Is it right then to say a player's creative agenda is what they commit to doing, and not what they aim to experience?
I am using "creative agenda" as Edwards does
here:
Talk to someone who participates in role-playing, and focus on the precise and actual acts of role-playing themselves. Ask them, "Why do you role-play?" The most common answer is, "To have fun."
Again, stick to the role-playing itself. (The wholly social issues are real, such as "Wanting to hang out with my friends," but they are not the topic at hand.) Now ask, "What makes fun?" This may not be a verbal question, and it is best answered mainly through role-playing with people rather than listening to them. Time and inference are usually required.
In my experience, the answer turns out to be a version of one of the following terms. These terms, or modes, describe three distinct types of people's decisions and goals during play.
Gamism is the mode of RPGing whereby one
has fun by
stepping on up.
Suppose the former. I feel like that cannot be applied as a binary, but must exist in degree. By asking questions like
- Is playing chess casually playing chess gamistly? What about craps?
- Are games necessarily less gamist if they take into account differences in ability?
- Is there an account of why it must be all or nothing?
- Is a weaker performance less gamist than a stronger one?
- Can inept players have gamist agendas?
- Can a player who misunderstands some rules still have a gamist agenda?
What I am thinking most about is something like this.
- As a game designer, I decide to craft a game I hope will appeal to those with a gamist creative agenda
- Surveying my audience, I see they want to engage with performance at risk, but they are not zealots in that regard: they only want to put moderate effort in and yet still value it
- I design a game that can be approached with a gamist agenda by someone willing to put only moderate effort in
I design for a broad audience, with a range of capabilities and interest in effort. Craps, not chess. So then what I'm identifying is that audience (often called casual, although they can be passionate in their adoption of a game.)
Wargamers might call them lazy or inept. Does that exclude them from being gamist?
Another possibility that I'm not sure we've mooted yet is gamist-fantasy, by which I mean the feeling of gamism, without over-indexing on wargamey crunch and difficulty.
So a casual player can get excited and feel great on an
@EzekielRaiden's
Score - Achievement axis (with perhaps some of my Construction - Perfection going on too) and that really is satisfying a gamist agenda, just not a rigorous wargamey gamist agenda. They're in it for the gamist-fantasy.
I wasn't expressing a view about how challenging something must be to count as gamist play. I was expressing the view that the "feeling" of gamism, prompted by play that involves characters facing challenges and overcoming them, is not the same thing as actual gamism. The key question is,
can the players lose?
There is probably also a threshold here. A challenge where victory requires spelling out a common word of English might be a genuine challenge for many six year olds in Australia or America or Ireland, but is unlikely to be a challenge for the typical adult gamer. At a certain point, it becomes so easy that while there is an "in principle" possibility of loss, there is not really any stepping on up required. It seems to me that it is a design feature of D&D 5e that, played at the difficulty presented as the default in the encounter building guidelines, and at levels above 1st or 2nd (these levels are different for reasons given upthread by
@EzekielRaiden), then making the most obvious choices suggested by a particular character build will strongly tend to produce success.
I think this is a deliberate design feature - to have the trappings of gamism, and maybe even produce the "feeling" of gamism - while not really requiring the participants to step on up. It's what permits the game to reliably deliver high concept simulationist play; while also permitting drifting to gamism, most often (as best I can observe) by stepping up the typical encounter difficulty.
(Note the contrast with 4e D&D, which was frequently criticised on the basis that casual players, making obvious choices like basic attacks, tended to not be able to succeed - the system mandated a degree of engagement with its intricacies to avoid failure. Essentials was, in part, designed to change this by making basic attack-oriented builds viable.)
EDITed to elaborate on
can the players lose:
Here is Edwards on the above:
Step On Up requires strategizing, guts, and performance from the real people in the real world. This is the inherent "meaning" or agenda of Gamist play (analogous to the Dream in Simulationist play).
Gamist play, socially speaking, demands performance with risk, conducted and perceived by the people at the table. What's actually at risk can vary - for this level, though, it must be a social, real-people thing, usually a minor amount of recognition or esteem.
This is what generates the threshold I described above: if the most obvious choices are apt to produce success, then there is no real "performance with risk". There is only the second level that Edwards describes:
The in-game characters, armed with their skills, priorities, and so on, have to face a Challenge, which is to say, a specific Situation in the imaginary game-world. Challenge is about the strategizing, guts, and performance of the characters in this imaginary game-world.
For the characters, it's a risky situation in the game-world; in addition to that all-important risk, it can be as fabulous, elaborate, and thematic as any other sort of role-playing. Challenge is merely plain old Situation . . . Strategizing in and among the Challenge is the material, or arena, for whatever brand of Step On Up is operating
When you have plain-old Situation, but without the Step on Up because there is no real performance with risk, then we simply have high concept simulationism: this is entirely consistent with Edwards remark that low competition gamism "shares some features with "characters face problem" Simulationist play, with the addition of a performance metric of some kind". Take away the performance metric - that is, the need for "performance with risk" - and you've got characters-face-problems, situation-oriented, simulationism. With the "feel" of gamism.