Eero Tuovinen wrote: Another reason is that not nearly all simulationist play requires or encourages character immersion, so calling it immersionism would be very confusing.

Can you give some examples?

I wrote something about the kind of games I like to play here. Although the question of G, N, or S was really throwaway flippancy on my part, the two forgites that answered came up with N or S/character - S/colour.

This got me thinking that there might not be much difference between the two when approached through certain techniques, such as immersion (which I tend to use). I think that if the player's technique is immersion you might even be hard pressed to say whether they were G, N or S.

GB Steve wrote:

Eero Tuovinen wrote: Another reason is that not nearly all simulationist play requires or encourages character immersion, so calling it immersionism would be very confusing.

Can you give some examples?

Sure.

- In my youth we played a lot of Twilight 2000. It's a game about the aftermath of the third world war with lots of rules. The game's really hard to play in any agenda but sim, but it's also near impossible to immerse in it - you're expected to do lots of complex calculations, and the rules have all kinds of things to say about character reaction. For instance, the combat rules decide when you character hesitates in battle instead of doing anything useful, which can't help immersion too much. The practical result was that the play experience was very simmy (lots of history, weaponcraft, military lore and geography in our games), but not in the least immersive.
- Middle-Earth roleplaying game and Rolemaster are another example. I've not played the latter, but the former is very familiar. When we played it in my youth, the game was very much about exploration of wilderness survival, strangely enough. Stuff like how far you can move in a day, in what manner you pack the rations, what kind of shelter you seek for the night, all were central to the experience. No doubt all of this was inspired by LotR. However, I don't remember the game being very character immersive for the most part. I couldn't tell you anything about the characters I played, the focus was much more in the experience of being in Middle-Earth. Characters were just a thin veneer on the experience of touring the mysterious wildernesses.

In general I consider immersionism in the sense Nordics use it a rather marginal and rare condition of play. It requires a game with character focus and very natural, simple rules. Most games fail to support this because they're either focusing on something else than character, or have such complex rules that the psychological requirements of immersion never get to activate.

The most common varieties of simulationist play could perhaps be characterized through the following phenomenons:
- setting matters
- modeling matters
- character matters
These are all simulationistic priorities, but people are used to thinking of them as somewhat separate values. However, they're just different facets of the single goal of appreciating exploration. Consider the why behind focusing on one kind of simulationism:
- keeping up a common, realistic setting baseline allows us to deduct even more detailed information about the setting, which is what exploring an imaginary situation is about
- modeling character action through rules allows us to generate unexpected chains of consequence, which is what exploring an imaginary situation is about
- figuring out character thoughts and motivations allows us to generate believable character reactions to different situations, which is what exploring an imaginary situation is about
See? The different simulationistic focuses are based on different methods of exploration, but they're all about the same general goal, exploring the material at hand. That's why they're all lumped under the name of simulationism. In general you get the most efficient simulationist exploration by combining these methodologies.

Contrariwise, immersionism doesn't fold neatly into a sub-class of simulationism, because it's a technique, not an agenda. You could go into immersion to make narrativistic decisions as well, or to get a peculiar kick out of a gamist experience. The nar variant exists and is proven as a concept, but I can't think of ever hearing of gamist immersionism. Might mean that it's too cumbersome for what we humans are, or just that nobody's thought of it yet. Gam-wise immersionism would most likely surface as a requirement for the activity - this game is about doing stuff in immersion, so not doing so is not playing the game. I don't know how feasible that would be.

Also, let me emphasize that character-focus sim is not necessarily immersionistic. Complex point-buy systems like GURPS are quite feasible for a kind of character-sim without immersion. Going even more psychological, MLwM can be played as character simulation without a bit of immersion. That kind of play is all about modelling character reaction, not experiencing it (which is what Nordics require of genuine immersion to differentiate it from character-sim).

This got me thinking that there might not be much difference between the two when approached through certain techniques, such as immersion (which I tend to use). I think that if the player's technique is immersion you might even be hard pressed to say whether they were G, N or S.

I agree. Or rather, I think that one of the peculiarities of immersion as a technique is that it "levels" the differences between agendas to a great extent. If you're limited to expressing yourself through character immersion, then all your actions can be justified in terms of character exploration, whatever your actual goals. Thus immersion as a technique works as a kind of interface between potentially very different agendas. It's no wonder that many people take this as a sign of immersionism being the crux of what roleplaying is about.

Immersionism is the Lunar religion of roleplaying.