GNS: Theses, Claims, Comments, and Questions

[Calithena]

1. Gamism, simulationism, and narratism are modes of play for games. (Question: is there some principled reason for thinking that these are all there are? What is it? Or is this an experimental question? Comment: gamism is the mode of play for most traditional boardgames and other non-RPG games. It is not wrong, as I suggested previously, imitating another board member, to say that e.g. chess or Dungeon is a gamist design. They’re not RPGs, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re designs which facilitate gamist play. Question: given this thesis, what are some examples of non-RPGs facilitating other modes of play? (The Ungame?) Question: If a non-RPG supports Sim or Nar, is it really an RPG after all despite appearances? Question: Are there modes of play in non-RPGs which have not yet been facilitated by RPGs? Claim (e.g. Ron): play can not manifest all three of these modes at once. Comment: This seems correct, and indeed even ‘hybrid’ modes seem like an easy and natural back-and-forth between two of these modes rather than a genuine combination. Else G, N, and S would not be modes, but mere qualities, or something else.)

2. GNS is a theory within social psychology: specifically, the social psychology of persons and small groups who play games. It claims that gaming psychology falls into different modes at different times, and that these will be observable, as manifestations of behavior, extrapolations from participant reports on their own goals, motives, and reasons. (Comment: Philosophical questions about the behavioral basis of social psychology, or lack thereof, are mostly irrelevant to the assessment of GNS. Like most philosophical questions in scientific discourse, they are red herrings.)

3. Game systems facilitate one or more of these modes of play, to varying degrees of success. (Claim (e.g. Ron): Designing games self-consciously to support play in a particular mode (or modes) improves the chance of a better design. Comment: This seems as though it should be the case, but the argument here rests crucially both on GNS being a correct theory of role-playing as an activity and on the psychological view that advance clarity about desired mode and a social contract which supports a specific mode brings greater Happiness. As to the former: if it is not a correct theory, then there seems to be no argument against designing games as it were at random, after the fashion of experiments, to see if some new mode of play might not emerge by happenstance, save for the usual pragmatic one, that one is far more likely to fail when experimenting in this manner. The latter is an empirical question about which I have nothing as yet to say.)

4. Players of games assume various stances relative to their in-game tokens. Among such stances are Pawn, Actor, Author, Director. (Comment: Possessor stance just seems to me to be an extreme form of Actor stance; see below for oblique elaboration. Question: What other stance-types are there, if any? Question: What are examples of games other than RPGs in which there is an expected stance-asymmetry between players (as with the various player/GM distributions in RPGs?)

5. Claim (implicit in Ron's discussion in S&S, though arguably not in his GNS essay here on the site): Assignment of stances breaks down according to whose motives are driving the in-game token: the player’s or the token’s, and again according to what the token is, a particular character or the world itself. player/character gives Author or Pawn (which leads Ron to categorize Pawn as a subset of Author); token/character gives Actor; player/world and token/world give slightly different forms of Director. (Comment: the easiest way to see this is just in thinking about GM deliberation: is the GM considering what would happen given what he knows about his world (“What would the priests of Hru’u in Sokatis say about that, anyway?”, or better, “What sort of terrain did I draw on my map in this area?”) or is the GM considering how he wants the story to come out (“What could the priests of Hru’u say to make this a maximally interesting story?” “What kind of terrain should be on my map here to make this a fun travel segment?” (Or to screw that jerkoff player who’s been acting uppity, etc.))

6. Comment: 5 provides a clear definition of stance, and in that sense I cannot fault it: men are free to use their words in the way that seems best to them. However, (a) the word ‘stance’ suggests a psychological state occupied by the player of a game. (b) Talking about the motives of an in-game token without reference to the players of the game, while utterly reasonable in the context of RPGs taken at face value, is highly problematic except in the face of quite remarkable theories about telepathy across possible worlds that probably ought not to be taken seriously – though I admit to being unable in all times and places to shake the ‘schizophrenic’ (usage colloquial, not medical) conviction that this is what is actually going on. (c) We have another definition available, which provides us with a roughly similar division of stances and which satisfies (a) more straightforwardly than does the definition in 5. I will propound it straightaway.

The question I would prefer to connect with stance, is, with what is the player identified? Questions of artistic identification are complex. (Subcomment: Interested readers might examine the following, if they haven’t already: H.G. Gadamer, “Poetry and Mimesis”, “The Play of Art”, etc., collected in The Relevance of the Beautiful; K.L. Walton, Mimesis and Make-Believe; R.K. Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art”; J.L. Borges, “Narrative Art and Magic”.) However, we need not wait on a successful psychology or metaphysics of artistic identification (identification of a real object with an art object, or identification of the self with an art object, either through a real object or otherwise), nor cavil at the obvious rejoinder that this is identification in no literal sense, to assert that artistic identification is a recognizable element of human experience, part of our psychology that is manifested in our behavior, and can therefore be used as an element of categorization for present purposes.

With this in mind, I assert the following:
- A player adopting Pawn stance lacks any particular artistic identification (they are identified with themselves, but this is not artistic in character).
- A player adopting Actor stance is identified with his or her character.
- A player adopting Author stance is identified with his or her character’s story.
- A player adopting Director ‘stance’ is identified with their campaign or game world as a broader organic whole.

7. What, then, is Director stance? Putting it in terms of identification, we get three forms of Director stance rather than two as above.
- When a player’s in-game token is the world itself (or some part of it), but there is no artistic identification going on at all: World-Pawn.  The “I show up” example fits in this category. The tire iron example is more complicated: this might be an example of World-Author or World-Pawn, depending.
- When a player is identified with the world itself as a definite entity: World-Actor. The surpassing example of this is Barker’s relationship to Tekumel.
- When a player is identified with the world’s story as a whole. Those who write the metaplots e.g for the WoD are arguably examples. An excellent example of a game where all players are encouraged to take on this World-Author stance in a particular way is in Ars Magica, where the world of the game is partly defined in terms of a Saga with the structure of the Four Seasons).

8. Comment: This division in terms of identification helps explain why people are tempted to identify pawn stance with gamism, actor stance with simulationism, and author stance with narrativism. Tokens in most traditional games are pawns, and one does not identify with them at all, except in passing moments of fancy. (Though such fancy is stronger in some than others: read D. Bronstein on chess for a good example of how the borders get blurred here in non-RPGs.) The gamist mode of play will encourage pawn stance. Similarly, simulationist play will encourage actor stance, and narrativist play will encourage author. However, stances may and indeed will need to be shifted within a given mode of play to accommodate the broader goals of that mode, or just for practical reasons (sometimes one will need to think about what a character would do (actor) as a way of guaranteeing story coherence (author); when a player shows up late to a traditional game it’s often easier just to let the player dictate the terms of his own entry (world-pawn).)

9. Comment: If players in the game never break out of Pawn stance, it is not an RPG, but a member of the broader family of games in general. This means that there is an essential tension in gamist RPG design, in that the gamist elements pull you towards a stance which if adopted absolutely and without exception would render the game no longer an RPG. On the other hand many people are perfectly comfortable with only very occasional forays into actor and author stance, for ‘color’ as it were, while spending much of their time in pawn. Comment/Question: The preceding is almost certainly too simplistic in one way, since Gamist RPGs are perfectly viable. So the question then becomes: how, in good gamist play and design, are transitions to actor or even author stance facilitated in a way that they don't interfere with the Gamism?

10. Slogans have been developed, to spur players who wish to play in a particular mode to their goal, as well as to serve the theoretical end of characterizing that goal. These are Step On Up, The Right To Dream, and Story Now. (Comment: Among other things, these slogans provide guidance for stance-shifting and other player actions during play.)

[M. J. Young]

Question: is there some principled reason for thinking that these are all there are? What is it? Or is this an experimental question?

As far as I know, the answer is that no fourth mode has been identified. Attempts have been made, but in each case it is found that what is being done is one of the other three.

The most interesting one offered in recent months was that there was a "social" mode, someone played in a fashion that facilitated someone else's play style; but the answer to this seems to have been that to play in a manner which facilitates one of the modes is to play in that mode in a facilitative manner (what referees do all the time).

There is no reason to presume it is limited to three, but that efforts to identify a fourth have consistently failed.

Comment: gamism is the mode of play for most traditional boardgames and other non-RPG games. It is not wrong, as I suggested previously, imitating another board member, to say that e.g. chess or Dungeon is a gamist design. They?re not RPGs, but that doesn?t change the fact that they?re designs which facilitate gamist play. Question: given this thesis, what are some examples of non-RPGs facilitating other modes of play?

I contend that these modes do crossover into other entertainments (not always games). I think that some wargames and some reenactments (e.g., Civil War reenactment groups) are simulationist activities. Improvisational acting may at times be narrativist. Efforts have been made at creating a narrativist CCG, but I don't play that category of games (by neglect, not by intent) so I'm not familiar with what's out there.

What other stance-types are there, if any?

That's a tough question. It's not always clear what the differences are between the identified stances, as they seem to some degree to be points on a spectrum (although they are reasonably clearly delineated points, based on crossing certain limitations). You could probably redefine the entire spectrum into more or fewer steps if you gave it enough study, but these are generally clear enough.

Talking about the motives of an in-game token without reference to the players of the game, while utterly reasonable in the context of RPGs taken at face value, is highly problematic except in the face of quite remarkable theories about telepathy across possible worlds that probably ought not to be taken seriously ? though I admit to being unable in all times and places to shake the ?schizophrenic? (usage colloquial, not medical) conviction that this is what is actually going on.

We have often debated whether characters are "real" in any sense, and that only leads to semantic arguments about what it is for a character to be real. Mine are "real enough" that when I take psych tests as them I come out markedly differently than when I take them as me. Yet I would concur that characters do not have motives, but rather are characterized as having them. The distinction, for the purposes of stance, is between what I as a player would like to have happen to this character who is distinct from me, versus what I as a player believe that this character would like to have happen to him. It's just a heck of a lot simpler to say that it's between what the player wants and what the character wants than to clarify that important philosophical distinction every time you want to reference the distinction.

This division in terms of identification helps explain why people are tempted to identify pawn stance with gamism, actor stance with simulationism, and author stance with narrativism.

There is some good stuff here, but I'm going to throw a monkey wrench into the works. The referee who is running a gamist game is playing gamism from director or author stance almost every time. Remember that the referee in a role playing game is one of the players, and has to be considered in the analysis. Yes, the character players are usually not given much credibility in gamist play, because it's easy to abuse, but the credibility is still there with someone, and it can shift.

If players in the game never break out of Pawn stance, it is not an RPG, but a member of the broader family of games in general.

I disagree. For one thing, you can have a game in which some players never break out of pawn stance but others do; does this make it an RPG for some but not for others? That's a bit metaphysical, isn't it? Either it is or it isn't an RPG. I think that there is a sense in which pawns can be used in a roleplay sense--you can even to some degree play narrativism in pawn stance, in the right sort of game (I'm not sure, but Mike, Ralph, would you agree that some of the elements introduced into Univeralis are treated in pawn stance?). I think that pawn stance is very shallow role play, but it is legitimately roleplaying.

So the question then becomes: how, in good gamist play and design, are transitions to actor or even author stance facilitated in a way that they don't interfere with the Gamism?

Since you can roleplay in pawn stance ("My character says this; my character does that") this question is not strictly necessary.

I'm surprised no one else touched this thread yet; I am taking Saturdays off now to play real games, so I won't be back until Sunday--but I hope this sheds some light, and look forward to the comments of others.

--M. J. Young

[Calithena]

Thanks for your responses, MJ.

Your point about the referee is a good one, but don't really constitute a monkey wrench. Note I said 'are tempted to identify gamism with pawn stance', not 'are correct in identifying...'. Of course you're right that one of the players is the referee and his stance will often be different.

Similarly with the Pawn stance objection, if the ambiguity around 'players' is tightened up. Change to 'if no player in the game ever breaks out of pawn stance'.

But actually I have to weaken it still further, because the GAME could be an RPG but the PLAYERS could all stay in pawn stance, I suppose. In that case we would have the following situation: the players would be playing an RPG, but they would not be role-playing.

"Either it is or it isn't an RPG."

I guess I agree with this, but there are some vague cases - for example, my friend Jeff's game Phantasy Realm (www.curiousgames.net). It's a boardgame which encourages Actor stance at various points, and has characters with RPG-like stats that change during play, and I've known people to play this game without even bothering with the various victory conditions, with the sole goal of exploring the board.

I would say that despite moderate potential for Sim play and the forays it encourages into Actor stance Phantasy Realm is a boardgame and not an RPG. Games like Talisman and Magic Realm are on a similarly fuzzy border.

What you say about 'my character does x' is really interesting to me. The linguistic form suggests no identification, hence Pawn, but it's plausible to imagine an entire RPG conducted in this way. And I suppose visualization doesn't strictly require identification, so maybe you're right - you can play a whole RPG in Pawn by the suggested definitions I put up here. So I'll cede that point - you're right - I can imagine legitimate RPG activity (maybe not even shallow for all intents and purposes, if the system was defined in the right kind of way) where the whole thing is conducted in Pawn stance.

Thank you! Ah, learning - nothing like it.

[Ian Charvill]

Just a note

"My character does X" can support author stance pretty easily - the shift to third person doesn't preclude sympathy or empathy.  Pawn stance explicitly does.

[Calithena]

That's a good point, Ian, and that was my first reaction to MJ's claim as well. But though you're right I think the usefulness of the third person for my thinking was just this: I imagined players (save the GM) staying in pawn stance throughout, using third person language, and playing something that was clearly an RPG. The third person language just made it clear to me how this was possible.

(I do wonder to what degree my imagining here has to do with the realization that the players can drift into Sim play while staying in Pawn stance, though. I wonder if I'm still thinking that if it was Gam/Pawn for all players all the way through it wouldn't be role-playing any more.)

[Calithena]

FWIW, I realized thinking about this today that the 'strong' sense of artistic identification I alluded to in those four authors can't be the source of a better definition of stance. I still think that something like identification might make the source of a good definition, but a less psychologically involved version of the notion seems apposite. Perhaps it's just whether the player thinks about the character as a 'that' separate from herself, tries to identify with the character as an agent, or approaches the character as a piece of a broader whole - as a driving element in a story involving the character.

Just wanted to throw that out there - the sources I mentioned are theory overkill for the problem, but I still think the point is worth considering.

[Mike Holmes]

With no preamble to all this it's hard to know how to address your comments and questions in a way. Is this all fact finding, or are you making some sort of overall point?

Anyhow...

1. What Mj said. Try to come up with one. You quickly see how hard it is.

4. Previously proposed was Audience stance. This is when the player isn't in some active relationship to the in-game elements at all, and instead takes things in. Said to not be a stance, because it's actually an absence of stance, and doing something on the Social level. In terms of the overall model, Stance is a technique.

6. The term Stance is used because it refers to where the player "stands" in relation to the character when using authority. Or that's how it's been explained to me.
Actor - The player considers his construct for the character's motives, and narrates the character acting accordingly.
Author - the player considers the narrative first, has the character do something to enhance the story, and then retroactively assigns a motive to the character to "cover".
Pawn - same as author, but without the retroactive assignment of motive. The character's motives are directly the players, and not some construct.
Director - the player considers the narrative, and narrates something happening outside of an assigned character's abilities to effect.

These all describe how the player "stands" in relation to the character when using Autority to create narrative in-game.

7 is problematic because it tries to deal with what director stance is by talking about it in terms of something other than character.

9 is problematic as it deals with the definition of RPGs, which is something that causes interminable debate. The question would be to ask if we should declare that all games that have only Pawn stance be declared non-RPGs? Which I think we ought not to do, because that's a slippery slope that leads to exclusion of games on all sorts of counts. In any case, I'm not saying that all games are RPGs either, just that they are included on more than one criteria. That is, there are many potential criteria and it would seem that to count as a RPG for practical purposes that you have to qualify for some measure of them. Thus, nothing precludes anything from being an RPG, RPGs just must pass some of the criteria. Thus CRPGs count because they allow characterizations on a level intended to create the feel of a character. Whereas Monopoly does not do this, or indeed have any characteristic of an RPG.

10. I think Ron's motive in creating these "slogans" is so that he would have terminology that nobody could argue with. That is, Gamism can be said to be confusing in that it really doesn't have anything to do with some quality unique only to Games. Such that someone might want a change to "Competitionism" or something. By choosing multi-word constructs, nobody can reasonably claim that they indicate a meaning other than what Ron has assigned them. Basically, he's avoiding the problem that you have with the term Stance.

Mike

[Calithena]

Thanks for your questions, Mike. It's a cross between fact-finding, possibly 1 idea that may or may not be new (I just got here), and some tweaks for Ron and others who like GNS about what they're doing, which are only valuable insofar as they haven't been thought up already. The real genesis of the post is that I typed this all up as a way of clarifying my own thought and then decided that there was just enough there that it was worth throwing out there into the internet mix to see what others said about it. Just enough, mind you.

"Stance is a technique." This reminds me of the standard translation of a phrase of Aristotle's: "Happiness is an activity." What the hell does that mean in English? (Note: this is not an attack, only an expression of my own discomprehension.) Normally, a stance would be a state of an observer or participant in some activity.

On your own definition of Director stance you should be able to see that it splits up along somewhat similar lines to the ones that you define for the other stances. On what grounds does the world do something? To serve the story, because that's the way the world is, or to provide a set piece for some IG conflict?

MJ already smashed 9, so no more need to discuss that as I originally wrote it. I've ceded the point. I do wonder whether it would be role-playing if all players of the game stayed in Gam/Pawn the whole time still, though.

Best,

Sean

[Mike Holmes]

"Stance is a technique." This reminds me of the standard translation of a phrase of Aristotle's: "Happiness is an activity." What the hell does that mean in English? (Note: this is not an attack, only an expression of my own discomprehension.) Normally, a stance would be a state of an observer or participant in some activity.

Hmm. Well Stance describes the mindframe of a player as he makes a decision. So it's not really the decision itself, but the "stance" from which it's made. Similar to a stance in combat. You start out with a particular facing and head off in that direction. Does that make sense? "Technique" here is Jargon meaning "underneath" GNS concerns. Basically what you do to make your GNS Agenda happen.

On your own definition of Director stance you should be able to see that it splits up along somewhat similar lines to the ones that you define for the other stances. On what grounds does the world do something? To serve the story, because that's the way the world is, or to provide a set piece for some IG conflict?

This is true, and it's been proposed before. I like it, too. The detractors would say that since Stance refers to character, it's unimportant to describe in what manner the player makes a decision to do something that does not emanate from the character.

But certainly there are two distinct phenomenon. The "sim" Director stance use is under-recognized, and I go out of my way to point it, and it's importance, out to people.

Mike