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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9251181" data-attributes="member: 4937">GNS as shorthand for certain types of gamer aesthetics is fine.  What bugged me about the theory was its claim that only one aesthetic could be served at a time and as such a game was incoherent (read "badwrongfun") if its design tried to serve more than one of the three aesthetics.  It was the notion that they were mutually incompatible and that games should strive to achieve one type or the other where I thought they were going off the rails.With this came the idea that players were only interested in one sort of fun at a time and would be unsatisfied except when the game was feeding them a steady diet of one of the three aesthetics.The other problem I had was that I thought it was an arbitrary division of the space of aesthetics.  It was useful and interesting, but for example I distinguish between the aesthetics of fantasy, competition, and challenge and typically find that players heavily invested in one are invested in the other two.  But if you try to map those aesthetics to GNS theory you don't end up with easy mappings which to me says that GNS can be obscuring what is actually going on at the table and why players enjoy or don't enjoy the game.</blockquote>