Splitting Simulationism?

[M. J. Young]

For a while lately I've been bothered by what I perceive as a widening rift in the definition of simulationism.

In my mind, I had come to identify simulationist play as that play which is driven by curiosity toward discovery. Within that, I'd distinguished objective and subjective discovery, but identified both as legitimate goals of simulationism. To clarify

[*]Objective simulationism included many of the sorts of play that seem so peripheral to so many. Scientific play which tests the nature of the physics of the game world, tourism play which is interested in visiting exotic places but not necessarily doing anything there, and what if play in which the players have set up a causal system and are running a scenario solely to find out what happens could all be objective simulationism. We are discovering something, and our characters are the pawns we use to manipulate the environment and discover the outcomes.[*]Subjective simulationism is mostly covered by what has been dubbed Virtuality. This is the sort of discovery in which the players want the experience of being the character, of being in the world, of losing touch with reality for a bit and finding themselves somewhere else.[/list:u]I would have said that subjective simulationism was simulationism with a preference for immersion techniques and actor stance.

I've opposed many efforts to define simulationism in such a way that it only covers the latter sort. Jay (Silmenume) has seemed to me on a number of occasions to have argued that this is simulationism, and some (possibly him) have implied that what I call objective simulationism isn't even genuine exploration.

Not so long ago, Ron got into the dispute, declaring that he considered such concepts as "discovery" and "what if" play to be completely confusing in relation to simulationist play, which, in his view, is always "the dream", and sounds like it must be that subjective sort of simulationist play which I have long argued is only part of the whole.

Chris Lehrich's recent thread, http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12838">Sim-Diceless Thread Search, has brought this conflict to the fore in my mind. The core premise of the thread, which is ostensibly about simulationism in general, is that mechanics disrupt the dream, that is, rolling dice or crunching numbers or otherwise working out the results interrupts the subjective experience which is accepted within that thread as simulationism.

However, smack in the middle of that thread,

Just as an aside: for me, (lower case) sim-style gaming isn't about "forgetting" the real world for the dream; it's about what you might call the step from artifice to artifact. I (with the help of the other players) build a situation and some rules, and then we can use it to play what-if? games. Having a strong internal causality means that all of the players will be on the same page about "what would happen if", and that lets us spin out long chains of action, consequence, and possibility. But outside that single chain of events, there's a TON of table-talk about alternate possibilities and hypothetical cases and the constraints of the setting. Part of what we're doing is making and editing the material and causal relationships between them that will be used now and in future play.

That seems to me to be exactly what I mean when I refer to objective simulationism. Neel, in this description, doesn't seem to be trying to get the experience of living through those events. He seems to be trying to get the understanding of what might happen, to create the possibilities and follow them through to their logical conclusions, from an entirely distanced viewpoint.

From the way Neel phrases that, I think he would agree with me that this is all simulationism, whether it is subjectively experienced or objectively manipulated. Yet from many other posts on that thread and elsewhere, it seems that there is a strong contingent here for the notion that simulationism is only that subjective experiential sort of play, and that those of us who play for the objective observation of events are not playing simulationism.

I still think that this can all be tied together if we look to something like discovery or learning or knowledge as the object or goal of all forms of simulationism. Yet it's not my place to define the agendum. Quite a few people quite clearly think that it is not so.

Thus I'm forced to wonder whether the concept of objective simulationism needs to be considered as a fourth agendum, and whether there are distinguishing features apart from immersion and stance that identify it.

--M. J. Young

[Ben Lehman]

Please, go read this thread.
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=11317

I'd like to talk about this in the context of the lumpley's "Technical Agenda," myself.

yrs--
--Ben

[C. Edwards]

Hey M. J.,

I don't think you're seeing a widening rift. I think that you're seeing an increase in people talking about specific combinations of predominant Stance and other techniques that all result in Sim play. Simple as that.

It's not Sim pschizophrenia or a fundamental disconnect or misunderstanding on anyone's part. From Neel, to Chris (Lehrich), to yourself, all of you are talking about Sim play. I really think that some things said in the thread to which Ben linked should be taken to heart by a lot of people.

Call it "Technical Agenda", or whatever. You're just seeing variables at work, dials twisted different ways, etc.

Man, if there was only one path to any CA role-playing would be about as exciting as a paper cut.

-Chris

[Mark D. Eddy]

The problem is, and was, and continues to be that these two versions of Sim are not compatable at the gaming table. So, using the Big Model, they are not the same Creative Agenda. They do not use the same techniques, they are different styles of Exploration, and they require a different Social Contract to implement. If the Creative Agenda does nothing to unify the experience of game play, there is no Creative Agenda.

The Big Model is not GNS-dependent. G,N, and S are Big Model dependent. This is an important distinction that too many people are missing.

[Marco]

In my mind, I had come to identify simulationist play as that play which is driven by curiosity toward discovery. Within that, I'd distinguished objective and subjective discovery, but identified both as legitimate goals of simulationism.

--M. J. Young

What you call subjective simulationism (being there) is what I experience as Narrativism--it all depends on where "there" is and what's going on there.*

CA's are supposed to describe some kind of actual dynamic at the table (in the case of Sim, confirmation of input). I don't know what that means: maybe this would be a good place for Ron to take another stab at going into what he means by that.

-Marco
* There were however, notably, at least a couple of posters who were very suspicious of this assessment.

[WiredNavi]

What you call subjective simulationism (being there) is what I experience as Narrativism--it all depends on where "there" is and what's going on there.*

I don't think that it's Narrativism for the simple reason that I have often played, and seen others play, from a perspective which regards two things as important: immersion and accuracy.  They don't worry about what will make a good story or address premises - or rather, they may worry about it before they play - but during play they worry about portraying their character accurately and about being able to think and see things as the character would.  Their enjoyment of the experience comes from being able to totally immerse themselves in as realistic a world as they can manage, and the systems they use are often designed to give as little disruption to that immersion as possible.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I'm quoting this for the second time now, although that's all right - so far it's been kind of buried.

Simulationist play is defined by confirming one's input, via the output.

You're a Star Trek fan? OK, then, let's play Star Trek. Whatever the agreed-upon important input is, its effect during play is supposed to get us Star Trek.

That input might be the funny-physics of the show. Fine - we work out what those are (or read them in the sourcebook, whatever) and put them into action via System.

Or that input might be the distinctive character interactions or political tropes of the show. Fine - we dedicate ourselves to depicting and reinforcing those issues through what our characters do, which is also System.

Or ... and so on. Whatever angle you choose as the motor for input, i.e. processing through System, the output should confirm that this is, indeed, Star Trek. To play in this fashion is a celebration of Star Trek.

It is absolutely irrelevant to the general concept of Simulationism whether a story is produced or not. It is, however, very important in terms of an applied instance of Simulationism whether a story is taken as one of our going-in constraints.

For instance, one group might be more interested in "being kitty-people fighting with ray-guns" than in "doing Star Trek." Their play-experience and attention to "doing the story right" will be very different from that of the Star Trek fans. However, the guiding aesthetic is the same: agreed-upon input, processing, confirmatory output.

Narrativist play, like Gamist play, is not confirmatory of anything that "goes in." In Gamist play, play itself determines who wins or does best in terms of personal strategy and guts. Similarly, Narrativist play is that in which only play itself determines how Premise is transformed into Theme.

To clarify about Narrativist play, think in terms of any story created by any person or group in some familiar medium like movies or novels. It is absolutely irrefutable that at some point in time, there was no story of this particular sort (medium, presentation, details, etc). But at some point in the creative process, a story did indeed appear.

Whatever happens at that transition is what happens during Narrativist play. It cannot be agreed-upon beforehand, nor can it be imposed by a single person in an "ah-ha" sense upon the others during the process.

As well as:

That's it, people. That's what Simulationist play is.

You want a distinctive statement of Agenda? There you go. Can it be compatible with a Gamist or Narrativist one, as a first priority? No it can't. Can it be realized through vast array of what gets Explored first or later, what gets Explored mildly or intensely? Yes it can. Is it compatible with my first attempts to articulate it in the Simulationist essay? Yes it is.

I am so sick of all this babble about "discovery" or "what if." All of that has brought us precisely nowhere. This post marks my explicit statement that people should simply drop those terms, even if they are personal favorites, as useful for purposes of discourse. They are perfectly fine as "say it yourselves," apparently, but in a group-discussion context, they're poison.

M.J., you seem to have read that final paragraph as an explicit rejection of "discovery" et al., and although my frustrated tone in that post is real, I'm telling you: there is no such rejection. What frustrates me is the proliferation of such terms without rigor, as people seize on them and claim to be agreeing.

Marco, you rightly asked me back when I first said all this how to tell it's happening and I still owe you a reply about that. Haven't forgotten. Let's get everyone up to speed on the basic idea first.

Best,
Ron

[Sean]

Mark -

Aren't G, N, and S types of CA? If one guy wants to compete for how many barmaids he can score with and another guy is just interested in tactical simulation, they're not going to play well together either.

I agree with you that the GNS labels need to be understood within the big model, but I think they're types of CA, not creative agenda proper.


Ron -

That 'confirming one's input via the output' bit is very interesting. I guess I see it as right for defining the role of stories in Sim vs. the role of addressing premise in Nar. I'm much less confident about it in general though. It seems to me that 'open-ended' forms of Sim should be possible, where choices in play directly effect the exploratory content being dealt with. As where say the characters actually do that physics experiment, or deliberately go to the empty part of the map, or whatever. I'll think about it more - right now it seems to me that you could stretch 'confirming input...' to cover these cases, perhaps, but it starts to look like a stretch, and one which would make the definition seem to start to cover G and N as well.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Mark, a couple of replies have said this already, but I'll confirm: using compatibility as your yardstick for defining Creative Agendas at their most basic level is only going to cause trouble. My comments in the thread Ben cited are pretty much my whole outlook on this topic.

Sean, what you're calling a stretch is no stretch at all. If a group enters into play with a desire to confirm their excitement about (say) Star Trek physics, and they play by putting the Enterprise or its in-game proxy into situations that were never seen on the show, it's still the same thing. Sim play of this sort wants to see that the show's physics will "handle" this new situation. If the solutions or applications proposed during play violate the shared understanding of the show's physics, they will be rejected as bad play or broken rules.

Best,
Ron

[timfire]

I've thought this before, but I don't see Ron's Sim & MJ's Sim as being that different. I think that when they get down to it, both of them are talking about the same thing. However, as I see it, they both talk about things differently, so it sometimes appears that they disagree.

Sim play of this sort wants to see that the show's physics will "handle" this new situation.

That sounds like MJ's objective Sim to me!

That said, this is the present state of affairs. I do believe MJ's efforts over time have done alot in furthering everyone's understanding of Sim.
--------------

On to other things now... MJ - I don't see why you want to seperate 'objective' & 'subjective' Sim. To me, objective looks like Sim with the Immersion dial down low, and subjective is just Sim with the Immersion dial up high. That's just a difference in technique. Who ever said that a person can't have a preference for a particular technique?

This reminds me of Ralph's "Narrativism is not a CA" thread. Ralph was arguing that people were confusing a particular technique (widely distributed credibility and lots of directorial power) as a CA.(*) It seems to me that the same thing is happening here. You (or maybe just others) are confusing a particular technique (Sim w/ Immersion) as a CA of it's own.

[(*) For the record, I disagreed with Ralph's conclusion in the thread.]

[Edited to add in a link to Ralph's thread.]

[Marco]

What you call subjective simulationism (being there) is what I experience as Narrativism--it all depends on where "there" is and what's going on there.*

I don't think that it's Narrativism for the simple reason that I have often played, and seen others play, from a perspective which regards two things as important: immersion and accuracy.  They don't worry about what will make a good story or address premises - or rather, they may worry about it before they play - but during play they worry about portraying their character accurately and about being able to think and see things as the character would.  Their enjoyment of the experience comes from being able to totally immerse themselves in as realistic a world as they can manage, and the systems they use are often designed to give as little disruption to that immersion as possible.

What makes you think this is at odds with GNS Narrativism? One of the key tenants of Narrativist play is that one need not "worry about what will make a good story or address premises."

-Marco

[Sean]

Ron,

Damn, that's slick.

'input' = in-play decisions, system-mediated exploration. 'output' = what those decisions and exploration get to, which will then be fodder for new input, say. 'confirm' = the output is seen as an appropriate development from/consequence of the input relative to the primary exploratory material.

"But...but...that happens in all CA!" Yes, but it's not the FOCUS of all CA, what play in that style is AIMING AT. Appropriateness always matters, and exploration is always there, and if an outcome is 'jarring' enough relative to the system and shared assumptions about the SIS, then it can be experienced as a breakdown for any sort of game. But 'appropriateness' of output in Gamist and Narrativist CAs is subject to additional standards - is the output a satsifactory resolution of the theme-addressing in the input? Does the output lead to further opportunities to Step on Up (or get whacked down)? In a Simulationist CA, it's just the confirmation of the primary exploratory material that matters. Exploration SQUARED, because the point is to deepen and broaden the connection to the primary exploratory material.

Is that it? Because I could go with that!

But again, to say this isn't quite to endorse the Beeg Horseshoe, because gamers there are who are really mostly just concerned with the exploratory aspects of play. One example is the guy most of us know from cons who wears it as a badge of honor that he 'played his character right even though it cost him his life'. He's displaying that when push comes to shove he allows his desire to confirm the original exploratory material (his character, as he understood it) to outweigh his desire to 'win' or 'step on up'. He's a Sim player, and proud of it.

(Narrativists and Gamists can sacrifice characters too, yadda yadda. The above is an example of Simulationism, not a criterion for it.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Sean, you and I are now in complete agreement. It seems like you've seen the point of my "squared" phrasing, which seemed so clear and useful to me when I proposed it, but has universally generated cries of anger or confusion until now.

For the record, I'm not particularly convinced by any Horseshoe so far, or if truth be told, especially interested.

Marco & folks, let's keep the Narrativism subtopic on hold, or move it elsewhere for later, all right? Jinx, especially, I think you're on the right track in terms of the basic topic for this thread, and Marco's secondary comment doesn't really factor into that as far as I can tell.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

My thanks to all who have contributed here. Particularly, I want to thank Sean; I've read that material from Ron several times each time it's appeared, including this time, and have been having a great deal of difficulty working out just what "confirming one's input, via the output" meant.

Tim, I don't particularly want to split sim into the objective and the subjective as distinct agenda. My problem has been that there are a number of people (Jay a.k.a. Silmenume comes to mind) who seem to have a narrower view of simulationism that focuses on the subjective and excludes the objective. Even Ralph recently seemed to be excluding certain forms of simulationist play from the category, such as tourism, and Ralph's been in these discussions longer than I have (in the sense that he moved here when they did, and I missed a stretch while things were developing here). Remembering that GNS was originally brought forward as a statement of GDS (rejected by proponents of the Threefold as not representative of their intent), and that under that model it is at least subjective if not immersive, I was beginning to wonder whether I had it wrong--whether indeed what the Model means by simulationism has always been what I consider the subjective sort of simulationism, exclusive of the detached objective play I've experienced which in many ways seems more clearly simulationist to my way of thinking.

See, I keep seeing these threads that try to say that simulationism is "this", and jumping in and saying yes, but not exclusively, because it also includes "that". I wanted to be clear that I wasn't the odd man out on this, and give people the chance to examine the question more openly, to be clear that simulationism is not limited to that "feeling of being there" concept.

Understanding finally what Ron means by that phrase, I think that's pretty close to what I mean by "discovery" (a bit more narrowly, but properly so), so I'm satisfied that we're on the same page.

Which I suppose means that unless someone has some particular objection to the notion that all of these variants of play are simulationist, I'm happy to call the thread closed.

--M. J. Young

[WiredNavi]

What makes you think this is at odds with GNS Narrativism? One of the key tenants of Narrativist play is that one need not "worry about what will make a good story or address premises."

I think that the difference between most Narr play and immersionist Sim is that the players in the former are enjoying the way they can use the SIS to reflect issues they find interesting, while the latter are interested in the SIS itself.  It's not necessarily a matter of different techniques.  Narr players are enjoying the issues brought up in-game; they don't have to be issues that the players deliberately brought up.  They may be issues which simply spring from the nature of the setting and characters, which means that they don't have to worry about a 'good story' or how to address premises directly.  Nevertheless, they're after something distinct from the Sim players I'm talking about.

Immersionist Sim players are enjoying the way they can use the SIS to imagine being there, being that person in that situation, and they relish the immediacy and accuracy of the virtual world and their interactions with it.  It's a combination of wish-fulfillment and world-exploration.  Any intrusion of out-of-character desires, or inconsistencies in the presentation of the SIS, tend to interfere with their ability to maintain the illusion that They Are There.

I've thought for a while now that perhaps Simulationism, as a blanket agenda, is really more of a backdrop for G and N gaming.  On the other hand, is it really possible to have an instance of gameplay which is entirely Sim, Narr, or Gam without either of the others?

*Edit:  To clarify, Immersionist Sim and Narrativism are not 'at odds', and I've seen that often they are found in functional, coherent Sim/Nar play as long as the player doesn't get frustrated while constantly resolving the conflicting impulses to 'play it straight' and to 'make it interesting'.   Narrativism needs - or usually wants, at least - an ability to empathize with the character, which often springs from immersion.  Immersion needs a way to keep the character interesting, which often springs from narrativist moral/ethical/whatnot conflicts in the character's situation.  However, they're not always found together.