What GNS is about [LONG]

[Valamir]

Jonathan:  The rest of the definition of Technique in the glossary pretty much concludes with the idea that the sum total of all Techniques in play is system.  So yeah, you're on the right wavelength.


Gareth:  So your definition of a CA is "A CA is anything which is identified as a CA".  Right.  That's why I called it Tautological, and that's why I reject it.  If you have an actual definition that's useable and that provides a foundation for future analysis lets hear it.  

As a side note, please don't take this personally, but I'm getting rather irritated by your constant criticism of ideas presented by others without presenting any of your own.  Its all well and good for you to disagree with my definition of CA, or my take on the role of conflict, or Marco's take on Virtuality...but other than your disagreement, I've yet to see you contribute any ideas of your own.  What is your definition of a CA if mine doesn't suit you?  I've about reached my limit of jumping-through-hoops-to-satisfy Gareth in these threads.



Gordon, here's the thing.  Players certainly have responses to other things.  But those are all social level responses that they'd have in most any other social endeavor.  The guy talking on the cell phone, the guy reading a novel, the guy making bad jokes, the guy talking smack...the player's response to those things are all part of the usual circle of social responses that a player makes.  In fact, its when a player supresses their natural social response to those social issues or handles them "differently" while gaming that leads to social dysfunction among gamers.

It is Exploration that distinguishes roleplaying from other social activities.  So when one is attempting to define / categorize / discern a player's roleplaying priorities it must start with their response and behavior to actual play.  That's where I get the "in game" part.  The thesis I put forth in my essay is that just any old response and behavior in actual play is insufficient.  Only conflict (through the entire cycle of conflict) is sufficient to make this determination.  The players responses to things that he does not deem to be a conflict are not definitive because those are things far more likely to be congruent because they aren't important enough to prioritize strongly.  That's where i get the "conflict" part.

Therefor I believe it is the in-game conflicts that the player is responding to that defines their roleplaying agenda.  Those other things exist, but they aren't part of the agenda.  As I frame it they're part of the skewer.

[M. J. Young]

What is that one property they must share?

I have pegged it as the player's response to ingame conflict.  If you agree with that then we are in accord on that property.  If not, then you need to provide what you think that property actually is, preferably in as clear and concise a manner as I have done.

I think I would peg it as the nature of the reward sought from play. Gamists want the glory of the respect of their peers for their skills. Narrativists want the meaning of a revealing story. Simulationists want the increase in knowledge from discovery. Each of those is, I think, an innate want of humans, something from which we derive pleasure. The Creative Agendum then is an organizing principle of sorts by which we order all aspects of play to achieve the targeted reward. Techniques are selected according to what will facilitate reaching that reward.

I will again admit that this suggests "narrativism" has been too narrowly defined; Ralph is right that as it stands it incorporates at least some techniques within it. Narrativism might best be facilitated by broad distribution of credibility, but I think that narrow distribution of credibility doesn't prevent finding meaning of a revealing story--it just means one person told the story, and the others found the meaning in it.

This pushes my mind back to Scarlet Jester's original comments about exploration. Although it's all pretty far in the past, I seem to recall that he introduced it with the suggestion that his particular interests were not so much in the objectives as the means--he wanted to be able to contribute to what was happening, and so wanted what we would now call broad distribution of credibility.

This also strikes me as connecting to Mike's recent remodeling, which I think tries to match up the reward portion with the credibility portion to get six models. The main problem I have with that is that although I think there is a "primary reward" focus (which defines Creative Agendum), I don't think there's a fixed "broad/narrow" distinction on credibility distribution, which as techniques appear across a sliding scale.

If I'm reading this right, what the Glossary defines as techniques can be arguably placed under System as defined by the lumpey Principle. Of course, I may be mistaken on this.

Yes, that would be correct; but that's the nature of the structure.

System is one of the elements of exploration. That is, it's one of the things we explore and one of the things we use to explore. Creative Agendum is the organizing principle--why we explore, how we explore, what we're after when we explore. Notice that it's generally represented by an arrow in the diagrams. It connects the elements to the techniques. Thus all the elements are composed of and introduced through techniques; and the relationship between the techniques and the elements, and which techniques are used and how they are used, is determined through the Creative Agendum.

--M. J. Young

[Valamir]

I think I would peg it as the nature of the reward sought from play.

I'm musing on that.  At first blush I don't think you're saying anything all that different from the way I pegged it.  My definition focuses more on 1) what the player does to get that reward ("the players response") and 2) the moments of play where that reward gets realized ("the in game conflict").

So if we combined these as:


"The player's response to in game conflict that will allow him to realize the reward sought from play"

or

"The nature of the reward sought from play as realized through the player's responses to in game conflict"

I don't think I'd disagree with that.

[clehrich]

Because in any form of hierarchal organization where one is putting elements into tiers you need two things.  You need the defining thing that illustrates why a given element belongs in one level of the hierarchy and not another.  And you need a consistant scale for each tier so that elements in 1 tier are not overlapping elements of the other.  That's basic hierarchal organization.

Fine.  Why are we putting GNS in a heirarchical structure then?  As I recall, Ron has resisted such models to the extent of being hostile to diagramatic representation of GNS.  I see no particular reason to think that building a tiered structure is useful.  What purpose would you expect it to serve.

I believe that Ralph is referring to the nested boxes or layers diagram which has been a part of Ron's model since at least last year. In the introduction to The Provisional Glossary, Ron provides a Big Model picture.

I'm asking if the specifics of that diagram require the same degree of heirarchical quality. I don't recall the name of the diagrams that we used to use for designing programme logic flow, but while they did have criteria to identify which elements appeared where, there was not a requirement as I recall that all elements in a tier be similar. They had to share a certain specific quality, not be inherently alike. I don't see any problem for example saying that all CA's appear on a tier, and do not see any implication that becuase they all appear on this tier they must share the same properties. They must only share one property - being a CA.

With John's important clarification in mind, I think there is actually no disagreement here.

1. Ralph (Valamir) says that a hierarchical classification structure, whether strictly taxonomic or nested-box, has a number of formal rules instrinsic to the structure.

2. Gareth (Contracycle) notes that there is no law of nature that says a hierarchical classification is necessary or inherently useful.

3. Gareth also notes that the only absolute rule of taxonomy is that objects placed within a category be defined according to that category.

4. Ralph correctly remarks that this last makes taxonomy potentially tautological.

But you're both completely correct, is the odd thing.

In order to classify two objects within a taxonomic structure, we must assert that the objects meet the criteria proposed (the definition) for the taxon.  So everything called a CA must fit the CA definition.

At the same time, CA itself does not exist: it is only a category constructed by us for reasons of classification.  Therefore, yes, all such classification is at some level logically tautological.

Suppose we consider walnuts and their close cousins pecans, both members of the Juglandaceae.  At the level of Juglandaceae, these are identical, but what that really means is that the categories "walnut" and "pecan" are indistinguishable at a higher level.  At a lower level, when we start looking at petals on calyxes, we have definitions that distinguish the two categories.

But thus far we haven't said anything about trees, and this is what's causing the problem here.  The whole purpose of having these categories "Juglandaceae", "Walnut", and "Pecan" is to be able to analyze the things put into those categories as groups, disregarding their differences.  For example, at this level of classification -- and usually in this kind of taxonomy in general -- there is no distinction between a big, healthy walnut tree and a twisted little sickly one.  Both are walnuts.

This kind of taxonomy works by emphasizing similarity.  And when it works very well indeed, what happens is that you find similarities within the category that you did not previously suspect.  Sometimes you also find consistent differences, and this leads to sub-categorization: two different varieties of walnut, for example.

But to repeat clearly: the point of classification is to enable other forms of analysis.

What has happened with GNS, which I think Lee's essay points to indirectly, is that we have begun to think that by classifying we have already analyzed.  This is nonsense.  If I look at a tree and announce, "It's a walnut!"  all I have demonstrated is that I either do or do not know the definition of a walnut.  I have not yet said anything about the tree, only given a context for what I could say in the future about it.

Just so, when we categorize something as Narrativist, we say nothing except that it may be useful in future to talk about this something in the context of previous discourse about Narrativism.  Apart from this we have done nothing at all.

The reason this isn't so apparent with GNS and GDS -- and for me this was one valuable implication of Lee's essay -- is that there aren't any trees there.  We don't have actual objects; we make them into objects.  And so we end up shifting grounds all the time: is it intent, or choice, or goal, or play-style, or what?  What Lee is asking, I think, is which of these is really the object of analysis upon which the taxonomy ought to be based.

My own take, as I've said several times, most recently in this thread, is that since the objects are so fluid and indeterminate, and nobody can much agree on their basic differentiation, classification on a hierarchical structure is not helpful.  GNS was useful, as was GDS, but now these models are actually getting in the way by implying that they are, to use Lee's word, isomorphic with actual things.  More dangerous still, we constantly slip from claiming isomorphism into claiming homology.  Unless we can step back and recognize that the categorization comes entirely from theory and has no necessary correspondence to reality, we will never be able to advance toward working out why we want descriptive models of any kind.

Lee, if I'm derailing or misunderstanding, say so -- it's not intentional.

[Valamir]

I'm not sure the objects really are fluid to the point of making classfication pointless.  I think rather that the categories started by observing a given play phenomenon and then correctly identified key features of that phenomenon that distinguished it from from other correctly identified phenomenon.

But I think at the time this was done we lacked a microscope powerful enough to allow us to zero in and see the various parts that make up that overall phenomenon.  Therefor lots of different pieces and parts all got lumped together in a big broad category.

Now, advances in our conceptualization allow us to better recognize the pieces and parts but the definitions of the categories haven't caught up to that.  I think we now have the capability to look at things like CAs that before we knew enough to know there was something crucial going on in there, but not enough to put our finger on exactly what the different components of it were.  Now we can put our finger on the next layer down of pieces and parts and start to identify the categories based on something more firm than our previous common features taxonomy.

This is a pretty normal evolution to theory.  A theory proves to be correct enough to be completely useful and functional for nearly every purpose its put to, and then as knowledge accumulates its rewritten in a way that opens the door to new uses and functions.

[contracycle]

As a side note, please don't take this personally, but I'm getting rather irritated by your constant criticism of ideas presented by others without presenting any of your own.  Its all well and good for you to disagree with my definition of CA, or my take on the role of conflict, or Marco's take on Virtuality...but other than your disagreement, I've yet to see you contribute any ideas of your own.  What is your definition of a CA if mine doesn't suit you?  I've about reached my limit of jumping-through-hoops-to-satisfy Gareth in these threads.

That pisses me right the fuck off.  If you are going to propose a modification to an existing model, or a new model, then it is incumbent on you to show why your model should supercede the existing one.  To date the sum total of dissatisfaction that you can articulate is that the CA's don't all appear to be alike, even though there is no particular reason for them to necessarily be alike.

Secondly, I have proposed a number of things both recentlyu and in the past.  IMO, phenomenon like Dramatism are better addressed as what I previously referred to as a minimum degree of dramatic construction to keep an audience engaged.  You don't seem much impressed by that idea, neither do any others so I've let the matter go.  But what I have not done is kept banmging on about a pet theory in the face of opposition and demanding that some problem I claim to see must be universally acknowledged.  IMO, all this intereste in "definitions" is preventing us from discussing actual, exhibited play behaviour in favour of abstract logivc that may, or may not, apply to the real world.

I have already told you what I see wrong with your definition of CA: I do not see a universality of conflict, especially seeing as this conflict is described in the same terms as gamist or narr conflict.  There is no reason at all that you have given to think this applies to Sim.  In my opinion, this idea is rubbish.


But, I too am sick of this back and forth, so I will step aside and leave the field to you.  What I hope you will do with this opportunity is present a discussion of your model that is as comprehensive and detailed as the work that Ron put in to articulating his.

[Gordon C. Landis]

(Quoted because I am only dealing with this bit of the thread, not any of the other issues)

Gordon, here's the thing. Players certainly have responses to other things. But those are all social level responses that they'd have in most any other social endeavor. The guy talking on the cell phone, the guy reading a novel, the guy making bad jokes, the guy talking smack...the player's response to those things are all part of the usual circle of social responses that a player makes. In fact, its when a player supresses their natural social response to those social issues or handles them "differently" while gaming that leads to social dysfunction among gamers.

It is Exploration that distinguishes roleplaying from other social activities. So when one is attempting to define / categorize / discern a player's roleplaying priorities it must start with their response and behavior to actual play. That's where I get the "in game" part. The thesis I put forth in my essay is that just any old response and behavior in actual play is insufficient. Only conflict (through the entire cycle of conflict) is sufficient to make this determination. The players responses to things that he does not deem to be a conflict are not definitive because those are things far more likely to be congruent because they aren't important enough to prioritize strongly. That's where i get the "conflict" part.

Therefor I believe it is the in-game conflicts that the player is responding to that defines their roleplaying agenda. Those other things exist, but they aren't part of the agenda. As I frame it they're part of the skewer.

I don't think I'm too far off of that, but I do have a few caveats.  First of all, the "social level responses" frequently have, IMO, direct and important influence on the Exploration itself, and thus can at least potentially be key to CA.  I'm talking here about interactions between the players as human beings, first and foremost, not as folks portraying a character or even as game players - except in so far as it is the game that is provoking the response.  So true, the phone-using/novel-reading/smack-talking don't really matter, but the anticipatory stare, the disgusted grimace, and the supposedly-casual rules inquiry do.

Secondly, I'm suspicious of the emphasis on conflict in the SIS.  Aside from the fact that it might leave us looking at the imaginary space instead of the live humans as a focal point, I'm not sure conflict is always the key to CA.  But I will agree that it is often useful.

So . . . here's where I'm left: wanting to make sure the emphasis for CA is on the real people, and a little worried about upping the importance of conflict within the SIS.  So maybe I'd phrase it as "CA is demonstrated by the response of the players as human beings (not as imaginary characters, nor specifically only as people who are playing a game together) to what is occuring or being proposed to occur within the SIS."  I'd have no problem adding some commentary about how conflict within the SIS often reveals that response quite strongly, but I can think of too many situations where the key to me "clicking" on what CA (GNS-mode) was really being prioritized in a particular group/game was an OOC comment and/or other person-to-person communication to be comfortable making in-SIS conflict the determiner.

Gordon

[contracycle]

I'd like to make one mopre comment in the light of Gordon's post.  While I do not see an inherenty quiality of sim that makes conflict important, I am not specifically hostile to the idea.  But I would need sopme reason arising out of sim itself to see that this is the case.  Similarity with other elements if the model is not in itself adequate in my opinion.  The argument has to made from sim itself, not from the structure of the model.

[Valamir]

So maybe I'd phrase it as "CA is demonstrated by the response of the players as human beings (not as imaginary characters, nor specifically only as people who are playing a game together) to what is occuring or being proposed to occur within the SIS."  I'd have no problem adding some commentary about how conflict within the SIS often reveals that response quite strongly, but I can think of too many situations where the key to me "clicking" on what CA (GNS-mode) was really being prioritized in a particular group/game was an OOC comment and/or other person-to-person communication to be comfortable making in-SIS conflict the determiner.

Gordon

I don't disagree with that at all.

In fact in my essay I was just as careful as you to ascribe the response to the player.

The Creative Agenda is the player's approach to dealing with in-game conflict as measured over a complete Instance of Play.

Some explanations are in order. First it should be stressed that it is the player's approach not the character's. That makes Creative Agenda an inherently meta-level concern. Second, "approach" can manifest in a variety of ways including how the player has the character act towards the conflict, how the player perceives or frames the conflict and what aspects he finds important, or how the player uses or is unwilling to use character resources to resolve the conflict. Most importantly it includes the set of circumstances surrounding the resolution of the conflict that the player will consider favorable or successful (again the player, not the character).

I didn't explicitly list OOC concerns in the second point, but given that I did explicitly note the player's response occuring at the meta game level, they aren't excluded.

[Valamir]

But I would need sopme reason arising out of sim itself to see that this is the case.  Similarity with other elements if the model is not in itself adequate in my opinion.  The argument has to made from sim itself, not from the structure of the model.

And that's the part I fundamentally disagree with.  You can't base the arguement on what arises out of Sim, because we cannot agree on what sim is.  Your recent go 'round with Marco over Virtuality should amply demonstrate that.  Since there is no clear singular acceptance about what sim is, it is impossible to argue from sim.

It is possible, however, to design a functional and useful structure that is easy to understand, easy to explain, and leads to beneficial future analytical directions while accomplishing all of the same things as the current structure does.  From that structure we can derive the definition of what "sim" must be to fit within that structure.  That allows us to surgically remove every thing else from the current definition of sim.  Not because those things aren't valid and deserve inclusion.  But because they don't belong in the same bucket with each other.  Then we can use the structure to determine where those things actually belong within the structure.

THEN once a singular understandable and easy to articulate definition for each of these elements has been established, and thier position in the structure used to illustrate their relationship to the Big Model as a whole we can begin to argue from the elements themselves as you desire to do so.  

But currently it is impossible to argue anything from the first principles of sim because there is no agreement on what sim even is.  There are only numerous people who have their own view of what sim is and therefor insist that the definition of Sim include the first principles of thier view.  This method of arguement is what has caused sim to be such a morass of conflicting ideologies from the beginning.

So no, I don't agree at all that your suggestion above is the correct way to proceed.  We've been using that method from day one and its left us in a very messy situation.

[Lee Short]

What is that one property they must share?

I have pegged it as the player's response to ingame conflict.  If you agree with that then we are in accord on that property.  If not, then you need to provide what you think that property actually is, preferably in as clear and concise a manner as I have done.

I think I would peg it as the nature of the reward sought from play. Gamists want the glory of the respect of their peers for their skills.

I've got a thought experiment that reflects on this issue.  

Imagine a hypothetical gamer named John.  John loves to "work the system" when he plays games.  He does it in CRPGs, RPGs, boardgames, you name it.  When John sits down to play an RPG, he does it because he loves to work the system.  

Now I've got a couple of questions:
 --  Is John's play Gamist, Narr, or Sim?
 --  How sure are you?

---------

I think that the power of GNS is that the three categories do in fact resonate with so many experienced gamers.  They hear G,N,S and they say to themselves, "hey, I think I've got some idea what they're talking about."  

I also think that these same GNS neophytes are going to unequivocally label John's play as Gamist.  I think there's a very good chance that, you, dear reader, did as well.  But we haven't said a darn thing about what reward John expects from RPGs -- ie, why he enjoys Playing The System.  I think that just the fact that he games because he enjoys Playing The System makes his play Gamist.  

If you disagree, how would you categorize John's play if he Played The System solely because he enjoys games as problems in game theory and not at all for kudos?  As an aside, I think that any Gamist who enjoys crunchy systems has a healthy dose of this motivation.    

If you agree, then the nature of the reward sought from play is not what you actually use to determine CA.  

To get back to the bigger point of the thread -- in any event, I think it's very important to have a clear idea of what it is that you actually use to determine CA.   I don't think that there is a clear consensus on this issue, and I think some people are talking past each other precisely because they are operating from different assumptions in this regard.

[Lee Short]

What Lee is asking, I think, is which of these is really the object of analysis upon which the taxonomy ought to be based.

My own take, as I've said several times, most recently in this thread, is that since the objects are so fluid and indeterminate, and nobody can much agree on their basic differentiation, classification on a hierarchical structure is not helpful.  GNS was useful, as was GDS, but now these models are actually getting in the way by implying that they are, to use Lee's word, isomorphic with actual things.  More dangerous still, we constantly slip from claiming isomorphism into claiming homology.  Unless we can step back and recognize that the categorization comes entirely from theory and has no necessary correspondence to reality, we will never be able to advance toward working out why we want descriptive models of any kind.

Lee, if I'm derailing or misunderstanding, say so -- it's not intentional.

No, no, no.  You're completely dead on (emphasis added).  

I didn't outright state this in my essay, but I completely agree that things like Techniques should be viewed as a separate and orthogonal model.  Since I don't have a really solid grasp of how GNS relates to these other parts of the Big Model, that's largely a first-impression sort of opinion that probably shouldn't be given much weight.

[Valamir]

Actually Lee, I think any experienced GNS "analyst" would answer your question with "don't know, you haven't given us enough information to tell".

I'm not sure what impact that has on your point, but while such snap judgements occur, they are pretty strongly discouraged.

[Marco]

Actually Lee, I think any experienced GNS "analyst" would answer your question with "don't know, you haven't given us enough information to tell".

I'm not sure what impact that has on your point, but while such snap judgements occur, they are pretty strongly discouraged.

I agree with this--although, as I've said recently, I'm not sure if the guy who runs off to kill the orcs because he likes the thrill of victory, the challenge of the combat, etc.--and has his comarads rolling their eyes--is Gamist or not.

The social kudos thing seems, to me, to be only one dimensional.

-Marco

[ErrathofKosh]

This is exactly why I've come to the conclusions that I have in various other threads. I now see three important questions that are related to CA's in some places, techniques in others:

What do I hope to gain from each conflict my player enters?
  Answer: Tactical Success, Philosophical Statement, Discovery  (This is, in my understanding, kind of how Ralph is thinking about CA's)

What am I exploring?
  Answer: One of the five elements.  (This is what MJ espoused about Sim in a recent thread, but applies to all Exploration IMO)

What is my vehicle of Exploration?
  Answer: Again, one of the five elements. (This is a given in the current theory as I understand it.)

Therefore, from my POV, I see the POSSIBILITY of 75 main skewers, with hundreds of variants (caused by differing techniques, etc.)  And I'm not sure that grouping skewers, for example, in groups of 25 to form "three main ways of roleplaying" is at all necessary.  In fact, a lot of disagreements are about which skewer goes in which skewer category and/or defining what each category is about.  I theorize that each CA is such a grouping, and when a skewer that hasn't yet been categorized is recognized, there is a lot of effort put into discovering "where it goes."

BTW, I'm not saying GNS isn't useful, it most certainly is, but it's limited to what Ron has defined under the three categories.  I'm fairly certain that it doesn't have the ability to apply to every case that can be postulated.

So, can these new ideas cover every conceivable type of roleplaying?  Probably not.  In fact, MJ's Travelogue play is outside it's scope, because there is no conflict that he hopes to gain from.  (But he still seeks to gain Discovery.)  What Ralph has proposed in the last few weeks is not intended to replace GNS, (in fact he is working within it's framework, as I understand) just to clarify it.  I'm not looking to replace it either, my goal is to just present an alternative that changes the perspective of our analysis of roleplay.  And it all still fits under the Big Model...

Cheers
Jonathan

Edited to note that I cross-posted with the last three posts and that I am responding to Lee's post preceding those....