chrislehrich ([info]chrislehrich) wrote,
@ 2005-11-23 16:32:00
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Memo To Self
Elliott just said something I want to tag for memory, about RPGs and wargaming; feel free to comment, of course!

He pointed to a blog wherein he drew a distinction between the tinkering-heavy "hard-core" wargaming and the clean-design "German-style" boardgaming. The point for me being that RPGs did to some degree arise from the former type of wargaming.

This raises an interesting point: people who played early proto-RPGs (the origin-points of D&D, Runequest, etc.) successfully were already well trained in a tinkering-with-rules-from-situation mindset. They had a lot of practice in engaging in dialogue between a real situation in-game and an overdetermined yet unclear abstract rules-set.

Which makes me wonder whether somehow heavy "crunch" can be used as Sim training-wheels. Hmmm...

It also raises the old Forge-popular argument about "newbies" and gaming styles. Sim really does require training; other styles do too, but we get that training in fairly everyday life by watching too much TV. Which goes nicely toward refuting the naturalist claim: it's not that Narrativism/Gamism and so on are more "natural and normal," but rather they are more smoothly in accord with mainstream structures of our culture's thinking. Again, hmmm....

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[info]ewilen
2005-11-23 10:22 pm UTC (link)
Hi, I just want to put in a better link to Jon Hastings' blog entry than the one I gave earlier.

Here it is.

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[info]jholloway
2005-11-23 11:57 pm UTC (link)
Recent developments in tabletop wargame design, at least, have changed some of the specifics of this, but the general principle remains absolutely true. That exact negotiation is required between the situation in-game (the celebration or simulation or whatever of which is the "point" of play) and the rules set, with different designers taking different stances on this procedure, but almost no one addressing it head-on.

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[info]jholloway
2005-11-24 12:00 am UTC (link)
And, of course, German-style games, nine times out of ten, drive me wild with frustration, because the imagined situation is just a bit of meaningless color layered on the top of a perfectly reasonable game-play experience. Battlelines doesn't have shit to do with the campaigns of Alexander the Great -- it might as well just be called Red vs. Blue or something.

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[info]jhkimrpg
2005-11-24 05:09 am UTC (link)
Hrm. There are two older Forge threads about this concept which I would reference: The Roots of Sim (Response to Nar Essay) (Jan 29, 2004) and The roots of Sim II (Feb 4, 2004).

Personally, I'm more interested in your argument absent the GNS-speak. That is, early RPGs certainly called for more tinkering and had less clear design goals. That's not particularly Sim, that's simply primitive design. I think tinkering applies just as much to clearly competitive RPGs.

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[info]chrislehrich
2005-11-24 03:38 pm UTC (link)
Thanks for the threads.

Yeah, you're quite right about my tendency to overuse the GNS-speak. Honestly I think it's primarily helpful to me at the moment because it helps me exclude types of gaming that don't interest me for the argument.

On the other hand, bricolage isn't the same as primitive design, precisely because you can't sketch progress from mythic thought to scientific thought. They're not the same thing to begin with.

My point about gaming is that I think early RPGs sometimes struck a goldmine in mythic thought, but did so largely accidentally. Then you have the progressive refinement of engineering design, which produces better and better games -- but makes it ever less likely that someone will hit that golden vein. (Which is NOT the only possible goal -- it just happens to be mine here.)

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[info]jhkimrpg
2005-11-28 10:16 pm UTC (link)
Ah. Can we simply define and characterize the nature of bricolage without the rest of GNS? For example, keeping within GNS means that you have to proscribe play from addressing Premise -- and it isn't clear to me that addressing Premise invalidates bricolage.

Specifically, which early RPGs do you think hit the goldmine in mythic thought? What are the common factors?

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[info]chrislehrich
2005-11-29 12:16 pm UTC (link)
Well, this is all rather tentative because I haven't yet delved all that deeply into the anecdotal information about early games, but I'll try.

First, I'm thinking especially the games that would become D&D and Runequest. My impression is that the games really arose out of a limited rule-system modeled on wargaming, combined with an intricate and growing campaign world. The usual emphasis, from Gygax and later commentators, is on the rules: were they good, were they coherent (in a broad sense), how were they refined, did they simulate well, and so on. I think this is a misreading, albeit a predictable one: the tendency (evidenced by everyone from Gygax et al. to Ron Edwards and the Forge design crew) is to think that system, in a mechanical sense, comes first -- logically, if not chronologically.

Thus there is an implication that D&D arose from Greyhawk more or less by luck and a bit of delusion. A common Forge reading -- Ron certainly emphasizes this one -- is that the D&D crew did one thing and thought they were doing another. You get a lot of this yourself: people tell you you're actually playing Nar when you don't think you are, but this, they claim, is because you're a bit deluded (to put it bluntly).

I think this is all ass-backwards. My sense is that you have to take seriously the notion of system arising from game-world. I think that there is nothing new about this process: it is the standard, rather slow, rather indirect method by which myth and ritual arise in traditional cultures. And Levi-Strauss has very famously analogized this process to bricolage.

So, to answer your first question, I don't actually think the bricolage analogy has a damn thing to do with GNS/Big Model. On the Forge, I get around this by simply taking as read that Nar and Gam play work by different means. I'm not sure whether I believe this or not, but it is very convenient for having an intelligent conversation without a lot of "no, I play differently, so you're wrong" nonsense.

But I assume that your questions are really aimed toward something like this: dropping the whole GNS Creative Agenda terminology, can you (me) please define this whole bricolage concretely and explain why you think it applies? I'm working on this. The problem is that it is a much bigger question than a straight-up RPG design question, because what it really asks is, "What is mythic thought, how does it work, and why do you think it is operative in some classic early gaming?" The last part is the easy one; the first two are a nightmare. I'm working on it....

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