La definizione del Glossario è quella postata da Mauro, ma ci giurerei che quella postata nel primo post l'ho già vista... dove l'hai trovata, Thomas?
Comunque, se volete leggervi il thread che ha coniato il termine...
Zilchplay [split from "Understanding: the "it"Se guardate la data del thread, il glossario è stato scritto subito dopo e quindi il termine non era stata ancora abbastanza dibattuto e sviscerato. Ecco qualche quote più recente (ultimi mesi) ottenuto facendo una rapida ricerca per la parola "Zilchplay":
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Da
qui, un brano già quotato altre volte:
I should point to a concept I've written about over and over, and often quoted in the following construction. I should stress that I'm using any social leisure activity as the empirical basis for it, with a special point about role-playing.
1. You have to trust that the procedures work - look, these instruments make different noises, so we can make music; look, this ball is bouncey, so we can toss and dribble it
2. You have to want to do it, now, here, with these people - important! (a) as opposed to other activities, (b) as opposed to "with anybody who'll let me"
3. You have to try it out, to reflect meaningfully on the results, and to try again - if it's worth doing, it's worth learning to do better; failure is not disaster, improvement is a virtue
My call is that role-playing, as a hobby and subculture, has failed to accept this idea, historically. And as such, the base-line for any sort of successful, fun participation for any other activity is, in role-playing, something of a mystic unknown. Many, many groups and even publishing strategies have developed what I consider to be compensatory mechanisms for its lack, none of which seem to have panned out well. An example of that is what's come to be called, here, "
Zilchplay," meaning the activity is effectively devalued and its content not evaluated. Others have developed a way to relate to their hobby in which their enjoyment is based mainly on reading about play and selectively remembering it rather than doing it.
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Da
qui:
"Drift to Incoherence" is a very powerful topic. The most definite example would be the common issue of
Zilchplay - basically
a group which sticks together and plays in a desultory if consistent fashion, "having fun" as long as "fun" means continuing to get together periodically, and getting a little bit of time in for one's character (and one's original if dwindling play-goals) once in a while. I'm also interested in whether and how Zilchplay is involved in the cross-group or no-group phenomenon, basically people who self-identify as gamers, participate in no consistent group, and who play briefly and occasionally in public meet-ups and as a guest presence in other groups.
Do people (groups/individuals) gravitate toward playing Zilch? The answer is empirically yes. What is that process? Does it have analogies in other small-a artistic social groupings? Do we even call it Drift?
And all of that should be distinguished from the other (original in discussion terms) meaning of Incoherence: clash of Agendas or desired Agendas. If Zilchplay is the outcome of, among other things, reduction of Agenda-desires to the individual level (such that getting a whiff every year or so is supposed to be enough), then Incoherence as originally described, which perhaps needs a name of its own, is the ongoing struggle to establish a given Agenda in the presence of conflicting desires. I'm not sure that a person or group arrives at this, because it's not so much a form of play as a condition in which play may, or unfortunately may not, occur. But who knows? Even a dynamic clash might become a "way" if it persists or occurs in a consistent enough fashion.
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Da
Qui:
I'll answer your last question first. Incoherence can arise for lots of reasons. One is certainly a clash of CA expectations across a group. In the early discussions at the Gaming Outpost and the Forge, it's probably not surprising that we focused on clashes of strong CA expectations as a problem, because that matched the experiences of people like me, Mike Holmes, Paul, and others.
However, over the years of discussion here and an exposure to a much broader range of actual play, I've realized that it's more common to see a group without much CA going on at all. Walt Freitag called this "
Zilchplay,"
which usually results from people being so accustomed to their goals-of-play being irrelevant to play, that they have pretty much given up. They might have minor or fleeting bits of their desired agendas expressed, once in a while, but not much.
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Infine, detta con parole mie...
E' l'ultimo stadio di un gruppo che, non riuscendo a stabilire un agenda creativa condivisa, e non riuscendo nemmeno a organizzarsi in maniera incoerente ma che comunque dia a ciascuno, ogni tanto la possibilità di giocare come vuole, ha finito con rinunciare a esprimere qualunque agenda e qualunque creatività.
Insomma, se in un gruppo puoi avere i tuoi dieci minuti in cui puoi sfruttare al massimo le tue capacità tattiche al limite, con gli altri che ti lasciano fare, e sei disposto a "sopportare" mezz'ora di scelte tematiche fatte da altri, hai un gruppo incoerente, ma funzionale. Ti diverti venti minuti ogni tre ore di gioco ma funziona.
Se invece la gente non "aspetta il suo turno", e non si riesce ad sprimere una agenda comune, ci sono le "agenda clash", ci si scontra, il gioco diventa disfunzionale.
Lo Zilchplay è la maniera in cui questo gioco può tornare funzionale: per rassegnazione. Io non mi sforzo nemmeno più di giocare in maniera tatticamente sensata perché tanto so che il GM ci fa vincere per non scontentare Mario, Mario non ci prova nemmeno più a cercare di esprimere qualcosa in gioco perché sa che lo prenderei per il culo. Finiamo per trovarci tutti i giovedì per tirare qualche dado e uccidere qualche mostro, seguendo la storia del GM abbastanza passivamente, senza che questo tirate dadi e uccidere mostri esprima né alcuna scelta tematica né alcuno sforzo tattico (e tanto meno nessuno sforzo di celebrazione di alcunché).
E sì, ho visto giocare così, e sono convinto che sia una maniera di giocare estremamente diffusa, specie fra i gruppi che giocano da molto tempo.
