Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8622476" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Sure, someone who values fellowship as a play aesthetic can find it in games that aren’t specifically cooperative, but a game that aims specifically to appeal to an aesthetic of fellowship can include mechanics designed to foster it. That’s the point.Expression is the primary appeal of mechanics that involve the players in creating the story. That’s… literally inviting the players to participate in creative expression. You don’t have to be literally putting yourself into the game to be expressing something.What the GNS model calls story now, story before, and story after are all different ways a game can appeal to a narrative aesthetic.Yeah, RPGs appeal to a fantasy aesthetic pretty much as a matter of course.The value of the model as it relates to RPGs in in analyzing how an RPG’s mechanics create dynamics that satisfy the different aesthetics. Yes, pretty much every RPG’s dynamics will satisfy fantasy, fellowship, and narrative. But it’s valuable when delving into a game’s mechanics to think about what they are doing that creates those dynamics. Could they be doing it better? Is a mechanic harming the game’s appeal to a particular aesthetic, and if so, is that worthwhile to increase the appeal to another aesthetic? The point isn’t to say “this game is a Narrative and Submission game; that game is a Challenge and Discovery game.” It’s to consider the different things that people want out of games and if/how a game will appeal to people who favor a given aesthetic.</blockquote>

Verification