Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8620213" data-attributes="member: 71699">We could take the minions to be unlucky and without will to live, but I felt the interesting question that you highlight is whether there can be an absurdist or surrealist simulationist game? One option is to say it's impossible, albeit it is likely intuitions will diverge as to what counts as absurdist or surrealist (are not many of the fantastical worlds of RPG to some extent absurd?)For me personally, 1 hit point minions were never part of a world I wanted to imagine. I'd separate that out from saying it is impossible for anyone to imagine a cosmos in which they fit.It feels like very much a case of - we recognise them fairly easily while finding it extremely difficult to define a universal razor. As I noted up thread, Wittgenstein famously used games as an ideal example of family resemblances in PI. Perhaps his arguments encourage skepticism about there being an essence of simulationist RPG? I'm reasonably happy with my definition,but I've noticed another problem.Suppose we agree that a gamist design is one that is easy and engaging/interesting to do. Do we then agree that a simulationist - being not gamist - must be one that is not easy and not engaging/not interesting to do?I feel reluctant to dismiss the possibility of finding RQ or ICE engaging or interesting, so if I adopt this definition must I be saying that the sole quality amounting to gamist design is play that is easy to do!? That feels like an impoverished definition (and I'd note the gap between the definition of gamist here and definitions of gamism elsewhere.)The problem, anyway, is that in this thread many posters have said this or that element is gamist and not simulationist. I don't see how that can be judged unless they have a definition for gamist in mind that can be articulated and sustained. I guess folk could say something like - element X is uncategorisable, but certainly not simulationist. I don't think that is the sort of argument being made however. I think it is more of the form - element X can be categorised as gamist, and gamist is not simulationist, therefore element X is not simulationist. But if gamist isn't defined, the "therefore" in that sentence doesn't work because we can't rule out the union of G() and S().</blockquote>

Verification