Notice the date? April 24, 2001:
All-out dissection (LONG AND BRUTAL)
The date on
GNS, Ch1, is October 14, 2002.
The date on
The Right to Dream is 29 Jan, 2003.
And in that essay the following remark is found:
Simulationist role-playing has a great deal of power and potential. In the previous essay, I wrote that it "... is expressed by enhancing one or more of the listed elements [Character, Setting, Situation, System, Color]; in other words, Simulationism heightens and focuses Exploration as the priority of play. The players may be greatly concerned with the internal logic and experiential consistency of that Exploration."
Familiar? It should be: it is the basis for
the remarks from Eero Tuovinen that you have praised.
Here is the actual text of the "hard question" for simulationist RPGers:
Role-playing is a hobby, leisure activity. The real question is, what for, in the long term? For Simulationist play, the answer "This was fun, so let's do it again," is sufficient.
However, for how long is it sufficient? Which seems to me to vary greatly from person to person. Is the focus on Exploration to be kept as is, permanently, as characters and settings change through play? Some say "sure" and wonder what the hell I'm talking about, or perhaps feel slightly insulted. Or, is Drift ultimately desirable? Is play all about getting "it" to work prior to permitting overt metagame agendas into the picture? Some might answer "of course" and wonder why anyone could see it otherwise.
So! Is there an expected, future metagame payoff, or is the journey really its own reward? Is Simulationist play what you want, or is it what you think you must do in order, one day, to get what you want?
I judge nothing with these questions. I think that they're important to consider and that answers are going to vary widely, that's all.
I think anyone can see that your paraphrase is neither accurate nor fair.
For completeness, here are the actual text of these also:
For the Gamist, the question is, why is role-playing your chosen venue as a social hobby? There are lots and lots of them that unequivocally fit Step On Up with far less potential for encountering conflicting priorities: volleyball, chess, or pool, if you like the Crunch; horse races or Las Vegas if you like the Gamble; hell, even organized amateur sports like competitive martial arts or sport fishing.
Do you play Gamist in role-playing because it doesn't hurt your ego as much as other venues might? Is role-playing safer in some way, in terms of the loss factor of Step On Up? Even more severely, are you sticking to role-playing because many fellow players subscribe to the "no one wins in role-playing" idea? Do you lurk like Grendel among a group of tolerant, perhaps discomfited Simulationists, secure that they are disinclined to Step On Up toward you? In which case, you can win against them or the game all the time, but they will never win against you?
I accuse no one of affirmative answers to these questions; that's the reader's business. But I do think answering them should be a high priority.
Given how many RPGers, including on these forums, complain about players who think they can "win" D&D - and produce allied complaints against munchkins, powergamers, etc - I don't think that that aspect of Edwards's question is out of order. The phenomenon appears to be a genuine one.
The . . . question is much like the Gamist one: why role-play for this purpose? Why this venue, and not some more widely-recognized medium like writing comics or novels or screenplays? Addressing Premise can be done in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of artistic media. To play Narrativist, you must be seizing role-playing, seeing some essential feature in the medium itself, which demands that Premise be addressed in this way for you and not another. What is that feature? If you can't see one, then maybe, just maybe, you are slumming in this hobby because you're afraid you can't hack it in a commercial artistic environment. Maybe you even hang with a primarily-Simulationist group, with the minimal levels of satisfaction to be gained among them, because it's safe there.
But let's say you do answer that question, and hold your head up as a Narrativist role-playing practitioner, addresser of Premise. Fine - now you have to ask yourself whether you can handle artistic rejection. That's right, no one might be interested in you. This is exactly what all aspiring directors, screenwriters, novelists, and other practitioners of narrative artistry face. In which case, you'll have to decide whether it's because your worthy vision is unappreciated and should seek new collaborators, or because your vision is simply lacking. It's not an easy thing to deal with.
But let's say that's all resolved too, and you are holding the brass ring: successful and fulfilling Narrativist play with a great bunch of fellow participants, fine and exciting content from your and the others' work, and the sense of worthy artistry. Now for the final conundrum: what will you sacrifice to sustain it? Maybe your spouse is tired of the time you spend on this; maybe you and a fellow group member get a little too close; maybe you decide your art would be even better if your best friend's sorry ass was no longer gumming up the group's work. Can you make those sorts of choices? Can you live with the results?
Good luck with it. No one ever claimed that balls-to-the-wall artists were necessarily easy to live with.
Of course, Edwards has already answered some of the later paragraphs earlier in the essay:
The first minor issue is not really a big deal - simply, not everyone is necessarily a whiz at addressing Premise even when they try. If they were, we'd see a hell of a lot more great novels, comics, movies, and plays than we do. Signs of "hack Narrativism" include backing off from unexpected opportunities to address Premise or consistently swinging play into parody versions of the issues involved. I don't see any particular reason to bemoan or criticize this bit of dysfunction; all art forms have their Sunday practitioners.
I cheerfully admit to being a Sunday practitioner.
As another poster recently noted, any resemblance between Glorfindel, Elf Lord of Rivendell, and Glothfindel the Elven Ranger and friend of Fea-bella the Elven Dreamwalker in my Torchbearer campaign, is mere coincidence!
Or to flip it around: if people think that their RPG efforts - which by their nature consist primarily in the creation of imaginative fiction - are significant art works, rather than hack and pastiche as mine largely are, then I think the onus is on them to show us their stuff!
If they think it's fun because it's
theirs, done with
their friends - and this is certainly my experience - then what does it matter that, somewhere else, Vincent Baker or Paul Czege or whomever is doing something more sophisticated or avant garde?