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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4809150" data-attributes="member: 80487">There's probably not a monolithic demographic of "non-gamers". The one safe bet is that if people don't like the current product, then whatever they would like would be notably different. (Of course, the key difference for some might be just a matter of marketing to produce a different perception of the product.)From RPG to STGI see several aspects to resistor's suggestions. One is that a move away from task resolution and toward conflict (or, perhaps more aptly, "scene") resolution is a move away from a role-playing game and toward a story-telling game. That's in keeping with the "making a story" emphasis.Now, there is some overlap in appeal. However, the gulf between those who prefer one or the other is pretty significant -- sometimes openly hostile -- among gamers. I don't know whether that would be true among "non-gamers", or whether STGs would (or will, eventually) in fact prove more popular. I think, though, that the notion that people are likely to be drawn to one via the other is pretty dubious.Competition and ComplexityAnother is that "competition" of some sort is essential to a game -- but need not be player versus player. Players can collaborate as a team in competition against the game itself.That is in fact the default mode of RPG play. There can be conflicts between character-players with the game master as referee, but those are usually discouraged.In narrative games, though, there's been some development of approaches that take the GM "out of the loop". It's possible in that case to keep the "game as opponent" model, but variety is rather limited without either a human or a computer devoted to running the game. Put another way, "the GM is the rules" is a way to keep complexity manageable. If every rule in a traditional GM-run RPG had to be stated explicitly, then the corresponding statements would end up making Acts of Congress look like models of brevity.Rather than reduce the enterprise to what would otherwise become highly stereotyped, perhaps even a mere solvable puzzle, designers have turned their focus to distributing "authorial" power among players.Games "Non-gamers" PlayThat can be done with a simple round robin: now it's your turn to say what happens next. There appear to be quite a few online games like that, pretty popular with the primary- and secondary-school set.A "problem": They don't look to be in the market for rules! Authorial power is vested the same way as power in other social networking, a real-life "game" in which the participants (mainly teenagers and "tweens") tend to be heavily involved.In my experience, putting "gamers" into such a scheme tends to result in competition directly at the narrative level -- which is the game equivalent of thermonuclear war.The reason, I think, is simply that they are GAMERS; they want to play a GAME; and just sitting around the campfire telling stories doesn't scratch that itch. Winning friends and influencing people probably doesn't do that either (which is not to say they disdain it, just that they hunger for something else as well)."Indy" InnovationsSo, the distribution of authorial power tends to involve a more conventional game of dice, cards, chips, or whatever. For some people, this "gamist" aspect -- because of its purity, its dissociation from "simulation" -- draws distractingly too much attention to itself. Combining the approach in a hybrid with GM moderation does not seem to help very much.Determinism in a GM-run game seems often (as illustrated in previous posts in this thread) to draw attention to the GM's power. Rolling dice does not actually put power in players' hands, instead ceding it to the dice, but simply taking it away from the GM clearly pleases some folks very much. (For myself, I appreciate the opportunity, even as GM, to be surprised by the results of fortune!)There are some potentially interesting developments in 4E in particular that seem to parallel trends in board-game design -- but this post is long enough!</blockquote>

Verification