Gamism and Narrativism

[Valamir]

And, please, where's the tactics & risk in Solitaire? Pitting your wits against a deck of cards? I'd barely even call Solitaire a game.

There are tactics to solitaire, but I believe it would be more accurately categorized as a puzzle than a game.

[contracycle]

The whole of the model being discussed here is predicated on RPG's being social, collaborative pasttimes. When folks are grooving entirely on the personal satisfaction of doing, they're missing a whole load of fun that's unique to RPG's.

That applies to any number of online games.  You have one level in which you are grooving on your own achievement, and one on which you get the warm fuzzies from the approbation of others.  But this latter does not appear to me to be the driving force because people often persist in games which they are bad at, but which they nevertheless enjoy.

Why call it gamism? Tactics & risk, the same as in other games, are being tested, but the rewards and methods are different.

I could make a cogent case that that is a form of Sim.  Succesfully understanding and exploiting your coherent surroundings to achieve a specified goal could all be described as exploration of setting or situation or both.

And, please, where's the tactics & risk in Solitaire? Pitting your wits against a deck of cards? I'd barely even call Solitaire a game.

Nonetheless, Solitaire is commonly considered to be a game.  Yes, you are pitting your wits against a stack of cards, or more precisely, against the objective world.

[Walt Freitag]

1. Gamist play is rewarded with increased social esteem based on assessing one another's strategy and guts.

2. All play is rewarded with increased social esteem based on assessing one another's play.

Just wanted to acknowledge Ron's response and say that I'm mulling it and continuing to follow the thread. I see where Ron's coming from, but I'm not completely settled on it because when I consider various aspects of another's play that one might be assessing, I see strategy and guts (or at least, one or the other) popping up everywhere, underlying everything.

In a game with a creative Sim agenda, someone makes the perfect "catbus" contribution into the imagined space -- an imagined element that's completely unexpected, and yet completely fitting. I load them up with social esteem. Why? Because I'm impressed and grateful. Why am I impressed and grateful? Because they've done something that's not easy to do or not frequently done well. Why is it not easy to do or not frequently done well? Because doing it requires, among other things, strategy and guts (more so the latter, in this case).

- Walt

[pete_darby]

Gareth, just to pick up on one bit... sure, you're exploring setting and character, but to what end? To find out more about the character or setting (sim) or to extend tactical options, or to put something at risk (both gam). That's one fairly unique aspect of RPG's: pretty much everything's done through a lens of exploration of a shared imaginary space, but that doesn't mean that exploration is or isn't the point.

Why do people persist playing games that they're "bad at"? Perhaps because, despite them not "winning" in the terms the game describes, they're being rewarded either internally or externally for having tried to apply tactical thinking and taken risks. Esteem, again both self and other, as driver. But, in a social past time, I think we've got to talk about social esteem.

Or perhaps they like the space they're exploring in the game, or they're crafting heart rending stories of staggering beauty on the quake servers. Maybe they just like to hang with the guys. Maybe the game doesn't matter, but the folks do.

Walt... I guess it's a common cause of peer approval, and is a good example of a gamist aspect to sim play, but still I'm seeing the preservation of the dream (the right idea at the right time) as being the main thing approved of here. And hey, I'm still pushing for striving to be used in general cases: all CA consist of striving for esteem in the group, but what's being esteemed is the clincher. In Walt's example, it's the quality, appropriateness and unpredictability of the suggestion that's rewarded, which certainly take guts to present, and perhaps a little tactical thinking about presentation, but it seems to me isn't the focus, the source of the approval.

[M. J. Young]

And, please, where's the tactics & risk in Solitaire? Pitting your wits against a deck of cards? I'd barely even call Solitaire a game.

There are tactics to solitaire, but I believe it would be more accurately categorized as a puzzle than a game.

That's a fine line; I tend to think of it as a game, and have learned much from playing it.

Several months back, Kelly Tessena published an article (free for anyone) at Gaming Outpost, http://www.gamingoutpost.com/GL/index.cfm?action=ShowProduct&CategoryID=54411&ProductID=78180&publisherid=76311">My Adventures as a New GM: Cheating in which she recalled playing solitaire as a child. She lost so frequently that she added a rule, allowing her to reshuffle the draw deck one time during play. A babysitter caught her doing this, and threatened to take the cards away from her if she was going to cheat like that.

I picked up on this idea in http://www.gamingoutpost.com/GL/index.cfm?action=ShowProduct&CategoryID=54411&ProductID=78487&publisherid=54849">Game Ideas Unlimited: Challenge, where I recognized that what Kelly was doing as a child, and what I had done with solitaire games when I was young, was adjusting the challenge level of the game.

The fact that rules changes--such as standard versus Vegas, for example--can make the game more or less challenging strongly suggests that we play for the challenge; the payoff is that we feel like we won. The game has to be hard enough that we might have lost, but easy enough that we win frequently enough to get that payoff and play again.

The "tactics" in solitaire lies in determining the move that has the greatest probability of leading to a win. The "risk" lies in deciding whether to make that move or not, knowing that the possibility exists for any move to be the fatal one. There is a great deal of opportunity for analysis of probabilities and risks in the game, trying to deduce what moves are most likely to bring success versus what moves are most likely to bring disaster. Some moves are high on both scales; some are low on both.

So solitaire definitely has a lot of gamism in it.

In a game with a creative Sim agenda, someone makes the perfect "catbus" contribution into the imagined space -- an imagined element that's completely unexpected, and yet completely fitting. I load them up with social esteem. Why? Because I'm impressed and grateful. Why am I impressed and grateful? Because they've done something that's not easy to do or not frequently done well. Why is it not easy to do or not frequently done well? Because doing it requires, among other things, strategy and guts (more so the latter, in this case).

My response to this is that while it does require things we call "strategy and guts" to do that in a sim game, it is a confusion of concepts that have the same names. That is, we can call the move good strategy in the same way that the author of a book can use good strategy in crafting his plot to draw in the readers, or an architect can use good strategy in laying out the floorplan of the building for traffic flow; but we don't mean quite the same thing by "strategy" in those cases as we do when we're talking about the sort of strategy that wins games. Similarly, we can say there was risk, and therefore guts, in the crafting of that plot or the layout of that floorplan, but (and this is a lot finer distinction, perhaps) it is a different sort of risk and a different sort of guts than the sort we're talking about in the risk taken to win a game. It's a confusion of similar things that have the same name because of their similarity (perhaps because they are analogous, but not identical).

So there might be risky strategic decisions made in addressing premise or discovering setting, but they aren't the same kind of risky strategic decisions that are made in meeting challenge.

Of course, Ron might have a completely different answer to this, but it works for me.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

That's a fine line; I tend to think of it as a game, and have learned much from playing it.

And that, I think, is the element thats missing from the description of Gamism at the moment.

IMO, games are an autodidactic behaviour; they are, if you will, 'experiments' conducted in the material world to explore, understand, how that world operates and acts.

I can't see at the moment any potential Sim interest that may be present in Patience/Solitaire.  Its so abstracted that it isn't anything thing other than an exercise (in all senses of the term) in problem solving.  I believe problem solving is in itself a self-satisfying behaviour, and that game playing amounts to a sort of practice for problem solving in the real world where things matter.

I think that for someone who enjoys this sort of activity, the absence or presence of the approval of others is pretty much unimportant.  That sort of thing may well be the ultimate purpose to which the practice is directed, but it may not - the real thing may well be something that determines survival.  People often sacrifice opportunites for social rewards in order to dedicate themselves to mastery of their specific discipline.

Yes, ultimately survival and performance may well be methods by which social approval, mating status, are achieved, but equally it seems to me that we award such approval to those who demonstrate high levels of skill and competence because we are impressed by that skill and competence.  We like people who can do, achieve, and reward and respect them accordingly.  To me, any attendant social rewards are incidental, rather than central, to the goals of the behaviour.  The presence of othe players is pretty much accidental except inasmuch as team-play presents qualitatively different challenges to learn and in which to develop skill.

Yes, like many activities, we engage in it socially and achieve more than one goal simultaneously.  I eat because I must, and I eat socially becuase I can achieve that and have a pleasant experience with my friends at the same time.  The fact that there may be some approval or otherwise going on here, if I cook say, only goes to explain why this instance of eating behaviour occurred in company, rather than why eating behaviour occurs at all.

[pete_darby]

MJ:

Damn good point there about "what do we mean when we say strategy or tactics?"

Gamism is, to my mind, concerned with the Costikyan definition of games, where strategy and tactics are concerned with management and manipulation of resources and risk.

Now, in sim games, you've still got your resources to manipulate and put at risk, but that's not as important as the preservation, expansion and exploration of the SiS: good management and manipulation of resources is only socially rewarded as far as they support the Sim agenda. Same with nar, you got resources and risk, but they're important as feeders for story now & address of premise, not so much for the elegance of their management.

But I get the feeling that, for satisfying play, there has to be struggle, and for struggle there has to be some element of personal esteem "on the line", at least as an opportunity cost as opposed to an actual loss. But that's just a long winded was of saying "we play to get approval of our play from the whole group (including ourselves), and gear our play to maximize that." Which is kind of the point of the whole of Ron's theory...

[Ben Lehman]

But I get the feeling that, for satisfying play, there has to be struggle, and for struggle there has to be some element of personal esteem "on the line", at least as an opportunity cost as opposed to an actual loss.

BL>  Why?  No.  Seriously.  A whole lot of people say this "I can't see anything that the resource management in Gamism serves, so there must be an esteem competition element."  I can't help but suspect that these people are not regular players of Gamist games, or only play a small subset of them.

When I play, say, Go, I play to win, of course.  But "playing to win" is an illusion.  I'm not trying to win.  I'm trying to play a good game.  What does that mean?

It means that the situations in the game, from a tactical/strategic viewpoint, are interesting.  This has absolute bull-pucky to do with the acclaim of my friends, although I might enjoy exploring those situations together with them.

Now, take the same situation, and map it onto D&D 3.0 .  Do I take the "Extended Rage" or the "Extra Raging" feat for my Barbarian, given my weapon choices, our fighting tactics, etc?  Well, there are a lot of complicated things in this situation, and the point is not to make the right choice but rather that the strategic situation itself is interesting.  The situation itself is "good game."  The choice matters, it matters a lot, but not because of what my friends will think of me for it.  It matters because its a difficult choice that we can think about together.

yrs--
--Ben

[pete_darby]

But my point was that in all play in RPG's, not just Gamist, there's an element of risk. In Gamism, it's more quantified, but in Sim it's the risk that your exploration won't gel with the other folks in the SiS, in Nar it's exposure of your own values. And there's my own crazy attitude that any creative endeavour involves some effort towards improving the endeavour, which is what I mean by struggle, and risk in that the effort may be misguided, or wasted. But this is getting very waffley, and should wait until I can express it properly.

In the example you gave... if no-one's grooving on approving optimal tactical play or risk, are you sure you're not exploring system in a Sim style?

But, how do you mean, play a good game? Exhibit tactical thinking? Take risks?

And, in terms of the big ol' theory, you may be grooving on the tactical thinking, but if other folks don't appreciate that's how you're playing, you can sure end up with a lot of strife. So the social esteem, or at least approval, is important for an ongoing game to stay "fun".

[contracycle]

In the example you gave... if no-one's grooving on approving optimal tactical play or risk, are you sure you're not exploring system in a Sim style?

Possibly.  I may well be slipping from one to the other, it happens, and Sim would be the mode I'm likeliest to slip to.

But it still seems to me that players of games are pretty much uninterested in the opinions of others in this regard.  while composing the previous post, I got to thinking about all the fan I saw trekking about in trail of the players in the golf Masters.  Presumably most of these are themselves players, not only groupies.  Sure, while they are there watching the greats, they are providing approval and perhaps, indulging in exploration of system.  But it seems to me, when they play for themselves, they are not exploring the system, I would think.  They are using it.  This is the part that is not, for me, explained by the model, the amount of time these people might spend on the driving range, practicing practicing practicing.  To explain this by reference to some sort of esteem they may garner at some later date does not ring true for me.

If I read a book, it seems more reasonable to me to conclude that I enjoy the book, the act and process of reading, etc.  It seems less plausible to me to assume that I am reading a book so that at some future time I may demonstrate my erudition and gain social approval.  Similarly, it seems more plausible to me that someone who exposes themselves to the agony and injury of many sports is more likely to actually enjoy that activity than some other, consequential, reward.

[pete_darby]

Well we're into things like the difference between sport and games (IMVOO, I think you need to be able to directly affect the other guy to make it a game, and golf don't qualify), and the difference between reading and writing a story, and the difference between solo activities, observing activities and participating activities, all of which have differing methods and rewards.

I'm not saying group esteem is the only reason anyone does anything (that would be crazy talk), but it is, to me, the reason they do social things, to get warm fuzzies from the group, as opposed to lone wolf activities.

And hey, some folks do read books they hate just to show off to their friends...

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

In fact, I think the more general topics should be taken to off-list discussions now. This thread has certainly more than served its purpose regarding RPGs.

Best,
Ron