Ideas that refuse to die: the Forge and the GNS

[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 GNS

Yes, 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.

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.

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. )

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. 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? 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.

---

@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?

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@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", 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" 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...ry_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...ry_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.

[quote]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.

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.

[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.

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