The Three Sentence Understanding

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Fred,

Well, let's put you at the ... oh, green belt level for this stuff. Here are a couple of things to consider.

It's a way to explain the _primary focus_ of what the rules are trying to achieve.

"Rules" can't try to achieve things. We're talking about real people engaged in actual role-playing. Rules only come into it because they influence (are incorporated into) System, which is one of the things the people are doing.

So GNS-stuff is all about people communicating with other people. Everything else ("games" as texts, rules especially) just influences that, but isn't actually it.

What that means is that you can forget all that stuff about "primary focus" or "exclusive" too. Since we're talking about a plain and simple personal (and social) priority, well, a priority takes first place, by definition. Maybe not the same priority all the time, but at any given time, one's going to be The One.

The other thing to consider is that "emotion" is involved in all three modes of play without any special claim going to any one of them. I'm pretty sure that you're still foggy about Narrativist play from the ground up, so we'll leave it at that for now.

Have you seen the Seven major misconceptions about GNS thread? It seemed to help a lot of people at the time.

Best,
Ron

[iago]

I'll accept the green belt as about as far as I can _easily_ tread... reading the elder thread you cite does clarify a few things for me, and I feel like I'm grounded enough now to be able to 'walk the walk' if necessary.

Part of what kicked this off for me was realizing I'd missed out on Iron Chef Simulationist (buying a house thrashed my ability to spend time on the forge), and then realizing ... I wouldn't have had the foggiest idea of how to hit the Sim part of the requirement.

Which, I suppose, brings up an interesting point -- you're effectively saying rules are optional to the GNS perspective, and that GNS is more of a creative/play/communication perspective -- but all the same, rules can and do encourage a particular style (else, why would the Iron Chef challenge as played out here on the Forge identify itself by one of the three GNS terms as the style of game to create?).

So I think the reason "rules" terminology keeps creeping into my attempts to express understanding is that I'm trying to understand best how to "set out to create a (blank) game" where (blank) is one of G, N, S.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Fred,

Which, I suppose, brings up an interesting point -- you're effectively saying rules are optional to the GNS perspective, and that GNS is more of a creative/play/communication perspective -- but all the same, rules can and do encourage a particular style (else, why would the Iron Chef challenge as played out here on the Forge identify itself by one of the three GNS terms as the style of game to create?).

Um, right. That's what all my essays are about. Maybe now is a good point to back up a little and think about some examples of real play and real people, before going toward design.

So I think the reason "rules" terminology keeps creeping into my attempts to express understanding is that I'm trying to understand best how to "set out to create a (blank) game" where (blank) is one of G, N, S.

The first step is to think about real people and real play. There they are, in the living room or at the convention table or anywhere you can imagine people role-playing. Think of what they're imagining together (which relies on communication), and think of those moments of play in which "payback" is achieved - when you can tell why they all got together in the first place.

What set of imaginary events real-people interactions constituted the real, actual, social payoff? Conceivably, if more than one sort occurred during a play-session, which one was the one which mattered, as opposed to the ones which only set the main one up, or could have been take-or-leave?

Only after thinking about this stuff should we even begin to discuss design.

Best,
Ron

[iago]

Yah.  I get it.  I'm just explaining that when I talk about GNS stuff, it's inevitably going to be colored by a further-ahead design goal, because that's the destination in my head.