Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS

[Vahnavoi]

Let's start this thread with something I've already written on the topic lately:


From the Wikipedia article concerning GNS theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_theory):

"On December 2, 2005, [Ron] Edwards closed the forums on the Forge about GNS theory, saying that they had outlived their usefulness."

It was never a good theory. It was internet forum posts level, built on earlier internet forum posts level musings. Its successor, the Big Model theory of roleplaying games, did not fare much better. Here is what RPG museum has to say on the topic: (https://rpgmuseum.fandom.com/wiki/Big_Model)

"The Big Model has been significantly criticised and is no longer widely used, even by many of the people who liked it when it was new and current. For example, Vincent Baker has said that, while it was a useful tool to diversify thought around what role-playing games could be (i.e. that there was more than a single type of RPG that could be played), the attempt to categorise all RPGs and all players (e.g. using the GNS creative agendas) do not hold up, and furthermore RPG design has moved on and left the Big Model behind."

The only lasting legacy these theories had was the use of certain phrases, such as the words "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", by people who happened to be part of early 2000s internet hobby discussion. Majority of people who use those words, use them wrong, with no significant relationship to their special definitions in these theories. Outside of these theories, there isn't enough settled common usage for them to even net their own dictionary definitions.

So. Why talk about this now? Because I've been seeing the terms "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", as well as some other GNS/Forge terminology, show up again. It's not really a surprise. Let's be honest, these forums, and many people who come here, are relics of early 2000s internet era, in some cases, even earlier. So they still have both Forge and GNS in fresh memory, despite over a decade having passed since they were relevant.

So what exactly is my issue with that? Because it pains me when someone, in year 2024, can still say something like this:


I have seen GNS theory bantered around over dozens of forums and discord channels over the years, and its terms are relatively well-defined and understandable.

Let's put this into context via analogy. In the early 2000s, there was still significant on-going debate over whether Homo neanderthalensis had cross-bred with Homo sapiens, with popular science magazines publishing opinions backing both sides of the argument. Since then, genetic sequencing has settled the argument in favor of "yes, some interbreeding did happen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans), with subsequent research focusing on what effects this might still have.

If someone's confused by my choice of analogy, I can defend it later. Before then, a tip: it has to do with GNS idea of "incoherence". The main takeaway I want you to have, is this: appealing to the Forge or GNS today, is about as credible as appealing to pre-2000s ideas of how any kind of interbreeding between human species was impossible. Much less credible, really, since GNS was never an academic theory.

I'll later revisit this topic to discuss some other ideas that cover the same ground as GNS, without sharing it's pitfalls. Namely, it will be about aesthetics of gameplay, which is somewhat related to another recent thread. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?667765-The-7-Joys-of-Role-Playing-Games)

[Xervous]

Something like the eight types of fun (https://gnomestew.com/the-eight-types-of-fun/) ends up serviceable because unlike GNS theory, it looks at the various desires a system can satisfy instead of attempting to cram so many different concepts into three categories. Understanding that The Forge was rabidly pro Narativism it’s not surprising to see how lots of other reasons for playing got swept into the other two G & S categories as afterthoughts. Narrative appeal features as but one of eight in ‘eight types’. GNS theory leads a person to sort the appeal of role playing into one of: Narrative where the essential concern is the formulation of a story, Simulation where the concern is a system of definitions of cause and effect that drive a world, and the Gamism category where fun that’s neither narrative or simulation gets dumped.

It’s no coincidence that most statements that invoke GNS tend to focus on and play up the importance/value of narrative fun in a game, that’s where GNS was designed to put the spotlight.

[Unoriginal]

If you want an idea to die, when the idea has already been disproven and discarded at large, then making a thread about it doesn't help further that goal.

An idea dies when it's forgotten.

Sooner or later, the GNS model will disappear from all threads, all mouths, all minds. But doing more than explaining why that model was discarded to people who don't know why is fanning the idea's dying embers.

[KorvinStarmast]

Something like the eight types of fun (https://gnomestew.com/the-eight-types-of-fun/) ends up serviceable because unlike GNS theory, it looks at the various desires a system can satisfy instead of attempting to cram so many different concepts into three categories.
Speculation:

Maybe Edwards grew up as a Trinitarian, so he felt a need to have three things.
Maybe he was a disciple of Dialectal Materialism, and needed three things (thesis, antithesis, synthesis)...and then there were three.
Maybe he was a confused Monty Pythoneer, and thus when with the Big Model he used five, rather than three, it blew up on him as he forgot that the number of thy counting shall be three.

I agree with you that Robin Laws got it righter. Five plus three = eight.
I think that part of the reason that Laws' approach has longer legs is that he derived from a play aspect, not an attempt to attach academic rigor to his topic.
(IIRC, Edwards was / is / has a PhD in something).

It’s no coincidence that most statements that invoke GNS tend to focus on and play up the importance/value of narrative fun in a game, that’s where GNS was designed to put the spotlight.
For our OP: (regarding the article you cited)

Majority of people who use those words, use them wrong, I think that you need an adverb there, since you are modifying a verb rather than a noun.
...use them wrongly.. The blue pencil service offered at no additional charge.

To test this out in your brain, sub in the term incorrect for wrong, and you'll find yourself using "incorrectly" almost automatically.

[Tanarii]

It is unfortunate that GNS refuses to die. And a large part of that is because people keep rediscovering it and thinking it's meaningful or even a stroke of genius insight, as opposed to the particularly odorous part of gaming history that it is. Especially on forums, and worse on Reddit. At least on forums there's enough old fogies around to set the record straight.

It doesn't help that there are still a lot of big names who came out of The Forge that have actually produced some damn innovative games. Provided you're willing to discard the Oberoni so-called Fallacy and in some ignore the included philosophical preaching that is directly contradicted by the actual rules they present, Torchbearer (Crane) and the far bigger Apocalypse World (Baker) have uniquely brilliant concepts built in to the rules. And Blades in the Dark is directly inspired by Baker's AW/PbtA.

[King of Nowhere]

Let's start this thread with something I've already written on the topic lately:



So. Why talk about this now? Because I've been seeing the terms "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", as well as some other GNS/Forge terminology, show up again. It's not really a surprise. Let's be honest, these forums, and many people who come here, are relics of early 2000s internet era, in some cases, even earlier. So they still have both Forge and GNS in fresh memory, despite over a decade having passed since they were relevant.

So what exactly is my issue with that? Because it pains me when someone, in year 2024, can still say something like this:



Let's put this into context via analogy. In the early 2000s, there was still significant on-going debate over whether Homo neanderthalensis had cross-bred with Homo sapiens, with popular science magazines publishing opinions backing both sides of the argument. Since then, genetic sequencing has settled the argument in favor of "yes, some interbreeding did happen" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans), with subsequent research focusing on what effects this might still have.

If someone's confused by my choice of analogy, I can defend it later. Before then, a tip: it has to do with GNS idea of "incoherence". The main takeaway I want you to have, is this: appealing to the Forge or GNS today, is about as credible as appealing to pre-2000s ideas of how any kind of interbreeding between human species was impossible. Much less credible, really, since GNS was never an academic theory.

I'll later revisit this topic to discuss some other ideas that cover the same ground as GNS, without sharing it's pitfalls. Namely, it will be about aesthetics of gameplay, which is somewhat related to another recent thread. (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?667765-The-7-Joys-of-Role-Playing-Games)

you are making two major mistakes here.

the first is, you are confusing hard and soft science when you say it's as credible as pre-2000 ideas of interbreeding between neandertals and sapiens. in hard science you can get hard proof, you can have gene sequencing and come to an absolute conclusion that the theory is right or wrong. you can't do that in soft science, because you can't define things as exactly.
you can check the genes on neanderhtals and those on sapiens and look for correlations - using rates of divergence over time that you calculated with other experiments - to figure out how much of our DNA comes from neanderthals. but you cannot define exactly what a gamer is looking for, divide it into a bunch of subgoals, and assign to each of them an exact and measurable mathematical value.
that doesn't mean human sciences are rubbish. they do study things that are important to us, and that hard sciences cannot tackle. imperfect, fuzzy knowledge is better than no knowledge at all. but we must keep in mind what exactly the value of certainty of this knowledge is, before throwing alternate interpretations out of a window.

second, and most important for the argument: just because a theory is disproven, it doesn't mean it's entirely rubbish and should never, ever be mentioned again.
classic mechanics has been proven wrong a century ago, discarded for relativity. and yet, most engineers still use classic mechanics for practical applications. because classic mechanics is good enough, and more simple. for everything that's bigger than an atom and significantly slower than light, classic mechanics works. the airbag on your car, the calculations that make your plane fly and not crash on the ground, those are made based on wrong theories. guess what. and most chemists still use the valence shell electron pair repulsion (vsepr) model, though it was proven wrong. we do use it because it's good enough and it can be understood without taking years of additional training in quantum mechanics. then we also know there are a few exceptions where that theory doesn't work because you've got to use molecular orbitals, but i don't know anybody among my coworkers who would actually be able to calculate a molecular orbital.

So, I am not familiar with the GNS theory beyond the basics, and i'm not really sure what exactly it said and how it is supposedly disproven. but dividing a game into gamist, narrative, and simulation is well within my experience. I can totally attest that some players care more for some of those aspects than for others, and that a good game should combine the three in a good way. I can use that therminology, not because i am a relic of the old generation that still remembers the 2000' like it was yesterday - and really, i never was exposed to that theory during that time. No, I can use it because it makes intuitive sense, it can be understood without any special training, and it works well enough for my needs.
I have no idea what other theory is used nowadays; i do not follow that field, nor do I really care. maybe the eights types of fun is a better theory, but it's a lot easier to keep track of three factors, and plan things that should appeal to each of those factors, than it is to track eight different variables.

or, to put it in a greater perspective: we can always find a deeper, more exact, more complex explanation. but for the sake of simplicity, since our intellectual resources are limited, it's generally better to stick with the simplest model that works well enough for our needs.


It is unfortunate that GNS refuses to die. And a large part of that is because people keep rediscovering it and thinking it's meaningful or even a stroke of genius insight, as opposed to the particularly odorous part of gaming history that it is. Especially on forums, and worse on Reddit. At least on forums there's enough old fogies around to set the record straight.

It doesn't help that there are still a lot of big names who came out of The Forge that have actually produced some damn innovative games. Provided you're willing to discard the Oberoni so-called Fallacy and in some ignore the included philosophical preaching that is directly contradicted by the actual rules they present, Torchbearer (Crane) and the far bigger Apocalypse World (Baker) have uniquely brilliant concepts built in to the rules. And Blades in the Dark is directly inspired by Baker's AW/PbtA.

similarly, the idea that you need better gaming theories to design better games is flawed. it just doesn't seem to conform to reality.
d&d was invented 60 years ago, when nobody had any inkling of those ideas. d&d third edition was developed in the early 2000. now we supposedly have those better theories, and they led to the 5th edition... which some people prefer, while others prefer to stick with the third. can we really, objectively say that either edition is "better"? or are they just different, and appealing to different tastes? what does even "better" means in this context anyway?
football (soccer for americans) was invented over a century ago, nobody had any inkling of what made for a good game back then, but it's still a very good and popular game. several martial arts as a form of sparring date back over a millennia, and they are still popular. many basic card games were invented centuries ago, and they are still great. chess got most of its modern rules codified in the late middle age.
you don't need an exact theory on what makes a game "fun" to make a good game. in part because there is not an univocal, objectively measurable definition of what a "good" game is. again, it's a soft vs hard science thing.
I would say, in fact, when it comes to something that you can't really calculate, an emphyrical evolutionary approach works better. that is, try a lot of things, keep what works. try to modify things, keep what works. that's how we got the things that are still immortal today: people in the past tried many things to pass the time, those that worked better were passed on to this day

[Unoriginal]

can we really, objectively say that either edition is "better"? or are they just different, and appealing to different tastes?

Without going into a "which is better?" debate, it's important to note that there is a big difference between "how well-crafted X is", which can be objective if we look at given criteria, and "how fun X is to play", which is purely subjective.

To give an example: Overwatch has objectively better graphics than Golden Eye 64. But some people can have more fun playing Golden Eye 64 regardless of how the characters and environment look.

[NichG]

I mean the real issue seems to come down to the idea of incoherence underlying GNS rather than any particular categorization - e.g. the idea that once you identify any particular set of differences between groups of people, then necessarily anything you do to try to satisfy those different groups will be mutually exclusive. So its an approach to game design that throws out the idea that compromise is possible, or that people might actually like more than one thing or want a diverse 'diet' in their gaming...

GNS in particular is not even necessarily un-useful as a way to get out of a rut of thinking about everything in terms of your first RPG. I mean, even now on these forums you still get people talking about freeform gaming as if it were unthinkable that anyone could ever actually enjoy it, so 'failing to understand wildly different kinds of play' is a thing and something, even a massively incomplete thing, that tries to span a larger space is helpful... But when you say 'yeah, now that we have these categories, you must pick one and devote your whole game to that or your game sucks', that's harmful.

[kyoryu]

Speculation:

Maybe Edwards grew up as a Trinitarian, so he felt a need to have three things.
Maybe he was a disciple of Dialectal Materialism, and needed three things (thesis, antithesis, synthesis)...and then there were three.
Maybe he was a confused Monty Pythoneer, and thus when with the Big Model he used five, rather than three, it blew up on him as he forgot that the number of thy counting shall be three.

He was building on the earlier categorization of GDS. Which, frankly, maps a lot closer to what people think of when they hear "GNS" and doesn't have nearly the same level of baggage.


I agree with you that Robin Laws got it righter. Five plus three = eight.
I think that part of the reason that Laws' approach has longer legs is that he derived from a play aspect, not an attempt to attach academic rigor to his topic.
(IIRC, Edwards was / is / has a PhD in something).

Also, Edwards was really really bad about explaining things, his theory was clearly aimed at promoting his preferred playstyle, very few people outside of his inner circle would agree with how things got characterized, and Edwards used some really really bad points - saying that people that played specifics types of games had brain damage, and then doubling down on that, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The entire idea that a game that didn't stick clearly to one of his categories was "incoherent" and therefore bad (despite their popularity and the love for them) also didn't help.

Which doesn't make him wrong, but it definitely means that people outside of the inner circle often ended up with vehement and often emotional arguments against the theory. OTOH, Laws' viewpoints are more descriptive, less prescriptive (he doesn't claim that the categories or goals are inherently opposed), has avoided most inflammatory language, and most people that have seen it at least sort-of-agree with the descriptions of what they like.

There's also the Cultures of Play (https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html) article, which I have some pretty strong quibbles with, but is a good general way of thinking about games (I'd split storygames into storygame/narrative games, and Classic into about three different things).


So, I am not familiar with the GNS theory beyond the basics, and i'm not really sure what exactly it said and how it is supposedly disproven. but dividing a game into gamist, narrative, and simulation is well within my experience.

The problem is that those words, within GNS, don't really mean what people usually intuitively think they mean. I'd rather people use GDS (Gamism, Dramatism, Simulationism) which actually does map what they intuitively sound like. Like, that idea of three goals? That's a reasonable idea, though I find it simplistic and missing a bunch of stuff (for instance, both linear games and narrative gaming would likely fall under 'dramatism', when they're pretty opposed styles)


or, to put it in a greater perspective: we can always find a deeper, more exact, more complex explanation. but for the sake of simplicity, since our intellectual resources are limited, it's generally better to stick with the simplest model that works well enough for our needs.

The question is "what utility do we expect to gain from it?" I think GNS fails on most definitions, if you use the terms the way that they are meant. Even the closer-to-intuitive GDS has some flaws in it. The utility I expect to get from a theory like this is either going to be predictive (guidelines to make a good game) or descriptive (if you like this type of game, you'll probably like this game).


similarly, the idea that you need better gaming theories to design better games is flawed. it just doesn't seem to conform to reality.
d&d was invented 60 years ago, when nobody had any inkling of those ideas. d&d third edition was developed in the early 2000. now we supposedly have those better theories, and they led to the 5th edition... which some people prefer, while others prefer to stick with the third. can we really, objectively say that either edition is "better"? or are they just different, and appealing to different tastes? what does even "better" means in this context anyway?

You have to define "better". Better at what? It's usually works best to define "better" in terms of "meeting some goal". 3rd and 5th ed of D&D meet different goals and desires. It's like, which is better, steak or sushi?


football (soccer for americans) was invented over a century ago, nobody had any inkling of what made for a good game back then, but it's still a very good and popular game. several martial arts as a form of sparring date back over a millennia, and they are still popular. many basic card games were invented centuries ago, and they are still great. chess got most of its modern rules codified in the late middle age.
you don't need an exact theory on what makes a game "fun" to make a good game. in part because there is not an univocal, objectively measurable definition of what a "good" game is. again, it's a soft vs hard science thing.

I would say, in fact, when it comes to something that you can't really calculate, an emphyrical evolutionary approach works better. that is, try a lot of things, keep what works. try to modify things, keep what works. that's how we got the things that are still immortal today: people in the past tried many things to pass the time, those that worked better were passed on to this day

For sure! That type of iterative approach is always what I'm going to recommend, though a good theory can help guide the iteration. I don't know if we've really hit a good theory, though.

[Easy e]

3 things are a lot easier to remember than 8. I am just an idiot in the business world, and I have always been taught to keep any categorization in 3-4 max. More than that and folks will not recall it without a cheat sheet. Perhaps that is why it hangs on, because it is easy and simple to recall the basics.

I tend to think of it as the old Business adage of "You can have cheap, good, or fast; choose 2". So the high-level idea is very simple and ancient. Sure, there are ways to get all 3, but typically that involves a whole lot of technical knowledge and expertise, and degrees of statistical analysis. Does that mean the general idea has been "disproven" or is it still a useful framework, even if there is a lot more beyond the catchphrase?

That said, there is still a pretty big discussion and several theories on what makes something "fun". 8 Ways of Fun is one. 4 types of players per Magic another. I have heard a different method using 4 (or 5) in relation to video game designers. I have seen some argue that you can not design for "FUN" because the definitions of it are mutually exclusive by player. However, I am not sure there is a lot of scientific consensus on what "FUN" is, just a lot of people claiming they know what it is.

[KorvinStarmast]

@kyoryu
The six cultures was a nice essay, bookmarked. Thanks. :smallsmile:

[Darth Credence]

My favorite thing about this thread is that I have no idea what the forge is or what GNS is, and coming to see what you are talking about has given me no idea other than, "Not even worth talking about." I will now be on my way, taking the implied advice of those who do know about it and not learning.

[kyoryu]

My favorite thing about this thread is that I have no idea what the forge is or what GNS is, and coming to see what you are talking about has given me no idea other than, "Not even worth talking about." I will now be on my way, taking the implied advice of those who do know about it and not learning.

I think that is the best lesson you can take from this thread.

[Vahnavoi]

Something like the eight types of fun (https://gnomestew.com/the-eight-types-of-fun/) ends up serviceable because unlike GNS theory, it looks at the various desires a system can satisfy instead of attempting to cram so many different concepts into three categories.

Looking at that article, it refers to the same paper (https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf) from which I get aesthetics of play, referred to above, and these "eight types of fun" are a paraphrase of the eight aesthetics named there.


Understanding that The Forge was rabidly pro Narativism it’s not surprising to see how lots of other reasons for playing got swept into the other two G & S categories as afterthoughts. Narrative appeal features as but one of eight in ‘eight types’. GNS theory leads a person to sort the appeal of role playing into one of: Narrative where the essential concern is the formulation of a story, Simulation where the concern is a system of definitions of cause and effect that drive a world, and the Gamism category where fun that’s neither narrative or simulation gets dumped.

It’s no coincidence that most statements that invoke GNS tend to focus on and play up the importance/value of narrative fun in a game, that’s where GNS was designed to put the spotlight.
I would argue "simulationism" is even more of a wastebin category in GNS than "gamism". "Simulationism" in GNS has only strenuous relation to simulating anything. The idea of simulation as core roleplaying game element is more domain of the even older GDS and wargamer gripes commented on by Gygax all the way back in 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide.

At the other end, while "gamism" and "simulationism" are too broad, "narrativism" is too narrow and doesn't actually cover all of the ground narrative covers in MDA (above), nevermind academic narratology. Briefly, Ron Edwards's concept of narrative and theme are too tightly wrapped around moral dilemmas. Then there's R.E.'s specific anti-"railroading" ideas baked into the concept which are frequently not followed or even understood by people advocating for narrative games.

---


If you want an idea to die, when the idea has already been disproven and discarded at large, then making a thread about it doesn't help further that goal.

An idea dies when it's forgotten.

The context of this thread, clearly, is that people have been more keen to forget that the ideas were disproven, than the ideas themselves. :smalltongue:

Not too long ago, I happily thought exactly like you. Unlike you, I consider resurgence of these things to be a sign that the idea isn't dying on its own, and may need some killing. This is hardly unusual. Sometimes, bad ideas get popular anew. I don't think the correct response is to wait for new damages to occur before speaking up.

---


=KorvinStarmastI think that you need an adverb there, since you are modifying a verb rather than a noun.
...use them wrongly.. The blue pencil service offered at no additional charge.

It's up to the reader to decide whether I made a typo, or used a faulty construction on purpose for emphasis. :smallwink:

---


So, I am not familiar with the GNS theory beyond the basics, and i'm not really sure what exactly it said and how it is supposedly disproven.

Uh, have you considered this, right here, is your issue? I named the concept that has been disproven in the analogy you are criticizing: incoherence. GNS posits three mutually exclusive creative agendas. If GNS was true, we should be seeing games crafted to specific standards be much more succesful than games which mix and match elements. This has not happened anywhere. The one empirical prediction GNS can reasonably make, has empirically failed to match reality. Any refinement of the theory that could deny or avoid this, runs into other issues. Which leads us to this:


the first is, you are confusing hard and soft science when you say it's as credible as pre-2000 ideas of interbreeding between neandertals and sapiens.

Uh, no. It's noted by me, twice in my post and once in the analogy you are criticizing, that GNS is not an academic, nevermind scientific, theory. Leaving the analogy aside, GNS doesn't fulfill scientific standards of even the softest of soft sciences. This is an argument against it, not in its favor. Moreover, this means your extended tangent about Newtonian mechanics completely misses the mark. Newtonian mechanics still has applications because it produces predictions that are still reliable in everyday domains. There is no proof for GNS doing this. Since you admit you have no comprehension of GNS "besides the basics", your anecdotal experience of its "usefulness" doesn't matter at all. You aren't actually using GNS - you are using words from GNS to mean whatever the hell you want.


or, to put it in a greater perspective: we can always find a deeper, more exact, more complex explanation. but for the sake of simplicity, since our intellectual resources are limited, it's generally better to stick with the simplest model that works well enough for our needs.

The basics of MDA, above, are five pages. Full explanations of both GNS and the Big Model are longer, but don't have any benefits over MDA. Due to your self-admitted ignorance of theory, you failed to check if there are better alternatives to clear even this very low bar.


[T]he idea that you need better gaming theories to design better games is flawed. [ . . . ] I would say, in fact, when it comes to something that you can't really calculate, an emphyrical evolutionary approach works better. that is, try a lot of things, keep what works. try to modify things, keep what works. that's how we got the things that are still immortal today: people in the past tried many things to pass the time, those that worked better were passed on to this day.

Oh, I totally agree games can be designed through trial and error, and that many good games can be and are being designed without any master theories of how to build games.

There is no logical reason why this stance would lead me to be unwilling to speak against theories that precisely call for abandoning trial and error in favor of pursuing badly defined creative agendas.

---

@Easy E: GNS does not boil down to a neat engineer's trilemma, using its terms in such a way is another case of misappropriating the words to mean something entirely different from the theory. Even if you find some use in it, it is not - get this - an example of GNS being useful.

Never you mind that you can do these kinds of trilemmas just as easily with aesthetics of play - just pick the three that are most relevant to the game you are making!

Now, as for M:tG and video game developers fairly consistently finding 4 to 5 types of players... those findings are (usually) based on factorial analysis of surveys. Something that, you know, an actual (soft) science might do. These findings have been used to criticize GNS, as explained even in Wikipedia article on GNS (already linked), because they do not support it. You see, nothing comparable was done to found GNS. It has three categories because someone on the internet thought three categories would suffice, and it wasn't even Edwards. So, yes, the discussion is on-going. Discussion being on-going isn't a reason to not move past obviously flawed theories.

[NichG]

Categorization (in a statistical sense) is more related to compression than prediction. The utility is whether it makes something very efficient to express, or sheds light on things you'd miss otherwise.

The idea of categories naturally implying mutual exclusion is the error, not that it's the wrong categories.

Also in the compression picture, there can't even really be correct or incorrect categories, just sets that are more or less efficient towards a particular communication goal. In that sense it's unlike any standard science, more like engineering... At best you can say that one category set dominates another for all possible goals.

[Tanarii]

similarly, the idea that you need better gaming theories to design better games is flawed. it just doesn't seem to conform to reality.

Agreed. Especially when the folks in question created games whose mechanics frequently directly contradict the (IMO elitist) theory-mongering they include in the same books. Kevin Siembeida and Eric Wujic also did (and probably still do) the same in their games.

One thing they did stick to is the idea that (paraphrasing) a given game should be designed to do one specific thing. As opposed to try to be generalist. AW and BitD are eminently hackable to do different specific things, which pans out as the groups of games known as PbtA and FitB. But they don't pretend to be general one size fits all games.

Kind of like D&D 4e and PF2e are designed to be Dungeons and Dragons Tactical Battles, but are often considered to be far more generalist. Or that D&D 5e was designed to be as general as possible and as a result doesn't do Tactical Battles, OSR, or non-D&D stuff in general (intrigue or heist especially) very well.

[Jason]

To give an example: Overwatch has objectively better graphics than Golden Eye 64. But some people can have more fun playing Golden Eye 64 regardless of how the characters and environment look.
Overwatch may have graphics that take more powerful hardware to run or take up more memory space, but that does not make them objectively better than the graphics used in Golden Eye 64.

"Better" is always a subjective term. "Objectively better" is an oxymoron.

The three booklets of Original D&D have a smaller page count, fewer color illustrations (as in none), and fewer total words than the three D&D 5E core hardcovers. That does not mean D&D 5E is objectively superior to Original D&D. It doesn't even mean that it is a more complicated game system than Original D&D.

[Vahnavoi]

@Jason: I find that to be a red herring. Yes, value judgements are subjective, but once such a statement has been agreed upon, objective claims can be made of how those values are pursued. F.ex. if we can agree that color illustration are a good thing for a game to have, then it makes perfect sense to say a game with none is worse, in that regard even if not overall.

This relates to the rest of discussion through aesthetics of gameplay, listed by MDA and equivalents. It shouldn't be a big ask to agree on the eight aesthetics named as goods a game can strive for. Once that is done, we can look at objective facets of games to rank them based on how they serve those goods.

I'd personally extend the list to cover various goods of printed products etc. physical aspects. The corollary being that yeah, OD&D likely objectively sucks in many respects compared to later products. I have no problem making these kind of evaluations of any other long-running game series I play. Let's be clear: I'm not "newer is better" guy. I play OSR games and spend way too much time steelmanning 1st edition AD&D alignment. You won't, however, see me defending 1st edition AD&D psionics anywhere. Why? Because they fail on logical-mathematical grounds. If someone responded to "1st edition psionics are objectively bad" with "badness is subjective!", I'd have to tell them: "okay. Explain what sort of values a person would need to have to find value in the system, and then show me one such person".

Please don't take this as an actual argument for "OD&D is objectively bad". I don't own OD&D books and have never played it, so I can't actually give a review of it.

[Jason]

@Jason: I find that to be a red herring. Yes, value judgements are subjective, but once such a statement has been agreed upon, objective claims can be made of how those values are pursued. F.ex. if we can agree that color illustration are a good thing for a game to have, then it makes perfect sense to say a game with none is worse, in that regard even if not overall.
Part of my point is that we can't in fact agree that having color illustrations are better than not having color illustrations.

"Better" is always a subjective term.

[Quertus]

So, here's pretty much where I stand:



So, I am not familiar with the GNS theory beyond the basics, and i'm not really sure what exactly it said and how it is supposedly disproven. but dividing a game into gamist, narrative, and simulation is well within my experience. I can totally attest that some players care more for some of those aspects than for others, and that a good game should combine the three in a good way. I can use that therminology, not because i am a relic of the old generation that still remembers the 2000' like it was yesterday - and really, i never was exposed to that theory during that time. No, I can use it because it makes intuitive sense, it can be understood without any special training, and it works well enough for my needs.

When I first joined the Playground, I would talk about "Realism". It was pointed out to me that, sometimes, when I used that word, what I really meant was "Verisimilitude". And sometimes what I mean is "Consistency".

When I was introduced to GNS terms (also on this site), and they were explained/defined to me (also on this site) I realized that, just like "Realism" vs "Verisimilitude", those words encapsulated meaning that was lacking from my vocabulary, that, sometimes, what you care about is making things "right", whereas sometimes what you care about is streamlining the rules to make them "playable" - Simulation vs Game. It's a definite, real, noticeable trade-off you can make between two outcomes of equal quality. Seemed good to add to my vocabulary, just like Verisimilitude. As an added bonus, GNS terms came with a 3rd word, "Narrative", for those crazy people who do things "for the Story", so I added that to my vocabulary, too. :smallwink:

Of course, being me, one of my many flaws is that I am very loose with my words, so there's whole sets of words I'll use almost interchangeably, like [Realism, Verisimilitude, Consistency, Coherence, Simulation, Accuracy], or [Efficient, Streamlined, Easy-to-learn, Game-play, Gamist, Playability], or [Plot Contrivance, Incoherence, Idiot Ball, Out-of-character, "For the story", Narrative, Unrealistic].

I think it's fair to say I'm not a fan of (any part of) GNS Theory, I just appropriated the terms, and abuse them as much as I do the rest of the English language.


The problem is that those words, within GNS, don't really mean what people usually intuitively think they mean. I'd rather people use GDS (Gamism, Dramatism, Simulationism) which actually does map what they intuitively sound like. Like, that idea of three goals? That's a reasonable idea, though I find it simplistic and missing a bunch of stuff (for instance, both linear games and narrative gaming would likely fall under 'dramatism', when they're pretty opposed styles)

The question is "what utility do we expect to gain from it?" I think GNS fails on most definitions, if you use the terms the way that they are meant. Even the closer-to-intuitive GDS has some flaws in it. The utility I expect to get from a theory like this is either going to be predictive (guidelines to make a good game) or descriptive (if you like this type of game, you'll probably like this game).

So... when I want to say I'm doing something because it'll make gameplay better, I say it's a "Gamist" concern; when I say I'm doing something because it maps to the fictional reality, I say it's a "Simulationist" concern. Ignoring that "Gamism Concern" and "Simulationism Concern" just sound silly (or that doing things for a "Gamism Reason" or "Simulationism Reason" just doesn't sound as good as doing them for a "Gamist Reason" or as "Simulationist Reason", or with G~/S~ Reasoning), am I using the terms the way GNS would, GDS would, both, or neither? Because (aside from the fact I'm me, and don't use my words consistently, like, at all) I feel I at least intend to use them the way I was told they were defined in GNS, which sounded intuitive.

Bonus question: the counterpoint to "Narrative Concern" (or Reason(ing)) would be... "Dramatic Concern" (or Reason(ing))? :smallconfused:

[kyoryu]

So... when I want to say I'm doing something because it'll make gameplay better, I say it's a "Gamist" concern; when I say I'm doing something because it maps to the fictional reality, I say it's a "Simulationist" concern. Ignoring that "Gamism Concern" and "Simulationism Concern" just sound silly (or that doing things for a "Gamism Reason" or "Simulationism Reason" just doesn't sound as good as doing them for a "Gamist Reason" or as "Simulationist Reason", or with G~/S~ Reasoning), am I using the terms the way GNS would, GDS would, both, or neither? Because (aside from the fact I'm me, and don't use my words consistently, like, at all) I feel I at least intend to use them the way I was told they were defined in GNS, which sounded intuitive.

Bonus question: the counterpoint to "Narrative Concern" (or Reason(ing)) would be... "Dramatic Concern" (or Reason(ing))? :smallconfused:

You're using the terms the way GDS would (which, again, I think is a reasonable-ish model though misses a lot).

GNS generally defines the terms in terms of exploration - of system (gamism), of the world (simulationism), or of theme (narrativism). Under GNS, Toon, GURPS, and Fate are all primarily simulationist games. As are linear, story-driven games like D&D running DragonLance.

[Unoriginal]

"Better" is always a subjective term. "Objectively better" is an oxymoron.

Person A tries to fire an arrow at the center of a target. They end up missing the target entirely.

Person B tries to fire an arrow at the center of the same target, in the same conditions. They hit the center of the target.


Are you declaring that B's performance cannot be described as objectively better than A's?


You can't measure fun or pleasure on objective bases, certainly, but there is such things as standards of quality that are objective.

If I buy two different backpacks for the same price, but one is so badly sewed together it breaks apart on the first day and the other lasts for years, then calling one purchase "objectively better" is not an oxymoron.




I'd personally extend the list to cover various goods of printed products etc. physical aspects. The corollary being that yeah, OD&D likely objectively sucks in many respects compared to later products.

If they were published today, the first D&D booklets would more than likely get the game company directly sent into a lawsuit-shaped hellscape, since there are artworks there straight up taken from Marvel comic books.

And you don't mess with Marvel's lawyers in 2024.

I'd say that "would destroy the company's finances if not immediately removed from sale" is a pretty good metric to say something objectively sucks.

[Vahnavoi]

Part of my point is that we can't in fact agree that having color illustrations are better than not having color illustrations.

"Better" is always a subjective term.

Who is this mystical "we"? Because I can likely go out on the street and get complete strangers to agree on that. More generally, it is in fact an objective requirement for the society I live in that a lot of people do agree on values and that that we can make conditionals bases on those values that are amenable to objective examination.

Seriously. Take a look at the named aesthetics of play in MDA. Which of those things you - you personally - would not be willing to nominate as a value for games?

[Satinavian]

So. Why talk about this now? Because I've been seeing the terms "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", as well as some other GNS/Forge terminology, show up again. It's not really a surprise. Let's be honest, these forums, and many people who come here, are relics of early 2000s internet era, in some cases, even earlier. So they still have both Forge and GNS in fresh memory, despite over a decade having passed since they were relevant.

So what exactly is my issue with that? Because it pains me when someone, in year 2024, can still say something like this:
I regularly see people use "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", but it is nearly two decades since i last have seen anyone use proper GNS.

Why is that ? Because people find some use in the concepts of "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", but have long given up on GNS, Edwards and Forge.

People find it useful, to describe certain play styles, preferences or even rules with those three terms. It helps to get ideas across. And yes, the use is not the same as in GNS. But i would not say "the people use the terms wrongly" and more "the use has shifted as no one is working in the GNS framework anymore". And yes, the current use is closer to the older, less elaborate GDS framework but as the term "Drama" nowadays has its own baggage, people will likely continue to use narrativism instead. People who liked simulation of Threefold did not exactly feel properly represented by how simulationism of GNS was used and vehemently disagreed about all the games they were associated with actually fit the category.




And why is GNS itself irrelevant ? Well, maybe it is because the idea to pursue purity in one of those agendas and how mixes are inconsistent never caught on. And of course the fact that the Forge only ever cared about NAR and never produced anything helpful for the other branches or, really, understood at all what was important there, hurt as well. And the latter is of course also a reason for the shift in use. Edwards was not the right person to properly define or write about gamism or simulationism given the poor understanding he had.

[Vahnavoi]

[P]eople find some use in the concepts of "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism" [. . . ] People find it useful, to describe certain play styles, preferences or even rules with those three terms. It helps to get ideas across. And yes, the use is not the same as in GNS. But i would not say "the people use the terms wrongly" and more "the use has shifted as no one is working in the GNS framework anymore".

Our chief disagreement is contained in this earlier phrase of mine:


Outside of these theories, there isn't enough settled common usage for [these terms] to even net their own dictionary definitions.

People like the words. Saying they like the concepts is a stretch, because there no non-equivocal concepts behind these terms. When someone says f.ex. "I like narrativist games" because they feel "this word sounds like it fits my personal definition of narrative game", the word is NOT helping them get an idea across - the only good response to that is "what do you mean by narrativism?". The alternative is to replace each instance of "narrativism" with narrative (and each instance of "simulationism" with simulation and each instance of "gamism" with game-like), but these are not clearer. Each of these terms has problems of usage to the point where I am forced to ask, how exactly are people finding them useful?

[King of Nowhere]

So, I am not familiar with the GNS theory beyond the basics, and i'm not really sure what exactly it said and how it is supposedly disproven.
Uh, have you considered this, right here, is your issue? I named the concept that has been disproven

no, my ignorance is part of my point: I do not need to know the gns theory to use terms from it - because using terms from that theory does not constitute an endorsment of the theory.

You act like everyone saying something like "this system is too gamist for my tastes, I prefer a more simulationist approach" was also carrying a big neon sign stating

THE GNS THEORY IS RIGHT IN EVERY ASPECT
No, that's not the case. we can use words like gamist or narrativist because they are useful descriptors, without that having anything to do with the GNS theory. Indeed, I challenge you to rephrase the sentence above in a way more suitable to your tastes, that's equally easy to convey and to read for the illiterate.
I bet most people using those words don't even know there's a theory in the first place. they use the words because they work and they are useful, that's all.


your anecdotal experience of its "usefulness" doesn't matter at all. You aren't actually using GNS - you are using words from GNS to mean whatever the hell you want.

my anectodal experience of its usefulness matters extremely, because that's exactly the point: the fact that people use words from gns to mean things that are more or less well agreed upon. you are complaining that people use words such as gamist or simulationist when they should not, because come from a wrong theory. I say that people should use them because they are useful. the fact that I - and others - find them useful is proof enough that they are useful. you are the one trying to prove a negative. when you try to prove a negative, a single case of the opposite is enough to make the demostration wrong.



the first is, you are confusing hard and soft science when you say it's as credible as pre-2000 ideas of interbreeding between neandertals and sapiens.
Uh, no. It's noted by me, twice in my post and once in the analogy you are criticizing, that GNS is not an academic, nevermind scientific, theory. Leaving the analogy aside, GNS doesn't fulfill scientific standards of even the softest of soft sciences. This is an argument against it, not in its favor. Moreover, this means your extended tangent about Newtonian mechanics completely misses the mark.


you are the one missing the mark. i don't care about gns, and that's never been the point. You can't talk of gaming theory - any piece of it - as if it was hard science.



Newtonian mechanics still has applications because it produces predictions that are still reliable in everyday domains. There is no proof for GNS doing this.

You are, once more, confusing "using some words that were first introduced by a theory" with "using the whole theory".




There is no logical reason why this stance would lead me to be unwilling to speak against theories that precisely call for abandoning trial and error in favor of pursuing badly defined creative agendas.


90% of people who use those terms never heard of those theories in the first place, and just use the words for convenience - with meanings that are generally agreed upon, as much as people can agree on softly defined concepts.

And I really don't get your crusade. You are trying to get people to stop believing in something they never believed in anyway. you are getting mad that people use some words because of associated meanings that are only mildly related to those words. you think everyone should spend time and resources into familiarizing with problems that are not their problems, and not really problems at all anyway, just for the sake of, perhaps, using a slightly more accurate therminology.

from my perspective, it would be like there are two lovers expressing love "from their hearts", and you burst out screaming"no! you don't love with your heart, you love with your brain - more precisely it comes from hormonal secretion in the hypothalamus! the theory that the heart is the source of emotions has been disproven centuries ago! I can't believe people still believe we think with our hearts! you must not say "i love you with all my heart", you must say "i love you with all my hypothalamus" instead! Go read some basic treaties on anathomy!"
Well, I will keep saying that I love people with my heart, just like I will say that I like a certain balance of gamist and simulationist elements, because they are good ways to convey ideas. I know exactly what those sentences mean, and people around me know exactly what those sentences mean, and if you are the only one disturbed because you read all kind of implied meanings into them, that's on you.


Our chief disagreement is contained in this earlier phrase of mine:



People like the words. Saying they like the concepts is a stretch, because there no non-equivocal concepts behind these terms. When someone says f.ex. "I like narrativist games" because they feel "this word sounds like it fits my personal definition of narrative game", the word is NOT helping them get an idea across - the only good response to that is "what do you mean by narrativism?". The alternative is to replace each instance of "narrativism" with narrative (and each instance of "simulationism" with simulation and each instance of "gamism" with game-like), but these are not clearer. Each of these terms has problems of usage to the point where I am forced to ask, how exactly are people finding them useful?

to me, that phrase is clear enough and effective enough at conveying its meaning.
what would you use instead to express the same concept?


My favorite thing about this thread is that I have no idea what the forge is or what GNS is, and coming to see what you are talking about has given me no idea other than, "Not even worth talking about." I will now be on my way, taking the implied advice of those who do know about it and not learning.
I came into this thread with no idea what the forge or gns was, and i googled it to be able to figure out why vahnavoi was so mad about it. i read about half a page, before concluding it wasn't really important. and then vahnavoi started referring to specific elements of it.
this is like streisand effect. by trying to kill the theory, vahnavoi is spreading knowledge of it to people who would have never known it in the first place.

[Vahnavoi]

.
to me, that phrase is clear enough and effective enough at conveying its meaning.
what would you use instead to express the same concept?

I have no clue, since nothing in context allows me to decipher it. You just read me explaining that these words have usage problems and what that means, without understanding that this is what it means.

Go on. Put these terms in a dictionary search. (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/narrativist) See what happens. Word not found. Did you mean narrative? If not, did you refer to GNS? Silly me, of course you didn't refer to GNS since by your own admission, you don't know anything about it.

So it must be narrative, then. Which meaning of narrative? (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/narrative) Which kind of narrative? And why would it make sense to talk of narrative games in contrast to simulations or games, since nothing in the common usage suggests these are contrasting or mutually exclusive terms?

[Satinavian]

And why would it make sense to talk of narrative games in contrast to simulations or games, since nothing in the common usage suggests these are contrasting or mutually exclusive terms?
Common usage suggests that narrative games are story focused. So people expect a plot, a dramatic arc and story conventions. All things not expected from common usage for simulation which implies modelling something mechanically and then following where that naturally leads.

That alone is already pretty useful, don't you think so ?



And if we go to people actually using those terms as shorthands - honestly, when was the last time they didn't understand each other ?

Language is a living thing. The words are used and understood. That alone is enough to validate them. Sure, it is a lingo of some niche group that won't ever enter the language at large because most people don't have any need to use special vocabulary to distinguish ways to roleplay. But that doesn't matter at all.


I tend to avoid these terms because of the GNS association, but it is not as if (similar but not identical) alternatives like Immersion, Drama and Challenge are so much better at getting your points across. And some like "Realism" are strictly worse.

[Vahnavoi]

@Satinavian: it's useful up to the point where someone points out "waitaminute, we can simulate narration". We can, in fact, get plot, dramatic arcs and story conventions from modeling things mechanically and following where that leads. "Narrative simulation" is coherent compound word in English.

EDIT:

As far as "when was the last time people didn't understand each other?":

How about today. If I go to a game shop and ask for a "narrativist" game, there are two options:

1) They give me a Forge game.
2) They have to do the bit about clarifying whatever the hell I mean, as just explained, because outside the theoretical framework it's a Hail Mary guess otherwise.

Sure, language changes. That doesn't mean it is always changing for good reasons or that we are neutral parties in its change. Here's some humorous (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/know-your-linguistic-philosophies) takes (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/prescriptive) on the topic (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/268) that nonetheless serve to carry the relevant point across. If your argument for using these terms is based on their usefulness in communication, I should be able to see a bit more useful communication with them.

[Satinavian]

@Satinavian: it's useful up to the point where someone points out "waitaminute, we can simulate narration". We can, in fact, get plot, dramatic arcs and story conventions from modeling things mechanically and following where that leads. "Narrative simulation" is coherent compound word in English.
And ?

I never said those things were mutually exclusive nor does common usage say so. GNS is dead.



How about today. If I go to a game shop and ask for a "narrativist" game, there are two options:

1) They give me a Forge game.
2) They have to do the bit about clarifying whatever the hell I mean, as just explained, because outside the theoretical framework it's a Hail Mary guess otherwise.
The same happens when i ask for an OSR game. Does that mean OSR is not a useful category just because only people deeply invested in RPGs might have heard of it ? (Also, even if i were to go to some rpg specialist store to ask for a narrativist game, i would probably get Fate or something powered by the apocalypse, not an actual Forge game. I might even get recommended WoD over a Forge game.)

[Vahnavoi]

@Satinavian: missed your answer while editing. Two points:

1) my point is about limits of expectations your comment rests on.
2 Since it appears you agree on those limits, then your answer to my question should've been something to the tune of "in that case, it doesn't make sense to use them in contrast to another, they're more serviceable as isolated descriptors".

EDIT:


The same happens when i ask for an OSR game. Does that mean OSR is not a useful category just because only people deeply invested in RPGs might have heard of it ?

This is a red herring. The usefulness of OSR label is a distinct discussion from other words. If you try to use it as analogy, then you have to remember that you and King Of Nowhere are arguing for usefulness of GNS terminology outside the context of GNS. The analogous argument for OSR, therefore, would be that OSR abbreviation has potential for useful communication between people who have no clue what OSR is beyond a superficial Google search. That may or may not be true, but it cannot salvage GNS terminology in any shape or form.

[Satinavian]

2 Since it appears you agree on those limits, then your answer to my question should've been something to the tune of "in that case, it doesn't make sense to use them in contrast to another, they're more serviceable as isolated descriptors".
Generally yes. Though there are situation where those ideas can come into conflict. You have to put in some extra work to have them play nice with each other or you just make a priority decision.
But that is not different from every other kind of perpendicular goals you could have. Satisfying several at once is harder, even if they are not technically at odds.


If you try to use it as analogy, then you have to remember that you and King Of Nowhere are arguing for usefulness of GNS terminology outside the context of GNSYes, outside of GNS, but inside the roleplaying community. I see those terms in use and understood in various RPG-forums in different languages i frequent, even in those where hardly anyone ever has heard of the Forge or Ron Edwards. I even see them used and understood in Larp-communities. That is enough utility for me.

And yes, the meaning is slightly different from how GNS understood them. Because no one cares for or references GNS. But they are clear enough, way clearer than other lingo terms like "Powergamer".

[Easy e]

You're using the terms the way GDS would (which, again, I think is a reasonable-ish model though misses a lot).

GNS generally defines the terms in terms of exploration - of system (gamism), of the world (simulationism), or of theme (narrativism). Under GNS, Toon, GURPS, and Fate are all primarily simulationist games. As are linear, story-driven games like D&D running DragonLance.

Thanks this was helpful to me, as was the link about the RPG styles history you posted earlier. I am starting to understand what GNS is so controversial.

I think I was also falling into the same trap as Quertus, in liking the basic and simple GDS and confusing it for GNS.

[KorvinStarmast]

I regularly see people use "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", but it is nearly two decades since i last have seen anyone use proper GNS.
GNS was improper to start with, which I think was the point laid out in the OP. Someone was trying to apply rigor to a thing and basically failed (due to internal agendas). But I will offer RE credit for making the attempt. Run it up the flag pole, see who salutes it.

Why is that? Because people find some use in the concepts of "gamism", "simulationism" and "narrativism", but have long given up on GNS, Edwards and Forge. But the meaning of those terms is unclear, and seems to wallow about in Humpty Dumpty land.

"the use has shifted as no one is working in the GNS framework anymore".
OK, not a bad take.

And why is GNS itself irrelevant ? Well, maybe it is because the idea to pursue purity in one of those agendas and how mixes are inconsistent never caught on. And of course the fact that the Forge only ever cared about NAR and never produced anything helpful for the other branches or, really, understood at all what was important there, hurt as well. And the latter is of course also a reason for the shift in use. Edwards was not the right person to properly define or write about gamism or simulationism given the poor understanding he had. And the issue of "incoherent if I don't like it" certainly was a case of well poisoning. :smallannoyed:

like "this system is too gamist for my tastes, I prefer a more simulationist approach" was also carrying a big neon sign stating

THE GNS THEORY IS RIGHT IN EVERY ASPECT
Heh, nice job time traveling back to about 2000-2002. :smallcool:

we can use words like gamist or narrativist because they are useful descriptors, without that having anything to do with the GNS theory. We can use vague terms and apply our own definitions to them, sure. People are that careless with a lot of terms, not just gaming terms. I have a massive personal bias against that for a variety of reasons, but the biggest has to do with my many years in aviation where getting terms wrong can lead to mistakes that get people killed due to misunderstanding and miscommunication

Say what you mean, mean what you say, and use the correct term for what you are talking about.
(Same is true for a variety of other things I dealt with in the military, such as making sure you call for the correct munition in a call for fire, else you may violate the RoE, may end up destroying things or killing people you didn't intend to, etc...but that's a few orders of magnitude removed from a gaming hobby).

I bet most people using those words don't even know there's a theory in the first place. they use the words because they work and they are useful, that's all. It is like people using the word "quantum" without understanding what they are talking about. (And at this point, I cast the "Summon @PhonenixPhyre" spell so that he can share his usual rant about that. :smallbiggrin: )

less well agreed upon. I'd go with that.

90% of people who use those terms never heard of those theories in the first place, and just use the words for convenience Just like saying Beetlejuice three times.

And I really don't get your crusade. Stamping out heresies is a very old human habit.

I came into this thread with no idea what the forge or gns was, and i googled it to be able to figure out why vahnavoi was so mad about it. i read about half a page, before concluding it wasn't really important.
Then why are you still engaging? (OK, I do the same thing sometimes).

And yes, the meaning is slightly different from how GNS understood them. Because no one cares for or references GNS. But they are clear enough, way clearer than other lingo terms like "Powergamer". Doesn't that mean Munchkin, or is that not a case of clean equivalence?

[Jason]

Person A tries to fire an arrow at the center of a target. They end up missing the target entirely.

Person B tries to fire an arrow at the center of the same target, in the same conditions. They hit the center of the target.

Are you declaring that B's performance cannot be described as objectively better than A's?
Yes. It cannot be objectively described as "better".

You can say, objectively, that "A missed the target and B hit it," but you can't say "B's performance was objectively better than A's."

Were they really both trying to hit the center of the target? What if A had made a bet that B was going to win the competition and threw the match on purpose, walking away rich?
What if A had never picked up a bow before and had a deadly fear of performing before an audience, and just picking up the bow to fire an arrow at an archery tournament represented a moral triumph for him, whether or not he hit the target, whereas for B hitting the target was "Tuesday"?


You can't measure fun or pleasure on objective bases, certainly, but there is such things as standards of quality that are objective.No, I don't think there are. Any argument that one backpack is "better" than another depends on what criteria a given observer is using to rate how good a backpack is, and is therefore by definition subjective.


If they were published today, the first D&D booklets would more than likely get the game company directly sent into a lawsuit-shaped hellscape, since there are artworks there straight up taken from Marvel comic books.

And you don't mess with Marvel's lawyers in 2024.

I'd say that "would destroy the company's finances if not immediately removed from sale" is a pretty good metric to say something objectively sucks.
That's a (subjective) judgement on the wisdom of using such art in your work. It is not an objective judgement on the quality of the art - because "art quality" is an entirely subjective quality.

Some people really like those crude old "copied from Marvel comics with light alterations" drawings because they remember their excitement when they first bought and read those booklets and then played that game with their friends.


Who is this mystical "we"? Because I can likely go out on the street and get complete strangers to agree on that.
Having lots of people agree on something doesn't make it objective. In fact, being objective means precisely that it doesn't matter at all how many people agree or disagree with it.


More generally, it is in fact an objective requirement for the society I live in that a lot of people do agree on values and that that we can make conditionals bases on those values that are amenable to objective examination.I disagree. Just because a large segment of society agrees that one value is better than another doesn't mean that one of those values is objectively better than another.

[Easy e]

I have no idea what the Forge is or was, or the controversy around it. So, for fun I sat with my table and asked a few questions to see what people thought of when I said some of the key "trigger" words in this thread. This is not data or scientific in anyway.

First, not one of them had any concept of these terms prior to me using them:

- Gamist = Things done to make the game play smooth, mechanics

- Narrative = Things done for the good of the plot or story

- Simulationsit = This one caused some confusion. Folks decided it was stuff you did to make a game react in a "normal or expected way" based on prior experience in the game.

- OSR = No idea. Once I told them Old School Revival, they assumed it meant playing older versions of D&D, not porting those ideas into new systems or anything about challenge level match the abilities of the characters.

- Nordic Larp = Live action role-playing. Probably from Northern Europe. No real thoughts beyond that.

- Trad/Neo-Trad = No idea, but it sounded the same as OSR to them. They assumed it was some conservative form or throwback form of gameplay.

- OC (Original Character) = No idea, but eventually got around to games set in a Franchise game like Star Trek, Star Wars, or something like that.


None of the people in the group are academics in game theory or design. Two have played RPGs since the 80's, One has played since AD&D 2nd, two started at the end of 4e, two are relatively new to RPGs. They have all played at least 4+ different systems beyond D&D 5e. The ones I know of are L5R, Avatar, Lasers and Feelings, and Those Dark Places.

My conclusion: This stuff is less relevant to the community gamers than it is to us on the forum.

Only a handful of grognard nerds even know anything about all this stuff much les care.

[catagent101]

Another thing to keep in mind is that it's pretty easy to accidentally coin these terms since they're just a common suffix stapled onto some common words. By extension some of their popularity is probably because the average English speaker can intuit a meaning from context without hearing about GNS. I would not be surprised if the majority of people using these terms have never heard about it.

Like, while I have heard about GNS it has always been in the context of "oh yeah remember THAT guy?"

[JNAProductions]

I have no clue, since nothing in context allows me to decipher it. You just read me explaining that these words have usage problems and what that means, without understanding that this is what it means.

Go on. Put these terms in a dictionary search. (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/narrativist) See what happens. Word not found. Did you mean narrative? If not, did you refer to GNS? Silly me, of course you didn't refer to GNS since by your own admission, you don't know anything about it.

So it must be narrative, then. Which meaning of narrative? (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/narrative) Which kind of narrative? And why would it make sense to talk of narrative games in contrast to simulations or games, since nothing in the common usage suggests these are contrasting or mutually exclusive terms?

Just because you don't understand the common usage of words doesn't mean the common usage is nonexistent.

[GloatingSwine]

Just because you don't understand the common usage of words doesn't mean the common usage is nonexistent.

Thing is, "Gamist" and "Narrativist" are terms that aren't in common usage at all. There just isn't a common usage of those terms that doesn't go back to GNS. (Simulationist has a number of other meanings, there's an art movement and the people who believe we're all in a computer simulation).

Which means that pretty much every time they are used they're probably novel terms that mean whatever the person using them intends them to mean (because they're probably not actually referring to the formal GNS stuff because nobody actually does any more really).

[Mechalich]

I would submit that the reason GNS theory and the terms associated with it continues to see discussion in the TTRPG space is simply that while it may be broadly acknowledged that the theory broadly failed to produce the results hoped for, nothing substantial has replaced it.

There was a major movement, in the 2000s to improve TTRPG design, and to do so in a systematic way with at least some attempt to discover/define first principles rather than simply producing games ad hoc. This was spurred in part by D&D 3e, which whatever its flaws represented a massive step forward in standardization and the use of theory in game design, partly by the end of the oWoD and the attempt by White-Wolf to create a unified rules system for the nWoD (at the time the second most popular portion of the market by a huge margin), and by both the OGL and just general advances in technology that made it possible for the first time for just about anyone with an idea to throw together a game system and try to sell it to people.

The thing is, this movement largely failed. The nWoD collapsed almost immediately (for reasons largely unrelated to the games themselves), and White-Wolf went down with it. The most theorycrafted version of D&D ever created: 4e, was also a massive failure, though this probably had more to do with marketing and the inability to continue campaigns across edition boundaries (ex. blowing the up FR) rather than the game itself. Smaller games that did utilize the sort of design theory that emerged during this time did get made, and many have acquired a solid niche, but the hobby as a whole contracted significantly up until the release of 5e, which succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of literally everyone including the people who created it (again for reasons largely unrelated to the game itself, like Stranger Things). 5e operates outside of basically any theory of TTRPG design, GNS or otherwise, but it's utter dominance of the market has broadly buried the discussion of how games should be created, leaving those people who do talk about such things to utilize old terminology from a period when such ideas had significantly wider play.

[Tanarii]

People like the words. Saying they like the concepts is a stretch, because there no non-equivocal concepts behind these terms. When someone says f.ex. "I like narrativist games" because they feel "this word sounds like it fits my personal definition of narrative game", the word is NOT helping them get an idea across - the only good response to that is "what do you mean by narrativism?". The alternative is to replace each instance of "narrativism" with narrative (and each instance of "simulationism" with simulation and each instance of "gamism" with game-like), but these are not clearer. Each of these terms has problems of usage to the point where I am forced to ask, how exactly are people finding them useful?
Hit the nail on the head.

This is why GNS is such a problem. People (including very much me) want to use words that aren't actually defined, let alone words that are defined and they're just using wrong.

When someone says "narratavism" in regards to gaming I can think of several disparate things that are not automatically related to each other :
1) An underlying "plot" thread that ties together events. Specifically, Railroading.
2) Players have input on the world, not just the character's attempted actions.
3) Meta-rules / meta-currency

Interestingly in many Forge GNS derived games (e.g. AW & BitD), #3 is explicitly to enable #2. And as I understand it, the entire point of GNS was railing AGAINST #1, especially White Wolf. The anti-Trad game (D&D especially) stance was because late-TSR had also gone that direction, with linear railroading adventures and campaign metaplots. Starting with Dragonlance.

I have similar issues with the terms Storytelling, Collaborative Storytelling, and Storytelling Game as used in context of RPGs. And the term Metagaming. They're either not used in any way that lines up with what the words actually mean, and for the undefined terms often mean something wildly different from person to person.

----------

5e operates outside of basically any theory of TTRPG design, GNS or otherwise, Dungeons and Dragons 5e has huge amounts of OSR input. Along with "back to roots" of course.

What's interesting is Mearls didn't make an OSR game at all. He took 4e and started rolling it back to something that 'felt' more like D&D (as early as 4e Essentials) and listened to input from the OSR community, without explicitly making something directly based on first principles of their theories. Which I don't believe were fully fleshed out in explicit terms at the time anyway.

Edit: To be clear, I don't disagree with you that it operates outside of theoretical design. Intentionally so. But Mearls had quite a few specific guidelines he used in his design process AND the input of groups directly oppose to The Forge / GNS theories.

[Vahnavoi]

@KorvinStarmast: I already beat you and PhoenixPhyre in the race to mock people who abuse "quantum"; see one of the comics I linked. :smallwink:

---

@Jason: it is not required for value statements to be objective, for us to agree on a set of values and then make conditional statements based on those values that can be examined objectively.

Elaborated using the tangent you had with Unoriginal, arbitrary and relative are not synonyms with subjective. It is, in fact, possible to give objective criteria for a good backpack as surely as it is possible to give objective criteria for a heavy backpack or a cool backpack. The benchmark is arbitrary because words used are relative and there is no absolute frame of reference, but the measures used are objective. The same applies to values. That is, how much you value (say) challenge over fellowship may be arbitrary subjective decision by you, but your decision is an objectively examinable fact to me and then, based on objectively measurable qualities of games, I can objectively rank them relative to your decision. Those relations are objective even if the points of comparison are subjective and arbitrary.

Hence, "better is subjective!" isn't an actual obstacle to discussing what makes games better, as long as people are willing and able to express what they value. Which is why, again, I ask you: Which of the eight aesthetics you personally would not be willing to nominate as a value for games?

---

@catagent101: the words "narrativism", "simulationism" and "gamism" follow a standard construction, yes. I agree they are easy to stumble upon. That doesn't mean they have standard use nor that their meaning is easy to intuit. A comparison can be made to "realism" (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/realism), which follows the same standard construction. That word has both lay and formal definitions that are clearly applicable to discussion about games. Yet, Satinavian argues it's an even worse term for discussion.

How could that be the case?

It can be the case when people act like King Of Nowhere and use "realism" to mean whatever the Hell sounds right to them, without taking more than five minutes in Google to find out what the past usage has been or which definition would be applicable, leading to fallacies of equivocation and false dichotomies.

---

@Mechalich: you may be right part of the problem is lack of popularized game design theories in hobby spaces. However, I'm willing to argue lack of such popularized theories can partly be blamed on the Forge, GNS, and their fallout: their failures caused at least some vocal people to develop a distaste for theories in general. Add to this clique-ish ideas about how special or different tabletop roleplaying games are in comparison to video games and other tabletop games, and it creates a situation where, even when game design in the rest of the world becomes more professional and academic, tabletop hobbyists end up ignoring it. For example, it wouldn't surprise me MDA goes underappreciated by hobbyists simply because it isn't specifically about tabletop roleplaying games.

---

@Tanarii:


I have similar issues with the terms Storytelling, Collaborative Storytelling, and Storytelling Game as used in context of RPGs.

There's a good chance you can lay some blame for usage problems these terms have, on the same people who advocated for GNS or were active on the Forge. After all, some of the same people went and founded Story Games.

But even beyond that, I agree, these have usage problems. Largely because "story" (https://www.thefreedictionary.com/story) is a loaded word all on its own, but partly also because roleplaying is a specific form of storytelling that does not necessarily overlap with other forms. So, when someone answers "what is roleplaying?" with (say) "it is collaborative storytelling", it's equivalent to answering "what is a ball game?" with "it is a team sport". Certainly, there are ball games that are also team sports, and roleplaying that is also collaborative storytelling, but the format of the answer commits a category error.

[Tanarii]

There's a good chance you can lay some blame for usage problems these terms have, on the same people who advocated for GNS or were active on the Forge. After all, some of the same people went and founded Story Games.
As I understood it a large part of The Forge motivation was railing specifically against the 1990s King of "Story Games" ... White Wolf. Specifically and as I said, White Wolfs (and late-80s TSR) penchant for railroading adventures and metaplot campaign settings.

Of course, when I dug into the history one thing I found absolutely hilarious is a segment of folks (or at least a few specific individuals) claiming to speak for OSR went off the rails to try and position OSR as the ultimate opponent to The Forge / GNS in the internet flame wars. And it's true that the games produced by the (actual) members of the two groups result in wildly different games. But both movements, at their root, seemed to largely stem from rejecting those two concepts: Railroading and Metaplot. Instead the actual games produced rely heavily on some form of Player Agency. (Although I've never seen post-Forgites call it that.)

Edit: it's probably important for me to re-note ... I do not consider the actual games produced by post-forgites to actually match either GNS theory nor the philosophical mantra they often spout at various points in their work.

[Vahnavoi]

@Tanarii: Yes, I know. I mean some people who despised White Wolf's Storyteller system joined the Forge and later went and founded a community called Story Games. The fact that self-described story games they made have opposed mechanics and opposed conception of how to tell stories with games, compared to earlier Storyteller system and other games that self-descriptively were about telling stories... that's what contributes to usage problems.

[Tanarii]

BtW I just re-found this while looking for something else. Not sure how accurate a rundown it is, but I do recall reading it previously.
https://whitehall-paraindustries.com/Theory/Threefold/rpg_theory_bad_rep.htm

[kyoryu]

BtW I just re-found this while looking for something else. Not sure how accurate a rundown it is, but I do recall reading it previously.
https://whitehall-paraindustries.com/Theory/Threefold/rpg_theory_bad_rep.htm

Pretty accurate from what I've been able to put together.

[Satinavian]

Doesn't that mean Munchkin, or is that not a case of clean equivalence?
No, that is why i used "powergamer" as an example.

Some people use it the same way as munchkin but many others use it with different meaning and there are even several groups out there who proudly claim the moniker for themself. Most of them would be quite cross with you for calling them munchkins. Not that they are all on the same page as the meaning of powergamer goes. Also there are several other rpg-"theory" pieces, some even in book form, that define use the term - differently, of course.

The term is just worse when it comes to clear communication and i avoid it.

[Tanarii]

GNS labels used with their original definitions are very much like "Charop" (mostly defined, good) vs "Munchkin" (mostly defined, bad). All carefully defined, you don't know what the word means if you're not an insider, and they're broken up as Narrative (Good) vs Gamism (mostly neutral) vs Simulationism (Bad).

Sometimes GNS labels as commonly used on the internet, are very much like "powergamer" (undefined, good or bad) or "storytelling game" (undefined, good or bad). People just make up their own definitions and it could be good or it could be bad.

And other times they're closer to "Metagaming". People assume the meaning based on the root word and what they think the common usage definition would be as a result. And it turns out they're completely wrong. Because that's not what the words mean in GNS. At all.

[Vahnavoi]

"Powergamer" is basically a pejorative for winning in an unsportsmanlike way, and people who use it as a self-identifier are equivalent to those wearing a T-shirt reading "This is what winner looks like". The usage case is clear, but also useless for game design.

[Jason]

@Jason: it is not required for value statements to be objective, for us to agree on a set of values and then make conditional statements based on those values that can be examined objectively.I see that the statements could be in a way objectively examined as statements (this statement is more or less correct), but any value judgements could not evaluated as more or less correct because value is inherently subjective.


Elaborated using the tangent you had with Unoriginal, arbitrary and relative are not synonyms with subjective. It is, in fact, possible to give objective criteria for a good backpack as surely as it is possible to give objective criteria for a heavy backpack or a cool backpack. The benchmark is arbitrary because words used are relative and there is no absolute frame of reference, but the measures used are objective.[quote]If the benchmark is arbitrary then it is not objective. Objective to me means that it is true for all observers. If a benchmark is arbitrary then pretty much by definition it will not be accepted by all observers.

[quote]The same applies to values. That is, how much you value (say) challenge over fellowship may be arbitrary subjective decision by you, but your decision is an objectively examinable fact to me and then, based on objectively measurable qualities of games, I can objectively rank them relative to your decision.
You may say "I find this game works better for people who value challenge over fellowship" but there is no reason to think I will agree with your statement. The qualities you speak of are not objectively measurable when it comes to determining the value someone else will assign to it.


Hence, "better is subjective!" isn't an actual obstacle to discussing what makes games better, as long as people are willing and able to express what they value.But people often don't really know what they value. There is no way of knowing what someone will like until they directly encounter it. The best you can do is make an educated guess from prior history.


Which is why, again, I ask you: Which of the eight aesthetics you personally would not be willing to nominate as a value for games?I have no horse in that race. I don't think discussing role-playing games in such terms is very useful.

[kyoryu]

If the benchmark is arbitrary then it is not objective. Objective to me means that it is true for all observers. If a benchmark is arbitrary then pretty much by definition it will not be accepted by all observers.


I think we have different understandings.

To use the backpack example, we can look at a few people that might want a backpack - a hiker, a schoolkid, a business person, and someone in the army.

The hiker needs a certain amount of storage, and doesn't care about more - they budget what they carry pretty closely. They also want to minimize weight since they're hiking. Appearance isn't that important, but preference probably is in the more "sport" range.

The schoolkid needs a good amount of space for books, and needs something sturdy to not fall apart with the abuse they put it through every day. Weight is less important since the books will outclass any weight from the backpack. Having a design that they like (per their interests) is also extremely important. If they like Pokemon, for instance, a Pokemon design would be great. "Boring" is probably out.

A business person wants something fairly light and easy to work with, and preferably something with appropriate pouches/compartments for the electronics they use the most. Overall carrying capacity is probably less of a concern. Appearance will typically aim for "professional".

Someone in the army wants a lot of space, durability, and more durability. Appearance will need to match Army requirements (assuming it's not just handed out by the Army). Weight probably doesn't matter too much, since again they'll be carrying a lot of weight above and beyond the backpack.

So, given these for people and their individual needs, we can't just say "The Pokemon backpack is better than the lightweight, plain black, computer laptop". "Better" is subjective in that it's dependent on the individual needs of the person. However, it's not arbitrary. Each person has a set of needs, and while there might be some truly arbitrary bits in them (some design aspects, for instance), to a great extent we can determine if a given backpack is better or worse for some user with a specific set of needs.

[BRC]

GNS labels used with their original definitions are very much like "Charop" (mostly defined, good) vs "Munchkin" (mostly defined, bad). All carefully defined, you don't know what the word means if you're not an insider, and they're broken up as Narrative (Good) vs Gamism (mostly neutral) vs Simulationism (Bad).

Sometimes GNS labels as commonly used on the internet, are very much like "powergamer" (undefined, good or bad) or "storytelling game" (undefined, good or bad). People just make up their own definitions and it could be good or it could be bad.

And other times they're closer to "Metagaming". People assume the meaning based on the root word and what they think the common usage definition would be as a result. And it turns out they're completely wrong. Because that's not what the words mean in GNS. At all.

I think part of the longevity is that, devoid of context, the GNS terms seem like useful discussion terms.

When I first encountered them, I thought "Oh, that's a neat way to talk about games, games tend to have elements of these three things, and different people enjoy different aspects to different degrees".

A Game is Narrativist to the degree that it's a tool for telling a story. It's Simulationist to the degree that it is a tool for providing a model for some fantastical scenario, and it is Gamist to the degree that it is mechanically fun to engage with. Scrabble is 0 simulationist, 0 narrativist, and 100% gamist, and that's just a tool for describing scrabble.

To me, this is the intuitive use of these terms.


Of course, that's not the origin of these terms, you've got years of discussion and, as you say, the original definitions exist not to describe aspects of a game, but to group games, and to implicitly serve as a value judgement on the "Correct" way for a game to be.

But so long as people keep getting exposed to the terms without the context, they'll keep showing up, because they seem like useful terms for discussion except that the very contexts that introduced them also poisoned them.

[Vahnavoi]

@Jason: the definition of 1 meter as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second, is an arbitrary benchmark. It is, also, objective. The fact that not everyone uses SI units of measurements doesn't make it less objective.


Objective to me means that it is true for all observers.

By this metric, motion isn't objective, because it is relative. In actual fact, relativity of motion is due to lack of an absolute reference point, but there are other absolute values, such as speed of light, which can be used to establish a a frame of reference to objectively gauge motion.

In the exact same way, what makes a better backpack for any given person is fundamentally rooted in physical shape of the backpack, which also have a relationship to such absolute values. The same is true of any game rules due to informational constraints of the human brain and mind. Again: don't confuse variability and relativity with lack of objectivity. People come in various sizes and with various cognitive skills, so of course a single product won't be the best for everyone - but this isn't more exotic than saying that a moving object won't have the same vector of motion relative to every possible observer.


You may say "I find this game works better for people who value challenge over fellowship" but there is no reason to think I will agree with your statement. The qualities you speak of are not objectively measurable when it comes to determining the value someone else will assign to it.

I find this a hasty conclusion, given I have not given any serious effort to measure these qualities from any given game. Also, pay attention to the sample statement you made. The truth value of "I find this game works better for people who value challenge over fellowship" does not depend on what you, specifically, think. It depends on what people who value challenge over fellowship think - it's a prediction that can be surveyed and studied at least statistically, possibly also neurologically. Doing so might be beyond my personal capabilities or difficult in general, but the same's true of objective analysis of any complex physical system.


But people often don't really know what they value. There is no way of knowing what someone will like until they directly encounter it. The best you can do is make an educated guess from prior history.

And? I also don't know the motion of an oncoming train before measuring it. Welcome to empiricism.

The basic error you are making here is the same that has been repeatedly made by people throughout history: presuming that because something is hard to study beyond your experience, that there is no objective study or theory to be found. Your line of argumentation is equal to Aristotle arguing temperature cannot be studied objectively, because hot and cold are subjective. Posterity has pretty well shown that we can go a long way to ground temperature in absolute natural constants to measure it objectively and, consequently, make useful predictions of what people will subjectively find hot or cold.

Why do you think the same can't be true of aesthetics of gameplay? Keep in mind said aesthetics include sensory pleasure, and contemporary science has quite a lot of objective things to say about how human senses work. If I can predictably create optical and aural illusions - things that very much require being able to find objective correlates of subjective experience - why do you think these findings aren't useful to game design?

[Jason]

So, given these for people and their individual needs, we can't just say "The Pokemon backpack is better than the lightweight, plain black, computer laptop". "Better" is subjective in that it's dependent on the individual needs of the person. However, it's not arbitrary. Each person has a set of needs, and while there might be some truly arbitrary bits in them (some design aspects, for instance), to a great extent we can determine if a given backpack is better or worse for some user with a specific set of needs.
I was referring to the benchmarks being arbitrary in Vahnavoi's example. If someone says "1.5 cubic feet is enough storage," then he's set an arbitrary benchmark, and it is of necessity a subjective benchmark.

You can say "this backpack has a capacity of 1.5 cubic feet" or something similar and be objective.
If a critic reviewing the backpack says "1.5 cubic feet is more than most other backpacks on the market," he can be making an objective statement.
A critic who says "1.5 cubic feet is enough storage for most people," he could even be objective, if he really has some evidence showing that most people report that this is enough storage in their backpacks.
If he says "this is a good backpack" then he's making a subjective judgement. Not necessarily an arbitrary judgement, but not an objective one.

Edit:

By this metric, motion isn't objective, because it is relative. In actual fact, relativity of motion is due to lack of an absolute reference point, but there are other absolute values, such as speed of light, which can be used to establish a a frame of reference to objectively gauge motion.
You can make such an argument, but whether something has moved or not is not a value judgement. My point was that value judgements are always subjective.


Posterity has pretty well shown that we can go a long way to ground temperature in absolute natural constants to measure it objectively and, consequently, make useful predictions of what people will subjectively find hot or cold.But whether they find it too hot or too cold is still subjective, because it is a value judgement. You can make an objective statement that "most people report that 100 degrees is too hot to be comfortable" but you can't say "100 degrees is too hot to be comfortable" and still be making an objective statement.


Why do you think the same can't be true of aesthetics of gameplay? Keep in mind said aesthetics include sensory pleasure, and contemporary science has quite a lot of objective things to say about how human senses work. If I can predictably create optical and aural illusions - things that very much require being able to find objective correlates of subjective experience - why do you think these findings aren't useful to game design?
I think you can make comparisons between different role-playing systems that many people will agree with. I don't think there is any way to objectively measure how good a role-playing system is, because that's a value judgement.
You can make an objective statement like "this game has more pages and words devoted to combat than that system". You can't say "combat in this game takes too long" and be making an objective statement.

[kyoryu]

You can make an objective statement like "this game has more pages and words devoted to combat than that system". You can't say "combat in this game takes too long" and be making an objective statement.

Right. You can say "combats in this game typically take <x> time" (or, more likely "x time per participant"). You can also talk about the preferences people have for how long combat takes. This gives you a good assessment about whether the game would likely be a good fit for a particular person, without making an overall objective statement of goodness or badness.

The analogy I like to use is cars. Is a Jeep, a Ferrari, or a minivan better? Depends on what you're doing - going fast and looking cool, driving over rough terrain, or carrying lots of people? Unless you go to "sell the Ferrari, and then buy...." level, you can't really say one is better than another overall. You can say one is better than another for a specific use case.

[KorvinStarmast]

"Powergamer" ... The usage case is clear, but also useless for game design.OK, I'll take your and Satinavian's responses and fold it into my notebook of terms. Thanks to you both.

[Jason]

Right. You can say "combats in this game typically take <x> time" (or, more likely "x time per participant"). You can also talk about the preferences people have for how long combat takes. This gives you a good assessment about whether the game would likely be a good fit for a particular person, without making an overall objective statement of goodness or badness.
I would be very surprised if you could come up with an accurate estimate of something like "x minutes per participant" for any given RPG combat system. In my experience the group and the situation make a lot more difference than the rules as to how long a combat lasts.

[TaiLiu]

I would submit that the reason GNS theory and the terms associated with it continues to see discussion in the TTRPG space is simply that while it may be broadly acknowledged that the theory broadly failed to produce the results hoped for, nothing substantial has replaced it.

There was a major movement, in the 2000s to improve TTRPG design, and to do so in a systematic way with at least some attempt to discover/define first principles rather than simply producing games ad hoc. This was spurred in part by D&D 3e, which whatever its flaws represented a massive step forward in standardization and the use of theory in game design, partly by the end of the oWoD and the attempt by White-Wolf to create a unified rules system for the nWoD (at the time the second most popular portion of the market by a huge margin), and by both the OGL and just general advances in technology that made it possible for the first time for just about anyone with an idea to throw together a game system and try to sell it to people.

The thing is, this movement largely failed. The nWoD collapsed almost immediately (for reasons largely unrelated to the games themselves), and White-Wolf went down with it. The most theorycrafted version of D&D ever created: 4e, was also a massive failure, though this probably had more to do with marketing and the inability to continue campaigns across edition boundaries (ex. blowing the up FR) rather than the game itself. Smaller games that did utilize the sort of design theory that emerged during this time did get made, and many have acquired a solid niche, but the hobby as a whole contracted significantly up until the release of 5e, which succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of literally everyone including the people who created it (again for reasons largely unrelated to the game itself, like Stranger Things). 5e operates outside of basically any theory of TTRPG design, GNS or otherwise, but it's utter dominance of the market has broadly buried the discussion of how games should be created, leaving those people who do talk about such things to utilize old terminology from a period when such ideas had significantly wider play.
Oh, neat. I wasn't aware of this history of TTRPGs. Are there articles or books that talk about this in more detail?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

5e operates outside of basically any theory of TTRPG design, GNS or otherwise,

Yet presumably the people making 5e had some sort of way of saying: "We'll make it like 3.5, but playing more like a game and less like a detailed simulation. Instead of skill points and a bunch of +2 to +5 bonuses of different types for the purpose of stacking or not, how about we go back to a single check if proficient or not (except in a few minor cases where we forgot we were doing this), we'll lower the bonuses so the Barbarian actually stands a chance at investigating stuff, remove some of the overly specialised skills and add in this bonus die mechanic from other games that we can call advantage and disadvantage."

I'll happily believe that GNS theory is wrong, I'll happily believe that I use terms like gamist wrong based on the definitions of the time, and I certainly don't have a detailed counter definition of my own. But at the end of the day, 5e is less of a simulation than 3.5 was, and therefor plays more "gamey". You can say exactly the same thing about 4e in comparison with 3.5 (presumably, most of what I know about 4e is just from "Will save world for gold"), so just "gameyness" is an inadequate filter for "if you like this game you might like that one too", as 5e was more designed for 3.5 players than for 4e players, despite both 5e and 4e being more gamey than 3.5. But it's still nice to have terms for that.

So I propose we all start talking about gamey, simulationy and narrativey games. Surely I have done everyone a favor and we will never need to have this discussion again. :smallbiggrin:

[Tanarii]

So I propose we all start talking about gamey, simulationy and narrativey games. Surely I have done everyone a favor and we will never need to have this discussion again. :smallbiggrin:
I'd rather talk about "play your character" vs "play the world" games. That'd be ones where the player solely makes decisions about character actions vs ones where they can define aspects of the world outside the character.

Or consequence-driven results vs plot-driven results.

Slow, fast, or intentionally variable paced. At least intended.

Dice Pools vs Modified Die

Rules Light vs "haha just kidding it's really not Rules Light despite people calling it that" vs Rules Heavy

Or the classic one, which is really about mindset for everything despite the name
Combat as War vs Combat as Sport

Or the newfangled ones (but not really):
Theatre of the Mind vs Battlemat / Grid / Minis (latter not officially named)
Combat vs Social vs Exploration vs Other

[kyoryu]

I'd rather talk about "play your character" vs "play the world" games. That'd be ones where the player solely makes decisions about character actions vs ones where they can define aspects of the world outside the character.

Or consequence-driven results vs plot-driven results.

Slow, fast, or intentionally variable paced. At least intended.

Dice Pools vs Modified Die

Rules Light vs "haha just kidding it's really not Rules Light despite people calling it that" vs Rules Heavy

Or the classic one, which is really about mindset for everything despite the name
Combat as War vs Combat as Sport

Or the newfangled ones (but not really):
Theatre of the Mind vs Battlemat / Grid / Minis (latter not officially named)
Combat vs Social vs Exploration vs Other

These are very interesting things.

In one book Malcolm Gladwell talked about spaghetti sauce, and how different attributes "clumped" into various areas. I find this a better model than high-level divisions - it allows for overlap, outliers, and the discovery of new "clumps" that work well together.

[Jay R]

A theory that states, “Phenomena X, Y, and Z exist” is very likely correct. A theory that states, “Only phenomena X, Y, and Z exist” is nearly always wrong.

Gamism, narrativism, and simulationism all exist in gaming. So those terms are not likely to die out.

But other phenomena exist as well, so GNS theory will die out.

[KorvinStarmast]

A theory that states, “Phenomena X, Y, and Z exist” is very likely correct. A theory that states, “Only phenomena X, Y, and Z exist” is nearly always wrong.

Gamism, narrativism, and simulationism all exist in gaming. So those terms are not likely to die out.

But other phenomena exist as well, so GNS theory will die out. It didn't just shoot itself in the foot, it shot itself in the heart, per Bon Jovi.

Shot through the heart
And you're to blame
Edwards, you give RPGs,
A bad name


Richie Zambora takes care of the rest with his guitar.

[Tanarii]

Gamism, narrativism, and simulationism all exist in gaming. So those terms are not likely to die out.

Do they? Under what definitions?

As has already been called out, that's the problem. Those terms have very specific meanings in GNS, and not only do they almost never mean what anyone else uses them to mean, everyone else uses them to mean some personal definition.

So "they exist" is an open question if they actually exist. Because their existing (or not) depends on who is saying it in the first place.

[NichG]

Do they? Under what definitions?

As has already been called out, that's the problem. Those terms have very specific meanings in GNS, and not only do they almost never mean what anyone else uses them to mean, everyone else uses them to mean some personal definition.

So "they exist" is an open question if they actually exist. Because their existing (or not) depends on who is saying it in the first place.

The point being, under any of those definitions however anyone who plays decides they feel like defining them, that term and choice of definition is meaningful to at least that one person and their experience of gaming. It 'exists' but doesn't exclude or really predict. As ways to look for resonance to understand or express your own tastes, almost anything goes - you could map games to classic elements and figure out that in that mapping you really like games with a lot of fire and air. Doesn't mean anyone else will immediately understand what you mean (but even without a precise shared definition, there's going to be at least some overlap of associations given words that aren't just totally alien) so how good that is for communication is a spectrum. Doesn't predict much of anything so it's not really a theory. But it's not invalid to do.

A theory that says 'no, when someone claims that what they seek in gaming is X, that's impossible and what they really want is Y' - which GNS as a theory claims - is much more likely to be false a priori.

[Satinavian]

Those terms have very specific meanings in GNS, and not only do they almost never mean what anyone else uses them to mean, everyone else uses them to mean some personal definition.Sure, they are not used in the GNS sense. And sure, lacking a definition people refer to, they stay somewhat vague.

But not really any more than all the other terms used when talking about RPGs. Drama ? Storytelling ? Versimilitude ? Realism ? Rules-light/heavy ? Grimdark ? Old School ? Sandbox ? High Fantasy ? All those and many more are not particularly better. It is all vague and people might mean very different thinks when using them and there is no proper authority but they all somewhat work and Simulationism, Narrativism and Gamism fit into this group quite fine.

[KorvinStarmast]

A theory that says 'no, when someone claims that what they seek in gaming is X, that's impossible and what they really want is Y' - which GNS as a theory claims - is much more likely to be false a priori. Succinctly put. The "brain damage" corollary hardly helps the GNS case, since it doesn't actually follow ...

[Quertus]

I'd rather talk about

Or the classic one, which is really about mindset for everything despite the name
Combat as War vs Combat as Sport

Preach it!


Succinctly put. The "brain damage" corollary hardly helps the GNS case, since it doesn't actually follow ...

As I understand it, I found this to be the most evocative (if poorly worded) part of GNS. That one can be conditioned by their experiences to accept something inherently suboptimal. Like how, if your grown up with slavery, or railroading, or reality TV, you might not think there was anything wrong with them. But then, I am a sucker for calls to examine my preconceptions, and look at the world differently. Pity the GNS crowd seemingly lacked that skill, to evaluate their own theories.

[kyoryu]

As I understand it, I found this to be the most evocative (if poorly worded) part of GNS. That one can be conditioned by their experiences to accept something inherently suboptimal. Like how, if your grown up with slavery, or railroading, or reality TV, you might not think there was anything wrong with them. But then, I am a sucker for calls to examine my preconceptions, and look at the world differently. Pity the GNS crowd seemingly lacked that skill, to evaluate their own theories.

I can't defend the quote. Like, I get what he was saying, but, the presentation was so awful. And then he followed up by doubling down and saying that the "damage" done by games was like child abuse of the worst, Chris Hansen, variety.

I couldn't make it up if I tried.

The other issue is that he's using a very specific definition of "story" in what he's talking about. Sure, the "successfully overcoming a series of obstacles" type of story that linear trad games tend to push is pretty much not what "stories" are in other places, and yeah, it forces characters into a reactive role. But he had very specific ideas of "story" and was incredibly dismissive to everything else.

[Quertus]

I can't defend the quote. Like, I get what he was saying, but, the presentation was so awful. And then he followed up by doubling down and saying that the "damage" done by games was like child abuse of the worst, Chris Hansen, variety.

I couldn't make it up if I tried.

It’s rare you encounter anyone whose player is such a Munchkin that they tanked their Charisma harder than I did, but this seems an example. I believe in trying to disentangle the message from the messenger.

And even if the specifics of the example lacked veracity, I still found it a compelling concept, that gaming tradition might well have bred blinders.

[kyoryu]

It’s rare you encounter anyone whose player is such a Munchkin that they tanked their Charisma harder than I did, but this seems an example. I believe in trying to disentangle the message from the messenger.

And even if the specifics of the example lacked veracity, I still found it a compelling concept, that gaming tradition might well have bred blinders.

Oh, of course it does. If a primary media you consume tells you that "story" looks like a certain thing, then you're going to think that, yes, that's what story means, and look for those widgets and not see others.

Part of the issue is that Edwards also uses a very narrow definition of story - essentially, exploration of theme using characters as the lens by which to examine it. Which is.... not at all a universal definition.

I also wonder if there's some correlation vs. causation there.... if the people that were into RPGs at that time tended to be self-selected against people that were into "exploration of story as theme". In my experience, that seems to be true - a lot of people taking things highly literally vs. looking for the metaphor/symbolism behind them. Again, not sure if that's causation or correlation.

[Vahnavoi]

@kyoryu: that question would require a psychological survey of hobbyists to see if people with poor metaphor comprehension are over-represented among tabletop roleplayers. If that was the case, it might be possible to guess at the cause, or why it happens.

[Tanarii]

There is no reasonable interpretation under which social conditioning to play a group of games a certain way should end up being called "brain damage".

There's plenty of (thankfully not permitted) topic areas where social conditioning of thinking patterns could be discussed in terms of permanent long term negative impacts. But that's not appropriate path to go down for a fun hobby. Doing so is a sign someone has jumped the shark and lost perspective on what it is they're discussing.

[Vahnavoi]

There is no reasonable interpretation under which social conditioning to play a group of games a certain way should end up being called "brain damage".

There is, but it mostly boils down to saying "stress damages your brain so stop playing if playing becomes a source of stress". It's also worth noting that the common causes of stress have very little to do with subject matter or game mechanics of games, and much to do with social dynamics of groups and how play is organized.

[Satinavian]

Succinctly put. The "brain damage" corollary hardly helps the GNS case, since it doesn't actually follow ...
I think that was just him noticing that his theory didn't really work and didn't capture the preferences of all that many players all that well but not yet willing to accept that he was wrong. "Of course my theory is fine. There must something wrong with the players who don't fit."

But when GNS was new, it was not just in the Forge. There were other forums heavily involved in it, many in other languages and most didn't really follow Edwards later path to explore only his preferred style. He became irrelevant even before GNS itself died. Except in the Forge itself of course.

[Tanarii]

But when GNS was new, it was not just in the Forge. There were other forums heavily involved in it,
That's because the Disciples of Edwards went forth to the Internet to spread the good word.

And to defend the good word when the theory inevitably got called out for its BS.


many in other languages and most didn't really follow Edwards later path to explore only his preferred style.If it didn't explore his preferred style it wasn't GNS. That's the entire point. GNS was strictly defined and it was intentionally defined to explore Narrativism specifically.

[Satinavian]

GNS was strictly defined and it was intentionally defined to explore Narrativism specifically.But he tried to hide that. And so many people didn't get the memo. And it also generally got lost in translation.

He couldn't really control how people used GNS outside of the Forge. It birthed at least one whole movement trying to make coherent gamist games (ARS). And most GNS users didn't care all that much about Narrativism and soon ignored the Forge.

[KorvinStarmast]

"Of course my theory is fine. There must something wrong with the players who don't fit." Indeed, which is sort of like a scientific theory that doesn't fit facts/observation/experimental data...so it was at best a hypothesis that never got beyond that.

That's because the Disciples of Edwards went forth to the Internet to spread the good word. As I have seen observed over the years, the internet spreads stupidity (and other information) at about the speed of electric current. Unfortunate side effect of the Information Age.

But since we are talking about RPGs, which include things like Call of Cthulhu, or D&D, then "cult" might be a better descriptive. :smallbiggrin:

If it didn't explore his preferred style it wasn't GNS. What other heresies were there?

But he tried to hide that. And so many people didn't get the memo. Kind of like people trying to describe quantum effects without really knowing what quantum mechanics is. And thus, I think, this thread's motivation: to clear out some of the misinformation

It birthed at least one whole movement trying to make coherent gamist games (ARS). Is ARS a game, a game company, or a community you are familiar with?

[Satinavian]

Kind of like people trying to describe quantum effects without really knowing what quantum mechanics is. And thus, I think, this thread's motivation: to clear out some of the misinformation
Is ARS a game, a game company, or a community you are familiar with?There was a community that tried to explore specifically Gamism and discuss design ideas and best practices and called the result ARS (Abenteuerrollenspiel, but also a pun on the latin word). Mostly active in 3 forums, and a couple of blogs. Made a couple of games on those priciples, some even self published. But stayed hobbyists instead of trying for commercial success. The community does not exist anymore, but now and then their ideas about game design and running games are still referred to, now completely removed from GNS.



Kind of like people trying to describe quantum effects without really knowing what quantum mechanics is. And thus, I think, this thread's motivation: to clear out some of the misinformation
And that is the point where i disagree. Edwards was widely misunderstood for various reasons, most of them his own fault. He never was honest about his intent. But his actual ídeas are even way less usefull than what people understood, so why do we even care about his intentions ? Death of the author. Just because formulated GMS, he doesn't own it, even less the Gamism, Narrativism and Simulationism terms.

[GloatingSwine]

Death of the author. Just because formulated GMS, he doesn't own it, even less the Gamism, Narrativism and Simulationism terms.

Which returns to the original point that there just isn't a widely accepted definition of any of those terms anyway.

Every time you use them you need to define what you're talking about by using them, which rather reduces their value as pointers to a widely understood set of design features.

The MDA model at least points to definable things which people are generally going to agree what is being referred to. (I can see a good deal of nitpicking over what goes into the "gamism" and "simulationism" buckets at least if you really tried to use them as separated things.)

[Talakeal]

I find that the original threefold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threefold_model) model is far more useful than Edward’s GNS model, but for some reason GNS is way more popular, and I don’t think if it hadn’t been for GNS most people would have ever even heard of the threefold model.

[KorvinStarmast]

I find that the original threefold (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threefold_model) model is far more useful than Edward’s GNS model, but for some reason GNS is way more popular, and I don’t think if it hadn’t been for GNS most people would have ever even heard of the threefold model.
It has some core limitations.

Another consequence of the model is the claim that by advancing towards one of the goals, one is moving away from the other two. Thus a game that is highly dramatic will be neither a good simulation nor a challenging game, and so on. This assertion has been widely challenged, and led to criticism of the model.

It isn't necessarily an either / or proposition between those elements...you can have big drama and big game moments (success, challenge, victory, surprise, epiphany, eucatrastrophe) at the same time.

In Tolkien's view, eucatastrophe can occur without the use of a deus ex machina.[9]

Eucatastrophe could be held in apposition to dyscatastrophe, another word that Tolkien also used to refer to the sudden turn from which there is no upward movement or hope.

[Quertus]

Another consequence of the model is the claim that by advancing towards one of the goals, one is moving away from the other two. Thus a game that is highly dramatic will be neither a good simulation nor a challenging game, and so on. This assertion has been widely challenged, and led to criticism of the model.

Ugh. So I like “Simulation”/“Realism”/verisimilitude vs gameplay / ease of use / simplicity, as those can (can, not must) be in opposition. But [challenge, drama, Simulation] are a horrible set in that regard. It would be like trying to advance a theory whose axis were [memorable, uniform, fun].

Actually, I think I could define those words where that almost made sense. Which is probably my biggest takeaway from this thread: GNS defined Gamist, etc wrong. Their definitions don’t do anything useful, so I’ll stick with my own, superior ones, thanks, and continue to use them the way I usually do, where the context serves to define the word, rather than the word needing to be defined to be useful in context. ie, “I went with uniform rolls for Gamist reasons”; “I’m using HP to Simulate action heroes’ ability to survive seemingly fatal wounds with little to no repercussions”, etc.

[Tanarii]

And that is the point where i disagree. Edwards was widely misunderstood for various reasons, most of them his own fault. He never was honest about his intent. But his actual ídeas are even way less usefull than what people understood, so why do we even care about his intentions ? Death of the author. Just because formulated GMS, he doesn't own it, even less the Gamism, Narrativism and Simulationism terms.
And this is why GNS and legacy of the Forge won't die. He did "own" GNS. He also defined "the Gamism, Narrativism and Simulationism terms" as part of of that. And people trying to use it for things that aren't what Edwards(mis-)used it for are constantly dragging it back into the light by not even knowing what GNS actually means and yet still talking about it.

Now, reclaiming is a thing. Communities actively try to do that for terms that have become a Slur. If there was a concerted enough effort by the big shot RPG game theorists to do that, it's possible it might even happen with GNS. But until then, if someone tries to use the labels, they are also automatically taking on the Forge's baggage in the process.

[Talakeal]

I tend to look at GDS as a way to evaluate individual mechanics. As a game designer, if a mechanic is good for all three, it is golden, toss it in! But that is rare, most mechanics you need to make a compromise between those three elements, which is where it gets very useful.

Very few game systems are all one thing, but it is very easy to see that, say, simulation is less of a priority in 4E D&D than it is in 3E D&D.

[kyoryu]

And this is why GNS and legacy of the Forge won't die. He did "own" GNS. He also defined "the Gamism, Narrativism and Simulationism terms" as part of of that. And people trying to use it for things that aren't what Edwards(mis-)used it for are constantly dragging it back into the light by not even knowing what GNS actually means and yet still talking about it.

And this is why i try to steer away from GNS - because every time somebody hears "GNS" (used with the common definitions), they end up getting pointed at the Edwardsian definitions.

Edit: Here's his explanation of his original "brain damage" comments, with the even worse allegory and his explanation. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=18707.0

His argument isn't really about "those other people" so much as it's even about himself. His primary issue here seems to be (as most of GNS), "why do people insist on playing Vampire as superheroes with trenchcoats and katanas, rather than the deep exploration of premise that I expected?" The answer of "it was the 90s and we were all into be SUPER EDGY" clearly wasn't enough of an answer.