In the thread about the "survival-game" we started discussing wilderness and survival in roleplaying games, in more general terms. I'd like to go on with that discussion in this thread. I've taken the liberty of citing part of the discussion made by me and "Contracycle" here:

I find that there is lots of elements in this type of game to make more than gamist challenges. In fact the gamist challenge is far from central in my writings on it. I choose to keep the hunt very abstract. I find that the Wilderness and the hunter has more to do with presenting a field of expertice, empowering the hunter over other types of characters, making him into some kind of negotiatior of danger. In addition it is about atmosphere; creating an emotional content of the game that matches the strong fear for the unknown underlying the "Here be dragons!"-note on old maps.

contracycle wrote: Erm, that sounds highly gamist to me. A negotiator of danger? Surely thats about as pure a form of step on up as is available, especially when framed by "the fate of the tribe rests on your shoulders".

contracycle wrote: Its true that I don't think of the wilderness primarily in allegorical terms, no. But that is the kind of failing I was trying to highlight - reducing the wilderness to some Issue like this robs it of its externality, its impassivity in the face of human suffering. And the result is that despite the the fact that game is nominally about survival, its in fact really just another save-the-world-before-sundown-by-killing-the-badguy-and-taking-their-stuff game. It could have been any where, and in any setting, and thus as a game about survival it fails.

If you look at the great "survival in the wilderness" movies, they're almost always about more than one person, and the focus is mostly on the relationship between those people against the background of the wilderness.

There are books that focus on one person's survival, but they delve deep into their thoughts, emotions, and reactions. Of course, a RPG is usually focused on more than one character...

As far as themes go, one of my favorite involves the "white" boy raised by the Indian tribe, who must fight the prejudice of others growing up, and who may return to the white man's world one day to face more prejudice. Of course, the larger theme is the conflict between a hunter race and a more industrial one and can be expressed in many other ways.

Another type of play on this "civilized" versus "savage" idea is found directly in Jack London's books. Either the character is coming more aware of his primal, savage state or becoming more "civilized" why still retaining some of the most important survival skills.

I think the Gold Rush in Alaska game could address some of the same issues that the hunter-gather game could.

Vaxalon wrote: If you look at the great "survival in the wilderness" movies, they're almost always about more than one person, and the focus is mostly on the relationship between those people against the background of the wilderness.

Vaxalon wrote: If you look at the great "survival in the wilderness" movies, they're almost always about more than one person, and the focus is mostly on the relationship between those people against the background of the wilderness.

Tomas HVM wrote:
What can be revealed of human nature trough the focus on wilderness?

The beast within us all is one obvious focal point. The harsh reality of nature is another one, surviving it, or succumbing to the forces that paly with a human life. Fear of the unknown is a third. A forth may be man and beast in conflict. What more is there to investigate in such a game?

Whoa!

Take it easy...

What Tomas proposed is a perfectly acceptable goal for a game.

If you want to go post another thread on how to do a game that attempts to simulate survival or wilderness experiences, go do it. This ones about exploring human issues through survival/wilderness experiences.

I think I'll go start one about how to design a game about overcoming the challenges of surviving...

Jonathan

contracycle wrote: Who cares?

contracycle wrote: How to make a stone hand-axe. The proper technique for baiting a mastodon into a pit. The importance of fire in neolithic lives. The neolothic "task-scape". How life is lived when your entire range of containers is limited to skin bags and clay pots. Which plants are edible and which poisonous in a given bit of terrain. How you construct a proper cleft-stick trap with twigs and twine. Hunting with dogs, the care and feeding of a pack of hounds, and the sheep-worrying habits of the wily fox.

All of the topics you have proposed are highly anthropocentric and emotive;

contracycle wrote: they have very little to do with the wilderness or with survival; they have to do with human appreciations of the wilderness at best.

contracycle wrote: A player of such a game might learn some things about human understandings of nature, but nothing about nature itself.

contracycle wrote: the point I'm raising is something like this: anyone who's played a FRPG has probably spent a fair amount of game time on horseback. And yet I have learned next to nothing about horses from RPG's despite this;

contracycle wrote: the balance should be redressed by focus on the wilderness in its own right, not merely as some backdrop for a cheesy, heard-it-a-thousand-times "human drama".

I think your going to have real problems with trying to have a game about hunting not be gamist.

For example, if I wrote an RPG about football and tried to make it about one's feelings during play, I think it's just going to drift to gamist. If the subject is a game, then it'll drift toward gamist.

And I really think hunting is gamist. In fact the 'kill them and take their stuff' joke is really a reflection of the hunting and gathering instincts within all of us.

I think there's a lot of material in the wilderness. At the least, when weve all gone camping, certainly one might be running by a game plan, but one is also getting feelings about the whole event.

I think the thing is, when you do go out into the world, the part of your brain that handles physical movement is the one doing most the work, leaving the other part free to wonder and think. At the roleplay table, this other part has to manage both the imagined physical activity and the emotional side. Really, one will end up taking precedence, because while in RL it only had to handle one task, now it has to handle two.

Tomas, I'm not sure why you are interpreting my position as a slam of your particular idea. All I am trying to indicate is that I think that wilderness has been, umm, under-explored in RPG to date, and that this has happened IMO mostly becuase of the stock arts convention that its human drama that is important. That is true in Drama, I'm not so sure its true in RPG which contains a significant Sim component. The result, as I see it, is that despite the large number of games set nominally in the wilderness, almost none actually deal with the wilderness significantly. The D&D expert Set and the Wilderness Survival Guide are pretty much still the state of the art in that respect.

There have been a number of computer games in which non-human nature was eaxtly the primary topic of play. Sim Farm, for instance, or the shortlived SimWolf, in which yes, you played a wolf. Boardgames have dealt with the topic quite directly, especially the Avalon Hill game Outdoor Survival (1972):
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/1511#stats

Its a simple concept:
"Lost and alone you must survive and escape the woods. There are 5 different scenarios from inexperinced hikers lost in the woods to a rescue party trying to find a lost person. You will have to deal with animals, finding food and water, mother nature and sickness without dying to win."

Check out the image here for a view of the map and some of the tables:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/6694

Would should hopefully be apparent is that this game is not a million miles away from orthodox RPG structures. It has an attritional health system, a sorta "wandering monster" system and keyed locations on an open hex map. One assumption it employs, from memory, that is not usually found in RPG is that the character automatically loses resources, there is no neutral state; the point is to get out before the decline is terminal.

Clearly, the subject of this game is the wilderness; the lost human is just a pawn. Although the players may well exhibit emotional responses, that is not what the game system is about. I think its entirely possible to build an RPG system around the wild and leave the emotional content and whys and wherefores of motivations to individual local games.

Noon wrote: I think your going to have real problems with trying to have a game about hunting not be gamist.

contracycle wrote: All I am trying to indicate is that I think that wilderness has been, umm, under-explored in RPG to date, and that this has happened IMO mostly becuase of the stock arts convention that its human drama that is important.

contracycle wrote: despite the large number of games set nominally in the wilderness, almost none actually deal with the wilderness significantly.

contracycle wrote: The D&D expert Set and the Wilderness Survival Guide are pretty much still the state of the art in that respect.

contracycle wrote: One assumption it employs, from memory, that is not usually found in RPG, is that the character automatically loses resources, there is no neutral state; the point is to get out before the decline is terminal.

contracycle wrote: Although the players may well exhibit emotional responses, that is not what the game system is about. I think its entirely possible to build an RPG system around the wild and leave the emotional content and whys and wherefores of motivations to individual local games.

Tomas HVM wrote:
So my game, even the wilderness module, is absolutely meant to deal with emotional responses and human relations, as well as the various elements which influence these conditions.

contracycle wrote: Fair enough.

contracycle wrote: I had hoped we might be able to move on to a discussion about how to bring inanimate apsctes of setting more into the centre of play, the foreground to use my own term.

Noon wrote: I think your going to have real problems with trying to have a game about hunting not be gamist.
(...)
And I really think hunting is gamist. In fact the 'kill them and take their stuff' joke is really a reflection of the hunting and gathering instincts within all of us.

Sorry to jump in with a bunch of less directly related comments but here goes.

Getting away from the whole GNS discussion there was a game in the late 70's called Legacy. It was billed as a "second generation roll assumption game". Legacy was concerned with these same aspects of survival in a race of primitive people called the Keya-Tu. One of the aspects that I have held onto all these years was that the players were tasked with coming up with new skills for their characters in the form of things they discovered. Like those berries make you puke and big snakes eat people. I wouldn't look for the game, it was, in many ways, a terrible system and the one I hold most responsible for making me the kind of person who reads the forge and wonders what would make a good survival game. But thought that there was something universal enough in the idea of improvising society which would make a great role playing experience.

Part of what makes survival movies fun is that the protagonists don't have all of the skills they need to get the job done they way they are used to getting them done and are forced to improvise new ways. This leads to a picking and choosing of the aspects of the society they come from that they need to to keep and those they must do without to survive. Think of the breaking of the canabalism taboo in Survive or the class features of Swept Away(either version). I can imagine a kind of Sorcerer like system where the rolls are made to allow the character to create what they need to live in the widerness with the difference being that the easiest way is to become an animal but that does not a hero make and picking and choosing the vestiges of civilisation that you need is an important feature. It could devolve into Gilligan's Island or the Lodr of the Flies, but the idea that you could have any feature from society for a cost to your humanity seems to be the right question in this sort of situation. It would certainly help to have a knowledge about what can be done in survival situations but those would amount to spells and the important thing is how starting a fire affects the story. Possibly what being the one who canstart a fire makes you in the party.