So, over in this thread, I raised some points that I'd like to discuss further. Three of them, actually. This is the first one.

ethan_greer wrote: Many (many many) Sim game texts rant and rave and go out of their way for paragraphs to explain how Gamism is bad bad bad. There's admonitions to players and advice to GMs on how to suppress Gamism ad nauseum. Why would this be necessary unless Gamism was a natural tendency in many (many many) role-players?

I think dysfunctional Gamism is fairly common, and it is bad bad bad. The anti-Gamist texts are probably an over-reaction to experiencing it in play.

Hello,

Most of what I have to say about this is already stated in the GNS Incompatibility and Hard Core sections of "Gamism: Step on Up." I'm very interested in others' interpretations and historical perspectives.

Best,
Ron

I think dysfunctional Gamism is very rare. Not at all common.

What is common is the dysfunction that arises when a dedicated Simulationist get involved with a group of perfectly happy functional Gamists. Then you have the Simulationists reacting in horror to what is perfectly understandable and reasonable play (from a Gamist perspective).

The extraordinary rules bloat of the 80s IMO ties right into these Sim gamers failing to recognize that this is a fundamental play difference best solved at the Social Contract level. Instead of simply not playing with "those gamers" they wrote rule upon rule upon rule designed to thwart "munchkins" and protect themselves from those "power gamers".

Problem is, rules will never stop a Gamist, if they're broken they may well get the gamist players to quit, but that's hardly an ideal solution. Gamists by definition are experts at figuring out how to use rules to their advantage.

This then fed directly into the whole "The GM is God" mentality. If the rules can't stop the rampaging gamists, then by god, the GM will. And the only way to ensure that the GM can do that is to make sure that the game strips every semblence of power out of the hands of players and puts it solely with the GM...whom sim oriented game designers presume will be a Sim GM.

This is where you get the horrible garbage like "the golden rule" of "If you don't like the rule change it"...which basically translates to "If any of those vile little gamist twerps try to use any of these rules to derail your carefully sim campaign...then simply remove the rule or rewrite so they can't".

Earlier rule sets IME didn't couch the GMs role in terms of his ability to smack players down. Descriptions of a GM's duties were generally pretty vague and mostly couched in terms of being a referee. The very choice of referee terminology points to the game origins of RPGs. Referees were there to know the rules better than the players did and to arbitrate any disputes or areas that the rules didn't cover. The very concept of "house rules" had as its origin this referee function where certain referees (typically the host) would enshrine various rulings for posterity.


So the notion that Gamism is bad is purely an artifact of conflict between largely incompatable Creative Agendas. Its a continuation of the same conflict that existed in wargames where there were very different camps on how to wargame. Should you treat the game as a simulation and base your moves on what your studies show General Montgomery would have been likely to do. Or should you treat the game as a game and base your moves on the fact that you know in advance exactly what the reinforcement schedule for both sides are, which cities provide Victory Points, and what units are in the enemy stack.

One can see the same rules bloat that effected RPGs effecting wargames. What are dummy counters and variable reinforcement schedules, and variable game end conditions, and hidden movement except an attempt by Sim oriented players to force Sim thinking on to game oriented players. A true sim oriented player would never base his decision on information that he knows he's not supposed to know...that would spoil the simulation. A game player would. So, enter 35 pages of rules on hidden movement, and preplotted orders. A sim player doesn't need those to achieve a sim outcome (believe me, I've seen entire battles fought out with no rules at all except the players understanding of how the units "would and could" operate). Those rules are there to try and force game players to play in a more simmy fashion.

Same thing in RPGs. The only difference is that the very clear and understandable wargame goal of simulation got all mixxed up with ideas about "story" and "genre".

Ron Edwards wrote: Most of what I have to say about this is already stated in the GNS Incompatibility and Hard Core sections of "Gamism: Step on Up." I'm very interested in others' interpretations and historical perspectives.

Valamir wrote: This is where you get the horrible garbage like "the golden rule" of "If you don't like the rule change it"...which basically translates to "If any of those vile little gamist twerps try to use any of these rules to derail your carefully sim campaign...then simply remove the rule or rewrite so they can't".

Hold on, folks. The thread is only minutes old and it's already fragmenting. The phenomenon of Simulationist rejection of Gamist opportunities, in rules-texts and play, seems to be agreed upon - whether a given trend in specific texts represents this must remain a matter of personal interpretation.

Ethan, it strikes me that in the main, Ralph (Valamir), Jay (coxcomb), and I are all agreeing. Is there some other aspect to the issue that isn't being addressed, as you see it?

Best,
Ron

As a long-since-recovered persecutor of Gamists myself, I thought I'd chime in with a few other things:

1) I think that while Simulationists did freak out back in the day about Gamism, and that it was primarily Simulationists (or people who thought they were Simulationists, or thought about their gaming in a Simulationist way) who set this standard, I also knew budding Narrativists who freaked out about Gamism. And different kinds of both. As Ron says in the essay, Gamism has a tendency to swamp out other modes of play, and especially given the high degree of Nar/Sim confusion in many minds ('roll playing' vs. 'role playing', never mind that Gamism need not be the former and neither Nar nor Sim need be the latter), I think enough people got their own agenda messed up by Gamism to define themselves as 'not that' in order to get whatever priority they might have been aiming at going.

2) On these same lines, don't forget how young many of us were. I learned to play RPGs mostly in clubs full of mostly young men who were mostly interested in competition. Many of those who really stuck with the hobby were interested in it for other things (either exclusively or as well), but you had to fight to define any sort of identity against a large crowd of people who were on the whole ego/accumulation/killing and looting mindset.

3) I think that 'the DM is God' thing does go back to the earliest rules texts, way before the anti-Gamist confluence of the cognoscenti in the early eighties, and can very specifically be traced to the individual egos of a few men - specifically and most importantly Gary Gygax, whose individual idiosyncracies cast shadows over the hobby in more ways than one, but also several others - Phil Barker and David Hargrave come most immediately to mind. So I guess I'm disagreeing with Ralph that 'the DM is God' comes in specifically as an anti-gamist 'patch' in Sim rules piling - it was there, with certain practitioners, from the start. Read articles in Alarums and Excursions from the seventies - by no means do all the contributors share this view, but many do. Aside from that, the three men I mention both actively promote the absolute power view of gamemastering in texts published before AD&D '77/78.


Conclusion: I agree with some of the main lines of the narrative being offered here but not with all the particulars. People who were serious about roleplaying but not (or not-exclusively) Gam-oriented, in the social context of the traditional '70's rpg or wargaming/rpg club as I experienced it (and while I'm sure my experience is not universal, I also know that I'm not alone), had to fight to seriously explore other CA. This isn't to say that all those people wanted to do the same thing, other than 'not that' - they wanted many different things, as GNS makes so wonderfully clear. But many of the most prominent early dissenters turned to Sim, and so attempted to enshrine their own partial view as a norm in the rules-texts they created. My point is that this is already a second-generation, reactive movement against the wargaming origins of the hobby.

(Edited to add extra amplification of final points.)

I'm not of the camp that sees some GNS modes as natural and others as unnatural or learned. I also would question the hyperbole of "rant and rave". The passages explicitly against gamism in simulationist texts cannot be explained by the mere presence of gamists. Narrativism, especially in its loosest formulations, is very common. There are not parallel passages "ranting and raving" against addressing premise.

Now, what is it specifically about gamism that warrants the passage? Or is it simply the case that narrativism is a recent development?

A part of it, I feel, is that while dysfunctional gamists - who I would characterise by cheating, aggression, sulking, dice throwing, disruptive behaviour (all of which I've seen in the context of gamist games) - may be rare in post-adolescent games, the ones you meet make an impression.

Okay. Everyone agrees that an anti Gamism bias exists in many role-playing game texts. That's not the real point of the thread. The point is in that last question I posed above.

Over in the other thread I saw a lot of gut reactions flying around, along the lines of, "hey! I prioritize Sim naturally, darn it!" Well, okay. My question is, how much of that "natural inclination" towards Sim is a result of anti-gamism rants in the mid-late 80s/early 90s texts?

Here's my answer: A shitload. Why? Simply because perception is shaped by language. And when nine out of ten texts say (in so many words) "Gamism is bad, Sim is the One True Way," it seems likely to me that people who were learning the hobby by reading those texts were subconsciously picking up up that bias, taking ownership of it, and assuming it to be their own idea. And I'm including myself in with that group of people.

Hi Ethan -

I agree with your answer to some degree if you're talking about people coming up today. But my point is that those eighties/nineties texts aren't coming out of a vacuum - they're coming out of the RPG culture of the seventies and very early eighties - and in that cultural context, there were also anti-Gamist reactions, which were shaped by a frustration with, well, the difficulty of establishing any other mode of play in high school and younger RPG clubs, and some collegiate clubs. I think this pressure is still present to some degree, which might be why so many of us who are serious about the hobby today (as young people or otherwise) so naturally absorb the texts you are talking about as 'right' even though they're really just 'right if you like a certain variety of Sim, and not otherwise'.

Sean

ethan_greer wrote: Over in the other thread I saw a lot of gut reactions flying around, along the lines of, "hey! I prioritize Sim naturally, darn it!" Well, okay. My question is, how much of that "natural inclination" towards Sim is a result of anti-gamism rants in the mid-late 80s/early 90s texts?

Hey Jay,
Were you using a ruleset in those early experiences, or was it mainly freeform?

ethan_greer wrote: Hey Jay,
Were you using a ruleset in those early experiences, or was it mainly freeform?

ethan_greer wrote: My question is, how much of that "natural inclination" towards Sim is a result of anti-gamism rants in the mid-late 80s/early 90s texts?
Here's my answer: A shitload. Why? Simply because perception is shaped by language. And when nine out of ten texts say (in so many words) "Gamism is bad, Sim is the One True Way," it seems likely to me that people who were learning the hobby by reading those texts were subconsciously picking up that bias, taking ownership of it, and assuming it to be their own idea. And I'm including myself in with that group of people.

I've got this idea, but I think perhaps I've been approaching it from the wrong direction.

Montag, good call. Strike "subconsciously" from that post. It's a worthless word in the context in which I used it.

I don't know how useful this conversation has been or can be. It cannot be argued that roleplaying texts have shaped the hobby. Likewise it cannot be argued that many roleplaying texts contain explicit bias against Gamism. Beyond that, I don't think I had anything else to talk about.

ethan_greer wrote: Over in the other thread I saw a lot of gut reactions flying around, along the lines of, "hey! I prioritize Sim naturally, darn it!" Well, okay. My question is, how much of that "natural inclination" towards Sim is a result of anti-gamism rants in the mid-late 80s/early 90s texts?

I see two issues here that should be included in the discussion of "anti-Gamism" texts. The first calls for a bit of clarification about just what texts we're talking about, as I think a fair number of what people call "anti-Gamism" rants (and thus, I guess, presumptively pro-Sim or Nar) would more accurately be called "anti-YOUR-Gamism" (or pro-MY-Gameism) rants. That is, in GNS terms an awful lot of (especially early) game texts are all about the Game - but feel very strongly that THEIR way of doing Game is better than some one else's way of doing Game. Somewhere along the line, a big way of conducting this agrgument became to seperate MY rules from the domain of Game (or "winning", or "power gaming", or "munchkinism", or etc.) entirely, so as to leave the now-negative label on the other guy alone. But a good portion of the time, this was (in GNS terms) just within-Gamism differences, rather than a real cross-mode conflict.

On the one hand, this first issue shouldn't be a surprise - arguing and/or getting clarity about the rules (in the broadest sense) IS an important thing within RPG play of any kind, and certain kinds of within-Gamism disagreements can get particularly prickly (Ron's point in the "Hard Core" stuff from the Gamism essay). But because exactly what an RPG was (is?) "supposed" to be hadn't (hasn't?) been fully-formed yet, this issue became about the "right" way to play AT ALL, as opposed to simply the right way to play THIS PARTICULAR GAME. So - while the whence-it-came is not necessarily unusual or unexpected, the effect on Gamism was to poison it more than was needed.

The other issue I'd point to is the drive for uniformity and consistency. In order for this hobby to establish itself as a "thing" of its own, it needed to be able to define itself - but to this day, we find that to be a very difficult thing to do. But this desire for uniformity and consistency of WHATEVER it was that folks were doing was (and is?) quite, quite strong. I think the very emergence of "supplemental" material for RPGs is an expression of this - the Strategic Review and later The Dragon came into existence because folks wanted "official" ways to have Rangers and Illusionists and all the rest. This desire eventually lead to TSR's RPGA and the tournament phenomena where (in theory) everyone was playing on the exact same level playing field. And here's where I think GNS kicks in - because once they really started OPTIMIZING for this level playing field, what ended up getting optimized was Gamism, pretty much to the exclusion of the other agendas. Whereas a personal serial-GM'd campaign with the Giant modules might be drifted to about any GNS CA, when you showed up for your first RPGA events - you better be ready for Gamism (and their particular flavor of Gamism, at that - to reiterate my first issue a bit), or you'll be in for a hell of a shock (and I was - speaking from personal experience here. I can remember the moment of disconnect vividly to this day, when me and my buddy said "we go down the hall looking for traps - sound good everyone?" and the GM said "Which square first? [roll-roll-roll] You see nothing. Do you continue? Yes? OK [roll-roll-roll] Which square next? That one? [roll-roll-roll] . . . " Uh, we're on a time limit here - obviously this isn't going to work . . . )

My guess - and it is ONLY a guess, I haven't spoken much with game designers from this early "disparage Gamism" time period - is that this shock of "how we play at home" vs. "how someone apparently thinks we're supposed to play" from convention/tournament play had a huge impact on the texts of games released shortly thereafter. Because I'd think that, while the "average gamer" of those days may not have been a regular convention-goer, MANY of the designers (or soon-to-be designers) were. But even if that guess is off-base, I still think the (not really necessary, but certainly understandable) drive towards uniformity and consistency are part of the whence-it-came. A HUGE positive I see in GNS (despite what some people say about it "dividing" gamers) is that it removes that - or rather, it looks towards different areas to find the uniformity and consistency, and thus possibly can be used to avoid the poisonous "edge" towards other approaches inherent in the anti-Gamism rants that Ethan alludes to.

That's my thoughts,

Gordon

Why don't people flee towards Narrativism? Because many anti-Gamist texts also assert that they're all about being Narrativist, and that their system is How To Do It (TM).

So, what do you get? You get games that are basically Sim, but that malign and discourage Gamism while claiming to be Narrativist. And you get quite a few confused gamers who are emphasizing different parts of the text according to their proclivities and wondering why their games always fall apart.

The best example I can think of for this kind of text is Vampire: The Cool Subtitle. More examples can be found in Ron's Simulationism article.

From my memories of the very late 70s and early 80s: I'll agree with the stuff everybody agrees on, but I think there is an additional point that exists with anti-G, but not with anti-N, and may well have contributed to the asymmetry of lots of anti-G rants, but no anti-N.

The point is this: the anti-G stuff actually works for pro-G people.

These guys were gleefully talking the talk about `powergamers', `minimaxers' and so on, all the while closing up rules loopholes in order for the in-game challenges to remain fun. At the same time they were playing a meta-game where there was significant social credit to be had for finding a fresh loophole in games like Champions or GURPS.

I think less than 10% of the anti-G talk I heard was by people who were actually anti-G. (I don't make a statistically significant sample of course, so despite the percentage this is purely anecdotal.)

This may the cooperative version of what Gordon talks of in his first point.

SR
--

It occurs to me that games like Vampire epitomise Big Horshoe design theory. To get narrativism you first have to establish a simulationist foundation. You then progress along the narrativist arm by adding subsidiary rules (Humanity, in the case if vampire).

But because of the heavy sim foundation the subsidiary rules - in order to be of piece with the foundational rules - end up being of a simulationist cast. So you end up with Vampire-style Humanity with Humanity dictating in game behaviour rather than Sorcerer-style Humanity where it acts as a flag for the players.

Now, this strikes me as a possible insight. Both about Big Horseshoe theory and the rise of sim. The idea that sim is not a mode of play, a goal, but a route to somewhere - that this is an idea that has led to a lot of bad design. That strieks me as plausible.

It seems to me that by the time rgfa had come into being, there had been a lot of anti-N ranting. The key phrase in this criticism being 'railroading for the sake of Story'. Again, though, a model could be constructed in which GM's appeal to "story" to legitimise action against Gamism, thereby provoking a backlash against "Story" from causality-oriented Simulationists.

Ian, yes and excellent thought, that description of Vampire really works for me. It might also explain some of the conflicting views of Vamp; because I think for some people, that route worked, and they really did end up in a place they would not have got to before, without that structure. But, it was a big millstone around the necks of the people who did not need to be 'walked' into a Nar-like play mode.