Quote from: CRKrueger;388127He thinks someone who immerses into a character to the point where 4e's level of dissociative mechanics impedes that immersion is either lying about it, or clinically insane.

No, I think a) what's immersive or not is entirely subjective and b) 4e's mechanics are any more of less disruptive to said immersion than any other set of mechanics.

Seanchai

Quote from: GnomeWorks;388109You can adopt the mental state of someone else while being fully aware of the fact that it is an adoption, that you are not actually that individual, just acting wholly as though you were.

Acting wholly? How could you ever act wholly as another person while still understanding that you're not that person? There's always going to be some kind of filter or process running in the background. For example, if you were "immersed" in the idea of being a person in a wheelchair and suddenly a fire broke out, the first thing that would pop in your head is, "I can just stand up and run away!"

Seanchai

Quote from: CRKrueger;388290I am a big fan of sub-dividing the term RPG into different categories because it's obvious that the term role-playing means different things to different people, hence the term becomes so general as to be meaningless without qualifiers.

I'm starting to think the same can be said for immersion.  A lot of people think of immersion as "losing yourself in something" ie. you get engrossed in what you are doing, then you realize 5 hours have gone by.  You can certainly be having so much fun in 4e that you become totally ingrossed in it.  You can certainly be so caught up in the story you're creating in a narrative game that the time flies by without realizing it.

What the "immersion crowd" in this thread are talking about however, is different, it's immersing into a setting, Lord Vreeg's "World in Motion".

Simulationist has been tainted by Uncle Ron, immersive unfortunately is becoming a "blanket term" because game designers do refer to different types of immersion.

So what the heck do we call it?  I get the feeling that if we came up with better terminology we could avoid some of these 600 post knockdown drag outs where the real reason we're fighting is that we're essentially debating a term using different definitions.

Verisimilitude.

"Realism" is right out, because you're playing a gnome who can make things catch on fire with her mind. "Immersion" is as you've noted a hapless three legged dog of a word. And "Simulationism" has been covered with six thousand word essays by the Ronster until it no longer means anything.

But Verisimilitude is a pretty good word. It's the extent to which the things that happen when you roll the dice and follow the rules match the way it seems like things should happen when you read the flavor text and describe the action.

-Frank

Quote from: two_fishes;388277Inevitably all arguments have to be decided by evidence, and that's something that's lacking in almost any RPG discussion. You can label mechanics associative or disassociative, and claim that disassociative mechanics interfere with immersion, but without a statistically meaningful survey of people playing the game, it's all just intellectual exercise.

It's not the lack of statistics that's hampering the discussion, it's the highly subjective nature of the subject matter.

Seanchai

Quote from: FrankTrollman;388309Verisimilitude.

"Realism" is right out, because you're playing a gnome who can make things catch on fire with her mind. "Immersion" is as you've noted a hapless three legged dog of a word. And "Simulationism" has been covered with six thousand word essays by the Ronster until it no longer means anything.

But Verisimilitude is a pretty good word. It's the extent to which the things that happen when you roll the dice and follow the rules match the way it seems like things should happen when you read the flavor text and describe the action.

-Frank

Yeah, but Justin uses 3:16 as an example of something that's "dissociated", yet it has verisimilitude because the actions follow logic, it's just that the scale is zoomed out a bit (rather than "mismatching" what would happen in reality).

I mean, I'm all for using the term as it describes what certain people like in terms of how mechanics shape the game-world, but I'm not sure it's 100% compatible with Justin's ideas of "dissociated" or "associated" mechanics.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;388309Verisimilitude.

"Realism" is right out, because you're playing a gnome who can make things catch on fire with her mind. "Immersion" is as you've noted a hapless three legged dog of a word. And "Simulationism" has been covered with six thousand word essays by the Ronster until it no longer means anything.

But Verisimilitude is a pretty good word. It's the extent to which the things that happen when you roll the dice and follow the rules match the way it seems like things should happen when you read the flavor text and describe the action.

-Frank

"Suspension of disbelief" is another important one, albeit one I'm afraid gamers have sadly all but forgotten.

To be honest I'm more and more finding it hard to find gamers who are even capable of it.  Half of them are just that dense, and the other half seem to have sprung up around some hipster trend of simply refusing to accept premise, the kind of idiots who write things like "D&D dungeons are genocide".

Quote from: LordVreeg;388280The internet can be a tough medium.  Your post
Stormy was giving you an example of Argumentum ad populum, which is a docuemented logical fallacy you were guilty of.  

Saying you can't look into other people's heads is not a logical fallacy. "The opposition" kept making claims that they could not hold. End of story. It is not Argumentum ad populum every time something brings a crowd into the mix and I wasn't saying "you are wrong because these many other people say so" I was saying "you are wrong, because you contradict these many people who have no reason to lie and into whose heads you cannot look".

@moving the goalpost: I did not. I just didn't repeat metagaming, which I did not have to as plenty of people immerse themselves just fine while metagaming. And one guys metagaming is the next guys "genre emulation".

Quote from: J Arcane;388318"Suspension of disbelief" is another important one, albeit one I'm afraid gamers have sadly all but forgotten.

To be honest I'm more and more finding it hard to find gamers who are even capable of it.  Half of them are just that dense, and the other half seem to have sprung up around some hipster trend of simply refusing to accept premise, the kind of idiots who write things like "D&D dungeons are genocide".

I'm wondering how much of a deforming mirror effect the internet creates in that respect.

I'm not meeting that many gamers who are completely stuck in their ways of suspending disbelief, if at all, but at the same time, the people I've been playing with for the last while have been people I introduced to RPGs myself: new comers to RPGs and children are usually more able to suspend disbelief than people who already are hardcore gamers, in my experience.

Still, there seems to be a "bladders for lanterns" effect on the internet. I wonder to which extent it makes this issue of suspension of disbelief or lack thereof a greater issue than it really is by giving virtual bullhorns to the "D&D is genocide" people in the first place.

Quote from: Saphim;388321...I wasn't saying "you are wrong because these many other people say so" I was saying "you are wrong, because you contradict these many people who have no reason to lie and into whose heads you cannot look".

It's the exact same thing, as soon as you are trying to show someone is 'wrong'.  If you attempt to counter an argument by demonstrating a certain population adheres to your argument, it is ad populum, plain and simple.

Look, I am hardly a staunch epistemologist or anything.  But there are ideas that are subjective, and ideas that are objective.  Calling an argument 'subjective' in order to undercut the premise only means that you are incapable of addressing the actual discussion.  Especially when you have several people presenting cogent, internally consistent, and coherent reasons why it isn't 'subjective'.  So, this kind of crap may fly in your Philo 101 class, but around here, it gets irritating fast.

Quote from: Benoist;388325Still, there seems to be a "bladders for lanterns" effect on the internet.

WTF???

I have a plan to make trillions of dollars.  Forget simple language translators, I am going to start a service that translates idioms.  

Quote from: StormBringer;388328But there are ideas that are subjective, and ideas that are objective.

1 + 1 = 3

2 + 2 = 5

...

Again, I'm not convinced that "associative" or "disassociative" are anything more than technical sounding jargon to lend credibility to a fairly arbitrary and subjective distinction between the sorts of mechanics you like and those you dislike. Justin Alexander said that disassociated mechanics "are disconnected from the game world" but does he mean by that. Fate points have been brought up as an example of disassociated mechanics, but Fate points are connected to the game world--their use has an effect on the game world. They may not have a direct corollary to the fiction, but I personally don't find the decision to use them any more disruptive to immersion than, say, comparing the physical strength score of my character against the determined weight of an object. It may be even less. If I as a player immersed in a character need to decide whether or not to decide to attempt lift something, I can make that decision and then decide to use the Fate point in the resolution, or do the strength/weight comparison in the resolution. In both cases, the decision point for the character happens "in immersion". Or, in both I can check my available Fate points or check the Strength/weight comparison prior to making the in-character decision. In both cases the immersion is "broken". It's a matter of when the rules are engaged rather than what the rules actually are.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;387990Going beyond that, I'm willing to make an even more provocative statement: When you are using dissociated mechanics you are not roleplaying

Why not? I may be using a "disassociated" mechanic, like Fate points, as a signal to indicate how much an outcome matters to me the player and by proxy me my character. I am looking at the situation as a character and giving it an emotional weight. As a player I may be aware of how that emotional weight affects the gameworld, but I don't see how that knowledge necessarily breaks my immersive connection with the character. It may even help. Spending Fate points costs me the player resources and so makes the decision more important; makes decisions that are important to me my character mechanically important to me the player. It heightens empathy with the character, facilitating immersion with the character.

And, I haven't seen any refutation that rules complexity has a far greater effect on most players ability to immerse than the actual manner of the rules. CRKreuger's stance seems to be that distraction is what breaks immersion ("You get an actor doing a serious dramatic scene, and no one makes a sound, no one even gets in their line of sight, because at that level of immersion it is extremely easy to lose it.") In that vein, the simpler (and typically, by necessity, "more disassociative") a mechanic is, the better it is for immersion. Association to the gameworld doesn't really enter into it, since any stop to roll dice is going to break immersion anyway. The more mental work the resolution mechanic requires, the more it's going to break immersion.

Quote from: StormBringer;388330WTF???

I have a plan to make trillions of dollars.  Forget simple language translators, I am going to start a service that translates idioms.  

LOL "Prendre des vessies pour des lanternes". French idiom. Means that you're taking something, considering an idea or concept say, and giving it much more importance than it really deserves.

Quote from: two_fishes;388333Again, I'm not convinced that "associative" or "disassociative" are anything more than technical sounding jargon to lend credibility to a fairly arbitrary and subjective distinction between the sorts of mechanics you like and those you dislike.

In practice, this is how political type discussions sometimes degenerate into.  After awhile, it becomes a "battle of definitions".

I have one offline friend who always uses semi-political terms to mean something completely different than the dictionary definitions.  Most of the time I have a hard time understanding the point he is trying to make, until I ask him to precisely define the terms he is using.  After awhile, I feel like I'm wasting my time talking with him about anything political.  (ie.  He's essentially playing with loaded dice).

The last several times I talked politics with this particular friend, I always stopped him in mid-sentence and demanded that he define every term he is using, so that there was no misunderstanding.  Essentially I caught him in a lie a few times, whenever he uses a particular term to mean different things in the same context.  (ie.  For example, this would be equivalent of defining the word "yes" to really mean "no", while simultaneously the word "no" to really mean "no").  He couldn't even get his own terminology straight, without twisting himself into verbal pretzel knots.

Quote from: Benoist;388325I'm wondering how much of a deforming mirror effect the internet creates in that respect.

I'm not meeting that many gamers who are completely stuck in their ways of suspending disbelief, if at all, but at the same time, the people I've been playing with for the last while have been people I introduced to RPGs myself: new comers to RPGs and children are usually more able to suspend disbelief than people who already are hardcore gamers, in my experience.

Still, there seems to be a "bladders for lanterns" effect on the internet. I wonder to which extent it makes this issue of suspension of disbelief or lack thereof a greater issue than it really is by giving virtual bullhorns to the "D&D is genocide" people in the first place.

It just seems like for one excuse or another, I can no longer seem to find real players who are willing and able to accept the fiction of the game world.  It's not a thing for them, they're just not willing to treat it as a real environment, to suspend disbelief as it were.

I'll agree to a limited extent that the "D&D is genocide" types are more common on the Internet, but I've encountered people like that IRL too, who insist on arguing against the most basic premises of the game in the most narrowly defined way, either because they like being argumentative douchebags, or because they think it's "funny".

Then you have the players who simply don't pay any fucking attention to what's going on and just roll the dice whenever they're told to, the ones who're more in it to see how badass a character they can roll up and still get it past the GM, the ones who ignore or seem to even react with hostility to anything that might present even the most basic backstory or fiction into the game.

I've even encountered quite a few who seem to treat the very idea of actually roleplaying something with open hostility, like it's some magic threshold where suddenly the past-time has just become too much of a geek endeavor for their tiny cocks to withstand. The other day I actually had a prospective D&D player inform a friend and I that any use of "voices", as he put it, meant he'd refuse to participate further in the game.

I'm just fucking sick of it.  The truth is, 4e isn't the problem, or the cause of the problem, it's just a symptom of it.  It's a generation too in love with irony and a very video game mindset to actually engage the game as it was meant to played, as a fucking roleplaying game.  D&D itself has become this ironic hipster geek thing, to be strutted out to gain "cred" in this burgeoning web geek culture that's formed in the last few years, and treated with the same overt self-awareness one expects from fans of B-movies and MST3K.  Everything is fucking cliche and shite and no one takes anything remotely fucking seriously, because otherwise you've suddenly crossed an invisible line and become one of "those guys", you know, the guys who actually are geeks instead of pretending to be them because it's cool to say on the internet.  

So you get lots of "dissociative mechanics" or whatever the fuck, because associating with them in the first place is anathema.