Quote from: Pierce InverarityTony, my conclusions aren't based on two words by you but on following Forge discussions for quite a while. When it comes to Sim you guys got nothing. Not three years ago and, given your above post, not now.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.  You seem (to my eyes) to be saying more than simply that I don't have a theoretical foundation for designing games to encourage this type of play (whether you call it Sim or, as JimBob advocates, discuss actual play in your own terms).

I agree that I don't have a theoretical foundation for this type of play.  You'll get no argument from me on that.  But you seem to be saying that I have nothing but I claim to have a complete understanding.  That part puzzles me.  Am I reading you wrong?

JimBob FTW.

By the way, didn't we have this discussion some time ago?

Quote from: JimBobOzThe point is that when you discuss things using their sloppy terminology, they've already mostly won the argument.

Totally.  If you want to talk about something (for instance Actual Play) that you don't think GNS terms cover properly then you should try to say something positive in terms that you think do describe your subject.

Quote from: JimBobOzThe point is that when you discuss things using their sloppy terminology, they've already mostly won the argument.

I know, but man, I gotta tough time passing on easy jokes. Caused me trouble before, but I don't mean anything by it except as observation.

I think GNS has infected common parlance because the words it uses look like actual words, words that describe the things that make up a roleplaying game. It's easy to mistake the concepts of GNS for actual things if you've never read the essays and are just interpreting their meaning based on their apparent roots.

Take "Gamism".

Quote from: Some hypothetical lurker, as yet innocent of the ForgeWell, "game" is the second word there, isn't it? And it's preceeded by "playing". If I didn't like games, I wouldn't be playing them. So...this must be, what? Playing with the system, right? Like character builds and getting positive modifiers and such. Well, yeah I like using the system. I get to roll dice and shit. Gamism's cool!

Poor fool. After being corrected by an Inner Circle member and directed to a dozen essays, he gets to the glossary and looks up Gamism. Of course, Gamism isn't defined under 'Gamism', but rather its cute little catch phrase "Step On Up (to flavor!)" The secret meaning, reliant on "social assessment of personal strategy and risk", doesn't really smack of "game", does it? But if that Inner Circle member never comes along to help with his indoctrination, he could easily be using Gamism to mean "playing with the system like a new toy", which people actually enjoy, and I must confess from my example 3.5 provides like few others.

Or Simulationism?

Quote from: Same dude as aboveSo, obviously the setting should seem consistent and the characters believable, without trying to pretend they're real. No "everybody talks in character all night", but we're trying to maximize the apparent reality of the world to all participants? Yeah, totally. I enjoy my play more when I can buy into the events of play. Guess I'm simulationist, though I kinda wish they'd talk about it more.

But, alas, he is once again confused by the similarities between Forgite and English. Interestingly, the Glossary definition ("Commitment to the imagined events of play, specifically their in-game causes and pre-established thematic elements") actually does pretty well for his reading of it, but appears to share very little with the way it's defined in active discussion (i.e., pointless 'realism' minutiae or nothing happens). So people try to use their understanding of it, but get shouted down because when they talk about it seems attractive or interesting, instead of a cowardly retreat.

Narrativism, well, they totally shoot themselves in the foot here. On the internet at large (as it relates to RPGs), Narrativism just looks like "The kind of person who thinks playing Igor through a railroad module is fun", so people use it to describe "Forge games".

Not saying it's right, just theorizing out loud, kinda. This post might be a waste of time, though I'm wondering if there's some mileage in buying into the setting/events vs. buying into the game.

To be kind of productive, I'd venture that if you used the actual English definitions of the words, then you'd have something much closer to an actual gaming theory. In any game, you do have mechanics, and a games internal logic being consistant is pretty important to a lot of people. Then you have narrative flow, which is either trying to be simulated by mechanics, or it's not.

Like I said, though, the reason why I think Nar got all the action is because it's the only aspect of the trifecta that actually facilitated something that looks like a new type of game. Of course, when the peeps tried to use narrative techniques (and I'm talking about the type found in actual lit), then you end up with a game that only plays one story over and over again. (Polaris, I'm looking at you.) They're games in the same way a rail-roaded module is a game, but they come with their own special systems.

This is ok if you want a one shot, in some cases, but for long campaigns, it's problematic. Once you try to get anything longer then a one shot, that whole theory falls apart. So, that's why, I think.

Quote from: Thanatos02To be kind of productive, I'd venture that if you used the actual English definitions of the words, then you'd have something much closer to an actual gaming theory. In any game, you do have mechanics, and a games internal logic being consistant is pretty important to a lot of people. Then you have narrative flow, which is either trying to be simulated by mechanics, or it's not.

Absolutely. When I first heard GNS, it made perfect sense to me. "Well, yeah. Roleplaying games being a simulation of a reality in which participants, while playing a role, utilize a game system to establish the events of an ongoing narrative." I figured it was a theory that dealt with the full experience of gaming, that gave some good ways to tie all of those bolded words together.

Then I read the articles, and realized that while we all exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, spend up to one third of our time unconscious, and consume organic matter for biological fuel, some people will remain forever outside my realm of understanding.

Yes, Jimbob is right--approaching this issue from the perspective of GNS skews things out of the gate. If you forget about GNS, then the Forge's bias is even narrower and clearer: the bulk of attention and kudos is for games that use a specific set of techniques--narration-trading and/or mechanical "conflict resolution" via pre-narration, mechanics that operate directly on the metagame level and leave in-game continuity to be handwaved, explicit "flags", high levels of improv ("no-myth"), and maybe a few others.

What these all have in common is foregrounding the metagame, lack of respect for "in-game" reality except as conscious artifice, and deliberate attempts to engineer social relations via rules and artificial economies.

If these sorts of mechanics were cast off or reformulated as advice and/or "capstones", then I think the products would have a wider appeal even if Ron et. al. still considered those games as Nar; conversely as long as those sorts of mechanics are foregrounded, I think the resulting games will be labeled as "Forge-y" regardless of whether Forge theorists officially consider them to be Sim.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityYou want to do Sim, you go do some reading. Take it up a notch, from what you remember about Anthropology 101 to grad school proseminar level.

So you're saying that (this form of) sim requires postgrad reading levels? Does the journey count?

Journeys are good... so long as we're traveling under a deadline. Allow me to join two metaphors into one unholy image, and say I'm here to kick people in the butt with the big picture.

Quote from: JimBobOzGNS is bollocks. The categories are arbitrary and meaningless. My daily horoscope in the newspaper has more insight into my game play style than does GNS.

Y'know, with a good enough horoscope writer, I can see that.

I mean, we're talking about reflecting reality off of someone's made-up idea of what reality is, in order to try and see something new and useful in the actual thing.  The person applying the reflection, and their ability to do so, can be much more important than the made-up device they're using to do the reflecting with.

Seeing Mr. Edwards apply GNS thinking to my actual play was fairly neat.  Every attempt by anyone else to apply that specific chunk of stuff to anything I've ever seen has been totally useless to me.

Thing is, Levi, we have to be careful with this thing of seeing patterns everywhere. We like to think humans think logically, but that's not how our brains work. What happens is that we try to see patterns, to draw different things together. In fact, along with mathematic and linguistic and so on, "pattern recognition" is one of the measures of intelligence.

But we're so keen on seeing patterns that sometimes we see them even when they're not there. If you've ever sat half-drunk watching static when the tv station closed down for the night, you start to see things moving in the static. Any soldier who's ever sat watch on a moonless overcast night will tell you - you sit there staring into space long enough, you start seeing movement, too. That tree stump starts looking like a soldier crawling to come and get you.

That's what we do visually, we take bits of information and try to make them into a whole picture. We're so good at doing that, we even make pictures when there's nothing there. That's the purpose of the Rorsharch tests - show people a splodge, what do they see? What they see doesn't tell us anything about the splodge, it tells us about them.

So when someone categorises and describes your experience for you, they're revealing far more about themselves than they are about your experience. Your experience described and categorised by them is a Rorsharch test for them. If you feel their description is "true", that simply means you've got some inner similarity to that person, some sort of connection.

Of course, your roleplaying experience is not a true Rorsharch test - your description of your experience is not a meaningless splodge. But no description is complete; in every description, things will be left unsaid, some things described in words which have one meaning for the speaker, and another for the listener. That stuff left unsaid, or said in ambiguous words, that's the Rorsharch test of that passage. You know how you were saying that semi-nakedness is sexier than nakedness, because our mind fills in the blanks? And of course the same is true of horror - something moving, heard but not seen, holds more horrific dread for us than something out there in the open, seen, because our mind fills in the blanks. Well, where your description of your game session is vague, someone's mind is going to fill in the blanks to make it sexy or horrific.

And even the clear words of that description will be filtered through the listener's personal experiences - that's why sometimes when we describe things, we get a response from someone we consider ridiculous, they're carrying baggage from some previous experience.

Western horoscopes, Chinese horoscopes, types of shoe, kinds of food, colours, kinds of music, psychological or sexual preferences or deviances, art movements - we could use any or all of these to describe and categorise our experiences, and because humans seek patterns even where there are none, the description would make sense to someone or other.

Don't make it true.

Hehehehe...sorry...that's just a funny image to me...

Madame Ronda Edwarsito - Palm Reader/Fortune Teller Extraordinaire...

Quote from: JimBobOzThing is, Levi, we have to be careful with this thing of seeing patterns everywhere. We like to think humans think logically, but that's not how our brains work. What happens is that we try to see patterns, to draw different things together. In fact, along with mathematic and linguistic and so on, "pattern recognition" is one of the measures of intelligence.

But we're so keen on seeing patterns that sometimes we see them even when they're not there. If you've ever sat half-drunk watching static when the tv station closed down for the night, you start to see things moving in the static. Any soldier who's ever sat watch on a moonless overcast night will tell you - you sit there staring into space long enough, you start seeing movement, too. That tree stump starts looking like a soldier crawling to come and get you.

That's what we do visually, we take bits of information and try to make them into a whole picture. We're so good at doing that, we even make pictures when there's nothing there.

There is a similar auditory phenomena - I forget what it's called.  When it's very quiet, you can swear the TV or radio are on, or something similar.  In actuality, it's your mind taking in the white noise and trying to make some sense of it - because that's what it does the other 95% of the time when there's meaningful noise...

Sorry...back to the thread...

Quote from: James J SkachSorry...back to the thread...

I don't honestly think we've left the topic.

Almost all gaming theory to date has been a screen to throw your experiences against, and see what new pattern emerges.  

Or, well, that's how it has been useful to me.

I tried to go with the whole make-a-true-theory route; I'm convinced that the whole direction is basically rubbish.  On the other hand, make-a-theory-that-shows-you-useful-stuff?  Still fairly interesting.