OK, I'm a newcomer to the forge, having stumbled onto the Lumply site and from there meandered over to here, and read up on a bunch of Ron Edwards' essays. From there I began corresponding with Ron, while also following a lot of threads on the forums. I had this written up to send to Ron directly, but then decided it might be a good topic to bring to the Forge Community directly, as an entry to the forums, and as a means of generating more varied feedback. So here we are:
I've been thinking over the three CAs and their relationship and I think I may have pegged what's been bugging me. See, I really grok the Big Model as a whole, but I'm not sure I agree with where all the parts are placed. In particular, I am really starting to feel that Simulationism is *not* equal to the other CAs, or more to the point, that it's not the same kind of thing (yes, I know that Ron and others have said as much, but I think the difference is more significant than it is commonly credited). Each CA has its own emphasis, Gamism's being accomplishment/competition and Narrativism's being premise/story. But Simulationism's emphasis, Exploration, is not like the others in that it mustbe present even when not emphasized. If we're not exploring anything, we're not roleplaying, even if the Exploration is only a platform for tactical feats of addressing moral problems. Exploration IS the experience of the Shared Imagined Space. Without that SIS, we're just playing a boardgame (in the case of Gamism) or philosophically pontificating (in the case of Narrativism). Heck, even most boardgames involves some degree of Exploration; you're "simulating" the world of real estate speculation when you play Monopoly, or the thrill of military conquest when you play Risk, even if you don't put a whole lot of effort into vividly imagining it. But Achievement and Premise are optional: groups can (and do) roleplay for years without addressing any personal crisis or moral dilemma in any real or dynamic way, and it's possible (though by no means prevalent) to play without any sort of competitive factor or tactical element. PrimeTime Adventures strikes me as one example of a system geared toward the latter extreme. So Ron's statement that the three CAs float on a sea of Exploration really means that Simulationism is an emphasis on the foundation itself, rather than the things which you can build on that foundation, and as such is not the same kind of animal.
I know Ron mentions a similar claim by Scarlet Jester, and claims that Sim is equal because it can "over-ride either Gamist or Narrativist priorities." But while I agree that it's an important element, I don't think it's on the same *level* with the other two. It doesn't belong on the same tier. Rather the model should be something like: [Exploration (subset:Simulationism) [CA (Gamism or Narrativism)[all the other stuff]]] with the understanding that Simulationism can override the Agenda in the lower tier, just as a breakdown in the Social Contract in a higher tier will severely hinder any activities in the lower tier.
The primary ramification of this rearranging of concepts is the realization that Simulationism is, in effect, the "default" mode of roleplaying. It's simply what happens if people get together, create characters, and insert them into the SIS and play out their actions and circumstances, without trying to achieve spectacular feats or gain tactical advantage, or to inject meaning into the Explored events or wrestle with thorny problems. As Ron has said, when Gamism enters play, it tends to dominate Simulationism, either breaking down the causality of the "pocket world" or using that causality as an arena for competition. And when I was confused about how do differentiate Narr from Sim with pre-loaded issues, Ron basically said that any time you actively address premise, through dynamic character choice, you are playing Narr, and no longer Sim. In other words, until you take that step, you're playing Simulationist, but as soon as you add anything that's not mere Exploration, you're then playing Gamist or Narrativist. Simulationism is defined by the absence of other elements, more than the presence of Exploration.
A footnote: In light of the above observations, I think the suggestion that "both Gamist and Narrativist priorities are clear and automatic. . .whereas I think Simulationist priorities must be trained" is best understood as arising from most people's tendency to inject either Achievement or Meaning into leisure activities (even passive ones, vicariously: "That movie kicked ass!" Vs. "That movie was so touching."), and roleplaying being no exception. Exploration for its own sake I can definitely see as an ingrown mindset that has been fostered as the hobby evolved, and this can of course put off many newcomers who want to know, "why does one play?" it's almost like playing football without points or writing novels without plot. It's great if one wants to do that, but it's certainly not very clear or inviting to aspiring footballers or novelists to put forth that unique version as the whole of the activity.
So, any thoughts? Agree, disagree? Have I hit on something significant, or just stated the obvious? I do fee it's a significant observation because
even if there's no contradiction between this and the Theory as it stands, I feel the actual text of the GNS essays does point one in another direction. But maybe it's just me.
Peace,
Alls I can say Joel, is old news.
I'm glad that your reading of the theory has progressed to the point that you can make as well articulated an evaluation of the above, however. I mean that sincerely since the theory can at times be opaque and I welcome new folks who are dedicated enough to reach the point where you are now.
I suggest you do a search on the Beeg Horseshoe and on Sim1 Sim2 which will connect you about a bazillion pages of threads that look similar to your own.
Things not GNS (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8157&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=sim1&start=15)
and
Clarifying Simulation (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8114&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=sim1&start=30)
are particularly productive threads to revisit.
Maybe some folks will pop in with some particularly solid links also.
Keep in mind the following two important points, however.
1) those threads are older and opinions represented there may have changed.
2) don't comment in those old threads, but if something in one particularly grabs you, link to it and start a new one.
Other than that, I don't think I have anything more to say at this point that I haven't already said previously. For the record, my opinion on the Sim1/Sim2 split I espouse in the above links hasn't really changed. I still think that alot of play that gets (mis)labeled Simulationism is really just Exploration sans Creative Agenda.
I'm inclined to think the agenda of simulationism, is learning. And since learning is very passive, rather than doing something (like with gamism or nar), it seems not to be doing anything at all. And thus not an agenda.
Just a personal observation:
With a sim supporting design, players will often slip into either gamist or narrativist mode for awhile, but seem to eventually bounce back to sim for a while before drifting again. I'm not sure that this is as readily true for designs specifically meant to support narr or gam.
Basically, self identified simmers ( like yers truly) are greedy devils that want a bit of everything...
And the attempt to provide a bit of everything is both the beauty and bane of sim supporting design.
We don't want to fall into mistaking the existance of Exploration for simulationist creative agenda. Exploration exists in all role-play; the simulationist CA does not. Remember, creative agenda is defined by what a group prioritizes. The simulationist group will choose to abandon opportunities for player challenge or addressing a premise if doing so would violate the ideal they are trying to vivify.
Quote from: MelinglorA footnote: In light of the above observations, I think the suggestion that "both Gamist and Narrativist priorities are clear and automatic. . .whereas I think Simulationist priorities must be trained" is best understood as arising from most people's tendency to inject either Achievement or Meaning into leisure activities (even passive ones, vicariously: "That movie kicked ass!" Vs. "That movie was so touching."), and roleplaying being no exception. Exploration for its own sake I can definitely see as an ingrown mindset that has been fostered as the hobby evolved, and this can of course put off many newcomers who want to know, "why does one play?" it's almost like playing football without points or writing novels without plot. It's great if one wants to do that, but it's certainly not very clear or inviting to aspiring footballers or novelists to put forth that unique version as the whole of the activity.
So, any thoughts? Agree, disagree? Have I hit on something significant, or just stated the obvious? I do fee it's a significant observation because
even if there's no contradiction between this and the Theory as it stands, I feel the actual text of the GNS essays does point one in another direction. But maybe it's just me.
Well, it's not just you. It's just that these have been expressed before in reaction to Ron's essay, but the results of that discussion have never been put up into a Forge essay of their own. In case you're not familiar with it, I'd recommend the Theory Topics section of RandomWiki. Specifically, the Beeg Horseshoe theory entry which has links to earlier threads.
http://random.average-bear.com/TheoryTopics/BeegHorseshoeTheory
This is a very nice restatement of the Beeg Horseshoe theory. Welcome to the Forge!
I don't agree with the idea that "Simulationism is negative", though. I think that the persistent recurrence of the belief that this is so is to some degree an artifact of our theoretical abstractions and the correct claim that Simulationism is a redoubled focus on explanation.
In practice, though, the difference is between using exploration as a tool to get to something else, and exploration for its own sake, in terms of the social rewards and interest that get expressed by the various gamers at the table. This is a fuzzy line in some games, but not in many. The easiest examples are games with a Sim CA based on some existing and well-fleshed out secondary worlds: Call of Cthulhu, Middle Earth RP, Star Trek can all be played this way. You see at the table that the majority of the social rewards for playing come, essentially, from being able to celebrate and constantly reconfirm one's knowledge of the world in question. Recognizing a shoggoth from snippets of description, knowing which sub-species of elves someone is from from the kind of clothes he wears, getting minor engineering trivia from the episodes right: group laughter, knowing smiles, status in the group apportioned by knowledge of the setting and its conventions, etc. This activity may be the same thing that we all do, 'squared', but the social reward system that supports it, and the social dynamics of play, are pretty darn different.
This is why it's a CA: because exploration is getting socially rewarded, dominantly, even when it's not being used for anything else.
Some, though by no means all, people who love Glorantha, Harn, and Tekumel love them because like literary worlds they support this kind of play through the mass of loving detail accumulated for them over time.
Does this make sense?
Quote from: komradebobJust a personal observation:
With a sim supporting design, players will often slip into either gamist or narrativist mode for awhile, but seem to eventually bounce back to sim for a while before drifting again. I'm not sure that this is as readily true for designs specifically meant to support narr or gam.
As the Horseshoe suggest, it's not really slippage from sim, it's movement between challenge and theme (or colour and character maybe).
Heya,
Welcome to the Forge! I'd just like to pose as a question, "Why did you expect all three to be alike?" I personally don't see any need for any creative agenda to look, feel, or act similar to any other. They are completely different preferences of play. It works out that Gamism and Narrativism happen to be similar in certain ways, but it wasn't always thought to be so. Go back (if you can, not sure anymore) to ealier threads here and especially at Gaming Outpost. In the begining, Gamism wasn't given much thought at all and certainly wasn't seen as the twin brother of Narrativism. In my view, non-alike-ness doesn't mean non-existance. :)
Peace,
-Troy
Hello, and welcome.
As others have suggested, what you're proposing looks a lot like Beeg Horseshoe. And very well articulated, I might add. In general, I think Beeg Horseshoe is a useful way of looking at Sim, but I don't think it's the whole story.
Below is a link to a thread which espouses the take on Simulationism that I tend to favor.
If you include the linked threads, which you should, it's a lot - and I mean a lot - of heavy reading. You may or may not consider it worth your time. I found it fascinating and insightful.
Sim is Bricolage and makes myth - comments? (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13909)
Thanks for the feedback, everyone!
Quote from: ValamirAlls I can say Joel, is old news.
Yeah, I had a feeling that was the case. I frankly just don't have all the time in the wold to catch up on five million pages of archive threads, so I just weighed in knowing my thoughts were probably not original. Thanks for confirming it.
Quote from: ValamirI'm glad that your reading of the theory has progressed to the point that you can make as well articulated an evaluation of the above, however. I mean that sincerely since the theory can at times be opaque and I welcome new folks who are dedicated enough to reach the point where you are now.
Thanks, I'm happy with it myself. It took a lot of pondering (and back-and-forth with Ron) to get over the false dichotomy of "I must buy every word of this system exactly as expressed" vs. "This is all crap, forget this." It was about being able to find a position that I'm personally comfortable with but which still understands and can make use of Big Model cocepts. So. . .score! :)
Quote from: ValamirI suggest you do a search on the Beeg Horseshoe and on Sim1 Sim2 which will connect you about a bazillion pages of threads that look similar to your own.
I've seen the Beeg Horseshoe referenced, but didn't know what it was. I'll look forward to checking it out, as well as the other links everyone has provided.
Quote from: SeanI don't agree with the idea that "Simulationism is negative", though. I think that the persistent recurrence of the belief that this is so is to some degree an artifact of our theoretical abstractions and the correct claim that Simulationism is a redoubled focus on explanation.
I scanned through my post and I don't think I ever caslled Sim "negative." What I did say was "Simulationism is defined by the
absence of other elements, more than the presence of Exploration." But even if I had used the "N" word, I would stand by that as it's not a pejorative in this sense, and not Sim itself that's "negative"; rather, its focus is defined
negatively by whaT it doesn't include. In a way, Sim is "Exploration plus nothing." in contrast to Narr and Gam's "Exploration plus
this." And I'm not necessarily coming down on that, so pardon me if my descrition sounded that way.
Quote from: Troy_CostisickI'd just like to pose as a question, "Why did you expect all three to be alike?" I personally don't see any need for any creative agenda to look, feel, or act similar to any other.
Aside from a basic (and often misleading) human tendency to order randomness, I don't necessarily
expect them to look alike--except that the Forge Essays seem to imply that they should, by placing them in the same tier within the Big Model. If they go in the same "place" and fulfil the same function, it seems reasonable that they'd behave in somewhat the same way. SO all this is my way of saying, "hey, waitaminute, they
aren't alike, and we don't have to pretend they are." Of course, I'm a bit late ion observing that, but hey, what can ya do? It does seem worth belaboring a bit, because far from a mere semantic or mental exercise, deciding where an element fits in the larger system can cary vital implications for how that element behaves and interacts with other elements.
Quote from: Troy_CostisickIn my view, non-alike-ness doesn't mean non-existance. :)
Agreed. I'm just jimmying with it's position and by implication it's relationship to other concepts.
Anyway, thanks again everyone for the nice, helpful feedback. I think on one level I just needed a hearty "No, you're not full of crap" from other thinkers to affirm my thought processes and allow for adjustment/correction. That, and something to break the ice as a Forge poster. :)
Also, it's wonderful to have some folks point the way to some reccommended reading, since this informational landscape is vast and overwhelming without an appropriate compass. So much obliged.
Peace,
Quote from: MelinglorIn a way, Sim is "Exploration plus nothing." in contrast to Narr and Gam's "Exploration plus this." And I'm not necessarily coming down on that, so pardon me if my descrition sounded that way.
Actually I think of Sim as exploration of colour and/or character. Either of these can happen at the same time as N or G. It's the second impossible thing before breakfast.
Pure N or pure G on the other hand, seem to me, to imply an absence of interest in the character as an individual. In pure G, it's the player's interests that are uppermost.
So Powergaming, for me, seems to me to be a confusion between player and character in which the desires of the former are expressed in the SIS as the desires of the latter, that explores colour or character in a way that is wholly subservient to the Gamist drive. So that acquiring some piece of in game knowledge is really about increasing the power of the character in a metagaming sense rather than anything about exploration of the SIS. Powergamers in mixed groups often claim that their desires and those of the character utterly coincide but this leads to conflicts as it is obvious to others that a certain amount of forcing is taking place.
For example, in a game of RQ, a healer, barred from violence through cult strictures but also protected from violence by the same code, would carry around a spear with a cork on the end in case she ran into trouble.
In pure N, I'm not sure you'd even have a character.
What about Exploration of setting? of Situation? Aren't these canditates for Sim focus as well?
I do think you raise a couple of good points--one, that "pure" Narr or Gam implies a lack of connection with (and fleshing out of) the character. I think that's one thing that turns people off to, for instance, Narr , because it starts to sound like your character is just a Puppet for Prfemise, exactly analagous to Hard Core Gam with extensive Pawn Stance.
This leads into the other point of yours that I like, which is that Sim exploration can happen "at the same time as N or G." (I'm a bit confused at your "impossible thing" reference though: isn't the "Impossible thing" Forgespeak for undesirable cognitive dissonance? Thank you, though, for the opportunity to use the phrase "cognitive dissonance." :) )This is an integral component to the misgivings I've stated in this thread, and one of the logical problems that confronts me when I consider the "all or nothing" style claims made aboiut which CA exists in a given play instance is the simple question "how often must you (e.g.) address premise to qualify as playing (e.g.) Narr?" Presumably not every round of every session. So how much? Once per session? Once per half-dozen? Whole dozen? Once a year? Obviously the any answer will be rather subjective, though extreme infrequency should pretty obviously be a "disqualifier." But within reason, shouldn't frequency be keyed to the pacing of a particular group? I mean, unless a given character's life is JUST CRAMMED CHOCK FULL of moral dilemmas, angsty conundrums, and immediate threats to his way of life, there just won't be room to "address premise" at every turn. Consider:
"You walk into the bar. There's a greasy bartender who nods at you, and some guys playing pool, ignoring you."
"Um, well, gee, I just order a drink I guess."
"Aww, man! You TOTALLY blew the chance to address premise for your judgmentalism issues with personal hygiene, or your secret pleasure at humiliating overconfident pricks at pool."
"Well, gee, sorry, I think right now my guy just wants a drink."
"Tch! Simulationist! Get away from my table!"
An absurd conversation, yes, but while I would trust most mature adults to handle it more tactfully, that's the logical end of the idea that you have to Story Now or Step On Up at all times to qualify for N or G. But is there anything wrong with our hypothetical barfly NOt addressing premise at that particular moment, yet still claiming a Narrativist goal overall? We'll asume for the sake of argument that he does address Premise when fe feels it appropriate. Is there any reason we can't just call that Narr instead of some kind of SiiiiiiiiiiiimNARRsiiiiiiiiiiiiiiimNARRsiiiiiiiim hybrid?
Wow, sure went off, eh? I just meant to post a couple short quips. I guess it's late and the internal censors aren't firing. But hey, that's a pretty good representation of my raw feelings on this component of the Theory, and the core reason I'm looking at moving Sim over to another box entirely.
Must sleep Catch ya later.
Peace,
Joel: remember that creative agenda is defined by the instance of play. The agenda labels are also used for players, gaming groups, sessions or game designs, but in all these instances what is really meant is not that this particular thing is narrativist or whatever, but that this particular thing favors this particular creative agenda given a single instance of play. This is, however, an abstraction.
So, in practice you usually get a mix of the creative agendas. Most games, for example, support all three to some extent, giving rise to different drifts of the game to different agendas. As an example, Call of Cthulhu supports a kind of simulationism in keeping up a very historical feel of society, equipment, adventure content and such, not to speak of the whole "celebration of Lovecraft" thing. However, the same game also has pretty strong gamist elements in pitting the player strike team against a codified array of monster challenges, with explicit in-game mission of winning at all costs. Thus one could say that CoC is a "simulationist game" or that it is a "gamist game", but what you'd really mean is that "it's possible to drift CoC into focusing on only one of these at a time."
It's the same with a given play session or player: you might pick one agenda in one instance and another in a second instance, because of any multitude of reasons (usually because the situation doesn't connect you to your preferred agenda). Agendas are only singular in a single instance of play, because (we assume) you can't want two of them at once.
Did that clarify it at all?
Quote from: Eero TuovinenAgendas are only singular in a single instance of play, because (we assume) you can't want two of them at once.
That was my second impossible thing. (I'm not really aware of the Forgespeak in this instance, it was a reference to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe - I've just seen H2G2).
I think the horseshoe idea shows that you can have two agendas at the same time. This is common in the real world. I think Bill Clinton called it compartmentalisation, and what about the kids, career, having it all debate? So why not in roleplaying.
I think G is particularly enlightening in this respect. If your character is involved in a contest in the game, regardless of the overall GNS angle, you can be trying to win and explore the premise of how far you'd go to win (and in a manner that explores character if you want to chuck in Sim).
I'm sure there are instances of pure G, N or S but I see much less of them than I do some entangled mess of them together. An entangled mess that chops and changes as the game progresses. And as Joel points out, sometimes it's almost none of them (although I might put in a bid for 'light sim' for the bartender experience).
Steve, let me elaborate on my understanding of the "many agendas at once" thing.
First, why I think it's significant: creative agendas are very much characterized by their property of being incompatible with one another. You could say that the only good reason for defining such agendas in one way instead of another is the incompatibility hypothesis: two creative agendas are distinct only insofar as their simultaneous existence causes GNS-incoherence. Without that incoherence there really isn't much reason to differentiate between the agendas. This is where most of suggestions for a fourth mode fail, because they don't fulfill the incompatibility hypothesis in actual play, and thus aren't really separate creative agendas.
Now, when you say that two agendas are possible in the same instance of play (I assume that this is what you mean by "same time", because otherwise I agree with you utterly, as evidenced by all the talk about creative agenda appearing as pure phenomenon only in instances of play), you're refuting the above incompatibility hypothesis. If two agendas can be functionally expressed at once, there's not much point in creative agendas in the first place apart from gratuitous labeling of stuff. This is why I think this is an interesting and important bit of GNS theory and not just a matter for empiristic experimentation.
OK, that being cleared up, next I'll say something about why I think it's not possible to express two creative agendas at once. (This has been discussed previously, by the by, if somebody wants to dig up links.) The key idea is to recognize that GNS describes agenda behavior in terms of player choice, not player psychology. Not all choices are agenda-significant, because they don't all address an agenda. For example, the choice of wearing blue socks to the session probably won't address any of the creative agendas, even when it's a choice. The crux is that we wouldn't call the choice to pick blue socks a choice expressing all three agendas, even if it's not clearly a choice for one of them.
This holds for your gamist example, too, Steve: the creative agenda of a player is not ever interpreted from his psychology, so we never need to consider whether he chooses to win because of gam, nar or sim priorities. If winning satisfies all of those priorities, that just means that the choice to win isn't a GNS-significant choice. You've opted to characterize this situation as the player holding all three agendas at once, but I think that that's psychologically inexact; a player in such a situation doesn't really have to make a choice between his priorities, so he naturally keeps the options open and doesn't commit to any agenda. So rather than saying that he's both gamist and narrativist, I'd say that he's neither at that moment. He's just doing base Exploration.
The real agenda situations come up when you have multiple options that exclude each other. These are the situations where you cannot express two agendas at once, because you can't pick both options. They are also the only situations relevant for GNS, because GNS is only about considerations of agenda discordance. The stuff that all folks can agree about, that's Exploration level basics. We're at the agenda level only when you can make "wrong" choices.
So, in summation: you can't express all GNS agendas at once, because if you do, your action is base Exploration and acceptable for all roleplaying. Nobody's going to complain about your socks at the table, because nobody has an agenda against them.
This made me think, though, about the case of expressing two agendas while excluding only one. I can imagine how this is possible in single instances, and it's certainly a GNS significant moment because it excludes that one agenda. Even then I think that one of the agendas is more important for the player psychologically, but as I just explained, psychology has little to do with GNS analysis. So perhaps combining agendas in a single instance of play is possible in observation? I don't know. Even in that case another instance of play could come up and require choice between those two agendas, so incoherence would still be possible.
Ralph - do you see any difference between 'exploration without an agenda' and 'incoherent play'? How does your view relate to Freitag's 'Zilchplay'? Just curious.
Melinglor wrote:
QuoteI scanned through my post and I don't think I ever caslled Sim "negative." What I did say was "Simulationism is defined by the absence of other elements, more than the presence of Exploration." But even if I had used the "N" word, I would stand by that as it's not a pejorative in this sense, and not Sim itself that's "negative"; rather, its focus is defined negatively by whaT it doesn't include. In a way, Sim is "Exploration plus nothing." in contrast to Narr and Gam's "Exploration plus this."
You mistake my issue.
I think that while this is a correct characterization of the Sim CA, it's misleading outisde the context of an appreciation of what Creative Agenda is and the way it's supported by the social interactions between the group. The particular way it misleads people is by making them think that Beeg Horseshoe or something like it is true. The Ron Edwards/M.J. Young argument to the effect that 'decisions not to prioritize this other stuff' make Sim amount to a CA even though there's no unique isolable positive element, is in my view similarly misleading, though if it were sound (as opposed to merely valid, which it is) it would indeed be sufficient to establish Sim as a separate CA.
Simulationist play occurs when a play-group's overall 'focus', in the sense of the stuff they mutually seek out and mutually support and reward one another for seeking out and exploring, centrally involves exploring itself, rather than doing something with the exploration.
Simulationist play is the kind of play that fulfills a Sim CA. If your group's play-goal is to explore, and you understand that consciously or unconsciously well enough to support it and to choose or tailor a game system to support it, then you're likely to be fulfilled by this kind of play.
This kind of play exists, is common, and is completely functional for groups that enjoy it. So there's nothing 'second class' or 'unequal' about a CA that seeks it out; and it's not 'default roleplaying' as you said in your initial post.
The fundamental basis of the Big Model is that there's this group of people together talking and interacting. All the concepts need to be understood in terms of that. I'm of the opinion that the recurring animadversions against Simulationism are artifacts of the structure of the theory when what the theory's about gets temporarily forgotten.
Or to put it another way: Exploration is what you're doing when you roleplay, within the context of the social interaction (which however is a product of the individuals making up that social group, which leads us into one of the thorniest metaphysical problems of the social sciences, but let's not go there). Your CA is what you're doing with it, what you want to get out of it, your goal or focus. That CA is going to be satisfied by a certain kind of play. Play whose social and exploratory rewards come out of an intense focus on particular aspects of exploration, without getting into Step on Up or Story now, is Simulationist play. So I want to say that even though the CA itself may be 'defined by an absence' in terms of the theory, in terms of the kind of play that satisfies it the rewards and reinforcements are just as present, real, etc. as those of any other CA.
Call of Cthulhu in high school provided the most enjoyable Simulationist play I ever experienced. We played very close to the Lovecraft source material, which we were all reading, in between taking that cheap-ass 'Necronomicon' down to the graveyard to try to summon ghosts and the like, and every adventure was engineered to kill or drive insane most or all of the party, and everyone knew they were going to die, and it was all good, because the goal was to explore color and a certain kind of 'story' and to scare ourselves a little with it (the 'what if' pleasure of exploration).
It's interesting though that one of the reasons we experienced CoC as profoundly liberating at the time in that group was that most of that group's prior play had been pretty gamist insofar as it was not incoherent. It was really good for that group of guys at that time to just sit around and play a game where Step on Up was more or less completely turned off. But now I'm drifting, so I'll sign off.
If you have two or more CA going in the same play-session firing more or less at random, that's called Incoherent play. Incoherence sometimes leads to painful play-experiences, including boredom, and sometimes does not.
There's also a thing where you Drift in an organized way between CA. A Champions game (one GM, me and one other player) was like this. Big focus on exploration most of the time, punctuated by battles in which naked Step on Up was the focus of everything. I think this was pretty deliberate with the three of us: the GM in this game had created a really interesting and elaborate setting that all three of us were interested in developing and exploring, but periodically we needed to beat our chests and yell. Because the three of us had been playing together off and on for like a decade by the time this game rolled around, we knew each other really well, so managed drift between Sim and Gam was pretty functional for us. This is the closest experience I have a 'supporting mode', but it's still not 'congruent play', which doesn't exist, but I digress.
So there's plain Incoherence and there's Drift and there's managed Drift. These are what 'expressing two CA at once' come to.
The 'instances of play' thing is interesting but also hard and confusing and I don't think we really know completely how to talk about it yet. In one sense play is obviously not 'made up out of its instances' in the way that a house is made out of bricks, yet in another sense there's nothing else for it to be made up of.
When you listen to music you might think of notes and passages as 'instances' of the music, and in a way you'd be right. But our experience of listening to music crucially involves also the anticipation of where the music is going, as when e.g. Beethoven plays around returning to the chord he started with for a long time without actually getting back there.
Ron's analogy to improvisational jazz is thus very apt, because in roleplaying we're working with this anticipation all the time, but we're also making the music as we go. So the 'instances of play' are forward-looking in the sense that 'instances of music' are, but we're creating the forward that they're going to. Together, as a group.
Quote from: Sean
The 'instances of play' thing is interesting but also hard and confusing and I don't think we really know completely how to talk about it yet. In one sense play is obviously not 'made up out of its instances' in the way that a house is made out of bricks, yet in another sense there's nothing else for it to be made up of.
Actually, Ron had this interesting idea at some point, I don't know if it's current: an "instance of play" always equates to a cycle of the reward mechanism, whatever it is. So you can't analyze play modally without seeing the rewards the player gets (or doesn't get) from the action, and if you take a big enough chunk of play, you might accidentally have multiple reward cycles, in which case there's potentially several GNS modes evident in the chunk of play you're considering.
Anyway, I agree with Sean about those session-wide concepts like incoherence and such. Certainly on that level the theory describes boredom and pain, caused by not getting your agenda fix. I'm just not sure how well that translates to the hypothetical instance of play catering to several modes. Could be possible.
Then again, considering those reward mechanisms... can a reward mechanism award currency that's valuable in several modes? Conseivably, because the most common reward is perhaps generally increased power over where the game goes, like in Universalis. Or is the reward cycle only ended after you've spent those reward coins? Are those Universalis coins even agenda neutral rewards? I could imagine an argument that the method of achieving the reward colors it's value. Gamist not appreciating a bonus gained by playing "wrong", or something. Dunno, just blabbing.
Hello,
Clarifications, speaking as current Forge participant rather than essay-author:
1. Eero, you have described my current thinking: the unit of play is a reward cycle. How that relates to sessions/scenarios will vary, but "moments" of play (i.e. a particular announcement, sentence, etc) are far too brief for CA-based analysis.
2. The "absence" concept of Sim is no longer my view - I now am considering Sim to be based on the input/output principle, that actual play is essentially a celebratory and confirmatory act toward some starting material or ideas. ("Genre" is not a valid paraphrase for this concept; I'm talking about what a group might do with a genre; also people might be interested in causal principles rather than genre trappings)
Best,
Ron
Ron:
It seems like your ideas have evolved over time. Is there any chance that you could be convinced to do a "State of the Theory 2005" essay?
NO. Sorry man, but the guy who wrote the essays is frozen in time with those essays, and the guy who just posted is me, today. I tried to lay out why I'm doing it that way in the forum sticky.
Another way to look at it is that the essays say what they say, and as of now, I'm just another guy who continues to think about them, in the same boat as the rest of you.
One last point: some of what I'm saying today is what I meant to say in the essays but didn't have the words for it, and some of what I'm saying today is altogether new stuff. Which is which, I am not sure.
Back to the topic.
Best,
Ron
Thank you, Ralph, for calling attention to the thread
Clarifying Simulationism (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8114&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=sim1&start=0); I've repeated the link because for some reason the other link opened to the third page, and I (rather immodestly perhaps) think my opening statement on the first page is important to the discussion.
Melinglor: all simplifications of the model are flawed in some way, but most are useful in another way. I'm going to offer a simplification that might be useful.
- Gamism is exploration of all things with emphasis on meeting challenges and proving your ability to the other participants.
- Narrativism is exploration of all things with emphasis on creating theme by addressing premise toward the creation of a story that has meaning to all the participants.
- Simulationism is the exploration of all things with emphasis on the discovery/creation of new facets and unexplored aspects of the shared imagined space, new ways to combine information that yields new information.[/list:u]
Emphasis, in all cases, means simultaneously "that which the individual player finds fun" and "that which is encouraged by the gaming group through social reinforcement as the correct way to play". If these two are not the same, you have dysfunction--the player is trying to have fun doing something that the rest of the group regards as inappropriate.
Gamists will make discoveries and may even create themes; that's not what the game is about.
Narrativists may well rise to challenges and certainly will make discoveries; again, that's not what the game is about.
Simulationists almost certainly will face the occasional challenge and may well address premises which create themes; that is not what the game is about.
And like Ron, I think that the idea of Sim being "decisions not to prioritize this other stuff" does not represent my view exactly, although I can see it having been a way of describing my past statements. Narrativism and gamism are equally "decisions not to prioritize this other stuff". In all cases, this is by default--in the same way that deciding to go to Disneyworld in Florida is inherently a decision not to go to Disneyworld in California, in that the two objectives are (at one moment in time) mutually exclusive. Yes, in deciding to pursue exploration toward discovery (simulationism) you decide not to pursue theme or challenge; but the other agenda do the same in excluding each other and simulationism when they prioritize their emphases.
I hope this is helpful.
Footnotes:
The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast is a phrase used around here to refer to the conflict in rules texts which claim that a player fully controls his character while the referee fully controls the story. Details of that are anticipated in an upcoming Places to Go, People to Be article on theory, but you'd have to ask GBSteve when that's likely to hit the web.
After that, the three-episode series will conclude with a look at Creative Agenda, and I hope that together the set will provide a reasonably good primer on the current state of the theory, at least as I understand it. (The first, System and the Shared Imagined Space (http://ptgptb.org/0026/theory101-01.html), is available, and covers the Lumpley Principle, credibility, stance, and authority, touching briefly on ritual and social contract. I hope you find them helpful.
--M. J. Young
Eero, you're post cleared up a lot of things for me. So the Creative Agendas are defined as being incompatible. Fair enough. I suppose then that the difficult part is to say what they actually are in such a way that this property holds. So that everything can be put into one of three boxes.
Next you say that there isn't always a GNS Creative Agenda. So these three boxes don't work for all play. Some play is outside the GNS partitioning. It's exploring without an agenda. Is it possible that most play in some groups is like this?
I'm also not sure about the agenda discordance. I thought GNS had moved beyond being a diagnostic tool. It's certainly not talked about that way by many people.
Sean talks about incoherence. Whilst I can see that creative agenda should be exclusive for one player, I'm not sure that players in the same group having different agendas is necessarily destructive. Unless the term 'incoherent' just means 'having different agendas' rather than the more usual indication that there is a problem. I'm sure there might be a problem, but not necessarily so.
We've got a powergamer in our group. Everyone is aware of his agenda and the games, the succesful ones, are couched in such a way that pander to this agenda without destroying the agendas of others. This seems to be what is called 'drift' or 'managed drift'. However that seems to suppose that the creative agenda of the group is unified but changes, whereas I can still see the case for different agendas managed to avoid destroying each others agenda. I think both things are possible and the reason for this is that whilst the SIS is shared, the sharing does not occur in any objective way. Each player is responsible for their own approach to the SIS, through their creative agenda.
Reward cycles I'm a bit confused about. These are when a payout is made in the currency of the game? Easily definable for MLwM but rather more difficult for other more complex games. And not necessarily relevant to the creative agenda, especially if your into Sim.
Maybe incoherence is more about rewards. I can see several CA existing in the same group, as long as each gets the appropriate reward. There is definitely scope for problems if that is not the case.
Looking at MJ Young's linked post suggest to me that it's not always easy to tell in which box players are situated, especially sim ones. Not in the least because the creative agenda is private an only accessible to others through the choices the player makes.
As for the next 101, from which I really should have remembered the "impossible thing", we're aiming for a pre-Origins issue which gives us a couple of weeks.
Quote from: GB SteveI think the horseshoe idea shows that you can have two agendas at the same time. This is common in the real world. I think Bill Clinton called it compartmentalisation, and what about the kids, career, having it all debate? So why not in roleplaying.
Why not indeed? This is precisely what I'm wondering, and part of finding out involves examining minutia like how CAs break down decision by decision, gasme event by game event. Hence my question about how often the play goal (Step on Up or Story Now, at least, since the "Right to Dream"
continues constantly as long as Exploration takes place) needs to rear its ugly ugly head for that CA to truly be called the priority for the session (or whatever).
Unfortunately as Euro says the primary use of the Theory is addressing Incompatibility. So either A) you and I are missing something, B) The Theory's all wet 'cause the incompatibility doesn't exist after all, or C) the incompatibility is there, but is a little more complex than "There's G, there's N, and there's S, and they don't get along." I'm leaning toward (C). Just not sure where all the pieces fit yet.
Quote from: SeanYou mistake my issue.
Quote from: SeanThis kind of play exists, is common, and is completely functional for groups that enjoy it. So there's nothing 'second class' or 'unequal' about a CA that seeks it out; and it's not 'default roleplaying' as you said in your initial post.
I dont think I have mistaken your issue; you seemed to take "negative" as a pejorative term on my part, and as shown here you're still doing it. I'm not trying to make Simulationism into a "Second CLass CItizen," or demote it or belittle it somehow. My point is simply that Sim seems to be "Exploration Plus Nothing Else", and is thus defined negatively, i.e. "not
this." This isn't a bad thing, this isn't a good thing, it just is. And it's
in relation to the other CAs. My social activities are defined by, for instance, an absence of smoking pot, or listening to country music,
in relation to social groups that DO smoke pot or listen to country music. How you feel about that will depend on what you personally feel about pot and country. But don't think I'm marginalizing or belittling Sim. If anything I'm trying to comprehend where my Sim leanings fit into my largely (I believe) Narr priorities. ONce I've got this sorted out I'll probably pick apart my Gam leanings similarly.
Quote from: SeanPlay whose social and exploratory rewards come out of an intense focus on particular aspects of exploration, without getting into Step on Up or Story now, is Simulationist play. So I want to say that even though the CA itself may be 'defined by an absence' in terms of the theory, in terms of the kind of play that satisfies it the rewards and reinforcements are just as present, real, etc. as those of any other CA.
See, you even used the phrase "
without getting into" in defining Sim. :)
Anyway, as I said I'm not knocking Sim, and of course I acknowledge that it's "real." I'm just questioning its nature and position. A Genus is just as real as a Phylum.
Quote from: SeanThe particular way it misleads people is by making them think that Beeg Horseshoe or something like it is true.
Well, I guess we know how you feel about the Beeg Horseshoe. A slightly prejudicial way to phrase that claim. Now I really have to investigate the Horseshoe ASAP and see what all the fuss is about. :)
Incidentally, given that several folks have informed me that my post is a restatement of the Horseshoe, I imagine that this remark can fairly be read, "I think your ideas on this subject are wrong." Fair enough. It'd be nice to know
why you think the Horseshoe is rubbish, though. Maybe it'll become clear when I read it.
Quote from: Ron EdwardsI now am considering Sim to be based on the input/output principle, that actual play is essentially a celebratory and confirmatory act toward some starting material or ideas.
I can't speak for
your "Absence principle," Ron, but this in no way contradicts
mine. A thing can be defined negatively by one attribute and positively by another. e.g. A Tennis ball is green. A tennis ball is also not square. If I say "A tennis ball is not square," and ro reply, "wait man, it's
green," I have no response but "What does that have to do with its relationship to squares?
Quote from: M. J. YoungSimulationism is the exploration of all things with emphasis on the discovery/creation of new facets and unexplored aspects of the shared imagined space, new ways to combine information that yields new information.
Now
this is a concept I can really dig, I think: Sim is emphasis on
discovery, not Exploration. That one little word makes a lot of difference. It answers the "what you're getting out of it" quandary that is really the point of the question "why do you Explore?" (i.e. Roleplay). And yeah, it's present even when not emphasized; the most childish and unsophisticate group will still be making (or confirming) Discoveries like "Dwarves are smelly and rude," "ELves are prissy and gay," Halflings are dirty sneaks," etc. etc. even when the point for them is really just exp, loot, showing off, et al.
The Knights of the Dinner Table comic is a beautiful example of this phenomenon at work, in this case a group of overbearing Hard Core Gamists running roubhshod over the carefully perpared plans of what I would call a SIm leaning GM, and a lone mostly Narr player. The players listen to all the description and dialogue the GM lays down, but only to spot threats or opportunities, often pouncing on one when there really isn't any. There may be "Discovery" going on, about the imagined world, and its Peoples, politics, and history, but it's not what the players are looking for at all.
(Aside: I find it telling that the Knights use the term "flavor text" to describe description that isn't (or isn't percieved to be) tactically important. I suppose this comes from the convention of running a pre-made module and reading an actual text to intro the adventure. But it also betrays a deep-seated feeling that all that filligree is so much fluff to get out of the way so the ass-whuppin' can commence. It's there; it's just ignored or endured.
Overall this construct, "Simplification" or no, makes a lot of sense to me; the only possible chink I see in its armor is that Gam and Narr goals could also be called "Discovery," mostly in a "find out what you're made of" sense, either how you come through in a fight or what touch choices you make when the chips are down, respectively. I guess the trick would be defining Dsicovery as a specific jargon term such that it excludes those two emphases. YOu almost seem to have that in your "unexplored aspects of the shared imagined space" phrase, except that a character's ass-kickery or personal moral fiber ARE part of the SIS.
ANyway, I think that's about all the brainwork I have in me tonight.
Peace,
Hey, just a quick addendum:
I had a look at the Beeg Horseshoe info and I think I know why everyone thinks I'm devaluing Simulationism. In the very fisrt post on the Horsehoe thread, Jared said "Simulation doesn't exist."
Well, I ain't Jered, and I ain't never heerd of no Horsehoe till you fellers pointed it out to me. SO rest asured, That's not where I'm headed with this, 'kay?
'Night.
Why does everybody call me Euro all the time? Is 'eu' somehow more common in English than 'ee'? Funny thing, that. I'm not currency, even when I'm current.
Quote from: GB Steve
Eero, you're post cleared up a lot of things for me. So the Creative Agendas are defined as being incompatible. Fair enough. I suppose then that the difficult part is to say what they actually are in such a way that this property holds. So that everything can be put into one of three boxes.
Three or more boxes. This is how I've understood the logical structure of the theory, anyway. Ron will correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure. "Creative agendas" as a level of the big model includes in principle all priorities a player might have
for roleplaying as activity. For this we do not need GNS classification, the big model works fine without pondering different possible agendas. The classification only becomes significant when we notice that some of those priorities do not mesh well together. So you could say that the definition of GNS requires the categories to be defined in such a way that they prove to be incompatible. At least, I see no other pressing reason to differentiate.
Consider: couldn't I describe the CA level of the big model in many other ways, as well? I could, for example, list the areas of focus that different types of sim players concentrate on. So there's settingism, characterism, colorism and so on. But that isn't GNS while being a valid characterization of the big model CA level, because these distinctions do not hold the useful properties that GNS has: no certain incompatibility between the modes, and lots of shared reward mechanisms instead. So what makes GNS useful compared to these alternative characterizations is the actual importance that it holds in actual play, in our experience. That importance springs out of human psychology, mainly, so the GNS modes correspond neatly to some major psychological drives that people have as regards
art and
games, two activities rpgs consist of.
Quote
Next you say that there isn't always a GNS Creative Agenda. So these three boxes don't work for all play. Some play is outside the GNS partitioning. It's exploring without an agenda. Is it possible that most play in some groups is like this?
Well, this is where the other agendas come up. Vincent and Ben Lehman have written lately about these things called mechanical agendas and social agendas (and I remember Clinton saying something about psychological agenda at some point, but that's probably the same as the social agenda). The point is that nothing particularly requires a player in a game to have a creative agenda, he might be there because he wants to hit on the GM. This just means that the person
isn't properly roleplaying, because the roleplaying just happens to be where the real action is at, regardless of it being roleplaying. The social agenda guy could just as easily be at the arcade, if his heart's desire was there.
A surprising amount of play in my experience is fueled by a social agenda. In my current group of teenagers, for example, I estimate that 50% of the boys play just because of friendship and to have something to do. They don't care about anything specific to the game, as long as it doesn't cause actively not-nice feelings.
Now, there's still another angle. Instead of looking at full formed player agenda, check out what happens on the level of individual decision. This is mainly the level below the reward cycles, and here's where lots of exploration happens. Remember how in the big model we have the exploration level, and the CAs are under it? What this means is that there is lots of parts of play that are definitely roleplaying (and not just socializing), but that don't have weight for creative agendas. This is the "exploration without agenda" that you asked about. (Don't mix this with ephemera and techinques; they're small pieces of play that don't per se have a creative agenda, but I'm not talking about them.)
Consider this example:
GM: OK, play starts at a tavern.
What has the GM done here? Is the above utterance CA-important? Is it part of any reward cycles? I think it is part of one, because the GM won't be getting a game without setting the scene. However, assuming a game where the GM always sets scenes, this is also a very agenda-free utterance. It's just exploration that doesn't particularly activate any creative agenda. The decision to open the scene is just necessary, bare minimum for roleplaying, not it's purpose.
Is it possible to play like this most of the time? I don't think so, because the "general exploration" activities all share the property of being agenda-neutral. This would mean that for you to stay clear of the agendas, you could never
1) try to better your position
2) refine exploration beyond bare minimum
3) make story-important decisions
Such play would be extremely hampered. It would consist mostly of die rolling or other mechanical activity outside the SIS, and there wouldn't be any appreciable content. It would be mostly like some teenage jocks playing around with D&D books without clear understanding what they're doing, while waiting for the match to start in 15 minutes.
Quote
I'm also not sure about the agenda discordance. I thought GNS had moved beyond being a diagnostic tool. It's certainly not talked about that way by many people.
Well, it's used for game design, too. What else?
Quote
Sean talks about incoherence. Whilst I can see that creative agenda should be exclusive for one player, I'm not sure that players in the same group having different agendas is necessarily destructive. Unless the term 'incoherent' just means 'having different agendas' rather than the more usual indication that there is a problem. I'm sure there might be a problem, but not necessarily so.
Dunno, theorywise incoherence is just having several creative agendas. For actual play, however, the destructivity of this depends on several factors:
- How strong the creative agendas are? Are you content with hanging out, or do you want to play world-class sessions?
- How tied to their agendas the players are? Are you willing and able to switch now and then?
- How the game enforces player input and reactions? Can you just shunt different agendas aside, or do you have to address that input, too?
If the players are just hanging out, everybody has a social agenda that's much stronger than the creative one, then I don't think that incoherence is much of a problem. Similarly, if the medium of play allows you to choose what input to acknowledge (like a socially dysfunctional gaming group, where you ostracize folks who don't play like they "should"), you can just ignore play that's incompatible with your own current goals.
The reason for incoherence being a problem generally is that many people are in roleplaying for the game, and thus want the best possible experience. They have a strong creative agenda. I myself have many times thought that every roleplayer must have a really strong dream of perfect play they cling to, how else could they stand the bother of organizing sessions and all the other hassle. There's so much easier hobbies with better chick-to-guy quotients, why bother if you don't care about it?
Also, note that generally a game with more personal contact between players is the better game. This is a separate theory topic, but the fact tends to cause situations where there is less and less room for incoherence when the quality of games and player goals increases. Many Forge games, for instance, have little to not any resistance to incoherence, they require that all players dig the game and play as it's supposed to go. Polaris, for example.
So it's not impossible to play with incoherence and have a good time, for any variety of reasons. What is fun and what's not is pretty subjective. There's just this tendency for gamers to get discontent in the long run if their gaming isn't improving. And when you get to high enough levels of game... incoherence frequently becomes the greatest hurdle. It's like playing in a band, again: when you're just doing it as a hobby in your garage, Matt's little brother may as well be the drummer. But if you want to get serious about it, you better get somebody who can use two drumsticks at a time!
Quote
Reward cycles I'm a bit confused about. These are when a payout is made in the currency of the game? Easily definable for MLwM but rather more difficult for other more complex games. And not necessarily relevant to the creative agenda, especially if your into Sim.
Rewards need not be mechanical, remember. For the great majority of sim games the main reward is respect, social authority, and getting your contribution into the SIS. For some games it's the ability to create more stuff (which it comes to with the respect thing too, of course), like in Universalis.
Reward cycles are an interesting topic, one I would like our gurus to write more about. My own understanding is spotty, but as far as I understand it, the reward cycles can be really short or long in real-time terms. Consider two examples:
1) I open my mouth and describe a cool maneuver in Exalted, and get bonus dice. Or, equally, I describe the maneuver just because I want to show how cool my character is.
2) I buy the wand of lightning in D&D, because I know that it'll be needed down the road.
In the first example the reward cycle is very short, just a matter of the GM handing you the dice. In the second example your reward comes when you actually get to use the wand of lightning, proving that your investment was solid. So the lenght of investment can be very short or very long.
What makes this interesting is the idea that CAs are connected to the reward cycles. We only need to consider the kind of reward I want to gain by my action, and we can find the CA. This is the "instance of play" from the older material.
Quote
Maybe incoherence is more about rewards. I can see several CA existing in the same group, as long as each gets the appropriate reward. There is definitely scope for problems if that is not the case.
As I outlined above, this is possible if you aren't bothered by other players playing pointlessly. The problem is, the CA rewards are in great part social. If the other players do not acknowledge your superiority in gam, or care about your elaborate character journal in sim, or even understand why you'd break character and betray them in nar, then it isn't very rewarding. In great majority of cases the reward system breaks down when the other players are disinterested enough.
Quote
Looking at MJ Young's linked post suggest to me that it's not always easy to tell in which box players are situated, especially sim ones. Not in the least because the creative agenda is private an only accessible to others through the choices the player makes.
Exactly!
Hey Melinglor,
I feel like you completely ignored every substantive point I made in my posts while harping on something I agree and agreed was a non-issue, so I'm bowing out of the thread.
You've got an exceptional grasp on the Big Model for a newcomer though - far better than mine was at a similar point in time - and I have no doubt that you'll get through this stuff. Figuring out where Exploration leaves off and Simulationism picks up is one of the trickiest things in the theory, but I expect you'll manage.
Best,
Sean
Hello,
Steve, you wrote:
QuoteSean talks about incoherence. Whilst I can see that creative agenda should be exclusive for one player, I'm not sure that players in the same group having different agendas is necessarily destructive. Unless the term 'incoherent' just means 'having different agendas' rather than the more usual indication that there is a problem. I'm sure there might be a problem, but not necessarily so.
You may have missed my many posts about this or not processed the point at the time. The argument goes as follows:
Incoherent play is more vulnerable to dysfunction than coherent play.No one is saying that incoherent play is doomed, bad, wrong, or stupid. I am suggesting that it carries risks for "not have fun" (which is what dsyfunctional means) that coherent play doesn't carry.
Best,
Ron
Quote from: MelinglorHey, just a quick addendum:
I had a look at the Beeg Horseshoe info and I think I know why everyone thinks I'm devaluing Simulationism. In the very fisrt post on the Horsehoe thread, Jared said "Simulation doesn't exist."
Well, I ain't Jered, and I ain't never heerd of no Horsehoe till you fellers pointed it out to me. SO rest asured, That's not where I'm headed with this, 'kay?
'Night.
No, that's not it. The "negativism" issue persisted long after Jared. Check out my Beeg Horseshoe Revisited for something more like how you think. I think even in there, and later than that, there was still this worry about sim being relegated to secondary status.
The idea is that if sim is, in any way, not it's own positive agenda, if it's in any way merely a rejection of other priorities (to a larger extent than all of the modes being defined as merely mutually exclusive), then it can be seen as a retraction from these other things, and therefore based on fear, or something. I could go on and on with what the sim proponents will tell you the negativity is intended to imply.
You just have to realize that defining it negatively at all is going to get the sim defensive crowd up in arms at what they might percieve (however wrongly it might be) as a relegation of sim to second class status. Heck, there are some who would say that merely by putting it on another axis as I do that this relegates sim to second class status.
So realize that it's nothing personal, but a standard reaction to the sorts of notions that you're proposing. Put another way, try to put a positive spin on it the next time you make the statement. If you can't then maybe they have a point.
Mike
OK, How's this for a positive spin: Defining something by an absence can be a Good Thing if the thing absent is berlieved to be bad or undesirable.
Take an extreme example: My social interactions are defined by (among other things) an absence of rape and murder. We can probably all get behind the idea that this is good. Some things are more subjective, such as my aforementioned absence of country music in my social gatherings. But for me, subjectively, that absence is very desirable. I think the "pure" Sim player can fairly be characterized as considering the absence "extra" ambitions over and above the Dream to be at best unnecessary and at worst ruinous and destructive to play. Thus in this instance absence is, for them, good. Consider an analogy: I grew up in a country church where the only poetry I was exposed to was "poetry with a point:" little ditties read before the congregation to provide some moral via object lesson or clever metaphor or mere blatant rhyming sermonizing. But for many people, having a "moral" for that mode of expression spoils the artistry of the poem--poetry is about the outpouring of raw emotion or the expression of pure aesthetic beauty. Such folk would probably say the rhymed atrocities read at my church weren't even "poems" at all, and would be quick to extol the vierues of pieces in which this sermonizing quality is absent.
I think where this differs from the "positive absences" of other CAs (e.g. Pure Narrativists certainly consider an absence of Step On Up to be good) is that the Simulationist stops earlier, at a different level. In a way (if you view the Model's spacial metaphor as heirarchical) you could almost say it's Gam and Narr that are secondary to Sim. In fact. that's just what you would expect a "Pure" Simulationist to say.
Put another way, I think perhaps Simulationists are content with the Dream as is. . .it's enough for them. They reach the point where things are entering the Shared Imagined Space "just so", so as to affirm and strenghten the particular quality that they value. It's like a person who lookas up at the stars on a clear night. . .and just keeps looking at them. While the person on his left is planning in his head how he might one day construct a rocket to reach those stars and exploit them, or battle aliens. . .he just stares. WHile the person on his right is pondering What It All Means, and wondering how man can ever cope when faced with the sheer magnitude of the heavens. . .our center man just stares. He smiles a slow smile, perhaps lays himself down on the grass, and stares for hours.
It many not be everyone's cup of tea (it's certainly not always mine, but it certainly seems positive to me. :)
Peace,
Sorry, Joel, I don't think it's going to work. That's basically a restatement of the same idea without changing the content hardly at all. We all understand that the idea of the definition in question is that the people playing this mode are rejecting something they see as bad. But that doesn't make it a non-negative statement. You're still defining sim by what it is not.
A true positive definition includes some unique reason for why sim players play sim. It can't be just "to avoid x" or to "just do exploration." Sim means more than that by anybody's definition. But some people want it to be about it's own goal. This is why people propose things like "discovery." Discovery, per MJ Young, would be to simulaitonism what step on up is to gamism, or story now is to narrativism.
Mike
Hmm. Seems to me that if someone's that touchy about what Sim should be, they're probably not entirely comfortable with their play style, or with applying the Sim label, or both. if a person is truly content with where they're at, in gaming or anything else, I wouldn't think a person would be terribly bothered by what direction the definition is approached from. In my (admittedly tentative) definition of Sim, it's the "enough-ness" of non-G or -N play that makes it good.
I'm aware that it was a mere restatement; that's because my view of what Sim is hasn't appreciatively changed. Just trying to bring out what I believe to be Positive (in a value-judgment sense) about my Negative (in a technical sense) definition. I thought that was what was implied in the suggestion to "put a positive spin on it the next time you make the statement."
But hey, I'm much more interested in working out the real, substantive questions of what Sim is, how it works, how it interacts with other elements, than with crafting the most ultra-diplomatic phrasing of my views, which are still in flux anyway. Maybe we can just take my "Gazing at the Stars" parable as a picture of what I find appealing in Sim, and leave it at that.
Anyway, as I said in an earlier post, I do like M.J.'s suggesting of Discovery as Sim's "thing." My only reservation is that the term "discovery" can be applied legitimately to any number of phenomena: "discovering' that my guy really can beat that dragon for instance, or "discovering" what choice my character makes in a tough situation. but that difficulty could be eliminated by specially defining Discovery for our needs. After all, we already have a slew of words ("Addressing," "Exploration," etc.) ith specialized Forge definitions. the definition would have to be fairly exact, though.
Actually, reading back through the posts, I see Young already states such a definition: "Simulationism is the exploration of all things with emphasis on the discovery/creation of new facets and unexplored aspects of the shared imagined space, new ways to combine information that yields new information."
Anyway, I think I'm just repeating statements from earlier posts, so that's enough for now.
Peace,
I'm glad I could help. Let me tackle this point:
Quote from: MelinglorI guess the trick would be defining Dsicovery as a specific jargon term such that it excludes those two emphases. YOu almost seem to have that in your "unexplored aspects of the shared imagined space" phrase, except that a character's ass-kickery or personal moral fiber ARE part of the SIS.
I think that it's perfectly reasonable to note that the character's "ass-kickery" or personal moral fiber are both perfectly acceptable areas of simulationist exploration. It is the
player's "ass-kickery" that makes it gamist, and the
player's moral instincts that make it narrativist.
I'm going to take exception to Mike saying that simulationist players get all defensive. I do play simulationist, and enjoy it; and I play gamist and narrativist as well, and probably always have.
The objection to putting simulationism on a different axis, or defining it negatively, is not so much that it relegates it to second class status as that it overly emphasizes how different it is.
A creative agendum is the motivating desire behind play, the thing the player wants to get from play. Beeg Horseshoe implies that people don't play for pure discovery, or that if they do this somehow means that this motivation is different in kind from either gamist or narrativist motivation, which are in some sense the same in kind.
There are some things that I do to win. I don't often play volleyball and don't last long when I do anymore, but I play to beat the other team and attempt to show off at least some skill in the area.
I also enjoy debating moral, ethical, and theological issues. I like to do this, and participate in a couple of lists and boards where this happens all the time. That's fun for me--it's a kind of narrativist fun.
I watch the history channel. I read non-fiction books. There is a desire to know. It is just as much a drive as the desire to win and the desire to grasp moral concepts. It is that desire that drives simulationist play: I want to know, I want to observe or experience this other world, this other person, this situation, because I will learn from it, benefit from it, be changed by it.
What the Beeg Horseshoe does is invalidate that desire to know as a valid drive equal to the other two. That's the objection.
I hope this clarifies things a bit.
--M. J. Young
Quote from: M. J. YoungI'm going to take exception to Mike saying that simulationist players get all defensive. I do play simulationist, and enjoy it; and I play gamist and narrativist as well, and probably always have.
In case it wasn't clear, I was talking not so much about players in general, but you MJ, and some other posters here on The Forge. It's precisely your objections to which I was refering.
QuoteThe objection to putting simulationism on a different axis, or defining it negatively, is not so much that it relegates it to second class status as that it overly emphasizes how different it is.
This is the objection to which I refered. Forgive me if I misstated it.
Mike
Quote from: M. J. YoungThe objection to putting simulationism on a different axis, or defining it negatively, is not so much that it relegates it to second class status as that it overly emphasizes how different it is.
The reason I was emphasizing the difference was that I was thinking Sim is a very different kind of animal, so different that it really didn't belong in the same "slot" in the model. Now, with the consideration of your "discovery" concept, I'm revising that opinion.
I think the biggest hangup was the lack of a clear CA Goal to hang Simulationism on, equiv. to Step on Up or Story Now. Your Discovery obviously takes care of that problem. I'm liking it the more every time I think of it.
By the way, I appreciate your examples of other activities in your life. I, too, enjoy all three of the CA properties in various eavenues. Of course, the question is not what you enjoy in general, but what you enjoy
in RPGs, and why. When I was corresponding with Ron, and I said something like, "why don't all the Gamists go play Diablo?" he shot back, well, they'd probably ask you "why don't you just read a book."
Touche. In my case, I think I enjoy all three "ingredients" in my gaming, in different amounts, and more or less at different times. My big lament is that while I've been comprimising in the direction of (mostly) Gamism over the years, it seems unlikely that I'll ever see much reciprocation in the other direction.
Quote from: Mike HolmesIn case it wasn't clear, I was talking not so much about players in general, but you MJ, and some other posters here on The Forge. It's precisely your objections to which I was refering.
I dunno what that's about, but I personally didn't find your posts to be defensive, M.J. It was other comments to which I was referring.
Peace,
Hello,
I think this thread is starting to hit a second-order level of explaining and refining answers to questions, so it's time to call it a day.
Very constructive, though.
Best,
Ron
Agreed. And thanks. :)
(Edited to add: PS, Sorry 'bout the name thing, Eero. I never meant to mistake you for currency.)
Peace,