GNS, AI, and psychology.
Alfryd:
Well, as far as I can tell, this seems to be the best place for this topic, but to be honest the subject's only tenuously related to specific RPG experiences (or, rather, it has a much broader application.) So, stop me if I'm veering off into irrelevance, but I thought this might merit some investigation regardless.
See, I have an informal interest in AI research and, more broadly, functional intelligence in general. I've come to suspect that the three major GNS modes correlate with, or at least bear some connection to, the basic cognitive functions of the modern AI agents. Broadly speaking, these could be summarised as:
Gamism: Action Planning.
Simulationism: Environment Modelling.
Narrativism: Rule Induction.
I further suspect these play a similar role in human intelligence, with the given secondary qualities:
G: Satisfying basic needs or instincts, including competition/social dominance. Overcoming challenges 'because they're there'.
S: Curiosity, conjecture, objectivity. Dreaming (i.e, unconscious simulation.) Humour (i.e, appreciation of unexpected non-threatening connections.) Emphasis on consistency with observations.
N: Communication (of pertinent insight,) social rules, moral directives. Aesthetics (i.e, appreciation of hidden structure or 'meaning'.)
I understand that it's a good idea to keep posts short, so I'll leave it there. Do you think that this jibes with your experiences of play in the various modes and the attitudes or priorities of the players?
Aaron Blain:
Some years ago, I was in the classic situation, dating a hot sorority girl, keeping my xbox and my army guys tucked away, cringing at any mention of geekery, trying to get in as much fun time as possible before the inevitable came to pass. She was a caricature of conformity, and would often rant to me about how she disliked girls who looked or acted differently. Following the rules of society in order to be accepted and cared for was god to her. My suspicions should have been aroused when she lit up at the mention of the "Mafia" campfire game (a murderer secretly kills everyone each night and the survivors try to figure out who the murderer is etc.), which had been one of her favorite things from adolescence, something in which ten or twenty people become invested in reading and following the operation of a shared, orderly reality. Anyway, I had dropped down to one weekly game session in favor of getting laid, but I couldn't hold back from our campus' day long annual gamefest. She planned to be partying elsewhere without me, I thanked the gods. I went through my usual routine starting with the standard huge Munchkin game that was great fun for the first half of its duration, the getting mildly ill on free pizza, a few skirmish games that were decided by mysteries of initiative and spelunking arcane tomes of troop abilities, slogging through a hefty chunk of "So what are you guys doing?" - style WoD, and a blessed little no-strings, no-bs dungeon hacking. Just as I was smoothing myself off to sneak back to the realm of procreating daywalkers, five feet per round and checking for traps as I went, I stumbled into my busty blank-eyed lover. She had followed me over and had been playing some combination of oldskool Demon and Mage for six hours, and regaled me for a good twenty minutes with all the things she had caused to happen in this shared reality. Creatures were manipulated and splattered, bookshelves tossed around, alliances formed and broken, buildings demolished. I was stunned. This beautiful young woman, who frowned confused and worried when she saw me playing Total War, who could barely be in the same room with my Firefly DVD's, who candidly detested blue collar people and anything that was the opposite of wealth and status and security, had had more fun at the Big Ass Day Of Gaming Roleplaying & Eating than I had. After the initial shock, I saw that it made perfect sense. Something about that "Simulationist" creative pact, even though she had never seen a dee-ten in her sexy, preppy little life, had keyed in perfectly to her psycho-emotional needs.
Nowadays, I'm primarily a Cataan man looking for anyone willing to get good at Twilight Imperium or, better, Archon. I've come to esteem those mental games which are only a step removed from the visceral engagement of tangible sport, and that from the real-life get-killed go-hungry type activities without which those of us in developed countries wax neurotic.
I think this whole business has to do with how we form a social fabric and a concept of reality in order to survive. If I meet someone in a coffee shop, we might play some chess. If they ask me a question, and I respond in a deadpan, "Because I'm the Kwisatz Haderach." and they laugh, I know I can probably rope them into some DnD. If we get to know each other, maybe after a while we'll bust out the moral dilemmas. I guess it's a question of the similarity of our shared realities. The stronger our shared language, the more easily we can interact and get what we each want emotionally in our, er, Shared . . . Imagined . . . er, Space.
Motipha:
That is an awesome story, but I'm not seeing the connection to the AP. But a really, REALLY awesome story.
Ron Edwards:
Hi guys,
Aaron, did you intend to begin a new thread with your post? If so, let me know; I can split it. Because there are about 100 fun things to discuss there.
Timo, to follow up on your AI idea, I tend to think that all three "sectors" you describe are present in all role-playing, and often as priorities of technique, rather than expressing any of the Creative Agendas.
If I were to extend the logic of your post into something I'd be more likely to agree with, it'd approach not only the substance of cognitive effort, but the relationship of the actor with everyone else involved. It would focus more on group dynamics of approval or excitement, and then seek repeated cycles, and finally, examine the content and activity within those cycles.
I submit, or speculate, that all three things you describe would be present at peaks of the cycles, or in very successful play, throughout the cycles, and that other things - rather specific ones - would pop out as CA-identification for that group.
Does any AI research concern group dynamics and relationships among interacting AIs?
Best, Ron
Alfryd:
Quote
The stronger our shared language, the more easily we can interact and get what we each want emotionally in our, er, Shared . . . Imagined . . . er, Space.
While I of course agree that role-play is a social activity that requires an overall concensus on 'what role-play's about', unspoken or otherwise, I agree with Timo that I'm not certain I see the applicable insight here. Are you saying that this is an example of a Sim-inclined-player who contradicts the description I gave before, or that the term just isn't meaningful? Was she playing in a Sim fashion, and/or with a Sim group, and/or using a Sim ruleset (I'm afraid I'm largely ignorant on the full array of systems out there)? I'm not certain how to reconcile your mention of 'shared realities' with the apparent ease with which she enjoyed her role-play- weren't you citing her as a specific example of someone whose 'reality' thus far was at a 180 face-off with conventional geekery?
I mean, if there's some kind of truth to the comparison with the categories of machine learning I gave, then none of the three modes are inherently dependant on social dynamics at all. An AI agent working in complete isolation can plan courses of action to attain specific goals, build up a model of their environment by exploration, and infer new formal rules based on prior observations, without ever consulting another agent or even requiring a theory of mind.
The idea of an Egri Premise being fundamental to dramatic narrative just struck me as an extension of pattern-inference, or, again in AI terms, of rule induction. Taking a series of isolated observations and discerning an underlying structure behind 'em. In this fashion, Nar play might be considered an extension of or reliance upon inductive logic, whereas Sim play would be an extension of or reliance upon deductive logic.
I mean, if you think of it in terms of computational processes within the brain, it would go some way to explaining why people show pronounced preferences toward particular GNS modes, and even go some way toward explaining the relative demographic sizes: Gamists being the most common, followed by Narrativists, with Simulationists as a distinct minority.
The brain is presumably constrained in terms of calory expenditure, available synapses, neurotransmitter production, etc. with respect to how much computation it can do at once, and 'hardware' optimised for a given purpose might be rather poor at others (white matter vs. grey matter, for example, which is generally suspected to go some way toward explaining why women, with more white matter, are statistically more communicative, better at multitasking, etc.) Each GNS mode would represent a specific kind of computational task that have to compete for resources within the brain.
Simulationism, insofar as it relates to building up a consistent model of the world, to acquiring and integrating data by hypothesis and exploration, is most biologically useful within environments that change rapidly. In environments that change slowly, it's almost always easier and safer to get information about the world from your peers and elders. For the vast majority of our evolutionary history, environments only changed slowly, and so the most volatile, exploitable, and dangerous aspect of the world was likely to be other humans. Consequently, Sim-inclinations make up only a small aspect of the general human psyche, and most of that is focused on Theory of Mind: forecasting others' behaviour based on knowledge of their foibles, motives and predilictions.
Of course, in order to acquire that knowledge in the first place, you have to generalise from observations (rule induction) and pay attention to second-hand info from other tribe members (communication.) And naturally, Gamism trumps both N and S, because the organism is fundamentally concerned with the bottom line- survival imperatives. In which respect I certainly agree with Aaron that "this whole business has to do with how we form a social fabric and a concept of reality in order to survive."
Naturally, of course, phenotypic variation would account for a wide spread of preferences within the larger population, because different GNS balances would have been optimal at different historical (or prehistorical) periods.
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