1/3rd baked idea about Situation and Sim

[Marco]

Ron,

It's cool--I wasn't thinking you were making wild absolute statements or anything. I was just relating how I personally approach the clarification digression in gaming (since it happened last night and all).

-Marco

[clehrich]

Okay, just for the moment I'm going to propose an alternate term, because this whole "investment" thing isn't getting us anywhere.  If this already has a term, let me know---I missed it.

Situation-Focus
By this I mean a sort of rubber-to-the-road kind of play focused directly, right now, on the game-world situation at hand right here.  The kind of moment that doesn't make Ron and Jay wince and think "get on with it!"  You know, the stuff that really matters in play.  Like, play play, not sorta-play or setting-up play or just-ironing-something-out-be-with-you-in-a-sec play.  Play right here, right now.

I don't mean anything odd, clever, or complicated by this.  It's a very constrained and narrow kind of play, but at the same time it's clearly a kind of play that just about every gamer (so far as I can tell, anyway) is extremely focused on.

I suspect that when the Big Model points to Situation as the crux, the center, of play, this is because the kind of play people really care about most is usually Situation-Focused play.

You with me?

CA and Situation-Focus
I'm pretty sure there is no controversy in saying that CA manifests strongly and clearly in Situation-Focused play, barring severe dysfunction.  For this reason, when we talk about various activities and techniques and so on as CA-relevant, CA-meaningful, or whatever, we usually do so in the context of Situation-Focused play.

However

This does not logically entail that other play activity is not CA-relevant.  Nor does it entail that CA-relevant activity must be Situation-Focused.  These are propositional fallacies:

All crows are black........................................Sit.-Foc. play manifests CA
*Black things are crows................................CA-manifesting action is Sit-Foc. play
*Not-crows aren't black................................Non-Sit.-Foc. play doesn't manifest CA
Non-black things aren't crows.......................Non-CA-manifesting action isn't Sit.-Foc. play[/list:u]The starred are fallacies.

CA-relevant action
In principle, any game-oriented activity can be, and probably is likely to be, CA-relevant.  For example, the process of designing a character requires all sorts of choices and constraints by the player having to do with what sorts of play he would like to engage in by means of and through this character.  Presumably if that player has any creative agendum at all, it will inform his design process.

Similarly, all that agonizing about exactly how many watts a phazer really uses and whether that's enough to erase the dilithium memory-crystals is CA-relevant, not only in how it is prosecuted by the group but in fact whether it is handled at all.  Properly speaking, not handling it is a way of handling it, but the point should be clear: there is a CA-relevant choice made as soon as the question arises, even prior to its expression by a player, as to what sort of question this is and how it relates to what is conceived of as the "proper" sphere and focus of play.

For a very rough model, we might say that every game activity constructs a range of potential applications, and sort of wraps them around a core of CA (assuming, for the purpose of simplicity, that CA is relatively coherent and straightforward in any given player or group).  When trying to put this potential into actuality, in Situation-Focused play, most of the potentials are temporarily stripped off, because they aren't relevant to that particular Situation; this leaves behind only potentials relevant to the Situation, which then become actualities, and CA.  Not surprisingly, this means that Situation-Focused play, as the application of a great many such constructions, manifests a great deal of CA very clearly: we've stripped off everything not Situationally relevant from a whole bunch of constructions, but we've kept CA intact in each and every one of them, so we've sort of got an overwhelming quantity of CA.

Sim in Particular
Seems to me that Sim is a reflexive CA.  Within Situation-Focus, the CA includes a desire not to see the CA, not to see the man behind the curtain as it were.  In some cases, of course, this leads to an emphasis on immersion, but that's only one possibility.

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.

So here's what I propose.

The ideal goal is seamlessness.  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.

I've said elsewhere (I forget where; Jay might remember) that it is when the Dream can potentially break that the Dream is most strongly bolstered, because abductive failure leads to deductive success and all that.  I think I'm sticking to that in Sim.  Basically what I mean here is that when there is a slippage, i.e. a break in the seamlessness of the Dream, it is the resolution of that slippage that enforces the claim of the Dream's being seamless.

That sounds paradoxical, I know, so let me be clear.

This is what's called the logic of the "supplement".  Suppose we assert, because we are Sim players, that the Dream itself is seamless and perfect.  In a perfect world, we, the players, would interact with it as a real world.  The claim is not that we are constructing the Dream through play, but that we are interacting with an already perfect Dream.  To my mind, this is a crucial part of the ideology of Simulationism.  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.

The effect of this is that of the supplement: by supplementing perfection, we demonstrate that it needed no supplement.  In other words, if we can resolve the question about the phazers, we have established that the game-world was indeed already perfect, that this was already known, but not to us.  Thus resolving the question of phazers reinforces the Dream.

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.  Thus, as Ron says, it's a Tell of a lot of Sim players.

What it isn't, though, is Situation-Focused.  Situation-Focus by my sketch definition is the ideal baseline, the continuity of play when there are no apparent breaks in the Dream.  Oddly enough, this implies that for Sim, Situation-Focus is not an especially strong locus of the manifestation of CA, because when the Dream needs no reinforcing there is no CA-activity that needs to take place.

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.  It's worth considering that in doing so they also reinforce their own necessary distance from the Dream, putting the ideal quite clearly a bit beyond reach, which would be an interesting point to follow up elsewhere.

[Ron Edwards]

Huh. That all worked for me, Chris.

It also explains why I was stuck between "but it is Situation" (based on the claims of players I've known who'd said that) and "dammit it's dropping investment" (my experience of the same thing).

Best,
Ron

[ffilz]

Wow Chris, that was so awesome. You really nailed what that kind of play is for me. That isn't the only type of play I enjoy, but when I'm running Tekumel or Glorantha, I go through those processes (though I have learned to set a time limit on myself, and give up the search and wing it instead). In my ideal game, when such a situation happened, all of the players would be invested in searching for the answer.

Frank

[clehrich]

Good lord, are we actually going to agree about this?  Weird!  :)

<thread-drift>
I realize this has gone around and around for a bit, but let's note that this is exactly what this forum (GNS Model Discussion, I mean) ought to be about.  Yes, it can be painful and difficult, but genuine clarification can happen here.  And even if not everyone is going to agree with this set of conclusions (we haven't heard from Jay, for example), I do think something has been learned.  I know I've learned something about Sim and about the Big Model I didn't know before.
</drift>

[Mike Holmes]

Well, we don't know that Jay agrees, and that's rather important, isn't it?

Sorry, just feeling spiteful that everyone likes Chris' version better than mine. ;-)

Mike

[M. J. Young]

Or we consider the idea that such a game is something like M. J.'s GM only input play (to Situation) and thus still considered part of some CA though the player input (to Situation) dial happens to be zero.  This last one is difficult to justify since the Model seems to be based on the idea that Situation must be dealt with by the players before such play is considered "role-play."  By the way I am not making up the claim that "Situation is central" out of personal preference, this is clearly stated in the Model and the essays.

Jay, it occurs to me to question whether there can ever be any game-related discussion that is not relevant to situation. It just depends on how the players identify situation.

After all, "You are crewmen aboard a Federation starship" is a situation. At that point, absolutely any details discussed about starship equipment and operation, Federation regulations and protocols, the nature of interstellar travel, races and civilizations throughout the universe, the known characters of the core shows and their likely handling of events--all of that is relevant to the situation of being crewmen aboard a Federation starship.

Thus I'm not sure how you can have discussion that is not relevant to situation, unless you're talking about Monty Python gags or pizza toppings or crooked dice, all of which are generally agreed to be disconnected from actual game events.

Perhaps, then, what makes such play so normative for simulationism is precisely because "we are here" is the situation in simulationism. In gamism, the situation is about the conflict which provides the opportunity to prove what we can do, and in narrativism the situation is about the pending crux in the issue we are exploring, but in simulationism "situation" is much simpler than that, being entirely about having the opportunity to explore the world and so expand our understanding of it.

This would also suggest that in simulationist play, something is "color" to the degree that it does not matter to the players, but immediately ceases to be "color" the moment exploration focuses on it--it then becomes setting and situation and character. The very fact that it can become the focus of exploration makes it relevant to the simulationist agendum.

I'm not sure how this fits with Chris' or Mike's views, or even if I can defend it, but it does seem to fit with the idea that simulationism is still on agendum when it wanders into these side questions.

--M. J. Young

[clehrich]

Mike,

Your spitefulness makes you a bad person, clearly.  Just plain naughty.

Mark,

I'm pretty sure that what you're proposing fits with my conception of Sim as a reflexive agendum founded on an ideal construction of the Dream.  Just so long as we're clear, and I'm pretty sure you are from your post, that this is a particular formulation of "situation" that is relatively specific to Sim, we're OK.  The thing is, this isn't really how Situation is formally defined by the Big Model.  Thus I had to theorize around that to deal with what Ron neatly describes: he (a mostly-committed Nar player) perceives as dropping out of Situation what some hard-Sim-committed players see as focused on Situation.  My contention is that what's shifting here isn't Situation but engagement, because Sim as a reflexive agendum does not permit an absolute distinction between Situation and Dream, whereas Nar for example requires a distinction between Situation and Premise or Story.

That's all very abstract, of course, but an attempt to link what I think you're saying to what I was proposing and seems, mirabile dictu, to be working for people.

Jay,

Hello?  You out there?

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

Mark/M.J. (I'm going to have to get used to that), and Chris, it's all working for me. You guys are very clearly stating stuff which I've been trying to verbalize for a while now. As you know, Chris, the "reflexive" aspect of Sim is a key thing for my understanding of this play-mode, which I've tried to articulate as the "what we put in, we get out, untransformed but better realized" aesthetic.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

I'm not sure how this fits with Chris' or Mike's views, or even if I can defend it, but it does seem to fit with the idea that simulationism is still on agendum when it wanders into these side questions.

Fits with me. In fact, I like how you put that last phrase there. It's not definitive of simulationism to explore any particular detail. I think this is what throws some people. Everyone knows that in narrativism, detail is only as important as it is to establishing premise really. What's less obvious is that a similar sort of descrimination occurs in sim play. Some sim players will worry about the bullets, some will not. Because the narrow agenda in question, the sub-agenda of sim in play, must be some subset of all of the potential detail which could be examined. It's simply impossible to examine all of the potential detail, because that potential detail is always infinite. How many bullets left? Why not look at the condition of each bullet to see if they'll misfire. We can go back and consider the manufacturer of the ammunition. We can consider the employees who were on duty the day the ammunition was created, and how they affected the quality of the ammunition. We can look at Fred the employee, and figure out his entire socio-economic situation to discover how motivated he is to produce good ammunition. We can then consider the early childhood influences that creates the mindset in Fred that would respond to those socio-economic influences as he does. We can then look at Fred's parents, and why they treated him the way they did. Then the cultural values that created their motives.

Obviously I'm belaboring the point, I could go on and on. You can't look at every detail, so instead we choose some level of detail that's "good enough" to create that feeling that Chris spoke of that there's a world out there that's pre-existent. That if we wanted to look back at the bullets we'd find the manufacturer, and Fred, and Fred's parents, and the culture in question.

Where that line lays, how in detail to get in a particular situation in order to maintain the feel in question, is always an aesthetic consideration. There's some consensus to be cfound out there at times, but I think that it's mostly based on tradition. The point being that everyone enforces some level of this sort of continuity in play. Where you draw that line defines your group's simulationism agenda. Note, though we talk in terms of magnitude at times, it's really all about what you want to explore. A particular agenda might look at all at one sort of detail which another group finds crucial, while they look at some other thing in extremely close detail that other groups might not. Simply because what makes a world seem to have that sense of pre-existence can be different for each individual.

Call this the Faster Than Light effect. Some people have real problems with FTL technologies being included in a setting, because they've done enough reading to understand the problems that it entails. For them there had better be a rather detailed reasoning as to how it works and what the ramifications are, or maybe they'll want it thrown out altogether. Other people, who don't see the problems - it's just faster, right? - don't have this problem with it. They're willing to accept "It's high tech, it just works" as an explanation. Nobody is right here. Either way, FTL or no, the settings produced are both fictions with less than perfect detail produced. The only question is what it takes to satisfy the individual players.

And don't read this as saying that this sort of exploration is somehow defensive or proscriptive. It's not. What we choose to explore is a positive decision in all cases. Whether it's ammo weight in Phoenix Command, adventure in Middle Earth, or what you would do for power in Sorcerer. We choose what to explore because it interests us, not because the game would be bad without it. There would be no game without a decision of what to explore.

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

High five to Mike.

That is the result, I think, of sustained constructive discourse for what, going on six years now?

I also think it validates my original Simulationism essay, with all of its shortcomings, but perhaps burnishing that essay is best left to another thread.

Best,
Ron

[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 that thread in RPG theory)

[clehrich]

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.

......

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!

Well well.  This is quite a turn-up for the books.  Jay, thanks for this thread, man -- it's looking like everyone's going to agree on Sim of all things!

Now as to the point you (Xero) make here.

My memory is fuzzy, but my recollection is that it's been a while since you read much of (yes, sorry) Levi-Strauss, and perhaps Propp would be more your bag on that end of things anyway, yes?  [Hang on everyone, I'm going to do this for just a sec then come back to earth.]

Okay.  Brace yourself.  What you're describing here is exactly a perfect reversal of what I was yammering on about with bricolage.  And the thing is, what you're talking about is definitely bricolage.  It's not the end of it I was emphasizing, teaching Levi-Strauss on the Forge not really being my remit, but he'd be right there with you on this.  So am I.

Dig up out your old grad-school books and re-read the first couple of chapters of The Savage Mind, with all these debates about Sim clearly in the front of your head.  It's going to click.  Hard.

For those of you who were just tuning out, let me put that without any jargon or names.

Basically what I was getting at in reference to Xero's games was that they have this aesthetic of a Dream in which we discover that which is already present, right?  Now what he's saying is that granted that, this allows us to construct within the Dream, out of pieces of the Dream.  While this is construction, because it is wholly within the Dream it also validates the infinite potential of the Dream.  That is, the Dream isn't like an ordinary novel, where you might think of it as having a story and some characters and some ideas and that's it.  The Dream is infinitely pregnant with meaning, pre-structured, all waiting for you to discover.  And some of that discovery happens when you do something creative and inventive within the Dream, out of pieces of the Dream, and thereby discover that the Dream was capable even of something you had never thought possible.

I think this is what Xero means about discovering archetypal patterns, at least more or less.  (We have a technical disagreement about that one, but that's neither here nor there.)

Referring that back to bricolage, in myth, the point is that such a construction also validates the systems that permit the construction.  In other words, the fact that you use exclusively what you already have within the world, i.e. the Dream or the "shed," to make new things, means that they are not really new things, but old wine in new casks.  And that proves that the system already had those casks and that wine.  And since the system in question in myth is the social system of the tribe or whatever, it validates that your system of living in and thinking about the world and also of interacting with each other is the right way, and a fully sufficient way, and you don't really need to change anything.  The changes are constructed in such a way that they're not changes; they're discoveries of what was always already true, revealed by the gods only you didn't notice that before.

Levi-Strauss would only have one objection to the Haiku analogy: he thinks that this is utterly unlike poetry.  Not unlike language, or prose, but unlike poetry in particular.  But that's a whole different issue and not one that fits here.

----

So, now wait a minute.  I haven't heard from Jay.  Ron, Mike, Xero and I are I think agreed.  I think Mark/M.J. is also agreed.  I haven't heard a lot of disagreement lately.

Ron thinks this in a sense confirms what he's been struggling to say for a while.

Mike, I'm not sure.  You've got a different take on Sim, I think; does this also work for that?

I think this isn't the same as the Big Model, but for narrowly analytical rather than applied reasons.

Xero I don't think is a fan of the Model, but is okay with this.

Ummmm....

Well, Jay, I think we can say the bun is pretty much baked now!

[Caldis]

I'll just add that I'm in agreement, especially when you consider MJ's point that situation is (or at least can be) simpler in Sim.  I think that was the central sticking point for this debate and I'd be interested to hear what Jay has to say on it though I dont think he'd agree with it, then again I may have been misreading him all along.

On a side note I'd like to say your short synopsis on Bricolage above did a better job of relating it to roleplaying than any of the previous discussion.  That's what I believe is needed before the term receives wide spread acceptance or the possibility of using it in debates as a meaningful term to all participants.  A discussion for a different thread I believe.

I did have one question for you yet. What did you mean by the following?

I think this isn't the same as the Big Model, but for narrowly analytical rather than applied reasons.

Right now I dont see how it is any different than the big model.  Maybe a clarification of a few points but not something that conflicts with it.  Can you clarify where you think they diverge?

[clehrich]

On a side note I'd like to say your short synopsis on Bricolage above did a better job of relating it to roleplaying than any of the previous discussion.  That's what I believe is needed before the term receives wide spread acceptance or the possibility of using it in debates as a meaningful term to all participants.  A discussion for a different thread I believe.

I'm going to sit down and try to hammer out where I think the state of the question rests at the moment, in a relatively applied fashion---and yes, that's another thread.

I did have one question for you yet. What did you mean by the following?

I think this isn't the same as the Big Model, but for narrowly analytical rather than applied reasons.

Right now I dont see how it is any different than the big model.  Maybe a clarification of a few points but not something that conflicts with it.  Can you clarify where you think they diverge?

Well, I think it is more a clarification than a disagreement, but there is an analytical difference.

The way the Big Model mostly works, and I think this is strongly true of the Right To Dream essay, is that it describes effects and infers back to causes.  Now right up front in "The Right To Dream," we get an emphasis on Exploration applied to different elements (Character, Setting, Situation, System, Color).  Thus any given Sim game may emphasize the exploration of some one or more of these elements, and this is then the primary criterion for distinguishing among Sim play modes.  This led to a lot of threads, once upon a time, trying to pinpoint which was emphasized in what play.

All that seems to me very useful, let me note up front.  On the applied end of theory, where design and play enter centrally, such criteria are clear and focused.  The problem is that it does not square with what a lot of Sim players experience.

What I (and I think Jay) have proposed is that Situation has a peculiar place in Sim, such that Exploration of System for example is actually constitutive of Dream via Situation.

Let me put that differently.  In Nar and Gam, it is appropriate to distinguish between process and product, between aesthetic aims and particular techniques by which this agenda is expressed.  Now analytically, from a distance, that makes sense in any gaming, but it is at odds with the aesthetic contents of Sim as CA.  We've seen this continually, with for example the common Sim assertion that meta-play is cheating.  The problem then is that Sim clearly does involve meta-play, but denies this flatly.

So the question, for me, becomes how we can describe Sim experientially, i.e. how Sim players can understand what they are doing as players.  How do they handle the distance between themselves and the Dream, when it seems that awareness of such a distance is problematic?  Practically speaking, why aren't all Sim players immersionists?

Ron's proposal was that there are different things to be invested in, and one form of that investment, applied to one kind of element-set, leads to Immersion.  But I think this again is off-kilter: Sim players in my experience very often seem to think of immersionism as a good thing, even if they themselves appear to have no interest in actually doing it.  So it seems their sense of "investment" is a little tricky.

The suggestion then is that the Sim CA is reflexive.  It's about itself, and it is, in committed players, potentially self-enforcing.  And that entails also that Situation is entirely embedded within the Dream, and in effect the core of the CA.  The CA itself being impossible to dislodge from other factors, again from the perspective of the actual Sim player, which means that everything is invested in Situation.  It's quite impossible to play Sim without being so invested, in fact.

Which then means the following: with reference to Sim, Situation becomes its own category, of which the other elements (Setting, Color, etc.) are properly sub-classes.  Furthermore, Situation becomes a near-synonym of Dream.

Now that sounds like a small clarification, but think what it does.  You now have a CA that refers to the model itself, which is circular.  It's as though you said that Nar was a CA best described as "Color Now."  That would imply (obviously it's not true of Nar) that the whole model sort of bends back on itself when talking about Nar.  A more plausible, but also wrong, example would be Gamism: System On Up.  But we know that Gamism doesn't work like this: System may be very important, but it is so in an even and continual tension with all other elements, and this is manipulated and constructed through techniques.

In Sim, however, we have a restructuring of everything such that Situation ends up meaning something very weird.  Situation, in fact, is made to include CA, which is quite backwards of how the model basically works.  In essence, for Sim in particular, you cannot discuss CA in a specific and precise fashion except as a substrate or implication of Situation.

The problem here is that we have a disparity, as we do not in Gam or Nar, between how the model suggests play works and how players experience their play.  Analytically speaking, to my mind, to make Sim a special case like this, when there are only three CAs anyway, is problematic.  What we're describing in Sim has to be hypothetically possible of other CAs, even if that is not observed.  The model cannot do this, because its central aim is reactive (in analysis of games and design) rather than predictive, so it constructs a clean, clear structuring lens through which to view its objects.  The problem being that you have a critical CA which essentially cannot play nice with that structure: you can describe Sim as the model does, with clarifications, but not in a fashion that is acceptable to Sim players (many of them, anyway), which is not the case with Nar or Gam.  And to me that entails a difficulty.

But as I say, it's a purely analytical difficulty, not an applied or practical one.  Since the Big Model does not claim to be aiming to be an ideal analytical model, this is not really a criticism, just a disagreement from me about what I think such models ought to do.