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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8623459" data-attributes="member: 19857">You have to be prepared to explain what you mean to people when they push back on the use of terms.  You can't just throw up your hands and point them at an essay that is over 15 years old and the associated discussion that nobody has seriously engaged with in a decade at this point and expect people to understand that "when I say gamist I don't really mean 'like chess' I mean rpgs that emphasize victory in combat and short-term problem solving over narrative structure or trying to simulate a genre".I do understand GNS theory and followed it quite a bit at the time and I thought at the time that the vocabulary used by the Forge was confusing and irritating.  It's even moreso to people who don't understand that the terms you are using have definitions that don't match the natural language usage of the terms.Gamist to non-Forge folks would mean "like a game". Simulationist would mean "like a simulation".  And narrativist would mean "like a narrative".  The fact that those terms in GNS theory don't really mean those natural language definitions is a communications problem for folks who want to talk about the theory to the people who don't already know it and accept what those terms mean.It's like if I came in and made up the term "randomized" to describe games that have events that don't happen on a fixed schedule but instead occur when various pieces end up at the same place on a board at the same time.  And I participated in a lot of forum discussions with people who accepted that definition and we created our own internal models around it and even more vocabulary about games similar to it.  And then, 15 years later, I went into forum discussions and assumed everyone knew what I was talking about.  If people got upset because they thought I was making claims about games that use dice or cards the problem would be with me for using a term that actually has a common meaning that isn't what my made up terminology defined it as.One of the most irritating things about GNS Theory is that there are some good ideas in there - and some folks have been able to pull them out and do good things with them - but actually trying to talk about it to anyone who doesn't already understand it is an exercise in frustration.</blockquote>

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