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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9634872" data-attributes="member: 6690965">This is something I've tried to get at before, which is linguistically tricky and fairly sensitive; I would not describe the second activity here as a game in the sense I'd use the word to talk about tabletop. I would argue the state you describe in chess above is a necessary component for a thing to be a game, you must have a goal to put forward choices in support of for the interesting gameful state to emerge.Obviously it does qualify more in the way people talk about games in other fields like improv, and my view is not universal (Amabel Holland has some interesting points about board games as artistic/polemic explorations of systems in her video essays that are worth considering for example). There's obviously nothing wrong with doing activities that don't produce that state, and it's obvious that the TTRPG is a bigger tent than the board game, wherein a more expansion use of the term "game" is normative.Personally (and I suppose I must claim this as the "gamist" position though I fundamentally disagree with the usual framing of that agenda), I think the RPG as a medium has unique things to offer to the creation of that interesting gameful state, if that's put forth as a priority. Not in the weak "skilled play" sense, but in a unique ability to offer unusual and unexpected board states that present interesting decisions. My issue with the gamist position is that it's an outsider's description of the means without understanding the ends. Focusing on the "display of skill" and/or the competitive aspect is to completely miss the point. Those are simply conditions and tools one uses to make that interesing state to be in that is playing a game. Games perform a kind of magic through the limitation of choices and rapid feedback that allows an elevate delight in making choices. Finding a correct path through an unknown maze, and then evaluating how well you've done, how you might do better, converting that knowledge into heuristic, breaking that heuristic when it doesn't serve, understanding how making the maze different produces different choices, admiring the connections between those choices....games are good, and I like them.This is the thing where I think we're leaving the overlapping parts of the TTRPG Venn diagram; we could not swap the activities we are both calling a TTRPG and claim to satisfyingly be having the same experience. I do not want to exist without the gameful state. The thing the medium offers me is a unique ability to go back and pick more and more different goals. The whole reason to roleplay is to figure out what character wants, so that want can be made a goal, and that goal can then be pursued and evaluated, spinning up an engine that allows for more game to emerge. It's the reason it's useful for the GM to both be bound by rules, so that the players can use those rules to pursue those goals, and the reason it's useful for the GM to be lightly bound in content, so that players will continue to be presented with more and more different board states to use those rules on.</blockquote>

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