From Outside the Big Model

[Caldis]

Hello Mendel

I await your further articles they sound interesting. As to where your agenda lies within the big model I'd say your d&d phone campaign seems to be a very specific form of gamism.  Your player is stepping up to the challenges and finding the ways to overcome them.  He also seems to be getting social credit for his gains in tactical and strategic ability.  Your other scenarios however dont seem to be following that creative agenda, instead moving to something else.

I'd suggest your agenda does lie at a higher level, a more personal level, part of the social level, and that you flop creative agendas to whatever is needed to match that bigger agenda.  The big model hasnt really delved into this as much so it may not be much use to you.  However if you do run into a player that is disrupting play and doesnt seem to get what you are trying to do then that GNS may help you.

Jay, I agree that bricolage is happening in several of the examples Mendel has given however I dont see the emphasis on getting the exploration right that denotes sim.  He's admitted that he resorts to metagame decisions as much as in game if it meets his larger goal. 

I think bricolage is in some ways a valuable addition to the lexicon around here.  However I dont believe it is connected to sim in any significant way.  It may be to your form of sim or to your higher goals or skewer as Ralph said in another recent thread.

This is likely off topic here so if you wish to discuss this further please start up a thread with an example of bricolage in action and I will gladly respond with an example of sim in action that may not use bricolage.  For the record I do think your play falls in the sim category but mostly because of things like your gm requiring instant responses and the required readings of Lotr.

[Wormwood]

Jay,

but rather the attention to the decision making that takes into account what happened in the past during play while "minding" the source material without being locked into it.

What you're describing here is a very large class of play. Basically continuous play, play that avoids discontinuities, where past content ceases having a relation to future content. After all, source material is just prior content. This doesn't clash with any Big Model CA. And if you're claiming that my approach prioritizes this do take a look at some of the other examples, and also my response to John (reply #16).

And as far as Bricolage, most people seem to play with a component of bricolage, although in PCon3 terms I'd say that it happens as a general schema for many types of play controls. In other words, bricolage serves as a means to select techniques in play and social contract elements out of play. But it is certainly not the only means to do so.

In particular, my theory and reductive testing approach during play is as similar to "engineering" as "bricolage". 


Caldis,

Thank you, I'm hoping to get the rest of the mini-articles written after the holidays, and to put them all together on my website. After that gets finished, I'll likely start applying PCon3 to some of the actual play posts here.


    - Mendel Schmiedekamp