OK, so Ian and Ron have suggested a separate thread to discuss the following point which I made in The Dream vs Story Now!:

John Kim wrote: As far as I can tell, this just goes back to what I said. What you are saying is that Narrativism maintains the Dream just as well as Simulationism. There are two possible conclusions here:

1) Simulationism is all about pursuing the Dream to the exclusion of other priorities. However, it is futile extra effort. It excludes Story Now in favor of the Dream, but the Dream is no more whole or complete than in the case of Narrativism. In short, there is extra effort which excludes Story Now but there is no gain.

2) Simulationism gains something other than the Dream. So both Narrativism and Simulationism fully maintain the integrity of the Dream, but Simulationism gains a different quality.

Hello,

That's an issue that remains open, John.

Paul Czege and I tend toward the view that cognitively (and perhaps emotionally), Simulationist play is best understood as a rejection and a diminution of aspects of Gamist and Narrativist play.

However, I also acknowledge (and respect) that procedurally, we are talking about a distinct set of behaviors, standards, and professed aesthetic concerns.

So is it a "thing" or the absence of a "thing"? Depends on what set of phenomena you're interested in talking about. Typically, I like to focus on the procedural/social side of things, as you know, so that's why I go with my "however" paragraph. In fact, that's why I have a section about that in the GNS essay and a whole essay devoted to Simulationist play. From that perspective, Simulationist play is indeed a "thing."

I also call attention to the possible cognitive/emotional side in the Gamism and (upcoming) Narrativist essays, which I think will be better articulated on my part when both those essays may be read side by side. In a nutshell, I am interested in the observation that dedicated (rather than supportive) Simulationist priorities apparently must be trained rather severely in newcomers to role-playing, whereas Narrativist and Gamist priorities seem to arrive full-blown.

Mike Holmes is currently the chief advocate of a position that Jared Sorensen described as "The Beeg Horseshoe Theory," so called because a horseshoe is more-or-less a circle with a piece missing. This is a little bit more like the cognitive/emotional interpretation - going so far as to say that the fully-Simulationist mode remains a hypothetical construct which no one actually achieves; that Gamist and Narrativist "drive" remain even when all of one's procedural behavior keeps trying to shut it down.

Mike suggests (and correct me if I'm wrong in this, Mike) that Gamism and Narrativism are at the ends of one axis, and that "plausibility" is an independent axis. When attention to the plausibility becomes so focused as to diminish and (attempt to) ignore the first axis, that's Simulationist play. Mike suggests, in accordance with the Beeg Horseshoe, that such attention is not ultimately satisfying, and that efforts to make that attention central are, essentially, an exercise in futility. But nevertheless the plausibility axis is a real thing and should always be considered a powerful tool for reinforcing priorities in play.

That's why Mike is fascinated by "hybrid" GNS modes: specifically S-under-G and S-under-N, and why he is also interested in congruent (not hybrid) G-N.

Do Mike and I disagree on this issue? Not much at all. I'm mainly reluctant to say, "this is it!" because (a) it represents too much a shift toward emotional/cognitive variables rather than social/procedural ones, and (b) I'd like to learn more about people's alternative "structural" ideas about the modes at the Creative Agenda level before embracing one particular structure. So officially, I remain mildly neutral about that.

Best,
Ron

My position is actually rather simple. I can't think what this extra thing the Dream would gain is in option #2, so the choice seems pretty obviously #1.

As the Dream is adding nothing beyond Exploration, Sim isn't needed in the Creative Agenda later - it's just confusing clutter. It's simpler to say that some people enjoy different levels of commitment to G/N or Exploration (as well as Social Contract, Techniques, or Ephemera).

I know Gordon's got a counter-point to this somewhere in his head.

It seems to me like people are ignoring the obvious:

Within gamism we diminish imaginative elements that do not contribute to the step-on-up. So if it isn't a challenge or a means to overcome a challenge within the shares imagined space, it's colour and not particularly interesting colour at that.

Within narrativism we diminish imaginative elements that do not contribute to the address of premise. If it's not emotionally resonant with some ethical or moral question, and provide in some sense and means of resolving or expanding the premise, it's just colour and not particularly interesting colour at that.

Simulationism has more scope than that. All imaginary elements can be granted weight regardless of whether they fulfil a metagame agenda. We thus have freedom to create without boundries. The "a world of endless possibilities where the only boundries are your own imagination" is coming out of this facet of simulationism. Gamism and narrativism are boundries on the imaginative process.

To subvert Ron's jazz analogy - narrativism is jazz on a pre-exisiting theme - where the rule is 'everyone is playing variations on this melody'. Simulationism offers something freer than that where themes can appear but disappear just as quickly, because the theme isn't the priority, invention or exploration is the point. To chart new territories.

Which is why retconning is a feature of a lot of sim play. Play charts out the territory in the freeform wandering wherever we want sense and then litarary form is given to it in retrospect. Kind of like the difference between the travel and the travelogue. Travel is experience and the travelogue shapes it. Sim gaming is the experience and retconning shapes it.

Functional simulationism is not avoidance of premise/challenge it's freedom from premise/challenge.

It may be that simulationism is harder to do well than gamism or narrativism because of the lack of defining boundries. So people fall back on spatchcocked groups, railroaded plots and cliche instead on inventions. But when it comes together simulationism allows you to invent things beyond your preconceptions and boundries, things you would never have thought up sat in a room by yourself, and that have an intensity and freshness because of that.

Ian Charvill wrote: It seems to me like people are ignoring the obvious:

Within gamism we diminish imaginative elements that do not contribute to the step-on-up. So if it isn't a challenge or a means to overcome a challenge within the shares imagined space, it's colour and not particularly interesting colour at that.

Within narrativism we diminish imaginative elements that do not contribute to the address of premise. If it's not emotionally resonant with some ethical or moral question, and provide in some sense and means of resolving or expanding the premise, it's just colour and not particularly interesting colour at that.

Simulationism has more scope than that. All imaginary elements can be granted weight regardless of whether they fulfil a metagame agenda. We thus have freedom to create without boundries. The "a world of endless possibilities where the only boundries are your own imagination" is coming out of this facet of simulationism. Gamism and narrativism are boundries on the imaginative process.

Ian Charvill wrote: It seems to me like people are ignoring the obvious:

...

Within narrativism we diminish imaginative elements that do not contribute to the address of premise. If it's not emotionally resonant with some ethical or moral question, and provide in some sense and means of resolving or expanding the premise, it's just colour and not particularly interesting colour at that.

Ian Charvill wrote: Simulationism has more scope than that.

Well, for me the acid test tends to be along the lines of, given a choice, does the group want to find out more about the situation, or change it? Most of the time, G & N players want to change it, S players want to deepen it...

Horrendously over simplified, but there you go.

Mark, sure that campaign is screwed, but so is a Nar campaign where no-one can agree to co-operate on the method of address of permise (it ends up looking like really bad soap opera, bad brechtian drama or the issues of Chris Claremont X-Men all your cool friends mocked...), or Gam session where no-one knows whether your pitting yourself against the GM, the other players, the scenario designer, the games designer, or merely a cruel and malicious god for making you this way. Agreement on CA doesn't guarantee harmony, sadly.

Jack... wait for Ron's essay, but it really is that easy in essence. The problem is making sim/gam designed systems feed the ever hungry mouth that is story now...

As for limits of any agenda... I think we only perceive them as limited when we're getting a Jones for something that another CA supports. The play in each is infinitely variable, but not all encompassing (or else, there'd only be one CA...)

Ian Charvill wrote: Functional simulationism is not avoidance of premise/challenge it's freedom from premise/challenge.

Ian Charvill wrote: To subvert Ron's jazz analogy - narrativism is jazz on a pre-exisiting theme - where the rule is 'everyone is playing variations on this melody'. Simulationism offers something freer than that where themes can appear but disappear just as quickly, because the theme isn't the priority, invention or exploration is the point. To chart new territories.

Which is why retconning is a feature of a lot of sim play. Play charts out the territory in the freeform wandering wherever we want sense and then litarary form is given to it in retrospect.

"When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story" he said. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right -- as right as you can, anyway -- it belongs to anyone who wants to read it.

Ron Edwards wrote: I also call attention to the possible cognitive/emotional side in the Gamism and (upcoming) Narrativist essays, which I think will be better articulated on my part when both those essays may be read side by side. In a nutshell, I am interested in the observation that dedicated (rather than supportive) Simulationist priorities apparently must be trained rather severely in newcomers to role-playing, whereas Narrativist and Gamist priorities seem to arrive full-blown.

cruciel wrote: As we established in the parent thread, adding theme to a pure dream game doesn't diminish the dream (excluding our maginal weird case). So, should you choose to actually do anything with this freedom, then you're no longer in Sim turf (because maintaining the dream doesn't exclude G/N). Once a conflict comes along (something requiring the player to decide how to proceed), the player has got to decide how he'll address the conflict. 'As the character would', with true integrity, will lead him down the path of Nar, as the character's beliefs begin to shape events.

John Kim wrote:

cruciel wrote: As we established in the parent thread, adding theme to a pure dream game doesn't diminish the dream (excluding our marginal weird case). So, should you choose to actually do anything with this freedom, then you're no longer in Sim turf (because maintaining the dream doesn't exclude G/N). Once a conflict comes along (something requiring the player to decide how to proceed), the player has got to decide how he'll address the conflict. 'As the character would', with true integrity, will lead him down the path of Nar, as the character's beliefs begin to shape events.

OK, you say that you can imagine it, but I have no mental picture then about what it would mean to be "Simulationist" from what you say. What would play look like?

M.J. Young wrote: We could debate for hours whether Gettysburg would have gone otherwise had commanders acted differently; but below that debate (which we could settle in quite gamist fashion by setting it up and playing it out) there's another issue: how much differently from the way they acted could they have acted, and still been true to who they were? We could play that wargame with all of us playing all sides, deciding together what each unit is most likely to do, given its nature, the character of its commander, the information they have available, and the changes we've made. We could really be playing it to find out how it would have come out with just this one change, with no gamist nor narrativist impulses involved. What would Pickett have done were it not for that order? What would Lee have done had he better intelligence on the Union artillery? We can play this just to see how it comes out, with no desires to influence that on the part of any player. You could play such a game all by yourself. Maybe I'm crazy; I sometimes play Bridge all by myself, because I'm curious about how the game works and don't have three other players. I'm playing to learn about the game. I could play to learn about Gettysburg or Normandy, with no desire to bring anything to this event other than what would actually have happened.

cruciel wrote: This is taken from the Beeg Horseshoe Theory Revisited.

M.J. Young wrote: We could debate for hours whether Gettysburg would have gone otherwise had commanders acted differently; but below that debate (which we could settle in quite gamist fashion by setting it up and playing it out) there's another issue: how much differently from the way they acted could they have acted, and still been true to who they were?
...
We can play this just to see how it comes out, with no desires to influence that on the part of any player.

The emphasis is mine, because I think it's the key statement - that scientific detachment from what happens in play. As a theoretical play style (or a not so theoretical one in this case), I can imagine it. It seems horribly marginal too me, but that's not necessarily a reason to discount it. However, I see nothing added; I just see Exploration absent of any other goal.

John Kim wrote: I guess my quibble would be with your phrase "scientific detachment", which implies a lack of emotion and/or interest. I think anyone who has worked with scientists knows that they are often quite passionate about their work. They fervently want to discover. They are not simply puttering about with tests for the sake of puttering about. There is scientific discipline to stick to certain methods, but there is no lack of emotion or interest.

John Kim wrote: I would say the same thing about Simulationism. With the Water-Uphill World campaign, we tossed four children into a bizarre fantasy world and looked at the results of what happened. I was interested by it, but I didn't know what would happen and I very deliberately did not want to influence it by how I thought the plot should go. It could have gone in many different directions. In retrospect, I think the most interesting part was about how the kids grew up in the face of pressure -- particularly Noriko's accepting of responsibility. But I think it would be fair to call this "Story-By-Accident" (as opposed to Ralph's "Story on Purpose") or "Story Later" (as opposed to Ron's "Story Now"). There were many things which did not have to do with this idea, because we didn't know that was important until after it happened.

cruciel wrote: No desire to actively effect the plot, not realizing the importance of an event as it happens, or just seeing what happens all fall under the 'you can play Nar even if you don't mean to' clause.

Obviously analyzing an instance of play based off a single sentence is certain to be flawed, but... (the bolded portion)

The fact that a key interest was how a character grew up when pressured denotes addressing a theme - one of personal growth by facing adversity, a coming of age sort of theme. (Assuming this was at some level interesting while you were playing it.) As I see it, Interest equals prioritize/address/author/whatever-you-wanna-call-it.

John Kim wrote: What you say suggests that rgfa Simulationism and GNS Narrativism are actually compatible. rgfa Sim is deliberate following of internal cause, and when things of interest to the players occur in the results those are considered the theme which was addressed (i.e. GNS Nar). However, I think Ron would quite disagree, in particular based on discussion in my Simulationism Revisited thread. In other words, just being interested in an instance of play doesn't make it a theme in Story Now.

That's what I get for taking Saturday's off, particularly when I finish early on Friday.

Someone messaged me and asked if I could throw any light on this mess; I seem to have emerged as one of the defenders of simulationism, and I hope I can help here.

The first note that I've made to myself pertains to John's suggestion that Narrativism fully contains The Dream plus something else, and that this leads to the conflict that either Narrativism doesn't fully contain the dream or Simulationism has nothing that Narrativism lacks. This overlooks the problem inherent in opportunity costs--an essential economics concept that states, as I'm sure you know, that each individual has only so much capital, and any investment he makes in X represents capital he cannot invest in Y. Thus the dream in narrativism (and in gamism, for that matter) is, or can be, fully consistent and adequately realized, but part of the focus has been shifted to the narrativist (or gamist) priority, and to the degree that we have moved the focus to this, we have reduced our ability to address the Dream itself.

The first time I read Perelandra, back in college, I was starting to get bored with the long descriptions of the oceans, the floating islands, the color of the skies, the total darkness at night, the strange plants--I had never had trouble sticking with a C. S. Lewis book before, and frankly if this had been the first I'd ever read (and it wasn't a course assignment) I don't know that I'd have finished it, or picked up another. I went back to it a couple years ago (twenty some years later) and was absolutely enraptured by the scene he painted, a world I am so dying to convert to game play, because it is so utterly different and fascinating.

My complaint in college was that nothing was happening in those chapters; it was all setting and color. There was no theme, and there was no action. Yet looking at it now, I can see that Lewis could have given us an adequate idea of Perelandra in a few pages, and gotten on with the moral story he was going to tell, and moved more quickly through it to the action sequence that forges the climax--but it would have meant that we had a much poorer image of that world.

So, too, in role play, to the degree that we are focusing our attention on premise or challenge, we are taking it off the dream; and in so doing, we are saying that the dream is less important, need not be so rich or detailed.

John might object that his game prep is very detailed; but that doesn't make the play simulationist. Yes, all that detail is there, behind the story--but do the players really attend to it? That feels to me more like he is prepared to reveal whatever they discover, but that there may be reams of material they will never know. If premise and challenge don't get in the way, they will know more of the dream. If they turn to premise or challenge, the part of the dream they know will remain coherent, but it will be less rich. It has to be, because time is finite and information transmission rates are finite, and any of these resources that are diverted to gamist or narrativist priorities are diverted from the dream.

The Beeg Horseshoe theory is very tempting; but it seriously misses this. It assumes that simulationist players are actively trying to avoid gamist or narrativist tendencies, when in fact simulationist players are actively trying to explore the dream, and are so overwhelmed by it that, at least for the moment, they aren't interested in gamist or narrativist priorities. Some people will give up sex for food, and some will give up food for sex, and some will give up both for money. Most recognize that it's difficult to get all three at once, and to the degree that they pursue one they're ignoring the other two.

I agree with John that the desire to discover can be very emotional; I agree with Jason that it can be very detached. Both are simulationist, in the same way that a friendly game of chess and an international competition between grand masters are both gamist.

One of the problems with most examples of simulationism is that many simulationist games drift; a corresponding problem is that most narrativist and gamist games look like simulationism when they aren't addressing their agendae directly. I think that the Water Uphill game is an example of one of these, but I'm not sure which one. At one time, I thought it was simulationism transitioning to narrativism when situation was introduced; then I came to think (as I am now inclined) that it was completely narrativist, a setting in which were situations geared to trigger play addressing premise, but that when those situations were resolved and there was no immediate premise to address (or no immediate way to address a premise) the system fell back to exploration. I'll say more on this in a moment, I think, because I want to address Jason's seven points, and one of them lands here.

I don't know that Threefold preference is particularly relevant to Creative Agenda. Simulationism appears to be most focused on in-game consistency and causality, which can be CA simulationist in a simulationist setup, but it can be narrativist in a front-loaded narrativist setting, and it can be gamist in a front-loaded gamist setting. To use a gamist illustration, if I, the referee, tell you that you, the player character playing yourself, wash up on the shore of a tropical island and are taken in by the host, who then at dinner a few days later announces that to repay him for his kindness in helping you survive, you are going to serve as prey for his hunting expedition starting tomorrow morning and lasting three days, it is perfectly in-game for you to decide you're going to beat this guy at his own game--and absolutely gamist play, if you as player take it as a personal test of your ability. Although Creative Agenda is built on the foundation that was Threefold, John has made it fairly clear that Threefold is about techniques directly; CA is about priorities, with techniques impacting only to the degree that they support priorities.

O.K., time to deal with Jason's seven points.

Jason wrote: 1) Theme does not damage the dream, in fact the dream supports theme.

Then Jason wrote: 2) GNS looks at an instance of play.
Isn't anything to argue here.

He next wrote: 3) Creative agendae are exclusive priorities.
GNS priorities are each exclusive, because they can conflict. Again, not much to argue - this is how GNS works.

Then he wrote: 4) Hybrid Sim play exists.

He next wrote: 5) Sim's metagame agenda is verisimilitude.

He then wrote: 6) Sim exists as a creative agenda.
This is in conflict with #5. As agenda are exclusive, this leaves Sim without a metagame agenda it can call its own, and hence nothing to define it. This is supported by #3, and the conclusion in #4.

Finally, he wrote: 7) Causality can create Nar play.
The unintentional thing we keep getting hung up on - supported by #1 which states that you needn't prioritize theme over the dream for the dream to hold. #5 is also in conflict with this, but as this seems to be a sticky spot I'm simply making a note about it. This isn't necessary to the point.

A brief note - I don't have time to contribute fully at the moment, which I regret, it's an important thread I feel - I heartily concur with M.J's points. Especially his latching onto opportunity cost as an important issue, I'm kicking myself for not employing that one.

Also a note on usage: agenda is already a plural - of agendum. Agendae has no foundation at all and is not good usage. I would venture to say that aganda is typically treated as singular in modern English, and so there is no great sin in pluralising it though: just use the standard English -s addition for plurals though: hence agendas.

Carry on.

Hi M.J.,

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Best,
Ron

M. J. Young wrote: (Re: C. S. Lewis' Perelandra)

My complaint in college was that nothing was happening in those chapters; it was all setting and color. There was no theme, and there was no action. Yet looking at it now, I can see that Lewis could have given us an adequate idea of Perelandra in a few pages, and gotten on with the moral story he was going to tell, and moved more quickly through it to the action sequence that forges the climax--but it would have meant that we had a much poorer image of that world.

So, too, in role play, to the degree that we are focusing our attention on premise or challenge, we are taking it off the dream; and in so doing, we are saying that the dream is less important, need not be so rich or detailed.

M. J. Young wrote: John might object that his game prep is very detailed; but that doesn't make the play simulationist. Yes, all that detail is there, behind the story--but do the players really attend to it? That feels to me more like he is prepared to reveal whatever they discover, but that there may be reams of material they will never know. If premise and challenge don't get in the way, they will know more of the dream. If they turn to premise or challenge, the part of the dream they know will remain coherent, but it will be less rich.

As always, M.J.'s full of insight. Rather than address the whole post, I'm just going to hit the points of disagreement. I'm also not going to bother plugging my counter-points back into the original seven points, at least not until there is a consensus of some sort - that'd be a big waste of time. Seems a shame to hack up such a nice post into smaller, non-contiguous chunks, but...

*****

Up at the beginning of his post M.J. Young wrote: The first note that I've made to myself pertains to John's suggestion that Narrativism fully contains The Dream plus something else, and that this leads to the conflict that either Narrativism doesn't fully contain the dream or Simulationism has nothing that Narrativism lacks. This overlooks the problem inherent in opportunity costs--an essential economics concept that states, as I'm sure you know, that each individual has only so much capital, and any investment he makes in X represents capital he cannot invest in Y. Thus the dream in narrativism (and in gamism, for that matter) is, or can be, fully consistent and adequately realized, but part of the focus has been shifted to the narrativist (or gamist) priority, and to the degree that we have moved the focus to this, we have reduced our ability to address the Dream itself.

Then way down at the bottom he wrote: One problem that it has taken me a while to realize is that setting, system, color, situation, and character are so thoroughly intertwined that each of them must be considered part of each of them. That's important, because we otherwise get confused into thinking that this "system" is simulationist, and it doesn't matter what we do with it because it will continue to encourage simulationist play. The thing is, as soon as you place premise-ridden characters or premise-rich settings or premise-loaded situations into this, they become part of the system, and suddenly the system contains the address of premise as part of itself. If the players pursue that, you've got narrativist play arising entirely from within the structure of the game; if they ignore it (as my Orc Rising player did), and go for exploring non-premise aspects of the structure, you've got simulationism, demonstrated by a prioritization of discovery of whatever there is to discover.

Somewhere in page two I wrote: My theme is 'What is freedom worth?" And blammo! I've got character, setting, and situation. I've got a setting where oppression exists, a character suffering from oppression, and a chance to break free from it (or whatever, examples only). Not everything I need to play, but once I'm playing System and Color show up. It goes in reverse: One slave (Character), One society with slavery (Setting), a chance to run for it (Situation), and I've got myself the theme.

So I've got theme, but not Nar yet. What I need to do to get Nar is address this in play, which occurs if I remain committed to he explored elements that comprise the theme. 'Cause the explored elements and theme are the same thing, we just put 'em in different little boxes for analysis. Remain consistent with the explored elements that initially created the theme, and you continue to address the theme. Continuing to address the theme means remaining committed to the explored elements it was spawned from (in one fashion or another).

M.J. Young, in response to point 6 wrote: Since I've shown that #5 is incorrect, #6 no longer conflicts with it. The sim creative agenda is the pursuit of knowledge; that is its metagame. It is most easily pursued in a system that is internally consistent. #3 does support it, even as qualified above; I've rejected #4 because I don't believe that hybrid play exists (even if hybrid design does), so it is irrelevant.

M.J. Young wrote:

Jason wrote: 5) Sim's metagame agenda is verisimilitude.

You're right to question this one, because it's not really true. Sim's metagame agenda is discovery*; verisimilitude is a necessary factor for discovery to have meaning.

...

*Discovery might not be the perfect word, since arguably the exploration of premise is a road to discovery, and even gamist play can be about discovery. I thought of enlightenment, but that seems to have even more narrativist implications. Simulationism is about knowledge and understanding. Discovery seems the best word for this.

M.J. Young wrote: I hope this helps.

Hello,

Jason, I have a couple of responses.

1. I have no objection whatsoever to your phrasing of the "structure of the explored elements" over the "add-on to the explored elements." I consider that a phrasing that suits your personal sensations and lacking any particular necess

Or to put it differently, I am making no specific claims about the relationship between Creative Agenda and Exploration that you're disputing. My only claim is that one cannot "do" Exploration, in the sense of actually role-playing together, without having a Creative Agenda at all.

2. You ask whether Simulationist hybrid play exists.

I'm going to dispute, first and foremost, that I am the ultimate authority for this or any related issue. I am only the authority over what I'm trying to say, not over How Things Really Are.

Therefore the question I'm going to answer is, "Ron, what do you think about Simulationist hybrid play?" With full acknowledgment that someone else's take on it, M.J.'s or whoever's, may well be a better take.

Here's an excerpt from the upcoming Narrativist essay, which is just an ace away from being done as we speak. To orient you, this follows just after a discussion of the N-S "blend," which I claim is merely Narrativist play and not a shred of Simulationist at all. Then,

... what about subordinate hybrids? Simulationist play may be a functional underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented moments. Such scenes or details can take on an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up pleasing neither enough to attract them further.

Historically, this approach has been poorly implemented in role-playing texts, which swing into Simulationist phrasing extremely easily, for the reasons I describe in Simulationism: the Right to Dream. You cannot get emergent Narrativist play specifically through putting more and more effort into perfecting the Simulationism, no matter how "genre-faithful" or "character-faithful" it may be. I consider most efforts in this direction to become reasonably successful High-Concept Simulationism with a strong slant toward Situation, mainly useful for enjoyable pastiche but not particularly for Narrativist play at all.

The key issue is System. Narrativist play is best understood as a powerful integration and feedback between character creation and the reward system, however they may work, in that the former is merely the first step of the latter in terms of addressing Premise. Whereas the usual effect in High-Concept Simulationist play is to "fix" player-characters appropriately into the Situation for purposes of affirming the story-as-conceived, especially in terms of varying effectiveness at specific task-categories, and reward systems in these games are usually diminished and delayed to the point of absence. Games which stumbled over this issue include Fading Suns and Legend of the Five Rings, both of which require extensive Drifting to achieve even halting Narrativist play despite considerable thematic content.

The more successful primarily-Narrativist, secondarily-Simulationist hybrid designs include Obsidian, to some extent, possibly Continuum if I'm reading it right, and The Riddle of Steel as the current shining light; I also call attention to Robots & Rapiers, currently in development.

[note: TROS play does tend to include distinct Drift toward either less-S-detours or throw-out-N-stuff versions, as you can see in the relevant forum.]

How about the reverse? Can Narrativist play underlie and reinforce a primarily Simulationist approach? I consider this to be a very interesting question, because it's not like Gamism in this regard at all. What happens when Premise is addressed sporadically, or develops so slowly that the majority of play is like those hardware-pages? Whether this is "slow Narrativism" or "S-N-S" or just plain dysfunctional play is a matter of specific instances, I think. But I do want to stress that it's not the "N/S blend" as commonly construed, which is to say, both priorities firing as equal pals.

Ron Edwards wrote: Or to put it differently, I am making no specific claims about the relationship between Creative Agenda and Exploration that you're disputing. My only claim is that one cannot "do" Exploration, in the sense of actually role-playing together, without having a Creative Agenda at all.

I'm going to dispute, first and foremost, that I am the ultimate authority for this or any related issue. I am only the authority over what I'm trying to say, not over How Things Really Are.

[snip]

Hmm.. MJ's post gives food for thought. Some table scraps:

I am reminded on the thread Sim Essay: reading the book is the start of play?
What brings this up are some of the examples brought up such as Perelandra, Moby Dick, etc. I confess to enjoying the fiction of Michael Crichton who also tends to provide passages of info-dumping. And I do enjoy these nuggets. I have notice two types of these portions of what Jared Sorensen might call "info-dumping"

• Passages which contain information about the setting, either daily life sort of things or an otherwise (hopefully) interesting bit. This bit of information has little or anything to do with the plot at large. The item described is not encountered by the protagonist and the influence of this item effects the character by six degrees of separation. As a minor example, in the Hobbit, Tolkien notes that the King of Eagles eventually becomes the King of all bird, but Bilbo never sees him again. That is, that the King of Eagles eventually gets a promotion is neither here nor there for the story of Bilbo Baggin tagging along with a group of Dwarves, but Tolkien notes it anyway.• The second type is very much like type 1. but it is necessary to the plot. Ideally, any such exposition will be woven into the story itself so it's not a large block of text that can be readily identified as such. However, sometimes this is unavoidable if the factoid is a little involved. To keep the audience from being confused about what's going on, it maybe simple be necessary. Example: in Crichton's Great Train Robbery, the characters needed to get copies of the keys to the safe. One of the possessors of one said key came down with a venerial disease. For the reader to understand the events, Crichton had to explain a myth in Victorian society that having intercourse with a virgin would either relief the symptoms of, or cure venerial disease. Without this passage, then the reason why the protagonist setting the fellow up with a virgin makes no sense.*



But what I'm thinking about here is that in either case, the passage has a similar flavor as an encyclopedia entry, regardless of writing style. Which is pretty much like the setting section or worldbook of an RPG.

So, if reading the book can be part of Sim play. What goes on at the table?

I suppose that it is a matter of what the players want, right?


* Interesting aside. I had met one person who had read Critchon's Great Train Robbery. He dismissed it as being mostly about how men in Victorian England would have sex with virgins to cure venerial diseases. That's like saying the movie Silence of the Lambs is about a guy who tucks his penis between his legs so that he looks female.

Hello,

John, can you provide some focus for this thread?

Best,
Ron

OK, so the initial impetus for this thread was the essential contradiction: if Narrativism supports "The Dream" just as well as Simulationism, then what is Simulationism for? If the former tenet is true, then it questions what "The Dream" is and whether Simulationism is really pursuing it.

Now, MJ's post suggested that there was "opportunity cost" for Narrativism, and that by spending opportunities on theme instead of world, Simulationism will have more deeply realized elements like setting, character, and so forth -- even if Narrativism maintains "adequate" consistency. Jack seems to be suggesting similar -- that Simulationism will have long exposition-like blocks of detail which may not have anything to do with the story.

I am not very satisfied with this. It makes Sim-vs-Nar into a sliding scale of how much detail you would like. However, outside of RPGs many stories have much more detail than is necessary to understand the plot (like Perelandra, Moby Dick, and Lord of the Rings.)

So I don't have an answer for my initial contradiction, but I am not satisfied with the one presented.

------

SIDE NOTE: It occurs to me that there is a bias against detail from starting with Egri's work on Dramatic Writing. Playwriting or screenwriting is different than novels, because the playwright skips a lot of detail. That detail is added in later by the actors, costumers, production designers, and so forth who take the screenplay and generate lots of detail (sets, movement, expressions, etc.) to surround the raw lines. Thus, for dramatic writing Egri suggests cutting out detail that doesn't directly address premise. But I've now read his later book on Creative Writing, and interestingly he makes much less about premise and more about character in that.

John

I wouldn't think of it as extra detail, I'd think of it as extra stuff.

It's like the excision of Tom Bombadil and the Barrow Wights from the film of The Fellowship of the Ring. They're entire episodes that we've had to miss because we were spending the limited amount of screen time on something else. Without a central driving thematic concern, you're free to have side episodes like this with the only criterion being is everyone having fun?

It's not that we're free to spend half-an-hour having a conversation with Mr Cuttymeat the butcher - rather than the ten minute premise driven one - it's that were free to have ten minute conversations with Mr Cuttymeat, Mr Doughneeder and Mr Waxshaper. I mean, you could have the half hour conversation, it's whatever floats your boat.

Hi,

John touched on an idea I've been nudging forward for a while. Ian just illustrated it again.

It's this: Ron, through Egri, built narrativism off the bones of dramatic narrative (play, movies). A lot of people use "stories" as examples of what they're talking about, and use examples from movies/plays and novels interchangebly. I don't think this can be done.

Though all these forms of storytelling produce stories, they are wildly different in their concerns as *forms*. There's a lot more breathing space in a novel, and thus a lot more room to "dream."

I suspect that when people talk about "long campaigns, you know, like Lord o the Rings," there's a dirrect connection between the sim desire of the campaign with a desire to be back in that feeling of wallowing in a novel. Where as narrativism, as Ron's defined it, and a lot of the techniques support it, are drawn from the traditions of dramatic narrative.

(Covering my ass time (but I think it's true): when folks with Nar priorities use books or prose fiction as examples, check out what they're doing: almost invariably they're picking the parts a screenwriter would most likely keep as an adaptation to the screen.)

So, I think there's a difference in terms of *what kinds* of details one can afford to have in different media. I'd say "the dream" is much more novelistic in the details. The Novel, for example, as it was once known, explored society -- and as much of the different social strata as the author wished. Which meant it could go all over the place. Details about doilies were often the norm. Dramatic narrative needs to keep moving and needs to be much more tightly focused. The details are fewer.

I type all this to offer to everyone using books and movies and plays as examples of the "dream" that's inherent in all stories: be aware that the nature of the dream varies on the nature of the media. And, in closing, that these different expectations of different media affect what sorts of details and "dream" different players will bring to the table.

Christopher

PS

(For illustrations of this conflict of how much "dream" is dream enough (or not enough), check out the Aint It Cool News Lord of the Ring Wars. There you will find the people who wanted their "deam" experience of reading the trilogy to be recreated on the screen, and the people who really wanted the "dream" experience a great movie can offer, argue it out over how the movies failed (because they weren't the dream of the book) or succeeded (because they are a movie lover's dream.)

I'll remind Christopher of his valuable insights in this thread about Film vs. Novel as N-model, and suggest that issue go in a new thread if we want to discuss it.

Another post about the two-point controversy in just a bit . . .

Gordon

OK, here's a long post - I think it is all/mostly focused on John's issue with "what is it that Sim does that Nar does not?" I think that *is* more than just the opportunity cost/addition-by-subtraction others have alluded to, and I think the Nar essay may help show that, but until then - Let me start by building a bit on MJ's excellent (to my eye) analysis:

MJ Young wrote: John might object that his game prep is very detailed; but that doesn't make the play simulationist. Yes, all that detail is there, behind the story--but do the players really attend to it?

MJ Young wrote: The thing is, as soon as you place premise-ridden characters or premise-rich settings or premise-loaded situations into this, they become part of the system, and suddenly the system contains the address of premise as part of itself. If the players pursue that, you've got narrativist play arising entirely from within the structure of the game; if they ignore it (as my Orc Rising player did), and go for exploring non-premise aspects of the structure, you've got simulationism, demonstrated by a prioritization of discovery of whatever there is to discover.

Hi there,

for GNS, what we see when Exploration is Squared is very different from what we see when it serves G or N.

Hi Gordon,

Thanks for reminding me about that thread. I had forgotten about it.

That said, I think the thread you referenced addressed a different issue than what I was trying to bring up here. The other thread was about issues of scale, breadth and length of the tale.

What I was tryingt to get at here was that no matter how long the story, different people play for different reasons, and those reasons often have to do a lot to do with their expectations. And often, we bring to RPGs expectations of different kinds of stories we've read or seen. And often people say, "But this story..." or "that story..." missing the fact the different stories where built with completley different tools, techniques and priorities. Thus, when John reference certain novels showing what he means by options for the Dream, I think its prudent to point out that differnt forms of fiction use details to different ends.

In short, what the writer does with the details, and how they serve the story. Or not. Sometimes, just building a big complicated world that all fits together really cool is cool... And you just need a few characters to wander through it, so the reader has a POV to experience the cool world and delight in its complexity.

Of course, what a writer's priorities are will affect which techniques he uses, and produce different kinds of results. Thus, there are different forms of story telling. Thus there are different styles of RPG play.

Which is a long way of saying, your post was great. I didn't go into all the different techniques between playwrighting, screen writing and writing novels... And I shouldn't have. But your thread illustrated how the specific differences in techniques for people of different taste and expectations prioritize different forms of play and produce different results.

And that I thought was great.

Take care,

Christopher

Christopher,

That all makes great sense to me - thanks. In particular, I want to emphasize your notion that we take expectations from a novel (or movie, or play, and etc.) and try and map them into our RPG play - I think that "story forms expectations, expectations then brought to RPG" model creates a separation between a story-work and a RPG that is very, very important, without destroying the clearly real association between the two.

For purposes of this thread, I find that important because those expectation issues seem to me mostly independant of GNS issues - sometimes overlapping a bit, but often not, and never fully equivalent. So - cool stuff, IMO,

Gordon

"....mostly independent of GNS issues..."

Absolutely.

Something I'm always aware of, but, I realize, not always clear about in my posts. I assume anology and influence between *all* media is constant, valuable and natural. I also assume everyone knows I'm not assuming a one to one ratio when identifying anologies between media.

The fact that people look for a one to one ratio when I refence between media always catches me off guard. I could say, for example, I know my screenwriting is getting better because of my study of drawing and efforts to clearly commnicate human anatomy on a two dimensional surface to a viewer. But am I saying a drawing of a human being is a screenplay? No.

My concerns in these anologies are *always* about the process, technique, priority and disciplines involved with the media. It's all the underground wiring, nuts and bolts stuff --- not what on the surface. I think the more people playing RPGs know about the nuts and bolts of different kinds of media they love, the nuts and bolts of different kinds of stories they love, they'll have a better chance to find anologous nuts and bolts to apply to their sessions. And I think that applies to people's expectation of "detail" elements and exploration of setting (whether that be the detailed environment of John Varley's "Titan" books or the bare bones sketch of a setting in the movie "Aliens".)

So, sorry if it looked like I was trying to yank the thread earlier. Not my intent at all.

Take care,
Christopher

I apologize for missing yesterday; I had a headache when I awoke, and it only worsened during the day, so I gave up somewhere in the midst of my e-mail and took the rest of the day off. (Does that make it a mental health day?) I do hope there isn't a "thread closed" tag at the end of all this, because there's so much here that I've had to start composing responses only part way through reading what's written.

Thank you, Ian, for calling attention to the agendum/agenda usage.

I also apologize that in my very long post, in using a book as an illustration I failed to mention that I was invoking it by analogy. I do not think that Perelandra or any other novel is simulationist; I was distinguishing those sections as being like simulationism. To expand this, and simultaneously respond to something later in the thread that I've misplaced for the moment:

• If you were to play a game based on Perelandra in which the focus was entirely on the conflict between the player character and the villain Weston, and the outcome of the debate and the battle, that would be gamist.• If you were to play a game based on Perelandra in which the focus was entirely on the moral issues of choice in an unfallen world, that would be narrativist (even if as part of that a fight broke out between the player character and Weston).• If you were to play a game based on Perelandra from which you removed Weston entirely, such that all that remained was exploring the vast strange unfallen world of floating islands (with or without the presence of the lady), that would be simulationist.


Lewis is of course primarily interested in his theme; these chapters are wonderfully expository of the alien world in which he is setting his story, but they are mostly setting and color--and I'm going to come back to that.

Jason wrote: Suffice it to say that we start with the assumption that Sim has something for a meta-game agenda. My question is, is this something unique to Sim? Or is it present in Nar, even if it is 'quieter'? If so, I think the inconsistencies that spring from point five remain.

Thus in regard to what John wrote: I am not very satisfied with this. It makes Sim-vs-Nar into a sliding scale of how much detail you would like. However, outside of RPGs many stories have much more detail than is necessary to understand the plot (like Perelandra, Moby Dick, and Lord of the Rings.)

Gordon C. Landis wrote: To take an example (and yes examples are always a bit problematic) from John's Vinland game, and think about it from an S-standpoint: the insight about the size and type of living space due to the change in availability of timber. How wonderful, say (in various ways) the people playing! This means that visitors from Iceland are going to feel uncomfortable here. Oh, their temper's may flare - things may get interesting in Vinland soon. That detail might even have been introduced to support a thematic issue - the conflict of tradition with progress, say. But in an S-Priority it drives the evolution of imagined events, rejoicing in the creation of more and more imagined space, simply because it is a joyous thing to do - including the issues around tradition and progress, as neat explorative elements.

Gordon C. Landis wrote: As far as I can tell, the people playing in the S-approach can still "learn" something about the issue itself. I'm just saying that they aren't looking at it as such while they play. By not seeing it as an issue itself, but rather "just" an element of the imagined world, they gain a purity of exploration that going Nar would of necessity lose. Any "learn about the issue" payoff must explicitly be outside play. Or if they do see it as such, and sacrifice that purity, they are doing Nar.

Gordon C. Landis wrote: To which I supose you could say that we need to learn about rejecting G and N for them to be absent. Or UNlearn our compulsion to persue them. Chicken and the egg problem perhaps. But stretching metaphors (applying GNS to the "root" action of imagining rather than applied imagining in an RPG), I'd guess that the Dream (in the simple sense of idle daydreaming) happens at a very early age, and it is only later that we learn to use it towards a goal. Maybe if it wasn't useful for anything, it would not persist - but in our earliest experiences with the impulse behind the Dream, there was no priority, only the Dream itself. As we learn, we become increasingly aware of priority, perhaps even realizing that we are incapable of operating without a priority - so we make the purity of the Dream a priority in and of itself.

We've got good posts from Gordon and M.J. pointing to what I think is the same answer:

Gordon wrote: First, though, what do we call "it"? The Dream, Exploration? MJ throws in discovery, and I'll add creation, or invention - all possible descriptions. All terms for a thing that G and N can be said to use in pursuit of their goals. But only S sees it (under whatever name) in itself as the point of play (note - not "with no interest or emotion," or at least not as a requirement). The relationship that S has with "it" is different than the relationship that G or N has with it - that's what defines S. For some people, the experience of Exploration Squared (the Right to Dream) is profoundly different than the experience of Exploration (the Dream) on its' own - and for GNS, what we see when Exploration is Squared is very different from what we see when it serves G or N.

[snip]

M.J. Young wrote: The first is that prioritization can show itself in discovery. A gamist may be involved in the sort of discovery about the world that seems to suggest simulationism, but while he is so involved he is using that (at some level) to prepare himself for the challenges ahead. Similarly, a narrativist may be picking up a great deal of information about setting and situation through exploration, but this information ultimately serves the address of premise, and does not exist for its own sake.

[snip]

John Kim wrote: 2) Simulationism gains something other than the Dream. So both Narrativism and Simulationism fully maintain the integrity of the Dream, but Simulationism gains a different quality.

Hmm. I sympathise with that description of the significance of combat as given; I'm not inclined to see it as theme at all. That is, the sanitisation of violence that occurs in most media gets on my nerves as a fact quite independant of any RPG. Thus, when I engage in RPG, my own act of creation, that "error" is one I consciously "correct".

Now, perhaps it is true that that for this specific player, there was a theme they were in fact addressing and the Sim rationale was just that, a rationale. But its so closs to one of my own bugbears, I wonder.

Therefore I disagree that sim is unconcerned with detail with and verismilitiude, but instead use "becuase its there" in a different way. I think that all games are a sort of self-teaching behaviour; the importance then of coherence and realism is to make that learning experience valuable, something that I can generalise into my own, real, life. If the rules are teaching me Wrong Things, then my behaviours and responses are being trained to those Wrong Things through the reward/feedback structure. Potentially, this can be worse than useless, it could be dangerous. All of ewhich is to say that I think there is a valid defence of Exploration for its own sake as a play-motivating goal.

Jason

I think it might be interesting to turn this one around. If narrativism is about making a statement - then why not just have the ethics discussion? Why go to all the trouble of engaging with all of the imagined elements if all you're interested in doing is making a statement.

By roleplaying you're getting 'making a statement' plus X - however you define X. Standard answer as per creative agenda is exploration. If the statements you want to make are insufficient to hold your interests by themselves then you must really like some effect that the X has. You could express simulatinism merely as liking the effect of X more than you like the 'making a statement'.

In order to have imaginative play by human beings that doesn't make a statement you would have to have narrativist play - because only by constant attention to premise could you ensure that theme did not emerge. Human beings have no choice in a shared imaginative arena but to draw from their experiences - and what experiences do they have if not human ones - and what can they do but express those in ways that are comprehensible to other human beings - otherwise, what else is being shared.

Only narrativist play could reliably exclude theme - simulationist and gamist play will, by necessity, be lousy with it. Hence John's comment:

What I find strange is that many posters think that pure imagination (i.e. "idle daydreams") lacks issues or meaning -- that issues have to be forced into our imaginings by System, because otherwise it would be "just dreams". To me, dreams are overflowing with issues, and the more raw and unquestioned the dream -- the more meaning it has.

cruciel wrote: She says, "No. I thought you'd say that. I wanted to convey the image of what I think a gunfight is. If you get shot you should be hurt, that should mean something, it should seem real." (She keeps expanding on this for a while, talking about realism, detail and her mental image.)

In my head I'm thinking "Wow, that's all just exploration stuff. That's so Sim. Huh... that doesn't make sense. There's no way that's why she did it - she's about as Nar as it gets."

Out of my head I say, "Believe it or not, I'm going to disagree with your opinion about what you want." Insert that, 'this better not be one of your condescending moments' look.

Here I go, "Ok, but why are wounds being serious more interesting?"

She thinks about it and says, "If everytime they get hurt they just shrug it off, or have it healed right away they begin to seem immortal. Then they begin to even act like they are immortal when they should be concerned for their health. It does nothing to express how fragile their lives really are. It waters everything down."

I get all excited and say, "Ah! There it is that's the theme!"
...(brief skip)...
Before I asked "Why?" all we had was exploration.

Why do you play? (What Sim gains in answer to John's option two.)
Nar - To make a statement.
Gam - For the challenge.
Sim - For its own sake.

If I say "Why did you climb that mountain?", and you say "Because it was there.", then I give you an irritated look and say "You didn't answer the damn question". Doing something for its own sake doesn't seem like much of a reason. This is hypocritical behavior on my part because I'll say "knowledge is an end unto itself." I'll have to think on this a bit and decide where I stand, but at the moment I don't see any particular argument that falsifies doing something for its own sake. Hence, the Sim agenda holds.

Heh. This last exchange between Jason and John hits exactly on something I've said for awhile and IMO it boils down to "you're both right".

I'm not a believer of the "there is no intent behind Creative Agendas" theory. In fact, I think that Creative Agendas are primarily about intent. Jason's probeing questions are an attempt to get to the intent...the "why" behind the creative agenda...and I fully agree and believe there is a "why" there at the root of it all.

But I also fully agree with John, that attempting to assertain the "why" is completely fruitless. A person is rarely cognizant of all of the reasons why they do something or all of the nuances of their preferences. People are also capable of prodigious feats of self delusion so even if they think they know the why it isn't necessarily so.

Therefor attempting to use intent or questions designed to elicit why is doomed to failure. Alls you'll wind up getting is a lot of circular talk and very little definitive anything (I think Johns commentary here on asking leading questions is not only telling, but quite common in this sort of thing).

This is why so much effort has been expended to keep intent and why out of diagnosing Agendas. Its completely and utterly futile. I won't agree with the position that some take that it isn't there. But I will agree that there or not it does us no good to look for it.

cruciel wrote: Why do you play? (What Sim gains in answer to John's option two.)
Nar - To make a statement.
Gam - For the challenge.
Sim - For its own sake.

Hey Blankshield, welcome to the Forge!

You seem to be fairly solidly on beam, except for where you're conflating exploration in support of Narrativism/Gamism with Simulationism. For all the electrons we spill over it here, for large portions of most game sessions no conflict over creative agenda would occur, because actions would be congruent for all three agendas. It's all exploration. Which is where we came in on the thread - the question of sim is exploration plus what?

As far as Concept goes, it's a fair enough term. When I think of Sim, I think of Invention, the power to make stuff up (TM). When Ron thinks of Sim he thinks of the Dream. When you think of Sim, you think of the Concept. It's all good, I feel. None of these terms really contradict each other, there just different takes on the same broad idea.

(and the sheer breadth of each of the three agendas, in terms of play styles, is something that took me a while to catch hold of)

When I think out loud it doesn't have all those nice qualifying statements so often needed for online communication.

First off, the direction I've taken with the previous post is contradictory, mostly, to what I've been saying in this and the parent thread. I don't know if I agree with it, but Gordon and M.J. seem to have provided an answer of 'yes' to option two and I'm seeing where that takes me.

contracycle wrote: mm. I sympathise with that description of the significance of combat as given; I'm not inclined to see it as theme at all. That is, the sanitisation of violence that occurs in most media gets on my nerves as a fact quite independant of any RPG. Thus, when I engage in RPG, my own act of creation, that "error" is one I consciously "correct".

Now, perhaps it is true that that for this specific player, there was a theme they were in fact addressing and the Sim rationale was just that, a rationale. But its so closs to one of my own bugbears, I wonder.

John Kim wrote: OK, I don't know if this applies to you, but I have been pretty annoyed by similar conversations in the past. It seems to me that you had an answer which you were looking for (theme), and when the first answer didn't fit you poked and prodded until you got something which was vaguely like a theme -- then you quickly declare that you have found the real answer, and that the first answer was mistaken self-deception.

I don't think that's right. You can always poke and prod at any story or RPG play, and you can come up with an explanation -- i.e. a theme. But if you poke and prod some more (or if someone else pokes and prods), you might find a totally different explanation -- a whole different theme. In a good story, you will find many different (and contradictory) explanations for what it means. But the story isn't any of those explanations. The story is itself, and it is more than any single moral metaphor which you tease out of it.

John Kim wrote: Well, here's my two cents: four-word answers for "why" are never true. Human motivation comes from a million different factors. Ask me why I like chocolate, or why I like hiking, or why I like singing -- and I can't give you a short sentence which conveys my whole reasons. For one thing, I don't know my whole reasons.

Ian wrote: By roleplaying you're getting 'making a statement' plus X - however you define X. Standard answer as per creative agenda is exploration. If the statements you want to make are insufficient to hold your interests by themselves then you must really like some effect that the X has. You could express simulatinism merely as liking the effect of X more than you like the 'making a statement'.

Ralph wrote: I'm not a believer of the "there is no intent behind Creative Agendas" theory. In fact, I think that Creative Agendas are primarily about intent. Jason's probeing questions are an attempt to get to the intent...the "why" behind the creative agenda...and I fully agree and believe there is a "why" there at the root of it all.

But I also fully agree with John, that attempting to assertain the "why" is completely fruitless. A person is rarely cognizant of all of the reasons why they do something or all of the nuances of their preferences. People are also capable of prodigious feats of self delusion so even if they think they know the why it isn't necessarily so.

Hmm, this may just be a rephrase of what Ralph said, but let me try anyway - for GNS purposes, "why" is not important. CA does not ask "why" you play, it asks where does play demonstrate your focus to be.

What matters is what actually happened. Did (per the e.g.) Tara's portrayal of an injured PC contribute to play that reveled in the Dream? Did it help in imagining what happens in a gunfight as fully as possible, such that the group as a whole got a buzz off the thrill (in whatever form) of it all? Or did it contribute to Story Now in a way that made everyone feel comfortable with the "shape" of the imagined situation, such that they could - and DID - communicate something about the premise effectively?

(A Gamist explanation could also fit here, of course - either directly to Step On Up or through the Explorative elements)

Sometimes what play demonstrates will line-up with a statement about why, and sometimes it won't. If they don't line-up, that MIGHT be a sign that there's a GNS problem in play - but not neccessarily, the whole why thing can get really complicated and it may be that the mis-match is just personal taste/interpretation on basically satisfying play. For Tara in the example, if what she wanted was to emphasize issues of mortality and provide herself and others an opportunity to address some sort of premise about how to live life when confronted by the ultimate unavoidability of death . . . sounds like it didn't work.

As an instance of play, it sounds like the subway shootout wasn't enough to draw a strong GNS conclusion - that's OK. It's also OK if an instance does show a strong Sim conclusion even though the folks involved like Nar. People may be OK with that for any number of reasons. But when over time they feel the need for that like of Nar to match up with play, staying in a Sim-instance will NOT be fun.

Moving back to what John said - it doesn't look to me like your details of what was "really" going on with Kjartan and room-size change anything. It looks like a group reveling in the creation/exploration/discovery as a thing itself. The only caution I'd add is that the rgfa-metagame issue isn't really the GNS-Sim issue. Reveling in the Dream *can* happen with what folks call metagame, and N or S can be quite metagame-averse, though perhaps not with the purity that some rgfa-Simfolk look for. As I think I and others have said in other threads, "Metagame" is an independant variable closely associated with personal taste - though if your taste is particularly extreme, you might find it hard to do anything but Sim in GNS terms.

And "meaning" in raw and unquestioned dream - also a matter of taste. A Sim- or Game-prioritizing approach can care or not care about meaning being present for examination after play. GNS just says that if during play you focus on dealing with that meaning, you are doing Nar.

Oh, and I'll just add - great discussion, all. Thanks,

Gordon

Hi Blankshield -

Welcome to the Forge! I'm gonna address a couple of things that seem a bit "off" (from a GNS-understanding) in your post - but overall, you seem to have a good grasp of a lot of the issues. Just didn't want you to think that your whole post was wacky beaucse I pick on the pieces that look like they need clarifying . . .

First of all - "just" because it's fun isn't going to cut it as an explanation for anything - one of Ron's earlier essays makes that pretty clear. Second, "System" is one of the five explored elements that are part of the Dream - any impression that the Dream is equivalent to "realism" or living in the imagined world without metagame is NOT valid, as I just tried to make clear with John. Exploration is EVERYTHING we do when we imagine together.

So . . . I'd change your last entry (caveats about four-word summaries and GNS-is-about-what-we-see taken as given, I hope) to "Sim: Because it's fun to Dream, as a thing itself." The "thing itself" part (or something like it, such as changing the entries from "because it's fun to . . ." to "the priority of play is to . . . ") is needed because everyone thinks the Dream is fun. It's only some people (a good number of 'em - Sim's not meant to be a "lesser-child" in GNS) that want it to be all about the Dream.

Gordon

cruciel wrote:

Ian wrote: By roleplaying you're getting 'making a statement' plus X - however you define X. Standard answer as per creative agenda is exploration. If the statements you want to make are insufficient to hold your interests by themselves then you must really like some effect that the X has. You could express simulatinism merely as liking the effect of X more than you like the 'making a statement'.

Where this goes doesn't seem to disagree with you. If Sim is 'The Right to Dream', then the Creative Agenda is 'The Right'. Nar and Gam have an equal right to the dream, but Sim takes the right 'just because'. It's the answer to "Why do you like X?"

Gordon,

I think we cross-posted.

Gordon C. Landis wrote: Hmm, this may just be a rephrase of what Ralph said, but let me try anyway - for GNS purposes, "why" is not important. CA does not ask "why" you play, it asks where does play demonstrate your focus to be.

Gorndon wrote: What matters is what actually happened. Did (per the e.g.) Tara's portrayal of an injured PC contribute to play that reveled in the Dream? Did it help in imagining what happens in a gunfight as fully as possible, such that the group as a whole got a buzz off the thrill (in whatever form) of it all? Or did it contribute to Story Now in a way that made everyone feel comfortable with the "shape" of the imagined situation, such that they could - and DID - communicate something about the premise effectively?

[snip]

Gordon C. Landis wrote:

First of all - "just" because it's fun isn't going to cut it as an explanation for anything - one of Ron's earlier essays makes that pretty clear. Second, "System" is one of the five explored elements that are part of the Dream - any impression that the Dream is equivalent to "realism" or living in the imagined world without metagame is NOT valid, as I just tried to make clear with John. Exploration is EVERYTHING we do when we imagine together.

So . . . I'd change your last entry (caveats about four-word summaries and GNS-is-about-what-we-see taken as given, I hope) to "Sim: Because it's fun to Dream, as a thing itself." The "thing itself" part (or something like it, such as changing the entries from "because it's fun to . . ." to "the priority of play is to . . . ") is needed because everyone thinks the Dream is fun. It's only some people (a good number of 'em - Sim's not meant to be a "lesser-child" in GNS) that want it to be all about the Dream

Two games may be equally Simulationist even if one concerns coping with childhood trauma and the other concerns blasting villains with lightning bolts. What makes them Simulationist is the strict adherence to in-game (i.e. pre-established) cause for the outcomes that occur during play.

Jason,

Yup, we cross posted. Your why/intent conversation clears up some things - but in looking at what happened in play, "digging up intent" isn't going to be any help, IMO. To paraphrase something I said elsewhere, "I meant to adress premise but instead I prioritized the dream" is meaningless in GNS terms. What happened - did you address premise or prioritize the dream? Figure that out. ("Neither/None" and/or "I don't know" based on the bits of play under consideration are valid answers, BTW)

Maybe the word "successfully" is tripping us up a bit - I do NOT take it to mean "well done" or "entirely satisfying." But I DO take it to mean that premise addressing happened - and yeah, actually addressing premise is a prerequisite for prioritizing the address of premise. Does that make sense/help?

If Tara "had fun" because she got to address theme as some kind of internal mental state, that is NOT evidence that Nar was going on in play. Evidence that Nar was going on in play would be that the players SAW that theme, grooved on it, and built from it.

GNS doesn't look at what you are telling yourself is fun - it looks at what the players are demonstrating is fun.

And to get back to Sim - what we see when Sim is happening is that the players are grooving directly on the creation/discovery of stuff in the imagined space, without connecting it to any particular challenge or meaning that stuff might represent. Everyone can - in fact, to some degree as dictated by taste they MUST - groove on the imagined stuff, but only in Sim can you get the pure, undiluted Dream. It leads somewhere where there is no challenge, or too much challenge? That's OK, we aren't worried about that. It leads to a place devoid of meaning, or where a particular meaning shines forth with undeniable brilliance? That's also OK, we understand such things happen. We're here to follow the Dream where ever it may lead, guided only by our tastes about the Dream. G and N "stuff" is there in play - challenge and meaning are parts of the human mind, you can't avoid them, just like they can't avoid the Dream - but G and N stuff are in not the priority that we're there for, when we play Sim.

Hope that brings it back on-topic - we may be done with this thread by agreeing that the answer is 2, Sim does have something special identifying it, and we can take figuring out what that is elsewhere.

Gordon

Gordon C. Landis wrote: Everyone can - in fact, to some degree as dictated by taste they MUST - groove on the imagined stuff, but only in Sim can you get the pure, undiluted Dream.
...
It leads to a place devoid of meaning, or where a particular meaning shines forth with undeniable brilliance? That's also OK, we understand such things happen. We're here to follow the Dream where ever it may lead, guided only by our tastes about the Dream. G and N "stuff" is there in play - challenge and meaning are parts of the human mind, you can't avoid them, just like they can't avoid the Dream - but G and N stuff are in not the priority that we're there for, when we play Sim.

Hi James (we do like havin' those real names here at the Forge - thanks!),

The five Explored elements are Character, Setting, Situation, System, and Color. I think Ron's use of "in-game" and the common use of "no metagame" are very different things. Now that I think about it, I bet that trips up many people and leads to a number of problems, and I don't know if we've ever adequately adressed that issue. I'll think on that one a bit . . .

As far as why fun isn't enough - well, the key question Ron asks to get the three Creative Agenda's of G, N and S is "what makes fun?" (that's in this article , I think) My last posts have talked a lot about what I think makes fun in Sim, so I won't repeat that. But let's take your list of reasons someone might give for roleplaying; "inside story", "explore situations," "be Conan." Those are answers to "what makes fun?" And with no other info (like, the addition that what is neat about Conan is he's always struggling with who to trust and how to do right by his friends, and I - the player - want to make those decisions too) they are Sim answers, because they say that the priority of play for those folks is the Dream.

And you're right, that's what I mean by "all about" - that's where the big charge, the big payoff, the REAL reason for playing lives. Read "all about the Dream" as equivalent to "prioritizes the Dream."

Which I think means we're in agreement - yay! Provided that broadening of "in the game" makes sense to you.

Gordon

Ian Charvill wrote: For you, when you play, what is it you like about gaming in addition to making the statement? Why do you, personally, game rather than having an ethical discussion with your gaming group?

The thing is, your "just because" sim example is recursive. We could apply the same model to narrativists: why do you game? to make a statement; why do you make a statement? just because. What does that tell us about sim that it isn't telling us about narrativism. Same question; same answer - but of course the question needs pointing at the creative agenda in each case.

[snip]

Gordon C. Landis wrote: Maybe the word "successfully" is tripping us up a bit - I do NOT take it to mean "well done" or "entirely satisfying." But I DO take it to mean that premise addressing happened - and yeah, actually addressing premise is a prerequisite for prioritizing the address of premise. Does that make sense/help?

If Tara "had fun" because she got to address theme as some kind of internal mental state, that is NOT evidence that Nar was going on in play. Evidence that Nar was going on in play would be that the players SAW that theme, grooved on it, and built from it.

GNS doesn't look at what you are telling yourself is fun - it looks at what the players are demonstrating is fun.

Hi John,

OK, I don't think we're actually in disagreement here. My point was meant to be that for GNS-Sim, the absence (yeah, given the human mind, true absence just isn't going to happen - I got overly poetic there) or presence of meaning doesn't matter. Which means you CAN have meaning if you want. For YOU, meaning matters - and you can get that in GNS-Sim (all uses of meaning here being in the broadest sense - Story, NOT Story Now). But under GNS-Sim, you don't have to care about meaning. Not needed does not equal not possible.

That movie analogy - well, analogies can be weak and all, but let me try this. I assume you're comparing "theme in movie" to Nar and "theme afterwards in dicussion" to Sim? I'd flip it around. Since Nar is about directly doing meaning, the theme-in-discusion sounds more Nar to me, and theme-in-movie seems more Sim, in that the theme is just there to be enjoyed rather than you creating it. Now, even the most heavy-handed theme needs you to in a sense "create" it by apprehending it as you watch - the analogy breaks down a bit - but I thought the contrast might still be useful . . .

Gordon

cruciel wrote: I think I take your meaning here. I don't think I agree. If you cannot address the premise all on your own, that is to say be prioritizing Nar without the group (successful or no), then GNS cannot diagnosis priority conflicts (because then GNS goals only apply to functional play). If you are trying to address a theme, and are blocked from doing it, that creates dysfunction. Failure at Nar doesn't mean you didn't prioritize Nar.

Which I think means we're in agreement - yay! Provided that broadening of "in the game" makes sense to you.

Hey James

"The Dream" is referencing prioritization of exploration. Within Ron's model the venn diagram runs

[Social Contract[Exploration[Creative Agenda[Techniques[Ephemera]]]]]

Which is to say techniques and ephemera - i.e. most of system - actually resides within exploration. Which is also to say the system is in some sense the underlying physics of the dream.

"Because it's fun" works on a general level but I think there's a standing assumption at the Forge that understanding why it's fun would allow you to have fun more reliably - both from a play and a design standpoint.

Jason

cruciel wrote:
I thought about the question a while, I ate dinner, I watched some tube, I went to work to start a software deployment, and then I thought some more. I didn't get anywhere. The question of why I choose to game instead of just talk about the issues directly came down to the question: why do people like stories, why do people imagine? (Why the interest in Exploration in the first place?)

OK, after a good night's rest:

In saying (basically) that there's no Nar unless Nar is happening (duh), I was trying to focus attention on what we can actually see as play occurs rather than what's in the players head. So if we can see that they are trying to address premise . . . yes, we can say that they are trying to make Nar happen. Whether it actually "counts" as fulfilling Nar play will vary as a matter of taste across individuals - maybe even within the group. Appolgies for implying anything stronger than that.

And yeah, "because it's fun" is certainly enough to know if you're having, well, fun. And if that's all you're worried about, there is probably nothing in the hundreds/thousands of GNS posts here that really matters - you're playing, you're having fun, and that is enough.

But if you aren't having fun, or if you're trying to get more fun, or you're trying to really analyze what's going on, THEN you need more than just "it's fun" - you need to know what makes fun.

Hope that's a little more clear,

Gordon

Ian Charvill wrote: Following on from my reply to James, I don't think 'because it's fun' or 'just because' or 'for it's own sake' are bad answers. I just think better answers might allow us to play better games.

Simulationism is expressed by enhancing one or more of the listed elements in Set 1 above; in other words, Simulationism heightens and focuses Exploration as the priority of play. The players may be greatly concerned with the internal logic and experiential consistency of that Exploration.

I am soooo frustrated; I have been blessed with an abundance of production work, but that has meant 14+ hours a day average and I don't have time to post in these wonderful threads! This thread has been seriously rocking and I want so badly to participate! Everyone here has been doing a bang up job, it's been a real pleasure to read, even if I can't come out to play.

Aure Entaluva,

Silmenume

Hello,

Actually, I think this thread is humpbacked and aggravating. If it were my Minion, I would thrash it soundly.

In fact, it's time for everyone to pick his or her favorite issue from this thread, and to start a new highly focused daughter thread with it.

Best,
Ron

Yesssssssssssss masssssssssster! Thraaaaaaaaashing and creaaaaaaating daaaaaaaaaaaaaughter minioooooooons!

Just out of curiosity, what do you see as some of the divergent topics creating this Frankenstein's monster?

Aure Entaluva,

Silmenume

Closed. This thread is closed. No one post anything else to it.

Jay, for new thread topics, use your own judgment.

Best,
Ron