Writing Style, Detail, and Simulationism

[Ian Charvill]

Ian, can you come up with a case where pursuing Story Now might damage the Dream?

Challenge.

[Mike Holmes]

Now I find this thread. Last time I duck out for a week.

OK, I think that the idea here is sorta silly. We all agree that fiction can't be Sim or whatever because it's not role-playing. But then here we are trying to attach lables anyhow. Why not say something that's not contradictory and yet still makes a connection?

For example, I would say that I personally love all that long, drawn out extra exposition that Tolkien puts in (what some people denigrate as awful story pacing). I would also say that from that same place in me that gets me all excited to read these things, I get excited about Sim.

So, no, Tolkien isn't Sim. But it has elements that give me the same thrill as heightened exploration does in RPGs. That seems to be a sensible statement, no?

Mike

[Gordon C. Landis]

Mike - yup, I think you're right.  That gets us back to John's initial questions:

So is this meticulous attention to detail in authors related to Simulationism? I tend to agree with Ralph that we can and should draw parallels between writing styles and gaming styles. And it certainly seems like drawing maps of the world, inventing languages, and diagramming out family trees is something that could easily be pegged as Simulationist in a game. So is this a spurious association or are they actually related?
[ . . .]
An important second question is: If Tolkien is Simulationist, then who are the more Narrativist authors?

My point (and I take Mike to be agreeing) on question one is that yes, we can say they are related.  But the ways in which they are related are limited.  To see that (perhaps very interesting or useful) realationship we have to get a bit loosey-goosey with the terminology, so it's important to remember the limitations.

Letting myself get loosey-goosey on question two, I think the problem is that an author is ALWAYS Narrativist.  There may be a very strong Sim-support, or a weak one, and either might work well or poorly in pursuit of the Nar goal, but fundamentally it's not that Tolkien is NOT Narrativist, it's just that he's also strongly Sim.  And I explain away this game-GNS impossibility by saying we can only loosely apply this to fiction anyway, and "Prioritization" issues aren't really there in a static fiction like they are in RPGing.

Let's see, what else - yeah, "addressing premise" and "authoring theme" are basically identical.  Maybe with a tiny, subtle distinction, that addressing premise doesn't mean that theme MUST be authored, just that it's very likely to be?  Maybe.  Oh, and I find Paul's point about looking to the engagement of others to be INCREDIBLY important to functional, enjoyable play of many, many stripes.  But Ralph is, I think, correct to say that it's not particularly a Nar identifier.

That's about all I can think to say on the subject - it may be that the borders to applying GNS to fiction ("only GNS loosely" but given that, "always fundamentally Nar") mean that there's not much else to say than Mike's "I would also say that from that same place in me that gets me all excited to read these things, I get excited about Sim."

Gordon

[lumpley]

I'm cool with that.  

I think my initial vehemence was because of the Egri-through-Babelfish bafflement I mentioned.  

-Vincent