GNS quiz? (For Science!!)

[Chauncymancer]

My senior thesis project just got accepted:
To survey my local gamer population, determine if significant GNS preferences exist within that population, and to determine if the heterogeneity or homogeneity of playgroups has any relationship to player satisfaction with that playgroup.

The first stop on my research project is:
1. Locate a good survey of GNS preferences.
Can anyone help me with this? I'm googling like mad, but now that the flame war's a smolder fight many old GNS links are dead.

[NOhara24]

For those uninitiated...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_Theory

[Tyndmyr]

Here's the issue. GNS isn't actually a theory in the scientific sense. It's not as if they started by gathering evidence, and built a theory to explain the results. No, they built the theory first, starting designing games based on it, most of which failed immensely, and formed a community in which the proponent of the theory happily bans people who disagree with him. Hell, GNS doesn't even use words to mean the normal, standard things that their definitions describe them as.

This means that in doing a survey, most people are going to not know what GNS is...of those already familiar, most will have an undying hatred of it, and will likely refuse to partake in your quiz, skewing your data.

So, no, there's not really useful data about GNS. Frankly, at this point, I don't think there really can be. I would strongly advise attempting the issue of surveying your gaming community from a more general perspective, instead of tying yourself to such an unpopular/controversial philosophy.

[Delwugor]

Wasn't GNS dropped by the guy who came up with it?

[horseboy]

Yeah, GNS just boils down to personal opinion of the designer: "Why games I like (Narrative) are superior to games I don't like (Stimulationist), oh, and there's a bunch of games I don't give a rat's ass about (Gamist). There's really nothing "scientific" to study.

[Crow]

Well, it sounds a little like the OP might be trying to determine if GNS is a viable theory. He would be remiss if he abandoned his project just because the majority of people believe it is not. Even if he comes to the conclusion that GNS is bull****, he has still reached a conclusion, provided he abides by scientific method. I'm curious how this can be done through a simple survey without the survey itself altering the results to a predetermined end.

You should probably just look for volunteers to take a Gaming Survey, and administer the survey privately, so as not to contaminate your subject pool as well.

Personally, I am with the GNS is bull**** crowd. For the record. Also, I'm worried at what institutions consider to be "research" these days.

[Maerok]

Oh I loved my senior thesis! It was on the development of fantasy writing through the 20th century. Lovecraft, Howard, Tolkien, etc.

I'd have to go with everyone else on this and say GNS is kind of unfavored.

[erikun]

I've found GNS to be a load of bunk. "Gamist" only works if you take it to mean solely randomized chance, the three points don't seem to conflict beyond seeing the purest form in a RPG system, and you will see a greater conflict on where to allocate limited resources in development to each principle (along with art, advertisement, setting development...) than you will between the three principles.

That doesn't mean you could not find a survey about it, but you'd want to be careful that it doesn't turn out too biased. As others have pointed out, some people aren't going to be familiar with the theory or definitions used, so asking something like "Do you prefer a Gamist, Narrativist, or Simulationist type of system" could end up producing junk data rather than anything valuable.


Sidenote: If you have a large enough body to survey, you might change the order of the choices with the various groups. I've heard that most people, when presented with an irrelevant choice, with frequently pick the first option. This could skew your data heavily towards one option, when the actual result should come out as "most people don't care".

[Nerd-o-rama]

Polling random jerks on the internet about inane and arbitrary labels made up by some random self-important jerk on the internet: science, apparently.

[Yora]

Is "GNS does not have any widespread acceptance among the surveyed group" a viable outcome for your research? If the validity of GNS is required for your research to be of any value, I'd seriously get the topic changed.

If you want to find out if GNS does have actual applications or not, then feel free to go with it. But I have very strong suspicion the answer to that is already known and you'll only presenting proof of that.

[stainboy]

Yeah, GNS just boils down to personal opinion of the designer: "Why games I like (Narrative) are superior to games I don't like (Stimulationist), oh, and there's a bunch of games I don't give a rat's ass about (Gamist). There's really nothing "scientific" to study.

This. You can't pin Ron Edwards down to a consistent definition of any of the three terms, but least of all Simulationist because it's merely the set of all things he doesn't like.

I'd actually describe Gamist as games Ron Edwards is afraid to pick a fight with. Why is 3e "openly gamist?" Because all the GNS articles were written during the height of the 3.0/OGL boom, and arbitrarily classifying 3e as "gamist" was a way to avoid picking a fight with the big dog. Why is Amber Diceless "gamist?" Because Eric Wujick wrote articles for the Forge, and it would have been a faux pas to put his game up for criticism.

The purpose of GNS theory is to hide Ron Edwards' personal agenda in a bunch of objective-sounding jargon. Nothing more. Most of the people who parrot his theories are guilty of the same dishonesty. "Oh, you like D&D? So you're a Simulationist gamer? Is that really what you want? Really? Really? Are you sure?" Even if you answer yes, you implicitly label yourself as a "simulationist" and undermine any further argument you might make.

It's a damn shell game. The con isn't to get you to pick the wrong cup - it's to get you to to pick a cup at all.

[Anxe]

I'm not seeing any problem with GNS after reading about it on the wiki. Not sure where all the hate is coming from...

As for the survey, in order to remain unbiased I think it should start off with an adventure choose-your-own-story of some kind. The survey can then ask the readers questions about what they liked in the story and what they didn't like. That way you avoid emotional attachments to certain systems.

But really I think you're gonna have to come up with the survey on your own and finetune it a little bit to make it unbiased. I also feel this is a good thing to post online and then throw a link out on these forums or other roleplaying games forums.

[Chilingsworth]

Out of curiosity, OP, what is your major? (Or if this thesis isn't for a graduate program, what class is this thesis for?)

Also, if you need a guinea pig, I volunteer.

[stainboy]

I'm not seeing any problem with GNS after reading about it on the wiki. Not sure where all the hate is coming from...

The Wikipedia entry glosses over a lot of parts of the theory that don't make any sense. If you want to form an opinion about GNS you should really start here: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/

[Dr Bwaa]

Wow, there's a lot of GNS-hate being tossed around, despite it being (as far as I can see) a non-assumed, somewhat minor part of a perfectly good thesis topic. It seems to me that it's only being mentioned as an efficient way to bring up the (uncontroversial, I hope) fact that different people may want different things from their games, and/or different things from different games.

OP, I don't know of any decent science behind it, but I'd happily discuss my personal experiences with you if you end up going that route (PM me if so; there's no guarantee that I'll check the forums with any regularity).

[Jerthanis]

My more hardcore RPG group had a thorough round of discussions about GNS for a few months following our discovery of the theory. Much of our discussion was in pinning down exactly what each term meant, and arguing over which games fell into which categories. We basically came to the conclusion that Ron Edwards didn't know what words in the English language meant, but that the words he happened to choose for his bizarre space-definitions actually worked pretty well for describing three aspects of RPG design. We use those words as a convenient shorthand to explain quickly how a game feels to us.

I might explain to a friend that the Smallville RPG is highly simulationist because it simulates the rules of a soap opera, but that it's also narrativist to only a slightly smaller extent because your chances of succeeding at things and the rewards you aim to acquire stem from furthering the story in specific ways.

Basically, we use the words associated with GNS to talk about RPGs, and the fact that he brought up the theory in the first place caused us to have a lot of very illuminating discussions amongst ourselves about the deeper underlying principles of roleplaying, but the theory itself is largely just a confusing, inaccurate mess at best.

So for me, if you were to ask which of the three I prefer, I'd probably say "Narrativist", but wouldn't mean exactly what Ron Edwards meant by Narrativist. The reasons for friction amongst members of my group don't often come down to differences in our GNS preferences. One of my friends is extremely Gamist in his approach to RPGs, but we have almost no conflict in our playstyles.

[Blacky the Blackball]

This. You can't pin Ron Edwards down to a consistent definition of any of the three terms, but least of all Simulationist because it's merely the set of all things he doesn't like.

I'd actually describe Gamist as games Ron Edwards is afraid to pick a fight with. Why is 3e "openly gamist?" Because all the GNS articles were written during the height of the 3.0/OGL boom, and arbitrarily classifying 3e as "gamist" was a way to avoid picking a fight with the big dog. Why is Amber Diceless "gamist?" Because Eric Wujick wrote articles for the Forge, and it would have been a faux pas to put his game up for criticism.

The purpose of GNS theory is to hide Ron Edwards' personal agenda in a bunch of objective-sounding jargon. Nothing more. Most of the people who parrot his theories are guilty of the same dishonesty. "Oh, you like D&D? So you're a Simulationist gamer? Is that really what you want? Really? Really? Are you sure?" Even if you answer yes, you implicitly label yourself as a "simulationist" and undermine any further argument you might make.

It's a damn shell game. The con isn't to get you to pick the wrong cup - it's to get you to to pick a cup at all.

Don't forget the attempts to force you to pick a cup by describing any game that isn't on one of those three ill-defined extremes as "incoherent"

[horseboy]

The purpose of GNS theory is to hide Ron Edwards' personal agenda in a bunch of objective-sounding jargon. Nothing more. Most of the people who parrot his theories are guilty of the same dishonesty. "Oh, you like D&D? So you're a Simulationist gamer? Is that really what you want? Really? Really? Are you sure?" Even if you answer yes, you implicitly label yourself as a "simulationist" and undermine any further argument you might make.

From what I've seen of the GNS believers, they rarely have any experience at anything more than one or two systems. When you actually start pinning them down on systems, they'll (eventually) admit to having not played most of the ones they're talking about. Ron set himself up as an "expert" and "kids today" are conditioned to believe an expert regardless of what they say so they believe him.

I'm not seeing any problem with GNS after reading about it on the wiki. Not sure where all the hate is coming from...

Did you ever deal with a fanboi who can't tell you why their choice is better except that it "just is" and they won't get out of your face about it? Yeah, that's a GNS believer.

My more hardcore RPG group had a thorough round of discussions about GNS for a few months following our discovery of the theory. Much of our discussion was in pinning down exactly what each term meant, and arguing over which games fell into which categories. We basically came to the conclusion that Ron Edwards didn't know what words in the English language meant, but that the words he happened to choose for his bizarre space-definitions actually worked pretty well for describing three aspects of RPG design. We use those words as a convenient shorthand to explain quickly how a game feels to us.

Yeah, if you take "Gamist" to mean "Game mechanic quality", "Simulationist" to mean the systems ability to maintain verisimilitude, and "Narrativist" to mean the systems ability to coherently tell a story, then you've got the three pillars of what makes an RPG an RPG. Without Game rules you're just doing the "Bang! I got you", without Narrativism you're just playing 40k, Without verisimilitude you're just left with cake.
Then there's the false choice of "You must choose one over the others, or else it's objectively worse than a system that does!" I'd think 4th edition with it's subjectively "betterness" after sacrificing narrative and simulation for the sake of Game would have been the final nail in GSN theory.

[Autolykos]

First, get your terminology right. GNS is a hypothesis at best, not a theory (since it hasn't been tested AFAIK) - no matter what the Wiki says. But probably not even that, since it doesn't make any testable claims (the physicist in me says at this point "this isn't even wrong" and urges me to forget about it).
If you want to do anything of scientific value with it, you'd first need to develop it to a proper hypothesis and devise something to test it. Possible things to test would be:

- Can gamers really be covered with those three groups, or is there a fourth one?
- Is every person/game a "pure" type, or are there mixed ones? Is perhaps everyone/-thing a mix with different proportions of those parts?
- Is it really impossible/hard for different types to play together? Is the friction generated between them what the hypothesis says or something different?
- Do player groups really just prefer systems fitting to their subtype, or is some difference actually preferable? How about mixed types? Is it possible to design a system with minimal friction for everyone?

These are just some examples to set you on the right train of thought - I'm sure you can think of your own ones.

TL;DR:
GNS isn't a theory, it's a mess. To do science with it, you first need an unambiguous definition of the terminology, make a testable hypothesis and test it.

[Chauncymancer]

I've never got this many responses on a Playground thread

I'm finishing my undergraduate degree in Psychology/Philosophy with a senior lab in social psychology. So I suppose the thing to start with is that in psychology, a theory on a topic explains the relationship between all the variables (so the theory of gravity would include gravitons, higg's bosons, mass, meters, fields, etc.) and a hypothesis is one causal relationship between the variables (if distance goes down and higg's density remains constant, gravitational attraction increases). So we can correctly refer to GNS as a theory, but it may be a bad theory, unsupported theory, psudeotheory, etc.

This being my first foray into research I'm starting easy: Regardless of what Ron may want us to believe, there are two claims I believe I can pull out of GNS.
1. People prioritize between the three corners.
2. Game sessions including players with different priorities will be less fun ("incoherent") than games where every player has the same priorities.

So I'll be wandering down to my local game stores and testing these claims against reality.

[Yora]

1 is a viable idea, which is the reason that some people seriously consider the whole thing.
But 2 is completely impossible to test. How do you quantify fun? And the group dynamics of playing RPGs are so complex that the game itself is only one small part of people having a good time.

[Manateee]

If you're going to try to quantify GNS, I recommend stocking up on aspirin.

And maybe rogain as an investment for the near future.

[stainboy]

Chauncymancer, how do you define G, N, and S? You're the one writing the polls, so what you think the terms mean probably matters more than anything Ron Edwards wrote.

[Sith_Happens]

Psst... What if this is actually some kind of blind study? That was a joke. I'm perfectly aware that ethics dictate that the participants know that they're taking part in *a* study at the very least.

[nedz]

GNS is supposed to be a theory about game systems, but you can run a variety of game types under any system. Now some may be better choices than others, but then some of us like a challange

It is also possible to run a game which swings wildly between all the corners, and there are really more than three I suspect. My favourite is the surreal corner

I wouldn't call any of this science; except in the sense that most sciences started out by catagorising things. GNS is more like literary criticism.

[Chauncymancer]

Maybe I should say this:

GNS is not the science.
This thread is not the science.
In about a month, I am going to be DROPPING THE SCIENCE ALL UP IN Ron Edwards theory.

In preparation for that, I'm nailing down GNS (not Edwards, mind you) to some testable claims. For example,

1. A game session is contained within a single Instance of Play (TM)
2. A single Instance of Play (TM) can only adequately serve one Creative Agenda (TM)
3. Particular Creative Agenda's (TM) exist at a given time in players.
4. Inadequately serving a player's particular Creative Agenda (TM) at the time of play will diminish fun.
[Conclusion] Groups with two or more Creative Agendas (TM) will have less fun than homogenous groups.

I'm determining that 1-4 are statements made in GNS (what I want your help with) arguing that 1+2+3+4= My Conclusion, and then testing my conclusion.

So, to refer back to the OP, did anyone supporting GNS ever put forward a rubric or survey or quiz indicative of "What it really meant" to feel like some Gamism tonight or to have a long term propensity for Narrativism?

[Kalirren]

Glad to hear about someone actually trying to do this. As you've framed it, that's a rather testable theory now, isn't it? (I expect the theory's conclusion really won't hold up because its premises are flawed, but I'll suspend judgment until I see your work.)

As you've framed it in your 4 restated premises of GNS theory, what it sounds like you need to do is videotape sessions, make transcripts, pick out decisive elements of the groups' interactions, classify those elements into G, N, S modes and then analyze the players' responses for satisfaction.

Why do you need a survey of GNS preferences? To answer your question as far as I know the correspondence, the one time Ron Edwards himself tried to comment on a game of a friend of his who submitted a transcript, he got into a dispute with his friend over what mode his friend liked. So no, I doubt anyone's ever formulated a workable rubric.

If you do end up doing this, submit to IJRP.

[Autolykos]

GNS is not the science.
This thread is not the science.
In about a month, I am going to be DROPPING THE SCIENCE ALL UP IN Ron Edwards theory.

In preparation for that, I'm nailing down GNS (not Edwards, mind you) to some testable claims.

Now THAT'S the spirit! May our words be tender for tomorrow we might have to eat them.

But seriously, that looks like a proper hypothesis (in the definition favored by natural sciences) you could test, as long as you have a way to quantify fun (but just asking the people - perhaps indirectly or with catch-questions - might be close enough). Now you just need to lock a good collection of GMs and players with different styles in a basement, supply them with coke, chips and pizza and get going.

[Beleriphon]

1 is a viable idea, which is the reason that some people seriously consider the whole thing.
But 2 is completely impossible to test. How do you quantify fun? And the group dynamics of playing RPGs are so complex that the game itself is only one small part of people having a good time.

The same way psychologists test for happiness. There are in point of fact scales and tests that can be used, and are hundreds of questions long, that test of how happy a person is compared to other people of the same general type. There's also the old social survey of just asking "Was this fun for your group". The important thing there is to make sure the whole group is interviewed as a group and then individually.

My advice, find some actual papers in some psych journals and use similar methods to those researchers for the surveys. You can probably find some of the social happiness type surveys online and modify them to suit your needs.

[Dr Bwaa]

Psst... What if this is actually some kind of blind study? That was a joke. I'm perfectly aware that ethics dictate that the participants know that they're taking part in *a* study at the very least.

If you didn't call it a study and just cited "gamers' opinions posted in gaming forums on the topic", this conversation would still probably be viable.