With regard to the discussion of John Kim's "Story and Narrative Paradigms in Role-Playing Games" 

    http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=8546.0

I wrote:

Kim's description of the "Virtual Experience" player fits me very well. I care about story, but the story I care about is the one I experience. I think that this may go beyond RPGs into the way people enjoy fiction. When I read I like to identify strongly with a character, and my suspension of disbelief can be broken if an author tries to "improve" the story by making that character choose unjustifiably stupid or arbitrary actions.

I suggest you open a thread in Actual Play to talk about that. I think you might be surprised at some of the local writings on the subject.

Hi, Dan.

You and I started with RPG's in the same year, sounds like.  That year I discovered the "blue book" of D&D, which ran about 50 pages.  It was super-awesome (at the time).  :)

After reading the post and the linked post, I'm not sure what your question is.  Can you clarify as to the direction you want this post to go?

Jeff

Did your Blue Book come with a set of dice like mine? I still have those dice, although their quality hasn't held up to the years.

I was "looking for discussion" because I didn't want to rehash things that have probably been beaten to death, and because I don't want to be an ignorant newbie throwing stones at years of hard work on Narrativist theory. Kim's model of "Virtual Experience" fits me not only as an RPG player, but also as a reader of fiction, which causes me to wonder how Virtual Experience as a Creative Agenda meshes with GNS theory? I regard simulation as a means rather than an end. The simulation has to be decent so that (1) suspension of disbelief is encouraged; and (2) character choices can be meaningful. We all stopped role playing as children because "Bang! Your dead!" "No, I'm not!" was not an adequate simulation, but making simulation a goal in itself seems to me to be absurd. On the other hand, what I have seen of Narrativism seems to me to be largely focused on Kim's "Collaborative Storytelling" model.

I guess my original question was something like "Can you show me where this stuff been talked about so I don't make a fool of myself (and offend people) asking stupid questions?"

Now I'll settle for "Does anyone have an opinion on where Virtual Experience seekers fit in the Narrativist world?

The link to the original essay is broken.  You included a quote from a discussion with yourself and Ron, but I don't see the thread that produced the quote.  Or maybe my brain is in remission again.

God, the low-impact dice...over the years, my d20 wore smooth enough to roll all over the table and the floor for quite a while before producing a result.  I still have a few of them hidden away, but using them would be like whipping out a walkie-talkie at a table of cell phone users.

If you can point me/us to the relevant essay or thread, I'd be interested to read.

http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/narrative/paradigms.html

Virtual experience seeking exists at the technical level in the Big Model, which means that, orchestrated properly, it can perfectly well serve any given creative agenda. In principle, there are virtual experience story now games, virtual experience right to dream games, and virtual experience step on up games, no problem.

There are a bunch of historical facts of fad, insight and innovation that make it so that virtual experience isn't well-represented in story now games by Forge designers. That's just how it's happened to turn out, it's not a feature of either the creative agenda or the technical agenda*.

So, yes, the simulation has to be decent so that the thing holds together, whatever it is. Bad simulation can scupper story now play, right to dream play, or step on up play, all equally. What matters to creative agenda is what you're turning your simulation toward, not how good or bad it is.

I should illustrate! Let's see.

A couple of months ago I was playing Shock:Human Contact with my friends J and Rob. In Human Contact you play deep-space explorers making first contact with an alien civilization, and the fallout thereof. It's (a) as story now as games get, and (b) pretty damn rigorous hard sf.

In our game, the alien civilization had some kind of faster-than-light technology that we contactors didn't understand, and we players handwaved a rationale for. It was a bit of an uncomfortable element! As long as we could all make sense of it, the game held together: our characters' decisions meant something, and the ethical, social and philosophical fallout of our first contact mattered. You know what I mean? But at times that technology didn't make sense, and threatened to turn into just convenient magic. If it had gone too far in that direction, we would have been playing in a space-fantasy world instead, and the issues and subjects we were dealing with would have been irrelevant, retroactively invalid. Violating the simulation we'd set up would have also, just as you say, made our character's choices meaningless.

Now, Human Contact's simulation is interpersonal and intercommunal, not really physical, so I don't know if Human Contact would meet your virtual experience seeking needs. This is just an example of how violating believable in-game causality can violate narrativist play.

-Vincent

* "Technical agenda" isn't an official Big Model term, but I don't think there's much controversy about it. It's the component of creative agenda concerned with how we're going to pursue it, is all.

I think this thread is probably the closest to what you are looking for especially the second page where Lumpley (Vincent Baker) and Paul Czege describe RGFA Simulationism as a set of techniques and ephemera.  

http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=9104.0

I think most people like taking on the role of a character, feeling connected to a character and acting like that character would really act.  Getting to the point where you are acting as a character in any situation is much more complicated than just connecting with a character.   We need to know things about this character like what he's capable of, what he cares about, what is happening in his life, what outside people and things are important and influence his life, what is going on in the world around the character.  You cant create all those things from directly inside the character.  They have to come from somewhere and are created for some kind of purpose, GNS (creative agenda) is mostly about trying to understand that purpose.  Why we create characters, situations, settings and what we hope to use this specific formulation to achieve is agenda how we do that is a combination of techniques like Virtual reality that John was talking about.

Sorry to have taken so long to reply. Partly it was the effort of absorbing that heavy thread full of references to still older discussions, and partly I've been down sick for a couple weeks.

For me, my best experiences playing in an RPG have very much like my best experiences reading a novel, and I see John Kim's essay as contrasting "like reading a novel" (Virtual Experience, Immersionist?) play with "like writing a novel" (Collaborative Storytelling, Fabulist?) play. Did John Kim never get the chance to compare Immersionist Narrativism with Fabulist Narrativism? (In this old thread, he was holding off, waiting for Ron Edward's "Story Now" essay to appear.)

Caldis wrote:

I think most people like taking on the role of a character, feeling connected to a character and acting like that character would really act.  Getting to the point where you are acting as a character in any situation is much more complicated than just connecting with a character.  We need to know things about this character like what he's capable of, what he cares about, what is happening in his life, what outside people and things are important and influence his life, what is going on in the world around the character.  You cant create all those things from directly inside the character.  They have to come from somewhere and are created for some kind of purpose, GNS (creative agenda) is mostly about trying to understand that purpose.  Why we create characters, situations, settings and what we hope to use this specific formulation to achieve is agenda how we do that is a combination of techniques like Virtual reality that John was talking about.

There are a bunch of historical facts of fad, insight and innovation that make it so that virtual experience isn't well-represented in story now games by Forge designers. That's just how it's happened to turn out, it's not a feature of either the creative agenda or the technical agenda*.