Pattern Recognition, Metaphor, and Continuity

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Marco,

Like I said, if someone wants to get a new thread going on this specific matter, I'll add what I can in terms of observations.

But I don't think this is the thread to do it.

Best,

Christopher

[Doctor Xero]

Here is my only argument, restated for clarity, for you:

-"A sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment" are possible to acheive with little or no prepared or previously agreed upon elements and/or director stance shared by the group as a whole.  I personally have experienced them as a regular feature of play.

Sorry, Chris, but the above is logically absurd.

A person can not discover something that does not already exist.  To claim otherwise is logically absurd.  To discover something is not the same as to invent or create.

Discover, invent mean to find something not known before.  Discover means to find or find out something that already existed, but was not known about or had not been seen . . . Invent means to make or work out something that did not exist before . . .

By definition, your statement about a sense of discovery being possible to achieve with little or no prepared or previously agreed upon elements etc. makes no sense.

A person can not recognize a pattern if there is no data within which to find said pattern.  To claim otherwise is logically absurd.

Pattern recognition is the research area that studies the operation and design of systems that recognize patterns in data.

(I don't have my Gibson nor other psychology and epistemology books near me at the university, so I'm settling for a definition from the web.)
By definition, your statement about the pattern recognition being possible to achieve with little or no prepared or previously agreed upon elements etc. makes no sense.

There are many kinds of personal empowerment.  That specific personal empowerment which comes from discovery and/or pattern recognition is not possible in situations which lack both anything to discover and any patterns to recognize.  Now you have, as plainly as I can put it, the chain of reasoning through which I dispute your claims.

If you can explain to me how you avoid the above logical absurdities, perhaps I will know how to translate more effectively into terms you would be more comfortable with.  I would appreciate your insights on this, so that I might learn.

Doctor Xero

P.S. For the record, I have focused on the importance of framing via an interaction with continuity because a large proportion of the threads I have encountered indicate that many Forge posters are already quite familiar with framing via an independence from continuity.  I have run both healthy games with a strong pre-existing continuity and healthy games with a malleable continuity.  Although I prefer to play characters who are embedded within the game setting, I have also occasionally played characters who could be easily transferred from one campaign to another.  I have witnessed many others who have done the same.  It has been quite common among AD-&-D aficionadoes, for example, to have characters who can be pulled out for any campaign they encounter.  I am not condemning one type for the other ; I am pointing out that different frameworks have different benefits, with the obvious conclusion that if you want certain benefits (discovery not invention, pattern recognition, the Tolkienian definition of myth) you need to make certain your are utilizing the proper framework.

Anyone who chooses to infer a condemnation of one type over the other is implanting said condemnation himself or herself.  That you choose to infer it does not mean I implied it.

Also, while I have encountered dysfunctional players, particularly at conventions, I have also played with some of the most talented and good-spirited gamers it could be any gamer's good fortune to meet.

In other words, I request that no one make any further assumptions about the sorts of gaming I've experienced nor any further aspersions against the quality of players with whom I have gamed.

-X.

[Bankuei]

Hi Doc,

You are correct, it is impossible to actually discover something that does not yet exist.  The key point is "A sense of discovery".  The sense, or feeling of, does not need to correspond to the actuality of it.  As you yourself pointed out- a GM could totally make up the clues on the spot, and the group can accept those and have the "sense of discovery" without actual discovery.

How does this work when the group consciously knows that things are being made up on the spot?  The fact is, that each person capable of producing input is already strategizing ways to fulfill their personal agendas, either within the immediate moment, or the future.  

I may not, for instance, know what kinds of events are going to happen in Universalis, but I do know that you, as a fellow player, may already have a scheme, plan, or series of plot points that will lead somewhere interesting.  My sense of discovery manifests in seeing where you are trying to take events in play, your input, your take on things.  Likewise for every other player at the table concerning every player's input.

As far as pattern recognition goes- you have already pointed out that many things people do reference and echo pre-existing archtypes and patterns.  The pattern that is recognized is the one produced in play.  To give an example, people playing Go have no idea what the final result or board will look like.  As they play, patterns are created, that they recognize and react to.  Likewise, in actual play itself, players produce archtypes and patterns in behavior.  The interaction of the players and the events create patterns to be recognized.

So what is the difference between a predetermined set of elements to create a pattern and one created through play?  As far as recognizing a pattern- there is none.  If the GM has a set of clues for us to find- we see a pattern and we recognize it.  If the GM makes up the clues, we recognize a pattern(either being spontaneously produced by the GM, or imagined and projected on our part).  If we all produce the elements in play, patterns emerge and we as a group recognize and either reinforce or attempt to change the patterns that emerge.  This happens in Universalis on a fairly regular basis.

There are many kinds of personal empowerment. That specific personal empowerment which comes from discovery and/or pattern recognition is not possible in situations which lack both anything to discover and any patterns to recognize. Now you have, as plainly as I can put it, the chain of reasoning through which I dispute your claims.

If you are claiming that there is a specific brand of sense of discovery, pattern recognition and personal empowerment that comes from predetermined elements- that is specifically different from other types of sense of discovery, etc.  - then I would say we're not in disagreement and we have suffered a confusion in communication.  I would be interested in hearing exactly how, for the purposes of play, this brand differs from the others other than simply play preference and what effects that has in terms of play.

If, on the other hand, you are saying that sense of discovery, pattern recognition, and personal empowerment are completely impossible for games that utilize conscious director stance on part of the group- then no, you have still to produce solid examples counteracting several accounts to the contrary.

Chris

[clehrich]

Here is my only argument, restated for clarity, for you:

-"A sense of discovery, the pattern recognition, and the personal empowerment" are possible to acheive with little or no prepared or previously agreed upon elements and/or director stance shared by the group as a whole.  I personally have experienced them as a regular feature of play.

Sorry, Chris, but the above is logically absurd.

A person can not discover something that does not already exist.  To claim otherwise is logically absurd.  To discover something is not the same as to invent or create.

To follow up on Chris's (Bankuei's) remarks, we have to remember that gaming is a purely social phenomenon.  As such, any patterns discovered are at base social ones, i.e. humanly-constructed ones.

One of the central arguments about myth formulated by Levi-Strauss in particular, by which I am persuaded, is that it is largely a matter of inventing and also discovering patterns of meaning.  This happens through the manipulation of both natural (non-humanly-constructed) objects and cultural (humanly-constructed) ones.  We juxtapose these within a larger framework, commonly narrative, and "discover" patterns -- but really, we are inventing them.

For example, the Murngin myth of the two Wawilak sisters who are destroyed by the great snake is mapped onto the rainfall patterns in Arnhem-land, where the Murngin lived.  To cut to the chase, they impose a human meaning onto a natural pattern.  Because they do this through a mythic procedure, they appear (to themselves) to discover a pattern already present, whereas from an exterior perspective it is clear that they are imposing (inventing) meaning by formulating an analogy.

Nature is not in itself contradictory.  It can become so only in terms of some specific human activity which takes part in it; and the characteristics of the environment take on a different meaning according to the particular historical and technical form assumed in it by this or that type of activity.  On the other hand, even when raised to that human level which alone can make them intelligible, man's relations with his natural environment remain objects of thought: man never perceives them passively; having reduced them to concepts, he compounds them in order to arrive at a system which is never determined in advance: the same situation can always be systematized in various ways.

[La pensee sauvage (trans. as The Savage Mind), ch. 3]

All of which means that improvisational invention is entirely capable of constructing a sense of discovery.  Indeed, from Levi-Strauss's point of view -- and I would agree -- this is one of the strongest markers of how mythic thought works.

Thus it appears that the best case to prove Chris's point that this is in no way logically absurd is myth, whether we take a Campbell-Eliade-Jung sort of archetypal reading (which I think is nonsense, but even so) or a structuralist perspective, which denies from the outset the possibility of such archetypes.

[Doctor Xero]

Hi Doc,

You are correct, it is impossible to actually discover something that does not yet exist.  The key point is "A sense of discovery".  The sense, or feeling of, does not need to correspond to the actuality of it.  As you yourself pointed out- a GM could totally make up the clues on the spot, and the group can accept those and have the "sense of discovery" without actual discovery.

Ah!  I now understand the point you are making.

I concur with you that the sense does not have to correspond to the actuality of it.  From your perspective, my argument about discovery must have seemed irrelevant, yes?

However, I have also encountered a large number of players whose enjoyment of a game hinges upon their believing that both sense and the actuality are one and the same in a particular game.  I have known many game masters who have heard intelligent, healthy roleplayers tell them, "I don't want to play in your mystery scenario unless there really is a solution already, unless there really will be clues, and unless there really is a chance that no one will be able to solve the mystery."  I have encountered this among both brilliant roleplayers and dysfunctional players, and I have encountered it frequently in conventions across the country, so I do not consider these players to be unusual but rather players whose preferences deserve to be taken into account.

It makes sense, if you think about it.  Puzzling out a problem uses different abilities than does creative invention.  A player who wants the fun of puzzling something out will be disappointed if he doesn't get that.

Can you see how, from their perspective, it does make a difference?

How does this work when the group consciously knows that things are being made up on the spot?  The fact is, that each person capable of producing input is already strategizing ways to fulfill their personal agendas, either within the immediate moment, or the future.

Again, I agree.  However, there are also many players who are don't want that, or at least they want to know up front about it.  I don't discount the pleasure of such gaming -- I've done it myself.  I simply argue that there are other gaming pleasures which are denied by that particular type of gaming.  

As far as pattern recognition goes- you have already pointed out that many things people do reference and echo pre-existing archtypes and patterns.
---snip!--
So what is the difference between a predetermined set of elements to create a pattern and one created through play?  As far as recognizing a pattern- there is none.

Again, I concur, but . . . (I hope this pattern is not bothering you. *wry half-grin*)

In terms of game play, well, it depends upon whether the player wants to tease out or puzzle out the theme or underlying patterns of the campaign because, well, knowledge is power.  If I understand how something works, I am empowered by that understanding.  If I understand it and another player does not (or his or her character does not), I have a level of empowerment he/she does not, which I might either use to my advantage (a classical gamist response) or might use through my character's mentoring his/her character (more of a simulationist response) or either (narrativist?  I'm unsure).

In the writings of the scholars of mythology and the fantastical whom I had quoted at the beginning of this thread, one point made was the idea that understanding a pattern empowers -- knowledge is power.  (Of the multilayered definings of myth, that is the layer to which I referred, as I imagine my choice of quotes had made clear.)  Identifying this pattern for material power has been a recurrent thread in writings on magic and alchemy.

I will provide you two gaming examples.  I recall being in a game in which the players were vampire hunters interested in spell-casting (not a World of Darkness campaign, so there were no libraries of gaming books and supplements for us).  One of the players played an atheist who considered vampirism a physical condition ; one played a nontheist metaphysicist who saw vampirism as magical not spiritual ; one played a religious Christian who saw vampirism as a spiritual blight ; another played a religious Christian who saw vampirism as demonic possession of a corpse ; etc.  Our characters were reluctantly cooperating, not a team, so there was an element of competitive discovery among characters despite player cooperation.  In this game, the key to empowerment over the vampires was the discovery of the metaphysics under which they functioned -- in doing so, recognizing the mythic or metaphysic pattern of the game world.  After all, if your character has proof positive that the vampire has met Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ has power specifically as the Messiah etc., you through your character have recognized that this campaign operates under a Christian metaphysics, which will empower your character in a way denied to characters who try to utilize Babylonian metaphysics in this Christian campaign setting.

Later on, we played under a different game master.  She loved the basic motif of vampires, but she really had no investment one way or the other in the metaphysics underlying them.  If we had decided simply to kill off the vampires with fire and stakes, it wouldn't have mattered.  However, after playing under the first game master, we were primed to look for an underlying metaphysical pattern to empower us against those vampires (and in all subsequent magic-working in this campaign).  So she admitted to us that she had no idea what the metaphysics was, and whatever metaphysics we could convince her (or the group), that would turn out to be the correct one.  Now we went from puzzler mindset to persuader mindset!  It was great fun, but it was still a quite different experience from the earlier vampire game, and while the first had rewarded players who were skilled with investigation and logic games, this second one rewarded players who were skilled with argument and persuasion.

I label these differences as frameworks primarily because it seemed the least loaded term I could find (so many good terms already have specific meanings on The Forge!).

The other difference comes from my experiences, and the experiences related to me by others, of character creation.

Sometimes game masters will ask each player to build a character which fits in particularly well with the theme being explored (narrativist) or the setting (simulationist).  They want players to make sure their characters are constructed to interact with or inflect those premises or settings.

Sometimes game masters will ask each player to build a character which is not dependent upon any particular setting (this often means we will be playing duck-out-of-water or strangers-in-a-strange-land campaigns) and/or which is not dependent upon any particular theme.

If I want to build a character which fits in particularly well with the theme or setting, I need that theme or setting to already be there.  And, like many of Allston's gamer types, I often enjoy building characters who fit in well.  I've met many others who feel the same.

If I want to build a character who fits in anywhere, I don't need to know the theme nor setting.  This can also be fun, although for me it's not as much fun.  In such cases, once the campaign is being played out, I will go out of my way to create relationships between my character and other PCs and NPCs so that I still feel as though my character is connected into this campaign.

If you are claiming that there is a specific brand of sense of discovery, pattern recognition and personal empowerment that comes from predetermined elements- that is specifically different from other types of sense of discovery, etc.  - then I would say we're not in disagreement and we have suffered a confusion in communication.

Yes, that is what I have been claiming from the very beginning.

I had thought my starting off with quotes would prep the reader for just such a thing.  That's how many of the works I've read begin.  In this case, however, it seems to have confused a number of people.

I would be interested in hearing exactly how, for the purposes of play, this brand differs from the others other than simply play preference and what effects that has in terms of play.

I hope my above example involving the two vampire campaigns does just that.  If it does not, please ask further.

If, on the other hand, you are saying that sense of discovery, pattern recognition, and personal empowerment are completely impossible for games that utilize conscious director stance on part of the group- then no, you have still to produce solid examples counteracting several accounts to the contrary.

I am claiming specifically that technical discovery is impossible in such situations, not that sense of discovery is impossible, as you yourself point out at the beginning of this post.  I am stating that pattern recognition of the sort which occurred in the first vampire game and of the sort which occurs in character creation when a player is aiming for a character who is already embedded in the setting or already embodies the premise before even the first moment of play, that this pattern recognition is impossible in such situations.  I am arguing that personal empowerment which comes from those specific phenomena of discovery (not sense of discovery) and pattern recognition of the sort described is dependent upon those phenomena and therefore logically is impossible without them.

That is what I have been claiming all along, but apparently there has been miscommunication.  While I love and study mythology, and while I still have difficulty conceiving how my quotes from Tolkien et al. (and not Levi-Strauss, for example) did not clarify the mythology perspective from which I wrote, it seems that while I have  been away from The Forge the term "myth" has accrued baggage and perhaps even become springloaded, so I regret bringing it in until after the initial theory had been successfully communicated.

Doctor Xero

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Doc,

A question.

You wrote:

"For the record, I have focused on the importance of framing via an interaction with continuity because a large proportion of the threads I have encountered indicate that many Forge posters are already quite familiar with framing via an independence from continuity. I have run both healthy games with a strong pre-existing continuity and healthy games with a malleable continuity. Although I prefer to play characters who are embedded within the game setting, I have also occasionally played characters who could be easily transferred from one campaign to another."

Now I may be misreading this.  Or it may be a matter of different ideas being packed into a single paragraph... So I want to check.

Are you saying that in the threads you've read on the Forge, many posters are running games where characters could easily be transferred from one campaign to another?

Thanks,

Christopher

[Bankuei]

Hi Doc,

Seems like a big ballyhoo of miscommunication for both of us.  I apologize for taking such a harsh stance- I was completely misreading what you were saying.  I concur that for players(also counting GMs) who enjoy having a prescripted mystery or imaginary elements to be uncovered that it is contingent upon those things already existing, and I recognize that there is a type of enjoyment to be had from that.

I am claiming specifically that technical discovery is impossible in such situations, not that sense of discovery is impossible, as you yourself point out at the beginning of this post. I am stating that pattern recognition of the sort which occurred in the first vampire game and of the sort which occurs in character creation when a player is aiming for a character who is already embedded in the setting or already embodies the premise before even the first moment of play, that this pattern recognition is impossible in such situations. I am arguing that personal empowerment which comes from those specific phenomena of discovery (not sense of discovery) and pattern recognition of the sort described is dependent upon those phenomena and therefore logically is impossible without them.

With the misunderstanding cleared up, this is as obvious as stating "People who like chocolate, like chocolate."  Obviously if a major point of play is the uncovering, then anything else won't be as satisfactory(in that regard).  Did you have something further to elaborate on, or did you happen to see confusion about that somewhere?

Regarding the idea that elements ought to fit together in a way that the group enjoys- I agree.  The only argument I have made in regards to that is that creating the elements can be part of play itself, and do not necessarily need to be done before play.  The reason I've pointed to Universalis so much is that it is one of the clearest examples of that.  You begin with nothing, not even a genre, setting, or anything, and as part of play construct that.  The group as a whole works together(or against each other) in order to produce the elements that fit together(according to the group's asthetic and preferences).

Chris

[M. J. Young]

A person can not discover something that does not already exist.  To claim otherwise is logically absurd.  To discover something is not the same as to invent or create....

A person can not recognize a pattern if there is no data within which to find said pattern.  To claim otherwise is logically absurd....

That specific personal empowerment which comes from discovery and/or pattern recognition is not possible in situations which lack both anything to discover and any patterns to recognize.  Now you have, as plainly as I can put it, the chain of reasoning through which I dispute your claims.

If you can explain to me how you avoid the above logical absurdities, perhaps I will know how to translate more effectively into terms you would be more comfortable with.

Sometimes when my brain seems to be skipping tracks and I need a mental break, I'll open a paint program on my computer and start doodling on the screen.

I am not a visual artist, and have only minimal training in the field, so I'm really just dabbing at the electronic canvas. I usually use tools like line makers, boxes, circles, and fill. I'll pick a place to start, and plop an object there--not quite randomly selected, but chosen according to mood.

At this point, there is the beginning of a pattern. There's not enough to know anything about it. But I'll add another object, and another--and by the time I've got three or four objects on the board, the image starts to have a sense of balance and proportion, one which is at this point imperfect. I have discovered a pattern emerging from the elements I have placed. I proceed to place the next element in accord with the pattern I have perceived. As I do, this reveals to me more of the pattern, as I can now see other points on the canvas which require attention to bring the pattern out more fully.

I am creating the pattern, but I am also discovering it. It exists, but in an incomplete form. As I complete it, I discover more of it.

I don't see the logical absurdity in this. As we create elements in our game worlds, they enhance the existing pattern. As they enhance that pattern, we perceive the enhancements and so discover new facets in what we have done, aspects we did not intend which nevertheless spring from our creation. That is, beginning with a few random elements, people perceive a partial pattern, discovering what is there; we then add to it something we believe fits the pattern, and in so doing we enhance the pattern and discover more of it, which enables us to build further and discover more. We create the data, and we discover unexpected patterns within the data.

Last week's Game Ideas Unlimited article posed an idea for a game that sprang from some discussions here. The idea was to approach science fiction not as a futuristic setting but as an exploration of the impact of technology on the world. At the beginning, players create characters in a modern world, or a world close enough to modern that everyone present can have a clear conception of what that world is like. Then one select technological advance is introduced, and characters begin deciding how this impacts their lives, what they do with it, what other people do with it that affects them. Another advance is introduced, and play continues to examine this new technology, also considering how it interacts with the old one. One by one new technologies are introduced which change the world; players explore the impact of those changes.

In this game, patterns are created by the input of the players; they are also discovered by the observations of the players. Someone might suddenly realize that the combination of laptop computer components, microprojection systems, voice recognition software and cellular telephones means that they can construct a computer that is part of their clothing and so be online every waking hour. That is the discovery of a pattern that emerged from the data; it is also a creation by the player who made the discovery. The potential for that device was there, in the data; the discovery of the pattern came from connecting the dots--like looking at a Rorshach drawing and seeing something of interest, except that in this case the elements perceived really did form a pattern quite unexpectedly.

However, I have also encountered a large number of players whose enjoyment of a game hinges upon their believing that both sense and the actuality are one and the same in a particular game.

I don't think anyone is challenging whether such players exist. I, too, have known such players. What is being challenged is whether the three elements you have linked are necessarily linked.

Consider this. Many narrativist games use strong elements of director stance. Vincent suggests, and rightly so, that with a well-constructed character who fits into a premise-rich world you could play a narrativist game completely in actor stance. Similarly, in Applied Theory, I suggested that you could play a simulationist game in heavy director stance--it's just not commonly done for very evident reasons, and a lot of people who do play as simulationists wouldn't like it. Thus it's clear that linking director stance to narrativism and actor stance to simulationism is a correct generalization, but incorrect as a rule.

Similarly, it seems fairly evident that the question of whether the continuity/fidelity spectrum, the division of credibilty spectrum, and the myth versus improvisation spectrum are in any way linked is the foundation of the argument. You seem to be saying that because there are players who want to be at one specific end on all three of these spectra, the spectra must be linked. Others are merely saying that there are players who want to be at one end on some of these and the other end on others, which sufficiently demonstrates that the three are not linked--it only happens that for a specific type of play they require a specific setting, which is virtually tautologous: to play this way, you have to play this way.

I hope this is helpful.

--M. J. Young

[Marco]

I think the terms  "sense of discovery" vs. "discovering" may be a bit misleading since the primary element of roleplaying is seen (here) as exploration. In other words, all roleplaying (exploration) must (in the lexicon) lead to some sense of discovery.

In this thread the concept of dice being used to "objectify" 'the challenge' came up.

The idea, if I understood it (it was advanced by Gareth) was that dice served to give the players (and GM) a sense of a reality that existed beyond their control.

Now, I realize this only applied in the thread to 'challenge' but I think that this concept applies across all interactions of a person (GM or player) and with SIS.

I think this is a more valuable way to look at player's relations to SIS than "discovery" or even "sense of discovery."

The mystery game is a perfect example of this. I have a book called The Dollhouse Murders which is a text, with pictures, of training scenarios used for forensic pathologists. In each picture (in the class they are dioramas) there is a crime scene with a murdered doll. Although I have not gotten through it yet, I believe that as a reader and observer, I can solve these murders or reach logical conclusions about 'what happened' in the imaginary crime.

In other words, there are patterns of information (visual and textual clues) and a imaginary reality behind them.

If the patterns match to the  later-disclosed (seemingly reasonable) reality, we say the game is consistent or plausible.

If we do not create the patterns then (as we do not, when dealing with such things in reality) then it becomes more "objectified" (to borrow the term).

How one relates to this says a lot though.

Let's say I examine the evidence and come up with a conclusion. It does not match the author's but is still (somehow) consistent with the clues.

Joe: "That's absurd. Nothing really happened. It's all an imaginary construction."
Fred: "Something specific happened. Your answer, although logical, is not correct."
Jones: "Well, if it matches the clues then it's right. It doesn't matter that some author guy had a different idea."

In 'reality' only Fred is right. In an RPG, any of them may be right--but how we react to the game and to patterns of information in the game will say a lot about how we play.

I think rather than 'discovery' this has to do with 'immersion' or, if you don't like the term immersion, with my relation to the SIS as a real space.

Yes, I need a GM moderator, but if I'm making up who the murderer is and I 'can't be wrong about my conclusions unless we all decide I'm wrong' then I'll relate to it far less as an "objective reality" than as a book I'm writing.

I think there is a tendency to conflate one of these views with some kind of GM Force or Participationism (although I don't know if that's what happened here).

-Marco

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Marco,

I have returned, to pull back the curtain and reveal my big answer to your question! (Swish!)

I am not conflating what you're talking about, and what Doc's talking about, with Participationsim.  I'm sorry if I gave that impression.

If we had continue this matter on another thread, I would have said that your issue (and one of the MANY issues Doc has brought up) can be summed up with Bankuei's word: "uncovering."

I think "uncovering" is perfect here.

I think that this notion of unocovering, however, whether it be a murder mystery, a metaphysical issue, or whatever, is easily independent of so many other factors that I cannot for the life of me see how much else got tied to it.

That's it, dude. No big ta' do.  I refered to a specif Participationism game covered other aspects of Doc's requests: games where the PCs fit the environment; games where the Players didn't muck about with the game world very much at all.

This aspect of "uncovering" -- while part of the thread since the murder mystery example -- has not been what the whole of the thread has been about.  For example, Doc referenced the Torg Cards early on.  Well, none of those Cards would (or could) influence either a Murder Case or the underlying Metaphysics the GM had put on the world.

As Bunkuei has just pointed out, this specific matter -- the idea that there's something concrete to be uncovered simply isn't that big a deal.  Whether you're playing Sorcerer, Riddle of Steel, The Pool, HeroQuest  and a host of other games that allow (if not demand) plenty of player empowerment, the GM can create a murder mystery or underlying metaphysics that the players can uncover without any of them bumping it iota from the place where the GM placed it.

Other games would not allow this, for a variety of reasons.  Universalis, for examples, allows the players to bid on the nature of reality.  And even if "rules" are established for the murder or reality, there's nothing for the players to uncover.

In the case of HeroQuest with Glorantha, the setting itself demands the metaphysics is in flux.  It is a war to determine the the metaphysics of the place.  So the players can determine the metaphysics.  That's why the group would choose to play the Hero Wars. (However, the GM could still, if he wished, impose a meta-metaphysics the their players either pursue or don't.  (This would be to the group's tasted.))

Significanly, again, even in Glorantha, a murder mytery would be a murder mystery would be a murder mystery -- if the GM set it up as such.  The rules simply would not allow the players to "make up" the solution, and if the group simply didn't use techniques that allowed the players to make up the solution, then it wouldn't happen that way.

And people -- on these boards, in the actual post threads, play in the aforementioned ways -- all the time.  And I'm sure Doc plays this way.

The difference is where one sets the dials on play to make it work.

But all these things -- murder mysteries, metaphysical mysteries, character design connected to setting, directorial and authorial stances in play, prepared narratives ahead of time, loose preperation of backstory ahead of time, "patterns" of "mythic" stories -- are all different dials that Doc says need to be linked.

I say no. They don't need to be linked.  They do need to be linked enough to satisfy the Creative Agenda of the group (as Doc has done to satisfy his group).  But that is a completely different matter.

That's why, Marco, I reffered to a Partitcipationism game.  Because I was discussing Doc's strong preference for continuity that couldn't be broken by players.  I was saying great.  I hadn't even touched on "uncovering". But let's do that now.

"Myst"-like, a GM could run a group of players through an astounding series of adventures and, in the offering of images, encounters and idea, let them uncover the world's underlying metaphysics.

But the GM could do the same thing wihtout any metaphysical agenda.

In another case, the uncovering of a game world's metaphyisics could be offered up with the players engaged in full Narratvist play, tossing in all sorts of details via author and director stance -- that "bumped into" the world's concrete metaphysics -- and these would be clues, too.

But its just as important that a group of cosmic misfit PCs (as silly as the players could concieve them -- the ninja, the dragon, the space cowboy) could still uncover a mystery carefully laid out by the GM. The fact that the PCs had no business being together would probably blow a metaphysical mystery, but not a murder mystery.  The murder mystery would go off without a hitch -- though aethestic sensibilities would probably suffer.

In other words, you can get freakish with some aspects of the continuit dial, and still have a honet to god murder mystery to solve.  (Could Bugs Bunny solver an actual murder myster, zipping off screen to change costumes, with Basil Rathbone showing up in a one second cameo for a laugh?  Yes.)

As M.J. just pointed out, and others have pointed out before, there a ton of independent issues that Doc has joined at the hips.  

I'm not saying he shouldn't do this.  He's found his dials for a type of play he enjoys.  That's a good thing.  But there's nothing inherently connected about them.  The balance of the dials he's found works for him.  But it's not the only way to set the dials.

When he says he's read all these threads around here where everyone apparently has a preference for ignoring "continuity" and inherently precluding any sense of "discovery" I am boggled. (If that's what he means.  I look look forward to his anwer to my question in my last post.).

Whether or not other people have said the GM Force is required to build a solid murder mystery, Marco, I am not one of those people.  I am, in fact, arguing something quite the opposite: that there a gazillion ways to set all this stuff up.

What's at stake is not the techniques and whether or not they'll work together.  What's at stake is the sensibilities and tastes of the players: they'll pull together the pieces that satisify them.  It may not be what another group needs or wants, but to that group it works just right.  

The strange part is only when someone says, "This is the only way to provide a game with X is to do A, B, and C." when a bunch of people reply, "Actually, we can get X by doing C, D, and E."  Then the first person says, "No, you're not doing X. You're doing Y. I've read your posts, you're doing Y."

Best,

Christopher

[Doctor Xero]

With the misunderstanding cleared up, this is as obvious as stating "People who like chocolate, like chocolate."  Obviously if a major point of play is the uncovering, then anything else won't be as satisfactory(in that regard).  Did you have something further to elaborate on, or did you happen to see confusion about that somewhere?

To be honest, many of the posts to this thread feel like one long exercise in intentional confusion about it.

See the rest of this particular post for my elaborations.

the idea that there's something concrete to be uncovered simply isn't that big a deal.

For some people, it is.

This concept is necessary if for no other reason than to point out what I would have hoped would be obvious -- that we should not simply restrict ourselves to the interests of one type of gamer and discount or refuse to recognize the interests of other types.

The concept is necessary if for no other reason than the need to remember that, for some players, the notion that there's something to be uncovered is a big deal!

if I'm making up who the murderer is and I 'can't be wrong about my conclusions unless we all decide I'm wrong' then I'll relate to it far less as an "objective reality" than as a book I'm writing.

EXACTLY!

My thoughts about frameworks have been an effort to put forth a vocabulary which enables us to take that (and the other issues I've brought up apropos character creation et al.) into account when designing a game.

Chris, Marco, a game aimed towards players who prefer a strong framework of interaction with the continuity is going to need a large section focusing specifically on either a) a pre-established setting or premise or b) involved advice on how the game master or group consensus can develop such a continuity, usually ahead of time so that said framework can be interacted with even as part of character creation.

A game aimed towards players who prefer a strong framework of independence from the continuity is going to need instead a large section focusing specifically on either a) how to adjudicate incorporating changes into the continuity as the game moves onward (such as bidding rules) or b) rigorous explanation of how to build characters which can be moved into any campaign.

Anyone who has difficult imagining b needs to take a look at a little game called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  Following official rules, I can build a character on my own and fit that character into any other official game I encounter, at conventions or at the neighborhood game shop or wherever, with not one change to said character -- all because that character has not been embedded in a specific continuity.

Of course, just as many games are aimed at both simulationists and narrativists or even those plus gamist, many games are aimed at both frameworks.

But it's not the only way to set the dials.

No, but it is one way, and that way needs to be recognized.

If there is further confusion, I suggest you read again the following and address your confusion based upon that.

As far as pattern recognition goes- you have already pointed out that many things people do reference and echo pre-existing archtypes and patterns.
---snip!--
So what is the difference between a predetermined set of elements to create a pattern and one created through play?  As far as recognizing a pattern- there is none.

Again, I concur, but . . . (I hope this pattern is not bothering you. *wry half-grin*)

In terms of game play, well, it depends upon whether the player wants to tease out or puzzle out the theme or underlying patterns of the campaign because, well, knowledge is power.  If I understand how something works, I am empowered by that understanding.  If I understand it and another player does not (or his or her character does not), I have a level of empowerment he/she does not, which I might either use to my advantage (a classical gamist response) or might use through my character's mentoring his/her character (more of a simulationist response) or either (narrativist?  I'm unsure).

In the writings of the scholars of mythology and the fantastical whom I had quoted at the beginning of this thread, one point made was the idea that understanding a pattern empowers -- knowledge is power.  (Of the multilayered definings of myth, that is the layer to which I referred, as I imagine my choice of quotes had made clear.)  Identifying this pattern for material power has been a recurrent thread in writings on magic and alchemy.

I will provide you two gaming examples.  I recall being in a game in which the players were vampire hunters interested in spell-casting (not a World of Darkness campaign, so there were no libraries of gaming books and supplements for us).  One of the players played an atheist who considered vampirism a physical condition ; one played a nontheist metaphysicist who saw vampirism as magical not spiritual ; one played a religious Christian who saw vampirism as a spiritual blight ; another played a religious Christian who saw vampirism as demonic possession of a corpse ; etc.  Our characters were reluctantly cooperating, not a team, so there was an element of competitive discovery among characters despite player cooperation.  In this game, the key to empowerment over the vampires was the discovery of the metaphysics under which they functioned -- in doing so, recognizing the mythic or metaphysic pattern of the game world.  After all, if your character has proof positive that the vampire has met Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ has power specifically as the Messiah etc., you through your character have recognized that this campaign operates under a Christian metaphysics, which will empower your character in a way denied to characters who try to utilize Babylonian metaphysics in this Christian campaign setting.

Later on, we played under a different game master.  She loved the basic motif of vampires, but she really had no investment one way or the other in the metaphysics underlying them.  If we had decided simply to kill off the vampires with fire and stakes, it wouldn't have mattered.  However, after playing under the first game master, we were primed to look for an underlying metaphysical pattern to empower us against those vampires (and in all subsequent magic-working in this campaign).  So she admitted to us that she had no idea what the metaphysics was, and whatever metaphysics we could convince her (or the group), that would turn out to be the correct one.  Now we went from puzzler mindset to persuader mindset!  It was great fun, but it was still a quite different experience from the earlier vampire game, and while the first had rewarded players who were skilled with investigation and logic games, this second one rewarded players who were skilled with argument and persuasion.

I label these differences as frameworks primarily because it seemed the least loaded term I could find (so many good terms already have specific meanings on The Forge!).

The other difference comes from my experiences, and the experiences related to me by others, of character creation.

Sometimes game masters will ask each player to build a character which fits in particularly well with the theme being explored (narrativist) or the setting (simulationist).  They want players to make sure their characters are constructed to interact with or inflect those premises or settings.

Sometimes game masters will ask each player to build a character which is not dependent upon any particular setting (this often means we will be playing duck-out-of-water or strangers-in-a-strange-land campaigns) and/or which is not dependent upon any particular theme.

If I want to build a character which fits in particularly well with the theme or setting, I need that theme or setting to already be there.  And, like many of Allston's gamer types, I often enjoy building characters who fit in well.  I've met many others who feel the same.

If I want to build a character who fits in anywhere, I don't need to know the theme nor setting.  This can also be fun, although for me it's not as much fun.  In such cases, once the campaign is being played out, I will go out of my way to create relationships between my character and other PCs and NPCs so that I still feel as though my character is connected into this campaign.

Doctor Xero

[Christopher Kubasik]

Okey-dokey.

[Doctor Xero]

Now that the unfortunate early miscommunications have been solved, let's try this again.

This theory will help game designers, campaign designers, and scenario designers remember the variety of player interests and desires.

I.
SOME REASON TO GIVE A DAMN ABOUT MYTH

Many researchers argue that myth and folklore help individuals develop a vital, necessary existential ability -- the ability to recognize underlying patterns.  This pattern recognition ability is the basis of science, scholarship, and appreciation of the Arts.  For example, empirical science is grounded in recognition of patterns of frequency, the scientific method in recognition of patterns of cause-and-effect ; I do not think it is a coincidence that people with little background in myth (of some shade!) often demonstrate a poor grasp of the recognition of underlying causal patterns (although over-awareness is just as bad, wringing superstition from happenstance).  The modern scientific equivalents of the mythic Great Story might be Bohm's theory of implicate order and/or the morphogenic field theory.

INTERLUDE:
WORKING DEFINITIONS OF MYTH AND OF
ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE STORYTELLING
TRADITIONS THAT FIRST INSPIRED RPGS

We live in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. To survive in it, we need think that somehow, it all means something. Where does that meaning come from?  That's the myth.

Legends and myth are largely made of truth, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be perceived in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Stories have a habit of getting tied in knots, and then unfolding.  First they entangle their protagonists, whose actions sometimes seem dictated by the needs of the story in which they have become engaged; then the light dawns, and the labyrinth becomes a path. . . . the literatures of the Fantastic positively glory in the fact that they present and embody Story-shaped worlds. . . .
For Aristotle, Recognition marks a fundamental shift in the process of a story from increasing ignorance to knowledge. . . . It is at this moment of Recognition that the inherent Story at the heart of most fully fantasy texts is most visible . . . most revelatory.  At this moment in "the structurally complete fantasy tale" (Brian Attebery's phrase) protagonists begin to understand what has been happening to them (he may have been an Ugly Duckling awaiting the moment he becomes king; she may have been re-enacting a Creation Myth in order that the Land be reborn; they may discover what Archetype serves as an underlier figure and defines their fate; etc.).  They understand, in other words, that they are in a Story; that, properly recognized (which is to say properly told), their lives have the coherence and significance of Story ; that, in short, the story has been telling them.

In other words : myth as inflected through literatures of the fantastic.

HOW THIS FUNCTION RELATES TO A TALE'S
PROTAGONIST

All of the above depends upon a sense of identification with the protagonist, usually a hero.

In other words, the protagonist becomes a metaphor for the audience, and his or her experiences become metaphors through which the audience can better understand their own experiences.

Use of these recognized metaphors enriches the personal lives of the savvy audience members.  This is one of the bases for the popularity in television of Star Trek and Babylon 5, in film of Star Wars, and in literature of The Lord of the Rings
(cf. Henry Jenkins' seminal work, Textual Poachers for more details).

fans cease to be simply an audience for popular texts ; instead they become active participants in the construction and accumulation of textual meanings.

All of the above leads to one conclusion:
one of the (several) primary functions of myth and fantastical literature involves the discovery and then recognition of the primal Story pattern(s) which underlies all of that reality.  It is not the manufacture of Story but the recognition of Story and, with that Recognition, the empowerment within a person's world when Story becomes inflected through a person.

HOW ALL THIS RELATES TO GAMING

If a game designer or game master wants to provide players with that network of experiences of discovery, recognition, and empowerment, he or she must create a game system in which there is a prior pre-existing pattern to be found.  Players can not discover a pattern if that pattern is one which they have just spontaneously cast onto the gaming reality.

If the game designer or game master has no interest in providing players with that specific network of experiences, he or she may not need to take prior pre-existing patterns into consideration when creating his or her game system.

However, remembering this aspect of the possible ingredient of mythic sensibility helps game designers, campaign designers, and scenario designers remember the variety of player interests and desires.

II.
MYSTERY NOT MYTHOLOGY --
THE PLEASURE OF PUZZLE-SOLVING

Despite linked lineages, mystery has come to refer not to the mystical experience of the old mystery religions but instead to the logical pleasure of puzzle solving.

Such puzzle solving is a pleasure given expression in reading a detective novel or viewing a detective film or in reading SF novels or viewing certain types of SF films.  (Not all detective or SF tales give the necessary clues for solving the puzzle, of course.)  In many horror tales, the key to defeating the creature involves puzzling out its weaknesses or modus operandi from the clues in its past behaviors.

Again, as with the fantastical fiction descended from myth, a major component of puzzle solving and mystery is the recognition of patterns.  Along with the recognition is the experience of discovery.  Such puzzles can sharpen the individual's mind, which empowers albeit in a different fashion than occurs with mythic storytelling.

I have also encountered a large number of players whose enjoyment of a game hinges upon their believing that both sense and the actuality are one and the same in a particular game.  I have known many game masters who have heard intelligent, healthy roleplayers tell them, "I don't want to play in your mystery scenario unless there really is a solution already, unless there really will be clues, and unless there really is a chance that no one will be able to solve the mystery."  I have encountered this among both brilliant roleplayers and dysfunctional players, and I have encountered it frequently in conventions across the country, so I do not consider these players to be unusual but rather players whose preferences deserve to be taken into account.

It makes sense, if you think about it.  Puzzling out a problem uses different abilities than does creative invention.  A player who wants the fun of puzzling something out will be disappointed if he doesn't get that.

In terms of game play, well, it depends upon whether the player wants to tease out or puzzle out the theme or underlying patterns of the campaign because, well, knowledge is power.  If I understand how something works, I am empowered by that understanding.  If I understand it and another player does not (or his or her character does not), I have a level of empowerment he/she does not, which I might either use to my advantage (a classical gamist response) or might use through my character's mentoring his/her character (more of a simulationist response) or either (narrativist?  I'm unsure).

HOW ALL THIS RELATES TO GAMING

If a game designer wants to provide players with that network of experiences of discovery, recognition, and empowerment found in puzzle solving and mystery, he or she must create a game system in which there can be a prior pre-existing pattern to be found.  Players can not discover a pattern if that pattern is one which they have just spontaneously cast onto the gaming reality.

If the game designer has no interest in providing players with that specific network of experiences, he or she may not need to take prior pre-existing patterns into consideration when creating his or her game system.  For example, some players are more interested in a sense of discovery than discovery.

Despite the ability of game masters to use illusion and suspension of disbelief to make a sense of discovery seem the same as discovery, not every player or game master wants such illusionism, so it helps to remember the variety of player interests and desires.

III.
CHARACTER CREATION TASTES

The player who likes to build a character that starts out intermeshed with the campaign continuity is the player who wants to operate from a framework of interaction with continuity.  He or she wants the game master or the collective group to pre-construct a continuity or framework within which the player might ground his or her character.

These are the players who ask the game master whether there will be elves in the AD-&-D-ish campaign or to specify how the premise specifically should be inflected through their characters or to describe the operating definition of superheroes for the campaign or to give the names of the established clans to which their characters might be allied.  These are the players who love the way Legend of the Five Rings sets up a framing continuity which tells them, before the first jot of character creation, what the clans are and how they interrelate and what opportunities each clan provides -- a framing within which they can construct their characters as integral parts of the continuity within which they will be playing.

The player who likes to build a character but who has very little interest in knowing or fitting into campaign continuity is the player who operates from a framework of independence of continuity.  He or she doesn't care what sort of world the game master or the collective group pre-construct so long as it doesn't get in the way of playing his or her character.  Anything which gets in the way of his or her character gets in the way of his or her fun, so he or she wants the authority to remove it immediately, within reason.

If said player is dysfunctional, he or she will demand this authority regardless of how such changes ruin the game for other players.  If said player is a decent enough person, he or she will negotiate with game master and/or other players when changes involve more than him or her -- but this negotiation is done out of courtesy, not out of any interest in fidelity to or interaction with the continuity!

Characters built by players who prefer to frame their characters independently of any continuity can be moved easily from campaign to campaign with little change if any to the character.  Since their characters are truly uninvolved in and uninvested in their continuities, they are truly mobile, which gives them character strength but not story strength.
Characters built by players who prefer to frame their characters interactively within a specific continuity can seldom move those characters into any other campaign without radical change, cutting away connections with the original campaign continuity and creating new ones for the next continuity.  Since their characters are truly part of their continuities, they have the power to truly be a part of stories which change those worlds, but they work poorly elsewhere ; they have story strength  but not character strength.

IV.
TERMINOLOGY: FRAMEWORKS

Whether or not a player is interested in this might be addressed by way of the terminology of frameworks.

Frameworks refer to a player's desired degree of interaction with and independence from a given campaign's or game's initial continuity.

Apropos this matter, a player's interests for a specific game can be pinpointed on a gamut running from extreme interaction with the continuity to extreme indpendence from it.

In the matter of mythic sensibility as defined in section I, the interests run the gamut from a high level of interaction with the continuity, so that there is a mystical reality there all along to be discovered, to a high level of independence from the continuity, in which there is no grand underlying pattern to find, no fantastical equivalent to Bohm's theory of implicate order.  Admittedly, with a high level of independence, the particular discovery of mythic Story becomes impossible, but not everyone is interested in that.

In the matter of the mystery genre, the interests run the gamut from a high level of interaction with the continuity, so that there is a pre-existing puzzle against which players through their characters can test themselves nad solve or fail to solve, to a high level of independence from the continuity, in which there is no puzzle for the players to uncover although players may well enjoy other aspects of the mystery genre or even enjoy creating their own solutions impromptu as the game progresses.

In the matter of characters, the interests run the gamut from a high level of interaction, in which the character is so embedded within the game setting or so inflects the game's premise that the character is useless in any other game  but that one, to a high level of independence from the continuity, in which the character can be constructed in almost complete ignorance of the game's setting or premise.

The recognition of Frameworks of Interaction with continuity and Frameworks of Independence from continuity can help us design our games with a greater sense of the variety of player interests and desires.

V.
SPECIFIC GAMING EXAMPLES FOR CLARITY

I will provide you two gaming examples.  I recall being in a game in which the players were vampire hunters interested in spell-casting (not a World of Darkness campaign, so there were no libraries of gaming books and supplements for us).  One of the players played an atheist who considered vampirism a physical condition ; one played a nontheist metaphysicist who saw vampirism as magical not spiritual ; one played a religious Christian who saw vampirism as a spiritual blight ; another played a religious Christian who saw vampirism as demonic possession of a corpse ; etc.  Our characters were reluctantly cooperating, not a team, so there was an element of competitive discovery among characters despite player cooperation.  In this game, the key to empowerment over the vampires was the discovery of the metaphysics under which they functioned -- in doing so, recognizing the mythic or metaphysic pattern of the game world.  After all, if your character has proof positive that the vampire has met Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ has power specifically as the Messiah etc., you through your character have recognized that this campaign operates under a Christian metaphysics, which will empower your character in a way denied to characters who try to utilize Babylonian metaphysics in this Christian campaign setting.

Later on, we played under a different game master.  She loved the basic motif of vampires, but she really had no investment one way or the other in the metaphysics underlying them.  If we had decided simply to kill off the vampires with fire and stakes, it wouldn't have mattered.  However, after playing under the first game master, we were primed to look for an underlying metaphysical pattern to empower us against those vampires (and in all subsequent magic-working in this campaign).  So she admitted to us that she had no idea what the metaphysics was, and whatever metaphysics we could convince her (or the group), that would turn out to be the correct one.  Now we went from puzzler mindset to persuader mindset!  It was great fun, but it was still a quite different experience from the earlier vampire game, and while the first had rewarded players who were skilled with investigation and logic games, this second one rewarded players who were skilled with argument and persuasion.

I label these differences as frameworks primarily because it seemed the least loaded term I could find (so many good terms already have specific meanings on The Forge!).

The other difference comes from my experiences, and the experiences related to me by others, of character creation.

Sometimes game masters will ask each player to build a character which fits in particularly well with the theme being explored (narrativist) or the setting (simulationist).  They want players to make sure their characters are constructed to interact with or inflect those premises or settings.

Sometimes game masters will ask each player to build a character which is not dependent upon any particular setting (this often means we will be playing duck-out-of-water or strangers-in-a-strange-land campaigns) and/or which is not dependent upon any particular theme.

If I want to build a character which fits in particularly well with the theme or setting, I need that theme or setting to already be there.  And, like many of Allston's gamer types, I often enjoy building characters who fit in well.  I've met many others who feel the same.

If I want to build a character who fits in anywhere, I don't need to know the theme nor setting.  This can also be fun, although for me it's not as much fun.  In such cases, once the campaign is being played out, I will go out of my way to create relationships between my character and other PCs and NPCs so that I still feel as though my character is connected into this campaign.

I have tried to integrate some of the insights given to me by the discussion in this thread.  I hope this is now all clearer!

[Doctor Xero]

The question that arises here is this: if Sim wants the Dream, and wants it intact and complete and lovely, then why are Sim players willing apparently to break from the Dream in order to emphasize seemingly trivial details about the Dream? Practically speaking, wouldn't it be preferable to gloss over the difficulty in order to stick to the Dream, which presumably is what is really wanted anyway?

This entails, assuming we're agreed here that such Sim players are not totally incoherent and insane, that such details cannot be glossed over.  There is a quality to them which actively damages the Dream.  Therefore if they are allowed to stand, as for example if the GM says, "Yeah, doesn't matter, anyway he blows a hole in the wall, what are you doing?" and the group doesn't agree that this detail doesn't matter, you have damage to the Dream that such players find unacceptable.
---snip!--
If the Dream were seamless, there would never be any need to break from Situation-Focused play, because the answer to every potential question of fact, however picayune, would already be known to all the players as it is in fact known to the characters.  In such an extreme ideal, there would also be a near-total adequation of player to character, which would probably manifest as extreme Turku-style immersion.

The trick is, such perfection (which is unrealizable) has a number of different factors.  Any game group must decide, usually largely unconsciously, which factors to prioritize.  Some groups prioritize immersion, and gloss over slippage elsewhere in order to maintain this.  A group like that Ron describes does not do this; they prioritize the depth and facticity of the Dream.  Thus when a slippage occurs in facticity, it requires external handling.  Similarly, an immersion-oriented group would presumably consider techniques to assist immersion when it fails, such as enforcing a rule that players must speak in-character and so on.
---snip!--
I'm pretty sure that this is part of what Dr. Xero describes in his games: the aesthetic of the game is that the players do not construct the Dream, but discover a story or pattern or whatever within it, already present and waiting for them.

Now because we have accepted this in advance (which you notice is not typical of Nar or Gam aesthetics), any construction is undesirable.  When we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true.  For example, we the players may not know whether phazer-fire induces current sufficient to wipe a memory disk, but the world already does know this.  It's built-in, a fact of nature.  When we debate the point, we're not inventing something new but figuring out how it always already worked.  The players did not know the answer, but it was already determined.
---snip!--
Provided, then, that your dominant aesthetic agenda is to reinforce the Dream, which more properly would be to bolster the claim that the Dream was and is and always will be seamless and complete, the handling of fine detail not only isn't CA-irrelevant but is in fact powerfully constitutive of CA.
---snip!--
All of which also goes some way toward explaining why Sim often seems incoherent and weird to non-Sim-committed players.  It seems as though Sim players keep stepping outside of exactly what they think they want, i.e. the Dream, in order to focus on detail that really doesn't matter very much.  Furthermore, they keep doing this even when there does not seem to be a very strong reason to do so, i.e. when the details seem trivial.  My proposal here implies that such players may be doing this because they want CA-meaningful activity, which is difficult to effect without an apparent break from the Dream.  From their point of view, such activity is not a break from the Dream, only a break from the ideal perfection of interaction with the Dream, which isn't the same thing.  By reinforcing the Dream by these means, they help constitute for themselves the certainty and perfection of that Dream.

This is one of the most accurate descriptions of Sim play I have have encountered anywhere!

There is only one thing you miss:
simulationism includes the possibility of construction within it.
However, the tools, resources, and raw materials must all be found within the Dream.  In other words, simulationist creation is like formal haiku -- the formal haiku pattern pre-exists the poet, but the poem he or she creates is still original even though it utilizes a pre-existing pattern.

A haiku poet can not write within the haiku tradition if there is no haiku tradition which pre-dates him or her, and a simulationist player can not construct within the simulation if there is no Dream which "pre-dates" him or her.

So simulationist construction and creation takes place with a greater consciousness of being within rather than outside the Dream or shared simulationist imaginary space.

And yes, you understand the point I have been trying to make with my terms Framework of Interaction and Frameworks of Independence -- and its relevance to understanding simulationism.  Thank you for wording it so well!

Doctor Xero
(cross-posted with http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14190)

[clehrich]

Okay, so honest confusion here.  I admit, right up front, that I haven't gone and re-read all of the posts on this thread since you just posted that bit.  I'm sure my memories are confused.

But....

We seem in some sense to have swapped positions.  I'm now mostly talking about a kind of rigid consistency and constancy, and you're now talking about construction and contribution.

I know more or less what I meant, and the ways in which I have and haven't changed my mind.  We can talk about that later if you care.  But it sounds like you haven't changed yours.  So can you explain how this formulation, this stuff about haiku (or bricolage in the other thread) and construction and so on fits into this whole thing about frameworks?

Or have you changed your mind?

Sorry, a bit lost.