Proposal to retire the term "IC" in favor of "Immersion"
Kevin
Warren (I think--forgive me if I err) has noted that the label "IC
stance" in the
four stance model is confusing, and I agree with him. It carrys quite a
varied
freight of connotations.
When I coined the term originally, I intended it to convey something
akin to the
stance of the method actor--that is, the attempt to "view" the fictive
world
"naturally" as your character would view it, to react to the fictive
world as your
character without first having to "think it through."
The "actor stance" in my original conception was also somewhat muddled,
since
it referred to two separate things--the PORTRAYAL of character, first
and foremost, but also the stance of the actor who has to
intellectualize his reaction to the fictive setting before portraying
it. It seems to me that all three of these stances are analytically
distinct, as brought out in recent conversations, and that we would be
well advised to formalize the distinctions in our terminology.
I would suggest the following:
"Immersive stance" refers to the method actor stance--the original IC
stance, which some people have been calling the "deep IC stance."
"Actor stance" refers to portrayal of character.
"IC stance" now refers to the person who has to think through their
character before acting it--for whom their is a distinct step between
reacting to the setting and acting in character, which is mediated by
their attempt to think out how their character OUGHT to act or react.
We probably should find a better term for this, since there will be some
confusion if we narrow the original term in this fashion. I confess I'm
at a loss here, but I have confidence that people will have good
suggestions :)
I'd like to see the outcome of this discussion be an agreed upon set of
terms to define these states a bit better, which can then be used as the
basis for amending John's FAQ. As the original author, I do feel some
ownership of the model, although of course it has percolated out far
beyond that :) At any rate, I would like to take some responsibility
for incorporating the very useful insights that have emerged from recent
discussion, esp. by Mary and Rodney, into the existing model.
Thanks in advance.
Best,
Kevin
Psychohist
Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
I would suggest the following:
"Immersive stance" refers to the method actor stance--the
original IC stance, which some people have been calling
the "deep IC stance."
Strongly agree.
"Actor stance" refers to portrayal of character.
I confess I don't completely understand the nuances of how this differs
from the previously intended use of this term. I mean, we had a couple
hundred posts on immersion from dozens of people, under the title 'deep
IC', and I feel like that was necessary to really clarify what was going
on. I don't know of a similar discussion on actor stance, and I'm not
sure we know enough about it to adjust the terminology.
"IC stance" now refers to the person who has to think
through their character before acting it--for whom their
is a distinct step between reacting to the setting and
acting in character, which is mediated by their attempt
to think out how their character OUGHT to act or react.
We probably should find a better term for this, since
there will be some confusion if we narrow the original
term in this fashion. I confess I'm at a loss here, but
I have confidence that people will have good
suggestions :)
I think that any use of the term 'IC' in these stances is bound to lead to
terminology problems. For example, the above could result in phrases
like, 'playing immersively rather than in IC stance', which would be
interpreted by those not completely familiar with r.g.f.a terminology as
"immersive play is not in character" - which might seem to them a pretty
ridiculous statement.
To me, having to think through actions before portraying them is author
mode - not deep enough to be channeling, but author nonetheless. So it's
already covered under the existing four stances.
Warren Dew
scott....@3do.com
In article <3349CA...@washingtonian.infi.net>,
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net wrote:
>
> Warren (I think--forgive me if I err) has noted that the label "IC
> stance" in the
> four stance model is confusing, and I agree with him. It carrys quite a
> varied
> freight of connotations.
>
>
> I'd like to see the outcome of this discussion be an agreed upon set of
> terms to define these states a bit better, which can then be used as the
> basis for amending John's FAQ. As the original author, I do feel some
> ownership of the model, although of course it has percolated out far
> beyond that :) At any rate, I would like to take some responsibility
> for incorporating the very useful insights that have emerged from recent
> discussion, esp. by Mary and Rodney, into the existing model.
>
I think that this has been the goal al along :-)
Scott
-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
John H Kim
As writer of what FAQ we have, I'd like to comment on this.
First of all, I'm all in favor of using "immersion" rather than
"In-Character" and "Deep IC" to denote a sort of method actor
approach where you try to think as your character. However, I have
some reservations about Kevin's other suggestions...
Psychohist <psych...@aol.com> wrote:
>Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
>: "Actor stance" refers to portrayal of character.
>
>I confess I don't completely understand the nuances of how this differs
>from the previously intended use of this term.
Well, what's more, I don't think this is clear at all.
I would be in favor of tossing out "actor" as a term. It is
especially confusing since we liken "immersion" to method acting.
I would favor a term like "portrayal stance" as being
at least less loaded.
-*-*-*-
>
>: "IC stance" now refers to the person who has to think through their
>: character before acting it--for whom their is a distinct step
>: between reacting to the setting and acting in character, which
>: is mediated by their attempt to think out how their character
>: OUGHT to act or react. We probably should find a better term
>: for this, [...]
Damn straight!! How about "analytic stance"? It's ugly,
but I think it is bound to be better than "IC" -- which is going
to confuse *both* newcomers (to whom it doesn't mean quite what it
says) as well as existing readers (to whom it is very different from
what "IC" used to mean around here).
>
>To me, having to think through actions before portraying them is author
>mode - not deep enough to be channeling, but author nonetheless. So
>it's already covered under the existing four stances.
Hmmm. This rather cuts to the heart of the issue. Basically,
the stances as they were originally envisioned break up what players
do according to the functions in a play or movie.
But it seems that we are trying to subdivide differently than
was originally conceived. I'll have to think more about this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Kim | "Faith - Faith is an island in the setting sun.
jh...@columbia.edu | But Proof - Proof is the bottom line for everyone."
Columbia University | - Paul Simon, _Proof_
Jaana Heino
Kevin <krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net> writes:
|I would suggest the following:
|"Immersive stance" refers to the method actor stance--the original IC
|stance, which some people have been calling the "deep IC stance."
|"IC stance" now refers to the person who has to think through their
|character before acting it...
"Immersive" is fine with me, but I *strongly* disagree using "IC" for
'having to think through', simply because that *definitely* is not how
people outside this newsgroup (or inside it, so far) tend to use it. One
definitely is IC when being immersive, isn't one?
I suggest that "IC" from this on refers to doing something 'as the
character', and that it is not at all used as one of the stances. So
the Four Stances would be Actor, Author, Audience and Immersive, and you
could be IC and do things IC in all of them. In Actor, you would talk
and behave IC, and in Immersive you might also feel and think IC...
--
Jaana Heino-----------------email: jant...@cc.helsinki.fi----
Iivisniemenkuja 4 F 70----------------------------------------
02260 Espoo------------------"Trust is the taste of death."---
FINLAND-------------------------------------------------------
Kevin
My original post provoked quite a few thoughtful replies. Rather than
respond to each, I'm going to use Jaana's response as a spring-board
from which to reply to all. Apologies in advance for taking such a lazy
way out :)
Jaana Heino wrote:
Kevin <krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net> writes:
|"Immersive stance" refers to the method actor stance--the original
IC
|stance, which some people have been calling the "deep IC stance."
There seems to be universal agreement on this one. John--is it OK with
you if
we consider this part of my proposal accepted?
|"IC stance" now refers to the person who has to think through their
|character before acting it...
"Immersive" is fine with me, but I *strongly* disagree using "IC"
for
'having to think through', simply because that *definitely* is not
how
people outside this newsgroup (or inside it, so far) tend to use it.
One
definitely is IC when being immersive, isn't one?
Well, I *did* indicate that I was not comfortable with the term either,
and was only using it in lieu of something better.
I suggest that "IC" from this on refers to doing something 'as the
character', and that it is not at all used as one of the stances. So
the Four Stances would be Actor, Author, Audience and Immersive, and
you
could be IC and do things IC in all of them. In Actor, you would
talk
and behave IC, and in Immersive you might also feel and think IC...
A number of people indicated that they perceived the (tentatively
labelled) "IC" stance above (to which Jaana rightly objects) as being
quite similar to the author stance. I'm not at all sure I agree,
although I'm not sure I disagree either. More below on this--hopefully
subsequent conversation will clarify the issue :)
Did anyone save the original article? If so, can you repost it?
Elsewise I can upload a text copy to rgfa . . .
John remarked, correctly, that the original analysis was predicated upon
the metaphor "rpg is like narrative," and sought to apply a
sub-metaphor, "rpg is like theatre" to understanding how one can go
about making sense of an rpg.
There is, it seems to me, something authorial going on when you stop to
ask yourself "what would my character do in this situation?" or "how
would my character react?" That is, in the context of the original
metaphor, the player of a character is approaching the game analagously
to the way a playwright approaches writing and conceptualizing a
character. So it does make some sense to me to call this "authorial"
and part of the "author" stance. If we accept this way of looking at
things, then the actor stance is narrowed purely to issues of
portrayal. It assumes knowledge of what is to be portrayed, however
that knowledge is generated (be it from method-immersion or from
authorial contemplation).
I think we lose something if we orient the labels too far away from the
original metaphor. The claim was never that "rpg IS theatre," but
rather that "IF rpg is LIKE theatre," then this is how one can go about
conceptualizing it. If we remove that "IF," it seems to me, we risk
losing sight of the provisional nature of the analysis. For, after all,
rpg is NOT theatre, and the narrative, theatrical metaphor, while
powerful, can only take us so far.
So I would oppose adopting language like "portrayal stance" and
"analytic stance," since these leave out the theatrical connotations.
Indeed, I worry somewhat, on second thought, of to what extent
"immersive stance" also deflects attention from the original context of
the analysis. I would propose, perhaps, the following, somewhat more
obscure schema:
METHOD stance (which explicitly references the method actor)
AUTHOR stance
AUDIENCE stance
ACTOR stance (now explicitly narrowed down to issues of portrayal)
These terms have the advantage, it seems to me, of preserving the
original references and connotations of the analysis. They highlight,
it seems to me, the dependence of the analysis on the comparison of rpg
to theatre--and hence the somewhat ambiguous and derivative nature of
the stances themselves. I think this is a good thing to remember, when
we talk about the stances--there is a sense to which the stances are and
always will be imperfect, because the metaphor upon which they are
predicated is imperfect.
All my best,
Kevin
scott....@3do.com
In article <5iidk6$rv4$1...@oravannahka.Helsinki.FI>,
Jaana Heino <jant...@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:
>
> "Immersive" is fine with me, but I *strongly* disagree using "IC" for
> 'having to think through', simply because that *definitely* is not how
> people outside this newsgroup (or inside it, so far) tend to use it. One
> definitely is IC when being immersive, isn't one?
>
> character', and that it is not at all used as one of the stances. So
> the Four Stances would be Actor, Author, Audience and Immersive, and you
> could be IC and do things IC in all of them. In Actor, you would talk
> and behave IC, and in Immersive you might also feel and think IC...
>
I would second this s well. This seems clearer. Remove IC from the
stances as that seems to be the root of the confusion.
Joshua Macy
Kevin wrote:
>
...snip...
>
> There is, it seems to me, something authorial going on when you stop to
> ask yourself "what would my character do in this situation?" or "how
> would my character react?" That is, in the context of the original
> metaphor, the player of a character is approaching the game analagously
> to the way a playwright approaches writing and conceptualizing a
> character. So it does make some sense to me to call this "authorial"
> and part of the "author" stance. If we accept this way of looking at
> things, then the actor stance is narrowed purely to issues of
> portrayal. It assumes knowledge of what is to be portrayed, however
> that knowledge is generated (be it from method-immersion or from
> authorial contemplation).
>
The problem I see with that is that while there might be _something_
authorial going on when you ask yourselves those questions, they seem a
pretty far cry (and perhaps even opposite in intent) to asking yourself
"What could my character do that would make for a great dramatic moment,
or really help the plot or mood?", which is what I understood authorial
to mean. It seems to me that by doing that you narrow and clarify "IC"
at the expense of broadening "author" to a confusing amount.
Doug Smith
Kevin <krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net> wrote:
> Warren (I think--forgive me if I err) has noted that the label "IC
>stance" in the
>four stance model is confusing, and I agree with him. It carrys quite a
>varied
>freight of connotations.
>When I coined the term originally, I intended it to convey something
>akin to the
>stance of the method actor--that is, the attempt to "view" the fictive
>world
>"naturally" as your character would view it, to react to the fictive
>world as your
>character without first having to "think it through."
>The "actor stance" in my original conception was also somewhat muddled,
>since
>it referred to two separate things--the PORTRAYAL of character, first
>and foremost, but also the stance of the actor who has to
>intellectualize his reaction to the fictive setting before portraying
>it. It seems to me that all three of these stances are analytically
>distinct, as brought out in recent conversations, and that we would be
>well advised to formalize the distinctions in our terminology.
>I would suggest the following:
>"Immersive stance" refers to the method actor stance--the original IC
>stance, which some people have been calling the "deep IC stance."
>"Actor stance" refers to portrayal of character.
>"IC stance" now refers to the person who has to think through their
>character before acting it--for whom their is a distinct step between
>reacting to the setting and acting in character, which is mediated by
>their attempt to think out how their character OUGHT to act or react.
>We probably should find a better term for this, since there will be some
>confusion if we narrow the original term in this fashion. I confess I'm
>at a loss here, but I have confidence that people will have good
>suggestions :)
>I'd like to see the outcome of this discussion be an agreed upon set of
>terms to define these states a bit better, which can then be used as the
>basis for amending John's FAQ. As the original author, I do feel some
>ownership of the model, although of course it has percolated out far
>beyond that :) At any rate, I would like to take some responsibility
>for incorporating the very useful insights that have emerged from recent
>discussion, esp. by Mary and Rodney, into the existing model.
>Thanks in advance.
I'm new to this NG so forgive me if my questions are seem simple.
What's wrong with using descriptive terms 'Method Acting", "Acting"
(or Regular Acting), and "3rd Person Acting" for someone who's more
detached from their character?
>Best,
>Kevin
DES
Yuri: "Whoops. So much for a live arrest."
Mark Grundy
| I would suggest the following:
|
| "Immersive stance" refers to the method actor stance--the
| original IC stance, which some people have been calling
| the "deep IC stance."
|
|Strongly agree.
|
| "Actor stance" refers to portrayal of character.
Here's a Friday-afternoon, off-the-wall comment:
Why the term `stance'?
It makes me think of Feng Shui martial arts -- Tiger Stance, Fire Stance,
Crane Stance...
It makes me think of golfers and boxers and weight-lifters shaping
up to their targets and grunting away.
It doesn't make me think of roleplaying at all, because we hardly ever
``stand'' anywhere. Usually we're on our butts and when we grunt
it's only because the cheese has come off our pizza wedge or the cat
has knocked over the cola bottle, or the dice just rolled into our shoe.
So why not ``immersive *seat*''? Okay, maybe not... Too equestrian.
Well anyway we need something less sporty and aggressive than ``stance''.
``Mode''? ``Orientation''? Or how about ``Perspective'' or ``View''?
Or borrow Edward De Bono's notion of ``Hat''? Or how about ``posture'' or
``pose''?
Actor pose... So lost in my character that I don't realise how silly I
look pose... Just here for the pretzels pose... Too much caffeine pose...
I *like* it.
Mark
---
Dr Mark Grundy, DCS, Phone: +61-6-249 3785
Education Co-ordinator, Fax: +61-6-249 0010
CRC for Advanced Computational Systems,
The Australian National University, Web: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Mark.Grundy
0200 Australia Email: Mark....@anu.edu.au
Psychohist
I'm not yet convinced that 'actor' stance is limited solely to issues of
portrayal, even if conscious determination of what the character does is
considered to be 'author'.
Consider the case of someone who ad-libs a humorous line, without thinking
about it - just to make a spur of the moment joke. But assume that it's
at the character level - say, the humor of the statement can only be
understood in the context of the character's world, not of the player's
world.
Assume the line is not particularly consistent with the character's
personality, so it doesn't come from immersive play. It isn't consciously
crafted, and it isn't particularly an attempt to manipulate the 'story' as
a whole, if in fact there is one, so it isn't really authorial. It's just
a throwaway line, the kind that actors used to be allowed to add on their
own in movies, back before actors were selected purely on the basis of
physique and looks.
I'd argue that the player is in actor mode here. In fact, I could argue
that this kind of thing characterizes actor mode better than 'portrayal' -
to the extent that there's a motivation for the throwaway gag line, it's
to entertain the rest of the participants, the traditional purpose of
actors.
Warren Dew
Psychohist
Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
These terms have the advantage, it seems to me, of
preserving the original references and connotations
of the analysis.
I don't think this is an advantage. Immersive play has been discussed
sufficiently - under the 'deep IC' thread - that everyone now understands
quite a bit about what it means. That understanding is independent of any
theatrical metaphor - indeed, many of the advocates of immersive play have
mentioned that they prefer little or no story orientation, and like a
strong dose of simulation.
Limiting the terms to a specialized metaphor seems to me to limit their
utility.
Warren
Joshua Macy
Kevin wrote:
>
> Joshua Macy wrote:
>
> The problem I see with that is that while there might be
> _something_ authorial going on when you ask yourselves those questions, they
> seem a pretty far cry (and perhaps even opposite in intent) to asking
> yourself "What could my character do that would make for a great dramatic
> moment, or really help the plot or mood?", which is what I understood
> authorial to mean.
>
> This was never my own or Sarah's understanding of what it meant to
> engage in an rpg from the stance of an author.
>
> The connections to drama, mood, or play may very well be present, but
> the original analysis did not draw the connections and did not intend to
> imply them--they are not constituent of the definition of the author
> stance, at least as we originally conceived it..
>
> A player may be said to working from the author stance whenever he or
> she thinks analagously to the author of a stage- or screen-play or
> novel. That often carries the connotations you suggest above, but not
> necessarily. I think its a mistake to insist on those connotations as
> being definitive.
They may not be definitive, but it doesn't seem sensible to exclude
them, and if you don't then your proposed authorial stance seems (to me,
anyway) to encompass antithetical ways of playing. I often ask myself,
"what would my character do?", but I never ask (and likely would resent
being asked to consider) what my character could do that would further
any overarching consideration that an author of a play might have (such
as drama, mood, pacing, suspense, or what-have-you). In fact, I can't
think of any consideration that an author might have *other* than
keeping a particular character in character that I would be comfortable
using for my own characters as a player, but I can't really imagine many
authors writing a play with that as their only (or even primary)
consideration.
Kevin
Joshua Macy wrote:
The problem I see with that is that while there might be
_something_
authorial going on when you ask yourselves those questions, they
seem a
pretty far cry (and perhaps even opposite in intent) to asking
yourself
"What could my character do that would make for a great dramatic
moment,
or really help the plot or mood?", which is what I understood
authorial
to mean.
This was never my own or Sarah's understanding of what it meant to
engage in an rpg from the stance of an author.
The connections to drama, mood, or play may very well be present, but
the original analysis did not draw the connections and did not intend to
imply them--they are not constituent of the definition of the author
stance, at least as we originally conceived it..
A player may be said to working from the author stance whenever he or
she thinks analagously to the author of a stage- or screen-play or
novel. That often carries the connotations you suggest above, but not
necessarily. I think its a mistake to insist on those connotations as
being definitive.
My best,
Kevin
Kevin
This is in reply to Warren, regarding why I think that the original
context of analysis is important.
Psychohist wrote:
I don't think this is an advantage. Immersive play has been
discussed
sufficiently - under the 'deep IC' thread - that everyone now
understands
quite a bit about what it means. That understanding is independent
of any
theatrical metaphor - indeed, many of the advocates of immersive
play have
mentioned that they prefer little or no story orientation, and like
a
strong dose of simulation.
Ah--but I would argue that simulation is its own metaphor. That is, we
understand what role-play is and how one can participate in it by
comparing the activity to something else, in this case simulationist
models of various sorts. By highlighting the metaphorical status of the
label, it seems to me, we open up the possibility for the same sort of
analysis as I orignially performed for the metaphor "RPG is like
theatre." The analysis, however, will necessarily be different.
As a start towards this, how would you define "simulationist?" Just
what are you trying to "simulate?" (Please do not assume a hostile
agenda when I frame the question this way :)
If you were to fill in the following sentence "simulationist rpg is like
X," what would "X" be?
Limiting the terms to a specialized metaphor seems to me to limit
their
utility.
I quite agree--but I think this is a virtue, not a flaw. I do not think
we have an adequate analysis of simulationist role-play as yet, and so I
don't think we are yet in position to compare the two metaphors.
Ultimately I think we will conclude
a. There are various legitimate metaphors for describing rpg; and
b. Each of them captures the activity imperfectly; because
c. There are lots of different kinds of activity subsumed by the label
"rpg."
But that is just a guess, of course--we won't know until we pursue the
question :)
I want to maintain that provisional, ambiguous sense of imperfection. I
do not think there is a holy-grail out there, that any one analysis will
provide the perfect insight into how rpg works. The activity, it seems
to me, is not so unitary such that we can dissect in quite such a
rigorous fashion.
My best,
Kevin
Scott DiBerardino
Psychohist (psych...@aol.com) wrote:
: I'm not yet convinced that 'actor' stance is limited solely to issues of
: portrayal, even if conscious determination of what the character does is
: considered to be 'author'.
There does seem to be a need to use more than one stance at once or
consecutively. If there is something to be portrayed, which is determined
by putting on the Author cap, then one must assume the Actor stance to do
so. I guess I am confused by what "portrayal issues" are. Since in
roleplaying the roles are generally solely defined by the player, there is
no script or role set by a separate author or the GM that one simply acts
out. Strict adherence to the character set down in the character sheet
seems like the only pure incidence of acting.
Emme
-scott \\ sco...@javanet.com \\ www.javanet.com/~scottd/banana.html
"Quantitative action works by violence and breeds reaction.
Qualitative action works by example and invites reciprocation."
-- Robert Fripp
Kevin
Joshua Macy wrote:
They may not be definitive, but it doesn't seem sensible to
exclude
them,
Please, Joshua--read what I wrote! I quite explicitly indicated that I
was *not* excluding them, in the original definition. Quite the
contrary, I most definitely would consider someone who made decisions in
a game one the basis of considerations of drama or plot to be acting in
the authorial stance. However, the converse of that is *not* true--the
author stance is not *limited* to considerations of plot or drama or
story. It includes such considerations, but it can include a great many
others as well.
We would seem to be talking past each other.
and if you don't then your proposed authorial stance seems (to me,
anyway) to encompass antithetical ways of playing.
I don't follow you here--how so?
I often ask myself,
"what would my character do?", but I never ask (and likely would
resent
being asked to consider) what my character could do that would
further
any overarching consideration that an author of a play might have
(such
as drama, mood, pacing, suspense, or what-have-you).
Not a problem--I'm not trying to attack how you play, in the slightest.
But, at least as I and Sarah originally proposed the definition, when
you ask yourself "what would my character do?" you *are* assuming the
authorial stance (although there are shades of the actor stance there
too, to be sure, at least as we originally defined the terms--which is,
I think, part of the larger problem here).
Any time you assume an orientation to the game that is analagous to the
orientation that an author has to a work in progress, you are assuming
the author stance.
In fact, I can't
think of any consideration that an author might have *other* than
keeping a particular character in character that I would be
comfortable
using for my own characters as a player,
I haven't got a problem with this--your preferences are your own, and
they seem legitimate enough to me. I have no quarrel with them, and
were you in one of my games, I'd strive to accomodate them.
but I can't really imagine many
authors writing a play with that as their only (or even primary)
consideration.
It does not have to be primary--simply *a* consideration. The way you
are construing the author stance is not the way Sarah and I did. If
"original intent" means anything (and it doesn't, necessarily) then you
are not using the term in its original sense. I did not intend to
restrict the author stance to "enhancing the drama of the game" or
"making a better plot" or even "making a better story." While I will
grant you that authors very often write with those things in mind, that
is by no means necessarily true all the time. Some authors write, for
example, to create the most realistic and believable character possible,
irregardless of considerations of plot or story or drama--would you then
want to say that they are not "real" authors when they write that way?
I wouldn't.
(For example, would you say that Bret Harte or Mark Twain, or any of the
other "local color" authors of the late 19th century, were not "true"
authors, when they neglected plot and story in order to convey the
"feel" of a particular place and time? Is the author of a non-fiction
travelogue not a "true" author?)
Since it seems unlikely to me that you really disagree with that, I
conclude that we are miscommunicating somewhere. Maybe you can restate
your understanding of the term?
Best,
Kevin
Jaana Heino
Kevin wrote:
>the analysis. I would propose, perhaps, the following, somewhat more
>obscure schema:
>METHOD stance (which explicitly references the method actor)
>AUTHOR stance
>AUDIENCE stance
>ACTOR stance (now explicitly narrowed down to issues of portrayal)
I would not really like this. One major part of the beauty of the
original four stances (imho, of course) was how it separated the three
ways I definitely feel in my own play. If you narrow what was called
'Actor' into just portrayal, you loose the distinction between what was
called 'IC' and 'Author'. The terms are not very good, maybe - there
seems to be some value judgements relating to 'IC' involved, too - but
the distinction is there, and I would like to keep it there.
(In case that I am unclear, I mean the distinction between "What would
she do?" and "Oh, whatever will I do?" This need not show outside, but
it is there.)
Mary K. Kuhner
In article <ScottD-1204...@noho-us224.javanet.com> ScottD@*remove*javanet.com (Scott DiBerardino) writes:
>I guess I am confused by what "portrayal issues" are. Since in
>roleplaying the roles are generally solely defined by the player, there is
>no script or role set by a separate author or the GM that one simply acts
>out. Strict adherence to the character set down in the character sheet
>seems like the only pure incidence of acting.
Players make small portrayal decisions all the time, mostly unconsciously.
Which statements do I say in character, and which do I summarize, and
which do I leave out? (No one says everything their character says,
down to "pass the salt", in every scene; takes too long.)
Which of my character's actions do I describe in detail, and which do I
summarize, and which do I leave out?
Do I describe the character's thoughts and feelings, or only his
words and deeds?
Do I try to work up an accent or mode of speech for my character? Do
I use invented words, or translate everything to English (i.e. when
speaking of game-world customs or foods)?
How do I describe my character's appearance? When? In what detail?
As I see it, these are Actor decisions, involving how the character is
portrayed to the other players and the GM.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Joshua Macy
Kevin wrote:
>
> Joshua Macy wrote:
>
> They may not be definitive, but it doesn't seem sensible to
> exclude
> them,
>
> Please, Joshua--read what I wrote!
Please, Kevin, finish reading the sentence before commenting. The
second clause contains an important modifier.
> I quite explicitly indicated that I
> was *not* excluding them, in the original definition. Quite the
> contrary, I most definitely would consider someone who made decisions in
> a game one the basis of considerations of drama or plot to be acting in
> the authorial stance. However, the converse of that is *not* true--the
> author stance is not *limited* to considerations of plot or drama or
> story. It includes such considerations, but it can include a great many
> others as well.
>
> We would seem to be talking past each other.
Apparently. I am aware that your use of the term "author stance"
includes a great many considerations--that's precisely my objection to
it: it includes *so many* considerations that I don't see it as being at
all useful in discussion. What, in your view, *isn't* subsumed under
author stance?
>
> and if you don't then your proposed authorial stance seems (to me,
> anyway) to encompass antithetical ways of playing.
>
> I don't follow you here--how so?
>
> I often ask myself,
> "what would my character do?", but I never ask (and likely would
> resent
> being asked to consider) what my character could do that would
> further
> any overarching consideration that an author of a play might have
> (such
> as drama, mood, pacing, suspense, or what-have-you).
>
> Not a problem--I'm not trying to attack how you play, in the slightest.
It's not a matter of attacking how I play--I'm not sensitive on that
score; it's a matter of how to describe how I play. You would describe
it as author stance, but you would also describe as author stance
methods of play that I don't do, and would be loathe to do. What, then,
does my telling you that I play using author stance (according to your
definition) tell you about the way that I play? Not much, as far as I
can see.
> But, at least as I and Sarah originally proposed the definition, when
> you ask yourself "what would my character do?" you *are* assuming the
> authorial stance (although there are shades of the actor stance there
> too, to be sure, at least as we originally defined the terms--which is,
> I think, part of the larger problem here).
>
I'm asking you what use is your originally proposed definition? What
distinction does it make? What _doesn't_ it encompass?
> Any time you assume an orientation to the game that is analagous to the
> orientation that an author has to a work in progress, you are assuming
> the author stance.
>
I find analogies to be slippery things. I tend to think that
everything in roleplaying games, even down to creating maps or rolling
random encounters, can be analogized to "the orientation that an author
has to a work in progress". No joke: books on creative writing often
recommend putting together random elements-- e.g. by drawing
three-by-five cards with character and plot elements from a hat-- to
stimulate new lines of thought; then there's Raymond Chandler's (I think
it was) famous dictum that whenever you get stuck in a plot, it's time
for someone to walk through the door with a gun in hand. The question
then becomes whether the analogy is at all useful; at the moment I don't
see how this one is.
...snip....
> The way you
> are construing the author stance is not the way Sarah and I did. If
> "original intent" means anything (and it doesn't, necessarily) then you
> are not using the term in its original sense. I did not intend to
> restrict the author stance to "enhancing the drama of the game" or
> "making a better plot" or even "making a better story."
I don't care about original intent, just about communication. If you
don't want to restrict author stance to "enhancing the drama of the
game", or whatever, I don't have a problem with that--my only problem is
with understanding how you do intend to restrict the meaning of author
stance, or even if you do.
...snip...
>
> Since it seems unlikely to me that you really disagree with that, I
> conclude that we are miscommunicating somewhere. Maybe you can restate
> your understanding of the term?
>
I no longer have any understanding of what you mean by the term,
other than perhaps an all-encompassing analogy, and propose to retire it
from my vocabulary.
Kevin
Joshua Macy wrote:
> We would seem to be talking past each other.
Apparently. I am aware that your use of the term "author stance"
includes a great many considerations--that's precisely my objection
to
it: it includes *so many* considerations that I don't see it as
being at
all useful in discussion. What, in your view, *isn't* subsumed
under
author stance?
Any time you are not approaching the game from an authorial viewpoint,
you are not in the author stance :) Round and round we go . . .
For example, when I am appreciating the role-play of others, I am not in
the author stance. When I am appreciating the portrayal of the world
from a metagame viewpoint, I am not in the author stance.
When I am focussed on the best way to portray my character to others, I
am not in the author stance.
When I am acting in the game world on the basis of having internalized
my character, feeling what my character feels, believing as my character
believes, I am not in the author stance.
One of the key insights that this analysis permits--and I hasten to add
it is not mine, but Sarah's--is that these ways of understanding and
participating in the play of the game do not mesh easily with each
other. Group decisions to highlight or emphasize one or more of the
stances will carry costs. The stances balance uneasily against each
other, and decisions to privilege one stance come at the expense of the
others. Moreover, to a certain degree ALL stances are always present
when we role-play--so all rpgs consist of a shifting balance of
stances. For me anyway, once I saw that, I could make more informed
decisions about what it was I was trying to accomplish. So I personally
have found the four stance model useful, because it permitted me to
assess the costs as well as the gains of various rpg styles.
It's not a matter of attacking how I play--I'm not sensitive on
that
score; it's a matter of how to describe how I play.
Why are you sensitive on this score? If you don't find the four stance
model useful, then don't use it!
You would describe
it as author stance, but you would also describe as author stance
methods of play that I don't do, and would be loathe to do.
Yes. Its inclusive of a general set of orientations towards the
game--particular ways of looking at and perticipating in the game. That
you would find some of those orientations objectionable does not
surprise me. But the orientations you laud do have something in common
with those you decry--which is the point, in part, of the analysis.
What, then,
does my telling you that I play using author stance (according to
your
definition) tell you about the way that I play? Not much, as far as
I
can see.
It tells me that you are not participating in the game, making sense of
the game, from one of the other stances. Which, depending on what your
agenda is, what it is you are trying to analyze, can be useful.
I no longer have any understanding of what you mean by the term,
other than perhaps an all-encompassing analogy, and propose to
retire it
from my vocabulary.
Fair enough--under the circumstances, I applaud your decision. If the
terminology doesn't perform useful work for you, don't use it.
Best,
Kevin
Kevin
Scott DiBerardino wrote:
There does seem to be a need to use more than one stance at once or
consecutively.
Yes--part of the original analysis was to point out how often we shift
back and forth between stances. In my experience people very rarely
inhabit purely a single stance. Even so, the group as a whole very
often makes decisions to emphasize one or more stances as being more
valuable or more akin to what they are after in an rpg--part of the
point of the original analysis (courtesy of Sarah Kahn) was to point out
what the costs of doing that are.
If there is something to be portrayed, which is determined
by putting on the Author cap, then one must assume the Actor stance
to do
so. I guess I am confused by what "portrayal issues" are.
Well, in a recent game I was playing CC, a military-trained killer with
strongly suicidal tendancies. CC watched his mentor and friend die in
the Gulf War, and feels responsible for his friend's death. (There's
lots more to the back story than this, and CC is not quite so
unidimensional and cliched as this brief description makes him appear.)
At various points in the game I have made decisions based on portarying
this aspect of his character to the other players. In small,
local-color scenes I will often make decisions not from the
Method-stance (for one thing, CC is so different from me that I have
difficulty wearing his emotions, as it were--although that is in part
why I am playing the character), or from the authorial stance, but
rather with considerations of portrayal--I want to give the other
*players* insight into CC's character. Sometimes this means balancing
what I know about what CC *should* do against the benefits of portraying
forcefully his inner emptional imbalance. (Obviously, btw, this kind of
rpg is not for everybody--the game is rather experimental,
actually--Mark Wallace is running it :)
The key thing here is that my prime concern is metagame--how best to
reveal CC's internal character--rather than in-game--how best to play
the character as I have written him, so that he is internally
consistent. Sometimes the outcomes are identical--but the process by
which I arrived at them is not.
Anyway, Mary Kuhner has already given you a substantively similar
analysis, and hers is easier to follow :) What she said . . .
My best,
Kevin
Kevin
Doug Smith wrote:
I'm new to this NG so forgive me if my questions are seem simple.
What's wrong with using descriptive terms 'Method Acting", "Acting"
(or Regular Acting), and "3rd Person Acting" for someone who's more
detached from their character?
Nothing wrong with this suggestion at all--it preserves the original
context of the model (which grew out of analysis of the metaphor "rpg is
like theatre") and is, it seems to me, clear enough about what is being
conveyed.
Jaana--would this satisfy you?
Best,
Kevin
Joshua Macy
Kevin wrote:
>
> Joshua Macy wrote:
>
>
> Any time you are not approaching the game from an authorial viewpoint,
> you are not in the author stance :) Round and round we go . . .
>
> For example, when I am appreciating the role-play of others, I am not in
> the author stance. When I am appreciating the portrayal of the world
> from a metagame viewpoint, I am not in the author stance.
>
Okay.
> When I am focussed on the best way to portray my character to others, I
> am not in the author stance.
>
Surely a large part of what an author does is seek the best way to
portray the characters he's writing about to the audience, so that ought
to be author stance as well.
> When I am acting in the game world on the basis of having internalized
> my character, feeling what my character feels, believing as my character
> believes, I am not in the author stance.
>
I wouldn't be surprised if there are authors who do that, too.
Certainly I've heard authors who claim that a particular character
writes itself, or refuses to go along with a particular plot direction;
it seems to me that must be based on the same sort of internalization.
...snip...
>
> It's not a matter of attacking how I play--I'm not sensitive on
> that
> score; it's a matter of how to describe how I play.
>
> Why are you sensitive on this score? If you don't find the four stance
> model useful, then don't use it!
>
I thought it was useful, until you started explicating it.
Carl D. Cravens
All the humor aside, I believe the intent was "view point".
My dictionary calls it (in definition 2) "The attitude adopted toward a
particular thing." (i.e. "What's your stance on gun control?") It
specifically notes that this is an American usage, which might be why
you question it.
Our usage may still be a little inappropriate though, if we really do
mean "view point."
(Your humor didn't go unappreciated, though.)
--
Carl (rave...@southwind.net) * Phoenyx Roleplaying Listserver
* http://www2.southwind.net/~phoenyx
If at first you don't succeed, try 2nd or shortstop.
Carl D. Cravens
On 10 Apr 1997 09:58:30 GMT, Jaana Heino <jant...@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:
>"Immersive" is fine with me, but I *strongly* disagree using "IC" for
>'having to think through', simply because that *definitely* is not how
>people outside this newsgroup (or inside it, so far) tend to use it. One
>definitely is IC when being immersive, isn't one?
>
>I suggest that "IC" from this on refers to doing something 'as the
>character', and that it is not at all used as one of the stances. So
>the Four Stances would be Actor, Author, Audience and Immersive, and you
>could be IC and do things IC in all of them. In Actor, you would talk
>and behave IC, and in Immersive you might also feel and think IC...
I would agree with this myself... use in-character to mean nothing but
in-character, the opposite of out-of-character, again.
--
Carl (rave...@southwind.net) * Phoenyx Roleplaying Listserver
* http://www2.southwind.net/~phoenyx
Hey! Lower your landing gear! !@#$*!?% NO HARRIER
Carl D. Cravens
On Thu, 10 Apr 1997 13:39:59 -0700, Joshua Macy <jm...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> The problem I see with that is that while there might be _something_
>authorial going on when you ask yourselves those questions, they seem a
>pretty far cry (and perhaps even opposite in intent) to asking yourself
>"What could my character do that would make for a great dramatic moment,
>or really help the plot or mood?", which is what I understood authorial
>at the expense of broadening "author" to a confusing amount.
As an authorial player, I have to say that you've got that slightly
backwards. You first consider what your character will do in a
particular situation... *then* you ask how it affects the overall story
or campaign. If the effects are displeasing, then you rethink it if
possible.
The need for a helping the story doesn't *drive* the decision process,
but it shapes it.
So the question is, "What will I do?" followed by, "How will it affect
everything?" What the character will do is the more important of the
two, shaped by what its effects are.
Did that make sense?
--
Carl (rave...@southwind.net) * Phoenyx Roleplaying Listserver
* http://www2.southwind.net/~phoenyx
ANY system works with enough hammer thumps.
russell wallace
Relabelling "deep IC" as "immersion" is fine by me.
Regarding "Author", it seems to me that the amount of debate and
confusion there's been so far about it proves that if we're going to
change the model at all, we really ought to split it up. Here's my vote
for separating out "What would my character do now?" under something
like "Analytical", and leaving "Author" for things like "What would make
for an interesting story?"
--
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin
rwal...@tcd.ie
Joshua Macy
Carl D. Cravens wrote:
>
...snip....
> backwards. You first consider what your character will do in a
> particular situation... *then* you ask how it affects the overall story
> or campaign. If the effects are displeasing, then you rethink it if
> possible.
>
> The need for a helping the story doesn't *drive* the decision process,
> but it shapes it.
>
> So the question is, "What will I do?" followed by, "How will it affect
> everything?" What the character will do is the more important of the
> two, shaped by what its effects are.
>
> Did that make sense?
>
Not to me, but I'm not an authorial player (except by Kevin's
definition).
Joshua Macy
russell wallace wrote:
>
> Relabelling "deep IC" as "immersion" is fine by me.
>
> Regarding "Author", it seems to me that the amount of debate and
> confusion there's been so far about it proves that if we're going to
> change the model at all, we really ought to split it up. Here's my vote
> for separating out "What would my character do now?" under something
> like "Analytical", and leaving "Author" for things like "What would make
> for an interesting story?"
>
That makes a lot of sense to me, although it still seems to leave a
gap. Under the old model, I would have called myself an "IC" player,
but not a "deep IC" player. I figured out what my character would do,
most of the time, by trying to think like my character rather than
analyze what my character would think...but I never experienced emotions
the way my character would, or any of that other "deep IC" stuff.
Irina Rempt
Psychohist (psych...@aol.com) wrote:
> Consider the case of someone who ad-libs a humorous line, without thinking
> about it - just to make a spur of the moment joke. But assume that it's
> at the character level - say, the humor of the statement can only be
> understood in the context of the character's world, not of the player's
> world.
[...]
> Assume the line is not particularly consistent with the character's
> personality, so it doesn't come from immersive play.
[...]
> I'd argue that the player is in actor mode here.
I'd argue that the *character* is in actor mode. Everybody says things
occasionally that aren't particularly consistent with their
personality; at least I do, as well as everybody I know well enough to
tell when something is consistent. When it happens to me, I immediately
notice and wonder where it came from.
I'd find a character less believable (more crafted, "authored" if
*everything* they said was consistent with their
personality-as-conceived.
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
-------------------- Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus --------------------
XII. "Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum!"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jaana Heino
Well, yes and no. It would satisfy me if I was speaking just about how
the player goes about acting out her character... but I don't think they
have much to do with the Stances, really. Where are the meta or scene
considerations of "Author" here, for instance?
--
Jaana Heino-----------------email: jant...@cc.helsinki.fi----
Iivisniemenkuja 4 F 70----------------------------------------
02260 Espoo--------------------"Life is a hard lesson."-------
FINLAND-------------------------------------------------------
Kevin
Joshua Macy wrote:
> For example, when I am appreciating the role-play of others, I am
not in
> the author stance. When I am appreciating the portrayal of the
world
> from a metagame viewpoint, I am not in the author stance.
>
Okay.
> When I am focussed on the best way to portray my character to
others, I
> am not in the author stance.
>
Surely a large part of what an author does is seek the best way to
portray the characters he's writing about to the audience, so that
ought
to be author stance as well.
Yes--there is a sense in which what you say is true. For that reason,
Sarah and I felt it useful to distinguish the other stances. The reason
we bothered to define them in the first place was to distinghuish
particular activities from the others, since we felt they had especial
relevance to role-play.
If you want to think of the actor and method stances as subsets of
author, that is OK by me. I would prefer, however, to define author in
such a fashion as to exclude the actor and method stances--I think it is
more useful that way.
> When I am acting in the game world on the basis of having
internalized
> my character, feeling what my character feels, believing as my
character
> believes, I am not in the author stance.
>
I wouldn't be surprised if there are authors who do that, too.
Certainly I've heard authors who claim that a particular character
writes itself, or refuses to go along with a particular plot
direction;
it seems to me that must be based on the same sort of
internalization.
I agree--I do think that the distinction between internalization and
what I have been calling "author" is useful, however. We have to draw
distinctions somewhere, it seems to me, if we want to accomplish any
useful work.
AFAICT the problem, for you, is that you want to expand the typology to
include a category that covers the attitude a player or GM assumes when
they ARE explicitly acting to advance a story or plot. This strikes me
as useful, and very much in keeping with the original analysis.
Certainly there are GMs and players who do make decisions in the game
based on such agendas.
My critique of this proposal is that it is not inclusive of ALL that an
author does. If we exclude the other stances (Actor/Portrayal,
Method/Immersive) from "author," and in addition exclude considerations
of story-telling and plot, it does not seem to me that we are left with
a null category. There is stuff left in the category that we can
usefully describe as author. This includes, I would contend, the player
or GM who has to rationalize or intellectualize a character's actions,
much as you describe how you play.
Or, put it another way, not all authors set out to tell a story.
Maybe the solution here is explicitly to hive off the
story-telling/plot-oriented side of the author stance into a separate
category, which we might call the "story-telling stance."
> Why are you sensitive on this score? If you don't find the four
stance
> model useful, then don't use it!
>
I thought it was useful, until you started explicating it.
Sorry about that. Under the circumstances, what would you suggest I do
differently?
Best,
Kevin
Kevin
Jaana Heino wrote:
Kevin wrote:
>Doug Smith wrote:
> I'm new to this NG so forgive me if my questions are seem simple.
> What's wrong with using descriptive terms 'Method Acting",
"Acting"
> (or Regular Acting), and "3rd Person Acting" for someone who's
more
> detached from their character?
>Nothing wrong with this suggestion at all--it preserves the
original
>context of the model (which grew out of analysis of the metaphor
"rpg is
>like theatre") and is, it seems to me, clear enough about what is
being
>conveyed.
>Jaana--would this satisfy you?
Well, yes and no. It would satisfy me if I was speaking just about
how
the player goes about acting out her character... but I don't think
they
have much to do with the Stances, really. Where are the meta or
scene
considerations of "Author" here, for instance?
Sorry to leave the entire post above unsnipped--it seemed clearer that
way.
Anyway, the typology is incomplete. In other posts in this thread
Joshua and I have been discussing the author stance. I think part of
the problem is the connotations of "author" which Joshua finds
unappealing. As a professional author (albeit of non-fiction) the terms
do not share the same connotations for me as they apparantly do for him.
Anyway, if all if this boils down to issues of labels, then the argument
seems easy enough to settle :)
One way to address these semantic issues is to rearrange the
labels--here is one schema that might work:
Original Term New Term(s)
Author \
\ Third person actor
/
/ Story-telling
Actor \
\ Method-actor/Immersive
/
/ Portrayal
Audience > Audience
IC \
\ Third Person Actor
/
/ Method Actor/Immersive
In the new schema, IC dissappears entirely, replaced by Third Person
Actor (the stance that Joshua uses to play his characters, for example)
and Method/Immersive (the stance that Mary Kuhner, John Kim, myself, and
others strive for).
Actor becomes Method/Immersive and Portrayal. Neither of these terms
strike me as controversial--there seems to be broad agreement as to what
they mean, and also as to their utility.
Similarly, Author dissappears too--replaced by Third Person Actor (which
I had previously classified as Author) and Story/Plot-Oriented.
Audience remains what it always was.
Now one problem I have with this new schema (as I have been arguing with
Joshua elsewhere) is that it still leaves out ways of participating in
the game that strike me as strongly authorial. What, for example, do we
do with the player who improvises part of the setting during the game?
As I argued earlier, you can do that in such a fashion that it
strenghtens Method Acting/Immersion, and is not oriented towards
enhancing the story or plot, or even the drama of a scene. I would
argue, however, that you have to leave the Immersive/Method stance in
order to do this--it involves thinking about the game differently, if
perhaps only very briefly. Such a player is, then, neither Immersive
nor Story-telling. Would you feel comfortable describing such a player
as Third-Person Acting? I'm not at all sure that Joshua would (how
about it, Joshua?)
All my best,
Kevin
Joshua Macy
Kevin wrote:
>
>
....snip...
> Actor (the stance that Joshua uses to play his characters, for example)
> and Method/Immersive (the stance that Mary Kuhner, John Kim, myself, and
> others strive for).
>
> Actor becomes Method/Immersive and Portrayal. Neither of these terms
> strike me as controversial--there seems to be broad agreement as to what
> they mean, and also as to their utility.
>
> Similarly, Author dissappears too--replaced by Third Person Actor (which
> I had previously classified as Author) and Story/Plot-Oriented.
> Audience remains what it always was.
>
....snip...
> Such a player is, then, neither Immersive
> nor Story-telling. Would you feel comfortable describing such a player
> as Third-Person Acting? I'm not at all sure that Joshua would (how
> about it, Joshua?)
I'm pretty sure that I don't quite know what you mean by "third person
actor."
Joshua Macy
Kevin wrote:
>
...snip...
>
> AFAICT the problem, for you, is that you want to expand the typology to
> include a category that covers the attitude a player or GM assumes when
> they ARE explicitly acting to advance a story or plot. This strikes me
> as useful, and very much in keeping with the original analysis.
> Certainly there are GMs and players who do make decisions in the game
> based on such agendas.
>
I think that rather than expanding the typology, I would restrict it.
My real problem is that under the old terminology, at least as I
understood it, it was quite clear to me how to describe my style of play
(IC, but not Deep IC), and to differentiate it from a stance that
allows/favors metagame considerations, whether from the point of view of
advancing plot/creating drama or creating bits of business and scenery
ad hoc (what I thought was covered by authorial), or from a stance which
allows/favors considerations of portrayal for the benefit of other
players (what I thought was covered by actor). Everything described by
IC seemed of a piece to me, if carried out to different degrees. What's
covered by author, though, as you describe it, seems to me to be several
quite different styles of play, with different orientations and
philosophies as far as metagame considerations as well as different
approaches to actually playing.
> Joshua Macy wrote:
> I thought it was useful, until you started explicating it.
>
> Sorry about that. Under the circumstances, what would you suggest I do
> differently?
Nothing in particular--if I don't understand the terminology or find
it useful, I just won't use it. I thought, though, that you might like
to know why it seemed confusing or unhelpful to me. I'm not really sure
what your objection to IC was, so I don't know if it can be addressed to
both our satisfactions.
Psychohist
Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
As a start towards this, how would you define
"simulationist?"
I like the 'realistic, not dramatic, and natural, not directed'
definition.
... Just what are you trying to "simulate?" (Please
do not assume a hostile agenda when I frame the
question this way :)
I could say that the my game is simulating the world of the Eastern Isles,
but most people would deny any independent existence of that world outside
the game. In this way, the term 'simulationist' is a bit of a misnomer.
But the alternative terms I might use would be insufficiently neutral to
prevent flame wars.
If you were to fill in the following sentence
"simulationist rpg is like X," what would "X" be?
"A simulationist role playing game is a world." Note the lack of the word
'like'. Metaphors are not always the best ways to understand things.
Limiting the terms to a specialized metaphor seems
to me to limit their utility.
I quite agree--but I think this is a virtue, not a flaw.
Limiting the utility of a term is a virtue? Is this really what you mean
to say?
Let me give an example to illustrate what I mean. In the discussion of
immersive play a few months ago, I noticed correlation between immersive
play and simulationist games, and a dichotomy between simulationist and
story oriented games.
This led me to the realization that a certain player whom I like a lot and
had been encouraging to rejoin my game in fact seemed to be primarily an
audience stance player - and that that was not a good match for my
strictly simulationist game. So I quit bugging him about it.
I made actual, productive use of the understanding of immersive play - and
the understanding that it's not what everyone aims for - without ever
realizing that the 'stances' originated in anything so obscure, to me, as
a metaphor to drama. (Hey, I hate plays, and I average less than one
movie every two years.)
Are you saying that I shouldn't have done that? That I should still be
wasting my time figuring out ways to interest this particular player when,
in fact, he probably wouldn't fit in with the rest of my gaming group?
Warren Dew
Psychohist
Responding to Kevin's suggestion:
METHOD stance (which explicitly references the method actor)
AUTHORstance
AUDIENCE stance
ACTOR stance (now explicitly narrowed down to issues of portrayal)
Jaana Heino posts, in part:
I would not really like this. One major part of the
beauty of the original four stances (imho, of course)
was how it separated the three ways I definitely feel
in my own play. If you narrow what was called
'Actor' into just portrayal, you loose the distinction
between what was called 'IC' and 'Author'. The terms
are not very good, maybe - there seems to be some value
judgements relating to 'IC' involved, too - but the
distinction is there, and I would like to keep it there.
I'm with Jaana here.
In fact, I'd say that it's the terms and their implied categorization, and
not their original definitions, that are really useful. The terms help us
clarify our thinking when we assign our own definitions to them. 'IC' and
'Deep IC' were less useful than the others, because of ambiguity, thus the
replacement with the term 'immersion'.
I think 'method' is poorly chosen, since a lot of what goes into method
acting is subjecting the actor to the things the characters is subjected
to. I doubt if most immersive players stay up all night to simulate their
characters' lack of sleep, or live on moldy bread while their characters
are in prison. True method acting seems more appropriate to live action
games than to table top games.
Warren Dew
Kevin
Joshua Macy wrote:
I'm pretty sure that I don't quite know what you mean by "third
person
actor."
Oh. Sorry . . .
OK--what I mean is that way of participating in a game in which, before
stating what your character does, you take time to ask yourself "what
should my character do in this situation?" or "How should my character
react in this situation?" Or, put another way, in which you have not
internalized your character, and so must think through what your
character does and how your character responds. Typically, for me
anyway, this invloves taking into consideration the character's
back-story, or what I have previously determined about his phychological
dispositions. Whatever, very often I have to think it through, before I
do anything in-character. This is quite different from those (rare, for
me) times when I successfully internalize my character, in the fashion
of the method actor, and don't have to think through, for example, my
character's emotional reaction to something happening in the game.
Hopefully this clarifies things--in your terminolgy, as I understand it,
IC maps to Third Person Actor, and
Deep IC maps to Method/Immersive.
Does this make sense?
Best,
Kevin
Kevin
Joshua Macy wrote:
Nothing in particular--if I don't understand the terminology or
find
it useful, I just won't use it. I thought, though, that you might
like
to know why it seemed confusing or unhelpful to me. I'm not really
sure
what your objection to IC was, so I don't know if it can be
addressed to
both our satisfactions.
Well, I do think ours has been a useful and productive exchange--that's
why I've pursued it. You have pushed me to refine my thinking, which on
the whole is a good thing.
I've gotten testy, I suppose, over what I have perceived as a derisive
attitude towards me from you--but perhaps I'm being too sensitive. I've
been burned alot in recent exchanges, not just with you but with others,
and it has made me considerable more suspicious of people's intentions
lately.
But whatever, I am interested in pursuing this conversation further, and
it does strike me as adding depth to my understanding of rpg.
My best,
Kevin
scott....@3do.com
In article <19970414175...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
Agreement here. I do believe that the four stances seem to describe well
what I have observed and played. I also agree that 'Method' is a poor
term for this discussion as the theatrical connotations can be
confusing, it is also confusing when people talk of other 'methods of
resolution', 'methods of character generation' et. The word itself is
common enough not to having another meaning on it. I would agree to the
term 'Immersive'.
Scott
-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
Joshua Macy
Kevin wrote:
>
....snip...
> Whatever, very often I have to think it through, before I
> do anything in-character. This is quite different from those (rare, for
> me) times when I successfully internalize my character, in the fashion
> of the method actor, and don't have to think through, for example, my
> character's emotional reaction to something happening in the game.
>
I think that leaves me somewhere in between--I often can do cognitive
things first person in character, but never experience emotions first
person in character--still it comports better with my experience of
playing (and my understanding of the way my friends play) than before.
> Hopefully this clarifies things--in your terminolgy, as I understand it,
>
> IC maps to Third Person Actor, and
> Deep IC maps to Method/Immersive.
>
So what becomes of Actor simply as performer--a method of acting out
the decisions made, for the benefit of the other players and GM as an
audience, but not as a method of arriving at IC decisions in the first
place?
Joshua Macy
Kevin wrote:
>
...snip...
>
> I've gotten testy, I suppose, over what I have perceived as a derisive
> attitude towards me from you--but perhaps I'm being too sensitive. I've
> been burned alot in recent exchanges, not just with you but with others,
> and it has made me considerable more suspicious of people's intentions
> lately.
>
seemed derisive, that wasn't the intent.
> But whatever, I am interested in pursuing this conversation further, and
> it does strike me as adding depth to my understanding of rpg.
>
Ok. Here's a question that occurred to me as I was mulling over the
third-person actor, immersive/method tags: why identify the methods of
staying in character with acting in the first place? It actually seems
to me that both stances would be regarded by actual actors as being
variations on method, since they're both methods of generating responses
from within, rather than taking responses as dictated by the script and
director and simulating them coming from within. It would be much
closer to actual (non-method) acting if the player were to decide what
the character was going to do based on authorial considerations and then
play them out as if they had arisen from the character.
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 14 Apr 1997 17:44:06 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:
>Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
>
> As a start towards this, how would you define
> "simulationist?"
>
>I like the 'realistic, not dramatic, and natural, not directed'
>definition.
The only problem I have with this is that it fails to capture what I
do :)
That is, I would contend that my games are realsitic AND dramatic.
The other opposition works better, for me--natural and directed do
strike me as exclusive.
> ... Just what are you trying to "simulate?" (Please
> do not assume a hostile agenda when I frame the
> question this way :)
>
>I could say that the my game is simulating the world of the Eastern Isles,
>but most people would deny any independent existence of that world outside
>the game. In this way, the term 'simulationist' is a bit of a misnomer.
>But the alternative terms I might use would be insufficiently neutral to
>prevent flame wars.
On what basis do you make choices of what to simulate? After all, you
cannot simulate everything. You discriminate, you must. What is the
principle by which you do so?
Don't sweat the terminology, at least for my sake. As long as you are
willing to concede that what I do is valid, and I likewise for you, I
think we can avoid flammage :)
> If you were to fill in the following sentence
> "simulationist rpg is like X," what would "X" be?
>
>"A simulationist role playing game is a world." Note the lack of the word
>'like'. Metaphors are not always the best ways to understand things.
Well, maybe. But that is another argument, and not one that we need
to go into here :)
The problem is that it can't be a world--you haven't got sufficient
time and energy to make it complete. So it has to be only part of a
world. How do you decide what part to simulate?
> Limiting the terms to a specialized metaphor seems
> to me to limit their utility.
>
> I quite agree--but I think this is a virtue, not a flaw.
>
>Limiting the utility of a term is a virtue?
Smile. In retrospect, that was a pretty stupid thing to write, wasn't
it?
I guess what I really mean is that I think limiting the scope of the
term is a good thing.
>Let me give an example to illustrate what I mean. In the discussion of
>immersive play a few months ago, I noticed correlation between immersive
>play and simulationist games, and a dichotomy between simulationist and
>story oriented games.
>
>This led me to the realization that a certain player whom I like a lot and
>had been encouraging to rejoin my game in fact seemed to be primarily an
>audience stance player - and that that was not a good match for my
>strictly simulationist game. So I quit bugging him about it.
>
>I made actual, productive use of the understanding of immersive play - and
>the understanding that it's not what everyone aims for - without ever
>realizing that the 'stances' originated in anything so obscure, to me, as
>a metaphor to drama. (Hey, I hate plays, and I average less than one
>movie every two years.)
>
>Are you saying that I shouldn't have done that? That I should still be
>wasting my time figuring out ways to interest this particular player when,
>in fact, he probably wouldn't fit in with the rest of my gaming group?
Good Lord, no! I'm glad that the original analysis had that kind of
usefulness for you. This is certainly the way that I use it, all the
time.
But I think that it is important to recognize where the insights came
from, because that lets you recognize their limitations. I do not
think that the terms are universally applicable. They come from a
particular way of looking at the game--once you recognize that, you
are better positioned, it seems to me, to use the stances in a
critical fashion.
I'm not suggesting that you don't use them--all I am saying is that I
see goodness in preserving the connotations of the original analysis,
since that highlights both the origin of the terms and some of the
potential blinders that may be built into them.
My best,
Kevin
Psychohist
Regarding my quote "a simulationist role playing game is a world", Kevin
Hardwick posts, in part:
The problem is that it can't be a world--you haven't
got sufficient time and energy to make it complete.
So it has to be only part of a world. How do you
decide what part to simulate?
Good question. Can I let Irina answer that one? I don't really know the
answer....
Obviously, I don't know the position and history of every molecule, or of
every human, or even of every dragon.
But I don't feel like there are any 'parts' that are not simulated. Or -
do you know any measure theory? The number of rational numbers is
countable, and the number of real numbers is not. Put another way, only
an infinitesimal proportion of the real numbers are rational. If you were
to somehow extract all the rational numbers' points on a number line, and
squash them all together, the length of the line segment they would make
would be zero.
Yet, the rationals are 'dense' on the real number line - on the line
segment between any two real numbers, there is a rational number.
(Actually, more than one; in fact, a countable infinity of them.)
I feel kind of like the 'parts' that are explicitly simulated are like the
rational numbers over the real number line. Like the irrational numbers,
there are infinitely more 'parts' that are not explicitly simulated; yet
if you look at any finite portion of the world, there will be parts that
are simulated, like rational numbers on any real line segment.
Perhaps another way of looking at it is that the entire world is, in fact,
simulated - but some parts are simulated in more detail than others.
I have a map of the world. I know something about the far reaches of the
world - even the farthest edges of it, a hundred thousand miles from the
areas the player characters know.
Then there are patches which have more detail, patches generally a few
thousand miles across, typically separated by thousands or tens of
thousands of miles.
There's a patch that corresponds to the first campaign I designed, one
which I never ran for other players.
There's a patch called Caldendon, an island continent run by Larry
Lennhoff in a campaign currently dormant. So not all the world is even
mine - though we each have veto power over changes to common rules or
mechanics.
Then there are several patches that are almost connected.
One is the Veldt, a realm of fractious coastal city states and dry inland
savannah, from the solitary manors and lonely giants in the west to the
teeming cities and cosmopolitan magic of the east. I have a lot of
detailed background information on the Veldt, including a lot of history
and quite a few characters, and I've even run it as a game on two
occasions.
There are the Crags, the mountain valleys east of the vast desert that
lies north of the Veldt. I can see the grand mountain peaks, and I know
the type of people that sparsely populate those valleys, but I have no
individual names. I do know, though, that some small quantity of goods
are traded through the Crags, passing through many hands between the
cities of the Veldt to the south and those of the Empire to the north.
On the opposite side of the desert, beyond a high ridge of mountains is
Faraway, a land of jungles recently discovered by explorers from
Caldendon.
And some distance north of both Faraway and the Crags is the City of the
South, located on the southern coast of that great bay in which lie the
Eastern Isles, the largest of which is Laratoa. The Eastern Isles, and
Laratoa in particular, is the area with the greatest detail, the area in
which the player characters live, the area in which most of the gaming
takes place.
Perhaps that's an answer to your question - the parts that are simulated
in greatest detail are those that are in contact with player characters.
But then again, perhaps not - for aren't the player characters there
because the area had enough detail to game in, in the first place?
(continued next post - Warren J. Dew)
Psychohist
(continued from previous post)
When the player characters explore - physically or otherwise - I certainly
tend to flesh out the world ahead of them. And these days, when I have
little extra time, that's all that tends to get done.
In the past, I'd also work on the parts of the world that were showing
consistency cracks. For example, I once started thinking about my
encounter tables, and the excess of carnivores that appeared on them, and
that led me to working out the ecology in detail. Then based on the
biomass numbers I'd worked out, along with factors for spotting ranges and
travel speeds, I revamped the encounter tables.
Of course, I then dropped the 'uninteresting' herbivore encounters, like
herds of antelope that would only flee, from the revamped tables, and they
turned out not to be so different after all. But in the process, I'd
worked out a well defined method for deriving important statistics for
creatures, very useful when designing or characterizing new ones, and I'd
also accumulated better descriptions of the existing creatures' physical
appearance and behavior.
But as the system and world get more refined, the cracks get fewer and
smaller. I could probably rework the creatures again using energy flow
rather than biomass, better capturing the differences between ectotherms
and poikilotherms, but the improvements would be subtle, and probably not
worth the immediate effort. And the players would probably not let me
live if I revamped the combat system again.
And in years past, when the world was being described or created much
faster than today, I spent my extra time on the parts of the world I felt
like working on. Not a very illuminating answer to your question, yet
it's probably the most important one. Sometimes I felt like drawing maps
of sea currents, and figuring out trade routes. At other times, perhaps I
was interested in the ancestry of a particular gamesmaster character, and
the history of his family. And then I might get bored with humanoids, and
want to think about dragons, or forests, or mountains.
Perhaps that's the real answer. The fixing of the details about the world
is driven by my own exploratory impulses. I explore, and the world
appears around me. Of course, it feels to me like all the details were
already there, just waiting to be discovered - but before they were
discovered, they didn't exist even in my head, so I won't even try to
argue that they really were there.
Warren J. Dew
Irina Rempt
Psychohist (psych...@aol.com) wrote:
> Regarding my quote "a simulationist role playing game is a world", Kevin
> Hardwick posts, in part:
> The problem is that it can't be a world--you haven't
> got sufficient time and energy to make it complete.
> So it has to be only part of a world. How do you
> decide what part to simulate?
> Good question. Can I let Irina answer that one? I don't really know the
> answer....
I'll try, though I'm probably less simulationist than Warren thinks and
much less simulationist than Warren *is*.
I don't know *how* I decide anything; usually I don't even notice
*that* I decide; mostly, things just turn out the way they are.
Valdyas is a world. At least, it's a kingdom situated on a world that's
comparable to Earth in things like climate, the fact that it has one
large moon, such-and-such gravity, landscape, people, common animals
and plants, etcetera. It's mostly used as a game world now, but it
started as something I started developing (I still see it as discovery
rather than development, but let's not quibble about that) about eight
years ago as a private project, as background for stories (fantasy
stories, that is; at the time the world still had magic, because I was
so green that I thought it wouldn't be fantasy without that) that grew
into something much bigger.
It exists. It has an existence of its own, probably originating
completely in my conscious and subconscious mind; lately (over the last
two years or so) with additions brought on by other people 'meddling'
with it but still subject to my approval ("no, that doesn't feel
right") and minor editing ("it has to be the Brun family, because the
Velain don't come from there") - for instance, my husband brought in
most of the concepts having to do with the nobility and the external
NPC/PBeM PC in our recent campaign worked out the details of the evil
god's religion that I knew existed, but didn't really want to know too
much about :-)
It isn't finished; that is, parts of the world are 'there' but I don't
know exactly what is there, because I haven't been there yet, neither
in my own mind, nor as GM/NPC, or in stories. To know what's there it's
not enough to *design* it, I have to *look* at it. There are PCs in my
campaign who know places that I don't know - yet, probably, until they
go home and actually show me around.
> Obviously, I don't know the position and history of every molecule, or of
> every human, or even of every dragon.
Right. Not even of every town; the town of Turenay has obviously been
in existence for at least two hundred years in Valdyan terms - you just
have to look at the style of the houses and the peeling paint on them -
but it's less than six months old on paper and in my mind. We needed a
place where the Queen would go to 'take the waters' and I looked at the
map, pointed at a location and said without any doubt in my mind "it's
there". ('Turenay', incidentally, means 'bathing-place')
> But I don't feel like there are any 'parts' that are not simulated.
[zap math]
This goes way over my head. Sorry.
> Perhaps another way of looking at it is that the entire world is, in fact,
> simulated - but some parts are simulated in more detail than others.
Ah, that's better. Right again, from my viewpoint too. Heck, I don't
know that much detail about the town where I live now, or about the
town where I was born, where my eldest kid was born, and where I lived
for a total of about 15 years in three separate stretches.
> I have a map of the world. I know something about the far reaches of the
> world - even the farthest edges of it, a hundred thousand miles from the
> areas the player characters know.
> Then there are patches which have more detail, patches generally a few
> thousand miles across, typically separated by thousands or tens of
> thousands of miles.
Yes; Valdyas is on a much smaller scale overall, but it comes to the
same thing.
[...]
> So not all the world is even
> mine - though we each have veto power over changes to common rules or
> mechanics.
I 'leased' a large continent to the south of Valdyas (Valdyas itself is
just the one kingdom, as well as the Crown Domain of Velihas to the
east) to someone who went on to develop it as his own and run games in
it. He uses his own rules, and we're one another's "mysterious unknown
continent".
[zap some clear examples]
> Perhaps that's an answer to your question - the parts that are simulated
> in greatest detail are those that are in contact with player characters.
Or, in my case, where I've set stories. So much so that when I went to
Lisbon for the first time in my life last February, I recognized it
immediately as a twentieth-century version of Essle in atmosphere and
general outlook.
> But then again, perhaps not - for aren't the player characters there
> because the area had enough detail to game in, in the first place?
In part; the PCs are there (and not somewhere else) because I know it
well enough to start them off there, but if they wander into the swamp
(as they did in our latest session) I get to see that in detail,
whereas before I only knew that there was a swamp there that people
could disappear in. I don't *make up* things as I go, I have to
*discover* things about one minute before the PCs do. Usually the
terrain is familiar enough that it doesn't lead to rapid burnout, but
details only come with actual experience, for me as well as for the
players.
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
-------------------- Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus --------------------
VII. "Heu! Tintinnuntius meus sonat!"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On Mon, 14 Apr 1997 20:43:35 -0700, Joshua Macy <jm...@ix.netcom.com>
wrote:
> If you were testy, I hadn't noticed. I'm sorry if anything I said
>seemed derisive, that wasn't the intent.
I'm glad I didn't come across that way. I get frustrated sometimes
when I fail to communicate clearly--its too easy in this media to
externalize that frustration :)
>> But whatever, I am interested in pursuing this conversation further, and
>> it does strike me as adding depth to my understanding of rpg.
>>
>
> Ok. Here's a question that occurred to me as I was mulling over the
>third-person actor, immersive/method tags: why identify the methods of
>staying in character with acting in the first place?
Grin. It seemed like a good idea at the time? :)
> It actually seems
>to me that both stances would be regarded by actual actors as being
>variations on method, since they're both methods of generating responses
>from within, rather than taking responses as dictated by the script and
>director and simulating them coming from within. It would be much
>closer to actual (non-method) acting if the player were to decide what
>the character was going to do based on authorial considerations and then
>play them out as if they had arisen from the character.
This strike me as a promising way of looking at the issue.
I agree with you--this is in part why I was originally arguing that
the third-person actor stance was subsumed by the author stance. But
I also can see that if we do that, the author stance label covers a
very wide range of viewpoint. I thought there was some merit to your
original argument, in other words :)
My best,
Kevin
Irina Rempt
> When the player characters explore - physically or otherwise - I certainly
> tend to flesh out the world ahead of them. And these days, when I have
> little extra time, that's all that tends to get done.
Right again, though sometimes I have talk sessions with my husband or a
friend lasting all evening and we explore something new like, again,
the nobility, the economy, or a point of theology - almost all of
Valdyas is about people.
[zap technical examples about what's probably ecology]
You're really working on a large scale here, Warren - compared to you
I'm not a simulationist at all. I don't bother with things like
biomass and predators, I let the gods take care of the ecology and I
let the nobles take care of hunting :-)
> Perhaps that's the real answer. The fixing of the details about the world
> is driven by my own exploratory impulses.
Now here comes an important point that I totally agree with - and I
expect some other people will too, notably Jaana when she talks about
"being IC with the world":
> I explore, and the world
> appears around me. Of course, it feels
> to me like all the details were
> already there, just waiting to be discovered
This is *exactly* what I've been trying to say.
> - but before they were
> discovered, they didn't exist even in my head, so I won't even try to
> argue that they really were there.
I'll argue that they were *somewhere* at least - there's a literary
reference somewhere, probably a science fiction story, in which it's
argued that all possible worlds already exist and we only have to find
them ... Anyone?
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
-------------------- Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus --------------------
VI. "Scis quod dicunt: quod fiat, fiat."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joshua Macy
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net wrote:
>
> > Joshua Macy wrote:
> > It actually seems
> >to me that both stances would be regarded by actual actors as being
> >variations on method, since they're both methods of generating responses
> >from within, rather than taking responses as dictated by the script and
> >director and simulating them coming from within. It would be much
> >closer to actual (non-method) acting if the player were to decide what
> >the character was going to do based on authorial considerations and then
> >play them out as if they had arisen from the character.
>
> This strike me as a promising way of looking at the issue.
>
> I agree with you--this is in part why I was originally arguing that
> the third-person actor stance was subsumed by the author stance. But
> I also can see that if we do that, the author stance label covers a
> very wide range of viewpoint. I thought there was some merit to your
> original argument, in other words :)
>
Oh, good, I thought so too.
If I were trying to come up with a categorization from scratch, it
would probably run something along these lines (I'm thinking as I go
here, so forgive me if it seems vague or confused):
I. Methods of making decisions
A. In Character
1. Immersion
- thinks and feels emotions as the character
2. First-person ratiocination
- reasons things through as the character might, but without
emotional content
3. Third person analysis
- reasons what the character might do based on understanding
of character goals and background
B. Out of Character
1. In-game considerations
- goals and methods set by the game situation, but not by
character preferences (e.g. We want to get into the guard tower, my
Priestess can try to vamp the guards to distract them...) Note that I'm
not suggesting any judgement here--it might be perfectly valid (and fun)
to decide to do something for the good of the party, then figure out a
way to justify it in character. It may not even be apparent to anyone
but the player that the decision was done OOC.
2. Meta-game considerations
- drama, pacing, plot advancement, SOD issues, game contract
issues
3. Out-of-game considerations
- e.g. we're going to have to wrap this up in an hour, so
let's just attack and have the big fight
II. Methods of conveying decisions once made
A. In Character
1. Acting
- actually performing the action (generally only applicable to
conversations, except for Live Action games)
B. Out of Character
1. Description
i. First person
- "I sneak up behind the guard"
ii. Third person
- "My character, Troilus, sneaks up behind the guard"
III. Methods of perceiving game world
A. Observation of GM and Players
- audience mode
B. Analysis of rules
- looks up how much a really strong man can lift
- looks up the history of the city
C. Interrogation of the GM
- "What do I hear when I listen at the door?"
- "How much can a really strong man lift?"
D. Making it up
- "I know that the guard is superstitious, because we grew up
together"
- "I know that the guard is superstitious, because the braids in
his beard indicate he's from Al-gher, where I spent some time as a
youth, and the people of Al-gher are extremely superstitious (GM thinks:
Al-gher? Where's Al-gher?)"
Psychohist
Irina Rempt posts, in part:
I'm probably less simulationist than Warren thinks and
much less simulationist than Warren *is*.
I dunno ... I'll admit that some of my examples tend to be more
quantitative, but quantitative methods are only one way of doing
simulation.
Sure, I've got my ecology worked out in more detail than you do. But
maybe it's just higher on my priority list because large and dangerous
animals are more common in Laratoa than in Valdyas.
I have the impression that Valdyas has a higher population density than
Laratoa, and is more civilized. As a result, the culture is more complex,
so you've spent more time on those aspects of the world than I have. And
those happen to be areas where quantitative approaches aren't as useful.
Philosophically, I think we tend to be in agreement most of the time, and
the rest of the time, we're still not in actual disagreement. And for
readers who are trying to figure out what 'simulationist' means, it's the
philosophical approach that has to be understood first.
Warren
Doug Smith
Jaana Heino <jant...@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:
>Kevin wrote:
>>Doug Smith wrote:
>> I'm new to this NG so forgive me if my questions are seem simple.
>> What's wrong with using descriptive terms 'Method Acting", "Acting"
>> (or Regular Acting), and "3rd Person Acting" for someone who's more
>> detached from their character?
>>Nothing wrong with this suggestion at all--it preserves the original
>>context of the model (which grew out of analysis of the metaphor "rpg is
>>like theatre") and is, it seems to me, clear enough about what is being
>>conveyed.
>>Jaana--would this satisfy you?
>Well, yes and no. It would satisfy me if I was speaking just about how
>the player goes about acting out her character... but I don't think they
>have much to do with the Stances, really. Where are the meta or scene
>considerations of "Author" here, for instance?
The more permutations you try to include in a definition, the more you
need and the more confusing the definition. The amount of control
over story line and plot content that players (as opposed to GM)
should have is a related but seperate consideration. I've known
people who didn't really role play at all but who wanted high levels
of control over story line. (usually power gamers.) I've also known
people who were excellent role players who wanted similiar control but
for positive reasons - they had a definite idea of what they wanted
their character to do, achieve, and even how that character should
die. I've also known the reverse - players who were great actors, but
who didn't want any real 'meta game' control over content. They
wanted to play off of the world and GM - improvise if you will.
What I'm saying is that I don't understand why these 'stances' are
defined the way they are. If you're going to include both acting
methodology with ideas of how a game should be orchestrated into one
definition then you're going to need a lot more than four definitions.
Apologies if my response makes no sense. Still getting a handle on
the jargon of this NG.
>--
>Jaana Heino-----------------email: jant...@cc.helsinki.fi----
>Iivisniemenkuja 4 F 70----------------------------------------
>02260 Espoo--------------------"Life is a hard lesson."-------
>FINLAND-------------------------------------------------------
DES
Yuri: "Whoops. So much for a live arrest."
Jaana Heino
Doug Smith wrote:
>What I'm saying is that I don't understand why these 'stances' are
>defined the way they are. If you're going to include both acting
>methodology with ideas of how a game should be orchestrated into one
>definition then you're going to need a lot more than four definitions.
I don't think the original Four Stances *were* trying to include the
acting methodology. At least I always understood them as describing the
'attitude' a player takes to the game - if one is concentrating on
portrayal, or story matters, or enjoying the show, or being the
character, and so on. How you actually achieve these would belong into
some totally other classification?
(Please correct if I am totally wrong.)
A Lapalme
Irina Rempt (ir...@lamarkis.uucp) writes:
>
> You're really working on a large scale here, Warren - compared to you
> I'm not a simulationist at all. I don't bother with things like
> biomass and predators, I let the gods take care of the ecology and I
> let the nobles take care of hunting :-)
Hmm...I think if we keep looking at it this way, every way will be a
simulation. You're always simulating something...
Back in the early days of the simulationist vs whatever wars, one thing
which kept coming up in trying to differentiate what was simulationist and
what wasn't was the decision making process of the GM. How is the GM
making decisions:
1 - to make things interesting for the players
2 - to make things intersting for the characters
3 - to make thigns more "dramatic"
4- becuase the plot "demands" it
5 - because the world demands it
6 - whatever else...
From my perspective, 5 is simulationist while all the others are not. The
key thing to remember is that, even the strictest simulationisst does not
use 5 all the times. The GM has to pick 1 and 2, and, to some degree,
even 3 to make the game worth playing (ie picking the interesting
moments).
>I think Warren wrote this:
>> Perhaps that's the real answer. The fixing of the details about the world
>> is driven by my own exploratory impulses.
Which does not mean the game is simulationist at all. The GM could do
world design in that mode but run game "a la Theatrix".
Alain
John H Kim
A comment here on the term "simulationist", in reply to Alain.
In my FAQ, I define this as simply "A game in which effort is made to
not let meta-game concerns during play affect in-game resolution."
Note the careful choice of words. I defined it to be about
"in-game resolution". Below, Alain suggests a more expansive use
of the term, which I consider unworkable...
A Lapalme <ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:
>Back in the early days of the simulationist vs whatever wars, one thing
>which kept coming up in trying to differentiate what was simulationist and
>what wasn't was the decision making process of the GM. How is the GM
>making decisions:
>
>1 - to make things interesting for the players
>2 - to make things intersting for the characters
>3 - to make thigns more "dramatic"
>4- becuase the plot "demands" it
>5 - because the world demands it
>6 - whatever else...
>
>From my perspective, 5 is simulationist while all the others are not.
>The key thing to remember is that, even the strictest simulationisst
>does not use 5 all the times. The GM has to pick 1 and 2, and, to
>some degree, even 3 to make the game worth playing (ie picking the
>interesting moments).
Alain, I am going to have to disagree with you here.
I consider your definition unworkable and not at all representative
of what I would consider simulationist games.
The key here is *which* GM decisions are based on what.
If I am running a "pure" simulation, I can still decide on the
*terms* of the simulation by any of #1 through #6+. Terms like:
who are the PC's, what is the world like, where and what time in
the world are we starting, etc.
A game about Navy SEALs is not somehow less simulationist
than a game about everyday accountants. I consider that severe
abuse of the term. I note that the "dramatic" crowd tends to
lampoon "simulationist" games as being drab and boring games about
average people in an average world.
-*-*-*-
A simulationist game simply insists that reason #5 is the
only valid reason for *in-game resolution*. I can still use other
reasons for pre-game world design, and for meta-game decisions.
Thus, under a pure simulationist contract, the following choices
are still valid:
-> As GM, I design a world which has paranormal powers and lots of
elite power struggles around them because this is both interesting
to myself and to the players. This is still perfectly simulationist,
because the game has not yet started.
-> I choose to not play through three weeks of travel time while
the PC's go to Russia -- instead I simply describe a few highlights
of what happens and pick up when they arrive. This does not
change the in-game resolution and thus is still simulationist,
even though I chose to skip it because it wasn't interesting.
-*-*-*-
Non-simulationist choices would include:
-> Adding or changing parts of the game-world on the basis of who
the PC's are or what they do. Obviously, things will have to get
added as the PC's are designed and played, but this should be done
ignoring the fact that they are *PC's* rather than NPC's.
For example, say the PC's flee to some out-of-the-way island.
It would be non-simulationist for the GM to add in a devious
villian trying to use foreigners to that island because the PC's
chose to go there.
-> Directly modifying a resolution for reasons other than #5,
such as having a shot miss a PC for game contract, or having a
killer only make his attempt exactly when the PC's arrive.
-*-*-*-
Thus, purely simulationist games will usually be interesting
because of a basic premise or because of choice of PC's. It won't
have new stuff continually added to it simply because it is
interesting. However, this doesn't mean that there isn't anything
interesting going on.
In my paranormals game, there were over 50 highly
individualistic and clever people all with strange powers interacting
over the backdrop of a many-layered mystery. The campaign went
on for a very long time while still involving only those things
which I had defined from the start.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Kim | "Faith - Faith is an island in the setting sun.
jh...@columbia.edu | But Proof - Proof is the bottom line for everyone."
Columbia University | - Paul Simon, _Proof_
Irina Rempt
John H Kim (jh...@ahnnyong.cc.columbia.edu) wrote:
[a lot of things which I strongly agree with, and also:]
> Non-simulationist choices would include:
[...]
> -> Directly modifying a resolution for reasons other than #5,
> such as having a shot miss a PC for game contract, or having a
> killer only make his attempt exactly when the PC's arrive.
Except if the killer wants to kill a PC or a NPC in the PCs' party.
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
-------------------- Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus --------------------
XI. "Cur ullum imprimere non vis?"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Irina Rempt
A Lapalme (ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA) wrote:
> How is the GM
> making decisions:
> 1 - to make things interesting for the players
Only at the beginning stages when PC's haven't 'settled' yet. (I have
mostly immersive players, non-immersive players tend to either learn to
immerse themselves or leave the campaign because they find they don't
fit the group)
> 2 - to make things intersting for the characters
My experience is that if the characters don't take an interest in
things as they are to start with, there's little I can do to make
things interesting without falling into the trap of having to come up
with ever more difficult challenges.
That is: I provide a background and present the PCs with things
happening in it (might be called "plotting" but usually I don't
consciously think it out, just have things present themselves to me and
try to work out how exactly they fit together) and we all work from
there. Caution: this isn't troupe-style play, the PCs get all
information from me, except what comes from PC/PC interaction.
> 3 - to make thigns more "dramatic"
> 4- becuase the plot "demands" it
Aren't these two the same thing? (but then I'm probably a relative
non-dramatist)
I do things for "story reasons" sometimes, mostly matters of pacing and
timing, like "if they haven't found it by now I'll have to make someone
give them a clue" or "it's handy if they arrive about the same time as
X". It would be too much hassle to work out detailed timing in advance
and keep track of how long the PCs take to do everything.
This doesn't feel like "making things dramatic" though, more like
on-the-fly world design - the passage of time is part of the background
rather than part of the plot.
I don't use things like weather tables either, but have it rain every
now and then to set the mood, and (recently) to encourage the PCs to
cross the river by having the road on their side washed away. But I'm
not so much of a railroader that I would have gone to great lenghts to
keep them from *trying* to take the side they were on, and giving them
a chance of success.
> 5 - because the world demands it
If we include the passage of time as under 3/4, and the non-PC
inhabitants of the world (both NPCs and "background people") in the
definition of "the world" this comes to about 75% of all my decisions.
> 6 - whatever else...
> From my perspective, 5 is simulationist while all the others are not.
Not even 6? :-)
> The
> key thing to remember is that, even the strictest simulationisst does not
> use 5 all the times. The GM has to pick 1 and 2, and, to some degree,
> even 3 to make the game worth playing (ie picking the interesting
> moments).
But how does the GM decide which moments are interesting? I've had it
happen more often than not that PCs went off on a sidetrack that
interested *them* which I didn't expect they would be interested in at
all. I'm lucky to have such a detailed world background (because it
exists mostly for its own sake) that there was already something there
- I've had my full share of playing with GMs who *had* to railroad
because there was only the one storyline in their game, and they didn't
know what lay outside it themselves (the syndrome that early AD&D
modules tend to suffer from - I haven't read any recent AD&D modules)
and weren't flexible enough to come up with something in a hurry.
> >I think Warren wrote this:
> >> Perhaps that's the real answer. The fixing of the details about the world
> >> is driven by my own exploratory impulses.
> Which does not mean the game is simulationist at all. The GM could do
> world design in that mode but run game "a la Theatrix".
True; with the danger that too much world design, too, is taken out of
the GM's hands. But then, not everyone would mind that.
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
-------------------- Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus --------------------
XXIII. "Latine loqui coacta sum."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Levi Kornelsen
Jaana Heino <jant...@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:
>Doug Smith wrote:
>>What I'm saying is that I don't understand why these 'stances' are
>>defined the way they are. If you're going to include both acting
>>methodology with ideas of how a game should be orchestrated into one
>>definition then you're going to need a lot more than four definitions.
>
>I don't think the original Four Stances *were* trying to include the
>acting methodology. At least I always understood them as describing the
>'attitude' a player takes to the game - if one is concentrating on
>portrayal, or story matters, or enjoying the show, or being the
>character, and so on. How you actually achieve these would belong into
>some totally other classification?
Agreed. I still think we need more stances, though. I had
a list of seven, but it never really caught on...
I like the "Immersion" thought, tho.
--Intrepid
Peter Jackson
In article <335263...@washingtonian.infi.net>, Kevin
<URL:mailto:krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net> wrote:
>
> IC maps to Third Person Actor, and
> Deep IC maps to Method/Immersive.
I dislike this mapping. It hides one of the distinctions between
IC and actor mode. When IC (and more so in deep IC) I am not
concerned with how other people (the audience) react. The term
actor implies such a concern.
--
Peter Jackson - work address pjac...@uk.oracle.com
Everything I write is my own opinion
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On Tue, 22 Apr 1997 07:54:18 GMT, ir...@lamarkis.uucp (Irina Rempt)
wrote:
>> 3 - to make thigns more "dramatic"
>> 4- becuase the plot "demands" it
>
>Aren't these two the same thing? (but then I'm probably a relative
>non-dramatist)
No, they are different, although they may correspond, depending on
what you mean by the term "plot."
Grin. Not to reopen *that* can of worms :)
Anyway, drama occurs because of an appeal to the "things that matter"
to a character. In colloquial usage, "drama" tends to be associated
with anything that is "exciting." But, as an author, how do you
produce excitement in an audience? You have to have a character with
whom the audience can identify, and you have to have some sort of
conflict in the things that matter to the character, which, because
they identify with the character, matter also to the audience.
I would argue that good plots are constructed out of dramatic
considerations. However, plots do not have to be built that way.
Plots that are not constructed that way, IME, often tend to result in
situations where the GM must railroad the players--which is a flaw,
IMO, but which nonetheless is characteristic of some, perhaps most,
RPG plots. There are also certain kinds of plots which are inherently
non-dramatic--a travelogue. for example. These stories have clear
beginnings and ends, but may not revolve around some central conflict.
I think this is important, since IMO simulationist games tend to
produce this kind of story. If we want to include simulationist games
within the rubric of RPG [grin] (and I do :) ), then we must
accomodate this kind of story.
All my best,
Kevin
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 19 Apr 1997 10:17:45 GMT, Jaana Heino <jant...@cc.helsinki.fi>
wrote:
>I don't think the original Four Stances *were* trying to include the
>acting methodology. At least I always understood them as describing the
>'attitude' a player takes to the game - if one is concentrating on
>portrayal, or story matters, or enjoying the show, or being the
>character, and so on.
Well, no--not exactly.
The four stances analysis grew out of the attempt to understand the
consequences of the analogy comparing rpg to various forms of literary
narrative (theatre, cinematography, story-telling, written literature,
etc.). If we accept the premise involved in the analogy, what then
follows for how we can understand rpgs?
IMO the best insights that came out of that analysis were about the
compromises that occur in any rpg. While all of the stances (Sarah
and I argued) are present in every rpg, the emphasis between them can
vary, and can lead to decisively different kinds of games.
I should note, by the way, that we did not restrict ourselves to rpg
players, in the original analysis--the model applies to GMs and
non-participants too.
Anyway, here are the relevant passages from the original article,
which I consider to be the most important part of the analysis:
"Breaking down the theatrical metaphor this way is useful for
highlighting the DIFFERENCES between theater and RPG. Theater has
an audience--the ultimate goal of the playwright is to convey the
story to an audience. In RPG, there may or may not be an audience
in this sense. When watching a dramatic movie or play, the
audience experiences the drama by identifying with the protagonist,
or possibly several characters. In RPG, the effort to BE your
character, and to act it, functions quite differently--the players
experience the drama from an actor-like perspective, as well as an
audience-like perspective. Dramatic techniques that help emphasize
drama for an audience, like for example cut-scenes, may serve to
undermine drama from the perspective of an actor (because cut
scenes are aimed at giving information to an audience, and may
distract from the actor's effort to maintain character). Plot
technique that helps a writer convey drama to an audience clearly
and powerfully, may be of less utility in the RPG setting because
the participants experience the narrative and impose meaning upon
it from additional perspectives than does a theater audience.
[Note: We are grateful to Hans Dykstra for clarifying many of these
points.]
"The structure of the narrative metaphor as it is typically deployed
by RPG designers, who emphasize the dichotomy between
author/director and character/actor, is thus incomplete. A second
important dichotomy, between author (and/or director) on the one
hand, and reader (and/or audience) on the other, can offer equally
important insights. Exploring this distinction suggested by
narrative metaphor raises the question, to what degree do we want
the "players" to have license to author within "the play" (in both
senses of the term) and to what extent do we want them to interpret
the game-events as if they were the audience? Is it the ACTOR's
narrative experience we want to model, or the AUDIENCE's, or the
AUTHOR's? Whose perspective do we want to privilege? The choice
we make here will have an enormous influence on the kind of
game-experience we collectively create.
"Clearly these three perspectives are not prioritized in the same
way by all game designers or players. The emphasis placed on each
of these perspectives varies tremendously from designer to
designer, gamer to gamer, even from game to game. And our choices
as to HOW we wish to prioritize these perspectives will have an
enormous impact on the tone of the Role Play experience we jointly
create.
"If we wish to emphasize the CHARACTER'S perspective--the first
person perspective of the experiencer--for example, it is less
desirable for the player to know out-of-character information, such
as the unknown details of the game world, the backgrounds of other
characters, or the intended structure of the story (if this is a
plotted game). We keep this information from the player, however,
at the expense of allowing the player to participate as fully as he
might as audience and as author. On the other hand, scenes which
would have little dramatic effect on an audience are more likely to
be played out in such a game, as there is a strong emphasis on the
experience of the character itself. Because such scenes often
interfere with dramatic structure, however, they may well detract
from the player's experience as audience.
"If we wish to emphasize the AUDIENCE'S perspective, however, than
it is more likely that the player will be privileged with more
information. In order for a player to be in the position of the
audience, she must be made aware of any dramatic irony existing in
the scenario--and this requires that she be privy to more
out-of-character information. Furthermore, the player-as-audience
ought to reap the full benefit of a dramatic structure. This
requires that the player be able to witness action taking place out
of the experience of her character. All of this diminishes the
extent to which the player is able to perceive the game as a first
person narrative. Moreover, to the extent we choose to emphasize
the player-as-audience, it is also desirable for us to retain
elements of surprise in the story; where the audience would be
surprised, we would want the player to be surprised. The
audience's perspective is therefore somewhat antithetical to the
author's, as an emphasis on player-as-audience suggests that the
player ought not be privy to the surprising events lying in store
within the game world.
"Similarly, if we wish to emphasize the perspective of the AUTHOR
then the player must be endowed with a great deal of knowledge and
creative control over the game. The player should be empowered not
only to control his own character's lines and actions, but also to
share in the creation of the "story." In order to do this, he must
be aware of many aspects of the game world which would be hidden
from the players in a game which emphasized either
player-as-audience or player-as-character, as he must understand
the structure of the game to be able to make good authorial
choices. An emphasis on player-as-author will, by necessity,
reduce somewhat the player's ability to embody either character or
audience: unlike the character, the author is capable of
recognizing a game structure that transcends the first person
perspective of the character; unlike the audience, the author knows
the inner workings of the game, and is empowered with a limited
prescience.
"Thus, while in practice Role Playing Games embody all three stances
on narrative, it should be noted that these three perspectives are
not on altogether friendly terms. They fight each other. They
strive for dominance. Combining them is a juggling act, and one
that each game system--and each gaming group's interpretation of
the particular system they deploy--will manage in its own
particular way. And the way in which it does manage to juggle them
will go a long way towards defining the flavor of the games
structured by its mechanics."
Hope this helps.
My best,
Kevin
A Lapalme
Either I didn't explain myself clearly or John and I are talking past each
other. I think I agree with everything he says so...
John H Kim (jh...@ahnnyong.cc.columbia.edu) writes:
> A Lapalme <ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:
>>Back in the early days of the simulationist vs whatever wars, one thing
>>which kept coming up in trying to differentiate what was simulationist and
>>what wasn't was the decision making process of the GM. How is the GM
>>making decisions:
>>
>>1 - to make things interesting for the players
>>2 - to make things intersting for the characters
>>3 - to make thigns more "dramatic"
>>4- becuase the plot "demands" it
>>5 - because the world demands it
>>6 - whatever else...
>>
>>From my perspective, 5 is simulationist while all the others are not.
>>The key thing to remember is that, even the strictest simulationisst
>>does not use 5 all the times. The GM has to pick 1 and 2, and, to
>>some degree, even 3 to make the game worth playing (ie picking the
>>interesting moments).
>
> The key here is *which* GM decisions are based on what.
> If I am running a "pure" simulation, I can still decide on the
> *terms* of the simulation by any of #1 through #6+. Terms like:
> who are the PC's, what is the world like, where and what time in
> the world are we starting, etc.
>
> A game about Navy SEALs is not somehow less simulationist
> than a game about everyday accountants. I consider that severe
> abuse of the term. I note that the "dramatic" crowd tends to
> lampoon "simulationist" games as being drab and boring games about
> average people in an average world.
>
> -*-*-*-
>
> A simulationist game simply insists that reason #5 is the
> only valid reason for *in-game resolution*. I can still use other
> reasons for pre-game world design, and for meta-game decisions.
> Thus, under a pure simulationist contract, the following choices
> are still valid:
OK. I wasn't clear. When I was talking of GM decisions, I was talking
about, mostly, game time decisions are opposed to design time decisions.
>Not simulationsist:
> -> Adding or changing parts of the game-world on the basis of who
> the PC's are or what they do. Obviously, things will have to get
> added as the PC's are designed and played, but this should be done
> ignoring the fact that they are *PC's* rather than NPC's.
> For example, say the PC's flee to some out-of-the-way island.
> It would be non-simulationist for the GM to add in a devious
> villian trying to use foreigners to that island because the PC's
> chose to go there.
>
Agreed.
> -> Directly modifying a resolution for reasons other than #5,
> such as having a shot miss a PC for game contract, or having a
> killer only make his attempt exactly when the PC's arrive.
>
Agreed.
So, John, where do we disagree here?
Alain (perplexed)
A Lapalme
Irina Rempt (ir...@lamarkis.uucp) writes:
> A Lapalme (ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA) wrote:
>
>> How is the GM
>> making decisions:
>
>> 3 - to make thigns more "dramatic"
>> 4- becuase the plot "demands" it
>
> Aren't these two the same thing? (but then I'm probably a relative
> non-dramatist)
>
If my games are any indication, drama happens quite frequently (unplanned
though) and I certainly do not plot. Plot and drama are often linked
together because good plots usually lead to good drama (and you can have
some plots which have no drama).
> I do things for "story reasons" sometimes, mostly matters of pacing and
> timing, like "if they haven't found it by now I'll have to make someone
> give them a clue" or "it's handy if they arrive about the same time as
> X". It would be too much hassle to work out detailed timing in advance
> and keep track of how long the PCs take to do everything.
>
Exactly. My view about this is that there is no such thing as a strict
simulationist. We all make decisions which are non simulationist (pacing
being a good example).
> This doesn't feel like "making things dramatic" though, more like
> on-the-fly world design - the passage of time is part of the background
> rather than part of the plot.
>
Maybe not dramatic but, hopefully, more interesting.
>> 5 - because the world demands it
>
> If we include the passage of time as under 3/4, and the non-PC
> inhabitants of the world (both NPCs and "background people") in the
> definition of "the world" this comes to about 75% of all my decisions.
>
>> 6 - whatever else...
>
>> From my perspective, 5 is simulationist while all the others are not.
>
> Not even 6? :-)
Depends what 6 is. Could be <shiver> dice!
>
>> The
>> key thing to remember is that, even the strictest simulationisst does not
>> use 5 all the times. The GM has to pick 1 and 2, and, to some degree,
>> even 3 to make the game worth playing (ie picking the interesting
>> moments).
>
> But how does the GM decide which moments are interesting?
This is where good GMs stand out (and I mean good relative to the group -
one group's good GM might be another group's anathema.) Part of the job
of GMing is knowing what interests the players and the characters
(sometimes/often these aren't the same). The hardest thing about new
players is trying to get out of them what they like. The hardest thing
about role-players is trying to get out of them what interests their
character.
>I've had it
> happen more often than not that PCs went off on a sidetrack that
> interested *them* which I didn't expect they would be interested in at
> all. I'm lucky to have such a detailed world background (because it
> exists mostly for its own sake) that there was already something there
That's the value of having a detailed world which exists for its own sake.
It is harder for the players to catch the GM shorthanded. I've often had
the experience you describe below. GMs who have spent the time working on
the background can wing it long enough to be able to recover.
> - I've had my full share of playing with GMs who *had* to railroad
> because there was only the one storyline in their game, and they didn't
> know what lay outside it themselves (the syndrome that early AD&D
> modules tend to suffer from - I haven't read any recent AD&D modules)
> and weren't flexible enough to come up with something in a hurry.
>
>> >I think Warren wrote this:
>> >> Perhaps that's the real answer. The fixing of the details about the world
>> >> is driven by my own exploratory impulses.
>
>> Which does not mean the game is simulationist at all. The GM could do
>> world design in that mode but run game "a la Theatrix".
>
> True; with the danger that too much world design, too, is taken out of
> the GM's hands. But then, not everyone would mind that.
Do you mean the improvisation part (in regards to taking world desing out
of the GM's hands)?
Alain
John H Kim
This again regards the issue of the word "simulationist".
Based on his definition, Alain has contended that there is no such
thing as a strict simulationist game -- which I would contend with.
For example, I don't think there was anything in my paranormals game
that wasn't simulationist... I had some odd bits of resolution (I
used HERO damage in a mostly realistic game), but they were consistent
and decided on from the start. I can't think of any time when I
consciously used non-simulationist reasons for in-game resolution.
Alain -- you say that there is no such thing as strict
simulation. Where would I have broken it in my game? What is
your basis?
A Lapalme <ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:
> Either I didn't explain myself clearly or John and I are talking past
> each other. I think I agree with everything he says so...
[..]
> So, John, where do we disagree here?
My issue is that you have labelled what I think of as meta-game
decisions as "non-simulationist" -- specifically such things as pacing.
As you put it:
>
> My view about this is that there is no such thing as a strict
> simulationist. We all make decisions which are non simulationist
> (pacing being a good example).
Hmm. I think you are lumping together things here which are
*very* different. There are two possibilitis for "pacing". The first
is meta-game: i.e. "Should we play through the two weeks of travel
time for the PC's to reach Russia?" I consider a pacing decision of
this sort to still be perfectly simulationist.
This is infinitely different from a pacing choice of "Things
are getting kind of slow -- I think I'll throw in an ambush." This
is actually non-simulationist, because it affects in-game resolution.
It is presumed above that the game-world resolution is roughly the
same regardless of whether they play through the trip or not.
-*-*-*-
I think if you lump the two of these together as both
non-simulationist, then you rob the term simulationist of its meaning.
Those who are concerned about simulation do not consider that skipping
over a character's bathroom break is "non-simulationist". Pacing the
passage of game time for the players interest is a *meta-game* concern
and does not break simulation.
Irina Rempt
A Lapalme (ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA) wrote:
> > True; with the danger that too much world design, too, is taken out of
> > the GM's hands. But then, not everyone would mind that.
> Do you mean the improvisation part (in regards to taking world desing out
> of the GM's hands)?
Well, I don't mind a PC improvising background details inside the game
("This root stops bleeding after a miscarriage, it worked on me once,
see, I've still got some, you can have it" - which incidentally saved
an NPC's life) and I don't mind *at all* if players come up to me
outside the game and say "I think my character comes from <this town>,
<that background> or <such and such a profession>, and we don't seem to
know much about it, shall we work it out together?"
What I *do* mind is when, as happened on one of my games, a player
comes in with a large piece of fully worked-out written background
material that he (the player in question happened to be a man which is
not to say that women couldn't do it) expects me to fit into my world
just like that.
I meant to say that some GMs don't mind, or even positively encourage
or expect players/characters to bring their own background, and try to
fit it all together. I'm not one of those people (who I have great
admiration for); I want the final say on what constitutes my world,
even if some parts of it *were* developed in cooperation with players.
I don't think it would make much of a difference if the world was only
a game world; I expect internal consistency even from that.
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
-------------------- Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus --------------------
XIII. "Non erravi perniciose!"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Lapalme
Hmm...I'm surprised. For a while I though that John and I were talking
past each. It seems that we are not. Rather, our views of what is
simulationist and what is not seems to be rather different!
John H Kim (jh...@aloha.cc.columbia.edu) writes:
> This again regards the issue of the word "simulationist".
> Based on his definition, Alain has contended that there is no such
> thing as a strict simulationist game -- which I would contend with.
> For example, I don't think there was anything in my paranormals game
> that wasn't simulationist... I had some odd bits of resolution (I
> used HERO damage in a mostly realistic game), but they were consistent
> and decided on from the start. I can't think of any time when I
> consciously used non-simulationist reasons for in-game resolution.
>
> Alain -- you say that there is no such thing as strict
> simulation. Where would I have broken it in my game? What is
> your basis?
>
Specifally, for your game, obviously I really can't say since I haven't
witnessed it. However, to throw a few things out for discussion:
-the actual characters the game has decided to focus on
-the type of "adventure"
-the genre (even though I'll admit that heavily simulationist game
tend to shy away from strict genres)
- the pacing (more on that later)
- the situations presented to the PCs
- etc
I realize that most of the above are meta-game non-play-time concerns but I
think it is an error to separate these from the actual running of the
game. The game is the product of its part.
>
> My issue is that you have labelled what I think of as meta-game
> decisions as "non-simulationist" -- specifically such things as pacing.
> As you put it:
>>
>> My view about this is that there is no such thing as a strict
>> simulationist. We all make decisions which are non simulationist
>> (pacing being a good example).
>
> Hmm. I think you are lumping together things here which are
> *very* different. There are two possibilitis for "pacing". The first
> is meta-game: i.e. "Should we play through the two weeks of travel
> time for the PC's to reach Russia?" I consider a pacing decision of
> this sort to still be perfectly simulationist.
>
> This is infinitely different from a pacing choice of "Things
> are getting kind of slow -- I think I'll throw in an ambush." This
> is actually non-simulationist, because it affects in-game resolution.
How? Once the deciosn to throw the ambush has been made, the GM can be a
strict simulationist thereafter. The only non-simulation decision was the
decision about activating the ambush. How it subsequently affect in game
resolutio' I'm not clear about.
In any event, I'm unclear as to why you differentiate between "throwing
an ambush" and "should we play the 2 week trip to Russia". Both are made
at the meta-game level and both are concerned with maintaining the group's
interest. While the "ambush" one is a more blatant break from a
simulation, I also consider the second one to be the same (it's just more
elegant).
A lot can happen in a 2 week trip: character development, chance
encounters, unusual weather, etc.. By skipping ahead, a meta-game
decision is
made concerning the simulation: "this 2 week period is unimportant to the
game". I see this as a break from the simulation.
> It is presumed above that the game-world resolution is roughly the
> same regardless of whether they play through the trip or not.
>
I remember a while back someone saying that they hated these "skip ahead"
things because it broke SOD for them. "What did my character do in that 2
week period? How did he relate to the others?" Now, I will agree that not
everyone would want to play through a 2-week travel but one is still
sacrificing part of the simulation by skipping that period.
Basically, I see little difference between:
1- things are slow, I'll throw an ambush and run it simulationist style
2- the two week trip will be boring, I'll assume nothing happens and
skip ahead
> -*-*-*-
>
> I think if you lump the two of these together as both
> non-simulationist, then you rob the term simulationist of its meaning.
> Those who are concerned about simulation do not consider that skipping
> over a character's bathroom break is "non-simulationist". Pacing the
> passage of game time for the players interest is a *meta-game* concern
> and does not break simulation.
>
What about plotting a game? It's a meta-game concern, and, once a plot is
set up it can be run simulationist style. If that's the case, the only
non-simulationist games are going to be the railroaded games (and even
then).
We are back to "everyone's game is a simulationist game". That is why I'm
advocating that we use the term simulationist to describe the decision-making
process of the GM, not the game as a whole. Some decisions are going to
be simulationist, some are not. The feel of the overall game will then be
a composite of these decisions.
It seems to me that most participants of this board
would like to think that their game is simulationist.
Therefore, every time someone comes up with a statement as to what a
simulationist game is, everyone tries to shift the definition so that
"their game" fits the criteria. I would much rather we concentrate on
what is a simulationist decision rather than what a simulationist game
is. (and the debate John and I are currently having on the issue of
pacing, I think, is what I am looking for - the decision making process,
not the overall feel of the game (even though, this decision making
process will obviously have an impact on the feel of the game)).
Alain
--
The Advocacy Gathering(Aug 13-16, 1997): The game I intend to run:
http://www.intranet.ca/~lapalme/rpg/advocacy/shir.html
Can-Games XXI - the largest and longest running Gaming Convention in Canada
http://www.magmacom.com/~sharvey/cangames.htm - Sept 19-21, 1997
A Lapalme
Irina Rempt (ir...@lamarkis.uucp) writes:
> What I *do* mind is when, as happened on one of my games, a player
> comes in with a large piece of fully worked-out written background
> material that he (the player in question happened to be a man which is
> not to say that women couldn't do it) expects me to fit into my world
> just like that.
>
Understood and I'm in your boat on this one. Players are heavily
encouraged to bring in their own background but with the understanding
that the GM can veto any or all of it. My SOD concerning my setting would
crumble to pieces if I had to incorporate everything a player wanted me to
put in. I have enough trouble with the stuff I put in... :(
> I meant to say that some GMs don't mind, or even positively encourage
> or expect players/characters to bring their own background, and try to
> fit it all together. I'm not one of those people (who I have great
> admiration for); I want the final say on what constitutes my world,
> even if some parts of it *were* developed in cooperation with players.
> I don't think it would make much of a difference if the world was only
> a game world; I expect internal consistency even from that.
>
I've never had the chance to play in such a game. While I can see it
working for a short campaign, I'm having trouble imagining a setting
remaining consistent and playable over the long haul. Each new
player/character would keep adding dimensions to it which, eventually,
would clash with each other, if not at the micro scale (ie a the the PC
level), then definitely at the macro level.
jh...@columbia.edu
Hmmm. Another post on the meaning of "simulationist". Again,
my definition was "a game which does not use meta-game concern affect
in-game resolution". Note that here I mean any events in the game
world -- not just those that are played out at the gaming table.
Frankly, I am baffled at Alain's seeming assertion that most
games don't have this at all. This forum is rife with suggestions
about how meta-game concerns can and should be used in play, such as:
-> Plot points, Fudge points, Whimsy Cards, etc.
-> Resolving events with "Does the Plot require an outcome?"
-> Adding events for foreshadowing or other literary effect
-> Not killing a player's character without warning
-> Shifting personality to not destroy the party
I know that I sure as hell am not "simulationist" in my
plotted games: I constantly add in things or change things so that
they will be more interesting. I am skeptical that Alain's games
are so different, given what I have read about them...
ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (A Lapalme) wrote:
> John H Kim (jh...@aloha.cc.columbia.edu) writes:
> > Those who are concerned about simulation do not consider that skipping
> > over a character's bathroom break is "non-simulationist". Pacing the
> > passage of game time for the players interest is a *meta-game* concern
> > and does not break simulation.
>
> What about plotting a game? It's a meta-game concern, and, once a plot is
> set up it can be run simulationist style. If that's the case, the only
> non-simulationist games are going to be the railroaded games (and even
> then).
Eh? What do you mean. I don't run most of my plotted games
in a simulationist style, but I wasn't railroading. Just because I am
using meta-game concerns does not mean that I am forcing the players
onto a certain path. The players have choices in my plotted games,
I just make sure those choices turn out interesting.
Again, "plotting" breaks simulation if you use it as a basis for
altering how you resolve actions or making changes to the game-world after
the game has started. A simulationist GM may "plot" in two ways:
1) In initially deciding what the campaign will be about, she may well
think about what will happen in the setting -- she may choose who the
PC's are and when in their lives to start because she thinks that will
be interesting. *However*, once the game is started she is not free
to add things on the basis of his plot (i.e. "I need a new villian,
let me design one.")
2) After the game is started, he may well prepare by guessing what the
players will do and what that would logically lead to given the
game world (i.e. predefined "If-then" sequences rather than thinking
it all through in-game.)
3) She may prepare time-tables of events which will happen outside the
PC's influence (i.e. how things will go unless the PC's interfere).
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
> >
> > For example, I don't think there was anything in my paranormals game
> > that wasn't simulationist...
>
> Specifally, for your game, obviously I really can't say since I haven't
> witnessed it. However, to throw a few things out for discussion:
> -the actual characters the game has decided to focus on
> -the type of "adventure"
> -the genre (even though I'll admit that heavily simulationist game
> tend to shy away from strict genres)
> - the pacing (more on that later)
> - the situations presented to the PCs
> - etc
> I realize that most of the above are meta-game non-play-time concerns but I
> think it is an error to separate these from the actual running of the
> game. The game is the product of its part.
(Incredulous.) So should we give up on any distinctions at
all in our games?!? Sure, a game is a product of its parts. My
simulationist game has many parts in common with other games: it had
the players design the PC's, and it had a GM (me) who would sit in a
room with the players and talk with them, etc.
That doesn't mean that we can't say that it is a different
sort of game from my pulp-actiony genre-heavy superhero game. I would
like to introduce terms which have *meaning* -- i.e. which help
distinguish one game from another. If you say all games are
simulationist or no games are simulationist, shouldn't we just
throw out the term?
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
> >
> > Hmm. I think you are lumping together things here which are
> > *very* different. There are two possibilitis for "pacing". The first
> > is meta-game: i.e. "Should we play through the two weeks of travel
> > time for the PC's to reach Russia?" I consider a pacing decision of
> > this sort to still be perfectly simulationist.
> >
> > This is infinitely different from a pacing choice of "Things
> > are getting kind of slow -- I think I'll throw in an ambush." This
> > is actually non-simulationist, because it affects in-game resolution.
>
> How? Once the deciosn to throw the ambush has been made, the GM can be a
> strict simulationist thereafter. The only non-simulation decision was the
> decision about activating the ambush. How it subsequently affect in game
> resolutio' I'm not clear about.
Uh, I don't think it takes a genius to realize that adding in
an ambush is going to affect the in-game resolution of events. The
events in the game-world are going to turn out drastically differently
because of adding in the ambush -- thus it has affected the resolution.
>
> A lot can happen in a 2 week trip: character development, chance
> encounters, unusual weather, etc.. By skipping ahead, a meta-game
> decision is made concerning the simulation: "this 2 week period is
> unimportant to the game". I see this as a break from the simulation.
Alain, this is patently absurd. Someone can trip and sprain
their ankle simply walking down the stairs. Is it breaking simulation
for the GM to let characters walk up and down stairs without rolling
for it? If he were "simulationist", would he have to take into
account how fast they were going and how distracted they were to
resolve this?
As long as the GM resolves what happens during these two weeks
purely on the basis of what is reasonable for the game-world, then
it is simulationist. She might make a roll for mishaps on the voyage,
but it is also perfectly valid to make a ruling that whatever mishaps
happen are the regular sorts of mishaps one might expect and assume
that the character's deal with them without permanent ill effects or
what have you.
Regardless of what you want to call it, do you agree that there
is a distinction here between these two types of pacing control?
For me personally, this is a very important distinction and I want to
have a term to talk about it.
>
> I remember a while back someone saying that they hated these "skip ahead"
> things because it broke SOD for them. "What did my character do in that 2
> week period? How did he relate to the others?" Now, I will agree that
> not everyone would want to play through a 2-week travel but one is still
> sacrificing part of the simulation by skipping that period.
So what is "properly simulationist" pacing in your book? Is a
game only simulationist if you play through every minute of the
character's lives on a one-to-one ratio? Is skipping detailed
descriptions of bathroom breaks also breaking simulation?
More importantly, I assert that Suspension-of-Disbelief (SOD)
is independent of simulation. Simulation is about what happens
*in-game*, where-as SOD is a meta-game concern. Someone's SOD could
be broken by going through things in too detailed a way (like playing
through every bathroom break). Indeed, Kevin and David have suggested
that SOD can be enhanced by using meta-game factors in how the game
is resolved.
I think it is thoroughly pointless and absurd to try to force
the word "simulation" to apply only to non-existant abstractions.
No simulation is going to have perfect fidelity. I designed a program
to simulate neutrino interactions in my experiment's detector: is
this "non-simulationist" because I skip over the non-spill period?
I feel strongly that it is moronic to define simulation as something
that cannot be achieved on any scale. At the very least, I want my
particle physics program to be acceptable as "simulationist".
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
> It seems to me that most participants of this board would like to
> think that their game is simulationist. Therefore, every time someone
> comes up with a statement as to what a simulationist game is, everyone
> tries to shift the definition so that "their game" fits the criteria.
> I would much rather we concentrate on what is a simulationist decision
> rather than what a simulationist game is.
Frankly, hell will freeze over before we have unanimous
agreement, and I don't think you are going to save any headaches by
shuffling the terms this way. For example, I expect that David will
insist that his decisions are all simulationist in the same way that
he insists that his games are all simulationist.
The definition I have given for "simulationist" has been
on my FAQ for quite some time, I would note.
-------------------==== Posted via Deja News ====-----------------------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Post to Usenet
Psychohist
Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
There are also certain kinds of plots which are
inherently non-dramatic--a travelogue. for example.
These stories have clear beginnings and ends, but
may not revolve around some central conflict. I
think this is important, since IMO simulationist
games tend to produce this kind of story.
Clear beginnings and ends? In a simulationist game?
I think the only way you could get clear beginnings and ends in a
simulationist game would be to do some careful editing. And if you're
going to do careful editing, you may as well select a story that has
drama, as well.
Warren Dew
Ennead
[Note: This is the second time I have tried to post this
article. My first attempt never showed up from my account, and
dejanews has no record of it. So this is a repost -- if my
previous attempt did, indeed, go through, then please forgive
me for the repeat of such a fiendishly long bit of text.]
Hi. Um...Sarah here. My little sabbatical from on-line
life ended up lasting much longer than I expected, so if I've
completely lost touch with the program, please be patient with me.
Having just finished reading through this thread and its
relatives, I feel that perhaps a reiteration of my original
conception of the Narrative Stance model might be in order.
Caveat the First: I certainly do not wish to imply that
this discussion has not yeilded useful results -- I certainly think
that it has -- but I fear that people may be trying to use the
Narrative Stance model to describe game dynamics for which it was
never (by me, at any rate) intended. It seems to me that this
could be responsible for a great deal of confusion over the terms.
Caveat the Second: I absolutely do not wish to step on
Kevin's toes here. Although I later added my own observations
and refinements to the model Kevin proposed, the original idea
was his. If -- as seems disturbingly possible to me -- Kevin's
original idea of what the model served to illustrate was never
really the same as my own, then the misunderstanding has stood
for a long time now. By reiterating *my* original conception
of the model, I do not wish to imply that it is THE original
conception. That honor goes to Kevin's.
All right, now that all _that's_ out of the way, I
would like to say that I think that these comments cut to
the core of the problems the Narrative Stance model has
generated:
: Doug Smith wrote:
: >What I'm saying is that I don't understand why these 'stances' are
: >defined the way they are. If you're going to include both acting
: >methodology with ideas of how a game should be orchestrated into one
: >definition then you're going to need a lot more than four definitions.
Jaana Heino <jant...@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote:
: I don't think the original Four Stances *were* trying to include the
: acting methodology.
Precisely. I never intended them that way, and I don't
think that Kevin did either.
My understanding of the model -- and the reason that I
prefer to think of it as the NARRATIVE Stance model -- is that
it describes the ways in which the *narrative* of the game is
viewed by its participants. Perhaps it would be even more
clear if we were to call it the "4 Stances Toward Game Narrative."
How the narrative is viewed by the participants of the
game may be influenced by the style of portrayal they prefer,
by their preferences in regard to drama or plot or pacing, by
their particular means of getting "in character," but these
stylistic issues are not the variables described by the model.
The model is intended to describe only how the *narrative* of
the game is approached by the participant, from what perspective
the text is read.
The CHARACTER views the narrative of the game in the
same way that the player views the narrative of his real life.
This is known as the narrative approach of the "historical
actor" (a phrase which Kevin and I chose *not* to use, feeling
that it would confuse those unfamiliar with the term). Like
a real person, the CHARACTER does not view the events of his
life as part of an externally-constructed drama (unless he is
very eccentric indeed). Instead, the CHARACTER constructs the
events which befall him *internally,* continuing to reconstruct
them throughout his life-time, so as to make meaning of his
existence. This means of viewing narrative is very familiar
to all of us, as it is how human beings approach the stories
of their lives.
The players in role-playing games very often choose to
view the narrative in this fashion; in the role-playing community,
this is usually referred to as being "in-character" or "IC."
The ability to view the narrative in this fashion might, in fact,
be viewed as a prerequisite to playing in a role-playing game,
as those who cannot manage to do so will inevitably violate so
many of the most basic rules of play that they are unlikely to
be invited back even to the most non-IC-intensive game until they
learn to master this skill. Fortunately, the narrative approach
of the CHARACTER is so much a part of everyday life that it would
be extremely unlikely to meet anyone incapable of grasping the
concept...although people do differ in how strenuously they apply
it to their play.
Please note that the distinctions of "Deep IC," "Channeling
Authorial," "Method Acting," "IC Lite," or what-have-you are
irrelevant here. Whether you feel the emotions of your character
or not, whether you consciously decide what your character will do
or merely allow the character to act as if through spirit possession,
whether you DIP or DAS...none of these distinctions matters when
it comes to how the narrative is being *viewed.* You can take
the Character Stance consciously (as a conceit, if you will) or
unconsciously -- you can *be* the character, or *play* the
character -- and it does not matter. What is important here is
that the narrative in this stance is viewed AS IF one is the
character, as if one is a person having these events really happen
to you in your real life. Being IC or acting IC both necessitate
being able to view the narrative as the CHARACTER does.
Another way in which narrative can be approached is as
an AUDIENCE. The AUDIENCE does not exist within the fiction,
but outside of it. It evaluates the narrative from an external
perspective, one that recognizes the events taking place as
fictive. Not only does the AUDIENCE recognize the events as
fictive, but it also perceives them as *outside of its immediate
control.* This is absolutely vital, for it is the distinction
between what it means to view a narrative as AUDIENCE and what
it means to view it as AUTHOR or as ACTOR. If the audience does
not like what it sees, it can write letters of complaint to
those responsible, it can refuse to act as audience for the
creators of the fiction a second time, it can choose to reinterpret
the work in a more pleasing fashion, it can appropriate from
the work what it likes and ignore the parts it didn't like, it
can even bitch about the work to its friends...but it cannot,
while acting as AUDIENCE, *do* anything to change the concrete
details of the fiction itself.
Gamers will sometimes choose to view the narrative of
the game as AUDIENCE, and sometimes they will have this perspective
thrust upon them. Some game techniques, such as Cut Scenes, force
the players to view the narrative as AUDIENCE: while the Cut Scene
is going on, the players are viewing it as fiction, and from an
external and relatively powerless position. Like the audience
of a movie or a novel, they cannot *change* the fictive events
presented; they can only *interpret* them...or, in a worst-case
scenario, they can "vote with their feet," refusing even to witness
the events comprising the narrative.
Cut Scenes, however, are far from the only situation in
an RPG in which the participants may view the narrative as
AUDIENCE. A scene in which two characters are talking, for
example, may be viewed as AUDIENCE by a player whose PC is not
present for the conversation. In such a situation, the player
is evaluating the events of the narrative from an external
perspective, unable to take an active hand in changing what
transpires, but nonetheless interested in the unfolding drama.
This is the AUDIENCE stance. Similarly, a player may choose
to view a GM's description of background detail as AUDIENCE,
rather than as CHARACTER, AUTHOR, or ACTOR. The character
may not even *notice* the architectural details of the cathedral
which the GM so lovingly describes, but the player may still
be enjoying the description (or being bored by it, as the case
may be) as AUDIENCE.
Often, games will be evaluated as AUDIENCE in retrospect.
Once the narrative has ended, the players, who initially saw
the events from other stances, may choose to sit back and
re-evaluate the narrative as AUDIENCE, adopting the conceit
that none of them were active participants in the events as
they unfolded. This is often the case when players describe
a game as "lots of fun to play, but it wouldn't have been very
fun to watch," or "the ending was really rather anti-climactic...
but I loved playing it." Such comments reveal gamers' inherent
understanding of the distinction between the way a narrative is
perceived by its creators (AUTHOR and ACTOR) and by its viewers
(AUDIENCE). Just as the adoption of the stance of CHARACTER
involves a conceit that the player *is* the character, so
the adoption of the AUDIENCE stance invokes the conceit that
the players are not the creators of the fictive work. To be
AUDIENCE is to view the narrative *as if* its unfolding lies
completely outside of ones own jurisdiction, despite the
fact that, in a role-playing game, this is never completely the
case.
The way the AUTHOR views a narrative, on the other hand,
assumes creative power and control over that narrative. Like
the AUDIENCE, the AUTHOR views the events of the narrative from
the outside -- he knows that they are fictive. Unlike the audience,
however, the author is able to take action to shape and to control
the course of that fiction. The AUTHOR "owns" the fiction; he
makes decisions which will affect the unfolding of the narrative
itself. This is therefore the approach in which the distinction
between the narrative as an abstract entity and the viewer of
that entity becomes the most diffuse.
The use of the term AUTHOR here is confusing mainly, I
think, because real authors -- at least, authors of fiction --
adopt the previous two stances regularly as a part of their
craft. Authors will *themselves* take the narrative approach
of the CHARACTER while writing fiction (many of them even do a
"Deep IC"), and authors of both fiction and non-fiction must
take the AUDIENCE from time to time, in order to evaluate how
their work will be received and whether their writing conveys
the intended information.
It is, of course, not coincidental that being an author
so closely mirrors being a participant in a role-playing game.
Both are acts of creation, and as such, both involve much the
same dynamic of stance-jumping. Every participant in an RPG
*is* an "author" of sorts, and so it is unsurprising to find
that both activities involve a similarly fluid approach to
narrative stance.
In the context of the Narrative Stance model, however,
this is not what AUTHOR is meant to convey. To view the narrative
as AUTHOR is to view it from an external and empowered position,
to perceive it as an "owned" object which one has the right and
the power to control, mold, and change. This is what I mean by
"viewing the narrative as AUTHOR" -- it is the aspect of "authoring"
which is not shared by any of the other stances.
In most styles of role-playing, the narrative is primarily
viewed as AUTHOR by the GM or referee. It is usually the GM's role
to create some form of plot or structure for the characters to
occupy, as well as the fictive world in which the characters exist.
Pacing, description, and thematic structure may also, depending
on the style of the game, be recognized as the GM's responsibility.
In order to deal with such concerns, the narrative must be viewed
from the stance of the AUTHOR.
The players, however, will also view the narrative as
AUTHOR from time to time. They must, for example, decide which
of their characters' actions to describe and which to leave
assumed and unspoken; this necessitates viewing the narrative
as AUTHOR. They may also, depending on the style of play, engage
in improvisation, help with world-building, make pacing decisions,
or redirect the focus of the game to one more to their tastes; in
all such cases, they must first view the narrative from the Authorial
perspective -- as a thing that they own and are themselves creating
as they play.
In traditional gaming styles, players are usually expected
to spend a good deal of time as AUTHOR before play, when they are
expected to answer questions such as: "What sort of game do we want
to play?" and "What sort of characters are appropriate to the type
of game we want?" and "Will my character conception fit in all right
with the rest of the PCs, or should I come up with a different one?"
Once play begins, however, players are often expected to view the
narrative in a less authorial fashion. Even during play, however,
role-playing games require the players to view the narrative as
AUTHOR on a regular basis, and metagame complications ("Oh, no -- Bob
is moving to Idaho; what shall we do about his character?") are
often irresolvable unless the entire group collectively joins
together in discussing the narrative from the viewpoint of the
AUTHOR.
As with the AUDIENCE stance, the AUTHOR is often adopted
after the fact, as a means of evaluating the narrative retroactively.
Statements like "we probably shouldn't have let the pace drag so
much during the journey across country," or "looking back on it,
I rather wish that we had handled that ugly combat scene differently,"
are symptomatic of the group's recognition of its own power over
the narrative -- and often lead to a resolve to handle similar
narrative structures differently the next time. This form of
retroactive re-evaluation of the narrative is similar to that of
the AUDIENCE, but differs in that it recognizes the narrative
as a thing which can be changed by the participants of the game,
rather than as a fait accompli presented by an impersonal
external force. When it happens during a break in the narrative
(between sessions, rather than post-game), it can often manifest
as a transition from AUDIENCE to AUTHOR: "I wish we had seen more
interaction between Kalgon and the Boy, rather than having it always
glossed over or happening off-stage -- let's play those scenes out
more in the future!"
The fourth way in which the narrative of the game may
be viewed is from a perspective similar to that of an actor in
a play written by someone else. The actor in such a situation
is, unlike the CHARACTER, aware that the narrative is a work of
fiction. Unlike the AUDIENCE, however, he is an active part of
the creative process; he is not a spectator. Yet he is unlike
the AUTHOR in that he is not empowered to create the narrative
events, nor to determine how they unfold; he may only determine
in what way the unfolding events will be portrayed, and thus, how
they are likely to be perceived by the audience.
This is the narrative experience of the ACTOR. It is
a tricky one to describe because, in many ways, the ACTOR is
a sort of a bridge between the other three stances. What the
CHARACTER perceives, he may attempt to convey. What the AUTHOR
intends, he may attempt to communicate. But his main concern lies
in what the AUDIENCE *sees.* Like the AUDIENCE, the ACTOR does not
"own" the narrative. Unlike the AUDIENCE, the ACTOR is empowered
to take action to make the narrative work better.
Like the perspective of the AUTHOR, the perspective of
the ACTOR is usually taken far more often by the GM of the game
than by the players, as it is an extremely efficient way to view
the narrative when running NPCs, particularly in a heavily-plotted
game. One-shot players invited to the gaming session specifically
to play pre-designed NPCs with pre-defined dramatic roles are
probably the best example of play which necessitates viewing the
narrative as ACTOR. There are times, as well, when players are
put in positions in which they must take the stance of the ACTOR.
Certain gaming techniques necessitate it. Flashbacks, for example,
in which the final outcome is already established in the in-game
reality, force the players to view the narrative as ACTOR: the outcome,
like the script of the play, is already written; the player's job here
becomes to portray the scene without violating either characterization
_or_ the established course of events.
Players may also choose to view the narrative as an
ACTOR for the sake of dramatic effect. A short player depicting
an imposing character might, for example, stand on a chair to
simulate the intimidating effect of the height difference between
his character and another's. In order to make the decision to
do this, the player must view the narrative from the point of
view of the ACTOR, evaluating the best way to act upon the "script"
of the narrative so as to achieve the desired emotional result.
In my opinion, the narrative perspective of the ACTOR
is the least important of the four, as unlike the other three,
it is possible to play a role-playing game without ever adopting
this particular view-point on the narrative. The ACTOR is, however,
an important perspective in certain gaming styles, and so it seemed
wise to include it in the model. It is my feeling, though, that
many people never view the narrative of their role-playing
games from this particular perspective, something which I do not
believe can be said for the other three.
*---*---*---*---*---*---*
Ugh. Well, that was a _very_ long article to return to
rgfa on. I shall be most impressed if anyone made it all the
way through.
I would like to repeat that I _do_ think it a terrific
idea for us to come up with a working vocabulary to describe
and define other aspects of gaming style. I think that a worthy
goal, and one that I would enjoy working on with all of you. I
was very interested in the conversations about "Deep IC,"
frustrating though they were at times, and similar attempts to
describe and define plotting methodologies have also been of
interest to me.
I just don't think that this particular model, which
attempts to describe ways of viewing *narrative,* is at all
well-suited to the tasks to which it has been set of late.
As Doug points out, acting methodologies and ways of reading
the text of a game are not at *all* the same thing. A single
model is *most* unlikely to be very useful for describing them
both at once, far less to encompass plotting styles, adjudicative
methodologies, group contract issues, and what have you as well.
It's nice to see that the model has held interest for so long,
but I really think that people are trying to shoe-horn far too
much into its parameters.
Oh, and on other (albeit related) topics:
I support whole-heartedly the idea of removing the term
"IC" from the Narrative Stance model altogether. As you can see,
I have instead used the term "Character" in this article, which
I think reflects far more accurately the narrative perspective
described.
I also support the idea that the term "IC" should be
returned to its original meaning of "in-character," leaving
the questions of what SORT of "in-character," how DEEPLY
in-character, how the in-character mind-set was PRODUCED, how
it is MAINTAINTED, how it is PORTRAYED...and so on and so forth
ad infinitum et nauseum...
(deep breath) What was I saying? Oh, yes. I like
the idea of using IC to mean "in-character." As opposed to
OOC -- "out-of-character." I'd rather come up with a different
set of terminology all together to handle the quibbles over
flavors of IC.
I also like the term "Immersive" for what was previously
referred to as either IC or Deep IC, as well as for the style of
gaming which fosters this state of mind *and* for the players who
favor such styles of play. The term gets the point across quite
well, in my opinion. It seems apt to me, and I say we keep it.
I do *not* like the adoption of the term "Immersive"
to replace IC within the context of the Narrative Stance model.
I don't think it makes any sense there. I think that it is quite
clear what it means to view the narrative from the perspective
of the Character, and it seems to me that "Character" fits in rather
well with the other human figures of "Actor," "Audience," and
"Author."
I have no _earthly_ idea what it might mean to read a
narrative from the point of view of The Immersive, or of The
Immersion. Perhaps this reveals a terrible lack of imagination
on my part, but there you have it.
Must sleep now. It's been great to read you all again.
-- Sarah
scott....@3do.com
In article <5k33kj$8g7$1...@nadine.teleport.com>,
Ennead <enn...@teleport.com> wrote:
>
> [Note: This is the second time I have tried to post this
> article. My first attempt never showed up from my account, and
> dejanews has no record of it. So this is a repost -- if my
> previous attempt did, indeed, go through, then please forgive
> me for the repeat of such a fiendishly long bit of text.]
>
> Hi. Um...Sarah here. My little sabbatical from on-line
> life ended up lasting much longer than I expected, so if I've
> completely lost touch with the program, please be patient with me.
>
Welcome back. (Snake Plisken? I thought you wuz dead!)
Scott
scott....@3do.com
In article <5juc03$l...@freenet-news.carleton.ca>,
In my thinking, Simulationism is defined by the the method of
adjudication. Pacing, to me is still a meta game concern, and the ambush
placement, thrown in, because things are 'slow' is also a meta game
consideration, albeit a different one.
Now a pure simulationist game, is one where the game grinds through every
day of the two week travel to Russia, but this is often not what the
average player enjoys (though I do, because i love travelogue).
In the example of skipping ahead two weeks, the reason this is seen as
less intrusive than the ambush, is that the 'pattern of events is not
disrupted, the characters are assumed to be competant, and avoiding any
unecessary conflict and danger when going from point a to B.
The ambush is more disruptive to the simulationist sense, because there
is no backstory giving a 'reason' for the ambush to occur. If the GM
mechanically arrived, or through research arrived at a reason for an
ambush there, then there is no problem, but it is the arbitrary placement
of an ambush for reasons of pacing that is damaging to a simulationist
sense. This is not to advocate 'wandering monsters' tables, but perhaps a
table with a more closer analysis to the occurance, and a better reason
for the results of the ambush. "The Injuns in this here parts don't take
kindly t' strangers on their lands", might be enough of a reason, and
then when hit by indians, however, it would be better if the indians had
been worked out before hand, and their temperment worked on a little so
that things would be a little less certain. But then again, they could
walk blythely by the indians, because they were at a watering hole, when
the stranger's wagon moved by. Now you could then have the indians track
the wagon, or not.
Basically the simulationist adjudication is one of finding reasons and
methods from the world and environment alone, and carrying out the
actions and implications regardless of the outcome, pacing, or survival
of the party, The sense of the world moving, and turning over like a
car's angine or a watch, regardless of the characters, though the game is
>focussed< on them.
Joshua Macy
Psychohist wrote:
>
...snip....
> Clear beginnings and ends? In a simulationist game?
>
> I think the only way you could get clear beginnings and ends in a
> simulationist game would be to do some careful editing. And if you're
> going to do careful editing, you may as well select a story that has
> drama, as well.
>
Perhaps I'm not sufficiently simulationist, but I tend to find that
the story of a particular character almost always has a clear beginning
(when the player starts playing that character in the game, since I
don't make them play the character's whole life), and often a clear
ending (since the players will often retire a character when some major
goal has been reached).
Ennead
Hi. Um...Sarah here. My little sabbatical from on-line
life ended up lasting much longer than I expected, so if I've
completely lost touch with the program, please be patient with me.
Having just finished reading through this thread and its
Psychohist
In response to John Kim's posting:
There are two possibilitis for "pacing". The first
is meta-game: i.e. "Should we play through the two
weeks of travel time for the PC's to reach Russia?"
I consider a pacing decision of this sort to still be
perfectly simulationist.
This is infinitely different from a pacing choice of
"Things are getting kind of slow -- I think I'll throw
in an ambush." This is actually non-simulationist,
because it affects in-game resolution.
Alain Lapalme asks:
How? Once the deciosn to throw the ambush has been
made, the GM can be a strict simulationist thereafter.
The only non-simulation decision was the decision about
activating the ambush. How it subsequently affect in
game resolutio' I'm not clear about.
'Only'? But once you decide to thrown in an ambush, the entire play
session is likely to center around it. The simulation has gone entirely
off track.
Simulations are not only about getting the nitty details right, you know.
It's even more important to get the big picture right.
The difference between the two is that abstraction of the trip to Russia
doesn't change the history of the game - it just leaves details
unspecified. Some of these details can even be specified later, if
necessary: 'well, my character got to know some of the locals during that
trip a while back, and she's no longer such a russophobe'.
In contrast, arbitrarily throwing in an ambush is a directed technique
that allows the metagame to affect the game. A gamesmaster who does this
kind of thing with any regularity simply isn't running a simulationist
game, no matter how realistic the details are.
Warren Dew
Psychohist
Welcome back, Sarah! You can be impressed if you wish, but I read your
post all the way through, and I imagine almost everyone else who starts it
will too. I think we really needed the refresher ... of course, I wasn't
here for the original four stances discussion, so it's the first time I've
seen a really complete exposition of the narrative stances that made sense
to me.
I think you are correct that 'character' is a better replacement for 'IC'
than 'immersion', and that the latter is best reserved as a replacement
for 'deep IC'. I foresee a little confusion when the stance follows the
word 'in', but that should be avoidable through careful writing - 'he was
playing in the character stance' instead of 'he was playing in character'.
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 28 Apr 1997 21:08:35 GMT, Ennead <enn...@teleport.com> wrote:
> Precisely. I never intended them that way, and I don't
>think that Kevin did either.
Well, yes and no :)
Sarah addresses an issue I have been very carefully avoiding :) , and
does so with her usual cogence.
The narrative stance analysis as I originally wrote it was a
complicated animal. It contained a lengthy discussion of narrative in
general, as it applies to rpgs. It was applied to rpgs as a whole,
and operated what I believe is a universal truth. That is, I believe
that the human condition is inherently narrative--that of necessity
the human animal makes sense of its experience by means of narrative.
And I also believe that that insight is useful, when it comes to the
analysis of rpgs.
However, the narrative stance model, in its narrow and more precise
application, was an exploration of just a subset of narrative--that
group of narrative techniques that can be subsumed under the label
"theatre and cinema." This is what I have been emphasizing in the
conversation here. And while there are aspects of the larger
narrative analysis that I believe are universal, that is not the case
of the narrower four stance model, as derived from the exploration of
the simile "rpg is like cinema" or "rpg is like theatre."
Thus, I think Doug is both right and wrong--he is correct that the
model is not about acting--rather it is about (as it were) reading.
However, it was most definitely, in its narrow form, about stage and
screen play, as opposed to acting methodologies.
Metaphors within metaphors--no wonder the conversation has become so
murky!
> My understanding of the model -- and the reason that I
>prefer to think of it as the NARRATIVE Stance model -- is that
>it describes the ways in which the *narrative* of the game is
>viewed by its participants. Perhaps it would be even more
>clear if we were to call it the "4 Stances Toward Game Narrative."
Here Sarah steps back from the analysis of narrative in its narrow
application, Cinema and Theatre, to narrative in its broadest
construction.
I'm less comfortable with this move--with operating on this larger
scale, because the claims advanced are more comprehensive.
I'm going to snip much of what Sarah writes--pausing only long enough
to remark that I agree unreservedly with just about everything she
says.
Regarding the "Historical Actor" stance--the stance of the living or
lived life:
> Please note that the distinctions of "Deep IC," "Channeling
>Authorial," "Method Acting," "IC Lite," or what-have-you are
>irrelevant here. Whether you feel the emotions of your character
>or not, whether you consciously decide what your character will do
>or merely allow the character to act as if through spirit possession,
>whether you DIP or DAS...none of these distinctions matters when
>it comes to how the narrative is being *viewed.* You can take
>the Character Stance consciously (as a conceit, if you will) or
>unconsciously -- you can *be* the character, or *play* the
>character -- and it does not matter. What is important here is
>that the narrative in this stance is viewed AS IF one is the
>character, as if one is a person having these events really happen
>to you in your real life. Being IC or acting IC both necessitate
>being able to view the narrative as the CHARACTER does.
This is absolutely so. However, I do see some advantage in
incorporating some of the distinctions that have emerged from this
conversation into the model. In doing so, of course, we should not
lose track of what distinguishes this stance from the others, which
you state so nicely above.
Sarah's definitions here strike me as especially apt. I am in
complete and fundamental agreement with them:
> Another way in which narrative can be approached is as
>an AUDIENCE. The AUDIENCE does not exist within the fiction,
>but outside of it. It evaluates the narrative from an external
>perspective, one that recognizes the events taking place as
>fictive. Not only does the AUDIENCE recognize the events as
>fictive, but it also perceives them as *outside of its immediate
>control.*
[snip]
And . . .
> The way the AUTHOR views a narrative, on the other hand,
>assumes creative power and control over that narrative. Like
>the AUDIENCE, the AUTHOR views the events of the narrative from
>the outside -- he knows that they are fictive. Unlike the audience,
>however, the author is able to take action to shape and to control
>the course of that fiction.
> In the context of the Narrative Stance model, however,
>this is not what AUTHOR is meant to convey. To view the narrative
>as AUTHOR is to view it from an external and empowered position,
>to perceive it as an "owned" object which one has the right and
>the power to control, mold, and change. This is what I mean by
>"viewing the narrative as AUTHOR" -- it is the aspect of "authoring"
>which is not shared by any of the other stances.
>
>
> The fourth way in which the narrative of the game may
>be viewed is from a perspective similar to that of an actor in
>a play written by someone else. The actor in such a situation
>is, unlike the CHARACTER, aware that the narrative is a work of
>fiction. Unlike the AUDIENCE, however, he is an active part of
>the creative process; he is not a spectator. Yet he is unlike
>the AUTHOR in that he is not empowered to create the narrative
>events, nor to determine how they unfold; he may only determine
>in what way the unfolding events will be portrayed, and thus, how
>they are likely to be perceived by the audience.
What I think is critical to note here is that in pratice we are almost
never solely in a single stance (as we originally defined them, and as
you so carefully describe them above). Sub-distinctions, like those
in the conversation I initiated, seek to clarify what is going on *in
practice.* And here questions about how one goes about the
play--immersive vs. rationalized, and so forth, matter. They matter
because the non-immersive actor is also adopting elements of the other
stances, for example. Since IME there are very few people who are
immersive all the time in a game, this is important, it seems to me.
The person who is rationalizing--thinking through how their character
out to act before acting, is partaking of elements of all of the other
stances, it seems to me. This is source of much of the confusion, I
think.
> I just don't think that this particular model, which
>attempts to describe ways of viewing *narrative,* is at all
>well-suited to the tasks to which it has been set of late.
>As Doug points out, acting methodologies and ways of reading
>the text of a game are not at *all* the same thing.
This is absolutely true--and worth repeating. However, it does seem
to me that the Immersive player reads the text differently than does
the rationalizing player--which is the insight that lead me to
initiate the thread :)
Thank you so much for clarifying the issues at stake here--I was
beginning to lose sight of them.
All my best,
Kevin
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 28 Apr 1997 05:52:37 GMT, psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:
>Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
>
> There are also certain kinds of plots which are
> inherently non-dramatic--a travelogue. for example.
> These stories have clear beginnings and ends, but
> may not revolve around some central conflict. I
> think this is important, since IMO simulationist
> games tend to produce this kind of story.
>
>
>Clear beginnings and ends? In a simulationist game?
In retrospect, sure. The issue is whether or not they start out that
way :)
>I think the only way you could get clear beginnings and ends in a
>simulationist game would be to do some careful editing. And if you're
>going to do careful editing, you may as well select a story that has
>drama, as well.
All simulationist games will *produce* a story, in retrospect. Its
pretty much unavoidable, if you think about it.
When someone asks you "what is your game about?" or "what has happened
in your game?" you will respond with a story, more than likely. That
is, when you answer those questions, you will do so in a narrative
fashion. When you get together with our gaming buddies and talk about
old games, you *do* tell stories, don't you? "There was this dragon
in the old dwarf mines, see, and my thief Dimwit was down on his luck
and in need of a buck, having just lost all his money in a high stakes
poker game, and so . . ." There's the clear beginning of a story, as
produced by a simulationist game.
In this sense even the most simulationist of games will produce a
story--just like every life that is lived produces a story. Indeed,
if you had a game that did NOT produce a story, then you would have a
poor simulation of real life, since all lives in real life happen in
time, and since we make sense of them by narrative means.
However, not all stories are good drama. Not every story is dramatic,
in the literary sense. A good example of a non-dramatic literary
genre--one that is similar to some kinds of simulationist games--is
the travelogue.
The distinction is important, it seems to me. Its not an issue of
beginning and endings, as you imply. Its rather an issue of whether
or not the game is united by a single dramatic conflict or line of
tension--which is altogether different, in my view anyway.
My best,
Kevin
Mary K. Kuhner
The abstracted-trip versus ambush example is tricky in a number of ways.
One very important one is that the decision to abstract the trip is
likely to be shared, whereas the decision to throw in the ambush is
likely to be the GM's alone. This may lead the players to react to
the ambush, on a meta-game level, very differently than to the
abstraction.
I played in a campaign where the GM was quite fond of throwing in a
combat scene to speed up the pacing. After a while the players, who
disliked being ambushed, started to do things like deferring all
planning to email. They also had their characters adopt preventive
measures--not the kinds of measures (varying your route, being
careful, sending out scouts) that the characters would have naturally
chosen, but measures directed at the metagame such as planning less,
acting "dramatically", and moving fast. In other words, they recognized
that the GM was playing the metagame, and responded likewise,
to the extreme detriment of the simulation.
I haven't really seen this happen with decisions such as abstracting
the trip, and so I regard the abstraction as far less of a break in
simulation than the ambush. It seems much less likely to provoke
metagame-oriented play from the players. It could: for example,
the players might encourage the GM to abstract because they feel
this will reduce the chance of the characters coming to grief on the
trip. ("The random monster table's awfully lethal. We'd be much
better off avoiding it. Let's see if we can convince him that
this trip's not worth playing out.") But it can also happen many
times in a game and not provoke any OOC behavior, which is not,
in my experience, true of pacing-determined ambushes.
Pacing can be used as a dramatist tool, but I don't think that all
uses of pacing as a tool break simulation. It's essentially impossible
to game without some use of pacing. I think it is worthwhile to
distinguish between manuvers (such as abstraction) that are pretty
much compatible with simulation, and ones (such as introducing
arbitrary events) which are not.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
Psychohist
Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
When someone asks you "what is your game about?" or
"what has happened in your game?" you will respond
with a story, more than likely.
Actually, no. The former question will be answered with a setting
description, not a story or narrative. I'd be stumped with the latter
question - so many things have happened, I wouldn't know how to choose -
so I'd probably say, "why don't you come watch a few sessions, or talk to
the players."
... When you get together with our gaming buddies and
talk about old games, you *do* tell stories, don't you?
Of course we tell stories - but they are edited to produce the beginnings
and ends, and they are also selected for drama. None of the players tells
stories that sound like travelogues.
And one nit - it's not old games, since it's still the same game after
nineteen years. It's old events in the same game. That's why you need
editing to get the beginnings and ends, just as you need editing to focus
on the drama.
If you think of the entire campaign to date as a single 'story' - well,
you're right, there's 'way too much there for dramatic unity, but then,
there isn't a clear beginning or end, either.
Warren Dew
Mary K. Kuhner
>And one nit - it's not old games, since it's still the same game after
>nineteen years. It's old events in the same game. That's why you need
>editing to get the beginnings and ends, just as you need editing to focus
>on the drama.
>If you think of the entire campaign to date as a single 'story' - well,
>you're right, there's 'way too much there for dramatic unity, but then,
>there isn't a clear beginning or end, either.
Really long campaigns are not stories, they are huge bundles of
intertwined stories. If I just write down "what happened in the
_Paradisio_ campaign" it does not make any kind of coherent narrative
line. Only by choosing one thread, character, or conflict as central
can I quarry a story out--and in fact I could quarry out a number
of quite different ones, each of which would sound plausibly like *the*
story of _Paradisio_.
This is much less true with short-story games or short campaigns.
I'm awed by the concept of a nineteen-year campaign. _Paradisio_
was only three or four, and it was quite a bundle already.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@genetics.washington.edu
jh...@columbia.edu
Hi, Sarah! Welcome back. Nice article on the narrative
stances: I do have some observations.
First, the Character stance is a very different beast from
Audience/Author/Actor. The latter three all view the game as
a narrative -- they differ mainly in how the *act* to participate
in that narrative, not in how they view it. The Character
stance does not view the game as a narrative per se. If you
want to restrict the stances to discussion of *narrative*, I am
confused as to why it is in here at all.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Ennead <enn...@teleport.com> wrote:
> I fear that people may be trying to use the Narrative Stance
> model to describe game dynamics for which it was never (by me,
> at any rate) intended. It seems to me that this could be
> responsible for a great deal of confusion over the terms.
Well, (and this also goes to Kevin), I think it is
unrealistic to expect that use of the terms will be restricted
to discussion within a particular metaphor or will be kept to
a particular intent. I think it is only natural that people
will try to relate the metaphor of the Stances to their own
games, which probably do not use the same metaphor.
I think if you are going to try to use these as terms, I
think you are going to have to accept that they will be used
outside of their original context.
Frankly, I think there was just as much confusion over the
stances even when discussion was restricted to the narrative
metaphor. Confusion on a newsgroup is pretty much inevitable.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
> I would like to repeat that I _do_ think it a terrific
> idea for us to come up with a working vocabulary to describe
> and define other aspects of gaming style.
[...]
> I just don't think that this particular model, which
> attempts to describe ways of viewing *narrative,* is at all
> well-suited to the tasks to which it has been set of late.
I would agree with this, but there is clearly an overlap.
The model you have includes two viewpoints: the character viewing
his world, and the participants viewing the narrative of the game.
Other viewpoints can be added to this: say the "Tourist" stance
who passively looks at details of the world without regard for
the narrative.
The problem is that there is clear overlap with the "Narrative
Stances" model -- which probably means it must be retired,
revised, or serve as a continual source of confusion.
Ennead
Psychohist <psych...@aol.com> wrote:
: Kevin Hardwick posts, in part:
: There are also certain kinds of plots which are
: inherently non-dramatic--a travelogue. for example.
: These stories have clear beginnings and ends, but
: may not revolve around some central conflict. I
: think this is important, since IMO simulationist
: games tend to produce this kind of story.
: Clear beginnings and ends? In a simulationist game?
I think that what Kevin means here is that one can
run a simulationist game defined at the outset by in-game
parameters. For example, one might decide to run a game
about a group of pilgrims travelling together to Mecca.
The game begins when the group sets out together, and it
ends when they reach the city.
In a simulationist game, of course, the group may
never _reach_ Mecca, or by the time they get there, their
goals and plans may have changed dramatically, but nonetheless,
it has been agreed that the game will come to an end when
they reach the city.
A game such as this one has a clear beginning and end
built into it from the start, and yet it may be completely
simulationist. (Of course, if the game goes well, the group
may clamor for a reconsideration of the original parameters,
but that's another issue...)
A better example of this type of play might be a
"Day In the Life" game, in which play covers one day,
and one day only, of the lives of a group of characters.
There is an obvious beginning and end to such a game, but it is
far from inherently dramatic: in my experience, at least, "Day
In the Life" games tend to be run with stringently simulationist
methodologies, as this is a large part of their appeal.
: I think the only way you could get clear beginnings and ends in a
: simulationist game would be to do some careful editing.
Well, the game has to start *somewhere,* and eventually
it must come to an end. Deciding ahead of time on an end point
for the game may be a type of "editing," I suppose, but it is
not necessarily dramatic editing. When I used to game in college,
end-points were often established for games, as the academic
schedules of the players made continuing sagas difficult, and
in-game parameters seemed more satisfying (and less unpalatably
meta-gamey) than the default parameter of "when the semester
ends and half the players graduate, then the game comes to an
end."
: And if you're
: going to do careful editing, you may as well select a story that has
: drama, as well.
I agree that if you're going to bother with careful,
dramatically-satisfying editing, then you may as well go whole
hog, but I don't see settling upon an end-point as quite the
same thing. In my experience, in fact, games with a pre-established
end-point usually ended up being rather anti-dramatic, as the
end point always seemed to come at a dramatically frustrating
moment -- interesting events were always left hanging in mid-air,
leaving me with an unpleasant "Damn! I wanted to find out what
would happen next!" feeling. Eventually, my college group
abandoned the practice for just this reason. (Although I think
that the GMs liked it, as it always left the players drooling
for more...)
-- Sarah
scott....@3do.com
In article <5k56qp$r...@nntp5.u.washington.edu>,
Aww Mary, it's easy. I ran my game for about 6-8 years with three or four
different parties. The Fantasy Hero Playtest lasted for 5 or six
years,(Three years past the publication of the game) and the following
'high Fantasy Campaign has been going on since before the Gulf War.
Where I come from these short campaigns are a recent and unwelcome
development.
Scott
scott....@3do.com
In article <19970429025...@ladder01.news.aol.com>,
> is meta-game: i.e. "Should we play through the two
> weeks of travel time for the PC's to reach Russia?"
> I consider a pacing decision of this sort to still be
> perfectly simulationist.
>
> This is infinitely different from a pacing choice of
> "Things are getting kind of slow -- I think I'll throw
> in an ambush." This is actually non-simulationist,
> because it affects in-game resolution.
>
>
> How? Once the deciosn to throw the ambush has been
> made, the GM can be a strict simulationist thereafter.
> The only non-simulation decision was the decision about
> activating the ambush. How it subsequently affect in
> game resolutio' I'm not clear about.
>
> session is likely to center around it. The simulation has gone entirely
> off track.
>
> Simulations are not only about getting the nitty details right, you know.
> It's even more important to get the big picture right.
>
> The difference between the two is that abstraction of the trip to Russia
> doesn't change the history of the game - it just leaves details
> unspecified. Some of these details can even be specified later, if
> necessary: 'well, my character got to know some of the locals during that
> trip a while back, and she's no longer such a russophobe'.
>
> In contrast, arbitrarily throwing in an ambush is a directed technique
> that allows the metagame to affect the game. A gamesmaster who does this
> kind of thing with any regularity simply isn't running a simulationist
> game, no matter how realistic the details are.
>
> Warren Dew
Thank You Warren, You have said this much more clearly and succinctly
than I have.
scott....@3do.com
In article <5k53na$q...@nntp5.u.washington.edu>,
Very Well put Mary. You bring up a good point in that the travel
abstraction, is usually consensual, whereas the ambush is not, but a
unilateral decision. Now while i am not an advocate of democratizing
gaming (:-)), The philosophy of Simulationism that i adhere to, would
not allow an arbitrary decision based on 'pacing' or 'action.' Everything
of the world must come from it for it's own internal reasons and
consistency.
A Lapalme
It looks like I've got John upset here, which definitely was not my
intention. What also seems clear to me, is that we keep missing each
other's points. Hopefully, this will help clarify a few things (as opposed
to my last post which did the opposite).
In article <8621552...@dejanews.com>, jh...@columbia.edu wrote:
>
> Hmmm. Another post on the meaning of "simulationist". Again,
>my definition was "a game which does not use meta-game concern affect
>in-game resolution". Note that here I mean any events in the game
>world -- not just those that are played out at the gaming table.
OK. The way I read you previous posts, it seemed to be the opposite: that
you were discussing only events which were played at the game table.
>
> Frankly, I am baffled at Alain's seeming assertion that most
>games don't have this at all. This forum is rife with suggestions
>about how meta-game concerns can and should be used in play, such as:
> -> Plot points, Fudge points, Whimsy Cards, etc.
> -> Resolving events with "Does the Plot require an outcome?"
> -> Adding events for foreshadowing or other literary effect
> -> Not killing a player's character without warning
> -> Shifting personality to not destroy the party
>
You've lost me, or misinterpreted me or I didn't communicate what I meant
well. I never intended to say that games do not have any of the above.
Frankly, I'm baffled as to where you found this.
>
>ai...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (A Lapalme) wrote:
>> John H Kim (jh...@aloha.cc.columbia.edu) writes:
>> > Those who are concerned about simulation do not consider that skipping
>> > over a character's bathroom break is "non-simulationist". Pacing the
>> > passage of game time for the players interest is a *meta-game* concern
>> > and does not break simulation.
>>
>> What about plotting a game? It's a meta-game concern, and, once a plot
is
>> set up it can be run simulationist style. If that's the case, the only
>> non-simulationist games are going to be the railroaded games (and even
>> then).
>
> Eh? What do you mean. I don't run most of my plotted games
>in a simulationist style, but I wasn't railroading. Just because I am
>using meta-game concerns does not mean that I am forcing the players
>onto a certain path. The players have choices in my plotted games,
>I just make sure those choices turn out interesting.
I was replying to your statement: "pacing the passage of game time for the
players interest is a *meta-game* concern and does not break simulation."
I interpreted it as meaning that, if something is a meta-game concern, it
cannot break the simulation. By extension, since plotting is a meta-game
concern, it can't break simulatino either.
It seems that is not what you meant (re pacing vs simulation). Now I'm lost
as to what you meant there.
>
> Again, "plotting" breaks simulation if you use it as a basis for
>altering how you resolve actions or making changes to the game-world after
>the game has started. A simulationist GM may "plot" in two ways:
>
>1) In initially deciding what the campaign will be about, she may well
> think about what will happen in the setting -- she may choose who the
> PC's are and when in their lives to start because she thinks that will
> be interesting. *However*, once the game is started she is not free
> to add things on the basis of his plot (i.e. "I need a new villian,
> let me design one.")
>
>2) After the game is started, he may well prepare by guessing what the
> players will do and what that would logically lead to given the
> game world (i.e. predefined "If-then" sequences rather than thinking
> it all through in-game.)
>
>3) She may prepare time-tables of events which will happen outside the
> PC's influence (i.e. how things will go unless the PC's interfere).
OK. So would you consider the above a simulationist style of game? I
probably would. However, and this is where we seem to differ, I wouldn't
consider that this game is 100% simulationist. In this case, it seems to
be that the running of the game (game-time) that is, is simulationist,
while the pre/post game time, is much less so. I think that,
somewhere, during design/play, non-simulationist decisions are
made in nearly all games. Therefore, my statement, that there is not such
thing as a 100% simulationist game.
>
>-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>> >
>> > For example, I don't think there was anything in my paranormals game
>> > that wasn't simulationist...
>>
>> Specifally, for your game, obviously I really can't say since I haven't
>> witnessed it. However, to throw a few things out for discussion:
>> -the actual characters the game has decided to focus on
>> -the type of "adventure"
>> -the genre (even though I'll admit that heavily simulationist game
>> tend to shy away from strict genres)
>> - the pacing (more on that later)
>> - the situations presented to the PCs
>> - etc
>> I realize that most of the above are meta-game non-play-time concerns
but I
>> think it is an error to separate these from the actual running of the
>> game. The game is the product of its part.
>
> (Incredulous.) So should we give up on any distinctions at
>all in our games?!?
I never said that. What I'm saying is that calling someone's game
simulationist hasn't helped one bit in helping any of us communicate about
what we mean (this particular sub-thread being a darn good example).
> Sure, a game is a product of its parts. My
>simulationist game has many parts in common with other games: it had
>the players design the PC's, and it had a GM (me) who would sit in a
>room with the players and talk with them, etc.
>
> That doesn't mean that we can't say that it is a different
>sort of game from my pulp-actiony genre-heavy superhero game. I would
>like to introduce terms which have *meaning* -- i.e. which help
>distinguish one game from another. If you say all games are
>simulationist or no games are simulationist, shouldn't we just
>throw out the term?
We tried that it didn't work. And, you may recall that, for a while,
everyone was a simulationist.
>
>-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>> >
>> > Hmm. I think you are lumping together things here which are
>> > *very* different. There are two possibilitis for "pacing". The first
>> > is meta-game: i.e. "Should we play through the two weeks of travel
>> > time for the PC's to reach Russia?" I consider a pacing decision of
>> > this sort to still be perfectly simulationist.
>> >
>> > This is infinitely different from a pacing choice of "Things
>> > are getting kind of slow -- I think I'll throw in an ambush." This
>> > is actually non-simulationist, because it affects in-game resolution.
>>
>> How? Once the deciosn to throw the ambush has been made, the GM can be a
>> strict simulationist thereafter. The only non-simulation decision was
the
>> decision about activating the ambush. How it subsequently affect in
game
>> resolutio' I'm not clear about.
>
> Uh, I don't think it takes a genius to realize that adding in
>an ambush is going to affect the in-game resolution of events. The
>events in the game-world are going to turn out drastically differently
>because of adding in the ambush -- thus it has affected the resolution.
We're not understanding each other. I understood the above to mean that
the outcome(resolution) of the ambush would be affected. It doesn't seem
to be what you meant.
My understanding of the above is that the outcome of the ambush, resolved
simulationist style, would be different depending whether or not the GM
actuated the event(ambush) using simulation techniques or other techniques.
To me, if the GM handles the ambush in a simulationist fashion, exactly
how it was triggered is irrelevant to the outcome of the ambush.
>
>>
>> A lot can happen in a 2 week trip: character development, chance
>> encounters, unusual weather, etc.. By skipping ahead, a meta-game
>> decision is made concerning the simulation: "this 2 week period is
>> unimportant to the game". I see this as a break from the simulation.
>
> Alain, this is patently absurd. Someone can trip and sprain
>their ankle simply walking down the stairs.
Under scrutiny, straw men don't hold up well, John. I was following the
examples you gave to illustrate a point. Naturally, they look silly since
they are simple examples.
[snip]
> Regardless of what you want to call it, do you agree that there
>is a distinction here between these two types of pacing control?
I would agree to a distinction in degree, not in kind though. If the group
has a habit of always skipping travel, it should eventually become obvious
to the characters that: "eh, nothing ever happens when we travel, no matter
how dangerous the road". Once that happens, the decision making process of
the GM has affected the IC view of what is happening and, when that
happens, I believe we are not longer "simulating".
>For me personally, this is a very important distinction and I want to
>have a term to talk about it.
>
[snip]
> More importantly, I assert that Suspension-of-Disbelief (SOD)
>is independent of simulation. Simulation is about what happens
>*in-game*, where-as SOD is a meta-game concern.
>
> I think it is thoroughly pointless and absurd to try to force
>the word "simulation" to apply only to non-existant abstractions.
>No simulation is going to have perfect fidelity.
Agreed. I'm not talking about whether the simulation has perfect fidelity
(heck, if we're using magic, there is nothing to simulate in the first
place but that doesn't mean that you can't run magic systems as a
simulation). I'm talking about the decision making process of the GM
because, in the final analysis, this is what will determine if a game has
an overall simulationist feel or not.
Going back to pacing: Pacing is affected by GM decisions which have nothing
to do the in-game events (in-game). However, if pacing becomes a major
decision making process of the GM, say the major one for argument's sake,
then, in my book, this game is no longer a simulationist game since most of
the events of the game are controlled by meta-game factors (even if all
the in-game decisions are made simulationist style).
*********
I still think we are talking past each other. I've tried to read
everything 2-3 times before replying but my guess is that I have probably
misinterpreted some things. In any case, I'll let this article sit for a
day before posting it. Maybe if I re-read it again, I might see where hte
confusion lies.
Alain (can we have peace now?)
Alain
The Advocacy Gathering --> The Shir Brothers' Game
For more information --> http://www.intranet.ca/~lapalme/rpg/advocacy/shir.html
e-mail: lap...@brelca.on.ca
Russell Wallace
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net wrote:
>
> In this sense even the most simulationist of games will produce a
> story--just like every life that is lived produces a story. Indeed,
> if you had a game that did NOT produce a story, then you would have a
> poor simulation of real life, since all lives in real life happen in
> time, and since we make sense of them by narrative means.
I remember disagreeing with you on this one awhile back, but I don't
think you ever replied to my disagreement; anyway, my opinion is that
while events *happen* to an individual, on a second by second basis,
sequentially, we do not generally remember them sequentially; the way we
organize them is completely different. Certainly it is for me, at
least.
Furthermore, while in order to communicate experiences to others we have
to speak them word by word, sequentially, we generally don't communicate
them in a *logically* sequential fashion. A told narrative, even from
one person's point of view, generally picks out a particular thread of
events from many interleaved threads.
From this point of view, what a simulationist game (or real life)
produces is not a story; it is a great many interleaved events, some
subsets of which can be (more or less arbitrarily) picked out and
verbally presented as stories.
--
"To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem"
Russell Wallace
rwal...@connect.ie
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On 29 Apr 1997 16:15:21 GMT, mkku...@phylo.genetics.washington.edu
(Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>
>Really long campaigns are not stories, they are huge bundles of
>intertwined stories.
Eactly! And, by literary standards, it is entirely possible that
*none* of them would make a "good" dramatic story.
Note, however, that you play multiple characters--so of course you
will experience multiple stories :)
Even so, any long-standing campaign will produce multiple stories, I
would think.
>If I just write down "what happened in the
>_Paradisio_ campaign" it does not make any kind of coherent narrative
>line.
Again, I am in complete agreement with you. As soon as you start
trying to work out what it means though, you will assign beginnings
and endings, more than likely. I would argue that this is a necessary
first step towards making sense out of any kind of lived experience,
although analysis need not by any means be complete with the
narrative--you can and likely do go way beyond this.
>Only by choosing one thread, character, or conflict as central
>can I quarry a story out--and in fact I could quarry out a number
>of quite different ones, each of which would sound plausibly like *the*
>story of _Paradisio_.
But whenever you try to work out what Padadisio *is* you will have to
do that via one or more narratives.
They will not necessarily be coherent, dramatic narratives. But they
will be narratives. The difference between this kind of game and a
more plot-oriented game is that in the latter, the GM and players seek
to ensure that the narrative(s) the game produces will be as dramatic
and unified as possible.
Since, no doubt, Paradisio meant *lots* of different things to you,
you will no doubt be able to construct lots of different retrospective
narratives from your experience of the game. None, most likely, is
definitive. While this is true of all games, I think it most likely
is more pronounced in simulationist games than in plotted.
My best,
Kevin
Levi Kornelsen
psych...@aol.com (Psychohist) wrote:
>Welcome back, Sarah! You can be impressed if you wish, but I read your
>post all the way through, and I imagine almost everyone else who
>starts it will too. I think we really needed the refresher ... of
>course, I wasn't here for the original four stances discussion, so
>it's the first time I've seen a really complete exposition of the
>narrative stances that made sense to me.
Ditto, ditto, ditto.
>I think you are correct that 'character' is a better replacement for 'IC'
>than 'immersion', and that the latter is best reserved as a replacement
>for 'deep IC'. I foresee a little confusion when the stance follows the
>word 'in', but that should be avoidable through careful writing - 'he was
>playing in the character stance' instead of 'he was playing in
>character'.
Not at all, as long as you also say "in Actor", "in Author".
--Intrepid
Joshua Macy
A Lapalme wrote:
>
....snip....
>
> OK. So would you consider the above a simulationist style of game? I
> probably would. However, and this is where we seem to differ, I wouldn't
> consider that this game is 100% simulationist. In this case, it seems to
> be that the running of the game (game-time) that is, is simulationist,
> while the pre/post game time, is much less so. I think that,
> somewhere, during design/play, non-simulationist decisions are
> made in nearly all games. Therefore, my statement, that there is not such
> thing as a 100% simulationist game.
>
I don't see much of a point in defining "simulationist" so that all
games are somewhat simulationist, and no games are completely
simulationist. Why not restrict the definition so that there are
demarcations where it can be said "This is a simulationist game" or
"This is not a simulationist game", instead of "This particular piece of
the game is kinda simulationist"?
....snip...
> I never said that. What I'm saying is that calling someone's game
> simulationist hasn't helped one bit in helping any of us communicate about
> what we mean (this particular sub-thread being a darn good example).
>
Well, I think that it _would_ help to communicate if we stuck to a
more definite meaning, that described the entire game (as I think it
does in the FAQ).
....snip example of a GM throwing in an ambush to keep things
interesting...
> We're not understanding each other. I understood the above to mean that
> the outcome(resolution) of the ambush would be affected. It doesn't seem
> to be what you meant.
>
> My understanding of the above is that the outcome of the ambush, resolved
> simulationist style, would be different depending whether or not the GM
> actuated the event(ambush) using simulation techniques or other techniques.
> To me, if the GM handles the ambush in a simulationist fashion, exactly
> how it was triggered is irrelevant to the outcome of the ambush.
I think that's exactly John's objection--the trigger for the event is
_not_ irrelevant; in fact it's the event's trigger that decides whether
the encounter is simulationist or not, even before anything is done to
resolve the encounter. If you create an ambush simply to keep the
_players'_ interest, there's nothing about the game world being
simulated there--there's nothing wrong about that, but it's not
simulationist. To be simulationist, as I understand the term, either:
A) The ambushers would have to have been created by the GM prior to the
encounter and set to attack whatever opportune targets passed by them
whether or not the PC's ever went that way, or
B) the ambush would have to have been planned specifically to target
the PC's by one of their enemies *bearing in mind* the intelligence
available to that particular enemy, communication and travel times,
available forces, suitibility of terrain, and so forth. (i.e., if the
PC's are taking a particular route, the enemy would have to have had
some way to learn of it, time to learn of it and dispatch his forces,
time for the ambushers to get in place, and so on.)
In _either_ case, the ambush would happen whether or not the players
were bored or itching for combat--it would happen even if the players
would rather it hadn't, because it arises out of simulation of what is
going on in the gameworld.
...snip...
> I'm not talking about whether the simulation has perfect fidelity
> (heck, if we're using magic, there is nothing to simulate in the first
> place but that doesn't mean that you can't run magic systems as a
> simulation).
I think this is incorrect; fidelity in simulationist games refers to
fidelity to the reality of the gameworld, not to the reality of our
world. If there is magic in the gameworld, then once the rules of magic
are established by the GM, the simulation can be more or less faithful
to those rules. One can, for instance, posit two different GM's running
with the same magic system, where one GM adheres to the rules of the
system, and the other GM alters the outcomes for story purposes or to
keep players' interest high; the former would be a simulationist
approach, the latter not.
jh...@columbia.edu
OK. Sorry, Alain, for getting cross. Let me try to run
through this definition again. I'm going to start from my FAQ...
"simulationist": A game in which effort is made to not let
meta-game concerns during play affect in-game resolution.
I want to go through this to show that there are games
which are fully simulationist (I know of at least one - the
paranormals game I mentioned), and there are games which are
explicitly non-simulationist:
A Lapalme <ai...@freenet.carleton.ca> wrote:
>John Kim <jh...@columbia.edu> wrote:
>> This forum is rife with suggestions about how meta-game concerns can
>> and should be used in play, such as:
>> -> Plot points, Fudge points, Whimsy Cards, etc.
>> -> Resolving events with "Does the Plot require an outcome?"
>> -> Adding events for foreshadowing or other literary effect
>> -> Not killing a player's character without warning
>> -> Shifting personality to not destroy the party
>>
>You've lost me, or misinterpreted me or I didn't communicate what I meant
>well. I never intended to say that games do not have any of the above.
>Frankly, I'm baffled as to where you found this.
Alain, you said that if we included plotting as allowable
in simulationist games, then all non-railroaded games would be
simulationist. In short, this is wrong. Games which use the above
techniques are *explicitly* breaking simulation for meta-game
purposes. It's not that complicated...
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
This is in contrast to games which *are* simulationist. First
of all, note that in my definition above it is the "effort" that is
important. Of course no simulation is going to be perfect, and thus
meta-game things *are* going to affect it. If the GM hasn't had a lot
of sleep, he may be irritiable and handle things differently than
if he was fully awake. Similarly, things might turn out differently
if the group plays out in gory detail a trip to a lunch meeting
in the city, instead of the GM just saying "You get to the meeting
and...".
Again, I assert here that this is not a breach of
simulation. If the GM or the players in a simulationist game
choose not to play something out, then they _try_ to resolve it
as if it had been played out. It is only an approximation, sure,
but all simulations have approximations.
For example, there are several ways the trip into the
city for a lunch meeting could be handled.
1) The players choose to play out a few snippets of conversation
along the way. The GM doesn't ask them for their actions, but
will occaisionally describe events as the trips go along such as,
"The subway is coming to your stop now."
2) The GM skips over the trip, and just briefly describes to the
players how long it takes -- asking the players if they did anything
important during it.
3) The GM plays out the trip in combat time: i.e. "You see a
turnstile ahead of you. There are a bunch of other people around.
Joe, you are in front this round, what are you doing?"
Now, obviously, it will probably make a difference which of
these methods is used (#3 will probably result in the players as
well as the characters going postal). As Alain puts it:
A Lapalme <ai...@freenet.carleton.ca> wrote:
>John Kim <jh...@columbia.edu> wrote:
>> Regardless of what you want to call it, do you agree that there
>> is a distinction here between these two types of pacing control?
>
>I would agree to a distinction in degree, not in kind though. If the
>group has a habit of always skipping travel, it should eventually become
>obvious to the characters that: "eh, nothing ever happens when we travel,
>no matter how dangerous the road". Once that happens, the decision
>making process of the GM has affected the IC view of what is happening
>and, when that happens, I believe we are not longer "simulating".
Hrrm. I strongly disagree with you here. As I see it, this
is the demand for perfect fidelity -- i.e. in order for it to be a
simulation, then everything has to be done exactly correct.
As a parallel, if the GM doesn't act out every NPC's personality
in individual detail, the characters "should" recognize that most
people in this world have roughly the same personality and
mannerisms. This is unintended and the GM's handling has affected
the IC view of what is happening.
You claim this as a breach of simulation, while I say that it
is just that the simulation is not perfect. Again, my rule of thumb
is that my neutrino physics Monte Carlo program should qualify as
"100% simulationist" -- it ignores certain effects as well such as
the muons traveling upstream of our target...
In my opinion, this demand is actively hampering to discussion
on this point. I see an important difference between games which
explicitly break simulation, say with Whimsy Cards -- and those
which simply have normal imperfections which come from running a
game with humans.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>
>I never said that. What I'm saying is that calling someone's game
>simulationist hasn't helped one bit in helping any of us communicate
>about what we mean (this particular sub-thread being a darn good
>example).
OK, you might feel that way -- but I would note that you also
feel that there is no distinction of kind between skipping over
travel time and throwing in an ambush.
There are those of us who *do* feel that these two represent
an important distinction. I think that the term of "simulationist"
has helped in discussions among those of us who recognize this as
a distinction. I now think the problem here is not so much the
semantics of the term, but rather that you and David and perhaps
others refuse to acknowledge what is to some is an important
distinction. Until you recognize that distinction, then I don't
think any amount of semantics will allow you to communicate on this
point.
-*-*-*-*-*-*-
>>
>>Again, "plotting" breaks simulation only if you use it as a basis
>>for altering how you resolve actions or making changes to the
>>game-world after the game has started. A simulationist GM may
>>"plot" in three ways:
>>
>>1) In initially deciding what the campaign will be about, she may well
>> think about what will happen in the setting -- she may choose who the
>> PC's are and when in their lives to start because she thinks that will
>> be interesting. *However*, once the game is started she is not free
>> to add things on the basis of his plot (i.e. "I need a new villian,
>> let me design one.")
>>
>>2) After the game is started, he may well prepare by guessing what the
>> players will do and what that would logically lead to given the
>> game world (i.e. predefined "If-then" sequences rather than thinking
>> it all through in-game.)
>>
>>3) She may prepare time-tables of events which will happen outside the
>> PC's influence (i.e. how things will go unless the PC's interfere).
>
>OK. So would you consider the above a simulationist style of game?
>I probably would. However, and this is where we seem to differ, I
>wouldn't consider that this game is 100% simulationist. In this case,
>it seems to be that the running of the game (game-time) that is, is
>simulationist, while the pre/post game time, is much less so.
This is what I don't get. Why do you say this? What is
non-simulationist about reasoning out what NPC's will do, or
time-tabling how things will go? How is deciding that an
NPC will travel to another city between games different from
deciding on an NPC reaction in-game?
>
>I think that, somewhere, during design/play, non-simulationist decisions
>are made in nearly all games. Therefore, my statement, that there is
>not such thing as a 100% simulationist game.
Well, I'll certainly agree that 100% simulationist games are
probably rare -- it is at the edge of a spectrum, after all. Maybe
if I analyze it a bit, I might find some lapses of simulation in
the Paranormals game (introducing Joe's character, perhaps).
Still, I think it is overboard to suggest that such a game is
impossible.
Mainly, it seems like you are saying that things which start
and remain in the meta-game are "non-simulationist". For example,
my Paranormals game decided to focus on the handful of people in my
world who had these paranormal powers -- I don't see that this is
any less simulationist than any other choice of PC's and situations.
Now, I would agree that most games would involve the GM
inventing new situations and events based on his meta-game desire
for adventure. In my game, I had worked out what whole groups
of NPC's were doing from the start, and the PC's stuck their noses
in. Sure, my whole conception of the world was based on that I
thought it would be interesting to play in -- but again, I don't
believe that is a breach of simulation. Do you?
krhr...@washingtonian.infi.net
On Tue, 29 Apr 1997 19:32:54 -0700, Russell Wallace
<rwal...@connect.ie> wrote:
>I remember disagreeing with you on this one awhile back, but I don't
>think you ever replied to my disagreement;
No--sorry about that. Real life intervened, and the moment passed :)
> anyway, my opinion is that
>while events *happen* to an individual, on a second by second basis,
>sequentially, we do not generally remember them sequentially; the way we
>organize them is completely different. Certainly it is for me, at
>least.
The question. though, is not about generic memories--its about how we
make sense of reality. Generally speaking, making sense of something
involves causality, and all causal arguments are narrative in
structure.
Inintially the situation was X, then Y happened and the situation
changed from X to Z.
Casual analysis has that structure, and it is a narrative structure.
Sure, there are other ways of organizing experience, but I would
submit to you that this one is pretty fundamental to how we make sense
of reality.
You may wish to quibble with the generic statement. I am convinced of
two things--first, if we examined how you make sense of reality with
suficient care, we would discover that at base it is narratological,
and two, it probably is not worth while to have that discussion :) I
would submit to you that even if I am incorrect above (which I will
certainly leave open as a possibility) there is sufficient truth to
what I am saying MOST of the time (if not ALL the time) that my
position has considerable merit.
>
>Furthermore, while in order to communicate experiences to others we have
>to speak them word by word, sequentially, we generally don't communicate
>them in a *logically* sequential fashion. A told narrative, even from
>one person's point of view, generally picks out a particular thread of
>events from many interleaved threads.
Yes--that is part of what it means to make sense of something. Human
beings are not passive receptors of experience. We organize it all
the time, and how we order it depends in part on what our agenda is.
There are always many possible stories we could tell--we pick and
choose between them. But whatever, we still tell stories, in the
basic sense of organizing our experiences in a causal fashion.
I would submit that we cannot help but try to impose meaning upon our
lives--that that is part of the human condition. You may well
disagree, and if so, hey, I'm cool with that. We can agree to
disagree. If we try to resolve it further, the conversation will
rapidly become technical and boring, it seems likely to me. We could,
I suppose, continue it via email--but it doesn't seem appropriate for
this group.
My best,
Kevin
scott....@3do.com
In article <33674F...@ix.netcom.com>,
jm...@ix.netcom.com wrote:
>
> A Lapalme wrote:
> >
> ....snip....
> >
> > OK. So would you consider the above a simulationist style of game? I
> > probably would. However, and this is where we seem to differ, I wouldn't
> > consider that this game is 100% simulationist. In this case, it seems to
> > be that the running of the game (game-time) that is, is simulationist,
> > while the pre/post game time, is much less so. I think that,
> > somewhere, during design/play, non-simulationist decisions are
> > made in nearly all games. Therefore, my statement, that there is not such
> > thing as a 100% simulationist game.
> >
>
> games are somewhat simulationist, and no games are completely
> simulationist. Why not restrict the definition so that there are
> demarcations where it can be said "This is a simulationist game" or
> "This is not a simulationist game", instead of "This particular piece of
> the game is kinda simulationist"?
hgoing over this thread, It seems to me that the basic definition that a
simulationist game is adjudicated with little tono consideration of
metagame fctors is sound, but not clear. The key to know when you are
looking at a simulationist game, is that:
1.) The adjudication will be unbiassed, and ruthlessly consistent.
Abstracted perhaps, and maybe not entirely accurate to this real world,
but the mechanics and processes will be proceedural, and try to model
effects with consistency.
2.) Events are triggered only by >in world< motives, and reactions.
3.) A feeling that the world goes on, regardless of the players, and
that it will react organically to the PC's actions, consistent with the
rules of that world.
>
> ....snip...
> > I never said that. What I'm saying is that calling someone's game
> > simulationist hasn't helped one bit in helping any of us communicate about
> > what we mean (this particular sub-thread being a darn good example).
> >
>
> Well, I think that it _would_ help to communicate if we stuck to a
> more definite meaning, that described the entire game (as I think it
> does in the FAQ).
>
> ....snip example of a GM throwing in an ambush to keep things
> interesting...
> > We're not understanding each other. I understood the above to mean that
> > the outcome(resolution) of the ambush would be affected. It doesn't seem
> > to be what you meant.
> >
> > My understanding of the above is that the outcome of the ambush, resolved
> > simulationist style, would be different depending whether or not the GM
> > actuated the event(ambush) using simulation techniques or other techniques.
> > To me, if the GM handles the ambush in a simulationist fashion, exactly
> > how it was triggered is irrelevant to the outcome of the ambush.
>
> I think that's exactly John's objection--the trigger for the event is
> _not_ irrelevant; in fact it's the event's trigger that decides whether
> the encounter is simulationist or not, even before anything is done to
> resolve the encounter. If you create an ambush simply to keep the
> _players'_ interest, there's nothing about the game world being
> simulated there--there's nothing wrong about that, but it's not
> simulationist. To be simulationist, as I understand the term, either:
> A) The ambushers would have to have been created by the GM prior to the
> encounter and set to attack whatever opportune targets passed by them
> whether or not the PC's ever went that way, or
> B) the ambush would have to have been planned specifically to target
> the PC's by one of their enemies *bearing in mind* the intelligence
> available to that particular enemy, communication and travel times,
> available forces, suitibility of terrain, and so forth. (i.e., if the
> PC's are taking a particular route, the enemy would have to have had
> some way to learn of it, time to learn of it and dispatch his forces,
> time for the ambushers to get in place, and so on.)
> In _either_ case, the ambush would happen whether or not the players
> were bored or itching for combat--it would happen even if the players
> would rather it hadn't, because it arises out of simulation of what is
> going on in the gameworld.
Precisely! The trigggering events should be internally consistant, and
>IN NO WAY< take into account drama, pacing, and player boredom, in a
putrely simulationist game. However, being human, and cranky about what
demands we make on our chosen entertainments, the games often will fall
lessthan the ideal.
>
> ...snip...
> > I'm not talking about whether the simulation has perfect fidelity
> > (heck, if we're using magic, there is nothing to simulate in the first
> > place but that doesn't mean that you can't run magic systems as a
> > simulation).
>
> I think this is incorrect; fidelity in simulationist games refers to
> fidelity to the reality of the gameworld, not to the reality of our
> world. If there is magic in the gameworld, then once the rules of magic
> are established by the GM, the simulation can be more or less faithful
> to those rules. One can, for instance, posit two different GM's running
> with the same magic system, where one GM adheres to the rules of the
> system, and the other GM alters the outcomes for story purposes or to
> keep players' interest high; the former would be a simulationist
> approach, the latter not.
Precisely, fidelity and consistency. If it simulates a real world event,
the model should perform similarly, and provide similar atmosphere. If
the event is made up, it should operate on a set of laws, that are
consistent, and often independant of the player deisres.
Scott
Irina Rempt
jh...@columbia.edu wrote:
> I'm going to start from my FAQ...
> "simulationist": A game in which effort is made to not let
> meta-game concerns during play affect in-game resolution.
To get it absolutely right, you wrote "resolution". I'll take this to
mean that an effort is made to not let meta-game concerns affect what
happens *on occurrence of an event within the game*, and only apply
this to events that actually occur.
Example: I had to let a metagame concern affect a game of mine when a
player suddenly had to go home because someone had been taken ill. The
game had come to a point when I knew something important was about to
happen, and I couldn't slow the action down or stop at that point
without breaking the mood. He and I were both aware of that (I learned
most of my GMing technique from him) and I asked him "do you want me to
speed things up (i.e. make the important event happen *now* instead of
letting the game take its course) or do you have a valid reason for
[your character] being away and missing it?" He said he'd rather miss
it, went off (and his character went away on a pilgrimage) and he and
his character had to hear everything in the next session.
IMO, this didn't make the game any less simulationist. More so in fact,
because one of the reasons for the character being with the party had
been the pilgrimage to start with, and there was no way that *the
character* would have known to stay with the party for the important
event: it was just that the time for the important event seemed to have
come earlier than the time for the character to start her pilgrimage.
Neither the player nor I wanted to break SOD by making the character
leave in the middle of the important event, which she *certainly*
wouldn't have done.
> I want to go through this to show that there are games
> which are fully simulationist (I know of at least one - the
> paranormals game I mentioned), and there are games which are
> explicitly non-simulationist:
> A Lapalme <ai...@freenet.carleton.ca> wrote:
> >John Kim <jh...@columbia.edu> wrote:
> >> This forum is rife with suggestions about how meta-game concerns can
> >> and should be used in play, such as:
> >> -> Plot points, Fudge points, Whimsy Cards, etc.
> >> -> Resolving events with "Does the Plot require an outcome?"
Do you mean "Does the plot require a specific outcome?" ("Is it
necessary for the plot that this NPC gets killed?") or "Does the plot
require any outcome at all, or could it remain unresolved?"
> >> -> Not killing a player's character without warning
Distinguo (ah, finally, a situation to say this in! ;-). But then I'm
usually so fair to my NPCs that I give *them* a sporting chance as well
when they're being attacked while in the spotlight.
Spoilers coming. Boudewijn, I know you read everything I write on this
newsgroup, but unless you're the best firewaller in the world please
skip the rest.
Hein, Ingeborg, that goes for you too if you're reading this :-)
Last night we started on the second of what will probably amount to a
series of short connected campaigns; it's a conspiracy/intrigue game,
probably the most directed thing I've ever done (not the most plotted -
I tended to overplot in the past and always had my players walk around
my plots) but the direction is restricted to:
[1] - a list of about two dozen inhabitants of the town where the game
is set, some of which may make an appearance as NPCs, with their
motivations and the things that are likely to happen to them whether or
not the PCs intervene. Example: students and apprentices mysteriously
disappear and are later found dead; some other students and apprentices
disappear because they've joined the conspiracy and gone underground; X
is thrown off a tower and survives; Y is killed for knowing too much;
poisoned yarn is delivered to a weaver's workshop.
[2] - a list of miscellaneous events involving PCs and/or NPCs that I
want to occur at the first opportunity, that is to say, the first
moment that is both likely and convenient in the context of the game.
Example: "the first PC meeting such-and-such criteria is approached by
a member of the conspiracy and invited to join it".
[3] - a short indication of the logical order that those events occur
in (so I don't inadvertently make someone disappear that I still need
as an active NPC, or have something happen that I still want the PCs to
have a chance to prevent).
re [2]: when I asked the only PC carried over from the first campaign
what he had been doing in the intervening months, he neatly set himself
up for being approached, so I had someone approach him almost at once.
Now is this simulationist (by Warren's, Alain's or John's criteria, all
of which seem to be different) or not? The *fact* of someone being
approached by a member of the conspiracy was already there, the exact
*moment* depended on the PCs' actions.
In other terms: the world background is, as always in my Valdyas games,
fully simulated (I hesitate to call this "simulationist" as I don't see
it as <whatever>-ism on my part); the narrative is directed, albeit
intuitively (I hesitate to call it "plotted" exactly because I decide
*intuitively* what events happen when, and I don't pre-determine the
outcome of any event that the PCs are involved in).
It's more like a mosaic than a jigsaw puzzle: I don't decide "that
piece has to go here" but "I think this calls for such-and-such a
piece".
[zap a lot; may comment on some of it later]
> How is deciding that an
> NPC will travel to another city between games different from
> deciding on an NPC reaction in-game?
For me, it's very different because I'm such an immersive player that I
get immersed in NPCs as well (I can't even help identifying with
characters in computer adventures :-). It's easier for me to decide out
of game that a NPC has done something than to make them do something
in-game, because out of game they're not interacting with any PCs that
may persuade them to do otherwise.
Example: one of my players decided to play a new character for the
second campaign, and his first character went back to the town she'd
just left and got an NPC to marry her. Now if I'd had to decide what
this NPC would have done out of game, it probably wouldn't have
included marrying this woman (or indeed at all), but once it had
happened it seemed the logical thing.
> Now, I would agree that most games would involve the GM
> inventing new situations and events based on his meta-game desire
> for adventure. In my game, I had worked out what whole groups
> of NPC's were doing from the start, and the PC's stuck their noses
> in. Sure, my whole conception of the world was based on that I
> thought it would be interesting to play in -- but again, I don't
> believe that is a breach of simulation. Do you?
I for one don't. Once the world exists (with everything in it,
including those groups of NPCs), you're simulating it as a whole unless
it's liable to *change* for metagame reasons.
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
-------------------- Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus --------------------
XVI. "De stella Martis vere venisti."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Irina Rempt
A Lapalme (ai...@freenet.carleton.ca) wrote:
> In article <8621552...@dejanews.com>, jh...@columbia.edu wrote:
> >
> > Hmmm. Another post on the meaning of "simulationist". Again,
> >my definition was "a game which does not use meta-game concern affect
> >in-game resolution". Note that here I mean any events in the game
> >world -- not just those that are played out at the gaming table.
> OK. The way I read you previous posts, it seemed to be the opposite: that
> you were discussing only events which were played at the game table.
Oops. Me too.
[Alain wrote:]
> I was replying to your statement: "pacing the passage of game time for the
> players interest is a *meta-game* concern and does not break simulation."
[and:]
> Going back to pacing: Pacing is affected by GM decisions which have nothing
> to do the in-game events (in-game). However, if pacing becomes a major
> decision making process of the GM, say the major one for argument's sake,
> then, in my book, this game is no longer a simulationist game since most of
> the events of the game are controlled by meta-game factors (even if all
> the in-game decisions are made simulationist style).
At least in my current game (I can't speak for anyone else's, and not
even for most of my other games) *when* events occur is mostly
determined by in-game factors. That is, not "things are getting boring,
we need an ambush" but "there's an ambush set up here, this is the
right moment to have it because the PC who is the intended victim
happens to pass the spot alone and in the dark".
And yes, there may be some sessions in which timing (and thus, pacing
decisions made by me as the GM) is very important; but that's not
"pacing the passage of time for the players' interest", it's "pacing
the passage of time as is most likely in the world" i.e. in-game, not
meta-game, concerns.
Irina
--
ir...@rempt.xs4all.nl
-------------------- Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus --------------------
V. "Scis quod dicunt: id quod circumiret, circumveniat."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joshua Macy
scott....@3do.com wrote:
>
...snip...
>> 1.) The adjudication will be unbiassed, and ruthlessly consistent.
> Abstracted perhaps, and maybe not entirely accurate to this real world,
> but the mechanics and processes will be proceedural, and try to model
> effects with consistency.
>
> 2.) Events are triggered only by >in world< motives, and reactions.
>
> 3.) A feeling that the world goes on, regardless of the players, and
> that it will react organically to the PC's actions, consistent with the
> rules of that world.
>
I like this summation, and think I'll save it as a reminder of what it
is simulationism aims for.
..snip...
>
> Precisely! The trigggering events should be internally consistant, and
> >IN NO WAY< take into account drama, pacing, and player boredom, in a
> putrely simulationist game. However, being human, and cranky about what
> demands we make on our chosen entertainments, the games often will fall
> less than the ideal.
>
Well, less than ideal for a simulationist GM. There are, of course,
plenty of GM's and players who are anti-simulationist.
Psychohist
Alain Lapalme posts, in part:
What I'm saying is that calling someone's game
simulationist hasn't helped one bit in helping
any of us communicate about what we mean (this
particular sub-thread being a darn good example).
Um, Alain, I agree that the term 'simulationist' certainly hasn't helped
you and John Kim understand each other, and perhaps hasn't ever helped you
understand anyone. But I don't think it's a valid generalization to say
it hasn't helped 'any of us communicate about what we mean'.
The term has helped me a lot in understanding what the games of posters
here are like, which is important to understanding examples that they
give. It has also helped me understand certain games that don't involve
anyone on r.g.f.a. There are others here who seem to consider it a useful
term as well.
Even this particular subthread has been useful to me - I'm beginning to
understand that what you mean by 'simulationist' is probably what I, and
possibly John Kim, mean when we say 'realistic' - that you don't care as
much about the directed/natural dichotomy. That's useful information to
have.
If the group has a habit of always skipping travel, it
should eventually become obvious to the characters that:
"eh, nothing ever happens when we travel, no matter
how dangerous the road". Once that happens, the
decision making process of the GM has affected the IC
view of what is happening and, when that happens, I
believe we are not longer "simulating".
Sure. Which is why a simulationist gamesmaster should take into account
how dangerous the road is when deciding whether and how to abstract each
trip.
Warren J. Dew
Ennead
jh...@columbia.edu wrote:
: Hi, Sarah! Welcome back. Nice article on the narrative
: stances: I do have some observations.
: First, the Character stance is a very different beast from
: Audience/Author/Actor. The latter three all view the game as
: a narrative -- they differ mainly in how the *act* to participate
: in that narrative, not in how they view it. The Character
: stance does not view the game as a narrative per se.
The Character does view the game as narrative -- as the
narrative of daily life. The character, in fact, is *incapable*
of viewing the game in any other way, unlike the player, who
has a much wider range of options available to him.
It seems that I'm using the term "narrative" in a
slightly different sense than you are. I also feel that I
may have been unclear about what I mean by the "narrative of
the game."
The "narrative of the game" is really the narrative
of the IN-game. In other words, it is composed of and formed
from the Stuff That Happens within the game world. Stuff Happens,
and people then form that stuff into narrative. Narrative is
the way people organize events in their minds, whether these
events be real or fictive.
Describing role-playing games as the narrative of the
IN-game is so common and natural that it seems to go unnoticed
most of the time. "What happened at last night's game?"
"Well...Kalgon finally decided to go for himself to that monolith
to see if he could sense anything there..."
This is the narrative of the in-game. From another
perspective, what happened was that Bob and Joe and Sally all
showed up at Mike's house at around 7:00 pm and sat around a
table and talked to one another, pretending to be some fantasy
characters named Kalgon and Baldric and Mephisto, and then at
about 9:00 they all stopped to eat some pizza... But that is
not what is generally meant by the question "what happened at
the game last night," and everyone knows it. The question,
and its anticipated answer, assume a view of the in-game as
the relevant narrative.
If you are an immersive player, or if you just prefer
to view the game primarily from the stance of the Character, then
you are necessarily viewing the game as narrative. This is a
very different perspective than that of the player who primarily
views the game as Game, or the game as Interpersonal Dynamic,
or the game as Psychotherapeutic Exercise, or what-have-you.
Viewing the game as narrative is a very different
kettle of fish than viewing the game as Game, and I think
that the distinction bears some emphasis. A game, for example,
might be described as "too easy," or as "unfair." Narrative,
whether that of fiction or of real life, is not evaluated
along those terms. (Well...all right, people *do* complain
that "life is unfair," but I hope you can see the distinction
in meaning between that statement and one that "the game was
unfair.") Narratives may be "too simplistic" or "too obvious,"
but they are not really "too easy" in the way that a game
might be. Ones daily life may be boring, or unsatisfying,
or tedious, but one would not label it as "too easy" as one
might label the same life viewed as Game.
(The big exception to this rule that I can think of
is the murder mystery, which a reader might consider "unfair"
or "too easy," but this is because a murder mystery is not
read just as narrative, but also as a kind of a Game.)
: If you want to restrict the stances to discussion of
: *narrative*, I am confused as to why it is in here at all.
Well, I think that the two major ways in which games
*are* viewed (by most people here, at any rate) are as
Narrative and as Game. And given the high proportion of
Immersive players we have on this newsgroup, I think that
the perspective of the game-as-narrative is an important one
to examine.
It seems that people have been reading "narrative"
to mean "fictive narrative only." That was not my intent,
and I'm sorry for the confusion over it. The definition of
narrative I've been using is a very common one, and I did
not realize that it had such a power to mislead.
Of course, I agree with you that the stance of the
Character *does* differ significantly from those of the other
three: the Character views the events as real, the other
three figures recognize them as fictive. The overriding
paradigm, however -- that of the in-game narrative as the
text under consideration -- is shared by all four stances.
: -*-*-*-*-*-*-
: Well, (and this also goes to Kevin), I think it is
: unrealistic to expect that use of the terms will be restricted
: to discussion within a particular metaphor or will be kept to
: a particular intent.
No, I understand that. I certainly do not expect the
terms to be restricted to this particular model -- in the case
of the term "Character," this would be madness. ;)
I did feel, however, that the model itself had perhaps
not been really *understood,* and it was this that I was trying
to rectify.
: I think it is only natural that people
: will try to relate the metaphor of the Stances to their own
: games, which probably do not use the same metaphor.
So do I. I do think, though, that the metaphor is
shared by a number of people who think that they do not share
it, if you get my meaning. The association of the term "narrative"
with *fictive* narrative only is, from my point of view, most
unfortunate.
I find the distinction between game-as-narrative and
game-as-game a very interesting one, as I think that it is on
this schism that much communication on this newsgroup has
tripped and faltered in the past.
: Frankly, I think there was just as much confusion over the
: stances even when discussion was restricted to the narrative
: metaphor. Confusion on a newsgroup is pretty much inevitable.
Sing it, Brother.
Really, I do know that, John. Nonetheless, trying to
clear up the confusion is pretty much what we all spend our
hours *doing* here, so you'll forgive me if I continue trying.
Even if I only end up making the confusion worse. ;)
: -*-*-*-*-*-*-
: I would agree with this, but there is clearly an overlap.
: The model you have includes two viewpoints: the character viewing
: his world, and the participants viewing the narrative of the game.
Yes. Although I would argue that the character is also
viewing the narrative of the game.
: Other viewpoints can be added to this: say the "Tourist" stance
: who passively looks at details of the world without regard for
: the narrative.
Hmmm. The "Tourist" is a tricky bloke, IMO, because the
details of the world are, in many ways, a part of the narrative
of the game. One might, however, wish to distinguish between
the parts of the in-game that are actually played out, and those
that are conveyed out-of-game as world elucidation or even as
world-building-for-its-own-sake.
Is my written history of Tympania A narrative? Certainly
it is.
Is it the SAME narrative as the narrative of the Isrillion
campaign? No, it is not, although the two do overlap.
Here, to my mind, lies the rub.
I tend to think that the Tourist is still viewing the
game as narrative. The narrative that interests him, however,
is not necessarily the narrative of the game per se -- the game
as played -- and this gets into tricky territory. It begs the
question of what the game *is,* which is never a good feeling. ;)
Since any game of sufficient complexity consists of an
enormous number of overlapping narratives, however, I don't know
that I believe that the Tourist exists outside of the paradigm
of game-as-narrative. No two participants in a game are going
to be reading the same text. The Immersive player, for example,
views the narrative overwhelmingly from the stance of Character,
which means in practice that the narrative she perceives in
the game is going to be quite different than the narratives
perceived by the other players. (There are quite a few games
I played so immersively that I could not on my *life* tell you
what they might have seemed to be "about" from an Audience
perspective; talking to others who also played in those games
is always a sort of revelation to me.)
I would say that the Tourist is definitely reading
the game as narrative. He might do so from the perspective
of Character (the IC tourist or historian) or Author (the
world-builder) or Audience (the passive appreciator and
evaluator of the game world you describe above), but he is
still concerned with the narrative of the game world.
Contrast this behavior with that of the designer
of rules systems, or the evaluator of the interpersonal
dynamics of the players, or the GM designing his adventure
to be properly balanced in terms of game balance and "challenge,"
and I think that the distinction becomes fairly obvious.
-- Sarah
Ennead
Psychohist <psych...@aol.com> wrote:
: Consider the case of someone who ad-libs a humorous line, without thinking
: about it - just to make a spur of the moment joke. But assume that it's
: at the character level - say, the humor of the statement can only be
: understood in the context of the character's world, not of the player's
: world.
What a good example!
Yeah, I'd say that in cases like that, the player is viewing
the narrative as Actor. He's looking _into_ the narrative of the
in-game, snatching the persona of one of the characters _out_ of
that context, and then "wearing" the character to make a joke.
That seems to me a very good example of the Actor's approach to
the narrative, doubly so because it reflects the fundamental
playfulness, the mercurial quality, that I tend to think of as
characteristic of the Actor's approach.
: I'd argue that the player is in actor mode here. In fact, I could argue
: that this kind of thing characterizes actor mode better than 'portrayal' -
: to the extent that there's a motivation for the throwaway gag line, it's
: to entertain the rest of the participants, the traditional purpose of
: actors.
Agreed. Not that the Actor can't be serious, of course,
but I do think of this type of toying with the narrative elements
as something for which the perspective of the Actor is very
well-suited.
-- Sarah