Ron Edwards wrote:

One of the key "tells" of a particular sort of Sim play is to be willing to drop investment in the current imagined situation for a while and really nail down a few details.

The ideal goal is seamlessness. If the Dream were seamless, there would never be any need to break from Situation-Focused play, because the answer to every potential question of fact, however picayune, would already be known to all the players as it is in fact known to the characters. In such an extreme ideal, there would also be a near-total adequation of player to character, which would probably manifest as extreme Turku-style immersion.

The trick is, such perfection (which is unrealizable) has a number of different factors. Any game group must decide, usually largely unconsciously, which factors to prioritize. Some groups prioritize immersion, and gloss over slippage elsewhere in order to maintain this. A group like that Ron describes does not do this; they prioritize the depth and facticity of the Dream. Thus when a slippage occurs in facticity, it requires external handling. Similarly, an immersion-oriented group would presumably consider techniques to assist immersion when it fails, such as enforcing a rule that players must speak in-character and so on.

I've said elsewhere (I forget where; Jay might remember) that it is when the Dream can potentially break that the Dream is most strongly bolstered, because abductive failure leads to deductive success and all that. I think I'm sticking to that in Sim. Basically what I mean here is that when there is a slippage, i.e. a break in the seamlessness of the Dream, it is the resolution of that slippage that enforces the claim of the Dream's being seamless.

That sounds paradoxical, I know, so let me be clear.

This is what's called the logic of the "supplement". Suppose we assert, because we are Sim players, that the Dream itself is seamless and perfect. In a perfect world, we, the players, would interact with it as a real world. The claim is not that we are constructing the Dream through play, but that we are interacting with an already perfect Dream. To my mind, this is a crucial part of the ideology of Simulationism. I'm pretty sure that this is part of what Dr. Xero describes in his games: the aesthetic of the game is that the players do not construct the Dream, but discover a story or pattern or whatever within it, already present and waiting for them.

Now because we have accepted this in advance (which you notice is not typical of Nar or Gam aesthetics), any construction is undesirable. When we do what appears by other criteria to be construction, we read it differently: we read it as discovering what was already true. For example, we the players may not know whether phazer-fire induces current sufficient to wipe a memory disk, but the world already does know this. It's built-in, a fact of nature. When we debate the point, we're not inventing something new but figuring out how it always already worked. The players did not know the answer, but it was already determined.

The effect of this is that of the supplement: by supplementing perfection, we demonstrate that it needed no supplement. In other words, if we can resolve the question about the phazers, we have established that the game-world was indeed already perfect, that this was already known, but not to us. Thus resolving the question of phazers reinforces the Dream.

Provided, then, that your dominant aesthetic agenda is to reinforce the Dream, which more properly would be to bolster the claim that the Dream was and is and always will be seamless and complete, the handling of fine detail not only isn't CA-irrelevant but is in fact powerfully constitutive of CA. Thus, as Ron says, it's a Tell of a lot of Sim players.

What it isn't, though, is Situation-Focused. Situation-Focus by my sketch definition is the ideal baseline, the continuity of play when there are no apparent breaks in the Dream. Oddly enough, this implies that for Sim, Situation-Focus is not an especially strong locus of the manifestation of CA, because when the Dream needs no reinforcing there is no CA-activity that needs to take place.

All of which also goes some way toward explaining why Sim often seems incoherent and weird to non-Sim-committed players. It seems as though Sim players keep stepping outside of exactly what they think they want, i.e. the Dream, in order to focus on detail that really doesn't matter very much. Furthermore, they keep doing this even when there does not seem to be a very strong reason to do so, i.e. when the details seem trivial. My proposal here implies that such players may be doing this because they want CA-meaningful activity, which is difficult to effect without an apparent break from the Dream. From their point of view, such activity is not a break from the Dream, only a break from the ideal perfection of interaction with the Dream, which isn't the same thing. By reinforcing the Dream by these means, they help constitute for themselves the certainty and perfection of that Dream. It's worth considering that in doing so they also reinforce their own necessary distance from the Dream, putting the ideal quite clearly a bit beyond reach, which would be an interesting point to follow up elsewhere.

The few details need to be nailed down because the fact that they were not nailed down ejected one to all of the participants from the imagined situation. At this point it is impossible for play to continue until the details are fixed.

My initial hypothesis would be that while situation is the nucleus around which the other component of exploration orbit in nar, mechanics is the tool that is the nucleus of gamism, character to what I called poetic (what Silmenume does) sim, and setting to what I called rational sim. What about colour? Well, how about comedy?

I really want to buy in on this, but I've got some problems.

Since gamism can be the agendum in a freeform game, mechanics is the wrong word--besides, it's not an element of exploration, so it's the one of these things that doesn't belong. So in my mind I replace it with system--and as soon as I do, I remember the discussions of simulationist exploration of system, where the players are testing the physics of the world, seeing how things work under these rules.

I think that all three agenda can be played with the emphasis more or less on any of the five elements of exploration. I'm not sure I'm understanding the concept of "seamlessness" here, so if it means something distinct from the focus of exploration maybe I'm missing what you're saying.

(Also, I don't know that I don't have other problems with this, but those strike me as the glaring ones.)

--M. J. Young

From the provisional glossary:

Exploration

The imagination of fictional events, established through communicating among one another. Exploration includes five Components: Character, Setting, Situation, System, and Color. See also Shared Imagined Space (a near or total synonym).

I remember the discussions of simulationist exploration of system, where the players are testing the physics of the world, seeing how things work under these rules.

Since gamism can be the agendum in a freeform game

I'm not sure I'm understanding the concept of "seamlessness" here, so if it means something distinct from the focus of exploration maybe I'm missing what you're saying.

I've seen freeform gamism in the old Red Dragon Inn at Quantum Link. Essentially it involved participants one-upping each other in the description of what they were doing (usually in fights), and there being no referee all was pretty much fair. Gamism is about showing off, as it were, getting glory from proving yourself in the situation. There doesn't necessarily have to be an agreed win condition--if a player can walk away from it saying, "I did good, there" or "I showed them", it's gamist.

I don't know that there's a published freeform game--that's almost an oxymoron, isn't it? Theatrix and Erick Wujcik's game (I don't know--I can think of his name, but not the name of the game, is that flattering or insulting to him?) are both diceless, but they certainly aren't freeform.

I think by definition "freeform" means a game in which the rules are not written at all, but developed through consensus among the players during play. Thus I could point to freeform games in progress, or possibly to accounts of freeform play after the fact (I can't think of any at the moment), but it wouldn't be logically possible to be able to point to a published freeform game system, would it?

Also, in response to your observation that simulationist exploration of system can only be done through setting, you're right--in fact, it can only be done through character engaging setting through system. That, however, is also how gamist exploration of system works, so showing that it's true of simulationism doesn't distinguish this.

--M. J. Young