"Gamism," The Forge, and the Elephant in the Room

[LurkAway]

This was mentioned upthread. As I said earlier, Edwards is not making a hypothesis to be tested via market research. He's putting forward an interpretive theory, to be "tested" by its capacity to deliver insight into human activity and self-understanding. My own view is that this cannot be value-free (because people cannot get the requisite degree of evaluative distance from their own activities). But as I also said, the best interpretive theories, for my money, utterly kill market research for power and insight.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the practical difference between "interpretive theory" and a carefully crafted opinion piece dressed up in an important-looking suit?

 

[pemerton]

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the practical difference between "interpretive theory" and an opinion piece dressed up in an important-looking suit?

What domain of inquiry are you talking about?

In academic disciplines, the difference is depth of inquiry. There is just no comparison, for example, between the depth of Weber's comparative historical and sociological research, and that of the typical NYT columnist.

When it comes to RPGs, there is no academic discipline, but depth of inquiry still makes a difference. One striking feature of discussions and essays at The Forge is the range of games discussed and played, and the detailed attention that is paid to the published texts for those games.

This contrasts with, for example, claims one sometimes sees made about the depth of simulationist or immersive play supported by 3E, for example, without any apparent familiarity with, or comparison to, other systems (such as BRP/RQ) that also aim at this sort of play. Or claims made about how skill challenges just cannot provide anything but a die-rolling experience, without any apparent familiarity with, or comparison to, other systems (such as Maelstrom Storytelling or HeroWars/Quest) that use similar action resolution mechanics. Or (and this one I remember from the ICE boards) claims that a game in which equipment is bought using points just cannot make sense or be played in a verisimilitudinous world, without any apparent familiarity with, or comparison to, points-buy systems (especially superhero systems) in which points buy for equipment is a standard part of character building.

I also want to stress that this has nothing to do with my own personal RPGing preferences. Look at the class balance thread on the New Horizons subforum. Poster after poster tries to tell the OP that s/he is mistaken, or asking for the impossible, in wanting balance to be handled via GM adjudication and the exercise of force, rather than via mechanical means, without providing any discussion of the long tradition of RPG play - and especially a certain type of AD&D play - that proceeds in precisley such a fashion. I personally don't like that sort of play, but it exists, and I would say at one time was perhaps the mainstream approach to playing D&D (at least judging from Dragon magazines of the era, the way modules are written, etc).

In short: familiarity with a breadth of differing examples, which then breaks down a person's general inclination to generalise from his/her own experience, is central to constructing plausible and worthwhile interpretive theories.

 

[LurkAway]

What domain of inquiry are you talking about?

As it pertains to this discussion...

When it comes to RPGs, there is no academic discipline, but depth of inquiry still makes a difference. One striking feature of discussions and essays at The Forge is the range of games discussed and played, and the detailed attention that is paid to the published texts for those games.

So with people clearly believing that GNS innaccurately lumps other playstyles into "Exploration", can Ron Edwards be considered to have made an honest effort to inquire and understand playstyles beyond Gamism and Narrativism, such that GNS can be described as having "depth of inquiry" in order to qualify as a comprehensive "interpretive theory"?

 

[pemerton]

So with people clearly believing that GNS innaccurately lumps other playstyles into "Exploration", can Ron Edwards be considered to have made an honest effort to inquire and understand playstyles beyond Gamism and Narrativism, such that GNS can be described as having "depth of inquiry" in order to qualify as a comprehensive "interpretive theory"?

I think so. Others apparently disagree. It also depends on what weight you're giving "honest". Is he lying? I don't think there's much evidence of that. Is he trying hard enough to put himself in others' shoes? When I read his essays and his posts, I think he tries about as hard as any RPG commentator that I've read, but others mightn't think so.

I certainly enjoy simulationiost play - both RQ/RM purist-for-system, and CoC high concept - and I don't feel slighted or misdescribed by Edwards or the GNS idea. I think that they are both exploratory play, although what is being explored is obviously very different in each case.

Trickier, in my view, is Edwards' claim that the ideal of a 1:1 correlation beteen mechancial resolution and ingame causal processes is at the heart of all simulationist play. This is obviously true for purist-for-system sim, but is it true for high concept? One reason to think that it is is that, when it breaks down, then space for the metagame wedge opens up (eg think about the endless hit point disputes, either driven by gamists whose PCs jump over 100 foot cliffs, or the more narrativistically-inclined who want "0 hp" to correlate to dead, or swooned, or disarmed, or . . ., as the mood strikes them). Conversely, part of what makes immersion very easy in CoC (at least in my experience) is that the mechanics make it very clear what is happening to your character, so you know who it is you're meant to be "inhabiting", and what the events are to which you are adding colour and characterisation.

Is this a plausible part of a "comprehenisve" theory? So far in this thread I've heard that GNS is inadequate in its characterisation of simulationist play, but the only account of why that is so (that I recall at the moment, anyway) is Rogue Agent - namely, by running together purist-for-system and "storyteller", GNS obscures that storytellers are really frustrated narrativists. But is this claim by Rogue Agent any better grounded than Edwards' claim? I'm not sure, but I see a lot of hostility on these boards to players with their metagame agendas, so I'm not sure that Rogue Agent is right.

TL;DR - I feel that Edwards gets my simulationist experiences right, but I'm not a big player of the the sort of game whose classification seems to be controversial, namely, GM-driven, plot-heavy high concept which (unlike CoC, at least as I've experienced it) is not expressly predicated on the players just sitting back and enjoying the ride.

 

[Rogue Agent]

Perhaps, for certain senses of "exploration".

Oddly, this appears to be true of "exploration" in the sense that Edwards defines it in the Big Model. As Justin Alexander noted in that link S'mon posted a few pages back, Edwards using the same terms he uses to describe simulationism to describe all roleplaying activities is a dead give-away that something is wrong with Edwards' conception of simulationism.

However, the WotC research didn't set out to prove any particular model, but just to gather information and see what could be seen. If GNS were accurate, you'd still expect a segmentation study in the same general area to give you a three-dimensional result, rather than a 2-D arrangement.

Well, not really. First, since we don't know anything about the questions asked, it's difficult to draw any conclusions from it. We know the conclusions WotC drew (and then ignored in 2008), but we have no way of validating those conclusions or looking for alternative (or additional) interpretations of the data.

So WotC's conclusions are interesting insofar as they go, but insofar as they don't seem to really be addressing any of the stuff GNS is addressing it's difficult to see how the two results actually mesh.

What's probably more damaging to GNS is actually the "8 core values", since it completely devastates the exclusivity which still lies tangled up in the heart of the theory (despite being mellowed somewhat).

 

[LurkAway]

Trickier, in my view, is Edwards' claim that the ideal of a 1:1 correlation beteen mechancial resolution and ingame causal processes is at the heart of all simulationist play. This is obviously true for purist-for-system sim, but is it true for high concept? One reason to think that it is is that, when it breaks down, then space for the metagame wedge opens up (eg think about the endless hit point disputes, either driven by gamists whose PCs jump over 100 foot cliffs, or the more narrativistically-inclined who want "0 hp" to correlate to dead, or swooned, or disarmed, or . . ., as the mood strikes them). Conversely, part of what makes immersion very easy in CoC (at least in my experience) is that the mechanics make it very clear what is happening to your character, so you know who it is you're meant to be "inhabiting", and what the events are to which you are adding colour and characterisation.

Is this a plausible part of a "comprehenisve" theory?

I understand the difference between hardcore vs "pretend" simulationism, but I never really understood why it was so important to polarize players by heavily differentiating between purist for sim vs high concept simulation.

I don't have an interpretive theory, only a mere opinion: that D&D -- with very unpurist systems -- was the most successful RPG in history, and that 4E -- which attempted to narrow down the playstyle -- has quickly seen the coming of the next edition.

So perhaps like anything in life, some of the best systems are the flawed and messy compromises, and that perfection is not the elegant elimination of inner conflict, and that Ron Edwards (being a purist, if I understand him correctly by some of the harsh judgement values he has applied to simulationism) fails to understand the importance of compromise in approaches to playstyles. And in that sense, perhaps the GNS lacks a depth of inquiry.

But unlike others who seem to have a solid grasp of GNS theory, I haven't really tackled it in-depth, so perhaps I don't know what I'm talking about.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I understand the difference between hardcore vs "pretend" simulationism, but I never really understood why it was so important to polarize players by heavily differentiating between purist for sim vs high concept simulation.

I don't have an interpretive theory, only a mere opinion: that D&D -- with very unpurist systems -- was the most successful RPG in history, and that 4E -- which attempted to narrow down the playstyle -- has quickly seen the coming of the next edition.

And yet 1e, arguably the longest lasting line, was actually pretty purist in what it was about. It was about going down dungeons and robbing the dungeons blind (with force if necessary). And just about everything from the XP rules (1GP = 1XP - blatant encouragement for robbing the monsters through cunning) to the wandering monster rolls (Get A Move On) to the monsters themselves (earworms? lurker above? cloaker?) was designed round this.

2E was the edition that attempted to be universal - and IME that's the most disliked one. It took out 1e being good at what it was good at and attempted to make it a very unpurist system without taking in to account that the base had a specific function.

 

[LurkAway]

And yet 1e, arguably the longest lasting line, was actually pretty purist in what it was about. It was about going down dungeons and robbing the dungeons blind (with force if necessary). And just about everything from the XP rules (1GP = 1XP - blatant encouragement for robbing the monsters through cunning) to the wandering monster rolls (Get A Move On) to the monsters themselves (earworms? lurker above? cloaker?) was designed round this.

2E was the edition that attempted to be universal - and IME that's the most disliked one. It took out 1e being good at what it was good at and attempted to make it a very unpurist system without taking in to account that the base had a specific function.

Well I was referencing D&D as a whole, because it's tricky to disentangle the various historical factors by which D&D editions evolved. So D&D is very popular in the mainstream, and Rolemaster not nearly as much, for example.

And for whatever it's worth, AD&D with unified mechanics seems popular here
EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine - View Poll Results

 

[Bedrockgames]

And yet 1e, arguably the longest lasting line, was actually pretty purist in what it was about. It was about going down dungeons and robbing the dungeons blind (with force if necessary). And just about everything from the XP rules (1GP = 1XP - blatant encouragement for robbing the monsters through cunning) to the wandering monster rolls (Get A Move On) to the monsters themselves (earworms? lurker above? cloaker?) was designed round this.

2E was the edition that attempted to be universal - and IME that's the most disliked one. It took out 1e being good at what it was good at and attempted to make it a very unpurist system without taking in to account that the base had a specific function.

Yeah but people were using 1E for things other than dungeon crawls long before 2E came around. Besides when 2E was out, it had a very large and playerbase. The main reason it gets demonized is it watered down the flavor material (to be more family friendly) and it went overboard with the story heavy GM advice).

Whatever te history though i think it is true that popular games need to appeal to a variety of players and playstyles. If you focus on one way you alienate the other appeoaches. And since gaming is a communal activity, it is rare for a group to be so homogenous that it is made up entirely of "gamists" or "simiulationists". 4E literally split gaming groups up because it catered to a narrow agenda.

 

[Umbran]

Is he lying? I don't think there's much evidence of that. Is he trying hard enough to put himself in others' shoes? When I read his essays and his posts, I think he tries about as hard as any RPG commentator that I've read, but others mightn't think so.

When I read his works, I don't think he's lying, either. Not in the, "I know and recognize the truth, but say something else anyway, sense. I think he frequently gets blinded by his own brilliance, and tends to assume the primacy of his own theories and personal preferences.

So, to me, he's not lying. He's just occasionally wrong, and not very willing to see what he doesn't want to see. Just like normal folks, really.

I don't think GNS is intended primarily to interpret others. It's intended to aid self-understanding, for deigners and players.

Ah. I'm pretty sure it is quite the opposite. To me, his writing style (and, honestly, focus) screams, "This is how you should look at everyone else," not, "this is how you should look at yourself."

Such a model may not (and I suspect is likely not to) correlate to all, many or perhaps even any critical accounts of television dramas.

Ah. I think I see what you mean. The issue we'll have, then, is that I find critical accounts not grounded in popular enjoyment of an art to typically be self-serving, self-referential and often useless.

Critics have a habit of turning away from the practical matters of what actually reaches a human heart, and instead start to base their assessment upon a critical framework, developed by critics for critique, with a disconnect from how non-critics perceive the work.

If such critics are taken seriously, this leads to artists creating art for the sake of getting positive critique, rather than for sake of communicating something to the rest of the world. You end up with museums filled with works that cannot be understood except by folks who have first spent time studying the particular critical formulae for the genre in question.

Take much of "modern art" as an example. Your your average person is bored in a modern art museum for this reason - the critical rules for modern art are not strongly associated to base human responses, and the art was created for folks immersed in those rules.

That wouldn't show that the critical accounts are wrong, however.

Correct, but... I will use an absurd analogy to demonstrate my point.

If I make up an arbitrary rule that says that all written work with more than a specified number of instances of the letter "a" as bad, I am not "wrong" to then say, "By my rules, this work is bad." That doesn't mean the rule is meaningful in the first place, though.