[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?
[Old Thoughts] Memories of the Ol’ Hobbying Hole February 9, 2007
Posted by Ian in Applied, Cool Links, Old Thoughts, Personal Reflection.add a comment
[Someone, somewhere mentioned McCloud on Story-Games. I'm too lazy to pin down the source, but it made me want to dig this up from my old blog. While I was at it, I just decided to repost it in its not so glorious original form. First posted February 9, 2006.]
I spent a few hours the other day flipping through my wife’s copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. It’s a good book and the fact that it uses the comic book medium to explain comic books is just smart. You not only learn about comics but see the concepts illustrated in the explanation itself (we call that ‘performative’ where I come from).
Now, there is a lot to be said about this book, but I want to zoom in on a particular observation—that one way to maximize the empathy we have for a character is to make the character’s depiction as simple as possible. The fewer the details composing the character, the easier it is for us to put ourselves in their shoes, the more room we have to ‘live’ through that character. He cites a couple of major works like Tin Tin and Cerebrus that employ this technique, but you really don’t have to go any further than the smiling and frowning bubbles that populate Zoloft commercials to appreciate his point. How difficult is it not to feel for the little buggers? I have talked a lot about my intellectual interest in gaming, but this reminds me of another very important aspect of it—all the imaginative pictures.
When I was wee gamer in a city far away, I spent a lot of time hanging around my favorite hobby shop (Titan Games & Comics) poring over games and it isn’t the rules that I remember most clearly. It’s all the illustrations (interior and exterior) and the suggestive taglines that accompanied them. I didn’t buy games primarily for their rules, but for the hope that the rules would capture the magic created by the juxtaposition of text and word. They didn’t even have to be well-drawn pictures and well-written text to capture my imagination. They touched on an amorphous reservoir of dreams, a mysterious place occupied by half-formed beings waiting for the right invitation to enter my conscious mind.
McCloud also made me consider something else—if you want a good roleplaying experience, one in which the players get in character, you probably shouldn’t go overboard in getting them to describe their characters. The best characters to roleplay are probably iconic in one way or another, composed of a few basic characteristics that indicate something of their character—character description a la Charles Dickens, if you will. That leaves the player the most room to live in their character, to invest them with life. Too much description and backstory gives the player too much rope—they spend all their time trying to put all the pieces together and not living them. The intellectual exercise of that may be fun, too, but it is a different sort of fun than straight roleplaying. I suspect the same goes for plots and npc’s on the DM’s end. Use description to sketch a world, drawing in detail only where it gives the players more room to act, to extend their involvement in the world. Maybe just sketch out the basics and let the players actions determine what else gets fleshed out. This goes to the recent decisions by Wizards of the Coast to keep flavor text short.
[Old Thoughts] Old School February 6, 2007
Posted by Ian in Community, Game Design, Old Thoughts.add a comment
[This is just something from my old blog, which I decided to dredge back up and repost here as a little salvaging operation. It was first posted April 6, 2006.]
I recently picked up a copy of the old AD&D Players Option: Skills and Powers and you know what–there were some darn cool ideas in there. At its heart lies the effort to make character classes and races more modular, easier to tailor to different sorts of settings. In retrospect, I may prefer the simplicity of that to the direction customizability went in 3.0 and 3.5 D&D—namely, prestige classes.
This interests me because I used to go around thinking that we (myself and the gaming community as a whole) had moved beyond the ‘rudimentary’ efforts of AD&D. I came back to 3.0 with the notion that they had really fixed the game and freed it from its archaic clumsiness. In short, I accepted a very simple idea of what it meant for a game to evolve. I treated the evolution to be one directional, with all the bad things in the past and the good things in the present and future.
This is not the case. Evolution is a question of suitability and suitability always presumes an implicit ’suited to.’ Old school AD&D is suited to do certain things well, certain other things not so well. The same can be said for any game—the old games I grew up with are not archaic, the new ones aren’t ‘high tech.’ What has changed is not the inherent quality of the games but the expectations that I have for the game. The one good thing about us (as gamers) today is that we (as a community) have become more self-reflective about the relationship between expectation and rules. We appreciate that different rules better suit different premises and audiences.
Unfortunately, we now have a tendency to see products of a less self-reflective moment in our history as less valuable. We forget that many of those pioneers we disregard as ‘grognards’ are and were no less reflective. They struggles with premise and rules, experimenting with home brews and alternative mechanics. They may have been less theoried than ourselves, but they shared a commitment to rules that worked for their aims.
More importantly, though, we forget that self-reflectiveness is no guarantee of quality. It gives us a false sense of awareness and makes it easier for us to ignore biases that fall outside our well-crafted terms. We can be far worse than any of the grognards because we *believe* that we understand how things actually work.
[Old Thoughts] Orality October 13, 2006
Posted by Ian in Applied, Methodological, Old Thoughts, Theory.add a comment
Dated 6/7/2006
Ok, so I have had this bee buzzing madly back and forth in the back of my skull for a few days. I have been reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wave in the Mind and it has been stimulating some old interests (like those raised by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller”). So, questions and thoughts I need to get out:
How deeply do oral structures (here I’m thinking about all that chat about orality that folks like Walter Ong use) play into rpg’s? Are rpg’s more fun when they are designed and played with certain oral structures in mind?
Some classic oral structures: repetition of certain metaphors, phrases, that provide the piece with an internal unity; call and response where, partially because the audience knows the repetitions, they are called to fill in the next line, to participate in the telling (something that seems pretty important for RPG’s).
Lower down on the abstraction ladder:
How do we use repetition in a rpg? How much can call-and-response structures build up the enjoyment of the game and player interaction?
Almost stepping onto the concrete:
I’m thinking in part about how, as we play rpg’s, we develop in-jokes and in-routines—so and so mentions x, so and so responds y (and everyone inwardly takes comfort in its predictability). Those seem very useful during play, the building blocks of higher level cooperation.
What about repetition in the storytelling? Where the same verbal elements reappear in descriptions or behavior?
Actual play:
I ran a game where one player regularly made it his aim to challenge someone in any new town he entered. It was a high-level D&D game and the character clearly overshadowed any potential rival. So, I always sort of avoided engaging the player on that front. Then, it hit me, that I was breaking one of my cardinal principals, namely: let players do the things they want. I had devalued that interaction so as to not even let it register on my radar of hooks to develop.
So, I got a chance to run the same players in a low-level setting, the whole stride into town and discover a great evil hidden beneath its mundane appearance. I deliberately put an NPC in the town that would not only be a worthy challenge, but eager to engage. Boom, PC challenges NPC to an arm-wrestling match—and it was wonderful. Everyone enjoyed it and it fed right into some meaningful social interaction.
If I had caught that earlier, I’m pretty sure that I would have been even more successful in repetition.
There is another question about secondary orality (orality that comes to exist on the basis of printed texts—like reading groups), but that brings up a whole ‘nother ball of wax
