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The following are comments from the http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=9156">Bad Roleplaying? I blame Tolkien thread.  I think the more general question which comes out of it is important, though.  

Quote from: Dr. Velocitymost fantasy rpg sessions DO seem to take ALL the worst kinds of cues from Tolkein; basically, going on the whole 'If Tolkein gamed...' issue, he was a simulationist - so the painstaking worry over how many arrows are remaining, if you have a rope, how many ounces of water it takes to put out a campfire, whatever else, were guaranteed to damn some role-players' characters to a hell of 'gosh too bad you didn't write down quill pen on your sheet', or simply drove them away from gaming due to a fanatical tendancy toward the pedantic.

Quote from: ValamirRole playing games did not evolve in a vacuum.  Our concept of what a story is and how it should be structured is influenced by all of the stories in our lives.  From the bed time stories we were told as children, to campfire stories we invented at camp, to movies, TVs, and yes even novels.

Contrary to Raven's statement I believe its IMPOSSIBLE to understand story structure as it exists in an RPG without drawing parallels to these other forms.  

How a "simulationist" might evaluate an RPGs story structure may well be very similiar to how a certain author might evaluate a novel's story structure and for many of the same reasons and goals.  It then is not that much of a stretch to say that author had a "simulationist" agenda.

Obviously these are two different mediums and the concepts are not 100% applicable across disciplines.  But to say they can't or shouldn't be compared with each other is IMO pretty absurd.

So I agree with both of these posters in some sense.  Tolkien certainly did have a writing style based on fanatical attention to detail.  He is not alone in this, however.  I mentioned the Patrick O'Brian novels along with Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" as other examples.  

So is this meticulous attention to detail in authors related to Simulationism?  I tend to agree with Ralph that we can and should draw parallels between writing styles and gaming styles.  And it certainly seems like drawing maps of the world, inventing languages, and diagramming out family trees is something that could easily be pegged as Simulationist in a game.  So is this a spurious association or are they actually related?  

Personally, I tend to think that they are related.  I think Tolkien's stated dislike of symbolism probably relates to this as well.  However, I think recent discussion on GNS has highlighted that views on Simulationism differ.  

An important second question is:  If Tolkien is Simulationist, then who are the more Narrativist authors?

Raymond Chandler. That's about as N as it gets, methinks.

edit: oh, and I agree with the first question. That is to say, it supports a certain type of simulationism.

Quote from: John KimAn important second question is:  If Tolkien is Simulationist, then who are the more Narrativist authors?

BL> In Fantasy: Dunsany, Le Guin, and Lewis come to mind.

To pick an old bone, if there are "Simulationist" writers, is it not right to describe the process of Narrativist play as "like writing a book" or "like telling a story?"  Isn't Simulationist play also "like telling a story?"

yrs--
--Ben

Even Tolkein, boring as he is, is no Simulationist.

Guys!  It's not Exploration vs. Story Now.  Ever.  It's Exploration plus Story Now vs. Exploration plus no Story Now.  (Or Step On Up, as you like.)  Tolkein, if his fiction could be interpreted somehow to be an RPG in play, would have lots and lots of in-depth Exploration, yes, but he's still all about the Story Now!  He sometimes bobbles it, sometimes bobbles it badly, but that's not the same thing a'tall.  That's just because he was a guy trying to write fiction.

I hesitate to mention it, because I couldn't read more than 15 pages, but Le Guin's Always Coming Home seems like the best bet for "Simulationist" "fiction" to me.  It's not real Simulationism because it's not collaborative in-play creation, obviously, but we'll give it anyway.  But it's not real fiction either, because nothing meaningful happens.  Made-up anthropology or made-up journalism, carefully robbed of protagonists and meanings - maybe.  If such a thing even exists.  But that's not Tolkein, nor O'Brian, nor Melville by a mile.

Say it with me!  Depth of detail does not mean Simulationism!  Detail can serve Narrativism or Gamism as easy as Sim!  All the Creative Agendas depend on a commitment to Exploration!  Character and Setting are the foundation for all roleplaying!  There's never yet a story well served by a poorly detailed or inconsistent in-world!

(If Tolkein inspired Simulationist play, it was because the players weren't, I dunno, literate enough to figure out what he was saying.  They were emulating his form, illiterately, not his substance.)

I'm very willing to be wrong about Always Coming Home, by the way.  And if you prefer, you can swap "carefully preserved free of" in for "carefully robbed of," so it won't seem like I'm dissing pointlessness.

-Vincent

Does all that attention to detail in LotR help facilitate the Story Now? For me, the 185 times that they sang some elf song that took up 18 pages of text and required more footnotes than "The Wasteland" did not produce that deep-down Story Now feeling. Maybe it's a YMMV issue.

I cited Chandler, on the other hand, as he adds a lot of detail, but it usually points directly at the corruption of his characters and the consequences of the choices they've made or will make.

Sure, attention to detail does not = Sim. But for it to promote N the reader/player has to make some kind of connection. With LotR I felt like it was more in the way. Again, YMMV.

Thanks, Vincent - I wanted to say something like that, but you did such a good job, now I don't have to . . .

If I do allow myself to think about Tolkein in terms of Sim, what I come up with is this - it wouldn't be about the meticulous attention to detail, it would be about the appreciation of that detail.  A group of fans going on about how this elvish name is drawn from something established in Lost Tales volume umpty-ump, and how Rohan culture was a reactionary response to the fall of Numenor, and etc. - touching on the meaning of the actual tale(s) only briefly, if at all - maybe you could say that fan group is showing a Sim appreciation for JRR.  And that his work has such a meticuous attention to detail means that they can do that quite readily.

To what extent the author himself could be said to have appreciated the details themselves rather than the "point" of the work as a whole is hard to say.  I'm sure he enjoyed the challenge to his linguistic knowldge and skills that creating the various languages entailed - does that mean LotR is a Gamist fiction?  No.  But if that group of fans is trying to one-up each other with their intricate knowledge of the background of the work, maybe you can call that a Gamist appreciation.

Or maybe not.  All in all, I think applying GNS to pre-created, static fictions just isn't a good idea.  There's a link via that awkward "story" word, but it's not a link that the real meaning of the terms G, N, and S can travel.

Gordon

PS - Always Coming Home the RPG.  Now that's an interesting thought . . .

I have argued in the past that there are literary forms that are akin to simulationism and gamism.

The simulationist form I most often mention is the travelogue--on television, the Michael Palin series Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole are exactly the sort of things I mean. "Now we're in Hong Kong, and guess what, we're going to eat snake, and we get to start by picking our snake out of the bin where they're all writhing together....we're in China, riding the train that crosses hundreds of miles of countryside, and one of the peasants wants to sell us a chicken....The contrast between China and Tokyo couldn't be more striking...." There's a story here in the sense that there are connected events and we find them interesting, but there's not really any premise being addressed at all.

Raw adventure stories are my candidates for gamist writing. The closest thing to a moral I've ever been able to derive from Raiders of the Lost Ark is that Indiana Jones at least had read the text that said that anyone who looks on the face of God will die, so that knowledge saved him when they opened the Ark--and thus we know that knowledge is always a good thing, even if you don't actually believe what you're learning, as you never know what might be useful. If that's the narrativist premise of the movie, it's pretty thin on the ground, I think. This movie is more about whether he's going to succeed, and how he'll do it. Now, I'm not so committed to this assessment (and less so that this particular film fits it) so let's not make this the focus of the thread. My point has much more to do with simulationism.

Tolkien is not simulationist; he's got moral and ethical and spiritual questions and issues springing up in the most unexpected places. He bombards us with the detail of his amazingly complex world, and sometimes we are overwhelmed by the backdrop (or by the presentation of the backdrop)--but we always come back to the story, the conflict between good and evil, the battle within ourselves between our own weaknesses and the good we know we should do.

He's got some good action in there at times, too, but it never overwhelms the issues.

--M. J. Young

Hmm, my feeling is that LOTR exhibits large periods in which story is NOT now, and there is only exposition.  The excruciatingly completist agonised farewells are a case in point, even in the movie.  I agree that depth of detail does not only indiciate Sim, but in this case I think it is Sim detail, not detail supporting story.  Theres just too much of it for me not to think it was a major part of what the author wanted to convey.

More generally, I don't think there are many writers of fiction that are truly simulationist with any degree of frequency.  More likely, such writers produce works like Caesars The Conquest of Gaul and T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  I'm not sure that looking to fiction, specifically, is likely to turn up too many Sim writers; if Story Now is a contradictory goal to the Sim dream, then why would an author introduce it?

Lawrence remarks: "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."

Just to pick up on the old shibboleth of "If it don't have a story, it's not fiction..."

Well, in my mind, if it's fictitious, it's fiction. It may not be narrative fiction, but much simmy support material is what I've classified as "non-narrative fcition," and my campaign to have this definition accepted amongst serious literature critics continues apace.

The message of Raiders is surely that some power has too great a price... or possibly that God hates Nazis and Frenchmen.

I found always coming home rich in meaning, and even protagonism (more as an emergent undercurrent than explicit). But sure, it's a Sim wet dream, all that detail and no damned plot getting in the way of THINGS!

I could go on about Tolkiens presumed creative agenda... well, most times when he's got a choice of "story NOW" or the dream, he'll go off on another bit of the dream. But heck, just because he tends to the sim doesn't make him all sim. His battle scenes have touches of the sneakier aspects of a gamist, especially in RotK. But a better man than I, with far more time on his hands, could check each decision in each scene by looking at Christopher Tolkiens works of Patrinecrophilia.

Interesting commentary.  Vincent's absolutely right.  The presence of exploration of setting found in Tolkien or O'Brian is just that...heavy Exploration of Setting.  The theory allows for heavy exploration of setting in any Agenda.

I think, however, that Tolkien's approach to the Premise was very Vanilla Nar.  Those who read LotR for the first time as children likely missed the Premii altogether.  Heck, there are even many adults who don't realize the Sam is the true protagonist of the story, and the relationship between Sam and Frodo is the core story.  Like Vanilla Narrativism, then, the Premise has to be teased out of the structure of an otherwise Exploration heavy story.

Earlier I made the comment that Tolkien couldn't decide whether he was writing a story or an encyclopedia.  I think that actually bears on the vanilla nature of the story.  Like a true simulationist Tolkien seemed to have a pathological aversion to doing anything "story" oriented that was not justified by a logical progression of historical events.  Before any character made any real decision of story impact he felt it necessary to be able to have a grasp of the 3 ages worth of history that brought the world to that point so that he could support (to himself anyway) why the choice was made the way it was.  [note, this entire paragraph is me projecting motivation on the author solely on the basis of how the end product reads and what I know of the elaborate notes that his son later gathered and published, and is thus somewhat speculative]

From this perspective...this need to prioritize the Exploration components above the story and to IMO literally not let story happen until he'd established the Explorative support structure to justify it, one could argue very much a Simulationist Agenda.


At this point, it should be noted that due to the differences in methods of creative input between a book and an rpg, that it is unlikely to be able to differentiate something as similiar as Simulationism and Vanilla Narrativism in a novel.

But I definitely think the apparent need to have the background justify the choices of the characters acts as pretty good model of the Sim agenda.  How much of the work's Premise simply fell into place as the logical extension of that background, and how much of the background was manipulated in order to produce that Premise is, in all likelyhood, unknowable.  I have a tendency to believe that Tolkien was willing to manipulate his background after the fact when he needed to reach a certain point in the story but that's purely speculation.

No way.  Tolkein's "Instance of Play" is wicked long, with lots of meandering, but that's a stylistic choice not an Agenda one.  Also he sometimes badly flubs pacing and conflict, but that's a skill problem not an Agenda one.

Quote from: Ralph...Tolkien seemed to have a pathological aversion to doing anything "story" oriented that was not justified by a logical progression of historical events. Before any character made any real decision of story impact he felt it necessary to be able to have a grasp of the 3 ages worth of history that brought the world to that point so that he could support (to himself anyway) why the choice was made the way it was.

That's okay for Narrativist play too.  

Now, there's a claim about Tolkein and Simulationism that I'll absolutely agree to: "it's easy to find inspiration for (some styles of) Simulationist play in Tolkein's fiction."  No doubt.  Tolkein's a goldmine if you're into that sort of play.  But to claim Tolkein as a Simulationist writer, you have to, ridiculously, claim that the Lord of the Rings isn't about anything in particular.

There's another claim about writers and gaming that I'll absolutely agree to: "writing styles and gaming styles are similar, in that you can find parallels and inspirations between one and the other."  That is, Tolkein's writing parallels and inspires certain styles of rpg play.  No doubt again.  But the gaming styles I'm talking about cross GNS: if I say that my game's "literarily Tolkeinesque", that doesn't reveal my Creative Agenda, only my approach to in-game causality, pacing, characterization ... that is, Exploration.  Am I playing Sim or Nar (or Gam)?  It depends what use I'm putting all that Tolkeinesquitude to.

-Vincent

Quote from: lumpleyNo way.  

No way to what...?

Where I said

QuoteI think, however, that Tolkien's approach to the Premise was very Vanilla Nar

or

QuoteFrom this perspective...this need to prioritize the Exploration components above the story and to IMO literally not let story happen until he'd established the Explorative support structure to justify it, one could argue very much a Simulationist Agenda.

If to the latter, then I agree (which is why I said the former).  But I don't think its nearly as cut and dry as you're making it, which is why I concluded with

Quotethat it is unlikely to be able to differentiate something as similiar as Simulationism and Vanilla Narrativism in a novel.

By this I mean, the clues of what actual people are really doing around the table during play (that are so important to determining CA) are absent when attempting to evaluate a novel.

I think the best that can be done is to say: its either Vanilla Narrativism (if Tolkien prioritized the premise over the exploration, or its Simulationism (if he prioritized the exploration over the premise).  But we really don't know.

As I say, I suspect its the former, because I suspect he allowed himself to mold the setting after the fact to provide what he needed once he decided what he needed.  However, true Tolkienophiles who've read through the piles and piles of notes he'd made that have since been published may well assemble a reasonable argument to the contrary.

But as interesting as it would be as a topic, its not really necessary to decide and determine which.  The benefit of looking at novels in this way is in the examination and not so much the diagnosis.

Sorry!  The latter.  We basically agree.

My position is that the presence of demonstrable theme in Tolkein's writing means that he authored theme, and that's all we need to judge by.  His own self-perceived priorities don't figure.  Which is to say - yes, I think it's cutter and dryer than you do.

-Vincent

Quote from: ValamirBut I definitely think the apparent need to have the background justify the choices of the characters acts as pretty good model of the Sim agenda.  How much of the work's Premise simply fell into place as the logical extension of that background, and how much of the background was manipulated in order to produce that Premise is, in all likelyhood, unknowable.  I have a tendency to believe that Tolkien was willing to manipulate his background after the fact when he needed to reach a certain point in the story but that's purely speculation.

Give a character a background and send him out into the world to make decisions based on that background.  You'll get yourself a theme based on whatever you put in the background, and hence get yourself a helping of Nar.  How well the events that transpire bring the theme to light it a matter of style and skill.

I'm on the cutter and dryer side.

You and Vincent are losing me here.
Since when did having a theme arise as the result of exploration qualify as Nar?  Didn't we just establish a few threads back, that themes in Sim play were entirely possible and common, and that the mere existance of a theme that can be identified after play finished is no indication that play was Nar.

I think so.

What differentiates theme as the result of Nar from theme as the result of Sim is whether there was a Premise being addressed during play by the participants at the table.

Translated to the world of novel writing then, in order for a novel to be Nar there has to be a Premise being addressed during writing by the author.  If the author is 100% focused on exploration and after he writes "the end" on the last page a critic can read the book and derive a theme...thats not Nar...that's Sim.  Theme or not.

So the issue in trying to answer whether a book is Nar or Sim has everything to do with how the author addressed the premise during "actual play/writing".  If he was addressing it intentionally during the writing process (and some books are written such that its obvious he was doing so) then one can say Nar.  If he wasn't and theme "just happened" then one can say Sim.  

If on the other hand the Nar is hidden under a strong emphasis in Exploration, the best you can do without consulting the author is say "could be either".  Might have been on purpose, might have "just happened"

I repeat that I agree that it was likely on purpose.  But to say its cut and dry is really overstating the position.  One can make a good arguement that it "just happened".  After all, look at all of the themes that people have attributed to the book that Tolkien during his life came out and said "No...had nothinng to do with that".  Never-the-less those themes are present.  They weren't intended, they "just happened".  Therefor not Nar themes.

In any case, this is really starting to discuss minutia in a tail chasing way.  The important thing is what can be learned from the discussion of such elements and not so much on reaching a definitive answer.