Toward a Sense, If Not a Theory, of Simulationism

[Knight]

Well, I've now seen people accuse the original threefold of being byassed towards all three direction.  For the record, I tend to think it leant towards dramatism.


I frequently mention the Social axis. I think it is legitimate. But if you remove Social concerns, Drama concerns, and Game concerns, what are we left with? On the other hand, if we remove Simulationist world concerns along with everything else, what are we left with? Can you imagine a game like that? Can you imagine a game in which every decision is always Dramatist or Gamist and never simply Simulationist (i.e. simply what would happen in the game world)?


I don't think this is just a simulationist thing - you can't acheive total purity of any of the elements.  Any game which didn't have a least some aspect of all three would no longer be recognisable as an rpg, IMHO.

[Supplanter]

Sorry, but I found that very confusing.  

What I think you are trying to say is that the metagame stuff comes up only when decisions are made.

I believe that what I said was confusing, because I was not saying "metagame comes up only when decisions are made." I'm actually saying that metagame comes first. Specifically, that social comes first - that the social interactions of actual people are the "base condition" and that various styles of decision-making channel those interactions productively. (And what is produced is a role-playing game.)

(What I haven't said, and will say now, is that if "simulationism" is a term that needs replacing, metagame needs replacing a lot more. IIRC, the term's history predates the incorporation of gamism into the rgfa model. What is really meant is "metaworld." Once you have "gamism," using "metagame" to mean "metaworld" is, IMHO, asking for trouble.)

The example phrases in the paragraph that I made so unclear represent the set of impulses we think of as leading to "rpg behavior":

story-telling - "There's this guy"
world creation - "I know a place"
contest/problem-solving - "See if you can beat this"

The "someone else" statements represent risks to storytelling, world creation and challenge if one does not channel the purely social realm:

"And this guy does X" - interloper usurps the story-telling function. The person who began "there's this guy" may violently disagree that "this guy does X."

"I know a better place" - kibitzer aborts the first person's world-creation. Which darn place is it?

"All right, I beat" - challenged party trivializes the contest with an arbitrary declaration of victory.

The third set of statements promulgate some high-level rules that resolve the social conflict (who tells what part of the story, what place we shall imagine, how shall victory be determined) be depersonalizing and regularizing authority. IOW, by making a game of it. (Which is why "metagame" becomes a problematic term.) The solution statements represent a set of traditional answers to the problem:

"Get your own guy" - you tell me what your character does and I'll tell you what mine does

"I'm the 'there's this place' guy" - We need a gamemaster as the ultimate arbiter of the world in which our characters' 'stories' (problem word, I know! sub 'chronicle' if it makes you feel better) take place

"You only win if you get to the last purple square first" - here's a victory (defeat) condition we can all understand and work towards with no "Is not is too" rancor.

People have imagined different sets of answers to the social problems that they still think of as constituting a role-playing game. The narrativists, frex, reduce the polarity of the character ownership and world ownership functions. (Perhaps in a narrativist Star Trek game they would reverse the polarity!;-)) But they still regularize the authority functions with rules - plot points etc.

A role-playing game is a set of rules for harmonizing conflicts of imaginative vision. (Potential conflicts, that is.) These rules may be mechanics (regardless of your imaginative vision, "this guy" dies when he runs out of hit points, frex), or they may be decision priorities. (What will happen is whatever I deem the most interesting outcome, frex.) Imaginative visions are personal things, and when you have multiple people trying to reach personal goals together, you have a social situation.

And that's why I think so many people who aren't Simulationists don't understand why anyone would want to play that way. "Why would you want to allow your game to be disappointing when there are so many metagame techniques that could prevent it?" Because the techniques are even more dispappointing to a Simulationist than the collapse of the game.

Absolutely. That's well put.

The other styles involve using specific metagame techniques to get specific results. Simulation is an absense of metagame and, as a result, it cannot guarantee specific results. That's the big negative. A purely simulationist game can end with all the PCs dead in the first session and the evil overlord taking over and enslaving the world, much to the dissatisfaction of everyone involved.

We are not in disagreement about this.

But if you remove Social concerns, Drama concerns, and Game concerns, what are we left with? On the other hand, if we remove Simulationist world concerns along with everything else, what are we left with? Can you imagine a game like that? Can you imagine a game in which every decision is always Dramatist or Gamist and never simply Simulationist (i.e. simply what would happen in the game world)?

Yes. After all, early in the hobby, "the game world" either didn't exist at all or was the thinnest tissue. The dungeon was set up to provide an appropriate level of challenge and to evoke a particular set of emotions in players. (I think there is a lot to be said about this latter topic at some point.) "The integrity of the game world" never entered the picture.

I can easily imagine an RPG of the "pure storytelling variety" - this would be a game in which "the game world" is revealed purely through player and GM decisions and exists only to the extent that the course of action establishes it. Consider Delaney's essays on how an sf text constructs an sf world - one abstracts the background from the foreground details. We read "the door irised" and now we know what doors are like in the spaceships of that universe. I don't see any reason why there couldn't be an RPG in which the game world exists entirely as the product of player and GM author function during play, with the author function aiming at story value rather than world consistency.

Best,


Jim