Ron Edwards wrote: M.J., I'm having a hard time seeing how your insight is a new thing. I mean, I'm glad you wrote it, and it makes perfect sense, and it's all good, but it also sorta seems obvious. The essence of "social interaction" is emotional commitment of some kind. The best way for me to respond is, "I agree!"

Perhaps it's not a new thing; but I think it is a thing that gets lost in discussion, and if it were brought forward more it might help analysis.

Again and again it is suggested that people always play simulationist when they're not playing gamist or narrativist; that is, it's treated as a fallback priority. I don't know that this is the way to understand it in practice.

I'm reminded of I think Gareth's long thread about gameplay in which he thought they were playing simulationist because they hadn't identified a premise, but all of the decisions he reported in describing his game were about fidelity and treachery and other very serious issues (and many times it seemed that verisimilitude took a back seat to letting people get involved in these events if they wished). Yet within that context, there certainly must have been a lot of play in which they paid attention to "realistic" or believable detail--they just stretched their "realism" when the issues they wanted to address came to the foreground. So I think it's not about having a first and second preference (although there could be some of that, as indeed if I'm in a situation in which narrativist interests are not at stake I might choose either gamist or simulationist ones, and might do so consistently). I think it's about calling on your GNS preference when the decision matters to it, and not otherwise. I don't think you're "playing simulationist" between the narrativist moments (although I recall looking at it that way in relation to John Kim's game a few months back). I think that playing narrativist means that you respond to events in a manner that addresses premise when it is possible, and you see that as the important part of play.

Perhaps in a sense this may give us a handle on how to analyze someone's GNS preferences not from watching them play but from listening to them describe games afterward. I would wager that, in the main, a gamist player would tell you all about how they overcame the obstacles before them, talking in great detail about what they did, whether combat or puzzle solving or whatever; a narrativist player would tell you about the conflicts and issues with which they dealt along the way, which ones they resolved, and which ones are still open for future games (very much what Gareth was doing in the previously mentioned thread); and a simulationist player would describe what was discovered, whether the strange landscapes or the odd treasures or the hidden secrets.

This escapes the typical objection that this player making this decision fits this mode, but when he made that decision it fit that mode. He's only in mode when he's making the decisions that matter to him. Those are likely to be the decisions and events that he remembers and describes to others when he recounts a "good" game session. Further, if there is a lack of such events, he's likely to say that "nothing happened" or it was a "boring game", because although he made many decisions during play, none of them were important, because they weren't within his play goals.

I've dropped many people into NagaWorld over the years. Some become extremely taken by the unusual world, studying the stars (one guy started to build a miniature Stonehenge to figure them all out) and the creatures and the artifiacts. Some go out to do battle with whatever they can find, from the coral bushes to the giant spiders to the war machines. Some start dealing with the issues of their separation from friends and family, and what that means to them. They find the game interesting because they're able to make decisions that move them into the kind of game play they enjoy. From that, I begin to see what kinds of worlds they are likely to enjoy from there.

So I think that one of the problems the observer has is that he's trying to identify what kinds of decisions the player is making when it matters, but he's failing to get behind that to identifying when, to that player, it matters. I suggest that getting the player to talk about what happened in the game will tend to highlight what the player found most interesting, and so help focus the process not on what the player decided, but what decisions the player thought important.

It's a subtle difference, but one that I think helps cut out a lot of the noise.

--M. J. Young