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Archive => GNS Model Discussion => Topic started by: Silmenume on February 04, 2005, 04:29:35 AM

Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 04, 2005, 04:29:35 AM
[blort]

If Sim is "about" the creation of meaningful interrelationships of its constituent parts (Character and Setting – Man vs himself in the former and Man vs mankind and Man vs nature in the latter) then Situation is the only place where that process can happen.  For it is only in Situation (The relationship between Character and Setting) that the Character's relationship to Setting can be worked out.  IOW Situation is the cauldron in which the meaningful interrelationships are created and shaped - it is in Situation that Bricolage takes place.

Why this partial thought?  Because the role of Situation in Sim has not been adequately addressed.  Now we know – eh?

[/blort]

See contracycle?  This is why Setting is so critically important to Sim.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 04, 2005, 09:59:36 AM
Hiya,

Seems to me, Jay, that this point about Situation applies to all of role-playing. I've diagrammed it and explained it a few times, most especially in the Gamism essay, where I describe Situation as the 800-lb gorilla.

So at the most basic level, yes, I agree with you.

However, as far as this idea's specific relationship to Simulationist play is concerned, though ... I'm thinking that you might be missing some of the variety within this CA. One of the key "tells" of a particular sort of Sim play is to be willing to drop investment in the current imagined situation for a while and really nail down a few details.

My observations of these events during play leave me with no doubt that the tactical consequences of the details (i.e. player tactics expressed in "knowing the rules") are not the point at all. The point is straightforwardly to ensure that the character's gun has exactly the right number of bullets and exactly the right penalties applied for recoil on subsequent shots.

All other play-activity gets suspended. The imagined characters hang in the air, their grimaces frozen, until the details get nailed down. The participants who are invested in this aspect of the game are enjoying themselves.

This is one of the reasons why Simulationist play is often confounded with an obsession over "picky rules." They're "picky" to Gamists because the rules/principles are being employed without reference to personal tactics and guts. They're "rules" to Narrativists (or would-be ones; most N-oriented gamers are pretty halting) who can't see why the action must be suspended. But that judgment is unfair, because everyone is obsessive about the rules which do support his or her CA (more accurately, that particular spin of his or her CA).

Side point: what I'm describing is a major feature of TROS play unless the group decides to ignore the relevant rules section. But that belongs in the other thread.

This sort of Sim play may not be the one which concerns you and your experiences, and your in-play accounts seem oriented very differently - in the games you've described, the Situation in motion is the priority, with maximal emotional investment in it (being in it) being reinforced by everyone at once. To stop everything for purposes of detailed clarity would be, I think, somewhat at odds for the overall Big-Model construction of what you and the rest of the group are doing.

But what I'm describing is definitely a major feature of other ways to play Simulationist.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 04, 2005, 02:16:20 PM
Quote from: Ron EdwardsSeems to me, Jay, that this point about Situation applies to all of role-playing. I've diagrammed it and explained it a few times, most especially in the Gamism essay, where I describe Situation as the 800-lb gorilla.

So at the most basic level, yes, I agree with you.
Apart from noting that this gorilla needs to go on a diet, as it used to be a svelte 400-pounder, I think Ron's hit the nail on the head.  I thought the point of Situation was that it is the skillet in which all the gameplay cookery really happens, where all the ingredients go in and from which food emerges.  So I'm not quite sure what you (Jay) are saying about Sim in particular.

I will note, in reference to Ron's remarks on Sim fascination with what some gamers would consider trivia, that this does indeed strike me as an important tell of Sim, albeit as he says not so much the style you yourself play.  My off-the-cuff suspicion is that this fascination is about defining Situation precisely.  For some reason, and I have my guesses about those, Sim very often demands a kind of precision and exactness about Situation that is less common in other modes of play.  And this is so crucial in many Sim circles that everything else must at times take a back seat.

Ron, is that utterly missing the point?  I mean, whatever you think of my guesses, are we talking about the same thing?

Jay, can I ask for a little expansion on where you see something distinctively Sim in this?
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Valamir on February 04, 2005, 02:24:50 PM
QuoteSim very often demands a kind of precision and exactness about Situation that is less common in other modes of play. And this is so crucial in many Sim circles that everything else must at times take a back seat.

And to emphasize something Ron alluded to, that precision is precision for its own sake.  Certain forms of Gamism will demand equal amounts of precision, but its precision in support of Gamist goals (like maximizing tactical effectiveness) where the precision provides the options and the level playing field.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: apparition13 on February 05, 2005, 02:28:28 AM
Howdy, I'm going to address some separate issues.  If you feel it's warranted feel free to split.  

Firstly, Ron said:

QuoteI'm thinking that you might be missing some of the variety within this CA. One of the key "tells" of a particular sort of Sim play is to be willing to drop investment in the current imagined situation for a while and really nail down a few details.

(Italics mine.)  I'd say this is inverted.  The few details need to be nailed down because the fact that they were not nailed down ejected one to all of the participants from the imagined situation.  At this point it is impossible for play to continue until the details are fixed.  (By the way, would the number of bullets in a gun be an aspect of situation or setting?  If this is an unclear question please ask.)

Clerich added:

Quote
I will note, in reference to Ron's remarks on Sim fascination with what some gamers would consider trivia, that this does indeed strike me as an important tell of Sim, albeit as he says not so much the style you yourself play. My off-the-cuff suspicion is that this fascination is about defining Situation precisely. For some reason, and I have my guesses about those, Sim very often demands a kind of precision and exactness about Situation that is less common in other modes of play. And this is so crucial in many Sim circles that everything else must at times take a back seat.
(Italics also mine.)  I'd say "fascination"  is the wrong word;  I'd use something like irritation instead.  I've experienced less googly-eyed wonder while engaging in this than a sense of "aaargh!  That just doesn't make any sense!".
re:  bold.  Would you care to go into detail about your guesses?

Valamir further added:

QuoteAnd to emphasize something Ron alluded to, that precision is precision for its own sake. Certain forms of Gamism will demand equal amounts of precision, but its precision in support of Gamist goals (like maximizing tactical effectiveness) where the precision provides the options and the level playing field.

To bring it all together, it isn't precision for precisions sake.  Like gamism it's precision in service to a central ideal, which in sim of this flavour is logic/reason/rationality as an aesthetic.  The rationality of any of the elements of exploration is aesthetically pleasing in exactly the same way the logic of a mathematical equation or a tense (http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=tense) computer program can be.  (Personal note;  I'm not a computer person, I just like the word.)  As long as everything meets the logical standards present at the gaming table things can hum along all hunky dory.  As soon as anything fails to meet those standards, someone gets kicked out of the SIS, play grinds to a halt and the offending detail is analysed to resolution, at which point everyone can re-assimilate into the SIS.  For clarity, "hum along all hunky dory" should be read as a synonym for "aesthetically pleasing".  In other words, the fact that everything is logically consistent in context is one of the sources of enjoyment in this variety of sim play, and is also the foundation upon which play is constructed and without which play cannot proceed.

Hi Silmenume;

On a side note I gather from some of the comments I have seen that your gameplay in the wide, wide (I'd say overly wide) world of sim is in the character-intensive/immersionist continent. I'd call this poetic, rather than rational, sim.  Would this be a fair characterisation of your gameplay style?
 
Which brings us to secondly. Silmenue wrote:

Quote
If Sim is "about" the creation of meaningful interrelationships of – Man vs himself in the former and Man vs mankind and Man vs nature in the latter) then Situation is the only place where that process can happen. For it is only in Situation (The relationship between Character and Setting) that the Character's relationship to Setting can be worked out. IOW Situation is the cauldron in which the meaningful interrelationships are created and shaped - it is in Situation that Bricolage takes place.

(Italics mine.)  I think this is a structuraly sound argument, but it only holds if the bit in italics is accurate.  I see neither "Sim is "about" the creation of meaningful interrelationships of its constituent parts" or "its constituent parts (Character and Setting)" (as opposed to any other combination of components of exploration) as self evident.  If I have missed the relevent analysis, please direct me to it; if not, please analyze.

Finally, I find this post timely because it is related to something I'm curious about.  Silmenume's argument seems somewhat founded on the less-svelt-than-he-used-to-be gorilla.  My initial hypothesis would be that while situation is the nucleus around which the other component of exploration orbit in nar, mechanics is the tool that is the nucleus of gamism, character to what I called poetic (what Silmenume does) sim, and setting to what I called rational sim.  What about colour?  Well, how about comedy?  As before, if the gorilla has been analysed please direct me, if not and/or there is interest I can take this to a new thread.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 06, 2005, 07:09:05 AM
Thanks everyone for your input, as I initially indicated my original post was but a fraction of an idea!  After more contemplation and the posting of the others I have been able to realize more about my idea.

Hey Ron,

I absolutely, fully and completely agree with you that Situation is the 800-lb gorilla of roleplay.  It is the act of wrestling with this gorilla that defines or at least distinguishes roleplay.  Many times have you argued that he who does not wrestle with the gorilla is not roleplaying!  (Roughly speaking)

OK – maybe we're talking past each other.  I am not saying that Bricolage is the only thing that happens in a Sim game, any more than I would say addressing Premise is the only thing that transpires in a Nar game.  However, what I am trying to get at is that Bricolage is that action which distinguishes (defines) Sim play.  Sure there can be many variant activities in addition to the distinguishing core process, but that core process needs to be present or its not Sim (or any CA for that matter.)  Just like there may be players doing things within the SIS during a Nar game that aren't directly related to addressing Premise, so it is with Sim.  Thus my saying that Bricolage is the Sim process is not meant to imply that players cannot or are not doing other things not directly related to Bricolage; yet Bricolage must be present as the core process for the game to be described as Sim.  What I do wish to make clear is that I do not believe these "non-Bricolage related" activities to be mistaken as definitional of the Sim process in and of themselves.  IOW just as the creation of Bangs is not definitional of the Narrativist game process (they just happen to be examples of player activity in support of addressing Premise) neither is the nailing down or haggling over minutia/details definitional of the Sim game process.  This "nailing down or haggling over minutia/details" is an activity in support of Bricolage, but not the Bricolage process itself and hence not definitional of Sim.  I am with Chris in that I believe such activities are an effort to aide in "defining Situation precisely."  Ultimately it is not enough to just define Situation, a player must act on that Situation.  This last sentence should not be controversial since Situation is the 800-lb gorilla of roleplay.  If I recall properly, both you and Chris agree that play where the players don't/can't effect Situation is non-functional – whatever it is, it is not roleplay.  Provisionally its been labeled Zilchplay (or the P-word). I hope that I have in some way clarified my position on this aspect of the discussion.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsOne of the key "tells" of a particular sort of Sim play is to be willing to drop investment in the current imagined situation for a while and really nail down a few details.

If the players are "dropping investment" in the current imagined Situation to pursue these details that to me is the equivalent of Nar players "dropping investment" in the current imagined Situation to "fiddle" with a non-relevant Premise question (non-relevant meaning a Premise question that is not related to play in any significant way – IOW one that is "off topic").  I would have to wonder what such players were really up.  Premise must be addressed via Situation for play to have transpired.  Same with Sim.  Fiddling with the pieces of Setting is not the Sim game process of Bricolage.  Haggling over mechanics misses the "point" of play as dealing with Situation is the "point" of play.  Isn't haggling over mechanics really a Social Contract level issue?  I agree with apparition 13 and his take –

Quote from: apparition13The few details need to be nailed down because the fact that they were not nailed down ejected one to all of the participants from the imagined situation.  At this point it is impossible for play to continue until the details are fixed.

I wish to return to mechanics a bit more before I move on.  I agree with your assessment that most if not all mechanics in so-called "Sim" facilitating games are laden with "picky rules."  I think problem lies in misunderstanding the role of mechanics.  Let's look at the Model.  In G/N games mechanics are employed to "facilitate" the address of Challenge and Premise.  IOW mechanics are not an end unto themselves, but a means to an end.  No controversy there.  But here we have Sim, and if I am interpreting you correctly, you are stating that employing mechanics can be an end unto itself.  But this violates the 800-lb gorilla principle – in order for that activity to be considered roleplay Situation must be acted upon.  "Employing mechanics" is not selfsame with "acting upon Situation."  In order for the employment of mechanics to be indicative of CA, then they must be employed in the service of the meta-game goal – that which I called "affect" and Chris referred to as "result" in another thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14117).  Again this statement should not be controversial.  The Model and several essays thoroughly support this construct.

If mechanics are supposed to be employed to facilitate CA expression how is done with regards to Sim?  If the Sim game process is Bricolage, then mechanics cannot directly aide that process.  The very nature of Bricolage, using the elements of Exploration as it source of objects (Explorage?), is the making and altering of social rules while being absolutely beholden to the physical rules.  This means that player input is "filtered" through "physics based mechanics" (and are essentially un-negotiable) during Situation for the purpose of negotiating the social "rules" thus "creating" the Dream.  Given the above, it follows then that if "social rules" are being created, then a fix mechanics system should not interfere with this process for two reasons.  First, being fixed negates the act of "creating new or altering existing" social rules.  Second, mechanical social rules denies the players the ability to make those very choices which are expressive of the CA.  IOW it would be the equivalent of forcing a Nar player to role a die to see how he should act on the Premise question.  If roleplay is defined by players dealing with Situation then employing mechanics as an end unto itself does not qualify as roleplay.  Employing or haggling over mechanics is not "dealing with Situation" and thus cannot be considered definitional of a CA and thus not definitional of Sim.

Many months ago I went digging into G and N to find what was at the heart both CA's and found that it was conflict within Situation.  IOW the Character in the SIS was facing something in the SIS which was in direct conflict to one or more of the Character's goals.  It is easy to see how conflict is central to G and N and why Situation was central to those two CA's.  Players in these modes of play purposefully sought out and/or created conflicts for the express purpose of expressing their CA inclinations.  In a certain way, the seeking of conflict is essential and thus somewhat bound up in the definition both CA's, but apparently not so for Sim.  

For many months now I have been mulling over how Sim fit into this taxonomy with the 800-lb gorilla.  Sim is not defined by its relationship with conflict.  So I was stymied.  Then I had an epiphany when I realized that Situation was not coequal with conflict.  Situation is the nature of the relationship between Character and Setting.  Conflict is a quality of that relationship, but is not Situation itself.  Having revised my understanding of Situation to that of "relationship between Character and Setting," and having realized that dealing with Situation is really dealing with said relationship I found positively, not by default, how the Sim game process (Bricolage) fits in the Model.  Mythic Bricolage, if I understand properly and if my phrasing isn't too far a field, is a dialectic between culture (personified in Character) and the world at large (Setting).  

The Model says Exploration (roleplay) places a huge premium (800-lbs worth!) on Situation.  Situation is the relationship between Character and Setting.  I have been squawking (with the help of Chris) about Sim employing Bricolage and creating myth (and I know Chris has reservations about this last part – and rightly so) and here I wanted to show the parallels between mythic Bricolage and Sim Bricolage.  But more importantly I needed to figure out how Sim Bricolage fit with the Model.  I have not been able to marry the process to the Model until now.  Situation can be used to create and resolve conflict (address Premise or Challenge) or it can be used for Bricolage - straight up; such that the employment of the Elements of Exploration as the objects for Bricolage allows.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsThis sort of Sim play may not be the one which concerns you and your experiences, and your in-play accounts seem oriented very differently - in the games you've described, the Situation in motion is the priority, with maximal emotional investment in it (being in it) being reinforced by everyone at once. To stop everything for purposes of detailed clarity would be, I think, somewhat at odds for the overall Big-Model construction of what you and the rest of the group are doing.

But what I'm describing is definitely a major feature of other ways to play Simulationist.

I am not claiming that Sim play mandates emotional investment (being in it) any more than Gam and Nar, but the very nature of the process of Sim Bricolage (Explorage?) does have an exceptionally strong tendency to pull one in.  It's the nature of the beast/process.  Not mandatory, but certainly facilitates that shift from here to there (the Dream).

I also agree there are lots of "nailing down of details" type of play, but I think that is a form of play that is, for lack of a better term, broken.  Addressing conflict is common to our daily lives we understand it almost intuitively.  Sim is not "about" addressing conflict.  If Sim is a form or a variant of mythic Bricolage then, given what Chris has told us about it being a "lost" cultural form, then it would make sense that while many new players are "attracted" to it initially, they don't understand the process.  IOW Sim play, to be functional, typically needs to be taught or "shown" to other players before they get "it."  And that has certainly been my experience.  Bringing in new players is a long involved nurturing process.  (Admittedly that process may be more drawn out than it needs to be because we ourselves were not overtly aware of the elements of said Sim game process itself.)

I read this fishing around for details, this almost manic hunger for "rules" as manifestation of a process of groping towards what I'm calling Sim Bricolage (Explorage?).  The problem is that the process is not intuitive and a lot of people get lost along the way.  There is no current cultural reference point here that players can draw upon.

Perhaps, now, I have left a ½ baked idea in my wake!
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 06, 2005, 11:55:27 PM
Hi Jay,

I get what you're saying. I don't think any more clarification is necessary, although I appreciate the latest post as a state-of-the-art summary.

What I'd like is some acknowledgment from you of my point. My point is that some folks would insist, in what appears to be direct and absolute defiance of your preferences and experiences, that play which focuses on the details that I'm talking about is what it's about. That not to do so is bad role-playing. That not to do so is simply and plainly lazy, in imaginative terms. Sloppy thinking, inferior imagination.

You don't have to agree with them, or even agree with me that such folks exist. What I'm looking for is acknowledgment that this is what I've said, and that you understand it. That's really different from arguing your own point, which you've done, and which I have read.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 07, 2005, 08:24:36 PM
Hey Ron,

Quote from: Ron EdwardsWhat I'd like is some acknowledgment from you of my point...

...What I'm looking for is acknowledgment that this is what I've said, and that you understand it. That's really different from arguing your own point, which you've done, and which I have read.

I thought that I had acknowledged you post when I said that I agreed or used your verbiage -  

Quote from: SilmenumeI absolutely, fully and completely agree with you...

Sure there can be many variant activities in addition to the distinguishing core process...

This "nailing down or haggling over minutia/details" is an activity...

If the players are "dropping investment" in the current imagined Situation to pursue these details...

I agree with your assessment that most if not all mechanics in so-called "Sim" facilitating games are laden with "picky rules."

I also agree there are lots of "nailing down of details" type of play...

I did acknowledge you on several occasions and directly employed the concepts you had provided, so I am a little confused.  If you are looking for me to agree that such type of play exists I thought I had implicitly agreed with you about that.  I didn't argue against such play nor did I ignore your ideas.  However, in the spirit of directly responding to your request I fully and without reservation agree that –

Quote from: Ron EdwardsMy point is that some folks would insist, in what appears to be direct and absolute defiance of your preferences and experiences, that play which focuses on the details that I'm talking about is what it's about. That not to do so is bad role-playing. That not to do so is simply and plainly lazy, in imaginative terms. Sloppy thinking, inferior imagination.

I also understand the above and had structured much of my post specifically with regards to that "form" of play.  I also agree that such play is or can be fun for those who do play it.  I'm not arguing against the existence of such play – I just assumed that it was understood that it does indeed occur.

If I have not addressed what you are looking for from me, let me know.

My point is that such play, because it does not focus on the players making decisions regarding does not qualify as CA as the Model currently stands.  IOW in order for play to be categorized as a Creative Agenda the player must be making decisions about Situation.

I'm going to borrow a quote (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=150958#150958) from lumpley (Vincent Baker) from the thread The Role of Dice (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14185)

Quote from: lumpleyDice are to ease negotiation. They're to take the decision out of one person's hands.

If CA is manifest by players making decisions and the use of dice/mechanics is to take the decision out one person's hands, in this case the player in question, then we have a case of play where the players are actively surrendering their decisions making authority or not caring about making decision at all.  I agree such play exists, but the question is how does it fit with the model?  There is no decision making process regarding Situation to analyze/diagnose, so how do we categorize it with regards to Creative Agenda?  I am struck by the notion that such play that focuses on the employment of mechanics for its own sake does echo some ideas brought up in the threads Toy Quality (A Fresh Start) (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14093) and Toy Quality (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14057).

I hope that I haven't over answered you question.

Hey apparition13,

Quote from: apparition13I see neither "Sim is "about" the creation of meaningful interrelationships of its constituent parts" or "its constituent parts (Character and Setting)" (as opposed to any other combination of components of exploration) as self evident. If I have missed the relevent analysis, please direct me to it; if not, please analyze.

First of all what I am describing is still in the formative stages and is just now being discussed.  IOW what you are seeing is essentially the cutting edge and is by no means universally or even partially accepted.  A lot of this stuff is me "proposing ideas."  This thread is an example of that very process.  As far as a reading list goes it gets rather heavy and involved, but here goes -

Ritual Discourse in Role-Playing Games (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html)
Not Lectures on Theory [LONG!] (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10283)
Ramblings on the role of Mechanics in CA's (fishing) (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13501)
The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast  (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13817)
Sim has not be discussed as process yet it needs to be so -  (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13910)
Sim is Bricolage and makes myth - comments?  (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13909)
Celebrating Theme is Nar Equiv of the Gamist Crunch. (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14024)
Participationism with an Agendum (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14095)
An effort to un-gum the Discussion. (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14117)[/list:u]The first two links are very heavy theory, the rest are recent threads about Sim or issues directly related to Sim.  I hope that I have provided you a decent starting point and have not buried you.

Regarding your question about the analysis on the "gorilla" (conflict/Situation) several months ago there was a spate of threads on conflict.  There are many more threads about Situation/conflict, but here are two that I remembered and could quickly find.
The Model as seen by Valamir [Long. Very, very long] (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12181)
Player action/reaction to Situation key to CA (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10293)[/list:u]I hope this helps.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 07, 2005, 11:44:44 PM
Just to add to the pain, I might note that the first extensive discussion of bricolage in regular forums, to my knowledge, is inOn RPGs and Text [Long] (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13560)[/list:u]

(edited for typo)
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 10, 2005, 08:57:43 AM
I have little time at the moment but I have to add that I'm with Artanis, I dont think sim is about "creating meaningful interrelationships" I see it more as creating interrelationships between meaningful elements.    Those elements can be as, Ron mentioned, things that stop situation to nail down the specifics properly.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 10, 2005, 09:13:52 AM
Wow. Caldis nailed it for me.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 10, 2005, 11:44:18 AM
Hey Caldis,

I know that you said that you only have a few moments, so I will have to wait to reply in depth because there is nothing to really reply against.  Once again you have only argued a conclusion.  If you wish to counter my arguments then please do so, with arguments.  As this thread deals with how Situation works in Simulationism, please include how your formulation demonstrates the functioning of Situation (the working of the relationship between Character and Setting) within Sim.  Remember, as Ron has said, play that does not engage Situation is not roleplay.

As this was non-argumentation, I am confused why it was supported.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Mike Holmes on February 10, 2005, 02:16:26 PM
It's a conclusion that they're hoping you see the inherent argument from, simply from the conclusion itself. It appears you don't see it, however.

In any case, I think we're merely talking about perspectives here. This is why I have my alternate versions of Ron's theories that don't really contradict them. It's precisely that one sees this sort of detail exploration as "halting" exploration of the SIS, and another sees it precisely as exploring the SIS (or the whole creation of interrelations of interesting things, or the interrelations being interesting themselves), that I think is the problem in everbody understanding the way that everyone else sees the play of the others.

To one perspective, the number of bullets in the gun is, in fact, situation. To another it's color. I think that's key.

Mike
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 10, 2005, 11:17:43 PM
Quote from: CaldisI have little time at the moment but I have to add that I'm with Artanis, I dont think sim is about "creating meaningful interrelationships" I see it more as creating interrelationships between meaningful elements.    Those elements can be as, Ron mentioned, things that stop situation to nail down the specifics properly.
Okay, now I'm lost.  I was mostly following Jay's points, I thought, but this post and Ron's agreement suggests to me that I'm quite missing what's at stake here.

Surely it's got to be both?

That is, surely it's "creating meaningful interrelationships between meaningful elements"?

It seems to me that if the elements are meaningless, the constructed relationships are empty constructs.  If the relationships constructed out of meaningful elements are nevertheless meaningless, then we have accomplished nothing by our process.

Could somebody explain to me what's going on here?
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: contracycle on February 11, 2005, 02:38:04 AM
IMO the terms "meaningful" and "relationship" trigger all sorts of associations with "thats deep, man".  But this can in fact be pretty trivial "meanings" - such as don't eat the yellow snow where the huskies go.

Hence I think we can see exactly why play halts to handle the classification of an item or element - it is because the fault in the representation implies things for other aspects of the setting, or distorts or changes the meaning of the object in question, and impinges on any other objects with which it has a relationship.  Thats exactly why it has to be solved NOW, before play proceeds any further - the error threatens to turn what has been meaningful into gibberish, and prevents any continuation of meaningful play.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 11, 2005, 05:05:18 AM
Hey contracycle,

Quote from: contracycleIMO the terms "meaningful" and "relationship" trigger all sorts of associations with "thats deep, man". But this can in fact be pretty trivial "meanings" - such as don't eat the yellow snow where the huskies go.

I don't have any disagreements with your assessment.

Quote from: contracycleHence I think we can see exactly why play halts to handle the classification of an item or element - it is because the fault in the representation implies things for other aspects of the setting, or distorts or changes the meaning of the object in question, and impinges on any other objects with which it has a relationship.  Thats exactly why it has to be solved NOW, before play proceeds any further - the error threatens to turn what has been meaningful into gibberish, and prevents any continuation of meaningful play.

Again, I don't have any issues with what you are saying.  This happens occasionally in the game I play in.  What you are talking about is clarifying elements because they will have an impact on Situation and the meanings created.  From what I understand about Ron's point, and I may be wrong, is that he saying there is play where such clarifying is an end unto itself.  IOW the players engage in this fine tuning without any substantial interest in how such fine tuning impacts Situation and by extension the meanings created.  Again I may be wrong, but I am reading him as saying that such impactless play or impact indifferent play is a type of Sim.  My argument is that the claim lies at direct odds with the model which says Situation must be engaged, that is the players must make an effort to have an impact upon Situation, or its simply not roleplay.  If I am wrong then I have created a straw man argument, but I feel fairly certain that I am reading him correctly.

Quote from: Ron Edwards...play which focuses on the details that I'm talking about is what it's about. That not to do so is bad role-playing. That not to do so is simply and plainly lazy, in imaginative terms. Sloppy thinking, inferior imagination.

If the details are an end unto themselves and are not intended to impact and in fact do not impact Situation then they are just Color.  The problem is that play that focuses on Color to the exclusion of engaging or having an impact on Situation is outside the Model currently since Zilchplay has so far been rejected as a form of functional play.

Hey Mike,

Quote from: Mike HolmesTo one perspective, the number of bullets in the gun is, in fact, situation. To another it's color. I think that's key.

The problem with this formulation is that Situation is not/cannot be an object or thing.  Situation is the dynamic, the relationship between Character and Setting (self and not-self).  So, yes, the number of bullets in a gun can have an effect on Situation, but are not Situation themselves.  You are correct in that the number of bullets in the gun can just be Color, but only if they have no bearing on Situation.  However, to look at the phrasing Ron provided, he appears to be talking about play where the players are really indifferent to the effects the number of bullets in the gun have on Situation as they are more interested in fine tuning the number of bullets in the gun as a satisfying end unto itself.  The players are said to be enjoying themselves and I have no reason to mistrust his claim.  However, as I understand the Gloss this is just Color and Color does not a CA make.

Ron,

I don't wish to mischaracterize you or your point of view, so let me know please if I am in error regarding your position.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 11, 2005, 08:40:37 AM
My apologies for the quick comment without much support, I'll try and elaborate a bit further here.  Part of this may seem off topic and should likely go into a different thread but I'll try and tie it back to the original topic.  If I'm unsuccessful feel free to split it.

Quote from: clehrich
That is, surely it's "creating meaningful interrelationships between meaningful elements"?

It seems to me that if the elements are meaningless, the constructed relationships are empty constructs.  If the relationships constructed out of meaningful elements are nevertheless meaningless, then we have accomplished nothing by our process.

Could somebody explain to me what's going on here?

I'll try Chris, to do so I'll go back to the statement in Jay's article that Artanis found a problem with.   "Sim is "about" the creation of meaningful interrelationships of its constituent parts (Character and Setting – Man vs himself in the former and Man vs mankind and Man vs nature in the latter) then Situation is the only place where that process can happen."
I find that problematic because what is an address of premise if not an "interrelationship between character and setting", what is victory to the gamist if not a meaningful interrelationship between his character and the setting.  I believe replacing Sim with Exploration in the statement makes it true, all roleplaying is about this and as has been pointed out situation is damn important in all three agendas.

So where does this leave Sim?  What's going on in Sim that Game and Narr are missing out on?  I'm going to make an analogy here that may seem demeaning to those invested in Sim but it's not, it's an example derived from watching human behaviour and I hope everyone can see how it relates.

Remember the Budweiser commercial from several years back that features a group of black guys who whenever they met or called each other on the phone would shout out WASSSSUPPP! What happened after those commercials aired? Everyone (or at least tons of guys my age or younger) would shout out WASSSSUPPP whenever they met.  Another example, a group of people at my work regularly play the card game asshole over lunch.  When someone is coming in late they shout out 'redeal' as they are coming up the stairs to the lunch room.  One day someone was engaged in two conversations at once and shouted out 'noodle' instead of redeal everyone had a chuckle and since then have been shouting out 'noodle' instead of redeal.   In both example's people are relating back to the source to get a sense of shared meaning.  I laughed when that guy said WASSSUPPP on tv, we laugh when we say it to each other, we're sharing meaning.

That is what is going on in Sim.  The participants are saying WASSSUPPP and expect a WASSSUPP right back at them, but for them Lord of the Rings or Star Trek or Generic Fantasy is WASSSUPP.  This is related to the "Ideal" that was discussed recently, play in sim is focused on emulating that Ideal to provide a sense of shared meaning among the participants.  Situation in Sim is important in that it must provide opportunity for the players to share meaning and it may occur in the situation but the meanings may also come in system, colour, definitely setting, and character.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 11, 2005, 10:55:13 AM
Hello,

I'm still with Caldis.

Jay, here is something to consider. Mike, Caldis, and I understand what you are saying. However, I at least consider it a bit self-limited on your part. No amount of further illumination, clarification, explanation, etc, by you is going to accomplish anything. This is because we get it - we understand what you mean. We merely disagree, due to our very wide experiences of role-playing and our acknowledgment that we don't want to write off what appears, in plain observational terms, to be a fine example of "Gaming on Purpose."

"That's just Color." It's Color to you. But we're not talking about you in this forum. We're talking about the array of Purposes (Agendas, modes, whatever).

If past experience is to be my guide, I anticipate that you'll try to explain yourself at least a couple of more times, that interest in your posts about this will slack off as we all discover that you are committed to repeating your explanation, and perhaps you'll switch over to private messages or private brooding, eventually. And then later we get some Site Discussion post about how the paradigm is being upheld at the expense of new ideas, or something like that.

Well, enough. Consider that I get it. Caldis gets it. Mike gets it. And that your conclusion would be reasonable if this were "the world according to Jay." But it's not. We do see how you see it. Explaining it again, or showing how what someone else says can be retooled into your worldview, is not productive.

I wonder if this is how William Colby felt when he was trying to talk to James Jesus Angleton.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 12, 2005, 11:38:07 AM
Ron's point above came across a bit harsh but I think it's pretty close to the mark.  I hope no one reads it as an attempt to stifle debate but rather as an attempt to move the debate forward if possible,  a debate that right now has some problems.  The biggest problems I see are synedoche, "my form of sim is the true form of sim", and an overeliance on theory.

On synedoche I'll just reiterate what Ron said, in my experience of the long running sim game I'm involved with the tells that people were gelling with what happened in game came as much from character and setting as it did from situation.

The overeliance on theory is an even bigger problem I believe.  What is happening is we are getting theory built on theory built on top of even more theory.  We're building an ivory tower of theory without checking to see if the foundations are solid, if that theory matches with what is happening in the real world.    I know I for one would never have understood any of GNS or the big model without the examples taken from different game texts in the essays, the application of it towards games in the review section, and seeing it in action in posts on Actual play and in the Independant game forums.   For anyone having trouble with GNS I really recommend the review section as a second step, seeing what aspects of games Ron relates to G, N or S is a real eye opener, plus as an added bonus you get to learn about some really cool games;)


I think Ron and others put a lot of time and effort into putting the glossary and the essays together.  I think everyone who posts here should respect that effort and if they feel there is something lacking in the definition of an agenda like Simulationism they need to make a similar effort to find proof for their assumption.  Find game texts that show a designers intentions matching what you are talking about, instances of play where we can see it in action, and show us how it relates specifically to play in this agenda and not to roleplaying in general.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 12, 2005, 04:07:16 PM
Hang on, I think I just figured out what Jay is saying.  Jay, follow me step by step and correct me if I go astray.

1. Situation is "the 'central node' linking Character and Setting" (Glossary)

2. Functional roleplay requires CA-meaningful effective activity

3. "One of the key 'tells' of a particular sort of Sim play is to be willing to drop investment in the current imagined situation for a while and really nail down a few details." (Ron, 2d post of this thread)

4. The type of behavior described in #3 here is not invested in Situation

5. If it is not invested in Situation, it is not CA-meaningful activity

6. If it is not CA-meaningful, it cannot be used to define CA

7. If it is not CA-meaningful, it cannot be functional roleplay

8. Therefore one of 1-3 cannot be true

And yet, in the #3 circumstance, "All other play-activity gets suspended. The imagined characters hang in the air, their grimaces frozen, until the details get nailed down. The participants who are invested in this aspect of the game are enjoying themselves" (Ron, same post).

This is because, according again to Ron, "everyone is obsessive about the rules which do support his or her CA (more accurately, that particular spin of his or her CA)."

Now continuing on beyond what Jay's saying:

That means

9. Obsessive focus on rules that support CA-meaningful activity is itself a kind of CA-meaningful activity

10. Suggesting that Situation is not as central as has sometimes been thought, at least for Sim

Leaving us with the following possibilities:

A. Situation and engagement with it is not the defining focus or instance of Sim play, or quite possibly of any play.

B. Functional roleplay does not require CA-meaningful activity.

C. The activity described by Ron as a key "tell" is not a Sim activity.

My sense is that Jay thinks solution A is incorrect:
QuoteIf the players are "dropping investment" in the current imagined Situation to pursue these details that to me is the equivalent of Nar players "dropping investment" in the current imagined Situation to "fiddle" with a non-relevant Premise question (non-relevant meaning a Premise question that is not related to play in any significant way – IOW one that is "off topic"). I would have to wonder what such players were really up [to]. Premise must be addressed via Situation for play to have transpired. Same with Sim. Fiddling with the pieces of Setting is not the Sim game process of Bricolage. Haggling over mechanics misses the "point" of play as dealing with Situation is the "point" of play. Isn't haggling over mechanics really a Social Contract level issue?
In other words, there is high-level negotiation within Social Contract, which cannot be used to examine or define CA, and there is more focused activity which is engaged with Situation whenever CA-meaningful activity occurs.  By this formulation, extra-Situational nailing-down of precise details is not CA-meaningful activity and hence cannot be called Sim behavior, ever.

It does not look to me as though anyone is proposing possibility B, that functional roleplay can happen without CA-meaningful activity.

Ron and many others have been clear about C, so I won't detail it.

-------
Assuming I have all this more or less correct, Jay is dead right about one thing: this is not a matter of examining actual play, or of talking about the kind of Sim he's used to, or anything like that.  It is a logical problem.  Either there must be a logical failure in the numerical chain, or one of the three solutions I came up with must be true, or there must be another solution to resolve the problem.

My sense is that the strengths lie here:

A. Making the comparison to Narrativism, engagement with Premise is generally understood to be localized in Situation.  If the players break from this to do something else, of whatever kind, then what they are doing during that break is not Narrativism.  It may be useful or fun or interesting, but it isn't Narrativism.  Therefore to say that such activity when performed by Sim players is Simulationism implies that there is something very much askew about how we understand Sim or Situation.

C. The activity described does appear empirically and anecdotally to be very common in gaming groups thought of as Simulationist.  Therefore however elegant the theory may be or become, it must take this factor into account, and no amount of logic should be used to make it go away.

My conclusion, tentatively, is that you're all wrong.  :-)

vs. A: Situation is not the sole locus of important and defining play.  When Narrativists break from addressing Premise to do something else, they are still doing Narrativism.  That does, yes, mean some revision of how we understand CA and its relevance to play and exploration and so on.

The issue is really methodological.  When attempting to diagnose CA, or classify play, we look to Situation as the prime location, because it is that part of play in which CA-meaningful activity most commonly occurs and does so most clearly and overtly.  But the inverse does not hold: if we are not looking at Situation, we can't know that we are not looking at CA-meaningful activity.  Such activity may occur in any part of play whatever, from Social Contract on down, though it may be difficult to observe.is a form of Situational engagement, albeit one not usual in Nar play.  This strikes me as very plausible: just as some Sim players find the common (but not CA-defining) use of meta-play in Nar uncomfortable or problematic, what we may well have here is exactly the same thing seen backwards, i.e. this is a kind of Sim-common meta-play that Nar players find problematic or uncomfortable.  In Ron's case, he may find it so, but is fair-minded enough to say that it seems to work for them; because of his predilections, however, he reads this as not Situationally engaged, because it would not be seen so in Nar games.  That is, if Sim players may see Nar-style meta-play as "cheating," we may have an instance here of Nar players seeing Sim-style meta-play as not invested.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Marco on February 12, 2005, 10:51:13 PM
Quote
4. The type of behavior described in #3 here is not invested in Situation

There are a lot of things I'm not sure of in this thread, however: I have seen players who were interested in winning a fight suspend play and have a lenghty nailing down of SIS, the exact rulings on how spells they are about to use work, ranges, attitudes and aspects of NPC's ("how are the king's guard dressed") and so on.

This did "hang play"--but it was clearly related to situational examination of tactical operations. I would also say it went down to "minutiae" since the GM wasn't going to, for example, give away the king's gard's stats--but they could, perhaps, be inferred by various clues in the SIS (how well used their swords looked).

It's my observation that any time a player feels he or she is out of step with SIS they're going to want to stop and nail it down. To me this seems very situation-based.

However, as I said, there's a lot going on here I don't really grok yet so I'm not sure if I'm even reading that statement relevantly.

-Marco
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 12, 2005, 11:38:18 PM
Quote from: clehrich
My conclusion, tentatively, is that you're all wrong.  :-)

vs. A: Situation is not the sole locus of important and defining play.  When Narrativists break from addressing Premise to do something else, they are still doing Narrativism.  That does, yes, mean some revision of how we understand CA and its relevance to play and exploration and so on.

Chris I dont see how your conclusion is anything controversial.  I dont think addressing premise has to be a constant activity, much of play can be setting up the situation, providing color and background and adding detail.  I'm sorry I cant remember the term Ron uses, maybe an "instance of play", Ralph used something with a similar meaning called it a "cycle of conflict" through that period players are looking to address premise, they arent doing it constantly throughout play.  I dont see the need for revising anything.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 13, 2005, 12:28:47 AM
Hello,

Chris, the logical flaw is in #4. The players are invested in Situation. They simply are finding aspects of the Situation interesting which (for instance) Jay does not find interesting.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 13, 2005, 01:17:22 AM
Quote from: Ron EdwardsChris, the logical flaw is in #4. The players are invested in Situation. They simply are finding aspects of the Situation interesting which (for instance) Jay does not find interesting.
But Ron, that requires a clearer formulation from you.
Quote from: YouOne of the key "tells" of a particular sort of Sim play is to be willing to drop investment in the current imagined situation for a while and really nail down a few details.
Jay is, I think, isolating that.  He may be wrong to do so, but you have indeed said simultaneously that the players are invested in the situation and have dropped investment in the situation.

What Marco is proposing, which is relatively similar to my comments vs. Jay's proposal, is that what's described here is not dropping investment.  It is thus a different form of investment, which operates at a meta-level.  Presumably this is a Technique common (though not exclusive) to Sim play in many (though not all) of its forms.

Another way to read it, which apparently you don't like, is to suggest that it is investment, but not in Situation.  You're in agreement with Jay on that one, apparently: his initial point was that investment in Situation is the crux.

Is this controversial?  I don't know.  But in response to Caldis's point:
Quote from: HeI dont think addressing premise has to be a constant activity, much of play can be setting up the situation, providing color and background and adding detail. I'm sorry I cant remember the term Ron uses, maybe an "instance of play", Ralph used something with a similar meaning called it a "cycle of conflict" through that period players are looking to address premise, they arent doing it constantly throughout play.
Oh, unquestionably.  CA-meaningful activity does not need to go on continuously.  But if this isn't CA-meaningful activity, how can it be a "key tell" of Sim?  More to the point, you are saying that by your reading, this type of behavior is not investment in situation.  It puts such investment temporarily on hold, then returns to it at a later point.  

Which Ron has now flatly disagreed with.

I do think there is some genuine disagreement here, don't you?
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: ffilz on February 13, 2005, 02:56:37 AM
Hmm, does this thread "Mechanics, Contribution, and Doug the Dice Guy" (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14266) have something to contribute to this discussion. I am most definitely one of those GMs who will push pause while I go frantically dig through my source material for some needed detail. If you ask people who have played games with me about my play, you will probably here about this. This is closely tied to my liking detailed settings. So what I'm thinking is happening is that the detailed setting Sim guy considers the source material part of the SIS, and thus, just like we would all expect to pause to clear up a misunderstanding in SIS that was created entirely verbally through play, this kind of Sim guy expects to pause the game to clear up a misunderstanding because the source material that is part of the SIS is misunderstood. I note also that Ron grants that to some Sim folks reading the source material may be play. Aha! So when I read the source material outside of a game session, I am playing, and entering that material into the SIS, but also, if I skip a chapter, I still provisionally enter it into the SIS, so when suddenly that provisional material is needed, I need to go off an read it so that it can properly be entered into the SIS.

I'm also thinking that some of these discussions are so hard because it's hard for us to imagine how something that totally doesn't address our CA could possibly be fun. Now obviously if we are able to step back from the game, and accept people's own feelings about their play, we can accept that they might find something fun which we don't find fun.

Frank
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 13, 2005, 06:04:10 AM
Hey Ron,

Quote from: Ron EdwardsThey simply are finding aspects of the Situation interesting which (for instance) Jay does not find interesting.

Underlining added

Bullshit!  I NEVER NEVER claimed or based my arguments on my personal "interest."  This has to stop right here and now.  I do not, nor have I ever made a "value judgment" about styles of play nor have I ever prescribed how people "should" play.  I have and continue to speak only about the nature of the MODEL.  If I make an argument that something lies "outside the model" that only touches upon one topic - I am discussing the Model.  That means I am not prescribing a style of play nor am I discussing the value of certain styles of play nor am I making judgments about said players. Are we clear on that now?  Can this issue be put to final rest?  How many times do I have to make this disclaimer?  Sheesh!

Hey Chris,

Quote from: clehrichHang on, I think I just figured out what Jay is saying.  Jay, follow me step by step and correct me if I go astray.

You summary or analysis of my points is spot on.

Quote from: clehrichMy conclusion, tentatively, is that you're all wrong. :-)

Poo!  I hate when that happens!

Quote from: clehrichEven if it is true that such activity goes on consistently more commonly in Sim games, perhaps of a certain type, that does not mean it is correctly described here. For example, it could be that such activity is a form of Situational engagement, albeit one not usual in Nar play. This strikes me as very plausible: just as some Sim players find the common (but not CA-defining) use of meta-play in Nar uncomfortable or problematic, what we may well have here is exactly the same thing seen backwards, i.e. this is a kind of Sim-common meta-play that Nar players find problematic or uncomfortable. In Ron's case, he may find it so, but is fair-minded enough to say that it seems to work for them; because of his predilections, however, he reads this as not Situationally engaged, because it would not be seen so in Nar games. That is, if Sim players may see Nar-style meta-play as "cheating," we may have an instance here of Nar players seeing Sim-style meta-play as not invested.

I stand guilty of never considering the possibility that Ron may have misunderstood the process and thus may have misdiagnosed such play as non-invested.  I am not saying that is indeed the case, he knows his experiences better than I, I just took his assessments on face value as accurate without further consideration.

Regarding that kind of play as a kind of Sim meta-play, I fully agree. On the first page of this thread I alluded to this when I said –

QuoteThis "nailing down or haggling over minutia/details" is an activity in support of Bricolage, but not the Bricolage process itself and hence not definitional of Sim.

When I used the phrase "in support of Bricolage" I assumed that the players were invested in the process (Bricolage) thus necessitating an investment in Situation.  Thus, if players were nailing down or haggling over minutia/details I would say they were doing so with an eye towards (still invested in) having an Impact on Situation.  IOW such activities during a game were not an end unto themselves but an activity in support of the core defining Sim game process.

Quote from: clehrich
Quote from: Ron EdwardsChris, the logical flaw is in #4. The players are invested in Situation. They simply are finding aspects of the Situation interesting which (for instance) Jay does not find interesting.
But Ron, that requires a clearer formulation from you.
Quote from: YouOne of the key "tells" of a particular sort of Sim play is to be willing to drop investment in the current imagined situation for a while and really nail down a few details.
Jay is, I think, isolating that.  He may be wrong to do so, but you have indeed said simultaneously that the players are invested in the situation and have dropped investment in the situation.

That is exactly what I have been going on about!  This "contradiction" also exists in the Sim essay and this I have been hammering on for weeks!

Quote from: clehrichWhat Marco is proposing, which is relatively similar to my comments vs. Jay's proposal, is that what's described here is not dropping investment.  It is thus a different form of investment, which operates at a meta-level.  Presumably this is a Technique common (though not exclusive) to Sim play in many (though not all) of its forms.

I addressed this above, but for clarity's sake I agree that such activity can and is frequently is support of CA – if it is done with an eye towards having an impact on Situation.  If it is truly done as a meta-Situation activity, that is without any interest on the Impact it has on the Situation, then it cannot be indicative of any CA.  It is pure Color, by definition.  I wish to make this VERY clear – I am not saying Color is "valueless" to play, rather I am saying Color is "valueless" in the diagnosing or defining a CA.

Quote from: clehrichAnother way to read it, which apparently you don't like, is to suggest that it is investment, but not in Situation. You're in agreement with Jay on that one, apparently: his initial point was that investment in Situation is the crux.

Which is still the central tenet of my argument.

Quote from: clehrichBut in response to Caldis's point:
Quote from: HeI dont think addressing premise has to be a constant activity, much of play can be setting up the situation, providing color and background and adding detail. I'm sorry I cant remember the term Ron uses, maybe an "instance of play", Ralph used something with a similar meaning called it a "cycle of conflict" through that period players are looking to address premise, they arent doing it constantly throughout play.
Oh, unquestionably.  CA-meaningful activity does not need to go on continuously.  But if this isn't CA-meaningful activity, how can it be a "key tell" of Sim? ...

I too fully agree that CA meaningful activity does not need to go on continuously.  I said so in my second post on this thread.  However, such activity that isn't CA-meaningful cannot be a  "key tell" of Sim is again something that I have been hammering at for weeks.  If the "nailing of details" doesn't effect or have an Impact on Situation then they cannot be "tells" - for any CA.  That such activity is not CA-meaningful does not mean that I am saying such play is pointless or valueless, rather I am saying that using such meta-Situational "nailing of detail" Color play for diagnostic or definitional purposes is pointless and valueless.

What I would like is a clarification on whether engaging Situation does or does not define the activity called Roleplay.  If engaging Situation is required for the activity to be called Roleplay - that means Situation must be engaged for a player to be expressing CA, including Sim.  That means a game which focuses on Color as the reason to play, to the exlusion of having an Impact on Situation, is not a form of Sim play since we have already agreed that such play is not even considered roleplay in the first place.

So, what is it?  Is engaging Situation neccessary for roleplay or not - and thus Sim by extension?
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 13, 2005, 09:26:05 AM
I think all the haggling here is just an arguement over the meaning of investment.  I'll follow my own advice and turn to actual play to clear up what I mean.

Standard proceedure for the sim campaign I'm in is for the Gm to come up with a mission for an individual member or for the group as a whole usually introduced through one a contact for one of the characters.  What will happen next is usually a team meeting, and that meeting will always happen in a bath house.  The reason it happens in a bath house is because one of the characters is a clean freak, he has a gurps quirk.  Every chance he gets we meet in a bathhouse or he's buying a magical bathtub.  These events are taking place within the situation but they are not invested in resolving the situation yet they are definitely tells of investment in Sim, they are clearly what the player is getting from the game and what the group is recognizing from him.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Sean on February 13, 2005, 10:24:59 AM
I'm with Ron and Caldis, and I find this thread a little unfortunate as a whole. Though I do want to thank Chris Lehrich for going through and breaking the whole thing down carefully - I wanted to do that earlier but I was too lazy, and I think it does make everything clear.

Loosely, I think the way I'd prefer to talk about it is that both the heavily immersed in actor-stance player and the exploration of setting that can go on 'around' that it comes out of being 'invested' in the situation in the broad sense. They're both forms of investment, and can serve any CA as techniques (Narrativist examples might be interesting for another thread).

The second one though obviously is not the 'direct' form of 'investment' that comes around when a player deeply immersed and in actor stance finds an 'identification' between his own 'desires' and the desires of his in-game avatar. But both this and the other can come out of a broad 'investment' in situation.

This all seems really obvious to me, so when I read threads like this it's hard for me to shake the suspicion that people are picking on Ron's words, the 'graduate student game' of scoring points on verbal contradictions. (This ceases to be a graduate student game when the contradictions touch deeper aspects of the theory: the difference is obvious to those who understand the theory, and not obvious to graduate students.) Let me immediately follow that up by saying I DON'T THINK THAT'S HAPPENING IN THIS PARTICULAR THREAD - Jay and everyone else on both sides here strike me as basically earnest and sincere. I have seen this happen in other threads on the Forge, though, and it's a common danger in theoretical discussions that get past first base.

That said, I don't really think much has happened in this thread - once you get past the pun on 'investment' here, and parallel it with Jay's insistence earlier on giving 'engagement with Situation' his particular immersionist twist, there's not much left but the verbal dispute.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Marco on February 13, 2005, 11:12:53 AM
Quote from: Sean
Loosely, I think the way I'd prefer to talk about it is that both the heavily immersed in actor-stance player and the exploration of setting that can go on 'around' that it comes out of being 'invested' in the situation in the broad sense. They're both forms of investment, and can serve any CA as techniques (Narrativist examples might be interesting for another thread).

The second one though obviously is not the 'direct' form of 'investment' that comes around when a player deeply immersed and in actor stance finds an 'identification' between his own 'desires' and the desires of his in-game avatar. But both this and the other can come out of a broad 'investment' in situation.

If I understand this correctly then we have two kinds of involvement:

Type-A [Sim]: The player is interested/intellectuall engaged/experiencing an appreciation of craftsmanship in the co-creation or experience of the game (i.e. how well it adheres to genre).

Type-B [Nar]: The player is feeling an emotional relationship to the imaginary events of the situation as though, in some way, they were real. This is the same sort of connection that leads people to cry at sad movies (i.e. they do not believe the movie is real but are engaged with it on an emotional (sad) level). I've called this "empathic emotions." At any rate, the player is affected by the human-experience elements in the game.

So if we have (B) then it's said to be Nar. If we have (A) and only (A) then it's Sim.

Would you say that's correct?

-Marco
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Sean on February 13, 2005, 11:32:43 AM
I'm not sure, Marco.

It seems to me that taking actor stance is a technique. So it can serve any CA. Likewise, nailing down aspects of situation, setting, color, whatever (which I think is clearly part of play) is an activity, which a variety of techiniques can address, and can be important within any CA.

So then. There are uses of actor stance and heavy immersion actor stance and the various techniques for nailing stuff down about the SiS that facilitate Sim play, and those that facilitate Nar play. So even drawing the brush very broadly, there are four possibilities here, not just two (marry each family of techniques to each CA). I think that there's an overall disconnect in the discussion which is brought on by a particular, in this case somewhat unhelpful emphasis on a certain way of being invested in Situation (the one that corresponds to actor stance and immersion) and a false belief that the director stance or even real world dialogue modes of nailing down elements of Exploration is not play. (Indeed, isn't there a game called Universalis that's as much about this part of play as about anything else)? Which is why I'm a little down on the thread as a whole, though as long as clarity is reached at the end it has some value.

So anyway your type A and type B read to me as fairly good descriptions of two different ways you could use actor stance/immersive technique to meet a Sim or Nar CA respectively. But there's a second distinction in this thread, between play that addresses Situation through 'being in character', actor stance, and these other sorts of techniques, and play that addresses Situation by considering just how photon torpedoes work, that is relatively unconnected to this one, and which I was also trying to address.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Marco on February 13, 2005, 12:12:32 PM
Okay--I understand now how this activity has nothing to do with situation: photon torpedoes simply aren't relevant to the game in progress and people are stopping play to discuss them. I understand.

I can see how someone could make a case that this kind of activity 'isn't actually roleplaying' (or not CA-relevant). I'm not sure how this is really different than what goes on without books and dice at any fandom discussion. I mean, I can take it for granted that this happens--but discussions of what exactly the no-win scenario in Star Trek 2 consisted of broke out during one of my Star Trek games and I don't think any players there would've considered the discussion roleplaying--but rather a break in it.

That has all the topicality of a setting discussion (i.e. the discussion was "in a hypotheitcally real star trek universe what did this known-to-exist thing consist of?") and zero relevance to situation (the PC's were the bridge crew of an acting ship that had nothing to do with the academy).

-Marco
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Sean on February 13, 2005, 12:55:25 PM
But it could be connected, too. This isn't that hard. The game is Star Trek; there's a Romulan Bird of Prey off the starboard bow; you want to know whether to fire on them, and one thing that factors into that is how on earth photon torpedoes work. That's the situation I'm imagining. This sort of thing comes up all the time:

"Wait a minute. You're hitting an IRON GOLEM with an unenchanted broadsword? It's got to get nicked or scratched or something..."

"If magic works based on contacting other dimensions that's fine, but if it's more like a psychic power the spell ought to work like this..."

In other words, it's when these kinds of discussion come up in relation to play that they're related to play, and not a digression.

There are players, and occasional moments for all players, when these kinds of questions become really, really important. The people who like to address them, and see addressing them as one of the points of play, and play for moments where they get to address them, tend to fall into the broad category of players who belong in a Sim CA.

Now these same questions can come up in the actor stance type situation. "I'm a Dunedain. What would I do here?"

"Vulcans believe that...therefore, I simply turn away from his challenge."

"Dude! In Akira it worked like this..."

Again, these could be fandom discussions, but when they come up in play, and mediate your own relationship to your own character, and your own role-playing, they aren't - they're Exploratory material in the game.'

If seeking out and answering those kinds of questions, and deepening your understanding of them, and 'getting it right' with respect to them in general, is your thing, you're in all likelihood a Sim-oriented player, at least when you play that way.

On the other hand, if you seek out and answer those questions because you want to engage directly with the moral and emotional material in them, make choices about them, etc., you're likely oriented towards Narrativism.

It's not that there are different questions, though the Sim player may ask them more emphatically or more regularly, because that's the point of play for them. It's what the questions are asked in service of that is indicative of Creative Agenda. I'm pretty sure.

One 'holy grail' of one type of immersionist play is to get so good at acting out your idea of elfhood that you don't have to break character to have the right responses. Fine, cool. I actually sort of like that kind of play, as long as the person doing it will break character to address important social issues in the group, and isn't using it as a cover for fuckwitude, etc.

Am I doing anything to help out here, or am I just creating more confusion? Or am I missing some other point that this thread is trying to make?
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Marco on February 13, 2005, 01:13:52 PM
Quote from: Sean
If seeking out and answering those kinds of questions, and deepening your understanding of them, and 'getting it right' with respect to them in general, is your thing, you're in all likelihood a Sim-oriented player, at least when you play that way.

On the other hand, if you seek out and answer those questions because you want to engage directly with the moral and emotional material in them, make choices about them, etc., you're likely oriented towards Narrativism.

If the statement is made that Sim players stop play and discuss some element of SIS "far more commonly and reliably" than Nar players then it is a tell, statistically. I think this is similar to claims made about 'story' (that being that despite what the essays say, if your transcript is gettin' story you are really likely to be playing Nar).

I'm not sure, myself. But if the activity is a tell based on the "reason why it is done" rather than the idea that "doing it" is indicative of the reason then I think, maybe, we're lookin' at it backwards.

-Marco
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 13, 2005, 02:20:37 PM
Hello,

There is no contradiction.

My phrase "dropping out of Situation" referred to Situation as Jay values Situation, for purposes of explaining my point to him. This purpose has clearly backfired into an incredible mess, and the backfire represents one of the primary reasons why this forum is no longer functional.

Chris, I am not going to deal with Jay-through-you. Post what you think, not as Jay's representative.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 13, 2005, 03:04:59 PM
Quote from: MarcoIf the statement is made that Sim players stop play and discuss some element of SIS "far more commonly and reliably" than Nar players then it is a tell, statistically. I think this is similar to claims made about 'story' (that being that despite what the essays say, if your transcript is gettin' story you are really likely to be playing Nar).

I'm not sure, myself. But if the activity is a tell based on the "reason why it is done" rather than the idea that "doing it" is indicative of the reason then I think, maybe, we're lookin' at it backwards.

The tell is in the how and why it's done Marco not that it is done.  A gamist can do it to try and find tactical advantage, a narrativist to seek clarification to better address premise.  The tell is that the sim player is finding enjoyment in the act of figuring it out rather than using what's figured out for something else.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Marco on February 13, 2005, 05:33:10 PM
Quote from: Caldis
The tell is in the how and why it's done Marco not that it is done.  A gamist can do it to try and find tactical advantage, a narrativist to seek clarification to better address premise.  The tell is that the sim player is finding enjoyment in the act of figuring it out rather than using what's figured out for something else.

It's not that I don't buy this--I'm just not clear on why this is called "a tell." What's the tell "telling?"

In poker a tell indicates the existence of some otherwise hidden piece of information (playing with one's wedding band indicates a bluff).

If we know the what, the how, and the why of an action, what is the piece of otherwise hidden information it is refering to?

-Marco
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 13, 2005, 05:53:07 PM
Quote from: Marco
It's not that I don't buy this--I'm just not clear on why this is called "a tell." What's the tell "telling?"

In poker a tell indicates the existence of some otherwise hidden piece of information (playing with one's wedding band indicates a bluff).

If we know the what, the how, and the why of an action, what is the piece of otherwise hidden information it is refering to?

The telling piece of information is the engagement with this activity.  If this is the part of play that the players can be seen to be really getting off on, if this is the biggest part of why the player is playing the game, then this can be said to be a sign of the players creative agenda.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Marco on February 13, 2005, 06:28:21 PM
Quote from: Caldis
Quote from: Marco
It's not that I don't buy this--I'm just not clear on why this is called "a tell." What's the tell "telling?"

In poker a tell indicates the existence of some otherwise hidden piece of information (playing with one's wedding band indicates a bluff).

If we know the what, the how, and the why of an action, what is the piece of otherwise hidden information it is refering to?

The telling piece of information is the engagement with this activity.  If this is the part of play that the players can be seen to be really getting off on, if this is the biggest part of why the player is playing the game, then this can be said to be a sign of the players creative agenda.

So what we're saying is: If the player enjoys activities for reasons we define as Sim then it is likely the player enjoys Sim-play?

-Marco
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 14, 2005, 12:19:19 AM
Quote from: MarcoSo what we're saying is: If the player enjoys activities for reasons we define as Sim then it is likely the player enjoys Sim-play?


Maybe Marco, though your wording sounds weak but then again so did mine so I'll try again.   What we are saying is that by watching a large variety of people play roleplaying games we see patterns in how they react in game and in what is giving them enjoyment from the game.   Those patterns tend to fall along the lines that Ron has laid out as GNS.  

It's not something that is neccessarily easy to see.  We have to infer the thought processes that are going on inside a persons head based on their reactions, and some people react in a just plain weird fashion and what can look to be one reaction may actually be totally different.  However if we can see signs that a person is reacting positively to the game and it looks to be that they are reacting positively to specific activities that seem to attract  that type of player then we can make a judgement that the player is following that agenda.

I'm sorry but I think I'm wording this fairly poorly.  You may have to read between the lines to get what I'm saying here , if you do then great if then just give me a  'I dont get it' and I'll try and think on better phrasing for a couple days.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 14, 2005, 12:30:01 AM
Hey,

Caldis & Marco, whaddaya think about starting a new thread? I think (but am not sure) that there's some topic-drift going on.

No need to answer me, just utilize some self-critique and carry on as seems best.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 14, 2005, 12:45:18 AM
Quote from: Ron EdwardsMy phrase "dropping out of Situation" referred to Situation as Jay values Situation, for purposes of explaining my point to him.
Okay, so a "key tell" of Sim is a particular type of shift in the techniques of addressing Situation, yes?  Good, then we've concluded that this is a technique.

I'd suggest that it be thought of with respect to Stance, incidentally, but that is a subject for another thread.  It does, however, imply that techniques may well serve as "tells" for CAs, which although in common usage (with respect to meta-play or Director Stance in Nar) is often seen as a dangerous connection to make.

The only piece of it that remains controversial is the definition of "investment," which clearly is not well understood.  Had we all known exactly what "investment" means, in particular what "investment in Situation" means, the argument would probably not have arisen.  I suggest that this would be an especially fruitful area for further thinking, as in many respects this is the rubber hitting the road.  Now that we have at least one example of two variant forms of Simulationist techniques for such investment, we have grounds for valuable synthesis from all the vast knowledge and theory about Nar.
QuoteChris, I am not going to deal with Jay-through-you. Post what you think, not as Jay's representative.
I resent that.  The very lengthy post concluded that Jay is incorrect in his assessment, because of a faulty causal construction: he has implied that effect entails cause.  I realize that you have found this thread frustrating, but that is no reason to take a swipe at me.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 14, 2005, 03:46:28 AM
Hey Marco,

Quote from: MarcoOkay--I understand now how this activity has nothing to do with situation: photon torpedoes simply aren't relevant to the game in progress and people are stopping play to discuss them. I understand.

I can see how someone could make a case that this kind of activity 'isn't actually roleplaying' (or not CA-relevant)...

That has all the topicality of a setting discussion (i.e. the discussion was "in a hypotheitcally real star trek universe what did this known-to-exist thing consist of?") and zero relevance to situation (the PC's were the bridge crew of an acting ship that had nothing to do with the academy).

Emphasis added

Exactly.  Though I would be more inclined to say such play is "not CA-relevant," but certainly can be enjoyable while gaming.  It certainly adds to the game experience by adding Color.  I see it as a way of helping "saturate" the game play experience because it is related on a general level to Setting and would include such things as say action figures, posters, music, etc.

My question is, if your examples are "not CA-relevant", and a game was composed entirely of such conversations and non-situation relevant pieces, then how do you diagnose such a game?  There are three prevailing schools of thought in this matter.  Such a game would not be role-play.  Such play falls inside the Model and is considered role-play but would be diagnoses as something like Zilchplay.  Or we consider the idea that such a game is something like M. J.'s GM only input play (to Situation) and thus still considered part of some CA though the player input (to Situation) dial happens to be zero.  This last one is difficult to justify since the Model seems to be based on the idea that Situation must be dealt with by the players before such play is considered "role-play."  By the way I am not making up the claim that "Situation is central" out of personal preference, this is clearly stated in the Model and the essays.

Just to be clear such "filling in of details" or conversations about "photon torpedoes" is CA-relevant and in fact important if they do have relevance to the Situation of the game in progress (Frex - a battle was just about to explode, or the player playing the Engineer was trying to effect a repair on the Photon Torpedoes or discern the effect of the Photon Torpedoes when used in an entirely unprecedented fashion).

So the long and short of it you understand what I am talking about.  Whether I am right or wrong is still being worked out, but you have what I was trying to get at.

Hey Sean,

Quote from: SeanBut it could be connected, too. This isn't that hard. The game is Star Trek; there's a Romulan Bird of Prey off the starboard bow; you want to know whether to fire on them, and one thing that factors into that is how on earth photon torpedoes work. That's the situation I'm imagining.

I fully agree, this isn't that hard.  You are basically agreeing with what I have been saying about such details being import when they are CA-relevant – as long as they are relevant to handling of the Situation at hand.  My issued lies with the claim that a game where the players focused specifically on non-Situation relevant details is definitional of a type of Sim.  The problem is the Model, as it currently stands, states that dealing with Situation is the core of role-play.  If you have a game where the players are not "dealing with Situation" by focusing on details as a satisfying end unto itself without an interest in "dealing with Situation" then the Model says we have a degenerate case – the equivalent of a division by zero error if you will.

Quote from: SeanIt's what the questions are asked in service of that is indicative of Creative Agenda.

Again, I agree.  The issue becomes again a matter of "dealing with Situation."  If the questions are asked in service of "handling of Situation" then they are CA-relevant.  The question is the same I posed to Marco.  A type of play has been proposed where the questions are not in the service of "handling of Situation" – What do we diagnose such a game as?  The glossary describes such activity as Color.

Quote from: SeanOne 'holy grail' of one type of immersionist play is to get so good at acting out your idea of elfhood that you don't have to break character to have the right responses. Fine, cool. I actually sort of like that kind of play, as long as the person doing it will break character to address important social issues in the group, and isn't using it as a cover for fuckwitude, etc.

Just to be clear I am not saying that this type of "immersionist play" is superior, better or preferred on any level to play where lots of questions need to be asked or are worked out.  Such detail questions happen in the game I'm in on a regular basis.  I'm just saying that the details need to be relevant to Situation to be CA-relevant and that very issue is what is being hashed out.

Quote from: SeanAm I doing anything to help out here, or am I just creating more confusion? Or am I missing some other point that this thread is trying to make?

I think you have been helpful.  The point of this thread is to argue that such details need to be in the service of Situation to be CA-relevant.  Thus far we are in substantial agreement.  There is a counter claim that such details need not be relevant to Situation to be CA-relevant that I do not agree with and I am trying to work through.  I could be wrong, but that is my understanding of the counter-claim.

Hey Ron,

Quote from: Ron EdwardsMy phrase "dropping out of Situation" referred to Situation as Jay values Situation, for purposes of explaining my point to him. This purpose has clearly backfired into an incredible mess, and the backfire represents one of the primary reasons why this forum is no longer functional.

Just to clear the air, the backfire didn't come from my disagreement with your position, what I took serious issue with was your mischaracterization of my motives then belittling me in a public forum based upon that very same mischaracterization of my motives.  I admittedly got upset and should not have vented, but I thought it was OK to occasionally not be "by your leave Alphonse" all the time.  Other than that I'm still excited to continue.

I am curious about your phrase "dropping out of Situation."  This is the first place where that phrasing showed up and to me the meaning of it is substantially different from your first phrasing "dropping investment in the current imagined Situation."  I have absolutely no issue with play where players "drop out of Situation" to iron out details about said Situation.  That has to happen.  I think it is impossible to stay entirely "in Situation" and role-play.  My contention is that when players do "drop out of Situation" to iron out details they have not "dropped investment" in the Situation.  IOW the reason the players are "dropping out of Situation" to work out such details is so that they may more effectively deal with Situation – they are still "invested."

There are also moments in games where such details get worked out that are not relevant to Situation, and I don't have issues with that either.  As in Marco's post for example, they may be related to the Setting.  My point is that when play centers on such "non-Situation relevant details" as an end to the exclusion or indifference to Situation, the Model itself says something is missing.  If messing with the 800-lbs gorilla is missing or not important then the Model yellow flags that style of play.

So as to clear the air, when you said "dropping investment in the current imagined Situation" did you intend to say "dropping out of Situation?"  IOW did you mean to say that play while the players drop out of Situation to iron out the details they were still interested/invested in Situation much in the same way Nar players can "drop out of Situation" to bid coins and still be invested in the Premise/Situation?  If that is the case we are in general agreement.  If you meant that the players "drop out of Situation" and work out such details as an end/goal of play and thus are not nor were ever particularly "invested" in Situation and that is indicative of CA-relevant play then we are still not in agreement.  This to me is the equivalent of players in the TROS really getting all excited and spending lots of in game time choosing, describing and talking about their Spiritual Attributes then having no interest in or completely avoiding all combat and calling that an example of functional Narrativist play.

I had a passing thought.  If you mean that this refining of details is a "tell" indicating that Sim play might be in progress I'm with you on that as well.  One would then still have to look and see what the players are doing with regards to Situation to ultimately make the diagnosis.  However, that the players are refining details is not sufficient to indicate Sim play in and of itself.

Hey Chris,

Quote from: clehrich
Quote from: Ron EdwardsMy phrase "dropping out of Situation" referred to Situation as Jay values Situation, for purposes of explaining my point to him.
Okay, so a "key tell" of Sim is a particular type of shift in the techniques of addressing Situation, yes?  Good, then we've concluded that this is a technique.

I'm OK with that.  I have never had any issues with the idea of players stopping play to nail down details when it was, as you described, a technique of or for addressing Situation.  I was originally under the belief that there was a style of play proposed that claimed that such ironing out of details was not a technique used to address Situation but an end unto itself and that this was definitional of Sim.  I'm very happy and excited calling dropping out of Situation to iron out details for the ultimate purpose of addressing Situation a Technique.  Makes great sense to me.

Quote from: clehrichThe only piece of it that remains controversial is the definition of "investment," which clearly is not well understood. Had we all known exactly what "investment" means, in particular what "investment in Situation" means, the argument would probably not have arisen. I suggest that this would be an especially fruitful area for further thinking, as in many respects this is the rubber hitting the road. Now that we have at least one example of two variant forms of Simulationist techniques for such investment, we have grounds for valuable synthesis from all the vast knowledge and theory about Nar.

Agreed.  Had it been clear that "dropping investment" did not mean or imply a lack of interest in Situation then there indeed would have been very little argument.  However until Ron clarifies his position I wish to refrain from assuming his meaning or intent.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 14, 2005, 09:07:13 AM
Easy.

"Dropping investment" can certainly be read in two ways.

The first one isn't what I was driving at, but it certainly was a reasonable inference on the reader's part. It means not playing. It means doing other stuff in a way which means play becomes less interesting to everyone. People often complain about others getting up to channel-surf, reading a Robert Jordan novel, or just interjecting with a completely unrelated conversation during play.

Perhaps it's best understood by a contrast. In our game group, for instance, play is often interrupted by a sudden urge to discuss (say) Clint Eastwood, or by food arriving, or comments on the wine, or whatever. But none of this actually disrupts play; part of our unspoken Social Contract is that "during this time, play is the priority, even if we're not doing it ... hence anything else is permitted as long as everyone understands that at least one of us probably needs a little break. We resume with full enthusiasm." In other words, we're not ceasing to invest in what's up with the role-playing until the session is designated to be over.

The second one has to do with shifting the focus of the SIS in some major way, that is, losing some or all of the attention and concenctration from where it was. This could be about anything - all the way from "let's quit all this stupid talk and fight!" to "But wouldn't a phaser melt the conduit, 'cause it can melt a bulkhead?" Or to whatever, maybe a sudden discussion of setting details because someone read a supplement (not uncommon during our Hero Wars game ...).

Think of everyone's attention and concentration on imagined stuff during play - not the resolutions and events, but the stuff. You can shift that attention and concentration up to a larger scale, down to a tiny scale; you can freeze in-game time to shift the attention and concentration 'round and 'round an in-game object; etc, etc.

In a Simulationist context, for some folks, such a shift can be a serious aspect of play, especially when it concerns exactly the sort of details that Sean has outlined so nicely. What's interesting about playing with these folks is how they don't seem to perceive it as a shift at all. Experientially, I'm with Jay - musing over how the phaser "really" works or saying "hold it! hold it! I'm calculating the effect of the ship's pitch and yaw on your grip on the rope" is agony for me. It's exactly like "Dropping investment" would be in my first description above, which is probably why I phrased it that way.

I also think it's most common in a Simulationist context specifically because Exploration qua Exploration is the goal (why Ralph doesn't like the term "Exploration squared" I'll never know; but everyone, say "emulation" instead if it helps). To some folks, getting into this "hold the phone" focus on what many of us consider insanely picky details is a high point of play. I think that in Simulationist play, this is at least aesthetically consistent with the basic Creative Agenda, even if it's procedurally or locally inconsistent for other members of the group, who have their own idea of what's appropriate to Explore.

Arguably, functional (fun) Simulationist play relies on agreements about that "focus/stop" knob, not because it's unique to Simulationist play, but because there's usually less overt "why we play" at the real-person level going on in Sim than in the other modes. That's a neat concept, and I wish I'd thought about it earlier. Caldis' points in this thread are consistent with this way of looking at it.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Marco on February 14, 2005, 11:25:23 AM
Quote from: SilmenumeHey Marco,
Exactly.  Though I would be more inclined to say such play is "not CA-relevant," but certainly can be enjoyable while gaming.  It certainly adds to the game experience by adding Color.  I see it as a way of helping "saturate" the game play experience because it is related on a general level to Setting and would include such things as say action figures, posters, music, etc.

My question is, if your examples are "not CA-relevant", and a game was composed entirely of such conversations and non-situation relevant pieces, then how do you diagnose such a game?
In the extreme case, I don't think it's roleplaying (that is: no characters involved, no roles, no mechanics, no game ...) That's the extreme case though where the discussions are not held relative to some in-game or meta-game objective on the parts of the participants.

If the digression, however, does have a purpose then I think it is roleplaying--it's clarafication of situation. Since I think that happens all the time and the player's enjoyment of that activity is based on many factors like how invested they are in controling an outcome (or making a specific statement), how interesting they think the ideas coming out are, how long it goes on, etc. I don't see how it can be deemed 'Sim.'

Last night in an IRC StarCluster game a PC was trying to shutdown the ship's drives (an NPC was trying to blow up the ship). The PC knew nothing about the technology and asked the GM to determine whether or not she shut down the a-grav as well.

There was a brief discussion about how emergency shutdown worked (there's a big, clearly marked button the engineer could direct her to--and it happens fast--and it's engine's only).

Now, here's the thing: we're on IRC so I have no idea what was in the player's head--however: I know that if I'd been asking the GM to calculate if I shut down the a-grav it would be because:
(a) I think it would be cool (illustrative of the character's ignorance of technology) and might be an interesting springboard for my character feeling guilt (the other PC's were engaged in a battle with the NPC).
(b) I think it might illustrate how the PC engineer should really be the guy down here.
(c) I think it's a likely possibility and want the versimilitude of a check.

Energy was high (for me, on my end of the keyboard) and I thought "this is exactly the kind of Sim-tell that we're discussing on The Forge."  I liked that question because I thought it showed that the Player was interested in the game in that they were "using the GM" as a tool to see if they could affect the game without directly using their character.

I.e. it's sort of indirect author-stance. "I take this action and inform the GM that I think maybe X would happen but I don't directly 'author' X--I'll leave it up to his interpertation."

So here's what I'm thinking:

I don't consider this musing If players had been "musing" about how one might shut down starship engines I think the play would have looked *very* different. I think that term indicates that the energy of play is low or the player is calling for a break from high energy (the ship is pitching around and the guy wants to stop and discuss orbial mechanics that aren't relevant) to low energy.

If we consider "musing" a Sim activity but not "clarifying" I'm good with that--the thing is, I've not seen much musing (discussion for the sake of discussion). Everything I've seen is purposeful to the person asking for it in terms of the SIS.

In Ron's example, however (the guy calculating pitch and yaw) I would expect that the player acutally *does* have a rationale other than musing about physics. As tortorus as it might be, IME--in my experience (and we've all had different experiences) the players who do that have a reason for it.

In the case of the character asking for calculations about accidental a-grav shutdown, I think it was to possibly "highten the tension." However, it could be for any reason and we don't know.

-Marco
[ We can have another thread on Tells--but what I don't see here, in this case, is the equivalent of the call or fold that makes a tell a 'tell' in poker-terms. ]
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 14, 2005, 11:39:43 AM
Hello,

Marco, I agree with you about all that. You seem, however, to be convinced that I'm talking about some kind of automatic guarantee that the behavior is Simulationist.

... and that's just funky. We started this discussion with issues of Simulationist play, so let's stay there, and not worry about how anything we discuss might be present or manifested (similarly or differently) in any other sort of play. Differentiating between Sim and other forms of play just isn't an issue at the moment.

What I'm discussing is a set of behaviors which happen to be common across the diversity of Simulationist play (which is different from "common in any instance of Sim play by definition"), and why their existence refutes the extremity of Jay's initial starting position.

Side note: Jay very fairly presented his position as 1/3 baked and therefore acknowledged it as open for some major objections, with no implied critique of him as a person or as a thinker.

Not every damn discussion of Sim has to get into a freakshow about how it is or isn't different from the other modes. Let's just talk about Sim, for crying out loud.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Marco on February 14, 2005, 11:49:20 AM
Ron,

It's cool--I wasn't thinking you were making wild absolute statements or anything. I was just relating how I personally approach the clarification digression in gaming (since it happened last night and all).

-Marco
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 14, 2005, 12:18:17 PM
Okay, just for the moment I'm going to propose an alternate term, because this whole "investment" thing isn't getting us anywhere.  If this already has a term, let me know---I missed it.

Situation-Focus
By this I mean a sort of rubber-to-the-road kind of play focused directly, right now, on the game-world situation at hand right here.  The kind of moment that doesn't make Ron and Jay wince and think "get on with it!"  You know, the stuff that really matters in play.  Like, play play, not sorta-play or setting-up play or just-ironing-something-out-be-with-you-in-a-sec play.  Play right here, right now.

I don't mean anything odd, clever, or complicated by this.  It's a very constrained and narrow kind of play, but at the same time it's clearly a kind of play that just about every gamer (so far as I can tell, anyway) is extremely focused on.

I suspect that when the Big Model points to Situation as the crux, the center, of play, this is because the kind of play people really care about most is usually Situation-Focused play.

You with me?

CA and Situation-Focus
I'm pretty sure there is no controversy in saying that CA manifests strongly and clearly in Situation-Focused play, barring severe dysfunction.  For this reason, when we talk about various activities and techniques and so on as CA-relevant, CA-meaningful, or whatever, we usually do so in the context of Situation-Focused play.

However

This does not logically entail that other play activity is not CA-relevant.  Nor does it entail that CA-relevant activity must be Situation-Focused.  These are propositional fallacies:CA-relevant action
In principle, any game-oriented activity can be, and probably is likely to be, CA-relevant.  For example, the process of designing a character requires all sorts of choices and constraints by the player having to do with what sorts of play he would like to engage in by means of and through this character.  Presumably if that player has any creative agendum at all, it will inform his design process.

Similarly, all that agonizing about exactly how many watts a phazer really uses and whether that's enough to erase the dilithium memory-crystals is CA-relevant, not only in how it is prosecuted by the group but in fact whether it is handled at all.  Properly speaking, not handling it is a way of handling it, but the point should be clear: there is a CA-relevant choice made as soon as the question arises, even prior to its expression by a player, as to what sort of question this is and how it relates to what is conceived of as the "proper" sphere and focus of play.

For a very rough model, we might say that every game activity constructs a range of potential applications, and sort of wraps them around a core of CA (assuming, for the purpose of simplicity, that CA is relatively coherent and straightforward in any given player or group).  When trying to put this potential into actuality, in Situation-Focused play, most of the potentials are temporarily stripped off, because they aren't relevant to that particular Situation; this leaves behind only potentials relevant to the Situation, which then become actualities, and CA.  Not surprisingly, this means that Situation-Focused play, as the application of a great many such constructions, manifests a great deal of CA very clearly: we've stripped off everything not Situationally relevant from a whole bunch of constructions, but we've kept CA intact in each and every one of them, so we've sort of got an overwhelming quantity of CA.

Sim in Particular
Seems to me that Sim is a reflexive CA.  Within Situation-Focus, the CA includes a desire not to see the CA, not to see the man behind the curtain as it were.  In some cases, of course, this leads to an emphasis on immersion, but that's only one possibility.

The question that arises here is this: if Sim wants the Dream, and wants it intact and complete and lovely, then why are Sim players willing apparently to break from the Dream in order to emphasize seemingly trivial details about the Dream?  Practically speaking, wouldn't it be preferable to gloss over the difficulty in order to stick to the Dream, which presumably is what is really wanted anyway?

This entails, assuming we're agreed here that such Sim players are not totally incoherent and insane, that such details cannot be glossed over.  There is a quality to them which actively damages the Dream.  Therefore if they are allowed to stand, as for example if the GM says, "Yeah, doesn't matter, anyway he blows a hole in the wall, what are you doing?" and the group doesn't agree that this detail doesn't matter, you have damage to the Dream that such players find unacceptable.

So here's what I propose.

The ideal goal is seamlessness.  If the Dream were seamless, there would never be any need to break from Situation-Focused play, because the answer to every potential question of fact, however picayune, would already be known to all the players as it is in fact known to the characters.  In such an extreme ideal, there would also be a near-total adequation of player to character, which would probably manifest as extreme Turku-style immersion.

The trick is, such perfection (which is unrealizable) has a number of different factors.  Any game group must decide, usually largely unconsciously, which factors to prioritize.  Some groups prioritize immersion, and gloss over slippage elsewhere in order to maintain this.  A group like that Ron describes does not do this; they prioritize the depth and facticity of the Dream.  Thus when a slippage occurs in facticity, it requires external handling.  Similarly, an immersion-oriented group would presumably consider techniques to assist immersion when it fails, such as enforcing a rule that players must speak in-character and so on.

I've said elsewhere (I forget where; Jay might remember) that it is when the Dream can potentially break that the Dream is most strongly bolstered, because abductive failure leads to deductive success and all that.  I think I'm sticking to that in Sim.  Basically what I mean here is that when there is a slippage, i.e. a break in the seamlessness of the Dream, it is the resolution of that slippage that enforces the claim of the Dream's being seamless.

That sounds paradoxical, I know, so let me be clear.

This is what's called the logic of the "supplement".  Suppose we assert, because we are Sim players, that the Dream itself is seamless and perfect.  In a perfect world, we, the players, would interact with it as a real world.  The claim is not that we are constructing the Dream through play, but that we are interacting with an already perfect Dream.  To my mind, this is a crucial part of the ideology of Simulationism.  I'm pretty sure that this is part of what Dr. Xero describes in his games: the aesthetic of the game is that the players do not construct the Dream, but discover a story or pattern or whatever within it, already present and waiting for them.

Now because we have accepted this in advance (which you notice is not typical of Nar or Gam aesthetics), any construction is undesirable.  When we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true.  For example, we the players may not know whether phazer-fire induces current sufficient to wipe a memory disk, but the world already does know this.  It's built-in, a fact of nature.  When we debate the point, we're not inventing something new but figuring out how it always already worked.  The players did not know the answer, but it was already determined.

The effect of this is that of the supplement: by supplementing perfection, we demonstrate that it needed no supplement.  In other words, if we can resolve the question about the phazers, we have established that the game-world was indeed already perfect, that this was already known, but not to us.  Thus resolving the question of phazers reinforces the Dream.

Provided, then, that your dominant aesthetic agenda is to reinforce the Dream, which more properly would be to bolster the claim that the Dream was and is and always will be seamless and complete, the handling of fine detail not only isn't CA-irrelevant but is in fact powerfully constitutive of CA.  Thus, as Ron says, it's a Tell of a lot of Sim players.

What it isn't, though, is Situation-Focused.  Situation-Focus by my sketch definition is the ideal baseline, the continuity of play when there are no apparent breaks in the Dream.  Oddly enough, this implies that for Sim, Situation-Focus is not an especially strong locus of the manifestation of CA, because when the Dream needs no reinforcing there is no CA-activity that needs to take place.

All of which also goes some way toward explaining why Sim often seems incoherent and weird to non-Sim-committed players.  It seems as though Sim players keep stepping outside of exactly what they think they want, i.e. the Dream, in order to focus on detail that really doesn't matter very much.  Furthermore, they keep doing this even when there does not seem to be a very strong reason to do so, i.e. when the details seem trivial.  My proposal here implies that such players may be doing this because they want CA-meaningful activity, which is difficult to effect without an apparent break from the Dream.  From their point of view, such activity is not a break from the Dream, only a break from the ideal perfection of interaction with the Dream, which isn't the same thing.  By reinforcing the Dream by these means, they help constitute for themselves the certainty and perfection of that Dream.  It's worth considering that in doing so they also reinforce their own necessary distance from the Dream, putting the ideal quite clearly a bit beyond reach, which would be an interesting point to follow up elsewhere.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 14, 2005, 12:37:04 PM
Huh. That all worked for me, Chris.

It also explains why I was stuck between "but it is Situation" (based on the claims of players I've known who'd said that) and "dammit it's dropping investment" (my experience of the same thing).

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: ffilz on February 14, 2005, 01:49:15 PM
Wow Chris, that was so awesome. You really nailed what that kind of play is for me. That isn't the only type of play I enjoy, but when I'm running Tekumel or Glorantha, I go through those processes (though I have learned to set a time limit on myself, and give up the search and wing it instead). In my ideal game, when such a situation happened, all of the players would be invested in searching for the answer.

Frank
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 14, 2005, 02:25:34 PM
Good lord, are we actually going to agree about this?  Weird!  :)

<thread-drift>
I realize this has gone around and around for a bit, but let's note that this is exactly what this forum (GNS Model Discussion, I mean) ought to be about.  Yes, it can be painful and difficult, but genuine clarification can happen here.  And even if not everyone is going to agree with this set of conclusions (we haven't heard from Jay, for example), I do think something has been learned.  I know I've learned something about Sim and about the Big Model I didn't know before.
</drift>
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Mike Holmes on February 14, 2005, 03:43:48 PM
Well, we don't know that Jay agrees, and that's rather important, isn't it?

Sorry, just feeling spiteful that everyone likes Chris' version better than mine. ;-)

Mike
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: M. J. Young on February 15, 2005, 12:45:03 AM
Quote from: SilmenumeOr we consider the idea that such a game is something like M. J.'s GM only input play (to Situation) and thus still considered part of some CA though the player input (to Situation) dial happens to be zero.  This last one is difficult to justify since the Model seems to be based on the idea that Situation must be dealt with by the players before such play is considered "role-play."  By the way I am not making up the claim that "Situation is central" out of personal preference, this is clearly stated in the Model and the essays.
Jay, it occurs to me to question whether there can ever be any game-related discussion that is not relevant to situation. It just depends on how the players identify situation.

After all, "You are crewmen aboard a Federation starship" is a situation. At that point, absolutely any details discussed about starship equipment and operation, Federation regulations and protocols, the nature of interstellar travel, races and civilizations throughout the universe, the known characters of the core shows and their likely handling of events--all of that is relevant to the situation of being crewmen aboard a Federation starship.

Thus I'm not sure how you can have discussion that is not relevant to situation, unless you're talking about Monty Python gags or pizza toppings or crooked dice, all of which are generally agreed to be disconnected from actual game events.

Perhaps, then, what makes such play so normative for simulationism is precisely because "we are here" is the situation in simulationism. In gamism, the situation is about the conflict which provides the opportunity to prove what we can do, and in narrativism the situation is about the pending crux in the issue we are exploring, but in simulationism "situation" is much simpler than that, being entirely about having the opportunity to explore the world and so expand our understanding of it.

This would also suggest that in simulationist play, something is "color" to the degree that it does not matter to the players, but immediately ceases to be "color" the moment exploration focuses on it--it then becomes setting and situation and character. The very fact that it can become the focus of exploration makes it relevant to the simulationist agendum.

I'm not sure how this fits with Chris' or Mike's views, or even if I can defend it, but it does seem to fit with the idea that simulationism is still on agendum when it wanders into these side questions.

--M. J. Young
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 15, 2005, 12:57:01 AM
Mike,

Your spitefulness makes you a bad person, clearly.  Just plain naughty.

Mark,

I'm pretty sure that what you're proposing fits with my conception of Sim as a reflexive agendum founded on an ideal construction of the Dream.  Just so long as we're clear, and I'm pretty sure you are from your post, that this is a particular formulation of "situation" that is relatively specific to Sim, we're OK.  The thing is, this isn't really how Situation is formally defined by the Big Model.  Thus I had to theorize around that to deal with what Ron neatly describes: he (a mostly-committed Nar player) perceives as dropping out of Situation what some hard-Sim-committed players see as focused on Situation.  My contention is that what's shifting here isn't Situation but engagement, because Sim as a reflexive agendum does not permit an absolute distinction between Situation and Dream, whereas Nar for example requires a distinction between Situation and Premise or Story.

That's all very abstract, of course, but an attempt to link what I think you're saying to what I was proposing and seems, mirabile dictu, to be working for people.

Jay,

Hello?  You out there?
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2005, 09:31:40 AM
Hiya,

Mark/M.J. (I'm going to have to get used to that), and Chris, it's all working for me. You guys are very clearly stating stuff which I've been trying to verbalize for a while now. As you know, Chris, the "reflexive" aspect of Sim is a key thing for my understanding of this play-mode, which I've tried to articulate as the "what we put in, we get out, untransformed but better realized" aesthetic.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Mike Holmes on February 15, 2005, 10:53:06 AM
QuoteI'm not sure how this fits with Chris' or Mike's views, or even if I can defend it, but it does seem to fit with the idea that simulationism is still on agendum when it wanders into these side questions.
Fits with me. In fact, I like how you put that last phrase there. It's not definitive of simulationism to explore any particular detail. I think this is what throws some people. Everyone knows that in narrativism, detail is only as important as it is to establishing premise really. What's less obvious is that a similar sort of descrimination occurs in sim play. Some sim players will worry about the bullets, some will not. Because the narrow agenda in question, the sub-agenda of sim in play, must be some subset of all of the potential detail which could be examined. It's simply impossible to examine all of the potential detail, because that potential detail is always infinite. How many bullets left? Why not look at the condition of each bullet to see if they'll misfire. We can go back and consider the manufacturer of the ammunition. We can consider the employees who were on duty the day the ammunition was created, and how they affected the quality of the ammunition. We can look at Fred the employee, and figure out his entire socio-economic situation to discover how motivated he is to produce good ammunition. We can then consider the early childhood influences that creates the mindset in Fred that would respond to those socio-economic influences as he does. We can then look at Fred's parents, and why they treated him the way they did. Then the cultural values that created their motives.

Obviously I'm belaboring the point, I could go on and on. You can't look at every detail, so instead we choose some level of detail that's "good enough" to create that feeling that Chris spoke of that there's a world out there that's pre-existent. That if we wanted to look back at the bullets we'd find the manufacturer, and Fred, and Fred's parents, and the culture in question.

Where that line lays, how in detail to get in a particular situation in order to maintain the feel in question, is always an aesthetic consideration. There's some consensus to be cfound out there at times, but I think that it's mostly based on tradition. The point being that everyone enforces some level of this sort of continuity in play. Where you draw that line defines your group's simulationism agenda. Note, though we talk in terms of magnitude at times, it's really all about what you want to explore. A particular agenda might look at all at one sort of detail which another group finds crucial, while they look at some other thing in extremely close detail that other groups might not. Simply because what makes a world seem to have that sense of pre-existence can be different for each individual.

Call this the Faster Than Light effect. Some people have real problems with FTL technologies being included in a setting, because they've done enough reading to understand the problems that it entails. For them there had better be a rather detailed reasoning as to how it works and what the ramifications are, or maybe they'll want it thrown out altogether. Other people, who don't see the problems - it's just faster, right? - don't have this problem with it. They're willing to accept "It's high tech, it just works" as an explanation. Nobody is right here. Either way, FTL or no, the settings produced are both fictions with less than perfect detail produced. The only question is what it takes to satisfy the individual players.

And don't read this as saying that this sort of exploration is somehow defensive or proscriptive. It's not. What we choose to explore is a positive decision in all cases. Whether it's ammo weight in Phoenix Command, adventure in Middle Earth, or what you would do for power in Sorcerer. We choose what to explore because it interests us, not because the game would be bad without it. There would be no game without a decision of what to explore.

Mike
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 15, 2005, 12:10:26 PM
High five to Mike.

That is the result, I think, of sustained constructive discourse for what, going on six years now?

I also think it validates my original Simulationism essay, with all of its shortcomings, but perhaps burnishing that essay is best left to another thread.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Doctor Xero on February 15, 2005, 06:28:07 PM
Quote from: clehrichThe question that arises here is this: if Sim wants the Dream, and wants it intact and complete and lovely, then why are Sim players willing apparently to break from the Dream in order to emphasize seemingly trivial details about the Dream? Practically speaking, wouldn't it be preferable to gloss over the difficulty in order to stick to the Dream, which presumably is what is really wanted anyway?

This entails, assuming we're agreed here that such Sim players are not totally incoherent and insane, that such details cannot be glossed over.  There is a quality to them which actively damages the Dream.  Therefore if they are allowed to stand, as for example if the GM says, "Yeah, doesn't matter, anyway he blows a hole in the wall, what are you doing?" and the group doesn't agree that this detail doesn't matter, you have damage to the Dream that such players find unacceptable.
---snip!--
If the Dream were seamless, there would never be any need to break from Situation-Focused play, because the answer to every potential question of fact, however picayune, would already be known to all the players as it is in fact known to the characters.  In such an extreme ideal, there would also be a near-total adequation of player to character, which would probably manifest as extreme Turku-style immersion.

The trick is, such perfection (which is unrealizable) has a number of different factors.  Any game group must decide, usually largely unconsciously, which factors to prioritize.  Some groups prioritize immersion, and gloss over slippage elsewhere in order to maintain this.  A group like that Ron describes does not do this; they prioritize the depth and facticity of the Dream.  Thus when a slippage occurs in facticity, it requires external handling.  Similarly, an immersion-oriented group would presumably consider techniques to assist immersion when it fails, such as enforcing a rule that players must speak in-character and so on.
---snip!--
I'm pretty sure that this is part of what Dr. Xero describes in his games: the aesthetic of the game is that the players do not construct the Dream, but discover a story or pattern or whatever within it, already present and waiting for them.

Now because we have accepted this in advance (which you notice is not typical of Nar or Gam aesthetics), any construction is undesirable.  When we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true.  For example, we the players may not know whether phazer-fire induces current sufficient to wipe a memory disk, but the world already does know this.  It's built-in, a fact of nature.  When we debate the point, we're not inventing something new but figuring out how it always already worked.  The players did not know the answer, but it was already determined.
---snip!--
Provided, then, that your dominant aesthetic agenda is to reinforce the Dream, which more properly would be to bolster the claim that the Dream was and is and always will be seamless and complete, the handling of fine detail not only isn't CA-irrelevant but is in fact powerfully constitutive of CA.
---snip!--
All of which also goes some way toward explaining why Sim often seems incoherent and weird to non-Sim-committed players.  It seems as though Sim players keep stepping outside of exactly what they think they want, i.e. the Dream, in order to focus on detail that really doesn't matter very much.  Furthermore, they keep doing this even when there does not seem to be a very strong reason to do so, i.e. when the details seem trivial.  My proposal here implies that such players may be doing this because they want CA-meaningful activity, which is difficult to effect without an apparent break from the Dream.  From their point of view, such activity is not a break from the Dream, only a break from the ideal perfection of interaction with the Dream, which isn't the same thing.  By reinforcing the Dream by these means, they help constitute for themselves the certainty and perfection of that Dream.

This is one of the most accurate descriptions of Sim play I have have encountered anywhere!

There is only one thing you miss:
simulationism includes the possibility of construction within it.
However, the tools, resources, and raw materials must all be found within the Dream.  In other words, simulationist creation is like formal haiku -- the formal haiku pattern pre-exists the poet, but the poem he or she creates is still original even though it utilizes a pre-existing pattern.

A haiku poet can not write within the haiku tradition if there is no haiku tradition which pre-dates him or her, and a simulationist player can not construct within the simulation if there is no Dream which "pre-dates" him or her.

So simulationist construction and creation takes place with a greater consciousness of being within rather than outside the Dream or shared simulationist imaginary space.

And yes, you understand the point I have been trying to make with my terms Framework of Interaction and Frameworks of Independence -- and its relevance to understanding simulationism.  Thank you for wording it so well!

Doctor Xero
(cross-posted with that thread in RPG theory)
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 16, 2005, 01:47:18 AM
Quote from: Doctor XeroThis is one of the most accurate descriptions of Sim play I have have encountered anywhere!

There is only one thing you miss:
simulationism includes the possibility of construction within it.
However, the tools, resources, and raw materials must all be found within the Dream.  In other words, simulationist creation is like formal haiku -- the formal haiku pattern pre-exists the poet, but the poem he or she creates is still original even though it utilizes a pre-existing pattern.

......

So simulationist construction and creation takes place with a greater consciousness of being within rather than outside the Dream or shared simulationist imaginary space.

And yes, you understand the point I have been trying to make with my terms Framework of Interaction and Frameworks of Independence -- and its relevance to understanding simulationism.  Thank you for wording it so well!
Well well.  This is quite a turn-up for the books.  Jay, thanks for this thread, man -- it's looking like everyone's going to agree on Sim of all things!

Now as to the point you (Xero) make here.

My memory is fuzzy, but my recollection is that it's been a while since you read much of (yes, sorry) Levi-Strauss, and perhaps Propp would be more your bag on that end of things anyway, yes?  [Hang on everyone, I'm going to do this for just a sec then come back to earth.]

Okay.  Brace yourself.  What you're describing here is exactly a perfect reversal of what I was yammering on about with bricolage.  And the thing is, what you're talking about is definitely bricolage.  It's not the end of it I was emphasizing, teaching Levi-Strauss on the Forge not really being my remit, but he'd be right there with you on this.  So am I.

Dig up out your old grad-school books and re-read the first couple of chapters of The Savage Mind, with all these debates about Sim clearly in the front of your head.  It's going to click.  Hard.

For those of you who were just tuning out, let me put that without any jargon or names.

Basically what I was getting at in reference to Xero's games was that they have this aesthetic of a Dream in which we discover that which is already present, right?  Now what he's saying is that granted that, this allows us to construct within the Dream, out of pieces of the Dream.  While this is construction, because it is wholly within the Dream it also validates the infinite potential of the Dream.  That is, the Dream isn't like an ordinary novel, where you might think of it as having a story and some characters and some ideas and that's it.  The Dream is infinitely pregnant with meaning, pre-structured, all waiting for you to discover.  And some of that discovery happens when you do something creative and inventive within the Dream, out of pieces of the Dream, and thereby discover that the Dream was capable even of something you had never thought possible.

I think this is what Xero means about discovering archetypal patterns, at least more or less.  (We have a technical disagreement about that one, but that's neither here nor there.)

Referring that back to bricolage, in myth, the point is that such a construction also validates the systems that permit the construction.  In other words, the fact that you use exclusively what you already have within the world, i.e. the Dream or the "shed," to make new things, means that they are not really new things, but old wine in new casks.  And that proves that the system already had those casks and that wine.  And since the system in question in myth is the social system of the tribe or whatever, it validates that your system of living in and thinking about the world and also of interacting with each other is the right way, and a fully sufficient way, and you don't really need to change anything.  The changes are constructed in such a way that they're not changes; they're discoveries of what was always already true, revealed by the gods only you didn't notice that before.

Levi-Strauss would only have one objection to the Haiku analogy: he thinks that this is utterly unlike poetry.  Not unlike language, or prose, but unlike poetry in particular.  But that's a whole different issue and not one that fits here.

----

So, now wait a minute.  I haven't heard from Jay.  Ron, Mike, Xero and I are I think agreed.  I think Mark/M.J. is also agreed.  I haven't heard a lot of disagreement lately.

Ron thinks this in a sense confirms what he's been struggling to say for a while.

Mike, I'm not sure.  You've got a different take on Sim, I think; does this also work for that?

I think this isn't the same as the Big Model, but for narrowly analytical rather than applied reasons.

Xero I don't think is a fan of the Model, but is okay with this.

Ummmm....

Well, Jay, I think we can say the bun is pretty much baked now!
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Caldis on February 16, 2005, 08:31:02 AM
I'll just add that I'm in agreement, especially when you consider MJ's point that situation is (or at least can be) simpler in Sim.  I think that was the central sticking point for this debate and I'd be interested to hear what Jay has to say on it though I dont think he'd agree with it, then again I may have been misreading him all along.

On a side note I'd like to say your short synopsis on Bricolage above did a better job of relating it to roleplaying than any of the previous discussion.  That's what I believe is needed before the term receives wide spread acceptance or the possibility of using it in debates as a meaningful term to all participants.  A discussion for a different thread I believe.

I did have one question for you yet. What did you mean by the following?

Quote from: clehrich
I think this isn't the same as the Big Model, but for narrowly analytical rather than applied reasons.

Right now I dont see how it is any different than the big model.  Maybe a clarification of a few points but not something that conflicts with it.  Can you clarify where you think they diverge?
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 16, 2005, 11:40:28 AM
Quote from: CaldisOn a side note I'd like to say your short synopsis on Bricolage above did a better job of relating it to roleplaying than any of the previous discussion.  That's what I believe is needed before the term receives wide spread acceptance or the possibility of using it in debates as a meaningful term to all participants.  A discussion for a different thread I believe.
I'm going to sit down and try to hammer out where I think the state of the question rests at the moment, in a relatively applied fashion---and yes, that's another thread.

QuoteI did have one question for you yet. What did you mean by the following?
Quote from: clehrich
I think this isn't the same as the Big Model, but for narrowly analytical rather than applied reasons.
Right now I dont see how it is any different than the big model.  Maybe a clarification of a few points but not something that conflicts with it.  Can you clarify where you think they diverge?
Well, I think it is more a clarification than a disagreement, but there is an analytical difference.

The way the Big Model mostly works, and I think this is strongly true of the Right To Dream essay, is that it describes effects and infers back to causes.  Now right up front in "The Right To Dream," we get an emphasis on Exploration applied to different elements (Character, Setting, Situation, System, Color).  Thus any given Sim game may emphasize the exploration of some one or more of these elements, and this is then the primary criterion for distinguishing among Sim play modes.  This led to a lot of threads, once upon a time, trying to pinpoint which was emphasized in what play.

All that seems to me very useful, let me note up front.  On the applied end of theory, where design and play enter centrally, such criteria are clear and focused.  The problem is that it does not square with what a lot of Sim players experience.

What I (and I think Jay) have proposed is that Situation has a peculiar place in Sim, such that Exploration of System for example is actually constitutive of Dream via Situation.

Let me put that differently.  In Nar and Gam, it is appropriate to distinguish between process and product, between aesthetic aims and particular techniques by which this agenda is expressed.  Now analytically, from a distance, that makes sense in any gaming, but it is at odds with the aesthetic contents of Sim as CA.  We've seen this continually, with for example the common Sim assertion that meta-play is cheating.  The problem then is that Sim clearly does involve meta-play, but denies this flatly.

So the question, for me, becomes how we can describe Sim experientially, i.e. how Sim players can understand what they are doing as players.  How do they handle the distance between themselves and the Dream, when it seems that awareness of such a distance is problematic?  Practically speaking, why aren't all Sim players immersionists?

Ron's proposal was that there are different things to be invested in, and one form of that investment, applied to one kind of element-set, leads to Immersion.  But I think this again is off-kilter: Sim players in my experience very often seem to think of immersionism as a good thing, even if they themselves appear to have no interest in actually doing it.  So it seems their sense of "investment" is a little tricky.

The suggestion then is that the Sim CA is reflexive.  It's about itself, and it is, in committed players, potentially self-enforcing.  And that entails also that Situation is entirely embedded within the Dream, and in effect the core of the CA.  The CA itself being impossible to dislodge from other factors, again from the perspective of the actual Sim player, which means that everything is invested in Situation.  It's quite impossible to play Sim without being so invested, in fact.

Which then means the following: with reference to Sim, Situation becomes its own category, of which the other elements (Setting, Color, etc.) are properly sub-classes.  Furthermore, Situation becomes a near-synonym of Dream.

Now that sounds like a small clarification, but think what it does.  You now have a CA that refers to the model itself, which is circular.  It's as though you said that Nar was a CA best described as "Color Now."  That would imply (obviously it's not true of Nar) that the whole model sort of bends back on itself when talking about Nar.  A more plausible, but also wrong, example would be Gamism: System On Up.  But we know that Gamism doesn't work like this: System may be very important, but it is so in an even and continual tension with all other elements, and this is manipulated and constructed through techniques.

In Sim, however, we have a restructuring of everything such that Situation ends up meaning something very weird.  Situation, in fact, is made to include CA, which is quite backwards of how the model basically works.  In essence, for Sim in particular, you cannot discuss CA in a specific and precise fashion except as a substrate or implication of Situation.

The problem here is that we have a disparity, as we do not in Gam or Nar, between how the model suggests play works and how players experience their play.  Analytically speaking, to my mind, to make Sim a special case like this, when there are only three CAs anyway, is problematic.  What we're describing in Sim has to be hypothetically possible of other CAs, even if that is not observed.  The model cannot do this, because its central aim is reactive (in analysis of games and design) rather than predictive, so it constructs a clean, clear structuring lens through which to view its objects.  The problem being that you have a critical CA which essentially cannot play nice with that structure: you can describe Sim as the model does, with clarifications, but not in a fashion that is acceptable to Sim players (many of them, anyway), which is not the case with Nar or Gam.  And to me that entails a difficulty.

But as I say, it's a purely analytical difficulty, not an applied or practical one.  Since the Big Model does not claim to be aiming to be an ideal analytical model, this is not really a criticism, just a disagreement from me about what I think such models ought to do.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Mike Holmes on February 16, 2005, 12:24:09 PM
Chris, I already said this above, but it seems you've missed it. Not to burst your bubble, but the way we see it, I think, you finally have come around to understanding the way that the majority of us here have always seen sim. So it's not surprising to me the agreement we're seeing here. The rejoicing seems a little premature.  

Most importantly, if I'd have to guess, I'd say that Jay will not agree with your assessment. You haven't reconciled his view with ours, I don't think, but just agreed with us. Meaning that we've gotten no further with the issue at the start of the thread. That is, I think Jay would say that what you're describing still includes as diagnostic of sim elements that he'd rather weren't in the description.

I may be way off, and would be overjoyed to find out that I'm wrong somehow. But let's not cry success in the thread until the original poster agrees that we've succeeded.

Mike
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 16, 2005, 12:31:24 PM
Hiya,

I'm with Mike.

Also, however, "success" only means that we all, or most of us, merely understand what one another is saying, not that we all agree.

So if that happens, then we're good.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: clehrich on February 16, 2005, 12:58:00 PM
Quote from: Mike HolmesChris, I already said this above, but it seems you've missed it. Not to burst your bubble, but the way we see it, I think, you finally have come around to understanding the way that the majority of us here have always seen sim. So it's not surprising to me the agreement we're seeing here. The rejoicing seems a little premature.
Not to start a fight or anything, but the fact that Ron has already indicated a genuine clarification to him of a problem he has had, where his experience of something is at odds with what Sim players experience, is not simply my coming around to what the Big Model has always said.  I'm not saying it's any big change or anything, but the progress made here is not solely my "getting" something that was always known to you and Ron and "the majority of us here."
QuoteMost importantly, if I'd have to guess, I'd say that Jay will not agree with your assessment. You haven't reconciled his view with ours, I don't think, but just agreed with us. Meaning that we've gotten no further with the issue at the start of the thread. That is, I think Jay would say that what you're describing still includes as diagnostic of sim elements that he'd rather weren't in the description.
Well, obviously we'll have to wait on Jay's assessment, but my conclusion is that there is a genuine disjuncture experientially within the formulation of Sim, where there is not in Nar or Gam.  I am surprised to hear that everyone has always known this, as it seems at odds with "The Right to Dream" and other discussion here of Sim.  It explains a great many oddities, including Ron's sense that pure Sim is a fringe interest (contrary to the perception by Sim players that Sim is normative), and Xero's perception that what he describes is read as anathema by the Nar core here at the Forge, and the mismatch between Jay's understanding of his play and the reading provided by Forge analysts, and so on.  What I've suggested is that this is to be expected because of the oddity of Sim as a CA structured reflexively; in a sense, you might say it's a CA that by its nature refuses to be classified as a CA.  If that's agreeing with what everyone has always said, it's certainly news to me, and it does suggest some significant (but not unacceptable) limits to the application of the Big Model in reference to certain kinds of Sim play.
QuoteI may be way off, and would be overjoyed to find out that I'm wrong somehow. But let's not cry success in the thread until the original poster agrees that we've succeeded.
Agreed.

MC:  Take it away, Jay!
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Ron Edwards on February 16, 2005, 01:26:07 PM
Hi Chris,

Sorry to say, it is agreeing with what we've been saying ... but I think it's worth pointing out that the "we" isn't a unified bloc or single set of text. Perhaps it's best to describe the standing agreement as a series of very hard-to-identify communications, composed of posts, reflections on old threads, phone calls, face-to-face discussions (often with drinks), and emails. So it's no wonder that it's not obvious. And it contains its own diversity of favored "ways to say it" and minor disagreements.

So basically, you've joined the "core," if you will. I can't say I'm happy that such a barrier exists between (1) simply posting here and (2) getting into that core set of extracurricular communication, but I can't say that this phenomenon is unusual, either - it exists for every complex discourse community I've ever seen or heard of.

Note that my statement of what this thread has provided for me concerns not how I think of it but rather how I communicate about it.

Best,
Ron
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Mike Holmes on February 16, 2005, 02:01:54 PM
Actually I think that there's a disjuncture with all modes, but it's not with how people experience them. That is, I think we all are always all talking about very much the same things when we say G or N or S. The problem is in coming up with text that describes these things.

And they're all tough this way.

Narrativism, for instance, as Ron points out in his essay is often opaque to people in terms of the textual description until the person states it in their own words. In the way, way, way back, there was this Gleichman guy who rather vehemently disagreed with the textual descriptions of Gamism. In fact, I'd say that likely many more of these arguments would happen here if more primarily gamism players frequented the site.

Basically I see Jay as in the same boat. I think he probably is talking about the same thing we are, but his verbiage so far has just not seemed to match our perceptions, just as he feels that our verbiage doesn't match his. But I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point he puts out a statement to which everyone goes, "Ah, sure, I get it. That's sim yeah. Not how I'd have put it, but it's not incorrect."

No, this does not represent some brainwashing process or anything, these definitions are all accomplished independently. Heck, I've got a couple three alternate models that represent my statements about what I think the modes are all about. Largely I've presented them in hopes that people would "get" them better than Ron's, but I've found that that's been pretty hit and miss. Because people still have to put it in their own words.

To delve into your area, Chris, I think that perhaps what's going on here is that it's like certain rituals that you see in twelve step groups. Pretty much every alcoholic has had very similar experiences to other alcoholics. But each individual is required to put their own experiences into their own words to introduce them to the group. What this does is to give them ownership of their experiences in that social context.

Why can't RPG definitions be more clinical, and agreed to without this sort of process? Well, I'm guessing that it has to do with the ritual nature of RPGs as a whole. It's this ritual nature that makes Ron's observation about people and their playstyles being like religions in terms of how vehement people can get when defending how they play, or even in trying to explain it's superiority. I think it's this deep personal investment that requires yet another ritual of statement to get to the point where you own your modes of play in the social context in question.

That might sound kinda out there, but I think it has some validity. I'd really like to see someday how an unbiased ethnographer or somesuch would catagorize these processes. I think we might all be startled at how easily they could come up with descriptions for modes - descriptions that we'd all immediately reject as being an outsider position on the issues. Because we all feel that we've "lived" through the roleplaying, and have a personal knowledge of what it's about that's somehow inviolate.

Crazy talk?

Mike
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: apparition13 on February 16, 2005, 05:26:07 PM
clerich said:
Quotewith reference to Sim, Situation becomes its own category, of which the other elements (Setting, Color, etc.) are properly sub-classes. Furthermore, Situation becomes a near-synonym of Dream.

In walking on limbs (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14350) I said:
Quote
Tentative (very) hypothesis:
Walking a little further out onto the branch, it seems to me that each of the CAs (or major sub-CAs in sim's case) is primarily (though not exclusively) focused on one of the components of exploration. It is also simultaneously constrained by that same component; seamless play happens inside those constraints. The other components then become the tools that are used to explore the primary component. So, restating my earlier post, in sim.obj, setting is the focus of, and constraint on, exploration; with character, mechanics, situation and colour taking on a secondary role as tools used to carry out that exploration. In sim.subj, character would be primary, with the others in the secondary role. Nar would be characterized by situation (addressing premise) as primary; and in gamist play mechanics (the rules of the game) serve as the focus and constraint.

(Replace "mechanics" with "system", my brain crossed circuits there.)

These statements are clearly contradictory.  To clarity my position, I will once again turn to examples.  

I'll start with Nar.  As I see it, situation is primary and the other components secondary.  In other words, the Nar is defined by situation, everything else is variable.  As an example situation, consider the relationship map in Sorcerer (and soul?).  As long as it's a nar friendly system, whether you  use Sorcerer or HQ or TROS or PTA or whatever won't fundamentally change the game.  Who the PC characters are, won't fundamentally change the game.  The setting could be 30's pulp, ancient Rome, a Traveller-like science fiction setting, Harn etc. without fundamentaly changing the game.  Change the situation and the game hasbeen changed fundamentally.

With Gam, it's system.  Character (another nameless dwarf), setting and situation can vary without fundamentally changing the game.  But change from D&D 3.5 to D&D modern to TROS to Elfs to WOD and you have fundamentally changed the game.

With regards to Sim.obj it's setting.  You can play Star Wars with many systems, address varying situations with different characters and it's still Star Wars.  Change the setting to Star Trek, or 40k, or Fulminata, or Jorune, or Talislantat or Glorantha etc. and you have fundamentally changed the game.

With regard to Sim.subj, it's character.  If you are exploring an "tortured artist" character, you can do that with Vampire, Sorcerer, D&D etc.  You can do it in Star Trek, Buffy, Forgotten Realms, or any other setting;  you can vary the situation.  All without fundamentally changing the game.  But change the character to "hard-boiled merc" and you have fundamentally changed the game.

If I have grossly misinterpreted "situation" my entire argument may well implode.   I see it as simply "what happens".   Whether it is the central node or not, I don't know;  as the above implies I suspect it doesn't have to be the primary node.  The 800 pound gorilla in Nar, you bet.  In the other CAs, not so much, you can change what happens without altering  the experience.
Title: Replies and apologies
Post by: Silmenume on February 16, 2005, 08:02:51 PM
Hey Chris,

I have been reading and re-reading your post since it first went up just to make sure I understood all the nuances and implications within.  I didn't want to run off about some issue half-cocked.  I apologize for the tardiness of my reply.

If fully agree and support the ideas and terminology of "Situation-Focus" and "CA-relevant action."

I want to make sure I understand you regarding the role of "fine-tuning details."  If I am reading you correctly you're saying that the "attention" to detail in Sim is the rough Nar equivalent of determining and fixing Premise (but does not include the "making the important decision" part), yes?  It is a vital, necessary, and to some a highly enjoyable process that supports and facilitates the "ideal baseline" (which does include making those "important decisions") of play?  "Ideal" not being prescriptive, bur rather theoretical.  Such attention to details is CA-relevant in Sim because it is necessarily a part of Bricolage (Sit-Focus) itself?  IOW one can't Bricolage without having "things" to work with and this "adding or fining of details" is a process of "refining" or adding "things" or to the stockpile of "objects" that the bricoleur can work with?

Thus to say the players are "focusing on details" is a "tell" of Sim in the same way that players discussing Premise or creating Kickers or designing Spiritual Attributes is a "tell" of Nar?

Quote from: clehrichThe ideal goal is seamlessness. If the Dream were seamless, there would never be any need to break from Situation-Focused play, because the answer to every potential question of fact, however picayune, would already be known to all the players as it is in fact known to the characters...

This lines up well with my experiences where there is a very high premium on the players to be thoroughly knowledgeable in the source materials.  Point in fact we require any player who is with us longer than 6 months to have read the Lord of the Rings.  I understand that is a matter of preference - I am not trying to be prescriptive.

Quote from: clehrichI've said elsewhere (I forget where; Jay might remember [http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=140281#140281]) that it is when the Dream can potentially break that the Dream is most strongly bolstered, because abductive failure leads to deductive success and all that.  I think I'm sticking to that in Sim.  Basically what I mean here is that when there is a slippage, i.e. a break in the seamlessness of the Dream, it is the resolution of that slippage that enforces the claim of the Dream's being seamless.

That sounds paradoxical, I know, so let me be clear.

This is what's called the logic of the "supplement".  Suppose we assert, because we are Sim players, that the Dream itself is seamless and perfect.  In a perfect world, we, the players, would interact with it as a real world.  The claim is not that we are constructing the Dream through play, but that we are interacting with an already perfect Dream.  To my mind, this is a crucial part of the ideology of Simulationism.  I'm pretty sure that this is part of what Dr. Xero describes in his games: the aesthetic of the game is that the players do not construct the Dream, but discover a story or pattern or whatever within it, already present and waiting for them.

Now because we have accepted this in advance (which you notice is not typical of Nar or Gam aesthetics), any construction is undesirable.  When we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true.  For example, we the players may not know whether phazer-fire induces current sufficient to wipe a memory disk, but the world already does know this.  It's built-in, a fact of nature.  When we debate the point, we're not inventing something new but figuring out how it always already worked.  The players did not know the answer, but it was already determined.

Bolding added.

So if I am reading you correctly, there is this "belief" that we as players aren't doing any construction, while in fact we are constructing the Dream.  And that this construction process is not self-same as fine-tuning details, rather that fine-tuning details is a process that aids in the construction process?  Thus it follows that fine-tuning details and the construction of the Dream are not the same thing?  That the baseline of Sim is the "addition" to the pre-existing Dream via Sit-Focus with as much or as little help as needed with the addition of details?  The key here is understanding that while Sit-Focus is the baseline of Sim play (the defining process), it does not necessarily have to be the driving motive behind play.

As an additional note I should add that in the game I play in there are frequent conversations outside of the game about the nature of the "world" and how uncharted areas socially might function.  IOW we discuss how the elves might react to X or what the Dwarfs things about Y.

I also agree that CA-relevant actions can occur outside Situation.  I have long thought, as was implied in my musings in the RPG theory forum, that CA sort of drove the whole game process, but that is a matter for a different thread.

In a strange way I kinda see Sim as a fractal pattern where at any moment we could "stop/focus" at any spot and magnifiy as much of the Dream as we see aesthetically fit via Bricolage with the support of specific details.

Hey M. J.,

Quote from: M. J. YoungJay, it occurs to me to question whether there can ever be any game-related discussion that is not relevant to situation. It just depends on how the players identify situation.

After all, "You are crewmen aboard a Federation starship" is a situation...

...Thus I'm not sure how you can have discussion that is not relevant to situation, unless you're talking about Monty Python gags or pizza toppings or crooked dice, all of which are generally agreed to be disconnected from actual game events.

What I had taken issue with was based in my misunderstanding of Ron's phrasing "drop investment in the current imagined situation."  I understand what he means now, but just to clarify what I was going on about is that I had mis-read his "dropping investment" to mean that the activity of "defining details" was as "irrelevant" to Situation as "talking about Monty Python gags or pizza toppings, etc."

Thus regarding you position that all those topics potentially having relevance to Situation - absolutely.  The key is that "addressing" Situation, the baseline of Sim, is the mindful alteration of the relationship ("playing on purpose") between Character and Setting.  Addressing Situation is not the same as clarifying Situation (defining or refining details or discussing mechanical modifiers).  Clarifying Situation is a Sim meta-game activity that is very important, and for many players enjoyable, but it is not identical with addressing Situation.

Overall I agree with your assertion that just about anything that relates to the Setting has the potential to become the focus of Situation thus making all such conversations potentially important.

Quote from: M. J. Young...in simulationism "situation" is much simpler than that, being entirely about having the opportunity to explore the world and so expand our understanding of it.

Actually its just the reverse.  (Caldis you were right!)  Addressing Situation is a very complex internal process in Sim.  It is, as I had indicated at the beginning of this thread, the cauldron where the meaningful relationships are created and modified.  And like the bricolage examples that Chris has provided, this is a "messy" and necessarily complex process that involves a lot of baggage (other meanings that are necessarily attached to the items being employed – which sometimes requires clarification or refinement of those items!) that must be taken into account during and regarded as part of the process.

What is interesting to note is that the expansion of "our understanding" is the result of our creations of players, we just don't read it as such.

Quote from: clehrichWhen we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true.

Underlining and bolding mine.

Isn't that interesting.  We construct the additional material, but we treat it as if the information was pre-existing.  It is a fascinating bit of paradox and I do think it is worthy of discussion, but not here, as per Ron's sticky (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14345) in the RPG theory thread.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsPoint #3: the "possible" part means that we often have to say, hey, maybe we don't know enough. We've exposed a crucial or fruitful zone of ignorance, assumption, or need to investigate further. That's good!

Bolding added

I think this paradox regarding that which we as players create as discovering that which already is needs to be further plumbed because it is both an interesting assumption and it frequently gums up the debate on Sim.  However, this is not to be discussed in this thread.

Hey Caldis,

Quote from: Caldis"]On a side note I'd like to say your short synopsis on Bricolage above did a better job of relating it to roleplaying than any of the previous discussion. That's what I believe is needed before the term receives wide spread acceptance or the possibility of using it in debates as a meaningful term to all participants. A discussion for a different thread I believe.

You're correct and I have to take full responsibility for employing the term as the foundation of so many of my recent threads without providing an adequate definition which lead to so much pointless confusion.  The problem is that while I understand it generally I am not sufficiently learned to be capable of explaining it effectively.  I see now that Chris has picked up the ball and provided an explanation in the thread entitled Bricolage APPLIED (finally!) (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14371) in the RPG forum.

Hey Mike,

Quote from: Mike HolmesMost importantly, if I'd have to guess, I'd say that Jay will not agree with your assessment. You haven't reconciled his view with ours, I don't think, but just agreed with us. Meaning that we've gotten no further with the issue at the start of the thread. That is, I think Jay would say that what you're describing still includes as diagnostic of sim elements that he'd rather weren't in the description.

Actually I agree with Chris' assessment whole-heartedly.  What I have been "rebelling against" is the idea that Sim can or does focus or operates on its constituent elements as discrete quanta.  IOW that one can focus on "refining details" or can focus on "exploring Setting" is not possible in Sim.  This is what I was, upon reflection, arguing against.  Chris' summation here really hits the ten ring on what I have been fumbling towards for over a year.

Quote from: clehrichThe suggestion then is that the Sim CA is reflexive. It's about itself, and it is, in committed players, potentially self-enforcing. And that entails also that Situation is entirely embedded within the Dream, and in effect the core of the CA. The CA itself being impossible to dislodge from other factors, again from the perspective of the actual Sim player, which means that everything is invested in Situation. It's quite impossible to play Sim without being so invested, in fact.

My failed process of argumentation was to try to show that the non "holistic" ideas proposed for Sim actually were non-functional within the framework of the Model.  IOW by showing that "piecemeal" Sim cannot work when examined with the Model, what must be left is that Sim must be "whole."  However until Chris articulated it I didn't realize that is what I was doing.  Assuming that he is, and by extension myself, are correct in this formulation of Sim, then it becomes "illogical", devastating to discussions and just plain misleading (not intentionally!) to make statements or arguments like players are "Exploring System" or "Exploring Setting" or "focusing on details."  IOW no one thing, no single element of Exploration can be described as the Sim process.

This is where I had my original bone to pick about details and dropping investment in Situation to do so.  I tried to demonstrate that if one really dropped investment in Situation to discuss details that such play fell outside the Model – thus one was not really dropping investment in Situation because such details were relevant (on a large general scale) to Situation.  Now this is was an ineffective form of argumentation, but I didn't really understand the "whole" until just now.

Quote from: Mike HolmesActually I think that there's a disjuncture with all modes, but it's not with how people experience them. That is, I think we all are always all talking about very much the same things when we say G or N or S. The problem is in coming up with text that describes these things.  ...

Basically I see Jay as in the same boat. I think he probably is talking about the same thing we are, but his verbiage so far has just not seemed to match our perceptions, just as he feels that our verbiage doesn't match his. But I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point he puts out a statement to which everyone goes, "Ah, sure, I get it. That's sim yeah. Not how I'd have put it, but it's not incorrect."

I agree with you to a certain extent, which is why I have been reluctant to post in Actual Play.  The problem is that everyone's verbiage does carry connotative baggage and until we can come to an agreement everyone's wording will mean different things that are partially or even completely incompatible.  The cool part about AP is that everyone can look at the material and bring to bear their (culturally based) intellectual tools to see what is going on.  Challenge (competition {very roughly}, strategizing, etc...) and Premise (Story, Theme and the like) are ideas that are very common and are fairly easily understood in our culture so it makes sense that looking long and hard enough someone will begin to put it all together.  Bricolage is not something that is common or understood anymore by literate cultures.  That means that until some cross-disciplinarian theorist came in with some essentially arcane and at first blush useless ideas no amount of hard staring at the AP material was going to get us anywhere.  The conceptual framework just wasn't in our cultural bag of tricks to make sense of what the hell was going on in Sim.  I guess I was attempting to do what Ron did when he created the conceptual framework called Exploration which then allowed for a huge flowering of understanding, discussion of theory and then eventually game design.  But until that happened everyone was chasing their tails and beating their heads against the wall.  I just don't understand why the same effort here met with such bitter and bilious resistance.

I know this probably doesn't belong here, but I think we are coming to a conclusion in this thread.  I apologize for the tardiness and disjointed nature of my reply.  After reading the thread in the Site thread I felt as if I was punched in the stomach.  This whole process has been a labor of love for me.  I am sorry if my pushing Sim so has revolted people or fucked up the Forge.  

I am not posting in the GNS forum just to navel gaze.  I am posting here so that a conceptual framework for discussing Sim can be erected so that fruitful dialogues can occur.  I would love to discuss my Sim game experiences and start thinking about how to design Sim facilitating games, but until the framework was up it was useless to do anything else.  While I play Sim, I certainly didn't understand the how's and why's of what we were doing.  The Model, while helpful was not adequate to the task as I found it 16 months ago.

So if I am slow in posting you'll have to excuse for me having lost some heart.  I can understand being written off as somewhat peripheral, but I just can't understand the rancor and venom.  I really am trying to be helpful while pursuing a deep love of mine, but that has mostly been seen not only as generally useless but poisonous.  My apologies.
Title: Re: Replies and apologies
Post by: clehrich on February 16, 2005, 10:13:45 PM
Jay,

Thanks for beginning what I think is probably going to be the denouement of this thread.  Good thread, incidentally, when all is said and done!
Quote from: SilmenumeIf fully agree and support the ideas and terminology of "Situation-Focus" and "CA-relevant action."
I have a nasty feeling that these terms refer to things for which we already have terms.  I also suspect they don't have a hugely wide value outside these narrow issues, and I hate to add more jargon to an already crowded field.  But the concepts are perhaps useful.
QuoteI want to make sure I understand you regarding the role of "fine-tuning details."  If I am reading you correctly you're saying that the "attention" to detail in Sim is the rough Nar equivalent of determining and fixing Premise (but does not include the "making the important decision" part), yes?  It is a vital, necessary, and to some a highly enjoyable process that supports and facilitates the "ideal baseline" (which does include making those "important decisions") of play?  "Ideal" not being prescriptive, bur rather theoretical.  Such attention to details is CA-relevant in Sim because it is necessarily a part of Bricolage (Sit-Focus) itself?  IOW one can't Bricolage without having "things" to work with and this "adding or fining of details" is a process of "refining" or adding "things" or to the stockpile of "objects" that the bricoleur can work with?
I'm not confident about the Nar parallel, but it sounds okay as a rough approximation.  The theoretical/prescriptive distinction in "ideal" is exactly 100% dead-on, and what's more a very unusually precise usage of this term (which is usually used very mushily).  As to bricolage, well, close enough for jazz.  There's a lot more to it than that, but I see what you're getting at and I can live with it for the purpose here.

Incidentally, in French, the verbal form would be bricoler, "to bricole," which is so ugly in English nobody ever uses it, and I gather very rarely in French either.  It's also not exactly clear what it would mean, given the formal analogy.  But this is a side issue, obviously.
QuoteThus to say the players are "focusing on details" is a "tell" of Sim in the same way that players discussing Premise or creating Kickers or designing Spiritual Attributes is a "tell" of Nar?
Errmmm, these comparisons are making me nervous.  I think that's right, but I'm honestly not sure.  As far as the Sim end, which is what's important here, I think what you're saying squares with what I'm saying, yes.
Quote
Quote from: clehrichThe ideal goal is seamlessness. If the Dream were seamless, there would never be any need to break from Situation-Focused play, because the answer to every potential question of fact, however picayune, would already be known to all the players as it is in fact known to the characters...
This lines up well with my experiences where there is a very high premium on the players to be thoroughly knowledgeable in the source materials.  Point in fact we require any player who is with us longer than 6 months to have read the Lord of the Rings.  I understand that is a matter of preference - I am not trying to be prescriptive.
Nice example.  As you say, not in itself an exact description of the range of this, but an example of one narrow sort of such thing.  Yes.
Quote
Quote from: clehrichNow because we have accepted this in advance (which you notice is not typical of Nar or Gam aesthetics), any construction is undesirable.  When we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true.  For example, we the players may not know whether phazer-fire induces current sufficient to wipe a memory disk, but the world already does know this.  It's built-in, a fact of nature.  When we debate the point, we're not inventing something new but figuring out how it always already worked.  The players did not know the answer, but it was already determined.  [Bolding added]
So if I am reading you correctly, there is this "belief" that we as players aren't doing any construction, while in fact we are constructing the Dream.  And that this construction process is not self-same as fine-tuning details, rather that fine-tuning details is a process that aids in the construction process?  Thus it follows that fine-tuning details and the construction of the Dream are not the same thing?  That the baseline of Sim is the "addition" to the pre-existing Dream via Sit-Focus with as much or as little help as needed with the addition of details?  The key here is understanding that while Sit-Focus is the baseline of Sim play (the defining process), it does not necessarily have to be the driving motive behind play.
As a formal or analytical distinction, I think it is necessary to separate "fine-tuning" (refining the structures) from "construction" (using them to build structures), yes.  But the "belief" issue is going to lead you into a very dark tunnel.  The thing is that these things are not distinguished in the doing; in fact, to distinguish them in the doing may possibly screw up the whole process.  Therefore we annul or suppress the distinction in the act in order to achieve the end.  So it's not that we believe that there is no construction, but rather that in order to effect construction we must focus on what isn't construction, in other words supplement perfection rather than build on a foundation.  I'm not sure about the issue of "driving motive," but I'll think about it.  Does it matter here, for you?
QuoteAs an additional note I should add that in the game I play in there are frequent conversations outside of the game about the nature of the "world" and how uncharted areas socially might function.  IOW we discuss how the elves might react to X or what the Dwarfs things about Y.
Fascinating!  If you want to play with the bricolage analogy in tribal cultures, what you're doing is basically picking flowers you don't know well and sitting down with your clan brothers to discuss their characteristics.  That looks like idle speculation, or random curiosity, but what you are really doing is picking up the crap your neighbor left on his lawn, or mucking about in the basement with the bits you've already got to see what they might possibly do in order, when the "real project" comes along, to be able to build your project better.
QuoteIn a strange way I kinda see Sim as a fractal pattern where at any moment we could "stop/focus" at any spot and magnifiy as much of the Dream as we see aesthetically fit via Bricolage with the support of specific details.
Nice analogy.  Yes, I think even Levi-Strauss might buy that one.  That the closer you look, the more detail is found, in part because everything has vast entailments, and in part because the process of looking creates the structure itself.  What Levi-Strauss didn't see, incidentally, is that this applies to the external analyst (like him) as much as to the natives.
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Quote
Quote from: clehrichWhen we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true.  [Underlining and bolding Jay's]
Isn't that interesting.  We construct the additional material, but we treat it as if the information was pre-existing.  It is a fascinating bit of paradox and I do think it is worthy of discussion, but not here, as per Ron's sticky (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14345) in the RPG theory thread.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsPoint #3: the "possible" part means that we often have to say, hey, maybe we don't know enough. We've exposed a crucial or fruitful zone of ignorance, assumption, or need to investigate further. That's good!

Bolding added

I think this paradox regarding that which we as players create as discovering that which already is needs to be further plumbed because it is both an interesting assumption and it frequently gums up the debate on Sim.  However, this is not to be discussed in this thread.
You're right.  That does deserve musing.  I hadn't thought of it in quite this context; thanks for bringing it up.

Hmmmmm.....
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QuoteYou're correct and I have to take full responsibility for employing the term as the foundation of so many of my recent threads without providing an adequate definition which lead to so much pointless confusion.  The problem is that while I understand it generally I am not sufficiently learned to be capable of explaining it effectively.  I see now that Chris has picked up the ball and provided an explanation in the thread entitled Bricolage APPLIED (finally!) (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14371) in the RPG forum.
Side note.  I read The Savage Mind in college, then in grad school, then it was on my qualifying exams, then I read it again while writing my dissertation, and then I have since taught it every semester, 2 classes a semester, for 4 years.  I still don't understand the last two chapters (which I don't teach, thank god).  In my current research, I continue to grapple with parts of it, as well as other works by Levi-Strauss.  I know top professionals who simply refuse to deal with the man because he's too damn hard.  So, I wrote that thread in part to start providing some application, and in part because it's insane to think that Forge readers are going to get the hang of all of it from my musing sketches in a couple of months.  Totally impossible; can't be done.  If your uses were inadequate, they were justifiably so.  I tell my students, "This will probably be the hardest book you ever read in your entire lives," and I am not kidding.  They doubt me, but you, dear Forge readers---DO NOT.  It really is the masterpiece it's cracked up to be.  I expect to be thinking about bits and pieces of it 50 years from now, if I haven't succumbed to total dementia by then.
QuoteMy failed process of argumentation was to try to show that the non "holistic" ideas proposed for Sim actually were non-functional within the framework of the Model.  IOW by showing that "piecemeal" Sim cannot work when examined with the Model, what must be left is that Sim must be "whole."  ....
There are some comments about this in the Bricolage thread, where we might follow it up if you like.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: M. J. Young on February 17, 2005, 11:09:36 PM
I was going to post this yesterday, but decided that it didn't particularly add anything to the discussion; now reading Apparition's comments, I'm inclined to think perhaps I should have.

I think that indeed Apparition has misunderstood situation; it is always the 800 pound gorilla in every game. It's just that understanding situation ties back into understand agendum.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Maarzan on February 18, 2005, 08:23:44 AM
I think is the trick of sim is that it answers the question what goes on less egcentric than the other two CAs. It is not about "how do I feel about this" or about "how can I win here" but about what "happens to the dream we have created at this point of unrest". The char is not the prime star.
Now this version is rather hard to manage so most groups focus on a certain window of the world.
It is also a) more interesting to put the system under stress to look how far someone can go until it breaks and b) it is also more interesting to see it in first view instead of a more theoretical abstracted view from above.
That for chars get generated to testpilot and explore the system from within.
If some fault is found back to the construction desk and repair the problem before continuing.

That for it is also rather easy to train gamists to be test drive monkeys. You just have to drill them that keeping in character is one goal of the game and way to win and seemingly únfair situations are just another increase of difficulty to master.
Story oriented player are more of a problem because they often try to mess with the system parameters instead to keep in the system itself and test it from within.  
Detailed discussing of a different part of the world isn´t leaving situation just refocusing on another part of the greater whole.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 18, 2005, 10:47:38 PM
Hey M. J.,

Your summation on the role and place of Situation certainly squares with my current understanding.

Quote from: M. J. YoungJay, there's one thing I didn't understand from your post. Was that a yes or a no?

I must ask you pardon M. J.  I am uncertain which question you are referring to.  Could you please indicate the question so that I may then give you an unambiguous answer?

Hullo Maarzan,

Quote from:  Maarzan I think is the trick of sim is that it answers the question what goes on less egcentric than the other two CAs. It is not about "how do I feel about this" or about "how can I win here" but about what "happens to the dream we have created at this point of unrest". The char is not the prime star.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with that.  Let me take you last quotation and demonstrate.

...what "happens to the dream we have created at this point of unrest". – is a fair question.  However it can be equally applied to Narrativism and Gamism respectively.

...what "happens to the theme we have created at this point of unrest".

...what "happens to the status of victory we have created at this point of unrest".

The big difference between G/N and S regarding Situation is that in Sim Situation and the Dream are virtually synonymous where as in Gam/Nar certain concepts (Challenge and Premise) can be abstracted and discussed independent of Situation.

Thus in all three cases (CA's) its not necessarily the Character that need be the "star" as much as the interest in the process in general - making decisions about the interaction between Character and Setting.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: M. J. Young on February 18, 2005, 11:36:21 PM
Quote from: Silmenume
Quote from: M. J. YoungJay, there's one thing I didn't understand from your post. Was that a yes or a no?

I must ask you pardon M. J.  I am uncertain which question you are referring to.  Could you please indicate the question so that I may then give you an unambiguous answer?
Sorry. Top of the previous page, I think it was, there was this whole string of posts in which Ron, Mike, Chris (Lerich), and I (and maybe someone else I've forgotten) all said isn't it amazing that everyone here agrees about what Sim is, maybe clearly for the first time? and then everyone said, yeah, but does Jay agree?, and that's kind of what we were waiting on when you returned.

--M. J. Young
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Maarzan on February 19, 2005, 03:01:47 AM
Quote from: SilmenumeHey M. J.,

…what "happens to the theme we have created at this point of unrest".

…what "happens to the status of victory we have created at this point of unrest".


The first version I can understand if all of them are pursuing the same moral question collectively. Theoretical possible.
Probably my view got colored by seeing a tendency of people saying they pay Nar to try to enforce their prefered answer through metagaming.
But ifthis is not part of Nar I am at a loss where NAR differs from SIM with focus on character psycho or probably added exploration of the players mind and motives.

A situation like "where do we stand with the theme" would be rather common in shared story telling but that was not what Nar is about if I got it right. On the other hand people telling stories do already know what they want so it is not a question they would ask, or just for rhetorical purposes.

The second one sounds silly for me. It is still the victory of the char and thus the player, be it alone or as a group that is the point. Imagine a gamist group finding delight in moving the focus away from their group to explore the this time really inevitable death force that the big guy they have pissed off is building out of their reach.
In nar it could be the question about "is a clean subconscious really worth risking inavoidable extinction" (collaboration or fruitless resistance).
In sim it answers the question about the possible outcome of such a setting and any fitting answer is OK.
Gamist would get the fits I think.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Silmenume on February 28, 2005, 08:10:26 PM
Hey M. J.,

I apologize for the extreme tardiness of my response.  I have been taking some time away from the Forge so I have not been particularly diligent in responding.  As regards to your question, "Do I agree that we all agree?"  I think we do, but I am not certain.  To the best of my recollection it Mike seemed to be operating under the understanding that I would not agree with Chris.  As I indicated above I did agree with Chris very strongly.  If Mike is in general agreement with Chris, and that his understanding of my position was based upon me ineffectively stating my arguments, then yes I think we are all in general agreement.
Title: 1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim
Post by: Mike Holmes on March 01, 2005, 12:02:31 PM
Yep, apparently I was incorrect in my assumption.

That said, I can't help wondering if we're only all agreeing because we don't fully understand each other. Which would be odd, usually misunderstanding causes disagreement. But it might be the case.

But I'm certainly not going to persue it. As I've said, perception of agreement here might be the best that we can hope for.

Mike