Narrativism? Simulationism?

[Simon Kamber]

I've been trying to get a grip on the big model for quite a while now. While I think I've gotten most of it, there's still an issue that keeps nagging me, regarding creative agenda. Also touched on the matter in this thread but it never really amounted to what I was looking for, since the actual play examples didn't really apply.

To begin with, I'll describe what, so far, I think CA is. It's what matters to the players, the reason they play. Creative Agenda is what you try to achieve, it's what's fulfilled when you have that magic moment (so far, it's never been more than a moment for me) where you feel the game is right, and where you feel you get what you came for. It's, so to say, the reason we're playing, our goal. Is this right? If not, I've gotten the wrong idea, and I'm nowhere near as close to understanding this thing as I thought I was, and I'd appreciate a bit of input on the matter.

Now, my problem is that there's a certain brand of creative agenda that I can't quite place. It's hovering somewhere between Narrativism and Simulationism. One day, I read a thread convincing me that it belongs in one, and another, I read an essay that changes that again.


Basically, what I'm looking for is the "story" of the character. It's when I sit, during the game, and decide something from the viewpoint of my character's story, kind of like an author designing telling the story about a character. I'm not really able to provide actual play examples beyond what I wrote in the thread above, because as concluded in said thread, the group I play with isn't exactly coherent.

However, let me pull out an example from another thread, Washing the blood.... In the 6th post of that thread, Solamasa writes:

"...and by the end of the previous session I had pretty much decided that Garrison's Peak would be Br. Hector's swan song. I was really savouring Hector's inability to reconcile his duty as a Dog with the shades of his past."

That's the kind of play I'm enjoying. It's where I sit, outside the character, and make decisions about his story.



What I'm trying to figure out is, where does it fit into the Big Model, and especially, into the three essays on CAs? I somehow alternate between thinking it's narrativism, untill I stumble upon some comment and realize that it seems to have nothing to do with premise, and thinking it's simulationism, but then realizing I'm in no way thinking about "what the character would do". One of these two notions has got to be flawed, or my misunderstanding is somewhere deeper in my perception of the big model, but either way, this is quite a stumbling block for my understanding of the Big Model at the moment. So, I'd appreciate any help in moving on beyond this point.



And on a last note, the chapter "Issues on the table" in the essay on "Narrativism: Story Now" has a line that I think matches my problem quite well:

"The first problem these audiences pose for me is that any point, example, or clarification I make that's specific to one of them is automatically misleading for the other."

The problem is, as far as I can see, that I keep running into these examples or clarifications, and I can't for the life of me figure out which of them are misleading, and which of them are actually appropriate.

[JMendes]

Ahey, :)

That's the kind of play I'm enjoying. It's where I sit, outside the character, and make decisions about his story.
<snip>
it seems to have nothing to do with premise
<snip>
I'm in no way thinking about "what the character would do"

At first glance, seems to me that one of these must be wrong. When you make decisions about his story, you are either basing your decisions on your internal view of the character (what the character would do) or on some sort of thematic issue (premise).

(Actually, there is a third option, that you may be making these decisions in a random non-descript fashion, but from your posts, I'd venture a guess that this is not so.)

Let me add two things:

1. The fact that premise is not immediately stateable does not mean that it is absent. (I think...)
2. The fact that you don't know what the character would do does not mean that you're not trying to do it like he would.

Thus, my question to you becomes: when you make a decision regarding your character's story, why did you make that decision? What made you decide to go one way rather than the other?

Cheers,

J.

[Bankuei]

Hi xect,

I occassionally bring up this analogy when it comes to communication-

Patient walks into a pharmacy.  "Give me medicine"
"Well, what's wrong with you?"
"I don't know, you tell me!"

From the little bit that you provided in the other thread, no one can give you helpful information.  Either you do have some stuff in play that pushes you towards one of the CAs going on and you can't see it for yourself, or else as Ron pointed out, you don't, and no one can identify what's not available for them to diagnose.

As far things that might help you in understanding the model let's start with this:

Stance doesn't mean anything to what kind of CA you get.

In the character's head(actor), as an author(author) or making up fiddly world bits(director), none of that makes a difference as to what kind of CA you're going to get.  So it's not worth examining as a focal way of figuring it out for yourself.

Second, the word "Story" is effectively meaningless because it means all kinds of things to all kinds of people.  That's why saying, "My game is about story" is all kinds of useless for discussion.  So, to try to narrow things down, let's try this:

If your character was presented with moral quandry, is it more important
to stick to what the "character would do" or is it more important to put in what YOU, personally, want to say on that issue?

Now before you answer- stop.  Don't think hypothetically.  Look back at your play history, examine play examples that you were personally in and chose one over the other.  Maybe the way the group played was not conducive to one or the other, but that's important to note too.  Maybe it's still too muddy to figure out from your memory, so maybe you should go play some more and pay attention the next time something like that comes up.

All in all- its not going to be too fruitful to shoot words back and forth across the internet ether- you can't upload your game experience for us, and the best we can do is try to pick out "tells" from what we read about from you.  And that doesn't necessarily bring you to understanding either.  

The only thing that will help you is your ability to identify what decisions are being made by the people at the table, yourself included.  This means you have to shift the focus of attention away from what's happening in the imagined space, and pay attention to the what's really happening, and how the imagined stuff is being made or approved/disapproved of by the people playing.  In fact, it may do well to practice that, forget all about theory or GNS and just note for yourself what you see happening.  After you get a feel for that, come back and see how that fits into the theory.

It's easy to get lost in the words and forget that everything is built on actual play and understanding of actual play.

:)

Chris

[Simon Kamber]

JMendes

At first glance, seems to me that one of these must be wrong. When you make decisions about his story, you are either basing your decisions on your internal view of the character (what the character would do) or on some sort of thematic issue (premise).

I'm aware that at some point, one of them is wrong. My point is that, reading the forge and trying to apply what I see to my actual play experiences, I alternately get convinced that one is wrong, and that the other is. By now, I'm pretty sure that there's some key concept somewhere that I misunderstood, because I'm getting the feeling that everything I read, I read out of context.

Let me try to describe what happens when I make a decision that feels "right". It's usually when I'm thinking about my character, and I get some idea about what I want to happen to him, or what I want him to do. My point is that this idea rarely comes as a direct result of something happening in-game, and often I arrange his surroundings to accomodate it. That's what I mean when I say I'm not making decisions going by "what my character would do". On the other hand, even looking back at the game, I can't think of any thematic content, or anything that has to do with premise, which is where I get confused.

I know I've done this one, but I'll try that bard again because it still stands  as the example I recall most clearly of a situation where I really felt I was rewarded by what was going on in the game.

First a bit about the game: It was a weekly game we played, thus, what happened was part of a larger scheme. Over the previous sessions, the setting had been established. Some demonic force had entered the forest that was my bard's homeland, not only killing the people who lived there, but also turning it into a stronghold of darkness. The heroes had been sent there in the usual "tavern pick-up" way to deal with it.

My character was an elven bard, from aforementioned forest, whose life seemed to center about songs, the history they held and the magic they could perform. Before the session where we were actually going into the forest, I already decided his main motivation was the fact that it was HIS home being destroyed.

The important part of the game came when we were doing the planning before going into the forest. Most of it was going on in my mind. I'm sitting and thinking about my character when I suddenly realize that he could have another motivation. The collection of facts dawned on me. I just took the "keeper of songs" prestige class for him, I was by that time looking to get him a cohort and he was reaching the degree of perform skill where he was actually described as someone who'd draw attention from all over the world, and sometimes even from neighboring planes. At that point, I started imagining how he could enter the forest and be able to collect the pieces of lore from what was (I thought) by that time a lost civilization. That way, he'd be not only a keeper of songs, but THE keeper of songs.

Most of it was happening inside my mind, in a stream of random ideas that connected and all seemed to coincide with facts on my characters sheet. I told the group what I was planning for him to do (go in there and get the lore). Due to the social contract, it never recieved more than a few nods and the appropriate requisites were added to the game. But the kick from that flow of inspiration made the whole session worth it nontheless.

1. The fact that premise is not immediately stateable does not mean that it is absent. (I think...)

But if it's not immidiately stateable, doesn't that sort of conflict with the whole notion that narrativism is about adressing it. If you can't define the premise, even in retrospective, how can you have actively strived to adress it?

2. The fact that you don't know what the character would do does not mean that you're not trying to do it like he would.

But I'm not looking for the actions, I'm looking for the whole process. The burst of creativity when I'm creating the web that is the story around a character, even if the scale might be as small as a single conflict, it's the whole conflict that intrigues me, not just my character's actions.

Thus, my question to you becomes: when you make a decision regarding your character's story, why did you make that decision?

Once I got the idea and started thinking it through, it just sort of felt "right". It seemed, for lack of a better word, like a "cool" story.

Bankuei

Patient walks into a pharmacy. "Give me medicine"
"Well, what's wrong with you?"
"I don't know, you tell me!"

Well, I'd usually visit a doctor, and I'd go there in the hopes that he could tell me what was wrong with me.

From the little bit that you provided in the other thread, no one can give you helpful information. Either you do have some stuff in play that pushes you towards one of the CAs going on and you can't see it for yourself, or else as Ron pointed out, you don't, and no one can identify what's not available for them to diagnose.

I'm not sure I understand that one. Are you trying to say that if play is incoherent and one's reasons for being there aren't being satisfied, there IS no creative agenda?

Second, the word "Story" is effectively meaningless because it means all kinds of things to all kinds of people. That's why saying, "My game is about story" is all kinds of useless for discussion. So, to try to narrow things down, let's try this:

A more accurate way to put it might be that I'm looking for the process of creating "the story of the character". I'm looking for that creative flow of inspiration that happens when I get swept up in the story of my character. In fact, I just noticed something remarkable. The threeway-model definition of Dramatism seems to include what I'm looking for, whereas the Narrativist definition, with it's inclusion of "premise" does not.

If your character was presented with moral quandry, is it more important
to stick to what the "character would do" or is it more important to put in what YOU, personally, want to say on that issue?

I can't think of any examples that revolved around a moral quandry per se, so I'll have to get back to you on that one when I think of an appropriate example.

By the way, let's just make one thing clear here. I'm not trying to identify what I enjoy, or to "find my creative agenda". I'm perfectly clear about what I'm looking for in the game. The "kick" I get when it happens is enough to tell me that. It's what I want, it's why I spend those hours playing roleplaying games. What I'm trying to do is to create more of them. And doing so entails being able to explain it in terms that will be understood by someone other than myself. So far, the GNS model is what has taken me the closest to that objective, which is why I'm trying to find out where (or if) my "kick" fits into the model.

Since I'm not the only player in that group that has looked for "roleplaying" in some way that we couldn't define, but which we could all agree was missing, I'm fairly certain that at least SOME of the other players in the group are looking for the same thing I'm looking for. But I need to be able to explain it before I can either move the current group towards it, or find out who'd be interested in playing in a seperate group.

[Bankuei]

Hi xect,

I'm not sure I understand that one. Are you trying to say that if play is incoherent and one's reasons for being there aren't being satisfied, there IS no creative agenda?

Nope, I'll just pull Ron's words from the other thread for your review:

So when you ask, "What's my Creative Agenda" (which is exactly the same as asking, am I playing G, N, S, or what combination thereof) ... there's no answer. You are trying to satisfy one or some combination of them. You occasionally succeed. The experience of doing is so fleeting, and so isolated to particular moments rather than to sessions or cycles of reward, that there's not much point in further attempts at definition.

Whether his diagnosis is correct or not depends on how well you've managed to communicate what has happened for you in play.  Hence my pharmacy analogy- we don't have enough info to really go on.  

But, I'll roll with the assumption that you fully understood the idea and that as you say, it ain't Narrativism.  Ok, so how do you communicate your particular -brand- of Sim to other folks?

Well, does what specific things make "story of your character" for you in play?

-Witty lines and colorful characterization?
-Defined character concepts and sticking to them?
-Protagonization according to those character concepts?
-Something else?

If you can explain what that means, then you can explain it to other people.  Maybe using terminology, maybe not.  Pay close attention if any of the rules or mechanics(official or drifted) played a part in making what you wanted.  Perhaps it was a feature of the types of conflicts presented, or the pacing.

Otherwise, we're pretty much stuck.  You've got an idea in your head, and you don't have the words for it.  You can't communicate it, and no one can "give" you better words to use for it.  I'd say looking very closely at examples of real play experiences where it manifests and what features of it, for you, worked, will be the key for you to describe it.

Chris

[Victor Gijsbers]

At first glance, seems to me that one of these must be wrong. When you make decisions about his story, you are either basing your decisions on your internal view of the character (what the character would do) or on some sort of thematic issue (premise).

There are other possibilities as well, and from the scant information which I'm seeing here, I guess one of them may be the case. The point is that Simulation of Character is not the only form of simulation: one can simulate colour, situation, setting - can I say 'genre-specific story'? In my current Otherkind game, I am striving towards creating an entertaining quasi-heroic fantasy story, with lots of action, lots of colour and lots of complicated situations. I make decisions not based on what my character would do (I have some idea: he is an embittered fighter for a lost cause, but it's not that important), and not based on the thematic content of the game (I believe the system as we currently use it is not too well suited to that) - I make decision based on what is in keeping with the setting, colour and 'genre' we have defined so far, while trying to generate violently exciting conflicts. Sim? Yes. In-character decisions? Nope.

I suggest that xect's example of the bard is simulation of the epic genre of stories, not of character. Wow, he's thinking, that would be a cool (exciting, epic, colourful - not thematic) story! And he tries to achieve it.

[Simon Kamber]

I suggest that xect's example of the bard is simulation of the epic genre of stories, not of character. Wow, he's thinking, that would be a cool (exciting, epic, colourful - not thematic) story! And he tries to achieve it.

That's pretty much spot on!

However, reading the "Simulationism: The right to dream" essay again, I still don't what I read there fully applies. In fact, just about everything in that essay seems, well, wrong according to what I'm trying to describe. The task-based resolution, the use of force, the toned-down metagame activity among the players, the whole "Internal cause is king" chapter (to me, "effect is king" would apply better). There's far too many things that are, in the essay, mentioned as central to the mode of play but which don't seem to fit. The paragraphs that seem to focus on these issues are the following, found under the "high concept" headline:

High Concept play can be divided neatly into those which are greatly concerned with "the big story" and those which are not. Historically, the latter used to be the most common: Call of Cthulhu, Jorune, or more recently Dread and Godlike, in which "the story" only refers to a record of short-term events and set-pieces. However, following the spearhead for this type of game text, Ars Magica, now the long-term story-type is more common. A lot of internet blood has been spilled regarding how this phenomenon is or is not related to Narrativist play, but I think it's an easy issue. The key for these games is GM authority over the story's content and integrity at all points, including managing the input by players. Even system results are judged appropriate or not by the GM; "fudging" Fortune outcomes is overtly granted as a GM right.

The Golden Rule of White Wolf games is a covert way to say the same thing: ignore any rule that interferes with fun. No one, I presume, thinks that any player may invoke the Golden Rule at any time; what it's really saying is that the GM may ignore any rule (or any player who invokes it) that ruins his or her idea of what should happen.

The functional version of such play is properly called Illusionism, which has undergone a good deal of debate and clarification at the Forge (see glossary). Most of these game texts overtly instruct the GM to practice Illusionism, for example in Arrowflight (2002, Deep 7; the author is Todd Downing).

Thing is, I don't like the idea of GM control at all. I don't really like illusionism, as what I want to do is create the story, as the player of a character. I guess it falls under "Protagonization according to those character concepts".

Otherwise, we're pretty much stuck. You've got an idea in your head, and you don't have the words for it. You can't communicate it, and no one can "give" you better words to use for it.

I guess you're right about that. What frustrates me, though, is that I see exactly the kind of game I'm looking for reflected in quite a few actual play threads in here. The prime example is still Washing the blood off our hands(the link in my original post seems to be mispasted). Particularly the thoughts mirrored in Kit's post (the 6th in the thread), resonate perfectly with what I'm trying to do. Does that thread have enough description to place it somewhere within the model?

[John Burdick]

I can't think of any examples that revolved around a moral quandry per se, so I'll have to get back to you on that one when I think of an appropriate example.

One of the recurring difficulties with understanding premise is trying to express the idea of moral question. People in the real world faced with the extinction of their language and literature do consider their cultural identity a deeply moral question. Whether you do isn't something anyone else can say. Maybe you care about real world cultures being destroyed, but that was irrelevant to your game.

In our games, we thoughtlessly gun down small children. There's no moral issue there. The GM has a history of abusing the old "the harmless looking one is the killer" idea. Oh, no, I see a child, blast him! In the movie Men in Black, Will Smith's character demonstrates this kind of logic.

People hold passionate convictions on things that seem odd to others. There are people on a crusade to save the world from unfree software. A man risked going to jail by publishing a program to encrypt email.

John

[Simon Kamber]

One of the recurring difficulties with understanding premise is trying to express the idea of moral question. People in the real world faced with the extinction of their language and literature do consider their cultural identity a deeply moral question. Whether you do isn't something anyone else can say. Maybe you care about real world cultures being destroyed, but that was irrelevant to your game.

Hold on a second. Are you saying that my decision to have my character enter the forest to recover the remains of the elven culture could be considered adressing a premise, even though I wasn't actually making the decision to adress a premise by doing it?

I'm aware that this isn't neccesarily the case, this is one of the points where I'll have to play to figure out more precisely what's going on inside my own mind, but could it have been? Is it possible to adress premise without ever stating a premise, even to yourself?

[Simon Kamber]

Wait, this just struck me. How's this:

The border between Narrativism and Simulationism in the two is whether or not the decision to enter the forest was ultimately about values, or about experiencing the story of his rise to glory.

In a narrativistic game, the whole point of the story would be to question those values. If he discovered that what actually happened was that the culture destroyed itself from within BECAUSE of the lore he was there to get, would he still want to retrieve it and present it to the world? If he discovered that retrieving the lore meant risking not only his own life, but also those of the party members he'd begun to regard like friends, would he still push on?

In a simulationist game, the whole point of the story would be to play through the fulfilment of these values. It would be about how he gathered the lore, how he collected it, and how he was recieved when he got back out. Complications like the discovery that the lore was actually the source of the corruption in the forest would be color, it would be one of the challenges he passed on his way to his goal, rather than central to the game.

So, creating the story happens in both games, what's making the difference between the two CA's is which parts of the story that are, ultimately, the central ones. Am I on the right track there?

[John Burdick]

Hold on a second. Are you saying that my decision to have my character enter the forest to recover the remains of the elven culture could be considered adressing a premise, even though I wasn't actually making the decision to adress a premise by doing it?

I'm aware that this isn't neccesarily the case, this is one of the points where I'll have to play to figure out more precisely what's going on inside my own mind, but could it have been? Is it possible to adress premise unconsciously, so to say?

Yes that is possible. I'm glad you were so specific in your question.

In Ron's Narrativism article he says "People daily address Premise without self-reflecting, both as audience and authors. There's no special need to say to one another, "This is the Premise" in order to be playing Narrativist."

If you feel a sudden surge of energy when you encounter something that moves you, that counts.

John

[Georgios Panagiotidis]

The way I understood (and applied) the terms was:

Narrativism - playing to create a story.

Simulationism - playing to create an 'authentic' experience.

The two seemingly blend together, when you are trying to create an 'authentic' story or an 'authentic' story experience. SteveD over at the RPG.net boards is doing just that with his Firefly RPG.

But when 'authenticity' determines your choices what to do next, you switch from Narrativism to Simulationism, IMO.

[Simon Kamber]

The way I understood (and applied) the terms was:

Narrativism - playing to create a story.

Simulationism - playing to create an 'authentic' experience.

The two seemingly blend together, when you are trying to create an 'authentic' story or an 'authentic' story experience. SteveD over at the RPG.net boards is doing just that with his Firefly RPG.

But when 'authenticity' determines your choices what to do next, you switch from Narrativism to Simulationism, IMO.

As far as I can see, the change in definitions from dramatism to narrativism meant that part of the games that focus on creating a story fell under the simulationist definition, namely those where experiencing the story is central to the game. As the rest of the thread demonstrates, though, I'm not really an authority on that point ;)

[Georgios Panagiotidis]

As far as I can see, the change in definitions from dramatism to narrativism meant that part of the games that focus on creating a story fell under the simulationist definition, namely those where experiencing the story is central to the game.

If I play to create a story, how is that playing Sim? Unless I'm trying to (re-)create a very specific kind of story?

[Simon Kamber]

If I play to create a story, how is that playing Sim? Unless I'm trying to (re-)create a very specific kind of story?

As I understand it, the difference between creating stories in Nar and in Sim are as I described them in the post above. I'm still waiting for someone to tell me if I got it right though.