A problem with the Intro to the GNS Essay

[Mark D. Eddy]

My straightforward observation of the activity of role-playing is that many participants do not enjoy it very much. Most role-players I encounter are tired, bitter, and frustrated.

Interestingly, most of the role-players *I* encounter enjoy their hobby very much, and have a good time at their games. I think that this opening sentence is at the core of why I really don't get GNS at all. Happy gamers don't need to reflect on what they're doing, don't care that their play might be called incoherent, and really don't care that there are other ways of approaching the entire topic of what roleplaying games are. I think that this is the big lightbulb as far as I'm concerned.

If it ain't broke, ya don't worry about fixin' it.

Now is your chance to tell me that this is elementary, trivial, and obvious, and to go and get a life. Or to show me why GNS theory might be useful to a happy rather than an unhappy gamer.

[Valamir]

Well my first answer is: absolutely.  If you're completely satisfied and thrilled to death with your gaming, then you're quite correct.

My second answer is: but are you sure you'll always be in that blessed condition or is there a chance that at some point tensions will arise at which time it might be nice to have some idea of their source.

My third answer is: Really?  There's no source of tension, or disatisfaction around your game table?  Are you sure all of the other players you game with are equally happy.  I've known many a GM who was thrilled at how well his game was going, would swear up and down that everyone was having a great time, and was completely oblivious to the fact that his players weren't enjoying themselves nearly as much as he thought they were.

My fourth question is:  Happy or satisified?  I tend to think that there is a difference between being happy and being satisfied and that often satisfaction gets conflated with happiness.  Satisfaction can be achieved simply through familiarity and comfort.  Satisfaction can be achieved simply by the absence of negative elements.  But happiness requires not just avoiding distasteful things but also embracing fulfilling things.  

So if your answers are yep, yep, yep, and yep...it would seem you're pretty well taken care of.

[Scourge108]

My question would be what is it that makes you so much more of a happy gamer.  I thought the GNS theory was right on base when I heard it.  For one thing, it matched many of my own observations.  Second, maybe the fact that I was one of the gamers Ron described in that quote has something to do with it.  And I can tell you why I'm unsatisfied.  I have come to consider myself a collector of roleplaying games rather than a gamer, as being a gamer would mean you actually have a chance to play the games.  It's damn near impossible for me to get a game started.  I talk to people who say they want to game again, but as soon as you start getting down times and places, they say they don't really have time right now, they have something else they're into at the moment, etc.  Nothing ever happens.  Sometimes we'll get through character creation and maybe even start some roleplaying.  But pretty soon everybody loses interest, they want to chat online while they play, they don't remember what was going on or what character they were playing, and everybody makes excuses not to show up.  After a while, months have gone by and the campaign is dead without even a funeral.  And when I do finally get a brief moment where I have an interested audience who really want to roleplay, it always happens after a really bad day at work when I'm dead tired and in an extremely anti-social mood.  So I have to be on, knowing I won't be my best.  And I'm not sure a more opinonated crowd than gamers exists.  One thing I know from experience, if a gamer does not have a great time the first time they play a new game, they will forever after loathe that game with every fiber of their being, and will never ever give it a second chance under penalty of death.  I have had good gaming groups before, that were really into it, and would keep the game going when the GM began to burn out.  But usually the GM has to maintain the enthusiasm for a whole group, which is quite exhausting.  And the group themselves are people it can be very trying to be around.

I think the GNS model pointed out where the breakdown happens.  My main gaming group I still have contact with is a married couple.  They usually don't leave because of difficulties with babysitters, so I have to go there.  They usually don't even bother to get off the chat rooms they're hooked on when I'm there.  Chris, the husband, is a gamist.  He mostly plays Shadowrun on mushes.  He studies systems, knows how to break any game (and refuses to play any game that is unbalanced in any way), and likes a clear goal for the characters to accomplish.  He is a very good roleplayer, but just doesn't seem to "get" the other perspectives.  The best example I can think of was when he helped me make a Shadowrun character.  I decided to design a homeless street shaman, and based him partly off of Wild Thing.  He was practically raised by feral cats, and learned magic for survival.  I had a few points to spend, when I was done, and Chris kept trying to get me to take a few skills, to the point of writing them down on the character sheet for me.  Things like Electronics, Computer, and Demolitions he said were very useful and I should take them.  But where is a feral person going to pick up these skills?  It was obvious things like character concept and internal conflicts were unimportant in this game, and I quickly lost interest.

Tanya, the wife, on the other hand is a Narrativist.  She mostly plays on freeform Vampire chatrooms.  She is very charismatic and a good roleplayer, and comes up with some interesting characters and stories.  But she hates systems (why she does freeform), for she has no patience with them.  Any game with a system she's tried to run, she gave up on because it gets in the way of her storytelling.  In the only test-run of a mutant RPG I tried, she almost didn't play because the powers were randomly determined.  She had a specific character (one from another game, a big clue she wasn't really interested) she wanted to use, and didn't want my Sim BS getting in the way.

Of course, I'm probably a Simulationist.  I like it when the players lose themselves in the game and feel like their characters.  I usually try to think about things like theme and moral choices when doing so, which might make me a touch Nar, but I think there's something to Sim.  So it's no wonder three people with three different goals would have such a hard time keeping interest in one game.  We need to find one game we're all really interested in.  Or we need to find gamers who are interested in our own kind of gaming.

[Rich Forest]

Mark,

In addition to saying, "Yeah, what Ralph said," I think it's worth pointing out that those two sentences you quote are really part of the introduction. They're doing a specific job in there that makes the most sense when you consider at the whole first paragraph rather than just those lines. They are just a part of the attention getter and goal statement:

"Having any problems with your game group? Then try reading this article and see if it has anything to offer you."

So in that sense, I don't think those first couple sentences really mean the same thing alone that they do in context. In a certain sense, it doesn't matter whether most roleplayers are happy (as in your experience) or frustrated (as in Ron's experience, at least at the time he was writing that). What matters is that if you're a roleplayer and you're frustrated, you're going to read that first paragraph, and it's going to get your attention, and get you reading, and maybe help you out.

Rich

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I went looking for an older thread in which I answered this same question, but didn't find it easily. So ...

If a role-player enjoyed every aspect of his or her play-experiences, and if this person also wanted to get analytical about why and how they might be enjoying them ...

... then the theory might be an interesting read for purposes of that understanding. It seems to have been useful as well, in that "interesting" sense, for any number of people who do fit this profile, especially as a springboard to strike out in new directions for them or as a way to communicate with others who might like different things.

But if a person (a) enjoys every aspect of his or her play-experience and (b) sees no point in merely understanding that enjoyment, then no, the theory, essays, dialogues, and forums here are entirely not worth that person's time.

And finally, as I've said a number of times, anyone is free simply to write off anything I've posted or said as the ravings of a Mad Old Man in the Corner, and therefore ignore them entirely.  

Best,
Ron

[Mark D. Eddy]

Thank you all: It appears that the answer to my question is not either/or, but both/and, as is so often true when real life interferes. If you're happy with your game and gamers, there isn't a pressing need for any game theory, I suppose. In fact, there isn't really any need to write a role-playing game, is there? But, and this is a biggie, if you're interested in checking things out "under the hood" as it were, the essays have a great deal of meat on the bones to gnaw, not to mention the marrow to suck. I'll stop there because that metaphor didn't just mix, it emulsified.

And in answer to Ralph's questions: Yep, I believe so (not being a fortune teller), Odd story, and yep.

The odd story: the only recent problem is in a Star Wars game I am a player in. It's a chat, and one of the players is some sort of emergency services type. He was called away unexpectedly to deal with an emergency in the middle of a game, and that caused some major tension because some of the other players didn't know what his job was. That's not really something that GNS is capable of dealing with, is it?

[Silmenume]

It does if you consider that the whole model includes a social contract.

The social contract in the game you mentioned should include a discussion about said player's circumstances and the interests off all the other players as well.  The model does not tell you how to come a workable solution, but the model does allow that such events arise and do need to be worked out.

Aure Entaluva,

Silmenume