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Caveat: This stems from a post by Lisa, here. For the purposes of these threads the moral implications of deceit should be ignored. This is really the only way to reasonably discuss these matters.

Self-deception is a very common phenomena among players. This may originate due to miscommunication, willful ignorance, or as a defensive measure to external valuations on how play should happen (i.e. the one true way). However, the end result is much the same. We arrive at a player, and possibly groups of players, who believe they wish to play in one manner (such as Nar) but who in actuality wish to play in another manner (such as Sim).

The typical response of the Big Model to this behavior is to attempt to correct the personal mis-evaluation that these players want to play in a particular manner. In essence this comes to stating that the therapist (Big Model expert) knows more about how the patient plays, then he or she does. The problem lies in the fact that the benefits the therapist presents all rely on the acceptance of this judgement.

Contrast this with many currently successful games:

D&D is considered incoherently designed because it supports gamist play (especially 3 and 3.5) while claiming to support Sim play. Rather than incoherence this could be construed as matching Sim-faux Gamists, who believe they wish to play Sim, but instead wish to actually play Gamist.

The WoD has a similiar incoherence, with purported Nar play constrasting with actual Sim support. Likewise this matches Nar-faux Simulationist, who, likewise, believe they wish to play Nar, but actually wish to play Sim.

A third example, which departs from CA perspectives is GURPS. In this case GURPS purports to be generic, but actually supports a specific tactical / realism form of play. This supports players who believe they wish to play a certain genre, but actually want realistic "crunchyness" instead.

In each of these cases the incoherence can actually cause a "have your cake, and eat it too" situation. This may help explain the reason why incoherent games are popular, rather than claiming that coherent games have simply been to rare or too unlucky.

Considering this the dynamics of player self-deception are certainly relevant to design. On a more positive note, understanding this self-deception is also necessary to learn to gradually remove it. Rather than using jolting corrections, a gradual coming to terms with self-deception will likely aid many players in learning what they actually want in play.

I hope this is food for thought,

   -Mendel S.

Mendel,
Discussing player perceptions of how a game should be designed or how someone might want to approach roleplaying is, IMO, good and profitable. I think that's the meat of your post. I don't like the way you've set up this discussion though.

I think that for everyone who found the games you listed to be problematic in some way there's at least one other person who found them desirable for exactly the same reason without any self-deception (i.e. the mix of mechanics and setting or mechanics and description of play. D&D doesn't use the term 'Simulationist' in its how-to-play section. People decide for themselves how to interpert those chapters).

I'm also not clear exactly what claim GURPS makes about it's generic-ness but I expect that although SJ Games might concede that they didn't hit all their design goals in terms of infinite scalability they would consider the 'genericity' of GURPS to apply across a reasonably broad range of geners--enough to earn it that title without saying it's deceptive.

Finally: talking about what other people are decieving themselves about seems like bad form to me. I'd find the conversation much less condescending in tone if discussions of precieved self-deception or miss-reporting were kept to real people who actually exist. Even if one's experience is that 'everyone is self-decieving,' unless you are prepared to say 'everyone but me' then it's hard to profitably take that position to analyze anything.

-Marco

Marco,

I'm not saying that people must be self-deceptive to enjoy these games, rather that incoherence in a design can actually prove a benefit.

As far as self-deception is concerned, people have an inherent and very valuable ability to decieve themselves. I certainly don't claim I'm not self-deceptive and I must admit that a claim that someone does not use self-deception should be faced with significant skepticism.

Remember self-deception is not placed in a moral context, it is like saying that people walk or eat food, it is a natural behavior, and I am proposing we examine this behavior in terms of game design.

Using explicit people as examples risks the compartmentalization of self-deception, rather than the consideration of it's full effect. I consider this at least as bad for the discussion as appearing to be condescending. I apologize for this. In such a touchy subject there are rarely any good ways to engage discussion.

  -Mendel S.

Mendel, as far as I am aware, incoherence means exactly one thing: that the game as written supports conflicting modes of play. Because the game is incoherent, you have one of two results: dysfunction or drift.

Dysfunction occurs when different players in the same gaming group are looking at different parts of the rules and trying to play the game they see there, with the result that they struggle for control over the game and accuse each other of playing "wrong", or at least (in a milder form) vy for screen time to do what they think they should be doing.

Drift occurs when the play group agrees which rules to follow and which rules to discard, and so finds a way to play together that works and is based on part of the rules, believing that they are playing "by the book".

One advantage incoherent games have from a publisher's perspective is that players with incompatible agenda will buy the game and then customize it to fit what they want from it. A functional group will then play the game they have designed from the rules, and credit the book with the fun they've had. A dysfunctional group will fight about how to play, and in the end blame each other for not understanding how the game should have been played. Either way, the game comes out with a good reputation, despite the fact that the players actually wrote the game they really played based on a menu selection from conflicting rules recommendations from the publisher. In D&D I think this was inadvertent; World of Darkness seems to have claimed it as a feature.

Thus for example Sorcerer will appeal to narrativist players very strongly, while gamist players will probably complain that their strategic analysis didn't matter and simulationist players will complain that it didn't really model a world to explore. Meanwhile, simulationists will find an interesting base for exploration in World of Darkness, narrativists may find the issues of vampire humanity worth examining, and gamists will build supervillains, each thinking he's doing what the game intended, each happily playing, as long as his gaming group plays the same way.

Does that clarify this?

--M. J. Young

Quote from: Wormwood
D&D is considered incoherently designed because it supports gamist play (especially 3 and 3.5) while claiming to support Sim play. Rather than incoherence this could be construed as matching Sim-faux Gamists, who believe they wish to play Sim, but instead wish to actually play Gamist.
   -Mendel S.

I think I get what you are saying--however, I'm not sure that couching people's aims in terms of CA's and describing games supported-CA as an objective quality is the right approach. Certainly people will find plenty of support for resource-and-chararacter-building strategy in D&D.  However, if one wants a sense of being a paladin riding down orks it does a good job of that too.

I think that how a game relates to a person will depend on how that person wants a CA. I know, for example, from past discussions that it is possible to look at many Nar-supporting games as upholding genre elements. I think the rules alone are the wrong place to look for CA-facilitation: I think you have to have a real player (and thus a real perspective) in addition to the rules before you get CA-facilitation or Incoherence.

I acknowledge that there are, at least, big groups of people who share a perspective on any given game (for instance, that it is Incoherent or faclilates a given CA)--but I think it's also proveable that most games faciliate more than one CA if looked at from a different perspective (i.e. I think I can get very well supported Gamism, Sim, and Nar from MLWM depending on how I approach it).

I think the GURPS example points this out. GURPS "purports to do every genre and every universe" as much as D&D purports to be 'Sim' (well, way moreso: D&D doesn't use the word Sim in the GNS context anywhere, I'm pretty sure. GURPS does use the words "generic" and "universal").

Whether you see GURPS's claims of *genericness* or *universality* as a valid descriptor (i.e. one that succeeds within reasonable limits), as sadly overblown marketing hype that discouraged you after you purchased it, or as some kind of malicious con-artistry will depend on how you read it. I think this POV-based analysis can be applied to GURPS' splash-text as well as to CA-facilitation.

-Marco

I dunno.. I think Wormwood is on to something.

I played V:tM for many years, and enjoyed it immensely, all the while thinking it was a "storytelling" game. I didn't know better, and had I heard the terms without going into their full meanings, I'd have called myself a narrativist.

Now I realize that I primarily enjoy simulationist gaming, and that is my habit. I enjoy telling stories too, and I'd like to increase my narrativist abilities and experience, but at the heart of it, Sim is what I do. The best I can hope for is a game that manages to blend the two in ways that work together without clashing, such as TRoS.

The idea of people deceiving themselves has merit, even if it's offensive. Admitting it is the first step to finding games that do what you want, and gamers who play the way you do; Finding them by design, rather than luck.

Quote from: Wolfen
The idea of people deceiving themselves has merit, even if it's offensive. Admitting it is the first step to finding games that do what you want, and gamers who play the way you do; Finding them by design, rather than luck.

Let me be real clear about what I'm sayin': people may or may not be decieving themselves. If you think you decieved yourself, I think that's a fine thing to bring to the table and talk about. However, if we are talking about "guys" decieving themselves or "sim players" or GURPS-people, or whatever I think that's not productive.

See, yer makin' a mistake right away: Sim play is storytelling. You can call it story-before if you want or story-driven-from-established-theme if you feel like--or you can use whatever language you wish to try to get at what you're trying to convey. The fact that you didn't have a complete handle on the GNS terms does not self-deception make--that's like just about everyone (and it's still bein' discussed).

But to say that Sim players who say they're engaged in "storytellin'" (and use that word, as you do) and using that term to hang your point on (as I think you do) are decieving themselves is flat out wrong.

The only person who you can say for sure was decieving themselves is you, 'cause you're the only person who knows for sure what you meant by storytelling.

-Marco
[ On the denial front: I've seen analogies to bad-gamin' and alcoholics in denial. I think if you're gonna make that analogy I want to know your history with alcoholism 'cause I don't think your local 12-step program would agree that most cases of bad-gamin' funk are even on the same planet with life-destroying addicton. ]

Quote from: Marco
See, yer makin' a mistake right away: Sim play is storytelling.

No it is not.

QuoteYou can call it story-before if you want or story-driven-from-established-theme if you feel like--or you can use whatever language you wish to try to get at what you're trying to convey.

What sim is, is a game with a great attention to internal causality.  It doesn't look like storytelling; it does not sound like storytelling; it ommits or avoids almost all features of storytelling.  In short, it is not storytelling.

Quote from: contracycle

Quote from: Marco
See, yer makin' a mistake right away: Sim play is storytelling.

No it is not.

I think claiming absolute authority over what 'storytelling' cannot mean in an RPG context is a big mistake.

-Marco
[ Edited: to make it simpler. ]

Quote from: Marco
I think claiming absolute authority over what 'storytelling' cannot mean in an RPG context is a big mistake.

Really?  Like claiming the authority to define sim?  As big a mistake as that, you think?

Quote from: contracycle

Quote from: Marco
I think claiming absolute authority over what 'storytelling' cannot mean in an RPG context is a big mistake.

Really?  Like claiming the authority to define sim?  As big a mistake as that, you think?

Well, let's look.

I make an assertion about 'Sim' and you can go and look in the Sim essay and the glossary and the threads ... ask Ron ... etc.

See "GNS Simulationism" isn't a real word. It doesn't exist outside The Forge. It was coined here and if we argue it's definition there is a body of authorative text that we can examine to see which of us is more convincing.

Now let's do storytelling. Hmm? Well, who do we ask? Us guys here? I think that's a small sample size. Let's go ask RPG.net what they think "Storytelling in an RPG context means"--there's like ten thousand of them or something.

But that's still not enough--there are people who've discussed storytelling in an RPG context who are dead. The phenomena has been around for a long time. Where's the authoratative body of work--who coined the term? What's the common usage?

That's not even getting into looking at the term story as defined here. Go back and look at the Retroactive Story thread. It seems pretty clear that if players are making decisions during play that put thematic elements into the transcript then under our specific, exacting, and non-universal definition of story that 'storytelling' is a reasonable fit for that activity.

So, you know, is it the same kind of mistake? I think that's one of those questions you have to answer for yourself.

-Marco

Quote from: Marco
That's not even getting into looking at the term story as defined here. Go back and look at the Retroactive Story thread. It seems pretty clear that if players are making decisions during play that put thematic elements into the transcript then under our specific, exacting, and non-universal definition of story that 'storytelling' is a reasonable fit for that activity.

No, I'm afraid, it does not.  All that was conceded was tha people will use the term "story" innapropriately because of the cachet it carries.  That does not mean the activity is anything like story telling.  In fact, no RPG activity is like story TELLING.

Does it begin "Once upon a time" or "in the beginning" or similar?  Is there a person involved who can be plausibly described as a storyteller?   Is there an audience?  Those are just some common features of story telling as a form of communication, and they are conspicuous by their absence in RPG.

Furthermore, you seem to have decided to completely ignore the very argument advanced in the retroactive story thread and elsewhere that story is wholly innapropriate to sim and makes sim extraordinarily difficult to discuss.  At the very least you could have acknowledged that your assertion was contested.

And it is abundantly clear to me that putting thematic elements into the transcript does not make it a story.  A story is not just a list of thematic elements or some shit that just goes down.  One wonders if you even read that very thread.

Gareth, man--I'm with you: Story-in-Sim is hard to discuss. I think that GNS theory should (and, IMO, profitably does) avoid Story as a distinguishing factor of anything (including Nar).

This was stated in the Retroactive Story thread and I'm not even sure I'd say it was contested: I agree with it. I think that was the conclusion of the thread. But if you start couching Nar in terms of 'Story' then I think you unavoidably do open that can of worms.

This is off topic here, though.

But what isn't is where you say:

Quote
In fact, no RPG activity is like story TELLING.

If that's true (and I think it's reasonable to make that assertion!) then when people like the Wolfen discuss "storytelling games" are they self decieving or are they simply using the closest-fit word that exists in the language?

I think it could be either one--so I'd be careful about hanging too much analysis on someone using that term to describe their game. I wouldn't make bold, prescriptive statements based on someone's use of that term.

I think the term 'storytelling game' is somewhat value-added in the way that "rules light" and "rules heavy" are vague but sometimes useful ways to describe systems. But that's all.

-Marco

Quote from: Marco
If that's true (and I think it's reasonable to make that assertion!) then when people like the Wolfen discuss "storytelling games" are they self decieving or are they simply using the closest-fit word that exists in the language?

I have no idea.  That does not prevent me from proposing what I consider a much more fruitful term: that of myth, or bricolage.  IMO, all usages of story in relation to Sim are counterproductive.

Quote from: WolfenI dunno.. I think Wormwood is on to something.

I played V:tM for many years, and enjoyed it immensely, all the while thinking it was a "storytelling" game. I didn't know better, and had I heard the terms without going into their full meanings, I'd have called myself a narrativist.

I've added emphasis here to Wolfen's quote.  Wolfen -- could you say more about where the self-deception comes in?  You say that if you didn't know what the word meant, you'd have called yourself a narrativist.  But that by itself isn't self-deception, that's just not being familiar with a jargon definition.  i.e. The mistake would have just been in your understanding of the term.  For this to be self-deception, you would have to think that V:tM was "story-telling" when even by your own internal definitions it was not.