NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5105549" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, they certainly aren't either narrativist or simulationist.  I'm not sure why it matters though that I agree that hit points (in any form) are pure gamist constructs.  They are a very good example of a pure gamist construct that is not 'video gamey' because despite their ubiquitousness in video games (in fact, they are even more common in video games than in RPG systems generally and found in things that aren't even RPGs at all), you can't call them 'video gamey' because there origin is in D&D rather than the reverse.  Hitpoints aren't ideas that have gone out into the computer gaming world and come back in different or more mature forms to influence RPGs.  They are ideas that went from RPGs to computers (and stuck hard).  And I would argue that they stuck hard precisely because as pure gamist constructs they are more suited to the strengths of a computer, which are gamist rather than simulationist or narrativist.  Simulationist and narrativist games tend to be inherently open ended in ways that computers currently can't cope with - although there have been valiant attempts over the years from Elite in the early days to Grand Theft Auto.  The limited space of a rules based 'game' though is perfectly suited for implementing in a computer program.Be as that may, it doesn't have a very direct bearing on the question of 'what does videogamey mean to you'.  I'm happy to concede that 'healing surges' are not a very good example of videogamey things, and am utterly uninterested in arguing over whether they are more or less gamist than hit points as a whole.  I'm happy to believe that they are both gamist AND that they are genera emulation, especially of a self-referential sort (in the sense that 'Die Hard' and similar movies are themselves easily described in RPG terms, as so could be said themselves to be 'RPG-y' or 'videogamey').  And I'm nearly equally happy to concede either or neither if it would move us past that point.For my example, one that I think is a more straight forward example, I would argue that the point where a game is conceptually over but where the character is not dead but has 'won the game', where there is nothing left for this character to explore and no further advancement is possible, is 'videogamey'.  The idea that you reach the end of the game is not part of traditional RPGs, and is an idea that I think comes back to RPGs from their computer offspring or at least which can be recognized as more typical of computer games than of traditional PnP games.</blockquote>

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