Hi, everyone. This being my first post, I figured some introduction was in order. I think that about sufficies.

I found this site while looking for, of all things, legal information on propietary system use. Right. Anyway. In rather short order, I got wrapped up in reading old threads, trying to figure out what the hell everyone was on about as they threw around “Narrative,” “Simulationist,” “Gamist,” “Director stance” and whatnot as if they had more significance than plain English words ought (the capitalization was a clue). I read the articles, figured out more or less the flavor of the Kool-Aid, and it all started melting and swirling, as thoughts (and Kool-Aid) are wont to do, and I started figuring out what I thought of it all. These thoughts pretty quickly linked back to my current project—about which more, later.

I read Ron's article, in which he introduces the Gaming / Simulationist / Narrative breakdown, and I found it more or less agreeable. And then, as I began to think of actual games—and, for that matter, actual stories—the lines began to blur, and I'd have to go back and make sure I had the categories right, and I'd sortof see everything fall into place. And then the process would begin anew. In short, it seemed difficult to actually hold the categories, as unique entities, in my brain, which indicates to me that, perhaps, there's something slightly…off…with them, as far as unified theories of role-playing go.

I started, for example, thinking of Narrative role-playing, in which the goal is story. You have a setting, and unless you're doing something truly bizarre, you probably have characters, and you're quite likely to have things happening to them. And the up-shot of all this is that we have, in the end, a good story. If we're trying for coherence, it seems as though we then try to forge game mechanics that focus on the story, recognizing primarily conflicts in the desired direction of the story, and providing some sort of method for resolving those conflicts in a story-centric way. “A story-centric way”, it seems, is meant to imply a focus on the traits of the characters as characters—that is, as protagonists (or antagonists, or in some games, extras [Insects of God comes vaguely to mind]) in a story of some genre or another. So I spend Character points: Escapee from Heaven in the Genre: Jhonen Vasquez, and that character has head-explodey. Or, I tell a tale a little taller than yours, and mine is the truth for being the better fiction. This is good; I like games like this.

And then things start to get fuzzy. Because then I start to think about writing. And I think that, hey, when I write, I will at times think about the greater Plot or the narrative occupations of my characters within it, or whatever, but most of the time, I'm exploring what's inside the characters' heads, and trying to understand their agency to act upon any desires therein. So I start to feel out the headspace of Jane Protagonist, and I start to wonder how she feels, what she would desire, and how she'd go about doing whatever it is she wants to do. This leads somewhat directly into a pondering of what her life experiences have been, what sort of skills she's developed and so forth, and pretty soon, I'm actually thinking about resolving Narrative conflicts in a very Simulationist way. I can't say that, presented with a blank sheet of paper, I've ever resolved writer's block by rolling a d10, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't quite possibly work.

Gamism doesn't factor into this quite so well, except in recognizing that existentialist literature notwithstanding, Jane Protagonist has goals. Jane Protagonist probably wants certain things to happen, and when things that Jane Protagonist wants to happen actually occur, she's probably going to feel pretty good about it. The desire and pay-off are all at the character level rather than the player level, but there's still a certain Gamist motivation behind certain things she does.

All this is to say: sometimes my life resembles a film, and sometimes my life resembles Deus Ex, and when you blend and layer those times upon each other in a sort of great, recursive, situational baklava, you get something that resembles my life to a great degree.

What I'm getting at here is the notion that yes, sure, system matters, but perhaps not as much as a clean-line division between role-playing types might suggest. There is value to incoherence; having Simulationist moments (and mechanics) can add to a Narrative, sending it off in interesting directions, and those directions will generate more situations in which the whole thing happens all over again. Building Narrative games on story-centric mechanics leads to a great deal of control over storytelling—almost, I would say, too much for my taste. Stories are messy, and twisted, and never go the way you plan them, and that's pretty much the nature of the fictional beast.

I have more to say here, relating specifically to the vaguely aforementioned current project. This has gone on quite long enough, though, and that discussion probably belongs in RPG Theory, so it will have to live in another thread.

Thoughts?

Much torment has arisen from people perceiving GNS as a labelling device. Used properly,

the terms apply only to decisions, not to whole persons nor to whole games.

To be absolutely clear, to say that a person is (for example) Gamist, is only shorthand for saying, "This person tends to make role-playing decisions in line with Gamist goals." Similarly, to say that an RPG is (for example) Gamist, is only shorthand for saying, "This RPG's content facilitates Gamist concerns and decision-making." For better or for worse, both of these forms of shorthand are common.

Hi BID, and welcome to the forge!

One thing anyone new to the Forge needs to take into account is that Ron's thinking, and the thinking of everyone here as these matters have been discussed, has developed somewhat since the time of System Does Matter, the original article and many of them are here for historical reference as much as anything. The cores of those concepts are still alive but the three essays on Gamism, Narrativism and Simulationism probably represent the most recent thought by Ron on these things. The Glossary is also useful. And now there is the Theory Wiki I know you said you read the articles but I wasn't sure if you meant all of them (in which case I'm impressed, I had to chew on those for weeks before I said anything at all.)

As Brendan correctly points out, decisions of all three Creative Agendas happen in all games and are made by all roleplayers. What GNS asserts is that over time a group or player may show a tendency to make decisions based on a particular CA more than the others. And that particular game systems may support a particular CA more than others. And that a great deal of roleplaying dysfunction happens due to players haveing conflicting CA's with each other or players CA's not being supported or incoherently supported by their chosen system.

I have not seen a suggestion ever, I think, that a game is purely one CA or another. But that a game whose rules are focused on a particular one is less likely to be at conflict (in a fun draining, game destroying sense) with itself or with the players. Moments of decision in the other CA's will happen, we aren't trying to get rid of those.

best,

Trevis

Hello,

The best introduction to the material is the opening section of the Glossary. A lot of people think I recommend it because they're supposed to memorize a bunch of definitions, but that is incorrect. Its value lies in understanding the Big Model.

The distinctions among Creative Agendas (G, N, or S) are frankly not very important, or worth anyone's time to discuss, until everyone involved grasps the Model as a whole.

Best,
Ron

Welcome to the Forge.

One thing I'll mention is that many of the most intelligent people here took weeks and months and even years to grasp what a creative agendum is. It took Ron himself years to give them that name, instead of just calling them "GNS". I've been aware of the concepts since 97 or 98, and had a fairly good grasp on them then, but even within the past few months I've learned something about what they are and what that concept means that has made the idea clearer than it was.

In that time, since the words Gamist, Narrativist, and Simulationist came into the vocabulary of game theory discussions as a trio, a lot of people have said that they don't make sense because of this or that or the other thing. In the end, though, most of them realize that they do make sense--and in any event, there are quite a lot of people who having taken the time to understand them have seen them as a significant part of the best model of role playing theory yet presented.

The new thing, something I probably knew for a long time but hadn't verbalized even in my own mind, that helped me understand these concepts better more recently is this: a creative agendum is that aspect of play that is fun for an individual player. We've identified three (without arguing as to whether there are more--we have not identified any more).

• Some people play to show off to their friends how clever or skilled they are. They like to overcome challenges, solve puzzles, use tactics, beat the odds, or otherwise prove themselves. They get their kicks from that. This is gamism.• Some people engage in moral, ethical, or personal discussions. They want to pose problems about loyalty or love or bravery or chivalry or any of a host of other concepts that impact character and relationships, and debate and test answers. They do this in their games. That's narrativism.• Some people like to learn. They'll read books about how castles really were constructed, what kinds of boats existed in particularly historic periods, which countries used which weapons and to what effect. Or they will go on long imaginary travels through imaginary worlds, filling in the gaps of what really is in Mirkwood or Lantern Waste or Deep Space Nine. They have a thirst for knowledge, even about fiction, fantasy, and trivia, and play is a way of satisfying it. That's simulationism.


What's peculiar is that an awful lot of people find exactly one of those kinds of play "fun", and find the others boring. Even more commonly, there are a lot of people who think that exactly one of those kinds of "fun" is the kind of "fun" you should get from a role playing game, and that if you're trying to get one of those other kinds of "fun" from it, you're "doing it wrong". There are people who "drift", who move from one kind of fun to another, but these aren't really so common, at least among role playing gamers.

It is also fairly common for gaming groups that work to have come to a practical consensus regarding which of these kinds of "fun" you have when you play with them, and for games to be designed to support one particular type of "fun". Incoherence arises in game design when a game encourages and supports several different types of fun without sorting out the differences, such that the game interferes with itself and players have to discard or ignore certain rules to make it do what they want. Dysfunction arises in a game group when different members within the group are attempting to get their particular kind of fun out of a game session, working against each other because each wants something different from the game.

That's what Creative Agendum is all about. As Ron says, you really should understand it in the context of the entire model, which means to start with the glossary.

I hope this has helped.

--M. J. Young

MJ's explanation above (or a similarly concise and easily understandable post) should be a sticky.

Thanks to everyone for responding. I've read (many) of the links and the Glossary and such, so I think I have a better handle on, y'know, what's going on. Thanks especially to M.J.—your explanation clarified a lot of things. The fundamental distinction between simulationism and narrativism still seems a bit weak to me, though; I might be interested, in say, exploring what it's like to be a particular person with particular tendencies in certain sitatuions. I am, in this case, interested in both the physical feel of the world, and the mental feel of my character. Is this as grey a case as it seems to me, or am I missing something?

This ties to the root of what I was trying to say: incoherence—systemic or textual—is not necessarily bad. At least, it doesn't seem so to me. I might be very interested in narrative, for example; in communally creating a character-driven story. But I might be equally interested in “getting inside the head” of my character, learning what she can do, why she does what she does, etc. And, on some level, I am interested in enrapturing the other players in what my character is doing, in bringing out the cool and interesting aspects of her abilities and nature in a way that everyone can appreciate. I think it's entirely possible to desire all these things, to appreciate role-playing on multiple levels. The question of system design is then a bit more intricate: what sorts of decisions do we want mechanics to resolve, and what sorts of decisions do we want to leave to the base social mechanic of “talking about it”? In essence, which aspects of the creative agenda should be mechanically supported, and which should be emergent?

I don't think there's any right answer, here. I tend to prefer narrative decisions to be largely emergent, with a greater percentage of the mechanical weight on simulationism / gamism, but that's merely a broad personal preference. Certainly I've played, developed, and enjoyed systems in which the entire weight of the system was brought to bear on narrative (as with the as-yet-unnamed highly cinematic system some friends and I developed), but I think I usually don't like making explicit decisions about the narrative, as I've tend to think the result is often (but by no means always) thin characters and forced plot.

Black Iris Dancer wrote: Thanks to everyone for responding. I've read (many) of the links and the Glossary and such, so I think I have a better handle on, y'know, what's going on. Thanks especially to M.J.—your explanation clarified a lot of things. The fundamental distinction between simulationism and narrativism still seems a bit weak to me, though; I might be interested, in say, exploring what it's like to be a particular person with particular tendencies in certain sitatuions. I am, in this case, interested in both the physical feel of the world, and the mental feel of my character. Is this as grey a case as it seems to me, or am I missing something?

clehrich wrote:

Black Iris Dancer wrote: Thanks to everyone for responding. I've read (many) of the links and the Glossary and such, so I think I have a better handle on, y'know, what's going on. Thanks especially to M.J.—your explanation clarified a lot of things. The fundamental distinction between simulationism and narrativism still seems a bit weak to me, though; I might be interested, in say, exploring what it's like to be a particular person with particular tendencies in certain sitatuions. I am, in this case, interested in both the physical feel of the world, and the mental feel of my character. Is this as grey a case as it seems to me, or am I missing something?

This isn't particularly a gray area, no, but M.J.'s quick intro didn't make this distinction sharply.

Ultimately, Narrativism addresses moral/mental/etc. issues and questions for the players, albeit usually mainly through the characters. That is, Nar always to some degree functions at a meta-level: "addressing Premise" is a player concern, not a character one.

In Simulationism, such addressing can occur, but is incidental. The point there is internal to the game-world and to the character's perspective. That this may also have ramifications for players is irrelevant.

Marco wrote:

clehrich wrote: Ultimately, Narrativism addresses moral/mental/etc. issues and questions for the players, albeit usually mainly through the characters. That is, Nar always to some degree functions at a meta-level: "addressing Premise" is a player concern, not a character one.

In Simulationism, such addressing can occur, but is incidental. The point there is internal to the game-world and to the character's perspective. That this may also have ramifications for players is irrelevant.

What do you mean by ramifications there? I would have said that largely the difference is that the players are not impacted by the address of premise under Sim play (i.e. the transcript of play may show that the question is answered by player action but the players themselves didn't get enjoyment from that aspect of play nor socially enjoy it in other's play).

I'm also not sure what you mean by "through the characters." Could you expand a little more on that?

clehrich wrote: Yes, that's more or less what I said. It may be that Sim players are in some way affected by Premise-oriented stories in which their characters participate, and it may be that the players are addressing Premise, and so on. But none of this is particularly important to the Sim player; at most, it's icing on the cake.

If you suspect that I mean something deeper or more subtle than the blunt surface here, I don't. Put simply:

• Nar players care about and address Premise. Sim players do not care about this; if they do address Premise, it's incidental.
• Both Nar and Sim characters may be involved in moral, ethical, whatever dilemmas. That has nothing whatever to do with the classification of CA.

Marco wrote: Okay, so it's a matter of degree (i.e. if I am impacted very little by the premise in the story then it's more Simm-y than if I'm impacted a lot)?

(I'm not going anywhere with this, I'm just clarifying).

What confused me was that I would say that everything not meta-game in RPG-dom is done "through characters" in in the blunt sense. Meta-game (and Author Stance) has, IME, been historically linked to Nar more than Sim.

In other words, the Sim player faced with an ethical problem also addresses it "through his character"--it's just that the player 'doesn't care' (or, to use my terminology, "isn't engaged by the Premise in the situation").

clehrich wrote: Ultimately, Narrativism addresses moral/mental/etc. issues and questions for the players, albeit usually mainly through the characters. That is, Nar always to some degree functions at a meta-level: "addressing Premise" is a player concern, not a character one.

In Simulationism, such addressing can occur, but is incidental. The point there is internal to the game-world and to the character's perspective. That this may also have ramifications for players is irrelevant.

Hello,

Going by your last post, you've basically stated the textbook Narrativist outlook. Even just three or four years ago, I would have agreed with you in full.

The catch is that many folks do state that the very outlook which you "can't imagine" is exactly why they role-play. So, you and I are forced to say, "Well, then, that's a really really different reason/approach for play than mine."

Hence it's a different Creative Agenda. And yeah, they're that different. Which leads me also to take another look at your thread title and suggest to you that we are not talking about artificial boundaries at all.

Best,
Ron

Black Iris Dancer wrote:
I don't see a difference, to be honest.

Hi Ron,

Ron Edwards wrote:

The catch is that many folks do state that the very outlook which you "can't imagine" is exactly why they role-play. So, you and I are forced to say, "Well, then, that's a really really different reason/approach for play than mine."

Hence it's a different Creative Agenda. And yeah, they're that different. Which leads me also to take another look at your thread title and suggest to you that we are not talking about artificial boundaries at all.

I suppose I could see a player who just gets into the heads of vampires and gods and drug addicts for kicks, explores their psychological makeup and walks away unaffected. But he pretty much lives in philosophical thought-experiment land—I literally can't imagine having lunch with such a person.

Similarly, if my agenda as a player is to explore themes of (say) power, responsibility, and hatred, I can't imagine constructing a situation in which someone who cares about these things from an in-world, character-centric point of view is satisfied, but somebody who cares about these things from an out-of-game, personal point of view is disappointed.