D&D General Supposing D&D is gamist, what does that mean?

[clearstream]

I'm not meaning to contradict you here. I think it's interesting to think about different design and play approaches to the question you've raised, across the variety of story now-oriented RPGs and RPGing.

That possibly connects to something I like about the three-folds. If one divides the engaging activities - or you could say urges or impulses - of gaming, several seem really evident.

• Solve a problem
• Tell a story
• Make believe
• Construct
• Collect

The bolded ones share an important feature - they can be managed ephemerally. Which is to say they don't rest on records and artifacts. For each of them, it's interesting to think about different design and play approaches to the questions that can be raised. Extending and paraphrasing your comment.

When I read GNS I see good answers to questions about what is vital to telling a story effectively. I don't see similar good answers in respect of solving a problem and making believe, but that doesn't mean there aren't some answers, nor that those aren't rightly called out as important impulses. And as you know, where Edwards saw incompatibility I see compatibility: greater strength, in fact, in weaving them together. That doesn't mean I think the theory isn't insightful... even though as a gamer I might feel it's not insightful enough on the solving a problem dimension. Must one theory be all things? Knowledge of what games are and can be is very much still evolving.

Not bolded are two other impulses or behaviours that are invoked in a few RPGs and perhaps offer opportunities for the future. An obstacle is figuring out how to make them ephemeral enough to manage at the table? Some games are starating to look at this - Artifact perhaps being an example, or The Ground Itself. Earthdawn printed attractive cards for players to collect and track their threadweaving to the depicted items.

 

[clearstream]

Some have.

I say it means Score-and-Achievement. Score, aka Step-On-Up, is about comparing. You can "play better," getting a higher Score. It may not be numbers. It might be complex. Maybe there are several valuable attributes, but you can't just have unlimited amounts of them all. Regardless, it still compares player success against something. It's where theoretical smarts and planned choice matter.

Achievement, aka Challenge, is rising to the occasion. Can you best the problem? Can you save the handsome dragon from the wicked princess? Are you a bad enough dude(tte) to save the President? It's where the action is. It's where practical smarts and dynamic choice matter.

Without Score, Achievement can't really happen, because the Challenge isn't overcome.* A fan of this style might mock it as having been "wished away," or as being a fake challenge with no failure condition. Score is the teeth, the bite that allows failure to have a sting, the thing that separates the wheat from the chaff. That means Score has to be "fair" in some sense, otherwise it's arbitrary and the challenge becomes a mere roulette.

Without Achievement, Score is pointless. Mere number jockeying without goal. This shows up more in video games. If the victories don't feel worthy, don't feel like they matter, then there is no growth, just change. Watching things change just to change gets boring quickly. Score alone becomes "spreadsheets" without meaning or merit.

There is a very intentional symmetry here between my four categories. The first term in each pair (Groundedness, Conceit, Score, Values) sets the stage. It allows things to happen. It doesn't DO things on its own. It may require actions in order to be present, but those actions are like putting out your paints and setting up your easel. They are not "painting" itself, but vital prep so you can paint. The second term in each pair is where the act of play occurs, and where those preparatory steps become useful. Just as one cannot paint if one has no paints to use, and setting up your paints and then not doing anything with them is pretty pointless, each term in the pair is...ineffectual without its partner. Prep and Action. The "Marine Creed" comes to mind.

Note that at no point did any of this require competition. That doesn't mean competition will be absent. Competition is a perfectly valid form of Achievement, and some games emphasize it. I, personally, don't care for it much. I value collab and co-op. I find competition for prizes within the group (e.g. jockeying to always get the best magic items) distasteful. But it remains valid. Outright conflict against fellow players is likewise a valid approach, I just don't personally find much enjoyment from it.

*This is probably why when I tell people that characters aren't subject to permanent, irrevocable, random death in my game, they think it must be "boring" or that the players "always win." They're so used to death being the ultimate metric of Score—how long did you survive?—that talk of doing anything else immediately makes them question how it is possible to still have any Achievement in the game.

Would you conflate desire for achievement (social ranking etc, present in many games) with solving a problem (overcoming an obstacle)? I see them as separate. Perhaps thus extending my list of five impulses above to six. I'm not at this time certain achievement is like the other impulses, as folk appear able to seek and value achievement connected to any behaviour.

 

[clearstream]

It's 43 pages, have people figured out what gamist means?

For me, a really important doubt still exists over the conflation of achievement with problem-solving. @EzekielRaiden shows quite well how the two can be connected. I think though, that one can have problem-solving (aka overcoming obstacles) without achievement. And you can have achievement connected with each other impulse - not just praise and pride, but overt score. Such as XP for resolving a bond in Dungeon World.

I'm tentatively mulling the following poles (activities, behaviours, impulses... not sure the best word here) - a five-fold model if you like

• Solve a problem
• Tell a story
• Make believe
• Construct
• Collect

I set aside achievement, as I believe it can be present in all impulses. That's likely my main dissatisfaction with definitions of gamist so far. Everyone was able quite easily (and based on the outcomes of arguments decades ago) to set aside competition as essential to gamist. I'm advocating for a similar separating out of achievement from an interest or urge toward problem solving or overcoming of obstacles.

 

[clearstream]

Well, there's nothing intrinsic about sharing a general agenda that ensures that a given game of that type will be satisfying. You can have a pair of dramatists who love and hate horror respectively, for example. All the agenda says is that the focal point is important to you, not that you're going to use it in exactly the same way.

Yes, I agree. It's interesting to observe that there can be incompatibilities within an agenda.

But both of these are fundamentally gamist concerns, they're just aimed at different spots in the spectrum, and different parts of the game experience (challenge in building characters in contrast to challenge in the tactical moment).

That's the essential point I wanted to make. If gamist is about challenge, it is equally gamist to prefer low challenge as high. Challenge is a very, very general term though, and there isn't anything like the deconstruction of narrativism to say what in game will amount to effective and engaging rather than ineffective and unengaging challenge. Nothing about what gamism needs to be.

I find it really hard to frame this into words. Perhaps it would be analogous to having a description in the theory about narrativism that said folk want to tell stories. There need to be characters, situations, etc. But nothing about dramatic character development or resolution of premise. Nothing about what makes a an effective and engaging story. Nothing about what story needs to be.

 

[clearstream]

How on earth is this a paradox? The player in question has an agenda that's more than just gamist. Your very example made that abundantly clear! They have a particular gamist agenda, and may have other factors involved too. Just because the GNS model has high-level catergorizations, doesn't mean those are the only factors under consideration. In fact, the GNS model goes to some pains to examine agendas within those top-level agendas.

I meant to imply that there can be incompatibility even when sharing an agenda. So that's a thing. "Paradox" evidently not the ideal word...

See my posts and @pemerton's about applying a broad brush and categorizing games and players with concepts meant to apply to moments and actions.

Supposing we remove players from the scene... do we retain any moments and actions?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Would you conflate desire for achievement (social ranking etc, present in many games) with solving a problem (overcoming an obstacle)? I see them as separate. Perhaps thus extending my list of five impulses above to six. I'm not at this time certain achievement is like the other impulses, as folk appear able to seek and value achievement connected to any behaviour.

I would personally refer to what you call "achievement" here as "prestige." An achievement is...something achieved, even if it goes unnoticed by others. Prestige by its very nature requires recognition from other people. It's impossible to be prestigious and unknown but it is quite possible to achieve something and have no one know about it.

Consider, for example, that Ramanujan made several achievements in mathematics while he was still completely unknown. Or that there are achievements of ancient peoples which got no recognition (hence, prestige) until they were unearthed by archaeology in modern times. Prestige is generally one of the reasons a person might desire to achieve things, as wishing to be high in the estimation of others is a pretty natural motivation, but it's far from the only reason. Like that one mathematician, Perelman, who turned down the Millennium Prize money for proving the Poincaré conjecture. He pretty clearly didn't do the proof purely for recognition, as he is an intensely private man who doesn't do many interviews and mostly stays out of the public eye, but that does not lessen his achievement at having proved a thing considered difficult and worthy of knowing.

So, ultimately, I stand by my chosen terms. Achievement is the action of surpassing a worthy challenge. Prestige is the (often desirable) result of being recognized for surpassing a worthy challenge. Prestige is a purely player-side motive which might drive one to play a Score-and-Achievement game, because such games are extremely amenable to having others understand quickly and effectively the magnitude and difficulty of any given achievement one makes. "I took down the Tarrasque" has meaning because "the Tarrasque" requires no additional context outside of knowing how the rules work and what specific ones it uses (in other words, its place in the Score space). There is no need to explain complex individual context, nor to work through the details of a situation with sufficient fidelity such that the reasoning behind the choices is revealed. This means the prestige of being able to lay claim to this Achievement is very easily reached.

You see similar things with stuff like "I survived the Tomb of Annihilation," or in the MMO space, stuff like the shirt I got from a friend that says "I Beat Ravana." (I didn't actually beat Ravana myself; friend is a tech support employee at Square-Enix and had some company swag to give away to friends. It's a delightfully comfortable shirt.) These things have meaning because the system is understood and requires no extra context, so long as fair play is assumed.

Perhaps it is important here to note that I am going for a taxonomy of "what is the game for" rather than "why do players choose to play it." If one is building a player motivation model, then yes, Prestige will be strongly associated with GNS "Gamist"/Score-and-Achievement games. I would contrast this against (if I may use a word slightly outside its usual context) "Understanding," "Epiphany," or "Enlightenment," where the player goal is to have as many moments as possible of suddenly SEEING the solution to a puzzle or quandary, which meshes with both Gamism/Score-and-Achievement (discovering a brilliant strategy or subverting an expected outcome in a clever way) and with "process" Sim (a particularly deft execution of naturalistic reasoning in pursuit of some end, or a clever explanation of a previously confusing or seemingly-ungrounded situation or entity). Self-Realization, by contrast, would be a player motivation in "Narrativist"/Values-and-Issues play, because the practice of that play requires putting values to the test, which can lead to surprises in what one is in fact willing or unwilling to do in pursuit of those ends. (See above for the example of the dwarf character who challenged his mother's criticisms, and the player speculating about what would have happened if their approach had failed instead of succeeding.)

I think I may have missed the post where you articulated your five (now six?) player motives, so I apologize if I am simply regurgitating your own points.

 

[Hussar]

Yes, I agree. It's interesting to observe that there can be incompatibilities within an agenda.

Well, that's a bit of an "of course" to be honest. I mean, good grief, have you never seen genre discussions? Any art critique will have all sorts of different approaches and interpretations even within larger umbrella's of critical discourse. Just because two people prefer Marxian deconstruction in no way means that they will agree about anything the other says.

That's the essential point I wanted to make. If gamist is about challenge, it is equally gamist to prefer low challenge as high. Challenge is a very, very general term though, and there isn't anything like the deconstruction of narrativism to say what in game will amount to effective and engaging rather than ineffective and unengaging challenge. Nothing about what gamism needs to be.

I find it really hard to frame this into words. Perhaps it would be analogous to having a description in the theory about narrativism that said folk want to tell stories. There need to be characters, situations, etc. But nothing about dramatic character development or resolution of premise. Nothing about what makes a an effective and engaging story. Nothing about what story needs to be.

Well, to be fair, when the essays were written, they kind of needed to go a bit deeper into Narrativist play simply because it was pretty new and not something you saw much of. There just weren't that many examples. OTOH, Gamist games have existed for, well, thousands of years. What makes something challenging and engaging in a Gamist game has been largely dealt with. As far as RPG's go, as I said earlier, once you start down the road of examining game balance and mechanical balance between players and between players and the GM, then you're largely in the realm of a Gamist game.

And, frankly, since the GNS model isn't really a template for making good or bad games - expecting the model to explain what something needs to be is largely outside the scope.

I think you're really looking at this from a very odd perspective. The GNS model is simply an art criticism model -it's defining genre. If I define a literary genre, say, mystery as a story where there is a central event, the cause of which is unknown to the characters in the story and often to the reader as well, and during the story, that cause will be revealed - that in no way defines what makes a good or bad mystery novel.

I mean, good grief, we've got literally a century of film making in the can. Hundreds of thousands of hours of theatrical release movies. And, despite all that information, you cannot begin to predict whether a movie will succeed or fail at the box office. The "sleeper hits" and the crash and burns abound every year. Given the bajillions of dollars spent on movies, you'd think that movie makers would have a winning formula by now.

So, if bajillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of hours of films can't lead to a model that tells us if a movie is good or not, why on earth would you think a bunch of geeks banging away on an Internet board could do it? The GNS model is simply an analytical tool. We can look at some game or some event within a game and deconstruct it based on the tool. And that can help us to understand why something is being done. But, tell us that it's good or bad? What it "needs to be"? Yeah, that's not going to happen.

 

[clearstream]

I would personally refer to what you call "achievement" here as "prestige." An achievement is...something achieved, even if it goes unnoticed by others. Prestige by its very nature requires recognition from other people. It's impossible to be prestigious and unknown but it is quite possible to achieve something and have no one know about it.

Consider, for example, that Ramanujan made several achievements in mathematics while he was still completely unknown. Or that there are achievements of ancient peoples which got no recognition (hence, prestige) until they were unearthed by archaeology in modern times. Prestige is generally one of the reasons a person might desire to achieve things, as wishing to be high in the estimation of others is a pretty natural motivation, but it's far from the only reason. Like that one mathematician, Perelman, who turned down the Millennium Prize money for proving the Poincaré conjecture. He pretty clearly didn't do the proof purely for recognition, as he is an intensely private man who doesn't do many interviews and mostly stays out of the public eye, but that does not lessen his achievement at having proved a thing considered difficult and worthy of knowing.

Thank you, that nicely clarifies your meaning. So we have prestige and achievement. The former relates to external recognition. The latter to internal cognition.

So, ultimately, I stand by my chosen terms. Achievement is the action of surpassing a worthy challenge. Prestige is the (often desirable) result of being recognized for surpassing a worthy challenge. Prestige is a purely player-side motive which might drive one to play a Score-and-Achievement game, because such games are extremely amenable to having others understand quickly and effectively the magnitude and difficulty of any given achievement one makes. "I took down the Tarrasque" has meaning because "the Tarrasque" requires no additional context outside of knowing how the rules work and what specific ones it uses (in other words, its place in the Score space). There is no need to explain complex individual context, nor to work through the details of a situation with sufficient fidelity such that the reasoning behind the choices is revealed. This means the prestige of being able to lay claim to this Achievement is very easily reached.

You see similar things with stuff like "I survived the Tomb of Annihilation," or in the MMO space, stuff like the shirt I got from a friend that says "I Beat Ravana." (I didn't actually beat Ravana myself; friend is a tech support employee at Square-Enix and had some company swag to give away to friends. It's a delightfully comfortable shirt.) These things have meaning because the system is understood and requires no extra context, so long as fair play is assumed.

Armed with your definition, I agree with your conflation of achievement with solving a problem. Although as I will come to, I have further thoughts on that score. As an aside, although I do get your thought of - a sense of achievement - it might be difficult to really divide an internal desire for accomplishment from a socially-projected desire for accomplishment. Going forward I'll use epiphany - a word you suggest further along.

Perhaps it is important here to note that I am going for a taxonomy of "what is the game for" rather than "why do players choose to play it." If one is building a player motivation model, then yes, Prestige will be strongly associated with GNS "Gamist"/Score-and-Achievement games. I would contrast this against (if I may use a word slightly outside its usual context) "Understanding," "Epiphany," or "Enlightenment," where the player goal is to have as many moments as possible of suddenly SEEING the solution to a puzzle or quandary, which meshes with both Gamism/Score-and-Achievement (discovering a brilliant strategy or subverting an expected outcome in a clever way) and with "process" Sim (a particularly deft execution of naturalistic reasoning in pursuit of some end, or a clever explanation of a previously confusing or seemingly-ungrounded situation or entity). Self-Realization, by contrast, would be a player motivation in "Narrativist"/Values-and-Issues play, because the practice of that play requires putting values to the test, which can lead to surprises in what one is in fact willing or unwilling to do in pursuit of those ends. (See above for the example of the dwarf character who challenged his mother's criticisms, and the player speculating about what would have happened if their approach had failed instead of succeeding.)

Would we not suppose that there can be some inward sense of satisfaction connected with each motive? Is there perhaps a redundancy or inseparableness that means we might as well fold "solve a problem" and "epiphany" into one construct?

Alternatively, if it really is "what is game for" we're going for, rather than "why to players choose to play it" then wouldn't we be silent on epiphany? Game is for presenting problems to solve. How much players might love solving those particular problems - why they choose to play it - is not a subject of our taxonomy.

I think I may have missed the post where you articulated your five (now six?) player motives, so I apologize if I am simply regurgitating your own points.

Not at all. In the light of your discussion, I find myself looking at Edwards' choice with fresh eyes. He suggests a symmetrical arrangement of

• prestige - real-world performance in person
• challenge - game-world performance via avatar

Challenge here is really situation, with a gamist spin on it. I'm not sure this arrangement offers much insight. Maybe it does and hopefully others will be able to show how. If my taxonomy of what game is for includes

• Solve a problem
• Tell a story
• Make believe
• Construct
• Collect

Then my taxonomy of why do players choose to play it might include

• epiphany
• prestige
• etc

 

[clearstream]

This seems like an argument that the way MCU makes films is more "functional" than the way Ingmar Bergman makes films, because the former have more viewers extolling their virtues.

I imagine that Palladium has sold more RPGs, and had more hours of those RPGs played, than John Harper's Agon or Vincent Baker's In A Wicked Age. Am I therefore obliged to conclude that Palladium's RPGs are "more functional" and "more successful" as RPGs that Agon or In A Wicked Age?

I can see how such concerns might arise from conflating concepts that are dissimilar. My claim is as to functional play. Functional for whom? All players participating in that play. Mine is not a claim about artistic (or other specific) merit, although I can see that where I or others use a general word like "success" we risk suggesting a much wider claim than intended. I hope it is clear that I am not suggesting anything wider than functional (and as contrasted with dysfunctional)!

This is why, upthread, I made the point that Edwards is not offering a theory of the commercial success of RPGs.

Your point as I understood it was that Edwards is not offering a theory of the success of RPGs. Are you clarifying here to say that the theory does predict success, but just not commercial success?

This also seems to be a description of a commercial strategy and commercial success.

You may have in mind a false dichotomy, unless your argument really is that commercial strategy and commercial success rule out the possibility of success on other criteria? If so, I'd again stress that I am making a narrow claim about the play being functional for the game's players. Success on other terms than that (including commerical) would be a separate debate.

This is not going beyond commercial success.

I see. For me the actual words of folk playing a game are worthy of credence, and I feel that the alternative view is unnecessarily elitist. I could be more critical of 5e and suggest that - like Marvel movies - it regurgitates and marginally improves upon only what has been found to be successful before it. But that is a separate complaint: it does not rule out the game also being successfully more functional for its audience (i.e. making improvements that result in greater or enhanced functionality for them relative to its precursors.)

I could say that those precursors were all just as functional, or even more so, for their various (and variously sized, but smaller) appreciative cohorts. It's pretty hard to make the case either way, but for me folk writing glowingly to make direct comparisons with those precursors based on their personal experience both of them and the current game, would be indicative. Or at least extremely difficult to count as implying the opposite, and putting the burden squarely on those who might think otherwise to sustain their counter-claims.

As to the artistic, ethical, etc merits? For me those are answered separately and from previous conversations I believe I share many of your preferences there.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For me, a really important doubt still exists over the conflation of achievement with problem-solving. @EzekielRaiden shows quite well how the two can be connected. I think though, that one can have problem-solving (aka overcoming obstacles) without achievement. And you can have achievement connected with each other impulse - not just praise and pride, but overt score. Such as XP for resolving a bond in Dungeon World.

I'm tentatively mulling the following poles (activities, behaviours, impulses... not sure the best word here) - a five-fold model if you like

• Solve a problem
• Tell a story
• Make believe
• Construct
• Collect

I set aside achievement, as I believe it can be present in all impulses. That's likely my main dissatisfaction with definitions of gamist so far. Everyone was able quite easily (and based on the outcomes of arguments decades ago) to set aside competition as essential to gamist. I'm advocating for a similar separating out of achievement from an interest or urge toward problem solving or overcoming of obstacles.

Aha, here it is.

As above, your model sounds like it asks a different question. Mine asks, "What purposes are there for games?" Yours, if I've understood your most recent post (response below), is asking, "Why do people choose to play games?" In Aristotelian terms, I'm examining formal causes (in essence, "why tables are shaped like tables"), while you are examining final causes ("why tables get made at all," more or less.) Complements to one another. "Prestige" applies to all four of my categories, though I'd associate it more strongly with Score-and-Achievement due to the emphasis it puts on (eventual) success. Values-and-Issues, on the other hand, puts almost no emphasis on success, but rather on resolution, which is very different--more on that later.

Your "make-believe" also shows up everywhere (we give things fluffy names, after all), but it's weakest in S&A (many D&D/PF game postings call for "skirt-length backstory"--that's clearly not overly enamored with "make-believe"), but it's of paramount importance for Groundedness-and-Simulation. "Process" Sim, at least as I see it, is focused on clear, intuitive symmetry between player and character. Frex, most issues with "metagame" knowledge/mechanics arise there. S&A players rarely outright dislike metagame stuff, unless it's seen as producing unfair play, while "process" Sim fans tend to loathe anything "meta." (I'd argue this is an area that separates G&S from Conceit-and-Emulation play, as metacurrencies etc. seem fairly common in games that openly pursue a particular genre, e.g. "supers" games.)

Back to my contrast between Achievement and "resolving" Issues. This comes from both theory and observation of play. Achievement--the purpose or goal of Gamist Situation, aka Challenge--is about success, but "resolving" Issues does not require success. A "Pyrrhic victory" is generally not seen as an achievement (small a), even if it does theoretically get the job done, because the success is tainted by the overwhelming loss/cost/secondary failures. Likewise, if the party (say) defeats the demilich, but only because the last surviving party member did it the turn before they failed their final save and got permanently petrified, then technically the party Achieved something, and the group in theory can expect prestige for their "victory," but the clear loss in terms of Score will taint it. Likewise, many D&D DMs struggle with parties who are unwilling to retreat from combat--because that means admitting defeat in the here-and-now, a loss of Score and (at absolute best) a delaying of Achievement (or more likely an abandonment thereof).

By comparison, "resolution" of an Issue doesn't have to succeed or fail--merely getting to the other side of the conflict. I'm thinking of DW's Bonds, and how they're discussed in the End of Session move, which opens with (emphasis mine): "When you reach the end of a session, choose one your bonds that you feel is resolved (completely explored, no longer relevant, or otherwise). Ask the player of the character you have the bond with if they agree. If they do, mark XP and write a new bond with whomever you wish." That's totally unrelated to success, or even (small-a) achievement; instead, it's related to how important or relevant the bond is to the people involved. If its relevance has run its course, then it doesn't matter whether one side or another has actually done anything, the bond is done. Be it abandoned, successful, or failed, all of those "resolve" the current Bond. But a Bond can also be resolved simply by changing to something new: the "field" shifts from its original Issue to a new one.

As an example of that kind of play in my own player experience, I played a Paladin in a DW game. We had a halfling Fighter, who was a gruff, rough-and-tumble type, who saw my character's idealism and compassion as weaknesses that needed to be addressed; he took the bond, "<Paladin> is soft, but I will make them hard like me." Conversely, I took the bond, "<Fighter>'s misguided behavior endangers their very soul!" This set up an interesting dynamic, where both sides saw the other as mistaken, but hoped to improve them. As we played through the game, though, I revealed (after a roll of some kind, can't recall which) that my character became a Paladin after his wife was killed by an evil wizard; he had killed the wizard in retaliation and then dedicated the rest of his life to being a better person and helping others who had been exploited or hurt. I can still hear the player's voice when he said, "<Paladin>....you're one of the strongest people I've ever known." And in that moment, after months of my character being a stalwart shoulder (well...hip, the Fighter was a halfling after all) to lean on and risking his life to save others, the Fighter realized that what he truly wanted to be more like my Paladin. He went full CG (very C but also trying hard to be G), saving people, raising up the downtrodden. That was a lovely game and I'm still a little sad we had to stop like, 2-3 sessions before it would have wrapped up completely.

Point being, "resolving" Issues can look a lot like Achieving things, because both of them have some kind of conflict and work to end it. But Achievement is pretty specifically focused on success and tends to see even "success at great cost" as not great, while "resolving" Issues has no specific relation to "success" at all and may even embrace an "objective" (=Score) failure because the future Issues it could lead to are worthy of exploration.

Maybe the best way to put this is: "Solve a problem" is extremely abstract. Because you can "solve" a problem by just letting go, right? If you decide the problem isn't a problem anymore then it's solved. But that would be totally against the Gamist ethos--it would be even worse than surrender, it would be declaring that success (and thus Achievement) didn't even matter. If "Solve a problem" is where you want your model to be at, then it's going to capture literally almost all games--not just RPGs--in a way similar to how I described Narrativism upthread: every game can contain narrative to some degree, so defining "narrativism" to mean "games where narratives exist" is a bit pointless. Likewise, what games do not have any semblance whatsoever of "solve a problem"? It would seem to me that, just as nearly all games contain some amount of narrative (however shoestring), nearly all games (by dint of being "games") contain some amount of "solve a problem." The category is too broad.

Would we not suppose that there can be some inward sense of satisfaction connected with each motive? Is there perhaps a redundancy or inseparableness that means we might as well fold "solve a problem" and "epiphany" into one construct?

I don't personally think so, no. I mean, they're related, but aren't "tell a story" and "make-believe" also related? It's hard to tell a story without engaging the audience's imagination in any way whatsoever. (I'm not so sure if the reverse is true or not, so I'll leave that aside.) The categories being related to one another isn't, in and of itself, a problem in my eyes. Others have already explained the reasons Edwards combined "process" Sim and "genre" Sim into one category, they do have things in common, even if (IMO) they end up going very different directions. But there are also parallels between some that are (usually) fundamentally at one another's throats, specifically "Gamism" and "process" Sim. Both care a great deal about rules (for very different reasons), put a premium on the decision-making process (but different kinds of decisions), tend to emphasize the character generation "minigame," and tend to evolve more by the proliferation of player options (again, for different reasons) than by the proliferation of new approaches or perspectives. Hence, even though they tend to pull in opposite directions, you can have fans of both types think a game (such as D&D) is in their camp and always has been and the other side has just been fooling itself about this. (See: the "meat points" debate, the fraught discussions of what is acceptable abstraction, etc.)

Alternatively, if it really is "what is game for" we're going for, rather than "why to players choose to play it" then wouldn't we be silent on epiphany? Game is for presenting problems to solve. How much players might love solving those particular problems - why they choose to play it - is not a subject of our taxonomy.

Oh, absolutely! That's why I use Achievement and not (as I called it) "prestige." Because while I do think there's a strong correlation between "epiphany"/"prestige" etc. and Achievement, I don't think they're always together. I, personally, don't really care much about prestige in general; it takes the right kind of environment to make me interested in that stuff. And epiphany (if you're meaning it in the sense I gave--I'm a bit confused there), while absolutely something a lot of fans of certain categories I've articulated would pursue, isn't something you can really manufacture. It has to arise naturally out of play. Trying to force it would ruin it, much like (say) overtly trying to make a character be super awesome and cool and badass is usually going to fail. That doesn't mean certain genres aren't associated with having that kind of protagonist and/or antagonist (consider shounen anime), but such things have to arise naturally from the process of actually telling the tale. You can't make people have a sudden dawning of understanding, but you can try to invite it through certain techniques. (This, incidentally, is one of the places Gamism and "process" Sim break: Gamism usually values transparency, wanting the rules to be straightforward, concise, and functional, while "process" Sim often actually values obscurantism, because if the rules are opaque, it is more feasible to feel that sudden moment of understanding where the pieces fall into place and you see how they really work together.)

I offered these things as suggestions since they seemed to be what you were going for, not because I wish to add them to my framework. They aren't part of my framework to begin with; it doesn't concern itself with why people care about Score and seek Achievement, just that those are purposes served by gaming.

Not at all. In the light of your discussion, I find myself looking at Edwards' choice with fresh eyes. He suggests a symmetrical arrangement of

• prestige - real-world performance in person
• challenge - game-world performance via avatar

Challenge here is really situation, with a gamist spin on it. I'm not sure this arrangement offers much insight. Maybe it does and hopefully others will be able to show how. If my taxonomy of what game is for includes

• Solve a problem
• Tell a story
• Make believe
• Construct
• Collect

Then my taxonomy of why do players choose to play it might include

• epiphany
• prestige
• etc

Well then, see above for my concern with "solve a problem." It seems, to me, that "solve a problem" is in the same space as "narratives exist in it." How could you have a game where it never, at any point, for any reason, involves anything that looks like "solv[ing] a problem"?