[Old Thoughts] GNS Considered February 9, 2007
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Game Design, Jargon, Old Thoughts, Theory.add a comment
[I'll stop with this, really, at least for now...I just get in a digging mood and then want to repost things to look at them again. Sort of strange, I guess, but do I care, really? Originally posted March 23, 2006; lightly edited to correct typo and rearrange a paragraph break or two]
I’m taking a little break from my current Game Chef addiction to chat about the humor article in this month’s Dragon—’The Ecology of the Adventurer.’ Ok, actually I’m just going to talk about it for a second before using it to jump into an extended consideration of GNS that it made me consider. Still—it’s hilarious and I adore the way they describe each gaming style as if it were descriptive of the character and not the player. Yarr, here be intellectualizing.
Now, it is no surprise to anyone who has been reading this (are there people who do?) that I have this craft hobby horse, and that much of that centers on the difference between concept and medium, with the question of how the two inform each other rather than just dictating to each other.
So, there seems a way to apply this to the whole GNS talk (which I am always tempted to use with scare quotes, but I’ll take it ’seriously’ for this entry at least). When this happens, you get a historical and crafty perspective on the genre.
To start: Roleplaying seems to have its roots in a simulationist mindset. It is not news that the first rpg’s were essentially ‘first person shooter’ versions of tabletop wargames. People like Gygax & Arneson got curious about shifting the focus of wargaming away from units to individuals and started to add some fantasy dressing. Right away, simulationist—how do you represent a sword’s damage or how armor protects someone? Many rpg’s that followed were just as simulationist, but took as their point of departure that D&D didn’t get the simulation ‘right’—think Traveller or The Morrow Project.
Unless you start doing fullscale, hardcore re-enactments, any simulation will have to be based on rules meant to extract the ‘key’ features of ‘real’ life. In these elisions lie the space for other simulationists to make ‘better’ models—notice how bogged down sim games can get with charts, math, and so on.
The extraction also makes the gamist possible—unlike the laws of Newtonian physics which have to get back to the ‘actual’ behavior being described, game rules tend to be adopted and used without the constant harkening back to ‘reality.’ These sorts of rules relate more to each other than to the reality they first simmed, so they become susceptible to people who ‘play the rules’ rather than the simulation.
An example of the conflict between the two: I gamed with a guy who had spent some time in the military—while in the service, he played a lot of Twilight 2000. During a session, a player wants his character to jump a trench wearing a heavy pack. The GM says he can’t and the player complains that the rules say he can. The GM’s answer? He pulls together a real pack and asks the player to leap a certain distance with a running start. The GM said, in short, this game is a simulation—let’s test this rule. If it doesn’t work, we toss it. The ultimate proposition for a simulationist.
Now, narrativism comes a little later, when gamers realize that they are telling stories and that there all these cool tools for telling stories to be found in literature and cinema. This attitude isn’t absent in the early rpg’s, but it is superceded by the simulationist urges. I’ll argue that the simulationist perspective includes a latent narrativism—they want the sim to be right, because they want to believe it, because the want the story to possess a certain ‘force.’ It is just that, for them, a cool story is also a realistic story.
What happens with games like those produced by White Wolf? They suggest that we can believe a lot more than is possible, that we can use the tools of literature and cinema to expand upon our repertoire. Again, this isn’t exactly new—after all, fireballs? But the new breed stretched that even further. Thus we find a cogent appreciation for scene breaks, for climactic encounters as opposed to realistic ones, and so on. It is unfortunate that the community of gamers can be so clique driven—so we end up with Storyteller getting labeled ‘touchy feely’ crap by the old schoolers while the new schoolers start calling the old schoolers immature and socially challenged.
Ironically, the gamist perspective comes into its own just after the hey day of storytelling—3.0 D&D breaks with many of the sim conventions in order to introduce a game that is more playable, a game whose rules are easier and more enjoyable to use. Now, this gets done under the auspices of a certain kind of sim-narrativist attitude: too many rules about ‘realism’ spoil the game, make it difficult to get in character, make it difficult to believe. A really unbelievable but easily applied dynamic turns up to seem more ‘real’ sometimes than a detailed mechanic that accurately captures the ‘reality’ of a situation. This isn’t unsurprising, really—look at hardcore physics texts, do you see falling rocks, orbits, or (what is really there) strange symbols, diagrams, and formula?
Bigger than feedback February 8, 2007
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Applied, Game Design, Jargon, Methodological, Theory.add a comment
Okay, which is when I finally start to circle back to what Brand was actually talking about, namely games being about more than just getting shiny tokens. Trying to recapture that idea in my own native tongue ends up starting with the idea that a lot of us have a pretty low token-eating threshold. We get tired of games that are mostly about the fiddly exchange of dice for behavior quickly, especially when its primarily about the exchange.
One of the greater rewards of gaming end up being intellectual and emotional ones. Games like D&D can be pretty darned satisfying because of the degree of strategic and tactical thinking it brings out, so while there is an underlying token economy (in the behaviorist, you do this, you get this sense), there is also a robust intellectual work out, too.
That is harder to map into a strictly behaviorist picture because the rewards are much more complex, the feedback loop having significant detours in each participant’s thinking through options. This happens, too, in more emotional rpg’s. The detour just happens to be more affective than cognitive.
Broadly construed, that kind of spike in your brain’s workload is a sort of reward, a sort of positive feedback mechanism. However, it’s difficult to get much further using that language, because the activity is deeply embedded, the rewards being knotted up with the behavior itself. It’s what we call self-reflexive, in that it responds to and reinforces itself to a large degree.
So, Brand is nicely pointing out that a good game isn’t just a skinner box. It’s mechanics don’t just reward behavior, they flag and encourage the players to engage in certain kinds of self-reflexive (often reflective) activities. So, when you ask if your design suits the theme you have in mind, you are asking if the game highlights the kinds of cognitive-affective activities entailed in that theme.
I suspect a lot of times, this is a question of how it engages interpretive, context-sensitive modes of thought.
Which is all just a long, long way of saying, “yeah, what Brand said.” Hey, but one reason to have a blog is to foreground process and not just product (i.e. muddle through your head in the limited public that is the intertron;)
Communities with Something in Common November 20, 2006
Posted by Ian in About blog, Actual Play, Applied, Community, Jargon, Manifesto, Methodological, Theory.3 comments
This does not entail a rejection of the communities of gamers that are already out there, that subsume individual groups. Online forums and in-person conventions all have their place in the big picture. That place, however, is not the regulation of play styles but as trading zones for them.
The forum serves as a point through which different cloisters can appreciate each other, share their successes and failures. The appreciation should always come with a sense of distance. There needs to be less investment in the hobby or industry as a whole, as an individual thing whose well-being we need to care about. That focus makes it too easy to get invested in pronouncements that we feel must hold true for all cloisters. Instead, we need an ethic of appreciation, a willingness to just listen, read, and absorb the stories from other cloisters. Think of it as travelers from all over the world meeting in an airport. They come to the place with very different experiences, very different lives, and we can learn more by just sharing and interacting than by trying to offer advice about how to ‘fix’ what we perceive as their problems.
Conventions provide precious opportunities in which we get to encounter different playstyles. Rather than assuming that the playtyle with which we come to the table is the ideal one, we ought to come to the table ready to negotiate with different playstyles. The convention game is an actual play trading zone where we can experiment with new arrangements and share our styles. It is to accept that mediocre play may happen, but that mediocre play may be the first step toward a different and powerful play experience. Sometimes, too, it is just a lesson of how badly certain play styles go together, of how certai relationships need not be pursued. In short, it’s not unlike dating.
This ethic of appreciation is, again, not about some airy romantic love of the other. It’s an acknowledgment that a person’s play style is not simply a set of actions that they perform here and now, but a set of lessons which they have acquired from a great number of actual play experiences. Those lessons reflect layers of active social learning which cannot be easily summed up, learning which has to a great extent gone on outside of a strictly verbal framework.
Cloisters of Gamers November 20, 2006
Posted by Ian in About blog, Applied, Community, Jargon, Manifesto, Methodological, Theory.2 comments
So, what does the community of these actual players look like? What we have is not a central agency that helps standardize play, but a number of productive, small centers each fostering their own mode of play. Given some broad similarities in temperament and opportunity, there will probably be a great deal of overlap in the sort of play that these groups create. I like to think of these small groups as ‘cloisters’—small locally-minded groups with connections to a broader movement curious to explore the diversity of play.
Such cloisters are not isolated, but nor are they entirely exposed. We might term this a ‘peninsular’ model, in which they are connected to the main body of gamers by common texts but not determined on all sides by the community of gamer’s activity. They focus upon their own members and their own play more than on the major currents in gaming. There is a certain sense of distance and choice from the large currents, a feeling that they could embrace them or not as they prefer.
This will likely lead to a certain peculiarity in the way each cloister uses and develops terms to describe its play. Those peculiarities are not kinks to be straightened. They are like the stretching of your favorite jeans—not a sign that the jeans are ruined, but that they now fit your body’s actual shape. The peculiarity is a virtue, the outward expression of the group’s efforts to come to terms with each other, to compromise and bolster each other.
The cloister should be proud of its cloister speech, its inside jokes, and ingroup language. It should also appreciate that other cloisters have struggled to produce their own pidgin and creoles. When they go out from their cloister or seek entrance into a new cloister, they should understand that there will be no common language with which to begin. They will have to approach the new cloister with a mixture of reverence and commitment. Reverence for what the group has achieved, reverence for the fact that it will take time to pick up on that group’s peculiarities. Commitment to furthering that group, not just accepting what they have done and accommodating to it, but bringing to bear their own personality, their own virtues which can contribute to the cloister’s development.
