Getting Beyond GNS

[Mike Holmes]

How do I miss these damn threads? Somehow I missed this: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=11837

All nine pages of it. Late in the thread, there was a lot of debate about some classic GNS issues like the mutual exclusion of modes. I wanted to go over some of this one more time because I think we're going round and round about the terminology again. (And I didn't want to impertinently add to a thread that I hadn't read entirely).


The definition that's currently used is that GNS modes as creative agendas are mutually exclusive because there will likely be moments in play where one has to make a decision where they cannot do what appears to be both modes at the same time. These have been referred to as "tells." When looking at whatever tells may exist, one discerns the GNS mode being prioritized by that.

If there are no tells, we can't tell what sort of mode is being prioritized. Now, what the theory submits is that, over time, when tells are available, players will show themselves always to be prioritizing one thing more than any other. That the overall agenda will be slanted towards one of the three modes. In fact that otherwise "invisible" tells become visible (or discernable retroactively) over the long haul, reinforcing this. This is based purely on the anecdotal evidence provided by folks like Ron and others who have observed this to be true.

This may shock some people, but this is, in fact, purely a matter of faith. Or, rather, for people who have observed this to be true, the theory is a very helpful thing.

Some people make the observation that there is, in fact, play that is "balanced" between modes, where two modes are being equally prioritized, then that's at least as valid in terms of anecdotal evidence. Interestingly, even this is right, it really doesn't make much difference. That is, the mutual exclusiveness of modes is something that has divided camps for a long time, but means very little.

Basically it comes down to the sim/nar line debate, and the implications of The Impossible Thing. That is, for Ron the mutual exclusiveness of modes is important, because it underlies the fact that both the player and GM can't have control of the same thing at the same time. Marco, perhaps the most ardent supporter of the idea that the theory might have holes surrounding this sort of thing, at least agrees with Ron that this is correct. He also notes that it is irrelevant, because it's his opinion that texts don't ever get read this way. Ron would say that's true, but that they get read as sim or nar, and that drift is problematic. I'm not going to get into that debate again, because it's also based on anecdotal evidence. Anyhow, Ron attaches the line of demarcation here to GM control of certain types of decisions made by the player.

And here's the important distinction between sim and nar play. Note that it's made atomically, by decision. That is, tells being cases where decisions are made such that they support one mode well, and are done in such a way as to be observably so (non-congruent, displaying of social reinforcement, etc.), are individually moment by moment events.


So, where am I going with this? Well, we can look at things atomically, too. That is, maybe Ron's right, and maybe overall different styles of play have agendas to them that can be determined over time, and which may be mutually exclusive. But that doesn't matter a whole lot. I shall explain.

The definition of incoherent play is where different players are making decisions in different modes. Obviously if the modes are observable, then there are tells that were discernibly evidentiary. If not, then play is congruent, per Walt. This is where the potential for dysfunction comes in (though not automatic dysfunction), because this is where individual players note the play of others, and may object. In fact, and I've said this a lot, objections that are brought up in play are almost always single instances that the player in question felt were egregious examples.

The point is that atomic dissection of play is possible, and profitable. Ron does not disagree with this. He merely says that these little instances are not agendas, but something smaller. And he has no problem with anyone saying that there were X of one and Y of another. He would say that this doesn't make that a particular agenda, but that's his definition. The point is that it's something, and it's significant. So it should be titled something recognizable.

Ron has actually suggested "Little N" and "Little S" and "Little G" for these things. I think that these are problematic, and I'd stand behind someone else who came up with better names for them. Perhaps something like Player Challenge Based Decisions, Dream Support Decisions, and Theme Creation Decisions. Actually my personal theories are much more complicated than this, but we have to start somewhere.

Once we start talking about these things, as opposed to agendas, then all of the problems that people have with what seem to be inconsistencies with how things work with GNS go away.  One can say that they're trying to create a game that promotes making Dream Support Decisions, in X cases, and Theme Support Decisions in Y cases. Then we can leave Ron to debate over whether this will end up with more support for an N or S agenda, hybrid or no, but it won't much matter.

Because this is how games are designed anyhow. We know that no game supports one thing to the disclusion of all else, nor does anyone believe that there's any imperative to do so. The only real imperative of GNS theory is that the system should not, through support, or via drift to certain support caused by poor translatability of the text, cause different players to have a different idea of how to play the game. Such that different players can feel justified at being annoyed at the play of others. As such, whether they are hybrid or actually multi-modal, design of games with support for more than one thing is something to be sought. That's not to say that seeking single modal games isn't also something to peruse, just that there's no imperative one way or another in regards to this.

What I'm saying is that I don't see any problem with Ron's definitions, but I agree that we need to get beyond them. And I think that changing the definitions is unnecessary, and, worse, just confuses things more than necessary. Instead what we need here is new taxonomy to discuss the new things that we're discovering. Sure, when they discovered quarks, some probably said that they should change the name of things like Protons so that the terms would better relate that of which they were composed. But instead they did the better thing, IMO, and came up with terms that referred to the mathematical building blocks of these participles.

I'm just hoping that eventually we can get beyond electrons, and start talking about K-capture here. That doesn't mean that we don't leave electrons as a term for the grade-schoolers - just that we understand those terms as the older, simpler way of looking at things.

Mike

[Eero Tuovinen]

Í don't want to disagree with you, mainly because I really am not of the highest circle of GNS theorists. I'll rather ask someone to recap for me how we've come from CAs to individual play decisions. I've always understood that IPDs (individual play decisions) are the basis of the GNS construction, but I've somehow come to understand that things like incoherency, congruency, agendas and such arise from the theorist having already analyzed the IPDs to a degree. I mean, aren't you proposing simply focusing on something that's already applied in the theory? If you are, that's no problem - surely there is more to understand about the IPDs, but I'm reading your text to mean that this is something new.

What I mean by IPDs being already applied, in case I'm being opaque, is the logic behind some of the fundamental theorems posited on the basis of GNS. Say, for example the idea of GNS conflict: Differing agendas can and often will lead to irrepairably incompatible play. Where does Ron get this claim, is it just pure fancy? Surely not, for it's a central basis for usefulness of the theory: the main point of the model has always been recognizing some quite central incompatibilities possible for roleplayers. However, if it's not fancy, what's it based on? I might be wrong here, but I always thought that this, as well as some other central notions, already is derived from observing the individual qualities of IPDs. GNS disagreement appears because for each agenda, the IPDs comprising it require other players to validate the IPD. A clear example is the gamist CA, in which case a given IPD is only rewarding if the other players are too playing to compete. If somebody throws the match (possibly because he doesn't care about winning but story instead) the game is over, and the gamist garners no honor. His time is wasted. This is not agenda theory, it's the logic of the single act: if I make an IPD that deliberately shows disregard for the goal, both my allies and my opponents will be pissed because I'm effectively saying that I can't be bothered to play. Thus gamist IPDs are both hostile to other agenda specific IPDs, as well as supportive of their own kind.

Indeed, if you think back on the very definition of creative agenda, is it not based on the idea that certain IPDs are not value neutral, but instead cause disagreement as to play goals? Furthermore, that disagreement is caused by the constructive nature of such IPDs: they have strong structure that tends to grow to steal the limited SIS. That is why they're called agendas. Thus agendas are defined through certain qualities of the comprising IPDs (compatibility of given theoretical IPDs with each other and incompatibility with certain other groups). If this were not so, I could conseivably call "lucky-die agenda" a creative agenda wherein my play decisions are towards teaching my dice to do tricks. Sure, but as such IPDs are not incompatible with others, it doesn't fullfill the definition. Agendas are not protons that are observed, but really include even smaller building blocks. Rather they are mesons, a theoretically constructed class that's only partially observable, but is theoretized to exist by observing quark theory.

From the above viewpoint I think that it really is not so simple to just decide that suddenly single instances of gam, sim and nar play decision can live happily side by side. What you propose seems to me to directly contradict a basic position that agendas themselves are defined as traits of IPDs that do not get along with others. The theory says IMO quite clearly that either a multimodal game is drifted (one kind of IPD gains ascendancy), or impact of play is lessened (several IPDs live side by side, each failing to support others) or dysfunction erupts (several agenda types of IPD are forwarded, none prevails). I don't see how this can be reconciled with your claim that what you're saying does not require redefinition and restructuring of theory.

I'm sure that all this is explained somewhere, so if you could clarify for me how I've misunderstood things, that'd be all for the best. Or if you simply disagree with Ron and wish to forward a claim against the idea of value charged IPDs, that's good to clear up too.

[Mike Holmes]

Í don't want to disagree with you, mainly because I really am not of the highest circle of GNS theorists. [/qhatever that means. Any well thought out analysis is sought here, from whomever. Infact not being in the "highest circle" is a qualification here, not something to keep you from posting. Not that it has. :-)

I've always understood that IPDs (individual play decisions) are the basis of the GNS construction, but I've somehow come to understand that things like incoherency, congruency, agendas and such arise from the theorist having already analyzed the IPDs to a degree.

Quite. There's nothing new in my entire post above. Indeed GNS is based on observations of the choices that players make in play. But GNS looks at them in aggregate. That aggregate being the overall agenda. It does not consider the decisions themselves in any individualized way.

From the above viewpoint I think that it really is not so simple to just decide that suddenly single instances of gam, sim and nar play decision can live happily side by side.

Not at all. I don't mean to imply that in any way. Just that we can analyze things like incoherence on a smaller scale.

Mike

[Eero Tuovinen]

Don't mind me, my English is far from perfect. What I meant was that I simply don't know enough to evaluate really deep GNS stuff, not that there's some social barrier.

Anyway, forward bound: As far as GNS is concerned, AFAIK the IPDs (for some reason I like that trio of bouncy letters) are characterized by a web of relations: my decision to attack the orcs was inspired by your decision to put them there suggestively, my decision to parley was inhibited by former IPDs having proved that a non-productive idea. As I see it, GNS does indeed consider the individual play decision, but only for it's outreaching characteristics: how the decision connects to other decisions both forward and backward in time. The GNS claim is that this is the defining property of the IPD as far as the social contract is concerned; if everyone puts forth IPDs with the right outreaching parts, they will connect like pieces of a puzzle and good play will result.

The whole field of theory Ron usually visualizes as boxes within boxes might as well be pictured as actions on IPDs: the Exploration is a web of IPDs connected by little System lines, creative agendas are properties of the IPDs that define what other IPDs they can connect to and so on.

Now, when focusing on the individual play decision the natural question to ask is what kind and nature it's inner attributes are. Is there stuff in there that is not expressed in the way the decision connects to other decisions, or to say it in other way, in it's GNS attributes? Take my decision to attack the orcs, as an example. We can all probably agree that it's a decision that might impact all five of the aspects of Exploration. The question: can my decision be wholly explained by it's relationship to other decisions made on the SIS? Or are there elements that are freely defined, residing "inside" the node that is the IPD? Are IPDs little dots in a web, where the web is the whole of roleplaying, or do they have an inner structure? GNS answers that there is one (and only one?) internal attribute to an IPD, and that is player motivation in issuing it in the first place. That motivation can have a color out of multiple possibilities, corresponding to agendas.

My question, Mike: do you think that the individual play decision has other properties relevant to Social Agenda theory, apart from their GNS orientation? What kind of properties those would be? If there are no such, is there anything new to be gained from this refocusing on the individual play decision, or is this just a remainder kind of thread to keep people connected with facts?

[M. J. Young]

Indeed GNS is based on observations of the choices that players make in play. But GNS looks at them in aggregate. That aggregate being the overall agenda. It does not consider the decisions themselves in any individualized way.

I think Eero has touched on an important aspect in recognizing that an individual decision "fits" within a string of decisions, and so reveals creative agendum not precisely by what is decided but by what is decided within the context of all other decisions that have been made.

I also think that a point I've raised before matters here. Your creative agendum is revealed when you make decisions which matter to you. You decided to attack the orc. Was that because you expected to have fun defeating the orc? Or is the orc some obstacle between you and what you really want? Or is it merely that the orc is there, and if you're going to get on with the part of the game that really interests you (whatever it is), you're going to have to defeat the orc? That you chose to attack the orc tells me nothing outside the context of your other choices, because I don't know whether that choice was part of your effort to express your creative agendum or merely something you did between the important scenes.

Scene framing underscores this sort of thing significantly. In narrativist play, it generally means that we gloss over those parts of "the story" that don't matter to the story--the shopping trips for more equipment, the night watches that pass uninterrupted, the cross town taxi ride to reach the scene. Those underscore narrativist play by eliminating the choices that don't matter to the players and getting them more quickly to those that do. We could have the same sort of techniques in gamist play. Let me create a "scene framing" dungeon crawl segment.

Long combat draws to an end.

Referee: That's the last of them; you've killed all twenty orcs. You go through your standard procedures, here's a copy of the map of the room, you can see two exits from it. You collect one hundred seventy-three silver coins from their purses, pass on the weapons which are junk, and bag a ring with a gemstone in it. There are no secret doors that you can find. Which way do you go?

Party Leader: We'll take the north door.

Referee: The north door leads through a winding corridor with no diverging paths, a total of one hundred thirty feet to another door. You follow your standard doors procedures. Hearing nothing, the thief picks the lock, the door slowly opens, and reveals a room filled with strands and masses of what appears to be spider web. What do you do?[/list:u]
The point of that exercise is to apply scene framing to a gamist situation: take away all the decisions that don't matter, and get back to the part that matters.

Now, if you didn't "scene frame" all that, you would have the players announcing that they're going to search and map the room, look for secret doors, check the bodies of the orcs, decide whether to keep the weapons, say who pockets the ring, and then go through the motions of traveling down the hall to the next doorway, listening at the door, picking the lock, and whatever else is done along the way. We might conclude from that level of detail that these players were playing simulationist--that the actual detailed experience of being in the dungeon was important to them. Maybe they are; but they're only playing simulationist if that's what they actually want--the discovery of what it's like to be there--as a primary objective. If what they want is to get to the next encounter so they can test themselves against whatever lies beyond that next door, then all of this intervening stuff is nothing. It's just unimportant choices that are there to move them through the shared imaginary space to the next place where they're going to make "important" decisions, as they define important.

So I think a lot of what has been called "Little Letter" agenda isn't agenda at all. It's marking time, moving through the details that don't matter to get back to the place where the players can do that which they really enjoy--whatever it is. And "what they really enjoy" is intimately interwoven with their creative agendum.

That's what we're seeking when we look at player choices: what did they choose when it mattered to them? It is at least as important which decisions mattered to them as what they chose when they reached those moments in understanding play.

--M. J. Young

[Mike Holmes]

I think that this is all true. That is, Eero's observation that these decisions aren't made in a vaccuum and relate to each other is important, as is the notion that some decisions are merely marking time. Ron points out that the decisions that "matter" to people, as you put it, MJ, are usually detectable by social reinforcement. Somebody shouts, "Yeah!" or something when you decide to attack the orc, and you grin back with delight.

All you guys are doing is disecting the means by which Ron comes to the assumption that these things are agenda. Which is fine, I completely agree. That is, I think you can do this sort of macro analysis and come up with statements about overall agenda.

My point is, however, that this is done mostly as a gestalt. Ron or whomever looks at the whole and says, hmmm, from what I've seen it's narrativism. The point that I'm getting at is that analysis has limited value. What can I say about such an assessment? That the players involved may have a predilection towards playing that way? That the system may have had some influence? That under similar circumstances, these players might not want to play with a player playing in a different mode?

Fine.

But I think that the real potential value going forward is in the micro-analysis. Looking at the particular relationships between decisions as you've both done above. Looking at the decisions in such a way as not only to come up with a better understanding of the overall agenda, but of the smaller subsets of play that might occur.

In TROS, I've said that I think that play is "partitioned." That is, the system promotes narrativism in deciding what's important to the character in terms of who to fight, but then once the fight begins, if it's close at all, it becomes a clear case of player challenge. I can definitely say that I've seen this in action. Ralph's characters beating at the hands of a kid with a stick is a great example - Ralph gets into the fight for pride's sake (he could have just as easily refused for pride's sake), and then it becomes a contest between Ralph and Jake to see if Ralph can hold his own.

The point is that nobody saw this moment of gamism in the midst of an otherwise very sim/nar game as at all problematic. I don't think that it changed the overall agenda of the game - it was still narrativism, I'd say. But it was important to note how the system allowed for that moment to occur and how fun it was in context.

The point being that only analysis of the decisions made on this level can look meaningfully at this sort of thing. More importantly, when considering things like this, it helps people understand that while the play overall may have one agenda or another, that doesn't mean that they don't get any enjoyment out of these other sorts of decision-making moments.

Yes, MJ, it may be that for some people that this would be "marking time." But not only is that worth looking at by itself, but for some people it's not just marking time. That is, there's absolutely no reason why an individual cannot enjoy making decisions in any mode of play. Yes, some have preferences for or against some modes, but, for example, I like all three, and like to see all three in play in some measure. Not in a confused way, but in a way that ensures coherence for the moment in question.

Any clearer?

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

This is all really interesting.

1. It's the final (and positive) fallout from the original GNS flap, back at the Gaming Outpost: is it describing people, games, or ...? And the answer was "decisions," in strict contrast to the usual readings. But then that led to most people thinking in terms of seconds and minutes, which is why I tried to take out the time-element with "instance of play." And that led to confounding "instance" with "instants," which was nothing but a headache ... so I eventually said, screw it, look at whole sessions.

'Cause all that stuff about single decisions being best understood as non-independent pieces of chains of behavior is what I was driving at. Fortunately, evidently all of this is now well-understood.

2. But that leaves all sorts of great discussions about those instants of play out in the cold, and I know that Mike has always wanted to root around at that scale of analysis, just like Walt Freitag. So as long as everyone's OK with the notion that we aren't discussing "is this instant of play G, N, or S," but rather "what's going on at the micro-level which may be related to Creative Agenda," then we're cool.

Does that make sense, Mike? Or more accurately, am I correct in saying this?

3. The funny thing is that I am not really all that concerned with this scale of analysis and am far more interested in expanding up in scale, to issues like Lumpley-stuff and long-term interactions of reward systems with social reinforcement. But vive la difference.

Best,
Ron

[ADGBoss]

Can I throw something in here? Please feel free to kick my butt :) if I am way off base or out of context or just do not know what the hell I am talking about but...

Ionization Effect of GNS

Mike, you mention looking at these things atomically and that really got ideas swarming in my head.  Now this is not an absolute example or 1 to 1 kind of idea because some Atoms don't have all 3 of the major particles (Proton, Neutron, Electron) but...

Could we describe Overall Agenda/CA in terms of being an Atom, which has a Positive (Gamist), Neutral (Simulationist), or Negative (Narrativist) Charge BUT that does not mean the other Particles do not exist. Now I am loathe to use the terms Positive and Negative because people might read extra conotations into it, but stirctly I am not assigning any meaning other meaning to the terms other then to describe them in some way.

That is I do not think that Sim (Neutron.NEutral charge) is the default state of play, I just happened to drop it there on the graph

Positive                    Neutral                       Negative
Proton                      Neutron                      Electron
G                             S                               N

So a game may have a Narrativist Charge to it, ie a Nar Charged Ion, but it still has elements of G&S.  The Ionization of gameplay simply describes what is preminent, not what is there in total.

Ok pseudo science but that is kind of where my mind is leaning.


Sean

[Mike Holmes]

Sean,

I agree with what you're saying, but it has nothing really to do with what I'm getting at. That is, yes, it's generally accepted that play is rarely "entirely" one mode. Now as to how to model that, there have been many attempts.

What I'm getting at is a much earlier model that looked at things in terms of individual decisions (tells). Just to clarify for a moment, decisions is in some ways an misleading term, because it assumes that in fact there has to be some discrete moment of choice like we typically think of large decisions. But, in fact, it refers to the choice of a player at any point to have the character do anything. That is, theoretically the decision of a player to have their character cross the room and talk to the bartender could be a tell. It doesn't have to be only when presented with a dichotomy, for instance.

Given that, play can be seen as a series of choices by the player as to what to do. These can be broken down to very small component parts if one likes. Hence my use of the term atomic. That is, one very small decision might have a quality which if it were extended out over a lot of play (or, more properly, many such decisions were made, or even that some context of such decisions occured) would be said to be indicative of a particular mode.

It's these little choices that are "Little G" or whatever we want to call them. They are the stuff of which overall agenda's are composed. In some ways, "atomic" is misleading, because that term has a specific meaning that indicates that it's something that can't be further subdivided (the fact that you can split atoms is a great semantic irony). In fact, decisions are probably never really atomic, but they are fractional in some way to the overall agenda.

This is what I'm talking about. Looking into the interactions of these moments.


Ron, you are correct in all particulars. And I think that Mega scale interactions of these things are also another rout that should be investigated as well (as well as some things that may be orthogonal in some ways, and stuff not yet dreamed of). The reason I harp on the small scale is because once people understand the small scale exists, I think that their problems with the theory tend to dissapate. That is, even when they understand intellectually that narrativism doesn't neccessarily imply nothing but narrativism, I think that people tend to think that way anyhow. That is, if narrativism is mutally exclusive from simulationism, that must mean that no play is at all simulationism in a game with a narrativism agenda.

See, it's even hard to say it. Narrativism is mutually exclusive from simulationism, but that doesn't mean that no simulationism is happening. That's a valid sentence in the theory as it stands, but it seems semantically to make no sense.

See, if narrativism is an overall agenda, then how can it also be the bits of smaller play that form it, or, worse, which occasionally are part of simulationsim? As soon as you have the small parts of play having their own terms, then you can say that narrativism is probably indicated when there's a lot of little N going on (though not neccessarily as MJ points out). It's the ability to make that sort of cogent sounding statement that I think is important.

Not to mention the potential applications of discussion into what the small scale interactions mean. Most importantly that we can indulge in more than one mode in play coherently. That is, it explains Hybrid play at least, and if there is in fact a way to get to El Dorado or other equally prioritized play, that this is the only way to find it without delving into incoherence a lot. Even if it's not possible, then at least we can get to the closest funcitonal hybrids possible.

Which is a goal not only for me, but for many, I think.

Mike

[Doctor Xero]

Basically it comes down to the sim/nar line debate, and the implications of The Impossible Thing. That is, for Ron the mutual exclusiveness of modes is important, because it underlies the fact that both the player and GM can't have control of the same thing at the same time.

I get the impression that a number of posters on The Forge have never had that marvelous experience of gestalt, of synchronicity, when neither an observer at the time nor an observer after the fact nor a participant at the time nor a participant after the fact can really discern any level of difference between player and game master control because it's almost as though every person involved in the game is just one modality of a campaign unity.

I have only experienced this with the best of gaming groups, but once you experience a campaign in which this is the norm, it's difficult not to want to experience it in all one's gaming.

Just as we are able to play simultaneously narrativist and simulationist.

Your creative agendum is revealed when you make decisions which matter to you. You decided to attack the orc. Was that because you expected to have fun defeating the orc? Or is the orc some obstacle between you and what you really want? Or is it merely that the orc is there, and if you're going to get on with the part of the game that really interests you (whatever it is), you're going to have to defeat the orc? That you chose to attack the orc tells me nothing outside the context of your other choices, because I don't know whether that choice was part of your effort to express your creative agendum or merely something you did between the important scenes.

Scene framing underscores this sort of thing significantly. In narrativist play, it generally means that we gloss over those parts of "the story" that don't matter to the story--the shopping trips for more equipment, the night watches that pass uninterrupted, the cross town taxi ride to reach the scene. Those underscore narrativist play by eliminating the choices that don't matter to the players and getting them more quickly to those that do. We could have the same sort of techniques in gamist play. Let me create a "scene framing" dungeon crawl segment.

Long combat draws to an end.

Referee: That's the last of them; you've killed all twenty orcs. You go through your standard procedures, here's a copy of the map of the room, you can see two exits from it. You collect one hundred seventy-three silver coins from their purses, pass on the weapons which are junk, and bag a ring with a gemstone in it. There are no secret doors that you can find. Which way do you go?

Party Leader: We'll take the north door.

Referee: The north door leads through a winding corridor with no diverging paths, a total of one hundred thirty feet to another door. You follow your standard doors procedures. Hearing nothing, the thief picks the lock, the door slowly opens, and reveals a room filled with strands and masses of what appears to be spider web. What do you do?[/list:u]
The point of that exercise is to apply scene framing to a gamist situation: take away all the decisions that don't matter, and get back to the part that matters.

Now, if you didn't "scene frame" all that, you would have the players announcing that they're going to search and map the room, look for secret doors, check the bodies of the orcs, decide whether to keep the weapons, say who pockets the ring, and then go through the motions of traveling down the hall to the next doorway, listening at the door, picking the lock, and whatever else is done along the way. We might conclude from that level of detail that these players were playing simulationist--that the actual detailed experience of being in the dungeon was important to them. Maybe they are; but they're only playing simulationist if that's what they actually want--the discovery of what it's like to be there--as a primary objective. If what they want is to get to the next encounter so they can test themselves against whatever lies beyond that next door, then all of this intervening stuff is nothing. It's just unimportant choices that are there to move them through the shared imaginary space to the next place where they're going to make "important" decisions, as they define important.

Well put!

I think scene framing problems is where G / N / S conflicts most often occur.

But some of us want to explore the dream between the encounters, test ourselves against the encounters, and forgo neither experience -- a simultaneous simulationist/gamist experience.

Doctor Xero

[Mike Holmes]

Doc Xero, your comments are pretty off topic for the thread. That said, they are precisely the sort of thing that I think can be discussed with the sort of analysis that I'm talking about in this thread. In fact, such discussions have occured many, many times. Truth be told, again, this isn't a new way to look at these things.

Anyhow, new threads if you want to pursue these things, please.

Mike

[ErrathofKosh]

I would call those micro-instances: suspension of the CA.  These "suspensions" would have to be allowed by the Social Contract, but in most instances they would be.  

I view these"suspensions" as mini-games within the game.  And to analzye them, you wouldn't drop the level from a whole sessions worth of "decisions" down to one, but to several, in a string.  

These suspensions must never actually violate the prevalent CA, but remain neutral overall.  Thus, they are a momentary second agenda...

If you want an atomic analogy, here goes.  A photon of nar is streaking along.  It collides with an electron of Sim.  The energy formerly moving the Nar photon along is momentarily being used to make the Sim electron "jiggle"  (I just like the word...).  However, the Sim electron settles back down and the Nar photon continues along.   Now, the photon could be Gam or Sim, and the electron could be Nar or Gam.  It doesn't matter, the "identity" of the "particle" is determined by it's place in the Social Contract.

In fact, I postulate that this occurs all the time where the "photon" and the "electron" are of the same CA, and we ASSUME that the event is just another tell of that CA, unless the "electron" stops the "photon" from resuming it's journey.  

For example, if my character is attempting to surmount an enormous challenge, he doesn't mind facing other challenges along the way.  He may fail at some, but as long as he can pick himself up and keep going, I am not frustrated.  (Even if I have to retrace my steps!)  However, if character comes into a situation where the challenge faced, whether won or lost, prohibits my character from his main goal, my face goes red and look at the GM with squinty little eyes.  GM force! Railroading!

A game has as few or as many of these suspensions as the Social Contract allows, but none can ever violate the main CA.

Now I know I'm going to burn.... :)

Jonathan

[Marco]

I think this thread is very, very interesting. I'm trying to wrap my head around it--which is why I've taken my time in replying. There are still some things I have serious questions about--but here's why I think this is important:

I believe that atomic-level CA analysis is not only valuable--it might be, for me, the key to making GNS useful to me during play.

The biggest problem I have with performing the holistic analysis is that my games (as a player and a GM) include a lot of exploration that usually sets the context for what could maybe be articulated as a premise.

But the preliminaries (and maybe even a majority of the game time-wise) are a lot like what I would call Sim play--including what I would say is a focus on The Dream (insofar as I understand it. I can't honestly say I have any real grasp of 'Story Now').

Is all the exploration that's necessary to set up context for premise Sim or Nar? If it's exploration for exploration's sake until the premise is articulated and then that's the focus of the game what's the preferred CA of the participants? How is the instance of play analyzed? Does something count as Force at the end of the session but not at the begining?*

I'm not sure. I don't think the essays are good at helping me figure that out.

One person (Contra) has suggested that play may switch back and forth from Sim to Nar. This sounds logical--but where does one draw the Instance of Play Lines to know this?

Someone else has suggested that there might be Sim sensibilities underlying what appears to be Nar play. Again: fine--if I knew what that really meant--but it sounds an awful lot like Nar-in-Actor-Stance that Vincent discusses ... which is, according to him, just-plain-Nar.

So I can't figure out anything useful about the my play.

But if we can look at atomic-level decisions then that *would* be useful to me since it doesn't rely on arbitrary instance-time-frames that I don't know how to draw.

So my question is: doesn't the theory say that individual decisions don't have a measurable CA or is it just that it's usually indeterminant?

-Marco
* The Force issue is important. I think that a tightly designed situation would constitute Force to someone who demands premise-freedom from the word go. But if I'm cool with letting the situation develope until the cards are on the table then I don't see it as Force or railroading.

After the situation is clear, however, I expect full latitude for any reasonable action and would greatly object to the Force-type examples Raven describes.

[M. J. Young]

So my question is: doesn't the theory say that individual decisions don't have a measurable CA or is it just that it's usually indeterminant?

That's an excellent question, Marco, and it probably pushes us back to some areas of "GNS" that have always been difficult.

From the earliest discussions, it was clear that play can drift. For what it's worth, I was the poster child for drift back then (maybe I still am), as it was always the case that I shifted my interests according to the flow of the game. If I was really getting into figuring out how things worked in a world--as I was in NagaWorld, when I started studying the grass, created a combustible fuel from it, determined that the residue made a valuable building material, and went from there to making cloth, paper, pottery, glass, and I can't remember how many other products merely because I determined how to do it by experimenting and exploring--the last thing I want is to face some challenge. On the other hand, if I get it into my head to go against the challenge, you can bet I'm going to think it through and play it to the best of my ability, and have a good chance of winning. Still, I've been in several worlds in which there were moral issues at stake, and I knew that through my character I was making statements about them, and that was what I wanted to do.
Today as I design worlds, I am often building some of them around discovery, some around challenge, and some around premise--not because I'm thinking I need a narrativist world now; that's the furthest thing from my mind when I start a world. I do it because I see something that I would enjoy playing, or I know that my players would enjoy, and I go for that.

Can you play simulationist for weeks on end, or even for mere hours, and then shift to playing narrativist when some premise appears that catches your interest? Sure. Are you doing that? I can't know from here.

So how would you know?

Although I find the term a bit, I don't know, dated?, there is something to the idea of "what the players are groovin' on" that gets to the heart of the matter. What is it that you're really enjoying at the present time? Why are you playing, and what excites you? Are you really fascinated by this place, these people, the way things work? Or are you just marking time, building a base from which you expect eventually that something interesting will arise--a premise, or perhaps a challenge? Does that eventual expectation color what you're doing now? The simulationist can become very interested in weapons and armor for their own sake, and for how they are going to function in the game. The gamist seems very similar, but he always has an eye on how he's going to use them when the time comes. The narrativist is usually more interested in such objects through what they say about his character and his place in the world, and how having or not having them will empower him to make statements about whatever premise arises.

So the question really is, what are you enjoying, and what are you hoping will happen? If at the moment you think you're playing simulationist, premise is the furthest thing from your mind and you're really fully engaged in understanding the world et al. for its own sake, then indeed at that time you are playing simulationist, even if later you drift into narrativist play when a premise catches your interest. On the other hand, if it is your expectation and hope that all of this discovery of the world is eventually going to become valuable in terms of the issues that you hope will arise in play, then it's all narrativist, in a preparatory phase--just like the players who enjoy the character generation systems where they get to develop their characters through point expenditures, min/maxing, and ad/disad features, you're enjoying creating the character through increasing your understanding of him in play, in preparation for the eventual meat of the game, the part where play really begins and you get to wrestle with the difficult questions from the foundation you've carefully laid.

Does that make sense?

--M. J. Young

[Mike Holmes]

I think it makes sense, MJ. Again, "Atomic" may be a bad way to look at it, but from your ideas, it's more like mini-CAs. Or an actual short term shift in CA. These are two different concepts.

The atomic idea, or mini-CAs say that there is some play that is occuring that, while not neccessarily satisfying the same motive that would normally be ascribed to the overall CA, does not make the overall CA change. We touch on this frequently - we accept that players have some motive or motives that make them desire a particular mode (and play to it), but we don't know what they are. People speculate about these, but when Ron talks about the products of these sorts of play (challenges confronted, the Dream, Story Now), we don't actually try to figure out what the motive is, it's retroactively defined. This is because there are likely multiple motives, and it's a very sticky subject (but somebody might want to address it at some point). So, I'd like to refer to these as the Gamism Motives (GMs), Simulationism Motives (SMs), and Narrativism Motives (NMs). That is it seems to me that we can talk about what a particular player is doing when a particular character choice is made, by looking at what motive it's meant to address. Yes, this is circular, but that's by design.

The point is that the "mini" concept means that one can sate a particular motive in the short term, and it doesn't mean that the overall CA has changed. As opposed to the idea of "shifting" in which the actual overall CA does change.

The question is, are one of these fictitous, or ancillary? That is, can you just describe play in terms of the Motive being addressed at the moment? I think you can to an extent. Incoherence comes up when a player has an overall agenda to play a certain way in certain circumstances, and another player plays another way when those circumstances arise.

Avoiding the problems of incoherence has always seemed to me a matter of making sure that folks were not annoyed every moment of decision - which certainly does not require that everyone adhere to one mode all of the time. It requires, instead, one of the following:

1. Just ignoring the problem when it occurs. That is, as an individual I can ignore someone playing to a different Motive when it seems improper to my expectations, understanding that the other player may have different expectations. This happens a lot in practice, I think, when the manner in which the motive is addressed is not particularly cognatively intrusive. That doesn't mean that the decision is actually congruent, neccessarily, it can be noticed - but some cases are just "worse" than others in terms of potential to affront. On the other side of the coin, some players may have the ability to make decisions that are these "near-congruent" sorts with greater fecundity than others. But any ability to do this comes from the players themselves, not the system (people may remember my Omni-play concept).

2. Playing in a way that co-ordinates what motive is to be addressed under what circumstances. This is where system can help to provide a framework.

And, of course, there's nothing wrong with just playing in one mode if that's what everyone wants, too.

The point, however, is that to find a way to have system promote good play, we're looking at how the system promotes decision making at any given moment of play. And incentives do shift in different ways in different rule sets. The idea here is that we can look at these supports more locally than an overall view of the system would allow. Hence why I'm guilty of saying that TROS supports narrativism more out of combat, and gamism more in combat, for instance (not to mention simulationism in it's details).

Mike