Samuel Leming said:
Perhaps a better basis for such a theory would be to identify what metagaming agendas are possible, or at least commonly used and then consider the effect their absence or amplitude have on play.
Yeah. That's how I ended up at the Forge. I put forward a similarly-based theory suggesting that one could categorize types of play based on how they functioned predictively. Players decide their characters should take actions based on a reasonable belief that the action will produce a particular outcome; I suggested games could be categorized based on what the player's predictive model centred on. It produced a threefold model that sounded superficially like the GNS system but, on closer examination, wasn't that much like it after all.
There was a rules-centred one where the player's main predictive tool was the rule book. There was a story/world-centred one where they player's main predictive tool was flavour text about the world and his character's lived experiences. And there was a symbolic/literary one where the player's main predictive tool was symbolic resonances between in-game events and literary and mythological tropes in the real world. The superficial parallel was further enhanced in that I was a proponent of the third, highly elitist, snobby kind of play that required a lot of explaining and showing off.
Aside from not being GNS, however, was the problem that my whole idea of a balanced game is to have an equal blend of players emphasizing each predictive model and that all the predictive models pointing towards similar actions was a sign of a successful game. Furthermore, I suggests that players could move happily from on mode to another and should do so.
I've since gotten kind of bored with this theory and instead try to minimize differences among different conceptions of play by trying to universalize the idea that rules=physics, regardless of how one plays, and that narrativist games are just simulationist but with post-modernist physics.
Illusionism? I don’t remember reading about that one, but it sounds interesting. You wouldn’t happen to have a link handy to a full explanation of that one.
No. But it's in the GNS articles. The first time I read them I missed them too; I re-read them last October and noticed Illusionism that time. Edwards was arguing that games by White Wold weren't really games because the players had no free will but were only conned into thinking they were playing, when, in fact, they were spectators. Just go through the GNS explanation with a Find/Search thing and you'll find it.
