[Snippet of comp play] It's the game worlds fault!

[Callan S.]

A very quick computer game play account, involving imagined tactical space. Of course this isn't roleplay as we know it, Jim! But it does involve using your imagination to try and figure out an advantage.

The game is Restricted Area, a sci fi Diablo clone. I'd been savaging mutants with my shotgun wielding psychic for at least an hour (enough to sink into the rhythm of the games reward cycle/game worlds occurrences).

Okay, so once again I use my psychics freeze ability on a laser toting mutant, rendering him inert just before he finished his attack animation. I get close as usual so more of my shotgun blast can hit. And I notice that where I happened to click, I walked behind him and he's facing where I was before when he got frozen. I thought, neat, that'll give me a split second more time once he unfreezes, because he'll have to turn around.

When he unfreezes, he doesn't turn, but his blast still comes out of his back and hits me. Then he turns around. The damage is negligible, but jeez!

A hypothesis struck me then. That this a prime example of a point where I can't reconcile gamism and simulationism, when I feel this in roleplay (a recent RPG actual play account was when a big scary dragon flew over our humble first level D&D characters...but we couldn't see what colour it was).

Because as a gamist, I shouldn't expect that my tactical imagining is the way the game world WILL occur. I should accept that at least in this game, it just doesn't work.

But at a simulationist level (or perhaps just at a critic level?), it just didn't jive. I lose my desire to learn the tactics of game world when my imagination, my preferred prime tool to help me win, is undercut like this. I imagined it happening one way, but it happened in another, really weird way. A pretty damn non-causal way (you turn then fire, not fire then turn!).

But, what the hell can I say when it's roleplay - "No, the game world works like this!"? I'm a gamist, I'm supposed to learn by my mistakes, not make statements on how the causality of the game world works and expect it to just be accepted, like you expect an address of premise to be accepted. I can't say "I'm not wrong, I didn't lose! - the game world is wrong! It's the game worlds fault!"

When the role of my imagination comes under attack, I really have no defense, unless I resort to simulationism and insist my statements about the worlds causality be accepted fully. And if I don't resort to that, through gamist play I learn a bunch of whacked out tactics (stuff like thinking about jumping off a cliff because you've got enough hit points, that you can shoot without turning, etc). Or resort to not using ones imagination at all because you just can't trust it to help you in this whacked out place. Instead you fall back to pure numbers (The hardcore, I think?).

What do you do when the fidelity of the SIS drops? Without actually taking over and simply stating how the game world works?

[Tommi Brander]

My players tend to ask. Simple as that. It causes spontaneous house ruling, too. When there is a problem, it gets fixed.
But our game is, in my mind, simulationist.

[Ron Edwards]

Urrgh. I can't believe you just said that.

This has nothing to do with Simulationism. This isn't a Creative Agenda issue.

You're talking about the enjoyability of the SIS, relative to and supportive of a Creative Agenda (analogous to Gamism, close enough, so that's what we'll call it). There's no Sim in that sentence.

Attention to, and enjoyment of, the Shared Imagine Space is not the definition of Simulationism. It is the functional underriding feature of all role-playing, although its degree (fidelity, etc) varies from game to game and group to group.

This is the whole point of my big essay, "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory."

I know. One guy uses vintage motorcycles as the material for his weird sculptures; he chops them up and mounts them in funny ways, with other objects. The other guy races vintage motorcycles. Both are successful and famous.

Got that? You are one of these guys, let's say the latter. You are annoyed because the vintage motorcycle someone just sold you has a crappy frame.

You are right to be annoyed; that makes sense and it's worth figuring out why and how the frame is crappy. But ... this has nothing to do with the other guy and his priorities. You can't say, hey, the fucker who sold me this motorcycle obviously has priorities like this other guy. No ... the frame was crappy, period.

I am not trying to relate Sim to sculpture or Gamism to racing. I don't care if that seems sensible at first glance. That is not the point. The points are:

1. that both people need motorcycles with good frames

2. that their priorities are utterly at odds, and cannot both be realized by the same guy with one motorcycle

3. that discovering a motorcycle with a bad frame cannot be assigned to the differences in priorities

Best,
Ron

[Tommi Brander]

Ron, who are you talking to?

[Supplanter]

Not to speak for Ron, but I'm pretty sure he's speaking to Callan. I'd gloss Ron's point as

Callan's goal in the computer game was to wax a mutant by rendering it helpless. He's playing the computer game to demonstrate he's good at waxing mutants. When the mutant unfreezes and is rendered (by the software engine) as shooting out its back, there's a violation of either Setting or Color. It's a Setting violation if the thing is really shooting a hand-held weapon through itself without turning around and the weapon pointing *completely away from its target (Callan)*. It's a Color violation if the rendering engine simply painted the order of actions backward.

But Gamism as a CA is perfectly consistent with objecting to either of these violations. "I want to be able to anticipate plausible behavior from the Setting so I can best plan my actions" is a perfectly gamist preference for Setting consistency. "I want imaginary events to 'look right' as I play" is a perfectly gamist preference regarding Color. The reason a Gamist chooses to play a tabletop RPG or a computer game instead of Monopoly or Go is because aspects of Exploration (Setting, Color, Character etc) engage him.

Another way of restating the "Exploration is the foundation of all roleplaying" thesis I think. An actual existing game matches an Exploratory Agenda to a Creative Agenda and on down through the layers of the model.

Best,


Jim

[Callan S.]

Hi Ron,

I think I've used the terms gamism and sim in a non standard way. I didn't conciously realise it before, but while writing the post I concentrated on the angenda I'm aiming for rather than the agenda which is actually, currently identifiable and happening at the table. I think I get your bike frame analogy and I agree. In my examples, the other party isn't offering me sim, it's just a broken frame. But that bike frame is making me think to myself "This thing is useless for racing...but for sculpture, I might be able to make something out of it...wait, my prefered agenda is racing, dammit! But this frame isn't any good for racing - it's not great for sculpture either, but at least IMO it would be better for sculpture than it would be for racing...but I don't want to compromise over to sim play, even if in my estimate I'd get more out of it! *Brain pops*"

Reconcilling gamism with simulationism isn't about the two agenda's themselves, rather it's about me having priorities that push for both and not being able to reconcile those priorities within myself.

That'd make for a better fit with the model? I didn't realise before how much I was thinking of agenda in terms of "what agenda I want" rather than "what agenda is actually happening".

If I'm on track, I'd like to get to those priorities. See if I can map them out a bit for scrutiny.



Hi Jim,

"I want imaginary events to 'look right' as I play"

That's the bit that worries me. What should I do when I think they don't look right? If my correcting the SIS undercuts a great deal of my gamist priorities/spoils gamism, and if I want to continue playing, simulationism is agenda to push for drift towards that's unspoilt/still a bit of  fun.

Actually, the social expectation that I'd keep playing is probably a lurking factor in this. But I'll wait for your reply before going further.

[Ron Edwards]

On track, Callan. With that post.

Best,
Ron

[Callan S.]

Those priorities are a bit harder to map than I thought. They seem to exist more as a heat of the moment thing and receed to the background over time. It's like trying to see what's involved when someone hit's your knee with a reflex hammer, after the event has finished.

So I'm left thinking of mechanics and what they'd provoke if I engaged a game that had them.

One idea is some sort of 'Only if you dare me' mechanic. It sort of makes the gamist aspect explicit, because if the player ever feels the game world is out of wack, he could invoke the mechanic and say "I'll only go with that if you dare me to take it on". If he is dared, he get's some sort of small currency reward (to encourage him to say this). If I'm not dared, the action has to be stricken from the record and we rewind a bit and try again.

If the mutant thing had happened in table top play and I had this mechanic, I could use it to sort of issolate the wackyness from seriously engaging the game world. Another player daring you to take on stuff is different enough from just engaging the game world, that the two wont mix in terms of tactical learning. But at the same time, I'm not absolutely controlling the game reality - I'm simply requesting it get turned into a dare!