Questioning the "few key decisions" paradigm

[Walt Freitag]

On the What's the Bugaboo About Out of Character Context?
thread, Paganini wrote:

Before we can identify Mode of Play X as being prioritized, Mode of Play X first has to come into conflict with Mode of Play Y, and a player has to choose in favor of Mode of Play X. (Or, of course, the group can pre-agree via social contract that, when a conflict comes up, Mode of Play X will be the de-facto choice.) That's what prioritizing is... choosing one mode of play over another mode of play when a conflict between them exists. It might take 5 sessions before a Mode of Play conflict comes up, or it might take 5 minutes. We just don't know how big an instance of play is, until it actually happens.

And on the I'd love to see an expansion of "address" thread, Bob McNamee wrote:

Remember that the vast majority of RPG decisions will produce similar observed decision for players of G,N,or S... (attack the evil guy or whatever)... but certain decisions are where the 'rubber meets the road' where the decision made will be different depending on what mode the Player favors...that's where the really useful observable event is, even though most of the previous decisions made by the player were made in their usual GNS mode.

Watching their choices when in critical decision points over time is one way to determine what their GNS preference is.

Both these posts reflect a fairly well-established idea shared and propagated by many here, including myself: the paradigm of analyzing Creative Agenda (GNS priorities) by looking for the few key player decisions that reveal a priority against a background of a large number of ambiguous or unrevealing (congruent) decisions. Furthermore, although most everyone referring to this paradigm is wise enough to acknowledge that these are player rather than "character" decisions, and that these decisions can be made based on either in-character or out-of-character concerns, the examples held up are invariably decisions that translate directly into imagined character behavior, such as choices of weapon or whether or not to take a certain risk in a specific situation. As opposed to, say, a GM's decision on whether or not to require a roll for a certain action, or a player's decision on whether to say "nice going!" or roll his eyes in response to another player's declaration.

I'm not about to say that the "few key decisions" paradigm is never applicable, nor even that it's not generally useful, as one of many types of evidence, in examining Creative Agenda. And I did notice that in the paragraphs quoted above, Bob did qualify the description of that process as "one way to determine... GNS preferences" rather than as the main way or the only way. So he's off the hook. Nonetheless, I think that overall we've over-used and over-promoted the "few key decisions" paradigm well beyond the point of being counterproductive.

Here are some reasons why I believe this. (In order to make my case, I'm going to have to use some simple made-up examples of play events. I realize the irony of doing so as part of this argument, but I don't know what else to do.)

1. The "few key decisions" paradigm tends to focus too much on the choice the player selects, rather than on the overall terms of the choice. The usual presentation is "if the player chooses A, it hints at X as his priority; if the player chooses B, it hints at Y as his priority." The canonical example is the player who chooses, or doesn't choose, a more effective weapon rather than a "more consistent with the character concept" weapon, indicating a Gamist or Simulationist priority respectively. But there's just as much or more information about priorities in the terms of the choice: fact that the choice of weapon is being made, how often it's being made, how much attention is being paid to it by the player and by the other players, and what the scope of the choice is. I'd say that if a player is frequently and with great fanfare choosing which of fifteen available weapons his character will use next, it's likely indicative of a Gamist priority.

I say "likely" because I have no doubt of your creative ability, dear reader, to invent play scenarios in which frequent selection among fifteen available weapons is completely consistent with a clear Simulationist or even Narrativist priority. ("What if we were all playing ten-armed Hindu gods? Wouldn't having a different weapon in each hand be a reasonable Sim expectation?") But if such a special context existed, it would be obvious from examining an adequate instance of play. And based on that context, and any reasonable observer would discount that particular observation as evidence of a Gamist priority. That's why no single piece of evidence of a priority is sufficient, and one reason why a reliable evaluation requires complete information about an entire play instance of generally a session or more.

2. It follows from the previous point that the "few key decisions" paradigm fails to recognize evidence of priority that is present throughout play, in decisions that don't fit the "key decision" model. In the crude example of a player selecting from fifteen weapons, such a decision is likely evidence of Gamist play whether or not the player actually chooses the optimum weapon for the current situation, and whether or not the system even exhibits verifiable optimality for one weapon over another. There might be no choice on the menu for which we can say, "this choice suggests Gamism while other choices would suggest Simulationism," and yet we can look at the decision as a whole, as it's being made in play, and see evidence for Gamism in it.

This is equally the case when we're looking at Narrativism. A decision in which all reasonable options express an idea the player has about the Premise question (my definition of "address," btw) has got to be at least as sound evidence for Narrativist play as a decision where a player demonstrably chooses to "do the Narrativist thing" instead of some Gamist- or Simulationist-looking alternative. A prevalence of such Premise-either-way decisions, or a prevalence of play decisions having the effect of bringing such decisions about (e.g. the construction of a kicker), is strong evidence for Narrativism -- or is the thing itself.

3. The "key decisions" paradigm encourages too much attention on the in-character domain (the player's choices about what the character "actually did" in play), at the expense of out-of-character clues, when evaluating Creative Agenda. Of course, now that the fallacy of in-character events being the only or the most important indicators of Creative Agenda has been exposed, the pendulum's swung the other way and folks are struggling with the equally stretched idea that only out-of-character player-behavior clues reveal Creative Agenda. The "key decisions" paradigm seems to play into both misconceptions.

4. "Key decisions" as they're generally described may be more indicative of coherence problems in play, especially if the players themselves are focusing a lot of attention on them, than they are of shared priorities in functional play. As the party prepares for the final showdown, a player declares that Joe the Fighter is arming himself with his gladius. The other players groan. It's that stupid vision again. Joe's character background describes a vision Joe had, in which he is standing triumphant over the fallen Emperor holding his bloody gladius as the teeming throngs bow down to him in awe and gratitude. So once again he's going into an important battle with a weapon that only does half as much damage, and it's probably going to get more characters maimed or killed.

There's a nice revealing key decision, Joe's player expressing a (likely) Simulationist priority. And it's also evidence of conflict. In general, the more obviously a priority is expressed by any single decision during play, the more likely it is to indicate a Creative Agenda conflict. Most choices made in an all-Gamist, all-Sim, or all-Narrativist context will be made with little noise and little pondering of the different-Agenda alternatives. It's the decisions that the player has to agonize over, the decisions for which the other players openly question or indicate disapproval of the player's choice, the decisions where "you could have picked the Gamist option instead" or whatever is brought into the foreground, that are most likely to appear to fit the "key decisions" mold. Those are the very decisions that are being affected by Creative Agenda conflict.

Hence, the "key decisions" paradigm may have contributed to the idea that the Creative Agenda of functional play is somehow more difficult to perceive than the GNS conflicts observable in dysfunctional play. This may in turn have contributed to the idea that GNS "only applies to" the latter.

5. The "key decisions" paradigm presents a misleading image of evaluating Creative Agenda as a primarily deductive rather than a primarily perceptual process. The "key decisions" model suggests that it might be feasible and reasonable and useful to hunt down all the key decisions, and count up how many of them go this way versus that way like some kind of election. It's not. It doesn't work. It bogs down immediately and fatally into a morass of ambiguity. (For instance, if every single time a player doesn't break plausibility to address a Premise or seek a Gamist advantage is interpreted as a Simulationist key decision, then you end up "proving" that all play is Simulationist.) The reason is that all decisions have to be evaluated in context, and context is established by looking at play, and play is entirely the result of decisions.

I've spoken here about, and other recent threads have discussed at length, decisions that address a Premise regardless of which options the player chooses. The occurrence of such decisions, regardless of the choices the players make in them, is evidence for a Narrativist Creative Agenda. But there's a problem. Look at any one of those decisions in detail, and you'll find that all the choices the player made or could have made are also plausible and consistent within the shared imagined space. In other words, completely consistent with a Simulationist Creative Agenda. Such a decision is only evidence for Narrativism when interpreted in the context of Narrativist play.

Uh, oh! Circularity! Deadlock! Interpretation depends on context; context depends on the interpretation! Illogical, illogical, must destroy all humans now!

But that's the way perception works. It's a positive feedback loop between formulating a context based on details, and interpreting details based on the apparent context. An image of a naked body might or might not be obscene, depending on whether or not it appears in a generally obscene context. Circular, but it works. In the end, we look at the whole picture, the perception loop kicks in, and "we know it when we see it."

And it's easy. Perception is fast and automatic. It has about a billion years of evolution behind it, compared to deductive reasoning that has maybe a few million. That's why it's easier to program a computer to play chess than to program it to examine a photograph of a room and find the chess board.

A drawback of perceptual positive feedback is that sometimes, especially in borderline cases or when observers are prejudiced, different observers can come to different conclusions, each of them seeing the evidence as consistent with the context in which they're interpreting it. But so what? Argue about it. Just because it's possible to draw a picture in which some see a vase and some see two faces doesn't mean no useful distinction can ever be made between faces and vases. So yes, there are going to be some instances of play that some conclude is Simulationist and others conclude is Narrativist. Get over it.

Then there are some people, like me, who are reluctant to make judgments based on holistic impressions. I'd prefer an acid test, a guarantee that predjudice or error won't kick the psotive feedback loop into an erroneous conclusion, some suboptimal local maximum that looks like a correct perception but isn't the best one. But I realize that GNS isn't going to offer me one.

"Key decisions" in role playing look like useful acid tests for Creative Agenda. But they're too hard to find and too hard to interpret in actual play, especially in functional play. If you're not willing to introduce some subjectivity into the evaluation, if you insist on a decisive acid test to even get you started, then you're not going to be able to perceive Creative Agenda and you're going to see the act of doing so as an unjustifiable leap of faith. (Ron, meet Marco. Marco, Ron.)

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Walt,

Actually, I've never been very happy with the "decisions" phraseology.

"Decisions" was first introduced at the Gaming Outpost, by Peter Seckler if I remember correctly, to keep the GNS-concept from being applied to persons (like little ear-tags) or to game systems as such. Although these particular fallacies aren't now practiced commonly at the Forge, that phrasing has hung on.

Me, I always ask about the social interactions when people ask me about their GNS-stuff. I've been doing that forever; I tend to trust people in their self-perceptions and perceptions of others in the absence of certain common defensive phrases. But when I can't get answers about that, I can't say much about the Creative Agenda going on.

What Christopher Kubasik describes in his Art? Science? Black magic? Whatever ... thread, is pretty much what I do. That's Creative Agenda in action - when Exploration is occuring and Techniques are being employed, seeing what Social stuff goes on.

Pretty damn easy, actually, once you get used to it.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

I've always focused on decisions as the point at which things become problematic. That is, your point #5, Walt. Precisely because it seems to me to illuminate GNS. But I can see where it doesn't illuminate Creative Agenda as it fits in the whole model. As Marco says, if GNS is about more than problems, then we have to look at more of play than just the points at which it tends to become problematic. In any case, I'm probably largely at fault for overemphasizing decisions, saying things like "It's all about the decisions made in play." I used that to try to get people to intuitively get something, and in the process may have muddied other waters.

That said, I always have intended the term decisions to mean more than just key decisions, and have said so. That is, everything that one does in relation to play is a decision. I decide to do some dialog, or I decide not to do so. So I guess that I felt it was OK to use the term. But if it's lead to any confusion, then I apollogize.

I think it is a better paradigm to talk about what happens in play in toto. And I think a problem that I have with this, however, is that this has by default come to be refered to as "play" itself. That is, play hasn't ever been well defined in this context, I'd say. But as long as it's taken in it's general connotation of "what you do in a gaming activity", then I think it's fine for these purposes. I'm still tempted to call it something else to give it the sort of weight that "decisions" seemed to have.

Mike

[Walt Freitag]

Right.

I regard "decisions in general" to be exactly equivalent to "behavior." That wasn't the issue. Only that focusing on "key decisions" leads to problems in evaluating Creative Agenda from actual play.

"Focusing on behavior at key moments" would mean the same thing and have all the same problems.

This whole thread is cross-threaded (as it were) with Christopher's "Art? Science?..." thread that Ron linked to. My point #5 looks at the same issue from a slightly different angle.

- Walt

[Gordon C. Landis]

Walt,

Thanks for that - a great job of showing both the plusses and the minuses of key moments (running with that substitution) as overall GNS discriminators.

I'll offer just one other factor that I think enters into the popularity of key moments - they are (or can be) also exemplifiers of one of the (for me) most powerful insights from GNS: that sometimes, you just can't support more than one Creative Agenda.  Your analysis applies entirely in this case as well - while a key moment can be a great way to notice when you've run into a "can't support both/all" situation, looking only (or mainly) at such moments can distract you from the more general, vague incompatabilities.

I think there's a lot to say about how people perceive "key moments" in play.  Maybe I'll start a new thread on that, as I think it takes us off the topic of your thread . . . but again, thanks.

Gordon

[M. J. Young]

I've said this before somewhere, but it bears repeating.

The "key decisions" paradigm only works one way. It's not about the observer trying to determine how the player made those choices that the observer thought were important. It's about how the player made those choices the player thought were important.

All the examples in the world of what weapon was chosen or any of the other "practical examples" are worthless, unless we know already that the player perceived this as an important choice.

Key decisions is far from the only (or perhaps even the best) way to identify creative agenda. It requires identifying not merely what the player chose, but what choices were important to the player. A narrativist or simulationist might create what looks like a gamist combat monster merely by default, because that's how this game is played; it's when the player finds significance in the choice relative to what he wants from the game that we're looking at one of those "key decisions"--the rest of the time, it's meaningless.

So the big problem with key decisions is first identifying which decisions actually did matter to the player, and then sussing what was chosen.

--M. J. Young

[Walt Freitag]

Hi M. J.,

I agree with what you're saying, but I think you're referring to an entirely different kind of "key decision" than I was talking about. I was talking about decisions in which the option the player chooses can be taken as evidence for a certain Creative Agenda preferece (and, it follows, the choice of some different option could have been taken as evidence for a different Creative Agenda preference). The examples I quoted above, and similar statements in many similar posts by many different correspondents going way back, state or imply that such revealing decisions (a) exist and (b) are crucial to evaluating Creative Agenda. You may never have believed it, Ron certainly never said anything to encourage or promote it, but that idea has been popping up often enough to be, IMO, worth refuting.

While the moments of play you're characterizing as "key" (most important to the player) certainly deserve that description, they're not the same thing. For instance, a player with a Narrativist Creative Agenda would probably get most jazzed about moments like the ones discussed on this thread and described as being "crucial" or "emotionally grabby." That is, decisions in which all possible choices are also assertions about the Premise. A far cry from moments in which the player has to choose to "make a Narrativist choice instead of a Gamist one" as the "few key choices" paradigm would suggest. Similarly, a Gamist player would probably get more jazzed about a moment of play in which he weighed several choices from an entirely Step On Up perspective, made a choice, and had it pay off, than he would about a moment in which he chose a "Step On Up choice instead of a Story Now choice" -- if choices can ever even be characterized that way, which I doubt.

So, your observations about "key choices" (most important to the player, not most revealing to the observer) are valid and interesting, but they deal with a completely different phenomenon than the one I was addressing.

- Walt

[M. J. Young]

Walt, I've looked at those kinds of choices, and I find them lacking. They do, more and more, seem like the observer deciding what matters and what the choices mean.

The dragon has arrived; you can choose to step up and accept the challenge, or fall back from it. But the choice itself is unrevealing. Did you face the dragon because you believed you were up to the challenge, or because you were exploring issues of courage, or because that's what a knight would do in this situation? Did you fall back because you thought the challenge beyond your capabilities, because you were exploring issues of cowardice, or because that's what a sensible person would do in this situation? The first problem with the "key choices" paradigm is that the moments when those so-called key choices are made are rarely revealing.

The second problem is that they lead to the belief that people have primary and secondary preferences, which I'm not at all certain is correct. Sure, some people always pick sim over gam even though given the option they'll pick nar; but that doesn't mean that sim is a second favored category--only that when nar is not at stake, they don't invest anything in the decision and just do what feels right.

It would be really nice if there were such choices in which it would be clear that a narrativist would do A, a simulationist B, and a gamist C. Frankly, Ron and I both fell into that trap (and I'll call it a trap) years ago, back when he wrote When the Rubber Meets the Road. I took his three examples and put them in my Gamers Preferences Quiz--and in retrospect, the problem with that quiz is that what you would do in a particular situation doesn't answer that question adequately. It answers a different question. Whether you would ignore the rule that you have to roll to survive cryonic transport to get to the beginning of the module or not does not tell us whether you're sim, nar, or gam--it tells us only whether you regard that as plot exposition or part of play. Whether your combat mechanics are more detailed or more streamlined when you come to the final battle of the story doesn't tell you whether your sim, gam, or nar--it only tells whether you prefer crunchy detailed combat or quick streamlined combat at those moments. I have yet to see any choice of what you do in play that really is a tell. What matters is what is important to you, what you enjoy and encourage.

I would love to be proved wrong, shown a list of critical "key decision" moments in which what you choose will clearly align with your creative agenda. I don't think it happens--and I think (from comments he has made about that quiz) Ron has given up expecting that sort of "key decisions" approach to work.

The tell is not what the player decides at the key juncture; it's which junctures he thinks are key.

--M. J. Young

[Walt Freitag]

Walt, I've looked at those kinds of choices, and I find them lacking.

That was the whole point I was trying to make starting out. So we're in, like, complete agreement then, right?

Thanks for pointing out additional arguments supporting that view, and for the additional historical perspective.

- Walt

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

M.J., your points are dead on target regarding the principles at work.

In the interests of full emotional disclosure, I remember the Rubber/Road thread rather differently. You wrote,

Frankly, Ron and I both fell into that trap (and I'll call it a trap) years ago, back when he wrote When the Rubber Meets the Road. I took his three examples and put them in my Gamers Preferences Quiz--and in retrospect, the problem with that quiz is that what you would do in a particular situation doesn't answer that question adequately. It answers a different question.

As I see it, my Rubber/Road thread was honed and focused precisely on someone's specific questions concerning people who were using game designs which mainly facilitated Simulationist goals - specifically, very physics-mechanistic ones. "You want to play Narrativist using those rules? OK, here's what you'll see, in terms of Drift."

That's what aggravated me about your quiz. Discussing GNS and Techniques always has to work with the Techniques a given person is familiar with, which in most cases are very limited (even if the person has played 10 games, they're often just one or two basic Techniques-designs). To expand the points made in that context as a generalized self-test seemed to me to be wrong-headed from the start. It didn't seem possible to explain to you (as I lacked the Techniques etc vocabulary) that using "what I said" wasn't valid for that purpose.

My point #7 in The big model - this is it arises directly from this experience. There, I say:

Point #7: In discussing Techniques, one person's mind-blowing, door-opening example is another person's ho-hum or still another person's deal-breaker. One of the most difficult problems with a multi-user forum discussion is when Person X explains something about the GNS-level to Person Y using a specific Techniques example, and then person Z gets the idea that this Technique is the GNS term. And if they hate the Technique, then they fall right off the cognitive mountain, sometimes irretrievably.

I fully admit that I may be editing my memories in my favor, and without the threads in public access (and as I recall GO, we'd need about six or seven full threads concerning "me beleaguered by foaming Simulationists," not just the one) it's hard to say. But that's how it seems to me now.

I guess what really matters is that you, Walt, and I seem to be in full agreement about the present issue in this thread.

Best,
Ron