Just a question, since I thought the answer was "yes", but your phrasing above suggests "no": you're aware that at least to a fair degree GNS was an attempted refinement of its predecessor GDS originally developed on rec.games.frp.advocacy many years ago, right?
Yes, and what I wanted to question is how GNS stands in relation to us? Ignoring how and why it was developed to look at what work it could be doing today (what it "amounts" to)? In relation to the ongoing conversation this is part of, I'd like to draw attention to
a recent post of Baker's here in which he updates (or clarifies) his viewpoint. He writes
At the Forge, we thought that narrativism was its own kind of game, it’s own kind of gameplay, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. What’s true is that narrativism is a thing that games and gameplay can do.
For example, I really like games where you make a commitment on incomplete information, get the rest of the information you need, and try to make the best of it, or at least see now how your commitment plays out. Roborally does this, Diplomacy does it, my board game The Abductinators does it, Burning Wheel’s combat system does it. A million games do it. A million other games don’t.
We could give this thing a name for easy reference (“guess & script,” say), but it isn’t its own separate kind of game, it’s just a thing that you can do in a game. A dynamic that games can include.
Same thing with narrativism.
And apposite to your comment
It’s tempting to look at Murderous Ghosts’ non-narrativist workings and say, “if it’s not narrativist, then aha, it must be gamist or simulationist. Which?”
But you and I could put our heads together and come up with interesting game dynamics all day long, limited only by our inventiveness as creators. Narrativism is exactly one of them. We’re supposed to divide the rest between gamism and simulationism? Why?
No, I don’t think that we should expect gamism and simulationism to mean anything at all, just because narrativism does.
That is — the gamism and simulationism of the Big Model. The terms gamism and simulationism were originally coined on rec.games.frp.advocacy back in the 90s, along with a term the Big Model didn’t adopt, dramatism. My vote would be to return them whole and outright. In the RGFA Threefold, they mean pretty much what you think they mean. We could forget that the Big Model ever seized on them:
Whenever you see the idea that gamism, simulationism, and “narrativism” (that is, dramatism) are spectrums, or that you might make a gamist decision in a sea of simulationist decisions, or that a game’s mechanics or subsystems can be broken down into their gamist, simulationist, or “narrativist” (dramatist) components, those ideas hearken back to the RGFA Threefold.
Baker is no doubt familiar with the definitions they have in GDS, but
here from Kim's site
"gamist": is the style which values setting up a fair challenge for the players (as opposed to the PCs). The challenges may be tactical combat, intellectual mysteries, politics, or anything else. The players will try to solve the problems they are presented with, and in turn the GM will make these challenges solvable if they act intelligently within the contract.
"
simulationist": is the style which values resolving in-game events based solely on game-world considerations, without allowing any meta-game concerns to affect the decision. Thus, a fully simulationist GM will not fudge results to save PCs or to save her plot, or even change facts unknown to the players. Such a GM may use meta-game considerations to decide meta-game issues like who is playing which character, whether to play out a conversation word for word, and so forth, but she will resolve actual in-game events based on what would "really" happen. [EDIT worth here reading
Sorenson's take on new sim which was linked from Baker's post.]
What is being discussed here amounts to group contracts to play in a certain way. Again from Kim's FAQ
The Threefold Model [GDS] is one way of grouping many aspects of "group contracts" into logical categories. Full group contract includes every facet of how the game is played: not just the mechanical rules, but also how scenarios are constructed, what sort of behavior is expected of PCs, how actions not covered by the rules are resolved, allowance of outside distractions, and so forth. The Threefold divides up many of these into categories known as Drama, Game, and Simulation.
And I suppose that just as much as one might say (to paraphrase) that certain techniques are liable to support or obstruct a player interest in experiencing narrativism (just one thing a game can do) certain techniques are liable to support elements prioritised in the group contract. I think it's worth reading
@pemerton's
#12,883 at this point in connection with the liability of techniques to support or obstruct player interests. Baker supplies a cautionary note -- it's easy to mistake or overstate the connection of a technique with afforded play (to suppose it necessary for that play, or limited to producing that play)
A lot of the accidental details of the games we made came to be associated with narrativism, wrongly.
For instance, narrativism requires the GM not to plan out a storyline in advance, but people have come to associate it with various forms of player empowerment beyond that. Player narration,
crossing John Harper’s line, “director stance” or “writer’s room” play, whatever. Some narrativist games use those techniques but narrativism itself doesn’t require them or refer to them.
I'm not resolutely skeptical on these matters, but how players will use a technique, how it sits within and interacts with other techniques, how players are guided to use it, are going to change how it plays out.
