The airplane issue

[jdagna]

OK, if I understand the airplane analogy, it seems to be saying that "aeronautics" in the future has more to do with serving drinks than with flying, because no one knows what a plane is for.  Thus, their study of planes is inherently wrong because they don't understand a plane the way we do.  I think Mad Max is a bad example, because they had planes, and would at least understand what one was... perhaps this is part of why everyone has a different understanding of it.  Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.

Can we discuss something we don't understand?  Of course we can - people do it every day.  People discussed and theorized about the stars even when they still thought stars were holes poked in a big sheet.  We certainly see them as being wrong today - will people feel the same way about the Forge in 100 years?

Perhaps.

But I think the concept of game is sufficiently defined by the English language so that the Forge doesn't need a specific definition.  Is it an incorrect definition, like the post-apocalyptic students' definition of airplane?

Perhaps.

But I'm pretty happy with Webster's dictionary.  I think the burden of proof lies on the person who wants to redefine it, and I'll certainly listen with great interest if anyone wants to try.

[deadpanbob]

Ron,

I'm not sure I can parse out Heinrich's point through the use of this analogy.  However, one of the possible meanings I get when I think about his analogy is this: How does GNS help me design a better game?

If the act of flying is roleplaying, and the plane is the RPG, and all of the ancillary stuff needed to fly a plane (like Air Traffic control towers et.al.) are various types of social contract issues, then to me, GNS seems like it's striving to be one part of a possible theory about why planes fly.

That is to say, that GNS attempts to diagnose problems with keeping a given plane flying, by beginning to address the principals that keep the plane in the air.  In this analogy, keeping the plane in the air is synonomous with the lowest common denominator of RPG's: "Having Fun".

However, where GNS breaks down for me, the plane designer, is that GNS doesn't help me directly and specifically with plane design.  It only provides me with a heavily subjective, unwieldly diagnostic device to see why my planes keep crashing.

(bearing in mind that it's the only diagnostic device I've come across that's of any value - like Democracy being the worst form of government save for all other forms of government)

GNS, in my opinion, could be improved by providing some degree of concrete design advice for building the plane.

Breaking out of the analogy, my frustration with this is compounded by things like Ron's recent statements in his Actual Play review of PACE.  After playing the game, he said he'd probably classify that game as Sim:Color.  I've not played the game yet - but it seemed a lot more Narrativist to me reading through it.

Take another example: TRoS - where pretty much everyone thinks its a functional hybrid of Sim:Nar (the Nar part being the SA's), but both in reading the game and in playing the game, it comes out strongly, coherently, and unequivocally Sim for me - with no houserules or modifications to the system in any way, just playing it as written.

So in terms of usefulness to the plane designer - to step back into the analogy - it seems like GNS is the only theoretical tool we have to build planes - but that a lot of planes have to crash and burn before we can design one that flies consistently and as intended.

So, even though it won't help my popularity, I agree with "Heinrich" about GNS having some major holes in it.  I wouldn't go so far as to call it a broken theory - and it's the only one I've seen that's even remotely functional when applied to addressing roleplaying dysfunction - but it's definitely not complete and not overly useful in a direct and immediate way to the game designer.

Note: When I'm talking about GNS here - I'm referring to the GNS article proper, System Does Matter, and the Simulationist essay - as well as several discussions on the forums that I had with the Forge community about just this issue - i.e. what kind of rubrics can we come up with to determine what makes a given game G, N, or S facilitating.

Cheers,


Jason

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Ron,

I'm not sure I can parse out Heinrich's point through the use of this analogy.  However, one of the possible meanings I get when I think about his analogy is this: How does GNS help me design a better game?

If the act of flying is roleplaying, and the plane is the RPG, and all of the ancillary stuff needed to fly a plane (like Air Traffic control towers et.al.) are various types of social contract issues, then to me, GNS seems like it's striving to be one part of a possible theory about why planes fly.

...

However, where GNS breaks down for me, the plane designer, is that GNS doesn't help me directly and specifically with plane design.  It only provides me with a heavily subjective, unwieldly diagnostic device to see why my planes keep crashing.

My contentiousness knows no limit this morning, not because of a bad mood, but because this discussion's so good.

Jason, one of the problems I see in people's interpretation of GNS is attempting to make it something it's not. In this case, you're saying both "[GNS] only provides me with a ... device to see why my planes keep crashing," and "GNS seems like it's striving to be one part of a possible theory about why planes fly."

The first statement I quoted is more correct. GNS is a theory about why planes crash. As for why they fly, I'm going to have to use a large quote, but one of the best I've ever read here.

From The Forge as a community

1) When a person creates something (film, novel, RPG) that shares interest with another, it's because the content "speaks" to the second person. What jazzes you, jazzes me. Or, in some cases, what jazzed you in way X, jazzes me too in way Y.

2) The personal commitment and personal spin brought to the creative work - the extent to which it jazzes and satisfies its own creator - is precisely what the audience member (or user, in the case of a musical instrument or an RPG) is responding to.

Which is to say, the more a work expresses a personal vision, the more likely it is to appeal to its audience.

3) People do indeed like fantasy, horror, humor, sex, biography, historical, adventure, and surreal fiction. Some like one, some like them all, but in the main, people like these things a lot. Enough of them like any particular spin on one or more of them that a product with potential fo r#2 above has a pretty good chance of getting a customer base, if it can get the attention of those people.
...
I am attempting to break the apparently very-deeply-embedded misconception that in order to appeal to a viable target market, the product must not express a personal vision and must instead be based on some other thing - usually a cobbled-together imitation of some thing that's been successful in the past. I am attempting to say instead that personal-vision role-playing games have a real audience awaiting them, in which they stand or fall based on their merits.
...
Instead: say what you want to say with your game. Have it play the way you want to play it. Make sure that it speaks to you, not to some group you want to please.

Again, that's a long quote, but read it carefully: it contains more wisdom than the 30 pages of theory written by the same author on this site, and I like those 30 pages.

In order to build a plane that facilitates X, you have to be excited about X, find a way to express X in a game that jazzes you, and write it. That's really all, and trying to use GNS to build a game differs little from trying to use market research or some ineffable idea of "cool" to build a game: you build for an artificial ideal that does not exist.

To bring it back to the analogy:

To find out how to keep a plane from crashing, use GNS.
To build a plane that works in a certain way, build a plane that works that way for you specifically.

[ethan_greer]

GNS is a method of categorizing RPG play behaviors based on observation of play and study of texts.

To even walk into the neighborhood of comparing GNS theory to, say, physics, is pretty silly.  It's a whole different animal - GNS and role-playing theory in general is a socialogical study, not a hard science.

Heinrich's analogy is not valid.

[deadpanbob]

In order to build a plane that facilitates X, you have to be excited about X, find a way to express X in a game that jazzes you, and write it. That's really all, and trying to use GNS to build a game differs little from trying to use market research or some ineffable idea of "cool" to build a game: you build for an artificial ideal that does not exist.

To bring it back to the analogy:

To find out how to keep a plane from crashing, use GNS.
To build a plane that works in a certain way, build a plane that works that way for you specifically.

Clinton,

No offense taken, and you're not being overly contentious as far as I can tell.

I know full well about the power of the vision thing - and that my excitement as a designer can potentially translate into a game that'll excite some group of other people.

So, I'm a plane designer, I get a line on the Forge, I bring my first plane with me - I'm excited about it, I think it can fly.  I get told, nope, it won't fly exactly as you intend - and here are some theoretical tools that might help you build a better plane - or at the very least help you fly one of the many other planes out there a lot better.

I take the theory away, and try and figure out how I can apply the theory to plane design.  The theory clicks in my head, I can see how it relates to flying the plane and flying it well - but aside from trial and error (with a crash and burn at the end of each) - GNS has not helped me to design a better plane.  I've got a really solid vision for my plane.  I'm jazzed by it.  I work on versions of it with nearly every free moment.  I take it out and fly it.  I crash it a lot.  I learn from those crashes by applying some of the GNS theory to analyze why the plane crashed.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

However, I think that GNS would be more helpful to me if it addressed the actual mechanical nuts and bolts required to make a plane that's more likely to fly.  In other words, I think that GNS is suffering from a lack of Engineering Application and an overabundance of Theory.

In the GNS essay (I think) and in other places, Ron says that GNS grew out of a desire by him to talk about and address Currency issues in RPG design/play.  He even goes so far as to challenge folks who read GNS to take up the torch.  So far, no one's been up to the challenge.  But precisely THAT type of discussion/theorizing/practical advice (i.e. these types of game/currency frameworks tend to create games that facilitate Gamist decisions) would greatly improve the Theory.

[EDITED: to add that I completely recognize that I haven't contributed anything of substance to the theory, nor have I taken it upon myself to try and add such advice to the resources here at the Forge.  I know that this is the height of selfishness - but in my own defense, Ron did ask the question and invite the discussion].

Cheers,



Jason

[Jeffrey Miller]

What I inferred from H's question was something like the old "I can't define pornography, but I know what it is" thing. Do we use GNS to define what an RPG is?

Well, pornography is when its on your computer;  on mine, its "art". ;)

Clinton, Alan - great stuff.  

My personal take on much of this is that, again, its really unimportant what a game is, as GNS is a tool for understanding and measuring player motivations, and a means of understanding such.  Does it matter to the caliper whether its measuring pipes, bolts, or sheets of wood?  

"Heinrich" seems to be arguing closer that it matters understanding "what is a religion" when attempting to compare 2 religions, but this too is a false assumption in dependancies.  One needent understand the intricacies of Tibeten straw-in-the-brain mysticism or Catholic liturgy to examine the reasoning behind why people devise religions.

(or something like this)

-jeffrey-

[Mike Holmes]

I agree with Clinton that GNS is limited in how he describes it. Does that mean that we have no theory on how to design games primarily? No, that does not. I mean, outside of all the other theory we have brought up here that has nothing to do with GNS (and that's a lot if you look at it), there's this thing that people keep overlooking called Game Theory.

I don't know why I have to mention this all the time, but Game Theory predates RPGs, and contrary to the opinion of some people that don't think it applies, is all about, you guessed it, Games. It just happens to have more widely applicable function than just games, so people think it's soley about economics (when it's used just as often in biology, for example).

Now, the problem with Game Theory is that it's a mathematical model, and extraordinarily complex. See the 1200 page The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviorby John Von Neumann that introduced it to the world. Yes, that's the same guy who invented the modern computer and various other important advances. So I can understand people's reticence to get into it as a discipline per se.

OTOH, it's really very intuitve stuff. That is, we all have an intuitive idea of what a Zero Sum game is, even if we've never read the above paper where the concept was introduced. In any case, we all use it in game design all the time. We're just not aware that there's a theory that supports what we're doing.

However, some people do Game Theory better than others. And even a cursory reading of the concepts can be helpful. And I'm talking getting beyond just the famous Prisoner's Dilemma and other such "examples", too. One needs to get to the point that one has at least a preliminary idea of how to do Game Theory analysis on their own. In practice it's not hard if you understand the basic principles.

I lament that we've not employed it in any measure so far in an explicit way. I've tried to introduce it's use on occasion, but I feel that I get met with the electronic equivalent of a blank stare. So it's been very little.

Now, I'm not expert in the field. I just have that passing knowledge which I think is important, and should really know more myself. So though I'd really like to teach the theory here, I'd probably do a bad job. Here's a link to a page from a course that can get you started that I just Googled up: http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/eco/game/game.html
A poor substitute for teaching, I know, but there you have it.

If anyone knows of better resources, or wants to discuss the concept with someone who has my limited knowledge, I'd really like to get into it. Anhd for God's sake, if you happen to know Game Theory well, please, please, start some threads and get some real information out to the people on it.

There's your Aerodynamics and Physics. GNS is just why the timing on the transmission just gets off sometimes (and in terms of design, how to make sure that doesn't happen). Al least that's always been my perspective.

Mike

[Walt Freitag]

I offer the perhaps surprising suggestion that the object of the GNS model is not, specifically, role playing games. Hence, the failure of the GNS model to generate (or even to buy into) any specific definition of "game" or "role playing game" is irrelevant.

The GNS model addresses recreational Exploration (in the specific sense defined by the model) of the elements of character, situation, setting, system, and color.

Role playing games just happen to be what we're most interested in applying the GNS model to.

I believe it's that simple. If a case were to come under discussion that was consensually regarded as a role playing game, but did not have Exploration as its central element, then there would be something to debate about. (Some might decide that it wasn't a role playing game because it didn't share a characterisic that GNS declares is a characteristic of all role playing games; others might believe that the case was a priori a role playing game and therefore GNS must be incomplete.) In actual discussion this has not occurred.

I'm very tempted to isolate about seven posts from that thread and show you all what you did to feed his ego instead of stick with the points.

I'd certainly be interested in seeing this. I wasn't one of the posters on that thread, but only because I wasn't confident of being able to not make things worse. More lessons in (purely defensive, of course) troll-fu might improve my chances of being able to help.

- Walt

[Kester Pelagius]

Greetings Mr. Nixon,

Kester,

Did your post have a point besides to derail the discussion?

Pardon?

Have I done something to offend you of which I am unware?

If so, I apologize.

Ron started this thread, not Heinrich. He asked a specific question, and the text from Heinrich he quoted was very obvious about using planes as a metaphor for RPGs.

It appeared to me that Ron was asking about what we, the members of The Forge, though about the overall context of what he was quoting, not specifically about an allusion to planes.

In fact, looking over the intial post, I see nothing specifically about planes, per se.  ("This thread is specifically about an idea." But which of the ideas expressed in the quote?) I did say I thought what had been said was a good take on the plane allusion.  Still, if what everyone else here percieved isn't what I might have mistaken the question to be about then I will refrain from posting and further detracting from the debate if that is what you wish.

I saw no answers in your post, just an attempt to muddy the waters of discussion.

Pardon. . . are you calling me an agent provocateur???

*flabbergasted*

I don't know what more to say than:  I am sorry you feel that way.



Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius

edited for bad grammar/syntax

[epweissengruber]

One needent understand the intricacies of Tibeten straw-in-the-brain mysticism or Catholic liturgy to examine the reasoning behind why people devise religions.

(or something like this)

-jeffrey-

I think that "Heinrich" claims that you cannot do local interpretation withot having a firmly defined general context.  But I can compare a Buddhist monk's prayer practices with those of a Dominican friar by using the word "prayer" in its generally accepted meaning.  "Heinrich" seems to think that you cannot begin this interpretation unless you rigorously define the genera (prayer) that gives rise to the two different species.  That such a "rigour" would lead to infinite regress is apparent to most of us (I can't define GNS until I define game, I can't define game until I know what human interaction is, I can't define that until I define what humans are, etc.)

I can fly a plane w.o. knowing aeronautics or physics.  I can even understand why my plane dived into the ground without being able to explain these more fundamental principles: "Dang, I pushed this sucker forward when I meant to pull it back.  From now on, I will make sure that I include this in my 'General Principles of Landing' theory."

An idea can inspire research even if that first idea could be improved by further empirical testing or theoretical rigour.  But some ideas are "heuristically fertile" -- they stimulate a series of research projects that lead to the establishment of new paradigms or the reformulation of old ones.  Yes, GNS could lead to a new theory of games.  Similarly, our experiences discussing why the plane smashed into the ground could stimulate us into more rigorous research into physics and aeronautics.  But they don't have to.

[Kester Pelagius]

Greetings,

Most of the replies have dealt with the plane analogy.  They address the pertinence of a definition of game and role-playing to any theory about games.

Just FYI:  When I posted my initial response there were *no* other messages in this thread.

I apologize for any perceived 'derailing' of the conversation.

Leaving now, per request.


Kind Regards,

Kind Regards

[Jeffrey Miller]

I have to wonder what the value of GNS and the role playing theory on this site is if it remains unequivocally opposed to asking the question, 'what is a game?' It's like a post-holocaust environment in which Mad Max is holding college level courses on aeronautics. Only no one knows what a plane is. So instead, they hold classes on everything you can do in one. You can sit in them, for example. You can be served drinks. On the outside, the plane has two wings and a nose, but those features aren't directly related to what you can do inside the plane. Once you have mastered this, you get your degree.

The more I think about this, the more this seems to be a faulty comparison.  One doesn't need to understand the physics of the plane in order to fly it, nor does one need to know the ins and outs of the food service on a plane to understand the physics involved.  Further, by trying to provide a mechanistic example for a social & abstract theory, one is missing the point entirely - GNS speaks towards player motivations, not games per se, so what is the plane?  The player?  The game?  Motivations?  The basis for the comparison is a failure to understand the theories goals, and thus can't readily be applied to understanding the theory itself.

Ron dit:

I'm not real happy with that. I'm very tempted to isolate about seven posts from that thread and show you all what you did to feed his ego instead of stick with the points.

I don't think that's warrented at all, Ron, and I'm glad you chose not to do such a thing.  Those of us who spoke too quickly or bit at the troll are aware of it without being scolded.

-jeffrey-

[Mike Holmes]

To follow up on EP's post, I think that what GNS adds to Game Theory is that people want different "currencies" than just "Gamist" currencies. Though I happen to know that this has been adressed in Game Theory already in more general terms. Still GNS is a very good application of Game Theory on a simple level, and cold be restated something like:

Given players desiring differing currencies, a game may become "broken". The more different the currencies, the more likely the breakdown.

Mike

[Jeffrey Miller]

It seems to me that the flight is the basic idea of play, rather than game. Play has several strong features which seem to fundamental parts of RPGs. In particular: exploration, social practice, and general learning. The plane itself, in that context is a game, it's the context in which play is facilitated. It does this through constraints, (It's not unreasonable to call games just constrained play, or constraints on play. In fact that definition seems to include quite a few popular definitions for game, including Wittgenstinian language games.)

Could we say that the physics of flight are GNS, that the plane is The Game, and the the pilot is The Player?  The physics of flight help us to understand the motivations or actions of the Pilot as a means to achieve their goal of safe flight?  

In this case, its really not important to understand what the plane is, other than a device to which The Pilot applies physics to achieve their goal.  Bipalne, ballon, zepplin, or wings of Daedalus, the goal - "flight" (or "fun" if we can agree to that as the LCD of "Game") is the only important aspect of the plane that we need to understand.

I think I might be stretching too far to make this whole plane thing fit ;)

-j-

[Jeffrey Miller]

And most of the controversy over GNS comes from a bunch of people who aren't willing to bake the damn cheesecake for themselves to taste it(learn it for themselves), and then declare anything from, "Cheesecakes don't exist!", "They must taste like crap, because not everbody's eating them!", or "It's really just like chocalate cake, but with a different name!"

I would love to see a thread (here, or over on RPG.net) titled "Why I Hate GNS" and see if any reasonable responses get generated, or whether people are just against it to be against something. "Acknowledge my distain, dammit!"

-jeffrey-