exploration of self

[lumpley]

John, Jason, the split you're looking for is right there in my "why do you write fiction?"

"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To exorcise my demons."

"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To try on different moral points of view."

"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To be the sword of God."

See it?

You might switch from playing Narrativist to playing Simulationist, with the same exorcise-my-demons goal, just like you might switch from writing fiction to writing autobiography.  Maybe even midgame / midstory, if you're willing to do something that drastic.  That just shows that there's a natural split there.

Each endeavor - playing Nar Sim or Gam, or fiction poetry or autobiography - gives you an angle of attack, like, on your expressive agenda.

-Vincent

[John Kim]

John, cruciel, the split you're looking for is right there in my "why do you write fiction?"

"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To exorcise my demons."
"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To try on different moral points of view."
"Why do you play Narrativist?" "To be the sword of God."

See it?

You might switch from playing Narrativist to playing Simulationist, with the same exorcise-my-demons goal, just like you might switch from writing fiction to writing autobiography.  Each endeavor - playing Nar Sim or Gam, or fiction poetry or autobiography - gives you an angle of attack, like, on your expressive agenda.  

Well, I think so, and I don't think this differs from what I said.  There is a fairly concrete dividing line between fiction and autobiography -- i.e. Are the events described true experiences of yours?  Of course, much of fiction is partly autobiographical, but in general any intentional untruth means that it is considered "fiction".  

GNS modes don't have such clear division even in principle.  They are at a sort of middle level between personal goals and techniques.  Now, a number of posters said that Threefold Simulationism isn't really a Creative Agenda; it is just a set of Techniques (sorry if I'm mangling the phrasing).  I thought this implied that the GNS modes are more than just collections of Techniques.  Come to think of it, I'm not sure about that.  I understand that GNS is supposed to be behavioral patterns rather than a goal -- but doesn't that just make it a grouping of techniques?  i.e. So GNS is one way of grouping techniques, and the Threefold would be another?  

That makes sense to me, in that both of these models are really artistic classifications, like genre or style.  There is no 'natural' level for such distinctions.  You can have broad groupings like "Post-Modernism" or more narrow groupings like "Cubism".

[Jason Lee]

See it?

Honestly... no.

You might switch from playing Narrativist to playing Simulationist, with the same exorcise-my-demons goal, just like you might switch from writing fiction to writing autobiography.  Maybe even midgame / midstory, if you're willing to do something that drastic.  That just shows that there's a natural split there.

Each endeavor - playing Nar Sim or Gam, or fiction poetry or autobiography - gives you an angle of attack, like, on your expressive agenda.

If your talking about why explore in the first place, I suppose I would place that outside CA; outside Social Contract; hell, outside the whole damn model.  However, what we seem to be talking about here is specifically something that takes place inside the SIS - that'd make it below Exploration, right?.  Social Contract goals don't need an SIS, you can hit on chics regardless of what's happening in-game.  A therapuetic agenda is going to need specific techniques to support and protect that agenda.

[AnyaTheBlue]

Hm.

I may be misunderstanding this horribly from Ron's GNS stuff, but here's my take on this.

Role playing is a social activity.  In any given social activity, there is a tension between individual goals, and group goals.  If the tension is too great, the group has no cohesion.  If it's slack, everybody is on the same page and working towards the same goal.  In my experience, it's usually in the middle somewhere.

When you're in the middle, there are n+1 goals, where n is the number of people playing.  Each player has personal goals and motivations distinct from the others.  "I'm playing because I hope to get a date with Tina."  "I'm playing because my boyfriend is."  "I'm playing to deal with internal personal demons."  "I'm playing to let off steam."  This goes on ad nauseum.

These individual goals and motivations, however, do have something in common.  You need other people with which to pursue them.  You can't do it all alone.  This is where I see Social Contract and Creative Agenda leaping onto the scene.

The social contract is the agreed upon group goals, the thing that provides something everybody tacitly or explicitly agrees to sublimate their own personal motives to for the sake of there being a group of people doing the same thing at all.

This doesn't mean that anybody's personal goals can't be met, it just means that they have to be met within the guidelines understood to be the Social Contract.  If that's not possible, then meta-game discussion and negotiation has to take place in order to modify the Social Contract suitably.

So, with all this taken into account, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a single individual can use any of the GNS techniques to meet a personal self-exploration goal without the self-exploration goal being part of the Social Contract (and, hence, the group's shared Creative Agenda as understood through that Social Contract).  I think this is what Ron and Vincent were thinking.  It's certainly what I was thinking.

At the same time, it's entirely possible to make this kind of exploration a part of the Social Contract -- it becomes a point of playing in the first place.  But the GNS techniques are still the techniques you would use to meet this shared goal.  This kind of 'embedding' of the goal into the Social Contract is what I think Emily is talking about.  As I see it, the purpose of the game playing is agreed to include self-exploration, but it doesn't necessarily change the way in which that play itself is undertaken.

As an aside, John, that sort of chimeric shifting from one technique/GNS Mode to another is in fact something I've seen a lot in gaming -- where some players are gamist and others are simist or narist so the session jumps around depending on where the Authorial Mantle has fallen at any given time.  I've even seen where individual players shift modes right there at the table as their immediate in-game goals change.

I don't see that as a problem, although I'm not sure if GNS really encompasses that as functional play.

[clehrich]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think Emily was right from the get-go: this is a CA, not "merely" a goal of exploration.

To see this, I propose thinking for a minute of all the 3 standard CA's (and this wouldn't be a very common CA!) as playing with a net.  The "rewind" option would be typical here: there is a tendency to want to do this self-analysis stuff only if there's some way to "back out" when it gets too crazy.  If we imagine a hyper-personal CA (I'll get back to a name for it later), I see it as necessitating play without the net, without the option to back out or down.  Thus the stuff quoted about Malori and her game would constitute incoherent therapeutic play.

Let me put that a little more clearly.

Coherent: You've decided that your purpose in playing, as a group, is to explore and challenge yourselves as personal subjects.  You agree that the game is not a "safe space," that the really intense things that happen to you will be real in an emotional and personal sense.  The only thing that makes the game even remotely "safe" is that nothing will happen to you physically, and the likelihood that you can later deal with the upshot of anything excessive by saying, "Okay, that shouldn't hurt me, I agreed to that, and everyone there was being supportive of the project."  But that's not much of a consolation if it really, really hurt.  You plan from the outset to explore your own limits, and break them.  You plan to suffer, and be changed by the game, and you plan for these changes to affect you for the rest of your life, changing the way you act and think in the world.  You concede that you will put everything on the line, not just your character; you yourself are at stake, and your character is just a way for you to put your neck on the block.

Incoherencies:

You've decided that this is

your goal of play, but the group isn't necessarily on track with that
You've decided that there will be a safety zone that allows you to stop when the going gets too rough
You've decided that only certain subjects will be allowable as exploration topics
You've decided that all this exploration should occur as a function of Story
You've decided that the game itself is "safe" so that you can try out new things without their affecting you otherwise[/list:u]What I think usually happens, then, is that people encounter the possibilities of such personal or therapeutic play while playing something else.  They dodge around it, get some "vibes" off it, but don't dive in and say, "Let's do this."  This is exactly what happens, for example, when people who see themselves as classic Immersive Simulationists find themselves addressing a Premise and wonder why that doesn't happen more often.  

The whole point of GNS, as I understand it, is to work out what the discrete CA's really are, and then diagnose a confused situation in which a group of gamers want X effect but can't seem to get it more often, or a group keeps breaking down to some degree because people's goals seem at odds, and so forth.  Furthermore, once the CA's are established, you can design your games to support them fully and not waste time on the stuff that isn't important to your group.

I see this as happening with this sort of therapy-play.  If defined as a goal, a CA, you'd immediately know (1) why some people are experiencing things that others aren't and aren't interested in; (2) why some systems seem more supportive of people who want this sort of thing; and (3) some basic principles that underlie such play, so that people who want this sort of game (if it can even be called a game any more!) can construct systems that promote these effects.

Take Ron's comments on Sorcerer.  Sure, because it's "intense" and focused on really creepy stuff, and founded on Narrativist principles, it can be used as a possible tool for therapeutic play.  But at base, as Ron says, this isn't the point of the game, and if everyone in the game wants therapeutic effects they will ultimately find Sorcerer to be a hammer used to drive a screw.  It works, but not well.

I made some remarks about the possibility of such play in my Ritual essay, where I proposed thinking about it in terms of ideology, politics, power, and whatnot; this is why I shy away from the "therapy" concept as such.  That is, defining such play as entirely therapeutic in the psychological sense, or even in terms of exploration (which Emily has rightly pointed out confuses the issue), skews our perceptions.  We miss the point that one could do this sort of gaming to encounter situations that are unlikely (or we hope they are) in real life: rape, brutal oppression, etc.  

Why would we do this?  Simply to know how we ourselves would respond in such a case?  That's pure exploration in a rather Sim sense.  To make a phenomenally good and meaningful story?  That's quite Nar, I think.  To defeat the situation, i.e. survive and be healthy at the least?  That's a rather Gam solution.  But is there another option?  I think there is:

To experience the situation, at the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual levels, and to generate new possibilities in ourselves.

Put this way, it sounds sort of Sim, in the sense that we're "trying out" a new situation.  But I maintain that one would also be quite focused on the out-of-game situation implied: you experience rape (from whichever side) to encounter emotionally a situation that may otherwise be purely intellectual, and from that to put your experiences into action within the world.  Similarly, you experience an intellectual situation or construct that would otherwise be an unexamined emotional idea, and this leads you to think differently in all contexts.

I guess you could call this Examination, in the sense of Socrates' oft-quoted idea that the unexamined life is not worth living.  If you've read Plato, you may have noticed that what teachers like to call "the Socratic method" has nothing to do with Socrates: it doesn't mean asking questions, it means deliberately painting people into intellectual, moral, and emotional corners in order to force them to examine the world and their own lives in radically new ways.  I see the Examination CA (as I think it should perhaps be called) as a true agenda for this reason: unlike the other three CA's, it's utterly focused on the negation of the line between game and world.

I suppose this CA would be very unusual; indeed, I can't think of a coherent example of Examination game design.  But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  In fact, I suspect that the lack of such game design and the lack of recognition of this as a true CA has something to do with the almost total insularity of the RPG hobby with respect to things like politics.  Examination games could be designed -- even if they might well be unpopular -- and would perhaps have a salutary effect on their players as "examined" people.

As a final point, if you haven't checked it out, look at some of what Jonathan Walton has been up to in his RPG.net column, "The Fine Art of Roleplaying."  Especially when he gets into Brecht, I think the Examination CA begins to raise its head.  My rather excessive response to some of the argument ("Naturalized Slavery") should also give some sense of where I come down on this.  I'd like to see Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, and their ilk coming into RPG's, frankly, and I think that this sort of work doesn't really fit any established CA coherently.

Chris Lehrich

[xiombarg]

OK, I'm trying to separate out "personal goal" from "group creative agenda" in my mind.  i.e. Suppose that others know about this as a personal goal and try to act to support it.  Does that make a difference?

I dunno if I'm running too far from the subject here, but to tie this into some actual play, it certainly makes a difference when others don't know that you're playing for exploration of self/theraputic reasons. As we've always found at the Forge, lack of clear communication and understanding leads to dysfunction.

In this particular case, I was running an Amber game. Unknown to me, one of the players was using her character to work out certain personal issues in the game. Well, let's just say I was blindsided by the angry, accusatory reaction when her character died due to the strict interpretation of Amber's karma rules I was using...

(And I'll note that this is another data point that women tend to enjoy the "exploration of self" mode.)

I'm not sure if that anecdote throws light on or muddies y'all's argument about exploration of self as a CA, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

[clehrich]

I was running an Amber game. Unknown to me, one of the players was using her character to work out certain personal issues in the game. Well, let's just say I was blindsided by the angry, accusatory reaction when her character died due to the strict interpretation of Amber's karma rules I was using...

A lovely example of Examination-Incoherence.  If everyone had been entirely on track for such Examination, then (a) the Karma rules wouldn't have been structured that way, (b) the situation wouldn't have arisen because the players would have seen that it led away from Examination, or (c) the death would have been a valid and shocking aspect of such Examination.

Chris Lehrich

[W. Don]

Hi folks,

was running an Amber game. Unknown to me, one of the players was using her character to work out certain personal issues in the game. Well, let's just say I was blindsided by the angry, accusatory reaction when her character died due to the strict interpretation of Amber's karma rules I was using...

A lovely example of Examination-Incoherence. If everyone had been entirely on track for such Examination, then (a) the Karma rules wouldn't have been structured that way, (b) the situation wouldn't have arisen because the players would have seen that it led away from Examination, or (c) the death would have been a valid and shocking aspect of such Examination.

Chris, just a thought: in the case above, given that the player reacted badly to it, might it also be said that the player was de-protagonised in his Examination agenda? Seems to work (at least semantically.)

Anyways, after reading all the posts about this thus far, I'm picking up on the idea that Chris' Examination, like teaching/learning values, or looking for a date and so on, are items that lie outside the model. These things  eat up the 3 CA, or rather they use the 3 CA in the service of items outside the game being just a game.

It occurs to me that CA as it stands was meant to address how the game might be played as a game. It says nothing as yet about self-examination and so forth. Should it? I don't know. Perhaps not.

The self-examination angle (and similar matters) will no doubt color how the game is played, how the rules are structured, how social contracting plays out and so on. In that sense, it cuts straight through the 3 CA and co-opts them instead of emerging as a CA in the sense that the three are.

They are at a sort of middle level between personal goals and techniques.

That's the clincher here for me. One one hand, you have the level of personal meaning -- ie: what a game means to you, what a game means to the people you play it with -- which is where Chris' Examination agenda comes from I think. The GNS Creative Agenda on the other hand refers to the nature of the game as a game, on a level lower than the "Why?" on a personal level.

- W.

[clehrich]

It occurs to me that CA as it stands was meant to address how the game might be played as a game. It says nothing as yet about self-examination and so forth. Should it? I don't know. Perhaps not.

Practically speaking, of course, GNS is naturally fairly limited.  In a logical sense, however, there's no absolute reason for the limit.  This is because nobody has yet successfully defined RPG's to everybody's satisfaction, and I think it's unlikely anyone's going to -- it's sort of like defining any other large, central category.  So there's no way absolutely to distinguish between "really the game" and "not really the game."  And thus what we might call "fringe" CA's are always going to be possible.

The self-examination angle (and similar matters) will no doubt color how the game is played, how the rules are structured, how social contracting plays out and so on. In that sense, it cuts straight through the 3 CA and co-opts them instead of emerging as a CA in the sense that the three are.

An excellent point.  To my mind, this raises some points about the Big Model's limits as a structure, but that would take us far away from Emily's thread.

Emily?  Any thoughts?

Chris Lehrich

[John Kim]

They are at a sort of middle level between personal goals and techniques.

That's the clincher here for me. One one hand, you have the level of personal meaning -- ie: what a game means to you, what a game means to the people you play it with -- which is where Chris' Examination agenda comes from I think. The GNS Creative Agenda on the other hand refers to the nature of the game as a game, on a level lower than the "Why?" on a personal level.

Right.  And that's what makes it sort of odd.  So when I want a game, I start with personal goals:  i.e. what do I want to get out of this game?  I want to choose (or perhaps design) a game which will fulfill these personal goals.  Assuming open communication, I am clear with the others of the group about what I would like -- and they agree and suggest compatible goals.  Given this agreement, there are a bunch of techniques which we can use so that the game can fulfill our personal goals.  

So how does GNS fit in this picture?  The "middle layer" interpretation suggests that we should figure out how to structure our play based on G, N, or S -- and then try to get our goals out of that.  If this is the case, it seems to me more straightfoward to skip the middleman.  i.e. Choose/design your techniques to fulfill the actual goals of play.  So if you are trying for Psychological Examination, you look at what techniques best accomplish this regardless of how they fit into GNS divisions.  

That said, I think that the GNS categories do represent broad classes of personal goals.  And I think those personal goals should be probed and examined, because those are the real things that people should be designing for.

[lumpley]

Hey John.

So how does GNS fit in this picture? The "middle layer" interpretation suggests that we should figure out how to structure our play based on G, N, or S -- and then try to get our goals out of that. If this is the case, it seems to me more straightfoward to skip the middleman. i.e. Choose/design your techniques to fulfill the actual goals of play. So if you are trying for Psychological Examination, you look at what techniques best accomplish this regardless of how they fit into GNS divisions.

I don't get this a'tall.  You shouldn't structure your play based on G, N, or S.  Why would you?  How even could you?

No: what the "middle layer" interpretation says is that when you choose your techniques to fulfill the goal of Psychological Examination, you will find that the resultant play is G, N or S, in addition to fulfilling your goal.

-Vincent

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

It strikes me that the "larger" (or from another viewpoint, isolated and thus smaller) goal represented by, in this case, psychological self-examination plays exactly the same role relative to role-playing as to any other creative/imaginative endeavor.

When that sort of thing comes up, I get a little suspicious of the Forge's ability to deal with it. It's exactly the same issue as, say, "Why does [name a musician] create music?" Sure, some reason or or reasons certainly exist, but dissecting that reason in question doesn't yield much meat at the general level. It seems to me the answer will always be, "Because he is this person with his given background at this phase of his life." Thus the answer to his individual take on "what to do" is always going to be, "It's his individual take on what to do" - i.e., a circular exercise.

Granted, I might be interested in the insights that emerge about a particular person whose music I like or whose influence captures my historical influence (Frank Zappa, for instance, as an example of both)> However, I think the answers are limited to that particular person and have value only to me as a particular person in dialogue with fellow enthusiasts.

Does this mean I dismiss such inquiry out of hand? Nah. I do think it represents exactly the point where the limits of the Forge-as-medium are met, though.

None of our theorizing about role-playing, here in these forums, can hope to address Mighty Big Questions about Humans, Life, and Art. Those questions ought to be relegated to those who are interested in them as such, and I certainly support the idea that role-playing is a worthy topic - right in place as an art form with cinema, comics, literature, music, et cetera. And if anyone wants to present a view on such a thing here at the Forge, as Chris Lehrich did with his Rituals paper, that's nifty too.

But resolve such things here? In disciplines such as metaphysics, myth-and-ritual theoretical anthropology, postmodern sociology, and similar?

Nope. Can't be done.

The Forge isn't an academic department, nor even a think-tank for issues at that level. We can provide meat for such analyses, but I really have a hard time imagining what sort of on-line environment might be expected actually to resolve them. That's an ideal I don't think this site needs to live up to.

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

Hi Ron,

I don't agree with you, I'm afraid.  Either that or I'm misreading.  It seems as though you're actually not getting the point of GNS, which seems odd....

When that sort of thing comes up, I get a little suspicious of the Forge's ability to deal with it. It's exactly the same issue as, say, "Why does [name a musician] create music?" Sure, some reason or or reasons certainly exist, but dissecting that reason in question doesn't yield much meat at the general level. It seems to me the answer will always be, "Because he is this person with his given background at this phase of his life." Thus the answer to his individual take on "what to do" is always going to be, "It's his individual take on what to do" - i.e., a circular exercise.

Two points:

1. The "dissection" of music in this fashion has a long and honorable history among composers most especially, and has often been central to the development of musical forms.  Not always, of course, but often.  For example, the turn of the 20th century in so-called classical music (Western highbrow art music, if you prefer) saw a tremendous self-conciousness in composing, because the previous theoretical directions had pretty much reached their limits.  So at the same time (plus or minus) you have Wagner, Mahler, Satie, Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ives, and a few others trying to work out where to go from here.  Each comes up with new theoretical possibilities, and generates new musical forms.  All were ultimately quite influential in one area or another (less so Satie than the others).  It seems to me that one of the points of GNS, in fact, is to clarify the field theoretically just as these composers did, such that we can see the situation of our medium as clearly and move forward as dynamically.

2. The answer to such a question is not necessarily "because that's his individual take on it."  Of course, in a sense, that's necessarily true, but that would be the case no matter what we're talking about.  Within GNS, I think we can and do ask, "Why do you play RPG's?" or "Why do you write RPG's?"  The old answers were often little more than "because it's fun"; GNS is one of several tools that have allowed more interesting answers: "Because I want Story Now," for example, as opposed to "Because I want the Dream."  Similarly, suppose we asked, "Why did Mahler hyper-complicate the symphonic form as he did, particularly beginning with the 2d Symphony?"  A stupid answer is, "Because he was Mahler."  A better answer is, "Because he was faced with the death (from over-perfection) of pure harmony, and wanted to re-integrate polyphony, and conceived of a notion that's been called 'emotional polyphony,' in which vast harmonic themes are made to represent emotional strata within the subject, then put into a fugal construction in order to represent and work through the totality of mankind's emotional and spiritual situation."  Note that this answer would be untrue when applied to Debussy, whereas the short, silly one would be true regardless.

In short, the question isn't "Why does X make music?" and it isn't "Why does Y play RPG's?"  The question is "Why in this way?"  Surely that's the point of GNS?

However, I think the answers are limited to that particular person and have value only to me as a particular person in dialogue with fellow enthusiasts.

Again, I think if you listen to Mahler having learned something about "emotional polyphony" [that's Benjamin Zander's term, incidentally], you experience the music differently, and perhaps more deeply.

But resolve such things here? In disciplines such as metaphysics, myth-and-ritual theoretical anthropology, postmodern sociology, and similar? ... Nope. Can't be done. ... The Forge isn't an academic department, nor even a think-tank for issues at that level.

Who needs to resolve anything?  Here or in academia?  We're talking about the whys and wherefores of our artistic medium, at both a practical and a theoretical level, and trying to see ways we could move forward -- maybe not all in unison, but all forward.  I just don't see how this is "The Big Questions" any more than any other part of GNS or the Big Model.

Chris Lehrich

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Chris,

I'm good with all of that. I think I over-did my post - the point wasn't to shut down the discussion, but to express why I'm not especially able to contribute to it myself. But if you or anyone wants to keep going, who knows, I may go "spoit" and realize that all kinds of insights are appearing that I (and similarly-inclined individuals) can't reach on my own. I'll respectfully reserve an "I told you so" if the tail-chasing goes nowhere for a particular avenue, which has been known to occur regarding other media. But hey, that's always a possibility at any level of analysis. So yeah, I buy your point.

Best,
ron

[Emily Care]

Hey folks,

Thanks for _not_ shutting this down, Ron. Though I liked Chris' response, I'm not trying to get at philosophical questions here. I'm really trying to understand why a play/design goal that would cause somebody to choose particular types of techniques etc. and that can and does come into conflict with the big three ca's, is seen as occuring at a different level than them. If that question could be answered for me, I'd be content.

And I recognize this thread is re-treading some ground (see the threads posted by Jason and me), but it's also coming up because there are things we need to clarify about the theory.  

heya Vincent,

I don't get this a'tall.  You shouldn't structure your play based on G, N, or S.  Why would you?  How even could you?

I respond by quoting System Does Matter

Here I suggest that RPG system design cannot meet all three outlooks at once. For example, how long does it take to resolve a game action in real time? The simulationist accepts delay as long as it enhances accuracy; the narrativist hates delay; the gamist only accepts delay or complex methods if they can be exploited. Or, what constitutes success? The narrativist demands a resolution be dramatic, but the gamist wants to know who came out better off than the next guy. Or, how should player-character effectiveness be "balanced"? The narrativist doesn't care, the simulationist wants it to reflect the game-world's social system, and the gamist simply demands a fair playing field.

One of the biggest problems I observe in RPG systems is that they often try to satisfy all three outlooks at once. The result, sadly, is a guarantee that almost any player will be irritated by some aspect of the system during play. GMs' time is then devoted, as in the Herbie example, to throwing out the aspects that don't accord for a particular group. A "good" GM becomes defined as someone who can do this well - but why not eliminate this laborious step and permit a (for example) Gamist GM to use a Gamist game, getting straight to the point? I suggest that building the system specifically to accord with one of these outlooks is the first priority of RPG design.

Even if Ron's ideas have changed over the years, this is still a common outlook on the usefulness of GNS.  If it is not applicable to play and design, why are we talking about it?

Now, going back to John's post:

So how does GNS fit in this picture? The "middle layer" interpretation suggests that we should figure out how to structure our play based on G, N, or S -- and then try to get our goals out of that. If this is the case, it seems to me more straightfoward to skip the middleman. i.e. Choose/design your techniques to fulfill the actual goals of play. So if you are trying for Psychological Examination, you look at what techniques best accomplish this regardless of how they fit into GNS divisions.

That said, I think that the GNS categories do represent broad classes of personal goals. And I think those personal goals should be probed and examined, because those are the real things that people should be designing for.

Let's see.  Personal goals are really tricky.  They are going to be complex, self-contradictory and often unconsciously held.  The greater the clarity about one's own goals, the better, in my experience, but when we are talking about a play priority (as we do with GNS) we can only, in truth, talk about what people actually do.  What goes on in their head and heart we can only speculate about.  So, keeping the ca's to observable (or projected) behaviour is the most constructive way to go about things.

That said, I completely agree that CA categories do, or at least could, represent broad categories of design and play goals as demonstrated by actual choices, decisions etc. in aggregate.  

Regards,
Emily