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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9243125" data-attributes="member: 42582">So, this is reminding me of some standard moves in analytic philosophy."The reason a gamist plays games is to win." "OK, so suppose we create a record that attributes wins to them, regardless of their play, aren't they getting what they want?" "No, they don't just want wins to be notched on their belts; they want to win by playing" "Then why do some gamists cheat?" . . . <conversation continues, perhaps without ever reaching an agreed resolution>I've got no objection to this in principle - doing analytic philosophy is one part of my day job!But I think we need to recognise that it's not what Edwards and Baker are doing. They are not trying to identify a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for someone, or their RPG play, to count as gamist (or narrativist, or simulationist, or neotrad for that matter).They are trying to characterise some broad patterns of RPG play that are suggested by observation; and to use that characterisation to provide some guidance in design - at least to point the way to certain possible techniques, identify some relationships between allocations of authority and achieving different sorts of satisfaction, etc.This method is not philosophical; it falls broadly within what I would call interpretivist social science.When it comes to gamist RPGing, we make little progress in design and satisfactory play by abstract debates about what counts as winning. The point is that a game which doesn't either expressly establish measurable ways of doing well (eg classic D&D's XP system), or permit such ways to emerge (eg munchkin-ish play of 3E D&D, based around building OP PCs that can roflstomp standard encounters), will not be very satisfactory for gamist play. An example: a typical CoC module played with typical CoC characters.Of course CoC can be drifted to a game involving body armour, bazookas and blowing up shoggoths (is this Delta Green? I've heard of it but don't know that much about it). Then we get gamist CoC. But it adds nothing to analysis to pretend that this is no different from playing through (say) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Statue_of_the_Sorcerer_%26_The_Vanishing_Conjurer" target="_blank">the Vanishing Conjurer</a>: it's taking the core of the game, allowing a measurable way of doing well to emerge, and then playing to that new thing.</blockquote>

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