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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8631779" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Okay. I did some reading. And my answer is...not very much difference. There may be differences in particulars, but at a midrange focus it reads more or less the same. My issue is that Edwards abstracts so far away from things that the abstraction obscures rather than illuminates.Eero Tuovinen wrote an essay on GNS Simulation wherein he provided the following definition (which he, at least, seems to think is what Edwards would support): "Simulationist play attempts to experience a subject matter in a way that results in elevated appreciation and understanding." I say this definition is too broad, because "elevated appreciation and understanding" is too abstract—e.g., why doesn't the deep learning of clever strategy count as "elevated appreciation and understanding"? Instead, I move to separate the act of elevating, so that something can be appreciated, from the act of examining, so that appreciation may be elevated. The former is Emulation, the latter, Simulation.This is not a trivial difference. When one holds up a Conceit and seeks to portray it faithfully, there is a normative push involved. Keep the Conceit, even if you must do illogical (or, as mentioned upthread, even farcical) things, so that the Conceit holds even in defiance of its rational consequences. It is not desirable that one should have to do so, but if it's needed, do it and don't look back. When one pursues Groundedness-and-Simulation, a wholly different normative push applies: be faithful to reason and consequence, no matter where they might lead. Again, this may result in undesirable elements, like disappointing anticlimax or frustrating gameplay, but genuine G&S again says "do it and don't look back."This reads, to me, like a conflict no less problematic than the conflict between "Story Now" and Gamism. The more committed you are to faithfully following naturalistic, rational consequence, the less committed you must be do faithfully portraying an archetype despite its (neath guaranteed) flaws. Unlike Edwards, however, I do not hold that these game-purposes are so wholly antagonistic as to be mutually exclusive (though, in fairness, it seems he wasn't nearly as committed to this as he is portrayed; in the "Right to Dream" essay he talks about Hybrids and other mixed experiences that do not have to be "incoherent," which others had presented as an absolute impossibility in this thread).I think this, in truth, is the error that forced him to lump these two together. They have some similarities (my approach expects there to be similarities between any pair of game-purposes one might wish to examine), but because he could not so stridently claim that C&E is incompatible with G&S, he was forced to conclude they had to be the same, and that false dichotomy (either they are mutually exclusive or they are one unit) weakens the theory.The "High-Concept" is what I call Conceit. The Conceit is elevated so that it may be appreciated (Emulation). Purist-for-System or "process" is a mix of both halves of Groundedness-and-Simulation. Groundedness means defining the starting terms, the metaphorical ground floor, the facts that are just known to be true, and then one engages in the act of Simulation by applying naturalistic, rational reasoning to that Ground to determine what else must also be true.Or, perhaps to phrase it differently, both G&S and C&E are "explorative," but in ways that are utterly at odds. G&S explores in the way one explores uncharted territory, making a map as one goes, finding joy in discovering the unknown. C&E explores in the way one explores a piece of art or music, picking apart its subtleties, and finding joy in more fully understanding the work. The two are similar. But "exploring" the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor or Frankenstein is extremely different from "exploring" an uncharted wilderness to find buried treasure.</blockquote>

Verification