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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 5362702" data-attributes="member: 3192">Freeform gaming is a postmodern game design term.  It really depends upon what you mean by freeform to answer the question.  Is it a few people sitting down to express themselves without any agreements (rules) between them on how to do so?  Or is it a pattern finding game with a code behind a screen (a la Mastermind) where the players take turn based attempts to crack the code?In postmodern thought both of those activities are the same.  Both are storytelling (story defined as "stuff happening").  In modernist thought the second activity is pattern finding where the intent of the players is to use memory and insight to uncover the repeated pattern.  Pattern here is defined as "a repetition" and in a language game it is a semantic repetition.  Story is defined as "a sequence of events" or a sequential pattern.  Both are improvised by people and both result in a a story. The twist is whether or not a participant believes repetition is ever possible, even pragmatically.  The freeform storygame is a group of people collaboratively expressing themselves without any prior social agreements on how to do so.  The other, may or may not be, a memory test enabled by one person who constructs a code prior to play and repeats it endlessly with the others taking guess attempts to demonstrate recognition of such.This second method seems almost entirely non-freeform as it presupposes an underlying structure to the pattern giver.  As a cooperative simulation with the "rules" (code) hidden behind a screen it works in two different ways.  One as a computer game with the programmers coding learned as play progresses.  The other is as a tabletop reality puzzle game, a sort of situational puzzle with multiple puzzle solvers.  That means it includes an "Irrelevant, so Yes" rule the computer cannot. This allows an unknowing programming of the code, which afterward cannot be contradicted.  Instead of a constriction to what a computer can do, it enables autonomy for the players within a shared vocabulary.I think gaming may be thought of as a series of faiths and which one each person chooses to agree with.  In Tic-Tac-Toe a naive realist might believe he can always win so long as he goes first, starts in the corner, and continues to outflank the other player.A critical realist might believe the game can be solved as it includes a finite number of game states.  Once both players solve the game, yet continue to play to the winning objective it simply becomes an endless boredom of tie games.A postmodernist might believe the game, like it's underlying math, is a fiction, therefore it does not exist anywhere even in the brain and should not be considered as real.  One cannot win or lose nor preconceive an endgame objective as the repetition of imagining such in one's mind and reaching that gamestate on paper is an impossibility.  So each player is telling a story and electing one player as the winner because they like his or her expression subjectively more.It is the postmodern turn.  Where a modernist sees patterns as real and everything a pattern, a postmodernist would see reality as a choice and no patterns ever happening.So don't use any rules to tell your story or pick up a cooperative world simulation game to hide behind a screen.  It's your choice.</blockquote>

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