Costikyan on Games

[clehrich]

I have long thought that one of the best things Ron did with the Big Model was to suggest that creating stories -- and in his model, creating them now as opposed to saying post facto that one has created a story -- is not a general priority or a necessity in RPGs.  Very often, in fact, it's not the priority, although the rhetoric of a game may fall into the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, that somehow the GM tells a story but the players are completely independent.

It's certainly true that this is a common claim, that story is both the medium and the product of gaming, but as I say I think one of the best things about the Big Model is that it indicates clearly that this is not necessarily the case, and that not all systems lend themselves to this project.

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that children's play, insofar as it creates stories, does so by the same means, for the same reasons, or with the same sense of "story" in the first place.  I know almost nothing about child psychology, so I'm guessing, but my sense is that children create stories as a way of imputing meaning and comprehensibility to the world around them.  I do not think this is at all common in RPGs, though it's certainly a latent possibility.

I'm with contracycle.  I think the emphasis on "story" as a central part of gaming is a misnomer, an atavistic holdover from false claims about how RPGs recreate our favorite fantasy (or whatever) novels interactively.  I'd grant that this is a common goal, but in many respects I think it's an impossible one.  To use Big Model terminology, this notion is the reason why so many people claim that their games are Sim-Nar hybrids; they never turn out actually to be so.  This is (if I've got the terms right) what Ron calls "ouija board" play: we do Sim modeling and construction and whatnot, and somehow magically story happens.  My impression of Ron's most important argument throughout the development of the Big Model is that he's saying this: if you want story, you want a system that creates Story Now (Nar), and if you want The Right To Dream (Sim), you must accept that it's not particularly likely to generate story.

All of which is radically different from children's play, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, as I said at the outset, I like Greg's article, and I like his points.  I don't happen to agree with him on this one point, but that doesn't undercut the value of his ideas.

[M. J. Young]

Concerning fudging rolls for the purpose of "story", the only time I fudged rolls in my D&D games was when a character was going to die and I thought it would be bad for the player at that moment. I usually reduced the character to one hit point, and let him escape with his life. I only did it if they got into something over their head through happenstance, such as a bad choice of which way to go.

I don't consider that "story". I consider it buffered gamism.

In this regard, I'll note that Multiverser referee Eric Ashley commented that Multiverser released his "killer GM". Before that, he would pull his punches, try to prevent character death, probably including fudging die rolls, altering scenario information on the fly, and providing escapes for characters. Multiverser's scriff rules meant that character death no longer mattered, so he no longer did it.

Thus I conclude that he was dealing with buffered gamism as well.

Hey, is that a new concept?

--M. J. Young

[simon_hibbs]

On a tangent, that's part of what drives me to tears when I attempt to fathom GNS theory. There seems to be two competing definitions of Simulationsim:

1) Modelling "real world" cause and effect.

2) Emulating source material.

I have this problem too,. If you're simulating a form of fiction, and that form of fiction is all about story now and adressing premise, then you are also deep into Narativism in the GNS  sense. At that point, both simulationism (simulation of narrative) and narativism become the same thing.

Simon Hibbs

[simon_hibbs]

It's certainly true that this is a common claim, that story is both the medium and the product of gaming, but as I say I think one of the best things about the Big Model is that it indicates clearly that this is not necessarily the case, and that not all systems lend themselves to this project.

.....

Anyway, as I said at the outset, I like Greg's article, and I like his points.  I don't happen to agree with him on this one point, but that doesn't undercut the value of his ideas.

I may not be understanding you properly here, but Greg most vcertainly does not believe that story is an inextricable part of gaming. He's consistently and eloquently argued that there are many forms of games in which there is no meaningful story whatever (chess, tetris, hopscotch, etc, etc...).

Simon Hibbs

[clehrich]

I may not be understanding you properly here, but Greg most vcertainly does not believe that story is an inextricable part of gaming. He's consistently and eloquently argued that there are many forms of games in which there is no meaningful story whatever (chess, tetris, hopscotch, etc, etc...).

You're right.  I was misreading -- or rather mis-remembering -- the article.

[Caldis]

I have this problem too,. If you're simulating a form of fiction, and that form of fiction is all about story now and adressing premise, then you are also deep into Narativism in the GNS  sense. At that point, both simulationism (simulation of narrative) and narativism become the same thing.

Simon Hibbs

This is entirely off topic so I suggest if you want to discuss it in depth start up a thread in the GNS forum.    The quick simple answer is that the difference between Sim and Nar is the same as the difference between reading the form of fiction that addresses premise and writing it.