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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8628783" data-attributes="member: 6790260">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.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.)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.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"?</blockquote>

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