Over time, the (Forge) dialogue re nar/sim/gam ended up coming down to a question of creative agenda -- specifically, what are the players creative agenda, and how are they pursuing that by interacting with the game.
In gamism, that's easy -- their agenda is to be challenged and overcome those challenges with a chance of failure, and the game allows them to pursue it by giving them challenges and letting them succeed or fail at them, and rewarding them for doing so.
In simulationism, that's hard -- their agenda is to make a consistent and believable X (where X is a simulated reality, a believable emulation of a genre or world, or whatnot), and they foster it by ? (where the Big Model has a big problem shoehorning Sim into its model in a coherent fashion).
In narrativism, that's interesting -- the player agenda is to have a compelling and coherent story, but having the GM provide such a story isn't an interesting game, or, really, much of a game at all. So the game supports the agenda by letting player actions influence and create the story, and making player choices meaningful in directing the choices; having the story develop from play and directing play to produce a coherent story.
Basically, the model is all about player empowerment -- regardless of creative agenda. This is a problem for Simulationism, because if you put it into the same box as Gam/Nar, rather than an entirely different box entirely, Sim is close to the antithesis of player empowerment (if you put it into a different box, you get Sim/Gam and Sim/Nar, both of which work better as long as you remember that the game is first about being a game or about creating a story, and only then about following your rules and having a coeherent dream), but it works just fine for the other two skews.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-04-10 09:15 pm (UTC)Over time, the (Forge) dialogue re nar/sim/gam ended up coming down to a question of creative agenda -- specifically, what are the players creative agenda, and how are they pursuing that by interacting with the game.
In gamism, that's easy -- their agenda is to be challenged and overcome those challenges with a chance of failure, and the game allows them to pursue it by giving them challenges and letting them succeed or fail at them, and rewarding them for doing so.
In simulationism, that's hard -- their agenda is to make a consistent and believable X (where X is a simulated reality, a believable emulation of a genre or world, or whatnot), and they foster it by ? (where the Big Model has a big problem shoehorning Sim into its model in a coherent fashion).
In narrativism, that's interesting -- the player agenda is to have a compelling and coherent story, but having the GM provide such a story isn't an interesting game, or, really, much of a game at all. So the game supports the agenda by letting player actions influence and create the story, and making player choices meaningful in directing the choices; having the story develop from play and directing play to produce a coherent story.
Basically, the model is all about player empowerment -- regardless of creative agenda. This is a problem for Simulationism, because if you put it into the same box as Gam/Nar, rather than an entirely different box entirely, Sim is close to the antithesis of player empowerment (if you put it into a different box, you get Sim/Gam and Sim/Nar, both of which work better as long as you remember that the game is first about being a game or about creating a story, and only then about following your rules and having a coeherent dream), but it works just fine for the other two skews.