What is Right to Dream for?
Simon C:
David, briefly: "Isn't that endemic to sentients in conflicts?" I think so. Therefore, what matters is treating the characters as if they were sentients. "Ethical choices" is Luke's very clever way of talking about a shared imagined space, I think. It's very clever because it highlights exactly what a shared imagined space is for.
Here's another reformulation of what I'm talking about:
I'm not seeing any differences between Right to Dream and Story Now design and play that couldn't also be described as differences in premise within a Story Now agenda.
Eero Tuovinen:
Good stuff, Simon - I think that this is an interesting and worthwhile discussion. I do not agree with Luke on ethical choices, but I do agree with Vincent about robust fiction; I do not think that this is a particular development in comparison to Forge theory from, say, five years ago, but more of a clarification: a robust fiction, which at times has been called "realistic" or "simulational" or whatever, is a necessary ingredient in developing Color and thus communicating the SIS effectively among the participants of a roleplaying game. This process of Exploration can be streamlined in some ways by heavily engaging genre expectations and other narrative shorthands, however, which might make it seem like some games are more or less concerned with the robustness of the fiction. In fact, though, Exploration is, no matter how detailed and realistic, a rather agenda-neutral activity: it's just the process of constructing a fictional environment, a Shared Imagined Space, and the extent to which you do it doesn't really comment on what you do it for.
The key claim, the most interesting one to me, is the idea that there is a moral dimension that is effectively engaged by any and all roleplaying. This might be the case for a certain understanding of "moral", but then that's not controversial - the exact model of Premise-cum-Theme is there exactly because just referring to a moral dimension vaguely can be understood in so many ways. For instance, take a purely immersive Nordic-style roleplaying game. Some game where the whole point is to imagine that you're a polar expedition that's slowly freezing to death while occasionally butchering a dog for food, say. (Not very hypothetical, waiting for death is a very popular premise in the Nordic scene.) What is the "moral dimension" of this game? Is it just that we as people are interested and engaged by impending death and desperation? If it's just that, then it's much more transparent to say that all roleplaying games need to "engage the players by being interesting". Mostly people are interested by people, so I guess you could also say that "roleplaying games need to have room for human action". That's still pretty far from any exact meaning of "ethical choice", unless you construe any and all choices as ethical, in which case that word isn't even needed.
(Personally I think that insofar as it matters for us, both Luke and Vincent are speaking of strictly narrativist rpg design in those discussions. Vincent actually has clearly stated as much - unless otherwise clarified, his blog concerns only narrativist design, which is his forte and main interest.)
Getting back to simulationism, my take is that it's pretty much experience for the sake of experience that seems to drive the simulationistic games I'm familiar with. "Right to Dream" is a very on-the-point description. The GM has a powerful image of being there, one he wants to transmit to the players; the players have a powerful interest in being there; the group together uses a range of techniques to build a Shared Imagined Space efficiently, and then engages it around the creative aspects that originally motivated the practice. The tableau is moved forward and progress is made in the game insofar as the art form is narrative in nature; events occurring and their temporal relationships are the interesting thing, not just still snapshots. Sometimes the stills are actually the interesting thing, like when you're playing a highly stylized superhero game and all you want is for your character to get to grandstand. Even then the whole game can't be just grandstanding, you need context that is created, ideally in efficient and cooperative manner.
As a practical example of a very simulationistic game that I've played in several sessions, I'd like to name Dead of Night. This is an useful example in that most times I've played the game we have in fact had situations that could be construed as narrativistic when isolated from the overall game. For example, in Hair II (Hair is this serial killer movie series I'm GMing with Dead of Night now and then, centering on a legendarized Charles Mason / James Dean who pops up in different parts of the USA for acerbic, bloody social commentary splatter stories) we had a situation where the serial killer had cornered a local artist at an art gallery, tied him in a chair and tortured him. Another player character, a police officer, stumbled on the scene in progress. Now, had this been a narrativistic game, in hindsight it's obvious that the issue of the scene would have been clear: will the player character, who'd earlier been entangled in a romance with the killer, try to save the innocent victim, or will he just escape as far and fast as he can?
However, this is one of the most coherently simulationistic games I've known, so nothing like the above question was evident in our play: my point in bringing the scene was to display my favourite serial killer, the scene was full of his fictional trademarks, the player's thing was to feel the fear and despair, and nobody really stopped to hesitate when we were all so busy in experiencing the story. Dead of Night has less railroading than many simulationistic games because of some very clever structural techniques, but it's still very much the GM's show in that he's responsible for the powerful horror elements, while the players are mostly responsible for experiencing and reacting and making choices as to the angle and velocity of the situation exploration in the game. In our session (which I really should write AP for despite its age, it's that cool) the creative drive came from our common willingness to experience a slasher story situated in an American mid-west small town, nothing more and nothing less. This was executed, and that's that - thematically the game was pure Hair, entirely pre-established by the GM. I've characterized this style of Sim as akin to computer adventure gaming: the GM provides a limited amount of subject material while the players have their characters walk around and click on various parts of the game. Just like a computer adventure game, the GM controls the content, but the player controls the pacing and focus at which that content is explored.
Hmm... I should actually write a bit more about that Monkey Island metaphor at some point, it sounds like it might develop into an useful design framework.
But anyway, I think that experiencing things is really a central quality of Simulationism in that when you play a simulationistic game, what you have at the end is an experience devoid of external measure such as dramatic arc or finished challenge. This is really powerfully seen in some immersionistic play: you pretend to be an elf just because you want to pretend to be an elf, and that's it, no external measuring stick to it. In the same way I want to play another session of Hair just because I'd like to "enjoy" another night of rebellious, pretentious pretty boy slashery (the next movie will be set in San Francisco, incidentally).
Am I even on the topic anymore? Sometimes it feels like this whole Simulationism thing is so under-developed that we really should just talk about simulationistic game experiences at length before even trying to figure out any second-order things like the actual topic we have here. At least I touched on the central question: Simulationism is separate from Narrativism, and I don't think that it is constructed of ethical choices like Narrativistic play largely is. While we don't really have superbly clear simulationistic design frameworks, at least we have some good games and gaming skill; for instance, I'm pretty certain that I can replicate a simulationistic gaming experience any day with the narrow range of simulationistic gaming tools I understand and appreciate myself. Same probably goes for others.
David Berg:
Quote from: Simon C on March 20, 2010, 12:58:42 PM
I'm not seeing any differences between Right to Dream and Story Now design and play that couldn't also be described as differences in premise within a Story Now agenda.
I'm pretty sure that to describe them as such would be using the terms in a very different way than Ron intends them. Ethical choices resulting from sentients facing obstacles gives you Story Eventually, but that's vastly different, socially, from Story Now.
Fred Simster and Joe Narrster might both want to explore what happens when cult members are exposed to their leader's hypocrisy. But they might drive each other nuts if they tried to do it together, because Joe wants every scene to take that exploration one step further and then cut, while Fred wants to let the exploration go wherever some colorful character play takes it. (I'm not saying either of these preferences is definitional of a CA, I'm just going for examples that might be familiar.)
Caldis:
I'm sort of with Eero about Luke's thought on ethical choices, my take is that while ethical choices may have been made by characters in all role playing games if the players dont really care about the ethical choices during the game then it doesnt tell you that much about the game in question. I think it misses the distinction between just having a theme and exploring premise as its done in Story Now.
Let's take it back to your play example. You stated the theme as "How does a person make their way in an indifferent universe?" It's formulated as a question here but in play is this really a question? Are the characters questioning how they should make their way in an indifferent universe? Does the player make an ethical choice for the character in the game or has the decision already been made?
Your example where they crash into the asteroid, that was special because it reaffirmed that it was an uncaring universe but was there ever really an ethical choice involved? You started the game as unscrupulous mercenaries so it was pretty much guaranteed from the get go that they would be making bad ethical choices, did it say anything about the characters that this specific incident did them in rather than some other point?
I think considering morality and ethics is probably a good thing and inevitable in most RPG's, so yeah it's probably a good thing to consider in design but there are different ways they can be used in play and you have to consider how you want to use them.
Anders Larsen:
I more and more begin to think that describing Simulationism as genre simulation/emulation is not very useful, because while genre simulation is important in Simulationism, it is not that alone which make it fun. It is like in Narrativism where it is not the moral choice alone that create the fun, but what you do with it and what consequences it creates.
I have experienced two approaches to Simulatonism in my own gaming life that I have found interesting:
The first one is the same that Ron explain in the thread David Berg links to. This is where you challenge everyones understanding of the fiction by throwing in a new element, that with the first glance seems to be out of place; it does not completely fit with what is already established. The fun is then to, through play, find hidden connections that can explain how this new piece of fiction actually fit into the established understanding. It is especially exiting when a number of pieces does not quite fit, and suddenly something is reviled than make everything fit perfectly in an unexpected way. A murder mystery is a perfect example of this.
The second one is more about exploration. It is where you explore how new pieces of the fiction relates to other elements of the fiction. And to explore what causally consequences the new piece have for the character and the rest of the fiction.
Genre/setting simulation is a very important ground rule for those two approaches, but it is what you do with it which make it fun.
- Anders
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