I respectfully disagree; OSR games are fundamentally about procedure (counting dungeon turns, wandering monster checks, resource management, etc.) and weighing risk based on what (incomplete) information you do have.
Dispensing with all of that proceduralism and focusing in on the creative "MacGyver" solutions, the feeling of being in a horrible dungeon, the dilemma of whether to drop gear for gold or risk a deeper delve? That's a hallmark of NuSR games, which are an outgrowth of OSR games but very much not doing the same thing.
I have never heard of this "NuSR" label. Most things I see of this nature still claim to be OSR, as noted by a linked essay upthread talking about how the label "OSR" has been used by multiple groups for distinct and rather different purposes, even though there are connections between them. That even the earliest OSR retroclones often made some tweaks, however minor, that were not strictly necessary for publication under the OGL indicates to me that procedure alone was not the only impulse.
Some of it is wildly misleading, but having read the primary texts, I don't have a problem understanding or applying it. In context.
Sadly, though for me very understandably, I think the biggest impediment to GNS is Mr. Edwards' style. I share a similar rambling, "must cover EVERY BIT OF CONTEXT" approach that can obscure when intending to clarify and blur when intending to focus very closely.
I'd say that what you describe Narrativism doing has everything to do with producing a narrative—dilemmas churn out story like crazy! But, it isn't the only way to produce a narrative! I agree that Narrativism was a terrible choice (as was "Story Now"), and I like your suggested name.
This is why I use the label "Values and Issues." It emphasizes that the point is to have Things That Matter To You And Can Be Threatened Or Uncertain, and then to Test That Caring In Problem Situations. This is a "test" more in the observation sense, like testing to see if it's raining, not testing to see if a student has learned the lesson, in that it's not about "how well do you perform" but rather what actually
does matter to the player and their imagined person in the imagined world.
Most good stories involve this as a central element. Even "slice of life" and other narratives that do not center on "conflict" or "danger" in the usual sense still contain this kind of experience, which is why I refer to things like "protagonism" or "main-character-ness." Being the main character of a story, even in a slice of life way, almost always means having things you care about that you have to work toward or put in effort to protect.
Simulationism can very much be concerned with game-worlds being simulations of physics and such, but it can also be about simulating all sorts of other things—not just genre. If the focus of play is on being true to whatever is important to the participants, and not going against that in order to make things go one's out-of-character way, that's shows a priority on Simulationism. I don't think this is a good name either, but "genre emulationism" also doesn't capture it.
Which is why I forked the two apart. Yes, there are some similarities. There are also differences. You could just as easily have done a three-way split between "Dilemmism," "Proceduralism" (Gamism + Process Sim), and "Thematicism" (Genre Sim on its own), or between "Theatricism" (Narrativism + Genre Sim), Gamism, and "Verisimilitude" (Process Sim on its own). I find the dogged insistence on keeping Genre and Process in the same bucket minimally valuable and extremely prone to inducing confusion and negative reactions.
Gamism doesn't need rules to be tight, predicatable, or physics-like. It needs rules to be masterable, which is helped by pure predictability but doesn't require it. Some Gamist motivations include mastering a particularly obscure, changing, or contradictory systems! Physics-like simulations, of course, belong under Simulationism, but many Gamist rules are at least grounded in such (or other subtypes of Simulationism, such as points that one can pay to generate setting-/archetype-/genre-appropriate events or actions). I don't have a problem with the name "Gamism", myself.
I'm not sure I buy the "contradictory" part. Obscurity may or may not be a virtue, but outright contradictory rules lead to systems with serious problems. You see this in 3.x game discussion; many feel a strong need to set some ground rules (like "no NI," meaning nigh-infinite loops or unrestricted power enhancement). Or stuff outside the TTRPG world, like Skyrim allowing the player to bootstrap Alchemy and Enchanting mutually (potions that increase your Enchanting skill to make more powerful enchantments that increase your Alchemy skill so you can make stronger potions that increase your Enchanting skill, an NI loop that can literally break the game with integer overflow.) Such things break the feeling of "mastery" because, specifically by being contradictory or overly exploitable, they ruin any possible feeling of challenge. When you know literally anyone can beat the game with an hour grinding on some stupid trivially-easy exploit, the fact that you played 80 hours to get there the "normal" way becomes rather less valuable.
As for "verisimulitudinous enough", that applies to all three—without some nonzero amount of each, we don't even have a role-playing game.
Right. Hence why I have avoided strident claims of incompatibility (though people tell me GNS is inaccurately understood to make strident claims of incompatibility...which does not jive with what things I ha e read from Edwards but, as I said, I peaced out of that Convo after like the fourth time something I thought was
extremely clear from the things I had read turned out to apparently be completely wrong.)
People care about there being enough of various things. Hence, even for someone who values Score and Achievement, there can be a point where a very small gain in greater evaluative objectivity or meritorious skillful play ceases to be worth making more sacrifices to how naturalistic the world is or how well the experience captures the idea of being a fantastical "hero" character. That doesn't mean the game isn't focused on a particular answer to the question "what are roleplaying games made for?" It just means that these things exist in a space, and utter absolutes are uncommon.
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On the topic of "X could happen, but I won't do that because it would upset the players," we can identify some characteristics here:
1. It is something arising from the coordinating player ("Dungeon Master" or "Game Master"), not from the other players. In GNS, this makes it pretty much axiomatically not Narrative.
2. It has little if anything to do with challenge, in the sense of players striving to do something difficult and having both success and failure as possibilities. Instead, it is about curating a pleasant experience for the players. This is not nearly as hard a distinction as the former, but it pretty clearly pushes this out of the Gamist space, at least in most cases. (If it had been structured as "it would be
unfair to have X happen," that would be much more plausibly Gamist, so I don't think we can totally exclude the possibility...but as written it doesn't look Gamist to me.)
3. This leaves the question of whether it is Process Sim or Genre Sim, and I personally think the answer is obvious here. If purity of "the world exists and proceeds as it proceeds, affected by the choices players make" were paramount, then the players would be expected to take their licking and like it. The world can be a harsh place; bad things happen to undeserving people, and an absolute commitment to verisimilitude is going to include some of that. (Again, as noted, most people are not THAT absolute, but the overall pattern stands.) So, by process of elimination, this is Genre Sim, or as I would put it, Conceit and Emulation. In this case, part of the Emulation process (as I have repeatedly said) is producing a
satisfying exploration of the Conceit(s) being focused upon. This means attention paid to "fun for its own sake," as opposed to "fun as a byproduct of activity presumed to be enjoyable," is very much a Conceit and Emulation consideration.
Someone writing a mystery novel that is absolutely perfect in its execution of the mystery but
painfully dull to read will have missed the mark compared to someone else who has written a sloppy, poorly-evidenced mystery that is an absolute joy. Likewise with film (many "Oscar Bait" films are incredibly tedious to watch unless you're a massive film snob), music (audiophiles love highly technical works, but most artists go for compelling pieces over absolute perfection of technique), etc. This is not to say that excellence in technique is incompatible with broad appeal; the Mona Lisa is a good example of enduring mass appeal and also incredibly strong artistic technique.
So: "I won't do that because it would cause a TPK, and this would upset my players" sounds like (in GNS terms) a Simulationist approach, with the desire of simulating (presumably) scrappy heroes beating the odds or something similar. If that requires some sleight of hand and deception on the part of the controlling player to ensure the party avoids such a cruel fate, so be it.
