model proposition

[contracycle]

Ron, that is probably the most clear and concise break
Given the definitions of N and S as they exist in the GNS model, there is no such space, and instances of what is being called "dramatism" (once broken down) can be seen as being clearly N or clearly S.

That describes the problem pretty well.

What is to be gained by adding D?  Is there some deeper insight into the nature of gaming that can only be gleaned if we expand our thinking to include D as a seperate entity rather than including D as part of N and S? If there is, then its an avenue definitely worth pursueing further.  If there isn't...then I'd have to ask "what's the motivation behind the desire to add D"?

Its an observable behaviour

[contracycle]

Hi Gareth,
My call is that saying "story-oriented decision" is just too damn vague in the first place. It can't be both ways: either the person's decision is

I agree.  I think there is MORE than one form of story orientation.

So screw the GM and illusion and whether "story is going on around" the character or not. Either the player perceives Narrativist Premise happening and makes a Narrativist decision to address that Premise, or he doesn't, in which case he is "being the character" as the priority. GNS is about real people's actual decisions and goals during play.

Why do you assume (and I use the word deliberately) that because the player is not addressing or aware of premise, they are therefore In Character?  Please justify this leap.

(b) There exists a values-based Premise: which has more value, selfishness or the needs of others? And an action answers it, as a priority: the needs of others - hence, creating Theme.

Meaningless; this action may have been totally at odds with the premise which is the topic of the present story.  Are we now to construct a different premise and different theme for every action, every decision?  Such logic could be applied to any action or decision based on any sense of values, which is nearly every action or decision.  

We are discussing players who A) do NOT want any knowledge of premise, theme, or hints of the future, and yet B) wish to contribute to the storyness of the story - NOT author the story.  

[Side note. It seems to me that people are way too hung up on the "consciousness" issue, as if Narrativist play has to be in some kind of non-experiential third-person at all times, as if in-character Author stance were not possible - when it is, as far as I can tell, observed very often as the most satisfying kind of Narrativist play.]

How can you be cpnscoius of theme, premise, working toward climax otherwise?  you must be thinking aboutb the story as a thing, with its own existance, during the process of creation.  Lots of people find this challenging to the UUC stances, others like me merely find such an exercise uninteresting.  Thus, the awareness and deleberateness with which it is done seem to me to be the salient points.

2) If this decision is basically irrelevant to the other players' emotions and concerns, we have ... marginally functional play, basically a hybrid that can at least walk (if not run or fly). Again, the others don't care, but they also don't mind that this player does and acts upon it. The player is making a Narrativist decision that more-or-less "abides" within the game - it might even be scooped up and made important to the GM's story later - but the character's actions had no thematic impact to anyone but that character's player.

Exactly so.  I submit this is not "mariginally functional" narratavism, but fully functional dramatism, and widely played as such by real live RPGers.

[Valamir]

What is to be gained by adding D?  Is there some deeper insight into the nature of gaming that can only be gleaned if we expand our thinking to include D as a seperate entity rather than including D as part of N and S? If there is, then its an avenue definitely worth pursueing further.  If there isn't...then I'd have to ask "what's the motivation behind the desire to add D"?

Its an observable behaviour

GNS doesn't model behavior.  It models decisions.  However since behavior is nothing more than a series of decisions over time GNS can be used to analyze behavior.

Over the course of any game session there will numerous decisions made by each participant.  Each one of those decisions will be either G, N, or S.  If we were to then look at the pattern of decisions made over the course of the game session we can begin to analyse roleplaying on the player and game level.

This is the key reason why there is no D in GNS.  D is a GAME level construct, not a decision level construct.

What you are describing as D, as an observable behavior and as a "fully functional" play style I believe is well explained by GNS as follows.

Dramatism:  A game in which both S decisions and N decisions are being made, but where the players are limiting themselves to S decisions and leaving the majority (or the entirety) of the N decisions to the GM.

I believe this definition addresses all of the characteristics of Dramatist play you've described, and is in direct contract to Narrativist play which requires the N decisions to be shared among all of the participants.

This is actually the direction I'd like to see GNS discussions go.  I'm with Clinton...stop hacking at the model (I've been pretty guilty of that myself) it has obtained a state where it is functional (if perhaps not perfect) as long as one uses it to describe decisions.  I am now more interested in seeing the model applied.

The above is a particularly powerful way of applying GNS, to describe games and players by looking at the pattern of GNS decisions that are actually made.

[Mike Holmes]

I think, Ralph, that the point of looking at models that include Dramatism is not particularly to challenge GNS as such.

The point of GNS is to avoid conflicts. So, the player motivation is what we are trying to serve. GNS says that the way to satisfy a player is to look at how they make decisions, atomically. Which I have found utility with, previously.

I think that what Gareth's model is looking to do, however, is to simply approach the problem of motivation from a diffferent angel, and to consider behavior, which as you point out is decisions made over time. A set of decisions may be looked at differently than each atomically. The GNDS theory would state that to satisfy player motivations you consider their behavior over time. Then you apply mechanics that will satisfy the player that plays with such behavior. This makes sense to me.

However, I what I haven't seen is Gareth's theory take on a truely coherent form yet, or one that seems particularly useful. Part of the problem is the assigned categories and how they are determined. They seem quite a bit more loose than, say, the atomic decisions of GNS. And we have yet to consider any extended ramifications of such a theory (such as how to apply design to it).

That's not to say that I think that such speculation is useless, however. I think the theory just needs some work. It's not an attack on GNS. It's its own theory, and one that might some day be useful. And if Gareth want's to ponder it here, I can think of no better place. Perhaps it should be in the theory forum as it is not GNS, but it has obvious similarities so it might as well be here.

Mike

[Mytholder]

What you are describing as D, as an observable behavior and as a "fully functional" play style I believe is well explained by GNS as follows.

Dramatism:  A game in which both S decisions and N decisions are being made, but where the players are limiting themselves to S decisions and leaving the majority (or the entirety) of the N decisions to the GM.

I believe this definition addresses all of the characteristics of Dramatist play you've described, and is in direct contract to Narrativist play which requires the N decisions to be shared among all of the participants.

But the player decisions aren't Sim decisions. They're story-based. They're dramatic. They're not as strongly "narrativist" as a decision made with conscious awareness of Premise or whatever, but they're very far from the deep immersion/strict actor stance of Sim...

[Ron Edwards]

Gareth (contracycle),

I have four points, both of which are compatible with the posts by Ralph and Mike above.

1) The hypothetical player described by Marco and described further by Gareth (mytholder) was the topic of my discussion that you quoted from. The distinction between "player wanting" and "player playing the character wanting" was made very clearly by Gareth (m), especially. My dichotomy, which you are criticizing as a "leap," applies only to this example, not to all play of any kind. In the context of the example, it is not a leap or assumption at all. Please don't extrapolate my points beyond the questions that they address.

2) GNS is about individual decisions. You are including, by your own words, Dramatism as a combination of diverse sorts of decisions, themselves each described by GNS. I think this level-jump, in which I am discussing individual decisions and you are discussing combinations of decisions, is precisely the problem.

As I stated in my essay, a given group of people may in theory display a wide variety of GNS decisions through the course of play. I also stated that some combinations are apparently functional, and even described a few of them.

It is no challenge to the points of my essay to assign a name to any or some of these combinations. If you want to call one of them "Dramatism," it's no big deal, as any and all points of the essay, including the three-way distinction among GNS categories at the individual-decision level, remain unchanged.

In other words, what you refer to as a "problem" in reference to Ralph's post, is only a problem insofar as you confound the individual-decision level with the group-as-a-whole level.

3) I have noted in the past that you perceive Premise to be an imposed issue upon the players, and I think this misperception is causing a lot of problems in discussion. Here, you state that the player's insertion of Premise via play may somehow disrupt "the" Premise. You describe a chaotic situation in which everyone is Premise-ing left and right ... and I have terrible news for you - that's right.

That's exactly right. Everyone, via individual instances of play, may be altering Premise left and right. Group Premise is an outcome, a merger if you will, of all these little Premises. If we have compatibility among them, we have functional play. That's an "if." Achieving that "if" is what the essay is about.

I am describing all of role-playing, in this point. This is what people do; there is no "the" Premise which everyone "must" cleave to. The developed Premise of a coherent role-playing experience arises from compatible decisions and actions during play. Once such a thing arises and is perceived to any degree, it may of course feed back upon subsequent individual decisions.

3) We evidently disagree about this "consciousness" issue at a very basic level. In my view, if we begin to talk about what people are thinking while they do things, and use that as some sort of indicator of the quality/nature of what they do, we move straight into a zone of debate with no data, no observations, no recognizable patterns, and no value. Again, since I think we simply disagree regarding these aspects of the mind and the "self," I don't expect much value to arise from debating the point.

If anyone really wants to do so, and if they can refrain from sophomoric challenges of "Oh yeah? Then ..." then they can contact me privately.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

I'm not really seeing the point of your post Mike.  No one had labeled CC's efforts as an attack on GNS or any such thing.

There is this behavior out there identified as Dramatist.  I'm not Anti-Dramatist, at all.  In fact, if you peruse back to the top of the thread you'll see me commented at my own struggles to determine where this Dramatist idea might fit within GNS.  

No matter how logical it seemed I couldn't see anything in Dramatism that could be identified as a motivation for making decisions that was distinct from the motivations already available.

The several exchanges that we've had since have solidified for me that the term Dramatist refers more to the outcome of how the game is played than actual decisions that are made.  The last post hit it home for me.  Dramatist play is a BEHAVIOR.

GNS looks at single decisions (or clusters of decisions for context as discussed recently in another thread), while behavior is a string of decisions.

Thus we do not need to account for Dramatist play with a new theory that changes GNS to GNDS...D doesn't belong at that level.  D belongs at the next level up in scale.  The level that we rarely get to because we've been too busy slogging in the mud.  D decisions are really just S decisions and N decisions, which is the point of Ron's posts above.  However, that is a little bit disatisfying because the play FEELS different and distinct.  My above post, I think, explains quite nicely why the play fees different even though its built with the same type of decisions.

I feel quite comfortable characterizing D play not as a different type of decision but rather as a particular pattern of decisions which constitute the "Observable behavior" during play.

In fact, relating back to the thread where Ron and I were talking about "Intances of Play" to provide a context for identifying a G N or S decision, I'm now tempted to take things a step further.

Hypothesis:  GNS is about discrete decisions during play.  A sequence of these discrete decisions constitutes player behavior.  The interaction of several player behaviors constitutes a game style.  What Ron was describing as an Instance of play as being enough observed decisions to provide context is really simply acknowledging that some times its easier to observe behaviors rather than individual decisions directly.

What this does is allow us to talk about player behaviors and game styles without trying to shoe horn EVERYTHING into the core of the model itself.  This doesn't in any way invalidate GNS rather it is simply an application of it.

Dramatist play does exist, it is totally legitimate to discuss it, and I'll leave questions of marginally functional or fully functional to the people who enjoy playing that way.  It is a specific type of game style that can be defined by a combination of player behaviors which are themselves combinations of GNS principals.  

Dramatist play is not only thus describable under GNS it is actually a perfectly natural and sensible application of GNS tenants.

[Mike Holmes]

Ralph,

You wrote "Stop hacking at GNS". I took that to mean that you saw what Gareth is doing as an attack on GNS. If he's not attacking GNS, then what "hacking" must he stop? And if you accept that Dramatism is one of these Behaviors, do you accept that there might be three others that might reasonably be labeled Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism?

If I'm not mistaken that's the point of this thread.

Note that if we were to start using these terms in earnest, I would suggest calling them Behavioral Gamism, then to discriminate between it and, um, Decisional Gamism. As I said, the theory needs work.

Mike

[Valamir]

No offense Mike but your post is really just side tracking things.  

This thread began as a model alternative to GNS in order to address issues that are not address in GNS.  There have been many sub issues that have come up but the main direction of the thread has been to demonstrate that those issues actually are already describable by current GNS theory.

It can be hard to see how the range of issues are addressed by GNS because GNS operates on a very atomic level, and many of the issues are macro level issues.  I offered one rough example of how a style of play that doesn't immediately seem to be represented in the model actually is represented if one adjusts the scale of reference.

Of course there are going to be other behaviors represented by different patterns of GNS arising during play.  Probably dozens.  Some of them may be Behavioral Gamism as a style of play that focuses almost exclusively on Gamist Decisions, as opposed to another style that is more of a blend of Gamist decisions and Simulationist decision, as opposed to another style that uses both Gamist and Simulationist decisions but each is limited to a specific area of game play.  

Point being is that this doesn't require a new model.  It doesn't require expanding GNS to include a D term.  It simply requires that we stop "hacking away" at the model and start applying it.  GNS is just a foundation.  We need to see what kind of house we can start building with it.

[Mike Holmes]

No offense, Ralph, but I think it is you who are sidetracking.  :-)

I think that the house that Gareth is building may potentially be able to stand on it's own. It certainly does not need to refer to GNS in any way if it doesn't want to. The relationship that you point out may be valid, but I'm not sure of the use of such a relationship.

For example, if we accept Gareth's model, then we could say that we are building a game based on serving Behavioral Dramatism, giving the GM lots of tools to create story for the players, and maybe some occasional player powers, whatever. We could then also point out how those things relate to GNS, but to what end? To say that such a game would not satisfy Decisional Narrativists? Mmm OK...

Mike

[Valamir]

Well, I'm not going to go around and around with you on this.

I see absolutely no value (as in zero) to discussing building a new model to address ANYTHING until we are convinced that the existing model does not address that thing already.  Reinventing the wheel over and over again is completely unproductive.

1) clearly identify the issue (which in another thread I started I state that I believe this has not been done).

2) identify how the GNS model (yes I said the GNS model, this is the GNS model forum after all) address or fails to address this issue.

3) only if the model fails to address the issue adequately is there a need to adjust the model or design a new one.

I don't believe there is any sense skipping ahead to 3 until 1 and 2 have been performed.

[Gordon C. Landis]

Looks like this has begun to spawn new threads to handle appropriate details (a good thing, I'd think), but for what it's worth -

Gareth's thoughts are (apparently) inspired to a large degree by perceived "issues" in GNS, so it is (IMO) appropriate to talk about those issues and seek clarification.  Certainly it seems to me that "Dramatism" fits comfortably in GNS.

On the other hand, that doesn't neccessarily mean this (or some other) model isn't worth looking at - it may do a BETTER job than GNS in capturing the nature of things.

But those are very different discussions - "this is needed because GNS  doesn't/can't handle x" vs. "this is needed because it handles x better than GNS does".  Being clear about which discussion you're having seems to me to be an important understanding to establish.

Gordon

[Mike Holmes]

Thanks Gordon.

This thread is about a new model related to GNS. I am here to discuss the validity, usefullness, etc of that model. I think that Gareth proposed it as a fix of GNS originally, but I, personally see it as an alternate model. That is I can see some potential use of it as an alternate model. I completely agree that it in no way should replace GNS, at least not from what I've seen.

To satisfy Ralph,

1) The issue is that GNS is used, in part, for addressing the needs of players.
2) GNS in looking at only decisions and nothing else as a baseline, fails to be usefull in adressing some of these motivations.
3) By looking at a wider behavioral model, perhaps we can address these issues better.

OK, now can we continue? We don't hav to prove the above to discuss it, do we? I mean isn't that waht the discussion is for?


Ron has said that GNS is just a starting place in theory. Isn't it time we started to look at other potential avenues of thoretical development?

Mike

[Valamir]

Whatever "new model" one comes up with can be only 1 of 2 things.

1) an alternative, as in "instead of", replacement to GNS. or
2) an addition to, extension of, application of GNS.

#1 IMO is counter productive.  We've done that 1000 times.  If that is what Gareth is interested in doing, great.  More power to him.  I'd submit that the GNS forum isn't the place to be doing that because it makes it real confusing but thats not my call.

#2 is what we need to do.  What I want to do.  What at least a dozen people I know want to do (what Ron's been begging us for months to do) but which never gets started because somehow we always wind up back at #1.

For any new model to be #2 and not #1 it has to build upon GNS not detract from it.  That means using the definitions of Narrativist and Simulationist, and Gamist as they are defined in the foundational theory.  Not using completely different definitions and slapping the same terms on them.  That's just completely confusing.  That means incorporating the basic tenents of GNS and going another step forward.  Otherwise you wind up with confusion, misunderstandings and incompatibility.

I offered the beginning of one possible way to begin to take GNS another step forward by scaling up from decisions to behaviors and defining behaviors as a series of related GNS decisions.  Is it a revolutionary idea?  Hardly.  But its a direction we haven't gone before to my knowledge.  I remember a number of threads on the topic which mistook GNS FOR behaviors, but I can't remember any which used GNS to define behaviors.

You can take it another step forward by beginning a rigorous examination of Stance and then examining how Stance interacts with GNS.

You can take it another step forward by realizing that not all behaviors can be defined as collections of GNS decisions + Stance.  That they are GNS decisions + Stance + Something Else, and starting to work on what that something else might be.

But at the end of the day, if the new models are to be actual advances of the theory they have to start with the theory as the foundation.  Otherwise we're right back to reinventing the wheel.

[Mike Holmes]

Given that Gareth is not interested in supporting any such model, and that I am left out here defending the idea alone when I did not start it, I will acceed to quitting the thread. But I still believe that a model can be created that looks for that "Something Else" and is only related to GNS as much as Stance is. And I'm still interested in seeing that looked at.

Mike