Keith Burgun, and his System of Forms

[Nik]

(hello everybody, i'm an italian guy that sometimes plays indie rpgs, i've seen ron a couple of times in his trips to italy. i'm also somewhat-infamous as a kind of "uncompromising indie-forgie troll" back the small, incestuos gamer community of my country. also recently i became quite fascinated by the creativity, vision and playability of many indie video games and boardgames. - end of presentation)

http://keithburgun.net/system-of-forms/

i wanted to share this article.

I think there is a very interesting perspective here, even ona that could be applied rpgs. For example, a game like Hero or Gurps can be easily seen as a Toy, whose value is the exploration.

An investigative campaign where all the right answers are held by the GM could be a Puzzle.

Dogs in the Vineyard, or Spione could very well be Games, and bring forth a peculiar kind of Understanding.

I dunno, is this interesting? helpful? I can provide insight about the video games examples, if needed.

besides, almost all of Keith articles have interesting parallel insights on our hobby, his maladies, and the disconnect between a player's needs VS the "industry" needs.

edited to fix a typo in the title - RE

[Nik]

(ok, how do i edit the title?)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Niccolo! Great to see you here. I'll fix the title.

All discussion of this guy's ideas are welcome here - at last, something solid discovered out there ...

[Moreno R.]

Nick, don't sell yourself short: you are the "Italian uncompromising indie-forgie troll"  :-)

About the link, I confess I have not read everything, so maybe there is something in one of his posts that contradict this, but from what I have read, he is talking specifically about video-games.

Before realizing this, I was about to dismiss everything as something D&D-centric ("mapping" as the larger activity?), but if he talks only about video-games, he makes sense: that a good video-game should have something to explore, and goals, decisions, etc.

I don't know that kind of games very well, so I don't know if that diagram really work for them, but for tabletop rpgs (or even Larps) it doesn't.

Could it work, adapting the boxes to a different kind of games? The outer box is called "exploration", that is the second box in the big model, but I don't think that they mean the same thing with "exploration". In the BM "exploration" is basilar act of role-playing: creating and changing the SIS with the dialogue and communication between players (I hope this is correct, there is always a certain queasiness in defining BM terms inside Ron's  lair). In Burgun's diagram instead it seems to indicate really a physical exploration of a location built bit by bit and pixel by pixel in the machine, a "virtual world".

And about the innermost boxes... I can name rpgs without puzzles (a lot, really), and games with no contests or competition (for example, the "Summer Lovin'" jeepform I organized at Gnoccocon)

Only the innermost box, "Decisions", is present in every rpg: but it's present in every other game, too (or at least I don't recall now a game with no decisions.

[Moreno R.]

I forgot to add one thing, regarding the importance that a lot of people in the 'net give to a supposed difference between "games" and "toys" in rpgs. It's a little off-topic here in a post by itself, but it should have been somewhere in my last post.

The usual way that "difference" is used is in the phrase "rpgs (like AD&D or GURPS) are toys, forge games are games, because they have objectives", but other formulations exist in the wild.

That is like saying that a car without both left tires is a motorbike.

A game without clear objectives is not a "toy". It's a incomplete, confusing game. The "toy" is the miniature of your character, or the die.

These incomplete games are not even "toolboxes". That's wishful thinking and nothing more. A car without two tires is not a toolbox. A toolbox is not a incomplete machine.

The real toolbox is the various techniques used in the various games: so, if you think about games that use techniques different like dice towers, looking in the eyes, dancing, stab a sheet with a knife, common cards, custom cards, liar's dice, coins, eating chocolate, interlocking sheets, etc, and compare them to games that always use a d20 used in the same way... you see easily who has the bigger toolbox.

(as I said, this is rather off-topic here, but I wanted to get it out of my chest)

[Nik]

Hello Moreno.

Keith Burgun is actually an indie videogame designer. He talks about videogames, but he really talks about game design, and that's a much more universalthing.

The parallels need of course some "conversion". I like in the useful position of being able to understand his stuff somewhat decently, and being able to understand big model quite decently. I also expected this kind of "skepticism" from non-videogamers.

So, what do i see in this?

First: let's compare his forms not to physical, written games, but to systems

Second: in a videogame, you interact with the game data, in a roleplaying tabletop game you interact with a dialogue. in both you interact with people (not in all videogames, but in some)

Third: as many of us used/use to play eith a single system and applying his game design to a single session or adventure, we must conced that some situations of the game could be different FORMS altogether. so a campagn could usually be exploration, but then a puzzle that takes 2 session to be resolved could allegedly be a FORM within the FORM.

last, we need to put zilchplay/parpuzio aut of the equation, because they are not really games.[1]

so, how do we translate the various activities?


TOY -> we "MAP/EXPLORE" the game's system, the people playing , the prepared situation. of course, "EXPLORATION" here is not the same thing as big model's exploration. it's more like "trying all combinations", discovering how the used system will respond.

are there games played in such a way? where you play till you know how the game (the gm?) will respond in almost any possible situation, and after you "mapped everything" the game goes stale?


PUZZLES -> you run an adventure, there is only one right solution to it. i don't think i've seen meny moment of play sincerely like this (usually there is no solution untile the GM thinks the players put in enough effort


COMPETITION -> you can try to play some rpgs in a tournament-like thing. it does not work. what about the game of competing for the gm favors? or the game of socially dominating the game group? i've seen may of them

and, finally, GAMES: Keith thinks games are an inerently superior form, and i agree. the point of a game is that all the precedent stuff is newly directed iin gameplay in a way where there is no right or wrong answer in a vacuum, but everything is instead understand as being immersed in the system and in other players decisions. whil in Street Fighter it means i can predict your move and counter it with a move of mine that is normally seldom used, in a roleplaying game i think this really means "CREATIVE AGENDA", as the most important thing in creative agenda play is that the game becomes a tool for "playing the other people", and different "strategies" interact in fun and productive ways. the UNDERSTANDING here becomes understanding of the system, of the people, and in story now play personal and group understanding of the theme. when you can play shahida and BY READING YOUR FELLO PLAYERS CONTRIBUTION it sprouts political dialogue about war, you gained understanding.

[1] (funnily enough, there are some thing plaguing video game design in the same way as parpuzio plagues rpg designs - i'll leave them for further discussion if this one proves useful)

[Ron Edwards]

So, here are my thoughts.

First, I think it's important not to be distracted by specific terminology. Instead of debating whether his layers are well-named, I'd rather go by his local definitions; that goes double for whether the terms match the Big Model terms or not. I'm interested in the ideas, not the labels.

I completely agree that a fucked-up, parts-missing activity is not a "toy," a "toolkit," or a "sandbox" (the latter term is especially messed up at present). I choose to interpret his outer layer as something functional in theory but which bluntly, I do not observe among role-playing games.

Second, his layers seem adequate to match to Gamist play in role-playing, although it doesn't translate fully without more attention to the medium (SIS), and I don't know if the innermost two are appropriately arranged for it ... in fact, decisions might even be way higher in the hierarchy, even if you're just (hypothetically) mapping your way through a landscape.

Third, what about risk? Role-playing affords a huge range of possible risks, most notably to real-world social respect and appreciation of your very presence, right there during play. That seems related to the decisions-issue, certainly.

[Lxndr]

I choose to interpret his outer layer as something functional in theory but which bluntly, I do not observe among role-playing games.

I believe I have witnessed his outer layer in role-playing gamers. And, the more I think about it, all the rest of the layers as well.

From the site: "It's learning all of the ins and outs of a given system – it's actually piecing together the ruleset itself."

A lot of roleplaying gamers I'm aware of concern themselves with this.  Stuff like, "it's a dice pool system" "it's a roll-under system" "it's class/level" "it's point-based" "it's skill-based". For many gamers, this level tends to be one of the first things they look for. The moving parts.

His next level, "the puzzle" is something we see mostly in character creation - We're scouring the edges of the ruleset (which we have to already have in order to engage with the puzzle and attempt to find the answer) attempting to find The Answer.

If you see 'The Answer' as "character concept" this is something that we see, a lot. Or in more mechanics-forward terms, it could be something like "can I create a first level fighter that can kill a dragon?" But this is the level where one chooses particular Demon Powers, or builds their Hero Character, or chooses feats or charms, or picks classes in service of some goal.

Some of Puzzle might also exist in actual play - how many status effects do I need to beat up the dragon?  How many bonus dice can I get?

His next level is closer to actual play - The Contest.  What beats what?  Or - more broadly - what are the possible outcomes and how likely are they?  (Success/failure is the binary that a lot of games have; a lot of current rpgs make this fuzzier, but there's still generally a sense of yes or no, or win or lose)

his final level, 'the game' feels like it might be closer to our creative agenda.  "The way that understanding happens is that an ambiguous decision is entered into a system, and then feedback is presented to the player.  In order for this feedback to result in understanding, the decision must be endogenously meaningful and the consequences have to be permanent. "

it's all about decision-making (and in turn what drives said decision making).