Gamism (split from Elucidating / microcosm)

[talysman]

I'd also correct the statement about Gamism. I don't think it's concerned with matters of character power, necessarily, or with winning (although a "sense of winning" might be different matter...) I may be wrong on this, but ROn seems to have made it clear many times that Gamism isn't necessarily about competition. we'll see his full opinion on Gamism soon enough.

meanwhile, my thought is: Gamism is concern with a feeling of challenge and progress. Gamist players want to feel they "beat" something and thus earned something, but what they beat could be the GM, other players, the dice, internal party politics, or even themselves.

TOON is routinely labeled as Gamist. where is the character power in TOON? where is the winning? I always interpretted the challenge of TOON as "being funny and creative" -- which is why players earn a plot point if they make the Animator laugh.

progress is also a frequent Gamist concern, although some games like TOON de-emphasize progress. Gamists want to see something improve. note that Gamist versions of DnD, as well as fantasy heartbreakers borrowing heavily from DnD, focus on gold, acquiring magical items, and leveling up. Rune also focuses on gold and experience.

the funniest and most revealing parody of Gamist gaming I've seen is a program called ProgressQuest. it's a game that eliminates all the tedium of MMORPGs by reducing all character details to a series of progress bars and eliminating all the descriptions of combat and treasure. you can play it nonstop and maximize your leveling-up: just start the program and leave it running unattended for days.

ProgressQuest was partially a joke, intended to get people to ask in the forums "how do I control my character? what's this 3D mode everyone keeps talking about?" but strangely enough, a competitive element reared its head: people compared notes on who had the best scores on the Top Score webpage. it was all sillyk because the only way to control your progress was to start early and run the program longer, but people enjoyed comparing their goofy characters anyways.

because they could.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi John,

As you might imagine, I have a great deal to say about this topic. I'd like to clarify that people mean many different things by the term "competition." They mean such different things that they can get really angry with one another about how "it" relates to role-playing.

Rather than go into my whole Notions here (that's what the upcoming essay is for), I'd like to take this opportunity for a Forge thought-experiment.

THE RULES
1. Imagine three players, Bob, Sam, and Cathy, with a GM named Lee. The three players' characters are Bartholemew, Sebastian, and Claudienne.

2. Please give me an example of what you consider to be an instance of competition during the play of whatever game they're playing. Do not be sketchy. Include dialogue, actions, interactions, descriptions of the physical aspects of play, what their characters are doing or facing, or whatever.

3. Do not name any game by title or refer to "like in Shadowrun" or whatever to make a point. You may refer to any rules or techniques of play from a real game (don't make them up).

4. Do not comment on anyone else's contribution. "Hey, that doesn't work because ..." and so on. Just don't do it.

Editing in: Whoops, forgot - this is open to anyone and everyone.

Best,
Ron

[talysman]

this is a difficult post to respond to, because (as I mentioned) I feel that Gamism is broader than many people suspect. I rejected the term "competition", above, but a better statement would have been "competition has too strong of an association to player versus player interactions to be useful". a looser definition of "competition" could be applied to each of the potential challenges I named, as well as to the TOON example I gave.

still, let me try a couple examples:

Bob, Sam and Cathy have responded to Lee's set-up of rumors of a lost Egyptian city by sending their characters into the desert with a caravan of camels and equipment. the game system is some standard "dice+adds beats a target number" system with the limitation that second attempts after a failed roll increase the target difficulty number. there's also some spendable resource to influence rolls.

[list=1]
[*] Lee announces the characters are caught in a windstorm and must make three successful rolls in a row each versus the difficulty of the storm. Bob rolls for Bartholemew and fails the first roll, so his next roll is at a higher difficulty. he opts to spend a resource to improve his chances and does so. he makes his next roll, then the two rolls following. this is competition against the GM or against the system, depending on interpretation.
[*] Sam announces he is using a point of resource on each roll and makes all three. "HA!" he says, "I did that better than you, Bob!" this is competition against Bob and against the GM/system.
[*] Cathy announces that she is using Claudienne's survival skill she pumped experience points into after the last adventure; this gives her an extra bonus on her die rolls and she beats the target easily. this is competition against the GM/system and against her "personal best"; her character is now better able to survive.
[/list:o]

I don't have any detailed examples of some of the other forms of competition I suggested earlier, like the players trying to out-do each other with creative dialogue, or the players trying to come up with role-playing bonuses to use on morale rolls to avoid character squabbles.