Simulationism

[Calithena]

In the thread at http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9025 , I offered some thoughts on Exalted. These lead me to ask some questions.

Ron's distinction there between the excitement generated by thinking about a game (which are for most people primarily dictated by color and setting, I think, and secondarily by considerations like "what kind of mechanics does this game have?", where different people clearly have different priorities) and the excitement generated by actually playing a game (which is more complex, and which GNS is aimed at addressing) is a very important one. Arguably the first has more to do with selling games to a wide audience than the second, though both are potentially trumped by aggressive advertising. That's not what I wanted to talk about in this thread though.

In particular, I'm worried about Simulationism. Arguably, the color/setting issues that fire people's imaginations when they're thinking about the game are in some sense Simulationist in character: people are dreaming, wondering "wow! wouldn't it be cool if...". So if that's what sells games, that indicates that most people have some Simulationist orientation. Except that there's a disconnect, because lots of people whose imaginations get fired up by stuff like this don't actually care to spend a lot of time on exploration of setting and color in play, except as it serves their Gam or Nar play-priorities.

But anyway, OK. So in my unqualified analysis of Exalted, I imagined a scenario where Nar Bob and Gam Sue both get some enjoyment out of a game because of imaginative elements, even though both get annoyed while the game focuses on the other character because, well, Bob and Sue don't care about the same stuff.

One way to describe this, not the way I did in the post, would be that both of them have some Sim priorities that keep them vaguely in there while the game goes in other directions. Of course, even that is not quite right. Because actually while Bob is bored while Sue hacks s-t up he's not really playing at all, he's just thinking about his character - entertaining himself by daydreaming and going through the motions when his combat round comes up, except occasionally when he gets to describe something that really serves the storyteling he's interested in.

Can anyone tell what I'm struggling with here and help out?

I worry sometimes that Sim is the most difficult and complex of the three categories. The initial thing that triggered this worry was just this: 'realism', as in wanting dangerous combat, fragile characters, lethal critical hit charts, etc., is a form of Simulationism. So is wanting to go into heavy immersion actor stance in order to explore what 'this guy' (not so much 'my guy') 'would do' in that sort of situation, in that world, with that cultural setting, etc. (The kind of thing that some people who get into Tekumel, Middle Earth, Jorune, and Glorantha love to do to no end.) So is wanting to know what's really going on in some part of the fictive world.

All these are describable as Simulationism, but I wonder sometimes if they are really the same thing. They're all potentially distracting for people with Gamist or Narrativist priorities, certainly. On the other hand, some of them are also usable to support those priorities (cf. TRoS).

But I wonder if they're really all the same thing. I think what I'm really wondering is this. If there's conflict between players with the same priorities, what causes it? If the players are Gam oriented, then presumably a character who's way more powerful than everyone else's, or who hogs everyone else's niche, or a character who doesn't have a niche maybe, will be dissatisfied within the Gam umbrella, because he's denied the proper sort of agency. Similarly, two Nar prioritized players may have such different ideas of the stories they want to tell or the values that their characters are realizing that they may not be able to get along.

But in both those cases I'd say the players are still wanting the same thing...they just have trouble wanting it together because of a lack of agency or because their characters aren't well suited to share stories. Whereas I can imagine three Sim prioritized players, one focused on 'realism', one focused on character exploration, and one focused on world exploration, who I'd be more inclined to describe as really wanting different things, even though they fall under the same GNS umbrella.

Anyway the point is: it makes sense to offset all these things under Sim in that they have a certain 'natural similarity' (what would/should it be like if...) and that play aimed at addressing those questions is distinct from Gamist- and Narrativist-prioritized play, even if there are some good examples of typically Sim elements being used to support both. But in another sense the category doesn't, to me, have the internal coherence that the other two categories do, in that the 'natural similarity' between different sub-priorities under the Sim umbrella is much looser than that in the other two modes. Or so I see it, anyway.

Urg. Didn't I have some work to do here? Anyway, I'd be interested in what others think/have thought along these lines.

[Alan]

Hi Calithena,

You might want to consider the distinction between individual fantasy and "Exploration" as used in Ron's model.  Exploration is group construction of a fantasy.  An imaginative contribution must be communicated to the other players for it to exist in Exploration.  

Simulationism requires Exploration - what is communicated between the players - but says nothing about unshared imaginings.  Such imaginings are outside the model.

[Ian Charvill]

All of the three GNS modes are very broad categories and all group together incompatible play styles.  For example, a player-vs-player gamist in a player-vs-GM gamist group (all shorthand caveats apply) is likely to kill everyone's joy.

It may be that simulationism is the broadest church - although I do not think that has been demonstrated - but, so what?  One of them has to be.

[Calithena]

Alan - check. Not sure it solves the problem here - which is not a problem for GNS as a whole, just a matter of understanding how the categories break down - but that is an important distinction. Still, I think that the differing Sim tendencies I described are ones we see manifested in play preferences - one guy gets mad at 'unrealistic' combat, another guy gets mad if the game doesn't facilitate his finding out new world details, but both are in some sense Sim-prioritized.

Ian - well, I suppose in one sense one of them 'has to be', but that's not the point here. You identify an important distinction within Gamism, but I'm not sure it's the same thing. Sort of a means-end distiction: everyone wants the same cookies, but some of them think they're a team against the GM to get the cookies, and others think it's about their guy getting the cookies period, to hell with the other players. There are some interesting issues here to be sure.

But the different Sim-prioritized players seem to me to want different cookies.

Even if what I'm saying is right, keep in mind that it's not really a criticism of GNS. More like a thought that in the case of Sim there are important breakdowns within the category for characterizing players' priorities that aren't necessarily there with the other two.

[Ian Charvill]

OK - different gamism cookies --

Kill-the-monsters vs solve the puzzle (e.g. you killed the npc before I could question him)
Front-load character design tactics vs field of battle tactics (I know people who explicitly criticise dnd3 because it falls into the former category)
Magic item gathering vs xp gathering (e.g. a low magic world with few items but plenty of opportunity for levelling up may not please some people who like their widgets)

These more in line with what you were thinking?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Let's see.

1. I think the "diversity within mode" issue is off topic.

2. Let's put aside the "sitting there imagining, not playing" issue - that's another issue.

3. Here's the issue for your basic inquiry, Sean. Exploration is not Simulationism. When people see Kewl Stuff in a game book, they instantly get fired up regarding Exploration, with whatever GNS combination/application they'd like being a distant dream for later.

You wrote,

In particular, I'm worried about Simulationism. Arguably, the color/setting issues that fire people's imaginations when they're thinking about the game are in some sense Simulationist in character: people are dreaming, wondering "wow! wouldn't it be cool if...". So if that's what sells games, that indicates that most people have some Simulationist orientation. Except that there's a disconnect, because lots of people whose imaginations get fired up by stuff like this don't actually care to spend a lot of time on exploration of setting and color in play, except as it serves their Gam or Nar play-priorities.

Everything you say after "arguably" is incorrect, because you're using Simulationism instead of Exploration. You also seem to think that Gamist and Narrativist play wouldn't "spend a lot of time" on Exploration, and that is also incorrect. This is key:

Time and effort spent on Exploration is what powers play of any Creative Agenda.

So that means you might see oodles and oodles of Setting and Color (for instance) in any role-playing experience. There is nothing Simulationist about that. Simulationism is a specific application of Exploration with distinct features.

Therefore your Bob and Sue aren't "meeting" due to shared Simulationist priorities. They are merely hoping, separately, that the Explorative content will be realized according to their respective agendas at least some of the time.

Best,
Ron

[Calithena]

Hi, Ron & all -

I guess I do have trouble with the Exploration/Simulation distinction - this has come up before. This leads me to new worries, however - about whether (what I perceive to be, rightly or wrongly) the non-category-threatening ambiguity I see in 'Simulationism' qua description of play priorities gets finessed by pushing it back onto 'a general interest in Exploration'.

My worry is that if you finesse the ambiguity (I perceive) in Sim this way you wind up with an ambiguity of greater scope affecting all the different types of Creative Agenda. Which I would find unfortunate, though even then far from a disabling problem with the theory.

What you say about Bob and Sue makes sense to me, Ron, so I'll drop the 'shared simulationist priorities' hypothetical explanation I considered for it. But the paragraph before that makes less sense to me. I'll mull it over.

One clarifying question for now: am I right to see a focus on realism, a focus on discovering 'mysteries' within a setting, and an intense interest in immersing one self in one's character as

a) all, when they describe player interests rather than, say, game design techniques, properly understood as types of Creative Agenda which fall under the Simulationist umbrella, and

b) things which it's entirely reasonable to expect that one player or group of players might have intense interest in one of and no interest in another, as manifested in their play preferences?

Because that's the 'data' I'm starting from. My perception that a and b are both true, or at least plausibly true, might by false - say because of a Sim/Exploration confusion, or for some other reason - but I need more to see why it's false.

I think in terms of the broad theory nothing particularly hinges on this for me. But if a and b were both true then I would tend to see Simulationism, as a category, as lacking the internal coherence I tend to see in the other two.

This is where the kinds of observations Ian offered would lead to an intense discussion that I guess I'd rather postpone for another time. I would stress the differences, someone else would point to similarities and/or differences in the other two categories - and we might reach agreement, or we might just get frustrated because both of us put different subjective weights on the similarities and differences without conjuring a particularly convincing reason. (For instance, the 'different cookies' Ian offered just don't seem different to me in the relevant sense. I'd want to say these were just different flavors of the same cookie, but that the three Sim subpriorities I identified were in fact 'more' different in some important sense - different types of snack food entirely. So I may be subject to some kind of cognitive illusion here. But until I have a more persuasive set of reasons to offer myself I won't go further with this.)

Anyway, thanks for your help.

[Calithena]

Eureka - I've got it. I think. That is, upstairs brushing my teeth just now I happened upon a sense in which a and b could both be true and Simulationism could still have the sort of strong coherence as a category that the other two do. Just coming at it from the wrong direction.

If I'm right then I think that Simulationist play preferences are less desire-driven, less 'immediate', than the other two, and more connected to daydream and wonder. At least in me - I certainly don't have enough general psychology to make an overarching claim here.

Ah well. If something like a and b pass muster feel free to try to figure out what sort of psychology might be involved to make all three the same thing, which isnt to say that the same issues will drive that thing for all persons etc., hence the different types of players. No biggie. If not, then back to the drawing board.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Sean,

The teeth-brushing did it. That is exactly right - almost kind of a drifting sense of wonder, if you will, even when applied to incredibly engineering-style System-heavy Simulationist play.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

I hope I'm not too late, because this thead sparked something in my mind that I think may be helpful to anyone still not getting it.

I think that simulationism is in some ways analogous to an interest in non-fiction.

The History Channel
The Biography Channel
The Discovery Channel
The Learning Channel
The Travel Channel
The Food Channel
Animal Planet

Now, those are all different, and odds are good that if you like watching the standard fare on any one of them, you probably like watching the standard fare on more than one of them--but probably not all of them. Yet your particular choices from the list are going to be different from mine, or from anyone else's choices. (Looking deeper, there are probably going to be some shows on all those channels that don't interest you, but most will have at least one once in a while that does.)

This is an interest in information for its own sake, in discovery, in exploring ideas and places and things.

That's what simulationism is like: it's mind-expanding, in that we're learning about something. It might be learning about people, or about places (real or imaginary), or about situations or color or just about anything else. Now, you might love to learn about physics and hate biology (no, that's me--and no, Ron, I don't hate biology--I just don't want to have to dissect anything, and want to keep my biological information free of blood and guts, thank you), but if you love learning about something, then that's what the core of the simulationist experience is: learning about something.

Is that helpful?

--M. J. Young

[Silmenume]

Perhaps this was already covered by the phrases "day dream and wonder" or "drifting sense of wonder", but I'll add my 2 cents as well, and I will borrow from M.J. Young if he isn't too offended.

Simulationism is also an interest in experiencing for its own sake, in feeling, in exploring emotions and desires.

In Simulationism one could play to feel what its like to be a hero or a cad.  To experience the aching joy of life or the piercing agony of death.  One could play and experience the strange peace of self-sacrifice for an innocent stranger or the wretchedness of survivor's guilt.  One could experience the bonds of friendship strained to the breaking point and celebrate their endurance or curse their fragility.  One could dive head first into hopeless odds driven by love and by some miracle survive only to find one's love dead.

Emotions.  Powerful.  Moving.

This style of play is more right brained than the left brained learning paradigm, but both are equally valid methods of simulationist play.

Aure Entaluva,

Silmenume