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Chauncymancer
2010-10-14, 06:37 PM
Obviously GNS theory is an incomplete oversimplification when applied to players, but what about Games?
Games are simpler than people, and more general: Exactly suited to broad strokes and generalizations. Therefore I ask: How well does GNS theory work for explaining new (to the prospective player) games? Does explaining a system using GNS terms tell you anything important about whether or not you want to play a game? Or buy the game? Or RUN the game?

Chauncymancer
2010-10-14, 06:53 PM
I guess I need to edit this:

I did not realize that GNS was designed as a system criticism. How effective is it as a system ... system?

Also, how did flamewars on the subject get to the point that GNS was applied to non How-well-does-this-game-do questions?

dsmiles
2010-10-14, 07:11 PM
I'm in the dark here...GNS?

Amphetryon
2010-10-14, 07:21 PM
Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist Theory. It posits that all games, gamers, and gaming styles fit more or less neatly into one of those three categories, with some spillover. Getting agreement on the accuracy of this position is slightly easier than herding greased cats. Rabid proponents are often met with equally rabid detractors.

Raum
2010-10-14, 07:21 PM
I guess I need to edit this:

I did not realize that GNS was designed as a system criticism. How effective is it as a system ... system?Here's some reading for you. (http://whitehall-paraindustries.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rpg-theory-has-bad-rep-part-i.html) The biggest single criticism of GNS as a theory is simply that it completely fails to follow the scientific method. Even so, it retains some vocal adherents.

dsmiles
2010-10-14, 07:25 PM
Ok. Read some wiki on GNS. I have three words for whomever came up with that theory:

Are you serious?
Really?
Mutually Exclusive?
Gimme a break!
WTF were you thinking?

(OK, maybe a few more than three.)

Glimbur
2010-10-14, 07:34 PM
Therefore I ask: How well does GNS theory work for explaining new (to the prospective player) games? Does explaining a system using GNS terms tell you anything important about whether or not you want to play a game? Or buy the game? Or RUN the game?

It's not terribly helpful in all cases. For example, RISUS could be run for either gamism or narrativism. Wuthering Heights, likewise. Riddle of Steel is supposed to be very simulationist, but that doesn't mean the focus of the GM and players has to be on really accurate sword fights. I suspect it could also support court intrigue with only occasional fighting. Legend of the Five Rings has rule support for court intrigue, duels, magic, and mass combat so it could be gamist or narrativist.

It would be more helpful to ask the prospective players and GM what they like to see in a game and go from there... which doesn't really require a theory.

valadil
2010-10-14, 09:03 PM
I think GNS has some merit. At first it seemed ridiculous, but in the past couple years it's grown on me. I still disagree that gamism, narrativism, and simulationism are mutually exclusive. But there are certain points in a game where they become mutually exclusive. At these points, GNS becomes relevant.

Character death and dice fudging are two such points. Avoiding death and fudging dice are both narrativist decisions. People who live and die by the dice would rather stick with what the dice say. People who want realism would let a lead character die, even if that means his plots die with them.

I also think GNS is useful when referring to decisions based on GNS. DnD 4e for instance is almost purely gamist. It counts diagonal movement no differently than movement along either axis. This is totally unrealistic and makes no sense, but makes it easier to count movement. 4e is very consistent in these types of decisions and is thus easily categorized as a such.

Knaight
2010-10-14, 11:02 PM
GNS is useful, you just have to ignore certain elements. Most of which start with "mutually exclusive." If you treat all games as fitting all three to some extent, you can look at how much of each is in it, and you can compare multiple systems along all three axis. For instance, D&D 4e is more gamist than D&D 3.5, where 3.5 is more simulationist. Neither of them are very narativist. Moving on, there are some systems that are almost entirely in one of the three categories. Dogs in the Vineyard is narrativist with a tiny spash of gamism, and pretty much no simulationism, Rolemaster is simulationism with no interest towards narrativism, as for pure gamism, find an actual board game. Settlers of Catan maybe.

The Big Dice
2010-10-15, 10:12 AM
The biggest problem with GNS is the way that written up by people who thought Narrativist = best and Everything Else = losers. Of course that could just be a sign of the times that the theory was coined in.

But getting back to the terms used, they don't mean what you think they mean. Take Simultionism. The writers of the theory aren't even sure themselves what it means. Is it in-game exploration of the game world? Or is it a system that attempts to model how things react in the real world? Make your mind up!

But mostly the way almost the entire gaming community rejected the concept out of hand speaks volumes about it.

Tyndmyr
2010-10-15, 11:18 AM
GNS could be salvaged if you start with the following.

1. Toss out the custom vocabulary and redefining of words.

2. Toss out the silly idea that games MUST be focused on only one game type.

3. Support your division of gamers with actual research on gamers. This may bring up other categories, such as the social gamer, who doesn't much care about the specific details of the game as much as he plays to hang out with his friends.

Unfortunately, throwing out those three things tosses out pretty much all of GNS. The fact that GNS-designed games have not enjoyed any notable advantage over non-GNS designed games, as well as the general unpopularity of it in the community indicate that the theory is pretty heavily flawed.

dsmiles
2010-10-15, 11:21 AM
Maybe us gamers should get together and write our own theory?

Tyndmyr
2010-10-15, 11:23 AM
Maybe us gamers should get together and write our own theory?

Not a bad idea, but I suppose it'd need to start with some research. Any statistics students or the like out there in need of a project?

Grynning
2010-10-15, 11:26 AM
My theory is that I like to play let's pretend games with rules and dice because it's fun.

In all seriousness, are we talking about a game design theory or a theory on gamer "types"?

If it's gamer types, isn't that kinda the point of the "Real Man, Real Roleplayer, Real Looney, Real Munchkin" things from years ago?

The Big Dice
2010-10-15, 11:27 AM
The problem with any kind of RPG theory is, no two groups play in the same way. It would be easier to come up with something to use to examine game systems than gamers.

That's my thinking, anyway.

dsmiles
2010-10-15, 11:31 AM
The problem with any kind of RPG theory is, no two groups play in the same way. It would be easier to come up with something to use to examine game systems than gamers.

That's my thinking, anyway.

Yer not alone. I don't think you can examine gamers either. To use the same terms: Gamist, Simulationist, etc. There's a little of each in all of us. How do you examine something so muddled to begin with? You'll just end up with no answers and more questions than when you started.

Tyndmyr
2010-10-15, 11:34 AM
You could probably rate how important each goal is to an individual player, as priorities might vary. Might be of some help.

But yeah, I think a lot of gamers would resist being described as entirely one type. I certainly believe I have a number of reasons for playing games, and for selecting the game systems I do. Reasons for the latter frequently include things like "well, everyone already knows how to play D&D 3.5, so I wont have to teach them".

Determining what players like, and trying to design games to match that is a worthy goal. Creating categories in advance, and trying to force gamers into them is not likely to be successful.

dsmiles
2010-10-15, 11:44 AM
Well, if I had to rate myself, it would probably look something like this*:

Gamist: 10%
Narrativist: 75%
Simulationist: 15%

*Disclaimer: All values are approximate estimates, and dependent on the game system used.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-10-15, 11:48 AM
I also think GNS is useful when referring to decisions based on GNS.
This is the hallmark of a useless theory :smalltongue:

Theories are only useful if they can make perscriptive statements like a Scientific Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory). Descriptive theories are nice if you lack a language about something, but there is nothing in GNS that adds to the discussion of RPG design; for example, calling something "gamist" tells me nothing new about a system that I didn't know before. Worse, the divisions drawn in GNS seem arbitrary at best: what separates a Gamist system from a Simulationist one? Can a game set in a fictional world (e.g. Heroic Fantasy, Cartoons) ever be Simulationist? Are diceless games Narritivist or Simulationist? How rigorous must a game be before it stops being Gamist?

Feh.

Of course, I have my own theory of game design (The Purposivist Game Paradigm, or "PDP") so I may be biased :smallwink:

Short version of PDP
At its core, every game has a purpose - something the designers were trying to accomplish when designing a system. Poorly designed games have purposes that contradict each other (e.g. heroic fantasy & simulation of real medieval life) and therefore have rules which work at literal cross-purposes. Well designed games are designed for purposes that don't conflict with each other and enunciate those purposes clearly through the fluff text and the design of the rules.

The Purposivist Design Paradigm therefore says that before designing a game you must lay out what its purpose is to be - and then include rules that serve only that purpose. Additionally, games can be judged as "good" or "bad" on the criteria of how well the rules serve the stated purpose and the degree of conflict between the stated purpose of the system and the purpose as revealed by the rules.
IMHO, this is how a Theory of RPGs should look: it is based on clear axioms and those axioms allow adherents to judge RPGs and gives guidance on how to build there own. As far as I can tell, GNS lacks these traits.

EDIT: You could use PDP to analyze individual gamers (i.e. what does each gamer seek to get out of a game) but that's not really it's point. To that end you can get a little more use out of GNS as both Gamist & Narrativist players are easy to identify. It is much harder to figure out what a Simulationist Player is, though - they look more like a subset of G or N types, where G-S looks for versimilitude in the rules while N-S looks for versimilitude in the RP.

dsmiles
2010-10-15, 11:53 AM
IMHO, this is how a Theory of RPGs should look: it is based on clear axioms and those axioms allow adherents to judge RPGs and gives guidance on how to build there own. As far as I can tell, GNS lacks these traits.

GNS lacks a lot more than those traits.

And PDP looks plausible as a game design theory.

The Big Dice
2010-10-15, 02:57 PM
Of course, I have my own theory of game design (The Purposivist Game Paradigm, or "PDP") so I may be biased :smallwink:

See, most games are based onthe idea of "Wouldn't it be cool if..." With everything following from there. Purpose isn't really part of the issue.

Though John Wick would say you should always know what the game you are writing is about. And that might not be anything even slightly connected to the genre you're writing in.

Oracle_Hunter
2010-10-15, 03:10 PM
See, most games are based onthe idea of "Wouldn't it be cool if..." With everything following from there. Purpose isn't really part of the issue.
Most mass-market games, perhaps, but they are - generally - overwritten and poorly constructed as a result.

That is rather my point - games like D&D are filled with "wouldn't it be cool if" points that are then rolled together without paying attention to how the various purposes interact. Even the TSR D&D rules were like this: they mixed "medieval life simulator" with "heroic fantasy" without trying to reconcile these two aims in a meaningful fashion. Other games (like SR) state one purpose in the fluff (cloak-and-dagger missions where contacts and connections are key) with another revealed purpose in the mechanics (elaborate combat simulations). These games would be better (under the PDP theory) if they did try to enunciate purposes for the game and then altered their rules to fit it.

Under PDP, games like D&D4 and Bliss Stage are great successes: they have rulesets tailored to clear and non-contradictory purposes. In fact, most of the best Indie RPGs (e.g. Burning Wheel) follow the basic intuition of PDP theory - design a game for a purpose, and focus on that purpose.

Morty
2010-10-15, 03:25 PM
The way I see it, GNS theory doesn't work for a very simple reason: it approaches the subject from an entirely wrong direction. Instead of looking at games and then analyzing them to see patterns and logic in how they're designed and played, it starts with a set of arbitrary rules and categories and attempts to force the entire RPG industry into them, calling everything that doesn't fit into the narrow categories as "incoherent" and therefore bad.

The Big Dice
2010-10-15, 11:08 PM
Under PDP, games like D&D4 and Bliss Stage are great successes: they have rulesets tailored to clear and non-contradictory purposes. In fact, most of the best Indie RPGs (e.g. Burning Wheel) follow the basic intuition of PDP theory - design a game for a purpose, and focus on that purpose.
Burning Wheel is based on Luke Crane having the thought, "Wouldnt it be cool if there was a game that used concepts and ideas that I liked instead of the ones that are out there?" D&D4 is based on the idea of "Wouldn't it be cool if we could get rid of all the balance issues people have with 3rd ed and replace them with a whole different set of issues?"

In fact, I can't think of a game that the words "Wouldn't it be cool if..?" dont work either as a route into the mindset of the game, or as a way of pitching it to players. Or as a thought to get the ball rolling to create something new and different. Or new and very much like other things, depending on your personal taste.

"Wouldn't it be cool if we played something that isn't D&D?" or "Wouldn't it be cool if we played laser sword weilding space samurai that ride round on nuclear powered horses?" or "WOuldn't it be cool if Dave stumped up for the pizza this week?"

Everything flows from that question. It's as true for RPGs as it is for TV shows, movies, comics and just about every other form of entertainment there is.

Tyndmyr
2010-10-15, 11:12 PM
This philosophy, while generally fairly hard to argue with, has disturbing implications for FATAL.

Knaight
2010-10-15, 11:25 PM
This philosophy, while generally fairly hard to argue with, has disturbing implications for FATAL.

FATAL just becomes a quite possibly insane person saying "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a game that perfectly simulated reality and mythology?".

Oracle_Hunter
2010-10-15, 11:27 PM
Everything flows from that question. It's as true for RPGs as it is for TV shows, movies, comics and just about every other form of entertainment there is.
Very well, you can have the "Wouldn't It Be Cool" ("WIBC") Theory of Game Design then :smalltongue:

From the perspective of PDP all games have purposes they are designed for - either explicitly or implied. The quality of a game is determined by how well those purposes work together and how faithful the mechanics are to the purposes of the game.

dsmiles
2010-10-16, 07:11 AM
FATAL just becomes a quite possibly insane person saying "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a game that perfectly simulated reality and mythology?".

Really? I thought it was, "Wouldn't it be cool to have a game that people couldn't play?" :smalltongue:

Raum
2010-10-16, 08:56 AM
From the perspective of PDP all games have purposes they are designed for - either explicitly or implied. The quality of a game is determined by how well those purposes work together and how faithful the mechanics are to the purposes of the game.That may well work as a way of critiquing games, I'm not sure it works from a game design quality aspect.

Look at the most popular systems out there...everything from D&D (all versions) to GURPS, WoD, BRP, FATE, and SW is a fairly general purpose system - they're flexible enough to support multiple genres and styles.

I wouldn't call it a theory, but I tend to view 'game systems as a language'. They exist largely to define terms and make it easier to describe game actions and events - easier for players to interact with the game.

Aotrs Commander
2010-10-16, 09:09 AM
That may well work as a way of critiquing games, I'm not sure it works from a game design aspect.

Actually, I think probably the most important part of rules design to have a clear idea of exactly what you are trying to model (even if "exactly" means to a large degree of abstraction) before writing any rules at all. You can usually tell when rules systems are written or have evolved from somebody designing the combat mechanics (or whatever) first, with the rest of the system trailing behind.

(If you do any amount of wargaming, you quickly find that far too many sets of rules - especially big and over-commercialised ones - commit this sin. (There are very few good sets of wargames rules, probably because wargames, until, comparitively recently, has been more hidebound by "we've always done it this way" even than RPGs.)

Raum
2010-10-16, 09:19 AM
Actually, I think probably the most important part of rules design to have a clear idea of exactly what you are trying to model (even if "exactly" means to a large degree of abstraction) before writing any rules at all. Granted. I've modified my statement to be more inline (I hope) with what I intended to say.

Measuring how well a designer met his goals is good from an employer's point of view. I'm not sure it is from a player's point of view. Most of us players just want to have fun in an imaginary setting. :) Whether or not the designer was able to successfully model 'wickets interacting with gizmos' is less important than whether or not the game play is engaging.

Aotrs Commander
2010-10-16, 09:30 AM
Granted. I've modified my statement to be more inline (I hope) with what I intended to say.

Measuring how well a designer met his goals is good from an employer's point of view. I'm not sure it is from a player's point of view. Most of us players just want to have fun in an imaginary setting. :) Whether or not the designer was able to successfully model 'wickets interacting with gizmos' is less important than whether or not the game play is engaging.

True, you can have fun with almost any game system; the aforementioned FATAL being an ovbious exception. (I myself have often used HeroQuest as a baseline RPG with which to corrupt the youth, er...I mean... ... No, actually, that's pretty much exactly what I mean.) And a good DM covers far more of the ills in an RPG than in a wargame.

Rapid Fire and Flames of War, for example, are relatively popular systems for World War II gamers; even though they have more in common, with say, X-Men the animated series than to actual WW2 warfare. (and, at least in the former case, are classic examples of "make up the shooting rules first and give everything else lip-service.) But they are well suited for people who just want to move models up and down the table a bit and rolling dice and not having to concentrate too hard and have a few beers. (As far as more tactically accurate rules go, Manouvre Group is the best in that regard. However, it's tactically too hard for some people because is one of the best simulations you can get on the tabletop.)

On the other hand, a better mechanically-written system generally improves the quality of the game (especially from the DM's side of the screen).

Oracle_Hunter
2010-10-16, 06:42 PM
Measuring how well a designer met his goals is good from an employer's point of view. I'm not sure it is from a player's point of view. Most of us players just want to have fun in an imaginary setting. :) Whether or not the designer was able to successfully model 'wickets interacting with gizmos' is less important than whether or not the game play is engaging.
The reason why Purpose is central to PDP theory is that there is no reason for one system to try to do anything and rules designed for one kind of game tend to do other forms of game poorly.
As an easy example, D&D was never designed to run political intrigue games well - the rules are most detailed in terms of combat and social rules - when they exist - are rarely fine-grained enough to adjudicate sophisticated social interaction. One can argue that these things aren't best modeled by any rule set, but that provokes the question: why use D&D for this sort of game at all?

By contrast, a game designed with these sorts of conflicts in mind will have better rules for dealing with those conflicts. Burning Wheel is one such case - if you wanted to play a Heroic Fantasy game which focused more on character conflict than combat, I'd say you should always use Burning Wheel instead of D&D.
This is the main sin of the mass market game - they are designed at cross puposes and, in trying to do everything, they do little well. Literal "do anything" systems like GURPS are not true games; you can't pick up the GURPS rules and say "let's play" - you have to pick which subset of rules you're using. GURPS is not a game; it's a book that allows you to build your own game.

As a consumer, PDP theory is helpful because one presumably wants Truth In Advertising.
If you picked up Shadowrun, say, and expected to play a noir-themed game with cyberpunk & magical elements you would be dismayed by all space devoted to cyberware interaction and combat instead of developing contacts and unraveling plots. This is not to say Shadowrun isn't a fun game, but it isn't going to be fun to people who come into it expecting to play what it claims to be.

Ormur
2010-10-16, 09:00 PM
I'm no expert on RPG theory but for any sort of theory to have merit it has to be useful to analyse situations and yield some results. Obviously in a study of RPGs, which would probably fall under social sciences, you're dealing with people so you can't expect complete theories which match each and every observation as the ideal in physical sciences.

What I've read about GNS seems to indicate it did not match up to observed or reported preferences of most gamers. When studying subjects the right response isn't to dismiss things that don't fit and declare that people are doing it wrong by not following the theory. The theory should match the facts not vice versa. But even theories that don't managed to catch it all can still be applied to isolated situations.

My experience with D&D is different as a player and a DM. As a player simulation doesn't really matter to much to me although a carefully constructed world might be nice scenery. I like a good story peppered with interesting encounters, so maybe I'm more narrativist than the hack'n slash dungeon crawler. As a DM I'm the one trying to make sense of the world according to the rules and there I encounter the glaring mismatch between any sort of a realistic world and the level based system, simulationism versus gameism? But most of all you want to tell a good story that the players take a part in shaping. The hope of challenging them with appropriate encounters is also there. So my attitude is very muddled.