Greg Costikyan made a lovely attempt at defining what a game is in his blog

You should read the article. Really, you just should, because if you're reading this post, you are probably interested in game design, and if you are interested in game design, you should really read the article.

Further, and less importantly, you should read the article before replying to this thread. Because, if you haven't read it, you have no business in this thread. There will be no one posting and saying "well, I haven't read the article yet, but..." Go read the article.

My interpretation of Costikyan's point is this:
Games are Formalized Play

Where, by play, he means the sort of play that children do.

I think that this is a pretty good definition. We can use this thread to argue it, but we shouldn't need to, really.

My question is this: What implications does this have for game designers? What is our role in the process? Are game designers ideally those that only formalize after play is done? Where does the creative artist come in, if at all?

yrs--
--Ben

Ben Lehman wrote: My question is this: What implications does this have for game designers? What is our role in the process? Are game designers ideally those that only formalize after play is done? Where does the creative artist come in, if at all?

Alan wrote: How about an rpg that dares the players to do what they would never dare do in real life? Some already exist, but many designs might arise from an explicit understanding of this.

Ben Lehman wrote: My question is this: What implications does this have for game designers? What is our role in the process? Are game designers ideally those that only formalize after play is done? Where does the creative artist come in, if at all?

You might want to actually go further and consider why we play.

It's to learn how to cope with life. Think of the last nature doco that showed lion cubs play fighting. The narrator always informs you their learning to kill.

We like playing because it sharpens our skills (to some degree). Rules help us sharpen, because we can not slack off in terms of those rules (I think that's why the push for realism is so vehement sometimes). Skills can be in terms of combat tactics, or other non combat areas.

And the Costikyan answer is, in part: Because it's the safe way to do it.

Greg's take on the relationship between games and story is also worth paying attention to. Games and story play similar roles inthat they are instructive. Games and play orriginate as strategies for learning and personal development, as do stories. There are already a lot of RPGs, in fact most of them, that simulate forms of literature.

I agree with Greg that story isn't in intrinsic or necessery component in games in general, but RPGs have a much closer relationship with story telling than most other types of games.

Simon Hibbs

Thanks for the link, Ben. I just posted this note at Costikyan's comment site and thought I'd re-post it here if anyone was interested in discussion:

Kendall Walton (an aesthetics professor at the University of Michigan) has written a book called Mimesis and Make Beleive in which he suggests that not only games but all art can be interpreted as a development of play. This same theme was also explored by the german philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (see his collection The Relevance of the Beautiful for discussions), but Walton argues more rigorously. Still, I recommend both books to you or anyone who's interested in exploring this subject - not only does it shed light on games, but on the sense in which games and art are interconnected conceptually and as activities.

Noon wrote: You might want to actually go further and consider why we play.

It's to learn how to cope with life. Think of the last nature doco that showed lion cubs play fighting. The narrator always informs you their learning to kill.

Ben, many thanks for this link. Very interesting!

I happen to think there's something very wrong with his thesis, but I'm having a lot of trouble thinking through why that is. One thing I'm sure he's wrong about is Wittgenstein, but that's not really the point; it just means that he's misunderstanding why definitions are so difficult and ultimately intractable. His main thesis, however, has nothing to do with the problem of definition.

But as to the play, game, and kittens stuff -- hmm. My problem here, I guess, is that I don't think that kind of play is about story in the same way as RPGs are about story, but I'm not quite sure what I mean by that.

Thanks for the link, again. Food for thought!

Chris, my intense, visceral response to your concern is that there are numerous childrens' games that are pretty clearly about story...so it must be that you are restricting your vision to too few kinds of play.

Shreyas Sampat wrote: Chris, my intense, visceral response to your concern is that there are numerous childrens' games that are pretty clearly about story...so it must be that you are restricting your vision to too few kinds of play.

In what way are RPG's about story?

I have grown to hate the word story. We use it as if it is an analloyed virtue but IME it means so many things to different people that it positively inhibits meanginful communication; almost every time I see the term these days I cringe.

I cannot think of a single childs game which is ABOUT story. There are games with STORY CONTENT; there are also games that FOLLOW THE RULES OF STORY DRAMA; and there are games that can made of the art of TELLING STORIES.

One of the few games I know of that is 'about' story is Nanofictionary in which story elements (problem, solution, complication et al) are dished out and a game is made of assembling these components into an actual story. This is an example of making a game of the telling of stories; another might be playing the broken telephone thing, although this more often done by way of social education for kids than for any interest in storey production per se.

This is becoming a standard rant on my part. Story is a term we use with criminal imprecision, all the time, and it muddies discussion of both desired outcomes and the methods achieved, IMO.

Footnote: I agree with Costikyan 100%. Games are learning experiences first and foremost; this is what makes Sim makes sense. Thats why it can be a CA.

clehrich wrote: But as to the play, game, and kittens stuff -- hmm. My problem here, I guess, is that I don't think that kind of play is about story in the same way as RPGs are about story, but I'm not quite sure what I mean by that.

Simon Hibbs:

Any kind of roll fudging is instant death to Simulationism. So then only remaining justification for either fudging or Hero Point style outcome manipulation is concern with story.

Why is there a seperation here between 'bang bang, your dead' childrens play and 'bang, your dead my half brother who betrayed my clan and had me thrown out to the waste lands where I learnt of the evil plot of alkazan and fought my way back here to blah blah blah' percieved here?

C'mon, it's just the same thing with more bells and whistles. It just feels different because as we grow older we gain more perspective on the childrens play. But we usually cant encompass adult story play easily. But that's not because their really different, its just a hard ware issue on our part.

I have long thought that one of the best things Ron did with the Big Model was to suggest that creating stories -- and in his model, creating them now as opposed to saying post facto that one has created a story -- is not a general priority or a necessity in RPGs. Very often, in fact, it's not the priority, although the rhetoric of a game may fall into the Impossible Thing Before Breakfast, that somehow the GM tells a story but the players are completely independent.

It's certainly true that this is a common claim, that story is both the medium and the product of gaming, but as I say I think one of the best things about the Big Model is that it indicates clearly that this is not necessarily the case, and that not all systems lend themselves to this project.

Furthermore, I'm not convinced that children's play, insofar as it creates stories, does so by the same means, for the same reasons, or with the same sense of "story" in the first place. I know almost nothing about child psychology, so I'm guessing, but my sense is that children create stories as a way of imputing meaning and comprehensibility to the world around them. I do not think this is at all common in RPGs, though it's certainly a latent possibility.

I'm with contracycle. I think the emphasis on "story" as a central part of gaming is a misnomer, an atavistic holdover from false claims about how RPGs recreate our favorite fantasy (or whatever) novels interactively. I'd grant that this is a common goal, but in many respects I think it's an impossible one. To use Big Model terminology, this notion is the reason why so many people claim that their games are Sim-Nar hybrids; they never turn out actually to be so. This is (if I've got the terms right) what Ron calls "ouija board" play: we do Sim modeling and construction and whatnot, and somehow magically story happens. My impression of Ron's most important argument throughout the development of the Big Model is that he's saying this: if you want story, you want a system that creates Story Now (Nar), and if you want The Right To Dream (Sim), you must accept that it's not particularly likely to generate story.

All of which is radically different from children's play, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, as I said at the outset, I like Greg's article, and I like his points. I don't happen to agree with him on this one point, but that doesn't undercut the value of his ideas.

Concerning fudging rolls for the purpose of "story", the only time I fudged rolls in my D&D games was when a character was going to die and I thought it would be bad for the player at that moment. I usually reduced the character to one hit point, and let him escape with his life. I only did it if they got into something over their head through happenstance, such as a bad choice of which way to go.

I don't consider that "story". I consider it buffered gamism.

In this regard, I'll note that Multiverser referee Eric Ashley commented that Multiverser released his "killer GM". Before that, he would pull his punches, try to prevent character death, probably including fudging die rolls, altering scenario information on the fly, and providing escapes for characters. Multiverser's scriff rules meant that character death no longer mattered, so he no longer did it.

Thus I conclude that he was dealing with buffered gamism as well.

Hey, is that a new concept?

--M. J. Young

komradebob wrote: On a tangent, that's part of what drives me to tears when I attempt to fathom GNS theory. There seems to be two competing definitions of Simulationsim:

1) Modelling "real world" cause and effect.

2) Emulating source material.

clehrich wrote: It's certainly true that this is a common claim, that story is both the medium and the product of gaming, but as I say I think one of the best things about the Big Model is that it indicates clearly that this is not necessarily the case, and that not all systems lend themselves to this project.

.....

Anyway, as I said at the outset, I like Greg's article, and I like his points. I don't happen to agree with him on this one point, but that doesn't undercut the value of his ideas.

simon_hibbs wrote: I may not be understanding you properly here, but Greg most vcertainly does not believe that story is an inextricable part of gaming. He's consistently and eloquently argued that there are many forms of games in which there is no meaningful story whatever (chess, tetris, hopscotch, etc, etc...).

simon_hibbs wrote:
I have this problem too,. If you're simulating a form of fiction, and that form of fiction is all about story now and adressing premise, then you are also deep into Narativism in the GNS sense. At that point, both simulationism (simulation of narrative) and narativism become the same thing.

Simon Hibbs