The following are comments from the Bad Roleplaying? I blame Tolkien thread. I think the more general question which comes out of it is important, though.

Dr. Velocity wrote: most fantasy rpg sessions DO seem to take ALL the worst kinds of cues from Tolkein; basically, going on the whole 'If Tolkein gamed...' issue, he was a simulationist - so the painstaking worry over how many arrows are remaining, if you have a rope, how many ounces of water it takes to put out a campfire, whatever else, were guaranteed to damn some role-players' characters to a hell of 'gosh too bad you didn't write down quill pen on your sheet', or simply drove them away from gaming due to a fanatical tendancy toward the pedantic.

Valamir wrote: Role playing games did not evolve in a vacuum. Our concept of what a story is and how it should be structured is influenced by all of the stories in our lives. From the bed time stories we were told as children, to campfire stories we invented at camp, to movies, TVs, and yes even novels.

Contrary to Raven's statement I believe its IMPOSSIBLE to understand story structure as it exists in an RPG without drawing parallels to these other forms.

How a "simulationist" might evaluate an RPGs story structure may well be very similiar to how a certain author might evaluate a novel's story structure and for many of the same reasons and goals. It then is not that much of a stretch to say that author had a "simulationist" agenda.

Obviously these are two different mediums and the concepts are not 100% applicable across disciplines. But to say they can't or shouldn't be compared with each other is IMO pretty absurd.

Raymond Chandler. That's about as N as it gets, methinks.

edit: oh, and I agree with the first question. That is to say, it supports a certain type of simulationism.

John Kim wrote: An important second question is: If Tolkien is Simulationist, then who are the more Narrativist authors?

Even Tolkein, boring as he is, is no Simulationist.

Guys! It's not Exploration vs. Story Now. Ever. It's Exploration plus Story Now vs. Exploration plus no Story Now. (Or Step On Up, as you like.) Tolkein, if his fiction could be interpreted somehow to be an RPG in play, would have lots and lots of in-depth Exploration, yes, but he's still all about the Story Now! He sometimes bobbles it, sometimes bobbles it badly, but that's not the same thing a'tall. That's just because he was a guy trying to write fiction.

I hesitate to mention it, because I couldn't read more than 15 pages, but Le Guin's Always Coming Home seems like the best bet for "Simulationist" "fiction" to me. It's not real Simulationism because it's not collaborative in-play creation, obviously, but we'll give it anyway. But it's not real fiction either, because nothing meaningful happens. Made-up anthropology or made-up journalism, carefully robbed of protagonists and meanings - maybe. If such a thing even exists. But that's not Tolkein, nor O'Brian, nor Melville by a mile.

Say it with me! Depth of detail does not mean Simulationism! Detail can serve Narrativism or Gamism as easy as Sim! All the Creative Agendas depend on a commitment to Exploration! Character and Setting are the foundation for all roleplaying! There's never yet a story well served by a poorly detailed or inconsistent in-world!

(If Tolkein inspired Simulationist play, it was because the players weren't, I dunno, literate enough to figure out what he was saying. They were emulating his form, illiterately, not his substance.)

I'm very willing to be wrong about Always Coming Home, by the way. And if you prefer, you can swap "carefully preserved free of" in for "carefully robbed of," so it won't seem like I'm dissing pointlessness.

-Vincent

Does all that attention to detail in LotR help facilitate the Story Now? For me, the 185 times that they sang some elf song that took up 18 pages of text and required more footnotes than "The Wasteland" did not produce that deep-down Story Now feeling. Maybe it's a YMMV issue.

I cited Chandler, on the other hand, as he adds a lot of detail, but it usually points directly at the corruption of his characters and the consequences of the choices they've made or will make.

Sure, attention to detail does not = Sim. But for it to promote N the reader/player has to make some kind of connection. With LotR I felt like it was more in the way. Again, YMMV.

Thanks, Vincent - I wanted to say something like that, but you did such a good job, now I don't have to . . .

If I do allow myself to think about Tolkein in terms of Sim, what I come up with is this - it wouldn't be about the meticulous attention to detail, it would be about the appreciation of that detail. A group of fans going on about how this elvish name is drawn from something established in Lost Tales volume umpty-ump, and how Rohan culture was a reactionary response to the fall of Numenor, and etc. - touching on the meaning of the actual tale(s) only briefly, if at all - maybe you could say that fan group is showing a Sim appreciation for JRR. And that his work has such a meticuous attention to detail means that they can do that quite readily.

To what extent the author himself could be said to have appreciated the details themselves rather than the "point" of the work as a whole is hard to say. I'm sure he enjoyed the challenge to his linguistic knowldge and skills that creating the various languages entailed - does that mean LotR is a Gamist fiction? No. But if that group of fans is trying to one-up each other with their intricate knowledge of the background of the work, maybe you can call that a Gamist appreciation.

Or maybe not. All in all, I think applying GNS to pre-created, static fictions just isn't a good idea. There's a link via that awkward "story" word, but it's not a link that the real meaning of the terms G, N, and S can travel.

Gordon

PS - Always Coming Home the RPG. Now that's an interesting thought . . .

I have argued in the past that there are literary forms that are akin to simulationism and gamism.

The simulationist form I most often mention is the travelogue--on television, the Michael Palin series Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole are exactly the sort of things I mean. "Now we're in Hong Kong, and guess what, we're going to eat snake, and we get to start by picking our snake out of the bin where they're all writhing together....we're in China, riding the train that crosses hundreds of miles of countryside, and one of the peasants wants to sell us a chicken....The contrast between China and Tokyo couldn't be more striking...." There's a story here in the sense that there are connected events and we find them interesting, but there's not really any premise being addressed at all.

Raw adventure stories are my candidates for gamist writing. The closest thing to a moral I've ever been able to derive from Raiders of the Lost Ark is that Indiana Jones at least had read the text that said that anyone who looks on the face of God will die, so that knowledge saved him when they opened the Ark--and thus we know that knowledge is always a good thing, even if you don't actually believe what you're learning, as you never know what might be useful. If that's the narrativist premise of the movie, it's pretty thin on the ground, I think. This movie is more about whether he's going to succeed, and how he'll do it. Now, I'm not so committed to this assessment (and less so that this particular film fits it) so let's not make this the focus of the thread. My point has much more to do with simulationism.

Tolkien is not simulationist; he's got moral and ethical and spiritual questions and issues springing up in the most unexpected places. He bombards us with the detail of his amazingly complex world, and sometimes we are overwhelmed by the backdrop (or by the presentation of the backdrop)--but we always come back to the story, the conflict between good and evil, the battle within ourselves between our own weaknesses and the good we know we should do.

He's got some good action in there at times, too, but it never overwhelms the issues.

--M. J. Young

Hmm, my feeling is that LOTR exhibits large periods in which story is NOT now, and there is only exposition. The excruciatingly completist agonised farewells are a case in point, even in the movie. I agree that depth of detail does not only indiciate Sim, but in this case I think it is Sim detail, not detail supporting story. Theres just too much of it for me not to think it was a major part of what the author wanted to convey.

More generally, I don't think there are many writers of fiction that are truly simulationist with any degree of frequency. More likely, such writers produce works like Caesars The Conquest of Gaul and T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I'm not sure that looking to fiction, specifically, is likely to turn up too many Sim writers; if Story Now is a contradictory goal to the Sim dream, then why would an author introduce it?

Lawrence remarks: "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."

Just to pick up on the old shibboleth of "If it don't have a story, it's not fiction..."

Well, in my mind, if it's fictitious, it's fiction. It may not be narrative fiction, but much simmy support material is what I've classified as "non-narrative fcition," and my campaign to have this definition accepted amongst serious literature critics continues apace.

The message of Raiders is surely that some power has too great a price... or possibly that God hates Nazis and Frenchmen.

I found always coming home rich in meaning, and even protagonism (more as an emergent undercurrent than explicit). But sure, it's a Sim wet dream, all that detail and no damned plot getting in the way of THINGS!

I could go on about Tolkiens presumed creative agenda... well, most times when he's got a choice of "story NOW" or the dream, he'll go off on another bit of the dream. But heck, just because he tends to the sim doesn't make him all sim. His battle scenes have touches of the sneakier aspects of a gamist, especially in RotK. But a better man than I, with far more time on his hands, could check each decision in each scene by looking at Christopher Tolkiens works of Patrinecrophilia.

Interesting commentary. Vincent's absolutely right. The presence of exploration of setting found in Tolkien or O'Brian is just that...heavy Exploration of Setting. The theory allows for heavy exploration of setting in any Agenda.

I think, however, that Tolkien's approach to the Premise was very Vanilla Nar. Those who read LotR for the first time as children likely missed the Premii altogether. Heck, there are even many adults who don't realize the Sam is the true protagonist of the story, and the relationship between Sam and Frodo is the core story. Like Vanilla Narrativism, then, the Premise has to be teased out of the structure of an otherwise Exploration heavy story.

Earlier I made the comment that Tolkien couldn't decide whether he was writing a story or an encyclopedia. I think that actually bears on the vanilla nature of the story. Like a true simulationist Tolkien seemed to have a pathological aversion to doing anything "story" oriented that was not justified by a logical progression of historical events. Before any character made any real decision of story impact he felt it necessary to be able to have a grasp of the 3 ages worth of history that brought the world to that point so that he could support (to himself anyway) why the choice was made the way it was. [note, this entire paragraph is me projecting motivation on the author solely on the basis of how the end product reads and what I know of the elaborate notes that his son later gathered and published, and is thus somewhat speculative]

From this perspective...this need to prioritize the Exploration components above the story and to IMO literally not let story happen until he'd established the Explorative support structure to justify it, one could argue very much a Simulationist Agenda.


At this point, it should be noted that due to the differences in methods of creative input between a book and an rpg, that it is unlikely to be able to differentiate something as similiar as Simulationism and Vanilla Narrativism in a novel.

But I definitely think the apparent need to have the background justify the choices of the characters acts as pretty good model of the Sim agenda. How much of the work's Premise simply fell into place as the logical extension of that background, and how much of the background was manipulated in order to produce that Premise is, in all likelyhood, unknowable. I have a tendency to believe that Tolkien was willing to manipulate his background after the fact when he needed to reach a certain point in the story but that's purely speculation.

No way. Tolkein's "Instance of Play" is wicked long, with lots of meandering, but that's a stylistic choice not an Agenda one. Also he sometimes badly flubs pacing and conflict, but that's a skill problem not an Agenda one.

Ralph wrote: ...Tolkien seemed to have a pathological aversion to doing anything "story" oriented that was not justified by a logical progression of historical events. Before any character made any real decision of story impact he felt it necessary to be able to have a grasp of the 3 ages worth of history that brought the world to that point so that he could support (to himself anyway) why the choice was made the way it was.

lumpley wrote: No way.

I think, however, that Tolkien's approach to the Premise was very Vanilla Nar

From this perspective...this need to prioritize the Exploration components above the story and to IMO literally not let story happen until he'd established the Explorative support structure to justify it, one could argue very much a Simulationist Agenda.

that it is unlikely to be able to differentiate something as similiar as Simulationism and Vanilla Narrativism in a novel.

Sorry! The latter. We basically agree.

My position is that the presence of demonstrable theme in Tolkein's writing means that he authored theme, and that's all we need to judge by. His own self-perceived priorities don't figure. Which is to say - yes, I think it's cutter and dryer than you do.

-Vincent

Valamir wrote: But I definitely think the apparent need to have the background justify the choices of the characters acts as pretty good model of the Sim agenda. How much of the work's Premise simply fell into place as the logical extension of that background, and how much of the background was manipulated in order to produce that Premise is, in all likelyhood, unknowable. I have a tendency to believe that Tolkien was willing to manipulate his background after the fact when he needed to reach a certain point in the story but that's purely speculation.

You and Vincent are losing me here.
Since when did having a theme arise as the result of exploration qualify as Nar? Didn't we just establish a few threads back, that themes in Sim play were entirely possible and common, and that the mere existance of a theme that can be identified after play finished is no indication that play was Nar.

I think so.

What differentiates theme as the result of Nar from theme as the result of Sim is whether there was a Premise being addressed during play by the participants at the table.

Translated to the world of novel writing then, in order for a novel to be Nar there has to be a Premise being addressed during writing by the author. If the author is 100% focused on exploration and after he writes "the end" on the last page a critic can read the book and derive a theme...thats not Nar...that's Sim. Theme or not.

So the issue in trying to answer whether a book is Nar or Sim has everything to do with how the author addressed the premise during "actual play/writing". If he was addressing it intentionally during the writing process (and some books are written such that its obvious he was doing so) then one can say Nar. If he wasn't and theme "just happened" then one can say Sim.

If on the other hand the Nar is hidden under a strong emphasis in Exploration, the best you can do without consulting the author is say "could be either". Might have been on purpose, might have "just happened"

I repeat that I agree that it was likely on purpose. But to say its cut and dry is really overstating the position. One can make a good arguement that it "just happened". After all, look at all of the themes that people have attributed to the book that Tolkien during his life came out and said "No...had nothinng to do with that". Never-the-less those themes are present. They weren't intended, they "just happened". Therefor not Nar themes.

In any case, this is really starting to discuss minutia in a tail chasing way. The important thing is what can be learned from the discussion of such elements and not so much on reaching a definitive answer.

cruciel wrote: Give a character a background and send him out into the world to make decisions based on that background. You'll get yourself a theme based on whatever you put in the background, and hence get yourself a helping of Nar. How well the events that transpire bring the theme to light it a matter of style and skill.

There are, I think, really simple reasons why GNS-style analysis cannot be used productively on a book. You would have to observe the writer working on the book and see which parts he was most emotionally engaged by; and then you would have to watch the readers reading the book and see which parts they were emotionally engaged by - and finally you would have to make some kind of aggregate judgment based on all of those observations.

A lot less clean and clear than half-a-dozen people sitting round a table rolling dice.

You might say that certain types of novel echo the types of story one might see if you compared transcripts of sessions of different types of play. But, and it's a big but, I think there's such limited utility in that it's pretty much not worth doing.

cf. Ron's narrativist essay excerpt .here.

Consciousness, intentionality, isn't necessary to Narrativism. The people at the table don't have to be intentionally prioritizing theme-authorship to be playing Narrativist. They only have to be doing theme-authorship. Am I wrong?

Whether Tolkein authored his themes on purpose or by raw instinct does not matter. He authored them. In the moment of creation, he was right there writing thematically-charged, premise-driven fiction. How do we know? Because what came out was thematically charged, premise-driven fiction!

Ralph wrote: The important thing is what can be learned from the discussion of such elements and not so much on reaching a definitive answer.

Valamir wrote: So the issue in trying to answer whether a book is Nar or Sim has everything to do with how the author addressed the premise during "actual play/writing". If he was addressing it intentionally during the writing process (and some books are written such that its obvious he was doing so) then one can say Nar. If he wasn't and theme "just happened" then one can say Sim.

If on the other hand the Nar is hidden under a strong emphasis in Exploration, the best you can do without consulting the author is say "could be either". Might have been on purpose, might have "just happened"

I repeat that I agree that it was likely on purpose. But to say its cut and dry is really overstating the position. One can make a good arguement that it "just happened". After all, look at all of the themes that people have attributed to the book that Tolkien during his life came out and said "No...had nothinng to do with that". Never-the-less those themes are present. They weren't intended, they "just happened". Therefor not Nar themes.

lumpley wrote: Consciousness, intentionality, isn't necessary to Narrativism. The people at the table don't have to be intentionally prioritizing theme-authorship to be playing Narrativist. They only have to be doing theme-authorship.

I reading through the rather long thread Ralph PM'd me, and that Ian linked. Then I'll respond in more detail to Ralph & Chris (if needed). However...

Valamir wrote: 1) It is possible to have theme arise through Sim Play
2) If the players author theme (conciously or no) its Nar Play.

These cannot both be true.

Either #1 is true, in which case, no, not all authoring of theme automatically constitutes Nar.

Or #2 is true, in which case every case where theme gets established is automatically Nar and there can never be a theme to Sim Play.

#2 cannot be true, because you'd have to work overtime to arrive at a story that had absolutely no theme that could be teased out...virtually all story would then have theme, so virtually all play would then be Nar. We know this is not the case.

Therefor #1 must be true, which means simply because one can identify a theme in Tolkien's work does not automatically make it Nar. There are other elements beyond the mere presence of theme that is required.

I think Tolkien was guilty of Story on Purpose. His major sources or influences were myths from various traditions. Tolkien tried to publish the Silmarillion, which reads like Ovid or one of the sagas, before he wrote LoTR.

Also, to put it in context, though LoTR wasn't published until the '50's, the level of detail lavished on setting feels much more like a 19th century work. Fiction has gotten spare since Hemingway.

And, a question, would a fictional narrative with story but no theme not be narrativist?

Regards,
Emily Care

#2 must be true for Vanilla Nar to exist, because Vanilla Nar is most often identified as Nar play occuring "unintentionally". Further more, virtually all play with theme may well be Nar. As a theme is being created in play it is being addressed.

I think efforts to say "Nar doesn't have to be concious" is incorrect. What I believe was meant by those points is that the players involved don't have to be framing their Premise in terms of "ok and now I'm going to introduce the premise of...X". In other words it doesn't require a certain structure or formula or jargon.

Ralph,

I'm also not just trying to be the guy with the right answer here, but the GNS I'm starting from and considering (perhaps foolishly) mapping onto Tolkien just doesn't look like the same GNS you're starting from. Taking your two statements that you think cannot both be true:

1) It is possible to have theme arise through Sim Play
2) If the players author theme (consciously or no) its Nar Play.

It looks to me that they can both be true. The only reason they couldn't to my eye is if you take "arise" (in statement 1) to be equivalent to "author" and/or "consciously" (in statement 2). And they are not, not in GNS as I understand it.

Then you say that folks have to author theme "on purpose" - gack. We're back in the discussion of what it means to intend something, and that's not fruitful ground. I think it's very clear that in GNS terms, the statement "well, I authored theme, but not on purpose" is meaningless. GNS does not care what your purpose was - you did, or you didn't. Now, it turns out that for many people, having a mental experience they label "having a purpose to author theme" means they are more likely to then do so, but that's not part of the definition. As Ron puts it (paraphrase) "the human mind very naturally and readily addresses premise in the right circumstances" - that being the case (and, I'd say, the same being true of the human mind in terms of the Dream and Step On Up), purposefulness and/or consciousness just doesn't enter into GNS.

The question in the discussion at hand is - how does that apply to talking about Tolkien? And the problem is, if we're looking at something like "the observed priority of the activity as demonstrated by mutual reinforcement amongst the group" as the defining way to determine G, N or S, it just doesn't map onto a book, and/or a singular author. To build on Vincent's analogy, the "instance of play" we have to look at with a book/author would be no less - AND no more - than the entirety of the work itself. What he said in letters before/after the work and etc. would NOT, in GNS terms, be part of play. Because in making a GNS determination, we do not care WHY players do what they do, we only care what they do.

Which (to address John's point a bit) doesn't mean the why (or the purposefulness/consciousness) doesn't matter, it's just not a GNS-variable. Well, if folks do happen to say something about why during play, sure, we can take that into account - but it won't trump the plain display of what they are actually doing. It might (as I take John to be pointing to) nonetheless be very useful information for future planning and play, but in itself - not a GNS issue.

So - as Vincent says, it's fine to say "Tolkien is like a Simulationist" in x way, as long as x isn't "failure to author theme." Because he did.

Unless . . . well, truth to tell, "author" in GNS is NOT equivalent to authoring a book. So I guess you could map GNS-author into book-author in such a way that there's a book-equivalent of "arise" (from your statement 1) in GNS that contrasts with author. Thus we could say:

1) It is possible to have theme arise through Sim book writing
2) If the writer authors theme (consciously or no) it's Nar book writing

Because that does such damage to one of the core (for me) aspects of GNS - that what we look at to make our determination is what happens in play - I'm reluctant to accept it. It's fine to look at the "thought process" behind the creation of a work of fiction and say some writers author theme, while others simply let theme arise through writing. It's fine to say that's an important distinction in looking at those fictions. But to take that "thought process" distinction back to GNS is NOT good. IMO.

Gordon

Valamir wrote: I disagree. Vanilla Nar is still "on purpose" it is not "unintentionally". Vanilla Nar is "on purpose, without making a big deal about it."

Theme that "just happens" cannot possibly be labeled Narativist. If it is, than Simulationism does not exist because it is virtually impossible to tell a story using pure exploration that doesn't stumble into a theme somewhere.

Hey Ralph,

1) It is possible to have theme arise through Sim Play
2) If the players author theme (conciously or no) its Nar Play.

These cannot both be true.

I think the whole "production of theme" thing is not necessarily the best litmus test for Narrativism. Theme is a byproduct. And it is unnecessary for a player to actively concern himself with producing it.

To identify Narrativism, instead look to the other players. Are they consciously or unconsciously aware that a significant issue has been raised for the character in question? You can tell this by the way they pay attention to that character's scenes. Does the player in question handle his character with attention to managing the interest of the other players? This, not the production of theme is the Narrativist's primary concern during play. If theme is produced, it is a byproduct of this. And yeah, I'm saying that maybe theme isn't produced. Maybe all the characters are killed by a broken aspect of the system. It was still Narrativism up to that point. Narrativism is the activity of taking the input of game events as raw material for managing the interest of the other players in your own character. A Narrativist constantly jerks and slaps at the interest of the other players. It happens to generally produce theme because our brains are wired to pay attention when presented with input that suggests it might be a story. Narrativism is a game of playing with audience interest.

Paul

Paul,

That's terribly interesting...

I'd always assumed that paying attention to the interests of the other players was up at the Social Contract level. I need to chew on this, and probably observe a few game sessions with this in mind. Gimme a hand though - how then, from his particular angle, are Sim and Gam defined?

Sorry Paul. I don't buy that at all. That's a telltale that indicates that maybe Narrativism is happening, but it isn't in itself Narrativism. Being concious of the interest of other players is something that can go on at the social contract level for all agendas.

It is a requirement that this happens for narrativist play to be possible, so we can say "without this interest, it can't be narrativism". But we can't declare the reverse, of "with this interest, it is".

So I think your above post is only 1/2 of the picture. In fact, I think you've nicely described what I meant by the "on purpose" phrase I used above which gave Gordon pause. But it is insufficient for a definition of Narrativism IMO, to simply as that a player "handle his character with attention to managing the interest of the other players".

The other half must be the element in which the other players are interested in.

In a Gamist game a player should handle his character with attention to managing the interest of the other players in the step on up aspects of the game. In a Simulationist game the interest being managed is the exploration. In a Narrativist game it must be the theme.

You can get theme as the result of a Gamist game or a Simulationist game. But only in Narrativism is the priority of play, is it done "on purpose".



In fact, to take this a step further and cross with another recent thread. Functional Roleplaying occurs when the players are handling their characters with attention to maintaining the interest of the other players. I submitt one could define Dysfunctional Roleplaying as a whole menu of activities that have as their common base that this is not being done.

Creative Agenda then is that which the other players are interested in...the dream, the step on up, story now. That's the second half.

lumpley wrote: Consciousness, intentionality, isn't necessary to Narrativism. The people at the table don't have to be intentionally prioritizing theme-authorship to be playing Narrativist. They only have to be doing theme-authorship. Am I wrong?

There's some fuzzy use of "theme" in this thread, which probably won't trip anybody up long-term but might. So to lay it out: Premise is the moral question. Authoring theme is answering the question. "What is freedom worth?" is the Premise (not to pick on you, Jason, I think your example above is quite tidy). "Freedom is not worth the death of your soul" is a theme. In roleplaying, showing in play that freedom is not worth the death of your soul is authoring that theme. "Authoring theme" and "addressing Premise" are the same thing.

That said.

People play Narrativist without noticing it all the frickin' time.

Ralph, your two points:

1) It is possible to have theme arise through Sim Play

Yes. HOWEVER, it is not possible to have theme be reliably, consistently co-authored through Sim play. As Gordon says.

When theme "arises" from Sim play, that means it was brought into the game by someone other than the-players-as-collaborators, or at some time other than the moment of creation. It was imposed by one player (like the GM), hard-built by the game designer, retrofitted by the reteller - whatever.

Play in which theme is reliably, consistently co-authored is, by defi-fucking-nition, Narrativist play. *

2) If the players author theme (conciously or no) its Nar Play.

Yes. If the players reliably, consistently co-author theme, even if they don't realize that's what they're doing, it's Narrativist play.

Your two points can be and are both true.

Here's my take on "on purpose":

Some folks play a game. They reliably, consistently, collaboratively address Premise, even when challenges arise (per Ian). You say to them, "hey, were you prioritizing theme-authorship?" They say, "huh? Dude no way, I was just playin' my guy." You conclude...

That they were prioritizing theme-authorship! Fuck, man, you watched them do it! They didn't notice or couldn't articulate or were flat-out mistaken about their priorities, but you don't care. You saw them reliably, consistently address Premise, even when it was hard. What better evidence for their priorities could there be?

...Which, here's Tolkein, reliably, consistently addressing Premise. He gets a pass on the "collaboratively" because he was playing with himself. As it, um, were.

More generally, it's baffling and odd to see GNS applied to fiction. It's like you've run Egri's ideas through Babelfish a couple times. I mean, we already know all about how premise and theme and challenge and prioritization and all that shit works in literature - that's where Narrativism was born!

Some side points:

MJ, I agree with you in principle about travelogues, but I think that often the -logueing of your travels is a creative moment, akin to authorship, and lots of times the -loguer adresses premise there. I'm thinking particularly of Errol Morris, who brings gripping theme-stuff into the raw material of his documentaries.

Emily, I don't think that you can even have a story in that sense without theme. That's Egri: what makes a fictional narrative a story is its premise.

Ian, can you come up with a case where pursuing Story Now might damage the Dream? I can't. Story Now depends on consistent, plausible, faithful Exploration, same as the Dream does. (It's easy to come up with cases where pursuing the Dream doesn't live up to Story Now, because Story Now depends on Exploration + Addressing Premise, not Exploration alone.) Maybe a new thread, if you feel like it?

-Vincent

* edit: I wish I'd said "defi-diddlydang-nition" instead. I'm not actually feeling mean or angry.

lumpley wrote: Ian, can you come up with a case where pursuing Story Now might damage the Dream?

Now I find this thread. Last time I duck out for a week.

OK, I think that the idea here is sorta silly. We all agree that fiction can't be Sim or whatever because it's not role-playing. But then here we are trying to attach lables anyhow. Why not say something that's not contradictory and yet still makes a connection?

For example, I would say that I personally love all that long, drawn out extra exposition that Tolkien puts in (what some people denigrate as awful story pacing). I would also say that from that same place in me that gets me all excited to read these things, I get excited about Sim.

So, no, Tolkien isn't Sim. But it has elements that give me the same thrill as heightened exploration does in RPGs. That seems to be a sensible statement, no?

Mike

Mike - yup, I think you're right. That gets us back to John's initial questions:

John Kim wrote: So is this meticulous attention to detail in authors related to Simulationism? I tend to agree with Ralph that we can and should draw parallels between writing styles and gaming styles. And it certainly seems like drawing maps of the world, inventing languages, and diagramming out family trees is something that could easily be pegged as Simulationist in a game. So is this a spurious association or are they actually related?
[ . . .]
An important second question is: If Tolkien is Simulationist, then who are the more Narrativist authors?

I'm cool with that.

I think my initial vehemence was because of the Egri-through-Babelfish bafflement I mentioned.

-Vincent