In the rather fraught Internet-mediated discussion of role-playing, few things are more controversial than the Forge-derived typology of the creative agendas of play--the collective orientation of players to the game, in other words--called GNS for its categories of Gamism (or "Step on Up"), Narrativism ("Story Now"), and Simulationism ("Right to Dream"). In a recent discussion, I wondered if perhaps Roger Caillois's four-fold of typology of play could be used to "reconstruct" the typology of creative agendas in a different way. The resulting discussion prompted me to write this post, in which I try to take my own advice.
Posted By: Eero Tuovinen on Story-GamesI especially agree that while challenging the existence of CA [Creative Agenda, i.e.] seems ludicrous to me, I could well imagine alternative or even more useful descriptions of of the entire field than GNS. . . . because Creative Agenda has many parts that can be tickled better or worse by different approaches -- different techniques. I'd like to say that the best thing I get out of GNS is that once I'm able to clearly verbalize that I want to do premise-ful play or whatever, that allows me to set aside all the other vistas and focus better on the smaller nuances that were never available to me when I spent all my time trying to negotiate the big basics.
Yes, exactly. The notion that descriptions of CA like GNS should be at root pragmatic game design tools strikes me as dead on. The further implication is that, because of the multiplicity of possible agendas for play, any particular description of "why people play" or "what people get out of playing" serves a normative function as well, helping to create the culture of play it purports to describe--at least insofar as people subscribe to it as a guide to design and play. This is as clear a case of the reflexivity of knowledge as one could ever hope to encounter.
In the case of GNS, one thing that it does very well--as Eero rather astutely points out--is call attention to a mode of play that it calls "narrativism." When you think about it, you realize that this mode is actually rather obscure, a kind of play that works by having one stand in a kind of alienation or distance from the character one plays in order to more strongly appreciate the moral weight of the decisions the character makes--this in contrast to the strong identification with character that is the desideratum of immersive play and the elision of character that is the hallmark of competitive play.
One side effect of this way of slicing up the phenomenon, as people use it to explore the design space that results, is that purely gamist designs become interesting as a way of examining the negative space of narrativism--in other words, of challenging the basic assumption of narrativist play and saying, hey, what if there's no character, not really, it's all just a contest between us here at the table, via the medium of a set of rather elaborately detailed pawns. It recapitulates the hoary old narratology versus ludology debate in a new form.
But another side-effect is to make "simulationism" inexplicable, or even pathological. I remember seeing a post on Vincent Baker's blog to the effect that while he understood gamism and he understood narrativism, simulationism struck him as puerile wish fulfillment power fantasy at best. I seem to recall the subordination of simulationism in some other context having driven David Berg to distraction, given his efforts to make sense of and reclaim the term. And I think the reason for that is that once you make yourself aware of the distance between player and character, and use that as a tool in your designs, then you have a tough time with a mode of play in which minimizing or hiding that distance is a sine qua non.
So in devising an alternate set of CAs, the answer to the "why bother" question (i.e., "why bother coming up with an alternative to GNS?") has to be in order to reveal a different space for play, or to open up new possible avenues for design, or minimally to render us more sensitive to the alternatives that may exist.
Part Two: Reconstructing Creative Agendas
What follows should be read with an eye on Eero's remark that the absence of narrativism from Callois's scheme has to be attributed to the paucity of "premise-ful" modes of play in the instances of play he examined, and that were he around today he'd surely incorporate that into his scheme. In other words, our theories should be constructed in light of the empirical evidence available. On the other hand, I always assumed that the reason that Caillois identified four categories--rather than three or five, say--had something to do with the linguistic structuralism associated with the Paris School of Semiotics, in which a huge semantic space is produced by the conceptual entanglement of opposites. So a "positive" term implies (the existence of) a corresponding negative, like yes implies no. But those terms can be "entangled" as both yes and no (i.e., "maybe") and as neither yes nor no (i.e., "I don't know"). Similarly, agon (skill) implies its opposite alea (not-skill: luck or chance). And those opposites can be entangled such that "both agon and alea" can be understood to mean mimicry, as successful mimicry is at once a skillful (albeit not wholly competitive) performance as well as a willingness to subject oneself to the dictates of fortune. By the same token, ilinx is clearly "neither agon nor alea" in that the dislocations or dissociations one experiences in ilingic play obviate both skill and luck.
Now, in this post-structuralist era, we don't believe that our categories are in any way essential or fundamental; they are analytic conveniences only.
So what happens if we imagine agon, alea, mimicry, and ilinx as the corners of a semiotic square? First of all, we notice that the underlying distinction in both the agon-alea and mimicry-ilinx pairs has something to do with the activity of the player; in the former, the player is active while in the latter the player is passive, in the sense that he or she is the object of the forces acting in the game, whether that’s the turn of the wheel of fortune or the elasticity of the bungee rope.
Secondly, we notice that the underlying distinction in both the agon-mimicry and the alea-ilinx pairs seems to be that the former in both instances presume the unalloyed agency of the player whereas the latter see the player as part of the field of play. In other words, whereas in both agon and alea you play the game, in both mimicry and ilinx the game plays you. You adopt a new persona, take on a new role, feel scared or excited, or otherwise lose control of yourself.
But these dualities are capable of being entangled, and we can use those entanglements to rebuild the CAs. We’ll follow Eero in suggesting that the combination of agon and alea is the Contest, in which players are interested in victory as the outcome of play. Conversely, the combination of mimicry and ilinx is Drama; players are interested in experiencing thematically resonant moments as the outcome of play. So far we’ve reconstructed the Gamism/Narrativism dichotomy in slightly different terms.
Looking at the orthogonal dimension, starting with the combination of agon and mimicry, I’d suggest that the appropriate metaphor or model is the Pageant, where players are interested in the skillful performance or faithful recreation of alternate roles. Its converse, the combination of alea and ilinx, is the Thrill Ride, in which players are willing to subject themselves to external control in return for the promise of a powerful or pleasant emotional experience. The effect of this, I’d say, is to reconstruct Simulationism as a kind of “agonistic mimicry” that stands in the same relationship to “Immersionism” as Narrativism does to Gamism.
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