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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9320764" data-attributes="member: 70468">According to The Elusive Shift, people were talking and worrying about it from the beginning.The wargaming community had long since learned that different players might prefer different levels of realism or playability when they sat down to game around the same table. In 1970, Gary Gygax ascribed to his Chainmail coauthor Jeff Perren a distinction between the attitudes of two types of players he called “warriors” and “gamers,” where “warriors seek to duplicate actual conditions of battle” to emphasize realism and “gamers are willing to twist realism any which way if a fun game results” (DB 3). Proposed player typologies along these or similar lines recurred in wargaming literature of the era. A few months later Steve Thornton advanced a more nuanced three-type model. Thornton spoke most warmly of the first type, those “fun wargamers who play just for enjoyment and who like non-complex, unambiguous rules that are quick to use” (WN 106). These he first contrasts with “‘simulators’ who try to re-enact battle conditions to the Nth degree,” and then least favorably with “competitors,” who “only play to win, invariably wrangling over the rules.” Commentators who adopted Thornton’s typology quickly recognized how divergent expectations could lead to unsatisfying outcomes at the table. Fred Vietmeyer observed, “For an Avalon Hill box game competitor to be engrossed in simulation of uniforms, flags, dioramas, etc., may be for him a waste of time.” A corollary is that “a simulator’s interest simply cannot be held with the simple games” favored by those emphasizing playability above all else. For Vietmeyer, the key to avoiding conflict was to embrace relativism and accept that players could come to the table with different incentives: “For one type of player to place his own viewpoint as superior to another’s hobby enjoyment is simply being too egocentric. The recognition that players could be sorted into buckets by the properties they want out of games thus became part of the theoretical apparatus of wargaming inherited by the earliest adopters of D&D.Excerpt FromThe Elusive ShiftJon Peterson[URL unfurl="true"]https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-elusive-shift/id1503982493[/URL]This material may be protected by copyright.</blockquote>

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