Using a Gamist engine for Narritivism

[sirogit]

The initial thought that brought on this idea was, "What situations cannot be used for Narrativism?" A self-challenge of sorts. I considered the situation of a deathmatch FPS: You and a bunch of other people are in a building filled with guns, last one alive wins.

My iniatial concept for Nar-mechanics around the situation: The Premise is "What will you do to win?", in order to emphasize this, the characters are expected to have a psychological background where honor in battle tactics matters.

We could say that characters start with a number of Glory/Honor/Spirit/Hero points, that they cultivate by doing justified things like shooting someone that dogged you first, assisting someone against overwhelming odds, going out of your way to end someone's misery if someone else left them to die a slow painfull death, engaging someone fairly when presented the oppurtunity to kill them indiscriminately.

Similarly, you lose Honor points by teaming against others, cheap shots, preying on those with a disadvantage.

Honor points can be used as a score to resist intimidation, keep your cool, resist penalities from damage, and to convince someone what you're speaking is the truth. Honor is something of a combat advantage, but with a definate flavor: It keeps you from dying on your knees, vs. dying on your feet.

So, the immediate reality of the game is: Your character wants to win, but by comprimising Honor in pursuit of that victory, not only could you lose the edge that you've been holding and be stuck with nowhere to turn, but even winning is more hollow the less Honor you have.  

Now, my intentions for this game are obviously Nar, but I'm using Gamism to evoke feelings from the players, when their character wins, that's something "Good", when they've used up all of their Honor and now need help, they feel remoserful and question themselves, largely due to the fact that they've largely comrpised their character survival.

The Creative Agenda is to create a story, but to hit the theme that the game is aimed at, players must recognize a meaningfull goal of "winning" for the possible sacrifice of that goal to mean anything. So the players assume the usual stipulations of Gamism in order for the story to make sense.

My two main questions is, is there something in my description that makes the game sound like it isn't Narrativist? Am I correctly recoginizng Gamism or am I lumping it in too simplisticly? If I'm correct in both assumptions, would it be problematic to use Gamism to evoke feelings from players in a Narrativist game such as the one I presented?[/i]

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I guess I don't see anything here but Gamism, of a fairly shoot'em-up sort. The "Honor" score seems like a simple corrective resource rather than a thematic element.

One phrase of yours I'd call attention to is about "creating story." Creating story can be a feature of any Creative Agenda as currently conceived. So just because your scenario creates a story doesn't make it Narrativist.

Can someone play as you describe and go Narrativist with it? Sure. But "can" isn't the issue. Creative Agenda is always a matter of what you do with it.

Best,
Ron

[sirogit]

I'd agree that creating a story, as a task, fits in with either Gamism or Simulationism just as well as Narrativism, but from my understanding of it, admitively largely coming from your essays , that it's Nar play when creating a story cooperatively is the purpose, and it does so by focusing on creating theme from a premise.

Now, one could play Gamism or Simulationism for the purpose that the game creates an amusing story as a result of their Gamist or Simulationist gaming, like a reality tv show, but by having nearly conflict in the game squared on addressing the premise of "What will you do to win?" by players choosing whether to take the long, broad path or the short, narrow path, in their manner of violent conquest, I assumed that that would create theme, and therefore fully facilitate Narrativist play vs. Gamist play.    

What Nar elements are missing from it to facilitate Narrativism?

[Blankshield]

Hmm.  To me, what you describe doesn't really sound like "What will you do to win?" but more "Can I win and still have high honor?"  There's two 'win' scales in the scenario, and players are Stepping On Up to both of them - Can you win, and Can you retain honor?  

Honor, as you describe it, doesn't feel so much like a hard personal choice (which is what I would use as a pretty good metric for if Nar play is happening) as a way of keeping track of who's winning "the best".

If instead you stripped out the honor mechanic, left it as a plain jane Shoot 'em up, but turned the question into "Is winning worth my honor?" that would lead more readily to Nar play, I think.  Especially if you didn't define honor, but left that to the players to decide for themselves.  It probably still wouldn't work as well as starting with a system that wasn't overtly gamist, but could be done, if the players were predisposed towards Nar play.  I suspect that if you gave this to a bunch of gamist players with no real interest in Nar, any meaning you tried to inject would get ignored as not relevent to the "real point" of the game, which is blowing up the other guy.

$0.02

James