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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9075215" data-attributes="member: 71699">The term is [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]'s. I'm trying to work out what it covers. Especially whether there is sufficient justification to say that theme is necessarily part of it.The first block of words I quoted are separated out by Eero in a blue box and concretely characterised by him as definitional. I also pondered those words that you have bolded (they struck me, too), and formed a view of their impact. I want to preface describing that impact with an interpretation of simulationism making use of Baudrillard's concept of simulacrum.Briefly, Baudrillard outlines four stages. In the first stage is the faithful copy: for simulationism the reference is accurately recreated for play without alteration. There are few pure examples of this. I think most of traditional simulationism falls into stage two: an altered reality. RuneQuest is an example of this. The stage two simulacrum is based on an underlying truth, but alters it; in this case facts about Glorantha extend the real world into an imagined realm of bronze age fantasy. (There is no real Bladesharp 4 or krarshtkids, etc.) In the third stage, the simulation becomes unanchored from any original version. Simulationist procedures can still be applied, but they are working upon phantasms.Much discourse on simulationism seems to me to take it to be static. A mode of play that has more or less always been with us and is available only for historical analysis. We can say something about what it is or was, but nothing about what it can be. Whether or not that is true for others: I take simulationism to be as vital and capable of evolution as gamism and narrativism.With that in mind, what Eero intended by those words might (as I think [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] is suggesting) be indicated by the list of cases he provided, and in that regard it is worth going on to read his application of that list to brief critiques of specific game texts. An apposite example isHowever, I am primarily interested in the words that you were requoting in terms of their impact on my thought. (Coming to different conclusions isn't the same as not making a holistic reading.)So back to those specific words that you bolded, in particular "explore", "stumble upon", and "the thing in itself". Starting with the last, in an imagined world there a many instances of things that are - like simulacrum - altered or unanchored from real references. They're true by virtue of their authorship... the more so to the extent they are indicated, constrained and cemented through conformance with internal causes. Just as some above have laid out for Tolkien, this process can stumble upon things that resonate internally... that fit with known internal causes or reveal causes that their authors weren't yet aware of. The conversation is the exploration. To put that together succinctly: we can author things for which nothing pre-loaded could turn out to be more true than what we authored.EDIT You should be able to see how the idea expressed just above embraces the player duality of audience=author. That duality isn't private to narrativism: it's ludic. However, narrativism requires certain possibilities implicit in authorship to be not just available but wielded at the table. (I could limit "authorial" choices to solely those that fit with what Edwards-ian narrativism demands: hedging simulationist TTRPG into a non-overlapping area of the <a href="https://eolt.org/articles/narratology" target="_blank">Venn diagram</a>. I think that is unnecessarily limiting and not, so far as I understand it, the view adopted in post-classical narratology.)I love your example of The Road (omitted for brevity.) I very much accept that when simulationists are using an appropriate game text in a committed fashion, and narrativists are doing likewise, ne'er the twain should meet. How much does that happen at the table? I've noticed and been told about more relaxed and flexible play of both. Whether those are heresies and we ought salt our mouths for speaking of them, or wonderful testaments to the human ability to want whiskey on Friday and wafers on Sunday. What I'm especially curious about is why P1 (sim) must object to P2's (nar) process, if the result is perfectly plausible and not in discord with internal causes? Is it principally that the play-performance in itself is jarring?Per my above, absolutely. Hundreds of posts ago I said that I thought some fundamental simulationist principles would be at odds with narrativist. What I note, however, is that if P is a narrativist and happens to make choices that turn out to be not inconsistent with internal causes, as has been claimed, then to that extent, conflicts (that jar) might not be noticed in play. And if a simulationist does not pre-load theme (why should they? the necessity of that still hasn't been explained) then they've done nothing to thwart P's addressing of premises.One could say that this is just a hypothetical accommodation. That doesn't help me, as I think I've witnessed it in play. Those same hundreds of posts ago, I investigated the possibility that no-myth modes could prove suitable for simulation ([USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] thought so, but felt it likely to be boring.)I am questioning a number of different things, which may be joined up in the end in different ways<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Does a simulationist have to pre-load anything (let alone theme)? What about no-myth simulationism?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">If a simulationist must pre-load something, why does that have to include theme? Where is the proof of that?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">If a narrativist makes choices that turn out to be consistent with internal causes, why should that inevitably jar simulationists sitting at the same table?</li> </ol></blockquote>

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