Eye-contact and turn taking in conversation

There was an article recently about how "eye-contact" was used to indicate turn taking in conversation, which led to a lot of reactions. But I didn't actually read it and I'm not sure how much it was talking about what I think of as "eye contact" (mutual face-looking however briefly) and how much it meant "looking at someone's face". And I realised I wasn't totally sure if I did that instinctively, or if I didn't do it at all.

I'm going to describe how I perceive things, and then ask people both neurodivergent and neurotypical what their experience is. And then maybe talk what else goes into who's turn it is. And some cultural differences.

Eye contact

I'm used to being aware of how much someone wants to speak, from cues like "shifting in their chair", "leaning forward", "having an expectant expression", up to and including "starting to talk and getting cut off" or (occasionally) asking for a chance to talk. And I think my brain has some magic neurotypical dust that does some sneaky cross-correlating with things like "did they do that when someone just said something they're likely to want to say something about" and "does it happen more than once" and just generally distinguishing miscellaneous shifting about or other expression changes from "wanting to speak".

My experience of... presumed normal people, is that these are all heuristics with a reasonable amount of flex in them. People misinterpret. People notice signs slowly. The "system" such as it is works when this communication *mostly* works it doesn't need to work reliably. Some people are particularly good at noticing. Some people can notice, but are bad at noticing, or bad at caring, or pessimistic that they'll actually be interested in what someone says.

So, my experience includes "being aware of someone's face cuing they might want to jump in and speak". But not a sort of mutual recognition, of "ok, message received". Now I describe this, I think this happens subconsciously: if someone looks to being paying attention to me and other people while they're talking, I'll subconsciously assume that they'll know if someone else wants to speak and be less concerned about it; and I will hopefully notice if someone is eager to speak, and subconsciously orient on them more to indicate "I'm interested in you shortly".

But I'm not sure that's what happens, because I think it's partly subconscious or automatic. And I think it works well enough without as long as people know each other well enough to expect they'll all get a chance to talk.

But now I'm saying all that, I'm really interested in what other people think. Does that sound right? Or does that sound like I've completely missed what everyone else does? Or somewhere between?

Other turn taking and cultural differences

What I described above is basically a lowest level handshake protocol for "who's turn to talk next". I think the biggest cultural difference is, some groups expect people to interrupt much sooner, like, as soon as you get the gist of a sentence, jump in to show support, and others much later, like, let someone develop several paragraphs and be sure they're done done before trying to interrupt

And there's also stuff like, who should speak next, which is going to be too long for this post. I think I'm average-ish at that. I do keep being confused, but I think that's because the actual protocol DOESN'T really work. And maybe a bit I don't notice status enough?

Opinions? Experiences? Observations?

Playing with inexperienced GMs

A few times I've noticed I seem to have a problem playing with inexperienced GMs. It feels like I shouldn't, I usually feel excited to engage with the bits they're good at, and happy to handwave rules away.

I think part of it is just, an inexperienced GM is just always going to have a bumpier game, and even less smooth with a bunch of players they're not already familiar with. But it feels like I get on worse than other people, and I wasn't sure why, so I did some introspecting.

I think my problem is, I'm happy to play with different rules, when they're something someone consciously knows, and can explain or be asked about. But I'm not good at situations where I don't know what I can do and what I can't. I'm the same with board games, or buying things in shops: I'm happy with any particular set of rules if I can work out what they are in advance and go along with them. But if I have a fireball spell, and the GM's never adjudicated one of those before, even if I have the spell description and a variety of "how people usually treat this in practice" at my fingertips, I still don't know, will the GM want to follow the rules literally, or go by GM's intuition for how many enemies it affects, etc, even before you get into edge cases like "do you target a square or a point". And I don't want to provide too much info and overwhelm the GM or make them feel like I'm rules-lawyering.

Or to put it another way, I'd be happy to play a game where we've explicitly said either "lets follow the move-attack-act-move rules exactly" or "lets not overthink it, don't complicate a turn basically do one attack and we'll handwave how much movement you get", but if we haven't said, I find it hard to "fit in" with what we've converged on.

Basically the right model is, "take simple actions, try to follow the more complicated rules once, if it gets bogged down, don't do it again". But my brain doesn't cope with that. It feels like, I shouldn't have got it "wrong" even once, even if "wrong" isn't against any agreement, just going too much by the book when no-one else was and it didn't really matter. And it feels wrong avoiding things which are "allowed" by the official rules, if we haven't explicitly agreed not to.

I have a similar problem with board games with people from different board game cultures: I'm happy to agree any variation to the printed rules, but I'm slow at picking up, "we never explicitly said so, but we just don't do that, it feels too mean" (even if I agree with it).

And now I SAY that, I don't know why I hesitate so much. I think I usually have a fair idea what someone else is going to think is reasonable. So I can go with that, and what happens is a little better or worse than I expect, that's fine, and sometimes I guess wrong what they considered reasonable and they think my proposed fireball isn't reasonable or is suicidal, I can say, "oh, ok, can I do something else, then".

I think the problem was, my head pretends like, I'm "entitled" to any amount of asking for clarification, but "oh, can I take that back" feels like asking for a favour I'm not entitled to. And I don't know why, because it's probably a lot more accurate to say, you're entitled to 1/N of the GM's time, whatever that ends up being taken up with, so get the most fun/effectiveness/whatever you can with that time. Which involves guessing "what interpretation is ok" and then rolling with whatever the GM says, and proposing differences only if it seems to really matter.

Basically, treating a social situation the way I (eventually) learned to treat any other uncertain situation, of accepting that I needed to take best guesses factoring in how much time I spent thinking, the way I (eventually) did with board games where the best strategy wasn't obvious from the start, or life where you have to guess as best you can what's most important when you can't ever have the time to know for sure.

Or in other words, I know the DnD social protocols ok, but I was missing a lot of "normal" social protocols...