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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 8628720" data-attributes="member: 22779">Well, that's a bit of an "of course" to be honest.  I mean, good grief, have you never seen genre discussions?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  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.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />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.</blockquote>

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