[Deceit] Self-Deception as a Design Consideration

[ffilz]

Hmm, is the need for the game to claim to be about story even though it's really Sim or Gam heavily due to the unfortunate mantra of "role playing not roll playing"?

I've been reading Monte Cook's DMing column in Dungeon Magazine and it's interesting reading in the light of the Forge and this thread in particular. I see a lot of self-deception in those articles.

I know I got caught up with this mantra, and burned by it. In my recent recruitment, I have stopped using that mantra, and been upfront about what my games are about (though perhaps I am stretching things by indicating that perhaps there will be some political intrigue - but then I'm not promising - though I also know people can read "I hope" as "I promise").

Frank

[clehrich]

Frank,

Is there anywhere I can read some of this material you cite?  I don't get Dungeon Magazine.  Or can you transcribe a little of the self-deception you see?

My horizons are pretty limited to the Forge these days....

[Lance D. Allen]

This leads to two questions, for me:

What sort of play style is this, that likes the rhetoric of Story yet actually wants something else? To put it differently, what is the something they actually want?

Are there other rhetorical or conceptual points, apart from Story, that might equally have positive self-deceptive effects for particular gaming styles?

From my own experience, I believe I can answer the first; The playstyle that grooves with a story rhetoric yet actually likes the more sim gameplay is precisely that. Simulationist with a side of Narrativist. My play preferences are strongly sim, but I have enjoyed many of the narrativist games I've played.. but some of the enjoyment, in these strongly nar games, is leached by the simulationist in me that wants things to make causal sense, rather than just thematic sense. But I'm the same way when I read a book or watch a movie, too.

Games which have a strong sim mechanic with smoothly integrated narrativist mechanics, like TRoS and Burning Wheel, meet this type of play very well. More strongly Narrativist games, like Sorcerer and DitV are enjoyable, but cause a certain amount of confusion and dissonance.

As for the second question, I cannot think of anything from my own experience, but I can conceive of some. A game might offer "real strategic decision-making!" and yet have the story events be very freeform, or very much controlled by the GM, so the decisions made by the players really don't matter in the long run. Another game might advertise "deep immersion in a fantasy world", but have rules mechanics which are non-intuitive or extremely complicated, requiring the players to frequently surface from their fantasy world to think about numbers.

Those are just a few off the top of my head. I'm sure there are other types of games that lead to self-deception.

[ffilz]

Hmm, so I'm not sure my comment about Monte Cook's articles is supportable. I guess it was an off the cuff response to this thread based on the fact that while he has been covering a lot of game theory, he has missed bits and pieces. For example, I see bits of Sim and Gam, but no real acknowledgement of the existence of Nar.

In his latest article, he does actually highlight one area of self-deception though. The latest article is dividing campaigns between "quest oriented" (i.e. GM scripted - railroading) and player driven ("where do you want to go next"). And then he suggests the combination. At the end of the Player Driven section he says:

Sometimes, though, players don't want to be in the driver's seat - even if they think they do. The players sit around the table and wonder what their characters would do next, secretly (or not so secretly) wishing that some NPC would just show up and tell them what to do. Even the most motivated player can feel this way.

So strike my comment about Monte Cook...

I still wonder how much of the self deception is driven by the "role playing not roll playing" mantra though.

Frank

[M. J. Young]

Marco, I want to thank you for sticking with us here through a lot of arguments about the various agenda. I think your contributions have often assisted me in clarifying my own thoughts.

I want to focus for a moment on the notion of a simulationist game.

First, it's pretty clear that we mean a simulationist-facilitating game, that is, one whose mechanics tend to reinforce simulationist choices and produce simulationist-friendly outcomes.

Second, and this I think gets lost in the shuffle, it must also be recognized that we're talking about a game that facilitates a particular variety of simulationism. We're very clear that gamist-facilitating games can facilitate or impede different styles of gamism. The same is true of narrativist-facilitating games, although we don't see it as much perhaps. It makes perfect sense that some games would support one type of simulationism, but not all types of simulationism.

Third, a game might be engineered to facilitate one specific agendum, or even a specific type of a specific agendum, and yet neither impede nor facilitate a different type of play, even a different agendum. A great deal of narrativist play took place within simulationist designs before narrativist games were developed, and it is entirely likely that some still does.

There are a couple of spots at which simulationist mechanics impede narrativist play to a significant degree.

One of those is in character death. It is extremely rough on narrativist play for the referee to announce, "The hero of the story just got killed by a lucky shot from the villain's henchman." Narrativist games often include mechanics which prevent protagonists from being killed without player approval; simulationist games rarely if ever do. In a narrativist game, when the character says, "It doesn't end this way; I don't die like this," he's probably right. In a simulationist game, he's probably wrong.

You are absolutely right that mechanics that support verisimilitude do not force a game to be simulationist, nor do they necessarily impede narrativist play. However, such a game is more likely to be simulationist, because the mechanics provide the sort of reliability of outcomes on which simulationist play is largely built, and narrativism requires something other than reliability of outcome--it requires injection of premise in a way that impacts play.

This is why the Spiritual Attributes of The Riddle of Steel are recognized as narrativist: suddenly the issues at stake to the players impact the outcomes of game events. Without those, the system is extremely good at reproducing "who would win" in fights. Those introduce into play a notion of "who should win", based on who cares about this enough to win.

So a game that is perfectly simulationist in design can be played narrativist without removing rules if things work right (e.g., the hero doesn't happen to get killed). It can also go narrativist if it is drifted unconsciously--for example, if the referee would never think of having some lowly henchman take a cheap shot at the player character when his back is turned, we've got a narrativist-facilitating decision interfering behind the scenes and we don't even realize it. (Of course, in a solid simulationist game, the henchman would take that shot, and he might just succeed.)

--M. J. Young

[Marco]

MJ,

I think this is a bit off-topic but I very much appreciate the reply. We should take this to another thread (the Nar-with-Sim mechanics).

-Marco

[Wormwood]

Chris,

I agree, faux-Nar Sim does tend towards TITBB. I think that behavior is one of the classic examples of TITBB, but I also think that TITBB has some self-deceptive behavior of it's own.

The way that a group resolves the GM has total control vs. the players have total control is to partition the range of control. However, this can be done using implicit self-censorship, making it so that players and GMs have well placed blind-spots in each other's main arena of control. This sort of self-censorship adjusts over time, which can explain why the dysfunction of TITBB can disipate in long term play. The balance of power hs become defined, but not consciously, as on the face each side is in "complete" control.

In essence TITBB is the realization that something is being left unsaid, that the balance of power cannot be what is on the surface. The real balance comes from trainging yourself to think inside a particular box. When playing it never occurs to you that you could step outside of it. However this network of self-deception is fragile, but self-correcting. A new player, or even an exposure to another type of play, can destabilize what is going one, this may be adjusted to, end the game, or change things to a more overt social dynamic (such as open social contracts). Retaining this self-deceptive conditioning is often a very important trait of keeping a game stable, even when somethings are overt. The unconscious limits of what would not even be considered to be done in play exist in any game, to some extent, past the boundary of what has been said aloud. In essence this is conditioning, which explains why OOC traditions, such as a particular site or food choices encourage stable games. The assumptions of each game are reinforced by these trappings, and recalled upon their re-encountering. As always, it matters not only that we decieve ourselves, but that we decieve ourselves about the right things.

I hope that helps,

  - Mendel S.


Note: This is why in the GNS Deceit thread I was talking about an OOC version of the SIS, which contains the fictions accepted by the group outside of the imagined world. This is reminiscent to frames as discussed by Gary Fine in his Shared Fantasy book.

[Doctor Xero]

A side comment:
This thread makes me a tad uncomfortable.

In some ways, people could be seen as declaring the right to adhere the label of "self-deception" to anyone whose personal experience disputes their own in these matters.  By what authority does one declare whose testimony and experiences can be dismissed as "self-deceptive"?

This becomes even more problematic with those people who hate it when others present their credentials like a gentleman -- now they can deny personal experience as "self-deception" while discounting any other form of credibility beyond personal experience.  In the wrong hands, this enables some people to construct a most efficient means of filtering any and all inconvenient challenges.

I don't intend to derail the thread, but I think this is a concern which should be recognized.

Doctor Xero

[Wormwood]

On the aside:

The study of deception does make people uncomfortable, but that doesn't make it a subject we should ignore. As far as I'm concerned, self-deception is only determined in any definite way by the continued cycle of conceal and reveal by which we live our lives. On the decieved can say that they were, in fact decieved. Also, remember at the beginning that self-deception is a natural human process, it has no necessary moral component.

As far as the impact of this on practical concerns, it is always the understanding of uncertainty. This is the difficulty with asking someone's CA preference, this knowledge may, quite explicitly be unavailable to the person. What you need is reinforcing information. Usually self-revelation comes from this exact procedure of checking for confirming information. Do the consequences match my hypothesis? To add to the complexity in a situation with as much uncertainty as RPGs, it is often easy to support incorrect hypotheses. A study in Kahnman and Tversky (Decisions under Uncertainty: Biases and Heuristics) indicates that a belief in a correlation can be increased faster by a random distribution of confirmation and disconfirmation, than by simply consistent confirmation. For example, my belief in a way to select grapefruit is increased more by failing about as often as it succeeds, rather than by succeeding all the time, as long as I look at each event as a single instance and refine my belief each time. (What happens is that the failures get explained away, and the successes confirm, but since explaining failures is an active cognitive activity it associates the hypothesis more strongly with correctness.) As a result RPGs are a rich soil for self-deception to grow, not to mention the fact that it encourages fiction creation as a skill.

Far from being a bad thing, I would go as far as to suggest that self-deception is responsible for more of the fun of RPGs than openess and total honesty. If it can be such a valuable tool, shouldn't we learn to harness it?

  -Mendel S.

Note: Among other things, this implies that it is at least as important for a design what is said as what is left unsaid. For example, storyteller tells the player that you are in control, but doesn't say anything about how to control the "story".

[John Kim]

In some ways, people could be seen as declaring the right to adhere the label of "self-deception" to anyone whose personal experience disputes their own in these matters.  By what authority does one declare whose testimony and experiences can be dismissed as "self-deceptive"?

I agree about this.  I think it's reasonable to consider self-assessed cases of self-deception -- like Wolfen in this thread.  On the other hand, if party A says that party B is engaged in self-deception -- who do you believe?  There's sometimes a tendency to believe whoever speaks first or whoever's side you happen to hear, but I think that's obviously a mistake.  So I would restrict myself to considering self-assessed cases.  In suggestions of other's self-deception, I think we have to consider both possibilities (i.e. party A's and party B's views).

[Marco]

Far from being a bad thing, I would go as far as to suggest that self-deception is responsible for more of the fun of RPGs than openess and total honesty. If it can be such a valuable tool, shouldn't we learn to harness it?

  -Mendel S.

There is, at best, a very narrow range of deceptions that I think could be considered beneficial. It's possible that John's hypothesis (RPGs as generally played are childish, I am playing an RPG in a special way [deception] therefore I am not childish) is perhaps one of them.

But I don't think Woflen actually used the world childish and, in fact, his conclusion was that he likes Sim play (presumably childish in John's formulation). While I believe there was self-deception there, I don't know what benefit would've been gained by it.

Note: Among other things, this implies that it is at least as important for a design what is said as what is left unsaid. For example, storyteller tells the player that you are in control, but doesn't say anything about how to control the "story".

I very much agree. In order to use terms like 'storytelling' and control in this context I think we have to first establish what they mean. I'm not sure precisely what "being in control of a character means" to many people (it may, for example, mean there will be no unintended consequences to that character's actions ... or that no actions will be prohibited by another player's declaration, or that another player won't tell me how my character feels, etc.)

I discussed some issues of "storytelling" and "control" here:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=14118

-Marco

[clehrich]

Mendel, let us know if we're going off-thread here, but I wanted to comment on self-deception and its exterior assessment.

From my perspective, self-deception is not only potentially beneficial, but is in fact absolutely normal to human social behavior.  For example, people constantly do things that manipulate others in order to get something they want, but they feel strongly that they are not doing this at all.  For another example, people tell themselves that they choose the clothing they wear because that clothing "expresses who they are" or whatever, when in point of fact the whole range of choice and meaning is constructed by a society.  At base, this is the social theory of knowledge: the basic categories of human thought -- space, time, genus, etc. -- appear to us as natural and normal, "just the way things are," when in fact they are fully constructed by social conditioning.

Now the thing is, to challenge such social construction continually is difficult and painful.  It makes you not fit well into the society in which you live, for example, and makes you uncomfortable.  Humans are social animals, after all, and they want to feel in some sense that they are like other people.  They also want to feel special and individual, of course, when in fact they are basically just like everyone else.  So what do we do?

We deceive ourselves.  We construct notions of individual choice that conceal the fact that our choices are largely constructed for us.  We construct a sense of what really is "natural" that allows us not to have to question our society constantly.  All of this in fact helps a society function well, and helps people lead happy, productive lives.

Now all of these things can, of course, become dangerous.  If everyone becomes convinced that it is the order of nature that black people are inhuman beasts, despite all the glaring evidence to the contrary, then people don't feel guilty about enslaving black people.

But most such self-deception is just how society functions.

Consider patriotism and the issue of the flag.  Now people do have these arguments: should flag-burning be illegal?  And there are arguments on both sides.  But what you don't hear a lot of is, "Hell, it's just a piece of cloth, who cares about the flag, flags are stupid."  Some people probably do feel this way, but that's not a significant part of the discussion.  But in fact, that happens to be true: it is just a piece of colored cloth.  What sort of idiot would die for it?  Why do soldiers crawl across battlefields to save them?  Because they're focused on the symbol, on what it represents.  Now they are deceiving themselves if they think that saving the flag saves America.  But because of that deception, they are able to make symbolic, meaningful, and powerful statements about how they feel about America by their actions toward a piece of colored cloth.

In other words, when we say that some gaming involves self-deception, I think there is a serious problem with the statement.  That problem is the word "some."  All gaming involves self-deception, because all social activity is predicated on such self-deception.

As Mendel keeps saying, that's no bad thing.

The question, then, is what deception is at work in a given situation?  And that's a methodological question: how do we identify it?

Consider the Big Model.  In many respects, the initial impetus for the model is precisely a matter of clearing up self-deception.  People think they want to do X, when in fact they don't, and when they try to do X they are unhappy.  Alternatively, people think they want to do X, and are correct about that, but they also think they are actually doing X, when they aren't, and they can't understand why they are unhappy.  The point of the Big Model (at least at first) was to help people un-deceive themselves about what they want and what they are doing.

Mendel is, if I read him right, pointing toward a complication of that model that will have far-reaching consequences.  He is suggesting that now that we have a basic sense of what sorts of choices, desires, and consequences are most likely in gaming, we need to look at the confusions and misrecognitions and misperceptions.

To my mind, that is an essential and long-overdue analytical move.  I am deeply shocked that I didn't think of it quite a while ago, since it's so basic and fundamental to exactly the sorts of things I like to think I know something about.  I am rather disappointed in myself, in other words, because Mendel has done exactly what I keep doing to my students: pointing out something so glaringly obvious and so just plain big that one tends not to see it -- a forest-for-the-trees sort of thing.

Right now, the difficulty appears to be that folks don't accept the general universality of such self-deception.  I think that this is primarily because you're not thinking about it large terms.  Back up a step.  This isn't something limited to gaming in any way; the question is what forms of self-deception and mystification are normal to gaming, not whether they exist.  Once we recognize that we're talking about a very ordinary principle of how social action and thought operates, I think it will be easier to swallow the idea of self-deception in gaming.

I hesitate to suggest a jargon term from another discipline yet again, but I wonder if "mystification" might carry less baggage than "self-deception."  Mendel, you know what I mean, and I do realize that Marxian mystification isn't the same as self-deception in your sense, but do you think they overlap closely enough for jazz, as it were?  Or can you think of another term that might be less loaded?  I just think that a lot of the difficulty here is that "self-deception" is being read very pejoratively, when that is not at all necessary, and it's getting in the way.

[John Kim]

Oops.  Accidentally hit "send" at the start.  

A brief comment: I think most people are actually agreed that self-deception has occurred.  However, I also think most people are agreed that discussing it involves a serious methodological problem.  How do you diagnose self-deception?  Simply put: would you accept it if someone else stated that you were engaging in self-deception?  

As I said earlier, I think that the safe way to approach this is to stick to self-diagnosed cases like Wolfen's.  If you want to take up cases like xiombarg's, then you have to consider at least two sides.  (i.e. Maybe xiombarg's players were deceiving themselves, or maybe xiombarg was deceiving himself.)  [/i]

[clehrich]

A brief comment: I think most people are actually agreed that self-deception has occurred.  However, I also think most people are agreed that discussing it involves a serious methodological problem.  How do you diagnose self-deception?  Simply put: would you accept it if someone else stated that you were engaging in self-deception?

For methodology, see long discussion below.  As to whether I or anyone else would accept this, no, quite possibly not.  So what?  That's a serious question.  The whole point of mystification (which I'm going to keep using as a term unless and until Mendel corrects me) is that we don't want it undone, and in fact may resist that strenuously.

As I said earlier, I think that the safe way to approach this is to stick to self-diagnosed cases like Wolfen's.  If you want to take up cases like xiombarg's, then you have to consider at least two sides.  (i.e. Maybe xiombarg's players were deceiving themselves, or maybe xiombarg was deceiving himself.)

Safe, perhaps, but not terribly effective.  I don't see why it's necessarily valuable to prescind from analysis just to be nice.  
---------
Okay, so methodology.

The first point is to have a reasonably functional model.   The Big Model seems to be working fairly well, so no problems there.  Bear in mind that if we do this analysis very well, we may alter the model somewhat, but we need a starting-point.

Second, we look for claims that seem unlikely or impossible as made, because they cannot occur under the model.  This is really all about rhetoric, about what people say about themselves, and how that differs from what is actually the case.

Third, we consider whether the model may be wrong, and that the statement as made is in fact correct.  If so, we change the model and start over.

Fourth, assuming that we don't find reason to revise the model thus, we examine the exact details of the claim, and what appears (from the model's analysis) to be actually the case.

Fifth, we examine the nature of the disparity.

Now we get a more serious question: what do we want to know?[list=1][*]Why the claim is made
[*]Why the claim is made in that form
[*]Why the claim is helpful
[*]Why the actuality is being mystified
[*]How the actuality is being mystified[/list:o]These are all different things, though of course we may well be interested in several or all of them.

So take our imaginary WoD game.

The players say that they do not engage in meta-activity of any sort.  They emphasize that immersion of some kind is the prime criterion of good player activity.  They assert strongly that what they want is "Story," which for the sake of argument we'll say fits a rough sort of narrative model (exposition, development, climax, denouement, or something like that).  They say that they get this, every time, unless irrelevant exterior factors enter (the GM was drunk or unprepared, etc.).  They say that they enjoy their gaming, because they can immerse in their characters and have great stories occur.  They say that this is what makes WoD games so wonderful.[/list:u](This is not intended to be skewed or tweaked or anything; it is intended to be a description that fairly matches a happy group of committed WoD players.  Please do let me know if I've bent it unfairly.)

Okay, the Big Model tells us there's something wrong here.  The process in which the players engage, and the system they use to engage in it, will produce "story every time" about as often as (to use Ron's phrase) "monkeys fly out of my butt."  

Now let's set aside the possibility that the model is wrong, because it's tangential to the point at hand.

So the Big Model now predicts that the players are acting "mindfully," i.e. engaging in various forms of meta-play in order to ensure that story is in fact produced.  This is absolutely at odds with what they say, which explicitly denies this.  But

nothing else in what they say needs to be inaccurate.  So long as the players do in fact engage in meta-play to produce story, everything else they say fits well.  Good -- that fits a kind of principle of simplicity, an Occam's Razor if you like.

So what's occurring here is this: the players' engagement in meta-play is being mystified.  So....

It is a fairly basic principle of social analysis, "a basic postulate of sociology" as Durkheim put it in 1912 (and I don't think people have denied this one), that "no human institution can rest on error."  In other words, people do not do things consistently, as a group, over time, if they don't have genuine reasons to do so.  That is, if this group does not get something out of mystifying their meta-play, they won't do it.  So we really want to know what it is they get out of this mystification, how they get that out of this process, how the process in fact works, and where that particular mode of mystification comes from.

Here's an off-the-cuff set of first guesses.  Since this isn't a real group, and we don't have serious data, we can do no better.  If we were analyzing a real group and had good data, we could get specific.

Some aesthetic or other principle, espoused consciously or otherwise by the players, tells them that meta-play is a bad thing.  Possibly they perceive this as "cheating," or something of the sort, which may arise from the culture of gaming as it extends from earlier games such as D&D which made this explicit.  Possibly they feel that something about "story" requires non-construction; that is, they feel that "story" should tell itself, or be discovered, rather than being deliberately invented.  At any rate, they believe that if they engage in meta-play, they are sufficiently violating some basic principle that their results -- having fun and telling stories -- will be invalid.

Therefore they make this claim in order to validate their results.  Now that may mean that it allows them to say that their results are stories when they aren't.  It may mean that it allows them to say that they are having fun when they aren't.  I think this is unlikely.  It seems to me more plausible that they are having fun and are telling stories, but that they wouldn't be having fun, and would consider their stories illegitimate, if they felt that these results had been generated (in part) by meta-play.

Why mystify meta-play, though?  Wouldn't it be simpler just to recognize that consistent story-production requires this?  This is a very complicated question, something that would require real data.  Ron's Narrativism proposes that players like this do exactly that, but not everyone accepts his proposal; indeed, many resist it (or things like it) strenuously.  I think there are a lot of guesses out there about why (some) story-desiring players fight meta-play, but I haven't seen anything I'd consider definitive, nor has it been established that there is a consistent reason for this.  But it's a fascinating and important question that deserves extensive investigation.

How exactly is it done?  Well, again I'm guessing, but I think there are two parts.  First of all, you have to remember that we have one member of the group whose primary task it is to do meta-work, i.e. the GM.  Apparently the aesthetic principle that says "no meta-play" does not apply to the GM.  Why not?  Good question -- needs investigation.  (Note the interest here and there in "freeforming" and "gm-less play", which may go some way toward clarifying this by identifying the ambivalence of such groups toward GMs.  Note also that an obvious extension of this principle leads to TITBB: the GM is the one doing the "telling" part of the story, and yet the players are free to be independent and uncontrolled characters.)  But having established such a person, we can ascribe to the GM all meta-play that necessarily gets done.

Second, we have a fascinating process of determining that certain kinds of meta-play "don't count," usually because they have a textual basis in the rules or involve the GM very strongly.  For example, if the players "follow the lead" of the GM, they are clearly engaging in meta-play, but this "doesn't count" because it's the GM -- so only the GM is understood to be doing meta-work, not those who collaborate with him.  If that seems like splitting hairs, bear in mind that this is not unlike a football team: credit for the win is often especially put on the QB, even though obviously a lot of other guys did a lot, and in fact the QB was only on the field during offensive plays, and not even 4th down offensive plays at that.  So apparently the process of deciding what "counts" as meta-play is not unlike the process of ascribing to a QB (or team captain, etc.) a kind of "generalship": as the director or general, the GM takes the responsibility for the meta-play, as well as much of the credit for its success.  This raises some interesting comparative analytical possibilities: could we make a deeper, more serious comparison between the rhetoric and social structuring that formulates the role and meaning of the GM to a sports-team captain or a military general?  What would happen if we did?

So what have we learned?  We've discerned a number of sub-processes at work in this mystification, strategies by which the players enable themselves not to see things they don't want to see, in order to produce results they want to achieve.  Now we go looking at those processes, and how exactly they work.  And we also ask historical questions: where and when did this particular aesthetic ideal arise?  What exactly is that ideal?  And so on.

All of which leads us to yet more investigation and analysis, getting ever more specific, and ultimately (we hope) leading to a much deeper understanding of the social dynamics of play and their relations to other modes of behavior and cultural practice.

Mendel, am I even remotely still on topic?

[Marco]

I think there are a few places I disagree with this analysis--but, on the whole, I think it's good.

1. Safe vs. Nice
It's okay not to be nice. But I think it's a mistake to assume bias in our subjects and not in ourselves. This makes observations of self-deception very, very suspect. It takes an extreme case (alcoholism) or some specific training (psychonalysis) and conversation (therapy) to make that statement in real life.

Here, I think it's not supportable. Bringing pop-psychology into the theory is going to be problematic on a number of levels. For instance, it's going obscure questions about the model itself,

I think that your interpertation of the model does have a flaw: getting story is not as rare as Monkeys Flying Out of My Butt so long as there is an organizing principle at work.

That principle need not be meta-game on the part of the players and can, in fact, be had from the position the WoD player take. So while we could assume they are deceiving themselves, we have to have a basis for that.

Before we can do that, we have to agree on that--and that hasn't happened.

When someone says "I decieved myself" we have a case where that clearly happened (well, as clear as we can be) and so it's better for examination.

Now let's set aside the possibility that the model is wrong, because it's tangential to the point at hand.

I don't think the model actually says that, though--so I don't think this is tangential. Ron did say it--but Ron said it in a specific context (Sim RP in general without attention to specific story-generating techniques on the part of the GM). Even if Ron did say that, he could be wrong too--he's not "the model" either (although he's certainly the best guy to interpert what he wrote in terms of what he meant--no argument there).

I think it's critical to question whether or not this is correct before concluding self-deception. As I pointed out in the thread on Storytelling, there are many ways your group, as described, could get Story on a reliable basis without self-deceiving or mystifying their meta-game involvement.

Edited to add: If the GM says "I'm not taking a hand at all in making these stories come out the way they do" and the players claim they are immersed and not conducting things so story is produced then, yes, we have a serious question. But until we hear from the GM, I think it's probable that this is just your (3) case and not self-deception. Most GM's would not say they play in an "immersed state." If the GM claimed that nothing he was doing was aiming towards story in any way then I agree: something seems strange.

-Marco