something to make sure that we’re on the same page. I’m trying to point out that silence is an effective tool, albeit one that needs to be programmed. Once we’ve done that, and once we’ve explored how to use it effectively, we can communicate a lot without words.
By “meta-definitions”, I mean to say that we can program silence to carry its own context, instead of relying on verbal/words-being-said for it.
Julian Michels
I don’t think any social scientists or linguists would consider silence a form of verbal communication, though it can absolutely be a form of nonverbal communication when it transmits shared meaning (be that explicit, as in TVQC or implicit, as in a shy glance). Obviously, nonverbal meaning is highly dependent on context.
That being said, whether we label meaningful silence as verbal or nonverbal doesn’t seem very important for Joe’s thoughts here.
Lisa T
Hey Joe,
for me, comfortable silence (the ability to be with someone without the need to fill the void with chatter) is part of my barometer for good friendships. I think external chatter and internal (brain) chatter are inextricably linked, and that we have to be comfortable with our own internal chatter or internal silences before we can be comfortable with another’s. I believe that silence is not always only to be perceived in the context of communication, but also in the experience of the individual…alone or otherwise. When alone, many people fill their space with chatter – music, talk radio, computer, etc. If we ask ourselves about our silences (observing them first without judgment) and learn about ourselves through them, we learn a lot about ourselves and ability to be – just be – in silence.
I’m glad to read that you’re working with silence within the gaming realm. It’s a place that seems to need to come up against the strength of silence.