I just read it.
For what it's worth, here are my main thoughts about it.
It starts with a definition of RPGing:
It is a table-top game played by a group of people. That game consists of people role-playing their characters in a continuing series of events set in a self-consistent setting with consistent rules.
It then breaks that definition up into G, N and S components:
It is a table-top game (Gamist) played by a group of people. That game consists of people role-playing their characters in a continuing series of events (Story) set in a self-consistent setting with consistent rules (Simulation).
It then uses that break up to accuse GNS of missing the point about RPGing, by insisting on the "only one creative agenda at a time" principle:
It is table-top game (Gamist) played by a group of people OR it consists of people role-playing their characters in a continuing series of events (Story) OR it is set in a self-consistent setting with consistent rules (Simulation).
I'm not personally 100% sure that the "only one agenda at a time" claim is true, in part because I think the distinction that Edwards et al deploy between "agendas" and "techniques" is somewhat loose - and Edwards himself seems to come close to allowing this when
he says that:
Gamist and Narrativist play don't tug-of-war over "doing it right" - they simply avoid one another, like the same-end poles of two magnets. Note, I'm saying play, not players. The activity of play doesn't hybridize well between Gamism and Narrativism, but it does shift, sometimes quite easily.
(This sort of passage tends, for me, to push against the view that GNS is about labelling and dividing the community. I know others see Edwards' writing differently.)
But even if the "only one agenda" claim is true, the criticism on those blogs wouldn't follow. Gamism is not about "playing a game". It's about doing well at the game being the point of play. Narrativism isn't about there being a "continuos series of events". It's about group play being capable of producing aesthetically satisfying fiction.
Because I don't think the criticism is fair or accurate, I don't think that these conclusions follow:
Indeed, if followed the model will produce something that is basically another type of game completely. . .
The Forges definition of Narrativist while very specific is still a method of viewing a Story based campaign. Some people like it. The games produced (for the best examples of the theory) by the theory are not what people commonly consider to be RPGs- but they are still games of some type liked by a certain type of player.
This is the first time I've heard it suggested that Dogs in the Vineyard, Sorcerer, My Life With Master, etc aren't RPGs. (And for me, it echoes the frequent characterisation of 4e as a boardgame rather than an RPG.)
I also don't think it's true to say that GNS involves
a very specific concept of Story. One that isn't one in common use by any means, and one that likely didn't apply to any significant number of rpg campaigns until he started to apply it.
Edwards' notion of "story" is straightforward enough - something of aesthetic appeal and aesthetic worth. (He is ambiguous about the relationship beteen appeal and worth, and has an overly moralised conception of what things are aesthetically worthwhile, which happily he drops when he actually starts talking about games, as opposed to talking abstractly about what story involves.) I've played in a lot of RPG sessions and campaigns - not just my own - where that sort of story is going on, although back in the years when I was doing a lot of play outside my own group people weren't very self-conscious about Forge-y techniques, and (especialy because of AD&D 2nd ed and Vampire, I would say) there was an excessive emphasis on the GM as the progenitor of the story.
But if I had to sum up my objection to the objection, it would be that
this is presented as if it were a strong reason to reject GNS:
It is inherently subject to Definition Conflict, and thus flamewars
There are obvious ad hominem avenues of rebuttal here - the refutation of GNS depends upon definitions, for example, that are highly contestable - a lot of Basic D&D lacks a continuing seris of events, for example, because the passage of time between trips to the dungeon is simply handwaved away.
But - and this goes back to my exchangs with Umbran earlier in this thread (and like Umbran this blog draws on the WotC data) - I don't regard it as an objection to an interpretive theory that its characterisation of some value, or of some domain of human activity, is contestable and contested. Simple example: Rawls' may be wrong in his account of fairness, in his account of the relationship between fairness and justice, in his claim that justice is the preeminent virtue of a society, etc. But you can't show he's wrong just by showing that others - including eminent others like Nozick - contest his account of fairness, of justice, of the relationship between these two values, of the relationship of justice to overall social virtue, etc.
Hardly anything worth saying about human affairs is uncontroversial!
I read about the brain damage here
Comments on the GNS Model
I've read the brain damage thread, although it was a while ago now (but well after the actual event).
As I recall it, it is not that
Ron thinks of other definitions of Story . . . [as] brain-damaged.
As I recall it, Edwards said that people had lost the ability to understand what it means to create a story from playing Storyteller RPGs. (This loss of ability was the so-called brain damage - Edwards makes it clear that he's a mind-brain identity guy, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's a hardcore Chomskyan!)
Here is an example, from Vincent Baker's blog:
protagonism was so badly injured during the history of role-playing (1970-ish through the present, with the height of the effect being the early 1990s), that participants in that hobby are perhaps the very last people on earth who could be expected to produce *all* the components of a functional story. No, the most functional among them can only be counted on to seize protagonism in their stump-fingered hands and scream protectively. You can tag Sorcerer with this diagnosis, instantly.
Notice that he includes
himself among the braindamaged - so he's not talking about people with differing views from his about what story means - though he also regards himself as among the most functional of the braindamaged.
What he's claiming is that the practice of RPGs - especially early 90s storyteller RPGing damages the understanding of protagonism - of story creation.
Here is another example, probably more outrage-provoking:
a human being can routinely understand, enjoy, and (with some practice) create stories. I think most postmodernism is arrant garbage, so I'll say that a story is a fictional series of events which present a conflict and a resolution, with the emergent/resulting audience experience of "theme." . . .
the routine human capacity for understanding, enjoying, and creating stories is damaged . . . by repeated "storytelling role-playing" as promulgated through many role-playing games of a specific type. This type is only one game in terms of procedures, but it's represented across several dozens of titles and about fifteen to twenty years, peaking about ten years ago [ie mid-90s]. Think of it as a "way" to role-play rather than any single title.
I now hold the viewpoint that in every generation, inspired and interested young teens and younger college students are introduced to a fascinating new activity that they are eminently qualified to excel at and enjoy greatly. However, subculturally speaking, it's a bait-and-switch, especially during the time-period outlined above. Instead, they were and are exposed to damaging behavior as they learn what to do, and therefore, the following things happen. (1) They associate the procedures they are learning with the activity itself, as a definition. (2) The original purpose which interested them is obscured or replaced with the "thing," or pseudo-thing, of the new purpose, which no one is qualified to excel at, nor does it offer any particular intrinsic rewards.
The vast majority of people so exposed quite reasonably recoil and find other things to do. Some stay and continue to participate. Socially, the activity occurs among the generational wave-front of the young teens and young college students, losing most as it goes, retaining a few each iteration, but always replenished by the new bunch. Of the ones who remain involved, many are vaguely frustrated and dissatisfied, and some of them gain power within that subculture and work hard to perpetuate it.
Now I don't know what toxic personalities and behaviours Edwards encounterd to make him write this. I have my own memories of university roleplaying clubs in the early to mid 90s, and while I wouldn't describe what I saw there in quite the strong terms that Edwards uses, and I also would regard the RPGing as only one component of a much bigger social dynamic, I did see things that fit what Edwards is describing - in particular the exercise, by GMs who were also dominant figures in this subculture, of their self-asserted power as GMs over
the story and
the game, as one element in a broader matrix of power exercised over acolytes or wannabe acolytes.
I would say that it was a social dynamic not radically different, in some of its broad features, from that of various and notorious cults that also like to collect their members from vulnerable late-teens who are newly commencing university/college students.
I had the good fortune to recruit some players, who became long term players in my game and long term friends, from refugees from games run by participants in this milieu. I also myself played in some games within this milieu, but mostly as an outsider, and in the only ongoing campaign I took part in remain very pleased with my role, as a player, in bringing the focus of play away from the GM and a would-be dominant player colluding with him to "own" the story, back to the rest of the players, and our PCs, and the various stories that we were trying to tell. (Was I therefore a "problem player"? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure the game folded not long after I quit it due to commencing full time work.)
I think Edwards' pejorative remarks about pastiche also have to be read in a similar social context. Everyone - or, at least, every roleplayer - presumably has some genre story or stories that s/he enjoys, and that inform his/her own story creation as a roleplayer - tropes, thematic concerns, characters who spoke to us and whom we like to echo, etc. When Edwards is attacking pastiche in RPGing, he is talking (I think) about the social pressure, within a certain sort of subculture associated at least weakly with sci-fi and fanatsy fans (including the RPGers among them) to adhere to
the story, the "canon", the world, as an already-given thing (or, more often, an already
purchased thing), to which a would-be player's own protagonistic inclinations must be subordinated.
This is why I always agree with [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] when debates break out on these boards about excesses of player entitlement, a GM's prerogative to control the game, etc. Of course the GM has some say over what game will be run, just as the players do to - if only by saying, if you're going to GM that than let's all go to the movies instead! But as soon as someone thinks that
it is important to call out a GM's prerogative, as if the banal fact that the GM is a human being too, participating in a voluntary leisure activity, wasn't all that we needed to know, then I react in the same fashion as Hussar. And I get a feeling of hostility to player protagonism that I don't understand, but that reminds me, however mildly, of Edwards' comments about RPGing.
Edwards says another curious thing on the Vincent Baker blog:
The design decisions I've made with my current project are so not-RPG, but at the same time so dismissive of what's ordinarily called "consensual storytelling," that I cannot even begin to discuss it on-line. . . I cannot articulate the way that I have abandoned the player-character, yet preserved the moral responsibility of decision-making during play.
I don't know what he was working on then, and whether or not it has seen the light of day. I'd be curious to see it.
From that comment, plus some other stuff on the Forge forum, I infer that Edwards thinks that the whole player-participant-via-PC model of RPGing is inherently flawed as a medium for collective story creation. If true, that would be a depressing conlcusion for me! - although a flaw need not, per se, be fatal.
One post by Edwards that has helped me a lot with my GMing was posted 7 months or so after the Brain Damage episode, and seems more upbeat about what can be done in an RPG:
Plot authority - over crux-points in the knowledge base at the table - now is the time for a revelation! - typically, revealing content, although notice it can apply to player-characters' material as well as GM material - and look out, because within this authority lies the remarkable pitfall of wanting (for instances) revelations and reactions to apply precisely to players as they do to characters
Situational authority - over who's there, what's going on - scene framing would be the most relevant and obvious technique-example, or phrases like "That's when I show up!" from a player
Narrational authority - how it happens, what happens - I'm suggesting here that this is best understood as a feature of resolution . . . and not to mistake it for describing what the castle looks like, for instance; I also suggest it's far more shared in application than most role-players realize . . .
The real point, not the side-point, is that any one of these authorities can be shared across the individuals playing without violating the other authorities.
For instance, in [a particular game RE GMed], I scene-framed like a m[*****]-f[*****]. That's the middle level: situational authority. . . But I totally gave up authority over the "top" level, plot authority. I let that become an emergent property of the other two levels: again, me with full authority over situation (scene framing), and the players and I sharing authority over narrational authority, which provided me with cues, in the sense of no-nonsense instructions, regarding later scene framing. . .
Well, let's look at this [ie another poster's problems with his game] again. Actually, I think it has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. . .
It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the SIS are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
So maybe he changed his mind about the viability of RPGs as a creative medium. I don't know.
TL;DR - I may be brain damaged!
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