GNS/Creative Agenda related to Bernard Suits' Game Theory

[Gerhi Janse van Vuuren]

Trying to dive into the deep end here.

I am writing up my masters dissertation in drama studies where I look at Bernard Suits theory of make believe games as he set it out in his book, The Grasshopper, Games, Life and Utopia (1978). Suits defines a game shortly as the voluntary overcoming of unneccessary obstacles. For this he uses the concepts of prelusory goal, lusory means, constitutive rules and the lusory attitude as defining features of the basis of all games.

In my research practice I used the D&D 3rd ed system as organising tool to devise a theatre play to be performed later. Despite achieving a performance the process failed miserably in that the actors were not able to be truly collaborative participants. I most definetely railroaded them towards a specific performance idea I had. In my analysis of the process I focussed on Bernard Suits' theory but were aware of the Threefold Model/GNS and suspected that it could throw a lot of relevant light on my analysis. In the crunch of writing up my dissertation it is clear to me that the Big Model and creative agenda/GNS is vital in relation to Bernard Suits' theory.

I would like to know if anybody familiar with GNS is also familiar with Bernard Suits' theory and have any ideas on the relationship between these?

[Alan]

Hi Gerhi,

Welcome to the Forge!

I for one don't know Suits's theory, so I can't contribute right now.  But I did a quick websearch and found this article by him: http://www.stsintl.com/articles/whatisagame.html
and this essay on the Grasshopper book: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/pcu/noesis/issue_vi/noesis_vi_3.html

Would comments based on a reading these be helpful?

Without knowing the theory we could certainly give opinions from the point of view of roleplay theory.  Whether you want to restrict contributions only to those who've read something about Suits's theory is up to you (and please don't hesitate to specify that here).

In either case, I think we'll need more description of what actually happened.  You might post an Actual Play message describing things like: - number, gender, and age of participants, - who had previous exposure to the hobby, - what the various players (including GM) did to contribute to the shared creation of events, - any participant conflicts, chafings, or misunderstandings and how they were resolved.

[Gerhi Janse van Vuuren]

Dear Alan,

Firstly, sorry for the duplicate post. My network server bombed on me just as I was posting and I accidently doubled it up.

Yes, the two sites you mention would help. The first (What is a Game) provides the basis for Suits' thesis on which he built the rest of the theory. It is a clear and quick summary of his understanding of games. What it does not provide is Suits idea of a game of make-believe as and open game. An open game, versus a closed game, does not have an aim such as winning that would automatically end the game. In a game of make believe as an open game then a player would make dramatic moves in response to other players, and would not make a dramtic move that would end the game. This is explained in detail in The Grasshopper.

I would like to get responses from people that take note specificaly of Suits' theory but would not mind posts straight from role-play theory. I will continue to expand or amend on what I understand Suits to be saying.

In terms of the specific instance of play. Here are some relevant details.
The series of D&D sessions played resulted in a play called The Foreshadowing. The participants were me, male 37 (then) as DM. The players were a group of five female undergraduate drama students. Their ages ranged from 18 to 20. Of the five only two knew what a role-playing game was and only one had played before. They were cast from a larger student body and I specifically cast these students who all had an interest in fantasy.  We played for six sessions. In session one we played a D&D 3rd ed introductory adventure (from the box). In session two we played one of my own adventures that takes place in an Inn. The other four sessions we played was an adventure adapted from a Dungeon Magazine based on The Tempest by Shakespeare. I think the designer was Selinker but I can provide a full reference later.

What was significant during play was that I as DM was and stayed a rules interpreter. Throughout the process the players stayed rookie players. I myself was still very unfamiliar with 3rd ed, having only acquired my manuals in the month or so before play began. After the game some of the players in their feedback still commented in the fun we had playing the 'board' game.  One instance of play that come to mind is when one player, playing a cleric, during a conversation said that she puts poison into the NPC Duke's cup. It took a while of explaining that no poison ring on the character sheet equals no poison to poison with. I think it was significant working with drama students for which improvisation means that things are developed on the fly and if you say you got it, you got it.

I could go on but would not want to redo my whole dissertation here.

To return to Suits. Does the prelusory goal as Suits define it refer to/relate to premise or is there another part of the Big Model that should be considered? Bernard Suits would say that the prelusory goal is the prolongation (continuing play) of the game through the making of dramatic moves on the spot.

Gerhi

[Alan]

Hi Gehri,

Just a preliminary thought: If I understand pre-lusary correctly, then I think the pre-lusary goal of a role-playing game is to create moments where the player can satisfy his or her creative agenda.  So the goal of gamist play is to create moments of challenge, the goal of narrativist play is moments of addressing premise, and the goal of simulationism is the sustained experience of some ideal environment.

I want to read the links I found in full before I say more.  Also, I hope, Ron and others will get involved.

[clehrich]

I took a brief look at those links, and will be back to this when I have a minute to think about it deeply.  Don't close the thread without me!

[Gerhi Janse van Vuuren]

Alan,

I think you are right about the prelusory goal creating moments for satisfying a creative agenda.
Adding the labels/elements into Suits definition of a game at the end of http://www.stsintl.com/articles/whatisagame.html would read like follows:

to play a game is to engage in activity directed toward bringing about a specific state of affairs (prelusory goals), using only means permitted by specific rules (lusory means), where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of the rules (constitutive rules), and where the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity (lusory attitude).

Using Suits' terminology then a creative agenda is the same as a specific state of affairs.
The state of affairs to be created the in gamist play is moments where players can Step on Up, The state of affairs to be created in narrativist play is moments where players can have Story Now, and The state of affairs to be created in simulatinist play is where players can have a right to dream.

The only problem I have with this so far is the "moments". What happens in between the "moments" when the goal is not being achieved. If the Prelusory goal of Chess is to immobilize the opposing King, then everything in all the moves of the game is focussed on that goal. How is all the moves in dramatic playing focussed on achieving the creative agenda? Is this a question of congruence?

Gerhi

P.S. Expectantly waiting for your deep thoughts Chris.

[Wormwood]

Gerhi,

The way I'd put it, the lusory goal is to generate patterns in play of intermediate complexity (neither stagnantly boring nor stochastically incomprehensible).  This goal my be further biased (and almost always is) towards a creative agenda. In this way, the patterns which are being generated should also be within a given agenda.

For example, gamist play might focus on generating patterns of a contest-result-reconsider loop. The dynamic component of this is  improvement of the result. Most of the player's actions in the game (even if she is an ideal gamist) will be simply to preserve any sort of structure (or ensure stagnation doesn't set in), regardless of the looping required. What distinguished between creative agendas is when the player biases from one pattern versus another.

In essence, what I've just described is exploration, but I often find the problem with the idea of exploration is that it lacks a definite sense by which the players bring it about. It seems to apply this theory you need to get at the issue of how people explore, not merely that they do so.

  -Mendel S.

[Gerhi Janse van Vuuren]

Mendel S.

To paraphrase what I think you mean. Pursuing a creative agenda in a game (exploration) is not just an on off switch with moments when it happen and moments when we do other a stuff wishing or waiting for it to happen.

It is rather a feedback loop where we identify the goal, pursue it, attain or play through it, reflect on it and then identify the next goal.
The how this happens is the question.  According to Suits the means for make-believe play is the invention of dramatic responses on the spot. Or, improvisation without a script. The same holds true for a RPG. If every step in the feedback loop is supposed to be a dramatic (understand action aimed at achieving creative agenda) response invented on the spot how is the loop sustained? What prevents it from degrading into default positions where players are just going through the motions but not actively engaging with the creative agenda?

In retrospect and regarding Systems that Matter, I attempted to achieve a narrative agenda in The Foreshadowing process with a gamist/simulationist system (especially in the way I used the system).  My concern is mostly with achieving narrative play and would like to know how the feedback loop could be attained, especially since my sense is that story tend to be a moving target?
It might be that I do not have experience in playing narrative games.
My experiences are limited to various versions of D&D, Gurps, Masquarade, Rolemaster, and a friend's Heartbreaker.  My own designs have fizzled out as very imitative heartbreakers.

Gerhi

[Alan]

The only problem I have with this so far is the "moments". What happens in between the "moments" when the goal is not being achieved. If the Prelusory goal of Chess is to immobilize the opposing King, then everything in all the moves of the game is focussed on that goal. How is all the moves in dramatic playing focussed on achieving the creative agenda? Is this a question of congruence?

Hi Gerhi,

I used "moments," because the states we strive for in an rpg demonstrably do not take up the whole period of play.  Even in simulationist play, where the goal is endurance of a particular state, that segment must be interrupted.

I think it's a common experience that an action movie that is all fast paced action is not as exciting as the movie that pauses to develop elements that will be factors in the next conflict.  The best action movies are a choreography of forces that manifest periodic states of high action.  I think it works the same way in role-playing games.

RPG activity before the "moments" can be viewed as putting the required elements into play, the moment itself happens when the right threads can be brought into intersection, providing all the elements of the central focus of a given creative agenda.  The activity after a "moment" is elaborating on its consequences and trying to use those consequences (within the limits of chosen set of rules about cause and effect of imaginary events, and the nature of the imaginary world and characters) to build up for a new moment.

Again, a significant difference between simulationist play and the other two agendas, I think, is that the simulationist is looking for sustained periods of experience that celebrate an ideal - a kind of rapture.  Players working toward the other two may get deeply engaged heading towards a Step on Up or Premise Addressing moment, but their payoff is a decision-point, or cluster of decision-points.

(As a side comment, it's interesting that traditional rpg play discarded the end point that most games, like Chess, have.  However, some rpg designs, like My Life With Master, are now bringing that concept back.)

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I'm not sure what you mean by conguence.  Can you say more about that?

[clehrich]

Gerhi,

My first question to you, now that I've had time to think my way through these two texts, is what your thesis – your argument, that is – might be.  I wonder whether you intend any sort of challenge to or critical confrontation of Suits' theory, or whether you are using it purely as a supporting framework.  The reason I ask is that I am not convinced that RPGs fit entirely into his definitions; if they do, it is in a peculiar way that would entail a certain amount of development on your (or his) part.

First of all, a point of clarification.  I think when Alan uses the term "moment," he is referring to the "instance" concept in the Big Model, which is a span of game-play events of indeterminate length, sufficient for evaluation of CA.  A "moment" in Alan's use is not the same as an "instance," being considerably smaller, but we might say that one "instance" must contain a sufficient number of "moments" that we can, on a statistical basis, discern the normative CA of the group's play.  I don't know if that helps, of course.  As I understand it, Alan is saying that there are within gameplay particular moments which express CA.  Without the larger context of the instance an outside observer cannot necessarily discern moments as such nor, if they are discerned, correctly analyze them in CA terms.  But taking for granted the larger context, it is at these moments that CA gets achieved, or "won" in Suits' terms.

The point being that if you take an instance of play you find that it is not unlike a game of chess, or a race, or whatever.  The players abide by essentially arbitrary and unnecessary constraints in order to generate a CA moment.  The only reason to abide by these rules is that without them, you cannot win, that is you cannot generate such a moment, and thus the only purpose to play is to engage in the activity that contains the possibility of winning.  Thus play of an RPG can be said to require the lusory attitude.

But I don't buy this conception.  Alan is, I think, making a good-faith attempt to approximate the two models to each other, but that in fact there is no such "moment".  In principle, one can isolate a "winning" moment, the pre-lusory goal, from that which surrounds it; indeed, this is precisely the starting point of Suits' definition.  Even if in fact it is impractical to do so in some games, at least hypothetically it should be possible to make the distinction.  But as I understand the instance concept (one of the most undertheorized elements of the Big Model), such a division is not in principle possible, because the entirety of the instance is its own winning moment.  Thus we are in some sense in the performative domain, à la Austen, where doing is achieving.  It is not possible to play coherently without winning, which makes the entire operation pointless from Suits' perspective.

Take Professor Snooze being approached by Professor Threat.  Suppose that the Premise of the Narrativist RPG we are playing has something to do with the "demented Kantian": it's about the obedience to rules and the ways in which this does or does not have definite moral implications.  Before I do anything as a player, I have already won: the Premise is already active simply because I have formulated the situation so.  If this is a Gamist RPG, the object of the game is to Step On Up to the challenge, in this case perhaps of saving Professor Threat without violating the causal rules of the world.  But even before I act, or better no matter what I choose to do, I have already succeeded: it makes no difference whether I in fact achieve my goal within the game, that is save Professor Snooze, because regardless I have Stepped On Up.  The formulation of the situation is impossible without the goal being in place, in Suits' structure, but as soon as the goal is in place in RPGs the CA is already expressed and we have "won" the game.

As Bradford puts it, "the lusory attitude is the subjective state of mind that consists in the choosing to conform to the rules of a game precisely so that the activity produced by such rules can be performed. As a component of game playing, it is the mindset of the agent as he engages in game playing. To Suits, it is this mental attitude that distinguishes game playing from other activities."  By this definition, it appears that RPG play is the expression of the lusory attitude and nothing else: it is lusory attitude without any pre-lusory goal.

Now a second objection arises from a quite different quarter.  There is a very famous essay by Clifford Geertz called "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," which you'll find in The Interpretation of Cultures, and also at this website here (though it looks to me as though it has been slightly abridged on the website).  To summarize very briefly and inadequately, the Balinese have these cockfights in which an enormous amount of money changes hands on the basis of what is constructed to be as close to a coin-toss as possible: the cocks are as close to equally matched as possible, to the point that if they appear unevenly matched the "game" is not desirable.  The Balinese say that these games aren't really about money; they're about status: the winner gains status and the loser loses it.

But Geertz points out that in actual fact, no status changes as a result of the cockfight.  After the fight, nothing has changed except money, and the Balinese say that the money doesn't make much difference (although people can be impoverished by a big match).  So why do they do this?

Geertz suggests that the Balinese do it as a way of interpreting themselves, as a way of reading how their society works and thinking about the nature of violence, something they abhor.  As he puts it,

What the cockfight says it says in a vocabulary of sentiment-the thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph. Yet what it says is not merely that risk is exciting, loss depressing, or triumph gratifying, banal tautologies of affect, but that it is of these emotions, thus exampled, that society is built and individuals put together. Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education. What he learns there is what his culture's ethos and his private sensibility (or, anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally in a collective text; that the two are near enough alike to be articulated in the symbolics of a single such text; and-the disquieting part-that the text in which this revelation is accomplished consists of a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits.

But this means that gameplay of this sort absolutely requires an end other than the lusory.  That is, where Suits' definition says that "the sole reason for accepting such limitation is to make possible such activity," in the case of the Balinese cockfight what is made possible is not the cockfight and the gambling on it, but rather another activity entirely, that of the "sentimental education" to which Geertz refers.

I have elsewhere referred to RPGs as ritual practice, and this is another example of the same.  The reason to engage in the activity is not the activity itself, although that is also necessary; rather, it is to provoke a reflection and encounter with one's own cultural situation and position in a displaced and thus sharply-delineated performative sphere.  This, I believe, makes Suits' definitions not applicable to RPGs: what he's analyzing is not a ritual mode but a game, and by his definitions the two are really not the same thing.

I hope I haven't just shattered your thesis.  I do think it would be interesting to reevaluate the "game" nature of RPGs from Suits' perspective, but I think it would take considerable reformulation of his categories, or rather an extension and reconstruction that might reveal something about RPGs not yet clearly understood.

[Wormwood]

Gerhi,

It's more a matter of the goal being "maintaining constructive play in my creative agenda." Focusing on the creative agenda ignores the fact that much of the actions in play are to maintain constructive play, rather than focusing on any agenda. Also, this means that the goal is an ongoing, naturally unstable state, rather than a sequence of mini-goals for the particular agenda.

I hope that helps,

  -Mendel S.

[Gerhi Janse van Vuuren]

Dear All

I have a lot to think on - Thanks.
Will get back with replies after some soul searching.

Gerhi