Gamism and Narrativism: Mutually Exclusive
Ron Edwards:
Hi Norm,
The social information helps a lot, including the Bif/Mike issue and the Morgan/Jenn issue. The whole thing reminds me very greatly of my college gaming (~1985) and seems to me now to be very fraught. The "group which works" seems to have coalesced around certain specific relationships, including one which might be described as "who the rest of us can all tolerate not enjoying entirely."
At the time, it seems to me as if you equated character effectiveness with competitiveness (or Step On Up more accurately), and perhaps equated "nerfing my character" with "story." That latter may be reaching a little, but even if it is, I can see how this second play account also suits the thread topic nicely.
Correction accepted regarding equipping the knightly character. I misunderstood you.
Color is not all that important to the discussion at the moment, but it is actually quite important - even key - to play. [Sorcerer] Cascadiapunk post-mortem illustrates a pretty good application of my current thinking. For this thread, well, I dunno where you want to go with the Color discussion. As a very basic distinction:
System: using dice to represent (or better as part of representing) a physical attack on another character, rolling a certain value, applying agreed-upon effects of that value to the target character's values, integrating the result with imagined events (i.e. effects).
Color: someone saying, "Your edge cleaves right down to his nose!", you shouting "Gunch!" for a sound effect, someone else saying, "Stopped him in his tracks!" Or any kind of description above and beyond the most literal translation of the System effects alone.
About reward systems, well, they're a lot like Color. They happen at the entirely emotional, social, and imaginative level of human action. Numbers, points, tokens, and specific rules applications are all ways of enjoying them. Such ways are fine things for game design, and woefully under-utilized in historical RPG design, but they are not, themselves, the reward or the Color in action.
Regarding The Exchange, that was Levi's project at the time, and I have no idea whether he pursued it. It's too bad if he didn't; the ideas were quite excellent.
Best, Ron
Ayyavazi:
So, I've read some of the threads you posted (2 of the four I think), and I have some good ideas firing around in my head.
First, as for color and reward, and how it all relates to GNS, I think what I am hearing is that how you play, and what rewards you get, all wrapped in the fiction packaging (which can reinforce/reward play type) determines your GNS. Therefore, even if there are lots of crunchy tactical encounters that are very risky, you can still be playing narrativist because all of your color and rewards are Narrativist based. Likewise, you could play in reverse, just happening to address premise, but actually stepping on up. Perhaps this is why the modes are so easily confused. Essentially, each mode can happen within the other, or so it seems. Because of this appearance of one mode within another, we assume they are both active, when really one is and one isn't.
However, if that is true, then why can't both be active at the same time after all? What if a reward system (both social and mechanical) could be set up in such a way that both Step On Up and Narrativism were rewarded? (Notice I avoid simulationism entirely. I thought I understood it, but I don't). So, in my actual play, there was ample social reward for my character actions. The fiction was reinforced, and the story progressed as our group addressed premise. By social reward I mean the "fun" which is to say all of the smiles, cries of, "That was awesome!" and such. But mechanically, I couldn't say how we were rewarded. We received Experience in big clumps, not immediately after each fight. And there was at least one instance where the GM explained that just because we chose to fight an optional encounter that was hard did not mean we would get experience. We got treasure, but experience was reserved only for fights which moved the story forward. For Mike, this meant that he got experience for fighting the right fights, and letting us do our thing. So he did. There was no bonus EXP to speak of, because all of the mechanical rewards were Narrativist, but Mike probably felt like it was gamist. Fights did produce social reward for stepping on up.
But what if the game had played out differently? Lets say there were mechanical rewards of EXP for every fight. In addition, lets say additional EXP is given for fights that move the story forward and address premise. This would still promote Narrativism, even if Social reward were equal for both, simply because you get more for Narrativist play than you do for gamist play. Is this where the incoherence/dysfuntional play comes in? If Mike wanted more gamism from the game under this model, he would fight everything he could, which would drag us into fights that we didn't care about so he could get his EXP. As is, the treasure awarded regardless of whether we did things that promoted premise was an indiscriminate mechanical award just big enough to get Mike and I to want to kill everything, or eventually, to explore everything and find all the loot we could. Only in later gameplay did I start trusting Dave to make sure we got enough of everything and stop trying to get every piece of loot I could.
So, in a system that attempts to equally reward more than one style of play, it can successfully reward them. But by doing so, groups will be split based on their basic desires of play. Gamists will ruin it for Narrativists and vice-versa. The only way a group could enjoy such a game is if everyone was on the same page, essentially making one whole set of reward-cycles useless and ignored.
So, in a game like mine (the DnD game I mean), players can't pursue both agendas at the same time, because to pursue gamism mars the pursuit of premise driven play, and vice versa. Any game that hybridized the two would need to somehow string its conflicts together so that both styles were rewarded in such a way that they complimented each other, with the Step On Up always reinforcing the Story Now, and the Story Now always providing a means to Step On Up. I dare say such a game has not been designed thus far, and whatever system is developed to do such a thing would be rightly called revolutionary.
But in the end, I think it means that for the moment, until such a game is designed, I understand and agree that the GNS agendas are mutually exclusive.
Thanks for your time Ron. I don't know if this thread needs to go any further or not. It will if I got things wrong, but if I got things right, then I need to start a first thoughts thread on developing a game like what I mentioned above. In the meantime, I want to understand simulationism more, and I want to ask a question about your essays as a whole.
If the ideas you have developed in the course of writing your essays and through threads here at the forge have evolved and matured, why haven't you re-written the essays so as to avoid some (certainly not all) of the confusion. For example, only by your third essay had certain ideas really gelled for you, and as such the previous two can confuse people who aren't fully understanding you on your terms. Its just a thought.
I really appreciate you spending time clearing this stuff up for me. Did I get everything right, or am I still shaky on some things.
Cheers,
--Norm
P.S. I didn't remember to include what I think color is, but to me it is essentially the fictional wrapping around everything you do that makes the game more than just crunching numbers and rolling dice. Does that sound about right?
Ron Edwards:
Hi Norm,
This reply takes your last post and responds to it as a series of points rather out of order, for purposes of maximum clarity, I hope. Let me know if I failed to answer anything important.
Most general first: I strongly recommend not perceiving my essays as theses or dissertations, and certainly not as textbooks or primary texts for "the Forge." They are signposts in an ongoing debate, and serve only as a snapshot of what I was thinking at that time in the debate. The dialogue at the Forge is the real text. If you want a revised version of the essays, you start a thread exactly like the one you started here, and the thread itself becomes the revised essay. That's how it works. If someone gets confused because they think I'm a guru and have posted some kind of Essays of Trooth for people to absorb and quote, well, I can't help them, until they grab a clue and join the discussion as an equal among equals, like you did.
You describe Color as:
Quote
... to me it is essentially the fictional wrapping around everything you do that makes the game more than just crunching numbers and rolling dice. Does that sound about right?
Very technically, it's too general; what you're describing is essentially the SIS. But you're not too far off the mark - if you were to take the number crunching and dice rolling and translate it into the SIS in the most literal and unadorned way, you'd have an SIS with little or no Color, but I have hardly ever observed such a thing to characterize play for long. In practice, Color goes hand in hand with "moving things along" in terms of fictional events and imagery.
Quote
First, as for color and reward, and how it all relates to GNS, I think what I am hearing is that how you play, and what rewards you get, all wrapped in the fiction packaging (which can reinforce/reward play type) determines your GNS. Therefore, even if there are lots of crunchy tactical encounters that are very risky, you can still be playing narrativist because all of your color and rewards are Narrativist based. Likewise, you could play in reverse, just happening to address premise, but actually stepping on up. Perhaps this is why the modes are so easily confused. Essentially, each mode can happen within the other, or so it seems. Because of this appearance of one mode within another, we assume they are both active, when really one is and one isn't.
I'll start by rephrasing you a little bit: how you play and what rewards you get, all wrapped up in the fiction, determines what Creative Agenda is present, if any. A person doesn't "have a GNS."
To clarify your larger point, you are a bit off. One mode does not happen "within the other." When I choose a particular effectiveness-increasing option in my available rules at the moment, it is not a little atom of Gamism within some larger mode. It is merely strategizing as a Technique. The whole point of the Big Model structure is to get away from this notion you're falling into. The Creative Agenda is not a level (something I didn't work out until finishing the three essays); it is a connecting principle that enables the levels to function together.
When a person understands that, then there is no more confusion about an Agenda within another one, or one Agenda supporting another one.
Regarding the Gamism + Narrativism sittin' in a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G., issue, you did a great job of staying with the thread topic, and it seems to me that you ended up answering the question yourself after you posed it:
Quote
... why can't both be active at the same time after all? What if a reward system (both social and mechanical) could be set up in such a way that both Step On Up and Narrativism were rewarded?
...
So, in a system that attempts to equally reward more than one style of play, it can successfully reward them. But by doing so, groups will be split based on their basic desires of play. Gamists will ruin it for Narrativists and vice-versa. The only way a group could enjoy such a game is if everyone was on the same page, essentially making one whole set of reward-cycles useless and ignored.
So, in a game like mine (the DnD game I mean), players can't pursue both agendas at the same time, because to pursue gamism mars the pursuit of premise driven play, and vice versa.
Quote
Any game that hybridized the two would need to somehow string its conflicts together so that both styles were rewarded in such a way that they complimented each other, with the Step On Up always reinforcing the Story Now, and the Story Now always providing a means to Step On Up. I dare say such a game has not been designed thus far, and whatever system is developed to do such a thing would be rightly called revolutionary.
Regarding that last bit, a better way to put it is whether play of this sort is functional or sustainable in the first place, and then the issue of effective game design and presentation that reinforced it could be raised. It probably won't surprise you that we've been here before, at the Forge. GNS and "Congruency" began a whole sub-chapter of theory discussion here.
(I could murdalize Walt for butchering the language with this thread, by the way. There wasn't any reason not to use "congruence" and "coherence." God knows why people tacked "-cy" onto the latter, which probably was his impetus for doing it to the former. The one favorable result of this repulsive neologism, though, is that it makes searches easy. Run a Forge search on "coherency," just with the general search option, and about ten threads will appear. Reading them in chronological order will provide a lot of perspective.)
The topic was quite thoroughly discussed and applied, and I think basically, was resolved in favor of abandoning "congruence" as meaningful. (1) Ultimately, we arrived at the conclusion that Creative Agenda is not atomic; i.e., Gamist play is not constructed of specifically and identifiably Gamist techniques and moment-level decisions. That conclusion is what led me toward investigating reward cycles (as opposed to Stances and resolution rules) and expanding my concept of "instance of play" much farther upward/outward than most people had read my earliest essay to mean. So the whole idea of playing N-N-S-N-N-G-N, so it "adds up" to N overall, is obsolete (and as I see it was a mis-reading in the first place), much for the reasons you just outlined in your own post.
(2) I think we need to distinguish between two sorts of "can happen," both of which are in the hypothetical sense, but are radically different issues. (i) One kind might be thought of as, oh, a carnivoran* mammal with horns. It's never been observed for a living or extinct carnivoran species. "Can" it happen? Developmentally and evolutionarily, on the face of things, nothing jumps up to dictate specifically why not, aside from the common carnivoran ancestor not having any, and nothing having happened to instigate horns' origins in that group. I.e., the phenomenon of no-horns-here may be purely historical. (ii) The other kind might be thought of as, oh, a carnivoran mammal with six locomotory limbs (banths, oh banths!). Here, instead, we're running into what appears to be a radical developmental constraint. Long before the origin of carnivorans or indeed of mammals, a group of animals lost most of the capacity to develop limbs along all of its body segments. Either that capacity was stripped out or suppressed so profoundly that messing with it would bollix up the critters' function beyond, well, functioning. Mammals evolved as a subset within this group, and carnivorans within the mammals. Four limbs, baby, that's what we're working with, and you can lose'em, but you aren't getting those other segments' limb-making capacity back.**
I'm distinguishing between "could if we got around to doing it," vs. "could if particular operative principles of reality-right-now happened to vanish." The question is, when we talk about Congruent play, which "can" or "can't" do we mean? If it's (i), then sure, design the game, or any Congruent game, and off we go now that the instructions are around to help us get it in play. If it's (ii), though, then all I can say is, you're up against the constraint that humans seem to want to play together together, and not in a way in which you, me, or anyone can switch around between eating pigs vs. hugging pet pigs individually when we all got together to "love pigs." I happen to think it's (ii), but I don't claim to be infallible.
And (3), simple observation played its role in the discussion as time passed. Forge discussion participants' strong interest in hybrids was founded in an over-stated concept of Simulationism, and better understanding of that agenda plus a lot of attention to games like The Riddle of Steel led to the conclusion that hybrids were more of an ideal and not particularly functional as such in play. People very strikingly played TROS either radically Narrativist or radically Simulationist, and in each case tending to junk or downplay specific pieces of the written rules in doing so. I think the current Capes discussion suggets that the same thing happens a lot with that game, with S instead of G, although that thread is marred a bit by some emotional content. Basically, whether hybrid (dominant/subordinate CAs) or congruent (both at once), we simply don't see it happening.
Luke and I discussed this recently in regard to Burning Empires, in which he explained to me that the occasional Gamist-like language in the rules (which is indeed occasional and a bit jarring) is not particularly serious, whereas the Narrativist instructions (which are present throughout and very consistent) are straightforwardly the point of play as he sees it. The strategizing and even boardgamey elements of the "larger scope" of play in that game are intended to be pure setup for the real point, occurring at the personal level.
If I'm not mistaken, this thread has reached an endpoint for your topic, but I don't want to close it because others may well chime in. So, anyone, please feel free.
Norm, I suggest addressing any questions you have about Simulationist play later in a new thread. Plus, make sure to read Simulationism aside, ignoring the subjective, and Constructive denial? in order. As far as I'm concerned, these threads settled the "what is Sim" hassle entirely and without pain.
Best, Ron
* I'm using "carnivoran" in the taxonomic sense, rather than "carnivorous" in the behavioral and ecological sense. In other words, the Order of mammals which includes doggies, kitties, sealies, mongoosies, hyena-ies, bearsies, weaselies, and a number of others, without reference to what they do or do not eat.
** Geeking out: this is called Dollo's Principle and is a topic of some weight and debate in the field. I promise to shut up now.
Ayyavazi:
Hey Ron,
Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. This is the first instance of internet access I have had in awhile. That said, I have not and will not have time to read the threads you recommended (which is quite a bunch) for quite some time.
Now, I am not much of a person to abandon logic and say, "I feel," but here I just feel like something is missing. I like to think it is my subconscious putting pieces together but only showing me the result of its findings, not the work that got it there. It is entirely possible that those threads will clear it up for me and solve the issue, which I think is this: I don't agree that creative agenda is separated from the techniques that seem to go into it. I understand that some techniques are used more often in certain agendas than others, but are use-able in all agendas. I also understand that play doesn't "add up" to one agenda or another. But perhaps in making agenda such an all-encompassing standby the forge (I would say we, but I don't feel right taking any real credit for all the theory discussion that has gone on before) has thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
What about moment-to-moment play? For example, lets go back to my play examples, which were broad-stroked a bit too much for you to see ( I think) the following: All of the surroundings were Narrativist play. Granted. Every battle was gamist. Was it setup for the narrative agenda? Sure. But each battle was hard enough that we had to decide what to do with it, whether to Step On Up (and no, I don't think I'm overusing that phrase-as-simplification) or not. And for each battle, the fun came not from premise, which normally fired only on small levels throughout some (not all) of the battles, but primarily from the thrill of winning and losing the combat, both of which happened occasionally. The fun in-the-moment came from that aspect AND the small-fire premise of some decisions.
Now, I get that overall, we were playing Narrativist. I know that it isn't because it added up that way, but because all of the play and the fun (much of which was only ascertained in the moments at which we realized premise had been addressed at all, which in some cases was weeks after the event) pointed to narrativist. What this means to me is that if you want to figure out creative agenda (as the hydra it seems to be to me), you have to look at the fun, but not just at any one level, and especially not at the overall level alone.
Essentially, look at the source of the fun at each point in play. This would mean moment-moment play (where the immediate fun might come from gamist goals, as it did in my example) and session-by-session play (where the fun was not even at the end of the session, but in the remembering of the session, and thus the recognition of all the premise that was addressed), and then in the overall entire-game sense (which again happens after the fact).
Looking at agenda this way paints a different picture, at least as I see it. Looked at this way, agenda fires on multiple moments and at individual points as well as on the after-the-fact remembering, which for me is often more fun than the actual game was itself. Is this an anomaly in me, or perhaps does it mean I should be doing something that can generate such memories without the game (such as simply day-dreaming)? I don't think so. My friends feel similarly from what I have observed. They always seem to have more fun after the fact than in the actual throes of the game. Maybe that means we are changing our memories, trying to justify an un-fun activity. But even accounting for that, it doesn't change the real enjoyment of the memory itself, which in such an overall-view as the GNS seems to require, seems to fit in perfectly. Essentially, if it is ok to look at the play experience as a whole in order to determine the GNS, why cannot we define the play experience as the before-during-after of the game in question?
Seen this way, I believe that not only is hybridized play possible, it is present in most games already. In these games the overall goal (if there even is one for a given group, and for many there isn't, at least not explicitly expressed and understood) might be narrativst, and the active agenda overall might be narrativist, but in the moment to moment, it is part Narrativist (the small-firing Nar moments), part Gamist (The Step-On-Up of accepting a battle or not, and applying risky tactics), and part Simulationist (from the actual imagining of play as these individuals in these situations, and the attempt to "get in-character").
So, did that make any sense?
Thanks again Ron. I don't think this thread is exhausted yet. It may just be my stubbornness, or just a general inability to accept things. It might even be lack of information on my part. But something in what I have written rings true. It wraps up everything very elegantly, at least for me. It makes everything make sense without further discussion. I also sense that what I have written may be counter intuitive to how you view the whole matter. That being said, I would love to see you pick apart what I have just suggested, and then give me a play example broken down at all of the levels to show me where I am wrong, or misunderstanding things. Maybe it would even be helpful for me to craft a play example (since I don't have one that I think fits) in order to demonstrate what I am saying. Maybe in that you would be able to help me understand where my assumptions are incorrect and thus leading me to incorrect conclusions.
Thanks again,
--Norm
Caldis:
Norm.
I think looking at those moment to moment things is a fascinating topic. It is however a different topic than Creative Agenda. I know some of Ron's earliest writings on GNS talked about what is the most fun for your group and that can often be a good tool to help determine GNS but I think often it can muddy the waters when certain instants are remembered and the fun of being in the moment and is recalled but how you got there and what made it important is forgotten.
On Hybrids I dont think they are possible, but when I say that I'm talking about in a full CA sense where it's the big driving force for your game. It's impossible to serve two masters. So what you are describing when you talk of moment to moment gamism is what Ron calls tatical play in support of narrativism. It may just seem a matter of different way of saying the same thing but I think that it's valid. It's often hard to pick out any CA at a moment to moment level, it's often just exploration, Simulationism to me doesnt really make sense as a moment to moment thing because then it is just exploration.
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