Years ago, and subsequently as I was developing an understanding of core theory at the Forge, I discovered my most persistent hurdle was accepting the disenfranchisement of the model. The model worked nearly always, as long as I excluded my own play from the analysis. After that I could move to my main goal which has been developing an experiment based understanding of RPGs. In the mean time I occasionally attempted to push the language of the model into something that wouldn't be disenfranchising, but this was never very fruitful.

And now here we are. Extending the theory or refining the language is not available. I am quite suspicious that the Big Model lacks the capacity to adequately describe my actual play. It is my hope that my suspicions are wrong.

First and foremost, I consistently do not play with a creative agenda. I do not enjoy recognized competition, in nearly every situation where I have acted competitively my actions and results are innately private and not made available to other players. I do not (and likely cannot) enjoy addressing a moral or ethical conflict by making difficult decisions. I do not play is such a way as to hold any aspect of play as effectively sacred. Each of these may be present in some way during play, but I do not innately engage them.

So as I said, I don't play with a creative agenda. But I do play with an agenda, a very definite and overwhelming agenda. I facilitate the enjoyment of the game, whether I'm GM or player, that is the role I undertake. And what engages me in that role is the very emotional responses of the other players. Each player's actions and emotions are what I focus on during play. Then I make in game, meta-game, or even out-of-game decisions to help adjust the context of play to enhance that enjoyment.

Creative agenda serve as mere techniques to be adjusted and discarded from one moment to the next, in the search of player enjoyment. When hitting on all cylinders, I find this process immensely enjoyable, and pleasantly exhausting. And in those cases, when I have been able to solicit player feedback it has been quite positive. In fact, during games like this I have successfully hooked at least a dozen completely new players into at least part time roleplayers.

What's more I actively game design and develop theories during play, those processes are in innate part of how I play. From my understanding of how RPGs are played, I cannot imagine game design and theory as processes being subordinate to play itself, when it is clear to me that play itself only originates as a culmination of those processes being performed, however primitively by the players in situ. Certainly that is how I play.

I can relate specific situations in response to specific queries.

    - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Wormwood wrote:
And now here we are. Extending the theory or refining the language is not available. I am quite suspicious that the Big Model lacks the capacity to adequately describe my actual play. It is my hope that my suspicions are wrong.

hi, Mendel. welcome back!

I think I'd like to see an example of play that you feel displays a lack of any Creative Agenda. it might help confirm your suspicions, and it gives us something concrete to talk about. if you could summarize a 1-3 session game cycle where you played a character through to a reward point (a point where you felt you had accomplished something with your character and could either retire that character or choose your character's next major step,) that would help describe what you mean.

I would like to say that this would not break the Big Model, because as it stands, there is no requirement that players *must* have a Creative Agenda, or that they can only have one Creative Agenda during a game. what the Big Model says is that there are three known Creative Agendas and they tend to exclude each other in particular ways. there has also been discussion of other Agenda that aren't Creative Agenda at all; Ben Lehman, I believe, came up with the concept of Social Agenda to help explain the position of Zilchplay in the Big Model. Zilchplay occurs when the players have no Creative Agenda preference and default to a sort of low-intensity Sim, but if one of the players suddenly shifts to real Sim or to Gamism/Narrativism, the Zilchplayer switches modes easily, going with whatever the rest of the group is doing. the term is one of those unfortunate names that some people are bound to interpret pejoratively, and there seem to be some people here who interpret Zilchplay as dysfunctional. I don't think it is, since dysfunction is by definition a social conflict over which Creative Agenda should dominate the game. a Zilchplayer, by definition, does not care which Creative Agenda dominates, but just wants to have fun roleplaying -- so there is no conflict.

without a specific play example, it sounds like you prefer Zilchplay as I have described it just now, or perhaps you tend towards Sim, but you have a  Social Agenda that takes priority; a third possibility is low-intensity Vanilla Narrativism; the provisional glossary has a note that Vanilla Narrativism is often mistaken for something else because it doesn't include the trappings of hardcore Narrativist games and doesn't have an abstract verbalized premise. you may not have considered low-intensity Sim or low intensity Vanilla Narrativism with a stronger Social Agenda because the examples for all three types of Creative Agenda are frequently described in terms of extremes; if you're pretty low-key and don't like being over the top on tough moral decisions or obsessing over fictional details, it's easy to think you might not have a Creative Agenda at all.

you might even like Sim and Nar equal (but with an aversion to Gamism,) but your Social Agenda is so strong, it swamps the Creative Agenda out and you switch back and forth as needed to fulfill your actual agenda.

but again, without a description of play, it's difficult to see which might be the case.

Judd,

Most, though by no means all, of my play is done in the role of GM (or what have you). In which case a few examples of games where I have GMed would likely be useful. One such example can be found here. Note, that the discussion on that thread was significantly hindered because my play contributions to the game were misapprehended.

I'll do my best to summarize a few more examples, but first a little bit of context on my introduction to our hobby. At a fairly young age I started designing RPGs. Then I discovered D&D. I tried figuring through that, and tinkering with it. My first experience actually participating in any game was running a session of D&D. Eventually I ran more and more games, as time and players allowed (which was rather rare). At least five years later, I actually got to play, in this case also D&D. I've been experimenting with different RPGs ever since. But since I don't mind taking on the GM role, I often was made to do so. And eventually, I became good at it, or at least that's what my player's seem to tell me (and I've learned to detect those cases where the player isn't being entirely honest about it).

One of the first games I ever ran was an over-the-phone single player campaign. Now the player in question had little experience with D&D and while I knew the mechanics quite well, I often would expedite play dramatically. And for simplicity reasons I rolled the dice. Almost from the first, I would avoid rolling damage and simply extract the damage dealt by the hit roll alone. I continued this manner of mechanical contraction over the course of the year or so I ran this game. What started as a band of two brothers (the player had two initial PCs), who were searching for dungeons to investigate soon turned into a political game, where the PCs were involved, first in gaining favor, and eventually in undermining the corrupt nobility of their nation. This ended up involving two dozen nobles and some illithid working on a psionic conspiracy beneath the nation. For several months all of this played out with the major preparation being a large chart of the interrelations and temperaments of the royal family (who, if recollection serves were somewhat excessively inbred).

Eventually my player managed to get his preferred PC as king. It was during that portion of the campaign that I threw in an object lesson character, a paladin who died fighting his own army, in order to protect the children of the orcish tribe being attacked.

Then the nation level interplay occurred. Enemy nations and races to develop and fund powerful magical technologies, and to gain the loyalties of the mages to who had them. This became role-playing intensive, you might say, but I kept the intrinsic randomness, even if it was just to roll a d20 to determine uncertain outcomes. Then there followed a variety of conflicts all escalating, involving everything from gladiatorial combats with the PCs valiant henchmen, to orbital bombardments using spelljammer ships (to eliminate armies of fiends released over large stretches of the world). Eventually this development reached its apparent apex with the ascension of the main character into the Unseen Pantheon (i.e. the pantheon that does all the work so that the others can do all their wars, feuds, and romances.) as the god of Death (he was a necromancer). And only then did he encounter a force that was too potent to stop (back then I had a policy of balance by antagonism, the more powerful you are the more likely something out there wants to cut you down). Essentially the multiverse was invaded by strange beings who killed and stole the souls of those who died. Eventually a daring gambit to invade the other multiverse culminated with the sacrifice of the main character, in essence to stop his own multiverse from being destroyed. The game ended with a short few sessions spent in the Alabaster City (see my game Deja Vu, which can be found under RPGs here).

After the campaign ended, my player actually wanted me to run something much like it for a friend, specifically because he felt that he had learned a wealth of tactical knowledge from playing. On the other hand, he was somewhat shocked to discover that my method of running the game primarily involved concentrated visualization with my eyes closed and rolling a d20 now and again to make more decisions. The objective of my decisions was to produce interesting decisions for my player, and give him enough options to signal for what sorts of decisions he wanted, and I used the d20 to keep me honest.

Given the complexity of that example, I will attempt to post additional ones in the near term, but at the moment I ought to clear my head, so I can avoid confounding details of games. Please ask if any portions of the above examples require more clarification.

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Alright Judd, here's the second part of my play examples.

Currently I am running three games weekly or on alternating weeks. The weekly games are Stargate SG-1 (now using Spycraft 2.0) with four players and an Eberron 3.5 D&D game with approximately five players. The alternating game is Aberrant with four players.

I have one player common between each of the games (in particular one of my Aberrant players plays Stargate, and the other plays Eberron), otherwise the groups are distinct. Each session I do a basic minimal preparation, with Eberron receiving the most preparation, with Stargate usually getting a randomly generated planet combined with a core idea for a conflict or a mission on that world.

The Stargate game has been running for a year and a half, with one team-member leaving due to graduation at the end of last year. Because of the particulars of scheduling for some of the players, I don't run the game during the summer months (one player is a high school student brought to game by her father, but over the summer she tends to live with her mother more, so the logistics are less workable). This has naturally lent to a seasonal break in those months, so technically the game is in season two, although the setting is as caught up to the current source material. Indeed, before I was talked into running the game, I had only seen a dozen episodes of the show. Since then, if only as a means of self-defense I worked to develop a more thorough understanding of the show's tropes.

However this does not mean that this game follows those tropes. One of the running themes of the game, which has developed ever since the first session is the general incompetence of SG-15. For example, during the very first session, the PCs were sent to a snow-covered world with various strange geysers. They eventually tracked down a structure in the snow, which appeared to be a massive greenhouse complex, with occasional releases of steam running through it. But when the players attempted to climb up the wall and enter the complex, it turned out that they were ill-suited to the task, several of them fell, and in one case one of the character's was slightly injured. Eventually they got inside, and as they tried to climb down into the complex another character fell and alerted the owners of the complex. From this point on, the idea of the teams incompetence was ingrained on the players.

At first I stayed neutral on the mater, giving the players opportunities for success and generally social challenges. And the players learned from their mistakes, as several of them purchased the climb skill, and then the diplomacy skill after one character disastrously ruined a first contact by offering a veggie burger MRE to some primitive aliens (it turned out the BBQ sauce is noxious to the aliens). Later demolition skills were sought after the Jaffa, with only two ranks in it attempted to create a distraction so the team could sneak in and interrogate, but ended up blowing up a munitions tent and destroying nearly anything useful. The players often discuss their team's incompetence, and the displeasure of their commanders. But they enjoy it, it has essentially become a comedy of errors. I fill in the details and otherwise provide the responses expected from their commanders, but on the whole, I let them do the rest.

I only describe the basic area around the stargate and then let them decided how they want to try to succeed in spite of themselves. In some cases I have taken a firmer hand, such as a protracted stint spent off world due to an invasion force occupying the stargate. In the end, that mission proved too serious, and I hurried it to a logical conclusion. We have found a general rhythm, where I provide the basic outline of a mission, and the players choose what to bring. And their concerns about the mission are the source I use to develop the conflicts which may occur. In general, I have no strong tie to any piece of a mission, and if the PCs avoid it I just ensure that their decisions, good or bad, lead to another interesting situation.

For example, in a recent mission the PCs were attempting to locate a giant sized Go'uld symbiote (which most resembled a Chinese dragon in size and mobility). Reports had placed it on a planet ruled a by a Roman analogue, with a second class citizenry, who were the original Mayan inhabitants of the planet. Their technology had advanced to mid-Industrial, by this time. Note, I randomly rolled the particulars of the planet, only the Go'uld symbiote was a novel addition. The PCs arrived and were sent to one of the Mayan cities, which had become centers of production, and likewise nexii of pollution and disease. I decided that more than likely the Mayans were becoming rebellious and that the dragon was on the face helping them. Also the Romans suspected as such, and intended to deal with the dragon directly. In this sort of situation, who better the send then the expendable team SG-15, who remained ignorant of much of this.

The PC's decided to take up a look out on a small mountain nearby the city. From there, since seeing a dragon would be difficult at best, I decided to put in a meeting of the Mayans in town. Since this intrigued the players, I added more details, and had them walking outside of town, presumeably having something to do with the dragon. Eventually, I gave the players some ambiguous information, hinging it on their spot rolls. The next day they decided to come down to the city, deciding that the locals probably know something about the dragon, or are at least up to something. After a nervous breakfast in a small inn, the players found themselves being followed by interested townsfolk. After some diplomacy (the player's learn their lessons, they rarely fail the same way twice, instead finding new and interesting ways to do so) they were able to earn the trust of their stalkers, and learned about the respiratory disease that has been running rampant in the city, and implying that the dragon was able to heal some of the sickest of the Mayan elders.

After this, the PCs investigated the Romans, and discovered that they had started building up a military presence in their fortress on the opposite side of the city from where the Mayans had gathered. In particular I pointed out that the Romans had recently brought in some heavy equipment. After an unhelpful meeting with the Roman commander (mostly due to player decisions on how to deal with him), the PCs returned, and awaited meeting with the Mayans and their dragon. As evening fell, they did so, confirming that, the dragon did indeed look like a gargantuan Go'uld symbiote. The dragon attempted to communicate, but I was feeling tired that night, and not up to playing something as alien as a symbiote dragon searching for his queen (whom the PCs had kidnapped earlier) and generally plugging enlightenment. So, I had the Romans open up with artillery cannons. The PCs made their reflex saves, recognizing artillery attacks, but the majority of the Mayans were not so lucky. The dragon, enraged charged towards the Romans, pulling the artillery shells into itself which engulfed it in flames, as the Romans were firing incendiaries. Unfortunately, almost half the city ended up being on fire.

In the sense of actions speaking louder than words, this quick scene got the idea of who this dragon was across far better than half an hour of enigmatic conversation. The PCs jumped into their vehicle and took off, trying to see what they could do to save the city or the dragon. In the end they decided to fire off their stinger missiles into Roman fortress, which ignited their ammunition, and made short work of them. Unfortunately, they didn't decide to do this until after the dragon crashed into the mountain side.

Par for the course, their mission was somewhat successful, and somewhat disastrous.

That ought to be sufficient for the moment, I can relate a similar example of Aberrant or Eberron. Also, John my next examples will be ones from a player perspective, as you requested.

        - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Sounds to me like your play is quite happily and functionally incoherent, Mendel.  Did you have a specific question?

Hey There,

I'm looking at your game writeups and I'm seeing a lot of "what happened" but I'm not really seeing "how it happened" in terms of the interactions between you and the players.  In your very first post you mentioned, "playing into your player's emotions."  I'm very curious about that.

1) Can you tie any point in your play transcript to a moment where you were playing into a player's emotion?  What emotion did you feel you playing into?  Why do you think what you did played to that emotion so well?

2) Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like playing into one player's emotion would actually be upsetting to another player?  If so, what did you do?

Jesse

John,

Thanks.

I'll put in a play example when I'm not running the game in a moment, however I first would like to discuss some of the other matters you brought up.

I'm not claiming the Big Model is broken, I'm claiming that it lacks the means to adequately describe how I play, and as such offers often untopical and down right unhelpful advice. In general, I'm not looking at a classification, I'm looking at an understanding. As it is, Zilchplay, Low-intensity Sim, Low-Intensity Vanilla Narrativism are all ways of describing something via absence. I.e. they are terms that only apply because the typical descriptions and contexts for understanding play do not apply. In a sense these are all "others" categories, which don't distinguish between the many different play approaches which lie at under those terms. Any therapeutic effect is largely useless because these terms just point to a frontier, not a definite and studied form of play.

The innovation of Zilchplay was to admit that people could have fun while not adopting a creative agenda, by "just roleplaying". Low intensity or no intensity doesn't make sense, as I suppose a die-hard Narrativist would object to being called a low-intensity sim player. The way I play can reach the level of intensity found in the best play examples I've seen posted here. But it doesn't do so in the same way.

Also, as a reply to Joshua, that is my problem with the title functionally incoherent. It's essentially a category of stuff that the model doesn't support. What I'm suggesting, that this isn't something that sits at the base of the model, but sits outside, just beyond the frontier, waiting to be explored and hopefully enfranchised, rather than treated as an irrelevant exception. If the Big Model can improve already functional play in a creative agenda, then why can't a model do the same for a facilitative agenda?

So, onto games I played rather than ran:

Note that your request for a reward point is somewhat of problem. I don't play for a reward point, and so I don't recognize them when they occur (or presumeably what someone else may view as a reward point doesn't qualify as one because I'm not looking for one.) However I will attempt to provide an example of a potential reward point.

The one game I currently play is a star wars game using a bastardized Trinity system. My character is a female rebel captain (now major) named Thadja, who is from a back water planet from which she is essentially a muskateer. Her technology is somewhat more advanced with a modern style rifle, and space tech armor. She insists on wearing the surcoat of her king, which as received notice, but never been discussed by her team. I've never detailed what happened to her king or why she hates the Empire enough to have become a known rebel, although those are likely connected. I figure those can be fleshed out on the fly. The other characters are a wookie bruiser, an upper class pilot, an engineer and droid aficionado, and a murderous vet. The beginning of the game involved Thadja leading a raid to rescue some rebel prisoners and picked the PCs up along the way.

The most recent mission we performed was a diplomatic envoy to a planet of fairly peaceful aliens being exploited by the Imperial aligned Mining Corporation. This is one of the last missions that will be performed under Thadja's command, as they PCs will be given a lucrative profiteering contract soon, after which Thadja will be the observer, rather than the commander. As such we spent much of a session discussing and planning how to infiltrate the Imperial held planet. During much of this time, I attempted to test and prod other players into adopting a leadership role, in preparation for the change in command structure. This was both in and out of character. In fact, during the entire mission, I was consciously aware of giving the PCs more autonomy. We eventually decided on a ruse using the pilot and the wookie as a wealthy couple, and the rest of us being the hired help. When we landed we quickly wandered into the city, in search of our contact, leaving the engineer behind to arrange a quick get-away if need be, again I wanted to separate the party somewhat to encourage PC autonomy.

Once we found our contact we were moved around through several safe locations, until we were brought to a meeting with the chief of the moderate clan. I attempted to convince him to ally with the rebels, but as sometimes occurs with this GM, there seemed to be a specific set of statements which would convince him. At first I monopolized the conversation, assuming that since the other PCs had focused even less on social situations than I had, that it wouldn't be a problem. Soon, however, several other PCs became frustrated with the lack of progress, and I backed off into a more cooperative approach. Eventually we were successful, mostly via dialogue, with some dice rolling for hints and the like. The intrinsic problem was that the PCs were operating on a very slim understanding of the alien's culture.

We were then shunted back to a safe house, where we discovered that the engineer had been accosted by stormtroopers, and had taken off, trying to hide on planet. We also discovered that an additional rebel agent had been smuggled in to help (a new player, who had never roleplayed before). Partially under the suggestion of the GM, I took her (the new player) under my wing for the rest of the session. This also made sense in character, as she had served under Thadja in the infantry.

Shortly afterwards, the aliens announced that the clans were willing to help, but that the principle leader was too afraid of Imperial reprisal to act. As such we were being called upon to kill the leader and make it look like an Imperial action. Quickly we gathered our new member, and the aliens brought us our engineer. Then we attempted to storm the office of the chief of chiefs, via the sewers. I used my tactics skill to get a clear idea of what order the GM wanted us to have, and then modified my plans accordingly. We encountered difficulty at the sewer entrance, and a failed security check set off an alarm at a vault door which had been placed there. Then with a combination of black power explosives and wookie strength, we managed to remove the door, and charge towards our objective. I brought the new player along to get to the final objective, so that she could get a chance to actually affect the game. As we went up the building I modified my character's effectiveness, usually by choices of when to split actions and when to spend willpower in order to ensure that the new player could take reasonable actions, but also avoid any significant danger. On the other hand, I also let the wookie do his own thing when he decided to jump four stormtroopers who we had snuck by. It nearly killed him, but they had a fun combat, especially when the knife wielding vet saved his life.

By the end, the wookie was patched up, and our new player had fired the killing shot against the chief of chiefs. Then we hurried back to the ship, where other plot was about to begin.

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Wormwood wrote: I'm not claiming the Big Model is broken, I'm claiming that it lacks the means to adequately describe how I play, and as such offers often untopical and down right unhelpful advice.

Wormwood wrote: If the Big Model can improve already functional play in a creative agenda, then why can't a model do the same for a facilitative agenda?

Jesse,

Well, for clarification, I'm not necessarily focusing on one player's emotional state at the time. In essence, when I make a decision I usually use an "interesting" heuristic (will this context produce interesting decisions, i.e. ones that do not have an obvious result given what I know about the players). To some extent this requires attention to the emotional response of all the players, as a whole and individually.

In answer to question one, take a look at the star wars example I just posted.

In answer to question two, consider the following analogy. I'm not solving each player in a vacuum, I'm taking the bulk system of all the players and attempting to solve it as a large dynamical system, or baring that simply testing to enhance later solutions. In that respect the answer to when player responses contradict is all time (in an avoidable way) and very rarely (in an unavoidable way).

I hope that helps,

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Joshua,

In my habit of correcting exaggeration in metaphor, it is more a matter of expecting a motorcycle repair handbook to help in truck repair. But what I'm really asking, is can we make a truck repair manual in the same manner as the motorcycle one? So, yes, I have been spending much of this thread motivating that actual play examples require extensions to common theory such as the Big Model. Isn't that how we are being asked to introduce theory questions, within the solid context of actual play? Please point out some extensions or wholesale theories which you think might help. I have some ideas, but I am definitely interested in other ones as well.

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Mendel, I submit to you it really is more different than motorcycles and trucks.  You are talking about fundamentally different activities that happen to use the same medium.  You're making sand castles; Big Model describes firing the sand into glass statues.  You don't need an 'extension' to describe your play; you need a different theory.  I look forward to you submitting something of substance to describe your preferred style of play.

As for "some extensions or wholesale theories" I mentioned a few in my last reply.  By your aggressive tone, however, I have an inkling that you're not here for constructive conversation.

Joshua,

I apologize if my tone seemed aggressive, it's always difficult to gauge that in the context of a text post. Perhaps we could both benefit from a more charitable reading. That being said, I am quite interested in theories that could apply to the situation I'm presenting. As I see it, there are two ways for a theory to apply:

1) Acting as a cognitive tool to better understand and predict players.

To do this the model will need to have some way to talk about players individually and dynamically, and also must be real-time predictive, in the sense that it can be used to build a hypothesis for future behavior and engagement based on past behavior during play.

2) Describing positive features of facilitative play (rather than listing features which are not present).

I suspect that this use also requires speaking of players individually and dynamically, as well the capacity for the theory to manage self-reference in terms of play intent.

In either case, I would very much appreciate if you could relate applications of any of the theories you presented explicitly. In particular if you could relate how your Interaction Model may be of use. From what I've read the Channel theory, Threefold, and four styles of refereeing don't properly manage the dynamical requirements of the situation. Although I could be misreading them. Any other theories which you would suggest as relevant are also welcome.

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Josh is right, Mendel (in fact, given the relative shortness of his time at The Forge, I'm often astonished about how right Josh is about these things). I didn't like his analogy, however, so I'll use a different one. You're looking for a medical theory that speaks about scurvy, which is a disorder caused by a diet deficiency. Creative Agenda is like Oncology, which is the theory behind treating cancer. You're asking Oncology to answer a queston about a diet disorder, and it can't. That doesn't mean that Oncology isn't important, just that it isn't what you need.

Creative Agenda very specifically in it's GNS classifications, at least, does not in any way speak to motive or product of play. There are possibly an infinite number of motives that one could assign to gamism for instance. Gamism doesn't say anything about that, just what the behavior looks like. So you have a motive to serve the players or something and you're wondering what creative agenda that fits into? That's like asking what kind of cancer scurvey fits into. They don't, because the theories in question don't deal with what you're looking for.

Still to this day, the most common misconception about the GNS modes is that all RPG behavior, motives and such can all be explained by GNS or Creative Agenda. The model can't do that, nor has it every attempted to do so. If you want a model that does that, you'll have to find it yourself. In fact your own P3 model might be far better for this.

Mike

Mendel,

thanks for the second example, although I notice that it's still lacking descriptions of the way you and the other players interacted, which points got you jazzed, and so on. what it looks like is a Transcript: the story produced as a by-product of play. you can't really tell any kind of agenda from a Transcript, because Transcripts focus on what happened in the Fiction instead of what happened around the table. still, there are a couple points where you let slip how you felt about a moment of play, how the other players reacted, so we can discuss those. what they reveal about Creative Agenda is perfectly describable under the Big Model and always has been, but there are gaps in the description -- but as you will see, the gaps have nothing to do with Creative Agenda.

before we do, however, there are a couple things we need to make clear. first, something I or someone else should have said in our resplies: Creative Agenda is about the group as a whole, not about individual people. people can switch agendas as they switch games or switch play groups, or can even switch after a couple sessions because one reward cycle has been completed and something else has caught the group's attention. I think this happens a lot with mostly Sim groups, for example; most of the sessions will be about detailing/celebrating the world they are creating together, but after the end of one quest/expedition, there will be a brief change of pace: an orc attack on a village that gets played out in a Gamist manner, or or a difficult choice between two flawed pretenders to the throne that turns into Narrativism. when that particular story is finished, the group goes back to Sim; basically, the group likes the other mode a little, but only in small amounts.

so, you are not Simulationist, Gamist, or Narrativist. no one is. people enjoy many styles of play, but may reject a particular style for a particular group, or may reject one style completely, or perhaps don't focus on the Creative Agenda part, instead focusing on another Agenda. this leads to the second point: the Big Model is not GNS. GNS (Creative Agenda) is one tiny part about play styles that cut through the layers of the Big Model (Social Contract, Exploration, Technique, Ephemera.) there are also other Agenda: Social Agendas describe what an individual prefers regardless of the contents of the fictional world created; Aesthetic Agenda describes which part of Exploration (Character, Setting, Situation, System, Color) a player prefers to emphasize; Technical Agenda describes which Techniques and Ephemera a player prefers (immersion, low-handling time vs. high-handling time, cards vs. dice, etc.) a specific Social Agenda, Creative Agenda, Aesthetic Agenda, and Technical Agenda together describe a particular style of play, called a Skewer. people have preferences for one or more Skewers, rather than to Creative Agendas in isolation. we know, for example, that the "hardcore Narrativist" Ron Edwards likes Gamism in the form of Tunnels and Trolls. there's something about that particular agenda combination that appeals to him where another kind of Gamist Skewer would not.

so here's the trick: when you say your playstyle is not described by the Big Model, you're talking about a Skewer, but you keep focusing on GNS and asking why one of those three Creative Agendas can't describe your playstyle. we *can* describe which Creative Agenda you enjoy, if we examine one reward cycle for a game you enjoyed to see what Creative Agenda the group (not you) was playing with. this is why I asked for a description of one of your reward cycles. it doesn't matter whether you played *towards* receiving a reward or not; at some point, you the player were rewarded for a couple sessions of play, and that formed one reward cycle.

now, without a description of a reward cycle and how your group interacted and made decisions, we still can't be sure of the Creative Agenda, but I think there are some clues. it does seem that you switch between Simulationist and Narrativist agendas during play. I don't know how strong your Simulationist side is, but the way you focused intensely in your description on all the little backgroiund details of the worlds you've played in suggests to me that you get a lot of joy out of the Fiction. I note also that you pick a lot well-known fictional universes to play in, rather than create one in play; Stargate SG-1 and Star Wars. although it's possible to play Nar or Gam in an existing fictional world, it sounds very much like a focus on celebration/exploration of those worlds, which marks it as Sim.

... except that you *did* slip in Narrativism. I picked up on a few statements:

W wrote: What started as a band of two brothers (the player had two initial PCs), who were searching for dungeons to investigate soon turned into a political game, where the PCs were involved, first in gaining favor, and eventually in undermining the corrupt nobility of their nation [...] Eventually my player managed to get his preferred PC as king. It was during that portion of the campaign that I threw in an object lesson character, a paladin who died fighting his own army, in order to protect the children of the orcish tribe being attacked.

W wrote: Currently I am running three games weekly or on alternating weeks. The weekly games are Stargate SG-1 [...]  One of the running themes of the game, which has developed ever since the first session is the general incompetence of SG-15 [...] I only describe the basic area around the stargate and then let them decided how they want to try to succeed in spite of themselves [...] in a recent mission the PCs were attempting to locate a giant sized Go'uld symbiote (which most resembled a Chinese dragon in size and mobility). Reports had placed it on a planet ruled a by a Roman analogue, with a second class citizenry, who were the original Mayan inhabitants of the planet. Their technology had advanced to mid-Industrial, by this time. Note, I randomly rolled the particulars of the planet, only the Go'uld symbiote was a novel addition. [...] I decided that more than likely the Mayans were becoming rebellious and that the dragon was on the face helping them.

Wormwood wrote:
So as I said, I don't play with a creative agenda. But I do play with an agenda, a very definite and overwhelming agenda. I facilitate the enjoyment of the game, whether I'm GM or player, that is the role I undertake. And what engages me in that role is the very emotional responses of the other players. Each player's actions and emotions are what I focus on during play. Then I make in game, meta-game, or even out-of-game decisions to help adjust the context of play to enhance that enjoyment.

...that the rest of the world is not as socially inhibited and inept as the English.We do not find it easy to initiate friendly conversation with strangerswith fellow [people]. We need help. We need props. We need excuses to make contact. We need toys and sports and games that get us involved wih each other

Provisonal wrote: Three distinct Creative Agendas are currently recognized: Step On Up (Gamist), The Right to Dream (Simulationist), and Story Now (Narrativist).

Mike,

Analogical connotations aside, I do largely agree with Joshua on this. I've not been trying to argue that the Big Model describes my play, nor that it ought to. Rather I've been motivating that additional theory is required to enhance my approach to play, by establishing that the Big Model does no do so. As such, I'm looking for suggestions of where such theory might come from. I'm gratified that you think my Play Content, Play Controls, and Play Constraints theory fits the bill. I concur, but since I developed it that shouldn't be too surprising that it fits my play approach fairly well. But, I want to see what other theory might do so as well.

John,

The way I play is intentionally constructed as a Rorschach test of play decisions. I provide a set of options which gives them context, and observe how they observe those options. The knowledge that certain players do not consider some of their options is a vital part of finding new decisions to provide. The approach of pulling out a small number of decisions from such play as the "true" motivations is essentially useless. Another person could pull out the tactics and confrontation of the phone game, and the SG team's focus on overcoming their own limitations as strong Gamism. As you pointed out, adherence to canon settings and likewise to the tropes built in them could be considered strong Simulationism. (As a point of clarification, the canon settings is actually due to player requests, setting and trope fidelity has never been something I have hesitated to kill when the situation calls for it.)

Indeed, in each of these cases, the player responses have varied, sometimes embracing, other times ignoring the options entirely. And yet, this had no effect on my enjoyment of play. So, in short, I am not playing a closet ... er vanilla narrativism. If you are seeing such a thing, it is predominantly because I gear my play to be perceived differently by different players.

Simon,

A facilitative agenda is not simply socializing. It is an intense and definite focus on the play responses of the other players (and usually all of them).  As much as a high-intensity Narrativism focuses strongly on the moral and ethical conflicts of the premise, I focus on the very strategies and perceptions of the players, and then test and expand those strategies by careful manipulation of the decisions they encounter.

And as far as the idea of "if your agenda works, why bring it up?" The reason I bring it up, is that it works. Because back in the day, Narrativism worked, but it could work better, and so theory was developed to do just that. Why shouldn't I be looking for a way to help a facilitative agenda work better? If not for me, perhaps for other players who play similarly?

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Wormwood wrote:

The way I play is intentionally constructed as a Rorschach test of play decisions. I provide a set of options which gives them context, and observe how they observe those options.

From stuff you say like:

I am quite suspicious that the Big Model lacks the capacity to adequately describe my actual play. It is my hope that my suspicions are wrong.

Wormwood wrote:
Simon,

A facilitative agenda is not simply socializing. It is an intense and definite focus on the play responses of the other players (and usually all of them).  As much as a high-intensity Narrativism focuses strongly on the moral and ethical conflicts of the premise, I focus on the very strategies and perceptions of the players, and then test and expand those strategies by careful manipulation of the decisions they encounter.

And as far as the idea of "if your agenda works, why bring it up?" The reason I bring it up, is that it works. Because back in the day, Narrativism worked, but it could work better, and so theory was developed to do just that. Why shouldn't I be looking for a way to help a facilitative agenda work better? If not for me, perhaps for other players who play similarly?

Mike,

My concern has never been that the big model does not provide a pigeon-hole to fit what I'm doing. I'm claiming that the pigeon hole is defined only by absence, and not in a manner which can provide useful insight into play. All agendas operate on the social level of the big model, the only distinction made is that my agenda does not operate at some indefinite lower level, or at least does not do so as a creative agenda. But, yes, I'm not playing by a creative agenda. It would be helpful if we could say something more substantial than that.

Basically it sounds like to me that, for you, CA isn't very important in terms of your enjoyment, and any socialization and play that produces any CA enjoyed by any other player than you is fine with you. Does that sound right?

Wormwood wrote: It would be helpful if we could say something more substantial than that.

In practice when I am discerning a player's play preferences this goes much further than CA. Indeed, I will often use CA as an initial approximation. But ultimately I want to develop a likelihood model of each player, and of the group as a whole, from which to personalize play even further.

Wormwood wrote: Often this means carefully blocking the CAs of players to move beyond them.

Joshua,

Why don't you lay out something more substantial?

You're actively blocking your players' preferences because you know better than they do what they want?  Do you talk to players before, after, or during play to see what they want out of the game (which is different than asking if the game was 'good' or 'fun')?

PCon3 sounds interesting. Can you give us an Actual Play example from your own experience -- and focus more on what you and the players did in the context of PCon3, and less on what the character story is? I feel this discussion needs some AP "teeth" to sink into; else it's all just groundless theory.

Adam,

I'll do my best to give you some actual play support to what I'm attempting to describe in PCon3. The main hurdle is that the typical approach of example -> meaning doesn't work so well for inductive theories. Instead, I'll need to generate a variety of examples for each inductive idea I'm presenting. As such, I'll apologize in advance for the number of actual play examples I will need.

The first axiom of PCon3 is that we can consider the purpose of play to be learning or reinforcement. To put it another way, players are playing to encounter and eventually absorb specific patterns. These patterns may be novel (learning) or familiar (reinforcement), but in either case these patterns are being taken in by the players. These patterns may be data (such as the day-to-day life of a medieval merchant) or they may be practice (such as criteria for the best weapon) or they may be empathic (such as the responses of players to guilt and innocence). Players have "fun" by encountering the patterns they want, and being able to make sense of them. That means that the patterns cannot be too complex (random), nor too simple (static).

A few of the play examples I put forth already demonstrate this concept.

First, the D&D phone campaign (listed as my first example in this thread) was predominantly focused on developing tactical and strategic skill (especially on the part of the player). The constant cycle of conflict and consequences was a pattern which permitted that learning. At times other elements needed to be added. I intentionally constructed decisions were sac refice was needed, because strategy is, among other things, the art of knowing when and what to sac refice to achieve the greater goals. Whether it was the paladin, or the bombardment of fertile lands and thriving cities to hold off a fiendish assault, or the final sac refice of the character, the decisions existed to teach the player the worth of sac refice, neither to be taken lightly, nor to be avoided. Also, I introduced many elements of coalition building and negotiation. These are the otherside of strategy, knowing when not to fight. These occurred within the royal family squabbles, the international politics, and the acquisition of followers. As the game progressed, I intentionally mixed those elements in when the game became too simply tactical. As a result, the player identified a significant growth in his tactical and strategic knowledge, and he felt that his time had been well spent acquiring it.

As an aside, the identification of what is learned or reinforced is the first step to employing PCon3.

A second example is a camarilla-based Changeling larp, which I ran about a year and a half-ago. It was the first game of our new Changeling venue. I had decided before hand to build in a motif of games within games. I had about 20 players, all commoners (due to the background of the town), and after the usual getting to know each others' character stuff, I handed out a series of dreams to each players. Those came with a mini-quest to perform. Then I let them operate on their own for a while. The objective of the mini-quests was only to provide more reason for interaction between characters. But part of this was also a breaking the ice for new players, as many of the participants did not know each other.

The second phase of the game occurred when enough players completed their mini-quests. I had a gateway open in the freehold, and then led all the players who ventured through (nearly everyone) into another room. There I took away their changeling character sheets, and gave each a simple identity of a normal person in a hospital waiting room. In some cases, I also gave the player a particular response each time they heard a bell ring (I carried one along with me). In essence, I inserted a short "nordic style" larp within the very typical changeling larp. This exploited the fact that with many new players attempting to determine how this larp would work, they would be actively interested in learning about larp structure. Likewise, this served as an opportunity to understand one of the key concepts of changeling, Banality, another opportunity provided by this occurring in the first game. I then released the players, one by one, into another room which was a freehold (fae dwelling) that they had just rescued.

One of the key insights of PCon3 is to intuit the views (particular material the player wants to learn or reinforce) of a player, and then help ensure that something exists in play for the player to bit on, as it were. More technical discussion of views can be found here and here. But another important matter is to recognize that views can change, and the adjustment of views is a very important tool for enhancing play. So, in the larp example, my chicanery helped many players move from a view of how this game worked into a view of how larps work in general. The views are close, which helps to make them work together.

In the 7th sea game I mentioned, here, as a GM I had a significant task in determining the desired material of focus for each of my players. Some players were new to RPGs, such as the captain and the monk, they needed to be shown a variety of different approaches to play. Also, they needed to have their competency in play reinforced, a lesser form of what a traditional "munchkin" is looking to have reinforced. Another player, the one who decapitated the apparent traitor, wanted to show off his character's martial prowess. The faustian player, most depicted in there needed to re-examine his approach to play, unfortunately, despite my attempts to shift his view, his predominant view was cultural view of character dominance, and in particular his dominance (this is a matter of reinforcement). I know that because had his view been focused on procedural dominance of the game, then he would have been willing to return without a guarantee of a character powerful enough to kill all the other characters. Indeed, such a guarantee would have been anathema to a procedural view, since such a view indicates a desire to learn how to dominate, not to simply dominate automatically.

By piecing these views, and maintaining patterns in various different levels of play, I was able to ensure that much of the time the players received their desired type of play. By no means was this a simple or reliable process. Especially since I had to adjust for the coming and going of various players (the troubles of a gaming group with non-trivial romantic involvements). In the end the players stabilized, and the last few months (of weekly game) worked very well, with players having adjusted their views to avoid conflict with each other (note, this very much did not mean that those views overlapped, but the guardsman's player's view of recognition for martial prowess, fit well with the captain's player's view of learning what it is like to be a privateer captain).

The purpose of PCon3 is to provide a language, rather than a taxonomy for play, and to suggest ways by which players can adjust, or be adjusted to feed each others' goals, even if they'll never see eye-to-eye.

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

This is all very interesting, Mendel. Thanks for those examples.

I am having a hard time understanding exactly what your PCon3 techniques are though. Can you elaborate?

From your description, I think PCon3 fits fairly cleanly into the Techniques box of the Big Model. Essentially, you've described techniques for better play.

The techniques you described seem pretty heavy-handed on the GM side, for my tastes. A lot of trickery and force, it seems, to get players to do what you want, even if it's for their own good.

Adam,

From your description, I think PCon3 fits fairly cleanly into the Techniques box of the Big Model. Essentially, you've described techniques for better play.

First, imagined content is not innately distinguished by the theory (which is not to say that players won't make such a distinction). Second, the purpose of play is always a type of learning or reinforcement, which lends itself to quantitative approximation via the complexity properties mentioned earlier (it turns out high epsilon-complexity at some scale is a good approximation for learning value). In practice these epsilon-patterns can often be discerned and described without resorting to computational means, such as the procedural cycle pattern, the declarative random walk, and the cultural network activation.

Adam,

The most direct way that imagined content is distinguished in RPG theories is by the idea of Shared Imagine Space. Indeed many theories focus entirely on imagined content. The Big Model attempts to also speak about non-imagine content, which occurs in the Social Contract level of that model.

In PCon3, no distinction is made between content which is "imagined" and which is "real". This avoids the complexity of making a distinction. Some views will focus on nominally imagined content, while some will be focused more on the real. But in that case, the distinction is made by the holder of the view, not by the theory in general.

As far as learning and reinforcement this is the fundamental idea of the theory. Each player (GM included if one exists) is learning from some portion of the available content. We cannot be certain of the underlying views of a player, although retention tests can suggest what views are likely. The basic justification for a learning-centric theory is that RPGs are always identified (and self-identified) as play, regardless of anything else. And from an anthropology perspective, play has underlying purposes of learning and reinforcement (especially social reinforcement).

The quantitative analysis comes from the fact that we can record the content during play, basically as a ethogram (listing of behaviors). This ethogram can then be reduced to a sequence of symbols, based on what variations are being examined. The specific method of assigning symbols reduced the content further ideally into a single view. So for example, symbols could be chosen to encode certain mechanics, or lacks of mechanics (such as combat, parley, or development) or they could be chosen to encode certain topics (such as specific character description, related source material, or unrelated source material).  These symbols lend themselves to any number of complexity analyses. The expectation is that a random distribution of symbols is poorly suited to learning and reinforcement. But a very structured distribution of symbols is also ill-suited to learning and to a lesser extent reinforcement. Hence if learning is being satisfied in that view the symbol stream must not have a high complexity (random), nor a low complexity (static).

Now, an epsilon machine (see Crutchfield and Shalizi) is a nifty little idea, which basically is a probabilistic finite control, which is generated as an approximation for the underlying structure of a sequence of symbols. The advantage of an epsilon machine is that random patterns and static patterns both produce small machines (meaning small epsilon complexity), leaving our intermediate complexity as just high epsilon complexity. The best part of this being, that specific programs exist to produce approximate epsilon machines (Causal State Splitting and Reconstruction Algorithm).

Unfortunately I haven't yet had a chance to do an ethogram for a game, partially because I get looped into running them so often. However, I have noticed some patterns which are reminiscent of epsilon machine types, and which seem to correlated to three broad classes of learning: declarative, procedural, and cultural. Those are a random walk (which is a stochastic machine constrained by locality), the cycle (a ring structured machine), and a network (which is a series of separated chains), respectively.

As far as write-ups are concerned, I was working on the next version, which is half completed across three threads in the RPG theory forum: here, here, and here. The next most recent documents are from a series of RPGnet articles here, here, and here. These are fairly up to date, but don't yet contain some enhancements, such as the views as a regular language and the forthcoming bricolage and play controls investigation. Before that, I wrote a preview of the theory on my theory and design livejournal. And if you want to look into the earliest stuff, search for "Technical Play" and look for my posts on this site.

I'm hoping to finish the current chain of articles, and collect them all together, in the next few months. And if things work out, I'll have some ethograms done by then as well.

  - Mendel Schmiedekamp

Hi Wormwood,

What you are playing is basic, solid, hardcore Sim.  The reason you and others are having such trouble "classifying" it is because the model does not effectively account for Sim play.  There is obvious structure to your game, but it is neither oriented around Challenge or Premise.  The structure is seeded by the source materials, but then grows via the play of the Players.  What is important to notice is not the strict adherence to "tropes" which is a red herring, but rather the attention to the decision making that takes into account what happened in the past during play while "minding" the source material without being locked into it.  IOW the Players through their actions are building a world.  In one case the SG team has demonstrated through play actions their "incompetence" as well as that they don't have a good relationship with their high command.

Bog standard Sim stuff - especially where you indicated that you visualized and occasionally rolled a die.  Look at Chris' Bricolage APPLIED (finally!) thread.  The processes he describes there are exactly what you have described in your own gaming experiences.

You are playing Sim and as it currently stands the Model does not have anything to offer you with regards to helping you understand your game process.

Hello Mendel

I await your further articles they sound interesting. As to where your agenda lies within the big model I'd say your d&d phone campaign seems to be a very specific form of gamism.  Your player is stepping up to the challenges and finding the ways to overcome them.  He also seems to be getting social credit for his gains in tactical and strategic ability.  Your other scenarios however dont seem to be following that creative agenda, instead moving to something else.

I'd suggest your agenda does lie at a higher level, a more personal level, part of the social level, and that you flop creative agendas to whatever is needed to match that bigger agenda.  The big model hasnt really delved into this as much so it may not be much use to you.  However if you do run into a player that is disrupting play and doesnt seem to get what you are trying to do then that GNS may help you.

Jay, I agree that bricolage is happening in several of the examples Mendel has given however I dont see the emphasis on getting the exploration right that denotes sim.  He's admitted that he resorts to metagame decisions as much as in game if it meets his larger goal. 

I think bricolage is in some ways a valuable addition to the lexicon around here.  However I dont believe it is connected to sim in any significant way.  It may be to your form of sim or to your higher goals or skewer as Ralph said in another recent thread.

This is likely off topic here so if you wish to discuss this further please start up a thread with an example of bricolage in action and I will gladly respond with an example of sim in action that may not use bricolage.  For the record I do think your play falls in the sim category but mostly because of things like your gm requiring instant responses and the required readings of Lotr.

Jay,

but rather the attention to the decision making that takes into account what happened in the past during play while "minding" the source material without being locked into it.