Robin D. Laws - Gaming Hut: Bleary With the Theory

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From:	technocracygirl
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:02 am (UTC)

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I am an academic (well, I should be, anyway,) and I love the GNS idea. I love it because it's a framework that makes me stop beating my head into the wall when I (a heavy N) play with Gs or Ss. Both types used to drive me buggy, with their emphasis on "the rules" or "getting to the end" or whatever. Having a framework to identify me, and them, enables me to take a breath, step back and say, "Okay, he's just playing differently. Read a book until the rules question gets settled, and everything will be okay."

I'm not certain that this actually has much to do with your post, but whatever.

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From:	romantorres
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:10 am (UTC)

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If anything, I thought that the theorizing about RPGs allowed for a conscious framework for design, and how the different components of an RPG might (or might not) work successfully together.

GNS, at its best, allows for the above, and gives a common vocabulary for discussion.

It is not, however, THE vocabulary.

I think the problem comes when some take GNS as dogma. It then ceases to be a useful tool and becomes another "-ism" in a world filled with too many "-isms."

Another difficulty I see is the possibility (danger?) that dogmatics will apply GNS theory such that it "kills to dissect." I earned an M.A. in English, and nothing will turn you off to literature faster than Literary Theory in the hands of dogmatics.

And yes, I agree that the problem of elitism goes hand-in-hand with theory, or any realm of analytical thought. The theory itself becoms the "point," rather than whatever it is the theory describes. Theory for theory's sake (or, more likely, theory for personal ego's sake). These are the same people that will beat you to death with, say, Middlemarch or Jude the Obscure, but will sneer at the pulps.

Anyway, just my 2 bits. I really enjoy the games you've designed, btw. Thanks for many hours of good gaming.

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From:	apollinax
Date:	February 15th, 2005 11:04 am (UTC)

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It is not, however, THE vocabulary.

I think the problem comes when some take GNS as dogma. It then ceases to be a useful tool and becomes another "-ism" in a world filled with too many "-isms."

Yes. I think that most of the heavy hitters on the Forge acknowledge and understand the distinction, but there are a lot of lackeys who do not. GNS is a model, not a truth; there are plenty of other models. GNS allows really interesting investigation of a wide range of topics, while by necessity marginalizing others.

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From:	matt_snyder
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:27 am (UTC)

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Cool, daddy-o.

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From:	unseelie23
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:28 am (UTC)

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I dunno... it's always struck me as self-important mental masturbation. A way to feel superior to those heathens that just enjoy roleplaying... a way to exclude the D&D playing masses that "you" know you're better than.

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From:	strangedave
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:55 am (UTC)

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Actually, after I steeped myself in GNS theory I started to run a joyously gamist D&D game, full of cheese and plot railroading.. GNS taught me a lot about running narrative heavy games, but the bigger lesson is not about narrativism, but about game coherence.

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From:	agrumer
Date:	February 15th, 2005 10:48 am (UTC)

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That's funny. That very attitude -- "it's just mental masturbation" -- has always struck me as a pose adopted by people who don't like theory; one that lets them present themselves as superior to the theoreticians for not wasting time on all that hifalutin' stuff.

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From:	2h2o
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:35 am (UTC)

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First, it's not at all clear to me that there's a meaningful distinction between swaddling a beloved object and fig-leafing an embarrassment. They both involve protecting the self - either directly or via protection of an important extension of the self. The motivation is the same "you can't hurt me" in either case.

Second, I'm sure why I should feel better about having the self-proclaimed elite "inside the gates, playing with the rest of us." If they're going to make people feel inferior (and they do), maybe it's better if they wander off to GNS-land (or GMS-land) and leave us alone, so we won't be stigmatized by both childish obsessions and jealous elitism over those obsessions.

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From:	the_never
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:40 am (UTC)

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"Doctrinaire hipsters helped to kill jazz as a popular form by erecting a hierarchy of cool that downgraded music ordinary people actually liked. Roleplaying has enough challenges without repeating that pattern."

You've actually pinpointed something I've said exactly. It came up when they were talking about "punk avenues" how they were doing something incredibly "punk rock" and I thought "this is more like those jazz critics in college telling me that contemporary jazz fusion was purer and better (as music) than primitive Cab Calloway or Max Roach". (and I've had that exact conversation). The reason being- "because of the math" ..(7/8 cut time, use of impossible scales, etc).

It's also useful to point out Edwards is a Biology professor- which necessarily involves more science than art.

Although I'm neither an academic nor a game designer, I am an artist and a musician (and a GM). When I hear "system does matter" I simply don't get it. It only matters as far as it works. People don't play for the system, or at least I don't. What really matters is the shared epic, the characters, the plotlines, the recurrent villians, the different lands and places, the mythology, all the things that you co-develop in an ongoing campaign-or shared world and keeps people in the group coming back. They aren't there to play (whatever game) they really show because they want to play their character. And for me- I know it's not the "D-whatever System" that gets me going every Friday afternoon before the game. I don't really care about the system (although I know it pretty well), but I care intensely what my villian is doing, and how the plotline is going to work out or what the characters will end up doing, or how I can introduce some new land or NPC.

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From:	romantorres
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:55 am (UTC)

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First, I get the whole "system" thing. I cannot immerse myself in a game when the system disrupts the suspension of disbelief. But that's just me.

Second, perhaps this is simply a cycle that I've seen repeated over and over across art forms.

Art form is birthed.
Art form flourishes.
Art form is imitated / pastiched.
Art form is studied and analyzed.
Art form is deconstructed.
Art form is mocked / parodied.
Art form is abandoned.
Art form is recovered and inspires new art.

Rinse. Repeat.

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From:	mcurry
Date:	February 15th, 2005 09:51 am (UTC)

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For me, the question about roleplaying theory is not if its motives are impure, but if it's of any help in facilitating a rewarding game experience. Ron's movement has spawned an incredible energy in indie game design. That's a big check mark in the plus column, then.

One of the things I've always liked about Ron Edwards is his emphasis on connecting theory with actual play and/or actual design, rather than going the theory-for-theory's-sake route. That very split is currently the topic of much debate over on The Forge.

I, personally, have learned whatever RPG theory is stuck in my brain after reading The Forge from posts about actual play and designers talking about their games, not from the pure theory stuff. IMO, it's the applied theory, and how it inspires game designers to try out new things, that's important.

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From:	bneuensc
Date:	February 15th, 2005 02:14 pm (UTC)

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One of the things I've always liked about Ron Edwards is his emphasis on connecting theory with actual play and/or actual design, rather than going the theory-for-theory's-sake route.

I don't know that I'd agree there's such a dichotomy there. I'm studying RPGs as an academic (from the viewpoint of an anthropologist and folklorist), and while the work I've done hasn't been as directly aimed at practical applications as Edwards' has been (you can argue fairly cogently that GNS is more of a manifesto than a theory), neither would I call it theory for theory's sake. I'm interested in the sociocultural aspects of gaming, which includes such topics as how people learn to play, how certain semi-arcane processes of game-playing are carried out (like, how do we manage to create coherent narratives with that many cooks on hand to spoil the soup?), how system can encode certain assumptions about the world, how character identity and player identity interrelate, etc. While I don't expect anybody to take this and ram it directly back into their game behavior and game design, it may have the effect of causing people to be more aware of what they do and how. "Theory" that is too applied can become very prescriptive of what people should do, instead of analytical of what people actually do. That's just as much a trap as Levi-Straussian arcana that becomes so abstract that nobody can see how it relates to the real world anymore. Ideally, the work I do should be equally relevant to both po-mo experimental GM-less meta-weird gaming, and good ol' D&D dungeon crawls -- and to the players who enjoy each type.

I wonder how much of the nature of GNS, and my problems with that nature, are linked to the fact someone mentioned above, namely, that Edwards is a biologist. Clear-cut categories are much more popular in his field than mine.

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From:	strangedave
Date:	February 15th, 2005 10:07 am (UTC)

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I think there is a big difference between GNS theory as such, and the very common trend among people who are familiar with it (both among those only slightly familiar with it, even opposed to it, and many of The Forge regulars) to see it as pushing narrativism.

I love narrativism and games that make it easy. I did my part to bring Hero Wars into the world. But I also enjoy gamist and simulationist games too. And I enjoy things that challenge my ideas about games too.

GNS theory is good in that it gives us a vocab to talk about important things in our hobby.

But the big message from GNS theory isn't that any of the three, or any other type of game, is better. Its that it does matter what people are looking for in the game, that people aren't necessarily looking for the same thing, and a gaming group that is all looking for the same kind of experience are more likely to get it and that makes everyones experience more fun.

The point about jazz is a good one. But the biggest message of GNS theory is pretty much 'if you all play in the same key and genre, its more likely to sound better'. Its a good first step a lot of people still miss - gaming groups that want to make category defying jazz can do that later, and other groups can pound out a gamist four bar blues if they want.

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From:	the_never
Date:	February 15th, 2005 10:15 am (UTC)

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Right, because gamism is (like blues) less sophisticated, right?

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From:	mearls
Date:	February 15th, 2005 10:17 am (UTC)

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"That’s why I’m happy that Ron’s movement has spawned a legion of practitioners creating weird funky games. They’re not gatekeepers — they’re inside the gates, playing with the rest of us."

If you define "us" as game designers, then I'd agree. If you define "us" as gamers as a whole I do not see it at all.

At its best the Forge spawns interesting experiments in game design, but I remain unconvinced that even the most successful of these does anything to improve the basic form of RPGs as practiced by the vast majority of active gamers.

At its worst, the Forge is a brand that positions itself as more White Wolf than White Wolf.

I also have an issue with this statement: "Like it or not, any roleplaying experience that generates a story is part of an art form."

But *every* RP experience generates a story, as does every sporting event, or walk to the park, or every life event. They aren't necessarily good stories, but they're still stories. I would argue that any "game" that has a goal of "produce a good story" is no longer a game.

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From:	wickedthought
Date:	February 15th, 2005 10:28 am (UTC)

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"At its best the Forge spawns interesting experiments in game design, but I remain unconvinced that even the most successful of these does anything to improve the basic form of RPGs as practiced by the vast majority of active gamers."

That's because the vast majority of gamers are only playing one game. (Who shall remain nameless, but whose initials are "D" and "D".) Just like any other medium, you have to wonder if a person enjoys only one genre because it's what he likes or it's because that's all he's been exposed to.

"But *every* RP experience generates a story, as does every sporting event, or walk to the park, or every life event. They aren't necessarily good stories, but they're still stories. I would argue that any "game" that has a goal of "produce a good story" is no longer a game."

I must respectfully disagree, Mike.

We see stories. We make the patterns.

I can make a story out of a chess game. That doesn't mean a story exists there.

Without imagination, story does not exist. It's a product of us, not the other way around.

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From:	bneuensc
Date:	February 15th, 2005 02:29 pm (UTC)

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I would argue that any "game" that has a goal of "produce a good story" is no longer a game.

This, to my mind, is one of the fundamental weirdnesses -- heck, maybe the fundamental weirdness -- of RPGs. They sit smack dab on the fence between game-land and story-land, evidently with a post or two of that fence poking them in uncomfortable places, and keep persistently not getting off the fence on one side or the other, despite efforts from people on both sides.

We call them games, yes. But a lot of them don't have all of the characteristics associated with a technical meaning of the word "game." And there's lots of people who use them for their narrative potential -- but all of them create narratives in the bare-bones sense, whether that narrative is aesthetically pleasing or not. We could try to split them into two groups, and put kill-bad-guy-get-treasure dungeon crawls on the game side, and the artsy-character-development narratives on the story side, but fundamentally, these are all still created in much the same manner, so dividing them would be kind of false. What joins them is role-playing (not that we have a perfect definition of that, but whatever). Where people go with the role-playing -- to a good story, or to some kind of "win" -- doesn't change the fact that they're all still participating in RPGs.

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From:	mind_of_richard
Date:	February 15th, 2005 10:49 am (UTC)

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Personally, I never cared for the GNS theory, because for me, it misses the key component of any game design. That component: fun. I do not care how innovative a game is, or if it is the best representation of a Narrative System. If the game is not fun, it fails.

I will now go back to my sick bed.

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From:	strangedave
Date:	February 15th, 2005 11:50 am (UTC)

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The GNS theory tells you how to stop getting in the way of your own fun, once you work out what your idea of fun is.

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