I read Touvinen as proposing a formulation of sim that covered different ground than before. This as opposed to just clarifying the old concept. In particular I interpreted this as making some cases previously falling under the nar umbrella to be shifted into this new sim concept. This would invalidate earlier discussions related to the boundaries between nar and sim. As you are pointing to those sources in your analysis I assume now you are interpreting it as rather an attempt at clarifying the sim concept while preserving the same scope?
You are correct about my reading of Tuovinen. I see nothing in there that changes the previously-suggested boundaries between "narrativist" and "simulationist" play. All the types of "sim" play that Tuovinen identifies are play that Edwards's essays characterise as sim. And it is the contrast between "fidelity" and "proactivity" as aesthetic goals that remains core to the difference between these two approaches to RPGing.
I think these passages support my reading:
The earlier Simulationism: Right to Dream is much less obviously satisfactory; don’t take my word for it, but I get the sense that Ron’s detailed exegesis of mechanical rules systems (System Purism vs High Concept, etc.) is not usually considered a satisfactory answer to what Simulationism is, and, what’s worse, what justification it carries as a human endeavour. Sometimes it seems like Ron himself doesn’t really know, either. It’s no wonder that there’s perennial interest for fixing this part of the theoretical corpus.
However, I just read said article anew prior to writing this one, and you know, I think it’s pretty close to spot on in many places. I mean, I’ll be rephrasing a lot in the following, and perhaps saying some things that Ron didn’t quite get to originally, but I have no complaints with the basic premise: Ron characterizes Simulationism as “heightening and focusing Exploration as the priority of play”, which, as you’ll come to see, is basically my conclusion on the matter. Ron also analyzes a wide variety of historical rpgs in the article, sharply observing their function; well worth the read.
What Edwards calls "heightening and focusing Exploration as a priority of play" is what Tuovinen gets at in saying "
Simulationist play expresses as heightened attention to the fiction". Above, I've shortened this to "fidellity" to the fictional material, in order to draw the contrast with narrativistic "proactivity.
Unrelated to this we are also seemingly interpreting differently what the GM story hour say about the GM in particular. I guess we both share the understanding that this section describes how a spesific technique can support sim play? The way I understand that is that in this description sim play is presumed understood, and hence it do not in any way try to define sim. "The GM decides what play will be about, but the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness." I think is the crucial formulation we might be reading differently. You seem to read it as "In any situation where GM decides what play will be about, and the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness, we have a sim game"? I read it as "If you have a sim game, then a technique to consider is that the GM decides what play will be about, but the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness".
So, when Tuovinen says that the "story hour" GM decides what play will be about, he means simply that
the GM is the one who presents the story - where "the story" encompasses plot and theme ("legit fantasy literature").
What makes this sort of play "simulationist" is because, in play, the orientation of the players is towards
coming to know, in detail, via the play of their PCs, this story that the GM is presenting to them. In Edwards's terminology, they are "exploring" the GM's story. In Tuovinen's, they are paying "heightened attention" to the GM's story. Part of how this heightened attention is manifested is by the way the players declare actions for their PCs. And the pay-off is that, by declaring those actions and having the GM respond, they are able to learn about the story in a way that is different from reading it in a novel or watching it as a film. To speak a little bit metaphorically, but not hopelessly metaphorically, they can "slow down" the good bits, they can "walk around" a set or scene to learn more about it, they can ask more questions of the antagonists to try and grasp their motivations, etc.
There can be simulationist play that is not as GM-centred or GM-driven as "story hour". Some types of "dollhouse" play, or "substantial exploration", might fit into this category. Some Ars Magic play might fit this description - playing out the life of the Covenant. Or some Traveller play - there can even be GM-less Traveller play, where the players roll for the worlds, the cargoes, the encounters, etc. I don't know Ars Magica especially well, but with the Traveller example I think it can probably drift into "gamism" fairly easily (shifting from "what happens to our trading enterprise?" to "can we keep our trading enterprise afloat?") but that need not be inevitable.
The important difference is that with my reading we can have a game where the GM decides what play will be about, and the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness, but that is incoherent!
I don't see why. The GM provides the plot and the theme - that is,
what play will be about. The players decide, via their action declarations for their PCs, how to investigate that "aboutness" - they spend more time chatting to the Knights of Solamnia learning their history and their view of the Oath and the Measure; or they spend less time with the Elves because they think they're boring, but they really get into the stuff with the Gully Dwarves; etc.
As I've posted, this interactivity is crucial to the difference between playing a RPG - even a "story hour" RPG - and reading a book or watching a film.
As Tuovinen explains, for this to work it requires that "the freedoms you give to the player are carefully constrained". This is why he has a discussion of how to railroad, and of the silliness/futility of trying to pretend a story hour is
not a railroad - as he says,
You’re literally only bothering with the railroad tracks because you don’t want to waste time preparing complex content and then just have the other players skip it; it’s much better to take the track as a given and focus on how to make your content worth the trip.
This is not incoherent in my view, but it does require abandoning some reflexive shibboleths: the players
aren't at liberty to do whatever they want; they are under an expectation/obligation to go along with the GM's story; the GM is, conversely, under an obligation to give them good stuff!
In my own RPGing, I can think of three different sorts of "story hour" experience. (All as a player; I don't recall ever having tried to GM a "story hour"). I've done CoC (and some other BRP) one-shots, GMed by terrific GMs who are able to bring the fiction to life, make it clear what the players are expected to do, facilitate the players engaging with and contributing to the colour, and deliver a rewarding story pay-off. (I will come back to these one-shots below; but first . . . )
I've done a long "story hour" campaign which had many players (my memory is 6, plus the GM) where - at least for me - the focus of play was more on the interaction between the PCs, and the relationships we built up and our expectations and orientations towards the setting; rather than the GM's story. The game ended when the GM - seemingly (i) having lost control of his own material, and (ii) wanting to disrupt the accreted layers of meaning from what we as players had done - teleported everyone 100 years into the future. That killed all the meaning in the game, and killed the game.
And then I've done multiple "story hours" where the story is weak, and/or the GM is not very deft, and the experience was a more-or-less tedious slog. These games fizzle out in a session or three.
Coming back to the one-shots: there is what I regard as a narrativist variant on the one-shot "story hour", where a good chunk of play resembles "story hour" as the GM builds up the situation; but then, at the moment of crisis, the players need to get "proactive" to decide how to resolve things. Some Prince Valiant scenarios have this character - eg The Blue Cloak and even moreso The Crimson Bull. (An actual play report on both of those is here:
Prince Valiant actual play) And I've played convention one-shots, using Stormbring/Elric and maybe also a couple of other BRP variants, that have this character.
Using the "aboutness" language, in these sorts of scenarios the GM introduces the subject-matter of thematic judgement, but it is the
players who, at the moment of crisis, actually make the judgement. The analogue, in DL, would be if the players got to express a judgement over whether the return of the gods is a good or bad thing; or whether the dragon armies should be helped or hindered; etc.
I have also identified some other unexpressed assumptions I have been using that I am not certain you are sharing. So I will try to list them explicitely here:
1: Creative agenda is primarily defined on singular actions.
2: To talk about play as a whole to follow a creative agenda, all participants must follow that agenda (make actions with that agenda)
3: If the various players follow different agenda play is rather described as incoherent.
4 The GM is a participant in play per point 2 and 3.
(There are some subtelties related to hybrid play, and that 2 is of course never pure, but this is the simplified mental model I am working under when I have been making unnuanced claims like I have done in this reply chain)
I don't think your (1) is correct, at least as I've understood creative agenda from the Forge "tradition" (I use scare quotes because I'm not sure we can have genuine traditions of thought that are only 20 years old). In the Forge usage, creative agenda manifests over periods of play (hours, sessions), and is understood in terms of
what does this group of RPGers take to be the "pay-off" of their play?
Subject to that, I think your 2 to 4 are uncontroversial: creative agenda is a group-level phenomenon, and if the participants are looking for different sorts of pay-off then play is incoherent by definition (in the technical sense of "incoherent") and likely to be unstable in the real world - eg those looking for simulationist pay-off will regard those looking for gamist pay-off as "munchkins" or "power gamers", and will regard those looking for narrativist pay-off as "pushy" types who tread on the GM's authority.
So the spesific example I have been looking at is how the incoherent situation where a GM is joining with a narrativistic creative agenda, but the players are joining with a different agenda. That might on the surface look very much like "story time" - the coherent sim mode. The difference would just appear in cases where the agendas are put under stress. The standard failure mode here is that the GM start introducing elements because the GM themselves think it makes cool story, rather than for them to be interesting to engage with. NPCs that take over the narrative and outshines the PCs is possibly the best known of these.
Personally I wouldn't try and analyse this is in terms of incoherence of creative agenda, but rather poor use of the RPG medium.
If you read Edwards and Tuovinen, you can see that - most of the time, unless they introduce express qualification - they are talking about RPGs with pretty mainstream role allocations. One participant - the GM - introduces/presents situations/scenes to the other participants; and those other participants - the players - control the actions of characters who are present in those situations, thereby shaping how the situations unfold. It is this distribution of authority that permits "story hour" to play out differently from just having the GM recite a story.
The use of over-powerful NPCs, which prevent the players from playing their role, is thus just poor RPGing, a clumsy use of the medium. Similarly - and setting aside absurdist RPGing like (perhaps) Toon and Over the Edge - introducing significant contradictions into the fiction isn't a creative agenda issue. It's just poor use of the medium.
But in some "story hour" or "substantial exploration" play a type of powerful NPC might be important: eg for revealing the rails, in a "story hour" (say, by revealing plot threads); and eg by teleporting the PCs here and there in a "substantial exploration" game, thus actually permitting the enjoyment of the material to take place. (In a sci-fi game the teleporting NPC could be replaced by a starship, or a TARDIS, or similar.)
In other words, not every bit of unsatisfactory RPG play is due to creative agenda malfunction. In the fizzled "story hours" I described above, the issue wasn't really creative agenda incoherence, as that the material was not interesting.
And this is where the difference between homebrew and prepublished become critical. If you run Dragonlance, noone can suspect you for just pushing your own ego unless you happen to be Hickman. This is not so obvious with a homebrew setting. It could be that you honestly are curious to see what the players would do with it. But it could also be that you just want to show off the cool stuff you have made and gather feedback. One of these I consider "story time" in the sense described by Touvinen, the other I do not understand as "story time" but rather a ticking bomb of incoherence.
To me, this simply comes back to Tuovinen's injunction: "respect yourself, respect your friends". Is the stuff interesting or not? If the stuff is interesting, ego is not a problem. It it's boring, modesty won't save it.
Again, I don't really see this as a creative agenda issue.
