One of these things is REALLY not like the others. . .

[Eero Tuovinen]

Steve, let me elaborate on my understanding of the "many agendas at once" thing.

First, why I think it's significant: creative agendas are very much characterized by their property of being incompatible with one another. You could say that the only good reason for defining such agendas in one way instead of another is the incompatibility hypothesis: two creative agendas are distinct only insofar as their simultaneous existence causes GNS-incoherence. Without that incoherence there really isn't much reason to differentiate between the agendas. This is where most of suggestions for a fourth mode fail, because they don't fulfill the incompatibility hypothesis in actual play, and thus aren't really separate creative agendas.

Now, when you say that two agendas are possible in the same instance of play (I assume that this is what you mean by "same time", because otherwise I agree with you utterly, as evidenced by all the talk about creative agenda appearing as pure phenomenon only in instances of play), you're refuting the above incompatibility hypothesis. If two agendas can be functionally expressed at once, there's not much point in creative agendas in the first place apart from gratuitous labeling of stuff. This is why I think this is an interesting and important bit of GNS theory and not just a matter for empiristic experimentation.

OK, that being cleared up, next I'll say something about why I think it's not possible to express two creative agendas at once. (This has been discussed previously, by the by, if somebody wants to dig up links.) The key idea is to recognize that GNS describes agenda behavior in terms of player choice, not player psychology. Not all choices are agenda-significant, because they don't all address an agenda. For example, the choice of wearing blue socks to the session probably won't address any of the creative agendas, even when it's a choice. The crux is that we wouldn't call the choice to pick blue socks a choice expressing all three agendas, even if it's not clearly a choice for one of them.

This holds for your gamist example, too, Steve: the creative agenda of a player is not ever interpreted from his psychology, so we never need to consider whether he chooses to win because of gam, nar or sim priorities. If winning satisfies all of those priorities, that just means that the choice to win isn't a GNS-significant choice. You've opted to characterize this situation as the player holding all three agendas at once, but I think that that's psychologically inexact; a player in such a situation doesn't really have to make a choice between his priorities, so he naturally keeps the options open and doesn't commit to any agenda. So rather than saying that he's both gamist and narrativist, I'd say that he's neither at that moment. He's just doing base Exploration.

The real agenda situations come up when you have multiple options that exclude each other. These are the situations where you cannot express two agendas at once, because you can't pick both options. They are also the only situations relevant for GNS, because GNS is only about considerations of agenda discordance. The stuff that all folks can agree about, that's Exploration level basics. We're at the agenda level only when you can make "wrong" choices.

So, in summation: you can't express all GNS agendas at once, because if you do, your action is base Exploration and acceptable for all roleplaying. Nobody's going to complain about your socks at the table, because nobody has an agenda against them.

This made me think, though, about the case of expressing two agendas while excluding only one. I can imagine how this is possible in single instances, and it's certainly a GNS significant moment because it excludes that one agenda. Even then I think that one of the agendas is more important for the player psychologically, but as I just explained, psychology has little to do with GNS analysis. So perhaps combining agendas in a single instance of play is possible in observation? I don't know. Even in that case another instance of play could come up and require choice between those two agendas, so incoherence would still be possible.

[Sean]

Ralph - do you see any difference between 'exploration without an agenda' and 'incoherent play'? How does your view relate to Freitag's 'Zilchplay'? Just curious.

Melinglor wrote:

I scanned through my post and I don't think I ever caslled Sim "negative." What I did say was "Simulationism is defined by the absence of other elements, more than the presence of Exploration." But even if I had used the "N" word, I would stand by that as it's not a pejorative in this sense, and not Sim itself that's "negative"; rather, its focus is defined negatively by whaT it doesn't include. In a way, Sim is "Exploration plus nothing." in contrast to Narr and Gam's "Exploration plus this."

You mistake my issue.

I think that while this is a correct characterization of the Sim CA, it's misleading outisde the context of an appreciation of what Creative Agenda is and the way it's supported by the social interactions between the group. The particular way it misleads people is by making them think that Beeg Horseshoe or something like it is true. The Ron Edwards/M.J. Young argument to the effect that 'decisions not to prioritize this other stuff' make Sim amount to a CA even though there's no unique isolable positive element, is in my view similarly misleading, though if it were sound (as opposed to merely valid, which it is) it would indeed be sufficient to establish Sim as a separate CA.

Simulationist play occurs when a play-group's overall 'focus', in the sense of the stuff they mutually seek out and mutually support and reward one another for seeking out and exploring, centrally involves exploring itself, rather than doing something with the exploration.

Simulationist play is the kind of play that fulfills a Sim CA. If your group's play-goal is to explore, and you understand that consciously or unconsciously well enough to support it and to choose or tailor a game system to support it, then you're likely to be fulfilled by this kind of play.

This kind of play exists, is common, and is completely functional for groups that enjoy it. So there's nothing 'second class' or 'unequal' about a CA that seeks it out; and it's not 'default roleplaying' as you said in your initial post.

The fundamental basis of the Big Model is that there's this group of people together talking and interacting. All the concepts need to be understood in terms of that.  I'm of the opinion that the recurring animadversions against Simulationism are artifacts of the structure of the theory when what the theory's about gets temporarily forgotten.

Or to put it another way: Exploration is what you're doing when you roleplay, within the context of the social interaction (which however is a product of the individuals making up that social group, which leads us into one of the thorniest metaphysical problems of the social sciences, but let's not go there). Your CA is what you're doing with it, what you want to get out of it, your goal or focus. That CA is going to be satisfied by a certain kind of play. Play whose social and exploratory rewards come out of an intense focus on particular aspects of exploration, without getting into Step on Up or Story now, is Simulationist play. So I want to say that even though the CA itself may be 'defined by an absence' in terms of the theory, in terms of the kind of play that satisfies it the rewards and reinforcements are just as present, real, etc. as those of any other CA.

Call of Cthulhu in high school provided the most enjoyable Simulationist play I ever experienced. We played very close to the Lovecraft source material, which we were all reading, in between taking that cheap-ass 'Necronomicon' down to the graveyard to try to summon ghosts and the like, and every adventure was engineered to kill or drive insane most or all of the party, and everyone knew they were going to die, and it was all good, because the goal was to explore color and a certain kind of 'story' and to scare ourselves a little with it (the 'what if' pleasure of exploration).

It's interesting though that one of the reasons we experienced CoC as profoundly liberating at the time in that group was that most of that group's prior play had been pretty gamist insofar as it was not incoherent. It was really good for that group of guys at that time to just sit around and play a game where Step on Up was more or less completely turned off. But now I'm drifting, so I'll sign off.

[Sean]

If you have two or more CA going in the same play-session firing more or less at random, that's called Incoherent play. Incoherence sometimes leads to painful play-experiences, including boredom, and sometimes does not.

There's also a thing where you Drift in an organized way between CA. A Champions game (one GM, me and one other player) was like this. Big focus on exploration most of the time, punctuated by battles in which naked Step on Up was the focus of everything. I think this was pretty deliberate with the three of us: the GM in this game had created a really interesting and elaborate setting that all three of us were interested in developing and exploring, but periodically we needed to beat our chests and yell. Because the three of us had been playing together off and on for like a decade by the time this game rolled around, we knew each other really well, so managed drift between Sim and Gam was pretty functional for us. This is the closest experience I have a 'supporting mode', but it's still not 'congruent play', which doesn't exist, but I digress.

So there's plain Incoherence and there's Drift and there's managed Drift. These are what 'expressing two CA at once' come to.

The 'instances of play' thing is interesting but also hard and confusing and I don't think we really know completely how to talk about it yet. In one sense play is obviously not 'made up out of its instances' in the way that a house is made out of bricks, yet in another sense there's nothing else for it to be made up of.

When you listen to music you might think of notes and passages as 'instances' of the music, and in a way you'd be right. But our experience of listening to music crucially involves also the anticipation of where the music is going, as when e.g. Beethoven plays around returning to the chord he started with for a long time without actually getting back there.

Ron's analogy to improvisational jazz is thus very apt, because in roleplaying we're working with this anticipation all the time, but we're also making the music as we go. So the 'instances of play' are forward-looking in the sense that 'instances of music' are, but we're creating the forward that they're going to. Together, as a group.

[Eero Tuovinen]

The 'instances of play' thing is interesting but also hard and confusing and I don't think we really know completely how to talk about it yet. In one sense play is obviously not 'made up out of its instances' in the way that a house is made out of bricks, yet in another sense there's nothing else for it to be made up of.

Actually, Ron had this interesting idea at some point, I don't know if it's current: an "instance of play" always equates to a cycle of the reward mechanism, whatever it is. So you can't analyze play modally without seeing the rewards the player gets (or doesn't get) from the action, and if you take a big enough chunk of play, you might accidentally have multiple reward cycles, in which case there's potentially several GNS modes evident in the chunk of play you're considering.

Anyway, I agree with Sean about those session-wide concepts like incoherence and such. Certainly on that level the theory describes boredom and pain, caused by not getting your agenda fix. I'm just not sure how well that translates to the hypothetical instance of play catering to several modes. Could be possible.

Then again, considering those reward mechanisms... can a reward mechanism award currency that's valuable in several modes? Conseivably, because the most common reward is perhaps generally increased power over where the game goes, like in Universalis. Or is the reward cycle only ended after you've spent those reward coins? Are those Universalis coins even agenda neutral rewards? I could imagine an argument that the method of achieving the reward colors it's value. Gamist not appreciating a bonus gained by playing "wrong", or something. Dunno, just blabbing.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Clarifications, speaking as current Forge participant rather than essay-author:

1. Eero, you have described my current thinking: the unit of play is a reward cycle. How that relates to sessions/scenarios will vary, but "moments" of play (i.e. a particular announcement, sentence, etc) are far too brief for CA-based analysis.

2. The "absence" concept of Sim is no longer my view - I now am considering Sim to be based on the input/output principle, that actual play is essentially a celebratory and confirmatory act toward some starting material or ideas. ("Genre" is not a valid paraphrase for this concept; I'm talking about what a group might do with a genre; also people might be interested in causal principles rather than genre trappings)

Best,
Ron

[komradebob]

Ron:
It seems like your ideas have evolved over time. Is there any chance that you could be convinced to do a "State of the Theory 2005" essay?

[Ron Edwards]

NO. Sorry man, but the guy who wrote the essays is frozen in time with those essays, and the guy who just posted is me, today. I tried to lay out why I'm doing it that way in the forum sticky.

Another way to look at it is that the essays say what they say, and as of now, I'm just another guy who continues to think about them, in the same boat as the rest of you.

One last point: some of what I'm saying today is what I meant to say in the essays but didn't have the words for it, and some of what I'm saying today is altogether new stuff. Which is which, I am not sure.

Back to the topic.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

Thank you, Ralph, for calling attention to the thread Clarifying Simulationism; I've repeated the link because for some reason the other link opened to the third page, and I (rather immodestly perhaps) think my opening statement on the first page is important to the discussion.

Melinglor: all simplifications of the model are flawed in some way, but most are useful in another way. I'm going to offer a simplification that might be useful.

[*]Gamism is exploration of all things with emphasis on meeting challenges and proving your ability to the other participants.[*]Narrativism is exploration of all things with emphasis on creating theme by addressing premise toward the creation of a story that has meaning to all the participants.[*]Simulationism is the exploration of all things with emphasis on the discovery/creation of new facets and unexplored aspects of the shared imagined space, new ways to combine information that yields new information.[/list:u]
Emphasis, in all cases, means simultaneously "that which the individual player finds fun" and "that which is encouraged by the gaming group through social reinforcement as the correct way to play". If these two are not the same, you have dysfunction--the player is trying to have fun doing something that the rest of the group regards as inappropriate.

Gamists will make discoveries and may even create themes; that's not what the game is about.

Narrativists may well rise to challenges and certainly will make discoveries; again, that's not what the game is about.

Simulationists almost certainly will face the occasional challenge and may well address premises which create themes; that is not what the game is about.

And like Ron, I think that the idea of Sim being "decisions not to prioritize this other stuff" does not represent my view exactly, although I can see it having been a way of describing my past statements. Narrativism and gamism are equally "decisions not to prioritize this other stuff". In all cases, this is by default--in the same way that deciding to go to Disneyworld in Florida is inherently a decision not to go to Disneyworld in California, in that the two objectives are (at one moment in time) mutually exclusive. Yes, in deciding to pursue exploration toward discovery (simulationism) you decide not to pursue theme or challenge; but the other agenda do the same in excluding each other and simulationism when they prioritize their emphases.

I hope this is helpful.

Footnotes:

The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast is a phrase used around here to refer to the conflict in rules texts which claim that a player fully controls his character while the referee fully controls the story. Details of that are anticipated in an upcoming Places to Go, People to Be article on theory, but you'd have to ask GBSteve when that's likely to hit the web.

After that, the three-episode series will conclude with a look at Creative Agenda, and I hope that together the set will provide a reasonably good primer on the current state of the theory, at least as I understand it. (The first, System and the Shared Imagined Space, is available, and covers the Lumpley Principle, credibility, stance, and authority, touching briefly on ritual and social contract. I hope you find them helpful.

--M. J. Young

[GB Steve]

Eero, you're post cleared up a lot of things for me. So the Creative Agendas are defined as being incompatible. Fair enough. I suppose then that the difficult part is to say what they actually are in such a way that this property holds. So that everything can be put into one of three boxes.

Next you say that there isn't always a GNS Creative Agenda. So these three boxes don't work for all play. Some play is outside the GNS partitioning. It's exploring without an agenda. Is it possible that most play in some groups is like this?

I'm also not sure about the agenda discordance. I thought GNS had moved beyond being a diagnostic tool. It's certainly not talked about that way by many people.

Sean talks about incoherence. Whilst I can see that creative agenda should be exclusive for one player, I'm not sure that players in the same group having different agendas is necessarily destructive. Unless the term 'incoherent' just means 'having different agendas' rather than the more usual indication that there is a problem. I'm sure there might be a problem, but not necessarily so.

We've got a powergamer in our group. Everyone is aware of his agenda and the games, the succesful ones, are couched in such a way that pander to this agenda without destroying the agendas of others. This seems to be what is called 'drift' or 'managed drift'. However that seems to suppose that the creative agenda of the group is unified but changes, whereas I can still see the case for different agendas managed to avoid destroying each others agenda. I think both things are possible and the reason for this is that whilst the SIS is shared, the sharing does not occur in any objective way. Each player is responsible for their own approach to the SIS, through their creative agenda.

Reward cycles I'm a bit confused about. These are when a payout is made in the currency of the game? Easily definable for MLwM but rather more difficult for other more complex games. And not necessarily relevant to the creative agenda, especially if your into Sim.

Maybe incoherence is more about rewards. I can see several CA existing in the same group, as long as each gets the appropriate reward. There is definitely scope for problems if that is not the case.

Looking at MJ Young's linked post suggest to me that it's not always easy to tell in which box players are situated, especially sim ones. Not in the least because the creative agenda is private an only accessible to others through the choices the player makes.

As for the next 101, from which I really should have remembered the "impossible thing", we're aiming for a pre-Origins issue which gives us a couple of weeks.

[Joel P. Shempert]

I think the horseshoe idea shows that you can have two agendas at the same time. This is common in the real world. I think Bill Clinton called it compartmentalisation, and what about the kids, career, having it all debate? So why not in roleplaying.

Why not indeed? This is precisely what I'm wondering, and part of finding out involves examining minutia like how CAs break down decision by decision, gasme event by game event. Hence my question about how often the play goal (Step on Up or Story Now, at least, since the "Right to Dream" continues constantly as long as Exploration takes place) needs to rear its ugly ugly head for that CA to truly be called the priority for the session (or whatever).

Unfortunately as Euro says the primary use of the Theory is addressing Incompatibility. So either A) you and I are missing something, B) The Theory's all wet 'cause the incompatibility doesn't exist after all, or C) the incompatibility is there, but is a little more complex than "There's G, there's N, and there's S, and they don't get along." I'm leaning toward (C). Just not sure where all the pieces fit yet.

You mistake my issue.

This kind of play exists, is common, and is completely functional for groups that enjoy it. So there's nothing 'second class' or 'unequal' about a CA that seeks it out; and it's not 'default roleplaying' as you said in your initial post.

I dont think I have mistaken your issue; you seemed to take "negative" as a pejorative term on my part, and as shown here you're still doing it. I'm not trying to make Simulationism into a "Second CLass CItizen," or demote it or belittle it somehow. My point is simply that Sim seems to be "Exploration Plus Nothing Else", and is thus defined negatively, i.e. "not this." This isn't a bad thing, this isn't a good thing, it just is. And it's in relation to the other CAs. My social activities are defined by, for instance, an absence of smoking pot, or listening to country music, in relation to social groups that DO smoke pot or listen to country music. How you feel about that will depend on what you personally feel about pot and country. But don't think I'm marginalizing or belittling Sim. If anything I'm trying to comprehend where my Sim leanings fit into my largely (I believe) Narr priorities. ONce I've got this sorted out I'll probably pick apart my Gam leanings similarly.

Play whose social and exploratory rewards come out of an intense focus on particular aspects of exploration, without getting into Step on Up or Story now, is Simulationist play. So I want to say that even though the CA itself may be 'defined by an absence' in terms of the theory, in terms of the kind of play that satisfies it the rewards and reinforcements are just as present, real, etc. as those of any other CA.

See, you even used the phrase "without getting into" in defining Sim. :)

Anyway, as I said I'm not knocking Sim, and of course I acknowledge that it's "real." I'm just questioning its nature and position. A Genus is just as real as a Phylum.

The particular way it misleads people is by making them think that Beeg Horseshoe or something like it is true.

Well, I guess we know how you feel about the Beeg Horseshoe. A slightly prejudicial way to phrase that claim. Now I really have to investigate the Horseshoe ASAP and see what all the fuss is about. :)

Incidentally, given that several folks have informed me that my post is a restatement of the Horseshoe, I imagine that this remark can fairly be read, "I think your ideas on this subject are wrong." Fair enough. It'd be nice to know why you think the Horseshoe is rubbish, though. Maybe it'll become clear when I read it.

I now am considering Sim to be based on the input/output principle, that actual play is essentially a celebratory and confirmatory act toward some starting material or ideas.

I can't speak for your "Absence principle," Ron, but this in no way contradicts mine. A thing can be defined negatively by one attribute and positively by another. e.g. A Tennis ball is green. A tennis ball is also not square. If I say "A tennis ball is not square," and ro reply, "wait man, it's green," I have no response but "What does that have to do with its relationship to squares?

Simulationism is the exploration of all things with emphasis on the discovery/creation of new facets and unexplored aspects of the shared imagined space, new ways to combine information that yields new information.

Now this is a concept I can really dig, I think: Sim is emphasis on discovery, not Exploration. That one little word makes a lot of difference. It answers the "what you're getting out of it" quandary that is really the point of the question "why do you Explore?" (i.e. Roleplay). And yeah, it's present even when not emphasized; the most childish and unsophisticate group will still be making (or confirming) Discoveries like "Dwarves are smelly and rude," "ELves are prissy and gay," Halflings are dirty sneaks," etc. etc. even when the point for them is really just exp, loot, showing off, et al.

The Knights of the Dinner Table comic is a beautiful example of this phenomenon at work, in this case a group of overbearing Hard Core Gamists running roubhshod over the carefully perpared plans of what I would call a SIm leaning GM, and a lone mostly Narr player. The players listen to all the description and dialogue the GM lays down, but only to spot threats or opportunities, often pouncing on one when there really isn't any. There may be "Discovery" going on, about the imagined world, and its Peoples, politics, and history, but it's not what the players are looking for at all.

(Aside: I find it telling that the Knights use the term "flavor text" to describe description that isn't (or isn't percieved to be) tactically important. I suppose this comes from the convention of running a pre-made module and reading an actual text to intro the adventure. But it also betrays a deep-seated feeling that all that filligree is so much fluff to get out of the way so the ass-whuppin' can commence. It's there; it's just ignored or endured.

Overall this construct, "Simplification" or no, makes a lot of sense to me; the only possible chink I see in its armor is that Gam and Narr goals could also be called "Discovery," mostly in a "find out what you're made of" sense, either how you come through in a fight or what touch choices you make when the chips are down, respectively. I guess the trick would be defining Dsicovery as a specific jargon term such that it excludes those two emphases. YOu almost seem to have that in your "unexplored aspects of the shared imagined space" phrase, except that a character's ass-kickery or personal moral fiber ARE part of the SIS.

ANyway, I think that's about all the brainwork I have in me tonight.

Peace,

[Joel P. Shempert]

Hey, just a quick addendum:

I had a look at the Beeg Horseshoe info and I think I know why everyone thinks I'm devaluing Simulationism. In the very fisrt post on the Horsehoe thread, Jared said "Simulation doesn't exist."

Well, I ain't Jered, and I ain't never heerd of no Horsehoe till you fellers pointed it out to me. SO rest asured, That's not where I'm headed with this, 'kay?

'Night.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Why does everybody call me Euro all the time? Is 'eu' somehow more common in English than 'ee'? Funny thing, that. I'm not currency, even when I'm current.

Eero, you're post cleared up a lot of things for me. So the Creative Agendas are defined as being incompatible. Fair enough. I suppose then that the difficult part is to say what they actually are in such a way that this property holds. So that everything can be put into one of three boxes.

Three or more boxes. This is how I've understood the logical structure of the theory, anyway. Ron will correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure. "Creative agendas" as a level of the big model includes in principle all priorities a player might have for roleplaying as activity. For this we do not need GNS classification, the big model works fine without pondering different possible agendas. The classification only becomes significant when we notice that some of those priorities do not mesh well together. So you could say that the definition of GNS requires the categories to be defined in such a way that they prove to be incompatible. At least, I see no other pressing reason to differentiate.

Consider: couldn't I describe the CA level of the big model in many other ways, as well? I could, for example, list the areas of focus that different types of sim players concentrate on. So there's settingism, characterism, colorism and so on. But that isn't GNS while being a valid characterization of the big model CA level, because these distinctions do not hold the useful properties that GNS has: no certain incompatibility between the modes, and lots of shared reward mechanisms instead. So what makes GNS useful compared to these alternative characterizations is the actual importance that it holds in actual play, in our experience. That importance springs out of human psychology, mainly, so the GNS modes correspond neatly to some major psychological drives that people have as regards art and games, two activities rpgs consist of.

Next you say that there isn't always a GNS Creative Agenda. So these three boxes don't work for all play. Some play is outside the GNS partitioning. It's exploring without an agenda. Is it possible that most play in some groups is like this?

Well, this is where the other agendas come up. Vincent and Ben Lehman have written lately about these things called mechanical agendas and social agendas (and I remember Clinton saying something about psychological agenda at some point, but that's probably the same as the social agenda). The point is that nothing particularly requires a player in a game to have a creative agenda, he might be there because he wants to hit on the GM. This just means that the person isn't properly roleplaying, because the roleplaying just happens to be where the real action is at, regardless of it being roleplaying. The social agenda guy could just as easily be at the arcade, if his heart's desire was there.

A surprising amount of play in my experience is fueled by a social agenda. In my current group of teenagers, for example, I estimate that 50% of the boys play just because of friendship and to have something to do. They don't care about anything specific to the game, as long as it doesn't cause actively not-nice feelings.

Now, there's still another angle. Instead of looking at full formed player agenda, check out what happens on the level of individual decision. This is mainly the level below the reward cycles, and here's where lots of exploration happens. Remember how in the big model we have the exploration level, and the CAs are under it? What this means is that there is lots of parts of play that are definitely roleplaying (and not just socializing), but that don't have weight for creative agendas. This is the "exploration without agenda" that you asked about. (Don't mix this with ephemera and techinques; they're small pieces of play that don't per se have a creative agenda, but I'm not talking about them.)

Consider this example:
GM: OK, play starts at a tavern.
What has the GM done here? Is the above utterance CA-important? Is it part of any reward cycles? I think it is part of one, because the GM won't be getting a game without setting the scene. However, assuming a game where the GM always sets scenes, this is also a very agenda-free utterance. It's just exploration that doesn't particularly activate any creative agenda. The decision to open the scene is just necessary, bare minimum for roleplaying, not it's purpose.

Is it possible to play like this most of the time? I don't think so, because the "general exploration" activities all share the property of being agenda-neutral. This would mean that for you to stay clear of the agendas, you could never
1) try to better your position
2) refine exploration beyond bare minimum
3) make story-important decisions
Such play would be extremely hampered. It would consist mostly of die rolling or other mechanical activity outside the SIS, and there wouldn't be any appreciable content. It would be mostly like some teenage jocks playing around with D&D books without clear understanding what they're doing, while waiting for the match to start in 15 minutes.

I'm also not sure about the agenda discordance. I thought GNS had moved beyond being a diagnostic tool. It's certainly not talked about that way by many people.

Well, it's used for game design, too. What else?

Sean talks about incoherence. Whilst I can see that creative agenda should be exclusive for one player, I'm not sure that players in the same group having different agendas is necessarily destructive. Unless the term 'incoherent' just means 'having different agendas' rather than the more usual indication that there is a problem. I'm sure there might be a problem, but not necessarily so.

Dunno, theorywise incoherence is just having several creative agendas. For actual play, however, the destructivity of this depends on several factors:
- How strong the creative agendas are? Are you content with hanging out, or do you want to play world-class sessions?
- How tied to their agendas the players are? Are you willing and able to switch now and then?
- How the game enforces player input and reactions? Can you just shunt different agendas aside, or do you have to address that input, too?
If the players are just hanging out, everybody has a social agenda that's much stronger than the creative one, then I don't think that incoherence is much of a problem. Similarly, if the medium of play allows you to choose what input to acknowledge (like a socially dysfunctional gaming group, where you ostracize folks who don't play like they "should"), you can just ignore play that's incompatible with your own current goals.

The reason for incoherence being a problem generally is that many people are in roleplaying for the game, and thus want the best possible experience. They have a strong creative agenda. I myself have many times thought that every roleplayer must have a really strong dream of perfect play they cling to, how else could they stand the bother of organizing sessions and all the other hassle. There's so much easier hobbies with better chick-to-guy quotients, why bother if you don't care about it?

Also, note that generally a game with more personal contact between players is the better game. This is a separate theory topic, but the fact tends to cause situations where there is less and less room for incoherence when the quality of games and player goals increases. Many Forge games, for instance, have little to not any resistance to incoherence, they require that all players dig the game and play as it's supposed to go. Polaris, for example.

So it's not impossible to play with incoherence and have a good time, for any variety of reasons. What is fun and what's not is pretty subjective. There's just this tendency for gamers to get discontent in the long run if their gaming isn't improving. And when you get to high enough levels of game... incoherence frequently becomes the greatest hurdle. It's like playing in a band, again: when you're just doing it as a hobby in your garage, Matt's little brother may as well be the drummer. But if you want to get serious about it, you better get somebody who can use two drumsticks at a time!

Reward cycles I'm a bit confused about. These are when a payout is made in the currency of the game? Easily definable for MLwM but rather more difficult for other more complex games. And not necessarily relevant to the creative agenda, especially if your into Sim.

Rewards need not be mechanical, remember. For the great majority of sim games the main reward is respect, social authority, and getting your contribution into the SIS. For some games it's the ability to create more stuff (which it comes to with the respect thing too, of course), like in Universalis.

Reward cycles are an interesting topic, one I would like our gurus to write more about. My own understanding is spotty, but as far as I understand it, the reward cycles can be really short or long in real-time terms. Consider two examples:
1) I open my mouth and describe a cool maneuver in Exalted, and get bonus dice. Or, equally, I describe the maneuver just because I want to show how cool my character is.
2) I buy the wand of lightning in D&D, because I know that it'll be needed down the road.
In the first example the reward cycle is very short, just a matter of the GM handing you the dice. In the second example your reward comes when you actually get to use the wand of lightning, proving that your investment was solid. So the lenght of investment can be very short or very long.

What makes this interesting is the idea that CAs are connected to the reward cycles. We only need to consider the kind of reward I want to gain by my action, and we can find the CA. This is the "instance of play" from the older material.

Maybe incoherence is more about rewards. I can see several CA existing in the same group, as long as each gets the appropriate reward. There is definitely scope for problems if that is not the case.

As I outlined above, this is possible if you aren't bothered by other players playing pointlessly. The problem is, the CA rewards are in great part social. If the other players do not acknowledge your superiority in gam, or care about your elaborate character journal in sim, or even understand why you'd break character and betray them in nar, then it isn't very rewarding. In great majority of cases the reward system breaks down when the other players are disinterested enough.

Looking at MJ Young's linked post suggest to me that it's not always easy to tell in which box players are situated, especially sim ones. Not in the least because the creative agenda is private an only accessible to others through the choices the player makes.

Exactly!

[Sean]

Hey Melinglor,

I feel like you completely ignored every substantive point I made in my posts while harping on something I agree and agreed was a non-issue, so I'm bowing out of the thread.

You've got an exceptional grasp on the Big Model for a newcomer though - far better than mine was at a similar point in time - and I have no doubt that you'll get through this stuff. Figuring out where Exploration leaves off and Simulationism picks up is one of the trickiest things in the theory, but I expect you'll manage.

Best,

Sean

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Steve, you wrote:

Sean talks about incoherence. Whilst I can see that creative agenda should be exclusive for one player, I'm not sure that players in the same group having different agendas is necessarily destructive. Unless the term 'incoherent' just means 'having different agendas' rather than the more usual indication that there is a problem. I'm sure there might be a problem, but not necessarily so.

You may have missed my many posts about this or not processed the point at the time. The argument goes as follows:

Incoherent play is more vulnerable to dysfunction than coherent play.

No one is saying that incoherent play is doomed, bad, wrong, or stupid. I am suggesting that it carries risks for "not have fun" (which is what dsyfunctional means) that coherent play doesn't carry.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

Hey, just a quick addendum:

I had a look at the Beeg Horseshoe info and I think I know why everyone thinks I'm devaluing Simulationism. In the very fisrt post on the Horsehoe thread, Jared said "Simulation doesn't exist."

Well, I ain't Jered, and I ain't never heerd of no Horsehoe till you fellers pointed it out to me. SO rest asured, That's not where I'm headed with this, 'kay?

'Night.

No, that's not it. The "negativism" issue persisted long after Jared. Check out my Beeg Horseshoe Revisited for something more like how you think. I think even in there, and later than that, there was still this worry about sim being relegated to secondary status.

The idea is that if sim is, in any way, not it's own positive agenda, if it's in any way merely a rejection of other priorities (to a larger extent than all of the modes being defined as merely mutually exclusive), then it can be seen as a retraction from these other things, and therefore based on fear, or something. I could go on and on with what the sim proponents will tell you the negativity is intended to imply.

You just have to realize that defining it negatively at all is going to get the sim defensive crowd up in arms at what they might percieve (however wrongly it might be) as a relegation of sim to second class status. Heck, there are some who would say that merely by putting it on another axis as I do that this relegates sim to second class status.

So realize that it's nothing personal, but a standard reaction to the sorts of notions that you're proposing. Put another way, try to put a positive spin on it the next time you make the statement. If you can't then maybe they have a point.

Mike