Ok while at dinner tonight and talking about Goth scene drama, I made a connection to Cosplay scene drama that may have unlocked a new theory for looking at ‘drama’.
Coincidently, Pen’s show tonight helped me think more about this theory and validate it, so here goes:

I call it the Drama Coefficient (or the Drama Factor for those less likely to Coefficize).

The Drama Coefficient is defined as the maximum seriosity difference amongst any group.
Seriosity (another one of my terms) is defined as ‘how much you take yourself seriously’ (and has a related theory based on it: the Seriosity Viscosity theory, the more that people around you take themselves seriously, the harder it becomes to crack some less-than-serious remark or sarcasm).

So in more lay-person speak: Take the the person who takes themselves the most seriously and the person who takes things the least seriously and take this difference.
This is the Drama Coefficient.

In illustration:

As examples:

If everyone in a room is a business professional and takes themselves very seriously, there is little likelihood of drama occurring within the group (and if they’re true professionals, little chance outside as it’s not nice to talk behind peoples’ backs). Contrariwise if you have a group of a bunch of friends making in jokes or “you know how I know you’re gay?” jokes and generally being sarcastic, no one is going to get bent out of shape.

Take this further example:

Both the person and the tiger appear to be pretty NOT SERIOUS. If one (in this case, specifically the tiger), were to suddenly become far MORE serious than the other, things would get ugly fast.

Ok, so that example was bullshit.

Regardless, I think I’m on to something here. Both the Goth scene and the Cosplay scene (the two highest drama scenes I know) have an incredibly wide gap between those who can’t take anything seriously at all, and those who can’t laugh at themselves if it meant life or death. That has to create tensions (both in motive and attitude). This also applies to the internet, both on sites that thrive from it (SomethingAwful/4chan/YTMND/etc I’m looking at you), or sites that pretend not to thrive from it (Fan forums of all types, furries, Neopets). Some useful side reading on this matter. Also refer back to some Second Life Drama for more theory.

Furthermore, crowd size plays into this. Given a random distribution of infinite people, you will eventually settle on a maximum Drama Coefficient, however, this is why it is a coefficient. You multiply this by the number of people interacting (or perhaps multiply by the number of people outside of Standard Deviation if you want to get really coy). However I find that the drama scales more with the kind of people than the amount, so lets up it a measure.

D = C²P (D is DRAMAs, C is coefficient, P is people - DRAMA is defined as the likelihood of a dramatic incident in a given timeframe)

So as your group scales, this can stay very low (say, a Drama Coefficient of 1.1 in a group of twenty people nets you 2420 centidramas), or get very high (a Drama Coefficient of 8 in a group of ten people nets you 640 dramas - 64000 centidramas).

So according to this your best options to avoid drama are either group yourself with like seriositous individuals (best choice). Or if you can’t, try your best to exclude those on the far end of the spectrums (warning: you risk creating drama this way, but at least you’re helping prove my theory so it’s worth it!)

There’s one thing that complicates things though: People change Seriosity index all the time, and some PEOPLE have a big difference between their own Maximum and Minimum Seriosity. These PEOPLE have more drama potential already - so much that some of them may even cause drama with THEMSELVES if no appropriate partner is handy. All people have this to a degree (some things you may be very serious about, others you may not be) and this can change over time. For cases of Multiple Personality Disorder, count P (people) in the equation to be 2 for all calculations - it may not be accurate, but it’s more fun this way.

Relating this theory to my Seriosity Viscosity Theory: In the room of ‘cool’ business people, if one suddenly decides to make a horrible fart noise in the middle of an important moment (for field reference see also: Will Ferrell), the energy/joules/force/mass/BALLS required to do this is large due to the high Seriosity Viscosity in the area. However, perhaps this against-will usage of energy (like all other energies that are wasted) gets turned into heat. Heat in the form of DRAMA. Perhaps if the heat gets to high enough amounts you have a Drama Bomb, or a lawsuit, or otherwise Something Awful.

Or maybe I’m just reading too much into it.

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