When was Illusionism added?

[Stuart Parker]

Some time ago, I tried to fit my group's style of play into the GNS model and came away very frustrated. In re-reading the essay this morning, I noticed the idea of functional illusionism and was struck by how well it described a new style of gaming I discovered in 1997 and played pretty exclusively for about 4 years.

I had always found it remarkable that my players in this particular style of game felt as though they had boundless free will and the capacity to really shape the story when, in fact, they had almost none. Whereas in games where narrative power was genuinely decentralized and story was a truly collaborative effort, they felt that they had much less control over the story when, in reality, they had vastly more.

(Forgive me for not adopting more GNS terminology in posting my thanks.)

Stuart.

[John Kim]

I'm not quite sure what the question is here.  Is it the origin of the term?  I believe it comes from Gaming Outpost, from a http://gamingoutpost.newmediaone.net/discussions/index.php?showtopic=28594">January 2001 post by Paul Elliot (aka Mithras).  From there it was incorporated into further discussion on GO and on the just-forming Forge boards, and was eventually incorporated into Ron's "GNS and Other Matters" essay towards the end of that year.  

Some time ago, I tried to fit my group's style of play into the GNS model and came away very frustrated. In re-reading the essay this morning, I noticed the idea of functional illusionism and was struck by how well it described a new style of gaming I discovered in 1997 and played pretty exclusively for about 4 years.

I had always found it remarkable that my players in this particular style of game felt as though they had boundless free will and the capacity to really shape the story when, in fact, they had almost none. Whereas in games where narrative power was genuinely decentralized and story was a truly collaborative effort, they felt that they had much less control over the story when, in reality, they had vastly more.

Could you describe a little more of this?  I'm curious because I've encountered very different atttitudes over what "control over story" means.  In particular, some people seem to associate "control over story" with control over background (i.e. NPCs and locations).  This suggests a concept of story which is mainly about background and events.  Others think that creation and control of the main characters is a central power.

[Stuart Parker]

I'm sure somewhere in the archives of this forum is me describing this game 18 months ago. Hopefully, with a clearer sense of the model and more perspective on my part this description will go over better and come closer to answering the questions that Forge members would need answered.

The lens through which I have understood gaming has not been the GNS model. But as a gamer who thinks, naturally I have come up against many of the issues the model examines. The way I and the person who invented the type of play I am about to describe thought about gaming was this:

Differences in gaming style can be seen as people utilizing different predictive models to play their characters. Whereas I think GNS is more about dividing play based on how people think about what should happen if their characters do a particular thing, our division focused more on how people think about what will happen if their characters do a particular thing.

So, if we think about character decisions as rooted in predictive systems, a few models come to mind:
(a) Physical: The main referrent the player uses is the physics of the world. Generally, the physics of a campaign world are best-revealed in the rules. The rules provide you with a predictive model that forecasts whether a particular strategy you have will be effective. People who use this as a predictive model will typically prioritize courses of action that the physics tells them are likely to work.
(b) Textual: The main referrent the player uses is the storyline. Information gleaned from NPCs, GM descriptions, textual or visual aids or packaged or original background material tends to be prioritized in decision-making.
(c) Symbolic: The main referrents the player uses are the tropes and symbols the GM employs that function as real-world referrents. Such a player might notice that their character seems to be inhabiting a story that is functioning like King Lear and will therefore begin employing King Lear as a predictive text.

I'm not good at the particular type of academic discourse in use on this site. So, I'll try a semi-accurate historical allusion: system (a) is like high medieval Aristotelian physics whereas system (c) is more like early medieval Platonic physics. For both, the natural world signifies and is used for predictive purposes but the signification systems are radically different. Or, in the medieval four senses of Scripture, (c) functions as the allegorical while (b) functions as the historical whereas (a) corresponds to the inferior but nonetheless useful Book of Nature.

Based on this understanding of divisions in play styles, I decided to create worlds that could be read all three ways and where all three predictive texts were in sufficient harmony as to recommend essentially the same course of action. And my friend (though I myself could never pull this off) created interpenetrating systems of signification so that, for instance, the rules signified both algebraically/arithmetically and numerologically.

In reality, to make the system work, the GM ends up primarily navigating at the symbollic rather than the textual level. Or rather, the text becomes wholly subordinated to the symbolic structure. So, in my game, the players felt they had absolute free will -- they could go to any city in the world they could get to; this city would have different people, a different physical environment, possibly a different culture but in symbolic or metatextual terms, no matter where they went, the city at which they arrived always conformed at the symbolic level to exactly where I needed them to be.

The players felt they were changing the story when they went to unanticipated places but, in fact, they simply changed the terms on which they encountered the basic tropes I was managing. They felt they were engaging with story but in fact they were just engaging with colour.

It sounds like illusionism was part of the essay when I read it the first time and I just skipped over it or it failed to make the right impression on me. But my style of GMing bore a number of characteristics Ron identified for illusionism: the illusory sense of free will and a manipultive GMing style that subtly or invisibly takes over control of the characters by manipulating them into predetermined interactions with the story.