The Forge Archives

Hey.

My Ars Magica crew's been talking a fair bit about Gamism, Narrativism and Simulationism, and I think we're doing something else.

Narrativism is about building a story.  You set up a premise, a meaty moral problem you're yourself interested in.  You create characters and Author them into and through the problem: do they change or do they not change?  You've got climax, denoument, engagement.  It's about the game as a literary experience.

The game we play is not that, but it's not 'my guy would do this' exploration either.  (And it's definitely not competition.)  We've set up problems that we're ourselves interested in -- bad fathers, boundary setting, responsiblity (especially as a parent) vs. freedom.  We've created and are Authoring our characters into and through those problems.  But we're not trying to get a literary experience out of it, I'm not anyway.  I'm interested instead in a (sort of) psychological experience.  Each of my characters is a way I might approach the problem in real life.  I dont use them to express the premise in a theme, I use them to play-act possible solutions to challenges I'm facing.  It's like children's pretend games, exactly like the games my five year old plays: what will I be when I grow up?  My game is: how might I be a good father?  how might I deal with having had a bad one?

It works with the other players too.  I push, say, Emily Care's character toward the problem I'm interested in, bad fathers.  I give her a bad but sympathetic father, who sees himself in a completely different way than she does, creating conflict in her between her experience and his stories.  Now I get to watch: how does she deal with it?  What can I learn?  It's cool and useful to see how other people handle things I struggle with, even if it's just in our imaginations.

So what do you think?  Is it controversial that there might be other metagame goals than competition and creating a story?  (Seems pretty obvious to me.)  Have I just described one?

-Vincent

Vincent,

It sounds like classical Simulationism with its emphasis on Character Exploration to me. Not one shred of doubt, not one detail inconsistent with that analysis.

Does that analysis seem odd or as if it's missing something to you? Why or why not?

Best,
Ron

Yeah, I'd say Exploration of Character also, but with a bit of a different twist from the "classical".  In classical exploration of character the player should be committed and interested in the character, but once that level of interest is ascertained the player's interest (in theory) takes a back seat to the "character's interests".

What Vincent is describing has a bit more metagame to be concidered classical exploration of character.  They are still "winding up the character to watch them go" which is the hall mark of Exploration of Character, but I think the motivations for doing so are distinctly atypical.  The player's interest is still in the front seat doing the driving.

Its almost like role playing in the psycho therapy sense where groups and couples play roles to act out their issues.

So yeah, I'd say its clearly covered by Simulation: Character Exploration, but a decidedly different flavor than most.

Vincent,

You might be interested in this older thread begun by Jim Henley: Mechanics, emotions, and Amberway II. It illustrates some fundamentals of my take on the topic, and how different people's priorities of play lead them to certain assumptions about how role-playing structurally works.

Best,
Ron

Ron, yes, it seems like it's missing something.

I've played games that I'd call what you said, classical Simulationism with its emphasis on Character Exploration.  The goal in those games was to get into the characters, to make them seem real and alive.  We invested tremendous energy in detail and history and characterization, and the reward was that the characters were rich, surprising, complex, and subtle.  Our current game started out just that way.

What they were missing was the metagame goal, and the intentional Author stance.  They were very simmy in that way.  'What my character would do' was all-important.  Bad father?  Sorry, my character just wants to go hunting.  Boundary-setting?  All resolved on page three of my history, want to see?  The characters lived and breathed and grew, they made good and bad choices, but just like if they made a story it was an accident, if they illuminated my real-world conflicts it was an accident.

More importantly, if they made a story, who cares?  If they illuminated the challenges I was facing as an actual person, so what?  That wasn't the point.

The game we're playing now, we're driving our characters ('against their will' as those other games would've had it) toward real-world dilemmas, Premise, I'd even say.  The hardcore character-exploration Simulationists I've played with would be appalled.

-Vincent

Hi Vincent,

Well, we can't have it both ways. Either Premise is a metagame priority, or it isn't. The way you describe it in the first post of the thread, it isn't; the way you describe it in the most recent post, it is.

Now, I'll give you my take as well as I can without actually playing in your group. It looks to me as if you are doing the Simulationist/Character thing, but in a different idiom, ie, procedurally different from other ways. What you have now is more shared-group focus on one another's Character Exploration, offering more "material" toward one another for the purpose of doing so. Thus resisting GM-material - which is central to certain types of Sim/Char play - is no longer necessary for your group.

(This procedure is correlated with the approach that you and others have already described about your group, best described as "GM-full," in which people trade off GM-style proffering of information about the situations the characters face.)

In other words, I see a procedural difference that results in a difference in the experience of play, but not a metagame-based difference that violates the basic Sim/Char analysis.

I really, really hope that people's thinking has matured past the point in which they think any and all Sim/Char play (for example) must be, by my analysis, procedurally identical and wholly compatible among all of its expressions.

Best,
Ron

Damn, I miss having Jim around.

While the trip down memory lane was nice, could you be more specific about what was to be gleaned from it.  I've apparently missed its relevance.

Hi Ralph,

I cited the thread for a couple of reasons.

1) Jim's style of play seemed to have some similar goals with Vincent's - illustrating, deepening, stressing, and expressing character emotions and psychology to one another (ie among players). I thought Vincent might like to use it as a basis for comparison - how much alike, how much unlike, and in what ways.

2) The same basic intellectual conundrum seems to underlie the discussion: "I do X, but X doesn't look or feel like Y, so how can your terminology apply the same term to X and Y?" My answer is always the same: the terminology you are looking at is at a higher level of categorization than the differences you are citing. If you add stance, balance of power, resolution, reward, and currency to the discussion (bringing it to a finer level of resolution), then X and Y are indeed different, and X and Y are indeed in the same GNS category.

#2 wasn't explicit in Jim's thread, which was more about mechanics per se, but I think it underlies a lot of the reasons why he and I had a hard time communicating about the issue he raised.

Best,
Ron

I think that Ralph's got it. It's Definitely Sim/Char, but with the a lot of Author stance. Which is simply unusual. I remember a thread in which we were positing that, since it's been determined that Stance has no absolute link to GNS mode, there must potentially be versions of Simulationism that included Author and Director stance. Heck, I even put some thought into it and tried to think of what play would look like, and what sort of game could be developed around it. But nobody could come up with a good example.

Turns out that Vincent has been playing that way for a while now. We just hadn't been informed. What you have Vincent is proof of the theory, not a challenge to it at all. And a particular style of play that may be unique. It's just not a fourth Mode to be added to GNS. We should thank you, however, for providing the missing example.

What specific sorts of desires do you see being satisfied by your style of play? One of my original problems was that I had a problem dissociating Simulationism from Immersion which I always see as coming soley from Actor stance (despite the fact that this is very disputed). From what I can see, it allows players to address things as they see fit via the Author mode, and thus be secure in the notion that they are actually creating something (and not just in an illusion). Including the ability to address random issues in a pseudo-thematic way. And it allows them to play in the "interesting series of events" mode (which I prefer over addressing Premise). So, I'd play. But are there other motivations that you see the style as satisfying?

I think that you are lucky for having a group that is so self motivated in this instance. Many players would not be engaged by such a style, I think (most of mine, anyway). I think that your GM passing probably helps this somehow, but I'm not sure precisely how. But it seems to be a winning combination.

BTW, another POV on this is that they are playing Narrativist with just an incredibly difuse and maleable and constantly micro-redefined in specificity Premise. Bad sentence. What I mean is that the Premise is something like "What's the (moral) effect of Magic on the world?" And the players just constantly redefine it in narrower ways so as to address lots of disparate issues under the larger umbrella. Even more likely is that you shift between these two forms regularly.

Mike

Valamir,

Yes.  Except that we're not winding our characters up to watch them go, we're driving and directing them every step.

Ron,

Is, I'd say.  I think that both my previous posts come down on the 'is' side of the question.  I don't see what you see in my first post that says Premise isn't the priority of play.  Certainly the characters aren't, they're just the vehicle.

I'm using Premise with some hesitation, though.  We're not playing a Narrativist game, I'm clear about that.  But we are quite intentionally Authoring our characters into and through moral and ethical problems that we're interested in in real life, to generate meaning for us as audience, because that's what we want to do.

(The truth is, there's a range of that in the group, with me at this end and Meguey at the character-exploration other.  Her goal is to play her characters.  We're finding a functional way to accomodate both, as any gaming group might do.)

Our procedures, our play structure, our Stance-adoption-styles, they're all what our game is made of, as you point out.  But when we started this game, we were doing all the same things.  More recently, our goal for the game shifted.  (GM-full freeform play is emminently driftable.)  We used to be exploring our characters.  Now I want to use them to explore me.

In the Jim thread, you belay 'but it's not Simulationism', on the grounds that what's under debate is Narrativism.  Can I repeat my question: we have two metagame goals, competition and creating a Story (in that Narrativist-specific sense that's pretty hard to pin down), plus the sort-of non-metagame goal of Simulationism.  Could there be more?

Isn't a psychological metagame goal as likely as a literary one?  They seem quite closely related to me.

-Vincent

Vincent,

There it is.

You wrote,
"We're not playing a Narrativist game, I'm clear about that. But we are quite intentionally Authoring our characters into and through moral and ethical problems that we're interested in in real life, to generate meaning for us as audience, because that's what we want to do."

Your sentence beginning with "but" is Narrativism. You cannot be "clear" that it's not; all you can be is mistaken.

It may be that what's throwing you is trying to characterize the group, when GNS is built to characterize instances of play. Quite likely, your instances of play are N (with strong character focus, obviously) and Meguey's are S (with strong character focus). Thus a functional hybrid is created at the group level, which is perfectly valid.

I've also looked over your first post, and it is, indeed, contradictory to what you're saying now. There, you  say that the group is definitely not engaged in a literary activity, in role-playing terms. Given the sentence I've quoted in this post, it is absolutely incontrovertible that that is exactly what you (at least, you as an individual) are doing.

Perhaps you have an image in your head of what Narrativist play must look like that is much more limited than what the range of Narrativism really is. (Which is another reason I cited Jim's thread; with all respect to him, he fell into that trap constantly.)

Best,
Ron

Hey,

I tend to agree with Mike. My thought from the descriptions is that Vincent's group's style is Sim/Char, with an awareness of audience and use of Author stance such that the emphasis is on "teaching" rather than "exploring/understanding."

Paul

Paul,

That doesn't work, given Vincent's latest post. If we're going by what he says there, he's playing Narrativist, with no room for debate being possible.

The issue is whether we are discussing him, alone, or his group, aggregate. I am seeing very clearly that these are going to yield two different (if compatible) answers.

Best,
Ron

Mike,

It's true, we've been playing weird-ass Simulationism for a while, and yes I have the coolest game group ever, thanks!  But there's definitely been drift, over the past six-nine months, and I'm trying to get a handle on it.  Transition, I mean.  Intentional drift.  A year ago, serious character-exploration was what we wanted and what we got.  Now we're doing something pretty different.

Ron,

Heh.  Or an image of what 'good' Narrativist play must look like.

It doesn't stand up that the meaning we're getting isn't literary, but psychological?  It doesn't have any -- well, many, well, some -- of the trappings of literature.  I don't expect Acanthus' story to resolve climactically, for instance.  It might, but it's not important to me.

There are really only two metagame goals?

I realize that literary vs. psychological is dumb, but I'm not sure how else to get at it.  There's something in there about resolution vs. process, unless a story is the same thing as trying on different solutions to a problem.

Uh.  Wait.  Didn't I read that in that Dramatica thing?  Hm.  You're probably right.

Paul,

'Teaching' is a little, well, railroady.  We don't like plan lessons or anything.  I like 'play-acting', myself, in very much the child-trying-on-roles sense.  If I were a fish, not what would that be like, but what would I learn from it?

-Vincent

Vincent,

I think that as long as we are talking about (a) Premise and (b) driving towards addressing its conundrum, then we're talking about thematic story creation as the priority. "Literary vs. psychological" has absolutely no meaning in this regard; I think that you're making a mountain out of the molehill, in which the molehill represents the difference between writing "structurally," i.e. "I will bring in this conflict three chapters from now," and writing in more of a "gut" way.

Best,
Ron