Initiative and the Next in Line effect

 

Image by Cdd20 from Pixabay

I'm sure you have noticed this over and over: you call on a player and they have no idea what the current situation is. They need a refresher before they act, everyone groans and fills them in on what just happened while they were zoned out. The player insists they were keeping up but just lost track for a minute. It won't happen again (it happens again). Maybe it happens to you as a player, and you don't know why.

Everything that took place prior to their precious turn is just... blank. Why?

• Is this just a failure to pay attention? 
• Are they only interested in themselves? 
• Is your game boring?

Or is there something more basic going on?

Background

A ways back, some researchers (Brenner, 1973) did an experiment on the long-observed phenomenon of how being next in line to perform can effect attention. To do this, they had participants sit down in a square, with each participant taking a turn to read a word aloud from a card. Turns out the participants had more trouble remembering the words they heard just before and after their turn.

If figures help for you, see below. It is a little crowded, but the dotted lines are the ones we are concerned with. The peak in the middle is their ability to recall their own word (of course). Notice that the lines on the left sink just prior and rise just after - showing that they remember less before and after their turn.

 

The article, and a decent amount of later research has attempted to fill out the explanation, including failure to convert the recent words from short term memory to long term memory, performance demands (which they show evidence to discount), and helpful sensory cues that occur during their own performance to explain the peak. 

It is all however, a little unsatisfying when applying this to role-playing games. It may be our closeness to the subject, but the the intuitive gamer explanation is that there is a simple competition for attention between preparing for your turn and noticing what the player before you did on theirs. I believe this remains to be tested in the context of RPGs - perhaps a job for an aspiring games researcher.

Solutions 

As interesting as it may be from a scientific perspective, it is a goddamn nuisance during a game. The problem clearly relies on using an Initiative system where the turn order is known before hand, as in nearly all D&D. If the players are less certain of when their turn takes place, this zoning-out effect may be avoided. Fortunately, there are many such ways to run Initiative:

• Volleyball Initiative: turns are passed from the actor to the actee, with strategies like bumps and spikes. I mention this first because I made it, it is awesome in play, and it still gets ignored by people who make big, supposedly definitive lists of initiative types.
• Troika/Bag Initiative: turns are decided by pulling rocks or chits out of a bag.
  
• Popcorn/Balsera/Elective Initiative: turns are passed by the actor.
• Side Initiative: turns are decided by the side holding Initiative.
• No/Spotlight Initiative: turns are decided by GM fiat.

 ... etc.

Conclusion

It's natural for players to space out before their turn. If this is unbearable, consider switching to one of the many types of Initiative that mix things up enough that they don't know exactly when their turn comes up. Will it work? Who knows.