Games and their styles

[Luke Sineath]

I'm new to the Forge.  Hello.

I've been reading the highly interesting articles on GNS, and R. Edward's note on whether a gaming system can influence the style of play.  Has anyone developed a listing of games, categorized by their modes of play?

[Eero Tuovinen]

I've been reading the highly interesting articles on GNS, and R. Edward's note on whether a gaming system can influence the style of play.  Has anyone developed a listing of games, categorized by their modes of play?

Welcome to the forums, then.

The short answer: you cannot classify individual games, because people play them differently. You cannot classify even a given session by a given group, because there are likely many different reasons for decisions people make. You can classify only a single decision, and even that is impossible, because to do that you'd have to know what the player was thinking while making the decision.

It's not all that bleak, though. In practice you can observe a concrete game for a time and see which creative agenda is the most common with that group playing that game. To do that you have to interpret correctly why someone makes some decision, but oftentimes it's relatively clear. We say that a group plays a game f.ex. narratively when narrativist decisions are the most common ones, and decisions are usually evaluated for conforming with narrativist ideals.

With a published game text you can only analyze it to work out what agenda it promotes best, that is, how it is most easy to play. Back your analysis up by researching how people actually play that game, and you might have some hint about what that game does. And still, there is some games that promote roughly equally two or even three agendas, and thus won't be so easily classified.

Some common games and their generally accepted classifications:

D&D: gamist/simulationist, depending on style of play
WW games: incoherent, mixing all three agendas to a degree
Sorcerer: strongly narrativist, almost impossible in other modes
CoC: simulationist/gamist, like an inverted D&D: almost all games from before -89, and certainly all you own, are essentially similar in this regard

Someone else can probably continue the list, if desired. There's not much point to it though, other than to see how people have used the given game in the past.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Actually, I'd prefer not to develop a simplistic list in this thread. I think it's potential for counterproductive readings is way too high.

Luke, if you go through the four main essays, you'll find that I use tons and tons of textual examples, both for individual points and for general trends in game design, relative to GNS. In some cases, I even lay out complex tables with pieces and parts of games presented for contrast. So it might be most useful for you to construct your own list based on all that information, especially because I'm careful to identify just which parts of the games are being discussed.

Best,
Ron