MMORPGs; totally alien from P&PRPGs??
soundmasterj:
Yeah ok, with Rons friendly reminder about how this is actual play, Iīd like to clarify that the two links I posted lead to a very story-like writeup of a huge "war" in the sandbox MMORPG Eve-Online. The griefers beat the role-players in this case and it reads like fiction. It also shows how the metagame is needed for actually making wars about something; there is no story when itīs just watching at pixels explode, but when some griefers set up thousands of players against each other for some actual reason, story emerges.
Itīs... Itīs hard do understand. But interesting in the context of Big Model / GNS / play theory (ah, and game theory, too).
I would like to talk about how I never cared for WoW becuase players wouldnīt really influence the story, but Iīm not sure thatīs what youīre going for ShallowThoughts.
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
I am talking about your actual play. When you make a statement about, for instance, what the SIS is or how it's produced, or when you draw a conclusion based on how the MMORPG thing is or isn't like it, then no one will be able to understand unless you describe what (again for instance) an SIS is for you, in your experience, with all the trimmings - system, events in the fiction, real people doing what, the works. Long experience shows that without that information, these conversations are hopeless.
I've found that if a person's point is understood and appreciated, and if he or she sees that this is happening, then the ideas can be subjected to extraordinary critique. Let's do that and have no more talk about who understood whom to have said what in such-and-such a way.
"Shallow Thoughts," it's not required, but it would be extremely helpful if we knew your first name. Soundmasterj's name is Jona.
Best, Ron
jag:
I'm glad this topic was brought up. Although i haven't played the newer generation MMORPGs, i spent an embarrassingly large portion of my teenage years playing and administering a MUD, and that has left indelible marks on my P&P RPG design process. I think MUDs/etc actually provide a very interesting lens with which to view P&P RPGs, and that we can learn much from them.
However, I'm unclear as to what the actual questions are. I'm going to paraphrase what i think might be the questions and what might not be the questions, and ShallowThoughts -- as the originator and thus director of the thread -- please tell me if I have it right or not.
First, the "not question". I don't think anyone is really disagreeing on the SIS as applied to P&P and MUDs, they are just disagreeing on terminology. In the P&P world, the SIS is a set of facts that all participants agree on. In order for play to continue functionally, these need to include the resolutions to conflicts, and other quantitative matters. They never include all possible colour, since my mental image of the ogre will be somewhat different than yours. A given game might fall anywhere in between these two extremes, and is negotiated (implicitly or explicitly) amongst the small group of participants involved. In the MUD world, the computer decides on all quantitative matters (with possible input from admins/gods), and gives you a basis for much of the colour that you can accept or reject as you wish. If you all agree, I'd like to declare this as a Common Starting Position, and not confuse the other important issues by arguing whether the first S in SIS applies to the MUD world.
My understanding of the question is as follows: HCDS is a classification scheme designed for players in MUDs. The Big Model is a theory of P&P RPGs, which includes in it a classification scheme of Creative Agendas. Creative Agendas are a purpose of play coupled with coherent reinforcements of that purpose, and after some years of wrangling it was felt that there were three distinct CAs, Gamism, Simulationism, and Narrativism. Coherent modes of P&P play can be described in terms GNS; can HCDS be taken from the MUD world and also be applied to P&P play? If so, are these two categorizations equivalent, in the sense that any situation described in one framework can be described in the other?
If this is the question, then i have things to say and examples to give. If this isn't the question, could you succinctly write what is the question?
Thanks,
James
Daniel B:
Hi there,
name's Dan.
Quote from: jag on November 15, 2008, 10:37:38 AM
Coherent modes of P&P play can be described in terms GNS; can HCDS be taken from the MUD world and also be applied to P&P play? If so, are these two categorizations equivalent, in the sense that any situation described in one framework can be described in the other?
Actually James, your whole post is spot on and I'd love to hear your thoughts on these questions.
Jona, on SIS's.. I think we may be disagreeing because you seem to require that "bi-directional" sharing in your definition of the term SIS, i.e. I think you're saying that it's not sharing unless both participants share with each other. However, consider this: where did Spiderman come from? You didn't invent him, certainly. You don't need friends over to think "Gee, I sure hope he doesn't die and gets Mary Jane in the end". The writer or director of the movie is sharing the imaginary characters he invented with you. Granted, you can't share anything with the writer/director (except your money, possibly), but that doesn't stop it from being a shared, imaginary space.
As for games like WoW, again, the game-authors are sharing their imagination with you, unidirectionally. They decided that if an ogre reaches 0 HP, it dies in the context of the game. You don't need anyone else to agree that the ogre you just killed is in fact dead ... because someone at Blizzard already made that decision for you. The computer is there to enforce these SIS rules.
Asking where's the place for Narrativism in an MMORPG is, again, effectively trying to reduce HCDS into GNS terms, but trying to cram one terminology into the other doesn't help much. The only reason I drew parallels between GNS and HCDS in the first place was to try and demonstrate that GNS is a bit lacking in describing the total set of player goals. You see, while I can describe GNS in terms of HCDS, not all player activities that can be described within HCDS are capable of being described in GNS. Furthermore, actions have a clear placement on the HCDS axes, but cannot easily be placed within any one GNS category and often fit into two or all three.
An actual play example; one member of the group (with whom I do not play anymore) got his thrills by taking goods off my dead-but-could-come-back-soon corpse. (He stole my precious ring of invisibility, and our cleric could raise me!! GRR!) This is a case of mismatched expectations of gameplay, but in particular, "Killer" (or "Club") behaviour of the HCDS. You might squeeze this type of behaviour into gamism, possibly simulationism, or maybe even with a stretch of the imagination, narrativism, but the fit is ambiguous (and for me, the ambiguity is uncomfortable .. why make up categories if they don't categorize?)
A related example, this same friend regularly ignored the requests of another buddy of mine to allow for social encounters by rushing into combat. (I remember one case in particular, when orcs were sitting around a campfire just talking and eating rabbit. The DM was a bit pissed off too, because he had thought we would try and discover their motives first, and learn they were on the good side.) More to the point, this person seemed to actively enjoy rushing into combat precisely because it pissed off my other buddy. This sort of behaviour could be labelled as gamism, but I don't believe this label gets to the heart of the motivation of the player.
Ta,
Dan aka Shallow Thoughts
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
Here's some GNS talk: Spider-Man doesn't have anything to do with the theory-topic here. In the earlier thread, I specified shared imagined, not imaginary space. By "imagined," I mean that fictional imagery and events are being actively produced, not merely received, and by "shared," I mean that they are occurring as communication. It's not enough to imagine, one must verbalize it, and that verbalization must be received and importantly acknowledged (reinforced) as such. That's the medium of role-playing (as discussed here).
People watching a movie together are not involved in an SIS. People who've read the same comic are not involved in an SIS. Even one person reading a story to another isn't an SIS. Only people actively producing imagined material, describing it, and using what they hear from one another to produce and describe more, create the circumstances of the hobby we're talking about. (I'll acknowledge that "type" and "read" could be substituted for on-line play, although to me it's like eating an apple through a paper bag.) Your interpretation of the term is not matching what I'm talking about in my essays or the body of theory formed here; you're describing fiction of any kind, whereas that term was invented to describe a unique medium for fiction. Jona's got it exactly right.
(As a side point, this is not to mean that anyone can't call boffer LARP or MMORPG "role-playing" if they want to. Of course they can; "role-playing" is a legacy term with no definition. But the actual thing being so labeled is a different thing, in terms of raw substance.)
You're also committing the extremely common error of thinking that the concept of Creative Agenda (the three terms) is somehow supposed to produce an entire taxonomy of play and players, all by itself. It's not. I may be wrong, but it is possible that you have read "System Does Matter," but not the other essays. If that's the case, then I recommend the first two pages of the Provisional Glossary, which includes seven terms and a diagram - the only material at the Forge which was written to be introductory, actually. I think you'll see that the behaviors you're describing fall quite nicely into various slots of what's called the Big Model, of which Creative Agenda is an important, but certainly not the only part.
That's also why there's no point in identifying all those things in the MMORPG article that aren't Creative Agenda. Of course they aren't; they're other things, also part of play, and it's no big deal.
Best, Ron
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