Social Mandate: Did you remember to bring your guitar?
contracycle:
I agree that by adding a win/loss condition to an activity, you signify and signboard the importance of that activity. This may be useful if it is not entirely clear to the practitioners which activities they should be concentrating on.
Callan S.:
Can't remember specific examples, but I've played cards or board games, and have reminded my opponent of a really obvious option they have upon using a card or such, but they forgot. That's because the game itself wasn't about remembering that really obvious option (it's so obvious, it can't be some memory test). This of course gets in the way of my winning - but if I didn't say anything, it would change the game, into one very similar but with this 'memorise the option' part. The important thing - I didn't set out to win that derivitive game. It's better to lose the game you set out to win, than to win a different game entirely. That stops the game mutating. And in terms of playing well, people play better when it's possible to lose. Not because their obliged to, but out of a natural desire.
Anyway, I'm begining to feel like I'm explaining there is more to an imaginary character than just how they appear. And that his actions shouldn't just be changed in the interests of a better story/a 'real' story. Here I'm saying there is more to the task of making dinner (if I put winning and losing in it) and that shouldn't be ignored in the interests of a better challenge/a 'real' challenge. I'm having to assert this just so I can then move on to the useful outcomes I refered to earlier. Perhaps its a dead end suggestion or perhaps this is gamer culture - any non gamer would go "So I can get five bucks, hey? Nice!", I'm fairly certain.
Bastoche: Yeah, it kind of would be, but it'd also be subordinated to nar or sim, whatever the games really about. It's like driving a car so you can get some place you really like. There are driving tests for cars - you have to get your learners, then do some time with a teacher driver, then to a P plate test (well, I'm describing the Australian system), then do more practice time until you can move on to a full capacity driver. Anyway, you can fail at any of these tests. That makes them important to pass. But you only got the car to get to the cool place you like, so the tests aren't as important as that place is.
Can't resist a bit of dark humour - yeah, it's like earning your psychologists degree. You have to earn that. Practice psychology without that qualification and you might cause some brain damage. Hur hur, end of dark humour.
Gareth: Yep, that's the useful features I see as well. :)
Bastoche:
Well I can at least think of a counter example.
Let's pick up a team sports game like hockey. In gaming terms, a hockey game certainly is a "gamist" game. There's rules to "win" and rules to "lose". Whichever team scores the most goals win. There are some other rules added to make the players abide to a certain gaming ideal and/or behavior especially where physical contacts are involved (and to restrain injury; that's no fun) and so on.
Let's assume now a bunch of players wants to play hockey not for "scoring goal's sake" but rather for "hitting the puck's sake". You could have 3 people, a goalie and 2 attackers and all they do is hit the puck and try to score the goalie. Nothing more, nothing less. It's fun and nothing is at stakes and as long as that game fits the three players' idea of "fun", they acheive the "playing a fun game" part without any winning/losing involved.
Or think of any such sports where the two teams just don't count the points. Of course, you could imagine some players who plays half assed because there's no stakes; no point in playing "well". But the idea is that playing the game is the reward itself so they play well because of that irregardless to the possibilities to "win" or "lose" (except some weight haha).
Callan S.:
How many times have they decided to hit the puck?
If I sit down to say, play the card game 'lunch money', and I happen to play three games of it, the three games aren't one activity just because they happened one after the other. Nor is each hit of the puck part of some activity. Each hit is its own individual game. A games size is defined by your intent/goals, and how far those reach. In your example their goals don't go any further than hitting it once - they haven't planned to hit it a certain number of times, or until a certain number of goals are achieved.
'Course, a lot of gamers are used to roleplay where they roll some dice here, or roll some dice there - but never with any real goal in mind except rolling the dice at that time. But they see the hours spent at it as a single session, even when its nothing of the sort. It's a series of small unassociated games, with some games forced to start from results of others, but not with any overall goal for all the activity. It's like the goalie throwing the puck back from the last goal and the next game of hitting a goal starts from where it lands - it's just hapstance result from the last game played, it's not an indicator of some larger activity.
Playing the game of 'hit the puck' multiple times doesn't add up to anything bigger - you'll only learn whatever is to be learned from hitting a puck.
FredGarber:
In my experience, when playing a heavily Sim/Nar session of a game, I can answer the non-gamer question "Did you Win?" with the answer to the question "Was it successful?"
However, I have an Actual Play counterexample to my own position:
We're playing a home-brewed game of Mage:The Ascension. Our group's creative agenda is reinforcing Sim/Nar play: The GM presents problems, and the way that our players decide to resolve (or screw up) the situation is the goal of play, with smiles, reinforcement, and XP given by both players and GM. The overall Premise of the game, the one which all the problems revolve around, is "With vast amounts of powers, how do your characters choose to use them?"
A former ally (played by a PC) has fallen in with some dodgy philosophy (he has a paradigm of Mages as Jedi, but the character is falling into becoming a Sith Lord) and is attacking us. Some PCs are trying to bring him back to the Good Side of the Force, some are just trying to win the fight. My particular PC is a nature warlock, and trying to put the Sith Lord down for the count. In my character's opinion(*), the debate over whether to save him or kill him is moot: He chose the Dark Side of the Force, he should know that Dark Jedis always die.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of offensive capability. So I execute a complicated magick, which ends up with me channelling another player's electrical magicks into the Sith, and cooking him like a microwave burrito. As his character fell over, I was close enough to try and give him one last chance at redemption: which he didn't take, proclaiming the Sith virtues of strength and force with his last breath.
I had fun. JD (the Sith) had fun. But H (the one whose power did the cooking) was strongly on the "let's talk him down" side, and my character had, effectively, tricked her character into killing. It caused a rift between the characters that lasted until the end of the game. And (to the point), H did not have fun. She felt like I had stolen her ability to interact with the SIS as well as my character stole her lightning powers. I would put this example in the category of a "successful play" situation that is ALSO a "I lost the game" for H.
WWGS LARPing is another play type that strongly states the "no winners, no losers" meme: Whenever that comes up, my friend Aaron is fond of saying "I can win the LARP by making it all about me."
I believe you can have a win/lose situation in any game: Was your character successful? You win. Otherwise, you lost. But did you have fun? That's where there the successful/unsuccessful play comes in.
-Fred
(*)My character's Opinions are probably also MY opinions: There were a lot of outstanding problems for our group, and it's possible that I did not find this particular debate worth of debate, and chose to render the question "Can a Sith Lord be redeemed" moot. It was a pretty immersion-heavy game.
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