Some reference threads:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6269
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6330

By GNS definition, all role-playing is Exploration; that is, creation of a fictional reality via communal imagination. Given this, it makes sense to me to go one step further and treat the imagined reality as a game state defined by the individual inputs from each participant in the collective.

From the definition of Gamism: "[Gamism is] competition among participants (the real people); it includes victory and loss conditions . . . [Exploring the 5 elements is] an arena for the competition."

That last bit is important. It emphasizes that the discussion must be kept in the context of Exploration. In Gamism, the imagined reality is an arena for competition.

So, competition. What is it? How can it exist in the context of the imagined reality as an arena for competition?

Competition: Endeavoring to gain what another is simultaneously endeavoring to gain; or attempting to cause what another is simultaneously attempting to prevent.

This implies Limited Currency - Obviously, the definition requires that there exist something to be gained. That thing to be gained must be limited, otherwise there is no conflict over distribution.

What do we have that can immediately fill this requirement in the scope of the shared imagination? "Lumpley Principle" Credibility! The lumply principle is that all role-playing rules distribute credibility. (This particularly means that all currency, game and meta-game, are incarnations of credibility empowerment / limitation. Example: D&D Healing potions are game currency that gives a player credibility to influence the life / death status of characters living in the imagined reality. Example: Universalis Coins are meta-game currency that gives a player credibility to establish anything he wants, subject to Challenge by another player, who also has credibility represented by Coins.)

Now, this works, but it's not enough for Gamism. Universalis, obviously, has competition for credibility; if we stopped here Universalis would be Gamist. Gamism also needs victory / loss conditions.

The open-ended nature of role-playing is such that "win / loss" isn't really a binary condition the way it is in traditional games. In traditional games, "winning" and "losing" are end-of-game signals; but an RPG is of potentially infinite duration, subject to the attention span of the participants. The fictional reality will exist as long as we have an interest in imagining it, regardless of whether or not we're doing well or poorly by some specific set of defined standards.

A "victory" condition in an RPG is more like a "doing well" flag, while a "loss" condition is more of a "sucks to be you" flag.

In terms of Currency manipulation, though, win / loss conditions behave the same in RPGs as they do in any other game. A "victory condition" is a goal to be achieved via manipulation / accumulation of currency, while a "loss condition" is something similarly to be avoided.

So, my pocket definition of Gamism is: Gaining credibility with which to complete conflicted goals in the context of the imagined reality.

(Comparing this with the starting point, it doesn't really appear that we've come that far . . . more like we've moved in a circle. Maybe for everyone else this post is a no brainer, but for me it's a big loop of understanding.)

Now, a slight tangent on plot (meaning linear plot, tree plot, and the like, not the "sequence of caused events" sort of plot that arises naturally from play). Unrealized plot (i.e., never imagined during play) is worthless. Assume an example case: The PCs are "Batman" characters; PC death is a loss condition. Plot in this case is a very dangerous thing. If the PCs die, the plot only exists in the mind of the GM. In a game where there's a good chance that PC's will die, plot can only safely exist as state-defining color (meta-plot or NPC protagonists, basically), demoting the PCs to "Robin" style characters. If you want Gamism, though, I think this is OK. The plot is part of the color of the imagined reality. Your character exists as your projection into the imagined reality, a manifestation of your credibility. It's not meant to be a protagonist, it's meant to be a strategic tool.

I made this sort of mistake in a SQUEAM game a while back. Trying to kill the characters, and trying to make sure they survive so the plot can be imagined are not compatible goals.

This is as far as I've gone along this line of thought. I'd like to actually follow this through and design a lean mean gaming machine, but it's probably wise to do that in another thread.

Hey, Nathan.

I think what you have hear is just one of many possible forms of Gamism. The competition can be between the players, between the players and the GM, or the players and the system.

Just as an example, I'm still fooling around with a dungeon card game. It's a solitaire game so there is no other player to compete against. But the game is stictly gamist, if it can be called such. The competition is between the player and the Contraption I have made out of the rules for playing the cards.

Hey Jack,

Jack Spencer Jr wrote:
I think what you have here is just one of many possible forms of Gamism. The competition can be between the players, between the players and the GM, or the players and the system.

Jack wrote:
Just as an example, I'm still fooling around with a dungeon card game. It's a solitaire game so there is no other player to compete against. But the game is stictly gamist, if it can be called such. The competition is between the player and the Contraption I have made out of the rules for playing the cards.

Paganini wrote: I tried to use the word "participants," as opposed to "players" and "GMs." Competition among the participants includes both GM vs. player competition, and player vs. player competition.

I don't, however, believe that compeitition can ever exist between players and system. Systems don't really have goals or agendas, and can't make strategic decisions. I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on this.

So, my thought is that compeitition requires two people, and Gamism requires compeitition. Gamism can't exist with only a single person - even when participation is delayed as in the case of, frex, T&T solo adventures. (Like, if you ever do City of Terrors, you get a pretty strong feeling that Mike Stackpole is personally trying to off you. ;

I'd have to agree that you can compete with a system, or at least a module. If the GM is seen as simply a referee, in essence a somewhat flexible computer with no independent judgment, then the players can compete to "break" the module.

Now if this were a deliberate construction, you could imagine a tournament working this way. Every team has the same starting powers, abilities, and equipment. The GM is intended to be an impartial moderator, and is overseen by another judge throughout the game, ensuring that impartiality is respected. Everything in the game has a strict point-value: HP are worth X, x.p. worth Y, money, treasure, etc. worth Z.

The object is for your team to get out with the maximum points.

Now in this example, you do have competition, team against team, but they don't play in the same arena; that is, the competition is not head-to-head.

But you could extend the example to provide "pure" competition against a module. Once you've run it with a number of teams, you have a kind of gradation available: get out with 1000 points is brilliant, with 750 is strong, with 500 is okay, with 250 or fewer is sucky, and so forth.

You're not really competing against the game designer as such, because he's just set up a tactical or whatever situation for you to tackle. You're not really competing against the GM, because he's supposed to be totally impartial. You're not really competing against other players, because competition within the team is self-destructive, and competition among teams is simply an abstraction; they're not actually there. So you compete against the module -- who else?

I thought this was the point of hard-core AD&D2E (hard-core meaning obeying every single rule to the letter, with the sole exception that all players can memorize the entire system if they like; sort of like Mike in KOTDT). And this isn't the same as computer gaming, either: computer games sometimes try to reach this as a goal, but they can't take into account every creative idea a player might have, so there are things you just can't do in a computer game. In AD&D2E, however, you can do pretty much anything, and there are generally rules available, or that can readily be extrapolated, to cover possibilities.

I have a sense I'm missing Paganini's point, and am contributing to thread-hijack. Am I?

Jack Spencer Jr wrote:
I don't want to talk too much about a game I may never get to press, but:
With the card game I mentioned, I suppose the player is in competition with me as the game's designer. It works sort of like the old text adventures with treasures found and monsters killed equaling a certain number of point. The deck has X amount of points in it and the competition is to see how close to getting all of the possible points available in the deck when playing. Furthermore, I see the decks as being customizable, so player are also in delayed competition with whoever built the deck

I have a sense I'm missing Paganini's point, and am contributing to thread-hijack. Am I?

But you could extend the example to provide "pure" competition against a module. Once you've run it with a number of teams, you have a kind of gradation available: get out with 1000 points is brilliant, with 750 is strong, with 500 is okay, with 250 or fewer is sucky, and so forth.

You're not really competing against the game designer as such, because he's just set up a tactical or whatever situation for you to tackle. You're not really competing against the GM, because he's supposed to be totally impartial. You're not really competing against other players, because competition within the team is self-destructive, and competition among teams is simply an abstraction; they're not actually there. So you compete against the module -- who else?

Pinball is a game, whether you play against another player or just against the machine.

Solitaire (the card game) is a game, and can be played competitively as Double Solitaire or singly against the lay of the cards.

Role playing games are games even when the referee is on your side and you're just trying to find a way to beat the scenario within the confines of the rules.

Craps is a game, even if you play by yourself.

Those old text-based CRPGs are games, even though you can't play against someone else in any practical way--you're just trying to "beat the game", whether it's Hitchhiker's Guide or DiscWorld or more recently Final Fantasy or Chronotrigger.

In fact, computer, console, video, and arcade game players always talk about "beating the game". What can that mean other than that the player is up against the system?

Colin Dexter's fictional detective Chief Inspector Endeavor "Pagan" Morse does the crossword puzzle in The (London) Times every day. Your definition would say that was a puzzle; Morse regarded it as a competition between the crossword setter and himself, and thus a game.

Greg is wrong. You can have competition against the game, against the creator, against the system, even against the odds. You don't necessarily have to have another person involved in any direct way for it to be competitive or a game.

Sorry, Nathan. Gamism is bigger than that, I think.

--M. J. Young

M.J.,

I need more. All you've done is contradict, not support. A big part of my first post is that Greg is correct - pinball is *not* a game, patience is not a game, Tetris is not a game. We're talking definitions here. You have to convince me that Greg's are wrong, and yours are better.

The definition of competition I used came from Dictionary.com, with a slight addition, and no alteration. It's not a jargon definition I pulled out of my hat . . . normal, everyday style competition requires active, simultaneous opposition to exist. Is competition something different in RPGs? If so, why?

BTW, in case you missed it, I already allowed that delayed competition can exist between a designer and a player, which does, strangely enough, make crossword puzzles games, even though no one I've ever met actually considers them so.

Paganini wrote: I'm saying, "you can't compete against the module, so there must not actually be any competition going on at all!"

Hi there,

Actually, the new Gamism essay is currently being reviewed by a number of readers. It speaks to a lot of the concerns in this thread. I hope to have laid the whole "competing against whom" issue to rest forever.

So bear in mind that I'm thinkin' and writing, and anything that crops up in this thread that opens up a difficult or new area to think about will be considered.

Best,
Ron

Jack Spencer Jr wrote: Actually, there is someone who you could compete against: Yourself.

Nathan this hasbeen done to death elsewhere. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, arguing the definition of Game is beyond pointless.

First, from your own source, dictionary.com there are no less than seven different definitions that it comes up with. Definition number one:

An activity providing entertainment or amusement; a pastime: party games; word games.

Mike, you've misunderstood me a bit. I realize that debating the definition of game is a dangerous thing, so for that reason I was using a specific industry definition that I find useful.

However.

I wasn't citing Dictionary.com as a reference for "game," but as a reference for "competition." The GNS definition of Gamism requires competition. Sure, the colloquial use of the word "game" includes pastimes... but pastimes are not Gamist, unless they include competition. According to dictionary.com, competition requires simultaneous activity by an opposing agent. This means that, unless you redefine competition, pastimes aren't Gamist. (It also means, I just realized, that there's a hole in my idea about "delayed competition." Gotta revise that...) So, you say:

Mike wrote: The more important point is that what we term Gamism does not specifically refer only to the sorts of competition that you want to define as competition. The examples that everyone is giving of competing against the module, or the system, or the designer, whatever, are all part of what we call Gamism.

Any time the decision is made based on something like, "how can I as a player do better," as opposed to, "what would happen in-game," or, "what's best for the story," sorts of techniques, it's a Gamist decision. That's not hard, is it?

Hello,

Nathan, you wrote,

So there are a lot more ways to play Gamist than just manipulating a character - a character is only one way to represent credibility.

Christ Nathan, you really want to be semantic about this? Dictionary.com is about the worst way to solve these things. I brought up the definition because you said that if it wasn't competition by your definition then it wasn't a game. That made it a passtime.

By your logic, and working in reverse, then if passtimes are games, then competition must, therefore include the sorts of things described. So it's as valid of me to say that you're redefining Game as it is for you to say that I've redefined Competition.

I haven't, you see. By your beloved Dictionary.Com definition, the requirement is "competition requires simultaneous activity by an opposing agent". Now, if we look up agent, we see that this doesn't have to be a person. If we look up activity, we see that this doesn't have to mean movement, but merely existing in such a way as interaction causes change. Thus a module or system can be "a simulaneously acting agent."

Moreover, who cares about that bullshit. It makes sense to think about it thie way people have been descriing it. You want a more detailed description, but the fact is, as you've already noted, Gamism is a lot larger than what you're definition restricts it to. So why are you arguing the point?

You seem to think that there's some essential element of Gamism that we've not discovered yet, but it seems plain as day to me. What defines "better"? Doesn't matter. As long as the player has the criteria. The player says, "If I have my character jump now, he'll survive, and that's better", or "If I have the Assembly of Gnortois pass a law saying that it's illegal for Martians to enter their airspace, that'll get me a tactical victory over the Martians, " or whatever. Yes character is irrellevant. That's obvious as Gamism is all about player success (a point repeated endlessly).

Currency? Not automatically, and not neccessarily. Let's say that Bob decides to have his character die pointlessly just so that Bill's character will go down in flames, too. Thus Bob is ensuring that Bill is out of the game. If this was Bob's goal, then he "wins" by accomplising it.

You want a really broad definition of Gamism? It's making decisions to get anything out of a game for player profit so long as that thing is not Verisimilitude related, or Story related. That is it's not Sim or Nar.

Does that help?

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: You want a really broad definition of Gamism? It's making decisions to get anything out of a game for player profit so long as that thing is not Verisimilitude related, or Story related. That is it's not Sim or Nar.

Hi Emily,

From my current draft of the Gamist essay:

What's meant by Step On Up? Gamist play, socially speaking, demands performance with risk, conducted and perceived by the people at the table. What's actually at risk can vary - for this level, though, it must be a social, real-people thing, usually a minor amount of recognition or esteem. The commitment to, or willingness to accept this risk is the key - it's analogous to committing to the sincerity of The Dream for Simulationist play. This is the whole core of the essay, that such a commitment is fun and perfectly viable for role-playing, just as it's viable for nearly any other sphere of human activity.

What's meant by Challenge? For the characters, it's a problem or conflict-of-interest in the game-world; it can be as fabulous, elaborate, and thematic as any other sort of role-playing. Challenge does not differ from plain old Situation in any qualitative or theoretical way, for any mode of role-playing - it only gets a new name because of the necessary attention it must receive in Gamist play.

Hey Ron,

Since you asked . . . ;) . . . I didn't respond to your post, because it seemed to stand on its own. This Gamism essay is gonna be something,
I anticipate.

The only thought your post sparked in me is that - given the nature of the split you outline - it might be more theoretically correct to identify the two levels as [A] meta-game conflict (external, social conflict between the players) and in-game conflict (exploratory conflict between elements of the imagined reality).

This is mostly what you already have, but it seems wrong to limit type competition to charaver vs. character. And your jargon is, as per standard, obfuscatory! ;)

I will leave the exchange with Mike where it is now; he's gone so far past me that I'm not even sure we're still talking about the same thing.

So, anyway, we've established that characters are not the only manifestation of credibility for competitive play. Let's add a new dimension to the discussion here . . . are there any existing gamist games in which the traditional character as engine of competition is not use? What other forms can credibility be given in order to facilitate competition?

Hi Nathan,

You're confounding "competition" with adversity. I'm stating as clearly as I can that Step On Up does not necessarily include conflict of interest among players, and that Challenge does not necessarily include conflict of interest among characters.

Gamist role-playing requires Step On Up; esteem/performance is on the line, to whatever emotional degree the people bring to it.

When Step On Up is operative as the creative agenda, then Situation becomes Challenge (this is mainly terminological, although not entirely).

You've got Gamism now. So far, all the players are cooperating and all the characters are cooperating. Yes, the characters are in danger in some way; that's fine - it's Challenge.

Now! The following is totally optional (in terms of play and/or design). Put a little red dial onto each of the above paragraphs. 1 = hardly any conflict-of-interest at work at all; 10 = massive and intense conflict of interest, such that success requires crashing failure for someone else.

As the dial in the Step On Up category gets spun to increase, the people at the table start to eye one another dangerously (which does not necessarily mean ill-will).

As the dial in the Challenge category gets spun to increase, the characters start to eye one another dangerously and post warding spells on themselves.

See how those are independent? Put a lot of competition in Step On Up but not into Challenge, and you have people busting butt to (for instance) level up faster than one another as their characters cooperate strategically to stay alive. Or, reverse it: put a lot of competition into Challenge but not into Step On Up, and you have the players gleefully cooperating to have the characters backstab one another.

Oh, and watch who you're calling obfuscatory, good buddy. I spent the last six months to a year working this stuff out, and you've taken, what, a couple minutes to think about it?

Best,
Ron

Hi Ron,

Just wanted to say I totally dig the 2 dials and it makes a lot of sense to me.

See how those are independent? Put a lot of competition in Step On Up but not into Challenge, and you have people busting butt to (for instance) level up faster than one another as their characters cooperate strategically to stay alive. Or, reverse it: put a lot of competition into Challenge but not into Step On Up, and you have the players gleefully cooperating to have the characters backstab one another.

Ron,

If I'm reading you right, you're saying that risk is fundamental to Gamism, rather than opposition. The important thing is that the players have something to lose. It doesn't matter who's taking it from them. Is that right?

I'm probably getting ahead of myself here, but this makes me think, isn't there more to Gamism than just "not losing" in a risky situation? Doesn't there need to be something to gain as well?

Either way, though, I think my original thought about credibility still works. Whatever the players stand to lose or gain, if you look close enough it's actually some form of credibility. If you change the way that credibility is represented in the game, then you can have a many diverse styles of Gamist play.

Ron wrote: Oh, and watch who you're calling obfuscatory, good buddy. I spent the last six months to a year working this stuff out, and you've taken, what, a couple minutes to think about it?

Hi Nathan,

I'm probably getting ahead of myself here, but this makes me think, isn't there more to Gamism than just "not losing" in a risky situation? Doesn't there need to be something to gain as well?

Either way, though, I think my original thought about credibility still works. Whatever the players stand to lose or gain, if you look close enough it's actually some form of credibility. If you change the way that credibility is represented in the game, then you can have a many diverse styles of Gamist play.

Ron Edwards wrote: If you handle the moment-of-crisis well, your esteem/etc goes up; if you don't, it drops a tad.

Hi Mike,

Yes, although that's moving more into the internal zone and thus out of GNS proper. GNS exists specifically as lines or perhaps spheres of communication among people.

As far as solo role-playing is concerned, I suggest that a fabricated social environment exists in the user's head, which at least substitutes for an actual interpersonal one - he sees himself as interacting with the "game" which is to say the game author, who shares and appreciates his rising/falling instances of play.

I suggest that the more successful solo adventures are those which, above and beyond their quality as challenges, promote and clarify that internal, cognitive, perceived shared environment between author and user. In most of the T&T solos, the text offers social commentary on your success or failure, rather than merely telling you what happens.

Best,
Ron

Mike Holmes wrote:
This includes, of course, self-esteem, right? So playing a solo RPG, or doing something that other players don't notice can still result in gain or loss of self-esteem, and still counts. Right?

Ron wrote:
I agree! Your credibility point was strong enough that I decided to bring all this essay stuff in (instead saying "just wait") - I knew you'd added something worth saying to the mix. To my way of thinking, your term credibility refers to the shared, social aspect of "what's at stake."

Paganini wrote:

Ron Edwards wrote: I agree! Your credibility point was strong enough that I decided to bring all this essay stuff in (instead saying "just wait") - I knew you'd added something worth saying to the mix. To my way of thinking, your term credibility refers to the shared, social aspect of "what's at stake."

Heh, cool. Now I feel all warm and fuzzy. ;)

Ron Edwards wrote: To my way of thinking, your term credibility refers to the shared, social aspect of "what's at stake."

Paganini wrote: So, my pocket definition of Gamism is: Gaining credibility with which to complete conflicted goals in the context of the imagined reality.

I see that credibility is in the air, there is an excellent discussion of it here.

It may simply be that credibility is always the stake: it just gets gambled in gamism. No that's not right.

One's personal standing/self-esteem are at stake with Step on Up, and the character's life/standing/loved ones/what have you are at risk with Challenge. Credibility is given a weight--which is the gain/loss of these things--in gamism that it may not be in the other styles.

Gamism places an emphasis on the fact that credibilityalways needs to be apportioned somehow and takes advantage of the fact that we have attachment to whether our version of reality takes or not. This is used to power the play style and makes it fun.

--EC

Em,

I was most definitely using "credibility" in the Lumpley Principle "who decides what happens" way. Ron seems to be saying that, in addition to this sort of credibility, also at stake is some form of "peer prestiege." You lose this prestiege if you're outdone, you gain it when you outdo. Kind of like your good buddy gloating after his 3 army country just defended successfully against a 12 army invasion in RISK.

Hi there,

Check me on this, but does it seem reasonable to identify the Lumpley Principle version of "credibility" with the basic social process of reinforcement during play (a Social Contract issue)?

If so, then the GNS breakdown would go like this:

- Gamism: reinforcing both the uber-cooperative and locally-possibly-competitive standards for what is at risk, and concerning what (in-play)

- Narrativism: reinforcing player authority over character protagonism (in the group-appreciative sense which Paul likes to talk about), which translates absolutely directly to producing Theme out of Premise

- Simulationism: reinforcing the internal causality of the in-game events, again, as communicated among the group for shared appreciative purposes

I can see all manner of ways in which the credibility is established - from simple positive social reinforcement (in our game of My Life with Master last night, everyone spontaneously clapped and cheered at each Epilogue), to various secondary creative acts supporting play (e.g. the comics pages that used to emerge from our Champions games), to gestures of respect (such as habitual deference to a given player or GM regarding where the buck might stop in instances of shared narration).

Best,
Ron

I dunno Ron. I wasn't thinking of it as being quite that deep or precise. The Lumpley Principle just says that all RPG rules distribute or regulate the right to determine what happens in the fictional reality right?

The way I see it, Credibility necessary for Exploration to exist. We have no way of creating the shared reality unless we know which player's imagination is the currently "official" one.

In Gamism you've identified Step On Up as a having a real world social concern at stake for the players. My RISK analogy was on target, right? "Outdoing" your friends is an example of Step On Up?

So the stakes are a form of social prestiege, however small they may be. But my point wasn't about the overall stakes, my point was about how the battle is fought.

The imagined reality is the arena for the contest that decides the stakes, right? That means that the players win or lose by manipulating the imagined reality. But manipulating the imagined reality is all Lumpley Principle. That's what credibility is all about - deciding which player gets to manipulate the imagined reality, and how much he can do.

*That's* why I realized that Gamism doesn't have to depend on character, even though it traditionally does. Character is just one way to give a player credibility.

In your T&T game, for example, you said that one of the victory conditions for the GM is to kill the characters. The players, obviously, want their characters to live. This whole thing is just one big load of Lumpley Principle Credibility. You're trying to get the credibility to establish that the characters in the shared reality are dead. The players are trying to get the credibility to keep them alive. Weapons, Items, Spells, Money, Monsters, Traps, Characters, and so on are all just expressions of Credibility as far as Gamism is concerned.

Here's my check, Ron:

Ron Edwards wrote: I can see all manner of ways in which the credibility is established - from simple positive social reinforcement... to gestures of respect...

Ron Edwards wrote: If so, then the GNS breakdown would go like this:

- Gamism: reinforcing both the uber-cooperative and locally-possibly-competitive standards for what is at risk, and concerning what (in-play)

- Narrativism: reinforcing player authority over character protagonism (in the group-appreciative sense which Paul likes to talk about), which translates absolutely directly to producing Theme out of Premise

- Simulationism: reinforcing the internal causality of the in-game events, again, as communicated among the group for shared appreciative purposes

Paganini wrote: In your T&T game, for example, you said that one of the victory conditions for the GM is to kill the characters. The players, obviously, want their characters to live. This whole thing is just one big load of Lumpley Principle Credibility. You're trying to get the credibility to establish that the characters in the shared reality are dead. The players are trying to get the credibility to keep them alive. Weapons, Items, Spells, Money, Monsters, Traps, Characters, and so on are all just expressions of Credibility as far as Gamism is concerned.

Paganin wrote: The imagined reality is the arena for the contest that decides the stakes, right? That means that the players win or lose by manipulating the imagined reality. But manipulating the imagined reality is all Lumpley Principle. That's what credibility is all about - deciding which player gets to manipulate the imagined reality, and how much he can do.

Paganini wrote: This whole thing is just one big load of Lumpley Principle Credibility.

(Hi Em!)

I check with Ron, fully.

I'd say it like this: Being credible makes you more credible. You say something cool, the group makes it true, the group also applauds you, next time you say something the group remembers applauding you last time and is more likely to make it true this time, round and round it goes. This happens at a subtle level, way more subtle than the level of the game mechanics. It's made up of eye contact, body language, little noises, interruptions of various sorts, all the ways people respond to each other in conversation.

But this subtle, conversational, interpersonal level, it's the level where decisions about when to use the mechanics and how to treat their results get made. Game mechanical credibility, like character effectiveness or access to director stance or whatever, is a manifestation of social, group approval-type credibility. Without the latter you can't ever get the former.

But I'm not positive who I'm agreeing and disagreeing with, or whether I'm just restating the common foundation and missing the contested point entirely. Nathan, are you saying that in Gamism, winning means increasing your personal credibility? Ron, are you? Emily?

-Vincent

Hi guys,

I can't see any point of contention at all, but maybe I'm just silly or something. In some ways, the very notion of credibility seems so fundamental to the existence of a Social Contract that it doesn't seem worth hammering so hard.

Best,
Ron

I think that you're agreeing with Ron. Not only that, but in a way I think that those were the most powerful definitions of the modes of play that I've ever seen. I like it a lot.

Mike

lumpley wrote: Nathan, are you saying that in Gamism, winning means increasing your personal credibility?

Hi Nathan,

There's a whole section in the new essay called "About What" that addresses this in-game "thing" you're talking about. What's especially interesting is that it may or may not correspond with any kind of quantitative or explicit "win" mechanic.

Best,
Ron

Hello all, hi Vincent,

I see two things here:

your Standing: what gets risked with Step On Up

your Say: whether what you assert is credible

Using one word (credibility) just increases already existing confusion. We all confuse these two, but they aren't the same, and one increasing needn't make the other go up or down. Games where your say depends on your standing are often quite unpleasant. And getting your say can most definitely decrease your standing.

yrs,
Em

Boink!

"Standing" and "Say." Straight into the lexicon.

Best,
Ron

Heck yeah.

-Vincent

I think it all depends on what one means by an "in-game flag".

Certainly we're talking about decisions made by the player that cause in-game actions to occur. But the "win" conditions, what counts as a win, can be completely internal to the player; he has only to imagine that they matter in the social context, and may even see a win condition that other's may not. That is, it doesn't depend on whether anyone else sees the condition, it's only important that the player make the decision in relation to the condition.

Paganini wrote:
In Gamism, there's some sort of personal social element of prestiege at risk. These stakes are completely meta meta meta game. Winning increases this prestiege, losing decreases it.

Hi Mike,

You wrote,

Have we identified a "goal" level related to GNS here at the social level?