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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Indaarys" data-source="post: 9507728" data-attributes="member: 7040941">Right yeah I agree with that. The statement probably ought to be that they can be a medium for it, not that they strictly are. Well thats what I'm saying makes Fiasco exceptional. And as for PBTA, I think a lot of that perception goes towards how certain fans of those games position them in relation to trad games. Much of what those games do is actually in-line with what the essay constructs as a better ideal, so pointing out how and why they aren't already the answer is apropros.Probably yeah. I grabbed reinforcment in the essay because it felt I like I needed to put a name to it, beyond the ambiguous "G", and it seemed apropros. Arguably roleplaying might have been the most appropriate, but that term has been muddled over time. But I should also say that as influential as that book has been on my thinking, game patterns aren't a standardized thing nor for the matter even a widely recognized tool or framework with which to approach game design. While we can get into the weeds over where the term comes from, I think Playstyle Reinforcement works to describe what the dynamic does in a concise way. And think thats additionally supported given how much discourse in the hobby is about playstyle and how games can support it; reinforce it, if you will. I think a lot of readers have kind of taken the idea too literally, which to be fair is partially my fault as the phrase is misusing terms to be provocative. The idea is more accurately put as the Rules are a Participant in the Improvisational Process. Aka, a Player in the improv vernacular. The idea isn't that the Game is a sapient entity like the two human roles are, but that by and through mechanical design it can still participate in the dynamics of improv so long as the humans continue to play. Approaching this design as though the game is a Participant, a Player in the improv vernacular, is how we can shape the game towards the themes and experiences we desire (eg, epic fantasy versus cyberpunk, save the world adventuring versus heists, and so on), but without disrupting the improv dynamic, and improving on them in turn in a way that would require very specificially talented and knowledgeable humans to pull off without it. It reminds me of the one poster here on EnWorld whose a really big advocate for FKR (name escapes me). In FKR, that expectation is just baked in, and the game only serves a minimal purpose in providing some mechanical structure to resolving actions in the game. If I were to play FKR with some of my like-minded friends, we could probably get a pretty good run going at something akin to Lord of the Rings. But, that would ultimately be down to us being big enough Tolkien fans and hobbyist writers that we could organically emulate the elements of his stories without needing much mechanical guidance to structure and guide it. It'd be unreasonable to expect that of others though, and arguably, the appeal in games that push this kind of mechanical minimalism is probably rooted in becoming so familiar with the kinds of game experiences they enjoyed over time, that they developed the knowledge and know-how to recreate those experiences with minimal or no guidance. For me at least, I just know that after a point, the idea of having interactivity gets superflous if we're that close to just doing improv outright but also intentionally focusing it towards a preconceived idea. Its like I related once upon a time about how I like games that just let me play in them, and why I can burn out on certain video games if I let my writers brain get antsy and start trying to force a story out of the mechanics. If I just stop and play normally, the fun comes back, and I start generating more organic experiences as stories instead. I regularly do actual, pure Improv these days (took a couple classes and have a regular group for it now), and I do greatly enjoy it, but engaging in it requires a very different headspace from what something like FKR calls for, and without the structure of something more robust than that, I'm likely going to get antsy if I don't get bored out of my mind first. Using FKR to pull off LOTR might be initially interesting as an intellectual exercise, but as a game I don't think i could cope for too long lol. Well it can get lost in the petty arguments and sniping, but I've said before a lot of my game design does more or less do some of the same things as those games. My contention with them was mostly due to how those designs are used, and not that they were fundamentally bad ideas in of themselves. The nature of the Events system and how its presented to the player was actually directly inspired by Moves, for example, they just work differently in that Events don't require you to acknowledge them or only do what they say. Its a prompt rather than a command, in other words, but mechanically its not all that different from a Move.</blockquote>

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