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[clehrich]

Hi Ron,

The last game I played with a fairly determined Simulationist slant (which is to say, our slant) was Hidden Legacy...

Interesting, I'll take a look.  Sounds like a good concept!

Is merely the use of dice per se supposed to break the Dream? That seems like an awfully restrictive concept for ideal Sim play to me.

Well, it's deliberately a little extreme, yes.  I guess it's related to, or a version of, your notion of "handling time."  What I find interesting is that handling time is not intrinsically a problem for Nar or Gam.  I mean, practically speaking it can be a pain in the ass to have a high handling time, but exterior mechanics do not in themselves work against the aesthetic goals of those CA's.  It's a matter of having mechanics that support your goals, which I think was a big part of your whole point with the original GNS essay and, I think, with the Big Model itself: you sit down and construct mechanics of whatever sort that support your aesthetic goals and don't construct mechanics that do not support -- or worse, work against -- those goals.  And if I get you right, part of the point of the CA level of the Big Model is to help define the nature of your aesthetic goals so that you can do this efficiently.

The interesting thing to me is that in Sim, the ideal mechanic is purely arbitrary causality within the Dream, and this is not actually achievable.  The ideal mechanic in Nar, for example, is one that does nothing at all except to facilitate Story Now; this is achievable, if exceedingly difficult.  But with Sim, you may have a theoretical impossibility on your hands.  So I'm interested in how various Sim games try to work around the problem.

Think of it like engineering.  You have a goal clearly in mind, and you construct a machine that achieves that goal as efficiently as possible.  If the goal is something that cannot be done with the tools at hand, you design new ones.  If the goal is not achievable at all, you either give up on the project or build a machine that approximates the desired solution.  Maybe you want a machine that requires no energy to maintain, i.e. runs by itself forever; this is not achievable, so you work to cut down friction and all that in order to produce an approximation -- a machine that will run by itself for a very long time.

In Nar or Gam, as I see it, your goal is achievable, and so the question of the engineer is how best to achieve it.  In Sim, your goal is not achievable, so the question is how best to approximate it.

The goal in Sim has to do with the machine itself, you see.  The ideal is a machine that doesn't exist but produces perfect results, to be simplistic about it.  Obviously you can't have a machine that works and also doesn't exist, so what you want is a machine that produces perfect results and is as close to invisible as possible, and there are a number of ways of going about achieving this.  But you cannot actually completely succeed.

The goal in Nar is a a machine that produces Story Now very efficiently, but there is nothing about the goal "Story Now" that says what the machine has to look like, only what it has to do.  This is achievable, and there are lots of ways of going about it.  And you can actually completely succeed, at least in principle.

Does that help?

If this is thread-Drift, stop me now and we'll call this post a "confusion footnote."

It isn't thread-Drift, so no worries.

[Sean]

I do think there's a sense in which resolution systems can at least schizophrenically amplify Sim play, which Ron's post suggested to me.

That is, let's say you're doing a resource allocation moment, or even some dice. You're in one sense 'out' of the dream; but in another sense you might be thinking this is the crucial moment, where something is going to happen in the SiS based on what has come before. So if you have dice, you respect their randomness as the genuine randomness of outcome in the SiS, the 'physics' of the game. If you have resource allocation or just lots of stuff to look up, you calculate everything very carefully, because you want the right outcome.

This is dream-breaking in one-sense, because you are coming back to reality to resolve things, but if you perceive your work in reality as devoted to what's happening in the SiS, as aiming at reaching an appropriate causal outcome relative to the imagined reality, then there can be a certain kind of Sim-facilitation that happens here. Again, I think of historical wargamers who want to understand what really happened or could have happened.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Also, my perspective tends to focus on the "shared" in SIS, which is to say, our communication about the stuff being imagined. So the dice are a form of communication; we're all watching them, we may be talking and commenting, we're all enjoying our version of what's happening and communicating it to one another. It's not like the one guy is doing all this imagining while the rest of us wait and do nothing.

So from this perspective, it seems to me that what you're calling "external," Chris, isn't definitionally disruptive to the Dream.

Best,
Ron

[Sean]

Your Big Model-Fu is strong, Ron. (Which does make sense, given...)

I find this exchange extremely illuminating of some of the connections and misconnections people were making in Ralph's big thread on Immersionism from a while back, actually. But even with Immersive play, there is a big difference between players who like being Immersed with a group, sharing the IC action as a way to create a SHARED imagined space, and those who just get into the details of their own immersion. The latter but not the former are Ralph's selfish Immersionists, I think.

I'll be interested to see what Chris says about this.

[clehrich]

Also, my perspective tends to focus on the "shared" in SIS, which is to say, our communication about the stuff being imagined. So the dice are a form of communication; we're all watching them, we may be talking and commenting, we're all enjoying our version of what's happening and communicating it to one another. It's not like the one guy is doing all this imagining while the rest of us wait and do nothing.

I don't see that this distinction between shared and individual really comes into it; I guess I'm not getting your point.

The social negotiation that must go on to make the SIS shared is part of every social interaction, RPG or otherwise.  Without telepathy, we have to do this to work toward an adequate understanding of what other people are on about.

But when we disagree in ordinary conversation, we do not normally move to a mechanical arbitration system.  If you and I come to a point of disagreement, we don't say, "Okay, we'll flip a coin, and if it's head I'm right and if it's tails you're right."  And let's face it, when they do this in the legal system (or arbitration), while both sides agree in advance that they will abide by the decision so made, they do not agree -- and often in fact deny after the fact -- that they will agree with the decision.  If you lose in court, you can appeal, or you can go around bitching about how stupid the jury and your lawyer were.

In an RPG, we all agree in advance not to do this, and we commonly accept from the get-go that it is normal to use an arbitration system.

Continuing the legal parallel, a Fortune system in effect announces, "We make no claims whatever to justice or truth.  We only claim that there will be an absolute decision.  You agree to accept it as true, not merely to abide by it but to accept it."  With me thus far?

A system founded on an aesthetic principle, for example a Nar-supporting system, says something like this: "We make no claims about justice or truth.  We claim that there will be an absolute decision, and that the decision will support Story Now."

Okay, now in Sim, the ideal system would say:  "We make no claims about justice or truth.  We claim that there will be an absolute decision, and that it will be completely arbitrary.  There will be no fear nor favor, no aesthetic principles, no nothing that will make the decision anything but arbitrary."  The reason being that the Dream functions on its own internal causality, and does not permit the insertion of exterior aesthetic or whatever principles.  Life isn't fair, for example, so a Sim game that hasn't changed this as a fundamental setting-design principle should not be fair; it's just what it is, period.

At the same time, the process of shared construction of and interaction with the Dream is one that should depend solely on our interactions, that is should be a solely social process of shared imagining.  It's not a question of Immersion; the point is that we are the ones doing the imagining.  

To take an extreme example, consider a fairly straight D&D-style fantasy setting.  Imagine that we've been working together to keep this SIS going, ever richer and more interesting, and we're excited about it.  Now some random dude walks into the room and says, "Okay, I've just decided that there are no gods and no races and no alignments."  If you actually have to live with that, the shared part of SIS breaks down.  You can start with such a principle, but as a rule you cannot make a drastic shift without its being a shared process.  If the game system has a special mechanic by which you draw a card, let's say, and produce a statement like this random guy's statement, and again you have to live with it, the process is again not shared: it's handed over to an exterior power (the cards) to which you have granted the authority to make the decision.  These things can be done, but they do put the Dream on rocky ground.

Now what I'm saying is that when we come to a conflict of some kind in our social process of constructing the SIS together, the perfect Sim solution would simultaneously be totally arbitrary (not based on exterior principles like aesthetics) and also completely shared (not handed over to some exterior power or authority like luck or a GM).

I'm saying that this isn't possible, at base, but that Sim is in some respects founded on trying to get there anyway.  Nar isn't like this, because you don't have to have a totally arbitrary system: you want your system to be based on Story Now.  Just so, you want a Gam system to be based on Step On Up.  But Sim wants the system to be simply the Dream itself.

Does that help?

[Vaxalon]

...what you want is a machine that produces perfect results and is as close to invisible as possible...

No, it's a machine that produces results as close to perfect as possible, as invisibly as possible.

[clehrich]

...what you want is a machine that produces perfect results and is as close to invisible as possible...

No, it's a machine that produces results as close to perfect as possible, as invisibly as possible.

Does this matter?  I mean, do you have a point or is this trying to pick at the semantics?  Because I don't see the distinction you're proposing.

I meant what I said, unless you want to clarify what you mean by the correction.

[John Kim]

The social negotiation that must go on to make the SIS shared is part of every social interaction, RPG or otherwise.  Without telepathy, we have to do this to work toward an adequate understanding of what other people are on about.

But when we disagree in ordinary conversation, we do not normally move to a mechanical arbitration system.  If you and I come to a point of disagreement, we don't say, "Okay, we'll flip a coin, and if it's head I'm right and if it's tails you're right."  
...
In an RPG, we all agree in advance not to do this, and we commonly accept from the get-go that it is normal to use an arbitration system.  

I don't agree with this parallel.  In most RPGs, I would say that negotiation is purely social, with no parallel to an arbitration system.  A typical in-game mechanic is not an arbitration system at all -- it is a tool which produces a result.  In Forge jargon, it doesn't assign credibility to a particular player, and thus it doesn't resolve disputes.  

For example, suppose a player says that her PC attacks a monster.  The player and the GM then roll dice to determine the result.  This isn't necessarily a dispute between the player and the GM.  Maybe the GM wants the PC to succeed just as much as the player does.  Or maybe the player would prefer it if her PC missed.  The point is, I don't think this roll amounts to an arbitration procedure between disagreeing parties.  Rather, it is a process which the player and the GM both use cooperatively.  

Okay, now in Sim, the ideal system would say:  "We make no claims about justice or truth.  We claim that there will be an absolute decision, and that it will be completely arbitrary.  There will be no fear nor favor, no aesthetic principles, no nothing that will make the decision anything but arbitrary."  The reason being that the Dream functions on its own internal causality, and does not permit the insertion of exterior aesthetic or whatever principles.  Life isn't fair, for example, so a Sim game that hasn't changed this as a fundamental setting-design principle should not be fair; it's just what it is, period.  

This doesn't seem to apply to GNS Simulationism.  GNS Simulationism allows that pre-created theme or genre may be used as principle by which the Dream should be patterned.  Indeed, the whole point of GNS Simulationism may be to celebrate the imposition of those exterior aesthetics.  Read Ron's post from http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=133952#133952">Narrativism: not a Creative Agenda.  

Now what I'm saying is that when we come to a conflict of some kind in our social process of constructing the SIS together, the perfect Sim solution would simultaneously be totally arbitrary (not based on exterior principles like aesthetics) and also completely shared (not handed over to some exterior power or authority like luck or a GM).

I'm saying that this isn't possible, at base, but that Sim is in some respects founded on trying to get there anyway.  

I think in some respects that rgfa Simulationism is based on principles like this, though I'm not sure GNS Simulationism is.  rgfa Simulationism is based on rejection of meta-game input, which is inherently impossible.  i.e. The meta-game will always affect the in-game.  However, those who use it feel that the effort of trying to reject it produces interesting and fun results.

[clehrich]

I don't agree with this parallel.  In most RPGs, I would say that negotiation is purely social, with no parallel to an arbitration system.  A typical in-game mechanic is not an arbitration system at all -- it is a tool which produces a result.  In Forge jargon, it doesn't assign credibility to a particular player, and thus it doesn't resolve disputes.

Argh.  Yes, sure.  Agreed.  Did you like any of the previous versions?

[BRIEF SLIGHTLY UNFAIR RANT ON!]

Look, folks, I'm not writing an essay making an argument here; people keep asking what I mean about external arbitrary system, and all I mean is a pretty rough-and-tumble notion of Mechanics.  Don't overthink this.  

Mechanics are exterior to the SIS.  Got it?

Mechanics.  Like dice.  Which are arbitrary.  Because nobody controls them.  And are external.  Because they don't exist in the game-world.

OR

Mechanics.  Like "GM fiat."  Which is controlled by a person's agenda.  And is external.  Because the GM doesn't exist in the game-world.

Is this really so hard?  Are dice arbitrary?  Well, at base, so are all mechanics.  Are dice exterior to the game-world, i.e. the Dream?  Well, at base, so are all mechanics.

Sim calls for perfect arbitrariness -- perfect causality and authority handed to that --

...and for perfect interiority -- no need ever to leap out of the Dream.

I'm willing to debate the rest with you, John included, because that's about exactly what Sim is and how it works and what the limits of arbitrariness are and all that.  But can we stop asking whether really, really, really dice are exterior to the game-world?  Yes, except in some weird reflexive pseudo-pomo game where you play RPG gamers, the mechanics of your RPG are exterior to the game-world, and even then they would be which is why it's more interesting as a gedanken experiment than actually a thing for pseudo-intellectual idiots to do.

The mechanics and stuff are exterior.  In all CA's.  In all games.  The Lumpley Principle does not actually run the universe.  Suck it up.

[UNFAIR RANT OFF!]

This doesn't seem to apply to GNS Simulationism.  GNS Simulationism allows that pre-created theme or genre may be used as principle by which the Dream should be patterned.  Indeed, the whole point of GNS Simulationism may be to celebrate the imposition of those exterior aesthetics.  Read Ron's post from http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=133952#133952">Narrativism: not a Creative Agenda.  

Well, yes; bringing in exterior agendas, principles, aesthetics, or whatever is perfectly legitimate so long as it isn't required.  That's what Drama mechanics usually lean on, for example.  If it's something selected deliberately for inclusion, whether it's that the Gods have decided that certain aesthetic principles of fairness or justice will reign, or that there are certain kinds of mechanics we will all agree not to look at within the Dream, that's not a problem.

This is, in fact, exactly where I started.  I am interested in how Sim games do this.  One easy way, an oldie but a goodie, is to say, "Dice?  Those don't count in the Dream.  Please do not look at them."  That's baseline normal behavior, which is why I was asking about diceless games.  Other games, like some of the stuff Eero and Jonathan mentioned, say, "Dice?  Those are your character's magic special dice.  When you character rolls those, he changes the nature of the universe, because he's wicked wicked cool."  And so on.  But these are devices for dealing with a basic problem: the mechanics are external to the Dream.

Is that clear?

A base principle in Sim is that a mechanic that says something like, "In this kind of situation, things should happen this way because it's cooler and more fun than that way," which is to say a strictly aesthetic mechanic, is not strictly speaking necessary; it's an option.  In Nar, this is not an option: if it isn't Story Now, it isn't Nar.  If it isn't Step On Up, it isn't Gam.  The point about Sim is that the fundamental principle is Right To Dream, and you can add any damn rules you want as long as you don't violate that.

In talking system, I'm talking about stuff like this:

what matters is that within the system, causality is clear, handled without metagame intrusion and without confusion on anyone's part. That's why it's often referred to as "the engine," and unlike other modes of play, the engine, upon being activated and further employed by players and GM, is expected to be the authoritative motive force for the game to "go."

The game engine, whatever it might be, is not to be messed with. It is causality among the five elements of play. Whether everyone has to get the engine in terms of its functions varies among games and among groups, but recognizing its authority as the causal agent is a big part of play.

I think in some respects that rgfa Simulationism is based on principles like this, though I'm not sure GNS Simulationism is.  rgfa Simulationism is based on rejection of meta-game input, which is inherently impossible.  i.e. The meta-game will always affect the in-game.  However, those who use it feel that the effort of trying to reject it produces interesting and fun results.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with fun, and based on your account this is not something that differentiates GNS Sim from RGFA Sim.  They don't like meta-game.  But it sounds like RGFA Sim takes this as an aesthetic principle, while GNS Sim says that meta-game is an option but not a necessity nor a taboo.  

The point is what I've highlighted above.  Of course it's impossible.  Yes, as you say, it's interesting and fun and worth doing.  All I'm interested in here is how Sim designers and theorists have tried to get around the point that a basic principle of their gaming style is impossible.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Doink! Chris, I am sure you've read The Beeg Horseshoe Theory by the inestimable Jared Sorensen. Check it out again - if I'm reading you right, it's close to what you're saying.

Jared's Horseshoe: there is no Sim. There is a circle with a big gap which has a name for some reason. Attempts to play Simulationist end up being denial of other stuff without achieving any coherent new stuff.

And which, at the time, I agreed with. Later I decided so many folks insisting on it as a desirable aesthetic must be talking about something anyway.

And which, as well, is 100% the opposite of what Mike Holmes calls the Beeg Horseshoe.

Mike's Horseshoe: Sim sats at the branch which forks into Gamism and Narrativism and may be thought of as an independent dial.

All of the foregoing may be considered (a) impossibly sketchy and unqualified, according to the respective authors; and (b) biased by me in some way, according to anyone who doesn't like my summary.

But anyway, if anyone hasn't read that thread, they should. Very meaty initial post, even though the thread geeked out later. You can see the Mike Holmes stew boiling over right then, destined to hiss later, loudly, sometime last year. And check the dates, too, just to keep some perspective.

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

Yes, Ron, I've read the Beeg Horseshoe thread.  I don't particularly agree with Jared, if that's what you're asking, though I find the idea interesting.

I'm sorry, but what is it you think I'm "saying"?  I thought I was asking for some suggestions on where to look for interesting ideas about how Sim games that don't use dice work around a basic logical and practical problem.  This has now become a fascinating discussion, which I hope will continue, but please don't saddle yourself with the illusion that this is some sort of weird argument I'm making about how GNS and the Big Model really work.  It isn't.  It's a request for suggestions about a theoretical problem I find interesting for quite different reasons.

If you care, my interests have to do with Sim as a mode of social interaction not entirely unlike mythology --- but if somebody wants to pick up that particular football please do it elsewhere.

Anyway, back to this nifty discussion that seems to have emerged....

[Sean]

FWIW I think Chris' idea is different from the 'beeg horseshoe'. I think the idea of the 'beeg horseshoe' emerges because 95+% of real-life Sim play uses some low-intensity Gamism or Narrativism to keep things moving along to drive a Simulationist CA; Step on Up or Story as a peg on which to hang hard-core Exploration. But I also think there's such a thing as 'pure' Simulationist play, though it's very rare in practice, so neither Jared's nor Mike's BH hold any attraction for me. We've had lots of threads on that already though, so I'd tend to agree with Chris that this is not the place for more.

Chris, I think where I'm sitting with respect to Ron's previous disagreement with you is to regard it as a difference in ontology, if you like. Ron is most of the time a resolute social realist about the SIS - it's the transations between people that constitute it for him, I think. So he doesn't see mechanics as outside it in a fundamental way. Whereas I think you are tending to see the SIS in terms of what might be called the participant-perspective - how individuals are reacting to those transactions, processing them subjectively in their minds, visualizing things, etc.

I think that you're talking about the same thing in different ways - these are both valid approaches to shared imagined space IMO. But here's the interesting thing - mechanics are unproblematically part of that in Ron's sense, but only problematically so in yours.

That is, if you're playing Gamist or Narrativist, you want to do something with the SIS. Mechanics that help you do that thing are good, others are bad.

But if you're playing Simulationist, as you rightly indicate, what you want to 'do' with the SIS is just get into (certain elements of) it more, to explore it more and more deeply. Now where I agree with Ron is that there's no reason mechanics can't help you do this, for particular kinds of exploration. But where I think you're really on to something is to point out that the actual time spent handling that mechanic, as a real-world interaction, does cut against actual participation time in the SIS for the Simulationist. That's what I was suggesting with the 'schizophrenic' bit above.

I can think of some partial exceptions besides the postmodern one - frex, resolving combats with boffers, playing in costume, etc. Also, if you're just playing to find out what a system can do - pervy Sim - then the mechanics are what you're exploring.  But still, I think you're on to something here in general. Most mechanics require real-world consciousness to process and the material of those mechanics are not part of where the FOCUSED exploration is occurring in the SIS. So if your CA is Sim then with virtually all mechanics ever devised, someone has to spend thought time away from the parts of the SIS you're focusing your exploration on to process them. As a general observation, that holds for Nar and Gam too, but the difference there is that it's OK to take a break from one focused part of exploration for the sake of what you're trying to do with that exploration.

If that's what you're saying, I think it's right, and very interesting. And not the same as Beeg Horseshoe.

[John Kim]

I don't agree with this parallel.  In most RPGs, I would say that negotiation is purely social, with no parallel to an arbitration system.  A typical in-game mechanic is not an arbitration system at all -- it is a tool which produces a result.  In Forge jargon, it doesn't assign credibility to a particular player, and thus it doesn't resolve disputes.

Mechanics are exterior to the SIS.  Got it?

Mechanics.  Like dice.  Which are arbitrary.  Because nobody controls them.  And are external.  Because they don't exist in the game-world.  

OK, counter-rant here.  

There is a distinction of "meta-game mechanics" and "in-game mechanics" which you are completely missing.  Now, obviously, in-game mechanics are not as themselves parts of an imaginary space.  However, they can be representational.  A representational mechanic is just like any other representational element of the game.  For example, a player speaking in-character is a representation of character speech.  The player's speech is not itself imaginary.  Rolling dice or speaking in-character are both meta-game actions which represent in-game actions.  A representational mechanic may form part of the players' understanding of the game world -- even if it is not explicitly invoked.  

In contrast, a meta-game mechanic is not representational.  Ron defines them as "Techniques which do not require justification using in-game cause, in many cases including Author and Director Stances."  

Are dice exterior to the game-world, i.e. the Dream?  Well, at base, so are all mechanics.

Sim calls for perfect arbitrariness -- perfect causality and authority handed to that --

...and for perfect interiority -- no need ever to leap out of the Dream.

I'm willing to debate the rest with you, John included, because that's about exactly what Sim is and how it works and what the limits of arbitrariness are and all that.

OK, so how did you get that Sim calls for perfect interiority?  Because what you're saying is that perfect Sim means dreaming by yourself in a sensory deprivation tank.  i.e. No interruptions from anything external like player speech, dice, or mechanics.  

I am interested in how Sim games do this.  One easy way, an oldie but a goodie, is to say, "Dice?  Those don't count in the Dream.  Please do not look at them."  That's baseline normal behavior, which is why I was asking about diceless games.  Other games, like some of the stuff Eero and Jonathan mentioned, say, "Dice?  Those are your character's magic special dice.  When you character rolls those, he changes the nature of the universe, because he's wicked wicked cool."  And so on.  But these are devices for dealing with a basic problem: the mechanics are external to the Dream.

Is that clear?  

OK, you need to explain your vision here better.  Because you're saying that input from the GM or other players or anything else in the world is a "problem".  I don't think that's true even as an extreme ideal of Sim.

[Ron Edwards]

Count me in with John, except I'm kind of puzzled and plaintive-looking.

Best,
Ron

[clehrich]

I'm going to assume that everyone has read M.J.'s rather fast-moving thread Splitting Simulationism?.  If you haven't, please do so now.  'Kay?

Okay, let me restate some things from the top, and then I'll make specific replies.

Point 1.  There is no argument, for me, embedded within what has been going on here.  None.  If I am misunderstanding Sim, that's interesting to me, because that complicates matters, but I have no agenda.  I have no axe to grind... at the moment.  When I do, believe me, you all will be the first to know.  So if you are looking to demonstrate that my argument is wrong or misguided, you are beating the wrong set of bushes.

Point 2.  What I mean about mechanics, and all I mean about mechanics, is that you and I, here and now, are capable of making a rough-and-ready distinction between mechanics and the Dream, i.e. the stuff that happens in SIS.  

Point 3.  Assuming we've gotten that far together, I note the following issue about CA's.  Here on my left are Nar and Gam, for which the goal/ agenda/ shtick /interest /etc. is Story Now or Step On Up, respectively.  The goal/agenda...../etc. for each has nothing directly to do with the Dream.  Not the point at all.  Now here on my right is Sim, for which the goal/agenda....etc. is the Dream, or at least, The Right To Dream.  Got me?

Point 4  Now mechanics are a BIG part of how we keep the Dream going.  In fact, a part of the Lumpley Principle is that System is exactly what keeps the Dream going, more or less.  So in that sense, and in that sense alone, at the very least, system is outside the Dream.  Right?  See point 2 if you're still lost.

Point 5  If the CA is totally focused on Dream, or, hypothetically, if the CA were totally focused on mechanics/system, then you would start to move into a kind of recursive loop.  If the CA has nothing to do with either, at base, then it doesn't matter.  To put it familiarly, "rules-lite" doesn't make a game Nar, and "rules-heavy" doesn't make it Sim (or Gam, depending on the stereotype).  But in Right To Dream, it matters very much indeed what sort of mechanics you use, because they influence how you are capable of interacting with and in fact thinking about the Dream.

Point 6  Which is not to say that Sim hates mechanics.  Nor that Sim mechanics are weird.  Nor that Sim can only use certain mechanics.  It's simply to say that Sim has a necessary ambivalence toward mechanics.  This manifests, incidentally, in such ideas as "no meta-game," or "speak only in character, that's how real gaming works," or the like.

I'm sorry, but wasn't this sort of embedded in your essay, Ron?  I know you don't put it in quite these terms, but is anything here new?  If so, what?  Because I thought this was all long since decided.

----

Now, assuming Ron's answer is, "Yeah, pretty much," and given that I am NOT covering all that Sim is or is about....

This Sim ambivalence provokes Sim game-writers to construct rules (mechanics, system, pick your favorite) in such a way as to keep the ambivalence from rising up and getting in the way.

What strategies do they use?  When it's not dice, and they can't gesture to tradition ("well, that's how we always did it, so there"), how do they do it?  That is and was my question.