Gamism and the New Sort of Games

AKA GNS post #3

This is a longish one, and it is bound to both piss a lot of people off and get a lot of people saying "no, Ben, you just don't understand Narrativism." I am sort of looking forward to this, in a perverse way.

But enough with the bullshitting. Two links and then let's get on with the writing.

(Though do check the date on that second thread. A year is a long time.)

There is a ton of talk, in the circles I run in (read: the Forge) about writing "games for people." The idea is to write a game that isn't targeted at gamers, that anyone can pick up and and play and enjoy. This has, of course, been the goal of tons of game companies throughout all time, and with a few exceptions (basic D&D) has failed, often in a drastic and dramatic manner. It doesn't mean that something won't succeed somewhere down the line, but it does mean that this is clearly a difficult thing. Those that go go to a war already fighting, a battlefield strewn with the corpses of those that have gone before them.

The really insightful thing that has come out of Forge discussion of this issue is that we cannot simply look at how to repackage role-playing games so that they appeal to a wider audience. Packaging will only go so far. It doesn't matter too much if you sell your game as a "role-playing game" or an "interactive shared story-telling experience" if the content is the same. If we are really serious about the mass-market role-playing game, we need to find new ways of playing games (and, by corollary, designing games and writing games) which are easier, more intuitive, more compelling, and more fun.

And, you know, we're working on it. My own Polaris and Tim's The Mountain Witch come to mind as steps in that direction (note: steps in that direction, not the final destination. Polaris, for what it is worth, is still mostly for gamers.) In my opinion, this sort of system design is going to be a slow, hard, long crawl towards something brilliant. I can feel where we are going -- I can look at a text and say "that's going the right direction --" but I can't see yet what the final shape of the thing will be. I don't know if anyone can. We are fumbling in the dark, but we've discovered a thread, a road.

(see Ron's post in this thread for a great summary-from-a-year-ago. What's happened in the last year? It should really be another post but, in short: The Mountain Witch is published, 3 short games about the Human Heart moves into a publication phase, Under the Bed design kicks up a notch. Those are the highlights, I think. Let me know if I missed anything.)

It's an exciting time to be a game designer, that's for certain.

Anyway, that's all background for the main point of this essay.

When talking about new ways to play, and ways to appeal to ordinary people, something that comes up a lot is, of course, GNS. Particularly, there is a lot of talk about the culture that surrounds largely simulationist supporting systems, and how it is essentially a fundamentally geekish culture -- by which I am not necessarily talking about computer programmers but about people who really want all the science in Star Wars to make sense, and will get into long arguments about it for recreational purposes.

Let me be clear: I love this shit. I find the entire series of comics I just linked to hilarious. My favorite article written for Daedalus was Neel Krishnaswami's superlative Causality and Choice: Getting rid of the {TECH}. I have a degree in physics, and I bitched to no end about the stupid thermodynamics of the Matrix to anyone who cared to listen. But this is a decidedly fringe, undergroundish, and definitely geeky activity. There is no way in hell that an ordinary person is going to care about this shit. This is fine, this is cool, and I like it this way.

And, to be frank, any role-playing game which tries to claim that the system is the physics of the world, and really live up to that, or any game which models everything on a meticulous point buy system, or some such thing, is really pretty much in this category of activity. No matter how much they get repackaged, rebranded, or redesigned, they are simply not going to appeal to the mainstream.

It should be pretty clear, though, that if we are talking about a broad-reach, mainstream appeal game, this is not going to be it. Ordinary people like science fiction, and ordinary people like fantasy, but ordinary people do not like knowing the cargo capacity of a star destroyer. This isn't about genre. This is about how we play the games.

The mode which gets thrown out there as an antidote to the Simulationist-by-habit tradition is Narrativism, which given the population of the Forge surprises about negative one people. And, in its own way, they are correct about that. People like stories -- they like telling them, and they like being told them. They do this naturally, in a way that most people don't naturally geek out about the physics of city/planets. It follows that they would prefer Narrativist play over most Simulationist play. And, frankly, I think that they are right about that.

(Note to those whose self-image is caught up with the invented word "simulationism:" I am not saying that your preferred sort of play is less valid or less fun or that you need to change your playstyle. I am simply saying that it is less likely to appeal to Joe-on-the-street. kthnksbye.)

But prescribing Dr. Ron's Brand Narrativist Pills* as the one true solution to cracking the mainstream problem is not a good idea, because it is ignoring the big elephant in the room of GNS theory -- Gamism. People like doing more activities than just telling compelling stories. And, yes, people are capable of being very caught up in the fraught struggles of fictional characters, but there is something else that they are almost universally more interested in -- other people, especially their family and friends. People love getting insight into other people's capabilities and guts. We love just getting in there and mucking around.

(* To be absolutely motherfucking clear, Ron does not hold the Narrativism is the one true way of anything, including the one true way of reaching a mainstream audience with gaming, and he is quite public about it. I'm talking about other people's reactions to his writings, rather than his writings themselves.)

And my claim is that Gamism can do that better than Narrativism. To show it, I'm going to have to talk a lot about Narrativism, which is much more well-explored theoretically.

(And, hey, guys who commented in my "which essay" thread, check this out: When I say "Gamism" you have to divorce it entirely from any idea of "tweaking your 13th level battledroid to the max." This isn't about system weight, levels, or anything like that. There are any number of highly Gamist, highly fun, very mechanically light systems.)

In some very old conversations with Vincent, which have been sadly partly eaten by his comment-eating bug, we talked extensively about what makes a protagonist, which has been an important and much-discussed topic on the Forge since the misty days of yore.

In short, a protagonist (and I'm talking here about Narrativist play) is a character who has to make a difficult decision, under pressure, and abide by the consequences. This is pretty much a summary from here so just go read that.

(This is all still about Narrativism) A really important point about this, and one that is apparently (apropos of my "Topics and GNS" thread) still a little contentious, is that this is a fictional character making a fictional decision about a fictional situation with fictional consequences. You are, in some ways, making the decision for the character, but there is a degree of separation -- you are free, for instance, to make what you see as a "bad decision" and see what happens. There is a safety net, because it isn't you who is the protagonist, it is the character.

Both Gamism and Narrativism have this strong emphasis on player-choice. Both of them have moments where everyone in the room gasps, looks at one player, and is thinking "Oh my god! What is he going to do?" Those moments are precisely the moments where protagonist activity is happening. That's the choice that Vincent is talking about.

To be personal for a second: I live for these moments.

But Gamism and Narrativism have a key different, here. Gamism, to be frank, has no safety net, no (or at least much less) fictional remove from the choices that you make and their consequences. If you, the player, make a bad choice or are unlucky then you, the player, will suffer the consequences (albeit in a limited game context.) Let me make this very clear: In a Narrativist context, your character is a protagonist. In a Gamist context, you are the protagonist.

I could connect the dots about what I think that that sort of experience is more likely to appeal to the mainstream, but I think I can safely leave that as an exercise to the reader.