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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2209144" data-attributes="member: 27012">Well, that's because he borrowed his original terms and categories from the GDS without, I think, fully understanding it.  He changed D to N and purged all of th story oriented role-playing that he didn't like (railroading) and dumped it into S.  Why?  Because as The Forge thread I linked to above illustrates, he didn't really understand S, so it became the toxic waste dump for The Forge.  As someone who is pretty solidly "S" in GDS terms, that makes the GNS pretty useless for me, because it tells me that a railroading storytelling GM shares the same play style that I do.  Uh, no.  Sorry.  Thanks for playing.  Try again.What he should have done was left the GDS alone and then created a second three axis model dealing with the locus of control in a game -- whether the game is governed by the GM, objective rules, or the players (all of the participants).  If you place that next to the GDS, you'd have a quite effective way of distinguishing railroading storytelling from group storytelling or even games like Theatrix, that provide rules to govern the whole process.  Of course the term "Simulationist" is still problematic, even in the GDS (I say this as someone who used to think it was a great term) because it doesn't define what it is trying to simulate.  In fact, the GDS was more clear when it was "world-oriented" and "story-oriented" and because of distribution problems with the message (you can only find a repost in the Google archive), rec.games.frp.advocacy really missed the boat by ignoring the labels in the first triangle proposed, which were:Interactive StorytellingIC (In Character) ExperienceProblem SolvingOf course the really frustrating thing is that because his original terms were used by the GDS and are designed to describe the GDS categories, most people who have not read numerous Forge essays on the nuances of the GNS read the terms and intuitively define them by their GDS meaning, which is why most non-Forge people who talk GNS are really talking about GDS with GNS terminology.  You'd think they'd get sick of people misinterpreting the model (followed by requests to read pages of essays) and pick terms that better fit their definitions.  But, alas, no.More accurately, I think he may have provided some useful insights about Narrativism and Gamism but because of the ghetto nature of their Simulationist category, I don't think it offers much useful insight there.</blockquote>

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