The Hard Question extended

[Silmenume]

I have been very busy lately so I apologize for not responding promptly.  I will quickly state before I go into my post that I was excited about this thread as I too was upset by the vanishingly quick conclusion of http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=10456">The Hard Question thread.  I had grown dismayed for a while for I was wondering where the defenders of Sim had gone!

Jay, you keep coming back to that one synecdoche, seeing all simulationism as character experience. I have agreed with you before that "being this other person" is a major simulationist experience; but I think that "being me, somewhere else" is also a major simulationist experience. What if we were Over the Rainbow, not being Dorothy, but being us, in Dorothy's place? Simulationism is not as narrow as "character in situation"; sometimes it's "situation in setting", with character being a very minor part of it (pawn-driven sim).

The Hard Question extended

As far as portraying ourselves in roleplay, we are at best playing an abstraction of ourselves as we think we are or as we would like others to perceive us.  As long as we are consciously trying to represent ourselves we will be not be playing are ourselves, but an idea that we have about ourselves that we would like others to see – in other words, a role.  Until all awareness of presentation is lost, we are truly unselfconsciously reacting to stimuli; we will not be ourselves, but an artificial representation of ourselves.  But if we lose all self-awareness of the game process I don't believe one is roleplaying anymore.

The "being me, somewhere else" is also a red herring.  First all characters we play have some of us in them.  We as players do respond emotively to what is happening to our fictional characters or we would not be able to make any decisions regarding them at all.  In order to make decisions we are, as research now indicates, emotively playing a what-if within ourselves regarding the character before we respond.  Second all roles we play while Exploring, even when we are attempting to play ourselves, have fictional elements in them.  They are still characters with fictional elements despite all our efforts for the self-character's to be honest reflections of who we think we are.  Thus "Character in Situation" is not narrow, but rather covers all character Simulation possibilities.  

"...'situation in setting', with character being a very minor part of it (pawn-driven sim)" is a problematic statement.  It is impossible to address Situation without addressing Character as well.  Situation and Character are inextricably intertwined.  Unless the player was minimizing the addressing of Situation they would be addressing Character as often as they were addressing Situation.  A player may not be particularly excited about exploring Character, but it happens none the less whenever said player addresses Situation.  Also, you cannot address Situation without Setting, as Situation is constituted, in part, by Setting.  I will agree that Setting has an impact on our interest in addressing a given Situation, for example I enjoy roleplaying in Middle Earth, but that really means I enjoy addressing Situation that is set in Middle Earth, but by addressing Situation I am also doing so based upon the limitations of said Character and thus, in the process, addressing Character.

In Sim, if one is fascinated by Setting but has no interest in Character, the only way to avoid addressing Character is to avoid addressing Situation.  If one does not address Situation then one is not expressing a CA.  If one is not expressing a CA then they are not roleplaying.

Aure Entaluva,

Silmenume

[M. J. Young]

"'situation in setting', with character being a very minor part of it (pawn-driven sim)" is a problematic statement.  It is impossible to address Situation without addressing Character as well.  Situation and Character are inextricably intertwined.  Unless the player was minimizing the addressing of Situation they would be addressing Character as often as they were addressing Situation.

I don't think this is really on topic for this thread, but I'm going to take a moment to respond primarily because I don't want yet another thread on whether all simulationism is about character identification.

Ralph Mazza has described play in which the players loved exploring the physics of the universe--worlds in which the most logical choice was to leap from the cliff, because the fall would not do sufficient damage to kill you and the monster would. That's a form of simulationism, exploration of system--finding out what the world is like if it really does work according to the rules, recognizing that characters would make choices which we would consider absurd, and having them do so just to see what happens. There's little or no character identification here; it's seeing how the world works.

The earliest role playing games emerged from a background of wargames. Yes, the presence of individual characters made them different; but for many players, it was still about maneuvering the characters in the battle. The use of miniatures, still present in our hobby, comes from that aspect. Yes, a lot of gamist play has its roots there; but a lot of simulationist play also reflects the notion that we are manipulating characters in an extremely sophisticated emulation of a world, to see what we can and cannot accomplish under these rules. This is simulationist play.

Certainly exploration of character is very strongly found in simulationism; but it's even more strongly found in narrativism, and it's also present in gamism. There really is simulationist play in which character identification is not an issue--who the character is does not matter to the player beyond a few essentials; the character is something to manipulate within the world. It may be the camera by which we view the world, and it may very well be no more of a person than a camera would be. I'm going to send my character to Mirkwood because I want to see what the elves are like; if they kill my character, so what--I'll create another character and try to visit them again, or visit the elves in Lothlorien and see whether they'll let me see their part of the world.

As I discuss in Applied Theory, a character is always a tool with which to accomplish the goals of play. What makes a good simulationist character is that it is a good tool to explore the world. In some forms of simulationist play, it doesn't have to be a person, or have a personality, or even be alive--I could role play a robotic probe exploring Mars, make the decisions I think the programming dictates, discover what I can about this imaginary version of Mars, and be playing simulationist. None of that has anything to do with what it's like to be a robotic probe (something that I think could be done as exploration of character, either in simulationist or narrativist play)--it has to do with using the character as a means of exploring the setting.

I'm sorry you don't think any simulationism exists outside that which you have experienced; I wish you would accept that your approach is one version of it, possibly the most popular version, but not the only way to do simulationism.

--M. J. Young