NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9242477" data-attributes="member: 71699">I agree with you that it was high time to repudiate pre-planned storylines, and the PtFO catchcry was valuable to that ends. I've praised many times the late Jennell Jacquays' Griffin Mountain which showed back in 1981 an approach to high-setting open-story. (Although lacked the many additional techniques later committed to game texts to really empower it.)Yes, it is time to find new terminology. Or better yet, to cast the light of PtFO over the whole of roleplaying. Because the implication that those with other creative motives aren't interested in playing to find out denies the validity of their engagment with game. One can immediately see how unreasonable the implied predeterminism is: that they know already everything important to them about how it will go down, and are playing to find out nothing at all.To me they are a car crash. Accurately it would be -G: Play to find out the new and unusual gamestates that emerge and the new decisions and unexpected answers that will force from you. S: Play to find out where your journey through subject - guided by your noetic and emotional compass - will take you. N: Play to find out how you will resolve problematic features of human existence.Edwards hit the same dissatisfactions many videogamers have felt with overlaid linear narrative - stories told to them. He noticed the same lusory-duality that others noticed around the turn of the millenia, and saw its implications. All that is lusory is played to find out. And this is the opportunity offered by games.I recently noticed the following by Wolfgang Walk, producer and narrative designer, and one of the authors of DDE (an update to MDA)If a designer thinks of the dynamics of a game system as the antagonist of the player-subject, that perspective allows the designer to comprehend the whole experience of playing a game as a narrative. Yes, there are certain expectations we have about narratives, and good designers will anticipate those expectations when creating a great narrative experience. If the antagonist of a narrative doesn’t fulfil that role, the narrative will be boring, or at least less interesting than it might have been, and it may even fall apart.Walk isn't talking about shooting games or driving games or adventure games, he's talking about all videogames. One can see here the long arc of the reconciliation of ludology with narratology, found in post-classical narratology. Game is narrative, albeit a new form of narrative. One of the single most powerful things we can say about it is play to find out. That's the implication of Aarseth's "ergodic literature". You want to know how it goes, play it.Once one appreciates game as process and play as experience, not product, one can see the destructive force of suggesting that play to find out belongs to a single creative motivation.The unfortunate implication is that only N wants to focus on things the participants care about. Which is what we (or I at least) want to be just as true of G and S. The words here - "the focus is on the characters, and on things that the participants care about" - are wonderfully descriptive of neotrad play.Play to find out is simply too fundamental to games, to glue to one set of motivations or modes. It needn't be abandoned: it can have an even stronger impact by acknowledging it's importance to all TTRPG.</blockquote>

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